Author: Helena

Afghan women call for end of war

I just watched the 11-minute video clip “Women of Afghanistan”, from Rethinkafghanistan.com.
It is very compelling.
At about 6:40 minutes, there’s a great short interview with Wall Street Journal correspondent Anand Gopal who explains very clearly that, while Afghan women were “imprisoned inside their houses” both under the Taliban and today, today many of them are also, in addition, living in the middle of a war zone in which women and children are disproportionately casualties.
He says (paraphrased),

    I have heard some women say that their life was better under the Taliban because, though they were also imprisoned then, at least there was not this big pervasive war.

The film then has segments of interviews with a number of leading Afghan women activists, many of them far from ideologically “extreme”, who expand on this same point.
One of them notes the devastating effect on Afghan women of the war deaths of husbands and other family members, noting that even war widows find it impossible to go our and earn a living, so they watch their families fall into deep impoverishment.
Another notes the bad effects of the US military presence, which is still increasing.
A woman from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, says explicitly, “If they really want to help women in Afghanistan, they should end this war.”
Another interviewee says, “I don’t expect anyone from outside to come and ‘liberate’ us. Afghan women will liberate ourselves.”
For any American who still thinks that in some way the US invasion of Afghanistan probably “helped” Afghan women, this video is very important to see.
Siun at FireDogLake also has a good supplementary commentary. (HT: HuffPo.)

My piece on the decline of the Israeli peace movement

… is now up on the Boston Review website, here.
I found it a really tragic article to work on. I have admired the Israeli peace movement since its inception. I still think its finest hour was when it mobilized hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets of their cities in September 1982, to protest the role Defense Minister Sharon and the IDF had played in orchestrating the massacres in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
From the late 1980s through 1993 I worked pretty closely with Naomi Chazan and other leaders in the movement, particularly in organizing and facilitating some of the early contacts with various Palestinians and Arab-state nationals in which these women and men started hammering out the details of what a viable two-state solution might look like and how it could be achieved.
Naomi is one of the smartest, most dedicated, as well as most fair-minded (un-chauvinistic) Jewish Israelis whom I have ever had the privilege of knowing.
The Jewish-Israeli peace movement still has many extremely inspiring and dedicated people in it. I have written about some of them here at JWN over the years. But the political and social weight of the movement within Israeli society has declined very steeply since 1982.
In the BR article I pinpoint the singular role that I think Ehud Barak played in deflating the movement– to be precise, with the fatwa he issued in December 2000, in which this man, who had been elected 18 months earlier on an explicitly pro-peace platform, ruled that he now judged that Israel had “no Palestinian partner for peace.”
But I also describe four long-term reasons for the movement’s decline:

    1. The diminution or elimination, post-Oslo, of the “cost” argument for leaving the occupied territories;
    2. The fact that so many Jewish Israelis have simply turned their backs on the Arab world over the past 10-15 years, and no longer partcularly seek or value good relations with it, seeing themselves as “westerners” or even quasi-Europeans, instead;
    3. The appropriation of the “demographic” argument the peace movement often used to use, by the forces of Israel’s newly emergent ethnonationalist rightwing; and
    4. The apparent effectiveness of the “Hamastan” argument inside Israeli society.

One factor I was not able to explore in the article– which got cut very heavily along the way– was the fact that over recent years a lot of pro-peace Israelis have actually moved away from the country. It’s not just Amos Oz and the late Amos Elon moving to Tuscany, or wherever. It’s the whole cohort of younger pro-peace Israelis who are now turning up in the US (and Europe), including many who now blog from here in “the west.”
I guess I can understand (and sympathize with) why they make this choice to emigrate from Israel. But their emigration does have the effect of leaving Israeli society even more heavily under the influence of the ethno-nats and the religio-nats than it would otherwise have been.
One thing the BR editors cut out of my piece was the observation I had made that though, at the beginning of Israel’s assault on Gaza last December, the (once proudly pro-peace) Meretz Party in Israel for a crucial few days gave its support to the war effort, the US branch of the Meretz publicly expressed its opposition to the war from the get-go.
(I think Meretz USA later tried to fudge the fact of that disagreement with the “mother party” in Israel.)
For me, this points to an interesting broader change in the dynamics between Jewish-Israeli society and Jewish-American society. Until very recently, the pro-peace movement in Israel was always a far broader and weightier presence in Jewish-Israeli society than the pro-peace movement in the US has been in Jewish-American society. A huge chunk of Jewish American society was– probably since the 1960s, if not earlier– what Phil Weiss and others have described as “PEP”, “progressive, except on Palestine.”
Throughout those long decades, you would frequently hear from Jewish Americans some version of this argument: “Though I might well have concerns about some aspects of the Israeli government’s policy toward the Palestinians, still, it’s the Israelis who are on the front-lines, and therefore we Jewish Americans can’t undercut them by expressing our concerns openly.”
… And meantime, in Israel, the pro-peace activists were frequently out on the streets protesting their government’s policy. They were founding organizations like Peace Now, B’tselem or Yesh Din, or the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions that threw great energy into documenting, publicizing, and organizing against Israeli abuses in the occupied territories. Those Israeli movements were (and still are) crucial voices of conscience; and for many long years they really made a difference.
Okay, perhaps not enough of a difference… But a difference, all the same.
And now? They are still a voice of conscience– a function that, as Quakers know, is never to be under-estimated. But they have nothing like the social and political weight in Israeli society that they once did.
But meantime, Jewish-American society is now more willing than ever before to adopt political positions that are in direct contradiction to those of the government of Israel; and important voices in Jewish-American society are more willing than ever before to criticize the Israeli government’s policies openly.
This is certainly true regarding the settlements issue; and I hope it proves true regarding other issues on the peacemaking agenda, too.
There is one further wrinkle in this new dynamic. Though Jewish-American critics of the actions of (this) government in Israel are a much larger force within Jewish-American society than they have been for many decades, the mainstream US media remains, in general, much less hospitable to views critical of Israeli government government policies than the mainstream Israeli media are.
However, the rise of the blogosphere has certainly “evened out the playing field” of the US political discourse on matters Israeli and Palestinian. So yes, while there are all kinds of staunchly pro-Netanyahu commentators out there in the US (and Israeli) blogosphere, there are also numerous strong voices– Jewish and non-Jewish– in the US blogosphere that are highly critical of Netanyahu and vocal in calling for a fair and durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
So anyway, do go and read my BR piece. I see you can comment on it there… But you can also comment on it here. Your choice!
(After a few days maybe I’ll see which discussion looks more interesting; and I might close the JWN one down at that point.)

More great blogging from N. Sheizaf on the ‘Wall’ ad

Maariv journo Noam Sheizaf, who blogs at ‘Promised Land’ (!) has a couple more great posts on the Israeli cellphone ad question.
In this one he argues that a “big” ad like this one for Cellcom was most likely conceived and designed by high-ups in the advertising company– and that they would have designed it to appeal to the broadest possible zeitgeist in (Jewish) Israeli society.
He writes,

    although some people in Israel find this commercial to be in bad taste, even offending, the Israeli mainstream sees nothing wrong with it – in fact, some comments on the internet even regarded it as one that advocates peace, since instead of fighting, the soldiers and the (unseen) Palestinians are having fun playing soccer.

Indeed, commenter ‘Michael W’ tried to make exactly that argument here on JWN an hour or so ago. That, despite the facts that– as I noted in that same discussion– no Palestinians are ever visible in the ad at all; and if the ad does have any “Palestinian” references in the story-line, they are mainly that,

    1. the Israeli soldiers are quite able to have a lot of fun playing with a soccer ball expropriated from the (quite invisible) Palestinians, and
    2. since the soldiers are playing so very close to the Wall, they are most likely doing so on Palestinian land that has been expropriated from the Palestinians by the Wall.

But of course, the Palestinians and their misery remain invisible. Which of course was also one of the major goals Sharon had in building the Wall. As one commenter someplace has also noted, the Palestinians also remained completely unheard in the ad.
In this PL post, Sheizaf notes that the cellphone ad topic has gotten some interest in the Israeli blogosphere and elsewhere– including the WaPo. But not yet anywhere in the Israeli print media.
He also notes this:

    immediately after I offered jewlicious.com as an example of some American liberal Jews’ tendency to adopt and defend right-wing politics and extremely unliberal ideas when it comes to Israel, there was a post on the site describing the commercial as “cute”.

How people ‘see’ Israel’s Apartheid Wall (contd.)?

The indefatigable Adam Horowitz published a post at Mondoweiss yesterday drawing attention to the sick ad an Israeli cellphone company is running that makes the Apartheid Wall seem like just a harmless (or even ‘fun’) natural feature of the landscape.
Maariv’s Noam Sheizaf also blogged about the ad yesterday.
You can see a clip of the ad there. It shows some on-duty Israeli soldiers kicking a soccer ball around in the shadow of the Wall’s 30-feet-high concrete fastness. Not shown: the Palestinians caged in on the other side.
The punch-line is, “After all, what are we all after? Just a little fun.”
Unspeakable.
When you see the Wall, especially the places where it goes anywhere near built-up Palestinian areas and is studded with looming concrete watch-towers, the overwhelming image that might come to your mind, as it does to mine, is that of the fence-and-watchtower system around a concentration camp.
The cellphone ad was made by the US-based advertising company McCann Erickson.
Can you imagine they’d make a similar ad using images of Bergen-Belsen as the “fun” location?
It’s interesting, though, the different ways that people “see” the Wall. When I was having lunch with my friend Yossi Alpher in Tel Aviv in March, I said something like, “But Yossi, you have to admit the way the Wall looks, it just looks so savage and inhumane– just like the old images of the Nazi camps in Europe!”
“Really?” he said, with his usual mild manner. “Do you think so? I think when most Israelis look at the Wall it just reminds us of all those old black-and-white pictures from our history books of the earliest Zionist settlements, which were all based on the ‘fence-and-watchtower’ model. We just don’t see it like the Nazi camps of Europe. It looks familiar and reassuring to us”
Actually that’s a pretty sad commentary on Israeli/Zionist history. The reason the early Zionist settlers in Palestine– like the early European settlers in North America, too– needed stockades and watch-towers was because (1) there were already people living on the land being settled, and (2) those indigenes did not (to say the least) welcome the incoming settlers with open arms.
But Yossi’s observation also pointed to the continuity of the Zionist land-grabbing project. After all, if the present Wall were built within Israel’s own pre-1967 borders, then (1) only a small number of Palestinians and only small numbers of other people around the world would object; and (2) the Wall would not need to be nearly so high, or studded so savagely with watch-towers, because if it were constructed inside Israel, and the Israeli army and settlers had pulled out of all the land to the east of it, then there could be a peace between the two peoples, with or without a peace agreement.
But no. Precisely because the Wall is part of a continuing attempt to fence off and grab Palestinian land from deep inside the West Bank (including east Jerusalem), that is why, in the Israeli view, it “has” to be that tall, and that brutal. Because there is resistance to that land-grabbing project– both from Palestinians and from billions of other people around the world.
So yes, there is a continuity with the longer history of the Zionist project.
But why should anyone else in the world, apart from the oh, perhaps four-five million Zionists, be expected to put up with this constant and arrogant stealing of the land of others? They shouldn’t.
And why should anyone in the world think that this Wall is just a “fun” backdrop for a cell-phone ad? Beats me.

A. Harel on IDF-settler symbiosis

This is a very informative article by Haaretz’s Amos Harel on the close symbiosis that exists between settler activists– including those responsible for most of the so-called “illegal” or “unauthorized” settlement outposts– and high-level authorities inside the IDF and other organs of the Israeli state.
He writes,

    The outposts are a continuation of the settlements by other means. The sharp distinction Israel makes between them is artificial. Every outpost is established with a direct connection to a mother settlement, with the clear aim of expanding the takeover of the territory and ensuring an Israeli hold on a wider tract of land. Construction in the outposts is integrated into the overall plan of the settlement project and is carried out in parallel to the seizure of lands within and close to the settlements.

He illustrates the cooperation of state authorities in the establishment and maintenance of the so-called “outposts” in the case of one called Migron:

    Migron is surrounded by a fence, guarded and connected to the necessary water and electricity infrastructures. Its “ascent to the land,” even though it was done on private Palestinian property, and despite the fact that it was undertaken in a deceptive manner, has received backing and practical support from the state. The security establishment’s declaration to the High Court of Justice this week that it would take more than a year to implement the compromise agreement, whereby the inhabitants of Migron would be moved to the adjacent settlement of Adam, shows that this backing is still in place…
    Behind every settlement action there is a planning and thinking mind that has access to the state’s database and maps, and help from sympathetic officers serving in key positions in the IDF and the Civil Administration. The story is not in the settlers’ uncontrolled behavior, though there is evidence of this on some of the hilltops, but rather in conscious choices by the state to enforce very little of the law.

Harel writes that the the Obama administration has held fast to the position that all the 100 “outposts” identified by the United Nations and by Israeli attorney Talia Sasson must be evacuated. (And not just the 23 or 26 outposts that PM Sharon’s security adviser Dov Weisglas agreed to evacuate, back in 2001.)
He writes that most of the present outposts were established during two waves of activity: between 1997 and 1999 (when, of course, Netanyahu was the PM), and between 2001 and 2003 (i.e., under Sharon– and notwithstanding Wesiglas’s 2001 promise to evacuate some of the ones that were already there.)
He adds,

    During those years, the area of the settlements themselves increased. The symbiosis between the army and the settlers in the West Bank was at its peak then. Many of the terror attacks elicited “a suitable Zionist response” with the army’s encouragement: the establishment of a new outpost or the pushing back of the fence around an existing settlement.
    The settlers’ moves were supported by surveillance cameras, protected roads, guards and often by declarations of a “special security zone.” To prevent infiltration, the area of the settlements was expanded and Palestinians from neighboring villages were prevented from approaching them. However, in the same breath, the moves were exploited for long-term goals, taking over and building on lands that were in large part private.
    For nearly 12 years now, I have been intermittently covering the outposts, as part of my coverage of the army. Officially, the IDF doesn’t see the connection between the defense establishment and the settlers. Construction in the territories is ostensibly a matter for settlement reporters and nosy activists from Peace Now. In fact, this connection is at the heart of the settlement project.
    In March 1998, during a tour, I was told by the commander of the Samaria Area Brigade, in an afterthought, that although the Gidonim outposts near Itamar were established without a permit, the Defense Ministry was acting to “launder” them. On that same day, Eli Cohen, the defense minister’s settlement adviser, was also touring the area. Queries put to the ministry by Knesset members were answered with evasive comments, but very quickly all the outposts in the vicinity were connected to all the necessary infrastructures.
    Five years later, at the height of the Sharon prime ministership, a senior officer who had recently been demobilized after service in the territories volunteered to explain the facts of life to my colleague Guy Kotev and me. With the patience usually reserved for children who have difficulty understanding, he asked us whether we really believed that the outposts go up without the authorities’ knowledge. He related that the director general of the settler organization Amana, Zeev Hever (known by his nickname, Zambish) was visiting the prime minister’s residence at night to go over the maps with Sharon. “And after that you expect that we won’t give them guards and we won’t hook them up to the water system?” he wondered.

So it is excellent to also learn from Harel that he judges that Obama has remained adamant on the need for speedy evacuation of all the outposts.
(As a precursor to the evacuation of all the settlements, I hope.)
He notes the very dire effects of the laxness that the last two US presidents have shown on the whole Israeli settlement construction question:

    During the 16 years since the Oslo process began, the number of Israelis living east of the Green Line (pre-Six-Day War border) increased from 110,000 to about 300,000 (not including East Jerusalem). The number of building starts in the West Bank in 2008 was 40 percent greater than during the previous year.

2008, lest we forget, was exactly the year-long period in which George W. Bush had vowed– during his speech at the Annapolis Middle east Peace Summit (remember that??)– that he would broker a final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement before the end of his term in office.
How can anyone say that Israel’s PM Ehud Olmert was negotiating “in good faith” with the Palestinians during that year, if at the same time he was accelerating his country’s expropriation of, and construction upon, the Palestinian land and national heritage?
Harel ends with a sober reflection on the split, or warped, moral vision of all the people– inside and outside the state apparatus– who have participated in the settlement- and outpost-construction project:

    Taking over the private property of someone who belongs to the neighboring people is a common phenomenon in the West Bank, even in recent years. We aren’t talking here about things that happened back in 1948. It is possible, of course, to describe these moves as a necessary part of the life-and-death struggle between the two peoples, in the name of which nearly all means are justified.
    One of the most obvious things learned from every visit is the extent to which things are done in a planned way, to this day. It is hard to miss the destroyed terraces in the settlement of Adam or the sight of the sewage flowing from Psagot, not far from the Binyamin regional council building, straight into the wadi that runs to the adjacent Palestinian town of El Bireh. But in those very same settlements live upstanding citizens, who would not cheat the grocer of 10 agorot and who would go out in the middle of the night to help a neighbor stuck on a dark road. In the outposts live scores of officers in the career army and the reserves, who serve in elite units and win citations for their courage. At the same time, according to the official state data, many of them have built their dream homes, a modest mobile home or a more luxurious villa, on land that has been stolen from someone else by force.

Great work, Amos Harel.

Newsweek gives us the scoop…

… in the form of the whole (PDF) text of the “Not for distribution or publication” real Hasbara Handbook from “The Israel Project”.
For anyone who’s followed the various interventions of Israel’s ever-eager army of international hasbaristas (propagandists) here or elsewhere, the actual handbook for their efforts that’s produced by TIP makes hilarious reading.
My main take on the portions I’ve read of the 116-page tome– full name “The Israel Project’s 2009 GLOBAL LANGUAGE DICTIONARY”– is that the authors seem fully aware they have new challenges to face in trying to justify Israel’s actions to (predominantly) a US audience. Hence, such advice as (p.7) “Don’t pretend that Israel is without mistakes or fault.”
Their reasoning for the advice they give on p.12 not to talk about religion is also interesting:

    Americans who see the bible as their sourcebook on foreign affairs are already supporters of Israel. Religious fundamentalists are Israel’s “Amen Choir” and they make up approximately one-fourth of the American public and Israel’s strongest friends in the world. However, some of those who are most likely to believe that Israel is a religious state are most hostile towards Israel (“they’re just as extreme as those religious Arab countries they criticize”). Unfortunately, virtually any discussion of religion will only reinforce this perception.
    Therefore, even the mention of the word “Jew” is many Israel contexts is going to elicit a negative reaction—and the defense of Israel as a “Jewish State” or “Zionist State” will be received quite poorly. This may be hard for the Jewish community to accept but this is how most Americans and Europeans feel.

These people are fairly smart in the way they advise their supporters to work to bend the public discourse in a pro-Israel direction.
Anyway, big thanks to the friends at Newsweek who brought us this gem.

Netanyahu: Panic and disarray?

There’s been quite a bit of commentary in the US blogosphere about the unsourced observation in this Haaretz article today that Israeli PM Netanyahu has been heard to refer to Obama’s two high political advisers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod as “self-hating Jews.”
Be that as it may. It strikes me that the much bigger story in the article, which is by Barak Ravid, is the picture he paints of disarray and something approaching panic in the high ranks of Netanyahu’s administration.
This, at a time in which Pres. Obama and his team have been maintaining their firm pressure on Netanyahu to completely freeze Israel’s construction of its quite illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
So far, neither side has backed down in this confrontation– though Obama has not yet taken any of the real-world policy measures that are potentially at his command, to back up his demand on Netanyahu.
Their conflict thus currently has many of the aspects of a staring match. Who will blink first? Or will Obama do something else that might radically change the nature of this engagement?
Ravid starts out today’s article by reporting on a press conference the centrist Kadima Party– currently in opposition– organized yesterday, 100 days into Netanyahu’s premiership, under the banner “100 days, zero gains. It’s the same old Bibi.”
Netanyahu responded in what looked like a distinctly panicky way, dispatching five of his advisers to quickly hold their own counter-press conference– though with no clear and discernible theme.
Ravid:

    An atmosphere of permanent crisis has surrounded Netanyahu’s bureau ever since he took office, so it was no surprise that the press conference also had an air of panic. The five advisers – National Security Adviser Uzi Arad, cabinet secretary Zvi Hauser, director general of the Prime Minister’s Office Eyal Gabai, political adviser Ron Dermer and Nir Hefetz, who heads the public relations desk – arrived at the meeting without a prearranged, uniform message. Over and over, they cut each other off.
    … [D]espite the unified front they tried to present, it is clear that all of Netanyahu’s aides dislike each other: They are constantly badmouthing each other and blaming each other for leaks. Arad, for example, demanded that Hauser undergo a lie-detector test and is now demanding the same of Hefetz. And the latter two say “it is impossible to work with” Arad.
    Compounding the problem is an inexperienced bureau chief, Natan Eshel, and a former spokesman, Yossi Levy, who is still clinging to his office and refusing to give it up to his replacement, Hefetz – who, for his part, is kept out of half the discussions.
    Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office…

It was in this context that Ravid wrote,

    To appreciate the depth of [Netanyahu’s] paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”

Now it is possible that Ravid was doing this reporting from a personal perspective that might be pretty much pro-Kadima.
Kadima, remember, stayed out of Netanyahu’s coalition because its leaders decided they wanted to hear Netanyahu firmly expressing support for the goal of a two-state solution with the Palestinians. (Which he finally did a couple of weeks ago, but only in a very circumspect way.)
There is certainly one way of looking at a possible US strategy wherein if Washington presses Netanyahu very hard on the settlement freeze and other peace-process issues, at some point his present rightist coalition partners would leave the coalition and Livni could step in and impose a few conditions of her own.
Or even take over completely as PM and form her own governing coalition.
Kadima did, after all, get one more seat in the February elections than Likud did. And unlike Labour leader Ehud Barak, who effectively broke his party in two because he was so eager to be Netanyahu’s Defense Minister, Livni has done a good job of holding Kadima together, despite the party’s many apparent internal ideological contradictions.
I imagine it is this idea that a powerful and credible Livni is just waiting in the wings for his coalition to split that is spooking Netanyahu these days– and a big reason why he is so resentful of the pressure he evidently feels he is under from Washington.
Anyway, to me that’s the importance of Ravid’s story today. The “self-hating Jews” business strikes me– if indeed Netanyahu said it– as pretty par for the course within Israel’s famously hard-fighting political culture.

NYT plays catchup with JWN on Mubarak story

Yesterday evening I put up a short post here about the fears swirling around the Middle East about the possible physical weakening of Egypt’s 81-year-old President Hosni Mubarak, an authoritarian ruler who is a key US ally in the region.
Now, more than 18 hours later, the vast (and vastly expensive) newsgathering operation of the NYT has finally caught up with the story.
Their Cairo-based correspondent Mona el-Naggar provides a few more details than I did.
She reports that “many local commentators” said that Mubarak, “looked weak and in poor health standing next to a youthful President Obama in their recent meeting here.” (Duh!)
Then she adds:

    This latest round [of concern about his health] … has its roots in a personal shock. Not long before Mr. Obama’s visit, one of Mr. Mubarak’s two grandchildren, a 12-year-old boy, died unexpectedly. By all accounts, Mr. Mubarak doted on the boy and was devastated by his death, canceling a planned visit to Washington — his first in five years — and disappearing from public view for about 10 days.
    He resurfaced to receive Mr. Obama but did not go to the airport to greet him.

I note, however, that back when he cancelled his Washington trip, there was some serious questioning as to whether the death of the grandson, however, sad, was actually a sufficient explanation for the ageing leader’s occlusion at the time. So Naggar’s “by all acounts” is not, strictly speaking, true.
She is quite right to note that he has never appointed a vice-president. And of course this means that any news of him failing some physically is necessarily going to spark a sharp succession struggle within the country’s closed and long military-dominated political elite. She notes, as I did yesterday, that two main contenders identified in Cairo’s ever-humming political salons are First Son Gamal Mubarak and military intel chief Omar Suleiman.
Naggar adds:

    If [Mubarak] dies in office, then the speaker of the Parliament, a veteran leader [of the ruling ‘National Democratic Party’, NDP], Fathi Sorour, would serve as an interim president until an election could be called. With no real political parties here, an election would effectively be a formality to install the candidate selected by Mr. Mubarak’s party. Gamal Mubarak is a high-ranking official in the party, but there remains no guarantee that the old-timers in the system or the military would go along with his ascension, political commentators said.

Mubarak has been president continuously since Anwar as-Sadat was assassinated in 1981. He had been his vice-president; both men, like Gamal Abdel-Nasser who preceded Sadat, came from the military and relied strongly on the military to buttress their rule.
In the heady days of G. W. Bush’s push for “democratization throughout the whole of the Middle East”, Mubarak agreed to allow opposition parties to run against him when he ran for his current six-year term in office, back in September 2005. But he very cleverly use government resources and media to outfox them, winning a handy victory.
Two months later, elections were held for the 444 elected seats in the lower house of the country’s parliament. This time, though the regime deployed many brutally repressive tactics against its opponents, Muslim Brotherhood (MB) candidates running as independents were able to win 88 seats.
The MB is by far the country’s biggest and best organized grassroots movement. It has been committed to the use of only nonviolent methods since the early 1980s, but this has not prevented the regime from using considerable violence and numerous quite unwarranted arrest campaigns, etc., against it.
The MB’s victory in the three-round elections of November-December 2005 provided something of a preview of what happened in the Palestinian legislative elections held in January 2006. In the Palestinian elections, Hamas, which had started out life in the 1970s and 1980s as, essentially, an offshoot of the MB movements in both Egypt and Jordan, won an upset victory over the US-backed Fateh movement.
That surprise outcome ended the Bush folks’ enthusiasm for Middle East “democratization” once and for all. Not only did the US back Israel’s brutal siege campaign against the elected Palestinian leadership, it also planned for a Contras-style coup against it, though that coup was only successful in the West Bank, and not in Gaza.
In Egypt, the Bushites’ sharp shift away from being concerned about democracy meant that when elections were held for the “Shura Council” upper house in 2007, the Mubarak regime made no attempt whatsoever to pretend to run them democratically… and the US’s very generous allocations of aid to the regime continued uninterrupted.

Mubarak’s hold on power weakening?

There have been several reports in both the Arab and Israeli media in recent days that Egypt’s ageing, 28-year president Hosni Mubarak may be weakening his long-clenched hold on power.
Given Egypt’s pivotal role in all the current diplomacy– over Fateh-Hamas reconciliation; Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange; and consolidation of the Gaza ceasefire– a weakening of Mubarak’s grip could have serious consequences.
At the very least, if these reports are widely believed within Egypt’s often delphically closed political elite, they could easily be sharpening the struggle to succeed the 81-year-old Mubarak.
This struggle is generally judged to pit his son Gamal against the security boss, Omar Suleiman… Who also (not concidentally) happens to be the chief point-man on all those negotiations defined above.
So what is the status of these latest reports?
I am having a hard time finding out exactly. Al-Bawaba website reports that,

    Saudi press reports Monday said that that during his recent trip to Jeddah, President Mubarak, 81, notified King Abdullah of his intention to step down soon as president following the upcoming parliamentary election. He also reportedly anticipates moving the presidential election forward to 2009 or 2010, instead of the scheduled 2011.

And the Israeli daily Ma’ariv reported either yesterday or today that,

    Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will not complete his current presidential term, but will rather retire beforehand and will try to transfer power to his son Gamal. This is the prevalent opinion among intelligence officials in Israel, which they voiced in discussions held recently on the future of the regime in Cairo.

Now sadly I cannot yet get better sourcing/links for either of these reports. The English rendering of the Ma’ariv one was taken from something called “Israel News Today”, a private news service that I don’t think is available on-line.
(If anyone can contribute links to any of the originals of these articles, that would be great.)
Interestingly both that report and the Bawaba one linked Mubarak’s present weakness to the recent death of his beloved grandson. Be that as it may…
Anyway, in terms of the political effects of a pre-succession struggle that may already have started, I would note the security forces’ recent round-up of yet another tranche of high-level Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
Fwiw, when I was in Cairo in february, some well-informed Egyptian friends said they had concluded that powerful trends within the MB there were betting on a Gamal succession.
…. Anyway, Egypt is obviously not the only heavyweight US ally in the Arab world that is facing imminent succession challenges. So is Saudi Arabia.
Thus, many things about the political structure of the region that the US political elite has taken for granted over the past 15-20 years might well be about to thrown into question.
For the sake of the peoples of both countries, my deepest hope is that these succession struggles are not violent or too disruptive, and that they can lead in both countries to the emergence of regimes that are much more responsive to the real needs of their citizens.