Western mainstream journalists often complain when people claim that they are government or corporate hacks, but when the next opportunity arises, they usually prove themselves to be exactly that. Their current coverage of the conflict between Iran and the US-led coalition proves the point once again.
Their admissions that they should have been more critical in the run-up to the Iraq war ring hollow to those who understand that they will play a similar role in the next war, and the next, and the next; that is, those who understand that the problem with Iraq war coverage was not a once-off lack of critical questioning, but a symptom of a media system that is too closely embedded with government and corporate interests and too constrained by its society’s attitudes and prejudices.
If journalists want to avoid an Iraq war scenario in Iran, here are some questions they can ask Barack Obama, David Cameron, and other senior government officials.
Q: Is it true that Iran has been so uncooperative, given 1. their 2003-2005
cooperation with the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 2. their
March-April 2005 offer of running their nuclear sites in cooperation with other countries and scientists and, 3. their March-April 2005 offer to permanently sign up to the Additional Protocol that would have ensured highly intrusive inspections? That is, after all, more cooperative than most other nuclear countries are. (Most 2005 coverage ignored Iran’s proposal, and focused on their rejection of a European deal which tried to commit them to a complete suspension of their uranium enrichment program. Words like “defiant” were thrown around with care-free abandon).
Q: Will you please spell out the conditions under which you will be comfortable with Iran exercising their right to enrich uranium?
Q: Given that, 1. the NPT does not prohibit countries from having a latent nuclear weapons program and, 2. you say that your problem with Iran is a lack of transparency, would you lift the sanctions and allow them to continue their research if they came completely clean and admitted that their research was aimed at having a latent nuclear weapon capability? If not, why not?
Q: Do you not think that you are producing a self-fulfilling prophesy by threatening, sanctioning and attacking Iran into wanting a nuclear weapon program? Surely any country that may not have had nuclear weapon plans may consider them after having scientists assassinated, computers attacked and their country threatened with war?
Q: Given that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003 (as attested by both the IAEA inspectors and your own inteligence organisations in 2007), and given that you pride yourself on a carrot-and-stick approach in your dealings with Iran, what carrot did Iran get after dismantling the program?
Q: Given that Iran has no history of large-scale attacks on other countries, why are you so worried about them having a nuclear weapon? Isn’t it simply the case that you want to be able to attack them some time in the future without having them able to defend themselves?
Q: 9/11, in which the US lost 3,000 of its 300 million citizens, had profound effects on the country’s psyche, leading them to declare an infinite war and crack down on civil liberties at home. Iran lost 1 million of its 70 million citizens during the war that Iraq launched on them with your support during the 1980s. What do you suggest Iran does as a deterrent against attacks by their neighbours, given that you will either support the neighbours’ attacks or at best not help Iran if it is attacked?
Q: What exactly is behind the intense hostility between Western Europe, the US and Iran? Clearly it is not nuclear weapons, since the support for the Iraqi attack on Iran pre-dated Iran’s lack of nuclear transparency.
Q: Considering that China and possibly Russia will veto a United Nations Security Council resolution for attacking Iran, why do you keep it open as an option? Do you think that doing it in contravention of international law is acceptable, or do you have any evidence that a country like Iran will respond well to military threats?
Q: Why do you consider the Gulf states as authentic partners on the Iran issue, given that their grievances against Iran are sectarian in nature, as proved by events in Bahrain and Eastern Saudi Arabia? Do you not think that this sectarianism is an enormous threat to stability in the region and beyond?
Q: One of your worries about a nuclear-armed Iran seems to be that it would cause nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, but why are you starting with Iran as the cause and not with Israel, or with yourselves, for that matter?
Once again, media space is allocated either to those who support a war in Iran or to those who support other measures to pressure Iran. The underlying messages in both camps are the same: Iran is dangerous and crazy and might attack us once they have nuclear weapons, Iran has been a great deal less cooperative than other countries with nuclear programs, we have the right to decide which countries are allowed to carry out what type of nuclear research, and so forth. That is the same foundation based on which the journalistic establishment missed the important questions before the Iraq invasion.
In March 2008, Slate Magazine asked some supporters of the Iraq war why they got it wrong beforehand. The answers are instructive. Jacob Weisberg attributed his pre-war thinking to groupthink. Andrew Sullivan complained that he “misjudged Bush’s sense of morality”, Jeffrey Goldberg said that he “didn’t realize how incompetent the Bush administration could be”, and Fred Kaplan admitted that he “trusted Colin Powell and his circumstantial evidence—for a little while.” In other words, trust your government that it is correct, sincere and capable of carrying out what it says it can. The idea that independent thinking and research might come in handy is gloriously absent from all three these. Josef Joffe’s response was that he forgot that security must come first if democracy is to come later. this also assumes our right to establish particular political systems in other countries, and only takes issue with how that can be done. Richard Cohen, similarly, said that he “thought we had a chance to stabilize an unstable region”, and he acknowledged that he “wanted to strike back” (for 9/11 and the consequent anthrax attacks that he blindly believed Iraq had something to do with). All those assumptions are still in place and informing journalists’ thinking about Iran.
So come-on mainstream Western journalists, ask questions about the underlying assumptions and prove to us that you are not establishment hacks. I wonder why I am not holding my breath.
Michael Treiger has responded to my previous post on Syria on his much recommended blog, and since the “post comment” button there seems not to work for me, I’ll post a more detailed response here.
The issue that he takes with me and “other unapologetic and ‘Moderate’ anti-Imperialist ‘explainers’ of the vicious and mass murdering regime of Syria” is this: when Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen revolted, anti-imperialists supported them because they were US-friendly. When Libya and Syria revolted, uh “we” didn’t support them because they were revolting against important anti-imperialist governments. In the same way as we threw our support behind the uprisings in the former category, we should back the uprisings in the latter. The Syrians are being mass-murdered, and their government’s relationship with the Western imperialists make them no less worthy of our support. And the way to support the Syrian opposition is to back the armed uprising. After all, who are we to make speeches about how the Syrian opposition should conduct their struggle while being slaughtered? And how dare we quote research at them that was done by “members of various western liberal ‘conflict resolving’ institutions?”
I will respond only for myself here, since I sense profound differences between my position and those of MrZine, Joseph Massad and As’ad AbuKhalil. Strangely enough, I agree with almost all of what Treiger says in his post. Of course the Syrian people have the right to armed self-defence, like the Palestinians and Yemenis and all the other people who live under oppressive regimes. I’ve defended Palestinian violence along these lines for years, and will defend Syrian violence now. If I was an older South African than I am, I would probably have participated in some form of violent resistance, even though the only violence that I was subjected to under apartheid was having both my shoulders dislocated by a policemen at a protest that my eight-year-old self attended.
Thus, if I have to choose between supporting the regime and the armed opposition, I wholeheartedly support the armed opposition. The fact that they will be armed and trained from abroad doesn’t matter, within limits the methods that they use like car bombs near civilian infrastructure don’t matter, that al-Qaeda supports their struggle is irrelevant, and so on. They’re fighting a fight that is heavily loaded against them, and doing pretty well, considering that they SEEM to have killed about 1 security force member per three-to-four deaths that have been inflicted on the population.
The question of whether violence is defensible differs from the question of whether it works, though. I am also asking myself what will actually improve the lives of Syrians in the long-term, and then the question of whether armed or unarmed revolution works best becomes relevant. And if research shows that fifty-one per cent of unarmed revolutions work while only three to seven per cent of unarmed revolutions do(1), and it moreover shows that negotiations at the beginning of a conflict often manage to end the conflict without giving the government a victory(2), I have to encourage the international community to back negotiations before violence. I don’t even see what is controversial about that. After all, what argument can be given for encouraging the thing that almost never works before bothering with the thing that works better? Surely leftists can’t claim that “real” leftism includes the position that the potential success of a strategy is irrelevant to whether it should be promoted?
The argument that it is problematic to use studies written by what Treiger calls “members of various western liberal ‘conflict resolving’ institutions” strikes me as no more persuasive than the Israeli government’s complaint that the Goldstone report is inaccurate because it was written by a former apartheid judge. I am uncomfortable with the research for reasons I alluded to in my previous post and will spell out below. But I have never come across a convincing argument to ignore science purely because of the nationality of the researchers.
Treiger also grossly misrepresents my position when he says I want the Syrian opposition to “lay down their guns.” No, I wanted the international community to mediate in April last year already, instead of making the Syrians think they had international support that no foreign country can now provide. The worst contribution that we can make to a conflict is to give strong support to a party when there is no meaningful support that we are capable or willing to give. The Georgian government learned this the hard way when they attacked Russia in 2008, thinking that NATO backed them and would help, just to find that NATO countries weren’t going to launch a war with Russia and could therefore do no more than make increasingly disapproving statements. During negotiations with Belgrade in 1992, the Bosnians could have had a deal similar to the one they signed at the Daton Accords three years and more than 100,000 dead people later, but since NATO countries supported their demand for a united Bosnia to secede from Yugoslavia, they decided to launch an uprising that they had known would be suicidal because they thought that NATO would help(3). (In case I am accused of blaming the victims for their plight, I am not speaking at the normative level at all here. I am merely using statements that the Bosnian leaders themselves have made to describe events so that we can hopefully learn something for the future.)
None of this comes close to a proposal that violent opposition movements should lay down their weapons. As is my standing policy on Palestinian violence, I will comment on how the international community could have assisted Syria, not on what the Syrians are doing. The Syrians are doing what we all would have done in their position. Their violence is absolutely essential for their survival, it hardly registers as a moral issue at all. Discussing their actions is unreasonable and judgmental.
I have not examined the positions of MRZine, Joseph Massad and As’ad AbuKhalil in detail, but part of my argument in the previous post was that anti-imperialists are wrong that foreign intervention will make the Syrian situation a lot worse. Once it is violent, there seems little to choose between the consequences of local and international violence. So at this stage, I won’t even have much of a problem with an international humanitarian intervention, which places me squarely at odds with people like Massad and AbuKhalil. And MRZine and AbuKhalil’s constant criticism of the Syrian opposition as Western stooges disturbs me, for the same reason as labeling Palestinian resistance movements as Iranian subjects does. If you’re under fire, you take the help from wherever it comes, so no one should fault the Syrians, Palestinians or whoever else for that.
My chief concerns with the above studies are these:
1. They include cases that achieved only limited success among the successful cases. They did so in both the violent and unarmed categories. I, thus, want to go through their databases and re-categorise many of their “successful” cases to cases that achieved limited success. How far the 51% success rate of unarmed revolutions and the 3% of violent revolutions will drop is important, but more important is whether the difference in the success rates of the two categories will be as large. As I said in the previous post, since war tends to cause the type of mass destruction that makes it difficult for a country to resist outside interference, and since a population that has learned that violence works resort of violent measures too easily, there is no obvious reason to think that the gap between the two success rates will close. It unfortunately seems to be the case that revolution just is a pretty unsuccessful business.
2. Studies like these include in the nonviolent category only major campaigns where a substantial percentage of the population rise up. It doesn’t include, for example, the numerous cases of Indian villagers who nonviolently resist the demolition of their villages or the Cambodian and Ethiopian farmers who peacefully protest the confiscation of their farmland. That makes me hugely uncomfortable with a lot of literature on the effectiveness of nonviolence, because it tends to prescribe it for small groups for whom it cannot possibly work, or for the Palestinians and Bahrainis whose nonviolence is rendered less productive by deliberately imposed territorial divisions, employment of foreign workers, and so on.
In the violent category, however, the above two studies don’t include campaigns by small groups either, Boko Haram for example is omitted. So while the prescriptions that result from a lot of this kind of research makes me cringe, the findings are still not being disputed.
3. If these studies had not included the possible effect of international support for oppressive regimes on the success of campaigns, I would have rejected them outright. The massive Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth study does include the foreign support variable, however, finding that foreign support for an oppressive regime does not render nonviolent campaigns less successful. It also shows that the benefit of foreign support is greater for a nonviolent than for a violent campaign, with the exception of sanctions, that have no effect.
I certainly do not take existing research as words from the lips of god, some re-interpretation of data and conclusions is always appropriate. but I cannot ignore research into the potential success of a strategy just because it doesn’t fit with my preferred “leftist” values or conclusions. I would have loved research to show that violence worked so we could arm ourselves and remove these vicious dictators. But it doesn’t, and ignoring the world as it is and engaging with the world as we wish it to be is disastrous policy.
That is why I wrote above that I agreed with almost all of Treiger’s piece. The disagreement here is not between “real” leftists and “fake” leftists; our principles appear quite similar. the disagreement is between people who incorporate available evidence into their policy proposals and those who don’t, or between those who allow idealism to override evidence and those who do not.
(1) For three per cent, see Chenoweth E. and Stephan, M.J. (2011). The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (New York, NY: Columbia University Press and Stephan, M.J. and Chenoweth, E. (2008). “Why Civil Resistance Works; The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict”, International security, Summer 2008, 7. For seven per cent, see Abrahms, M. (2006). “Why Terrorism Does Not Work,” International Security, 31(2), 42-78
(2) Regan, P. M., & Aydin, A. (2006). Diplomacy and Other Forms of Intervention in Civil Wars. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(5), 736-756.
(3) Kuperman, A. J. (2008). The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans. International Studies Quarterly, 52, 49-80.
In March 2011, I wrote a long piece on the military intervention in Libya in which I summarised academic research on intervention in intrastate conflicts. Since proponents of the responsibility to protect doctrine typically argue for it via an account of one or two notorious cases where we should have but failed to intervene, the debates typically overrate the lessons of those few cases and ignore all the rest. Consequently, I disregarded theoretical and anecdotal accounts of, or arguments for, military intervention and focused exclusively on empirical studies where the authors analysed dozens or hundreds of conflicts across the past century or more to calculate whether the consequences of such intervention are usually positive.
While I’m hoping to discuss our mistakes in the Syrian situation here, the issue of military assistance to the Free Syria Army (FSA) will soon begin to dominate the discussion. So before I proceed, I will summarise the findings on military intervention.
- The majority of genocides and politicides occur when armed rebels challenge the state, and the likelihood of such an occurrence rises significantly when the rebels are supported by the civilian population. (Harff and Gurr (1988 in Kuperman 2008; Valentino et al. 2004 in Kuperman 2008).
- Military intervention prolongs intrastate conflicts. (Balch-Lindsay and Enterline 2000; Regan 2000, 2002; Elbadawi and Sambanis 2000).
- Even if military intervention never materialises, the very expectation of military intervention prolongs intrastate conflicts, primarily because the party who will be supported by the intervention refuses to negotiate or drop their maximalist demands. (Elbadawi and Sambanis, 2000; Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2005; Kuperman 2008).
- If the government of the target country expects military intervention to be carried out by a state with which it has poor relations, the effect in 3. is even stronger. (Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2005).
- While foreign military intervention in general tends to prolong conflicts, neutral interventions prolong them the most. That is, the shortest conflicts are those without foreign military intervention, and the longest are where foreign powers militarily intervene in a way that is neutral between the government and the rebels. (Regan 1996, 2002; Balch-Lindsay and Enterline, 2000).
- A foreign military intervention that supports the militarily weaker side is likely to prolong the conflict the most. (Dixon, 2001; Balch-Lindsay, enterline and joyce, 2008).
- Compared to negotiated settlement, a military victory is more likely to result in post-war massacres and is less likely to lead to democracy. (Licklider, 1995; Dixon, 2001; Gurses and Mason, 2008).
- Foreign military intervention has the initial effect of reducing the chance of a negotiated settlement. (Mason, Weingarten & Fett, 1999).
- Foreign military intervention on the side of the rebels has the lowest likelihood of a negotiated settlement. (Gent, 2005; Balch-Lindsay, enterline and joyce, 2008).
- Counter intuitively, but confirmed by both studies that tested it, foreign military intervention on the side of the government increases the chance of settlement relative to government military victory. That is, the most likely result of a government-biased intervention is a negotiated settlement, with a government victory second most likely. (Dixon, 2001; Balch-Lindsay, enterline and joyce, 2008).
- Foreign military interventions do not typically give rise to democracies in the target countries. Some studies claim that the likelihood that a democracy will emerge after a foreign intervention is no greater than chance; that is, that target countries gain no democratic benefit over similar countries that do not experience such intervention (Pickering and Kisangani, 2006; Pickering and Peceny, 2006; Downes and Monten, unpublished; Pearson, Walker and Stern, 2006). Other studies show that, after an initial flurry of post-intervention democratic activity, interventions led to a reduction in democracy compared to what the target country would have had without the intervention (Bueno de Mesquita and Downs, 2006; Easterly, Satyanath and Berger, 2008; Gleditsch, Christiansen & Hegre, 2004).
- Foreign military intervention typically causes target countries to be less peaceful and stable than they would have been without the intervention. (Gleditsch, Christiansen & Hegre, 2004; Piec and Reiter, 2010; Downes, working paper).
- Interventions that damage state infrastructural power the most by installing a wholly new government result in the largest increase in the chance of subsequent civil war. (Piec and Reiter, 2010; Downes, working paper).
- The effect in point 13. is much stronger in poor and ethnically heterogeneous countries. (Downes, working paper).
These findings should make anyone think carefully before proposing military assistance to the FSA. But the question that I want to discuss here, especially in the light of the near universal condemnation for this weekend’s Chinese and Russian United Nations Security Council (UNSC) vetoes, is what action is open to us in situations like Syria and Libya if military intervention is a bad idea. I will again turn to research, but this time studies on mediation and negotiations.
After examining 153 conflicts between 1945 and 1999, Patrick Regan and Aysegul Aydin (2006) found that diplomatic intervention was likely to reduce the duration of civil wars. They found that mediation attempts early in a conflict increased the likelihood of compromise without increasing the likelihood of a government victory. Marie Olson and Frederic Pearson )2002) reached a similar conclusion. Since most of us think that the authoritarian Assad regime should make way for a democratic government in Syria, this would have been a good place to start. Russia is making belated efforts in that direction, but the amount of time that has passed will make mediation very difficult.
There are two forms of mediation that have been found to be especially effective. Barbara Walter (1997) found that the offer of a security guarantee by a third party was a necessary condition for civil war settlement. In the Syria case, this would require NATO to encourage the FSA to put down their arms so that violence could stop, with a guarantee that NATO would step in if the Assad forces continued the violence. it would similarly require NATO to guarantee the safety of regime officials and minorities once they laid down their arms. This could allow for peaceful conditions during which parties could negotiate a settlement, and would ensure the safety of both sides after a settlement.
The second type of mediation that has been found to be effective is one that few Westerners will appreciate. According to Isak
Svensson (2008), mediation by non-democracies are more likely to lead to a settlement than mediation by democracies. The most likely reason for this is that democracies, due to the popularity contest that their governments are involved in, are more likely to moralise and choose sides early in a conflict. Accordingly, the Turkish government, who strives for popularity inside Turkey as well as in the rest of the Middle East, came under heavy criticism for their conciliatory stance towards the Syrian government, whereupon they changed their stance from engagement to hostility. Russia would not have been seen as a neutral mediator, and neither would Iran, Iraq or the sectarian GCC countries.
What is required here is that the UN should develop the responsibility to protect doctrine further to spell out the diplomatic measures that should be pursued before even talk of military intervention is permitted. It would shift the emphasis from military intervention and sanctions, to negotiations and foreign mediation. It would clarify the immediate steps that should be taken, which might prevent situations where violence increases while the international community sits on its hands while aimlessly shooting off from its mouth. It would change the approach from an haphazard to an evidence-based one. And it would prevent political movements from using humanitarian intervention to achieve their political goals, since those that refuse to negotiate will not, except possibly under special conditions, be helped. It leaves room for political movements who want to pursue their political goals through violence, but it at least removes the incentive that they currently have to draw state violence onto their civilian populations in the hope that the international community will help.
The UN should have a standing mediation committee with members drawn from several countries, and those members should temporarily suspend their membership when mediation is required in a case where their countries have special interests. This will bypass the problems that democracies have when trying to mediate, and it will remove the concern about intervening countries’ interests that might dominate discussions.
For those who worry about excessive international meddling in countries’ domestic affairs, especially with the disproportionate amount of influence that some countries have in the UN, these type of situations almost always gives rise to international meddling anyway, a lot of which is far from transparent or unbiased. Others might object to negotiations and mediation as forms of airy-fairy idealism, to which I will simply refer them back to the empirical evidence and remind them that this strategy does not rule out military intervention; it merely creates conditions under which the evidence-based approach, which backs negotiations and mediation, will become the default position.
When we get to the stage that the Syrian situation has now reached, the question that countries like India, Brazil and South Africa have to answer is this: if our position is consistent with research and is therefore the nearest to being right, but the actions of others render that position impractical, do we hold onto the correct impractical position or do we join the misguided consensus? In cases like Libya and Syria the former option would leave ill-equipped rebels and civilians at the mercy of a ruthless regime, and the latter would enable the international community to act, but will reinforce the misguided position of the consensus for the future.
If they stand by the correct position, most of the world will despise them, but the international community will learn, firstly, that the UN Security Council cannot be used for regime change and, secondly, that countries should work hard from the beginning to find negotiated solutions to conflict. The long-term consequence of standing by the correct position will thus be to reinforce a negotiation trend, and will therefore be positive. The UNSC can then be used for cases where the evidence-based position does not succeed. China’s explanations for their UNSC veto have been quite muddled, and Russia’s have been a combination of principle and self-interest. But broadly speaking their vetoes will reinforce the correct position for future cases.
But, as South Africa and India probably calculated, in the Syrian case adherence to the correct position and reinforcement of a negotiation trend will in effect authorise a bloodbath. Assad knows that the international community is paralysed, he knows that non-universal sanctions will take years to do substantial damage, he has watched Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir remain in place notwithstanding his nauseating record of mass civilian killing, so he will finish the crackdown until civilian protesters stay at home, and until the FSA is wiped out, or until his own army is depleted, or until the minority Christians and Alawites are exterminated. One has to be brave to think of “long-term trends” and “ultimate reinforcement of correct principles” while so many are dying. And this time they are dying in front of our own eyes on citizens’ media, it is not Nicaragua or Rwanda or even Iraq where we can leave the painful reality to the locals and celebrate the ignorance that makes our non-involvement so much easier to bear.
While it is currently fashionable to scream at Russia and China for their UNSC veto, they do not carry sole responsibility for placing us all in the position where there is no safe course between the current Scylla and Charybdis of the correct principle and the incorrect consensus. Citizens’ media and 24-hour news television have turned revolutions and uprisings into a spectator sport, with everyone stuck in front of their televisions cheering on their team. And who can blame us for acting like this when the world is finally set to get rid of oppressive regimes like the ones that have been tormenting Middle Easterners for decades?
But in case the Libyan and Syrian episodes have not demonstrated this clearly enough, this is not a harmless game with the team having to be cheered on to the goal. It’s always deadly, it always sows massive dissension often to the point of hopelessly splintering a society, it shatters security because it pits society against its security forces, it destroys infrastructure, it devastates the economy, and often all that destruction achieves little. In an exhaustive study of major historical uprisings, Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth (2011) found that unarmed revolutions succeeded 51% of the time, while armed revolutions had a 3% chance of success. If the point is not clear, even the more successful type of revolution succeeds only half of the time.
So far as I can see, major revolutionary efforts have three likely courses: First, if the opposition incorporates into their strategy strikes and other forms of non-cooperation (as opposed to just protests that are easy for security forces to attack), then the government and the opposition have to negotiate and devise a compromise plan whereby some of the protesters’ demands will be met and others will remain unmet. South Africa, where the black population received political rights but little financial benefit, is one example. And even if those crazy courageous Egyptians manage to throw off military rule, their government will probably not adopt economic policies from which the population, as opposed to international investors, will benefit. These are the type of cases that the Stephan and Chenoweth study labeled successful. So while negotiations can often prevent extreme violence, it results in compromises that leave protesters unhappy.
Secondly, if one or both sides refuse to negotiate, the most likely outcome is state and opposition violence on each other. Since this struggle will always pit poorly funded and equipped civilians against a fully trained and equipped army, it will yield what we’re currently witnessing in Syria. If the opposition fights for long enough and manages to pull off an unlikely victory with the help of some army defectors, then there is a 3% chance that the country will democratise, which is a poor outcome for so much destruction.
Thirdly, in case a rebel army cannot pull off the job and international military intervention is required, then the likelihood of consequent democracy drops to below 3% (Bueno de Mesquita and Downs, 2006), the majority of countries suffer a 33% decline in democracy (Easterly, Satyanath and Berger, 2008), the likelihood of post-war massacres exist (Licklider, 1995; Dixon, 2001; Gurses and Mason, 2008), the war is likely to be longer than it would have been if the intervention had not taken place (Balch-Lindsay and Enterline 2000; Regan 2000, 2002; Elbadawi and Sambanis 2000), and so forth. This is also an awful deal for the amount of destruction. But more importantly, it is not, as anti-imperialists would currently have it, so much worse than a purely local violent revolution, with its 3% chance of success.
For economic leftists and anti-imperialists, I have not come across studies that examined the likelihood of the adoption of a strict IMF-style neoliberal economic program or submission to a US-led world order under each of these three scenarios. Under the second and third international domination is almost certain; the radical destruction and instability that a war brings leave a state with little with which to resist the outsiders who offer them money, military equipment, military training, and so forth. Under the first, like South Africa, Namibia, Angola and many others can testify, a locally-led change does not preclude neoliberalism and its accompanying poverty.
A strong argument can thus be made that a negotiated solution, though in many ways unsatisfactory, remains by far the superior option. People can always re-visit their demands at a later stage and push for further change once enough time has passed to evaluate the initial phase. but, as seen above, mediated negotiations work best to achieve compromise if it is employed early on.
That is what is irritating about being asked: “so what do you suggest should be done now?” It is not what should be done now, it is what should have been done then.
Most of the world’s civil society carries some responsibility for not wanting negotiations in the early stages of the Syrian conflict. It has become quite fashionable for the political left and the right and everything in-between to claim that one should not negotiate with a regime that is killing its own people. Further, the spectator-sport aspect of these uprisings makes us cheer on our team towards their goal, instead of pausing and reflecting on what would work best to achieve that goal. That is also partly responsible for the protest movements’ prioritising vulnerable demonstrations over workers’ strikes and other forms of non-cooperation. After all, how would al-Jazeera cover a workers’ strike and how can it give rise to dramatic YouTube videos?
Responsibility is shared by world governments who generally overlooked the idea of mediation, from the start supported the opposition who refused to negotiate, and heavily criticised the government even though it was more or less prepared to negotiate. If the majority of world countries or the more powerful countries support a movement that will not negotiate, then they are paving the route to violence. And since less militaristic countries’ evidence-based position hinges on the negotiations that have then been ruled out, they can do nothing to prevent the violence.
The question should accordingly not be whether we will fulfill our responsibility to protect the Syrian people. The question should be why we have already failed to fulfill that responsibility. And while we are at it, we should remember to accept some of the blame which everyone is now so furiously piling on China and Russia.
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Balch-Lindsay, D., & Enterline, A. (2000). Killing Time: The World Politics of Civil War Duration, 1820-1992. International Studies Quarterly, 4 (4), 615-642.
Balch-Lindsay, D., Enterline, A., & Joyce, K. (2008). Third Party Intervention and the Civil War Process. Journal of Peace Research, 45(3), 345-363.
Bueno de Mesquita, B., & Downs, G. W. (2006). Intervention and Democracy. International Organization, 60(3), 627-649.
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Downes, A. B. (2010). Catastrophic Success: Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and Civil War. Unpublished Working Paper. Duke University.
Downes, A. B., & Monten, J. (2010). FIRCed to be Free: Foreign-Imposed Regime Change and Democratization. Unpublished Working Paper.
Easterly, W., Satyanath, S., & Berger, D. (2008). Superpower Interventions and their Consequences for Democracy: An Empirical Inquiry (Working Paper): National Bureau of Economic Research.
Elbadawi, I., & Sambanis, N. (2000). External Interventions and the Duration of Civil Wars: World Bank Development Economic Research Group.
Gent, S. E. (2005). The Strategic Dynamics of Military Intervention. University of Rochester, Rochester.
Gleditsch, N. P., Christiansen, L. S., & Hegre, H. (2004). Democratic Jihad? Military Intervention and Democracy. Paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Meeting.
Gurses, M., & Mason, D. (2008). Democracy Out of Anarchy: The Prospects for Post-Civil-War Democracy. Social Science Quarterly, 89(2), 315 336.
Kuperman, A. J. (2008). The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention: Lessons from the Balkans. International Studies Quarterly, 52, 49-80.
Licklider, R. (1995). The Consequences of Negotiated Settlements in Civil Wars, 1945-1993. The American Political Science Review, 89(3), 681-690.
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I am going to make some enemies here, but regardless, I shall state my view and see where it goes.
Andrew Adler, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, announced his resignation yesterday after publishing an op-ed that speaks approvingly of the assassination of Barack Obama as a solution to Israel’s “security problems.” Here is the part that offended many.
… give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take
his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.Yes, you read “three” correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type
scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?Another way of putting “three” in perspective goes something like this: How far would you go to save a nation comprised of seven million lives…Jews, Christians
and Arabs alike?You have got to believe, like I do, that all options are on the table.
Offensive to be sure, and certainly a sentiment with which I disagree, but the passion with which he has been hounded to apologise and resign and, especially, keep quiet, strikes me as unacceptable.
The crux of what he said was that it is acceptable to kill in order to achieve one’s political objectives. The American government and its journalistic friends frequently express such sentiments; a good example is the callousness whereby they sentence Pakistani civilians to death as collateral damage of their drone campaign. Another example is their approval of the killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki whom they glibly labelled the “terrorist.” There is hardly any outrage over the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, since the West sees these assassinations as fulfilling a political objective. Western op-ed writers typically call it a campaign necessary to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapons program, even though some of the scientists, such as the latest Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, work at facilities that are under full IAEA inspection and have been verified as non-nuclear weapon sites. Tony Blair happily told the media that he thought a war in Zimbabwe would be appropriate and Palestinian political leaders who are killed by Israel are typically called militants. Even the United Nations is guilty of this type of thinking when they count as militants civilian leaders of the Taleban that are killed by the United States; all that while knowing the political function that the civilian body count serves in the rhetorical war over the war in Afghanistan. On the left, some years ago John Pilger told Democracy Now that the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan might cut back on the type of American militarism that has come to define so much of the world since the 2nd world war.
The only circumstances under which I believe free speech should be curbed, is where there is a likelihood that the speech can trigger a direct and tangible harm. Since the Israeli Mossad is hardly likely to take instructions from an American journalist, the chance that Adler’s comments will trigger such a harm is miniscule. Who knows whether they have been considering such a thing, but they are certainly not going to think it’s a great idea just because Adler has proposed it in an American newspaper.
Commentary magazine and the American antidefamation League have jumped on the bandwagon of critics simply because they are afraid that the incident brings out too clearly a phenomenon they have been trying to deny, namely, the existence of Americans who put Israel’s needs ahead of those of the United States itself. So I shall put their criticism to the side as basically unprincipled, and move on.
The reactionary pretend-intellectual left, however, is as usual incomprehensible to me. Instead of merely disapproving of Adler’s statement and articulating reasons for disagreeing with him, which any intellectual would consider normal behaviour, they seem to make common cause with those who are trying to shut him up. Many readers found, for example, the Guardians cheerleading for killing Libyan conscripts and migrant workers offensive, to which they responded by writing letters to the paper on why they disagreed with its editorial stance. Many of those letters were published and so the intellectual debate could proceed.
There are many reasons for thinking that the debate that Adler started should be allowed to proceed. For one, as mondoweiss pointed out yesterday, assassination in the service of its political goals is by no means a strategy unheard-of in the statist Zionist community. Secondly, it could have opened up a debate on the extent to which Barack Obama is pro-or anti-Israel. It could, thirdly, have forced the Israel firsters to come clean on just how far they would be prepared to go to secure Israel’s interests. It is, thus, an important debate which has now been shut down with our help.
As a radical leftist whose views are often outside the boundaries of mainstream discussion, I am also aware that, in an intellectual environment where some views are disallowed, mine will be some of the first to be judged beyond the bounds of reasonable discussion. The Palestinians, for example, have tried for many years to discuss the merits of a one state solution in Israel-Palestine, but they were called extremist and the necessary debate never managed to get off the ground in the mainstream. In fact, the debate is still not welcome in the mainstream. As both intellectuals and activists, we should thus be careful what methods we use, since they are the same methods that tend to be turned on us.
Before I took my desperately needed sick break, I pledged to comment on the connection between the Occupy Movement and Palestinian rights. While the debate has died down for the moment, and I feel somewhat silly to talk about this all by myself, the discussion will flare up occasionally so long as the Palestinian plight remains unchanged. I will thus have my say anyway.
The question of whether protests like Israel’s J14 and the worldwide Occupy Movement should include Palestinian rights is actually two interconnected questions, which I will try to separate. One question is the pragmatic one of whether the Occupy Movement can address Palestinian rights; that is, can the movement succeed or even survive if it addresses it? The other is the normative question of whether, in principle, the movement should address it.
The pragmatic question typically arises when activists for Palestinian rights point to similarities and links between the economic oppression of the American people and the overall oppression of the Palestinian people, and insist on having the Palestinian issue included. This usually prompts others to express the fear that it will discredit the movement with the broader American citizenry and thereby kill a rights movement that could otherwise have become significant. The normative question, in my view, arises in much uglier circumstances, with activists for Palestinian rights accusing protests and their participants of anything from callousness to Islamophobia to racism to white supremacism if they do not include Palestinian rights.
First, the pragmatic question. With very rough estimates of the size of the Occupy movement placing it at somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Americans, one has to agree that the most important task is to attract new members. A movement that constitutes only roughly 0.01%-0.02% of a society will get absolutely nowhere. Even the Syrians, with approximately 5% (1.1 million of 22 million) of its population constantly participating in protests, are making their painful, slow-motion and suicidal progress only because of the horrific violence of the Assad regime. And the Israelis, with roughly 8%-10% participation, achieved near nothing. Even the Russians are currently managing larger protests than the Americans, and very few pundits think that their campaign against corruption will bring about real change.
Unlike the Syrian case where we simply do not know the amount of support for the regime, or the Israeli case that flared up temporarily while students were on vacation and died down when everyone returned to their work or studies, the Occupy Movement is well-placed to grow. A strong majority of Americans want to raise taxes on those with an annual income of over $250,000, 64% according to a recent McClatchy-Marist poll (68% according to an October Time poll conducted by Abt SRBI. According to the same poll, 80% oppose cuts to the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and just under half support cuts in defence spending (but the fact that 63% of college graduates support it and 61% of non-graduates oppose it suggests that education of the non-graduates could make a difference.) A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 51% support for defence cuts, and a Rasmussen poll found that 48% think the US could cut defence spending without compromising American security.
In October, a CNN/ORC International poll discovered that Americans viewed Wall Street bankers and brokers as greedy (80%), overpaid (77%) and dishonest (65%); a crude collection of views, to be fair, but roughly on the Occupy Movement’s wavelength . That same poll found that 32% of Americans had a favourable view of the Occupy Movement while 29% viewed it negatively. Thus, even though some of their demands have support, the movement itself doesn’t have much.
At approximately that same time, a CBS News/New York Times poll showed that 66% of Americans believed wealth was not distributed fairly while 25% believed it was (a Time poll conducted by Abt SRBI showed 79% VS 17%.) 43% of respondents declared themselves roughly in agreement with the Occupy Movement’s views, while 27% disagreed. But still only 25% said they had a favorable impression of the Occupy Movement, 20% had an unfavorable impression, while 53% didn’t know. To put this more simply, “we think we share your views, but we do not like you much.”
According to a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute (credibility unknown) Americans think that Tea Party (57%) and the Occupy Movement (56%) do not represent their views. These numbers are very different (56% VS the 27% of the CBS/NYT poll) , because the questions discouraged neutral responses (“I’m not sure” or “I don’t care”), and were generally less specific. But with this in mind, it is nevertheless interesting that white evangelicals were the most likely to say the Tea Party shared their values (49%), followed by white mainline Protestants (32%), Catholics (26%), the religiously unaffiliated (19%) and minority Christians (19%). The Occupy Movement drew the strongest support from the unaffiliated (38%), followed by minority Christians (34%), mainline Protestants (30%) and Catholics (29%). And in case anyone doesn’t get the point, a protest movement that appeals mostly to the religiously unaffiliated and minority Christians (and not even strongly at that), is near doomed in the United States.
In a November poll with a fairly small sample size, USA TODAY/Gallup found Americans largely ambivalent or indifferent. 56% called themselves neither supporters nor opponents, and 59% said they didn’t know enough about the movement’s goals to judge. Still, 31% disapproved of the way the protests were conducted; this was just after the New York police cleared the Zuccotti camp which, it can be inferred, won the protesters no sympathy at all.
According to an October Rasmussen poll, 33% of Americans had favourable views of the movement, and 27% unfavourable. A November Quinnipiac University poll found that 30% of American voters viewed the movement favorably, while 39% viewed it negatively.
On the upside, with New York being one of the strongest backbones of American opinion-making, An October Quinnipiac University poll found that 67% of New York City residents approved of the movement with 23% disapproving. Similarly, a November NY1-Marist Poll showed that 44% of New York voters supported the movement, while only 21% supported the Tea Party.
Further, while college graduates are evenly split between support and non-support for the movement, among non-graduates non-supporters outnumber supporters. Information might thus win over some of the undecided. For example, a December Gallup poll, while showing that Americans’ fear of big business has declined relative to their fear of big government, reminded us that historically Americans see big government as a much greater threat than big business. Education might help here, since the majority of Americans seem to miss the necessary inter-relatedness of big government and big business. Under the current economic system, the question hardly even makes sense. Strangely, considering their lower concern about big business, the October Time poll conducted by Abt SRBI showed that 86% of Americans thought that Wall Street had too much influence in Washington and 79% believed that executives of financial institutions responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008 should be prosecuted. A confused bunch, so education might help.
Lastly, a December Pew Poll showed that those who earned under $75,000 a year (thus the vast majority of Americans) and those under the age of 29 (who are the most likely age group to take protest action to the streets) were the most supportive of Occupy.
To summarise this messy group of results: if the Occupy Movement is not mentioned at all, majorities of Americans support what can broadly be called anti-neoliberal economic measures. when Occupy is mentioned and people are asked whether they share some of its goals, that number drops considerably from majorities to sizable minorities. When people are asked about their views of the movement specifically, the number drops even further to between a quarter and a third of the population. David Schlussel and Jacob Albert expressed the frustration more than eloquently here. All this shows how terribly fragile the movement is, but also bears the hope that the potential for growth is high, given the large numbers that support anti-neoliberal measures, such as taxing the wealthy, providing social security and curbing Wall Street’s influence over central government.
Now, given the current fragility of the movement, the inclusion of Palestinian rights as a demand may not put off those who are enthusiastic about the protests or who were at the forefront of it, but it probably will limit the further numbers that the movement is capable of attracting. In other words, the 0.01%-0.02% who are already there probably understand that corporate greed and its control over politics is a sufficiently big issue to protest against, regardless of the political differences that may exist among group members. But the large numbers on which the movement’s success depends are undecided; they are watching and judging and trying to learn.
At this stage, the only way of attracting those large numbers is to exclude controversial issues. This does not mean that they will be excluded permanently, but the movement first needs to pull in supporters that will remain involved regardless of political differences that will crop up among group members. If Egyptians included a secular or a Shariah-based constitution as a central demand of their uprising, or if they included solidarity with the Israeli working class, Mubarak and his NDP would have continued in power. Controversial issues are gradually filtering into protests now, and the continuing protests make it abundantly clear that Egypt can never be stable until it addresses them to the satisfaction of the loud impassioned minority. but it simply could not have started off with, for example, secular and anti-military-influence demands.
The reality of the situation as it now stands is that the inclusion of Palestinian rights will contribute almost nothing to the plight of Palestinians, while it will compromise the rights of Americans and others by breaking up the Occupy Movement. After all, small anti-neoliberalism protests will remove neither neoliberalism nor US support for Israel nor Israel’s appalling treatment of the Palestinians. The contribution to human rights will thus be negative in that it ends the hope of those who suffer under run-away neoliberalism, and for that they would not even be able to show that the Palestinians have benefited.
This is not fair, or moral, or humane. It is heartbreakingly sad for Palestinians and Israelis, and I have little in common with activists that can campaign only for popular causes or for their own rights. Any animal knows how to follow the herd or how to stand up for itself; it is simple instinct and nothing that can be called morally praiseworthy. But unfortunately at this stage that is where US citizens stand.
One cannot fast-track rights campaigns; there are no shortcuts. And while I admit that there is something utterly perverse in advocating that a 63-year campaign for equal rights in Israel-Palestine should not be fast-tracked, one has to plan the future of a campaign based on where one is now, not on where one should have been if the world had been a more just place. And what is this “now” based on which the campaign needs to proceed?
All the following can be found here. I’ll start with the more positive indicators that suggest that the inclusion of Palestinian rights might not kill Occupy.
A November CNN/ORC Poll found that 9% of Americans wanted economic aid to Israel increased, 43% wanted it kept the same, 22% wanted it reduced and 24% wanted it stopped altogether. Thus, 52% to 46% of Americans believe that, notwithstanding Israel’s wealth, and notwithstanding American financial distress, economic assistance to Israel should remain. Before the 2008 meltdown, the breakdown was 59%-36%, so Americans’ views are partly informed by their own difficulties. This might help, for even if the 46% despise those occupiers that support the Palestinian cause, they might stay in the movement to advance their own rights.
According to the same poll, however, 14% of Americans want military aid to Israel increased, 50% want it left the same, 12% want it reduced and 21% want it cut altogether. the economic meltdown did not change people’s views, so the previous conclusion might be too optimistic.
The polls usually cited to show that Americans’ support for Israel is declining are the ones that show that Americans want the US government to remain neutral, instead of backing one side over the other. a May CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll, for example, showed that 32% wanted the US to take Israel’s side, 1% the Palestinians’ side and 65% neither side.
An examination of what they mean by “neutral” is enlightening, though. As we saw above, large majorities want economic and military aid to Israel to remain. According to a November CBS News Poll regarding US support for Israel, 31% of Americans think that it’s too much, 17% too little and 38 just right; thus, by 55% to 31%, Americans are comfortable with the current extreme levels of support. A few days after the 2010 flotilla killings, 40% of respondents to an Ipsos poll expressed support for Israel’s preventing civilian aid missions to Gaza, while 40% disapproved. Since the blockade on Gaza is not even an aspect central to the conflict, like the occupation itself or the violence that the IDF routinely uses, this is not as promising as the 40-40 split first appears.
In January 2009, a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll showed that, by 63%-31%, Americans thought Israel was justified to take action in Gaza, and while 38% thought the level of force was inappropriately high, 57% thought that it was too little or just right. Even worse, 57% of Americans told Ipsos pollsters that they thought Hamas was using excessive force while 18% thought it appropriate. Neutrality, thus, means judging the side that kills almost 1,000 civilians more harshly for excessive force than the side that kills 3. Right, with that cleared up …
44% of respondents told the same pollsters that Hamas was responsible for the assault on Gaza, while 14% held Israel more responsible. In other words, let’s forget about those occupation and blockade things altogether, it’s the rockets that’s the problem. And their suggestion for what the American government should have done? 39% told the Pew Research Center that the US government should support Israel, 38% that they should do nothing, and 9% that they should criticise Israel. One probably needs to be grateful for the 38%, but the suggestion to idly stand by while dozens were being killed every day with US-supplied weapons is hardly a resounding vote for neutrality.
Regarding Americans’ personal attitudes, as opposed to policy preferences, a September CNN/ORC Poll found that 5% of Americans had a very favourable view of the Palestinian people, 24% somewhat favourable, 25% somewhat unfavourable, 14% very unfavourable, and 31% said they hadn’t heard enough. 22% had very favourable views of the Israeli people, 37% somewhat favourable, 13% somewhat unfavourable, 6% very unfavourable, and 21% said they hadn’t heard enough. Thus, 59% viewed Israelis favourably and 29% viewed Palestinians favourably, while 39% viewed Palestinians unfavourably and 19% viewed Israelis unfavourably. In fact, in a January 2009 Ipsos poll, 53% said that they didn’t make a distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people at all.
A September Pew Research Center poll showed that 40% of Americans sympathised more with the Israelis, 10% more with the Palestinians, 3% with both and 21% with neither. Sympathy for Israel was down from 51% in 2009 and 48% in May 2011, but sympathy for the Palestinians was also a bit down with the refugees fleeing to supporting neither or being unsure. The fact that 37% sympathised with Israel in 2005 and 41% in 2003 suggest that, when sympathy for Israel drops, it is temporary with deserters restoring their sympathy soon after. Similarly, a May CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll showed 67% sympathise with Israelis, 16% with Palestinians, 5% with both, and 9% with neither. Gallup has also consistently reached the same findings.
At the very least, the Israel-Palestine issue is intensely polarising, with passionate views in favour and in opposition, and with few managing to remain neutral. It is not the type of issue that families will discuss peaceably at dinner tables without someone taking strong offence, nor is it one that seems to lend itself to friendly disagreements inside the Occupy Movement. Considering the above torrent of data to the contrary, those who think the movement will survive the inclusion of an unpopular cause should come up with supporting information of some kind. If the likelihood of killing the movement has some (imperfect) data behind it, while the likelihood of its survival seems based on hope and blind optimism, the responsible and reasonable must go with the former.
My comment on the Daniel Sieradski incident is that any campaign for rights typically includes elites who are trying to co-opt it, or at least limit where it can go. For example, none of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi Islamists or the so-called liberal secular political leaders in Egypt embraced the working class strikes of the past few months. they supported the protests when the main aim was to remove Mubarak, but split off from the movement when workers’ rights became an explicit demand. Egyptians wisely allowed those individuals concerned with workers rights to campaign for it, but allowed those who didn’t want to push those demands to remain part of the movement. The Occupy Movement has to be on constant guard against being co-opted by the Democratic Party, but while co-option should be resisted, wealthier democrats cannot be excluded or reproached if they remain involved. Zionists are just another type of elite that want to limit where the movement can go. Daniel Sieradski, for example, made his opposition to an Israel potentially run by non-Jews clear enough. the argument that a country should be ruled by one’s own race or religion is offensive and a clear form of elitism, but since many such elites exist in all protests, barring them or treating them with contempt will break up too many potentially successful rights campaigns.
The normative question is whether the protesters are principled if they exclude Palestinian rights, or whether a movement can be principled if it excludes some people’s rights.
One part of the problem with building a real worldwide solidarity movement is the near-monopoly that a small handful of corporates and authoritarian governments have had over the world media. For Westerners, concepts like solidarity movements and working class struggles and even strikes have been dirtied by media’s associating them with the old pre- and post-WW2 Russian authoritarianism (bizarrely so, since it hardly took place there.) For many of those who have lived in authoritarian systems all along, activism and solidarity movements have not up to recently been terms in their behavioural vocabulary at all. This is why mass movements often misunderstand what is required in order to help the 99 percenters in their own countries and across the world.
For example, many Western leftists were horrified when Libyans asked the transnational elites to help them break free of their dictator, precisely because such leftists knew that those elites would save them from Qaddafi in order to take control of them themselves. Or Egyptians were baffled when the Occupy movement offered to send election monitors to Egypt, because they knew that solidarity was supposed to happen between elections when the elected powers refused to rule for the benefit of the masses. Similarly, at this stage many Western activists do not understand that solidarity with the Israeli working class can weaken the system that oppresses both Israelis and Palestinians, and, more to the point, many potential American Occupiers will not understand why the Occupy movement should show solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian population. Media has ensured that these missteps of rights movements and the ignorance of their participants will be inevitable for some time to come.
The availability of the internet as an alternative information system only partially overcomes the media problem. Firstly, there is at least as much inaccurate information on the internet as accurate information, so sending people to the internet for information can at best have a neutral overall effect, and could backfire if people spend their time reading Atlas Shrugs, the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and the like. Secondly, telling a single working mother of 3, among others, to spend hours a day sifting the internet grain from the chaff is unhelpful. Most people do not have the time or inclination. So if people intensely dislike the Palestinians, and reflexively defend Israel, it’s not callousness or Islamophobia or racism or white supremacism, it’s ignorance and misperceptions. Self-imposed ignorance in many cases, but still ignorance.
Furthermore, the normative issue of which rights SHOULD BE excluded and which SHOULD BE included is not a negligible one. As a vegetarian, it is beyond me how the Occupy protesters can fight for their own rights while devouring slaughtered vulnerable animals who are unable to fight for theirs. I think that they are elitist, in that they rate their own species’ enjoyment of a meal above another species’ right to life. Activists for Palestinian rights who do not also wish to have animal rights included in the protests are also elitists because of the speciecism that this entails, and so are those who judge racist Occupy participants negatively but overlook speciecist ones.
The very fact that I cannot write this paragraph without opening myself up to ridicule should prove that the choice of which rights should be included and which excluded is not a choice based on high principle, but on the pragmatic consideration of how far our societies are capable of widening the moral circle. Today education about animal rights mostly invites ridicule, hopefully by the 2050s education will be welcomed and by the 2100s animal rights will be a majority concern. Similarly, US citizens were closed to being educated about Palestinian rights in 1980, today education and limited campaigning are possible but widespread campaigning is not. Few vegetarians habitually pore scorn on speciecists who eat animals for their own enjoyment, firstly because most of us were in that group some years ago, and secondly because I at least understand that people go so far as they are able to go in their current circumstances.
The BDS campaign is an education tool with great potential. With the progress in the decentralisation of the media that the internet has brought, and the citizens’ journalism that it has made possible, more people can now access information that was hidden before. Advertisements on busses, letters to pressure the media for more accurate and just coverage, the public naming and shaming of congressmen and corporates, appeals against corporates at the European Court for Human Rights, flotillas which force media coverage of Gaza’s social/financial indicators, fly-ins that force media coverage of limitations on visits to Palestinian areas, International Solidarity Movement participation in protests and olive harvesting that makes it impossible for media to ignore soldier and settler violence, the donation of money to Palestinian rights or education campaigns, the organisation of protests; all that can make a difference. But campaigning is a hard, long, laborious slog and it requires thousands of serious volunteers whose lives are almost entirely consumed (and in many cases destroyed) by their activism. Unfortunately, up to the last 5 years, almost none of the above was taking place in the US, and there is limited progress that one can make in 5 years.
Some Occupy protesters are concerned that the inclusion of support for Palestinian rights may draw anti-Semitism charges and accordingly compromise their appeal with greater American society. They thus want to exclude it completely.
I, however, think that the Occupy movement should neither include nor exclude solidarity with the Palestinian struggle from their protests. Some of its members will express support for Palestinian rights, others will disagree. That is healthy. It reflects the range of views that one should find in both the rank-and-file and the leadership of any functional democracy that respects freedom of speech. Those whose voices are silenced and issues are excluded will leave. By definition, Occupy’s insistence on consensus among protesters will exclude unpopular minorities’ concerns. Gay and lesbian solidarity won’t be safe in Christian America, neither will support for Muslim Americans who have suffered considerable levels of hatred in the past decade. The healthiest position to adopt is therefore to require consensus on the issues at the core of the movement, like a campaign for corporate taxation, and to leave the issues closer to the periphery undecided. In an ideal world solidarity with the 99% across the world would be a core rather than a periphery issue, but in our current divided world the best we can do is to allow smaller numbers to show solidarity, and work towards educating the rest.
One thing that one cannot do, however, is to hold the plight of millions of the world’s poor and starving and dying hostage to the prejudices or ignorance of America’s majority. One cannot tell them that they simply have to stay hungry or die without health care until we have worked out a way of drowning out the skewed israel-palestine coverage by the corporate-funded media. that would be nothing that can qualify as a human rights campaign. It would bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the attitude of statist Zionism itself, whereby “our rights supersede those of other groups because our suffering has been so great.” Most importantly, it is likely to be the kind of thing that would horrify leftist/socialist Palestinians to the core.
If single-issue activists like some Mondoweiss readers insist that #Palestine be included in every protest, nothing will ever improve for anyone anywhere. I live in Gaza part-time and cannot love the people more. I’m disappointed that the Occupy Movement does not include them. But neoliberal economic measures are killing millions, many of them Americans and Europeans, a lot more of them my suffering African cousins. Idealism shouldn’t collapse into support for a strategy whereby no injustices are removed unless all injustices are removed. The ultimate goal should be to remove all injustices, of course, but that struggle will involve different stages each of which attracts different participants. By insisting that all the stages should include all injustices and involve all the people, and by demanding that currently unpopular causes be included at the risk of de-railing each necessary stage of the overall struggle, one is essentially voting for the status quo, for no social justice movement would be able to get off the ground. The civil rights struggles of American LGBT and black communities, for example, would have been stillborn.
John Galsworthy once said, “idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.” Accordingly, the relatives of those 82,000 Americans that die of treatable illnesses every year (according to a Commonwealth Fund study) are more likely to understand the fatality of this type of idealism than ones typical Western liberal is. So are the 62% of America’s bankrupt who had to apply for bankruptcy due to medical bills. So are the 1.6 million homeless American children or the 49.1 million Americans who live below the poverty line. The horrors that obtain in so-called developing countries are too bloodcurdling for any statistic to capture. The most idealist position is that protest movements should address the rights of all oppressed people, but those whose suffering can potentially be alleviated by a less inclusive movement cannot afford to disparage such movements.
Even if Palestinians are excluded from the Occupy protests’ solidarity list, we can take heart from some of its potential consequences. If protests manage to weaken neoliberalism, the Palestinian struggle can benefit in various ways.
Since the super wealthy might end up paying much higher taxes, fewer of them will throw their remaining money at American congressmen and Israeli settlements, partly because they will have less money, and partly because the system might be revise so as to prevent that politicians supply favourable policies in exchange for money.
Secondly, South Africa’s black citizens unfortunately discovered that political power means preciously little in a system where politics operate in the shadow of the greater power of money. Many black South Africans claim that they are financially worse off than during apartheid. Unemployment and under-employment (about 40%), poverty (about 50%), adult literacy (about 85%-90%) and the Gini coefficient of inequality (about 0.66-0.67) have remained approximately the same as under the apartheid system. Life expectancy is now substantially lower (64 VS 52 years) and miraculously infant mortality is down from roughly 60 to just under 50 per 1000 live births.1 A Palestinian neoliberal state will give Palestinians political rights, but only a small number of them will be financially comfortable while the vast majority will continue to suffer. Moreover, as South Africans can testify, international funding and civil society support are likely to be cut once the Israeli occupation ends, even if a neoliberal state leaves Palestinians even worse off. Addressing worldwide neoliberalism will thus translate into benefits for the Palestinians.
Further, since one of the pillars of the Occupy Movement is anti-imperialism and anti-American militarism, and since much of the US’s support for Israel is motivated by Israel’s usefulness as an arm of the American military-industrial complex, the movement can chip away at the leverage that Israel has over the US. Civil society Anti-apartheid campaigning paid off only when governments implemented sanctions and when foreign banks called in their loans to South Africa, and they could do that mostly because the world system changed with the approaching collapse of the Soviet Union, which ended the West’s need for a strong ally in Southern Africa. Such strong official measures are inconceivable so long as the US needs Israel. That’s why European countries have been uselessly spewing out critical verbal statements for decades while diligently refusing to act.
More broadly, a movement that intends to break down the worldwide political power of the super-wealthy needs to take off in the country with the most wealthy people before it can effectively spread to the South American, African and Asian continents where it is needed the most. Canada, Australia and Britain are playing an apparently permanent “monkey sees, monkey does” game with the United States, so a successful movement in the US will make it difficult for them to resist. European governments will similarly be overwhelmed, especially given their generally more politically involved citizens and their history of state welfare. According to recent reports by the Bank of China, Bain & Company and the China Merchants Bank, about 60% of China’s wealthy have moved, are moving, have applied or are trying to move, to the US, Canada or Singapore. they variously cite the higher-quality education available for their children overseas, better healthcare, concerns about the security of their assets on the mainland and hopes for a better life in retirement. China seems, according to its own wealthy, not to coddle them enough.
African and South American countries risk losing all international investment by rejecting neoliberalism; Venezuela is a good example. This is not a movement that can succeed unless it first succeeds in the country with the most wealthy people. But if it succeeds there, it can succeed very big everywhere.
1. Michael Savage, “The Cost of Apartheid”, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, Apr 1987. D. Lachman, “Economic Challenges Facing South Africa”, Finance and Development, Vol. 29, No. 2, 1992. The 2011 reports on South Africa by Data Monitor PLC and Political Risk Services.
I have many thoughts on the issue of the Occupy movement and the inclusion or exclusion of Palestinian rights, which I will post as soon as time and health allow.
As a run-up to that post, Mondoweiss came close to committing one of my intellectual pet hates today, so a post on that is in order.
The false consensus effect is our tendency to project our own beliefs and attitudes onto others, which gives us a sense of exaggerated support for our views and attitudes. For example, while it is terribly obvious to anyone with a minimal knowledge of polling results that the Occupy movement will place itself at risk of alienating mainstream Americans if it includes Palestinian rights in the protests, people in the Palestine solidarity campaign seem to think that this is a dubious assumption.
Mondoweiss has been a firm proponent of the need for the Occupy movement to include Palestinian rights. In fact, like with the J14 economic justice protests in Israel, Mondoweissers frequently imply that no social justice protest can be truly worthy or even effective if it does not include Palestinian rights.
Today it ran a statement from Jewish Voice for Peace-NY, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice and Jews Say No! titled, “Occupy movement cannot silence itself on Israel/Palestine”. The statement says the following:
As Jewish-American organizations, we regret that right wing media outlets, organizations, and individuals have tried to undermine the Occupy Movement with unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism.
We have been particularly concerned to see the conflation of anti Semitism with criticism of Israel. Anti-Semitism is an expression of bigotry while criticism of Israel, just like an anti-capitalist or an anti-war statement, is an expression of a political position. It is important to maintain this distinction between bigotry against an ethnic or religious group and criticism of a state or its policies and actions. The Occupy space has been a consistent venue for expressions of non-violent resistance to economic injustice and other forms of government oppression, including solidarity for the occupied people of Palestine. As Jewish-Americans who endorse the goals of OWS and are committed to the struggle for justice in Israel-Palestine, we believe it would be an egregious double standard to ask the Occupy movement, which has so admirably raised the call for justice and freedom around the world, to silence itself when it comes to Israel Palestine. Instead, we seek to ensure that space is created at OWS to speak about Israel-Palestine when appropriate and that this space is a welcoming, safe space for all people.
Both prior to, and now within the Occupy movement, Jewish Voice for Peace-NY, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Jews Say No! have worked to promote justice and peace in Israel-Palestine and greater understanding of all forms of oppression. There have indeed been criticisms issued of Israel’s domestic and foreign policy at Occupy Wall Street, linked to the larger protests against the costly war mongering and corporate impunity that have bankrupted the US both financially and morally. These linkages include the way that the military-industrial complex hurts our economy domestically and engages in unnecessary and immoral wars while supporting the occupation of other peoples, including the Palestinians. Forging such connections is very much in keeping with the spirit of Occupy Wall Street.
JVP-NY, JFREJ, and JSN! denounce the idea that open debate about Israeli policies or solidarity with Palestinians is a sign of anti Semitism. We continue to be inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movements across the country and the world. We are committed to continuing our work together as part of these movements for justice and dignity.
In this statement, I read a concern about the media’s conflation of antisemitism and criticism of Israel. I also read a commitment on the part of these organisations to remain involved in the Occupy movement and to express solidarity with the Palestinian struggle while doing so. It is not obvious to me that Mondoweiss would have chosen its article title if it had not already held a strong view on the issue, however. Some of the comments, similarly, make it clear that the statement has been misread.
“Occupy movement cannot silence itself on Israel/Palestine” seems very strong to me. These Jewish organisations are not saying that OWS cannot be silent on Palestinian rights, or that OWS should include it. They’re saying, given who else and what else is included in the Occupy movement, those that raise the Palestinian rights issue shouldn’t be silenced by the movement or passed off as antisemites by the media.
“Individual members shouldn’t be silenced” and “the movement cannot silence itself on” are very different things. The former implies that some people should be allowed to include it if they like, whereas the latter heads towards prescribing it for the movement as a whole. The former says that the Palestinian rights issue is consistent with the demands of the protesters. The latter says that one cannot/shouldn’t push these other demands without including the palestinian issue.
This latter position is clearly Mondoweiss’ position, but since the Jewish organisations’ statement doesn’t contain it, Mondoweissers should be careful not to exaggerate the position so that it will fit in with their own.
My views on whether the Occupy movement should or should not include Palestinian rights in the next post.
Judge Richard Goldstone’s latest OpEd in the New York Times is so confused and inaccurate that no intelligent person can take it seriously. He tries to argue that Israel, unlike former South Africa, is not an apartheid state, neither inside Israel nor in the West Bank – Gaza was not mentioned.
His one argument is that Israel cannot be an apartheid state because, unlike former South Africa, it allows Palestinians to vote, to hold senior legal and political office, and so forth. as I have said numerous times before, people who put forward this argument always neglect to mention the mass 1948 and post-1948 expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and the occupied territories. In 1948, Israel and South Africa were both trying to answer the same question: “we are a minority in this territory, as a minority we want to rule, how can we go about it?” South Africa responded by denying the majority political rights, Israel responded by expelling the majority so they would not have to deny them political rights. Both of these are utterly vile strategies; contra Goldstone, Israel has no moral high ground here.
If his argument is to be taken seriously, then South Africa’s problem was not that it was white supremacist or discriminatory, but that it was stupid. If white South Africans imported migrant workers from abroad and sent the vast majority of its black people to the Bantustans, and South Africans held their noses and put up with the small number of remaining blacks, the details of the apartheid system would have differed, but the spirit and the underlying aims would have been identical.
Some may want to argue that we cannot call Israel an apartheid state because of something it did in 1948; that we should judge it by how it handles its non-Jewish population now. But the point is precisely that those same discriminatory aims dictate their policies today. The refusal to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their historic homes is something they are doing today, not just something that they did in 1948. All wars create refugees, but if those refugees are refused the right to return 10 or 20 or 60 years after the war, then we call it ethnic cleansing. There are well understood reasons why Israel perpetrates this ongoing ethnic cleansing; the United States and Europe even support it.
The expulsion did not even cease in 1948, so Israel’s defenders cannot argue that the expulsion occurred in conditions of war only. 130,000 of the approximately 140,000 Syrians were expelled from the Golan heights in 1967 and 1968, the vast majority of them after the 6-day war. That was all consistent with Rehavam Ze’evi, then a general at the IDF General Command under then IDF chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin, who specified in a War Room meeting on 9 June 1967 that they wanted the Golan Heights delivered “clean of its residents.” Israel is currently expelling approximately 5,000 Palestinians from East Jerusalem every year by preventing Palestinians who work or study abroad from returning. They expelled 140,000 from the West Bank alone between 1967 and 1994. It is actions like these that allow Israel to grant its Palestinian population rights.
One can, of course, try to find differences in the motivations behind the discriminatory practices and attitudes. For example, the Jewish people are returning to land that they used to inhabit while South Africans didn’t, or the Jews need a safe haven from discrimination elsewhere while the South Africans didn’t. I won’t discuss the merits of those arguments here. For the purpose of this post, it suffices to say that, even if some of the motivations behind the discrimination in the two cases differ, let’s not pretend that the one is systematic discrimination against a specific nationality/ethnic group while the other isn’t. whatever merits the concept of a Jewish state possesses or lacks, the treatment of the Palestinians has always been discriminatory and will have to continue to be discriminatory.
Judge Goldstone also judged Israel favourably against South Africa on the grounds that Israeli hospitals and ambulances serve all its citizens while many South African black people died without health care. It is not unreasonable to assume that Goldstone is fully aware that many West Bank Palestinians die while waiting at check points; he certainly knows that people in Gaza die due either to a lack of medical equipment or to prompt passage out for medical care elsewhere. UNICEF’s 2010 report on Israel-Palestine, for example, stated that 4 children under the age of 3 died while waiting for permits to leave Gaza for medical treatment during the year.
He defended the West Bank wall as a non-apartheid measure, calling it a necessary security measure against Palestinian attacks on Israelis. But in the Goldstone report he approvingly quoted the judgment of the International Court of Justice that ruled that the wall was aimed at annexing Palestinian land, not at proportionately preventing attacks on Israelis (Par 1579, for example.) If he has discovered evidence based on which he has changed his mind since 2009, evidence that made him think that the ICJ’s judgment may have been wrong, he didn’t mention it in the OpEd.
In the Goldstone report, judge Goldstone expressed the concern that the measures that Israel was undertaking in East Jerusalem, in the West Bank and between the West Bank and Gaza were aimed at removing Palestinians from East Jerusalem, splitting the West Bank from Gaza and making Israel’s control over the West Bank permanent (Pars 1579-1583, for example.) In the OpEd, however, he differentiates between apartheid South Africa and Israel based on the supposed fact that apartheid South Africa was meant to be permanent while Israel’s measures in the occupied territories are not. This contradicts his statements in the Goldstone report, but it is also becoming difficult to understand why people continue to believe this.
Israel’s defenders, including Goldstone in the OpEd, typically cite its verbal willingness to grant a Palestinian state as a reason for concluding that the discriminatory system in the occupied territories is temporary. But the settlements most certainly are not temporary, and they are built on land that is meant to be part of that Palestinian state. The continued expulsion of Palestinians is not temporary either, since they will not be allowed to return. So people like the OpEd version of Goldstone are allowing Israel to make permanent changes and then defend their discriminatory system as temporary. The Goldstone report version of Goldstone understands this. In paragraph 1579, for example, he notes that the settlements violate the “prohibition on the occupying Power of changing the nature and legal status of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (art. 55 of the Hague Regulations.”)
The one problem is thus that Israel is making permanent changes that its defenders are calling temporary measures. The other problem is that they allow Israel to permanently claim that its measures are temporary. Formal apartheid in south Africa existed for 46 years between 1948 and 1994 (and almost no apartheid measures were followed between 1990 and 1994.) Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has entered its 45th year, and its discriminatory expulsions and refusal to allow refugees to return have been going on for 63 years. At some point intelligent people need to realise that the situation is permanent, regardless of what the discriminating agents say it is.
Professor John Dugard once expressed it like this:
The major difference I see between South Africa’s apartheid system and what prevails in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is that the South African apartheid regime was more honest We had a rigid legal system which prescribed in great detail how discrimination was to occur and how it was to be implemented. … In the case of Israel, it is concealed.
Once again, if the OpEd version of Goldstone is to be taken seriously, the problem with South Africa was not that it was white supremacist and discriminatory, but that it was stupid enough to acknowledge that the system was permanent.
In the Goldstone report judge Goldstone accepted that there was a high likelihood that Jewish and Arab protesters inside Israel were treated differently by the security forces (1748, 1798), but in the OpEd he tries to deny systematic discrimination against Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Not quite contradictory, but heading there.
All these contradictions cast doubt on whether he even believes what he wrote in the OpEd. Why he is writing them is not worth speculating on, but since it is work of extremely low intellectual quality, and since he seems to be defending things he doesn’t believe himself, I will not comment on any of his OpEds again.
The debate of whether or not Israel practices apartheid is certainly one worth having. I tend not to call it an apartheid state, because I understand the differences between the two cases too well to allow me to gloss over them, and the most widely understood definition of the word is still the South African version, not the broader UN version. But a system that deliberately and systematically discriminates against a group based on ethnicity and religion is an abhorrent system, regardless of what it is called.
Israeli academic Lev Luis Grinberg took on this question in an excellent paper in the International Journal of Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, 2009, “Speechlessness: In Search of Language to Resist the Israeli ‘Thing Without a Name.’” He thinks that there is “no single word able to comprehend the phenomenon of constant dispossession, violent repression, and righteous blaming of Palestinian resistance as terror.” He thinks that the system is only partly captured by existing words like occupation, Apartheid, colonialism, and Zionism, or by new inventions like ethnocracy, politiciside, Bantustine, spaciocide, sociocide, or symbolic genocide. here are some paragraphs from it, the whole paper is very much worth reading:
The thing is not apartheid, in which one particular group is marked, separated, and stripped of its collective rights. In such cases, the political goal is clear and agreed upon: one man-one vote, namely the dismantling of the racist regime and the provision of equal rights and democracy. But the Thing Without a Name distinguishes between different groups of Palestinians, some of which live in conditions that are more favorable than apartheid. These are the Palestinian citizens of Israel, whose limited civil and political rights enable them to advance democratic demands for full equality. Each of the other Palestinian groups has different demands stemming from its unique conditions: those living outside the borders of Israeli control demand the right of return; those living under military rule demand independent statehood; and those imprisoned within the Gaza Strip demand control over their borders. This division of the Palestinian people into subgroups keeps them from waging a united national struggle for independence.
…
Neither is the thing an occupation. An occupation regime is the result of war and under international law is defined as temporary. If it were clear that this was a case of belligerent occupation, the international community would be obligated to put the Israeli government leadership on trial, as most of its actions are prohibited under international law. This is true of the establishment of settlements; collective punishment; house demolitions; restrictions on movement; the construction of the separation barrier; and the killing of civilians and political leaders. If either international or Israeli public opinion viewed Israeli control in “the territories” as an occupation, then acts of Palestinian resistance would need to be considered legitimate, and not acts of “terrorism.”
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This is not exactly a case of colonialism, because there is no civilizing project. Israel does not intend to “modernize” the Palestinians, and is not converting them or transforming them into good citizens. In contrast to colonial regimes which attempt to profit from their control of distant regions, Israel neither invests “there” in roads or infrastructure for the “local population” nor establishes “there” enterprises that complement the Israeli economy. In fact, the opposite is true. It destroys infrastructure, buildings, and factories. However, the first and foremost difference between the Thing Without a Name and colonialism is the fact that Israel is separated from the “the territories” by neither sea nor border. Furthermore, there are no separate state apparatuses serving as a device of colonial control. As a result, there is nothing to facilitate an anti-colonial struggle aimed at expulsion of the foreign rulers, decolonization, and the creation of a post-colonial situation.
It is also not a case of “colonization,” as there is no complete displacement of the Palestinian population as in Australia; no mass killing, as was the case in the USA; and no incorporation of the local population through the subordination of its existing framework, as in North and South Africa and South and Central America. If things had taken such a course, it would have been possible to struggle for democracy and equal rights with the European settlers, as in South Africa, or for independence and the expulsion of the settlers, as in Algeria. The blurring of the border and the division of the Palestinians into subgroups are salient features of the Thing Without a Name which prevent the struggle for liberation, as the result is that there is not only one regime to oppose.
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They (These words) are easily neutralized by proving them “incorrect” or by using them out of context.