Author: Helena

Information liberation award to Juan Cole

Talking of freedom of media, information, and dialogue in our present world, I want to express huge appreciation to Juan Cole for liberating the “Fact File” on the Danish cartoons issue produced apparently jointly by the CIA-linked “FBIS” media-monitoring organization and its British counterpart at BBC monitoring.
A careful reading of this fact-file, going back to the original Sept 30 publication of the offending images and the reactions of many concerned parties since then really helps to clarify the whole tangled story, and to show that the world’s “Muslims” have not merely been acting “emotionally and irrationally” to something that happened a long time ago… There is a whole history to this issue– inside Denmark and more broadly, that it is important to know about.
However, the monitoring reports produced by FBIS and the BBC are for-pay products– even though both are produced by tax money taken from taxpayers including (in the US) myself. So a big thanks to Juan liberating this “Fact File” for the global discourse.
Juan’s own commentary throughout the file is also v. worth reading. His conclusion there is this:

    The allegation that this thing was fanned by Saudi Arabia does not seem to be substantiated by the FBIS record, which shows Egypt’s secular foreign minister to have been among the main fanners of the flame. Minor members of youth wings of Islamist parties in places like Pakistan then got into the action. Nor is it true that things were quiet after the immediate publication of the cartoons. Nor is it true that the Danish prime minister or the Jyllands-Posten expressed any sympathy for the hurt feelings of Muslims early on. Indeed, they lectured them on being uncivilized for objecting.

I just parenthetically note that this whole controversy is doing more for inter-Muslim unity than anyone could have expected. Including– as Salah has noted here– between Shii and Sunni adherents in Iraq; and also, as Juan notes, between more secular Muslims like the Mubarak government and their less secular confreres.
Interesting times. Let’s focus on pulling back from escalating this into a “clash of civilizations” but try to focus on the need to civilize the discourse and all its related actions. Increasing the amount of information available about the issue, as Juan has done, makes a great contribution.

What is it about Rasmussen?

…And maybe other European leaders, too.

    Note: I revised and extended this post shortly after first posting it. Including I changed its title. ~HC

I can’t understand why Denmark’s Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who has said he disapproves of the cartoons of Muhammad, continues to insist he cannot apologize about the activities of his country’s media publisherss.
The government of Lebanon, badly shaken by the very nasty anti-Danish and anti-Christian violence shown by some hotheads in Beirut, quickly apologized to Denmark. This, from AP:

    Lebanese Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said early Monday that the government had unanimously “rejected and condemned the … riots,” saying they had “harmed Lebanon’s reputation and its civilized image and the noble aim of the demonstration.”
    “The Cabinet apologizes to Denmark,” Aridi said.

I take it that no-one is inferring that, by having apologized to Denmark for the harm caused to its embassy, the Lebanese government is admitting to any culpability of its own in the act. But the apology regarding the harm caused by some Lebanese citizens (and also some non-citizen residents of the country) is a humane, very statesmanlike thing for a national leader to do.
So why does Rasmussen continue to feel– even five months after the original publication of the cartoons, and having seen quite clearly the hurt to others that they caused– that he “can’t apologize” for the actions of Danish publishers? To do so, after all, would imply no assertion whatsoever that his government should be held responsible for the actions of all of its citizens. But it would be a humane, very statesmanlike thing to do.
That same AP story linked to above, notes that Rasmussen says he can’t apologize “on behalf of” the Danish publishers of the cartoons. I don’t think people are asking him to apologize on their behalf. (Only they themselves could do that, or authorize it to be done.) But he could surely– as the national leader of the “nation” of Danes– apologize to Muslims in and far beyond Denmark for the hurt caused by this Danish institution and about the activities that caused that hurt?
… So what has been holding him back from doing that?

    Update after following this link from Juan Cole’s blog:

Here’s what Rasmussen said in a statement he made on Al-Arabiya satellite TV on Thursday evening:

    “I have a very important message for you: the Danish people have defended freedom of expression and religious freedom for generations. We deeply respect all religions including Islam and it is important for me to tell you that the Danish people have no intention to offend Muslims.
    “On the contrary we will do our utmost to continue our historic tradition of dialogue and mutual respect. And therefore I am deeply distressed that many Muslims have seen the drawings in a Danish newspaper as a defamation of the Prophet Mohammed,” Rasmussen said.
    The Danish leader said he would do his “utmost to solve that problem” and noted that the Danish newspaper had already apologized for the offence caused by the drawings.
    But Rasmussen defended his country’s tradition of freedom, saying, “We have a free press and this freedom of expression is a vital and indispensable part of our democracy and this is the reason why I cannot control what is published in the media.
    “But on the other hand neither the Danish government nor the Danish people can be held responsible for what is published in the media,” he said.

To me, this looks like an insufficient, indeed blame-the-victim type of apology. He says he is distressed that “many Muslims have seen the drawings… as a defamation of the Prophet Mohammed.” Clearly implied sub-text there: “Why are they so primitive? Can’t they ‘grow up’ and be like us and see these ‘drawings’ as quite value-neutral What is their problem?”
It strikes me that this was highly dishonest and unsatisfying. He must have known long before that point that the cartoons were not value-neutral but were indeed both clearly and intentionally desecrative of very widespread Islamic norms against pictorial representation of the Prophet and– in the case of at least one of them– defamatory to the Prophet and thereby to the worldwide community of Muslim believers. So for him to say that the “problem” that caused him distress was only the Muslims’ reaction to the cartoons, rather than the existence and publication of the cartoons– by anyone at all! but actually, as it happens, by a Danish media company– is mean-spirited in the extreme.
And then, he expresses “distress” over this but no “apology”. And rushes to argue that “neither the Danish government nor the Danish people can be held responsible for what is published in the media.”
Well, that is an important crux of his argument. It is one that is highly contested by many others around the world who have less of a free-speech-absolutist position on these issues than he does; and it is certainly a discussion we should all can engage in in our increasingly globalized world.
But if he wants to issue a sincere apology I suggest he simply does that. As the government of Lebanon did. Without making any mention in the statement of apology of issues of culpability or non-culpability. Those could be addressed later.
But this guy is certainly not acting in a way that is either humane or statesmanlike. What a dangerous ignoramus. Let’s hope the Danes hold him accountable at the next election.

    Second addendum, 1:30 p.m., Monday

I just checked the Wikipedia entry on Rasmussen. From that he appears to be much more like a wittingly dangerous person in this matter than someone who merely “lacks awareness” of the effects of his actions.

The “cartoons”

I can understand, perhaps, if some publisher in a not terrifically lively place like Denmark decides he wants to make some money by publishing some cartoons that– perhaps– he doesn’t even know are actively offensive to a billion-plus of his fellow humans. What I don’t understand is that, after the offended people have expressed their deep hurt about these cartoons, a bunch of other publishers all over Europe should choose to reprint them.
And they call that “free speech”? To me, it is exactly like sexual pornography, which is an ideology and a billion-dollar industry that intentionally demeans and objectifies women and provides the ideological basis for the industries of prostitution and human trafficking that are built centrally on the human suffering of women and young girls and boys.
Liberal societies have laws against the free publication, display, and distribution of pornography, and I’m glad that they do. Many have laws against publications that incite race-hate.
Publishing cartoons whose main intent is– as we all well know– to cause predictable amounts of great offense to adherents of a religion is not a “free speech” issue. It is incitement to hate of the most childish and irresponsible kind.
Of course Muslims should also find effective and nonviolent ways to express their sense of deep hurt. The violent response that’s been seen in a number of Muslim communities does nothing, I think, to either defend or honor the values of the religion. Huge, disciplined, nonviolent protests of all kinds– demonstrations and possibly also boycotts– would achieve those things so much more effectively.
Meantime, maybe we should all have a calm and reasoned discussion about the nature of sacred-ness in our world– and how we can all learn better to respect the feelings of others about the sacred.
What does it mean, indeed, when we say something is “sacred” to us? Is free-speech absolutism a “sacred” value? Thoughts?

Ending insurgencies, building peace

I’m having this very weird life these days. My main task is to complete the last revision of my book manuscript on peacebuilding in Africa– title as of now: Amnesties After Atrocity? But then events in Iraq and Palestine keep sucking me back in so I have to take a little time out from Africa and write something or do something regarding Hamas, or the Saddam trial, or whatever.
Meantime, about 70% of my consciousness is still in Africa… From which space I have sent out occasional messages to world along the way, regarding issues of burning but more general concern.
Well, here’s the latest message. It’s from Mozambique. (Did I tell y’all that I “nailed” the South Africa portion of the book last Friday, and have since then been sailing up the eastern coast of the continent a little… Oh my, what wouldn’t I give to be back on those beaches and eating those giant prawns, and chilling a bit with all those lovely people in Mozambique right now?)
Mozambicans are so darn’ wise! They could give lessons to everyone in the world on how to end nasty internal conflicts, and how, after the war, to set about building a new life based on love and cooperation. But they are modest people, so they don’t jump up and down saying, “Hey everyone! Look at what we did! We can show you all how to do it, too. You should all do things the way we suggest!” (That role is already taken– by the Bushies.)
But I digress. Sometime, I should really pull together all the many “lessons in effective peacemaking” I learned from my colleagues and friends in Mozambique. But for now– with special reference to the situations in Iraq, and Israel/Palestine– I have this one…
It comes from Cardinal Alexandre Dos Santos, a lovely, gentle, almost coal-black elder of the Catholic church in Mozambique, who played a key intermediary role during the peace negotiations that in 1992 brought to a definitive end the extremely harmful, atrocity-laden civil war that had afflicted the country for more than 15 years.
When I interviewed Do Santos in 2003 he recalled that an important aspect of the peacemaking work he and his colleagues undertook in the build-up to the 1992 General Peace Agreement had been to stress the need for a forward-looking rather than backward-looking perspective. “You can’t solve anything if you speak about the reasons you are fighting,” Dos Santos said. “You need to just try to find the way to get peace. You want to speak about the way to find a meeting of the minds, not speak about the differences… I told people, ‘We are not here to discuss the reasons, or the past, but the way to get peace!'”
Re-reading Dos Santos’s words in my Chapter Four here led me to reflect a bit on a fairly broad theme in the field of “transitional justice” today. TJ is the (recently defined) field of endeavor whereby communities/countries that are emerging into a more democratic order while still reeling from the effects of recent atrocious violence seek to “deal with” the effects of that violence in a way that will strengthen the march toward democracy. (More or less.) They nowadays tend to try to do so through war-crimes courts, or truth commissions, or whatever…
But one of the problems in the application of TJ principles in recent times, it seems to me, is that too many ultra-eager TJ advocates and practicitioners try to “jump the gun”, and start trying to institute TJ process even before the underlying, essentially political issues that lie at the heart of the conflict being fought over have been resolved. There is, for example, the current attempt to use war-crimes prosecutions against leaders of the anti-government insurgency (but not against government people) in northern Uganda– while the political causes of the insurgency have still not been resolved…
And in Iraq, there’s the attempt to try Saddam Hussein– at the same time that the political causes underlying the insurgency there are, obviously, still far from resolution.
And regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, of course we have all the extremely lengthy and contentious attempts to point fingers at one side or the other, right now– including in the Comments discussions here– at a time when perhaps we should all be taking Cardinal Dos Santos’s words to mind and saying, “For now, the important thing is to focus on what unites us, not on what divides us.” A time for “looking back” and trying to wrestle with the rights and wrongs of the past, may (or may not) come later. But for now: How can Palestinians and Israelis find a sustainable political formula by which they can coexist, in peace? How can Iraqis find a formula by which they live peaceably together without foreign intervention? … Surely, those should be our focus.
And to inject a backward-looking, and quite prematurely applied, TJ intervention like a war-crimes trial into the situation in Iraq at this time is quite wrongheaded and divisive.

Just a question

If Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador to Iraq, is– with the full backing of President Bush and apparently the US Congress– engaging in negotiations with leaders of the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq, who have been targeting (and killing) US troops continuously for the past three years and in many places continue to do so, who have engaged in some extremely inhumane acts against noncombatants, and whose rhetoric is often extremely anti-US… Then on what basis does the Bush administration, with apparently the full backing of the US Congress, call for “no negotiations with Hamas”, an organization that has never in its history targeted US troops or other assets and that with one exception has maintained a ceasefire in its own theater of operations (Palestine/Israel) for the past ten months?
Don’t get me wrong. As I have written on several occasions, I think it is excellent that Zal has been reaching out to the (authentically Iraqi) Sunni leaders in Iraq to try– as I understand it– to find a peaceful way to ramp down the violence and arrive at an agreed, legitimate political order in that country.
But if he, a US Ambassador, can talk to those insurgent leaders, why on earth should US officials at a high rank not also be talking to leaders and members of a party in Palestine that recently emerged the winner of a democratically contested election– with a similarly eirenic goal in mind?
I would be “shocked” indeed [irony alert there] to learn that the interventions of a foreign power were dictating US policy in this matter.
Just a reminder to everyone here: peace is made between opponents, not between people who already like each other. If we are serious about trying to find a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, then talking to all relevant parties is the only way forward. In Palestine, as in Iraq… Please, let the pro-Israel “lobby” be reminded of these essential facts, and sent politely on its way with all its special pleading. It’s time to get serious about making peace and averting another generation or two of strife and war.

Prospects with Hamas

I have a column in the CSM today: it’s titled
Hope for a Mideast resolution could grow with Hamas leadership
.  In it, I do a quick analysis of the Hamas victory and write:

The strong internal discipline within Hamas, as opposed to the indiscipline
and factionalism within Fatah, indicates that a strong Hamas leadership
can be a more effective participant in peace diplomacy than the Fatah leadership
has ever been. (Interestingly, this view has been expressed even by some
Israelis.)

The main evidence I adduce for Hamas having much stronger internal discipline
than Fateh is (1) its performance duing the ceasfire of the past ten months–
as opposed to the enormous lack of discipline showed within fateh, and (2)
its performance in the recent elections, where actually it was only the fact
that Hamas stuck rigorously to running single lists of candidates at the
distruict level, while Fateh had many competing lists at that level, that
gave Hamas the resounding (74 seats out of 132 total v) victory it got in
the polls.

I note that despite the strength of that victory in terms of seats, Hamas
did only get 44% of the popular vote– and its leaders know and understand
this, which is one of the rreasons why they continue to argue for a government
of national unity, rather than acting as “winners who take all”.

Today, in addition, there is an extremely interesting and significant

op-ed in the WaPo
, written by Mousa Abu Marzook, who is the deputy to Khaled Mashaal, the
head of Hamas’s political bureau.  He writes from Damascus– where he
has lived for most of the time since being deported from the US in 1997.
 It is titled simply What Hamas is seeking.

I find it very significant and hopeful that Abu Marzook addressed this
message to an American audience so soon after the Hamas victory.  (Interesting,
and relatively hopeful that the WaPo had the good grace to publish it, too.)

Abu Marzook writes: “Through historic fair and free elections, the Palestinian
people have spoken.” (Interesting that he doesn’t dwell on the 44% issue
there.)

Continue reading “Prospects with Hamas”

Saddam trial in shambles

The US occupation forces’ much-hyped effort to put Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on trial in Iraq is now in complete shambles.
On January 15, the former Chief Judge, Rizgar Amin, resigned from his job after complaining of political interference from the Iraqi government, which has been described by the the powerful and shadowy US government body that created the “Iraqi Special Tribunal” as being “in charge” of the proceedings.
Some body– unclear exactly which– then proposed Amin’s deputy, Saeed al-Hammashi to succeed him. But the Iraqi government’s “Debaathification Commission” then accused Hammashi of having been a Baathist. He was taken out of the running and the job was given to Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman, who opened today’s resumtpion of the proceedings…
Which almost immediately degenerated into chaos.
According to that account, by the Daily Telegraph’s Oliver Poole,

    The new chief judge … helplessly banged his gavel yesterday as a defendant was dragged from court, the defence team left in protest and Saddam walked out shouting: “Down with traitors.”
    …Mr Abdel-Rahman opened proceedings with the clear intention of stopping more outbursts from Saddam and his henchmen. Political speeches would not be allowed, he said.
    “If any defendant crosses the lines he will be taken out of the room and his trial will be carried out without him.”
    Within minutes, his strictures resulted in the departure of half of the defendants and all defence lawyers. Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, Saddam’s half brother and the former head of intelligence, ended a lengthy statement about his health by calling the court “the daughter of a whore”.
    When he refused to leave, two guards grabbed him and the three men started pushing and shoving. Still fighting and egged on by Saddam, who was shouting “Long live Iraq” and waving his fist, al-Tikriti was then dragged from the room.
    That led to further scenes as the defence team protested at what it called his mistreatment.
    Mr Abdel-Rahman ordered one lawyer to be evicted after he refused to stop shouting complaints. The rest of the defence team walked out in protest despite warnings from the bench that “any lawyer who walks out will not be allowed back into this courtroom”.
    After lawyers appointed by the court arrived in their place, Saddam refused to accept them, saying that he had the right to leave if he did not recognise his legal representatives. As he stood up, a guard pushed him back into his chair.
    “You do not leave; I allow you to leave when I want to,” Mr Abdel-Rahman said, before ordering his removal.
    Saddam, by now in control of proceedings, replied: “I led you for 35 years and you order me out of this court?” He then left, accompanied by two guards and followed by two other defendants who had refused to accept their new lawyers.
    The session increased doubts that the trial can afford the defendants a fair hearing.

In the absence of Saddam Hussein and his chosen legal team, Abdel-Rahman continued with the trial, bringing in more prosecution witnesses, who were questioned by the prosecution attorneys for three hours.
Miranda Sissons, who has been observing the trial on behalf of the International Center for Transitional Justice, noted the passivity of the court-appointed “defense lawyers” during those appearances. She told the NYT’s Robert Worth that, “They said nothing during three hours of testimony this afternoon, even as prosecutors and the judge peppered the witnesses with questions about accusations of torture and executions ordered by Mr. Hussein and his lieutenants.”
In a press release issued January 27, Human Rights Watch had warned about the risks of the bench and the entire trial becoming politicized. The organization’s Richard Dicker went memorably on the record there saying,

    “The removal of Judge al-Hammashi from the trial created the appearance of a court that is continually subjected to political interference… Sitting judges cannot be shuffled around as though they were deck chairs on the Titanic.”

H’mm, an interesting analogy don’t you think? I mean, if we are really talking about the trial as the Titanic, then it doesn’t make any difference if the deck-chairs get rearranged or not, does it?
Here, anyway, are links to two JWN posts I put up about the trial back on December 22: Saddam trial: Iran’s opening bid … and Legality and the Saddam trial.
Here is a fairly lengthy coment I left over at the “Grotian Moment” blog a couple of days ago. It’s about the unavoidable influence that politics inevitably has on the conduct of the trial.
Actually, the inevitability of the “politicization” of transitional justice efforts, in any situation of deep political transition, is a major theme of much of my recent work on transitional justice. Too many lawyers (especially lawyers growing up in the insulated bubble of the US) think that somehow– poof!– a few high-level prosecutions can suddenly make everything right in the world, even after episodes of truly atrocious violence and in deeply traumatized societies struggling to escape from very violent inter-group conflict…
But they can’t…
That’s why I’m glad that the government of East Timor has decided not to seek proscutions of Indonesians or others responsible for the terrible suffering inflicted on their people during their 27 years of being under military occupation by Indonesia– as I wrote about here.
And now, the Saddam trial is collapsing into shambles…
Well, a part of me would have loved to see a decent, thorough-going trial of the man and of all those who enabled and connived in his war-crimes and crimes against humanity. (Which would include, in at least an “accessory” role, people like Donald Rumsfeld and other US enablers.) It would be great to have had all Saddam’s misdeeds brought together and made public in an incontrovertible historical record, and to see the forces of Baathist authoritarianism incapacitated forever.
Both those things may yet happen. But I very much doubt that this embarrassing farce of an “Iraqi Special Tribunal” will be the vehicle through which they happen. Actually, at this point, I strongly doubt they will ever happen at all.
And meantime, one of the chief things we see happening with this “Special Tribunal” is the continued politicization of the justice system inside the “new” Iraq.

‘Democracy denied in Iraq’ counter goes up again

45 days and counting… It’s an outrage.
I confess that when I wrote this post on January 25, I for some reason undercounted the number of days since the Iraqi election. Oh well, now I’ve got the automatic counter up there, the software does the counting for me.
I’ll just restate what I wrote there:

    The US government, which is the occupying power in Iraq, also claims it is a strong advocate for democratic rule (equals “rule by the people”) everywhere. Yet the voting system put in place by the US, this time, as in the elections of January 2005, has more or less guaranteed that sectarian/ethnic parties would predominate and has made it very hard indeed for these parties to form a government.
    Democracy, I repreat, is rule by the people being governed. It has nothing to do with rule by an occupying military power. At its base is the concept of national self-determination. The US military and political bodies in the country have no legitimacy to have any say in running a democratic Iraq. They must plan to leave the country with all possible haste.
    In the meantime, their presence and their machinations are yet further delaying the formation of a governing administration in Iraq that is accountable to the country’s people.

I wonder, am I the only person who thinks it’s an unconscionably long time for the Iraqi people to be left in a state of limbo since that very important election? Why does it seem that no-one else is making an issue of this?

Hamas victory seen from Palestine, Israel

I wrote a column for Tuesday’s CSM about the Hamas victory. (It’ll be up on their website tomorrow evening, and I’ll link to it then.)
In researching it I came across some good reporting from the SF Chronicle’s Matthew Kalman, from Ramallah, and the FT’s Harvey Morris, from Gaza.
I was also intrigued by Haaretz’s recent report that around half of Israelis said their government should negotiate with a Hamas-led administration. (Can’t find that link now.) This report by Ian Black in today’s NYT gives a snapshot of the multidimensionality of (Jewish) Israeli attitudes. Certainly, they look much more nuanced and more potentially hopeful than the hard line the Olmert government evidently feels it needs to uphold at present. (Though I also saw that Defense Minister Mofaz had described Hamas’s behavior since the election as “reasonable.”)
Israeli blogger Imshin has also had some interesting reactions to the Hamas victory: here and here. Including, in that latter post, this:

    As the hysteria continues, I can’t help thinking ‘What do we want from the Palestinians?’ They did what was right for them. I probably would have voted for the Hamas too, if I were in their shoes. The corrupt, thieving Fatah had it coming.
    How long were people expected to tolerate such chaos, such anarchy?

I wish I were there– in both countries… but I’m intending to be, soon. (Gotta finish this work on the Africa book first. It really is a project I believe in deeply.) But the big bottom line for me right now– as so often in the past– is that the Israeli-Jewish public seems noticeably more realistic and nuanced in its reactions than their PM…. And a thousand times more realistic and nuanced than Israel’s ever-hysterical “amen corner” here in the west– and I so far include Bush and Blair in that category, and probably a lot of other EU leaders, as well.

Palestine: challenges of transition

Since Hamas’s victory in last Wednesday’s elections most of the MSM in the west– Israelocentric as ever– has focused overwhelmingly on “What on earth would this mean for the peace process?”
(As if there had actually, over the past four years existed any peace process! What peace process? Since 2002, Israeli PM Ariel Sharon completely refused to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority– and he maintained that boycott of peace talks even after the election of Mahmoud Abbas as PA President last January… Ehud Olmert, despite stating that he “wants” to get back into talks with the Palestinians, hasn’t gotten around to doing anything about it… So I am still totally mystified by all those “concerned” pundits who say “What will the Hamas victory do to the peace process?” What on earth are they talking about?)
Meanwhile, in the real lives of real Palestinians, chafing under their 39th year of life under foreign military occupation, there will be the huge challenge of trying to assure a peaceful transition of authority from the old Fateh-dominated PA to the newly elected Hamas adminsitration. Ensuring the peacefulness of a political transition from one party to another is a task at the core of democratization… A task that is perhaps even more important than being able to hold a “free and fair” election.
I’m remembering the role Jimmy Carter played, in Nicaragua, in 1990, when Daniel Ortega’s ruling Sandinista Party suffered a surprise defeat at the hands of Violeta Chamorro’s party. Carter played a good role then, stressing the essential democratic principle of ensuring an orderly and calm political transition from one party to another…
And he’s playing the same role in Palestine today. At a time when pundits in what’s called the “western donor community” are voicing all kinds of scary warnings (or perhaps, veiled threats?) to the Palestinians, that the US and EU donor governments “are constrained by law” from directing funding to the PA if it led by a pro-Hamas government, Carter is telling us that isn’t so, and we should all remain calm. This, from today’s NYT:

    Former President Jimmy Carter, who led a team of election observers for the Palestinian voting, said in an interview on Friday that the United States and Europe should redirect their relief aid to United Nations organizations and nongovernmental organizations to skirt legal restrictions.
    “The donor community can deal with it successfully,” Mr. Carter said. “I would hope the world community can collectively tide the Palestinians over.” He urged support for what he said [international aid-to-Pals boss] Mr. Wolfensohn was describing to him as a $500 million appeal.
    “It may well be that Hamas can change,” Mr. Carter said, remembering his presidency, when the Palestine Liberation Organization under Yasir Arafat finally agreed to recognize the existence of Israel and to forswear terrorism. “It’s a mistake to abandon optimism completely.”
    He urged Israel and the world: “Don’t drive the Palestinians away from rationality. Don’t force them into assuming arms as the only way to achieve their legitimate goals. Give them some encouragement and the benefit of the doubt.”

Good for him.
There are, of course, many other problems of the political transition that the Palestinians face, even before they get to these issues of economic aid.
Fateh has been in power in the PA since it was established in 1994, and before that in the nationalist movement since 1969. It has massive, deeply entrenched systems of patronage that criss-cross right across the Middle East and around the world. Nearly all of those are now in jeopardy– both because the new, pro-Hamas government will rightly seek control over all national resources, which have become sadly and badly commingled with Fateh’s resources over the years– and because, even while Hamas and its allies will be trying to do that, there’s a very bitter power battle going on inside Fateh, itself.
I wrote a long “obituary” for the secular-nationalist vision of Palestine represented by Fateh, here, on December 30. There, and in the piece I wrote on Palestine for Boston Review two years ago, I noted the crumbling/implosion of the last vestiges of internal discipline inside Fateh.
This near-complete absence of internal discipline in Fateh is already considerably complicating the task of ensuring an orderly post-election transition to the newly-elected administration. In this story, from AP, we learn the following:

    Angry [Fateh-affiliated]police stormed the parliament building in Gaza and armed militants marched into Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’ compound in Ramallah to demonstrate their rejection of Hamas’ authority. Their defiance raised fears of a spike in violence between Palestinian factions.
    Clashes have already broken out between the two sides. Hamas gunmen wounded two policemen in Gaza early Saturday in what authorities said was a roadside ambush. The attack came hours after another firefight wounded a Hamas activist and two police officers, one of whom was in a coma Saturday.

Let’s hope for an improvement in discipline, calm-seeking, and de-escalation from all sides. (We are much more likely to see it coming from the Hamas side, than from Fateh’s.)
We learn from that AP story, too, that Hamas’s over-all leader Khaled Mashaal, has suggested that Hamas’s armed forces could be merged into the Palestinian forces— and also, very significantly indeed, this:

    Mashaal also said Hamas would abide by existing agreements with the country “as long as it is in the interest of our people.”
    Israel and the Palestinians have a host of agreements dealing with everything from administration to peace frameworks. Mashaal did not say which agreements he was referring to.

These are, it seems to me, very mature early decisions to be coming from an organization that, just a week ago, probably did not dream it would end up winning a clear majority in the parliament…
I want to write more, sometime, about the “international aid” that has been doled out to the Palestinians over the past 12 years, and the function it has played in actually keeping the Palestinians in subservience to Israel. The Americans and Israelis– and some EU nations– want it to carry on playing this role! But Hamas is very unlikely indeed to play ball with that.
That’s why I think Jimmy Carter’s suggestion– that aid should continue to go to the Palestinians, but not through the old US- and Israel-dominated channels– is an excellent one. Let’s have international “aid”– to both the Palestinians and the Israelis– that actually supports a robust international diplomacy that terminates this conflict rapidly, and in a decent and sustainable way. Let’s end the system of international “aid” that has massively subsidized Israel’s illegal colonial project in the Palestinian territories while supporting a corrupt Palestinian administration that was expected to do the Israelis’ work of internal repression, for them.