The Middle East has always been a difficult challenge for Western
human rights organizations, particularly those seeking influence or
funding in the United States. The pressure to go soft on US allies
is in some respects reminiscent of Washington’s special pleading
for Latin American terror regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. In the case
of Israel such organizations also face a powerful and influential
domestic constituency, which often extends to senior echelons of such
organizations, for whom forthright condemnation of Israel is anathema.
Given that Israel is reliant on US subventions and public goodwill
to a degree without precedent in the history of American foreign policy,
there is considerably more than vanity at stake. If Israel’s
stature in the United States were to be reduced to that of South Africa
during the apartheid era, or Serbia during the Balkan wars, this would
almost certainly have material consequences for the “special
relationship”. It is a reality very unlike that between the
US and Saudi Arabia, for example, in which the American public’s
longstanding contempt for the House of Saud has proven basically inconsequential.
In Israel’s case, image is a political resource of the first
order, and its preservation a matter of national security.
Until the mid-1980s, before which Israel’s human rights violations
– from deportation to area bombing and all in-between –
were generally several orders of magnitude worse than during the subsequent
quarter century, the human rights community simply ignored the question
of Israel. If challenged, organizations would respond that in view
of limited resources they had to go after serious violators, like
Ba’thist Iraq and Iran under the Shah, or hide behind an Israeli
judiciary that although essential to the machinery of occupation at
least went through the motions of oversight, or express fears of being
tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism (or all of the above). In private,
such justifications would be augmented by references to political
pressures and funding issues, often with a barb at one or more director
or board members’ Zionist sympathies thrown in. That the first
widespread exposure of the systematic application of torture in Israel’s
prison system was reported by the Sunday Times rather than Amnesty
International was no mere coincidence.
The eruption of the Palestinian uprising in December 1987 made it
impossible for human rights organizations to continue relegating the
question of Israel to the backburner. With Israeli leaders like Yitzhak
Rabin publicly exhorting Israel’s soldiers to “break the
bones” of unarmed Palestinian protestors, and television images
that made it impossible to explain away such barbarism as a mistranslated
rhetorical flourish, human rights organizations faced a real quandary:
ignore the question of Israel and lose credibility, or confront it
and lose support.
By and large they chose a third way, producing reports that were often
strong on documentation but exceptionally weak when it came to conclusions
and consequences. No less importantly, they adopted the criteria of
‘balance’. In effect, a Hubble telescope was deployed
to discover Palestinian actions that could in any way be considered
violations of International Humanitarian Law, with these subsequently
placed under an industrial-strength microscope. Treatment of Israeli
actions was rather more selective and careful. Primary issues such
as the legality of Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, or its settlement enterprise in the occupied territories were
avoided; detailed analysis of Israeli abuses, like deportation and
summary executions, that indisputably constituted “grave breaches”
of the Fourth Geneva Convention (the latter’s equivalent of
war crimes) steered clear of unambiguous conclusions; and on the key
issue of how to resolve the human rights emergency, such reports typically
ended with exhortations to the Israeli government and military to
show greater concern for Palestinian rights – as opposed to
demands that Western governments use their various forms of aid to
Israel as leverage to halt abuses.
In the process any sense of context, of this being a struggle for
freedom by a dispossessed and occupied people against a colonial army
– a context that in other cases the human rights community communicated
so well – was entirely lost. All the more so because Israel
was systematically spared the type of rhetoric and denunciations typically
deployed with respect to similar situations in other continents and
domestic repression in Arab states. If it was an approach that left
neither the victims nor apologists of Israeli human rights violations
satisfied, it at least met their minimal requirements – unprecedented
exposure for the Palestinians, continued impunity for Israel. More
importantly, it enabled the human rights organizations in question
to navigate the storm and emerge relatively unscathed.
The Oslo agreements of 1993 provided a welcome development in this
respect. Henceforth, ‘balance’ could be maintained by
releasing reports on both the Israeli and Palestinian Authority judiciary,
discrimination against Arabs in Israel and of violence against women
in the occupied territories, torture in Israeli as well as Palestinian
prisons. The idea of an overarching regime of occupation primarily
responsible for both sets of violations – a concept that came
so naturally when discussing the brutalities inflicted on the residents
of South Africa’s ethnic homelands – rarely entered into
the fray.
The onset of the Al-Aqsa Uprising in September 2000 posed a new set
of challenges. Israel’s image was once again under unprecedented
pressure on account of its savage attacks on Palestinians throughout
the occupied territories, while committed staff on the ground –
motivated by a combination of genuine concern and professional honour
– exercised significant pressure on human rights organizations
to step up to the plate. At the same time, particularly after 11 September
2001, such organizations were under massive pressure by right-wing
and pro-Israeli forces – the latter of whom often tended towards
the liberal end of the spectrum – to toe the line. Nowhere was
this more true than at Human Rights Watch, an American organization
that by the late 1990s had emerged as the industry leader.
In the years since 2000, HRW pursued a consistent – and consistently
effective – formula: criticize Israel, but condemn the Palestinians.
Challenge the legality of an Israeli aerial bombardment, preferably
in polite, technical terms, and vociferously denounce the Palestinian
suicide bomber in unambiguous language – especially when raising
questions about the latest Israeli atrocity. In HRW publications,
explicit condemnations and accusations of war crimes were almost wholly
monopolized by Palestinians. With Israeli citizenship a seeming precondition
for the right to self-defense, the right to resist was for all intents
and purposes non-existent.
Where – as with the obliteration of a good portion of the Jenin
Refugee Camp in 2002 – accusations of Israeli war crimes could
not be avoided, HRW diluted these by just as prominently reporting
that it did not find evidence of much worse atrocities. Its major
report on the issue, Jenin: IDF Military Operations, was several months
later ‘balanced’ by Erased in a Moment: Suicide Bombing
Attacks Against Israeli Civilians.
One need only compare the titles of these two reports to surmise which
party to the conflict stands accused of perpetrating “atrocities”
that HRW “unreservedly condemns”, “war crimes”,
and indeed “crimes against humanity”; in which of the
two cases HRW repeatedly demands that all those with command or operational
responsibility – and they are many indeed – face “criminal
liability”; whose national leader must, despite HRW’s
finding no evidence of command responsibility, face “accountability”
for not preventing the acts of others, as well as for “significant
political responsibility for the deliberate killing of civilians”;
and whose actions HRW concludes “are among the worst crimes
that can be committed, crimes of universal jurisdiction that the international
community as a whole has an obligation to punish and prevent”.
A comparison of the two reports’ covers might also help readers
judge whether it was Israel or the Palestinians who are merely referred
for further examination: “Every case in the report listed below
warrants additional thorough, transparent, and impartial investigation,
with the results of such an investigation made public. Where wrongdoing
is found, those responsible should be held accountable”.
Needless to say the press release accompanying Erased in a Moment
did not, as in the case of the Jenin report, use the opening paragraph
to shift discussion to more sensational allegations for which no evidence
could be found – such as “HRW researchers were unable
to substantiate published claims by prominent advocates of Israel
that Palestinian suicide bombers have been lacing their explosives
with AIDS, hepatitis and rat poison”. Its summary did however
delve extensively – in fact primarily – on the person
of Yasir Arafat, even though most suicide bombings were carried out
by rival organizations and HRW concluded he was not involved in attacks
carried out by his Fatah organization. It was presumably a simple
coincidence that HRW’s highly critical account of the late Palestinian
leader – occupying significantly more space in the report summary
than Hamas and Islamic Jihad combined – was published at the
height of the Bush administration’s campaign for Palestinian
regime change.
Moving forward, and in an incident that might otherwise be considered
comic, HRW in November 2006 went so far as to denounce Palestinians
who refused to vacate homes threatened with imminent aerial bombardment,
rather than the state bent on obliterating their houses, as war criminals.
By the time it retracted its claims in a rare recantation –
the howls of outrage from less partisan lawyers and human rights professionals
were simply too loud to be ignored – the damage had already
been done.
Interestingly, Palestinians were denounced by HRW on the legally correct
(but in this case factually inaccurate) assumption that “It
is a war crime to seek to use the presence of civilians to render
certain points or areas immune from military operations or to direct
the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in
order to attempt to shield military objectives from attack”.
Yet HRW’s 2002 report, In a Dark Hour: The Use of Civilians
During IDF Arrest Operations, which according to the accompanying
press release “documents how the IDF routinely has taken civilians
at gunpoint to open suspicious packages, knock on doors of suspects,
and search the houses of ‘wanted’ Palestinians during
its military operations”, pointedly declines to define human
shielding as a war crime. Indeed, the only differences between the
documented 2002 cases and falsely alleged 2006 incidents are that
the former were conducted by Israel and reached the level of systematic
practice.
In 2006 HRW additionally leveled war crimes charges against Palestinian
militants who captured Gilad Shalit – a uniformed soldier on
active duty – on the grounds that they intended to exchange
him for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel. Consequently, the main
and clearest finding of “Israel: Gaza Offensive Must Limit Harm
to Civilians” (28 June 2006), is that “A hostage is a
person held in the power of an adversary in order to obtain specific
actions, such as the release of prisoners, from the other party to
the conflict … which is a war crime under the laws of war”.
Against this apparently unprecedented act in the annals of military
history, Israel’s own actions, which included the mass arrest
of Palestinian parliamentarians and in some respects resembled a test
run for Israel’s latest onslaught on the Gaza Strip (and which
were the alleged subject of the press release), elicited only legal
exegesis, shorn of meaningful conclusions.
More recently, the organization has issued a fatwa that any Arab launching
a projectile at an Israeli target is by definition a war criminal,
because such rockets and mortars are – unlike the state-of-the-art
shells and missiles fired by Israel at apartment blocks, schools,
hospitals, and UN facilities – not precision-guided and therefore
according to HRW incapable of distinguishing between a military and
civilian target. Such gunners can also not hide behind the excuse
that they hit an empty field or even that they successfully aimed
at and struck a legitimate military target; for HRW it is the act
of using yesterday’s weapon rather than its impact that defines
the crime. (There is, parenthetically, no record of HRW condemning
Israel or the US of committing war crimes by virtue of using unguided
projectiles).
Asked about this rather bizarre state of affairs, every current and
former HRW staff member spoken to over many years – most of
them in rather senior positions - point at least two fingers at HRW
director Kenneth Roth’s affinity for Israel. At least as important,
apparently, is Roth’s exceptional ability to divine the political
wind, and do whatever is necessary to ensure that HRW retains the
resources and credentials to remain the industry leader. It is that
rare case where principle and opportunism merge rather than collide.
(While Roth undoubtedly has allies on the organisation’s board
and among its staff for his approach to the question of Israel, these
are easily outnumbered by critics who would like to see a more uniform
standard applied by their organisation).
Thus, in a 2006 missive to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
on the eve of her Mideast sojourn at the height of Israel’s
US-sponsored onslaught on Lebanon Roth, in perhaps the outstanding
act of political courage during the Bush years, insisted on drawing
her attention to the war crimes being perpetrated in the conflict
– by Hizballah. According to several senior HRW employees, Roth
subsequently tried to arrange for a critic who questioned HRW’s
partisanship to be fired by filing a written complaint to the critic’s
director.
As a case study of HRW’s response to the question of Israel,
its publications during the recent Israeli onslaught on the Gaza Strip
- all of which were consulted on www.hrw.org on 25 January 2009 –
only confirm the pattern discussed above, and in some respects go
beyond it as well.
True to form, HRW’s first pronouncement on the conflict, issued
on 30 December 2008 and entitled “Israel: Artillery Poses Risk
to Gaza Civilians”, despite its brevity meticulously documents
relevant Israeli practice and the cost it has exacted in Palestininian
life and limb. That said, there is no condemnation to be found. “In
assessing the legality of the IDF's artillery fire under international
humanitarian law, or the laws of war”, it politely concludes,
“it is necessary to determine for each attack whether it was
targeted at a specific military objective; whether the weapon used
could be aimed with sufficient accuracy to differentiate between the
military objective and civilians; and whether the anticipated civilian
casualties were not disproportionate to the expected military gain
from the attack”.
Turning next to a subject entirely unrelated to the publication’s
title – namely Palestinian rocket attacks – the arcane
technical analysis suddenly comes to a screeching halt. Rather than
‘if on the one hand, but then on the other’, we read the
following: “Human Rights Watch has repeatedly condemned the
launching of rockets at population centers in Israel by Hamas and
other Palestinian armed groups. The rockets are highly inaccurate,
and those launching them cannot accurately target military objects.
Deliberately firing indiscriminate weapons into civilian-populated
areas, as a matter of policy, constitutes a war crime”.
For good measure HRW that same day released “Israel/Hamas: Civilians
Must Not be Targets”. On the one hand, “Human Rights Watch
investigated three Israeli attacks that raise particular concern about
Israel's targeting decisions and require independent and impartial
inquiries to determine whether the attacks violated the laws of war.
In three incidents detailed below, 18 civilians died, among them at
least seven children”. Indeed, “Some other Israeli targets
may have also been unlawful under the laws of war”.
Yet, on the other hand, “Human Rights Watch has long criticized
Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli civilians - most recently,
in a public letter to Hamas on November 20 (http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/11/20/letter-hamas-stop-rocket-attacks).
The rockets are highly inaccurate, and those launching them cannot
accurately target military objects. Deliberately firing indiscriminate
weapons into civilian populated areas, as a matter of policy, constitutes
a war crime”.
Nevertheless by the following day, in the lengthy “Q&A:
Hostilities between Israel and Hamas” Hamas leaders were no
longer being led to a war crimes tribunal in HRW chains. Confronted
with evidence too overwhelming to ignore that Israel was deliberately
firing much greater quantities of precision-guided weapons not only
into civilian-populated areas, but directly at the civilian population
and to much greater effect, HRW was confronted with a stark choice:
accuse Israel of war crimes, or change Hamas’s rap sheet. It
prudently opted for the latter, accusing Israel only of “indiscriminate
attacks in violation of the laws of war”.
For the rest of the conflict, Hamas was able to “deliberately
fire indiscriminate weapons into civilian populated areas, as a matter
of policy”, with total impunity, not once being denounced by
HRW for committing war crimes. Too clever by half, Roth apparently
believed no one would notice this sudden about-face.
As the devastation of the Gaza Strip continued apace, and the death
toll reached horrific levels, it was becoming increasingly clear that
civilians were very much in Israel’s crosshairs. In an orgy
of organized savagery entire families were obliterated with the press
of a button; refugees were herded into buildings, the premises shelled,
and survivors denied medical care and essential supplies for days
afterward; UN facilities, including the UNRWA headquarters and schools
transformed into safe havens (whose precise coordinates and functions
were communicated to the Israeli military) were repeatedly bombed;
women and children seeking refuge with white flags raised were summarily
gunned down; and entire neighborhoods were systematically razed to
the ground. Yet, from HRW’s perspective, none of these acts
– whether individually or collectively – merited the same
characterization that had until 30 December 2008 been routinely meted
out to their Palestinian adversaries.
As part of its response, the organization simply feigned ignorance.
“Israel's refusal to grant access to Gaza for all international
media and human rights monitors since the fighting began on December
27”, it complained on 12 January, “has limited severely
the flow of information and investigation from impartial observers
into events on the ground”. “Human Rights Watch,”
it had the cheek to report on 16 January, “is unable to conduct
full investigations into alleged laws of war violations by either
side because of Israel's continuing denial of access to Gaza”.
This despite the fact that the Gaza Strip was saturated with Arab
journalists, local and international humanitarian staff, medical personnel
including several Europeans, and approximately 1.5 million residents
most of whom had at least intermittent access to telecommunications.
Yet none of these, apparently, met the criteria of credible witness.
Indeed, HRW’s main and almost exclusive source of reliable information
consisted of staff located on the Israeli side of the boundary on
account of Israel and Egypt’s ban on entry to the Gaza Strip.
HRW’s insistence on the most scrupulous standards of quality
control for information emanating from the Gaza Strip, while in principle
laudable, stands in rather sharp contrast to its operations in Ba’thist
Iraq, where much more severe restrictions didn’t preclude the
organization from concocting stories about babies thrown out of incubators
and issuing detailed accounts of genocide. Similarly, even during
the Gaza conflict HRW had no problem lending its imprimatur to reports
of state repression of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Iran, Saudi
Arabia, and Tunisia – countries in which it was also denied
access. “Gaza Crisis: Regimes React with Routine Repression”,
issued on 21 January, didn’t hesitate to assert as fact various
beatings and arrests in the darker parts of the Middle East, using
precisely those forensic methods deemed insufficiently impartial in
the Gaza Strip. Nor did denial of access prevent HRW from denouncing
such regimes for throwing not one but two shoes at their people –
a wholly appropriate turn of phrase but also the type of rhetoric
one never sees deployed when addressing the question of Israel.
At several points HRW’s coverage of the conflict descended to
the level of obscenity. On 16 January, in a press release entitled
“Israel: Stop Shelling Crowded Gaza City”, the organization
once again provides an accurate account, based primarily on the testimony
of HRW senior military analyst Marc Garlasco, of the facts –
in this case Israel’s use of heavy artillery against the centre
of Gaza City, including the shelling of UNRWA headquarters with white
phosphorous. Yet rather than conclude that a war crime had been perpetrated,
or even suggest that the time may be ripe for investigation and accountability,
the microphone is handed to Israel’s Prime Minister: “Ehud
Olmert apologized for the attack, but said Israeli forces had come
under fire from the UN compound. ‘It is absolutely true that
we were attacked from that place, but the consequences are very sad
and we apologize for it’, he said”.
Curiously, UNRWA officials, who are quoted elsewhere in the press
release describing the attack, are not cited as “categorically
rul[ing] out any possibility that militants had been firing from the
compound," as they had to the Associated Press and other media.
Nor is the lay reader informed about the legality of the attack even
if Olmert’s version of events was substantiated, or of the consequences
in terms of accountability even if he was genuinely saddened and apologetic.
Indeed, the only reference to an investigation is to the one HRW was
purportedly unable to conduct.
Further down the same press release reports: “Israeli fire also
hit the al-Shurouq tower, which houses media outlets such as Reuters,
al-Arabiyya Television, and al-Hayat newspaper, causing substantial
damage and wounding at least two journalists … Media organizations
had provided the Israeli military with the GPS locations of all their
offices. Israeli forces told the media that they had come under fire
from the building”. Seemingly, the recently pardoned war criminals
of Hamas successfully transformed the building into the headquarters
of their rocket battalion without even being noticed by the dozens
of journalists and their dozens of cameras in, on and around the building
- though a more likely explanation is that the journalists, all of
them Arab, fail to meet Roth’s standards for “impartial
observers into events on the ground”.
The press release then states, “"Human Rights Watch is
unable to conduct full investigations into alleged laws of war violations
by either side because of Israel's continuing denial of access to
Gaza. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups have also violated
the laws of war by continuing to fire unguided Qassam and Grad rockets
at population centers in Israel." Once again, HRW insists on
having it both ways: If violations can only be alleged pending confirmation
by exhaustive investigations in situ, how can a mere reference to
the type of weapon used by one party prove sufficient for finding
that it has in fact committed such violations? By the time the reader
gets to the final paragraph of the press release, a recommendation
to Israel to “Collect and analyze data regarding Palestinian
civilian casualties from artillery shelling in order to assess the
harm to civilians caused by the use of artillery in particular locales
and situations, and thus to base targeting decisions on a proper weighing
of foreseeable civilian harm”, the reader could be forgiven
for reading this as an exhortation for further Israeli shelling to
ensure sufficient data is collected.
The low point of HRW’s coverage of Israel’s onslaught
on the Gaza Strip was not its consistent refusal to apply a single
standard – whether legal or rhetorical – to Israel and
the Palestinians, nor its effective contribution to Israeli impunity,
but rather a personal betrayal of an HRW colleague in his hour of
greatest need.
“On the afternoon of January 3, 2009”, according to HRW’s
“Israel: Investigate Former Judge’s Killing in Gaza”
(issued on 9 January), “an Israeli bomb or missile from an F-16
jet fighter killed the two Gazans at the al-Ghoul farm, northwest
of Beit Lahiya and close to Gaza’s border with Israel. Akram
al-Ghoul was a judge who worked in the Palestinian Authority courts
and resigned after Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in June 2007. He
is the father of Fares Akram, Human Rights Watch’s research
consultant in Gaza. Mahmoud al-Ghoul, 17, was a student”.
One aspect of the question of Israel on which HRW has pulled considerably
fewer punches than others concerns internal investigations conducted
by the Israeli military. Only two days before it issued the above
press release, in fact, in a separate press release entitled “Gaza:
Israeli Attack on School Needs Full Investigation”, the organization
noted that according to its previous studies of the matter, “IDF
investigations into alleged laws-of-war violations, when they have
occurred, have been deeply flawed … To Human Rights Watch's
knowledge, Israel never conducted impartial and thorough investigations
of those [previously recounted] incidents or held any of its military
personnel accountable. During Israel's last major ground offensive
in Gaza in March 2008, Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces
committed several targeted killings and other serious violations of
the laws of war. To date, no IDF investigation has taken place in
these cases”.
Yet how did Kenneth Roth and the world’s leading human rights
organization respond to the killing of their colleague’s father
and relative? “Human Rights Watch today called on the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF) to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation
into the deaths by an Israeli airstrike of Akram al-Ghoul, 48, and
Mahmoud Salah Ahman al-Ghoul, 17, the father and cousin of Human Rights
Watch’s research consultant in Gaza. In a letter to Brig.-Gen.
Avichai Mandelblit, IDF Military Advocate General, Human Rights Watch
urged the military to investigate the attack, make the results of
the investigation public, and prosecute any persons it finds to have
acted in serious violation of international humanitarian law”.
HRW didn’t even bother to go through the motions of calling
for an “independent” investigation of the killing of their
Arab informant’s father.
In doing so, HRW chose to pursue justice for a colleague by steering
his case into what they better than perhaps any others know to be
meaningless dead end. The impression that the murder of Fares Akram’s
father was instrumentalised by HRW to lend a much-needed veneer of
respectability to the Israeli military’s investigations of itself
is particularly reprehensible.
---
Mouin Rabbani is a contributing editor to Middle East Report.
MERIP
OP-EDS Sects
and the City New York Times Magazine May 17, 2010
Moustafa Bayoumi
I
had almost forgotten I’d sent
in an application when the e-mail message
appeared, like Mr. Big, out of nowhere. “Hi,
Moustafa,” it began, as if we
were old friends. “Thank you
for e-mailing us regarding your interest
in working on ‘Sex and the City
2.’ ”
No
way. Last August, I half-jokingly answered
an e-mail message posted on a list-serv
requesting “lots of Middle Eastern
men and women” as extras for
the second “Sex and the City” movie
(opening this week). Although I must
have been one of the very few in the
tri-state area to possess all the talents
requested in the e-mail (legal to work,
Middle Eastern and between 18 and 70
years old), I still never thought I
would be selected. Two months later,
I got the call. Full
Story>>
At
first glance, there’s a clear
need for expanding the Web beyond the
Latin alphabet, including in the Arabic-speaking
world. According to the Madar Research
Group, about 56 million Arabs, or 17
percent of the Arab world, use the
Internet, and those numbers are expected
to grow 50 percent over the next three
years. Many think that an Arabic-alphabet
Web will bring millions online, helping
to bridge the socio-economic divides
that pervade the region. But such hopes
are overblown. Full
Story>>
Iyad
Allawi, the not terribly popular
interim premier of post-Saddam Iraq,
is in a position to form a government
again because he won over the Sunni
Arabs residing north and west of
Baghdad in the March 7 elections.
The vote, while it did not “shove
political sectarianism in Iraq toward
the grave,” as Allawi would have
it, rekindled the hopes of many that “nationalist” sentiment
has asserted itself over communal
loyalty. Full Story>>
Americans got a crash course on Yemen for Christmas.
That’s
because we’ve wanted to know more about the little-known, dirt-poor
country in southwestern Arabia where the “underwear bomber” who
tried to blow up a plane—bound for Detroit from Nigeria on
Christmas Day—says he was trained. President Barack Obama says,
correctly, that “large chunks” of Yemen “are not
fully under government control.” So it seems to make sense
to strengthen the Yemeni government, to get at “al-Qaeda in
the Arabian Peninsula,” as the local gang of Islamist extremists
is known. Full Story>>
Bethlehem,
Palestine is a special place to celebrate Christmas. It’s
home to the Church of the Nativity and the field where shepherds, tending
their flocks by night, spotted the star heralding Jesus’ birth.
But apart from the historical mystique, here in Bethlehem we celebrate
Christmas much like Christians throughout the world. We hang lights
from the rooftops. We erect a tree in Manger Square. We host a Christmas
market. Our children carol and perform Christmas pageants. Christmas
in Bethlehem, as elsewhere, is a time for family, peace, love and joy. Full
Story>>
For
the past two months, President Barack Obama has been weighing Gen.
Stanley McChrystal’s request to send an additional 40,000 troops
to Afghanistan to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda.
That same effort, according to Obama, entails ensuring that the Taliban
can’t regain control of the country. But a military strategy
alone won’t beat al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Achieving lasting
stability in Afghanistan will require national political reconciliation,
the establishment of a functioning, accountable political system,
and a credible government. In this respect, the outcome of Afghanistan’s
presidential election, marred by cheating, was a step in the wrong
direction. Full
story>>
So
much is still unknown about the shooting at Fort Hood Army base and
the motives of the alleged shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, but still
I have that same queasy feeling in my stomach that I've had before:
this will not be good for Muslims. Full
Story>>
Morocco
serves as the backdrop for such Hollywood blockbusters as Gladiator,
Black Hawk Down and Body of Lies. The country’s breathtaking
landscapes and gritty urban neighbourhoods are the perfect setting
for Hollywood’s imagination.
Unbeknown
to most filmgoers, however, is that Morocco is embroiled in one of
Africa’s oldest conflicts - the dispute over Western
Sahara. This month the UN Security Council is expected to take up the
dispute once more, providing US President Barack Obama with an opportunity
to assert genuine leadership in resolving this conflict. But there’s
no sign that the new administration is paying adequate attention. Full
Story>>
Shortly
before assuming office, President Barack Obama was handed a missive
signed by such Washington luminaries as ex-national security advisers
Zbigniew Brezezinski and Brent Scowcroft, urging him to “explore
the possibility” of direct contact with Hamas. One month after
he entered the White House, Obama received an epistle from Ahmad Yousef,
a Gaza-based spokesman for the Islamist movement, making the same recommendation. “There
can be no peace without Hamas,” Yousef told the New York Times
when asked about the letter's contents. “We congratulated Mr.
Obama on his presidency and reminded him that he should live up to
his promise to bring real change to the region.”
There
is no word, as yet, on how the foreign policy doyens' message was
received, but Yousef's occasioned a huffy US rebuke of the UN Relief
Works Agency, whose top official in Gaza, Karen Abu Zayd, passed the
letter to Sen. John Kerry while he was visiting the devastated territory
in mid-February. Even a single sealed envelope, it seems, creates the
appearance that the Obama administration is breaking with the US vow,
enunciated first under President George W. Bush, not to speak with
Hamas until it agrees to renounce violence, abide by previous Palestinian
agreements with Israel and recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Full
Story>>
It
has been quite a week. For the first time, the international community
indicted a sitting president of a sovereign state. Omar al-Bashir
of Sudan stands accused by the International Criminal Court in The
Hague of "crimes against humanity and war crimes" committed
in the course of the Khartoum regime's brutal suppression of the
revolt in the country's far western province of Darfur. Having indicted
two other figures associated with the regime in 2007, ICC prosecutor
Luis Moreno Ocampo began building a case against the man at the top,
and on Wednesday, the court issued a warrant for Bashir's arrest.
Full Story>>
Speaking
to his people on January 18, hours after Hamas responded to Israel’s
unilateral suspension of hostilities with a conditional ceasefire
of its own, the deposed Palestinian Authority prime minister Ismail
Haniyeh devoted several passages of his prepared text to the subject
of Palestinian national reconciliation. For perhaps the first time
since Hamas’s June 2007 seizure of power in the Gaza Strip,
an Islamist leader broached the topic of healing the Palestinian divide
without mentioning Mahmoud Abbas by name.
At
a press conference the following day convened by Abu Ubaida, the
spokesperson of the Martyr Izz al Din al Qassam Brigades, the Hamas
military wing, the movement went one step further. “The Resistance”,
Abu Ubaida intoned, “is the legitimate representative of the
Palestinian people”. Full Story>>
Three
weeks after the war on Gaza, Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire
but refused to terminate its so-called defensive operations. In response,
Hamas declared a ceasefire for one week, until the withdrawal of
Israeli troops has been completed. For many in the West, the ceasefire
might seem like an occasion to celebrate, for the cessation of military
hostilities on both sides will perhaps renew the peace process. But
there are reasons to be critical of this ceasefire, since it continues
the situation in which Israel acts unilaterally. What we are actually
witnessing is a new phase of the catastrophe in Gaza. While the characteristics
of this phase are not yet known, Israel's violence has become ever
more evident. And perhaps this is why Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
did not mention the word "peace" once in the speech he gave
to announce the ceasefire. The "peace process" might soon
be revealed as the other side of the coin to war -- its continuation
by other means -- that simultaneously feeds it. Full Story>>
Bob
Woodward’s four books chronicling the wars of President
George W. Bush are sensitive barometers of conventional wisdom in Washington.
Whereas the first volume, published in 2002 at the height of the self-righteous
nationalism gripping the capital after the September 11, 2001 attacks,
hailed Bush’s self-confidence in acting to protect the homeland,
the 2008 installment depicts the same man as cocksure and incurious.
This much is not news. More educational are Woodward’s hints
about the worldviews that will outlast this unpopular administration,
embedded in the organs of the national security state. Full
Story>>
The
Egyptian regime has once again succeeded in stifling freedom of speech,
this time not in Egypt, but in the US. Earlier this month, an Egyptian
court convicted a prominent Egyptian-American activist for his outspoken
criticism of the regime’s poor human
rights record in American public fora. The court accused Saad Eddin
Ibrahim, of "tarnishing Egypt's image" abroad. The conviction
referred primarily to writings he published in the foreign press; most
notably among them an August 2007 op-ed in the Washington Post in which
he criticized Egypt's human rights record and questioned the reasons
behind US aid to Egypt. Full
Story>>
Militant
Islam is under global scrutiny for clues to conditions that foster
its rise, and to strategies for reversing that growth. But the key
is not in Islamic doctrine, US foreign policy or formal ties to various
nations, as many analysts have asserted. It lies at the community
level, with clan and local leaders. Full
Story>>
Kurdish
parties have become kingmakers in Baghdad , and they know it. As
no federal government can work without them, they are pulling every
available political lever to expand the territory and resources they
control, trying to build the foundation of an independent Kurdish state.
But even more than territory, they need security. If everyone acts
quickly and wisely, that understanding could help resolve one of the
Iraq war’s thorniest issues. Full
Story>>
The
debate over the war in Iraq follows a yellowing script: The minute
someone suggests that the US move to withdraw its troops, war supporters
cry “Havoc!”
True to form, when no less a figure than Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri
al-Maliki stated he wants a timeline for a US pullout, John McCain
summoned the specter of dire consequences. “I’ve always
said we’ll come home with honor and with victory and not through
a set timetable,” McCain said. In his major foreign policy speech
on July 15, Barack Obama affirmed his support for a withdrawal timetable,
adding that the US must “get out as carefully as we were careless
getting in.” Obama’s position is the correct one, but he,
like many other war critics, has done too little to counter the refrain
that withdrawal is simply
“cutting and running,” a recipe for disaster. Full
Story>>
