Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Butch Cassidy is talking to the Sundance Kid:  “Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”

The line comes in one of many memorable moments in the 1967 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman (at left) as Butch, and Robert Redford as the Kid.

We lovers of classic films like to believe we remember most of the good lines from movies we admire, but it was not until a recent episode of NCIS* that this line returned to my consciousness.

In a flashback NCIS episode “Baltimore”, of the 2010-2011 season, Jethro Gibbs (Mark Harmon) has just enlisted a new agent for his NCIS team. 

The new guy is Tony DiNozzo (Michael Weatherly), who recognizes the line Jethro tosses him as he walks down the hall, shouting over his shoulder,  “Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.”  Tony shouts back, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid!” Tony knows his movies.

Tony proves to be a worthy addition to Jethro’s team, indicating that Gibbs is a man with a vision. Jethro is shown here, not with Tony, but with another member of the team, Ziva (Cote De Pablo).

We desperately need a few good men and women with vision in Washington this week when President Obama, AIPAC and both houses of the US Congress, prepare to receive a foreign visitor to American soil.

The visitor is Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who has demonstrated again and again, that he lacks vision. Israeli leaders have governed their state since 1948 on the short term vision of paranoia, military power and fear, not a good recipe for a newcomer to bring to a neighborhood.

Focusing only on the immediate moment, Bibi was unprepared for what would happen once the Arab Spring reached Egypt. Israel’s old best buddy, Hosni Muburak, was gone from power. The new Egyptian military rulers put together an Hamas-Fatah unity meeting last week which forced Bibi to look up and discover that he no longer feels the love from his southern border.

Gone is the love he felt when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was a reliable one half of the oppression of Gaza.

Bibi never did feel the love from his northern border. All he, and his predessors, knew from that direction was a military standoff with Syria and ongoing military clashes with Lebanon.

A leader with vision would have known what was coming on the first Nakba Day after the the Arab uprising began. On Sunday, May 15, reality crashed into Israel’s northern borders.

Palestinian refugees descended on Israel”s borders with Syria and Lebanon. The Arab Spring had spread from North Africa into Syria, Lebanon, and briefly, into Israel. No doubt, it will be back in a yet uncertain form. 

Israel reacted to the incursion in the only way it knows how to react, with force, killing at least 15 Arab “protestors” who climbed border fences and threw stones at the Israeli soldiers. Tear gas or air attacks are usually the weapons of choice used by the IDF against civilians. Not this time. 

Reporting on these incursions, the US media, which covers the region from an Israeli perspective, demonstrated its own short-term vision by also not anticipating how Arabs along Israel’s northern border would respond to Nakba Day, 2011.

The US media might better have served its readers, viewers and hearers, and reported on what a long term vision would have told them: The days are over, thanks to the Arab uprising, when the US government could maintain the fiction that the US is an honest broker in the region.

That term lost its meaning in Bill Clinton’s first term in office.  The Arab Spring is an event which erupted from the people, armed only with cell phones linked to Facebook. These are largely young people who no longer expect any help from the democracies of the world.

This is how the Huffington Post reported the story from Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights:

Mobilized by calls on Facebook, thousands of Arab protesters marched on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza on Sunday in an unprecedented wave of demonstrations, sparking clashes that left at least 15 people dead in an annual Palestinian mourning ritual marking the anniversary of Israel’s birth.

In a surprising turn of events, hundreds of Palestinians and supporters poured across the Syrian frontier and staged riots, drawing Israeli accusations that Damascus, and its ally Iran, orchestrated the unrest to shift attention from an uprising back home. It was a rare incursion from the usually tightly controlled Syrian side and could upset the delicate balance between the two longtime foes.

Huffington Post is displaying its own Israeli bias when it refers to Nakba Day as “an annual Palestinian mourning ritual marking the anniversary of Israel’s birth.”

That same bias is also evident later in the report:

Palestinians were marking the “nakba,” or “catastrophe” – the term they use to describe their defeat and displacement in the war that followed Israel’s founding on May 15, 1948. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted. Today, the surviving refugees and their descendants number several million people.

Nakba is not a day of “mourning”; it is a day when not only Palestinians, but supporters of Palestine, both Arab and non-Arab, remember the “catastrophe” when, to be more precise, not “hundreds of thousands”, but more than 750 thousand Palestinians were driven out of their villages and cities.

And they were not “uprooted”. Thousands were killed; the rest were driven away from land Israel had identified for its future state.

It was this new state which obliterated more than 475 villages from which the Palestinians were forced to leave. Nakba is not a “mourning ritual” for these events; it remembers them with an intensity that anyone with a long term vision should have anticipated.

Contrary to the Huffington Post version, the surviving refugees and their descendants number not “several million people”, but 4.7 million people, and growing, some of whom were killed on Nakba Day, 2011, by soldiers of the Israeli Defense Force.

JTC, “the global news service of the Jewish people”, described the Nakba Day events as a “breach” of Israel’s northern border”.

Uriel Heilman writing from Tel Aviv, touches on the familiar theme of hyperbolic paranoia in describing that breach.

If a single phrase could capture the sentiment that motivated thousands of Arabs to try to cross Israel’s borders on Sunday to “retake Palestine” from the Jews, it would be this: Yes, we can.

That can-do attitude had toppled regimes in Egypt and Tunisia, and threatened dictators from Tripoli to Damascus. So why not apply it toward Israel? If Arab leaders weren’t willing to send their armies to storm the Zionist state, the Arab protesters figured, well then, they’d just do it themselves.

Heilman stretches matters a bit when she sees the border protests as the start of a campaign to “storm the Zionist state”. More likely, and seen from a less paranoid vision, the Nakba protests have more to do with demanding justice and freedom than with conquest.

Prime Minister Netanyahu put the paranoid icing on the cake with this warning from the world’s fourth (at least) most powerful military force:

Let nobody be mistaken, we are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty.

JTA does not bother to ask, “which borders and which sovereignty”?  The news service for the Jewish people is content to describe the border crossings as just possibly the start of a third Palestinian intifada, “at least on Facebook”.

Uriel Heilman writes further that “For Israel, the breach of the Syria-Israel border came as something of a surprise. It marked the first major violence along the border since the May 1974 disengagement agreement that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War.”

And there you have it. Both a government, and a news service locked into a short term vision, were surprised when Israel felt the latest wave of the Arab spring. To paraphrase Ray Bradbury, “If they didn’t see the steeple on the court house, what else has Israel missed?”

Which raises yet another question: Whatever possessed President Barack Obama to agree to “keynote” this years’s AIPAC conference?

JTA, again, has the story:

President Obama’s decision to keynote the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference, rumored for days, was confirmed Monday by Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, to reporters traveling with the president aboard Air Force One. AIPAC confirmed the news.

The Associated Press quoted Carney as saying that Obama will not outline policy in his speech but instead will focus on the “deep bond” with Israel.

The AIPAC Conference runs from Sunday, May 22 through May 24.  On Thursday, May 19, Obama will deliver a “policy speech on Arab democracy”.  The next day, Friday, May 20, Obama will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

A policy speech on “Arab democracy” delivered just before the President pays homage to AIPAC and sits down for a chat with Bibi?  Is there no one in the White House who might have suggested to the President that the Arab Spring is all about democracy, and Israel will have nothing to do with a genuine Palestinian or Arab democracy?

This is a president we thought would bring a vision to the White House.  Now it turns out he is wearing bifocals that see no further than the Zionist script handed him by his AIPAC hosts.

Or perhaps not, cries the eternal optimist in each of us.  The next ten days are crucial to Arab democracy. Washington will be Zionist Central for this period. Does President Obama believe he can “send a message” to the Arab people by discussing their future in such a Zionist setting?

We can only wait and see what our leader has to say. Wait, see, and, of course, pray.

* NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which conducts criminal investigations involving the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.

The picture at top of Gibbs and Ziva are from CBS television. The photo above of the demonstrators on Israel’s Northern border is by Hamad Almakt from Flash 90.

by James M. Wall

In the summer of 2009, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad (right) released a lengthy document which described plans and a program to build a future Palestinian state alongside Israel, with borders along the 1967 Green Line.

He predicted that such a state would be ready for statehood within two years.  The London Guardian greeted the announcement with the optimistic observation and with a nod to the movie, Field of Dreams, ”If you build it, the state will come.”

This coming September, 2011, the two years are up. Over the past two years, Fayyad and the Palestinian Administration, have put into place a working structure for statehood.

Right on schedule, the recognition of a Palestinian state will be voted on at the United Nations in September.

And something that was not anticipated in the Fayyad plan, there is a strong possibility that a unified Hamas-Fatah political structure will be in place.

In a Wall Writings posting, dated September 2, 2009, I reported on a Washington Post column written by former President Jimmy Carter, in which Carter discussed the Fayyad program and described the support it had received from Javier Solana, secretary general of the Council of the European Union.

Carter and the Elders, a group of distinguished world leaders, met with Fayyad in 2009 after he announced his two year plan. After that meeting, Carter wrote:

. . . Solana proposes that the United Nations recognize the pre-1967 border between Israel and Palestine, and deal with the fate of Palestinian refugees and how Jerusalem would be shared.

Palestine would become a full U.N. member and enjoy diplomatic relations with other nations, many of which would be eager to respond. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad described to us [the Elders traveling with Carter] his unilateral plan for Palestine to become an independent state.

Fayyad’s program was published under the optimistic title, “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State”. It was described in the Huffington Post by Palestinian Journalist Daoud Kuttub, as ‘brilliant'”.

Kuttub explained the reason for his optimism:

Palestinians have finally started to act in a different way. Instead of cursing the occupation, the new strategy is aimed at building up the desired Palestinian state.

The idea is to force the Israelis to the negotiating table rather than beg them to come. The way to do that is to work for a state as if there were negotiations. This idea has been brilliantly developed by the Palestinian prime minister.

Salam Fayyad proposal for the de facto creation of a Palestinian state within two years is a brilliant idea that is hard to ignore or oppose it.

Fayyad’s blueprint includes plans to end the Palestinian economy’s dependence on Israel, unify the legal system and downsize the government. The idea, submitted by him after weeks of meetings with his ministers and staff, also involves building infrastructure, harnessing natural energy sources and water, and improving housing, education and agriculture.

After the Brussels meeting in April, 2011, Riyad Mansour, PA ambassador to the UN, told a UN committee that it is time to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and to “allow for full membership of a Palestinian  state in the UN.”  Press TV has a clip:

http://youtu.be/XYF7Gbf7rMY

Someone who has the ability and the experience to connect the dots in developments in the Middle East is veteran American diplomat, Ambassador Chas Freeman, who delivered a major lecture on May 4, at the Palestine Center, in Washington.

Freeman was this years’s Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecturer, part of a lecture series named in honor of Dr. Sharabi, who help found the Palestine Center as well as the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

Freeman described Sharabi as a “great figure in the study of Arab politics and society” and “an indefatigable advocate of Palestinian rights. “Sharabi was born in Jaffa, Palestine. He received his undergraduate degree from American University and an MA from the University of Chicago. He died, at the age of 78 in Beirut.

Sharabi was an outspoken supporter of Palestinians, but was also known for his willingness to speak critically of Palestinian leaders when they failed to exercise strong leadership.

Ambassador Freeman fits nicely in the Sharabi tradition. After many years of service as an American diplomat, Freeman was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as chairman of Obama’s National Intelligence Council.

Freeman, and Obama, ran into intense pressure from hardline Israeli Zionist supporters, led by New York Senator Chuck Schumer. The pressure was so intense that President Obama agreed that Freeman should withdraw from the nomination. Freeman did not go quietly. For background and more on the political infighting around this episode, click here to read my piece in the AMEU publication, The Link.

Zionists seem never to learn.  They savor small victories only to discover that they have set themselves up for future defeats.  Ben Smith covered Freeman’s departure from the National Intelligence Council for Politico:

The attacks on Freeman, in the end, hinged primarily on the question of Israel, something the Democratic senators who helped break the back of the nomination Tuesday made clear.

“His statements against Israel were way over the top and severely out of step with the administration,” said Senator Chuck Schumer in a statement. “I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him, and I am glad they did the right thing.”

Hours before the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, expressed his “regret” at Freeman’s withdrawal, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) told Blair he was concerned about “statements that [Freeman]’s made that appear either to be inclined to lean against Israel or too much in favor of China.”

In particular, Freeman has described “Israeli violence against Palestinians” as a key barrier to Mideast peace, and referred to violence in Tibet last year – widely seen in the United States as a revolt against Chinese occupation – as a “race riot.”

Freeman left no doubt where he places blame in a written statement after his withdrawal.

“The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East”.

In his 2011 Sharabi lecture, delivered two years after his Zionist-inspired departure from the Obama administration, Chas Freeman spoke of the role played by Zionist forces in American politics and governance in the US. I would like to believe Hisham B. Sharabi was applauding throughout. Below are a few excerpts from the lecture.

Freeman’s lecture (38 minutes) deserves to be read and/or heard, in full, which you may do by clicking here:

As the former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Legal Department has argued:

“If you do something for long enough the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries . . . . International law progresses through violations.”

A colleague of his has extended this notion by pointing out that:

“The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.”

These references to Iraq and Afghanistan underscore the extent to which the United States, once the principal champion of a rule-bound international order, has followed Israel in replacing legal principles with expediency as the central regulator of its interaction with foreign peoples. The expediently amoral doctrine of preemptive war is such an Israeli transplant in the American neo-conservative psyche.

Neither it nor other deliberate assaults on the rule of law have been met with concerted resistance from Palestinians, Arabs, or anyone else, including the American Bar Association. The steady displacement of traditional American values – indeed, the core doctrines of western civilization – with ideas designed to free the state of inconvenient moral constraints has debased the honor and prestige of our country as well as Israel. . . . .

Given the protracted failure of U.S. diplomacy in the Israel-Palestine arena, Palestinians and others may be forgiven for believing that it is time to entrust peacemaking to other parties who are more objective, less politically constrained and less emotionally biased. Others in Europe and elsewhere have taken alarmed note of the adverse effects of the unending conflict on Israel, on the Palestinians, on Arab politics, on regional stability, on inter-religious relations, on the moral standing of global Jewry and Islam, on Arab and Islamic relations with the West, on international law and organizations and on world order.

Media outside the United States have taken progressively more balanced and nuanced note of the human suffering in the Holy Land. Europeans and others now evidence a considerably greater sense of urgency about these problems than Americans have done. The notion that only Americans have the capacity to manage conflict resolution in the Middle East will no longer withstand scrutiny. One recalls the role of Norway in crafting the Oslo Accords. Perhaps, now that the United States has struck out, it’s someone else’s turn at bat.

Ambassador Freeman then points the way to what could, should and must happen in 2011.

A new game is clearly beginning. A self-confident, religiously tolerant but secular Turkey has emerged as a major influence on regional affairs and as an inspiration to its democrats.

Arab diplomacy is being invigorated by the aftereffects of the revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere. There is mounting pressure on all Arab governments to accord greater deference to popular opinion in both domestic and foreign policy. The Middle East will no longer allow itself to be the diplomatic playground of great powers outside it.

There will, however, be new opportunities for interested outside parties to forge diplomatic partnerships with those in the region.

Opportunities, like, a unified Fatah-Hamas government which has become a significant development in this emerging “new game”.

Nazareth-based Jonathan Cook describes this dramatic new move in CounterPunch (May 5).

Israeli officials have expressed alarm at a succession of moves by the interim Egyptian government that they fear signal an impending crisis in relations with Cairo.

The widening rift was underscored yesterday when leaders of the rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation pact in the Egyptian capital. Egypt’s secret role in brokering the agreement last week caught both Israel and the United States by surprise.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the deal “a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism”.

Several other developments have added to Israeli concerns about its relations with Egypt, including signs that Cairo hopes to renew ties with Iran and renegotiate a long-standing contract to supply Israel with natural gas.

More worrying still to Israeli officials are reported plans by Egyptian authorities to open the Rafah crossing into Gaza, closed for the past four years as part of a Western-backed blockade of the enclave designed to weaken Hamas, the ruling Islamist group there.

Egypt is working out details to permanently open the border, an Egyptian foreign ministry official told the Reuters news agency on Sunday. The blockade would effectively come to an end as a result.

Finally, there is the matter of the worldwide response to the death of Osama bin Laden, a response that is sadly lacking in wisdom and insight into the human heart. 

Veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery (right) understands this. He addressed the response in his weekly Gush Shalom column:

“Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth, / Lest the Lord see [it], and it displease him, and he turn away his wrath from him.”.

This is one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible (Proverbs 24:17-18), and indeed in the Hebrew language. It is beautiful in other languages , too, though no translation comes close to the beauty of the original.

Of course, it is natural to be glad when one’s enemy is defeated, and the thirst for revenge is a human trait. But gloating – schadenfreude – is something different altogether. An ugly thing.

Ancient Hebrew legend has it that God got very angry when the Children of Israel rejoiced as their Egyptian pursuers drowned in the Red Sea. “My creatures are drowning in the sea,” God admonished them, “And you are singing?”

These thoughts crossed my mind when I saw the TV shots of jubilant crowds of young Americans shouting and dancing in the street. Natural, but unseemly.

The contorted faces and the aggressive body language were no different from those of crowds in Sudan or Somalia. The ugly sides of human nature seem to be the same everywhere.

by James M. Wall

Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul (right) has stern words of advice for Bibi Netanyahu. He told Israel’s Prime Minister that the Arab revolution in the Middle East is aimed directly at the state of Israel. The advice came in a New York Times column by President Gul:

The wave of uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa is of historic significance equal to that of the revolutions of 1848 and 1989 in Europe. The peoples of the region, without exception, revolted not only in the name of universal values but also to regain their long-suppressed national pride and dignity.

But whether these uprisings lead to democracy and peace or to tyranny and conflict will depend on forging a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and a broader Israeli-Arab peace.

The plight of the Palestinians has been a root cause of unrest and conflict in the region and is being used as a pretext for extremism in other corners of the world. Israel, more than any other country, will need to adapt to the new political climate in the region.

But it need not fear; the emergence of a democratic neighborhood around Israel is the ultimate assurance of the country’s security.

A Muslim president of a predominantly Muslim nation, Gul also has advice for the President of the United States:

Moreover, it is my firm conviction that the United States has a long-overdue responsibility to side with international law and fairness when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The international community wants the United States to act as an impartial and effective mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, just as it did a decade ago. Securing a lasting peace in the Middle East is the greatest favor Washington can do for Israel.

Since Israel’s Occupation is the “root cause” of unrest in the region, Turkey wants Israel to act now to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians.  And he expects the US to be a helpful partner in dealing with that “root cause” of unrest. 

No historical parallel is ever exact. But parallels from history are very much in Gul’s thinking.

The 1848 revolution in Europe, which began with the French Revolution, spread across Europe, taking different forms and moving at different speeds. In 1989, the uprisings in Europe began with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The current Arab uprising began in Tunisia and Egypt.  Now it has erupted in Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. As was the case in both 1848 and 1989, the 2011 uprising is having, and will continue to have, mixed results and follow different paths.

The Syrian military, for example, was reported on Saturday to have killed more than 120 protestors, bringing harsh criticism from the US amid increased suppression by Syian authorities. In contrast, the president of Yemen agreed, under certain conditions, to step down following weeks of street protests.  A New York Times story from Cairo reported:

Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, agreed on Saturday to leave power after 32 years of autocratic rule, according to a top Yemeni official, but only if the opposition agrees to a list of conditions, including that he and his family be granted immunity.

Opposition leaders said they were prepared to accept most of the terms of the deal, which both they and a Yemeni official said would establish a coalition government with members of the opposition and ruling party. The president would turn over authority to the vice president.

Bruce Riedel, a former longtime CIA officer and now a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, wrote an analysis on the end of the police state in the Middle East, for The Daily Beast:

The revolutions that are sweeping across the Arab world this spring have many different causes and each will have its own outcome, but they all have one thing in common: Arabs are demanding the end of the police-state system that has misruled them for over a half century. They want freedom and accountability.

The U.S. was a big stakeholder in the police-state system, known in Arabia as the mukhabarat states (the Arabic word for secret police), but it now needs to help build legitimate accountable governments.

The Palestinian Authority has chosen its own method by which to revolt against the Israeli mukhabarat. The PA administers a people, but not as a state. The method it has chosen is to create a state governmental structure in anticipation of future statehood.

Support for a Palestinian state has swept through the member states in the United Nations General Assembly, the world body which will vote in September on whether to admit Palestine into the UN.

The Obama White House appears to be divided on how the US should proceed to cope with the impending UN vote. The New York Times Helene Cooper describes the internal US divide as “bizarre”.  For three months, she writes, White House officials have discussed the important question: Who should go first with a peace proposal: Bibi or Barack?

Apparently, according to Cooper, the President and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton believe “the time has come for Mr. Obama to make a major address on the region’s turmoil, including the upheaval in the Arab world.”  Obama and Clinton appear to favor an Obama speech that would  “propose a new plan for peace between Israelis and Palestinians”.

That option is “opposed by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East.” Ross is known to be close to AIPAC, and is also close to Bibi Netanyahu, who continues to favor “negotiations” to resolve the future status of a Palestinian state.

Republicans in the US Congress have invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to speak to the combined House and Senate membership during the week of May 22, when the Prime Minister will be in Washington to address the annual gathering of AIPAC.  He has accepted, which has caused consternation in the White House.

In speaking before friendly audiences in both the AIPAC Policy Conference and the US Congress, Netanyahu is expected to adopt a reconciling tone. At the same time, he will no doubt stick to the Israeli hard line position that the only track acceptable to Israel is the one which would resolve Israel’s differences with the Palestinians through “negotiations” between the two parties.

The trouble with the “negotiation” track is that the Palestinians have long known that “to negotiate” with Israel, is futile. The warden does not negotiate with his prisoners, except, possibly, to improve their cuisine.

Ross is supported in endorsing the “negotiations” track by former White House official Aaron David Miller. Now out of the White House and nestled inside the warmth of a Washington NGO, where he can speak more candidly, Miller wrote in the Washington Post:

In almost two decades of working on Arab-Israeli negotiations as a State Department adviser and negotiator, I’ve come up with more than my fair share of dumb ideas. But the notion Palestinians are cooking up, for U.N. action on Palestinian statehood this fall, takes dumb to a new level.

Yet another resolution won’t deliver Palestinians a state or even bring them closer to one. The result will be the opposite of what the Palestinians want: forcing the United States to oppose Palestinians’ efforts, energizing Congress to restrict much-needed assistance to Palestinian institution-building, and probably prompting Israel to do very real (and dumb) things on the ground.

The “who speaks first” debate will be an interesting one to follow. Ross and Miller are staff level operatives but they carry Bibi’s water for him, which means that they also speak for AIPAC.

Meanwhile, while the debate rages over how best to deal with the US favored ally in the Middle East, President Obama announced that he would be sending drones into Libya.  

What is a drone? The picture at right is that of a MQ-1B Predator unmanned aircraft system, called “a drone” for short. The MQ-18 is shown taking off for a training mission at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada.

Drones are sent to targeted areas halfway around the world. They receive their flying instructions from Air Force personnel sitting at computers at Creech.

On Holy Thursday, April 9, 2009, Catholic priest, peace activist, lecturer and author John Dear, and 12 of his colleagues, were arrested for trespassing while praying, on the grounds of Creech Air Force Base in a protest action against the use of drones.

Kathy Kelly, who is from Chicago, is well known as an anti-war protestor for her many years of activism in war zones. She was among the Creech 13.  For more on the work of Father John Dear, click here.

Two years later, on Holy Thursday, April 21, 2011, the 13 were found guilty of trespassing. In a posting he wrote for Truthout,  Dear explains what inspired the group to go to the Nevada base.

My friends and I have tried every legal means possible to stop our government from its terrorist, drone bombing attacks on civilians in Afghanistan, and so we journeyed to the drone headquarters at Creech AFB near Las Vegas on Holy Thursday to kneel in prayer and beg for an end to the bombings. This nonviolent intervention is determined to be criminal – not the regular drone bombing attacks on children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The guilty verdict was handed down as President Obama was authorizing the US Air Force to expand drone attacks into Libya.

How sensitive to civilian casualties has drone warfare been in Pakistan? The New York Times reported on Good Friday:

An American drone attack killed 23 people in North Waziristan on Friday, Pakistani military officials said, a strike against militants that appeared to signify unyielding pressure by the United States on Pakistan’s military amid increasing public and private opposition to such strikes. (emphasis added).

Further down in the story, the Times adds that among those 23 people were women and children.

Why is Obama using drones in Libya “amid increasing public and private opposition to such strikes”?

When President Obama organized the NATO air strikes to help the Libyan rebels, he cited “humanitarian grounds”. He had support from the “humanitarians” in his administration, and in the progressive media, most notably, the highly respected, Middle Eastern scholar Juan Cole.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that in any military action, the goal is to kill “the enemy”. The use of drones guarantees that many of those deaths will be civilians. 

Many Americans do not like the fact that the US is now engaged in three armed conflicts against Arab states. The protestors who were arrested at Creech AFB are part of what should become a growing tide of resentment against President Obama for his failure to take action to alleviate, in President Gul’s words, “the plight of the Palestinians”, which is the “root cause of unrest and conflict in the region”.

Before Prime Minister Netanyahu comes to Washington in May to be cheered by his friends and supporters in AIPAC and in the US Congress, President Obama should say to his Israeli counterpart, “You are running a democratic government. It is time for you to lead that government to recognize the wisdom in President Gul’s call for you to forge ‘a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and a broader Israeli-Arab peace’.”

He should also tell Netanyahu that Israel’s present treatment of the Palestinian people is harmful not only to the Palestinians, but also to Israel and to the US.

Obama should also remind Netanyahu of the closing words of encouragement, warning and admonition, that President Gul delivered to Israel:

It will be almost impossible for Israel to deal with the emerging democratic and demographic currents in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. Turkey, conscious of its own responsibility, stands ready to help.

The picture at top is of Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul. It is from Getty Images. The picture of Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is from the web site, Top News In Law. The picture of the drone is by Senior Airman Larry E. Reid Jr., US Air Force.