The far rightwing government of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu may have a choice between expanding settlements in the West Bank or achieving a global consensus on the need to sanction and coerce Iran into giving up its nuclear enrichment program. Netanyahu is so dedicated to the settler project that he cannot see the ways in which it forestalls other, broader Israeli objectives.
The serious policy differences between Binyamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration are helping Iran,and reducing pressure on that country.
The Times of London reports that Netanyahu was put firmly in his place by President Obama during his visit to Washington earlier this week. At one point Obama is said to have left Netanyahu for dinner with Michele and the girls after urging the prime minister to contact him if anything changed.
Obama is said to have still been bristling at the slight of VP Joe Biden when the latter was in Israel (Netanyahu insisted on supporting continued colonial settlements on theWest Bank.the form of an announcement of the building of more homes on occupied Palestinian land. The Palestine Authority leadership, including President Mahmoud Abbas, refuses to restart peace negotiations as long as Netanyahu refuses to commit to a freeze of Israeli colonization efforts. Abbas had been about to set aside his objections and begin proximity talks when Netanyahu’s government announced a substantial settlement expansion. And they made the announcement on the very day of Joe Biden’s arrival to kick off the talks with the Palestinians. Predictably, the Palestinians pulled out of the talks.
There may have been more to the policy differences than just the lack of a state dinner. A report at the Herald Scotland site that the US was moving bunker busting bombs to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia set off a flurry of speculation that the US was getting ready to move against Iran.
The sanctions resolution being prepared by the US on behalf of the United Nations was abruptly watered down to meet Russian and Chinese objections. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad responded to the news, saying sanctions had no ability to harm or influence Iran. (He might have added, ‘especially watered down ones’!)
That China and Russia know how tense US-Israeli ties are at the moment may also incline them to avoid the sanctions route.
Netanyahu is convinced that Iran is committed to acquiring a nuclear weapon (a proposition for which there is no firm evidence), and is further convinced that such a development would pose an existential threat to Israel. It is unclear why he reaches that conclusion, since Mutual Assured Destruction would operate to deter Iran from attacking Israel (which has 200 nuclear warheads), lest it be devastated itself. It is a ludicrous idea that the shrewd and pragmatic leadership in Tehran, which has launched no wars since coming to power and has dealt cannily with a multitude of challenges, consists of erratic madmen who would risk seeing their capital annihilated. Not to mention that there is no good evidence that they have a weapons program, and every reason to think that they are a decade or more away from a nuclear warhead even if they did. Some of the more hysterical pronouncements attributed to Netanyahu and to his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, if true, would also raise questions about the safety of the nukes in Israel’s arsenal.
The long and the short of it is that Israel and the US have poor relations for the moment, and that the rest of the world is aware of it, making it harder for the two of them to pressure the UNSC.
The London pan-Arab daily al-Hayat [Life] reports in Arabic that that the Shiite State of Law coalition and the Shiite Iraqi National Alliance say they are prepared to make an alliance before they enter the new parliament. This move reduces the chance that current prime minister Nuri al-Maliki will get a second term.
The State of Law said it had negotiated without preconditions, considering that who fills the post of prime minister is less important that for the two parties to arrive at a common plan. The fundamentalist Iraqi National Alliance groups Muqtada al-Sadr’s Free Independents with Ammar al-Hakim’s Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and other religious Shiite parties. The paper’s contacts in that movement likewise affirmed that the National Iraqi Alliance is eager to form some sort of united front with the State of Law coalition, in accordance with ‘countless political calculations.’
Sadiq al-Rikabi of the Islamic Mission Party, the core component of the State of Law List, told al-Hayat that it was important for his party to reach a common vision with the National Iraqi Alliance. He said that the two had a common notion of confronting challenges. He said it is not important at this point to name a prime minister, and that other details can be worked out first.
The Sadrists, the leading bloc within the National Iraqi Alliance, deeply dislike al-Maliki because he sent the army in after their paramilitary, the Mahdi Army, in both Basra and Sadr City in spring-summer of 2008. The State of Law may well have to sacrifice him to get an alliance with the more religious Shiite parties.
Abdul Hadi al-Hassani of the State of Law also announced talks toward merging the two blocs. He said that the two ‘agree on most issues,’ aside from the question of who should be prime minister and how to distribute cabinet posts by party, as well as how to run the executive branch. He said he expected the two to merge, given that they were most compatible in their platforms. He downplayed Sadrist dislike of al-Maliki and said what was important is that the two have a similar governing structure and could settle issues by a vote. He envisaged a further partnership, with the Kurdistan Alliance and with the Accord Front (Sunni fundamentalists).
It sounds as though the State of Law leadership is entirely prepared to throw al-Maliki under the bus to get the votes required to form a government.
The State of Law could end up with over 90 seats, and the National Iraqi Alliance may well get over 70. An alliance would take them very close to the 163 seats needed to govern Iraq. State of Law says it is also working on an partnership with the Kurdistan Alliance, which would be needed to elect a president on the first ballot.
A Shiite alliance plus the Kurds recalls the governing coalition of 2005 and after, which cannot be good news for the US. Al-Sadr may well make his joining the coalition conditional on al-Maliki stepping down and an acceleration of the timetable for US troop withdrawal.
Al-Sadr, whose movement may get as many as 40 seats, will be pivotal to forming a government. He is a supporter of Iran, Hizbullah and Hamas, and once called himself the right hand of Hamas. If he becomes a kingmaker, the Middle East will lurch to the Right.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sets the tone for Israeli policy– one that is earning him few friends in the West. Three embarrassments broke for him on Tuesday. First, yet another housing expansion in East Jerusalem was announced while he was meeting President Obama. Then, the cover story of Israeli troops accused of firing live ammunition at Palestinian protesters began to unravel. Then British Foreign Minister David Miliband unceremoniously tossed the Mossad London station chief out of the country for counterfeiting British passports, to be used in an Israeli assassination of a Palestinian in Dubai recently. Netanyahu personally ordered that hit, and is responsible for the forging of real peoples’ passports and their use to commit a murder. Netanyahu is the one behind these acts of arrogance, and they are emblematic of his mean brand of politics.
The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu humiliates American officials every time it meets with them. Netanyahu met Obama in Washington on Tuesday, and like clockwork Israel embarrassed Obama by announcing that same day it was going ahead with a building project (funded by an American millionaire) in East Jerusalem that the Obama administration had strictly told the Israelis to halt. What I don’t understand is why the Palestinians cannot sue over this issue in American courts. If the administration’s stance is that East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel, and the US is signatory to the Fourth Geneva Convention, then why couldn’t Palestinians with standing sue in the US when their property is usurped by an American millionaire?
Israel will investigate the shooting deaths of two Palestinian youth who were protesting (not rioting as AP puts it) against Israeli theft of water from the village well. Israeli troops claimed they were using rubber bullets, but Palestinians charge it was actually live ammunition.
British Foreign Minister David Miliband said he had compelling evidence that Israel was responsible for forging British passports with respect to the recent assassination of an alleged Hamas figure in Dubai. Miliband expelled from London a senior Israeli ‘diplomat’ who was likely actually a Mossad or Israeli intelligence operative. In Israel, some parliamentarians responded by calling Miliband an ‘anti-Semitic dog.’ The Israeli use of passports of actual persons in the assassination put at risk not only those individuals but all persons from those countries in the Middle East. Miliband complained that the forgeries represented a profound disregard for the sovereignty of Britain. He might now commiserate a little with the Palestinians, whose sovereignty was robbed by the British with their Balfour Declaration and by the Israelis, to the point where they have been demoted from a Class A League of Nations Mandate declared almost ready for nationhood to stateless refugees.
Israel is in danger of using up its previous stock of good will in the West by these acts of hubris, initiated by the petulant policies of Netanyahu. End/ (Not Continued)
[This map follows the biblical narrative, showing a united kingdom of Israel in the tenth century BC, which, as I said Tuesday morning, has been shown to be mythical by archeology; it is very odd that standard Western references haven't caught up with science here and shows that even in supposedly secular societies narratives considered scripture still have enormous sway.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Monday that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.” He continued that the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel cannot be denied. He added that neither could the historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. He insisted, “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today.” He said, “Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” He told his applauding audience of 7500 that he was simply following the policies of all Israeli governments since the 1967 conquest of Jerusalem in the Six Day War.
Netanyahu mixed together Romantic-nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group.
So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him.
1. In international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory, as are the parts of the West Bank that Israel unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 forbid occupying powers to alter the lifeways of civilians who are occupied, and forbid the settling of people from the occupiers’ country in the occupied territory. Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, its usurpation of Palestinian property there, and its settling of Israelis on Palestinian land are all gross violations of international law. Israeli claims that they are not occupying Palestinians because the Palestinians have no state are cruel and tautological. Israeli claims that they are building on empty territory are laughable. My back yard is empty, but that does not give Netanyahu the right to put up an apartment complex on it.
2. Israeli governments have not in fact been united or consistent about what to do with East Jerusalem and the West Bank, contrary to what Netanyahu says. The Galili Plan for settlements in the West Bank was adopted only in 1973. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave undertakings as part of the Oslo Peace Process to withdraw from Palestinian territory and grant Palestinians a state, promises for which he was assassinated by the Israeli far right (elements of which are now supporting Netanyahu’s government). As late as 2000, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak claims that he gave oral assurances that Palestinians could have almost all of the West Bank and could have some arrangement by which East Jerusalem could be its capital. Netanyahu tried to give the impression that far rightwing Likud policy on East Jerusalem and the West Bank has been shared by all previous Israeli governments, but this is simply not true.
3. Romantic nationalism imagines a “people” as eternal and as having an eternal connection with a specific piece of land. This way of thinking is fantastic and mythological. Peoples are formed and change and sometimes cease to be, though they might have descendants who abandoned that religion or ethnicity or language. Human beings have moved all around and are not directly tied to any territory in an exclusive way, since many groups have lived on most pieces of land. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews, i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese, many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not exist.
4. Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of Peace but rather ‘built-up place of Shalem.”
5. The “Jewish people” were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 10 plagues & etc. Jews and Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside Palestine. (See Daniel Lazare’s Harper’s article on the archeological disproof of the Bible, preserved at this website (I am not endorsing the web site).
6. Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent “Jewish people” in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not ‘the city of David,’ since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens, don’t know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine.
7. Since archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in the 330s BCE. Alexander’s descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when Alexander’s other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine in 6 CE (CE= ‘Common Era’ or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.
The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 and ruled it until 1099 when the Crusaders conquered it. The Crusaders killed or expelled Jews and Muslims from the city. The Muslims under Saladin took it back in 1187 CE and allowed Jews to return, and Muslims ruled it until the end of World War I, or altogether for about 1192 years.
Adherents of Judaism did not found Jerusalem. It existed for perhaps 2700 years before anything we might recognize as Judaism arose. Jewish rule may have been no longer than 170 years or so, i.e., the kingdom of the Hasmoneans.
8. Therefore if historical building of Jerusalem and historical connection with Jerusalem establishes sovereignty over it as Netanyahu claims, here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:
A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.
B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.
C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.
D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.
E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.
F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.
G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.
9. Of course, Jews are historically connected to Jerusalem by the Temple, whenever that connection is dated to. But that link mostly was pursued when Jews were not in political control of the city, under Iranian, Greek and Roman rule. It cannot therefore be deployed to make a demand for political control of the whole city.
10. The Jews of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine did not for the most part leave after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 136 CE. They continued to live there and to farm in Palestine under Roman rule and then Byzantine. They gradually converted to Christianity. After 638 CE all but 10 percent gradually converted to Islam. The present-day Palestinians are the descendants of the ancient Jews and have every right to live where their ancestors have lived for centuries.
— PS: The sources are in the hyperlinks, especially the Thompson edited volume. See also Shlomo Sands recent book.
I’m all for holding elections. But the US right wing misunderstands elections as equalling democracy, which they do not. In fact, what we have seen since George W. Bush began backing neoconservative talking points is that elections in the Middle East have most often been subverted by authoritarianism and have contributed to social divisiveness.
The holding of elections in Iraq gave rise to a spate of articles on how may George W. Bush really did change the Middle East and maybe Iraq is turning out all right after all. These arguments derive not from analysis but from a desire to bolster the Republican Party and its ideology (which combines militarism abroad with Marie Antoinette-style lack of empathy with the woes of the common person domestically.)
That is that pressure from Washington, combined with the ambitions of local elites, and the increasing ability of Middle Eastern publics to mobilize and express their discontents, have produced not democratization but a move to what Marina Ottaway calls semi-authoritarian regimes in the Middle East. In fact, the most marked movement from authoritarianism to multiparty democracy in the past decade in the region, that of Pakistan, took place through popular mobilization and long-established political parties in the teeth of heavy support by Washington (i.e. Dick Cheney) for military dictator Pervez Musharraf.
Ottaway argues that during the Cold War, the opposition between authoritarian regimes and democratic ones was more stark and that hybrid forms falling in neither camp were rare. “Semi-Authoritarian regimes” have political parties and NGOs, hold elections, and look on paper as though they at least have some democratic attributes. But behind the scenes the power elite makes sure it remains in power and reduces the ‘democratic’ activities to a shadow play for the benefit of a restless domestic public and for that of international bureaucrats.
We have seen a string of farcical or stolen elections in the Middle East in the past decade, which have been used by often Washington-backed regional elites to reinforce their power rather than to allow the peaceful succession of one government by another.
Not only are the prime minister and president of Iraq strongly implying massive ballot fraud in Iraq (an allegation that al-Maliki admits could spark a return to ethnic violence), but recent elections in the region have more often been seen as fraudulent than as fair.
Afghanistan’s presidential election of August, 2009, was repeatedly denounced as having been marred by electoral fraud to the benefit of incumbent Hamid Karzai. Karzai remained in power, but at the cost of losing legitimacy in the eyes of some Afghans, especially Tajik supporters of his rival, Abdullah Abdullah. The US response has been to back Karzai unreservedly and to attempt to bestow on him hundreds of thousands of new troops and police so that he can exercise stronger control in the country.
Iran’s presidential election of June, 2009, provoked massive demonstrations in summer of that year on the part of those who believed that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had stolen it, leading to the establishment of the dissident Green Movement around presidential challengers Mir Hosain Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. In the aftermath, the regime became more authoritarian and the military and security forces came to wield more power than before.
The January 2006 election in the Palestine Authority produced a Hamas-led government, much to the dismay of Israel and the US. Those two worked to undermine the Hamas government and ultimately backed a successful coup against it in the West Bank, but failed to dislodge the elected government from Gaza. President Mahmoud Abbas is now acting extra-judically and extra-constitutionally, since further elections have not been held and there has been no judgment rendered by any competent legal authority as to the legitimacy of his government vis-a-vis that of Hamas.
In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak reacted to pressure from then secretary of state Condi Rice to open up the presidential elections by allowing his main rival to leave prison and run. After Mubarak trounced him, he was sent back to jail. And, some 88 Muslim Brothers (a group the US abhors) gained seats in the lower house of parliament. Some thought that for the Mubarak regime to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to do so well was itself a warning to Washington. It said that pressure for democratization will backfire and lead to Muslim Brotherhood regimes.
Even Israel elected its most rightwing government ever in February, 2009, and persons that might formerly have been shunned because of their extreme political views, such as Avigdor Lieberman, were allowed to serve in the government. Lieberman wants to administer loyalty tests to Palestinian-Israelis and would very much like to strip the latter of their Israeli citizenship and expel all 1.5 million of them from the country. For a man of Lieberman’s views to become Israeli foreign minister is a step toward semi-authoritarianism in that country. Likewise, the Israeli state has been cracking down on peace groups such as B’tselem and other NGOs, with methods more familiar in Egypt or Syria than in the freewheeling Israel of earlier decades.
So some authoritarian regimes are moving to put up democratic facades and so becoming semi-authoritarian. And the few regimes that seemed earlier to make a place for more democratic governance–Israel, post-2001 Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine, post-2003 Iraq– seem to be moving toward semi-authoritarianism and slipping back from democracy.
Ironically, the most genuine steps toward democratization have taken place in Turkey and in Pakistan. But Bush and the neoconservatives had backed the Turkish and Pakistani militaries, so this heroic story of the little people attaining their rights was never celebrated by the US mass media. Democracies are unpredictable and hard to control (as Bush found out when US allies like France and Turkey declined to line up behind the invasion of Iraq), and so Turkey and Pakistan are disturbing the world status quo. That is the real reason for which some Obama administration officials have talked about Pakistan as the most dangerous country in the world. They did not speak that way when Gen. Pervez Musharraf was in control of the country. You have to wonder how committed most Washington elites really are to democratization, and have to wonder whether semi-authoritarianism in Middle Eastern allies might not be perceived as holding benefits for the US.
The USG Open Source Center summarizes the address of Leader Ali Khamenei of Iran on the occasion of the Persian New Year, in which he replies to President Barack Obama’s offer of direct negotiations and an opportunity for Iran to end its diplomatic isolation. Khamenei blamed Obama for the protests that shook the regime last summer and fall, and said that such subversion made improved relations with the US a non-starter. Actually, the Green Movement is indigenous and took Washington by surprise. Khamenei, in rejecting its legitimacy and sincerity and turning it into an American plot, not only injures a significant group in the Iranian body politic but also stupidly pushes away the first sincere overtures from Washington in decades. Sometimes good policy making falters because potential diplomatic partners are paranoid and unable to escape their own mental cramp.
FYI — Iran: Khamene’i Says ‘Fate of the Enemy is Failure’ in New Year Address Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN) Sunday, March 21, 2010 … Document Type: OSC Summary
Tehran Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN) in Persian
at 1300 GMT on 21 March carried live an address by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i's to pilgrims and the people of Mashhad at the Shrine of the eighth Shiite imam, Reza, in Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi Province. . .
He then referred to President Obama’s hand of friendship message and said: “In my last year’s message on the first day of the new year at a huge gathering here I talked to you about the new American President’s message where he said ‘we stretch a hand of friendship.’ I said that we will follow up the issue with vigilance. We will watch out to see if it really is a hand of friendship and whether intentions are friendly or they are hostile intentions in the form of deceiving words. This is very important to us. I said last year that if underneath your velvet gloves lie iron fists we will not stretch out our hands and will not accept your friendship. We are careful to make sure that a dagger is not hiding behind your smiles.
“Unfortunately, what happened was exactly what was expected. The American Government and the new establishment and president with their interest in just and appropriate relations — about which they wrote a letter and sent a message and announced over loudspeakers and repeated at private parties — said that we want to normalize our relations with the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately they did the opposite. In the eight months after the elections they adopted the worst possible stance. The American President introduced the street rioters as a civil movement.”
He said: “You cannot talk about friendship but at the same time hatch plots and try to harm the Islamic Republic.” Khamene’i said the action of the enemy should not be hidden from the eyes of the Iranian officials. He concluded that Iran will continue its path and is sure that will succeed as it has done in the past. He said the fate of Iran is success and the fate of the enemy is failure.
Khamene’i concluded his speech with prayers.
The broadcast ended at 1412 GMT.. .
(Description of Source: Tehran Islamic Republic of Iran News Network Television (IRINN) in Persian — 24-hour news channel of state-run television, officially controlled by the office of the supreme leader)
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