In the fall of 1982, I found myself in a large, mainstream, Conservative shul in Philadelphia for the High Holidays. This was not in and of itself particularly strange. I grew up in Philadelphia and spent a lot of time in shuls there. But what was notable about this particular holiday was its proximity to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and the opportunity the board or the rabbi, or someone in power at that particular shul, took to share with the congregation their ideas of what that invasion meant. On every single chair in the sanctuary was a copy of a New Republic article, the gist of which was that the Lebanese themselves were grateful that the Israelis had invaded them and saved them from the nasty PLO. (This sounds pretty familiar these days too, yes?)

I was 21 years old. I had been suspicious of Jewish American positions on Israel for years, having spent a chunk of time in Israel already and formed my own opinions about what was going on over there. But the blatant jingoism and outright audacity of this article changed my life. While I honestly do not remember what it was like to believe that the Israeli position on Middle East politics was the only position worthy of attention, I do remember like it was this morning’s coffee when that belief changed: it was in shul on that Rosh Hashanah 5743. Happy New Year to me, indeed.

Jeff Halper is the founder and mainstay of ICAHD – The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions – and an anthropologist by training. He is a fairly well-known leftist in Israel, a Minnesotan who immigrated in the early 1970s. Halper identifies himself as an Israeli first and foremost, though he also recently requested and received Palestinian citizenship. All of this is to say that Halper positions himself as entirely secular (and Israeli), and not religious (and Jewish). This distinction will be increasingly important to his book – which he subtitles Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel – as it tries to be both an anthropological and historical exposé as well as a blueprint for a possible solution to the Israeli/Palestinian issue. His approach, at least initially, is that of an educator and one has to admire his optimism when he states “When I began my career as an educator almost 40 years ago, I shared the simple, commonsensical and optimistic assumption of my fellow educators that people, when given sufficient information, will learn.”

The presumption that by reading massive amounts of material we will come to see his position is one of the great weaknesses of Halper’s book. For instance, the entire middle section of An Israeli in Palestine is taken up with a review of the last decade’s worth of material on the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. By all means, should you need a refresher course, or should you not have read Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris, Michael Oren, Tom Segev, Achad Ha’Am, Tanya Reinhardt, or Gershom Gorenberg (among many many others), read the middle 200 pages of Halper’s book and you’ll know almost as much as those of us who have read them. The information is encyclopaedic and clearly explicated.

As an educator, it is difficult not to be deeply sympathetic to Halper’s position. And, in fact, people generally do learn when given the opportunity. Where Halper trips himself up is in his naïve hope that people will learn what he thinks they should be learning.

I do not wish to downplay the value of this observation. In and of itself, it is not a new observation, but it is definitely an important thing to note: Jewish statehood can be and often is a large part of the problem. But despite his encyclopaedic overview of the last 60 years of Israeli history, I am not convinced by Halper’s arguments that this is the root. Not least because it would also mean that there is no real solution to the conflict except a one-state solution.

For Halper, Israel is more like Bosnia than it is like France. An interesting political statement since it is also true that Israel is much more like its regional neighbours in this regard than it is like a European nation. And at this juncture, the truly serious difficulties with his book come to the fore. If, perhaps, he had taken his analysis of the situation from this point and related it to the Middle East, rather than Europe, he might have had more traction for his positions. Most of the nation-states in the Middle East are religio-ethnocracies. The main difference between Israel and its Arab neighbours are the ways in which religion is and is not written into their various constitutions.

Halper’s intention appears to be to force upon his readers the epiphany he writes about in his introduction, which he distills to a single question at the close of his first chapter: “Why in the hell did they demolish this family’s home?” It’s a refrain that returns again and again, and is the seed of much of the information in the book that is fresh to this reader: that it is next to impossible to get a building permit in the Occupied Territories, even to build on one’s own land, and how that frustration can lead to building a home without the required permit in order to have a roof over one’s head and therefore how unrelated to actual security it is to demolish the majority of the homes that are demolished. How politically motivated the various “outposts” and “settlements” in the Occupied Territories are, and how semantically subtle pronouncements from the various government officials on the various attempts at peace are (an outpost is legal; a settlement is not). And finally, how completely detached the Israeli populace has become from the issue at hand as a result. To return to his naïve earlier statement about “if you give people information, they’ll learn from it,” Halper seems to believe that if everyone had an epiphany such as his, they would all learn as he did that what the Israeli government is doing must change. “What pushed me beyond Zionism into a much more critical but contested and prickly political space was the demolition of Salim’s house. If, as the popular saying has it, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, then a post-Zionist is a Zionist who has witnessed a housing demolition.”

I’m not sure that’s the case. There are a number of other things to learn from witnessing a housing demolition. This is simply what Halper learned. Rachel Corrie learned something else, and the soldier on the bulldozer, extensively quoted by Halper? He learned something entirely different from even that.

And so I return to my own epiphany of Rosh Hashanah 1982/5743 as I sat in the main sanctuary and read The New Republic article so generously left for me: I learned something that day that I expect most of the other 2000 or so people in the room did not – we had the same article in front of us, but what we learned was different. Halper’s book both wants to teach us that housing demolitions are part of the root of the problem in Israel – they may well be – and he wants to universalize his experience so that we’ll reach the same conclusions he has. But like my own experience, I suspect that won’t be the case for the majority of his readers unless they came into the book predisposed to accept a one-state solution. If an ethnocracy “cannot make peace”, as Halper so starkly claims and the majority cannot be “lead to the trough” of his teaching/learning, we are once again stuck at an impasse. Halper’s “solutions”, ICAHD’s various “reframings” notwithstanding, if we cannot get past the issue of Jewish statehood, he’s wrong: there is no solution through an anthropological model.

And I promise you all that my very generous and kind and thoughtful uncle, who got me that high holiday ticket all those years ago, believes to this day that Lebanon was grateful for that invasion.

People do learn, they just don’t always learn what we want them to.

 

[I am extremely grateful for the careful and considered reading of this article given to me by Joe Lockard.]

From: Shmuel Rosner

To: Adam LeBor

Dear Adam,

Thank you for your letter. I now see that it was probably an error not to first detail more of the stories highlighted in your book, and only then move to ask the grand-question of "the UN, an angel or Satan."

So now you corrected my structural mistake, and we can go back to this question. You say that you'd first like to see a "a system of internal UN accountability that calls to account those officials involved in the UN’s failures" – but that is not a real answer to my question.

Or maybe it is; if one wants to see more accountability at the UN headquarters, oneAli Khamenei: Can the UN stop him from going nuclear? can still see the benefit of having the organization function properly. However, this is not an obvious conclusion for the reader of your book. As you rightly blame the permanent five members of the Security Council for failing to meet their duty, you also reveal the incoherence that is inherent to the process necessary to achieving any goal through this paralyzed body.

Consider a problem that we're all familiar with by now, sanctions on Iran. Whether it is wise or not to sanction Iran, whether sanctions can really stop Iran from pursuing its nuclear goals, whether it is even necessary to stop Iran from achieving its goals – all these are beside the point. We are now looking at the mechanism at the heart of every decision reached by the UN, and what you've masterfully detailed in regard to genocide in Rwanda is repeating itself in regard to Iran: an inability to reach a decision and to act upon it decisively that originates with the domestic considerations of the different members, and their conflicting interests in dealing with the world.

In his book A War In A Time Of Peace, the late David Halberstam was quoting an interview with Canadian General Romeo Dallaire – the one commander that was left in the field in Rwanda whom you mention in your letter. "Rarely had a commander at such a tragic venue" writes Haberstam, "been so unsparing of himself, even though his superiors had not listened to his warnings." Here is what Dallaire had to say:

I haven't even started my real mourning of the apathy and the absolute detachment of the international community, and particularly the western world, from the plight of Rwandans. Because fundamentally, to be very candid and soldierly, who the hell cared about Rwanda? I mean, face it. Essentially how many people remember the genocide in Rwanda?... Who comprehends that more people were killed, injured and displaced in three and a half months in Rwanda than in the whole of the Yugoslavian campaign in which we poured sixty thousand troops and the whole of the western world was involved there?

So yes – in theory they are all against murder and rape and violence. I'm sure they are. But you'll have hard time convincing Dallaire that they care enough. Not enough for the Chinese to support a more robust response to stop the atrocities in Darfur, not enough for Russia to stop Slobodan Milosevic, and apparently, not enough for Bill Clinton to support a military response in Rwanda. Washington, wrote Halberstam, "wanted no part of Rwanda. The political fallout from Somalia had caused enough damage."

Damage – political damage at home. And Clinton didn't really move in the Balkans until he was certain that the political damage would be greater if he didn't act, than the possible damage if he did. Political considerations at home were always a decisive factor for any government. When the British government headed by Tony Blair was reluctant to deal with Darfur, you write, "several British members of Parliament began to press the Blair government, which had once proudly announced a new, ethical, foreign policy, on its unwillingness to take a robust stand."

Now, you highlight the fact that careers were not hurt by the failure to preventBill Clinton With Rwandan Children: Ballsy catastrophe, but why would they be if, as you write in the book, "the Secretariat takes its cues from the P5." On the one hand you blame the countries represented at the Security Council, but on the other hand – lacking the means to punish them for their deeds or lack thereof – you want the bureaucrats to pay a price.

So maybe the problem is with the way this system was devised. Maybe we should stop hoping that the UN will somehow miraculously improve, and be more realistic about it. Maybe genocide can only be stopped if someone is willing to pick up the tab and pay the price of stopping it. Maybe sharing the power in a parliament-like world institution is the less efficient way of dealing with the horrors of the world.

And if that is the case – no technical fine-tuning of the way the UN operates can fix the problem. This can only be fixed by an overhaul of the international system. It could be this old-new idea of League of Democracies now promoted by presidential candidate John McCain, or it could be a decision by powerful countries, like the US, or powerful organizations, like NATO, that preventing genocide is a cause important enough as to justify circumventing the UN. This means unilateral action – an idea that was discredited by the Iraq war and that people here have no appetite for.

My grim conclusion will be this: as soon as the next genocide starts to take shape, you can start working on your new book. Unfortunately, it will be very similar to the one you already wrote.

Best,

Shmuel

From: Adam LeBor

To: Shmuel Rosner

Dear Shmuel,

Many thanks for your thoughtful letter. Yes, you are right, Complicity with Evil is a very depressing book. Depressingly compelling, and even essential, I hope. It chronicles the United Nations' failures in Bosnia, Rwanda and, even as you read this, Darfur. So catastrophic are these that we may rightly ask what is the point of the United Nations' continued existence? It was founded by the Allies in 1945, in the shadow of the Holocaust, and with the noblest of ideals, as its charter details: to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" and "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights." The United Nations’ key documents—the Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and genocide convention—are the most advanced formulation of human rights in history. And they have been flouted by UN member states for decades.

Much of the blame for the UN's failures in Rwanda and Bosnia lies with theKofi Annan: Preferred "neutrality" to stopping genocide permanent five members of the Security Council: the United States, Great Britain, Russia, China and France—the victors of the Second World War. If they had wanted to stop the slaughter, they could have. Was there any more shameful decision in modern American history than President Clinton's demands that the UN actually pull out the 2,500 UN peacekeepers deployed in Rwanda in early 1994? None of whom were even American? After pressure from the Clinton administration just 250 remained, under the command of the Canadian General Romeo Dallaire.

To understand these tragic events we need to peer inside the UN building in NYC and examine the role of the Secretariat, the body of permanent officials who advise and serve the member states—for as you say, the devil is in the details. Secretariat officials often claim to be impartial. But they are not. And I wanted to investigate how, in the age of mass communications and transport, two genocides occurred: one lasting months, in Rwanda, and one that just took a few days, in Srebrenica, and how we—the world—could stand by and do nothing. No one involved can say they did not know; both genocides took place where the United Nations had deployed both peacekeepers and relief workers, in regular contact with their headquarters in New York.

Many of the answers were quite easy to find in the United Nations' own reports into Rwanda and Srebrenica. The reports on the UN's role in the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica are in the public domain; they are extremely detailed, offering a day to day, sometimes hour by hour, chronology account of these grisly events. The United Nations is no good at stopping genocide but its officials are skilled at recounting and explaining its failures. The Rwanda report details the decisions made by Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) officials in New York, led by Kofi Annan, then DPKO chief. It shows how his and his colleagues' obsession with guarding the UN's neutrality—rather than enforcing the humanitarian principles on which the organisation was founded—was part of the chain of events that led to the deaths of 800,000 people.

By January 1994 General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of UNAMIR, the UN peacekeepers in Rwanda, had received detailed information about the planned mass murder of Tutsis from a source inside the Hutu militia, known as "Jean-Pierre." General Dallaire asked the DPKO for authorisation to raid the Hutu arms caches. On January 11 he cabled New York: "Since UNAMIR mandate the informant has been ordered to register all Tutsi in Kigali. He suspects it is for their extermination. Example he gave was that in 20 minutes his personnel could kill up to 1000 Tutsis." Annan's office replied, in a cable signed by his deputy, Iqbal Riza: "No reconnaissance or other action, including response to request for protection, should be taken by UNAMIR until clear guidance is received from Headquarters." When Dallaire repeated his request, Annan again refused. "The overriding consideration is the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated repercussions," his cable concluded.

Srebrenica was one of five UN-declared 'safe areas' in Bosnia, islands of besieged,The UN's Disgrace In Rwanda government-controlled territory, surrounded by the Bosnian Serbs. The term had been agreed after much finely-calibrated diplomatic wrangling in the Security Council, but was meaningless. The Serbs launched their final attack early on Thursday 6 July 1995 and Srebrenica fell the following Tuesday. UN commanders refused the Dutch peacekeeper's repeated requests for air-strikes—on one occasion because they had completed the form incorrectly. It was common knowledge at the DPKO in New York that Srebrenica was not viable. DPKO officials had even been briefing the UN press corps that something might happen. They said that the Serbs might attack the southern part of the enclave, and attempt to capture a road. So it was not surprising that initially, the Serb attack on Srebrenica caused few ripples at the half-empty DPKO office.

Despite the judicious leakings, Annan was away as the Serbs advanced. So was Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, traveling in Africa. Shashi Tharoor, the DPKO team leader on Yugoslavia, was on leave. So was General Rupert Smith, the British commander of peacekeepers in Bosnia. On Saturday July 8, Boutros-Ghali, Annan, General Smith, and other senior UN officials met in Geneva. They barely discussed Srebrenica. Incredibly, they sent General Smith back on leave. By the time Shashi Tharoor finally returned to his desk on the Monday, Srebrenica had virtually fallen. The killing started immediately and over the next few days up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by the Bosnian Serbs.

None of which hindered the careers of any of the DPKO officials. Annan, as we know, served two terms as secretary general. Shashi Tharoor was repeatedly promoted, and with Annan's behind the scenes backing, nearly succeeded him as secretary general. Iqbal Riza, who signed off the cable to General Dallaire, became Annan's chief of staff, one of the most influential positions in the UN. So in answer to your question, Shmuel, as to whether I would like a more efficient UN, or a more robust response to genocide from countries like the US, I would first of all like to see a system of internal UN accountability that calls to account those officials involved in the UN's failures. And one which stops promoting them.

Very best,

Adam

In researching Complicity with Evil, Adam LeBor discovered that the three great killing fields of the last decade—Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur—were not only ravaged by murderous convulsions (still ongoing in the case of Darfur), but abetted in doing so by the appalling negligence of the United Nations, which sat idle without shutting the killing fields down. LeBor's bleak conclusion is that the UN, at present, is simply incapable of fulfilling its foundational obligation to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Shmuel Rosner, Haaretz's chief U.S. correspondent, has seen his share of war-zones as well, and explores the questions of genocide, the duty to stop evil, and the legitimacy of international institutions with LeBor in the dialogue below.

From: Shmuel Rosner

To: Adam LeBor

Dear Adam,

That is one depressing book.

Complicity with Evil you call it, but it is also complicity with hypocrisy, withMass Graves At Srebrenica cynicism. "The United Nations in the age of modern genocide" is an example of complicity with mediocrity. Your book is the story of an institution incapable of doing the one task that is important enough to justify its less than obviously justified existence. A depressing book. I will recommend it to anyone who's still idealistic enough, or naïve enough, or stupid enough, to think that the United Nations has the power of moral authority. Amazingly, I do meet such people from time to time.

This story has been told before in many ways. How the world failed to defend the people of Srebrenica, and the people of Rwanda, and the people of Darfur. Samantha Power, in her masterful work, A Problem From Hell, was pointing at America and asking, essentially, the questions you're asking now. Her work was extraordinary, but I find yours more persuasive in at least one respect. That is, one can claim that America has no duty to stop all evil, and that its policies are justifiably aimed at maximizing American interests. But one can not say the same of the United Nations.

You make this point right at the beginning of this book: "If the United Nations, whose very raison d'être is the maintenance of international peace and security, does not bare some responsibility for failing to stop the slaughters… than who does?"

The power of this book is the way it assembles the details, the everyday decisionsRwanda's Killing Fields that made genocide possible. "Bosnia could not be saved because it was small and mountainous. Darfur cannot be saved because it is large and flat." A couple of months ago, writing for Slate about Darfur, I angered some activists by stating that "The campaign to save Darfur is alive, but it is no longer kicking. You could say that it has achieved all its stated goals: public awareness, international pressure, congressional action, the administration's involvement. Well, all but one: The crisis in Darfur is not yet solved, and the campaign to save Darfur is running out of options."

Sadly, I do not see a reason to change even one word in that paragraph. But after reading your book I now understand even better why this campaign—to save Darfur—was probably doomed to fail before it even started.

When I was interviewing President Bush in mid May at the Oval Office, one of the questions he was asked referred to recent events in Lebanon: "We have in place U.N. resolutions, Security Council resolutions that were meant to deal with the problem of Hezbollah. Nevertheless, it has not seemed to help." Unfortunately, only by translating the President's body language to words can one convey his response. "If you're going to pass a resolution, you better mean it," he said. In the case of Lebanon—a country suffering from the aggression of Hezbollah, but that cannot be compared to a country in which a genocide in taking place—the UN has proved incompetent. In many ways, this incompetence is no different in nature than the ones you describe in your book. The UN is hesitant whenever there's an aggressor involved, whenever there's a threat of violence involved. The UN can only keep the peace in places of—well—relative peace.

But here is the question I have for you, the expert on UN incompetence. It is actuallyRemnants Of Darfur a dilemma on which I also wrote in the past. Reading your book, one might conclude that what the world needs is a more vigorous, more determined world body. But I have my doubts, and the reason is simple: I do not believe such body will be more moral—and if I do not trust it to be more moral, why would I want it to be more competent?

Here is the way I framed it, writing to an Israeli audience about the Security Council, Lebanon and Iran:

A powerful and effective Security Council is a double-edged sword. More than once in the past Israel benefited from the fact that the council did not press for the implementation of resolutions less favorable to it. The U.S. administration, which has a complex relation with the UN and its institutions as well, also faces a similar dilemma… Use the Security Council for your needs, but do not seek to make it more powerful than necessary so that it will not turn around and bite you.

So: this will be my question for this first session of our dialogue: Do you want a more efficient UN, or would you prefer a more robust response against genocide from countries like the US, while giving up on this righteous-UN idea once and for all?

Best,

Shmuel

A Serbian court today sentenced four former Serb paramilitary policemen for up to 20 years in jail after they were caught on film killing six Muslim men during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.

January 23, 2007 To: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Tehran, Iran Bismillah ir-rahman ir-rahim, blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and upon his House, peace. I write in response to your letter dated 29 November 2006 and directed to the people of the United States. As an ordinary American citizen, with no official responsibilities, I will address you ...