Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange–

… could well be near, it seems?
I’m assuming Marwan Barghouthi will be part of it. Also, all the PA parliamentarians detained as hostages/ bargaining chips right after Shalit’s capture. Also, other Palestinian prisoners possibly numbering in the hundreds…
The political effects of this for Hamas would be huge. It would be another big political achievement for them.
I’m assuming Marwan would be a big supporter of Fateh concluding a speedy and decent reconciliation with Hamas. At this point, given the deep divisions within Fateh and the organization’s almost total internal political decay, his reactivation on the scene might be the only development that can allow Fateh’s deeply fragmented factions to come together on anything at all, whether in the negotiations with Hamas or (just possibly) in the broader peace process.
Also, the release of the parliamentarians would allow the (as it happens, Hamas-dominated) PA parliament to regain a quorum once again. So the ’emergency’ that gave Abu Mazen the space to run wild with ’emergency legislation,’ the emergency appointment of his own chosen PM, etc, would then be ended.
The politics and diplomacy of all this could well be fascinating and head in directions no-one in the west has yet really thought much about. Remember that Likud (which is coming in very soon) and Hamas have more objective interests in common than you might think…

45 thoughts on “Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange–”

  1. Ms. Cobban, this is fyi only – the comments sections cannnot be reached. Is it someone’s sabotage? I already happed only a week ago or so.

  2. “Remember that Likud (which is coming in very soon) and Hamas have more objective interests in common than you might think…”
    Never a truer word spoken. Hamas and Likud have always both been opposed to the “two state” solution.Two states is Kadima/Labor and the PLO’s bag.
    Hamas’s goal is to take over the PLO and the Palestinian Authority; can you see any reason why Likud wouldn’t encourage them under the table?
    The Israeli Right has always been able to reclaim office by piggy backing off Hamas extremism and rejectionism: that’s how Likud won in 1996 over Peres; how Sharon beat Barak in 2000; and how recently the Israeli Right handsomely won the recent elections. Hamas tactic was to destroy the Israeli peace movement and the secular Left in Israel and Palestine and to a large extent appears to have succeeded.
    To Likud, a large transfer of prisoners and Shalit’s return would be no more than clearing the decks for the next round of hostilities.
    If Hamas (backed by Iran) gets to take military control over the West Bank via the PA, then Likud will have almost total domestic Israeli support to maintain its iron grip, and, because of the Iranian connection if for no other reason, the US, EU and the PA’s regional neighbours will cheer them on from the sidelines.
    Is this what you mean by “fascinating” and heading “in directions no-one in the west has yet really thought about much”?
    You seem to be looking forward to it?

  4. Olmert is desperate to score something before he yields his post of ‘prime minister’ of a shitty little Levantine country that’s conducted two massacres against its neighbours on his watch, to a slimy right-winger who completely f—-d the hope of the Oslo Accords.
    I agree that releasing elected and kidnapped parliamentarians may be worth the price to pay for the release of one Israeli soldier.
    I will follow the news on Gilad Shalit’s release after nearly 3 years in captivity –
    – Was he waterboarded, subject to loud noises, excess temperatures, or anything else suitable for an enemy combatant?
    And I will compare his and Marwan Barghouti’s recollections of their imprisonment.

  5. Richard, you can’t entirely blame Netanyahu for the “failure” of the Oslo accords, which were always intended mainly as a means to buy time for Israel to tighten its grip on the OPT’s and create facts on the ground that would obviate the two-state solution. Oslo was, after all never supposed to lead to a Palestinian state.

  6. Olmert is desperate to score something before he yields his post of ‘prime minister’ of a shitty little Levantine country….
    Helena, I think it’s time to put up or shut up!

  7. Also, the release of the parliamentarians would allow the (as it happens, Hamas-dominated) PA parliament to regain a quorum once again. So the ’emergency’ that gave Abu Mazen the space to run wild with ’emergency legislation,’ the emergency appointment of his own chosen PM, etc, would then be ended.
    Thanks for mentioning Israeli’s kidnapping of the Palestinian parliament in order to buy room for the US/Israeli Contras to “operate”.
    That’s something that’s rarely (never, ever!) mentioned in the MSM and should have been mentioned by all of us on a daily basis for the past 2 years.
    I think you need a thicker skin JES. We all put up with you and N who take ten times the space to be just as tedious as Richard.

  8. John Francis,
    Perhaps you weren’t around (or on a binge) when I was castigated for using “anal language”.

  9. Perhaps I’ve grown too hardened: I suspect Marwan Barghouthi will not be released, or if he is, he’ll be re-arrested soon after.

  13. Marwan Barghouthi is a terrorist who sent suicide bomber to blow up Israeli schools and malls.
    Israel tried Barghouti in an Israeli court.
    He was convicted on May 20, 2004 of five counts of murder. He was acquitted of 21 counts of murder in 33 other attacks. On June 6, 2004, he was sentenced to five life sentences for the five murders and forty years imprisonment for the attempted murder.
    At least he get red cross visitations, family visitation,he is able to make phone calls and write letters.
    Shalit on the other hand is a young soldier who was kindnaped by terrorist. No one has seen him since. No red cross visits, no phone calls.

  14. to Jihad Richard,
    Your comments reminds me of Nazi propaganda.
    I was wondering if you guys were still around. I was beginning to think you were extinct. Guess not. What a shame.
    How would you feel if your son was in Shalits place?….. You are an A hole.

  15. Helena,
    The Likud and Hamas have no objective interests in common . Israel is a western-style democracy being pressured to make peace with a neighbor that has attacked it over and over and over.
    Hamas is a murderous terror group.
    How would we react if a large aboriginal group started launching frequent attacks? Would we react by peacefully letting them form their own nation where they would be free to continue to launch attacks?
    It would go a long way if people stopped seeing Israelis as so different from themselves. Regardless of their religion, Israel is a nation of modern Western-style life, and until people (like the other commenters here) see them as such, it will continue to be an ignorance dump for the masses.

  16. Calling Israel a democracy is a joke. More than half the people within its political control have no vote and no rights, political, civil or human. If Israel were a true democracy we would be in a far different position. When a state arbitrarily rejects the rights of half of the population within the area of its control based on ethnicity, that is not democracy, it is apartheid.

  18. James – “How would we react if a large aboriginal group started launching frequent attacks?”
    We would transfer them all to somewhere like Oklahoma.
    James – “How would you feel if your son was in Shalits place?….. You are an A hole”
    I would be camping out opposite the Israeli Prime Minister’s residence just as his parents are currently doing.
    And if I were Rachel Corrie’s, or Tristan Anderson’s parents, I would be doing the same thing.

  19. to Jack,
    Apartheid ensured the domination by a white minority over a black majority in every aspect of their daily lives. Blacks could not participate in the political process, they were forced to study in languages selected by the government and their education was geared towards making them useful laborers for their white ‘bosses’.
    All citizens of Israel (whether Muslim or Jewish, Arab or European) have equality before the law. There is nothing close to resembling the separate provision of amenities – Muslims and Jews use the same hospitals, Muslims and Jews use the same public transport, Muslims and Jews all vote in Israeli elections, Muslims and Jews can run for election etc etc. Muslims in Israel can choose to study in the language of their preference and Arabic is even one of the national languages of Israel. In apartheid South Africa, although blacks made up over 80% of the population, not a single African language was recognized by the state.

  20. The Palestinians already have three nations – Jordan, PA, and Gaza. That they have made of sewer of the latter two (PA, GAZA) is their own fault. That they have not made a sewer of the first (Jordan) is to the credit not of the Palestinians, but of the Hashemites.

  21. James –
    I believe that you are partially correct in that what exists within Israel proper (whatever that is) is currently more Jim Crow than Apartheid. But that may change with Lieberman. What transpires in the occupied territories is apartheid on steroids. No rights, checkpoints, separate roads, nighttime raids and killings, pass systems, no travel, etc. Just what about apartheid is missing there?

  23. I am so torgued off by all the antisemtic propaganda around here. We constantly hear about Israel’s ‘landstealing’ in the West Bank, and all the walls and checkpoints and invasions and kidnappings and attacks on peaceful demonstrations, etc.. We never hear about how thoughtful it is for Israel to keep the best land in the West Bank ‘warm’ for possible future generations of Palestinians who might leave behind their lazy, violent and deceitful primitivism in order to embrace civilization. We never hear about how Israel keeps tens of thousands of Palestinians out of trouble by securing them, and not only that, but feeding them, providing helpful discipline, etc.. We never hear about how kind Israel is to drive Palestinians away from peaceful demonstrations where they might get hurt. We never hear about the strenuous efforts Israel is making against global warming by trying to prevent Palestinians from gobbling up all the gas in the world by whizzing around the West Bank as if it were some kind of gigantic Formula One course.
    We constantly hear about the blockade of Gaza. No one ever talks about the helpful way Israel has put an entire population on a diet. The rest of the world pays big bucks for diet help. Israel provides it to Gaza for free. And constantly bleeding hearts around the world complain about the way Israel bombed Gaza. Listen, each one of those bombs was aimed at a specific person. Everything else was just a friendly warning. I mean sometimes it’s tough love, but it’s L-O-V-E.
    Someday the Palestinians will thank Israel for all its attention and concern, and someday the world will thank Israel for putting a stop to the greatest threat to civilization since the Dinosaurs.

  24. So intent they are on burying history:
    …letters, official reports, diaries, and essays of the early Zionist settlers—the “Lovers of Zion”—from the last two decades of the nineteenth century were filled with references to the Arabs surrounding them everywhere in Palestine. Those writings were collected many years ago and published by Asher Druyanov.[5] Republished several years ago they are now easily accessible, […]
    Also
    […] two of the most important articles by Jewish writers dealing with the Arab problem, which even around the turn of the century troubled the Jewish immigrants to Palestine. The first was written in 1891 by Ahad Ha’am, perhaps the greatest modern Jewish thinker, and was called “Truth from Palestine”; the second, called “Hidden Question,” was written in 1907 by Y. Epstein and published in Ha-Shiloah. Both writers exhorted their fellow Jews in Palestine to take seriously the large Arab population and its feelings; the Ottoman Empire might go, they wrote, but the Arabs would remain.

  25. When Palestinians realize that the only way to protest their situation is through nonviolence (i.e., Ghandi and MLK), then their situation will improve. So long as these idiots choose to continue lobbing rockets daily at a civilian population, they can expect to be invaded and bombed from time to time. If Mexico allowed the lobbing of thousands of rockets at US cities every year, you can be damn sure there would be overwhelming support for retaliation. And, just like with the most recent Israeli response, that retaliation would be justified.

  27. D. Mathews,
    Israel’s actions in Gaza are justified under international law. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter reserves to every nation the right to engage in self-defense against armed attacks.
    Hamas is committing war crimes — targeting Israeli civilians, using Palestinian civilians as human shields, and seeking the destruction of a member state of the United Nations.
    Israel is acting in self-defense and out of military necessity.

  28. “Israel’s actions in Gaza are justified under international law.”
    That is, to say the very least, in serious, widespread dispute.

  30. Hamas broke the ceasefire !
    During the “Cease Fire”, rockets were still being fired at Israel, from Gaza.
    On November 4. Following information about Hamas’s preparations to abduct IDF soldiers through a tunnel, the IDF operated near the border. The operation prevented the planned attack and killed seven Hamas terrorist operatives.
    Even with all the violations, Israel STILL kept the border crossings open until approx mid-November.

  32. “Hamas broke the ceasefire !”
    LOOOOOOOL! Even the Israeli Ministry of Defense admits that Israel broke the ceasefire, and the resumption of rocket fire was a response to Israeli attacks and yet these silly hasbara wannabes keep running around waving their arms and yapping out talking points they pass around to each other, and that have littler or no connection to anything factual or reality-related. It’s hilarious really.
    “During the “Cease Fire”, rockets were still being fired at Israel, from Gaza.”
    1. The IMOD reported that Hamas was not involved in any rocket fire during the ceasefire prior to Israel’s deadly attack on November 4-5.
    2. The IMOD credited Hamas for effectively reigning in groups that were not a party to the ceasefire, and achieving a 99% reduction in rocket fire.
    3. The IMOD reported that the majority of the rockets that WERE fired from Gaza came from Fatah, the party of their latest fair haired boy, Mahmoud `Abbas – OOOOOOOPS!
    “On November 4…information about Hamas’s preparations to abduct IDF soldiers through a tunnel…The operation prevented the planned attack…”
    Oddly, Israel has offered not one iota of evidence to support their claim of a tunnel that breached Israeli territory, or a plot to capture (combatants involved in an armed conflict are captured, not kidnapped) Israeli soldiers.
    “Even with all the violations, Israel STILL kept the border crossings open until approx mid-November.”
    LOOOOOOOL! Riiiiight! Except that Israel’s version of “keeping the border crossings open” is to allow in at most 15% of the shipments, and to arbitrarily block whatever they were in the mood to block at any given moment.

  33. D. Mathews,
    I don’t think that “Justworldnews” has reached the level of readership that would put it on the Megaphone Alert List!

  35. Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it? — But, referred to the sun, it is widest at its base, which is no greater than his own opacity. The divine light is diffused almost entirely around us, and by means of refraction of light, or else by a certain self luminousness, or, as some will have it transparency, if we preserve ourselves untarnished, we are able to enlighten our shaded side. At any rate, our darkest grief has that bronzed color of the moon eclipsed. There is no ill which may not be dissipated, like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. Shadows, referred to the source of light, are pyramids whose bases are never greater than those of the substances which cast them, but light is a spherical congeries of pyramids whose very apexes are the sun itself, and hence the system shines with uninterrupted light. But if the light we use is but a paltry and narrow taper, most objects will cast a shadow wider than themselves.
    Henry David Thoreau “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers ; Walden, Or, Life in the…”

  36. The Palestinians are like a Greek tragedy…only without the Greeks. Until they change their Culture of Death mentality- life will be short and not sweet.

  38. Wow, thanks D. Mathews for providing us with this fabulous collection of pro-Palestinian propaganda talking points! I guess that one could call this the “Palestinian Hasbara Manual”

  41. When all else fails, recourse to vitriol is the preferred choice of those shallow in character.
    Press on with your narrow and paltry taper.

  42. D. Mathews, I assume you’re addressing me.
    Of course I’m familiar with Prof. Porath. He is a recognized authority on the Palestinian national movement having written a multi-volume study on the topic. He was one of the founders of Shalom Ahshav and Meretz, although since the mid-1990s he’s moved too far to the right for my taste.
    Back in 1986, when he wrote this article, he was still on the left and provided a (mostly justified) critique of Joan Peters’ book. Perhaps you missed this:
    Until the mid-1960s the Arab claims were usually presented as part of the ideology of Arab nationalism. Palestine was (and ideologically speaking still is) considered part of the greater Arab homeland and the Palestinians part of the greater Arab nation. The aim of the Arab struggle was to preserve the Arab character of Palestine from the Jewish-Zionist threat. The Palestinian case was at best secondary when it was made at all. Only since the middle of the 1960s and particularly after 1967 has the distinctively Palestinian component become relatively stronger among the factors that shape the identity of the Palestinian Arabs.
    Further, when he speaks of the two contrasting mythologies that the Arabs and the Jews have developed to explain their situations…, he clearly sets out as mythologies those aspects presented in what you linked to earlier and what I have called the “Palestinian Hasbara Manual”, notably that:
    first of all the Jews were not a nation in the modern sense of the term and consequently did not require a state of their own. In the tradition of both Western liberal and doctrinaire socialist thinking, the Arabs argued that the Jews were only a religious community; that peoples could not return to their ancient homelands without turning the entire world upside down; and, most important, that Palestine had been settled since the seventh century AD by Arabs. Over the years many Arab ideologists even claimed that Arabs had occupied the land in pre-Biblical times because of the “Arab character” of Canaanites.
    Zionism, the Arab argument continued, if it had any grain of historical justification at all, emerged only in a European setting. It came about as a reaction to Western Christian or secular and racist anti-Semitism, with which the Arabs had nothing to do; therefore, they should not be required to pay the costs of remedying it. In Arab and Islamic countries Jews suffered none of the terrible treatment that Western Jews had suffered. On the contrary, the Muslims in general and the Arabs in particular treated their religious and ethnic minorities with full equality and enabled both Christians and Jews to take part in public life, to rise to high positions of state, and, in recent times, to become full members of the modern and secular Arab nation living in its various states. The Jews living in the Arab and Muslim countries, moreover, did not take part in the Zionist movement. They even actively opposed it and did not want to emigrate to Israel. That most of them eventually did so the Arabs attribute to the machinations of Israel working with corrupt Arab rulers who were “stooges of imperialism.”
    After the 1948 war Arab propaganda added an important new claim: since the Jews wanted Palestine empty of Arabs, they used the opportunity of the war to systematically expel the indigenous Arab population wherever they could do so. Some Arab writers, and others favorable to their cause, have gone so far as to claim that the war itself was set off in December 1947 by the Jews in order to create the right circumstances for the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland.

  43. So you want to return to a “status quo ex ante” of 50 AD or thereabouts? I suppose we should drain the Americas of Europeans and give it back to the few survivors of the genocide perpetrated against the indigenous populations.
    Both sides have their “mythologies”, granted. It doesn’t do justice to typical zionist claims. Read on…
    Of course there was no separate state called Palestine before the British Mandate and there is no need to demonstrate this at length, as Mrs. Peters tries to do. Nonetheless a large majority of Muslim Arabs inhabited the land; and the desire to keep it that way was the goal of the Arab struggle in Palestine against the Jews and the British. Of what possible significance, therefore, is Mrs. Peters’s claim that Arab domination of Palestine after its conquest by the Muslims in 635 AD lasted only twenty-two years? Was the land empty of any population? Such a vague claim is typical of many others made in the book. What is more surprising is the authority on which it is based. We are told that a statement to this effect was made in February 1919 to the Paris Peace Conference by “the Muslim chairman of the Syrian delegation.” An innocent reader would take it that this delegation was representing the Arab population of Syria, who were then struggling for independence. In fact the delegation was organized by the French as a device to oppose the nationalist struggle, and its chairman would have said anything required by his masters. Whether the Palestinian Arabs saw their identity as having local roots or whether they saw themselves more as part of the larger Arab world, they undoubtedly wanted Palestine to remain Arab. That the name of the country in Arabic, as in most other languages, is derived from the name of the Philistines does not matter to them any more than the fact that the name of Jerusalem, even in Hebrew, is derived from the Jebusees. All such terminological claims, and there are plenty of them in Mrs. Peters’s book, are worthless.

  44. To cut this fruitless back and forth, there is one thing that should be obvious to any reasonable person. Both peoples have a claim to the region and will have to learn to live together. At the moment, Israel seems bent on the same type of “solution” that the Europeans visited on the native population of the Americas. Wake up! The wholesale slaughter or expulsion of one people by another isn’t going to cut it in the twenty first century as much as you would like to pursue this alternative. You are surrounded by Arabs. Either learn to live in peace or resign yourselves to the ridiculous conundrum of garrisoning yourselves in an increasingly racist state. To your likely rejoinder (I’m already accustomed to your talking points) of “it is them not us”, so said the Afrikaners of the Blacks in the bantustans and look where South Africa is today.

  45. Well D. Mathews, I happen to agree with your statement that “both peoples have a claim to the region and will have to learn to live together.” However, I don’t happen to agree with your statement that “Israel seems bent on the same type of ‘solution’ that the Europeans visited on the native population of the Americas.” I don’t see that, and I think that my vantage point is much better than yours is.
    It is truly a pity that Helena doesn’t speak or understand Hebrew, because had she done so she would have heard that a major topic of discussion in the local media had to do with a confederation and land swaps among the major players: the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Egyptians. In other words, creative solutions to end the conflict.
    Just a comment about my “likely rejoinder”: don’t ever assume anything because to assume makes an ass out of u and me.

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