Haggai  Apr 21 2008 - 9:52am   

This isn't the biggest deal in the world, and with everyone anticipating the Pennsylvania vote tomorrow, I doubt anyone's paying attention to it. But Obama, in response to a question about Jimmy Carter meeting with Hamas, said the following yesterday:

"I actually disagree with him on his meeting with Hamas," Obama said... "On the other hand, what I also disagree with is a habit of American presidents which is every president in their last year, they finally decide, we're going to try to broker a peace deal," Obama added. "Bill Clinton did it in his last year and he ran out of time. George Bush tried to do it."

This is a pretty dishonest equivalence he's drawing. The most salient point is that Clinton's presidency began just before Israel and the Palestinians agreed to direct negotiations with each other for the first time in the entire history of the conflict. The Oslo accords specified a five-year "transitional period" starting from the first negotiated withdrawal of Israeli forces, which ended up happening in May of '94 (this was the "Gaza-Jericho" interim agreement). Permanent status negotiations were supposed to begin no later than the beginning of the third year of the five year interim period, i.e. May of '96, with a final deadline of May '99. So how, exactly, was Bill Clinton supposed to "broker a peace deal" during his first year in office?

Let me get more specific about what happened before moving on to Bush. Israel and the Palestinians signed another overall interim agreement ("Oslo II") in September of '95, which re-affirmed the negotiating deadlines I mentioned above. After Rabin was assassinated in November of '95, Peres went into May of '96 (deadline for the start of permanent status talks) seeking a mandate in the election which was held that month. He lost to Netanyahu, who immediately moved to put any permanent status talks on ice. After some fits and starts in more interim talks, the "Wye River Memorandum" agreement of November '98 again re-affirmed the May '99 deadline for reaching a final agreement. When that date came around, there was, once again, an Israeli election, with Barak defeating Netanyahu that very month. It was only at that point that final status talks began in earnest, which eventually led to the Camp David summit and everything that followed.

So how, exactly, was Bill Clinton supposed to have "brokered a peace deal" before the parties themselves had reached the specific timetable that they had agreed upon between themselves? This isn't to exonerate Clinton of any and all criticism; one could argue that on a tactical level, they could have tried harder to keep the negotiations on track during the interim periods (Dennis Ross himself has essentially admitted as much), or maybe that they should have pushed harder for progress under the recalcitrant Netanyahu (on the other hand, such pressure might only have strengthened his position with a terror-weary Israeli electorate). In any event, I simply don't think it's reasonable at all to blame Bill Clinton for having "finally decide[d]" in his last year to try to broker a deal, as Obama said.

Regarding Bush, the record is quite different. It's true that he entered office with the peace process having collapsed into violence, and with a hard-line Israeli prime minister having just been elected in a historically massive landslide (Sharon defeated Barak by 25 points only two weeks after Bush's inauguration). So the atmosphere was hardly conducive to successful peace-making. However, as I noted here, Bush simply did not think that active U.S. involvement in negotiations was the right policy when he took office. Of course, anyone with even a passing familiarity in the conflict (and an honest desire to see it resolved) knew that the outbreak of the intifada and the apparent collapse of the entire Oslo framework had opened up a dangerous vacuum, and this was only going to lead to much worse violence unless something replaced it, which could only happen with assertive U.S. leadership. But that wasn't how Bush saw it, and Powell didn't try very hard to convince him otherwise, so things just kept getting worse.

So the overall point here is that it simply isn't fair at all to draw an equivalence between the fact that both Bush and Clinton have attemped to broker a final peace deal only in the last year of their two-term presidencies. Obama probably knows that and was just trying to score some more points by linking the Clintons to Bush and "old-style politics" or whatever. Obama has faced plenty of unfair or tendentious attacks directly from the Clintons, but his more enthusiastic defenders should probably realize that stuff like this is bound to annoy the Clintons in a big way, and that they're perfectly justified in taking umbrage at Bill's record being characterized unfairly by a fellow Democrat.

Haggai  Mar 11 2008 - 3:38pm  Bush Administration  Middle East  United States Armed Forces   

What's this all about? First he denies the article which says that he disagrees with the administration on Iran and might be replaced because of it...and then he resigns and blames the article?

Haggai  Mar 4 2008 - 3:04pm  Bush Administration  Israel  Palestine   

As a smart person says here, regarding the David Rose Vanity Fair article on Gaza, "[Calling this story a "Bombshell" is] kind of a silly claim, since it was reported at the time and the Bush administration made little attempt to hide its plan." People who are freaking out about this need to step back and think things through a bit. More below the jump.

Haggai  Jan 15 2008 - 3:09pm   

An amusing detail in this column that's new to me is the name of the British government's emergency command center: COBRA.  It's just an acronym for the mundanely titled Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, but many American males around my age who grew up watching cartoons on TV will automatically associate that term with the arch-villain organization* on G.I. Joe.  Was Tony Blair using that command center for the secret development of a Weather Dominator, or for plotting to clone a super-leader from the DNA of long-dead historical figures to lead a new campaign of global conquest?

*You sure can learn a lot from Wikipedia.  Who would ever have known that Destro was Scottish?

Haggai  Nov 1 2007 - 1:28pm  Department of Defense  Terrorism   

Robin Wright's article about Rumsfeld's internal memos to his staff over the last few years of his tenure in the Bush administration details some unsurprising things--he would get angry about critical articles and request staff-written responses, which I'm sure is par for the course for publicly prominent cabinet members--but also a couple of sentences that register extremely high on the "WTF?" scale (my emphasis added below):

In one of his longer ruminations, in May 2004, Rumsfeld considered whether to redefine the terrorism fight as a "worldwide insurgency." The goal of the enemy, he wrote, is to "end the state system, using terrorism, to drive the non-radicals from the world." He then advised aides "to test what the results could be" if the war on terrorism were renamed.

Neither Europe nor the United Nations understands the threat or the bigger picture, Rumsfeld complained in the same memo. He also lamented that oil wealth has at times detached Muslims "from the reality of the work, effort and investment that leads to wealth for the rest of the world. Too often Muslims are against physical labor, so they bring in Koreans and Pakistanis while their young people remain unemployed," he wrote. "An unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism."

I'm not sure what to say about "too often Muslims are against physical labor" besides "WTF?" And then he compounds that by observing that these same anti-physical-labor Muslims take care of that problem by bringing in workers from a country where over 96% of the population are Muslims.

By the standards of that insanely misinformed sentence, the one about "an unemployed population is easy to recruit to radicalism" registers as trenchant sociological analysis. Of course, it happens to be almost completely false, though I guess the ol' SecDef was in better company in making that claim than he was in opining that Muslims think physical labor is icky and therefore import other Muslims to do it for them.

Haggai  Oct 8 2007 - 10:35am  Congress  Israel  White House   

So get ready for an endless post on our old friends, Mearsheimer and Walt. In what follows, I’ll adopt a few abbreviations for shorthand: “TL” stands for “The Lobby” (in the authors’ sense of the phrase), “LRB” is the London Review of Books article that led to their book, and “M&W” are the authors themselves.

First of all, some disclaimers. As anyone even vaguely familiar with my thoughts on the subject knows, I’m far from a fan of the current U.S. administration’s Israel policy, and in ways that are often similar to some of the arguments presented by M&W. I agree with most of what Daniel Levy says in his review of the book, particularly his perceptive argument that “the neocons co-opted the Israel lobby, and Israel itself, to their own vision of regional transformation. This is more PNAC than AIPAC. Still, most of the Israel lobby were willing accomplices, and this represents their historic error.” I also concur with his advice that “liberal American Jews who care about Israel…[should end] the outsourcing contract with neocons and right-wing evangelicals.”

To a fairly significant degree, this puts me in agreement with M&W’s positions on the Bush administration and the loudly right-wing voices within what they characterize as “The Lobby.” It seems to me that many people out there have decided that this (and the unjustified screams of anti-Semitism from some of the usual suspects on the right, plus some slightly less than usual suspects who should know better than to use that accusation lightly) constitutes sufficient grounds for defending the book. But—a very important but (to quote one of my favorite movies)—I still think this is a bad book.

Even some of M&W’s defenders have conceded flaws in some of the book’s key arguments, especially its characterization of the Iraq war as being driven by TL. I’ll attempt to go through what I see as some other significant problems with the book’s arguments, relative to Israel-specific policies (more below the break).

Haggai  Sep 2 2007 - 9:40am  Bush Administration  White House   

Forget Commander in Chief, Decider in Chief, or what have you. In the interview discussed here, we seem to have gotten a glimpse of The Dude in Chief:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, "The policy was to keep the army intact; didn't happen."

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush's former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army's dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, "Yeah, I can't remember, I'm sure I said, 'This is the policy, what happened?' " But, he added, "Again, Hadley's got notes on all of this stuff," referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

As Steve Benen observes:

Let's not brush past this too quickly. The disbanding of the Iraqi army was one of the biggest mistakes of an administration burdened by near-constant missteps, one that was largely responsible for the creation of an Iraqi insurgency. On the subject, Bush sounds like a confused child -- he didn't understand the decision, he's not sure how the decision was made, and asked for his reaction to the decision, Bush is left to conclude, "Yeah, I can't remember."

But The Dude abides. Or perhaps, to quote Walter Sobchak, "You have no frame of reference here, Donny. You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know..."

In the interview, Bush actually did (unintentionally, one assumes) reveal a thoroughly clear understanding of the fact that the surge is his policy, not Petraeus', unlike much of the rhetoric we've heard for months:

[Bush] otherwise addressed his unpopularity as a tactical issue. For instance, in May he said that this fall it would be up to General Petraeus to convince the public that the Iraq strategy is working.

“I’ve been here too long,” Mr. Bush said, according to Mr. Draper. “Every time I start painting a rosy picture, it gets criticized and then it doesn’t make it on the news.”

So once Petraeus testifies to Congress, I guess the White House could just play this clip over and over instead of having Bush make any more statements:

Look, man, I've got certain information, all right? Certain things have come to light. And, you know, has it ever occurred to you, that, instead of, uh, you know, running around, uh, uh, blaming me, you know, given the nature of all this new shit, you know, I-I-I-I... this could be a-a-a-a lot more, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, complex, I mean, it's not just, it might not be just such a simple... uh, you know?

Haggai  Aug 4 2007 - 12:49pm  Congress  Israel  Saudi Arabia   

I wanted to chime in on the news of the increased arms sales to the Middle East. It does seem to be a pretty dubious policy, but I just want to mention a couple of previous instances where similar things happened, even without the Bush administration's unusual indifference to diplomacy.

As detailed in Steven Spiegel's historical overview of US Middle East policy, the most similar precedent to the new arms deal was Jimmy Carter's "triple arms sale" of 1978, where fighter jets were sold to three countries simultaneously: F-15s to Saudi Arabia, F-15s and F-16s to Israel, and F-5Es to Egypt. The sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia were already in the pipeline when Carter came into office, as a result of negotiations that Kissinger had supervised under Ford. For instance, the impending sale to Israel partially grew out of the Kissinger-mediated negotiations that had produced the "Sinai II" agreement between Israel and Egypt that built on the disengagement following the October 1973 war. Apparently Carter was initially opposed to selling the planes to the Saudis, but:

[V]arious bureaucratic studies urged the Saudi sale. When Carter travelled to Saudi Arabia in January 1978, he had found the Saudis nervous because of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem [in November 1977]. They had pleaded for the planes and Carter acquiesced. Finally, the Egyptians sought 120 F-5Es as a reward for cutting themselves off from the Soviet Union since 1973 and creating the peace initiative.

Carter decided to resolve all those issues simultaneously: he presented a deal to Congress to sell the various jets to all three of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, all as part of one package that would have to be accepted entirely or rejected entirely. The Israel lobby sprang into action to try to block the sale to the Saudis, but about three months later, the deal passed the Senate by a vote of 54-44. The administration's arguments won them enough support to get the deal passed, but their predictive power wasn't so hot, as Spiegel points out:

Proponents of the sale argued that it would increase Riyadh's confidence in the United States, encourage Saudi support for the peace process, and lead to decisions keeping oil production high and prices low. The argument proved effective but not prophetic, for within a year the Saudis opposed Camp David and helped triple oil prices.

Another controversial Middle East arms sale that followed just a few years later was Reagan's sale of five AWACS aircraft to the Saudis, in his first year in office. Israel and AIPAC were vehemently opposed, but the sale ended up going through. This Haaretz article from a few days ago says it was the Saudis and the oil lobby that played the decisive role:

On October 26, 1981, The New York Times did an inventory count: The paper discovered that 53 senators opposed the sale of AWACS espionage planes to Saudi Arabia and only 38 were in favor of the proposed deal. Nearly two weeks earlier, Newsweek had reported that the Saudi deal would probably "become [President Ronald] Reagan's first major foreign policy defeat." The magazine said that the likely outcome of the vote would be a "humiliation." Those two weeks proved an illuminating lesson in the Saudis' juggling ability in Washington's power games. On October 28, two days after the Times published its count, 52 senators voted for the deal, 48 voted against.

The chairman of an American concern persuaded Sen. Orrin Hatch; the CEO of Union Pacific, the railway company, spoke with Senators Jim Exon and Edward Zorinsky, from Nebraska; the oil companies put pressure on Senator David Boren, from Oklahoma.

On the other hand, Spiegel credits the Reagan administration with getting the sale pushed through:

Proponents of the sale promoted the slogan, "It's Reagan or Begin." Indeed, the president himself suggested at a 1 October press conference, "It is not the business of other nations to make America's foreign policy." The slam on Israel and its supporters was clear...the scales were tipped in favor of the AWACS sale by the president's forceful intervention. Without him, opponents of the sale would certainly have won.

So, I guess my point in all of this is just to point out that this type of sale is not uniquely a Bush thing. Even an administration as wrapped up in diplomacy as Carter's was willing to pursue a controversial arms sale to both Israel and Saudi Arabia, in the midst of what turned out to be the most successful achievement in the history of America's Middle East diplomacy (although it failed to gain any support from the Saudis). Reagan also pushed through a similar sale before getting militarily involved in the region at all--the Lebanon intervention was still more than a year away. These two previous sales also demonstrate that as powerful as "The Lobby" has been for many years, it doesn't win when a president is determined to fight it on any one particular issue. Indeed, Teh Lobby has never managed to prevent a major arms sale to any Arab country. So Bush probably just wanted to minimize any potential problems he might face in getting the sale through, and since he's basically sympathetic to the more militarist line of thinking vis-a-vis Israel anyway, bumping up U.S. arms sales to Israel obviously isn't something he sees any problem with.

Is it good policy? It doesn't seem like it. U.S. gains from those previous arms sales to the Saudis did not materialize in the way that their proponents predicted, and there are plenty of reasons to doubt those same arguments today. But it didn't spring out of a vacuum, and it's not unprecedented for administrations of hugely divergent ideological outlooks to try the same thing.

Haggai  Jun 16 2007 - 1:00pm  Palestine   

In this post, I'm going to argue differences with a few other posts from other blogs about Gaza and where to go from here, first in order to point out some important principles that I think are being overlooked in many corners, before coming to my own "what should be done" conclusion. The rest is below the break.

Haggai  Jun 11 2007 - 11:18pm  Foreign Affairs  Israel  Senate   

Here are some thoughts about Ken Baer's article that misquoted Ezra, and without saying much of anything in particular about what U.S. policy vis-a-vis Iran should be. Baer quotes from recently declassified Senate Foreign Relations Committee transcripts in the run-up to the Six Day War, attempting to draw an analogy between the potential threat from Iran against Israel today and the threats facing Israel in that crisis. He argues for a connection on the basis of analyzing "how American foreign policy works under the weight of a foreign adventure gone horribly wrong," and he ends up urging progressives "not [to] use anger at one war as an excuse to blink when confronting a future threat head on." I think there's a different analogy to be made between the events surrounding the Six Day War and Iran today, which I'll detail later, probably in another post. But for now...(more after the break)

Haggai  Mar 31 2007 - 1:37pm  Foreign Affairs  Israel  Palestine   

So do we have a "debate" on Israel policy in America? On the substance of the issue, the answer is actually "yes," and it has been for the last several years, even if a lot of the people who constantly pine for "debate" haven't bothered to notice. I'm going to trace a few instances of that in this post.

Ever since the collapse of Oslo with the intifada and the election of Sharon in late 2000/early 2001, all roads to a "new" Israeli-Palestinian policy for America have led inevitably in the same direction. Oslo was predicated on the concepts of interim steps and confidence-building measures that would eventually lead to final status talks at the end of the process. The only peace-process-type framework that's been put forward by the Bush administration, the "road-map," isn't very different from that at all, aside from the interim tactic of a "provisional" Palestinian state (which I blogged about a couple of months ago). But with pretty much any and all mutual trust having been destroyed by the events of the last 7 years, and for various other reasons related to the leadership situation on both sides, the chances that the two parties could reach a mutual acommodation in face-to-face talks is practically nil. So, almost by definition, the cornerstone of any genuinely new approach to trying to end the conflict has to change the sequence of "interim steps first, final status issues last" in a fundamental way, i.e., reversing them. This means that a final status package would be on the table from the beginning, with the rest of the process being devoted to implementing it, as opposed to the familiar sequence of interim/cease-fire/hudna/confidence-building what-have-you at the beginning that then (theoretically) lays the groundwork for final status negotiations.

The foundation of any such implementation would have to be a concerted international effort at keeping the two parties locked into the framework, with no back-door escape routes. Somewhat along those lines, MY recently linked to an op-ed in Ha'aretz by Shlomo Ben-Ami (Barak's foreign minister at Camp David and afterwards) about attempting to strike a final status deal based on the Clinton parameters and the Saudi initiative. New idea, right? Not so much. There was a NY Times op-ed along very similar lines five years ago, written by...Shlomo Ben-Ami:

The poor record of observance of agreements in this process shows that a multinational peacekeeping force and strict mechanisms of implementation and monitoring are required. It can be argued that the Oslo accords collapsed because they lacked such mechanisms, relying instead on the desperately diminishing asset of mutual trust...

The concept of interim agreements -- in principle a reasonable means of restoring trust -- has run its course and is no longer valid. But both Israelis and Palestinians are afraid, indeed incapable, of taking a step toward a reasonable final compromise. Only the international community under assertive and resolute American leadership can coax them into crossing the chasm together in one big step.

People interested in pithy bon-mots can note that he characterized this proposed shift from a bilateral negotiating process to an internationally supervised one as moving from "the peace of the brave" to "the peace of the exhausted."

On the question of whether this approach could generate enough support to work, at least in Israel, Ben-Ami wrote the following in his recent book:

The government is incapable of responding to the popular yearnings for peace. For, regardless of party loyalties and according to most studies, the overwhelming majority of Israelis would support a peace settlement that is based on the Clinton parameters -- two states, withdrawal from territories, massive dismantling of settlements, two capitals in Jerusalem -- but they trust neither their political system nor, of course, the Palestinian leadership to come to an accomodation on that basis. Which may explain the results of a poll conducted in 2002 by the Steinmetz Centre for Peace at Tel Aviv University indicating that, convinced of the incapacity of their political system to produce solutions, 67 percent of Israeli Jews would support an American effort to recruit an international alliance that would coax the parties into endorsing such a settlement.

Also note in that poll that when words like "imposed" settlement got thrown around, support within Israel dropped to around the mid 40s. I haven't seen any more recent polling on questions like this, but my educated guess is that similar results would be true today. But what would be the difference between an "imposed" and a "coaxed" settlement? At this point, I'll just observe that this is the sort of thing that requires what some would call "diplomacy."

An even more ambitious proposal for resolving the conflict was spelled out in Martin Indyk's May 2003 Foreign Affairs article, where he presented a fairly detailed approach for a "trusteeship" that would aim to reconstitute the Palestinian Authority in the territories under international supervision, under the umbrella of a final status package much like the Clinton paramters. For various reasons, I doubt that this specific approach would be workable today (and Indyk might agree)--just a few of the key things that have changed since the time of that article are the death of Arafat, the passing of Sharon from the political scene, the election of Hamas, the Gaza withdrawal, the Lebanon war, and the collapse of support for involvement in Iraq within U.S. public opinion. But Indyk's case in that article is still important to consider, especially the points he made about how/why the U.S could try to persuade both sides to accept the arrangement. Many of his arguments remain applicable to any concerted effort the U.S. might undertake to effect an internationally supervised end to the conflict.

One of the things I want to emphasize is that these ideas have been around for the last several years, and that they were put forward by people who were intimately involved with the peace process in the '90s at a very high level. People who have been complaining about "no debate" have either been ignorant of these ideas or actively chosen not to engage them. Everyone's favorite "there's no debate" taboo-breaking act of courage, the good old Mearsheimer and Walt article, specifically named Indyk four times as a negative influence on the Israel debate in America. Whether they were even aware of his proposal for a U.S.-supervised international trusteeship that would replace Israel's occupation of the territories on the way to a Palestinian state is open to question; if they did know about it, they chose to ignore it.

In other words, if one wants to debate this issue, then OK, let's debate it. Go out and read the different ideas that have been proposed. It might actually help, as opposed to the muddled crap-flinging that inevitably results from lumping the proposals of Ben-Ami and Indyk together with the preferences of Doug Feith and Martin Peretz.

Haggai  Mar 19 2007 - 10:06pm  Foreign Affairs  Israel   

Which was described (ironically, of course) as a place where "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens." A few things swirling around the blogosphere prompted me to collect a lot of thoughts into some good old-fashioned long-winded posts.

Nicholas Beaudrot, guest-blogging at Chez Ezra, braces himself and asks:

Why is there not even a remotely sizeable lobbying outfit devoted to less-hawkish methods of guaranteeing Israel's security? When answering, consider that the last two Democratic Presidents (a) made substantial efforts to ensure Israel's long-term security, and (b) presumably have some personal acquaintance with high-dollar Democratic donors who consider Israel's long term security important, and thus might be persuaded to help fund such a group.

I'll eventually get around to dealing with those questions, with my eventual point being that I don't think they're exactly the right questions to ask. Much bloviating to follow, below the break:

Haggai  Mar 6 2007 - 4:28pm  Israel  Palestine   

Ha'aretz Palestinian affairs reporter Danny Rubinstein brings up a very odd-sounding possibility in this article about what might be an upcoming push for Israel to release Marwan Barghouti:

[T]he presentation of the [Palestinian] unity government is clearly supposed to be part of a more comprehensive move that will include a deal for the release of Gilad Shalit, parallel to the first stage of the release of hundreds of Palestinian security prisoners. Without Shalit's release in return for prisoners, the unity government will not be able to begin its work...

In this context, it is desirable for the government of Israel to decide to release the secretary general of Fatah in the West Bank, Marwan Barghouti. It's the right opportunity to do so, as opined by Environmental Protection Minister Gideon Ezra, whose remarks have been given prominent play in the Palestinian media: "I know Barghouti well, and I know that he has the ability to strengthen Fatah and Abu Mazen."

Publicity like this does not always help Abu Mazen or the Fatah movement. If we assume the Palestinian unity government will not last and will fall apart shortly (a common assumption), another election race in the PA will be unavoidable. Then, the demand for Barghouti's release will grow, because only Barghouti is capable of coping with Hamas, and Israel might as well release him.

But freeing him in such circumstances could backfire. The Palestinian street could see such a move as a crude intervention in their elections and an attempt to dictate their vote - and will do the opposite. That is, they will vote for Hamas and trip up Barghouti. There is much discussion of such a possibility among Barghouti and acquaintances who visit him frequently in prison. Barghouti has been telling them that if Israel frees him so he can run against Hamas, he will refuse to be released.

My own emphasis added at the end. I guess I could believe a report that Barghouti would decide not to run in a Palestinian election if he suspected that Israel was releasing him to tame Hamas on their behalf, but that he would refuse to be released? How the heck would that even work? They tell him he's free to go, he refuses to leave; they kick him out by force, and he goes on hunger strike to be thrown back in? Or something? It seems a bit too bizarre, even for that region of the world.

It also reminds me of a movie I saw the last time I was in Israel, "Azulai the Policeman," from 1970, which was the most famous movie role played by Israel's greatest comic actor, the late Shaike Ophir. He plays a bungling Jerusalem policeman who's about to be fired, so the local criminals on his beat hatch a scheme to get one of their gang arrested by him, hoping that it'll help keep him on the force so they can continue their activities without fear that he'll ever catch on to them. Of course, he's so inept that they find they can't get him to arrest one of them even when they're trying to get caught. So if Barghouti responded to being released from jail by refusing to leave, would Israel hit back by sending some current-day Azulai to watch over his cell?

Haggai  Feb 27 2007 - 12:06pm   

I ran across an article recently that reminded me of this exchange in the Israel Lobby panel discussion from a few months ago (which we discussed in this thread at that time):

TONY JUDT: The NRA distorts policy in many ways as well. When John Bolton went to the United Nations convention on the illicit trade in small arms, prevented it actually coming to a conclusion, he went along the three senior members of the NRA.

I would say that that distorted our foreign policy.

I would also point out that that when I read about that… that one landed on my head with whatever the anti-rifle equivalent of anti-Semitism and I think this is the crucial point about the Israel Lobby or the group of lobbies, or whatever you want to say.

There are hundreds of distorting lobbies. Its one of the ways in which our political system is defective. [The Israel lobby] is the only significant Lobby I know of which not only acts to advance the interests of its cause but acts constantly and very effectively to silence criticism of its cause. This is not the case of other lobbies.

DENNIS ROSS: I guess two points: One is, maybe Tony you haven’t paid a whole lot of attention to the NRA. I think they’re pretty good in terms of finding ways to silence their critics...

I was reminded of that exchange when I saw this article a couple of days ago:

Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West.

Zumbo's fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America's gun culture -- and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

"Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity," Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. "As hunters, we don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I'll go so far as to call them 'terrorist' rifles."

The reaction -- from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association -- has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo's career appears to be over.

His top-rated weekly TV program on the Outdoor Channel, his longtime career with Outdoor Life magazine and his corporate ties to the biggest names in gunmaking, including Remington Arms Co., have been terminated or are on the ropes.

The NRA on Thursday pointed to the collapse of Zumbo's career as an example of what can happen to anyone, including a "fellow gun owner," who challenges the right of Americans to own or hunt with assault-style firearms.

From his home near Cody, Wyo., Zumbo declined repeated telephone requests for comment. He is a 40-year NRA member and has appeared with NRA officials in 70 cities, according to his Web site.

In announcing that it was suspending its professional ties with Zumbo, the NRA -- a well-financed gun lobby that for decades has fought attempts to regulate assault weapons -- noted that the new Congress should pay careful attention to the outdoors writer's fate.

"Our folks fully understand that their rights are at stake," the NRA statement said. It warned that the "grassroots" passion that brought down Zumbo shows that millions of people would "resist with an immense singular political will any attempts to create a new ban on semi-automatic firearms."

But oh, that Israel lobby, they're the only ones who are out there silencing people. And they're the only ones who have a coordinated strategy for making sure that everyone toes the party line:

Zumbo's fall highlights a fundamental concern of the NRA and many champions of military-style firearms, according to people who follow the organization closely. They do not want American gun owners to make a distinction between assault weapons and traditional hunting guns such as shotguns and rifles. If they did, a rift could emerge between hunters, who tend to have the most money for political contributions to gun rights causes, and assault-weapon owners, who tend to have lots of passion but less cash.

The NRA appeared to be saying as much in its statement Thursday, when it emphasized that the Zumbo affair shows there is "no chance" that a "divide and conquer propaganda strategy" could ever succeed.

OK, all snark aside, my point is this: of course there are pro-Israel people and groups who aggressively throw charges of anti-Semitism around, and such coordinated campaigns are bad for the state of the public debate about the issue in the US, but is it anywhere near as bad (let alone much worse, as Judt was claiming) as this example of what happens to someone who goes off-message within the gun lobby? It was a pretty shrill remark--I can understand hunters and/or pro-gun types taking offense at being lumped in with terrorists--but the guy who made it is apparently a prominent hunting commentator who's been a gun lobby ally for the last few decades. Who's the last public figure who's (a) generally been considered as being on the "pro" side of the Israel debate and (b) been hounded out of public for making some intemperate anti-Israel remark? Not just criticized or even slandered, but utterly run out of town on a rail, like Zumbo apparently has been regarding his TV and magazine affiliations, plus some endorsement deals.

I'm not familiar with other gun lobby affiliated groups beside the NRA--probably some hunting organizations fall under that tent--but it's also worth pointing to the "divide and conquer propaganda strategy" quote from the NRA. AIPAC is of course the major player vis-a-vis the Israel debate in the US, but there's also the Israel Policy Forum, Americans for Peace Now, and some other similar groups. They represent different voices in the "pro-Israel" debate within the US. Is there a similar diversity of organizations within the "gun lobby"?

Yes, AIPAC is the most powerful of the Israel-related groups, by far, and people affiliated with the more moderate groups do have to deal with shrill and unfair charges of anti-Semitism from the stronger forces within that sphere. But has AIPAC ever issued an analogous quote to the NRA "divide and conquer" remark? As I understand it, the NRA is openly threatening public destruction against anyone who even makes an intemperate remark (which is all Zumbo did) that could create a gap between hunting rifles and assault weapons. So is there anything even approaching an IPF-like organization within the gun lobby? Looks to me like it wouldn't even be able to get off the ground.

Haggai  Jan 19 2007 - 11:34am   

For no particular reason, I decided to post a few quotes from unexpected sources as a "guess who said THAT!" quiz sort of thing. I ran into one of them the other day, and it got me thinking about the other two as well.

(1) This is from an anecdote in Bernard Lewis' book "Semites and Anti-Semites." In the early '50s, when a rumor that Hitler might still be alive somewhere in South America was spreading, an Arab newspaper asked some public figures what they would say to him, if they could contact him. Most of the replies were negative, with some of them mentioning the gas chambers. But which eventually prominent Arab leader submitted this response?

I congratulate you with all my heart, because, though you appear to have been defeated, you were the real victor. You were able to sow dissension between Churchill, the old man, and his allies on the one hand and their ally, the devil, on the other. Germany is victorious because it became necessary for the world balance of power that Germany be created anew, whatever East and West might think. There will be no peace until Germany is restored to what it was, and this is what West and East will bring about in spite of themselves ... As for the past, I think you made some mistakes, such as opening too many fronts or Ribbentrop's short-sightedness in the face of Britain's old man diplomacy. But you are forgiven on account of your faith in your country and people. That you have become immortal in Germany is reason enough for pride. And we should not be surprised to see you again in Germany, or a new Hitler in your place.

Answer here.

(2) Michael Oren's book "Six Days of War" mentions some extremely pointed criticism that was directed at Yitzhak Rabin, two weeks before the war started, when the situation was already extremely tense and war seemed possible at any moment:

We have been forced into a very difficult situation. I very much doubt whether Nasser wanted to go to war, and now we are in serious trouble... You have led the state into a grave situation. We must not go to war. We are isolated. You bear the responsibility.

So which self-hating dovish appeasenik dared to say this to the IDF's chief of staff? This one.

(3) In the years following the Six Day War, which prominent Israeli said this, about the run-up to that war?

The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him...

We did not do this for lack of an alternative. We could have gone on waiting. We could have sent the army home. Who knows if there would have been an attack against us? There is no proof of it. There are several arguments to the contrary. While it is indeed true that the closing of the Straits of Tiran was an act of aggression, a causus belli, there is always room for a great deal of consideration as to whether it is necessary to make a causus into a bellum.

To see the original context of these remarks, surely made by some reflexively anti-war Peace Now-type, click here.

Haggai  Jan 16 2007 - 9:10pm  Israel  Lebanon   

IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz has now become the highest ranking career-casualty of the 2006 Lebanon fighting:

Halutz' decision to step down comes against a backdrop of failures in IDF functioning, his own performance and the performance of the army during the war against Hezbollah in July and August of last year.

Two weeks ago, Halutz said he would resign if the government-appointed Winograd committee of inquiry found him responsible for the mishandling of the war in Lebanon. The Winograd committee is also separately looking into the conduct of Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz.

"If the committee hands down an unambiguous sentence, it would obligate me [to resign]," Halutz had said. The resignation, however, comes before the committee has released its conclusions.

Senior IDF officers testified before the Winograd committee that they considered Halutz responsible for the failures of the war. The officers told the members of the panel that the IDF had made a rushed recommendation to go to war, without preparing the units needed and without devising an exit strategy.

Two precedents come to mind of IDF chiefs of staff who faced similarly bleak assessments from post-war commissions of inquiry. After the Yom Kippur War, Dado Elazar resigned after the Agranat commission recommended that he do so. Following the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, the Kahan commission "arrived at grave conclusions" about the conduct of Raful Eitan, and it was generally understood that if his term had not been due to end only two months after the report was issued, it would have recommended that he resign. FYI, all of these investigative commissions have been named for their chairmen--Shimon Agranat and Yitzhak Kahan were both presidents of the Supreme Court at the time they chaired their respective committees, and Eliyahu Winograd is a former Supreme Court justice.

As for what comes next, this will presumably increase the pressure on the astoundingly unpopular Olmert and Peretz to follow suit. In the case of Dado Elazar, following the Yom Kippur War, public outrage over the Agranat commission's refusal to assign responsibility to Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan led to their resignations shortly afterwards. But seeing as how they've managed to survive this long with such bottom-feeding approval ratings, it's still possible that one or both of Olmert and Peretz could survive this as well.  As of now, I'm not betting against them.

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Photo: AFP via BBC.

Haggai  Jan 16 2007 - 10:05am  Israel  Syria   

Ha'aretz is reporting that a secret understanding was worked out in the last couple of years between representatives from Israel and Syria:

In a series of secret meetings in Europe between September 2004 and July 2006, Syrians and Israelis formulated understandings for a peace agreement between Israel and Syria...

The document is described as a "non-paper," a document of understandings that is not signed and lacks legal standing - its nature is political. It was prepared in August 2005 and has been updated during a number of meetings in Europe.

The meetings were carried out with the knowledge of senior officials in the government of former prime minister Ariel Sharon. The last meeting took place during last summer's war in Lebanon...

The contacts ended after the Syrians demanded an end to meetings on an unofficial level and called for a secret meeting at the level of deputy minister, on the Syrian side, with an Israeli official at the rank of a ministry's director general, including the participation of a senior American official. Israel did not agree to this Syrian request.

The article describes the main points of the understandings. As far as I can tell, the new thing that might represent progress over previous negotiations from the '90s is the idea that much of the Golan would have the status of a public park. Israelis would have free access to travel there, although the territory would be under Syrian sovereignty.

Not surprisingly, officials on both sides are furiously denying that anything of the sort took place. Of course, nobody wants to give something away for free, so it's pretty safe to assume that the denials are just for face-saving purposes. But, the question then remains, why did the existence of these talks leak at this specific point in time? Apparently they came to an end about 6 months ago, so why is it coming out now?

Blake is guessing that it leaked "in order to strangle it in its cradle," which is certainly one possibility. Someone opposed to the negotiations might have been concerned that Rice's trip to the region could spark a renewed US effort to push for Israel-Syria talks on the basis of those secret understandings; maybe she had just heard of it herself, and the leak was timed to ensure that such an effort wouldn't get off the ground. That seems a little far-fetched, though, considering how little interest Bush would have in any such endeavor. It could also just be an internal Israeli thing, with someone opposed to the talks trying to cut them off before support could build within the government.

It's also possible that someone involved in the talks decided to leak the details in an attempt to increase pressure for renewed Israel-Syria negotiations. The Ha'aretz report is very detailed about the timeline and the mechanisms for the talks, which makes it seem more likely to me that the primary sources for the story were people involved in the effort itself. Anyone involved would of course understand that a leak of this sort would immediately prompt fierce denials, but if someone looking for support in the Israeli government for the effort had spent the last few months trying behind closed doors but running into a brick wall, they might calculate that a leak was their best option for increasing pressure on the government to enter into negotiations.

EDIT: Laura Rozen's post points to some other recent indications of possible behind the scenes dialogue, including a public meeting in Madrid between Syrian representatives and former Israeli officials.

Haggai  Jan 15 2007 - 12:43pm  Borders  Foreign Affairs  Israel  Palestine   

Matt Yglesias is wondering where the idea of a "provisional" Palestinian state is coming from, and why it's being discussed now. His suspicions about it as an excuse for attempting diplomacy without being very serious about making real progress is reasonably accurate, though it's worth pointing out that this idea has been around for several years.

I believe the first time that the concept was floated as part of a high-level proposal was the "Peres-Abu Ala understandings" of 2001, when Peres was Sharon's foreign minister, and Abu Ala was the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Those "understandings" never consituted an official agreement, and they were never really codified in any official document that I can remember, although some pretty specific terms were floated in various press outlets. They never received much support from either Sharon or Arafat. Yossi Alpher of bitterlemons.org discussed them here in early January 2002. He was mostly skeptical about the vague principles and reliance on phased steps, which were all too reminiscent of what turned out to be fundamental problems with the Oslo accords. This was the basic idea of Peres-Abu Ala:

A ceasefire will take hold and confidence building measures be instituted within six weeks. Within another eight weeks Israel will recognize a Palestinian state in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, immediately after which negotiations on all outstanding final status issues will commence, to be completed within 9-12 months. The final status agreement will be implemented within another 9-24 months.

So the order of recognition and negotiations, with recognition of the Palestinian state coming before the negotiations and implementation of a final status agreement, is based on the idea of a "provisional" Palestinian state with "temporary" borders. I suspect, although without having read this anywhere that I can remember, that Abu Ala and his colleagues who backed the concept were hoping to build on the Palestinians' position of the previous few years that if the final status negotiations were not completed by the end of the 5-year "interim period" of the Oslo accords, which ended in May of 1999, they would go ahead and unilaterally declare statehood. That was largely in response to the intransigence and foot-dragging of the Netanyahu government, as a lever to prompt more pressure on Israel to comply with those terms of Oslo. Arafat did not, in the end, choose to declare statehood unilaterally, as a result of the Wye accords with Netanyahu in late '98, and continued US efforts in tandem with Barak's government, which was elected in May of '99. But the idea of a Palestinian state with temporary borders was inherent in that position--the Palestinians would declare statehood and continue to demand the '67 boundaries as the final borders of their state. I'm guessing that Abu Ala saw the idea of an agreed "state with provisional borders" as a concession they might be able to accept along the lines of what they were threatening to do when the interim period of Oslo was winding down with no final status negotiations in sight. The main Palestinian argument against it is that "provisional" or "temporary" borders wouldn't be of any benefit to them, and it might increase the risk of receiving that and nothing more, i.e. that the temporary might become permanent.

The idea did end up being accepted by the Bush administration, as early as Bush's June 24, 2002 speech in which he announced that the US would no longer deal with Arafat. Bush specifically said that "when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state, whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East."

A provisional Palestinian state was also incorporated into the official statement of the "road map" from April of 2003, which was issued by the "quartet" of the US, EU, Russia, and UN. Phase II of the road-map called for "an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders and attributes of sovereignty, based on the new constitution, as a way station to a permanent status settlement." In essence, the road map was a close variation on the Peres-Abu Ala understandings, if you look at the three different phases involved: cease-fire/end to violence, interim period based on Palestinian statehood with provisional borders, and then negotiations and implementation of a final status agreement. It was always doubtful that such an approach could work, though one can say that it's never been seriously tried; neither of these plans have ever gotten out of "phase I." In any event, it doesn't hold out much hope for success, certainly not with the current leadership in place on all sides.

So in response to MY's initial wonderings, it's basically just business as usual for the Bush administration. Trot out some old ideas about jump-starting negotiations, but don't put too much effort into making anything happen. Rice's recent statement that "I think no plan can be 'made in America' [because] there are too many important stakeholders, and any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front is going to require all of the parties" is along similar lines to any talk of getting to a provisional Palestinian state.

Haggai  Dec 20 2006 - 2:30pm  Israel   

Regarding the explosive story about Israeli settlements from a month ago that didn't end up causing anything to explode, Uzi Benziman of Ha'aretz has an article up bemoaning the lack of explosiveness that's resulted in Israel.

Haggai  Dec 12 2006 - 4:31pm  Israel  Palestine   

Martin Peretz' "Spine" blog has got it all--dishonesty, sexism, painfully unfunny conservative humor, you name it. However, this post is one of the rare ones that actually does link to something worthwhile--indeed, something I probably wouldn't have seen if the perpetually perfervid one hadn't linked to it.

It's a link to this post on a blog that I hadn't seen before, which seems to be of a familiar neo-conservative bent, what with recent post titles like "Thank You John Bolton" and "Memo to Jim Baker: Revisit 1938." The post in question is about some maps in Carter's new book about the peace negotiations between Barak, Arafat, and Clinton in 2000. Specifically, a group of maps relating to the July 2000 Camp David talks, and the December 2000 Clinton "bridging proposals."

In short, Carter's book appears to have taken a couple of maps from Dennis Ross' book (a) without attribution while (b) describing and re-labelling them in a misleading fashion. Carter presents two maps that he labels as the Israeli and Palestinian interpretations of Clinton's bridging proposals. However, the one presented as the Israeli interpretation is actually Ross' own interpretation, and the one presented as the Palestinian interpretation of Clinton's bridging proposal is actually their version of what was being offered at Camp David, which Ross disputes with his own Camp David map. The blog post re-produces all the maps in question and, as I can vouch for vis-a-vis the ones that are directly from Ross' book, it describes them very accurately.

A couple of notes of clarification missing from that post: no actual map was presented to the Palestinians representing the "91+1" proposal at Camp David. However, Ross argues in his book (with maps) that the Palestinian's subsequent map representation of that offer was inaccurate. Also, as Ross makes clear in his map of Clinton's Dec. 2000 bridging proposal, that proposal did not present an actual map to either side--Clinton presented the two sides with guidelines within which he believed that the final deal would have to be struck (negotiators from both sides understood this nature of the proposal ahead of time, and indeed both sides had specifically requested that Clinton present them with such a proposal). The map that Ross presents in his book is, in essence, a version of the map that the Clinton administration expected the two sides to accept as the blueprint for the final deal, with the super-specific details to be negotiated subsequently.