Tag: israel/palestine

Beirut help needed to save archive

Arabist reader Zazou has passed on a call for help to save important academic archives in Beirut:

If you know anyone (preferably British) who is in Beirut, and who is about to be evacuated, would you please see if they are willing to help save a very valuable archive of Palestinian oral history?

– BACKGROUND

Diana Allan, an anthropologist at Harvard, has worked with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, particularly Shatila, and collected precious oral testimonies of 1948 survivors. She has hundreds of hours of testimonies, comprising of 750 DVD’s. Needless to say, this is a major treasure for our community and, as far as we know, nobody has done this work as extensively and thoroughly as Diana has.

– SITUATION & NEED

We need to salvage this valuable archive by getting it out of Beirut asap, preferably with foreigners being evacuated. The evacuees are only allowed a small bag, but the British embassy has agreed to let this be carried and not count as part of someone’s baggage allowance, but conditional on having someone to carry it and take responsibility for it. It is 15 kg. So… if you know anyone (preferably British, otherwise they would need to be willing to carry it at the expense of their personal belongings) who is trustworthy and willing to take this… please let us know right away!!

– CONTACT

Please contact Diana at dallan AT fas.harvard.edu.

I also have a phone number in Ramallah for anyone who might help, just leave a comment or email issandr AT arabist.net

Latest developments

Latest death toll is 362 (most civilians) in Lebanon, 34 (most soldiers) in Israel. From Reuters:

July 22 (Reuters) – Here are developments in the Middle East on the 11th day of Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon.

* Israeli soldiers oust Hizbollah guerrillas from hilltop village of Maroun al-Ras, a stronghold just inside Lebanon, where six Israeli commandos have been killed this week.

* Israel says no full-scale invasion set for now.

* More than 40 rockets fired by Hizbollah hit towns across northern Israel, injuring 16 people, damaging three houses and setting cars ablaze.

Continue reading Latest developments

The revolt of the frogs

It is said when you throw a frog into boiling water, it jumps out right away. But when you put it in warm water, then heat the pan increasingly till the boiling point, the frog will not take notice, till suddenly it’s faced with a boiling situation and dies. The learned wisdom, the frogs have to revolt now, coz they have nothing to lose but their boiling pans.

With those words activist blogger 3alaa starts a funny posting titled, “Boiling the Frogs between Cairo and Tel Aviv,” where political activism meets his cyber-humour. Behind the cartoon and the Egyptian street slang humour however, there lies a lot in 3alaa’s message.
3alaa, an independent leftist, shares a belief upheld by many on the left in Egypt today: the local is connected to the regional. A blow struck against autocracy in Cairo, solidifies the resistance in Palestine and Lebanon, and vice versa.
During the 15 July demo in solidarity with Sharqawi and Sha3er before their release, 3alaa and his fellow bloggers were distributing a statement, brilliantly written in my view.
The statement affirmed the leftist bloggers’ support for Hizbollah and Hamas in their fight to liberate the Lebanese and Palestinian detainees, but drew the attention to the Egyptian fight to liberate our own detainees in the regime’s prisons. The statement is only available in Arabic, and could be found here. 3alaa did not forget to add his own humourous touch to it, signing the statement in the name of “30th of February Organization,” the name activist bloggers are jokingly referring to themselves by.
In his last posting, you can see a frog chanting against Mubarak, saluting the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance, and stating that “boiling” will not deter dissent.

Norton on the war

Forget the talking heads on television going on about Syria and Iran at lengths, and listen instead to the real experts, such as Augustus Richard Norton. Harpers has an excellent interview with him in he makes excellent points, which I agree entirely with:

  • Iran didn’t “commission” the attack as some would have you believed. It is a Hizbullah initiative that “was tactically very smart, but strategically they were taking a real gamble.” Precisely my original views and the reason for my stupefaction (and anger) when Hizbullah carried out the attacks.
  • Olmert and his pals are not over-reacting because they’re not historic military officers in Israel. There is a military / strategic logic to the Israeli onslaught that goes beyond politics and whose aim is total dominance of its “near-abroad” (Norton says it has to do with Iran.) I can’t believe how often this one is repeated, apparently to excuse Israel’s actions (the perverse logic goes something like this: “Israel is a democracy, so its leaders have be politically savvy, so they can’t afford not to look tough, so they have to carry out war crimes, etc. Utter nonsense.)
  • The Israeli attack is completely disproportionate and is a form of collective punishment against civilians. I thought this was interesting as Norton is a Vietnam vet:

I’ve been talking to people in Lebanon and it appears that Israel has established a killing box in south Lebanon, what the U.S. called a “free fire zone” in Vietnam. You establish a zone, which you dominate from the air, and force out civilians—there are already hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have been displaced. Then you presume anything still moving in that zone is the enemy. This is a recipe for lots of hapless civilians dying, as happened a few days ago when 16 southern Lebanese villagers were killed in automobiles while adhering to Israel’s order to flee their homes.

  • Hizbullah will emerge from this with its stature diminished. I’ve wondered about this, and a lot of pundits are saying that Hizbullah will emerge stronger. For my part I don’t see a solution to this where Hizbullah does not come out weaker, and the Lebanese will (rightly) want to have more say over its actions in the future. One should not confuse support for resistance with support for Hizbullah’s political leadership and continued “untouchable” status in Lebanon. Norton says:

Totally disarming Hezbollah is a fool’s errand. It’s too easy to hide weapons and there’s too great an incentive to keep them. Hezbollah is facing an interesting dilemma. The more it uses the rockets the more it creates a rationale to keep the time period open. Inside Lebanon there is going to be a readjustment of politics. Hezbollah will be diminished in stature, it won’t be able to maintain its privileged position after what has happened.

  • Outcome for Israel and the US will be negative. Two key quotes:

Israel has made a profound mistake.

I’ve been studying American foreign policy in the Middle East for 34 years and I can’t recall any U.S. president who has subordinated American interests to Israeli interests like this one. The administration is being naïve about how this is going to reverberate elsewhere, in places like Iraq.

There going to be hell to pay for this in the long run. I can already imagine Al Qaeda recruiters are working non-stop.

What’s missing from the interview, though, is discussion of Syria. I’ve commented on other blogs about this, so here are my two cents: Syria’s weak domestic position (created by Israeli/French/US pressure and its own idiocy and assassinations) makes it actually more difficult to really push for regime change there, as some are advocating. The weaker the Bashar Al Assad regime is, the more careful Israel and the US will be. The majority opinion in the leadership of both countries now is that the regime’s fall would either lead to Iraq-like chaos (which would compound Iraq’s own problems and naturally affect Lebanon) to relative stability under a new Islamist regime. I think enough Islamists have come to power recently for the taste of everybody in the region right now. So the Syrian regime is reinforced and can be more intransigeant in the current situation, since it is not paying much of a price and most probably won’t be challenged.

The caveat is, of course, that the advocates of Syrian regime change will win the argument over Syria and change everybody’s mind (or something will happen to make people change their mind.) In that case, don’t plan a trip to the Levant for the next 10-20 years.

U.S. speeds up bomb delivery for the Israelis

I just wanna puke…

NYT: U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis

By DAVID S. CLOUD and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON, July 21 — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

Continue reading U.S. speeds up bomb delivery for the Israelis

Pro-resistance Tahrir demo on Wednesday

National Forces For Palestine and Lebanon–a united front of leftist, Islamist political groups, and NGO activists–have called for a demonstration in Tahrir Square, Wednesday 26 July, at 6pm, in solidarity with the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance. Wednesday also coincides with the 50th anniversary of the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
If you are attending, please bring Lebanese or/and Palestinian flags.
And here’s the demo banner, designed by the organizers. It adresses Arab leaders saying “Your Majesties, Your Excellencies… Spit on You!”

Demo banner

Activism Calendar

Israel’s rationale behind bombing civilians

The San Francisco Chronicle ran an interesting article on Israel’s motives behind agressively bombing civilian targets in Lebanon. The report quotes a variety of security experts, one of whom referred to how “Hezbollah is so intertwined with the society and community, it’s very difficult to try to destroy the Hezbollah infrastructure without such collateral damage,”

“The casual references to ‘Hezbollah neighbourhoods,'” Arabist reader SP rightly said in an email exchange, very much “echo the idea of ‘VC villages’ in Vietnam.”

Civilian toll raises questions
Israel, criticized for killing hundreds of Lebanese, says Hezbollah stores missiles in residences
Anna Badkhen, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, July 20, 2006

As Israel has steadily escalated its military assault on Hezbollah, so has the criticism about the rising number of civilian deaths resulting from its campaign.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Saniora, accusing Israel of indiscriminately targeting civilians, said Wednesday that his country “has been torn to shreds” by Israel’s aerial bombardment, which he said has killed 300 Lebanese, mostly civilians, wounded 1,000 and displaced half a million more.

Continue reading Israel’s rationale behind bombing civilians

Letting Lebanon burn

Excerpts from a new MERIP editorial on the war.

On the US media:

The American broadcast media nevertheless labor to fashion symmetry where there is none. There is balanced treatment of the casualties on both sides. The Israelis forced into bomb shelters are juxtaposed with the Lebanese politely warned to flee their homes. For competing renditions of the day’s bloodletting, CNN’s avuncular Larry King turns first to nonchalantly windblown Israeli spokeswoman Miri Eisen and then to a program director from Hizballah’s al-Manar satellite channel, Ibrahim al-Musawi, who always seems to have one eye on the sky. The rock-star reporters who parachuted in to cover the story dispense dollops of confusion. CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Cyprus explained that, since Hamas members are Sunni and Hizballah members Shi‘i, they are “historic rivals.” MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson, sans bowtie to convey the seriousness of the occasion, wondered if Hizballah had rocketed Nazareth because its residents are all Christian, ignoring the images on the screen behind him from the attack victims’ funeral at a mosque.

On Hizbullah’s motivations:

No evidence, beyond leaked Israeli intelligence of secret meetings between Nasrallah and his alleged Syrian and Iranian puppeteers, has been presented for the thesis of broader conspiracy, let alone for the core proposition that Hizballah snatched the Israeli soldiers on orders from Bashar al-Asad and/or Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (Who else sees the hand of Iran, by the way? Saddam Hussein, admonishing Syria from his Baghdad jail cell not to “deepen its coalition with Iran, because Iranians have bad intentions toward all Arabs and they hope to do away with them.”) The fact that Hizballah’s arsenal includes missiles of Iranian and Syrian provenance is also adduced as proof. By this same logic, of course, Washington must be ordering every sortie of Israeli F-16s over Beirut and every demolition of Palestinian homes by Caterpillar bulldozers.

Hizballah is not shy about acknowledging its external patrons, who presumably assented to its operation. But the timing of the militia’s cross-border raid, as Israel was punishing all of Gaza for the capture of one soldier, suggests another motivation rooted in regional politics — namely, that Hizballah aimed to impress the Arab public as capable champions of the Palestinians, in contrast to the impotent grumbling of the US-allied Arab regimes. Surely, as well, Saudi and Egyptian criticisms of Hizballah stem more from the popularity of Nasrallah among their own (all or mostly Sunni) populations than from a genuine fear of a “Shiite crescent.”

This Shia crescent nonsense has been way overblow, in my opinion. The Saudis have been warming to the Iranians for years, and the Egyptians have tried but have been probably blocked by the Americans. What does Hosni Mubarak have to fear from Shias? He barely has any in Egypt. The only thing he fears is being upstaged as a regional VIP.

Here’s the conclusion, but read the whole thing:

On July 19, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Tony Snow if Bush’s insistence that Rice not undertake shuttle diplomacy until Israel “defangs” Hizballah made the conflagration in Lebanon a US war as well as an Israeli one. Snow dissembled: “Why would it be our war? I mean, it’s not on our territory. This is a war in which the United States — it’s not even a war. What you have are hostilities, at this point, between Israel and Hizballah. I would not characterize it as a war.”

It is a war, an unjustified war. Israel’s legal justifications — protecting the sanctity of its borders and enforcing UN resolutions — are disingenuous to the point of being dishonest, after Israel’s own years of ignoring the will of the international community and crossing and erasing boundaries with impunity. The US is the only international actor with the power to stop this war, and instead has chosen to encourage the fighting. So the US, too, will be held accountable by history.