http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/28/bulldozing_the_special_relationship?page=full

Only the most naive observers would be surprised by the verdict from an Israeli court on the civil case brought by the parents of Rachel Corrie, the American activist killed in 2003 at the hands of the Israeli military. The court ruled this week that Israel was not responsible for the death of the 23-year-old student, referring to it as a “regrettable accident” that Corrie herself could have prevented by staying out of the area. But while this latest official Israeli whitewashing is not unexpected, it does raise important questions about the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship and how far Israel can go in dealing so cavalierly with inconvenient Americans — and, indeed, with the United States.

Corrie’s story has become a case study of the impunity with which the Israeli political and legal system treats its adversaries. She was in southern Gaza during the Second Intifada with the International Solidarity Movement, an organization that stages nonviolent protests against the Israeli occupation and was then engaged in a campaign to protect Palestinian wells and homes from destruction. She was killed when she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer as she was trying to protect the home of a Gazan pharmacist, Samir Nasrallah. The official Israeli investigation claims that the whole thing was a dreadful accident and that she had been killed by a blow to the head by a hard object, “probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down.”

Israel’s official autopsy of her death has never been released, but Human Rights Watch says the report concluded she was killed by blows to her chest, fractures of her ribs and vertebrae, and tears in her right lung. Such injuries are consistent with the damage that might be caused to a person by a bulldozer — contradicting Israel’s version of the story.

The Israeli investigation added that she had placed herself and others in danger by being in a combat zone and that she was essentially responsible for her own death. This claim was echoed by the court, and its ruling was blasted out to the public by Ofir Gendelman, spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who tweeted that because the “tragic accident took place during ‘combat activities in war’ … the state is therefore not responsible.”

The U.S. government has gone on record with its dissatisfaction with the official Israeli narrative, on which the court verdict was almost entirely based. “For seven years, we have pressed the government of Israel at the highest levels to conduct a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation of the circumstances of her death,” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro recently complained. However, he added, Israel considers “this case closed.”

The only thing unusual about this whitewash is that the victim is an American. Israeli courts and investigations have a longstanding history of either covering up abuses against Palestinians, foreign activists, and journalists in the occupied Palestinian territories, or imposing only symbolic and pro forma penalties on military personnel found to have engaged in misconduct. And unfortunately, the U.S. government has proved itself willing to offer little more than highly attenuated criticisms of Israeli actions when they result in the death of Americans perceived to be siding with Palestinians.

Another such incident was the killing of Turkish-American Furkan Dogan, who was shot five times by Israeli troops during the storming of the Mavi Marmara during the Gaza flotilla raid on May 31, 2010. Again, the United States expressed official concern but did nothing to hold Israel accountable or ensure that Israel held its forces accountable.

In both of these instances, as well as others, unarmed U.S. citizens were killed by Israeli forces and subsequently accused by Israel and its supporters of being responsible for their own deaths — in effect, of being terrorism-supporting malefactors who deserved what they got. And in both of these cases, the American reaction has been limited to expressions of concern — pro forma in the case of Dogan and stronger but still purely rhetorical in the case of Corrie.

The sad reality is that there is a limited reserve of sympathy for the likes of Dogan and Corrie in American society, and especially American political life. Israel and its supporters have succeeded in painting them as supporters of terrorism and interloping troublemakers. As a result, these killings get nothing like the traction they ought to in U.S. public and policy discourse.

The Corrie verdict, of course, will not change that. Even if there were more of an outcry about the killing of unarmed American activists by Israeli forces, the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” is so deep-rooted that it still probably wouldn’t be enough to change matters. After all, the relationship has persisted despite far greater strains in the past.

Take the June 8, 1967, Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, which left 34 American sailors dead. It has successfully been chalked up as an accident — or an “unfortunate” occurrence — for which there is, therefore, no plausible remedy. The incident quickly faded from the collective national memory, and efforts to raise questions about the attack have proved completely ineffective for more than 40 years.

These incidents may have not been able to dent the “special relationship,” but the calculation may change if Israel is perceived as having dragged Washington into a full-fledged regional war. And that is the possibility currently looming on the horizon: If an Israeli first strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities leads the United States to enter a conflict that most U.S. citizens and policymakers regard as premature and unwise, it could finally force the re-evaluation of the U.S.-Israel relationship that Corrie’s death was never able to.

Ironically, the very depth of the special relationship is what makes such a scenario plausible. It would be extremely difficult for the United States to allow Israel to muddle through alone if Israel faced a powerful and effective Iranian response — and extremely easy for Washington to find itself in over its head after entering the conflict. It’s conceivable that the same set of political imperatives that would force America’s hand in such a contingency would be severely undermined, or even undone, if things went dreadfully badly in the war.

But it really will take something as dramatic as a war to shake the zone of impunity that hovers around Israeli misconduct toward American activists, and even toward the United States itself. As things stand, the United States has an ally and a client in the Middle East with a level of discretion that is unusual — if not unparalleled — in U.S. history. And there is, as of yet, no real space to debate that reality in the American policy conversation. The Rachel Corrie verdict ought to provide an opportunity for that — but the unfortunate reality is that it will be wasted.

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=431270

Over the past few years it was frequently alleged, not least by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that the Palestinian leadership had climbed out onto various political “tree limbs.” The implication was that on issues such as the settlement freeze, Palestinian leaders adopted rhetorical positions that were not in keeping with their real strategic options and hadn’t allowed themselves sufficient room to climb down. As a consequence, it was suggested, they were stuck with unworkable policies.

But now Netanyahu appears to have climbed out onto a tree limb of his own regarding the Iranian nuclear program. Netanyahu, his Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, and their subordinates have raised the level of rhetoric regarding Iran to the point where they appear to have left themselves with few palatable alternatives.

Israel’s military option seems to carry considerably more costs than benefits. The idea that Israel could achieve much on its own, given its limited conventional long-distance firepower, is extremely doubtful. It could certainly do significant damage to the program and set it back by a number of years, but it might also have the counterintuitive effect of redoubling Iranian determination to actually seek a nuclear deterrent. And it might rally Iranians around the otherwise highly unpopular ruling faction.

Under the present circumstances, international support for such a unilateral action, including from the United States, seems virtually nonexistent. An upcoming report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is expected to find that Iran has secretly installed hundreds of new centrifuges at an underground enrichment facility near Qom, has only underscored the divisions between Washington and Tel Aviv.

Israel claims the report vindicates its dire warnings. By contrast, an unnamed “senior administration official” told the New York Times the United States considers this information to be “not a game changer.” Some of this disagreement can be attributed to the obvious gulf between the American position that Iran must not be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon and the Israeli view that Iran must not allowed to become capable of producing one.

If it were to strike Iran alone—and without prior permission from, and coordination with, the United States—Israel would probably be testing its “special relationship” with the Americans more strongly than at any time in recent decades. The strains would be even greater if the United States found itself drawn into a difficult or protracted conflict with Iran and its proxies, especially if this was widely regarded by American citizens and policymakers as involuntary and premature.

There’s always the chance that a limited Israeli strike might draw a limited Iranian response, with both sides seeking to attenuate their behavior in order to keep the Americans out. But even if both sides were to begin with that caution in mind, events could quickly spiral out of control. And there’s no guarantee that Iran’s reaction would be cautious, given the enormity of the provocation.

For these reasons, a critical mass seems to have formed in Israel against such an attack, including President Shimon Peres, most of the defense and military establishments, and a solid majority of the public.

However, if they decide not to take military action after all their bluster, Netanyahu and Barak could find themselves in the unenviable situation of creating a “paper tiger” impression of Israel, appearing to be a power that speaks loudly but carries a small stick.

Moreover, their alarmist rhetoric has made the development of a workable containment strategy regarding a nuclear Iran very difficult to justify. But this is almost certainly the most intelligent response to a difficult situation. If containment can work with a nuclear North Korea, it can certainly work with Iran. And the dangers of that approach must be weighed against the risks of any unilateral military action.

The Obama administration, too, has created a rhetorical framework that logically culminates in military action if an agreement with Iran cannot be achieved. But the American red line might be one the Iranians can learn to live with—at least for a time—if it takes them to the brink, but not over the line, of nuclear weapons power status. And if they can’t—and the United States sticks with its position that it will not tolerate the emergence of a nuclear Iran—unlike Israel, the Americans certainly possess the conventional firepower to severely damage, and not just dent, Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In that case, the United States would be acting in its own interests and according to its own timetable, not Israel’s.

Netanyahu and Barak could throw the dice by attacking Iran in what would be one of the riskiest gambles in recent history. Or they could accede to everyone else’s better judgment. Either way, Israel’s leaders have left themselves only a set of options, all of which carry a considerable cost.

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=429736

It’s hard to imagine a more hypocritical position than complaints from Russia about other countries providing weapons to armed groups in Syria. But on August 20, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling arms smuggling to support Syrian rebels “unacceptable,” after the Lebanese navy intercepted a ship containing several caches of small arms and grenade launchers presumably intended for opposition groups.

Last Saturday I appeared on Al Jazeera English’s program “Inside Syria” with a former Russian diplomat, Vyacheslav Matuzov, who had the temerity to blame the United States for providing weapons to armed groups. He said external support for rebels is what is making diplomacy and a peaceful solution impossible.

The hypocrisy and shamelessness of such statements is breathtaking. The war in Syria, from its outset, has been driven by the regime using billions of dollars’ worth of weapons supplied by Moscow. Indeed, Russia has continued to provide weapons to the Syrian government even in the face of numerous atrocities and massacres of civilians.

In early June, Human Rights Watch issued a detailed report on these shipments, identifying the Russian firm Rosoboronexport as the primary culprit. It noted that Rosoboronexport is at risk of criminal liability in Syrian government “crimes against humanity.” “The company’s known weapons deals significantly enhance Syria’s military capability at a time when it is engaged in serious crimes, and the arms potentially could be used in its assaults on civilians,” the report says.

On May 26, Reuters reported that a Russian vessel delivered a consignment of heavy weaponry to the Syrian government through the Russian naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus. The vessel reportedly turned off its transponder, a violation of international maritime law, as it approached the port in order to make tracking it more difficult. And Syrian and Russian officials refused to disclose the ship’s cargo manifests.

Another Reuters report held that Russia had sold Syria “nearly $1 billion worth of arms including missile systems” in 2011, well into the conflict in that country. The same report said that four cargo vessels had left the Black Sea port of Oktyabrsk, the primary port used by Rosoboronexport for arms shipments, bound for Tartous. The report cites Mahmoud Suleiman Haj Hamad, former chief auditor for Syria’s Defense Ministry, as saying that Russian weapons supplies to the Damascus regime approximately doubled during 2011, as the conflict developed.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that Russia supplied 78 percent of Syria’s weapons imports from 2007 to 2011. More significantly, it confirmed that “During 2011 Russia continued deliveries of Buk-M2E SAM systems and Bastion-P coastal defense missile systems to Syria, as well as securing an order for 36 Yak-130 trainer/combat aircraft.”

In June, Amnesty International cited UK Foreign Office sources saying that Russia had attempted to ship refurbished attack helicopters to the Damascus regime, but had to abandon the mission when the insurance on the vessel carrying the consignment was revoked. Amnesty noted that “Anyone supplying attack helicopters—or maintaining, repairing or upgrading them—for the Syrian government displays a wanton disregard for humanity.”

Given these facts, and the long-standing military and trade relationship between Russia and Syria dating back to the Soviet era, there is no question that the overwhelming bulk of the weaponry used by regime forces in Syria has been of Russian origin. It is estimated that approximately 20,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict, most of them unarmed civilians killed by uniformed or un-uniformed regime forces.

There had been growing reports of the reliance by regime forces on heavy weaponry, including large caliber machine guns, tanks, high-explosive mortars, and, increasingly, fighter jets, against rebels and civilian targets. The indiscriminate use of such weapons appears to have reached new heights in the ongoing battle over Aleppo.

No open-minded person can honestly doubt that Russia continues to supply Damascus with a wide range of weaponry, including heavy weapons. The reasons for this are clear: Moscow is determined to do everything can to help the regime of Bashar al-Assad stay in power at all costs. Its interests in Syria, including such lucrative weapons sales, military and other ties to the regime, and its precious warm water port on the Syrian coast—the only remaining Russian military base outside of the former Soviet Union—are well known.

Russian accusations against anyone else for supplying weapons to forces involved in the Syrian conflict therefore constitute the height of effrontery. These accusations are particularly hollow when leveled against the United States, which has restricted itself to non-lethal aid to some opposition groups.

Neither the West nor the Arab world should ignore or forget Russia’s role in promoting the carnage and chaos in Syria. Russia must pay a significant price for its central role in the Syrian government’s unmitigated aggression against its own people.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/15/dr-lewis-and-mr-bernard.html

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=427954

Few contemporary thinkers have been more revered and reviled than the late Palestinian-American professor Edward Said. But even his most ardent critics can hardly deny that Said was one of the most significant public intellectuals of our time. And while he is probably best remembered for his political activism, it was as a major literary theorist that he produced his most important work.

Said was widely misread and misunderstood by friend and foe alike, and while reams of articles, journal papers and books have been published about his work since his untimely death in 2003, little of it has added to any deep understanding of his intellectual legacy. But a new book by a leading critical theorist, R. Radhakrishnan, A Said Dictionary (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), illuminates much of what is most important, and also problematic, about Said’s work.

Radhakrishnan’s book is called a “dictionary,” but in fact it’s a series of short essays built on key terms Said relied on in his writings. Radhakrishnan explicates and engages with these difficult, often elusive concepts as Said deployed them, such as his notions of “democratic criticism,” “secular criticism,” “Traveling Theory,” “worldliness,” and “professionalism.” But Radhakrishnan’s book is not merely a guide, a hagiography or a tribute. It involves a robust and often contentious engagement with Said’s most provocative and, at times, problematic ideas. Most specifically, Radhakrishnan dwells on “Said’s way of being worldly.”

Said was a prolific and profound thinker, but not a particularly methodical or philosophically rigorous one, engaging in what Radhakrishnan aptly describes as “freewheeling relationships and affinities with a number of theories, theorists and schools of thought.” For example, in his best-known book, Orientalism(1978), Said attempted to forge an uneasy methodological marriage between Michel Foucault’s poststructuralist and anti-humanist systems of genealogy with his own deep-seated high humanist orientation. The book was a sensation, for many reasons, but this combination simply couldn’t be sustained, and Said quickly fell back on his humanist commitments.

Said engaged in numerous noteworthy debates and exchanges with both allies and antagonists, perhaps most notably another redoubtable champion of Enlightenment rationality, Ernest Gellner. But while Gellner sought to pit critical rationalism against critical theory, Said engaged theory and contributed heavily to it, but often by critiquing its excesses.

Early on in his book, Radhakrishnan confesses to often finding Said to “not be a philosophic enough figure as he addresses the crises and problems of humanism and essentialism.” For Radhakrishnan, Said sometimes ducks or simply dismisses some of the more difficult philosophical questions raised by his own work.

For example, he finds in Said’s crucial notion of “contrapuntal criticism,” an ethical imperative in which “no one history… can be thought of in isolation from other histories.” Summing up Said’s position perfectly, Radhakrishnan writes, “To be truly secular is to forfeit the privileges of essentialism and/or nativism, as well as the false premise of doing one’s own history within one’s own protected enclave.” But, he notes, this ethic raises important dilemmas that Said never fully grappled with. “Can the counterpoint degenerate into a posture of easy accommodation?” Radhakrishnan asks, noting, “Said could be faulted for aestheticizing the political a little too felicitously.”

Radhakrishnan’s own work has increasingly turned away from the normative structural and post-structural methodologies in critical theory towards a re-embrace of phenomenology. His new book suggests that he finds in Said an analogous spirit: “[I]n Said’s case it is the political and historical that validate theory and epistemology, and not the other way around.” In his phenomenological turn, Radhakrishnan writes, Said poses a “direct and candid question to Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and the rest… What are you for, and what are you against?”

No concept was more central to Said’s thought than that of agency and intentionality. In championing secularism as an ethical model for intellectual activity, Said was emphasizing agency and the essential question of intention and affiliation. Intellectuals must not be detached “professionals,” hiding behind academic method and intellectual rigor to avoid responsibility and decline solidarity with constituencies that shape the world in which we live.

As Radhakrishnan notes, “Said’s retrieval of individual consciousness also heralds a phenomenological return to ‘perspectivism’… The critic becomes an actor again: he is no longer a correct functionary whose function is no more than professional maintenance and repetition of a dogma.” But Radhakrishnan teases out numerous unanswered questions raised by these and other aspects of Said’s thought and asks, rhetorically, “Whether it is possible to exorcise the philosophical dimension of reality by just not thinking about it…” Radhakrishnan clearly doesn’t think it is.

Anyone remotely interested in Said’s thought needs to read Radhakrishnan’s book. He has managed to make difficult and sometimes abstruse ideas and arguments accessible to a general audience and simultaneously engaging to specialists. It is without question the most important contribution to understanding Said’s complex legacy yet written.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/13/is-morsy-staging-or-reversing-a-coup.html

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDetails.aspx?ID=425761

A major controversy erupted last week when Israel announced that Egyptian President Mohammad Morsy had sent a letter in reply to Ramadan greetings he had received from Israeli President Shimon Peres. Spokespersons for Morsy’s office, his Freedom and Justice Party, and the Muslim Brotherhood issued angry denials, calling the reports “fabrications” and “lies” spread by the Israeli media in order to embarrass Egypt’s new Islamist president.

The facts are still somewhat murky, but following the denials, first the cover sheet of the fax from the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv was released to the Israeli media, and then an image of the purported letter itself was posted on Peres’ Facebook page. The letter includes this pledge: “I am looking forward to exerting our best efforts to get the Middle East Peace Process back to its right track in order to achieve security and stability for all peoples of the region, including the Israeli people.”

The letter and cover sheet appear genuine. Some have argued that the misspelling of Peres’ name as “Perez” indicates a forgery, but it seems at least as likely, if not more so, a bureaucratic error than an indication of a crude fake. At this stage it is almost certain that this letter was actually faxed by the Egyptians. Because the language is boilerplate, reflecting traditional Egyptian communications with Israeli officials, it’s remotely possible that its content was shaped by Egyptian diplomats without the detailed approval of the president’s office in Cairo. Very probably, though, the letter, which does not bear Morsy’s signature, is indeed a genuine communication between the two presidents. Assuming that’s the case, what explains the letter, its contents and denials on the Egyptian side regarding its authenticity?

First, the letter suggests that, as one would have anticipated, Egypt’s actual foreign policy hasn’t changed under the new president, because its interests haven’t changed. Morsy has to deal with the same equation that other Egyptian leaders have faced, and cannot abandon decades of foreign policy because of a different ideological orientation.

Last Sunday’s attack on Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula by masked gunmen demonstrates this dynamic precisely. There’s no question that the assailants are pursuing an agenda that undermines both Israeli and Egyptian interests simultaneously, forcing the two sides to re-examine contentious positions. Egypt can no longer dismiss Israel’s often-stated concerns about security in Sinai, because its own interests have been directly attacked. Meanwhile, Israel cannot expect Egypt to deliver on security while maintaining a de facto demilitarized zone in the north of the Peninsula, according to the terms of the now decades-old peace agreement. These are the dangerous international waters the Egyptian state, including its new president, must navigate.

Moreover, Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood officials have been working hard to convince the United States not to be alarmed by the party’s rise to power in Egypt, particularly regarding the peace treaty with Israel. So the motivations for such a letter from the point of view of Egypt’s national interests, and even the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood, are not particularly mysterious.

It’s also likely that Morsy and his allies, assuming they did approve the communication, were surprised that the Israeli government would “embarrass” them with their own supporters by announcing its receipt and, worse still, by revealing its contents.

Second, if genuine, the letter confirms a truism that may apply to most governments around the world to some extent, but has been particularly evident in the Middle East, where governments often conduct foreign policies that are inconsistent with their public statements and their ideological slogans.

Morsy’s predecessor Hosni Mubarak, for example, proved unable to explain Egypt’s policies to the public during the 2007-2008 Gaza war because of precisely such a disconnect between Egypt’s actual interests and its foreign policy pronouncements. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claim to be the champion of the Palestinian cause has been thoroughly exposed for the lie it has always been. This applies to many other states in the region as well.

The Palestinians themselves have experienced the price of this disconnect between politics and policy on numerous occasions. One obvious example was their mishandling of the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war, during which they could not successfully reconcile statements aimed at domestic public consumption and imperative diplomatic considerations.

As for Israel, anyone who still takes at face value Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s professed commitment to a genuine two-state solution is simply being naïve given his governments policies, especially regarding settlement expansion.

Finally, anyone, whether on the Arab or Israeli side, who thought that Egypt’s Islamists were necessarily going to eagerly move their country into a more hostile relationship with Israel was deluded. Even sillier was the notion that Islamist politicians would be more honest and straightforward with the public than nationalist ones.

Even Hamas is drawing back on its rhetoric that placed so much hope in Islamist rule in Cairo. Recently, it had to send a delegation asking Egypt to open the crossing point with Gaza, which, in spite of numerous announcements, it has yet to do.

When they operate in opposition, ideologically extreme parties benefit from harsh rhetoric on foreign policy designed to draw contrasts with existing governments. But when they come to power, they quickly find themselves responsible for the national interest and facing the very same set of intractable problems and limited options their predecessors did.