Navajo Artist Creates Controversial Pro-Palestinian Mural on Santa Fe’s Eastside

14 JANUARY 2020

About five years ago, a set of posters appeared on an adobe wall on the corner of Old Pecos Trail and Camino Lejo — an intersection that sits at the gateway to Santa Fe’s famed Museum Hill and is situated on one of the city’s main arteries. The signs were put up by a local organization called Santa Feans for Justice in Palestine, and depicted pro-Palestinian slogans and images, including images of Palestinian children who were killed during Operation Protective Edge, a 2014 military campaign by Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.

The posters were soon torn down by an objector, and a years-long campaign ensued. The wall, which belongs to Santa Fe resident Guthrie Miller, has had dozens of iterations of posters, signs, and art on it over the years, all with similar messaging. “As a private citizen, I would like to see more murals and wall art that have some political merit,” Miller told Hyperallergic. The signs have been vandalized or destroyed every time. After that first incident, Miller applied for a permit with the city — which is required, since his property is in a historic district — and has only displayed the city-approved three-by-five foot signs since.

That is, until January 4, when a Navajo activist and artist who goes by the name Remy installed a series of large-scale works on the wall, each depicting an image taken from the news. Remy, who had heard about Santa Feans for Justice in Palestine and their frequent attempts to display pro-Palestinian imagery on this wall, installed the work without permission, though Miller intends to keep it. “I wanted to widen the field of vision for that struggle, rather than relegate it into predetermined spaces. You can imagine where the indigenous analogies play into all of that,” he told Hyperallergic. The images are life-size renderings of photographs of Palestinian children and civilians and IDF soldiers, and might be familiar to those who have seen them circulating online. They include a solider pointing a gun at a family, a father shielding his 12-year-old son Muhammad al-Durah from a soldier, a 14-year-old boy named Faris Odeh throwing a rock at a tank, and a teenage boy named Fawzi al-Junaidi being carried blindfolded by a group of soldiers.

“I lived with a Palestinian family in the US around the time 9/11 happened,” Remy said. “There were a lot of connections we were making in terms of our indigenous struggles.” The artist likened his own resistance to that Faris Odeh, the young boy depicted facing a tank. “Even though I’m using everything in my arsenal, I’m up against armor and steel,” he said. Remy also created a video work of the project, which can be found on his Instagram page. “Art should move you to change,” he emphasized.

The Jewish community of Santa Fe is divided over the issue. “Why is Israel singled out as an aggressor when there are many troubled spots in the world?” asked Rabbi Berel Levertov of the Santa Fe Jewish Center-Chabad. “There are many facets to the story and to highlight Israel is just anti-semitic propaganda.” Rabbi Levertov said he hoped someone would create a work of art depicting other aspects of life in the region, such as Jews and Arabs living in peace. The intention of the mural on Old Pecos Trail, he said, is “not to promote peace, but to instigate and inspire hate. And in today’s environment with the rise in anti-semitism, this is not serving any goodness in the world.” He called the comparison with Native American struggles in the US “unfortunate propaganda” and “just not factually correct, because Jews are Indigenous to the land.”

Jeff Haas, an organizer for Santa Feans for Justice in Palestine, met Guthrie Miller through the Occupy movement in 2012. An integral part of their message, he told Hyperallergic, is to “stop military aid to Israel. All these things are financed by and diplomatically supported by the United States.” Haas, who is Jewish, has largely been behind the previous signage on Miller’s wall, but Remy’s work was a surprise to him as well. “Our organization endorses it, and we’ve gotten a tremendous amount of reaction to it being up there, mostly positive,” he said. “These are larger and much more difficult to destroy.”

Santa Fe resident Richard Lieberman protested to being forced to see the murals while driving through town. “I have to drive by this wall every day? It’s anti-semitic,” he said. “It plays into age-old dangerous and false anti-Jewish tropes. Here we are, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, and we are facing an uptick in dangerous rhetoric that reminds us of those dark times. What we fear is that after the murals come the swastikas.”

In response to accusations of anti-semitism, Remy told the Santa Fe New Mexican: “It’s not anti-Semitic to be sympathetic to a humanitarian crisis.”

Guthrie Miller and Rabbi Levertov are planning to sit down with a small group to discuss their differing points of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and any parallels to the history of indigenous displacement and genocide in the United States. “I would love to meet the artist, and I hope he can attend,” Rabbi Levertov said.

On Monday, January 13, the city of Santa Fe ruled that the murals were not approved under the historic preservation code, and would have to be removed within two weeks. The decision was unrelated to the content of the work; it was due to the medium of papier maché not being included on the list of acceptable materials for exterior walls in a historic district. In response to this decision, Remy told Hyperallergic he was “curious to know who the people are on this board that makes decisions on what is deemed ‘historic’ on Tewa land. … In Santa Fe it seems to be fine to be indigenous but only on the other side of the glass, in terms of the number of institutions that capitalize on our culture.”

SOURCE: Hyperallergic

A “Jeopardy!” Contestant Asked, “What Is Palestine?” The Game Show Gave the Wrong Answer.

14 JANUARY 2020

The producers of the game show “Jeopardy” broadcast a rare, uncorrected error on Friday, when a contestant mistakenly said that the Church of the Nativity, the site in Bethlehem believed by Christians to be the birthplace of Jesus, was in Israel, but was awarded $200 for what millions of viewers were told was the right answer.

Another contestant, Katie Needle, looked puzzled as the show then went to a commercial break. That’s because, moments earlier, Needle had offered the correct answer, “What is Palestine?” — putting her response in the form of a question in keeping with the show’s rules — only to be told that she was wrong, and had $200 deducted from her score.

Compounding the confusion, when the show returned from the break, Needle’s score had been adjusted to return the $200 she had been penalized for a wrong answer, but the money had not been taken away from the contestant who said the church was in Israel, Jack McGuire. The show’s host, Alex Trebek, did not explain the change in scores or offer an on-air correction, as he had earlier in the show when the judges decided after the fact that another answer had mistakenly been judged correct.

To some viewers at home, that looked like an attempt at a Solomonic compromise by show’s judges — a panel overseen by Jeopardy’s executive producer, Harry Friedman, and head writer, Billy Wisse — who perhaps decided that it would be uncomfortable to explain the actual status of Bethlehem, a Palestinian-administered city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

But by failing to adjust McGuire’s score, the producers seemed to put a seal of approval on what even ultranationalist Israelis, who like to refer to the occupied territories as “disputed,” would consider an error. Bethlehem is not even claimed by Israel; it is literally walled off from Israel by a massive concrete barrier, topped with watchtowers, constructed by the Israeli military.

That wall was prominently featured in news reports on ABC, the network that broadcasts “Jeopardy!”, in 2014, when Pope Francis leaned against it in prayer before celebrating mass in Bethlehem’s Manger Square.

The unit of Israel’s military that administers the occupation, known as the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, refers to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” but acknowledges that this region is not part of Israel. According to a COGAT primer on the city, Bethlehem is “the most central crossing from Judea and Samaria into Israel,” and its local economy is supported by “goods exported to Israel.”

When Ariel Sharon, an ultranationalist Israeli prime minister, argued in 2003 that a political solution to the conflict with the Palestinians was necessary because “the idea that we can continue holding under occupation — and it is occupation, you might not like this word, but it’s really an occupation — to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is, in my opinion, a very bad thing for us and for them,” he specified that the alternative was to put Israeli troops permanently in Palestinian cities like Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem.

Although the producers of “Jeopardy!” initially refused to comment, a witness who was in the studio for the taping last fall told The Intercept that they appeared to be aware that they had made a mistake almost immediately. According to the source, who asked not to be identified for fear of violating a promise to keep the results of the prerecorded contest secret, audience members sensed that something was wrong when the show’s producers and writers clustered around Trebek during an extended pause in the taping at that stage.

After intense discussions, the host, whose mic remained on, could be heard saying in a low voice to the producers, “You’re going to have to explain it to them,” apparently instructing the staff to talk to the contestants. When the show’s staff did then address the contestants, a decision seemed to have been made to eliminate the question and both answers from the show, because the scores were reset to what they were before the question, and a new question was recorded in its place. Because McGuire answered that question correctly, a new $200 was added to his score.

After nearly three days of rampant speculation, the producers of “Jeopardy!” released an online correction on Monday afternoon, explaining that after the question about the church in Bethlehem was asked, they “became aware that the clue was flawed as written and that determining an acceptable response would be problematic.” Because of a production error, the substitute question was not used instead of the question about Bethlehem when the episode, which was recorded about three months ago, was broadcast on Friday.

In an interview with The A.V. Club in 2015, the show’s head writer, Billy Wisse, explained that, during the recording of episodes, he sits at the foot of the stage with fellow writers and producers who act as the judges, “Listening, first and foremost, for responses that they give that we didn’t expect that turn out to be correct.”

The scripts for the games, Wisse added, list the answers Trebek is instructed to accept, as well as a “do not accept” list, “if there’s something that seems like a plausible response that we’ve thought of but we know is not right. But sometimes things come out of the blue and we just say, ‘Well, we never thought of that.’”

A spokeswoman for the show did not reply to a request to explain why the producers decided during the pause in taping the episode that it would have been “problematic” to simply accept Needle’s answer that the church is in Palestine.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which admitted Palestine as a member state in 2011, and added the Church of the Nativity to its list of World Heritage sites the following year, the site is in Palestine. But Israel and the United States lobbied against the church’s listing, and remain bitterly opposed Palestine’s UNESCO membership, describing it as part of the Palestinian Authority’s campaign to win international recognition of Palestinian statehood without first agreeing to give Israel a say on where its borders should be.

In 2017, citing what it called “anti-Israel bias,” the Trump administration announced that it was withdrawing from UNESCO, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said his nation would follow suit, “because UNESCO has become a theater of the absurd and instead of preserving history, distorts it.”

Although Palestine has now been recognized as a state by a majority of the world’s nations, that list does not yet include the United States or Israel, which might have influenced the “Jeopardy!” producers who made the decision that their writers had come up with a clue with no “acceptable response.” At the start of the game, the contestants were told that to answer clues in the category “Where’s That Church?” they would be required “to give us the present country.”

Israel plays no role in managing the church in Bethlehem, but the Palestinian Presidency does, through an advisory committee that works in conjunction with three Christian bodies that have been recognized as its protectors for centuries. It’s under the Status Quo of the Holy Places, an international agreement that the Church of the Nativity and the holy sites in Jerusalem should be managed by mutual agreement of religious orders, without external political interference.

While it remains unclear why the show’s judges did not consider Palestine an acceptable answer in this case, it is interesting that they apparently expected any Americans who had heard of the Church of the Nativity to guess that it was in Israel.

Wisse, who now shares the title of co-head writer with Michele Loud, told the A.V. Club that making sure the questions are not too obscure for contestants and the audience is a constant challenge. “A lot of it is based on your age and we have to struggle with that because there’s not a lot of turnover on our staff,” Wisse added. “We continue to get older while the contestants get younger, and so we have to be aware that things that happened in the Reagan administration are not second nature to people who were born during the Reagan administration.”

“We want the contestants to answer the clues correctly,” Loud said in a recent behind-the-scenes video that showed the judges in the studio. “We’re really working hard to make sure that the people at home and the people playing the game in the studio can answer the questions.”

In a way, what the “Jeopardy!” writers assume most Americans will know about the world might act as a barometer of changing views — in this case, about the legitimacy of Israeli claims to the territories it has occupied since 1967, and what Palestinians see as an attempt to erase their culture and history in that land.

Wisse — who presumably vetted the question and, like whoever wrote it, mistakenly thought the church was in Israel — was born in 1962 into a staunchly pro-Israel family. His parents moved the family to Israel when he was nine, before they decided a year later not to settle there permanently.

He could also have inherited a skepticism toward the legitimacy of Palestinian claims to statehood from his mother, Ruth Wisse, a neoconservative writer known for her aggressive defense of Israel and her harsh criticism of Palestinians and Israelis who advocate withdrawal from the occupied territories. (“The obvious key to the success of Arab strategy is the presence, in the disputed territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River, of Palestinian Arabs, people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery,” she wrote in a notorious essay for the journal “Commentary” in 1988.)

While the “Jeopardy!” writer’s own politics could well differ from those of his mother, a spokesperson for the show declined to say if the co-head writer was the same Billy Wisse who wrote a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times in 2007 to complain that the paper’s reporting on stalled Middle East peace talks was unfair to Israel and biased in favor of Palestinians.

If the “Jeopardy!” writing staff made this error because it unthinkingly reflects the default, pro-Israel consensus of older Americans — with a frame of reference formed, as Wisse suggested, during the Reagan era — they might well have been surprised to hear a younger contestant like Needle, who is a Bernie Sanders supporter from Brooklyn, correctly state that Bethlehem is in Palestine. (Another possibility is that they confused the Church of the Nativity with one of the Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem, an area of the West Bank that has also been occupied by Israel since 1967, but which Israel annexed — a move that violated international law, but was recently endorsed by the Trump administration.)

On Twitter, where Needle has shared content from the Democratic Socialists of America and defended Rep. Ilhan Omar, she was widely praised by Palestinians and their supporters for treating the existence of Palestine as a matter of fact.

While she is still barred by “Jeopardy!” from discussing what happened during her run on the show, after Friday’s broadcast, Needle did recommend that followers read her friend’s article in the Journal of Palestine Studies on how the Trump administration’s aid to Palestinian Authority security forces has “tethered Israeli political aims to its remit.”

After Sana Saeed, a producer for Al Jazeera’s AJ+ channel, tweeted her support for the “Jeopardy!” contestant, Needle thanked her, and wrote simply, “Palestine should be free.”

Update: Tuesday, January 14, 6:31 p.m. ET

After this article was originally published, Glenn Fleishman, a two-time Jeopardy champion and a veteran technology reporter, weighed in on Twitter to say that the program “made a mistake in the moment, messed it rectifying it in editing, did Palestinians and viewers a disservice in not explaining it, and should state clearly what happened and apologize.”

As Fleishman suggested, since the false information, that Bethlehem is in Israel, was broadcast to about 10 million Americans, an on-air correction, preferably one stating clearly that the correct answer to the question is Palestine, would seem more appropriate than the confused online-only statement belatedly issued by the show on Monday.

SOURCE: The Intercept

What does Israel really want?

6 JANUARY 2020

When representatives of the Zionist State of Israel are asked by the media regarding what it is that Israel ultimately wants, the answer inevitably is that all they want is peace. All they want is a place where Jews can live in peace.

Any half reasonable person would have to validate that answer as a good and decent thing for anyone to want, let alone a people who had just recently suffered the horrors of the Holocaust.

But while that may be the reality so far as what the Zionist State wishes for it’s (Jewish) citizens, it is the way that they are going about reaching this goal that is so offensive to any reasonably minded person. If we unpack Israel’s desire for peace we find that this goal contains three basic goals within it.

The first of these goals is that Israel be a Zionist State. Zionism is an ideology whose goal it is to transform Jewish identity away from its historic roots in Torah Judaism into a secular nationalistic identity like the European nation states of the last century. As a Zionist state, Israel desires to be a Jewish state in that it is a state that belongs to the Jewish people in a way than non-Jews living in Israel can never attain to. As it stands, Israel has some fifty laws that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews living in Israel, in favour of Jews.

Secondly, Israel wants to be a democracy. This is a very controversial point as the reality of the situation is that Israel is really only a democracy for Jews in Israel. In effect, Israel has four systems of law for the people that it rules over in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The first is the system of democracy for Jews who live in Israel and the settlements in the West Bank. The second system is for Palestinian citizens of Israel that are clearly discriminated against even though they have voting rights and can be members of Parliament. If this were not so, then in what way could it be said that Israel was a Jewish state? The very demand for Israel to be a Jewish state inevitably creates discrimination against non-Jews living in Israel. By any other name, this is racism. The third system is for Palestinians living in the West Bank. They live under the extremely harsh rule of the Israeli military. The fourth system is really no system at all. This system relates to the Gaza Strip, which Israel declares as an “enemy entity”. As such, Gazan’s are persona non grata. Israel considers itself free to treat the Gaza Strip in anyway it sees fit with no recourse to International Law in any way.

Thirdly, Israel wants territory. At the moment it desires to be in control of 100% of historic Palestine.

The problem is that Israel simply can’t have all three of these things at once. If Israel annexes the West Bank and Gaza, then it will somehow have to incorporate millions more Palestinians into the greater state of Israel. It really has only two choices of how to do this. One, it gives Palestinians equal voting rights as Jews. This would put the whole Zionist nature of the state in jeopardy. This is because Palestinians would have electoral power because of their increased numbers. Palestinians would have a chance of having an Arab political party in power and they would inevitably overturn the Zionist nature of the state. The alternative is that they do not give equal voting rights to the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza and Israel would officially become an Apartheid state. This situation would be intolerable in the sense of support from the International community, even the U.S.

In 1948, The Zionists ethnically cleansed nearly 800,000 Palestinians from their homes. This was done so that the newly created Jewish state would have a Jewish majority. Soon after this, Israel instituted laws that gave any Jewish person in the world the right to come to Israel while at the same time it forbade the return of any Palestinians to their former homes. This meant that the state of Israel now had a means of having a permanent Jewish majority within its borders. It was only after Palestinian resistance in Israel had been effectively crushed, that, in 1967, Palestinians in Israel were given voting rights. This ensured that even though Palestinians could vote in Israeli elections, they would never have enough numbers to have any real electoral power.

It is the demand of Israel that they succeed in all these three goals that is the cause of violence in this dispute. Israel does want peace, but in endeavours to get peace in a way that will never obtain it because it continually creates injustice for Palestinians. Without justice, peace has no chance.

SOURCE: Craig Nielsen

Noam Chomsky: US Is a Rogue State and Suleimani’s Assassination Confirms It

7 JANUARY 2020

Trump’s decision to assassinate one of Iran’s most prominent and highly respected military leaders, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, has added yet another name to the list of people killed by the U.S. — which many rightly see as the world’s biggest rogue state.

The assassination has escalated hostilities between Tehran and Washington and created an even more explosive situation in the politically volatile Middle East. As was to be expected, Iran has vowed to retaliate on its own terms for the killing of its general, while also announcing that it will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Iraq’s parliament, in turn, has voted to expel all U.S. troops, but Trump has responded with threats of sanctions if the U.S. is forced to remove its troops from the country.

As world-renowned public intellectual Noam Chomsky points out in this exclusive interview for Truthout, the primary aim of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has been to control the region’s energy resources. Here Chomsky — a university professor emeritus at MIT and laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona who has published more than 120 books on linguistics, global affairs, U.S. foreign policy, media studies, politics and philosophy — offers his analysis of Trump’s reckless act and its possible effects.

C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the U.S. assassination of Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassim Suleimani has reaffirmed Washington’s long-held obsession with Tehran and its clerical regime, which goes all the way back to the late 1970s. What is the conflict between U.S. and Iran all about, and does the assassination of Suleimani constitute an act of war?

Noam Chomsky: Act of war? Perhaps we can settle on reckless international terrorism. It seems that Trump’s decision, on a whim, appalled high Pentagon officials who briefed him on options, on pragmatic grounds. If we wish to look beyond, we might ask how we would react in comparable circumstances.

Suppose that Iran were to murder the second-highest U.S. official, its top general, in the Mexico City international airport, along with the commander of a large part of the U.S.-supported army of an allied nation. Would that be an act of war? Others can decide. It is enough for us to recognize that the analogy is fair enough, and that the pretexts put forth by Washington collapse so quickly on examination that it would be embarrassing to run through them.

Suleimani was greatly respected — not only in Iran, where he was a kind of cult figure. This is recognized by U.S. experts on Iran. One of the most prominent experts, Vali Nasr (no dove, and who detests Suleimani), says that Iraqis, including Iraqi Kurds, “don’t see him as the nefarious figure that the West does, but they see him through the prism of defeating ISIS.” They have not forgotten that when the huge, heavily armed U.S.-trained Iraqi army quickly collapsed, and the Kurdish capital of Erbil, then Baghdad and all of Iraq were about to fall in the hands of ISIS [also known as Daesh], it was Suleimani and the Iraqi Shia militias he organized that saved the country. Not a small matter.

As for what the conflict is all about, the background reasons are not obscure. It has long been a primary principle of U.S. foreign policy to control the vast energy resources of the Middle East: to control, not necessarily to use. Iran has been central to this objective during the post-World War II period, and its escape from the U.S. orbit in 1979 has accordingly been intolerable.

The “obsession” can be traced to 1953, when Britain — the overlord of Iran since oil was discovered there — was unable to prevent the government from taking over its own resources and called on the global superpower to manage the operation. There is no space to review the course of the obsession since in detail, but some highlights are instructive.

Britain called on Washington with some reluctance. To do so meant surrendering more of its former empire to the U.S. and declining even more to the role of “junior partner” in global management, as the foreign office recognized with dismay. The Eisenhower administration took over. It organized a military coup that overthrew the parliamentary regime and re-installed the Shah, restoring the oil concession to its rightful hands, with the U.S. taking over 40 percent of the former British concession. Interestingly, Washington had to force U.S. majors to accept this gift; they preferred to keep to cheaper Saudi oil (which the U.S. had taken over from Britain in a mini war during World War II). But under government coercion, they were forced to comply: one of those unusual but instructive incidents revealing how the government sometimes pursues long-term imperial interests over the objections of the powerful corporate sector that largely controls and even staffs it — with considerable resonance in U.S.-Iran relations in recent years.

The Shah proceeded to institute a harsh tyranny. He was regularly cited by Amnesty International as a leading practitioner of torture, always with strong U.S. support as Iran became one of the pillars of U.S. power in the region, along with the Saudi family dictatorship and Israel. Technically, Iran and Israel were at war. In reality, they had extremely close relations, which surfaced publicly after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. The tacit relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are surfacing much more clearly now within the framework of the reactionary alliance that the Trump administration is forging as a base for U.S. power in the region: the Gulf dictatorships, the Egyptian military dictatorship and Israel, linked to Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil and other similar elements. A rare semblance of a coherent strategy in this chaotic administration.

The Carter administration strongly supported the Shah until the last moment. High U.S. officials — [Henry] Kissinger, [Dick] Cheney, [Donald] Rumsfeld — called on U.S. universities (mainly my own, MIT, over strong student protest but faculty acquiescence) to aid the Shah’s nuclear programs, even after he made clear that he was seeking nuclear weapons. When the popular uprising overthrew the Shah, the Carter administration was apparently split on whether to endorse the advice of de facto Israeli Ambassador Uri Lubrani, who counselled that “Tehran can be taken over by a very relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel. I mean the men who would lead that force will have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they’d have to kill ten thousand people.”

It didn’t work, and soon Ayatollah Khomeini took over on an enormous wave of popular enthusiasm, establishing the brutal clerical autocracy that still reigns, crushing popular protests.

Shortly after, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with strong U.S. backing, unaffected by his resort to chemical weapons that caused huge Iranian casualties; his monstrous chemical warfare attacks against Iraqi Kurds were denied by Reagan, who sought to blame Iran and blocked congressional condemnation.

Finally, the U.S. pretty much took over, sending naval forces to ensure Saddam’s control of the Gulf. After the U.S. guided missile cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian airliner in a clearly marked commercial corridor, killing 290 passengers and returning to port to great acclaim and awards for exceptional service, Khomeini capitulated, recognizing that Iran cannot fight the U.S. President Bush then invited Iraqi nuclear scientists to Washington for advanced training in nuclear weapons production, a very serious threat against Iran.

Conflicts continued without a break, in more recent years focusing on Iran’s nuclear programs. These conflicts ended (in theory) with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2015, an agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN, plus Germany, in which Iran agreed to sharply curtail its nuclear programs — none of them weapons programs — in return for Western concessions. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which carries out intensive inspections, reports that Iran fully lived up to the agreement. U.S. intelligence agrees.

The topic elicits much debate, unlike another question: Has the U.S. observed the agreement? Apparently not. The JCPOA states that all participants are committed not to impede in any way Iran’s reintegration into the global economy, particularly the global financial system, which the U.S. effectively controls. The U.S. is not permitted to interfere “in areas of trade, technology, finance and energy” and others.

While these topics are not investigated, it appears that Washington has been interfering steadily.

President Trump claims that his effective demolition of the JCPOA is an effort to negotiate an improvement. It’s a worthy objective, easily realized. Any concerns about Iranian nuclear threats can be overcome by establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East, with intensive inspections like those successfully implemented under the JCPOA.

As we have discussed before, this is quite straightforward. Regional support is overwhelming. The Arab states initiated the proposal long ago, and continue to agitate for it, with the strong support of Iran and the former nonaligned countries (G-77, now 132 countries). Europe agrees. In fact, there is only one barrier: the U.S., which regularly vetoes the proposal when it comes up at the review meetings of the Non-Proliferation Treaty countries, most recently by Obama in 2015. The U.S. will not permit inspection of Israel’s enormous nuclear arsenal, or even concede its existence, though it is not in doubt. The reason is simple: under U.S. law (the Symington Amendment), conceding its existence would require terminating all aid to Israel.

So the simple method of ending the alleged concern about an Iranian threat is ruled out and the world must face grim prospects.

Since these topics are scarcely mentionable in the U.S., it is perhaps worthwhile to reiterate another forbidden matter: The U.S. and U.K. have a special responsibility to work to establish a NWFZ in the Middle East. They are formally committed to do so under Article 14 of UN Security Council Resolution 687, which they invoked in their effort to concoct some thin legal basis for their invasion of Iraq, claiming that Iraq had violated the Resolution with nuclear weapons programs. Iraq hadn’t, as they were soon forced to concede. But the U.S. continues to violate the Resolution to the present in order to protect its Israeli client and to allow Washington to violate U.S. law.

Interesting facts, which, unfortunately, are apparently too incendiary to see the light of day.

There’s no point reviewing the years that followed in the hands of the man “sent by God to save Israel from Iran,” in the words of the serious figure of the administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Returning to the original question, there’s quite a lot to contemplate about what the conflict is about. In a phrase, primarily imperial power, damn the consequences.

The term “rogue state” (used widely by the U.S. State Department) refers to the pursuit of state interests without regard to accepted standards of international behavior and the basic principles of international law. Given that definition, isn’t the U.S. a star example of a rogue state?

State Department officials are not the only ones to use the term “rogue state.” It has also been used by prominent American political scientists — referring to the State Department. Not Trump’s, Clinton’s.

During the era between Reagan’s murderous terrorist atrocities in Central America and Bush’s invasion of Iraq, they recognized that for much of the world, the U.S. was “becoming the rogue superpower,” considered “the single greatest external threat to their societies,” and that, “In the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States” (Harvard professor of the science of government and government adviser Samuel Huntington; President of the American Political Science Association Robert Jervis. Both in the main establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, 1999, 2001).

After Bush took over, qualifications were dropped. It was asserted as fact that the U.S. “has assumed many of the very features of the ‘rogue nations’ against which it has … done battle.” Others outside the U.S. mainstream might think of different words for the worst crime of the millennium, a textbook example of aggression without credible pretext, the “supreme international crime” of Nuremberg.

And others sometimes express their opinions. Gallup runs regular polls of international opinion. In 2013 (the Obama years), it asked for the first time, which country is the greatest threat to world peace. The U.S. won; no one else even came close. Far behind in second place was Pakistan, presumably inflated by the Indian vote. Iran — the greatest threat to world peace in U.S. discourse — was scarcely mentioned.

That was also the last time the question was asked, though there needn’t have been much concern. It does not seem to have been reported in the U.S.

We might ponder these questions a little further. We are supposed to revere the U.S. Constitution, especially conservatives. We must therefore revere Article VI, which declares that valid treaties shall be “the supreme law of the land” and officials must be bound by them. In the post-war years, by far the most important such treaty is the UN Charter, instituted under U.S. initiative. It bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs; specifically, the common refrain that “all options are open” with regard to Iran. And all cases of resort to force unless explicitly authorized by the Security Council or in defense against armed attack (a narrowly construed notion) until the Security Council, which must be immediately notified, is able to act to terminate the attack.

We might consider what the world would look like if the U.S. Constitution were considered applicable to the U.S., but let’s put that interesting question aside — not, however, without mentioning that there is a respected profession, called “international lawyers and law professors,” who can learnedly explain that words don’t mean what they mean.

Iraq has struggled since the U.S. invasion in 2003 to maintain a balanced situation with both Washington and Tehran. However, the Iraqi parliament has voted after Suleimani’s assassination to expel all U.S. troops. Is this likely to happen? And, if it does, what impact would it have on future U.S.- Iraq-Iran relations, including the fight against ISIS?

We don’t know whether it will happen. Even if the Iraqi government orders the U.S. to leave, will it do so? It’s not obvious, and as always, public opinion in the U.S., if organized and committed, can help provide an answer.

As for ISIS, Trump has just given it another lease on life, just as he gave it a “get out of jail free” card when he betrayed Syrian Kurds, leaving them to the mercy of their bitter enemies Turkey and Assad after they had fulfilled their function of fighting the war against ISIS (with 11,000 casualties, as compared with half-dozen Americans). ISIS organized at first with jail breaks and is now free to do so again.

ISIS has been given a welcome gift in Iraq as well. The eminent Middle East historian Ervand Abrahamian observes:

The killing of Soleimani … has actually provided a wonderful opportunity for ISIS to recover. There will be a resurgence of ISIS very much in Mosul, northern Iraq. And that, paradoxically, will help Iran, because the Iraqi government will have no choice but to rely more and more on Iran to be able to contain ISIS [which led the defense of Iraq against the ISIS onslaught, under Suleimani’s command] … Trump has pulled out of north Iraq, of the area where ISIS was, pulled the rug out from the Kurds, and now he’s declared war on the pro-Iranian militias. And the Iraqi Army has not been in the past capable of dealing with ISIS. So, the obvious thing is now, the Iraqi government, how are they going to deal with the revival of ISIS? … they will have no choice but to actually rely more and more on Iran. So, Trump has actually undermined his own policy, if he wants to eliminate Iran’s influence in Iraq.

Much as W. Bush did when he invaded Iraq.

We shouldn’t forget, however, that enormous power can recover from muddle-headedness and failure — if the domestic population permits it to.

Putin appears to have outmaneuvered the U.S. not only on Syria, but almost everywhere else on the Middle East front. What is Moscow after in the Middle East, and what’s your explanation for the often infantile diplomacy displayed by the United States in the region and in fact around the world?

One goal, substantially achieved, was to gain control of Syria. Russia entered the conflict in 2015 after advanced weapons provided by the CIA to the mostly jihadi armies had stopped Assad’s forces. Russian aircraft turned the tide, and without concern for the incredible civilian toll, the Russian-backed coalition has taken control of most of the country. Russia is now the external arbiter.

Elsewhere, even among Washington’s Gulf allies, Putin has presented himself, apparently with some success, as the one trustworthy outside actor. Trump’s bull-in-a-China-shop diplomacy (if that is the right word) is winning few friends outside of Israel, on which he is lavishing gifts, and the other members of the reactionary alliance taking shape. Any thought of “soft power” has been pretty much abandoned. But U.S. reserves of hard power are enormous. No other country can impose harsh sanctions at will and compel third parties to honor them, at cost of expulsion from the international financial system. And, of course, no one else has hundreds of military bases around the world or anything like Washington’s advanced military power and ability to resort to force at will and with impunity. The idea of imposing sanctions on the U.S., or anything beyond tepid criticism, borders on ludicrous.

And so, it is likely to remain even as “in the eyes of much of the world, in fact, the prime rogue state today is the United States,” considerably more so than 20 years ago when these words were uttered, unless and until the population compels state power to pursue a different course.

SOURCE: Truthout

Israel/OPT: ICC investigation into war crimes a ‘historic step towards justice’

20 December 2019

Responding to today’s announcement from the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, that her office’s preliminary examination into the “Situation in Palestine” has concluded that war crimes have been committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and that “all the statutory criteria under the Rome Statute for the opening of an investigation have been met”, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director, Philip Luther, said:

“Today’s decision by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is a historic step towards justice after decades of war crimes and other crimes under international law committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

“This announcement offers a crucial opportunity to break the cycle of impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity. An International Criminal Court investigation paves the way for the thousands that have suffered as a result of these crimes to finally gain long overdue access to truth, justice and reparation.”

Today’s decision by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is a historic step towards justice after decades of war crimes and other crimes under international law committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories 

Philip Luther, Amnesty International

However, before proceeding with an investigation the Prosecutor has sought confirmation from the ICC’s judges “as swiftly as possible” that the territory over which the Court may exercise its jurisdiction comprises the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

“It has already been five years since the preliminary examination of the situation in Palestine was announced and it is vital that the International Criminal Court’s judges reach a conclusion swiftly and avoid further delays,” said Philip Luther.

“For over half a century, those suspected of criminal responsibility for crimes under international law, including war crimes, have been allowed to escape justice for atrocities committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

Background:

On 1 January 2015 the State of Palestine lodged a declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the ICC over alleged crimes committed in the “occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, since June 13, 2014”.

On 16 January 2015 the ICC Prosecutor announced the opening of a preliminary examination into the “Situation in Palestine” in order to establish whether the Rome Statute criteria into opening an ICC investigation are met. 

Amnesty International has been calling for ICC Prosecutor to investigate crimes committed by all parties to the armed conflict, so that prosecutions may take place in fair trials.

For years, Amnesty International and other organizations have gathered and published compelling evidence that war crimes and other crimes under international law committed by Israel and Palestinian armed groups.

SOURCE: Amnesty International