Author: Helena

Israeli occupation and western taxpayers

The fearless Akiva Eldar does a great critique in today’s Haaretz of Netanyahu’s claim that his policies have already improved the economy of the West Bank.
(The other part of Netanyahu’s policy is to hope that Palestinians would be satisfied with only some degree of easing of their deep economic plight, and would therefore somehow miraculously “forget about” their even deeper political plight…)
Eldar writes,

    During a sweaty and well-publicized visit he held last weekend at the Allenby Bridge crossing, Netanyahu boasted of the fact that economic growth in the West Bank had reached 7 percent.
    At the cabinet meeting on Sunday the growth rate grew to double digits: 10 percent. Thus will be done to good Arabs who maintain Israel’s security and don’t launch Qassam rockets at the country.

I wish he had noted that actually, for many months now, there have been no Qassam rockets fired at Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza.
But he goes on to note that,

    Without the assistance, though, of the European and American taxpayer, who are paying the salaries of the Palestinian Authority’s over 100,000 policemen and officials, the economy of the West Bank would long since have collapsed along with the PA.
    The Palestinian economy is not recovering thanks to Israel, but in spite of it.

The fact that the vast majority of the costs involved in administering Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza have since Oslo been paid by the EU and the US is an extremely important one to underline.
Prior to Oslo, those costs were borne mostly by the Israeli taxpayers themselves… Just as, from 2003 until now, American taxpayers have been paying nearly all the costs of administering our country’s military occupation of Iraq.
Running an occupation is, it turns out, a pretty expensive business. It’s expensive even when, as in the case of the OPTs, the “occupied” population can be used for decades as a captive market for the products of the economy of the occupying power. (Since it’s the occupier that, surprise surprise, totally controls the terms of trade between the two… As we saw in Iraq, also.)
Prior to Oslo, the costs to Israeli society– both financial and human– of maintaining the occupation of the OPTs were a significant factor in motivating Israelis to find a way to end the occupation. Back then, Israeli peaceniks produced numerous studies showing the size of the burden that the occupation placed on their economy, and how Israel could win a significant “peace dividend” if only it ended the occupation.
Bus after Oslo– poof!! Suddenly the fact of the continuing occupation became miraculously “sanitized” when Arafat shook Rabin’s hand, and the Europeans and Americans lined up to pick up the burden of paying for the administration of the occupation under the rubric of support “to the PA”.
As I noted in my latest article in Boston Review, the post-Oslo disappearance of the previous “economic argument for peace” was a significant factor in leading to the decline of he Israeli peace movement.
And yes, after Oslo, the occupation still continued. But the PA– more properly known as the PISGA, Palestinian Interim Self Governing Authority– soon enough started acting as the Israeli military’s principal contractor in this venture, its Halliburton if you like, and undertaking most of the time-consuming tasks of administering the occupation on the ground.
And now, suddenly the costs were all borne not by Israel but by EU and US taxpayers! Shazam!
Akiva Eldar refers to a lot of material from the IMF that shows that the “West Bank economic miracle” that Netanyahu is currently claiming is nowhere near as impressive as the PM makes it out to be…
We can also note that in addition to paying the operating costs of the PISGA, western taxpayers have two other forms of financial entanglement with aspects of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the OPTs:

    1. Our governments give generous tax breaks to many supposedly “charitable” organizations that provide significant financial and other support to the ongoing project of illegally implanting settlers into the occupied lands; and
    2. Our governments give tax breaks and a certain amount of actual government funding to a range of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the OPTs (and in Israel) that do many different things on a not-for-profit basis, ranging from the provision of vital health, humanitarian, and community development services to Palestinian communities under stress to monitoring the rights situation in the OPTs and in Israel itself, and advocating and organizing to end gross rights abuses.

Among these latter types of organization are the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, Anera, the courageous Israel organization Breaking the Silence, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, B’tselem, etc, etc.
In Eldar’s article, he notes that Netanyahu’s political adviser Ron Dermer has recently talked about “the need to silence… NGOs like Breaking the Silence (an organization of veteran Israeli soldiers that collects testimonies from soldiers).”
He adds, however, that Dermer,

    forgot to do his homework. Had he checked the Knesset records, Dermer would have discovered that he is not the first right-wing politician to think of the brilliant idea of banning the transfer of money from abroad to NGOs of a political nature.
    The late MK Yuri Stern of Yisrael Beiteinu suggested an almost identical legislative initiative in the 16th Knesset. The draft bill passed in the first reading and then disappeared into oblivion. During discussions it turned out that the law would require [all] NGOs in Israel that receive donations from abroad to present the record of their economic activity to the Registrar of Non-Profit Organizations.
    The representatives of Shas and United Torah Judaism immediately became the leading opponents of the initiative.

Eldar notes this:

    the grants given by these [European] governments to the human rights organizations are nothing compared to the hundreds of millions of tax-exempt American dollars that charity organizations of American Jews and Christians pour into NGOs identified with the right.
    A legal opinion presented to the MKs anticipated that the court would find it difficult not to recognize a tax exemption on donations as de-facto government funding. That was the end of the [previous] legislative initiative.

He also quotes an un-named “leading European diplomat” as mentioning,

    that European assistance to human rights organizations in Israel is a drop in the bucket compared to money that Europe channels to the Palestinian Authority.
    He is not aware of Israel donating 1 billion euros every year in order to assist with any conflict in Europe.

Anyway, the bottom line here. There are many very significant ways in which tax monies or tax breaks from western governments do things that support not only the continuation of Israel’s occupation of the OPTs but also its illegal implantation of Jewish settlers into the West Bank. There are a few ways in which western governments send much, much smaller amounts of financial aid toNGOs that in various ways help save the resilience of the Palestinian people.
We who are citizens of these western countries are directly morally implicated in all these activities of our governments. We should take responsibility for them, and find ways to end the occupation now.
Really end it, that is. Not just put lipstick on it and throw a few sub-contracts for running it to a PISGA that has definitely, 15 years after its established, long outlived its sell-by date.

Is this gnome running US Mideast diplomacy?

It turns out there’s a popular figure in some portions of US popular culture called “the underpants gnome.”
The underpants gnome has a “business plan” that consists of three phases. Phase one is “Collect underpants”. Phase three is “Profit.” But neither the gnome nor anyone else can figure out what the Phase two is that bridges from phase one to phase three.
Joshua Foust at Registan has used the UG as a metaphor for various proposals that have been made to deploy more military-backed “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” into either Afghanistan or Pakistan. He is (imho rightly) very skeptical of the idea that PRTs can be a magic bullet to resolve the deepset problems of governance and security in either country.
But I think we’ve seen the underpants gnome phenomenon at work in Obama’s Arab-Israeli “peace” diplomacy, as well:

    Phase One: Keep on repeating that you want to speedily solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by establishing a Palestinian state; keep on publicly criticizing the Israeli government’s settlement construction; send George Mitchell out to the region like a yo-yo, many times.
    Phase Two: ? ?
    Phase Three: Achieve the Palestinian-Israeli final peace agreement.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the underpants gnome video clip, do go see it. It’s only 30 seconds.

Fateh conference update #2

Al-Quds al-Arabi has some good, substantial news articles about the continuing saga of preparations for Fateh’s 6th general conference, due to open tomorrow in Bethlehem.
It seems the conference is still on track to proceed, despite continuing problems regarding both the attendance and the credentialing of the delegates from Gaza.
This QA report tells us that the meeting of the Revolutionary Council (the medium-level body that stands between the Conference and the Central Committee was postponed from yesterday evening to this evening. It also has a host of other details about conference preparations.
Regarding the attendance of the Gaza delegates, there have been reports that both Hamas and Israel have (separately) prevented the travel of these delegates from Gaza to Bethlehem. I don’t think this would actually be a deal-breaking issue on its own– modern videochat/videoconference technology could certainly enable the delegates to take part remotely, though of course all these communications would be visible to everyone in the spy business, including of course the Israelis. But who is Fateh kidding? Of course their conference, like their movement, is already deeply penetrated by the Shin Beth.
Anyway, they already have provision for the ‘involvement’ in some form or another, of more than 200 of Fateh’s longstanding group of prisoners inside Israel’s (smaller) jails, who won’t actually be making it to Bethlehem. So what’s the big deal about whether the Gaza delegates can physically travel to Bethlehem or not?
That same QA report says that reliable Fateh sources in Bethlehem say there are some Gaza-origined Fateh people now in Bethlehem/ the West Bank who are credentialed for the conference– and they spell out that this is a reference to Muhammad Dahlan and his supporters– but who are afraid that if the conference goes ahead they could be called to account for the disastrous failure Fateh suffered at the hands of Hamas in Gaza in June 2007… and that if this looks likely to happen, the Dahlan group would prefer to call the conference off on the pretext of the non-attendance of the delegates who are still resident in Gaza, rather than go ahead with it…
Yes, wheels within wheels within wheels there. I guess that’s what happens when you try to run a political “movement” that has no functioning mechanisms of internal accountability except the sloshing around of huge amounts of US-mobilized money.
Xinhua, meanwhile, reported out of Gaza a short while ago that, Ibraheem Abu al-Najja, described as a Fatah leader in Gaza, told their reporter that,

    “We have agreed to go ahead with holding the general conference without Fatah members of Gaza and to append them to the central committee and the revolutionary council after two months,” he told Xinhua.
    Abu al-Najja had been in the West Bank but has just returned to the Gaza Strip “to join the Fatah people who were banned from heading for the West Bank.”

I don’t know if that means they’ll go ahead with the video-conference option, or not.
This whole business about who is prevented by Hamas from going to Bethlehem, who is prevented by Israel from going, and of course the continuing Israeli bans on just about everyone else’s travel into or out of Gaza, and on the travel to East Jerusalem of any West Bank Palestinians (or those visiting the West Bank for the conference) is a sort of very vivid and physicalized representation of the degree to which ll three of these parties can hold each other hostage….
Ah, but I don’t notice that anyone is holding any Israelis hostage in that picture, except for the one young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured while he was on a military operation just over three years ago.
So: one Israeli held hostage by Palestinians versus millions of Palestinians held hostage by Israel. That is a good representation of the balance of power on the ground… And therefore, a strong reminder, if such be needed, that just “leaving the two parties to work out the details of a final peace agreement on their own,” as so many people have suggested could only ever lead to an outcome that is highly coercive, unjust, and unstable, and thus an absolute non-starter…
Luckily, there is another basis for securing the peace agreement. That is international law, the resolutions and principles of the United Nations, and the full weight of the international community. So let’s get ahead and use all those tools as soon as possible!
It would help a lot, of course, if Fateh and Hamas could meanwhile speedily reach some kind of an agreement on how they’re going to work together, including in authorizing and monitoring the performance of a Palestinian negotiating team.
(Update #1, in case you missed it, was here.)

Ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem continues…

The Israeli authorities are continuing with their campaign to expel Palestinians from East Jerusalem and replace them there with Jewish settlers.
At some point before dawn this morning, black-clad Israeli riot police evicted 53 Palestinians, including 19 children from two homes in the occupied part of the city.
The BBC reported that “Jewish settlers moved into the houses almost immediately.”
The Israeli High Court has ruled that Jewish families hold legal title to the properties. And the Israeli government maintains that its legal institutions are sovereign in the whole of the occupied city– though the UN, the US government, and just about all the other governments of the world remain firm in their judgment that East Jerusalem is occupied territory under international law, and that implantation of Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem is therefore quite illegal under international law.
The eviction of Palestinian families from East Jerusalem is the latest in a long string of continuing Israeli governmental actions in the occupied West Bank (of which E. Jerusalem is the capital), that are aimed either at the expulsion/expropriation of Palestinians or the implantation of Jewish settlers, or both.
Pres. Obama has called for an end to the settlement activity and to the eviction of Palestinians from their longtime homes. But thus far neither he nor any other world leader has done anything concrete to hold Israel accountable for the continuing grave violations of international law that these actions represent.
Inside Israel, meanwhile, large numbers of Israelis have been mourning the killing of two people, and the wounding of eleven more, when a masked gunman took aim at the Tel Aviv Gay and Lesbian Association last night.
In that BBC story, PM Benjamin Netanyahu is reported as vowing “to bring the killer to justice.”
That is excellent news. But when will he be “brought to justice”– or even held in any way “accountable”– for the many continuing breaches of international law that his government is committing in the occupied territories?

Countdown to Fateh conference?

Xinhua has shown its emerging agility in reporting on Palestinian-Israeli developments by apparently getting hold of a copy of the “political report” that Mahmoud Abbas’s leadership will be presenting to the Fateh conference due to open Tuesday in Bethlehem.
In Xinhua’s characterization of the document, it would commit Fateh to

    adopt[ing] public peaceful resistance against Israel to support peace talks between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the Jewish state, a new document showed…
    “The forms of public resistance can be found in all types of boycotting, public and cultural mobilization against the occupation, escalating public activities against the occupation, its checkpoints and settlement and carrying out these activities on daily systematic process,” said the document obtained by Xinhua.
    The awaited Fatah program did not mention any sort of military activities or reveal the future of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the movement’s armed wing.

However, for those hoping that Fateh would be bending completely to the will of Israel and the US, there were some shocks. Xinhua:

    Meanwhile, the document stressed that settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be based on UN resolutions and Arab visions rather than the U.S.-backed Road Map peace plan or the declaration of the 2007 U.S.-hosted Annapolis peace conference.
    Fatah will “stick to international references to the peace process and the Arab peace initiative and will not be drawn to alternative references that help the (Israeli) occupation disavowing its commitments.”
    It also emphasized that the Palestinians can never recognize Israel as a Jewish state. “This is to protect the rights of the Palestinian refugees and the Palestinians (Arabs) who live inside the green line (Israel).”

Looks like an interesting political straddle to me.
It is also not very far from the political stance of Hamas, including as articulated to me by political bureau head Khaled Meshaal on June 4, and most recently also by Meshaal to the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon and Julien Barnes-Dacey.
We can also note, in the document reported by Xinhua, that not mentioning armed activities is not the same as disavowing them.
The latest news about the content of the proposed Fateh political platform comes while intense controversy continues to swirl about Tuesday’s conference, which will be the Sixth General Conference of Fateh, which was founded by Palestinian refugees in Kuwait in 1959.
This latest conference will, however, be the first to be held since 1989. And as I noted in this recent IPS news analysis and elsewhere, a tremendous amount of things have happened to the Palestinian people since 1989….
Including, of course, the whole fiasco– from the Palestinians’ point of view– of the so-called “Oslo process”, which has been presided over continuously since 1993 by the Fateh leaders of the PLO and the Oslo-derived Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, PISGA.
Small wonder, then, that Fateh is in deep internal chaos.
(I have written about this fact extensively this year, including in some of the reporting I did from the West Bank in February-March. One notable blog post on this topic was this one. Other blog posts and print articles on the topic can be accessed through this portal.)
Much of the commentary in the western media has focused on whether Fateh’s rivals in Hamas (which also now gives significant support to the whole PISGA project) will “allow” those delegates to the Fateh conference who are residents of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to leave the Strip and travel to the conference site in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.
Mahmoud Abbas and several of his allies have accused Hamas of holding the Fateh members in Gaza captive.
However, matters are by no means that simple! Three Fateh conference delegates resident in Gaza have now told Ma’an news agency that though Hamas is ready to facilitate their departure for Bethlehem, it is Israel that will not allow them to go to Bethlehem.
This is a very vivid example of the fact that– as many Fateh activists both inside and outside the occupied territories have long warned– Abbas’s decision to hold the conference in the Israeli-controlled West Bank gives Israel a de-facto veto over who attends, and thus wrecks the idea that the conference will produce any authentic or legitimate expression of an independent Palestinian nationalist will.
And in addition to Israel banning the participation of some Fateh delegates from Gaza, the veteran leadership of Fateh in Gaza under Zakariya al-Agha is still actively contemplating a boycott of the conference of its own accord, over its accusation that Abu Mazen has engaged in massive packing of the conference by suddenly credentialing an additional 1,000 participants of his own choosing, to add to the 1,200 previously envisioned.
Toufic Haddad of Faster Times published a terrific article Tuesday with many details of the way in which many of Abbas’s recent decisions around the conference have served to further deepen the already severe crisis of trust and legitimacy within Fateh.
If you scroll down that page, you’ll find the handy translation into English that Haddad made of a key article that Bilal Hasan published in al-Sharq al-Awsat on July 19.
Hasan– a veteran journalist and one-time leading member of the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine– is also the brother of two of the key founders of Fateh, the late Khaled al-Hasan and Hani al-Hasan.
Bilal Hasan recounted how the committee that Abbas had originally established to prepare for the fateh conference was some while ago summarily disbanded by him. GIven that the committee was headed by longtime Fateh Central Committee member Abu Maher (Muhammad al-Ghunaim), that move already signaled a serious new fissure.
(You can find a list of all of the Central Committee’s current 13 members at the bottom of this Maan web-page.)
So Bilal Hasan doesn’t say exactly when Abu Maher’s PrepComm was disbanded, but evidently it was a number of weeks ago– before veteran Central Committee member Aboul-Lutf dropped his big bombshell by accusing Abu Mazen of complicity in the poisoning of Arafat.
Hasan wrote that after disbanding the PrepComm, Abu Mazen,

    announced in an individual manner, that he was calling upon a number of Fateh cadres located in the West Bank to an emergency meeting in the presidential compound. The meeting — the majority of whose attendees derived from one political stripe — took absolute and binding decisions regarding all three issues that had been debated in the dissolved “Preparatory Committee.”

Those issues were the location of the conference– that is, under Israeli occupation, or not under it; who would participate; and the content of the party platform.
Hasan went on,

    It was decided that the conference would take place inside [i.e. in the OPT] and that the delegates would be open to 1200-1600 [members of Fateh], so as to give the opportunity to change and exchange [members]. As for the [conference’s preparatory] documents [and their political line], discourse would head towards ending armed confrontation with the occupation. It [armed struggle] will remain mentioned in [the movement’s] general principles, but will be removed from the operational program.
    This is what happened in the face of the Preparatory Committee, and against it. A coup by all meanings of the term. A coup inside Fateh, led and implemented by the head of the government, that aims in the end at controlling it organizationally, intellectually, and politically, and with the support of a group that represents one stream inside Fateh with respect to its political coloration. One stream [as well] as far as its membership.

Hasan described the outcome as a fairly (though not totally) definitive-sounding split within Fateh. And he warned that,

    if Fateh splits, it won’t just split in two. There could be successive splits — one splitting off independently in an Arab country, another in Europe [etc.] so that we find ourselves before a series of Fateh splinters. Moreover these splits will not result in anything inevitable [such as the reform of the movement], but could bring about the gradual diminishing of the movements membership [overall], such that its [Fateh’s] body, presence and influence atrophy day after day, until one day the only part of Fateh within them is a piece of its history.
    These splits point to the end and failure of the Palestinian national project that was led by Fateh, by way of the PLO, and its declared political program. They also point to the end of the revolution and the failure of the revolution. The question here is what comes after the end of a revolution and its failure?

Anyway, as Haddad writes, there are all sorts of further stories of intrigue, buy-offs, vote-packing etc involved in the preparations for the planned conference… It remains quite possible that the conference will not be held at all… And of course, the political worth of whatever comes out of it, if it’s held, will remain open to serious contestation– especially from among the ranks of still-disgruntled Fateh members.
… So, there’ll be lots to watch for over the days ahead. The best English-language news sources I’ve found are Ma’an and Xinhua. I guess I’ll also try to read some Arabic-language sources on this over the next couple of days..

IPS piece on Obama, Jewish Israelis, and Jewish Americans

… here. Also archived here.
Actually, right now the archived version is the definitive one, because I lost a few words from the version I’d sent to my excellent editor at IPS, before I sent it to her…. Bill the spouse just alerted me to that so I sent the correction to Kitty the editor. And took the opportunity to insert the necessary words into the archived version right now.

Just how inept is Ross as a ‘Mideast expert’??

Short answer: extremely.
In case anyone is in any doubt, they should read the transcript of what Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at the end of his meeting with Hillary Clinton in Washington yesterday.
The core of what he said there:

    I would be remiss if I didn’t express our thanks and appreciation to President Obama and to Secretary Clinton for their early and robust focus on trying to bring peace to the Middle East…
    It is time for all people in the Middle East to be able to lead normal lives. Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and– we believe– will not achieve peace. Temporary security, confidence-building measures will also not bring peace. What is required is a comprehensive approach that defines the final outcome at the outset and launches into negotiations over final status issues: borders, Jerusalem, water, refugees and security.

This is a resounding slap in the face for the approach of using lengthy “interim” periods and “confidence building measures” (CBMs) that was a hallmark of Israeli-Palestinian conflict management (not conflict termination) diplomacy, as practiced by Dennis Ross for eight years under Pres. Clinton.
CBMs, of course, were a concept first developed in great detail in US-Soviet diplomacy in the ramp-down phase of the Cold War. That, indeed, was the field in which Dennis got his core academic training. He later rebranded himself, never terribly credibly, as a “Middle East expert.” His main credential in this new field ended up being the abysmal record he racked up as a failed “peacemaker” for those eight years in the Clinton administration.
Oh, and then there was the term he served as founding president of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute from 2006 through earlier this year… Did that make him a “Middle East expert”, I wonder?
This whole concept of CBMs has made an eery comeback into Washington’s Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy since the arrival of Dennis Ross in the White House at the end of June.
Laura Rozen blogged last week that she had,

    confirmed that President Barack Obama has sent letters to at least seven Arab and Gulf states seeking confidence-building measures toward Israel, which Washington has been pushing to agree to a freeze of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
    One former senior U.S. official who was aware of the letters said they had been sent “recently” to seven Arab states, including the leaders of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The letters reinforce “the Mitchell message re: the need for CBMs [confidence-building measures] in exchange for [settlement] freeze and to [get] peace talks restarted,” the former senior official said by e-mail.
    “These letters were sent some time ago,” a White House official told Foreign Policy Sunday, when asked about them. “The president has always said that everyone will have to take steps for peace. This is just the latest instance of this sentiment.”
    The official declined to provide a date of the letters, but said, “they’d been reported before a month or two ago.”

Coincidentally– or not– one of the big campaigns that AIPAC is currently running is to get US legislators to sign onto a letter “urging” Obama to push Arab states to give up-front CBMs to Israel…
Arab leaders and their citizens have seen this movie before.
In the 1990s, many Arab states moved to end the “secondary boycott” they had previously maintained against international companies doing business with Israel; and some, like Qatar, even took some other small steps toward “normalization” like opening an Israeli trade office in their capitals. That was entirely predicated on Israel making the real progress that was mandated by the Oslo Accord to concluding a final-status peace agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), before the defined deadline of May 1999.
Never happened. The deadline came and went. The Israeli government just went on waffling, with the ever-eager help of Dennis Ross in the White house. And the Israeli government also kept on shoe-horning additional tens of thousands of new illegal settlers into the occupied territories each year…
In the piece that Roger Cohen has in tomorrow’s NYT magazine on US policy toward Iran, there is a telling vignette that reveals just how deeply Dennis Ross does not qualify as anything even approaching a “Middle East expert”:

    On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

Dennis Ross, let’s remember, supposedly dealt closely with the Saudis throughout the eight years he was Pres. Clinton’s chief Middle East adviser. He also dealt closely with them, though in a subordinate role, when he worked for Sec. of State James Baker during and after the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war.
But then, he didn’t even really know to deal with them at all, come 2009? He just talked (and talked and talked…) at the Saudi monarch– and couldn’t even deal with the few, to-the-point questions that the king came back to him with?
I don’t know if he tried to raise the issue of CBMs-for-Israel with King Abdullah during that meeting. But evidently, this issue has been pitched to Riyadh as well as other Arab capitals in recent weeks.
And now, Prince Saud has come to Washington to give a definitive and very public answer on the CBMs question.
Of course, it riles the heck out of many Americans, including especially many members of Congress, that they can’t just wave the wand of economic aid over the big Arab oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia to get to do what they (and AIPAC) want them to do….
Also significant: In that same State Department transcript, Sec. Clinton uses a significant– and in my view, significantly flawed– way to describe the US’s role in the current Israeli-Palestinian pre-negotiation.
She said,

    There is no substitute for a comprehensive resolution. That is our ultimate objective. In order to get to the negotiating table, we have to persuade both sides that they can trust the other side enough to reach that comprehensive agreement.

This is completely, still, that same “trust-building” or “confidence-building” approach to mediation/negotiation that was used to such dismally unsuccessful effect during the Bill Clinton administration when– acting on Dennis’s advice– Pres. Clinton saw his role as only that of a facilitator trying to build “trust” between the two parties.
No. The US is not just a “facilitator”. The US is a party with a strong and direct national interest in getting all the strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict speedily and finally resolved in a way that is sufficiently fair to all sides that the outcome is sustainable for many generations to come.
So the role of the US “mediator” is not just to “persuade” and nudge the countries to the point where they can “trust each other” (and to do this prior to the negotiation starting???) But rather, the US role should be to:

    1. Reaffirm its own strong interest in a speedy, fair and sustainable end to all dimensions of the Israeli-Arab conflict;
    2. Reaffirm that the outcome it seeks is one based on international law and the longstanding resolutions 242 and 338 of the UN Security Council;
    3. Affirm (for the first time in many decades) its readiness to use all the instruments of national power at its disposal to win the speedy, fair, and sustainable final peace agreements between Israel and all its Arab neighbors; and
    4. Reaffirm that it stands ready to work with its partners in the Quartet to provide all the guarantees the parties might need regarding monitoring all steps of the (most likely phased) implementation of these peace agreements.

In other words, it is at that stage– the stage of implementing the different phases of a final peace whose full content has already been agreed– that the sides themselves can really start to build the “confidence” or trust of the other side…. And the US and its peace-monitoring partners can certainly help that process along.
But to imply that you need full trust between the two sides to the dispute before you expect them even to sit down at the peace table?? That’s nuts!
The process of so-called “confidence building” that Dennis Ross was so happy to see dragging on for years and years in the 1990s did not end up building up any trust at all. Just the opposite. It built mistrust– on both sides. Not least, because people still locked into the dispute on the ground had no idea where the final process was heading– so every little altercation between them became a huge existential issue that had to be fought over “to the death.”
And meanwhile, Ross’s good friends in the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute were able to implant thousands of additional settlers into occupied Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. How “lucky” for them, eh?
This time, someone should tell Sec. Clinton– and best of all her boss, the president– that you don’t need to build full trust between the sides before the negotiation starts.
What you need to build is a healthy and realistic recognition from each of the parties that:

    * the US has its own strong interest in the success of this peacemaking project,
    * the US is prepared to use its national power to secure fair and sustainable final peace agreements between all the parties, and
    * the US stands ready to use its national power to help guarantee the implementation of these agreements.

So now, Pres. Obama, let’s get on with it.
I also note, parenthetically, that Saud al-Faisal seemed to be placing more emphasis on getting the final peace negotiations started than on getting Obama’s demand for a complete Israeli settlement freeze implemented. I think that’s the right emphasis.

Tax-exempt US group sends western Jews to Israeli settlements

Nefesh b’Nefesh is an organization that is tax-exempt in the US that woks to help implant US-origined and European-origined Jews as settlers in Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Big kudos to Mairav Zonszein for writing about NBN in The Nation today.
Zonszein co-publishes the relatively new Ibn Ezra blog with Joseph Dana. The two of them are American-Israeli activists in the great Ta’ayush (‘Coexistence’) organization.
Dana has also posted a good 5-minute video of some interviews the two of them conducted during a recent NBN arrival ceremony at Ben Gurion airport, here. To really understand it, you need to know which of the place-names the NBN people they interview are inside Israel, and which are settlements. Many of the destinations mentioned for NBN-sponsored immigrants are indeed in the occupied West Bank.
Somebody here in the US needs to seriously challenge NBN’s tax-exempt status! On this page on their website they brag about the close relationship they have with the Government of Israel.
Including this:

    Nefesh B’Nefesh is the sole NGO that has authority to certify Proof of Residency for the Bituach Leumi (National Insurance Institute) and is deputized to utilize a portable passport control scanner for the Israel Border Police.

How on earth can an organization like this claim to be “non-political”? And why should I and other US taxpayers be giving a tax break to an organization that is openly defying both international law and our government’s firmly articulated policy regarding expansion of the settler population?

Two great new resources on Palestine

Okay, they’re very different, but here they are:

    1. This beautiful essay by African-American poet and author Alice Walker: Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters “the horror” in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel. It is a powerful reflection on some of what Walker experienced as a participant on the recent CODEPINK delegation to Gaza. It takes time to read, but is well worth it.
    When our Quaker group published its 2004 book on the Israel/Palestine conflict we called the final chapter, “Beyond Silence.” Alice Walker goes very beautifully beyond silence in this essay. Including writing about the painful fact that her (Jewish) husband still

      could not tolerate criticism of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians./Our very different positions on what is happening now in Palestine/Israel and what has been happening for over fifty years, has been perhaps our most severe disagreement. It is a subject we have never been able to rationally discuss. He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi. And that he objected to in his own Brooklyn-based family… His mother, when told of our marriage, sat shiva[because of Alice’s skin color], which declared my husband dead. These were people who knew how to hate, and how to severely punish others, even those beloved, as he was, of their own. This is one reason I understand the courage it takes for some Jews to speak out against Israeli brutality and against what they know are crimes against humanity.

    A shorter version of Walker’s essay has been published at Electronic Intifada– HT: Ray Close. But it’s better to read the whole thing.
    2. I told you this would be different. But “Rbguy”, writing his regular diary at “Daily Kos” this week, has done a great job of pulling together the many recent resources in the English language (including one of my own) on the topic of including Hamas in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
    I was planning to do a longer JWN post on all these resources. But then, after reading Rbguy’s diary I realized I really don’t need to.
    Rbguy, btw, is one of the new generation of Jewish-American bloggers and other activists who are certainly ready to “speak out against Israeli brutality” and to join with everyone else who is sincerely brainstorming fair and sustainable ways to end Israel’s long-running oppression of the Palestinian people and all other manifestations of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
    And yes, his writing is also beautiful in its own way!