Informed Comment is on hiatus until after New Year's Day. Enjoy the holidays!

In the meantime, enjoy the following sites (the underlined parts are clickable):

http://www.jerusalem.indymedia.org/ (Palestine Independent Media Center);

http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/webcast/index.php3?language=en (Israel Independent Media Center)

and

http://www.iraqjournal.org/ Iraq Journal (Alternative views on the Iraq issue).

Informed Comment does not necessarily endorse any particular report at any of these sites, but thinks alternative, peace-oriented views on these subjects should get a hearing, at least. And it is that sort of season around here.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

India almost went to war with Pakistan twice in the last year, according to India Today. Last winter, Indian forces prepared to attack the Pakistani line of control in Kashmir, but were dissuaded by the US and by the relocation of Pakistani terrorist camps from Kashmir to Pakistan itself. The war plans in the summer were dampened by fears of the approaching monsoons (heavy rains are no weather in which to fight) and by uncertainty about the exact nuclear capabilities of Pakistan (Delhi feared a nuclear reprisal and could not rule one out). This Indian war mobilization was, as Clausewitz would have foreseen, also a form of politics. It was a way of pressuring the US to pressure Pakistan to stop cross-border infiltration of Kashmir by terrorists.

The world dodged a bullet twice here, since two South Asian nuclear powers going to war with one another would be unpleasant for us all. But we are clearly not yet out of the woods.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

From a discussion of so-called Koranic "belligerancy" in the Medinan chapters

In general, theological explanations by themselves do little to explain foreign policy, while foreign policy debates tend to distort the meaning and history of theology. In Islam, the difference between the Medina chapters of the Koran (c. 622-632 A.D.) and the Meccan chapters of the Koran (610-622 A.D.) can be explained with proper reference to historical context. The two sections are not different because the former are "tolerant" and the latter are "belligerent", but because the political situation had changed.

The pagan Meccan leadership in Mecca deeply disliked Islam and Muhammad from the time (c. 613?) he started denouncing polytheism. They harassed the Muslims, punished the weak among them, boycotted them, even chased away some to Ethiopia, for being monotheists. But the Meccans did not take really drastic action in the teens. In response, the Koran instructs Muhammad that he is only a 'warner' and has no sovereignty or political power.

Around 621-622 the Meccan leadership became so threatened by the continued spread of Islam in the city that they decided to assassinate Muhammad and to try to wipe Islam out. He knew that the city was becoming dangerous for him and when the notables of nearby Medina came to him seeking a "sheriff" figure to put their own town in order, he decided to leave his hometown. He escaped with a companion to Medina in 622, avoiding assassination, and was joined there by the Muslims.

The Meccan elite found the idea of Muhammad in charge of a rival city-state to be unacceptable, and it was clear there would be hostilities between the two. Muhammad's forces fought three wars and several bedouin-style "raids" with the Meccan pagans, who wanted to wipe them out and kill their prophet. By 629 Muhammad and the Muslims had prevailed. Had the war gone the other way, they would have been slaughtered or enslaved by the Meccans. As it was, Muhammad announced a general amnesty and showed impressive generosity to his defeated foes, some of whom later emerged as leaders of Islam.

Even at the time that the Muslims were defending themselves from Meccan aggression, the Koran urges that peace be made if it can be, and forbids naked aggression. It is the Medinan chapters that assure pious Jews and Christians that they have nothing to fear in the afterlife and which praise the Hebrew Bible (Torah) and the New Testament (Injil) as full of "guidance and light."

The odd sectarian enterprise of Mahmud Muhammad Taha (d. 1985) of Sudan, which aimed at discarding the Medinan chapters and creating a Meccan reading of the Koran, is not likely ever to be more than a minor heresy in Islam. It is in any case perfectly possible to construct a moderate Islamic modernism that eschews aggression on the basis of the entire Koran, and this has been done over and over again in the modern Middle East by scholars from Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) to Abdul Karim Soroush and Muhammad Sa`id `Ashmawi in the present. Indeed, violent radical Muslims can only make their case by neglecting to quote key Koranic verses (Bin Laden typically quotes only half a verse, completely skewing its meaning).

Where serious pacifist activists have arisen among the Palestinians, as with Mubarak Awad, they have been summarily expelled from the Occupied Territories by the Israeli authorities. See Mubarak's profile at: http://www.peacemagazine.org/archive/awad.htm

Ultimately, theology is not much related to foreign policy. Theology does little to explain the foreign policy of Christians and Jews, who have behaved with enormous aggressiveness toward the Muslim world in the past two centuries, invading, colonizing, displacing, and invading again. Episodes such as the French tenure in Algeria (1830-1962), the British in the Suez (1882-1956), or the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza (1967-present) are not in any way related to the Bible. After all, the Bible contains both rather bloodthirsty works like the Book of Joshua as well as more irenic passages. As for Muslims, the most aggressive and expansionist power in the Middle East, the Baath Party of Iraq, is a secular nationalist organization that has little to do with Islam.




For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A letter by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's right-hand man, has been published by Asharq al-Awsat. Dated February 1998, the letter speaks of Americans as "the foreign investors" who "must be hit." The term "investor" is part of a code in the letter, where everything is referred to as a "company" and an economic transaction. This sort of language is presumably something al-Qaeda learned from the CIA ("the Company") during the period when the two were cooperating against the Soviets.

Al-Zawahiri complains that "The Upper Egyptian Company" has ceased its commerce, a reference to the decision of the jailed leadership of the Islamic Grouping (al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya) to give up armed struggle after the disastrous 1997 shooting of dozens of tourists at Luxor. The Gamaa is famed for being disproportionately drawn from Asyut and other areas of Upper Egypt. He says that since both "firms" (the Gamaa and his own al-Jihad al-Islami) are facing international monopoly capital (sharikat al-ihtikar ad-dawliyya), it is counterproductive to fight internally. At this point the commercial code seems to be more than just code, echoing Marxist ideas.

His correspondent seems to have been Egyptian; he expresses at the beginning of the letter his hope that they will meet again in "our country" (i.e. that the Islamists will overthrow Hosni Mubarak, which is the only way such a meeting could take place).

He says, however, that the Omar Brothers Company is open for business, referring to the Taliban/al-Qaeda. He thus seems to implicate Mulla Omar in al-Qaeda terrorism, the exact details of which are still murky. He also refers to Mulla Omar as "Amir al-Mu'minin," or "Commander of the Believers," a title of the Caliph.

Using the same sort of code, he refers to the joining of his al-Jihad al-Islami terrorist organization with al-Qaeda, producing the new improved "Qa`idat al-Jihad" or "Base for Holy War." (Al-Qaeda means base in Arabic, and actually refers to Bin Laden's earliest data base of graduates of his terror training camps in 1986-88). His correspondent is apparently a contributor to the Taliban cause and is assured that under Mulla Omar, the Omar Brothers Company is flourishing.

Al-Zawahiri hopes for success in an operation in "the Village" (Egypt) and urges sympathizers to come to Afghanistan for training. He said that his organization could not bear the travel expenses, and that volunteers would have to pay for the ticket out of their own pockets or take a small loan for that purpose.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

In response to a question raised about the request Paul Wolfowitz made to put 100,000 US troops into eastern Turkey on the Iraq border, and whether there was a prospect of Turkish troops going into Iraq in case a war broke out:

The whole point of asking permission to put US troops into Turkey on the border with Iraq is to *forestall* Turkish military interference in the Iraq campaign. My own view is that it is unlikely that the American force striking from the north is actually necessary militarily or perhaps even wise. It is rugged territory and in any case is held by Kurdish U.S. allies. Rather than being aimed at Baghdad, such a force may well be envisioned as securing the Kirkuk oil fields. The Kurds have pretty openly announced that they will try to take them in the fog of war, and the Turks have been equally clear that they would find such a development unacceptable to the point of intervening themselves. Putting US troops in the north could forestall a Kurdish-Turkish side-war. But of course it risks the possibility of a US-Kurdish confrontation during the early stages of the war.

The US is not seeking to inject Turkish troops into Iraq. I think the wording is simply that there are two actions that require parliamentary approval--putting US troops into Turkey, and sending Turkish troops abroad. Although it has long been likely that the Turkish National Security Council would cooperate with a US war on Iraq, despite public opposition, it is not clear that the Islamist Ak party representatives in Parliament will go along with thousands of US troops being put on Turkish soil to fight a Muslim neighbor. But, $5 bn. (which is what is being asked for by the Turks in aid as a quid pro quo) is quite an incentive.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A number of Iraqi expatriate groups will boycott the forthcoming dissident summit in London, according to Asharq al-Awsat. Al-Hizb al-Islami al-Iraqi, a Sunni Islamist party, complains that Sunni representation at the summit is weak. He says that two-thirds of the delegates are Shiites. (He does not say that about 2/3s of Iraqis are Shiites; that is, the sort of representation he is complaining about is just proportional to the population. In the past, the Shiite minority has usually been taken advantage of and treated as a functional minority.)

Dr. Mubaddir al-Ways of the Socialist Party criticized the conference as funded and organized by the US rather than springing from the Iraqi people. He said the aim was to detach the Iraqis from the Arab nation and to deliver them into a (primary) relationship with Israel. He maintained that the US would not join up with any indigenous Iraqi fighting force, and that it had put pressure on Iran to prevent the Shiite al-Badr Brigade (based in Iran) from being allowed into Iraq in case of a war. (Iran yesterday announced that it would not allow Iraq to be attacked from Iranian soil, which would make it difficult for the 10,000 to 15,000 fighters commanded by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq to move its forces into support of the US advance from the south. Al-Ways is claiming that this prohibition was announced at US insistence. I find this allegation highly unlikely; Rumsfeld at least seems to want to hook up with SCIRI fighters.)

The Communist Party of Iraq has similar qualms about participating in a primarily US-fueled conference that has no Iraqi grass roots.

Keeping the Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs happy with one another in a post-Saddam Iraq is obviously not going to be easy.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Al-Qaeda has launched a campaign against Usama Rushdi, a former publicist in Holland for the Islamic Grouping (al-Gamaa al-Islamiyyah), he says. The Islamic Grouping was implicated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat in 1981, and in the 1990s launched a series of terrorist attacks and challenges to the Egyptian government. Rushdi gained asylum in the Netherlands on the grounds that he would be persecuted for his beliefs in Egypt. He says he is now the target of three forces--the Dutch extreme Right, who wants him deported to Egypt; al-Qaeda, which is angry that he published criticisms of Usama Bin Laden; and "the outside."

Rushdi's newspaper, al-Mahrusa, has been accused of being a mouthpiece for Bin Ladin by the Dutch Right, but he says that it has been critical of al-Qaeda, thereby making him a target of that organization.

Rushdi represents himself as part of a reform movement within the Islamic Grouping that has broken with the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, and has sought a way of interpreting Islam as essentially pacifist. I append a comment I made on Rushdi at Gulf2000 earlier this year. (- Asharq al-Awsat).

---
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 07:16:44 -0500 (EST)
To: gulf2000 list

An "Islamic indictment"

Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 02:22:22 -0500
From: Juan Cole

A leader of the al-Jama`ah (al-Gamaa) al-Islamiyyah in exile, Osama Rushdi, has given an interview in al-Sharq al-Awsat in which he strongly condemns the attack on the United States of September 11, appealing to the strictures of Islamic law and the principles enunciated by classical jurists like Ibn Qudama. He excoriates Ayman al-Zawahiri's principle of "taking the battle to the enemy" and Bin Ladin's of "praiseworthy terrorism." He is careful to say that he does think U.S. foreign policy makes it an enemy of Islamists, and that he strongly opposed the war in Afghanistan. But he says the fault is not all on one side (sic) and that it is time for Islamists openly to reassess the movement in the light of the grievous errors that have been made.

Rushdi is wanted in Egypt (though apparently unindicted) for terrorism but is seeking asylum in the Netherlands. He is said to have been among the leaders of the organization who arranged a cease-fire with the Egyptian government after the shooting of tourists in Luxor in 1997.

The interview is on the Web at:

http://www.asharqalawsat.com/pc/
news/25,1,2002,012.html

An informative artlce about Rushdi is at:

http://www.ahram.org.eg/weekly/2001/
539/eg10.htm

It would be easy to be rather cynical about all this, as, perhaps, an attempt by a man who could easily be extradited to life imprisonment at any moment to rehabilitate himself and strengthen his asylum case in Europe.

On the other hand, I personally believe that terrorist groups like al-Gamaa al-Islamiyyah do have a powerful ideology that helps drive them to act as they do, and its ideologues are therefore not insignificant.





For "cont'd" postings, click here.

The trial of suspected al-Qaeda member Mounir El Motassadeq for having been part of the Hamburg cell that planned and carried out September 11, now being held in Germany, may be transferred to the United States. This move is contemplated because it would allow prosecutors to call to the stand Ahmad Ressam, now in Federal penitentiary in Washington state for his role in the "Millennium Plot" to blow up the Los Angeles Airport in 2000.

Ressam has shown increasing remorse for his actions since September 11, especially as it finally dawned on him that he was in prison for life. My guess is that he, an Algerian, has information about El Motassadeq (a Moroccan) that would ensure the latter's conviction. Maybe in return he'll become eligible for parole at some distant point in the future. The change of venue may also be necessary because the German defense team has filed a motion to dismiss on the grounds that they have been denied access to a key witness, Ramzi Binalshibh, who was arrested in Pakistan last summer and also played a key role in the Hamburg cell.

In the meantime, an FBI agent testified at the trial that Muhammad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi received as much as $200,000 from sources in the Persian Gulf in the months before September 11. Atta sent a large sum back to the UAE shortly before that date. El Motassadeq had signing authority over al-Shehhi's bank account.











For "cont'd" postings, click here.

A summit has been set up between Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan for the initialling of a deal to build a $3.2 bn. pipeline from Turkmenistan down to South Asia. It is scheduled for Dec. 26-27 in the Turkmenistan capital of Ashkabad (Ashgebot). The pipeline would stretch from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Gwadar, and will be funded in part by the World Bank. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai will be there but it is unclear who will represent Pakistan.

India in particular is an emerging market for this gas, and Pakistan has already waived any objections to the pipeline going over to India, as well. Afghanistan and Pakistan would collect substantial tolls on the gas, and desperately poor Turkmenistan would get some much needed income.

Dawn reports that "The project has seven stages including feasibility, survey, design and engineering, construction, commissioning, operation and maintenance and installation of gas processing plant in Gwadar."

The obstacles to this pipeline plan are formidable. There has been heavy fighting for months around Shindand between Herat warlord Ismail Khan's forces and those of a rival. Gas pipelines are especially vulnerable to terrorism and sabotage, in which the Taliban and al-Qaeda specialized. Given that the US has not yet provided order to Afghanistan and that fair numbers of Taliban and al-Qaeda are still in the country, it seems to many observers that this pipeline project is no more than a pipe dream.

Certainly, Afghanistan will need a lot more order and security before it will become feasible, and achieving that goal seems to me at least a decade or perhaps more into the future.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

     The more the Kuwaiti government thinks about it the less it likes the speech Saddam Hussein gave the day before yesterday. All though it appeared to contain an grudging apology for the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it also contained lots of other, more sinister language.

     The Kuwaiti officials now read it as a series of threats against them, and they have therefore sent a memo of protest to the United Nations. They see it as accusing them of treason against the Arab world for hosting US troops, and they read it as a threat against Westerners in Kuwait.

     They also worry that it was meant to create a division between the Kuwaiti people (many of whom, while they despise Saddam, are uneasy about cooperating in an attack on a fellow Arab country launched unilaterally by the US, a Western power). As a result, the Kuwaitis are setting up popular demonstrations against Saddam's letter. Even the Islamic party will join in this endeavor (since Saddam is a secular nationalist, they have reason to despise him, but surely are also torn by their dislike of the US and any projection of its power in the region.







For "cont'd" postings, click here.

     Stinger shoulder-launched missiles are being sold in the bazaars of Kabul for $200,000 according to foreign observers in that city. The geniuses in the Reagan administration (who we now have with us at the top of the government, like Paul Wolfowitz) gave Islamic extremists about 400 stingers in the 1980s to use against Soviet helicopter gunships.

     While this move may have been brilliant militarily, it was highly problematic with regard to long-term U.S. security. These deadly weapons have floated around arms markets ever since. Kuwait bought a fair number before 1990, so presumably some of those were confiscated by the Iraqis when they invaded. That's what we needed, Saddam with stingers. (Though it is not as if the original warlord recipients of this Reagan largesse were much better).

     The recent use of old Soviet SA-7s by al-Qaeda terrorists to attempt to shoot down a US fighter jet in Saudi Arabia (last winter) and now an Israeli airliner taking off from Mombasa reminds us of how absolutely devastating those weapons could be in the wrong hands.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been freed from prison by an Egyptian appeals court, which nullified his earlier sentence of seven years of hard labor. But, it ordered a retrial rather than simply freeing him. (He was out for `Id al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan). A human rights activist, Saad has been an inspiration to us all. President Bush had complained about his treatment in a letter to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, which is something of a milestone in the evolution of US-Egyptian relations. The reaction of prickly Egyptian parliamentarians was that they would not accept foreign meddling. One thing they did not seem to grasp was the in a globalizing world we are all open to influences from abroad. The European Union puts pressure in various ways on the US to abolish the death penalty, e.g. The other is that a gross injustice had been done, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been violated. As a member of the UN, Egypt is signatory to covenants enshrining freedom of speech, and so was in violation of its own law. Why should other UN members not say so?

The thing that worries me is the prospect of another trial. Saad's health is not good, and he may not be able to take it. I think the notion of a retrial is a broad hint to him to leave Egypt and go abroad, but so far he has been too stubborn and principled to take such hints. For all we know he will be convicted again in the new trial. It reminds me of the ending of the Bonfire of the Vanities, where the protagonist had become a perpetual defendant even though he had never been shown to have committed an actionable crime. On the other hand, his poor health may be a cause for the courts not to go forward with the retrial. Let us hope they have this sense and decency.

The defense demonstrated that the Ibn Khaldun Center had not illegally received donations from abroad, since the funding from the European Union had been awarded as a sort of contract, and had not consisted of donations in the legal sense at all. Likewise they demonstrated that the military court had misconstrued the law forbidding the besmirching of Egypt's honor. (This is a ridiculous law to have on the books in any case. A country, the honor of which is so fragile that it needs such a law has already lost its reputation; and jailing its foremost thinkers is calculated to strip it of any honor it has left.)

Congratulations to Saad for this great victory, and let us all hope Egypt has taken a step toward becoming a more humane and democratic society.


For "cont'd" postings, click here.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim's case will be decided today by the appeals court, which can set aside or confirm his sentence of seven years of hard labor. If the appeal is turned down and Saad Eddin serves that sentence, there is some question about whether his health will collapse altogether long before he is released. Hosni Mubarak will then be guilty of judicial murder, and I don't think he realizes how little the world community and those of us concerned with human rights will forgive him for it.

Saad Eddin, a professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, was railroaded from beginning to end, and is basically in jail for helping peasants learn how to vote intelligently and for criticizing Hosni's plan of turning the country over to his son in a dynastic manner. I studied with Saad Eddin, and have long admired him. If this is what happens to people who work peacefully for democracy and human rights, Mubarak is only inviting the extremists into the arena. The wind is blowing against authoritarian military regimes in the Middle East, and Egypt's ruling elite should stop being so complacent. Giving Saad Eddin his liberty would be a first step in the sort of reforms that might save their necks.
For "cont'd" postings, click here.

It's "Not Back to School" for Palestinian Children


Children continue to be among the chief victims of the continuing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Although it is natural to concentrate on the toll in lives taken by the struggle, among its biggest impacts have been psychological and educational.

Over a million and a half Palestinian children live under harsh Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Months into the school year, most still cannot move about freely or attend school. Over a fifth of them are acutely or chronically malnourished, in large part as a result of the Israeli lockdown. UNICEF estimated last summer that 317,000 Palestinian children were in "desperate need of assistance due to financial hardship."

All this is not to deny the real impact of violence. In the past two years, about 250 Palestinian children and 72 Israeli children have been killed in the conflict, according to Amnesty International. Literally thousands more have been traumatized by the direct experience of violence and by the loss of loved ones.

Palestinian suicide bombers have in some cases clearly chosen targets, such as dance clubs or pizzerias, where they knew many of their Israeli victims would be children. For their part, the Israeli armed forces have begun throwing caution to the wind in their pursuit of Palestinian fighters, injuring many civilians, and have responded with excessive force to the rock-throwing of protesting children.

UNICEF special representative to the Occupied Territories, Pierre Poupard, is worried about another dimension of the conflict. He says that, in contravention of international law, "a generation of Palestinian children is being denied its right to an education." His organization recently estimated that over 226,000 children and more than 9,300 teachers cannot get to their regular classrooms.

Under the tight Israeli curfew, about 580 schools have been closed. The United Nations noted last summer that "Checkpoints, closures and curfews severely impede access to medical care, education and employment."

In the first week of October, Palestinian children in Nablus defied the 24-hour curfew imposed by the Israelis last summer to go to school. They risked life and limb to do so. Just before they opened their schools, a 12-year-old boy was critically wounded when Israeli troops opened fire at a taxi-driver who was driving around when he should not have been. A 15-year-old boy was shot dead October 4 in a similar incident.

Curfews have long formed a key part of the repertoire of colonial states attempting to keep local populations under control. Curfews, checkpoints and restrictions on movement were routinely employed by the South African government in application of its racist Apartheid policies. Rhodesia imposed two major curfews in the early 1980s, in its attempt to continue to monopolize the country's wealth and resources for a small class of white colonialists. Ominously, these curfews served to prevent news from leaking out, of massacres of local populations. Although Israeli policies within Israel are largely democratic, its behavior in the West Bank and Gaza is increasingly that of a colonial power.

Israeli incursions, as at Khan Yunis on October 6, which killed 13 Palestinian civilians, including four children, have been on a much smaller scale and come in response to acts of terrorism. But Israel has violated the Fourth Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians in occupied territories, as well as the United Nations convention on the rights of the child.

Strict Israeli control of media reporting from the Occupied Territories has had the effect of keeping the full horror of life under curfew from public awareness in the West. It is not hidden to Arabs and Muslims, however. The Kuwaiti men who shot American marines there in October gave as one reason for their rage the loss of innocent life in the Israeli attack at Khan Yunis.

Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorists, by police work. But collective punishment of a whole people, especially of innocent children, is wrong. Can anyone imagine the outcry if the British government had attempted to place the entire Irish population under such a curfew because of terrorist attacks in Belfast?

Now that the Labor Party in Israel has ended its national unity coalition with the far rightwing Likud, its leaders should make every effort to end the policy of military re-occupation and harsh curfews.

Israel cannot hope to win peace by such policies nor by fostering ignorance and poverty in the next generation of its Palestinian neighbors. Nor can the United States government hope to achieve important diplomatic goals in the region if it continues to treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with benign neglect.



For "cont'd" postings, click here.

At the request of a number of friends, I'm reprinting this piece here.

-----

Chronicle of Higher Education

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

OPINION

Why We Should Not Boycott Israeli Academics
By JUAN COLE

I thought the divestiture movement and the boycott of academic institutions in the old racist South Africa a good idea, and was cheered to see students at the University of
Michigan demonstrating against apartheid in the 1980s. I do not feel the same way about boycotting Israeli academics, as has been called for by hundreds of European scholars since April. Nor is this a matter on which I have the luxury of not taking a stand. As a historian of the modern Middle East, I am sometimes invited to conferences hosted at least in part by Israeli institutions. I edit the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the flagship publication of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, which receives large numbers of submissions from academics in Israel and sometimes has Israeli scholars on its editorial board.

In April, I was happily making airplane reservations for an Istanbul conference, which had partial Israeli sponsorship, on the 20th-century historiography of the Middle East. Despite the sound of the topic, dull as antique scissors, it promised to be an intellectually engaging experience. And I would hate to miss Istanbul's Ottoman architecture, the priceless museums, the chance to practice my Turkish, and the play of spring light on the Golden Horn. Then one of the invited conference participants, himself an Israeli living in the United States, sent out an e-mail message saying that he would avoid the conference and urging others to do so, too. He cited the European boycott of Israeli academic institutions, and said he could not in good conscience participate in the wake of the early April Israeli army actions at Jenin and elsewhere in the West Bank.

For many faculty members in the United States, where the political culture is strongly pro-Israel, this question would provoke no soul-searching. Indeed, a petition against the boycott idea has garnered thousands of signatures from intellectual luminaries here. While I strongly support Israel's right to exist within secure and peaceful borders, I reached my decision about the Istanbul conference only after days of hard thinking and consultation with conscientious and progressive friends.

Unlike most Americans, I find the political and military behavior of the Israeli government in the West Bank and Gaza appalling and contrary to the Geneva Conventions and other instruments of international law. The United Nations charter, to which Israel is a signatory, forbids the acquisition of territory by military conquest. Some Israelis argue that they may do as they please with the West Bank and Gaza because of the territories' unclear status, but this position ignores the rights of the Palestinian residents.

The massive usurpation of land and water resources since the Israeli capture of the territories in 1967, the illegal settling of about 200,000 colonists there, and the harsh and humiliating treatment of an essentially colonized population has provoked a good deal of Israel's problems with the Palestinians. Although much of the Palestinian population has now been nominally put under the Palestinian Authority, the major roads remain under Israeli control, the often-armed colonists remain in place, and the Israeli army frequently reoccupies the territories, destroying PA infrastructure and imposing curfews and other harsh measures in response to the terrorist actions of a few. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appears to envision annexing large swaths of the West Bank.

Like any human being with a heart, I too feel the helpless rage, the sickened despair, at seeing the serial murders by pitiless bombers who take the lives of innocent Israeli victims as well as their own. I understand the Israeli public's demand for an end to these monstrosities, and the willingness to use force for that purpose. Still, the Geneva Conventions were enacted with precisely such heated situations in mind, and Israel is not exempt from them by grief.

The second Palestinian uprising that began in October of 2000 and Israeli attempts to put it down have tragically claimed the lives of more than 525 Israelis and more than 1,450 Palestinians, according to the Israel-based International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism. The institute calculates that more than 420 of the Israeli dead were noncombatants, whereas about 568 of the Palestinians were. It is clear that the radical Palestinian forces are guilty of actively targeting civilians -- which is morally heinous -- and that the Israeli army has, at best, been careless in avoiding the deaths of Palestinian civilians. More likely, Israel has been cavalier in taking the lives of innocents in its narrow pursuit of enemies. This behavior, on both sides, is a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions, which were formulated to apply to wars of national liberation as well as to conventional warfare.

The Human Rights Watch report on Israeli-government actions at Jenin described how Israeli forces bulldozed buildings to make way for tanks in the labyrinthine refugee camp, sometimes giving insufficient notice to residents or refusing to wait when informed that a civilian (in one case a paralytic) was still inside the building.

When a group of Palestinian guerrillas put up a fight that killed 13 Israeli soldiers in the Hawashin district, the Israelis riposted and most residents fled. The Israeli army bulldozed 140 buildings and extensively damaged 200 others, leaving as many as 4,000 camp residents homeless. That action was a form of collective punishment. Throughout the West Bank, civilians who have inadvertently, or because of an emergency, gone outside during curfews have sometimes been shot dead by Israeli soldiers -- again, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

That isn't the narrative put forth by the Likud Party, but it is, more or less, the way the European news media presented the situation. If some European academics thought international law was being consistently flouted by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government, then it is not hard to understand why they proposed a boycott in early April. The European Union treats Israel as a European country for the purposes of scientific and academic exchange, a practice that the European academics sought to end as long as Sharon continued his hard-line policies.

While I understand the impulse, the shunning of Israeli academic institutions seems to me entirely the wrong place to begin. The supporters of the European academic boycott often make an analogy to South Africa and its apartheid policies. Yet while Arab Israelis are discriminated against in many ways in Israeli society, there is nothing like apartheid. Baruch Kimmerling, an anthropology professor at Hebrew University, wrote in a piece for the Independent Media Center that not "all the members of the Israeli academy are great humanists or support the idea of self-determination of the Palestinian people. We are a highly heterogeneous community." He points out, however, that while South African academic institutions generally gave vigorous support to the apartheid government and sanctioned dissident faculty members, the Israeli academy, on the whole, shows great independence. Israeli universities have Arab-Israeli students and have conducted hundreds of joint projects with their counterparts in the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Israeli academics tend to be left of center, and finding one who expresses something other than deep distaste for Sharon is no easy task. It seems especially inappropriate to punish academics for the actions of a government they largely oppose. Many Israeli academics have been involved in the peace movement, which, although badly damaged by the suicide bombings, struggles on.

It is surely that movement which, however dark its prospects now seem, holds the greatest hope for a better future. Kimmerling says that an increasingly chauvinistic Israeli public militates against the independence of journalists, whereas tenured faculty retain the ability to speak out on human-rights abuses.

Hillel Shuval, a professor of environmental sciences, also at Hebrew University, was quoted in The Chronicle warning that the boycott would harm projects in which he has been involved that get Europeans, Israelis, and Palestinians to work together. It should be remembered that the Oslo peace process itself originated with back-channel meetings of Israelis and Palestinians at a university in Norway. The current boycott call would forestall important new developments deriving from such exchanges.

As for the recent sacking of Miriam Shlesinger of Bar-Ilan University and Gideon Toury of Tel Aviv University from the editorial boards of the British journals The Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts, respectively, here individuals are being sanctioned for the policies of their government, and that is wrong. Ironically, Shlesinger is a prominent Amnesty International activist who has been highly critical of Israeli government policies in the West Bank. In contrast, I could support the divestment campaign at some American campuses, aimed at university investments in Israeli firms, because the business elite in Israel is both more powerful and more entangled in government policy than the academics.

I am not unaware, of course, that in some circles such a position would immediately raise the question of anti-Semitism. For those of us actually involved in the Middle East, that reaction is simply unhelpful. Israel is a state -- just as Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are -- and it is not exempt from censure for illegal or unethical behavior because it is Jewish. I would argue that treating the Sharon government with kid gloves in order to tiptoe around the issue of anti-Semitism would itself be a form of anti-Semitism, a way of cordoning off all Jews as somehow unlike other human beings. In any case, this non-issue was irrelevant to my own thinking, which was more pragmatic. An academic boycott is a political act with a political goal, and if it is unsuited to the purpose then it is bad politics.

I recently appointed an Israeli academic at Hebrew University to the editorial board of the journal I edit. At the Istanbul conference I attended with my Israeli academic colleagues, they promptly led others in working up a petition to protest the policies of the Sharon government in the West Bank and Gaza. I signed it in solidarity with them. Refusing to meet and talk with a concerned party to an epochal set of political and cultural negotiations is the farthest thing from a progressive act.

Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and is the author of Sacred Space and Holy War (I.B. Tauris, 2002).

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Lawrence Davidson has written an interesting rebuttal of my piece at:

http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-news-0248.html






For "cont'd" postings, click here.

At a conference in South Africa, State Minister Ronny Kasrils, himself a Jew, condemned Israel's treatment of Palestinians and said it was actually worse than the Apartheid government's treatment of blacks in South Africa had been. He said Israel actively discriminated against the Palestinian people. The conference was focused on solidarity with the Palestinians and discussed their future. (In other news reports Kasrils is described as minister for water and forestry). ( - Asharq al-Awsat ).


For "cont'd" postings, click here.