Middle East – Hank Kalet

The spread of protest

Events move quickly on the other side of the globe, but it appears that the protesters in Egypt have reached a point that the Iranian opposition failed to get to last summer. And it is having reverberations around the region.

I mentioned Jordan yesterday. Today’s paper brings word of Yemen, where

the longtime president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, announced a series of concessions on Wednesday that included suspending his campaign for constitutional changes that would allow him to remain president for life and pledging that his son would not seek to be his successor.

“No extension, no inheritance, no resetting the clock,” Mr. Saleh said Wednesday during a legislative session that was boycotted by the opposition. “I present these concessions in the interests of the country. The interests of the country come before our personal interests.”

He ordered the creation of a fund to employ university graduates and to extend social security coverage, increased wages and lowered income taxes and offered to resume a political dialogue that collapsed last October over elections. In answer to opposition complaints that voter records are rife with fraud, he said he would delay April parliamentary elections until better records could be compiled.

Yemen, which is a U.S. ally, is home to a significant al Qaeda presence.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Change in the Middle East: The people choose a different model

There appears to be a wave of change rushing across the Middle East. Tunisia, Egypt and now Jordan have faced or are facing massive demonstrations, with governments falling and change being forced upon calcified regimes.

Neocons had made the case back in 2003 that the toppling of Saddam Hussein by the American military would lead to a sea change in the region, but that sea change never came.

Suddenly, in response to the suicide of a fruit seller in Tunis, the revolution appears to be happening.

What the Bush administration and his neocon allies never understood back in 2003 was that democracy cannot be created at the point of a gun, that change would only happen from below. Now, with Hosni Mubarak’s regime teetering on collapse and Jordan having dismissed its cabinet, we are faced with the prospect of a change we cannot control — and it scares us, because we see a remake of the Iranian revolution in the offing.

But what if what we are witnessing is not Iran-redux, but a remake of the 1989 collapse of the Iron Curtain? Jonathan Schell, in his 2003 book, The Unconquerable World, talked of the power of people movements, as opposed to the use of force.

Violence is the means, as all dictators have known, whereby the few dominate and exploit the many. Nonviolence is the means by which the many can reclaim their rights and advance their interests. Peace begins, someone has said, when the hungry are fed. It is equally true that the hungry will be fed when peace begins. Equality and nonviolence–peace and justice–are inextricably linked, and neither can flourish in the absence of the other. Peace, social justice and defense of the environment are a triad to pit against the imperial triad of war, economic exploitation and environmental exploitation.

The Eastern Europeans, he said, along with others who have broken away from dictatorial regimes and managed to set up free and open societies, eschewed violent revolution for the force of human connectedness. Where violence was the means to the end, the overthrow of the strongman was followed by the creation of a new authoritarian regime (as with the former Soviet Republics that border on Asia and many of the former colonial holdings in African and Latin America).

Violence begets violence, which is why our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan led to civil wars in those countries and has yet to bear democratic fruit. It is why we are more likely to see democracy grown in Tunisia and Egypt than in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least in the short term.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Who is U.S. government rooting for in Egypt

Hosni Mubarak is considered a U.S. ally, a friend in the war on terror and someone we can trust when dealing with Israel.

He’s also a brutal dictator.

Now, with unrest in the streets of Cairo and Mubarak cracking down, we will learn which value is more important to the American oligarchy. Are we committed to the spread of democracy or will we attempt to prop Mubarak up, if he seems to be teetering?

My suspicion is that, despite our grand democratic rhetoric, we will side with the dictator. This is just a gut feeling, but given that we attempted to shut down Hamas even after the organization won what most observers considered to be a fair election and that we seem to care little about who runs most countries unless they are under out control, I just don’t see democracy as our primary objective.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

The circle (of victimhood) is unbroken

The death toll is mounting again in the Gaza Strip, with Israelis and Palestinians lobbing bombs and accusations following the demise of a six-month truce.

An Israeli military offensive that began Saturday already has taken the lives of more than 350 Palestinians, about 60 of them civilians, according to U.N. numbers reported by The New York Times. “Four Israelis — three civilians and a soldier — have died,” the paper also reports.

The two sides are laying blame for the latest hostilities on each other — Isrealis blaming Hamas rocket attacks, while Hamas blames Israeli aggression. It is a chicken-and-egg type argument that ignores the weight of a murky history of aggression on both sides.

A New York Times news analysis earlier this month — a day before the truce was to officially expire — sums up the truce’s failures and predicted the carnage that was to follow:

Israel and Hamas accuse each other of bad faith and of violations of the Egyptian-mediated accord, and each side has a point. Rockets from Gaza never stopped entirely during the truce, and Israel never allowed a major renewed flow of goods into Gaza, crippling its economy. This is at least partly because the agreement had no mutually agreed text or enforcement mechanism; neither side wanted to grant the legitimacy to the other that such a document would imply.

“I think it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” remarked Robert A. Pastor, who has been traveling in the region with former President Jimmy
Carter, meeting with Hamas and other officials. “It did lead to a significant reduction in the number of rockets fired at Israel until November, but the truce had less impact on the goods going in. One hopes both sides learn lessons and agree on a text and publicize it.”

That is yet to be seen. One thing is clear, however, and that there is plenty of blame to go around. The harsh occupation imposed by the Israelis in Gaza and its willingness to use its massive military force at the slightest provocation creates a desperation among Palestinians that now finds voice among Hamas militants. And Hamas uses what power it has — everything from rocks to mortars — to fight back.

A strange dynamic has developed in which both sides take go on the offensive and claim to be playing defense, upping the ante and intensifying the conflict. Only one side is accused of terrorism, however, a failure of language that fans the flames of populist resentment against the West and many of the western-aligned governments of the Middle East.

Nir Rosen, in The Guardian (UK), describes the dynamic this way:

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims’ struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.

The power imbalance contributes to the conflict, as does the ingrained — and earned — sense of victimhood among Israelis. There was a time when Israel was under siege in the region, targeted by the major Arab governments for extinction. That is no longer the case, though the mindset remains and is now focused on the relatively powerless Palestinian organizations Hamas and Fatah (primarily on Hamas).

Nothing will change in the Middle East until this circle of victimhood can be broken.

Political theater

I would like to be hopeful about the Middle East peace negotiations, but it is truly difficult. The show of conciliation offered by the principals yesterday was nothing more than political theater, as this description by New York Times reporters Steven Lee Myers and Helen Cooper, shows:

Flanked by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, Mr. Bush cast peace between Israelis and Palestinians as part of a broader struggle against extremism in the Middle East.

It was a moment of diplomatic theater, endorsed by the attendance of a member of the Saudi royal family and framed by many participants’ concerns over the increasing influence of Iran and Islamic radicalism in the region.

The moment was orchestrated by Mr. Bush, who pledged that the United States would “monitor and judge the fulfillment of the commitment of both sides.” The agreement, cast as a “joint understanding” between the Israelis and the Palestinians, fell short of the detailed five-page document that Palestinian officials have been seeking. But it went somewhat further than the Israelis had wanted, calling for an immediate start to wide-ranging talks aimed at reaching a final accord within 13 months.

“We agree to immediately launch good-faith bilateral negotiations in order to conclude a peace treaty, resolving all outstanding issues, including all core issues without exception, as specified in previous agreements,” the joint understanding said. “We agree to engage in vigorous, ongoing and continuous negotiations, and shall make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008.”

Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent, sums up my thoughts perfectly:

Reading the speeches – especially the joint document – it seems like an exercise in self-delusion. The Middle East is currently a hell disaster and the President of the United States thinks he is going to produce the crown jewels from a cabinet and forget Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran – and Pakistan, for that matter. The worst element of the whole Annapolis shindig is that once again millions of people across the Middle East – Muslims, Jews and Christians – will believe all this and will then turn – after its failure – with fury on their antagonists for breaking these agreements.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.