Greens Engage

Terrorism is the attempt to advance political objectives by killing, maiming and terrifying innocent people. Terrorists instrumentalise people like you and me, deliberately harming us and using our deaths, injuries and fright to force change. We should try to comprehend terror, never justify terror. Terrorists should never  be permitted, still less encouraged, to view themselves as heroes on the ropes. Terrorists should view themselves, at best, as murderers who had to cauterise part of their conscience and humanity to commit their acts.

Caught this on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme yesterday (0836, Monday 17 Aug 09) and because its response to Miliband’s apology for terror was good, thought I’d try to capture it for posterity before it disappears from Listen Again.

Synopsis:

“Shadow foreign secretary William Hague has condemned the Foreign Secretary David Miliband for saying there are circumstances in which acts of terrorism are “justifiable” and “effective”. Mr Miliband was speaking on Radio Four about the anti-apartheid activist, Joe Slovo. Former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell and terrorism expert Andy Hull examine the foreign secretary’s comments.”

Transcript:

“JH: “Menzies Campbell, there are two questsions. Is he philosophically right when he says that terrorism is justifiable, and should he have said it as foreign Secretary?”

MC: “Well let’s take the second of these first. If I may say so I think William Hague’s quite right indeed quite reticent in describing the Foreign Secretary’s remarks as ill-judged. The timing of this! We’ve got 9,000 men and women in Afghanistan – what are they doing, they’re fighting against terrorism among other things. And to give any kind of succour to the notion that terrorism is a legitimate activity seems to me to fly in the face of that commitment. But of course as far as the first of these things is concerned, I would say no. Why – because I am someone of a liberal persuasion who is committed to peaceful change, and if you consider that terrorism almost certainly involves innocent people, it is rarely successful – how many instances can you point to of people being able to bomb their way to the negotiating table – and of course it hardens attitudes – you’ve only got to look at Israel to see how the attitudes of the Israel public have hardened – why – because of terrorism.”

JH: So in absolutely no circumstances – I dunno – the Hitler bomb plot, you would say that that was out of what should be considered.

MC: What I say is that the use of violence for political ends is unacceptable.

JH: Ah. That’s pretty clear. Andy Hull?

AH: You can’t kill your way to justice. I think however legitimate your grievance, terrorism is not a legitimate tactic.

JH: Not in any circumstances at all.

AH: No, I don’t think we should seek to justify terrorism. But I do think it’s important to comprehend it. I think if you take the current neo-jihadi Islamist threat that we face, I think that with all the best cops and all the best spooks we’re not going to be able to arrest or spy our way out of the problem. Which means we’re going to need to get to a place where people no longer want to blow us up, and in order to do that I think we’re going to have to try to understand what makes a bomber tick.

JH: And where do you stand on the wisdom or otherwise of a Foreign Secretary saying something of this kind?

AH: Well I think it was unwise because I think it’s wrong. I think, as I say, that however legitimate your grievance terrorism is not a legitimate tactic. And it isn’t effective either. It wasn’t bombs in Pretoria that ended apartheid and it wasn’t bullets in Belfast that ended the troubles. Al Quaeda bombs won’t bring about a global Caliphate.

MC: I agree with all of that. If you look at South Africa, for example, what it was was economic reality. De Klerk realised the economic future of South Africa was not going to be in any way sustainable if there was the continuing political divide. If you look at the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, their terrorism has not proved fruitful, and if you look at the Basque separatists in Spain, they have not achieved any of their political objectives by the use of terrorism.

JH: Can you, Andy Hull, point to any examples where the use of terrorism has been effective, putting aside any moral judgement one may make about whether it was right or wrong?

AH: No. It’s always the politics in the end that has the effects. But I do think that what we need in this country is a grown-up political debate that understands that you can understand terrorism without endorsing it. And I think that moral outrage about terrorism is understandable but we do need to get beyond it.

JH: Is there a danger, since you mention moral outrage, that moral outrage about a remark like that of the Foreign Secretary, stifles genuine debate – that there’s something we ought to be talking about here, but aren’t?

AH: Yeah, absolutely. I think that there is a danger that that moral outrage stifles productive debate, and I think it’s a shame. We saw it previously with some comments that Jenny Tonge made about Palestine. I think it’s important that we have an honest, open, grown-up debate about these issues, and that does mean that it’s reasonable to seek to understand the motivations of terrorist bombers.”

In Caroline Lucas’ response to Mumbai I missed this kind of genuine will to comprehend terror. Caroline Lucas blamed Mumbai on Israel and called this “looking at some of the root causes”. She politicises her ‘understanding’ to fit a well-known and pre-existing agenda; she extends this ‘understanding’ to some and not others. Compare her ‘understanding’ to Andy Hull’s and it quickly becomes clear why Andy Hull is heard respectfully when he calls on us to understand the motivations of terrorists, but Caroline Lucas provokes outrage.

Andy Hull wants to understand.

Update: on openDemocracy from a couple of years back, a different question is addressed: does terrorism work. Of course, even it if did work, not everything that works is good.

Human Rights Watch, whose contribution to documenting human rights violations in Israel and the occupied territories is hugely valuable, have released a 31-page report, Rockets From Gaza, of their investigation into the role of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Gaza since November 2008.

The report documents the missiles from Gaza which jeopardised and terrorised the 800,000 Israeli citizens who lived within their range, and finds armed groups to have intentionally targeted Israeli civilians, in violation of international law.

The executive summary is informative; as well as providing an overview of the death and damage resulting from the attacks (including to Gazan families), there is a restatement of ethos:

“The purpose of the laws of war is not to create parity between parties to a conflict, or to assess their violations in light of their relevant capacities, but to minimize the harm to the civilian population.  Violations of the laws of war are not measured in the number of civilian casualties, but whether each side is taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian loss.  Using unsophisticated weapons does not justify failure to respect the laws of war, nor does an adversary’s use of sophisticated weapons provide a pass to its opponents to ignore those laws. Disparities in military capability, however measured, are irrelevant. The taking of civilian life can be minimized only if both parties recognize their legal obligations to abide by the laws of war however sophisticated the weaponry at their disposal.

Human Rights Watch is committed to documenting the worst violations of the laws of war committed by all sides to conflict. It is to promote the principle that civilians may never be the object of attack, regardless of the relative strength of the attacker, that Human Rights Watch has published this report.

The laws of war require parties to a conflict to investigate and take appropriate punitive action against individuals within their control who are implicated in war crimes.  Hamas authorities have failed to take any action against Hamas commanders and fighters responsible for unlawful rocket attacks against Israel.  Hamas has reportedly taken violent steps to prevent other armed groups from firing rockets.  On March 10, the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported the alleged torture by Hamas police of 10 members of Saraya al-Quds, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad.[3] The paper reported that Hamas police detained the 10 men, from Khan Yunis, and tortured them to coerce them to sign pledges that they would not fire rockets at Israel.”

Recommendations follow.

Read the report.

Update:

Besides the BBC, is there any reporting organisation which hasn’t abandoned itself to partisanship on Israel and Palestine?

There are questions to ask about the integrity of Human Rights Watch because of how it raises money.

“An on-line Wall Street Journal op-ed posted two days ago alleged that Human Rights Watch officials went trolling for dollars in Saudi Arabia, and that the organization’s senior Middle East official, Sarah Leah Whitson, attempted to extract money from potential Saudi donors by bragging about the group’s “battles” with the “pro-Israel pressure groups.”

This is a serious allegation, and one I found difficult to believe, because Human Rights Watch has always been moderately careful about the optics of its fundraising efforts. The group’s credibility, of course, rests on its neutrality; playing traditional enemies off each other as a way to collect money from one (or both) sides in a conflict seems beyond the pale. (Let’s put aside for now the queasy-making image of a human rights organization venturing into one of the world’s most anti-democratic societies to criticize one of the Middle East’s most democratic states.)”

Human Rights Watch has since published a report about gunning down of white-flag-waving Palestinians. It was edited by Joe Stork, reported in Commentary to be vehemently anti-Israel, an inaccurate reporter and – far more seriously and untrustworthily for a human rights activist – a supporter of Palestinian terror against Israelis and (from the comments) a diminisher of human rights abuses against Iraqis under Saddam. It would be good to be able to trust HRW reports. It’s discredit if they employ biased editors, and it’s a shame that only the political right seems to be motivated to do homework on these authors. I suppose, from now on, we have to do this too.

The Rockets From Gaza report was authored by a researcher called Bill Van Esveld, based in HRW’s Middle East and North Africa section, where Joe Stork is also based (Esveld also co-authored the white flag report). I can’t see any signs of bias against Palestinians at all.

In the Huffington Post, he writes:

“Hamas’ attacks on civilians violate international law, but those violations are no excuse for a blockade that, as Israeli officials have implicitly acknowledged, amounts to collective punishment. “There is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards” at Israeli communities, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on January 23, 2008.

After two years of looking the other way, the international community, and especially the United States, should be pressing not only Hamas to end its unlawful attacks on Israeli civilians but also Israel to end its unlawful punishment of 1.5 million Gazans.”

In comment to the BBC:

“HRW’s Bill Van Esveld said last Thursday that a Newsweek report quoted in a recent Israeli Foreign Ministry briefing was “as clear evidence of human shielding [by Hamas] as you’re going to get”.

Journalist Rod Nordland wrote on 20 January: “Suddenly there was a terrific whoosh, louder even than a bomb explosion. It was another of Hamas’ homemade Qassam rockets being launched into Israel – and the mobile launch-pad was smack in the middle of the four [apartment] buildings, where every apartment was full.”

But Mr Van Esveld said he was only aware of evidence of “three or four” such cases, and had seen more evidence of the use of human shields by Israeli troops than by Palestinian militants.”

No more time, but there is no reason to suppose an anti-Palestinian agenda on the part of Van Esveld. Stork’s anti-Israel, pro-terror opinions on the other hand, disredit him.

I fear, given the pursuit of Saudi funds, that HRW will be giving disproportionate focus to exposing the abuses of Saudi’s enemies.

I have frequently drawn on HRW reports and it is unbelievably dispiriting to be writing this update. Greens Engage is more concerned with Israel than (Black) Engage, because we hope that Green international policy makers, currently faced with Green Party anti-Israel bias, will be looking. We try to view Israel as critically and fairly as any other country might expect. How can we do this if deprived of basic facts we can trust?

Update 2: it gets worse for Human Rights Watch. Bias is a particularly disgusting thing in an organisation which purports to stand for human rights. There should never be a good reason for the subject of a negative report to turn round and say “They have it in for us”. But HRW have provided precisely that reason by eagerly publishing allegations based on such flimsy evidence that investigative journalists became interested in the editor, and discovered a past which should have ruled him out of publishing on this subject.

Lest the perhaps-murdered and their families, who should be at the centre of the publicity for the report, are lost in the fallout of Joe Stork’s bias, I would say that it would be good if anybody involved in combat or policing were issued with their own black box, or some way of recording their actions. I can see all kinds of problems with this, but in the end they are small fry problems if you view them in the light of a situation in which men and women in a citizen army (with, it follows, a proportion of bad soldiers) are sent to find and kill enemy combatants in heavily populated areas. To be honest, I would trust Israelis to know what to do with this kind of evidence more than I would trust an organisation like Human Rights Watch and its low standards of evidence. This is not to write off HRW. It’s a salutory reminder not to trust any organisation unreservedly, to search the web for critical responses to such reports before quoting them, and to keep in mind that there may be vested interests at work in writing, crediting and discrediting such a report. Some people want to frame Israel. Some people want to defend Israel’s reputation. Some people want the truth. I hope this blog is concerned with the latter, limited only by time and other resources.

So to end, an analysis of the Rockets From Gaza report from the JTA (discovered by searching for links to the report pages – there wasn’t anything else of substance).

Not foiled – failed.

See the BBC and Ha’aretz

“Security forces were called to the parking lot after the mall’s security guards heard a small explosion coming from the direction of a Subaru parked in a parking lot adjacent to the shopping center at around 8 P.M. on Saturday. Sappers said part of the device had gone off prematurely and another had failed to detonate.

“It’s important to note that the car was parked in the outer car park and not underground, which means it was not checked by mall security,” a police officer said.

Tatiana Daminovitch, an eye witness, said “at first the shoppers were nonchalant, some of them thought that it was a drill, and therefore the evacuation was delayed a bit.”

The commander of the Coastal District said following the incident that the police, together with the shopping center’s management, will examine the security protocols relating to the security of the mall. “We will assess the situation in this mall and in additional malls in order to gain insight into how to better secure them in the future. Without a doubt this was a large bomb that could have cost a lot of lives and damage,” he said.”

I suppose this highlights one faint silver lining. During the Second Intifada (currently suppressed by the checkpoints and security barrier) few Israelis would have assumed that an explosion was a drill.

It must be rather radicalising being blown up, or threatened with being blown up, day to day. For Palestinians and Israelis.

Reports from Israeli human rights groups can be found on a recently-set-up blog, Human Rights in Gaza and Israel During the Hostilities.

Further to David Hirsh on Caroline Lucas’ Any Questions response about Mumbai, Howard Jacobson has an interesting and apposite piece in today’s Independent and see also Petra Marquardt-Bigman on Jerusalem Post Blog.

From Jacobson’s piece:

“There is no hierarchy of the dead. The slaughtered are the slaughtered. This is not always what the slaughterers think. For those who kill in the name of religion their killing answers to deserts – a casual bullet in the face if you’re a poor Hindu, a more selective punishment if you’re American or British, a slow, luxuriating torture if you happen to be a Jew. In reward for which, their religion tells them, they themselves will be arranged according to degree in heaven: the more assiduous their killing in God’s name, the closer to His right hand they will sit. They are cruelly mistaken. No rewards await them in another world. Just as no restitution according to degree of suffering awaits their victims. In death there is no hierarchy.

So I mean nothing hierarchical when I talk about the Jewish victims of the Mumbai massacre. I sorrow no more for them than I do for the impoverished Bihari migrant workers waiting to catch trains home, innocent of any involvement in the mythical cause the gunmen had been brainwashed into believing they must kill for. I allude to the Jewish aspect of this tragedy, not because I am Jewish myself and know a little about the outreach programme in which the murdered Jews were involved – the provision of kosher food and a place of prayer for Jewish tourists in Mumbai – but because it bears on the blame game which, with the usual unseemly haste and ignorance, has already begun in this country.

…

“The Chabad Centre in Mumbai was a Jewish organisation, not an Israeli one. Its occupants were tortured and killed for being Jews, not for being complicit in the “strangulation” of Gaza, unless all Jews are held to be complicit in the strangulation of Gaza, in which case Caroline Lucas must be very careful where and in what language she lays blame. If she is right that the perception of a great wrong in Palestine motivates such murders as those in Mumbai, then it behoves her, as one who influences perception, to be scrupulous in her observations.

Scrupulous, I say, not discreet. I would not wish her, in caution’s name, to speak other than the truth. But truth is hard to find. I have visited Israel several times recently, making a documentary about Jesus, travelling in the company of Israelis of all parties and persuasions. The “Green” view is that there are good Israelis and bad Israelis, the good being those who oppose the occupation. Nothing could be more simplistic. I encountered extreme left-wingers who could not bear what their government was doing, but understood its sometime necessity; I met right-wingers who had no sympathy with settlers, and could not wait to live in peace with Palestinians; all wanted change, all were frightened, all loathed the naive, ahistoric sentimentalism that paints them as brutal invaders of a foreign land, and not as fellow combatants in a long and tragic struggle for safety and self-determination.”

Nearly 200 people died in the recent terror attacks in Mumbai. They included husband and wife Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holzberg, who ran a centre where observant Jews visiting Mumbai can pray and eat kosher food, along with Leibish Teitelbaum, Bentzion Chroman, Yocheved Orpaz and another unnamed hostage. There are reports that the Jewish victims were tortured particularly severely before they were murdered. During those attacks those of us who cared to see observed how, for the terrorists and some commentators, the distinction between Jew and Israeli disappeared completely. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this was the murder of Leibish Teitelbaum, a rabbi and kosher supervisor of an orthodox persuasion of Judaism which doesn’t recognise the state of Israel in any way.

This is confusing. That’s because it’s confusing. For a way into understanding why, listen to Michael Walzer [MP3].

Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions whether extremists could ever be defeated, Caroline Lucas passed lightly over the terrorists themselves to concentrate on the causes of terror. To the disappointment (slight or in my case deep) of an unknown number of Greens, and although it was known that the terrorists in Mumbai belonged to an organisation whose stated aim was to liberate and Islamise Kashmir and had been highly trained, probably in Pakistan, Caroline Lucas omitted these things from her reckoning about the causes of extremism. She mentioned only Israel and the circumstances of the Palestinians.

Going on past experience, it is going to be difficult to persuade Greens who don’t understand what was wrong with Caroline Lucas’ response. Caroline Lucas’ deep focus on Israel caused her to neglect the issue of Kashmir and Pakistan on Any Questions. It also caused her to ignore the fact that while the jihadis obscenely punished US citizens and UK citizens for the policies of the US and UK, when it came to punishing Israel the distinction between Israel and Jew completely disappeared. It is obvious, if elementary, that “you don’t bring peace through the barrel of a gun” (Howard Jacobson observes in The Independent that – I paraphrase – it’s more than a little funny when the barrel of a gun invigorates attempts to understand the terrorists, while ignoring the victims of terror and their responses). It is also elementary that there are underlying, poorly-understood political problems which must be solved as a requirement of peace. But the news that Jews who died in Mumbai were sought out, and not as Israelis but as Jews, rocked Jews around the world with insecurity and a sense of conspicuous Jewish life as a potential target. Just one example close to home – a Jewish friend of mine went to a wedding last weekend at which the guests were asked to consider themselves fortunate that they themselves had not been targeted as Jews.

To respond, then, to a question about defeating extremism by seeking in such a singular way to concentrate listeners’ attentions on the perceived iniquities of only Israel is not only wrong, it is oblivious. Two of the central objections of Greens Engage to the dominant narrative about Israel which emanates from the Green party is this singular treatment of Israel and the long  failure to even attempt to get to grips with the complex relationship between Israel and Jews, roughly half of whose global population is Israeli.

I think there is probably a place for Israel in an explanation of the radicalisation of these young men from Pakistan, and others who share their views.  Certainly Israel is used by jihadis – who view it as a Jewish and Western outpost penetrating into what they believe should be Muslim lands – as a pretext for terror. And there is certainly popular outrage stoked both by the occupation itself  (which is often outrageous), by the blockade of Gaza, and by the media coverage of these things.

But they are certainly not the main, let alone only cause, or even cause “in particular” of the Mumbai attacks worth mentioning on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions.

Separate but related, Eamonn McDonagh on Z-Word Blog comments on William Dalrymple in The Guardian. David T is horrified by Richard Silverstein.