Siege Democracy Confirmed

This week the Israeli Knesset confirmed my characterization/classification of Israel as a siege democracy by passing legislation allowing any Israeli company that is the target of a boycott call to sue in civil court without having to prove that it was actually damaged economically. This has so far backfired by forcing many Israeli liberals who disapprove of boycotts to defend the free speech rights of others to call for them. This has left the Right in Israel even more isolated as many Jews in the diaspora have opposed the legislation. Either this easily-foreseen consequence was simply overlooked, which means that the originators of the legislation are incompetent, or secretly desired, in which case they want to damage Israel's interests while appearing patriotic.

In any case Israel is swiftly moving into the territory of the South African regime during the late 1980s. The National Party regularly spoke of a "Total Onslaught" against South Africa that could only be fought by a "Total (totalitarian) Response." In the 1987 election campaign the opposition Progressive Federal Party was demonized as collaborating with the outlawed African National Congress. The tactic worked in the short term and delivered a big electoral victory for the National Party and made the nationalist Afrikaner Conservative Party the official opposition. This in turn increased South Africa's opposition internationally. In Israel's party system there is no real "official opposition" but rather parties that take turns as coalition partners with the Likud. Avigdor Liebermann is aiming to be the new head of the Israeli Right by replacing Netanyahu. Bibi is running scared. He reacts short term to the danger from the Right. He learned his lesson from his first premiership--don't provoke the Right.

J Street's misdirected activism

On Sunday I attended a house party for the Madison chapter of J Street. There were about ten of us there to listen to the Midwest coordinator from Chicago explain J Street's strategy for the "two-state summer" to pressure the Obama administration to reengage in Middle East diplomacy on the Palestinian track. I spoke to him for about a half hour before the meeting and although we agreed on many things, we had a fundamental disagreement about American policy. I hold that the situation is fundamentally unripe for another attempt to renew Israeli-Palestinian direct talks. The Israeli government is opposed to a further settlement freeze or any substantial concessions to the Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas is opposed to making any substantial concessions to the Israelis and has already committed himself to the UN route of seeking UN sanction and recognition for a declaration of Palestinian independence. Until he plays this hand out he is very unlikely to try to engage in another game with different rules in which he has always been dealt a losing hand.

Several of us at the meeting spoke of the possibility of J Street attempting to persuade the Obama administration to shape the Palestinian initiative by making UN recognition and pressure on Israel to end the occupation conditional on Palestine fulfilling certain conditions such as giving up the right of return. But apparently J Street believes that that is too dangerous a course. In other words Obama is politically healthy enough to be pressured into engaging in another high-profile round of the peace process, as in 2010, but not healthy enough to take on the UN and a unified Palestinian government. I fail to understand the logic here.

Either engaging in a peace process will cost Obama valuable political capital when he is gearing up for a reelection campaign or it won't. If it will it should be avoided. If it will not then he should spend that capital in a process that has not yet failed and has a slim chance of succeeding.

Aaron David  Miller wrote a very interesting article on how the Arab Spring has affected American Middle East calculations. Here is the link.

Europe and the Middle East Peace Process

For a number of years I have advocated that the United States enter into a partnership with the European Union for the purpose of sponsoring a non-biased peace process in the Middle East that can engage with both the Palestinians and Israel and bring pressure on both of them. The model for this dual mediation is the Anglo-Irish peace process in Northern Ireland from 1993 to 2007.

But recently an article on the Real Clear World website pointed out that Stephen Wall, a former senior British Finance Ministry official responsible for policy towards Europe and author of a book on British European policy, said that as a result of the Euro crisis in Europe with both Greece and Ireland in trouble and Spain and Portugal threatening to go bad, he expected to see the whole European economic and political project to unravel within his lifetime. He is 64. So figure some time within the next 20 years at the outside. This is partly because Europe is forever trying to run before it can crawl properly.

It has instituted a common currency without having a common monetary policy or economic policy binding on all member states. This has led to the present crisis.

Since 1979 it has been issuing policy statements on the Arab-Israeli conflict and trying to get its foot into the door of regional diplomacy. But in the early 1990s when a crisis--or more correctly, several interrelated crises--occurred in Europe's backyard in the Balkans, Brussels was asleep at the wheel. The Bosnian civil war was finally resolved by American mediation in late 1995 after Washington grew tired of Europe's empty claims of preeminence. Tens of thousands died in the killing fields of Bosnia--many under the noses of European peacekeeping troops--while Europe struggled unsuccessfully to come up with a common problem. This was because Germany supported the Croats in Bosnia and Croatia while Britain and France favored the Serbs for historical reasons dating back to World War I.

It may be another decade before the region is again ripe for a peace process. Before the Palestinians are united around a common negotiating position that would allow a solution with Israel. A decade before the Arabs in the surrounding countries have dealt with the issues arising out of the Arab Spring. That will give Europe and the United States a decade to work out a solution and implement it before Europe collapses. In Northern Ireland it took nearly fourteen years to do this, and the conflict in Northern Ireland is much simpler than that in the Middle East without hundreds of thousands of refugees, without holy sites in Belfast sacred to three of the world's major religions, and without a massive ongoing settlement effort by unionists on nationalist land. 

So maybe all the pessimists are right and the conflict is unsolvable.

The green shade of nationalism versus the plaid of unionism

Peter Robinson, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and first minister of Northern Ireland, recently announced (go to the BBC article for June 25th) that his party would begin a new drive to attract Catholic members. When one considers that for decades the DUP was the political arm of the Free Presbyterian Church, with Ian Paisley in the role of both leader of the former and moderator (leader) of the latter, this is a major change. The Free Presbyterian Church was an independent fundamentalist evangelical Protestant denomination with its theology stuck in the 16th--17th century reformation era when Scotland changed from being largely Catholic to mainly Presbyterian. Paisley used to preach sermons condemning any ecumenical activity between Catholicism and Protestantism. His party newspaper specialized in scandalous and sexually-charged stories about the activities of nuns in Catholic convents and the activities of priests.

Robinson, however, did not belong to the FPC and represented the "secular" wing of the party along with Sammy Wilson that was based in East Belfast and had supporters in urban areas of Northern Ireland as opposed to the more rural supporters of the fundamentalist wing of the party. Paisley and the DUP represented the wing of unionism that was suspicious of all nationalists as an alien fifth column and that advocated their suppression rather than assimilation. This tradition was also well represented in the ranks of the former ruling Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).

Due to the IRA's failure to decommission its weapons in a timely fashion, IRA activities in Colombia and in Northern Ireland that violated the ceasefire, and Protestant ambivalence about power sharing with nationalists, the DUP replaced the UUP as the main unionist party between 2002 and 2005. The UUP was marginalized in the Westminster parliamentary election of 2010 and the Northern Ireland Assembly election of 2011. The Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV),  a DUP-splinter party representing traditional DUP thinking was left with only a single Assembly seat. So Protestant voters generally are left with a choice between three parties as relevant: the DUP, the UUP, and the non-sectarian Alliance Party--which does not define itself as unionist but supports Northern Ireland remaining a part of the United Kingdom as long as a majority of its citizens feel that way.

In the last year a number of prominent activists and candidates in the UUP have defected to both of the other two parties leaving the continued existence of the UUP as a viable party in doubt. The center ground in unionism is now being combated between the DUP and Alliance. Like Republicans who tout the non-racist credentials of the GOP in the hope of attracting white suburbanites rather than large numbers of blacks and Latinos, the DUP may be attempting to attract potential moderate unionist voters away from the UUP and Alliance by appearing more plaid and less orange (the traditional color of unionists after William of Orange).

Meanwhile the fight among Catholics is largely between Sinn Fein and the SDLP with the latter losing much more ground to the former than to Alliance. Thus the SDLP may attempt to appear more green by emphasizing its commitment to Irish unity rather than attempting to win over closet Catholic unionists.

A recent survey  (go to the June 19th articles in the Belfast Telegraph and Irish News) showed a large majority of Northern Irish Catholics as supporting the province remaining a part of the United Kingdom rather than uniting with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west. This is the first time that a majority of Catholics have indicated a preference for the UK over the Republic. This is no doubt a reaction to the recent crash of the economy in Ireland and the discrediting of the main Irish nationalist parties in the Republic.  But it is likely that most of these voters will continue to support Sinn Fein over the SDLP in the believe that Sinn Fein does a better job of protecting their rights (never mind the hundreds of Catholics that the IRA killed and thousands that it maimed during The Troubles).

Maybe the SDLP should go back to its roots as a party--implied in its name--that emphasized social democracy as well as Irish unity? The party probably cannot compete with Sinn Fein's unity credentials (its leaders went to prison and killed for their beliefs), but can compete in terms of delivering social policies based on social democracy rather than corporatism. 

And maybe Alliance should think about starting a membership drive among Catholics not just in its traditional Greater Belfast heartland but also in areas like the Ulster Midlands and west of the Bann--the dividing line between nationalist Ulster and unionist Ulster. It might find that some voters starved of innovative policies for decades may prefer these to identity politics based on the border and past history.

Hafez al-Assad's student

The House of Assad (Beit Assad in both Arabic and Hebrew) stayed in power for forty years (and counting) not by being nice. But not merely by being brutal and cruel either...after all the Saddam dynasty was even more cruel and it is no longer in power. Hafez al-Assad was a very astute student of the politics of power, both domestically and in the region. He saw that it was in his interest both domestically and regionally to remain in a state of no war, no peace with Israel. He lacked the strength militarily to compel Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria, but could use the quest for it as the legitimizing feature of his regime, based as it was on the minority Alawite group and an alliance with other sectarian minorities such as the Druze against the Sunni Muslim majority.

Assad perfected the art of negotiating so as to extract the less morsel that the opponent could give. He extracted the return of Kuneitra, captured in 1967, along with the territory captured in the 1973 Yom Kippur War from Israel in separation of forces agreement negotiated in May 1974. He then managed to extract a promise from Yitzhak Rabin that Israel would return all the territory captured in June 1967 in exchange for peace before negotiations even began. He, and his son Bashar, at times made what seemed like generous offers but he refused to make any gestures like Sadat did in November 1977 or as King Hussein did to reassure the Israeli public that he was a trustworthy partner for peace. He preferred the appearance of being open to peace more than the actual peace itself.

He was notorious during Bill Clinton's first term for keeping Secretary of State Warren Christopher waiting for meetings and for engaging in meaningless small talk for hours before getting down to the matter at hand. Both Assads only appeared eager for negotiations and peace when there was movement on the rival Palestinian track with the PLO. Thus, the seemingly far-reaching offers by Bashar Assad to Olmert's secret envoy in 2007-08 when Olmert was engaged in negotiations with the Palestinians. Peace talks or hints at peace were more common after the collapse of Syria's Soviet patron in 1992 than before. Both Hafez al-Assad and Bashar needed to keep the administration in Washington sweet.

Damascus's main regional alliance under the Assads was with Tehran. After Anwar Sadat, Assad's partner in the 1973 October War, went to Jerusalem in 1977 Assad was "forced" into the rejectionist camp with his Ba'athist rivals in Baghdad. So when the mullahs came to power in Tehran in 1979 Assad eagerly embraced them as a means of escaping the hated regime in Iraq and allying with a powerful protector. It was a pan-Shite alliance consisting of the Shite regime in Iran, the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, and the Shia Alawites in Damascus.

Knowing the obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace on the Palestinian track, and the Syrian record for keeping agreements on the Golan, the Israeli security establishment became a prime advocate of a deal with Syria during the 2000s. They envisaged Damascus trading its alliance with Tehran for one with Washington as Cairo had done under Sadat thirty years before. But that was never seriously in the cards. Tehran never complained about Syria's internal affairs as Washington would have done constantly. And Syria could never have continued its ploy of being the champion of pan-Arabism if it was allied with Washington. But the Iranian alliance prevented the Assads from having any Arab imitators. But they did have one imitator in the region.

In his first term in office Benjamin Netanyahu came into power opposed to the Oslo process, was forced by pressure from Washington to make territorial concessions at Wye in October 2008 and then saw his coalition collapse before he could implement the agreement. Bibi claimed to have learned his lessons. But rather than opting for a coalition with Tzipi Livni and Kadima a decade later he concluded an agreement with rightwing parties with Labor as window dressing. He then paid lip service to accepting "two states for two peoples" in June 2009 in a speech at Bar Ilan University. But he made this conditional on the Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, something that Israel's Arab minority vehemently opposes. Like Assad Netanyahu knew when to make concessions to Washington and when to thumb his nose at the Obama administration. He is blessed with Palestinian partners who seem to be as hesitant about making peace as he is. Just as Hafez al-Assad was blessed with the weak Shimon Peres in 1996 and the hesitant Ehud Barak in 1999-2000.

Netanyahu's balancing act will be much more delicate than Bashar Assad's. He cannot call the police and army out into the streets to shoot down protesters...or at least not Jewish ones. So he will be forced to creatively bob and weave with a housing freeze here and new settlement construction there. And he may be forced to change dance partners soon from Avigdor Liebermann to Tzipi Livni. At least then he will have a foreign minister then who can speak passable English and is not loathed by the international community. Should this occur we can expect lots of renewed talk about the new Bibi, just like the new Nixon in the 1960s. There were multiple new Nixons and there will be multiple Bibi's.

So Basher Assad should stop worrying, at least if he is forced into exile he leaves a legacy behind.

Ratko Mladic and the Cost of Genocide

I was stationed as a military policeman with the stabilization force (SFOR) in Bosnia from October 1997 to April 1998. When we arrived in country we were given a debriefing by the outgoing unit. I was told that the members of the unit had had Serb war criminals pass through their checkpoints unhindered because the Army wasn't interested in risking the safety of its soldiers to enforce that policy. I vowed to myself that if I ever encountered any war criminals that I recognized as such (we had their faces on posters) I would risk my life and career rather than let them go. If they resisted I would give up my life rather than let them go free. This is because I knew the history of the region from intensive reading before deployment.

In World War II some 1.5-2 million people had been killed during an internal civil war within Yugoslavia as terrorist Ustashe Croatians took over control of Croatia under fascist protection and Serbia was torn between the communist Partisans of Josip Broz Tito and the nationalist Chetniks of Gen. Mihailovic. Because there were no war crimes trials or prosecutions after the war, those who had personally suffered by having had family killed, like Ratko Mladic, thought that it was alright to take personal or national vengeance by ethnic cleansing and massacres. I was determined that war crimes trials have a chance to avoid another round of genocide in the future.

Over the fifteen years since the civil war in Bosnia ended at Dayton, Ohio in December 2010 the most important successor states to the old Communist Yugoslavia have given up nationalism. First Croatia in the early 2000s as Franjo Tudjman died and was followed in office by a pragmatist Western-oriented politician rather than another Communist turned nationalist. Then Boris Tadic replaced the Serb nationalist who had overthrown Slobadan Milosevic in 2001. With the handing over of Mladic to the Hague for trial, Serbia removes the main barrier to entry into the European Union. Now only Macedonia and Bosnia remain. Macedonia with its ethnic strife between Muslim Albanians and Christian Slavs and Bosnia with its barely-suppressed conflict among Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs. The Office of the High Commissioner, the office responsible for the implementation of all economic and political reform in Bosnia since Dayton, is set to be abolished in less than a year. If that happens the chances of any further reforms being achieved becomes remote. And Bosnia will remain a ticking time bomb within Europe--if not in its heart than maybe in its groin.

While I was on leave from Bosnia in early 1998 I went on leave to Poland. I visted Oswiecim (Aushwitz). I remember distinctly looking into a display case of spectacles taken from those who had entered the gas chambers at Aushwitz. I wondered if they added up to the 6,000 then thought to have been murdered at Srebrenica in 1995. The number since then has been scaled up to 8,000. I remember thinking how short the direct distance was between Srebrenica and Aushwitz and the wonder that it had only taken half a century to travel from one to the other. Srebrenica, unlike Rwanda or Cambodia, was not located someplace in the Third World. It was in Europe. Non-Christians were still not welcome there.

The European and Western indifference to the ethnic cleansing that took place in Bosnia helped to pave the way for the fundamentalist growth in the country since 1992. As it was mainly the Arab Gulf countries and Iran that provided Bosnia with financial aid and arms, the population grew to accept that the most backward countries in the Middle East were their natural allies. Just as the betrayal at Munich in September 1938 paved the way for the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia a decade later, the Western indifference helped to pave the way for fundamentalist Muslim inroads into Bosnia and Kosovo. Hopefully, London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna won't pay the full price for their policies in the 1990s.

A Speech or a Policy?

President Obama's speech was a bit of a let down after all the publicity that preceded it. Most of the speech related to the Arab Spring, and was probably just an attempt to enunciate a coherent policy. While Obama came out squarely on the side of civil and democratic rights for Arabs, he was unable to really enunciate a single one-size-fits-all policy for the myriad of American interests and local circumstances across the region. He devoted a total of eight sentences to the unrest in Syria and failed to call for Bashar Assad's removal as he had previously called for Kaddafi's removal. This is a recognition of reality--our forces can only take on so many dictators and nation-building projects at a time.

On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, about ten minutes out of a fifty-minute speech (go here for the text), he pronounced a few policy guidelines rather than announcing a new policy or a plan to achieve peace. His most controversial statement from the viewpoint of Israeli and American Zionists and their supporters in Congress was that the 1967 borders (really the 1949 armistice lines) should serve as the starting point for a peace deal with territorial swaps to take account of Israeli settlement blocs. Senator Mitchell went on the Sunday talk shows to emphasis the feature of mutually-agreed borders. Netanyahu predictably ignored this so as to be able to posture for the folks back home in declaring the 1967 borders indefensible. The speech, although not as detailed as the December 2000 Clinton parameters was perfectly compatible with them as well as with a 2005 Bush letter to then Israeli Prime Minister Arik Sharon, as Mitchell Plitnick points out.

Dan Fleshler declared this to be a "gutsy, principled speech"defying the Israeli government. It was nothing of the sort. It was in reality an attempt to demonstrate that Washington is still relevant to the region after the start of the Arab Spring. It was also an attempt to keep liberal Zionist groups and their supporters on board for Obama's reelection without endangering his support among Democratic and independent supporters of Israel who are more hawkish, by attempting another peace initiative. J Street, APN and Ameinu can all claim to their supporters that they are relevant and pressured Obama into acting. Meanwhile, Obama will be free to concentrate on his real priorities (the economy, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Russia) until after the 2012 election.  Call it Cairo 2009 Mark II.