Beginning of the End in Syria?

There are signs that the Assad regime is caring out ethnic cleansing in the coastal area between Tartus and Latakia, Syria.  According to Syria specialist Joshua Landis this is strategic ethnic cleansing similar in purpose to that carried out by Israelis against Palestinians in 1948. But I contend that Israeli ethnic cleansing was carrying over a European norm from World War II, where only two years before massive ethnic cleansing was carried out by Central Europeans against Germans as revenge and protection against future depredations by German aggressors. The Jews thought that they were protecting themselves against future Palestinian attempts to snuff out the newborn state. Thus, ethnic cleansing in 1948 was not only defensive in nature but conformed with contemporary European, if not quite Western, norms. 

But others suggest that the Assad regime is now winning the war. There has been a shift in power in recent weeks away from the rebels in favor of the regime. Since the start of the war, massacres of rebel-leaning populations or suspected rebel-supporting populations have been the norm. Bashar al-Assad, like Saddam Hussein, is like a Mafia don who uses violence to intimidate. Even as the tide of war seems to turn in his favor, he is making contingency plans for the event that power shifts again. He is preparing alternative scenarios: remain in power in Damascus or create a statelet on the Alawite coast of the Mediterranean.

Intervention in Syria?

The op-ed columns of the quality newspapers have been full of columns arguing for and against American intervention in Syria over the last several months. I have yet to see an argument that explains credibly how it would be in the American national interest to intervene in Syria. This lack of logic is pointed out in a piece from The Nation, which I normally do not find myself in agreement with. Most that attempt this sort of argument explain that we need to intervene in order to buy influence at the bargaining table. They claim that the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs who are now backing the opposition in Syria are not interested in democracy and human rights. This is true. But anyone who knows Islamists or even ordinary Muslims knows that they are like those pious Christians who ignore all the direct causes of anything that happens and attribute it all to God. If Washington gave arms to the Free Syrian Army or another outfit, the group would be happy to claim credit for Allah. Washington would be only a conduit. Is it really necessary to be grateful to a mere conduit?

Yakhimovich admits that her stand cost Labor Party seats

972 blogger Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf had a short item about Israeli Labor Party leader Shelli Yakhimovich telling party activists that her refusal to campaign on the Palestinian issue (or the diplomatic issue as she puts it) cost the party four seats in the January 22, 2013 election. She assigned these four as two to Meretz and two to Tzipi Livni's haTnua (the Movement) party. Why did she make this admission and is it true?

Loyalist paramilitaries demonstrate their strength

East Belfast witnessed on Saturday a parade by some 10,000 commemorators of the centenary of the founding of the original Ulster Volunteer Force in 1913. Over thirty flute, fife and drum bands marched in the parade along with those in period costumes dressed as soldiers and nurses of the UVF. This is part of the centenary decade of commemorations dealing with the creation of Northern Ireland as a province within the United Kingdom separate from the rest of Ireland. At the ceremony the granddaughter of James Craig aka Lord Craigavon, the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, spoke as did Billy Hutchinson, a former double-murderer, loyalist prisoner and present leader of the Progressive Unionist Party, which has a single member in the Assembly. Click here and here for stories on the parade. The parade seems to have been also intended as a show of force by the modern-day Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a terrorist group founded in 1966 and the main loyalist paramilitary organization during The Troubles.

European Union Taking a Stand in the Middle East?

In my most recently published book, When Peace Fails: Lessons from Belfast for the Middle East, which was published in 2010 by McFarland Publishing of Jefferson, NC, I stated that the dual mediation used in Northern Ireland by London and Dublin would be a good model for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other ethnic conflicts. I wrote that the two partners in the Middle East should be Washington and Brussels (EU), as each had good connections and bias towards one of the parties in the conflict and yet very good relations with each other. This is the Northern Ireland model. It was reported in the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv (in Hebrew) that EU Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton received a letter from 19 distinguished European statesmen and politicians including one former president (female), four former prime ministers and seven former foreign ministers calling on her to assert a more active role for the EU in mediation of the conflict challenging the traditional solo role of Washington and also criticizing the way Israeli settlement has been allowed to perpetuate the occupation.  Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf discusses the letter on his joint blog, 972. He reproduces the text of the letter and the names of the signators. The most prominent are probably: Miguel Moratinos, the former EU representative to the Oslo talks and former foreign minister of Spain; Giullio Amatto, the former prime minister of Italy; and John Bruton, the former prime minister (taoiseach) of Ireland during the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s.  Bruton was in office (1994-97) when the peace process was frozen because the IRA had broken its ceasefire over the decommissioning issue.

In 1979 the forerunner of the EU, the European Economic Community (EEC), issued a declaration from its Venice Summit in July calling for Palestinian participation in the peace process. This was at a time when the PLO refused to recognize Israel and had been carrying out a terrorist campaign against it from the mid-1960s. (The PLO was taken over by the fedayeen organizations in 1969 that had been carrying out this attack from the mid-1960s. The PLO was founded by the Arab League in 1964.) The United States ignored the declaration and it had no real effect. The EU did have observer status during the latter part of the Oslo process in the Taba talks in January 2000. Otherwise it has been basically ignored. 

In 1992-93 Washington left the Europeans to deal with the civil war in Bosnia and Brussels dropped the ball, unable to bridge the differing biases of its leading members towards Serbia and Croatia. Finally Washington had to intervene in 1995 to change the military balance and then mediate an end to the war. Only then was Europe allowed to take over again. In 1998-99 Washington did not even bother going to the European Union to deal with Serbian repression in Kosovo but led a NATO intervention in the spring of 1999. 

Maybe Europe is better able to deal with crises that occur outside of Europe? Maybe Europe can deal effectively with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? But I would not expect Europe to try to kick Washington out of the game completely, but rather only demand an equal share.  The Northern Ireland model is still the best model out there.

For Obama's Second Term Israel Policy Read Peter Beinart

Those wondering what Obama's policy towards Israel will probably be in his second term should read Peter Beinart's 2012 Jewish bestseller The Crisis of Zionism. Although the subject of the book is the crisis within American Judaism (emptiness of communal life) and in Israel (loss of democracy and the occupation) he does devote a full three chapters out of ten total to Obama. The first of these is entitled "The Jewish President," and in it Beinart attempts to do for our first actual black president what black novelist Toni Morrison famously did for Clinton when she declared him "America's first black president." Beinart argues that Obama as an adult was most influenced by his association with Jews in Chicago, most of whom were either liberal or radical and critical of Israel. But as a candidate Obama was a cautious politician who picked Jewish advisors more for their reputation with the Jewish community than for their academic or policy credentials. This is why he replaced Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer with Ambassador Dennis Ross as his main advisor on Israel and the peace process during the 2008 campaign and for his first term. Beinart ends the chapter with a quote from one of Obama's key Jewish influences, Rabbi Arnold Wolf, "He's going to go very cautiously and not do anything that shakes up the Jewish community." That turned out to not be quite accurate.

The Cost of Compromising in Democracies: Israel and the United States

Today I went to see the new Israeli documentary film, The Gatekeepers, about the reminisces of six former heads of the Israeli General Security Service, better known by its acronym as Shabak or Shin Bet (Sherut haBitakhon haKlali). The interviewer asked the six individuals a series of questions--some the same and some different for each individual--and then received the answers. The talking heads were interspersed with news footage, some of cars being tracked and destroyed by Israeli aircraft or buildings being hit by Israeli bombs and footage of the aftermath of bomb explosions. The film is in Hebrew with English subtitles and for those with a good grasp of Hebrew easy to follow without the subtitles.

 

One segment of the film dealt with the settler terrorist underground that existed in Israeli settlements in the early 1980s before the network was rolled up by the Shabak in 1984 as it prepared to plant bombs on Arab buses in an effort to make a mass killing (250) of Arabs. The religious settlement leaders said they were sure that the Dome of the Rock would not remain and that the Temple Mount would remain in Jewish hands. The film also showed the incitement campaign conducted by the Israeli Right against Rabin before his assassination. 

 

Watching this it suddenly occurred to me that this was a result of the compromises that were made both with the religious sector in general when Israel was created as a Jewish state and then with the religious Zionists following the Six Day War of 1967. The compromise was not an easy one to make: it was a choice between compromising on the democratic features of the state or excluding religious Jews from the state. The United States made a similar compromise in 1776 when independence was declared. Thomas Jefferson's paragraph on slavery was left out of the Declaration of Independence and the slave states of the South were assured that slavery would remain legal in an independent America. And even beyond this when the Constitution was written it was decreed that 60 percent of the slave population of the country would be counted as free for the purposes of assigning representation even though the slaves lacked all civil rights including the franchise. This allowed the South to dominate Washington for the first half of the nineteenth century even though the free population of the North was much larger than the free population of the South. This situation was only ended by a terrible war--the most costly in American history, one more costly than the other wars combined (excluding the Civil War) up until World War II. 

 

Slavery was not ended by the British Anti-Slavery Society or by any foreign pressure but by a civil war that included tens of thousands of former slaves serving in uniform. The anti-slavery political parties, a series of three increasingly larger and more powerful parties, after two decades of existence only brought the country  to the point where the South could be provoked into seceding. This then led to the Civil War and the ending of slavery by presidential decree, force of arms and finally by Constitutional amendment. 

I went to see The Gatekeepers both because of the favorable reviews I had read of it and because J Street, a pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy lobbying group urged its members to see it. J Street maybe commands the support of a majority of American Jews, although its active membership is much smaller, or about two percent of the American electorate. In the 1840s the Liberty Party could count on between two and three percent of the vote in Northern states in state and local elections and in the 1844 presidential election. J Street and its predecessor, Brit Tzedek vaShalom, has been in existence for a decade now. Time-wise this would compare to the Free Soil Party in 1851. The Free Soil Party bounced between ten percent of the popular presidential vote in 1848 and five percent in 1852 with a much lower support level from late 1850 to mid-1852. In Israel the share of the vote to the anti-occupation parties has been steadily shrinking for a decade. This means that the likelihood of either Israel saving itself from the occupation and its accompanying settlement effort and the U.S. saving it is quite remote at present.

Slavery was finally ended in America because the slavocracy or slave power over reached and tried to ignore the results of a presidential election and break up the Union. In biblical language this was known as God hardening the heart of whatever enemy of Israel over reached. Unless the Israeli Right and especially the settlers over reach in a similar fashion they are quite safe. As some one who does not believe in a God of history that interacts with mankind, I do not expect a divine hardening of the heart--but I never the less see it going on today in Israel.