Hillary Clinton, Gaza, and the six-state solution

Welcome, Madame Secretary.

Welcome to Israel, a country whose byzantine electoral system has managed only to elect an outgoing premier-for-life. Advertisement Welcome to a nation in which, with apologies to a former Louisiana legislator, half the country is under fire, and the other half is under indictment.

Welcome to a peace process which, in the manner of lies, damn lies, and statistics, seems determined to prove that there are impossibilities, absolute impossibilities, and Two States for Two Peoples.

Welcome, that is, to the political campaign of your life.

At this, the outset of your tenure at State, the campaign for peace in the Holy Land gives every appearance of a diplomatic offensive. Don’t be fooled. You and your president must approach this challenge for what it is: a campaign for swing states.

At stake is nothing less than the conflict the world wants most to solve.

To prevail, you will need to successfully contend with six swing states. There are, first of all, the Four States for Four Peoples located within the cramped confines of the Holy Land itself – two of them Palestinian -one in Hamas-ruled Gaza, one in the Fatah-led West Bank – and two of them Israeli – one for settlers, one for the rest of us.

Then, for good measure, there are the swing states of Syria and Iran.

These six are the keys to Middle East peace, and the reason for its absence.

The conflict is so hidebound, the sides so exhaustively jaded, that you will need every ounce of creativity, energy, sensitivity, wiles, wisdom, charm and against-the-squall optimism to make a half an ounce of headway.

Your opening moves have been useful. The hundreds of millions of dollars in aid earmarked for reconstruction in Gaza recasts the U.S. policy message in a way that will be difficult for Israel and the Palestinians to ignore. It will lend fresh impetus and urgency to solving the logjam over border crossings and the critical need to speed reconstruction aid into the Strip.

One left-field reason that U.S. the aid may actually foster movement: Americans, who have been notably understanding of wide-scale Israeli attacks on heavily populated areas, may take heightened interest in the rebuilt structures, and having them remain intact. This is, in turn, a potentially powerful incentive for Israel to seek alternatives to the devastation of the recent war, whose effectiveness inn the service of Israel’s interest has yet to be demonstrated.

Herewith an overview of the swing states.

1. EXODUS ISRAEL In essence, the nation within the pre-1967 borders of the state of Israel.

THE UPSIDE: Opinion polls have consistently shown that a majority of Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike, favor a viable independent Palestinian state in the West Bank. In fact, given Avigdor Lierberman’s explicit endorsement last week of such a state, a clear majority of 70 Knesset members in the 120-seat house may be said to favor such an eventual solution [Kadima (28 seats), Yisrael Beiteinu (15), Labor (13), Hadash (4), Ra'am-Ta'al (4), Meretz (3), and Balad (3)

THE RUB: Qassam and Grad/Katyusha rocket attacks in the wake of the 2005 disengagement from the Gaza Strip have gutted all Israeli popular support for a withdrawal in the West Bank in the foreseeable future.

THE WAY FORWARD: High energy, under-the-radar diplomacy with presumptive prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Allow him to pay domestic lip service where needed, but encouraging him to quietly but powerfully explore a peace deal with Syria and take back-channel local steps like gumming up new settlement construction in bureaucratic mire [see next].

2. THE ORANGE FREE STATE The settlement empire in Judea, Samaria [the West Bank] and East Jerusalem.

THE UPSIDE: The financial crisis along with fringe anti-government extremism on the part of a small but vocal segment of the settler population has cooled general Israeli sympathy and support for fostering settlements.

THE RUB: Despite the obvious differences in form and function, settlement construction inflames Palestinians in much the same way that Qassam rockets infuriate Israelis, placing peace that much farther from reach. Meanwhile, the rise of radical Islam among Palestinians props up the settlement enterprise, adding weight to the basic settler argument that Arabs covet Tel Aviv as part of a Palestinian state every bit as much as they claim Jenin and Nablus.

THE WAY FORWARD: Continued U.S. support for and coordination of successful Palestinian Authority police security responsibility in Arab population centers of the West Bank, fostering greater autonomy, less friction, and tangible movement toward future Palestinian sovereignty. Also, savvy U.S. encouragement of concessions to boost employment and economic growth for Palestinians in the West Bank, at the same time ensuring that this does not come at the expense of the security of settlers. Also, the U.S. should lend planning assistance toward a future two-state solution, with settlement concentrated in enclaves along the 1948-67 Green Line borders, the geographic option left open for a Palestinian state including part of Jerusalem as a capital, and free movement for Palestinians north and south in the West Bank.

3. QASSAMISTAN The Gaza Strip, more rigorously Islamic and poorer by far than the West Bank. Herein dubbed Qassamistan, and not Hamastan, in commemoration of the lethal role that the rockets have played in the death of the peace process.

THE RUB, WHICH MAY ALSO BE THE UPSIDE: Hamas, sole ruler of Gaza since bitter civil warfare with Fatah in mid-2007, is itself divided at least three ways. Once a movement with iron discipline and one voice, Hamas’ leadership is shared with varying levels of ease between the Damascus-based Political Bureau of Khaled Meshal and his deputy Musa Abu Marzuk, the founding Gaza branch of Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahar, and Izz el-Din al-Qassam, the group’s shadowy but influential military wing. Despite an unwillingness to amend the group’s frankly and even murderously anti-Semitic charter, there have been voices within the group suggesting that Hamas would be willing to reach an accommodation with Fatah and even, on a level which allows it its own lip service, an eventual co-existence with Israel.

THE WAY FORWARD: Intelligent and largely unseen U.S. diplomacy to help forge a Palestinian unity government which Israel can suck up and live with, so that negotiations on a wide range of sub-peace-deal issues (e.g., aid distribution, prisoner exchange including Gilad Shalit, border crossing policy) can take place without one Palestinian side, or Israel, intentionally scuttling any talks between any two of the others. Key: An effective Egyptian role in mediation and in cooling cross-border attacks.

4. THE DUCHY OF UPPER PALESTINE East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Culturally and to an extent linguistically different from Gaza, and with a legacy of some condescension toward the Strip and its residents.

THE RUB: Fatah’s long history of corruption and double dealing has harmed its standing with Palestinians. Many younger residents of the West Bank have opted for radical Islam and the eventual erasure of the Jewish state.

THE UPSIDE: Successive Palestinian disappointments this decade have effectively eroded support for every Palestinian faction in existence, leading to signs of a new openness for solutions to the conflict, along with hope for economic stability.

THE WAY FORWARD: Fostering the Fatah-ruled West Bank as a new model for an eventual independent state. Convincing Israel to let Fatah-PA control security (and suppress the Islamic Jihad and armed Hamas units) in the West Bank, rather than having Israeli soldiers undermine PA authority in high-profile IDF raids.

5. SYRIA Arguably the most important swing state of them all.

THE RUB: Damascus still plays host to a range of ultra-militant Palestinian organizations. It remains allied to Iran and, as such, is crucial to the power Hezbollah holds in Lebanon.

THE UPSIDE: Syria, increasingly cash-starved as falling oil prices sap Iran’s treasury, is desperate to end its international isolation, and fervently desires Washington’s help to that end. Netanyahu has flirted with the prospect of peace with Syria in the past, knowing that only a Likud-led government could command the clout needed to give up the Golan. Were such a peace concluded, Hezbollah would lose much of its strength in Lebanon, and there would be strong Palestinian public pressure for a final peace as well.

THE WAY FORWARD: Encourage Netanyahu to pick up where he left off in the 1990s.

6. IRAN

THE RUB: Nuclear weapons research, ballistic missile research, lobbying and backing Hezbollah, Hamas, for proxy wars.

THE UPSIDE: Plummeting oil revenues, economic crisis, long-term effects of inflation and imbalance of wealth, an internet-aware younger generation. An election later this year, which could topple Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

THE WAY FORWARD: Keep back channels open to Tehran, while supporting Netanyahu, should he pick up with Syria.

Death as a Human Right

The beauty of freedom contains unpronounceable atrocities

What a day!

Who knows why they had to die?

The freedom to live contains the duty to kill.

Life in spite of everything – Gaza Sderot

Two cities separated by a little more than three kilometre. Millions experiencing the same fears and horrors. Violence nourishing the same hate. If you listen closely what people from both side tell you, you understand at first sight simple fact of life. Everybody wants to have to pursue happiness for her- and himself and their descendants. In conflict the most common point you can find among enemies is the way people mourn over the loss of a child. So while we are divided by race, colour, social class, sex, religion, nationality and abilities we still are the literally identical. Today such a sentence should not need to be written, at least not again. To be honest, it’s with a sad feeling that I write these lines. We are constantly reminded through the action of ourselves or through external events that it is far more natural, or at least seems, to behave violently than to overcome this impulse. It is important to note that it is through our intellect and our experiences that we overcome it. But, and this is a crucial point, we are the result of evolution, of a natural fight for survival, to put it far to simply we fight for the right to procreate, we do nothing more than to protect the future of our genes.

Arte TV followed several citizen of both cities during the month before the military incursion. It is a documentary revealing, at close observation, more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than many well known so-called ‘experts’.

See for yourself  – http://gaza-sderot.arte.tv/

Some passages On Bullshit

by Harry G. Frankfurt

Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming that the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to account for the fact that it is currently so great.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person’s opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of scepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “antirealist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things,and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to sceptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

On Ignorance

Yesterday I watched a video on Youtube that was send to me through a friend of my cousin. The movie was a Hamas propaganda movie. I’m not upset about the movie. During conflicts any side tries to win world public opinion for its cause. What caused me to write this note was a comment someone made. He wrote “One in a million is not enough”, reffering to the 1000 Palestinian deads of  Operation Cast Lead and the world Muslim population. I wondered:

Could it be that some german might have had a similar thought in 1936…

Loebbus Woods, Manifesto 1992

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture.

I am at war with my times, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no form place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no sacred or primordial site.

I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then melt into air.

I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the darkening sky. I cannot know your name, nor can you know mine.

Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city

Good 50×70 – War – 2007

http://good50×70.org/2007/

Democracy

There’s no escape.

The big pricks are out.

They’ll fuck everything in sight.

Watch your back.

- Harold Pinter Februrary 2003

Après moi, le déluge

The ongoing violence in Gaza, the siege, the humiliation and the apathy of world leaders create the next generation of terrorists. While it seems that the blood which is currently spilled in this round of violence is mostly Palestinian, it will be the state of Israel and its citizens who will carry the final burden. However, long sightedness is not an Israeli virtue.

Karl Marx informs us that shame is a revolutionary sentiment. Jean Paul Sartre encourages us to inform ourselves so to feel that sentiment. The first time I really understood this idea was in 2002. At that time I was still soldier in the IDF. When I was off duty I lived in Tel Aviv.

We, that is a bunch of new immigrants, shared a single room flat plus a roof top. Two (Palestinian) friends of us had lost their jobs and flats due to the intifada and we, as friends do, invited them to stay with us. This were uneasy days for them. They had to hide constantly. Every small excursion turned into an adventure. Countless times did we have to go to the Abu Kabir jail in Holon to pick up our friends after they had been arrested. It was also a time of intense discussions and mutual understanding. I wouldn’t want you to think that this was some kind of ‘humanitarian’ action. We were friends, first and foremost.

One Saturday in spring Adel’s cousin Abed came from Nablus looking for work. He had just turned 20 and had never left Nablus before. We accommodated ourselves to make one more sleeping spot. In the afternoon then we thought to go to the beach.  Avoiding the patrolling police squads we reached the sea. While I was walking into the water, someone grabbed my hand. I looked up. It was Adel’s cousin. With tears in his eyes he confessed to me that he saw the sea every day from his home but had never sat a foot into it. He was afraid. In this moment, for the first time I understood what the occupation meant. It meant to have a world full of possibilities untouchable, right behind a glass wall. In this very moment I felt ashamed like I’ve never did before.

People like Abed are an exception. While he felt the humiliation of the occupation every single day as a young man unable to provide for his family, he did not fall into blind hatred. This in itself is not an accomplishment. However, separation leads to ignorance and ignorance to hate. Many others chose another path. The path of resistance and violence. They fill the cells of our prisons, planning their revenges.

In the streets of Gaza, somewhere there is a boy. He grew up in eternal violence. Violence against Israel, but also between rival palestinian factions. On the one hand he recognizes the limits of the Palestinian resistance movements to face the IDF. On the other he sees the incapacity of Arab leaders to unite in the face of the attacks on Gaza. He observes the sly smiles of senior Fatah members, stating that Hamas has brought this upon itself. He hears the helpless UN security council stumbling. He knows, only through more violence, more resistance will he one day be free. Free to travel, free to educate himself and his children, free to pursue happiness.

The price tag for our security is his freedom.

Reporter

half of the population

so they can help and deliver

go to school

identifying with the aggressor

unable to protect the children