Mideast Media Sampler 06/13/2011

From an email from DG:

1) More Brisbane

A few months ago, I sent an e-mail to the newly appointed public editor of the New York Times, Arthur Brisbane.

I wrote about four specific issues, but the fourth was from the International Herald Tribune, which Brisbane's office has no authority for. So here is an excerpt of that e-mail.

1) Last week, Isabel Kershner wrote about the result of a probe that faulted an Israeli soldier for the killing of an unarmed man.

However there was the result of another probe that day. The probe of the death of the woman at the Bilin demonstration (which I wrote about to you previously).

The Israeli army found that she died of poor treatment at the hospital. Why didn't Ms. Kershner (or Mr. Bronner) report on this?
The charge that Ms. abu-Rahma died of tear gas inhalation was suspect from the start as tear gas is non-lethal in the open air and there are no documented casesof someone dying as the witnesses claim she did.

(I also think that Ms. Kershner was incorrect in calling tear gas "toxic," it is an irritant. Water can be fatal if ingested in great quantities, but no one would call it toxic.)
Since Robert Mackey wrote about Ms. abu-Rahma it also would be appropriate for him to write about the results of this investigation especially given the skeptical tone he employed in describing the IDF. (Note in the embedded video that Mr. Mackey included, how casual the protesters are while in proximity to the tear gas. If tear gas were ordinarily lethal wouldn't they be showing a bit more urgency in getting away from it?)

2) Over the weekend the result of a different inquiry - investigation into Israel's raid on the Mavi Marmara - were released. Ms. Kershner's reporting was pretty good.

Still, I have some quibbles. In the third paragraph she writes:

The raid stirred international outrage and condemnation of Israel and its blockade of the Gaza Strip, and Israeli officials were hoping that the investigation would win the country at least some foreign support. But critics argued that the findings were a foregone conclusion. 

Of course the same thing could be said about the international outrage; it was a foregone conclusion. Yet a Turkish journalist who was aboard the Mavi Marmara (and who was generally sympathetic to Hamas) confirmed the Israel version.

True, Ms. Kershner at the end of the article observes:

Video images released at the time showed Israeli commandos being set upon as they rappelled from helicopters onto the ship’s deck. Some soldiers’ equipment was seized, and the commission found that two were shot during the melee, but it said it was unable to determine whether the I.H.H. activists had taken firearms on board. 

Isn't this evidence that the Israeli version of the events is accurate and shouldn't it have been reported earlier in the story?

Finally while this is probably out of your purview, Ms. Kershner reported:

Under intense pressure, Israel eased restrictions last summer on many goods going into Gaza through land crossings. 

In recent weeks Israel has reportedly been hit by Kornet missiles. The easing of restrictions has apparently allowed more than just humanitarian goods go through.

3) In the past couple of days the "Palestine papers" have gotten a lot of attention. Your Jerusalem Bureau chief, Ethan Bronner wrote about them:

Internal Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera and published this week illustrate that dichotomy. The public Palestinian posture is that every inch of East Jerusalem that was taken must be yielded. In reality, Palestinian officials have acknowledged that much would stay part of Israel in exchange for land swaps elsewhere. 

"In reality" is too broad a term. Perhaps these papers showing negotiating positions (rather than final positions) showed some Palestinian flexibility, but it is Jerusalem that Saeb Erekat said sunk the negotiations in 2008.

In November 2008… Let me finish… Olmert, who talked today about his proposal to Abu Mazen, offered the 1967 borders, but said: “We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.” Abu Mazen too answered with defiance, saying: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine – the June 4, 1967 borders – without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places. This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign…

This is not some arcane point, a similar account was given to the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl two years ago by Mahmoud Abbas:

In our meeting Wednesday, Abbas acknowledged that Olmert had shown him a map proposing a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank -- though he complained that the Israeli leader refused to give him a copy of the plan. He confirmed that Olmert "accepted the principle" of the "right of return" of Palestinian refugees -- something no previous Israeli prime minister had done -- and offered to resettle thousands in Israel. In all, Olmert's peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of Bush or Bill Clinton; it's almost impossible to imagine Obama, or any Israeli government, going further. 

Abbas turned it down. "The gaps were wide," he said. 

In other words whatever flexibility the Palestinian negotiators may have shown during the negotiations ended when it came to making an agreement, they were - dare I say it - intransigent.

I received a very polite e-mail back telling me that my concerns were duly noted and that Brisbane would at a future point discuss the Middle East. Yesterday he did.

I believe that I made substantive points about the Times's accuracy, so for Brisbane to fall back on a "passions about this issue are high and since both sides criticize us it must be because we are fair" argument is disappointing. Expected, but still disappointing. In the four cases Brisbane cited, he certified the editorial judgment to be appropriate. Three of those cases are judgment calls and the fourth implicitly endorses mistaken history. Clearly Brisbane proceeds from a premise that his employer purveys the "absolute truth." Given the clear bias at the Times there is little hope for Israel to get a fair hearing there.

2) Who lost Turkey?

Barry Rubin writes:

Remember this: By the end of 2011 more than 250 million people in the Middle East may well be living under what are in reality anti-American Islamist governments, mainly in Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, plus the Gaza Strip and an allied (but not Islamist) Syrian regime. Might this be a problem?

The elections in Turkey mark a revolution. When Iran’s revolution happened and the Islamists took over in 1979, everyone knew it. In contrast, Turkey’s revolution has been a stealth Islamist operation. It has succeeded brilliantly, while Western governments have failed shockingly to understand what has been going on. 

The lack of urgency has been echoed in the media.

I did find a cautionary news article in the Washington Post dated June 11, but the concern about Erdogan's authoritarianism is presented strictly an internal matter.

Even AKP critics do not deny the economic strides the party has made, but doubt lingers about its democratic credentials.

The rough treatment of protesters by police at Erdogan rallies set off a wave of other demonstrations. Free-speech issues have come into question with a new Internet filtering system set to take effect in August, which would ban pornography as well as content deemed subversive to the unity of the state. Freedom of the press, critics say, has largely been curtailed because of overambitious court cases aimed at the military for plotting a coup. Some journalists have been detained for conspiring to overthrow the government and for belonging to terrorist organizations.

Even people optimistic that a constitution drafted by the ruling party would bring more freedom fear that Erdogan’s personality might make it difficult for Turkey to transition to a presidential system without sliding into authoritarianism.

"Iran" does not appear in the article.

In an editorial last year, the New York Times expressed its confidence in Erdogan;

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, from the Islamically rooted Justice and Development Party, has an admirable record as constitutional and economic reformer. But he has also been known to stoke domestic (and international) divisions with inflammatory language. He and President Abdullah Gul must not try to pack the judiciary with political loyalists or religious extremists. 

A series of arrests of journalists earlier this year, though, dampened some of the Times's enthusiasm for the AKP:

Since Mr. Erdogan took office in 2003, he and his party have changed Turkish society for the better. They have shown that a party rooted in Islam can reinforce democracy by expanding religious freedom. And they have reasserted civilian control over a politicized military. They must now set these spiraling conspiracy investigations on a sounder legal basis, or risk these achievements and their country’s democracy. 

(I came across this by accident, but for an interesting bit of history read the late William Safire's "Turkey's Wrong Turn" from 2003:

Such delaying tactics are helped by Turkey's foot-dragging. The new, Islamic-influenced government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan transformed that formerly staunch U.S. ally into Saddam's best friend.

The main reason Turkey now permits U.S. overflights is that we have demonstrated our capability of doing it the long, hard way, from the west through Jordan. For that, we owe King Abdullah plenty; we owe Mr. Erdogan nothing.

Before that, Ankara Islamists kept allied supply ships floating off Turkey's shores, while those politicians dickered over the price of a transit toll. Six billion cash plus 10 billion in loan guarantees wasn't good enough in that time-consuming bazaar. We had to send our ships around to Kuwait, lengthening the war and causing more allied and Iraqi casualties.

Adding diplomatic insult to this military injury, Turkey massed 40,000 troops on its border with Iraq, hoping to grab the oil fields of Kirkuk if Iraqi Kurds rectified Saddam's ethnic cleansing by daring to return to their homes.

Erdogan's move away from the United States has been going on from when he first took office.)

Whatever doubts the editors of the Times retain about Erdogan's ambitions, they were missing from a profile of Turkey that appeared in The Week in Review, Can Turkey Unify the Arabs? The reporter Anthony Shadid described Erdogan's ambitions to recreate the Ottoman empire and does it in a way to make it seem harmless, or even admirable.

No one in Marjayoun would necessarily pine for the days of the Ottoman rulers. Massacres occurred, and Jews and Christians faced discrimination in taxes and commerce. There was no such thing as equality. To this day, the darkest moments of Marjayoun’s history remain those last breaths of the empire — the seferberlik. It was the Ottoman name for the draft, but it came to represent the famine, starvation and death that World War I brought to the town, when the famished searched the manure of animals to find an undigested morsel of grain. 

Yet more than a few in Marjayoun today might express a nostalgia for the time and place the Ottoman Empire represented, when Marjayoun’s traders ventured to Arish on the coast of the Sinai Peninsula and down the Nile to Sudan, by way of Palestine. The town was a way station on the route from the breadbasket of the Houran in southern Syria to Acre, the Levant’s greatest port on the coast of Palestine. Beirut was an afterthought. Marjayoun’s traders plied the steppe of the Houran, its gentry owned land in the Hula Valley, and its educated ventured to Haifa and Jerusalem to make their reputations. 

World War I and the borders that followed augured the demise of this style of life, and not just in Marjayoun. The ideologies that gained prevalence in the town then were about contesting those frontiers — Arab nationalism, pan-Syrian nationalism and Communism, which itself was imagining a broader community. These movements failed as more borders were drawn in wars with Israel in 1948 and 1967. And with those lines on the map came a smaller sense of self. By the time Lebanon’s 15-year civil war began in 1975, ideologies had given way to identities, and most people in Marjayoun identified themselves simply as Christian, or perhaps Greek Orthodox, too unique to survive as a community. 

Unless I'm reading it wrong Shadid seems sympathetic to the idea that the "artificially drawn borders" of the 20th century have been detrimental to the Middle East; something that Erdogan is anxious to correct. But those borders, include the borders of Israel, which clearly offend Erdogan. "Palestine" appears three times in the article.

I came across a story that's funny for its irony, Radicalization in Dutch politics worries Turkish Prime Minister. Fortunately, there as a good response:

A member of the Dutch opposition Socialist Party, Sadet Karabulut, said on Twitter, "Turkish premier Erdogan may be concerned about a radicalization in Dutch politics. I'm concerned about Mr Erdogan's radical politics."

The Wall Street Journal had a disappointing editorial, The wisdom of the Turks:

The AKP's capable stewardship of Turkey's economy explains its run of electoral success. Exports have quadrupled in a decade and per capita income has nearly tripled. Turkey shows the merits of free market policies, including open trade and sound fiscal management. The AKP has also alleviated many concerns about creeping Islamization, which wasn't an issue in this campaign. If Mr. Erdogan stays true to his word last night and smooths his intolerant edges, Turkey could become a true model for liberty in the Middle East. 

With Murdochs like that who needs Sulzbergers?

Finally if the Republicans want to run against President Obama on foreign policy, I bet this photograph will be seen quite a bit.


3) Focusing on what's important

Barak Ravid reports in Ha'aretz ( via memeorandum )

Washington is pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accede to its proposal to resume Israeli-Palestinian peace talks on the basis of U.S. President Barack Obama's May 19 speech. 

An Israeli source who spoke recently with senior officials in Washington said the Americans were very frustrated with Netanyahu's behavior, feeling that he was impeding America's efforts to keep the Palestinians from unilaterally seeking UN recognition of a state in September. 

Similarly, Eli Lake reports in the Washington Times

A senior administration official Friday told American Jewish leaders that the request for Israel to endorse the president’s peace principles was part of an effort to head off Palestinian plans to declare an independent state at the United Nations in September. 

Steven Simon, the new White House National Security Council senior director for the Middle East and North Africa, said he was looking to get both the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government to adopt Mr. Obama’s “principles as a basis for negotiation,” according to a recording of the call played for The Washington Times. 

Mr. Obama said last month, “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” But the president has also rejected a set ofU.S.-Israel understandings made during the Bush administration that tacitly accepted construction in some Jerusalem suburbs over the 1967 line. 

Jennifer Rubin asks:

Is the U.S. president pressuring Israel to adopt a position that is not its own and diminishes its bargaining position? And what happened to the statements in President Obama’s speech to AIPAC that Israel could not be expected to sit down with those who want to destroy it? After all Hamas has not yet agreed to the Quartet principles (recognize Israel, renounce terrorism and abide by past agreements), nor has Mahmoud Abbas separated himself from the unity government. To the contrary now he is renouncing past agreements including the Oslo Accords, which call for mutually negotiated final borders and prohibit the parties from taking unilateral steps that would impair negotiations.

Rubin couldn't get an administration official to defend the President's actions. Instead the spokesman she talked to referred back to the President's speech.

But shouldn't this be a big deal to the administration or anyone else interested in peace?

Under last month’s accord, which ended a four-year rift, Fatah and Hamas agreed to form a government of unaffiliated technocrats whose chief task would be to prepare for presidential and parliamentary elections in a year.

But influential Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip balked Sunday at Fatah’s nomination of Fayyad, whose policies are seen by the Islamist group as aligned with U.S. interests in the region.
“Salam Fayyad is unacceptable, because he has drowned the Palestinian people in billions of dollars of debt and made its economy and political decision-making dependent on foreign donors,” Salah Bardawil, a member of the political bureau of Hamas, said by telephone from Gaza.

Surely giving Hamas veto power over a moderate figurehead, so that the joint Fatah-Hamas government can't even pretend to be moderate is a more emphatic rejection of peace than building apartments in Jerusalem.

During the campaign, candidate Obama famously declared that being pro-Israel and being pro-Likud were not the same thing. Now he's effectively legitimizing Hamas, a terrorist group devoted to Israel's destruction. I wonder how many people conflate being pro-Hamas with being pro-Israel. And I wonder how much self-reflection and soul searching the President has done about the support he's given to Hamas.

4) Donating $500,000 to the Palestinians isn't enough

James Wolfensohn,the former President of the World Bank, raised $14 million - including his own $500,000 - from American Jews to buy the greenhouses left by Israelis leaving Gaza in 2005. In short order after the disengagement from Gaza, Palestinians looted the greenhouses.

Apparently though, his efforts at helping the Palestinians isn't much appreciated in the Arab world.

What has been coined the "Arab Spring" has gained momentum, this time in the region's most well-reputed and prestigious university, the American University of Beirut. The campus has been a scene of protests ever since the university decided to grant Sir John Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank and member of the advisory council for the Israeli Democracy Institute, an honorary degree during this year's graduation ceremony.  Ninety-five faculty members and hundreds of students have signed a petitionin opposition to the university's plans to ask Wolfensohn to deliver the keynote speech to the graduating class of 2011 later this month.

The signatories stated that honoring Wolfensohn "symbolically undermines AUB’s legacy in the struggle for social justice and its historical connection to Beirut, to Palestine and beyond."

In response to the petition, Wolfenson informed the AUB community on Saturday of his intention to skip the ceremony “out of concern that his presence would distract from the celebratory nature of the event."

Wolfensohn's crimes? 

The petition tied its objections to Wolfensohn’s work as president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, his membership in the International Advisory Council of the Israel Democracy Institute, which according to its website, "acts to promote the values and norms appropriate for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state," and his investment in Better Place, a company that according to the petition, "intends to build infrastructure to serve Israeli settlers in the West Bank."

Moshe Kaplinsky, chief executive of Better Place Israel, previously served as commander of the Sayeret Golani, Golani and Galilee Brigades in the Israel Defense Force. During his tenure, he was promoted to the prestigious rank of major general and appointed military secretary to the prime minister in 2001. In 2005 Kaplinsky served as deputy chief of the general staff. 

Lebanon technically remains in a state of war with Israel.

So an institution in decreasingly democratic Lebanon gets to pass judgment on the nature of Israeli democracy. What's astonishing is that Wolfensohn also used his position at the as an envoy to the Middle East to pressure Israel to ease up on restrictions on the Palestinians. But neither the money not the hectoring of Israel has protected Wolfensohn from the hatred of Israel. 

I guess I shouldn't surprised but this disinvitation hasn't evoked any outrage.

I guess that Wolfensohn has learned that Lennon and McCartney were right, money can't buy you love.


5) What us worry?

Last week, Roger Cohen wrote a silly column, When Fear Breaks, which concludes:

When I was in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the revolution, there was a moment when momentum seemed lost. The outcome hung in the balance. Then Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who had disappeared for days into Mubarak’s brutal labyrinth, reappeared and tweeted: “Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for.” 

The tweet electrified the square. Combined with Ghonim’s T.V. appearance that night, it opened the way to Mubarak’s fall. The energy it generated was a reminder of the spirit of the moment when fear dissolves. That’s the instant authoritarian regimes fear most. Yes, freedom is a bless worth fighting for. 

And everything will be great in Egypt now that the authoritarian's gone? Not everyone sees it that way.

The amended articles called for parliamentary and presidential elections to be held this year and require that the new parliament and president form a committee to to write a new constitution within six months of electing the president. Human rights advocates, however, protested that a consitution should be written before a new govermnment is elected. 

“The insistence on putting the cart before the horse --that is electing a parliament based on the rules of the old regime’s constitution before preparing a constitution for the new order -- will allow parties that win elections to manage the drafting of the constitution with accordance to their own narrow interests,” said the human rights groups' statement.

Clearly the folks fighting for freedom are very concerned that if elections precede the writing of the constitution, the most organized opposition group will write a constitution that will cement its hold on power.

Funny, the Pollyannas about the Egyptian revolution are mostly the same people who aren't at all concerned about the AKP's growing power in Turkey.

Technorati Tag: Middle East.