It’s controversial

Robert Fisk's latest:

I wasn't personally at all surprised at the killings on the Turkish ship [by the IDF]. In Lebanon, I've seen this indisciplined rabble of an army — as "elite" as the average rabble of Arab armies — shooting at civilians. I saw them watching the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians on the morning of 18 September (the last day of the slaughter) by their vicious Lebanese militia allies. I was present at the Qana massacre by Israeli gunners in 1996 — "Arabushim" (the equivalent of the abusive term "Ayrab" in English), one of the gunners called the 106 dead civilians, more than half of them children, in the Israeli press. Then the Israeli government of Nobel laureate Shimon Peres said there were terrorists among the dead civilians — totally untrue, but who cares? — and then came the second Qana massacre in 2006 and then the 2008-09 Gaza slaughter of 1,300 Palestinians, most of them children, and then...

Well, then came the Goldstone report, which found that Israeli troops (as well as Hamas) committed war crimes in Gaza, but this was condemned as anti-Semitic — poor old honourable Goldstone, himself a prominent Jewish jurist from South Africa, slandered as "an evil man" by the raving Al Dershowitz of Harvard — and was called "controversial" by the brave Obama administration. "Controversial", by the way, basically means "fuck you".

So, like regrettable, controversial means "fuck you." I hadn't realized….

Then and now

…and tomorrow?

In his recent Independent column, Robert Fisk wrote:

In 1948, our politicians — the Americans and the British — staged an airlift into Berlin. A starving population (our enemies only three years before) were surrounded by a brutal army, the Russians, who had erected a fence around the city. The Berlin airlift was one of the great moments in the Cold War. Our soldiers and our airmen risked and gave their lives for these starving Germans.

Incredible, isn't it? In those days, our politicians took decisions; our leaders took decisions to save lives. Messrs Attlee and Truman knew that Berlin was important in moral and human as well as political terms.

And today? It was people — ordinary people, Europeans, Americans, Holocaust survivors — yes, for heaven's sake, survivors of the Nazis — who took the decision to go to Gaza because their politicians and their statesmen had failed them.

….

And what does this [attack on the Freedom flotilla] say about Israel? Isn't Turkey a close ally of Israel? Is this what the Turks can expect? Now Israel's only ally in the Muslim world is saying this is a massacre — and Israel doesn't seem to care.

But then Israel didn't care when London and Canberra expelled Israeli diplomats after British and Australian passports were forged and then provided to the assassins of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. It didn't care when it announced new Jewish settlements on occupied land in East Jerusalem while Joe Biden, the Vice-President of its erstwhile ally, the United States, was in town. Why should Israel care now?

How did we get to this point? Maybe because we all grew used to seeing the Israelis kill Arabs, maybe the Israelis grew used to killing Arabs. Now they kill Turks. Or Europeans. Something has changed in the Middle East these past 24 hours — and the Israelis (given their extraordinarily stupid political response to the slaughter) don't seem to have grasped what has happened. The world is tired of these outrages. Only the politicians are silent [emphasis added].

If something has changed in the Middle East, as Fisk suggests here, this change may be attributable to changes that have already occurred in the world at large, changes reflected in the attempt to break Israel's illegal and immoral blockade, in the willingness of the activists, diplomats, professional politicians and others on the ships who staked their lives in order to put the blockade into history's trash can. The world is no longer merely "tired of these outrages," as Fisk suggests; it appears to me to have produced the makings of a transnational, cross cultural movement which intends to put an end to the Palestinian Genocide, to call the situation by its proper name. In fact, Fisk suggests as much in his article. The international movement already exists; the questions have thus become: Will it grow and ultimately succeed?

Update

Ali Abunimah, a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, writing for Aljezeera English, states clearly the point I wanted draw from Fisk's article:

Since Israel's invasion and massacre of over 1,400 people in Gaza 18 months ago, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, global civil society movements have stepped up their campaigns for justice and solidarity with Palestinians.

Governments, by contrast, carried on with business as usual, maintaining a complicit silence.

Israel's lethal attack on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza may change that, spurring governments to follow the lead of their people and take unprecedented action to check Israel's growing lawlessness.

Writing for Haaretz, Anat Lapidot-Firilla adopts a realistic and well-tempered attitude towards Israel's Gaza siege and the blockade it includes:

In its latest, catastrophic attempt to enforce the Gaza siege, Israel has demonstrated that in fact, it is under siege — one it has imposed upon itself. Many Israelis are finding it hard to fathom the results of Monday's failed commando raid on the Turkish aid flotilla, which resulted in the deaths of foreign citizens. Those who believe that the blockade of the Gaza Strip must end, and even those who believe the operation was justified, realize that this is the time to reevaluate some of the anachronistic attitudes of those charged with defending the country.

The first attitude is based on the belief that it is possible to carry out a long-term blockade under the political conditions prevailing today internationally. Instead, the effectiveness of the blockade needs to be reexamined after having been in place for three years. Israel's security chiefs surely recognize that the flotillas to the Gaza Strip will not stop; rather, they will only intensify. The political and military leadership that decided to take over the ships behaved in a way befitting a different era. The struggle today takes place on the media battlefield and requires a corresponding solution.

Moreover, what will Israel do with the next flotilla? Or when the United States ceases to show understanding for Israel's position? Or when the number of casualties is higher? And what will the army do when countries like Turkey begin providing military escorts to such civilian flotillas? The military's response to this week's challenge suggests a lack of understanding of the nature of the conflict, and makes one wonder: Who endangers our security more? The human rights activists and the militants who have linked up with them, or those who determine Israel's defense policy?

Like Fisk, Lapidot-Firilla also recognizes that something has changed. Let us see if Israel's hard-right leaders learn from their blunder.

Last updated on June 4, 2010 at 6:51AM

Political society vs. civil society in Iran

Robert Fisk's most recent assessment of Iran's conflict: "Symbols are not enough." They are insufficient because:

…it is indeed an intifada that has broken out in Iran, however hopeless its aims. Millions of Iranians simply no longer accept the rule of law because they believe that the law has been corrupted by a fraudulent election. The dangerous decision by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to throw his entire prestige behind Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has erased any chance that he could emerge above the battle as a neutral arbiter.

Juan Cole's also pointedly judges the situation:

By stealing the election for Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has effectively made a coup on behalf of the clerical sphere in alliance with lay hard liners, which threatens to virtually abolish the sphere of popular sovereignty. That is what Mousavi and Karroubi and their followers are objecting to so vehemently. From the outside, Iran was often depicted as a totalitarian state. But from the inside it seemed to have wriggle room. The reformers are saying that the regime has just moved toward really being a totalitarian state and is now removing any space for dissent.

Robert Fisk and Juan Cole on the Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech

Iran's palace intrigues

Although much of the world is surely watching while the popular opposition in Iran presses its and Mir-Hossein Mousavi's cause with the Iranian government, Robert Fisk holds the opinion that the decisive political struggle in Iran can be found only among those members of the elite vying for power.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was Thomas Cromwell yesterday, praising those he loathed with just enough directness for the recipient to know that a Supreme Leader's anger will embrace a senior cleric or two. When he expressed his admiration for Ali Akbar Rafsanjani's revolutionary credentials and added that "nobody has accused this gentleman of corruption" — who said they had? — you knew exactly what he meant. Think profits from pistachio nuts and the Tehran Metro. And when Khamenei said that "those who voted for these four candidates will have their rewards from God Almighty", you knew that most would not be rewarded with the president of their choice.

Thus Khamenei's threats were meant not only to persuade the mobilized common folk to return to their homes, lest they become cannon fodder when the government chooses to restore order to the country. They were, Fisk suggests, indicative of the fact that Khamenei also feels personally threatened by these events and the opposition leaders who stand to profit from them:

So why did he [Khamenei] glue himself to Ahmadinejad? Could it be he is worried about another very powerful clergyman who lives in the golden-domed city of Qom, a certain Ayatollah Yazdi who has long feted and praised the aforesaid Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? And is it possible — it is, by the way — that Ayatollah Yazdi would very much like to be the next Supreme Leader?

Good reason then for Khamenei to stand by the President who insisted a halo shone around his head when he addressed the UN.

Juan Cole shares Fisk's concerns:

It now seems only a matter of time until there are high-level arrests and then an intervention against the protesters by the security forces of a quite brutal sort. Only if Mousavi backs down (and thus possibly demoralizes the crowds) can this outcome now be averted.

The real question is whether this is 1963, when the shah managed to put down a rebellion led by Ruhollah Khomeini, or whether it is 1978-79, when he failed to do so. The answer lies in the depth of support for the protests among the population, and in the stance of the various armed forces toward the latter. In 1963 the military was willing to crack down hard on the protesters. In 1978, they started refusing to fire on them. The air force officers actually went over to Khomeini, which was decisive. Precisely because the opposition is from within the ruling circle, we cannot know what the Revolutionary Guards and the regular armed forces are thinking. Mousavi helped get Iran's military act together during the Iran-Iraq War. Rezaie is a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran's national guard. If the armed forces hesitate or split, Khamenei could be in real trouble. If not, the protesters could end up being crushed.

So, the stakes are large. And did Khamenei's threats work? Have the popular and elite opponents of the election retreated? No, according to an Agence France-Presse report: "Iran's opposition will go ahead with a planned rally in Tehran despite a government warning against new protests, an aide to defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi told AFP."