TheWestBank's Open Salon Blog

Is Mike Huckabee Crazy? (Update)

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:08:49 -0400

Mike Huckabee – erstwhile Republican presidential hopeful – has lost it.

On a junket paid for by a questionable charity run out of New York, the former Governor of Arkansas and Southern Baptist pastor made the following statements while standing in the West Bank:

“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that, should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That's what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic."

Few in the foreign policy blogosphere have really acknowledged just how significant these statements are.

Glenn Greenwald yesterday brought out the comparison between Huckabee “bashing” US policies on foreign soil and Al Gore doing something similar while in Saudi Arabia back in 2006. The particular hypocrisy Greenwald points to is the lax response when it’s a Republican doing the bashing and it’s an excellent point but it’s one of style and not substance.

Huckabee is rejecting the policy that the United States has endorsed since the Occupation began. He is rejecting what most States and most Israelis support. He is, instead, endorsing quite explicitly the ethnic cleansing of The West Bank.

The continued expansion of settlements like the ones Huckabee toured this week is what, to use his words makes a Palestinian state “virtually unrealistic”. Claiming that the Israelis have a “god given right” to live wherever they so chose in whatever he means by “Jewish homeland” flies in the face of agreed upon parameters of international law and, ultimately, common sense.

Richard Silverstein does an excellent job in Tikun Olam at deconstructing where Huckabee is coming from (and more importantly, where his funds are coming from).

In the end one could argue that the inability for any progress to be made on a solution to the conflict makes Huckabee’s assertions the reality anyway. The difference of course, is that the principle that Palestinians have rights in their land – be it full democratic rights of a single state solution or the self-determination of a two-state solution – is still the foundation for discussions. What Huckabee wants is the end of discussions, the military suppression and transfer of Palestinian Muslim and Christians alike, and ultimately an ethnically pure Jewish state.

www.thewestbank.blogspot.com

-- UPDATE --

Stephen Walt has posted about this as well - for some back and forth in the comments between myself and the usual Foreign Policy neocon readers check it out here

Bruhaha as Protestant Church Attempts Boycott of Israel

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:08:36 -0400

The United Church of Canada, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination – with roughly 10% of the country’s population describing themselves as adherents – has made another attempt at addressing the Israeli Occupation of Palestine. The General Council Meeting of the church that is held every three years is taking place this week in Kelowna British Columbia and once again has garnered some controversy over a proposed resolution calling for a divestment and sanctions campaign against the State of Israel.

The key issue seems to be specific language used in background documents of the initial resolution calling for sanctions. The CBC is reporting that the background documents that have raised the ire of the pro-Israel lobby group the Canadian Jewish Congress do the following:Calls on the Canadian Government to end its support for Israel’s “Occupation” of Palestine.

· Calls for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions in protest.

· Likens Israeli policies towards Palestinians with Apartheid South Africa.

· Questions Canadian Members of Parliament who hold dual Canadian-Israeli citizenship.

· Argues that paid junkets to Israel should be classified as “bribes”.

The references to apartheid and members of Parliament have since been removed from the documents and the council will address the rest of the resolution tomorrow. This comes after a sustained PR campaign by the pro-Israel Canadian lobby that called the documents “anti-Semitic” and threatened that the Church was risking an irreparable “schism” with the Jewish community.

As a member of the Task Force behind the proposal I have some information that the pro-Israel lobby tries to hide: These documents that they call “anti-semitic” were drawn up by both members of the United Church and members of the Jewish Community and rely largely on sources and quotes from Jewish academics and activists in Canada, The United States and Israel.

That efforts to call attention to the brutal occupation of Palestine should be branded “anti-Semitic” should come as no surprise. It is, as a matter of routine now, a shield used indiscriminately against opponents of the Occupation. As rational people see that criticism of a state and its actions against civilians is hardly an indictment against a people based on their ethnicity this shield will show increasing signs of wear. When the day comes that Israel finally realizes that the Occupation is unsustainable and reaches a fair peace deal with Palestine – the travesty will be that the use of the epithet “anti-Semitic” will be so worn the real enemies of Judaism may get a free pass.

www.thewestbank.blogspot.com

Foreign Policy's "Assault on Islam"

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:08:38 -0400

Professor Sebastian Gorka of the National Defense University published an article in Foreign Policy magazine yesterday on al-Qaeda’s global reach and what the US can do to combat it. It’s a rambling article with a few good points shrouded with illogical jumps in reason and a shaky hold on terminology.

Gorka walks the reader through an important debate in counter-terrorism circles taking place right now over al-Qaeda’s relative importance in the continuation of a “Salafist-jihadi” terror campaign. One side argues that al-Qaeda as become irrelevant with the rise of “leaderless jihad” where individuals or small groups have become radicalized and carry out act of violence without guidance from al-Qaeda. The other argues the opposite: that al-Qaeda remains a significant threat to global stability and their central operations continue to maintain command and control over global partners.

Gorka wades into this debate by pointing to intelligence assessments and open source information that paints a picture of an al-Qaeda…

“…continuing to exercise a significant degree of control over the shaping and dissemination of its Salafi-jihadi message and with the coordinated acts of violence against civilians that it does manage to carry out continuing to play an important role. Al Qaeda does not possess the organizational strength it had eight or 10 years ago, but al Qaeda’s ideology is not waning among the young and extreme. On the contrary, its ‘propaganda by the deed’ continues to inspire new recruits and terrorist attacks, particularly outside the Arab world.”

I don’t entirely disagree with Gorka’s assertion (we differ on minor points), what baffles me is how he gets there.

Immediately after the above paragraph he asserts that “Salafi terrorism” of the kind al-Qaeda “inspires and directs” has reared its head “thousands of miles from Iraq and Israel”. There is no doubt that al-Qaeda in Iraq is – beyond the name – an ideological successor to Bin Laden’s group. But I’m confused about the Israel reference. This may look like a small point but it’s indicative of a trend in the article. None of the Palestinian groups who have carried out attacks against Israel, nor Hezbollah for that matter, are al-Qaeda inspired Salafists.

Gorka really doesn’t distinguish between Islam, Islamism, or Salafism. This is like collapsing Christians, Protestants and Southern Baptists into one amorphous group. His assertion that al-Qaeda’s ideology is “winning converts among Muslims” because recent polls in Pakistan and Egypt show a majority of the population thinks “the west is at war with Islam” is preposterous. Al-Qaeda’s ideology is a lot more than “the west is at war with Islam” and the elements of that Salafi ideology – a juridical system based entirely on early Sharia law, or the insistence on labeling Shi’a "apostates" deserving death, for instance – are far less popular among the one billion Muslims worldwide. Let us also not forget that the feeling that “the west is at war with Islam” is one held by millions of Americans. Your average Egyptian could be convinced of the existence of such a war as easily by John Hagee as Osama Bin Laden.

It’s clear that the United States has to continue to combat al-Qaeda’s ideology head on. Gorka thinks that a troop surge in Afghanistan is the wrong tactic and he may or may not be right. A murky conflation of who al-Qaeda is and who their message appeals to is certainly unlikely to help guide that strategy. We need an understanding of how and why Salafism becomes appealing to someone in Indonesia, or Somalia or Liverpool and that understanding requires a much more nuanced examination.

www.thewestbank.blogspot.com

Indyk: Israel got a "blank check of love".

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:07:26 -0400

Interesting piece out of The Daily Beast today: a short article from Benjamin Sarlin who interviews former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk about how Obama can get “back on track” with Israel. At no point in the article does anyone really question if Obama is off track with Israel at all. It’s taken as a self evident truth that because Netanyahu is in a huff about Obama’s pressure over settlements, something must be done on the American end to soothe his hurt feelings.

Indyk argues that because the Israelis “love to be loved” and received “a blank check of love” during the Bush years, they’ll need to be reassured that they are still in favor in Washington. Haaretz reported that a lot of these hurt feelings grew out of Obama’s much celebrated Cairo speech in June in which he extended an olive branch to the Arab and Muslim worlds. Apparently peaceful rhetoric towards the Arab and Muslim worlds, and being an ally to Israel, is mutually exclusive.

Liar! Elliot Abrams and the Washington Post

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:07:33 -0400

I recently revisited an op-ed piece Elliot Abrams’ wrote in April for the Washington Post in which he argues that the settlement freeze is a red herring for Arab-Israeli peace. Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and was the deputy national security advisor for Near East and North African Affairs in the George W. Bush White House. While that last job position should be alarming to anyone who follows American involvement in the Middle East, anyone familiar with Abrams’ resume is probably already aware that he lacks much credibility. He was convicted for lying to Congress nearly 20 years ago during their Iran-Contra investigation. His track record in Central America – where he allegedly covered up atrocious violence perpetrated by right-wing Governments – apparently provided a solid foreign relations background for dealing with the Middle East.

His take on an Israeli settlement freeze is shockingly ignorant of what it’s actually like in the Occupied Territories and contains a number of falsehoods as well. He argues that while Israel hasn’t always “kept to the rules” concerning settlements (no new ones, no financial incentives to move to one, no new construction except within boundaries of pre-existing ones) it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter because it won’t affect a final negotiation presumably because Palestinians would have to take land in the Negev desert in exchange for the land on which settlements have been built. He suggests that this is the deal offered to the Palestinians by Ehud Barak in 2000 and Olmert in 2009.

But Abrams shows a stunning ignorance of both history and geography. Firstly, the deals offered by Barak and Olmert for “between 94 and 98 percent” of the Occupied Territories were horrible deals that the PA had to reject. Without getting into the specifics, the territory offered to the Palestinians wasn’t contiguous, creating a series of mini-states similar to their current situation. This setup has been accurately compared to the Bantustans of South Africa. One of the reasons these Cantons would need to be created is to sustain the Israeli-only network of roads that connect Israel proper with their settlements within the Occupied Territories. To suggest that the settlements have no impact on even the idea of land swap is completely disingenuous.

Secondly, the settlements in the Occupied Territories do not have the same value to warrant a one for one land swap with Israeli territory in the Negev desert. Israeli settlements are constructed close to or on top of the few fresh water reservoirs in the region. According to Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem, Israelis consume five and a half times more water than their Palestinian neighbors on a per capita basis making the control of water a primary driver in settlement policy. Abrams knows this but he’s hoping the average Washington Post reader doesn’t. This problem has been left out of discussions about land swaps since the Barak “offer” was made in the hope that public opinion would see the failure of such a deal as Palestinian intransigence.

Lastly, Abrams is suggests that it doesn’t matter that Israel continues to violate the “rules” that he helped create (during the Bush administration’s Road Map phase). That most settlement expansions “do not affect much Palestinian life” is another fallacy. Palestinians, and the Arab world in general, look to the settlements as an example of Israel’s unwillingness to make even the smallest of concessions. Freezing settlement expansion is literally the easiest thing Israel will have to do if they really want a peace with the Palestinians. It doesn’t involve serious existential questions about Jerusalem or the compensation and return of refugees. It’s continually cited by the UN, the Quartet and most heads of state as the single most pressing issue and yet Israel is still unwilling to stop settlement expansion. What, I wonder, will happen when they have to actually remove some settlements?

It’s a shame Abrams couldn’t have retired like his former boss. Surely his twenty plus years of screwing up other countries has left him with a nice nest egg?