When Ignatieff Wasn't Afraid to Be Smart

When I said back here that a guy as smart as Michael Ignatieff should be smart enough to hold an informed and nuanced position on Israel and Palestine? This is what I meant:

Two years ago, an American friend took me on a helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the Golan Heights over the Palestinian West Bank. He wanted to show me how vulnerable Israel was, how the Arabs only had to cross 11km of land to reach the sea and throw the Israelis into it. I got this message but I also came away with another one. When I looked down at the West Bank, at the settlements like Crusader forts occupying the high ground, at the Israeli security cordon along the Jordan river closing off the Palestinian lands from Jordan, I knew I was not looking down at a state or the beginnings of one, but at a Bantustan, one of those pseudo-states created in the dying years of apartheid to keep the African population under control.

That was when I understood that for all their talk about a two-state solution, both sides never inhabited the same universe of discourse about what it actually meant. It is not just that both sides failed to make peace, but that peace never meant the same thing.

Given who Arafat was and is, it required extraordinary vision by Israelis to understand that their security depended on having a strong neighbour in Palestine, not a weak one. The Israelis failed to realise that they needed a Palestinian Authority capable of providing enough services for its population to keep them from wanting to kill Israelis, and enough military and police capability to stop them if they tried. The Palestinians equally failed to understand that a good neighbour is a strong one. Many wanted a state of their own, to weaken Israel and prepare the final conquest of Tel Aviv.

Both sides have an equal share of blame in the slow collapse of the two-state solution. The Palestinian leadership degenerated into a venal tyranny, holding back an increasingly frustrated Palestinian civil society. The Palestinian Authority also failed because Israel never allowed it to become a state. When authorities cannot become competent states, when they cannot meet the needs of their people, they can only survive by playing to the longing of their populations to counter humiliation with acts of suicidal revenge.

~ Michael Ignatieff, The Guardian, April 19, 2002

I would still disagree that the U.S. sending troops anywhere would make anything better, but the rest of the article sure as hell beats the simplistic crap that's come out of his mouth more recently.

I swear, he's playing dumb just to avoid comparisons with Dion.

BTW, that letter I sent back in January? It took two weeks just to get a robot email saying "We have received your email", and another FIVE WEEKS to get an actual response to my question. Which wasn't a response at all, really - just a form letter saying "Thank you for your letter regarding the situation in Gaza. The Liberal Party shares your concerns about this conflict and the suffering and loss of life on all sides, passing shot at the Conservatives, yada yada yada". From the Office of the Leader of the Opposition.

(H/T to Alison at The Beav)

The Worst Thing I've Read in a While

If you're sick of reading about Gaza, or you just can't bear to read any more tales of atrocities, just stop right now. But if you think you can take it, read this latest testimonial from In Gaza. Not to obsess on the suffering, but just so we don't forget.

Eyes open.

The family of 14 was still huddled under the stairwell when Israeli soldiers stormed the outer gate.

“My father opened the back door and stepped out. They shot without warning. He died immediately,” said al-Helo.

The soldiers then ordered the rest of the family to leave the house. “Get out, get out,” al-Helo said they screamed. When he tried to remain in the house with his father Fouad’s body he said the Israeli soldiers told him “If you stay here we’ll kill you.”

They left, trying in vain to find shelter. “We were knocking at the doors of people’s houses along the road, desperate to get in. Everyone was afraid to open, or had left their home,” said al-Helo.

The terrified family had only walked a few hundred meters down a back lane before Israeli snipers began shooting at them, hitting one-year-old Farah in the abdomen. The girl, whose name means “joy,” didn’t immediately die, instead suffered for the next few hours, intestines falling out. Her mother, Shireen, breast-fed her in a desperate attempt to comfort the baby.

I don't think I am ever, ever going to get that image out of my head.

That every single citizen of Gaza hasn't taken up arms against Israel is a testament to their self-restraint and their desire for peace. I don't know if I would be that restrained under the same circumstances.

Dear Mr. Ignatieff

(I sent the following email to Michael Ignatieff on January 9th. To date, I have received no reply.)

Dear Mr. Ignatieff,

As a proud member and supporter of the Liberal Party of Canada, I would like to express my profound disappointment in the comments you made yesterday in Halifax regarding the situation in Gaza.

Your statements, whether you intend them to or not, are coming across as identical to the position of the Conservative government - and for that matter, that of the Bush administration. I don't know if those comments accurately or fully reflect your true opinions, or if you are simply trying to be cautious and inoffensive. But hearing you echo the simplistic notion that only Hamas is to blame for civilian casualties and anything Israel does in its own defense is justified, only seems to confirm everything your worst critics have said about you.

I agree with your condemnation of Hamas and appreciate your support of Israel's right to defend itself. But surely it is possible for a man of your intellect to express that support, and at the same time articulate something a little stronger than a vague "concern" over the growing humanitarian crisis and the appalling and disproportionate death toll among innocent Palestinians, particularly children.

Tens of thousands of Israelis have been taking to the streets to protest their government's actions. Prominent members of the Jewish community in Toronto and elsewhere have publicly called for an end to Israel's killing of innocent civilians in Gaza while condemning, equally, Hamas' rocket attacks on Israel. And yesterday, Jimmy Carter - who probably knows more about the Middle East than anyone in North America - wrote his own account of the events of the past year which manages to detail Israel's own culpability for the current situation without in any way excusing the actions of Hamas.

If all these people - none of whom could ever be described as 'anti-Israel' - can bring themselves to criticize Israel's blockade of Gaza, the killing of UN aid workers, the bombing of UN schools and other appalling incidents, while simultaneously condemning the attacks on Israel, then surely you can find a way to do the same.

Yours truly,


Jennifer Smith

New Year's Catch Up: Gaza

I've been taking a bit of a blogging break, partly because of the holidays, but also because I've been reluctant to weigh in on the situation in Gaza. Not that I don't have opinions - it just seems like too much of an effort to try to appear to be unbiased when I'm not feeling unbiased at all. But I suppose I can't avoid it forever.

Holiday's over.

To start, I would like to say how disappointed I was with Michael Ignatieff's statement on Gaza. To condemn only Hamas without even acknowledging Israel's culpability both before and during this current conflict was particularly spineless, even for Ignatieff. Sadly, this is exactly the sort of thing we've come to expect from him - it's just a shame that he's now making these sorts of evasive, apologist statements on behalf of the Liberal Party of Canada.

Not everyone is busy tap-dancing, however. Today, the BBC cuts through a lot of the bullshit with a surprisingly dispassionate analysis of the murky question of what is and is not being considered a legitimate military target in Gaza.

The bloodied children are clearly civilians; men killed as they launch rockets are undisputedly not. But what about the 40 or so young Hamas police recruits on parade who died in the first wave of Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza?

And weapons caches are clearly military sites – but what about the interior ministry, hit in a strike that killed two medical workers; or the money changer's office, destroyed last week injuring a boy living on the floor above?

As the death toll mounts in Gaza, the thorny question is arising of who and what can be considered a legitimate military target in a territory effectively governed by a group that many in the international community consider a terrorist organisation.

This is also the group that won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006 and a year later consolidated its control by force.

...International law’s rules on keeping civilian casualties to a minimum are based on the distinction between "combatants" and "non-combatants".

As Israel launched the first air strikes, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: "You - the citizens of Gaza - are not our enemies. Hamas, Jihad and the other terrorist organisations are your enemies, as they are our enemies."

But when an Israeli military spokesman also says things like "anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target," things get complicated.

The International Committee of the Red Cross - guardian of the Geneva Conventions on which international humanitarian law is based - defines a combatant as a person "directly engaged in hostilities".

But Israeli Defence Forces spokesman Benjamin Rutland told the BBC: "Our definition is that anyone who is involved with terrorism within Hamas is a valid target. This ranges from the strictly military institutions and includes the political institutions that provide the logistical funding and human resources for the terrorist arm."

And the money quote:

As Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch puts it: "Even if you have a legitimate target you can’t just drop 10-tonne bombs on it."

Indeed.

Meanwhile, the CBC is also showing a little spine. I just finished watching Suhana Meharchand call bullshit on Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Ofir Gendelman when he tried to claim that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. She quoted the heads of CARE and other NGOs who have said otherwise and asked if he was calling them liars. Nice.

So what do I think? I think that, ultimately, it doesn't matter what I think. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too complex and too intractable to be solved by a bunch of bloggers and pundits. I do think we need to speak up - loudly - when obvious violations of human rights and international law are being perpetrated by either side, but any long-term solution is ultimately up to the people of Israel and Palestine.

The only thing that gives me hope is remembering other seemingly insoluble conflicts in places like South Africa and Northern Ireland, that just seemed to end of their own accord one day after decades of violence and stalemate. Sure there were treaties and accords and ceasefires, but those had been made all along and broken dozens of times before without bringing a final end to the violence.

Looking back on it, it seems to me that two factors were key. One was simple weariness, as though the two sides simply tired of fighting one another and decided it was no longer worth the trouble. The other was the integration of former enemies - even those previously branded as 'terrorists' - into the government. The ANC, Sinn Fein, even the Parti Quebecois are examples of supposedly radical factions being elected to govern and, almost overnight, becoming peace-loving, moderate bureaucrats.

I believe this could have happened to Hamas after their election as the legitimate government of the Palestinian Authority. However, the stubborn refusal of Israel and the United States to recognize that government and their subsequent transformation of Gaza into a virtual prison camp, has made that transition all but impossible.

People don't stop fighting because of treaties and accords. They stop fighting when they no longer have a reason to fight and, more importantly, when they have an investment in the peaceful governance of their own lives.

UPDATE: Big H/T to skdadl for introducing us to Eva, who is blogging direct from Gaza as she travels with medics caring and transporting the wounded and the dead.

Skdadl's right - stop reading all us armchair bloviators and go read In Gaza.