Tariq Ali on Gaza, Boycotts, and the One-state Solution in the LRB

Below you can find the full text of Tariq Ali's recent comments on Gaza for the LRB--one point of interest in particular is his mention of the US Army's recently published document on "Hamas and Israel" (Ali links to it as well), which notes that Hamas seemed ready to alter their position on Israel's 'right to exist' even before the blockade. Ali also refers to a recent call by 500 Israelis to Western Embassies in support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions:

A few weeks before the assault on Gaza, the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army published a levelheaded document on ‘Hamas and Israel’, which argued that ‘Israel’s stance towards the democratically-elected Palestinian government headed by Hamas in 2006, and towards Palestinian national coherence – legal, territorial, political and economic – has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking.’ Whatever their reservations about the organisation, the authors of the paper detected signs that Hamas was considering a shift of position even before the blockade:

It is frequently stated that Israel or the United States cannot ‘meet’ with Hamas (although meeting is not illegal; materially aiding terrorism is, if proven) because the latter will not ‘recognise Israel’. In contrast, the PLO has ‘recognised’ Israel’s right to exist and agreed in principle to bargain for significantly less land than the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, and it is not clear that Israel has ever agreed to accept a Palestinian state. The recognition of Israel did not bring an end to violence, as wings of various factions of the PLO did fight Israelis, especially at the height of the Second (al- Aqsa) Intifada. Recognition of Israel by Hamas, in the way that it is described in the Western media, cannot serve as a formula for peace. Hamas moderates have, however, signaled that it implicitly recognises Israel, and that even a tahdiya (calming, minor truce) or a hudna, a longer-term truce, obviously implies recognition. Khalid Mish’al states: ‘We are realists,’ and there is ‘an entity called Israel,’ but ‘realism does not mean that you have to recognise the legitimacy of the occupation.’

The war on Gaza has killed the two-state solution by making it clear to Palestinians that the only acceptable Palestine would have fewer rights than the Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa. The alternative, clearly, is a single state for Jews and Palestinians with equal rights for all. Certainly it seems utopian at the moment with the two Palestinian parties in Israel – Balad and the United Arab List – both barred from contesting the February elections. Avigdor Lieberman, the chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu, has breathed a sigh of satisfaction: ‘Now that it has been decided that the Balad terrorist organisation will not be able to run, the first battle is over.’ But even victory has its drawbacks. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Isaac Deutscher warned his one-time friend Ben Gurion: ‘The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase “Mann kann sich totseigen!” — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten off much more than they can swallow.’

Five hundred courageous Israelis have sent a letter to Western embassies calling for sanctions and other measures to be applied against their country, echoing the 2005 call by numerous Palestinian organisations for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on the South African model. This will not happen overnight but it is the only non-violent way to help the struggle for freedom and equality in Israel-Palestine.

Inauguration Day News

Watching TV in a hotel room in Chicago this weekend, No Empires learned from a scroll on CNN that "History Will Happen in 48 Hours." Ok. But now that it's happened (and yes, Michelle Obama donned a yellow Isabel Toledo number, while Aretha wore a sort of fantastic hat), we can point you to Kevin Alexander Gray's piece on Obama, black American national heros, and the US, the country that Martin Luther King Jr once called the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world." Reminding us of King's rising unpopularity towards the end of his life due in part to his outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam, Gray suggests that we remember King for something more than "I have a dream", particularly in light of the Gaza massacres. Certainly something to keep in mind while dancing to Beyonce and U2/reading Maureen Dowd.

And speaking of Gaza: Israel's High Court of Justice lifted the ban on Arab parties in the Knesset today; Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN, as well as about 300 other human rights groups, are claiming that Israel used white phosphorous in its attacks on Gaza and are calling for war crimes investigations.

Despite all of the "victory" talk by supporters of the Gaza massacres, Joseph Massad questions Israel's "right to defend itself", just as Khalid Mish'al and Bashir Abu-Manneh explain that the massacres will not weaken Hamas.

Gaza Massacres

As Western media outlets talk about hopes for a cease-fire in Gaza, we at No Empires thought we'd direct your attention to something that's been getting a bit less attention in Western media: Israel's surprising decision to bar Arab political parties from the Knesset this week, citing their support of a "terrorist organization" as well as violations of a 2002 law that would require them to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Here's Jonathan Cook on the issue for Electronic Intifada.

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Thanks to our friend John and Jewish Peace News for another couple of links on Gaza:

First, Gush Shalom tells us about a 1000-person spontaneous demonstration outside of the defense ministry in Tel Aviv on Saturday. Next, The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) take the Israeli government at their word that the attack is an immediate response to Quassam attacks, but also discuss the ways in which Israel is unwilling to address the root of such problems--the fact that they are fight "a besieged and starving Gaza" after "41 years of increasingly oppressive Israeli Occupation without a hint that a sovereign and viable Palestinian state will ever emerge."

Next, Ravid Barak focuses on the planning of Operation "Cast Lead," a plan that dates back more than 6 months, but started coming to fruition over a month ago after dozens of Qassam rockets exploded in Israel.

Finally, we'll leave you with an excerpt from Zvi Barel's latest for Haaretz. Here, Barel delves a bit into the relationship between Israel's attack on a tunnel between Gaza and Egypt on November 6, killing at least six and violating the ceasefire. Increased rocket attacks after that date, Barel notes, were a result of this Israeli breach. According to Barel, Israel:

unilaterally violated [the cease-fire] when it blew up a tunnel, while still asking Egypt to get the Islamic group to hold its fire. Are conditions enabling the return of a ceasefire no longer available? Hamas has clear conditions for its extension: The opening of the border crossings for goods and cessation of IDF attacks in Gaza, as outlined in the original agreement. Later, Hamas wants the cease-fire to be extended to the West Bank. Israel, for its part, is justifiably demanding a real calm in Gaza; that no Qassam or mortar shell be fired by either Hamas, Islamic Jihad or any other group.

Essentially, Israel is telling Hamas it is willing to recognize its control of Gaza on the condition that it assumes responsibility for the security of the territory, like Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon. It is likely that this will be the outcome of a wide-scale operation in the Gaza Strip if Israel decides it does not want to rule Gaza directly. Why, then, not forgo the war and agree to these conditions now?

On the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time

By now, we've all heard about the recent attacks on Gaza, but just to re-cap: on Saturday at about 11:20am (when children were at school, employees were in offices, and aspiring police officers were in the middle of training), 60 Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed 50 different sites in Gaza. This first bombardment took 3 minutes and 40 seconds, killed over 200 Palestinians, and injured nearly an additional 1,000. By Monday morning, several buildings at the Islamic University in Gaza had been leveled, tunnels between Gaza and Egypt were no longer functional, and more than 325 Palestinians were dead (as well as 2 Israelis since Saturday). At this point, as Gaza hospitals are running out of supplies and room for corpses (which they are forced to pile up on morgue floors right now), Israel is poised to embark on a ground invasion: tanks are lined up near the Gaza border and journalists have been forced to leave the area.

The US government has voiced near-unequivocal support of Israel's actions (actions which the UN called "disproportionate" in a frustratingly weak call for a cease-fire). In a statement on the situation in Gaza, Nancy Pelosi wrote: "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally." And on Meet the Press, Barack Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, avoided anything like condemnation of the Israeli attacks as well, telling viewers: “There’s only one president at a time...The president speaks for the United States of America. We will honor that.”

On December 27, Richard Falk, United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the Occupied Territories, issued a statement outlining Israel's war crimes in Gaza on Saturday, which include collective punshment, targeting civilians, and disproportionate military response.

Israel has called this an all-out war against Hamas because of quassam attacks that have killed about 18 people in 8 years, but as Neve Gordon writes in the Guardian, this attack has nothing to do with rocket attacks, which Israel could have prevented long ago. Instead, it has to do with a) the destruction of Hamas as a political entity (which, Gordon notes, is not going to happen, at least not through military means); b) to help Kadima and Labour defeat Likud and the abominable Netanyahu; c) to re-establish the Israeli military in the eyes of the world after its performance two summers ago; and d) to keep Abbas in power for a bit longer after his term ends on January 9. In Syria, the exiled political leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, is calling for a 3rd intifada, a call which the Fatah leader clearly has no mind to heed. Meshaal said on Al Jazeera that Hamas had tried "all the peaceful options, but without results;" he is now pushing for more rocket attacks and considering the reinstitution of suicide bombings in Israel (which would be the first since 2005).

For more information on whats going on in Gaza, please see this article by Jennifer Loewenstein in Counterpunch, Hassan Haidar's piece for Dar Al Hayat on the timing and pre-meditation of the attacks, this first person account of the bombing on Saturday by Dr Eyad Al Serraj, a psychologist in Gaza City, this episode of Democracy Now, which features NE favorite Gideon Levy as well as an phenomenal discussion with one-state solution advocate Ali Abunimah. We'll leave you with an excerpt:

We have to go back to the Warsaw Ghetto or Guernica to find crimes in the modern era of the scale of the viciousness and of the deliberateness of what Israel is committing with the full support of the United States, not just the Bush administration, but apparently as well the incoming Obama administration. We have to recognize the complicity not just of the so-called international community, but also of the Arab regimes, Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak, the Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt. Tzipi Livni, when she issued her threats against Gaza, was in Cairo in the biggest Arab capital, and Aboul Gheit stood next to her silently.

Mahmoud Abbas is not a bystander, the so-called president of the Palestinian Authority. For two years since the elections, which Hamas won, he and his coterie have been collaborating with Israel and the United States, first to overthrow the election result and then to besiege Gaza. We have talked before of the Palestinian Contras, funded and armed by the United States, which sought to overthrow Hamas in June 2007 and had the tables turned on them. And now this. The complicity of Mahmoud Abbas is very clear and must be clearly stated. He does not have the authority, moral or otherwise, to call together the Palestinian people for anything. He has gone over to the other side. He has joined the Israeli war against the Palestinian people, and I choose my words very carefully.

And let me say this, as well, Amy, that Israel is trying to produce and promote the fiction that it is engaged in a war with a so-called enemy entity. What Israel is doing is massacring a captive population. You heard—you said in the headlines how Nancy Pelosi, our so-called progressive, liberal, antiwar Speaker of the House, gave her full support to these crimes. Obama has done the same through a spokesman. And that will not change. The United Nations issued a weak statement aimed at covering the backsides, let me say, of those who issued it, not aimed at changing the situation.

What are Palestinians calling for today? Yesterday, the Palestinian National Committee for the Campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions reissued and reaffirmed its call on all international civil society in the United States, in North America, in Europe, everywhere, to redouble the efforts for boycott, divestment and sanctions modeled on the anti-apartheid movement. This is necessary. This is moral. This is the nonviolent resistance we can all participate in. And it is more urgent than ever. Let’s not look back at these crimes like we look at the Warsaw Ghetto and like we look at Guernica and we look at the other atrocities of the twentieth century and say, “We had the chance to act, but we chose silence and complicity.” The time to stop this is now.

And we also have to be clear that those who are accountable—Ehud Barak, his orders over the past few months to withhold insulin, chemotherapy drugs, dialysis supplies, all forms of medicine from the people of Gaza, were just as lethal and just as murderous as the orders to send in the bombers and warplanes to attack mosques, to attack universities. The Islamic University in Gaza is not a military site. It is a university with 18,000 students, 60 percent of them women. Last night, Israeli warplanes attacked a female dormitory in the Islamic University. This is what Israel is attacking. They attacked the fishing port. No food gets into Gaza. People can barely fish enough to sustain them, and Israel has attacked the fishing boats that sustains them. These are historic crimes, and we cannot be silent about them.

Gone so long

As you may have noticed, early this fall No Empires went into retirement. But now, faced with the devastation of Gaza, we've decided to decided to start writing again. So stay tuned for a long piece on the Gaza massacre as well as a round-up of some of the best news and opinion pieces on the subject.

But for now--for all New Yorkers, please head out to Herald Square this evening to protest Israel's actions in Gaza.

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Of note in Israel this week was a remark by Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai, in which he threatened a 'shoah' in Gaza if Qassam rocket attacks do not cease; the word is rarely used other than to refer, of course, to the Holocaust. The situation in Gaza worsens, with nearly 40 Palestinians--including civilians, and, of those, nine were children--dead in the past few days. The physical attenuation of Gaza's population continues. Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah with reaction.

An interesting article from former Israeli journalist Yonatan Mendel on the coextensiveness between the Israeli press and the Zionist project. Mendel looks in particular at the curiosities and double-standards of language that are scattered throughout Israeli journalism.

America's Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, noted Thursday that the security situation in Afghanistan is worsening, with President Karzai controlling not even a third of the country. Karzai, the Guardian notes, denies the American intelligence assessment (which itself echoes earlier, more critical reports by various think-tanks), claiming that his government in fact controls a vast majority of the country. Declan Walsh finds the explanations given by Nato commanders curious. Those commanders claim that the steady increase in suicide bombings is evidence that the Taliban is being "worn down." This claim--which hints at the fact that suicide bombing is an act marked significantly by desperation--is one never heard with regard to suicide bombings in Israel, which are discursively framed as proof of a larger looming (pan-) Arab threat. Walsh also credits the safe haven offered to Taliban fighters in Pakistan with playing a huge role in the Taliban's resurgence.

In his latest piece for Counterpunch, Patrick Cockburn discusses Turkey's bold-faced invasion of Northern Iraq (the only part of the country, he notes, that was at peace until last week), comparing Turkey in their hunt for PKK Turkish Kurd Gorillas to Israel in their repeated incursions into Gaza. He points out that this most recent development in Iraq weakens the state of the Kurdish Regional Government, which, according to Cockburn, was "one of the few concrete achievements of the US and British invasion of Iraq five years ago." Cockburn goes on to provide another useful counter-narrative to the relatively cheery reporting on the "surge" offered by the Times and its cohorts.

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For the NLR, Alex Cockburn has expanded a piece from Le Monde Diplomatique--which we linked to several weeks back--on the state of the American anti-war movement. Cockburn writes on the recent history of anti-war and left groups in America, both popular and marginal, and details the ineptitude of the splintered coalitions opposing the Iraq war, finding much fault with the mainstream anti-war movement's "occasionally petulant subservience" to the Democratic party since 2003.

Also, tacked onto a piece for Counterpunch on Nuri al-Maliki is a reaction to Cockburn's criticism of the anti-war movement from the Institute for Policy Studies' Phyllis Bennis. Bennis takes issue in particular with the notion, proposed by Cockburn in his original piece, that it would behoove the left in the US to humanize Iraq's multifaceted resistance. Bennis complains that because the Iraqi resistance lacks a cohesive and demonstrable central authority (unlike the FMLN, or the African National Congress), it lacks accountability to the population of Iraq (who bear the brunt of the America's aggression, as well as of the resistance) and so does not deserve the support of anti-war sympathizers in America. It's puzzling, if not plain stupid, that Bennis could possibly expect an El Salvadorean-style resistance authority after six years of the Bush administration doing everything in its power to exploit deep-seated ethnic tension in Iraq. Bennis also makes the point that, because some actions taken by the resistance are morally reprehensible, no further attempt at humanizing the resistance are necessary, or even warranted. Cockburn then responds. Read on.

George Bush has recently likened the situation in Iraq, and the consequences of a troop withdrawal, to the fate suffered by millions of Vietnamese following the end of the war there. The New York Times claims that "Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies." Bush mentions the Khmer Rouge and the "killing fields" of Pol Pot, but neglects the fact--pesky historical memory! motherfucker!--that, had Richard Nixon heeded the antiwar movement, the war would've ended in 1969, and the "secret" war in Cambodia, which paved the way for Pol Pot by completely destroying the country, would've never taken place.

Munir Chalabi has written a crucial piece of analysis of the Iraqi oil law, which remains stillborn.

Here's a trio dealing with fallout from the recent Hamas putsch/Fatah coup, and it seems that Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad combined may yet outflank post-Oslo Arafat's desperate ineffectivity and enslavement to US-Israeli diktats. Amira Hass, an NE hero and an Israeli woman who has lived in and reported from Gaza for over a decade, gives us the latest from Israel's wet-dream of a "Palestinian state." Amira is characteristically even-handed in reporting the Palestinian political civil war, faulting

Israel, the occupier that shirks its obligation as an occupying power; the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which is abandoning its citizens while continuing to try to ostracize the majority movement and make it fail; Hamas, which boasted about "liberating" Gaza and uses Qassam fire and declarations of "resistance" to escape its political and economic failures; the donor states, which use (generous) donations to cover up political powerlessness; and the United States, which is leading the boycott campaign [against Hamas] and supports Israel.

Exiled ex-Israeli MK Azmi Bishara, writing for al-Ahram Weekly, draws historical, political, and moral parallels between apartheid South Africa and the occupied Palestinian territories. This is a concern, of course, pursued in recent decades by Maxime Rodinson, Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein, Nelson Mandela, Ramzy Baroud, Jennifer Loewenstein, and others. Bishara remains under threat of arrest, were he to return to Israel, due to accusations that he provided tactical support to Hezbollah during last summer's Lebanon war, charges with both Bishara and Hezbollah have stringently denied.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article8962.shtml

No Empires Misses Alan Johnston Pt. 2

Both the BBC and The New York Times recently reported that Hamas arrested "a spokesman" for Army of Islam, the Palestinian group that kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston. Of course, this is absolutely terrifying, considering the tape AOI recently released in which Johnston explains how his captors will kill him if any rescue attempts are made. The Hamas government has rightly made the Johnston case a major issue in its attempts to stabilize Gaza.

The article can be found here. Note that while the Times's Steven Erlanger can't come up with much negative to say about Hamas's latest attempts to free the Johnston, he adds to the end of his article a bizarrely disconnected fact-sheet of sorts on the organization and on Israel/Palestine in general, starting with information on how the Hamas government "organizes religious and charitable institutions that are also used to recruit members and sometimes armed fighters" and later outlining recent arrests of Hamas members, which of course brings the article full circle and seems to call into question whether the democratically elected Hamas government has any right to arrest anyone at all.

About six months ago, one-half of No Empires wrote a letter to the NYT editor to bemoan Erlanger'sround shoddy reportage from Israel--he's a huge fan of the bumbling, ideologically-motivated subject change evidenced above. The letter apparently couldn't pass muster at "the paper of record," and was never printed.

Both at home and abroad, this insistance on the illegitimacy of the Hamas government allows the vacuum of leadership evidenced by groups such as the AOI, as well as the Johnston kidnapping, to continue. This crisis of leadership dates back at least to the death of Yasir Arafat, if not to the era of the thoroughly-discredited Oslo accords, and it seems that despite Hamas's efforts, the situation is only getting worse. No Empires would finally like to point out that NOTHING good can come of this, particularly if Johnston is indeed killed (which, unfortunately, seems more and more likely as those on all sides get increasingly desperate).

Alistair Crooke on the future of Palestine

The current situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has been treated with (characteristic) obfuscation, over-simplification, and all-round poor analysis in the Western media. No Empires would like desperately to direct your attention to an article by former UN envoy Alastair Crooke in the most recent edition of the London Review of Books. In a timely and sober analysis, Crooke not only hits precisely on the ways in which the governments of Europe, Israel, and the United States have, since January 2006, created the conditions for recent developments; he also, accurately, characterizes Hamas and Hezbollah as "moderate Islamist groups," with specific and local political aims, and broad grass-roots popularity--a welcome respite from the blanket treatment of these movements in the Western press as "terrorist organizations" or "militant Islamist groups," or any similarly inappropriate ideological description. No Empires implores you to read Crooke's piece.

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Near East

• In a terrifying development, Alan Johnston--now held captive in Gaza for 105 days--has appeared in a new video wearing what is purported to be a bomb-belt, which he says would be detonated if there is any attempt made, either by Hamas or the British, to free him by force. In the video, Johnston is quoted as saying that his "Captors tell me that very promising negotiations were ruined when the Hamas movement and the British government decided to press for a military solution to this kidnapping." This comes as Hamas, trying to show itself capable of exercising a less violent form of control in Gaza, has taken it upon itself to secure Johnston's release. Something No Empires finds interesting is the attempt being made to discredit Hamas both by Fatah capitulationists (backed, of course, by America, Europe, and Israel) and extreme Islamist elements hoping, it would appear, to outflank it.
• No Empires wants to drive home the (obvious) fact that the Hamas government must still be considered to represent the political will of the occupied Palestinian population. Here, Saree Makdisi explains why the "relief" felt in the halls of Western power at the removal of the elected government by "presidential fiat" is certainly not shared by people who once again have, as their "legitimate" leaders, corrupted careerists who have consistently watered-down (if not abandoned wholesale, under American and Israeli pressure) any truly just political solution in Israel/Palestine.
• Despite UN pressure, Israel continues to resist opening the Karni crossing to allow passage of vital supplies. As No Empires readers will recall, Israel has pledged, certainly half-heartedly, to do all it can to facilitate humanitarian aid to Gaza; but not Karni, not yet--despite its being an economic lifeline for Gaza, Israel, true to form, vaguely invokes security concerns. Israel has promised to allow passage of supplies through smaller border crossings instead.

US

• DePaul's Matthew Abraham marvels at his colleagues' deafening silence surrounding the denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein and Mehren Larudee.
• Last week, both The New York Times and The Washington Post featured op-ed letters by Ahmed Yousef, political adviser to Ismail Haniya. In the Times, Yousef focuses on Hamas' reasons for taking control of Gaza. In the Post, Yousef urges the ever-intractable Bush administration to reverse its policies in Israel/Palestine, noting that "Hamas has a world in common with Fatah and other parties, and they all share the same goals." No Empires thinks these articles might be the most worthwhile op-eds to come out both papers in quite a while, though they have prompted much outrage from authoritarians and fascists who think that "terrorists" should not have a place on the opinion pages of a newspaper.

Europe

• Robert Fisk, in vintage form, absolutely skewers Tony Blair's visit with the Pope, as well as his new job prospect as the Quartet's Middle East peace envoy. Sadly for Mr. Blair, Catholic-in-training or not, no poorly-timed pangs of conscience can undo 10+ years of ignorance, unbridled militarism, and Washington-teat-sucking. A disclaimer: No Empires finds the second article on Blair linked to above, from the Guardian, a journalistic embarrassment and further evidence of the Guardian's noted slide toward liberal apology. However, we do learn that Blair was encouraged to seek out his future role by none other than George W. Bush, who then passed along his suggestions to the UN, without even the slightest regard for the other members of the illustrious "Quartet." We are also told that, though Mr. Blair's popularity may be lacking in the streets of the Arab world--we can only wonder why!--he is held in high esteem by the "Arab political elites": i.e., those like Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah II, and Abu Mazen, who are currently hammering more nails into the coffin of the Palestinian cause, with the help of Ehud Olmert, at Sharm el-Sheikh. Sadly, despite fresh Russian objections, it does appear that Blair's future is certain. Also see Soumaya Ghannoushi on this veritable slap in the face to both justice and sense.
• Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the Israeli government today that Russia, which has not ruled out dealing with Hamas, does not support an Israeli "divide and conquer plan" of isolating Haniya's government and eventually invading Gaza.
• No Empires was not quite surprised to hear that the Indian-born writer Salman Rushie was knighted last week, considering his heart-warming transition from apparent anti-imperialist to UK lapdog in the past six years or so. Following Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa that called for the Rushdie's death, "Sir Salman" railed against "Islamists," backed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supported House of Commons leader Jack Straw in the face of his memorable comments on the Niqab. See Mahir Ali and Priyamvada Gopal on the ridiculousness of "Sir Salman."
  

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US

• Gilbert Achcar, a favorite of No Empires, provides a balance sheet on Washington's surge, as George Bush announces that all additional US troops mandated by the surge are in place. A writer for the Socialist Resistance website is Achcar's interlocutor, and while the questions asked may leave one wanting, Achcar's responses are illuminating, particularly as he traces shifts in the strategic/political thinking of Moqtada al-Sadr and Hassan Nasrallah.
• The Israeli paper Haaretz features a section called "The Israeli Factor: Ranking the presidential candidates," which ranks the American presidential candidates by how Israel would fare should he/she be elected. Unsurprisingly, front-runners Clinton and Giuliani are at the top of the list, Giuliani for turning down a $10 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, after the prince suggested US policies in the Middle East (and Palestine in particular) might have played a factor in the attacks. (We're surprised someone from the Saudi monarchy was allowed to insinuate even THAT much.) You may recall Giuliani's much-lauded outburst at the second Republican debate not long again after Ron Paul (not included in the Haaretz list) suggested that a cause for 9/11 might have been the fact "we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years." "That's really an extraordinary statement," Giuliani shot back. "As someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq; I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11." No Empires cannot help but be blown away by the fact our fellow New Yorker gets away with this shit. Notably, Barack Obama sits at the low end of the scale--despite his recent overtures toward AIPAC-- but the lowest rating went to Republican Chuck Hagel, who called for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon last summer.

Middle East

• Just sworn in as the head of a Palestinian emergency cabinet, Salam Fayyad is already telling Palestinians in Gaza, "'You are in our hearts, and the top of our agenda." No complaints from him, however, when Israel cut off fuel supplies to Gaza gas stations, and not a peep in the face of reports that Ehud Barak--he who, as prime minister, gave the go-ahead to Ariel Sharon's "right-of-ownership walk-about" (the phrase is David Hirst's) on the Temple Mount, accompanied by scores of Israeli security forces, sparking the (ongoing) second Intifada--now, as defense minister, plans to launch a military operation in Gaza within weeks.
• Ilan Pappe, in a piece for the Electronic Intifada, decries the Western media's abandonment of any historical context in its coverage of recent events in Gaza, and calls for an explicit rejection of any framing of these events under the auspices of a "global war on terror." He also reminds us that the Strip--not just since last week, but since Oslo--has been conceived of as a completely separate "geo-political entity" by Israel, the United States, and the capitulationist Palestinian "leadership."
  

Well-Made World #14

US

• No Empires still hates Lee Bollinger. He was terrible as our university president, and only gets worse when it comes to placating the ADL and friends.
• NE could not pass this one up. Turns out that, since 1994, the US military has been researching the use of, shall we say, "unconventional," non-lethal weaponry. The highlight of this article is the revelation of one US hope to develop a bomb that would cause uncontrollable sexual urges among (male) enemy forces. "Let's watch these men fuck, and then kill them!"--is this how it would have gone? For more on enduring racist assumptions about Arab sexuality, from Andre Gide to Abu Ghraib, as well as an eloquent work of intellectual history, see Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs, Chicago, 2007.
• Manhattan judge Charles S. Haight Jr. reverses his recent rebuke of NYPD surveillance tactics, dealing a blow to organized dissent in the city No Empires calls home.

Middle East

• Huge developments in Israel/Palestine over the last twenty-four hours. The Western "strategy" of isolating a democratically-elected government is playing out to devastating effect in the Gaza Strip, amid recent intense factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Abu Mazen has, unsurprisingly, dissolved the fragile unity government in Palestine and declared a state of emergency; what is surprising, however, is that Fatah appears to have been so thoroughly routed, given its links to Muhammad Dahlan and his millions in arms, courtesy of Washington. No Empires is prone to believe Hamas spokesmen who say that they were pressed to ensure that Dahlan's thugs (the National Security Forces) did not act as a supra-governmental force--though this, of course, does not mean we condone the violence, which of course plays right into Washington's and Jerusalem's hands.
• The Palestine Center for Human Rights documents, and condemns, the recent violence in the Occupied Territories, going so far as to apologize for their staff's inability to fully cover events as they unfold, given the starkly dangerous atmosphere in which they are working.
• Alvaro de Soto, former UN coordinator for the Middle East (as of yesterday) discusses Palestine/Israel in his End of Mission Report, claiming that the one-state solution is gaining ground, and also that Western refusals to deal with democratically-elected Hamas officials may lead to a weakening of democratic impluses amongst Palestinians. Full text of his speech can be found here.
• Not long after Desmond Tutu compares the situation in Palestine to South African apartheid, Israel walks all over him once again. Despite Tutu's efforts to investigate the carnage wreaked at Beit Hanoun last year, Itzhak Levanon shrugs it off, playing the part of the broken record. As usual, he cites "imbalanced and one-sided resolutions" in the UN council, "which utterly ignores the fact that we live with terrorism every day and that more than 3,000 Qassam rockets have been launched into Israel since we withdrew from Gaza," adding that "a large part of these missiles have been launched precisely from towns such as Beit Hanoun." Towns such as Beit Hanoun, No Empires asks? Cheap rhetorical devices abound.
  
• As you may well know, No Empires loves Ilan Pappe. Thank you JL.
• And finally, Amira Hass on the current situation in Gaza.

Europe

• Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, responds in full to the exiting Prime Minister's repudiation of his paper, wondering if Blair would have gone so far if the Independent hadn't been so scathingly critical of Blair and Bush's march toward Baghdad.
  

Well-Made World #6

• In November of 2006, Joseph Massad began drawing parallels between the United States's support of the Chilean military in the overthrow the Allende government, and the current aid being given to Fatah (or, to be more explicit, to the faction of security forces led by Mohammed Dahlan, the new US bulldog in Palestine), in ostensible preparation for a coup against the democratically-elected Hamas government. Tony Karon has picked up this thread in his blog, where he gives a lucid analysis of the recent disheartening violence in Gaza, and asks: is this the time for the "Palestinian Pinochet" to make his move?
• Israel's national infrastructure minister, meanwhile, has declared that all members of the Hamas government are potential assassination targets.
• "For years, Israel was proud of the democratic miracle of an obedient army that did not accumulate too much power and served the elected government loyally, even though the country was engaged in a continual existential war." A Haaretz editorial uses the example of the army's disregard for court decisions regarding the separation wall in the West Bank--as well as an ever-increasing (illegal) settlement rate there--to show why this is no longer the case.
• John Loose brushes us up on our Coleridge: 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree'. The American embassy under construction in Baghdad is costing upwards of 700 million dollars, and is the size of the Vatican. One shouldn't be too given to wonder why this is the case.
• No Empires officially believes that no action of the US Army, sadly, can be too surprising. But a secret plot to kill the most popular Shia politician in Iraq? Is it the Americans taking a page out of the Israeli playbook? Regardless, for their aims, it is a remarkably short-sighted move. Patrick Cockburn reports.