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No matter who you are, no matter what greatness you’ve achieved in your life or what gifts you’ve given to the rest of humanity, if you criticize Israel, you must expect to become persona non grata.

You should expect an utter onslaught of attacks. Otherwise rational and decent people will, one by one, genuflect and sign onto the stupid clichés and tiresome accusations that question your character, integrity and even sanity. You will be called an anti-Semite, or a self-hating Jew if you happen to be Jewish. The Holocaust will be invoked. You’ll be reminded of Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels and perhaps likened to Nazis, or capos if you’re Jewish. You’ll be accused explicitly or implicitly of secretly supporting the genocide of Jews and having a deep-seated desire for it.

Incredibly, this nonsense does not occur among the paranoid fringe, but in mainstream culture.

It happened to moral authorities like Nobel laureates Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter, both of whom were called anti-Semites, crazy old fools and worse, for daring to criticize Israel’s criminal policies toward Palestinians — the natives of the Holy Land.

It happened to renowned scholars like John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt for publishing a well-documented and supported audit of Israel’s manipulation of US foreign policy through their domestic proxy lobby.

Judge Richard Goldstone was chastised, shunned and punished by his own community for reporting his findings which stated that Israel had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. In response, he then utterly discredited himself as a jurist by retracting his well-reasoned legal conclusions based on irrefutable evidence, which was nonetheless upheld by all his colleagues and by the international legal community.

Among many abuses, they called him a “capo” and a “self-hating Jew” and he was told he would not be welcome at his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Those labels too have been hurled at intellectuals like Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky — the latter actually banned by Israel from entering the West Bank to speak at Birzeit University. The list is too long for one article, but it stretches the full breadth of international thinkers, artists, intellectuals, clergy, moral authorities and political figures. No one is immune from this insanity.

Günter Grass and obvious truths

But the world still has brave people who are willing to take significant risks for the rest of humanity. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, renowned crime fiction writer Henning Mankel, 84-year-old Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, and many like them risked their lives to break the siege of Gaza when they boarded the Freedom Flotilla, joining an unarmed group of people carrying humanitarian aid who were attacked, and, in some cases, killed by Israeli forces.

Others, like Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire, likewise have risked the abuse and attacks that come with speaking up for the rights of Palestinians against Israel’s unchecked aggression.

The latest case in point is Günter Grass, the German Nobel laureate who dared to suggest glaringly obvious truths: that Israel has a robust nuclear program and its hinted intention to attack Iran is a threat to world stability.

Of course, the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” is banning him from ever entering the Holy Land, which happens to be my homeland. I’m barred from living there, too, but for different reasons. By the laws of the State of Israel, I am not the right kind of human being to inherit my family’s property and live where all my ancestors have dwelled for millennia. But I digress.

Germany sits on sidelines

Günter Grass has entered forbidden intellectual and political territory, and the criticism against him has been intense. The other side of Germany’s silence when it comes to Israel is loud and sure chastising of Israel’s critics. Every article here in the mainstream US press mentions Germany’s “understandable” reluctance to criticize Israel, as if it’s a foregone and logical conclusion that it’s perfectly fine for Germany to sit on the sidelines — eyes, ears and lips sealed — sending aid and weapons to a country that has placed itself above the law, a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world, and one that is engaged in systematic ethnic cleansing of the native population of the land it occupies.

As a member of that native population, I do not accept that it is “understandable” for Germany to continue unreservedly support Israel no matter what. It is convenient, for sure. Because Germany is not the one paying for its sins. We, the Palestinians, are.

Everything — home, heritage, life, resources, hope — has been robbed from us to atone for Germany’s sins. To this day, we languish in refugee camps that are not fit for human beings so that every Jewish man and woman can have dual citizenship, one in their own country and one in mine.

We are the ones who find ourselves at the other end of the weapons that Germany supplies to Israel. It is Palestine that is being wiped off the map. It is our society that is being destroyed. Of course, Germany’s silence is easy and convenient, but “understandable” it is not.

We remember

Israel is not Judaism. It is a nuclear power with the most advanced death machines ever known to man, which it unleashes frequently against a principally unarmed civilian population that dares to demand freedom. It is a country that is currently in violation of hundreds of UN resolutions and nearly every tenet of international law. It is a country that has been condemned by every human rights organization that has ever investigated the situation on the ground there.

It is a country with multi-tiered legal and social infrastructure that measures the worth of a human being by his or her religion. It is the regional bully that has refused a comprehensive peace proposal set forth by all Arab states. It has in the past attacked Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, all on the pretext of pre-emption. And now it wants to attack Iran under the same pretext, citing the tired “existential threat” mantra.

We are reminded of the Jewish Holocaust. But there is no need because we remember it. We also remember the Armenians, the Serbs, and we remember Rwanda. We remember the holocaust of the extermination of Native Americans and we remember the holocaust of slavery — 200 years of kidnapping, buying and selling human beings as a commodity. And we remember Deir Yassin, Sabra and Shatila, Qibya and the many other atrocities Israel has committed against Palestinians.

But no matter how great or unspeakable the crimes, victims are not, and should not be, granted license to commit crimes against others with impunity.

None of us can fully predict the ramifications of an Israeli attack on Iran but we can all imagine the immensity of loss, blood, upheaval and instability that will reverberate far beyond the region. All so that Israel can maintain unchecked military dominance in the region.

I can only thank Günter Grass for making a minimal gesture that Germany should take measures not to remain complicit in the destruction of Arab or Persian life.

By Susan Abulhawa

15 April 2012

@ The Electronic Intifada

Susan Abulhawa is the author of the international bestselling novel Mornings in Jenin.

It’s a policy fierce enough to cause great suffering among Iranians — and possibly in the long run among Americans, too. It might, in the end, even deeply harm the global economy and yet, history tells us, it will fail on its own. Economic war led by Washington (and encouraged by Israel) will not take down the Iranian government or bring it to the bargaining table on its knees ready to surrender its nuclear program. It might, however, lead to actual armed conflict with incalculable consequences.

The United States is already effectively embroiled in an economic war against Iran. The Obama administration has subjected the Islamic Republic to the most crippling economic sanctions applied to any country since Iraq was reduced to fourth-world status in the 1990s. And worse is on the horizon. A financial blockade is being imposed that seeks to prevent Tehran from selling petroleum, its most valuable commodity, as a way of dissuading the regime from pursuing its nuclear enrichment program.

Historical memory has never been an American strong point and so few today remember that a global embargo on Iranian petroleum is hardly a new tactic in Western geopolitics; nor do many recall that the last time it was applied with such stringency, in the 1950s, it led to the overthrow of the government with disastrous long-term blowback on the United States. The tactic is just as dangerous today.

Iran’s supreme theocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly condemned the atom bomb and nuclear weapons of all sorts as tools of the devil, weaponry that cannot be used without killing massive numbers of civilian noncombatants. In the most emphatic terms, he has, in fact, pronounced them forbidden according to Islamic law. Based on the latest U.S. intelligence, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has affirmed that Iran has not made a decision to pursue a nuclear warhead. In contrast, hawks in Israel and the United States insist that Tehran’s civilian nuclear enrichment program is aimed ultimately at making a bomb, that the Iranians are pursuing such a path in a determined fashion, and that they must be stopped now — by military means if necessary.

Putting the Squeeze on Iran

At the moment, the Obama administration and the Congress seem intent on making it impossible for Iran to sell its petroleum at all on the world market. As 2011 ended, Congress passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that mandates sanctions on firms and countries that deal with Iran’s Central Bank or buy Iranian petroleum (though hardship cases can apply to the Treasury Department for exemptions). This escalation from sanctions to something like a full-scale financial blockade holds extreme dangers of spiraling into military confrontation. The Islamic Republic tried to make this point, indicating that it would not allow itself to be strangled without response, by conducting naval exercises at the mouth of the Persian Gulf this winter. The threat involved was clear enough: about one-fifth of the world’s petroleum flows through the Gulf, and even a temporary and partial cut-off might prove catastrophic for the world economy.

In part, President Obama is clearly attempting by his sanctions-cum-blockade policy to dissuade the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu from launching a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. He argues that severe economic measures will be enough to bring Iran to the negotiating table ready to bargain, or even simply give in.

In part, Obama is attempting to please America’s other Middle East ally, Saudi Arabia, which also wants Iran’s nuclear program mothballed. In the process, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has even had Iran’s banks kicked off international exchange networks, making it difficult for that country’s major energy customers like South Korea and India to pay for the Iranian petroleum they import. And don’t forget the administration’s most powerful weapon: most governments and corporations do not want to be cut off from the U.S. economy with a GDP of more than $15 trillion — still the largest and most dynamic in the world.

Typically, the European Union, fearing Congressional sanctions, has agreed to cease taking new contracts on Iranian oil by July 1st, a decision that has placed special burdens on struggling countries in its southern tier like Greece and Italy. With European buyers boycotting, Iran will depend for customers on Asian countries, which jointly purchase some 64% of its petroleum, and those of the global South. Of these, China and India have declined to join the boycott. South Korea, which buys $14 billion worth of Iranian petroleum a year, accounting for some 10% of its oil imports, has pleaded with Washington for an exemption, as has Japan which got 8.8% of its petroleum imports from Iran last year, more than 300,000 barrels a day — and more in absolute terms than South Korea. Japan, which is planning to cut its Iranian imports by 12% this year, has already won an exemption.

Faced with the economic damage a sudden interruption of oil imports from Iran would inflict on East Asian economies, the Obama administration has instead attempted to extract pledges of future 10%-20% reductions in return for those Treasury Department exemptions. Since it’s easier to make promises than institute a boycott, allies are lining up with pledges. (Even Turkey has gone this route.)

Such vows are almost certain to prove relatively empty. After all, there are few options for such countries other than continuing to buy Iranian oil unless they can find new sources — unlikely at present, despite Saudi promises to ramp up production — or drastically cut back on energy use, ensuring economic contraction and domestic wrath.

What this means in reality is that the U.S. and Israeli quest to cut off Iran’s exports will probably be a quixotic one. For the plan to work, oil demand would have to remain steady and other exporters would have to replace Iran’s roughly 2.5 million barrels a day on the global market. For instance, Saudi Arabia has increased the amount of petroleum it pumps, and is promising a further rise in output this summer in an attempt to flood the market and allow countries to replace Iranian purchases with Saudi ones.

But experts doubt the Saudi ability to do this long term and — most important of all — global demand is not steady. It’s crucially on the rise in both China and India. For Washington’s energy blockade to work, Saudi Arabia and other suppliers would have to reliably replace Iran’s oil production and cover increased demand, as well as expected smaller shortfalls caused by crises in places like Syria and South Sudan and by declining production in older fields elsewhere.

Otherwise a successful boycott of Iranian petroleum will only put drastic upward pressure on oil prices, as Japan has politely but firmly pointed out to the Obama administration. The most likely outcome: America’s closest allies and those eager to do more business with the U.S. will indeed reduce imports from Iran, leaving countries like China, India, and others in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to dip into the pool of Iranian crude (possibly at lower prices than the Iranians would normally charge).

Iran’s transaction costs are certainly increasing, its people are beginning to suffer economically, and it may have to reduce its exports somewhat, but the tensions in the Gulf have also caused the price of petroleum futures to rise in a way that has probably offset the new costs the regime has borne. (Experts also estimate that the Iran crisis has already added 25 cents to every gallon of gas an American consumer buys at the pump.)

Like China, India has declined to bow to pressure from Washington. The government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which depends on India’s substantial Muslim vote, is not eager to be seen as acquiescent to U.S. strong-arm tactics. Moreover, lacking substantial hydrocarbon resources, and given Singh’s ambitious plans for an annual growth rate of 9% — focused on expanding India’s underdeveloped transportation sector (70% of all petroleum used in the world is dedicated to fuelling vehicles) — Iran is crucial to the country’s future.

To sidestep Washington, India has worked out an agreement to pay for half of its allotment of Iranian oil in rupees, a soft currency. Iran would then have to use those rupees on food and goods from India, a windfall for its exporters. Defying the American president yet again, the Indians are even offering a tax break to Indian firms that trade with Iran. That country is, in turn, offering to pay for some Indian goods with gold. Since India runs a trade deficit with the U.S., Washington would only hurt itself if it aggressively sanctioned India.

A History Lesson Ignored

As yet, Iran has shown no signs of yielding to the pressure. For its leaders, future nuclear power stations promise independence and signify national glory, just as they do for France, which gets nearly 80% of its electricity from nuclear reactors. The fear in Tehran is that, without nuclear power, a developing Iran could consume all its petroleum domestically, as has happened in Indonesia, leaving the government with no surplus income with which to maintain its freedom from international pressures.

Iran is particularly jealous of its independence because in modern history it has so often been dominated by a great power or powers. In 1941, with World War II underway, Russia and Britain, which already controlled Iranian oil, launched an invasion to ensure that the country remained an asset of the Allies against the Axis. They put the young and inexperienced Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the throne, and sent his father, Reza Shah, into exile. The Iranian corridor — what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the bridge of victory” — then allowed the allies to effectively channel crucial supplies to the Soviet Union in the war against Nazi Germany. The occupation years were, however, devastating for Iranians who experienced soaring inflation and famine.

Discontent broke out after the war — and the Allied occupation — ended. It was focused on a 1933 agreement Iran had signed with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) regarding the exploitation of its petroleum. By the early 1950s, the AIOC (which later became British Petroleum and is now BP) was paying more in taxes to the British government than in royalties to Iran for its oil. In 1950, when it became known that the American ARAMCO oil consortium had offered the king of Saudi Arabia a 50-50 split of oil profits, the Iranians demanded the same terms.

The AIOC was initially adamant that it would not renegotiate the agreement. By the time it softened its position somewhat and began being less supercilious, Iran’s parliamentarians were so angry that they did not want anything more to do with the British firm or the government that supported it.

On March 15, 1951, a democratically elected Iranian parliament summarily nationalized the country’s oil fields and kicked the AIOC out of the country. Facing a wave of public anger, Mohammed Reza Shah acquiesced, appointing Mohammed Mosaddegh, an oil-nationalization hawk, as prime minister. A conservative nationalist from an old aristocratic family, Mosaddegh soon visited the United States seeking aid, but because his nationalist coalition included the Tudeh Party (the Communist Party of Iran), he was increasingly smeared in the U.S. press as a Soviet sympathizer.

The British government, outraged by the oil nationalization and fearful that the Iranian example might impel other producers to follow suit, froze that country’s assets and attempted to institute a global embargo of its petroleum. London placed harsh restrictions on Tehran’s ability to trade, and made it difficult for Iran to convert the pounds sterling it held in British banks. Initially, President Harry Truman’s administration in Washington was supportive of Iran. After Republican Dwight Eisenhower was swept into the Oval Office, however, the U.S. enthusiastically joined the oil embargo and campaign against Iran.

Iran became ever more desperate to sell its oil, and countries like Italy and Japan were tempted by “wildcat” sales at lower than market prices. As historian Nikki Keddie has showed, however, Big Oil and the U.S. State Department deployed strong-arm tactics to stop such countries from doing so.

In May 1953, for example, sometime Standard Oil of California executive and “petroleum adviser” to the State Department Max Thornburg wrote U.S. ambassador to Italy Claire Booth Luce about an Italian request to buy Iranian oil: “For Italy to clear this oil and take additional cargoes would definitely indicate that it had taken the side of the oil ‘nationalizers,’ despite the hazard this represents to American foreign investments and vital oil supply sources. This of course is Italy’s right. It is only the prudence of the course that is in question.” He then threatened Rome with an end to oil company purchases of Italian supplies worth millions of dollars.

In the end, the Anglo-American blockade devastated Iran’s economy and provoked social unrest. Prime Minister Mosaddegh, initially popular, soon found himself facing a rising wave of labor strikes and protest rallies. Shopkeepers and small businessmen, among his most important constituents, pressured the prime minister to restore order. When he finally did crack down on the protests (some of them staged by the Central Intelligence Agency), the far left Tudeh Party began withdrawing its support. Right-wing generals, dismayed by the flight of the shah to Italy, the breakdown of Iran’s relations with the West, and the deterioration of the economy, were open to the blandishments of the CIA, which, with the help of British intelligence, decided to organize a coup to install its own man in power.

A Danger of Blowback

The story of the 1953 CIA coup in Iran is well known, but that its success depended on the preceding two years of fierce sanctions on Iran’s oil is seldom considered. A global economic blockade of a major oil country is difficult to sustain. Were it to have broken down, the U.S. and Britain would have suffered a huge loss of prestige. Other Third World countries might have taken heart and begun to claim their own natural resources. The blockade, then, arguably made the coup necessary. That coup, in turn, led to the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini a quarter-century later and, in the end, the present U.S./Israeli/Iranian face-off. It seems the sort of sobering history lesson that every politician in Washington should consider (and none, of course, does).

As then, so now, an oil blockade in its own right is unlikely to achieve Washington’s goals. At present, the American desire to force Iran to abolish its nuclear enrichment program seems as far from success as ever. In this context, there’s another historical lesson worth considering: the failure of the crippling sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s to bring down that dictator and his regime.

What that demonstrated was simple enough: ruling cliques with ownership of a valuable industry like petroleum can cushion themselves from the worst effects of an international boycott, even if they pass the costs on to a helpless public. In fact, crippling the economy tends to send the middle class into a spiral of downward mobility, leaving its members with ever fewer resources to resist an authoritarian government. The decline of Iran’s once-vigorous Green protest movement of 2009 is probably connected to this, as is a growing sense that Iran is now under foreign siege, and Iranians should rally around in support of the nation.

Strikingly, there was a strong voter turnout for the recent parliamentary elections where candidates close to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dominated the results. Iran’s politics, never very free, have nevertheless sometimes produced surprises and feisty movements, but these days are moving in a decidedly conservative and nationalistic direction. Only a few years ago, a majority of Iranians disapproved of the idea of having an atomic bomb. Now, according to a recent Gallup poll, more support the militarization of the nuclear program than oppose it.

The great oil blockade of 2012 may still be largely financially focused, but it carries with it the same dangers of escalation and intervention — as well as future bitterness and blowback — as did the campaign of the early 1950s. U.S. and European financial sanctions are already beginning to interfere with the import of staples like wheat, since Iran can no longer use the international banking system to pay for them. If children suffer or even experience increased mortality because of the sanctions, that development could provoke future attacks on the U.S. or American troops in the Greater Middle East. (Don’t forget that the Iraqi sanctions, considered responsible for the deaths of some 500,000 children, were cited by al-Qaeda in its “declaration of war” on the U.S.)

The attempt to flood the market and use financial sanctions to enforce an embargo on Iranian petroleum holds many dangers. If it fails, soaring oil prices could set back fragile economies in the West still recovering from the mortgage and banking scandals of 2008. If it overshoots, there could be turmoil in the oil-producing states from a sudden fall in revenues.

Even if the embargo is a relative success in keeping Iranian oil in the ground, the long-term damage to that country’s fields and pipelines (which might be ruined if they lie fallow long enough) could harm the world economy in the future. The likelihood that an oil embargo can change Iranian government policy or induce regime change is low, given our experience with economic sanctions in Iraq, Cuba, and elsewhere. Moreover, there is no reason to think that the Islamic Republic will take its downward mobility lying down.

As the sanctions morph into a virtual blockade, they raise the specter that all blockades do — of provoking a violent response. Just as dangerous is the specter that the sanctions will drag on without producing tangible results, impelling covert or overt American action against Tehran to save face. And that, friends, is where we came in.

By Juan Cole

12 April 2012

@ Tomdispatch.com

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is available in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Cole discusses the consequences of sanctions on Iran, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Virtuous Obama Omits US Nuclear Terrorism History Threatens Korea Iran

In To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War, 1987, Prof. Michio Kaku, chronicled 12 acts of US nuclear terrorism since it terrorized Japan by A-bombling Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stream of new revelations about U.S. nuclear planning fills in a picture of what North Korea calls “the increasing nuclear threat of the US,” which it cites as the reason it developed its own atom-bomb program — as a deterrent.

President Obama delivers a speech on nuclear security at Hankuk University in Seoul, South Korea and the world is treated to watching David Rockefeller’s choice for a token minority face for the American empire in superb form – a boyishly young black American carrying a big stick and saying he will have no problem using it, talking down to the colonially exploited non-white majority of mankind like no white American president ever dared.

Obama Warns Iran, North Korea,

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74459.html

President Obama double talks the way all US presidents of the US security state have double talked since it was organized under Truman, but Obama, for not being white, gets away with it much easier. Of course he is authorized by his handlers to throw humanity the usual bone, “We have more nuclear w eapons than we need” indicating that he can get rid of a few (outdated ones, we are sure).

Obama Warns Iran, North Korea,

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74459.html

Those readers who are asleep to the danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of those ruling the US corporatist empire might best read To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans , by eminent  Professor of Theoretical Physics Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking’s closest confident, who in 1987, chronicled the twelve times the US had practiced  nuclear terrorism in threatening nuclear bombing of various countries since it dropped atom bombs to terrorize Japan into unconditional surrender by obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By 2012, that number twelve would have to be revised upward, if for nothing else, by counting in the times President Obama has threatened Iran with nuclear attack.  ( Paperback edition, used, from Barnes and Noble available as low as $3, hardcover $13.)   kaku/1002301837?ean=9780921689065&itm=22&usri=michio+kaku

Library review, 1987

“The authors, both university physicists, maintain that U.S. nuclear policy for the past 40 years has not been one of deterrence as publicly stated, but rather has been one of threatening the use of nuclear weapons. This policy has been documented in such books as the New England Regional Office of the American Friends Service Committee’s The Deadly Connection and Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan’s Force Without War: U.S. armed forces as a political instrument . The authors’ thorough analysis of recently released Pentagon documents provides the basis for a description of the nuclear war fighting strategy of the Reagan administration. The authors also outline the attitudes and biases of U.S. nuclear strategists and policymakers. Recommended for public and university libraries.” [Dennis Felbel, Univ. of Manitoba Lib., Winnipeg]

As of October 2008, China, India and North Korea, have publicly declared their commitment to no first use of nuclear weapons. China was the first to propose and pledge NFU policy when it first gained nuclear capabilities in 1964, stating “not to be the first to use nuclear weapons at any time or under any circumstances” . NATO has repeatedly rejected calls for adopting NFU policy, arguing that preemptive nuclear strike is a key option. The US is a member of NATO. [ First Strike Nuclear, Wikipedia ]

From the 1950s’ Pentagon to today’s Obama administration, the United States has repeatedly pondered, planned and threatened use of nuclear weapons against North Korea, according to declassified and other U.S. government documents released in this 60th-anniversary year of the Korean War.

Air Force bombers flew nuclear rehearsal runs over North Korea’s capital during the war. The U.S. military services later vied for the lead role in any “atomic delivery” over North Korea. In the late 1960s, nuclear-armed U.S. warplanes stood by in South Korea on 15-minute alert to strike the north.

Just this past April, issuing a U.S. Nuclear Posture Review,Defense Secretary Robert Gatessaid “all options are on the table” for dealing with Pyongyang — meaning U.S. nuclear strikes were not ruled out.

The stream of new revelations about U.S. nuclear planning further fills in a picture of what North Korea calls “the increasing nuclear threat of the U.S.,” which it cites as the reason it developed its own atom-bomb program — as a deterrent.

“This is the lesson we have drawn,” North Korea’s vice foreign minister, Pak Kil Yon, told the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Sept. 29.

Even without nuclear weapons, three years of U.S. conventional bombing had devastated North Korea, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The nuclear planning didn’t stop with the fighting. On Aug. 20, 1953, declassified documents show, the Strategic Air Command sent Air Force headquarters a plan for “an air atomic offensive against China, Manchuria and North Korea” if the communists resumed hostilities. “OpPlan 8-53 — called for use of “large numbers of atomic weapons.”

The new information is contained in Korean War documents released by the CIA to mark this June’s anniversary of the start of the conflict; another declassified package obtained by Washington’s private National Security Archive research group under the Freedom of Information Act; and additional documents, also once top-secret and found at the U.S. National Archives, provided to The Associated Press by intelligence historian and author Matthew Aid.

[ US repeated threatened to use nukes on N. Korea: declassified documents, Associated Press , 10/9/2012]

The reader can draw his or her own conclusions as to where lies the threat to Mankind from nuclear weapons. Korea, Iran, nations that store many nuclear weapons, or the US, which stores tens of thousands, and whose president pretends that his single superpower country is a reliable, fair and trustworthy friend and protector of the residents of planet Earth?

By Jay Janson

27 March 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Jay Janson, 80, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England, India and the US, and now resides in New York City. Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his. GlobalResearch, InformationClearingHouse, CounterCurrents, DissidentVoice, OpEdNews, Minority Perspectives UK, HistoryNewsNetwork, are among those who have published his articles .

Meeting Sunday in the Turkish city of Istanbul, the so-called “Friends of Syria” conference stepped up the US-led campaign to destabilize and oust the government of Syria through a combination of diplomatic maneuvers and direct military interference.

Washington leads the group of 74 countries, with the aid of the European powers and the pro-US dictatorships of the Middle East. The conference took place as former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan heads a UN monitoring mission in Syria, with the stated goals of bringing about a ceasefire and opening dialogue between the government and the opposition. The Syrian regime has signed on to Annan’s peace talks, though the main US-backed opposition groups have refused to do so.

Opening proceedings Sunday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan made clear that the Annan mission is to be used by the “Friends of Syria” as a means to ratchet up tensions with the Assad regime and lay the groundwork for foreign military intervention.

“I need to state that if the Syrian regime does not cooperate [with Annan’s mission], it will be an inevitable requirement for the UN Security Council to fulfill its responsibility and put an end to the massacre in Syria,” Erdogan said. “If the UN Security Council avoids this historic responsibility once again, the international community will be left with no choice but to support the Syrian people’s right to self-defense.”

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a similar note in her address to the conference, telling delegates that the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad would not observe the conditions of Kofi Annan’s peace talks. “Nearly a week has gone by, and we have to conclude that the regime is adding to its long list of broken promises,” said Clinton. “The world must judge Assad by what he does, not what he says. And we cannot sit back and wait any longer.”

The US-led “Friends of Syria” coalition was established earlier this year in order to circumvent the United Nations Security Council, which had been unable to pass resolutions against the Assad government due to the vetoes cast by Russia and China, whose governments refused to sign off on Washington’s campaign for regime-change in Syria.

Like the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” that the George W. Bush administration fashioned in the run-up to the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Obama administration has assembled the “Friends of Syria” group to provide a fig leaf to cover the brazen imperialist campaign against a former colonial country in the oil-rich Middle East.

The Istanbul conference invited members of the Syrian National Council (SNC) to attend as representatives of the Syrian people. In a statement to the press before the start of the talks, SNC leader Burhan Ghalioun called on the delegates to militarily enforce “humanitarian corridors” inside Syria and to increase the supply of arms to the opposition. “We have repeatedly called for the arming of the Free Syrian Army,” Ghalioun said. “We want the Friends of Syria conference to live up to this demand.”

As Washington and its allies well know, the SNC is a deeply divided outfit with little popular support inside Syria. Together with its allies, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and various Islamist militant groups, the SNC is implicated in terrorist attacks on government personnel and buildings that have killed many civilians, as well as kidnappings, torture and sectarian killings.

Nonetheless, the final communiqué of the “Friends of Syria” meeting accorded the SNC the status of “legitimate representatives of all Syrians.” This new title has no weight in international law, but is intended as a mechanism to promote the SNC as a government in waiting, in the same way as the “rebel” National Transitional Council was boosted in the run-up to the NATO-led war against Libya to oust the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The SNC and the FSA are based in Turkey, and have received arms, financing and training from other pro-US governments in the region, especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Washington last week officially announced that it would also arm the anti-Assad militants, providing “non-lethal” aid such as sophisticated communication systems that will allow opposition fighters to better coordinate their attacks inside Syria.

The Istanbul conference discussed establishing a “trust fund” for the SNC, though there remained disagreement among the delegates on how the money should be used. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are pushing for the cash to be made available to purchase weapons for opposition fighters. Washington and the European powers appear reluctant to openly commit to this, preferring to limit the use of funds to supposed “humanitarian” projects.

Clinton announced that the US would provide an additional $12 million in support for the SNC, while Germany’s foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, stated that his government would contribute $7.6 million to the opposition. Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies are understood to be preparing a multimillion dollar contribution to the fund.

The money will be funneled to the Syrian National Council, which will be the conduit for funds to those engaged in armed attacks within Syria. The group’s president Ghalioun said, “The SNC will take charge of the payment of fixed salaries of all officers, soldiers, and others who are members of the Free Syrian Army.” In other words, the so-called “rebels” in Syria are nothing more than paid mercenaries of the imperialist powers and the Gulf sheikdoms.

By solely recognizing the SNC at the Istanbul conference, Washington and its allies are also attempting to delegitimize all other Syrian opposition groups. For example, one opposition bloc, the National Coordination Committee, which has participated in negotiations with the Assad regime through the mediation of the Russian government, was not invited to the conference.

Russia and China did not join the “Friends of Syria” meeting, and refused to participate in the last such gathering in Tunisia in February. The Kremlin condemned the meeting in Istanbul as a distraction from the ongoing diplomatic mission of Kofi Annan, and an attempt to destabilize Syria rather than bring about peace talks.

According to a Russian foreign ministry statement Saturday, the Istanbul meeting was not “looking for dialogue that could put an end to the conflict. On the contrary, it may pave the way for external interference.”

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev last week claimed that the demands of Washington, the Western European powers and the Gulf monarchies for Assad’s immediate resignation were “shortsighted” and likely to prolong the conflict, while insisting that the UN-sponsored mission under Kofi Annan was the “last chance” to prevent full-scale civil war in Syria.

The government of Iraq also refused to send delegates to the Istanbul conference. Iraqi spokesman Ali Mussawi told the AFP news agency last week that Baghdad wanted to “maintain our mediation role, and the role of mediator sometimes requires not participating in this conference or that.”

Behind the hypocritical talk from Washington and its allies about “democracy” and “human rights,” the campaign against Syria articulated at the Istanbul conference is aimed at ousting Assad and replacing his Ba’athist regime with one more directly subordinated to imperialist interests. This is part of a broader US strategy to refashion the energy-rich Middle East that includes regime-change in Iran, Syria’s principal ally in the region.

In a further sign that Washington is preparing for war against Iran, President Barack Obama announced Friday that sanctions against the Iranian oil and gas industry, already passed by the US Congress, would be implemented. To mitigate the impact this will have on global oil prices, which have spiked by 20 percent this year, largely due to commodity traders speculating on the outbreak of a new war in the Middle East, the Obama administration has won an agreement to increase oil production from Saudi Arabia.

According to CNN, during talks Friday between Secretary Clinton and Saudi King Abdullah, ostensibly in preparation for the “Friends of Syria” meeting, the king agreed to make up for the loss of Iranian oil under the US sanctions. This would equate to Saudi Arabia increasing production by between one and two million barrels per day.

By Niall Green

2 April 2012

@ WSWS.org

President Barack Obama has approved much wider use of drone-fired missiles in Yemen, according to press reports Thursday, quoting unnamed US government officials. The result will be a much higher death toll from American attacks in that country, which has joined Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya and Somalia as a battlefield for the US military and CIA.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Obama had given the green light to a request by CIA Director David Petraeus to allow the agency to fire missiles at buildings, cars and armed groups without identifying exactly who is being targeted, based simply on a pattern of activity observed by US surveillance satellites or on-the-ground informants.

These “signature” strikes are a marked escalation from the previous “personality” strikes, which were restricted to individuals targeted as alleged leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a militant Islamist group that Washington claims has attempted terrorist attacks against US targets.

The Journal quoted a US official with reservations about the new policy, which he considered so broad that it was likely to provoke widespread opposition in Yemen which could undermine the US-backed government of newly installed President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. “Every Yemeni is armed, so how can they differentiate between suspected militants and armed Yemenis?” the official asked.

The Yemeni government must approve the missile strikes, thereby taking responsibility for them in the eyes of the Yemeni people, who overwhelmingly oppose US military intervention in their country.

The Washington Post reported that the first such signature strike took place last Sunday in Yemen’s Marib province, identifying the target as Mohammed Saeed al Umda, an AQAP commander whom US officials claimed was linked to the bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port city of Aden in 2000. No evidence was presented to demonstrate that supposed connection.

Obama administration officials who confirmed the missile strikes claimed that they were aimed at “terrorists” who were planning attacks on US targets, not on the tribal or factional opponents of the US-backed Yemeni regime. But according to the Post, “In recent months, U.S. spy agencies have collected intelligence indicating plots against American diplomats or U.S. special operations troops who are working alongside Yemeni counter-terrorism units.”

In other words, the so-called “terrorists” are Yemenis who oppose the intervention of American military forces into their country to prop up the decades-long dictatorship of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who turned over his office to Hadi in February, but remains the principal power behind the scenes.

A Lebanese newspaper, the Daily Star, reported that another US drone strike killed three militants allegedly linked to Al Qaeda on Thursday, when a missile hit their car in the southern Yemen city of Mudiyah. Residents told the newspaper they saw two drones in the sky after the explosion.

It was not known whether this drone strike was conducted under the expanded authority just provided by the White House, or under the targeting rules previously in place. The CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command have carried out at least nine missile strikes in Yemen so far in 2012, as many in four months as in the entire previous year.

The stepped-up drone strikes come as both the US and Yemeni government have issued warnings about a supposed upsurge of Al Qaeda activity in Yemen. The Hadi government warned that AQAP was planning an assault on Sana’a, the capital city, although nearly all known AQAP activity has been confined to the southwestern part of the country, far from Sana’a and much closer to the virtually unpoliced border between Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s “empty quarter.”

White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, in a speech last week at New York police headquarters, described AQAP as “very, very dangerous,” claiming it has grown to more than 1,000 members since the assassination of one of its alleged top leaders, US-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, last September.

Awlaki was killed by a CIA drone missile, an attack approved by Obama under the doctrine, later elaborated by Attorney General Eric Holder, that the president has the authority to order the killing of any American citizen who is deemed an “enemy combatant,” without any legal process or judicial review.

FBI director Robert Mueller was in Sana’a Tuesday for talks with Hadi and Yemeni security officials. The FBI chief promised that the US government would continue to support Yemen “with full force” adding, “The US will provide the possible assistance in various aspects bilaterally with the international community to achieve stability in Yemen.”

On the same day, the Yemeni defense ministry said that an offensive in the southern province of Abyan had killed 52 militants in two days, mostly in the city of Zinjibar, which was captured by AQAP fighters last May. Yemeni troops, backed by artillery and tanks, pushed into the center of Zinjibar in the middle of the night Monday, destroying at least four tanks that had been previously captured by the militants.

Other Yemeni military operations against supposed AQAP militants are ongoing in Shabwa, Marib and Baitha provinces.

Drone missile attacks in Yemen have resulted in numerous atrocities in which innocent men, women and children, including entire families, and even the deputy governor of a province, were exterminated by “mistake,” because CIA or Pentagon targeters claimed they were opening fire on Al Qaeda targets.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a US civil liberties group, has just filed a Freedom of Information request into the legal basis for a cruise missile attack in Al Majalah in Yemen in 2009, which killed 41 people, 21 of them children.

Cables released by WikiLeaks revealed the US State Department’s role in covering up the Al Majalah killings, for which the Yemeni government agreed to take responsibility, claiming the attack was carried out by Yemeni jet fighters, in order to conceal the use of US missiles.

According to the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, US drone strikes in Pakistan since Obama took office have killed 535 civilians, including more than 60 children.

The escalation of drone attacks in Yemen means a death toll on that scale or even higher, justified by the Obama administration with the claim that it is preventing “imminent attacks” on the United States—although now, under the expanded authority approved by Obama, the US government need not even identify in advance those it is murdering.

By Patrick Martin

27 April 2012

@ WSWS.org

With Tuesday’s passing of the deadline under a UN peace plan for the withdrawal of army troops from Syria’s major population centers, Washington and its allies have escalated their threats of intervention in the Middle Eastern country.

Under the six-point plan drafted by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Syrian troops and heavy weapons, including tanks, were to have been removed from towns and villages by April 10 as the prelude to a ceasefire by both government forces and the Western-backed armed opposition forces 48 hours later.

Endorsed by the Security Council as well as the Arab League and accepted by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the Annan plan, as far as Washington, the Western European powers, Turkey and the reactionary Gulf oil sheikdoms are concerned, represented merely a ploy aimed at legitimizing imperialist intervention.

Reports in the major media have been filled with charges that the Assad government has “defied” the Annan plan and is continuing alleged atrocities against civilians, seemingly without provocation. Wildly inflated estimates of the number killed provided by opposition-controlled—and Saudi funded—outfits like the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights are reported as fact, while the deaths of Syrian soldiers and police are barely mentioned.

In a letter to the UN Security Council Tuesday, Annan said that he was “gravely concerned at the course of events” in Syria.

He said that “credible reports indicate that … the Syrian armed forces have conducted rolling military operations in population centers, characterized by troop movements into towns supported by artillery fire. While some troops and heavy weapons have been withdrawn from some localities, this appears to be often limited to a repositioning of heavy weapons that keeps cities within firing range.”

The ex-UN secretary general rejected out of hand an appeal made by the Syrian government on April 8 for the UN to secure written guarantees from the armed groups such as the Free Syrian Army that they would halt terrorist violence and from countries in the region that they would stop financing and arming these factions.

At a “Friends of Syria” conference in Istanbul, held on April 1—one week after the Assad government signed on to the Annan plan—Saudi Arabia and Qatar announced that they were not only arming the “rebels”, but would be putting them on their payroll. The US and Britain, meanwhile, have pledged “non-lethal” support, including sophisticated communications gear, night-vision goggles and intelligence that can be used to target government forces.

Despite these clear efforts to escalate the civil war in Syria, Annan described the requests from the Assad government as “ex post facto requirements that are not part of the six-point plan that they agreed to implement.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that the Syrian government was no longer demanding written guarantees from the armed opposition groups, but merely assurances from Annan that the groups backed by the West together with Saudi Arabia and Qatar would cease armed actions and that their foreign sponsors would support the peace plan.

Lavrov spoke after two days of talks with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem in Moscow. He said that the Assad government “could have been more active and decisive” in implementing the Annan plan, but added that Damascus remained committed to complying with its requirements.

Russia, along with China, had vetoed two earlier Security Council resolutions because of their failure to mention the armed attacks of groups like the Free Syrian Army and their demands for the ouster of Assad. Having acquiesced to the US-NATO war for regime change in Libya by failing to exercise their veto power, Russia and China forfeited their own interests in the oil rich country in a war that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Having come forward as a broker for the Annan plan, Russia has opened itself up to increasing pressure from the Western powers to accept UN-backed action against Syria if the Assad government fails to abide by the plan’s terms. With Syria representing a major trading partner and offering Moscow its only warm water port outside Russia, the Russian government confronts a deepening crisis over events unfolding in the country.

Two incidents Monday involving Syrian troops firing across the country’s borders have heightened tensions and raised the specter of the Western-stoked civil war turning into a regional conflagration.

In the first incident, Syrian troops were in pursuit of an armed group that attacked a military checkpoint near the Turkish border, killing six soldiers. The assailants then fled into Turkey. The gunfire wounded five people—three Syrian refugees and two Turks—at a refugee camp next to the Oncupinar border post near the provincial center of Kilis in Turkey. According to one report, Syrian refugees ran out of the camp to come to the aid of the fleeing gunmen.

In the second incident, a Lebanese television cameraman was shot dead by Syrian troops as he was filming along the border with Syria. Syria’s state news agency SANA said that the gunfire was the result of an “armed terrorist group” staging a cross-border raid against a Syrian border post.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced the first clash as a “clear violation of the border.” He added, “Obviously we will take the necessary measures.”

The pro-government newspaper Zaman reported Monday that the Erdogan government was considering the invocation of a 1998 agreement with Damascus to legitimize an armed intervention in Syria. The accord included Syria’s pledge not to undermine Turkey’s security.

The Turkish media reported that Ankara is “finalizing plans” to impose a “buffer zone” or “humanitarian corridor” by its militarily seizing Syrian territory and using it to house refugees and train armed anti-government groups.

Syrian Foreign Minister Moallem countered the shrill reaction from Ankara, stressing that Turkey was itself fomenting violence inside Syria by “hosting gunmen, giving them training camps, allowing them to smuggle weapons.” The nominal head of the Free Syrian Army, a hodgepodge of locally based militias, has made his headquarters in Turkey, near the Syrian border.

In response to threats of a Turkish imposed buffer zone on Syrian territory, Moallem stated, “Syria is a sovereign state and has the right to defend its sovereignty against any violation of this sovereignty.”

The United States described itself as “absolutely outraged” by the firing into Turkey. Ominously, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland suggested that Turkey could invoke mutual defense provisions of the NATO treaty over the border incident, clearing the way for a US-Western European intervention. “I would not be surprised if the Turks do raise this in Brussels,” she said.

One reporter at the State Department asked Nuland how what had happened on the Syrian-Turkish border was any different from the kind of actions US occupation troops regularly engage in on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nuland insisted that the comparison was “apples and oranges”, stressing that the US had “protocols” with Pakistan and falsely alleging that the Syrian forces were chasing “innocents”.

The growing constituency for imperialist intervention in Syria within the US ruling elite was reflected in back-to-back editorials in the Washington Post and the New York Times proclaiming the failure of the Annan plan and the inevitability of another war.

The Post declared: “The inescapable reality is that Mr. Assad will go on killing unless and until he is faced with a more formidable military opposition. That is why the shortest way to the end of the Syrian crisis is the one Mr. Obama is resisting: military support for the opposition and, if necessary, intervention by NATO.”

The Times, only slightly more circumspect, demanded that the United Nations Security Council “take tough and unified action against Mr. Assad and his forces,” and that Russia and China “stop protecting his brutal regime”, i.e., allow the US, Britain and France to ram through a resolution authorizing a Libya-style war for regime change.

Popular sentiment in the United States, however, is wildly at odds with this increasing support for war within the political establishment. A survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center late last month, found that only 25 percent of the public believes that Washington should intervene in Syria, while roughly two-thirds (64 percent) oppose such an intervention.

By Bill Van Auken

11 April 2012

@ WSWS.org

US and Afghan officials announced Sunday that they had reached a draft agreement committing the United States to continuing military and financial support to the puppet regime in Kabul long after the scheduled withdrawal of the bulk of US ground troops at the end of 2014.

The pledge of long-term involvement in Afghanistan flies in the face of popular sentiment in the United States, the European countries and Australia, where there is overwhelming opposition to continuing the occupation of Afghanistan and a war that has dragged on for eleven years.

Neither of the envoys who negotiated the agreement, US ambassador Ryan C. Crocker and Afghan national security adviser Rangin Spanta, would release its text, or even outline its main features, ostensibly to give time for their respective governments to review and approve the drafts.

The deal will become final when signed by US President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. It will not be submitted for Senate ratification, making the agreement’s longterm effect contingent on Obama’s reelection in November. In effect, it is a promissory note from Obama to Karzai to keep funding the regime in Kabul, assuming Obama remains in the White House and Karzai survives the pullout of most US and NATO ground troops.

The New York Times cited unnamed “Western diplomats in Kabul” who said the agreement was important “because it would help persuade other Western countries to continue to support Afghanistan.” The talks have been conducted under the deadline of a May 20-21 NATO summit in Chicago, where Obama is expected to pressure his European counterparts to make pledges of money to offset the anticipated drawdown of their military forces in the Central Asian country.

The US is also pushing for commitments of elite special forces to conduct “counterterrorism” operations after 2014, after its biggest non-NATO ally in Afghanistan, the Australian government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, enlisted Australian SAS troops for such a mission.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the US has begun discussions on the deployment of special ops forces from other NATO countries, and has proposed to cut the size of the Afghan security forces in order to free up funds to conduct counterterrorism missions. Prior to a meeting of NATO foreign and defense ministers in Brussels April 18, US defense secretary Leon Panetta met with Australian defense minister Stephen Smith.

The Journal noted Gillard’s declaration that Australia would pull out most ground troops but “was prepared to consider a limited special-forces contribution” beyond 2014. According to the newspaper, “That statement was greeted warmly by US officials,” and the Journal cited a “senior US defense official” declaring “Not only is this not a pullout, this is a symbol of commitment.”

What information has been released on the terms of the draft agreement suggests that the deal corresponds precisely to the power relationship between the two sides: the United States makes no definite commitment of either money or manpower after 2014, but Afghanistan commits itself to host and stand guard over whatever forces the US side decides to deploy. The US will have complete freedom of action for at least a decade after 2014, while the Afghan regime operates at its beck and call.

A US official told the Washington Post, “The nature, function and size of the U.S. security commitment still has to be worked out.”

Talks were stalled for months because of a series of atrocities and offenses committed by American troops in Afghanistan, including the burning of Korans at a US base, the massacre near Kandahar by an American staff sergeant in which 17 people were killed, nine of them children, and the release of photos and video of US soldiers desecrating the corpses of Afghan victims of the war.

The American media has repeatedly suggested that Karzai was adopting a hard-line position in the talks, demanding a halt to night raids by US special forces and the handover of all US-run prisons where Afghan citizens captured in the war are being held. In practice, however, Karzai accepted a fig leaf of acknowledgement of Afghan control and sovereignty, while the US occupiers will continue to do as they please.

Some press reports spoke of private assurances, not spelled out in the text, that US financial backing to the Karzai government would be at least $2 billion a year, enough to sustain capital flight from the country. Nearly half of Afghanistan’s annual income has been exported in the form of cash, taken out by government officials and those profiteering from the war—frequently their relatives—and invested in safer venues such as banks and real estate in the Persian Gulf sheikdoms.

An Associated Press account made clear what was uppermost in Karzai’s mind, reporting that he complained last week in a speech in Kabul, “They are providing us with money, there is no doubt about that. But they say they will not mention the amount in the agreement. We say: give us less, but mention it in the agreement. Give us less, but write it down.”

Perhaps the most critical issue has been postponed for later discussion: the US demand for long-term leases on military bases which will give American air and special ops units more or less permanent access to the oil-rich Central Asian region, maintaining the deployment of American military forces on all sides of beleaguered Iran: on the east, in Afghanistan, on the north in several of the former Soviet republics, on the west in Turkey, Iraq, Kuwait and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms, and in the south, in the Arabian Sea.

The draft agreement was also said to be aimed at warning the Taliban and other anti-occupation guerrilla forces that the US and NATO were not pulling out abruptly in 2014, but intended to “stay the course” in propping up the Karzai regime.

A statement issued by the Taliban noted that the number one goal of the agreement was “securing routes to the Central Asian and Caspian oil fields,” as well as “establishing an army hostile to Islam that protects Western interests.”

Introduction

The mounting threat of a US-Israeli military attack against Iran is based on several factors including: (1) the recent military history of both countries in the region, (2) public pronouncements by US and Israeli political leaders, (3) recent and on-going attacks on Lebanon and Syria, prominent allies of Iran, (4) armed attacks and assassinations of Iranian scientists and security officials by proxy and/or terrorist groups under US or Mossad control, (5) the failure of economic sanctions and diplomatic coercion, (6) escalating hysteria and extreme demands for Iran to end legal, civilian use-related uranium enrichment, (7) provocative military ‘exercises’ on Iran’s borders and war games designed for intimidation and a dress rehearsal for a preemptive attack, (8) powerful pro-war pressure groups in both Washington and Tel Aviv including the major Israeli political parties and the powerful AIPAC in the US, (9) and lastly the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (Obama’s Orwellian Emergency Decree, March 16, 2012).

The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: (1) the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. This message is directed at Iran and coincides with Israeli announcements of war preparations. (2) The second track targets the ‘liberal public’ with a handful of marginal ‘knowledgeable academics’ (or State Department progressives) playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers in Tel Aviv and Washington are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or any capacity to produce them now or in the near future. The purpose of this liberal backpedaling is to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations, and to derail the burgeoning anti-war movement.

Needless to say the pronouncements of the ‘rational’ warmongers use a ‘double discourse’ based on the facile dismissal of all the historical and empirical evidence to the contrary. When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations – they intend to go to war – just as they did against Iraq in 2003. Under present international political and military conditions an attack on Iran, initially by Israel with US support, is extremely likely, even as world economic conditions should dictate otherwise and even as the negative strategic consequences will most likely reverberate throughout the world for decades to come.

US and Israeli Military Calculations on Iran’s Capability

American and Israeli strategic policy makers do not agree on the consequences of Iran’s retaliation against an attack. For their part, the Israeli leaders minimize Iran’s military capacity to attack and damage the Jewish state, which is their only consideration. They count on their distance, their anti-missile shield and protection from US air and naval forces in the Gulf to cover their sneak attack. On the other hand, US military strategists know the Iranians are capable of inflicting substantial casualties on US warships, which would have to attack Iranian coastal installations in order to support or protect the Israelis.

Israel intelligence is best known for its capacity to organize the assassination of individuals around the world: Mossad has organized successful overseas terrorists acts against Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese leaders. On the other hand Israeli intelligence has a very poor track record with regard to its estimates of major military and political undertakings. They seriously underestimated the popular support, military strength and organizational capacity of Hezbollah during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Likewise, Israel intelligence misunderstood the strength and capacity of the Egyptian popular democratic movement as it rose up and overthrew Tel Aviv’s strategic regional ally, the Mubarak dictatorship. While Israeli leaders ‘feign paranoia’ – tossing clichés about ‘existential threats’– they are blinded by their narcissistic arrogance and racism, repeatedly underestimating the technical expertise and political sophistication of their Arab and regional Islamic foes. This is undoubtedly true in their facile dismissal of Iran’s capacity to retaliate against a planned Israeli air assault.

The US government has now overtly committed itself to supporting an Israeli assault on Iran when it is launched. More specifically, Washington claims it will come to Israel’s defense ‘unconditionally’ if it is “attacked”. How can Israel avoid being ‘attacked’ when its planes are raining bombs and missiles on Iranian installations, military defenses and support systems, not to mention Iranian cities, ports and strategic infrastructure? Moreover, given the Pentagon’s collaboration and coordinated intelligence systems with the Israel Defense Forces, its role in identifying targets, routes and incoming missiles, as well as integrated weapons and ordinance supply chains will be critical to an IDF attack. There is no way that the US can dissociate itself from the Jewish State’s war on Iran, once the attack has begun.

The Myths of ‘Limited War’: Geography

Washington and Tel Aviv claim and appear to believe that their planned assault on Iran will be a “limited war”, targeting limited objectives and lasting a few days or weeks – with no serious consequences.

We are told Israel’s brilliant generals have identified all the critical nuclear research facilities, which their surgical air strikes will eliminate without horrific collateral damage to the surrounding population. Once the alleged ‘nuclear weapons’ program is destroyed, all Israelis can resume their lives in full security knowing that another ‘existential’ threat has been eliminated. The Israeli notion of a war, limited in ‘time and space’, is absurd and dangerous – and underlines the arrogance, stupidity and racism of its authors.

To approach Iran’s nuclear facilities Israeli and US forces will confront well-equipped and defended bases, missile installations, maritime defenses and large-scale fortifications directed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Armed Forces. Moreover, the defense systems protecting the nuclear facilities are linked by civilian highways, airfields, ports, and backed by a dual purpose (civilian-military) infrastructure, which includes oil refineries and a huge network of administrative offices. To ‘knock out’ the alleged nuclear sites will require expanding the geographic scope of the war. The scientific-technological capacity of the Iranian civilian nuclear program involves a wide swath of its research facilities, including universities, laboratories, manufacturing sites, and design centers. To destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear program would require Israel (and thus the US) to attack much more than research facilities or laboratories hidden under a remote mountain. It would require multiple, widespread assaults on targets throughout the country, in other words, a generalized war.

Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that Iran will retaliate with a war of equivalence. Iran will match the breadth and scope of any attack with a corresponding counter-attack: ‘We will attack them at the same level as they attack us’. That means Iran will not confine its retaliation to merely trying to shoot down US and Israeli bombers in its airspace or launch missiles at offshore US warships in its waters but will take the war to equivalent targets in Israel and in US-occupied countries in and around the Gulf. Israel’s ‘limited war’ will become a generalized war extending throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Israel’s current delusional fetish about its elaborate missile defense system will be exposed as hundreds of high-powered missiles are launched from Teheran, Southern Lebanon and just beyond the Golan Heights.

The Myth of Limited War: Time Frame

Israeli military experts confidently expect to polish off their Iranian targets in a few days – some might think a mere weekend – and perhaps without the loss of even a single pilot. They expect the Jewish state will celebrate its brilliant victory in the streets of Tel Aviv and Washington. They are deluded by their own sense of superiority. Iran did not fight a brutal, decade-long war against the US-supplied Iraqi invaders and its western/Israeli military advisers, to just turn over and passively submit to a limited number of air and missile attacks by Israel. Iran is a young, educated mobilized society, which can draw on millions of reservists from across the political, ethnic, gender, religious spectrum, galvanized in support of their nation under attack. In a war to defend the homeland all internal differences disappear to confront the unprovoked Israeli-US attack threatening their entire civilization – its 5000-year culture and traditions, as well as its modern scientific advances and institutions. The first wave of US-Israeli attacks will lead to ferocious retaliation, which will not be confined to the original areas of conflict, nor will any such act of Israeli aggression end when and if Iran’s nuclear research facilities are destroyed and some of its scientists, technicians and skilled workers are killed. The war will continue in time and extend geographically.

Multiple Points of Conflict

Just as any US-Israeli attack on Iran will involve multiple targets, the Iranian military will also have a plethora of easily accessible strategic targets. Though it is difficult to predict exactly where and how Iran will retaliate, one thing is clear: The initial US-Israeli strike will not go unanswered.

Given Israeli-US supremacy in long and medium range sea and air power, Iran will probably rely on short-range objectives. These would include the highly valued US military facilities and supply routes in adjoining terrain (Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan) and Israeli targets with missiles launched from Southern Lebanon and possibly Syria. If a few Iranian long-range missiles escape the Jewish State’s much vaunted ‘anti-missile dome’, Israeli population centers may pay a heavy price for their leaders’ recklessness and arrogance.

The Iranian counter-strike will lead to an escalation by US-Israeli forces, extending and deepening their air and sea war to the entire Iranian national security system – military bases, ports, communication systems, command posts and government administrative centers – many in densely populated cities. Iran will counter by launching its greatest strategic asset: a coordinated ground attack involving the Revolutionary Guards together with their allies among the Iraqi Shia troops, against US forces in Iraq. It will coordinate attacks against US facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the growing nationalist-Islamic armed resistance.

The initial conflict, centered on so-called military objectives (scientific research facilities), will spread rapidly to economic targets, or what US and Israeli military strategists refer to as “dual civilian-military” targets. This would include oil fields, highways, factories, communications networks, television stations, water treatment facilities, reservoirs, power stations and administrative offices, such as the Defense Ministry and headquarters of the Republican Guard. Iran, faced with imminent destruction of its entire economy and infrastructure (which occurred in neighboring Iraq with the unprovoked US invasion of 2003), would retaliate by blocking the Straits of Hormuz and sending short range missiles in the direction of the principle oil fields and refineries of the Gulf States including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a mere 10 minute distance, crippling the flow of oil to Europe, Asia and the United States and plunging the world economy into deep depression.

It should not be forgotten that the Iranians are probably more aware than anyone in the region of the total devastation suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion, which plunged that nation into total chaos and devastated its advanced infrastructure and civilian administrative apparatus, not to mention the systematic obliteration of its highly educated scientific and technical elite. The waves of Mossad-sponsored assassinations of Iranian scientists, academics and engineers are just a foretaste of what the Israelis have in mind for Iran’s outstanding scientists, intellectuals and highly skilled technical workers. Iranians should have no illusions about the Americans and Israelis who seek to thrust Iran into the brutal dark ages of Afghanistan and Iraq. They will have no more role in a devastated Iran than their counterparts had in post-Saddam Iraq.

According to US General Mathis, who commands all US forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, ‘an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for the United States there’ (NY Times, 3/19/12). General Mathis “dire cost” estimate only takes account of the US military losses, likely several hundred sailors on warships within missile distance of Iranian gunners.

However the most delusional and self-serving assessment of the outcome and consequences of an Israeli air attack on Iran, emanates from top Israeli leaders, academics and intelligence experts, who claim superior intelligence, superior defenses and supreme (if also racist) insight into the ‘Iranian mind’. Typical is Israeli Defense Minister Barak who boasts that any Iranian retaliation will at worst inflict minimal casualties on the Israeli population.

The ‘Judeo-centric’ view of re-ordering the balance of power in the region, which is prevalent in leading Israeli war circles, overlooks the likelihood that war will not be decided by Israeli air strikes and anti-missile defenses. Iran’s missiles cannot be easily contained, especially if they arrive several hundred a minute from three directions, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and possibly from Iranian submarines. Secondly, the collapse of its oil imports will devastate Israel’s highly energy dependent economy. Thirdly, Israel’s principle allies, especially the US and the EU, will be severely strained as they are dragged into Israel’s war and find themselves defending the straits of Hormuz, their army garrisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their oil fields and military bases in the Gulf. Such a conflict could ignite the Shia majorities in Bahrain and in the strategic oil-rich provinces of Saudi Arabia. The generalized war will have a devastating effect on the price of oil and the world economy. It will provoke the fury of consumers and workers rage everywhere as factories close and powerful shocks throughout the fragile financial system result in a world depression.

Israel’s pathological ‘superiority complex’ results in its racist leaders consistently overestimating their own intellectual, technical and military capabilities, while underestimating the knowledge, capacity and courage of their regional, Islamic (in this case Iranian) adversaries. They ignore Iran’s proven capacity to sustain a prolonged, complex multi-front defensive war and to recover from an initial assault and develop appropriate modern weaponry to inflict severe damage on its attackers. And Iran will have the unconditional and active support of the world’s Muslim population, and perhaps the diplomatic backing of Russia and China, who will obviously view an attack on Iran as another dress rehearsal to contain their growing power.

Conclusion

War, especially an Israeli-US war against Iran is indissolubly linked to the asymmetrical US-Israeli relationship, which sidelines and censors any critical US military and political analysis. Because Israel’s Zionist power configuration in the US can now harness US military power in support of Israel’s drive for regional dominance, Israeli leaders and most of their military feel free to engage in the most outrageous military and destructive adventures, knowing full well that in the first and last instance they can rely on the US to support them with American blood and treasure. But after all of this grotesque servitude to a racist ,isolated country, who will rescue the United States? Who will prevent the sinking of its ships in the Gulf and the death and maiming of hundreds of its sailors and thousands of its soldiers? And where will the Israelis and US Zionists be when Iraq is overrun by elite Iranian troops and their Iraqi Shia allies and a generalized uprising occurs in Afghanistan?

The self-centered Israeli policy-makers overlook the likely collapse of the world oil supply as a result of their planned war against Iran. Do their Zionist agents in the US realize that as a result of dragging the US into Israel’s war, that the Iranian nation will be forced to set the Persian Gulf oilfields ablaze?

How cheap has it become to ‘buy a war’ in the US? For a mere few million dollars in campaign contributions to corrupt politicians, and through the deliberate penetration of Israel-First agents, academics and politicians into the war-making machinery of the US government, and through the moral cowardice and self-censorship of leading critics, writers and journalists who refuse to name Israel and its agents as the key decision makers in our country’s Mid East policy, we head directly toward a war far beyond any regional military conflagration and toward the collapse of the world economy and the brutal impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people North and South, East and West.

By James Petras

7 April 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals.

Plans to move entire communities and put them in townships would deprive them of their livelihood and land rights

Beer-Sheva, Israel – “It is not every day that a government decides to relocate almost half a per cent of its population in a programme of forced urbanisation,” Rawia Aburabia asserted, adding that “this is precisely what Prawer wants to do”.

The meeting, which was attempting to coordinate various actions against the Prawer Plan, had just ended, and Rawia, an outspoken Bedouin leader who works for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was clearly upset. She realised that the possibility of changing the course of events was extremely unlikely and that, at the end of the day, the government would uproot 30,000 Negev Bedouin and put them in townships. This would result in an end to their rural way of life and would ultimately deprive them of their livelihood and land rights.

Rawia’s wrath was directed at Ehud Prawer, the Director of the Planning Policy Division in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s office. Prawer took on this role after serving as the deputy director of Israel’s National Security Council. His mandate is to implement the decisions of the Goldberg Committee for the Arrangement of Arab Settlement in the Negev, by offering a “concrete solution” to the problem of the 45 unrecognised Bedouin villages in the region.

An estimated 70,000 people are currently living in these villages, which are prohibited by law from connecting any of their houses to electricity grids, running water or sewage systems. Construction regulations are also harshly enforced and in this past year alone, about 1,000 Bedouin homes and animal pens – usually referred to by the government simple as “structures” – were demolished. There are no paved roads in these villages and it is illegal to place signposts near the highways designating the village’s location. Opening a map will not help either, since none of these villages are marked. Geographically, at least, these citizens of Israel do not exist.

History

The State’s relationship with the Bedouin has been thorny from the beginning. Before the establishment of the state of Israel, about 70,000 Bedouin lived in the Negev. Following the 1948 war, however, only 12,000 or so remained, while the rest fled or were expelled to Jordan and Egypt.

Under the directives of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, many of the remaining Bedouin were uprooted from the lands they had inhabited for generations and were concentrated in the mostly barren area in the north-eastern part of the Negev known as the Siyag (enclosure) zone. This area comprises one million dunams [one dunam = 1,000m 2 ], or slightly less than ten per cent of the Negev’s territory. Through this process of forced relocation, the Negev’s most arable lands were cleared of Arab residents and were given to new kibbutzim and moshavim , Jewish agriculture communities, which took full advantage of the fertile soil.

After their relocation and up until 1966, the Bedouin citizens of Israel were subjected to a harsh military rule; their movement was restricted and they were denied basic political, social and economic rights. But even in the post-military rule of the late 1960s, many Israeli decision makers still considered the Bedouin living within the Siyag threatening and occupying too much land, so, despite the relocation that had been carried out in the 1950s, the state decided to find a better solution to the “Bedouin problem”.

The plan was to concentrate the Bedouin population within semi-urban spaces that would ultimately comprise only a minute percentage of their original tribal lands. Over the course of several years, government officials met with Bedouin sheikhs and reached agreements with many of them. In a gradual process, spanning about 20 years, seven towns were created – Tel-Sheva, Rahat, Segev Shalom, Kusaife, Lqya, Hura and Ar’ara.

In some cases, Bedouin were already living where the town was built, but the large majority of the Bedouin were relocated once again and moved into these Bedouin-only towns. Some did it of their own volition, while others were forced. The price that most families had to pay for their own displacement was hefty: renouncing the right to large portions of their land and giving up their rural way of life.

For many years following the establishment of each town, the Bedouin residents were not allowed to hold democratic elections and their municipalities were run by Jewish officials from the Ministry of Interior. The towns also rapidly turned into over-crowded townships, with dilapidated infrastructure and hardly any employment opportunities. Currently, all seven townships, which are home to about 135,000 people, are ranked one on the Israeli socio-economic scale of one (lowest) to ten (highest), and are characterised by a high unemployment, high birth rates and third-rate education institutions.

After years of indecision, the government appointed Prawer to try, yet again, to solve the “Bedouin problem” once and for all. His mandate is to relocate the Bedouin who had been unwilling to sign over their property rights and remained in unrecognised villages. The government’s justification for not recognising these villages is that they are relatively small (ranging from a couple of hundred to several thousand people) and are scattered across a large area, all of which makes it difficult, in the government’s view, to provide them with satisfactory infrastructure. In the name of modernism, then, the government wants to concentrate the Bedouin in a small number of towns.

Wadi al Na’am

After meeting Rawia, I drove to Wadi al Na’am, an unrecognised Bedouin village located about 20 minutes south of my house in Beer-Sheva. I wanted to ask some of the people there what they think of Prawer’s Plan.

Along the highway, I passed literally hundreds of Bedouin dwellings made from tin panels, scrap wood and canvas. Chicken, sheep, goats and donkeys adorned the terraces. I was again struck by Bedouin wheat pastures because they are not irrigated, and the height of the stalk depends on the amount of rain that falls during a given year; it is easy to identify a Bedouin pasture because the stalk is miniscule when compared with “Jewish” wheat, which receives plenty of water.

Although I had been to Wadi al Na’am a few times before, I suddenly felt unsure about where I was supposed to turn off the highway and called Ibrahim Abu Afash to ask for directions. “Don’t you remember,” he said, “at the road sign pointing towards the electricity plant take a left and I will wait for you on top of the hill.”

I followed Ibrahim’s Subaru on dirt roads for about ten minutes until we reached his shieg , a large tent towering over a concrete floor covered with rugs, a row of mattresses and pillows scattered along the perimeter. In the middle of the tent, there was a hole in the concrete, with an iron pot of tea simmering over burning coals. Ibrahim sat on a mattress next to his brother Labad and right behind them were a few young men smoking Israeli cigarettes and drinking tea.

Ibrahim is the sheikh of Wadi al Na’am. When he was young he served as a scout for the Israeli military, which may explain why his Hebrew is better than mine. After a few niceties, he cut to the point.

“I met Prawer and he is a good man,” he said, and then added that “often good men, do bad things.”

“The fact that Wadi al Na’am, like many other unrecognised villages, is located right under electricity grids and next to central water pipes and that we were never allowed to connect our homes to these basic services is no doubt a criminal act of discrimination.”

“You know,” he continued, “in the past two decades, several dozen single-family Jewish farms have been established throughout the Negev and more recently, ten new Jewish satellite settlements have been approved and will be constructed on Bedouin land near the Jewish town Arad. Incidentally, at least two unrecognised Bedouin villages, al-Tir and neighbouring Umm al-Hiran, are due to be emptied of their combined 1,000 residents to make way for these new Jewish communities.”

Ibrahim did not mention that in the northern Negev there are already 100 Jewish settlements scattered about, each one home to an average 300 people, but he nonetheless managed to underscore that Prawer’s scheme is biased at its very core. And even though he never came out and said that the true motivation behind the plan is the desire to Judaise the land, it is obvious that this is indeed the objective. There is no other feasible explanation for why the state does not relent and legalise the unrecognised villages.

The Bedouin as a threat

As he was formulating the plan, Ehud Prawer met many Bedouin in order to understand the complex issues involved in trying to provide a solution to the unrecognised villages. Years of service within Israel’s security establishment have led him, however, to relate to Bedouin less as individual bearers of rights and more as a national risk that needs to be contained.

Working closely with Prawer are a few people who, like him, were for many years part of one of Israel’s security arms. His right hand man, Doron Almog, is a retired military general, while Yehuda Bachar, chairman of the Directorate for the Coordination of Government and Bedouin Activities in the Negev, was a senior officer in Israel’s police force. Not coincidentally, before submitting the plan to the government, Prawer asked Yaakov Amidror, the Director of the National Security Council, to provide his stamp of approval.

The fact that the life experiences of almost all of the people responsible for providing a solution for the unrecognised Bedouin orbited around issues of security is not a minor matter, since for them the Bedouin are first and foremost an internal threat. The “Bedouin problem”, accordingly, has little to do with rights and much more to do with managing risks.

Algorithm of expropriation

Ironically, the plan Prawer drafted and the proposed law based on the plan do not really address the problems of these villages.

“If the state is so adamant about not recognising the villages in their existing locations, I would have at least expected Prawer to state clearly that the government will build a specific number of villages and towns for the Bedouin, to specify exactly where they will be located, and to promise that they will be planned so as to take into account the Bedouin’s rural form of life,” Hia Noach, the Director of the Negev Co-existence Forum, explained in an interview.

“Instead, the plan, which will soon become law, focuses on creating an algorithm for dividing private property among the Bedouin, while discussing in a few ambiguous sentences the actual solution for the unrecognised villages. Isn’t it mysterious that the plan dealing with the relocation of the Bedouin does not include a map indicating where the Bedouin will be moved to?”

Prawer’s algorithm is an extremely complex mechanism of expropriation informed by the basic assumption that the Bedouin have no land rights. He is aware that, in the 1970s, as Israel was relocating Bedouin to townships, about 3,200 Bedouin filed petitions to the Justice Ministry, claiming rights over property that had belonged to their family for generations.

All in all, they petitioned for a million and a half dunams, of which 971,000 were claims regarding property belonging to individuals, and the remaining half a million dunams were land that had been used by communities for pasture. Over the years, the Ministry of Justice has denied claims relating to two thirds of the land, which means that, currently, property claims amounting to about 550,000 dunams, or four per cent of the Negev’s land, are still waiting to be settled.

Prawer’s plan aims to settle all the remaining petitions in one fell swoop. Ironically, though, his underlying assumption is that all such claims are all spurious. At the very end of the government decision approving the Prawer Plan (Decision 3707, September 11, 2011), one reads:

“The state’s basic assumption over the years … is that at the very least the vast majority of the claimants do not have a recognised right according to Israeli property laws to the lands for which they have sued … By way of conclusion, neither the government decision nor the proposed law that will be brought forth in its aftermath recognise the legality of the property claims, but rather the opposite – a solution that its whole essence is ex gratia and is based on the assumption of the absence of property rights.”

The strategy is clear: Take everything away, forcing the Bedouin to be grateful for any morsel given back. And this, indeed, is how Prawer’s algorithm of expropriation works.

First, only land that is disputed (meaning land that families filed suit for 35 years ago) and that a family has lived on and used consecutively (as opposed to pasture areas that have been collective) will be compensated with land, but at a ratio of 50 per cent. So if a person has 100 dunams, lived on this land and planted wheat on it for the past three-and-a-half decades, this person will be given 50 dunams of agricultural land. Most of this newly “recognised land” will not be located on the ancestral lands, but at a location wherever the state decides.

Second, cash compensation for land that had been petitioned for, but held by the state and therefore not used by Bedouin will be uniform, regardless of the location of the land and whether or not it is fertile, remote or attractive.

Third, the rate of compensation will be about 5,000 shekels ($1,300) per dunam, a meagre sum considering that half a dunam in a township such as Rahat costs about 150,000 shekels ($40,300). The cost of a plot is important, since the families will have to buy plots in the towns. If a Bedouin landowner has five or six offspring, by the time he buys plots for the family, he will be left with little, if any, land for agricultural use. Finally, Bedouin who filed land claims and do not settle with the state within five years will lose all ownership rights.

To where?

Hia Noach estimates that of the existing 550,000 dunams of unsettled land claims, about 100,000, which is less than one per cent of the Negev’s land, will stay in Bedouin hands after the Prawer Plan is implemented. But this, she emphasises, is only part of the problem. Another central issue has to do with the actual relocation. Where will the Bedouin be moved to and to what kind of settlement? These are precisely the questions Ehud Prawer is yet to answer.

One detail that has become public knowledge is that the unrecognised Bedouin will be relocated east of route 40, which is the Negev’s more arid region situated close to the southern tip of the occupied West Bank. While this part of Prawer’s plan is reminiscent of Ben Gurion’s strategy of concentrating the Bedouin within certain parameters in order to vacate land for Jews, it may be the case that there is something more sinister at hand. If there are ever one for one land swaps with the Palestinians in the West Bank, what could be more convenient for the Jewish state than handing over some parched Negev land with a lot of Bedouin on it?

Regardless of what the Bedouin think about this scheme, the government is going ahead with the plan and has decided to allocate about $2bn for relocating 70,000 Bedouin. Incidentally, this is more or less the same sum that was allocated for relocating the 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The government has also stated that about $300m will be allotted to the existing townships, indicating that at least some of the Bedouin will be moved to these dilapidated municipalities.

It is unclear how people accustomed to living off agriculture and raising sheep will make ends meet once they are forcefully relocated. This is not merely a theoretical concern, considering that the majority of Bedouin who moved to the first seven towns never succeeded in socialising to more urban life. There are talks that three more towns will be created, but if history is any indication, it is unlikely that these will be any better suited for the Bedouin’s rural form of life.

Before leaving Wadi al Na’am, I asked Ibrahim what he thinks will happen if they do not reach an agreement with the government. He paused for a moment and then replied that he does not want to think about such an option, adding that “they will not put us on buses and move us, they will simply shut down the schools and wait. When we see we cannot send our children to school we will ‘willingly’ move”.

This is how forced relocation becomes voluntary and how Israel will likely represent it to the world.

This article first appeared in Al Jazeera. A shorter version of the article also appeared in the London Review of Books.

By Neve Gordon

3 April 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation . He can be reached through his website .