The Sharon Doctrine. By Hussein Ibish.

The Sharon Doctrine. By Hussein Ibish. Foreign Affairs, January 11, 2014. Also here.

Sharon’s Lessons for Israel. By Martin van Creveld. Foreign Affairs, January 11, 2014. Also here.

Did Sharon Want More Withdrawals? By Walter Russell Mead and Staff. The American Interest, January 13, 2014.


Ibish:

For most Arabs, no Israeli in history is more synonymous with violence and Israeli expansionism than Ariel Sharon. His name quickly conjures the worst massacres, deepest pro-settlement fanaticism, and most extreme nationalistic provocations in the Palestinian bill of particulars against Israel. Less readily appreciated by most Arabs is the complexity of Sharon’s legacy and the important lessons, both positive and negative, his final policies suggest for peace.

 

For most of his life, Sharon was the epitome of what has been called “gun Zionism”: the notion that Jewish Israelis have a kill-or-be-killed relationship with the Arabs, and above all the Palestinians, surrounding them. He spent most of his professional life armed, first as a teenager in the Jewish underground under the British mandate in 1942, and then as a Haganah fighter in the so-called “Battle for Jerusalem” in the fall of 1948. Sharon quickly earned a reputation as a maverick best suited for missions that required ruthlessness – before long, he was placed in charge of Israel’s early “special operations” Unit 101.

 

This group eventually specialized in tit-for-tat raids with Palestinian guerrilla groups, which often resulted in civilian deaths on both sides. The most notorious of these was the Qibya massacre in 1953 when troops under Sharon’s command attacked a West Bank village and killed 69 Palestinians, two thirds of whom were women and children. Sharon later wrote that he had believed that the civilians had already fled the village when their homes were destroyed, although contemporaneous documents cast doubt on that account. Sharon told his troops the purpose of the attack was “maximal killing and damage to property,” and reports from both the Israeli military and UN observers are consistent with a deliberate effort to kill civilians as opposed to Sharon’s version.

 

In Israel's conventional wars with Arab armies, Sharon was generally regarded as an effective, but unpredictable and undisciplined, commander. But the Israeli public was quick to lionize his performance in the 1973 war, during which he was credited with creative maneuvers that defeated Egypt’s Second and Third Armies on the crucial southern front. National fame led to a political career, and in 1981, Sharon became Israeli Minister of Defense.

 

That made Sharon Israel’s de facto commander-in-chief during the country’s invasion of Lebanon. In September 1982, Sharon’s forces facilitated and, in effect, permitted a large massacre of Palestinian civilians by Lebanese Christian militias at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps under Israeli control. Although Lebanese carried out the actual killings, the Israeli government in general, and Sharon in particular, are almost universally considered by to be responsible. As Israel’s defense minister at the time, the troops controlling the camps were under his direct command. Israel’s own Kahan Commission of official inquiry into the massacre held the Israeli military “indirectly responsible” for the massacre and found that Sharon “bears personal responsibility” for not anticipating the entirely predictable killing or taking any measures to stop it. The Commission recommended his removal from office.

 

The bodies piled up in Sabra and Shatila irrevocably defined Sharon’s reputation for Arabs and many others. For almost two decades, his political career languished on the margins. But, as memories faded, he clawed his way back into favor, cultivating a growing constituency on the ultra-nationalist right during the first premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Succeeding Netanyahu as head of the Likud party, Sharon proved that he had maintained his talent for provocation. In September 2000, Sharon, accompanied by large numbers of police officers and some Israeli extremists, marched through the Haram Al-Sharif complex, also known as the Temple Mount, and declared that the holy Muslim sites there would remain under permanent Israeli control.

 

In most Palestinian and Arab narratives, this is considered the beginning of the second intifada. Standard Israeli narratives, by contrast, hold that Palestinian President Yasser Arafat launched it through deliberate Palestinian violence after the failure of the Camp David summit in the previous summer. Both versions are contradicted by the definitive Mitchell Commission Report, which cites instead Israeli border police use of live fire against Palestinians at same holy site a few days after Sharon’s visit. But if Sharon was trying to provoke an incident, as the Mitchell Report strongly implies, he certainly succeeded.

 

The subsequent explosion of the Second Intifada propelled Sharon, at long last, into the premiership, in February 2001. His attitude towards the conflict was tough by Israeli standards (and even by Sharon’s own standards) and ensured that many more Palestinian civilians perished than Israelis. Yet as he was confronting, perhaps for the first time in his career, a conflict that clearly had no military solution, he endorsed, with some reservations, the U.S.-led Roadmap for Peace in 2003. And, in 2004, Sharon explicitly acknowledged the need for a Palestinian state. He even started referring forthrightly to the Israeli “occupation” of Palestinian lands, something most Israeli right-wingers rarely admit.

 

Sharon was shifting. But why? In general, Israeli leaders who have gone from being pro-occupation to supportive of Palestinian statehood have been impelled by the same factor: demographics. Sharon was no more able to answer what Israel was to do with 4.5 million occupied Palestinians – men and women whom it could neither incorporate nor peacefully dominate – than his predecessors. The only viable conflict-ending solution was a Palestinian state.

 

Sharon was not the Israeli leader who would make a final peace agreement with the Palestinians. But he did take a major step, the implications of which Palestinians and Israelis alike cannot underestimate: he evacuated settlements in both Gaza and the northern West Bank. Sharon did not do this in the interests of peace. He did it as an Israeli national imperative, and a way to resolve a strategic liability. Sharon's action is sometimes erroneously described as a “withdrawal” from Gaza, but Sharon more accurately termed it a “unilateral redeployment.” In other words, Sharon’s shift was not one towards an agreement with the Palestinians, but rather towards increased Israeli unilateralism. His action was entirely pursuant to Israeli interests and conducted without any agreement on the Palestinian side.

 

In his unexpected action, Sharon faced and overcame substantial resistance from the settlement movement in Israel. By explaining why the evacuation was a strategic and military necessity, he ultimately mobilized the support of a large Israeli majority. Indeed, the experience led him to leave the Likud and form a new center-right party, Kadima, shortly before the stroke that incapacitated him. Several Israeli journalists have suggested that Sharon was anticipating repeating a larger withdrawal in the West Bank should he become Kadima’s first prime minister.

 

There are two crucial lessons to be drawn from Sharon’s last major action and final legacy, one positive, the other negative. On the positive side, Sharon demonstrated that settlements can, in fact, be evacuated. Because of his actions, it is no longer even possible to ask whether the Israeli government is capable of dismantling settlements. The questions are simply when and where they will choose to do so. And that means that none of the existing settlements and other demographic, infrastructural, topographic, or administrative changes Israel enforces in the occupied territories should be regarded as irreversible. The implications of this for the prospects of a two-state solution are profound.

 

On the negative side, Sharon yet again demonstrated that unilateralism between Israel and the Palestinians is a dead-end that only produces more conflict. Unilateral acts do not leave a party on the other side that has entered into a mutual agreement for its own reasons and therefore has a stake in making things work. It would have been wiser for Palestinians to have responded to the Gaza redeployment differently – in the event, they allowed Gaza to fall into the hands of Hamas rather than reflecting a well-functioning and properly-governed society. But Israel did not give them any clear incentive to see the action as an opportunity for progress. Exactly the same can be said of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, which was as unilateral as its various invasions of that country had been.

 

Israelis should consider this when they complain that their “withdrawals” from Lebanon and Gaza were “rewarded” with rocketfire from Hezbollah and Hamas. To conclude that Arabs are recalcitrant or that agreements with them are impossible is to badly misread the reality of such policies. What unilateralism produces is a change in the context of conflict, not an end to it. The same would almost certainly apply to any Israeli unilateral action, as reportedly contemplated by Sharon, in the West Bank.

 

One need only contrast the track record of unilateralism with that of mutual agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The peace treaty with Jordan is rock solid, and that with Egypt has survived the transitions from Anwar Sadat to Hosni Mubarak to military rule to Mohamed Morsi and now the new, interim Egyptian government, entirely unscathed. Even the armistice with Syria has been largely satisfactory from the Israeli point of view.

 

The real legacy of Israel’s most famous and notorious practitioner of “gun Zionism” was to simultaneously demonstrate that the government of the State of Israel is, despite all its doubts, capable of overriding the settler movement in the greater national interest, but also that if it does so unilaterally, it will be a dead-end. Whether Sharon himself would have come to see this by now, or would have clung to a vision of unilateralism – as so many on the Israeli right are increasingly coming to embrace – we cannot know. But, even if he never got the chance to draw the right conclusions from the unsatisfactory consequences of his final policies, the rest of us can, and must, act on their implications.

The “Clash of Civilizations” That Never Was. By Leon Hadar.

The “Clash of Civilizations” that never was. By Leon Hadar. Haaretz, January 13, 2014. Also here.

Hadar:

A famous 1992 claim that the clash between Western civilization and Islam would be the new global battleground has ultimately proved wide off the mark.

 

For several years, there was a feeling among some Western intellectual elites that the “Clash of Civilizations” predicted by political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1992 had indeed come to pass. The attack on the Twin Towers in New York, the struggle against Islamic terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among others, appeared to confirm the Harvard professor’s claim that the clash between Western civilization and Islam would lie at the center of international relations following the end of the Cold War.

 

The rise of China as a competing power with the United States, economically and militarily, also fit Huntington’s thesis of a future global struggle between a declining West and East Asian civilization, with China at its core.

 

Yet today, Huntington’s predictions are depicted as nothing more than a brilliant intellectual exercise. Huntington may have been right when he determined that ethnic, religious and cultural identities would fuel the awakening of new political conflicts. But contra his thesis, most of these struggles now take place within the framework of the large super cultures. Instead of these cultures creating superregional and global frameworks, the different cultural identities are creating political fissures in different nation-states.

 

Middle Eastern countries are unlikely to unify under the rule of a single Islamic caliphate in the near or distant future. If it were possible to define any one thing as lying at the center of Muslim civilization today, it would have to be the stubborn struggle between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims – with Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively, leading the two rival camps.

 

This struggle is creating political splits in Iraq, Syria and Bahrain, as well as counterresponses from secular forces in Turkey and Egypt. In Libya and Yemen, old ethnic and tribal conflicts are being revived.

 

China has not become the core state of East Asia unifying the surrounding countries under an anti-Western cultural banner. To the contrary, its efforts to become the dominant regional power have generated a counterresponse from countries such as Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, which are pressuring the United States to continue playing a key role in serving as a brake on China’s strategic ambitions in the region.

 

The conflict most likely to light the fuse of a major regional war in East Asia is not the one between Washington and Beijing, but between Beijing and Tokyo. Both China and Japan are driven by nationalist agendas and territorial struggles.

 

Likewise – and in contrast to Huntington’s predictions – China did not form alliances with radical, anti-Western Islamic countries. Rather, Beijing is working aggressively to suppress the national and religious awakening of its large Muslim minority.

 

Sometimes, it seems that one of the most faithful adherents to Huntington’s thesis is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who tries to present his foreign policy as part of a global cultural struggle.

 

Russia has two roles in this struggle. The first is to represent the Orthodox-Christian legacy of Byzantium and its branches in the Balkans (Serbia) and the Middle East (the Orthodox Christian minorities in Syria) in the face of its historical rivals – Turkey and its Western allies – for control of the region.

 

In its second role, it represents a conservative worldview against the liberal secular values represented by the European Union and the United States, with its opposition to gay rights serving as a symbol of those conservative and traditional values.

 

The real culture war is taking place within Russia, with the conservative elites represented by Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Western-oriented intelligentsia concentrated in the large cities.

 

A similar values-based dichotomy propels a clash of civilizations elsewhere. In the United States, supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement oppose the liberal-democratic coalition. In Turkey, Islamist supporters of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan are arrayed against his secular opponents. In the European Union, those who support a strong centralized union are engaged in struggle with those who oppose it.

 

In Israel as well, the supporters of liberal, cosmopolitan values found in greater Tel Aviv are opposed by the ultra-Orthodox and nationalist camps.

 

Putin’s success in using culture as a tool to strengthen his rule and promote Russia’s strategic interests highlights the dilemma facing those who march under the flag of liberal reform: Enlisting public support is much more effective when you present yourself as someone seeking to defend community members from those seeking to harm its collective identity, whether it is Pan-Slavic Russian, Islamist or Messianic Zionist.

 

This explains the difficult challenge faced by the side trying to defend enlightened universal values in a local clash of civilizations.

Chris Christie’s Conservative Problem. By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Chris Christie’s Conservative Problem. By E.J. Dionne, Jr. Real Clear Politics, January 13, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Dionne:

What is the greatest fear of conservatives when they warn against the dangers of big government? It is that a leader or the coterie around him will abuse the authority of the state arbitrarily to gather yet more power, punish opponents and, in the process, harm rank-and-file citizens whose well-being matters not a whit to those who are trying to enhance their control.

 

This, of course, is a quite precise description of what happened when New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s aides ordered the closure of some access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September. Their motivation was political payback. The result: thousands of commuters along with emergency vehicles, school buses and pretty much the entire town of Fort Lee, N.J., were thrown into gridlock.

 

Using public facilities for selfish ends is the very definition of corruption, which is why this scandal bothers people far outside the conservative orbit. It took months for the episode to hit the big time because so many (the governor claims he’s one of them) had difficulty believing that government officials would act as recklessly as Christie’s gang did — and with such indifference to how their actions would affect the lives of people in northern New Jersey who were bystanders to an insider game.

 

Christie was finally moved to condemn the indefensible only after the smoking gun emerged in the form of e-mails from his staff and his appointees. Their contents reflected a vindictive urge to squelch all resistance to the governor’s political interests.

 

And this is the problem Christie hasn’t solved yet. At his epic news conference Thursday, he focused again and again on how loyal staff members had “lied” to him and how he felt personally victimized. What he never explained was why he did not press his staff earlier for paper trails so he could know for certain that all his vociferous denials were true. He didn’t deal with this flagrant foul until he had no choice. Saying he had faith in his folks is not enough. Christie still has to tell us why he did not treat the possibility of such a misuse of power with any urgency.

 

Even assuming that Christie’s disavowal of complicity holds up, he faces a long-term challenge in laying this story to rest. History suggests that beating back a scandal requires one or more of these assets: (1) a strong partisan or ideological base; (2) overreach by your adversaries; or (3) a charge that doesn’t fit people’s perceptions of you. Christie has trouble on all three fronts.

 

If Christie has a base, it consists of Wall Street donors, a media fascinated by his persona and relative moderation, and some but by no means all members of the non-tea-party-wing of the Republican Party.

 

He does not have the committed ideological core that Ronald Reagan could rely on to overcome Iran-Contra. He does not have the Democratic base that stuck with Bill Clinton during his sex scandal because the excesses of a special prosecutor and then of a Republican House that impeached him came to enrage Democrats even more than Clinton’s misbehavior.

 

What of Christie’s base? Wall Street is fickle and pragmatic. The media can turn on a dime. And the Republican establishment, such as it is, has alternatives. Oh, yes, Christie also has support from some machine Democrats in New Jersey who have made deals with him. But they will be even more pragmatic than Wall Street.

 

Overreach by one’s enemies is always a possibility, but there are no signs of this yet. Christie’s detractors have every reason to take things slowly and methodically. They will enjoy dragging this out.

 

And as has already been widely noted, the Christie operation’s penchant for settling scores is legendary. This charge fits the existing narrative about the guy so well that Christie had to say the words, “I am not a bully.” Denials of this sort usually have the opposite of their intended effect.

 

Christie has one other obstacle, and this may be the most important. A great many conservatives never trusted him, and a tale that plays so perfectly into their critique of government could make things worse. Erick Erickson, the right-wing writer, captured this rather colorfully. People sometimes want a politician to be “a jerk,” Erickson wrote on Fox News’ Web site, but “they want the person to be their jerk,” not a jerk “who tries to make everyone else his whipping boy.”

 

To win Christie some sympathy on the right, defenders such as former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour quickly deployed the GOP’s first-responder technique of attacking “the liberal media.” But liberals are the least of Christie’s problems.

Why Iraq Is in Turmoil. By Fareed Zakaria.

Why Iraq is in turmoil. By Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS, January 11, 2014.

What went wrong in Iraq? Video. Panel with Rashid Khalidi, Richard Haass, Meghan O’Sullivan, and Peter Bergen. Fareed Zakaria GPS, January 10, 2014. Transcript.







Zakaria:

Here’s a startling statistic: more than 8,000 Iraqis were killed in violent attacks in 2013. That makes it the second most violent country in the world, after its neighbor Syria.

 

As violence has spread and militants have gained ground in several Middle Eastern countries, people have been wondering how much this has to do with the Obama administration and its lack of an active intervention in the region. The Wall Street Journal and a Commentary magazine opinion piece have both argued this past week that the Obama administration's decision to withdraw troops from Iraq is directly responsible for the renewed violence in that country. They and others have also argued that because it has stayed out of Syria, things there have spiraled downward.

 

Let me suggest that the single greatest burden for the violence and tensions across the Arab world lies with a president – though not President Obama – and it lies with an American foreign policy that was not too passive but rather too active and interventionist in the Middle East. The invasion and occupation of Iraq triggered what has become a regional religious war in the Middle East. Let me explain how, specifically.

 

From March through June of 2003, in the first months of the occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration made a series of catastrophic decisions. It authorized the disbanding of the Iraqi army and signed onto a policy of deBaathification, which meant that anyone in Iraq who had been a member of the top four levels of the Baath Party – the ruling party under Saddam Hussein – would be barred from holding any government job.

 

This meant that tens of thousands of bureaucrats and hundreds of thousands of soldiers – almost all Sunnis – were thrown out of work, angry, disposed, and armed. This in turn meant the collapse of the Iraqi state and of political order. But it also sparked the rise of a sectarian struggle that persists to this day.

 

The Bush administration went to war in Iraq to spread democracy. But in fact it spread sectarianism – displacing the Sunni elite who had long ruled the country and replacing it with hardline Shia religious parties that used their new found power to repress the Sunnis – just as they had been repressed.

 

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has been utterly unwilling to share power with the Sunnis – who comprise about 20 percent of Iraq – and that has driven them into opposition, extremism, and terrorism. During the surge the prime minister made several promises to change his ways and over the last few years has reneged on every one of them.

 

This sectarian power-struggle is the origins of the civil war that has been ongoing in Iraq for 11 years. It is the cancer that has spread beyond Iraq into other countries, from Syria to Lebanon.

 

The Bush administration seemed to have made the massive strategic error almost unthinkingly. There is for example a report that a few months before the invasion, President Bush met with three Iraqi exiles and appeared unaware that Iraq contained within it Sunnis and Shias. An Arab leader confirmed to me that in his meetings with the president, it was clear that Bush did not understand that there was a difference between the two sects. Others in the administration, better informed, were convinced that the Shia would be pluralists and democrats. Those of us who warned of these dangers at the time were dismissed as pessimists.

 

So if we’re trying to understand why we see a Sunni-Shia battle unfolding across the Middle East, keep in mind that the primary cause is not that the Obama administration didn't intervene in Syria. It’s because the Bush administration did in Iraq.


Panel:

ZAKARIA: Rashid, when you look at all this turmoil brewing in the Middle East, what do you see as the cause?

RASHID KHALIDI, AUTHOR, PROFESSOR OF MODERN ARAB STUDIES, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: Well, there are many causes, but one cause is that you have some sectarian issues that are working themselves out.

Another cause is a whole generation or so of American policies that I think exacerbated things.

A third cause is American alliances with countries that have their own dogs in some of these fights, Saudi Arabia, Israel, others.

Each of these, I think, exacerbates a set of problems.

ZAKARIA: How do you see it, Richard.

RICHARD HAASS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: A big part of the cause, it comes from within Middle East itself. These are societies that have never really dealt with – successfully with modernity.

You’ve never had a clear divide between the religious and the secular. People confuse democracy and majoritarianism. There's not a real sense of minority rights or places in these societies. So all sorts of divides also between governments and individuals.
 
So those issues have never been sort out. It’s, in some ways, the least successful part of the world. And, then, in many ways, I agree, American foreign policy has exacerbated things by removing centers of authority, in many cases, unattractive, but still . . .

ZAKARIA: Right.

HAASS: Centers of authority and not doing things that were needed to put something better or at least enduring in its place.

So we say Assad must go, put pressure on him, but then virtually nothing happens to see that he goes, much less to replace him with something better.

Gadhafi must go, then what? No boots on the ground.

ZAKARIA: Right.
 

HAASS: I’m not saying we should have done boots on the ground, but before the United States starts advocating or pushing for regime change, be it Iraq or Libya or Syria, we need to be sure that we have something we think that's better to go in its place and we are prepared to do the expensive process of putting there.

If not, we had better start thinking twice before we make regime change the default option for American foreign policy.

Omar Barghouti, Founder of BDS: “No Palestinian Will Ever Accept a Jewish State In Any Part of Palestine.”

Omar Barghouti on “ethical decolonization” and moving beyond Zionist racism. By Benjamin Doherty. The Electronic Intifada, September 29, 2013.

Doherty:

“Ethical decolonization”

It was serendipitous that I found a video featuring a presentation by Omar Barghouti that dispenses with the “peace process” and “two states” completely and focuses on the ethics and mechanics of decolonization.

Barghouti refers to the work of the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire when explaining the moral responsibilities of the oppressed, and he proposes “indigenizing” the settler-colonial population through a process of “ethical decolonization.”

“Indigenizing” the settlers

The argument escapes the common traps about “Jewish self-determination” and the “Jewish state” by outlining a path where the settler-colonial population becomes entitled to determine the future of the state through joint struggle with the indigenous community and on condition that the settlers abandon their colonial privilege.

The excerpt below is edited slightly for readability:

Accepting modern day Jewish Israelis as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society — free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination, as called for in the democratic state model — is the most magnanimous, rational offer any oppressed indigenous population can present to its oppressors. So don’t ask for more.

Only by shedding their colonial privileges, dismantling the structures of oppression — the laws and the policies and so on — and accepting the restoration of the rights of indigenous people of the land — especially the right of Palestinian refugees to return and to receive reparations and the right of all Palestinians to unmitigated equality — only then can settlers be indigenized and integrated into the emerging nation and therefore become entitled to participate in determining the future of the common state.

I make a distinction between self-determination for Jewish settlers in Palestine, which I categorically oppose — never in history was a colonizing community ever allowed self-determination not in South Africa, not in Algeria, not in Ireland, not anywhere. Colonizers are not entitled to self-determination, by any definition of self-determination, but post-colonialism, post-oppression, after justice has happened, then we must envision integrating the former colonizers into a common nation that can determine its future. So they are part of the future determination of the state if they are indigenized.

The indigenous population on the other hand must be ready after justice has been reached and rights have been restored to forgive and accept the settlers as equal citizens enjoying normal lives, neither masters nor slaves.

Dian Kjaergaard on Barghouti:

The two Barghouti references (here and here) are priceless. To them I can add the following:

In December 2003, before the BDS movement was officially started (9 July 2005), Omar Barghouti called explicitly for “the one-state solution… a unitary state solution”, a “unitary state, where, by definition, Jews will be a minority.” http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/12/12/relative-humanity-the-essential-obstacle-to-a-just-peace-in-palestine/

And 10 years on? Omar Barghouti has recently participated in a meeting called “Strategies for change.” An enthusiastic analysis of his talk can be found here: – along with a link to a 16-minute video of the talk.

Omar Barghouti is deeply interested in the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paolo Friere’s work with the pedagogy of the oppressed, and starts by saying that the oppressed must, of course, not become oppressors. Mr Barghouti wants (1:32 – slightly paraphrased): A secular unitary state in British Mandate Palestine, recognizing the inalienable rights of indigenous Palestinians and “acquired rights of colonialist, indigenized Jewish settlers after they no longer have colonialist privileges.”

I disagree with the “colonialist” label, but that’s not the most important point here.

After discussing the three cardinal goals of BDS, Mr Barghouti says (5:40 – slightly paraphrased):

“A Jewish state in Palestine – any shape or form – cannot but contravene the basic rights of the indigenous Palestinian population and perpetuate a system of racial discrimination. It should be opposed just as we oppose a Muslim state, or a Christian, or any kind of exclusionary state –”

At 5:50 he seems to back down a bit in his opposition to Muslim or Christian states, and says:

“most definitely do we oppose a Jewish state. No rational, not-sell-out Palestinian will ever accept a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.”

Approximately 8:00:

“…. post-colonialism – after justice – we must envision integrating into a common nation that can determine its future together.”

Elsewhere Mr Barghouti has admitted that substantial minority protection in Muslim majority states is seldom seen, but he believes that the “Arab Spring” suggests that there is potential for a better situation.

My evaluation is that Mr Barghouti is either dangerously naïve – or dangerously manipulative.


Nakba denial and rape culture at Peter Beinart’s Open Zion. By Benjamin Doherty. The Electronic Intifada, November 4, 2013.

Why Israel Fears the Boycott. By Omar Barghouti. New York Times, January 31, 2014.

Is BDS’ campaign against Israel reaching a turning point? By Omar Barghouti. Al Jazeera English, December 22, 2013.

On Academic Freedom and the BDS Movement. By Omar Barghouti. The Nation, December 14, 2013.

The BDS Movement Explained. By Omar Barghouti. New York Daily News, February 25, 2013.

Omar Barghouti Admits BDS Wants to Destroy Israel. Huffington Post Monitor, October 4, 2013. Go to 5:55 for the good stuff.

NY Times, MSNBC Whitewash BDS. By Yair Rosenberg. Tablet, February 6, 2013.

Why do Zionists falsely claim BDS movement opposes two-state solution. By Ali Abunimah. The Electronic Intifada, February 6, 2013.

They Can’t Hide the Sun: An interview with Omar Barghouti. By Peter Rugh. Mondoweiss, February 7, 2013.

“Boycotts work”: An interview with Omar Barghouti. By Ali Mustafa. The Electronic Intifada, May 31, 2009.

Omar Barghouti on “Why BDS?” Mondoweiss, April 6, 2011.

Omar Barghouti at UCLA: No to BDS, no to occupation. By Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller. Jewish Journal, January 23, 2014.

Omar Barghouti at UCLA: A speaker who brings hate. By Roberta P. Seid. Jewish Journal, January 16, 2014.

The Chutzpah of Omar Barghouti. By Daniel Greenfield. FrontPage Magazine, February 9, 2012.

Omar Barghouti’s Lectures: A Case Study of Dangerous Propaganda. By Roberta Seid and Roz Rothstein. StandWithUs. [January 2012]

The Message of BDS. By Joel Fishman. Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, January 4, 2011.

Omar Barghouti. Divest This.

International Solidarity with Palestine: Towards a Global Intifada (Omar Barghouti). Video. SJPatUCLA, January 21, 2014. YouTube.



Omar Barghouti: Strategies for Change. Video. John Y. Jones. Dag Hammarskjöldprogram/Network. Vimeo. Excerpt at YouTube.






BDS campaigner Omar Barghouti lecture and conversation with Amy Goodman in Santa Fe. By Ali Abunimah. The Electronic Intifada, February 10, 2013. Videos at Vimeo, here and here.






Omar Barghouti Talks About Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions Against Israeli Apartheid at Yale University. Video. strugglevideomedia, February 8, 2013. YouTube.




Omar Barghouti : Co-founder of the Global BDS Movement & PACBI Interviewed. Video. planxtysumoud, February 24, 2010. YouTube.

QUESTION: If the occupation ends, would that end your call for BDS?

BARGHOUTI: No, it wouldn’t. . . . The majority of the Palestinian people are not suffering from occupation, they are suffering from denial of their right to come back home.




Omar Barghouti: BDS – The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Video. PHubb, July 13, 2011. YouTube.

Ariel Sharon’s Masterstroke: The Gaza Withdrawal. By Fabio Rafael Fiallo.

Ariel Sharon’s Masterstroke: The Gaza Withdrawal. By Fabio Rafael Fiallo. Real Clear World, January 12, 2014.

Fiallo:

Much to the dismay of his detractors – and he had many – Ariel Sharon secured a distinct place in history when he made the watershed decision in 2005 to unilaterally withdraw Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip.

 

The move aroused apprehension and criticism within Sharon's own political camp. Why, it was said, disengage unilaterally – i.e., without securing reciprocal concessions – from a territory that would for sure be utilized to launch terrorist attacks against Israel?

 

The malaise created by that initiative was so deep that today’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, resigned from his cabinet position in protest. Sharon, for his part, had to create a new political party, Kadima, so as to be able to pursue the course of action he had chosen.

 

And yet, history has clearly vindicated Ariel Sharon's decision.

 

True, terrorist attacks launched from the Gaza Strip since the pullout did expose Israel to periods of insecurity on more than one occasion, though no more or less than what most Israelis had already grown accustomed to. Gusts of rocket fire reached a peak in 2008 and again in 2012, triggering Israel’s self-defense operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense.

 

Be that as it may, Hamas, which seized control of Gaza in 2007, is bitterly learning that any terrorist attack against Israel carries a heavy price – in the form of Israel’s reaction – that badly impairs its ability to administer the Strip and meet the needs of the Gazans.

 

Gone are the pre-withdrawal days when Hamas drew its popularity by playing the underdog. Now, Palestinians living in Gaza can, and actually do, hold Hamas accountable for their vicissitudes and suffering.

 

Thus, to avoid widening its disconnect with the concerns of Palestinians living in Gaza, Hamas is obliged to think twice before giving free rein to its terrorist fixations – or those of other terrorist organizations in the territory. 

Furthermore, with Israel’s pullout and the ensuing takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the protracted internecine war between Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has taken the form of fratricidal turf warfare. Fatah’s members have a tough life in Gaza, as do Hamas’ activists in the Fatah-controlled West Bank. Retaliatory imprisonments and cross-assassinations are commonplace.

 

Fatah and Hamas have given priority to their factional war, and often at the expense of the needs and expectations of Palestinians under their administration.

 

No wonder that, since the “Arab Spring” erupted in 2011, both Hamas and Fatah have fretted about public uprisings in their respective territories. More often than not, they have severely repressed not only street demonstrations but criticisms posted to the web, as well.

 

By giving rise to a turf war between Hamas and Fatah, the Sharon pullout laid bare the many grievances and contestations in the territory, as well as the scant regard for democratic values among the two leading factions of the Palestinian leadership.

 

To fully understand the effect of Sharon’s decision, consider this counterfactual: what would have happened if Israeli troops had still been in Gaza at the time of the “Arab Spring” in 2011?

 

A safe bet is that Hamas and Fatah would have tried to replicate the unrest in the disputed territories, possibly sparking a new intifada. Under the present circumstances, however, Hamas and Fatah are guided by a radically different preoccupation: to prevent a Palestinian intifada against them.

 

Moreover, had Israeli troops remained in Gaza, Arab rulers likely would have attempted to divert international attention away from the discontent of their own citizens by fostering protests in Gaza against the “Zionist occupier.” Hamas would have been more than delighted to receive financial and logistical support to fulfill that deed. The Palestinian Authority, in turn, would have promoted similar protests in the West Bank, if only to prevent Hamas from exploiting regional unrest first.

 

That scenario was preempted by Sharon’s pullback.

 

There remains the mother of all questions: Did the pullout serve to advance the cause of peace? And the answer is yes. By exposing to the world the futility of negotiating with a double-headed and disorganized Palestinian leadership, the pullout from Gaza has exposed the need for an aggiornamento of the Palestinian leadership as a prerequisite for a real, durable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

For all these reasons, Ariel Sharon’s handover of the Gaza Strip can retrospectively be regarded as a masterpiece of political vision and strategic cleverness.

Ariel Sharon Never Changed. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Ariel Sharon Never Changed. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, January 11, 2014.

Goldberg:

Shortly after the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000 – an uprising allegedly, though not actually, triggered by an infamous Ariel Sharon walkabout atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – I was visiting Sharon’s ranch in southern Israel for the harvest holiday of Sukkot. Sharon, who died today at 85 after eight years in a stroke-induced coma, had erected a sukkah – a temporary open-air hut meant to serve as a symbolic shelter – that could seat 200 people. He was the leader of the Likud party then, contemplating a run for prime minister, and the sukkah was overflowing with party activists. The mood was celebratory. At one point, a small group of young activists took up a chant: “Arik, King of Israel,” using Sharon’s nickname. Many members of the Likud Knesset faction were present. I sat for a while with one of the toughest Likud hardliners, Uzi Landau, who was in a gloating mood.

 

The Oslo peace process had more or less collapsed by Sukkot of 2000. Ehud Barak, who was then prime minister, had returned to Israel empty-handed from the Camp David peace talks a couple of months earlier. He had offered Palestinian negotiators most of what they said they wanted, but Yasser Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization leader, left Camp David without even making a counter-offer. Barak was suffering in the polls, and Sharon saw a chance to strike. I asked Landau, who was one of Sharon’s key supporters, what he thought about the demise of the peace process. “Oslo is Munich, and Arik is Churchill,” he said.

 

Later, I would ask Sharon if he agreed with Landau – not about the Churchill comparison, but about the notion that Bill Clinton, who convened the Camp David talks, and Ehud Barak, were trying to do to Israel what Neville Chamberlain did to Czechoslovakia. “There are people out there who don’t understand the true intentions of the Palestinians,” Sharon said. “I am not one of them. They want to destroy Israel. They want our country.”

 

Flash forward five years. Sharon, now prime minister, was about to do something few people could ever have imagined him doing: He was preparing to unilaterally evacuate the Gaza Strip of all Israeli settlers and soldiers. This was shocking because it was Sharon, as a cabinet minister a quarter-century earlier, who had first planted Jewish settlers in Gaza. He believed, as he had written in his autobiography, that Gaza, which was captured by Israel from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War, remained indispensably important to Israel’s security. “What will we do once we withdraw from Gaza and find, as we inevitably will, that Arafat or his successors have stepped in and that squads of terrorists are again operating from there into Israel, murdering and destroying?” he wrote. “What will we do when the Katyusha fire starts hitting Sderot, four miles from the Gaza district, and Ashkelon, nine miles from Gaza, and Kiryat Gat, fourteen miles from Gaza.”

 

Sharon felt a special affection for the Gaza settlers, who in his mind were rough and resilient pioneers serving as a picket line along Israel’s southern flank. And he had fond memories of fighting terror in Gaza, where he was, for a while, inordinately successful.

 

“Once, we captured a Lebanese fishing boat,” he said in the course of a long and nostalgia-filled conversation with me about his fighting days. “We filled it with Lebanese food and newspapers and we put our soldiers in it, dressed as Arabs, who spoke Arabic. And they landed on the beach in Gaza, and the Palestinians hid them. They thought they were their people, fugitives. And we were pursuing them ourselves, making believe they were hunted terrorists. The Palestinians took them to meet an important group of terrorists in the northern part of the Gaza district. And when they met them our soldiers killed them. Then they were evacuated out of Gaza. You have to think of things like that. You have to be creative.”

 

Sharon’s decision to evacuate the settlers of Gaza, and remove the army, was seen by his critics in the Likud, and in the parties to the right of the Likud, as proof that he had gone mad. One of his most caustic critics was Landau, the man who five years earlier described Sharon to me as a latter-day incarnation of Churchill. “Arik is making a joke of his party and a joke of his beliefs,” Landau told me when I interviewed him shortly before the evacuation. “He is destroying himself, destroying his party and destroying Israel’s security, and for what? So that he will be popular in Europe?”

 

This idea that Sharon had changed in some profound and mystifying way was popular not only with his critics on the right, but even among some of those in the Israeli center, and on the left.

 

In the coming days you will read that the Gaza withdrawal, and the cleaving of the Israeli right that it triggered – Sharon and his allies would leave the Likud party, and form their own, Kadima – represented a reversal of everything Sharon had once stood for. This is wrong: The unilateral evacuation was of a piece with everything he had previously done.

 

The evidence to support the notion that he had suddenly become a peacenik was superficially compelling. If there has been one theme to Sharon’s life, it was relentless, aggressive expansion: forward, always forward. I spent enough time with him to know that the manner in which he ate – he could vacuum up vast quantities of food – corresponded to the way he conquered territory.

 

In 1967, as a daring tank commander, he helped secure the Sinai Peninsula for Israel. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he led a tank force across the Suez Canal to within striking distance of Cairo. As Israel’s agriculture minister, and later its defense minister, Sharon oversaw the planting of Israeli settlements not only in Gaza, but also in the far-flung reaches of the West Bank. In 1982, as Menachem Begin’s defense minister, Sharon focused his attention north, on Lebanon, which had become a base for PLO attacks against Israel. Not content merely to kill terrorists in Lebanon’s south and go home, Sharon decided he would deal the PLO a fatal blow – and remake Lebanese politics in the process, by installing a friendly Christian government in Beirut. Israel’s invasion ended, instead, with the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians by Christian militiamen, under the noses of the Israeli army.

 

So what changed? What caused a man who moved so relentlessly forward to suddenly reverse course? His view of the Palestinians, and their desires, had not changed at all. In 2000, he told me that, “The Arabs don’t want the Jews to be here. That is the secret of this whole story. This land we are on is considered by the Muslims to be holy land. They will never let anyone possess it. You should read the Koran. You’ll see what they think about the Jews. They want to take this land by violence.”

 

Four years later, he told me more or less the same thing, though in language softened somewhat by knowledge that he was speaking as prime minister, not as the leader of the right-wing opposition. “We have a problem with our partner. It is not realistic to think that the Palestinians would agree to stop their war on us if they receive some pieces of territory.”

 

Nevertheless, Sharon by 2005 reached the conclusion that a piece of territory is what the Palestinians would get, without even the hassle of negotiation. “I’ve decided that it is impossible to keep holding three and half million Palestinians in a situation of occupation,” he told me. His use of the word “occupation” in and of itself was revolutionary – in the 1990s, he would describe the West Bank and Gaza as liberated territory, not occupied.

 

What changed was not his heart, not his life’s aim, but his understanding of reality. In his heart, he understood Israel’s enemies to be implacable. His objective was unaltered: to defend the existence of the Jewish state by any means necessary. For many years, he believed that the existence of the Jewish state was dependent on the occupation of Gaza. But he then came to realize that the “occupation” of Gaza was undermining Israel’s democracy, international standing and security. And so he left. He left Gaza for the same reason he invaded Lebanon: He thought it would make Israel safer.

 

Sharon made one terrible mistake in Gaza. His mistake was not leaving: He grasped, correctly, that over time staying would have been fatal for Israel. His mistake was leaving unilaterally. A negotiated withdrawal – and there were Palestinians with whom he could have negotiated such a withdrawal – could have extracted important concessions from Palestinians. Instead, radicals in Gaza were empowered by Sharon’s unilateralism. They believed, not entirely incorrectly, that their terrorism had paid off, forcing even a legendary warrior like Ariel Sharon to turn tail. The fallout from the withdrawal is well known: Hamas soon came to power and turned Gaza into a launching pad for missile attacks against the towns Sharon long before predicted would be attacked.

 

And yet, Sharon, through the same force of will that propelled him heroically across the Suez Canal, and sent him deeply and disastrously into Lebanon, did something hugely important for his country: He began to disentangle Israel from the lives of the Palestinians. Settlers will never return to Gaza. That is an achievement.

 

And it is a lesson for Benjamin Netanyahu, who will shortly surpass David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest serving prime minister. Netanyahu lacks some of Sharon’s defects, but he also lacks some of Sharon’s most important positive qualities. He is not a man of action, and this has kept him from launching unnecessary wars. But it has also kept him from acting on what he knows. Netanyahu grasps the same reality Sharon grasped 10 years ago. Continued settlement of the West Bank, and continued entanglement of Israel in the lives of millions of Palestinians, will eventually be his country’s undoing. A way out must be found. It is a good thing that Netanyahu isn’t a bulldozer; he would never execute a withdrawal from the West Bank in the sort of precipitous, blundering Sharon-like way that would increase the danger for Israel. But he might never do it at all. If Sharon had not been stricken eight years ago, Israel might today already be out of the West Bank. It is up to Netanyahu now to save the Jewish state.

No End to Palestinian Claims: How Israel and the Palestinians View Borders. By Pinhas Inbari.

No End to Palestinian Claims: How Israel and the Palestinians View Borders. By Pinhas Inbari. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, January 8, 2014.

Never Mind Group Membership – It’s Islamic-Supremacist Ideology That Matters Most. By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Never Mind Group Membership – It’s Islamic-Supremacist Ideology That Matters Most. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, January 8, 2014.