Terra Incognita: A recipe for a big mess
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN at the Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=213348
03/22/2011 23:43
The central problem with the intervention in Libya is the lack of a clear goal.
Talkbacks (8)
Take two parts Muammar Gaddafi. Add one part rebellion and a pinch of African and Eastern European mercenaries. Season with UN and NATO air strikes and let simmer. That is the dish being brewed in Libya. Every day, more news of nonsense comes out of that country. It’s worth summing up some of it and contemplating the chances for failure in light of this half-hearted foreign intervention.
“War in the desert is warfare in its purest form.”
Such were the words of Gen. Kress von Kressenstein upon observing the 1917 battle of Gaza, in which the British used tanks against the German defenses.
But the rebellion in Libya is far from pure warfare.
The battle for Libya is between feeble rebel units that display much bravado to reporters but little in battle, and Gaddafi’s wishy-washy army.
Like the current conflict, World War II in Africa was a seesaw affair. In 1940 Italy – which occupied Libya – invaded British-occupied Egypt. But, like the Libyan rebels, the Italian army, despite its bravado, became bogged down and the British quickly beat it back toward Tripoli. In March 1941 the Axis forces, now reinforced with Erwin Rommel’s German units, overran the British and forced them back to Egypt, much like Gaddafi rolled back the rebels. The Germans surrounded several British units in Tobruk, near the Egyptian border, and laid siege to them for 240 days. In June 1942 Rommel once again defeated the British, this time forcing them to within 70 miles of Alexandria. But as we know, the war did not end there; the Germans were again driven back, this time for good.
AS IN the desert war, the Libyan conflict has lurched from crisis to crisis. In late February, sporadic protests turned into a genuine rebellion. Rebels captured arms in Benghazi, capital of eastern Libya. For two weeks it seemed that the Libyan regime was finished. Newspapers printed maps showing most of Libya in rebel hands. But things apparently were changing. After defections by some army units, Gaddafi brought in African mercenaries to bolster his dwindling cadre of loyalists. By March 5, his army had been reorganized, and he unleashed it against rebel forces around Tripoli.
There have been reports that Gaddafi’s offensive was bolstered by Eastern European mercenaries, who, unlike the African recruits, would have been familiar with Soviet equipment such as T-72 tanks. Whatever the case, by March 10 the government forces had recaptured Zawiya near Tripoli and Ras Lanuf, between Tripoli and Benghazi. By March 16, both Brega and Ajdabiya were in government hands.
The rebels have repeatedly made blustery statements. Just prior to suffering a string of defeats around March 10, they had given Gaddafi mere hours to leave the country. They have made claims regarding recruitment, describing enlistment drives that armed 5,000 men and then another 8,000. But rebel spokesman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga claimed on March 20 that 8,000 rebels had been killed in fighting. The rebels have boasted of receiving defectors who have brought over tanks and airplanes.
They possess at least a few warplanes, but one of them, a MiG-23, was shot down on March 19. They have fired rockets wildly and adorned themselves with belts of ammo to give the impression of being well-armed. They talk about receiving military aid from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On March 16 it was reported that Khalifa Belqasim Haftar, a former Libyan commando officer, had returned to fight alongside the rebels.
But the rebels show little military prowess. Nonetheless, they received a boost on March 17, when the UN imposed a no-fly zone over Libya. On March 19 French planes began bombing Libyan tanks in the suburbs of Benghazi.
Further raids by British and American planes followed. So now the road for the rebels is once again open between Benghazi and Adjabiya.
BUT THE central problem with the intervention in Libya is its lack of a goal. It is not about killing Gaddafi: US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said it would be “unwise” to kill him, and UK Gen.
Sir David Roberts claims his country hasn’t targeted him because the UN does not permit such action.
It is not about helping the rebels: Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said there could very well be a stalemate in the aftermath of air strikes, and both President Barack Obama and British MPs have said there are no plans for ground troops. Justin Crump, a contributor to Al Jazeera on military affairs, correctly notes that airpower is not a panacea, and will almost certainly not be enough to tip the balance against Gaddafi.
The rebels seem incompetent. So unless the world is incredibly lucky, intervention there seems to be a recipe for a big mess. Unending conflict in Libya is not in the interest of anyone. With uncertainty already casting a pall over Egypt, Tunisia and increasingly over Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, and chaos having given rise to Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza, it can’t possibly be good to have a long stalemate in Libya which, until a few months ago, had the highest GDP per capita in North Africa, at around $14,000 (Israel’s is $29,000). Egypt and Morocco were less than half that.
Plunging a relatively wealthy country back into the dark ages, akin to Saddam’s Iraq between 1985 and 2005, is not good either. And getting Libyans hooked on foreign aid, like Kosovo, East Timor, Haiti, Gaza and some African countries, will also spell trouble.
The dish being prepared in Libya needs to be tossed out in favor of a more positive future.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Terra Incognita The decline of the Israel Prize
Terra Incognita: The decline of the Israel Prize
By SETH FRANTZMAN
03/15/2011 22:29
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=212298
Is this country so bereft of good people that none can be found who doesn’t describe Jews as ‘apes’ or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis?
How low did things have to get so that the Israel Prize – the country’s highest civilian honor – is routinely awarded to people who feel outright contempt for their fellow citizens? One was reminded of this last week, when it was revealed that singer Yehoram Gaon had said of Mizrahi music: “It’s rubbish that even the devil didn’t create.”
His comments were tame compared to those by prize laureate Natan Zach, who last year described Sephardi Jews as cave dwellers on national television.
Since its inception in 1953, the prize has been awarded to individuals in a variety of categories such as culture, sciences, the humanities and special contributions to the nation. Over the years more annual prizes have been awarded (14 in 2010), for a total of 633. Several people received the prize twice, and one – architect Ram Karmi – was the brother and son of recipients. Beginning in the 1990s, numerous anti-Israel people have received the prize.
Controversy began in 1992, when the Arab nationalist and communist Emile Habibi received the prize. The nomination caused scientist Yuval Neeman to return his.
Awarding the prize to people who don’t like Israel was inaugurated by education minister Shulamit Aloni in 1992 (she also received the prize in 2000). Aloni has declared that this is an apartheid state in the online magazine Counterpunch (January, 2007). She compared Yitzhak Rabin to Mussolini in 1989 and Binyamin Netanyahu to Joseph Goebbels in 1999.
The next controversial person to almost receive it was Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the philosophy professor who called this a “Judeo-Nazi” state. However, he declined the prize.
In 1997 the prize was almost awarded to Ma’ariv columnist Shmuel Shnitzer, who had written an article in 1994 entitled “Importing Death” (sometimes translated as “Importing Blood”), in which he argued that Ethiopian Jews were “thousands of apostates carrying dangerous diseases.” His nomination was only blocked by the High Court.
Aloni was given the prize in 2000 by her Meretz Party colleague Yossi Sarid when he was serving as education minister. No one asked whether there was a conflict of interest. In 2003 the prize was awarded to artist Moshe Gershoni, who refused to accept it because he didn’t want to shake hands with prime minister Ariel Sharon or education minister Limor Livnat.
In 2004 Yuval Tumarkin, a sculptor, received the prize. Tumarkin described religious Jews as “a mob... [of] primitives and monkeys... When one sees the haredim, one understands why there was a Holocaust.” oroccan Jews were “descended from a nation of primitive parasites.”
In 2005 Alex Levac, famed photographer of the bus 300 affair, received the prize. He said after that “although the prize was given to me by the officialdom, they are not the ones who choose me” – an apparent reference to his respect for the cultured members of the selection committee. He accepted his prize despite his revulsion at the “officials” who gave it to him.
Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell received the prize in 2008 despite a 2001 column in Haaretz in which he suggested that “there is no doubt about the legitimacy of armed resistance in the territories themselves. If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements... and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line.”
NOT EVERYONE has stood silently by while the prizes were given to Israel-haters. Writer Carol Novis compared rewarding a prize to unsavory characters to appreciating Wagner, who was a great artist and a bad man. Uri Avnery went further, arguing that those who stirred controversy by getting the prize should be happy not to receive it, for the real prize is that they are moral people standing against the state. Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum condemned the continuing awarding of the prize to intolerant individuals. But this misses the point.
Is Israel so bereft of good and brilliant people that none can be found who has contributed greatly to arts and culture and who doesn’t describe Jews as “apes” or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis? Why did Aloni receive the prize but not Shimon Peres or Menahem Porush? Perhaps when it comes to the latter it is because the prize has almost never been awarded to a religious Jew (let alone a Sephardi one).
Jews from Muslim countries make up a third of the population, yet, by my own estimate, only about 2 percent of Israel Prizes have gone to them. Unfortunately, the prize is generally awarded to people from a very narrow, selfappointed elite. In these circles it seems that comments about Sephardim being “from caves” and haredim being “monkeys” are acceptable. No member of this elite seems to recall which culture produced the Holocaust.
YUVAL NEEMAN was right to return the prize; it has become, like some Groucho Marx joke, a club to which one would not want to belong.
The fact that people like Zach are only “outed” as racists years after receiving the prize doesn’t say much. If they describe Sephardim as cave-dwellers on national television, what do they do in private? If they write in a major paper that Ethiopian Jews are disease-ridden, what curses must they hurl in the company of friends? And it’s not about “freedom of speech.” The freedom of Zach and Tumarkin to hate other Jews is not in question; they are welcome to wallow in their sewer of hate. It’s just that a sewer shouldn’t deserve an award for being the best cesspool on the block.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
By SETH FRANTZMAN
03/15/2011 22:29
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=212298
Is this country so bereft of good people that none can be found who doesn’t describe Jews as ‘apes’ or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis?
How low did things have to get so that the Israel Prize – the country’s highest civilian honor – is routinely awarded to people who feel outright contempt for their fellow citizens? One was reminded of this last week, when it was revealed that singer Yehoram Gaon had said of Mizrahi music: “It’s rubbish that even the devil didn’t create.”
His comments were tame compared to those by prize laureate Natan Zach, who last year described Sephardi Jews as cave dwellers on national television.
Since its inception in 1953, the prize has been awarded to individuals in a variety of categories such as culture, sciences, the humanities and special contributions to the nation. Over the years more annual prizes have been awarded (14 in 2010), for a total of 633. Several people received the prize twice, and one – architect Ram Karmi – was the brother and son of recipients. Beginning in the 1990s, numerous anti-Israel people have received the prize.
Controversy began in 1992, when the Arab nationalist and communist Emile Habibi received the prize. The nomination caused scientist Yuval Neeman to return his.
Awarding the prize to people who don’t like Israel was inaugurated by education minister Shulamit Aloni in 1992 (she also received the prize in 2000). Aloni has declared that this is an apartheid state in the online magazine Counterpunch (January, 2007). She compared Yitzhak Rabin to Mussolini in 1989 and Binyamin Netanyahu to Joseph Goebbels in 1999.
The next controversial person to almost receive it was Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the philosophy professor who called this a “Judeo-Nazi” state. However, he declined the prize.
In 1997 the prize was almost awarded to Ma’ariv columnist Shmuel Shnitzer, who had written an article in 1994 entitled “Importing Death” (sometimes translated as “Importing Blood”), in which he argued that Ethiopian Jews were “thousands of apostates carrying dangerous diseases.” His nomination was only blocked by the High Court.
Aloni was given the prize in 2000 by her Meretz Party colleague Yossi Sarid when he was serving as education minister. No one asked whether there was a conflict of interest. In 2003 the prize was awarded to artist Moshe Gershoni, who refused to accept it because he didn’t want to shake hands with prime minister Ariel Sharon or education minister Limor Livnat.
In 2004 Yuval Tumarkin, a sculptor, received the prize. Tumarkin described religious Jews as “a mob... [of] primitives and monkeys... When one sees the haredim, one understands why there was a Holocaust.” oroccan Jews were “descended from a nation of primitive parasites.”
In 2005 Alex Levac, famed photographer of the bus 300 affair, received the prize. He said after that “although the prize was given to me by the officialdom, they are not the ones who choose me” – an apparent reference to his respect for the cultured members of the selection committee. He accepted his prize despite his revulsion at the “officials” who gave it to him.
Prof. Ze’ev Sternhell received the prize in 2008 despite a 2001 column in Haaretz in which he suggested that “there is no doubt about the legitimacy of armed resistance in the territories themselves. If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements... and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line.”
NOT EVERYONE has stood silently by while the prizes were given to Israel-haters. Writer Carol Novis compared rewarding a prize to unsavory characters to appreciating Wagner, who was a great artist and a bad man. Uri Avnery went further, arguing that those who stirred controversy by getting the prize should be happy not to receive it, for the real prize is that they are moral people standing against the state. Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum condemned the continuing awarding of the prize to intolerant individuals. But this misses the point.
Is Israel so bereft of good and brilliant people that none can be found who has contributed greatly to arts and culture and who doesn’t describe Jews as “apes” or compare Jewish politicians to Nazis? Why did Aloni receive the prize but not Shimon Peres or Menahem Porush? Perhaps when it comes to the latter it is because the prize has almost never been awarded to a religious Jew (let alone a Sephardi one).
Jews from Muslim countries make up a third of the population, yet, by my own estimate, only about 2 percent of Israel Prizes have gone to them. Unfortunately, the prize is generally awarded to people from a very narrow, selfappointed elite. In these circles it seems that comments about Sephardim being “from caves” and haredim being “monkeys” are acceptable. No member of this elite seems to recall which culture produced the Holocaust.
YUVAL NEEMAN was right to return the prize; it has become, like some Groucho Marx joke, a club to which one would not want to belong.
The fact that people like Zach are only “outed” as racists years after receiving the prize doesn’t say much. If they describe Sephardim as cave-dwellers on national television, what do they do in private? If they write in a major paper that Ethiopian Jews are disease-ridden, what curses must they hurl in the company of friends? And it’s not about “freedom of speech.” The freedom of Zach and Tumarkin to hate other Jews is not in question; they are welcome to wallow in their sewer of hate. It’s just that a sewer shouldn’t deserve an award for being the best cesspool on the block.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Terra Incognita 138 Libya Many Collaborators, Little Romance
Terra Incognita: Libya: Many collaborators, little romance
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=211331
03/08/2011 22:47
The long-running attachment West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in rebels now fighting his tyranny.
Can someone tell me why the world’s press rushed to Tahrir Square in Cairo and cooed about how wonderful that uprising was, yet cares little for Libya?
By all standards, the Libyan situation seems more heroic. Photos show jury-rigged pickups with anti-aircraft guns mounted atop them to shield the protesters from Muammar Gaddafi’s Russian-made aircraft. They show old men waving antique rifles and swords while fighting marauding gangs of mercenaries who shoot into crowds. Isn’t all that more courageous than the protesters at Tahrir who, for the most part, were not harmed on such a large scale?
But there are few op-eds waxing poetic about Libyan freedom fighters. Nicholas Kristof, the inveterate New York Times columnist, is a good example. He wrote four laudatory columns between February 1 and 6 about Egypt. They included “Exhilarated by hope in Cairo” and “We are all Egyptians.”
But on Libya he was bored, noting on February 24 that “it’s time to nudge Col. Muammar Gaddafi from power.”
Nudge? And on March 2 he really got down to business with, “Let’s ratchet up the pressure toward a peaceful outcome.”
Such strong language!
Kristof is typical of a malaise about Libya. Is it really just because the press got used to rebellion in the Middle East? It seems that the big yawn is more about the fact that Libya doesn’t fit the right model. Gaddafi is an anti- Western socialist in the mold of Fidel Castro, an exotic part-time crazy person. He banged his fists at the UN; he carted around a big Beduin tent that he forced countries to allow him to pitch where he pleased. He postured and posed in robes that seemed like they came from the set of a movie about 1970s pimps. He wasn’t a fat, US-funded dictator and friend of Israel.
Because, for all the talk about how the Egyptian revolution wasn’t about Israel, there sure were a lot of headlines in the Economist, BBC and New York Times about how Israelis were sourpusses for not celebrating the downfall of Mubarak.
Had Gaddafi been the best friend of the Jewish state, would we not be hearing more about the inspiration of the Arabs throwing off the dictator? Or had he been some Western- supported regime, like Mubarak, with US airplanes bombing the protesters, wouldn’t there be some huge outcry about the “propped-up dictator” murdering Arabs in the street?
WE WILL never know why Libya didn’t inspire. We won’t ever know why Palestinians with slingshots and checkered keffiyehs make people weak in the knees, while the same people 1,000 miles away are boring.
But the lack of romance hides a more intriguing question: Why, for decades, did so many people and countries collaborate with the barbaric regime in Tripoli? I’m not speaking only of business interests like British Petroleum, but politicians, prominent leftist activists, academics, human rights programs and universities. The latest scandal involves the London School of Economics, which accepted $488,000 from Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam. Saif also received a doctorate from LSE, which is now being probed for plagiarism and was invited to give a speech at the university in 2010. Reports noted that he declared democracy to be the best system of government for his country.
But the ties between the LSE and Gaddafi are only the tip of a giant iceberg.
The West was wooed by Gaddafi after 9/11, when the regime attempted to portray itself as fighting Islamic terrorism. After the 2003 Iraq War, Gaddafi ostentatiously abandoned a nuclear weapons program. In murky dealings that are still not clear, the Scottish government released the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Mughrabi, in 2009 because he was supposedly dying of cancer. Mughrabi was given a hero’s welcome in Libya, and is still alive. Now it appears the UK government had some underhanded role in that release.
But releasing terrorists and giving the crooked sons of a dictator PhDs isn’t enough. The UN time and again gave Gaddafi a stamp of approval, first in 2003 when Libya was elected leader of the UN Commission on Human Rights. In 2010, 155 countries voted to put Libya on the Human Rights Council. Just prior to that event Ali Treki – a Libyan diplomat – was elected president of the UN General Assembly. This, despite the fact that he said in a 1983 speech: “Is it not the Jews who are exploiting the American people and trying to debase them? If we succeed in eliminating that entity, we shall by the same token save the American and European peoples.”
But why would a raving anti-Semite not head part of the UN, and a brutal dictatorship not be in charge of human rights?
Leading celebrities time and again patronized the Gaddafi family. Usher, Nelly Furtado, Beyonce and Mariah Carey all performed at lavish parties for them. When Gaddafi was in Italy in June of 2009, he asked to meet 1,000 prominent Italian women. And, no surprise, they came in droves to sit and listen to the dictator, much like Columbia University lapped up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in 2007.
According to one report, “there were leading figures from politics, culture and industry; ministers posed for cameras, lawyers talked earnestly... in their seats and reality TV personalities blew kisses across the aisles.”
Human Rights Watch has been accused of “marketing Gaddafi” by praising his son Saif for creating “an expanded space for discussion and debate.”
Groups of activists, including Israeli- Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, have made pilgrimages to Tripoli.
The long-running attachment the West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in the rebels now fighting his tyranny. Gaddafi and his henchmen should never have been given a pulpit at the UN, in Italy, at the LSE, or anywhere else, and hopefully sooner rather than later the rebels will remove them from power.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=211331
03/08/2011 22:47
The long-running attachment West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in rebels now fighting his tyranny.
Can someone tell me why the world’s press rushed to Tahrir Square in Cairo and cooed about how wonderful that uprising was, yet cares little for Libya?
By all standards, the Libyan situation seems more heroic. Photos show jury-rigged pickups with anti-aircraft guns mounted atop them to shield the protesters from Muammar Gaddafi’s Russian-made aircraft. They show old men waving antique rifles and swords while fighting marauding gangs of mercenaries who shoot into crowds. Isn’t all that more courageous than the protesters at Tahrir who, for the most part, were not harmed on such a large scale?
But there are few op-eds waxing poetic about Libyan freedom fighters. Nicholas Kristof, the inveterate New York Times columnist, is a good example. He wrote four laudatory columns between February 1 and 6 about Egypt. They included “Exhilarated by hope in Cairo” and “We are all Egyptians.”
But on Libya he was bored, noting on February 24 that “it’s time to nudge Col. Muammar Gaddafi from power.”
Nudge? And on March 2 he really got down to business with, “Let’s ratchet up the pressure toward a peaceful outcome.”
Such strong language!
Kristof is typical of a malaise about Libya. Is it really just because the press got used to rebellion in the Middle East? It seems that the big yawn is more about the fact that Libya doesn’t fit the right model. Gaddafi is an anti- Western socialist in the mold of Fidel Castro, an exotic part-time crazy person. He banged his fists at the UN; he carted around a big Beduin tent that he forced countries to allow him to pitch where he pleased. He postured and posed in robes that seemed like they came from the set of a movie about 1970s pimps. He wasn’t a fat, US-funded dictator and friend of Israel.
Because, for all the talk about how the Egyptian revolution wasn’t about Israel, there sure were a lot of headlines in the Economist, BBC and New York Times about how Israelis were sourpusses for not celebrating the downfall of Mubarak.
Had Gaddafi been the best friend of the Jewish state, would we not be hearing more about the inspiration of the Arabs throwing off the dictator? Or had he been some Western- supported regime, like Mubarak, with US airplanes bombing the protesters, wouldn’t there be some huge outcry about the “propped-up dictator” murdering Arabs in the street?
WE WILL never know why Libya didn’t inspire. We won’t ever know why Palestinians with slingshots and checkered keffiyehs make people weak in the knees, while the same people 1,000 miles away are boring.
But the lack of romance hides a more intriguing question: Why, for decades, did so many people and countries collaborate with the barbaric regime in Tripoli? I’m not speaking only of business interests like British Petroleum, but politicians, prominent leftist activists, academics, human rights programs and universities. The latest scandal involves the London School of Economics, which accepted $488,000 from Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam. Saif also received a doctorate from LSE, which is now being probed for plagiarism and was invited to give a speech at the university in 2010. Reports noted that he declared democracy to be the best system of government for his country.
But the ties between the LSE and Gaddafi are only the tip of a giant iceberg.
The West was wooed by Gaddafi after 9/11, when the regime attempted to portray itself as fighting Islamic terrorism. After the 2003 Iraq War, Gaddafi ostentatiously abandoned a nuclear weapons program. In murky dealings that are still not clear, the Scottish government released the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Mughrabi, in 2009 because he was supposedly dying of cancer. Mughrabi was given a hero’s welcome in Libya, and is still alive. Now it appears the UK government had some underhanded role in that release.
But releasing terrorists and giving the crooked sons of a dictator PhDs isn’t enough. The UN time and again gave Gaddafi a stamp of approval, first in 2003 when Libya was elected leader of the UN Commission on Human Rights. In 2010, 155 countries voted to put Libya on the Human Rights Council. Just prior to that event Ali Treki – a Libyan diplomat – was elected president of the UN General Assembly. This, despite the fact that he said in a 1983 speech: “Is it not the Jews who are exploiting the American people and trying to debase them? If we succeed in eliminating that entity, we shall by the same token save the American and European peoples.”
But why would a raving anti-Semite not head part of the UN, and a brutal dictatorship not be in charge of human rights?
Leading celebrities time and again patronized the Gaddafi family. Usher, Nelly Furtado, Beyonce and Mariah Carey all performed at lavish parties for them. When Gaddafi was in Italy in June of 2009, he asked to meet 1,000 prominent Italian women. And, no surprise, they came in droves to sit and listen to the dictator, much like Columbia University lapped up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech in 2007.
According to one report, “there were leading figures from politics, culture and industry; ministers posed for cameras, lawyers talked earnestly... in their seats and reality TV personalities blew kisses across the aisles.”
Human Rights Watch has been accused of “marketing Gaddafi” by praising his son Saif for creating “an expanded space for discussion and debate.”
Groups of activists, including Israeli- Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, have made pilgrimages to Tripoli.
The long-running attachment the West had to Gaddafi puts in perspective the subsequent lack of interest in the rebels now fighting his tyranny. Gaddafi and his henchmen should never have been given a pulpit at the UN, in Italy, at the LSE, or anywhere else, and hopefully sooner rather than later the rebels will remove them from power.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita The Sky is Falling
Terra Incognita: The sky is falling (maybe)!
By SETH FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
03/01/2011 22:54
Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.
Talkbacks (5)
If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.
The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”
The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.
One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”
But it was the same in 2007. In that yearHaaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”
As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.
The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”
After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”
But it hasn’t happened, yet.
The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.
Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.
Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.
MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”
In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”
But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”
Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”
Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.
The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.
This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”
Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.
WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”
He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.
Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”
AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”
And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.
Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.
In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
By SETH FRANTZMAN
Jerusalem Post
03/01/2011 22:54
Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.
Talkbacks (5)
If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.
The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”
The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.
One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”
But it was the same in 2007. In that yearHaaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”
As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.
The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”
After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”
But it hasn’t happened, yet.
The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.
Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.
Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.
MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”
In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”
But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”
Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”
Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.
The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.
This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”
Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.
WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”
He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.
Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”
AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”
And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.
Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.
In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Friday, March 4, 2011
Terra Incognita 136 Honor Killings in Israel
Terra Incognita: A communal state of denial
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/22/2011 23:11
Another day, another honor killing that goes unpunished.
Talkbacks (3)
On January 20, sometime after nightfall a pretty, dark-haired, 19-year-old woman arrived at the Central Bus Station in Ramle. At the corner of Herzl and Bialik streets, she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the Jawarish neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of the town. She didn’t get very far. The taxi stopped at a light and a man from a neighboring car got out and shot her several times.
Initial news reports minimized and confused the story, saying she got shot while getting out of the taxi. Another early report made it seem like the bullet was a stray. Ramle is a rough town, and it seems that some people assumed this was just a tragic accident. Eventually it emerged that the woman, Alla Dahar, was a promising medical student and a resident of the upper-class neighborhood of Kababir in Haifa – a community composed of the tiny Ahmadiyya Muslim sect.
RELATED:
Terra Incognita: Between 'we' and 'they'
Terra Incognita: Careful what we wish for
Terra Incognita: Deathly silence
Within hours of her murder the police had arrested a suspect, Hassam Abu Ghanem, 24, a former boyfriend. It turns out Dahar was not a passive victim. She had complained to the police in Haifa in May that her boyfriend had threatened to kill her, and had assaulted her when she expressed a desire to study abroad. For 10 days the police did nothing. When they informed the police in Ramle of the complaint, the police there closed the file; by then, Dahar was already abroad, so why cause trouble?
Some people will be quick to say that the lack of police interest is entirely related to the Arab ethnicity of the people involved. But that’s not the whole story. It’s not the first time police received complaints from a woman, Jewish or Arab, about abuse and didn’t do anything. The police sometimes do embarrassingly little to investigate serious cases, as is clear from the story about Neta Blatt- Sorek, whose murder at the hand of terrorists at Beit Jimal was initially ruled a suicide.
THE REAL story about the Dahar murder is not just about police incompetence. It isn’t just about an enterprising young woman who wanted to make something of herself, and whose only mistake was to go out with the wrong man. It is also about the great and terrible stae of denial regarding ‘honor’ killings, and the conspiracy of silence and lies surrounding them. After Dahar was murdered her mother, Marwa, told the media her daughter had never been in a relationship with the suspect, or been threatened.
But ‘honor’ killings and denial in Ramle are a sort of national pasttime.
In 2007, 20 female relatives of the Abu Ghanem clan came forward to police with stories of a reign of terror in their neighborhood. The Abu Ghanems are a Beduin clan that moved to Ramle in the 1950s and number around 2,000 people. They dominate the Jawarish neighborhood.
Over an eight-year period, nine female members of the family had been murdered to defend “family honor.”
In 2008, Dalia Abu Ghanem, a 16- year-old mother, disappeared. In 2000 her mother had been murdered, and in 2006 her sister, who was 15, was also murdered. Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, wanted to be a nurse. Instead, she was beaten by her brother in 2007, ostensibly because she refused an arranged marriage. She called the police, and they appear to have done nothing. Then she was murdered, shot nine times in bed.
Reem Abu Ghanem, 19, was strangled to death.
Murder after murder, a long line of blood and body bags for just one community. The women are buried in unmarked graves – typical of cases where “honor” is involved. But the public receives the story in a different way. In neighboring Lod (another mixed town), two women were murdered in October. In total 20 Muslim women were slain in Ramle and Lod between 2005 and 2010.
After the spate of murders in Lod there were protests. Not against the men doing the killing. Not against the culture of “honor” which values a woman less than a car. The protest was against the government. This was a typical line of approach to the murders in Lod: It’s all about neglect, a lack of investment in the police force and the Arab community.
Arab MKs led the way. Jamal Zahalka (Balad) said: “I am against sweeping anything under the carpet, and in our community – just like in any community – there are men who use violence against women for all sorts of reasons, especially to prove their masculinity.” Afo Agbaria (Hadash): “The media is always so quick to label these murders honor killings, but we have to take these words out of our lexicon because every murder of a woman must be viewed as a murder, and nothing more.” Ahmed Tibi (Raam Ta’al) suggested banning the use of the phrase “honor killing” when referring to these types of crimes, and making it easier for relatives to sue the newspapers that describe the killings this way.
THIS IS the state of denial. The police do very little to prevent these killings, because the Arab community won’t cooperate with them, they lack resources and they are, unfortunately, incompetent. The community claims the killings don’t even happen, it’s all “mistaken identity” (you might ask yourself here, why then so many men aren’t being gunned down by stray bullets and buried in unmarked graves). For the Arab leadership, the words should simply disappear. For the Jewish public it is about neglect, and it is the government’s fault.
The extreme sense of hopelessness and denial can be seen in the statement by one Arab woman from Lod to the media: “The minute the police describe a murder as an ‘honor killing,’ it severely damages [the reputation of] the family for generations to come.”
The tragedy of this point of view is palpable. Honor killings can be stopped. The first step should be the passage of a bill to make them like hate crimes and crimes involving criminal conspiracy in the US. This will provide special tools to prosecutors and the police. The criminals involved should receive twice, maybe three times the normal sentence for murder.
But it mustn’t end with enforcement. Women in Arab communities must be empowered to speak out, whether via better witness protection or more avenues, and to feel that their culture and hardships are understood and respected.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=209432
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/22/2011 23:11
Another day, another honor killing that goes unpunished.
Talkbacks (3)
On January 20, sometime after nightfall a pretty, dark-haired, 19-year-old woman arrived at the Central Bus Station in Ramle. At the corner of Herzl and Bialik streets, she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the Jawarish neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of the town. She didn’t get very far. The taxi stopped at a light and a man from a neighboring car got out and shot her several times.
Initial news reports minimized and confused the story, saying she got shot while getting out of the taxi. Another early report made it seem like the bullet was a stray. Ramle is a rough town, and it seems that some people assumed this was just a tragic accident. Eventually it emerged that the woman, Alla Dahar, was a promising medical student and a resident of the upper-class neighborhood of Kababir in Haifa – a community composed of the tiny Ahmadiyya Muslim sect.
RELATED:
Terra Incognita: Between 'we' and 'they'
Terra Incognita: Careful what we wish for
Terra Incognita: Deathly silence
Within hours of her murder the police had arrested a suspect, Hassam Abu Ghanem, 24, a former boyfriend. It turns out Dahar was not a passive victim. She had complained to the police in Haifa in May that her boyfriend had threatened to kill her, and had assaulted her when she expressed a desire to study abroad. For 10 days the police did nothing. When they informed the police in Ramle of the complaint, the police there closed the file; by then, Dahar was already abroad, so why cause trouble?
Some people will be quick to say that the lack of police interest is entirely related to the Arab ethnicity of the people involved. But that’s not the whole story. It’s not the first time police received complaints from a woman, Jewish or Arab, about abuse and didn’t do anything. The police sometimes do embarrassingly little to investigate serious cases, as is clear from the story about Neta Blatt- Sorek, whose murder at the hand of terrorists at Beit Jimal was initially ruled a suicide.
THE REAL story about the Dahar murder is not just about police incompetence. It isn’t just about an enterprising young woman who wanted to make something of herself, and whose only mistake was to go out with the wrong man. It is also about the great and terrible stae of denial regarding ‘honor’ killings, and the conspiracy of silence and lies surrounding them. After Dahar was murdered her mother, Marwa, told the media her daughter had never been in a relationship with the suspect, or been threatened.
But ‘honor’ killings and denial in Ramle are a sort of national pasttime.
In 2007, 20 female relatives of the Abu Ghanem clan came forward to police with stories of a reign of terror in their neighborhood. The Abu Ghanems are a Beduin clan that moved to Ramle in the 1950s and number around 2,000 people. They dominate the Jawarish neighborhood.
Over an eight-year period, nine female members of the family had been murdered to defend “family honor.”
In 2008, Dalia Abu Ghanem, a 16- year-old mother, disappeared. In 2000 her mother had been murdered, and in 2006 her sister, who was 15, was also murdered. Hamda Abu Ghanem, 18, wanted to be a nurse. Instead, she was beaten by her brother in 2007, ostensibly because she refused an arranged marriage. She called the police, and they appear to have done nothing. Then she was murdered, shot nine times in bed.
Reem Abu Ghanem, 19, was strangled to death.
Murder after murder, a long line of blood and body bags for just one community. The women are buried in unmarked graves – typical of cases where “honor” is involved. But the public receives the story in a different way. In neighboring Lod (another mixed town), two women were murdered in October. In total 20 Muslim women were slain in Ramle and Lod between 2005 and 2010.
After the spate of murders in Lod there were protests. Not against the men doing the killing. Not against the culture of “honor” which values a woman less than a car. The protest was against the government. This was a typical line of approach to the murders in Lod: It’s all about neglect, a lack of investment in the police force and the Arab community.
Arab MKs led the way. Jamal Zahalka (Balad) said: “I am against sweeping anything under the carpet, and in our community – just like in any community – there are men who use violence against women for all sorts of reasons, especially to prove their masculinity.” Afo Agbaria (Hadash): “The media is always so quick to label these murders honor killings, but we have to take these words out of our lexicon because every murder of a woman must be viewed as a murder, and nothing more.” Ahmed Tibi (Raam Ta’al) suggested banning the use of the phrase “honor killing” when referring to these types of crimes, and making it easier for relatives to sue the newspapers that describe the killings this way.
THIS IS the state of denial. The police do very little to prevent these killings, because the Arab community won’t cooperate with them, they lack resources and they are, unfortunately, incompetent. The community claims the killings don’t even happen, it’s all “mistaken identity” (you might ask yourself here, why then so many men aren’t being gunned down by stray bullets and buried in unmarked graves). For the Arab leadership, the words should simply disappear. For the Jewish public it is about neglect, and it is the government’s fault.
The extreme sense of hopelessness and denial can be seen in the statement by one Arab woman from Lod to the media: “The minute the police describe a murder as an ‘honor killing,’ it severely damages [the reputation of] the family for generations to come.”
The tragedy of this point of view is palpable. Honor killings can be stopped. The first step should be the passage of a bill to make them like hate crimes and crimes involving criminal conspiracy in the US. This will provide special tools to prosecutors and the police. The criminals involved should receive twice, maybe three times the normal sentence for murder.
But it mustn’t end with enforcement. Women in Arab communities must be empowered to speak out, whether via better witness protection or more avenues, and to feel that their culture and hardships are understood and respected.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=209432
Terra Incognita 135 Israel's Prophets of Doom
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=210393
Terra Incognita: The sky is falling (maybe)!
By SETH FRANTZMAN
03/01/2011 22:54
Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.
Talkbacks (5)
If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.
The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”
The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.
One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”
But it was the same in 2007. In that year Haaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”
As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.
The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”
After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”
But it hasn’t happened, yet.
The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.
Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.
Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.
MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”
In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”
But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”
Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”
Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.
The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.
This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”
Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.
WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”
He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.
Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”
AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”
And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.
Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.
In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita: The sky is falling (maybe)!
By SETH FRANTZMAN
03/01/2011 22:54
Things are always ‘exploding’ or ‘ticking’ or ‘being pushed toward an uprising’ or ‘civil war’ in this country.
Talkbacks (5)
If this country were a coal mine, it would be full of canaries. The canary is, so we are told, especially sensitive to noxious gas, so when it stops singing, it means disaster is coming. There are lots of canaries here. They sing and sing, but they don’t stop. Consider what they sing about.
The coming Druse intifada. In 2009, a group of Druse protested outside the Prime Ministers Office. According to reports “Hamud Jabar, the head of a Druse regional council in northern Israel, warned in remarks to Ynet that if the demands presented on Sunday are not met, the Druse may launch an intifada of their own, similar to the Palestinian terrorist campaigns against Israel.”
The Druse demanded cancellation of taxes, and complained of budgetary discrimination.
One sign read: “A Druse is as good as a Jew in war, but when it comes to budgets, 10 Druse children are equal to one Jewish child.”
But it was the same in 2007. In that year Haaretz ran a headline titled “A Druse intifada?” What prompted the accompanying article was an incident in Yirka in which a Jewish man, Ari Tal, appointed to run the local council, was abused and thrown out of the village, which was about NIS 68 million in debt. The reason was that only 14 percent of the residents paid taxes, and only 8% paid their electric bills. Yet the article noted that the village “has become one of the biggest shopping complexes in the North.”
As a message to the next person who might be appointed to run the village, a coffin was placed outside the municipality.
The statement was clear: let us run our own affairs, or else. The former council head, Rafik Salameh, claimed, “It’s impossible to protect him. And I fear that his arrival in the village will be the opening salvo of the Druse intifada.”
After riots in the Druse village of Peki’in in October 2007, more talk was heard about the coming “explosion.”
But it hasn’t happened, yet.
The imminent Negev Beduin uprising.
Because the government will not give the Negev Beduin some 800,000 dunams of land and won’t recognize their 50 illegally constructed villages there is, supposedly, an imminent danger they may rise up.
Most often in the news is the hamlet of al- Arakib – site of a few ramshackle structures that has become a hot spot in the Beduin squatting campaign. Month after month the Beduin settlers return, and month after month the Israel Lands Authority and police destroy the place.
MK Taleb a-Sanaa (United Arab List- Ta’al), who is a Beduin, claimed “the state is pushing its Beduin citizens to the point where they may launch a popular intifada, which will have severe results.”
In 2010 Haaretz noted: “It’s hard to understand why Israel is pushing a significant sector of its citizens toward extremism and crime.”
But we have heard it before. In 1998, Dr. Elie Rekhes of Tel Aviv University’s Program on Arab Policies warned The Jerusalem Post of a “Beduin intifada” unless urgent steps were taken. Am Johal reported on Antiwar.com in 2004 that people are “predicting a coming Beduin intifada.”
Muhammad Zeidan, head of the Arab Human Rights Association, noted “they are being pushed to do this.”
Max Marshall of the College of New Jersey called it “a ticking time bomb” in 2006. It’s still ticking, evidently.
The eventual boiling over of ‘mixed’ towns.
This is always a cause for concern. The “gentrification” or “Judaization” of Jaffa, Ramle, Haifa, Lod and Acre is always, supposedly, pushing people toward an intifada. Kenneth Bandler writing at The Jerusalem Post noted last year that MK Haneen Zoabi was warning of a “third Palestinian intifada... this time the uprising will come from within Israel.”
Similar things were heard in 2007, after rioting by Arabs and Jews in Acre on Yom Kippur. In 2002, Effi Oshaya of the Labor Party warned of an Israeli-Arab intifada in an interview with a publication called Let’s Talk Peace.
WHAT ELSE is boiling over? Well, Gaza and the West Bank, to be sure. East Jerusalem: Meir Margalit claimed in these pages that “the daily humiliation suffered by residents is reaching a boiling point, and it’s only a matter of time until a conflagration erupts... the Arabs of east Jerusalem have been humiliated and trampled upon for years. Here too, patience is running out.”
He titled his article, “The 10 plagues of east Jerusalem.” He had written a similar article for Occupation magazine in 2009.
Then it was: “Several moves have made their lives unbearable and – the most difficult to bear – they feel their honor is being trodden underfoot.”
AND LEBANON. Egypt. Jordan. Things are always “exploding” or “ticking” or “being pushed toward an uprising.” The haredim, are they on the brink too? What of the foreign workers? And who recalls now all the talk of a “civil war” with the settlers? Remember the insights about “radicalization,” “alienation” and the “wild weeds.”
And the radical academics and anti-Israel crazies – are they also being “pushed” toward an intifada? We might be lucky the government doesn’t care too much. It means that grievances aren’t being addressed, but it also means officials don’t run around as if the sky is falling trying to fix problems partly of their own making.
Maybe there will be intifadas, but there’s very little that can be done about it except to abandon the Negev to squatters, stop asking Druse villages to pay taxes or relinquish control of east Jerusalem. And that won’t happen.
In coal mines, the canaries stopped singing when an explosion was actually imminent. Too bad human prognosticators aren’t as reliable. The least they could do is be quiet, but that too won’t happen.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Terra Incognita 134 Between "we" and "They"
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=208389
Terra Incognita: Between 'we' and 'they'
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/15/2011 22:21
Some here ascribe all sorts of fabricated evils to Israelis.
Talkbacks (9)
In a recent article on Egypt, Larry Derfner repeats an unoriginal theme when he ascribes to “us” all sorts of values and opinions merely to place himself above and outside our society. “It’s not that we’re against democracy, goes the Israeli line on Egypt, it’s that we’re afraid of the Islamists and radical Arab nationalists taking over... we’ve taken sides against popular revolts that could hardly have cared less about the Israeli-Arab conflict... we’re tarring the Egyptian masses now as radicals... We have no problem supporting dictators or opposing democrats... We were doing to other people what we’d always hated other people doing to us.”
“We” is used no less than 48 times. And yet surely Derfner is not suggesting he is responsible; he isn’t speaking as someone who actually was part of the “we,” such as the government officials who met with their South African counterparts in the 1970s. What he really means is “they” – the bad Israelis, the Israelis to whom he ascribes all these things. But by saying “we,” many in Israel ascribe terrible sins to “us” only to take part in some banal self-flagellation and present themselves as lone righteous voices.
There is this never-ending self-lashing, this “oh, woe is me... we are so evil... our society is so terrible....”
To ascribe all these uniquely obnoxious traits to their own society, they portray that society as a distorted nightmare, like some Picasso drawing. Yossi Sarid, a former education minister, writes in Haaretz: “This was a civil uprising [in Egypt], one that did not suit the wild and violent image we insist on ascribing to all Arabs and to all Muslims... if only Israeli flags had been burned in the streets, we could frighten ourselves and the whole world, saying we were right again... can only Israel enjoy its limited democracy? The Exodus from Egypt, from slavery to freedom, is for Hebrews only, not for Arabs... finally we fit into the region.”
What is Sarid getting at? When he says “we,” does he mean that when he was education minister he worked hard to promote democracy in the Arab world, or does he mean that he too viewed the Arabs as insufferable extremists?
Well it seems he neither promoted democracy nor held this racist view. So who is “we”?
What he means is “they” – those bad Israelis, the ones who hate Arabs. Which Israeli ever said freedom is for Jews only? Yet suddenly that outlandish view becomes “we,” merely so “we” can be racist and hateful and reactionary.
Anshel Pfeffer writes, also in Haaretz, “are we afraid we won’t be able to bask in the title of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’? Doesn’t Egypt deserve democracy too?” Which “we” is this? Where, ever, did someone complain that we won’t be able to bask in the title of the only democracy in the Middle East? Never were such words uttered, and yet this apparently becomes the normal notion of so many of “us.”
Bradley Burston writes on his blog on Haaretz.com: “I want you [Egyptians] to show us the last thing we expected to see. Because it is only when we see our best consensus assessments proven dead wrong, when the wholly unanticipated stuns us, when the inconceivable turns overnight into the inevitable, that change comes to this place... why has this Israeli government done its best to emulate in two years repressive measures Hosni Mubarak took 30 years to refine?”
At the end of his column Burston explains, “We deserve to build settlements because we have suffered and the Arabs are violent.” Once again, “we” is not the author, and the actual people referred to, the settlers, would never describe their reasoning this way.
TO TURN “us” into the a bogeyman, reality must be skewed so that the labels of “we” and “us” can be placed on it. Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar writes, “True, in Israel they do not arrest bloggers for insulting the president’s honor. On the other hand, Egypt does not hold for more than 43 years millions of people under military occupation.”
Eldar, like all his fellow travelers, imagines an Egypt that is democratic and an Israel that is a dictatorship. Egypt, he forgets, has had decades of emergency rule and lives under military dictatorship even today.
Derfner argues that our fears are “part of the story of why the incredibly brave people in Egypt inspire just about everyone in the world except us.”
Yet he knows very well that many people in the Gulf states, Iran, China and all over the world are not so inspired by Egypt, and he also knows that in Israel the Egyptian uprising inspired many. So he misleads on two accounts, he makes “us” into freedom haters, and makes the world into something it is not.
Why does Sarid write that Israel has “limited democracy”? He knows all too well, from having been in the Knesset, that this is a fabrication. In the Hebrew press it is the same: “we, us, ours, all of us.”
Part of the reason for the plethora of “we” that oozes into every piece of punditry is simply group think. In two of four February 13 op-eds in Haaretz, “Orientalism” is the topic. That isn’t coincidence; it stems from the same people all sitting around and telling the same nonsense to each other; “we live in a racist society, Orientalism finally is proven wrong by Egypt’s democracy, we believe democracy is only for us...”
And the readers, do they suffer from a mass psychosis? They should know very well that “we” is a stand in for “they.”
The over-emphasis on “we” stems from a prophetic tradition, but also betrays a deeper self-hate. In Judaism the child at Passover who indicates inclusion is “wise,” while the one who places himself outside is “wicked.”
Not wanting to be wicked, many of those who truly abhor Israel ascribe all sorts of nonsense and evils to it and its people. They style themselves “we” and “us,” when they do not actually view themselves as one of us, for they have only contempt for our society, which they paint as brutish, racist, savage and ignorant.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
Terra Incognita: Between 'we' and 'they'
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
02/15/2011 22:21
Some here ascribe all sorts of fabricated evils to Israelis.
Talkbacks (9)
In a recent article on Egypt, Larry Derfner repeats an unoriginal theme when he ascribes to “us” all sorts of values and opinions merely to place himself above and outside our society. “It’s not that we’re against democracy, goes the Israeli line on Egypt, it’s that we’re afraid of the Islamists and radical Arab nationalists taking over... we’ve taken sides against popular revolts that could hardly have cared less about the Israeli-Arab conflict... we’re tarring the Egyptian masses now as radicals... We have no problem supporting dictators or opposing democrats... We were doing to other people what we’d always hated other people doing to us.”
“We” is used no less than 48 times. And yet surely Derfner is not suggesting he is responsible; he isn’t speaking as someone who actually was part of the “we,” such as the government officials who met with their South African counterparts in the 1970s. What he really means is “they” – the bad Israelis, the Israelis to whom he ascribes all these things. But by saying “we,” many in Israel ascribe terrible sins to “us” only to take part in some banal self-flagellation and present themselves as lone righteous voices.
There is this never-ending self-lashing, this “oh, woe is me... we are so evil... our society is so terrible....”
To ascribe all these uniquely obnoxious traits to their own society, they portray that society as a distorted nightmare, like some Picasso drawing. Yossi Sarid, a former education minister, writes in Haaretz: “This was a civil uprising [in Egypt], one that did not suit the wild and violent image we insist on ascribing to all Arabs and to all Muslims... if only Israeli flags had been burned in the streets, we could frighten ourselves and the whole world, saying we were right again... can only Israel enjoy its limited democracy? The Exodus from Egypt, from slavery to freedom, is for Hebrews only, not for Arabs... finally we fit into the region.”
What is Sarid getting at? When he says “we,” does he mean that when he was education minister he worked hard to promote democracy in the Arab world, or does he mean that he too viewed the Arabs as insufferable extremists?
Well it seems he neither promoted democracy nor held this racist view. So who is “we”?
What he means is “they” – those bad Israelis, the ones who hate Arabs. Which Israeli ever said freedom is for Jews only? Yet suddenly that outlandish view becomes “we,” merely so “we” can be racist and hateful and reactionary.
Anshel Pfeffer writes, also in Haaretz, “are we afraid we won’t be able to bask in the title of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’? Doesn’t Egypt deserve democracy too?” Which “we” is this? Where, ever, did someone complain that we won’t be able to bask in the title of the only democracy in the Middle East? Never were such words uttered, and yet this apparently becomes the normal notion of so many of “us.”
Bradley Burston writes on his blog on Haaretz.com: “I want you [Egyptians] to show us the last thing we expected to see. Because it is only when we see our best consensus assessments proven dead wrong, when the wholly unanticipated stuns us, when the inconceivable turns overnight into the inevitable, that change comes to this place... why has this Israeli government done its best to emulate in two years repressive measures Hosni Mubarak took 30 years to refine?”
At the end of his column Burston explains, “We deserve to build settlements because we have suffered and the Arabs are violent.” Once again, “we” is not the author, and the actual people referred to, the settlers, would never describe their reasoning this way.
TO TURN “us” into the a bogeyman, reality must be skewed so that the labels of “we” and “us” can be placed on it. Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar writes, “True, in Israel they do not arrest bloggers for insulting the president’s honor. On the other hand, Egypt does not hold for more than 43 years millions of people under military occupation.”
Eldar, like all his fellow travelers, imagines an Egypt that is democratic and an Israel that is a dictatorship. Egypt, he forgets, has had decades of emergency rule and lives under military dictatorship even today.
Derfner argues that our fears are “part of the story of why the incredibly brave people in Egypt inspire just about everyone in the world except us.”
Yet he knows very well that many people in the Gulf states, Iran, China and all over the world are not so inspired by Egypt, and he also knows that in Israel the Egyptian uprising inspired many. So he misleads on two accounts, he makes “us” into freedom haters, and makes the world into something it is not.
Why does Sarid write that Israel has “limited democracy”? He knows all too well, from having been in the Knesset, that this is a fabrication. In the Hebrew press it is the same: “we, us, ours, all of us.”
Part of the reason for the plethora of “we” that oozes into every piece of punditry is simply group think. In two of four February 13 op-eds in Haaretz, “Orientalism” is the topic. That isn’t coincidence; it stems from the same people all sitting around and telling the same nonsense to each other; “we live in a racist society, Orientalism finally is proven wrong by Egypt’s democracy, we believe democracy is only for us...”
And the readers, do they suffer from a mass psychosis? They should know very well that “we” is a stand in for “they.”
The over-emphasis on “we” stems from a prophetic tradition, but also betrays a deeper self-hate. In Judaism the child at Passover who indicates inclusion is “wise,” while the one who places himself outside is “wicked.”
Not wanting to be wicked, many of those who truly abhor Israel ascribe all sorts of nonsense and evils to it and its people. They style themselves “we” and “us,” when they do not actually view themselves as one of us, for they have only contempt for our society, which they paint as brutish, racist, savage and ignorant.
The writer has a PhD from Hebrew University and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.
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