- Robin Lustig
- 6 Jan 09, 01:52 PM
According to the Israeli government, more than 3,200 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza during 2008. That's an average of more than 265 each month.
But for six months, Israel and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, were meant to be observing a ceasefire, or truce. So didn't it make any difference? Well, yes, actually, it did.
We asked the Israeli military spokesman's office to give us a month-by-month breakdown of rockets fired from Gaza during the truce. It came into effect on 19 June; here are the numbers (all of them, according to the military spokesman, are approximate).
19-30 June: 9
July: 20
August: 17
September: 2
October: 2
On 4 November, when much of the world was watching Barack Obama win the US presidential election, Israeli forces crossed into the Gaza Strip and killed six Hamas fighters. Israel says Hamas was building a tunnel under the border fence at Deir al-Balah which it intended to use to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Hamas responded by launching rockets and mortar shells into Israel. The number of rockets fired from Gaza during November was, according to the Israeli military, 190.
According to the best estimates I can find, 16 Israelis have been killed by rockets fired from Gaza since the beginning of last year. Palestinian medical sources say more than 500 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the current Israeli military operations 10 days ago - but as you know, the Israeli military are preventing foreign reporters from entering Gaza, so these figures can't be verified.
Do numbers prove anything? Probably not. But I think they're interesting, nonetheless.
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- Robin Lustig
- 4 Jan 09, 02:41 PM
I know it may seem perverse of me to draw your attention to this, given everything that's going on in Gaza at the moment, but if we take a step back from the daily headline horrors, there does seem to be some good news to take note of from the Islamic world.
According to the Middle East scholar Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, the good news over the past year includes: the election of a secularist government in Pakistan at the beginning of 2008; the "near strategic defeat" of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia; a political settlement in Lebanon; a consolidation of the transition to democracy in the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia; and the avoiding of a major political crisis in Turkey when the constitutional court declined to find the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) guilty of undermining the official ideology of secularism.
His full list is here.
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- Robin Lustig
- 30 Dec 08, 01:33 PM
If I were sensible, I would take the following words as my guide:
"What happens next? I do not know. Nor do you. Desperate though we are to find out, we should be grown-up enough to admit there is no one to tell us. It makes life hard, but what would we be otherwise? Curiosity about what happens next is an essential part of the joy and anguish of being human."
They were written by the Financial Times columnist Michael Skapinker a couple of days before Christmas, and very wise words they are too. Nevertheless, fool that I am, I shall ignore them.
So, for your entertainment and edification, here are my global predictions for the coming year.
1. The fate of the global economy will dominate everything. It will be horrible. Enough said.
2. Gordon Brown will not call a general election.
3. Discussion about what to do in Afghanistan will increasingly become a discussion about what to do in Pakistan. Tension between Pakistan and India will escalate yet further as the Indian general election approaches. There may be more Mumbai-style attacks in India, as jihadis try to relieve the pressure on them in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border areas.
4. President Obama will start pulling US troops out of Iraq - but more slowly than some of his supporters would like. He will also announce that thousands will remain as "trainers".
5. He will announce his intention to close the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay - but then there'll be a huge fuss over who'll take the ex-detainees who can't or won't go back to their country of origin.
6. He'll make a major speech about his vision for the US's relations with the rest of the world, and especially with the Islamic world, probably in Jakarta, but maybe in Cairo or Amman.
7. There'll be growing social unrest in Russia - and China - over rising unemployment. Moscow may be tempted to deal with it in the time-honoured fashion: escalating a dispute with a neighbour (Ukraine? One of the Baltic nations?) to take voters' minds off the economic crisis.
8. The South African presidential election will see the newly-created party COPE (Congress of the People) do creditably but not outstandingly. Supporters of the likely new president, Jacob Zuma, will denounce the new party as a stooge of Western capitalism. Tensions between Zulu, who tend to back Zuma, and Xhosa, who are suspicious of him, will grow.
9. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will win the presidential election in Iran, but only after seeing off a serious challenge and amid allegations of widespread vote-fixing. It'll become increasingly clear that he wields little real power.
10. The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire in eastern and central Europe will be marked by endless analyses and retrospectives along the lines of: Is The World Now a Better Place? I'll probably add to the outpouring.
I agree: it doesn't seem that there's much to look forward to. So here's what I suggest you do: enjoy the company of family and friends; admire the trees and the flowers in parks and gardens; count your blessings. And remember: only fools try to predict the future.
Happy New Year.
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- Robin Lustig
- 29 Dec 08, 11:56 AM
If you want to know what bloggers in Gaza and Israel are saying about current Israeli military operations there, rather than just reading what people thousands of miles away think about them, click here for the Global Voices website.
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- Robin Lustig
- 19 Dec 08, 06:45 PM
So, will Barack Obama change the world? Er, probably not.
Will he radically change US foreign policy? Well, maybe he will, but there again, maybe he won't.
If you heard our special edition of The World Tonight from Washington last night, you'll have heard four of Washington's most respected foreign policy analysts discussing the likely future shape of US foreign policy once Obama takes office next month. And what struck me about them was how uncertain they were. (If you missed the programme, it's available on the website, as is an extended version, including a question and answer session with our invited audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.)
Will Obama keep his promise to pull US combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months of moving into the White House? Probably, yes.
Will he make any headway in reviving the Middle East peace process? Probably, no.
Will he sign up to a new global agreement on reducing carbon gas emissions to combat climate change? Possibly, but it's far from certain.
And so it goes on. During the Presidential election campaign, Obama promised "change you can believe in". But beyond the rhetoric, there weren't that many concrete policy proposals, especially in the field of foreign policy. Which is why even the best informed analysts here really have little clear idea what he's planning to do.
And here's the key issue: the over-riding preoccupation of the incoming administration will be how to revive the economy. Peace in the Middle East, forging a new relationship with Moscow, breathing new life into nuclear non-proliferation - all that may have to wait.
So what should we expect? Well, the rhetoric will certainly change: you won't hear so much about the US ending tyranny and spreading democracy around the world. There'll be more of an emphasis on negotiations, and on building international alliances. But will it be, in the words of a New York Times columnist,"continuity we can believe in", or, in the words of another New York Times columnist, "a sweeping shift in foreign policy"?
Our panellists couldn't agree. Is a change of tone the same as a change of policy? Or do US national interests always eventually over-ride Presidential ambitions? We're about to find out - and the answer could well shape the world we live in.
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- Robin Lustig
- 12 Dec 08, 10:04 AM
How often do I get the chance to write about the transition from feudalism to democracy these days? Not often, is the answer. So when the opportunity arises, I grab it.
The island of Sark is one of those places you need a powerful magnifying glass to find on the map. It's the smallest of the Channel Islands, just off the northern coast of France - and it's in the news today because only now is it experiencing the uncertain pleasures of a democratic political system.
In the words of the official Sark government website: "Sark holds a unique position within the Channel Islands, which themselves hold an unusual position in Her Majesty's possessions, in that they are not part of the United Kingdom or Great Britain nor are they sovereign states. Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Sark have their own insular legislature, judicial system and administration."
Which means, for example, no income tax, no health service, no unemployment benefit and no old age pension. And until yesterday, no fully-elected parliament (which is called the Chief Pleas. Please don't ask me why.)
The main investors in Sark are multi-millionaire twin brothers, Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay. They're not great fans of feudalism, and they lobbied to introduce a fully-elected parliament, which they fondly believed would be much more likely to welcome their ideas for reform and modernisation.
It seems they were wrong. The islanders have elected a parliament made up overwhelmingly of representatives who were not on the Barclays' most-favoured list. As a result, the Barclays have started shutting down their businesses on Sark. "The islanders got what they wished for," was the stark comment from their lawyer.
I visited Sark once, more than 20 years ago. The man in charge, then as now, was the Seigneur, Michael Beaumont - I described him at the time as "a most friendly man with a relaxed manner and a ready smile ... he reminded me of the better kind of headmaster, living in semi-retirement somewhere, perhaps in East Anglia." Not a typical feudal ruler.
He owns every inch of Sark (it's not a vast area, about two square miles, with a total of 600 people living on it). He's the only man allowed to keep pigeons, and the only man allowed to keep an unspayed bitch. And now he has to come to terms with democracy.
More to the point, so do the islanders. According to the Barclays' lawyer, the brothers have been investing about £5 million a year in Sark - and that's now going to stop, because, in effect, the islanders elected the wrong people to parliament.
Democracy can sometimes be expensive. And 12 days before Christmas, about 140 people have lost their jobs. How odd that, in 2008, they should be reflecting that they might have been better off if they'd stuck with feudalism.
I'll be in a very different sort of democracy next week: on Thursday, we'll be broadcasting a special programme, live from Washington, in which we'll be discussing with a panel of experts Barack Obama's foreign policy priorities as he prepares to take office next month. I hope it'll provide us with a real insight into what changes to expect after George Bush's eight years in the White House. So I hope you'll be able to tune in, either on air or online.
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- Robin Lustig
- 7 Dec 08, 05:56 PM
The Israeli political commentator and former government adviser Daniel Levy draws attention to a report from the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution that suggests the next US administration should "press Israel to freeze settlement construction" by threatening to withhold some of its aid if settlement-building continues.
His comments come after widespread condemnation in the Israeli press of attacks by settlers against Palestinians after the Israeli army moved to evict settlers from a house in the flashpoint West Bank town of Hebron. (There's video footage of some of that violence here.)
One report in Haaretz described the violence as "out and out pogroms". Haaretz also reports that the Israeli security forces are now preparing for a "wave of violence by extremist West Bank settlers".
But here's the thing: Israel goes to the polls in February and the opinion polls suggest the right-wing Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu will win. He is unlikely to take kindly to any suggestion from Mr Obama that US aid could be tied to a settlement freeze.
So could this become one of the new US President's first big foreign policy challenges? I wonder if secretary of state-designate Hillary Clinton has already booked her ticket to Tel Aviv.
