Israel's Gaza strategy

In the fog of war, it isn't just the truth that falls casualty. So does common sense. Quite a few pundits seem to think that Israel lacks a strategy in Gaza. But unlike the Lebanon war of 2006, this war has been planned in advance, and every stage has been war-gamed. Here is my read of Israel's strategic plan, which lies behind "Operation Cast Lead."

Israel's long-term strategic goal is the elimination of Hamas control of Gaza. This is especially the goal of the Kadima and Labor parties, which are distinguished by their commitment to a negotiated final status agreement with the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas. The Hamas takeover in Gaza reduced Abbas to a provincial governor, who no longer represents effective authority in all the areas destined for ar future Palestinian state. Hamas rule in Gaza is a bone in the throat of the "peace process"- one Israel is determined to remove.

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Hamas and the Bushes

It was December of an election year, and President Bush was winding up his term. The newly elected Democrat was waiting in the wings. In Israel, a prime minister who seemed committed to the "peace process" decided to put an end, once and for all, to the threat posed by Hamas to Israel's citizens. The prime minister took a bold move, and entrusted Ehud Barak to do the job.

No, this scenario isn't December 2008. It's December 1992. The outgoing president was George H.W. Bush; the incoming one, Bill Clinton. The Israeli prime minister was Yitzhak Rabin; Ehud Barak held the position of IDF Chief of Staff. The bold move? The deportation of 415 Hamas activists from the West Bank and Gaza to south Lebanon, following Hamas's killing of four Israeli soldiers, and its abduction-murder of a border policeman. Those expelled included Ismail Haniyeh, now the Hamas "prime minister," and Mahmud az-Zahar, today its "foreign minister." Israel announced that the deportation would be "temporary," for two years, and that it was required by the "state of emergency" engendered by Hamas attacks.

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The year 1967 and memory

How did the outcome of 1967 change the way Arabs think about themselves and the world? It was the late Malcolm Kerr, one of America's leading Arabists at the time, who perfectly summarized the consensus. (Kerr was a UCLA professor, later president of the American University of Beirut, who was killed there in 1984.) He put it thus, in a famous passage written only about four years after the 1967 war:

Since June, 1967 Arab politics have ceased to be fun. In the good old days most Arabs refused to take themselves very seriously, and this made it easier to take a relaxed view of the few who possessed intimations of some immortal mission. It was like watching Princeton play Columbia in football on a muddy afternoon. The June War was like a disastrous game against Notre Dame which Princeton impulsively added to its schedule, leaving several players crippled for life and the others so embittered that they took to fighting viciously among themselves instead of scrimmaging happily as before.

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Rashid Khalidi of the PLO

This post has several important updates. The first brings a passage from a 1978 New York Times report from Beirut, noting that Rashid Khalidi "works for the PLO." The third uncovers a passage from a 1976 Los Angeles Times report, also from Beirut, describing Khalidi as "a PLO spokesman." - Martin Kramer

Was Rashid Khalidi a PLO "spokesman" or director of its press agency in Beirut back in 1982? I'll leave it to others to determine whether or not it matters (or matters enough) to the Khalidi-Obama connection. But I get riled up when people testify to Khalidi's bona fides without doing due diligence - especially when they specifically address Jewish audiences. Example: Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

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Khalidi and Obama: kindred spirits

He has family literally all over the world. I feel a kindred spirit from that." - Rashid Khalidi on Barack Obama

The link between Palestinian-American agitprof Rashid Khalidi and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has finally been picked up by the mainstream media. It's something they should have looked at long ago, and even now, they aren't really digging. They're simply reporting the demand of the McCain campaign that the Los Angeles Times release the video of Obama's praise of Khalidi, at a farewell gathering for Khalidi in 2003. Obama and Khalidi (and their wives) became friends in the 1990s, when Obama began to teach at the University of Chicago, where Khalidi also taught. In 2003, Khalidi accepted the Edward Said Professorship of Arab Studies at Columbia; the videotaped event was his Chicago farewell party. The Los Angeles Times, which refuses to release the tape (and which endorsed Obama on October 19) reported last spring that Obama praised Khalidi's "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases." Other speakers reportedly said incendiary things against Israel. Whether or how Obama reacted, only the videotape might tell.

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Rashid Khalidi, Obama's Palestinian pal

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University, is much in the news these days, for his connection with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The Los Angeles Times did some digging around the story last spring, and most of the facts are there. I don't know anything about the connection that I haven't read elsewhere, so I have nothing original to say about it.

But this seems like an opportune moment to flag my own writings on Khalidi, going back a number of years.

Muftis of Morningside Heights

Columbia University will be hosting an "Edward Said Conference" on November 7-8, with the title "1948-1978: Orientalism from the Standpoint of its Victims." The participants, who include all of Columbia's Palestinian mandarins, will focus on the contradiction "between European representations and Palestinian realities" as a case study of Orientalism. 1948, the audience will learn, was "a world-event enabled and prepared by the history and structures of Orientalism" - the anti-Oriental, anti-Arab and anti-Islamic racism supposedly endemic to the West since time immemorial, as alleged by Said in his 1978 book, Orientalism. The West therefore owes the Palestinians a reversal of 1948, for sins of misrepresentation going back to Homer.

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America's interests: a bedside briefing

I've already prepared my briefing for the next president. No point in waiting until he calls me at 3 a.m., which he certainly will. Of course, I could leak it then, but Bob Woodward is already working on his next book, so I might as well leak it now. Here we go.

Thank you for the White House invitation, Mr. President. You don't know how much I appreciate this appointment as your advisor - my talents were wasting away in that think tank. You've asked me to give you a ten-minute briefing on our interests in the Middle East, in a way even a community organizer or small-town mayor or US senator can understand. You've asked for an unvarnished telling - no lipstick. No problem. Here's what you need to know.

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Intimidation at Georgetown

Back in the spring, some students at Georgetown University took umbrage at a celebration of Israel's sixtieth anniversary, organized by a pro-Israel student group. Their protest took the form of sitting on the lawn next to the revelers, mouths taped shut. The student newspaper The Hoya covered the demonstration, and described it thus:

About 30 demonstrators, many of whom were graduate students, wore black shirts, tape over their mouths and, in many cases, neck scarves. They did not speak but handed out quarter sheets with a cartoon and short message; one held a poster-sized version of the quarter sheet which began, "Our presence is a gesture toward the many for whom the passing of these 60 years is not marked by celebration."

There is nothing unusual about this scene at Georgetown or any campus. Student demonstrations for and against political causes are a staple of campus life.

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Obama buys the myth

In one of my earlier posts The Myth of Linkage, I brought a number of exemplary quotes from figures such as Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski to illustrate my point. Now another quote can be added to the collection - this one from Barack Obama, fresh from his quick tutorial in the Middle East:

I think King, King Abdullah [of Jordan] is as savvy an analyst of the region and player in the region as, as there is, one of the points that he made and I think a lot of people made, is that we've got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected. If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hizbullah as a way to stir up mischief in the region. If we've gotten an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, maybe at the same time peeling Syria out of the Iranian orbit, that makes it easier to isolate Iran so that they have a tougher time developing a nuclear weapon. "