Is Israel a settler colony like South Africa?: A guest column

REALISTIC DOVE

Candid, constructive commentary on Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, America’s Middle East policies and their domestic political context.

Is Israel a settler colony like South Africa?: A guest column

This blog is fortunate to get regular contributions from Tom Mitchell, a scholar who has carefully analysed the similarities and differences between Israel, South Africa and Northern Ireland. He sent me a summary of a longer article. I thought I would publish it, as people on the far left often claim that there is little difference between South Africa under apartheid and contemporary Israel. And people on the right deny that there is any similarity. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. In addition. peaceniks like me often point to the reconciliation achieved in Northern Ireland as a sign of hope and a shining example for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tom offers some insights into the similarities and differences.

Tom is the author of Native vs. Settler: Ethnic Conflict in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, published in 2000 by Greenwood Press. He then took some of the unused material from that book and wrote a second one, Indispensable Traitors: Liberal Parties in Settler Conflicts, also published by Greenwood two years later. Below is the summary of an article published in the Journal of Conflict Studies in the Winter 2004 issue. It is scholarly and not polemical, which means some of you will have no use for it, but I hope the rest if you dive in and follow his analysis.

ISRAELI POLITICS AS SETTLER POLITICS

Conventional wisdom in much of Western academia is that Israel is a settler colony, and that this means that it is another apartheid state a/la South Africa. Below is analysis showing why I believe that the first half of this equation is true, but the second half is false. The strategies employed to bring peace in South Africa and Northern Ireland were very different, so it is important to determine which one Israel more closely resembles. This determines why we should go with mediation and not sanctions.

Israel’s politics is characterized by the following six main features:

1. Numerous political parties are in the Knesset, which in turn results in weak coalition governments.
2. There are powerful religious parties with no equivalent in the West and comparable to Islamic parties in the Third World (Indonesia, Turkey).
3. Israeli politics is populated with many former senior military officers, creating a class of Arab-fighter politicians comparable to native-fighter politicians in the U.S. and S. Africa.
4. In the past, there were two important parties (Herut, Ahdut Ha’Avoda) that were paramilitary parties. Their descendants are the two main Israeli parties today.
5. The Arab question or native question has been the main issue in Israeli politics, dividing parties of the left and right since before independence.
6. In Israel, Jews and Arabs have a different legal status under formal law constituting a legal distinction between settlers and natives.

These six features can be divided into two groups: the first two, which are not features of settler societies, and the last four, which are features of settler societies. The combination of the last four features makes Israeli politics a variant of settler politics—the political features that are typical of independent settler colonies such as the United States, South Africa, etc. that are also democracies.

When looking for settler societies to compare Israel with, I looked for societies that were

• a) democratic;
  
• b) involved in prolonged conflict with the native population; and
  
• c) either independent or at least autonomous.
  

This last requirement eliminated nearly all of the dependent settler colonies that were run by local representatives of the European settler power rather than by the local settlers.

I found three societies that could usefully be compared with Israel: Northern Ireland, antebellum America, and South Africa. Each of these three societies is useful for comparing with a different aspect of Israel.

Northern Ireland exhibits all of the above six features except for number 3 (because the UK is responsible for its security). The United States exhibited traits 3,5, and 6, and briefly had a multiparty system between 1828 and 1860 but no coalition governments. South Africa exhibited traits 3, 5, and 6 and had a genuine multiparty system from 1910 to 1950 and had two stable two-party coalition governments in the interwar period. Thus, if one looks at it, Israel has more of these settler traits than any of the three societies being compared with it. Northern Ireland lacks a native-fighter politician class, while both the U.S. and S. Africa lack paramilitary parties.

Northern Ireland can most usefully be compared with Israel when examining the peace process with the Palestinians and interparty and intraparty dynamics. Because it is only a province of the UK, it has no foreign policy and so cannot be used for comparison of foreign policy with Israel. But because the Arab-fighter politician class is such an important feature in Israeli politics, comparisons of Israel with Northern Ireland need to supplemented with either the U.S. or S. Africa.

South Africa can be divided into three main periods:

• the period of the Boer republics from 1860-1900;
  
• the Union of South Africa from 1910-1950; and
  
• the Republic of South Africa from 1961-1994.
  

African-fighter politicians were most important in the South African Republic (ZAR or Transvaal), particularly from 1881 to 1900. But the ZAR had a weak two-party system rather than a multiparty system, had no standing army, and had less than 10,000 men voting in its presidential elections during this period. So it is clearly not suitable for comparison with Israel.

Military politicians were also important in the Union of South Africa, which did have a three- to four-party system, a standing army, and a much larger population. There were no military conflicts with the native population of South Africa, however, during this period. Politics was cantered on ethnic disputes between Afrikaners and English-speakers rather than on the native question. During the Republic of South Africa under apartheid, there was only one elected African-fighter politician, General Magnus Malan. This indicates that South Africa is not a particularly useful supplementary case for looking at internal politics in Israel.

The U.S. had a weak three-party system from 1828 to 1848, with the third party being mainly represented at the local and state levels rather than the federal level, present only in the North, and combining with one or both of the two main parties to form new parties. With its presidential system. it completely lacked coalition governments. But the U.S. did have a party, the Whigs, that was dependent on the charisma of former generals to head its tickets. And it did carry out transfer of the native population, the Indians of the East to the West. This latter subject comes up off and on in Israeli politics since the 1940s. The Whigs can usefully be compared to Labor, the Democrats to the Likud, and the third parties (Antimasons, Liberty Party, Free Soil Party) to Mapam and Meretz. The Know Nothings or American Party of 1854-57 can also be compared to Tommy Lapid’s Shinui Party both as a nativist party and with its sudden success and sudden collapse. Beyond that party comparisons are not available.

South Africa is useful for comparing with Israel’s regional defense policy. South Africa and Israel both were/are peripheral countries in conflict with the core of their region. In the Middle East the core is Arab states. In sub-Saharan Africa the core is made up of independent African states and the white settler colonies were the periphery. South Africa and Israel had similar strategies of supporting minority peoples in the Arab countries and black neighbors such as the Kurds in Iraq and Christians in Lebanon and Sudan, and the Ndebele in Zimbabwe and various minority peoples in Namibia. Both countries also engaged in numerous cross-border raids and invasions. In this regard it is useful to compare Israeli policy in Lebanon and South African policy in Angola.

Between 1967 and the mid-1990s Israel was dependent on migrant Palestinian labor from the territories in the same way that white South Africa was dependent on black labor from the homelands (bantustans). But this migrant Palestinian labor is much reduced today as a result of Israeli recruitment of East Asian and East European workers in reaction to the Islamist terrorist campaign of the 1990s and the Al-Aksa Intifada.

Likud plans for a Palestinian state under Sharon could also fairly be compared to South Africa’s bantustan system. Any plans for leaving a Palestinian state made up of several non-contiguous parts can be compared to most of the South African homelands in particular the KwaZulu and Bophutatswana homelands. With the above in my opinion, the usefulness of the South African comparison has exhausted itself.

The purpose of making these comparisons is not to delegitimize Israel. It should be borne in mind that the Israeli Jews are not only settlers but also returned natives, that is the original population of the country that returned with the support of the international community. So in its origins Israel is a unique settler society. But as a result of the ongoing native-settler conflict with the Palestinians, Israel developed features typical of other settler societies.

The comparisons are not meant to replace traditional methods of political analysis of Israeli politics and policy, but to augment them. When radio telescopes, X-ray telescopes and infrared telescopes were developed, astronomers did not stop using optical telescopes but merely used these new instruments to give a fuller picture of distant galaxies and our own galaxy. I make these comparisons in the same spirit. If Dan will indulge me, I will explore the lessons of Northern Ireland and the U.S. for Israel in two further pieces.

By Dan Fleshler
March 31, 2008

Israel, human rights and the silence of [most] American Jews

REALISTIC DOVE

Candid, constructive commentary on Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, America’s Middle East policies and their domestic political context.

Israel, human rights and the silence of [most] American Jews

Those who empathize with the plight of Palestinians under occupation are often puzzled by American Jews’ silence in the face of Palestinian suffering, especially when the suffering results from Israeli actions that much of the world deems to be human rights abuses. A whole industry exists to monitor and refute human rights NGOs whenever they set their signs on Israel. Worse, even mentioning Palestinian misfortunes is suspect in some quarters, as Barack Obama has learned.

But it is not just the pro-Israel right wingers and centrists who either defend or mutely accept the way Israelis treat their neighbours. It is also my camp, the liberals who crave compromise. Some of us marched against the Vietnam war and even against the Iraq war. Some of us give money to help victims in Darfur and shelters for battered women here at home. If we are within the Jewish communal tent, not enough of us can bring ourselves to say very much out loud about the battering of an entire people.

I include myself in this category, guilty as charged, looking back on my own reactions to sundry allegations of Israel’s human rights violations. I think it is important for American Jews who support Israel to stop suppressing their moral instincts, to stop ignoring what is best within themselves, and to start finding a language, a vocabulary to acknowledge the horrors of occupation. But before providing a prescription, we need the diagnosis.

“It blows my mind that my Jewish brothers and sisters, who are with me on Darfur, who were with me on South Africa, can’t bend themselves to deal with injustice to the Palestinians,” said a Protestant minister whom I interviewed for my book. “I just never understood it.”

One simple answer is that American Jews who agree with the minister on most issues view the realities of the region through an entirely different prism, which reflects Israelis’ sense of permanent vulnerability and their fierce determination not to be vulnerable.

American Jews who see themselves as ethical and caring can usually find reasonable explanations and justifications for Israeli activities that the world abhors. The core argument is the same one used in Israel: what appears to be cruel and unjust behaviour is usually an unfortunate, unavoidable consequence of The Situation that Israelis and Arabs are mired in. Plus, we have a rooting interest in information and arguments that prop up our craving to believe in the Israelis, while others have a rooting interest in finding ways to blame them. The raw truth is usually the victim.

Object to the missiles that repeatedly killed non-combatants in Gaza or Lebanon, and you will be assured that Israel has done everything possible to avoid collateral damage, Israel has been much more careful about shedding innocent blood than its adversaries, Israel is perfectly within its rights under the Geneva Convention to go after enemy combatants that hide among civilians. Besides, you will be told, we can’t be armchair moralists judging Israelis by western, humanistic standards; they live in a tough neighbourhood where there is no respect for the weak…Look at how the Lebanese army shelled Palestinian refugee camps unmercifully a few months ago in their fight with militant jihadists..I’ve made those arguments.

Object to anything that al-Jazeera decides to transform into yet another symbol of Zionist bestiality, and eventually you are likely to hear evidence that the truth has been distorted by Palestinian propagandists and their media allies. When Israel assaulted the West Bank village of Jenin during the second Intifadeh,

• at first the international media alleged that hundreds of innocent Palestinians had been massacred and
  
• that bulldozers had crushed houses and
• destroyed property for no discernible reason.

Later, media and some human rights groups changed their story; they said there had been no massacre, and most of the Palestinian casualties were armed combatants. The truth was probably somewhere in between, but you could almost hear the sounds of Israel’s friends around the world, including me, breathing sighs of relief.

Another reason for our silence is that the world unfairly singles out Israel for its abuses, real or imagined, and ignores even worse behaviour by, say, the armies of central Africa or Sri Lanka or the security services of every Arab country. To liberals with a connection to Israel, the intense, remarkably single-minded focus on the Jewish state by the United Nations Human Rights Council and a large swath of the blogosphere is so suspicious, and so offensive, that we feel reluctant to add to the clamour of its avowed enemies. We certainly don’t want to give rhetorical fodder to those who blithely call for tearing down the “apartheid wall” –not changing the route of the security barrier, but obliterating the whole thing– and refuse to acknowledge that Israelis need protection from those who want to blow themselves up in shopping malls and discos.

But sometimes, what we read about or see on our T.V. screens makes it impossible to counter allegations of indefensible Israeli behaviour. When that happens, something besides logic and evidence kicks in, we are left with little except a panicky unwillingness to believe Israelis are behaving as badly as people claim. So, we look the other way if we come across titbits like the following, from a B’Tselem press release this past December:

A survey conducted by the Israeli military and published by leading Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, found that a quarter of soldiers serving at checkpoints in the West Bank perpetrated or witnessed abuse of Palestinians. In response, B’Tselem, said that the numbers are shocking, but not surprising. The organization commends the military for initiating the survey, but states that physical and verbal abuse of Palestinians by soldiers, particularly at checkpoints, has long become routine. In spite of official condemnations, the military does not do enough to ensure accountability and to deter soldiers from engaging in such behaviour.

According to B’Tselem, most soldiers who harm Palestinians are never held accountable. Law enforcement authorities place numerous obstacles on Palestinians who try to complain against security forces personnel and only a small minority of complaints result in charges against those responsible for abuse.

"There must be a reasonable explanation,” we try to tell ourselves. “There must be something terribly wrong with the way this story is being told, even if it is the Israeli army itself that is telling it.”

We try to tell ourselves, “there must be a reasonable explanation for the extra-judicial, execution-style killings of four Palestinians sitting in a car in Bethlehem,” as reported today by Richard Silverstein in Tikun Olam. “Ok, it’s suspicious, but war is hell.”

“There must have been a very good, sound military reason for bombing that power plant in Gaza and inflicting darkness for half a day, for months, on a civilian population,” we try to tell ourselves, even though reasonable people called it a clear violation of international law. “And even if it is a war crime,” we tell ourselves, “why say anything? Israel has enough problems, enough enemies…”

After awhile, though, the evidence accumulates and becomes too troubling to be discarded or wished away. The anguished testimony of the Israeli soldiers in “Breaking the Silence” makes a mockery of willfull denial. “Breaking the Silence” is an explicitly non-political organization that just lets those who have served in the territories speak for themselves about the level of brutality and wanton cruelty. They are not refuseniks. Most of them return to the IDF every year for reserve duty. They want their own society to wake up to what Israeli soldiers are being asked to do, and, sadly, what some of them eagerly volunteer to do. Read what they have to say on the group’s web site.

When the pro-Israel left in this country confronts what Palestinians are subjected to, the standard response is that there is no such thing as a benign occupation. Unless and until there is a political solution, we assert, morally grounded Israeli soldiers and border police will be forced into circumstances where it is difficult and sometimes impossible to be humane, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to be good. I use that argument, all the time, and it is true…up to a point.

But lately, I am tired of relying upon it as the exclusive answer. The problem is not merely that the brutality and humiliation inflicted on Palestinians is an inevitable consequence of occupation; the problem is that is just plain WRONG. Why can’t we say that? What happened to our moral compass?

Yes, those who focus only on Israeli behaviour without putting it into context, without appreciating that steps must be taken to protect Israel’s borders, have also lost their moral compass. Yes, the Palestinians have in many ways brought this situation upon themselves [e.g, there used to be a vocal peace camp in Israel; it was shattered by the second Palestinian Intifadeh. Now, the prospect of Hamas rockets being hurled at Tel Aviv from the West Bank has made it even harder to put that doveish, Humpty Dumpty back together again]. But once that context is affirmed, the reasons for decrying the brutality and humiliation become compelling and the rationalizations for saying nothing become very hollow.

Rabbis for Human Rights is an Israeli organization that does not hesitate to call some Israeli policies morally reprehensible and contrary to Torah values. A few American rabbis, like Arthur Waskow, are associated with it. But thus far, its message has been unheard or barely noticed, let alone echoed, in the organized American Jewish community.

The unwillingness of American Jews to say, simply, “This is wrong!” has many consequences, in addition to the way it contributes to the corrosion of souls and hearts. What should also be of concern to the mainstream Jewish community is that the silence contributes to the alienation of Jewish college students and young adults from anything remotely connected to Israel. That does not matter to the anti-Zionists who believe the whole enterprise of Israel is illegitimate, but it should matter to anyone who wants to help fix what is broken in Israel.

Yes, speaking out forcefully against Israeli policies and behaviours will add fuel to the fiery rhetoric of those who don’t want the Jewish state to exist. That is undeniable; it is a problem and I have never come up with a solution to it. But a greater risk is that an entire generation of Diaspora Jews will want nothing more to do with Israel. There are a host of Israeli organizations trying their best to monitor and change unjust Israeli policies; instead of connecting our young people with those groups and showing there is a way to be pro-Israel and true to their ideals and values, much of the community either derides or shuns those groups. That is why the message from Israelis like Rabbi David Froman, one of the more articulate activists in Rabbis for Human Rights, is decidedly Zionist. After deriding those in the UK and elsewhere who want to boycott Israeli academics, he tells us:

And yet, we know in our hearts of hearts that while such boycotts are not justified on the universal plain of comparisons, there are more than a few elements of truth in what these hypocrites claim. For one segment of the population over whom we have responsibility, we have abrogated any semblance of democracy. It is especially painful that some in South Africa have joined the fray of those who boycott us, because of that country’s moral authority - given how blacks suffered years of unspeakable oppression under white minority rule.

But how would one describe certain things we are doing in the West Bank that have virtually no security value - checkpoints between Palestinian villages and within Palestinians cities; separate roads for Palestinians; thousands of Palestinians arrested under administrative detention; confiscation of Palestinian property for illegal Jewish settlements; a twisted route for Israel’s security barrier that separates Palestinians from their lands and divides villages in half; administrative home demolitions; covert protection for Jewish settlers who harass Palestinians tending their agricultural fields; preventing Israelis who marry Palestinians from living in Israel; banning Palestinians from swimming in natural springs along the Dead Sea? And yet, despite the above, Israel’s present situation is still not politically analogous to South Africa’s history of discrimination; and so, we confidently argue that “apartheid” is not an appropriate term to apply to what we are doing in the West Bank. But what term would one choose to define a privileged protectionism for a few thousand Jews in the West Bank over a separate and unequal existence for over two million Palestinians?

…We have shamed ourselves as a Jewish state that sought to educate the world that we would not be a nation like other nations and that the Zionist enterprise would fashion a society based on a prophetic vision of social justice. Instead, we have created a moral morass - and, if it takes the hypocritical self-righteousness of some foreign pseudo-intellectuals and pig-headed unionists to open our eyes and alter this unacceptable reality, then something positive will ultimately be served.

Something positive will be served if Americans who want both Israel and Palestine to thrive, side by side, stop keeping their eyes closed and their mouths shut.

Topics: Palestinians, Israel, Zionism, American Jews, Far left, Israeli occupation, Gaza Strip
By Dan Fleshler | March 28, 2008

What lessons can be learned from Northern Ireland?

REALISTIC DOVE


Candid, constructive commentary on Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, America’s Middle East policies and their domestic political context.

What lessons can be learned from Northern Ireland?

Below is the second column by Tom Mitchell. I have always told myself that the main “lesson” that can be learned from Northern Ireland is that violent, longstanding and seemingly intractable ethnic or religious conflicts eventually can be solved. It has been a source of hope. I am not sure if Tom agrees with that premise. Hope so. I also hope Tom won’t mind that I made a few parenthetical comments:

NORTHERN IRELAND’S LESSONS FOR THE MIDEAST

Introduction
Having previously demonstrated that Northern Ireland is the case closest to Israel, I will briefly look at the main lessons of the peace process from Northern Ireland and their application to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Lessons
First, it was the centrist parties that started the process.

In Northern Ireland there were deep divisions on both the nationalist Catholic and unionist Protestant sides. The nationalists had two main political parties, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Fein. The SDLP opposed the armed struggle conducted by Sinn Fein’s armed wing, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The unionists were traditionally split into two main political parties, the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the hardline Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

During the peace process, the centrist Protestant UUP did its negotiating exclusively with the moderate Catholic nationalist SDLP, while pointedly ignoring Sinn Fein. Only the [Irish and British] governments negotiated with the terrorist parties, because the governments were the ones responsible for the issues that concerned those parties. [DF: So, is one lesson that the situation in Israel-Palestine might be helped if the U.S. negotiated with Hamas?]

Second, there were preconditions that participants to the negotiations had to meet. All participants had to swear-off violence and had to agree to decommission any illegal weapons they might have. These conditions were known as the Mitchell Principles, after Senator George Mitchell who came up with them and served as the chair of the talks. [DF: The very same man who came up with the “Mitchell Plan” to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Guess one out of two ain’t bad]

Third, it was the joint Anglo-Irish dual mediation that kept the talks going and was responsible for finally successfully implementing the April 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Two British and three Irish governments worked closely together. In both countries the negotiations and NIPP had bipartisan support from the main political parties. British prime ministers spent up to 40% of their weekly time on the Northern Ireland Peace Process (NIPP). It had top priority even during the start of the Iraq war..

This process worked because the two governments were less emotionally invested in the conflict than were their respective clients whose views they represented in formulating the framework for the process. Periodically they would issue new documents when needed to serve as parameters for the process. Outside governments like Washington, Helsinki, and Ottowa also contributed to the NIPP at the invitation of the two governments. Of these the largest contribution by far was by Washington.

Fourth, the NIPP dragged on for so long because the British government was unwilling to back up its side after the Republican Movement (Sinn Fein/IRA) failed to disarm in the allotted time period. London was mainly interested in avoiding a renewal of IRA bombing of London and other British cities and so was afraid to confront and pressure Sinn Fein. This also undermined the SDLP as more nationalists voted for Sinn Fein as they saw that its strategy was paying off.

Fifth, the NIPP worked because the UUP was willing to ignore violence including major bombings by dissident republican organizations and still keep negotiating. UUP leader David Trimble decided that an agreement was in the unionist interest. The Omagh bombing in August 1998, the worst in the history of the conflict, also served to end public support for the armed struggle and bring the two sides together.

Sixth, the UUP under Trimble was willing to negotiate before the Republicans had completed their journey from violence to democracy. It took the IRA 31 years from its founding in 1970 to its first act of decommissioning in October 2001 to make that journey. It took another four years to complete that journey. It is probably necessary to engage a terrorist organization/liberation movement before it has completed the journey to give it the incentive to do so. [DF: This may well be the most important lesson of all].

Seventh, the UUP paid a big price and the SDLP a slightly lesser price when the peace process failed between 2001 and 2005. The UUP will probably never again become the leading voice in unionism. If it does, it will take decades. The SDLP can only be saved by merging it with a party from the Republic.



Application to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Unfortunately, there is no real Palestinian equivalent of the SDLP. Fatah is the equivalent of the IRA. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are the equivalent of the dissident republicans. Labour is the equivalent of the UUP and the Likud is of the DUP. The equivalent of Dublin would be the European Union. Instead of calling for Washington to be more balanced—which goes against both historical and political reality—its pro-Israel bias should be balanced by bringing in the Europeans. It is doubtful that Labour, having already paid a heavy price for the failure of the Oslo process, will want to back a new peace process if the results are doubtful going into it. Barak’s hesitation is perfectly understandable.

Only two American presidents have devoted the same time and effort to the Mideast Peace Process that the British and Irish prime ministers devoted to the NIPP. These were Carter from 1977 to 1979 and Clinton during the last six months of 2000. Clinton devoted his attention after it was already too late and time was too short. Much of the fault for this is with the parties: the Palestinians failed to act sufficiently to curb terrorism and the Netanyahu government was unwilling to carry out Israeli obligations under the process. To be successful American support for the peace process will have to again become a bipartisan American effort as it was in the 1970s. With a devoted Washington-Brussels dual mediation effort the Mideast Peace Process stands a slim chance of success; without it there is no chance for success.

Gov't Likely to Retry Muslim Charity

By DAVID KOENIG

23 Oct 2007

DALLAS (AP) — Prosecutors will likely retry the former leaders of a Muslim charity, as well as the organization itself, after the government's biggest terror-financing case since Sept. 11 ended in a mistrial.

Not one of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was convicted Monday, and many acquittals were thrown out after three jurors took the rare step of disputing the verdict.

Juror William Neal told The Associated Press that the panel found little evidence against three of the defendants and was evenly split on charges against Shukri Abu Baker and former Holy Land chairman Ghassan Elashi, who were seen as the principal leaders of the charity.

"I thought they were not guilty across the board,"

said Neal, a 33-year-old art director from Dallas. The case

"was strung together with macaroni noodles. There was so little evidence."

Some jurors were dead-set for convictions even before they began deliberating, Neal said.

"They brought up stuff that wasn't even in the case," he said. "They brought up 9-11."

The jury heard two months of testimony on charges that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development funnelled more than $12 million in aid to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Such aid was illegal after January 1995 because President Clinton branded Hamas a terrorist group.

After 19 days of deliberations, and a bewildering final day in court Monday, jurors returned no convictions against any of the five former leaders of Holy Land, the largest Muslim charity in the country when it was shut down in December 2001.

Former Holy Land chairman Mohammed El-Mezain was acquitted on all but one charge. The judge declared a mistrial on the remaining El-Mezain charge and all counts against the other defendants and the defunct charity itself.

Prosecutor James Jacks said the government would probably try the case again.

"This is a stunning setback for the government," said a former U.S. attorney, Matthew Orwig. "There is absolutely nothing positive in that verdict today for the government."

During the trial, prosecutors introduced bank records showing Holy Land sent money to groups in Gaza and the West Bank.

• A lawyer for the Israeli domestic security agency Shin Bet, who testified under a false name, said those groups were controlled by Hamas, which has carried out suicide bombings in Israel.

Prosecutors also offered thousands of pages of documents, many of them translated from Arabic, and hours of videotape that showed Holy Land leaders consorting with Hamas figures. One showed defendant Mufid Abdulqader pretending to kill an Israeli in a skit.

Jurors finally indicated that they had reached verdicts last Thursday. But their decisions were sealed until Monday because federal District Judge A. Joe Fish was out of town.

As Fish read the results, it appeared that jurors had acquitted Abdulqader on all charges, El-Mezain and Abdulrahman Odeh on most charges, and failed to reach decisions on any counts involving Baker, Elashi or Holy Land itself.

But even that partial result was precarious. When the judge polled each juror whether he or she agreed with the verdicts — normally a formality — things turned chaotic, as three jurors disavowed the vote.

Fish sent the jury back to resolve the differences, but after about an hour, they said they could not continue, and the judge declared a mistrial.

Interest in the case ran all the way to the White House. President Bush personally announced the seizure of Holy Land's assets in December 2001, calling the action

"another step in the war on terrorism."

• The mistrial followed two other high-profile terror-financing trials in Chicago and Florida that also ended without convictions on the major counts.

Abdulrahman Odeh is lifted by supporters in front of the federal court in Dallas, Texas, Monday, Oct. 22, 2007. after a mistrial was declared in the case against five former leaders of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

'Israel gives US unreliable intel'

Sep 5, 2007 9:38
'Israel gives US unreliable intel'
By AP AND HERB KEINON
DALLAS

Israeli intelligence about Palestinian groups that a US-based Muslim charity aided was often unreliable, a former senior US diplomat testified at the organization's trial on terrorism-support charges.

Edward Abingdon, who served as US consul-general in Jerusalem during the 1990s, said the Israelis had an

"agenda" and provided "selective information to try to influence US thinking."

Abingdon's testimony Tuesday took dead aim at prosecutors' claims that the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was knowingly funding terrorists instead of providing humanitarian aid.

Holy Land, once the United States' largest Muslim charity, and five of its leaders are charged with funneling millions in illegal aid to Hamas, which the US government considers a terrorist organization.

Prosecutors say Holy Land funded schools and hospitals it knew were run by Hamas. US agents raided Holy Land and shut it down in December 2001.

In six weeks of testimony, the prosecution's key witness was an Israeli government lawyer who was allowed to testify anonymously. He said many of the Palestinian schools and charities to which Holy Land gave money were controlled by Hamas.

Prosecutors presented bank records of transactions with a man who later became a Hamas leader, and secret surveillance including Holy Land officials at a Philadelphia meeting of Hamas supporters in 1993.

Abingdon, whose post essentially made him the US ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, testified that he was privy to daily CIA reports in Jerusalem yet was never told that terrorists controlled the groups that got money from Holy Land.

Abingdon, the first defense witness of the trial, said the US Agency for International Development gave money to some of the same groups. He added that he met many officials of the charities.

The diplomat said he had heard of Holy Land "as a Palestinian-American charity that distributed assistance to needy families in the West Bank and Gaza."

• From 1993 to 1999, Abingdon was consul-general in Jerusalem, and like others he was under orders not to have contact with Hamas.

• Abingdon said the Israelis provided intelligence to the CIA, and defense attorney Nancy Hollander asked him if he found the Israeli information reliable. "No," he answered, and she asked why not.

"I feel the Israelis have an agenda ... they provide selective information to try to influence US thinking," he said.

• Abingdon spent 30 years in the State Department. He resigned in 1999 and spent seven years at a Washington lobbying firm that represented the Palestinian Authority for as much as $750,000 a year. He said he never worked for Hamas.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Barry Jonas questioned Abingdon's objectivity, suggesting that officials in Washington considered him anti-Israeli and close personally to the late Yasser Arafat, who led the Palestinian Authority.

• Both Israeli and American diplomatic officials placed little stock in Abingdon's statement, saying that the intelligence cooperation between the two states was very tight.

The relationship between the national security establishments in Israel and the US is a close and intimate relationship, based on mutual trust, respect and cooperation, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said. Both countries value highly this cooperation which is built upon mutual respect for each side's professionalism and integrity.

A US diplomatic official said that Abingdon expressed his opinion as a private citizen, and that it doesn't reflect the attitude of the US government.

"We have excellent relations with the Israelis,"

he said.

A protestor holds up a sign showing support for the Holy Land Foundation and leaders of the Muslim charity that federal officials say funneled millions of dollars to Hamas.
Photo: AP [file]

The Mother of all Pretexts

The Mother of all Pretexts

13/10/07
Uri Avnery's Column

WHEN I hear mention of the "Clash of Civilizations" I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

To laugh, because it is such a silly notion.

To cry, because it is liable to cause untold disasters.

To cry even more, because our leaders are exploiting this slogan as a pretext for sabotaging any possibility of an Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It is just one more in a long line of pretexts.

WHY WAS the Zionist movement in need of excuses to justify the way it treated the Palestinian people?

At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all in order to set its own conscience at rest.

From early childhood we learned about the pioneers, many of them sons and daughters of well-to-do and well-educated families, who left behind a comfortable life in Europe in order to start a new life in a far-away and - by the standards of the time - primitive country. Here, in a savage climate they were not used to, often hungry and sick, they performed bone-breaking physical labor under a brutal sun.

For that, they needed an absolute belief in the rightness of their cause. Not only did they believe in the need to save the Jews of Europe from persecution and pogroms, but also in the creation of a society so just as never seen before, an egalitarian society that would be a model for the entire world. Leo Tolstoy was no less important for them than Theodor Herzl. The kibbutz and the moshav were symbols of the whole enterprise.

But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited by another people. How to bridge this contradiction between its sublime ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion of the people of the land?

The easiest way was to repress the problem altogether, ignoring its very existence: the land, we told ourselves, was empty, there was no people living here at all. That was the justification that served as a bridge over the moral abyss.

Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist movement was courageous enough to call a spade a spade. Ze'ev Jabotinsky wrote as early as 80 years ago that it was impossible to deceive the Palestinian people (whose existence he recognized) and to buy their consent to the Zionist aspirations. We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently, like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need an "Iron Wall" to protect the Zionist enterprise.

When Jabotinsky was told that his approach was immoral, he replied that the Jews were trying to save themselves from the disaster threatening them in Europe, and, therefore, their morality trumped the morality of the Arabs in Palestine.

Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach. They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with.

Thus started the long quest for justifications - with each pretext supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual fashions in the world.

THE FIRST justification was precisely the one mocked by Jabotinsky: we were actually coming to benefit the Arabs. We shall redeem them from their primitive living conditions, from ignorance and disease. We shall teach them modern methods of agriculture and bring them advanced medicine. Everything - except employment, because we needed every job for the Jews we were bringing here, which we were transforming from ghetto-Jews into a people of workers and tillers of the soil.

When the ungrateful Arabs went on to resist our grand project, in spite of all the benefits we were supposedly bringing them, we found a Marxist justification: It's not the Arabs who oppose us, but only the "effendis". The rich Arabs, the great landowners, are afraid that the glowing example of the egalitarian Hebrew community would attract the exploited Arab proletariat and cause them to rise against their oppressors.

That, too, did not work for long, perhaps because the Arabs saw how the Zionists bought the land from those very same "effendis" and drove out the tenants who had been cultivating it for generations.

The rise of the Nazis in Europe brought masses of Jews to the country. The Arab public saw how the land was being withdrawn from under their feet, and started a rebellion against the British and the Jews in 1936. Why, the Arabs asked, should they pay for the persecution of the Jews by the Europeans? But the Arab Revolt gave us a new justification: the Arabs support the Nazis. And indeed, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, was photographed sitting next to Hitler. Some people "discovered" that the Mufti was the real instigator of the Holocaust. (Years later it was revealed that Hitler had detested the Mufti, who had no influence whatsoever over the Nazis.)

World War II came to an end, to be followed by the 1948 war. Half of the vanquished Palestinian people became refugees. That did not trouble the Zionist conscience, because everybody knew: They ran away of their own free will. Their leaders had called upon them to leave their homes, to return later with the victorious Arab armies. True, no evidence was ever found to support this absurd claim, but it has sufficed to soothe our conscience to this day.

It may be asked: why were the refugees not allowed to come back to their homes once the war was over? Well, it was they who in 1947 rejected the UN partition plan and started the war. If because of this they lost 78% of their country, they have only themselves to blame.

Then came the Cold War. We were, of course, on the side of the "Free World", while the great Arab leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, got his weapons from the Soviet bloc. (True, in the 1948 war the Soviet arms flowed to us, but that's not important.) It was quite clear: No use talking with the Arabs, because they support Communist tyranny.

But the Soviet bloc collapsed. "The terrorist organization called PLO", as Menachem Begin used to call it, recognized Israel and signed the Oslo agreement. A new justification had to be found for our unwillingness to give back the occupied territories to the Palestinian people.

The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the "Clash of Civilizations". And so we found the mother of all pretexts.

THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attacked from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.

Islam is murderous by nature. Actually, "Muslim" and "terrorist" are synonymous. Every Muslim is a terrorist, every terrorist a Muslim.

A sceptic might ask: How did it happen that the wonderful Western culture gave birth to the Inquisition, the pogroms, the burning of witches, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, the ethnic cleansings and other atrocities without number - but that was in the past. Now Western culture is the embodiment of freedom and progress.

Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the American empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes all the opponents of the United States around the world. The Communists delivered the goods - the whole world was divided between Good Guys (the Americans and their supporters) and Bad Guys (the Commies). Everybody who opposed American interests was automatically a Communist - Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Salvador Allende in Chile, Fidel Castro in Cuba, while the masters of Apartheid, the death squads of Augusto Pinochet and the secret police of the Shah of Iran belonged, like us, to the Free World.

When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-Terrorists. Not only Osama bin Laden, but also the Chechnyan freedom fighters, the angry North-African youth of the Paris banlieus, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the insurgents in the Philippines.

Thus the American world view rearranged itself: a good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same.

This way, a huge part of the world, composed of manifold and very different countries, and a great religion, with many different and even opposing tendencies (like Christianity, like Judaism), which has given the world unmatched scientific and cultural treasures, is thrown into one and the same pot.

THIS WORLD VIEW is tailored for us. Indeed, the world of the clashing civilizations is, for us, the best of all possible worlds.

The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a world-wide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean - we are among the good guys of this world.

This is now the line of argument of official Israel: the Palestinians elected Hamas, a murderous Islamic movement. (If it didn't exist, it would have to be invented - and indeed, some people assert it was created from the start by our secret service.) Hamas is terroristic, and so is Hizbullah. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas is not a terrorist himself, but he is weak and Hamas is about to take sole control over all Palestinian territories. So we cannot talk with them. We have no partner. Actually, we cannot possibly have a partner, because we belong to Western Civilization, which Islam wants to eradicate.

IN HIS book "Der Judenstaat", Theodor Herzl, the official Israeli "Prophet of the State", prophesied this development, too.

This is what he wrote in 1896: "For Europe we shall constitute (in Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a vanguard of culture against barbarism."

Herzl was thinking of a metaphoric wall, but in the meantime we have put up a very real one. For many, this is not just a Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the world-wide wall between the West and Islam, the front-line of the Clash of Civilizations. Beyond the wall there are not men, women and children, not a conquered and oppressed Palestinian population, not choked towns and villages like Abu-Dis, a-Ram, Bil'in and Qalqilia. No, beyond the wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of blood-thirsty Muslims, who have only one desire in life: to throw us into the sea, simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization.

With an official position like that - who is there to talk to? What is there to talk about? What is the point of meeting in Annapolis or anywhere else?

And what is left to us to do - to cry or to laugh?

Neocons in Cheney's Office Fund al Qaeda-Tied Groups ... and No One Cares?

Neocons in Cheney's Office Fund al Qaeda-Tied Groups ... and No One Cares?
By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com.
Posted March 17, 2007.

Seymour Hersh's recent report that Iran-Contra veterans working out of Dick Cheney's office are using stolen funds from Iraq to arm al Qaeda-tied groups and foment a larger Sunni-Shia war is a very big deal.

Let me see if I've got this straight.

Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal -- holding positions in the Bush administration -- was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret, and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others -- and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw Reagan administration assistance to the anti-communist Contras.

In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success -- and would have worked far better if the CIA and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the Vice President's office.

Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the Brits), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began.

Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funnelled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

All of this was being done as part of a "sea change" in the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policies aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shiite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Syrian government -- and launching secret operations to undermine, roll back, or destroy all of the above. Despite the fact that the Bush administration is officially at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general Global War on Terror), despite its support for the largely Shiite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officials may be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shiite rift in the region.

Imagine. All this and much more (including news of U.S. military border-crossings into Iran, new preparations that would allow George W. Bush to order a massive air attack on that land with only 24-hours notice, and a brief window this spring when the staggering power of four U.S. aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available to the President in the Persian Gulf) was revealed, often in remarkable detail, just over a week ago in "The Redirection," a Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker. Hersh, the man who first broke the My Lai story in the Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In recent years, from the Abu Ghraib scandal on, he has consistently released explosive news about the plans and acts of the Bush administration.

Imagine, in addition, that Hersh went on Democracy Now!, Fresh Air, Hardball with Chris Matthew, and CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer and actually elaborated on these claims and revelations, some of which, on the face of it, seem like potentially illegal and impeachable offences, if they do indeed reach up to the Vice President or President.

Now imagine the response: Front-page headlines; editorials nationwide calling for answers, Congressional hearings, or even the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into some of the claims; a raft of op-ed page pieces by the nation's leading columnists asking questions, demanding answers, reminding us of the history of Iran-Contra; bold reporters from a recently freed media standing up in White House and Defense Department press briefings to demand more information on Hersh's various charges; calls in Congress for hearings and investigations into why the people's representatives were left so totally out of this loop.

Uh ...

All I can say is: If any of this happened, I haven't been able to discover it. As far as I can tell, no one in the mainstream even blinked on the Iran-Contra angle or the possibility that a vast, secret Middle Eastern operation is being run, possibly illegally and based on stolen funds and Saudi money, out of the Vice President's office. You can certainly find a few pieces on, or reports about, "The Redirection" -- all focused only on the possible build-up to a war with Iran -- and the odd wire-service mention of it; but nothing major, nothing Earth-shaking or eye-popping; not, in fact, a single obvious editorial or op-ed piece in the mainstream; no journalistic questions publicly asked of the administration; no Congressional cries of horror; no calls anywhere for investigations or hearings on any of Hersh's revelations, not even an expression of fear somewhere that we might be seeing Iran-Contra, the sequel, in our own moment.

This, it seems to me, adds up to a remarkable non-response to claims that, if true, should gravely concern Congress, the media, and the nation. Let's grant that Hersh's New Yorker pieces generally arrive unsourced and filled with anonymous officials ("a former senior intelligence official," "a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel"). Nonetheless, Hersh has long mined his sources in the Intelligence Community and the military to striking effect. Undoubtedly, the lack of sourcing makes it harder for other reporters to follow-up, though when it comes to papers like the Washington Post and the New York Times, you would think that they might have Washington sources of their own to query on Hersh's claims. And, of course, editorial pages, columnists, op-ed editors, Congressional representatives, and reporters at administration news briefings don't need to do any footwork at all to raise these subjects. (Consider, for instance, the White House press briefing on April 10, 2006, where a reporter did indeed ask a question based on an earlier Hersh New Yorker piece.) As far as I can tell, there haven't even been denunciations of Hersh's report or suggestions anywhere that it was inaccurate or off-base. Just the equivalent of a giant, collective shrug of the media's rather scrawny shoulders.

Since the response to Hersh's remarkable piece has been so tepid in places where it should count, let me take up just a few of the many issues his report raises.

"Meddling" in Iran

For at least a month now, our press and TV news have been full to the brim with mile-high headlines and top-of-the-news stories recounting (and, more rarely, disputing) Bush administration claims of Iranian "interference" or "meddling" in Iraq (where U.S. military spokesmen regularly refer to the Iraqi insurgents they are fighting as "anti-Iraq forces"). Since Hersh published "Plan B" in the New Yorker in June 2004 in which he claimed that the Israelis were

"running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria,"

he has been on the other side of this story.

In "The Coming Wars" in January of 2005, he first reported that the Bush administration, like the Israelis, had been

"conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since"

the summer of 2004. In April of 2006 in "The Iran Plans," he reported that the Bush administration was eager to put the "nuclear option" on the table in any future air assault on Iranian nuclear facilities (and that some in the Pentagon, fiercely opposed, had at least temporarily thwarted planning for the possible use of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran). He also reported that American combat units were "on the ground" in Iran, marking targets for any future air attack, and quoted an unnamed source as claiming that they were also

"working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast. The troops ëare studying the terrain, and giving away walking-around money to ethnic tribes, and recruiting scouts from local tribes and shepherds,' the consultant said. One goal is to get ëeyes on the ground' ... The broader aim, the consultant said, is to ëencourage ethnic tensions' and undermine the regime."

In "The Redirection," he now claims that, in search of Iranian rollback and possible regime change,

"American military and special-operations teams have escalated their activities in Iran to gather intelligence and, according to a Pentagon consultant on terrorism and the former senior intelligence official, have also crossed the [Iranian] border in pursuit of Iranian operatives from Iraq."

In his Democracy Now! radio interview, he added:

"[W]e have been deeply involved with Azeris and Baluchis and Iranian Kurds in terror activities inside the country ... and, of course, the Israelis have been involved in a lot of that through Kurdistan ... Iran has been having sort of a series of backdoor fights, the Iranian government, because ... they have a significant minority population. Not everybody there is a Persian. If you add up the Azeris and Baluchis and Kurds, you're really 30-some [%], maybe even 40% of the country."

In addition, he reported that

"a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the President, within twenty-four hours," and that its "new assignment"

was to identify not just nuclear facilities and possible regime-change targets, but

"targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq."

Were there nothing else in Hersh's most recent piece, all of this would still have been significant news -- if we didn't happen to live on a one-way imperial planet in which Iranian "interference" in (American) Iraq is an outrage, but secret U.S. operations in, and military plans to devastate, Iran are your basic ho-hum issue. Our mainstream news purveyors don't generally consider the issue of our "interference" in Iran worthy of a great deal of reporting, nor do our pundits consider it a topic worthy of speculation or consideration; nor, in a Congress where leading Democrats have regularly outflanked the Bush administration in hawkish positions on Iran, is this likely to be much of an issue.

You can read abroad about rumoured American operations out of Pakistan and Afghanistan aimed at unsettling Iranian minorities like the Baluchis and about possible operations to create strife among Arab minorities in southern Iran near the Iraqi border -- the Iranians seem to blame the British, whose troops are in southern Iraq, for some of this (a charge vociferously denied by the British embassy in Tehran) -- but it's not a topic of great interest here.

In recent months, in fact, several bombs have gone off in minority regions of Iran. These explosions have been reported here, but you would be hard-pressed to find out what the Iranians had to say about them, and the possibility that any of these might prove part of a U.S. (or Anglo-American) covert campaign to destabilize the Iranian fundamentalist regime basically doesn't concern the news mind here, even though past history says it should. After all, many of our present Middle Eastern problems can be indirectly traced back to the Anglo-American ur-moment in the Middle East, the successful CIA-British-intelligence plot in 1953 to oust Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh (who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry) and install the young Shah in power.

After all, in the 1980s, in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, the CIA (with the eager connivance of the Pakistanis and the Saudis) helped organize, arm, and fund the Islamic extremists who would someday turn on us for terror campaigns on a major scale. As Steve Coll reported in his superb book Ghost Wars, for instance, "Under ISI [Pakistani intelligence] direction, the mujahedin received training and malleable explosives to mount car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill Soviet soldiers and commanders. [CIA Director William] Casey endorsed these despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."

Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Iraq National Accord, an organization run by the CIA's Iraqi exile of choice, Iyad Allawi, evidently planted, under the Agency's direction, car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime. The New York Times reported this on its front page in June 2004 (to no effect whatsoever), when Allawi was the Prime Minister of American-occupied Iraq.

Who knows where the funding, training, and equipment for the bombings in Iran are coming from -- but, at a moment when charges that the Iranians are sending into Iraq advanced IEDs, or the means to produce them, are the rage, it seems a germane subject.

In this country, it's a no-brainer that the Iranians have no right whatsoever to put their people, overtly or covertly, into neighboring Iraq, a country which, back in the 1980s, invaded Iran and fought a bitter eight-year war with it, resulting in perhaps a million casualties; but it's just normal behavior for the Pentagon to have traveled halfway across the planet to dominate the Iraqi military, garrison Iraq with a string of vast permanent bases, build the largest embassy on the planet in Baghdad's Green Zone, and send special-operations teams (and undoubtedly CIA teams as well) across the Iranian border, or to insert them in Iran to do "reconnaissance" or even to foment unrest among its minorities. This is the definition of an imperial worldview.

Sleepless Nights

Let's leave Iran now and briefly take up a couple of other matters highlighted in "The Redirection" that certainly should have raised the odd red flag and pushed the odd alarm button here at home far more than his Iranian news (which did at least get some attention):

1. Iran-Contra Redux: Does it raise no eyebrows that, under the leadership of Elliot Abrams (who in the Iran-Contra period pleaded guilty to two counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress and was later pardoned), such a meeting was held? Does no one want to confirm that this happened? Does no one want to know who attended? Iran-Contra alumni in the Bush administration at one time or another included former Reagan National Security Advisor John Poindexter, Otto Reich, John Negroponte (who, Hersh claims, recently left his post as Director of National Intelligence in order to avoid the twenty-first century version of Iran-Contra -- "No way. I'm not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. [National Security Council] running operations off the books, with no [presidential] finding."), Roger Noriega, and Robert Gates. Did the Vice President or President sit in? Was either of them informed about the "lessons drawn"? Were the Vice President's right-hand men, I. Lewis Libby and/or David Addington in any way involved? Who knows? In the Iran-Contra affair, the Reagan administration drew together the seediest collection of freelance arms dealers, intelligence agents, allies, and -- in the case of Ayatollah Khomeini's Iranian regime -- sworn enemies in what can only be called "amateur hour" at the White House. Now, it looks like the Bush administration is heading down a similar path and, given its previous "amateur hour" reputation in foreign policy, imagine what this is likely to mean.

2. Jihadis as Proxies: Using jihadis as American proxies in a struggle to rollback Iran -- with the help of the Saudis -- should have rung a few bells somewhere in American memory as another been-there, done-that moment. In the 1980s -- on the theory that my enemy's enemy is my friend -- the fundamentalist Catholic CIA Director William Casey came to believe that Islamic fundamentalists could prove tight and trustworthy allies in rolling back the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, as a result, the CIA, backed by the Saudis royals, who themselves represented an extremist form of Sunni Islam, regularly favored and funded the most extreme of the mujahedeen ready to fight the Soviets. Who can forget the results? Today, according to Hersh, the Saudis are reassuring key figures in the administration that this time they have the jihadis to whom funds are flowing under control. No problem. If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

3. Congress in the Dark: Hersh claims that, with the help of Saudi National Security Adviser Prince Bandar bin Sultan (buddy to the Bushes and Dick Cheney's close comrade-in-arms), the people running the black-ops programs out of Cheney's office have managed to run circles around any possibility of Congressional oversight, leaving the institution completely "in the dark," which is undoubtedly exactly where Congress wanted to be for the last six years. Is this still true? The non-reaction to the Hersh piece isn't exactly encouraging.

To summarize, if Hersh is to be believed -- and as a major journalistic figure for the last near-40 years he certainly deserves to be taken seriously -- the Bush administration seems to be repeating the worst mistakes of the Reagan administration and of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan, which led inexorably to the greatest acts of blowback in our history. Given what we already know about the Bush administration, Americans should be up nights worrying about what all this means now as well as down the line. For Congress, the media, and Americans in general, this report should have been not just a wake-up call, but a shout for an all-nighter with NoDoz.

In my childhood, one of the Philadelphia papers regularly ran cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in a perilous situation -- say, clinging to the ledge of a tall building -- would be screaming for help, while passersby were so engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the opposite situation. A journalist essentially writing bloody murder in a giant media and governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the mainstream evidently cares -- not yet anyway -- to pay the slightest attention. It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a damn. Think Kitty Genovese on a giant scale.