People fearful of the effects of the Hamas victory in Palestine might like to go back and do some serious study of the whole transition in South Africa… From a situation of harsh inter-group conflict, extreme fearfulfulness among all groups, and armed violence that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands– perhaps millions– of Black Africans in and especially beyond the borders of South Africa, as well as of some (low) thousands, or possibly even only hundreds of White South Africans… from there, to a situation of inter-group peace and basic civility within just four years.
How did that transformation happen? That is precisely what I am writing about these days…
Author: Helena
Hamas update
According to nearly complete election returns from Palestine, Hamas reportedly won 76 of the 132 seats in the upcoming parliament.
I am fairly optimistic about the impact this could have on progress towards a real, sustainable peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Read some of my reasons for this here.
Oh wow. That AP news report says that Fateh got only 43 seats. That is truly a debacle for the movement that (1) dominated the reconstitution of Palestinian national life in the 1950s (but oh, that was a long time ago now), and (2) has dominated the entire governance and patronage system inside the West Bank and Gaza since 1994.
The report also says this:
- Mahmoud Zahar, a top Hamas official, said the group would extend its year-old truce if Israel reciprocates. “If not, then I think we will have no option but to protect our people and our land,” he told Associated Press Television News.
That he announces a readiness to extend the truce is good news. But note that he’s stating that at this point it would have to be reciprocal. Over most of the past year, Hamas has abided by a truce (tahdi’eh– literally, a “calming”) against Israel that Israel never subscribed to and indeed that Israel never abided by.
If Zahar is holding out the offer of a reciprocal truce now– will Israel respond?
The AP report also notes that Hamas’s top leader, Khaled Mshaal, called Abu Mazen from Syria, and
- “He stressed Hamas insists on a partnership with all the Palestinian factions, especially our brothers in Fatah,” Hamas said on its Web site.
This, after Fateh for decades– that is, so long as Y. Arafat was still alive– always steadfastly refused to engage in power-sharing with Hamas. (Abu Mazen tried to do some power-sharing with Hamas back in 2003, when he was PM. But Arafat still refused– and that was a major reason why Abu Mazen resigned back then… My sense is he is most likely still open to working with Hamas this time round.)
Interesting days.
Iraqi Sunni leaders try to take a stand
Gilbert Achcar has generously sent over his translation into English of an intriguing piece in yesterday’s Hayat that gives some great details about the efforts of some Sunni parties in Iraq to isolate and incapacitate the inflammatory extremists in their community like those led by Abu Musaeb al-Zarkawi.
The piece is titled: The Association of Muslim Scholars: We Are Now Waging Two Battles: Against ‘the Occupation’ and Against ‘the Terrorists’; Sunni Clans Take the Initiative of Launching a Campaign to Expel Zarqawi’s Followers and ‘Foreigners and Intruders’
You can find it here.
It seems like a tough job these Sunni leaders have– trying to deal with both the Americans (as much as they can do, through political means), and the nothing-left-to-lose extremists, whom they call takfiris.
Huge thanks for sending this, Gilbert!
My own theory about fighting terrorism has always been that the trick to success is to be able to find political ways to persuade the condoners of the terrorists to stop their condoning… You’ll find a lot about that in this article.
Obviously, in the case of the extremely violent Sunni extremists in Iraq, the very best-placed people to undertake this campaign are the leaders of the Sunni community itself. But– and this is a big but– those leaders also need to be able to win significant satisfaction of thier own legitiimate political demands, if they are to be effective– or even, to survive…
(The same thing that Israel and the Bushies notably refused to give to Abu Mazen, in Palestine.)
Let’s see if the powers-that-be in Iraq can be smarter than the administrators of the Israeli occupation in Palestine…
Hamas wins the vote
So, building on the solid reputation it has won by its provision of basic services in the Palestinian localities, Hamas has now won an outright victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. In this AP report, Sarah El Deeb writes,
- on Thursday morning, Hamas officials said the group had won up to 75 seats — giving it a solid majority in the 132-member parliament.
Interestingly, the Hamas win– which was achieved under the name of the “Change and Reform” list that it created for the election– was not predicted by exit polls. The pollsters’ error probably has to do with two factors: the quite legitimate reluctance of some voters to describe their choices accurately to an official-looking personstanding outside the polling place with a clipboard, and the fact that the Hamas win was scored mostly through the filling of the district-based seats which were far harder for pollsters to collate.
Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa’), the ineffectual old Fateh boss who has been Prime Minister for the past year (not that anyone really noticed) has resigned. Now, the newly elected legislators need to be able to take their seats in the parliament. (Will Israel let them all get to Ramallah, anyway? Even Marwan Barghouthi?) Then they need to agree on a new PM, though technically the PM choice is first made by President Abbas and then ratified by the parliament.
My money’s on Ziad Abu Amr. Not just because he’s an old and dear friend, but also because as a smart independent MP from Gaza who has acted as the major intermediary between Abbas and Hamas in the past, he’s a natural choice for the job. You can read a bit of an account of a long conversation I had with him in 2004, here.
If Ziad does get the job, I will really need to get on down to Palestine and do some reporting from there. (But I need to finish this work on the Africa book first. Hurry up, Helena, already!)
Actually, I’m a little bit hopeful about the way things may be going. Hamas is a steady, disciplined force that has a strong record on keeping its commitments. (Unlike Fateh.) Okay, so they’re not in “the peace camp” yet. But there have been some signs that could change. And the news from Ehud Olmert in Israel is also fairly encouraging. Olmert has declared himself in favor of negotiations to resolve the conflict, rather than pure, bullying unilateralism as favored by Sharon. He’s said some interesting things about Palestinian rights in Jerusalem. He’s continuing to crack down on the inflammatory extremists amongst the settlers.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been reviewing the portion of my book dealing with how the negotiations between de Klerk and Mandela got underway, and how those two bitterly battling parties finally made it to a negotiated, politically egalitarian settlement…. But why should such a settlement– whether of two equal states, or of political equality within one state– not emerge in Israel/Palestine right now?
Who would have thought, in the harshly violent days South Africa experienced in the late 1980s, that they could have basic civil peace and a definitive end to the conflict by 1994?
I intend to write a lot more about this… I do think the South Africans– Afrikaners and ANC people– could be hugely helpful right now if they found a hundred ways to share the record of their experiences with both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land.
I’ll just note here that when de Klerk and the National Party entered into negotiations with the ANC and the other Black-led parties, they did so on the basis of a ceasfire only, and not on the basis that the ANC should disarm, beforehand.
Why should Israel think it could stand out for “complete disarmament” of Hamas before it will talk to them?
Why should Hamas’s people be expected to have any trust in a process that requires that their side disarm while Israel remains quite free to continue its offensive military and land-grabbing operations? That defies human logic.
Yes, Hamas has used some vile and anti-humane violence. But as the Algerian nationalist leader Larbi Benmahidi told the French officer in the very reality-based movie “The Battle of Algiers”– “Yes, we sent women to French cafes with bombs in their shopping baskets. But I’ll happily give you all my women with bombs in their shopping baskets in return for your airplanes and tanks.” (The French later tortured Benmahidi to death… But the Algerians won their independence from French colonial rule.)
I imagine the Hamas leaders would be prepared to make a similar offer to Israel.
Anyway, let’s see what happens…
Religion, war, peace, and March 2 event
If you’re in New York City on the evening of March 2, then you can come hear me and some other, much more inspiring folks. We taking part in a public discussion on the topic of Study War No More: Religion and the contemporary peace movement.
Daniel Berrigan will keynote it. Other speakers are Ibrahim Ramey, Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard, and Simon Harak. I shall be the “moderator”, but they’ve also asked me to say a couple of things. (“Read Just World News!” “Here’s the URL for it!” … What? You don’t think that would suffice?)
It’ll be at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Amsterdam & 112th), at 7 p.m. Come if you can. You can download a flier for it here.
And while I’m writing about religion, war, and peace, I wanted to make sure and get in link here to this fascinating article, which appeared in the NYT last week. It’s by Charlottesville home-boy Charles Marsh. Actually, he’s not a “boy”; he’s a Professor of Religion at the University of Virginia.
The piece is titled Wayward Christian Soldiers, and it documents an important series of utterances made by various prestigious US Christian-Evangelical leaders, between the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003, about the prospect of the then-imminent war.
Here’s what Marsh found:
Democracy denied (again) in Iraq
I note that today it is 35 days since the Iraqi people went to the polls to vote for the National Assembly.
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.
It is now 35 days since the election. I’ll have to dig out the HTML for the “Democracy denied in Iraq” counter I used to have on my sidebar here, and put it up again. How many days (or weeks, or months) more till Iraqis achieve true self-governance?
Flynt Leverett on Bush’s Iran mis-steps
Flynt Leverett, who was a White House/ National Security Council insider at the beginning of the first Bush administration, wrote an important piece in the NYT today in which he identified three crucial occasions on which the administration “turned away from [an] opportunity to put relations with Iran on a more positive trajectory.”
These were:
- In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Tehran offered to help Washington overthrow the Taliban and establish a new political order in Afghanistan. But in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush announced that Iran was part of an “axis of evil,” thereby scuttling any possibility of leveraging tactical cooperation over Afghanistan into a strategic opening.
In the spring of 2003, shortly before I left government, the Iranian Foreign Ministry sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations to resolve bilateral differences. The document acknowledged that Iran would have to address concerns about its weapons programs and support for anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. It was presented as having support from all major players in Iran’s power structure, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A conversation I had shortly after leaving the government with a senior conservative Iranian official strongly suggested that this was the case. Unfortunately, the administration’s response was to complain that the Swiss diplomats who passed the document from Tehran to Washington were out of line.
Finally, in October 2003, the Europeans got Iran to agree to suspend enrichment in order to pursue talks that might lead to an economic, nuclear and strategic deal. But the Bush administration refused to join the European initiative, ensuring that the talks failed.
So, decisions like those have consequences. (Didn’t anyone explain the theory of “consequences” to the Prez during some of his 12-step gatherings?)
As Leverett writes:
- Now Washington and its allies are faced with two unattractive options for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue. They can refer the issue to the Security Council, but, at a time of tight energy markets, no one is interested in restricting Iranian oil sales. Other measures under discussion – travel restrictions on Iranian officials, for example – are likely to be imposed only ad hoc, with Russia and China as probable holdouts. They are in any case unlikely to sway Iranian decision-making, because unlike his predecessor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disdains being feted in European capitals.
Alternatively, the United States (or Israel) could strike militarily at Iran’s nuclear installations. But these are spread across Iran, and planners may not know all of the targets that would need to be hit. Moreover, a strike could prove counterproductive by hardening Iranian resolve to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity…
As I mentioned here earlier, the President really is faced with a tough dilemma in this Iranian-nuclear business.
Leverett has his proposal for what might be done. It envisages the creation of a “Gulf Security Council”, involving all the Gulf states as well as (though he doesn’t really explain why) all five of the Security Council’s permanent members. His idea is that this body could negotiate an agreement for creating a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Gulf, perhaps linked to a future such zone covering the whole of the Middle East.
Phew, lucky old Israel! That would get it off the hook of having to denuclearize for quite a while yet, wouldn’t it?
Actually, right now only one power has nuclear weapons in the Gulf. It’s the US of A, whose carrier battle groups always, as a matter of course, include warships armed with nuclear-tipped SLBMs.
So maybe what would be needed is a US-Iranian negotiation to start with. One in which the US could, at a very minimum, give Iran the very valuable “negative” security guarantee, to the effect that it has no intention of attacking Iran militarily and seeks to resolve all outstanding issues of concern with Iran through peaceful means?
I think such a declaration from the US would do a lot to help launch a fruitful negotiation with Teheran. Oh, that, and a similar undertaking from Israel…
If we just go by the past performance of the Bush administration, as spelled out by Flynt Leverett, however, it doesn’t look as though it’s about to resolve its differences with Iran through peaceful means…
How come they’re willing to join in a negotiation with Kim Jong-Il, but they’re not willing to negotiate with Iran, anyway? (Oops, don’t tell me that that’s because Kim already has those nasty kind of weapons that the Iranians don’t have?)
Iranian-Canadian blogger to visit Israel
The Iranian-Canadian blogger Hoder (Hossein Derakshan) has two interesting posts up today. In this one, he writes,
- I wrote a few weeks that the single biggest reason Ahmadinejad is ranting unexpectedly against Israel and the uproar he’s made in the past few weeks, has internal purposes.
Khamenei has effectively prevented Ahmadinejad from having any say in foreign policy. So Ahmadinejad’s strategy has been causing problems in major foreign policy issues in order to get into the gaming…
(Read the rest of that short post, too. It’s interesting.)
And in this one, Hoder announces that he’s en-route for making his first-ever visit to Israel. He says he’s going “as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.” I think this is great. It’ll be interesting to read what he writes.
Nuclear proliferation developments
I think it’s very important to get onto the record this short and sensible position paper on the threat of Iranian nuclear proliferation, written by Pierre Goldschmidt, the former Deputy Director General of the IAEA and head of its Department of Safeguards from 1999 to June 2005. He argues that the IAEA’s various safeguards regimes around the world have improved considerably in capability in recent– but just at a time when the political will to use them seems to be eroding.
He recommends this:
- action by the United Nations (UN) Security Council to adopt a generic binding resolution that would establish three peaceful measures for containing crises when a state is found by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be in non-compliance with its safeguards obligations. These measures are strengthening the IAEA’s authority to conduct the inspections necessary to resolve uncertainties, deterring the noncompliant state from thinking it could withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and then enjoy the benefits of ill-gotten material and equipment, and suspending sensitive fuel-cycle-related activities in the state.
… And just when we thought maybe the government of Iran and North Korea might be the scariest actors in the nuclear-weapons field, along came France’s President Jacques Chirac to threaten the world, according to this piece in friday’s WaPo,
- that France was prepared to launch a nuclear strike against any country that sponsors a terrorist attack against French interests. He said his country’s nuclear arsenal had been reconfigured to include the ability to make a tactical strike in retaliation for terrorism.
“The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would envision using . . . weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and fitting response on our part,” Chirac said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in Brittany. “This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind.”
The French president said his country had reduced the number of nuclear warheads on some missiles deployed on France’s four nuclear submarines in order to target specific points rather than risk wide-scale destruction.
“Against a regional power, our choice is not between inaction and destruction,” Chirac said, according to the text of his speech posted on the presidential Web site. “The flexibility and reaction of our strategic forces allow us to respond directly against the centers of power. . . . All of our nuclear forces have been configured in this spirit.”
What a sad and dangerous old man. It makes you wonder whether France– or indeed any of the world’s five “recognized” nuclear-weapons states– should still be trusted by the rest of the world community to be able to “manage” their possession of these globe-threatening weapons responsibly.
By my count at least two of them– France and the US– are currently on the record as stating that they are not prepared to make any declaration of “No first use” of these ghastly weapons of doom.
Onward with the negotiations for “complete and general disarmament” that mandated 35 years agoby Article 6 of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, I say!
—-
Addition, Monday morning:
I’ll just make a quick diversion into the topic of the world’s (currently four) non-“recognized” nuclear-weapons states, of which Israel is of course the doyen. Commenter Frank sent me a link to this Jerusalem Post article that describes a panel discussion on nuclear proliferation at Israel’s annual swanky and prestigious “Herzliya conference”. (All the “best and the brightest” of the Israeli security-political establishment tend to turn up there. Two years ago, it was the place where Ariel Sharon first announced his “Disengagement” strategy.)
During the discussion at this year’s conference, Sir Michael Quinlan, the former Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Ministry of Defence,
suggested that if Israel wanted to seriously diminish future nuclear threats, it should be prepared to negotiate the status of its own nuclear program “once it existed in secure and settled borders, accepted by all neighbors in an agreement underwritten by the UN Security Council.”
And the reaction of that august and dignified, mainly Israeli, audience to this sensible and actually very mildly stated suggestion? According to the J. Post, they “hissed.”
What a bunch of childish, self-absorbed little bully boys. Really. And anyone wants to think we should trust them with nuclear weapons, as well?
US trying to “buy” the Palestinian election
The WaPo’s Scott Wilson and Glenn Kessler had an intriguing article in today’s paper, in which they described how the Bushies have tried to “secretly” shovel $2 million into Palestine in recent weeks in a last-minute attempt to influence the results of the parliamentary election that will be held there next Wednesday. (Here, also here.)
The idea was to give the now-ruling Palestinian Authority (PA) some small amounts of money to do very public things for which the PA’s ruling party, Fateh, could get credit. Wilson and Kessler write:
- In recent days, Arabic-language papers have been filled with U.S.-funded advertisements announcing the events in the name of the Palestinian Authority, which the public closely identifies with Fatah. Some of the events, such as a U.S.-financed tree-planting ceremony here in Ramallah that Abbas attended last week, have resembled Fatah rallies, with participants wearing the trademark black-and-white kaffiyehs emblazoned with the party logo, walls plastered with Fatah candidates’ posters, and banks of TV cameras invited to record the event.
“Public outreach is integrated into the design of each project to highlight the role of the P.A. in meeting citizens needs,” said a progress report distributed this month to USAID and State Department officials. “The plan is to have events running every day of the coming week, beginning 13 January, such that there is a constant stream of announcements and public outreach about positive happenings all over Palestinian areas in the critical week before the elections.”
This is distasteful on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin.
Maybe by saying that if the US government had truly wanted to bolster the political position of the PA’s Fateh leadership (with at its head that very decent man Mahmoud Abbas), then they could have done a lot more to provide solid political support for him a long, long time ago. Like back in 2003, when he was Prime Minister, and he pleaded and pleaded with the Americans to get serious about the peace negotiations that the Palestinians so urgently need if the dead weight of Israel’s colonial project is to be lifted from all the occupied Palestinian territories.
But they didn’t do a thing.
Or back throughout the whole of the past year, when Abbas was President, and he similarly pleaded with them to throw their weight behind the re-opening of peace negotiatinons. But they did nothing, and just continued shoveling billions of dollars to Israel’s Ariel Sharon even while Sharon steadfastly continued to refue to have anything at all to do with Abbas.
So now, the US “democracy cavalry”– led in its present campaign, according to the WaPo, by “a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who worked in postwar Afghanistan on democracy-building projects” (name of Larry Sampler)– thinks they can sweep into Palestine at the last minute and buy the election for Abbas with a few tiny, basically meaningless little projects for which the US taxpayers also have to buy publicity in Palestinian newspapers. It beggars belief.
Wilson and Kessler:
- Elements of the U.S.-funded program include a street-cleaning campaign, distributing free food and water to Palestinians at border crossings, donating computers to community centers and sponsoring a national youth soccer tournament.
When I read that I said to Bill the spouse, “Do they think Palestinians are stupid? Or cheap? Or what?” He said, “No, it’s not just the Palestinians… They think everyone except themselves are stupid.”
Oh, of course, along the way there it wasn’t only “consultant” Larry Sampler who made out like a bandit. There were also not one but two layers of other for-profit contractors involved. Everyone got a little bit of the skim.
Wilson and Kessler were smart enough to write that,
- The program highlights the central challenge facing the Bush administration as it promotes democracy in the Middle East. Free elections in the Arab world, where most countries have been run for years by unelected autocracies or unchallenged parties like Fatah, often result in strong showings by radical Islamic movements opposed to the policies of the United States and to its chief regional ally, Israel. But in attempting to manage the results, the administration risks undermining the democratic goals it is promoting.
Darn right they are.
In connection with the general topic of US-funded support for “democratization” projects around the world, I just quickly read this thought-provoking piece on Open Democracy by Sreeram Chaulia. He provides a fairly good round-up of the work of various US-financed INGOs (international NGOs) and GONGOs (government-reliant NGOs), especially in the recent “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. He has a good quote from Julie Mertus: “It’s not the NGOs driving the government’s agenda; it’s the US government driving the NGO agenda.”
One cavil with Open Democracy: They do carry some interesting articles on their website. But why don’t they put sources and other materials into their online articles? It’s quite pathetic for someone to use a good, poweful quote like that one and not give us a hyperlink to the source.