November 2007 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Israeli precedent in France/Algeria?

I went to an interesting discussion today. It was led by the Franco-Israeli writer Sylvain Cypel, who was talking about his recent book Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse.
I asked him about the state of the Israeli peace movement these days, wondering aloud if it is really in such chaos and disarray as it seems to be.
His answer was interesting. He said that the essential issue that Israelis and all others need to focus on is the need to end the occupation, rather than “peace” as such. And he recalled how, growing up in France in the 1950s, those on the French left for long time had a main slogan regarding Algeria that was “peace in Algeria,” and didn’t make too much impact with that. But then, he said, in around 1959, they switched their slogan to “Withdraw from Algeria”, and that was when the political system inside France really started to shift on the issue.
So I thought about that quite a bit afterwards. It is true, isn’t it, that everyone right across the political claims that their goal is “peace” between Israel and its neighbors. Including those who specifically negate the idea that this peace needs a robust territorial basis, such as for example, those who argue that what’s needed is a “peace for peace” deal, rather than a “land for peace” deal.
Cypel argued that what is required, first and foremost, is a clear Israeli statement that it will withdraw from the lands occupied in 1967, and then on the basis of that the modalities of the withdrawal, including the possibility of balanced adjustments in the final border, and the nature of the post-withdrawal relationship can all be effectively negotiated. But, he stressed, they should be negotiated in the context of a clear prior Israeli commitment to withdraw. Which is what international law requires of Israel, anyway.
(By the way, this is a principle that needs to be applied in the case of the US’s current occupation of Iraq, as well.)
On a broadly related note, when I went to the panel discussion with the Anglo-Israeli peace activist Daniel Levy yesterday, one of the most striking things he said was that it is quite unreasonable to ask the occupied people to provide assurances for the security of the occupiers and even for the settlers from the occupying country.
He also said that making “absolute security” for Israel a firm precondition for the conduct or completion of any final-peace talks– as the Annapolis process currently does, with its references to the really damaging “Road Map”– is a recipe for sure failure. “How can the Palestinians assure the security of Israelis? They don’t have a state, they don’t have anything!”
Parenthetically, I’d add that the PA is quite unable to assure the security of Palestinians, so how can anyone demand that they assure the security of Israelis, as well?
Levy’s bottom line was that completion and implementation of the final-status Palestinian-Israeli agreement simply cannot be held hostage to conditions placed on either side in the arena of interim measures.
This is what I’ve been arguing for the past 14 years. Since Oslo. It’s a crazy idea, and one that gratuitously gives the whole peace negotiation over as a hostage to hardliners on either side who, when they want to torpedo it, have merely to launch yet another escalation or provocation.
Today, by the way, Cypel reminded us that the first terrorist event after Oslo was that undertaken by the American-Israeli settler extremist Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 worshipers in Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque, and wounded 150 more, during his February 1994 rampage there.

60th anniversary of Palestinian Partition Plan

I was at a fascinating post-Annapolis briefing this afternoon, jointly delievered by two Israeli peaceniks (Daniel Levy and Ori Nir), two Palestinian negotiations officials (Ghaith al-Omary and Greg Khalil) and one American negotiations expert (Scott Lasensky.) It was hosted by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, whose Executive Director Phil Wilcox chaired the session, and had many other great pro-peace organizations supporting it.
All the contributions from the panelists were interesting, some very inspiring indeed. Levy, who had been a key advisor to then-FM Shimon Peres during the very hurried negotiations of the last months of Barak’s premiership in 2000, is a very smart young British-Israeli. (His dad is the slightly disgraced and controversial Blair fundraiser/crony, Lord Levy. But Daniel seems smart and very thoughtful in his own right, as well as being, obviously, very well-connected.)
He reminded the hordes gathered there in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill that today is the 60th anniversary of the UN’s passing of the Partition Plan for Palestine.
“That was truly an amazing day,” he said.

The 78% of the land of M.P. was what the Jewish state ended up controlling after the fighting of 1948-49– right up to the Armistice Line agreed on in the Armistice (ceasefire) Agreements of 1949. The remaining 22% of M.P. is what the Palestinians and the Arab peace Plan want to see as the territory of the independent Palestinian. Both Levy and Khalil noted that the Arabs are not now talking about the 22% of land that Israel conquered in 1948, that the UN had earlier allocated to the Palestinian Arab state. You can see a good mapped representation of those areas in the the Wikipedia page linked to above.
Levy also warned, incidentally, that the Annapolis-launched negotiations really represent Israel’s last chance at retaining a Jewish state. “If they fail,” he said, “Israel will become more and more like South Africa (I’m assuming he meant pre-democratic South Africa ~HC) and international support for it will fall, especially among US Jews.”
Anyway, there is a lot more to write about the event. I’ll have to wait a while to do that, though, as I have a bunch of other things to catch up with.
So mazel tov to all Israelis on the anniversary of the birth-certificate of your Jewish state! Do remember, though, that there was a twin brother given a birth certificate at exactly that same time, in the same incubator, but he hasn’t been allowed to see the light of day yet. It strikes me that the fate of both peoples is still irrevocably intertwined.
(Note to commenters: Yes, I am well aware the Arab states rejected the Partition Plan at the time. A regrettable but in the circumstances not incomprehensible position to take. Now, they are seeking significantly less than the P.P. We have discussed the Arab rejection of the P.P. here on JWN many times and don’t need to revisit it in this discussion. Let’s be forward looking! What can be done to help realize the hopefulness there is in the Annapolis process– however small it might appear as of now?)
Update, 20 mins. later:
Levy has put a thoughtful assessment of Annapolis up on his blog, here. I thought his analysis of the speeches the three principals made there was very perceptive. especially this comment:

Only President Bush came up short, sticking to a simplistic good-versus-evil narrative that was not only patronizing, divisive and lacking any resonance with the Arab world, but might very well prove counterproductive.

Personally, I wish Levy were running US diplomacy right now. Couldn’t we naturalize him with the same haste that the Australian Zionist activist Martin Indyk was naturalized here in 1992 in order that he could immediately jump into helping run Clinton’s Middle East policy, and then have Levy be named Condi’s deputy?
Update, a further 30 mins later:
I have just checked my notes, and actually in making the reference to the two-state solution and South Africa, levy made clear that these were remarks that Olmert had made in a very recent interview with HaAretz. (And here it is in English.) Of course, this makes it an utterance of considerably greater political weight and impact. Sorry about the mistake.

Sadat and Saudis tried to prop up failing Nixon?

Yet more from the Nixon tapes, which will prove to be, I think, a huge treasure trove. (The Nixon Archives link to the new releases is here.) The WaPo’s Walter Pincus evidently spent time poring over them yesterday and came up with a cable to Kissinger from then-US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Jim Akins (mis-spelled by Pincus as Adkins) describing a “secret” letter Pres. Sadat wrote to King Faisal in January 1974 saying that Nixon

“could easily be impeached” and that “Arabs must do everything they can to strengthen” Nixon…

Well, the letter was supposed to be “secret”, but Akins reported that a “senior Saudi official” had read it out to him…
That was in the middle of the post-1973 War oil boycott. Pincus continues:

“The one thing they could do which would be most effective,” Sadat wrote Faisal, “would be to assure the president that the [oil] boycott would be lifted as soon as disengagement [with Israel forces] could be accomplished.” Kissinger traveled to the Middle East in February 1974, and the boycott was lifted the following month.

The linking of the termination of the oil boycott with the Israeli-Egyptian disengagement agreement has always been well understood. A motivation on the behalf of at least some of the Arabs to do this to “save” Nixon seems new to me, though perhaps not to others. It is also quite possible that that the oil-exporting states needed to end the boycott for their own reasons, as well. (And that the US needed to get the disengagement for its own reasons, too.)

Kissinger on the Israeli nukes

U.S. government archives from 1969 currently being declassified and made available to the public show that back in 1969 Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, (1) knew that Israeli had nuclear weapons, contrary to public avowals of no such knowledge, and (2) helped to design and implement a policy whereby Israel’s connivance in a scheme to keep its nuclear arsenal hidden would be rewarded by the US giving them additional, very potent, non-nuclear weapons.
Kudos to the NYT’s David Stout who has been scouring the newly released documents and writing about their revelations, e.g. here. I have long argued, e.g. in this 1988 (long PDF) article here, that successive Israeli governments have used their thinly veiled possession of a powerful nuclear arsenal as much to blackmail the US as for any other purposes. For example, one of the Kissinger quotes Stout has from 1969 is that, “The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons.” I actually doubt that, under most scenarios. After all, what would happen to Israel itself if they did use them?
Maybe Kissinger actually the Israelis would be crazy enough to use ’em, or maybe he only wrote that to Nixon, to scare him into going along with the conventional-arms transfer scheme. (Kissinger was also, in his role as a US strategist as opposed to merely an Israeli flak, known to use the idea of trying to make opponents think the US would be crazy enough to use its nukes or do other irrational things, as a way of scaring them into undertaking actions of appeasement.)
No time to write more now. Stout’s piece has some good links to the actual documents which will certainly be worth following up.
Of course, this whole “revelation” of a matter that has in fact been public knowledge for decades now– that Israel was indeed the first nuclear-weapons state in the Middle east and so far remains the only one– could be seen as coming at a bit of an awkward time for the Bushites, as they continue to try to crank up opposition to Iran’s nuclear program, which is still nowhere near producing any nuclear weapons at all even if (which is as yet unproven) that is where the Iranians are heading.

Saudi-Syrian deal gives Lebanon a President?

So it looks as though– just as Pervez Musharraf has been stripping off his uniform in Pakistan– in Lebanon Army Chief of Staff Michel Suleiman may be about to move into the Presidential palace in Baabdah.
Suleiman has been one of the candidates favored by Syria. For me, this immediately raises the question of whether there was a Saudi-brokered deal that involved the Syrians sending a (not high-level) representative to Annapolis, and them then getting a presidential candidate in Lebanon with whom they feel they can live?
It was a switch to Suleiman’s candidacy by the Saudi-supported Saad Hariri’s “Future Movement” that made Suleiman the front-runner. Some constitutional issues still persist– namely, that a government employee of his stature is not supposed to become president. But no doubt Musharraf could teach him the dance of the seven combat boots. And anyway, many Lebanese harbor some fairly fond memories of the presidency of Fouad Chehab, who took over in 1958 after a successful, nation-building term as Chief of Staff.
Re the possibility of a Suleiman-Annapolis ‘deal” recall that in Point 3 of this Nov. 22 post on JWN I wrote:

it was their Lebanon interests

Well, perhaps not so different after all?
On the question of why Syria cares so much about what happens in Lebanon, there are, of course, hundreds of reasons. (You’ll have to read at least three of my books to find out everything I have to say on the subject.) Right now, though, Syria’s Baathist rulers and their many supporters have a vivid fear that the “joint”, Lebanese-international tribunal investigating the 2005 Hariri murder and a string of other political murders since then will be used by the US-dominated “international community” to in some way weaken and perhaps bring down the Baathist regime in Syria. Within Lebanon the president is one key player, but not the only one, in the decisionmaking around the tribunal.
(But since Syria did go to Bush’s party in Annapolis, does that mean it can now have some assurance that the Bush administration will be easing up on the panoply of regime-needling, regime-weakening, and otherwise very destabilizing things it’s been doing against Syria in recent years? We’ll have to see.)
One strong illustration of the intense hostility that some Lebanese have toward the Asad regime was provided when long-time Lebanese Druze feudal leader Walid Jumblatt addressed the strongly pro-Israeli “Washington Institute for Near East Policy’s annual conference last month. Walid’s father was killed by the Syrians during the Lebanese civil war of 1977; and in late 2004, the Syrians (or someone) tried to blow up the car carrying Walid’s close political confidante Marwan Hamadeh. So you can perhaps understand that Walid is very strongly anti-Syrian at this point. (Though for most of the period between 1977 and 2004 he was a fairly close ally of Syria. Go figure.)
Actually– how can I say this kindly, which I want to do to since I’ve known him fairly well since before his father’s death?– Walid is, ahem, not the world’s most stable individual.
Anyway, if you read the transcript of his presentation at WINEP, you’ll discover it is full of incitement against Syria. Including this exchange, with the well-known failed diplomatist Dennis Ross:

Ross:

Jumblatt:

If you could send some car bombs to Damascus, why not?

A few exchanges later, he tried to pass off that remark as “just a joke”… I was, actually, fairly shocked to read the whole transcript of that session and see how extremely belligerent and batty the guy has become… Or perhaps, to see how very belligerent in form of mental instability has now become.
Remember, too, that he was not speaking to a collection of backwoods, powerless people there at WINEP. The place is stacked high with former and future mid- to high-level officials in administrations both Republican and Democratic. It is “revolving-door central” in the systematic effort the tough pro-Israelis in this country have mounted to put their people into positions of power and influence. All the more worrying, therefore, to me as a US citizen– and presumably also to the Syrians?– to see that Walid’s original remark about the car-bombs was greeted by the audience with, according to the transcript: “[Laughter, applause]”
Meanwhile, back in Lebanon, it is by no means a done deal yet that Suleiman’s backers can pull together all the votes they need to get parliament to elect him. But it definitely looks as though something interesting has been getting unblocked in the country’s previously deadlocked political geology.
That’s good news. Let’s hope this trend toward de-escalation can continue.
Update, way past bed-time: I just saw Josh Landis’s take on this. He writes: “If … Suleiman becomes president of Lebanon, Syria will be a winner as a result of Annapolis. Lebanon as well.” I’m not as convinced of that as he seems to be… But the general trend-line seems good.

After Annapolis: Bring the Syrians back in!

The bicycle is going forward, over rough ground, and very shakily. It might lose momentum at any time. And then, how many of those now perched atop it will tumble to the ground?
Or, is there anything those now aboard it can do to give it some real forward momentum?
This is an interesting question. George Bush may have thought that, by succeeding in getting so many participants to come to Annapolis, he would put added pressure on the Israelis and Palestinians– well, especially the Palestinians– to make the concessions that would be needed for a diplomatic success.
He may have thought that by getting such a broad turnout he would succeed in increasing the diplomatic isolation of Iran.
I think, though, that with the broad turnout he succeeded mainly in creating extra pressure on his own administration to perform effectively in the diplomacy started in Annapolis. All those invitees are all now, to one degree or another, invested in the process. (In the case of the Saudis, I would say that in both cash and political terms, they are are, actually, invested very heavily in it at this point.)
But the Brits, the Russians, the Chinese (as a permanent member of the UNSC), the EU, and the UN itself are all also heavily invested in the post-Annapolis “process”. And not, mainly, by virtue of their having gone to the confab itself, though that is definitely a part of it. But also by virtue of all those parties having very strong interests of their own in Middle Eastern stability, and the fact that post-Annapolis is now “the only game in town” for defusing and resolving the potentially extremely destabilizing Israeli-Palestinian crisis… And it is, as is now quite clear, a very high-stakes game indeed. As of today, the goal has been defined: a final-status agreement between Israel and Palestine before the end of 2008.
So the Bush administration, as the party that prepared, stage-managed, and hosted this gathering, is now in the hot seat. And if Washington cannot perform well in the diplomatic tasks ahead of it, then those other parties, who may have been invited along to Annapolis to play the role of Greek Chorus, may well come to the conclusion that the stage director is wrecking the play– and is causing grievous harm to their own interests in the process– and they, or a sub-group of them may feel they need to move in and take over the show.
This peacemaking business will certainly not be easy, whoever does it. Of course, the rifts within the Palestinian community are huge. (And so will be the rifts inside Israel if the government moves significantly towards the kind of “painful compromises” that Olmert talked about in his speech.)
One thing I really wish Bush had done that could have made a significant difference in the dynamic of the negotiation was to spell out clearly and compellingly that the goal of this process is to have an Israel that is– finally!– at peace with all of its neighbors… an Israel that is no longer threatened by invasion but has straightforward and constructive working relations with not just all its neighbors but also all the Arab states beyond them, too. This is, I know, a good part of the intention of the Arab Peace Plan of 2002. But it corresponds to a much older and deeper dynamic, too: the idea that an Israel that is at peace with all its Arab-state neighbors will have a lot more of the self-confidence required to make those “painful concessions” to the Palestinians who are currently lodged with their necks under the IDF’s boots.
That’s why I think it is a huge pity that Bush was so peremptory and dismissive of the Syrians at Annapolis. In fact, he didn’t even mention Syria in his address, and neither did Olmert or Abu Mazen. [Correction, Wed. evening: Abu Mazen actually did mention the need to end the occupation of Syrian Golan, and the need for “Arab-Israeli” peace as well as Palestinian-Israeli peace. Sorry about my too-fast reading of it last night. ~HC] Olmert mentioned “normalization” with Arab states– but he didn’t mention the vital other part of that equation, which is a successfully negotiated final peace agreement with all of Israel’s Arab neighbors, and Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied lands in Syria and Lebanon, as well as Palestine.
If a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace is to be reached, that requires active engagement on the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese tracks. And Syria is not a small or weak power. It has considerable influence inside the political communities in both Lebanon and Palestine. Bringing the Syrians fully into the process at Annapolis would have served the cause of peacemaking on all three of the remaining “tracks” and would have transformed the political dynamics of the whole Near East.
By contrast, tricking the Syrians into coming to Annapolis– which is what it looks like right now– and then giving them the cold shoulder once they got there will end up serving nobody’s interests. Doing that may well end up riling a number of the other “big powers” who were represented at Annapolis. And it almost certainly portends further trouble down the road for the hard-pressed people of Lebanon.
I would love for someone to explain to me why the idea of a truly comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, one that ends the state of war that has existed for decades now between Israel and all three of these Arab neighbors, was not enthusiastically embraced and proclaimed in Annapolis by Bush (or, come to that, by either Olmert or Abu Mazen). Does this idea– which seems so inspiring and so powerful to me– somehow induce fear in the members of the Bush administration?
I suppose some people might say, “Well, it’s going to be hard enough to get a decent peace between just the Israelis and Palestinians– but trying to get an Israeli-Syrian peace and deal with the hornet’s nest of Lebanon all at the same time would make the task impossible!” But I think that reaction seriously mis-states the dynamic at work here, which I see roughly in the way I outlined above. Remember, too, that (1) the Syrians have tremendous power– if they are thus motivated–to help bring aboard the peace train (or bike, to keep my metaphors somewhat straight here) numerous Palestinians and Lebanese who would otherwise be inclined to oppose the idea of concluding a final peace agreement with Israel. And (2) just the broad reframing of the whole peace project, by itself– the proclamation that “the goal here is to end the state of war in this whole region and to build it up into a region in which everyone has the chance to live and to thrive in peace”– could have a powerful political effect in communities exhausted and drained by so many decades of war. Especially if it is the whole world, except Iran, who is saying this.
The “vision thing”: that’s what Pres. Bush the Elder used to talk about sometimes, in fairly derisive terms. But I don’t think this particular peace bicycle has any chance of moving forward without it. So if the bike collapses shakily to the ground, who will be the ones falling off?

Golan, the human story

Much of the western media follows the Israeli-initiated habit of thinking and speaking about the issue of Golan only in (very threatening) strategic terms. But Golan is also– like the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza– a frequently heart-rending human story, one of dispossession, exile, oppression, and the splitting-up of families.
You can read a lot about the human dimension of Golan in Golan Days, a series of five articles that I published in Arabic in al-Hayat in 1998. They were the result of research/reporting trips I had made to Israel, occupied Golan, and Syria earlier that year.
Note that Israel unilaterally annexed Golan in 1981. But that act of Anschluss was quite illegal under international law. During the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of the early and mid-1990s, Israeli premiers Rabin and Peres promised the U.S. that, if they could win the security, economic, and political measures they desired from Syria, then Israel would be ready to withdraw from the whole of the Golan.Those negotiations failed after that Israeli offer was abruptly pulled off the table by Ehud Barak in 2000.
Meanwhile, throughout and since the 1990s Israel’s policy of implanting settlers on the broad, fertile expanses of Golan’s land has continued, though not with the fervor and frenzy of the settlement project in the West Bank. In 2006, there were 18,105 settlers on Golan, according to this table from the Foundation for Middle East Peace (which is an excellent source on the Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank, too.)
Before Israel occupied Golan in 1967, there was a population of around 130,000 Syrians in the area, mainly farmers. This 2000 map (PDF) from FMEP shows you the ghosts of the villages and towns that they left behind them– the empty grey circles and squares there. Tragically, in the fighting of 1967, nearly the whole of the indigenous Syrian population of Golan fled or was forced out. Their national army, which had previously held the whole of the Golan plateau, had suffered a humiliating rout.
Only a small number remained– mainly followers of the Druze religion, who lived in winding villages clinging to the slopes of Jebel al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon). You can see their five villages in grey near the top of the map. Nowadays, they have, I think, around the same population as that of the Israeli settlements– but living under very different circumstances from the land-pampered settlers. You can read a little about the lives of the Golan Syrians who still live in their family’s ancestral homes, in Parts 1 and 2 of my Golan days series.
Also, you should go look at the two installments of an English Al-Jazeera documentary called Across the Shouting Valley, that are available on YouTube here and here. They very movingly portray the human and many other dimensions of the Golan issue. They have some interesting interviews with settlers; and they have many beautiful shots of the Golan landscape, too.
(Great job, Al-Jazeera!)
The second installment there has a short interview with an Israeli settler called Effie Eitam who is also a leader of one of Israel’s rightwing parties. But in general, the political profile of most of the settlers in Golan is significantly different from that of the West Bank settlers. For starters, Golan is not generally considered by most Jews to be part of the historic “Land of Israel”. So there is very little of that intense, religio-nationalist fervor that marks the activities of many West bank settlers. Secondly, putting settlements on the Golan was overwhelmingly a project of Labour governments in Israel, who put them there for reasons that– at the time, in the late 1960s– were much more justifiably “for security reasons” than most of the settlements in the west Bank. (Since then, of course, the development of long-distance missiles means that possession of the high ground in Golan is no longer the strategic “ace in the hole” that it once was.)
But the result is that the 18,000 Golan settlers are much more likely to be long-time Labour supporters than most of the West Bank settlers. And though many of their most vocal community leaders are staunchly on the hawkish, pro-territorial expansion wing of Labour, there are many others who are not– including a very interesting farmer called Yigal Kipnis whom I met and talked to back in 1998, as you can see in Part 4 of the series.
Read in particular, his views on the possibility of Israel withdrawing in the context of a peace treaty:

“We need to remember that we came here in 1967 to protect our own settlements inside Israel, and to protect our water rights — not to take any extra land. Our presence here was and is still intended to provide that protection. But if we have a peace agreement with Syria, the situation would be quite different — provided those things were protected.”

(Yigal still lives in the settlement of Maale Gamla. He and I kept in touch in a rough fashion after that. Some time later he enrolled in a Ph.D program in Haifa University– and wrote his whole thesis there on the Israeli political aspects of the Golan issue. I met him again recently in Washington DC. I want to help him get some of his work made available in English– it seems like fascinating stuff!)
Anyway, it has long mystified me why the Syrians have not done more to explain some of the human dimensions of the Golan issue, which are often just as heart-rending as all those “Let y people go!” campaigns that US Jewish organizations ran in favor the Soviet Jews back in the 1980s. Instead, the Syrians have allowed the Israeli narrative of Golan as “simply a strategic question– and an Israelo-centric one, at that” to dominate all discussion of the Golan issue in the west. Human-interest-centered stories about political issues may seem trite. But still, they do have a great power to help frame the way that people think about the political issues involved… But from the way Golan is presented in the western media, you’d think that it is just a single, steep and potentially very threatening strategic escarpment and has no human dimension at all. Not true!
(You could call this the “vertical” view of Golan– as opposed to a “horizontal” view that takes into account the fact that there’s a huge expanse of lovely, fertile land up there; and that there are people from both nationalities who have histories, lives, and claims there.)
I guess in my wondering– and discussing with a few Syrian friends– why the Syrian government has not done more to “humanize” the issue, I concluded that could perhaps be explained by two factors: (1) a lingering sense of shame about the extent and seriousness of the collapse that the national army’s whole network of positions in Golan experienced in 1967, and (2) a reluctance to do too much to empower and/or mobilize the Golani Syrians within the national political system.
By some counts, the “nazeheen” (displaced persons) from Golan and their descendants now number more than a quarter million. And of course, under international law (and human logic) they have every right to be able to return to their ancestral homes and properties there.
Unlike the Palestinians displaced in 1948 and 1967, the Syrian nazeheen did have a government that provided them with the basic services they needed to survive and to get a fairly good start in life: basic housing, health, and education services. And like many displaced persons throughout history they have actually, in general, done pretty well in the Syrian economy and professions, and in the Syrian migrant-labor community in the Gulf. But Syria’s Baathist government is chronically wary of seeing any auto-mobilization of sub-groups within the society, so maybe its failure to present the wrenching human dramas of the split and dispossessed families more effectively to the outside world has something to do with that, too.
So if the Syrian-Israeli negotiations do get resumed in earnest in the days and weeks ahead, I’ll probably try to follow up on some of these human interest stories.

Condi’s conversion, Bush, etc

Two fascinating pieces in today’s NYT.
This one by Elisabeth Bumiller chronicles Condi rice’s conversion from being a big Israeli-Arab negotio-skeptic to now being the cheerleader for Bush’s extremely belated venture into peacemaking there.
After describing how derisive both Bush and Rice were back in 2001 of the whole idea of the US having an active role in israeli-Palestinian mediating, Bumiller wrote,

When Ms. Rice became secretary of state in the second term, she told Mr. Bush in a long conversation at Camp David the weekend after the 2004 election that her priority would have to be progress in the Middle East. It was a turning point in more ways than one; Mr. Arafat died a few days later. Although Ms. Rice said in an interview that she had set no conditions when she took the job, her aides said that she had known that her relationship with the president would give her far greater influence to push an agenda, including peacemaking in the Middle East, than Mr. Powell’s…

Her first two major judgment calls in the Palestinian arena showed mainly her lack of ability to judge it. Those were (1) the active support she gave to Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and (2) the active support she gave to the Palestinian elections of January 2006. In the first case, the fact that the Israeli withdrawal was unilateral meant that (a) it did nothing to establish a negotiating-type relationship between Sharon and Abu Mazen, (b) Israel remained quite free from any negotiated-and-agreed commitments to the Palestinians, so it retained a free hand to continue very oppressive and sometimes lethal policies in both the West bank and Gaza, and (c) it weakened Abu Mazen politically by making him look irrelevant to Palestinians.
How many of those outcomes were foreseen or intended by Rice, I wonder?
Regarding the Palestinian elections, I think she made completely the right decision– but she totally misjudged the outcome, which was a rout for Fateh. (In part, because of factor ‘c’ above.) And then, instead of swallowing hard and dealing with the outcome, she backed Olmert in his pursuit of extremely punitive policies against the Palestinians.
And then, in the summer of 2006, she (or her boss?) made decisions regarding Israel’s lethal assault against Lebanon that were both ethically horrendous and very counter-productive from a policy point of view.
So we cannot at this point say that her track record as Bush’s chief manager on Israeli-Arab affairs has been a good one.
Bumiller also has this description of the motivations for Condi’s current activism in the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace:

I am really surprised and saddened to see that her aides apparently didn’t say a word there about Condi finally realizing that peace is an extremely necessary and valuable thing for both Israelis and Palestinians to work for… They just seem to be presenting her as this machiavellian manipulator.
(Bumiller also has a really hackneyed quote from previous longtime– and failed– “peace processor” Dennis Ross in which he says, “This administration has too often engaged in stagecraft, not statecraft.” Like Dennis was any good at statecraft during all those years he presided over a string of failed negotiations?? Note that I exempt from that criticism the work Dennis did in helping prepare the Madrid conference of 1991– but at that point, he was acting mainly as a gofer for Jim Baker, rather than running the show himself.)
The second interesting NYT piece is also by Bumiller. It is this short-ish exploration of Rice’s relationship with Bush. Turns out she tries to be his nanny, too, not just the nanny to the whole of the rest of the world… and he sort of jokes about the extent to which she “tells” him what to do. It sounds like a bizarre and very unhealthy way to run a country.
And finally, we have this, from the president himself when he was meeting with Abu Mazen earlier today:

The United States cannot impose our vision, but we can help facilitate.

That is such nonsense! There is a tremendous amount the US could do, both by working other nations in the security Council and by re-structuring the pattern of the incentives and disincentives it gives to Israelis and Palestinians (i.e. carrots and sticks), in order to push for the US’s own reading of what is a just, legitimate, and sustainable outcome between Israelis and Palestinians. The US is a great power, for goodness’ sake, and seldom holds back from telling any other country in the world how to run its business.
But in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, all Bush aspires to do is to “help facilitate” the negotiations between these two extremely mismatched parties.
If he sticks with this approach, and if the adults in the international community don’t step in and take the process over from him as he falters, then this Annapolis-launched process will be going, very dangerously, nowhere.
Why can’t he simply say, forthrightly and frankly, that the US has its own strong interests in the speedy attainment of a fair and sustainable final peace agreement– all of which is true– and will be working hard with all concerned parties to achieve that?

State Dept spin on Annapolis: Other possible scenarios?

The very well-informed Boston University expert on Lebanon and the Middle East, Dick Norton, had a great catch on his “Speaking Truth to Power” blog yesterday: the text of the internal “Talking Points” (= spin) that the US State Dept HQ has been sending out to diplomats and consular officials around the world, regarding the imminent Annapolis meeting.
This spin-sheet is fascinating inasmuch as it can be understood as expressing a great deal of Condi Rice’s current actual hopes and planning for the Annapolis and post-Annapolis “process”.
However, though Condi and her boss might think they can control the whole of this process, I judge that it may well get beyond their control.
Back at the time of the last launch of a serious Israeli-Arab peacemaking process, in Madrid in 1991, the US stood at the height of its global power. The USSR was in the midst of long, four-year collapse into its constituent parts. The US was the Uberpower that had “won” the Cold war– and throughout the rest of the 1990s, it was able to control every aspect of the Israeli-Arab peacemaking diplomacy. (Which, guess what, got nowhere, while Israel continued implanting hundreds of thousands of additional settlers into the West Bank.)
But 2007 ain’t 1991. The US’s power position in the world has eroded considerably since then. As has– especially after summer 2006– the strategic utility of the military dominance that Israel continues to exercise over the whole of the Mashreq (Near East.)
In 1991, the Bush-Baker team at Madrid had the USSR sitting there as some kind of co-hosts. But really, that was a nearly wholly symbolic gesture. Two years later the USSR collapsed completely.
This year, the US has the other three members of the “Quartet” along in some kind of possibly co-hosting capacity. That’s Russia, the EU, and the UN. (The UN’s stance as “junior partner” to Washington in this peacemaking is highly anomalous and, I would say, not sustainable for very much longer.) We should not imagine that these three “partners” will all continue to be happy just to be Condi’s arm candy for very much longer. Matters for all parties, throughout the Middle East are far too serious for that; and the need to proactively pursue this chance for speedy final resolution of all the remaining strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict is correspondingly pressing.
I shall write more on this broader aspect of Annapolis in the days ahead. But for now, let’s look at the main dimensions of the spin that Dick Norton has caught for our edification:
Immediate comments on this:

1. No mention at all of the Syrian track.

the efforts of the Palestinians and the Israelis.

This is bad news for the Syrians, of course, who have for a long time been eager to resume and complete their long-stalled negotiations with Israel. But it is also bad news for everyone else. A US/Israeli peace effort that seeks mainly to split the Palestinians off from the Syrians and play one against the other is a recipe for failure on all tracks. A successful Israeli-Syrian agreement, reached in parallel with a successful Palestinian-Israeli agreement, would also bring in its train a rapid Israeli-Lebanese peace– and Israel would then be at peace with all its neighbors!
Imagine that! That was the vision held up at Madrid, and it is still the most compelling, and most viable, vision that we can hold up today.
2. No mention by name of the President. In the section on “U.S. commitment,” the spin-sheet refers only to actions undertaken by Rice. The US stance would be a lot more convincing if the Pres had committed his full power to this process. How can we be assured that that Dick Cheney is not still busy machinating hard against it behind the scenes?
3. Ignorance and boilerplate vagueness. Okay, I know it was the Thanksgiving Day weekend and probably lots of people in Condi’s spin-shop were not in the office… But look at this little sub-clause: “the stablishment [sic] of a Palestinian state for the first time in many years.” How sloppy! Folks: There has never been a Palestinian state yet!
Also, look at this, for vagueness: “Much has been said over a long period of time about critical issues like border, refugees and Jerusalem.” Yes? And what kind of conclusion does the US think these discussions ought to come to? How about some recognition that a lot of fine preliminary work has been done on all these issues in the years since 1991, so with good will and determination they should not be too hard to resolve?
I should note, though, that both the global and regional balances have undergone significant, though still limited, shifts since the time the Geneva and Nusseibeh-Ayalon formulas emerged back in 2003, so the US and Israel will no longer be so able to defend the interests of the Israeli settlers as they were back then. That is, a politically sustainable outcome reached in 2007-2008 would probably be closer to the “international law” position and the Green Line than Geneva or Nusseibeh-Ayalon were…

Anyway, my bottom line on “Annapolis” today: Let’s wait and see whether it really develops into a worldwide effort to get the whole of the Israeli-Arab conflict resolved.
If it does, that’s good for everybody. Everybody. If it doesn’t, it will be certainly be bad for everyone concerned.

Annapolis: the Israeli political aspect

Two interesting articles in Monday’s HaAretz. This one is headed Rightists target mainstream to fight concessions at Annapolis, and tells us the following:

forced to contend with defeatism as well as internal disputes

There is a lot more interesting material in there, too, including some consideration of what looks like a generational clash within the settler movement. Older leaders are more reported as focused on trying to keep/win the “hearts and minds” of the non-settlers who make up the vast majority of Israel’s population, while the younger settlers have maintained an active posture of battling with the police in various spots throughout the occupied West Bank. (This has been woefully under-reported in the US MSM.)
I guess I had been wondering in my own mind what effect the heavily “dramatized” events of the summer of 2005– when thousands of settler activists from the West Bank rushed to the Gaza settlements and staged some very determined– and yes, nonviolent– mass actions to try to “resist” being evicted from those settlements as per Sharon’s plan of that year. (You can read some of the contemporary discussion of those events on JWN from mid-August 2005, here— also, in many other posts in August and July 2005.)
You could also say that part of Sharon’s plan then had been precisely to see and then broadly publicize those emotional scenes, as he had done earlier with the 1982 evacuation of the settlements in northern Sinai, as a way of “showing” to the world how difficult or perhaps impossible a later evacuation of the West Bank settlements would be…
But how very interesting if the lesson some of the settler leaders took from that whole episode was that even with all the efforts they undertook in 2005, they still failed to sway Israel’s non-settler public opinion in their favor.
(I would note, too, that though it is evidently significant that during the Gaza events, the settlers were overwhelmingly nonviolent, that still does not in itself make their cause just. They were, after all, trying to hang onto settlements that were illegal under international law, all along.)
And the second HaAretz piece I found really interesting was this little article, headlined Study: Israelis’ confidence in IDF, security services at 7-year low.
So I guess public-opinion researchers from two Israeli universities, who have used a measure of their compatriots’ confidence in some public institutions since 2001, have found that the IDF in general got 3.27 points out of a possible 5.00 in this year’s survey, down from 3.56 in 2001. The Mossad and Shin Bet (foreign and domestic security services) meanwhile had a combined score of 3.53 this year, down from 3.81 in 2003.
I am still not sure whether these kinds of findings are generally good the broader cause of peace, or not. I would certainly hope that– especially after the events of summer 2006 demonstrated quite clearly that no amount of technical military superiority can on its own enable Israel to win significant strategic gains against a determined and smart opponent— the fact that Israelis currently have a lowered confidence in their military and security services would incline them more towards finding a negotiated peace with all their neighbors.
However, it is also possible that an embattled Israeli military and political leadership– which both of them are at this point, politically, at home– might seek to “break out of” their sense of being besieged by launching yet another doomed but extremely harmful military adventure.
However, the momentum, for now, is in the direction of peacemaking. That is excellent! Let it be for real! And let Israel’s 7 million people now– finally– increase their understanding that finding a sustainable, respectful peace with all their neighbors is a far, far better way to assure their security than all their 60 years’-worth of reliance on brute force, militarization, nuclear weapons, oppression, and intimidation.