Shimon Peres tries to preserve the "imbalance of power"

In a meeting between Israeli President Shimon Peres and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at the latter's Black Sea summer house yesterday, Peres urged his counterpart to cancel an arms deal between Russia and Iran that would upset the "delicate balance" of power in the Middle East.

"Peres brought up an agreement which had been signed between Russia and Iran on the sale of several S-300 anti-aircraft systems. Peres asked that the Russian government not carry out the deal, saying that it would violate the 'delicate balance' of power in the entire region," Haaretz reported on Wednesday.

The deal between Russia and Iran involves the sale of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles. While Iran might legitimately claim to need those missiles to ward off an impending Israeli Airforce onslaught, Israel avoids its own threatening stance toward Iran and says Iran wants to funnel the missiles to Hezbollah for deployment on Israel's northern border with Lebanon.

Iran's relationship with Hezbollah is well documented, but Peres is wrong to insist that Iran's motive for acquiring the missiles is to supply its proxies on Israel's borders. With all of the rhetoric coming out of Israel about an imminent strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran cannot be painted as a lunatic schemer for seeking to build up its missile shield. Peres made sure to cite President Ahmadinejad's call to "eliminate the State of Israel" in his conversation with Medvedev -- the Israeli mantra in these sorts of conversations -- but if anything is imbalanced in the Iran-Israel conflict it's the extent of verbal provocation between the two countries. Israeli anti-Iran invective is published daily all over the world; sometimes it seems like the core of Israeli foreign policy, allowing them to avoid discussions about West Bank settlement expansion, East Jerusalem evictions, and the three-year Gaza blockade.

Speaking of balances, what "delicate balance in the Middle East" is Peres talking about? There is no balance of power between Israel and its neighbors. No Middle East state can challenge Israeli supremacy over the skies. No Middle East state can challenge Israel's alliances with the United States and Europe. Israel will remain the region's largest nuclear threat even if Iran does acquire a bomb. Even if Hezbollah were to acquire some of those anti-aircraft missiles, no real disruption of the current imbalance of power would occur. No rough beast would come slouching toward Tel Aviv.

With regard to the specter of Hezbollah, perhaps they are also concerned about defending their skies. We all remember 2006. They're still cleaning up the cluster munitions from the IAFs bombing runs, and they'll be cleaning them up for decades to come.

"I was Superman."

I came across Superman on my way back to the hostel at about 2 in the morning, in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul. Superman was crouched behind his shoeshine kit, next to a table full of drinkers at one of the dozens of chic cafés off Istiklal St. I was wearing flip flops, but that didn't stop him from looking up at me with pleading eyes, gesturing for me to let him do his work. The contrast between the downtrodden, anachronistic man—whose name was Zia—and the bustling nightlife around him caused me to stop in my tracks. I sat down next to Zia. I wanted to take his picture, but I wanted to make him comfortable about it first. Plus, it was dark, and I would need him to sit very still for me, so I figured I had better gain his trust.

Zia's face lit up when I sat down. He pulled a tattered Fuji Film envelope out of the breast pocket of his sportcoat and starting flipping through it. Turns out Zia was an actor. He showed me photos of himself costumed as a mobster, a rebel, a knight, and, his favorite, as Superman, chest out, chin up, fists on his hips.

Zia said he was 45 yrs. old and that he'd been homeless for three years. I couldn't get much more out of him, other than that he clearly misses his acting days. That much was clear by the way the tears welled up in his eyes when he looked at himself in the photos, then up at me, then back at the photos, then at me again with a look that asked a question: "How did this happen?"

Soldier electrocuted in Iraq by KBR-installed water pump

Contractors employed by Kellogg, Brown & Root -- under the umbrella of supercontractor Halliburton--are paid upwards of $100,000 annually to install and maintain equipment on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. But such a generous sum doesn't compel all of those contractors to pay attention to their work, to pay "attention to detail," in military parlance. An article in the NY Times today reminds us of one deadly failure on the part of KBR contractors to work meticulously and ensure quality control -- the article describes the death of Special Forces Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, who was electrocuted in 2008 while taking a shower. The water pump feeding into his shower container was not properly grounded, a careless oversight that KBR refuses -- as the article shows -- to assume responsibility for.

I am not surprised. When I was in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, I was jolted daily by my own door handle every time I returned from the shower. The generator next to my living container -- big enough to power an entire apartment building -- was not properly grounded, and my wet feet provided the perfect conduit between the electrically charged dirt beneath my feet and the metal doorhandle. Lucky for me, the jolt was just enough to seize up my muscles, make me clench my jaw. After awhile it became a joke between my roommate and me. We'd call our friends over as they ambled back to their containers from the shower, then we'd trick them into grabbing the doorhandle. It was hilarious. It could have been deadly. When we finally got a KBR contractor to bring his Turkish crew over to investigate the problem, he told us as much. "You guys are lucky," he said, "this much current could fry you."

It took us more than weeks to get the KBR contractor to fix our generator, despite constant harassment and the obvious danger posed by the situation.

In the aftermath of an investigatory commission's findings on the Maseth accident, a KBR spokeswoman has issued a statement denying any responsibility on KBR's part. "The military never directed KBR to repair, upgrade or improve the grounding system in the building in which Maseth resided," wrote KBR's Heather Browne, "nor was KBR directed to perform any preventative maintenance at this facility." The amount of money raked in by KBR and other Halliburton contractors during the Iraq war is legend, not to mention obscene. One would expect any contractor paid such a gross fee to offer all necessary follow-up services -- even if those also implied a fee. But, as Ms. Browne's comments reveal, KBR is more than happy to blame the US military for its own shortcomings. It's as if she were to say, "It's the military's fault that they didn't have enough generator expertise to know to tell us that we needed to come and do preventative maintenance." How about a little follow-up on your services, KBR? And why didn't you ground it right the first time?

No accountability is a popular escape mechanism for contractors and politicians alike these days. Who will call these people to account?

Istanbul 1

Bread vendor, Sultanahmet, Istanbul



View from Galata Bridge, Istanbul

Karakoi punks, Istanbul

Kid & Soldier in the Old City

The Old City is a tense, bustling place. Ultra-orthodox Jews and Muslims rush past one another in the narrow, tunnel-like streets and arcades on their way to Jerusalem's holiest sites: the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall. But the Old City is also a thriving bazaar, loaded with street vendors and curiosity shops, hawkers and panhandlers. In this photo, an Israeli soldier taking a break from patrolling the Old City haggles with a young Palestinian boy over the price of knock-off sunglasses.

Kid vendor and Israeli soldier, Damscus Gate, Old City, Jerusalem

Iraqi Kurds make their big and totally predicted move

From a NY Times article today :

"With little notice and almost no public debate, Iraq’s Kurdish leaders are pushing ahead with a new constitution for their semiautonomous region, a step that has alarmed Iraqi and American officials who fear that the move poses a new threat to the country’s unity."

Well, it looks like the Kurds are making their big move to secure their hold on Iraq's oil futures — the big bone of contention between the separatist and ethnically isolated Kurds and their Arab neighbors to the south. We always knew it would come at some point. It'll be interesting to see how this new source of formal division in the Iraqi political context plays out alongside the withdrawal of American troops from major population centers and the near-complete turnover of control to the Green Zone government. Ay yay yay.

Traffic Jam — Al Atatra, Gaza Strip

Hope's Coffin: a Gaza Story

Elliott D. Woods

The Virginia Quarterly Review

July 1, 2009

For a generation of young people, the Gaza Strip has become a place where dreams go to die.

Israel did its best to keep me out of the Gaza Strip. Not just me—all international media. For two weeks, we watched from the Egyptian side of Gaza’s southern border as plumes of smoke erupted from around Rafah, and the wounded trickled out, one by one, in battered Palestinian ambulances on their way to intensive care units in Cairo. Finally, in the last week of Operation Cast Lead, something gave, and the Egyptian government unexpectedly opened the gates.

I entered Gaza with a few dozen journalists and aid workers on January 16—the day after my twenty-eighth birthday. An armed drone tracked my taxi, plastered with press insignia, through the wasted streets of Rafah, and the ear-splitting sonic booms of strike fighters rattled the windows. The war was no longer a spectacle on the horizon; I was in the kill zone.

As I moved north from the heavily bombed neighborhoods near the Egyptian border, targeted for their proximity to Gaza’s illegal tunnel network, toward the epicenter of the Israeli offensive in Gaza City, I was haunted by images of Stalingrad, Dresden, Hué City. Weeks of shelling had left the tiny, teeming enclave a moonscape of flattened homes and ravaged fields.

On January 18, Israel called an end to Operation Cast Lead and withdrew. What, if any, tactical or ideological gains Israel had made, however, remains unclear. Ostensibly the offensive was designed to reduce militant rocket fire against southern Israel and to cripple Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—which has governed in the Gaza Strip since 2007. But Hamas retains the capability to launch rockets; its senior cadre remains intact; its smuggling tunnels are still operating; and Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped in 2006, isn’t any closer to freedom—in fact, some Palestinian militants have circulated the rumor that Shalit was injured by the Israeli bombings.

Hamas, for its part, can hardly declare a tactical victory over the Israeli military (Israel lost only thirteen soldiers in the fighting, four to friendly fire), but twenty-two days of air strikes by screaming F-16s and two weeks of ground maneuvers by the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) highly trained riflemen and tankers produced nearly 1,400 martyrs for Hamas to claim. Such casualties have left Hamas stronger than ever as it has sought, in the months since the offensive, to portray Operation Cast Lead as conclusive evidence of the savagery and irrationality of the occupier.

Among young Gazans, raised on a diet of death and disappointment, this message is especially powerful. According to the Ministry of Social Affairs, 437 children under the age of sixteen were among the dead of Operation Cast Lead and nearly 1,900 more were wounded. And those are only the immediate, visible casualties. A joint Japanese and Jordanian team of doctors is treating more than a thousand children for the long-term effects of white phosphorus weapons, and the Gaza Community Mental Health Project estimates that as much as 90 percent of Gaza’s youth suffer from some sort of psychological trauma. For hundreds of thousands of children, Operation Cast Lead proved what their forebears have told them all along—Israel thirsts for Palestinian blood and will stop at nothing to punish the Palestinians for the very fact of their existence.

Continue reading at The Virginia Quarterly Review

Elliott D. Woods traveled to Gaza with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Learn more about this reporting project.

Qalqilya: The Wall

On a settler highway running north-south past the Ariel settlement block, you might never know that you were cutting Palestinian territory in half with your speedy commute. The wall to your right if you're going north, to your left if you're going south, looks like one of the sound barriers you find on I-495 around Washington DC, the kind that keep bedroom communities quiet and serene. But it's not a sound barrier — it's a physical barrier, a separation wall constructed in 2002 to enclose the approximately 40,000 residents of Qalqilya. The wall cuts Qalqilya residents off from their land, from the labor market in Israel many once depended on, and from their families.

In early June, a week after these photos were taken, Qalqilya witnessed a spate of violence that captured the insanity of Israeli-Palestinian blood politics. Israeli authorities made it known to the PA security forces that they wanted several high-priority targets from the Hamas paramilitary wing dead. Who knows what the Israelis promised to the PA in exchange for doing their dirty work. PA forces botched an assault on a Hamas safehouse, getting three officers killed in an attempt to kill their own targets. Two Hamas fighters and the owner of the house also died in the attacks. A string of retributive arrests took place in the West Bank and Gaza over the ensuing days. The violence and the political turmoil that resulted threatened to derail the fragile reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas in Cairo.

In the end, Israel decided to remove its major checkpoint going into Qalqilya from within the West Bank, and also decided to allow yellow-plated cars belonging to Arab Israelis to enter Qalqilya freely (Israeli citizens, Jew and Muslim, are prohibited from entering Palestinian territory almost everywhere else, although it's an odd prohibition, given that 400,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem).

It seems the IDF got what it wanted. And lived up to whatever promises it had made to the PA.

LIFE ALONG THE WALL: QALQILYA, WEST BANK

Sarkozy's funny convo. re: Avigdor Lieberman

Saw this bit about a conversation between French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in a NY Times article today and laughed out loud. I wish more reporting was this humorous. I also wish more reporters had access to fly-on-the-wall stories like this one.

When Mr. Lieberman visited France recently, Mr. Sarkozy declined to meet with him, although he routinely received Ms. Livni, who was foreign minister in the last government.

According to the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Netanyahu that he should remake his government so that he, Ms. Livni and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, could produce historic breakthroughs for Middle East peace. He was reported to have said, “I’ve always received Israeli foreign ministers. I met with Tzipi Livni in the Élysée Palace, but with that one I simply can’t meet. I’m telling you, you need to get rid of that man. Get him out of the government and bring in Livni. With her and with Barak you can make history.”

The paper said Mr. Netanyahu replied: “No need to exaggerate. Lieberman is a very nice person, and in private conversations he speaks differently.”

Mr. Sarkozy was reported to have replied, “In private conversations, Jean-Marie Le Pen is also a nice person.”

Mr. Sarkozy is said to have added of Mr. Lieberman, “Sometimes when I hear what he says I have the urge to pull out my hair.” He placed his hands on his head and grabbed hold of his hair.