Brontides

A couple of days ago, a Palestinian man got convicted for rape by deception in Israel. The bare facts of the case are this. The man met an Israeli woman in a bar. The two got to talking, and during the course of the conversation the man directly claimed to be Israeli. The two spent the night together; explicit consent was given, and that consent was not made explicitly dependent on the man being an Israeli. Later, the woman discovered that the man was, in fact, an Arab, and prosecuted him for rape by deception.

This is a complex situation, clearly, and large sections of the internet have devoted considerable time to overreaching in search of hard conclusions. Mondoweiss, for example, which does this by raising false equivalences. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera calls it “the selective application of the law against Arabs” and “just plain racism.” Even Feministe concludes that “there are certain circumstances where rape by fraud is a legitimate claim” but “this… is not one of them, and opens the door to even greater abuses.”

One thing is clear: the crime of rape by deception is a legitimate complaint, and not in an abstract sense. Cases have been successfully prosecuted where the man has lied about his sexual health, passing HIV onto his partner; where a man posed as a senior official and promised increased social security payments in exchange for sex; and where a woman consented to sex with a man who she believed to be her boyfriend but was actually her boyfriend’s brother. The statute is not used for situations where a man, say, claimed to be 27 when he’s actually 25, or a woman who claims to be a supermodel in a bar.

For many, though, the overtly racist nature of the complaint seems to be the deciding factor. My own personal feeling is perhaps dangerously relativistic, but my gut tells me that racism needs to be viewed through a different prism when dealing with Israel and Palestine. From a western perspective, the explicitly racial justification for the suit can be nauseating; but then, racial issues – although by no means defused in Europe or America – are less of an immediate concern than they are in the Levant. It is impossible not to decry the institutional racism and xenophobic nationalist tribalism exhibited by both Israeli and Arab political and social elements.

But the heart of this case isn’t an abstract principle; it’s rooted in personal actions and responses. The woman felt genuinely and legitimately deceived and violated. That in itself isn’t enough to determine guilt of course. What is, however, is the fact that the man knew that the deception was of decisive magnitude and did it anyway. The problem here is that the man chose to tell a lie of sufficient magnitude to deny the woman the opportunity to give consent. That the woman’s objection to the deception was racist in nature is vile but to some extent beside the point.

In many ways, Israel and – to a lesser extent – the occupied territories (particularly the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip) are fundamentally racist. They are societies constructed on a nationalist ideal, defined by opposition to an alien “other”. Widespread societal changes are needed to prevent citizens of Israel from viewing non-Israeliness as a defining flaw. But the fact remains that, for now, it is a defining flaw, and that fact is a factor that must have been known to the defendant.

As much as it galls me, I have to accept that in this case the verdict was probably correct.

EDIT: For an interesting comparative, check out how rape is handled in the UAE.

How far should a government go in order to safeguard its citizens?

Two stories have emerged concurrently that cast the question into new light. While most citizens tend to be happy with the theoretical notion of covert defence, security agencies usually try to keep the visceral practicalities of that defence obscured, as support for their methods often vanishes like spit on a hot rock when exposed to the full scrutiny of public opinion.

Yesterday, I discussed the story of Shahram Amiri the Iranian who was kidnapped by / defected to the CIA in 2009. To my chagrin, the post was overtaken by events almost as soon as it was posted; Amiri was flown back to Iran and has started to talk about the events that led to his disappearance:

Speaking to Al Jazeera during a transit stop in Qatar, Shahram Amiri said he was interrogated for 14 months by US agents who refused to allow him contact with his family, but that he “never cracked” and had not revealed any secret information about Iran’s nuclear programme.

Washington has denied the claims, saying Amiri had lived freely in the US, had himself reached out to US officials, and was free to come and go.

[..]

“They gave me a shot which made me unconscious and then transferred me to the US onboard a military plane,” Amiri said in Tehran, before making allegations that he was tortured during interrogations in the US.

“Within the first two months, I was subjected to fierce mental and psychological torture by agents and interrogators from the US Central Intelligence Agency.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera during his journey back to Iran, Amiri said he had been forced by US authorities to say in a video released on the internet that he was enjoying life in the state of Arizona.

Although it seems unlikely that the US will receive the censure it deserves for this, it is still unquestionably a scandal of severe proportions. The US government kidnapped a man on a religious pilgrimage, held him against his will for over a year and subjected him to torture and coercion. The man in question was not a military target, nor even a political one. Both the US and Iran deny that he was involved in the country’s nuclear programme, so whatever paltry justification the CIA may have had has become noticeably thinner.

Meanwhile, this morning the Guardian is reporting that the UK has also been complicit in kidnapping and torture, this time of its own citizens. The Guardian has helpfully highlighted many of the key passages, but the entire document is worth reading.

A few thoughts emerge from this. Firstly, dragging these revelations into the light of day is hard and the organisations that have done so deserve to be praised. Iran will probably not receive any credit for this in the wider world, but by doggedly and tenaciously pursuing the fate of its citizen it exposed a cruel double-standard at the heart of America’s security apparatus. Here in the UK, civil liberties organisations such as Liberty and, in particular, Reprieve deserve a tremendous amount of credit for their lobbying and legal action in exposing the worst excesses of the government in the early days of the Global War on Terror. These organisations should be celebrated for their achievements and offered every support.

Secondly, citizens should not be content to give abstract permissions to government in any situation, let alone one as broad-ranging as security and defense. We have an obligation to understand exactly what is being done in our name, and if we don’t ensure that the government is acting in accordance with our wishes then we are complicit in whatever acts they undertake.

Third, it is distressing that this is so unsurprising.

That’s Shahram Amiri.

Mr. Amiri is an Iranian who vanished while on hajj in 2009. What happened to him is a mystery. A video released by the Iranian government in June suggested that he was an Iranian nuclear scientist, that he had been kidnapped by the CIA and tortured, and that he was being held within the US against his will. In a concurrent video, a person who appears to be the same man explains that he wasn’t kidnapped – he moved to the US of his own volition, to complete his PhD. Further muddying the waters was this ABC report, which cited unnamed CIA officials, and which claimed that Amiri is a nuclear scientist, but that he defected to the CIA of his own free will.

That’s the straightforward bit.

Yesterday morning, both the Pakistani and Iranian governments claimed that he had taken refuge in Pakistan’s Washington embassy – which serves Iran’s interests in America in the absence of its own diplomatic mission – and was trying to get home. America flatly denied the claim, however, and Wired’s Danger Room blog has a repudiation from a spokesperson at the Pakistani embassy.

But a Pakistani embassy official tells Danger Room that the reports of Amiri turning up in the embassy are ”incorrect information” and “we have no one here” matching his description. That’s from an individual at the press office who didn’t identify herself and said she could not speak for the record. She added she couldn’t explain why a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry in Islamabad told reporters that the scientist is at the embassy’s Iranian interest section, about two miles away from the main facility in D.C.’s Glover Park neighborhood. But she also didn’t split hairs: “He’s not in the embassy at all.”

That said, the Iranian interest section is staffed by Iranians, not Pakistanis. A spokesman for the Iranian interest section, Ali Shahrazi, tells Danger Room, “When we arrived this morning, [Amiri] was here.” He dodged a question about whether the Pakistanis assisted in Amiri’s alleged arrival, saying that it was the job of Iranian staff to help Iranian nationals. But there are lots of questions remaining about Amiri’s true identity, to say nothing of his whereabouts.

What to make of this? Firstly, if you think that the CIA isn’t trying to abduct Iranian scientists and hold them against their will then you’re out of your mind. The only question is, would they do so so badly? If true, this shows a frightening lack of finesse, not least in allowing the captured scientist the liberty to broadcast his unexpurgated thoughts onto YouTube, and then permitting him to wander into Pakistan’s embassy unimpeded. Also, the still above – of Amiri’s pro-Merican-version video – is so obviously staged it hurts. The chess set? The globe, artfully set to show America on its visible face? The warm, structured lighting rig (note how the light illuminates Amiri on the face, despite the low, mood-lighting behind)? C’mon, you can almost see the camera crew and military escort just offstage.

On the other hand, this could quite easily be an Iranian stitch-up, although it would be hard to see the benefit to Iran to escalate the story to the level that it has unless it had something worth revealing.

One thing is for sure, though, and that is that you couldn’t pay me enough money to be an Iranian nuclear scientist. Wherever he is right now, I’m quite sure that Mr Amiri is wishing for nothing more than a quiet life.

EDIT: Looks like answers may be forthcoming, as he’s on his way home.

The original title for this fine post, as seen under the banner “Israel’s biggest enemy is itself” on Liberal Conspiracy, was (marvellously) Self-Clowning Lunatics Strike Again. The money shot:

Shorter – there really is an urgent and perilous threat to Israel. It’s called “the Israeli government”.

A neat line, but that’s not really what this is about, and that’s the problem.

The Zionist argument has always been that certain ethical contortions have to be made to protect the state of Israel from its aggressors, and from the threats that imperil its very existence.

This argument resonates with those who were alive to remember the Yom Kippur War, in which Egypt and Syria used Judaism’s holiest day to pour across the border and reclaim their lands, leading to a scramble for mobilisation in which the existence of the state of Israel itself looked, very briefly, to be genuinely imperilled. Israel rallied, and the US (who viewed Egypt as a Soviet proxy) shipped in emergency military assistance; the invading armies were thus pushed back, losing the land that they had reclaimed and more.

The argument hasn’t changed, but the truth is that the situation has. Israel is, up to a point, at peace with its neighbours. In the aftermath of Yom Kippur, Egypt fell out of the Soviet periphery and is now as much a client state of the US as Israel is. Even if that wasn’t the case, neither Egypt nor Syria have the hardware to mount a serious invasion of Israel that wouldn’t be immediately and brutally punished by the Jewish State’s comprehensive and well-equipped war machine.

In short, despite the protestations of those – from both the left and the right – who remember the day when it looked like the Jews were going to lose the only state they’ve ever had, Israel faces no real external threats today. Israeli commandos killed more people last night in international waters than Hamas has killed in Israel during a decade of resistance.

Israel is no longer defending itself.

What it is defending is the siege. It is defending the status quo in Gaza and it is defending its steady encroachment into the West Bank. But it is continuing to use the language of self-defence in order to do so, and that’s a huge problem. For those who remember Yom Kippur, it’s an emotive issue. But times have changed.

It’s no longer possible to argue that criticism of Israeli actions automatically implies a rejection of the legitimacy of that state, because it’s no longer the case that Israel is acting purely in self-defence. By continuing to assert otherwise, the Israeli government and the Zionist movement is perpetrating a deceit that cannot be upheld.

It is now the will of most people – even in the Arab states surrounding it – that Israel be allowed to live in peace. By clinging to a past version of the truth, which asserts that Israel is surrounded by enemies and in a state of constant peril, the Israeli government and its supporters risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Israel will always have enemies, but by pursuing the politics of arbitrary cruelty it risks creating more.

This blog is not anti-American. While I may criticise the policies of that country’s Government and its many excesses, I feel that America’s stand on most issues is principled and right. The chief failing in America’s foreign policy is inconsistency; its governing motivation is driven by the aforementioned principle, but as a highly political culture it indulges in methods that are frequently tawdry, and too often the means overwhelm the end.

We’re seeing an example of that this week with the latest series of twists in the Iranian nuclear drama. For those who missed the background, Brazil and Turkey brokered a deal with Iran, similar to one agreed several months ago which Tehran reneiged upon, under which they would transport their raw uranium to Turkey in exchange of low-enriched fuel rods – suitable for fuel, but not suitable for weapons. I’ve blogged a little about Brazil’s foreign policy before, but this is the strongest and most visible piece of fruit it’s bourne yet.

The success of these negotiations – where previous bargains between Iran and Europe have failed – is a heavy endorsement of the growing clout of the so-called “emerging” powers. The success seems to have been predicated on the capability of Turkey and Brazil to resolve the most critical obstacle in the stand-off: the issue of trust. Both through the modalities of the new deal as well as by virtue of who they are, Turkey and Brazil have succeeded in filling the trust gap. The collapse of the previous deal hinged on this issue; they were unwilling to hand their nuclear assetts over to a West that had proven its capability to reverse its own agreements and seize Iranian property. But if the enrichment take place in Brazil, rather than Europe or Russia, then Iran can take a lot more on trust.

Stephen M. Walt, professor of international affairs at Harvard and Middle East specialist, has a good overview of the deal and its implications. The key passages, though, are these:

Here’s why I think the United States should welcome the deal. The only feasible way out of the current box is via diplomacy, because military force won’t solve the problem for very long, could provoke a major Middle East war, and is more likely to strengthen the clerical regime and make the United States look like a bully with an inexhaustible appetite for attacking Muslim countries. (And having Israel try to do the job wouldn’t help, because we’d be blamed for it anyway). I think George Bush figured that out before he left office, and I think President Obama knows it too. So do sensible Israelis, though not the perennial hawks at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, who appear to have learned nothing from their shameful role cheerleading the debacle in Iraq back in 2002.

[...]

So what should the United States do? It should welcome the deal in principle, while making it clear that it will monitor implementation carefully and emphasizing that this particular agreement does not resolve the larger question of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Rejecting the deal would do nothing to advance broader U.S. objectives and would be an unnecessary slap in the face of Turkey and Brazil. Trying to scotch the deal would also allows Iran to blame Washington should the deal fall through, and it will only reinforce Iranian assertions that U.S. leaders are lying when they say they would like to improve relations.

So far, so sensible. It would be nice to think that America’s foreign policy establishment would manage to get to the end of that thought chain on their own; but, sadly, no.

There are a number of unanswered questions regarding the announcement coming from Tehran, and although we acknowledge the sincere efforts of both Turkey and Brazil to find a solution regarding Iran’s standoff with the international community over its nuclear program, the P-5+1, [...] are proceeding to rally the international community on behalf of a strong sanctions resolution that will, in our view, send an unmistakable message about what is expected from Iran.

What is expected from Iran, if not this? Well, America’s stated desire is for Iran to give up all fuel enrichment, for civilian purposes as well as military, despite it having a inaliable legal right to produce fuel for power. But the truth is that America has other reasons for wanting this to fail. It had just finalised a tortuous agreement with Russia and China for further sanctions, and politics demanded that America take its bow on the world stage for that. Doubtless there was some desire to slap down the rising powers – and make no mistake, this is a diplomatic humiliation for Brazil and Turkey, who negotiated in good faith and secured a major breakthrough because of it. And its current Middle East policy is calibrated towards containment and demonisation of Iran. For all these reasons and more, the US Government was never likely to agree a deal that was anything short of Iranian capitulation.

In other words, politics overtook principles.

Sunny Hundal at Liberal Conspiracy reports on The Times’ humiliating climbdown over its attack on the Human Rights Watch, an international and non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. As the second link, from Opinio Juris, points out, the attack is as inaccurate as it is unprincipled, and although the retraction is fairly all-encompassing there are some distortions that remain uncorrected.

At the end of his post, Sunny asks:

In other words [Jonathan] Foreman didn’t really do his research properly and ran a hatchet job that smeared HRW. If he approached HRW in advance with these points that could have been corrected.

So why didn’t he? Why did it require HRW to contact the Sunday Times after the article had been published?

If this had been an isolated issue then it would be a fair question, but attacks upon progressive international organisations have been a staple weapon in the armoury of the right-wing media – and in particular the Murdoch-owned press – in the UK and America for a few years now. These attacks are often incoherent and frequently attract corrections and retractions, but the effect is cumulative. Take Robert Bernstein’s criticisms of the organisation, from October last year, as being “left-wing, anti-Israel [and] anti-Western” (note that not only is HRW anti-Israel, it’s actually anti-Western, and – worse yet – left-wing). As an attack it holds together by the barest of threads, and is quickly demolished by Kevin John Heller of Opinio Juris, but the headline that sticks in the memory is that the organisation’s own founder turned on it for its anti-Israeli policy, and that’s a problem.

Nor is it the only problem. Recently Amnesty got into a spot of bother over a whistleblower who claimed that the organisation was working with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Times led the charge on this one, and I’m disinclined to defend the charge – for better or worse, Amnesty was working with the Taliban, and silencing internal dissent on the matter rather than forcefully articulating and defending its policies was the wrong decision. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you go back and look at that Google search, you’ll see that – with the exception of one story, detailing the origin of Israel’s white phosphorus shells – the Times has effectively ignored the entirety of Amnesty’s 2010 activity, mentioning the organisation only to report this story. A brief list of some of the other things that Amnesty has done in 2010, which other organisations have found newsworthy:

• Released a report detailing the rate of capital punishment in the world in 2009
• Detailed the failing system of maternal healthcare in the US
• Reported on migrant abuse in Malaysia
• Commented on a survey showing that 1 in 7 women students have been subjected to sexual assault or violence in the UK
• Attempted to prevent the execution of a Lebanese man in Saudi Arabia
• Held a panel discussion on how religious fundamentalism affects gay and women’s rights
• Called upon Sudan to respect the work of NGOs and allow them to work unmolested

…You know what? I’m bored. That’s not all of 2010; just what I can find, from other news organisations – most of which are significantly smaller are far more poorly resourced than News Corp – from the last month. The Times has covered none of it.

What it has done is to take some chunks out of DfID – the UK government’s Department for International Development – for, again, no very good reason. I could go on in this vein but you get the gist.

The question is, why does the right wing mistrust and fear internationalism so much? The economic right should love it; organisations such as Amnesty, HRW and DfID set up supply routes and manufacture chains that, in the long run, can form the paths that corporate bodies can follow to new markets. The problem is the social right, whose witlessly reflexive delusions grow ever more elaborate – witness, today, the claim that Lady Gaga is the principle obstacle to Middle Eastern peace, and those pesky settlements are just Beltway bleating. There really isn’t much that can be done about that – other than to oppose it when it emerges and hope that enough people are listening that it doesn’t take root.

As an aside: a track from the new New Pornographers album exists. It’s good; check it out.

There was an excellent interview in last weeks’ London Review of Books with Tony Judt, the American historian of European history. As I said, it was in last weeks’ magazine, but the whole thing’s available online, so you should read it before I fisk it.

There’s quite a lot here, so I’m going to speak to general points rather than specific lines or paragraphs. Firstly, I think that there are a number of ways in which events have quite rapidly played out to undermine some of Judt’s points. He early-on makes the point that Barack Obama is a compromiser, a consensus-builder – a common criticism that is balanced out by the counter-charges that he is a “machine politician” (FiveThirtyEight did a fine elaboration on that theme way back in 2008). On the whole, I think that the later group has the right of it. Obama is not a bridge-builder, he’s just someone with an acute and subtle understanding of how the machinery of power and legislation works. Sometimes, that requires him to at least appear to seek compromise. At others, it requires him to screw his party to the sticking point and ram legislation through Congress by brute force. The recent passage of healthcare exemplifies that, and should silence those who chirp about Obama’s lack of courage in the face of intransigence, at least for a little while.

Judt later observes that courage is unheard of in today’s politicians; that it is, in fact, a negating virtue. It should be noted that the passage of healthcare was considered by many to be courageous. I’m not convinced that it was – the Dems had a majority in the House, and once they’d been talking about it for a year, passing it was more or less the path of least resistance – but I do think that some individual politicians displayed considerable courage.

His comparison of the US President with the position of his European counterpart, however, was on the nose. Although it should be noted that the UK, tepidly, held out for a much more powerful and robust holder of the mandate, by and large the actions of the EU’s leaders have been exemplified by a stark lack of spine. It’s fair that the leaders of France, Germany, Spain and Britain fear an eclipsing of their individual national clouts, as a robust EU Presidency would do exactly that; but it’s a hit that’s worth taking, because the individual national clouts of France, Germany, Spain and Britain are slight and diminishing by the day. Relinquishing some local power in order to gain access to much greater, wider-scale influence should be an easy decision to make, but it takes courage, and Europe’s leaders are trained to be some of the most risk-averse in the world.

But the internal politics of Europe are thus in most regards. Judt also talks about Europe’s relationship with Israel, correctly observing that:

Israel wants two things more than anything else in the world. The first is American aid. This it has. As long as it continues to get American aid without conditions it can do stupid things for a very long time… However, the second thing Israel wants is an economic relationship with Europe as a way to escape from the Middle East [...]They don’t want to be there economically, culturally or politically – they don’t feel part of it and don’t want to be part of it. They want to be part of Europe and therefore it is here that the EU has enormous leverage.

This is largely correct, and indeed economically and politically it has largely succeeded. Most international companies who divide their regional operations by continent will have Europe and MEA (Middle East & Africa) – with Israel firmly in the former camp. This is largely a practicality; a sales rep or local manager with an Israel stamp in her or his passport will struggle to cross Arabic borders. But it is also a reflection of a broader truth, in which the state of Israel is culturally divorced from the land upon which it lies, even as its claims of legitimacy depend on that land for their historical vigour. Should Europe start to push back – making political and economic ties incumbent on the observation of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example – then Israel would be faced with a choice that has the same outcome either way: one that forces it to reconcile itself with its neighbours and the contested land upon which it is built.

Judt asserts that Europe resists the impulse to use this economic and cultural leverage out of a misplaced sense of historic guilt; that many European states continue to treat Israel with kid gloves as a way of continuing to atone for the events that it either perpetrated or failed to prevent. I think that this relies on too many assumptions and thus fails to meet the standards set by Occam’s Razor. Treating Israel as a member of the club of civilised nations, when it already has America’s robust backing, is simply a continuation of progress along the path of least resistance.

That this multinational spinelessness must be rooted in a domestic system that encourages and perpetuates a venal political elite seems like the next logical conclusion, and to an extent, Judt makes that link persuasively. He talks robustly about the “bad use of fear” that has taken hold of Europe’s social democratic model:

There is the demagogic exploitation of fear of outsiders and strangers, which culminates in putting up barriers against immigration, refugees or exiles. The sense that things are out of control, that we may lose our jobs next year because of competition from China or India, or that some farms may become unworkable in five years’ time because of climate change, has been intensified by globalisation, and it has given rise to large, unspecific fears which are played on [...] in Denmark by the anti-immigrant party, or in Switzerland with the referendum against minarets [...] Britain has more closed-circuit television cameras, which keep a record of almost everyone’s movements everywhere at all times, than any other democracy in the world. In the old days we would have seen this as an unacceptable intrusion on personal freedoms, yet today it’s accepted because people are frightened of crime, outsiders, terrorism. We no longer have a choice of a wonderfully happy and prosperous, secure and stable future: this isn’t Sweden in 1965.

Again, this can be explained in many forms, and socially it makes a lot of sense, but politically it’s only rational if most or all of the actors are acting in a narrow, cowardly self-interest. Acquiescing to these fears breeds nationalism, patriotism, preventive wars and repressive anti-terrorist legislation. These trends can be satisfying for a population in the short term, but the ugly truth is that in the end it’s just excessive state power. They have no power to combat or limit terrorism; they don’t strengthen our economy or our cultural vibrancy; they limit our international political power and tarnish our model of governance with claims of hypocrisy; and in the long run, they make the local population less comfortable and less free. But the European politicians with the courage to make these points and argue forcefully against the encroaching illiberality of the state are noticeable by their absence.

If the cause of this trend is understandable then the ways of fixing it seem daunting. When asked how and why we have reached the point where mass protests are ignorable by political elites, Judt talks about the disconnect between the people and governments; and as he correctly observes, in the span of a nation’s transition to democracy from an earlier state, the window of opportunity – where a political system is sufficiently unstable that it has to listen to popular will – is quite narrow (although it can be artificially extended). In late-19th Century Britian, he remarks,

They felt very vulnerable. Elections could remove them from power and if elections didn’t work, then the masses on the streets might achieve the same result.

This isn’t a state that lasts, however, and one of the weaknesses of democracies is that as democratic structures become more entrenched and social continuity becomes more normalised, the threat of actual consequential popular uprisings recedes. It doesn’t help that much of today’s European political activities are quasi-undemocratic, being run from bureaucracies and unelected bodies (such as the European Union, haw haw).

When I did my degree, we learned about a process called “incorporation,” by which subcultures are amalgamated into the mainstream. It’s a two-stage process; first, superficial and somewhat challenging aspects of the subculture are embraced by society at large; then, the remaining aspects are rejected as extremist and ignorable. This was presented as a process affecting the subcultures that surround musical genres (for example, clothing and some of the musical trappings of punk were assimilated, while the broader political and social aspects were attributed to anarchism and discarded), but it can also be clearly seen as affecting non-artistic philosophical and social movements – in feminism, for example, in which superficial aspects of female empowerment are embraced and prominently displayed as virtuous while the wider complaints of inequality and rape culture are dismissed as excessive and extremist.

I mention this because, to some extend, it corroborates the earlier discussion of cowardice in Europe’s political ranks. Courage is, after all, collocated with threat, but the political determination of the populace has been largely incorporated into modern mainstream politics. Elections and mass-media provide some semblance of what can be referred to as direct democracy, but the wider, more effective trappings of people power are dismissed as extremist – protest, worker collectivism and engagement with party politics. Against this backdrop, modern politicians lack a serious threat and thus have very little incentive to be courageous. The truth is that, no matter how easy and tempting it is to blame the electorate for Europe’s malaise, the power to reverse it has been removed from them.

Temporarily, though. The problem with Judt’s analysis is simply that it’s too pessimistic. It treats the status quo as a final state; it assumes that cowardice is a feature that Europe is doomed never to escape. It is this underlying assumption that is shown up by the one encouraging sign that comes from across the water, where Barack Obama – the machine politician – has demonstrated that courage, or the appearance of it, can be its own political virtue. The marvellous thing about democratic systems is that they have the potential to be self-renewing; that in a time of cowards, the courageous man is valuable simply by dint of his courage, let alone the effects and intentions that lie behind it. The era of loud, brash direct mass involvement of populaces in politics may well be over, and that may not be a bad thing, but a population can still make its will felt in terms of broad themes, if not entirely on matters of specific policy.

All of which is to say: if you value political coherence and courage enough, and vote accordingly, then it will come. In the meantime: please write to your MP and demand proper debating time for the Digital Economy Bill. It’s a dreadful piece of legislation and an accelerated period of debate won’t help that.

Photo: Reuters

I’d be lying if I tried to pretend that I wasn’t secretly pretty psyched that Britain is expelling an Israeli diplomat.

Diplomatic work between Britain and Israel needs to be conducted according to the highest standards of trust. The work of our Embassy in Israel, and the Israeli Embassy in London, is vital to the cooperation between our countries. So is the Strategic Dialogue between our countries. These ties are important and we want them to continue. However I have asked that a member of the Embassy of Israel be withdrawn from the UK as a result of this affair, and this is taking place.

My own gut reaction is tempered by the fact that the reasoning is pretty dreadful, though. That Israel can get away with bloodshed and theft in Palestine, but only manages to elicit a response when it clones some passports for an assassination in Dubai, speaks volumes about the priorities of the British Foreign Office and its gutless toad of a Foreign Minister. This reeks of opportunism; Israel is a tarnished brand, this week anyway, and if it gets Miliband’s name in the papers only a few weeks before an election – and, doubtless, a Labour leadership campaign – then so much the better.

Either way, it’s been a miserable week or two for Israel and its foreign policy. Between the Biden insult, the Turkey spies debacle, and now Mauritania – one of the first Muslim states to normalise relations with Israel – severing ties, Israel’s rebranding mission seems to have tanked catastrophically.

Juan Cole tells it like it is:

Top Ten Reasons East Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the American Israel Public Affairs Council on Monday that “Jerusalem is not a settlement.” He continued that the historical connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel cannot be denied. He added that neither could the historical connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem. He insisted, “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today.” He said, “Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” He told his applauding audience of 7500 that he was simply following the policies of all Israeli governments since the 1967 conquest of Jerusalem in the Six Day War.

Netanyahu mixed together Romantic-nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group.

So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him.

1. In international law, East Jerusalem is occupied territory, as are the parts of the West Bank that Israel unilaterally annexed to its district of Jerusalem. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 forbid occupying powers to alter the lifeways of civilians who are occupied, and forbid the settling of people from the occupiers’ country in the occupied territory. Israel’s expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem, its usurpation of Palestinian property there, and its settling of Israelis on Palestinian land are all gross violations of international law. Israeli claims that they are not occupying Palestinians because the Palestinians have no state are cruel and tautological. Israeli claims that they are building on empty territory are laughable. My back yard is empty, but that does not give Netanyahu the right to put up an apartment complex on it.

2. Israeli governments have not in fact been united or consistent about what to do with East Jerusalem and the West Bank, contrary to what Netanyahu says. The Galili Plan for settlements in the West Bank was adopted only in 1973. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave undertakings as part of the Oslo Peace Process to withdraw from Palestinian territory and grant Palestinians a state, promises for which he was assassinated by the Israeli far right (elements of which are now supporting Netanyahu’s government). As late as 2000, then Prime Minister Ehud Barak claims that he gave oral assurances that Palestinians could have almost all of the West Bank and could have some arrangement by which East Jerusalem could be its capital. Netanyahu tried to give the impression that far rightwing Likud policy on East Jerusalem and the West Bank has been shared by all previous Israeli governments, but this is simply not true.

3. Romantic nationalism imagines a “people” as eternal and as having an eternal connection with a specific piece of land. This way of thinking is fantastic and mythological. Peoples are formed and change and sometimes cease to be, though they might have descendants who abandoned that religion or ethnicity or language. Human beings have moved all around and are not directly tied to any territory in an exclusive way, since many groups have lived on most pieces of land. Jerusalem was not founded by Jews, i.e. adherents of the Jewish religion. It was founded between 3000 BCE and 2600 BCE by a West Semitic people or possibly the Canaanites, the common ancestors of Palestinians, Lebanese, many Syrians and Jordanians, and many Jews. But when it was founded Jews did not exist.

4. Jerusalem was founded in honor of the ancient god Shalem. It does not mean City of Peace but rather ‘built-up place of Shalem.”

5. The “Jewish people” were not building Jerusalem 3000 years ago, i.e. 1000 BCE. First of all, it is not clear when exactly Judaism as a religion centered on the worship of the one God took firm form. It appears to have been a late development since no evidence of worship of anything but ordinary Canaanite deities has been found in archeological sites through 1000 BCE. There was no invasion of geographical Palestine from Egypt by former slaves in the 1200s BCE. The pyramids had been built much earlier and had not used slave labor. The chronicle of the events of the reign of Ramses II on the wall in Luxor does not know about any major slave revolts or flights by same into the Sinai peninsula. Egyptian sources never heard of Moses or the 12 plagues & etc. Jews and Judaism emerged from a certain social class of Canaanites over a period of centuries inside Palestine.

6. Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent “Jewish people” in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon. So Jerusalem was not ‘the city of David,’ since there was no city when he is said to have lived. No sign of magnificent palaces or great states has been found in the archeology of this period, and the Assyrian tablets, which recorded even minor events throughout the Middle East, such as the actions of Arab queens, don’t know about any great kingdom of David and Solomon in geographical Palestine.

7. Since archeology does not show the existence of a Jewish kingdom or kingdoms in the so-called First Temple Period, it is not clear when exactly the Jewish people would have ruled Jerusalem except for the Hasmonean Kingdom. The Assyrians conquered Jerusalem in 722. The Babylonians took it in 597 and ruled it until they were themselves conquered in 539 BCE by the Achaemenids of ancient Iran, who ruled Jerusalem until Alexander the Great took the Levant in the 330s BCE. Alexander’s descendants, the Ptolemies ruled Jerusalem until 198 when Alexander’s other descendants, the Seleucids, took the city. With the Maccabean Revolt in 168 BCE, the Jewish Hasmonean kingdom did rule Jerusalem until 37 BCE, though Antigonus II Mattathias, the last Hasmonean, only took over Jerusalem with the help of the Parthian dynasty in 40 BCE. Herod ruled 37 BCE until the Romans conquered what they called Palestine in 6 CE (CE= ‘Common Era’ or what Christians call AD). The Romans and then the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium ruled Jerusalem from 6 CE until 614 CE when the Iranian Sasanian Empire Conquered it, ruling until 629 CE when the Byzantines took it back.

The Muslims conquered Jerusalem in 638 and ruled it until 1099 when the Crusaders conquered it. The Crusaders killed or expelled Jews and Muslims from the city. The Muslims under Saladin took it back in 1187 CE and allowed Jews to return, and Muslims ruled it until the end of World War I, or altogether for about 1192 years.

Adherents of Judaism did not found Jerusalem. It existed for perhaps 2700 years before anything we might recognize as Judaism arose. Jewish rule may have been no longer than 170 years or so, i.e., the kingdom of the Hasmoneans.

8. Therefore if historical building of Jerusalem and historical connection with Jerusalem establishes sovereignty over it as Netanyahu claims, here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:

A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.

B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.

C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.

D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.

E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.

F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.

G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.

9. Of course, Jews are historically connected to Jerusalem by the Temple, whenever that connection is dated to. But that link mostly was pursued when Jews were not in political control of the city, under Iranian, Greek and Roman rule. It cannot therefore be deployed to make a demand for political control of the whole city.

10. The Jews of Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine did not for the most part leave after the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt against the Romans in 136 CE. They continued to live there and to farm in Palestine under Roman rule and then Byzantine. They gradually converted to Christianity. After 638 CE all but 10 percent gradually converted to Islam. The present-day Palestinians are the descendants of the ancient Jews and have every right to live where their ancestors have lived for centuries.

Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Two more bits of bleg that surfaced this morning:

First, a typically overwordy piece of analysis by Stratfor sees signs of weakening in Al Qaeda. A video offered by as-Sabab, AQ’s media outlet arm, on March 7th is the usual treat for counterterrorism cryptologists, and does appear to signal a weakening of central AQ’s efforts to cause havok – advocating, as it does, individual and “lone wolf” activity rather than a reliance on big, centrally-planned schemes.

It has come a long way from the early days of as Sahab, when bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders issued defiant threats of launching a follow-on attack against the United States that was going to be even more destructive than 9/11. The group is now asking individual Muslims to conduct lone-wolf terrorist attacks and to follow the examples of Hasan [the soldier who perpetrated a massacre at Fort Worth in Texas] and Mir Amal Kansi, the Pakistani citizen who conducted a shooting at a stoplight outside CIA headquarters in January 1993 that killed two CIA employees [...] this video is a clear indication that the trend toward decentralization is continuing.

While lone-wolf terrorists remain a threat, research – covered previously in this blog – suggests that, without a sense of cohesive community, the terrorist spirit may find fewer and less fruitful purchases.

Secondly, Ayatollah Akhbar Rafsanjani, the massively influential, famously mercurial and ruggedly individual Iranian cleric and politician, has finally pinned his colours to the mast, throwing his weight behind Khamenei and the government at the expense of the Green Movement. At this stage he had little choice – the Green Movement has more or less run out of steam and no longer possesses the will or capability to project its power onto the streets. But it is not a cause for untrammelled pessimism for Iran:

Rafsanjani has much in common with mainstream conservatives who have long supported Khamenei, but he will never align himself with the new generation of influential hard-liners, led by Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

[...]

In exchange for Rafsanjani’s loyalty, the supreme leader appears to have given him power over a new bill that will establish a National Elections Commission to reform the electoral process. Not only is this issue at the heart of Iran’s political crisis, but the commission would also determine the eligibility of individuals to stand as candidates in elections. And the Expediency Council, which monitors legislation and is responsible for any conflicts that might result over Iranian laws, will also decide the members who serve on the National Elections Commission.

That’s a huge change, and wrests a significant amount of power away from the hard-liners and the Guardian Council. Instead of being a defeat, Rafsanjani’s decision to throw his lot in with the Supreme Leader can be seen as a pragmatic compromise, which has a good chance of bearing greater fruit than the spent reform movement – whose capacity to persist as a political actor he has, effectively, killed.

In centuries to come, the early 21st Century will come to be regarded as the moment at which Brazil emerged from a long dark age.

Probably “discovered” by the Portuguese at the start of the 16th Century, it underwent just over 300 years of Colonial surpression as its lands and resources were contested by a variety of European powers. Portugal was more successful here than it had been elsewhere; while its African and Eastern properties were gradually stripped from it by more predatory Empires, it stubbornly clung onto Brazil in the face of mounting French and Dutch opposition, eventually even shifting its metropole from Portugal to Brazil in the early 1800s to avoid the worst of the Napoleonic Wars. The absence of the King and Court from Portugal caused unrest at home, however, and after just thirteen years King João VI returned to Europe, leaving in charge his son Pedro, who promptly declared independence.

The “Empire of Brazil” lasted for some sixty years, before falling to a military coup in 1889. The ensuing parliamentary democracy also fell to a junta in 1930, which led to a period of uneasy governance, which vascillated from military dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, before resolving definitively into a full military dictatorship after another coup in 1964. Since 1989, Brazil has been steadily redemocratising, and has been governed since 2002 by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula” for short. Elected on a platform of reducing Brazil’s extreme inequality (Brazil has one of the most pronounced splits between rich and poor in the world), Lula is probably one of the most popular democratically elected politicians in the world; even after 8 years in power his popularity remains in the high 70s. His chosen successor, Dilma Roussef, seems to be cut from the same mould and is likely to win by a landslide. Brazil is now one of the more significant emerging economic powers; with a huge – and cheap – labour force, abundant mineral deposits, a growing middle class and rapidly developing infrastructure, Brazil has the potential to grow into a major player over the course of the next century.

With economic swagger comes political, of course, although until recently Brazil had been content to make an exception of itself in this. He is regarded as a key US ally in Latin America almost by default – by virtue of being peaceful, democratic, opposed to Chavez-esque populism and open to free-market liberalism. Although he has lobbied strongly for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Lula had – until recently – been pursuing a modest foreign policy – possibly designed to demonstrate responsibility on the world stage – best described as Oman-esque:

[...] Oman from 1970 has explicitly taken the policy to adapt to changing circumstances, remain non-aligned, never harbor hostile intentions, and avoid confrontation.

Over the last few weeks, though, something seems to have changed, and Lula has slowly, iteratively, but decisively been lowering himself into a more decisive foreign policy. His caution is justified, as his chosen point of insertion is possibly the most divisive and unstable geopolitical fracas of our times. He has refused to yeild to American pressure on Iran, saying “It is not prudent to push Iran against a wall [...] The prudent thing is to establish negotiations.” He has visited Palestine. And now, he is criticising Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, saying that he is willing to talk to Hamas and caliming that Israel’s continued settlement building was “extinguishing the candle of hope”. He has also shown himself willing to kick the US about for violating international trade law. So much for avoiding confontation.

Could this presage a more muscular Brazilian presence in world politics? While I admire Lula’s adherence to a series of principles which must seem obvious to most observers who do not rely on America’s patronage, this will do his immediate chances at gaining a permanent seat on the Security Council no good. In the long run, however, he may be gambling on the strength of a non-aligned movement in a multipolar world. What is certain, however, is that as Brazil’s strength grows it will become increasingly hard to ignore.

Apologies if this post is somewhat short of being lucid – I’ve not been sleeping well lately and am thus struggling with articulation.

Hosni Mubarak, President-for-life of Egypt, re-emerged overnight after a protracted stay in a German hospital, quelling rumours of comas, juntas, illegitimate children and unannounced deaths, although the internet of course persists in contriving elaborate conspiracy theories. For a moment, though, it did look touch-and-go; and sources continue to report that Mubarak won’t seek another term in office following this recent health scare.

Which is doubtless what prompted Stratfor to hold forth on what course a post-Mubarak Egypt might take. Like the good folk at arabist.net, I’m not convinced by the idea that current intelligence chief General Suleiman will place-hold for young Jamal Mubarak; although I have no doubt that there are sections of the Egyptian government who believe that that is, or are counting it being, the plan, but the factionalism that exists within the Egyptian government and the ruling NDP is such that any multi-stage transition of this kind seems unlikely. If General Suleiman were to take power then I’d consider it far more likely that he will keep power, rather than handing it off to a comparative neophite with no firm powerbase of his own.

Questions about who will run Egypt tomorrow, however, should not distract from the question of who is running Egypt today:

This is new. For all its faults, Egypt’s political system generally makes clear who is in charge [...] Is it the security apparatus? His son? High members of the National Democratic Party? What is the role of his wife, a visible figure in Egyptian public life? Most important of all, who will follow him? Mubarak’s illness has catapulted these questions from the rumor mill to the headlines. But it has not answered them.

Aside from its overenthusiastic punctuation, the al-Shuruq article calmly reported that Husni Mubarak had deputized Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif to take on day-to-day presidential responsibilities. But Nazif is no Alexander Haig asserting that he is in control. If there is an Egyptian Haig, he is not in sight. The article made clear that Nazif’s authority is limited and that in important matters (such as those related to security) he consults with named and unnamed responsible authorities. [...]

While it is not clear who wields power — or who will run things if Mubarak’s absence becomes permanent — it is clearer how that power is being wielded. There are, to be sure, some signs of disarray, of different institutions and power centers pulling in different directions. But that disarray only goes so far. The overall direction is clear: Egypt is now in the midst of an uneven political clampdown.

Pity Egypt.

Here’s a list of the demands that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to “restore confidence” in the US-Israel relationship:

Earlier Sunday, Netanyahu continued to consult with the forum of seven senior cabinet ministers over a list of demands that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made in a telephone conversation Friday. ….Haaretz has learned that Clinton’s list includes at least four steps the United States expects Netanyahu to carry out to restore confidence in bilateral relations and permit the resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.

1. Investigate the process that led to the announcement of the Ramat Shlomo construction plans in the middle of Biden’s visit. The Americans seek an official response from Israel on whether this was a bureaucratic mistake or a deliberate act carried out for political reasons. Already on Saturday night, Netanyahu announced the convening of a committee to look into the issue.

2. Reverse the decision by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee to approve construction of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo.

3. Make a substantial gesture toward the Palestinians enabling the renewal of peace talks. The Americans suggested that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners be released, that the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from additional areas of the West Bank and transfer them to Palestinian control, that the siege of the Gaza Strip be eased and further roadblocks in the West Bank be removed.

4. Issue an official declaration that the talks with the Palestinians, even indirect talks, will deal with all the conflict’s core issues – borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security arrangements, water and settlements.

Zesty stuff. Like most (including Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren), I expected this crisis to run out of steam towards the end of last week. Instead, the US Administration is escalating. Netanyahu will not meet all four of those steps; he probably won’t even attempt to meet the second or third. It would be too strong a repudiation of his existing policies in this area. One wonders if the White House truly has the courage to fight the fight it’s picking.

Vice President Joe Biden is not a happy man.

He went all the way to Israel to calm some tattered nerves, to salve some egos, to smooth some furrowed brows with talk of unshakable bonds and “happy ends” (don’t ask) – not to mention with an intent to kick-start a new round of “proximity talks” between Israel and the PLO.

And how was he greeted?

Well, I’m glad you asked! On the day that he arrived, Israel approved 1600 new housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of Jerusalem. Ramat Shlomo is itself a fairly new neighborhood in north Jerusalem that lies just west of the Arab neighborhoods of Shu‘afat and Beit Hanina, not far from the Shu‘afat refugee camp. What’s more, Harat Shlomo is an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) neighborhood. It’s east of the Green Line, of course – meaning that it’s well into what the international community would consider to be Palestinian territory – and not far from the East Jerusalem to Ramallah road.

Whatever the future of Jerusalem ends up being, though, this really looks like a deliberate affront to Biden. Netanyahu has disavowed all knowledge, and the stroy goes that Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who heads the hard-line Shas Party, was freelancing. This seems implausible, to say the least; Netanyahu’s hold on his coalition is not so shaky as to allow such an obvious and major insult to sneak through without clearance. It’s too overt; it’s as if someone in the Prime Minister’s office said to themselves, “Where could we approve new construction that would be the most offensive to the US right now?” Yes, Israel insists it has the right to build in all parts of Jerusalem, but the timing here looks like a blatant “in your eye, Joe” to the Vice President, and it sounds like he took it that way:

“I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them. This announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict. The United States recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians and for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world. Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues. As George Mitchell said in announcing the proximity talks, “we encourage the parties and all concerned to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks.”

Pat Lang said it best:

Joe! Joe! If you kiss their butts and say that they are we and we are they, then you have to expect to be treated like the servant that you are. Just today you snuggled up to them and told the world that there is no “space between Israel and the US.” They took you at your word, that’s all. You got what you asked for.

The real question is: how far can Israel push before the US public allows its government to push back?

Yemen has leapt into the media spotlight since Christmas Day, and probably for good reason – like Somalia, it’s a perennially misunderstood and under-observed place, whose sudden elevation in the eye of the global media has led to some wild and hysterical mis-reportage. Waq Waq, which has been fighting the good fight on Yemeni news for nearly a year, shares my despondence. The misunderstanding of the nature of qat is a particular pet peeve; yes, it’s mildly narcotic, and yes it informs myriad attending problems, such as water consumption, reduced productivity in the workforce and the criminality inspired by the mafia-esque organisations that distribute it. But it has next to nothing to do with terrorism, alienation or extremism in the region, so why every news report feels the need to hold it up as a cultural constant is beyond me.

An inside look on one at the least-understood of geopolitic’s actors is always worth a look. Understanding the structure of power in Tehran is crucial as it provides context for everything that is happening today, and this is a clear, lucid and accessible starting point.

More detail on the Jordanian who killed seven CIA operatives here. It’s a pretty remarkable story, really – in some ways one is inclined to believe that technology has moved us past the point at which physical, flesh-and-blood cloak ‘n’ dagger intrigue is efficient or cost-effective. But then, one would not be alone:-

In the past, Jordanian officials have privately criticized American intelligence services, saying they relied too heavily on technology and not enough on agents capable of infiltrating operations.

Ironic. But also interesting given my post yesterday. The man had been plucked from a Jordanian jail and recruited by the Americans and the Jordanians to spy on Al Qaida. He had a history of supporting violent islamist causes, and was a well-known contributor to al-Hesbah, a online forum run by Islamist extremists. He also ran his own Islamist blog. That the US military allowed him to walk straight from an Al Qaida stronghold into a US military intelligence facility without even frisking him shows a severe and naive lack of understanding of basic human nature.

I read this on the way back home this evening, and it was interesting – a paper by a pair of Zurich-based economists who set out to demonstrate how the decision to become a suicide bomber can be rational, and doesn’t necessarily run counter to economic principles of utility.

The whole thing is worth a read, but its chief interest for me was that it came as a reminder that insanity is to psychoanalysis as dark matter is to physics – something hazy and indistinct used to fill the chasm that exists between what we can measure, define and understand, and what we can observe as extant but not explain. While it may briefly satisfy a theoretical gap, it doesn’t absolve the inquiring mind of the duty to push deeper for more worthy explanations. The most common reasons suggested for suicide terror are madness and hate, but the paper successfully argues that these are minor influences in the decision-making process that leads to an attempted suicide bombing. The paper sets out some of the (many and varied) alternatives, splitting them out into three distinct categories:

• posthumous effects: rise in the social and monetary status of the attackers family; immortality of the attacker; accomplishment of political, religious and social goals.
• announcement effects: admiration and rise in status of the attacker before the attack.
• defection effects: negative consequences arising in case the attacker does not carry out the attack.

Aside from that, the paper also carries the stories of Wafa Idris, the first female Palestinian suicide bomber, and Dareen Abu Aysheh, who detonated a bomb at an Israeli roadblock a month later. Since Idris, the Palestinian territories have become the area second most targeted by female suicide bombers, but at the time, cases such as Idris’ were a rarity. In her book, Army of Roses, Barbara Victor describes Idris as “talented… married and divorced because she was sterile”; of Abu Aysheh it was said by her brother that “[s]he was sure that [she] would be killed for nothing, maybe at a roadblock or when our houses are bombed, and she used to say that it is better to die for a reason”. In the absence of the suicide-bombing industry that would come to utilise the effects outlined above, these two women – and many others besides – used suicide bombing as a way to validate their own lives and their positions within society. Even by strictly utilitarian standards the logic makes pernicious sense.

This is the outrage that underpins the claim – briefly fashionable in the media, now thankfully on the wane, although still prevalent, at least on the British street – that Islam is a violent religion. The simple truth is that any population – even the most stoic, resolutely middle-class British or American WASPs – will, when placed in conditions similar to those under which the Palestinian population has laboured, eventually turn to violent resistance and extremism. The solution to this isn’t bombs, roadblocks and walls, it’s to remove the depredations (which, unerringly, tend to be found in the form of bombs, roadblocks and walls) that drove that population to its extreme in the first place.

Finally, this footnote – of all things – perked my interest. The writers say:

…the terrorist activity level is not modelled as a continuous variable with the maximum level being suicide attack (see eg. [J.P.] Azam [Suicide bombing as inter-generational investment] 2005).

Two thoughts emerge from this – first, why should suicide bombing be modelled on a continuous scale with other acts of terrorism? There’s no evidence to suggest progression – that a sufficiently hardened terrorist will, eventually, commit a suicide attack. And secondly, this leads to the idea that suicide bombing and other forms of terror are strictly non-analogous. To be a terrorist is to be a killer, a murderer, a methodical, calculating – and unsacrificing – designer of plots to cause havoc and death. A suicide bomb, however, is an act of desperation, a statement of self-sacrifice, and ultimately inward-facing. As this paper proves, suicide bombing is, more often than not, a strictly utilitarian decision, which is a somewhat sanitised way of saying that, for the bombers, the benefits of dying outweigh the negatives. Idris and Abu Aysheh would never have considered “conventional” terror, because any act of terror that did not result in their deaths would have missed the point. What horrors must a community suffer to make that course of action a rational one?

Anyway, the paper’s a good read, so I recommend at least glance.

What does a good week look like when talking about Iran?

Sadly, the last few weeks have skirted about as close to positive as we are likely to see, at least in the short term.

First, a bad story miraculously managed not to get worse. On the back of the collapse of a near-miss deal, which would have allowed for Iranian fuel to be enriched in French and Russian reactors, and the revelations of a second reactor in Qom, the US House of Representatives passed a crummy bill (when AIPAC crow about it, you know it’s bad), giving the President the power to ban any company who traded in Iranian petroleum from operating in the US – effectively, a sanction. This would be – and still may, in actuality, end up being – an awful idea; Prof. Gary Sick referred to it as “perhaps the worst idea to come out of Congress since they opposed the purchase of Alaska”, although Sarah Palin reminds us of the charms of that earlier act of obstructionism. Indeed, the sanctions would be entirely self-defeating; they would, by forcing legitimate companies to avoid trading in Iranian fuel, channel funds and effective power into the hands of the Revolutionary Guards, while further agitating the possibility another neocon pet war in the Middle East and exacerbating the perception that the US is hostile to the average Iranian. But midterms loom, it looks great on a campaign leaflet, and opposing it is politically risky, especially with the Democratic brand so heavily tarnished by the dirty fight over healthcare.

Happily, the US media – probably heavily aided by the White House – have responded responsibly, acknowledging the substantial successes that the White House has enjoyed in its current policy and hopefully giving the Senate the cover it needs to quietly neuter the sanctions bill.

Secondly, contrary to the expectations of many – including myself – the Green rebellion continues to develop, almost in spite of the conventional wisdom surrounding how rebellions and revolutions behave. Once again, Gary Sick, who predicted that the dissent would have legs, provides some measure of clarity on this. In many respects, the Iranian regime has performed a by-the-book suppression of the unrest, but have met with little success.

One of the interesting factors surrounding the post-election Iranian unrest is the extent to which it has been beyond the influence of individuals. At the time of the election, I said the following:

I think that Ahmedinejad is, at best, a bystander in events at the moment. To an extent, though, so is Mousavi; he seems to be one step behind the protests, always calling them after they’ve already been arranged. And to a different extent, so too is Khamenei. The ultimate choice of whether to risk it all by using force is his and his alone, but that’s the limit of his ability to act; I don’t think he’ll take that choice, so it remains to be seen how far the protesters can go.

As time goes by, this seems truer and truer. Even following the assassination of his nephew, there is no indication to suggest that Mousavi is even particularly closely connected to the bulk of the revolutionary force, which seems to be quite adept at organising and directing itself. Ahmedinejad, after a brief attempt at a post-election power-grab, has disappeared completely as an actor on both the national and international stages. And Khamenei… I wonder to what extent the Revolutionary Guard are still loyal to him, given that his survival increasingly rests squarely on their shoulders. If this rebellion does develop into a full-blown revolt then it will be a unique and intriguing new form of civil unrest, albeit one that may be applicable only to the uniquely Byzantine circumstances that prevail in Iran.

I have long admired Prof. Sick’s analysis on Iran but have respectfully dissented against his optimism regarding the outcome of the current turmoil. It increasingly seems, however, that a positive outcome in Iran may be possible – not likely, perhaps, and certainly not imminent, but possible. The longer that the Green revolutionaries in Iran hold out, and the wise continue to thread the needle in Washington, the better the odds get.

On the tension between Israel-as-Democracy and Israel-as-Ethnocracy.

An interesting question addessed honestly.