Tag: Israel/Palestine
Passover wandering
Like 70% of American Jews, I spent last night at a Seder, celebrating the story of liberation from pharaoh. Here are some of the thoughts that were on my mind.
Three years ago I wrote with enthusiasm about the Passover of Arab liberation. Two years ago Syria seemed already in the midst of ten plagues and ruled by a pharaoh who wouldn’t let his people go. Last year I thought things in the Middle East better than expected.
This year I’ve got to confess things are a mess, not only in the Middle East but also in Ukraine.
The war in Syria rages on. Israel/Palestine peace negotiations are stalled. Both sides are pursuing unilateral options. Egypt is restoring military autocracy. Libya is chaotic. Parts of Iraq are worse. The only whisper of good news is from Morocco, Yemen and Tunisia, where something like more or less democratic transitions are progressing, and Iran, where the Islamic Republic is pressing anxiously for a nuclear deal, albeit one that still seems far off.
In Ukraine, Russia is using surrogates and forces that don’t bother wearing insignia to take over eastern and southern cities where Russian speakers predominate. It looks as if military invasion won’t be necessary. Kiev has been reduced to asking for UN peacekeeping troops. NATO can do nothing. Strategic patience, and refusal to recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea and any other parts of Ukraine it might absorb, seems the best of a rotten bunch of options.
This is discouraging, but no one ever promised continuous progress. Even the Israelites wandered in the desert. Everyone forgets the part about getting stuck in one lousy oasis for 38 of those years. Freedom is not a one-time thing. It requires constant effort. There are setbacks. And there are breakthroughs.
Americans face their own liberation challenges. While the past year has seen giant strides in acceptance of gay marriage, there have been setbacks to the right to vote. Money is now speech and corporations are people, according to the Supreme Court. I’ll believe that when a corporation gets sent to prison and banks start accepting what I say as a deposit. The right to bear arms continues to expand, but not my right to be safe from those who do, except by arming myself. In Kansas City Sunday a white supremacist and anti-Semite allegedly shot and killed three people at Jewish facilities, all Christians.
The plain fact is that liberation, as Moses discovered, is hard. It requires persistence. There are no guarantees of success. The only directions history takes are the ones that people compel it to take. Some of those people are genuinely good. Others are evil. Sometimes they are both, as son Adam’s piece on LBJ this week suggests. There may be a right side and a wrong side of history, but it seems difficult for many people to tell the difference.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Peace Picks April 14 – 18
1. Terrorism, Party Politics, and the US: Expectations of the Upcoming Iraqi Elections
Monday, April 14 | 12:30 – 2pm
Room 517, SAIS (The Nitze Building), 1740 Massachusetts Ave NW
Ahmed Ali, Iraq research analyst and Iraq team lead at the Institute for the Study of War, and Judith Yaphe, adjunct professor at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, will discuss this topic.
For more information and to RSVP, send an email to: menaclub.sais@gmail.com
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
All deliberate speed, please
UN Secretary General Ban is marking the third anniversary of the Syrian uprising, which by my reckoning is March 15, by appealing to Russia and the US to revive peace talks. That’s his job, but prospects are not good.
The Asad regime continues to make slow progress on the battlefield. The opposition continues to insist that he step down to initiate a transition to democracy. There is no “zone of possible agreement.” Asad is preparing to conduct what he will call an election this spring to reconfirm his hold on power. The conditions in regime-controlled areas will not permit the election to be anything like free or fair. The conditions in liberated and contested areas won’t allow an election to occur at all. But Asad will claim legitimacy. Russia will concur.
In the US, consciousness of the horrors occurring in Syria is growing. The recent reports of the Save the Children and UNICEF boosted the case for humanitarian relief. The US has already been generous, even to a fault, as it appears to be buying tolerance for the failure to bring about a political resolution of the conflict. Russia, more committed to realpolitik, continues to arm, finance and provide political support to the regime. The crisis in Crimea leaves little oxygen in Washington for Syria. There is an argument for replying to Putin’s moves in Ukraine by strengthening opposition efforts in Syria, but I am not seeing signs that it is winning the day.
Some key members of the Syrian Opposition Coalition (Etilaf) will be in DC next week making the case for more support, including to the more moderate fighters. What Etilaf needs to do is convince the Obama Administration that vital American interests are at risk in Syria. The two most striking are the risk of extremism putting down deep roots in Syria and the risk of state collapse, both of which would affect not only Syria but its neighbors, especially Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. Perhaps eventually also Turkey and even Israel, whose boundary with Syria in occupied Golan could become hotter than it has been for many years.
Etilaf has not yet convinced Washington that it can be an effective bulwark against these threats. The Coalition has precious little control over even the relative moderates among the fighters. It has little to no capacity to counter Jabhat al Nusra or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the former the official al Qaeda franchisee and the latter its Iraq-based competitor. Etilaf favors preservation of the Syrian state, but with every passing day that becomes less likely. Nor has Etilaf demonstrated a lot of traction with the ad hoc administrative councils that pop up in liberated areas.
Where Etilaf showed itself to best advantage was at the Geneva 2 talks, where it outmaneuvered the Asad regime and scored lots of good points in favor of a managed transition and against the horrors of what Asad is doing. There is irony then in Etilaf emphasizing the limits of diplomacy, which is the arena in which it has done best.
That is not however a good reason to revive the talks, which really went nowhere. Nor can they be expected to, given what is happening on the battlefield. Until Iran and Russia are convinced that they risk more by continuing to support Asad rather than abandoning him, Tehran and Moscow will provide the edge he needs to continue to gain ground, albeit slowly. This is a formula for more war, not less.
A couple of weeks ago, the Obama Administration was thought to be looking at new options for Syria. There is no sign they have emerged from the “interagency” labyrinth. That’s not surprising. It took 3.5 years for something meaningful to emerge from the National Security Council in Bosnia, and depending on how you count at least that long in Kosovo. Only in Afghanistan and in Iraq have such decisions proved quick, mistakenly and disastrously so in Iraq.
Deliberation is wise. But if it takes too long, vital American interests in blocking extremists and maintaining the states of the Levant may suffer irreparable damage. Not to mention the harm to Syrians, who deserve better. All deliberate speed, please.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Things are not going well
Things are not going well in many parts of the world:
- The Syrian peace talks ended at an impasse over the agenda. The regime wants to talk terrorism. The opposition wants to talk transition. The US is looking for options.
- Ukraine’s peaceful protests are ending in an explosion of violence. Russia is financing and encouraging the government. The US is ineffectually urging restraint.
- The UN has documented crimes against humanity in North Korea. No one has the foggiest notion what to do about a regime that has now starved, tortured and murdered its citizens for more than six decades.
- Egypt is heading back to military rule. The popular General Sisi is jailing both his Muslim Brotherhood and secularist oppositions. Terrorism is on an upswing.
- Libya’s parliament has decided to overstay its mandate. A new constitution-writing assembly will be chosen in elections tomorrow, but in the meanwhile violence is on the increase and oil production down.
- Yemen’s president has short-circuited the constitutional process altogether. He announced a Federal structure that divides the South, whose secessionists reject the idea.
- Afghanistan’s President Karzai is putting at risk relations with the US, because he is trying despite the odds to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban.
- Nationalism is heating up in Japan, South Korea and China. Decades of peace in Asia are at risk as various countries spar over ocean expanse and the resources thought to lie underneath.
- Nuclear talks with Iran are facing an uphill slog. The interim agreement is being implemented, but prospects for a comprehensive and permanent solution are dim.
- Israel/Palestine negotiations on a framework agreement seem to be going nowhere. Israel is expanding settlements and increasing its demands. Palestine is still divided (between Gaza and the West Bank) and unable to deliver even if an agreement can be reached.
For the benefit of my Balkans readers, I’ll add: Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
The Cory Remsburg metaphor
The President’s State of the Union speech last night broke little new ground on foreign policy. He is pleased to be finishing two wars and will resist getting the United States involved in other open-ended conflicts. He may leave a few troops in Afghanistan to train Afghans and attack terrorists. Al Qaeda central is largely defeated but its franchises are spreading in Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Mali. He will limit the use of drones, reform surveillance policies and get us off a permanent war footing. He wants to close Guantanamo, as always, and fix immigration, as always.
He will use diplomacy, especially in trying to block Iran verifiably from obtaining a nuclear weapons and in resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, but also in destroying Syria’s chemical weapons capability. He will support the moderate Syrian opposition. He will veto new Iran sanctions in order to give diplomacy a chance to work, maintain the alliance with Europe, support democracy in Ukraine, development in Africa, and trade and investment across the Pacific. America is exceptional both because of what it does and because of its ideals.
The President didn’t mention Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Russia or Japan. He skipped North Korea too. His mother must have taught him that when you don’t have anything nice to say you shouldn’t say anything at all. Those countries might merit mention, but all have in one way or another been doing things that we prefer they not do. He mentioned China, but only as an economic rival, not a military one. He skipped the pivot to Asia as well as Latin America. For my Balkans readers: you are not even on his screen. Read more
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Peace Picks, January 27-31
1. War Crimes, Youth Activism & Memory in the Balkans
Monday, January 27 | 12pm – 1pm
Woodrow Wilson Center 6th floor, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Past post-conflict justice processes in the Balkan region were comprised of a variety of protagonists, such as governments, international institutions, and civil society. Mechanisms to cope with mass atrocities committed during the conflict in the 1990s included international trials in The Hague, domestic trials in many of the former states of Yugoslavia, and several truth commission attempts. In recent years there has also been a rise in youth activism to confront war crimes. However, literature in transitional justice that addresses this phenomenon remains underdeveloped. This research draws on over two-dozen in-depth interviews with youth activist leaders across the former Yugoslavia focusing on their performance-based campaigns. Additional data was collected from online prosopographic analysis—which consists of studying common characteristics of these activists by means of a collective study of their lives and careers. In his findings, the author explains why the emergence of transitional justice youth activism in the Balkans falls short of the significant institutional reforms of earlier youth movement mobilizations in the regions. He also throws light on why their performance activism is distinct from practices of older, established human rights organizations in the region. Notwithstanding, he argues that this performance-based advocacy work has fueled the creation of a new spatiality of deliberation—so called strategic confrontation spaces—to contest the culture of impunity and challenge the politics of memory in the former Yugoslavia.
SPEAKERS
Arnaud Kurze: Visiting Scholar; Center for Global Studies, George Mason University
John R. Lampe: Senior Scholar Professor Emeritus; Department of History, University of Maryland – College Park Read more
RSS - Posts
