Are US-Israeli Relations Changing?

Two recent statements by US officials have me wondering if we are seeing a subtle shift in US-Israeli relations. One is that for the first time, acts of violence by Israeli “settlers” against Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been described by the State Department as “terrorist incidents”; the second is a statement made by the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro who said that an official Israeli investigation into the death of American activist Rachel Corrie in 2003 was not “thorough, credible and transparent.”

Corrie was only 23 when she was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she and others tried to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The action prompted international outrage and became a rallying point for those protesting the Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli government promised a full investigation into the incident (a “thorough, credible and transparent” investigation, which Amb. Shapiro referenced in his statement).  But last week, Israel closed the formal investigation, concluding it was an accident, but also chiding the now-dead Corrie for inserting herself into a war zone.

Turning back to the terrorist declaration against the Israeli settlers, the State Department took the move after recent attacks by groups of young settlers against Palestinians, including attacks on mosques, beatings and one particularly brutal incident: the firebombing of a Palestinian taxi that left six people injured, including two four-year old twins.  The State Department's Country Reports on Terrorism for 2011 included: “Attacks by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian residents, property and places of worship in the West Bank.” According to the United Nations, which monitors conditions in the West Bank and Gaza, attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians have increased by almost 150% between 2009 and the end of 2011.

It is important to note that the State Department isn't going out on much of a limb here. The Israeli media and government have been growing increasingly concerned about the actions of extremist settlers, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the fire-bomb attack of the taxi and other government officials have used the word terrorism when referring to some of the actions taken by a subset of extremist Israeli settlers (though the Israeli government supports the expansion of more “mainstream” Israeli settlements in the West Bank).

But given how reluctant the US typically is to criticize the actions of Israel, it is then quite noteworthy that officials with the US government would, in the space of a week, use the word “terrorism” when referring to the actions of Israeli settlers and would condemn an official report by the Israeli government. Could it be the sign of a subtle shift in US-Israeli relations? Only time will tell.

Shepherds and Settlements

Humble shepherds in the hills above Bethlehem play an important role in the Christmas story.  But ask one of the remaining Christian shepherds tending their flocks in modern-day Israel the line from the famous Christmas carol about what they see and the reply is likely to be not a star, but a settlement wall.

The BBC reports this holiday season, that the shepherds tending their flocks near Bethlehem are saying their age-old way of life could soon be coming to an end, thanks to the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank.  Israel has been expanding their massive housing developments - illegally built on Palestinian land, the BBC notes - in recent years.  But security walls surrounding the settlements have cut shepherds off from many of their prime grazing lands, while the settlements themselves draw massive amounts of water from already marginal reserves in the arid region, leaving little behind for the shepherd's flocks of sheep.  The result is that many of the current generation of shepherds are likely to be the last – their children don't want to go into an already difficult line of work, work now made nearly impossible thanks to the Israeli settlements.

Consider this – Israeli policies towards the West Bank and Gaza are staunchly supported by Conservative Christians in America, yet those very policies are now working to end a traditional way of life for a group of Christians that dates directly back to the time of Jesus.  As Homer Simpson once said: “think about the irony...”

Perry (and Washington) On US Foreign Policy

Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry was in New York today giving a speech where he accused President Barack Obama of not only single-handedly setting out to destroy the United States, but to destroy Israel as well. The backdrop for Perry's speech was the United Nations General Assembly meeting where the Palestinians are widely expected to petition the UN for full member-nation status. Perry contends that the Palestinians wouldn't be taking such a step if Obama hadn't thrown Israel under the bus.

"Simply put, we would not be here today, at the precipice of such a dangerous
move, if the Obama policy in the Middle East wasn't naive, arrogant, misguided
and dangerous,” Perry said.

As we've seen from last week's special election in Queens, New York to fill the seat of disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, potentially sabotaging America's relationship with the world's billion-plus Muslims by vetoing Palestine's petition to the UN just isn't enough to make some people believe that Obama isn't anti-Israel. Perry's fellow presidential candidate, businessman Herman Cain, has also said that he would make support for Israel the bedrock of his presidency.

Since candidates, particularly Republican candidates, love to wrap themselves in the words of the Founding Fathers, it’s a good time to print what George Washington himself had to say about “foreign entanglements”:

A passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite Nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite Nation of privileges denied to others, which is apt doubly to injure the Nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained; and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld.

Now none of what I'm saying should be taken as an anti-Israeli position; I think that the only places US presidential candidates should be speaking of defending so passionately are parts of the United States itself. But if we are talking foreign policy, I can easily think of a list of places of far more strategic/economic importance to the United States than Israel that these candidates should be focusing on, for example:

Mexico – the country with which we share thousands of miles of border, which is currently locked in bloody battle with the militias of a group of powerful drug cartels.
China – the nation many feel will soon join America in the Superpower Club.
Canada – the other nation with whom we share thousands of miles of border, who also is our largest trading partner and a major energy supplier; just because the Canadians are quiet doesn't mean we can ignore them.
The European Union – gripped by an economic crisis that could drag our country into a recession, or a depression.
Saudi Arabia – the country that still exports more of the black sticky stuff we're addicted to than anyone else in the world.

Those are just five off the top of my head. You could probably make a case for Russia, Brazil, India, Japan and even Somalia as having more real importance to the United States than Israel. Yet an outsized portion of our foreign policy efforts remain focused on the US-Israel relationship. And at least in the early days of the campaign, it seems like Israel will take center stage in our foreign policy debates as well.

Turtle Bay Train Wreck

So if all goes as threatened tomorrow, the legs could get kicked out from under US diplomatic efforts across the Middle East/Islamic world. That's because Tuesday was the day set by President Mahmood Abbas to petition the United Nations to admit Palestine as a full member-state, a petition the United States has already publicly promised to veto on behalf of Israel.

Last week the Saudis issued a dire warning via the pages of the New York Times that a veto would make the United States “toxic” across the region and could put an end to the decades-long US-Saudi love affair. It was a warning so dire, that you're almost inclined to ignore it, to simply dismiss it as another bit of hyperbole in a region long noted for such verbal excess. But things have changed in the MENA (Mid-East/North Africa) region. The “Arab Spring” has made despots take note that you sometimes actually have to listen to your people. And while the House of Saud has managed to stave off overthrow, they have done so with a mix of security crackdowns and by passing out tens of billions in social aid to the growing Saudi underclass; no wonder they're worried about how “toxic” America might become.

The Arab street is sure to take a veto as yet another put-down of the long oppressed Palestinian people; but I'm viewing a veto as an incredibly hypocritical move on the part of the United States, for two reasons. First, the US has spent much of 2011 cheerleading (in the case of Egypt), threatening (in the case of Syria) or bombing (in the case of Libya) on behalf of some notion of self-determination among the oppressed Arab peoples. Yet in the case of Palestine, we're taking the opposing position – continuation of a status quo that fundamentally denies Palestinians many of the rights that we're saying the Egyptians, Syrians and Libyans deserve; all, apparently, because it doesn't fit into our preconceived notion of how the Palestinians should gain these rights and because Israel opposes it – neither is a terribly convincing argument in favor of a veto.

To make matters worse, a veto of Palestinian membership would go against the precedent that the United States itself set for such situations with Kosovo back in 2008. The Kosovars had been engaged in a multi-year, UN-overseen process of negotiating a settlement of final status with Serbia (Serbia wanted Kosovo to remain part of the country, the Kosovars wanted to split), when the Kosovo side decided that the talks were going nowhere and unilaterally declared their independence from Serbia. The United States, along with Great Britain and France, were quick to recognize the independence of Kosovo, even though it was in explicit violation of the UN-led process and seemingly out of step with the norms of international law – the argument was that the Kosovars' right to self-determination had to be respected more than some UN “process”. Then there's Palestine, which has been involved in two decades of negotiations started in 1993 under the Oslo Accords with Israel as part of the “two-state solution” that would see the creation of a nation of Palestine. From the Palestinian point of view, that day will never come; the negotiations, when they even happen, seem endless, and in the meanwhile Israel continues to expand “settlements” in the West Bank that every year gobble up a little more of the land that would one day become the Palestinian state. And despite American insistence that all parties return to the negotiating table, there is zero reason to expect there to be any substantive movement, let alone a real breakthrough, so President Abbas has decided enough is enough and is using the UN declaration as an end-run around a moribund process.

Given the precedent we unwillingly set with Kosovo, the United States should be a vocal supporter of Palestinian membership in the UN, but instead, we are promising a veto. And before you say that the difference is terrorism, it is worth noting that the Kosovo Liberation Army, which became the government of Kosovo, was and is considered a terrorist organization by Serbia and as late as the 1990s was also considered a terrorist organization with possible ties to al-Qaeda by other countries, including the United States.

But while the Kosovars were supposedly within their rights to short-circuit continued negotiations they found pointless, the Palestinians are committing a breach of international law by taking the same action. Saudi Arabia's Turki al-Faisal is likely right in saying the veto will fuel anti-American anger in the Arab street, the rest of the world may just take note of the rank hypocrisy of the move.

The Saudis' Stark Warning

While the United States was otherwise absorbed in a day of self-reflection over the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an influential member of the Saudi royal family issued a stark warning that the long-standing US-Saudi love affair may soon come to an abrupt end.

That was the take-away from Turki Al-Faisal's Op-Ed in yesterday's New York Times, over why the United States should not oppose the creation of an independent nation of Palestine. The Palestinians are widely expected to use the United Nations General Assembly meeting later this month to put a formal end to talks with Israel, unilaterally declare their independence and petition the United Nations for full membership; the United States is also widely expected to use their veto the UN Security Council to squash Palestine's bid for membership on behalf of Israel. Al-Faisal warns though, that such a move would make the United States “toxic” in the Arab/Muslim world, and that this would force the Saudis to then drastically scale back their cooperation with the US and to pursue “a far more independent and assertive” foreign policy in the region. Al-Faisal goes on to say that this would result in Saudi Arabia not formalizing relations with the fledgling government in Iraq, parting ways with the United States on Yemen and suggesting it could lead Saudi Arabia into direct conflict with Iran, among other possible outcomes.

Two things make this more than just the ramblings of another dreary government official in the editorial pages. The first is Turki Al-Faisal's position within the Saudi hierarchy: he is both the former head of the Saudi intelligence services and former ambassador to the United States, roles that have made him the usual go-to guy to do the rounds in the American media when the Saudis want to announce a shift in policy; the second is the overall bluntness of his op-ed. Typically writings like these are couched in diplomatic language, which is vague enough to allow for just about any possibility, Al-Faisal was much more definitive: this will happen, this decision will have that effect, and so-on.

Given the speaker and the tone, it is a message that Washington should take to heart, though it is a pretty safe assumption that they won't.

Arab League Doubles Down

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice are said to have led the charge within the American government to intervene for humanitarian grounds in Libya, the act that seems to have spurred the global community to action was the Arab League's call for a no-fly zone. Within a few days of the Arab League's announcement, which amounted to their symbolically turning their backs on one of their more famous members, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, aircraft from the United States, Great Britain and France were patrolling the skies over Libya.

Now the Arab League is calling for another no-fly zone, this time over the Gaza Strip. That call is spurred by an increase in fighting between the Gazans and Israel over the past week, which has seen rocket attacks launched from Gaza met by Israeli airstrikes. So far the casualty totals are one wounded in Israel and 19 dead in Gaza. That statistic has the Arab League calling Israel's actions “brutal” and asking that the UN Security Council “consider the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip on an urgent basis to stop its siege and impose a no-fly rule on the Israeli military to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip,” according to the League's formal statement. Not surprisingly, the Israelis responded by telling the Arab League that instead of UN resolutions, they should focus on getting the folks in Gaza to stop launching missiles into Israel.

The Arab League's call for a no-fly zone over Gaza won't fly (forgive the pun) if for no other reason than a resolution authorizing it will be vetoed by the United States within the Security Council as are any resolutions that are perceived to interfere with Israel's security stance. But the fact that the Arab League is publicly calling for a no-fly zone in the first place is yet one more bit of tension in an already tense region. Meanwhile, both the Gazans and the Israelis say they are willing to abide by a cease-fire, so long as the other side stops shooting first. As to why there has been a flare up in attacks between Israel and Gaza after a period of relative calm (relative to the region at least), a couple of factors are likely at play: a recent attempt at rapprochement between the Hamas-led government in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, as well as Palestine's potential unilateral declaration of statehood that could happen later this year, both factor that would drastically change the current Israel-Palestine equation.

You Think This Would Be News: Argentina and Palestine

Second item for the Would Be News file, the government of Argentina announced on Monday that it recognized Palestine as a “free and independent” state within the 1967 borders. Argentina's announcement comes just three days after Brazil made a similar proclamation towards Palestine.

Argentina said it took the step of recognizing Palestine out of frustration on the progress (or lack of progress) in the “two-state” peace negotiations which started back in 1991 and continue to drag on today. This is exactly what Israel feared might happen after talks once again stalled after the Israeli side refused to renew a freeze on the construction of Israeli-only settlements within the borders of what would-be the Palestinian state. As part of a proposed deal for a one-time extension of the settlement freeze, the United States promised to block any unilateral moves by organizations like the United Nations to recognize Palestine as an independent state.

Of course that doesn't stop countries like Argentina from acting unilaterally, and apparently several other countries in Latin America are planning to issue their own statements of recognition according to the Palestinians. Even though Argentina's recognition has little practical effect, the Palestinians are hoping as more countries join in, the idea of a nation of Palestine occupying the 1967 borders will become the default position in the international community, a condition that they hope will lead to actual statehood for Palestine.

Turkey's Rambo Takes Aim At Israel

While we're on the topic of media, Foreign Policy is reporting that relations between Israel and Turkey will likely suffer another blow with the upcoming release of a Turkish spy film. “Valley of the Wolves: Palestine” is the latest adventure for Agent Polet Alemdar, who Foreign Policy describes as a sort of “Rambo for the Islamic world”; Alemdar's target this time is Israel, specifically Israeli agents who intercepted a Turkish aid ship bout for Gaza.

You likely remember the story of the Gaza-bound relief flotilla intercepted by Israeli forces earlier this year; while several of the boardings went off peacefully, the boarding of the Turkish-owned Mavi Marmara went terribly with a battle breaking out on deck between the Gaza activists and Israeli commandos, which left nine of the Mavi Marmara's crew dead. “Valley of the Wolves: Palestine” is the story of Alemdar's quest for revenge against the Israeli agents responsible for the events aboard the Mavi Marmara, a story that actually sounds a lot like the movie Munich, the story of Israeli agents exacting revenge against the Palestinians who planned the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Similarities aside, the Israelis are livid over the release of “Valley of the Wolves: Palestine”, which they say is another example of the “creeping anti-Semitism” in Turkey today. It's worth noting that Israel-Turkey relations hit another low point recently after a Turkish television movie about secret agents painted Israel's Mossad is a very unflattering light. Following the airing of that movie, the Turkish ambassador to Israel was publicly dressed down on Israeli television, an act that outraged the Turks.

But it's not only the Israelis who are angered over their portrayal in another country's pop culture, Chinese officials are also fuming over recent depictions of their officials in the British spy series Spooks (MI-5 here in the states). According to reports in the British press, government officials in China have ordered Chinese television networks not to do business with the BBC in protest over a storyline in the latest season of Spooks, which cast the Chinese as the bad guys planning to, among other things, set off a “dirty bomb” in London if the British interfered with their plans; a pretty strong reaction considering that Spooks doesn’t even air in China. Officially, the Chinese foreign ministry said it would have to “look into the matter” of the alleged BBC boycott.

Bill Clinton, Russia And The Settlements

The current round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are once again slouching towards failure and much of the blame, at least on the part of the Palestinians, is falling on Israel's failure to maintain a freeze on settlement building within the West Bank. The “settlements”, in case you haven't been keeping up on the details of the negotiations, are Israeli-only housing projects built on the land the Palestinians hope will one day become their homeland; settlement blocks are ringed by security zones and linked by private roads, causing a map of the West Bank to bear a striking resemblance to a piece of Swiss cheese. The Israeli government meanwhile insists the settlements aren't a real issue but merely an excuse used by the Palestinians to sink the latest round of talks.

Now Bill Clinton has weighed in on the issue, laying the blame for the fragile state of the peace talks not only on the settlement issue, but on Israel's Russian-born immigrant population in particular. Clinton describes the Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel in huge numbers following the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the hardest of the hardline segments in Israel. Russian Jews moved to the settlement blocks in large numbers and now that they are there, they don't want to leave, providing a major obstacle to a negotiated Israel-Palestine settlement in the process.

It's certainly an interesting theory on Clinton's part, and it points to a demographic reality that isn't discussed much outside of Israel. It is estimated that one in six Israelis today were born in the former Soviet Union; in Israel's fractious political system, there are several parties that cater especially to Russian-speaking Israelis. And if Israel's current Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, originally from the former Soviet Republic of Moldova is any indication, Clinton may be onto something as far as the political attitudes of Russian-born Jews; Lieberman has a long history of supporting aggressive policies towards the Palestinians, including in the past endorsing the idea of mass deportations of Palestinians from the West Bank.

Israel/Palestine - Why Now?

The big foreign policy news from Friday is that apparently the US has brought the Israelis and Palestinians kicking and screaming back to the negotiating table to try to hammer out some sort of lasting peace agreement. The big question is why?

Finding an end to the intractable Israel-Palestine problem has been something of a mania for the past several presidents; sadly it has also proved to be a fool’s errand. There's no reason to think this time will be any different: there has been no substantive change on the ground, if anything the two sides are less suited for talks than they were when the last round of negotiations fell apart under George W. Bush – the Israeli government is even more right-wing and hawkish than it was previously, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is even weaker than he once was (not to mention that his term of office actually ended a year and a half ago...). And if the two sides were just waiting for George W. to leave the scene before starting negotiations again, then talks would have started long ago, not more than a year and a half into the presidency of Barack Obama.

Given all that, I can't see why anyone in Washington can believe these talks will be anything more than yet another Mid-East fail. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu is steadfast in their refusal to put a full and binding halt to Israeli settlement construction; the key irritant to the Palestinian side (they raise a good point – how can they be expected to have a country when Israeli settlements are swallowing it up bit by bit?) Meanwhile Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas, who hold half the cards in Palestine as the ruling party in Gaza.

Both Israel and the United States consider Hamas a terrorist organization, and both maintain that they won't negotiate with terrorists, which is true, except when it's not... The United States does negotiate with terrorists, and does so quite frequently in fact. The success of the much-ballyhooed “surge” in Iraq was based in large part on negotiating with “terrorists”, particularly Sunni tribes, who following the 2003 invasion became allied with al-Qaeda militants in the country. The US negotiated with, and eventually won over, many Sunni militias, rechristening them the “Sons of Iraq” who were not dedicated to rebuilding their country. Now, as we try to replicate the surge strategy in Afghanistan, a key facet is identifying and negotiating with “more moderate” elements of the Taliban – another group the US considers to be terrorists. And it's worth noting that the successful peace process in Northern Ireland came about after the British began negotiating with a group they considered terrorists, the Irish Republican Army.

The simple truth is that peace negotiations mean sitting down with people you hate. Or as the great Israeli statesman Yitzhak Rabin is often quoted as saying: “you don't make peace with your friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.” Excluding Hamas from the talks alone is a clear indication that no one is serious about this process actually yielding results. After a couple of weeks the talks will likely end after Palestinian militants launch one of their home-made rockets into Israel, or a hawkish member of the Israeli government (looking at you Avigdor Lieberman) makes another ill-timed announcement about the further expansion of Israeli settlements; or both. As other nations around the world make a bid to be big-time players on the world stage, playing moderator for the Israel-Palestine peace process is a role the United States should gladly relinquish.

Support for “President” Abbas

Good news for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas – a recent poll shows that he has the support of a clear majority (54%) of those surveyed.  Maybe he can go ahead then and hold the presidential election that Palestine was suppose to stage a year and a half ago…

Ask an international diplomat who leads the government in Palestine and they’ll point to Mahmoud Abbas.  Technically though, Abbas’ term in office actually ended in early 2009; he’s been pretending to be president and the world has been pretending he’s legitimate ever since, largely because under the terms of the Palestinian constitution, the presidency should pass to ranking members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (their version of a national parliament), who also happen to be members of Hamas, and no one wants that.  Abbas cancelled the scheduled elections in 2009 by declaring a state of emergency following Israel launching Operation Cast Lead – their full-fledged military assault on the Gaza Strip.  In the year and a half since though neither Abbas nor the Palestinian Authority has found the time to reschedule them, again in large part because of the belief that Abbas would lose to a candidate put forward by Hamas.

This circles back to a problem the United States and other “Western” powers have in dealing with the Middle East: while they preach the need for democratic reforms in the region, they consistently accept autocratic rule in countries throughout the ME, so long as the autocrats are reliable allies – for prime examples, look at Saudi Arabia and Egypt.  Speaking of Egypt, it will be interesting to see if the US continues to support the decidedly un-democratic Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt with an increasingly iron fist for the past three decades, now that the former head of the UN’s atomic watchdog agency, Mohamed ElBaradei is emerging as the head of an opposition movement set on opposing Mubarak in the next election. 

View From The Gaza Border

On Saturday, The Guardian published a series of brief interviews with residents of Gaza queuing up to cross the border into Egypt. For the past three years, Egypt has largely kept the border crossing at Rafah closed in response to Hamas’ takeover of the government in Gaza and Israel’s subsequent blockade. But since Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, Egypt announced the Rafah crossing would be open indefinitely.

Passage through the checkpoint is still monitored by Egyptian guards and there are limits as to who can cross from Gaza: primarily students planning to study abroad, those seeking medical treatment and people with foreign passports; members of Hamas are banned. And the process is slow, leading to wait-times that can stretch into days. With this in mind, The Guardian interviewed several Gazans waiting at the crossing, three interesting themes emerged from their interviews: first were the number of people leaving Gaza for medical treatment in Egypt or at other locations further abroad, a testimony to the toll the blockade has taken on basic services in Gaza; second, despite the hardships that mark the daily lives of most Gazans, the people The Guardian talked to by and large didn’t want to leave the Gaza Strip, at least not permanently; and third, despite widespread criticism aimed at the United States for acting as Israel’s chief patron (and according to some, serving as accomplice to Israel’s oppression of the Gaza Strip), one young girl interviewed hoped to leave Gaza to study in the United States, adding “I love America – it's a wonderful country and culture.”

Israel, Iran and the Summer War

If there is a message to be drawn from Israel’s raid on a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla it is this: there will be a major war in the Middle East this summer.

The flotilla raid was more than simply a military operation; it was an outward expression of Israel’s ongoing internal political and security debates. Since the modern state’s founding, Israel’s national mythos has been built on the idea that they are an island surrounded on all sides by hostile forces. While this was certainly true during their early history, Israel has enjoyed peaceful relations with two of their next-door neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, for several decades now; Turkey too was one of their closest allies, at least until the flotilla raid. In recent years, though hard-line Israeli governments have expanded this mythos: so now not only do they have enemies on all sides, they also exist in a world that (with the notable exception of the United States) is indifferent to their plight while secretly hoping for their downfall. The generally negative reaction to the flotilla raid around the globe (again save for the US) has only given strength to this idea.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s post-flotilla raid press conference gives valuable insight into the current thought process of Israel’s leadership. Netanyahu was quick to dismiss the flotilla’s stated mission of providing humanitarian aid and instead condemned it as an attempt by Hamas - the ruling force in Gaza that Israel regards as a terrorist organization - to rearm in preparation for a new conflict with Israel. Netanyahu then went a step further, to draw the line from the flotilla through Hamas in Gaza and back to Iran, at one point saying that Iran could not be allowed to “open a port on the Mediterranean [Sea].” It is a sign of how completely Iran is dominating current Israeli strategic thinking. Israel regards their main security challenge today as coming not from the Palestinian Territories, but rather from Iran and their ongoing nuclear program. Israel dismisses Iran’s claims that their nuclear research is meant to establish a domestic nuclear power program; instead saying it is a front for a secret atomic weapons program, which Israel regards as an existential threat to its very existence.

Here, it’s useful to take a look at Amos Oz’s op-ed in the June 1 New York Times. Believing that hostile forces surround them, Israel has responded by building and maintaining a formidable military. The downside to this belief, as Oz explains, is that Israel now acts as though every foreign policy problem has a military solution; Israel’s military campaigns against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2008 though, both of which failed to destroy these groups, would seem to argue against this belief. Yet the Israeli leadership remains undeterred, arguing that only military action (namely air strikes) and not a new round of sanctions will prevent Iran’s nuclear program from going forward. Here Israel is buoyed by their success in 1981, when a raid against the research reactor at Osirak destroyed Iraq’s fledgling nuclear program.

To this point, diplomatic pressure and fear of a widespread backlash seem to have kept Israel from ditching the UN-based sanctions scheme and preemptively launching air strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites. I would argue the flotilla raid then should be viewed as a sign that these forces will no longer restrain Israel. Simply stated the flotilla raid is Israel in effect saying: “we’re surrounded, we’re going to act in our defense and we don’t care what you think about it.”

What effect would an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities have? Here it’s useful to look at a war game scenario conducted by the Brookings Institution that examined both the Israeli raid and the probable Iranian response. Rather than retaliate directly against Israel militarily, Brookings predicts that Iran will use their Lebanon-based proxies in Hezbollah (which receives a large portion of its funding from Iran) to strike back against Israel. And here is where the air strikes will spark the region-wide war. In April, Israel accused Syria of smuggling Scud missiles across the border to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria have all denied the claims, though that has not stopped Israel from pressing them. Because Hezbollah has seats in the Lebanese parliament, Netanyahu has said that Israel will regard any attack against Israel from Hezbollah as being officially sanctioned by the Lebanese government and will respond accordingly, the same goes for Syria for their role as the transshipment route for the weapons. So, if Iran’s Hezbollah proxies strike out at Israel, Israel will respond militarily against the governments of Lebanon and Syria (it’s also hard to imagine that Hamas, which also receives funding from Iran, won’t launch retaliatory strikes against Israel as well). What started as a series of air raids against a select group of targets in Iran will then quickly devolve into a war pitting Israel against Lebanon, Syria and Gaza.

The United States will find itself involved in the Summer War, by both choice and circumstance. During Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the United States provided emergency shipments of precision guided bombs when Israel’s stockpile of these weapons ran low as what they thought would be a series of air strikes and hit-and-run ground incursions turned into a month-long guerilla campaign. It’s logical to believe that the United States will again be called on to provide Israel with war material; US troops based in Iraq (still numbering in the tens of thousands) are likely to become targets of retaliation attacks from Iranian-backed militias within Iraq, or by groups in Iraq sympathetic to the Iranian cause. Since the removal from power of their long-time adversary Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iranian influence in Iraq has steadily grown – Shiites, the dominant Islamic sect in Iran also make up the largest single ethnic group in Iraq as well. If Iran chooses to play the “oil card” by attacking oil tankers and other shipping in the Persian Gulf (a possibility outlined in the Brookings scenario), the United States, with the largest naval presence in the Gulf, will be pressed into the role of securing these vital shipping lanes as well.

Wars have unusual ways of unfolding once the shooting starts. It is impossible really to script exactly how the Summer War would play out – what role Turkey will play, how the populations in Jordan and Egypt will react to the fighting and how the government in Iraq will formally respond all are difficult to predict, as is how long the Summer War will actually last. But even before it starts, we can know the war will be a strategic loss for Israel. Countries go to war with specific goals that define victory – for Israel air strikes against Iran are meant to bring an end to their nuclear program. Israel believes this is an achievable outcome because of their experience with the Iraqi reactor at Osirak. But Iran has studied Osirak as well, and they have learned from the Iraqi experience not to concentrate their nuclear program at one lightly guarded site. Iran has scattered their nuclear sites across the country and some are allegedly buried 75 feet or more underground, protected by anti-aircraft weapons systems. It is extremely unlikely that the Israelis could destroy them with air strikes alone. And the experiences in 2006 and 2008 show that it is also unlikely Israel will be able to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas through military might as well. So long as the Iranian nuclear program, Hezbollah and/or Hamas survive the conflict in some meaningful form, they win/Israel loses.

An Israeli loss will likely (again) spell the end of Netanyahu’s government. Israeli political coalitions are notoriously fragile; fighting another unwinnable war will likely turn Israeli public opinion against Netanyahu and bring down his government. The Summer War will probably spell the end of any meaningful foreign policy efforts on the part of Barack Obama as well. Support for Israel in an unprovoked attack against Iran will undo all of the outreach Obama has conducted with the Islamic world, which started in earnest with his landmark speech in Cairo last summer. It will also drive a wedge between his administration and rising powers, like Brazil and Turkey, who attempted to negotiate a deal that would defuse the Iranian nuclear situation in May – an attempt that was rebuked by the United States; and it will be another irritant in relations with Russia and China, both of whom the United States has worked hard to bring onboard for a new round of sanctions against Iran. Attempting to justify America’s support for Israel’s preemptive strike against Iran and their launching of a wider regional war will dominate Obama’s foreign policy efforts for the rest of his term in office, crowding out other initiatives.

The biggest losers, of course, will be the many, many innocent civilians who will be killed, maimed or displaced by the fighting in an unwinnable war.

Osama bin Laden: Economist, Environmentalist

Osama bin Laden took on an oddly populist tone for his second audiotape in the past week, as he blamed the failure of December’s climate change negotiations on the United States, while urging the world to drop the dollar as the globe’s default reserve currency. “Discussing climate change is not an intellectual luxury, but a reality,” he said, faulting the United States for rejecting the earlier Kyoto Protocols that would have set limits on greenhouse gas emissions. He added that “this is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that.” Under the heading of “what to do”, bin Laden suggested that people and nations stop using the dollar in international trade in the “fastest possible time.”

Bin Laden went on to slam government bailouts of financial companies, saying that they were the ones who caused the global economic crisis in the first place. "When those perpetrators fall victims to the evil they had committed, the heads of states rush to rescue them using public money," he said. And if you’re curious as to what the world’s most wanted terrorist has been reading lately, the list seems to include noted linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky, who bin Laden cited during his audio message: “Chomsky was right when he pointed to a resemblance between American policies and the approach of mafia gangs. Those are the real terrorists,” bin Laden said referring to a recent editorial by Chomsky.

Bin Laden used his first audiotape to take credit for masterminding the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, saying that America would not enjoy security until the occupation of Palestine ended.

New York Times' Abbas Error

Today's New York Times featured this little article about how the Palestine Liberation Organization extended the term of office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a move the Times said was necessary since Abbas' "official tenure expires in little over a month."

The problem is that Abbas' term as president actually ended almost a year ago on January 9th. In January of 2005 Abbas was elected to a four-year term as the president of the Palestinian Authority (the de facto national government of "Palestine"). Some simple math shows that January 2005 + four years = January 2009; yet Abbas remains in office and continues to call himself "President".

Last year Abbas said that it would be impossible to hold a presidential election since the Gaza Strip portion of Palestine was being controlled by Hamas, the arch-rivals of Abbas' Fatah Party. Abbas pushed to have the presidential election delayed until 2010 when the next elections for the Legislative Council were scheduled. Now the Palestine Liberation Organization (Fatah's umbrella organization) is using the same Hamas excuse to now indefinitely delay those elections.

The problem is that in a democracy - at least not in a functioning democracy - the president or ruling party can't just arbitrarily extend their term in office. I would expect a venerable news organization like the New York Times to know a small detail such as the fact that Abbas' term in office actually ended almost a year ago - but apparently I'm expecting too much from the Times these days.

The Car Smugglers of Gaza

If you set aside your geopolitical feelings on the region, you have to admit that the Palestinians are a pretty ingenious people.

For years Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have operated tunnels under the Israeli-controlled border between the Strip and Egypt. The Israelis say the tunnels are used by Hamas to smuggle explosives and weapons into Gaza, while the Gazans say that the tunnels are a vital link to the outside world, and are often the only way to bring in the staples of life - food, fuel, medicine, etc. past the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Now something new is coming through the tunnels of Gaza - automobiles.

Smugglers have started to bring entire cars through the small, hand-dug tunnels. The cars, often stolen in Egypt have to be hacked apart into four or more pieces to be hauled through the tunnels. Once on the Gaza side, they're reassembled and even painted in the new owners' choice of color. The cars aren't cheap - they sell for at least twice as much in Gaza as they would in Egypt, but demand is reportedly high - hundreds of cars were reported destroyed in Israel's military campaign in January, while many others stopped running because of a lack of spare parts.

Battle Shows There Are Worse Things Than Hamas

Big news this weekend out of the Gaza Strip. Hamas, the ruling government of Gaza, got into a day-long gun battle with Jund Ansar Allah (which translates into: "Warriors of the Companions of God") an al-Qaeda-inspired militant organization, that left more than 20 people dead.

The fighting started when Jund Ansar Allah's leader, Sheikh Abdel-Latif Moussa used Friday's prayer services in the Gazan city of Rafah to declare the "the birth of an Islamic emirate" in the city, basically seceding from Gaza and pledging his loyalty to Osama bin Laden. That was enough for Hamas, which sent in their troops and fought a pitched battle against Jund Ansar Allah in and around the Rafah Mosque they used as their headquarters. In the end, Jund Ansar Allah was defeated after a long gun fight, its leader Sheikh Moussa was dead, according to some reports from Hamas, after blowing himself up with a suicide bomb vest, killing a Hamas negotiator in the process.

Much of the coverage of the Hamas/Jund Ansar Allah battle focused on two things: one, speculation that Hamas is losing control over Gaza following last January's three-week battle with Israel, and that extremist groups are growing in popularity among Palestinians; and two, that Hamas' crackdown against Jund Ansar Allah shows that the group is unwilling to accept any challenges to their authority in the Gaza Strip.

But I think the story points to something else - that there are worse alternatives than having Gaza run by Hamas. Israel is dead set against having any part of the Palestinian Territories run by Hamas and they've opposed any attempts to form a coalition government between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinian faction that runs the West Bank. So far the international community (namely the US) hasn't pushed for a Hamas/Fatah unity government either. And there's no denying that Hamas has launched terrorist attacks against Israel (notably the crude, ineffective rockets their forces fired into Southern Israel by the dozens, prompting last January's conflict with Israel). Hamas claims these are all acts against an enemy occupying their lands that they are, in effect, 'freedom fighters'.

By contrast, the folks allied with Jund Ansar Allah are hardcore Islamic Jihadists; sharing the same 12th-century worldview as their spiritual head, bin Laden. Sheikh Moussa's goal was to see Gaza put under sharia law, many of his followers sported the long beards and headdresses you see on Taliban jihadis in Afghanistan, and, according to Hamas, Jund Ansar Allah were behind a series of recent attacks in Gaza against music shops and a wedding party - all things they deemed "un-Islamic" (not to mention attempting to launch a suicide bomb attack on horseback against Israel a few months ago).

In that light, it seems like it would be much better to deal with Hamas, a group with a clear goal behind their actions - a Palestinian homeland - than it would be to deal with groups like Jund Ansar Allah, who are nothing more than nihilists seeking the destruction of everything they deem "against Islam". In fact, two weeks ago Hamas' leader, Khaled Meshal announced his group would accept a Palestinian State based on the borders as they existed in 1967, before the Six Day War that led to Israel's occupying the West Bank and Gaza.

Could Europe Create A Palestinian State?

Yesterday Israel rejected a proposal by the European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana that the international community pick a date for the creation of a Palestinian State, and that if by that day negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians haven't led to a state, the global community just go ahead and recognize Palestine as an independent country.

It's interesting since this is the first I've heard of the EU proposal. But Solana seems to be publicly expressing frustration over endless negotiations that seem to be going nowhere. The whole process of bringing the Israeli and Palestinian sides together to negotiate a homeland for the Palestinians began back in 1991. The two sides were close to an agreement in 2000 during the waning days of the Clinton administration, but have basically made no progress whatsoever in the decade since.

Solana's idea was for the EU to set a deadline for the two sides to negotiate a settlement. If by then they haven't reached a deal, the European Union would (in Solana's plan with the United Nations) go ahead and recognize Palestine as a country and push for their full membership in the UN.

It's a pretty simple solution to what seems like an unsolvable problem, it also puts much of the responsibility on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, since they could just stall the negotiations and still get their state in the end. Of course, maybe there's not much to negotiate - the borders of a Palestinian state are pretty clear, the stumbling block has been the Israeli settlements woven through the West Bank, settlements that under international law are illegal anyway, so one questions what there is to negotiate about them.

Speaking of the settlements, they remain a sore point between the Obama administration and Netanyahu's government - Obama wants all construction of settlements stopped, while Netanyahu has been pushing for “natural growth.” His argument boils down to this: if a family in a settlement has six kids, they should be allowed to expand the settlement to accommodate the larger population. But a new report throws a lot of cold water on that idea. Research from Israel's own Central Bureau of Statistics shows that in 2007, 36% of the growth in the settlements came from people moving into them from other parts of Israel or from abroad - that's almost 4 in 10 people, meaning there would be a lot less growth if immigration to the settlements was halted, and thus a lot less need for “natural growth.”

Israel Slammed By Rights Groups (And Arrests A Former Member Of Congress)

Israel, on Wednesday, was slammed by not one but two of the world's leading human rights groups over its conduct in last January's military campaign in the Gaza Strip.

First, Human Rights Watch blasted Israel for its use of unmanned drone aircraft armed with air-to-ground rockets, which HRW said was responsible for the deaths of 29 civilians, eight of them children. Drone aircraft were said to be responsible for incidents where Palestinian children were killed while playing on a rooftop and another where a group of students were killed while waiting for a bus. Because of the high-resolution cameras that drone aircraft use to view the ground below them, HRW investigators said that Israeli operators should have realized they were targeting civilians and not militants in those situations.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International accused Israel of "wanton destruction" in their Gaza campaign, saying that much of the damage done could not be justified under the rules of war. Thousands of buildings in Gaza were destroyed or heavily damaged in the fighting, while estimates are that between 1,100 and 1,400 Palestinians were killed. Amnesty also found no evidence to support Israeli claims that Hamas militants were using civilians as "human shields", but did basically accuse Israel of doing just that by forcing Palestinians civilians to stay in buildings that were taken over by Israeli troops.

Amnesty International did also accuse Hamas of their own war crimes for deliberately targeting civilians by launching rockets and mortars into towns in Southern Israel along the border with Gaza.

And you would think if a former member of Congress were arrested in a foreign country, it might make the evening news. But Israel's detention of former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has gone all but unnoticed (after all it has only been a week since Michael Jackson died), even though Israeli forces detained her on Tuesday. McKinney was one of 20 human rights activists onboard a boat loaded with humanitarian supplies that tried to break Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The ship was stopped and its passengers, McKinney included, detained by the Israelis.

The Green Party, which organized the boat trip, is demanding the immediate release of all the activists, a demand the US Congress so far has failed to echo.

Could Prisioner Release Been the End of "President" Abbas?

I have to wonder if Israel's decision to release a high-profile Palestinian prisoner could lead to political change in Palestine.

On Tuesday, Isreal decided to let Aziz Dweik out of jail two-months early. Mr. Dweik is also the Speaker of the Palestinian Parliament and a member of Hamas, his membership in that organization is what prompted the Israelis to throw him in jail for a three year stretch on charges of being a member of an illegal organization.

But now that Speaker Dweik is out of jail will he, and Hamas, push to formally take over the Palestinian government? While Palestine is currently led by President Mahmoud Abbas, his term in office officially ended in January, meaning that under the Palestinian constitution, Abbas legally has no claim on the job. Power should pass, according to the structures spelled out in the constitution, to the Speaker of the Legislative Council, Mr. Dweik, though formally taking power would obviously have been difficult with him stuck in prison.

Now that's changed. Hamas didn't push the matter of control when Abbas' term ended, because back in January Palestine was reeling from the three-week Israeli incursion into Gaza. But with Dwiek out of jail, the peace process stalled and the relationship between Israel and their chief ally, the United States, strained over the issue of Israeli settlements, you have to wonder if Hamas will think the time is right to make a bid for full control over the Palestinian government.