Wolfowitz and Corruption Fetish

So today there is a huge showdown in the Bank over Wolfowitz, and it looks like he might actually be forced out. A decision will be made this week. Wolfie is protesting his innocence saying that he is subject to a “smear campaign” (which begs the question: Is it even possible to smear someone like him?) Steve Clemons has some of the gritty details (here and here), and George W Bush is, expectedly, speaking up in support of his demented crony.

I have to say, this is more than I had expected; I thought that this would be swept under the rug quickly, but all credit to the unity and determination of the Workers of the World (Bank) who, with nothing to lose but their very comfy contracts and 5-star junkets in starving countries, have made enough of a big deal about this that the Executive Board had to do something. It also helped that pretty much everyone in the development world despised Wolfowitz and couldn’t wait for a chance to lay into him.

On a more theoretical, academic and mundane note: I have always had a lot of trouble with the World Bank’s obsession with corruption and democratization, a fetish that started with Wolfensohn’s reign in 1994 and continues to grow.

The case the World Bank has incessantly tried to make since the mid-1990’s is that fighting corruption and democratizing are the keys to unlocking sustained economic growth and development. After a thorough review of the development literature, one will find that the simplistic relationship that everyone talks about between corruption and democracy and development has very flimsy support in the real world.

The theoretical, quantitative and case-study evidence on this is really missing, and relies heavily on some really shoddy statistical work that frankly makes very little sense.

My personal take from reviewing all this literature is this: corruption and democracy have very complex interactions with one another and with other factors that in turn influence growth and development. It is too complex to be able to generalize it across countries across different points in time, and it is misleading to attempt to study it in a simplistic cross-country regression. The simplistic mantras of “corruption bad” and “democracy good” are quite misleading and possibly as wrong as saying “corruption good” and “democracy bad”.

However, this does not just say that we should just forget about these things; we have to remember that these are important issues not just for their impact on development, but for their own right. It is a mark of the short-sightedness of some development economists that they only view the issue of democracy in terms of its impact on growth, ignoring its importance in its own right.

But what we should say about this is that the attempts from an international institution with as much clout as the World Bank or the IMF to crusade around the world with this message and packaging it as a necessary and sufficient precondition to development and growth has in itself possibly been harmful to the causes of development and growth.

This is at best irrelevant and promises false results that will lead to skepticism towards the virtues of democracy and anti-corruption; but at worst, could lead to political and economic implications that then complicate things for developing countries. The best example of this is how democratization and liberalization have, in many cases, lead to certain elites managing to capture power and special interests in their own hands, and weakened the government’s ability to undertake positive policies for development.

This is a very complex issue and I have not discussed it here thoroughly enough, but I will discuss this more in the future. Suffice to say for now: The World Bank should certainly tread very carefully when discussing these issues. However, they should certainly be very assertive in throwing Wolfowitz out on his ass for what are surely corrupt and despicable acts with no potential good for anyone but him and his cronies.

Bill Maher on US Government

Bill Maher’s ‘New Rules’ from a couple of weeks ago makes a very good point about “elites” in government.

The amount of unqualified cronies and morons appointed to the US Government is seriously mind-boggling, and goes a long way towards explaining ever single fuck-up this country has had recently from Hurricane Katrina to the Justice Department firings of US Attorneys.

But what is most interesting in my opinion is how the Republicans benefit from their own incompetence: whenever government fucks up, their talking heads all over the media will use that as support for their view that government is fundamentally corrupt, inefficient and useless, and that we should therefore reduce the size of government and elect more Republicans to save us from the scourge of big government. Then America rewards Republicans for their incompetence and they continue it, producing a self-sustaining cycle of incompetence and corruption.

It’s a win-win situation if you’re a corrupt megalomaniac Republican, or one of their minions like Monica Goodling and Michael Brown.

Walid Khalidi on Morris’ 1948

“Should the olives know who planted them… their oil will turn to tears.” Courtesy of Hanzala Art

Every now and then I come across something so beautifully eloquent, logical, powerful, rational and affirmative that it makes me happy that I was lucky enough to be enlightened by it; and makes me wish I had the intelligence to say it myself.

This below is what I have been trying to articulate for a while as the best response to Benny Morris and his nonsensical racist hodgepodge of explanations, justifications and exonerations for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948. From Walid Khalidi’s “Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine” in the Autumn 1988 issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

“Morris, for example, unequivocally and commendably confirms the death of the (albeit long-deceased) Arab evacuation orders. But along with the others he views the Palestinian exodus in an historical vacuum. To be sure, he mentions discussions before 1948 in the highest Zionist circles of the “transfer” (euphemism for expulsion) of the Arab population, but he sees no link between this and Plan Dalet. He regards the obvious linear dynamic binding together the successive military operations of Plan D as fragments in an, as it were, cubic configuration accidentally related to one another only through their joint occurrence in the dimension of time.

“From his perspective, no connection exists between the imperative to “transfer” the Arab population and seize its lands and the imperative to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of Jews it was planned to bring to the new Jewish state. Morris bravely admits the evacuation through force or fear of the bulk of the 369 Palestinian villages, which he meticulously lists (see Appendix D below). But he subliminally places the moral burden of this, not on the invader, but on the invaded, who by resisting or panicking brought permanent exile upon themselves. If their villages were blown up in order to prevent the return of their inhabitants and to parcel out their farms among existing Jewish colonies and new Jewish immigrants, this was only as an afterthought, an extemporized innovation, a lightning brainwave with no ideological, attitudinal, motivational, or strategic antecedents.”

On VT Tragedy: The Economist Goes Where Most American Media Won’t

The tragedy in Virginia Tech is such a shockingly gruesome crime that has had me feeling very disturbed for days.

But perhaps what has most surprised me about it is the incredibly idiotic “discussion” that has been heard in the media about it. In the first few hours after the incident, I came across “analysis” blaming this incident on Islamic terrorism, Pakistani culture, Korean military ruthlessness, Korean “male anger”, “militant Christianity”, “capitalism’s excesses”, bullying in school and countless other phenomena too stupid to even mention. None of these explanations deserve to expound on and refute.

But, as expected, the Economist offers one of a very few voices of reason on American issues.

While everyone is discussing every single aspect of issues that have nothing to do with this crime, the most important point is missed: Every society has deranged people like this criminal; only in America can he walk into a department store with a history of stalking, instability and violence, and purchase semi-automatic weapons with the same east with which he purchased the tapes he used to film himself; the same tapes that got thousands of hours of play in the media, while no one even discussed where he might have gotten his guns from.

How convenient it is for the NRA that everyone is talking about other issues and avoiding the issue of guns. And the few voices that have mentioned this issue (on Fox News) have criticized the university for not allowing teachers to carry guns in class. Indeed, what an intelligent idea: a fully-militarized society is the answer to gun-crime.

As pro-Palestine activists in America know all too well, when there are powerful special interest groups, open debate becomes an impossibility. On this issue as well, let’s try and not fall into this trap.

After the Virginia Tech massacre America’s tragedy
Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print editionIts politicians are still running away from a debate about guns

IN THE aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech university on April 16th, as the nation mourned a fresh springtime crop of young lives cut short by a psychopath’s bullets, President George Bush and those vying for his job offered their prayers and condolences. They spoke eloquently of their shock and sadness and horror at the tragedy (see article). The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives called for a “moment of silence”. Only two candidates said anything about guns, and that was to support the right to have them.

Cho Seung-hui does not stand for America’s students, any more than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did when they slaughtered 13 of their fellow high-school students at Columbine in 1999. Such disturbed people exist in every society. The difference, as everyone knows but no one in authority was saying this week, is that in America such individuals have easy access to weapons of terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America. There are estimated to be some 240m guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all.

But the tragedies of Virginia Tech—and Columbine, and Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where five girls were shot at an Amish school last year—are not the full measure of the curse of guns. More bleakly terrible is America’s annual harvest of gun deaths that are not mass murders: some 14,000 routine killings committed in 2005 with guns, to which must be added 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents (2004 figures). Many of these, especially the suicides, would have happened anyway: but guns make them much easier. Since the killing of John Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century. In 2005 more than 400 children were murdered with guns.

The trigger and the damage done
The news is not uniformly bad: gun crime fell steadily throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. But it is still at dreadful levels, and it rose sharply again in 2005. Police report that in many cities it rose even faster in 2006. William Bratton, the police chief of Los Angeles (and formerly of New York), speaks of a “gathering storm of crime”. Politicians on both sides, he says, have been “captured” by the vocal National Rifle Association (NRA). The silence over Virginia Tech shows he has a point.

The Democrats have been the most disappointing, because until recently they had been the party of gun control. In 1994 President Bill Clinton approved a bill banning assault weapons (covering semi-automatic rifles plus high-capacity magazines for handguns) and the year before that a bill imposing a requirement for background checks. But Democrats believe they paid a high price for their courage: losing the House of Representatives in 1994 shortly after the assault-weapons ban, and then losing the presidency in 2000. Had Al Gore held Arkansas or West Virginia or his own Tennessee, all strongly pro-gun, he would have won the election. These days, with hopes for a victory in 2008 dependent on the South and the mountain West, it is a brave Democrat who will talk about gun control. Some of them dismiss the very idea as “insensitive”.

Mr Bush however, has done active damage. On his watch the assault-weapons ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. New laws make it much harder to trace illegal weapons and require the destruction after 24 hours of information gathered during checks of would-be gun-buyers. The administration has also reopened debate on the second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. Last month an appeals court in Washington, DC, overturned the capital’s prohibition on handguns, declaring that it violates the second amendment. The case will probably go to the newly conservative Supreme Court, which might end most state and local efforts at gun control.

Freedom yes, but which one?
No phrase is bandied around more in the gun debate than “freedom of the individual”. When it comes to most dangerous products—be they drugs, cigarettes or fast cars—this newspaper advocates a more liberal approach than the American government does. But when it comes to handguns, automatic weapons and other things specifically designed to kill people, we believe control is necessary, not least because the failure to deal with such violent devices often means that other freedoms must be curtailed. Instead of a debate about guns, America is now having a debate about campus security.

Americans are in fact queasier about guns than the national debate might suggest. Only a third of households now have guns, down from 54% in 1977. In poll after poll a clear majority has supported tightening controls. Very few Americans support a complete ban, even of handguns—there are too many out there already, and many people reasonably feel that they need to be able to protect themselves. But much could still be done without really infringing that right.

The assault-weapons ban should be renewed, with its egregious loopholes removed. No civilian needs an AK-47 for a legitimate purpose, but you can buy one online for $379.99. Guns could be made much safer, with the mandatory fitting of child-proof locks. A system of registration for guns and gun-owners, as exists in all other rich countries, threatens no one but the criminal. Cooling-off periods, a much more open flow of intelligence, tighter rules on the trading of guns and a wider blacklist of those ineligible to buy them would all help.

Many of these things are being done by cities or states, and have worked fairly well. But jurisdictions with tough rules are undermined by neighbours with weak ones. Only an effort at the federal level will work. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, has put together a coalition of no fewer than 180 mayors to fight for just that. Good luck to him.

Finkelstein demolishes Dennis Ross’ lies

If I were to be asked to give two words that summarize why there is no peace in Palestine, I could hardly think of any better candidates than “Dennis” and “Ross”.

This isn’t to say that this demented liar is the reason there is no peace; that would be giving a stupid minion like him too much credit. But what this says is that in a time when a despicable racist liar like Ross can get a job as a “mediator” of negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis; use that job as a mercenary for the Israelis; get a free pass in propagating outright lies about his role in the process and the process itself; have his lies published in a book that sells massively and is then used by “experts” to justify positions on the Middle East; and continue to make millions portraying himself as an honest peacemaker–no wonder there is no peace in the Middle East.

Ross is the “mediator” who was too upset that Barak offered too much concessions to the Palestinians, he even said: “If Barak offers anything more, I’ll be against this agreement.” Let’s remember that anything that Barak offered was at best a Bantustan solution that would’ve made the leaders of apartheid South Africa in the 1970’s look generous. Ross then made a career out of trumpeting these concessions as a “Generous Offer”.

I will write more when I have time about Ross and his lies and racist and fatal commitment to Israeli racist hegemony; but for now, I will leave you with this excellent, thorough and comprehensive demolition job carried out by Norman Finkelstein in the latest issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

This sentence from Finkelstein sums up perfectly the problem with Ross’ demented perception of the conflict:

“Palestinian demands appear maximal while Palestinian concessions appear minimal because Ross ignores international law.”

He goes on:

whether at Oslo or Camp David: the Israelis might have had to settle for much less than they wanted, but the Palestinians had to settle for much less than they were owed. To curb one’s desires is fundamentally different from surrendering one’s rights. In disregarding international law, Ross obscures this crucial distinction. Concomitantly, he obscures the fact that throughout the peace process, all the genuine concessions came from the Palestinian side.

Finkelstein ends his piece with this conclusion:

Judging from Ross’s account, Camp David failed because Palestinians stubbornly clung to the illusion that they had real needs. Had they understood that all they really needed was symbols, Palestinians would have leapt at the generous Israeli offer. The root of the problem, again, appears to be that Palestinian “sense of entitlement”: Camp David might have succeeded if only Palestinians grasped that they aren’t real, actual human beings.

Incidentally, the Journal of Palestine Studies is such an excellent scholarly resource for the conflict. One can only wish that people would read this journal instead of the bucket-loads of inimitable crap emanating from the likes of Ross, Thomas Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg.

The Most Ethical Army in the World

Israeli soldiers use Palestinian children as human shields.

The next moron who tells me Israel is “progressive”, “humanist”, “democratic”, or “ethical” will really get an earful about this.

Irish Call for boycott

The erudite and courageous James Bowen, from the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign has this excellent article on the need for boycotting Israel. I agree with everything he says, but I have one small point to make:

Notice how an Israeli newspaper can publish something like this, but no American paper will ever touch it. This speaks volumes of how disgustingly idiotic, biased and downright racist American media is in discussing Israel/Palestine. But before supporters of Israel start boasting about how great their democracy is and how great their society is for having a free press, they should stop to think for a minute. The fact that Israel’s press openly and freely talks about all the land theft, persecution and human rights abuse that happens in Israel means that the people know what’s going on, and yet continue to support it and elect the same criminals that undertake it. While Americans can genuinely plead ignorance over what is happening in Palestine, Israelis can not. Which raises a million questions about how they continue to vote for despicable war criminals like Ariel Sharon.

And this, in turn, poses another supportive argument for boycotting Israel. As long as the Israeli people know these attrocities are happening, and feel no need to do anything about them, then an international boycott is essential to make them realize, like South Africa’s whites before them, that you can not continue knowing about this despicable oppression and voting to continue it without facing sanctions from the world.

A boycott by any other name …

_{By James Bowen}
In the late 19th century, changes in Ottoman law created a new class of large landholders, including the Sursuq family from Beirut, which acquired large tracts in northern Palestine. A similar situation had long existed in Ireland, where most land was controlled by absentee landlords, many of whom lived in Britain.

The 1880s, however, initiated dynamics that led the two lands in different directions. In 1882, the first Zionist immigrants arrived in Palestine, starting a process that subsequently led to the eviction of indigenous tenant farmers, when magnates like the Sursuqs pulled the land from under their feet, selling it to the Jewish National Fund.

In contrast, in 1880, Irish tenant farmers started a process that turned them into owner-occupiers. A former British army officer played a role in this drama, which introduced his name as a new word into many languages.

Western Ireland was again suffering near-famine conditions. The potato crop had failed for the third successive year. Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott, agent for Lord Erne, the absentee landlord of an estate in County Mayo, refused the request of tenants for a rent reduction and, instead, in September 1880, obtained eviction notices against 11 of them for failure to pay their rent.

Thirty years earlier, evictions had expelled huge numbers of Irish to North America. But times were changing: A nationwide tenants’ rights movement, the Land League, had recently been formed, under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, a scion of the landlord class, whose pro-tenant sympathies were inherited from his American mother, a woman whose grandfather had been one of George Washington’s bodyguards. Speaking on September 19, 1880, Parnell outlined the strategy of the league:

“When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must shun him on the roadside when you meet him, you must shun him in the streets of the town, you must shun him at the shop-counter, you must shun him at the fair and at the market-place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him into a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind, as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation.”

Three days later, court officials attempted to serve Boycott’s eviction notices on the tenants, and the Land League policy went into effect. Within two months, Boycott’s name had become a synonym for ostracism, he had left the estate, and both landlords and government had discovered the power of ordinary people. Within a year, legislation at Westminster provided government finance for tenants wishing to purchase their farms.

For too long, Israel has been taking land from which Palestinians have been evicted, and detestation is spreading around the world. In Ireland, photos of Israeli bulldozers are placed beside those of landlords’ battering rams. Even a former U.S. president has recognized hafrada (”separation” in Hebrew) as apartheid. Disgust has reached such a level that even highly conservative institutions that normally try to avoid politics are driven to express concern.

One such body is Aosdana, the Irish state-sponsored academy of artists. Its annual general assembly on March 28 passed a resolution whose full text is: “Mindful of the August 4, 2006 call from Palestinian filmmakers, artists and cultural workers to end all cooperation with state-sponsored Israeli cultural events and institutions, Aosdana wishes to encourage Irish artists and cultural institutions to reflect deeply before engaging in any such cooperation, always bearing in mind the undeniable courage of those Israeli artists, writers and intellectuals who oppose their own government’s illegal policies towards the Palestinians.”

Although on the surface, this is a mild resolution, it is a boycott call in all but name. Its significance was not lost on Dr. Zion Evrony, the Israeli ambassador in Dublin. The very same day, he issued a press release that was replete with cliches that might have worked several decades ago, when Irish people were still unaware of the horrors that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians.

Possibly, the alacrity of Dr. Evrony’s response was due to the fact that the strength of feeling among Irish artists had been rehearsed in the Irish press. Indeed, the proposer of the motion, playwright Margaretta D’Arcy, who is Jewish, had written in The Irish Times on February 16 that, “I was reluctant to advocate a cultural boycott of Israel until I visited the country for the first time last November … I became convinced that a cultural boycott was necessary, if only as an act of solidarity with those in Israel who seek to remove the inequality, discrimination and segregation of their society.”

Continuing, she quoted from “Land Grab,” by Yehezkel Lein, published by B’Tselem - the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories: “The settlement enterprise in the occupied territories has created a system of legally sanctioned separation based on discrimination that has, perhaps, no parallel anywhere in the world since the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

Ms. D’arcy finished by saying: “My uncle went to live in the Holy Land in the 1920s to help set up the utopian dream of peace, justice and equality between Jew and Arab. It was only when I arrived there that I realized how mistaken he was. He would have done better to have stayed in the East End of London to struggle for peace, justice and equality in England.”

Parnell finished his call to action by saying that “there will be no man so full of avarice, so lost to shame, as to dare the public opinion of all right-thinking men.”

They were both right.

Prof. James Bowen is the national chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Is the Earth Round?

The excellent Phil Weiss has posted an item on his great blog about a recent event I attended entitled “Is Zionism Racist?” (part of the “Asking The Bloody Obvious” series of lectures which included such gems as “Is the Earth Round?” and ”Is Oxygen Important for Humans?” ) This piece is very well written, I have a few minor quibbles about it, but most significantly I really am surprised at the last point that Phil mentions, I did comment on it in his blog and am copying my reply at the bottom of the post here.

April 15, 2007
AT A HILLEL, ‘IS ZIONISM RACISM?’ BRINGS EXPECTED PALESTINIAN RESPONSE AND UNEXPECTED JEWISH ONE

A month back I went to a highly emotional talk at Columbia University Hillel that I’ve been meaning to blog about because it shows how much the discourse on Israel/Palestine is changing. Mine is a report from a liberal university, not a Washington thinktank, but it reflects shifting attitudes among young Jews.Amazingly, the title of the talk–“Is Zionism Racism?”—was chosen by Lionpac, Columbia’s undergraduate version of AIPAC, the Israel lobby. About 35 students jammed a small conference room on the fourth floor of Hillel–a room in which I’d seen two men studying Torah just an hour before. Just when it seemed no one else could fit in, a darkhaired man wearing a black kaffiyah slipped through the door and dropped his scarf on the back of his chair: a Palestinian graduate student.

The speaker was Anita Shapira, an Israeli Zionist scholar. Seated at the conference table, she began by dismissing the question. She likened it to an insult in a joke in which a man calls another man’s sister a whore. If you don’t like someone you accuse them of racism. “Why do you ask me if Zionism is racism?” Having spoken 7 or 8 minutes, she opened the floor to questions.

I’ll now reprise the Q-and-A. The explosive moments come during an exchange between Shapira and the Palestinian, Saifedean Ammous, that I found cathartic. But the more intriguing exchanges were between Shapira and young Jews, who are struggling with the same questions Ammous is framing, but in a more tentative fashion.

The first question was from such a student. “Aren’t Arab citizens always going to feel alienated in the Jewish state?”
Shapira: “Maybe this is true but this is not racism. Israel defines itself as the state of the Jews. But it has non-Jewish citizens.” For instance, about a quarter million of the recent Russian immigrants were not Jewish. It is true that many Israeli Arabs don’t feel at home. But then Israel had been in a constant clash with their Palestinian brethren, and so how could you expect them to identify with Israel. “This is a very tragic situation, but it has nothing to do with racism.”

Q. Why should we embrace Jewish nationalism?
Shapira: “Israel was founded according to a nationalist concept from Europe. That statehood goes with nation. The idea that state and people are more or less one and the same is not something that is considered illegitimate or out of place in Europe. Finland is the land of the Finns ….Maybe the idea of a nation having a state is an outdated concept. Maybe it’s time to move on to multinational units [and here Shapira spoke of American pluralism]. But why should we always be the first to try it?”

Q. Why should we rationalize the law of return, allowing any Jew to move to Israel tomorrow?
Shapira. “The fact of giving preference to a certain ethnic group in your laws because you want to promote the convergence between nationhood and statehood is something that many nations have and is not something we should apologize for. What is so awful about the fact that Jewish identity is a strange mixture of the ethnic and religious?” The Israeli population was diverse. “I come from Poland. There are Ethiopian Jews. There are Russian Jews. Ethnically we are anything but a race.”
At this point, Ammous, who had been seething in his chair, burst forth that Shapira was dishonestly trying to ennoble Israeli nationalism. “Why is there a clash between Jews and Arabs? Because Zionism is racism. That is why there is a clash…. I don’t believe in God. But my Jewish friends who were born to a religion which they don’t believe either can go and get my grandfather’s land from the Jewish National Fund.” This was a racial distinction; Ammous said that the Holocaust demonstrated how destructive such distinctions are.

Shapira seemed stunned. “The Jews are one of a kind. Both a nation and a people if you wish.”
Ammous: “I find it hard to believe that is an acceptable concept in the 20th Century. How’s that different from [Afrikaaners’ ideology in] South Africa?”

Shapira insisted that Ammous was racializing a simple conflict. “You have two national movements fighting for the same piece of land… This is a normal clash between people. There are hundreds around the world…. I do not accept the fact that because Jews are a strange mixture of religion and ethnicity, I have to deny my own identity.”
Ammous said that her definition of citizenship, involving religion/birth and all those non-Jewish Russians, was arbitrary. “You might as well base citizenship on the Horoscope. No Scorpios are allowed, and my family are Scorpios. I see that as equally irrelevant, and absurd. The reason there is a conflict is because you set up an identity that excludes me and my grandfather. Don’t you see the absurdity of this racism?”

Shapira was now upset. “I am what I am. The relationship between the Palestinians and Jews goes back more than 150 years. Putting the label of racism on it is unfair.”

A pretty blond girl broke in. She thanked Ammous for coming, then said, “Israel was created as a safe haven for Jews. Very few nations have such strong claims to nationhood as Israel: a common culture, common land of origin.”
To which Shapira added, “Bahai people found a refuge in Haifa. There are Christians living happily in Israel.” The Palestinian case was special. The refugees created by the founding of Israel in 1948 were “an unfortunate situation….I know a lot of the invading Arab countries told them to get out.”
Ammous. “Wrong… You had to ethnically cleanse the land in order to set up the state.”

The room was in shellshock. Finally a leader of Lionpac broke in to move the conversation along. “I really appreciate your coming,” she said to Ammous. “I appreciate the liveliness of the debate.” But she said that the ’48 war was not part of the topic.
I raised my hand. I was upset myself. In a calm tone, I said that on a trip to Hebron I took with an Israeli group last summer, religious settlers who had taken over the center of the city had thrown rocks at us. Later we watched a video of young settlers throwing rocks at Arab girls who were just trying to go to school. The Israeli next to me wanted to run from the room and vomit when he saw this. After I came home, Avigdor Lieberman, who believes in the transfer of Arabs out of Israel, became deputy prime minister, without significant protest from anyone. As a progressive Jew, I said, I want to wash my hands of the whole country. Why shouldn’t I?

Shapira said that such things make her want to vomit too. “The fact that Israel is not perfect, that is a fact. We have our better moments and our worse moments. We also make mistakes.” But she said that it was wrong to conclude “ that everything is premeditated and everything is a conspiracy to bring about the suffering and displacement of the Palestinians …. I wish other states would be so open and critical of their government.”

At this point, Ammous began playing a video game on his blackberry, and his role was taken over by a student named Noah Schwartz. “The issue of 1948– that’s the main argument we have here,” he said. “You couldn’t have a Jewish state without the displacement of another people. The idea of a distinct people in a vacuum may work for Antarctica. But the standard history, and it is not dispute, is that transfer arrangements were [discussed by]… the Jewish Agency, once the civil war broke out after Partition.” Because nobody believed the Jewish state could actually function, with a large Arab minority.
Shapira: “You take for granted what happened after that as if it were planned in advance. In ‘47 [at the time of Partition] Jews were so happy to receive even a small portion of the land…”

Schwartz seized on the issue of Jewish immigration during the Mandate period. “You live in Philadelphia, and all of a sudden 1 million Chinese move to the place. Speaking a different languge. You wouldn’t like it.”
Shapira: “The connection of Jews to Palestine was not the same as the connection of Chinese to Philadelphia.”
Now Saif Ammous broke in. “No, but how does that relate to the Palestinians living there.”
Shapira seemed to throw up her hands. “It’s a tragedy,” she said.
Ammous: “So we can just go fuck ourselves.”
(”a PhD candidate hurling an f-bomb at one of the world’s foremost experts on Zionism…”– per a mocking/defensive post on a Columbia blog)

Shapira gathered her dignity about her, and concluded with a discussion of refugees. “After the war, we are talking about a period in which all over Europe we had movements of population. There were many many questions of refugees. All of them found an answer in the country where they landed. Later, Israel received 1 million refugees from the Arab world. She absorbed them and didn’t claim that they are refugees. The Arabs refused to absorb their people in order to immortalize the problem. I don’t think it had to be like this. I am sorry for the Palestinians.”
It was a good point (one that Alan Dershowitz makes, too). I know Ammous, and need to challenge him about it. As I say, the discussion was cathartic. Thanks to Hillel and Lionpac, I left the room smarter than when I went in. Later I thought that I should have followed up my own question. “When you say that Israel is not perfect, I am sure segregationists defended their system in the American south in the 1960s in the same way, ‘It’s not perfect.’ At some point, as an outsider, you stop accepting rationalizations for injustice and just say, ‘This has got to change.’” That would have struck a chord with some of the young Jews in the room.

Here is my comment on Phil’s post:

On that last point:

I seriously do not understand how that can be a good point, and the reason I never answered it is that I thought it was too ridiculous to answer.

Does the fact that other refugees settle somewhere automatically make the plight of all other refugees in the world their fault?

If I stole your house, surely you wouldn’t accept that as OK if someone else, somewhere else in the world decided they were OK with someone else stealing their house.

There’s a name for kicking people out of their homes against their will: it’s called ethnic cleansing. It is no way justified, tempered or ‘placed in context’ by mentioning that it happened to other people who got over it.

The key thing to remember is that the people who were ethnically cleansed did NOT want to become citizens of other countries, they did NOT want to forget about it; they wanted to go to their homes, which is a very fair and legitimate demand.

It is a demand that is surely more fair and legitimate than millions of Jews from all around the world, who have never lived in Palestine, having an automatic right to migrate there at any time and set up their lives on the remains of the ethnically cleansed Palestinians.

Phil, placing the blame on the refugees that were ethnically cleansed for not accepting their ethnic cleansing more graciously, while exonerating the racist state that ethnically cleansed them and allows people from all over the world to take their place based on an anachronistic definition of race/religion/ethnicity is really not a good point.

Saif

Circling The Wolfies

Our bitter vengeful baying-for-blood World Bank correspondent is back with more gems about the one man band of incompetence, racism, nepotism, sadism and downright pathetic idiocy that is Paul Wolfowitz.
He has filed this report from the frontlines of The War on Neoconservatism:

Oh, the tangled web we weave… when we are corrupt megalomaniac bastards unaccustomed to accountability and the uniform application of ethical standards.

To summarize:

1) Wolfie arranged extraordinary (and extraordinarily out of line) compensation packages for his political and physical lovers, and then tried to blame it on the Board of the World Bank. For full report click here, go to posting of 4/13 “GAP Points Out Bank Board Given Wrong Information”, and see second link.

2) The World Bank Staff Association (and the Financial Times, and others) have called for Wolfie’s resignation.

3) His girlfriend, Shaha Riza, took a leave of absence from the Bank (before Wolfie was president) to work as a subject expert for a US defense contractor in Iraq without disclosing the employment to the relevant Bank authorities, in violation of Staff Rules.

4) The relatively new Managing Director of the World Bank appointed by Wolfie, Juan Jose Daboub, former government official of El Salvador (and founding member of the far-right party ARENA, which has well-documented relations with 80’s civil war death squads) and active Opus Dei member, personally directed the removal from the Madagascar Country Assistance Strategy and the Health, Nutrition and Population Sector Strategy all references to the phrase ‘family planning’. Apparently, he felt the need to overturn decades of official policy because family planning falls ‘under the purview of UNFPA’. Read The Emails here.

5) This last point isn’t yet under discussion by the Board as reflective of Wolfie’s ethics, but it should be (and will be investigated by the WB Ethics Committee)… Wolfie has another major conflict of interest because he personally, in his capacity as Deputy Secretary of Defense, approved multi-billion single source contracts to Halliburton, and then, in his capacity as President of the World Bank Group, sits on the International and Advisory Monitoring Board, which is to oversee the appropriate use of precisely those funds.

Wolfie About to Bite the Dust

Paul Wolfowitz, one of the most detested people in the world, the “mastermind” behing the Iraq War and the crazy fanatic hell-bent on using the World Bank to ruin the rest of the world, seems to be on his way out. Good fucking riddance.

Executive Summary of the whole affair: After ruining the Middle East, Bush decided to send Wolfie to the World Bank so he can apply his unique blend of incompetence, racism, dogma, idiocy and demagoguery to the rest of the world. He came in and branded himself as a crusader against corruption, going out of his way to piss off everyone in the world by fucking over governments that disagree with Bush under the pretense of ‘fighting corruption’. Meanwhile, he promoted his girlfriend and moved her to the State Department and got her the highest sallary in the State Department, even higher than Condi! He also subverted the rules to get this done, and hired a couple of mercenaries from his days in the US Government to go around the Bank and terrorize the fuck out of anyone who objects to anything he says. Word got out of this whole affair and now the Workers of the World (Bank) have united against their boss.

A friend of mine who works for the Bank sent me this email on the beautiful staff meeting that happened there yesterday:

I just got out of a question and answer session with the Chair of the World Bank Staff Association, in which she called on Wolfowitz to resign because “his conduct has compromised the integrity of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership”…. to his face! Once the calls of “Resign! Resign!” from the crowd of staffers subsided, Wolfowitz provided a meek statement that he cannot talk about the details currently under review by the Executive Directors, but that he had tried to excuse himself from the matter of his girflriend’s promotion at the outset, yet now “regrets not have excused himself completely”.

One of the best perks about the WB job for Wolfie was that he has had a very convenient excuse to not answer anyone about what happened with Iraq. Since getting this job he has refused entirely to answer any questions about Iraq, citing a conflict of interest. It is good to know that that will soon be over. Though Steve Clemons has a very interesting piece of gossip about Wolfie going around DC these days with a merry kit of fabricated nonsense talking to “influential journalists” and trying to convince them that he was right about Iraq and that Saddam was indeed best buddies with Osama.

In other news, Bush is looking for a new ‘War Czar’, in what could arguable be called the worst possible job in the whole world. Who better to fuck up Bush’s last days in office than a man significatly responsible for starting his wars. Let’s hope Bush assigns it to him! Anyone up for starting a campaign on this?

Further Reading:
The FT calls for his head
Wonkette has been following this affair minute-by-minute, with relish.