Author: Helena

‘Hamas and the end of the two-state solution’ in Boston Review

My latest long article on Hamas is now up on the Boston Review’s website. The full title is Breakout: Hamas and the end of the two-state solution.
Of course, you should read every word of it. But if for some hard-to-fathom reason you don’t have time, here’s the “conclusion”:

    even with a [Gaza-Israel] ceasefire, what are the prospects for peace over the next five to ten years? Most likely there will be a “two-entity” situation, with one of these entities being a small, quasi-state administration operating in Gaza and the other an Israel that is unable to disentangle itself from the West Bank. Neither of these entities would be a settled state, secure within stable and recognized borders.
    This hardly constitutes an enduring, solution. Israel cannot maintain its current, extraordinarily repressive measures against the 2.3 million Palestinians of the West Bank over the long run. And if it cannot meet the West Bankers’ demands for self-determination and the liberation of their territory, then the West Bankers might turn to demanding full equal rights for themselves within the Israel that threatens to engulf them. Meanwhile, the claims of the five million or so Palestinians who are [diasporic] refugees either from pre-1967 Israel or from the West Bank for, first and foremost, a return to their families’ homes and farms, or failing that proportionate compensation, will continue. It is worth remembering, too, the high proportion of Gazans who come from refugee families. Even a Gaza that becomes economically rehabilitated to some degree will not abandon the broader Palestinian movement. And Jerusalem will always remain a touchstone issue—for Palestinians and for a billion other Muslims around the world, just as for Jews in Israel and beyond.
    As Israel reaches its 60th birthday this May, its citizens have reason to be proud of many of the state’s achievements. But it has still failed to find a fair and sustainable accommodation with the Palestinians who were the earlier residents of its land, and this failure will plague its relations with its neighbors and others around the world until it is resolved…

Actually there is whole lot in the piece other than that that’s worth reading.
I found the piece really hard to write, in good part because of the long lead-time involved in all this dead-tree publication business. I guess I get spoiled with the instant publication-gratification I get used to here on the blog.
A careful reader will note that the date-stamp embedded into the text is April 24. Throughout a lot of the writing and the lengthy revising of this article, the prospects for Hamas reaching a ceasefire agreement with the Olmert government were pitching and yawing wildly up and down. (Nautical terms there, folks.)
That made it particularly hard to write.
As of now, May 15, Olmert has been losing power within the coalition so rapidly in recent weeks that the prospects for the tahdi’eh with Hamas that he was exploring much more seriously back in April seem to have plummeted again. Guess that’s how it goes, though goodness only knows the situation of Gaza’s 1.45 million people remains extremely difficult indeed.
Anyway, since George Bush thrust the whole “we should never talk to Hamas!” issue into the public limelight today, I would like to remind JWN readers of the following two articles I wrote last year, that laid out the arguments why we should, indeed, do so:

George Bush made a foolish and very self-destructive error when he simply lumped Hamas and Hizbullah in with Al Qaeda as “terrorists” who– like the Nazis in 1939– should be shunned and crushed by the US and everyone around the world. As you’ll see in those articles, there are considerable and politically very significant differences between, on the one hand, Hamas and Hizbullah, and on the other Al-Qaeda. Also, to liken either of these movements with a Nazi apparatus that controlled the resources of an entire, powerful, European state at the time is the height of historical ignorance, and folly…

From Taef to– Doha?

As US officials deeply understand, there is considerable diplomatic kudos and power that attaches to being the ones that control (and elbow all others out of) key strands of Middle East peace-brokering.
So in 1989 it was the Saudis who brokered and hosted the intra-Lebanese negotiations that resulted in the “Ta’ef Accord,” named after the Kingdom’s summer capital.
The Ta’ef Accord had a lot of good elements in it. But over the years the Saudis became more and more identified as partisan actors within the Lebanese political scene.
So tomorrow, the relevant Lebanese and Arab parties will be heading to Doha, the capital of Qatar, for the latest round of intra-Lebanese negotiations, which could well be the most productive since, um, Taef nineteen years ago.
The Arab League delegation which was in Beirut today (Thursday) was headed by the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani. A significant commitment of national prestige there. Notable too: none of the Arab states who are directly involved in sponsoring different movements in Lebanon was represented on this particular delegation: No Saudi Arabia, no Egypt, no Syria. Well, Egypt was sort of there, in the person of the indefatigable Amr Musa, who was formerly Egypt’s FM and has now been sec-gen of the Arab League for many years.
What the AL delegation did in Beirut was, basically, sign off on the steps the Lebanese themselves had already taken. Namely, after PM Siniora realized that he could not rely on the support of either the Lebanese army or the US navy, he hurried to reverse the provocative steps his government took ten days ago against Hizbullah’s defensive capabilities; and Hizbullah in turn finally said it would be delighted to negotiate all the tricky constitutional questions that have held up the naming of a new president for the past six months.
Hence, the “pilgrimage” to Qatar tomorrow, where those matters will be discussed.
Qatar seems like an interesting place. It hosts both a huge contingent of the US naval/military power in the region– and Al-Jazeera, a t.v. empire that, while it isn’t anywhere close to being as anti-US as some Americans believe, does nonetheless have a voice that is independent of the pro-US orthodoxy proclaimed by, e.g., the big American networks, the BBC, or Saudi media like Al-Arabiyah. Qatar is a Wahhabi state– that has always jealously guarded its independence from Saudi Arabia. Also, for Wahhabists, its rulers seem strangely entrepreneurial. (Maybe that judgment just reveals my ignorance about the nature of Wahhabism. I’m not sure.)
Anyway, the fact that the Saudis have been so totally sidelined both by the collapse of the street/popular power of their proteges within Lebanon, and by their sidelining from the levers of the AL’s Lebanon diplomacy, is extremely interesting, and has broader significance for the region as a whole.
Update, 10:45 p.m.:
The L.A. Times’s Borzou Daragahi blogs glowingly from Beirut:

    Sheik Hamad also said: “Everyone knows that there is no winner in this.”
    Except for maybe the sheik himself, who emerged as a diplomatic rock star.
    He put on a heck of a performance.

I guess it was my understanding that the Lebanese parties had concluded their basic deal before the AL delegation reached Beirut. Borzou quotes Karim Makdissi, who teaches political science at AUB as saying, “The lesson to be drawn is that the notion of an international community… imposing itself cannot work unless the real situation on the ground allows it.”
Someone send that bit of basic wisdom to GWB?

Oops, George, your time-frame slip is showing!

At the Annapolis summit last November, Pres. Bush pledged that he would work to secure a final-status Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement before his term in office ends. Soon after that, the goal was “clarified”, to spell out that this would only be an uncomfortable type of thing called a “shelf agreement”, that wouldn’t have any operational capacity until a whole host of other conditions had been met.
Today, in his speech in the Knesset, Bush’s timeframe seemed to be slipping even further. Um, by an additional 60 years. The most he could “promise” the non-Israeli majorities in the Middle East was that “60 years from now” the whole region would be peaceful, non-oppressive, etc etc…. And “the Palestinian people will have the homeland they have long dreamed of.”
It doesn’t really seem like a winning argument to me?
Bush also drew a quite ridiculous parallel between pre-1939 Nazi Germany and un-named “terrorists and radicals” in the Middle East today, in what was widely seen as a politicized side-swipe at Barack Obama.

Re-engage book, launch news

My Re-engage! book has been getting a good soft roll-out already. But next week we have the first two significant launch events– one in Charlottesville, VA and the other in Washington DC. Then more will be coming along thick and fast.
The events we already have firmly scheduled are listed on this page on the book’s website.
If you live in NYC or Boston and have concrete ideas about launch events in either of those cities for next month, please let us know a.s.a.p!
Tony is kind enough to comment there,

    I heartily recommend her book and her site [that’s JWN] to anyone seeking a more peaceful, constructive and cooperative relationship between the last superpower and the world that has long since slipped beyond its control.

the “Guest-blogging” gig I did about the book on Tony Karon’s excellent “Rootless Cosmopolitan” blog.

Bush, Israel at 60, interesting days ahead?

McClatchy’s perceptive Jerusalem correspondent Dion Nissenbaum has a great post on his blog today titled “Bush/Olmert: A meeting of lame ducks.” (Though he does note the term was actually coined by Yedioth Aharonoth.)
Later in the post, Dion writes:

    Once Bush leaves, Israeli leaders are expected to step up their [military] operations in Gaza… The military leadership once opposed a ground operation as a potential tar pit. Now, according to Maariv, they see it as inevitable.

I have one word for them. Not just a tar pit, but a sinkhole. And a sinkhole that will suck in not just Israel’s military power but also such shreds as remain of Washington’s once near-hegemonic position of influence within the Middle East.
Can anyone imagine that if, just a short time after a “triumphalist”, extremely pro-Israeli GWB visit to Israel, Israel launches a big, very damaging military attack against Gaza, that wouldn’t have a major impact on the US’s standing around the region?
Meanwhile, it certainly seems that the three-months-long negotiations over a Gaza-Israel ceasefire (tahdiyeh), that Olmert has been conducting with Hamas, with Egypt’s mediation, are currently at a dead-end after the failure of Egypt’s security boss, Omar Suleiman, to nail them down last week.
It looks as though Hamas is preparing some interesting options, too. In this post on the Palestine Info Center website yesterday they called on their Gaza followers to join a march to the Erez checkpoint tomorrow.
I was intrigued that in the short, videotaped “welcome address” that Israeli Prez (and 1996 war-launcher) Shimon Peres had on the website of the grandiose “Facing Tomorrow” conference that Prez. Bush will be addressing today, Peres talked glowingly about “a frontierless world, a world without frontiers…” (The site is here. I’m sure you can find that welcome address if you dig around a little.)
I thought it was pretty strange for Peres to talk that way, given that the hall the conference is being held in is less than three miles from some of the tallest and most impenetrably concrete portions of the Separation Barrier that Israel has put up between itself and the Palestinian communities of the West Bank. But maybe tomorrow we can expect Peres to leap out of the conference hall and go to engage in a Berlin-style orgy of wall-smashing in order to build the “frontierless” world he is forecasting?
The only other explanation for his words is that, like his guest George W. Bush, he inhabits some kind of strange, alternative universe in which the mere “facts on the ground” such as the rest of the world sees and deals with, have no substance and no meaning? And, like Bush, he confidently expects the rest of us to agree with him that “the emperor has lovely clothes!”
Meanwhile, in other Jerusalem-related news, Akiva Eldar tells us that

    The Jerusalem municipality has begun the process of approving a plan for a new [Jews-only] housing complex, including a synagogue, in the heart of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan south of the Old City.

And Dion Nissenbaum tells us that:

    Hours before Bush arrived, Israel’s Shas party, a crucial coalition partner, said that Olmert would approve hundreds of new homes in the West Bank soon after Bush heads home.
    The boast was denied by Israel’s Housing Ministry, but… This time around, according to Israel’s Maariv newspaper, Bush has given Olmert the OK for the construction.

So it looks as though no-one in either the present Israeli or US administrations really gives a hoot about about the “two-state solution”, the political viability of the Abbas-Fayyad leadership, or anything else they sometimes claim to care about regarding the Palestinian issue?

Lebanon: The human cost of war

Rami Zuraik has yet another excellent post on his blog today. It is about the vulnerable and encircled small informal settlement in West Beirut in the area known as “Behind Sports City.” (At one point, I lived not far from there. I know exactly what he’s talking about.)
He focuses on the experiences during the recent fighting of one BSC resident, a house-cleaner called Najwa:

    On Wednesday, Najwa told me, the Future militia established armed presence around her and shot at the houses of opposition supporters. Many left. When the skirmishes started on Thursday afternoon, the neighborhood filled up with armed men. She looked out of her door and saw her neighbors sitting outside the house. Their 17 years old stood up and walked towards the street. He was shot and died there.
    Najwa and her son left the house in a hurry and ran down the hill to seek shelter in Sabra. The Palestinian camp was boiling, filled with armed men. Hamas and Fateh supporters were eying each others menacingly. Hama’s people support Hizbullah, and Fateh are sympathetic to Hariri and the Future movement. But when the night fell, they all joined rank as the camp began to tremble. As the sound of explosion and gunfire increased, a rumor had spread through the camp: Samir Geagea men, the Lebanese Forces, were coming back to massacre everyone, as in September 1982. Najwa tells me that as of this moment, the camp established serious guard rounds till the morning, and only relaxed when the news came that the Opposition had taken over the city.
    When she went back to her house, Najwa found the neighbors in mourning. Being Shi’a, their grief and anger had been adopted by the Amal militiamen. These had gone around shooting and terrorizing some of the known Future supporters. The Nawar [i.e. Roma] people, she told me, paid the price. But her neighbor’s son was dead.
    The poor, regardless of color, race or creed, always pay the price.

You can only imagine how vulnerable these BSC residents were if they felt that fleeing into the Sabra refugee camp could make them more secure…
(That reminds me of the period in Beirut in the late 1970s when Turkish Kurds started pouring into the city. Beirut was in the full throes of the civil war… but those Kurds felt that even Beirut was more secure than their own home areas in Turkey at the time. I visited some of the places where they lived in Beirut: half-destroyed houses very close to the Green Line. It was truly Dickensian– but still, better than staying where they had been in Turkey.)
As Rami says, when there’s war and insecurity it is always the poor and marginalized who pay a disproportionate amount of the price.

Earth to GWB: The Lebanese Army isn’t on your side any more!

So there was George Bush, telling the BBC today that he is willing to send US aid to the Lebanese Army… Doesn’t he realize that, as I suggested here yesterday, the Lebanese Army isn’t on his side any more??
Is it any wonder that the administration led by this man is losing so badly in the Middle East these days?

Prospects for Lebanon

Rami Khouri, a very astute observer, writes in Monday’s Daily Star

    The consequences of what has happened in the past week may portend an extraordinary but constructive new development: the possible emergence of the first American-Iranian joint political governance system in the Arab world. Maybe.
    If Lebanon shifts from street clashes to the hoped-for political compromise through a renewed national dialogue process, it will have a national unity government whose two factions receive arms, training, funds and political support from both the United States and Iran. Should this happen, an unspoken American-Iranian political condominium in Lebanon could prove to be key to power-sharing and stability in other parts of the region, such as Palestine, Iraq and other hot spots. This would also mark a huge defeat for the United States and its failed diplomatic approach that seeks to confront, battle and crush the Islamist-nationalists throughout the region…

The rest of his piece is worth reading, too.
I’ll only attach the one further small observation: That actually, the government in Iraq is already, effectively a US-Iranian condominium, given the long and still-continuing ties between Iran and the parties that dominate the government in the Baghdad Green Zone.
It is possible, though, that in Lebanon Hizbullah may be aiming for a bit more than a “US-Iranian condominium”?
On Saturday, after the collapse of the anti-Hizbullah militias in West Beirut, the Siniora government backed down from its earlier demands that (1) the pro-Hizbullah security chief at the Beirut airport be removed and (2) Hizbullah dismantle its relatively secure, fiber-optics communications system. Siniora said something like, “Oh gosh, we really didn’t mean to do that– but let the army decide what’s best.”
The army, whose officers have been extensively courted by Hizbullah over the past years, reacted by requesting the government to revoke those two decisions.
The position adopted by the army leadership has considerable importance for the prospects of any kind of stability in the country in the months ahead. Not least because, under UNSC resolution 1701 it’s the army that is responsible for assuring the security of Lebanon’s southern border. And various things like the movements of the UNIFIL forces in the south are subject to the supervision of the army, which represents Lebanon’s sovereignty within the country.
Hizbullah has acted in responsible fashion in most parts of the country where it routed opposing militias: It almost immediately handed over the areas it thereby brought under its control to the army.
Evidently, right now, Hizbullah’s leaders feel they have reason to trust the army.
But what of Lebanon’s civilian “government”? So far, PM Siniora (or as Pres. Bush routinely mis-names him “Sonora”) has kept on hewing to a fairly strongly anti-Hizbullah line — with the exception of the bowing toward realism Saturday, when he said it should be the army that decides on the airport-security and Hizbullah telephony issues.
But in at least one semi-official Hizbullah commentary today, (here in English) a Hizbullah person is “predicting” that Siniora himself won’t last long in office. Mohamad Shmaysani writes there, on the Al-Manar English website that “sources” had told him that close US ally Saudi Arabia

    stopped Saniora from tendering his resignation on Friday… The source told Al-Manar that Riyadh was close to agree[ing] on Saniora’s resignation, but US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interfered and stopped the process. She assured Saniora and promised his big Arab support during the ministerial meeting in Cairo Sunday as well as international backing Monday.
    What’s next?
    The fast fall of the ruling bloc is for sure and a new political era will start; an era that will have its repercussions on the regional stage, for sure.

Regarding the Arab League’s sparsely attended ministerial meeting in Cairo today, I see that AP is reporting that about the only thing the meeting could agree on was that:

    The Arab League demanded Shiite gunmen pull out of West Beirut and leave Lebanon’s army in charge of security. The gunmen had mostly left the streets by Sunday, a day after the army called on them to clear out.

Well, there is a “mission” that has already been largely “accomplished.”
But I’m not sure that the Arab League can save Siniora’s government at this point?
Oh, and did I mention that Pres. Bush is going to be making a splashy big appearance in Jerusalem on Wednesday?
In the context of the continuing stasis in the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations, I imagine that all the heavily trumpeted instances of Bush’s undying support for Israel that we’ll hear over the days ahead might not be quite what the increasingly embattled pro-US forces in the Arab world need at this point?

Bush’s conference in Jerusalem

Pres. Bush is scheduled to arrive in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Once there he’ll be the guest of honor at a big international conference that Israeli Pres. (and former war-launcher) Shimon Peres is holding under the blah, catch-all title Facing Tomorrow. (Conference organizers are said to be keeping their fingers crossed that all the unseemly news about the latest probe into PM Olmert’s alleged improprieties doesn’t take the gloss off the conference.)
The conference has its own, extremely lame English-language blog. You can read the schedule either there or in this PDF file, available on the official conference website.
Though the conference is headlined by Peres, I guess his office doesn’t have the budgetary or administrative capability to put on something as big and glitzy as this. So the funding has come from the ever-controversial Sheldon Adelson, who made himself the third-richest man in the US by buying and developing casinos in the USA and worldwide. Adelson is a big financial backer of, among many other organizations, the rabidly pro-war “Freedom’s Watch” organization in the US, and the strongly pro-settler Shalem Center in Israel.
He and his wife have been named as “Honorary Chairs” of the conference.
But they do not, it seems, have the intellectual clout to pull together a world-class set of conferees for this gathering. So that job has been left to– guess who? … None other than our old friend Dennis Ross, who for 12 years there was the chief US official in charge of the Israeli-Arab “peace process.”
But now, Ross has reinvented himself as the head of the Board of Directors of the Jerusalem-based “Jewish People Policy Planning Institute“. And it is JPPPI that has been paid, presumably by Adelson, to provide the “content” for the conference.
On p.6 of that PDF file about the conference, Dennis has a letter in which, on behalf of JPPPI, he “welcomes” all the conference participants to Jerusalem.
Dennis has also been described as a leading foreign policy advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Are you confused enough yet?
Is he a US citizen, or an Israeli, or both at this point? The extremely deep intermingling of the two countries’ political elites continues.
Dennis Ross has always been a bit of a political chameleon. He was secretary of State Baker’s chief implementer when Baker (and Bush I) Organized the Madrid Arab-Israeli peace conference in October 1991. Then in 1992, as Bush’s re-election chances started diving along with the US economy, Bush drafted in Baker– a supremely accomplished political operator– to run his campaign. And Dennis went with him into the GOP campaign. But that one lost to Clinton, as we know. And who should pop up as Clinton’s Arab-Israeli negotiations chief but– Dennis Ross!
Quite a feat. Proving, perhaps (as with all the more recent Obama and Clinton buzz) that in some elite political circles in the US a proven commitment to Israel is more important than, and can sometimes transcend, “mere” party-political differences.
While working for Clinton, Dennis was the strongest advocate of the incrementalist, process-fixated approach that allowed Israel to drag its feet in signing anything at all throughout the whole of the 1990s, while it also stepped up its drive to build Israeli settlements in the West Bank– while incurring no penalty whatsoever for that from its superpower patron. In 2000, he and Clinton, working totally in cahoots with Ehud Barak, inveigled first Pres. Hafez al-Asad then Yasser Arafat into renewed negotiations with Israel under false pretences; and both those coercive, very-last-minute negotiations failed miserably.
So we can certainly expect Dennis Ross to be in the receiving line when Pres. George W. Bush arrives at the conference, Wednesday. “Welcome to Israel, Mr. President!”

Intra-Iraqi ceasefire met with escalated US bombardments

So in Iraq, earlier today, the (Shiite-dominated) Iraqi government concluded a ceasefire agreement with the Sadr movement… and just hours later the US military started an aerial bombardment of Sadr City that according to this “Voices of Iraq” report lasted six hours.*
What on earth is going on?
Have large parts of the Bush administration and the US military all gone absolutely, criminally bonkers all at the same time?
Only two possible explanations present themselves to me. The first is the “all gone bonkers” one. (Which would also fit with the reports about imminent US missile attacks against Iran.) The other is that this is all part of a sane-but-devilish scheme cooked up by the US military, perhaps in cahoots with some of its people in the Iraqi government… and playing very much according to the “one last battering before the ceasefire gets implemented” playbook followed by Israel in Lebanon in August 2006.
You’ll recall how disastrous that “one last battering” ploy proved to be for Israel at the time.
Anyway, I do note from the “Voices of Iraq” report that the ceasefire goes into operation “Sunday.” (Also noted in the AP/Yahoo account linked to above, and in Xinhua.)
I believe that under the ceasefire agreement the US forces are supposed to leave the positions they had seized inside Sadr City over the past couple of weeks.
It seems to me that in both Sadr City and West Beirut, the anti-US forces have been playing a carefully calibrated game in their relations with national governments that had, until now, been solidly pro-US. (Following Hamas’s playbook there.) Their preferred strategy seems to be not to overthrow or directly confront the national government, unless the national government confronts them… But rather, to do a combination of whittling down the government’s legitimacy while also holding out to it a potential life-raft of cooperation– but on the basis of a nationalist and ever more strongly anti-US platform.
In both Lebanon and Sadre City, the anti-US forces seem to be doing rather well at this game, the ultimate “prize” of which is to win the loyalty of the national government (and therefore, also, all of its international legitimacy.) Given that this game requires smarts, subtlety, patience, and an intimate knowledge of the minutiae of local/national politics, is it any surprise that the US is doing very poorly at it?
I shudder to think of the effects of that six-hour bombardment, though. We peace activists in the US have to redouble our efforts to get the US troops out of Iraq and let the Iraqis have their country back!
—
* Big hat-tip to the ever-diligent Badger.