Rocket Science

post from TPMCafe on 06 January 2009 07:46:00 AM. © TPMCafe

You'd need a slightly robotic view of human beings to believe this, but let's say Hamas' acts of terror, from suicide bombing to indiscriminate missile attacks, are the pure expression of a closed circle of jihadists, whose fanatic, intractable views are more or less conveyed by the organization's charter: that the "land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [trust] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day," that Islam must "obliterate Israel," and "all initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors."

Think of Hamas' message as code--as the Darwinist digerati say, a "meme"--that spreads and replicates itself under given conditions. Suppose that no peace process can survive its triumph, and that not only Israelis, but West Bank leaders and professionals, moderate pro-Western Arab regimes, Americans and Europeans--all advocates of civil society--have an interest in seeing it defeated. How to fight it? Is Israel's attack in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, a kind of awful therapy?

Let's leave aside for the moment whether Israeli settlement organizations express a corresponding fanaticism, or whether Israeli forces have ever committed acts that might qualify as terror, killing Palestinians indiscriminately (or accepting random "collateral" deaths), or whether people who were once terrorists, or actively tolerated terrorism, from Yasser Arafat to Yitzhak Shamir, might eventually be transformed into responsible political figures. No, let's default to an extreme Machiavellianism, subordinate being loved to being feared, and entertain the idea that Israel should obliterate Hamas before Hamas obliterates Israel. Would we not first ask under what conditions the Hamas meme seems to have spread?

TWENTY YEARS AGO, during the first intifada, Hamas was a miniscule Islamist organization, preaching a vague jihadism and just beginning to engage in suicide bombing and kidnapping. The vast majority of Palestinians were insisting on national representation by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had begun angling for a two-state solution. Palestinians in the territories militantly resisted the occupation, but tens of thousands still worked on Israeli construction sites, and their mass demonstrations were not, on the whole, lethal: Most young men and women threw rocks and the odd Molotov cocktail at heavily armed soldiers and tanks. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, afraid that a show of weakness would encourage resistance, adopted the "iron fist" policy of repressing the uprising, ordering his troops to "break the bones" of demonstrators--an order some soldiers took literally. Hamas stayed underground. As the Intifada wound-down, Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups flourished.

The Oslo process put Hamas into nearly total eclipse. Under Israeli pressure, Arafat's Palestine Authority imprisoned Hamas activists. Israel, for its part, began to engage in targeted assassination of Hamas leaders, especially in Gaza. Yet Hamas was never wiped out because, throughout the Oslo process, neither side had any idea where peacemaking was leading. Jewish settlements never stopped; in fact, the number of settlers doubled, and annexationist activities in Jerusalem redoubled. The schools of the PA continued to glorify armed struggle.

In Gaza, where the Israel Defense Forces' defense of Jewish settlements from periodic attacks trumped everything else, there were often border closings, and per capita income of Gazans plunged to about half of what it had been in the early 1990s. Fatah leaders of the PA enriched themselves, often claiming monopolies through their "ministries" of food and building commodities. Finally, in 2000, a new intifada erupted.

Ariel Sharon tried another iron fist, which he called Operation Defensive Shield. He belittled the newly elected Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, deeming him too weak to govern, while more and more Palestinians saw Fatah as Quislings. By the winter of 2006--after Sharon was forced to evacuate Gaza, much as Rabin had been forced to recognize the PLO--Hamas was strong enough to eke out a victory in PA elections. Hamas leaders even became culture heroes to Arab citizens of Israel who were increasingly frustrated by the exclusionary way so many Israelis defined the Jewish state.

THIS HISTORICAL SKETCH is seriously incomplete, but some patterns are clear. The Hamas meme spread especially when Israelis attacked in Palestinian towns to "reestablish deterrence." The idea that the disproportionate power of Israel's occupation was ever doubted, or that Hamas acts of "martyrdom" came because its youth were simply not afraid enough of Jews, rests on the kind of primitive psychology you get from combat generals, neocons, and battered children.

Actually, Israel's expansive power has always been a part of the Hamas message: The Hamas charter continues, "After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates." And how could Israelis seriously expect ordinary Palestinians in their towns to turn off any Hamas insurgency just because they were getting battered?

Hamas ideology spread, moreover, when Israel insisted that the occupied territory of the West Bank was actually "disputed," or tried to dissociate its evacuation from Gaza from what it was doing in the West Bank. Hamas influence spread when circles upon circles of grieving youth fought out of rage and survivors' guilt. It spread when settlers seemed able to push Palestinians who would otherwise support a two-state solution into calls for steadfastness; or when jihadists were themselves able to push Israelis, who are increasingly skeptical of the settlements, into calls for national solidarity in the face of "existential threats."

Hamas ideology spread, especially, when Israel sealed the Gaza border in a vain effort to starve the place of Hamas influence. It spread when Palestinian economic life seemed futile, or inevitably corrupt--when a fight to the finish seemed the only chance at a meaningful life. Why would Gazans feel beholden to Hamas' tunnels if they had an open border, relief from grinding poverty, and business opportunities with West Bank partners?

MAKE NO MISTAKE, even under international law, Israel has the right to respond to missiles on Sderot and other southern towns. And if Israeli forces could wipe out Hamas in a great, terrible blow, killing only people set to kill Israelis, one could hardly blame the IDF for defending Israeli lives. A ground attack has just begun, but nobody in his right mind thinks this will end as a surgical strike, which will excise the whole of the Hamas leadership, and not utterly destroy many neighborhoods; already, much of Gaza city is without power; to kill Hamas extremist Nizar Rayyan, a bomb killed his four wives and nine of his children. It is most likely that Cast Lead will end in a monitored cease-fire, and that Israel will be satisfied to have made what one Sderot resident called "a statement." Unfortunately, this statement helps Hamas, or its successor, make its case--not only in Gaza, but across the West Bank, and among Israeli Arabs as well.

The point is, the rise of Hamas is a cautionary tale about trying to do quickly with military force what needs to be done over a generation with reciprocity. All along, Israel might have made a strong statement of a different kind. It might have endorsed the obvious features a two-state solution, like the ones worked out with President Clinton just before he left office in 2001. It might have helped strengthen the Palestinians' immunity to Hamas ideology, creating a stronger civil society, new businesses, new schools, new Palestinian cooperation with international peace-keepers and investors.

Israel might have meanwhile announced, say, that it can know the precise location from which each Hamas missile is launched, and that it would bomb that location exactly ten minutes after each launch, giving surrounding citizens a chance to flee--and creating a mounting incentive for civilians to resist Hamas cadres using their homes as cover. One can think of any number of creative ideas that project strength, decency, and hope. This is not, well, rocket science.

(This post appeared first in The Daily Beast.)

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Tuesday Open Thread

post from My Left Wing - Front Page on 06 January 2009 07:41:11 AM. © My Left Wing - Front Page

"We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin."

Alan Watts- Born- January 6, 1915

video details and more

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Docudharma Times Tuesday January 6

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 06 January 2009 07:30:00 AM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Important News From The AP:The Color Of Sasha Obama's Backpack. Now Back To Our RegularlyScheduled Programing Tuesday's Headlines: Obama Pitches Stimulus Plan Police in Israel grapple with a mafia gang war Two strikes, and another family lay[...]

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Live-Tweeting the 111th's First Day

post from Kansas Jackass on 06 January 2009 07:27:00 AM. © Kansas Jackass

We're live-tweeting the 111th Congress's opening right now- for those who are interested, you can[...]

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Iran's Postmodern Beast in Gaza (Robert D.
Kaplan/The Atlantic Online)

post from memeorandum on 06 January 2009 07:10:03 AM. © memeorandum

Robert D. Kaplan / The Atlantic Online:
Iran's Postmodern Beast in Gaza — Israel has just embarked on a land invasion of the Gaza Strip after a week of aerial bombing. Gaza is bordered by Egypt, and was under Egyptian military control from 1949 through 1967. And yet in a startling rebuke to geography and recent history …

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Senate turns Burris away

post from AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth on 06 January 2009 06:57:00 AM. © AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth

This is great. But it would be nice had they turned Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and every other crook away as well. At some point, Democrats need to show the same testicular fortitude in standing up against Republicans as they do fellow Democrats. More from the Washington Post:

Placing himself at the center of a nationally televised spectacle, Burris arrived at the Capitol in a steady rain with an entourage of aides and lawyers, followed by dozens of journalists, including some broadcasting the procession into the Capitol and up to the third floor on hand-held digital cameras and cell phones....

Burris was met at the Capitol entrance by Terry Gainer, the Senate sergeant at arms, who escorted him through the regular visitors' entrance and up to the third floor of the Capitol to Erickson's office -- in a regular elevator bank, not the one reserved for senators only.

When Burris was rejected, he marched out of the Capitol and across the street, with a media army in tow, where he held a press conference next to the Russell Senate Office Building.

Just go away.

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Palin In-Law Drug Warrant inadvertantly lost
among Voter slips

post from Maximum Db on 06 January 2009 06:13:00 AM. © Maximum Db

It's all Updates: up on the Tundra these days.Unbelievably (not!) the AP reports that The union[...]

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Zahar Claims Victory, Calls to Kill Jewish
Children (Maayana Miskin/Arutz Sheva)

Maayana Miskin / Arutz Sheva:
Zahar Claims Victory, Calls to Kill Jewish Children — (IsraelNN.com) Hamas spokesman Mahmoud Az-Zahar claimed victory for Hamas on Monday, saying Hamas had succeeded in “destroying Israel's sense of security” with its rocket attacks. Zahar made his proclamation in video footage sent from a secret hideout …

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The tables turn: Those zany Republicans are
behaving like Democrats

post from BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash on 06 January 2009 06:07:48 AM. © BuzzFlash.org - Progressive News and Commentary with an Attitude | Fight Ignorance: Read BuzzFlash

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

There was a time when such a thing was unthinkable, but now it can be said: There is, simply, no more rewarding, enjoyable experience than following the madcap adventures of the modern Republican Party.

Who, as they say, woulda ever thunk it? But it's true. Those once-efficient chieftains of sober Rotarianism and world domination have with blinding velocity transmogrified -- or evolved, depending on how one looks at it -- into a gaggle of baffoonish stumblebums.

They're now saying and doing things of the most unRepublican sort; they are, to put it succinctly, acting like Democrats. Here, for instance, is a representative quote from a Republi Bookmark/Search this post with: buzzflash | delicious | digg digg | yahoo yahoo | technorati Technorati Tags: P.M. Carpenter republicans democrats palin obama

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How Bush Broke Government

Good accounting of the disaster of the Bush administration at the American Prospect:

"You know how there are all these checks and balances in the government?" says Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. "Under the Bush administration, all that was turned on its head. When you look at what they did, it's like reading the opposite of the Federalist Papers."

And a nice outline of what Bush did over at the VA while waving the American flag:

Department of Veterans Affairs:
Secretary Jim Nicholson embarked on a campaign in 2005 to reduce the number of claims made by veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, announcing a plan to review the cases in which veterans receive full disability benefits for the disorder. He said he wanted to root out 'fraud.' Shortly thereafter, a New Mexico veteran who was undergoing review committed suicide, partly over concern about the review, according to veterans' advocates. On Nov. 10, 2005, Nicholson discontinued the claim review.
...
Department of Veterans Affairs:
When Anthony Principi requested an increase for the agency's fiscal year 2005 budget, President George W. Bush balked. He recommended that the VA receive a budget of $65.3 billion, $1.2 billion less than what Principi wanted. Principi, who had served as an acting secretary of the VA in the first Bush administration, knows how things work in Washington. Nevertheless, he spoke out during a House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on Feb. 4, 2004. By December, Principi was out of a job. His departure marked a turning point for the VA. Many of the programs that he had championed, such as a mental-health task force and efforts to improve claims processing for veterans who have been injured in combat, lost the strong backing in the agency and were allowed to languish. ...
Department of Veterans Affairs:
Bush's initiative allowed a set of institutional changes at Veterans Affairs that have had a significant impact on the constitutional separation of church and state. In the past, faith-based groups supported by federal grants had to agree that they would not use religion while helping veterans. Under the new regulations,
individuals supported by federal funds do not have to make this promise. Meanwhile, at the VA Health Care Network in upstate New York, 'spirituality assessments' of patients are conducted by a chaplain within 24 hours of a patient's arrival, according to a lawsuit that was filed by members of a Wisconsin-based organization, Freedom from Religion Foundation. A VA hospital in Big Spring, Virginia, also conducts a basic spiritual assessment, with such questions as 'When talking to people, how often do you mention spiritual or religious things?' and 'How often do you pray?' And at the Loma Linda VA Medical Center in California, a questionnaire states one of the goals of the assessment: 'Maintain Optimal Spiritual Health.' In some facilities, these spiritual assessments are documented in a patient's medical progress report.

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