International Mediation in Tajikistan: A United Nations Case Study is the title of my fourth and final term paper for my political science classes at AUB. The assignment from my Conflict and Conflict Management class was very broad–write a paper about an instance of conflict management. No further direction, instruction, or guidelines. In the end, that class was a bit of a disappointment–the professor was extremely intelligent, knowledgeable, and experienced, but just not a good teacher. Rather than give lectures, which would have been fascinating, he assigned students to give presentations continuously, to the point that each 2.5 hour class session consisted of about six students coming up in front of the class and reading off of an outline of an article that they had read. Not very interesting or educational. Still, there were some worthwhile presenations, one of which resulted in this paper.
My friend Hamza was assigned a chapter out of our textbook that covered international mediation as a tool of conflict management. It was a very detailed essay, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to use its description of international mediation as a template to view one specific conflict. The only other thing was to pick a war to research. I decided on the 1992-97 civil war in Tajikistan because it is one case where the United Nations’ international mediation effort was highly successful and very professionally carried out. For once, the UN managed to create real, lasting change, rather than act as a stopgap for something that would come back to haunt a region two years later. Tajikistan today is relatively stable, and is recovering from the brutalities of the war. This paper examines the conflict, then goes point by point through the book’s chapter in examining the UN’s role. As always, you’re free to use it for whatever, as long as you cite me as the author of the essay.
I’m in Thessaloniki, Greece, right now, and will post about my continued adventures as they occur. Expect some pretty epic stories. Cheers.
International Mediation in Tajikistan: A United Nations Case Study
A few stories going on right now that I want to call attention to. Bear with me, they’re both pretty important.
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German newspaper Der Spiegel printed an article two days ago claiming that it had obtained leaked information on the Hariri tribunal, and that the verdict was more or less in–Hezbollah was responsible.
Hold the phone.
Hezbollah? The party that, as I mentioned a week ago, stands to gain so much in the next election? And this damning information happens to come out less than two weeks before that very same election? I’m not much for conspiracy theories, but I am heavily dubious of Spiegel’s claim. Read the story at the above link, and then consider these points:
1. Logic The article makes the claim that Hezbollah “gained” from Hariri’s assassination, somehow brushing off the fact that it led to a massive anti-Syrian, pro-Western surge in the country by tying it to Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers the next year, leading to the party’s victory in the 2006 July War. There is no correlation between the two incidents, though. Hassan Nasrallah suffered greatly in the aftermath of the former Prime Minister’s killing as Saad Hariri swept to become the most popular person in Lebanon. The Syrians, Nasrallah’s closest allies, were forced to withdraw. The West became more involved. Then, a year and a half later, Hezbollah started a war. Afterward, Nasrallah admitted that Hezbollah would not have kidnapped the soldiers if they had known it would lead to so much destruction. This wasn’t a masterminded plan, no matter how much Der Spiegel tries to associate the two events to each other. Nasrallah would have been far, far better off if Hariri was still in power during the July War, and Hezbollah had proven itself stronger than the government by winning.
2. Style of the article Spiegel’s article reads like sensationalist journalism. It speaks romantically of the whole background story, providing far too much detail in the wrong places. It gives a great deal of unnecessary history, and excepting the title and subtitle, doesn’t get to the point until the 9th paragraph. In the subtitle, it emphasizes more that the information is being kept secret (duh, that’s the way investigations are required by international law to work–private investigation, public trial) than that Hezbollah was the guilty party. This doesn’t read like breaking news, which it certainly would be if the information was certified to be true–it reads like a tabloid. At a few points, there are contradictions: the article first claims to have “sources close to the tribunal” that provided the information, but then later speaks of “Spiegel’s source.” There are also large sections that are admittedly built on “speculation.”
3. Timing Isn’t it suspicious that this article came out perfectly in time to greatly influence the election? Even Haaretz, an Israeli paper, admitted that this was a little bit too convenient:
It is possible that the UN investigator examining the Hariri assassination received new information refuting earlier intelligence estimates that the murder was the work of the Syrian regime and Lebanese intelligence officials linked to it. The timing of the report, however, gives the impression that it was released more to alter election results than to bring the truth to light.
I’m personally inclined to agree. There is a lot at stake in this election, and I wouldn’t put it past anyone from meddling. There’s a long who’s-who list of individuals, nations, and organizations that would love to see March 14th perform better than anticipated in the election–first on the list being the US government. Hell, Spiegel even admits that the timing seems fishy:
One can only speculate over the reasons why the Hariri tribunal is holding back its new information about the assassination. Perhaps the investigators in the Netherlands fear that it could stir up the situation in Lebanon. On Friday evening, the press office in Leidschendam responded tersely to a written inquiry from SPIEGEL, noting that it could not comment on “operational details.”
Perhaps, indeed. Maybe we should speculate a little bit more before printing articles.
Now, perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m so anti-Zionist (and thus so anti-current Israeli administration) that I’m biased towards trusting an organization that has indeed been responsible for many assassinations and kidnappings in the past. But I feel like it’s telling that Spiegel reported on it, and no one else did. Despite the wide coverage that the Hariri tribunal has garnered around the world, you won’t find any mention of this new evidence, or even a story about the story of the evidence, in the New York Times or BBC. The Israeli papers are, of course, going crazy right now. Al Jazeera posted a short article, which quickly got buried. The majority of the buzz around this story has been centered on those most affected, and the bloggers who pay attention. Many of them are likewise suspicious of this story. It’ll be a while before we find out for sure, but this is a pretty big deal and could have a large impact on the elections. I’ll keep you posted if more information comes up.
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The second issue I wanted to bring up is a story that has gotten far too little media coverage, so I thought I’d spread it around as much as possible. It came to my attention a few days ago when I saw it here, on my friend Nicolien’s blog.
From Haaretz, on May 15th:
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s party wants to ban Israeli Arabs from marking the anniversary of what they term “the Catastrophe” or Nakba, when in 1948 some 700,000 Arabs lost their homes in the war that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.
The ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party said it would propose legislation next week for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators.
“The draft law is intended to strengthen unity in the state of Israel and to ban marking Independence Day as a day of mourning,” said party spokesman Tal Nahum.
The initiative could fuel racial tensions stoked by Lieberman’s February election campaign call to make voting or the holding of public office in Israel contingent on pledging loyalty to the Jewish state.
If that isn’t a racist policy, I don’t know what is. “Palestinians in Israel” (what Arab-Israelis generally refer to themselves as) make up 20% of the population of a nation that guarantees equal rights to all citizens, regardless of race or religion. May 15th is usually the date of commemoration for al-Nakba, though this year it was held on the 14th because the 15th was a Friday. Lieberman’s proposal has gotten remarkably little coverage in Western papers. I did find mention of it in Al Jazeera, but not in its own article–rather in a separate one about how Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu stated that he wouldn’t stop settlements from expanding, and was instead going to keep dismantling a few infinitesimally small “illegal outposts” that aren’t approved by the government, while allowing the much larger and more destructive ones to continue on their own path. The UN has declared all Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law.
Al-Nakba is an incredibly important historical event in the Palestinian consciousness. It had a massive impact not only within Palestine, but also on the neighboring countries that suddenly took on hundreds of thousands of poor refugees that had been evicted from their land. It is a truly tragic story, and I personally am disgusted by Lieberman’s gall at blatantly trying to make the Palestinians forget their roots. That is something that cannot, and I think will not, ever happen. This excellent site has a huge amount of information about al-Nakba and Palestine before 1948, I definitely recommend browsing around–it’s not only Palestinians that should remember what happened. I’d like to further shamelessly steal from Nicolien’s blog by posting this picture that she shared. Red is Palestinian territory, grey is Israeli.
EDIT: Fortunately, coverage of this story is increasing. For more information, the BBC put up a pretty good article this evening.
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On a mostly unrelated note, I should point out that today in Lebanon is “Liberation Day”–commemorating when the Israeli occupation of Lebanon ended in 2000. IDF troops were stationed in the southern part of the country for 18 years, ten of which were after the Civil War ended, until the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army collapsed and Israel was left truly alone. The rapid and chaotic withdrawl was messy and widely regarded as a Hezbollah political victory, as the Israelis were seen turning tail and running, many of their Lebanese allies (considered traitors by the government, citizens, and the Party of God) attempting to cross the border and seek asylum in Israel.
Apologies for the absence, but it’s been a very busy week or two and I’ve had a lot of exciting stuff going on. I’ll split it up into two posts, one regarding school stuff and one with non-academic activities. Here we go:
My first week of school has been very exciting. My courses all appear to be interesting and challenging, but a few stick out in particular. I had to fight tooth and nail to get in, but it does appear that I will be in enrolled in a master’s level course entitled Conflict and Conflict Management in the Middle East, taught by a man named Timur Goksel. A quick Google search of Prof. Goksel yields 104,000 results, and it’s not like he has a common name. Goksel was basically in charge of the UN efforts in southern Lebanon throughout the Lebanese civil war, and only retired from that post in 2003. He maintains very close contact with all of the players—he personally knows people like Shimon Peres, Ehud Olmert, Hassan Nasrallah, and Michel Suleiman. He is extremely well-known regionally for being influential, level-headed, and very, very smart. There is a lot of information out there on him, but here’s a short 1999 article by Robert Fisk (who graduated from AUB and went on to do some of the most defining journalism of the Civil War era) about Timur’s work with the UN. Anyway, the course is entirely based around discussion and debate and student-given lectures, which is very exciting. Additionally, the syllabus mentions a field trip to “southern Lebanon” at some point later in the semester. With Goksel’s level of clearance, “southern Lebanon” means “the Israeli border.” Exciting much? I definitely had to push some administrative buttons to get into the course as an undergraduate, but I should be in now.
My other courses are cool but not as mindblowing. My Senior Seminar in Arab Politics is taught by a sitting member of parliament who seems more like a politician than an educator. Interesting experience perhaps, but he’s not very personable or communicative with students, and from the one short class we had already he seemed quite disinterested in the opinions of the Lebanese and internationals enrolled in his course. Maybe that was just a bad first impression, but I wasn’t particularly impressed by his demeanor. Still, though, given the subject matter of the course I’d think that he’s pretty well-qualified.
Human Rights is still exciting. There hasn’t been quite as much conflict in the past few classes as there was on day one, but there are still some heated debates. Generally, these are initiated or at least perpetuated by the very outspoken young lady I referred to in my last post. Hamza actually had to reign her in when she launched into an off-topic speech, which was amusing and appreciated because of the way she sputtered and protested so much about it. The professor here seems intelligent, though he’s content to let the class run away with discussions and get sidetracked without any real course-related progress being made, so that could be a flaw. It is interesting material though, so it’s not like these discussions are a waste of time.
Politics in Lebanon is amusing because the professor there has a very finely-tuned sense of humor that he unleashes on unfortunate students. However, the internationals are often left out of class discussions by references to well-known families and clans from different regions, or local historical figures that all of the students with families in one part of the country know, but the Americans and Europeans and even some other Lebanese are left clueless about. Also, despite his good English, the professor lapses into Arabic frequently without noticing, and we have to stop him and ask him to repeat himself in the language of the university. We had one good sized reading assignment that was interesting, though I don’t know entirely how relevant it is to my education as a whole regarding the Middle East. However, this class should hopefully be filling a key course requirement at L&C and sparing me the need of taking a comparative politics class back there, so it is definitely worthwhile in that respect. Also, there are Lebanese elections coming up in June, so presumably this will give me some idea of what’s going on.
That just leaves Intermediate Lebanese Arabic. There are only three levels offered, so “Intermediate” is a slightly misleading course title. I certainly don’t feel like an intermediate in Arabic of any dialect, but apparently I’m in the right class regardless. It’s just a really freaking hard language to learn. This course has challenged me so far, but I guess in a good way. The professor speaks quickly and mostly in Lebanese, so it’s often difficult to understand her, but immersion has always proven to be the most effective learning tool for languages. This is my only class that I have more than twice a week (it’s every day), and there is a considerable homework load. However, I hope that it will get me to a passable level in Arabic, at least to the point where a taxi driver won’t switch to speaking to English out of frustration at me fumbling around in his native language.
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I’ve gotten into the school swing of things pretty nicely, I think. I’ve got a good rhythm of sleeping and studying and socializing down (and by that I mean I don’t sleep, in order to both study and socialize). Arabic is my first course of the day, and it’s not until 11 am, so I’m able to have leisurely mornings, and my apartment is close enough to campus that I can always go home during the day if I need something or to save money for lunch by eating the nonexistent groceries I have there. I’ve made some friends on campus that are mostly internationals at this point, but mixed in with a few Lebanese as well. Which brings me to the less educational but certainly more entertaining non-academic aspect of my life. Read on…
Filed under: American University of Beirut, History, Lebanon General, Travel
Lots of adventures to report on. It’s been a busy few days in Beirut and around Lebanon, so this will be a long and hopefully enjoyable post. And an added bonus—check the photos page for the first of my pictures from here! Yay! (unfortunately I’m struggling with slow internet connections so it’s hard to get them all up right now, but please check back over the next few days and I hope to have a few albums up by then)
Two days ago, we went on a bus adventure to the town of Baalbek, in eastern Lebanon. Now, a word on the dimensions of this country: it’s small. Lebanon is on the east side of the Mediterranean, meaning that Beirut is the farthest point to the west you can go. Going to the other side of the country here isn’t like it is in other places. Our bus ride, with several stops and some difficulty getting out of Beiruti traffic, took a grand total of 1.5 hours, and cost just a few dollars. The ride was a bit of a white-knuckle experience, because Baalbek is in the Bekaa valley, on the other side of a mountain range. The mountains here obviously aren’t like they are in Montana, but they were still considerable when taking into account the condition and width of the road, as well as the speed we were going. It should also be mentioned that the bus was a minivan with 8 or so passengers in it, plus a driver who was likely rolling on some pretty heavy methamphetamine at the time. We also passed through one military checkpoint, which was a very casual affair with some bored looking soldiers waving us through without any questions. Lebanon’s army mostly serves as traffic police, and they’re actually very bad at policing traffic, so I guess it wasn’t particularly surprising that the ones doing time as checkpoint guards didn’t really guard the checkpoint that well either. Then when we got to Baalbek and were sort of unceremoniously removed from the vehicle and told that we had arrived and needed to pay. Welcome to our country!
Why were we here? Excellent question. Baalbek is famous for its massive set of Roman ruins, which were actually bigger than anything built in Rome at the time and are still quite extensive. What remains is a partially built temple to Jupiter, who presumably was too busy scoping out maidens to finish the rest of his clubhouse, a very complete temple to Bacchus, which proves that drunkenness does not hinder productivity in the slightest, and the surrounding complexes. Before we even got in, though, there were some obstacles.
You know those annoying merchants that hassle tourists by trying to convince them to buy things of some degree of local and authentic significance? This especially seems to happen in developing areas that have lots of exciting things to see but not enough jobs to support people, so there are large groups of individuals who support themselves and their families of five to eight children by hawking touristy crap at you. Baalbek is one of those areas, but there’s another local thing besides the ruins that they have to advertise—it’s the original home of Hezbollah. Walking down the street and being accosted by men offering t-shirts and flags embossed with the Hezbollah logo, complete with Kalashnikov rifle, is quite an experience. On top of the shock of that, I also had a closer-than-expected encounter with some local wildlife when I was physically lifted up and pulled by two particularly persistent businessmen and placed on a camel that I was not even aware was kneeling next to me on the sidewalk. The camel appeared to be likewise surprised, though not particularly impressed with his treatment. By the time I really knew what was going on, he was standing up and being led away so I could experience the authentic Bedouin lifestyle in the middle of a medium-sized city, for the small price of whatever the guys wanted to charge. We quickly took some pictures and then I communicated in broken Arabic that the camel joyriding had gone on for long enough and they let me down. What ensued then was an adventure in wallet-gouging haggling, which set us back a few dollars but did make for a few pretty cute pictures and a good memory.
The ruins were very much worth the price of admission. They just kept going, farther and farther, and there were always more inscriptions and columns and rooms to explore. All that remains of the Jupiter temple is a set of six pillars that are 22 meters tall, the biggest in the world. That’s pretty ridiculous, since as far as I know they main method of building them was injecting a bunch of slaves with the stuff they give KFC chickens and having them all stand on each other’s shoulders holding big chunks of column over their heads. It’s just six pillars, but they’re pretty impressive. The Bacchus temple, meanwhile, is quite complete and imposing. It was actually very much buried, and was excavated by ze Germans in the early 1900s when they were researching how best to build an empire (oops! guess we didn’t do our homework quite well enough, did we, Wilhelm…). Anyway, they collaborated with the Ottoman Quality Furniture Empire on excavation, which was commemorated by placing matching plaques in German and Arabic on the wall of the temple at what was then ground level. Today, those plaques hang about 15 meters up, so yeah. The rest of the temple is quite impressive as well, check the photo album. As impressive as the temples were, it was also pretty cool to just walk around the general courtyards and complexes surrounding the main structures. There was a lot of very ornate engraving, some stairways leading nowhere, and a random but large hole in the ground. There was also a very respectable, if slightly dark, museum with lots of interesting artifacts and sarcophagi. We would have spent more time there, but I think that the interior designers went a little crazy with the dimmer switches, because we couldn’t really see anything. The really impressive stuff was on the outside though, so we felt pretty good about the experience.
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That night there was a dinner for international students at a very nice Lebanese restaurant in the trendy Gemmayzeh neighborhood. Lebanese food is famous for being very good and very confusing. As an outsider, you sort of have to observe how the locals eat the many dishes that are put in front of you, family style. Most of it involves trying to not look worried when dipping a pita-like bread into bowls of unknown but usually delicious substances. Quite enjoyable. The other awesome part of Lebanese cuisine? Hookah, at the table, all throughout dinner. It’s basically the same stuff as we smoke in the states, but here they call the water-pipe an argileh, and the flavored tobacco is hookah, as opposed to back home where we refer to the apparatus as a hookah and the tobacco as shisha. If you mention shisha here, they think you’re talking about hashish, which is a totally different and much less legal story. After dinner, the student leaders offered to show any of the interested new kids around the bar scene. I believe that a grand total of five out of the forty students at dinner turned down the offer, and that was because they had to get back to campus before curfew.
So our big group went on a Saturday night adventure in Beirut. It was pretty early in the evening (the club scene usually gets going around 1 am, and at this point it was only about 8:30), so we were all able to get into a very nice bar underground. Very posh place, with comfy couches and low tables and a little bit of dancing space. I had a slightly alarming experience in learning about prices, when I ordered a drink and put down a 10,000 lira bill (approximately $6.50), expecting to get change, but instead was given the 10,000 back with a receipt saying “13,000” circled at the bottom. Oops. Fortunately, the other students there were very generous when it came to buying rounds, and no one suffered from sobriety.
A word on the other internationals—they’re great! I really like this group of kids. They’re an interesting mix, especially when placed with the student leaders that are Lebanese. Many of them are Jordanian or American, with others from Australia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, and Romania. My rather limited Arabic was actually enough to empress many of them, who have less of a background in the language than I expected. However, the majority of them seem to be very intelligent. I spoke at length with Hamza (a Pakistani/American) and Ghassan (a Lebanese leader) over a few shots about our favorite Muslim philosophers, the need to balance democratic dissent with social cohesion for the sake of utilitarianism, and why we really should go to Istanbul for the first time together over spring break. Mona, from California, used the same book and DVD set to learn Modern Standard Arabic as I did, so we had some really great laughs impersonating the girl in the videos and all of the ridiculous things she says. Yara, a Lebanese girl that is in her first year but is already leading groups, was very curious about what stereotypes Americans have about her people, but was very close-mouthed about what they thought of themselves. Jed and Eli were American graduate students from Alaska and Portland respectively, and we had a great conversation about a movie that has been heavily recommended to me by many people called “Waltz With Bashir,” which I’m told to pass on the recommendation for to anyone interested in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as long as they can handle a pretty intense film. Anyway, we all had a lovely time for several hours, over which time the group thinned considerably to maybe 10 or 12. We took a big round of parting shots together and walked out to the street, where Asher, an American of strong Turkish descent, produced a travel guitar and marched us around, dancing and clapping, while we waited for taxis to get us back to our home neighborhoods. Six of us guys decided we weren’t quite ready to call it a night, so met up at a dive bar in Hamra to play darts and gossip about which girls were cutest (I’m not going to say who won, but there was an interesting mix of consensus on some girls and dissent on others). I made it home by 3:30, in time to catch a few hours of sleep for the next big day.
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Sunday was a road trip with Walid. His family is from a small city in the south called Nabatiyeh, and he was happy to take us on a scenic drive through a large chunk of the country. He first took us through some parts of Beirut that we hadn’t seen yet, including the poor Shia neighborhood and the areas around the Palestinian refugee camps. Today, about 400,000 refugees live in Lebanon, with no real legal status. They are largely confined to the camps, with little right to leave and even less money with which to do so. Unfortunately, Lebanon is poorly equipped to handle the burden of half a million more poverty-stricken civilians and can’t incorporate them into society, so the Palestinians remain in limbo in the camps. It’s an ugly situation, with no solution for those people besides giving them back the land that Israel now occupies and guards so jealously, which doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon. Beirut’s an interesting place like that.
We drove south along the coastal highway for a while, then into the interior on a winding road with lots of smaller villages and towns spaced around on hills. It’s a beautiful region, with very picturesque terraced plantations of fruit trees, olives, grapes, and other Mediterranean crops. It was very pleasant to spend the greater part of the morning driving around on the scenic route rather than hurrying down on the busy interstate. There were some cool attractions along the way, as well. By a town called Arnoun, there are the remains of a Crusader castle on a very strategic hill. We drove up, and from the top we could see Israel and the Golan Heights in one direction, and much of southern Lebanon in the other. The castle was used personally as a base by Yassir Arafat, and later by Israeli troops during the occupation of 1982. When we were there today, a Syrian/Lebanese/Kuwaiti film crew was setting up an action sequence for a movie being filmed by a locally famous Syrian director who apparently does pretty good work in general. We didn’t see anything super exciting going on, but there was a guy hanging from a crane at one point, which I guess was kind of cool. The castle itself is very well preserved considering how old it is and how many times it’s been bombed by different factions over the last few decades. Today, a yellow and green Hezbollah flag flew from a metal pole driven into the top of the structure. Tomorrow, who knows.
Walid’s uncle Ali and his wife Najla own some land and an organic goat farm in a small town outside of Nabatiyeh. They were an extremely friendly couple, and welcomed us to their home with a big traditional lunch and a tour of the farm. Najla spoke excellent English, and Ali and I bonded by speaking some formal Arabic together. The livestock were also quite active and happy to see us. There were even a few baby goats, that looked quite energetic/delicious. After lunch, we sat and chatted over tea and coffee, and just enjoyed the countryside. It’s very different from Beirut, in a very enjoyable way. I noticed that there was some sort of quranic recitation coming from the nearby mosque in a very soothing lull over the loudspeakers. I couldn’t understand any of it, but it went on for at least an hour in the background and made for an exceedingly peaceful ambiance. I hope to go back to Ali and Najla’s at some point during the rest of my stay in Lebanon.
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Today was more ancient history. We took a bus to Byblos, also known as Jbeil, to see the layered ruins of a whole bunch of civilizations that felt like there wasn’t enough space in the country so they would just build their castles on top of each other. The city is one of the longest continuously-inhabited places in the world, and it shows. Next to the slightly touristy but very nice souk, there was a Crusader castle. This was the top layer of pre-modern development. Beneath that were the remains of a Roman temple, an Iron Age city, and a Bronze Age settlement. Some of the leftovers had been dug up and careful moved to the surrounding area so that one can see all of the different layers at once.
One of the highlights of the ruins were a series of vertical burial shafts dug deep into the ground to bury royalty. Presumably, their families had watched “The Mummy” series with Brendan Frasier, and wanted to make sure that the dead stayed down there, because these graves seemed unnecessarily deep otherwise. Also, there was another series of columns leftover from the Roman period, though these were considerably smaller than those at Baalbek. I actually felt like these were a little bit too well preserved and refurbished, because they just seemed sort of unrealistically perfect and smooth. We could have hired a guide for more information, but I felt like it was fun to just wander around and look at the various spots without always knowing everything about them.
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I’m back in Beirut now, staying in a hotel across the street from AUB. Walid and Nicolien have been fantastic, but we stayed with them for about five nights and it was sort of time to give them and the cats their space. Hopefully I’ll be able to move into my dorm and meet my new roommate, Ian, very soon. Tomorrow there is a big orientation for all of the new students (not just internationals), and advising and registration starts. Very busy times! I’ll try to keep people posted.
Thomas Friedman, one of my favorite authors, published “From Beirut to Jerusalem” in 1989 to recount his experiences as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times during the Lebanese civil war. The seventh chapter is entitled “Poker, Beirut-Style.” In it, he discusses the intricate way in which all of the political and military factions in Lebanon bluffed and intimidated each other, all while risking everything and playing for very high stakes and depending on skill and chance to see them through it. Now, the players have changed, but the rules seem much the same. The game has moved south, to Israel and Gaza more than Lebanon. Israel, however, has been caught cheating.
The Israeli government has played the victim card one too many times now. Its entire strategy relies on appealing to the rest of the world as a weak nation, beset upon from all sides by oppressive Arab regimes and organizations. It points fingers at the military actions of everyone around it, making dire claims about the immense perils it faces and how endangered it is. At times, this is perfectly legitimate. But in this instance it is 
too much–the Israelis have now unabashedly put five of a kind down on the table, and are counting on the rest of the world to not call them on it. I won’t go into the basic facts of each conflict because they’re an easy Wikipedia search away, but I would like to point out some intense hypocrisy in each one that might not be as well-known. Once again, I’d like to reiterate that Israel does face many legitimate security threats and at times its claims of necessary defensive response have been fully warranted. However, this post aims to expose instances of the opposite.
1. 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The Israelis created a policy called “Plan Dalet,” which they claimed was a defensive contingency strategy in case of further action on the part of Palestinians. In reality, though, it seems that it was more insidious than that. Take this excerpt from the nonpartisan Washington Report on Middle East Affairs magazine:
Under Plan D, once the British authorities were out of the way, Jewish fighters would treat all of Palestine as a no-man’s land and seize any Arab village or town from which an attack on Jews was launched. But officials of the Jewish Agency’s Land Department, which was headed by a close ally of Ben-Gurion, chose to ignore the difference between friendly and hostile villages and encouraged local commanders to evacuate Arabs wherever there was fertile land. Jewish forces also attacked villages that lay along strategic routes, such as Deir Yassin, where on April 9, 1948, the Irgun slaughtered more than 250 men, women, and children. After Deir Yassin, frightened Palestinians fled in even greater numbers. From April 1, 1948 to the end of the war, [Ilan] Pappé writes, “Jewish operations were guided by the desire to occupy the greatest possible portion of Palestine.”
2. 1956 Suez Crisis. Israel’s economic interests were damaged by Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and David Ben-Gurion banded with Britain and France (who were likewise disadvantaged by Nasser’s completely legal decision) to invade the Sinai Peninsula. It claimed that the real reason for invasion was the continued actions of militants (which were not sanctioned by Egypt and had killed only 28 people over the course of six years). This violence, Israel argued, was intolerable and left military action as the only option. Over the course of the following months, the United States put heavy economic and diplomatic pressure on the coalition of aggressors, and the idea of throwing Britain and France out of NATO was even tossed around. By the end of the war, 1,650 Egyptians were dead with 5,000 more wounded and a further 6,000 taken prisoner. 1000 coalition troops were injured, and 200 killed.
3. 1967 Six-Day War. In the wake of the war, the Israeli government heavily encouraged and expedited settlement in newly occupied territories. However, evidence shows that it did so in full knowledge that such action was in direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. A May 2007 edition of the British magazine The Independent discusses a memo written by “Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser at the time and today one of the world’s leading international jurists,” that explained how settlement violated the Convention:
Despite the legal opinion, which was forwarded to Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, but not made public at the time, the Labour cabinet progressively sanctioned settlements. This paved the way to growth which has resulted in at least 240,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank today….The memorandum, details of which were published by the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg last year, also says settlements built on private land would explicitly contravene the 1907 Hague Convention.
4. 1982 Lebanon War. In the early ’80s, Israel was looking for an excuse to destroy Yassir Arafat and the PLO, which were taking refuge in Lebanon and had made many attacks across the border into Israel throughout the 1970s. Take this, from an analyst at the CATO Institute:
Supporters of the Camp David accords may have thought that the Israeli-Egyptian peace would inspire Israel to seek peace with the rest of its adversaries. But the Begin regime viewed the matter differently: security on its west flank freed Israel to pursue its other objectives. One of those was the discrediting and destruction of the PLO, which, by June 1982, had observed its cease-fire with Israel for about a year and had been pursuing a diplomatic strategy. In that month Israel’s ambassador to London, Shlomo Argov, was wounded in an assassination attempt. Israel declared that the PLO had violated the cease-fire, and on June 6, under the direction of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, launched Operation Peace for Galilee–a massive invasion of Lebanon.
It is important to note that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization, a noted anti-PLO group. Israel, of course, knew this.
The invasion was horrendous–about 9,000 PLO and Syrian troops were killed, along with an estimated 17,825 Lebanese that were caught in the crossfire, compared to 675 Israelis. The siege of Beirut left the city permanently scarred. Several massacres occurred on Israel’s watch–Sabra and Shatila come to mind, which left somewhere between 350 and 3,000 Palestinian civilian refugees murdered. The number is very speculative because the Israeli forces cordoned off the camps while Christian militiamen participated in the slaughter, then buried many bodies in mass graves with bulldozers. The Israeli withdrawal just three months after it first invaded led to a power vacuum and the bloodiest part of the Lebanese Civil War, with thousands killed in the aftermath.
5. 2008-2009 Gaza Invasion. Claiming self-defense after enduring years of Hamas rockets fired from Gaza, Israel engages the people of the non-state territory of Gaza in a non-stop campaign of aerial bombardment followed by a large-scale ground invasion. Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas broke the ceasefire and therefore the action is justified because it is simply defending its people. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, this is blatantly false. Reuters provides these rather chilling numbers for December 27-January 17:
PALESTINIANS IN GAZA:
– The independent Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said its researchers had documented the deaths of 1,284 people in the war, of whom 894 appeared to be civilians, including 280 aged under 18. A further 167 members of Hamas’s police force died.
– The Health Ministry has said 5,300 people were wounded, including about 1,630 children.
– Israel estimated it killed about 500 guerrillas in its drive to deter rocket attacks from Gaza on its southern towns.ISRAEL:
– Thirteen Israelis were killed: 10 soldiers and three civilians hit by Hamas rocket fire. Some 700,000 Israelis live in areas struck by Hamas rockets.
Please note that while 700,000 Israelis may live in areas struck by Hamas rockets and the Jerusalem Post reports that 7,500 of these weapons have hit Sderot between 2001 and 2009, they are crude and ineffective to the extreme. I spent an hour researching, and could not find a comprehensive total of Israeli injuries and deaths from Hamas rockets. This leads me to believe that they have been very, very limited. I would estimate that there have been less than 40 deaths in 8 years. More people die from lightning strikes each year in the US.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that over 1.3 million people live in the Gaza Strip. These people aren’t dealing with an occasional rocket landing in their city and maybe injuring someone. They’re dealing with the effects of a full invasion from one of the most powerful militaries in the world, which for all of its high-tech surveillance and targeting systems, somehow managed to kill 900 civilians in under a month, all under the pretense that Hamas was using them as human shields and apparently there was no other way to kill the militants besides carpet bombing any area that they’ve ever fired guns near, regardless of if it includes a school, hospital, or UN building. As awful as it must be to have ordinance blow up in a nice Israeli neighborhood that has power/water/medicine/food/bomb shelters, no Palestinians have ever used white phosphorus on Israel or attacked it with supersonic jets and massive, well-equiped armies. All this while restricting access to the entire territory by any sort of international commerce or aid, or specific areas by journalists and photographers.
I think the conclusions here are succinctly laid out by Jerusalem Post writer Larry Derfner, who is a Jew:
“The [Palestinian] Kassam [rockets] have terrorized the 25,000 people in Sderot and its environs, but have caused very, very few deaths or serious wounds. By contrast, Israel has terrorized 1.5 million Gazans, locked them inside their awfully narrow borders, throttled their economy, and killed and seriously wounded thousands of them…This is crazy. Israel is the superpower of the Middle East, but because we still think we’re the Jews of Europe in the 1930s, or the Israelites under Pharaoh, we spend a lot more time fighting our enemies than we might if we looked at the whole picture, not just our half of it.”
Bottom line: Israel is no longer the victim. It should stop pretending it is.
