Jon Stewart on Weeping Beck

Jon Stewart uses satire to point to the real dangers of Glenn Beck's demagoguery (brought to you by the world's most evil billionaire, Rupert Murdoch)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Intro - Progressivism Is Cancer
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

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Jund Rocket Kills Thai Farm Worker in Israel; Israeli Jets Retaliate; Lady Ashton of EU calls for Resumption of Talks

The visit to Gaza of Lady Ashton, the head of foreign policy in the European Union, was marred Thursday when a small fringe militant group calling itself Jund Ansar al-Sunnah fired a homemade rocket at a nearby Israeli farm collective, killing a Thai immigrant farm laborer.

Aljazeera English reports on the rocket attack, the first to produce a fatality in over a year.



Lady Ashton said she was "extremely shocked" by the loss of life. But she said the right thing to do now is to quickly restart peace negotiations.

Israel has the civilian population of Gaza under a blockade, and has increasingly refused admission to foreign dignitaries and human rights workers.

Ashton herself had had to lobby vigorously and for some time to be allowed to enter Gaza. Relations between Israel and and Europe have been strained, inasmuch as the European parliament has pressured Israel to cease its blockade of Gaza, which harms civilians and constitutes a form of collective punishment-- illegal in the international law of occupations. The European parliament has also backed the Goldstone Report on Israeli atrocities and crimes during the Gaza War, and has urged EU member states actively to monitor Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. (This European assertiveness is new, since Europe had in the past deferred to the US and Israel on Mideast Policy. The Gaza War provoked public anger throughout Europe for its obvious use of disproportionate force and targeting of civilian infrastructure, as well as wilful disregard of civilian life).

FT says that since the end of the Gaza War, in which the Israeli military destroyed thousands of buildings, most of them civilian in character, left 1 in 8 families homeless, and killed 1400 Palestinians (14 Israeli troops were killed), there have been few such rocket attacks. Israel holds Hamas responsible for any that are launched, even if it is not responsible for them.

In response, on Friday morning Israeli fighter-jets bombed four targets in Gaza, including a tunnel and a metal foundry.

The violence comes in the wake of a diplomatic crisis between the US and Israel over the colonization of Palestinian territory annexed to East Jerusalem, which is analyzed by U of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer in the London Review of Books.

The Thai farmworker's death is, as Lady Ashton said, shocking and most lamentable. That it was a Thai who was killed, however, puts the spotlight on the plight of guest workers in Israel, many of whom are fighting deportation because Israeli policy is to offer permanent residency only to Jews.

Israel's population is about 7.5 million, with 5.6 million Jews. But there are some 800,000 Israelis residing outside Israel if one counts the second generation, and it is not clear whether they are counted in the census. Israel has a million and a half Arabs, and some 300,000 other non-Jewish citizens (many of them Russians).

Jewish-Israeli population growth has fallen to only 1.7 percent a year, while Palestinian-Israeli growth is 2.6 percent a year, suggesting that the latter will be a third of the population by 2030. Since the Rabbinate is resisting allowing conversions among the 300,000 classified as non-Jews, their proportion of the population may also grow.

The irony of Israel importing Thai and Filipino labor on a rotating basis while imposing a 45% unemployment rate on Gaza, is hard to miss.



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Jeffrey Goldberg: The Movie

Here is the video version of Jeffrey Goldberg's punditry on the Middle East.




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Panetta: Al-Qaeda Effectively Disrupted; Yemeni Killed in Drone Strike; Nearly 6,000 Pakistanis Killed in Terrorist Incidents since 9/11

CIA director Leon Panetta said Wednesday that US strikes against targets in northern Pakistan have left al-Qaeda in disarray and without the command and control necessary to plan and carry out major operations.

The US is claiming a big success in a precision strike on the town of Miranshah in North Waziristan, saying that it killed Husain Yemeni. Yemeni is said to be a liaison between al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Arabs holed up in North Waziristan, north Pakistan. He is also said to have been involved in the bombing of a CIA forward base in Afghanistan in late December, which killed several CIA operatives along with some contractors.

The News reports that: since 9/11 (102 months), Pakistan has suffered a major terrorist bombing roughly once every 10 days. Over these years, there were 332 'terrorism-related incidents,' which killed 5,704 persons (substantially more than died in the September 11 attacks). By city, terrorist bombings clustered this way:

Peshawar: 58 terrorist incidents
Rawalpindi/Islamabad: 46
Karachi: 37
Lahore: 21
Swat Valley: 21
Karachi: 21

In the troubled Northwest of the country, the Taliban of Miranshah in North Waziristan on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to an ongoing truce with the government. The truce is observed by Pakistan as it campaigns in South Waziristan, so as to be able to concentrate on one tribal area at a time. The truce is shaky, and was annulled last summer briefly by the Taliban.

Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus cautioned Pakistan that another terrorist attack on India such as Lashkar-e Tayyiba carried out on Mumbai could spark severe conflict in South Asia. Radicalism in Punjab of the Lashkar sort is an increasing concern among Pakistanis, as this Dawn editorial shows.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's two big rival parties, the Pakistan People's Party and the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PMLN), have been roiled over comments earlier this week by Shahbaz Sharif, the Chief Minister of Punjab Province, who said that Taliban should not hit the Punjab, since Punjabis had been more or less on the same page in their opposition to military dictator Pervez Musharraf. On Wednesday, the Taliban showed interest in a truce with Sharif. The Pakistani public is outraged at the remarks, seen as cowardly and/or collaborationist.

Female member of parliament Nighat Orakzai (PML-Q) taunted Sharif that if he is so afraid of the Taliban, he can borrow her neck scarf (dupatta), which many Pakistani women wear on their shoulders instead of covering their faces. She dropped hers on the floor of Parliament.

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French Television Demonstrates Cheney Effect

AP reports on a French reality show where contestants proved willing to administer torture-level shocks to human beings, replicating the findings of the classic Milgram Study at Yale:



The show repeated the classic social psychology experiment of Stanley Milgram of Yale from the early 1960s, which has been successfully demonstrated numerous times around the world. Apparently about 70% of human beings have no independent conscience and will torture others if simply ordered to by a person in authority. The good news is that 30% will resist.

This finding helps explain the "Cheney Effect," whereby he illegally ordered torture but Americans are not eager to put him on trial for breaking the law. A super-majority is willing to go along with Abu Ghraib, and not blanch when the former vice president talks about being a "big supporter of waterboarding."

The only way you even got laws against torture is that they were self-interested-- forbidding one's own troops to torture is a way of trying to prevent their being tortured when captured by the enemy (and ensuring there is punishment, a la Nuremburg, for war crimes. Note that Stalin wanted just to summarily execute 50,000 - 100,000 German officers. Roosevelt demurred, jesting that surely 49,000 would be enough. In the end Henry Stimson's plan for war crimes trial was approved by Truman.

Nowadays, the Liz Cheneys and Bill Kristols prefer Stalin's methods of summary punishment, and are attacking the whole idea of defense attorneys for enemy combatants, as Matthew Yglesias notes. No doubt the attorneys would inconveniently object to the torture Cheney and Kristol want inflicted.

Anyway, most people don't get anti-torture laws. What is really hard to explain scientifically is how the US Republican Party got almost none of the ethical 30%. Shouldn't conscience be roughly equally distributed by party?

--

Update: Glenn Greenwald mischievously points out that Fox Cable News anchors expressed amazement at how horrible the French are because of this story, missing the irony that this news channel has been an unremitting cheerleader for torturing people!

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Lord Curzon on Palestine as a Class A Mandate: League of Nations said 'Homeland for Jews' not a Legal Claim on Territory

I posted Tuesday on the legal implications of the League of Nations' recognition of Palestine as a "Class A" Mandate, i.e. a former Ottoman territory nearly ready for national independence, to which the mandatory authority (i.e. Britain) was to lend 'administrative assistance' in its attainment of independence. I received some strange mail from fanatics afterward, insisting that the British Mandate of Palestine was not recognized as a Class A Mandate. A scholar also wrote me to point out that unlike the case with Iraq and Syria, the British brought the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate document. The latter is true, but not relevant to my point, since the League of Nations interpreted the language of the declaration differently than did the Zionists. Others complained that the map starts in the mid-1920s after the British had already hived off Transjordan. But so what? If Class A Mandates were almost ready for independence, why couldn't some portion of them be granted independence first? The French also split the Mandate of Syria into two parts, Syria and Lebanon. What has that got to do with anything?

The legal history does not bear out any of these objections to my argument. The following British archival document makes it very clear that the British were forced by France and Italy not to disregard the interests of the over 90% of their mandate that was Palestinian, and that London revised its Mandate document under pressure as a result. The League of Nations created and granted the Mandate, contrary to what Balfour kept sputtering (he was not even in office 1922-1924). What the victorious Powers and the League of Nations wanted has to be part of the interpretation of the Mandate's charge. The League of Nations wanted the British Mandate of Palestine to serve the Palestinians in accordance with their status as "Class A." It envisaged a Palestinian state. Indeed, Sir Herbert Samuel, the first governor of the British Mandate of Palestine, urged that the "future government of Palestine" be required to repay any loans raised during the Mandate for its development. So they envisaged a future government of Palestine, which they assumed would be overwhelmingly Palestinian.

As for the language about a Jewish homeland, by that was not meant a territorial state on Palestinian land. Curzon is clear that although the Powers at the Versailles conferences after WW I recognized a Jewish connection to Palestine and the Balfour Declaration, "this was far from constituting anything in the nature of a legal claim . . ." He also reports that the Powers said that "while Mr. Balfour's Declaration had provided for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, this was not the same thing as the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish National Home--an extension of the phrase for which there was no justification . . ."



So here is the Memorandum of Lord Curzon, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, concerning League of Nations "Class A" Mandates in November 30, 1920. British National Archives, Catalogue Reference: CAB/24/115. Crown copyright. (Note that I am not reproducing the entire document, leaving out some discussion of arrangements in Iraq):


MANDATES A.

MEMORANDUM BY THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS. [Lord Curzon].

A FINAL decision about Mandates A is required. The Assembly of the League of Nations is concerned about their submission to the Council, and will probably not allow the gathering at Geneva to come to an end without a decision being taken on the point.

It is understood that the Council of the League is likely to hold a meeting while at Geneva to consider the.se Mandates, and it has been informed that they will be submitted without further delay. The Mandates concerned are those for Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine.

The French Mandate for Syria is drawn on the same lines as ours for Mesopotamia, though not actually identical with it. There is nothing in it to which we desire to object.

The Mandate for Mesopotamia has passed through several stages, tending in each case to further simplification. It has bemi shown to, and approved by, the French and Italian Governments, to whom we were under a pledge at San Remo to submit it In its last printed form this Mandate was approved by the Cabinet a few weeks ago . . .

As regards the Palestine Mandate, this Mandate also has passed through several revises. When it was first shown to the French Government it at once excited their vehement criticisms on the ground of its almost exclusively Zionist complexion and of the manner in which the interests and rights of the Arab majority (amounting to about nine-tenths of the population) were ignored. The Italian Government expressed similar apprehensions. It was felt that this would constitute a very serious, and possibly a fatal, objection when the Mandate came ultimately before the Council of the League. The Mandate, therefore, was largely rewritten, and finally received their assent. It was also considered by an Inter-Departmental Conference here, in which the Foreign Office, Board of Trade, War Office and India Office were represented, and which passed the final draft.

In the course of these discussions strong objection was taken to a statement which had been inserted in the Preamble of the first draft to the following effect:— " Recognising the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the claim which this gives them to reconstitute Palestine as their National Home."

367 [4996]

It was pointed out (1) that, while the Powers had unquestionably recognised the historical connection of the Jews with Palestine by their formal acceptance of the Balfour Declaration and their textual incorporation of it in the Turkish Peace Treaty drafted at San Remo, this was far from constituting anything in the nature of a legal claim, and that the use of such words might be, and was, indeed, certain to be, used as the basis of all sorts of political claims by the Zionists for the control of Palestinian administration in the future, and ;2) that, while Mr. Balfour's Declaration had provided for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, this was not the same thing as the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish National Home--an extension of the phrase for which there was no justification, and which was certain to be employed in the future as the basis for claims of the character to which I have referred. On the other hand, the Zionists pleaded for the insertion of some such phrase in the preamble, on the ground that it would make all the difference to the money that they aspired to raise in foreign, countries for the development of Palestine. Mr. Balfour, who interested himself keenly in their case, admitted, however, the force of the above contentions, and, on the eve of leaving for Geneva, suggested an alternative form of words which I am prepared to recommend.

Paragraph 3 of the Preamble would then conclude as follows (vide the words italicised in the Draft-;

" and whereas recognition lias thereby (i.e., by the Treaty of Sevres) been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine, and to the grounds for reconstituting their National Home in that country."

Simultaneously the Zionists pressed for the concession of preferential rights for themselves in respect of public works, &c, in Article 11.

It was felt unanimously, and was agreed by Mr. Balfour, that there was no ground for making this concession, which ought to be refused. . .

During the last few hours a telegram has been received from Sir H. Samuel, urging that, in order to facilitate the raising of loans by the Palestine Administration, which will otherwise be impossible, words should be added to Article 27, providing that on the termination of the Mandate, the future Government of Palestine shall fully honour the financial obligations incurred by the Palestinian Administration during the period of the Mandate. This appears to be a quite reasonable demand, and I have accordingly added words (italicised at the end of Article 27) in order to meet it. With this explanation, therefore, I hope that the Mandates in the form now submitted may be formally passed and forwarded to the Council of the League.

C. OF K. November 30, 1920.

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100 Wounded as Israelis Crack Down on Palestinian Protests in Jerusalem

Palestinian protesters in East Jerusalem were repressed by Israeli security forces on Tuesday, leaving over 100 persons wounded. Recent Israeli moves to claim sites in the Palestinian West Bank, holy to Christians and Muslims as well as Jews, as Israeli heritage sites-- have alarmed Palestinians that the Likud government may have designs on the Aqsa Mosque, among the holier sites in Islamic lore.

Aljazeera is saying that the demonstrations and clashes spread from Jerusalem to Ramallah and Hebron (where the Israelis have inserted a synagogue into the mosque over the alleged tombs of Abraham and the patriarchs).

Aljazeera English has video:



Looks to me like peaceful protesters or stone-throwing youth facing 3000 heavily armored and armed Israeli security forces.

The USG Open Source Center translates an Arabic article about Palestine Liberation Organization leader Saeb Erekat's denunciation of what he calls Israeli attacks on Palestinian holy sites. His warning that Israel and the US are playing with fire to inflame Muslim passions in this way should be heeded. The Israeli occupation of Jerusalem was one of the three reasons given by Usama Bin Laden for his creepy war on the United States. For a billion and a half Muslims, Jerusalem is their third holiest city, and when all Palestinians have been expelled from it, there will be a big bang.

"PA's Erekat Decries 'Attacks' on Holy Sites, Says Israel 'Playing with Fire'
"Erekat Calls on International Community To Rein in Israeli Futile Policy" -- Ma'an headline
Ma'an News Agency
Tuesday, March 16, 2010 . . .
Document Type: OSC Translated Text . . .

Bethlehem, 16 March (Ma'an) -- Dr Saeb Erekat, head of the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, condemned the Israeli policies of dictating terms, settlement activity, provocations, and attacks on holy sites, similar to the ones that took place on 16 March. Erekat said: No sooner did the Arab world, the Palestinian leadership, and the international community announce to the US Administration their decision to launch proximity talks in a bid to end the conflict, than the Israeli Government disregarded this decision by issuing tenders for the construction of settlements, carrying out raids, dictating, assassinating, laying siege, imposing closures, and taking provocative steps of a religious nature.

Speaking to Ma'an Radio Network, Erekat said: "Not only do we denounce these Israeli acts, but we also hold the Israeli Government solely responsible for the repercussions of the futile and provocative policies of imposing facts on the ground, which seek to torpedo efforts to launch the peace process."

Erekat also noted that he has been mandated by President Mahmud Abbas to travel to Moscow, carrying with him written messages, documents, and maps for Quartet members, which shed light on the inflammatory Israeli practices in Jerusalem. He further argued that the Israeli policies are playing with fire and adding fuel to it. Therefore, the written messages urge the international community to intervene immediately in order to curb the Israeli occupation and force it to halt its practices and unavailing policies.

Erekat went on to say that the Palestinian leadership is relying heavily on the international community and stated: "We are part of the international community and we resort to international law. Treating Israel as a country above the law destroys the international community's peace efforts in the region and has proved that the Israeli Government disparages international law." He also pointed out that the US Administration and the international community are capable of forcing Israel to stop these policies, which he decried as criminal and futile.

(Description of Source: Bethlehem Ma'an News Agency in Arabic -- Website of independent, leading Palestinian news agency; funded by the Dutch and Danish Foreign Ministries; URL: http://www.maannews.net/)"

The violence in Jerusalem comes on the heels of a major spat between the United States and Israel over last week's humiliation of Vice President Joe Biden by the announcement of 1600 new households to be built on a part of the Palestinian West Bank that Israel high-handedly annexed to its district of Jerusalem. Fear that the Israelis will attempt to push the Palestinians altogether out of East Jerusalem lay behind some of the anxieties that provoked Tuesday's demonstrations.


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Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg, Guarding the Prison of the Nationalist Mind

As a Middle East expert who lived in the Muslim world for nearly 10 years, travels widely there, speaks the languages, writes history from archives and manuscripts, and follows current affairs, I found that none of that counted for much when I entered the public arena in the United States. It isn't that I am thin-skinned or can't dish it out as good as I get it. Rather, it is like being a professional baseball player ready for the World Series, who gets in the van and instead of being delivered to Yankee Stadium is blindfolded and taken to a secret fight club where people are betting on whether he can go 12 rounds with a giant James Bond villain. And he says, "But I'm not a boxer, I bat .400." And they sneer, "You will pay for insulting our great aunt."

This is an arena where vehement partisans are honored as "journalists," where ability to speak languages or engage in cultural interaction counts for nothing, and where rich and powerful patrons make reputations rather than any real knowledge. NYT columnist David Brooks slammed me for not having recognized Ariel Sharon's potential as a peace-maker with the Palestinians and for not seeing how positive the Iraq War was for resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. (???) I was routinely denounced by David Horowitz, who used to be an insufferable leftist in the 60s when he edited Ramparts and now is an insufferable rightwinger, but who knows nothing at all about the Middle East (and what he thinks he knows is wrong). Marty Peretz, who married into the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and then used his wife's money to buy and ruin The New Republic, turning it into pro-Contra, pro-war rag, was annoyed to see me on television because of his vast fund of knowledge about Arabic hollow verbs. Michael Oren, a bad, partisan historian and Israeli army reservist (who fought in the Gaza War); who revived the Gobineau Orientalist tradition in his book on the US and the Middle East; and who is now the Israeli ambassador to Washington-- weighed in against my receiving an appointment to the Yale History Department. Princeton-trained Martin Kramer until recently of Tel Aviv University, who recently advocated using the Gaza blockade to force small families on the half-starving Palestinians, made a cottage industry of snarky and mostly false remarks about Informed Comment; and has a relationship with the so-called "Middle East Forum", which runs the McCarthyite 'campus watch' and which was part of a scheme to have me cyber-stalked and massively spammed.

More recently I have provoked the ire of a burly former Israeli military prison guard at the notorious Ketziot detention camp during the first Intifada, who is among our foremost journalists of the Middle East and given a prominent perch at The Atlantic magazine-- Jeffrey Goldberg.

Horowitz and the others routinely just make up entire passages and attribute them falsely to their victims. You always think you can defend your position in an honest debate. You aren't prepared the first time someone says, "How do you justify your spirited defense of Pol Pot?" Horowitz had some Kahaneist string together a series of statements I never wrote and published them in a book on the supposed 101 most dangerous professors (as if anyone is more dangerous to our Republic than a lying rightwing demagogue). What I really mind is that he never sent me so much as the T-shirt. Also, students still don't seem sufficiently impressed by the title to get their papers in on time. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, who had supported the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front's attempt to take over the Algerian government, accused me of being pro-Islamist and then just made up entire sentences he claimed I had written, which he was forced to retract because I had not.

Likewise, Jeffrey Goldberg just now accused me of wanting "to deny to the Jewish people a state in their ancestral homeland." The fact is that a) I'm generally sympathetic to the states recognized as United Nations members. But b) wounded romantic nationalism of Goldberg's sort is a pathetic remnant of the twentieth century, which polished off tens of millions of human beings over wet dreams about "blood and soil." There isn't any "blood" or "pure" "races," and human groups have no special relationship to territory. My complaint about the treatment of the Palestinians is that they have been left stateless and without citizenship or rights. I'm not a Palestinian nationalist who insists that they return to what is now Israel (though they should receive compensation for lost property if they don't). The Germans weren't always in Germany (in fact they are relative newcomers), and they aren't of 'pure' 'blood,' and the 200,000 Jews in contemporary Germany--some of them Israelis-- have as much right to be there as anyone else. Most Germans and most Ashkenazi Jews have a relatively recent female common ancestor. As a species and subspecies, we are from southern Africa, and that only about 100,000 years ago. If someone is nostalgic for the Old Country, they should try Gabarone, Botswana. And say hello to Mma Ramotswe for me.

Israeli Army Cpl. Jeffrey Goldberg then corrects my assertion that he has no vision of the future of the Palestinians by saying that he has advocated for a Palestinian state in all of the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital.

So let me say up front that I did not in fact think Goldberg would go quite that far, and that I apologize for getting him wrong.

But here are some problems with Goldberg's position, nevertheless:

He doesn't seem to understand that simply having a vague notion that maybe a two-state solution is desirable (for the good of his vision of an ethno-nationalist state in Israel) is different from actively working for it and being willing to criticize publicly those leaders attempting to forestall it. It isn't a talisman you can use to justify warmongering or bigotry. George W. Bush, after all, took the same position. In. One. Speech. I don't see the sense of urgency and passion about this issue in Goldberg that was visible in his wretched so-called 'journalism' about Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which was riddled with ridiculous assertions about Saddam sleeping nude every night with Usama Bin Laden while playing with his miniature atomic bombs, and which Dick Cheney used to get up the horrific invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Goldberg has not only not exactly been at the forefront of the peace movement, he has argued and agitated against doing anything practical to achieve this increasingly unlikely goal. He is the Rottweiler of ideologues when it comes to making sure that no Israeli policy is ever criticized by anyone without his branding the critics bigots and even genocidal. Since, as noted, Goldberg is possibly still an Israeli army reservist and actively served in the Israeli Army as a prison guard during the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising, I can't understand why anyone takes him seriously when he lashes out at critics of Israeli policy. I mean, what would you expect? If an Arab-American had served in the Palestine Authority police, would anyone give him a perch at The Atlantic and routinely bring him on CNN to denounce critics of Mahmoud Abbas?

Holding the leadership of a country harmless from civil society criticism guarantees that the leadership will not change its policies. Goldberg actually instructed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton not to pressure the Netanyahu government to move in the two-state direction, on the grounds that pressure only sends Israeli leaders to their bunkers. Well, if you can't pressure them, then I suppose you are waiting for the Likud Party and Yisrael Beitenu to volunteer to cease colonizing the West Bank and cease blockading Gaza. The United States routinely pressures other countries, including allies, over issues on which there is a US interest. The US pressured Turkey to let the 4th Infantry Division march through that country to Iraq. The US pressured France to vote for a UNSC resolution authorizing the Iraq War. The US is currently pressuring Japan not to close the bases on Okinawa. Why does Goldberg think the US should treat the Israeli leadership with kid gloves?

Me, I see Likudniks and Avigdor Liebermans at the head of a country with one of the world's most powerful militaries and intending to implement policies likely to get Americans killed, and I intend to scream bloody murder.

Does Goldberg have a plan "B"? Because his two-state solution is so 1993. The problem is, it is almost certainly past the point where any such thing is possible, given the size and extent of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Goldberg admits that the only two likely outcomes of the current policies of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are Apartheid or a one-state solution.

Would Cpl. Goldberg like to specify which he would prefer, in case it comes to that (as it likely already has)?


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The Map: The Story of Palestinian Nationhood Thwarted After the League of Nations Recognized It

On March 10, I posted on the humiliation heaped on Vice President Joe Biden by the Israeli government of far-right Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. Biden went to Israel intending to help kick off indirect negotiations between Netanyahu and Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Biden had no sooner arrived than the Israelis announced that they would build 1600 new households on Palestinian territory that they had unilaterally annexed to Jerusalem. Since expanding Israeli colonization of Palestinian land had been the sticking point causing Abbas to refuse to engage in negotiations, and, indeed, to threaten to resign, this step was sure to scuttle the very talks Biden had come to inaugurate. And it did.

The tiff between the US and Israel is less important than the worrisome growth of tension between Palestinians and Israelis as the Israelis have claimed more and more sites sacred to the Palestinians as well. There is talk of a third Intifada or Palestinian uprising.

As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century.



Andrew Sullivan then mirrored the map from my site, which set off a lot of thunder and noise among anti-Palestinian writers like Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, but shed very little light. (PS, the map as a hard copy mapcard is available from Sabeel.)

The map is useful and accurate. It begins by showing the British Mandate of Palestine as of the mid-1920s. The British conquered the Ottoman districts that came to be the Mandate during World War I (the Ottoman sultan threw in with Austria and Germany against Britain, France and Russia, mainly out of fear of Russia).

But because of the rise of the League of Nations and the influence of President Woodrow Wilson's ideas about self-determination, Britain and France could not decently simply make their new, previously Ottoman territories into mere colonies. The League of Nations awarded them "Mandates." Britain got Palestine, France got Syria (which it made into Syria and Lebanon), Britain got Iraq.

The League of Nations Covenant spelled out what a Class A Mandate (i.e. territory that had been Ottoman) was:

"Article 22. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory [i.e., a Western power] until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory."

That is, the purpose of the later British Mandate of Palestine, of the French Mandate of Syria, of the British Mandate of Iraq, was to 'render administrative advice and assistance" to these peoples in preparation for their becoming independent states, an achievement that they were recognized as not far from attaining. The Covenant was written before the actual Mandates were established, but Palestine was a Class A Mandate and so the language of the Covenant was applicable to it. The territory that formed the British Mandate of Iraq was the same territory that became independent Iraq, and the same could have been expected of the British Mandate of Palestine. (Even class B Mandates like Togo have become nation-states, but the poor Palestinians are just stateless prisoners in colonial cantons).

The first map thus shows what the League of Nations imagined would become the state of Palestine. The economist published an odd assertion that the Negev Desert was 'empty' and should not have been shown in the first map. But it wasn't and isn't empty; Palestinian Bedouin live there, and they and the desert were recognized by the League of Nations as belonging to the Mandate of Palestine, a state-in-training. The Mandate of Palestine also had a charge to allow for the establishment of a 'homeland' in Palestine for Jews (because of the 1917 Balfour Declaration), but nobody among League of Nations officialdom at that time imagined it would be a whole and competing territorial state. There was no prospect of more than a few tens of thousands of Jews settling in Palestine, as of the mid-1920s. (They are shown in white on the first map, refuting those who mysteriously complained that the maps alternated between showing sovereignty and showing population). As late as the 1939 British White Paper, British officials imagined that the Mandate would emerge as an independent Palestinian state within 10 years.

In 1851, there had been 327,000 Palestinians (yes, the word 'Filistin' was current then) and other non-Jews, and only 13,000 Jews. In 1925, after decades of determined Jewish immigration, there were a little over 100,000 Jews, and there were 765,000 mostly Palestinian non-Jews in the British Mandate of Palestine. For historical demography of this area, see Justin McCarthy's painstaking calculations; it is not true, as sometimes is claimed, that we cannot know anything about population figures in this region. See also his journal article, reprinted at this site. The Palestinian population grew because of rapid population growth, not in-migration, which was minor. The common allegation that Jerusalem had a Jewish majority at some point in the 19th century is meaningless. Jerusalem was a small town in 1851, and many pious or indigent elderly Jews from Eastern Europe and elsewhere retired there because of charities that would support them. In 1851, Jews were only about 4% of the population of the territory that became the British Mandate of Palestine some 70 years later. And, there had been few adherents of Judaism, just a few thousand, from the time most Jews in Palestine adopted Christianity and Islam in the first millennium CE all the way until the 20th century. In the British Mandate of Palestine, the district of Jerusalem was largely Palestinian.

The rise of the Nazis in the 1930s impelled massive Jewish emigration to Palestine, so by 1940 there were over 400,000 Jews there amid over a million Palestinians.

The second map shows the United Nations partition plan of 1947, which awarded Jews (who only then owned about 6% of Palestinian land) a substantial state alongside a much reduced Palestine. Although apologists for the Zionist movement say that the Zionists accepted this partition plan and the Arabs rejected it, that is not entirely true. Zionist leader David Ben Gurion noted in his diary when Israel was established that when the US had been formed, no document set out its territorial extent, implying that the same was true of Israel. We know that Ben Gurion was an Israeli expansionist who fully intended to annex more land to Israel, and by 1956 he attempted to add the Sinai and would have liked southern Lebanon. So the Zionist "acceptance" of the UN partition plan did not mean very much beyond a happiness that their initial starting point was much better than their actual land ownership had given them any right to expect.

The third map shows the status quo after the Israeli-Palestinian civil war of 1947-1948. It is not true that the entire Arab League attacked the Jewish community in Palestine or later Israel on behalf of the Palestinians. As Avi Shlaim has shown, Jordan had made an understanding with the Zionist leadership that it would grab the West Bank, and its troops did not mount a campaign in the territory awarded to Israel by the UN. Egypt grabbed Gaza and then tried to grab the Negev Desert, with a few thousand badly trained and equipped troops, but was defeated by the nascent Israeli army. Few other Arab states sent any significant number of troops. The total number of troops on the Arab side actually on the ground was about equal to those of the Zionist forces, and the Zionists had more esprit de corps and better weaponry.

The final map shows the situation today, which springs from the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and then the decision of the Israelis to colonize the West Bank intensively (a process that is illegal in the law of war concerning occupied populations).

There is nothing inaccurate about the maps at all, historically. Goldberg maintained that the Palestinians' 'original sin' was rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan. But since Ben Gurion and other expansionists went on to grab more territory later in history, it is not clear that the Palestinians could have avoided being occupied even if they had given away willingly so much of their country in 1947. The first original sin was the contradictory and feckless pledge by the British to sponsor Jewish immigration into their Mandate in Palestine, which they wickedly and fantastically promised would never inconvenience the Palestinians in any way. It was the same kind of original sin as the French policy of sponsoring a million colons in French Algeria, or the French attempt to create a Christian-dominated Lebanon where the Christians would be privileged by French policy. The second original sin was the refusal of the United States to allow Jews to immigrate in the 1930s and early 1940s, which forced them to go to Palestine to escape the monstrous, mass-murdering Nazis.

The map attracted so much ire and controversy not because it is inaccurate but because it clearly shows what has been done to the Palestinians, which the League of Nations had recognized as not far from achieving statehood in its Covenant. Their statehood and their territory has been taken from them, and they have been left stateless, without citizenship and therefore without basic civil and human rights. The map makes it easy to see this process. The map had to be stigmatized and made taboo. But even if that marginalization of an image could be accomplished, the squalid reality of Palestinian statelessness would remain, and the children of Gaza would still be being malnourished by the deliberate Israeli policy of blockading civilians. The map just points to a powerful reality; banishing the map does not change that reality.

Goldberg, according to Spencer Ackerman, says that he will stop replying to Andrew Sullivan, for which Ackerman is grateful, since, he implies, Goldberg is a propagandistic hack who loves to promote wars on flimsy pretenses. Matthew Yglesias also has some fun at Goldberg's expense.

People like Goldberg never tell us what they expect to happen to the Palestinians in the near and medium future. They don't seem to understand that the status quo is untenable. They are like militant ostriches, hiding their heads in the sand while lashing out with their hind talons at anyone who stares clear-eyed at the problem, characterizing us as bigots. As if that old calumny has any purchase for anyone who knows something serious about the actual views of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, more bigoted persons than whom would be difficult to find. Indeed, some of Israel's current problems with Brazil come out of Lieberman's visit there last summer; I was in Rio then and remember the distaste with which the multi-cultural, multi-racial Brazilians viewed Lieberman, whom some openly called a racist.


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Jacoby: US Withdrawal on Schedule; Al-Maliki's party has strong showing in Basra; Al-Maliki said Convinced he can retain Prime Ministership

Al-Hayat [Life] is reporting in Arabic that Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby now says that the US military withdrawal from Iraq is on schedule and that only 50,000 US troops will be in the country by the end of August. He also affirmed that the Iraqi military and police are now capable of keeping order in Iraq, saying that the role they played in providing security during the March 7 elections shows that they have made a big advance in their capabilities.

The Obama administration is eager to get out of Iraq militarily, and so far is experiencing good luck insofar as security has improved, and the civil war has subsided.

The parliamentary election has also not developed into an obstacle to withdrawal. Indeed, it is likely to produce a government that looks somewhat like that of summer, 2006, with Nuri al-Maliki again prime minister and a national unity cabinet with representation for the Shiite fundamentalist parties and for the secular Sunni-Shiite coalition of Iyad Allawi. It will take weeks or months to cobble this 'alliance of rivals' together, since government ministries are given out as inducements, and there is wrangling over who gets what. (Iraq operates by the 'spoils system' common in the 19th century US, whereby victorious parties get to hire their party workers to staff government jobs in the ministries they control).

That al-Maliki is likely to get a second term has pros and cons for Washington. The pros are that there will be continuity in Iraqi politics, that al-Maliki has gotten control of the armed forces and will remain in control, and that while he has good relations with Iran, he is not as close to Tehran as some of the fundamentalist Shiite parties in the Iraqi National Alliance. The cons are that al-Maliki has shown little interest in reconciliation with secular, Arab nationalist Sunnis, that he has cultivated tribal militias loyal to himself, and that he has not shown very much interest in or capacity for starting and speeding along projects key to Iraq's economic infrastructure. Washington would no doubt prefer to have an anti-Iran prime minister like Allawi, and one less hostile to Israel.

Al-Hayat also says that the Independent High Electoral Commission in Iraq has released further partial results from the March 7 parliamentary election, showing that the State of Law coalition of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is substantially ahead in Basra, with the fundamentalist religious parties of the Iraqi National Alliance coming in second in the southern Shiite oil port. (See also the numbers below).

Al-Maliki's coalition is also said to be leading by a good margin in Baghdad province (where it had won 38% in last year's provincial elections). This assertion is contested, however, by political commentator Hazim al-Na'imi, who expects Baghdad in the end to divide its vote in almost equal thirds among al-Maliki's coalition and its two major allies. Al-Hayat says that with 60% of the vote counted, Baghdad has returned 158,763 votes for al-Maliki's party, 108,126 for the Shiite Iraqi National Alliance, and 104,810 for Allawi's secular Iraqiya.

Al-Hayat says its sources close to al-Maliki report that he has become convinced that he will remain prime minister, insofar as his coalition defeated the Iraqi National Alliance, Shiite parties close to Iran, among the 60% of the population that is Shiite Muslim.

The National Iraqi List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi, which has attracted a lot of Sunni Arab votes along with those of secular-minded Shiites, is coming in third after the Shiite fundamentalists, but only by a small margin.

Although Allawi's secular party has largely supplanted the Sunni fundamentalist party, the Iraqi National Accord (Tawafuq), the members of the cabinet will likely be somewhat similar to those of past Iraqi governments.

Reader Harmis4 helpfully writes in:

"Results as Sunday 7PM EST

The IHEC has released election PDF files of 10 provinces on it's website. Perhaps 10% of the national vote is listed. The combined totals and the estimated seat distribution based on Iraqi Electoral Law and the partial totals are as follows.

State of Law - 345,005 57 Seats

Iraqi National Movement - 290,724 58 seats

Iraqi National Alliance - 276,403 48 seats

Kurdistan Alliance - 130,409 14 seats

Iraq Unity Coalition 31,150 4 seats

Iraq Accordance - 30,360 9 seats

Change - 22,948 2 seats

Kurdistan Islamic Group - 12,511 1 seat

Islamic Union of Kurdistan - 11,173 1 seat

Others 70,085 0 seats

Total: 1,220,768 194 of 310 regular seats.

More of the mainly Sunni Provinces are in in than the Shia or Kurd.

Based on these results the final seat totals may look something like this.

Rule of Law - Maliki - 90 to 95 Seats

National Movement - Allawi/Hashimi 80 Seats

Iraq National Alliance - Hakim/Sadr
75 to 80 seats

Kurdistan Alliance - Talabani/Barzani 40 seats

Small Parties - 75 Seats including 8 religious minority seats"

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