D. Makovsky and M. Sfard on the Palestine Question

On Wednesday, I went to two intriguing discussions in Washington about different aspects of the Palestine Question.
The first was a seven-person round-table discussion on the US Institute of Peace’s recent report Hamas: Ideological Rigidity and Political Flexibility. The seven people included the report’s two authors, Paul Scham (formerly of Americans for Peace Now; now a visiting prof at the University of Maryland and Executive Director of its Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies), and Osama Abu-Irshaid, the imam of a mosque in Northern Virginia and founding editor-in-chief of Al-Meezan. It also included a moderator and four other people, all of them male and almost none of them with the degree of expert knowledge of Hamas’s politics that I have.
But hey, USIP has to keep its Congressional source of funding flowing, so I guess the very cautious people there felt they couldn’t have anyone who has actually conducted (and published) as much research on Hamas as I have!
… Anyway, there were a couple of interesting exchanges there. Some of the most interesting involved David Makovsky, a long-time pro-Israeli propagandist who is currently the director of the “Project on the Middle East peace process” at the pro-AIPAC Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Listening to Makovsky marshalling his very misleading (and often simply mendacious) claims and arguments was made bearable only because the other panelists and the moderator, the WSJ’s Cam Simpson, all did a good job of having a decent, fact-based, and realistic discussion on the issues.
I’ll get back to Makovsky in a moment.
… From USIP I biked along to the New America Foundation where Michael Sfard, a Jewish Israeli lawyer and the legal adviser to the excellent Yesh Din anti-occupation organization, was talking about “Settlements and the Occupation.”
New America is such an agile, tech-savvy organization that they already have the16-minute video record of that session available for your viewing there. Along with Sfard, it features the indefatigable NAF duo of Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah.
Sfard made several important points in his presentation. He noted that the maps of where the settlement boundaries are inside the West Bank always greatly understate the depth of the disruption, fear, and exclusion that the presence of the settlements, their (often Jews-only) feeder roads, and other Israeli objects and facilities have on the lives of the area’s 2.3 million indigenous Palestinians.
He said,

Every Palestinian farmer knows the true situation better than any Israeli politician. They know that there’s an unseen line around each settlement or other Israeli facility– even a cell-phone tower!– that they can’t cross without a real fear of getting shot at; and this line is ways outside the boundaries of the settlement or other facility.
Every Israeli structure in the West Bank is the epicenter of magnetic lines, if you like, of growth and of domination.
We in Yesh Din are trying to map the real lines of domination. The existing maps don’t show it. The true situation is constantly changing.

He argued, too, that even if the Obama administration succeeds in winning a complete freeze on settlement construction from the Netanyahu government, even that would count for little unless there is also a complete freeze on planning for new construction in the settlements.

“All this work takes time,” he said (my paraphrase here):

Behind each brick that is laid in a settlement in the West Bank there is a whole tail of around four years’ work in all the zoning, planning, and design work that has been done.
So if you get a freeze on construction, but that planning work would still continue, then the planners would simply intrensify their labor in anticipation of the day that the “defrost” button gets pushed. It is the whole process that needs to be frozen.

Sfard and Atallah both stressed the importance of the Obama administration not getting caught in the trap of trying to “negotiate” how a freeze could be modified or mitigated to meet some of Netanyahu’s concerns. Washington’s freeze demand must remain total, they said.
Sfard also argued that much of the violence that the settlers deploy against the civilian Palestinian indigenes of the West Bank has a clear political goal– “and therefore, it qualifies as terrorism.”
He said,

This is not just a question of a few hooligans among the settlers…
In the past year there’s been a big change in the way settler violence is carried out. It’s not a secret that there’s a correlation between the rate of violence and the settlers feeling the political winds blowing against them. So today, the settler violence we’re seeing is not just a spontaneous thing; it’s being planned much more than before.
Now there is some kind of leadership coordinating this effort to build up the tension whenever there’s a decision to dismantle an outpost or whatever.
There’s a clear plan: when the army is sent to dismantle an outpost in the north then groups of settlers in the south will make a swarm and go and burn fields in the south, and that diverts the security forces.
They are spreading terror to get political gains, and this is the very definition of terrorism.
We saw this already in Hebron. An action like this sometimes prevent the government from achieving its immediate objective—but it also has a deterrent effect on the government.
Not all the settlers are involved in these actions,of course, but a portion of them are.

Anyway, those were the main points of what Sfard said. But the whole session is well worth watching on the video. Mikhael Sfard is one in a distinguished line of Israeli lawyers who take seriously their professional charge of trying to uphold the rule of law– including the requirements of international law– by all parties, including their own government.
… And now, back to David Makovsky and his sheaf of dishonest claims.
Here were a few of the most egregious:
1. He claimed he was just back from a short visit to Ramallah, and

Everyone I talked to there was adamant that the US should not deal with Hamas. I talked to hundreds of people there, and they all said that to me!

What a gross misrepresentation of the facts about the attitudes and preferences of the people of Ramallah!
Makovsky claims he talked to “hundreds” of people in Ramallah in his short time there?
I would love to know who just two or three of them were. He gave us no names.
But honestly, how do you talk to “hundreds” of people in Ramallah during a short visit– or even, a long visit? I spent more than a week there back in February/March, and I was able to gain meaningful interviews with no more than two dozen Ramallah residents. And I am, yes, considerably better plugged-in there than someone like Makovsky.
So what was with that ridiculous exaggeration of Makovsky’s, and why did no other participants in the panel discussion call him on it?
At one point one of the other panelists– I think it was Nathan Brown Paul Scham, it may have been Amjad Atallah, who was there who was there as well as, later, at NAF– indirectly challenged the general impression that Makovsky was presumably trying to convey, namely that “all of Fateh” wants the US to continue excluding and combating Hamas.
Of course that is not the case. As Nathan pointed out, Fateh is deeply split– on this issue as on a number of other issues.
Osama Abu Irshaid also made the excellent point that the split inside Fateh is not— as it has commonly been portrayed in the west– one between “the old guard” and (as many westerners like to believe) a more pragmatic and flexible “new guard.” No– inside Fateh, as incidentally also inside the Iranian rveolutionary authorities these days– the split is deeply inside the old guard itself.
Anyway, be that is it is, Makovsky’s claim that he’s somehow speaking on behalf of a claimed majority of the Palestinian people when he argues that the US should continue to exclude and combat Hamas had all the air of the worst kind of mendacious colonialist misrepresentation of the “true” desires of the indigenes.
What a silly and despicable argument.
Yes, I know there are some individuals in Ramallah who are virulently anti-Hamas. But they coexist there with many of their compatriots who are either Fathawis and other secular Palestinians who are supportive of a Fateh-Hamas reconciliation, or are themselves actually Hamas supporters. (Hamas, remember, won four of the five seats in the 2006 elections that were elected directly from Ramallah/Al-Bireh.)
2. Makovsky also made this outrageous claim about Hamas’s record regarding firing rockets into Israel:

When Israel got out of Gaza they started firing rockets on Israel immediately. There have been 4,000 rockets since then.
This happened the day after!

Once again, no-one else on the panel challenged this gross misrepresentation of the facts.
On December 16, 2007 the Israeli foreign ministry’s own website gave this account of the rocket attacks that had occurred after the Israeli withdrawal/disengagement from Gaza was completed in August/September 2005:

Following the disengagement, Hamas’ grip on the security and politics of the Gaza Strip was strengthened at the expense of Fatah and the security services under Abu Mazen’s control… However, because of political considerations which will be discussed below, Hamas does not directly participate in rocket launches for extended periods of time, but rather grants the other organizations, especially the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, considerable freedom of action. That enabled the terrorist organizations to increase the scope of their rocket attacks significantly in 2006 and 2007 and to train their sights on new Israeli settlements (primarily the large city of Ashqelon ). When Hamas does decide to join directly in the shooting, the range of settlements affected is liable to be much greater because of the organization’s potential and technical capabilities.
… Many examples which illustrate the influence of internal Palestinian relations and Palestinian-Israeli relations on Hamas’ rocket fire policies are contained in this study. For example:
i. After Arafat died in November 2004, there was a lull in the fighting resulting in a temporary decrease in the amount of rocket fire.
ii. In September 2006, Hamas stopped firing rockets after a lethal “work accident” resulted in hostile internal criticism.
iii. Since the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25, 2006 and the establishment of the Hamas government in March 2006, for long periods of time Hamas has preferred not to participate directly in rocket fire.
iv. The cease fire agreed upon by the Israeli prime minister and the PA chairman on November 26, 2006, brought about a reduction in rocket fire, but did not end it.
v. The worsening of the battles between Fatah and Hamas in May 2007 made Hamas initiate a massive rocket attack unprecedented in scope.
vi. Since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in June 2007, it has not directly participated in rocket fire because its priority is to strengthen its grip over the Strip.

B’tselem’s careful listing of the names of all Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians between 2000 and Israel’s launching of the assault on Gaza last December, shows that in the months between August and December 2005 not a single Israeli civilian was killed by Palestinian fire of any kind anywhere at all near Gaza.
What planet does David Makovsky live on, and why should anyone take his claims seriously?
3. And finally (for now), Makovsky treated as outrageous and unthinkable the idea that a final peace agreement Israel and the PLO, if the negotiation of this is ever completed, should be submitted to a pan-Palestinian referendum for approval.
He seemed to assume that it was a quite “normal” for everyone to expect that the only Palestinians allowed to vote on this momentous development in the history of their people should be that small subset of the Palestinian people whom Israel still allows to live in the (Israeli-occupied) West Bank and Gaza Strip portions of their own homeland!
This is a quite unacceptable idea.
Israel has controlled the population registries of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. Throughout those decades it has unilaterally made and enforced the residency rules, including provisions that if a Palestinians leaves for work or study and doesn’t return within a certain time s/he loses the right to reside in her own home town forever.
Israel has also, throughout those years, undertaken many schemes to (a) make life inside the occupied territories inhospitable or actively unbearable for Palestinians, and (b) to encourage Palestinians to move out.
The idea that political exiles and refugees somehow lose their political rights the moment they become exiles or refugees is one that a strongly developing body of international practice actively counters.
In all the recent big conflict termination events of the post-Cold War years, political exiles and refugees have been fully enfranchised in the political processes that are a part of, and that flow from, the peacemaking. Mozambican refugees in 1992, South African refugees in 1994, Bosnia refugees later in the 1990s, Cambodian refugees, Iraqi refugees, Afghan refugees, etc etc… All have been fully included in all the referenda, elections etc that accompanied and flowed from peacemaking.
Why should Palestinians be any different?
(Right, I understand that elections within the context of the “Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority”— to give it its full name– have been restricted to Israeli-permitted residents of the West Bank and Gaza, only. But that is only an interim body. In a final settlement, the refugees and exiles will have to be involved and rallied and mobilized in support of a settlement, otherwise it won’t have a chance of succeeding.)
Why would Makovsky simply “assume” that Palestine’s millions of long-suffering refugees and exiles should continue to be disfranchised at the point of final termination of their conflict with Israel?
Why did no-one at the event challenge him on this?
Yes, I understand that there are still a lot of political neanderthals in Washington on these issues of fundamental importance to the wellbeing and survival of the Palestinian people.
But it would be kinda nice if some people on the program at an event like the USIP one would be prepared to challenge more of the outright lies and misleading arguments of an old-style propagandist like David Makovsky.
Editorial note: the above post was re-edited at around 10:18 p.m., and some minor emendations were made.