Author: Helena

Settlers going ‘crazy’ as pressure mounts

Haaretz’s Bradley Burston reported this yesterday:

    On the Sabbath, Israeli television viewers were treated to the recorded-on-a-weekday observations of Arele, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Karnei Shomron, grinning as he watched the progress of an arson fire burning Palestinian land near the Gilad Farm, an icon of the outlaw outpost movement.
    Asked by Israel Channel Two Television reporter Shai Gal what would happen if Israeli forces tried to evacuate Havat Gilad, Arele replied, “At most, they’ll demolish one measly shack, so they’ll have something to show – that Kushon [a Hebrew slur equivalent to the “N” word] in the United States, in order to have an Etnan [the biblical term for a fee paid to a prostitute] to give him – if you [secular] guys know what an Etnan is.”
    According to Arele, the fire, in this instance a form of pre-emptive revenge, was the price tag Palestinians would be forced to pay each time Obama pressed Israel to “touch any settlement of any kind, any place in Judea and Samaria.”

This last point is very important.
Gabi Peterberg has warned that, as in the case of the final portion of many decolonization processes, as decolonization in the West Bank become a more imminent reality those settlers who fear losing their situation of uber-privilege and even perhaps their quite illegally acquired homes may well go on final rampages of unbridled violence against the unarmed indigenes.
(And don’t you love the term “pre-emptive revenge”?)
The UN-OCHA weekly report for 27 May – 2 June reported (PDF) that,

    Settler violence and attacks increased this week in the northern West Bank, notably in the Nablus and Qalqiliya districts in response to a recent Israeli government announcement of its intention to dismantle 26 settlement outposts.

The Palestinians of the West Bank urgently need protection from this violence.
Can the very numerous Palestinian “security forces” who have been trained and armed by the US do anything to provide it– or are they too busy trying to suppress internal political opposition to Ramallastan in an attempt to help Abu Mazen “protect” the settlers?
The rest of Burston’s report makes important reading, too. In it, he writes of “racism… masquerading as love of Israel.”

Mitchell includes Syria, Lebanon

It’s now confirmed. US peace envoy George Mitchell, now on his fourth trip to the Middle East, will travel to both Syria and Lebanon this week.
He met this morning in Tel Aviv with Ehud Barak, and is meeting– possibly as I write– with Avigdor Lieberman and PM Netanyahu. Tomorrow, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah. So Damascus maybe Thursday?
This is excellent news. Mitchell certainly shouldn’t have delayed so long in going to Syria, a country that is a necessary and pivotal part of any comprehensive peace between Israel and all of its neighbors.
The type of peace, that is, that will end the state of war that Israelis have lived in, with their neighbors, throughout all the 61 years since the establishment of their state in 1948.
(How will Jewish Israelis– whose national culture, mindset, and economy have all been built importantly, though not wholly, around their sense of of being surrounded by hostile others– deal with the prospect of such a ground-shifting transformation in their situation? This is a non-trivial question that too few Israelis have ever studied in much depth… )
When I was interviewing Syrian foreign minister Walid Moualem and other high Syrian officials in Damascus on Tuesday-Thursday of last week, they expressed eagerness to receive Mitchell and to be fully included in the peace-making venture that he leads.
Syrian officials are also very eager to have a serious discussion with the Obama administration on issues of joint concern regarding Iraq.
They told me they have a strong interest– in common with the Obama administration– in seeing the Maliki government in Baghdad increase its effectiveness and strength: something that will both prevent the whole region from collapsing into a chaos that would be very harmful for Syria, and will allow US troops the smooth exit from Iraq that Obama is now committed to.
(In discussions with a few Syrian private citizens, I heard a little speculation that if the situation in the Gulf area is for whatever reason too chaotic to allow US troops to exit Iraq through that route, they might even be allowed to exit through Syria…. Interesting!)
More, obviously, from my important Moualem interview later– here and elsewhere.
One of my main observations, after 35 years of reporting on and studying the dynamics of various Israeli-Arab peace-making efforts, is that US peace brokers have a number of different ways of approaching the Syrian (and Lebanese) tracks, and their relationship with the Palestinian track.
Here, in capsule form, are my further thoughts on this subject:

    1. Washington ‘peace’ brokers have very frequently tried to play the Syrians off against the Palestinians.
    2. They do this either over a longer or shorter time frame. That is, sometimes they have both these tracks “in play” at the same time, and there is a literal use of pressure as when Dennis Ross or whoever conveys a message like this: “We’ve got the other track just about ready to reach completion but we wouldn’t have any more energy then to deal with your track– so give me an even better offer!” Sometimes the manipulation occurs over a longer time-frame than that.
    3. The success of that manipulative strategy depends crucially on the maximization of distrust between the Syrian and Palestinian leaderships, and the minimization (or absence) of direct communications between them.
    4. Presidents Clinton and GWB both relied on this manipulation strategy very heavily. The whole Oslo phenomenon, of course, fed very strongly into it.
    5. Neither Clinton nor GWB proved able to secure a final-status peace, on either of these crucial negotiating tracks!!!
    6. So the ‘manipulation’ strategy really doesn’t have any credibility– unless the goal is to delay the conclusion of final peace agreements on these two tracks, which “by an amazing coincidence” gives Israel the opportunity to build more Jews-only colonies in both the occupied West Bank and the occupied Golan.
    7. Obama has committed himself to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state within a relatively short time frame– some say two years, some say four.
    8. While he has publicly reiterated that commitment a large number of times, including in Cairo last Thursday, his references to the need for a comprehensive peace between Israel and all of its neighbors have been far fewer, and far less clear.
    9. He has, however, made several approving references to the Arab Peace Initiative, which is based centrally on the concept of a ‘comprehensive’ peace between Israel and all neighbors, and which also stresses the need for Israel to evacuate all the Arab lands occupied in 1967.
    10. In the context of an effort to build an fair, stable, and increasingly trust-imbued order in the Arab-Israeli region, the manipulative, “divide and rule” approach that has marked all US peace efforts since 1993– whose failure has now been amply documented– needs to be laid aside in favor of one that actively welcomes the building or rebuilding of good working relations among all the Arab parties as the Arab parties walk together along the path laid out by their peace initiative of 2002.
    11. It was, remember, only a level of decent working relations among ideologically diverse Arab parties that in 1991 allowed the convening of the breakthrough Madrid Peace Conference. The same is true– but even more urgent!– today.
    12. Decent working relations are therefore now needed both within national communities– as in, between Fateh and Hamas; and also amongst the different large parties in Lebanon– and among the Arab states themselves.
    13. GWB’s malicious and divisive policy of stoking “moderates” versus “extremists” tensions at the regional level needs to be decisively cast aside. The languaging around that policy also needs to be jettisoned.
    14. One big challenge, obviously, is for the Palestinians to find a workable amount of intra-party reconciliation. It is good news that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal traveled to Cairo yesterday– hopefully, to try to break the logjam in the Cairo-mediated talks with Fateh. (It is my hope that one of the big things Obama and Hillary did when they were in Cairo last week was to tell Mubarak and his man Omar Suleiman quite clearly that they want him to succeed in this mediation, regardless of what Mubarak’s own small sectional interests in the matter might be.)
    15. Another challenge will be to build good relations between the Palestinian and Syrian leaderships as the negotiations gather steam. Having a national unity government for the Palestinians would most likely make that easier, as Hamas has had a long working relationship with Syria.
    16. Good relations between these two important Arab parties, and between Syria and Lebanon, (and among all the Arab parties) should be seen at this point as potentially synergistic and very helpful for the peacemaking effort, rather than being feared as presaging the imminent creation of a strong anti-Israeli military alliance– which was always the old fear of Israel and its western backers.
    17. We need to remember that these days, no Arab leaders have either the will or the capability to launch a military attack against Israel. They are all– including Hamas– focused on the peace arena. “Divide and rule” would be a completely counter-productive way for Washington to deal with this situation. Inclusion has to be the name of the game. Oh, and of course, real forward progress on securing the actual peace.

Anyway, as I say, I’m planning blog a lot more on all of this over the days ahead… For now, you’ll have to make do with my “17 points”.

M-14 win in Lebanon

The March 14 bloc in Lebanon, that is heavily supported by the US and Saudi Arabia, came out ahead in yesterday’s elections in Lebanon.
Qifa Nabki has done a great job of pulling together and assessing some of the dominant current western explanations for this outcome, here.
Qifa’s own main explanation is this:

    Far more decisive, in my opinion, seems to have been: (1) the high turnout of Sunnis in Zahle — many of whom came from abroad — coupled with a low turnout of Christians; (2) strong feelings of antipathy towards Hizbullah by the Christians of Beirut who voted decisively for March 14th’s list in the district of Achrafieh; (3) some rare rhetorical blunders by Nasrallah in the past couple of weeks, calling the events of May 7th [2008] “a glorious day” for the resistance.

This last point might well track with the one Paul Salem had made Friday, namely that “Hezbollah didn’t really want to win and give up its cozy seat in the opposition.”
Certainly of the “experts” Qifa refers to in the post, I would trust the judgment of Qifa himself and of Paul Salem considerably more than that of Andrew Exum, Rob Satloff, or Tony Badran.
The prime contest in the election was not, as many western analysts wrote, between Hizbullah and its opponents. Because of Lebanon’s blatantly gerrymandered and discriminatory political system, the Shiite Muslim community that is the largest single religious community in Lebanon, representing around 40% of the population, has only a tiny number of members in the confessionally constituted parliament. Hizbullah could only ever expect to keep the 11 seats in the 128-seat body that it had before yesterday; and it has done that.
The main contest, then, was inside the grossly over-represented Christian community. Here, Hizbullah’s allies in the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) apparently lost in a major way to supporters of March 14 who are also members of extremely well-entrenched political “families” and ardent supporters of the present system of Christian political privilege.
The FPM and its leader, General Michel Aoun, had offered a clear alternative to that system, as well as a strong political platform for this election. For those reasons, despite some other other misgivings I have about Aoun (and about Hizbullah), I wanted their alliance to win. Hizbullah, by the way, also supports a “de-confessionalized”, one-person-one-vote system in Lebanon.
It is truly anomalous that so many Americans, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, intervened in the election to support the anti-democratic March 14 coalition.
Now, I hope we can see another broad national unity government in Lebanon, like the outgoing one but hopefully a lot more effective in meeting people’s needs than that one.
There are, of course, several issues remaining from the election itself. Nicholas Kimbrell writes in today’s Daily Star that Carmen Jeha, the Deputy Coordinator of the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections (LADE) said her organization had identified over 900 “critical violations” of the election law.
To his credit, Kimbrell leads with that news, and then mentions the efforts and assessments of the the Lebanese Alliance for Election Monitoring (CLOE), which fielded Lebanese-citizen observation missions “with 2,500 monitors countrywide”, and which also noted significant violations.
Kimbrell then goes on to note that the Lebanese Interior Ministry, which organized the elections, and the foreign election-monitoring teams fielded by the EU and the Carter Center, had all given the election process relatively high marks.
I expect that in much of the western media, the assessments of the foreign monitors will receive a lot more play than those of the indigenous Lebanese monitors. But why should westerners need to give undue weight to western monitors (whose reach inside the country is anyway miniscule compared with that of the indigenous Lebanese organizations)?
If we really support democracy for all peoples, shouldn’t we also highlight, celebrate, and respect the work and assessments of indigenous Lebanese democracy-supporting organization much more than those of western teams who just parachuted into the country for a tiny proportion of the whole campaign process?

First-day thoughts: My latest trip

    One cool thing about Quakers is that, by tradition, we don’t use the Nordic/pagan names of the days of the week that are common in western society, but use a simple counting-off system: First-day is ‘Sunday’, Second-day is ‘Monday’, etc. In practice, among the members of my Quaker meeting in Charlottesville, VA, we quite frequently use the Nordic/pagan names, to be more generally understood; though sometimes, amongst ourselves we use the counted-off names, which were once an integral part of what was known as Quaker ‘plain speech.’
    Going to Meeting for Worship on a First-day often puts me in a reflective/spiritual mood that lasts long after the meeting itself. That happened today; so I thought I’d put these ‘First-day thoughts’ onto the blog. I may do so again, in the future. Anyway, here these ones are. ~HC

The trip turned out to be a big one. Qatar, in early May, was a lot more thought-provoking than I’d expected– thanks in good part to a friend who lives there who took me to the old downtown and talked a lot about what the conditions of life are like there for the country’s numerous Arab-national expatriate residents. The UNESCO conference was also a lot more substantive than I’d expected– and it gave me the great gift there of spending a lot of time with someone I’ve long admired, Allister Sparks.
London was good, too. Mainly, to catch up with some old friends and colleagues; to spend some good time with my best friend from Oxford days, the economist Bridget Rosewell; and to catch up with two of my sisters (though I did see them back in April, too.)
But the most memorable parts of the trip were the two weeks I spent in Turkey and the week I spent in Syria. Both these legs were with Bill the spouse. We had planned that part of the trip as a bit of an indulgence, to mark our 25th wedding anniversary; but it all proved extremely informative, as well as enjoyable.
I hadn’t been to Turkey since 1976, when I drove through the country with my first husband in the Fiat 127 we had bought shortly beforehand from Jihad Khazen for 250 Lebanese pounds (!) That trip was part of the longer drive we undertook from Beirut to the UK that summer.
This time, before Bill and I went I thought quite a bit about Mary Fisher, a young London woman who was one of the “Valiant Sixty” of early Quaker leaders, back in the mid-17th century. Some 18 months ago, Friends Journal published a terrific article about Mary, that focused on the journey she undertook in 1658 to go and share her version of the truth with Ottoman Sultan Mehmet IV. I don’t have my collection of FJ’s to hand right now– and the full text is sadly not available online. But what I recall from it is that Mary persuaded a small number of male Quakers to go along with her on the trip– but they all turned back when they received advice from the British consul in Smyrna that there might be “brigands” ahead…
So anyway, she proceeded on her own, and caught up with the Sultan and his court in Adrianople (now Edirne), north and west from Istanbul. And she somehow, without speaking a word of Turkish, talked her way into his exalted presence and got an audience in front of him and his courtiers. He asked her to speak her promised message; and after a short period of silence in the Quaker fashion, she did just that. It was doubtless a classically Christian testimony, as proclaimed by all those foundational Quakers in the 17th century.
The Sultan apparently listened to it with due respect, and thanked her for it. He then courteously asked if he could give her an armed guard to ensure she could return to Smyrna in peace; but she declined the offer, returning quite peaceably enough on her own… Sometime later she was one of the first of the English Quakers who, suffering from repression at home, migrated to north America to find refuge there. She was persecuted by the Puritans there, too; but she ended her days many years later in, I believe, South Carolina…
In the current era, Turkey has been ruled since 2002 by the AKP, a party that is avowedly Islamist but is also committed to pluralism and democracy. It has been ruled very well indeed by them. In 2007, the party was re-elected, with a stronger mandate than before. I was really interested to go there, see some of the country, and meet with Turkish friends and colleagues, though sadly our attempts to meet with a few of the officials who’ve been working on their very innovative Middle East policy did not work out.

Continue reading “First-day thoughts: My latest trip”

Best Lebanese election coverage, from Qifa Nabki

In this post, which he promises to update throughout the day, Qifa gives an excellent description of the voting experience under Lebanon’s “new improved” system, and the general atmosphere in the country.
This is the latest in his series of excellent posts about the whole election process. The guy is a national treasure.
Highlights from today’s post:

    I was struck by how calm and orderly everything was. Soldiers and police manned the entrances and exits, checking every voter’s identification card before letting him or her in, one by one, to vote.
    …Leaving the election center, someone tried to slip me a “thank you” voucher for $20 worth of gasoline at the Sahyouneh gas station on the way out of Saida, but I politely declined the offer…

One apparent innovation in this election is that voters can write their own ballots– that is, they have the option not to simply vote for an entire preprinted list of candidates in each of the multi-seat constituencies.
QN voted some place south of Saida. Then he traveled to a few polling places in East and West Beirut and wrote this:

    More of the same: people making their way to voting centers in an orderly fashion; party representatives passing out ballots to people in cars at intersections; soldiers everywhere. I collected a few of these ballots as souvenirs. As you can see below, there isn’t a whole lot of room on each ballot to scratch out any names and replace them with others; this is, of course the point, such that voters are compelled to vote for an entire slate, “zayy/mitl ma hiyye” (just as it is).

It strikes me that the lack of standardization in the ballot papers can be a cause of huge confusion in the tallying process… Also, his report about the gasoline voucher offer is a huge concern.
Of course, the whole campaign process has been drenched in money, much of it apparently foreign.
But has all this money been poured in to ensure that the voting process actually is a fair and accurate one? Shouldn’t the election authorities in Lebanon have done more to ensure that this is the case?
And why is someone taking very visible steps (the gas vouchers) to subvert the process? Might this scheme actually have been intended, by those organizing it, to create evidence that “proves” that the election process is flawed, and thus a basis on which to challenge its outcome?
Lots of questions.
Let’s hope the election-monitoring teams sent by the Carter Center– headed by the former Prez himself– and other respected bodies will be able to sort it all out.

Longer Meshaal

A longer version of my interview with Khaled Meshaal yesterday is here. Also here.
It covers the most important points he made on current issues in Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, as well as his reaction to the big Obama speech.
I’m planning to transcribe the full version of the recording I made of the interview, and will publish it here as soon as that work is done.

Meshaal reaction on Foreign Policy website

It’s here. Good exposure, I think.
But now I have so much more writing up to do! (Also, I’ll try to get a few more reactions from Syrian friends to the speech.)
Update: I just did a Google news search on ‘Meshaal’ and the FP piece came out at the top. But where was the JWN post that had scooped it? (Also: The FP version contains two small typos, since corrected in the JWN original.)

Meshaal on Obama speech: Good, but–

A couple of hours ago I finished an hour-long, on-the-record interview here in Damascus with the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal.
I started, not surprisingly by asking his reactions to the Speech that Obama made in Cairo earlier in the afternoon.
He replied,

    Of course I listened to the speech. The words are different from those used by Bush. The speech was cleverly written in the way it addressed the Muslim world– using phrases from the Holy Kor’an, and referring to some historical events. And also, in the way it showed respect to the Muslim heritage.
    But I think it’s not enough!
    What’s needed are deeds, actions on the ground, and a change of policies.
    For example, if the Palestinians today don’t find a real change from the situation of siege in Gaza, there’s no point; the speech by itself doesn’t help them. What they’re looking for is an end to the siege and an end to occupation.
    We want to see practical steps by the United States such as ending Israel’s settlement activity, putting an end to Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian land and its campaign to Judaize Jerusalem; an end to its demolitions of Palestinian homes; and the removal of the 600 checkpoints that are stifling normal life in the West Bank.
    Rather than sweet words from President Obama on democratization, we’d rather see the United States start to respect the results of democratic elections that have already been held. And rather than talk about democratization and human rights in the Arab world, we’d rather see the removal of General Dayton, who’s building a police state there in the West Bank.
    In the speech, Obama talked about the Palestinian state, but not its borders. He didn’t mention whether it should comprise all the Palestinian land that was occupied in 1967, or just part of it, as Israel demands.
    He made no mention of Jerusalem or the Right of Return.
    Yes, he spoke of an end to settlement activity; but can he really get them to stop?
    Without addressing these issues, the speech remains rhetoric, not so very different from his predecessor’s.

Just for the record, Obama did mention Jerusalem, when he said he wanted to work for the day,

    when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

The Meshaal interview contained in-depth answers to numerous other questions I posed; but I wanted to get this answer published as soon as possible. The other answers ranged across a broad spectrum of issues related to ongoing political/diplomatic dilemmas.
One of his key answers that really stuck in my mind was this:

    We’ll work for the success of any project that ends the occupation, restores Palestinian rights, and achieves the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

I’ll publish a lot more from this interview, and from other interviews conducted here, including with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, over the days ahead.

Washington’s new tone on Islamist political parties

Two excellent initiatives by the Obama administration in the lead-up to The Speech tomorrow. They’ve made a point of inviting members of the Egyptian parliament affiliated with the long banned and often forcibly suppressed Muslim Brotherhood to attend The Speech.
And Obama himself put an interesting, and potentially helpful, twist on one of the long-standing Three Preconditions that Hamas will have to meet before the US or other Quartet members will deal with it.
In his interview with NPR on Monday, Obama defined the Preconditions in these terms:

    that you recognize the state of Israel without prejudging what various grievances or claims are appropriate, that you abide by previous agreements, that you renounce violence as a means of achieving your goals

… And he added that if Hamas met these conditions, then ” I think the discussions with Hamas could potentially proceed.”
The “without prejudging” clause there is new and important. As, too, is the impression he conveys that discussions with Hamas are a worthwhile thing to win.
Also notable, of course, in this context is the fact of the longstanding close relations between Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
Marc Lynch has reported that the head of the MB parliamentary bloc has said they will attend– and also that the MB declined to join the anti-Obama protest being organized by the Kefaya movement.
Many aspects of that are interesting. When I was in Cairo in February a couple of well-informed friends there noted how very restrained the MB’s reactions to the Mubarak government’s collaboration with Israel in besieging Gaza had been, and speculated that the MB may well be placing a subtle bet on hoping the ageing Egyptian despot’s son Gamal will succeed him– and that Gamal may give them more space for real political participation than any other possible successor.
Who knows? Anyway, it looks as though Obama is setting a very intelligent new tone.
Another important point in his NPR interview came when he talked about the importance of movements like Hamas making the transition from using violence to renouncing it.
Of course, governments like Israel can be expected to make that transition, too. Just like Britain eventually did, in Northern Ireland.
… I am still in Damascus. I’ll be blogging some reactions from various parties here to The Speech, before I leave Saturday morning. Stay tuned.
Next week, I’ll have a piece in the CSM on the fascinating experience Turkey has had of being governed by a party that is both moderately Islamist and committed to democracy. Turkey’s AKP is such a good role model for other Islamist movements.
By the way, can any reader confirm for me what time– Cairo time– The Speech is scheduled for? Thanks!
And I would be delighted to publish reactions to The Speech, especially from readers who are part of the intended Muslim-world prime audience.

Note to commenters

One of our commenters here, an Israeli-American who anonymously goes by the name of ‘JES’, has been seriously violating JWN’s guideline on discourse-hogging– and others of the blog’s posted guidelines— for quite some time now.
I have therefore decided to ban this person’s from the blog for a period of time.
It is quite possible that this person will find a way round the ban, and he may or may not start posting in a different name. I shall try to delete as many as possible of the comments that I have reason to believe are coming from him during the period the ban is in effect. (Which I have yet to decide. Maybe two weeks.)
I’ve pointed out to JES that if he wants to get his views heard in the blogosphere he can start his own blog. He has no need to be parasitic on our venture here at JWN.