FULL ARTICLES

“I BEGAN LIFE AS SHEPHERD LIVING IN OUR FAMILY TENT”

Lost in the blur of slogans
By Ishmael Khaldi
The San Francisco Chronicle
March 4, 2009

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/03/EDRP168GMT.DTL

For those who haven’t heard, the first week in March has been designated as Israel Apartheid Week by activists who are either ill intentioned or misinformed. On American campuses, organizing committees are planning happenings to once again castigate Israel as the lone responsible party for all that maligns the Middle East.

Last year, at UC Berkeley, I had the opportunity to “dialogue” with some of the organizers of these events. My perspective is unique, both as the vice consul for Israel in San Francisco, and as a Bedouin and the highest-ranking Muslim representing the Israel in the United States. I was born into a Bedouin tribe in Northern Israel, one of 11 children, and began life as shepherd living in our family tent. I went on to serve in the Israeli border police, and later earned a master’s degree in political science from Tel Aviv University before joining the Israel Foreign Ministry.

I am a proud Israeli – along with many other non-Jewish Israelis such as Druze, Bahai, Bedouin, Christians and Muslims, who live in one of the most culturally diversified societies and the only true democracy in the Middle East. Like America, Israeli society is far from perfect, but let us deals honestly. By any yardstick you choose – educational opportunity, economic development, women and gay’s rights, freedom of speech and assembly, legislative representation – Israel’s minorities fare far better than any other country in the Middle East.

So, I would like to share the following with organizers of Israel Apartheid week, for those of them who are open to dialogue and not blinded by a hateful ideology:

You are part of the problem, not part of the solution: If you are really idealistic and committed to a better world, stop with the false rhetoric. We need moderate people to come together in good faith to help find the path to relieve the human suffering on both sides of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Vilification and false labeling is a blind alley that is unjust and takes us nowhere.

You deny Israel the fundamental right of every society to defend itself: You condemn Israel for building a security barrier to protect its citizens from suicide bombers and for striking at buildings from which missiles are launched at its cities – but you never offer an alternative. Aren’t you practicing yourself a deep form of racism by denying an entire society the right to defend itself?

Your criticism is willfully hypocritical: Do Israel’s Arab citizens suffer from disadvantage? You better believe it. Do African Americans 10 minutes from the Berkeley campus suffer from disadvantage – you better believe it, too. So should we launch a Berkeley Apartheid Week, or should we seek real ways to better our societies and make opportunity more available.

You are betraying the moderate Muslims and Jews who are working to achieve peace: Your radicalism is undermining the forces for peace in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. We are working hard to move toward a peace agreement that recognizes the legitimate rights of both Israel and the Palestinian people, and you are tearing down by falsely vilifying one side.

To the organizers of Israel Apartheid Week I would like to say:

If Israel were an apartheid state, I would not have been appointed here, nor would I have chosen to take upon myself this duty. There are many Arabs, both within Israel and in the Palestinian territories who have taken great courage to walk the path of peace. You should stand with us, rather than against us.

 

“DURBAN IS FLAWED AND SHOULD NOT PROCEED”

Durban II in danger
Editorial
Japan Times
March 10, 2009

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ed20090310a1.html

On paper the U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance is an eminently laudable project – if you believe that the United Nations should promote grand statements that promote norms of good behavior. But the preparations for this meeting, and its predecessor, suggest that good intentions are not enough. Instead of fighting racism, the conference looks set to enshrine it as policy by singling out Israel for criticism and equating Zionism with racism.

Meetings like this undermine the U.N. and empower its critics. Acquiescing to this agenda is a mistake. The more countries protest against this meeting, the more hope there is for getting the U.N. back on track.

The first such conference was held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. That meeting was dominated by discussions over the Middle East and the legacy of slavery. The United States and Israel walked out halfway through after it became apparent that attendees were going to spend most of their time condemning Israel, and ignoring virtually the rest of the world. The conference focus undermined respect for the U.N. in the mind of the U.S. administration, reinforcing a mind-set that saw the world body as discriminatory, misguided and unprepared to work on real problems.

There were hopes the next U.N. conference on racism, dubbed Durban II after its predecessor and scheduled for next month, would change its approach to restore legitimacy in both the institution and its work. The new administration of U.S. President Barack Obama had indicated that it was prepared to rejoin deliberations if they were fair and unbiased.

But after dispatching representatives to preparatory meetings last month, the U.S. announced that it will boycott the conference unless the final declaration is changed to drop all references to Israel and the defamation of religion. In joining Canada and Israel in shunning the meeting, the U.S. noted that the document under negotiation “had gone from bad to worse” and declared that it was “not salvageable.” Other European governments are expected to do the same if the document is not changed.

Western complaints focus on three areas: First is the unrestrained support for the Palestinian cause and the blind criticism of Israel. Attempts to equate Zionism with racism repeat the divisive and corrosive debates of the 1970s. The U.N. is seen as anything but fair in these discussions, and the institution is discredited and marginalized as a result. The second complaint is the call for reparations for slavery.

Many Western governments have acknowledged their role in enslaving and relocating millions of Africans. The demand that they make compensation payments may be cathartic but it is unrealistic. Moreover, it ignores the role of other players, some African and Arab, in the slave trade. The third area of concern is language that calls for restrictions on defamation of religion. Western governments say these provisions undermine freedom of speech. They also note that while the protections are sweeping in their scope, the only religion identified by name is Islam.

It is tempting to blame the Libyan chair for the turn the conference has taken, or the Cuban special rapporteur. Both countries have been at the forefront of the movement to isolate Israel and use the U.N., along with other world bodies, as blunt instruments to cudgel the West and the U.S., in particular. But, sadly, they are not the only countries that desire to single out Israel for international censure.

Reportedly, members of the Muslim world are also using the frictions generated by the war against terrorism to privilege their religion at the conference. The identification of Islamic extremists with terrorism is equated with persecution of that faith in their mind and, therefore, must be prevented at all costs. At the same time, protections for Jews are being blocked. An effort to protect against discrimination and intolerance looks like anything but.

Racism and discrimination are too often evident. Much more must be done to fight these evils and banish them, at least from the realm of government policy. The U.N. should be helping to establish and enforce such norms. But norms such as these are intended to protect minorities, not enshrine the prejudices of the majority. Numbers, like military might, do not make right.

The fate of the Palestinians is a tragedy and Israel has been complicit in that ugly history. But Israel alone is not to blame. The charitable explanation for the mentality behind the Durban meetings is the mistaken belief that the best way to remedy the sufferings of one group is to victimize another. Less charitably, one could argue that Durban is an attempt to punish Israel and the Jews, regardless of what they have done. By either explanation, Durban is flawed and should not proceed.

 

ANTI-SEMITISM IS AS MUCH PART OF ARAB LIFE TODAY AS THE HIJAB OR THE HOOKAH

Anti-Semitism In Araby
By Josef Joffe
Newsweek
March 9, 2009

www.newsweek.com/id/186974

This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit Israel and the West Bank, stepping into the longest-running show in American diplomacy, one that goes all the way back to the Rogers Plan of 1969. The play is called “Mediating in the Middle East,” and it might be another 40 years before the cast sings the finale.

The reasons for this slow pace are familiar: the status of Jerusalem, problems with security, Jewish settlements, civil war among the Palestinians, etc. But one other key problem is stubbornly ignored:

the fact that no Arab regime has shown itself willing to truly prepare its people for peace with Israel, which would mean accepting the lasting presence of Jews in their midst. Indeed, anti-Semitism – the real stuff, not just bad-mouthing particular Israeli policies – is as much part of Arab life today as the hijab or the hookah. Whereas this darkest of creeds is no longer tolerated in polite society in the West, in the Arab world, Jew hatred remains culturally endemic.

For a European, it all feels uncomfortably familiar. Take the cartoons one sees in the government-controlled Arab press. They feature The Jew as a murderous conspirator, a capitalist bloodsucker or Satan himself – the classics. He even looks like his predecessors in Der Stürmer, with his hooked nose, thick lip and sinister beard.

Open Egypt’s Al-Gomhuria newspaper, and there is The Jew as a serpent strangling Uncle Sam over a caption that reads “The Jews taking over the world.” On Al-Nas TV, Egyptian cleric Ahmad Abd al-Salam tells his viewers, “I want you to imagine the Jews sitting around a table, conspiring how to corrupt the Muslims… The Jews conspire to infect the food of Muslims with cancer [and] to ship it to Muslim countries.” Al-Salam’s colleague, Zaghloul al-Naggar, has called Jews “devils in human form.” And this is a country at peace with Israel. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ chief propagandist, would be proud.

Meanwhile, Saleh Riqab, Hamas’s deputy minister of religious endowment, has picked up smoothly where European anti-Semitism leaves off, declaring on TV that “the protocols of the elders of Zion discuss how the Jews should seize control of the world. In Europe, and especially in the U.S., there was a quick Jewish takeover of the major mass media.” One Egyptian cleric has even voiced the widely shared opinion that “Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews.” So much for a two-state solution.

No anti-Semitism is ever complete without the idea of sexual subversion. The Nazis accused the Jews of “polluting” the Aryan race. Sure enough, one Egyptian “expert” has opined on Al-Nas TV that “the No. 1 goal [of the West and the Jews] in spreading pornographic films is to destroy the identity of the Islamic nation.”

A favorite trope is the Nazi-Jew comparison, which has a simple psychological function. Since Nazis are the epitome of evil, so must be the Jews. Thus a Qatari paper has shown the contrails of an Israeli warplane forming a swastika, and a Saudi paper has superimposed it on the Star of David.

The official Syrian Tishreen newspaper has depicted an Israeli soldier gesticulating to Adolf Hitler in front of a sea of skulls. The caption reads “The Israeli is explaining to the Nazi: ‘We are the same’.”

Finally, an example that might be amusing if it didn’t illustrate the depth of the problem. It comes from Captain Shahada, of Egypt’s Unique Moustache Association, who confessed on Egyptian TV: “I respect the moustache of this Hitler because he humiliated the most despicable sect in the world. He subdued the people who subdued the whole world – him with his [style number] ‘11’ moustache.” This is the essence of obsession: the compulsive recurrence of images and ideas over which you have no control.

So peacemakers, beware. They’ll have to deal with a civil society on one side that is by no means civil. Indeed, as the Egyptian examples show (and there are plenty more from Jordan), there is an inverse relationship between policy and attitudes. Egypt’s government has been at peace with Israel for 30 years; for Jordan, it’s been 15.

Cynics might argue that this horrid creed is the price of peace –that the regimes in Cairo and Amman (and Ramallah, Qatar or Riyadh) deliberately stoke the flames of hatred to distract the masses from their quasi alliances with the Jewish state. The Palestinian Authority today owes its life to the Israeli Army. So it has to out-Hamas Hamas when it comes to the Jew-devil.

It’s a nice theory, and it might even be true in parts. But it’s not sustainable. How can you make or maintain peace with Satan incarnate? The Israelis long ago began to change their textbooks from a nationalist narrative to a more inclusive one that emphasizes not only the Holocaust but also the nakba, the flight and plight of the Arabs in 1948-49. But in Araby, we have the Syrian actress Amal Arafa, who makes a very different point. Even in peace, “Israel will continue to be a black… spot in my memory, in my genes and in my blood… We’ve sucked it in with the milk of our mothers [and] we will pass it down for many more generations.”

Good luck, Secretary Clinton.

 

OBAMA SHOULD NOT SWEEP HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER THE RUG

Opposition in Syria dying with a dissident
By David Schenker
Los Angeles Times
March 10, 2009

Reports from Damascus say Syria’s leading dissident is on his deathbed. Riad Seif, 62 and suffering from prostate cancer, has spent the last year in Adra prison as punishment for attending a meeting of pro-democracy groups in Damascus. Syrian President Bashar Assad has prohibited him from seeking treatment abroad, a restriction Seif once called “a slow death sentence.”

Seif is the most respected member of Syria’s dwindling secular, democratic opposition to the iron-fisted rule of Assad and his Alawite clan. As the Obama administration prepares to resume diplomatic engagement with Damascus, Seif’s plight is a poignant reminder of the abysmal state of human rights in Syria. His biography illustrates why it would be a mistake for Washington to sweep human rights under the rug.

A former member of parliament, Seif devoted much of the last two decades to criticizing the Assad regime. A garment trader by profession -- at one time he held the license to manufacture Adidas in Syria -- his fortunes changed after he was elected to parliament in 1994 and, in contrast to virtually all of his colleagues, embarked on a public campaign against corruption and for political and economic reforms.

His efforts to change Syria cost him personally and professionally. In 1996, two years after his election, Seif’s 21-year-old son, Iyad, died under what Seif later described as “mysterious circumstances.” Then, after Seif published a high-profile study on economic stagnation in Syria, the regime charged him with tax evasion and levied fines in excess of $2 million, leaving him bankrupt. Refusing to bow to pressure, Seif ran for parliament again in 1998. Remarkably, he won.

During his second term, Seif wrote and distributed a scathing report on the common practice in Syria of granting mobile-phone monopolies to regime cronies, implicating, most notably, Assad’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf. Then in 2000, Seif gave a speech demanding an end to Assad’s “political monopoly.” In response, the government arranged to strip him of his parliamentary immunity. He was tried and sentenced to five years in prison. Amnesty International calls him a prisoner of conscience.

Even behind bars, Seif was undeterred. In 2005, he coauthored the Damascus Declaration, which called for political pluralism, an end to the hated Emergency Law and a new Syrian constitution limiting the powers of the president. Seif eventually was released but had been out of prison for less than two years when he was sent back to Adra in February 2008.

Seif’s case offers the Obama administration an opportunity to connect directly with the cause of human rights, which resonates deeply in Syria and throughout the Middle East. During the George W. Bush era, the White House devoted at least rhetorical importance to the cause: Bush publicly mentioned Seif at least three times. Today, some suggest that sidelining human rights may be the sort of “confidence-building measure” toward Damascus that helps create an environment conducive to Israel-Syria peace talks. That would be a mistake. In its most recent annual assessment, Freedom House gave Syria its worst rating on political liberties. The trend, its report said, was getting worse.

Pressing for peace over human rights is a false choice. To the contrary, Washington might be able to demand respect for human rights in exchange for playing a role in negotiations with Israel over the return of the Golan Heights and a permanent peace deal with Israel.

During his inaugural address, President Obama said his administration sought a “new way forward” with the Muslim world, “based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” If Washington is really committed to change, this formulation should apply not only to Middle Eastern leaders, but to people such as Riad Seif, who share our values and reside in authoritarian states like Syria.

 

AN ARTIFICIAL EVENHANDEDNESS

Amnesty and HRW have failed to live up to their own moral codes over the Gaza conflict
By Dan Kosky
The Jewish Chronicle
March 5, 2009

When it comes to writing the history of the recent Gaza conflict, the prevailing narrative will be influenced by those perceived as “honest brokers”, including powerful human rights groups. Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have wasted no time in cementing their position by calling for international investigations by the UN and European Union into alleged “war crimes” and a suspension of arms sales. These demands pay lip service to their self-serving image of impartiality. Yet in reality, these groups play a dangerous game of moral equivalence and disinformation which threatens the ethics of human rights and international law.

In a recent article published in the Financial Times Deutschland, HRW officials brazenly claimed that “it is clear that both Israel and Hamas have perpetrated serious violations of the laws of war”. Not a shred of evidence was supplied, and HRW failed to provide the courtesy of waiting for the IDF and others to release the findings of their internal reports. Instead, the inconvenient lack of evidence in this “rush to justice” was brushed aside as the same article lamented, “No one expects to see anyone in the dock soon for war crimes in Gaza. But the work has to start now.”

This week, Amnesty International’s report provided an inventory of weapons used in Gaza, but no proof of their illegal use. Using pure conjecture, Amnesty concluded that countries must place an arms embargo on Israel and audaciously stated that: “Both Israel and Hamas used weapons supplied from abroad to carry out attacks on civilians – thus committing war crimes.”

The false assumption of these groups is that a conflict involving civilian casualties is by definition unjust, wrong and illegal. This baffling view of warfare makes it almost impossible for countries to defend themselves or for western democracies to fight terror.

Civilian casualties are a tragic reality of modern war, especially when terrorists hide weapons and fight from civilian areas. International law accepts the inevitability of civilian casualties, so long as it does not outweigh the perceived military advantage. If the standard set by Amnesty, HRW and others were to be adopted, there could be no such thing as a just war and all leaders who defend their populations against attack, as is their responsibility, would become potential “war criminals”.

This moral confusion, the inability to distinguish the right of self-defence from the thirst for death and destruction has infected much of the NGO commentary on Gaza. Some 50 NGOs released over 500 statements in the month covering the fighting and its aftermath. A constant feature of these statements is the failure to differentiate between the actions of Israel, apologetic at each civilian death and Hamas, which measures its success by the quantities of innocent blood spilled.

Although NGOs are keen to promote a veneer of neutrality, proclaiming alleged abuses “on both sides”, the reality is very different. NGO commentary on Gaza has been characterized by overwhelming condemnation of Israel and a marked reluctance to condemn the widespread and illegal use of human shields by Hamas. Human rights groups use a warped logic to justify this imbalance by arguing that the clarity of Hamas violations speak for themselves and therefore attention should be focused on Israel. “The Israeli authorities deny everything, so one has to prove what happened in a way that you don’t need to do with the Palestinian rockets,” said Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International.

An artificial evenhandedness might be understandable for leading politicians, not so in the case of NGOs. By their very definition, human rights organizations must distance themselves from political considerations and provide moral clarity. Their failure to do so over Gaza leaves a dangerously distorted picture.

 

ERDOĞAN PLAYS A DANGEROUS GAME WITH TURKISH DEMOCRACY

Bayezid II vs. Erdoğan I
By Burak Bekdil
Hurriyet Daily News
March 2009

www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/opinion/11145625.asp

“How can you call Ferdinand of Aragon a wise king? He has made his land poor and enriched ours,” thus spoke Sultan Beyazit II (1447-1512) when a majority of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 went to the Ottoman Empire to settle down.

Five hundred and seventeen years later, a wannabe Ottoman sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan I, said of the Jews, “When it comes to killing, you know it too well.” But why should Turkey have an elected sultan in the 21st century’s political architecture? Because the Turks democratically chose to have a sultan. And that’s all too normal in the Orient. The Lebanese, after Mr. Erdoğan’s flare-up in Davos, proposed to declare him the new “caliph.” Why should the Turks not call him the new Ottoman sultan?

Mr. Erdoğan is playing a dangerous game. He plays his Islamist self in public, and his pragmatist self in private. Easy game: You call the Jews – that “cursed nation” as most dogmatic Muslims think of them – “killers” in public road shows and win votes.

Then you resort to all possible means of private diplomacy and back channels to avoid Jewish-American hostility because you must also behave like a survivor. Excellent blend! And you don’t care the least because you have perilously added to the already explosive anti-Semitic sentiment at home. Plus, you can now play the new Ottoman sultan, the darling of all the oppressed nations of the Middle East. Very cunning indeed.

But do the gains in real life come that easily? Not always. Not forever. True, Washington needs Turkey’s services, especially at a time when it hopes for a graceful exit from Iraq and for a better task force in Afghanistan, to name just two. But statesmen do need to talk realities in addition to fantasies. One of those moments will come soon.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will be in Ankara on the weekend. During their meeting, according to Mr. Erdoğan’s account, the prime minister-turned-sultan will ask the secretary of state for an explanation of the State Department’s human rights report on Turkey.

Add to that Mr. Erdoğan’s all-too enthusiastic love affair with Hamas. Now add to that blend fresh input: Mrs. Clinton reaffirmed on Monday that “the United States would deal only with a Palestinian unity government that renounced terrorism and recognized the right of Israel to exist; that would clearly exclude Hamas, which, she noted, continues to launch rockets at Israeli towns.”

There will surely be niceties in Ankara. That will be the “pragmatic” part of the very important talks in the Turkish capital. In reality, Mr. Erdoğan’s neo-Ottomanism does not fit into the new U.S. administration’s view of an ideal Middle East. Mr. Erdoğan will no doubt wear his pragmatic mask when he meets with Mrs. Clinton. And for sure Mrs. Clinton will tell Mr. Erdoğan all the necessary words of consolation over the human rights report which, according to his own words, angered him a lot. In return, he will nod and return the pleasantries, highlighting Turkey’s “geo-strategic importance” for American interests. There is nothing unusual in all that talk.

But the fundamental – and widening – divergence of world views is too powerful to hide behind temporary periods of mutual pragmatism:

* Mr. Erdoğan is too pro-Hamas whereas Mrs. Clinton’s idea for peace does not include a popular political movement with a branch that commits terrorism.

* For Mrs. Clinton, the Israelis have a right to exist whereas for Mr. Erdoğan the Israelis “only know too well when it comes to killing.”

* For Washington, Turkey must remain a genuine democracy, not an autocracy with free elections. But Mr. Erdoğan loves his messianic role as the Ottoman Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan I, if he just does not have an eye on the trophy for the new caliph.

* Hopefully these “negligible” differences can be skipped – but not forever if anyone on either side of the Atlantic is serious about the Middle East.

And by the way, this is how Mrs. Clinton’s State Department reported on Mr. Erdoğan’s Turkey on religious freedoms:

* Religious social orders (tarikats) and lodges (cemaats) are officially prohibited; however, they remained (in 2008) active and widespread and many prominent politicians and social leaders continued to associate with these and other societies.

* Mr. Erdoğan’s government continued to restrict applicants’ choice of religion on their ID cards.

* There are reports that officers in governmental ministries faced discrimination because they were not considered by their supervisors to be sufficiently observant of Islamic religious practices.

Need one say more?