notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part VI)

(224): The movement of settlers into the Occupied Territories took place in phases, accelerating with each successive one. Settlers numbered an estimated forty-six thousand by 1984, the end of the decade that followed the Yom Kippur War. By the time the Oslo Accord was signed a little less than ten years later, in 1993, there were roughly 200,000 settlers in the Occupied Territories. The irony is that the flow increased after the Oslo Accord. In the third decade, by the end of 2002, the number of settlers had doubled, to nearly 400,000---including those in East Jerusalem, now claimed by Israel. A recent israeli human-rights report notes that Israeli settlements now control almost 42 percent of the West Bank, not including Palestinian East Jerusalem.
(231): Political terror comes out of a government's or guerilla movement's failure to win civilian support. The most obvious link is with the practice of counterinsurgency that the British pioneered in their Malaysian colony during the Second World War and that Samuel Huntington advised America to emulate during the Vietnam War. Huntington called for the creation of strategic hamlets, to which to relocate the population sympathetic to the Viet Cong, so as to detach guerrilas from the population on which they had come to depend for support. Counterinsurgency turned the theory of guerrilla struggle on its head. If guerrillas claimed to be waging a political struggle with arms, moving through the population with the ease of fish in water, to use Mao's metaphor--and not a conventional war in which one could easily separate soldiers from civilians--then the point of counterinsurgency was first to drain the water so as to isolate the fish. Counterinsurgency, however, did not work as long as guerillas actually enjoyed the political support of part of the civilian population. So civilians had to be targeted militarily and intimidated into submission.
(234): The second cost of the Afghan war arose because the United States and its allies created, trained, and sustained an infrastructure of terror, international in scope, free of any effective state control, and wrapped up in the language of religious war.
(235): The third cost... was the development of a parallel infrastructrue of criminality connected with the international development of an illicit drug trade. The simple fact the government had to face was that if you decide to wage war without legislative consent, then you are likely to be short of funds.
(236): When it came to the contra war and CIA involvement in the cocaine trade, the consequences were direct. Between 1982 and 1985, the number of cocaine users in the United States rose by 38 percent to 5.8 million, more than ten times the number of heroin addicts.
(239): Modern Western empires are different from empires of old as well as the Soviet empire of yesterday in one important respect: they combine a democratic political system at home with despotism abroad. Even in the German case, as Sheldon Wolin reminds us, Nazi terror was not applied to the population generally. So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.
(242): US-Israeli relations have gone through different phases since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Relations were the most stretched during the 1956 Suez Crisis when Israel, along with Britain and France, was forced to acknowledge America's rise as the hegemonic Western power. It is only after 1967, and more so 1973, that we can speak of the building of a strategic alliance between the United States and Israel.
(246): Who can forget that apartheid South Africa claimed to be "the only democracy in Africa," just as Israel today claims to be "the only democracy in the Middle East"? This is not entirely a hozx, but neither does it reflect the whole truth... The larger truth... is that the "civilizing mission" was never meant to include all the natives. It was never meant to generalize the regime of rights or democracy to natives. The whole truth is that, just as the colony of Liberia and apartheid South Africa, Zionist Israel, too, reflects a contradictory unity, a democratic despotism, in a single space.
(249): At the same time, the founders of Israel considered themselves secular Jews, as the founders of Pakistan were self-declared secular Muslims. The shift from a secular to a religious Zionism in Israel under Begin, just as the Islamization of the Pakistani state, under Zia, occurred under the protective American umbrella during the Cold War.
(252): Rather than argue whether terrorism is a foreign import or a homegrown product, I have tried to point up the relationship between the two: the homegrown product could not have flourished except in a global environment where at least one superpower turned a blind eye to "its" terror.
(252): Perhaps no other society paid a higher price for the defeat of the Soviet Union than did Afghanistan. Out of a population of roughly 20 million, 1 million died, another 1.5 million were maimed, another 5 million became refugees, and just about everyone was internally displaced. UN agencies estimate that nearly a million and a half went clinically insane as a consequence of decades of continuous war. Those who survived lived in the most mined country in the world. Afghanistan was a brutalized society even before the American bombing began.
(255): If state terror claims to be an exercise in maintaining law and order, societal terror presents itself as a fight for justice. I have stressed the importance of grasping the relation between the two.
(260): To win the fight against terrorism requires accepting that the world has changed, that the old colonialism is no more and will not return, and that to occupy foreign places will be expensive, in lives and money. America cannot occupy the world. It has to learn to live with it.

Israel blames Hamas for primitive homemade rocket attacks on the nearby Israeli city of Sederot. In 2001-2008, these rockets killed about 15 Israelis and injured 433, and they have damaged property. In the same period, Gazan mortar attacks on Israel have killed 8 Israelis. Since the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, Israelis have killed nearly 5000 Palestinians, nearly a thousand of them minors. Since fall of 2007, Israel has kept the 1.5 million Gazans under a blockade, interdicting food, fuel and medical supplies to one degree or another. Wreaking collective punishment on civilian populations such as hospital patients denied needed electricity is a crime of war.

The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.
(...) According to Oxfam only 137 trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October this year and 564 in December 2005.
(...) Between 5 November and 30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed; during the week of 30 November it received 12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days 20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.
(...) By April, according to the FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on chicken as a major source of protein.
(...) The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with, it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah – which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19 December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade. How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.

sadism in samarra:
At least 10 residents have died as the result of a curfew imposed by the U.S.-backed Iraqi government, local doctors say.
(...) The Iraqi government and the U.S. military imposed a strict curfew on the city that day after a suicide car bomb killed a dozen police officers, including police chief Abd al-Jalil al-Dulaimi. Samarra has been a hotspot of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq since close to the beginning of the occupation in March 2003.
(...) Local people told IPS that the main bridge in the city has been closed, ambulances have not been allowed to reach people, and residents are facing an increasingly dire situation.
(...) "We are being butchered here by these Americans," Majid Hamid, a schoolteacher in Samarra told IPS. "People are dying because we lack all of the necessities, and our government seems to be so happy about it."
(...) Residents and service providers told IPS that electricity has been cut. "There is no life in the city because of the collective punishment," an employee in the electricity service office of Samarra, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. "Depriving people of electricity means depriving them of water, healthcare and all of life's maintenance necessities, especially with such hot temperatures now."
(...) The power grid and water supply in Samarra were already in a state of disrepair. Both IPS correspondents have been in the city several times throughout the occupation and witnessed first-hand the U.S. military tactics of cutting water and electricity to residents after occupation forces had been attacked. U.S. and Iraqi military tactics have also included bulldozing houses, home raids and detentions.
(...) "This is not the first siege that we have suffered," Nahla Alwan, a pharmacist in the city told IPS. "The Americans have done this so often and they will keep doing it since we do not accept their occupation and all the disasters it has brought us." She added, "They should know that we resent them more now, and we will teach the future generations to take revenge for the innocent souls killed by the American criminals."
(...) A doctor in Samarra's main hospital, speaking like many others on condition of anonymity, told IPS that at least 10 people, including seven babies, had died because of lack of fuel for generators needed to run incubators and life-saving equipment. At least two elderly patients were among the dead.
(...) "This collective punishment is unfair and it clearly shows how cruel Americans are," a member of Samarra's city council told IPS. "They are punishing innocent people in a cowardly way."
(...) The doctors demanded immediate end to the blockade, which they called "an act of collective punishment." They called for local NGOs and health workers to be allowed access to the city.
(...) "Those cowards are enjoying killing our children and so are the Persian (Prime Minister Nouri) Maliki government officials," 45-year-old Abu Nabhan in Samarra told IPS. "They seem to be in need of further attacks from our blessed sons in the resistance because this attack on the people of Samarra will only increase our hatred against the Americans."
(...) Residents are becoming ever more angry with the occupation forces. "The situation is getting much worse because of this irresponsible behavior of the U.S. forces," a worker with a local NGO who gave his name as Yassin told IPS. "They are raising more anger and inclination for violence. All our efforts to calm the people are wasted now as more people than ever believe in violence instead of peace."

democrats and israel:
During the five weeks of fighting, 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 Israeli civilians were killed. It was the Lebanese who suffered the most, however. Massive Israeli bombardments took the lives of more than 1,100 people, the vast majority of whom were innocent civilians, and caused more than $3.5 billion in damage to the country’s civilian infrastructure and widespread environmental damage.
(...) Yet Congress continues to justify last summer’s widespread attacks on civilian targets by the U.S.-supplied Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) by claiming that Hezbollah used the Lebanese civilian population as “human shields,” thereby seeking to protect America’s closest Middle East ally from its moral and legal responsibility for its war crimes. For example, on April 25, the House of Representatives passed by a near-unanimous voice vote a resolution (H. Res. 125) claiming that “throughout the summer of 2006 conflict with the State of Israel, Hezbollah forces utilized human shields to protect themselves from counterattacks by Israeli forces.” In defense of the Bush administration’s controversial backing of Israel’s 35-day assault on Lebanon, the Democratic-led House cited President George W. Bush’s claim that “Hezbollah terrorists used Lebanese civilians as human shields, sacrificing the innocent in an effort to protect themselves from Israeli response” and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s assertion that “`Hezbollah and its sponsors have brought devastation upon the people of Lebanon, … exploiting them as human shields.”
(...) Investigations by independent human rights groups during last summer’s fighting did not find clear evidence that Hezbollah deliberately used civilians to shield their personnel or equipment from Israeli strikes. For example, a detailed study published at the end of the fighting in August by Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that they had found “no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.” Similarly, Amnesty International, in a well-documented report published in November observed, “While the presence of Hizbullah’s fighters and short-range weapons within civilian areas is not contested, this in itself is not conclusive evidence of intent to use civilians as ‘human shields’, any more than the presence of Israeli soldiers in a kibbutz is in itself evidence of the same war crime.”
(...) In any case, the vast majority of Israeli strikes in civilian areas were nowhere near Hezbollah military activity. As Human Rights Watch noted, “In dozens of attacks, Israeli forces struck an area with no apparent military target. In some cases, the timing and intensity of the attack, the absence of a military target, as well as return strikes on rescuers, suggest that Israeli forces deliberately targeted civilians.” Similarly, Amnesty International reported that Israeli forces “carried out indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on a large scale,” including “those on civilian infrastructure” and “direct attacks on civilian objects.” Furthermore, they reported that “These attacks seem to have been aimed at inflicting a form of collective punishment on Lebanon’s people” and that “based on the available evidence and the absence of an adequate or any explanation from the Israeli authorities for so many attacks by their forces causing civilian deaths and destruction, when no evidence of Hizbullah military activities was apparent, it seems clear that Israeli forces consistently failed to adopt necessary precautionary measures.”
(...) My efforts to ascertain where members of Congress get information to back up their defense of Israeli war crimes have revealed a rather startling inclination to rely on rather dubious right-wing sources for information. For example, following a speech in March, in which Senator Barack Obama repeated the myth that Hezbollah had used “innocent people as shields,” I contacted his spokesman as to what evidence the presidential hopeful had to make such charges. He referred me to a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, a right-wing Israeli think tank headed by the former chief of the Mossad which maintains close ties to the Israeli government. Despite repeated requests, Obama’s office was unable to provide any other source supporting the senator’s charge. This underscores serious concerns among human rights activists that Obama and other leading Democrats, like President Bush, have the same propensity to believe the findings of ideologically-driven right-wing think tanks above those of objective scholarship, reputable journalists, or principled human rights groups and other nonpartisan organizations.
(...) A recent HRW report notes how “Human Rights Watch and Israeli and Palestinian organizations documented numerous cases of Israeli forces using Palestinian civilians as human shields.” Similarly, Amnesty International has reported how Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank “have often used Palestinians effectively as human shields, endangering their lives in violation of international humanitarian law. There have been no Congressional resolutions condemning Israel’s use of human shields, however. Congressional Democrats essentially share the Bush administration’s practice that if you are perceived as an adversary, your crimes will be exaggerated or even manufactured, while it you are perceived as an ally, your crimes will be covered up.
(...) Perhaps the ultimate reason is that the Democrats’ agenda is essentially the same as the Republican administration and their Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill: to cover up for abuses of international humanitarian law by the United States and its allies and discredit human rights organizations that challenge these practices as a means of enhancing the hegemonic role of the United States in the Middle East and elsewhere.

legacy of summer 2006:Israel bombed an oil refinery in Jiyyeh, south of Lebanon's capital, Beirut, during its conflict with the armed wing of Lebanese political party Hezbollah last July. The bombing caused the refinery to spew an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 tonnes of fuel oil into the Mediterranean Sea. It was Lebanon's worst environmental disaster, say environmentalists.
(...) US state development agency USAID awarded a US $5 million contract to US company Seacor Environmental Services to clean roughly 60km of shore north of Byblos. Lebanon's Environment Ministry oversaw the work. In January, a USAID press release said the job was done, but Lebanon's Ministry of Environment clarified that "phase one" was completed - the removal of free-floating oil and oil in danger of going back into the sea.
(...) Bahr Loubnan clean-up supervisor and local resident Raif Nader said many beaches in the area had not been touched. "They didn't do anything here. USAID told us Mother Nature would wash the rocks. Why does it cost $5 million just to let it wash back out to sea?"

collective punishment (from october 2003):
US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.
(...) Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons." Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.
(...) But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.
(...) Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger and death."
(...) The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."
(...) Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."