This is an article about all the great social things that can be done in the world instead of the obscene amount of money that has been spent on the Iraq War. From the Monday, January 21, 2008, World section of the Toronto Star, page AA2:
HOW THE IRAQ WAR'S $2 TRILLION COST TO U.S. COULD HAVE BEEN SPENT
Craig and Marc Kielburger
Global Voices
In war, things are rarely what they seem.
Back in 2003, in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon adamantly insisted that the war would be a relatively cheap one. Roughly $50 billion is all it would take to rid the world of Saddam Hussein, it said.
We now know this turned out to be the first of many miscalculations. Approaching its fifth year, the war in Iraq has cost American taxpayers nearly $500 billion, according to the non-partisan U.S.-based research group National Priorities Project. That number is growing every day.
But it's still not even close to the true cost of the war. As the invasion's price tag balloons, economists and analysts are examining the entire financial burden of the Iraq campaign, including indirect expenses that Americans will be paying long after the troops come home. What they've come up with is staggering. Calculations by Harvard's Linda Bilmes and Nobel-prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz remain most prominent. They determined that, once you factor in things like medical costs for injured troops, higher oil prices and replenishing the military, the war will cost America upwards of $2 trillion. That doesn't include any of the costs incurred by Iraq, or America's coalition partners.
"Would the American people have had a different attitude toward going to war had they known the total cost?" Bilmes and Stiglitz ask in their report. "We might have conducted the war in a manner different from the way we did."
It's hard to comprehend just how much money $2 trillion is. Even Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world, would marvel at this amount. But, once you begin to look at what that money could buy, the worldwide impact of fighting this largely unpopular war becomes clear.
Consider that, according to sources like Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs, the Worldwatch Institute, and the United Nations, with that same money the world could:
* Eliminate extreme poverty around the world (cost $135 billion in the first year, rising to $195 billion by 2015.)
* Achieve universal literacy (cost $5 billion a year.)
* Immunize every child in the world against deadly diseases (cost $1.3 billion a year.)
* Ensure developing countries have enough money to fight the AIDS epidemic (cost $15 billion per year.)
In other words, for a cost of $156.3 billion this year alone - less than a tenth of the total Iraq war budget - we could lift entire countries out of poverty, teach every person in the world to read and write, significantly reduce child mortality, while making huge leaps in the battle against AIDS, saving millions of lives.
Then the remaining money could be put toward the $40 billion to $60 billion annually that the World Bank says is needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, established by world leaders in 2000, to tackle everything from gender inequality to environmental sustainability.
The implications of this cannot be underestimated. It means that a better and more just world is far from within reach, if we are willing to shift our priorities.
If America and other nations were to spend as much on peace as they do on war, that would help root out the poverty, hopelessness and anti-Western sentiment that can fuel terrorism - exactly what the Iraq war was supposed to do.
So as candidates spend much of this year vying to be the next U.S. president, what better way to repair its image abroad, tarnished by years of war, than by becoming a leader in global development? It may be too late to turn back the clock to the past and rethink going to war, but it's not too late for the U.s. and other developed countries to invest in the future.
Craig and Marc Kielburger
Friday, February 1, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Peace Action Website
From the Peace Action website, http://www.peace-action.org/abt/abtpa.html, an article about what Peace Action is about:
We give ordinary people the tools to change the world.
At Peace Action we believe...
that war is not a suitable response to conflict.
that every person has the right to live without the threat from nuclear weapons.
That America has the resources to both protect and provide for its citizens.
Our target issues
What we do at Peace Action…
We are the nation's largest grassroots peace network, with chapters and affiliates in 30 states. We organize our grassroots network to place pressure on Congress and the Administration through write-in campaigns, internet actions, citizen lobbying and direct action. Through a close relationship with progressive members of Congress, we play a key role in devising strategies to move forward peace legislation, and, as a leading member of United for Peace and Justice and the Win Without War coalition, we lend our expertise and large network to achieving common goals.
Peace Voter Campaign
Citizen Movement
Given the right tools, ordinary people can change the world.
At Peace Action, we recognize that real change comes from the bottom up and we are committed to educating and organizing at the grassroots level. Together, we have the power to change the world.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Tolstoy: An Inspiration to Gandhi
From the Ideas section of the Sunday, January 6, 2007, Toronto Star, page ID3, is this article about how Tolstoy's writing and the letters between the two men confirmed for Gandhi his belief in non-violent action:
WAR AND PEACE
A tale of two giants bound by pacifism
Gandhi, assassinated 60 years ago this month, was overwhelmed by Tolstoy's writings
Daniel Aldana Cohen
Special to the Star
Sixty years ago this month, history's most famous pacifist was felled by an act of senseless violence. Just after 5 p.m. on January 30, a Hindu nationalist named Nathuram Godse shot Mahatma Gandhi three times in the chest. He died the following day.
Yet while Gandhi's life and message of non-violence are well-known, a crucial chapter in his philosophy's genesis is largely forgotten. The story features the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, includes a bridge from Russia to Canada, and begins nearly 20 years before Gandhi's birth with the Crimean War (1853-56).
In his early 20s, growing tired of his (apparently) full life of gambling and whoring, Tolstoy went to visit his brother, an army officer stationed in Central Asia. Tolstoy signed up and joined in imperial forays against the local Muslim population of the Caucasus mountains. He then moved on to the Crimean War, where he fought with an artillery unit during the Siege of Sevastopol.
Already a budding writer, he penned thinly fictionalized dispatches called the "Sevastopol Sketches" for a monthly literary journal back in St. Petersburg. "They were a sensation," says Professor Donna Orwin, a Tolstoy specialist at the University of Toronto. "Everyone was desperate for news from the front and here comes this great writer out of the blue."
As the world's first embedded journalist, he could accurately describe an officer's simultaneous vanity and dread of death: "At the instant the shell or mortar reaches you, you invariably think it will kill you," he wrote. "But pride keeps you up, and no one notices the dagger that is digging into your heart."
These experiences formed the raw material for the famous battle scenes of War and Peace - an old novel that's come back to life with two new translations into English this past fall and a third in 2005. Though the novel describes Napoleon's invasion of Russia, its portrayals of the bewildering fog of battle are based on Tolstoy's memories of fighting in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol.
How could men commit the most horrific atrocities in the most gorgeous places on Earth? Tolstoy asked. His characters always notice the absurdity one moment too late. Here's a veteran of many battles as a live artillery shell lands at his feet: "'Can this be death?' Prince Andrey wondered, with an utterly new, wistful feeling, looking at the grass, at the wormwood and at the thread of smoke coiling from the rotating top. 'I can't die, I don't want to die, I love life, I love this grass and earth and air.'"
So is War and Peace a pacifist noel? Orwin does not think so. "The paradox is that these situations, terrible as they are, do create heroic moments," she says. "Tolstoy learned that war tests people in a way that nothing else does. Those tests can be character building, but they can also be character destroying."
Tolstoy struggled with this tension his whole life.
In 1877, after completing his other great novel, Anna Karenina, he began a profound conversion that would transform him into an outspoken vegetarian, pacifist and Christian anarchist.
When he discovered the persecution of the Doukhobors, a group of peasants with a similar take on Christianity, he used the proceeds of his novel, Resurrection to help pay for their relocation to the Canadian prairies. (Since then, most have moved to British Columbia.)
After his conversion, Tolstoy mainly wrote about war in pamphlets advocating non-violence. The exception was a novella set in the Caucasus called Hadji Murat, the story of a Muslim, Chechen freedom fighter torn between Russia's corrupt imperialism and a loathsome local imam.
Though the costs of violence are rendered clearly, so is the glory of the hero's bloody resistance. "Why am I writing this?" Tolstoy asked in his diary.
Outside literature, he came to see clearly that you cannot achieve positive change through violence. "Think of his pacifism as a strategy," Orwin says.
"His argument was that if you do things the old way, by fighting, you're going to turn into what you hate."
In South Africa, Tolstoy's writings landed on the desk of a young Indian dissident, Mahatma Gandhi. He was overwhelmed, declaring that after reading Tolstoy his "lack of faith in non-violence vanished."
He hung a picture of Tolstoy on his office wall and named the camp where he trained activists in peaceful resistance Tolstoy Farm.
Gandhi wrote five letters to Leo Tolstoy and received four in return, all glowing with praise and intellectual exchange. In his last letter, writing in September 1910 only weeks before his death, Tolstoy told Gandhi that his activity was "the most central and important of all the work now being done in the world."
Years later, Gandhi repaid the compliment, writing that he knew of no one "in India or anywhere else who has had as profound an understanding of nonviolence as Tolstoy had." Tolstoy had inspired Gandhi's legendary instruction to "be the change you want to see in the world."
WAR AND PEACE
A tale of two giants bound by pacifism
Gandhi, assassinated 60 years ago this month, was overwhelmed by Tolstoy's writings
Daniel Aldana Cohen
Special to the Star
Sixty years ago this month, history's most famous pacifist was felled by an act of senseless violence. Just after 5 p.m. on January 30, a Hindu nationalist named Nathuram Godse shot Mahatma Gandhi three times in the chest. He died the following day.
Yet while Gandhi's life and message of non-violence are well-known, a crucial chapter in his philosophy's genesis is largely forgotten. The story features the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, includes a bridge from Russia to Canada, and begins nearly 20 years before Gandhi's birth with the Crimean War (1853-56).
In his early 20s, growing tired of his (apparently) full life of gambling and whoring, Tolstoy went to visit his brother, an army officer stationed in Central Asia. Tolstoy signed up and joined in imperial forays against the local Muslim population of the Caucasus mountains. He then moved on to the Crimean War, where he fought with an artillery unit during the Siege of Sevastopol.
Already a budding writer, he penned thinly fictionalized dispatches called the "Sevastopol Sketches" for a monthly literary journal back in St. Petersburg. "They were a sensation," says Professor Donna Orwin, a Tolstoy specialist at the University of Toronto. "Everyone was desperate for news from the front and here comes this great writer out of the blue."
As the world's first embedded journalist, he could accurately describe an officer's simultaneous vanity and dread of death: "At the instant the shell or mortar reaches you, you invariably think it will kill you," he wrote. "But pride keeps you up, and no one notices the dagger that is digging into your heart."
These experiences formed the raw material for the famous battle scenes of War and Peace - an old novel that's come back to life with two new translations into English this past fall and a third in 2005. Though the novel describes Napoleon's invasion of Russia, its portrayals of the bewildering fog of battle are based on Tolstoy's memories of fighting in the Caucasus and at Sevastopol.
How could men commit the most horrific atrocities in the most gorgeous places on Earth? Tolstoy asked. His characters always notice the absurdity one moment too late. Here's a veteran of many battles as a live artillery shell lands at his feet: "'Can this be death?' Prince Andrey wondered, with an utterly new, wistful feeling, looking at the grass, at the wormwood and at the thread of smoke coiling from the rotating top. 'I can't die, I don't want to die, I love life, I love this grass and earth and air.'"
So is War and Peace a pacifist noel? Orwin does not think so. "The paradox is that these situations, terrible as they are, do create heroic moments," she says. "Tolstoy learned that war tests people in a way that nothing else does. Those tests can be character building, but they can also be character destroying."
Tolstoy struggled with this tension his whole life.
In 1877, after completing his other great novel, Anna Karenina, he began a profound conversion that would transform him into an outspoken vegetarian, pacifist and Christian anarchist.
When he discovered the persecution of the Doukhobors, a group of peasants with a similar take on Christianity, he used the proceeds of his novel, Resurrection to help pay for their relocation to the Canadian prairies. (Since then, most have moved to British Columbia.)
After his conversion, Tolstoy mainly wrote about war in pamphlets advocating non-violence. The exception was a novella set in the Caucasus called Hadji Murat, the story of a Muslim, Chechen freedom fighter torn between Russia's corrupt imperialism and a loathsome local imam.
Though the costs of violence are rendered clearly, so is the glory of the hero's bloody resistance. "Why am I writing this?" Tolstoy asked in his diary.
Outside literature, he came to see clearly that you cannot achieve positive change through violence. "Think of his pacifism as a strategy," Orwin says.
"His argument was that if you do things the old way, by fighting, you're going to turn into what you hate."
In South Africa, Tolstoy's writings landed on the desk of a young Indian dissident, Mahatma Gandhi. He was overwhelmed, declaring that after reading Tolstoy his "lack of faith in non-violence vanished."
He hung a picture of Tolstoy on his office wall and named the camp where he trained activists in peaceful resistance Tolstoy Farm.
Gandhi wrote five letters to Leo Tolstoy and received four in return, all glowing with praise and intellectual exchange. In his last letter, writing in September 1910 only weeks before his death, Tolstoy told Gandhi that his activity was "the most central and important of all the work now being done in the world."
Years later, Gandhi repaid the compliment, writing that he knew of no one "in India or anywhere else who has had as profound an understanding of nonviolence as Tolstoy had." Tolstoy had inspired Gandhi's legendary instruction to "be the change you want to see in the world."
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Non-Violent Leadership of the Dalai Lama
From the Friday, October 19, 2007, Comment, Editorials section of the Toronto Star, page AA6, is an article about the non-violent leadership of the Dalai Lama and how it should act as a model for other world leaders:
WORTH REPEATING
Leader a model of non-violence
It is a given that whenever the Dalai Lama is honoured, China's Communist leaders lash out. It happened when the Tibetan spiritual leader, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was received by German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, and it happened again Wednesday when the Dalai Lama met with President George Bush and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington.
The Dalai Lama said Wednesday that he felt "regret" over the tensions. It is our hope that leaders will continue to ignore China's protests and threats, and that by continuing to honour the Dalai Lama they will finally persuade Beijing to open serious talks about granting autonomy to Tibet.
The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese army crushed an uprising there, is a powerful symbol of Tibet's resistance to China's suppression of its religious culture. In Beijing-speak, the Dalai Lama is a "splittist," someone out to split off a chunk of China. Zhang Qingli, the Chinese party boss in Tibet, denounced the Dalai Lama as "a person who basely splits his motherland and doesn't even love his motherland."
The fact is that the Dalai Lama does love his motherland - Tibet - and is not trying to split it away from China. He said Wednesday that he is not seeking independence from China. What he wants, he says, is "meaning autonomy for Tibet."
We would like to think that the spiritual leader's lifelong dedication to non-violence and tolerance might also rub off on some of the people he meets in Washington. "Through violence, you may solve one problem, but you sow the seeds for another," is one of his statements that politicians everywhere might mediate upon. Or this: "The world has become so small that no nation can solve its problems alone, in isolation from others."
This is an edited version of an editorial in The New York Times yesterday.
WORTH REPEATING
Leader a model of non-violence
It is a given that whenever the Dalai Lama is honoured, China's Communist leaders lash out. It happened when the Tibetan spiritual leader, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was received by German Chancellor Angela Merkel last month, and it happened again Wednesday when the Dalai Lama met with President George Bush and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington.
The Dalai Lama said Wednesday that he felt "regret" over the tensions. It is our hope that leaders will continue to ignore China's protests and threats, and that by continuing to honour the Dalai Lama they will finally persuade Beijing to open serious talks about granting autonomy to Tibet.
The Dalai Lama, who fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese army crushed an uprising there, is a powerful symbol of Tibet's resistance to China's suppression of its religious culture. In Beijing-speak, the Dalai Lama is a "splittist," someone out to split off a chunk of China. Zhang Qingli, the Chinese party boss in Tibet, denounced the Dalai Lama as "a person who basely splits his motherland and doesn't even love his motherland."
The fact is that the Dalai Lama does love his motherland - Tibet - and is not trying to split it away from China. He said Wednesday that he is not seeking independence from China. What he wants, he says, is "meaning autonomy for Tibet."
We would like to think that the spiritual leader's lifelong dedication to non-violence and tolerance might also rub off on some of the people he meets in Washington. "Through violence, you may solve one problem, but you sow the seeds for another," is one of his statements that politicians everywhere might mediate upon. Or this: "The world has become so small that no nation can solve its problems alone, in isolation from others."
This is an edited version of an editorial in The New York Times yesterday.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Peace Greeting by Fra Giovanni, 1513
From the December 2007, Eartheasy newsletter, a lovely greeting from one friend to another of peace and joy for the holiday season:
I SALUTE YOU
There is nothing I can give which you have not;
but there is much that, while I
Can not give, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts
Find rest in it today.
Take happiness.
No peace lies in the future,
which is not somewhere hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace
The sometime gloom of the world is but a shadow;
Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take joy
And so, at this holiday time, I greet you,
With the prayer that for you, now and forever
The days break with peace,
and all shadows flee from your path.
Fra Giovanni
A salutation written to a friend in 1513
I SALUTE YOU
There is nothing I can give which you have not;
but there is much that, while I
Can not give, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts
Find rest in it today.
Take happiness.
No peace lies in the future,
which is not somewhere hidden in this present instant.
Take Peace
The sometime gloom of the world is but a shadow;
Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy.
Take joy
And so, at this holiday time, I greet you,
With the prayer that for you, now and forever
The days break with peace,
and all shadows flee from your path.
Fra Giovanni
A salutation written to a friend in 1513
Destructive of the American War
It is unfortunate that instead of stories about finding peace, there are so many stories about the destructive nature of war.
From the Saturday, November 17, 2007, World & Comment section, pages AA, AA2:
JOURNAL: HO CHI MINH CITY
Beautiful, bustling Saigon haunted by ghosts of 'the American war'
Bill Schiller
Asia Bureau
Ho Chi Minh City - The Saigon River comes alive at night. From the fifth-floor terrace of the Majestic Hotel, it's a torrent of tugboats, and barges and groaning ferries filled with a million motorcyclists on the move.
Everyone seems to be beeping a horn, anxious to get to the other side, to go home, leave home, visit friends, have a drink - do whatever the upwardly mobile do on a Saturday night in Saigon - as the locals continue to call it, despite the official "Ho Chi Minh City."
Out on the water, the glow of neon billboards casts bands of electric colour across the surface: brilliant purples and blues and gold, and intermittently, as big bunches of water hibiscus come sliding down stream, fishermen in thin dugouts - as though from another era - navigate their way silently upriver, through the coloured bands and back into darkness.
The air is soft. It's 29 Celsius. And the moon is swept with clouds.
I went down into the street and bought a copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American from a hawker, and over the next few days read it aloud to my wife, Mary - which I still think is a great way to read a book so beautifully written.
You can't come here as a Westerner, especially as a baby boomer, and not be consumed by memories of "the Vietnam War."
The Vietnamese, by the way, call it "the American War."
Published in Britain in 1955, Greene's novel was the anti-clarion call to arms: a grim warning of what lay ahead for America if it stumbled its way into an all-out war, which it did of course, and at great cost.
When the U.S. edition was printed in 1956, it was dismissed in the United States as "anti-American."
How haunting that book is today. How stinging.
"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," says the book's protagonist, British journalist Thomas Fowler, of CIA agent Alden Pyle, the "quiet American" of the title.
The late American war correspondent and author David Halberstam once said he and his generation of reporters in Vietnam all carried dog-eared copies of Greene's book.
"It was our Bible," he said.
For two days and a night, we hired a boat and a guide and travelled the Mekong Delta, a web of waterways so intricate and complex it left you puzzled and humbled - and wondering how any foreign force could believe it could fight and win here.
And I wondered, too, how after everything, small children still come charging out of the bush to the riverbank, dragging their mothers with them, to smile and wave at foreign people moving slowly upriver in a boat.
How does that happen?
Back in Saigon, I went to the War Remnants Museum and was reminded that Graham Greene's eloquent book was by no means the only warning issued.
There, starkly displayed, was Life magazine's first great cover story on the war in Vietnam by legendary photographer Larry Burrows, "Mekong Delta Sweep."
The article began: "The fighting in South Vietnam, where each hour deepens U.S. commitment..."
The date was Jan. 25, 1963.
The article noted that only 53 Americans had died.
By war's end that number would be 58,000. At least 1.7 million Vietnamese would also die.
It was at the museum - in the final room where visitors can write impressions in a guest book - that I stumbled upon one man's sombre reflection on the "powerlessness" of the American majority:
It is my deep hope that the people of the world will be able to separate 'America' from 'Americans' and know how sorry, remorseful, ashamed and disgusted the vast majority of Americans are - both in regards to this war and that in Iraq. We want peace, but just like everywhere, we are largely powerless over the actions of our government."
Joshua, Tucson, AZ
And it reminded me, that 38 years ago this week, more than a quarter of a million Americans took to the streets of Washington, D.C., to demand a U.S. pullout from Vietnam.
But America was very different then.
Bill Schiller is the Star's Asia Bureau Chief. Contact him at bschiller@thestar.ca
From the Saturday, November 17, 2007, World & Comment section, pages AA, AA2:
JOURNAL: HO CHI MINH CITY
Beautiful, bustling Saigon haunted by ghosts of 'the American war'
Bill Schiller
Asia Bureau
Ho Chi Minh City - The Saigon River comes alive at night. From the fifth-floor terrace of the Majestic Hotel, it's a torrent of tugboats, and barges and groaning ferries filled with a million motorcyclists on the move.
Everyone seems to be beeping a horn, anxious to get to the other side, to go home, leave home, visit friends, have a drink - do whatever the upwardly mobile do on a Saturday night in Saigon - as the locals continue to call it, despite the official "Ho Chi Minh City."
Out on the water, the glow of neon billboards casts bands of electric colour across the surface: brilliant purples and blues and gold, and intermittently, as big bunches of water hibiscus come sliding down stream, fishermen in thin dugouts - as though from another era - navigate their way silently upriver, through the coloured bands and back into darkness.
The air is soft. It's 29 Celsius. And the moon is swept with clouds.
I went down into the street and bought a copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American from a hawker, and over the next few days read it aloud to my wife, Mary - which I still think is a great way to read a book so beautifully written.
You can't come here as a Westerner, especially as a baby boomer, and not be consumed by memories of "the Vietnam War."
The Vietnamese, by the way, call it "the American War."
Published in Britain in 1955, Greene's novel was the anti-clarion call to arms: a grim warning of what lay ahead for America if it stumbled its way into an all-out war, which it did of course, and at great cost.
When the U.S. edition was printed in 1956, it was dismissed in the United States as "anti-American."
How haunting that book is today. How stinging.
"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," says the book's protagonist, British journalist Thomas Fowler, of CIA agent Alden Pyle, the "quiet American" of the title.
The late American war correspondent and author David Halberstam once said he and his generation of reporters in Vietnam all carried dog-eared copies of Greene's book.
"It was our Bible," he said.
For two days and a night, we hired a boat and a guide and travelled the Mekong Delta, a web of waterways so intricate and complex it left you puzzled and humbled - and wondering how any foreign force could believe it could fight and win here.
And I wondered, too, how after everything, small children still come charging out of the bush to the riverbank, dragging their mothers with them, to smile and wave at foreign people moving slowly upriver in a boat.
How does that happen?
Back in Saigon, I went to the War Remnants Museum and was reminded that Graham Greene's eloquent book was by no means the only warning issued.
There, starkly displayed, was Life magazine's first great cover story on the war in Vietnam by legendary photographer Larry Burrows, "Mekong Delta Sweep."
The article began: "The fighting in South Vietnam, where each hour deepens U.S. commitment..."
The date was Jan. 25, 1963.
The article noted that only 53 Americans had died.
By war's end that number would be 58,000. At least 1.7 million Vietnamese would also die.
It was at the museum - in the final room where visitors can write impressions in a guest book - that I stumbled upon one man's sombre reflection on the "powerlessness" of the American majority:
It is my deep hope that the people of the world will be able to separate 'America' from 'Americans' and know how sorry, remorseful, ashamed and disgusted the vast majority of Americans are - both in regards to this war and that in Iraq. We want peace, but just like everywhere, we are largely powerless over the actions of our government."
Joshua, Tucson, AZ
And it reminded me, that 38 years ago this week, more than a quarter of a million Americans took to the streets of Washington, D.C., to demand a U.S. pullout from Vietnam.
But America was very different then.
Bill Schiller is the Star's Asia Bureau Chief. Contact him at bschiller@thestar.ca
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Peace Talks Versus Daily Strife: Israelis & Palestinians
From the World & Comment section of the Toronto Star, Tuesday, December 18, 2007, pages AA, AA5, an article about the irony of Israeli-Palestinian skirmishes while there are international efforts for peace:
TALK OF PEACE DOES NOTHING TO BRING END TO DAILY STRIFE
Israeli-Palestinian tit-for-tat skirmishes remain out of sight and mind for many
Oakland Ross
Middle East Bureau
Jerusalem - It was another autumn morning in the Holy Land, and it began in the usual way, with a mixture of sunshine and clouds, mild temperatures, and a deadly strike by the Israeli air force.
The target was a group of suspected Hamas militants gathered in the town of Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip. Completed almost as soon as it began, the aerial attack left three Palestinians dead and four others wounded.
It was 8:34 a.m. on Wednesday Dec. 5 and the war had resumed for another day.
It's a strange kind of war, at once distant and familiar, a deadly battle that is oddly unobtrusive for most people here, most Israelis anyway. The conflict barely gets covered in the local media and instead persists, like an annoying background drone, something that's unpleasant but bearable and that won't go away.
Lately, the air waves have been filled with talk of peace - skeptical talk, for the most part - but nontheless the subject has been harmony, or the hope of harmony, and the focus has been the recent resumption of international efforts to put an end to six decades of armed strife between Israelis and Palestinians.
But words are one thing. Weapons are another.
The harsh daily reality lived by many people here - mostly Palestinians but some Israelis, too - has not changed much, if at all, and it feels a lot less like peace than it does like war.
"There are incursions every day," said Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, equivalent to the Red Cross. "Perhaps you have heard that, in Bethlehem, one man was killed today, and three were killed in Gaza."
He was speaking to a reporter near the end of another day of life and death in this realm of prophets, miracles, and saints, a day marred instead by rocket salvoes and mortar attacks, by rifle-fire exchanges and attempted bombings - a litany of hostilities that left approximately eight people dead, all of them Palestinian.
Yesterday, Israel killed a senior Islamic Jihad commander and at least four other militants in the Gaza Strip, prompting the group to threaten suicide bombings within the Jewish state.
Many terms are used to describe these daily clashes, and they vary according to which side is doing the talking - "resistance struggle," "security operations," assassinations," "jihad," "terrorism."
Unlike the many other conflagrations that have inflamed the Middle East in recent decades, this particular conflict does not really have a name, and it takes place largely out of sight and mind of most people here.
It's a low-intensity confrontation between asymmetrical sides, and it is typically fought in locations where few Israeli civilians would dare to venture.
But, invisible or not, a war is being waged in the Holy Land, under cover of darkness or by the light of day, splintering wooden doors, smashing cinderblock walls, puncturing steel panels, zinc roofs, and human flesh. Its chief characteristic - apart from bloodshed and woe - is its remarkable obduracy.
It just won't quit.
"Every night, Israeli troops go into Ramallah or Hebron to catch some of the activists," said a Palestinian woman who did not wish her name to be published. She was referring to several Palestinian cities in the West Bank which, unlike Gaza, is still under formal Israeli military occupation. "In Nablus, every night, the Israelis are in the old city to arrest some people."
But the conflict cuts both ways, and not all of the victims are Palestinian, although the majority are.
Since the Islamist militants of Hamas took power by force in Gaza in mid-June, paramilitary organizations there have fired more than 353 rockets and 554 mortar shells at Israeli targets, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose figures were last updated on Nov. 30.
During this period, the Palestinian rockets - home-made contraptions, known as Qassams - have killed two Israelis, injured many others and drive thousands more to flee the southern town of Sderot, target of most of these attacks. The mortars, by contrast, are aimed mainly at Israeli military sites.
"I think they would like to kill more people if they could," said Ephraim Kam, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has written extensively about the Palestinian conflict.
For its part, Hamas insists the not-very-accurate, short-range rockets that soar daily out of Gaza "do little damage compared to Israeli firepower" and "have turned out to be a more acceptable tactic in the West than martyrdom operations," according to a brief penned by Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
"Martyrdom operations" is a term some Palestinians use to describe a form of attack better known in the West as "suicide bombings," a tactic now largely abandoned by Palestinian militant organizations.
Following its eruption in September 2000, a Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada caused shocking levels of violence that affected both sides, killing combatants and innocents alike.
In April 2002 alone, Palestinians suffered 245 fatalities, their worst single month. That same year, 451 Israelis were killed.
The carnage has subsided dramatically since then. Last year, 30 Israelis were killed in political violence. So far this year, eight have lost their lives.
Palestinian deaths are far higher than this but still vastly reduced from the early years of the intifada. This past May, for example, 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. In June, 27 Palestinians died.
In all, more than 4,500 Palestinians have perished in fighting since the intifada began a little more than 1,100 lives in the same period.
For all practical purposes,the intifada is over now. But an intractable and bloody war of attrition grinds on in its place. Almost daily, more attacks are carried out or attempted, triggering reprisals, leading to further attacks.
Every day, more people die.
Now many worry that this low-intensity conflict may soon explode again into a high-octane war should Israeli forces launch a large-scale invasion of Gaza to halt suspected arms smuggling form Egypt and to cripple the territory's military infrastructure.
"Violence," said Sari Bashi,a Palestinian human-rights activist, "does not help the peace process."
TALK OF PEACE DOES NOTHING TO BRING END TO DAILY STRIFE
Israeli-Palestinian tit-for-tat skirmishes remain out of sight and mind for many
Oakland Ross
Middle East Bureau
Jerusalem - It was another autumn morning in the Holy Land, and it began in the usual way, with a mixture of sunshine and clouds, mild temperatures, and a deadly strike by the Israeli air force.
The target was a group of suspected Hamas militants gathered in the town of Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip. Completed almost as soon as it began, the aerial attack left three Palestinians dead and four others wounded.
It was 8:34 a.m. on Wednesday Dec. 5 and the war had resumed for another day.
It's a strange kind of war, at once distant and familiar, a deadly battle that is oddly unobtrusive for most people here, most Israelis anyway. The conflict barely gets covered in the local media and instead persists, like an annoying background drone, something that's unpleasant but bearable and that won't go away.
Lately, the air waves have been filled with talk of peace - skeptical talk, for the most part - but nontheless the subject has been harmony, or the hope of harmony, and the focus has been the recent resumption of international efforts to put an end to six decades of armed strife between Israelis and Palestinians.
But words are one thing. Weapons are another.
The harsh daily reality lived by many people here - mostly Palestinians but some Israelis, too - has not changed much, if at all, and it feels a lot less like peace than it does like war.
"There are incursions every day," said Younis Al-Khatib, president of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, equivalent to the Red Cross. "Perhaps you have heard that, in Bethlehem, one man was killed today, and three were killed in Gaza."
He was speaking to a reporter near the end of another day of life and death in this realm of prophets, miracles, and saints, a day marred instead by rocket salvoes and mortar attacks, by rifle-fire exchanges and attempted bombings - a litany of hostilities that left approximately eight people dead, all of them Palestinian.
Yesterday, Israel killed a senior Islamic Jihad commander and at least four other militants in the Gaza Strip, prompting the group to threaten suicide bombings within the Jewish state.
Many terms are used to describe these daily clashes, and they vary according to which side is doing the talking - "resistance struggle," "security operations," assassinations," "jihad," "terrorism."
Unlike the many other conflagrations that have inflamed the Middle East in recent decades, this particular conflict does not really have a name, and it takes place largely out of sight and mind of most people here.
It's a low-intensity confrontation between asymmetrical sides, and it is typically fought in locations where few Israeli civilians would dare to venture.
But, invisible or not, a war is being waged in the Holy Land, under cover of darkness or by the light of day, splintering wooden doors, smashing cinderblock walls, puncturing steel panels, zinc roofs, and human flesh. Its chief characteristic - apart from bloodshed and woe - is its remarkable obduracy.
It just won't quit.
"Every night, Israeli troops go into Ramallah or Hebron to catch some of the activists," said a Palestinian woman who did not wish her name to be published. She was referring to several Palestinian cities in the West Bank which, unlike Gaza, is still under formal Israeli military occupation. "In Nablus, every night, the Israelis are in the old city to arrest some people."
But the conflict cuts both ways, and not all of the victims are Palestinian, although the majority are.
Since the Islamist militants of Hamas took power by force in Gaza in mid-June, paramilitary organizations there have fired more than 353 rockets and 554 mortar shells at Israeli targets, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose figures were last updated on Nov. 30.
During this period, the Palestinian rockets - home-made contraptions, known as Qassams - have killed two Israelis, injured many others and drive thousands more to flee the southern town of Sderot, target of most of these attacks. The mortars, by contrast, are aimed mainly at Israeli military sites.
"I think they would like to kill more people if they could," said Ephraim Kam, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has written extensively about the Palestinian conflict.
For its part, Hamas insists the not-very-accurate, short-range rockets that soar daily out of Gaza "do little damage compared to Israeli firepower" and "have turned out to be a more acceptable tactic in the West than martyrdom operations," according to a brief penned by Ahmed Yusef, political adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
"Martyrdom operations" is a term some Palestinians use to describe a form of attack better known in the West as "suicide bombings," a tactic now largely abandoned by Palestinian militant organizations.
Following its eruption in September 2000, a Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada caused shocking levels of violence that affected both sides, killing combatants and innocents alike.
In April 2002 alone, Palestinians suffered 245 fatalities, their worst single month. That same year, 451 Israelis were killed.
The carnage has subsided dramatically since then. Last year, 30 Israelis were killed in political violence. So far this year, eight have lost their lives.
Palestinian deaths are far higher than this but still vastly reduced from the early years of the intifada. This past May, for example, 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. In June, 27 Palestinians died.
In all, more than 4,500 Palestinians have perished in fighting since the intifada began a little more than 1,100 lives in the same period.
For all practical purposes,the intifada is over now. But an intractable and bloody war of attrition grinds on in its place. Almost daily, more attacks are carried out or attempted, triggering reprisals, leading to further attacks.
Every day, more people die.
Now many worry that this low-intensity conflict may soon explode again into a high-octane war should Israeli forces launch a large-scale invasion of Gaza to halt suspected arms smuggling form Egypt and to cripple the territory's military infrastructure.
"Violence," said Sari Bashi,a Palestinian human-rights activist, "does not help the peace process."
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