When sectarianism and tribalism become institutionalized, it often follows that politicians become preoccupied with holding on to personal rewards of power instead of tackling national problems

by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
Ha’aretz
May 18, 2012

http://www.meforum.org/3234/south-sudan-chaos

When the state of South Sudan came into existence last July, with great fanfare, Israel was one of the first nations to recognize it, having provided support for South Sudanese leaders since the 1960s during the first civil war. Indeed, in late December, Salva Kiir Mayardit – the president of South Sudan – came to Jerusalem, where he discussed the unique prospect of locating the country’s embassy there. It was therefore no surprise that President Shimon Peres spoke so enthusiastically of the visit as a "moving and historic moment" for him and Israel.

Now, less than a year later, in light of Israel’s plans to deport South Sudanese refugees, it is worth taking a look at how the world’s youngest nation is faring.

Arguably, the worst problem the country faces is tribalism, despite the unity that was cultivated among South Sudanese rebels during decades of resistance to Khartoum’s aggressive campaigns of Islamization against the animists and Christians in the south, prior to independence.

Early signs of this malaise became apparent when low-level clashes between the Lou Nuer and Murle tribes in Jonglei state in the east of the country – going as far back as 2009 – suddenly intensified in August 2011. By the start of 2012, over 3,000 were dead and more than 100,000 displaced. The origins of these tensions lie in the mutual theft of cattle.

In an attempt to calm tensions, an agreement was signed early this month to end the violence, by tribal leaders representing six ethnic groups in Jonglei: the Dinka (who are regarded as politically dominant in South Sudan’s government), Kachipo, Jie, Nuer, Anyuak and Murle.

Stability in Jonglei is crucial to South Sudan’s economic future, because it offers a potential pipeline route that can go through Ethiopia to Djibouti, making it possible for the country to export its vast oil reserves without having to rely on its northern neighbor. However, Sudan has not only imposed heavy transit fees on South Sudan; it has also permitted itself the liberty of seizing part of the oil production when those fees haven’t been paid.

Yet the unilateral decision to respond to Sudan’s policies by suspending oil production before it had laid an alternative pipeline can only be described as folly on the part of the leadership in Juba, the capital.

As a confidential World Bank report recently leaked to the Sudan Tribune revealed, the shutdown of the oil industry – together with the austerity measures subsequently adopted by the government – could increase the poverty rate from 51 percent this year to 83 percent by 2013, while infant mortality is expected to double in the same period.

The reason such startling statistics could become reality is that, like post-Saddam Iraq, South Sudan is extremely dependent on petroleum, with oil exports accounting for 98 percent of government revenue. Unfortunately, Mayardit and his cabinet appear to be oblivious to the implications of their decision-making.

Meanwhile, it is not only in the rural areas of South Sudan that tribalism is evident. The phenomenon extends even to the university campus in the capital. As the Dubai newspaper The National reported, a minor incident at a soccer match on March 27 among Juba University alumni led to a square-off between 100 students the following morning. Since then, the university has been closed.

The newspaper also interviewed the president of the student union at the university, Ajang Ajang, who pointed out that "people still think about their tribes first, their nation second." Many members of the union sought to expel him after he decided to ban tribal associations on campus in February.

If such tribalism is evident on the country’s main university campus among students who will likely constitute South Sudan’s future elite, then it should come as no surprise that the president appears to be displaying authoritarian tendencies.

For when sectarianism and tribalism become institutionalized, it often follows that politicians become preoccupied with holding on to personal rewards of power instead of tackling national problems, and so a leading figure will probably emerge to assert himself as a strongman. Mayardit has been behaving in precisely this manner.

For example, The National recently highlighted the case of James Okuk, an employee of South Sudan’s foreign ministry. When he returned home from a trip to Brazil in October he was arrested by police, held at an abandoned house for four days and charged with "offending the president" simply because he wrote some articles critical of Mayardit’s tenure.

Okuk is now on trial. The case may partly have to do with the fact that Okuk’s uncle is Lam Akol, who broke away from the country’s ruling political faction – the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM ) – to form the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement: Democratic Change (SPLM-DC ) in 2009.

Akol has reportedly been resented by the Dinkas who dominate the SPLM for quite some time, but he has the support of the Shilluk people of the country’s northeast. Of course, Akol’s residing in Khartoum while his children finish their schooling there hardly helps his image.

When South Sudan declared independence, there were high hopes for a model democratic country in sub-Saharan Africa, but developments so far point to a country plagued by tribalism, government authoritarianism and disastrous economic policies that could greatly exacerbate poverty levels in the country, such that one may have to agree with the World Bank’s fears of a "state collapse." A bleak outlook indeed.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an adjunct fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Why Israel is a hotbed for flash storage innovation

Israel has long been a nation that draws in big corporate R&D facilities and acquisitions

.

By Lucas Mearian, Computerworld
May 17, 2012 08:50 AM ET

At the same time EMC was in Israel trying to strike a deal to buy XtremeIO, NetApp and Dell were also there vying for the flash storage array maker’s intellectual property.

EMC’s acquisition of the NAND flash storage company followed a similar move by Apple when it purchased Israeli-based flash drive maker Anobit in January.

"Particularly in flash memory they have really good talent over there," said Ryan Chien, an analyst with market research firm IHS iSuppli.

Flash storage is at the forefront of technology powering current industry trends such as cloud services, virtualization and online transaction processing. Because of that, flash development is a red-hot industry, analysts said. That fact has not been lost on Israel.

Israel has long been a nation that draws in big corporate R&D facilities and acquisitions. Microsoft and Cisco both built their first non-U.S. R&D facilities there, for instance. Google has two R&D centers in Israel now; Intel has four. Intel also has two manufacturing facilities

In 2010-2011, Israel was ranked No. 1 in the world in terms of the quality of its scientific research institutions by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum. It also ranked seventh in its capacity for innovation.

EMC itself has about 800 employees in Israel, part of an R&D center that includes VMware development. In 2010, Micron also purchased Numonyx, which operates a flash fabrication in Israel.

R&D centers in Israel (Source: State of Israel Ministry of Industry, Trade & Labor)

In flash, software rules

When it comes to engineering NAND flash storage products, writing code to manage how the non-volatile memory is used is key, especially as the size of flash chips continues to shrink. (Smaller chips increase the likelihood of increased data errors as electrons leak through thinner and thinner silicon cell walls.) Controlling how data is laid out on flash chips also results in longer product life.

On top of managing the NAND flash itself, solid-state drive (SSD) systems need software that enables optimum performance in conjunction with I/O hungry applications and hard disk drives. For example, tiering technology migrates data from low-end disks to high-end disks to flash drives.

Israel has long been home to flash storage development. For example, USB flash drives were invented by the Israeli company M-Systems in partnership with IBM. M-Systems was bought out by flash drive maker SanDisk in 2006.

"EMC is looking at the NAND resources in Israel, scientists who can handle all the issues with lower-lithography NAND," Chien said.

In 2010, EMC hired Orna Berry — formerly the chief scientist of Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor — to be the general manager of its Center of Excellence (COE) facility in Beersheba, directly adjacent to Ben-Gurion University. The COE is responsible for R&D in areas such as security, high availability systems and flash memory and runs EMC’s anti-fraud service for the company’s worldwide user base.

The Israeli difference

Because of Israel’s diminutive size and its location, technological innovation is more a matter of "life and death," Berry said. "Many of the technologies, if we don’t invent them, we also [could not] buy them. It’s a political issue. Consequently, we often need to be self-sufficient in certain technologies. On the other hand, being first to market often gives us an opportunity to have a place in the market."

Israel’s military-industrial complex is also tightly intertwined with academia, helping to develop and promote programs that foster technology innovation and corporate incubation. "I would say that almost more than any other government, maybe with the exception of Finland and Singapore, Israel has been extremely focused on turning know-how into economical or defense value as a policy," Berry said.

Mark Peters, an analyst with market research firm ESG, agreed. What Israel has to offer is a large population of students steeped in mathematics and science. The country has no natural resources to speak of and doesn’t export any significant retail items, Peters said.

"When was the last time you saw a tag that said ‘Made in Israel?’" Peters said. "For Israel, education is all about sophisticated science and math. As a country, they’re not focused on low-margin products. They’re always at the advanced level."

Israel’s top schools, such as Tel Aviv University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, are bastions of high-tech education.

Additionally, Peters noted that an unusually high number of well-educated Russians have immigrated to Israel since the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Peters also pointed to high military R&D spending, and a strong venture capitalist community for the nation’s tech success.

Big companies on the prowl

Every large technology company – from IBM to Hewlett-Packard – is considering acquiring a full range of solid-state products, from drives to arrays, Peters said. If they don’t, they’ll be left behind.

"They’ve got to be shopping around everything," he said. "Management, ultimately, for solid-state technology has got to be up and down the entire stack," he said.

For example, last year flash drive maker SanDisk purchased Pliant Technologies for its enterprise-class flash drives. It then turned around and purchased flash management software vendor FlashSoft this past February.

EMC’s acquisition roadmap to date has included nine Israeli-based companies, including Kashya, nLayers and Proactivity. But XtremIO is its largest acquisition by far, with EMC reportedly spending $430 million on a company that has yet to ship its first product.

While the XtremIO buyout raised the eyebrows of some industry pundits who doubted the wisdom of the deal, according to Peters and Kobi Rozengarten, a managing partner at Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP). JVP is one of several major investors in XtremIO, which garnered $25 million in venture funding since its founding in 2009.

Peters and Rozengarten said EMC wanted superior "architectural" software — and got it.

"Today’s flash is a very unreliable device with poor retention and endurance (especially when scaling to 20 nanometers and bellow)," Rozengarten said. "This requires a sophisticated ECC based on [a digital signal processor] and new flash controller know-how. In this space, Israeli’s companies are leading with companies such as Anobit and Densbits."

In fact, Israel has been a hub for many leading companies and technologies including semiconductors, communications, security and storage, Rozengarten said.

As a result, it has become a nation of high-profile startups that don’t last long before they’re scooped up by big international players, Peters said.

Outside Israel, the flash storage market is flush with vendors for the picking, from all-flash array makers such as Nimbus, Violin Memory, Texas Memory Systems, Pure Storage, and Whiptail to PCIe flash card vendors such as Fusion-io, Intel, Micron and Virident. There are also all-flash appliance makers such as SolidFire and Tintri. Of the latter companies, Violin is the least likely to be acquired as it has its sights on going public.

Flash arrays: the next battle ground

Chien expects flash array products to be the next battle ground among vendors. The industry will consolidate quickly over the next several years, he said, as big storage vendors such as Dell, NetApp and HP rush to scoop up flash technology in much the same way they did data deduplication companies a few years ago.

That, no doubt, played into EMC’s decision to snap up XtremIO.

One reason for the battle is that flash storage’s ultra-high performance characteristics address specific applications that are on the leading edge of corporate IT projects — namely cloud, virtualization and web-based services.

For example, cloud service providers want arrays that have the ability to offer multi-tenancy, or many users on a single server or array, but without hitting I/O performance. Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDIs) place a heavy I/O burden on servers when large corporate deployments boot up in the morning and shut down and refresh at night.

Although Dell declined to comment on whether it’s in the hunt for flash storage vendors, a NetApp spokesperson said by e-mail that the company is "always on the lookout for opportunities to acquire technology and businesses that complement and enhance our product and solution portfolio.

"We cannot disclose details around our interest in a specific space or target," the spokesperson said. "NetApp remains interested in pursuing corporate development opportunities that help us to gain share, whether it be through acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and/or reseller agreements."

When it came to an XtremIO deal, both NetApp and Dell were at a disadvantage. EMC had been an investor in the company from the beginning, according to at least two sources.

More importantly, EMC was not looking for just another flash hardware product, Peters said. It wanted XtremIO’s flash management intellectual property — the software.

In remarks after the purchase, EMC spokesman Dave Farmer did not refer to XtremIO’s product as a flash array but as "an architecture."

"EMC, whatever else you may think of them, doesn’t do a lot of stupid things," Peters said. "For the next few years, the industry will be focused on storage management and not flash technology."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas’s RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

All contents copyright 1995-2012 Network World, Inc. http://www.networkworld.com

by Hussein Ibish | Daily Beast,May 17, 2012

It’s easy to understand why so many people are giving up on negotiations and a two-state solution, and instead are looking for “creative alternatives.” Israeli-Palestinian talks are at an impasse. The two sides haven’t seemed this far apart since the second intifada. The number of settlers and settlements continues to baloon relentlessly. Israel’s government appears united behind recalcitrant policies, while the Palestinians appear hopelessly divided.

But any purported “creative alternatives” to a negotiated two-state solution need to be subjected to a simple litmus test before they can be taken seriously. They have to be plausibly acceptable to all parties that would need to agree in order for them to be realized. If any such “alternatives” are by definition unacceptable to any of the parties, then they’re not serious ideas. In most cases, they quickly reveal themselves to be thinly disguised versions of long-standing maximalist fantasies.

A man places a sticker on a car in Jerusalem. (Awad Awad / AFP / Getty Images)

Take, for instance, the perennial fantasy on the pro-Israeli right that “Jordan is Palestine” or that Egypt can somehow be induced to take responsibility for Gaza. Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians all categorically reject any such idea, so it can’t happen.

Similarly, in pro-Palestinian circles the idea of a South Africa-style “one-state” solution of a single entity for all Israelis and Palestinians, including refugees, based on "one-person one-vote," is a total nonstarter for the overwhelming majority of Israelis. So that, too, simply won’t happen.

Some of the most dangerous “creative alternatives” are being increasingly floated on the pro-Israeli right, especially the idea of a greater Israel including the occupied territories but without full or equal citizenship, or voting rights, for its Palestinian population. In other words, formalized, permanent apartheid.

Recent articles advocating or describing some version of such an approach have been published by MK Danny Danon, Rep. Joe Walsh, Jay Bushinsky, and Caroline Glick, among many others. This is also the clear implication of resolutions adopted by several US state legislatures and, apparently, the Republican National Committee.

There seems to be a real willingness on the pro-Israeli right to sacrifice Israel’s “democracy” in order to retain the West Bank, and reduce its “Jewish character” to despotic minority rule and unapologetic, discriminatory, ethnocracy.

Of course any effort to impose such a system would simply be to formalize what already exists, and has since 1967. It can’t possibly be anything but a recipe for further, intensified and unrelenting conflict since it deprives millions of Palestinians of their most basic human and political rights on a permanent basis.

Others have tried to elaborate alternative approaches that present themselves as more constructive and grounded in the understanding that nothing that is categorically rejected by one of the key parties can offer a conflict-ending solution.

Ami Ayalon, Orni Petruschka and Gilead Sher, writing in the New York Times, proposed another form of unilateralism, essentially proposing that Israel create provisional borders based on the West Bank separation barrier, end all settlement activity beyond those territories and in Arab parts of occupied East Jerusalem, and create a plan to relocate 100,000 settlers behind the wall. Palestinians would be tempted to see the imposition of this unilaterally-created “temporary” border as being, in effect, permanent, but the authors insist Israel should remain open to negotiating final status issues in the future.

A similar "alternative idea" has been floated in the past by the new Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz. He suggested creating “an independent, disarmed Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza” with “temporary borders” and negotiations on all final status issues as a first phase, to be followed by the implementation of agreements as a second phase.

Whatever the intentions behind such ideas, perceptions on the other side will be very difficult to manage. When the 2000 Camp David summit failed, my father asked me what I thought the Israelis would do. My response was immediate: over time, and carefully, they will seek to impose by force the borders Palestinians have rejected at the negotiating table. The creation of the separation barrier has added to widespread Arab concerns that Israel intends, and welcomes the opportunity for rationalizing, a unilaterally imposed “solution.”

But if they cannot be accepted, either immediately or over the long run, by the other side, none of these “creative alternatives” offer what a negotiated two state agreement does: a conflict-ending solution in which both sides have an equal and inescapable national imperative to uphold.

As Israel’s experiences in Gaza and southern Lebanon demonstrate, when there isn’t a party on the other side with a vested interest in making an arrangement work, unilateralism in this conflict provides no solutions whatsoever. By contrast, Israel’s peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt have been maintained by all sides, because they all have a stake in making them work.

Whatever “creative alternatives” might seem appealing during the current interregnum, remember all roads ultimately lead back to the negotiating table.

Reprinted from Daily Alert, May 16. 2012

• The Meaning of Nakba Day – Jonathan S. Tobin
  Nakba is an Arabic word which means disaster, and that is what those who participated in the protests consider the founding of the State of Israel on May 15, 1948. The focus on 1948 is significant. For those who claim the Middle East conflict is about borders or Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the prominence given Nakba commemorations ought to be an embarrassment. It highlights that the goal of the Palestinians isn’t an independent state alongside Israel. Their goal is to eradicate Israel and replace it with yet another Arab majority country.
      The Nakba narrative draws no distinction between the pre- and post-1967 borders. The Jewish presence within the internationally recognized borders of the State of Israel is treated as just as illegitimate as that of the settlers in the territories. This is not a minor point, because for the Palestinians, the desire for the descendants of the 1948 refugees to "return" to Israel is tantamount to demanding the dismantling of the Jewish state.
      The war that created the refugees was one started by Arabs whose goal was not to share the land but to prevent Jewish sovereignty on any part of it. That they and their descendants still regret this reversal of fortune may be understandable, but it is not a point on which they have any right to demand the world’s sympathy. (Commentary)
• For Jews from Arab Lands, a Different History of Displacement and Loss – Matti Friedman
  I have spent a great deal of time in the past four years interviewing people born and raised in Aleppo, Syria. Some are descended from families with roots in Aleppo going back more than two millennia, to Roman times. None of them lives there now. On November 30, 1947, a day after the UN voted to partition Palestine into two states, one for Arabs and one for Jews, mobs in Aleppo stalked Jewish neighborhoods, looting houses and burning synagogues.
      One man I interviewed remembered fleeing his home, a barefoot nine-year-old, moments before it was set on fire. Abetted by the government, the rioters burned 50 Jewish shops, five schools, 18 synagogues and an unknown number of homes. In Damascus, rioters killed 13 Jews, including eight children, in August 1948, and there were similar events in other Arab cities.
      At the time of the UN vote, there were about 10,000 Jews in Aleppo. By the mid-1950s there were 2,000, living in fear. Today there are none. Similar scripts played out across the Islamic world as some 850,000 Jews were forced from their homes. In Aleppo, Tripoli, Baghdad and elsewhere, the people who live in or around the Jews’ old homes still know who used to own them and how they left.
      Roughly half of the 6 million Jews in Israel today came from the Muslim world or are descended from people who did. The simple narrative of Nakba Day conveniently erases the uncomfortable truth that half of Israel’s Jews are there not because of the Nazis but because of the Arabs themselves. (Times of Israel)

Palestinians Riot on Nakba Day – Khaled Abu Toameh and Tovah Lazaroff
One Israeli soldier, three border policemen and 270 Palestinians were lightly hurt, mostly from tear gas inhalation, in clashes in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem Tuesday as Palestinians marked the "Nakba," meaning "catastrophe," their loss to Israel in 1948. In Ramallah, children marched into Martyr Yasser Arafat Square beating drums and wearing black T-shirts that read "1948." PA representatives including Prime Minister Salam Fayyad led the rally. "The right of return is sacred and cannot be compromised," Fayyad told the crowd. (Jerusalem Post)

    See also Nakba Day Defanged – Mitch Ginsburg
On May 15, "Nakba Day" demonstrations were limited to the West Bank. Bassem Eid, a Palestinian human rights worker, attributed the relative calm to the state of Palestinian society, which he described as frustrated, fractured, tired and hopeless. "The back of Palestinian society has been broken by the Hamas-Fatah separation," he said, noting that within the West Bank, the rifts within Fatah were so deep there was no hope of any coordinated uprising. "There cannot be an intifada so long as we have an intrafada," he said. (Times of Israel)

    See also Israel: Palestinians Should Direct Anger at Their Own Leaders – Herb Keinon
Rather than demonstrating against Israel, the Palestinians should be directing their "Nakba Day" anger at the extremist Palestinian leadership that 64 years ago rejected any accommodation, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev said Tuesday. "The Palestinian leadership in 1947 and 1948 adopted an extremist and maximalist position. Unlike the Jewish leadership, they rejected partition and refused to accept a Jewish state even in truncated borders."  (Jerusalem Post)

“People are fed up with politics and are looking how to improve their daily lives. If they have skills, they can get work.”

by Kathleen Peratis | May 15, 2012 10:01 AM EDT

Gaza City, Gaza—

Is the two state solution dead? I don’t think so but the conversation is being radically transformed into one that no longer accepts the binary “two states or bust” paradigm and begins to imagine—or live—alternatives.

I spoke to young people, officials and activists in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza over the last two weeks.  I was surprised at what I heard.

Palestinian school children do their homework on candle light during a power cut in Gaza City. (Mohammed Abed / AFP / Getty Images)

A large chunk of the Gaza economy comes from international donations, money from UNHRW and other multilateral organizations.  A pretty young blogger in Gaza City, Jehan Al Farr, told me that these governmental programs for job creation are “nothing but machines that pull people in and suck out their creativity and motivation.”  True entrepreneurship, she says, occurs outside the box, not inside a donor-welfare society. I told her she sounded like a member of the Tea Party.  Having spent a year at a Colorado high school (she speaks perfect English), she knew exactly what I meant. She laughed and told me that she is fed up with politics (she is 25) and believes she and her generation can only end the occupation when they stop caring about it and instead, try to go about a normal life of book clubs and social events.  “No more death, no more blood.  Just focus on the positive.” The siege has become “more mental and internalized,” she said.  For her, the survival technique is evading that box that is affected by borders and the siegek with blogging and other IT enterprise. Gaza City hotelier Jawdat Al Khodary said much the same thing.  “People are fed up with politics and are looking how to improve their daily lives.  If they have skills, they can get work.”

These coping strategies and this hopefulness seem to me to be a lot of whistling in the dark.  Things look worse than they did six months ago when I was here last—more garbage on the streets, more closed shops, less construction.  And while Jehan told me she didn’t feel constrained by her sex at all, the statistics tell a different story. Everything that goes wrong for women in poor and depressed places happens here too. One trivial but stark visual was the offices of the Hamas-affiliated media group Airessaiah (print, web and radio station). The editor in chief, Wasam Afifa, regaled me with his liberal values and harsh critique of Hamas and then showed me around the offices. The main reporters’ space is large, light and airy; the women reporters’ room (at least there are some) is small dark and shabby. When I told Jehan and showed her the pictures I had taken, she shrugged and said, “Well, that is the culture.”

I also asked her about the lack of any palpable reaction on the street to the hunger strikers, the settlement of which was, on the day of our conversation, two days away.  She said she blogs about it, but as for activism in the old sense, there is none.  In fact, shop owners in Gaza City had previously been asked by local activists to close up for two hours in support of the hunger strikers. Hotelier Al Khodary told me that only two agreed to do so.  He himself thought the effort fatuous. The demonstration in Gaza City—about 1000 people—on the day the settlement was announced had been carefully managed by Hamas.

The West Bank too is remarkably quiet, apart from important but small-scale nonviolent resistance to the path of the security barrier.  I asked people in the West Bank and in Israel what they make of that. Are Palestinians just ground down from oppression, knowing any protest might be (and sometimes is) met with fierce Israeli opposition?  Is the footprint of military occupation getting a bit smaller, with fewer checkpoints and fewer nighttime raids? Is increased prosperity enough to make the “struggle” not worth the candle?

Palestinian Israeli human rights activist Ghaida Renawie-Zoabi  was stunned by my question and a little shamed by what looks like Palestinian passivity. She promised me that she will give much thought to this question, so I am staying tuned.

Khaled Sabawi, a young Canadian-born Palestinian entrepreneur in Ramallah, credits both apparent prosperity and exhaustion. And, he says, sounding what was becoming a familiar theme, he just wants to get down to business. He has given up thinking about one state-two states, and believes his people will gain their freedom through economic freedom and human rights, which are “more important than the flag.” He goes further and accuses Salam Fayyad and Abu Abbas of perpetuating the illusion of a dynamic Palestinian economy, which is in fact systemically dependent on donor aid. 

Regarding the continuing struggle for a Palestinian state, Sari Nusseibeh, now president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, made much the same point several years ago. Forget statehood for now, he urged.  Focus on human rights and improving day-to-day life. Nusseibeh was never a nationalist, and so he was always an odd duck in the Palestinian nationalist struggle, but this thesis marginalized him even more.

Yesterday, I had a perhaps historic conversation in Gaza with nine Islamists, eight of them Hamas members or supporters, in which we spoke for over two hours about the American Jewish community. We spoke of the anti-occupation tool of massive nonviolent resistance. They told me that just as the second intifada was not launched until Arafat approved it, no mass non-violent demonstrations will be allowed anywhere in Palestine until President Abbas gives his hekhsher. Which he will not, they assured me, knowing the risk that such demonstrations could turn violent and perhaps be directed against the Palestinian Authority itself.

What about mass protests in Israel?  Activists are gearing up for another summer of social protests focusing on economic inequality.  However, no one has confidence that the protest leaders will explicitly connect social gaps with the price of occupation. And more surprising to me, plenty of traditional lefties and long-time peace activists do not condemn that strategy.

Dan Goldenblatt, new director of the Israel Palestine Center for Resarch and Information (IPCRI), told me that all his life, he had believed it the “two states or bust” paradigm.  Now, he too and a group of intellectuals he is leading are at least start imagining other alternatives, alternatives that will afford human rights and dignity to Palestinians.

I for one have not given up hope, but I believe the keys, or at least one of them, is in the hands of the Palestinians themselves, in the form of the very collective action that seems so out of reach—but is it?

My hotel in Gaza City has 80 rooms.  Eight are occupied.  There are blackouts repeatedly throughout the day and night and blocks of time with no electricity at all, due largely to the decreased fuel supplies from Egypt. A meeting I had on the twelfth floor of an office building could not be scheduled in the morning because there is no electricity until 11 AM.

Gazans, who have been tolerant of siege-related deprivation because they regard it as collective punishment from Israel, are now blaming Hamas for the current fuel crisis.  “After five years, the government has a responsibility,” Afifa, the newspaper editor, said.

If I ever heard a universal message, that was it.

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC

The Decade for Peace in Israel-Palestine

By Peter T. Coleman, Ph.D.

Created May 14 2012 – 6:38am

Having just returned from a visit to Israel where I spoke at a meeting of government scholars which included several negotiators who had been directly involved in past peace processes, one thing is clear: peace with the Palestinians seems impossible. The message I heard was that the Israeli government is stuck; oriented, incentivized and institutionalized for war, politically hand-cuffed by its own internal party-politics, uninformed about their own history of negotiations with the Palestinians because of this infighting, and clueless about how to proceed on the main issues of contention. It seems that it is not simply that the Netanyahu government won’t negotiate for peace, they can’t. Peace is not just off the table, there is no table.

This is at a time when unemployment for the 4 million Palestinians living in the territories is at roughly 30 percent (more than 40 percent in Gaza), exports have flat-lined and imports have skyrocketed for 10 years, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths since 2000 is 6:1 (10:1 for children), and the military actions and settlements of Israel have called into question the legitimacy of the current government, isolating them increasingly internationally. Yet the barrier wall constructed around the territories has reduced violence against Jews in Israel substantially, leading to a creeping sense of complacency for many Israeli citizens. Yet Israel will soon be exposed to increasing danger from long-range missiles able to hit its large population centers. In other words, the status quo of the conflict and occupation today feels like the only option and is completely unsustainable. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that radical change is today unfolding everywhere in the Middle East. Beyond the turmoil of the Arab Spring we are now seeing televised political debates in Egypt (the first ever in the region), civil war in neighboring Syria, signs of life in the multiparty talks over Iran’s nuclear program, and this week thousands of young protestors again taking the streets in Tel Aviv under the slogan “Returning the state to its citizens”.

Why is such tumult in the region good news?

Because radical change can be good for peace in areas that have been stuck in intractable conflict for decades.

Experts estimate that about five percent of international conflicts become intractable: highly destructive, enduring and resistant to multiple good-faith attempts at resolution. These conflicts seem to develop a power of their own that is inexplicable and total, driving groups to act in ways that go against their best interests and sow the seeds of their own ruin. And although uncommon, they last an average of 36 years and have accounted for 49 percent of international wars since 1816, 76 percent of civil wars since 1946, and evoke disproportionate levels of expense, misery, hopelessness and instability. What is particularly daunting about this 5 percent of protracted conflicts is their substantial resistance to resolution. In these settings, the traditional methods of diplomacy, negotiation and mediation – and even military victory – seem to have little impact on the persistence of the conflict. In fact, there is some evidence that these strategies may only make matters worse.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is such a conflict. An immensely complicated hundred-year-old conflict that today operates and is reinforced across a multitude of issues, time periods, stakeholders and lands. It has become what Stephen Cohen, founder of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development describes as “the crucible of multiple conflicts in the region and multiple grievances that feed upon one another and that produce reoccurring eruptions of violence.” Unfortunately, every large-scale effort at peacemaking to date – at Oslo, Wye, Camp David, Taba, Geneva, all 26 proposals and counting – have been overwhelmed by the conflict and seem to have only contributed to peace fatigue.

So it is good news is that the status quo is unsustainable.

Fortunately, the resolution of other seemingly intractable conflicts elsewhere in the world offer Israel-Palestine important lessons, particularly in light of the changes currently taking place in the region. In South Africa, Mozambique, Liberia, and Northern Ireland, we witnessed conflicts that were locked in violent cycles for decades, even generations, where many attempts at peacemaking failed, and where, eventually, peace emerged.

What have we learned?

Leaders can capitalize on current regional instability. In studies by Paul Diehl and Gary Goetz of the approximately 850 enduring conflicts that occurred throughout the world between 1816 to 1992, over three-quarters of them were found to have ended within ten years of a major political shock (world wars, civil wars, significant changes in territory and power relations, regime change, independence movements, or transitions to democracy). Events such as those erupting in the Middle East today promote optimal conditions for dramatic realignment of sociopolitical systems.

For example, ten years ago 9/11 shocked the world, and on its heels the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, deposed their leaders, and triggered an unprecedented level of turmoil and instability in the region. Such events, as horrible and costly as they are, provide ideal conditions for repositioning of socio-political systems, even those well beyond the borders of the countries directly affected. However, the effects of such destabilization are often not immediately apparent and do not ensure radical or positive change; it is therefore only a necessary but insufficient condition for peace. Nevertheless, instability does present unique opportunities to steer the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a new direction.

Envision complex networks of causation. Although the sources and responsibility for the conflict is always under dispute, at this point they are almost irrelevant. For over time such conflicts gather new problems and grievances and disputants which combine in complicated ways to increase their intractability. It helps to understand this, even to map-out the different parts of the conflict, in order to get a better sense of what is operating. This is particularly important when the polarizing tide of Us vs. Them becomes strong and leads to the oversimplification of the sources of the conflict (‘Them!’).

Decouple the conflict. Because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is embedded in a complex network of independent but related conflicts, change will require a period in which it delinks from other, more distant conflicts. For instance, the Arab-Israeli conflict became less severe as Jordan chose not to take part in the 1973 war and Egypt made peace with Israel.

Work from the bottom up. Shifting focus from top leaders negotiating global ideals and principles (territorial ownership, sovereignty) to community leaders problem-solving achievable, on-the-ground goals can loosen the conflict’s stranglehold on the peace process and ignite it from the bottom up. During the round-table negotiations over solidarity in Poland, focusing first on moving the practical aspects of the society forward (functional health care, agriculture, transportation, tourism, etc.) went a long way toward a peaceful transition. Working at a lower level, while temporarily circumventing the global issues of power, control and identity, can help to initiate an altogether new emergent dynamic.

Welcome weak power. Case studies of intractable conflicts like Mozambique in the 1980s-90s where sustainable resolutions eventually emerged have taught us that forceful interventions by powerful authorities or third-parties rarely help for long. Paradoxically, they have shown that it is often weaker third-parties who employ softer forms of power (are trust-worthy, unthreatening, reliable, and without a strong independent agenda) who often are most effective as catalysts for change.

Support existing islands of agreement. Harvard Law Professor Gabriella Blum has found that during many protracted conflicts, the disputing parties often maintain areas in their relationship where they continue to communicate and cooperate, despite the severity of the conflict. In international affairs this can occur with some forms of trade, civilian exchanges or medical care. Bolstering such islands can not only mitigate tensions and help contain conflict, but also offers some of the most promising sources of constructive change for moving forward toward peace.

Rethink cause and effect. Research has also shown that the changes brought on by destabilizing shocks to systems often do not manifest right away. In fact with intractable international conflicts, changes can take up to ten years after a major political shock before their effects take hold. Thus, conflicts of this nature require us to rethink our tendency to think in terms of immediate cause-and-effect, and to understand that changes in some complex systems operate in radically different time frames.

Work incrementally to affect radical change. The real work for the advocates of peace, justice and freedom in the region, the Arab world, the U.S. and the international community begins now. This entails essentially two tasks. First, the arduous work of bolstering or establishing a complex array of institutions, mechanisms and social norms – through grassroots NGOs, schools, government initiatives and international agencies – which encourage tolerance, cooperation, inclusion and justice. But in parallel each community must begin to actively dismantle the institutions and mechanisms that have for decades fomented inequality, resentment, exclusion and contempt. The effects of this work, like those of political shocks, may take a decade or more to surface. But without them, the status quo of Israel-Palestine will soon detonate.

Peter T. Coleman, PhD is a psychologist on faculty at Teachers College and The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and author of the books: The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts (2011) and The Psychological Components of Sustainable Peace (2012).

Copyright Peter T. Coleman

Source URL: http://www.psychologytoday.com/node/95613

Links:
[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/experts/peter-t-coleman-phd
[2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-five-percent
[3] http://www.psychologytoday.com/taxonomy/term/1063
[4] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/barrier-wall
[5] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/complacency
[6] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/conflict-resolution
[7] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/government-scholars
[8] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/infighting-2
[9] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/israeli-citizens
[10] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/israeli-government-0
[11] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/jews-in-israel
[12] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/legitimacy
[13] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/military-actions
[14] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/negotiators
[15] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/netanyahu-government
[16] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/nuclear-program-0
[17] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/palestinian-deaths
[18] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/palestinians-and-israelis
[19] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/party-politics-0
[20] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/peace
[21] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/peace-processes
[22] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/political-debates
[23] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/population-centers-0
[24] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/radical-change
[25] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/range-missiles
[26] http://www.psychologytoday.com/tags/signs-life-1

Minister Gilad Erdan’s proposal to cut off Strip’s electricity supply is logical, not racist

Hanoch Daum, YNet News, April 14, 2012

Many people are apparently unaware of the history of the past 20 years, and we can assume that they did not read the words written by Dennis Ross, Shlomo Ben Ami, Gilad Sher, Dan Meridor, Bill Clinton and others.

These people also did not hear apparently what Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak had to say about the six times where Israel offered a comprehensive peace agreement, which included the division of Jerusalem, but the Palestinians rejected it.

Legal Action

Time to fight Jenin lies / Noah Klieger

Op-ed: Get over reluctance to persecute Mohammad Bakri, director of libelous anti-Israel film

Full Story

For that reason, these people are now happy to slam Minister Gilad Erdan and explain that he is a primitive, ignorant person for suggesting to cut off Gaza’s electricity supply in case of a power shortage in Israel. After all, the details are of no significance for these people.

So what if a local power plant in Gaza, which is supposed to provide about half of the Strip’s electricity supply, has been paralyzed in recent months because of a conflict between Hamas and Fatah.

So what if Hamas activists get extra electricity for free, and so what if Israel cannot assume responsibility for the injustice done by the Hamas government to residents of the Gaza Strip, just like Israel is not responsible for President Bashar Assad’s crimes in Syria.

So what if 4.5% of Israel’s electricity supply is directed to Gaza, a place that Israel left some seven years ago. So what if Israeli citizens were expelled from their homes in order to enable the Palestinians to live in Gaza under an autonomous government, a move that prompted rocket attacks on southern Israel residents.

So what if Minister Erdan brought an expert delegation from Gaza to Israel in order to learn about desalination, saving energy and other issues, and the Ministry he heads treats the environment as an issue that cuts across borders.

Why not blame him for racism when we can?

14 May 2012

Nato urged to investigate civilian deaths in Libya

A leading human rights organisation has urged Nato to investigate fully the deaths of civilians in air strikes in Libya last year.

Human Rights Watch believes Nato air strikes killed at least 72 civilians and says the organisation needs to bear responsibility where appropriate.

“We’re calling for prompt, credible and thorough investigations,” HRW’s Fred Abrahams told BBC News.

Nato insists it took unprecedented care to minimise civilian casualties.

It argues that it cannot take responsibility because it has had no presence on the ground to confirm the deaths.

Aircraft from the US, the UK and France conducted most of the 9,658 strike sorties last year, targeting forces loyal to Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi.

In March, another human rights organisation, Amnesty International, said it had documented 55 cases of named civilians, including 16 children and 14 women, killed in air strikes.

It described Nato’s failure to investigate these cases thoroughly as “deeply disappointing”.

The point of the Nato air campaign in Libya last year was to protect civilians, so how many innocent people died is still a sensitive issue, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall reports.

‘Deeply troubling’

In its report published on Monday, HRW said it had examined in detail evidence of claims of civilian deaths from eight separate Nato strikes.

In one instance, it said a first Nato bomb killed 14 people and a second bomb, moments later, killed 18 more who had rushed to help victims.

What concerns Mr Abrahams, the main author of the report, is that the deaths remain unacknowledged and the families have been offered no compensation.

“Until now, Nato has taken a position of denial,” he said.

“They refuse to give information about how they died and they refuse to investigate, and it is this lack of transparency that is deeply troubling.

“I think it will lead to unnecessary civilian deaths in the future if Nato refuses to look at what went wrong and make corrections.”

Nato says it is ready to co-operate with the new Libyan authorities in assessing what further action is appropriate.

But so far the task force being set up in Tripoli seems to have made little headway, our diplomatic correspondent adds.

It is noteworthy in this context that the Jewish people constitute the ultimate success of an indigenous people reclaiming sovereignty and rights in their historic space. Jews have been there from the time of the Bible.

by Shoshana Bryen
American Thinker
May 11, 2012

In early 2011, President Obama announced that the United States would sign the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Now the U.N. wants us to give Mt. Rushmore to the Indians. James Anaya, U.N. special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, spent twelve days in the U.S. meeting with representatives of Native Americans. Returning to Geneva, he urged the government to turn over control of lands considered sacred to the tribes, including the Mt. Rushmore site.

It was bound to happen.

With typical overstatement, the president said as he announced U.S. participation in the Declaration, “The aspiration it affirms, including respect for the institutions and rich cultures of native peoples, are ones we must always seek to fulfill.”

Always? Americans happily adapt and adopt parts of other people’s cultures (Chinese food unlike anything served in Beijing, pizza Italians wouldn’t recognize, St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo parties) and respect other parts (forms of dress, holy days and fasting for Ramadan). But there are aspects of “native” cultures that simply do not warrant respect: honor killings, female genital mutilation, slavery, stripping trees for cooking fuel, clubbing baby seals, and governance by the sword come to mind.

The Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a prescription for endless warfare. “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired,” according to Article 26. Article 28 states that qualified groups “have the right to redress,” which can include “restitution” or “just, fair and equitable compensation” for land or resources that have been “confiscated, taken (or) occupied.”

Applied to American Indian tribes, it not only covers Mt. Rushmore, but also may include reparations and mineral rights.

Applied to Palestinians and Kurds, not to mention minorities from Azeris in Iran to Uighurs in China to Armenians, Hmong tribesmen, and Guatemalan Indians, it could wreak havoc.

The Kurds form a tribal/national grouping that spans Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. They are unquestionably an “indigenous people” with a distinct language and culture. Is the United States prepared to support border changes to allow them the right of self-determination? American lives were expended in the quest for a unitary Iraq, and we supported Turkey’s determination not to allow Kurds to secede during the PKK war. But how can we deny the Kurds while supporting a Palestinian “right to self determination”?

This raises the question of whether the Palestinians are actually a separate grouping outside their multigenerational refugee status and determination to erase Israel. Certainly they are less separated from West Bank, Israeli, and Jordanian Arabs than the Kurds are from Turks and the Arabs of Iraq. Palestinians are largely descended from the people of the Ottoman vilayet of Syria and the British Mandate. But Jordan’s King Abdullah is a Hashemite from the Hejaz of Arabia.

This in turn raises the question of which set of people is the “indigenous” one, and which is the usurper. How long does it take before a former indigenous people are lost to history and their usurpers become the new indigenous people? Those who call themselves “Palestinians” are not the descendants of the indigenous Philistines; they are the descendants of Arab tribes that arrived in the 7^th century.

Today, one of the few things upon which Hamas and Fatah agree is that all of Israel and Jordan are “occupied” Palestinian territory. While it is surely pushing for the establishment of Palestine in part of the old British Mandate territory, is the United States prepared to turn Jordan over to its “indigenous peoples” so they can have the rest of it? Or replace Israel with “Palestine”?

It is noteworthy in this context that the Jewish people constitute the ultimate success of an indigenous people reclaiming sovereignty and rights in their historic space. Jews have been there from the time of the Bible. Most but not all of them were expelled in the early part of the last millennium, but Jews maintained religious, cultural, linguistic, and tribal ties to the land until the establishment of the Third Jewish Commonwealth in 1948.

The conferring of “rights” on “peoples” implies a corresponding debt to be paid to them by others. Doing so without responsibility (the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is non-binding) is a prescription for demands by people determined to wrest something from others who may not be prepared to pay or even acknowledge that the debt is real. And the debt may not be real.

Far from a harmless exercise in multicultural sensitivity, the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples sets the stage for an endless series of “small wars” that may have big consequences. Mt. Rushmore is only the beginning.

A team of Israeli scientists offer hope in treating autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn’s, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis.

Rachel Hirshfeld, May 10, 2012

A team of Israeli scientists from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot may have achieved a breakthrough in treating autoimmune diseases, such as Crohn’s, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy tissue rather than invading germs.

The scientists managed to “trick” the immune systems of mice into targeting an enzyme known as MMP-9, one of a family of proteins essential for processes including healing wounds. When the enzyme gets out of control, however, MMP-9 facilitates autoimmune diseases as well as the spread of cancer.

President of the Israeli Biophysical Society Irit Sagi and her research group spent years looking for ways to block MMP-9. They first tried making a synthetic drug molecule targeting MMPs, attempting to mimic the body’s MMP inhibitors, known as TIMPs. However, the efforts proved largely ineffective and had extremely severe side effects.

Subsequently, Netta Sela-Passwell, a graduate student in Sagi’s lab, decided to work on a solution, whereby a vaccine was used to trick the immune system into creating natural antibodies against MMP-9. It works in the same way that a vaccine containing a dead virus induces the immune system to create antibodies ready to attack the live virus.

Together with Prof. Abraham Shanzer of the Weizmann’s organic chemistry department, the researchers created an artificial version of the metal zinc-histidine complex at the heart of MMP-9. They then injected these small, synthetic molecules into mice.

Blood tests done on the mice following the procedure showed the presence of antibodies the scientists dubbed “metallobodies,” which are similar to TIMPs in structure and function. In lab experiments, they saw that the metallobodies bound tightly to both the mouse and human versions of MMP-2 and MMP-9.

They then induced an inflammatory condition that mimics Crohn’s disease in mice, and watched how the metallobodies operated. To the scientists’ great delight, the Crohn’s symptoms were successfully prevented.

“We are excited not only by the potential of this method to treat Crohn’s, but by the potential of using this approach to explore novel treatments for many other diseases,” said Sagi, who is president of the Israeli Biophysical Society.

Yeda Research and Development Company, the technology transfer arm of the Weizmann Institute, has applied for a patent for the synthetic immunization molecules as well as the generated metallobodies.

www.israelnationalnews.com