The geopolitics of cement

I met a chap last week I know who had just come back from Afghanistan. He commented that it would be a good time to be in the cement industry in Kabul as they are throwing up concrete blast barriers everywhere. He reckoned the whole city felt very uneasy and all the expats were very gloomy and nervous - and that plus the blast walls reminded him of Baghdad in the even-worse-ole'-days.

Still on a cement theme, last weeks episode of This American Life had a remarkable interview with one of the tunnel owners who runs a business smuggling things into the Gaza Strip from Egypt. He noted that building materials still make up a lot of the produce going into Gaza after the war a year and a bit a go, but bizarrely now they are smuggling a lot of guns out of Gaza and into Egypt where they command a higher price. Supposedly the Hamas government in Gaza has banned the public carrying of weapons, plus there are so many stockpiled in the strip, there are now plenty of spares to be sold off to Egyptian crooks.

The Rafah crossing on the blockaded Gaza-Egypt Border (click to enlarge)

The Gaza-Egypt border

A screen grab of the Rafah crossing from Google Earth. The Philipdelphi corridor is visible as the obvious straight line (click for a bigger version).

Of all the dimensions to the Gaza war of last month, I've always thought that one that was worst reported was the Egyptian - Gaza border, and hence the Egyptian Palestinian relationship. I became interested in how the 14 kms of the border between Gaza and Egypt worked a couple of years ago when looking into how the blockade worked. I couldn't figure out how the Israelis could blockade Gaza when only controlling three of the four sides of the territories. Whilst Israel occupied Gaza, the IDF maintained a few hundred metres wide strip along the Gazan side of the border, the Philadelphi corridor, meaning that in effect they control all sides of Gaza, but it was handed to the Egyptians in 2005 during the settlement evacuation. I'm not certain, but I don't think the Egyptians ever patrolled on the Gaza side, instead letting the PA take control until the Hamas coup kicked them out. The EU had a mission - EUBAM (I can't help think of Bam Bam of Flintstones fame...) - which was meant to neutrally run the Rafah crossing, but they had to get there from Israel into Gaza and the Israelis would block them getting into Gaza at one of the other crossing points when they wanted Rafah closed. EUBAM were still twiddling their thumbs in Askelon, waiting for someone to tell them to go back to Rafah last time I looked.

So they Egyptians have just built a bloody great wall along the border with Gaza, hence all the tunnels underneath it. Anyway, File on Four on BBC Radio 4 have done a pretty good programme looking at Egypt's role in the Gaza crisis (download the podcast whilst you can). It doesn't cover everything, like political instability in the Sinai, but it's a very good primer. It also shows the hypocrisy of many of the Arab regimes - they allow at times strident, ugly anti-Israel rhetoric as a pressure valve on their oppressed domestic constituency who have no real democratic say, whilst actually do very little to help the Palestinians.

A not-about-Gaza post

I've been asked to blog something about Gaza for work, and I've wanted to say something about it here as well, but I haven't yet. It's all too fucking miserable to be honest. I think Hamas have shown themselves again to be zealots who don't care who gets killed - including their own kids - if it makes their bizarre point. I think the Israeli leadership has shown itself to be crass and willing to play politics with other people's lives. The IDF has shown itself ready to use massive force recklessly and then to lie about their civilian killing mistakes - even when they surely were just that, mistakes. Too many pro-Palestianian protestors around the world have turned out to be religious zealots who are surfing a new wave of religious anti-semitism or ridiculously cockeyed anarcho-leftist types who are all about teenage posturing and are in it for the ruck as much as anything else. And too many of the pro-Israeli voices are ridiculously screaming "I'm the victim here!" which just makes them look foolish to any disinterested observer as the IDF artillery pounds Gaza and F16s and Cobra attack choppers swoop overhead. Meanwhile the Israeli people get further away from ever being able to live without fear and the Palestinian people continue to get pissed on from a great height. I wish I didn't care and that most people didn't deserve better, but they do - both Israelis and Palestinians.

Anyway, my day was hugely improved upon when by mistake on Youtube I found this:

One can not loose all faith in mankind when somewhere in Tokyo there is a man who dresses up in an Imperial Stormtrooper costume and dances for apparently no reason at all. Tokyo Dance Trooper, I salute you.

No surprise: the BNP is utterly cynical

I've been writing today on the BNP and its recently acquired respect for Israel and Jews more generally. This has meant lots of reading the BNP website - a rather depressing experience - but I turned up one gem of political cynicism from the pen of Nick Griffin himself. A 2007 article called "By their fruits (or lack of them) shall you know them" is basically a reply to American neo-Nazis who have criticised the BNP for being to cosy with 'the Jews'. These US anti-semites parrot some of the Islamist (and indeed "Troofer") conspiracy theories, that terror attacks like 9/11 were really the work of Mossad and represent Israel's continued machinations to get the US west to fight their middle eastern wars for them. Griffin writes that these conspiracies "may or may not contain some elements of truth" but this is not the point:

“May or may not contain some elements of truth,” I said. Is that too cynical for the purists? Then they need to wake up to the rules of real life politics rather than settling for last place every time. It’s better to be a little cynical on this issue and stand a chance of winning than to fret about which bunch of liars are lying in this particular instance and in so doing miss a great political opportunity to surf our message into the public mind on the back of a media tsunami of ‘Islamophobia’.

Everyone accuses politicians of utter cynicism, but normally they at least have the decency to try to hide it. Mr. Griffin rather lays it out for all to read. He then goes on to consider why the British media have become so critical of Islam in recent years - suggesting various explanations before concluding:

Frankly, who cares [why]? We don’t have the media clout ourselves to swim against the tide, but as it’s running in our favour in terms of boosting public rejection of mass immigration and the multi-cult, why should we even want to? Instead of wasting time worrying about it, we should - to mix metaphors - be organising to make hay while the sun shines.

By their own word shall you know them.

The wrong lobby

Waltz and Mearsheimer have become internationally famous for their Israel Lobby article which has now been published as book. This ain't bad going for international relations (IR) professors, a job that whilst respected rarely catapults you stardom (Condoleezza Rice being an obvious exception). It's important to realise that within IR they are the big men of the Realist school of the thought - that countries have national interests and act in accordance to them. All classic power politics stuff. The problem is that they keep getting it wrong. They didn't see the end of the cold war coming, they didn't see the pacification of Europe, and its gradual union via the EU. Indeed in the early post-coldwar era Mearsheimer was recommending that Germany builds nuclear weapons to balance the threat from France! He felt that only if states had a balance of power would the system be stable. So wrong, wrong, then wrong again. How, then, were they to explain the U.S. picking on its own terms, on its own timetable, to invade Iraq and plunge the country into the biggest military crisis since Vietnam? Well they couldn't - because it is, particularly in retrospect, such a dumb thing for America to have done. So if the administration hadn't been acting in the U.S. national interest, why did they go into Iraq? Because they were tricked - by the Israel Lobby. This is essentially the core argument of the Israel Lobby.

You shouldn't throw the bath water out with the baby though: their essential point was wrong - that a domestic lobby for a foreign power could persuade the US to act against its own interests - but they make very many good points about the influence and power of the pro-Israel lobbies (plural being more accurate) in the US, and particularly the lack of debate in the US media on Israel. In fact if you want to hear all sides of the story, you would do much better following the vigorous and nuanced debate that takes place in Israel itself, rather than in America.

In the hue and cry that followed the articles publications one of the more interesting comments was made by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national-security adviser. He said that the Israel lobby does exist, and that it is influential in Washington, but it was only one of various successful national lobbies. Equal to the pro-Israel lobby was in his opinion the Cuban-American lobby and the Armenian lobby, with the Greek and Taiwanese groups not far behind.

It Waltz and Mearsheimer want an example of a national lobby exerting its influence in a way that is pushing the U.S. in a policy clearly at odd with its immediate interests, they should have taken the Armenians. The ongoing attempt to get both houses of the US Congress to condemn as genocide the Armenian massacres by Ottoman Turkey in 1915, is exactly that. The declaration might have a noble intent, but it will never be anything but symbolic. What is not in doubt is that the implications are that U.S.-Turkish relations are going down the pan.

Israeli politics briefing

Tel Aviv from the air

The domestic setting to Israeli foreign policy is often ignored internationally or at least underplayed. My PhD work is basically an argument that you can't separate domestic and international politics (although my case-study is Finland not Israel), particularly not in the globalised world, and this is as true of Israel as anywhere else. Hence what follows is my take on the discussions and briefings we had with policymakers, academics, journalists and others on my recent visit to Israel.

The Israeli economy is hugely successful with growth being driven by high-technology industries, in which the IDF has cleverly involved itself. But this is leading to what a number of speakers called the core-periphery issue (and this is clearly seen by both the left and right) in which certain sectors of Israeli society have missed the high-tech boat and are now being left ever further behind. The periphery has ethnic, religious and geographical aspects to it. A major distinction within Israel is "Ashkenazi" and "Sephardi". The Ashkenazi Jews are generally those of the European descent, whilst the Sephardi are the Jews who came to Israel from the Mid-East and North Africa. Israel was predominantly formed by Ashkenazi and all of the early leaders in the Labour Party (the ruling party until 1977) were of that background. The Sephardi generally arrived in Israel later, after being thrown out of the Muslim states in response to the founding of Israel. Sephardi have seen themselves as second class citizens ever since and remain on average poorer and less educated. The town of Sderot, infamous for being the target of Qassam rocket attacks from the Gaza strip, is a particularly working-class, Sephardi town. Many there say that if it was a rich, white suburb of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv getting rocketed daily, there is no way the government would put up with it. The mayor of Gush Etzion, the settlement we visited in the West Bank not far from Jerusalem, held very similar views saying that the security issues they faced were mishandled by the government because they don’t care about the poor and the rural. The other major ethnic distinction to economic marginalisation is the “Soviet” Jews who emigrated mainly after 1990, and now make up a sixth of the population. Integration has not been wholly successful - as the recent arrest of a “Nazi” gang, made up of Russian-Israeli youths, suggests.

The religious division in the economy affects firstly the Israeli Arabs who face many problems in the technology industries because they can’t get security clearances. This is partly said to be straight prejudice from some parts of the Jewish majority, and partly to do with many of them using the Arab exemption from military service. Secondly, the orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews do not take part in the standard state education system, and are also exempt from IDF service. The focus of their religious schools is on the Torah, with English, maths and sciences taking a back seat. This badly prepares orthodox children for taking part in the modern economy leading to economic marginalisation. Oddly, the argument has parallels to that over the Madrassas in Pakistan. At the same time the Orthodox Jews have large families, so this sector of society is becoming demographically more significant.

The political system is currently partially paralyzed, with increasingly unwieldy coalitions having to be formed as proportional representation produces an ever more diverse and fractured polity. The three biggest parties in the Knesset: Labour, Likud and Kadema still do not command a majority even if all vote together. So whilst the marginalized groups fail economically, they remain very influential politically as governments need them in coalitions. This makes the direction of Israeli politics very hard to predict. It also mean that the people of the Israel no longer wholly share its founding premises and experiences. For example the Holocaust was central to the creation of the Jewish state, but this was to a great extent an Ashkenazi experience. The Jews of Yemen or of Iran were little affected by it, yet they now are part of the state that came out of that tragedy. The rise of Likud in the late 1970s was directly related to the support of the Sephardi community, after the post-Independence hegemony of the Labour and the Ashkenazi community, and brought with it a different world-view.

Whilst these important questions of identity and political structure remain unresolved it is not clear what will happen next in the Middle East Peace Process. We were told that last year’s war was fought by Olmert with one eye on Lebanon and the other on the stock exchange - waiting for global markets to tell him when he had to stop because Israel could not handle a collapse in confidence in the economy. The Israelis have long said that they don’t have a partner to talk to with the Palestinians, but to me it isn’t completely apparent who the Israeli partner is either. Until there is a more stable governing-coalition that isn't forced into adopting lowest common denominator policies to pacify such disparate parties within it, the future is far from clear. The next prime minister is likely to be Netanyahu or Barak, both of whom are not likely to have radical new thinking from their first attempts at power in the 1990s. And beyond the peace process, no one really seemed to know what to do about Hezbollah, let alone Iran.