Author: Helena

The passing of Joseph Samaha

I’m on the road. I arrived in Damascus from Amman by car about an hour ago. Now I’m settled in the Omayad Hotel which has wifi in the rooms. Great!
But I learned from commenter David that the veteran Lebanese journoJoseph Samaha has died. I agree it’s a huge loss to Middle Eastern intellectual life. David points out that As’ad Abu Khalil has a good post about Joseph on Angry Arab.
I have very little to add to that. As’ad knew Joseph much, much better than I did. I do remember a good evening we had in Beirut back in November 2004 with some friends who had invited a small number of other guests, of whom Joseph was one. It was an excellent conversation. (I knew his friend Fawaz Trabulsi a bit better than him, back in the 70s.)
Anyway, As’ad’s post is really informative. One of his longest ever; and it reveals a lot about what a great loss Joseph’s passing is. (It also tells us some nice things about As’ad. Maybe an increased sense of human connectedness is one of the legacies of the passing of a good person.)

US church leaders finish Teheran visit

A delegation of thirteen leaders from US church institutions has just finished a six-day visit to Iran, culminating in a 150-minute discussion with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The delegation includes two leaders from Quaker organizations: Joe Volk, the head of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and Mary-Ellen McNish, the had of the American Friends Service Committee.
Today (Sunday), the delegation issued a statement in which the members said,

    What the delegation found most encouraging from the meeting with President Ahmadinejad was a clear declaration from him that Iran has no intention to acquire or use nuclear weapons, as well as a statement that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be solved through political, not military means. He said, “I have no reservation about conducting talks with American officials if we see some goodwill.”
    We believe it is possible for further dialogue and that there can be a new day in U.S. – Iranian relations. The Iranian government has already built a bridge toward the American people by inviting our delegation to come to Iran. We ask the U.S. government to welcome a similar delegation of Iranian religious leaders to the United States.
    As additional steps in building bridges between our nations, we call upon both the U.S. and Iranian governments to:
    * immediately engage in direct, face-to-face talks;
    * cease using language that defines the other using “enemy” images; and
    * promote more people-to-people exchanges, including religious leaders, members of Parliament/Congress, and civil society.
    As people of faith, we are committed to working toward these and other confidence building measures, which we hope will move our two nations from the precipice of war to a more just and peaceful settlement.

You can read more about the delegation if you read this page from the FCNL website. which has links to a number of interesting “diary” entries that Joe Volk made during the early days of the trip.
I am in Jordan right now. My personal view from here is that a U.S. military attack on Iran remains a live possibility. People I’ve talked to here– as in Egypt– say the consequences for their country in the event of such an attack could be very dire indeed.
These are two countries whose leaders are closely allied with the US. However, opinion amongst these two countries’ peoples is very strongly opposed to the idea of a US attack on Iraq, which they see as very destabilizing for the whole region.
As I’ve noted many times before,the Bushites have been working very hard indeed to try to frame the issues in the Middle East in a “Sunni vs. Shiite” way, or an “Iran vs. Arabs” way, and to project the idea that “most” Sunni Arabs would actually welcome a US move to diminish Iranian/Shiite power in the region. I cannot stress strongly enough here the fact that this is not so.
Anyway, tomorrow, the participants in the church leaders’ delegation will be having a press conference in Washington DC, so I hope we will all hear a lot more about the conversations they had on their trip.
(As for me, tomorrow I travel to Damascus.)

Depends what you mean by ‘Honor’…

Blogger Will Bunch had a good post recently analyzing the statement Unca Dick Cheney made recently, namely that,

    “We want to complete the mission [in Iraq], we want to get it done right, and we want to return with honor.”

Bunch quite appropriately recalls the eerily similar use that Richard Nixon made of the same term “honor” in his presidential nomination acceptance speech in August 1968.
Bunch writes,

    For Richard Nixon, “peace with honor” was not synonymous with “peace.”
    It meant “war.” A lot of war.
    Not long after taking office in 1969, Nixon — without authorization from Congress — initiated a secret air campaign against enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia that dropped 2,750,000 short tons of bombs, more than the alllies used during all of World War II. He later undertook a massive bombing campaign of Hanoi and Haiphong, and his efforts didn’t bring much peace on the homefront, culminating in the slaughter of four bystanders during a 1970 protest at Kent State.
    Finally, in January 1973, Nixon declared “peace with honor.”
    There are three things you should know about this.
    1) When Nixon gave that speech at the GOP convention, it had been 1,467 [days] since the alleged incident in the Gulf of Tonkin that triggered the American escalation of the war. When he finally achieved his “peace with honor,” it was another 1,633 days later, so more than half the fighting came after the “peace with honor” promise.
    2) More importantly, from the start of 1969 through the end of the war, some 20,604 American soldiers died in pursuit of “peace with honor,” more than one-third of the total (58,202) for the entire war.
    3) In the end, “peace with honor” didn’t look all that different than “peace” — i.e., if Nixon had merely brought the troops home on Jan. 20, 1969. As we all know, Saigon still fell, in May of 1975.

So I think that a necessary first question should be, what on earth does Cheney mean when he talks about a return with “honor”? Let’s please have no repeat of the same kind of damage, destruction, and dishonor that followed Nixon’s use of that term.
Secondly, long-time JWN readers will be well aware that I’ve always supported the idea that the US troops should be allowed an orderly withdrawal from Iraq– provided a total and speedy withdrawal according to a well-publicized and verifiable timetable is indeed the path ther administration chooses to pursue. To me, it is less important whether the administration chooses to try to describe this withdrawal in some form of slightly sugarcoated terms. (When they withdrew from Beirut in February 1984 they called it a “redeployment offshore.” H’mmm.) The important thing is that it happens, and happens soon.
But please let’s not completely debase (or dishonor) the concept of honor in human affairs by going down the path established in Vietnam by Richard Nixon.
Finally, this time around, given that the Cold War has now completely ended and the world has been moving into a new stage, one of the main things we need to do is ensure that this withdrawal from Iraq is followed by a rational and radical downsizing of the US military and the building of new, much more globally accountable structures of international security in all the various areas of the world through which the Pentagon’s generals still swagger as though they own them.
They don’t.
Any “honor” that I can in US strategic affairs in the coming 20-year period will come from the US realizing it needs to work in good faith with other powers to ensure common security interests around the world, and in working diligently to make that happen.
Otherwise, G-d save us all from the possibility of any further repeat of the crimes of 2003.

Interview with Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh

Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh is a genial, energetic man who looks
to be about 60 years old.  The thick, dish-like lenses of his
eye-glasses magnify his eyes and give him a vulnerable, owlish
look.  To
see him at his office in the gracious old building that houses both
the Egyptian Medical Society and the Arab Medical Union, you have to
make the appointment well in advance.  When you arrive a tall,
well-organized young man who glides around the building with a bundle
of files in his hand takes you to Dr. Abul-Futouh’s office. We greet
each other, and the doctor immediately lays out the terms of engagement
for the interview.  “Ask anything!  How long do you
need?  Is thirty minutes enough?”  I ask for forty, and am
granted them.

Did I mention that, in addition to being the General Secretary of the
Arab Medical Union, Dr. Abul-Futouh is also a member of the Guidance
Council
of the Muslim Brotherhood?

The most interesting part of the interview came when I pressed him to
explain his view on Israel.

“We as the Muslim Brotherhood know that the Jews in Israel are human
beings,” he said,

and we know they should live, and should not be killed.  Just the
same as the Palestinians who are the original owners of the country
should live and should not be killed.  The Palestinian problem was
made by the western regimes and surely they should solve it– but not
at the expense of the Palestinians!

He sought to illustrate his argument about why the Jewish people
of Israel should not be killed by describing an Arab custom whereby a
person who is born as a result of a rape should not face any punishment
or stigma on account of that fact.  “That person’s existence may
be the result of a fault, but the fault was not his,” he said. 
“What fault has he committed?”

He continued,

The Jewish people can go or stay,
but whatever they do the Palestinians should win their rights. 
You could have an outcome with one state there– a secular, democratic
state– or two states.  But I think one state would be better,
because if you have two states, then they would fight.  It would
be better to be one state– like South Africa.

I asked him, did he really say a “secular, democratic
state”?  This seemed ground-breaking given the MB’s traditional
opposition to the idea of secular rule, and I wanted to confirm that he
really intended to say it that way– in Arabic, “dawla dimuqratiyya ‘ulmaniyya“. 
He confirmed that he did mean that.

— But Israel refuses
everything!  And now, the US regime– the regime, not the people–
has joined Israel in imposing this very bad siege on the Palestinians.

Why does America attack us?  I think they do this because they are
rightwing and extremist and have interests with the multinational
companies which bring so many benefits to people associated with the
regime there that they live well at our expense.

I had started the interview by asking how he saw the situation in
Egypt, whre the MB has been the subject of a governmental crackdown
that has grown increasingly harsh over the past year.

He said,

Continue reading “Interview with Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh”

Egyptian blogging on trial

The trial of Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer, who is on trial for his writings criticizing Egypt’s al-Azhar religious authorities, Islam and President Husni Mubarak, resumes in his home town of Alexandria today. Fellow blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy writes:

    From the way the trial has been going, and Kareem’s family’s recent media stunt, unfortunately I’m expecting a harsh verdict. I hope I’m proven wrong…

Kareem is a student at Al Azhar University, where he enrolled with, I presume, the strong support of his very religiously observant family. He broke with their religious values/practices– and now as I understand it his dad has publicly excoriated him. It must be very painful for all members of the family.
Kareem’s supporters have been running a support blog called Free Kareem, which distributes news of the various public actions being held in his support in various places around the world. I see that sadly none are listed for Egypt. The only Middle Eastern country in which activities are posted is Bahrain. The photos indicate that many of these actions are very sparsely attended. Having taken part in any number of sparsely attended public actions of my own I understand that doing that– especially in a place where such public actions are not very common– takes a certain amount of courage.
The way I see it, this trial is about Kareem Amer– but it is also about the fate of blogging and the freedom of expression in general, in Egypt. In the past few years all of the public media here has become markedly more open and more ready to publish views highly critical of the regime. This applies to the print media as well as the blogosphere and other portions of the internet.
Here, by the way, is a very interesting article on the whole subject that was posted recently on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website. It surveys the whole scene of the Egyptian blogosphere– secular and pro-MB– and has material from an interview conducted with Hamalawy:

    Hossam el-Hamalawy, one of the most famous Egyptian bloggers, whos is publishing http://arabist.net/arabawy/, says that the Muslim Brotherhood experience with the Internet started early, seeing the Islamic group as among first political powers to use the Internet and Email groups from an early time.
    El-Hamalawy suggested that he was receiving many Emails and statements from Muslim Brotherhood Email Groups as early as 2002.
    El-Hamalawy added that the weblogs have been introduced to Egypt by the secularists, specially Leftists whether the mainstream Left ( those affiliated to a leftist party or group ) or leftist individuals; but the actual revolution of weblogs in Egypt was during 2005 referendum, after which bloggers managed to make weblogs a credited source of news.
    El-Hamalawy pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood’s young members’ use of the weblogs took place later on may be because the weblogs are considered personal diaries in which personal feelings are expressed while the Muslim Brotherhood discourse avoids such methods, specially under the tense relation with the regime and security.
    El Hamalawi added that the most important Muslim Brotherhood weblog that has been recently browsing is: http://ana-ikhwan.blogspot.com/ because it follows up the news of detentions among the Muslim Brotherhood group.

The article also contains a whole blogroll of blogs maintained by “MB Youth”. They start off there with some female-authored blogs… Haven’t had a chance yet to check many of them out.
And here is a post from yesterday on the MB website, under the title Blogs against military rulers, which summarizes some recent blog postings on the continuing campaign of detention and economic expropriation that the Egyptian authorities have been maintaining against the MB.
I just note, finally, that if Kareem Amer is sentenced to a jail term it is possible he could be subjected to some bad harrassment in jail– from guards or fellow prisoners who object to the criticisms he has voiced of the role of Muslim religious authorities and/or are influenced by the government’s accusations that that makes him un-Islamic and a threat to national security. I think it would be excellent if an influential organization like the MB could declare publicly that it stands against any mistreatment of Kareem Amer or any individual on the basis only of views that he or she has expressed and of government accusations against him…

Notes from Cairo, #3

I have been incredibly busy, “uploading” information and impressions from here in Egypt into my brain, renewing old acquaintances here, making new ones, rushing around in general. My daughter– and one-time research assistant– Leila is here for the week, too, taking her one-week midwinter break from teaching first grade in snowbound Brooklyn with us here, which has been a LOT of fun. So yes, on Sunday I did spend a day doing out with her to see some pyramids…
It was good to re-connect with 5,000-plus years of this ancient civilization, with its underpinnings of an incredibly stable state/bureaucratuic structure. Also really interesting to drive through the peri-urban areas– to see the extent to which the hyper-fertile green fields are being eaten up by “informal housing”– that is, dense clumps of four- and five-story concrete and brick buildings that have metastasized out from the older city in many, many directions.
We had a brief discussion along the way about the effects of the Aswan High Dam, built in the 1960s to regulate what used to be the very frequent (and actually, soil-enriching) inundations of the Nile down here at the apex of the agriculturally fabulous Delta. The person who was with us said that since the dam was built, the absence of flooding means the farmers downstream can now get five crops per two-year cycle, where previously it was only one crop per year. But they need a lot of ferilizer to keep the soil productive on such a punishing schedule… Anyway, all the irrigated land we saw as we dove around– to Memphis, to Saqqara, to Giza– was intensely cultivated and very green, and the villages that remained unengulfed by the city’s growth looked bustling and productive.
Monday, Bill and I drove out for lunch with Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and his wife Hedayat at their farm west of town. Getting out of Cairo took– as always– a long time, and then we sped through some agricultural land and some near-desert. When we were about 50 minutes out from the city center– well into a partly agricultural, partly desert-side zone– we passed a massive conglomeration of fantastically futuristic buildings, all of them constructed from acres of sheeny blue glass supported by whitewashed concrete. The effect was somewhere between “Mediterranean Arabic” as in Tunisia’s cute seaside villages, Windows’ “blue screen of death”, and just plain tacky… This was the “Smart Village”, a huge zone of office structures and labs for participants in the country’s booming IT sector. (With reportedly big investment from Bill Gates, hence perhaps the “blue screen of death” effect?)
We sped on… Barely five minutes later as we drove along a broad tree-lined road Bill nudged me: “Look!” Ahead of us was a herd of camels being herded along the other side of the road to, presumably, some camel market nearby. There were about thirty of them, all trotting/galloping fast fast along the road, all keeping to their own side of it, and being herded by (as far as I could see) a single herder mounted on his own camel who brought up the rear and controlled them by, I suppose voice commands. It was a great sight– one I have never seen before. The camels had paint-writing on their flanks and their full, plumped-out humps; it looked like the names of their owners or perhaps the names of butchers who had bought this meat on a futures market.
As we continued driving, we passed a couple of smaller herds, and I saw one large pickup truck with a couple of very recalcitrant-looking camels tied down in the back. Must have been market day somewhere close?
Heikal, for those who don’t know much Egypt, was a key eminence grise of the Nasser regime who often acted as an intermediary between Nasser and western powers in times when Nasser was intent on trying to hew to a neutral position in the Cold War. He became Nasser’s Minister of Information, and kept that job under Sadat after Nasser died of a heart attack in fall 1970. After Sadat undertook his peace diplomacy with Israel Heikal became a vocal critic of that… And then, when Sadat went into his last fatal spiral of paranoia in fall 1981 and started locking up everyone whom he suspected of harboring any independent thoughts at all, Heikal was one of those imprisoned.
(I was working in London at the time– including, doing a little research on Heikal’s behalf in the Public Records Office in Kew into some aspects of Britain’s policy in Egypt in the late 1940s. But as the Egyptian crisis deepened I went to Cairo to do some reporting, and I was able to go visit Hedayet and get some news back to their friends in London about what was going on… I think I have only seen her once since then; so it was good to reconnect with them both this week… )
These days, Heikal, who is 84, is doing a weekly half-hour program on Al-Jazeera in which he is narrating his research and analysis of, I believe, events during his entire time close to power. He has been doing it for about three years now and has reached 1955. It’s an interesting format: he sits behind a desk looking very scholarly, and brings out documents– both the original diplomatic records (maybe some that I had gotten for him from the PRO back in 1981?)– and their Arab translations, and discusses both the documents and the other events around them…
Anyway, we had a good lunch conversation there with the Heikals and their other guests. Heikal said, “Ask me anything!” and I did. One of the things I asked him about was the succession issue here in Egypt. He was adamant that Gamal Mubarak would not be the next president: “Everyone hates him!” he exclaimed at one point. He also talked at length about the extent to which President Mubarak has insulated and isolated himself from ordinary Egyptians and has built an impermeable bubble of courtiers and yes-men around himself.
One of the other lunch guests remarked on the fact that that morning, Mubarak had presented the Egyptian “Order of Merit”, one of the country’s highest honors, on the outgoing head of US Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid. “Outrageous! That just proves how isolated Mubarak has become!” was Heikal’s reaction. (I haven’t seen this significant award mentioned anywhere else. Has anyone else seen any reports of it? Maybe the news of it was fairly tightly held by the Mubarak courtiers so as not to embarrass the ageing Pharaoh?)
More later on the content of those conversations… That evening we were once again generously hosted, this time by Ali Dessouki and his wife Eglal. Ali is a recent Minister for Youth and Sports. He and another of the dinner guests, Muhammad Kamel, are both on the NDP committee that’s working on political reform. We had a very lovely dinner in an incredibly posh new sporting- and social club out to the southeast of the city, and a conversation that was often very lively. Ali grew very impassioned as he explained to me how the regime felt it really had to crack down on the Muslim Brotherhood these days, with an argument along the lines of “We gave them an inch [of liberalization] and they tried to take a mile, so we really had no alternative but to push back against them very hard.” On that basis he was adamant about justifying, for example, the recent re-arrest of some dozens of MB activists immediately after they had just been freed on the orders of a judge…
Yesterday morning I went to the generally pro-establishment Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, where the Director, Dr. Abdel Monem Said Aly had thoughtfully set up a small round-table discussion for me on current strategic developments in the region, with three of his senior colleagues there at the center. The discussion continued for two hours– mainly in Arabic (which I had to record, since I absolutely cannot conduct a conversation in Arabic while taking notes on it at the same time.) Again, more later on that… The main thing that came out of the discussion there was the intense preoccupation that these people all had with the current rise of Iran in the region. Indeed, it was hard to get them to talk about anything else!
Abdel Monem noted that there are a variety of views among Egyptians towards Iran and its nuclear program, with some seeing it as something of a threat, some seeing it as a potentially useful bargaining chip to try to win an agreement on making the whole Middle East into a region free of nuclear weapons, and some seeing it as an actual strategic asset for Egyptians.
And then, on to my afternoon appointment, which was with Dr. Abdel Monem Abul-Futouh, who is both the secretary-general of the Cairo-based Arab Medical Union and a member of the Guidance Council of the MB. Once again, as when I interviewed Dr. el-Arian last week, this meeting was in the downtown headquarters of the Egyptian Medical Society. One of the most notable things he said was to express support for the idea of a secular democratic state in Palestine! (That was, of course, the old proposal of Fateh and the PLO, back in the late 1960s, before they became converted to the idea of a two-state solution.) Dr. Abul-Futouh said something like, “We could see there being either a one-state solution or a two-state solution in Palestine. But I think if there’s a two-state solution they would still be fighting, so from that point of view one state– a secular democratic state– would be better.”
I double-checked with him that he meant to say a secular democratic state, and he said he did. I also probed a little the degree to which he would see the Jewish (Israeli) citizens of present-day Israel being included in this political project, and he said they should be. “Like the South African solution,” he confirmed. He also quoted a saying about the need to give decent treatment to a child born as the result of a rape. “The child should not be punished,” he said. The clear implication was that, though he saw Zionism as a political crime, as he said, the people who had come into being as Israeli citizens as a result of it should not be punished. Or anyway, not all of them. I did not get to complete clarity with him whether only the Jewish Israelis born in Israel or all those currently in Israel should be allowed to stay; though he did say clearly that there should be an end to discriminatory forms of (Jews-only) immigration into the country.
He repeated his and the MB’s respect for Judaism as a religion.
Anyway, more of that later, too.
Later yesterday, a quick meeting with former close presidential confidante Osama al-Baz…
As you can see, I’m having some extremely interesting discussions and experiences here Now, I gotta run and have some more.

Riverbend’s cry from the heart

The talented Iraqi woman blogger Riverbend has posted again today– the first time since December 31.
This post is an agonized reflection on an interview she saw on Al-Jazeera t.v. last night, with an Iraqi woman who had been gang-raped by members of the US-trained Iraqi “security” forces.
As I noted here recently, the use of sexual humiliation and other forms of humiliation to try to “ensure” the post-detention silence of detainees is a common tactic of oppressive, torturing regimes; and it takes enormous courage for any victim to be able to speak out afterwards about what was done to her/him.
Riv writes,

    look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries- that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too.
    She’s just one of tens, possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons. She looks like cousins I have. She looks like friends. She looks like a neighbor I sometimes used to pause to gossip with in the street. Every Iraqi who looks at her will see a cousin, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt…

And of course, many non-Iraqi Arabs who watch this on Jazeera will have a very similar response, too.
Riv starts out her post by noting the contrast between the Oprah Winfrey Show, airing at that exact same time on one of the t.v. channels her family is able to access, which dealt with challenges US women face as they make their shopping choices or deal with their shopping addictions… and the other show, the one on Jazeera. She writes, too, that she is (quite understandably) filled with rage. But when she writes, “I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate” I think that is to some her extent her rage and anger talking there.
I did not see the footage, since we don’t have a t.v. in our apartment here. (Can anyone send me a link to a streaming video version of some of this interview?) But evidently, from her account and from this one on the AJ website, it must be very disturbing– and I think it would be so to anyone who watches it, whether Arab, or non-Arab.
This is how Riv ends:

    And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.
    Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.

One last question from me. Has this footage aired on any US t.v. channel yet? Will it? Will it provoke the kind of discussion that we US citizens ought most certainly to be engaging in about how we can even start to help repair the damage our government’s policy has wrought in Iraq?
One first step is evidently that we need to stop the perpetration of gross rights abuses in Iraq both by our own troops and by all the allegedly “Iraqi” military formations that have been trained up by the occupation forces and still act effectively under the command of the US occupation forces there.
Under international law the US, as occupying power, continues to hold the responsibility for public security in Iraq. It has failed, utterly failed, to exercise that responsibility. The occupation must end. And everyone concerned– Iraqis, their neighbors, the UN, Arab league, and Islamic Conference– should gather together to do what is possible to repair the damage and re-assemble a working governance structure in Iraq.

J’lem ‘Summit’ fails: What’s the alternative?

Today’s three-way meeting in Jerusalem seems to have failed even more seriously than I and many others had been expecting. AP’s diplomatic writer Anne Gearan reports that,

    Talks between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, initially billed as a new U.S. push to restart peace efforts, ended Monday with little progress other than a commitment to meet again.
    … Neither Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas nor Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert joined Rice as she delivered her statement [which had lasted precisely 90 seconds], and she left the room without taking questions from reporters.
    …State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said there is no date for another three-way meeting.

Gearan also wrote,

    Speaking later, Olmert said he and Abbas agreed to maintain an open channel of communication “which would focus primarily on the need to improve the lives of the Palestinian people in various areas, and of course a continued war on terror by the Palestinian Authority — in practice — to bring terror to a complete halt.”
    Abbas and Olmert also discussed possibly extending a 3-month-old cease-fire covering the
    Gaza Strip to include the West Bank, said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

I will just note, regarding the avowals one repeatedly hears from Israeli leaders that they intend to work “to improve the lives of Palestinians”, that

    (1) This has long been a code whereby Israelis signal that though they may– or may not– be prepared to talk about a few surface economic issues with the Palestinians, still at the same time they continue steadfastly to refuse to discuss the central political demands the Palestinians raise regarding their sovereignty, national independence, national borders, the status of Jerusalem, etc. I recall that at one “track two” gathering between Israelis and Palestinians that I helped organize back in 1991, one of the (Likudnik) Israelis trotted out this line and the Palestinians were already furious. One of the Palestinians there exclaimed, “You consider us just like animals in a pen who might require some feed from time to time, but you never think of us as humans with full political rights!”
    It’s still the same today. (And of course, in the interim, the Israelis have succeeded in implanting additional hundreds of thousands of their citizens into the illegal settlements in the occupied territories, and have furthered the project of the systematic economic de-development of the Palestinians.)
    (2) Despite the fact that we’ve heard all these Israeli avowals that they will try to improve the Palestinians’ daily lives so many times before, their track record on following through by attending to even the Palestinians’ basic humanitarian needs is atrocious.
    It was Secretary Rice herself who “brokered” the “Karni Agreement” back in November 2005, under which the Palestinians of Gaza were to have assured passage for goods through the Karni crossing with Israel, plus the rapid organizing of convoys of buses for people to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, etc, etc.
    What came of that one?? Almost nothing. What price did Rice and her boss impose on Israel for its anti-humanitarian foot-dragging on that? Absolutely none! So why should anyone take seriously these even vaguer avowals of concern for the Palestinians’ wellbeing being made by Olmert today?

Regarding the prolongation of the ceasefire: Yes! That would be great! But please let it be reciprocal, monitored by a trusted third party, and be considered as a gateway to the swift convening of a final-status peace conference between the two governments.
Approximately 39 years and six months of time that should have been used to broker a final peace between them has already been wasted. The world– and especially the hard-pressed Palestinians both inside and outside their historic homeland– should not be expected to wait for very much longer.
A final-status peace conference. That is the best alternative to failed attempts at (highly coercive) summitry.

Rice’s meeting with two other “weak reeds”

As I write this– 10:30 a.m. Monday by Cairo time– U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The first thing to note is that all three of these officials represent political trends that are currently extremely weak within their respective countries.
So in this summit of three weak reeds, can any of the three expect to gain any strength from the support that the other two may– or may not– be able to offer them?
Of these three political trends, Mahmoud Abbas’s is currently (at his domestic level) the least weak. This might seem paradoxical. But his Fateh movement is the only one of these three three trends that has actively engaged with its domestic critics and done the hard work of reaching an agreement for internal entente; he did that through the Mecca Agreement that he concluded with Hamas last week.
By contrast, the administration that Rice represents has done almost nothing to try to reach a workable entente with the domestic critics whose rising power and new willingness to challenge the administration havey been much in evidence in the past two months. And as for Olmert, his complex governing coalition is limping along with little direction, plagued by internal problems and having still failed to recover any of the sense of direction it lost when its main original project– the pursuit of unilateralist “convergence” in the West Bank– was rendered irrelevant by the Hizbullah victory of last summer. (For details of which, see here.)
Though Abu Mazen is currently domestically stronger than the other two summiteers, his ability to give support to the other two weak reeds there is, of course, severely constrained by the terms of that same Mecca Agreement which represented, essentially, his conceding to the reality that Hamas is noticeably stronger and better organized in Palestinian society than is Fateh.
The Mecca Agreement represented a significant set-back to the US-Israeli plan to weaken or break Hamas’s power by using Fateh against it. (Just as, in Iraq at the end of December, the US plan to weaken or break Moqtada Sadr’s power by using SCIRI and other Iraqi Shiite forces against it was also blocked by the indigenous political forces there.)
These days, regarding Palestine, Rice is evidently fnding it hard to come to terms with the Palestinians’ new attainment of national entente. Al-Jazeera English tells us today that she told the Palestinian daily paper Al-Ayyam that: “This is a complicated time, and it has been made more complicated by the (Palestinian) unity government, but I’m not deterred…”
She has been going out of her way to “lower expectations” regarding the outcome of the summit. (Note to Rice: You think anyone even had any expectations of it in the first place?) She has made clear that she intends to coordinate closely with the Israelis throughout all the new bout of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy of which today’s summit is supposed to be a key first step– and that she thinks the parties are nowhere near to reaching any lasting diplomatic agreement. (See her interview with Aluf Benn in today’s HaAretz.)
Here in Egypt I found veteran journalist and commentator Fahmi Howeidy quite scathing regarding his expectations from the summit. He told me:

    When Rice visited the region before and said she wanted to reach a final agreement on the Palestinian issue I said that she was not here primarily for the sake of the Palestinians but to try to shore up the Americans’ position in Iraq. It’s the same thing today!
    They just want to try to convince the Arabs that they’re doing something about Palestine, in order to help them build an Arab coalition that could support their policies in Iraq– or towards Iran. It’s all a show!

Did he think the Arabs would be taken in?

    Look, for the Arab regimes, it’s not a problem. They don’t need to be persuaded, because they have already stated their support for Bush. Even President Mubarak has said he supports Bush’s ‘surge’ policy. But what the administration needs to do is to convince the Arab people. This, they can’t do, because the Arab people aren’t stupid!”

So, back to my main question: can any of these three weak reeds receive meaningful support from the other two at today’s summit?
However much support Abu Mazen might want to give to Rice or Olmert (and I suspect that isn’t very much, anyway), he is constrained by the terms of the Mecca Agreement– and by the very strong support it has received from within Palestinian society– from making any further concessions to Rice and Olmert at this time.
As for whether they will do anything to support him? That doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, either. In her interview with Benn Rice still seemed quite inflexible regarding the Bushites’ demand that the Palestinian government meet all three of the Quartet’s extremely tough conditions, and she expressed her complete unwillingness to respond to Abu Mazen’s strongly stated request to move rapidly into negotiations of the final-status settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
So I guess that means the answer there would be a “No.”
(I’ll try to update this later in light of any public statements issued after the summit and the lunch that will follow it.)

Interview with Dr. Issam el-Arian

“The US administration has worked out a package deal with our
government,” key Muslim Brotherhood (MB) spokesperson Dr. Issam
el-Arian told me recently.  “The regime works for US
interests in the region, and the
US remains silent on its abuses.  That deal  worked for many
years.  But it
can’t work now in an era of transparency.”

I met Dr. Arian in his office in the gracious– and
bustling– 1930s villa in downtown Cairo that is the headquarters of
the Egyptian Medical Society.  Arian is the organization’s
treasurer, having been released just this past fall at the end of a
five-year stint in jail.  (He had earlier served two shorter prison terms.) I asked him about the kind of
treatment he had received in jail this time round.  “It was more
terrible under President Nasser,” he said.  But he said that
regime agents had been following him throughout the preceding week, and
there was a risk he might be re-arrested.  “And they’ve prevented
me from traveling,” he said.

We talked February 11.  Four days later, the Egyptian police
arrested an additional 73 MB members, including some individuals who
had run as candidates in the parliamentary elections held in November
2005.  But not Arian. This brought to around 300 the total number
of imprisoned MB members, with the majority of them having been
arrested within the past 12 months.  (Human Rights Watch has a list of
the 226 MB members detained as of February 13, 2007.)

Arian is a friendly, well organized man in his early fifties, with a
slightly receding hairline and the same kind of neatly trimmed beard
that the Hamas people wear. “I feel we are in a border stage between
two eras,” he told
me.  “Our president is 79 and ill.  There are many rumors
about the possible succession of his son, Gamal.  This is a big
problem in Egypt because the army has always been the main power
here.  It still is, though now the “State Security” is much
stronger than it was.  Still, the army has taken to the streets
twice here, in 1977 and 1986.  And that has to be a big concern.”

He said that in his view, the constitutional changes now being
discussed in Egypt “are aimed at preventing the ermergence of all
indpendent political parties, not just the Brotherhood.”  He
explained that though there are some 23 or 24 “official” opposition
parties in the country, “they only have seven or eight seats between
all of them.”  (The parliament contains 444 elected seats– and
ten seats allocated by the President.)  Some of the changes
currently being discussed for the country’s Constitution concern
Articles 76 and 77, which define strict conditions for which
parties  should be allowed to field candidates in the presidential
election.  Though Article 76 stipulates that the president should
be elected in a multi-party election it is in fact true that, under the
current rules and most currently presented changes to them, none of the
“official” opposition parties would qualify!

For its part, the MB now has 88 members of parliament who are loyal to
it, though they ran as independents in the November 2005
election.  In addition, Arian said that six of the country’s
two-member constituencies still have not had their election results
certified.  “And they would give us probably another seven
members.”

Despite the fact he felt he was being closely watched and followed,
Arian seemed relaxed, and he even projected a
certain amount of confidence.  One of the topics I was eager to
discuss with him was the complex relationship between Egypt and
Palestine– and between the MB and the organization that had grown out
of the MB’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas.

“The main obstacle to the development of strong relations between Gaza
and Egypt comes from Egypt,” he said.  “And the main reason for
that obstacle is the government’s fear of the relationship between the
Brotherhood and Hamas.”  He recalled a news account of the degree
to which Hamas’s victory had distrubed the Egyptian government.

“The fact that Fateh and Hamas reached their recent agreement in Mecca,
not here, was significant, because the negotiations were actually going
well here in Egypt until the Americans intervened,” he said.  “The
Egyptians have no room to navigate with the Americans.  Saudi
Arabia has more…  As for Hamas, it continues to work with the
regime here regardless of what the regime does to the
Brotherhood.”  He indicated that he understood why Hamas made that
choice, and he could live with it.

Later, he said, “If you consider what Hamas was able to do– to survive
for a whole year under those terrible siege conditions– it was really
remarkable.”  He also said that the Egyptian Medical Society had
been making aid shipments to the Palestinians for the past 20 years,
and that the society and the Arab Medical Union with which it is
affiliated now have plans to raise $1 billion of aid to send to
Palestine.

He noted, regarding the demonstrations that had taken place the
previous Friday to protest Israel’s launching of some excavation work
in occupied East Jerusalem, at an entrance to the Al Aqsa Mosque, that

The police response to the
demonstrators here in Al-Azhar was even worse than the Israeli police’s
response in Al-Aqsa!  It is really a bad position for the regimje
to be in– when it is seen as punishing those who only want to defend
Al Aqsa.  It would be different if the [ruling] National
Democratic Party itself were doing anything serious on the issue, but
they are not doing anything to protest.

And then, Olmert says he has a ‘green light’ from the Arab regimes to
proceed.  Which three do you think are most involved in the issue
of Al Aqsa?  Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia… But you know, this
issue might cause the people to explode.

I was also interested to ask this spokesperson for a large Sunni Muslim
organization for his views on the possibility fo a serious split
developing within the Middle East along primarily sectarian,
Sunni-Shiite lines.  “Recently, our Murshed (Supreme Guide) made an
address about this issue, warning about the risk of breakdown between
the Sunnis and the Shiites.  The MB has worked on this since
1940… But why are we seeing this issue re-emerging now?  Because
of the rise of Islamic trends, from Morocco to Indonesia. So the
Americans have been planning how to try to stop this.”

He said he thought the issue was most problematic for Iraq, Saudi
Arabia, and the Gulf states.  “In Iraq, many Sunnis and Shiites
had intermarried.  They were all oppressed under Saddam
Hussein.  He was not a Sunni
ruler, but a dictator.”

I asked what he thought the reaction of Egyptians would be to any
prospective US military attack on Iran.  “At the official level,
the government will probably be quietly supportive,” he said. 

And at the popular level, I imagine they are hoping the reaction will
be weak?  This is why they hitting the Muslim Bortherhood now,
precisely to weaken our ability to organize a response! This crackdown
here is because of the critical situation in the region.

But the Americans are facing many problems for their schemes.  For
example, if the Palestinians make an agreement, and the Lebanese can
also, this would block some of the Americans’ plans.  Yes, the
Bush administration looks quite blind to what is going on in the region.

He also noted the apparent disregard of  US officials to the
troubling rights situation in Egypt.
 

Even ambassador [Frank]
Ricciardone!  I have known him for 18 years, since he was here as
a young diplomat.  But he didn’t say a word while I was in jail,
or congratulate me on my freedom since.  Now, he’s not even saying
anything about the continued imprisonment of [secular reformist
politician] Ayman Nour.  And they never said anything about all
the Brotherhood people detained.

The administration has worked out a package deal with our
government.  The regime works for US interests in the region, and
the US remains silent on its abuses. That worked for many years. 
But it can’t work now in an era of transparency.

There is a lot more that can be said, certainly, about the political
prospects in its birth-country of this veteran organization, which was
founded in Egypt in 1928 and now has affiliates in many other parts of
the Arab and Muslim worlds.  Egypt is now– as I noted here—
entering a decidedly fin de
régime period, in which great uncertainties abound. 
It is doing so, moreover, at a time when the region of which it is a
part is in huge turmoil, the future course of which is hard to predict.

The regime that is approaching its fin—
at at the very least, approaching a crucial turning point as the powers
of the president continue to decline– is one in which there are many
different trends and currents, including the representatives of the
different security forces, the power of NDP officials and
bureaucracies, the eroded power of officials in the public sector, and
the “lobby” of the big  business interests that have emerged under
the past three decades of economic infitah
(opening) of what was previously a tightly state-controlled
economy.  And yes, there are some really huge business interests
in Egypt today.  Some of those trends push towards liberalism and
open-ness; others are much more conservative. 

And the Brotherhood itself is, by all accounts, not monolithic. 
Indeed, one look at the relative radicalism of its rhetoric and the
conservatism of its actual political practice will quickly indicate
that there must be many younger members or supporters of the
organization who, fired up by its rhetoric, may not yet have fully
understood the nuances or practices of its political
conservatism.  And the Brotherhood, too, has some big business
interests behind it…  There are, indeed, many ways in which it
might seem to line up naturally with portions of the conservative trend
that is under the regime’s umbrella, and others in which it benefits
from the (relative) political open-ness that is encouraged by the
liberalizing trend within the regime.

One thing seems certain, though.  That is that the opening of the
Egyptian public space– principally, its media– that has occurred over
the past decade will prove almost impossible to roll back.  And in
this new atmosphere of the proliferation of media sources and the
general democratization of the information order both locally here in
Egypt, and internationally, it will be impossible for the regime to
keep all its opponents bottled up and excluded from political power for
very much longer.  The broad crackdowns– against the MB, and all
other opponents, real and perceived– that were possible in the Nasser
era can never be repeated.  Even when Sadat attempted to repeat
those tactics in 1981 it proved extremely counter-productive for
him.  Now, no ruler who is even half-way sane would do to attempt
to repeat such actions.

It strikes me, therefore, that since the MB has proven its staying
power and its adaptability to the changing decades, it is very likely
that within the next few years the regime is going to have to do some
kind of a political deal with it, to ensure the stability of the
country.

For my part, yes, I do have concerns about several parts of the
organization’s agenda.  I wish that, like Hamas, they had done
more to foster the real inclusion of women into their public political
life.  I wish they would do a lot more to start thinking about a
future for the region that would seek to include the Israeli people and
their reasonable political aspirations, on an egalitarian basis. 
I hope that, benefitting as they now do from the agendas of many
human-rights organizations, they will continue to keep the human-rights
agenda very much in mind if and when they move closer to exercising
real political power.

Anyway, I learned a lot from my conversation with Dr. Arian.  I
hope I can explore some of these issues a lot further with him in the
future.