Author: Helena

An informed view of Hamas policy

Today, I was able to have a fascinating short talk with Dr. Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian-British thinker and media mogul who was the author, most recently, of Hamas: A history from within.
One of my continuing research interests is the story of how and why Hamas made the decision to enter the elections for the PA legislature in 2006 after they had refused to participate in the rounds of elections held under the PA’s framework prior to that… Does this mean that Hamas supports the PA project? … If so, why did its views on the project change? … How deep is its current loyalty to the project?
So this morning I put some of those questions to Tamimi.
His reply was:

    It’s not that they support the PA project. But they realized they needed to deal with the status quo. They needed space to operate in.
    What allowed them to participate in the 2006 election was Sharon’s implementation of theunilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Until Sharon did that, the PA was completely a product of Oslo. But Sharon killed Oslo, and then the PA had an opportunity to become something a little different. The thinking of the Hamas people was, “We’ve liberated Gaza, and now we’re about to liberate the West Bank.”
    Also, in one sense, Hamas had no choice but to participate, because if they hadn’t, the PA would have stayed in the hands of those very corrupt people who were controlling it.

He said there had been long discussions inside Hamas before they reached the 2005 decision to run in the elections. “There always are long discussions! It means that Hamas does sometimes miss opportunities… ”
He said that Hamas political bureau head Khaled Meshaal, whom he has known since both were youngsters in Kuwait together, is a strong supporter of Hamas’s consensual style of decisionmaking: “He’s a very careful person, not a gambler.”
Tamimi was pretty strongly convinced that nothing would come out of the Fateh-Hamas reconciliation talks that are intermittently being conducted in Cairo. He said he thought the Egyptians were the main ones blocking agreement, describing the generally very polite contest of wills between Hamas and Egypt as “a game of finger-biting.” (Maybe, this is like a game of chicken?)
“The Egyptians want to force Hamas to compromise, but Hamas will never compromise,” he said.
He judged there were two main reasons for the Mubarak regime’s intransigence: firstly, their concern that bringing Hamas openly into the regional diplomatic/political game would strengthen the Egyptian Muslim Brothers; and second, because they see supporting Mahmoud Abbas as a project of great importance. This, despite (or because of?) Abbas’s currently extreme political weakness.
We talked a little about Mubarak’s boosting, and manipulation, since January of a new form of “Egypt first” (al-Misr Awalan) nationalism that is tinged with a strong streak of anti-Palestinianism.
Tamimi said that this sentiment, which he called “illusionary nationalism” had affected even some of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers to some degree.
I asked his view of– and expectations from– Obama.
He said he liked and admired him as a person:

    But he is not just a person, now. He’s the president, with all the compliactions that institution involves.
    If he pursues the Clinton way once again, once again it won’t work out. That would be, if he continued to always put Israel’s interests first and just throw a little something to the Palestinians, but still strictly within the specifications laid down by israel.
    Obama needs to recognize the strong shift in Palestinian society. Hamas now represents Palestinian society, not Fateh, and not the PLO.
    Hamas wants peace– but a peace based on a truce, not on recognition.

I asked him whether he did not see a point of possible convergence between Hamas’s longstanding project of entering into a “truce” (hudna) arrangement with Israel and the “two-state” outcome now being pursued by the US and most of the international community.
He argued that he saw a clear difference, that centered around the recognition of Israel that would have to be involved, for the Palestinians, if they agreed to the two-state project as it is currently being proposed.
So for him, the question of recognizing Israel— or rather, refusing to recognize Israel– is key.
He said,

    The world needs to think about what the demand for us to recognize Israel really means. For me as a Palestinian, if I say I recognize Israel, then I’m saying that what happened to my people in 1948 was legitimate, and this I will never say.
    We can proceed by having a de-facto relation between us. In that way, we could have a longterm peace, even without any recognition of Israel.
    Hamas says it would need a total withdrawal to the lines of 4th June 1967 for that truce to go into effect. Israel might say they would need security guarantees. We’re open to discussing that. But honestly, the best security guarantee they could have would be Hamas’s signature on a truce document, because once they have that it becomes a religious obligation for all Palestinians to respect the truce.

I observed that this did still sound a lot like a version of the two-state solution.
He replied,

    No, I don’t like to speak about a two-state solution, because that implies it’s the end of the story. I talk about a de-facto two-state situation, which might last 10 years, or 5 years, or 20 years. But it is still not the end of the story.

He said he thought Pres. Obama had introduced some policy changes on some issues, like Iran.

    But on Palestine, Obama has just still been promising the same things that George W. Bush promised.
    George Mitchell is a good person, too. But now he’s made how many trips to the region– ? And he still hasn’t met anyone from Hamas.
    He has to meet them! He has to sit and listen to the way they see things. Wasn’t that how he won his success in Northern Ireland– by reaching out and including the IRA and Sinn Fein?

Anyway, it was an interesting conversation… More later, I hope.

J. Cook on the Pope in Nazareth

Jonathan Cook, aka the Sage of Nazareth, is back from his vacation and doing some timely reportage on the background to the Pope’s imminent visit to Nazareth.
See this piece from yesterday’s National about the struggle Israel’s Christian Palestinians had to wage to persuade their government that Nazareth would be more appropriate than Haifa as a place to hold the big papal mass.
This piece, from today’s edition of the paper, gives some background to the Muslim-Christian tensions that are very evident in the city.
This pope seems like an unlikely bearer of any kind of peace message. His background in the Hitler Youth was bad enough. And then, he made that borderline Islamophobic speech in 2006… But I guess I believe in the power of everyone to act more compassionately and fairly over time.

Meshaal on the Palestinian state alongside Israel; Nunu on the tahdi’eh

Al-Hayat had an interesting article today (Arabic), combining reports of Hamas’s positions from their correspondents in both Damascus and Gaza… (HT: the spouse.)
From Damascus, the Hayat people report that Khaled Meshaal “sent an implicit political message to Pres. Obama” when he told a press conference held by the “Palestinian National Conference” in Damascus that,

    Hamas and most of the Palestinian forces accepted, through the 2006 document of national agreement [that would be, I think, the Prisoners’ Document] the principle of establishing a fully sovereign Palestinian state on all the land occupied in 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital, after the dismantling of all the settlements, and along with attainment of the Right of Return and [the state having] full sovereignty over the land and airspace and borders and crossing-points.
    He stressed that his movement “still rejects the conditions of the international Quartet because they are oppressive and they cannot lead to the attainment of Palestinian interests.”

The Hayat reporters judged that another important implied political message to Obama came from Taher al-Nunu, the spokesman for the still-besieged Haniyeh government, when he stressed the government’s readiness to abide by a renewed tahdi’eh with Israel.
Nunu’s statement came a day before Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak is due to meet with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. Mubarak’s intel chief Omar Suleiman has been the sole mediator in the “proximity talks” that have continued between Hamas and Israel since the end of the Gaza war over the two topics of strengthening the still-fragile and un-negotiated brace of ceasefires that went into operation January 18, and the prisoner exchange issue. Egypt is also the main mediator in the still-limping reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fateh.
Nunu went out of his way– on behalf of, I assume, Haniyeh and the whole Hamas leadership– to express support for Egypt’s role in all these peace efforts. Egypt will also, of course, be the place where Obama will make his big “speech to the Muslim world” early next month.
For my part, I’m hoping Obama will use his time in Egypt to nudge his hosts along to more speed and success in all the negotiations they have been sponsoring, which have thus far not resulted in any successes and have left the 1.5 million people of Gaza in terrible distress.
(Question: What will Obama say about Gaza when he is in Egypt? Kind of embarrassing if he gets that close to Gaza and doesn’t even mention it… Of course, it would be even better if he had the guts to go and visit it… Obama at the Rafah crossing: “Mr. President, this wall must come down!”)
Anyway, Nunu also said this:

    The [Haniyeh] government considers that ending the occupation and lifting the siege are the keys to bringing about stability and arriving at a just peace in the region that will return to our people their legitimate rights…
    Th Palestinian government appreciates the efforts the Egypt is making in more than one matter, especially regarding the issues of the [Palestinian] national dialogue and the tahdi’eh, and the efforts to bring about security and stability in the region.

On a related note, I’ve found a possible source for the mysterious Haaretz report I blogged about earlier today, which said this:

    The Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas will not accept a two-state solution as a means to end the conflict with Israel, the movement’s Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Meshal said Saturday.
    Meshal said that Hamas rejects the two-state solution but could still be part of a national unity government if a Palestinian state is established based on 1967 borders.

What I have found is this report on the close-to-Hamas PIC website. It’s datelined Damascus, and is their report of the same Meshaal press conference the Hayat team was reporting on (which was also attended by Ahmed Jibril.)
The PIC report says this:

    [Meshaal] denied accepting a two-state solution during an interview with the American press [most likely the recent NYT interview], adding that he said that Hamas accepted the establishment of a fully sovereign state on the 1967 occupied lands with Jerusalem as its capital after dismantling all settlements and endorsing the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

This is slightly (but still significantly) different from what Haaretz reported.
My understanding of Meshaal’s present position is that he accepts the Palestinian state on all the Palestinian land that was occupied by Israel in 1967. But he has not yet said whether he considers that that is the end of the Palestinian state’s territorial claims. That is the sense in which he has not yet accepted a two-state solution. At this point, though, I don’t think he has ruled it out.
Obviously, this needs to be further clarified.

Meshaal: the longer NYT text, and a question about Haaretz

So, later in the day on Tuesday, after I had complained about the NYT only running tiny snippets from Taghreed al-Khodary’s five-hour interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, the NYt did put some longer excerpts from the interview onto its website.
That’s excellent news. (I had looked on the website for some longer version of the interview, a couple of times during the day Tuesday, but never found them. Thanks to the friend who sent me this link.)
Here is the first topic he speaks to, which is very important:

    On the Hamas Charter and a Palestinian State:
    The most important thing is what Hamas is doing and the policies it is adopting today. The world must deal with what Hamas is practicing today. Hamas has accepted the national reconciliation document. It has accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders including East Jerusalem, dismantling settlements, and the right of return based on a long term truce. Hamas has represented a clear political program through a unity government. This is Hamas’s program regardless of the historic documents. Hamas has offered a vision. Therefore, it’s not logical for the international community to get stuck on sentences written 20 years ago. It’s not logical for the international community to judge Hamas based on these sentences and stay silent when Israel destroys and kills our people.

The rest of it is really worth reading, too.
Today, there is news (e.g. here) that the reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fateh are in a bad state.
But beyond that, Haaretz is running a story that starts thus:

    The Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas will not accept a two-state solution as a means to end the conflict with Israel, the movement’s Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Meshal said Saturday.
    Meshal said that Hamas rejects the two-state solution but could still be part of a national unity government if a Palestinian state is established based on 1967 borders.

They give no further details regarding the context or provenance of that “news”. They do not have a correspondent in Damascus (!), so they must have gotten it from somewhere– though they give no clue as to where, let alone giving due attribution to the source.
I did a quick search to see what news report it might be they were referring to. Can anyone help identify the source? Or is their lede there just based on a misunderstanding? Or is it a really mendacious piece of disinformation?
Haaretz is, generally, a pretty good source of information. But there are, certainly, people who work there who are strongly opposed to Hamas.

On Qatar and Sheikha Mozah

Last weekend I had my first visit to Qatar. I went to participate in a two-day conference there, that was co-organized by UNESCO and the office of Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned to mark World Press Freedom Day.
Sheikha Mozah is a most remarkable woman. She would be in any society– but she certainly stands out in the socially very conservative states on the Arab coast of the Gulf.
She’s the second of three wives of Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and she’s used that position to play a huge role in the life of her country and– increasingly– globally, too.
Her dad, Nasser Abdullah al-Missned, was reportedly quite a bit of an Arab nationalist. Definitely a modernizer– which in the context of Qatar’s deeply Wahhabi-influenced society is/was really something. (I’m not sure if he’s still alive?) I gather he– and she– had to spend quite a but of time outside Qatar when she was growing up.
Her husband, Sheikh Hamed, deposed his father in 1995 during what’s described as a “bloodless coup.” That was at the time when US military planners were looking for an alternative to Saudi Arabia to base their troops. Soon after the “coup”, Qatar started hosting one big US base; it now has two. A large proportion of the forward operations of US CENTCOM are run out of Al-Udeid base. I think that includes the rear-base “piloting” of many of the killer drones used in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But Sheikh Hamed and his wife have, if you like, “balanced” the support they’ve given to the US military by also supporting the fiercely independent Al-Jazeera news operation that has, imho, transformed the global information environment by breaking the monopoly the “west” once had on the gathering and transmittal of breaking news.
That is no small achievement. Other laudable contributions the present regime in Qatar has made to international life have included:

    1. Their pursuit of very constructive peacemaking initiatives in Lebanon, Darfur, and elsewhere.
    2. The support they have given– at the global level– to furthering the realization of such goals as press freedoms, freedom of expression, and democratization.
    3. The generous and often visionary aid they have given to distressed communities in Palestine and elsewhere.

However…. Well, all these things are laudable and very helpful at the global level. But I am still troubled by several aspects of the political/social climate within Qatar itself. There is, of course, the hosting of the big US military presence. But there is also a domestic climate of notable press and political un-freedom that’s in stark contrast to the liberal and modernizing profile Qatar presents– and with some good reason– internationally…
Also, as in all the Arab Gulf states, there is the near-total reliance of the nationals on always vulnerable term-contract migrant labor to do just about all the real jobs– apart from the decisionmaking jobs and the internal-security jobs– that get done in Qatari society.
That gives the place an unmistakeably apartheid-y feel. Even though all the migrant workers I encountered in my short time there were pleasant and very competent, a couple pf the migrant service-workers responded to my friendly enquiries with some complaints about the terms of their employment. There are scores of thousands of professional-level migrant workers there, too. (Interestingly, Iraqi expats seem largely to have displaced Egyptian expats in many of these positions over the past few years. Some people told me the loss of those opportunities for– and remittances from– Egyptian migrant workers is one reason for the Egyptian government’s current displeasure with Doha.)
I think I understand a good part of the challenge that Qatar and the other small states of the Gulf face. They want to develop their own countries as much and as rapidly as they can. They have the capital needed to do amazing kinds of development. But they don’t have the native manpower; so they import it.
At least, in Qatar, the regime (Sheikh plus Sheikha) seem deeply committed to developing their own human resource-base as rapidly and effectively as they can. They also– unlike most other states in the Gulf– seem committed to doing this while also working on developing a modern, specifically Arabic-cultured and pan-Arab scientific and information infrastructure.
Very interesting.
In pursuit of this latter goal, Sheikha Mozah went to Baghdad on Thursday, to discuss several initiatives she’s been working on, in conjunction with UNESCO, to try to rebuild Iraq’s once-proud educational system at all levels.
Look at her in the center of the picture there, being rushed into one of her meetings in cargo pants, a flak jacket and hard hat.
She is one gutsy and dedicated woman!
Back on January 14, she led a peaceful march in central Doha calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Palestine: The archipelago ‘map’, spaciocide, etc.

I imagine that by now most JWN readers have seen the thought-provoking nautical representation (shown below) by French cartographer Julien Bousac of the land mass that is (as of now) left to the Palestinians of the West Bank…
Bousac comments on that page that,

    To make things clear, areas ‘under water’ [in the map] strictly reflect C zones, plus the East Jerusalem area, i.e. areas that have officially remained under full Israeli control and occupation following the [Oslo] Agreements.

He also seems fully aware of the irony/paradox of using a “romantic” kind of imagery like this to represent a grim reality.
I think this is a great device. One shocking aspect is, of course, that it demonstrates that the whole area of occupied east Jerusalem is “under water”, i.e. unavailable for Palestinian land-use or development planning purposes.
However, readers should be aware that Bousac’s map still considerably under- over-represents the amount of West Bank land that is available to the Palestinians, since he marks the large areas of the southeastern West Bank that have been arbitrarily designated by Israel as “nature reserves” as being somehow “above water.”
You can find another representation of what is currently available to the Palestinians if you look at the small map in the bottom-left corner of this larger (PDF) map from UN-OCHA. Only the areas left white in that small map are now available to the Palestinians.
I note that designating land as a “nature reserve” is a trick the Israelis have often used to render it unavailable for Palestinian development. That sort of it puts it into a lock-box for them. Then, when the occupation authorities discover they have the budget or need to develop it for themselves, as settlements or whatever, they speedily “un-green” it– and presto, it is available for Israeli development. Many Palestinians have, as a result, become pretty cynical about Israel’s claims that it “cares for” the enviroment of the land that both peoples claim to love.
Sari Hanafi is a Palestinian sociologist who has been arguing that what the Israelis have been pursuing towards the Palestinians living in the area of Mandate Palestine constitutes a policy of “spaciocide”:

    the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal), in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. This systematic destruction of the Palestinian living space becomes possible by exercising the state of exception and deploying bio-politics to categorize Palestinians into different groups, with the aim of rendering them powerless…

Other examples of spaciocide abound around the world… including Saddam Hussein’s draining of the marshes.
Anyway, here, for those who haven’t seen it yet, is a small version of Bousac’s map.
palestina

My piece in The Nation on Hamas

… is in the May 25 edition of the magazine. It’s here— but sadly most of it is behind a subscribers-only paywall.
So I guess you’ll need to go buy the mag…
The piece draws heavily on the material I gathered when I was in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank earlier this year. I chart the resilience of Hamas and the continuing decay of Fateh and its non-Islamist allies– noting, among other things, that the aid the US has poured into supporting Fateh has had the effect of hastening the movement’s internal collapse.
I also wrote this:

    Given the current weakness of both Gaza and Ramallah, the center of gravity of the Palestinians’ national leadership has started to move out of the occupied territories: flowing to key centers among the more than 5 million Palestinians living in exile– and also to the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. This shift has big implications, since these are the two Palestinian constituencies whose needs were most notably ignored when Arafat signed the Oslo Accord. Oslo and the negotiations that flowed from it gave very short shrift to the longstanding Palestinian demand that refugees be allowed to return to the homes and properties their forebears fled from in the territory that became Israel in 1948. In addition, Oslo and the entire two-state solution concept are both based on an ethno-nationalist view of statehood that felt threatening to many Palestinian Israelis. In both groups, there is understandable enthusiasm for a unitary, binational state.
    People in Israel’s newly ascendant right have also been touting some alternatives to a two-state outcome. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has revived his former, never feasible idea of a purely “economic” peace with the Palestinians. He and other Israeli rightists also speak of trying to offload the problems of Gaza and the West Bank onto Egypt and Jordan, under what they dub the “regional” approach.
    Since the beginning of his term, President Obama has called for speedy progress toward a two-state solution. But thus far, his administration has done nothing to challenge any of the actions by which Israeli policies make this outcome increasingly impossible. The people of Israel and Palestine are thus perilously poised between very different versions of the future. In the luxurious cafes and shopping malls of Tel Aviv, it is easy to imagine that the present situation can be effortlessly sustained. But for the deeply hurting Palestinians, maintaining the status quo is not an option. Unless Obama moves rapidly to throw US power behind the so- far empty cadence of his rhetoric, Palestinians could soon face another destabilizing crisis.

I’m still on the road in London, which means I haven’t even seen this issue of the mag yet. Any hints from anyone where I might find a copy in London on Monday?

Obama and Israel’s nukes

My IPS news analysis piece yesterday was on the Obama administration’s intriguing injection of Israel’s nuclear weapons into the global and regional diplomacy. It’s here (and here.)
The piece attempts to put Rose Gottemoeller’s fascinating statement, made to an NPT review gathering in New York on Tuesday, into the broader context of Obama’s return to stronger support for the NPT– and the ‘non-proliferation’ strategy it embodies. This, after eight (or 16?) years of US support for the much more unilateral approach of ‘counter-proliferation’.
In the article I failed to spell out, as I should have done, that Iran is a member of the NPT.
Gottemoeller said,

    “Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea … remains a fundamental objective of the United States.”

I have been interested to note that some people have reacted to the statement by saying it was “no big deal.” This includes Joshua Pollack, writing Wednesday on the normally quite sensible Arms Control Wonk blog.
Pollack was reacting to this excellent piece of reporting in the Washington Times.
He notably made zero mention of this equally excellent piece of opinion writing, in the WT the same day, which was by Avner Cohen, who is the world’s best-informed expert on the facts about, and impact of, Israel’s nuclear arsenal. (Oh, he also happens to be Israeli.)
Cohen argued that the US’s 40-year-old policy of, essentially conniving in Israel’s protection of its nukes through the use of a robustly maintained policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” should be changed.
He writes there,

    Israel’s nuclear opacity is incompatible with today’s norms of nuclear transparency.
    Instead of reaffirming those ancient Nixon-Meir [don’t ask, don’t tell] understandings, Israel’s interest favors forming with Mr. Obama a set of new and more open nuclear understandings that would reflect today’s political reality and nuclear norms. Those understandings should follow the idea of the Indian nuclear deal with the United States. That is, those understandings should openly recognize Israel’s status as a “responsible democracy with advanced nuclear technology.”
    Only such recognition would allow Israel to be engaged in meaningful arms-control and nonproliferation negotiations. The time has come to end the hypocrisy of not recognizing Israel’s nuclear status for what it is.

He also argued that the new policy could help make a negotiated approach to the Iranian nuclear question much more feasible– something he strongly supports.
Cohen’s recent piece in the Forward is also worth reading.
But the reason I found J. Pollack’s “no-big-deal” response to Gottemoeller’s statement so interesting is that this is exactly the tactic that Israeli hawks and their friends frequently use to “bury” news that they find disquieting. (This goes right back to Ze’ev Schiff’s early responses to Mordechai Vanunu’s revelations, back in 1986.)
Pollack’s argumentation is certainly all over the place. He quotes, with glowing approval, some comments that George Perkovich reportedly made (PDF) at a recent conference on nonproliferation.
Perko had said:

    I also think it’s not constructive to kind of like call out and talk about Israel as having nuclear weapons and that, you know, people ought to come clean and so on…

He also said,

    How would we create a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East? And you invite all of the states in the region, and you have the little placards there for Iran, for Saudi Arabia, so on and so forth – and Israel. And I guarantee you, Israel will show up and other seats will be empty…

This is dangerous and misleading nonsense. Even in present circumstances, if you convened a conference dedicated to the creation of a zone free of all WMDs in the Middle East, you would certainly get Egypt and Jordan prepared to turn up and commit themselves to the goal alongside Israel.
Yes, it’s true that Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t currently have diplomatic relations with Israel; but there are plenty of diplomatic contexts in which their representatives do sit down alongside those of Israel to discuss disarmament-related issues, and it’s perfectly possible to imagine a way the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament or some other UN-linked body could convene a gathering at which all the Muslim Middle East states would agree to sit down with Israel to discuss actions toward this important goal.
I suspect it would be Israel that would not sit down there, if it is made plain in advance that everyone’s nuclear weapons capabilities will certainly be on the agenda.
Why does Perkovich make such a silly and mendacious claim?
… Anyway, while J. Pollack was trying to argue that Gottemoeller’s statement was no big deal, Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn and Barak Ravid were writing that the content of the statement– and the fact it had not been “coordinated with Israeli officials” in advance– was being understood by people in Israel’s political elite as signaling a big change from the lovey-dovey-ness Israeli governments have enjoyed with the White House under George W. Bush.
Good.

White House (still) guiding Middle East policy

After George Mitchell’s appointment as Israeli-Arab peace envoy was announced January 22, I noted (also here) that the way it had happened indicated he would be reporting to both the president and the secretary of state.
When Mitchell returned from his first “listening visit” to the region, he made his report-back primarily to the prez.
Early this morning, Laura Rozen had a blog post in which she demonstrated the degree to which the Obama White House is continuing to keep its hands firmly on the conduct of Israeli-Arab diplomacy.
She writes this, about the meeting Israeli prez Shimon Peres had at the White House yesterday:

    Clinton was not at the meeting, though as noted earlier she met with Peres separately at his hotel.
    “The White House won’t let her on TV on the Sunday morning talk shows,” a plugged-in Washington Middle East hand observed. “Who is talking about foreign policy on those shows? Axelrod. Who is showing up at the meeting with Obama-Peres? Axelrod. They are controlling the message.” [Btw, this anonymous source is most likely the same Steve Cohen who is liberally quoted by name elsewhere in the post, but here speaking off the record.]
    “They’ve never even had her even on Charlie Rose,” he added. “You have not really seen the secretary of state in the U.S. media; you’ve seen her in the international media. Who is their main messenger on foreign policy?”
    (An aide confirmed Clinton hadn’t been on the Sunday talk shows since the campaign.)
    The plugged in Washington Middle East observer noted that Clinton was not sent by the administration to address the AIPAC conference, either. Instead, Vice President Joseph Biden was dispatched, where he called for Israel to stop its settlement expansion.
    “Biden is the person who is perceived as a very experienced foreign-policy hand who has a very solid relationship with Israel, but that relationship is solidly based on American strategic analysis,” Cohen said. “And not affected so much by the Clinton experience of being a [former] New York senator.”

Higher up in her post, Rozen had zeroed in on the fact that, though Clinton was not at the White House meeting, Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and political adviser, David Axelrod, were.
She writes this– again, liberally quoting Steve Cohen, largely as a kind of inside-the-shtetl story:

    Emanuel and Axelrod are two high-level Jewish members of Obama’s administration; they have been increasingly enlisted in recent weeks to build support within the Jewish-American community for a two-state solution in the face of resistance from the new Netanyahu government…

I don’t see it exactly the same way. Yes, there is clearly an inside-the-shtetl aspect to it. But the importance of these two men– Emanuel and Axelrod– is far greater than just their Jewish credentials. They are the president’s two leading political advisers and operatives. If he is gearing up for a Bush(1)/Baker style of confrontation with a Likud government in Israel, he will need to be planning a strategy that covers all the domestic political bases, not just the Jewish one. (And at this point, probably a larger proportion of evangelical Christians would be prepared to fight hard for this government of Israel than the proportion of Jewish Americans who would be so inclined.)
So from this perspective, it is probably a good thing that these two very savvy (and perhaps only coincidentally Jewish) political operatives were in the room. Especially at the exact same time that AIPAC has been flooding the offices of members of congress with citizen-lobbyists arguing that the US must let Israel completely dictate the pace of any moves towards peace.
Because of the extreme permeability of the US political system– especially at the level of members of the House of Representatives– to the influence of pro-Israelis (whether Jewish or not), any US policy that affects Israel is never simply a matter of “foreign” policy. For the president to succeed, he has to be able to use his own immense powers of persuasion not just on the foreign leaders and publics concerned– but also on his own public and congress.
Over the next couple of weeks, Obama will be receiving Israel’s Netanyahu, Egypt’s Mubarak, and Ramallastan’s Abbas in the White House. Sometime soon after that, he is expected to come out with some more definitive policy initiatives. That is when we need to see Obama using his “bully pulpit” of presidential influence– and using it domestically, as well as internationally.