By Mark LeVine
Learning from the Israelis (as Usual) (the last section @ the bottom)
If such planned chaos was limited to Iraq, we could perhaps see it as an aberration rather than part of the larger dynamics of contemporary globalization. But research on countries from Africa to the former Soviet Union has demonstrated that chaos -- whether the "instrumentalized disorder" in sub-Saharan Africa or the "bardok" of Central Asia -- defines political life across an increasingly large "arc of instability" stretching across three continents. Palestine is a particularly good example of how chaos, or "fawda" as Palestinians term it, can serve the political interests of an occupying power.
It has long been an open secret that the U.S. conducted extensive training with the help of the Israeli Defense and Security forces to prepare for the urban warfare and interrogation practices of Iraq. While discussing the best way to ram through walls and "interrogate" suspected insurgents, it's not unlikely that the Israelis shared their experiences fomenting chaos to wear down Palestinian society, particularly since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada and the demise of the Oslo negotiations.
As argues Israeli social scientist Gershon Baskin, Ariel Sharon's policy of unilateralism in response to the failure of negotiations has made sense to the majority of Israelis largely because they see the "total chaos" across the West Bank and the "rule of the gun" in newly "liberated" Gaza as demonstrating that "the PA is too weak to rule" an independent Palestine, or even to negotiate its establishment. What few Israelis sharing this position consider, however, is how Israeli policies have systematically created the very chaos that is now used as the excuse for engaging in unilateral steps such as withdrawing from Gaza while cementing -- literally -- Israeli control over much of the West Bank.
Yet the roots of Israel's strategy of chaos do not lie in the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, or in the autocratic and corrupt policies of Yasser Arafat. Rather they go back to 1994 -- the same year that Paul Wolfowitz, then a dean at the Johns Hopkins University, held a conference on the "coming anarchy." It was then that the Paris protocols to the Oslo Agreements were signed. These agreements, rarely mentioned in discussions of why Oslo failed, locked Palestinians into a catastrophic neoliberalized relationship with Israel for the remainder of the Oslo process. This happened just at the moment when Israel more or less permanently closed the Occupied Territories. Aside from a few industries run by Palestinians with ties to Israel, this nearly destroyed what was then a modest but growing Palestinian economy, led to a creeping but disastrous emigration of the country's middle class, and ultimately helped create a "severely depressed… devastated" economy that, in the words of the 2004 Palestine Human Development Report, was "ripe for corruption." <more>
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=30881