Helena – Page 144 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

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.

Golan: Getting it straight

Whoa there, AP! The generally well-regarded US newswire is putting out an extremely tendentious little “fact-box” today, on the situation in the Israeli-occupied Golan. Tendentious and, need I add, one-sided.
For example, here:

• LOCATION: Plateau at southwestern corner of Syria overlooking Sea of Galilee and northern Israel.

Note to AP: The occupied Golan also overlooks a huge stretch of Syria, including the national capital, Damascus. And from the top of Jebel al-Sheikh, the area’s highest mountain– known by the Israelis as Mount Hermon– Israel’s military is also currently able to dominate a large chunk of Lebanon, too.
Guess it depends on whether we have an Israelo-centric view of the Middle East, or not?
Then, the AP has this:

• HISTORY: Syrian soldiers shelled northern Israel from the Golan Heights between 1948 and 1967. Israel captured the territory in 1967 Mideast war. Israel annexed it in 1981, though no country recognized that.

The last two sentences there are correct. The rest of the graf is unbelievably one-sided. Yes, Syrian soldiers used Golan between 1948 to shell Israeli forces– but those forces were busy consolidating Israel’s military control over areas to the north of the Sea of Galilee that were supposed to have been completely demilitarized under the Armistice Agreement of 1949. UN records from the 1949-1967 period make clear there were infractions from both sides of the Israel-Syria Armistice Line– but more from the Israeli side than from the Syrian side.
Finally, the AP box gives us this:

• DISPUTE: In 2000, Israel-Syria peace talks broke down. Israel offered to withdraw from all the Golan Heights down to the international border in exchange for full peace. Syria insisted on recovering land across the border that it captured in 1948, including the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee.

This is simply not true. At Geneva, Ehud Barak notably did not agree to withdraw to the international border, which according to the maps drawn between Syria and Mandate Palestine ran either along the water-line along the northeast quadrant of the Sea of Galilee, (as in this recent BBC map or this CIA map), or in some versions through the Sea of Galilee roughly at the twelve o’clock and three o’clock lines. Anyway, in those days Syria had certain valuable rights as a littoral (coast-line) power on the SoG, including rights to fish, undertake water-borne transport on it, maintain small ports, etc.
In 1994, during the heart of the negotiations that Syria and Israel maintained from 1991 thru 1996, Israeli PM Rabin told the American mediators that in return for an array of other security measures, demilitarization, normalization of relations, economic links etc, he would be prepared to withdraw Israel’s forces to the international border; and in the negotiations that continued between then and the defeat of his successor, Shimon Peres, at the Israeli polls in spring 1996, that was the basis on which the negotiations continued. (In Israel, it became known as the “Rabin deposit.”) During marathon sessions at the Wye Plantation in Maryland in January 1996, the two sides came very close to concluding all the elements of a final peace agreement.
Peres’s success, Bibi Netanyahu, was not interested in proceeding with those talks. The talks resumed only some months after Ehud Barak was elected in 1999. But when he inveigled Bill Clinton into presenting his “final, final offer” to Syrian president Hafez al-Asad in May 2000, the extent of the promised Israeli withdrawal had mysteriously (or not) shrunk from the Rabin Deposit. Now, Barak insisted on Israel maintaining control off a strip some 100 or so metres wide around the whole of the SoG coast-line. Not surprisingly, Asad demurred. Less than a month later he had died of a heart attack…. and a few months after that, as we know, the Palestinians’ second intifada started, and then Barak lost at the polls to Ariel Sharon.
So, friends at AP: Please let’s not keep that very tendentious, and indeed inaccurate, listing of “facts” up on your newswire. The way you present this material matters. It matters both to the way you are viewed around the world– whether as fair-minded and accurate, or neither of those things. And it matters because your material affects the way many Americans (and perhaps other people elsewhere) think about these issues. If you want to make it look like the Syrians have always been wrong and the Israelis blameless, that matters.
By the way, since the Golan issue is now going to be discussed at Annapolis, people might want to take a look at this series of articles I published in Al-Hayat in 1998, on the human geography of the area.
Also, since I see that my 2000 book on the Israeli-Syrian negotiations of 1991-96 is now listed by the publisher, the US Institute of Peace, as out-of-print, you might want to get a used one from Amazon.
I think I’ll contact USIP and see if we can maybe have them put the final chapter of the book up on the web… (Note to certain carping commenters here: I have never had a royalty agreement with USIP for sales of this book, since they had helped fund some of the research for it. So when I mention the book here, it is certainly not from a desire to increase my earnings.)

Lives and livelihoods in two ME blogs

My able tech assistant (and son) put Google Reader onto my computer as well as the Analytics last week. He said it’s the best RSS reader he knows, and showed my how you can aggregate different feeds into tags and themes, etc.
That meant I needed to go through the slightly chaotic collection of blogs that I’ve been tagging with my “Delicious” system over the past few months, and pick out a subset to put into my Google Reader. Lots of the “usual suspects” there– including a couple of the BBC’s excellently organized RSS feeds, Juan Cole, TPM, etc, etc. Two that I put in that have given me particular pleasure reading the feeds from have been these:

Inside Iraq

As you may know, McClatchy’s news coverage is about the best there is from Iraq, and this is due overwhelmingly to the work of these Iraqis. In the blog, though, they get to write much more informally about their lives and the neighborhoods they live in. Now that Faiza and Riverbend are no longer in Iraq to give us their vividly written, very intimate accounts of what daily life is like there, Inside Iraq is the next best thing.
Read Correspondent Hussein’s recent reflection about the tragedy of Dying Alone, or Sahar IIS’s post about the trouble her dental-student daughter has been having finding enough patients to practice her skills on. Or, come to think of it, any of the posts on the blog, and you’ll learn a lot about what out-of-the-office life is like for– I should imagine– mainly middle-class Iraqis these days.
(Plus, remember that these writers are different from many Iraqis because on the one hand they have jobs, but on the other the jobs they have make many or most of them direct targets for insurgents, so their lives are often lived under tremendous pressure.)

Land and People

Zurayk provides a lively and very well-informed take on agricultural issues as they affect not just Lebanon but also most other countries outside the rich world. He writes a lot about international agricultural policy (e.g. here and here.) He also dives into a lot of specifics about agricultural and environmental issues within Lebanon itself, including with this recent little reflection on recipes that use pomegranate, the health benefits of pomegranates, etc.
On his sidebar, he has links to some of his more political writings. He’s a Palestinian. (L&P also recently had an interesting post expressing his views on a project aimed at Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian cooperation in seedstock improvement.)
… With both of these blogs, as with many others that I have learned a lot from in recent years, what I’ve found of particular value is the opportunity to read these views/posts as they were directly and thoughtfully written by the authors, and un-mediated by the editorial or story-shaping choices of corporate editors. It is truly incredible, the whole new set of windows that the internet gives us into the lives, views, and concerns of other people around the world. (Thanks, Darpa!)
I think we should also give special recognition to McClatchy, a media corporation that respects and trusts the people who work– and risk their lives– for it enough to allow them to write the Inside Iraq blog.
If any of you can recommend other blogs that have similar qualities of immediacy, good writing, thoughtfulness, and insight into the lives and livelihoods of people who live outside the rich portions of the world, do please send in a comment that has, obviously, the URL, and also your own short note on what you find distinctive about it. Thanks!

Calling JWN’s readers from around the world!

Just over a week ago, my son put Google Analytics onto JWN, so i now have a week’s worth of their great data on who YOU, the readers, are.
I am thrilled that during the past week, readers from 107 countries (1,281 cities) visited JWN. I love the mapping gadget. I could travel from the Cape to Cairo through countries where JWN has readers. Can’t quite make it right down the Pan-American Highway through central America… Laos and Myanmar are the only standouts in East Asia. We had visitors from all the states of the US except North Dakota, with California very evidently leading the pack.
I’ve been very interested, ever since I first started writing JWN, in developing a global readership. (Remember back when I tried to use the non-English options for the date-stamps here?) It turns out that 42% of the visits this past week came from non-US-based readers. Well, I know there are some US-citizen readers who visit us from outside the US, and some non-US readers who visit from inside the US, so maybe those two categories more or less balance each other? The top five locations among non-European-heritage locales are India, Egypt, Pakistan, China, and South Africa, all bunched together with each having around 0.6% of the total visitorship.
So it’s still not a totally global forum here. But I’m really delighted to find how international it is.
I realize that over the past few months, while I’ve been working on this latest book of mine and doing a few other things, I haven’t been as systematic or intentional– okay, some might say “obsessive”– as I have been at various earlier stages of publishing the blog. I was starting to feel a bit burned out with it, or feel it wasn’t achieving very much, or whatever. I even thought of closing it gracefully down. (Or ungracefully. Bam! Just like that!)
But seeing the Google Analytics maps has been a real blast. And I’ve even started to think about various ideas for ways I could make JWN more effective. I think it will always be fairly idiosyncratic, or as the Lebanese say, “mazaji.” But there are probably things I could do either with the layout or with a better organization of the content, or by trying to be a bit more intentional in planning the content, that would make it more interesting for more readers.
What do any of you think? Would you like more shorter posts? (Please don’t ask for photos.) What other ideas do you have? What do you like about JWN? What might make it more interesting or useful for you? What would make it so much more interesting that you could recommend it to more of your friends?
Actually, instead of sitting here enjoying looking at the maps and thinking about the future of the blog, what I should be doing is finishing the revisions on the book manuscript. I really do need to get it done within the next two or three days….
If you put your ideas here in the form of a comment, could you just tell me your home-country as well when you do so? Thanks!

Annapolis: Saudi and Palestinian dimensions

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said today in Cairo that he will attend the Annapolis meeting. I think this is a good decision. It will allow him to give the extremely helpful, Saudi-initiated “Arab Peace Plan of 2002” a good and serious presentation there.
That AP story by Salah Nasrawi also notes that Prince Saud said that at Annapolis he “would not take part in a ‘theatrical show,’ such as handshakes with Israeli officials, saying the gathering must make serious progress.” That is fine, too. Under his plan, the Arab states would all engage in full normalization of relations with Israel simultaneously with Israel undertaking its withdrawal from all (or nearly all) the lands its army occupied in 1967. (Many Israelis and their friends want to have this recognition/normalization performed upfront. Of course they might want that. But I can’t see why they would reasonably believe that anyone else would support that request.)
Regarding the core issues of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, I see that Amira Hass has another piece in Haaretz today in which she explains why many Palestinians consider the PA’s negotiating stance to be a weak, overly appeasing one. I think this is a further commentary on the Nov. 17th negotiating Draft (note that’s a PDF there) that she had received recently– the one in which the Israeli and Palestinian sides could not even agree whether it should be a “Joint document” or a “Joint statement.” There were also, at that point, many other remaining disagreements between the two sides.
Also in today’s Ha’aretz is an intriguing account by Akiva Eldar of the conclusions reached by members of something called the Aix Group, a group of Israeli, Palestinian, and “international” experts that has been trying to unravel the many economic strands that would be involved in a satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue.
The group recommends that Palestinian refugees from 1948 should be allowed to choose their place of permanent residence, but implementation of that should be subject to the sovereign wishes of the state involved; and an alternative package of full compensation would be offered to those not returning to their original homes and properties in what is now Israel. The total amounts of compensation involved would, the group estimated, come to “between $55 and $85 billion.”
Exploratory work like that– based on updated surveys of the extent of Palestinian property claims against Israel, like those recently produced by Prof. Michael Fischbach here in the US– is really helpful. If a Palestinian-Israeli final peace agreement is to be sustainable, it must of course be sold to a sizeable majority of the people in both national communities, and must provide a basis for the new Palestinian state that is viable in both economic and political terms.
Maybe a formula like that proposed by the Aix Group, which involves overwhelmingly compensation to the refugees rather than actual physical return, could work out. But I believe it only really has a chance of working provided the territorial base of the Palestinian state is broad enough and coherent enough to accommodate Palestinian aspirations for a viable state. That is, it cannot be eaten into in the West Bank by the massive blocs of illegal Israeli settlements, as solidifying the line of the current Israeli “security” barrier into the final state boundary would do. Most of the areas currently occupied by those settlements would therefore have to come under the authority of the Palestinian state.
In addition, a permanent passage between the West Bank and Gaza needs to be assured. Completely free interaction between Palestine and the world economy– notably, NOT an interaction mediated always through Israel, as in the Oslo formula– needs to be guaranteed. And of course, a workable formula needs to be found for Jerusalem.
Much of the work of brainstorming possible formulas on all these issues has already been done. You can see a survey of proposals on Jerusalem, for example, in the 2004 book on the Israeli-Palestinian question that I worked on, along with a group of fellow Quakers from around the world.
Mainly at this point, what is needed is for the leaderships on both sides to show that they really are committed to finding a robust and sustainable solution that meets the needs of all the people iinvolved– around 8 million-plus Palestinians and 7 million-plus Israelis– sufficiently fairly.
Given that gross population data, an outcome that ends up giving the Palestinian state a land base that is in any significant way inferior to the 23% of Mandate Palestine that makes up the West Bank and Gaza, would seem very far from able to meet this requirement.
So there’s a lot of work to do at the bilateral level. And a lot of hard decisions that the US government will need to take, especially regarding the degree to which it plans to continue underwriting Israeli intransigence in this peacemaking.
There are also numerous other regional issues that need to be addressed. To see my comments on some of them, read my previous post here.