Pat Lang seems to think so. This may be a case of cry wolf. No one believes it anymore, because it hasn’t happened despite warnings yet.
But remember, when the boy cried wolf the second time there was a wolf.
We’ll see.
Category: Middle East Page 19 of 21
Latest victim is Octavia Nasr, who tweeted:
“Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah… One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot.”
Hezbollah, of course, are designated terrorists by the US state department, for the 1983 bombing of marine barracks in Lebanon.
Two things about that attack:
- Marine barracks are, by any definition, legitimate targets of war.
- Do you know why they attacked a military target? Because the US shelled Shia villages in Lebanon.
Let me emphasize, Hezbollah attacked a military target, killing soldiers, in retaliation for US attacks on defenseless civilians.
Now that doesn’t mean I agree with everything Hezbollah does, they’ve done some real terrorist attacks. But they have a policy against terrorist attacks against Americans and have for a long time. Certainly they have killed far fewer civilians than either the US or Israel.
As for Fadlallah and Nasr, her own words say it best:
I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam…
It is no secret that Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah hated with a vengeance the United States government and Israel. He regularly praised the terror attacks that killed Israeli citizens. And as recently as 2008, he said the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust were wildly inflated.
But it was his commitment to Hezbollah’s original mission – resisting Israel’s occupation of Lebanon – that made him popular and respected among many Lebanese, not just people of his own sect.
She further notes that as he got older, he actually spoke out against Hezbollah and hardline Iranian clerics:
In later years, Hezbollah’s leadership apparently did not like Fadlallah’s vocal criticism of Hezbollah’s allegiance to Iran. Nor did they like his assertions that Hezbollah’s leaders had been distracted from resistance to Israeli occupation of portions of Lebanon and had turned weapons against their own people.
At first, he was simply pushed to the side, but later wasn’t even referred to as a Hezbollah member. Rather, he was referred to as the scholar – the expert on Islam – but nothing more. During the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, his honorary title “Sayyed” – indicating that he’s a descendant of the prophet – was dropped any time he was mentioned on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and other Hezbollah media outlets.
None of this is to say he was a “good guy”, but he was certainly no more evil than a man who launched a pre-emptive war based on lies against a country which was no threat to his own country, killing hundreds of thousands and making millions homeless.
It’s not that journalists can’t have opinions, it’s that they can only have approved opinions, or at least they can only admit to approved opinions.
Intentional, or a side effect?
In the last war, much of the fighting took place on open scrubland, Merli said. But the deployment of United Nations forces in southern Lebanon had forced Hezbollah into built up areas where troops from the international UNIFIL force have no authority.
Not good. Note that Hezbollah fought outside built up areas for military reasons: they felt they were more effective there, because outside of population centers they were also away from informants. UNIFIL’s mission means the next war will be fought in population centers.
Somehow that does not seem to be something a UN peacekeeping operation should be ensuring.
Look, enough. Let me lay it out really simply for the dense.
The Palestinians did not deserve to be colonized, displaced and turned into 2nd class citizens in their own land because Europeans tried to kill off the Jewish people.
The morality here is the same as the morality of Iraq and 9/11. “Well, some folks attacked us, so we’re going to use it as an excuse to beat the shit out of someone who was completely uninvolved.”
Telling the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to “go back to Poland” is outrageous. I received a “defense” of Thomas’s remark from a leftwing blogger who suggested that if HE were a refugee in World War II he would not have wanted to live in Israel. Not helpful. Going back to 1948 — let alone suggesting the repatriation of the descendants of European Jews to the countries that annihilated them — is as absurd as it is hideous.
Oh really, is Germany or Poland as bad a place to be a Jew as Gaza or the West Bank are to be a Palestinian? Why, exactly, did Western nations pay for their sins by giving Jews a nation in the Middle East instead of, say, a chunk of Germany and Poland? Why take from, why punish, those who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
Is it really as bad to be told to go back to a first world nation where you would have full citizenship, as it is to be forced to live in a slum where you have no rights, can be starved at will, can’t travel as you choose, can have your house bulldozed and your farm destroyed? Is it really so “hideous”?
Of course it isn’t.
The fundamental truth of Israel’s existence is that it is a settler nation in the modern world. Yes, there have been plenty of them, including Canada, the US and virtually every nation in the Americas, but is that an excuse to do it again? To not learn from the past? To turn our heads and say “well, too bad for the Palestinians, because we Western nations need to expiate our sins, and we intend to make them pay for what we did wrong? And hey, whatever, it’s not as bad as what we did to the American Indians, so the Palestinians should just suck it up?”
Obama wanted Helen Thomas gone because she had a habit of asking questions he hated. She was a fool to walk right into it, but hey, someone who was the soul of discretion wouldn’t have asked the questions over the years Helen asked.
You want eunuchs in the White House press corp? This is how you get them.
As with Helen Thomas when asked what she thought about Israel. “I think they should get the hell out of Palestine.”
Israel is a colonial power occupying a land whose population was, prior to their getting rid of many of them, majority non-Jewish. This is why “right of return” is a non-starter, because if all the people pushed out of Israel were allowed to return…
The general assumption has been that if push comes to shove between Israel and Turkey, that NATO allies will not support Turkey, and that the US will supply Israel, but not supply Turkey.
I wonder if those two things are both true.
It’s interesting to note that Britain, normally a staunch Israeli ally, in response to the attack on the aid flotilla in international waters called for an end to the Gaza blockade. As with both Turkey and Israel’s actions, one imagines this may be driven by domestic political concerns. To put it simply, Britain has a lot more Muslim citizens than Jewish ones, and England’s Jewish residents tend to be liberal and unlikely to become radicalized and blow things up. Electorally, helping Palestinians may be a winner.
In the US, AIPAC and the Jewish lobby are generally considered amongst America’s strongest lobbies. But it’s worth putting in perspective—when George Bush senior tackled AIPAC, he crushed them. The vast majority of likely Democratic voters aren’t that sympathetic to Israel. And to mess with Israel, all Obama has to do is stop protecting it at the UN, which is completely under his control, and not preferentially ship supplies to Israel in the case of a crisis, something which is also 100% inside the executive’s purview.
Obama has been snippy with the Israelis in the past, as when new settlements were announced during vice-President Biden’s visit. While it’s hard to read Obama, I think it’s clear that he hasn’t appreciated the way Israel has taken the US’s support for granted.
And hey, changing the conversation from the BP oil spill can only be good.
I also don’t think it’s clear that Israel can use its nukes on Turkey without any other nuclear power threatening retaliation. Glassing a major metropolis is not something likely to make Britain, the US or France happy. In the US the idea of using nukes seems to occasion something of a yawn, but in the rest of the world it is the ultimate taboo.
Likewise, I’m not entirely sure that if Israel attacks Turkey’s military vessels in support of what may soon be considered an illegal blockade of Gaza, that other NATO nations won’t back Turkey up if it responds with a naval blockade of its own. In particular, I’m not sure that the new British government comes in on Israel’s side, nor am I sure France does. And either of those nations is more than capable of slapping Israel around if Israel gets too big for its britches.
Israel’s been pissing off its friends for a long time now. This particular attack seems to have been done for domestic political reasons, and was a deliberate flouting of international law, a slap in the face “you won’t do anything about this, we can do whatever we want.”
Works, until it doesn’t. I don’t know if Israel has crossed the line, but I think it may have. For Britain, in particular, to come out with a statement calling for the end of the Gaza blockade is not a small thing.
All of which is a long way of saying, I’m not so sure the US, and particularly Britain, will automatically support Israel in any confrontation with Turkey.
If they actually do this, it is the very definition of throwing down.
Wow.
Does Israel want a war with Turkey? They can’t win it, short of using nukes, and Turkey is a NATO member, if Israel attacks NATO ships, Turkey can invoke Article V (in fact, they can invoke it already, since the ships were attacked by a non NATO power on the high seas.) If Turkey does so, of course NATO nations will refuse, but doing so will break NATO.
This is high stakes.
Update: I might add that in the case of a war between Turkey and Israel, if Turkey is serious, unless Israel uses nukes, my money is on the Turks. They have a huge armored corp, and the nations between Israel and Turkey aren’t going to say no if Turkey asks for access (because if they do, Turkey will just roll right through them.) Also if Turkey and Israel goes to war, it’s at least 50/50 the Egypt jumps in as well.
Israel is really playing with fire on this one.
Update 2: See Sean-Paul’s comments on the domestic reasons of Turkey’s reaction, and what the death of the Israeli/Turkish Entente means.
Update 3: See this analysis (h/t Pogge) for the legalities. Short of it is that if the act wasn’t rogue, then this was an act of war, not an act of piracy.
As news comes in that Israeli commandos, boarding a relief flotilla for Gaza, have killed 10 to 16 peace activists, it’s worth reviewing the situation Israel finds itself in.
First, Israel is a state about half of whose population, the Palestinians, have restricted economic and political rights. This is true both of muslim citizens and those Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza. I count them as under Israeli rule because when Israel controls their ability to exit or enter the country, bulldozes their houses at will, decides if they can import food and medicine, arrests “cabinet members” at will, determines where and when Palestinians can go, what the curfews are, and so on, it is clear that Israel rules them.
This makes West Bank communities (which are divided from themselves) and Gaza effectively South African bantustans, where non-citizen residents are forced to reside. And that means that Israel, is, yes, effectively an apartheid state, different from South Africa in the eighties only in that a smaller proportion of the population are second class citizens confined to ghettos.
Population is, of course, the key to understanding the Israeli situation. Not only are Palestinians outbreeding Israelis, so that they will soon be the majority of the population, but within the Israeli population proper, right wing religious Jews are outbreeding their more secular brethren. This is leading to a hardening within the voting population, and a higher tolerance for violence and crackdowns, at the same time as the Jewish population feels itself more and more beleagured.
Population is also at the core of the resource problem, or, to be more specific, the water problem. There is a limited amount of water in Palestine, and as the population increases, there are fears that there isn’t enough. A viable Palestinian state would require more water than Israel wants to give up, for very good reasons.
Another important demographic issue is that given how young their population is almost every living Palestinian has never known anything but Israeli occupation. This is less true of Israelis, but still, any Israeli who isn’t closing in on 50 probably doesn’t remember a time when Israel wasn’t occupying a hostile population.
Demographic realities lead to one conclusion: if things keep going on as they are now, in two generations Israel will e so clearly an apartheid state, with the vast majority of the population powerless Palestinians without a vote, that no one will be able to pretend otherwise, either inside or outside the country.
Since Israel’s identity is as a specifically Jewish state, that is, one based on religious and ethnic identity (many Jews don’t recognize converts) that will mean that Jews will rule over a population mainly made up of non Jews.
This is, in a sense, a modern Sparta, an outnumbered ethnicity ruling over numerous Helots. It is unlikely the rest of the world will tolerate it, and it is an unstable state for a nation with democratic aspirations.
The status quo thus ends, most likely, in a single state solution. The Palestinians are given the vote, as the blacks were in South Africa, and the state of Israel as a Jewish state, ends. Those who find the idea of one ethnicity or religion ruling over others may not find this end particularly tragic.
However this end-state is anathema to most Israelis, who believe that Israel should be a state based on religious ethnicity. If they are unwilling to accept it, then there are two options available to them to avoid that fate.
First, they can try and come to a two-state solution. This has been the status quo preferred solution for a couple decades now, but it seems more and more unlikey. The number of settlers in the West Bank goes up every year, as does the continued ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem of undesirable Muslims. The facts on the ground say very clearly that the Israeli government does not want a two-state solution, and is not acting to achieve one. However, as the situation becomes more intolerable, they may come to see the situation otherwise.
Any Israeli Prime Minister who acts on this will take his life in his hands. Right wing settlers have already assassinated one Prime Minister, and there is no reason to believe they would hesitate to do it again. Furthermore the Israeli military has become infected by right wing religious Judaism, with right wing Rabbis, in the last incursion into Israel, telling soldiers that killing Palestinians was their religious duty. This influence is likely to only grow stronger the more time goes on, and by the time a Prime Minister feels he must make a deal, or else, the military may no longer be willing to obey orders.
The ability to make a two-state deal is thus likely to decline over time, even as the necessity to do so increases.
The third solution set is to simply remove all Palestinians from the occupied territories. This doesn’t mean genocide, this just means shoving them out into neighbouring nations, and letting them worry about the Palestinians. This will turn Israel into a pariah state, but it will give them control of a good portion of Greater Israel without having to worry about pesky Palestinians, and while the neighbouring nations won’t like it, Israel has nukes, so who cares what they think?
These seem to me to be the three most likely endgames for Israel – the end of the Jewish ethnic state in a one state solution, a two-state compromise, or the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine and the creation of a Greater Israel which is Jewish, and a pariah state.
It’s hard to anticipate which solution will be chosen, but I think the single state or the cleansing of Palestinians are the most likely end-games at this point. The two-state solution is unlikely to occur, since making it occur would cost an Israeli PM his life and might not be allowed by the army.
One might object that a single-state is unlikely for the same reasons, but single-state is the long term solution. When population numbers become 80/20 Palestinian/Jewish you either have to ethnic cleanse or give up, the status quo will be intoldrable. The two-state solution is what occurs before then.
I don’t hold out a lot of hope for a pretty solution in Israel/Palestine, or a solution in the near term. Could be I’m wrong, and I hope I am, but it seems unlikely.