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.

Hugo Chavez supports CIA conspiracy theory re: Iranian elections

The French daily Le Monde ended an article today about the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Venezuela with a statement about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's support for the idea that the protests throughout Iran are the result of CIA meddling. The quote from the article is here:

"Mercredi, M. Chavez a réitéré son soutien à la réélection contestée du président Mahmoud Ahmadinejad et accusé la CIA de soutenir les manifestations en Iran."

In English: "Wednesday, Mr. Chavez reiterated his support for the contested reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and accused the CIA of supporting the demonstrations in Iran."

While it doesn't seem outlandish to me to think that the CIA might be thrilled about what's going on in the streets of Iran right now, it does strike me as absurd to assume that any foreign intelligence agency could so successfully mobilize a large and thoroughly modern population to confront authority. How utterly ironic that the man who loves to dress up like Ché Guevara and who buddies up to Fidel Castro would speak out against what is clearly a people's movement in Iran against an autocratic, militaristic and theocratic regime. The irony is compounded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's warnings that any movement against the revolutionary government — which is to say, the governmental system that has ruled Iran since the successful 1979 Islamic revolution — will be met with crushing force.

Herein lies the problem with revolutionary movements and the people who rise to power on their wings — the principle of revolution that enables major social, political, and economic transformation inevitably becomes a threat to the original revolutionaries. Once safely installed in power, former revolutionaries — history shows — are loathe to support the same revolutionary spirit in their subjects, much as they may claim otherwise. Former revolutionaries all too often become strong-fisted autocrats, often bearded, though not always.

But the problem for Iran's current rulers and men like Hugo Chavez is that the concept of "revolution" — while convenient for mobilizing the masses in the short term — will perpetually destabilize subsequent governments if those governments tend toward autocracy, especially when it becomes part of the ideology of a people. A revolutionary people will never tolerate the stagnancy of autocracy for long. The revolution — as the word itself implies — will come full circle.

And perhaps this is why Hugo Chavez, the so-called revolutionary, fears the apparent revolution against the Islamic revolution in Iran. This is perhaps why Hugo Chavez blames the CIA and supports President Ahmadinejad — he knows that the very revolutionary ethos he subscribes to and claims to represent will become a danger to him in the future.

And for all of Mr. Chavez's scathing talk about the Great Gringo, he never mentions the fact that his country is the third largest exporter of crude oil to the United States. Mr. Chavez nationalized the oil industry in Venezuela, and now his central government reaps profits from the U.S. addiction to gasoline. How many of his "revolutionary" socialist redistribution of wealth programs would be possible without oil revenue?

Sadr City bomb does not bode well.

The New York Times reported today that a bomb in a crowded Sadr City market killed at least 60 Iraqis last night. It was, according to the Times, the third bomb in two weeks to cause double-digit casualties in the Shiite areas. The portent of these bombings, as well as recent activity in Falluja — the former hotbed that has been quiet for over a year — is that the American "troop surge" was only successful in as much as it put "cops on every corner." Now that those surge troops are drawing down, and coalition forces are scaling down tactical operations altogether, it is becoming clear that the surge did not rid Iraq of its destabilizing elements — it merely forced them into hiding. They're much less afraid of Iraqi security forces, who share similar equipment and do not benefit from the immense tactical and logistical superiority possessed by the Americans. In the coming weeks, as the Americans begin to pull out of population centers, we will see that the relative calm of the surge years — when there was a cop on every corner — gave us and the Iraqis a false sense of security.

As Alissa Rubin writes, "The bombing on Wednesday occurred just six days before the American forces officially withdraw from Iraqi cities, towns and villages, as required under the Iraqi-American security agreement. In Baghdad, many of the troops have already withdrawn, and whatever preventive effect they had may well be fast evaporating. In their absence, insurgent groups appear to be beginning to test the security system now run almost wholly by Iraqis."

It may be the case that the period of relative calm that resulted from the surge afforded Iraqi security forces the time to hone their skills under their foreign instructors and gain critical real-world training. It may be the case that Iraqi security forces will be able to maintain stability in Iraq even amidst isolated bombings and attacks by destabilizing elements.

Just because "insurgent groups appear to be beginning to test the security system now run almost wholly by Iraqis" doesn't mean that they are capable of causing that security system to fail. But it's going to be a bloody examination. Whether the Iraqi security system passes or fails may not matter politically to those Iraqis who have to suffer through the test.

Tel Aviv by night

Went out in Tel Aviv last weekend just for the night. Stayed up 'til dawn walking the streets, stopping for the occasional beer. Tel Aviv is a very walkable place — there's a long street called Rothschild that has a double-lane bike highway running through the middle, flanked by grass and benches. There are open air kiosk-style restaurants every couple of blocks or so, and people stay out all night. Tel Aviv is a good place to shoot photos — chock full of weird lights, weird buildings, and weird people. It's a good place to be a weirdo.

Tel Aviv is known as a "bubble city." It's a place you can go to escape the tension of Jerusalem. Which is to say, it's a place you can go to escape Israel. Or to escape Palestine, in my case. Tel Aviv's residents give the air of blissful detachment from the hostile, hateful politics and cutthroat geopolitics that make their lives (and my escapist weekends) liveable and colorful. I can't blame them — they're in too deep. Why not enjoy the sea, pretend to anarchist sympathies, crank up to punk rock, and go out for sushi?

Down the street from Tel Aviv is the old Palestinian city of Jaffa, or Yafo in Hebrew. I regret that I wasn't able to photograph Jaffa on this trip. The old citadel juts out into the sea, gleaming under yellow lights in the distance. The storefronts in downtown Jaffa are vaulted arches affixed with cast-iron-latticed windows. It's beautiful, and tragic. Jaffa is still a predominately Arab city, but Jewish Israelis are busy buying up the choicest properties, just like everywhere else.

Tel Aviv was a boondocks when Jaffa was in its prime. Tel Aviv was a Jewish settler outpost when Jaffa was the pearl of the British Empire's holdings in Palestine. Now Tel Aviv is spiked with sky scrapers, filled with bars, bikinis and modern art. There are also drugs, prostitutes, Russian mafiosos. You have to take the good with the bad ...

Jaffa is still sleepy by comparison. It's maintained its tranquil seaside aura amidst all the turbulence and disappointment of the last six decades. Its walls and arches will outlast decades to come, that much is certain.

Japanika: a booming kiosk shushi restaurant on Rothschild St., Tel Aviv


Cool lights on the sidewalk on Rothschild St.


One of Tel Aviv's crumbling anachronisms


Rothschild St.


Poster graffiti, Tel Aviv subterranean




Stencil graffiti in a bar explains the Tel Aviv bubble

Haaretz Daily turns over reporting to Israel's writers and poets

What if Dave Eggers, Don Dellilo, Rita Dove, and Charles Wright were handed the reins of the New York Times for a day? Wouldn't that be cool!

That's exactly what Haartez Daily did for Tuesday's reporting — they replaced their normal reporting staff with Israel's top writers and poets for a day, and they published the results today in the "Writers' Haaretz." I'm not sure the content is noticeably different ... but it was a cool gesture anyway!

Ehud Barak acknowledges reality, begrudgingly

The following quote is from a June 10 Haaretz story about Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak's "conversation between two speeches," i.e. President Obama's speech in Cairo to the Muslim world and Israeli PM Netanyahu's upcoming response:

"Barak spoke Tuesday night to the Council for Peace and Security, in an auditorium full of veterans of the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service and the Mossad - or as one journalist described it, 'generations of defense officials. These people led us from disaster to disaster.'

"Barak told the audience what he certainly managed to tell Netanyahu: It would be a mistake for Israel to be the one preventing Obama from trying to bring a peace agreement to the Middle East. Whether Netanyahu listened to him and was convinced, we will know only on Sunday"

Isn't this a unique and much-needed way of looking honestly at military and intelligence leadership, seeing them as the "people [who lead] us from disaster to disaster" instead of the heros who deliver us from peril and ensure our future security by way of the gun?

There is a well-worn phrase in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories — "Israel is not a nation with an army, but an army with a nation." The Israel Defense Forces, the Mossad, and Shin Bet have fielded Israel's senior political leadership since the founding of the state, not surprising given that all Israeli Jews and Druze are required to serve on active duty (men serve three years, women serve two) and as reservists until middle age. Orthodox can opt out.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak himself comes from the senior ranks of the IDF. He led troops in the first Lebanon War. He rose to the rank of general. Former PM Menachim Begin got his start with an organization called Irgun, a thorn in the side of the British occupation and a terror to Palestinians. PM Yitzhak Rabin — who presided over the Oslo Accords in the 90s before being assassinated by a settler extremist — also fought the British occupation before becoming an IDF general and leading Israel in the Six Day War. Current PM Benjamin Netanyahu — a hard-line and completely anti-conciliatory leader, whose vocal resistance to "agreements" between the Israeli state and the Palestinians is matched only by Hamas' resistance to such agreements — served as an IDF officer in an elite reconnaisance unit. Opposition leader and Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni, who served the last government as Foreign Minister and spearheaded the winter offensive in Gaza, served as a lieutenant in the IDF before going on to a long and successful career with the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. Tzipi Livni is seen as a moderate, perhaps even a leftist. Can you imagine a "moderate spy" rubbing shoulders with former senior military leadership in the U.S. Senate?

Having a separation of military/intelligence leadership and civilian leadership in government may not be as critical as a separation of church and state (a score on which the Israeli government also receives poor marks), but it is nonetheless important that the military and intelligence communities do not dictate domestic and foreign policy. In Israel, it seems as if the military directs all affairs, internal and external, and without regard for a peaceful vision of the future. And why would we expect officers (especially former generals) and top spies to look critically at the long-term effects of their overmilitarized policies? For them, military action — or laying the groundwork and forging the alliances for military action — is the only solution to Israel's complex problems with its neighbors.

We have seen what has happened in the U.S. everytime Congress has gotten too close to the Pentagon. In our time, we have not heeded Republican President and Five Star General (also Supreme Allied Commander during WWII, how's that for a title) Dwight Eisenhower's warning against the "Military-Industrial Complex." In his original speech, he was going to call that beast the Military-Congressional-Industrial Complex. The most recent results of our failure to heed his warning can be seen in Iraq and in the bank accounts of Halliburton — it was the promise of renewable multi-billion dollar no-bid defense contracts, and the complicity of Congress in granting them, that pushed us into the debacle in which we know find ourselves.

While General David Petraeus can be credited with offering realistic suggestions for working our way out of the hole into which we've dug ourselves, some of his predecessors can be faulted with putting us in the hole in the first place. General Tommy Franks, for one, who signed on eagerly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's plan for a short war involving hi-tech Stryker Brigades and small unit tactics that would make a large military presence and a long-term occupation unnecessary (both things were considered doubtful by General Eric Shinseki, who was not among the pre-Iraq "yes men," and who — as Chief of Staff of the Army — warned the Senate Armed Forces Committee in 2002 that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would take several years and over 400,000 troops).

In Israel, the military carries even more political weight than in the U.S. — defense and security are everything to the Israeli state. Generals and intelligence officers have led Israel from "disaster to disaster," and they have led the Jewish people in the land of Palestine from an occupied people with a tenuous claim on the land to an occupying people whose claim on the land remains tenuous sixty years after "independence." Israel has never gained acceptance or stability in the region because of its ferocity toward Palestinian Arabs and its unwillingness to compromise. Zionist ambitions to control Judea and Samaria — a.k.a. the West Bank — preclude sustainable peace, contribute to militancy and extremism among Palestinians, and cause a completely unneccessary environment of fear and hate on all sides of the separation fence(s).

Israelis need to set aside "politics as usual" — which seem to depend almost entirely on the issue of foreign threats and how to deal with them — and ask themselves what they want from the future. They need to be honest with themselves. Do they want a future in which their children can live without fear, without hate? Or do they want a future in which their children will grow up into the same environment of distrust and perpetual threat that Israel has known since its founding? If they want the latter — and I can't see how they would — then they should continue on their current course, though to do so will be to foreshorten the life of the state of Israel, because such a top-heavy, overmilitarized national project will tumble under its own weight. If they want the former, the time is now to take measures and make compromises to pave the path of peace.

Get out of the settlements. Quit strangling the flow of life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories with checkpoints, fences, and incursions — those practices don't make Israel safer; they cause misery and breed hate. Put the military in its place — an important place, but at a safe distance from the civilian planning and decision-making apparatus.

Ehud Barak should be praised for acknowledging that Israel must not stand in the way of the West's efforts to negotiate peace in the region. President Obama said in Cairo that a sustainable peace between Israel and Palestine would benefit the United States, Israel, and Palestine. I think we can add the world at large.

Jerusalem, Old City: Orthodox on Shavuot

Friday, May 29, was a Jewish holiday called Shavuot. I went to the Old City to watch the Orthodox Jews pour in through the Damascus gate on their way to pray at the Western Wall, sometimes jogging — clutching their big fur hats to their heads, strollers rattling across cobblestones — to get to the Wall before sunset. I didn't know until now what the Shavuot holiday signifies. I just Googled it and found out that it marks the day when God handed the Torah over to Moses at Mt. Sinai.

I would have known last Friday, on Shavuot, when I asked four or five Orthodox to explain the significance of Shavuot to me. Each successive person looked at me with a look of disdain or discomfort, or some mixture of both. No one would answer me, or even respond to my "Shalom," and the dozen or so people that I made eye contact with and smiled at looked straight through me, as if I weren't even there. Maybe there's a prohibition against smiling on Shavuot — when the Orthodox observe Sabbath conditions — or maybe they were reluctant to speak to me for fear of embarrassment or because of poor English language skills. Whatever the case, the experience caused me to wonder if the Orthodox behave similarly to more secular Jewish Israelis, or if the silent treatment is reserved for foreigners and Arabs. Do they not condescend to acknowledge my presence because they are God's chosen people, and I am not one of them?

I walked home in the quickly cooling air of early evening. I stopped to take a picture of some Arab kids playing soccer in a park lit by electric lamps. A few of them came up to talk to me. We talked about all sorts of simple things — food, geography, soccer (mentioning Barcelona is a quick way to make friends, even if you, like me, know nothing about soccer), etc. Then I said I had to go, and as I started to walk away, I heard a kid yelling "Cous ukhtek, cous imek." Your sister's pussy, your mother's pussy. Two common insults hurled at me for no reason that I could understand, other than the fact that the kid probably thought it would be funny to make fun of me loudly in a language I couldn't understand. But I did understand, and I made him aware of the fact that I understood. I asked him why he would say such a thing.

Instead of apologizing, he threw a rock at me.

A Palestinian woman sells parsley next to the Damascus Gate as Orthodox Jews pour in on Shavuot


Foot traffic inside the Damascus Gate as Orthodox Jews make their way to the Western Wall


The Orthodox have large families, rivaling the Arab "population bomb" with their reproduction rates.


Orthodox men speculate on what's causing the blockage at the Damascus Gate.




Oranges and apples inside an Israeli soldier's helmet at the Damascus Gate.

Jersusalem, Old City: first impressions

I spent the morning walking around inside the walls of the Old City. It's a maze of cavernous, arched alleys, riddled with street vendors, tourists, and locals of various faiths of the Book making the daily trek to their sites of worship. The vendors seemed tense. Not so quick with jokes or smiles, but not pushy either. In front of a falafel stand, I raised my camera to a blank wall to measure the light. The boy working in the stand yelled, "No photo." I turned and looked at him, wondering what objection he could possibly have to a foreigner aiming his camera at a blank wall. The boy's face registered a small look of surprise when I spoke to him in Arabic. "Why?" I asked. "Aaschen hayq," he responded. Because.

It must get pretty annoying to work in a place that's flooded with tourists who are always snapping up shots of your daily life, which they (and I) can't help but see as exotic, fascinating, quaint. But, the Old City is a tourist area, right? Perhaps a highly spiritualized and politicized tourist area, where you can cut through the tension with a knife, but a tourist trap nonetheless. Tourists take photos — it's what we do. Get over it.

I sat on a wicker stool with a group of old men and ate a falafel under the vaulted arcade that leads up to the Dome of the Rock. I drank a cup of Arabic coffee and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I watched Muslims pass back and forth to the mosque — the second holiest site in Islam — for Friday prayers. Occasionally a Jew would pass by, only to be turned away by an Israeli soldier and armed security guard at the gate. The Dome of the Rock is reserved exclusively for Muslims on Fridays, the Muslim holy day.

I was turned away by the same guards, in fact. And not so pleasantly, either. I approached the steps, and wasn't even going to enter, and a private guard lunged up from his stool. "It's closed! Muslims only today." "Okay," I said. I stood on the step, catching a glimpse of the stunningly intricate blue and gold paintwork on the side of the mosque. "BYE!" the guard shouted at me. Immediately, the soldier chimed in, "bye bye!" He shooed me away with his hand. I stood there, transfixed, on the edge of rage. A vendor had a toy stand inches away from the soldier and guard, so I asked, "I can't stand on the steps?" "No." "What if I want to buy something from this stand?"

They begrudgingly said, "Okay." I told them that they didn't have to be so rude. They stared at me blankly. I should have asked them why they behave that way, why they would be so hostile to a foreign visitor, or anyone for that matter. It wouldn't have done any good. And maybe there's something I don't understand about why they behave that way. Whatever the reason, that type of behavior doesn't put the best face on Israel.

This Friday is a Jewish holiday called Shavuot, so the Old City was packed with orthodox on their way to the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall — the last remnant of the 2nd temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The orthodox have different styles of dress depending on where their families came from in Europe. Men wear big black hats, mostly wide-brimmed variations on the homburg and fedora, usually made of felt or velvet. But a certain group, I'm not sure which, wears giant circular fur hats that I never get tired of staring at. I know it's not nice to stare, but these things are amazing. I'm going back to the Old City this afternoon to try to get some more photos of them.

There is a checkpoint before the entrance to the Wailing Wall area. There is a metal detector and there are armed guards. Something about the presence of armed guards at the entrance to a holy area, a peaceful sanctuary, seems contradictory to me. Call me crazy, but I'm sure it's not what God intended. But where is God in all of this?

Here are some photos from today in the Old City. Look out for more soon.

Orthodox men entering the Old City through the Damascus Gate, on their way to pray at the Wailing Wall

An old man rocks back and forth as he recites the Torah in a tunnel adjacent to the Wailing Wall

Men pray at the Wailing Wall. Tables and plastic chairs are available for those who wish to sit and study Torah.

Israeli soldiers patrol the Arab quarter of the Old City near the Dome of the Rock, Wailing Wall

A woman in traditional Palestinian dress sells fresh mint in the Old City.

Most Palestinians want unity gov't — but what do their leaders want?

I saw this Reuters article this morning and it reminded me of a survey I read about in a recent International Crisis Group report, titled "Gaza's Unfinished Business." The survey in the ICG report showed that 40% of Gazans had no faith in either Fatah or Hamas before the Israeli offensive, and that number has risen to 60% in the months since the offensive. The Bir Zeit survey reported in this article claims that 58% of Palestinians (from a sample of over 6,000 from Gaza + West Bank) want a unity government. They should have it — but their leadership stands in the way.

The fundamental principle of democracy — before you get into variations like representative democ., parliamentary, etc. — is, to put it roughly, "let the people decide, and give the people what they want." The will of the people should supersede political differences; in a parliamentary system, parties debate and oppose one another with the ultimate goal of achieving a political outcome that is satisfactory to as many of the "people" as possible, including underrepresented minorities.

Perhaps I am naïve, but if the will of the people is so clear in Palestine, why doesn't the leadership respect it? Both Fatah and Hamas claim to support democracy. In fact, Hamas often claims to be the only truly democratically elected government in the Middle East; the Islamic movement's supporters cannot get over the ironic rejection of Hamas' victory by the West, so keen to spread democracy, so much less keen to respect its outcomes. I am reminded of Caliban's remark to Prospero in The Tempest:

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is I know how to curse

The sharp-tongued anti-America rhetoric that we hear from Hamas' leadership should not surprise us; we are, in so many ways, Prospero. We have given Hamas the tools to walk and talk like a democracy, and they are using their newly acquired skills to throw mud in our faces. And we should not expect anything different — our support for democracy in Palestine was always half-hearted at best, and never intended to allow for majority representation of Hamas.

But now that Hamas has the mandate in Gaza, and responsibility for 1.5 million people who are currently recovering from a catastrophic invasion, will they continue to curse us, and to curse Israel, without giving their own people what they so desperately want and need, the unity government that will be a critical step toward ending the siege and confronting the expansion of settlements in the West Bank? Will they continue to allow their resentment at being spurned by the Palestinian elite and the West to dictate the path forward? And as for Fatah, will they recognize Hamas as the coequal that they have clearly become? Or will they cling to power in the West Bank through underhanded means and deprive their own supporters of a viable political future?

What is it, really, that both Fatah and Hamas want? Do their priorities represent the people?

Memorial Day

Today is Memorial Day. Today I remember every American who has ever served in the U.S. military, whether by choice or by obligation. I remember with sadness those who have died in uniform, especially those I was lucky enough to know:

Nicholas Mason
KIA 21 DEC 2004, Mosul, Iraq



David Ruhren
KIA 21 DEC 2004, Mosul, Iraq



Jonathan Forde
Died 13 AUG 2007



David Lambert
KIA 26 OCT 2007, Baghdad, Iraq



Derek Banks
KIA 14 NOV 2007, Baghdad, Iraq



Jeremiah McNeal
KIA 6 APR 2008, Baghdad, Iraq

You can read a tribute I wrote to Jeremiah McNeal when I learned of his death about this time last year here. You may also take the time to read a story I wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review about Nick Mason, David Ruhren, and two other veterans of Charlie Co. 276th Engineer Battalion who were close to Nick and David. The VQR story, "A Few Unforeseen Things," includes video footage of interviews with the Mason family and David's mother, Sonja Ruhren. I hoped the videos and the stories could help non-military people think about what it means to serve, to lose, and to return. And I hope these stories can be memorials in their own right.

Gaza: Portraits young and old

I've taken a new interest in portraiture after spending some time with photographer Asim Rafiqui in Gaza last winter. Asim and I were working together on a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. You can see our project page here. We each wanted to do something different than what our fellow journalists were doing in the aftermath of Israel's winter offensive against Hamas—Asim as a photographer, and I as a writer. We were working on more long-term, subjective projects, and we were interested in showing more than destruction and immediate suffering. Not to say that destruction and suffering aren't worthy subjects; rather, we knew that our peers in the foreign media were covering those aspects of Operation Cast Lead's aftermath extensively, and we knew our grant afforded us the opportunity to approach our subjects with a bit more intimacy.

Asim shoots black and white photos with two vintage Leica M7 cameras. He has a masterful eye for light, and he knows how to put his subjects at ease with one or two simple words and gestures. Watching Asim work with his subjects was like a live workshop. The beauty of portrait photography, I learned, is that you can put a little bit of yourself in every portrait, but you never have to put words in anyone's mouth. All you have to do is fill the frame with the humanity inches from your lens, and if you do it right, the picture says it all.

I'm not claiming I do it right yet, but I'm trying to learn. I look through my photos from Gaza and Egypt pretty often, and from Montana and Virginia too, and I never get tired of looking for new phrases in the wonderful stories that faces tell.

Here are three of the portraits I took in Gaza last winter. I'll post more soon.

Ahmed Hussein, 65, Jabalia

Gazan girlscout, Gaza City

Waaji Imsalaam, 70, Jabalia

IDF and Hamas: "opposite and complementary narratives" of winter offensive

From Amira Hass's story in Haaretz, 24 May, 2009:

Comparing Hamas and IDF accounts of the winter 2008-2009 offensive in Gaza, Amira Hass notes the following: "Fighting . . . was intensive, continuous, complex: opposite and complementary narratives of Hamas and the IDF, and both can be believed to the same extent."

"To the same extent," that is, if the extent is "not at all." The IDF says the fighting was intensive and complex in order to justify the extreme amount of damage it inflicted on civilian structures and lives. Iz Al-Din Al-Qassam fighters say the fight was heavy and long because to say otherwise is to admit that they ran away, which they did, and which they are perfectly happy to admit out of the other side of their mouths, as Hass notes in her article: "In all the organizations, and particularly Iz al-Din al-Qassam, the decision was taken not to lose fighters. Not to commit suicides."

Gazan civilians are stuck between the "opposite and complementary narratives" of Hamas and the IDF. It's a deadly, voiceless space.

Mark Regev on the issue of settlements

From the Washington Post, 24 May 2009:

"Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev said there are no plans for a full settlement freeze. 'The issue of settlements is a final status issue, and until there are final status arrangements, it would not be fair to kill normal life inside existing communities,' he said."

I just get hung up on that phrase, "it would not be fair to kill normal life inside existing communities." Is that not exactly what the settlements and their concomitant security fences and checkpoints do to "existing [Palestinian] communities," that have existed for a lot longer than the settlements?

I took a tour of the security fence/separation wall about ten days ago, and it's nothing if not a mechanism to "kill normal life" and to divide communities, to cut off farmers from their lands and towns from their markets. I talked to one man who owns olive groves on the "inside" of the fence, meaning the Israeli side. He's allowed to cross to his fields during three half-hour intervals each day — at 8:00, 12:00, and 4:30 — and if he gets stuck when the fence closes for the night at 5:00 pm, he has to report to the nearest Israeli military post, where he'll probably have his permit revoked. On the way north from Ramallah, far from the security fence, we passed an olive grove that was still smoldering from an act of arson by settlers that left several acres burnt to a crisp. The farmers were there when we passed, looking on helplessly. A fire truck was parked on the highway above, unable to reach the flames.

When Mr. Regev speaks about fairness, I wonder if he thinks about the truly unfair impact of the settlements on West Bank Palestinians. I wonder if he thinks about what it might be like to walk out of your door one morning and see your grandfather's olive groves going up in smoke.

An electrified security gate on the separation fence that cuts off Palestinian land from Israeli-controlled land on the massive Ariel settlement bloc. The settlement bloc is home to some 40,000 people.

Olive groves burned by settlers north of Ramallah. In the lower left, Palestinian olive farmers look on helplessly as the flames spread below.

From the Archives: Snapshots at Giza

In December, I took my mom to the Giza Plateau to see the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx. Despite the fact that it was a really windy day, with sandstorm conditions, the Giza Plateau was jam packed with tourists and Egyptian schoolkids on field trips.Egyptians pay one pound to get into the park — roughly twenty cents — and foreigners pay about fifty pounds for each attraction, or ten dollars. It's cool that the Egyptian government tries to make Egypt's treasures financially accessible to the public; it's a lot easier than weeding corruption and nepotism out of Egyptian government and business, which might allow for a greater dispersal of wealth across social strata, which might allow for Egyptians to pay as much as anyone else to get into their parks.

I didn't bring my big camera; instead, I brought my little tiny Nikon Coolpix that I bought about three years ago and have almost never used. Turns out the thing takes pretty cool pictures if the conditions are just right, but this one doesn't hold a candle to my original 3.2 mp Coolpix that I carried for four years, through thick and thin, before it finally conked out.

Schoolgirls hanging out alongside the Great Sphinx. I imagine the two girls on the right are making fun of the Japanese tourists taking fifty photos of the Sphinx's head.

Descending the long walkway between the Great Pyramids and the entrance to the Great Sphinx's chamber. Egyptian girls love to get decked out in super colorful outfits. It makes otherwise beige and grubby Cairo a pretty photogenic place after all.

A camel-mounted Egyptian policeman looks down on the Great Sphinx and hordes of tourists from his perch on the Giza Plateau. You can see the city of Giza in the background — it runs all the way up to the gates to the Pyramid park. The Giza Plateau is a great place to get a sense of how huge — and how polluted — Cairo actually is. You can see a brown haze of smog sprawled across the city even on days that seem clear from below.

In this last photo, I played around with Photoshop a little bit, trying to use the Duotone feature to make a nice black & white. I added some orange and it made the camel practically pop off the page, while leaving the background gray. I love playing with Duotone and Tritone, but as with so many things on Photoshop, every new tool is a blessing and a curse — there are too many options, and I waste my life trying to decide which of the four million colors to add to my black ink when no one will notice the difference, including me.

P.S. I can't figure out how to change the copyright watermark so it doesn't say copyright twice. Oh well.

Great Sentences: P.J. O'Rourke on Disneyland's HOF II

I'm going to start posting some of the great sentences I come across from time to time. Sometimes sentences are so perfect they're like poems. I'll start off this new trend with a couple of lines from P.J. O'Rourke's story in the December 2008 Atlantic, called "Future Schlock," about the disappointing corporate assault on Disney's creative output, as evidenced by the product- and brand-placement priorities in Disneyland's new House of the Future II.

O'Rourke begins by waxing nostalgic about the original House of the Future, which he visited in the fifties as a kid, and which left him spellbound and ready to race "to infinity and beyond." Unfortunately, Disney boxed up HOF I in 1967, much to O'Rourke's dismay. Here we find great sentence #1:

"Reports have it that a wrecking ball merely bounced on the sturdy polymer seed cases, and the prematurely postmodernist structure had to be sawed apart by hand. (As many a timorous would-be suicide has discovered—with viselike grip on a bridge railing—the future is harder to get rid of than you'd think)."

I for one did not see that parenthetic sledge hammer coming. And I'm still wondering where it came from.

Mr. O'Rourke is clearly a family man — appropriate since much of the essay's import has to do with the myth of the perfect family that permeated and inspired so much of pop culture from the post-war period all the way into the 1970s. O'Rourke admits that his family isn't perfect, but he never stops talking about his kids, which I find very reassuring. He also writes with a self-deprecating sense of humor that gives birth to great sentence #2, in the middle of a paragraph about "smart houses" that do all of your housework for you, like the Jetsons' house, and even pick out your wardrobe and suggest recipes based on what you place on the counter:

"And have you watched the clever manner in which convertible car tops operate? . . . If a house must be smart (and, as a man who is continually outwitted by his wife, children, and dogs, I'd really prefer that it just dummy up and mind its own beeswax), why can't it be as smart as a Pontiac Solstice?"

More great sentences soon.

Japan: Sakura Season

One Day when Alex was at work, I took off for Tsuyama to enjoy the sakura trees in full bloom around Tsuyama's castle. I was very lucky to be in Japan during late March and early April, because I got to see the whole cycle of the sakura season, and I also got to attend more than a few beer-soaked "hanami," or sakura-viewing, picnics.

This guy is a Shinto priest made out of bronze. The paddle he's holding in his hands has something to do with Shintoism, though I have no earthly idea what.



Here's a shot of the pathway leading up to Tsuyama Castle, perched atop the town on a hill surrounded by beautiful stone walls. The red lanterns are all over Japan during sakura season, and people stay late into the night eating and drinking under their subtle glow.



A cluster of sakura flowers.



High school girls gather on the steps leading up to Tsuyama Castle for lunch. Japanese school kids where uniforms all the way through high school. Whacked-out sneakers and crazy haircuts are about the extent of rebellion.



Older women like hanami too.



Like most castles in Japan, Tsuyama Castle was destroyed during the Second World War. The reconstruction is spectacular, however, and the park is a very popular place for tourists and locals.