'They might snap'

In a recent exchange on lenin’s tomb, Sean Coleman, Ireland Campaign Manager, Sudan Divestment Task Force, wrote,

Now imagine the US military unveiled a new strategy in Iraq: …attacks will be conducted without any reference to civilians, merely to say that if you're a civilian killed by an American bomb, it was your own fault for your proximity to the insurgents and your lack of "protection". Any such policy would be decried as a murderous and monstrous way to prosecute a war. That is because it is. Supporting it - as in the case of those who lend support to Iraqi resistance - is, I think, concurrently lacking in moral sense.

Now, writes Tina Susman, the April murder of the teenage son of a Los Angeles Times employee in Baghdad has provided an opportunity to see what is really going on there.

The 17-year-old had been struck by a bullet in the chaos that followed the explosion and was bleeding heavily. Within two hours, the boy was dead. Witnesses charge he was killed by U.S. troops firing randomly.

U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents…With more troops on the ground as a result of President Bush's "surge," U.S. military officials acknowledge that there are greater chances for civilian casualties.

"Being that we are doing more operations in places where we were not before, and doing operations in large numbers, there is just more contact with the enemy and therefore more chance of people on the periphery being involved in that," said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

According to counterinsurgency expert Kalev Sepp, "you just end up with another group of foreign occupation troops shooting civilians who they feel threaten them when their car drives too close to them."

If the anecdotal evidence is an indication, such deaths often occur after troops are shaken by roadside bombs, as occurred when The Times employee's son was killed April 17.

"They were confused and angry and suspecting anyone around," Mohammed said. "If a bird had passed by, they would have shot it."

The U.S. military said troops shot in self-defense after being targeted first by the bomb and then by gunfire, but Mohammed and other witnesses denied that anybody shot at the soldiers.

"It's a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance," said Alaa Safi, who said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

"I can't tell you that nobody got killed in that specific incident," Garver said. "In some instances, we're not able to know what really happened."

"You must be reasonably certain that your target is the source of the threat," the rules state.

Military officials have acknowledged, however, that the rules are sometimes broken in the heat of combat…troops "become stressed, they become fearful" on a battlefield where it is difficult to tell civilians from insurgents…"But I would say it's stress, fear, isolation, and in some cases they're just upset. They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion and they could snap."

And who could blame stressed and frightened kids from snapping under such conditions? Clearly they need to be disarmed and removed from harm’s way. At least if a concern for innocent bystanders is the point. What always seems to get lost in these news reports is that the IEDs and the snipers wouldn’t be attacking American troops if they weren’t there in the first place. Garver speaks of the insurgents as ‘the enemy’. But in reality, he and his troops are the enemy. The insurgents can’t just pack up and go home. They are home.

Last year, retired Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated that U.S. troops alone had killed "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis, either by accident or through carelessness.

Even the troops directly involved in incidents often cannot say if civilian casualties have occurred.

So it’s no surprise that nobody is doing body counts. Furthermore

The challenge of reaching an accurate tally has become more acute since the military surge began.

The Iraqi government, eager to show that the security plan is working, has stopped releasing monthly civilian casualty figures to the United Nations, arguing that Cabinet ministries collecting the numbers were inflating them for political purposes.

The U.S. military rarely issues public reports on civilians it has killed or wounded. It did not respond to requests for information on civilians killed this year by U.S. troops.

And yet nobody wants to believe the estimates of excess deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq from the only reliable source there is – the cluster survey carried out last July by a team from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al-Mustansariya University Medical School and published by Burnham et al. in the eminent British medical journal The lancet last October.

Susman writes, for example, ‘Estimates of civilians killed…range from tens of thousands to as many as 600,000.’ In reality, Burnham did not estimate civilian deaths at all for quite sound reasons. For one thing, they thought it could endanger the interviewers to probe too deeply into such matters. For another, in this context, it is simply not possible to distinguish reliably between civilians and combatants. And since the resistance only exists as a response to the occupation, those killed fighting the occupation are absolutely no less victims of the occupation than those who die without taking arms against their oppressors.

In contrast, Iraq Body Count’s (IBC) claim that it can rely on the mainstream media - i.e. 65 journalists holed up in the Green Zone or 'embedded' with Coalition troops - to distinguish reliably between combatants and non combatant deaths in each and every case is beyond naive. It is wilfully dishonest.

In this connection, I want to emphasise a point Eli Stevens always makes.

In the news today, a car bomb in Baghdad killed 23 people and injured 68 others, while later, a second killed 17 people and wounded 55 others. Will you ever hear what happened to those 123 injured people (or the others who were injured in incidents where the numbers of dead didn't reach double-digits, and weren't even "newsworthy" by the standards of American reporting on Iraq)? Not a chance. Will some, maybe even the majority, die later today in the hospital, or tomorrow, or next week? Quite likely. But according to the Western press (and those such as Iraq Body Count), 40 people died in those two incidents, a number which will never change.

So it never contributes to the IBC count. Obviously, this is not an issue with the Burnham team’s methodology.

Furthermore, Burnham et al did not estimate ‘as many as 600,000’ dead. They estimated about 655,000 excess deaths, although for statistical reasons, the true number could have been as low as 400,000 or as high as 940,000. And that was a year ago, a year moreover that has seen Iraqis dying at an accelerating rate. The current number of Iraqis who have died because of the occupation of their country is almost certainly a million or more.

While on the subject of Burnham et al again, apologists for the invasion have made a clumsy attempt to discredit their findings by suggesting that the sampling methodology deployed in the survey is subject to ‘main street bias’ (MSB). Interviewers were instructed to select a ‘residential street’ intersecting a main street, to select a dwelling at random, and to interview the household residing there and the next 39 households.

The MSB hypothesis relies on the assumption that the interviewers would have interpreted ‘main street’ as ‘principal thoroughfare’ and selected the first household in a street intersecting one of these that was itself a main street. It also assumes that car bombings and other killings would occur on these secondary main streets where markets are thought to be located. This is of course irrelevant, as those killed at a bazaar are not just those residing whose in the flat above it. Anybody buying or selling there is equally vulnerable, whether they live in the same building, in the same street, or somewhere else in the neighbourhood, or anywhere.

The 17 year old son of the LA Times employee lived

…in a middle-class neighborhood of split-level houses with balconies, driveways and cerise bougainvillea draping garden walls. The stroll took him down his quiet street to a commercial strip with small stores, butcher shops and cafes. Parallel to the strip is a median and then a highway, which passes beneath a concrete tangle of overpasses before heading to the airport. Blackened blotches are evidence of the frequency of attacks on troops patrolling it.

One tragic incident showing, among other things, that in a city full of rampaging stressed and frightened US troops armed to the teeth, you don’t have to live on a main street to be a victim of the violence they have unleashed.

Higher education

A telephone survey conducted 30 May to 3 June by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press of a sample of 1503 American adults reveals that 51% now think ‘the U.S. made the wrong decision in using military force against Iraq’. Fifty-six percent ‘think the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible’, which is comparable to the 55% who want the number reduced reported in the Washington Post-ABC News Poll about the same time. But while only 15% in the WP-ABC poll wanted troops removed immediately, 20% gave that response in the Pew poll.

Interestingly, every population separately tabulated has shown a significant increase in the proportion saying bring the troops home since June 2006. Even 29% of identified Republicans held this view, an increase of six percentage points in the last year. Apart from Republicans, every population but three had a majority favouring withdrawal. Pluralities of 49% of both men and White Evengelical Protestants wanted the troops out, with 46% and 45% saying they should stay in Iraq. The only population with a plurality that favoured keeping troops in Iraq was College graduates – 46% said bring them home, 48% said let them stay. Fifty-two percent of those with ‘some college’ and 64% of those with ‘High School or less’ wanted the troops out.

In a rather more disturbing development, 49% of the half sample asked whether ‘the United States has a responsibility to do something about the ethnic genocide in Darfur’ said it did, while 45% of the other half favoured ‘the use of U.S. troops in Darfur as part of a multinational force to help end the ethnic genocide there’.

What’s truly appalling is the wording of the question. It certainly does not go without saying that what’s going on in Darfur is ‘ethnic genocide’ and there is an interesting argument about this on lenin’s tomb. The argument revolves around the issue of whether it is in fact genocide and more significantly whether the characterisation of the situation in Dafur as genocide is a diversion from Iraq. Given the leading question, though, it’s disturbing that less than half think ‘something must be done’ – 34% said it’s not the US’s responsibility and 37% opposed sending troops. It’s also disturbing that even after all the blatant lying and scandals and corruption and cronyism and stolen elections and the completely unjustified decimation of Iraq, that a majority say was wrong, so many American adults still think that the US, and even US troops, can act as a force for good and rescue the suffering Fur. It’s as if they’ve forgotten Somalia and so many other US ‘humanitarian interventions’. Perhaps the large number of refusals – 17% and 18% - are an encouraging sign.

DePaul screws Finkelstein

In news just to hand, Jennifer Howard reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education that de Paul University’s Board on Promotion and Tenure decided not to grant tenure Norman Finkelstein. University president the Rev. Dennis Holtschneider upheld the tenure board’s recommendation.

Further details should appear on Finkelstein’s site or the campaign site soon and I’ll update the information somehow.

Update: Here is a link to the DePaul press release and to Holtschneider's letter denying FInkelstein's promotion to Associate Professor and advising him that his contract is to terminate at 30 June next year.

A symbol of freedom

After a harrowing ordeal at the hands of his captors, civil rights campaigner Syed Mohammad Iqbal Kazmi was released yesterday morning.

Dawn reports

Mr Kazmi said that two men tortured him during this period and quizzed him about his association with Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf chief Imran Khan…They also asked him to disclose the names of his supporters. He claimed his captors used to throw cold water on him to force him to stay awake.

“They burnt the sensitive parts of my body with cigarettes and pressed my fingers with stones,” he said.

[Dawn photo]

Mr Kazmi said that his captors threatened him with death if he did not disclose the names of those who had asked him to file the petition. He said his cellphone containing photo clips of the May 12 incidents, Rs12,000 in cash, a telephone directory and other documents were taken from him.

He said that one of the men -- whom the others referred to as ‘sahib’ – talked to him in a much more civilised manner. He said the man grilled him and asked him to withdraw the petition.

His captors forced him to sign blank papers, drugged him, and left him on the side of he road.

He said that he would neither surrender nor leave Karachi even at the cost of his and his family’s lives.

His wife, Sadia Kazmi, also said that the family would not leave Karachi and would face whatever happened.

Meanwhile, Information and Broadcasting Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani,

…claimed that the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory (Amendment) Ordinance…was actually meant to counter “some incidents of terrorism and extremism” rather than block the airing of criticism of the government.

…he rejected the charges that a curtailment of media freedom was intended and said the present government was credited with making Pakistan what claimed to be “a symbol (of press freedom) not only in the Islamic world but the whole world”.

The minister blamed recent interruptions of the programmes of some leading private television channels to technical problems…

And yet, Dawn’s Raja Asghar reports

The government used its numerical superiority in the National Assembly on Friday to block a debate on new media curbs…

The opposition parties had sought the debate on the restrictions and higher penalties ordered for the private electronic media through a presidential ordinance and instructions issued by the Pakistan Electronic Media Regularity Authority (Pemra) as well as alleged harassment of journalists mainly for their coverage of events relating to the prevailing judicial crisis in the country.

‘A symbol of press freedom’, Durrani said, not a respecter, implementer, or defender of press freedom.

BBC breaks ranks

Armour clad South African soldiers are trying to protect those scabbing on the 500,000 strong public sector strike, while police wounded three strikers with rubber bullets, according to the BBC, which also implicates the army itself in the scabbing.

Army medical staff have already been brought in to provide care in some hospitals to try and cover what analysts say is one of the biggest strikes in the country's history.

The union federation announced

"Cosatu [Congress of South African Trade Unions] will not allow a defeat of the public sector strike. The implications of such a defeat to workers as a whole would be devastating," the union federation said.

Unless the government agrees to raise wages by 10%, to keep ahead of the 7% inflation rate,

It said all workers, such as those in the crucial mining and manufacturing sectors, will go on a "solidarity strike" starting on Monday, building up to a "complete strike" next Wednesday.

At present, the government is offering a 6.5% increase.

The BBC's Mpho Lakaje in Johannesburg says the strike has been marked by violence and intimidation with more than 20 arrests in Durban.

Striking nurses had been warned they would be fired unless they return to work by Monday.

It’s not every day that the mainstream media so clearly acknowledge scabbing, rubber bullets and arrests as forms of violence and threats to workers’ living standards and livelihoods as violent intimidation. Bravo!

'You can't prove anything!'

In his Council of Europe report, ‘Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states: second report’, released yesterday, rapporteur Dick Marty begins

What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges levelled against them and without any judicial oversight – denied the possibility of defending themselves. Still others have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe, the existence and operations of which have been concealed ever since.

Some individuals were kept in secret detention centres for periods of several years, where they were subjected to degrading treatment and so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (essentially a euphemism for a kind of torture), in the name of gathering information, however unsound, which the United States claims has protected our common security. Elsewhere, others have been transferred thousands of miles into prisons whose locations they may never know, interrogated ceaselessly, physically and psychologically abused, before being released because they were plainly not the people being sought…These are the terrible consequences of what in some quarters is called the “war on terror.”

Marty’s investigations are a response to US president George W Bush’s admission on 6 September 2006

In addition to terrorists held at Guantanamo, a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the U.S., in a separate program operated by the CIA. The detainees recently transferred to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay were previously held and questioned by the CIA. The CIA program focused on a number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives – dangerous men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and plans for new attacks.

In response to the revelations in Marty’s report, the BBC reports

A CIA spokesman said the report was biased and distorted…"operations have been lawful, effective, closely reviewed and of benefit to many people - including Europeans - by disrupting plots and saving lives".

Or, as Bart Simpson put it, ‘I didn't do it, no one saw me do it, you can't prove anything!’

Eye to eye

Last month, Zogby conducted an opinion poll of Jewish and Arab Americans on behalf of Americans for Peace Now and the Arab American Institute. Between 22 and 23 May, 501 American Jews were surveyed by telephone and 501 American Arabs were surveyed between 22 and 26 May.

Richard Silverstein, whose blog, Tikun Olam, alerted me to the poll, reckons

The poll also confirms what many of us have known for years–that American Jews diverge strongly from the views of their leaders and the Israeli government when it comes to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

His only reservation

One somewhat distressing finding was that only 34% of Jews believe that Arabs support a secure Israel, while in fact 88% do. This, of course, indicates the sorry, violent state of affairs in the Middle East today and also the drumbeat of negativity that is inculcated into American Jews by the local Jewish media and the Israel lobby.

At one level, he is probably right to suggest that a significant proportion of American Jews disagree with those who purport to represent them, like the Israeli government and AIPAC and the AJC. But, as always, it’s worth looking at what the survey actually asked.

First though, I checked out the methodology section of the report, Seeing Eye to Eye: A Survey of Jewish American and Arab American Public Opinion. There I learned that the samples had been selected ‘using Zogby International's list of Jewish surnames’ and of Arab surnames. So you’d kind of expect to find a range of demographic characteristics. But when you look at the table, it transpires that there is some very suspicious stuff going on there.

Perhaps American respondents can make sense of it, but the output categories for the variable Zogby seems to call ‘ideology’ are Progressive, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative, and Libertarian. I guess someone with my political orientation would have had to answer ‘Other’, but there doesn’t appear to have been a residual category for this particular variable.

I was surprised to find that a plurality of 40% of Jews and 33% of Arabs reported annual incomes in excess of US$100,000, which makes me wonder how representative the sample really is.

Another big surprise was that even though the Jewish sample was selected on the basis of surname, and not, say, synagogue records, 100% reported their religion as ‘Jewish’. I am not overly concerned that the count provided was also ‘100’ rather than the 501 you would expect, as this was probably a typo. ‘N/A’ has been entered in every other cell in the Jewish columns. Now if I had drawn a sample of 501 Jews and there was not one single atheist, agnostic, or Taoist among them, I think I’d start to worry.

Furthermore, when asked about attendance at religious services, only 21% of the Jews responded either ‘Attend on holidays only’, ‘Attend rarely’, or ‘Never attend’. This contrasts very markedly from my personal knowledge of American Jews, such as it is, which leads me to expect nearly 100% in these three categories. In comparison, a plurality of 43% of the Arabs reported attendance in this range.

The Arabs are much more religiously diverse, including 13% ‘Other/None’. Interestingly, just 24% of the Arabs in the sample reported their religion as Muslim. The plurality of 35% said they were Catholic, with a significant majority of 63% saying they were either Catholic, ‘Protestant’, or ‘Eastern Orthodox’. Jews were further classified into six separate ‘denominations’, some of which I never heard of and none of which seemed to accommodate Hassidism. In contrast, the Muslims were classified into ‘sects’ – Shi’a, Sunni, and Other. Now as the word is typically used, sect is derogatory. Sects are ‘sectarian’, obviously. They depart from the mainstream. But for Zogby, apparently, there is no Muslim mainstream – they’re all sectarians. Denominations in contrast, is about as neutral as you can get – just what you’re called. Doubtless Zogby has some perfectly reasonable explanation for this superficially racist distinction, but it’s not worth explicitly articulating it. Another curious thing is that there appears to have been no attempt to classify the Protestants and Orthodox. I assume that Zogby’s intention was that Catholic refer exclusively to Roman Catholics. But in light of the numbers and considering that 56% appear to have specified Lebanese origin, many of these may actually be Maronite, which I think might otherwise be considered an Orthodox rite. The point is that it would probably have been worthwhile probing for what kind of Catholic. In all honesty, though, the report does not provide the questions used to determine these characteristics of the sample, so maybe they did.

While on the subject of religion, I couldn’t help noticing that there were no Druzes reported. As only about 20,000 of the reported 3.5 million Arabs in the US are Druze, however, this should come as no surprise. Still, there are plenty of empty cells in the table (‘African-American’, for example), and the absence of a Druze category suggests that respondents may not even have been asked.

So before even looking at the substantive questions, I already have serious reservations about how representative the sample is and the kinds of biases the developers may be bringing to bear on the data.

A small majority – 55% of each population, give or take 4.5% - claimed that they ‘follow the situation in the Middle East’ ‘very closely’ and another 37% of Jews and 38% of Arabs follow it ‘somewhat closely’.

Then it starts getting more interesting. Question 4 asks, ‘Concerning the Bush Administration’s efforts at pursuing peace in the Middle East, which of the following statements do you feel is most accurate?’ In other words, to answer the question at all, you have to share the assumption of the question’s framers that the Bush Administration is in fact making efforts at pursuing peace in the Middle East. Now little could be more obvious than that the Bush administration is absolutely committed to pursuing a strategy of war in Iraq and sabre rattling hostility to Syria and Iran. If Afghanistan counts as the Middle East, then they are real keen on war there, too. The Bush administration is pouring weaponry into Lebanon right now and evidenced a strong desire to avert a ceasefire in the Israeli war on Lebanon last year. But we know that they don’t mean the Middle East as a whole. They really mean just Israel and the occupied territories, as they did in the previous question. And again, the level of military aid to Israel, explicitly at the expense of non military aid, which has been winding down now for a decade and will reach zero next year, suggests that pursuing peace is not where the Bush administrations efforts are directed. The recent adventure in arming and training elite Fatah militia with the specific aim of attacking the ‘military’ of the PA also suggests an agenda at variance with peace as usually understood. If these respondents are prepared to accept the bogus assumptions that underly the question, it already casts doubt on their honesty when they claimed to be following events closely.

Having bought into the assumption, 41% of the Jews and 59% of the Arabs said the Bush administration was leaning towards Israel. Another 17% of Jews and 15% of Arabs said they were steering a ‘middle course’, and 34% of Jews and 21% of Arabs said the US was ‘disengaged’. Now it happens to be the case that Israel receives some US$3 billion per year in untied military aid. Since the election of January 2006 that resulted in a Hamas victory, the PA has received effectively nothing. It’s hard to imagine anyone following events closely and failing to notice this fairly glaring evidence of partiality on the part of the Bush administration. There’s plenty of other, less tangible evidence. Without reciting the whole sorry litany, I might just point out this one thing. One of the only UN Security Council resolutions pertaining to Israel that the US has neglected to veto is the famous Resolution 242, the gist of which is ‘the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war’ and calling for ‘Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict’. Yet in his letter to Sharon of 14 April 2004, US president Bush, presumably speaking for the Bush administration, wrote

In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations [sic] centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949…

A cynical acceptance of the very ‘facts on the ground’ Israeli governments of every political hue had established for precisely this reason – to make it ‘unrealistic’ to relinquish territory acquired by war. To me this looks exactly like taking sides with Israel. So again, it looks like the 59% of Jews and 41% of Arabs who missed this point are not assessing their attention to the region accurately or honestly.

The real guts of the survey comes in questions 9, 10, and 14.

9. Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree that Israelis have a right to live in a secure and independent state of their own?

10. Do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, or strongly disagree that Palestinians have a right to live in a secure and independent state of their own?

At this point, I think I’ll refrain from opening the can of worms concealed beneath the innocent phrase, ‘have a right’.

To answer question 9, one of the things you have to assume is that there is such a thing as Israeli nationality and this simply is not the case. In a famous ruling the Israeli Supreme Court determined that to acknowledge the existence of such a thing would undermine the Jewish character of Israel and that therefore all Israelis would be identified as of ‘Jewish nationality’ or some other ‘nationality’, such as ‘Arab’. So the question, as worded, really doesn’t make any sense to anyone who actually follows developments in the region at all closely.

What Zogby probably meant to ask was whether the respondent agreed that Israeli Jews in particular had this right. And the rest of the question is also in code. A more open and honest wording of the question that I’m quite confident the respondents thought they were answering would be something like, ‘Do you agree… that Israeli Jews are entitled to a country in historic Palestine where they can extend special rights and privileges to Jews and be free from the annoyance of violence carried out in the name of anybody else’s national liberation?’

Notwithstanding the similarity in wording, Question 10 presents a slightly different picture. Since there is no actual State of Palestine, we don’t know what Palestinian nationality would entail. But the expression Palestinian is used in two ways. I always insist, correctly in my view, that Palestinian denotes the Arabic speaking people who inhabited the area known as Palestine administered by the British League of Nations Mandate from 1923 to 1948, in other words from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and their descendants. Specifically, that would include the 1948 refugees in the diaspora, the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and those now inhabiting the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli occupation. Since Oslo, however, and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the term has come more and more to denote just this last group, in common parlance. So which Palestinians have this right to a secure and independent state of their own?

What the question is really asking is whether the respondent agrees that a state ought to be established on all or part of the West Bank and Gaza to be a national homeland for the Palestinian ethnic group. To my mind, this is rather a meaningless question in the absence of a specific position on the status of the Palestinian Israelis. I think it is fair to take it as read that the intention would be for this tiny overpopulated microstate to absorb as many of the 5 million or more refugees as decide that six decades is long enough to live in exile.

As for whether such a state can realistically be secure or independent, I think it is rather obvious that the answer is no. I suppose you can make a case that the Palestinians, somehow delimited, possess such a ‘right’, but that would pry the can of worms open. The real point is that Israel has a very strong military and great and powerful friends. In an unprecedented move, the occupied population was boycotted by the entire international community because they voted for representatives that the occupiers found objectionable. No campaign, no union meetings, no incremental implementation was required. In one fell swoop, the PA was cut off completely. And to my knowledge not a single Harvard Law professor ‘has threatened sanctions to "devastate and bankrupt" those acting against’ the PA. With a neighbour that has for over a century demonstrated a real commitment to their destruction, denying their existence, committing wholesale ethnic cleansing, can anyone honestly claim that security and independence are a realistic prospect for the state of Palestine?

Neither question addresses the little issue of borders. I’m sure a lot of people answered them on the assumption that the borders would be roughly the Green Line, with ‘mutually agreed adjustments’ to take account of ‘facts on the ground’. In other words, the Israeli Jewish-only conurbations constructed precisely to gain permanent control of the most fertile lands and the aquifers in the West Bank would be annexed to Israel, as intended, and in compensation, the Palestinian state would get, as Jonathan Cook wrote recently, ‘a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghettoes being crafted next door…The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens.’ Quiet ‘transfer’ – disarming the ‘demographic time bomb’.

14. Would you strongly support, somewhat support, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose a negotiated peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that included the establishment of an independent, secure Palestinian state alongside an independent, secure Israeli state, and resolved final status issues of Jerusalem, refugees, and borders?

Much of the discussion of Questions 9 and 10 applies directly to Question 14. What is new here is the issue of negotiations and the explicit mention of the ‘final status issues’.

Who negotiates on behalf of ‘Israelis’ is not problematical. It goes without saying that the Israeli government has to power to claim to negotiate on behalf of ‘Israelis’, although there are certainly grounds for disputing it. I surmise that Palestinians is here being used in the sense ‘the PA’. In my view, as the PA is not a state, as Israel absolutely is, like it or not, it does not have the power to make that claim. In particular, there isn’t even a pretence that the PA represents Palestinian Israelis or the refugees, although these groups will be directly and immediately affected by any negotiations. Beyond that, it appears to be universally accepted that Israel can decide who represents the Palestinians – Israel refuses outright to have anything whatsoever to do with the very people the Palestinians in the occupied territories have elected for the very purpose of representing them. Anything whatsoever, that is, apart from shell, shoot, and arrest them. To offer any answer to this question therefore requires that the respondent buy into the fiction that there is some entity, presumably the PA, but not the elected representatives of the Palestinian Legislative Council, that can legitimately negotiate on behalf of all Palestinians.

The mention of ‘final status issues’ really makes it quite explicit that this is what’s going on. In principle, only the refugees, individually, can negotiate on their status. And as I’ve written before, for them to exercise their rights in a meaningful way actually presupposes that many of these questions are already settled. It matters to the refugees whether they exercise their right of return into a Jewish state, whether Israel is empowered to determine which ones get to exercise that right, and so on.

The other strange property of the question is that it speaks of ‘resolved final status issues of Jerusalem, refugees, and borders’ without suggesting that it may matter specifically how they are resolved. Obviously, that would be an outcome of the negotiations. And yet, when Israel asserts that such and such an issue is not negotiable, for example return of refugees en masse to ‘Israel proper’, or anything that might compromise the Jewish ‘character’ of the Jewish state, the ‘international community’ just accepts that that issue is not negotiable. When Israel declares that such and such a party is not a suitable partner for negotiation, the ‘international community’ just accepts that the party is not suitable. Imagine that Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh were to declare, the Israeli government is not a suitable party to negotiate with. It is, he might justifiably claim, a terrorist state. A rogue state. A serial violator of ‘international law’. How, indeed, could anyone trust such a state to negotiate in good faith? Obviously, that would just be a joke. Imagine he agreed to negotiations, stipulating that in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which Israel promised to implement as a condition of its admission to the UN, each and every refugee and their descendants would be entitled to choose whether to resume their property in Israel proper or to accept fair compensation for its expropriation. Again, nobody in their right mind would take that seriously. So when respondents say they support ‘a negotiated peace agreement’, it is not obvious that they mean a just agreement negotiated on fair terms between two entities on equal terms.

Richard Silverstein’s assertion is that the poll result ‘…reinforces the absolute divorce between the views of average American Jews and their leadership and the leadership of the State of Israel’. [my emphasis]

What the poll report says with regard to Question 14 is

Support for a negotiated two-state solution which resolves final status issues of Jerusalem, refugees, and borders is strong in both communities with 87% of Jewish Americans and 94% of Arab Americans pledging support.

Looking at the websites of AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), it is not obvious what their own positions are. There is no ‘What we stand for’ page. AIPAC writes approvingly, in its ‘issue brief’ on ‘Israel’s search for peace’, ‘The United States is committed to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’. I surmise that that is the official AIPAC position.

The AJC’s pamphlet, Israel’s quest for peace approvingly quotes the last three Israeli Prime Ministers, including this November 2006 statement by Ehud Olmert,

In the framework of this dialogue, and in accordance with the Road Map, you will be able to establish an independent and viable Palestinian State, with territorial contiguity in Judea and Samaria—a State with full sovereignty and defined borders.

So it would seem that on this central question the views of 87% of American Jews and those of two of the principal organisations purporting to lead them, as well as the incumbent Israeli Prime Minister, are not quite so irrevocably estranged as Richard makes them out to be.

Underlying any partition of Palestine is the assumption that one of the states must be specifically a Jewish state. For a Jewish state to be a meaningful concept, it must privilege Jews or Judaism in some way. Otherwise, everybody would just welcome the refugees and give equal rights to all the inhabitants within historic Palestine and the matter would be settled. In correspondence with Richard, he conceded that it would not suffice for the Jewish state just to make Hebrew one of the national languages and celebrate Jewish holidays. But I couldn’t get him to be more specific than that.

And if the sample was as representative as it purports to be, it would certainly seem that there is consensus between the vast majority of American Jews and the Israeli and American Jewish leaderships on the more fundamental issue that a Jewish state in some meaningful sense ought to exist.

A voice of sanity

In the midst of all the kerfuffle about last week’s decision by Britain’s University and College Union (UCU) to commence discussion of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, characterised by panic and shrill accusations of anti-Semitism, a voice of sanity. Israel’s Alternative Information Centre is promoting this petition. Here is an extract.

We Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel strongly support the proposal for UNISON [British public sector union] to implement an economic and cultural boycott of Israel.

We refuse to accept the state of poverty, unemployment, oppression and violence from which our Palestinian brothers and sisters are suffering in the OPT. We stress the connections between the violent oppression of the Palestinians in the OPT, and the oppression of the working poor, women, immigrant workers, the unemployed, Arabs, and other minority groups within Israel. The ongoing conflict in the region prevents Israeli workers from effectively mobilizing against neo-liberal reforms and an accelerated process of privatization, under the guise of an ongoing state of emergency in which national security always take precedence over sectarian needs. [my emphasis]

The initiators of this statement have taken a courageous and principled stand and they and their supporters deserve congratulations and support. If you happen to be Israeli and would like to sign please send your name to: bds.occupation@gmail.com.

Free Farooq Tariq!

Update 2007 06 21: Socialist Unity reported this morning that Tarooq was released on Tuesday!

===============

Further to this morning’s post, among the hundreds of political activists rounded up in recent days is Farooq Tariq, General Secretary Labour Party Pakistan. He was taken from his home on Tuesday without a warrant. Yesterday, in a transparent attempt to preclude visits, he was moved to Bahawalpur Jail where he is to spend the next three months by order of the Punjab Home Secretary. Bahawalpur is eight hours’ drive from Farooq’s home in Lahore (see map).

If you think it will help, there is a list of phone numbers and email addresses to contact to demand his release at leftclick.

It's not perfect

On Wednesday, US President George W Bush, the leader of the free world, and champion of freedom for the unfree world, addressed a press roundtable at the Kempinski Grand Hotel in Heiligendamm, Germany. In answer to the question, ‘But if you think democracy is the best way to confront radicals and terrorists, shouldn't we be pushing hard for democracy to really get established in Pakistan?’ he replied

Well, democracy is -- it's a lot more established in Pakistan than some of the other nations I mentioned. And there's upcoming elections. And what you're seeing is a lot of posturing about the election process, and it's not perfect. Either was our democracy perfect for 100 years when we enslaved people.

To underscore how robust the establishment of democracy in Pakistan really is, Dawn reports

The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered that a man handed over to the Military Intelligence by Faisalabad police in 2004 be produced in court. The Faisalabad police deputy inspector-general had admitted before the court that Hafiz Abdul Basit had been arrested by police in January 2004 but after recording his statement he was handed over to Capt Amir of the MI.

A Supreme Court bench comprising Justice Javed Iqbal, Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar and Justice Falak Sher has taken up petitions of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP)…

Mr Basit’s uncle Hafiz Abdul Nasir claimed that when he himself was abducted by the military to pressure his nephew, he was in critical condition.

However, National Crisis Management Cell (NCMC) Director Col Javed Iqbal Lodhi insisted that the cell had no information about Mr Basit.

Mr Basit is only one of hundreds who have disappeared into the bowels of Pakistan’s democratic security establishment. It was largely thanks to his demands for the release of disappeared persons that General Musharraf relieved Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry of his post, the principal catalyst for the current imbroglio. Justices Javed, Abdul, and Falak might need to take care how they pursue these cases, lest they find themselves on the receiving end of Pakistani freedom.

Also on Wednesday, civil rights campaigner

Syed Mohammed Iqbal Kazmi, who recently filed petitions on the May 12 mayhem in Karachi and the new Pemra ordinance, went missing after he dropped his 12-year-old son at the house of his mother-in-law in Gulistan-i-Jauhar.

Just yesterday, Pakistan again evidenced its profound respect for freedom when, Raja Asghar reports

…another first in Pakistan’s parliamentary history as Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain was quoted to have ordered his staff not to let journalists enter the parliament building to cover Thursday’s sitting of the National Assembly in what seemed to be a reprisal for a previous day’s unprecedented incident when they chanting slogans from the press gallery had scuffles with non-journalists who allegedly tried to undermine their protest walkout by occupying reporters’ seats.

Only members of the state media — the Pakistan Television, Radio Pakistan and the Associated Press of Pakistan -- were allowed entry to cover the…newly-promulgated Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) (Amendment) Ordinance providing for easier and harder punishments for perceived violations of the original Pemra law.

All journalists from newspapers, private television channels and other domestic and foreign news organisations were not allowed entry when they arrived at the parliament building for the scheduled 10am start of the National Assembly sitting. But they stayed on outside under a scorching sun [yesterday’s high temperature was 41C/105F], often chanting slogans such as “we want freedom” and “Pemra Ordinance na-manzoor (unacceptable)” whenever a government minister or other assembly members would come and drive into the parliament premises.

To further demonstrate how freedom flourishes in the ‘Land of the pure’, Dawn reported Wednesday that

Scores of journalists, civil society representatives, lawyers and politicians, who staged a torch-bearing protest against new curbs on the media here on Monday, were booked by police on multiple charges, including...chanting anti- government slogans.

…the case had been registered on the directive of the government who had ordered the police to take strict action against the protesters.

Among those named were 250 journalists, including Rawalpindi-Islamabad Press Club president Mushtaq Minhas.

Former federal minister Julius Salik, Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) information secretary Ahsan Iqbal and a representative of civil society, Jehangir Akhter, were booked on the charge of provoking the journalists during the procession.

Besides, the police also booked several lawyers and representatives of civil society.

At the same time, according to Carlotta Gall, writing in the NY Times on Wednesday,

The provincial home secretary of Punjab, Khusro Fazal Khan, told the independent channel GEO Television that the police had arrested 312 political party local leaders and workers throughout the province. They were detained under an article of law in force since Friday that bans gatherings of more than 5 people.

Opposition parties say hundreds of their workers have been rounded up in house raids in the last few days in the Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province. Legislators protested the arrests at the opening of a new session of Parliament, called after a three-week recess, but the speaker refused them time.

In the time honoured tradition of freedom loving leaders, the Times reports the Pakistani daily The News quoted General Musharraf at a Wednesday meeting with senior members of the governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League, which gives him his base of support in Parliament, “If I myself have to do everything, then you are for what purpose?”

As President Bush said on Wednesday, ‘The process and progress move at different paces and different places…in the long run, the best way to secure your society is through liberty. In the short run, let's work collaboratively to protect ourselves.’ Either the Pakistanis have all the liberty they deserve, or they can wait until the Americans feel adequately protected.

The looming threat

Peter W. Rodman is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and until recently was assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. William Shawcross is the author of “Allies: Why the West Had to Remove Saddam” and many other books.

‘Many years ago,’ they write in their joint op-ed in today’s NY Times,

the two of us clashed sharply over the wisdom and morality of American policy in Indochina, especially in Cambodia… Decades later, we have not changed our views. But we agreed even then that the outcome in Indochina was indeed disastrous, both in human and geopolitical terms, for the United States and the region. Today we agree equally strongly that the consequences of defeat in Iraq would be even more serious and lasting.

After detailing their view of the unfortunate outcomes of the US defeat in Vietnam, they conclude,

American defeat in Iraq would embolden the extremists in the Muslim world, demoralize and perhaps destabilize many moderate friendly governments, and accelerate the radicalization of every conflict in the Middle East.

It never ceases to amaze me the way these ‘intellectuals’ think that they deploy a ‘friendly’ word like ‘moderate’ and suck in all the regular punters. As if we didn’t know just what kind of moderate governments they prefer remain stable. The ones whose moderation is evidenced by hacking off people’s limbs as a punishment and taking a strong stance against women’s suffrage, or even driving.

The ones they endeavour to demonise as ‘extremists’ include, but may not be limited to, those who espouse such extreme political views as trade union rights for Egyptians, an end to the US occupation of Iraq, or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, or even making ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ a state of all its citizens – ‘or what the rest of us would call a liberal democracy’ as Jonathan Cook puts it.

Our conduct in Iraq is a crucial test of our credibility, especially with regard to the looming threat from revolutionary Iran. Our Arab and Israeli friends view Iraq in that wider context. They worry about our domestic debate, which had such a devastating impact on the outcome of the Vietnam War, and they want reassurance.

That would be the looming threat of Iran developing nuclear power and selling more oil to America’s looming economic rival in China, in Euros. And obviously, ‘we’ mustn’t do anything to worry ‘our Arab and Israeli friends’, the hand choppers and beach shellers.

The United States cannot be strong against Iran — or anywhere — if we accept defeat in Iraq.

Well…good, and not a moment too soon! American credibility has not benefited the people or the planet. The only concern is the release of greenhouse gases as billions issue a collective sigh of relief.

Reading polls

Just yesterday, US Vice President Richard “Dick’ Cheney was caught in the act of trying to delude a group of 100 high school students in Wyoming into the old myth of Iraqi involvement in 9/11.

Nico Pitney writes on Think Progress, via AlterNet,

During the question and answer session, one student asked, "I was wondering -- I'm not trying to start a debate, or anything, but do you still think that the Iraq war can be won?" Cheney immediately answered "yes," adding, "I think we're making significant progress now."

He then launched into a justification of the war, citing the September 11 attacks. "The fact of the matter is Iraq is part of the global war on terror," he told the students. "And you've got to go back and look at what happened on 9/11." Cheney recounted the tale of the late al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the administration's great pre-war myths:

The worst terrorist we had in Iraq was a guy named Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a Jordanian by birth; served time in a Jordanian prison as a terrorist, was let out on amnesty. ... Then when we launched into Afghanistan after 9/11, he was wounded, and fled to Baghdad for medical treatment, and then set up shop in Iraq. So he operated in Jordan, he operated in Afghanistan, then he moved to Iraq.

Thankfully, Cheney’s lie about Iraq and 9/11 has not got through to the majority of Americans, according to the results of the latest Washington Post-ABC News Poll of 1205 adults between 29 May and 1 June, although, as I think we’ll see, other aspects of his message have penetrated their consciousness.

An encouraging majority of 67% ‘disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq’. In April 70% disapproved. Fifty-five percent want the number of US troops in Iraq reduced, the highest proportion since they started asking the question in March 2005, and of these, 27% – that is 15% of the entire population – wanted immediate withdrawal. Of the other 72% who didn’t demand immediate withdrawal, a total of 57% wanted the troops out by the end of 2008, including 31% who wanted them out this year.

Considering that over half want US troops withdrawn, it is somewhat unsettling that 75% consider ‘a full-scale civil war in Iraq’ likely if ‘the United States withdraws from Iraq before civil order is restored there’. Under those circumstances, 72% think it’s likely that ‘parts of Iraq’ will become ‘a base of operations for terrorists targeting the US’, yet 62% said ‘the risk of a terrorist attack occurring here in the United States’ was ‘about the same’ whether troops withdrew or remained in Iraq. Seventy-two percent envision ‘Iran taking control of parts of Iraq’.

Since April, the proportion saying that the war with Iraq was not worth fighting ‘considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States’, has declined by five percentage point from 66% to 61%. Asked whether they ‘think the war with Iraq has or has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States’, 53% thought it hadn’t.

Asked whether they ‘think things in this country (are generally going in the right direction) or do you feel things (have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track)’, 73% said it was on the wrong track, the highest proportion since January 1996. But only 19% of them thought this was because of the war in Iraq.

Sixty-two percent disapprove Bush’s ‘handling his job as president’ and 60% ‘cannot trust the Bush administration to honestly and accurately report intelligence about security threats facing the United States’.

Anyway, what I find interesting about this poll is not so much the numbers as the questions. My understanding is that it’s ordinarily considered unacceptable to ask leading questions. Technically, perhaps these are not leading, as the wording doesn’t prejudice the answer. But to answer a question like ‘Do you think the United States is or is not making significant progress toward restoring civil order in Iraq?’ (64% thought not) at all, you have to presuppose first that you know what ‘civil order means and that you agree that it is a desirable thing. Then that there was once civil order before, but is not now, that the US is trying to restore civil order, that it wants to restore civil order. Furthermore, you need to accept the assumption that the US was not involved in disrupting this desirable state of affairs. Only then can you decide whether the US is making progress and whether the progress is significant. So it’s a leading question in the sense that it entices you to make dodgy presuppositions and assumptions and accept bogus implications, whatever response you give.

I hasten to add that the biggest presupposition of all, penetrating all these questions, the real dinosaur on the ceiling that’s so big you can never perceive it, is that there is some unitary entity that is ‘the United States’ that incurs costs and derives benefits as a whole, enjoys security collectively, without distinctions of any kind. The ubiquitous and pernicious myth underlying nationalism.

Similarly, ‘Do you think this increase of U.S. forces will or will not improve the security situation there over the next few months?’ (No, according to 58%.)

‘Do you approve or disapprove of the way Bush is handling the US campaign against terrorism?’ assumes that the respondent knows what terrorism means, which is very far from obvious. Well, the respondents probably have the same commonsense impression of what it is as the propagandists want them to have, but if pressed almost certainly couldn’t define it so as to capture what they mean without tying themselves in knots with arbitrary exclusions – ‘non state actors’, and the like. They also have to accept the assumption that there is a campaign, that it is against terrorism, that it’s the US [sic] that is waging it, and that Bush is handling it.

If you want to have a bit of a laugh, you can tease out the assumptions and presuppositions lurking in this one: ‘Do you think (the United States must win the war in Iraq in order for the broader war on terrorism to be a success), or do you think (the war on terrorism can be a success without the United States winning the war in Iraq?)’

One of the things that comes up when you think about these things is what the prejudices betrayed by a close analysis of the question wording mean. Do the people framing the questions word them as they do to achieve a predetermined result? Or to influence the opinions they purport to be trying to measure? Or are they as oblivious as everyone else? When they ask about ‘US campaign against terrorism’, is it because they believe all the presuppositions underlying the question? Or are they trying to insinuate it into the consciousness of the respondents, as if they needed to do that? Or is it just common sense and they never really thought about the presuppositions in the first place?

In the 1993 BBC tv series ‘To play the king’, Francis Urquhart’s lover, a pollster by the name of Sarah Harding, if memory serves, claims she can word questions to achieve any results she wants. With evidence like that, I’ve always assumed that these guys know exactly what they’re doing.

But perhaps I give them too much credit. In this poll, you probably noticed that none of the questions asks about the ‘invasion of Iraq’ or ‘occupation of Iraq’. Expressions like that would evidence bias on the part of the framer and suggest an agenda. Similarly, ‘war on Iraq’ has a clear implication that Iraq is somehow the victim of the war. ‘War in Iraq’ and the even more ‘neutral’ ‘situation in Iraq’, however, occur in a number of the questions. I find it intriguing that two questions – the ‘costs and benefits’ question and the one about ‘long-term security’ – ask about ‘the war with Iraq’. Now the way I read it, ‘war on Iraq’ makes Iraq the victim, and is obviously unacceptable. ‘War in Iraq’ simply locates the war and is therefore quite neutral. But ‘war with Iraq’ makes the US and Iraq direct adversaries. This does not strike me as according with the prevailing tenor of the questions, which assume that the US presence there is wholly beneficent – ‘restoring civil order’ and ‘improve the security situation’, presumably positive things. I surmise, therefore, that this prepositional lapse was unintentional, so maybe the boffins framing these opinion poll questions are not quite as infallibly Machiavellian as commonly believed.

As with any political discourse, what’s omitted is often as significant as, if not more significant than, what’s expressed. And perhaps the most glaring omission among all these questions pertaining specifically to the US ‘war on terror’ is any mention of Afghanistan. I doubt if this is what motivated the pollsters, but my own fear would be that we’d find quite radically different views on the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan and desirability of retaining a military presence there. A trope that often comes up in discussions on what passes for the left in the US is that the unprovoked aggression against Afghans was entirely justified. That’s where the ‘real war on terror’ is going on. After all, ‘their government’, the despised Taliban whose actions were obviously the personal responsibility of every Afghan, defied the US’s demand for Osama bin Laden’ extradition, utterly unreasonably insisting on evidence of his guilt. Now if anything has ever justified slaughtering thousands, driving tens of thousands into exile in the middle of winter, and scattering cluster bomblets all over the countryside, that would have to be it.

The only mention of Iran is in the question about whether Iran would take control of parts of Iraq in thee event of a US withdrawal. With all the hype there’s been about Iran’s mythical nuclear weapons, I’d actually be rather surprised if there weren’t a significant population in the benighted USA that believed that Iran had an existing stockpile and had explicitly threatened to nuke New York and Tel Aviv. But that’s just speculation. It would be interesting to see the response to a survey question. And I for one would be interested, with some considerable trepidation, to see what proportion of Americans support attacking Iran. Well, clearly the Washington Post and ABC News don’t think we’re ready to know that yet.

Creating jobs

Last month I mentioned that John Howard’s boast that jobs growth vindicated his draconian WorkChoices legislation was based on a misinterpretation of the data. Specifically, his claim that 276,000 jobs had been created in the year since WorkChoices came into effect was nearly true - 276,000 more persons were employed, which is not the same thing, but is more important anyway. But because of an increase in the size of the labour force, this figure was an over statement of the net growth in employment by a factor of nearly six. In reality, the net growth was only 46,400. If fewer of the 230,100 new entrants to the labour force over the period from March 2006 to March 2007 had found jobs, Mr Howard would have had a much higher unemployment rate to boast of.

The ABC reported this morning in an item provocatively titled ‘IR changes creating jobs: survey’, that according to Christena Singh, author of the ‘Sensis Business Index’, a survey of 1,800 smaller businesses found ‘a significant number of businesses have decided to recruit staff based on the workplace changes’.

What the report actually shows is that although ‘15 per cent of SMEs’ reported ‘a rise in employment’, this ‘was offset by the 10 per cent of businesses that experienced employment declines’.

This is a trick. And a much nastier one than Mr Howard tried. There’s actually a pretty close relation between the number of persons employed and the number of jobs. In fact, as I pointed out in a comment on Lefti the other day, in the US last month, the increase in jobs and the increase in employment were actually equal.

What’s going on here is that the proportion of businesses hiring new staff, or laying staff off, is not necessarily the same as the proportion of people getting and losing jobs. So one possible scenario that the data could describe is that there was a net increase of 5% in the number of jobs. Another is that each of the businesses that hired new staff created 50 new jobs and those that laid off staff had each just let one go. Or vice versa. The fact is, the report doesn’t tell us anything at all about employment even if the survey actually collected data that would clarify the issue. And of course, the other thing it tells us nothing about is anything whatsoever about employment by larger business and non business employers.

Not that I would attribute any clairvoyant powers to small and medium business owners, I suppose it’s fair to attribute their ‘expectations’ to their intentions. And only 13% of SMEs surveyed said they expected an increase over the current quarter, down by two percentage points from the expectations recorded in the past two quarters. Similarly, while 24% said they expected an increase in their workforces over the next year, another 4% expected a decrease, giving a ‘net balance’ of only 20%, three percentage points lower than the corresponding expectation in the previous two quarters.

What I found most interesting about the survey, unreported by the ABC, was this ominous observation.

Despite strong employment growth, net growth in total wage costs decreased during the last quarter, and SMEs were expecting further decreases in their wages bills for both the short and medium terms, easing inflationary fears.

As a matter of fact, wage inflation is not my deepest fear. The conclusion I draw from this is that the wages share of the economy is declining, and more importantly, wages on average are declining, just in case anyone was entertaining any hopes that WorkChoices was going to deliver a higher standard of living for workers.

Return to Tel Aviv

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the launch of Israel’s ‘preemptive’ war of conquest. I hasten to add that respected Israeli historian and Ha’aretz columnist, Tom Segev, writes in today’s NY Times,

Leading Israeli policy planners had determined six months before the Six-Day War that capturing the West Bank would be bad for the country. Recently declassified Israeli government documents show that according to these policy planners, taking over the West Bank would weaken the relative strength of Israel’s Jewish majority, encourage Palestinian nationalism and ultimately lead to violent resistance.

These comprehensive political and strategic discussions began in November 1966 and concluded in January 1967. The participants were representatives of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence branch and the Foreign Ministry. The documents they prepared were approved by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and the army’s chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, and therefore reflect Israel’s strategic thinking six months before the war.

[Jordan’s King] Hussein was also endeavoring to unify the West Bank with the East Bank and was encouraging West Bank Palestinians to migrate to the east. Over the preceding 15 years, the number of Palestinians who had left the West Bank for the east had reached 200,000. Moreover, approximately 100,000 Palestinians had left Jordan altogether. Hussein’s effort to integrate Palestinians was “a positive phenomenon from Israel’s point of view,” concluded the final position paper that emerged from that winter’s discussions. Hussein was acting to eradicate the Palestinian question, and this was an excellent reason not to take the West Bank away from him.

But when Jordan attacked the Israeli part of Jerusalem on the first day of the conflict, all reason was forgotten. Jordan’s attack obviously called for some kind of retaliation — but striking back at the Jordanian Army did not require the conquest of the West Bank or East Jerusalem.

Records of the Israeli cabinet meeting where the scope of the retaliation was determined are now available. Amazingly they show that not one of the cabinet ministers ever asked why it was in the interest of Israel to control the Arab parts of Jerusalem. Israel was about to take over some of the holiest places in the Christian and the Muslim world, but no analysts were called in to offer the cabinet alternative ideas. No experts on international law were asked to brief the ministers on the legal implications of their pending decision.

The ministers obviously felt there was no need to raise these questions: the answer was as clear as only fantasy can be. Acting under the influence of the age-old dream of return to Zion as well as Israel’s spectacular victory over Egypt’s forces a few hours previously, the ministers decided with their hearts, not their heads, to take East Jerusalem.

So his argument is that territorial conquest was not really part of Israel’s orginal plan for the June 1967 war. And that’s as may be. But as he points out, they wanted it. And badly. Segev’s central point seems to be that it was a matter of timing. Cooler heads in cabinet would have deferred taking the West Bank until King Hussein had completed the job of transferring all the Palestinians out. Or at least taken the process a lot further. And now, poor Israel is saddled with this terrible demographic burden.

Eli Stephens of Left I on the news linked to, ‘Occupation’, a 2003 song by David Rovics that I’d never heard before. The audio is available from that link, along with the lyrics. I couldn’t help noticing some transcription errors, so I’ve taken the liberty of amending the transcript to correspond to the audio and reprinting them here.

Occupation
(David Rovics)

You ask me how it is
That I dare to take a side
You say I loathe myself
For pointing out that you have lied
You say it's tribal warfare
But I disagree
For the dynamics of the situation
Are not difficult to see
On the one side is the fighter jet
On the other is the stone
On the one side is the slave
On the other is the throne
For the many there are checkpoints
While foreign soldiers rule the street
For the one side there is victory
But the people don't accept defeat

(Chorus)
The word you need to know is occupation
The very definition of a land without a nation
And if peace is what you're after then let us not deceive
It will come on the day the tanks return to Tel Aviv

On one side there is hunger
And bulldozed olive trees
On the other is the Army
Ruling by decrees
Caterpillars maul the streets
Destroy entire city blocks
While children swallow shrapnel
For the crime of throwing rocks
Fences are erected
Around the towns they flatten
And Herzl's own fanatics
Sleep on sheets of satin
And they water their plantations
Drilling ever-deeper wells
While the displaced children of the hopeless
Are filled with bullet shells

(Chorus)
...It will come on the day the settlers return to Tel Aviv

On one side there’s the Mossad
Rounding up the men
Thrown in jail with no trial
Being tortured once again
On the other there is rage
Helplessness and fear
And a growing realization
That another holocaust is near
On the outside there are prisons
Inside detainees
Being stripped of their humanity
Beaten naked to their knees
Outside the ghetto walls
Stormtroopers all around
While inside the hungry people
Yearn for liberated ground

(Chorus)
...It will come on the day the jailguards return to Tel Aviv

All across the world
You can hear the people say
The children of Jerusalem
Will be free one day
In overcrowded camps
Amidst the stench of death and flies
To the suburbs of Detroit
You can hear the anguished cries
While in the land of Israel
With God ever on their side
Walls and fences are constructed
Papers are denied
People fight for their existence
While we turn a blinded eye
And those who should know better
Insist on asking why

(Chorus)
...It will come on the day the refugees return to Tel Aviv

Created February, 2003
Copyright David Rovics 2003, all rights reserved

Pedantic nitpicking bastard that I am, I feel compelled to point out that Tel Aviv was established in the 1880s specifically as a Jewish town. It didn’t grow to engulf the neighbouring Arab town of Jaffa until 1950. So there are unlikely to be very many refugees from the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948-49 who could, strictly speaking, ‘return to Tel Aviv’. Still, the sentiment is welcome.