Poverty and unemployment for Palestinians on the West Bank has gotten so bad that Palestinian children sneak into Israel to make money as street corner beggars.
NAZARETH, Israel—For 15-year-old Issa, days of summer start when the sun rises over a northern Israeli hill, shining on a garbage dump, a thorny field and then the dirty mattress that is his bed.
Issa is among hundreds of Palestinian child laborers who sneak into Israel from the West Bank, hawking or begging at traffic junctions.
Israel's massive barrier of walls and fences separating it from the West Bank has made it harder for adult laborers to enter Israel, so families wracked by poverty are increasingly sending their children instead.
"Pimps" pay parents to use their children as beggars.
Often Palestinian or Israeli Arab middlemen pay the children's families $250 for the right to take a child into Israel, the advocates said.
These "pimps," as they are called by Israeli authorities, force the children to beg at intersections, take their money at the end of the day and bring them to sleep in rundown apartments, they said. The children return home on weekends, or every few weeks.
"This brings continuous deprivation on the children who do not see their families, do not go to school and never rest," said Salwa Kupti, an Israeli Arab social worker in Nazareth who has worked with the children for 10 years. "The children become machines."
Reality is not pretty.
Palestinian children can enter Israel as long as they are escorted by a Palestinian with a work permit to enter. Also, some sneak in at locations along the barrier where the barrier is not complete yet. So then will the begging decrease as the barrier becomes more developed?
I wonder what the trend is with illegal alien workers in Israel. Are the numbers of Palestinian illegals going up or down?
You are probably as bored of Palestinian violence and the Arab-Israeli conflict as I am. Really, hasn't this series produced enough episodes by now? Can't we experience it through reruns in syndication? But the writers have thrown a new twist in it with civil war between Palestinian factions reaching a climax. Hamas is emerging triumphant over Fatah in the Gaza Strip.
Hamas fighters launched a fierce offensive on Gaza City Wednesday, firing mortars and rockets at Fatah's main security bases and the president's compound as the Islamic group appeared close to taking control of the entire Gaza Strip.
Fatah's forces were crumbling fast, with some fighters seen fleeing their security posts and hundreds of others surrendering, hands raised, to masked Hamas gunmen.
Hamas' control of Gaza and Fatah's control of the non-Israeli parts of the West Bank effectively split the Palestinian state into two separate states.
Some nutcases tried to have a peaceful protest. Didn't anyone tell them that all protests much use violence? Don't they know the rules? Or are they some sort of trouble makers?
Among those killed Wednesday was a man shot when Hamas gunmen fired on a peaceful protest against the violence, witnesses said.
The President of the two Palestinian statelets is a member of Fatah and he is not happy.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah called the fighting "madness" and pleaded with the exiled leader of Hamas to halt the violence.
Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas issued a joint statement after nightfall, calling on all sides "to halt fighting, and to return to language of dialogue and respect of agreements," according to a statement from Abbas' office. The call was broadcast on Palestinian TV.
I'm guessing maybe the greater Israeli control over West Bank will prevent Hamas from taking over there as well.
Should we care one way or another about all this? If so, why? I'm just asking.
Update: Over in the West Bank Fatah is making preemptive moves to defeat Hamas.
The Palestinians Authority's security forces, accompanied by Fatah members, began arresting senior Hamas members in the West Bank on Wednesday night.
The operation was launched in Ramallah, and the list of detainees contained 1,500 names of senior Hamas members and activists.
It will be interesting to see if Hamas and Fatah can quickly consolidate their power in their respective territories and put down all opposition. If so, one might ask why the civil war in Iraq is taking so much longer to finish.
Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor has put together a collection of links to stories about how Bush Administration members and neocon supporters want Israel to attack Syria but Israel's government and commentators think the neocons are nuts. In one sense this isn't really news. The neocons have advocated the overthrow the Alawite Assad government in Damascus for years. But in another sense the continued neocon embrace of this proposal is worth noting: The neoconservatives have not learned anything about reality from the Iraq debacle. They still think panacea solutions are waiting to be had if we would only act boldly enough and pay the price to enter utopia.
Neoconservatism is utopian and therefore is not a form of conservatism. People who advocate panaceas and use abstractions that are disconnected from empirical evidence are not thinking like classical Burkean conservatives. One shouldn't be anti-conceptual and anti-abstraction. But one should recognize that abstractions are usually simplifications of reality and that abstractions should be developed from empirical evidence and not built from one's fantasies and desires.
Noah Millman of Gideon's Blog offers a more conservative analysis of Israel's problems with Syria and Hezbollah. Millman does not believe overthrow of the Syrian government would solve anything or that Israel can achieve a huge lasting gain in Lebanon. (my bold emphasis added)
- Similarly, after the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, I presumed that Israel would have to return. Israel had no territorial claims on Lebanon; its presence was entirely security-driven. Yes, the long occupation produced Hezbollah. But there was no reason to think that withdrawal would result in Hezbollah withering away, as indeed it has not. So now Israel has had to launch a full-scale war merely to "degrade" Hezbollah's capabilities - capabilities that can be rapidly rebuilt, at a fraction of the cost for Israel to degrade them. Israel's stated objectives are to make it possible for the Lebanese army and some unspecified international force to come in and "control" the region in which Hezbollah operates. But Hezbollah is more popular than ever in Lebanon, and it is inconceivable that an international force will actually use, well, force. In terms of restraining Israeli action any such force will be worse than Israeli settlements, and in terms of restraining Hezbollah they will be inferior to the Syrians who, if they chose to, certainly could force some restraint.
- Which brings us to Syria. Various hawkish voices have called for Israel to take the war to the source - that is to say: to Damascus, which never seems to suffer adequately for the wars it provokes (see, e.g., 1967, 1973). But there is no mystery about why Israel has declined to take any action against Syria directly: because the Assad regime is the best Israel could plausibly expect in that country. Were the Syrian regime to fall, it would be replaced not by a friendly Arab democracy but by one of three possibilities: a new military dictatorship (not obviously better than the current regime), a radical Sunni Islamist regime (obviously worse), or a state of anarchy such as obtains in Iraq (also obviously worse). If Israel were certain that the Syrian regime could survive a direct Israeli attack, then, perhaps, Israel might launch such an attack, which would make the Assad regime *fear* collapse and take the necessary actions to prevent it, even if these meant acceding to Israeli objectives such as reining in Hezbollah. The fact that Israel is being very careful with Syria is a testament not to Israeli weakness but to their perceptions of Syrian weakness, and their recognition that the fall of the Assad regime would be unlikely to benefit Israel. Israel will not turn decisively against Damascus until such time as it appears that Assad has been "captured" by Hezbollah, and has forgotten who is the patron and who is the client. That doesn't appear to have happened yet.
The problem with overthrowing the Assad regime is so incredibly simple: A replacement government will be as bad or even much worse for Israel. Why? Because it would be made up of Syrians and the majority of people in Syria have no affection for Israel. Israel's problem is not the particular regimes in power in Arab countries. Israel's problem is that Arab Muslims are predisposed for deep seated reasons to feel hostile toward Israel.
The US overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq has not made the Iraqis any better disposed toward Israel. A US or Israeli overthrow of the Syrian regime would similarly not make the Syrians any more friendly toward Israel and very likely would have the opposite effect. Currently Israel benefits when neighboring countries are not ruled by majority groups. The overall trend in human affairs in the last century has been toward rule by members of native elites. When the ruling elites are not representatives the majority group (e.g. minority Alawites rather than majority Sunnis rule Syria) for each country the regimes have to tread more carefully. Forcing the Middle East to move even further toward the global trend is likely to produce governments that even more strongly see Jewish Israelis as minority outsiders who should be booted from the region.
Noah Millman says serious thinkers do not believe the US can impose a better regime on Syria.
- (Side note: some*might* think it in Israel's interests for there to be an *American* effort to topple the Syrian regime, on the assumption that America can simply *impose* a more friendly government on that country. I think that since the Iraq campaign, no one serious in America or Israel still believes that America has that ability.)
If no one serious believes the US or Israel can impose a better regime on Syria then a lot of unserious people are setting policy in the United States and writing articles for neoconservative journals and think tanks.
A conservative analysis of the Middle East should start with the insights that humans are not perfectible, that human cultures differ from each other in important ways, and that the habits and beliefs of other peoples are at best extremely difficult to change. As Mick Jagger pointed out, "you can't always get what you want". Even worse, you can't even always get what you need (e.g. get a diagnosis of advanced liver cancer and the need for a cure will not magically cause a cure to be produced). A rational empirical analysis of the Middle East that attempted to determine what policymakers could hope to accomplish should consider the role of consanguineous marriage (marrying cousins) and tribalism in determining the nature of Arab governments and societies. An emprical analysis would consider how Islam and a cultire which sees all relationships as based on submission and dominance pose extremely intractable obstacles for liberalizers. A conservative approach to the Middle East would also eschew a set of assumptions and a logic that leads toward genocide as the solution when neocon utopian schemes inevitably fail.
Some Israelis will continue to die every year due to Arab terrorists. Wanting that to change will not make it change. Bold utopian schemes to stop this are more likely to make the problem worse than better. What Israeli policy change in recent years has done the most to decrease Israeli deaths at the hands of Palestinian terrorists? The construction of a border barrier between the West Bank Palestinians and Israel. Walls and fences are not utopian. They do not produce ultimate solutions which totally eliminate a problem. Yet they do provide real substantial benefits.
The gap between reality and US Middle Eastern policy has reached a point of creating splits within the Bush Administration. Condi Rice wants to take a more moderate position in the Middle East but Bush has begun to overrule her.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has become increasingly dismayed over President Bush's support for Israel to continue its war with Hezbollah.
State Department sources said Ms. Rice has been repeatedly stymied in her attempts to pressure Israel to end strikes against Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon. The sources said the secretary's trip to the Middle East last week was torpedoed by the Israeli air strike of a Lebanese village in which 25 people were killed.
"I've never seen her so angry," an aide said.
The splits within the Bush Administration bring to mind the famous comment by a Bush aide that people who want to use empirical evidence to make policy are part of the "reality-based community". That's the community I belong to but that's not the community that Bush and the neocons belong to.
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Now we get to study the debacle in Iraq. We get to study the decay in American communities hard hit by massive Hispanic immigrants. The Bush policy makers are making new realities. Unfortunately, those realities are more nightmares than utopias.
Even as dozens die in sectarian violence in Iraq every day the Shia Arabs in Sadr City Baghdad could organize and make a march to the city center without anyone getting killed. American soldiers helped provide security so that Iraqi Shia Muslims could march in support of Lebanese Shia Muslims against Israel and against America.
BAGHDAD, Aug. 4 -- Thousands of Shiite Muslims marched though the Iraqi capital on Friday in support of Hezbollah guerrillas battling Israeli forces in Lebanon, answering a call by radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to rally to the cause of their fellow Shiites.
Throngs of Shiite men, most clad in white burial shrouds that symbolized their willingness to die, gathered in the northeast Baghdad slum known as Sadr City. Then they marched toward the center of the capital, chanting: "We will step over America. We are Hezbollah" and "How can we sleep tonight? We have a quarrel with Israel."
They did not march for freedom of press or freedom of religion or democracy. If they had bothered to march about women's rights they would have marched for less rights, not more.
The United States helped bring to power a Shia Muslim government in Baghdad and empowered the Shia majority in Iraq.
The large turnout, along with the absence of any reported violence, also suggested that Sadr's ability to rally legions of disciplined followers remains strong at a time when factional militias dominate Baghdad.
Only 14,000 marched according to the US military.
But the U.S. military said in a news release that calculations based on pictures taken from unmanned surveillance aircraft put the crowd at 14,000.
In the intense heat of August and with the threat of car bomb attacks by Sunni insurgents that's still a decent turn-out.
The Sunnis in Sunni Arab countries fielded smaller crowds in support of Shia Arabs.
In the most violent demonstration, about 100 people threw stones and a firebomb at the British Embassy in Tehran, damaging the building but harming nobody as they accused Britain and the United States of being accomplices in Israel's fight against Hezbollah, a Shiite group in Lebanon that is backed by Persian Iran.
Even Sunni Muslim demonstrators took to the streets of Damascus, Cairo and Amman. But their numbers were dwarfed by the huge Shiite turnout in Baghdad, organized by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
An article in Time magazine claims that Shia Arabs in Iraq trust Shia militias more than they trust the Shia dominated government.
But disarming Sadr's army may prove, if anything, even more difficult than disarming Hizballah in Lebanon. That's because the three-year campaign of terror against Shi'ite civilians by Sunni insurgents has led the community to see its militias, rather than the central government, as its only protection. As that violence escalates, the likelihood diminishes that these communities will support any effort to forcefully dismantle the militias. Nor can an agreement to disarm be easily orchestrated by removing the insurgent threat, since the branch of the insurgency responsible for targeting the Shi'ites is led by al-Qaeda in Iraq, the faction most implacably opposed to any reconciliation with the elected government.
If the Madhi Army decides to take on US forces with urban warfare in Baghdad the US forces in Baghdad might need to ally themselves with a Sunni militia. Do you suppose we could restore Sunnis to power? We should exempt Saddam Hussein from capital punishment. We might need him.
The neoconservatives, a predominantly Jewish group of Cold War liberals, have been the principal promoters of President Bush’s Muslim democratization campaign, as a direct result of which hundreds of thousands of Shi’ites in the U.S.-liberated, U.S.-occupied, and U.S.-empowered country of Iraq are now freely marching under the slogans “Death to Israel,” “Death to America.” Those same Jewish neoconservatives have also been the chief promoters of America’s post-1965 non-discriminatory immigration policy, as a direct result of which every Jewish institution in this country must now be surrounded by layers of security to prevent Muslims who are in this country solely due to that immigration policy from murdering Jews, as happened in Seattle last week.
The Arabs do not believe in the equality of man. Liberalism is not a universal philosophy for all of humanity. Liberals who support mass immigration are supporting suicide of their own culture. If I could separate myself and other non-liberals from them I would. But I'm stuck going down with them and I heavily resent them for doing this to the rest of us.
Steve Sailer thinks surely the Lebanese could be bought off if we could figure out who to bribe.
But the nutty thing is that the annual Iranian subsidy of Hezbollah, which we are constantly told is a world-historical crisis, turns out to be about $100 million.
For 28 years, the U.S. has paid Egypt $2 billion annually not to blunder into another war with Israel. This has been a good deal for all concerned, but it's pretty expensive because it's public. I would imagine you could rent most of the important people in Egypt for a lot less, if you did it surreptitiously with deposits in the right Swiss bank accounts.
Lebanon is a tiny country compared to Egypt with less than 4 million people, which is why Iran's $100 million seems so vast to them.
Surely, the friends of Israel could outbid Iran for influence in Lebanon? There's always the problem of making sure the VIPs you buy stay bought, but the people who have the money to spend on this problem are often geniuses at structuring deals, so that doesn't seem insurmountable.
The bribery deals would need to have incentive plans for performance.
What I wonder: What would it cost to buy south Lebanon and turn it into a park? Have no land there for houses. Hezbollah would try to kilr sellers to make people. Some Hezbollah followers would refuse to sell. So this might not work.
Consider how many things could merit bribery payments: Know when and where some trucks or an aircraft will deliver missiles from Iran? A group could even be bribed to capture trucks delivering missiles. Know where Nasrallah is at some moment? Know the locations of arms stashes? Know how to get some Shiite faction shooting at another Shiite faction? Bribes are best offered for confirmable information. A bribe for, say, "who in this village is a trained Hezbollah fighter" doesn't work because the bribee could finger those who hate Hezbollah rather than the members in good standing.
I've made a similar argument on Iraq. The place is full of factions and sub-factions. Would some of the factions accept bribes in exchange for not fighting or even in exchange for betraying information about other factions and fighting those factions that create the biggest problems?
Bribery is way cheaper than fighting a war:
The cost of the war in U.S. fatalities has declined this year, but the cost in treasure continues to rise, from $48 billion in 2003 to $59 billion in 2004 to $81 billion in 2005 to an anticipated $94 billion in 2006, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. The U.S. government is now spending nearly $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from $8.2 billion a year ago, a new Congressional Research Service report found.
Those costs do not include the long term care of tens of thousands of permanently injured soldiers and their lost earnings. These costs also do not include the cost of replacing much of the equipment which is wearing out more quickly. Nor do these costs include the interest in the debt for the money borrowed to finance the war. Nor do the costs include income not earned by Reservists and National Guard called up and taken from their civilian jobs.
To be worth doing bribery wouldn't have to totally solve the problems Israel faces with Lebanon or the US faces with Iraq. The United States could just withdraw from Iraq. But since the Bush Administration is intent upon staying we ought to use more unconventional means to deal with the enemies we face.
Greg Cochran points me to the news on a poll of Lebanese attitudes about Israel and the Hezbollah. Hezbollah wants to show that Israel is not invincible.
TYRE, LEBANON – The ferocity of Israel's onslaught in southern Lebanon and Hizbullah's stubborn battles against Israeli ground forces may be working in the militant group's favor.
"They want to shatter the myth of Israeli invincibility," says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a leading Lebanese expert on Hizbullah. "Being victorious means not allowing Israel to achieve their aims, and so far that is the case."
Israel's prowess is now taking a hit just like America's military power is taking a hit due to events in Iraq.
Hezbollah is getting wide support across sectarian lines - even from Christian Lebanese.
The stakes are high for Hizbullah, but it seems it can count on an unprecedented swell of public support that cuts across sectarian lines.According to a poll released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 percent of Lebanese support Hizbullah's fight with Israel, a rise of 29 percent on a similar poll conducted in February. More striking, however, is the level of support for Hizbullah's resistance from non-Shiite communities. Eighty percent of Christians polled supported Hizbullah along with 80 percent of Druze and 89 percent of Sunnis.
Lebanese no longer blame Hizbullah for sparking the war by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers, but Israel and the US instead.
The latest poll by the Beirut Center found that 8 percent of Lebanese feel the US supports Lebanon, down from 38 percent in January.
The government of Lebanon is elected. Lebanon has a democracy. Yet the people of Lebanon support an organization that carries out terrorist attacks and advocates the destruction of Israel. Bush and the neoconservatives argue that democracy and freedom can end the appeal of terrorism in the Middle East and bring peace. The evidence argues otherwise.
"Some people say, `We saw you beheading, kidnappings and killing. In the end we even started kidnapping women who are our honor,'"al-Mashhadani said."These acts are not the work of Iraqis. I am sure that he who does this is a Jew and the son of a Jew."
My fellow Americans, we helped bring him to power. You see, democratically elected Muslim power brokers are supposed to be better than dictator Arabs. Also, voting Arabs are supposed to be better than Arab subjects of dictators. Really, the democratically elected President of the United States says so.
"The Israeli attacks and airstrikes are completely destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure,” al-Maliki is quoted as saying during a news conference in Baghdad. “I condemn these aggressions and call on the Arab League foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo to take quick action to stop these aggressions. We call on the world to take quick stands to stop the Israeli aggression.”
By contrast, some of the Sunni Arab dictatorships have found fault with the Shia Hezbollah.
In contrast to Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab countries, Maliki declined to criticize Hezbollah.
That placed Maliki’s US-backed government in the discomfiting company of Algeria and Syria, rejectionist radicals in the Arab world.
Obviously, Israel isn't going to be secure as long as democratic regimes remain in the Middle East. We need to go on a campaign to overthrow democracies.
One of the democracy myths is that democracies will never fight each other. Yet the democratic Israelis are as enthused to kill Hezbollah as the Lebanese are to see Hezbollah hitting at Israel.
A new poll released in Israel confirms that Israelis are united in support of the fight against Hezbollah. 82 percent say the army’s offensive into Lebanon is justified, and 71 percent believe Israel should use even more force in attacking Hezbollah.
Unless a military force from other countries goes into South Lebanon and takes on Hezbollah how will this conflict stop? Can Hezbollah sustain the rocket attacks?
Americans are less enthusiastic about the Israeli attack.
The continued attacks, however, have put a minor dent in American public support for Israel. A recent Gallup Poll found that a large majority of Americans back Israel's military campaign against Hezbollah, although half of those polled thought Israel had gone too far.
Lydia Saad, a senior editor at The Gallup Poll, said the number of civilians killed by the Israeli attacks appeared to be a main reason for that reaction.
The survival of Sheikh Nasrallah is already remarkable. Even more so is the West’s sudden obsession with his leadership — not just of Hezbollah but also, for all practical purposes, of Lebanon and of an upsurge of pan-Arab solidarity potentially more powerful than any since the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
His support on the Arab street will not of itself rebuild Lebanon or destroy Israel, which remains a key Hezbollah goal. But it has made him the new face of jihadism, with an appeal transcending border and sectarian divides. This is why, with stunning swiftness, Sheikh Nasrallah has eclipsed even Osama bin Laden as the West’s most potent enemy in the War on Terror.
“Nasser 1956 — Nasrallah 2006” declare the posters on the streets of Cairo. No al- Qaeda figurehead was ever so honoured. “Oh beloved Nasrallah, strike Tel Aviv,” chant protesters in Bahrain, home of the US 5th Fleet. And his latest televised threat is to do just that, with long-range missiles he has not needed to deploy so far.
To Israel, the story of Sheikh Nasrallah is one of toxic extremism and remorseless killing. To his followers, it is of patient planning and heroic defiance. Until this month his greatest triumph, in their eyes, was Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon six years ago. But by taking on the full might of the Israeli Defence Forces in a war of his own timing — and then holding it at bay — he surpassed himself.
The amount of damage the missiles have done to Israel to date is fairly small. Few Israelis have been killed and the physical destruction is small. The economic damage due to disrupted work is probably larger than the damage to buildings. That is worrisome because Hezbollah might be able to keep this attack up for weeks or even months. Longer range missiles could cause economic disruption over most of the Israeli economy. That's a really big problem for Israel, probably the biggest it has faced in decades.
Events in the Middle East are a challenge to the universalist aspirations of Western liberalism. Democracy in the Middle East does not release anywhere near as many suppressed liberal urges as it releases tribal and religiously based motives.
While many Jewish neoconservatives dream of overthrowing Arab governments that have firm grips on their people and borders Israel hasn't been attacked by such goverments in decades and the attackers who are Israel's biggest headaches operate in territories over which no government exercises firm sovereign control. Israel's strategic problem is how to cause fragmented territories to come under firm control of elites which can exercise sovereign power over their territories. It is not clear that most Israelis understand this. Gideon Lichfield, The Economist's Jerusalem correspondent, explains why Israelis are so supportive of their government's reaction to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
When I discuss such questions with Israelis, as we peel off the layers of reasoning and approach the core, what I most often meet is a kind of crude Pavlovian determinism. The Palestinians, the Lebanese, the Arabs in general—they understand only the language of force. Not showing force is a mistake. Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, summed up the thinking well this week in his speech to the Knesset: "Our enemies misinterpreted our willingness to exercise restraint as a sign of weakness."
And since all of Lebanon, in Israel's eyes, is complicit in letting Hezbollah live unmolested, it won't do any harm for all the Lebanese to feel a little force too. Not too much, of course. Nothing gratuitous. But just enough, as a by-product of actions that might be justified (the two soldiers might be spirited away via the airport, after all), to make them think twice about allowing Hezbollah to flourish in the future. And the civilian casualties—well, that's what you get for letting bad, bearded men with guns live across the hallway.
It is, in fact, the way Israel has kept its enemies at bay since it was born: the notion that force will knock sense into them. Olmert again, in a press conference just before the Lebanon crisis, when asked why Israel had recently gone into Gaza with bombs and tanks after the kidnapping of a soldier there: "These are effective measures and it may take some more time, but I'm hopeful that at the end of the day, the dominant forces within the Palestinian community will impose the end and the cessation of these violent actions by Palestinians."
It worked in the old days, when the equation was simple: one country, one leadership, one army. Defeat the army, and that was that. But now things are messier.
Lebanon is rather like several countries pulled together; its government is a weak and fragile balance of groups, including Hezbollah. Israel's coalition is fractious too, but its groupings are political and fluid. Lebanon's are ethnic-religious and fixed—Hezbollah's supporters are Shia Muslims, the country's biggest religious group—so the balance doesn't just shift with the political winds.
Lebanon is more of a confederacy than a proper modern nation-state. Lebanese fought a bitter civil war from 1975 up to at least 1990. Those non-Shia Lebanese who are "complicit" in allowing Hezbollah to attack Israel tried to bring their civil war to a point where one group or alliance of groups came out on top. But they were too divided and ultimately failed. Syrian troops were required to put an end to the civil war. Now the Israelis want the Lebanese Christians, Druze, and Sunnis to take on the Shias of south Lebanon. Effectively that would restart the Lebanese civil war. Well, doing that would cost those other groups far more than what the Israelis are costing them now. So those groups are unlikely to decide to unite to take on the Shias.
Hezbollah can attack Israel from south Lebanon because the non-Shia Lebanese do not want to take on the Shias. Many non-Shias and more secular Shias do not like what Hezbollah is doing by taking on Israel. But while the non-Shias are unhappy with the situation news accounts do not report on Sunnis or Druze or Christians ready to take up arms against Hezbollah.
The stark physical contrast reflects a deep and growing divide in Lebanese society between the less affluent, more religious Shiite south and the more urban center, largely of Sunni Muslims, Druse and Christians, which has built and benefited from a long-awaited economic boom.
“The country is going in two totally different directions,” said Ghassan Salhab, a Lebanese filmmaker and a middle-class secular Shiite. “One is, ‘We have an enemy and we need to fight it,’ ” he said, referring to Hezbollah’s supporters. “The other is, ‘We want to live and build and go with the world, wherever it goes.’ ”
The secular types do not want to take on the religious people in a war which will mainly benefit Israel. While Hezbollah is costing them in trade and safety a civil war would cost them more. So Hezbollah is free to do what it wants. The Lebanese Army would not get tasked with taking on Hezbollah unless a very large multinational force showed up to help them do it. Even then the Lebanese would have to worry about how long that force would stay, how hard that force would be willing to fight, and what would happen after that force left.
President Jacques Chirac said on Wednesday France could play a major role in an international force for Lebanon under certain circumstances, but insisted the force should not try to disarm Hizbollah guerrillas.
However Chirac added that he did not favor a role for NATO.
Germany also said it was opposed to deploying NATO's reaction force as peacekeepers.
"If such an international stabilization force comes about ... Germany would rule out using the NATO Response Force," government spokesman Thomas Steg told reporters, referring to the force due to be fully operational in October.
"It is clearly unsuitable for this purpose."
Why would any nation want to pay the huge price? US experience in Iraq, Israel's previous experience in Lebanon, and even Israel's current experience in Lebanon all suggest that putting down a Hezbollah insurgency would require a large force and be extremely costly in lives and money. Governments mostly do not see a net benefit from taking on such a job.
Rather than expect the Lebanese non-Shias to take on the Shias why not split up Lebanon? If South Lebanon was split off into a separate country then Hezbollah would rule the new government and Hezbollan soldiers would be the soldiers for that government. Then Hezbollah's actions against Israel would be those of a state actor and Hezbollah would bear all responsibility for what happened.
The Gaza Strip has less of a sovereign government than Lebanon. A New York Times piece examines how the Palestians in Gaza are split into rival factions that fight each other when they are not fighting the Israelis.
Giora Eiland, a former director of Israel’s national security council and a retired major general who led an investigation into the June 25 raid, agreed. “Recently there was the illusion that Hamas, while not a perfect partner, was at least a group that could implement decisions,” he said. “But it has become apparent that the political leadership of Hamas is much less influential than Khaled Meshal and leaders of the military wing.” Mr. Meshal is the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau and lives in exile in Damascus, Syria.
The Qassam Brigades is the Palestinians’ largest and best organized militant group but it is not the only militia operating in the area under Palestinian control. At least six other armed groups field soldiers to fight Israel or, when there are no Israelis to fight — as was the case for nine months after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza last year — to fight among themselves.
I flash on Monty Python's Life Of Brian:
REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
How can the will of the people possibly be wrong? The Arab masses insist that Hizbollah should rain missiles on Israel.
DAMASCUS, Syria — The rapidly escalating conflict in Lebanon has divided the Arab world, deepening the gulf between rulers and ruled and reinforcing in the public's mind the impotence of leaders who for two generations have been unable to produce a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, governments with ties to the United States have guardedly denounced Hezbollah for the attack on Israel that triggered the fighting — even as their citizens began tacking up posters of Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the cleric who heads the Shiite Muslim militant group and has vowed to bring "war on every level" to Israel's door.
The disconnect between the broad range of public support for Hezbollah and the unease felt by many Arab leaders is one of the reasons that Arab governments have been largely unable to mount an effective diplomatic response to Israel's 5-day-old bombing campaign.
How frustrating for the neocons. Those democracy-hating Arab dictatorships refuse to act on the will of their populaces. By contrast, the neocons (and liberals who celebrate their faith in the diversity cult) must be excited by the triumph of Arab democracy in Lebanon. The democratically elected government in diverse, divided, and democratic Lebanon has allowed Hezbollah to act on popular Muslim sentiment toward Israel. The sizable presence of elected Hezbollah officials and popular Lebanese Muslim support for hostilities against the hated Jews has prevented the Lebanese government from cracking down on Hezbollah (the Party of God).
The US government is officially thrilled that the Syrians pulled out of Lebanon on April 26, 2005:
The Lebanese people have accomplished much over the past year, but much remains to be done. The United States, and the international community, stand with the Lebanese people as they work to reassert their independence and strengthen their democracy, and we support their call for national dignity, truth, and justice.
We call on the international community to continue to hold the Syrian regime accountable until it responds completely to concerns about its cooperation with the UN International Independent Investigation Commission, interference in Lebanon, insufficient action on the Iraqi border, sponsorship of Palestinian terrorist groups, and harsh crackdown on civil society.
The Syrian withdrawal made Syria less able to control Hezbollah and also simultaneously made the Syrian government less accountable for what Hezbollah does. While the Syrians derive some satisfaction on seeing missiles raining down on Israel the Assad regime probably would have acted to restrain Hezbollah if a large Syrian military contingent remained in Lebanon. Assad would not want Israeli warplanes attacking Syrian troops in Lebanon or Syria proper.
The US government's pressure to get Syria out of Lebanon helped enable Hezbollah to carry out the popular will of Shiite Lebanese. What is the next nutty neoconservative step? Overthrow the undemocratic regimes in Syria, Jordan, and Egypt so that elected populist theocratic leaders can better express the will of the Arab street toward Israel.
Lebanon is too diverse. Imagine breaking Lebanon up into 3 or more countries. Each one could be made so ethnically pure that the populace will accept firm rule from a government they see as of their tribe and therefore legitimate. The Shia country might still try to war with Israel. Or its elite might make the same calculation that Syria, Jordan, and Egypt's elites have made: Israel is too powerful and if they do not challenge Israel they can enjoy the perks of power.
The other alternative: Make Lebanon fully a part of undemocratic Syria. Then no missiles would fly from Lebanon into Israel. Also, Lebanese Christians would enjoy the same protection that they enjoy in Damascus.
But in the wake of Syria's withdrawal of its troops from Lebanon in 2005, the disarmament of Hezbollah has emerged as one of the foremost issues in Lebanese politics. Since the fighting with Israel started Wednesday, calls for Hezbollah to relinquish its weapons have gathered urgency. The violence began when Hezbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border incursion, followed by an Israeli attack on roads, bridges, power stations and airports.
Israel's attacks on Lebanon are having salutary effects on Lebanon's rulers.
Lebanese critics as well as allies of Hezbollah insist that the Israeli response was disproportionate. But at the same time, in meetings Thursday, Lebanese officials began to lay the groundwork for an extension of government control to southern Lebanon. Hezbollah largely controls southern Lebanon, where it has built up a network of schools, hospitals and charities.
"To declare war and to make military action must be a decision made by the state and not by a party," said Nabil de Freige, a parliament member. He belongs to the bloc headed by Saad Hariri, whose father, Rafiq, a former prime minister and wealthy businessman, was assassinated in 2005, setting off a sequence of events that forced the Syrian withdrawal. "It's a very simple equation: You have to be a state."
Are the non-Shias in the Lebanese government really serious about taking on Hezbollah? An attempt to suppress Hezbollah runs the risk of starting a civil war in Lebanon. Plus, the Shias in Lebanon are a big voting block and even many non-Shia Lebanese Muslims sympathize with any group that would attack Israel. My guess is the lower classes are not as supportive of a crackdown on Hezbollah as the upper class business interests. The Lebanese government would have a much stronger hand against Hezbollah if a dictatorship ran Lebanon. You do not see the authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Jordan, or Syria letting groups shoot rockets from their territory into Israel. The governments of those countries have the means to maintain control of their factions and their borders.
Lebanon has been bouncing back from their civil war and has reached a per capita GDP of $6200 which compares very favorably with Syria at $3900 per capita GDP and Jordan at $4700 and Lebanon has achieved this in spite of the physical damage and heavy debt burden due to the civil war. The Christian Lebanese (39% of the population) and some of the other factions would like the good times to continue and see the Hezbollah as an obstacle in the way of letting the good times roll.
But can all the non-Shia factions unite to extend sovereignty over the south of Lebanon? They have economic incentive. They do not want the Israelis bombing the Beirut airport and blowing up bridges and other infrastructure. That is bad for business. But the Israeli threat has to be balanced against the problems posed by trying to take on Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian backers. Hezbollah could wage an insurgency fight and start attacking into neighborhoods and business districts of Druze, Sunni, and Christian Lebanese. You can bet the Lebanese elites are weighing their options.
The US government seems focused on Syria's and Iran's roles as backers of Hezbollah.
Analysts here say Iranian influence has become ascendant following the Syrian pullout, though foreign policy in the two countries has so far largely overlapped. The United States renewed its call Thursday for those countries to intervene to get the two Israeli soldiers released.
"It's really time for everybody to acknowledge that these two states do have some measure of control over Hezbollah," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington. "And the international community has called upon them to exercise that control, to have these two individuals released."
Neoconservatives fantasize about extending the US invasion of Iraq into invasions of Syria and Iran. But an invasion of Syria would collapse a regime which both fears Israel and which very effectively prevents dissident groups from shooting rockets or doing cross-border attacks into Israel. An overthrow of the Assad family dynasty would put an end to a regime which both prevents attacks on Israel from its territory and which also provides one of the safest and friendliest living environments for Christians in the Middle East. An invasion of Syria would ruin the lives of Christian Syrians as thoroughly as the overthrow of Saddam put Christian Iraqis into the line of fire of Muslim insurgent groups. Such an invasion would also destabilize Israel's border with Syria.
There's talk about how Israel's battles with Hezbollah and Hamas could escalate into a regional conflagration. Well, how exactly? Assad in Syria and his top people know that a direct attack on Israel would be suicidal folly. Ditto the Mubarak family dynasty in Egypt.
The Israelis would benefit if Lebanon became more like Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and less like West Bank and Gaza. I do not know if that is possible. However, a US invasion of Syria is not the way to bring this about.
The US lacks leverage over most of the actors.
The Bush administration has few ways of directly pressuring Iran on any of the three fronts. "They have sanctioned themselves out of leverage on Iran," Malley said. "They have cornered themselves out of a lack of influence on any of the parties that are driving this -- Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran. Counseling restraint or condemning actions is pretty meager when you think of the influence the United States should be wielding."
The United States reached out to Arab allies -- Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia -- to weigh in with Syria and, through Damascus, to Iran. In Paris for talks on Iran's nuclear program, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on all sides to "act with restraint." She also talked to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Lebanon's problem for Israel and Washington is that it is not united under a single government. Maybe Israel could make some gains here by convincing Syria (e.g. by bombing Syria rather than the Beirut airport) that attacks by Hezbollah will be treated as attacks by Syria. That'd give Syria some incentive to turn against Hezbollah. Not sure if that would work. But the Israelis ought to tell Jewish supporters in Washington DC that a US overthrow of Assad's regime and replacement by a democratically elected Sunni fundamentalist regime would not improve Israel's security in the long run.
Update: The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel's chief goal in its attacks on Lebanon is to force the Lebanese government to take responsibility and assert control over south Lebanon.
Lebanon can be "shut down for years, as long as necessary" a senior military official said over the weekend. He added that the goals of the Israeli blockade of Lebanon were, on a tactical level, to make sure that no rockets could be supplied to Hizbullah, and strategically, to make the government in Beirut take responsibility for its southern border.
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The feeling within the IDF General Staff is that the Lebanese government will eventually succumb and deploy its army in the south, but that this decision will be made at the political level, under international pressure.
The senior military official said the current clash with Hizbullah was inevitable, that the "writing had been on the wall." Hizbullah miscalculated Israel's response to the kidnapping of two soldiers on Wednesday, he said.
"Prodi told me that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert informed him of two demands for a cease-fire - handing over the two captive Israeli soldiers and a Hizbullah pullback to behind the Litani River," a government statement quoted Siniora as telling the cabinet.
Most analysts here says that the strong support for Hizbullah from Lebanon's 40 percent Shiite population makes total destruction of the group impossible. Mindful of repercussions, Israel says it is trying to avoid causing irreparable damage to Lebanon.
"We didn't remove the gloves completely," a high ranking military official told reporters over the weekend. "We need to be very careful that we only put enough pressure on the Lebanese government to change the situation but not enough to make it fall."
It is hard to tell whether the outcome the Israelis want is within the realm of possibility.
The United States is not doing much to stop the attacks between Hezbollah and Israel.
The reasons the US is watching this crisis from the sidelines are many: The Bush administration has been preoccupied with Iraq, it does not have diplomatic ties with the Middle Eastern countries that matter in this escalation, and it has been unwilling to pressure Israel to avoid military response when Tel Aviv's security is threatened. The US position represents a change from earlier days - such as the administration of the first President Bush, who enlisted diplomats like James Baker and Brent Skowcroft to ease tensions - when America brought pressure to bear on all parties, including Israel, to slam the Pandora's box back shut.
"The US has very little leverage over the situation, and all that does is underline that the US is weak and has lost the kind of influence it once had in the region," says Arthur Hughes, former director general of the Israel-Egypt multinational force and now a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. "It's frightening to our partners, like Japan and Europe because, as they see it, the only thing worse than a US that is too strong is a US that is too weak."
The United States was eager to get Syrian troops out of Lebanon. But imagine that the Syrians had not pulled out. In that case Hezbollah would have been less able to launch attacks on Israel because the Syrian backing of Hezbollah would have been more overt and Israel would have been in a stronger position to retaliate by attacking Syria. So Syria would have been motivated to restrain Hezbollah to an extent that Syria is not currently motivated to do so.
Modern Tribalist blogger Adam Lawson points to reports that most Israeli Jews want the Arabs in Israel to leave.
More than 60 percent of Israeli Jews believe the government should encourage Arabs to leave the country, according to a survey published by the Israel Democracy Institute on Tuesday. The findings have led MK Muhammad Barakei (Hadash) to ask for a special parliamentary session to address racism.
The Jews among a representative sample of 1,200 Israelis were asked to agree or disagree with the statement, "The government should encourage Arabs to emigrate." Sixty-two percent said they agreed.
Prof. Asher Arian, scientific director of the Guttman Center at the IDI and director of the 2006 Israel Democracy Index, said that the statistic indicated a "general lack of tolerance of Israeli Jews toward Israeli Arabs."
Only 14 percent of respondents said ties between Arabs and Jews are good, while 29 percent said a Jewish majority is required for decisions of crucial national significance. Meanwhile, 26 percent said religious Jews and secular Jews enjoy a good relationship.
According to the annual survey, Israelis trust the IDF more than any other institution (79 percent,) followed by the High Court of Justice, the media, and the Knesset.
I bet if the Arabs were bribed enough to leave then after the Arabs were gone the relationship between the secular and religious Jews would deteriorate as they no longer felt the need to hold back their grievances toward each other in front of the enemy.
82 percent of respondents believe that democracy is the ideal form of government for Israel, a 5 percent increase from the previous poll. 77 percent believe that democracy is the ideal form of government for any country.
Groups do not trust other groups for good reason: Other groups are more likely to violate their rights and less likely to do charitable acts toward them. Democracy works better in a society with greater trust. The levels of trust between the Jews and Arabs in Israel are very low. It makes sense that they should separate. They do not have enough trust to belong together in the same society.
I'm reminded of Steve Sailer's proposal for the Europeans to pay the Muslims to leave Europe. Seems a very sensible proposal to me. Also, Steve's comments about the Danish cartoon crisis are pertinent as well:
Guess what? Danes and Muslims don't agree on the basics of social organization and don't want to live under the same rules. That shouldn't be a severe problem. It's what separate countries are for. But due to mass immigration, it is in fact becoming a huge stumbling block.
The Arab Muslims and Jews in Israel similarly do not want to live under the same rules.The difference between them in regards to what constitutes fair rules is far too large for them to live equally. If the Arabs become a larger fraction of the population of Israel at some point the Israelis may abandon democracy rather than give the Arabs power over Jews. Better to pay the Muslims to leave and thereby preserve the democracy. Of course there are lessons here for America. But our traitorous elite would rather shaft us than to learn these lessons.
The Bush Administration advocates the spread of democracy in the Middle East as a way to reduce the threat of terrorism. Yet the political Islam tide continues to rise wherever democracy is present in the Middle East.
With national elections less than a month away, parties that represent Israel's Arab population are struggling to maintain their small foothold in the Israeli parliament. As the parties grapple with new legal barriers, fresh competition and a frustrated constituency, at least one coalition is drawing a lesson from Hamas's recent victory in the Palestinian territories: The solution is Islam.
The United Arab List has adopted an explicitly Islamic message in the hopes of inspiring thousands of Arab voters who have boycotted past elections. Using Koranic verse and showcasing religious candidates, Sarsur's party, called the Islamic Movement, and its secular-nationalist partner are seeking to unite Israel's religious Islamic parties, who like their more radical Palestinian counterparts have long disagreed over whether to take part in elections that, in effect, presume the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
Socialist Arab nationalism was the last supposed solution. How long will Islam remain the favored solution? I figure it'll last until genetic engineering allows rising IQ and then rising living standards. (more here) Higher IQs will simultaneously solve the economic problems of Arab countries while also making Muslims smart enough to look more critically at their religion.
Head of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency Yuval Diskin says Israel may end up missing Saddam Hussein as dictator of Iraq.
When asked about the growing destabilisation of Iraq, Mr Diskin said Israel might come to rue its decision to support the US-led invasion in 2003.
"When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos," he said.
"I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam."
Maybe Diskin notices that Shia dominated Iran is Israel's most feared enemy and that a Shiite theocracy in Baghdad makes that situation worse by greatly reducing the threat Iraq poses to Iran. Maybe Diskin figures a chaotic place with lots of terrorists running around is a lot worse than a place with a strong central dictator.
A tape was made of Diskin talking to some West Bank settler seminary students.
The TV station said the tape came from a closed meeting about a month ago between Diskin and Jewish seminary students at Eli, a hardline Jewish settlement in the West Bank near the city of Nablus.
Diskin's voice was heard on the tape. "Sometimes when you dismantle a system in which a tyrant controls his people by force," he said, commenting on the US-led offensive against Saddam, "and it breaks into pieces and generates chaos, you get a situation like in Iraq.
"Is the situation better in Iraq today compared to what it was before?" he asked. "From the Israeli point of view, we could come around to missing Saddam," he added.
But the neocons assure us that democracy in Arabia is just the cure for what ails them.
Diskin also thinks that Israel's leniency toward its own Jewish terrorists harms Israel.
Jewish terrorism is a "cancer" that Israel is lenient in tackling, according to Israel's Shin Bet chief.
"Understand that a Jew who carries out terrorism is ultimately much more of a cancer in the nation than an Arab who carries out terrorism," Yuval Diskin said in a recent closed-door briefing to army cadets, a recording of which was aired this week by Israel's Channel 10 television.
Asked by his audience, which included West Bank settlers, whether the Shin Bet hunts suspected Jewish radicals, Diskin said they receive better treatment than Palestinians or Israeli Arabs held in similar cases.
"I do not see an equality in the way the system handles them, even when they are accused of the same kind of crime," Diskin said.
The Israelis need to separate themselves from the Arabs. The intertwining of Arab and Jewish communities driven by the Jewish religious folks determined to settle in land they think God gave them is corrupting them.
The US faith-based initiative to spread democracy in the Middle East as a way to stop terrorism and create a friendlier neighborhood for Israel bears more bitter fruit with a big political victory for the Palestinian Muslim political party Hamas.
Hamas's triumph on Thursday in winning 76 seats in the 132-member Palestinian parliament against 43 for Fatah was widely seen as a political earthquake in the Middle East, triggered by voter disenchantment with corruption.
The same qualities of Arab nations that lead to corrupt governments also make democracy unlikely to improve the situation. Successful democracy is an outgrowth of qualities of a culture which must already be present before democracy is established. Well, some of those qualities are missing from most of the world.
Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood spin-off dedicated to the destruction of Israel.
Founded in the crowded Gaza Strip in 1987 as an outgrowth of the Egyptian fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, the group, whose name means "zeal," is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Its birth coincided with the start of the first Palestinian uprising against Israel and its covenant, published a year later, called for a zealous campaign to destroy Israel.
"Holy war," the document declared, is a duty binding on all Muslims whenever "enemies usurp Islamic lands."
Only a few years ago, political Islam was considered to be on the decline, partly stunted by the 1991 cancellation of elections that Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was set to win. The move by the military plunged the country into a long civil war and devastated the FIS, serving as a bleak warning to other Islamists aspiring for power through the ballot box.
The September 11 2001 attacks also put Islamist parties on the defensive, and gave Arab regimes an excuse for harsher crackdowns.
But as US pressure for democratisation in the region has gained momentum, Islamists, whether militant or non-violent, have been the most adept at capitalising on the popular discontent with existing governments.
Recent history shows the pro-American side doesn't always win elections in the Arab world. Far from it: Besides Hamas, which has roots in the Islamist movement and Palestinian nationalism, Islamic parties have done well in recent elections in Egypt, Morocco and Iraq.
The most notorious example may be Algeria, where the Islamic Salvation Front won a first-round election victory in December 1991, only to have further balloting halted. An army crackdown targeted the Islamists and fueled a civil war that claimed more than 100,000 lives, according to the CIA's World Factbook.
Democracy means theocracy in the Middle East.
There are, however, three powerful reasons why this ban may not last, or at least may not mean quite what it says. The first is that a similar ban on dealings with the Palestinian Liberation Organization did not prevent discreet talks through third parties, usually the Algerians.
The second is West is financial. The spending of the PA government, including the salaries of its officials, health service and construction industry, is very largely dependent on funding from the European Union. The economic collapse and social despair that are likely to follow a complete breakdown of the Palestinian state could swiftly become a humanitarian crisis.
The third and probably crucial reason why Hamas may yet end up talking to the West is that there is a profound contradiction between a ban on talks with Hamas and the Bush administration's commitment to promote democracy in the Middle East.
Walker points out that the Bush Administration will be under intense pressure from Jewish groups to maintain the US ban on Hamas. How can democracy be the fount of moral legitimacy when elections can bring to power governments which would like to destroy other democracies?
If it is the democratic will of the Palestinians to wipe the Israelis from the face of this Earth then how can that will be illegitimate? Western liberals and neocons alike strike the rhetorical pose that the democratic will of the majority is the definition of moral legitimacy.
Will Hamas make sure it never loses future elections?
The world should be on alert, however, for a move by Hamas to slowly take over the machinery of elections to prevent itself from being voted out. That wouldn't be unusual for a fundamentalist Islamic group that relies on a rigid hierarchy for its internal affairs.
In many nations, from 1930s Germany to modern third-world nations with elected leaders-turned-dictators, democracy has too easily been hijacked by those who use it merely to gain power and then hold onto it by manipulation of that power.
Islamists will fail to fix what ails the Middle East. Democracy in the Middle East will be a disappointment for the Arabs and for the neoconservatives around Bush. Who will each group blame for the outcomes?
Israeli politics just took a very interesting turn.
Faced with the choice between running again as head of Likud and likely winning but getting nowhere with his agenda because of internal opposition, or risking everything on a new party with the chance to achieve his goals, Sharon opted for the latter course.
"That's an interesting choice. It means the substance is more important to him than the politics," said Yair Hirschfeld, an initiator of the first back-channel, Israeli-Palestinian contacts in the 1980s that eventually led to the interim peace agreement known as the Oslo Accords.
Sharon is driven to create defensible borders for Israel.
And the substance of what Sharon wants to achieve, Hirschfeld said, is nothing less than the ultimate definition of Israel's future borders, either through negotiations with the Palestinians or through unilateral moves.
Sharon is looking more moves down the chessboard than his opponents. While some hardliner settlements supporters think that they have a God given (or "G-d given" in their parlance) right and duty to make settlements. Sharon is a lot less sentimental or a lot less mystical. Sharon sees the basic problem: Israel needs demographically defendable borders. The wombs of Palestinian women are a demographic time bomb ticking in the heart of Israel. The only solution is to put more Arabs on the other side of walls. If only American leaders could have Sharon's guts and insight.
Sharon has formed a new party of the political center and hopes to use his popularity to retain power in an election which will come by March 2006.
Now 77, Sharon spent years as a military tactician. On Monday he proved again that as he has gotten older, he has also gotten bolder.
Never one to play defense, the man nicknamed "the bulldozer" charged ahead with a beaming smile, sweeping aside the traditional rules of the game by founding a new, centrist "National Responsibility" party that will test the sentiments of the Israeli electorate in snap elections that will take place no later than mid-March.
Sharon's new party is expected to be made up of about a dozen breakaway members of Likud, including prominent Finance Minister Ehud Olmert. But the new party's aim is to attract members from the left and center as well, including possibly former Labor Party leader and prominent statesman Shimon Peres.
Some Likudniks want to reverse the settlements pull-outs. But Israel really needs to go even further and put even more Arab Muslims on the other side of walls separating the Jews from the Muslims. The Israelis have already also so betrayed the Arab Christians that they probably need to separate themselves from the Christians as well.
A reduction in rates of infection and selective abortion has greatly reduced infant mortality amont Arabs living in Israel. But Arab marriage practices keep the rate of defective babies and infant mortality higher than among Israeli Jews.>The Israelis now want to convince the Israeli Arabs to not marry their cousins and other close relatives as a way to further reduce Arab Israeli infant mortality.
The district health office has initiated a project in areas with large Arab populations that includes study days for health personnel, initiation of reports against inbreeding in the Arabic-language mass media, and encouragement of Muslim religious leaders to declare in mosques that this practice is likely to produce defective children.
Most of the activity, however, recruits elementary and high-school teachers in the Arab sector who speak to pupils about the dangers of marrying close relatives. "The effect on the reduction of the rates of consanguineous marriages should be observable within years, and the effect on infant mortality within generations," Strulov predicts.
The three-pronged effort would further reduce the gap in infant mortality rates between the Jewish and Arab populations in Israel, he said. In 2002, the annual infant mortality rate was 4.0 per 1,000 live births among Jews and 9.0 among Arabs; in the Northern District, it was 5.4 among Jews and 7.8 among Arabs.
The Arab Israeli infant mortality rate has already fallen by about two thirds since the early 80s.
In the early Eighties, the rate among Arabs was 22.6 per 1,000 live births and half that among Jews.
Aside: Note that the Israelis have been accused of genocide against Palestinians. But they have been trying (and succeeding) in lowering Arab (mostly Muslim) Israeli infant mortality rates. Of course they can not expect gratitude or even recognition for this. Life isn't fair.
The Israeli attempt to lower the rate of cousin marriage in their Arab populations has larger implications beyond effects on infant mortality or rates of congenital defects. First off, intelligence among the Israeli Arabs might be boosted. The Arabs are not exactly top of the pops in the IQ league tables. Higher IQs might reduce religiosity. Also, higher IQs will lead to more education and probably lower birth rates in future generations as smarter people spend more time in school and have fewer children.
If the Israelis are successful in changing Israeli Arab mating customs then that suggests Arab governments could carry out similar programs to change the mating practices of their Arab populations. Such a change in the Arab countries would have a huge political and economic impact. The bigger effect would show up in the form of reduced loyalty toward family and therefore increased loyalty toward larger scale polities, notably in the form of increased national loyalty. This would reduce nepotism and corruption and would therefore make Arab economies more efficient. Though the impact would take decades to reach full effect. Still, the attempt by the Israelis to lower rates of marriage to close relatives among Israeli Arabs bears close watching.
If you want to develop an understanding of how consanguineous marriage affects the politics of the Middle East a good place to start is my post "John Tierney On Cousin Marriage As Reform Obstacle In Iraq". From that post you'll find links back to previous posts and writings by others on this topic.
Dov Weisglass explains the significance of the barrier fence and withdrawal from Gaza Strip.
"The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass has told Haaretz.
"And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress."
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"...what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Given that the Palestinian Authority is despotic and has degenerated even further into criminality and given Arafat's support for terrorism (which was so not a surprise to anyone who didn't fantasize about Oslo) the so-called "peace process" never made any sense. But I think treating the Palestinians fairly still made sense and that never happened. So I'm not totally sympathetic to the Israelis.
Weisglass tried to backpedal when the reaction to his statements became a problem for the Israelis.
"The paper quoted only the first half of my sentence. What I said is directed at this specific time when there is a non-functional Palestinian Authority, and when terror is raging– if that's the case there should not be, God forbid, a process that would lead to the establishing of a Palestinian State, which would have anarchy as its founding stone."
Israel's ambassador to the United States puts a more positive spin on it while Yossi Beilin says Sharon is not a partner for peace.
"This plan gives Israel some breathing space, to wait until there is a partner with whom it will be able to start negotiations. I think this is the core aims of the plan," Ayalon said.
MK Yossi Beilin (Yahad) said Weisglass's statement was said in "a rare moment of truth and uncover the prime minister's true intentions. The peace camp must join forces and bring the PM down, Beilin said. "Sharon is not a partner for peace," Israel Radio quoted Beilin as saying.
Of course the PLO isn't a partner for peace either and certainly Islamic Jihad and Hamas have no desire for any peace that doesn't involve total victory for their side.
Weisglass has been Sharon's point man in dealing with the Bush administration.
Sharon's office later issued a statement, saying the prime minister remains committed to the road map. However, in a newspaper interview last month, Sharon said Israel is no longer following the plan.
So what to make of all this? On the one hand the Israeli Likudists have legitimate fears about a "peace" deal. The demand for refugee return would lead to the end of the state of Israel if it was agreed to. Also, splitting Jerusalem between two sovereign governments strikes me as a recipe for all sorts of mischief and trouble down the road. The Muslim claim to Jerusalem as an important holy city in the Koran is bogus and was dreamt up in the Middle Ages (and I'm too busy to google up the story of how that happened but would appreciate a link from anyone who knows where to find it).
But there is a powerful faction in the Likud which is basically using the "lack of partner for peace" argument against the Palestinians to continue to build and expand remote settlements in the West Bank to ensure the Palestinians never take sovereign control of the West Bank. This faction is a mix of Jewish religious fundamentalist nutcases (like US Defense Department neocon Douglas Feith's former law partner Marc Zell and of course some nut jobs in the Bush Administration) and others who dream of a bigger Israel.
The biggest downside from the construction of the barrier fence around the West Bank is that it reduces the pressure on the Israeli government to do anything to treat the Palestinians better. As long as Israelis are not getting killed daily in terrorist attacks the settlement expansion program can continue apace while the Palestinians endure the various barriers the Israelis will of course maintain for the benefit of the remote settlements.
The remote settlements and the taking of Palestinian land are a real public relations bonanza for anyone in the Middle East who wants to stoke up anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment. Speaking as an American nationalist who wants to protect American interests it is the anti-American sentiment that concerns me most. The Bush Administration could have taken the position on the barrier fence that the Bushies would support it in exchange for evacuation of the remote settlements. But the Bushies didn't do that. They basically took the side of the harder line American and Israeli Likudniks. If I was a Palestinian I'd see this as a bad faith move on America's part.
The barrier fence is still a good idea because it will reduce the death rate on both sides. Also, the pull-out from Gaza is a good idea by itself. But the demographic trend of lower Jewish than Palestinian Muslim birth rates combined with the continued imposition of the remote settlements on the West Bank Palestinian population is storing up bigger troubles for the future.
Also, there is an argument to be made for imposing a sort of de facto sovereignty on the Palestinians. Withdraw back to near the Green Line with barriers. Tell the Palestinians that they now have to find a way to govern themselves. Some rockets might come over the border. The Israelis would have every right to retaliate. But the Palestinians would know that what belongs to them really does belong to them. But as long as settlements are being built on seized land that is not the case.
Update: You might be wondering why Weisglass would publically state Israel's position in a way that would cause a diplomatic flap and criticism. He is trying to tell the Israeli Right that a pull-out from Gaza is part of a bigger process that produces an outcome that they will like.
Mr Weisglass, a lawyer who handles most of the Israeli Prime Minister's contacts with Washington, appeared to be attempting to make the Gaza evacuation more palatable to the Israeli right wing, which opposes the plan.
The Israelis are not going to pull out of the remote settlements unless the US applies a lot of pressure and that pressure is just not going to happen given the reality of American domestic politics. So there is not much to watch with the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. Positions are solidifying. But babies are being born too.
There are web logs that report on the Palestininan-Israeli and Arab-Israeli conflict on a daily basis with each attack, retaliation, and fanatical statement passed along either with approval or disgust. But real changes in the positions of the combatants rarely change. The bigger changes are in attitudes and in demographics. Those changes do not bode well for the future.
David B. Green, editor of the Jerusalem Report, has an interesting essay in the UK's Prospect Magazine on the topic of Israeli leftist historian Benny Morris's abandonment of his belief that the Palestinians can be bargained with. Morris, like many Israelis, has woken up to the fact that their state is threatened by a demographic trend.
That was only the beginning. Earlier this year, Morris gave an interview to Ha'aretz, the Tel-Aviv based daily broadsheet. He explained that his research for a recently revised edition of the Palestinian Refugee Problem had turned up more evidence of murder and rape of Palestinians. In addition, he had found confirmation of numerous cases in which ethnic cleansing of Arabs from territory Jews were trying to consolidate had been policy and not just the by-product of a defensive war. "Transfer," he wrote in the book, "was inevitable and in-built into Zionism - because it sought to transform a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of the Arab population."
Yet far from wringing his hands over these new revelations, Morris explained that Israelis, at least, would probably have been better off had they completed the expulsion of the Palestinians from the entire land - the Mediterranean to the Jordan river - in 1948. Israel's leader, David Ben-Gurion, he argued, had got cold feet. "If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself." As a consequence, Israel was burdened not only with some 3.5m Palestinians in the occupied territories, but also with a large minority population of Arab citizens in Israel proper (today 1.2m out of a total population of 6m), and they constitute a "timebomb" and a "potential fifth column." He contemplated (some might say relished) the possibility that some day, if Israel were exposed to an existential threat from, say, Egypt and Syria, it might have no alternative but to complete the expulsion begun more than 50 years earlier.
Demographic trends ran in a direction favorable to the Jews in Palestine and Israel for most of the 20th century. They came to take favorable demographic trends for granted and made some large and damaging miscalculations as a result. Leaving the question of fairness aside, the Israeli Jews were unwise to build settlements on the West Bank because those settlements depended upon a continued favorable demographic environment. But at some point Jews as a percentage of the population west of the Jordan river peaked and began a decline which now looks set to continue for decades to come.
Aside: Does anyone know in what year Jews peaked as a percentage of the total population west of the Jordan River? Also, when did Jews peak as a percentage of the population of Israel proper? It would be interesting to see a chart showing the percentages of Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others west of the Jordan River over the last 100 years.
The demographic trends in Israel and surrounding environs make the security barrier between the West Bank and Israel absolutely necessary for the security of Israel. The only issue that ought to be debated about the barrier is its exact route.
Demographic trends due to immigration and low native birth rates in Europe and the United States are also unfavorable. The West needs to embrace very vigorous border control and restrictive immigration policies or the character of Western societies will experience large changes for the worse.
Morris's books trace the development of his thinking as he delved into history but then also reacted to the second intifada. See The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, and Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001.
A combination of the IDF's given free reign in the West Bank and the difficulties created by the barrier fence have led to a large decrease in terrorist attacks within Israel.
The more relaxed mood has a simple explanation. It is three months since the last serious terrorist attack.
The army says there were 25 such attacks in 2002, which killed 147 people. Last year there were 20, killing 141. So far this year there have been only two, in which 19 died.
...
Sources close to Hamas, which is responsible for many of the suicide attacks, say that in the West Bank, from where most operations were launched, the organisation has been badly hit.
"There is no money to finance operations," said one. "Many of the leaders are gone and it is difficult to replace them. Hamas needs at least two years to rebuild."
Israel's government has once again given the IDF free rein to operate in the West Bank as it could before the Oslo Agreement. The IDF and the intelligence services have been rebuilding informer networks and rounding up literally thousands of suspected terrorists. A lot of the decrease in attacks is a consequence of the gradual restoration of the informer networks and the locking up of all the sorts of people that Oslo set free.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz says only about 2,000 Palestinians have been locked up. But an Israeli human rights organization puts the number at about 6,600.
He also said that security forces have arrested over 2,000 Palestinians. According to Be'tselm, the Israeli human rights organization, Israel currently holds over 6,600 Palestinians in military and government-run prisons.
Writing for the Jewish magazine Forward Ofer Shelah explains it is much more difficult to launch attacks through the remaining gaps in the barrier.
Another major factor is the security fence. Although barely one-third of its planned length is completed, it poses new difficulties for the terrorists. Before its erection in northern Samaria, more than 80% of suicide bombers penetrated Israel from that region. Now, terrorist organizers in Nablus or Jenin have to smuggle the would-be bomber to Ramallah, where he or she must contact another operative, and receive the explosive belt, which must be smuggled separately. Another operative, often a resident of East Jerusalem (who carries an Israeli ID, and therefore has an easier pass through the roadblocks), tries to smuggle the person and charge into Israel. All this activity takes time and makes it easier for Shabak to trace it somewhere along the way. Six such attempts were foiled in or around Ramallah in the past two months.
The completion of the barrier will reduce terrorist attacks still further. But when will the barrier be completed?
The most worrisome trend is the involvement of Israeli Arabs in attacks. (Jerusalem Post, free registration needed)
In 2003, terror organizations assisted by Israeli Arabs succeeded in perpetrating four suicide bomb attacks in Israel in which 45 Israelis were killed. East Jerusalem Arabs were involved in five suicide bomb attacks in Israel in which 64 Israelis were killed. The terror organizations also enlisted the help of east Jerusalem residents to compile intelligence, stake out suitable sites to launch attacks and shelter and dispatch suicide bombers to the sites. Some 26 Israeli-Arab terror cells were uncovered last year.
Since last August security officials have noticed a growing involvement of Iran and the Hizbullah in Palestinian terror organizations operating in the Territories.
Once the barrier is completed what will be the next move by the Palestinian terrorist groups? Will Hizbullah become a bigger player? How will they manage to get attacks launched in Israel proper? It seems unlikely that the frequency of attacks can be restored to its peak during Intifada II. But my guess is that Hizbullah and Hamas will work together to launch new kinds of attacks that offer the prospect of killing many more Israelis per attack. If they can develop the technology and use Israeli Arabs to help build and deliver bombs aimed at blowing up fuel storage sites or buildings they still might manage to kill hundreds or even thousands of Israelis in a single year.
The Israelis need to separate themselves from the Palestinians as thoroughly as possible. But if the settler movement manages block attempts to close the remote settlements on the West Bank and the remote settlements even expand then the IDF will need to continue to operate roadblocks and conduct a high tempo of operations in the West Bank. The disruption of the lives of ordinary Palestinians will continue, avoidable grievances will continue to build up, and world opinion toward Israel will deteriorate.
Update: With regard to the mentions above of Hezbollah (also spelled Hizbollah or Hiz Bollah) and the threat it poses to Israel as well as the involvement of Iran and Syria in supporting Hezbollah see the previous post Jeffrey Goldberg on Hezbollah. Note the sheer amount of rockets the Hezbollah possesses in Lebanon. Imagine what Hamas or Islamic Jihad would do with such rockets if they had them in Gaza Strip or the West Bank.
The desire to prevent the smuggling of rockets into Gaza has got to be one of the motives for the latest move the Israelis are considering: Israel may build a moat along the Philadelphia road that separates Gaza from Egypt to stop weapons smuggling.
JERUSALEM -- Israel set in motion a plan yesterday to dig a dry moat 2 1/2 miles long and 80 feet deep along the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, a project meant to prevent arms from reaching Palestinian militants through tunnels.
Some reports say the moat will be a water-filled canal.
The IDF is considering a 60 meter wide, 20 meters deep canal filled with water in order to prevent tunnels being built from Egypt to the Palestinian side of Rafah, IDF officials told the Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
The IDF hasn't decided whether the ditch should be filled with water.
It was not clear whether the moat would be filled with water, as Israeli military sources had suggested last month, or would be dry.
The intent is to make smuggling of weapons harder once the Gaza s