Washington losing struggle for Abu Mazen’s soul?

Al-Hayat had an interesting report (in Arabic there) today saying that leadership sources in Hamas confirm that they have reached a “memorandum of understanding” with Fateh in preparation for the imminent resumption of dialogue between the two movements.
Does this look like some major steps back toward the Mecca Agreement for peaceful power-sharing between the two Palestinian movements that was achieved with Saudi mediation (and financial backing) back in February? Not surprising if it does, since Hamas’s website reports today that Hamas’s Damascus-based overall leader Khaled Mishaal has now traveled to the Saudi capital “to discuss means of restoring Palestinian national dialogue.”
To me, this indicates that the Saudis are most likely pretty disappointed with the Annapolis meeting of November 27 and the notable lack of any serious US engagement with the peacemaking at and since that meeting
When Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal attended Annapolis, from his country’s perspective it was making a huge up-front concession to the Israelis by agreeing to be there in the negotiating room with them before Israel has even done anything to announce a clear commitment to undertake significant withdrawals from the Arab territories it has occupied since 1967. The Saudis also went out on a limb, and probably paid quite a lot of hard cash, to help “persuade” the Syrians and other Arab governments to participate in Annapolis. (Though they were noticeably unable to persuade the Iraqis or Kuwaitis, both of which governments no doubt felt that Iran’s close proximity and power and strongly expressed opposition to Annapolis outweighed any Saudi urgings that they should attend.)
The Bush administration responded to the goodwill Riyadh had shown in the run-up to Annapolis by (a) showing blatant disrespect to the Syrians at Annapolis, and (b) doing nothing visible at all to push the peace process any further forward after the confab. Indeed, Pres. Bush has said nothing further in public about Israeli-Arab peacemaking since about noon on Nov. 28. As though his job has now been done?
For its part, Israel responded to Annapolis by announcing its decision to build 300 additional settler-only housing units in the occupied Arab land of Jebel Abu Ghneim, which it renamed Har Homa. Condi Rice responded to questions about that announcement that by bleating sheepishly that she had “sought further clarifications from the Israelis” regarding their plans.
Where is the vision? Where is the commitment? Where is the leadership that is so sorely needed if the peacemaking that was launched at Annapolis is ever to succeed?
Not visible in Washington.
So the Saudis seem to have returned to their original Plan A, and to be retracing the steps they took back in January to craft a new– hopefully more sustainable– Fateh-Hamas agreement.
Some in Washington may be very angry with this attempt. For my part, I think having a unified Palestinian body politic is the only way there is to then move forward to achieving a sustainable Palestinian-Israeli agreement. A politically very weak Abu Mazen (1) will not be strong enough in the negotiations with Israel to withstand or do anything to counter the overbearing demands that the Israelis continue to place on him (with a lot of help from Washington and lapdog-in-chief Tony Blair), and (2) will not be strong enough within the Palestinian community to be able to make any agreement he should happen to reach with Israel “stick.”
A unified Palestinian movement could strengthen its position considerably through the sustained pursuit of massive non-violent civil action in defense of Palestinian rights. That takes vision, discipline, and above all national unity. If Fateh and Hamas can reach a strong agreement on how to proceed, between them they could mobilize tremendous amounts of support from governments and peoples around the world as a way to counter Israel’s reliance on (a) military and administrative domination, and (b) its tight links with some power centers in Washington. And between them, if they remain united, Hamas and Fateh could make any agreement they reach with Israel stick, and stick well.
Readers may want to go back and read this JWN post from late June (shortly after the Fateh-Hamas rift over Gaza), titled “Ten reasons to talk to Hamas,” and this article I had in The Nation in early November on the need to engage politically with both Hamas and Hizbullah.
Former Israeli spy chief Efraim Halevy and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell are just two of the prominent figures internationally who now argue that Hamas should be engaged with politically and not only through the barrel of a gun.
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Update Monday morning:
Haaretz is reporting that “Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s adviser Ahmed Yousuf told Haaretz that he sent a rare letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declaring that Hamas was interested in opening dialogue with the U.S. and the European Union.” On another page, Haaretz carries what it describes as the text of Yousuf’s “Open Letter”, though the provenance of this text is not clear and it is not on Hamas’s own main English-language website or, from a quick glance, their Arabic site.

9 thoughts on “Washington losing struggle for Abu Mazen’s soul?”

  1. Pardon if you covered this elsewhere. I found this (hat tip to Joshua Landis) very intriguing:
    Both conservative and liberal pundits see the [NIE] report as so weakening the White House that the U.S. may have no option but to more aggressively seek direct talks with Iran. Even some U.S. diplomats are seizing on the hope that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could use the intelligence report to open up talks with the West…
    In addition to the report on Iran, Washington’s sudden opening to Syria and President Bashar Assad has also stunned many diplomats and foreign-policy analysts. For most of the past six years, the White House viewed Damascus as among its most intractable foes in the Middle East…
    In recent weeks, though, the U.S. has displayed a growing willingness to talk with Syrian leaders. Damascus’s Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad addressed the Annapolis peace summit last month, just weeks after it was uncertain that the State Department would even invite the Syrians. And U.S. officials say they are considering backing a Russian initiative to promote direct peace talks between the Syrians and the Israelis.
    Won’t this undoubtedly have an impact on the Israel-Palestine issue?

  2. Israel right wingers do not want the Palestinians united, and they do not a solution which brings about a Palestinian “State” in the true meaning of being a state. Hamas was used by Israel to keep Arafat weak, and now Fateh is being used to keep Hamas week. Divide and Rule.
    The Israeli right is about a Greater Israel whose borders are expanded into Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinians driven off, and a divided and weakened Middle East (see Oded Yinons thoughts from the 80’s) .
    There are Israelis and American Jewish who do not share that vision, but there are many Americans who do not agree with US policies, and see what we are doing.
    The only way Israel changes anything is if there is US pressure. The neocons use to joke that Republicans and the Likud Part were one party, and perhaps the Democrats have joined them, so the outlook is not good. The MSM ensures that Americans do not see the real picture, so there is no pressure on the US to change their policy. I do not know if Israel is our 51st state or if our capitol has been moved to Tel Aviv, but the one thing Democrats and Republicans all agree on is whatever Israels position is on any given issue relating to the Palestinians and Middle East.
    The efforts made today are most likely to appease the Saudi’s and their extremist base, and perhaps some legacy building for the future historians who will inevitably write about GWB being a great war time President despite being a man of peace.

  3. There is pressure on the US to change policy but it is largely external. Probably the most crucial pressure comes from states like China and Russia whose foreign policies thrive without automatically as countries retreat from alliance with a power so biassed against Palestinians. The careful image building of the cold war years has evaporated quickly.
    There are also signs that a new, much more muscular, alliance of anti-Israeli forces is being built from the ground upwards. The old paper alliances of Sultans and Pharaohs, with corrupt, demoralised internal security forces masquerading as armies, has lost all credibility not only as opponents of Israel but as legitimate governments. As the Hashemites and the Mubaraks fall they will be replaced by a generation of leaders whose only strength comes from popular support, inspired, not by the pidgin modernism of the Arafats, but by puritanical revolutionaries like Nasrallah, subtle, practical and uninterested in publicity. Particularly in the west.

  5. Slightly off topic, but…
    This morning I listened to a lengthy interview with Daniel Levy and Mustafa Barghouti that left me with a much better impression of Daniel Levy than I had from other things I have heard from him. I commented here a couple of weeks ago that he had exuded palpable arrogance in one interview in particular, and seemed hostile toward his interlocutor, and seemed to want to control the debate. In the interview I heard this morning, I saw something very different, and far more encouraging.

  6. Shirin, thanks for telling us of your revised opinion of DL. My impression is that he is one of these ultra-smart, ultra-articulate young male people whose effusive tendency to have something to say on any topic raised I can often find extremely irritating– except that in Daniel’s case he really is smart and he has a far greater capacity for empathy and for seeing matters from the other person’s point of view than the vast majority of smart, articulate young men have.

  7. Helena, until this morning I would have taken you on big time on your empathy impression, but after hearing the interview I agree that he came across as understanding and empathizing with the Palestinians’ point of view and needs. He and Barghouti seemed to be very much in concert on the important issues and points.
    My thought at the end of the interview was that if it had been up to Daniel Levy the issue would have been taken care of a long time ago.

  9. Wouldn’t it be worth considering if these latest Hamas moves, underlined by those reported by Ha’retz, should be put in the wider context of a possible Iran/US rapprochement being negotiated out of our sight?
    Surely Syria would not have gone to Annapolis at all without Iranian approval or acquiesance given that they announced quite recently a mutual defence pact?

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