David Trinh

The average Israeli apparently has no idea that Israel’s illegal settlements precipitate Palestinian outrage:

For most Israelis, the occupied territories are located somewhere beyond the world’s edge. After the Second Intifada began in 2000, the army banned Israelis from visiting Area A — the parts of the West Bank under full Palestinian control — for their own safety. Except for settlers, Israeli civilians are unlikely to visit the other areas. They don’t see how the suburban houses of the settlements have spread on the hills, how illegal outposts have sprung up between the established settlements, how the 200-foot-wide security barrier meandering through the countryside further hems in Palestinians. (The settlers look at this every day, but in their own way they are blind to it.)

I’ve heard statements along this line before and I never cease to be astonished by the apparent ambivalence of the Israeli electorate towards the settlements.  I mean, the American electorate is chronically uninformed, but I would still wager that if the United States began annexing swathes of Mexico (and the Mexicans responded  with an armed insurgency!) most American voters would take notice and demand some shift in policy.  What gives Israel?

Can’t say I entirely agree with this assessment of the GOP field of gubernatorial candidates:

State Rep. Emmer and former State Auditor Anderson are both well-known enough to garner significant support, but both are targeting the same intraparty demographics. If at any point one of these two candidates pulls away and unites the 37-39% who are supporting one of them, that could be a pretty effective counterweight to Seifert’s superior name recognition. (Bold mine-DT)

It’s always been my understanding that Pat Anderson is mostly trying to tap into the Paulite/libertarian segment of the GOP base, while Tom Emmer is more of a mainstream Republican aiming for the type of Republicans likely to vote for frontrunner Marty Seifert.  If this is true, which I’m reasonably confident it is, neither Anderson nor Emmer has access to a universe of voters that could coalesce into some sort of grand anti-Seifert coalition.

What I expect will happen over the next few months is that Emmer will struggle to peel voters away from the Seifert column and Anderson will try to cobble together enough Ron Paul supporters to overwhelm party regulars at poorly attended precinct caucuses.  Personally, I’m not putting much stock in either strategy panning out.

On Tuesday, Aluf Benn, the editor of Haaretz, published a bizarre editorial in the New York Times in which he chastised Obama for failing to “speak directly to Israelis.”  Benn further argued that it is this failure by Obama to open up a dialogue with Israel that has let Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu enjoy “a virtual domestic consensus over [Netanyahu’s] rejection of the settlement freeze.”  The implicit case Benn makes is that Obama could turn Israelis against Netanyahu, and thus sway popular Israeli opinion on the settlements, if only he would bother talking to Israel.

Color me confused.  Hasn’t Obama already had a series of high-profile White House meetings with Netanyahu?  And the President sure hasn’t invited the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to share a beer at the White House.  Also, I seem to remember President Bush being fairly popular in Israel throughout his presidency which is funny because Bush never visited Israeli to “speak directly to Israelis” until January of 2008.

Benn makes a cute argument but I have a hard time taking it seriously.  I mean, I suppose it’s possible that Israelis feel so slighted by Obama that they’re embracing Netanyahu’s draconian settlement policies to spite him.  Or because of a power vacuum.  Or something.  However, I think it’s far more likely that Israelis dislike Obama because they disagree his policies.  And you know what?  This is fine!  Israelis are perfectly within their rights as a free people to disagree with Obama about the merits of their illegal settlements.   Let’s not pretend though that Obama could smooth over this situation simply by sitting down to coffee with the people of Israel writ large for a nice candid conversation.

Benn makes a few other strange arguments in his piece, one of which I’ll excerpt here:

Fourth, as far as most Israelis are concerned, Mr. Obama has made a mistake in focusing on a settlement freeze. For starters, mainstream Israelis rarely have anything to do with the settlements; many have no idea where they are, even when they’re a half-hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.

More important: in the past decade, repeated peace negotiations and diplomatic statements have indicated that larger, closer-to-home settlements (the “settlement blocs”) will remain in Israeli hands under any two-state solution. Why, then, insist on a total freeze everywhere? And why deny with such force — as the administration did — the existence of previous understandings between the United States and Israel over limited settlement construction? There is simply too much evidence proving that such an understanding existed. To Israelis, the claim undermined Mr. Obama’s credibility — and strengthened Mr. Netanyahu’s position. (Bold mine- DT)

Is it really true that Israelis have next to no knowledge about the settlements?  The same settlements that are a PR nightmare for Israel and perhaps the biggest reason why Israel is losing popular support in the West?  Even Americans eventually figured out that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay weren’t too popular with friends of the United States.  Is the Israeli street really so insulated from the pulse of world opinion that it doesn’t realize these settlements have become a big deal?    Honestly, if ‘mainstream Israelis’ know so little about these land grabs that they “have no idea where they are,” Obama is doing Israel a huge favor by warning the country that continued settlement expansion is akin to political suicide.

Finally, Benn’s contention that the United States should continue to allow settlement expansion because it may have previously had a clandestine agreement over illegally expanding settlements is crazy.  The settlements are illegal!  While we may have indulged in a supporting a dangerous policy in the past, that’s no reason why we should continue to embrace it today.  I almost understand Benn’s argument that the United States should fess up to any secret agreement it may have previously abided by, but, at least from a pragmatic standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to admit this at the risk of incurring the ire of the Arab street.  It’s also totally possible that Netanyahu is making this entire secret agreement up!  I certainly haven’t seen the mountain of evidence Benn claims proves such an understanding once existed.

All in all, this is a pretty concerning article.  Haaretz is widely described as a left of center publication that, at least according to Jonah Goldberg is “Israel’s most vehemently anti-settlement daily paper.”  The fact that a senior editor from Haaretz would hold opinions this out-of-sync with, errr, reality does not bode well for the peace process.

Sometimes this isn’t easy, but it always needs to be done:

A top conservative German politician is making headlines on Tuesday for his unusually sharp stance against Israel’s settlement-building policies. Ruprecht Polenz, who is chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign policy committee and a member of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party, has warned Israel that it will be committing “political suicide” if it doesn’t cease construction of settlements in the Palestinian territories.

If the government in Jerusalem continues with construction, Polenz told the Düsseldorf daily Rheinische Post, it would run the danger “of gradually committing suicide as a democratic state.”

I took a little heat in the comments yesterday for suggesting that Israel was staging a land grab through its aggressive use of settlements in East Jerusalem.  The debate over the legitimacy of Israel’s actions aside, I hope we can all agree (although I suspect we won’t) that these settlements are a really bad idea from the Israeli perspective.  Polenz advice to Israel is dead on: if Israel is serious about peace and a two-state solution, it has to allow the Palestinian state to use East Jerusalem as its capital.   Absent some Palestinian control over Islam’s third most holy city, peace would be unattainable and Israel would be dooming itself to a less than optimal status quo of rocket attacks, suicide bombers and rule over a de facto apartheid state.

Ugh:

Israel on Sunday rejected a U.S. demand to suspend a planned housing project in east Jerusalem, threatening to further complicate an unusually tense standoff with its strongest ally over settlement construction.

On Sunday, Netanyahu told his Cabinet there would be no limits on Jewish construction anywhere in ”unified Jerusalem.”

”We cannot accept the fact that Jews wouldn’t be entitled to live and buy anywhere in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu declared, calling Israeli sovereignty over the entire city ”indisputable.”

”I can only imagine what would happen if someone suggested Jews could not live in certain neighborhoods in New York, London, Paris or Rome. There would certainly be a major international outcry,” Netanyahu said.

Good lord.  You don’t need to be a Middle East scholar to take issue with this particular charge.  Israel has no legitimate claim to East Jerusalem.  The only reason that this contentious settlement is being constructed is because Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and has since decided to seed the area with settlements in an effort to secure an illegal land grab.  None of this has to do with anti-Semitism!

No one is saying that Jews shouldn’t be allowed to live in East Jerusalem by virtue of being Jewish.  These settlements have drawn an international outcry because they’re being built on stolen land in violation of international law.  Netanyahu’s willingness to toss around hyperbolic statements about anti-Semitism like this is shocking and belies his failure to take the peace process seriously.

Last week I mentioned an Amnesty International Report which detailed human rights abuses by the IDF during their excursion into Gaza last fall.  Now, Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights organization, has released some even more damning interviews of veterans of the conflict—all of which show a stunning disregard for civilian casualties and, in some cases even, a brutal effort to run up the body count.  The Der Spiegel writes:

Israel has claimed that everything was done to protect innocent lives during its recent military operation in the Gaza Strip. But according to statements from Israeli soldiers there were malicious acts of destruction, white phosphorus was used and civilians were deliberately targeted….According to the report by Breaking the Silence, Hamas’s cynical conduct of war can no longer be solely blamed for the large number of civilian casualties. (Bold mine- DT)

From what I can tell, there were only isolated instances where Israeli battalion commanders actually officially encouraged civilian casualties, but at least according to this report, there were far too many subtle insinuations on the part of Israeli military commanders that minimizing civilian casualties was not a top priority.  For instance, the report says that “standard procedure was to fire shots when they [the IDF] entered residential buildings” and according to other testimony “fundamental rules designed to protect civilians were even deliberately ignored at times.”  This kind of behavior is not the mark of the ‘most humane army in the world’

This really made me cringe:

Some veterans also confirm that the army sent local residents into houses where Hamas fighters were holed up, as a kind of vanguard. This method, known as the “neighbor procedure,” is expressly banned in Israel. According to one soldier, his unit placed a gun barrel on the shoulder of a Palestinian and forced him to walk ahead of them into a suspicious building. If this is true, Hamas fighters were not the only ones who misused civilians as human shields.

Look, I have to give Israel credit for officially banning the practice of using human shields (I’m sure Hamas has never issued an injunction against this practice), but honestly, crossing out those sorts of tactics from your military playbook is really a pretty low bar to cross.  Who could possibly argue that deliberating placing civilians in harms way is acceptable?  However, while the IDF is content to officially ban the practice they seem to have no qualms about using this horrendous tactic when they think that no one is looking.  Sure, Hamas and Hezbollah’s outright defiance of human rights norms is awful, but, at least on this matter, is the IDF’s clandestine behavior any better?

Maybe this report is inaccurate.  It could very well be that the IDF is simply getting smeared by human rights activist who disagree with some of the IDF’s harder-edged but not actually illegal military tactics.  It’s worth noting though, that recently these charges against the IDF have been crescendoing to a roar.  If these allegations are true, can Israel continue to insist it deserves a special relationship with America?

Last year I was told dozens and dozens of times by Israel hawks that the civilian casualties which Israel was causing in Gaza were actually Hamas’ fault because Hamas had the temerity to use civilians as ‘human shields.’  Turns out that claim wasn’t entirely true:

Amnesty International on Thursday accused both Israel and Hamas, the militant movement that controls Gaza, of committing war crimes during the three weeks of fighting there early this year…

Amnesty International, which is based in London, released its 117-page report on Thursday. It explicitly rejected Israeli claims that Hamas used civilians as human shields but said that in several cases, Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians, including children, as “human shields, endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions.”

“The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented,” the report said, citing the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including many children. (DT- bold mine)

We all know that Hamas employs some less than savory tactics, but I think, more often than not, we forget that the IDF also uses some pretty reprehensible tactics.  And, while there’s obviously no objective yardstick we can use to measure which side is more in the moral wrong, I think it’s safe to say that using civilians as human shields usually qualifies as some sort of moral evil.  If Israel’s most militant supporters want to strengthen their justification of Israel’s use of force, it really would help if the Israeli military refrained from using tactics typically associated with terrorist organizations.

Last week French President Sarkozy urged Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to wise up and dump his extremist foreign minister, a bold statement, albeit one made behind closed doors, which earned Sarkozy a stern earful from the Israeli right:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel defended his ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on Tuesday after reports emerged that President Nicolas Sarkozy of France had urged that he be replaced with the leader of the centrist opposition, Tzipi Livni.

Mr. Sarkozy made the statement in a private meeting last week at the Élysée Palace attended by Mr. Netanyahu and a number of aides to both men, comparing Mr. Lieberman to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right anti-immigrant French politician. Several participants at the meeting confirmed the reported statements.

Mr. Lieberman’s spokesman said that Mr. Sarkozy’s comment amounted to grave and insufferable meddling in the affairs of another democracy. Israeli radio broadcasts were filled with discussion of the episode, with right-wing members of Parliament assailing France and expressing indignation, while some on the left said that Mr. Sarkozy was correct.

Sure.  Setting aside the fact that, you know, Sarkozy is right, let’s take up the policy of ‘meddling in the affairs of another democracy.’  After all, such interference does sound awfully nasty.  How can we possibly allow Sarkozy to get away with offering such arrogant advice?   The horror!  Oh… wait:

In a sign of growing concern in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government over US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policies, Minister-without-Portfolio Yossi Peled proposed Israeli sanctions on the US in a letter to cabinet ministers on Sunday.

In what may be his most controversial suggestion, Peled recommends intervening in American congressional races to weaken Obama and asking American Jewish donors not to contribute to Democratic congressional candidates. He predicted that this would result in Democratic candidates pressuring Obama to become more pro-Israel.

Peled called for the formation of a new body intended to influence American public opinion. The groups he suggests courting include Hispanic Americans and Labor unions in industries that benefit from Israeli military acquisitions.

Here we have a high-ranking official who isn’t just simply urging a foreign leader to dump an underling in private; no, instead we have a senior minister recommending that his nation directly intervene in the elections of a foreign power.  I have to say, I admire their chutzpah.

[Not really sure why Peled wants to form ‘a new body intended to influence American public opinion,’ after all, AIPAC seems to get the job done pretty well as it is.]

This Monday, Prime Minister Netanyahu sat down with CBS news to discuss his most recent speech, an address in which he finally agreed to a two-state solution but simultaneously imposed a few punitive conditions that will likely serve to scuttle any peace plan before it gets off the ground.  One of these conditions was Netanyahu’s insistence that the new Palestinian state be ‘demilitarized,’ an incredible demand that led the interviewer to ask if Netanyahu really believed a regulated Palestinian military would resemble “terrorists lobbing rockets at random opportunities from Gaza.”   Netanyahu’s answer, unsurprisingly, was less than satisfactory:

There– there are two questions about this. One is– what is the military force that we face? And obviously we don’t wanna see a– an army with rockets– tanks, mortars, artillery– because the Palestinians don’t really need that to govern themselves. To govern themselves or even to– deal with terrorists internally you don’t real [sic] anything– need anything beyond– small arms and– rel– relatively– simple– security measures.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Well, yes.  One can very well argue that Palestinians “don’t really need [a military] to govern themselves,” but it’s also true then that no nation really needs a military to govern itself.  Indeed, there are a few nations in the world that really do go without standing armies such as Nauru and Iceland; however, it’s also important to remember that this is because these nations have their security guaranteed by other nations or bodies (Australia and NATO defend Nauru and Iceland respectively).  If Israel really insists on living next to a demilitarized Palestine, what country will guarantee Palestinian security?  The United States, Israel, the Arab League, the Vatican?

Short of a Tom Clancy novel springing to life, all of these options are extremely problematic.  The United States can’t defend Palestine because there’s a good chance that this would lead to some sort of awkward and armed confrontation with our ally Israel.  Likewise, putting Palestine under the wing of the Arab League is a terrible idea, because really, does anyone want to make this new state a protectorate of Israel’s historic enemies?  And, for reasons that should be obvious to all, the Palestinians will not be totally cool with being protected by a state which has violated their borders and killed their citizens scores of times.

Netanyahu’s demand for a demilitarized Palestinian state is unreasonable.  Even without delving into the emotionally charged issues such as respect, legitimacy and humiliation which go along with depriving a people of their means of self-defense, Netanyahu’s plan fails because it lacks a mechanism to guarantee Palestinian security.  Even if Netanyahu could convince the Palestinians to sign a treaty stripping them of their ability to defend themselves (as far as I know, no people have ever agreed to such terms), he would in all likelihood, be unable to find a nation to safeguard the new state.   In the end, Netanyahu’s ‘equitable formula for peace’ seems to come with a crippling poison pill.

Andrew Sullivan has been doing great work this week at the Atlantic blogging about the elections in Iran and their ensuing aftermath.  Part of this coverage consists of Youtube videos, which Sullivan entitles “This Is What Fascism Looks Like, Ctd,” that show government operative doing horribly things to protestors and unarmed civilians.  These clips are all appalling and I’m glad Sullivan is posting them so the public knows what atrocities the Iranian regime is committing against its own people.

Unfortunately, yesterday following a video in which a group of police appear to break into a yard and beat a person unconscious, Sullivan added a note which said, “[y]ou begin to understand the Second Amendment a little better seeing this.”  This may be beside the point, certainly the actions of the Iranian regime are brutal, but I’m hardly convinced that this clip offers evidence that widespread gun ownership in the United States should be a constitutionally protected right.

Most obviously, Iran and the United States are different countries with radically different forms of government.  For instance, the United States has a long history of respecting the democratic process and the rule of law-Iran’s track record is shakier.  While these two forces haven’t always played out smoothly in America, there have been few times in American history when the government has turned deadly force on its own people.  The Battle of Blair Mountain and the shootings at Kent State make up the handful of occasions when I think deadly force has been unjustly used by United States against its citizens.  On the other hand, in a nation like Iran, which actually has something approaching a tyranny, there might be good reasons to worry about government power run amok.

More generally, I am extremely uncomfortable with grounding a defense of the 2^nd Amendment in a fear that the government will need to be resisted or overthrown through the use of deadly force.  While rhetoric is routinely tossed around by right-wing extremists (the sort who assassinate doctors and attack Holocaust museums), I think more level headed thinkers should careful not to suggest that violence should be used to resolve political disputes or even resist what one might deem to be abusive government action.  We’re fortunate that we have institutions in our country that allow us to mediate our political differences peacefully.  Pointing at Iran and saying, ‘it happened there, it could happen here too,’ is not an intellectually rigorous argument for an unfettered right to gun ownership.