fugitive peace

What do you do when your country has an image problem? Meet MC Carolina, aka Carolifa because of her hair, which looks vaguely like what Hebrew-speakers mistakenly call a lifa (they mean loofah, which happens to be an Arabic word). She’s a member of the trio The Nechama Girls, one of Israel’s biggest bands. I saw her last night at a concert arranged by Oleh Records, a non-profit label that promotes Israeli musicians abroad in an attempt to get the world to see Israelis as something other than military occupiers. Takes a little more than crazy hair and good music to do that, but we had fun all the same…

Addition (March 25th): A friend points out that in the 2005 Barbican production of Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine” the Qur’an-burning scene was replaced with a general book-burning and various references to the prophet Muhammad were dropped — this for a play that was written over 400 years ago.

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I’m fascinated by the debate over whether Geert Wilders’s film “Fitna” about the “fascist ideology” of Islam should be banned in Holland. The Dutch foreign minister says that the potential risks to Dutch people, especially abroad, make it “irresponsible to broadcast this film.” The Dutch protestant church evidently agrees and the film’s website has been suspended by its ISP.It certainly proves the point Wilders is trying to make: that Islam and free speech are incompatible. But so what? Anyone who’s followed the Danish cartoon scandal knew that already.

Like Theo van Gogh, who was killed in 2004 for his film Submission about violence against women in the Islamic world, and like Pim Fortuyn, who was also killed for his anti-Muslim views, Wilders is a provocateur. Wilders and Fortuyn in particular built their careers by stirring up popular fears about Islam and immigrants. Nobody deserves to be killed for it, of course. But exploiting public feeling on this to make a name for yourself makes you no different from the imams who wilfully whip up Muslim sentiment over cartoons.

Nor can Wilders reasonably claim that he’s defending the principle of free speech. Every Western country curtails free speech and other liberties if they clash with what politicians decide is the national interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch politician who made Submission with van Gogh and then had to flee the country because of death threats, certainly isn’t concerned about the principle of free speech: she believes in closing Muslim schools in the West to stop them teaching children anti-Western values. Her argument is that the only way to maintain a society broadly based on those values is to infringe them when it comes to Muslims.

So it’s a matter of pragmatics, not principle, and the pragmatics are based on whether you believe, as Hirsi Ali does, that Islam is such a threat to the West that it has to be kept at bay. She at least has an excuse, given her own experience of Islam. Wilders is a pure rabble-rouser.

None of which is to say that there isn’t a real dilemma here. Showing the film could set off social unrest and attacks on Europeans abroad. Does that justify banning it? Not showing the film could send a message of capitulation to extremism. Does that outweigh the risks of showing it? There isn’t a simple answer. You have take it case by case. In this case I would ban it, but I can’t say what I would do about Submission, for instance.

This takes me back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a European diplomat in Tel Aviv, just after the Danish cartoon scandal had re-erupted and set off a new wave of anti-European protests across the Middle East. His colleagues in Arab countries were pleading for their foreign ministry to give them some mollifying messages to transmit. The ministry didn’t seem to care.

The disconnect isn’t surprising. From where the diplomats are, it’s in the country’s best interest to maintain good relations with the rest of the world. For the politicians, the country’s own national values and the views of domestic voters are paramount. Which way you lean between defending Western values and soothing the friction with Islamic ones depends on where you’re standing. And these kinds of dilemmas are going to be more and more frequent in the years to come.

I feel sorry for the poor Winograd commission that investigated the second Lebanon war. They’re nice, serious, committed people who tried to give Israel the definitive, all-encompassing recipe for how to make sure it doesn’t screw up a war ever again. It took them:

• 16 months
• Over 270 witnesses and interviewees
  
• 629 pages, including appendices
• 21 pages for the table of contents alone
• 223 instances of the word “fail”, “failure”, “failed” etc
• 286 instances of the word “flaw” or “flawed”
• 14 key recommendations for reform of the army and executive branch

But the press and public are calling the report a sell-out. Why? Because the only thing they want to know is: whose fault was it that so many soldiers died in Lebanon for nothing? Or more specifically, will the person whose fault everyone believes it was, Ehud Olmert, now at last quit? And since he has no intention of doing so, it’s Winograd’s fault for not giving him the push.

There is a Russian saying: kto vinovat i shto dyelat’? — “Who is to blame and what is to be done?” Israelis, being impatient people, only want to know who’s to blame; to hell with what’s to be done, because in a few months time the government will change again and nobody will do it anyway. Which is why, as I wrote in this week’s piece on it, the Winograd report will probably sink into obscurity like all its worthy predecessors.

This from today’s email inbox:

From: MORGANTINI Luisa
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 12:26 PM
Subject: P/R : 23 Palestinians killed, 55 blessed: where is the EU strong condemnation?

PRESS RELEASE
BY LUISA MORGANTINI
VICEPRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

23 Palestinians killed, 55 blessed inside gaza by IDF:
where is the EU strong condemnation of these murders?

Strasbourg , 17^th January
“23 Palestinians killed and other 55 blessed, children, women and men, by Israeli raids in only two days: where is the EU strong condemnation of these murders?” -asked Luisa Morgantini, Vice President of the European Parliament expressing a deep concern regarding the escalation of violence of these days in Palestine and Israel.

One of the great things about working for a weekly is that I can usually avoid the press conferences, photo-ops, stake-outs and other feeding frenzies required of the purveyors of instant news. With Bush coming I’m especially glad. Here are some edited highlights from the schedule sent to the media (my emphasis added):

Tomorrow:

11:55 – Official reception at Ben-Gurion International Airport… entry via Terminal 1 by 09:00… MBU’s [ie, mobile broadcast units] to enter… by 07:00;

Thursday:

Meeting and Press Conference of the Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas with President of the United States of American (sic), George W. Bush… Press conference will begin at 11:30 a.m… All Press MUST arrive at the Press Gathering Point BEFORE 06.30.

Friday:

08:10-09:40 – Visit Yad Vashem…. Pool members at PM’s Jerusalem Office by 06:00

Not that the rest of us are going to have it easy. Jerusalem traffic has already slowed to about half its usual speed. Military choppers keep buzzing overhead in both Jerusalem and Ramallah. There are more guns around than at an NRA convention. People are avoiding making appointments for the next couple of days. Some who commute between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are finding places to stay overnight so they don’t have to make the trip. Some offices in Jerusalem have given their employees the time off; one friend who works for an international agency has been told to stay at home because of “security concerns”, though it’s not clear whether they’re afraid their employees will get caught up in a assassination attempt or run over by a speeding presidential limousine.

This had better be good.

While I was researching this week’s piece on the upcoming Bush visit to the Middle East, something caught my eye in the White House’s December 18th press briefing about it. Dana Perino, the spokeswoman, was asked whether Bush would meet with Hamas, and answered:

“I think the President wants to deal with the elected leader of all the Palestinians, which is Abu Mazen and Prime Minister Fayyad. So he is going to focus on talking with them. Hamas is a terrorist organization. He is not going to be talking with them.”

Now, all the reporters in the room knew that Hamas was also elected by the Palestinians, and that Fayyad was not elected at all but appointed by Abu Mazen to head an emergency government whose legal legitimacy is questionable at best. Nobody challenged her.

Still, Hamas is a terrorist organisation, and that’s a good enough reason not to talk to it, right? Except that a lot of the Palestinian security men guarding Bush on his visit to Ramallah have also been active in Fatah’s military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which has carried out more attacks from the West Bank than Hamas has; and the al-Aqsa men who killed two Israeli soldiers near Hebron last week were themselves on the PA security forces’ payroll. What’s more, this fluidity between the Brigades and the official PA forces has been common knowledge for years (even I’ve written about it). In short, “terrorist”, like “democrat”, is an extraordinarily flexible term in the Washington dictionary.

That nobody corrected Perino isn’t surprising. Press conferences are not for getting into arguments — there’s no point. The journalists are there to hear the official position, and at best pick up on whether it’s changed since the last time. If the official position is that Hamas are terrorists and Abu Mazen and Fayyad are democrats, that’s just another way of saying that Hamas are our enemies and Abu Mazen and Fayyad are our friends.

This loose use of labels is nothing new, of course: yesterday’s strategic ally is today’s evil dictator (Saddam) and yesterday’s freedom fighter is today’s terrorist (Bin Laden). The trouble is that as journalists we’re so used to this doublespeak that we don’t even notice it any more, so we just shovel it on to the general public — and usually we don’t have the time or the space to explain, to those who follow events less closely than we do, that the people we’re quoting are talking out of their backsides.

We’re nearly there. And it seems I got it wrong when I said that Annapolis might be derailed by Ehud Olmert’s insistence that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state before negotiations began. I think the reason is he never actually insisted on it - he just managed to look as though he was.

How I got misled on this is instructive. The funny thing is I sort-of saw it all begin, though I didn’t realise it at the time.

On November 5th, at the Saban Forum dinner at the president’s residence, the Ha’aretz journalist Ari Shavit asked Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), the head of the Palestinian negotiating team on Annapolis, whether the Palestinians would recognise Israel as a Jewish state. Ha’aretz reported this, but I first heard it from someone who had come straight from the dinner and was stunned by Abu Ala’s response.

“He could have thrown them a bone,” said my witness. “He could have said something like ‘Come on, guys, you know if it were up to me, you know what I think, but this is an issue that’s part of the talks and we have to leave it for the talks.’ I mean, they’re sitting there in the residence of the president of Israel. But instead he just said ‘let’s leave it for the talks,’ which makes it look to the Israelis like the whole issue of recognising the Jewish state is in question.”

I confess I didn’t take him too seriously. So what if Abu Ala didn’t soft-soap his hosts? He was right on the main point: recognition of Israel as a Jewish state implies renouncing the right of return, so it’s a no-no for Palestinians to concede it except as part of talks.

What I missed was that the media, and then the rightists within the coalition, would turn this into an issue. Within a week Olmert was insisting that “Whoever does not accept [Israel as a Jewish state] cannot hold any negotiations with me” and that “This will be a condition for our recognition of a Palestinian state.” Saeb Erekat retorted that “no state in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity,” which was rather foolish and only infuriated Israel even more.

A few days later Olmert repeated his demand to Javier Solana: the recognition of the Jewish state would be a “foundation for the post-Annapolis negotiations” and “is not subject to either negotiations or discussion.”

Both Israeli and international media interpreted this to mean that Olmert was making Palestinian recognition of the Jewish state a precondition for holding talks. But a close reading shows he never actually did.

When he said that only someone who accepts a Jewish state could hold talks with him, he followed it up with a qualifer: that he was sure Abbas and Salam Fayyad “are committed to prior agreements and want to make peace with Israel as a Jewish state”. In other words, they personally could hold talks with him. And when he said the condition was non-negotiable, he meant there would be no agreement without it — but not that there would be no talks without it.

Thus Olmert was able to make it look like he was bending to the rightists without actually doing so. This week, as if nothing had happened, he repeated that he wanted to complete a final-status deal within a year. If nothing else, you have to give the man his due as a master of manipulation.

Anyway, this week’s issue finally has my piece on Annapolis as well as an editorial written in London that calls on Bush to rescue Annapolis by making his own speech about the shape of a two-state solution, and a cover picture of Bush entitled “Mr Palestine” which I find absolutely hilarious.

For the crowd that filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv tonight (Saturday night) for the annual memorial ceremony, there was what a friend of mine described as “a surrealistic irony, like something out of a Greek tragedy”: on Sunday, the actual anniversary of Rabin’s death, his assassin, Yigal Amir, will watch as his newborn son is circumcised.

Rabin’s son Yuval, who this year spoke at the ceremony for the first time, remarked that one of the names for the circumcision ceremony in Hebrew is the Covenant of Isaac, or Brit Yitzhak, since Abraham’s son Isaac was the first Jewish male to get snipped on the prescribed eighth day after his birth. Arranging for a man to perform a Brit Yitzhak on the anniversary of his murdering another Yitzhak sounds like the kind of nasty joke dreamed up by a deity who has had a particularly tiresome day.

Indeed, for the Israeli religious right this will probably pass into legend as a stroke of divine justice. Luckily for the people in the square, not too many looked like they believed in divine justice. Though Rabin’s death is sometimes compared to JFK’s in terms of the national trauma, the mourning of it, at least nowadays, is a strictly partisan affair, observed mainly on the secular left and centre. By my reckoning, a good one-third of the people were wearing the blue shirts of the Labour youth movement. Most of them would have been too young to remember the day he was killed.

There were no big names from parties to the right of Rabin’s Labour party (unlike two years ago, when Tsipi Livni, then in the Likud, caused quite a buzz by giving a speech). On the contrary, there were several not-so-veiled references to the fact that though Yigal Amir is in jail, nobody has punished those in the settler movement and the Likud who incited against Rabin; his son noted that “one finger pulled the trigger, but many hands brought it there”.

I confess that tears welled up a couple of times. One was during Yuval Rabin’s eulogy for his father, which was tough and moving. The other was the minute’s silence, when 150,000 (according to the organisers) yakking, jabbering Israelis suddenly went into a hush. You could have heard a mobile phone ring all the way across the square; I just prayed it wouldn’t be mine.

But then I remembered Barbara Plett, a BBC journalist who admitted to crying at the pathos of the moment when the helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat on his last journey to a Paris hospital lifted off from the presidential compound in Ramallah. She was roasted by pro-Israel media watchdogs such as HonestReporting: “Another BBC Mideast reporter displays open attachment to one side of the conflict”. Although her report was in the BBC’s “From our own correspondent” programme, which is meant to be a personal view — rather like this blog — the BBC partly upheld a complaint against her. She was transferred to Pakistan not long afterwards. When I started this blog, though it’s separate from The Economist, my editor warned me to “remember Barbara Plett”.

So should I be admitting that my eyes got damp for Rabin? They say Karachi’s quite nice this time of year. Somehow, though, I don’t think HonestReporting will jump on my “open attachment to one side of the conflict” for this one. Palestinian media groups might, but they seem to have less interest in hunting down such infractions, or maybe just fewer resources, and certainly less clout (I can’t immediately recall a case of a journalist being drummed out of her job for being too pro-Israel).

Nor do I think it’s somehow more legitimate for a journalist to shed tears over Rabin than over Arafat. Rabin may have made a greater leap towards peace than any Israeli leader before or since, but a lot of Palestinians remember him chiefly as the man who talked peace while letting the settlements grow faster than ever (as the book Lords of the Land, which I reviewed recently, points out, making it all the more ironic that the settlers hated him so). In political terms, settlement-building is to Palestinians what terrorist attacks are to Israelis: the deal-breaker, the actions that belie the other side’s claim to want peace. Arafat, at least before the second intifada, was a bit like Rabin, trying but failing to stop the extremist forces in his society. They both got the Nobel.

But in any case, what moved me, like Barbara Plett, wasn’t the memory of the man himself, but the emotion of the moment. Surely that’s legitimate for anyone.

You would think the launch party for a big Israeli defence firm would be the perfect place for me to find out exactly what happened during Israel’s raid in Syria. The Mikal Group, the new controlling company for a collection of defence suppliers with its eye on the export market, held a glitzy gathering tonight at the Tel Aviv port. There were hundreds of guests - weapons-business executives, army colonels, brigadier-generals, ex-brigadier-generals (identifiable by their close-cropped greying hair and gimlet-eyed gazes) and journalists. The drinks were free, and the bar staff were pouring them damn strong. Someone had to blab.

Not a chance. While the US and British press continue to dish up scoop after supposed scoop, the Israeli media remain censored and those in the know stay mum. Of course, it’s hard to tell who’s really in the know. All you get is little nuggets here and there - so-and-so’s friend in the air force told him they were preparing for this months ago, such-and-such heard that the pilots weren’t even told what they were going to bomb. I learned nothing. I felt terrible. I felt better after a military-affairs journalist with years of experience told me she had been pumping all her sources and learned nothing either.

I think it’s still OK to say that Israel launched a big raid and had good reasons for doing so. Beyond that, nothing is verifiable. The cheerleaders point to hints of something fishy, such as changes to the port records of a ship that docked in Syria three days before the raid carrying (supposedly) cement. Doubters turn up signs that what Israel hit, if anything, wasn’t nuclear. An Israeli journalist, Yigal Laviv, repeats the argument that if there were proof of nuclear material in Syria, Israel and the US would surely be trumpeting it to the skies (partial translation here). But then again, if there was nothing incriminating in Deir al Zur, surely Syria would be doing the same.

I mentioned to an Israeli acquaintance at the Mikal party how strange it was that, after this barrage of leaks and stories, we still knew basically nothing. “And that’s as it should be,” he said. From Israel’s point of view, the eerie silence at home mixed with tantalising media stories from abroad is working wonders. As I’ve noted before, when there is no hard information, rumours fill the gap, and he who controls the rumours controls the truth (Orwell forgot to include that one). Israelis are starting to believe in their army after its failures during last summer’s Lebanon war. Westerners are beginning to wonder whether there aren’t WMD in the Middle East after all. Arabs are fearful at the thought that Israel can still strike deep in their territory and get away with it. It may all be true; it may all be false; but in terms of the effect on the world, that’s irrelevant. “It’s not what you know,” my interlocutor said, “it’s what you think you know.”

All of which may answer my earlier question about why the Israeli media blackout on the event continues - and suggests that it may not be lifted after all.

Update (September 19th): I was wrong on two counts. One is that the official silence has already been broken - albeit by Bibi Netanyahu, who despite not being a member of the government, let alone one of the three ministers reportedly involved in the decision to attack, claims he was “involved… from the first moment”, whatever that means.

The second is that I apparently misheard over the noise at the Mikal party: the phrase was “it’s what they think you know”. I actually liked the wrong version better.

The mystery about Israel’s air strike against Syria on September 6th, which I wrote about in the current issue, continues to deepen. The story taking hold is that Israel hit material or equipment for nuclear weapons supplied by North Korea. But something still smells fishy.

For a start, the way this story has emerged in public is odd in the extreme. Well-connected Israeli journalists hinted from very early on that they knew what was going on but couldn’t say, a sign that censorship was in effect. (That is censored too, but it has become so obvious that they are now saying it openly.) All last week it was the American media - CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times - which dripped out the story, mainly with off-the-record comments from American officials.

But today it’s Britain’s Sunday Times which carries it forward, with a lot of enticing details from unnamed Israeli sources about how an Israeli commando unit on the ground guided the bombers; how the Mossad found “evidence that Syria was seeking to buy a nuclear device from North Korea”; how Israel diverted a spy satellite from Iran to Syria; and, interestingly, how the mysterious rise in Israel-Syria sabre-rattling a few weeks ago - which I wrote about in my very first post - was actually the result of Israel’s sending more troops to the Golan “in anticipation of possible retaliation by Damascus in the event of air strikes.”

So, first question: why the Sunday Times? Letting details of the attack leak via Washington last week may have been a way to prevent a flare-up between Israel and Syria or other Arab states. But if Israeli officials have decided that it’s now safe to break silence, why not in the Israeli press?

Second question: is it true? Uzi Mahnaimi, the Sunday Times’s man in Tel Aviv, is a former Mossad man (correction: served in military intelligence) known for having excellent security sources. But as I’ve discussed before, journalists in that position are also susceptible to being fed misinformation and printing it, knowingly or otherwise.

The operational details he reveals are probably accurate. The nukes claim, which seems to have been fed both to Uzi and to his Washington colleague, is more questionable. Newsweek today reports that, yes, Israel showed satellite photographs of northern Syria to officials in Washington, suggesting that they revealed a nuclear project; but that other anonymous US officials “say they’ve seen no credible evidence yet of nuclear ties between North Korea and Syria”.

So the alternative view going around is that this news cycle is all part of a big conspiracy by Washington hardliners - with ex-UN ambassador John Bolton at the fore - and Israel to push the Iran-Syria-North Korea connection, with the media gullibly playing along.

Thus, the Sunday Times cites Bolton saying that “I’ve been worried for some time about North Korea and Iran outsourcing their nuclear programmes,” but Newsweek gets him to admit that he “never saw proof North Korea was sharing nuclear technology with Syria.” Joshua Landis, who has also clipped several other useful pieces on this issue, lists reasons to think that Bolton is “shooting from the hip”, and Blake Hounshell at Foreign Policy’s blog argues that quotes Joseph Cirincione saying that

If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

I’m suspending judgement. Launching an air strike at Syria, especially if there were indeed ground commandos, was risky. It’s hard to imagine Israel would have done it just to lend credibility to a neocon claim about nukes or prevent US-Syria dialogue (if anything, Washington is even more sceptical of Syria’s intentions than Jerusalem is). An alternative hypothesis is that Israel really believed that Syria might have the hot stuff, but only because the neocons led Israel by the nose. But I still can’t figure out why keep the Israeli media muzzled, unless it’s just that they’re less likely than the US press to buy into the spin. At any rate, stay sceptical. Not everything is clear yet.