Authors: Mickey Huff
38
. “Cobalt,” US Congressional Budget Office, 1982.
39
.
Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993–2003
, mapping report, 2010.
40
. “PEPFAR Strengthens UPDF with Critical HIV Services,” United States Virtual Presence Post Northern Uganda,
http://northernuganda.usvpp.gov/pepfar_updf.html
.
41
. Ibid., 318–324; “Gender Against Men, Refugee Law Project,” Vimeo video, 43:47, posted by “SRLAN,” March 25, 2010,
http://vimeo.com/10430187
; Samuel Olara, “Uganda, Winning Acholi Region,”
The Monitor
, February 7, 2011,
http://allafrica.com/stories/201102080261.html
.
42
. Milton Allimadi, “Congo: Targeted Rapes to Spread HIV/AIDS Started in Uganda,”
Black Star News
, October 6, 2010,
http://www.blackstarnews.com/news/135/ARTICLE/6840/2010-10-06.html
.
43
. “Howard French—Congo: Rape, Savagery, and Stereotypes, the Heart of Darkness,” YouTube video, 2:17, posted by “crisisincongo,” May 14, 2011.
44
. John Prendergast and Don Cheadle,
The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa’s Worst Human Rights Crimes
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011).
by Jon Elmer
While arguably the most reported conflict in the North American press, the Israel-Palestine conflict is, at the same time, often the least understood. The pace of events, the overemphasis on diplomatic reportage, and the ritualistic coverage of an unending peace process obfuscate the overarching strategic imperatives that are being implemented by the state of Israel.
Israel’s separation barrier surrounding Palestinian communities has been reported on extensively over the nine years since construction first began. Coverage has invariably been dominated by narratives of Israeli security, with occasional stories on the barrier’s impact on Palestinians framed as a human interest-type narrative. Missing in this coverage is the larger Israeli project that has, since the end of the Second Intifada (the al-Aqsa Intifada), reshaped the core dimension of the conflict.
In an effort to maintain Israel as a Jewish state in the face of increasing demographic parity between Jewish and Palestinian populations residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Israel has sought to establish Palestinian enclaves—or “cantons” as their architect, former prime minister Ariel Sharon, called them—that would euphemistically be called a state. In apartheid South Africa, indigenous enclaves were referred to as Bantustans; in North America they are called reserves or reservations; “ghettos” was the term during the Nazi occupations in Europe during the Second World War.
For their part, Israel’s top political leadership has been reasonably straightforward about this project and its critical place in the country’s strategic vision.
Speaking last year at the Herzliya Conference, Israel’s most important annual security plenary, former prime minister and current defense minister Ehud Barak was clear: “If, and as long as between the Jordan [River] and the Sea there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or nondemocratic. If the
Palestinians vote in elections it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state.”
1
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert delivered an equally unambiguous message en route to the Annapolis peace conference in 2007: “If the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African–style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished.”
2
Indeed, for the first time in its history, Israel is now acknowledging that a Palestinian state—even one that looks like no other state in the world—is a necessity. Put another way, the creation of a Palestinian state is now an Israeli imperative.
The fall of 2003 was a turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The three-year Palestinian uprising, or intifada, was beginning to wane, attacks on Israel had declined significantly (though not vice versa), and internal fissures within Israeli society were coming to the fore.
It is in this context that Sharon’s leading portfolio holder, Olmert, floated a trial balloon to the Israeli public that came to be known as the “disengagement plan.”
In an interview with the Israeli daily
Ha’aretz
, Olmert laid out the strategic vision and the reasons for the imperative. Its headline was instructive: “Maximum Jews, Minimum Palestinians.” Olmert said:
There is no doubt in my mind that very soon the government of Israel is going to have to address the demographic issue with the utmost seriousness and resolve.…
We don’t have unlimited time. More and more Palestinians are uninterested in a negotiated, two-state solution, because they want to change the essence of the conflict from an Algerian paradigm to a South African one. From a struggle against “occupation,” in their parlance, to a struggle for one-man-one-vote. That is, of course, a much cleaner struggle, a much more popular struggle—and ultimately a much more powerful one. For us, it would mean the end of the Jewish state.…
The formula for the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of
Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem.
Large settlements such as the cantons Sharon proposes would “obviously” be carved into Israel. The unilateral project, Olmert said, “would inevitably preclude a dialogue with the Palestinians for at least 25 years.”
3
Dov Weisglass, Sharon and Olmert’s top aide, characterized the unilateral action in even blunter terms several months later:
In the fall of 2003 we understood that everything is stuck. Time was not on our side. There was international erosion, internal erosion. Domestically, in the meantime, everything was collapsing. The economy was stagnant, and the Geneva Initiative garnered broad support. And then we were hit with letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [of refusal to serve in the Palestinian territories]. These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose who give off a strong odor of grass. These were really our finest young people.
When negotiations begin, it’s very difficult to stop them. The result would be a Palestinian state.
This is the thrust of the Israeli predicament: Israel needs a Palestinian state to exist, but the question is what kind of state it will be—namely, how can they establish its borders in accord with Israel’s maximum aspirations? Enter the disengagement plan. Said Weisglass:
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.…
The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure.…
In regard to the large settlement blocs, thanks to the disengagement plan, we have in our hands a first-ever American statement that they will be part of Israel … There is an American commitment such as never existed before, with regard to 190,000 settlers [of 240,000].
Rather than critiquing Sharon for relinquishing Gaza—as many right-wing Israelis did at the time, the settlers, said Weisglass, “should have danced around and around the Prime Minister’s Office.”
Weisglass further elaborated the substance and intended outcome of the project: “The term ‘political process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The political process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The political process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.… When you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem.”
Because of this plan, Weisglass said, “there will be no timetable to implement the settlers’ nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely.”
4
The disengagement was passed with the consent of the US Congress and was reaffirmed by US President Barack Obama in the late spring of 2011, when he said that mutually agreed swaps would form the basis of negotiations. It was passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 405–7 and in the Senate by 95–5. Israel’s most important ally was backing the canton plan.
For the ghetto-state plan to be viable, it must be palatable to the international community. The attempt to construct a framework of legitimacy has been a three-pronged process centered on governance, economy, and, most importantly, security.
The first pillar, governance, is spearheaded by former International Monetary Fund (IMF) official Salam Fayyad. Appointed prime minister of Palestine in 2007 following Fatah’s failed coup in Gaza, after having received only 2 percent of the popular vote in the 2006 elections, Salam Fayyad was installed by the US and Israel. Since then, he has been tasked with rebuilding the Palestinian Authority institutions in the West Bank that Israel destroyed during the al-Aqsa Intifada (2000–2005).
In a meeting with senior western diplomats, Israeli President Shimon Peres characterized Fayyad as the “Palestinian Ben Gurion.”
5
The right-wing daily, the
Jerusalem Post
, carried a long feature by editor David Horovitz headlined, “Fayyad builds Palestine.”
6
The economic pillar is headed by Quartet envoy Tony Blair. In order to create legitimacy for the ghetto state, lofty economic benchmarks achieved in the West Bank are regularly touted. Blair has selected several “model cities” to highlight this economic growth, including Jenin and Bethlehem. The goal is to implement a kind of “economic peace,” in Netanyahu’s words.
In 2010 the Palestinian economy’s growth rate was almost 10 percent, among “the world’s hottest economies,” the
Financial Times
said.
7
These statistics are brandished most commonly not by Palestinians, but by Israeli leaders.
The UN, however, disagrees with the simplistic accounting. “Contrary to media reports of a flourishing West Bank economy, evidence from the second half of 2010 shows deteriorating labour market conditions, with falling employment growth, accelerating unemployment and lower real wages. These trends disproportionately affected refugees.”
8
A systematic appraisal by the Carnegie Endowment found that “to the extent that Fayyadism is building institutions, it is unmistakably doing so in an authoritarian context.… A governmental system with no organized domestic constituency whose performance is completely dependent on continuing international largesse can hardly be seen as stable indefinitely.”
9
The damning report continues: “The entire program is based not simply on de-emphasizing or postponing democracy and human rights but on actively denying them for the present. But [Fayyad] has done so in an authoritarian context that robs the results of domestic legitimacy.”
The most important aspect of the ghetto-state plan is the reconstituted security apparatus of the Palestinian Authority. Under the auspices of Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, also the US security coordinator, an
entirely new security force has been established since 2005, ostensibly tasked with confronting the Palestinian resistance.
The project began in Gaza. Sean McCormack, a state department spokesman at the time, explained Dayton’s role as “the real down in the weeds, blocking and tackling work of helping to build up the security forces.”
10
But within weeks of Dayton’s arrival in Israel in the last days of 2005, things began to fall apart. Hamas’s decisive January 2006 election victory ushered in a crippling international blockade on the Palestinians in Gaza. Soon after, the security forces of Hamas and Fatah began fighting in the streets, culminating in Hamas’s June 2007 takeover of the enclave.
Dayton’s initial aims lay in tatters, and while Fayyad became prime minister in a “caretaker” government in Ramallah, a new security strategy was formulated. As a grim status quo was established in Gaza, Dayton’s new mission became clear: the job of the security coordinator was now “to prevent a Hamas takeover in the West Bank,” according to Michael Eisenstadt, Dayton’s former plans officer.
11
The Palestinian forces have an open agenda to target Hamas and other Palestinian factions. In May 2010, six people were killed when Dayton’s forces attacked Hamas activists in the West Bank town of Qalqilya, sparking a gun battle that lasted several hours and took place without Israel’s interference. Hamas characterized the attack as “an awful crime” committed by “collaborators,” while Abbas declared that his forces would continue to strike opposition groups “with an iron fist.”
12
Lieutenant General Dayton saw the Qalqilya event as a telling example of how the security forces would operate inside a future ghetto-state. They had, he said, engaged in a series of violent raids that were “surprisingly well coordinated” with Israel. Dayton characterized the results as “electric.”
13
“They have caught the attention of the Israeli defense establishment for their dedication, discipline, motivation, and results,” Dayton added.
That Palestinian security forces are being trained in Jordan, not in the West Bank, cuts to the heart of their lacking credibility among their own people. It is presumed that they cannot be trained in their local milieu because they lack political legitimacy.
To this end, Dayton told the staunchly pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an audience of American and Israeli diplomats and policymakers, American and Israeli alike, in 2009: “You might ask, why Jordan? The answer is pretty simple. The Palestinians wanted to train in the region, but they wanted to be away from clan, family, and political influences. The Israelis trust the Jordanians, and the Jordanians were anxious to help.”
14