LRB · Vol. 32 No. 22 · 18 November 2010

http://www.lrb.co.uk

  • Neve Gordon · The Day After · LRB 4 May 2015
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/2015/05/04/neve-gordon/the-day-after

    Many others began to understand that the ethical dilemmas raised in the briefings were a #farce:

    We knew that we were entering a house and that we could be good kids, on our best behaviour, but even then a D9 [armoured bulldozer] would show up and flatten the house. We figured out pretty quickly that every house we left, a D9 would show up and raze it. The neighbourhood we were in, what characterised it operationally was that it commanded a view of the entire area of the [Israel-Gaza border fence] and also some of the [Israeli] border towns. In the southern and some of the eastern parts of Juhar ad-Dik, we understood pretty quickly that the houses would not be left standing … At a certain point we understood it was a pattern: you leave a house and the house is gone; after two or three houses you figure out that there’s a pattern. The D9 comes and flattens it.

    This is the Dahiya doctrine in action, named after the Beirut neighbourhood which #Israel turned into rubble in 2006.

    #doctrine_dahiya #mascarade #éthique

  • Iran’s Physicists « LRB blog
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/03/19/jeremy-bernstein/irans-physicists

    The #Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran was founded in 1929 as a school of engineering. It became a general technological institute in 1972. It now has more than a dozen departments with thousands of undergraduate and postgraduate students. Few if any American universities have a more complete list of undergraduate physics courses. Looking at the faculty reveals an interesting split. The senior professors all did much of their degree work abroad. One of them for example was an undergraduate at Columbia. The junior faculty, including one woman, all did their degree work in Iran. In another generation, it may be that all of Iran’s physicists will have been educated in Iran. No other country in the Middle East would show a demographic like this. Taken in the large this means that Iran has a serious scientific infrastructure, which must be taken into account in any negotiations over its nuclear programme. The notion that the country can be negotiated into a scientific stone age is nonsense.

    #Physique #science

  • Israël et la CPI

    La décision prise par la procureure générale de la Cour pénale internationale d’ouvrir un examen préliminaire sur la situation de la Palestine a peu de chances d’aboutir à la mise en procès de responsables israéliens pour crimes de guerre. Mais si ces mêmes responsables — et en particulier Benyamin Netanyahou — se disent outragés et menacent de "détruire" la CPI, c’est en réalité parce qu’ils craignent que le narratif israélien sur le conflit (déjà usé jusqu’à la corde) change officiellement avec cet examen, désignant une fois pour toutes qui est la victime et suscitant notamment une réinterprétation de la notion de violence légitime.

    Israel and the ICC
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/01/21/nicola-perugini/israel-and-the-icc

    #cpi#israel#palestine#justice

  • Moral Clarity « LRB blog
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/01/09/adam-shatz/moral-clarity

    Today a new cry can be heard among intellectuals in the US: ‘Je suis Charlie.’ It is a curious slogan, all the more so since few of the Americans reciting it had ever heard of, much less read, Charlie Hebdo before the 7 January massacre. What does it mean, exactly? Seen in the best light, it means simply that we abhor violence against people exercising their democratic right to express their views. But it may also be creating what the French would call an amalgame, or confusion, between Charlie Hebdo and the open society of the West. In this sense, the slogan ‘je suis Charlie’ is less an expression of outrage and sympathy than a declaration of allegiance, with the implication that those who aren’t Charlie Hebdo are on the other side, with the killers, with the Islamic enemy that threatens life in the modern, democratic West, both from outside and from within.

  • If France continues to treat French men of North African origin as if they were a threat to ‘our’ civilisation, more of them are likely to declare themselves a threat, and follow the example of the Kouachi brothers. This would be a gift both to Marine Le Pen and the jihadists, who operate from the same premise: that there is an apocalyptic war between Europe and Islam
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/01/09/adam-shatz/moral-clarity

  • Nathan Thrall · Rage in Jerusalem · LRB 4 December 2014
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n23/nathan-thrall/rage-in-jerusalem

    #Abbas has refused even the non-violent means of pressuring #Israel that have been available to him for several years, such as supporting the boycott of goods not just from the settlements but from the state that creates and supports them, and curtailing security co-operation with Israel. Thanks in part to collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, Palestinian dissent is more conspicuous in areas outside the PA’s control: hunger strikes in Israeli prisons, boycotts and divestment in the diaspora, and protests and violence in Palestinian communities in Israel and Jerusalem. When the PLO’s political strategy is to submit resolutions to the UN Security Council which it knows in advance will be vetoed , it is little wonder that Palestinians in Jerusalem are acting on their own.

  • Europe’s Folly « LRB blog
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/11/07/aaron-bastani/europes-folly

    Those are political choices. The week that #Triton was announced, the Home Office defended its decision not to contribute to a like-for-like replacement of #Mare_Nostrum. The new arrangements had been agreed by Europe’s interior ministers, including Theresa May, earlier in the month. Their explanation for the reduced role of Triton was that the expansive reach of its forerunner, operating in an area of 27,000 square kilometres, was a counterproductive ‘pull factor’ in attracting undocumented migrants.

    It’s an absurd claim. People who have fled war zones, famine and economic deprivation will keep on trying to reach Europe, however treacherous the journey. By the end of August, the UN estimated that more than six million people had been displaced in Syria and three million more had fled to neighbouring countries. Their experiences are repeated, to differing degrees, along much of Europe’s periphery. It is meaningless to talk of ‘pull’ when the ‘push’ is so strong.

  • Chiffrage des discriminations économiques subies par les Palestiniens

    Organised Hypocrisy on a Monumental Scale
    Robert Wade (professor of political economy at the LSE, and winner of the 2008 Leontief Prize in Economics)
    London Review of Books, le 24 octobre 2014
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/10/24/robert-wade/organised-hypocrisy-on-a-monumental-scale

    #Palestine #Economie #Statistiques #Discriminations

  • Patrick Cockburn · Whose side is Turkey on?: The Battle for Kobani · LRB 6 November 2014
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n21/patrick-cockburn/whose-side-is-turkey-on

    Ankara gave its support to jihadi groups financed by the Gulf monarchies: these included al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, and Isis. Turkey played much the same role in supporting the jihadis in Syria as Pakistan had done supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The estimated 12,000 foreign jihadis fighting in Syria, over which there is so much apprehension in Europe and the US, almost all entered via what became known as ‘the jihadis’ highway’, using Turkish border crossing points while the guards looked the other way. In the second half of 2013, as the US put pressure on Turkey, these routes became harder to access but Isis militants still cross the frontier without too much difficulty. The exact nature of the relationship between the Turkish intelligence services and Isis and al-Nusra remains cloudy but there is strong evidence for a degree of collaboration. When Syrian rebels led by al-Nusra captured the Armenian town of Kassab in Syrian government-held territory early this year, it seemed that the Turks had allowed them to operate from inside Turkish territory. Also mysterious was the case of the 49 members of the Turkish Consulate in Mosul who stayed in the city as it was taken by Isis; they were held hostage in Raqqa, the Islamic State’s Syrian capital, then unexpectedly released after four months in exchange for Isis prisoners held in Turkey.

    • En effet...

      "The replacement of Nouri al-Maliki’s corrupt and dysfunctional government by Haider al-Abadi hasn’t made as much difference as its foreign backers would like. Because the army is performing no better than before, the main fighting forces facing Isis are the Shia militias. Highly sectarian and often criminalised, they are fighting hard around Baghdad to drive back Isis and cleanse mixed areas of the Sunni population. Sunnis are often picked up at checkpoints, held for ransoms of tens of thousands of dollars and usually murdered even when the money is paid. Amnesty International says that the militias, including the Badr Brigade and Asaib Ahl al Haq, operate with total immunity; it has accused the Shia-dominated government of ‘sanctioning war crimes’. With the Iraqi government and the US paying out big sums of money to businessmen, tribal leaders and anybody else who says they will fight Isis, local warlords are on the rise again: between twenty and thirty new militias have been created since June. This means that Iraqi Sunnis have no choice but to stick with Isis. The only alternative is the return of ferocious Shia militiamen who suspect all Sunnis of supporting the Islamic State. Having barely recovered from the last war, Iraq is being wrecked by a new one. Whatever happens at Kobani, Isis is not going to implode. Foreign intervention will only increase the level of violence and the Sunni-Shia civil war will gather force, with no end in sight."

  • Paul Farmer’s ’Diary’ in the London Review of Books. Great pieces on #Ebola - long but worth it
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/paul-farmer/diary

    Weak health systems, not unprecedented virulence or a previously unknown mode of transmission, are to blame for Ebola’s rapid spread. [However] if patients are promptly diagnosed and receive aggressive supportive care ... the great majority, as many as 90 per cent, should survive

  • Paul Farmer · Diary: Ebola
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n20/paul-farmer/diary

    Anyone whose metrics or proof are judged wanting is likely to receive a cool reception, even though the #Ebola crisis should serve as an object lesson and rebuke to those who tolerate anaemic state funding of, or even cutbacks in, public health and healthcare delivery. Without staff, stuff, space and systems, nothing can be done.

    If such things were thin on the ground in Monrovia and Freetown, they were all but absent in rural regions. (...)

    Ebola is more a symptom of a weak healthcare system than anything else. But until this diagnosis is agreed on, there’s plenty of room for other, more exotic explanations.

    #métriques #ebola #santé

  • Met police to pay more than £400,000 to victim of undercover officer
    http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/oct/23/police-compensation-payout-woman-undercover-officer

    Female activist who was traumatised after discovering that the father of her son was a spy is to receive compensation

    Jacqui - in her own words

    He watched me give birth. To me, he was watching his first child being born. He was there throughout the labour, and that is something so intimate between a man and a woman, to watch your wife, your girlfriend, your partner give birth to your child is, despite all the blood and gore and everything that’s there, so intimate. And I shared that with a ghost, with someone who vaporised.

    As I said, I have no foundations in my life. I had a spy who was being paid by the government to spy on me to the extent that he watched me give birth. So he saw every intimate part of me. He was 14 hours with me, giving birth.

    How did he report that back? Did he report every contraction back to the police? What use was that for information purposes? He had to spent all of a Sunday evening right the way through to the Monday at lunchtime[when] I actually gave birth. [He] held our son before I did, because I was out of it.

  • Feeling Good about Feeling Bad
    Nathan Thrall
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n19/nathan-thrall/feeling-good-about-feeling-bad

    Curiously for a book so concerned with the legitimacy of Zionism, My Promised Land doesn’t make the most powerful and obvious arguments for the right of Jews to self-determination in what is now the state of Israel: the fact of its being enshrined in international law, in the form of UN Resolution 181, reaffirmed in the declarations of independence of both #Israel, in 1948, and Palestine, in 1988. No matter the actions of their forebears, there are now more than six million Jews in Israel, 75 per cent of its population. And denying Jews their own country would be to seek redress for past injustices by creating new ones.

    Rather than make Israel’s case on these narrow and fairly uncontroversial grounds, Shavit chooses a more ambitious, and fraught, approach: a history of Israel in which the 1948 war emerges as the exception that proves his country’s morality. Shavit relegates other difficult aspects of Israeli history to the shadows. The resulting mélange of legend and fact is not firm ground on which to stake a moral claim, and he makes many assertions that are easy to dispute: that early Zionists were oblivious to the existence of a native population; that there were few alternatives available to Jews in Eastern Europe; that the historic right of the Jewish people to establish sovereignty in their ancient homeland trumped the rights and wishes of the local population who had lived there for more than a thousand years; the economic boon Arabs enjoyed as a result of Zionist immigration; the socialist egalitarianism of the kibbutz as a moral justification for Zionism; the Holocaust as a retroactive justification of the Zionist settlement that preceded it by more than half a century; and the fairness of the democracy established after Israel’s founding. Several of these points have some merit, but all are presented with glaring omissions and misrepresentations, even by the standards of mainstream Zionist historiography.

    Shavit is a secularist who sees the decision to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine as based on broad universal grounds – the need of a persecuted people for asylum – and not on the belief that the Jews own the land by virtue of God’s promise to Abraham. Save for brief references to the Holy Land and the Jews’ ancient homeland, religion is almost entirely absent from his description of early Zionism. Yet, as Anita Shapira, among the strongest critics of the New Historians, shows in her new book, Israel: A History, religious ideas, traditions and texts were at the heart of the enterprise from the start.​* In the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community, ‘ the Bible was the seminal text,’ according to Shapira. ‘ It preserved historical memory … and also concretised the Land of Israel, forming a direct connection between past and present.’ As she makes clear, the piety of Eastern European Jews was the main reason the secular leaders of the Zionist movement chose to settle in Palestine and not in Argentina or the East African territory offered by the UK government.

    (...)

    #Palestine #sionisme #Israël #religion

  • After the Ceasefire « LRB blog
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/09/12/omar-hamilton/after-the-ceasefire-2

    On 26 August a ceasefire between #Israel and Hamas was agreed, bringing a fragile end to a war that killed 2150 Palestinians (mostly civilians) and 73 Israelis (mostly soldiers). Since then Hamas has not fired a single rocket, attacked an Israeli target, or done anything to break the terms of the ceasefire. Israel has done the following:
    1. Annexed another 1500 acres of West Bank land
    2. Seized $56 million of PA tax revenue
    3. Not lifted the illegal blockade (as required by the ceasefire)
    4. Broken the ceasefire by firing at fishermen on four separate occasions
    6. Killed a 22-year-old, Issa al Qatari, a week before his wedding
    7. Killed 16-year-old Mohammed Sinokrot with a rubber bullet to the head
    8. Tortured a prisoner to the point of hospitalisation
    9. Refused 13 members of the European Parliament entry into Gaza
    10. Detained at least 127 people across the West Bank, including a seven-year-old boy in Hebron and two children, aged seven and eight, taken from the courtyard of their house in Silwad – and tear-gassed their mother
    11. Continued to hold 33 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council in prison
    12. Continued to hold 500 prisoners in administrative detention without charge or trial
    13. Destroyed Bedouin homes in Khan al Ahmar, near Jerusalem, leaving 14 people homeless, and unveiled a plan to forcibly move thousands of Bedouin away from Jerusalem into two purpose-built townships
    14. Destroyed a dairy factory in Hebron whose profits supported an orphanage
    15. Destroyed a family home in Silwan, making five children homeless
    16. Destroyed a house in Jerusalem where aid supplies en route to Gaza were being stored
    17. Destroyed a well near Hebron
    18. Set fire to an olive grove near Hebron
    19. Raided a health centre and a nursery school in Nablus, causing extensive damage
    20. Destroyed a swathe of farmland in Rafah by driving tanks over it
    21. Ordered the dismantling of a small monument in Jerusalem to Mohamed Abu Khdeir, murdered in July by an Israeli lynch mob
    22. Continued building a vast tunnel network under Jerusalem
    23. Stormed the al Aqsa mosque compound with a group of far right settlers
    24. Assisted hundreds of settlers in storming Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus
    25. Prevented students from entering al Quds University, firing stun grenades and rubber bullets at those who tried to go in
    26. Earned unknown millions on reconstruction materials for Gaza, where 100,000 people need their destroyed homes rebuilt. The total bill is estimated at $7.8 billion

  • Edward Said · Diary: an encounter with J-P Sartre · LRB 1 June 2000
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n11/edward-said/diary

    ‘Demain Sartre parlera.’ And so we retired in keen anticipation of the following morning’s proceedings.

    Sure enough Sartre did have something for us: a prepared text of about two typed pages that – I write entirely on the basis of a twenty-year-old memory of the moment – praised the courage of Anwar Sadat in the most banal platitudes imaginable. I cannot recall that many words were said about the Palestinians, or about territory, or about the tragic past. Certainly no reference was made to Israeli settler-colonialism, similar in many ways to French practice in Algeria. It was about as informative as a Reuters dispatch, obviously written by the egregious Victor to get Sartre, whom he seemed completely to command, off the hook. I was quite shattered to discover that this intellectual hero had succumbed in his later years to such a reactionary mentor, and that on the subject of Palestine the former warrior on behalf of the oppressed had nothing to offer beyond the most conventional, journalistic praise for an already well-celebrated Egyptian leader. For the rest of that day Sartre resumed his silence, and the proceedings continued as before. I recalled an apocryphal story in which twenty years earlier Sartre had travelled to Rome to meet Fanon (then dying of leukemia) and harangued him about the dramas of Algeria for (it was claimed) 16 non-stop hours, until Simone made him desist. Gone for ever was that Sartre.

    […]

    ‘For example,’ B-HL intoned, ‘Sartre’s record on Israel was perfect: he never deviated and he remained a complete supporter of the Jewish state.’

    For reasons that we still cannot know for certain, Sartre did indeed remain constant in his fundamental pro-Zionism.

    • Merci Alain.

      Au passage, je vois que John Gerassi est décédé en 2012:

      John «Tito» Gerassi, l’ami américain de Sartre, mort à 81 ans
      http://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2012/08/10/john-tito-gerassi-l-ami-americain-de-sartre-mort-a-81-ans_1744962_3382.html

      John Gerassi était un rebelle non repenti, en état de belligérance depuis son adolescence avec le monde tel qu’il est, et avec le cancer qui le rongeait depuis une dizaine d’années. Il est mort en soins palliatifs, au Beth Israel Hospice de Manhattan, le 26 juillet, à 23 h 30, veillé par deux de ses étudiants. Il s’en est donc fallu d’une demi-heure qu’il ne meure pas à la date anniversaire d’une histoire qui avait compté dans son imaginaire politique : l’attaque ratée contre la caserne Moncada par Fidel Castro et ses compagnons, point de départ, en 1953, de l’épopée révolutionnaire cubaine.

      S’il avait depuis longtemps perdu ses illusions sur le régime castriste, John Gerassi n’en gardait pas moins foi dans la révolution et n’abandonnait pas sa conviction que le capitalisme, qu’il fût d’Etat comme dans les économies dirigées ou économico-financier comme dans les régimes dits démocratiques, menait la société humaine au fascisme. John Gerassi, que ses amis et ses étudiants appelaient « Tito », professait donc un marxisme virulent, d’orientation libertaire et fortement teinté d’existentialisme.

      Il faut dire que Jean-Paul Sartre fut le premier homme à le tenir dans ses bras, le 12 juillet 1931. Son père, le peintre Fernando Gerassi, attendait sa naissance à la Closerie des Lilas, en compagnie de Picasso, Breton, Chagall, Miro et quelques autres. Quand Sartre les rejoignit du Havre où il avait parlé du cinéma pour la distribution des prix de son lycée, il trouva ces artistes fins saouls et alla s’enquérir de l’état de la mère et de l’enfant à la clinique Tarnier, tout à côté. La mère, Stépha Gerassi, ravissante féministe ukrainienne, née Awdykowicz, amie de Simone de Beauvoir, lui tendit l’enfant à qui elle venait de donner le jour.