Journalist Eileen Fleming was on the Israel/Occupied Palestine trip with me in June of 2009. Our group met with Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem whose home are being stolen by state-sanctioned (and American Zionist funded) illegal settlers. Here is her report.
MasterCard and the Extremist Settlers of Silwan
Eileen Fleming
Occupied East Jerusalem, June 13, 2009- Over thirty CODE PINK activists met with a few of the soon to be 1,500 homeless residents of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, located minutes away from the Temple Mount and the Al Aqsa Mosque.
On June 8, 1998, under the cover of darkness, members of the fundamentalist nationalistic settlement group Elad [a Hebrew acronym for: To the City of David] entered four Palestinian homes, threw out the furniture and raised Israeli flags on the property.
Yigal Kaufman, a spokesman for Elad was quoted the following day in the New York Times, ''Our aim is to Judaize East Jerusalem. The City of David is the most ancient core of Jerusalem, and we want it to become a Jewish neighborhood."
The NY Times also reported that the religious extremist's moved into the homes "with the advance knowledge and protection of the Israeli police, raising charges that they were tacitly backed by the Israeli authorities." [1]
On June 12, 2009, Abd Schlode, a lifetime resident of the village informed the CODE PINK activists who gathered in the village's solidarity tent, "We are fighting for survival. Over 50,000 Palestinians live in Silwan.
"In 2005 we began to receive [demolition] letters on our doorsteps written in Hebrew addressed from the 'Municipality Against Honorable Unknown' but most of our people do not read Hebrew.
"We have documents that prove this land is ours and that we paid taxes.
"Since 1967 the Israelis destroyed over 18,000 homes and there are currently 22,000 home demolition orders. Yesterday 25 new home demolition letters were delivered here.
"In 2007, we paid 87,000 million shekels to the Israeli courts and we pay our taxes, but we have no playgrounds or opportunities for our children. We need the world to hear us, to look and see just who is the victim.
"The settlers are digging tunnels towards the Mosque and we learned of it when an UNWRA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East] school collapsed and killed ten of our children.
"These settlers are the most extreme religious nationalists and they are behind what is going on here. They say this area was a part of King David's kingdom. So what? Many civilizations have been here since, Muslims were here too, but does this give them the right to build a zoo here?
"We need schools but the settlers take our land and build on it...It is unlikely that they actually live here, but it is recorded that among the settlers are the Minister of National Security and the head of the National Archives.
"The Shabaak [Israeli Security] are doing a great job here-there are lots of cameras and guards with guns. If I throw a stone they will see it and arrest me immediately. They arrested a ten year old boy for throwing stones.
"I once was a member of Fatah, but the last time I was arrested I quit the political party, because this is all about homes and children, survival and human rights.
"Bush made a lot of people hate America, but a few days ago when Obama was talking in Cairo, my son said to me, he is a good guy. We hope he will make the changes we need, but we know he faces a hard time with AIPAC.
"There is a lot of money coming here from developers."
Much of that money comes from the American casino tycoon Irving Moskowitz.
"For over a decade, Moskowitz has funneled millions in profits from his California-based Hawaiian Gardens casino, where he has been sued for exploiting undocumented workers, into settlement construction projects in the West Bank, including Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. He has also funded several neoconservative think tanks including a research center named after Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan, who was killed while leading the Entebbe rescue raid in 1976. Moskowitz and Netanyahu have remained close since he established the center.
"In 1996, Moskowitz convinced Netanyahu, in his first round as prime minister, to open a tunnel adjacent to the Temple Mount, a controversial act that led to several days of rioting and 70 deaths. Four years later, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the tunnel set off the so-called Al-Aqsa uprising, the opening salvo of the Second Intifada. [2]
Last week, holders of an Isracard and/or MasterCard credit cards in Israel received an offer for a "City of David tour" with "attractions for the entire family" - which makes no mention of the fact that the tour is to be conducted by the Elad settlers.
Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc, wrote the Directors of the MasterCard Company the following letter which received a swift threat as a reply.
The letter:
Dear Sir or Madam
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the Isracard Company, entrusted with issuing MasterCard credit cards in Israel, is at present involved in supporting extreme-right Israeli settlers who are actively dispossessing the Palestinian inhabitants of East Jerusalem's Silwan Neighbourhood. Moreover, Isracard has been using the MasterCard name and logo in this campaign of support for the settlers.
Two weeks ago, Isracard sent to its customers a gift coupon providing a large reduction in entry fees to the so-called "City of David National Park", managed by the highly controversial Elad settler association. The reduction is dependant upon the customer paying with a MasterCardPlus card.
In providing such coupons to its customers, Isracard has taken a clear position in support of the extreme right in Israeli politics – and has implicated MasterCard in the same. "The City of David National Park" is administered by the settler association "Elad" whose members have established themselves since 1991 in East Jerusalem's Silwan Neighbourhood, since which time they are constantly extending their foothold by means of entering Palestinian homes and expelling their inhabitants. The proclaimed aim of the Elad settlers is to "Judaise" the village of Silwan, which they call "The City of David" and where they assert the Biblical King David had his palace 3000 years ago (a claim strongly disputed among historians and archaeologists). The tens of thousands of Palestinians who live for generations in this location are for the Elad settlers no more than "a nuisance" to be expelled. Among other things, it was the Elad settlers who initiated – and got the Jerusalem Municipality to adopt – the plan of demolishing 88 Palestinian homes in Silwan in order to establish in their place "The King's Garden", where according to the settlers King David had his garden. As you may recall, this plan was strongly condemned by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on her visit to Jerusalem in March this year.
Visitors to the "City of David National Park" are not only directly contributing to the Elad setters' coffers, but are also exposed to an intensive dose of extreme-right nationalistic propaganda and a highly biased and one-sided description of Jerusalem's history, almost completely ignoring the part of non-Jews – especially, the part of Arabs and Muslims – in the city's history. Such a distorted depiction of history also appears on the settler website to which the Isracard coupon, emblazoned with the MasterCard logo, refers the company's customers: http://www.cityofdavid.org.il
Isracard's issuing this coupon and promoting the Elad settlers clearly cannot be considered a legitimate commercial activity. Rather, it is a political act with far-reaching implications. As the MasterCard name and logo were directly used, implicating your company with its world-wide business network, I feel it is incumbent upon your company to take up the matter with your "Isracard" business partners and firmly ask them to sever immediately and completely all connections with the Elad settlers.
As you have taken care to make widely known, your company has taken the initiative to create "The MasterCard Foundation" whose proclaimed aim is to help and empower poor, isolated and disadvantaged people in such countries as Tajikistan and Rwanda, and whose leadership includes such distinguished people as Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, known for her great devotion to the promotion of Human Rights . Obviously, this is the polar opposite of what the Elad settlers are doing in the Palestinian parts of Jerusalem, and I am sure you will take quick steps to remedy this discrepancy.
Adam Keller
Gush Shalom spokesperson
On June 12, 2009, Gush Shalom received a fax from Ayala Tidhar and Orit Hangali of the Isracard Marketing & Foreign Relations Section and Rani Rahav an Isracard public relations director, phoned Keller and threatened to sue Gush Shalom.
Keller stated, "It is a bit surprising to hear that we are supposedly 'causing great damage' to the Isracard Company. How come one email message to our list of supporters would cause so much damage to one of the biggest companies in the Israeli economy? It would be good for them to consider if the damage was caused by us, or perhaps by the truth about them which we have uncovered.
"Indeed, the site known as 'The City of David National Park', just outside the Old City of Jerusalem, officially belongs to the National Reserves and Parks Authority, a supposedly neutral body. But this is in no way enough to whitewash Isracard's involvement with the place. It is well known that the administration of the place in practice has been transferred to the settler association Elad – a body which has a clear political and ideological identity on the extreme right side of the spectrum. The Elad people are openly and explicitly promoting the aim of "Judaizing (East)Jerusalem" – not simply by talking but also by constant and intensive activity, creating 'facts on the ground', dispossessing Palestinian inhabitants and violating International Law.
"Isracard cannot wash its hands off the nefarious settler activity by claiming that this is 'a governmental site'. In Israel, as in many other countries, a company must tell consumers what is the nature of the product or service which it is offering for sale. Isracard is not at liberty to offer its customers 'entertainment for the entire family' at a park run by extreme right people, without disclosing that, once arriving there, the customers would be exposed to extreme right propaganda.
"If Isracard goes through with the threat of judicial proceedings against us we won’t be afraid. We have available plenty of testimonies and witnesses regarding the 'City of David National Park' – what it is, who runs it and how, what kind of 'guidance' is given to visitors and what is the political slant of that 'guidance'. The gift coupon sent by Isracard to its customers includes the name and logo of MasterCard, an international company conducting world-wide business. Despite their extensive and long-standing business relationship, Isracard did not bother to let MasterCard know of the use made of its name and reputation in promoting extremist settlers who violate International Law.
"We in Gush Shalom decided to fill the vacancy and inform the MasterCard directors, with the help of our friends abroad. Meanwhile, there is a continuing wave of protest messages sent by Israeli peace activists to the Isracard offices and by Americans and Europeans to MasterCard."
Gush Shalom is requesting people of conscience to voice their concerns to the MasterCard company-contact info available @
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/events/1244656130/
Please CC your correspondence to info@gush-shalom.org
1. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/09/world/settlers-move-into-4-homes-in-east-jerusalem.html
2. http://maxblumenthal.com/2009/06/gambling-with-conflict-how-settlers-and-a-california-casino-king-control-israeli-policy/
Eileen Fleming, Founder of http://wearewideawake.org/
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com and The Palestine Telegraph
Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"
--
Friday, July 24, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
USA= ONE PARTY STATE
Bill Maher on Democrats
Every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there's a major political party standing in his way: the Democrats. Now, people talk a lot about a third political party in America; we don't need a third party, we need a first party ... this is because we don't have a left and a right party in this country any more: we have a center-right party, and a crazy party. And over the last 30-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge-fund managers, credit-card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture, and the pharmaceutical lobby: that's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, Flat-Earthers, and Civil-War re-enacters, who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans. And who actually worry that Obama is a Socialist. Socialist? He's not even a Liberal! I know he's not, because he's on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don't see actual Liberals. And if occasionally you do get to hear Ralph Nader, or Noam Chomsky, or Dennis Kucinich, they're treated like buffoons. … Shouldn't there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget? A party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot, and steep, direct taxing of polluters? These aren't radical ideas. A majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren't being served by the Democrats. Because, bottom-line: Democrats are the new Republicans. ~ Bill Maher
Every time Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, there's a major political party standing in his way: the Democrats. Now, people talk a lot about a third political party in America; we don't need a third party, we need a first party ... this is because we don't have a left and a right party in this country any more: we have a center-right party, and a crazy party. And over the last 30-odd years, Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge-fund managers, credit-card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture, and the pharmaceutical lobby: that's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, Flat-Earthers, and Civil-War re-enacters, who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans. And who actually worry that Obama is a Socialist. Socialist? He's not even a Liberal! I know he's not, because he's on TV. And while I see Democrats on television, I don't see actual Liberals. And if occasionally you do get to hear Ralph Nader, or Noam Chomsky, or Dennis Kucinich, they're treated like buffoons. … Shouldn't there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget? A party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot, and steep, direct taxing of polluters? These aren't radical ideas. A majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended. And what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren't being served by the Democrats. Because, bottom-line: Democrats are the new Republicans. ~ Bill Maher
Monday, July 20, 2009
Israeli Jews, citizens of the Schnorer State*, relax and don't worry
* Schnorer: Yiddish for a beggar, a mooch. Israel's standard of living is elevated by sponging off of the American tax-payer and gifts from wealthy donors.
From Haaretz
Last update-11:18 19/07/2009
Israelis don't pay price for injustice of occupation
By Gideon Levy
Really, who needs all this? The U.S. president is devoting a considerable amount of his precious time and goodwill trying to be persuasive about the need to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Europeans are ready to act, half the world is waiting, but let's admit the truth: Why all the commotion about us? The settlers might scream and block highway intersections. The Israel Defense Forces would become less important and the news could actually become boring. The vineyard in the Golan Heights is liable to close, as might the boutique winery in the settlement of Ofra.
Life in Israel is just peachy, and who wants to think about peace, negotiations, withdrawals, the "price" we have to pay and all this unnecessary mess? Cafes are bustling and restaurants are packed. People are vacationing. The markets are surging. Television dumbs us down, highways are jammed, and the festivals are blaring. La Scala performed in the park and Madonna is to follow, and the beaches are full of foreign tourists and locals. The summer of 2009 is wonderful. So why should we change things?
The Israelis aren't paying any price for the injustice of occupation. Life in Israel is immeasurably better than in most countries. The global financial crisis has hit Israel less than other places. It has poor people but not like in the developing world, and the rich and middle class here have not been critically harmed.
Advertisement
The security situation is also in good shape. No terrorist attacks. No Arabs. And when terrorism subsides, as it has over the past several years, who remembers that there is a "Palestinian problem"? The army and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can continue to scare us with the terrorism threat, but for the meantime, at least, it doesn't exist. The Iranian nuclear threat is also just a vague option at the moment. Life in Israel is currently secure.
True, every few years a wave of violence erupts, but it usually happens in the country's outskirts and doesn't interest anyone in the center. Qassam rockets in Sderot or Katyushas in Kiryat Shmona? Who cares? This is followed by another period of quiet, like now. The separation fence, media, education system and political propaganda do a great job in creating an illusion to make us forget what we need to forget and hide what needs to be hidden. They are there and we are here, and here life is a bowl of cherries, if not a blast. Like Switzerland? Even better.
We always knew how to add a measure of significance to the pleasures of life. We practice the cult of security, society's true religion, and we perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust. You can enjoy yourself in Israel and also play the victim, party and gripe. Where else is there a place like this?
The Israelis don't pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before the Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative, and why should they?
Even the most cruel terrorist attacks to befall the country haven't instilled an understanding among the Israelis about the connection between cause and effect - between occupation and terrorism. Thanks to the media and the politicians - two of the worst agents for dumbing down and blinding Israeli society - we learned that the Arabs were born to kill, the whole world is against us, anti-Semitism determines how Israel is dealt with, and there is no connection between our actions and the price we pay.
Neither an international blockade nor terrible bloodletting appear to be on the horizon, to our great fortune. So why should we worry? It's true that the world is beginning to scowl at Israel. So what? The world hates us anyway, Israelis are convinced. As long as they are not deprived of the world's pleasures, there is no reason to worry. Try to ask them why they are ostracized and you will immediately hear scorn about the world, rather than any self-criticism, God forbid. The Israelis are not only enjoying themselves. They are also very satisfied with themselves - over their level of morality and that of their army and state.
All this really could have been peachy if not for the fact that blindness is dangerous and the not-so-good ending is known in advance. It's another wonderful summer in Tel Aviv - and Gaza and Jenin - but a part of the world will blow up in our faces. And then we will pretend to be amazed, miserable victims, as we so much like to be.
From Haaretz
Last update-11:18 19/07/2009
Israelis don't pay price for injustice of occupation
By Gideon Levy
Really, who needs all this? The U.S. president is devoting a considerable amount of his precious time and goodwill trying to be persuasive about the need to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Europeans are ready to act, half the world is waiting, but let's admit the truth: Why all the commotion about us? The settlers might scream and block highway intersections. The Israel Defense Forces would become less important and the news could actually become boring. The vineyard in the Golan Heights is liable to close, as might the boutique winery in the settlement of Ofra.
Life in Israel is just peachy, and who wants to think about peace, negotiations, withdrawals, the "price" we have to pay and all this unnecessary mess? Cafes are bustling and restaurants are packed. People are vacationing. The markets are surging. Television dumbs us down, highways are jammed, and the festivals are blaring. La Scala performed in the park and Madonna is to follow, and the beaches are full of foreign tourists and locals. The summer of 2009 is wonderful. So why should we change things?
The Israelis aren't paying any price for the injustice of occupation. Life in Israel is immeasurably better than in most countries. The global financial crisis has hit Israel less than other places. It has poor people but not like in the developing world, and the rich and middle class here have not been critically harmed.
Advertisement
The security situation is also in good shape. No terrorist attacks. No Arabs. And when terrorism subsides, as it has over the past several years, who remembers that there is a "Palestinian problem"? The army and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can continue to scare us with the terrorism threat, but for the meantime, at least, it doesn't exist. The Iranian nuclear threat is also just a vague option at the moment. Life in Israel is currently secure.
True, every few years a wave of violence erupts, but it usually happens in the country's outskirts and doesn't interest anyone in the center. Qassam rockets in Sderot or Katyushas in Kiryat Shmona? Who cares? This is followed by another period of quiet, like now. The separation fence, media, education system and political propaganda do a great job in creating an illusion to make us forget what we need to forget and hide what needs to be hidden. They are there and we are here, and here life is a bowl of cherries, if not a blast. Like Switzerland? Even better.
We always knew how to add a measure of significance to the pleasures of life. We practice the cult of security, society's true religion, and we perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust. You can enjoy yourself in Israel and also play the victim, party and gripe. Where else is there a place like this?
The Israelis don't pay any price for the injustice of the occupation, so the occupation will never end. It will not end a moment before the Israelis understand the connection between the occupation and the price they will be forced to pay. They will never shake it off on their own initiative, and why should they?
Even the most cruel terrorist attacks to befall the country haven't instilled an understanding among the Israelis about the connection between cause and effect - between occupation and terrorism. Thanks to the media and the politicians - two of the worst agents for dumbing down and blinding Israeli society - we learned that the Arabs were born to kill, the whole world is against us, anti-Semitism determines how Israel is dealt with, and there is no connection between our actions and the price we pay.
Neither an international blockade nor terrible bloodletting appear to be on the horizon, to our great fortune. So why should we worry? It's true that the world is beginning to scowl at Israel. So what? The world hates us anyway, Israelis are convinced. As long as they are not deprived of the world's pleasures, there is no reason to worry. Try to ask them why they are ostracized and you will immediately hear scorn about the world, rather than any self-criticism, God forbid. The Israelis are not only enjoying themselves. They are also very satisfied with themselves - over their level of morality and that of their army and state.
All this really could have been peachy if not for the fact that blindness is dangerous and the not-so-good ending is known in advance. It's another wonderful summer in Tel Aviv - and Gaza and Jenin - but a part of the world will blow up in our faces. And then we will pretend to be amazed, miserable victims, as we so much like to be.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
HAMAS OPEN TO COEXISTENCE SAYS NEW REPORT
Hamas...has sent repeated signals that it may be ready to
begin a process of coexisting with Israel.
http://www.usip.org/files/resources/Special%20Report%20224_Hamas.pdf
U.S. Institute of Peace Special Report on Hamas, June, 2009
Summary
Although peaceful coexistence between Israel and Hamas is clearly not possible under
the formulations that comprise Hamas’s 1988 charter, Hamas has, in practice, moved
well beyond its charter. Indeed, Hamas has been carefully and consciously adjusting
its political program for years and has sent repeated signals that it may be ready to
begin a process of coexisting with Israel.
As evidenced by numerous statements, Hamas is not hostile to Jews because of religion.
Rather, Hamas’s view toward Israel is based on a fundamental belief that Israel
has occupied land that is inherently Palestinian and Islamic.
For Hamas, “recognition” of Israel would represent a negation of the rightness of its
own cause and would be indefensible under Islam. It considers unacceptable for itself
the actions of those Muslim countries that have recognized Israel, such as Egypt and
Jordan, and those that have indicated their willingness to do so, such as Saudi Arabia
and the rest of the Arab League, because they have provided no theological
justification for their policies toward Israel.
Although Hamas, as an Islamic organization, will not transgress shari‘a, which it
understands as forbidding recognition, it has formulated mechanisms that allow
it to deal with the reality of Israel as a fait accompli. These mechanisms include
the religious concepts of tahadiya and hudna and Hamas’s own concept of
“Palestinian legitimacy.”
Tahadiya refers to a short-term calming period between conflicting parties during
which differences are not put aside. A tahadiya stopped most violence between Hamas
and Israel from June to December 2008.
Hudna is a truce for a specific period, which is based on the practice of the Prophet
Mohammad and on subsequent events in Muslim history. Hamas has indicated on a
number of occasions its willingness to accede to a
hudna with Israel, assuming basic Palestinian rights as set forth in the Arab Peace
Initiative (API) are agreed to first.
Palestinian legitimacy is a term employed by Hamas to describe its willingness to
consider accepting a binding peace treaty, such as the proposal set forth in the API,
so long as the treaty is first ratified by the Palestinian people in a referendum.
Although Hamas would not directly participate in peace negotiations with Israel,Hamas
has indicated that it would be willing to be part of a Palestinian coalition
government with Fatah under which Fatah would negotiate the actual treaty.
begin a process of coexisting with Israel.
http://www.usip.org/files/resources/Special%20Report%20224_Hamas.pdf
U.S. Institute of Peace Special Report on Hamas, June, 2009
Summary
Although peaceful coexistence between Israel and Hamas is clearly not possible under
the formulations that comprise Hamas’s 1988 charter, Hamas has, in practice, moved
well beyond its charter. Indeed, Hamas has been carefully and consciously adjusting
its political program for years and has sent repeated signals that it may be ready to
begin a process of coexisting with Israel.
As evidenced by numerous statements, Hamas is not hostile to Jews because of religion.
Rather, Hamas’s view toward Israel is based on a fundamental belief that Israel
has occupied land that is inherently Palestinian and Islamic.
For Hamas, “recognition” of Israel would represent a negation of the rightness of its
own cause and would be indefensible under Islam. It considers unacceptable for itself
the actions of those Muslim countries that have recognized Israel, such as Egypt and
Jordan, and those that have indicated their willingness to do so, such as Saudi Arabia
and the rest of the Arab League, because they have provided no theological
justification for their policies toward Israel.
Although Hamas, as an Islamic organization, will not transgress shari‘a, which it
understands as forbidding recognition, it has formulated mechanisms that allow
it to deal with the reality of Israel as a fait accompli. These mechanisms include
the religious concepts of tahadiya and hudna and Hamas’s own concept of
“Palestinian legitimacy.”
Tahadiya refers to a short-term calming period between conflicting parties during
which differences are not put aside. A tahadiya stopped most violence between Hamas
and Israel from June to December 2008.
Hudna is a truce for a specific period, which is based on the practice of the Prophet
Mohammad and on subsequent events in Muslim history. Hamas has indicated on a
number of occasions its willingness to accede to a
hudna with Israel, assuming basic Palestinian rights as set forth in the Arab Peace
Initiative (API) are agreed to first.
Palestinian legitimacy is a term employed by Hamas to describe its willingness to
consider accepting a binding peace treaty, such as the proposal set forth in the API,
so long as the treaty is first ratified by the Palestinian people in a referendum.
Although Hamas would not directly participate in peace negotiations with Israel,Hamas
has indicated that it would be willing to be part of a Palestinian coalition
government with Fatah under which Fatah would negotiate the actual treaty.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
AN AMERICAN JEW VISITS A VERY FOREIGN COUNTRY: 2 WEEKS IN ISRAEL
Photos above: Anti-Obama poster at ultra-Zionist demonstration: "Obama, anti-Semite and Jew Hater," Old Jaffa, Tel Aviv
An American Jew Visits A Very Foreign Country:
PART I -- Tel Aviv and my impressions, or what kind of a place IS this?
-- Rick Congress
THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE
Tel Aviv is awash with sunlight and has a light airy feel. It’s great to walk along the beach. People young and old are sunbathing, swimming, and I can see many ultra-modern high rises as I look eastward toward the city. I’ve arrived on June 3 to join up with 30 other participants in the Code Pink organized Free Gaza delegation, a follow up on the journey I took in March where 62 of us entered Gaza from Egypt to campaign against the Israeli/US/Egyptian blockade that is strangling Gaza and magnifying the suffering caused by the savage bombardment carried out by the Israeli armed forces in December and January. Our group would team up with the Coalition of Women for Peace made up of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis in an attempt to get into Gaza from the Eretz crossing in Israel.
But right now I’m in a swimming suit, relaxing. Everyone around here is relaxed. No worries or cares. And it’s not just at the beach. In the several days I spend in Tel Aviv out of my two week stay in Israel I can see and hear that the people of this supposedly more liberal and secular city on the Mediterranean shore don’t care about anything except their own well-being (which is hardly a shock, most people in the world are first of all concerned with making a living for themselves and their family). But when confronted with even a whiff of concern about Gaza, the “Arabs,” those other people, they make it clear they don’t care if they live or die (preferably die, or disappear, if you press the point).
This reaction is what you get from Israeli Jews. But it’s hard to find a non-Jewish citizen of Israel to speak with. Not the cab drivers, or the cleaning women in the hotels, or the busboys in the restaurants, or the workers in the stores. They are all Jewish, or maybe they are Russian non-Jews who posed as Jews to get out of the then-USSR and get housing and other subsidies for a good life, thanks to those perennially generous chumps, the U.S taxpayers.
This is “The Jewish State,” or the “democratic state of all the Jewish people” that Netanyahu now demands that everyone recognize Israel as being. With this designation Israel will have a free pass to expel all the Palestinians (“Palestinians” … a word the regular Israeli-in-the-street sneer at. “They are Arabs and don’t belong here”), imprison them all, or anything they want. If Israel is the state for only the Jews, then the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinians, Muslim or Christian, don’t have any rights. Not that they have much in the way of right at this moment, but there is some shred of legality they are hanging on to. Now Israel’s Foreign Minister, (a Russian speaker from Moldavia) Avidor Lieberman, wants the Palestinian citizens of the “State for all of the Jews” to pledge that they are loyal to the state that specifically says it doesn’t represent them.
Of course you can’t have a democratic state once you christen it with an ethnic label. To preserve the Jewish majority you have to use undemocratic, positively dictatorial means to keep it that way. Thus the urge to push out all Palestinians. Though Israel knows they have to do it slowly, in covert ways, to cover it up with Orwellian double-talk. Israel in its Pre-1967 borders (without Gaza and the West Bank) has 5.5 million Jews and 1.5 million Palestinians. The West Bank has 2.5 million and Gaza has 1.5 million Palestinians (the 500,000 settlers in the West Bank are counted as living in Israel, since the government won’t recognize what the whole world knows, the West Bank isn’t part of the state of Israel, it is illegally occupied land.)
The long run demographics are against a Jewish majority state. So, warring against these numbers, Israel has laws making it illegal for an Israeli citizen who marries a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza to live with his or her spouse inside the State of Israel. Other laws restrict movement, and others take away the homes of people who have title to their land going back hundreds of years to the Ottoman Empire.
Anyway, back to the streets of Tel Aviv. What I finally realize is that the Palestinians are segregated in Tel Aviv. Tel Aviv is a Jim Crow town. They aren’t wanted so they are not employed in hotels, or as bus or cab drivers. A premise of Zionism and “Labor Zionism” is that they have a normal society with Jewish rich, poor, middle class, workers, paupers…. all strata of society must be 100% Jewish. They don’t want to exploit Palestinian labor, they want to eliminate it. This is a major difference from South African apartheid where black labor was exploited as cheap labor to enrich all of white society. The Israelis by and large want the Palestinians gone.
Walking around Tel Aviv with other members of the delegation we got strange looks. Some of our group were wearing Code Pink T shirts that said “Free Gaza” and “Lift the Siege of Gaza.” There obviously was something wrong with us. When we decided to go to Jaffa, we finally found some Palestinians. Jaffa is an ancient city dating from the Bronze Age that became a Muslim city in 625 AD. It’s a beautiful, historical place with arched walkways and massive stone building that are many centuries old. If you walk south from our hotel (which was on the corner of Hayarkon St. and Allenby Road and a block from the beach) it takes about half an hour to get to the old city of Jaffa.
As we got close to Jaffa we saw some young Palestinian couples and families strolling along the waterfront, but not very many. Jaffa has been taken over by Jewish Israelis. It’s been absorbed as part of the Tel Aviv municipality. In 1948 most of the residents were pushed out by military action. They were marched to the docks and forced onto boats as Israeli soldiers fired over their heads. Many of these Jaffans and their descendants are now in Gaza (see “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” by Illan Pappe www.oneworld-publications.com Pappe is an internationally acclaimed Jewish historian who now is the chair of the History department of the University of Exeter in the UK.). Now Jaffa has become a tourist attraction and a center for Israeli artists. When my wife asked someone who worked at a gallery we were browsing in where she could find Palestinian art the woman looked puzzled and answered, “we only have well know artists here.”
There were a few signs in Arabic in Jaffa. At least they hadn’t been removed yet. All over Tel Aviv, and other cities as well, the public signs and signs on businesses are in Hebrew, Russian (there are 500,000 of them in Israel and is the main voting block for Liberman’s far-right party), and English. Rarely was anything in Arabic.
There are highway signs in Arabic on the main roads between cities. Especially ones that warn drivers that a road is for Jews only (the ones that connect West Bank settlements to cities in Israel proper). Cars registered to Palestinians have different colored license plates than those registered to Jewish Israelis so the police and soldiers can separate out the vehicles they want to.
While in Jaffa I went to a hilltop over the harbor where an archeological dig had unearthed an arch that was constructed by Egyptians during the reign of Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II. A blurb on one of Yahoo’s Tourism Web pages says:
On the slope of the green, carefully manicured hill in the park area of Old Jaffa is an interesting archeological site. A massive doorjamb, as it were, stands in front of partially excavated ruins. This is the reconstructed gateway to a building from the time of Egyptian ruler Ramses II (1400-1200 BCE). A portion of the jamb, inscribed with hieroglyphics, was discovered by an Israeli archeologist in the late 1950s. The archeological site has remnants of structures from the many civilizations that established, or attempted to establish, themselves in the area.
.
Does this trump the 3000 years of history that Zionists say gives them the right to all of biblical (broadly defined) Israel today? Was the Mediterranean coast part of biblical Israel or it’s rival kingdom, Judea? Does the Ramses gate give Mubarak a claim to Tel Aviv? Was the bible written by visiting space aliens as a practical joke? Stay tuned.
During my stay in Israel there were banners hung in Tel Aviv celebrating the city’s 100th anniversary. Why was it founded right next to Jaffa in 1909 by Jewish immigrants during the time of the Ottoman Empire? Because they didn’t want to live with lowly Arabs. They wanted an all-Jewish town.
Ralph Ellison wrote a great novel, “The Invisible Man,” about how white Americans looked right through black Americans, they didn’t want to see them, but they were there. Blacks lived in segregated, run-down housing apart from white society. They commuted into town to work in low-paying jobs and went right home again.
In Israel, in everyday life, the Palestinians are also made to be invisible. But different from the U.S. experience, they aren’t commuting to work for Israelis. There is no work for them. Jobs are for Jews, not Palestinians. Well, not quite. If there aren’t enough Jews to do low-wage jobs then these jobs are for Filipinos, or Indians … anyone but Palestinians. There are thousands of mainly Asian “guest” workers in Israel. One friend who had spent a lot of time in Israel told me the Hebrew word for home health care attendant is “Filipino.”
OBAMA TRAUMA
I was in Tel Aviv during Obama’s Cairo speech at the start of my trip and also, near the end of my trip, was standing outside Bar-Illan University in Tel Aviv where Netanyahu gave his response to Obama’s speech. I was with a group of protesters from the Code Pink delegation, later joined by a small number of Israeli Peace Now members.
My president, Barack HUSSEIN Obama (Israelis stress the Hussein part) isn’t appreciated by Jewish Israelis. “Someone should shoot him in the head, you Americans are crazy,” is a remark a cab driver in Tel Aviv made to a member of our delegation. Newspapers refer to him as “Pharaoh.” Opinion polls show that he is not viewed as a friend of Israel; he’s not to be trusted. Foreign Minister Lieberman made a show of visiting Moscow with the idea that Israel could find other powerful friends. An article in the Jerusalem Post told about a minor cabinet minister’s proposal that Israel impose sanctions on the U.S.A. Would they boycott our money? The article didn’t specify, other than to let the minister vent his anger at Obama for daring to question Israel’s behavior.
Did Obama cut off the three billion dollars a year in foreign aid (Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid)? Did he demand that the borders with Gaza be opened right now or he will impose sanctions against Israel? All he did is make the mildest criticism of Israel, overlooking the systematic theft of land and war crimes, and made a very weak demand of not expanding existing settlements. The prospects of Obama doing anything strong against Israel’s intransigence are slim to none. But his words are enough to make him public enemy number one. Just the departure from the norm of U.S. presidents falling over themselves to shower praise on Israel and give it everything it wants, and a suggestion that Palestinians are an occupied and dispossessed people (or even the assertion that they are a people at all) is enough to drive rightwing Israeli Jews (that is to say, the current majority of the people) crazy.
They aren’t used to hearing any public criticism from the White House. It’s not very likely that Obama will end up doing anything to really stop the expansion of the West Bank settlements, let alone dismantle most of them, which is an absolute necessity for a Palestinian state to be a real one, not the pretend state that Netanyahu proposed in his public response to Obama at Bar-Ilan University June 12.
While I don’t expect any meaningful action on Obama’s part (I’d like to be wrong) words can be important. Israeli leaders must sense, as do their AIPAC (the famous Israel lobby in Washington) surrogates, the slippage in support in the U.S. for Israel due to their murderous attack on the civilians of Gaza.
Standing across the street from the University gates my group of demonstrators -- with signs calling for the ending of settlements, and lifting the siege of Gaza -- were treated to the spectacle of frothing at the mouth counter-demonstrators who help up posters showing Obama dressed up like Yasser Arafat with a keyfaia and military tunic (someone probably just Photo Shopped Obama’s face into a picture of Arafat). The caption in large letters said: Obama, anti-Semite and Jew hater. Nice way to talk about your major financial benefactor!
This prompted me to do something I’ve never done in the U.S.(or anyplace else that I can think of) I supported the president …. Just to piss off the ultra-Zionists across from us. We yelled: “American Jews voted for Obama! Obama won the election, the neo-cons are out! American taxpayers are tired of paying for your war crimes,” and so on.
I came up with a few good chants. Holding up my U.S. passport I yelled, “I want my money back! Three billion dollars a year, we want a refund! Hey Bibi, give me that Armani suit you’re wearing. I paid for it!” I think my best one was “No more U.S. taxpayers money to Israeli schnorers (Yiddish for moocher).
CAN ONE OF THE CHOSEN PEOPLE CHOOSE NOT TO HANG OUT WITH CHOSEN PEOPLE?
Helen (my wife) and I had trepidations about going to Israel. Mainly because we knew of pro-Palestinian political activists who were not let into Israel and summarily deported, sometimes after humiliating strip-searches and rummaging through luggage. Some were detained for hours and finally allowed to enter Israel, but often with restrictions, such as a visa good for only 3 days, or threats of arrest if they participated in any unspecified “improper activity.” We were warned that a careless possession of book by Noam Chomsky, or a “Free Palestine” button in our belongings would lead to our detention and or expulsion (to be put back on the next plane to New York).
When we went to Gaza via Egypt we were welcomed as desperately needed supporters and friends by the officials and people there. Going to Israel was like entering hostile territory. So I got a short haircut and we dressed like well-off old Jews from New York and were square enough looking to clear customs. While waiting in line we saw a couple of young women, each traveling alone, taken out of line and led off somewhere. Someone later told us that young unescorted women were often suspected of being part of some pro-Palestinian activist group like the ISM (International Solidarity Movement). I suppose the reasoning was that if a young woman came in with a husband or boyfriend they wouldn’t get out of control.
On the plane from JFK to Tel Aviv an Israeli woman struck up a conversation with Helen. “Are you Jewish?” The answer being “yes,” the woman went on, “Oh, you’ll love Israel,” and mentioned some sights to see. Then she said, “I’m glad to get back home, it’s great to live in a country where everyone is Jewish.” Helen though it best to let that pass without comment.
As the days went by during our stay in Israel we talked about how it felt to be in a “Jewish State.” Virtually everyone around us in Tel Aviv (even most of the tourists) were Jews. One evening we were in a Jewish owned restaurant in Jaffa and Helen commented how the clientele, a mostly middle-aged to older bunch, reminded her of the people at her parent’s country club in Long Island. She was right, I recognized the type. That’s the problem with Israel, I realized. I know this type of people, having grown up with them and I had to put up with their small mindedness and racism (“Oh, the svartzers, what’s the matter with them?”).
The woman on the plane returning home to Israel thought it was great to live exclusively among Jews. For me, it’s definitely not great to live in a place where the people are all the same. It sucks! I grew up in a small Jewish community in white-bread bland Indianapolis. I was glad to finally get out of there for good and live in places with some variety. I don’t automatically crave Jewish companionship or society. I like rice and beans, hot peppers, Chinese food, but not Jewish heart-attack food. Being a deracinated Jew is great! Living in New York where an Albanian can get into an argument with a Bengali over a parking space in front of a Peruvian restaurant is great! Contrast! Stimulation! Multi-culturalism! Living in this kind of environment is great. The ingrown, ethnocentric, paranoid culture of an exclusvely Jewish state is not great.
MORE POSTS TO COME
Meeting with a Palestinian member of the Kenesset
Jerusalem: the Silwan neighborhood
Bi’lin
The Galilee
Sunday, May 31, 2009
ROCKET (political) SCIENCE, R Congress
Here are two articles. One is by me, your ironic blogger, and is followed by an article published in the London Review of Books by Henry Siegman in the 1/29/2009 issue.
ROCKET (political) SCIENCE
Rick Congress
In the main stream media's score card of good guys and bad guys the rockets fired from Gaza at Israel are always the great crime, inexplicable, out of the blue, unprovoked assaults on poor, innocent Israel, just trying to live in peace ... and now this!
One reason for Palestinians firing rockets from Gaza is the fact that the Israeli Army has continually launched air strikes, rocket attacks and ground attacks against anyone they deem a “terrorist.” Which by Israeli standards could be anyone and everyone. These “self-defense” attacks have happened over several years in Gaza and the West Bank and have been barely reported. However, there was one well-publicized event that illustrates the issue. A few years ago there was a Hamas person the Israelis wanted to kill in Gaza City. They dropped a bomb on the apartment building he was in. They definitely got their man. They also destroyed the block-long building and killed 50 other people. Even the Bush administration had to criticize them…. but not too harshly. It was more on the order of "when you go out to kill someone (who are we to question who or why?) just be more careful and don't kill too many extra people."
Over the last three years, especially since the growth in the influence of Hamas (which developed a particularly strong base in Gaza) Israel has killed a couple of thousand people as they carried out “surgical strikes” against specific individuals. They just don’t happen to care if they also kill three, or four, or ten or twenty other people in the process. That’s the breaks.
It’s not too hard to see why para-military groups from Hamas, or other organizations (one of which is Islamic Jihad, which is outside of Hamas control and considers Hamas too moderate) would want to retaliate, however ineffectual – militarily and politically – it may be. Over the years less than a dozen Israelis have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza. These weapons are fairly small scale semi-improvised devices. Despite unproven charges of Iranian or other “rogue” country or organization’s largess, no one in Gaza has anything close to the wherewithal of Israel with it’s three billion plus annual subsidy from the U.S. government.
These numbers comparing Palestinian and Israeli victims of military attacks don’t include the 1400 Palestinians (and 13 Israelis) killed during the December ’08 to January ’09 three week Israeli ground and air attack on all areas of Gaza.
Rather than some necessary, measured response by Israel to a reign of terror from Hamas’s deadly rocket attacks, this strike, aimed at all the people of Gaza (of all ages) is part of Israel’s standard doctrine of collective punishment.
But what about Hamas breaking an agreed upon truce?
To find out more abut this read the following article by Henry Siegman in the January, 29, 2009 issue of the London Review of Books.
Israel’s Lies
01.29.2009 | The London Review of Books
By Henry Siegman
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’
The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade.
Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take; instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at Israel’s civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.
The greater lie is that Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was intended as a prelude to further withdrawals and a peace agreement. This is how Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass, who was also his chief negotiator with the Americans, described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Ha’aretz in August 2004:
What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns . . . The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush’s] authority and permission . . . and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians don’t read the Israeli papers, or that when they saw what was happening on the West Bank they couldn’t figure out for themselves what Sharon was up to?
Israel’s government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict’. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Ha’aretz, that material released by Israel’s Ministry of Defence showed that ‘there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.’ In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Ha’aretz whether he condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:
A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.
In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.
It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions.
These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the former head of Mossad and Sharon’s national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy. The Hamas leadership has undergone a change ‘right under our very noses’, Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that ‘its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future.’ It is now ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how ‘temporary’ those borders would be, ‘they know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.’ In an earlier article, Halevy also pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.
In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled] Mashal’s declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaida’s approach, and provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for the better.
Why then are Israel’s leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian ‘state’ made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective of Israel’s military, intelligence and political elites since the end of the Six-Day War.[*] They believe that Hamas would not permit such a cantonisation of Palestinian territory, no matter how long the occupation continues. They may be wrong about Abbas and his superannuated cohorts, but they are entirely right about Hamas.
Middle East observers wonder whether Israel’s assault on Hamas will succeed in destroying the organisation or expelling it from Gaza. This is an irrelevant question. If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition.
If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave them to work out their differences, he will assure a future Palestinian resistance far more extreme than Hamas – one likely to be allied with al-Qaida. For the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, this would be the worst possible outcome. Perhaps some Israelis, including the settler leadership, believe it would serve their purposes, since it would provide the government with a compelling pretext to hold on to all of Palestine. But this is a delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost – and were probably no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective strikes on key Hamas facilities. ‘Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly achieve?’ he asks. ‘Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.’ Cordesman concludes that ‘any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends.’
15 January
[*] See my piece in the LRB, 16 August 2007.
Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.
ROCKET (political) SCIENCE
Rick Congress
In the main stream media's score card of good guys and bad guys the rockets fired from Gaza at Israel are always the great crime, inexplicable, out of the blue, unprovoked assaults on poor, innocent Israel, just trying to live in peace ... and now this!
One reason for Palestinians firing rockets from Gaza is the fact that the Israeli Army has continually launched air strikes, rocket attacks and ground attacks against anyone they deem a “terrorist.” Which by Israeli standards could be anyone and everyone. These “self-defense” attacks have happened over several years in Gaza and the West Bank and have been barely reported. However, there was one well-publicized event that illustrates the issue. A few years ago there was a Hamas person the Israelis wanted to kill in Gaza City. They dropped a bomb on the apartment building he was in. They definitely got their man. They also destroyed the block-long building and killed 50 other people. Even the Bush administration had to criticize them…. but not too harshly. It was more on the order of "when you go out to kill someone (who are we to question who or why?) just be more careful and don't kill too many extra people."
Over the last three years, especially since the growth in the influence of Hamas (which developed a particularly strong base in Gaza) Israel has killed a couple of thousand people as they carried out “surgical strikes” against specific individuals. They just don’t happen to care if they also kill three, or four, or ten or twenty other people in the process. That’s the breaks.
It’s not too hard to see why para-military groups from Hamas, or other organizations (one of which is Islamic Jihad, which is outside of Hamas control and considers Hamas too moderate) would want to retaliate, however ineffectual – militarily and politically – it may be. Over the years less than a dozen Israelis have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza. These weapons are fairly small scale semi-improvised devices. Despite unproven charges of Iranian or other “rogue” country or organization’s largess, no one in Gaza has anything close to the wherewithal of Israel with it’s three billion plus annual subsidy from the U.S. government.
These numbers comparing Palestinian and Israeli victims of military attacks don’t include the 1400 Palestinians (and 13 Israelis) killed during the December ’08 to January ’09 three week Israeli ground and air attack on all areas of Gaza.
Rather than some necessary, measured response by Israel to a reign of terror from Hamas’s deadly rocket attacks, this strike, aimed at all the people of Gaza (of all ages) is part of Israel’s standard doctrine of collective punishment.
But what about Hamas breaking an agreed upon truce?
To find out more abut this read the following article by Henry Siegman in the January, 29, 2009 issue of the London Review of Books.
Israel’s Lies
01.29.2009 | The London Review of Books
By Henry Siegman
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’
The truce, which began in June last year and was due for renewal in December, required both parties to refrain from violent action against the other. Hamas had to cease its rocket assaults and prevent the firing of rockets by other groups such as Islamic Jihad (even Israel’s intelligence agencies acknowledged this had been implemented with surprising effectiveness), and Israel had to put a stop to its targeted assassinations and military incursions. This understanding was seriously violated on 4 November, when the IDF entered Gaza and killed six members of Hamas. Hamas responded by launching Qassam rockets and Grad missiles. Even so, it offered to extend the truce, but only on condition that Israel ended its blockade. Israel refused. It could have met its obligation to protect its citizens by agreeing to ease the blockade, but it didn’t even try. It cannot be said that Israel launched its assault to protect its citizens from rockets. It did so to protect its right to continue the strangulation of Gaza’s population.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that Hamas declared an end to suicide bombings and rocket fire when it decided to join the Palestinian political process, and largely stuck to it for more than a year. Bush publicly welcomed that decision, citing it as an example of the success of his campaign for democracy in the Middle East. (He had no other success to point to.) When Hamas unexpectedly won the election, Israel and the US immediately sought to delegitimise the result and embraced Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah, who until then had been dismissed by Israel’s leaders as a ‘plucked chicken’. They armed and trained his security forces to overthrow Hamas; and when Hamas – brutally, to be sure – pre-empted this violent attempt to reverse the result of the first honest democratic election in the modern Middle East, Israel and the Bush administration imposed the blockade.
Israel seeks to counter these indisputable facts by maintaining that in withdrawing Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Ariel Sharon gave Hamas the chance to set out on the path to statehood, a chance it refused to take; instead, it transformed Gaza into a launching-pad for firing missiles at Israel’s civilian population. The charge is a lie twice over. First, for all its failings, Hamas brought to Gaza a level of law and order unknown in recent years, and did so without the large sums of money that donors showered on the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. It eliminated the violent gangs and warlords who terrorised Gaza under Fatah’s rule. Non-observant Muslims, Christians and other minorities have more religious freedom under Hamas rule than they would have in Saudi Arabia, for example, or under many other Arab regimes.
The greater lie is that Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza was intended as a prelude to further withdrawals and a peace agreement. This is how Sharon’s senior adviser Dov Weisglass, who was also his chief negotiator with the Americans, described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Ha’aretz in August 2004:
What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements [i.e. the major settlement blocks on the West Bank] would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns . . . The significance [of the agreement with the US] is the freezing of the political process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush’s] authority and permission . . . and the ratification of both houses of Congress.
Do the Israelis and Americans think that Palestinians don’t read the Israeli papers, or that when they saw what was happening on the West Bank they couldn’t figure out for themselves what Sharon was up to?
Israel’s government would like the world to believe that Hamas launched its Qassam rockets because that is what terrorists do and Hamas is a generic terrorist group. In fact, Hamas is no more a ‘terror organisation’ (Israel’s preferred term) than the Zionist movement was during its struggle for a Jewish homeland. In the late 1930s and 1940s, parties within the Zionist movement resorted to terrorist activities for strategic reasons. According to Benny Morris, it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. He writes in Righteous Victims that an upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict’. He also documents atrocities committed during the 1948-49 war by the IDF, admitting in a 2004 interview, published in Ha’aretz, that material released by Israel’s Ministry of Defence showed that ‘there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought . . . In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them, and destroy the villages themselves.’ In a number of Palestinian villages and towns the IDF carried out organised executions of civilians. Asked by Ha’aretz whether he condemned the ethnic cleansing, Morris replied that he did not:
A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.
In other words, when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.
It is too easy to describe Hamas simply as a ‘terror organisation’. It is a religious nationalist movement that resorts to terrorism, as the Zionist movement did during its struggle for statehood, in the mistaken belief that it is the only way to end an oppressive occupation and bring about a Palestinian state. While Hamas’s ideology formally calls for that state to be established on the ruins of the state of Israel, this doesn’t determine Hamas’s actual policies today any more than the same declaration in the PLO charter determined Fatah’s actions.
These are not the conclusions of an apologist for Hamas but the opinions of the former head of Mossad and Sharon’s national security adviser, Ephraim Halevy. The Hamas leadership has undergone a change ‘right under our very noses’, Halevy wrote recently in Yedioth Ahronoth, by recognising that ‘its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future.’ It is now ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state within the temporary borders of 1967. Halevy noted that while Hamas has not said how ‘temporary’ those borders would be, ‘they know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their co-operation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: they will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.’ In an earlier article, Halevy also pointed out the absurdity of linking Hamas to al-Qaida.
In the eyes of al-Qaida, the members of Hamas are perceived as heretics due to their stated desire to participate, even indirectly, in processes of any understandings or agreements with Israel. [The Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled] Mashal’s declaration diametrically contradicts al-Qaida’s approach, and provides Israel with an opportunity, perhaps a historic one, to leverage it for the better.
Why then are Israel’s leaders so determined to destroy Hamas? Because they believe that its leadership, unlike that of Fatah, cannot be intimidated into accepting a peace accord that establishes a Palestinian ‘state’ made up of territorially disconnected entities over which Israel would be able to retain permanent control. Control of the West Bank has been the unwavering objective of Israel’s military, intelligence and political elites since the end of the Six-Day War.[*] They believe that Hamas would not permit such a cantonisation of Palestinian territory, no matter how long the occupation continues. They may be wrong about Abbas and his superannuated cohorts, but they are entirely right about Hamas.
Middle East observers wonder whether Israel’s assault on Hamas will succeed in destroying the organisation or expelling it from Gaza. This is an irrelevant question. If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition.
If Barack Obama picks a seasoned Middle East envoy who clings to the idea that outsiders should not present their own proposals for a just and sustainable peace agreement, much less press the parties to accept it, but instead leave them to work out their differences, he will assure a future Palestinian resistance far more extreme than Hamas – one likely to be allied with al-Qaida. For the US, Europe and most of the rest of the world, this would be the worst possible outcome. Perhaps some Israelis, including the settler leadership, believe it would serve their purposes, since it would provide the government with a compelling pretext to hold on to all of Palestine. But this is a delusion that would bring about the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost – and were probably no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective strikes on key Hamas facilities. ‘Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly achieve?’ he asks. ‘Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.’ Cordesman concludes that ‘any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends.’
15 January
[*] See my piece in the LRB, 16 August 2007.
Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Why the Darfur Campaign appeals to the Main Stream Media
Interesting article on why the American media and pop stars are fixated on Darfur as a feel-good, non-guilt inducing cause (instead of U.S. government-backed or initiated atrocities in Iraq or Palestine).
London Review of Books
8 March 2007
Mahmood Mamdani
The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
Mahmood Mamdani
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?
The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.
A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’
What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.
The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.
As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.
Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.
The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:
Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.
By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on ‘violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties’, and specifically to determine ‘whether or not acts of genocide have occurred’. Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that ‘the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its control.’ But the commission did find that the government’s violence was ‘deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity’ (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: ‘The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.’
At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces – namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – which it held ‘responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes’ (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, rebel movements were accused of ‘war crimes’. Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included ‘officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’. The list named 51 individuals.
The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the ‘foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of ‘contractors’.
The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.
Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. ‘Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March, ‘the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: ‘The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that ‘at best, “only” 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease’ but ‘if things go badly, half a million will die.’
The UN commission’s report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed ‘massive displacement’ of persons (‘more than a million’ internally displaced and ‘more than 200,000’ refugees in Chad) and the destruction of ‘several hundred’ villages and hamlets as ‘irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had ‘allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that ‘the numbers are fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as ‘a UN estimate’, to ‘independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000’. A warning followed: ‘and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.’
The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?
In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: ‘China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.’ In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as ‘war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of ‘underwriting’ war crimes in Darfur?
Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.
Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.
The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’. But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’. Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.
‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’, has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.
The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as ‘an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.
To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?
Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: ‘When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.’ But instead of answering the question, Kristof – now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell – moved on: ‘And malaria annually kills one million to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: ‘We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special – not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’ That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of them no more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur – but not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide?
It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of ‘Arabs’ killing ‘Africans’. Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities.[*]
Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: ‘Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?’ Two years later he asked: ‘And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?’ Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the ‘real blind spot’ in the Muslim world, he said: ‘You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.’
If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: ‘Early in his presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: “Not on my watch.” But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.’
With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.
What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.
The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny ‘Arabised’ elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.
The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.
The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.
* Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’
From the LRB letters page: [ 22 March 2007 ] Sindre Bangstad, Martin Shaw [ 5 April 2007 ] Gérard Prunier, Matthew Moore, Sean Coleman, Jannie Armstrong, David Rubenstein [ 26 April 2007 ] Mahmood Mamdani, Elliott Green [ 24 May 2007 ] Sean Coleman.
Mahmood Mamdani, the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror, is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the departments of anthropology, political science and international affairs at Columbia.
Other articles by this contributor:
Lessons of Zimbabwe · Mugabe in Context
Was it like this for the Irish?
Gareth Peirce: The War on British Muslim
London Review of Books
8 March 2007
Mahmood Mamdani
The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency
Mahmood Mamdani
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?
The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.
A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’
What would happen if we thought of Darfur as we do of Iraq, as a place with a history and politics – a messy politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency? Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done? Why might it not create the actual possibility of genocide, not just rhetorically but in reality? Morally, there is no doubt about the horrific nature of the violence against civilians in Darfur. The ambiguity lies in the politics of the violence, whose sources include both a state-connected counter-insurgency and an organised insurgency, very much like the violence in Iraq.
The insurgency and counter-insurgency in Darfur began in 2003. Both were driven by an intermeshing of domestic tensions in the context of a peace-averse international environment defined by the War on Terror. On the one hand, there was a struggle for power within the political class in Sudan, with more marginal interests in the west (following those in the south and in the east) calling for reform at the centre. On the other, there was a community-level split inside Darfur, between nomads and settled farmers, who had earlier forged a way of sharing the use of semi-arid land in the dry season. With the drought that set in towards the late 1970s, co-operation turned into an intense struggle over diminishing resources.
As the insurgency took root among the prospering peasant tribes of Darfur, the government trained and armed the poorer nomads and formed a militia – the Janjawiid – that became the vanguard of the unfolding counter-insurgency. The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource.
Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the violence, the first from the US, the second from the UN. The American verdict was unambiguous: Darfur was the site of an ongoing genocide. The chain of events leading to Washington’s proclamation began with ‘a genocide alert’ from the Management Committee of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum; according to the Jerusalem Post, the alert was ‘the first ever of its kind, issued by the US Holocaust Museum’. The House of Representatives followed unanimously on 24 June 2004. The last to join the chorus was Colin Powell.
The UN Commission on Darfur was created in the aftermath of the American verdict and in response to American pressure. It was more ambiguous. In September 2004, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, then the chair of the African Union, visited UN headquarters in New York. Darfur had been the focal point of discussion in the African Union. All concerned were alert to the extreme political sensitivity of the issue. At a press conference at the UN on 23 September Obasanjo was asked to pronounce on the violence in Darfur: was it genocide or not? His response was very clear:
Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That’s what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.
By October, the Security Council had established a five-person commission of inquiry on Darfur and asked it to report within three months on ‘violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur by all parties’, and specifically to determine ‘whether or not acts of genocide have occurred’. Among the members of the commission was the chief prosecutor of South Africa’s TRC, Dumisa Ntsebeza. In its report, submitted on 25 January 2005, the commission concluded that ‘the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide . . . directly or through the militias under its control.’ But the commission did find that the government’s violence was ‘deliberately and indiscriminately directed against civilians’. Indeed, ‘even where rebels may have been present in villages, the impact of attacks on civilians shows that the use of military force was manifestly disproportionate to any threat posed by the rebels.’ These acts, the commission concluded, ‘were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity’ (my emphasis). Yet, the commission insisted, they did not amount to acts of genocide: ‘The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing . . . it would seem that those who planned and organised attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.’
At the same time, the commission assigned secondary responsibility to rebel forces – namely, members of the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement – which it held ‘responsible for serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which may amount to war crimes’ (my emphasis). If the government stood accused of ‘crimes against humanity’, rebel movements were accused of ‘war crimes’. Finally, the commission identified individual perpetrators and presented the UN secretary-general with a sealed list that included ‘officials of the government of Sudan, members of militia forces, members of rebel groups and certain foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’. The list named 51 individuals.
The commission’s findings highlighted three violations of international law: disproportionate response, conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, targeting entire groups (as opposed to identifiable individuals) but without the intention to eliminate them as groups. It is for this last reason that the commission ruled out the finding of genocide. Its less grave findings of ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ are not unique to Darfur, but fit several other situations of extreme violence: in particular, the US occupation of Iraq, the Hema-Lendu violence in eastern Congo and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Among those in the counter-insurgency accused of war crimes were the ‘foreign army officers acting in their personal capacity’, i.e. mercenaries, presumably recruited from armed forces outside Sudan. The involvement of mercenaries in perpetrating gross violence also fits the occupation in Iraq, where some of them go by the name of ‘contractors’.
The journalist in the US most closely identified with consciousness-raising on Darfur is the New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof, often identified as a lone crusader on the issue. To peruse Kristof’s Darfur columns over the past three years is to see the reduction of a complex political context to a morality tale unfolding in a world populated by villains and victims who never trade places and so can always and easily be told apart. It is a world where atrocities mount geometrically, the perpetrators so evil and the victims so helpless that the only possibility of relief is a rescue mission from the outside, preferably in the form of a military intervention.
Kristof made six highly publicised trips to Darfur, the first in March 2004 and the sixth two years later. He began by writing of it as a case of ‘ethnic cleansing’: ‘Sudan’s Arab rulers’ had ‘forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’ (24 March 2004). Only three days later, he upped the ante: this was no longer ethnic cleansing, but genocide. ‘Right now,’ he wrote on 27 March, ‘the government of Sudan is engaged in genocide against three large African tribes in its Darfur region.’ He continued: ‘The killings are being orchestrated by the Arab-dominated Sudanese government’ and ‘the victims are non-Arabs: blacks in the Zaghawa, Massalliet and Fur tribes.’ He estimated the death toll at a thousand a week. Two months later, on 29 May, he revised the estimates dramatically upwards, citing predictions from the US Agency for International Development to the effect that ‘at best, “only” 100,000 people will die in Darfur this year of malnutrition and disease’ but ‘if things go badly, half a million will die.’
The UN commission’s report was released on 25 February 2005. It confirmed ‘massive displacement’ of persons (‘more than a million’ internally displaced and ‘more than 200,000’ refugees in Chad) and the destruction of ‘several hundred’ villages and hamlets as ‘irrefutable facts’; but it gave no confirmed numbers for those killed. Instead, it noted rebel claims that government-allied forces had ‘allegedly killed over 70,000 persons’. Following the publication of the report, Kristof began to scale down his estimates. For the first time, on 23 February 2005, he admitted that ‘the numbers are fuzzy.’ Rather than the usual single total, he went on to give a range of figures, from a low of 70,000, which he dismissed as ‘a UN estimate’, to ‘independent estimates [that] exceed 220,000’. A warning followed: ‘and the number is rising by about ten thousand a month.’
The publication of the commission’s report had considerable effect. Internationally, it raised doubts about whether what was going on in Darfur could be termed genocide. Even US officials were unwilling to go along with the high estimates propagated by the broad alliance of organisations that subscribe to the Save Darfur campaign. The effect on American diplomacy was discernible. Three months later, on 3 May, Kristof noted with dismay that not only had ‘Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick pointedly refused to repeat the administration’s past judgment that the killings amount to genocide’: he had ‘also cited an absurdly low estimate of Darfur’s total death toll: 60,000 to 160,000’. As an alternative, Kristof cited the latest estimate of deaths from the Coalition for International Justice as ‘nearly 400,000, and rising by 500 a day’. In three months, Kristof’s estimates had gone up from 10,000 to 15,000 a month. Six months later, on 27 November, Kristof warned that ‘if aid groups pull out . . . the death toll could then rise to 100,000 a month.’ Anyone keeping a tally of the death toll in Darfur as reported in the Kristof columns would find the rise, fall and rise again very bewildering. First he projected the number of dead at 320,000 for 2004 (16 June 2004) but then gave a scaled down estimate of between 70,000 and 220,000 (23 February 2005). The number began once more to climb to ‘nearly 400,000’ (3 May 2005), only to come down yet again to 300,000 (23 April 2006). Each time figures were given with equal confidence but with no attempt to explain their basis. Did the numbers reflect an actual decline in the scale of killing in Darfur or was Kristof simply making an adjustment to the changing mood internationally?
In the 23 April column, Kristof expanded the list of perpetrators to include an external power: ‘China is now underwriting its second genocide in three decades. The first was in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the second is in Darfur, Sudan. Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of Darfur, Chinese-made AK-47s have been the main weapons used to slaughter several hundred thousand people in Darfur so far and China has protected Sudan in the UN Security Council.’ In the Kristof columns, there is one area of deafening silence, to do with the fact that what is happening in Darfur is a civil war. Hardly a word is said about the insurgency, about the civilian deaths insurgents mete out, about acts that the commission characterised as ‘war crimes’. Would the logic of his 23 April column not lead one to think that those with connections to the insurgency, some of them active in the international campaign to declare Darfur the site of genocide, were also guilty of ‘underwriting’ war crimes in Darfur?
Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.
Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.
The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’. But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’. Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.
‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’, has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.
The depoliticisation of the conflict gave campaigners three advantages. First, they were able to occupy the moral high ground. The campaign presented itself as apolitical but moral, its concern limited only to saving lives. Second, only a single-issue campaign could bring together in a unified chorus forces that are otherwise ranged as adversaries on most important issues of the day: at one end, the Christian right and the Zionist lobby; at the other, a mainly school and university-based peace movement. Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice wrote of the Save Darfur Coalition as ‘an alliance of more than 515 faith-based, humanitarian and human rights organisations’; among the organisers of their Rally to Stop the Genocide in Washington last year were groups as diverse as the American Jewish World Service, the American Society for Muslim Advancement, the National Association of Evangelicals, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Anti-Slavery Group, Amnesty International, Christian Solidarity International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Black Church Initiative. Surely, such a wide coalition would cease to hold together if the issue shifted to, say, Iraq.
To understand the third advantage, we have to return to the question I asked earlier: how could it be that many of those calling for an end to the American and British intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur? It’s tempting to think that the advantage of Darfur lies in its being a small, faraway place where those who drive the War on Terror do not have a vested interest. That this is hardly the case is evident if one compares the American response to Darfur to its non-response to Congo, even though the dimensions of the conflict in Congo seem to give it a mega-Darfur quality: the numbers killed are estimated in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands; the bulk of the killing, particularly in Kivu, is done by paramilitaries trained, organised and armed by neighbouring governments; and the victims on both sides – Hema and Lendu – are framed in collective rather than individual terms, to the point that one influential version defines both as racial identities and the conflict between the two as a replay of the Rwandan genocide. Given all this, how does one explain the fact that the focus of the most widespread and ambitious humanitarian movement in the US is on Darfur and not on Kivu?
Nicholas Kristof was asked this very question by a university audience: ‘When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur. It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000. In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War Two.’ But instead of answering the question, Kristof – now writing his column rather than facing the questioner at Cornell – moved on: ‘And malaria annually kills one million to three million people – meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.’ And from there he went on to compare the deaths in Darfur to the deaths from malaria, rather than from the conflict in Congo: ‘We have a moral compass within us and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special – not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from Aids or malaria.’ That did not explain the relative silence on Congo. Could the reason be that in the case of Congo, Hema and Lendu militias – many of them no more than child soldiers – were trained by America’s allies in the region, Rwanda and Uganda? Is that why the violence in Darfur – but not the violence in Kivu – is named as a genocide?
It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies. In Kristof’s words, the point is not so much ‘human suffering’ as ‘human evil’. Unlike Kivu, Darfur can be neatly integrated into the War on Terror, for Darfur gives the Warriors on Terror a valuable asset with which to demonise an enemy: a genocide perpetrated by Arabs. This was the third and most valuable advantage that Save Darfur gained from depoliticising the conflict. The more thoroughly Darfur was integrated into the War on Terror, the more the depoliticised violence in Darfur acquired a racial description, as a genocide of ‘Arabs’ killing ‘Africans’. Racial difference purportedly constituted the motive force behind the mass killings. The irony of Kristof’s columns is that they mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities.[*]
Kristof chides Arab peoples and the Arab press for not having the moral fibre to respond to this Muslim-on-Muslim violence, presumably because it is a violence inflicted by Arab Muslims on African Muslims. In one of his early columns in 2004, he was outraged by the silence of Muslim leaders: ‘Do they care about dead Muslims only when the killers are Israelis or Americans?’ Two years later he asked: ‘And where is the Arab press? Isn’t the murder of 300,000 or more Muslims almost as offensive as a Danish cartoon?’ Six months later, Kristof pursued this line on NBC’s Today Show. Elaborating on the ‘real blind spot’ in the Muslim world, he said: ‘You are beginning to get some voices in the Muslim world . . . saying it’s appalling that you have evangelical Christians and American Jews leading an effort to protect Muslims in Sudan and in Chad.’
If many of the leading lights in the Darfur campaign are fired by moral indignation, this derives from two events: the Nazi Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. After all, the seeds of the Save Darfur campaign lie in the tenth-anniversary commemoration of what happened in Rwanda. Darfur is today a metaphor for senseless violence in politics, as indeed Rwanda was a decade before. Most writing on the Rwandan genocide in the US was also done by journalists. In We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, the most widely read book on the genocide, Philip Gourevitch envisaged Rwanda as a replay of the Holocaust, with Hutu cast as perpetrators and Tutsi as victims. Again, the encounter between the two seemed to take place outside any context, as part of an eternal encounter between evil and innocence. Many of the journalists who write about Darfur have Rwanda very much in the back of their minds. In December 2004, Kristof recalled the lessons of Rwanda: ‘Early in his presidency, Mr Bush read a report about Bill Clinton’s paralysis during the Rwandan genocide and scrawled in the margin: “Not on my watch.” But in fact the same thing is happening on his watch, and I find that heartbreaking and baffling.’
With very few exceptions, the Save Darfur campaign has drawn a single lesson from Rwanda: the problem was the US failure to intervene to stop the genocide. Rwanda is the guilt that America must expiate, and to do so it must be ready to intervene, for good and against evil, even globally. That lesson is inscribed at the heart of Samantha Power’s book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. But it is the wrong lesson. The Rwandan genocide was born of a civil war which intensified when the settlement to contain it broke down. The settlement, reached at the Arusha Conference, broke down because neither the Hutu Power tendency nor the Tutsi-dominated Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had any interest in observing the power-sharing arrangement at the core of the settlement: the former because it was excluded from the settlement and the latter because it was unwilling to share power in any meaningful way.
What the humanitarian intervention lobby fails to see is that the US did intervene in Rwanda, through a proxy. That proxy was the RPF, backed up by entire units from the Uganda Army. The green light was given to the RPF, whose commanding officer, Paul Kagame, had recently returned from training in the US, just as it was lately given to the Ethiopian army in Somalia. Instead of using its resources and influence to bring about a political solution to the civil war, and then strengthen it, the US signalled to one of the parties that it could pursue victory with impunity. This unilateralism was part of what led to the disaster, and that is the real lesson of Rwanda. Applied to Darfur and Sudan, it is sobering. It means recognising that Darfur is not yet another Rwanda. Nurturing hopes of an external military intervention among those in the insurgency who aspire to victory and reinforcing the fears of those in the counter-insurgency who see it as a prelude to defeat are precisely the ways to ensure that it becomes a Rwanda. Strengthening those on both sides who stand for a political settlement to the civil war is the only realistic approach. Solidarity, not intervention, is what will bring peace to Darfur.
The dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny ‘Arabised’ elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalised populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.
The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organised negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.
The camp of peace needs to come to a second realisation: that peace cannot be built on humanitarian intervention, which is the language of big powers. The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.
* Contrast this with the UN commission’s painstaking effort to make sense of the identities ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’ (emphasis mine). Finally, the commission put forward the view that political developments are driving the rapidly growing distinction between ‘Arab’ and ‘African’. On the one hand, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ seem to have become political identities: ‘Those tribes in Darfur who support rebels have increasingly come to be identified as “African” and those supporting the government as the “Arabs”. A good example to illustrate this is that of the Gimmer, a pro-government African tribe that is seen by the African tribes opposed to the government as having been “Arabised”.’ On the other hand, this development was being promoted from the outside: ‘The Arab-African divide has also been fanned by the growing insistence on such divide in some circles and in the media.’
From the LRB letters page: [ 22 March 2007 ] Sindre Bangstad, Martin Shaw [ 5 April 2007 ] Gérard Prunier, Matthew Moore, Sean Coleman, Jannie Armstrong, David Rubenstein [ 26 April 2007 ] Mahmood Mamdani, Elliott Green [ 24 May 2007 ] Sean Coleman.
Mahmood Mamdani, the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War and the Roots of Terror, is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the departments of anthropology, political science and international affairs at Columbia.
Other articles by this contributor:
Lessons of Zimbabwe · Mugabe in Context
Was it like this for the Irish?
Gareth Peirce: The War on British Muslim
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