Apropos Of Nothing

The extremely interesting writer Michael Totten (c.f. Daniel’s post in praise of Totten’s Mideast blog) has mentioned a theory floating around about the abduction of the two Fox journalists: that it’s the work of Al Qaeda operating in Gaza. This is obviously extremely ominous, and it makes a number of inconsistencies fall into place; primarily, that the hostages were not released within hours or a couple of days, as has always happened in the past when garden-variety Palestinian terrorists have snatched foreign nationals, and that the demand is for the release of US-held Muslims, not Israeli-held Muslims.

We are seeing an increasingly dangerous pattern of outside influence on the already bad behavior of Palestinians in “liberated” Gaza. Another example is the Hezbollah-style abduction of still-missing Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit prior to the Lebanon war. Not only has the withdrawal from Gaza — which I supported — resulted in just the kind of unrelenting missile attacks on Israeli civilians across the border that was anticipated by opponents of the withdrawal, but it has also allowed an apparently festering, freakish jihadism to take root on our doorstep. (And I’ll just remark in passing that if I were a resident of Sderot, I would be wondering why missile attacks on my front yard are tolerable to my government but missile attacks on front yards in Nahariyya are a cassus belli.)

These are disorienting times. When the British foiled the terror plot to blow up multiple airliners last week by using a long-term, patient program of police surveillance and cross-border intelligence-sharing, I had an intensely disconcerting thought: that John Kerry might have actually had a point about something; viz, that terrorists can be effectively combatted by approaching the problem as a police matter. The cesspool of Wild-West chaos and extremist terrorism that Gaza has become since the Israeli withdrawal has made me wonder whether I wasn’t wrong on that one, too.

Last week, the Lebanese army caught a boat loaded with weapons and long-range missiles headed for Israel (shades of the Karine A). The weapons were apparently intended for the use of either Hamas or the Islamic Jihad in Gaza. The boat departed Lebanon from Naher Al Bard, a Palestinian refugee camp near the southern port of Tripoli. There were four people on the boat as well, and they were detained by the Lebanese.

This action by the Lebanese is quite encouraging. It indicates an independence on the part of the Lebanese army from the desires of Hezbollah, and more speculatively, it might suggest an inclination among the Lebanese to take advantage of the Syrian collapse to reach out to Israel. That’s an extremely hopeful scenario, but not at all an impossible one.

I’m trying to give the NY Times the benefit of the doubt here.

I know it’s important to put a bright shiny face on incipient Palestinian statehood (although the absence of any coverage whatsoever abroad regarding most of the internal Palestinian chaos currently prevailing [c.f. deadly clan battles over turf, trigger-happy Fatah security guys wasting civilian protesters, attempted lynchings of academics and terrorizing of journalists, kids and old people being blown away in the crossfire/explosions/etc.] rather begs the question why such news is so rarely considered fit to print). Yes, all the parties need to see and believe that progress is being made, that Israeli disengagement wasn’t a bad idea.

But there’s pointing out the positives and there’s bending the truth.

Today’s NY Times has a piece on the imminent Gaza harvest, a historic event that most assuredly warrants coverage and admiration. The way the information in the piece is written and organized, the implication is made that the stumbling blocks on the road toward Palestinian agricultural economic sustainability lie more with Israeli intransigence at checkpoints than with Palestinian acts of stubborn self-defeatism (like reducing functioning greenhouses to rubble). Still, we must be fair: the author does mention in graf 8 that the Israeli greenhouses were subjected to Palestinian looting after the departure of the settlers.

But farther down the article, there’s a bit of language that is so patently attempting to massage the reader’s perceptions toward a falsehood that I’m surprised it was allowed to stand:

James D. Wolfensohn, the envoy for countries involved in Middle East peacemaking, cobbled together a group of wealthy Jewish Americans who pledged $14 million in compensation for the Israeli farmers provided that they left the greenhouses intact. The deal was reached just days before the settlers were evacuated, and it is not clear that it prevented much additional damage to the greenhouses.

There’s something gloriously Humphrey Applebyesque about the locution “it is not clear that it prevented”. Let’s blow away a little of the agent-less obfuscation, shall we? Philanthropists (through the efforts of the tireless and admirable Wolfensohn) came up with a large chunk of money to ensure the Palestinians a livelihood, and they (no, not all of them by any means, but enough) threw the gesture in the donors’ faces. The satisfaction of taking a sledgehammer to an Israeli greenhouse outweighed both the desire to respond in a civilized manner to an unsolicited act of great generosity and the desire to sustain a viable source of Palestinian income.

All right, you say; but after that initial hiccup they did get on the ball. We should be accentuating the positive at this delicate time, no? Acknowledging their successes? Encouraging them further?

Couldn’t agree more. But the trouble with taking the agency out of the “damage to the greenhouses” in the sentence as it was contextualized in the surrounding paragraph is that the reader is subtly encouraged to believe it was the Israeli settlers who trashed the greenhouses themselves. Look at the order of the information given: donors pledge money to settlers provided they leave greenhouses intact; deal is accepted; greenhouses are damaged anyway. To whom is the reader logically intended to assign responsibility? The only actors in the paragraph are donors and settlers.

Picky? Perhaps. But image is everything, isn’t it? That’s where we started, after all: with the premise that the image of a successful, sustainable Palestinian Gaza is important enough to elide the details of the bullet casings flying through the air, university doors being shuttered, free newspapers being forcibly closed down, and so on. But you know what? We have an image too. And as one who believed that disengagement from Gaza was indeed a good idea, and who expects the parties on all sides to pull up their socks, behave like mensches, and make it a success, I particularly resent sly, dishonest attempts to make the Israelis who were compelled by the rest of us to leave their homes look bad. We have no right to cast any false aspersions. And neither does the NY Times.

Daniel in Brookline — to whose excellent blog I warmly commend you — recently posed an interesting question in response to my post, Where Is Gary Cooper When You Need Him?. The post addressed the incident not long ago in which Palestinian drivers protesting a rise in gas prices were sprayed with gunfire by members of Fatah’s military wing. (Fatah is not a renegade splinter group; it is the party of the Palestinian chief executive.)

Daniel is curious: “Has anyone protested this brutal mistreatment of Palestinians?”

The short answer is no, not that I’m aware of. But the question had me thinking all weekend, and it’s prompted me to posit a thesis I’ve expressed before only in private. It is this. The blithe disregard by the otherwise opinion-happy observing international community for Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence reflects, above all factors, a fundamental racism. No, not a healthy respect for the differences among cultures and the need to allow those cultures to express themselves in their own unique ways in order to foster a world of tolerance and understanding. Racism.

Before we get to the outsiders looking in, let’s consider the locals. Daniel asks about Shalom Achshav (Peace Now), the Israeli peace movement founded in 1978 during the Israeli-Egyptian peace negotiations. It is true that they have been as conspicuously silent as anyone else about the intra-Palestinian bloodshed that has prevailed since the disengagement from Gaza, but I think one can safely argue that the human rights of the individual Palestinian, while obviously of concern, were never a prime motivating factor for Shalom Achshav. As they state on their website,

The basic principles of the movement from the outset were the right of Israel to live within secure borders and the right of our neighbors to the same, including the right of the Palestinians to self-determination.

While I don’t doubt that most members of the movement find the Palestinian version of self-determination disappointing up to this point, the championing of Palestinian civil rights when the Palestinians are ruling themselves was never the organization’s remit. Shalom Achshav is motivated by the desire to remove from Israel the role of oppressor (however accurately or otherwise that label might be applied). Shalom Achshav maintains, for example, a project called Settlement Watch, which “monitors – and protests – the building of settlements, including housing tenders, expropriation of lands, budget allocations, and the like” and also conducts studies on settler attitudes toward withdrawal. The notion of a “Palestinian Self-Rule Watch” by Israelis would, I imagine, strike most members of Shalom Achshav as the height of presumption (and would, no doubt, be met by a torrent of Palestinian righteous indignation. I’m sure Saeb Erekat would have some choice words for any Israelis who deigned to point out the Palestinians’ failings to them.)

I’m going out on a bit of a limb here, but I would say that Shalom Achshav’s primary concern is the restoration of Israeli confidence in our own morality — an end to the discomfiting state of affairs in which we must, if we are honest with ourselves, question the fundamental rightness of our own actions toward others. Although I have certainly met Israeli members of the organization who despise their country at a very deep level, most of them are motivated not by self-loathing but by an abiding love for Israel. The Palestinians will need to get their own act together — and that was always the point.

But what about the rest of the world? All those activists on campuses in Britain, for example. And those editorial writers at the Guardian. Where is Sue Blackwell, champion of the anti-Israel academic boycott by the British Association of University Teachers? Where is Mona Baker, Egyptian-born editor of the British academic journal The Translator, who was so offended by the occupation that she forcibly removed two Israeli academics from the editorial boards of her publications (now that’ll teach ‘em)? Where is the International Solidarity Movement, sponsors of flag-burning “peace missions” to occupied Gaza? I could have sworn they all held some pretty strong views on the basic human right of Palestinians to live in safety and build their nation. Innocent Palestinians — little girls, taxi drivers, civilians of every stripe — have been dying in Gaza since disengagement was completed. Don’t these people have anything to say?

Well, no. The problem is not, and has never been, Palestinian suffering per se. The problem is Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israelis. And just as the Palestinians cannot be blamed for their acts of grotesque violence against Israelis, nor can they be blamed for their acts of grotesque violence against each other. Why not? Because unlike the Israelis, who, like “us”, should know better, they just can’t help it. This is how “they” behave. It is not for us to interfere, or even comment.

This cavalierly racist attitude sprang into full relief for me over an incident that occurred last Wednesday. A couple of dozen Fatah men (yes, them again) stormed Al-Azhar University in Gaza City. They burst into the office of university president Dr. Adnan al-Khaldi, beat him, and forced him to run for his life. Nor was this the first incident of its kind — al-Khaldi had escaped another Fatah lynch mob earlier in the year. The university, unable to function, has now closed down.

This is the test, I thought. Surely this story offends the delicate sensibilities of those high-minded, passionate observers abroad. Surely all those scholars, so willing to put themselves on the front lines for Palestinian human rights, will be stirred to rescue the disintegrating Palestinian academy.

Anyone? Anyone?

The great irony, of course, is that these arbiters of righteousness — these staunch defenders of the moral high ground — class us, the contemptible Israelis, along with them. We are to be held to what (in a weak moment) they might define as a civilized standard of behavior, while the Palestinians do not warrant such an exacting standard. In the view of their advocates abroad, the Palestinians are simply not capable of meeting it. So for all their cringing at the sight of their own names next to Israeli ones on journal mastheads, the Sue Blackwells and Mona Bakers of the world believe we’re in their club.

Those Palestinians suffering in the streets of Gaza, meanwhile — those people being dragged from their offices and homes and beaten and shot, or having the doors of their university slammed shut in their faces by Fatah thugs, or being murdered for the crime of protesting gas prices — will have a long wait before they get any help, or even acknowledgement, from their friends abroad. But hey, it’s not so bad. They’ll be back in a flash if the Israelis start throwing their weight around. And remember — they have the greatest respect for the dignity of Palestinian culture.

Abbas’s Fatah organization, under extreme pressure from both without (violent Islamist factions jockeying for political position) and within (Palestinian security officers who feel increasingly hamstrung by the administration), decided to try a page from Hamas’s own playbook this weekend. Five members of Hamas were kidnapped (and later released relatively unharmed) in a move allegedly orchestrated by PA security officials and “members of the ruling Fatah party”.

Lo and behold, this morning there are reports of a truce between Hamas (among other violent factions) and Fatah.

Word to the wise, Mahmoud: we’ve learned over here that Hamas’s interpretation of the word “truce” is, shall we say, flexible. It also bears mentioning that their spiritual compatriots (and your sworn enemies), eager to see a rejuvenated Taliban in Gaza, are making noises in the neighborhood.

Watch your back.

Lest we infer from the events of last night that Abbas’s Fatah crew are the white hats and Hamas the black in the Gazan Wild West drama:

Earlier in the day yesterday, members of Fatah’s military wing, the Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, responded to a roadblock set up east of Khan Yunis by several hundred Palestinians protesting a rise in gas prices by spraying them with gunfire. Taxi-driver Yasser Barakeh, 36, was killed at the scene and three others wounded. In a collective gesture simply loaded with ironic historical reverberations, the drivers at the roadblock reached down, picked up stones, and rained them down on the gun-waving Fatah men. They turned tail and ran.

It’s the Wild West revisited in Gaza right now — and none of the bullets flying around are Israeli. Last night, Hamas took on the Palestinian police in a frenzy of shootouts that left at least three Palestinians dead — two policemen and a ten-year-old girl — and at least 40 wounded. According to Palestinian sources, hundreds of Hamasniks descended on the police station in the Shati refugee camp and attacked it with “rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons”. For good measure, they also set Palestinian police cars on fire. This started because the police had had the audacity to attempt to search a car containing, among other armed Hamasniks, Muhammad Rantisi, the son of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi. (Rantisi the elder, who was one of the most rabid and bloodthirsty of the violent Palestinian maximalists [and that's really saying something], was whacked by the Israelis last April.)

I can’t help but feel sympathy for Mahmoud Abbas. At long last, he is attempting to enforce his declared ban on the carrying of weapons in public by the assorted political and quasi-military factions — not a move for the faint of heart, considering the dire threats of full-scale civil war that are said to be an inevitable consequence of such a ban. Judging by the events of last night, it appears entirely possible that civil war will indeed break out in the run-up to the January Palestinian elections. That makes it more necessary, not less, that Abbas stick to his metaphorical and literal guns and do everything he can to curtail the activities of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the other militant Islamic groups jockeying for position in Gaza.

Not for the first time, events in the region have taken on a certain surreal quality. It must be a little disorienting for Holocaust-denying Abbas to be having reassuring telephone conversations with Ariel Sharon while intra-Palestinian gun battles are raging in Gaza City.

On Friday night, Hamas held another rally to celebrate what they consider to be (and substantially was) their eviction of the Israeli settlers from Gaza. As tends to happen when Hamasniks gather, the event turned out to be less a rally than a parade of live ordnance. Unfortunately, a pickup truck loaded with live Qassam rockets (the rockets the Palestinians lob at Israelis in Sderot) exploded just as it arrived at the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing 19 people and injuring over 100 more, including many children.

Hamas immediately blamed Israel, citing a phantom airstrike. No one takes this accusation seriously, least of all Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who has been at his wit’s end of late trying to convince Hamas to impersonate civilized nation-builders. The situation now is one of petulant intra-Palestinian sniping and name-calling even as the Palestinian victims’ families bury their dead and the wounded adjust to life with their limbs blown off.

Meanwhile, Hamas expressed its frustration at looking bad by flinging 40 Qassams at long-suffering Sderot, injuring six Israelis and prompting an Israeli tactical shift – the decision to use artillery to respond to Palestinian rocket attacks and the resumption of targeted assassination. It also prompted a series of sweeping raids by the IDF, encompassing Hebron, Bethlehem, Jenin, Qalqilyah, Ramallah, Tul Karm and Nablus, in which 207 Palestinians (mostly members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad) were taken into Israeli custody.

Although the firmness of the Israeli response to an obviously trumped-up provocation bolsters Sharon’s image in the very short term, the overall situation, with its apparent justification of all the doom-saying predictions about the withdrawal hastening an escalation in terror, is bad news for him – especially on the brink of a Likud vote on the advancing of the Likud primary to November. Such an advance would favor Sharon’s scowling nemesis, Bibi Netanyahu, who posits a direct linkage between the Qassams that rained down on Sderot this weekend and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in response to Netanyahu’s explicit linkage of the two, appeared to confirm my interpretation of Sharon’s motivation in pulling the settlers out:

…Olmert said “there is one good thing about this withdrawal – the fact that 10,000 fewer people are exposed to this terror within the Gaza Strip and there are no longer 20,000 troops who have to guard them.”

The more chaos reigns in Gaza – particularly chaos that affects nearby Israeli population centers – the rosier Netanyahu’s prospects become (a sobering thought, when we recall his last rather ignominious tenure as prime minister after Rabin’s assassination). But let’s not count his chickens quite yet. The vote to advance the primary will be among Likud members, a small minority of actual Likud voters, and they do not include too many resounding supporters of Bibi. Still, the situation is delicate. The question now is whether Sharon will feel it necessary to do something really dramatic (read: really violent) to ensure Likud confidence in his determination to fight Palestinian terror. Hamas is well aware of Sharon’s position, and may well attempt to call his bluff with a serious escalation. If he elects not to rise to the bait, Hamas may ultimately be able to add regime change in Israel to their list of dubious accomplishments.

Not long ago, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice remarked that the withdrawal from Gaza must be only the beginning of Israel’s concessions to the Palestinians. Though the remark was couched in padding of praise for Israel, it raised some eyebrows, echoing as it did the language of Israel’s enemies even as settlers were struggling to disinter their loved ones from the cemetery at Neve Dekalim. The gracelessness of Rice’s timing, as much as the implicit warning in the message, caused alarm among those who fear that the Gaza withdrawal will be used as a precedent to cudgel Israel into far more dangerous concessions.

To these people I say: tirag’u, chevre. Take it easy. There are plenty of things to worry about at the moment – the inauspicious beginning of Palestinian sovereignty in Gaza does not augur well, to be sure – but Condi’s comment isn’t one of them. It’s worth examining, though, to give a glimpse into the method behind the current American relationship with Israel and the Palestinians.

There are two possible explanations for the remark. Either the Secretary was simply off message, or Bush and Rice are playing good cop/bad cop with Israel. If the first is the case, several subordinate questions arise. Was the remark deliberate? If so (and Rice strikes me as far too controlled to allow such a significant slip), should we infer a potentially hazardous split between Secretary of State and Commander in Chief? Was she, in other words, expressing the real attitude of the Department of State, putting Bush in a position roughly analogous to that of Truman before him with regard to Israel?

The widely popular perception of the American president as a bumbler with a bulldozer – a man too dim to formulate coherent arguments to support his positions, but who will cheerfully flatten anyone in his path who disagrees with his addled hunches – encourages one to see Rice’s remark as a fleeting revelation of the true face of a State Department hamstrung by the president’s delusional foreign policy. One might even speculate that Rice’s curiously automaton-like delivery bespeaks her reluctance to associate her own personality with the messages she is assigned to convey.

But the premise is wrong. Bush is many things, but a dolt is not one of them. (To the Tooting Station has an entertaining piece this week on the popular assumption of American presidential stupidity, by the way.) I believe Bush knows precisely what he is doing with regard to Israel, and Rice is with him up to the hilt. There is American strategy at work in the Gaza withdrawal as much as Israeli, obviously, and her comment reflects that strategy.

Condi’s words immediately put me in mind of James Baker III, Secretary of State under George Bush the Elder. (It was Baker who body-checked Shamir and the Palestinians into their historic photo-op in Madrid in 1991, setting in motion the eventual formal resuscitation of the PLO.) Baker’s tenure as advocate for Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement was notable for a curious feature: as far as he was concerned, we could all go to hell. There were many other factors at work, of course, but Baker’s scarcely-concealed contempt for both the Israelis and the Palestinians (particularly the Israelis) had its own motivating effect: neither party wanted to be responsible for their desertion by the Americans. His style contained not even a hint of the discomfiting whiff of supplication that would later characterize the efforts of Warren Christopher, Bill Clinton’s frequent-flying man on the job. Condi Rice’s words struck me as a more decorous version of the Baker approach: to remind the parties — in this case, Israel — that American patience is finite.

This position reassures the wider audience that the US is a broker for more than one side, and the granting of such reassurance is all to the good. The Americans are fully aware that words spoken to Israelis are destined for broader consumption, and it is in all our interests that they retain their credibility as mediators while we stumble toward some version of coexistence.

So I wouldn’t let Condi’s tactlessness worry you. As far as Israel is concerned, the good cop is still the guy in the Oval Office.

Fasten your seat belts, people. The Sharon we remember is getting down to business.

This past Wednesday, as the Gaza withdrawal was drawing to a close, the IDF entered the Tulkarem refugee camp with the intention of arresting Adel Al-Gawi, an Islamic Jihad senior member who had been involved in the planning of two suicide bombings that killed ten Israeli civilians this year in Tel Aviv and Netanya. In the process, Al-Gawi and four other Palestinians who opened fire on the Israeli soldiers were killed. None of the soldiers was injured.

I expect this event, which has prompted a froth of Palestinian finger-pointing, satisfied columnist Charles Krauthammer, who is convinced that Palestinian terrorism will continue apace after the withdrawal. He has even come up with a practical suggestion for how to deal with Gaza-based missiles landing in Sderot. For every missile launched from Gaza into Israel proper, he writes, Israel should launch five back. With this policy in force, a Gazan mulling over the launch of a Qassam or two in our direction will have to calculate the cost of a dependably disproportional response.

A proposal like this is certainly tempting. It has an obvious emotional appeal, for one thing: if the Palestinians’ national aspirations are really so narrow that all they want is to become a terrorist thugocracy, then, one might argue, they deserve whatever retaliation Israel chooses to unleash.

There are difficulties, however. There’s a moral question involved. A counterstrike into Gaza is not analogous to an IDF raid into a terrorist hideout. It will not be possible to avoid civilian casualties, in part because Gaza is very small, and in part because the terrorist minority will place its own human and materiel targets among the civilian population. (The old PLO tactic of placing weapons caches under kindergartens and similar soft shields goes back decades and will certainly be seen again.) Then there is the related problem of the instant erosion of favorable world opinion, which is more inclined than usual to try to see things from an Israeli perspective now that Sharon has pulled the settlers out of Gaza.

As the Tulkarem raid (along with swift recent moves intended to ensure the contiguity of Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem) suggests, Sharon is less concerned with world opinion than he is with American opinion, and that is still very much in his favor (notwithstanding Condi Rice’s recent grumblings about the insufficiency of the Gaza withdrawal). I doubt he would take issue with Krauthammer in principle, but in practice, I think he would consider a five-missile counterstrike very small potatoes.

I would argue that to Sharon (and to quite a few of the rest of us), the narrative has been irretrievably conceded to the Palestinians, at least in the short- to medium-term. In Sharon’s view (so it appears to me), job one is not to reassure the world of Israel’s good faith but to ensure that in the wake of a concession that increases Israel’s vulnerability, the facts on the ground are as much in Israel’s favor as possible.

Look, therefore, for a low tolerance for Gazan terrorism, as well as a pattern of more and more swift, bold, Sharonesque moves to solidify Israeli control over the future border. The unilateral precedent Sharon set with the Gaza withdrawal will be echoed again and again in moves intended to lock in a preferred border in advance of future negotiations. That’s a pattern I believe will accelerate as we approach a likely early election in November.