The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony

by Paul Street
Truthdig

There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at arm’s-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. global power--to the erosion of the United States’ superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar world.

This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October, the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W. Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essay titled “How Trump Is Ending the American Era.” Cohen recounted numerous ways in which Trump had reduced “America’s standing and ability to influence global affairs.” He worried that Trump’s presidency would leave “America’s position in the world stunted” and an “America lacking confidence” on the global stage.

But it isn’t just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about how Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women’s March against Trump) frets that that Trump’s “America First” and authoritarian views have the world “looking for leadership elsewhere.”

“Could this be it?” Vick asks. “Might the American Century actually clock out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that bother?”

I recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a left-liberal American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and mostly excellent and instructive volume, the author finds it “worrisome” that other nations see the U.S. “abdicating its role as the world’s leading policeman” under Trump--and that, “given what we have seen so far from the [Trump] administration, U.S. hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than it has been in a long time.”

For the purposes of this report, I’ll leave aside the matter of whether Trump is, in fact, speeding the decline of U.S. global power (he undoubtedly is) and how he’s doing that to focus instead on a very different question: What would be so awful about the end of “the American Era”?the seven-plus decades of U.S. global economic and related military supremacy between 1945 and the present? Why should the world mourn the “premature” end of the “American Century”?

It would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the politically cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives outside the U.S. would feel about the end of U.S. global dominance. My guess is that Uncle Sam’s weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents who pay attention to world events.

According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup International at the end of 2013, Earth’s people see the United States as the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by a wide margin.

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Uri Avnery's Column: All Quiet on the Eastern Front

by Uri Avnery

Gush Shalom

PEOPLE ENDOWED with sensitive political ears were startled this week by two words, which, so it seemed, escaped from the mouth of Binyamin Netanyahu by accident: “Eastern front”.

Once upon a time these words were part of the everyday vocabulary of the occupation. In recent years they have been gathering dust in the political junkyard.

THE VERBAL couple “Eastern front” was born after the Six-day War. It served to buttress the strategic doctrine that the Jordan River is Israel’s “security border”.

The theory: there is a possibility for three Arab armies – those of Iraq, Syria and Jordan – to gather east of the Jordan, cross the river and endanger the existence of Israel. We must stop them before they enter the country. Therefore, the Jordan Valley must serve as a permanent base for the Israeli army, our troops must stay there.

This was a doubtful theory to start with. In order to take part in such an offensive, the Iraqi army would have to assemble, cross the desert and deploy in Jordan, a lengthy and complex logistical operation that would give the Israeli army ample time to hit the Iraqis long before they reached the bank of the Jordan. As for the Syrians, it would be much easier for them to attack Israel on the Golan Heights than to move their army south and attack from the east. And Jordan has always been a secret – but loyal – partner of Israel (except for the short episode of the Six-day War.)

In recent years, the theory has become manifestly ridiculous. The Americans have invaded Iraq and defeated and disbanded Saddam Hussein’s glorious army, which turned out to be a paper tiger. The Kingdom of Jordan has signed an official peace treaty with Israel. Syria is using every opportunity to demonstrate its longing for peace, if Israel would only return the Golan Heights. In short, Israel has nothing to fear from its Eastern neighbors.

True, situations can change. Regimes change, alliances change. But it is impossible to imagine a situation in which three terrifying armies cross the Jordan into Canaan, like the children of Israel in the Biblical story.

Moreover, the idea of a ground attack, like the Nazi blitzkrieg in World War II, belongs to history. In any future war, long-range missiles will play a dominant role. One could imagine the Israeli soldiers in the Jordan valley reclining on deckchairs and observing the missiles flying over their heads in both directions.

So how did this silly idea gain new life?

IT MAY be useful to go 43 years back in time, in order to understand how this bogeyman was born.

Only six weeks after the Six-day War, the “Allon plan” was launched. Yigal Allon, then Minister of Labor, submitted it to the government. It was not adopted officially, but it did exercise a major influence on the Israeli leadership.

No authorized map of the plan was ever published, but the main points became known. Allon proposed to annex to Israel the Jordan Valley and the western shore of the Dead Sea. What was left of the West Bank would become enclaves surrounded by Israeli territory, except for a narrow corridor near Jericho which would connect the West Bank with the Jordanian kingdom. Allon also proposed annexing to Israel certain areas in the West Bank, the North of Sinai (“the Rafah Opening”) and the South of the Gaza Strip (“the Katif Bloc’).

He did not care whether the West Bank would be returned to Jordan or became a separate Palestinian entity. Once I attacked him from the Knesset rostrum and accused him of obstructing the establishment of the Palestinian state, which I advocated, and when I returned to my seat, he sent me a note: “I am for a Palestinian state in the West Bank. So how am I less of a dove than you?”

The plan was put forward as a military imperative, but its motives were quite different.

In those days I met with Allon fairly regularly, so I had the opportunity to follow his line of thought. He had been one of the outstanding commanders of the 1948 war and was considered a military expert, but above all he was a leading member of the Kibbutz movement, which at the time exercised a lot of influence in the country.

Immediately after the seizure of the West Bank, the people of the Kibbutz movement spread out across the ground, looking for areas that would be suitable for intensive modern agriculture. Naturally, they were attracted to the Jordan Valley. From their point of view, this was an ideal place for new kibbutzim. It has plenty of water, the terrain is flat and eminently suited to modern agricultural machinery. And, most important, it was sparsely populated. All these advantages were lacking in other West Bank regions: their population was dense, the topography mountainous and the water scarce.

In my opinion, the entire Allon plan was a fruit of agricultural greed, and the military theory was nothing but an expedient security pretext. And, indeed, the immediate result was the setting up of a great number of kibbutzim and moshavim (cooperative villages) in the valley.

Years passed before the limits of the Allon Plan were burst open and settlements were established all over the West Bank.

THE ALLON PLAN gave birth to the bogeyman of the “Eastern Front”’ and since then it has terrorized those who seek peace. Like a ghost, it comes and goes, materializes and vanishes, once in one form, once in another.

Ariel Sharon demanded the annexation of the “widened valley”. The valley itself, a part of the Great Syrian-African Rift Valley, is 120 km long (from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea) but only about 15 km wide. Sharon demanded almost obsessively the addition to it of the “back of the mountain”, meaning the eastern slope of the central West Bank mountain range, which would have widened it substantially.

When Sharon adopted the Separation Wall project, it was supposed to separate the West Bank not only from Israel proper, but also from the Jordan Valley. This would have enabled what was called the “Allon Plan plus”. The wall would have encircled the entire West Bank, without the Jericho corridor. This plan has not been implemented to date, both because of international opposition and because of lack of funds.

Since the Oslo agreement, almost all successive Israeli governments have insisted that the Jordan Valley must remain in Israeli hands in any future peace agreement. This demand appeared in many guises: sometimes the words were “security border”, sometimes “warning stations”, sometimes “military installations”, sometimes “long-term lease”, depending on the creative talents of successive Prime Ministers. The common denominator: the valley should remain under Israeli control.

NOW COMES Netanyahu and resurrects the verbal duo “Eastern Front”.

What Eastern Front? What threats are there from our eastern neighbors? Where is Saddam Hussein? Where is Hafez al-Assad? Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to send the armored columns of the Revolutionary Guards rolling towards the Jordan crossings?

Well, it goes like this: the Americans are going to leave Iraq some day. Then a new Saddam Hussein will arise, this time a Shiite, and ally himself with Shiite Iran and the treacherous Turks, and how can you rely on the Jordanian king who abhors Netanyahu? Terrible stuff may happen if we don’t keep watch on the bank of the Jordan!

This is manifestly ludicrous. So what is the real aim?

The entire world is now busy with the American demand for starting “direct talks” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. One might be tempted to think that world peace depends on turning the “proximity talks” into “direct talks”. Never have so many words of sanctimonious hypocrisy been poured out on such a trivial subject.

The “proximity talks” have been going on for several months now. It would be wrong to say that their results have been close to zero. They were zero. Absolute zero. So what will happen if the two parties sit together in one room? One can predict with absolute certainty: Another zero. In the absence of an American determination to impose a solution, there will be no solution.

So why does Barack Obama insist? There is one explanation: throughout the Middle East, his policies have failed. He is in urgent need of an impressive achievement. He promised to leave Iraq, and the situation there makes it impossible. The war in Afghanistan is going from bad to worse, a general leaves and a general arrives, and victory is further away than ever. One can already imagine the last American climbing into the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy in Kabul.

Remains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here, too, Obama is facing failure. He hoped to achieve much without investing anything at all, and was easily defeated by the Israel lobby. To hide the shame, he needs something that can be presented to the ignorant public as a great American victory. The renewal of “direct talks” is meant to be such a victory.

Netanyahu, on his part, is quite satisfied with the situation as it is. Israel is calling for direct talks, the Palestinians refuse. Israel is extending its hand for peace, the Palestinians turn away. Mahmoud Abbas demands that Israel extend the freeze on the settlements and declares in advance that the negotiations will be based on the 1967 borders.

But the Americans are exerting tremendous pressure on Abbas, and Netanyahu fears that Abbas will give in. Therefore he declares that he cannot freeze the settlements, because in that case - God forbid! – his coalition would disintegrate. And if that does not suffice, here comes the Eastern Front. The Israeli government is giving notice to the Palestinians that it will not give up the Jordan Valley.

In order to emphasize the point, Netanyahu has started to remove the remaining Palestinian population in the valley, a few thousand. Villages are being eradicated, starting this week with Farasiya, where all the dwellings and the water installations were destroyed. This is ethnic cleansing pure and simple, much like the similar operation now going on against the Bedouins in the Negev.

What Netanyahu is saying, in so many words, is: Abbas should think twice before he enters “direct talks”.

THE JORDAN Valley descends to the lowest point on the surface of the earth, the Dead Sea, 400 meters below mean sea level.

The revival of the Eastern Front may indicate the lowest point of Netanyahu’s policy, with the intent of putting to death once and for all any remaining chance for peace.

Uri Avnery's Column - A Matter of Timing

by Uri Avnery

Gush Shalom

SOME WEEKS the news is dominated by a single word. This week’s word was “timing”.

It’s all a matter of timing. The Government of Israel has insulted the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, one of the greatest “friends” of Israel (meaning: somebody totally subservient to AIPAC) and spat in the face of President Barack Obama. So what? It’s all a matter of timing.

If the government had announced the building of 1600 new housing units in East Jerusalem a day earlier, it would have been OK. If it had announced it three days later, it would have been wonderful. But doing it exactly when Joe Biden was about to have dinner with Bibi and Sarah’le – that was really bad timing.

The matter itself is not important. Another thousand housing units in East Jerusalem, or 10 thousand, or 100 thousand – what different does it make? The only thing that matters is the timing.

As the Frenchman said: It’s worse than criminal, it’s stupid.

THE WORD “stupid” also figured prominently this week, second only to “timing”.

Stupidity is an accepted phenomenon in politics. I would almost say: to succeed in politics, one needs a measure of stupidity. Voters don’t like politicians who are too intelligent. They make them feel inferior. A foolish politician, on the other hand, appears to be “one of the folks”.

History is full of acts of folly by politicians. Many books have been written about this. To my mind, the epitome of foolishness was achieved by the events that led to World War I, with its millions of victims, which broke out because of the accumulated stupidity of (in ascending order) Austrian, Russian, German, French and British politicians.

But even stupidity in politics has its limits. I have pondered this question for decades, and who knows, one day, when I grow up, I might write a doctoral thesis about it.

My thesis goes like this: In politics (as in other fields) foolish things happen regularly. But some of them are stopped in time, before they can lead to disaster, while others are not. It this accidental, or is there a rule?

My answer is: there certainly is a rule. It works like this: when somebody sets in motion an act of folly that runs counter to the spirit of the regime, it is stopped in its tracks. While it moves from one bureaucrat to another, somebody starts to wonder. Just a moment, this cannot be right! It is referred to higher authority, and soon enough somebody decides that it is a mistake.

On the other hand, when the act of folly is in line with the spirit of the regime, there are no brakes. When it moves from one bureaucrat to the next, it looks quite natural to both. No red light. No alarm bell. And so the folly rolls on to the bitter end.

I remember how this rule came to my mind the first time. In 1965, Habib Bourguiba, the president of Tunisia, took a bold step: he made a speech in the biggest refugee camp in Jericho, then under Jordanian rule, and called upon the Arabs to recognize Israel. This caused a huge scandal all over the Arab world.

Some time later, the correspondent of an Israeli paper reported that in a press conference at the UN headquarters, Bourguiba had called for the destruction of Israel. This sounded strange to me. I made inquiries, checked the protocol and found out that the opposite was true: the reporter had mistakenly turned a no into a yes.

How did this happen? If the journalist had erred in the opposite direction and reported, for example, that Gamal Abd-el-Nasser had called for the acceptance of Israel into the Arab League, the news would have been stopped at once. Every red light would have lit up. Someone would have called out: Hey, something strange here! Check again! But in the Bourguiba case nobody noticed the mistake, for what is more natural than an Arab leader calling for the destruction of Israel? No verification needed.

That’s what happened this week in Jerusalem. Every government official knows that the nationalist Prime Minister is pushing for the Judaization of East Jerusalem, that the extreme nationalist Minister of the Interior is even more eager, and that the super-nationalist Mayor of Jerusalem practically salivates when he imagines a Jewish quarter on the Temple Mount. So why should a bureaucrat postpone the confirmation of a new Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem? Just because of the visit of some American windbag?

Therefore, the timing is not important. It’s the matter itself that’s important.

DURING HIS last days in office, President Bill Clinton published a peace plan, in which he tried to make up for eight years of failure in this region and kowtowing to successive Israeli governments. The plan was comparatively reasonable, but included a ticking bomb.

About East Jerusalem, Clinton proposed that what is Jewish should be joined to the State of Israel and what is Arab should be joined to the state of Palestine. He assumed (rightly, I believe) that Yasser Arafat was ready for such a compromise, which would have joined some new Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem to Israel. But Clinton was not wise enough to foresee the consequences of his proposal.

In practice, it was an open invitation to the Israeli government to speed up the establishment of new settlements in East Jerusalem, expecting them to become part of Israel. And indeed, since then successive Israeli governments have invested all available resources in this endeavor. Since money has no smell, every Jewish casino-owner in America and every Jewish brothel-keeper in Europe was invited to join the effort. The Biblical injunction – “Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog, into the house of the Lord thy God, for any vow; for even both these are abomination unto the Lord thy God” (Deuteronomy 23:18) – was suspended for this holy cause.

Now the pace is speeded up even more. Because there is no more effective means of obstructing peace than building new settlements in East Jerusalem.

THAT IS clear to anyone who has dealings with this region. No peace without an independent Palestinian state, no Palestinian state without East Jerusalem. About this there is total unanimity among all Palestinians, from Fatah to Hamas, and between all Arabs, from Morocco to Iraq, and between all Muslims, from Nigeria to Iran.

There will be no peace without the Palestinian flag waving above the Haram al-Sharif, the holy shrines of Islam which we call the Temple Mount. That is an iron-clad rule. Arabs can compromise about the refugee problem, painful as it may be, and about the borders, also with much pain, and about security matters. But they cannot compromise about East Jerusalem becoming the capital of Palestine. All national and religious passions converge here.

Anyone who wants to wreck any chance for peace – it is here that he has to act. The settlers and their supporters, who know that any peace agreement would include the elimination of (at least) most settlements, have planned in the past (and probably are planning now) to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, hoping that this would cause a worldwide conflagration which would reduce to ashes the chances of peace once and for all. Less extreme people dream about the creeping ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem by administrative chicanery, demolition of houses, denying means of livelihood and just making life in general miserable for Arabs. Moderate rightists just want to cover every empty square inch in East Jerusalem with Jewish neighborhoods. The aim is always the same.

THIS REALITY is, of course, well known to Obama and his advisors. In the beginning they believed, in their innocence, that they could sweet talk Netanyahu and Co. into stopping the building activity to facilitate the start of negotiations for the two-state solution. Very soon they learned that this was impossible without exerting massive pressure – and they were not prepared to do that.

After putting up a short and pitiful struggle, Obama gave in. He agreed to the deception of a “settlement freeze” in the West Bank. Now building is going on there with great enthusiasm, and the settlers are satisfied. They have completely stopped their demonstrations.

In Jerusalem there was not even a farcical attempt – Netanyahu just told Obama that he would go on building there (“as in Tel Aviv”), and Obama bowed his head. When Israeli officials announced a grandiose plan for building in “Ramat Shlomo” this week, they did not violate any undertaking. Only the matter of “timing” remained.

FOR JOE BIDEN, it was a matter of honor. For Mahmoud Abbas, it is a matter of survival.

Under intense pressure from the Americans and their agents, the rulers of the Arab countries, Abbas was obliged to agree to negotiations with the Netanyahu government – though only “proximity talks”, a euphemism for “distance talks”.

Clearly, nothing will come out of these talks except more humiliation for the Palestinians. Quite simply: anyone building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is announcing in advance that there is no chance for an agreement. After all, no sane Israeli would invest billions in a territory he intends to turn over to the Palestinian state. A person who is eating a pizza is not negotiating about it in good faith.

Even at this late stage, Abbas and his people still hope that something good will come out of all this: the US will acknowledge that they are right and exert, at long last, real pressure on Israel to implement the two-state solution.

But Biden and Obama did not give much cause for hope. They wiped the spit off their faces and smiled politely.

As the saying goes: when you spit in the face of a weakling, he pretends that it is raining. Does this apply to the president of the most powerful country in the world?

Uri Avnery's Column - The Harlot’s Grave

by Uri Avnery

Gush Shalom

SOME WEEKS ago, Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in Rome, was released after serving 28 years in prison.

The motives for his act have never been clarified. But a Palestinian leader once told me his version: God appeared to Agca in a dream and told him: Go to the Holy City and kill that damn Pole. But the Turk misunderstood, so instead of going to Jerusalem and killing Menachem Begin, he went to Rome…

Which just goes to show that holy cities are a pain in the neck.

THE LATE Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an observant Jew and a resolute opponent of the religious establishment, used to praise a deed of the Wahhabis, the radical sect that arose more than 200 years ago to cleanse Islam of impurity. The first thing they did upon conquering Mecca was to destroy the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad. The sanctification of graves was, to their mind, a pagan abomination. Leibowitz lauded this act and poured his wrath on religious Jews who sanctify “holy” sites.

He was standing on solid ground. The last chapter of the Torah (Deuteronomy 34) states: “So Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab…and he buried him…but no man knoweth of his sepulcher unto this day.” Clearly, the authors of the Bible, too, believed that the adulation of graves was a despicable habit of idolaters.

In the course of generations, Jews, too, were infected with this ailment. Orthodox Jews worshipped at the grave of Rabbi Nachman in the Ukraine and of Rabbi Abu-Hatzira in Egypt. The mutation of Judaism, which has become a kind of state religion in Israel, has turned this idolatry into a holy cult.

During the first years of the state, an official of the Ministry of Religions (as it was then called), a certain Shmuel Zanwill Kahana, toured the country and discovered holy sites right and left. He found graves of Muslim sheikhs and announced that they were, actually, the tombs of our forefathers. They were declared holy places and taken over by his ministry.

That aggrandized the ministry and its budget, attracted tourists and “proved” that Jews had deep roots in the country. Secular Israelis smiled in derision, and some religious Jews, like Leibowitz, were furious.

But after the Six-day War and the beginning of the occupation, the worship of holy places assumed a much more sinister character. It became an instrument of the settlers.

USING HOLY sites to justify conquest and massacres is by no means an Israeli, or Jewish, invention.

One of the most abominable examples is the First Crusade. Pope Urban II called upon the Christians of Europe to rise and liberate the Holy Sepulcher – not the country of Palestine, not the city of Jerusalem, but one specific site: the grave where, according to Christian tradition, the body of Jesus lay before his resurrection.

For this grave, many thousands of Christians crossed immense distances to Jerusalem, murdering masses of people (mostly Jews) on the way, and, after conquering the city, carrying out a horrendous massacre. According to Christian chroniclers, they waded up to their knees in blood. The victims were Muslims and Jews, men, women and children.

But there is no need to go back 911 years to find fanatical or cynical leaders using holy places to justify monstrous deeds. When Slobodan Milosevic carried out the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo – an act of genocide – his central claim was that the country was sacred to Serbs.

And indeed, in 1389 a historic battle took place there. The Christian Serbs were beaten by the Muslim Ottomans, who took over the country for the next 600 years. During that time, the local population voluntarily adopted Islam. But the Serbs sanctified the battlefield – a rare example of a people celebrating its defeat (as Jews do at Masada).

If Binyamin Netanyahu’s favorite expression – “the Rock of our Existence” – existed in Serbian, Milosevic would surely have used it. He argued that Kosovo was the spiritual and religious center of the Serbian people, in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants are now Albanian Muslims. Until this very day, Serbia does not recognize the independent state of Kosova, because of the ancient Serbian churches and monasteries located there.

AND HERE? Since the beginning of the occupation, the “holy places” in the West Bank have served as weapons in the hands of the settlers. They go there, they say, to restore Jewish rule over Judaism’s holy places, obeying God’s commandment.

The stories of the Bible are set mostly in these territories. The settlers and the Israeli army call them “Judea and Samaria”. Place names can be acts of annexation. They confirm the ownership of the Jewish people from ancient times. (In the 50s the British historian Steven Runciman, a leading expert on the crusades, drew my attention to the fact that the names have somehow been reversed: the Israelis are living in the land of the Philistines, from which the name Palestine is derived, while the Palestinians live in the land that was the ancient kingdom of Israel.)

The first settlement was established by a group of religious people who entered Hebron by deceit. Since the Israeli military governor forbade Jews to enter the city, they asked for permission to stay there for a few days in order to deliver their Passover prayers in the holy city.

Since then, the “Cave of Machpelah” in Hebron has become a holy battlefield. Near it, the most extreme Jewish settlers have established themselves. They are rabid Arab-haters and aim to drive out the 160 thousand Arabs, whose families have been living there for many generations. The most notorious mass murderer from among the settlers, the physician Baruch Goldstein, massacred Muslim worshippers in order to cleanse the holy place.

Holy places serve now as justification for the robbing expedition called settlement. Pieces of land are stolen all over the occupied territories because of their sanctity. The most extreme leaders of the settlers, all of them “rabbis”, fight for the liberation of holy graves. One of them is leading a crusade (or, rather, star-of-davidade) in order to take possession of the “tomb of Joseph” in the center of Nablus, which would turn the city into a second Hebron. The Israeli army chauffeurs the settlers there in armored vehicles, so they can “pray” there.)

But not only “fathers of the nation” deserve holy graves, on which blood can be spilt. Every secondary figure in the Bible can get one and become a target for the settlers. Now a battle is raging around the “tomb of Othniel”, bearing the name of Othniel the son of Kenaz, an obscure Biblical personality. The Muslim inhabitants of Hebron believe that it is the grave of the founder of their city.

Some days ago, settlers invaded an ancient synagogue in Jericho, which has been preserved by Muslims for generations. Jews had no problem visiting the place peacefully – the Jericho municipality, a part of the Palestinian Authority, has enabled all Jews to pray there. But the settlers did not go there to pray. They came to conquer.

Which reminds me of another prophecy by Yeshayahu Leibowitz on Jericho. The settlers, he said, would sanctify the tomb of Rahab the Harlot in Jericho. This heroine of the Bible (Joshua 2), the whore who betrayed her city and helped the invaders to conquer it and murder all the other inhabitants, is in good company with the settlers.

NO NEED to point out that the worship of these holy places is manifestly absurd. There is not a single grave in the country that can be seriously identified with any Biblical figure, real or imagined. Most holy graves are those of local Arab Sheikhs, who, because of their righteousness, were believed to be able to intercede with Allah. The location of most holy sites, including the Christian Holy Sepulcher, is much in doubt, to say the least.

That is also true for the two sites where bloody riots have lately broken out: the Tomb of Rachel in Bethlehem and the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron.

This is not the place to ask whether “Our Mother Rachel”, one of the most attractive figures in the Bible, belongs to the realm of legend or of history. But even according to legend, she is not buried at the spot that now bears her name. Many Bible experts (of those who believe that she really existed) think that she was buried North, not South, of Jerusalem. It is Muslim tradition that located her grave in the isolated, modest building that appears on the postage stamps of Palestine during the British Mandate. Many generations of Muslim, Jewish and Christian women have prayed there, asking Rachel to bless them with offspring. This building cannot be seen anymore: the army has surrounded it with fortified walls and gates, so that the site now looks menacing, an ugly copy of a Crusader fortress.

The building in Hebron known as the “Cave of Machpelah” – actually no cave at all - has also been preserved by Muslim tradition, which sanctified it as “Ibrahim’s Mosque”. Many Bible experts who do not think that the story of Abraham is a legend believe that the Cave is located at another place altogether. But on this spot, much blood has been spilt.

This week’s riots took place at both holy sites. They were caused by a decision by Netanyahu to include them in a list of Jewish “Heritage Sites” to be renovated by the Israeli government. Since both are holy to Muslims, Jews and Christians, this unilateral act is nothing but an expropriation and a blatant provocation. If there were really a desire for the improvement of the sites, it could have been done by a joint committee of the representatives of the two peoples and the three religions.

Years ago, I was invited by the late lamented mayor of Florence, Giorgio La Pira, to take part in a joint prayer session with a Catholic priest, a Muslim Sheikh and a Jewish rabbi at the Cave of Machpelah. In spite of being a devout atheist, I went along. At the time, it crossed my mind that such a site could well serve as a symbol of fraternity for both peoples of the country.

Joint love for the country, including all its periods and sites, holy and unholy, could serve as a spiritual basis for peace and reconciliation. Even now I hope for the day when schoolchildren in both states, Israel and Palestine, will learn the annals of this country in all its periods, and not just Jewish history here and Muslim history there. The wonderful richness of this country’s history, from the time of the Canaanites to this day, could create a strong bond.

However, the intentions of Netanyahu and his settlers are quite the opposite: to misuse history as an instrument of occupation, and to build settlements around the harlot’s grave.

Uri Avnery's Column - The Quiet American

by Uri Avnery

Gush Shalom

THE QUIET AMERICAN was the hero of Graham Greene’s novel about the first Vietnam War, the one fought by the French.

He was a young and naïve American, a professor’s son, who had enjoyed a good education at Harvard, an idealist with all the best intentions. When he was sent to Vietnam, he wanted to help the natives to overcome the two evils as he saw them: French colonialism and Communism. Knowing absolutely nothing about the country in which he was acting, he caused a disaster. The book ends with a massacre, the outcome of his misguided efforts. He illustrated the old saying: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Since this book was written, 54 years have passed, but it seems that the Quiet American has not changed a bit. He is still an idealist (at least, in his own view of himself), still wants to bring redemption to foreign and far-away peoples about whom he knows nothing, still causes terrible disasters: in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, it seems, in Yemen.

THE IRAQI example is the simplest one.

The American soldiers were sent there to overthrow the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. There were, of course, also some less altruistic objectives, such as taking control of the Iraqi oil resources and stationing an American garrison in the heart of the Middle Eastern oil region. But for the American public, the adventure was presented as an idealistic enterprise to topple a bloody dictator, who was menacing the world with nuclear bombs.

That was six years ago, and the war is still going on. Barack Obama, who opposed the war right from the start, promised to lead the Americans out of there. In the meantime, in spite of all the talking, no end is in sight.

Why? Because the real decision-makers in Washington had no idea of the country which they wanted to liberate and help to live happily ever after.

Iraq was from the beginning an artificial state. The British masters glued together several Ottoman provinces to suit their own colonial interests. They crowned a Sunni Arab as king over the Kurds, who are not Arab, and the Shiites, who are not Sunni. Only a succession of dictators, each of them more brutal than his predecessor, prevented the state from falling apart.

The Washington planners were not interested in the history, demography or geography of the country which they entered with brutal force. The way it looked to them, it was quite simple: One had to topple the tyrant, establish democratic institutions on the American model, conduct free elections, and everything else would fall into place by itself.

Contrary to their expectations, they were not received with flowers. Neither did they discover Saddam’s terrible atom bomb. Like the proverbial elephant in the porcelain shop, they shattered everything, destroyed the country and got bogged in a swamp.

After years of bloody military operations that led nowhere, they found a temporary remedy. To hell with idealism, to hell with the lofty aims, to hell with all military doctrines – they’re now simply buying off the tribal chiefs, who constitute the reality of Iraq.

The Quiet American has no idea how to get out. He knows that if he does, the country may well disintegrate in mutual bloodletting.

TWO YEARS before entering the Iraqi swamp, the Americans invaded the Afghan quagmire.

Why? Because an organization called al-Qaeda (“the basis”) had claimed responsibility for the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. Al-Qaeda’s chiefs were in Afghanistan, their training camps were there. To the Americans, everything was clear – there was no need for second thoughts (neither, for that matter, for first thoughts.)

If they had had any knowledge of the country they were about to invade, they might have, perhaps, hesitated. Afghanistan has always been a graveyard for invaders. Mighty empires had escaped from there with their tails between their legs. Unlike flat Iraq, Afghanistan is a country of mountains, a paradise for guerrillas. It is the home of several different peoples and uncounted tribes, each one fiercely jealous of its independence.

The Washington planners were not really interested. For them, it seems, all countries are the same, and so are all societies. In Afghanistan, too, American-style democracy must be established, free and fair elections must be held, and hoppla – everything else will sort itself out.

The elephant entered the shop without knocking and achieved a resounding victory. The Air Force pounded, the army conquered without problems, al-Qaeda disappeared like a ghost, the Taliban (“religious pupils”) ran away. Women could again appear in the streets without covering their hair, girls could attend schools, the opium fields flourished again, and so did Washington’s protégés in Kabul.

However - the war goes on, year after year, the number of American dead is rising inexorably. What for? Nobody knows. It seems as if the war has acquired a life of its own, without aim, without reason.

An American could well ask himself: What the hell are we doing there?

THE IMMEDIATE aim, the expulsion of al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, has ostensibly been achieved. Al-Qaeda is not there – if it ever really was there.

I wrote once that al-Qaeda is an America invention and that Osama Bin-Laden has been sent by Hollywood’s Central Casting to play the role. He is simply too good to be true.

That was, of course, a bit of an exaggeration. But not altogether. The US is always in need of a world-wide enemy. In the past it was International Communism, whose agents were lurking behind every tree and under every floor tile. But, alas, the Soviet Union and its minions had collapsed, there was an urgent need for an enemy to fill the void. This was found in the shape of the world-wide jihad of al-Qaeda. The crushing of “World Terrorism” became the overriding American aim.

That aim is nonsense. Terrorism is nothing but an instrument of war. It is used by organizations that are vastly different from each other, which are fighting in vastly different countries for vastly different objectives. A war on “International Terror” is like a war on “International Artillery” or “International Navy”.

A world-embracing movement led by Osama Bin-Laden just does not exist. Thanks to the Americans, al-Qaeda has become a prestige brand in the guerrilla market, much like McDonald’s and Armani in the world of fast food and fashion. Every militant Islamist organization can appropriate the name for itself, even without a franchise from Bin-Laden.

American client regimes, who used to brand all their local enemies as “communist” in order to procure the help of their patrons, now brand them as “al-Qaeda terrorists”.

Nobody knows where Bin-Laden is – if he is at all – and there is no proof of his being in Afghanistan. Some believe that he is in neighboring Pakistan. And even if he were hiding in Afghanistan – what justification is there for conducting a war and killing thousands of people in order to hunt down one person?

Some say: OK, so there is no Bin-Laden. But the Taliban have to be prevented from coming back.

Why, for god’s sake? What business is it of the US who rules Afghanistan? One can loathe religious fanatics in general and the Taliban in particular – but is this a reason for an endless war?

If the Afghans themselves prefer the Taliban to the opium dealers who are in power in Kabul, it is their business. It seems that they do, judging by the fact that the Taliban are again in control of most of the country. That is no good reason for a Vietnam-style war.

But how do you get out? Obama does not know. During the election campaign he promised, with a candidate’s foolhardiness, to enlarge the war there, as a compensation for leaving Iraq. Now he is stuck in both places – and in the near future, it seems, he will be stuck in a third war, too.

DURING THE last few days, the name of Yemen has been cropping up more and more often. Yemen – a second Afghanistan, a third Vietnam.

The elephant is raring to enter another shop. And this time, too, it doesn’t care about the porcelain.

I know very little about Yemen, but enough to understand that only a madman would want to be sucked in there. It is another artificial state, composed of two different parts – the country of Sanaa in the North and the (former British) South. Most of the country is mountainous terrain, ruled by bellicose tribes guarding their independence. Like Afghanistan, it is an ideal region for guerrilla warfare.

There, too, is an organization that has adopted the grandiose name of “Al-Qaeda of the Arab Peninsula” (after the Yemenite militants united with their Saudi brothers). But its chiefs are interested in world revolution much less than in the intrigues and battles of the tribes among themselves and against the “central” government, a reality with a history of thousands of years. Only a complete fool would lay his head on this bed.

The name Yemen means “country on the right”. (If one looks towards Mecca from the West, Yemen is on the right side and Syria on the left.) The right side also connotes happiness, and the name of Yemen is connected to al-Yamana, an Arabic word for being happy. The Romans called it Arabia Felix (“Happy Arabia”) because it was rich through trading in spices.

(By the way, Obama may be interested to hear that another leader of a superpower, Caesar Augustus, once tried to invade Yemen and was trounced.)

If the Quiet American, in his usual mixture of idealism and ignorance, decides to bring democracy and all the other goodies there, that will be the end of this happiness. The Americans will sink into another quagmire, tens of thousands of people will be killed, and it will all end in disaster.

IT MAY well be that the problem is rooted – inter alia – in the architecture of Washington DC.

This city is full of huge buildings populated with the ministries and other offices of the only superpower in the world. The people working there feel the tremendous might of their empire. They look upon the tribal chiefs of Afghanistan and Yemen as a rhinoceros looks down at the ants that rush around between its feet. The Rhino walks over them without noticing. But the ants survive.

Altogether, the Quiet American resembles Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, who defines himself as the force that “always wants the bad and always creates the good”. Only the other way round.

Uri Avnery's Column - Cast Lead 2

by Uri Avnery

Gush Shalom

DID WE win? Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of the Gaza War, alias Operation Cast Lead, and this question fills the public space.

Within the Israeli consensus, the answer has already been given: Certainly we won, the Qassams have stopped coming.

A simple, not to say primitive, answer. But that is how it looks to the superficial observer. There were the Qassams, we made war, no more Qassams. Sderot is thriving, the inhabitants of Beersheba go to the theater. Everything else is for philosophy professors.

But anyone who wishes to understand the results of this war has to pose some hard questions.

Was the real aim of the war to stop the Qassams? Could this have been achieved by other means? If there were other aims, what were they? Is the final balance sheet positive or negative, as far as the interests of Israel are concerned?

I PITY the historians. They have to scrutinize documents, peruse protocols, disentangle tortuous texts.

Documents are misleading. If Talleyrand (or whoever it was) was right in saying that words were invented in order to hide thoughts, this is even more true for documents. Documents falsify facts, hide facts, invent facts – all according to the interests of the writer. They disclose a little to hide the rest. Anyone who has been involved in public affairs knows this.

Therefore, let’s ignore the protocols. What were the real aims of those who started the war? I believe that they were as follows, in order of decreasing priority:

1. To overthrow the regime in Gaza, by turning the life of the inhabitants into such hell that they would rise up against Hamas.
2. To return to the Government and the army their self respect, which had been severely damaged in Lebanon War II.
3. To restore the deterrent power of the Israeli army.
4. To stop the Qassams.
5. To free the captive soldier, Gilad Shalit.

Let’s examine the results, one by one.

THIS WEEK, hundreds of thousands gathered in the Gaza Strip for a demonstration in support of Hamas. Judging from the photos, there were between 200 and 400 thousand. Considering that there are about 1.5 million inhabitants in the Strip, most of them children, that was quite an impressive turnout - especially in view of the misery caused by the Israeli blockade that has continued throughout the year and the ruined homes that could not be rebuilt. Those who believed that the pressure on the population would cause an uprising against the Hamas government have been proved wrong.

History buffs were not surprised. When attacked by a foreign foe, every people unites behind its leaders, whoever they are. Pity that our politicians and generals don’t read books.

Our commentators portray the inhabitants of Gaza as “looking with longing at the flourishing shops of Ramallah”. These commentators also derive hope from public opinion polls that purport to show that the popularity of Hamas in the West Bank is declining. If so, why is Fatah afraid of conducting elections, even after all Hamas activists there have been thrown into prison?

It seems that most of the people in the Gaza Strip are more or less satisfied with the functioning of the Hamas government. In spite of the misery of their lives, they may also be proud of its steadfastness There is order in the streets, crime and drugs are decreasing. Hamas is trying cautiously to promote a religious agenda in daily life, and it seems that the public does not mind.

The main aim of the operation has failed completely.

THE SECOND aim, on the other hand, has been achieved. The Olmert government, which lost public confidence in Lebanon War II, won it back in the Gaza War. That did not help Olmert himself – he had to resign because of the cloud of corruption affairs hovering over his head.

The army has restored its self-confidence. It has proved that the military deficiencies, that came to light at every step in the Lebanon War, were superficial. The public believes that in Gaza the army functioned well. The fact that a total of six Israeli soldiers were killed by enemy fire, while over a thousand people died on the other side, has reinforced this belief. Only few people are bothered by moral scruples.

THE QUESTION whether the third aim – deterrence - has been achieved is closely connected with another question: Who won the war militarily?

In a war between a regular army and a guerrilla force, it is hard to decide what “victory” means. In a classic battle between armies, victory belongs to the side which remains in control of the battlefield once the fighting ends. Obviously that does not apply in an asymmetrical contest. The Israeli army did not want to stay in the Gaza Strip – on the contrary, it was very keen to avoid such a possibility.

Some argue that Hamas won the war: if a band of ill-armed guerrillas holds out for three whole weeks against one of the strongest armies in the world, that constitutes a victory. There is a lot of truth in that.

On the other hand, the deterrent force of the army has certainly been restored. All Palestinian factions and all Arab forces in general, now know that the Israeli army is prepared to kill and destroy without any restraint in any military confrontation. From now on, the Hamas leaders – as well as the Hizbullah chiefs – will think twice before provoking it.

THE QASSAMS have stopped almost completely. Hamas has even imposed its authority on the small, extreme factions, which wanted to continue.

No doubt the newly restored deterrent force of the army has had a bearing on that. But it is also true that the army is taking great care not to cause regular incidents, as was their wont before Cast Lead. At least for now, the deterrence in the Gaza theatre is mutual.

It can be asked whether a means could have been found to stop the Qassams short of war. If the Israeli government had recognized the Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip – at least de facto – and maintained businesslike relations with them, and if it had not imposed the blockade – could the missiles have been stopped? I do believe so.

THE RELEASE of Shalit – a secondary but important aim in itself – has not been achieved. If Shalit is freed, it will happen only as part of a prisoner exchange, and that will look like a huge victory for Hamas.

TAKING INTO consideration all these results, one can draw the conclusion that the war has ended in a kind of draw.

Except for Goldstone.

This war has dealt a fatal blow to Israel’s standing in the world.

Is that important? David Ben-Gurion famously said that “it is not important what the Goyim say but what the Jews do.” Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, said that no nation can afford to behave without “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”. Jefferson was right. “What the Goyim say” has an immense impact on all the spheres of our life - from the political arena to security matters. The standing of our state in the world is a vital factor in our national security.

The Gaza War – from the decision to throw the army into a densely populated area to the use of white phosphorus and flechette munitions – has raised a dark cloud over Israel. The Goldstone report, coming as it did after the gruesome pictures broadcast throughout the war by all the world’s TV networks, has produced a terrible impression. Hundreds of millions of people saw and heard, and their attitude towards Israel has changed for the worse. This will have far-reaching impact on the decisions of governments, the attitude of the media and in thousands of big and small decisions concerning Israel.

Almost all our spokesmen and journalists, from the President down to the last TV talk-show host, keep parroting that the Goldstone report is “one-sided”, “vile” and “lying”. But people around the world know that it is as honest a report as could be expected after our government’s decision to boycott the investigation. The damage increases from day to day. Some of it is irreversible.

It is impossible to measure the results of the war without laying this fact on the scales. The upshot is that the damage done to us by the war outweighs any benefits.

Some people in our leadership silently accept this conclusion. But there is no lack of voices – both in the leadership and in the street - which talk openly about a “Cast Lead 2” as being just a matter of time.

A saying attributed to Bismarck goes: Fools learn from their own experience, clever people learn from the experience of others. Where does that leave us?

Impunity in Guatemala

by Colin Murphy

Le Monde

At 7.15am on 4 September last year, Yuri Melini stepped onto the street from his mother’s house in a suburb of Guatemala City. A man standing across the road called him.

The man had a lost look, and had the dress and manner of someone from rural parts. He was holding a folded newspaper. “Chh chh,” called the man, and Yuri Melini crossed the street to help him. When Yuri Melini was one metre away, the man took a gun out from behind the newspaper. Yuri Melini turned to run, but the man shot him, and then shot him again, six more times. Yuri Melini collapsed and the man approached him. Yuri Melini lay there, awaiting the “coup de grâce”, but it never came. The man left.

“And here I am,” says Yuri Melini, speaking on the phone from Guatemala, as if happily surprised.

Melini is one of the most prominent human rights and environmental activists in Guatemala, a country where protection for rights and the environment is impoverished, and their protectors are besieged. Since 2000, he has run an organisation called Calas (in English, the Centre for Legal, Environmental and Social Action), which agitates for indigenous rights and the protection of the environment, among other areas.

Guatemala is caught in “a vicious circle”, he says, mired in a “historical level of violence”, the residue of the civil conflict that lasted from the 1970s to the peace accord of 1996. Not only is violent crime chronic, there is a culture of “total impunity”.

Melini’s language and analysis is echoed elsewhere. Amnesty International reported that, of 5,781 killings in Guatemala during 2008, 1% resulted in a conviction. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions has criticised Guatemala for fostering impunity for killings. Human Rights Watch concluded: “A dozen years after the end of Guatemala’s brutal civil war, impunity remains the norm when it comes to human rights violations.”

‘Life has little value’

In May of this year, Amnesty International reported that activists working with two leading human rights organisations in Guatemala had received dozens of death threats via SMS text messages. One message read: “You’ve got one hour, this is the last warning. Stop messing with us. We’ll kill your kids first, then you.”

Melini elaborates: “In general terms, there is a very low value placed on life. Women and young people are killed on a regular basis. Environmentalists are also killed, when they get in the way of [vested] interests. You can contract a hired gunman for a very small price. A group with money can hire in a Colombian group to carry out assassinations.”

In the first half of 2009, he says, there were 241 attacks on human-rights defenders. This context is such that, despite a growing international consensus around the need to prioritise environmental interventions, work as an activist in Guatemala is increasingly difficult. Defence of the environment has become a crosscutting issue that involves work on human rights, criminality and governance.

He cites examples: in the mining industry, the use of toxic chemicals, such as arsenic, has insidious effects on the health of workers; indigenous Mayan communities living on traditional lands in isolated areas suffer intrusions from narco-trafficking and illegal mining.

Yet there is, he says, “a sign of hope that some things can change”. The election of Barack Obama in the US and subsequent substantial investment in “clean” technologies point the way forward at an international level. The global financial crisis “is an opportunity to develop a more sustainable model” and a “just economy”. “The economy and environment may seem like distinct themes, but they’re complementary. The key elements of development – factories, roads, railways – all have an environmental impact.”

Status is no protection

There is, as yet, little appreciation of this in Guatemala, though, where there is “a crisis of governmentality”. “On the one hand, there is no sense of corporate responsibility and on the other hand, there is total impunity and a justice system that doesn’t work.”

The attempt on Melini’s life has left him reliant on a zimmer frame for walking, and on bodyguards for protection, but it brought him to international attention, which culminated in May this year with an international award for the protection of human-rights defenders from the organisation Front Line. The attack “raised me to the status of a recognised public figure, and has generated a debate in the country about these issues,” he says. “The Front Line award has permitted me to launch myself onto a new level, in a way that I couldn’t have done before, and that itself is an additional form of protection.”

That it may be, but “celebrity” on the international human rights circuit, and even national recognition, is no bulletproof charm. Amidst the culture of impunity that Melini has documented, it could be tempting to despair at attempts to foster change.

Jim Loughran of Front Line concedes this. “Sometimes, when confronted by such an extreme situation, you can feel powerless,” he acknowledges. “How do you break the cycle of poverty and violence in a country? Where is your starting point?” This, he says, is where Front Line’s philosophy applies: “protect one, empower a thousand”. “Your starting point is action to create a safe space around human-rights defenders, those people working on the ground to create change. You take the small steps that enable people on the ground to reduce their risk of arrest, harassment or assassination.”

Whether those small steps serve to help Guatemala advance along the path to stability remains to be seen.