Outrageous Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict -Part 3 of a Series

by Gary Berg-Cross

Having outrageously dispatched 2 global problems in prior posts on Climate Change and the Wealth Gap, we can try some simpler regional problem like Israel-Palestine (I-P).  Well to be fair as a child there were 3 intractable disputes: South Africa, Ireland-Northern Ireland and Israel-Palestine. With difficult 2 of these have been handled and the tougher nut is left.

 You might say that the Irish issue goes back pretty far and has called for outrageous, but modest proposals for solution. In 1729 Jonathan Swift  anonymously & satirically published “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.  It took a while to settle that one, and the I-P conflict goes back to an even earlier invasion.  

Even Jon Stewart can’t solve this one, although he has some modest proposals, like fewer weapons sent to the area. Seems like an important ingredient but this has already gotten him criticized so we have to step delicately here too and note that the problem is dynamic and when something is tried such as things that worked in either South Africa (boycotts) or George Mitchell diplomacy (Ireland) there is blockage even if some negotiations start. Unfortunately I-P negotiations aren’t between the likes of MLK and Gandhi.  It’s more like warlords. As with the wealth gap there are asymmetries to the situation. One side has the power and uses disproportional responses. So the other side uses unconventional means.  Both seem to be criminal in their own way.

In I-P the key folks know how to bollix things up.  There is, for example, Israel's sequence of reasons offered for attacking Gaza – see  video report. So maybe sidelining them is a solution ingredient.

The usual approach of first diagnosing the problem of being responsible, as well as fact based and settling into hard negotiations over a long time. But you know understand the situation hasn’t been fruitful. The problem is as emotional as they come. Revenge seems an important ingredient.

At first blush, since the problem of land control disputes and conquest goes back thousands of years (per the previous upsetting animation on the history of conflict in this land) we might try some older techniques.  I was thinking of the old royal hostage exchange. 

“In medieval Europe hostages were given, not taken. They were a means of guarantee used to secure transactions ranging from treaties to wartime commitments to financial transactions. In principle, the force of the guarantee lay in the threat to the life of the hostage if the agreement were broken but, while violation of agreements was common, execution of hostages was a rarity. Medieval hostages are thus best understood not as simple pledges, but as a political institution characteristic of the medieval millennium, embedded in its changing historical contexts.” From Hostages in the Middle Ages  Adam J. Kosto

The idea is that each side offer some of its elite children, who would grow up in the others land and help preserve the peace. We’d have to put Jewish children near the Gaza border, for example, so that their presence would stop the type of bombing and destruction we saw as IDF troops move in.  Palestine would be raised in Israeli cities and towns and…

you know this isn't going to work.  

There is not much risk to their being killed by small rockets or suicide bombs.  The previously mentioned asymmetry of the situation doesn't make this outrageous approach feasible.

Back to the sketchy pad. 

So again we need something simple and bottom line. Something like getting a bunch of the war crime responsible parties before the International Criminal Court ICC.  Human Rights Watch for example is for this. This would give some space for moderates.

What to do next as past crimes are being prosecuted and each side has

some revenge going? Well the US has leverage with both sides.  The Palestinians need us to negotiate as the indispensable country. Israel needs our vote at the UN and we provide $3 billion or so a year in support. Sure this is hard to use as leverage because in the US American Israel Public Affairs Committee takes Pols out who disagree with the conservative Israeli government policies.  So if a Pol argues, as some have, that you only get progress when Israel is pressed, you find yourself running against a well-funded opponent.

How to get around that blockage?  There is the simple idea again of using a moral argument.  We’d have to reinforce it maybe with ur secular religion (see part 2 of outrageous solutions). It should help promote the idea around the world, and recall we already talked about UN and ICC backing. With this in place we argue that it’s just seems fair that from now on with the ICC going parties responsible for any new damage should pay for them.  I mean financially sort of like implied by the “your break it, you bought it idea.”  It’s bottom line stuff that everyone can understand. Jewish author and scholar Norman Finkelstein, touched on this briefly in an interview.

“It’s really a kind of weird conflict. I mean, there are so many weirdnesses about

this conflict. Israel blows everything up. Nobody even talks about Israel paying reparations. It’s just taken as a matter of fact that the international community rebuilds after Israel destroys. … We destroy, they pay. Nobody even discusses the possibility maybe Israel should pay reparations for its death and destruction in Gaza.”

Ok, so we have some American Jews buying in. But Palestinians have to pay for the damage they cause too, just as the relevant people have to go to the ICC for war crimes. Let’s say that we could agree on making the groups doing the damage responsible for them.

Now asymmetry works to dampen the damage.  And throw in the idea that the US will allocate $$ from the 3 billion a year it ships over.  So if we have a $5 billion or so conflict in Gaza with Israeli weapons that’s almost 2 years of the money Israel normally receives. 

This is getting a bit complicated, but we need one more outrageous idea to make this work.  

There will be lots of legal wrangling over this. Like Oslo this process would be gamed.  So we need a good legal team with the right experience to manage this.  It has to be better than what was done in Oslo.  I think that we need a team of  LA divorce lawyers to handle the negotiations.  It’s probably the only group that has the experience and tenacity to handle the egos involved.  Too bad that Donald Sterling won't be available. 

One thing though.  Can we afford these lawyers with just 3 billion or so to work with after damages?

Scarred Anniversaries and Article 9

by Gary Berg-Cross

Hard on the heels of the 100^th anniversary of the start of WWI Japan marked the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima this week. Quite an August for conflict in memory and in the flesh of 2014. This doesn't even include the anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin, giving President Johnson war powersto use  against the North Vietnamese or Nixon's resignation which followed a decade later in 1974.

 In Hiroshima it is quite a big deal. People don’t want to forget.  They want to move on and solve the problem of nukes. You can proably throw in other means of mass killing such as we have going in a few spots around the world. Joan Rivers made an uncomfortable comparison to the deaths of innocents in Hiroshima and Gaza.

But in Hiroshima’s peace park doves fly in the rain as you can still see some atomic bomb-scars of  building shell mixed with pleas for rational solutions to conflict.  The historical reflection by Noam Chomsky on Hiroshima Day 2014 and things like the US 1960 strategic plan for the use of nukes , for example, are sobering.

Caroline Kennedy, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, was on hand to hear entries to disarm.  It must have seemed a bit strange with prominent conflicts going on and prime minister Abe seeking to make Japan a more “normal country.”  How?  By allowing it to “defend foreign countries and play greater roles overseas.”   Seems like a slippery slope to war launched off of that slogan – a country has a right to defend itself.  Well actually, yes, but as people like Chomsky note, maybe not by violence and war and masses of civilian death.  

Abe is a moving away of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution which outlaws war as a means to settle international disputes involving the Japanese state. It is worth considering the power of Article 9's 73 words tempered after the Hiroshima bomb to secure a lasting peace.

“Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

One wishes these were written into more, not fewer, constitutions.

“You must not hate those who do wrong or harmful things; but with compassion, you must do what you can to stop them — for they are harming themselves, as well as those who suffer from their actions.”

– Dalai Lama XIV

Getting Sound Advice from MLK

By Gary Berg-Cross

Agonizing over the various conflicts around the globe I wondered what Martin Luther King might have said.  At the time he spoke up about the Vietnam war the main street press largely criticized him:

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position

of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.

This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind," and the best way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam.

Well we are long past Vietnam but justice and judgment are still issues. 

Pushed by Neocons and ill served by career politicians lobbyists and a careerist, collaborative press we stumbled into Iraq.  We still brandish weapons at Iran, support authoritarian regimes, military-security states, occupations and drone populations into enemies at will.  We are grid locked and unable to stop the various wars that threaten.

The neocon voices are heard loudly in the land so perhaps a quick visit to the MLK memorial and some quotes brought up to date from him can put us in a better peace perspective.  What would MLK say?  And what goes through people's mind as they face the challenge of a moral life?

"I oppose the war in Vietnam (add your favorite here – Gaza, Ukraine, Iran etc.) because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world."
Anti-War Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 26, 1967.

"Injustice anywhere (again add your favorite here – Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Lybia, Syria etc.) is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
Letter from Birmingham, Alabama jail, April 16, 1963.

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits." (Only we aren't going to pay for any of it.)
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 1964

"It is not enough to say 'We must not wage war.' It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but the positive affirmation of peace." (I hear in Congress that we must restore full funding to DoD.)
Anti-War Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 25, 1967.

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience and comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." (OK, I think we have the challenge and controversy, who’s standing where?)
Strength to Love, 1963.

"Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies."
New York City, April 4, 1967. (Oh that UN thing again.  What about American/Israeli/Russian etc. exceptionalism?)

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective."
Christmas sermon, Atlanta, Georgia, 1967. (See above….our loyalties are too important to give to the world for free it seems.)

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."
Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, 1964. (OK, this temporary has gone on long enough.)

"Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a better person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in."
March for Integrated Schools, April 18, 1959. (I might make this a career, after all jobs are hard to come by  What does it pay?)

Contemplate these and see where you stand on events. Comments appreciated. 

Literal and Propagandistic Views of Terrorism

I see that terrorism and anti-terrorism is in the news again. A Nashville paper reported a protest of > 200 Tennessee Muslims who turned out at the Legislative Plaza to oppose an anti-terrorism bill which they argue grew out of a direct assault against Islam. As first drafted, the so called anti-terrorism bill made it a felony to follow Shariah law. Eventually the references to the Muslin religion were excised but perhaps the spirit driving it is there.

The religious and sometime nationality profiling of terrorism and terrorist got me thinking on how we got to position so irrational that we see a boogie man of Shariah law taking over when other religions seem more front and center in the influence game in this country. This is only a small part of what is probably shaping up to be a loud, finger-pointing debate in the 2012 political season. There are broad issue like terror in Libya and definitions of terrorist acts and groups. For example, is Pakistan supporting Taliban terrorists? Or is this US 'negative propaganda' -http://bit.ly/hXson0? Is the use and the threat of the use of force, that some described as coercive diplomacy, a form of terrorism? In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man John Perkins describes it that way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man). So I went back to some earlier Progressive writing on the history and of some of the thinking that goes into the terrorist idea.

I didn't need to go very find when I retrieved from my "files" a Noam Chomsky article called International Terrorism: Image and Reality from 1991 which at 10 years before 9/11 seemed a reasonable distance. But as Chomsky notes terrorism became a major public issue back in the 1980s of the Reagan administration. He took office announcing its dedication to stamping out what the was called:

"the evil scourge of terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age" (Secretary of State George Shultz).

The way Chomsky likes to frame this type of terrorism discussion is as a propagandistic approach. The propagandistic exposition of terrorism and terrorist acts is the one that is prevalent in corporate media. Chomsky argues that this is a particular, manufactured construct of the concept of terrorism which can be used, "as a weapon to be exploited in the service of some system of power." We claim some group is terrorist and thus we may do violent things against them to protect ourselves and our values. In Reagan's reign we had a US proxy war against Nicaragua which killed many. Was this support of terrorism? Chomsky's history on this is:

"The State Department specifically authorized attacks on agricultural cooperatives -- exactly what we denounce with horror when the agent is Abu Nidal. Media doves expressed thoughtful approval of this stand. New Republic editor Michael Kinsley, at the liberal extreme of mainstream commentary, argued that we should not be too quick to dismiss State Department justifications for terrorist attacks on farming cooperatives: a "sensible policy" must "meet the test of cost-benefit analysis," an analysis of "the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end." It is understood that US elites have the right to conduct the analysis and pursue the project if it passes their tests."

When civilians are killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Gaza these are judged as not terrorist acts in the light of there being protective acts against groups labeled terrorist.

There is another way to study & understand terrorism - a literal approach. As you might expect Chomksy prefers a literal approach which takes the topic seriously and uses an historical-fact-rational perspective to understand it. Some of the history of the development of the concepts of terrorism is above. You don't have to be a linguist to appreciate Chomsky's rational- literal approach that Socratically asks what constitutes terrorism and then explored instances of the phenomenon teasing out causal relations. Although he has issues with it Chomsky gets great mileage out of using official United States Code definition of "act of terrorism" to mean an activity that --

(A) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life that is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any State, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or of any State; and
(B) appears to be intended
(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.

Chomsky sees much of this intimidation of civilian populations in our support of the Contras in Nicaragua. His other example of terrorism during pre-Reagan period is Israel's involvements in southern Lebanon going back to the 1970s when the civilian population was first held hostage with the idea that pressuring these populations would force agreement on Israeli arrangements for the region. He cites Abba Eban, commenting on Prime Minister Menachem Begin's account of atrocities in Lebanon committed under the Labor government, in the style "of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name,"

Eban normally portrayed as a Labor dove describes Israel policy in terms that would fit US and international concept of terrorism (if not aggression). Indeed as Chomsky notes thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands driven from their homes in these attacks as a modern form of terrorism came to the Middle East. Israel's invasion left some 18,000 killed to achieve political ends, as discussed in Israel. We see the consequences of it as terrorism but may not label the sources of it in a literal way. As Chomksy reports:

"ABC correspondent Charles Glass, then a journalist in Lebanon, found "little American editorial interest in the conditions of the south Lebanese. The Israeli raids and shelling of their villages, their gradual exodus from south Lebanon to the growing slums on the outskirts of Beirut were nothing compared to the lurid tales of the 'terrorists' who threatened Israel, hijacked aeroplanes and seized embassies." The reaction was much the same, he continues, when Israeli death squads were operating in southern Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion. One could read about them in the London Times, but US editors were not interested. Had the media reported the operations of "these death squads of plainclothes Shin Beth [secret police] men who assassinated suspects in the villages and camps of south Lebanon," "stirring up the Shiite Muslim population and helping to make the Marine presence untenable," there might have been some appreciation of the plight of the US Marines deployed in Lebanon. They seemed to have no idea of why they were there apart from "the black enlisted men: almost all of them said, though sadly never on camera, that they had been sent to protect the rich against the poor." "

For more on the introduction of terrorism to the Middle East see Chomsky's "Who are the Global Terrorists?" http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200205--02.htm which describes the 1985 Israeli attack on Tunis and the CIA and Saudi car-bombing in Beirut to get a Shi'ite leader accused of complicity in terrorism which didn't kill him but killed 80 people and wounded 256. The Similar violence was noted in Peres's 1996 invasion and who can forget the use of cluster bombs as Obama took office. These relied on US military and diplomatic support. Accordingly, Chomksy notes "they too do not enter the annals of international terrorism."

In light of our more recent "interventions" in the Middle East (how many civilians died in our Iraq War?) it is useful to remember this history and how things were portrayed. We (and our friends) have a history of organizing proxy army to subdue some recalcitrant population. We see this as a legitimate option but it fits the concept of of a terrorism. In Reagan's day Jeane Kirkpatrick argued that "forceful intervention in the affairs of another nation" is neither "impractical" nor "immoral". As Chomsky noted, this doesn't make it legal. It may make it a hot topic for the coming campaign season in late 2011.