The flotilla, elusive peace, and the Israeli quagmire

I still have two more days’ worth of travel blogs to write and post from my trip to Israel last month, after which I’d planned to write a broader thoughts and lessons-learned piece. With the flotilla incident and related events this week though it seems prudent to move that last piece up, and so I’ve been pondering the incident and the wider picture thru the week.

Before traveling to the region my belief was that it’s a highly complicated situation with no easy answers, and that belief was certainly affirmed by the time I spent there. If there were easy answers, they’d have been thought of already. But there aren’t. And I think that, unless there’s some out of the box thinking or something happens to radically alter the current dynamics, nothing will change any time soon. Certainly not for the better, anyways.

My exposure to the Palestinian side was obviously very limited. We did speak to Israeli Arabs and a Palestinian journalist, and we did visit the West Bank, although Ramallah was a no-go, and obviously Gaza was off limits. So I won’t claim any great insight or perspective on their view – what I did learn was second-hand.

On the Israeli side though, I was struck by the near unanimity of the necessity and inevitability of a two-state solution. And I found a less prevalent but growing belief that Israel needs to get the heck out of Gaza. Many I spoke to felt strongly that allowing the status-quo to continue – blockade, occupation, poverty and suffering – besides being unacceptable on humanitarian grounds, will only weaken and hurt Israel. It likes to claim a certain moral authority as the only democratic government in the region, and it likes to boast of the Israeli Arabs in the Knesset, in the Supreme Court. But at the same time, democratic states don’t abide the suffering in Gaza, and by allowing it, no matter the reason, Israel fritters away that moral high ground.

I think a large percentage of Israelis would be happy to bring the troops home, open the borders, and leave the Palestinians to their own devices tomorrow – if it meant peace. The problem, though, is they’re quite certain it won’t. The reason for the blockade, the security wall/fence, the closed borders, is because Palestinian territory is being used as a base to launch terror attacks on Israel. Rockets are routinely fired into Israel from Gaza, including this week, smuggled in from Iran and elsewhere. Weapons are routinely smuggled in, and used to attack Israel. That’s why the blockade, and that’s why, even if they wanted to, they couldn’t just leave tomorrow. They just wouldn’t be safe.

The flotilla incident this week is like a microcosm of this entire conflict. However well-intentioned the activists were, and however in the minority those that thought it was a good idea to attack the Israeli soldiers with knifes and pipes were, this was all about sparking a confrontation and creating a conflict. If it was just about delivering aid, they’d have gone to an Israeli or Egyptian port. Make no mistake, they wanted the confrontation.

I think both sides acted stupidly. The activists had to know full well they’d likely face a military response. And Israel had to know rappelling troops armed with paintball guns down one-by-onto a ship of potential belligerents was stupid. It was a high-risk, low-reward play particularly knowing that, if anything goes wrong, you’ll take the brunt of negative public opinion. That’s just the way it is for Israel. They needed to find a better way of stopping those ships.

I’m not sure what the better ways might be though and that, like with the wider Israeli/Palestinian quagmire, is the problem. It’s not as easy as just ending the blockade, as the UN Secretary-General has called for. Yes, it’s a human rights issue. The right to live without rockets raining down on your home is a human rights issue too, but ending the blockade is just addressing the legitimate concerns of one side. And that’s not a viable solution at all.

As long as people keep searching for easy answers, and seeing the region in black and white, we’ll get nowhere. All that will happen is Israel will be increasingly isolated and disengaged, and will take a harder line. If peace is the goal, if two peoples living side-by-side in peace is the goal, this isn’t the way to go. Something needs to change.

Whether it’s on flotillas and the blockade or the wider issues, I think it’s incumbent on the international community to offer Israelis and Palestinians another choice. We need to change the dynamic. Before the next flotilla approaches Gaza looking to spark a confrontation, we need to give them both another choice. Another way. It almost seems to call for a peacekeeping scenario with 3^rd-party border inspections, but I’m not sure you could find a party (the UN, NATO) that both sides would accept.

Long-term, there does seem to be hope in the West Bank, particularly compared to Hamas-controlled Gaza. It’s a long-term process but increasing economic prosperity, the thinking is, will lead to a lessening of tensions and allow for a lasting, just peace. Maybe H&M will indeed bring them together. It’s a hopeful thought. Certainly, poverty breeds desperation and anger, while prosperity breeds contentment.

But if that’s true, it only makes the Gaza situation all the more dangerous, as the blockade is just breeding more anger and resentment, worsening the security threat and feeding back on itself in a self-perpetuating cycle of violence and despair.

Canada, and much of the international community, has cut-off direct aid to Gaza since the election of the Hamas government. It’s easy to say that’s the principled move to make, but given that it has only worsened the situation on the ground and driven the public more toward Hamas, is this really a policy that will achieve our desired ends? I cheekily asked one of our diplomats if we can seriously try to run foreign policy on principle – unsurprisingly, he didn’t directly answer. As I’ve said though something, clearly, has to give, because the status-quo isn’t working for anyone.

As I said at the outset, I don’t know what the answers are. But I do know that it’s not easy, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Note: Disagree with my take as violently as you’d like in the comments but do keep it clean and on the issues. Personal attacks won’t make it out of moderation.

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Travel Blog: Day Two in Israel - Peace and politics in Jerusalem

My second day in Israel was also spent in Jerusalem. This day was a little more heavy on briefings, and a little less heavy on the tourism. A few of the briefings were off the record so I can't share the details. They did, however, provide some insights both on Canada's development activities in the West Bank (active around justice) and Gaza (negligible due to inability to work with Hamas), as well as the Israeli government perspective on lawfare and Canada's policy on the Middle East. I can't share specifics, but it will help to shape my later conclusions.

The day begin with a briefing and a tour of Israel's Supreme Court. The contrasts to the Canadian system were very interesting. Their justices are appointed by a panel that includes both government and opposition politicians, current judges, and learned members of the legal community. The politicians are a minority on the panel; some want to change that due to the sweeping power of the court here, while others argue against politicization.

The court heard 12,000 cases last year, a number which I'm sure would put our Supreme Court to shame. There's two reasons for the high number. One, most cases aren't heard by the full court. Most are heard by three-judge panels, although the chief justice can select larger panels of any odd number for more complicated cases.

The second reason for the high number is that, in addition to being the court of final appeal for criminal and civil cases, anyone, including non-citizens, can bring a complaint against the Israeli government to the court and be heard. For example, many cases have been heard by the court, and more are pending, on the controversial security wall Israel has built between it and select Palestinian territories. It has caused much hardship, with many Palestinians cut off from their land and their neighbourhoods by the wall/fence. The court has upheld the security necessity of the wall, but in a number of cases has ordered costly reconstruction and relocation of the wall, or compensation, when it's placement caused a burden where the hardship imposed outweighed the security necessity, and it was felt the line was drawn more for ease of constriction than security reasons.

Next we headed over to East Jerusalem, the Arab-dominated half of the city that could become part of a Palestinian state in any peace settlement. We went to the American Colony Hotel, a really cool, Hemmingway-esque facility, to meet Khaled Abu Aker. He's an Israeli-Arab and the director of Amin Blogs. It's a blog site for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza that's designed to allow the citizens to bypass the Palestinian media and publish stories the press won't.

It's not about blogging for blogging's sake, said Aker. It's about blogging for change, and using citizen journalism as a tool for social change. And he said it's about more than just ending the occupation. Bloggers criticize the Palestinian Authority over internal management and mismanagement, issues, things that impact daily life.

While blogging is still in its infancy here compared to other Arab countries, Aker said it has the potential to be an important tool for social change, and instilling democratic values, although it's still to early to gauge the influence. But he noted 51 per cent of Palestinians have regular Web access. And they can't rely on the local media, which he said routinely self-censor. There may be reason for hope though, as he said on a recent press freedom day event at his offices in Ramallah, Palestinian Authority PM Salam Fayad stopped by unexpectedly to lend his support for press freedom.

On larger peace issues, Aker said the Swiss model just won't work here. He said Israel is becoming an Apartheid State because it has no choice, and it's only getting harder with the difficulty in making peace and balancing security issues. He said he'd like to see Israel take more responsibility for the Palestinians as it did pre-Oslo, rather than ceding it to the PA. He said most Palestinians don't reasonably expect a full right of return, and most don't want to return to live in any Israeli-state anyways. What he said they want is a symbolic right of return to be negotiated and implemented.

Lastly, Aker took a different view on Obama that the Israeli-Jews we've spoken to, saying he feels Obama is prepared to listen to both sides, marking a return to the Clinton-style from the less balanced policy of the Bush years.

Later in the day, we visited the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, and met with Labour Party MK Einat Wilf. Although traditionally a left-wing party, Labour is part of Likhud's governing coalition and Wilf's leader, former Prime Minister Ehud Bark, serves in the coalition as defence minister.

Wilf delivered a fairly frank and wide-reaching message, in-line with what we'd heard earlier from Halevi about the decline of the Israeli left, and the blurring of left/right distinctions in the country. Even for a member of a governing coalition, she delivered what from a Labour MK was a pretty strident defence of the Likhud and Netanyahu line, more strident than probably necessary by coalition loyalty alone.

She began by talking about U.S. policy under Barrack Obama, a popular topic over here, and Wilf made clear that she feels the Obama administration has made a strategic policy change to out the settlements issue front and centre. It's a change she said has nothing to do with any alleged insult of Joe Biden, and one that requires an Israeli policy response. She added the current government had frozen settlements where others had allowed expansion, but that this government got no international credit for that because it's not sees as being as committed to peace as its predecessors.

Moving on, Wilf said over the last decade she, like many Israelis, has grown disillusioned wit the peace process. The Israeli people want two states, but they wonder if some/many Palestinians will ever accept the existence of a Jewish state. She employed a break-up, scorned lover metaphor. The Israeli people were deeply hurt, she said, and aren't keen to jump into a new relationship. So if someone (like the U.S.) wants to push them into one, it had better work out because if it ends badly, they could close off their hearts for a very long time.

Iran is a popular topic over here; Israel views a potentially nuclear and stridently anti-Jewish Iran, arming terrorist groups like Hezbollah, as a real and serious threat. Wolf again here took issue with U.S. policy, saying Obama favours process and talk over actual results.

Finally, we asked a few questions on the Israeli left, and why, by and large, the left around the world tends to have strong issues with Israeli policy. Wolf made some pretty colourful comments here. She said the Israeli left is actually staunchly Zionist, while the global left is anti—Zionist. She went on to add two-thirds of the countries in the world make less sense than Israel, but no one questions them. She added the Israeli left feels isolated from the rest of the world. She said we're not just fighting about real estate here, it's about societal values, and to those who say it should just be an Arab-dominated country, she said as a woman she wouldn't want to live in any of the Arab countries in the neighbiourhood, and she wondered why the global left isn't talking about that issue (women's rights under Arab governments.)

We ended the day over dinner with Sara Miller, the editor of Haaretz.com, the Web site of the country's largest English-language Web site. Much of the conversation went of on a bit of a tangent about Web site monetization and search engine optimization I won't recount – suffice to say they seem a little ahead of Canadian media. When we got around to politics, Miller probably provided one of the first defences of the Israeli-left we'd heard on the trip at that point. As Steve recounted, she said the left has actually proven influential in that now all of the country, even the right-wing Likhud, now accept the inevitability and necessity of a two-state solution. She was also more optimistic on the prospects for peace than others, although not any time soon.

That's it for today. Tomorrow, a primer on Israeli politics, a security tour of Jerusalem, and dinner with a right-wing Israeli-Arab journalist.

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A plea for sanity that will be unanswered

I’m not under the impression that anything I write or don’t write will make one iota of difference to anything happening in the Middle East, and none of us really have enough information about what's happening on the ground to be making definitive judgments.

I am getting increasingly frustrated at some of the garbage I’ve been reading of late on the Liblogs aggregate though. I’m staunchly in favour of people’s right to free speech, even if what they say makes them look stupid, and luckily that same right to free speech also allows me to speak-up and say so when people are saying stuff that is pretty dammed stupid. And there’s been a lot of that the last few days.

Stupid like implying that, because the Liberal Party thinks Israel has the right to defend itself from constant rocket and terror attacks, that the Liberal Party is directly responsible for the death of 40 people at a school in Gaza. That’s absolutely ridiculous. I’m not sure what this blogger is trying to accomplish or contribute here, and I echo Red Tory’s sentiments. If you really think “Liberals” are “kill”ing people, maybe you’re supporting the wrong party. Actually, strike the maybe. You are.

So many on both sides of this issue see it as either/or, which is why I’m generally loathe to engage in it. And they automatically dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their bias. Take this attack on the school yesterday that killed 40. According to reports Hamas militants were using the school as a base/shield for attacks. It seems to be a common Hamas tactic. But I read many blog commentaries that either fail to mention the reports Hamas was using the school as a shield while they condemned the Israeli attack, or dismissed it outright as lies and propaganda. Why, because a terrorist organization like Hamas would never do such a terrible thing? Please, that’s stupid. You must know better than that. They’re terrorists!

This blogger even went as far as to claim Israel is deliberately assassinating innocent civilians, a completely asinine contention that, even if we accepted it, makes absolutely no sense. Why would they do that, exactly? For kicks? Because they’re evil? What military purpose would it serve?

Let me be clear. I think the death of those 40 people is tragic. I think Israel should do everything it can to avoid civilian casualties, and I think Hamas should as well, and that includes stopping using civilians as human shields. But if Israeli forces are taking fire from Hamas terrorists shielding themselves with civilians, what exactly are they supposed to do? There’s no easy answers there. And to just blame one side in that tragic situation, and for that side to NOT be the people using civilians as human shields, is just dammed ridiculous.

As I’ve said before, I’m loathe to wade into the Middle East mess. But I’m also loathe to be associated with some of the anti-Israel bigotry that has been appearing on the Liblogs aggregate. And while people are free to expose their stupidity, I’m going to speak up to make clear I don’t support it.

Oh, and not for nothing, but maybe Sid Ryan should spend more time trying to get York TAs back to work and less time making an ass of himself. This kind of bullshit is why labour unions, which have and do play important roles in our economy, get a bad name.

Finally, while I’m talking about things that piss me off, let’s talk about Ezra Levant. Ezra is playing a patently transparent game that is extremely repugnant and obvious.

First, he’s cherry-picking examples of objectionable comments by some Liberal bloggers to impugn all Liberal bloggers, and by association the Liberal Party as a whole. That’s idiotic. A diversity of opinion has been expressed on the aggregate, from pro and anti either side to a more middle of the road view. And if we’re going to tar all members of an aggregate, and the political party they support, with the views of a few of its members, then as members of the Blogging Tories, Ezra, Stephen Taylor and co. have some explaining to do, as does Stephen Harper, because they have some serious moonbats in their midst.

Secondly though, what Ezra is trying to do here is use the Gaza crisis as an opportunity to score political points for the Conservative Party, in whose war room he worked last election, by convincing Jewish voters the Liberal Party is anti-Israel because of the comments of a few rogue bloggers. The fact Ezra is trying to use this war, and these deaths, to score political points is utterly repugnant and shameful.

Finally, once again, here is my view on Gaza and the larger Middle East quagmire. And while there are hardliners on either side, I think the majority are, like me, somewhere in between, and those that seek to polarize things aren’t helping anything at all.

I have no easy answers on the Middle East. Obviously, no one does. I believe in a few things. I believe in a free, safe and independent Jewish state of Israel, and I believe that country has a right to defend itself. I also believe in a free, safe and independent Palestinian state that also recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and the rights of both its peoples to live in peace.

On the current Gaza conflict, I believe Israel has the right to defend itself, and that includes from the ongoing and regular rocket attacks, and it has a right to take actions to try to stop those attacks if local authorities are unable or unwilling to do so.

That said, it’s unclear to me how the current military campaign, which now includes a ground attack, will accomplish either Israel’s short-term or long-term objectives. Indeed, it may well only serve to breed new hatred against Israel amongst the Palestinian people, creating yet another cycle of violence and attacks. Their options, however, are limited. And stuck in the middle are the ordinary people that just want to live their lives.

I'll add that this war in Gaza needs to come to an end now. Caught in the middle of Hamas and Israel are the innocent civilians, and no matter who you blame, they're paying too high a price. I support an immediate cease fire, but a cease fire that returns to the status quo, a barricaded people in Gaza and rockets raining on Israel, is unacceptable. I don't think Israel can disarm Hamas by military means. But it's incumbent on the international community to give them another option. End the war, get aid to the civilians, disarm Hamas. How? That's for people smarter than I.

With that, I am off to have lunch and await the vitriolic slings and arrows from all sides, some of which will even make it out of moderation.

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Stepping into the minefield

I’ve learned a few things over my three years as a blogger: funny is good, rum and coke + live blogging=great blogging insight, and don’t feed the trolls. If there’s another rule I’ve adhered to, it’s that you don’t touch the Middle East with a 10-foot poll. You can’t win, and there’s little appetite for nuance on either side.

I’m going to break that rule though, which has served me well, as it seems that with the current Gaza conflict things are getting out of hand in Liberal blogdom, with some unfortunate things being said in the heat of emotion that I think many will come to regret later.

I have no easy answers on the Middle East. Obviously, no one does. I believe in a few things. I believe in a free, safe and independent Jewish state of Israel, and I believe that country has a right to defend itself. I also believe in a free, safe and independent Palestinian state that also recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and the rights of both its peoples to live in peace.

On the current Gaza conflict, I believe Israel has the right to defend itself, and that includes from the ongoing and regular rocket attacks, and it has a right to take actions to try to stop those attacks if local authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. That said, it’s unclear to me how the current military campaign, which now includes a ground attack, will accomplish either Israel’s short-term or long-term objectives. Indeed, it may well only serve to breed new hatred against Israel amongst the Palestinian people, creating yet another cycle of violence and attacks. Their options, however, are limited. And stuck in the middle are the ordinary people that just want to live their lives.

The only real answer is a lasting peace, but that would require compromise on both sides as well as a willingness and readiness to make peace, pre-conditions that are not yet in place.

Until that mythical day I hope my blogging colleagues on either side will be measured in their rhetoric and hyperbole, think carefully before they click Post, and consider that little here is as black and white as we’d hope.

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