Israel/Palestine

Silly solutions for serious problems

Published on October 30, 2007

via Unfogged, comes this absolutely fucked-up “solution” for the Israel-Palestine conflict only an economist could love:

Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that’s that.”

Even if you can take the underlying and unarticulated assumptions of this solution seriously, there’s plenty of criticism to be leveled at this, but the fundamental flaw lies deeper. Mesquita’s solution ignores the realities of the conflict for the politically correct view of it, which is that both parties are equally at fault locked into a conflict neither wants, which mutual distrust keeps going and if only there was some magical formula that could break through the distrust, the conflict could be solved.

Reality is different. The current situation is not the result of two parties desperately wanting peace but afraid to trust each other, but has been deliberately engineered by one of them, Israel. Israel has acceptated that an outright annexation of the occupied territories and/or direct ruling its Palestinian population is now impossible, due in large part to the first Intifada. Instead, why not let a nominally independent Palestinian government do your job for you, while making it impossible for the Palestinian strategies during the First Intifada to work again?

Israel’s post-Oslo strategy therefore has been to force the Palestinians to accept the semblance of an independent state in the territory conquered in 1967, while keeping a firm control of everything of interest within it. So the Westbank has been carved up in a patchwork of Palestinian bantustans, each surrounded by Israeli settler colonies and Israeli only roads, with the Israelis controlling the borders with Israel and Jordan. Which means that each of these statelets can be cut off at will if need be, while the media can be kept outside. Meanwhile the Palestinian Authority only has nominal control over its territority, as it doesn’t control its own airspace, water supplies or even much of its income (with the Israelis e.g. controlling customs and excise). The only real authority the Palestinian government has is the authority to police the population for Israel.

This strategy has made a repeat of the First Intifada, with its emphasis on relatively non-violent direct resistance, impossible, as we’ve seen with the Seconf Intifada, when the suicide bombers took over. If you’re cynical enough, you might say that the emergence of the suicide bomber targeting “soft” civilian targets as the major vector of Palestinian resistance against Israeli rule was an intended side effect of the Israelí strategy, as it kept support at home for repression high, while it got sympathy abroad. Even more so of course for the Palestinian rocket attacks, which are much less lethal than suicide bombings but almost equally dramatic.

The problem therefore is not that both sides are desparately looking for peace but don’t know how, but that one side has already won the conflict, but only in a way that keeps it eternally frozen. So no, silly solutions as “revenue sharing on tourism” will not help here.

Realist empire

Published on October 13, 2007

Jamie explains how the current backlash against the Israel lobby, even if limited, might help to strengthen the power of the (Bush) presidency and hence the American empire:

Take the famous Mearsheimer and Walt book. Responses have centred on whether its portrayal of the dimensions and influence of the Israel Lobby in the United States are accurate; at least when they haven’t been a competition for the most creative ways of suggesting that M & W are anti-semites.

Behind that there’s another point. Lobbies flourish in the US because the law permits them wide latitude to influence public affairs in whatever way they can. You can’t change the terms of trade for Israel without changing them for all the other lobbies. And one of the most efficient ways to do that is to limit Congress’s ability to respond to their lobbying. That in turn implies limiting its freedom of action, something which would automatically strengthen the executive.

I have noticed a … tendency amongst those American liberals brave enough to admit and object to the existence of a Israel lobby to believe that it was largely that lobby that was responsible for the War on Iraq. In a strange way, the wingnut insistence that liberals use “neocon” as an antisemitic slur (don’t bother with the reasoning behind that) also draws from this belief. Having an existing and clearly very succesful lobby to put the blame on makes it of course easier to ignore the flaws and malice in American politics itself that made it possible to start an illegal and immoral war on the flimsiest of reasons.

A puzzler

Published on October 8, 2007

Here’s a puzzler for you. While “foreign insurgents” in Iraq and Afghanistan are routinely condemned as the worst of the worst, which other Middle Eastern country has no problem with letting foreigners like Jeffrey Goldberg serve in its army, with not even a hint of disapproval from the usual suspects?

Iran, Israel and the Bomb

Published on October 3, 2007

Avedon Carol quotes Israeli historian Martin van Creveld on Iran and nuclear weapons: “Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.”

Carefully not noted by Martin is a) the lack of evidence about Iran’s alleged attempts to create nuclear weapons and b) the fact that there is one country in the Middle East which unquestionably does have nuclear weapons which it has never admitted to: Israel…

Recognising Israel

Published on July 16, 2006

Ellis Sharp explains why recognising Israel’s right to exist is not as simple as all that:

Now of course in one obvious sense Israel exists. But as anti-Zionist bloggers have repeatedly asked: which Israel is to be recognised? The Israel defined by the United Nations in 1948, which handed over land held by a majority Arab population to European Jews? The Israel of 1949, when the first major phase of ethnic cleansing had been completed, and Palestinians had not only been driven out of the U.N.’s defined Jewish state but a huge area of land on top of that? Or should it be Israel in 1967, when within Israel yet more ethnic cleansing had been surreptitiously carried out, and when the rest of historic Palestine was occupied? Or Israel in 2006, which has flouted innumerable UN resolutions and grabbed even more occupied land from the Palestinians? Israel 2006, presumably.

The Israeli writer Yizchak Laor once observed that as an ideology Zionism has always been closer to racism and fascism than to liberalism. But, historically, it has always succeeded in co-opting liberals to its cause, right back to the days of George Eliot and Daniel Deronda. The British Labour movement throughout its history appears (as far as I can tell) to have always been strongly pro-Israel.

To succeed in getting even Harold Pinter to demand “recognition of Israel” and to have the GMB passing blatantly Zionist motions is, to my mind, quite remarkable. Recognition of Israel’s right to exist requires beaten-up victims to recognise that thieves have a right to stolen property. But that’s not what recognition is really about. Recognition is about accepting Israel’s right to exist as a sectarian state which defines citizenship by religion and comprehensively discriminates against citizens who do not belong to the master religion. Israel has no general anti-discrimination legislation and no commitment to equality. Israel accords second-class status to non-Jews.

Decent people cannot recognise Israel as a state with a right to exist until it stops being an Apartheid state, like decent people could not support South Africa’s right to exist as an Apartheid state either. Now it may seem today that this will never happen, but it seemed that way with South Africa in the eighties as well, with its Black population herded into bantustans and only let out to serve as cheap labour, almost slave labour, the South African army rampaging across the Frontline states at will, Mandela and other resistance leaders locked up or killed and no negotiation with the ANC possible. Yet a few years later the system was broken down, South Africa made peace with its neighbours and Mandela became president. Israel could do the same, but will not do it voluntarily. Therefore, we need toboycott Israel like South Africa was boycotted.