When The Gods Laugh - A short biography of Shimon Peres

If the life of Shimon Peres was a play, it would be difficult to classify. A tragedy? A comedy? A tragicomedy?

URI AVNERY

IF THE life of Shimon Peres was a play, it would be difficult to classify. A tragedy? A comedy? A tragicomedy?

For sixty years it looked as if he was under a curse of the Gods, much like the curse of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll an immense boulder up a hill, and every time he approached his goal the rock would roll down again to the bottom.

Disclosure: our lives have run somehow on parallel lines. He is one month older than I. We both came to Palestine as boys. We have both been in political life from our teens. But there the similarity ends.

We met for the first time 60 years ago, when we were 30 years old. He was the Director General of Israel’s most important ministry, I was the publisher and editor of Israel’s most aggressive news magazine. We disliked each other on sight.

He was David Ben-Gurion’s main assistant, I was Ben-Gurion’s main enemy (so defined by his security chief.) From there our paths crossed many times, but we did not become bosom friends.

ALREADY IN his early childhood in Poland, Peres (still Persky) complained that his mates in (Jewish) school beat him up for no reason. His younger brother had to defend him.

When he came to Palestine with his family, he was sent to the legendary children’s village Ben Shemen, and joined a kibbutz. But already as a teenager his political acumen was evident. He was an instructor in a socialist youth movement. It split and most of his comrades joined the left-wing faction, which looked more young and dynamic. Peres was one of the few who remained with the ruling party, Mapai, and thereby drew the attention of the senior leaders.

He had to make a much more momentous choice in the 1948 war, a war all of us considered a life-and-death struggle. It was the decisive event in the life of our generation. Almost all the young people hastened to join the fighting units. Not Peres. Ben-Gurion sent him abroad to buy arms – a very important task, but one that could have been carried out by an older person. Peres was considered a shirker at the supreme test and was never forgiven by the 1948ers. Their contempt plagued him for decades.

At the early age of 30 Ben-Gurion appointed him director of the Defense Ministry – a huge advancement, which assured him a rapid rise to the top. And indeed, he played a major role in pushing Ben-Gurion into the 1956 Suez war, in collusion with France and Britain.

The French were struggling with the Algerian war for independence and believed that their real enemy was the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. They got Israel to spearhead an attack to topple him. It was a complete failure.

In my opinion, the war was a political disaster for Israel. It dug the abyss separating our new state from the Arab world. But the French showed their gratitude – they rewarded Peres with the atomic reactor in Dimona.

Throughout this period, Peres was the ultimate hawk, and a central member of a group which my magazine, Haolam Hazeh, branded as “Ben-Gurion’s youth gang” – a group we suspected of plotting to assume power by undemocratic means. But before this could happen, Ben-Gurion was kicked out by the old party veterans, and Peres had no choice but to join him in political exile. They formed a new party, Rafi, Peres worked like mad, but in the end they garnered only 10 Knesset seats. Peres and the boulder were back at the bottom.

Redemption came with the Six-day War. On its eve, Rafi was invited to join a National Unity government. But the big prize was snatched by Moshe Dayan, who became Minister of Defense and a world idol. Peres remained in the shadows.

The next opportunity arose after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Golda Meir and Dayan were pushed out by an incensed public. Peres was the obvious candidate for Prime Minister. But lo and behold, at the last minute Yitzhak Rabin appeared from nowhere and snatched the crown. Peres was left with the Defence Ministry.

The next three years were a continuous story of subversion, with Peres trying by all available means to undermine Rabin. As a part of this effort, he allowed right-wing extremists to establish the first settlement in the heart of the West Bank – Kedumim. He has rightly been called the father of the settlement movement, as he was earlier called the father of the atom bomb.

Rabin coined a phrase that stuck to him: “Tireless Backstabber”.

This chapter ended with the “dollar account”. Upon leaving his former job as ambassador in Washington, Rabin had left an open account in an American bank. At the time, that was a criminal offense, generally settled with a fine, but Rabin resigned in order to protect his wife.

It was never proved that Peres had a hand in the disclosure, though many suspected it.

AT LONG last, the way was clear. Peres assumed the leadership of the party and ran for elections. The Labor Party was bound to win, as it always had before.

But the Gods only laughed. After 44 years of continuous Labour Party dominance, in the Yishuv and the state, Peres managed to achieve the unthinkable: he lost.

Menachem Begin made peace with Egypt, with Moshe Dayan, Peres’ competitor, at his side. Soon afterwards, Begin invaded Lebanon. On the eve of that war, Peres and Rabin visited him and urged him to attack. After the war went wrong, Peres appeared at a huge peace rally and condemned the war.

In the election before that, Peres had a shattering experience. In the evening, after the ballots were closed, Peres was crowned on camera as the next Prime Minister. On the following morning, Israel woke up with Prime Minister Menachem Begin again.

The elections after that ended in a draw. For the first time Peres became Prime Minister, but only under a rotation agreement. When Shamir assumed power, Peres tried to unseat him in a dubious political plot. It failed. Rabin, caustic as ever, called it “the Dirty Exercise”.

Peres’ unpopularity reached new depths. At election rallies, people cursed him and threw tomatoes. When, at a party event, he posed the rhetorical question: “Am I a loser?” the audience shouted in unison: “Yes!”
To change his luck, he underwent a cosmetic operation to alter his hangdog look. But his lack of grace could not be remedied by a surgeon. Neither could his oratorical skills – this man, who has delivered many tens of thousands of speeches, has never expressed a truly original idea. His speeches consist entirely of political platitudes, helped along by a deep voice, the dream of every politician. 

(This, by the way, disproves to me his pretence of having read thousands of books. You cannot really read so many books without a trace of it showing up in your writing and speeches. One of his assistants once confided to me that he prepared resumes of fashionable books for him, to save him the trouble of actually reading before quoting them.) 

IN THE meantime, Peres the hawk turned into Peres the peacenik. He had a part to play in achieving the Oslo accord, but it was Rabin who garnered the glory. The same, by the way, had happened before with the daring Entebbe raid, when Peres was Minister of Defence and Rabin Prime Minister.

After Oslo, the Nobel committee was about to award the Peace Prize to Rabin and Arafat. However, immense world-wide pressure was exerted on the committee to include Peres. Since no more than three persons can share the prize, Mahmoud Abbas, who had signed the agreement with Peres, was left out.

The assassination of Rabin was a turning point for Peres. He had been standing near Rabin when the “peace song” was sung. He came down the stairs, when Yigal Amir was waiting below, the loaded pistol in his hand. The murderer let Peres pass and waited for Rabin – another crowning insult.

But, at long last, Peres had achieved his goal. He was Prime Minister. The obvious thing to do was to call immediate elections, posing as the heir of the martyred leader. He would have won by a landslide. But Peres wanted to be elected on his own merit. He postponed the elections.

The results were disastrous. Peres gave the order to assassinate Yahya Ayyash, the “engineer” who had prepared the Hamas bombs. In retaliation, the entire country blew up in a tsunami of suicide bombings. Then Peres invaded South Lebanon, a sure means to gain popularity. But something went wrong, artillery fire caused a massacre of civilians in a UN camp, and the operation came to an inglorious end. Peres lost the elections, Netanyahu came to power.

Later, when the feared Ariel Sharon was elected, Peres offered him his services. He successfully whitewashed Sharon’s bloody image in the world.

IN ALL his long political life, Peres never won an election. So he decided to give up party politics and run for president. His victory was assured, certainly against a nondescript Likud functionary like Moshe Katzav. The outcome was again a crowning insult: little Katzav won against the great Peres. (Causing some people to say: “If an election cannot be lost, Peres will lose it anyway!”)

But this time the Gods seem to have decided that enough was enough. Katzav was accused of raping his secretaries, the way was clear for Peres. He was elected.

Since then he has been celebrating. The remorseful Gods shower him with favors. The public, which detested him for decades, enveloped him with their love. International celebrities anointed him as one of the world’s great.

He could not get enough of it. Hungry for love all his life, he swallowed flattery like a barrel without a bottom. He talked endlessly about “Peace” and the “New Middle East” while doing absolutely nothing to further it. Even TV announcers smiled when they repeated his edifying phrases. In reality he served as a fig leaf for Netanyahu’s endless exercises in expansion and sabotaging peace.

The culmination came this Tuesday. Sitting alongside Netanyahu, Peres celebrated his 90th birthday (two months before the real date), surrounded by a plethora of national and international celebrities, basking in their glamour like a teenager. It cost a lot – Bill Clinton alone got half a million dollars for attending.

After all the cruelties they had inflicted on him all his life, the Gods laughed benignly.

US control is diminishing, but it still thinks it owns the world

The United States has long assumed the right to use violence to achieve its aims, but it is now less able to implement its policies

• 
• • Noam Chomsky for TomDispatch, part of the Guardian Comment Network
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 February 2013 14.01 GMT

'We "stabilise" countries when we invade them and destroy them.' Photograph: Olivier Laban-Mattei/AFP/Getty Images

 

This piece is adapted from Uprisings, a chapter in Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire, Noam Chomsky's new book of interviews with David Barsamian (with thanks to the publisher, Metropolitan Books). The questions are Barsamian's, the answers Chomsky's.

Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab spring is limited, but it's not insignificant. The western-controlled dictatorial system is being eroded. In fact, it's been being eroded for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources – the main concern of US planners – have been mostly nationalised. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the US invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it's maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You're not supposed to say this. It's considered a conspiracy theory.
The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by Iraqi nationalism – mostly by nonviolent resistance. The United States could kill the insurgents, but they couldn't deal with half a million people demonstrating in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was going to be very hard to reach US goals. And at that point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration came out with an official declaration about what any future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had two major requirements: one, that the United States must be free to carry out combat operations from its military bases, which it will retain; and, two, "encouraging the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments". In January 2008, Bush made this clear in one of his signing statements. A couple of months later, in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something like the old system of control, but it was beaten back. In general, I think, US policies remain constant, going back to the second world war. But the capacity to implement them is declining.

Declining because of economic weakness?

Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse. It has more diverse power centres. At the end of the second world war, the United States was absolutely at the peak of its power. It had half the world's wealth, and every one of its competitors was seriously damaged or destroyed. It had a position of unimaginable security and developed plans to essentially run the world – not unrealistically at the time.

This was called "grand area" planning?

Yes. Right after the second world war, George Kennan, head of the US state department policy planning staff, and others sketched out the details, and then they were implemented. What's happening now in the Middle East and north Africa, to an extent, and in South America substantially goes all the way back to the late 1940s. The first major successful resistance to US hegemony was in 1949. That's when an event took place that, interestingly, is called "the loss of China". It's a very interesting phrase, never challenged. There was a lot of discussion about who is responsible for the loss of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it's a very interesting phrase. You can only lose something if you own it. It was just taken for granted: we possess China – and, if they move toward independence, we've lost China. Later came concerns about "the loss of Latin America", "the loss of the Middle East", "the loss of" certain countries, all based on the premise that we own the world and anything that weakens our control is a loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.

Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in a farcical form, listen to the Republican debates, they're asking, "How do we prevent further losses?"

On the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has sharply declined. By 1970, the world was already what was called tripolar economically, with a US-based North American industrial centre, a German-based European centre, roughly comparable in size, and a Japan-based east Asian centre, which was then the most dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the global economic order has become much more diverse. So it's harder to carry out our policies, but the underlying principles have not changed much.

Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that the United States was entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure "uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies and strategic resources". That goes beyond anything that George W Bush said. But it was quiet and it wasn't arrogant and abrasive, so it didn't cause much of an uproar. The belief in that entitlement continues right to the present. It's also part of the intellectual culture.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries ago, there used to be something called presumption of innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he's a suspect until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It's a core part of American law. You can trace it back to Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying maybe we shouldn't throw out the whole basis of Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of very angry and infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones were, as usual, on the left-liberal end of the spectrum. Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left-liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he ridiculed these views. He said they were "amazingly naive" and silly. Then he explained the reason. He said: "One of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers." Of course, he didn't mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on which the international system is based is that the US is entitled to use force at will. To talk about the US violating international law or something like that is amazingly naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target of those remarks, and I'm happy to confess my guilt. I do think that Magna Carta and international law are worth paying some attention to.

I merely mention that to illustrate that, in the intellectual culture, even at what's called the left-liberal end of the political spectrum, the core principles haven't changed very much. But the capacity to implement them has been sharply reduced. That's why you get all this talk about American decline. Take a look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs, the main establishment journal. Its big front-page cover asks, in bold face, "Is America Over?" It's a standard complaint of those who believe they should have everything. If you believe you should have everything and anything gets away from you, it's a tragedy, and the world is collapsing. So is America over? A long time ago we "lost" China, we've lost southeast Asia, we've lost South America. Maybe we'll lose the Middle East and north African countries. Is America over? It's a kind of paranoia, but it's the paranoia of the super-rich and the super-powerful. If you don't have everything, it's a disaster.

The New York Times describes the "defining policy quandary of the Arab spring as how to square contradictory US impulses, including support for democratic change, a desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who have become a potent political force". The Times identifies three US goals. What do you make of them?

Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favour of stability. But you have to remember what stability means. Stability means conformity to US orders. So, for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big foreign policy threat, is that it is destabilising Iraq and Afghanistan. How? By trying to expand its influence into neighbouring countries. On the other hand, we "stabilise" countries when we invade them and destroy them.

I've occasionally quoted one of my favourite illustrations of this, which is from a well-known, very good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about the overthrow of the Salvador Allende regime and the imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973, he said that we had to "destabilise" Chile in the interests of "stability". That's not perceived to be a contradiction – and it isn't. We had to destroy the parliamentary system in order to gain stability, meaning that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favour of stability in this technical sense.

Concern about political Islam is just like concern about any independent development. Anything that's independent you have to have concern about, because it may undermine you. In fact, it's a little paradoxical, because traditionally the United States and Britain have by and large strongly supported radical Islamic fundamentalism, not political Islam, as a force to block secular nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the world, a radical Islamic state. It has missionary zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan and funding terror. But it's the bastion of US and British policy. They've consistently supported it against the threat of secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt and Abd al-Karim Qasim's Iraq, among many others. But they don't like political Islam because it may become independent.

The first of the three points, our yearning for democracy, that's about on the level of Joseph Stalin talking about the Russian commitment to freedom, democracy and liberty for the world. It's the kind of statement you laugh about when you hear it from commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod politely, and maybe even with awe, when you hear it from their western counterparts.

If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That's even recognised by leading scholars, though they don't put it this way. One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded – a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan's state department and has several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history. The history is that every US administration is "schizophrenic". They support democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course, there's another interpretation, but one that can't come to mind if you're a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.

Within several months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and prosecution. It's inconceivable that US leaders will ever be held to account for their crimes in Iraq or beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?

That's basically the Yglesias principle: the very foundation of the international order is that the United States has the right to use violence at will. So how can you charge anybody?

And no one else has that right?

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills 1,000 people and destroys half the country, OK, that's all right. It's interesting. Barack Obama was a senator before he was president. He didn't do much as a senator, but he did a couple of things, including one he was particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the United States do nothing to impede Israel's military actions until they had achieved their objectives, and censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting resistance to Israel's destruction of southern Lebanon, incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they inherit the right. Other clients do, too.

But the rights really reside in Washington. That's what it means to own the world. It's like the air you breathe. You can't question it. The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticise the Vietnam war on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what's coming. Other countries don't have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is "transcendent" – to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he's a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the records. He said that, when you studied the record, it looked as if the United States hadn't lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says that to criticise our transcendent purpose "is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds" – which is a good comparison. It's a deeply entrenched religious belief. It's so deep that it's going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near-hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or "hating America" – interesting concepts that don't exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they're just taken for granted.

Pakistan and Israel are identical twins

India and Israel are often likened to each other, but it is Pakistan that Israel resembles the most

Much is made these days of the apparent likeness between India and Israel. Both are supposed to be modern democracies. Both, it is pointed out, are also fighting Islamic terrorism. But this is a superficial comparison. There is no dearth of modern democracies in the post-Cold War world, and no dearth of nations fighting Islamic terror either, post-9/11. For two nations to be considered alike, they ought to be similar in ways that are more fundamental and, at the same time, that also set them apart from other nations.

It is not India but Pakistan that shares a number of such traits with Israel.

Violent partition

Both Pakistan and Israel were carved out through partitions of historically and culturally unified territories within a year of each other: Pakistan in August 1947 and Israel in May 1948. Pakistan was created by splitting the Indian subcontinent, tearing asunder people who, while belonging to different religions, shared a common cultural heritage and had together fought their war of Independence. It created fissures even within ethnic communities — Punjabis in the west, Bengalis in the east and, a year later, Kashmiris in the north. The same happened when Israel was carved out of historical Palestine, dividing Arabs to the west of the Jordan river for the first time.

Two, neither partition was peaceful. Hundreds of thousands of people had to leave their homes in both instances to become refugees in what, just days earlier, had been their own land. Pakistan’s creation saw more than 10 million people migrate on either side of the border, many driven away by their neighbours. Nearly a million are believed to have died in the pogroms that ensued. While eloquent espousals of nationalism and patriotism poured out of leaders at bully pulpits, the slit throats of citizens spattered blood in the streets.

Israel’s creation was similarly gory. More than 700,000 Palestinians were hounded out of their homes by Zionist militias in what the Arabs have since called the Nakba, or catastrophe. Thousands perished. Many migrated to West Bank, Gaza and the refugee camps of Lebanon, Jordan and the Sinai; many others fled to Europe and the United States — places from where harried Jews had been moving to Palestine in preceding decades to escape persecution. One diaspora replaced another, and Arab became the new Jew of the West. The irony was profound.

Three, neither Pakistan nor Israel has clearly defined its borders since its creation. It’s not just that their neighbours don’t agree with them, but both these nations have themselves stopped short of stating precisely where they want their borders to be. While India categorically specifies the borders it claims in Kashmir, Pakistan’s position is ambiguous at best. It calls the portion it conquered in 1947-48 “Azad Kashmir” (Independent Kashmir), but Pakistan’s army exercises even more control over the lives of Azad Kashmiris than over the average Pakistani. It even has an Azad Kashmir Regiment — headquartered in Punjab.

Israel has also desisted from stating exactly how large or small it intends to be. For more than 20 years, even the Palestinian Authority has recognised the so-called Green Line — which defined Israeli territory until the 1967 war — as the international border subject to a two-state solution (that would create a Palestinian state). Israel itself, however, does not recognise the Green Line anymore. Nor does it say where it would draw its own Line, all the while grabbing more land in the West Bank for Jewish settlements.

Four, both Pakistan and Israel have fought wars of aggression against neighbours. The India-Pakistan conflicts of 1947-48, 1965 and 1999 were the result of Pakistani aggression. It also waged a proxy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a misadventure from which it is yet to dissociate itself. Israel’s wars are still more numerous. It attacked Egypt in 1956, Lebanon in 1982 and 2006, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza on numerous occasions. Gaza remains under Israeli siege even today.

Dominated by religion, military

Five, being born in blood and bred in wars, both Pakistan and Israel have developed societies and polities that are dominated by religion and the military. The green uniform has been at the helm of Pakistan’s affairs for nearly half its independent history, and lords over politicians even when not formally in charge. Its hand has been strengthened by the appropriation of Islam as a political ideology, and the nation is effectively run by a nexus of generals and mullahs.

Israel’s military has similarly clawed its way into the heart of the nation’s society and politics in the name of protecting its Jewish character. Making a name for yourself in wars is the surest way to a successful political career, ministerial posts and prime ministership. Just like Pakistan, Israel seems to be run by a league of generals and rabbis.

Six, both Pakistan and Israel nurture exclusivist national identities, concerned more with who does not belong to them than with who does. Created as a homeland for Muslims, Pakistan has always treated Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslims as second-class citizens. But that isn’t all.

Various categories of Muslims — migrants from India, Ahmadis, Shias, Baluchis and so on — have also found it difficult to integrate into Pakistani society and are perpetually blamed for all its social and political ills.

Israel was created as a homeland for Jews, and it treats Arabs as second-class citizens. But many Jews too — black Jews, Sephardic Jews, Mizrahi Jews, Russian-origin Jews and so on — face rampant discrimination. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis of Jewish ancestry are simply not considered Jews by law and struggle to be a part of Israeli society.

Benedict Anderson has called nations “imagined communities,” comprising people who share a deep bond of unity even with those they have never met or do not personally know. But Pakistan and Israel exhibit an extraordinary lack of imagination in the construction of their nationhood. Exclusivist identities, religious chauvinism, military dominance and a history of belligerence have rendered them societies that are perpetually at war — with their neighbours and with themselves. Their own uncertainty over their borders betrays this existential insecurity.

That is where India differs from both these nations. Imagined as a country of infinite communities, we have largely remained true to this founding principle. Muslims running away from riots in Gujarat or Assam, Biharis fleeing persecution in Maharashtra and Northeasterners escaping prejudice in South India are still exceptions in a nation that culturally and constitutionally believes in diversity. This belief, more than anything else, is the source of our national identity.

Let us hope that is how, and who, we remain.

(Saif Shahin is a doctoral research scholar in political communication at the University of Texas, Austin, U.S.)

Viswanathan Anand shows the heart of a champion in winning Fifth World Title

They trash-talked him, ridiculed him, and wrote him off. They said he had slowed down, lost his flair and chutzpah, and become conformist and traditional in his play. But Viswanathan Anand took on everything the Russian-Israeli chess mafia and his growing band of critics threw at him and emerged on top yet again on Wednesday, winning the world chess title for the fifth time, and shutting up detractors for now.

For sure, they will carp and crib at Anand's struggle to retain the title, the same way critics put down Sachin Tendulkar when he's going through a lean patch, or plays conservatively. But these two heroes of India have set such stratospheric standards for themselves that any hint of a slowdown or downturn in form is enough for detractors to write finis to their careers.

However, 42 is not 24; even the greatest don't have the same reflexes and mindset they when they push 40 -- much less in the twilight of a career -- that they had in their teens and twenties. But when it comes to the crunch, great champions find a way of winning. The flesh and bones might have sagged a little, but a lifetime of experience and a capacious heart comes into play. That is pretty much what Vishy Anand summoned on Wednesday to win the world title in a tie-breaker after Boris Gelfand, an Israeli challenger from the Russian stable of chess greats, held him to a 6-6 tie in regulation play.

The stakes were enormous. Anand has not been in top form for several months now; he's given up several titles he routinely won on the chess circuit. He's also the happy father of a year-old son who is more important than anything on the board. And to top it all, the Russian chess mafia has long been smarting at the loss of the chess crown to the genial Indian after the Karpov-Kasparov combine dominated the game for decades.

Anand has taken on everything they have fired at him from since 2000, including a divided and discredited world title. But since 2007, he had been the undisputed world champion, defeating the Russian Vladimir Kramnik, whom Moscow regarded as the heir to the two Ks, and the Bulgarian Veselin Topalov in 2010.

In each instance, Anand has had to battle not just his opponent, but also a mighty chess establishment, and sometimes even forces of nature. In 2010, he had to drive from Spain to Bulgaria, a distance of nearly 3000 kms across Europe, after the volcanic ash disrupted flights and the (challenger's) host country refused to delay the start, citing TV rights issues. He got to Sofia just in time -- and went on to win.

This time too, the biases were evident. After the two players were tied 6-6 in regulation play, the Russian news agency Ria Novosti ran a preview that, citing ''Russian pundits,'' said ''Boris Gelfand is the favorite to dethrone India's world champion Viswanathan Anand now their title match in Moscow has gone to a rapid chess tie-break.'' This, despite Anand's well-known prowess in rapid and blitz chess.

So even the most cerebral of all sports was not exempt from mind games. In Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a giant screen installed in his office to follow the live telecast of the games, often conferring with his former cabinet colleague Natan Sharansky, a chess player himself, about the moves. In Moscow, Sergei Smagin, the Moscow chess federation vice-president, described Anand as being "in terrible shape, which forced him not to play to win, but to struggle all match long," demonstrating "a tremendous lack of confidence and lot of mistakes.''

The situation is likely to be the same at a tie-break, giving the Israeli better chances to win provided that he copes with nerves, Smagin added.

Smagin hadn't factored in the heart -- the heart of a champion.

My Weltanschhaung - 14/02/2012

Being Valentine's Day, I am reminded of the guy who spoke at IIT-Kharagpur's humour festival - "Yeh Valentine day kya hai? Yeh to ek soone ka hiran hai jo dhanush banane wale companiyon ne bazaar me chhod rakha hai.! Translation, 'This Valentine's Day business is a golden deer released in to the market by firms selling bows'.

I am shocked at the competence of the managers of Jet Airways and Kingfisher Airlines who have not paid their staff salaries for two months. These are supposedly market savvy, professional and efficient firms.
What shocks me the most is the statement by Sanjay Aggarwal CEO of Kingfisher,  "We got hit by a couple of large unanticipated payments which had to be addressed on an emergency basis." 
How can you be unaware of such large payments coming up? Is there no penalty for not paying salaries on time? I think both these firms tactics aim to scupper any relief and rescue of Air-India, stating that they all need relief from the government.

I am surprised that the Israeli Prime Minister knew who attacked his staff in New Delhi even before the local police. The Israelis and its allies have been assasinating Iranian nuclear scientists without the same publicity though. The bomb blast in Delhi may be aimed at preventing India from signing up a bilateral treaty with Iran. Will the Indian government buckle under the pressure?

A President who is helpless in the face of Middle East reality

Robert Fisk in The Independent:

Obama's UN speech insists Israelis and Palestinians are equal parties to conflict

 

Friday, 23 September 2011

Today should be Mahmoud Abbas's finest hour. Even The New York Times has discovered that "a grey man of grey suits and sensible shoes, may be slowly emerging from his shadow".

But this is nonsense. The colourless leader of the Palestinian Authority, who wrote a 600-page book on his people's conflict with Israel without once mentioning the word "occupation", should have no trouble this evening in besting Barack Hussein Obama's pathetic, humiliating UN speech on Wednesday in which he handed US policy in the Middle East over to Israel's gimmick government.

For the American President who called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, an end to the theft of Arab land in the West Bank – Israeli "settlements" is what he used to call it – and a Palestinian state by 2011, Obama's performance was pathetic.

As usual, Hanan Ashrawi, the only eloquent Palestinian voice in New York this week, got it right. "I couldn't believe what I heard," she told Haaretz, that finest of Israeli newspapers. "It sounded as though the Palestinians were the ones occupying Israel. There wasn't one word of empathy for the Palestinians. He spoke only of the Israelis' troubles..." Too true. And as usual, the sanest Israeli journalists, in their outspoken condemnation of Obama, proved that the princes of American journalists were cowards. "The limp, unimaginative speech that US President Barack Obama delivered at the United Nations... reflects how helpless the American President is in the face of Middle East realities," Yael Sternhell wrote.

And as the days go by, and we discover whether the Palestinians respond to Obama's grovelling performance with a third intifada or with a shrug of weary recognition that this is how things always were, the facts will continue to prove that the US administration remains a tool of Israel when it comes to Israel's refusal to give the Palestinians a state.

How come, let's ask, that the US ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, flew from Tel Aviv to New York for the statehood debate on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's own aircraft? How come Netanyahu was too busy chatting to the Colombian President to listen to Obama's speech? He only glanced through the Palestinian bit of the text when he was live-time, face to face with the American President. This wasn't "chutzpah". This was insult, pure and simple.

And Obama deserved it. After praising the Arab Spring/Summer/ Autumn, whatever – yet again running through the individual acts of courage of Arab Tunisians and Egyptians as if he had been behind the Arab Awakening all along, the man dared to give the Palestinians 10 minutes of his time, slapping them in the face for daring to demand statehood from the UN. Obama even – and this was the funniest part of his preposterous address to the UN – suggested that the Palestinians and Israelis were two equal "parties" to the conflict.

A Martian listening to this speech would think, as Ms Ashrawi suggested, that the Palestinians were occupying Israel rather than the other way round. No mention of Israeli occupation, no mention of refugees, or the right of return or of the theft of Arab Palestinian land by the Israeli government against all international law. But plenty of laments for the besieged people of Israel, rockets fired at their houses, suicide bombs – Palestinian sins, of course, but no reference to the carnage of Gaza, the massive death toll of Palestinians – and even the historical persecution of the Jewish people and the Holocaust.

That persecution is a fact of history. So is the evil of the Holocaust. But THE PALESTINIANS DID NOT COMMIT THESE ACTS. It was the Europeans – whose help in denying Palestinian statehood Obama is now seeking – who committed this crime of crimes. So we were then back to the "equal parties", as if the Israeli occupiers and the occupied Palestinians were on a level playing ground.

Madeleine Albright used to adopt this awful lie. "It's up to the parties themselves," she would say, washing her hands, Pilate-like, of the whole business the moment Israel threatened to call out its supporters in America. Heaven knows if Mahmoud Abbas can produce a 1940 speech at the UN today. But at least we all know who the appeaser is.

Why I had to leave The Times

Robert Fisk:

When he worked at The Times, Robert Fisk witnessed the curious working practices of the paper's proprietor, Rupert Murdoch. Despite their jocular exchanges, the writer knew he couldn't stay...

Monday, 11 July 2011 in The Independent

He is a caliph, I suppose, almost of the Middle Eastern variety.
You hear all these awful things about Arab dictators and then, when you meet them, they are charm itself. Hafez al-Assad once held my hand in his for a long time with a paternal smile. Surely he can't be that bad, I almost said to myself – this was long before the 1982 Hama massacres. King Hussein would call me "Sir", along with most other journalists. These potentates, in public, would often joke with their ministers. Mistakes could be forgiven.
The "Hitler Diaries" were Murdoch's own mistake, after refusing to countenance his own "expert's" change of heart over the documents hours before The Times and The Sunday Times began printing them. Months later, I was passing by the paper's London office on my way back to Beirut when the foreign editor, Ivan Barnes, held up the Reuters wire copy from Bonn. "Aha!" he thundered. "The diaries are forgeries!" The West German government had proved that they must have been written long after the Führer's death.
So Barnes dispatched me to editor Charles Douglas-Home's office with the Reuters story and I marched in only to find Charlie entertaining Murdoch. "They say they're forgeries, Charlie," I announced, trying not to glance at Murdoch. But I did when he reacted. "Well, there you go," the mogul reflected with a giggle. "Nothing ventured, nothing gained." Much mirth. The man's insouciance was almost catching. Great Story. It only had one problem. It wasn't true.
Oddly, he never appeared the ogre of evil, darkness and poison that he's been made out to be these past few days. Maybe it's because his editors and sub-editors and reporters repeatedly second-guessed what Murdoch would say. Murdoch was owner of The Times when I covered the blood-soaked Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Not a line was removed from my reports, however critical they were of Israel. After the invasion, Douglas-Home and Murdoch were invited by the Israelis to take a military helicopter trip into Lebanon. The Israelis tried to rubbish my reporting; Douglas-Home said he stood up for me. On the flight back to London, Douglas-Home and Murdoch sat together. "I knew Rupert was interested in what I was writing," he told me later. "He sort of waited for me to tell him what it was, although he didn't demand it. I didn't show it to him."
But things changed. Before he was editor, Douglas-Home would write for the Arabic-language Al-Majella magazine, often deeply critical of Israel. Now his Times editorials took an optimistic view of the Israeli invasion. He stated that "there is now no worthy Palestinian to whom the world can talk" and – for heaven's sake – that "perhaps at last the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip will stop hoping that stage-strutters like Mr Arafat can rescue them miraculously from doing business with the Israelis."
All of which, of course, was official Israeli government policy at the time.
Then, in the spring of 1983, another change. I had, with Douglas-Home's full agreement, spent months investigating the death of seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners of the Israelis in Sidon. It was obvious, I concluded, that the men had been murdered – the grave-digger even told me that their corpses had been brought to him, hands tied behind their backs, showing marks of bruising. But now Douglas-Home couldn't see how we would be "justified" in running a report "so long after the event".
In other words, the very system of investigative journalism – of fact-checking and months of interviews – became self-defeating. When we got the facts, too much time had passed to print them. I asked the Israelis if they would carry out a military inquiry and, anxious to show how humanitarian they were, they duly told us there would be an official investigation. The Israeli "inquiry" was, I suspected, a fiction. But it was enough to "justify" publishing my long and detailed report. Once the Israelis could look like good guys, Douglas-Home's concerns evaporated.
When he died, of cancer, it was announced that his deputy, Charles Wilson, would edit the paper. Murdoch said that Wilson was "Charlie's choice" and I thought, so, all well and good – until I was chatting to Charlie's widow and she told me that it was the first time she had heard that Wilson's editorship had been her late husband's decision. We all knew Murdoch had signed up to all manner of guarantees of editorial independence, oversight and promises of goodwill when he bought The Times – and had then fired his first editor, Harold Evans. He would deal with the trade unionists later.
Charles Wilson – who much later became, briefly, the editor of The Independent – was a tough, friendly man who could show great kindness, as well as harshness, to his staff. He was kind to me, too. But once, when I was visiting Wilson in London, Murdoch walked into his office. "Hallo, Robert!" Murdoch greeted me, before holding a jocular conversation with Wilson. And, after he had left, Wilson said to me in a hushed voice: "See how he called you by your first name?" This was laughable. It was like the Assad smile or the King Hussein "Sir". It meant nothing. Murdoch was joking with his ministers and courtiers.
A warning sign. Still in west Beirut, where dozens of Westerners were being kidnapped, I opened The Times to discover that a pro-Israeli writer was claiming on our centre page that all journalists in west Beirut, clearly intimidated by "terrorism", could be regarded only as "bloodsuckers". Was the paper claiming that I, too, was a bloodsucker? In all this time, Murdoch had expressed exclusively pro-Israeli views, and had accepted a "Man of the Year" award from a prominent Jewish-American organisation. The Times editorials became more and more pro-Israeli, their use of the word "terrorist" ever more promiscuous.
The end came for me when I flew to Dubai in 1988 after the USS Vincennes had shot down an Iranian passenger airliner over the Gulf. Within 24 hours, I had spoken to the British air traffic controllers at Dubai, discovered that US ships had routinely been threatening British Airways airliners, and that the crew of the Vincennes appeared to have panicked. The foreign desk told me the report was up for the page-one splash. I warned them that American "leaks" that the IranAir pilot was trying to suicide-crash his aircraft on to the Vincennes were rubbish. They agreed.
Next day, my report appeared with all criticism of the Americans deleted, with all my sources ignored. The Times even carried an editorial suggesting the pilot was indeed a suicider. A subsequent US official report and accounts by US naval officers subsequently proved my dispatch correct. Except that Times readers were not allowed to see it. This was when I first made contact with The Independent. I didn't believe in The Times any more – certainly not in Rupert Murdoch.
Months later, a senior night editor who had been on duty on the night my Vincennes report arrived, recalled in a letter that he had promoted my dispatch as the splash, but that Wilson had said: "There's nothing in it. There's not a fact in it. I wouldn't even run this gibberish." Wilson, the night editor said, called it "bollocks" and "waffle". The night editor's diary for that day finished: "Shambles, chaos on Gulf story. [George] Brock [Wilson's foreign editor] rewrites Fisk."
The good news: a few months later, I was Middle East correspondent for The Independent. The bad news: I don't believe Murdoch personally interfered in any of the above events. He didn't need to. He had turned The Times into a tame, pro-Tory, pro-Israeli paper shorn of all editorial independence. If I hadn't been living in the Middle East, of course, it might have taken me longer to grasp all this.
But I worked in a region where almost every Arab journalist knows the importance of self-censorship – or direct censorship – and where kings and dictators do not need to give orders. They have satraps and ministers and senior police officers – and "democratic" governments – who know their wishes, their likes and dislikes. And they do what they believe their master wants. Of course, they all told me this was not true and went on to assert that their king/president was always right.
These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a "news" story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire.
In the sterile world of the Murdochs, new technology was used to deprive the people of their freedom of speech and privacy. In the Arab world, surviving potentates had no problem in appointing tame prime ministers. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The Genie Is Out of the Bottle

... and no power on earth can put it back. It is the genie of revolution, of renewal, of rejuvenation, that is now haunting all the regimes in the region.
Uri Avnery


THIS IS a story right out of 1001 Nights. The genie escaped from the bottle, and no power on earth can put it back.

When it happened in Tunisia, it could have been said: OK, an Arab country, but a minor one. It was always a bit more progressive than the others. Just an isolated incident.

And then it happened in Egypt. A pivotal country. The heart of the Arab world. The spiritual centre of Sunni Islam. But it could have been said: Egypt is a special case. The land of the Pharaohs. Thousands of years of history before the Arabs even got there.

But now it has spread all over the Arab world. To Algeria, Bahrain, Yemen. Jordan, Libya, even Morocco. And to non-Arab, non-Sunni Iran, too.

The genie of revolution, of renewal, of rejuvenation, is now haunting all the regimes in the region. The inhabitants of the “Villa in the Jungle” are liable to wake up one morning and discover that the jungle is gone, that we are surrounded by a new landscape.

WHEN OUR Zionist fathers decided to set up a safe haven in Palestine, they had the choice between two options:

They could appear in West Asia as European conquerors, who see themselves as a bridgehead of the “white” man and as masters of the “natives”, like the Spanish conquistadores and the Anglo-Saxon colonialists in America. That is what the crusaders did in their time.

The second way was to see themselves as an Asian people returning to their homeland, the heirs to the political and cultural traditions of the Semitic world, ready to take part, with the other peoples of the region, in the war of liberation from European exploitation.

I wrote these words 64 years ago, in a brochure that appeared just two months before the outbreak of the 1948 war.

I stand by these words today.

These days I have a growing feeling that we are once again standing at a historic crossroads. The direction we choose in the coming days will determine the destiny of the State of Israel for years to come, perhaps irreversibly. If we choose the wrong road, we will have “weeping for generations”, as the Hebrew saying goes.

And perhaps the greatest danger is that we make no choice at all, that we are not even aware of the need to make a decision, that we just continue on the road that has brought us to where we are today. That we are occupied with trivialities – the battle between the Minister of Defense and the departing Chief of Staff, the struggle between Netanyahu and Lieberman about the appointment of an ambassador, the non-events of “Big Brother” and similar TV inanities – that we do not even notice that history is passing us by, leaving us behind.

WHEN OUR politicians and pundits found enough time – amid all the daily distractions – to deal with the events around us, it was in the old and (sadly) familiar way.

Even in the few halfway intelligent talk shows, there was much hilarity about the idea that “Arabs” could establish democracies. Learned professors and media commentators “proved” that such a thing just could not happen – Islam was “by nature” anti-democratic and backward, Arab societies lacked the Protestant Christian ethic necessary for democracy, or the capitalist foundations for a sound middle class, etc. At best, one kind of despotism would be replaced by another.

The most common conclusion was that democratic elections would inevitably lead to the victory of “Islamist” fanatics, who would set up brutal Taliban-style theocracies, or worse.

Part of this, of course, is deliberate propaganda, designed to convince the naïve Americans and Europeans that they must shore up the Mubaraks of the region or alternative military strongmen. But most of it was quite sincere: most Israelis really believe that the Arabs, left to their own devices, will set up murderous “Islamist” regimes, whose main aim would be to wipe Israel off the map.

Ordinary Israelis know next to nothing about Islam and the Arab world. As a (left-wing) Israeli general answered 65 years ago, when asked how he viewed the Arab world: “though the sights of my rifle.” Everything is reduced to “security”, and insecurity prevents, of course, any serious reflection.


THIS ATTITUDE goes back to the beginnings of the Zionist movement.

Its founder – Theodor Herzl – famously wrote in his historic treatise that the future Jewish State would constitute “a part of the wall of civilization” against Asiatic (meaning Arab) barbarism. Herzl admired Cecil Rhodes, the standard-bearer of British imperialism, He and his followers shared the cultural attitude then common in Europe, which Eduard Said latter labeled “Orientalism”.

Viewed in retrospect, that was perhaps natural, considering that the Zionist movement was born in Europe towards the end of the imperialist era, and that it was planning to create a Jewish homeland in a country in which another people – an Arab people – was living.

The tragedy is that this attitude has not changed in 120 years, and that it is stronger today than ever. Those of us who propose a different course – and there have always been some – remain voices in the wilderness.

This is evident these days in the Israeli attitude to the events shaking the Arab world and beyond. Among ordinary Israelis, there was quite a lot of spontaneous sympathy for the Egyptians confronting their tormentors in Tahrir Square - but everything was viewed from the outside, from afar, as if it were happening on the moon.

The only practical question raised was: will the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty hold? Or do we need to raise new army divisions for a possible war with Egypt? When almost all “security experts” assured us that the treaty was safe, people lost interest in the whole matter.

BUT THE treaty – actually an armistice between regimes and armies – should only be of secondary concern for us. The most important question is: how will the new Arab world look? Will the transition to democracy be relatively smooth and peaceful, or not? Will it happen at all, and will it mean that a more radical Islamic region emerges - which is a distinct possibility? Can we have any influence on the course of events?

Of course, none of today’s Arab movements is eager for an Israeli embrace. It would be a bear hug. Israel is viewed today by practically all Arabs as a colonialist, anti-Arab state that oppresses the Palestinians and is out to dispossess as many Arabs as possible – though there is, I believe, also a lot of silent admiration for Israel’s technological and other achievements.

But when entire peoples rise up and revolution upsets all entrenched attitudes, there is the possibility of changing old ideas. If Israeli political and intellectual leaders were to stand up today and openly declare their solidarity with the Arab masses in their struggle for freedom, justice and dignity, they could plant a seed that would bear fruit in coming years.

Of course, such statements must really come from the heart. As a superficial political ploy, they would be rightly despised. They must be accompanied by a profound change in our attitude towards the Palestinian people. That’s why peace with the Palestinians now, at once, is a vital necessity for Israel.

Our future is not with Europe or America. Our future is in this region, to which our state belongs, for better or for worse. It’s not just our policies that must change, but our basic outlook, our geographical orientation. We must understand that we are not a bridgehead from somewhere distant, but a part of a region that is now – at long last – joining the human march towards freedom.

The Arab Awakening is not a matter of months or a few years. It may well be a prolonged struggle, with many failures and defeats, but the genie will not return to the bottle. The images of the 18 days in Tahrir Square will be kept alive in the hearts of an entire new generation from Marakksh to Mosul, and any new dictatorship that emerges here or there will not be able to erase them.

In my fondest dreams I could not imagine a wiser and more attractive course for us Israelis, than to join this march in body and spirit.