Author: Helena

US MSM and Latin America

Our South African friend Dominic has sent me links to two important articles about the MSM’s atrociously poor– both negligent and biased– handling of some of the important stories out of Latin America.
The first was this May 1 piece by Mark Weisbrot, about the recent re-election of Ecuador’s left-leaning President Rafael Correa.
The second is this piece by Dan Beeton about the failure of the MSM to give anything like adequate coverage to the threats that Bolivia’s indigenous-culture Pres. Evo Morales faces from noticeably racist (settlerist) rightwingers in some parts of the country.
I wish I had time to write more. But thanks, Dominic, for sending me these pieces.

NYT interviews Meshaal

Today’s NYT carries an important (though unfortunately severely truncated) account of an interview that Taghreed al-Khodary had with Khaled Meshaal in Damascus recently.
Meshaal spelled out more clearly than ever before that he does not consider the “Charter” promulgated by Hamas when it was founded in 1987 to be a currently operational document. He also specified the length of the term– ten years– that he judged a “long-term” hudna, or truce, with Israel should have.
When I interviewed Meshaal in January 2008 I asked him about the length of the hudna he envisaged. He said “We do not talk about the number of years. Sheikh Ahmad Yassin spoke about ten years.”
This is an important question, because if there is a point of convergence between Hamas’s ‘hudna” proposal and the two-state outcome being promoted (in two slightly different forms) by the US and the Arab League, this would hinge on the term of the hudna being either extremely lengthy, or unspecified.
For Meshaal now to endorse Yassin’s ten-year-term proposal is a small retreat from the “constructive ambiguity” on this issue that he expressed in January 2008.
Still, laying out a ten-year term for it could well be an opening position for Hamas that, in negotiations, they might be prepared to extend.
Anyway, the other conditions that he specified for a hudna will probably be even harder for Hamas and its future negotiating partners to reach agreement on than the hudna’s term.
Worth noting from Khodary’s account of the interview: her judgment that he “gave off an air of serene self-confidence. Also, this quote that she used:

    “I promise the American administration and the international community that we will be part of the solution, period.”

A little more on the NYT and the way the piece was presented, below.
Here is the points of substance in what he told her:
1. On the Hamas Charter:

    [H]e urged outsiders to ignore the Hamas charter, which calls for the obliteration of Israel through jihad and cites as fact the infamous anti-Semitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Mr. Meshal did not offer to revoke the charter, but said it was 20 years old, adding, “We are shaped by our experiences.”

2. On the Obama administration:

    Regarding President Obama, Mr. Meshal said, “His language is different and positive,” but he expressed unhappiness about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, saying hers “is a language that reflects the old administration policies.”

3. On the two-state solution:

    “We are with a state on the 1967 borders, based on a long-term truce. This includes East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.” Asked what “long-term” meant, he said 10 years.

4. On recognition of Israel, as demanded of Hamas by the US and the Quartet and requested of it by some pro-US Arab leaders:

    He repeated that he would not recognize Israel, saying to fellow Arab leaders, “There is only one enemy in the region, and that is Israel.”
    … Mr. Meshal said the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Mr. Abbas had granted such recognition, but to no avail. “Did that recognition lead to an end of the occupation? It’s just a pretext by the United States and Israel to escape dealing with the real issue and to throw the ball into the Arab and Palestinian court,” he said.

5. On the firing of rockets against Israel from Gaza, as undertaken by Hamas and other Palestinian groups– (the article notes that in April only six rockets and mortar rounds were fired at Israel, many fewer than over the previous three months)–

    Mr. Meshal made an effort to show that Hamas was in control of its militants as well as those of other groups, saying: “Not firing the rockets currently is part of an evaluation from the movement which serves the Palestinians’ interest. After all, the firing is a method, not a goal. Resistance is a legitimate right, but practicing such a right comes under an evaluation by the movement’s leaders.”
    He said his group was eager for a cease-fire with Israel and for a deal that would return an Israeli soldier it is holding captive, Cpl. Gilad Shalit, in exchange for many Palestinian prisoners.

6. On Hamas’s relationship with Iran:

    “Iran’s support to us is not conditioned. No one controls or affects our policies.”

7. On whether Hamas wants to bring strict Muslim law to Gaza and the West Bank:

    [H]e said no. “The priority is ending the occupation and achieving the national project,” Mr. Meshal said. “As for the nature of the state, it’s to be determined by the people. It will never be imposed upon them.”

Meshaal was recently elected to his fourth four-year term term as head of the Hamas political bureau.
Over the past 13 years Israel has undertaken repeated, often very brutal, attempts to decapitate Hamas, primarily by undertaking large numbers of assassinations. In 2004 Israel succeeded in killing the organization’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and then in short order after that the man named to succeed him in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi. Scores of other top Hamas leaders have been assassinated by Israel over the years, including during the recent war in Gaza; and other attempts high-level assassinations have been atempted, but failed. A 1997 attempt by Mossad to posion Meshaal himself was foiled by his security guards in Amman, Jordan.
But Hamas has always laid a lot of stress on training and supporting the emergence of new generations of leaders. In this way, despite all Israel’s decapitation efforts, the organization has always generated new leaders. It has also gained ans maintained an impressive degree of internal organizational integrity and discipline.
The US-favored Fateh is, by contrast, riven with internal splits and a deeply embedded culture of corruption and clientilism. That culture has only further been fueled by the huge amounts of money the US has poured into it in recent years. As a result of its internal weaknesses, jealousies, and resentments, Fateh has been unable to decide how or where to hold a meeting of its leading body, the General Conference, since 1989; and its internal organization has, in effect, broken down.
It is admirable that Meshaal agreed to give this interview to the NYT. It is probably true, as the article says, that he has not given an interview to a US news organization in the past year. But the NYT is beng worryingly self-referential if they don’t recognize the importance of the interviews he has given to media based in other countries, including over recent months, including the very substantial ones given in March to the Australian Paul McGeough, and to a group of Italian correspondents– as well, of course, as the numerous interviews he has given to Arabic and other non-western media.
By not recognizing the existence, let alone the importance, of these other interviews, they are quite unable to put his words into any kind of context and note, “This is new; this is slightly different; this shows a bit more flexibility; this shows less; etc.” It makes their whole article much less valuable than it should have been.
Their handling of the interview is troubling in other ways, too.
Khodary writes, with a Damascus deadline, that he gave her “a five-hour interview… spread over two days” But they only publish a very few short extracts from the interview. What I have reproduced above is just about all they published.
So what about the rest of what was said in the interview? What about the nuance and context one could gain from that?
(Also, a question of equity: If they’d gotten an exclusive interview with, say, Netanyahu, would they have been as stingy with the word-length as they have been here? I think not!)
Memo to the NYT: Please publish the whole interview for us, as soon as you can. This is an important document.
I wonder if, before sharing the whole interview with their readers, they may have shared it with people in the US or other governments? I certainly hope not. But we all need to see it.
Another point. Why on earth do they need to put Ethan Bronner onto the byline, in addition to Khodary? At the bottom of the page, it says, “Taghreed El-Khodary reported from Damascus, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.” So he wasn’t even in Damascus with her! (Making his inclusion in the main, Damascus-datelined byline quite mendacious.)
The only possible factual input Bronner had into the article is in this sentence: “In April, only six rockets and mortar rounds were fired at Israel from Gaza, which is run by Hamas, a marked change from the previous three months, when dozens were shot, according to the Israeli military.” That by no means justifies his inclusion into the byline. Besides, it is information that I am sure Khodary could just as easily have gotten from the Israeli military herself. She didn’t need Bronner to get it for her.
There is a nasty whiff of racism in the way the piece has been presented: it’s as though the NYT editors judge that something is a little suspect if it comes “only” under the byline of someone with an Arabic-sounding name, and without the endorsement of some big white bwana.
I have definitely seen this with the reporting they do from Baghdad, too– just about all of which, in some stories, is very evidently based on reporting done by their Iraqi reporters, but which very frequently also has the western bwana’s name on the byline, too.
Still, it is better that the NYT has this interview, rather than not having it.
But give us the whole text! Please!

Discussing Hamas with Allister Sparks

I had the very good fortune to spend a couple of hours today chatting with Allister Sparks, the legendary South African journalist who was editor of the gutsy Jo’burg paper the Rand Daily Mail for four crucial years 1977-81 when it was a leader in uncovering many of the sins of apartheid. What I hadn’t realized before talking to him was the degree to which, in recent years, he has turned his considerable energies and wisdom to trying to understand– and in in his own way to start to de-escalate– the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
(By the way, we’re both in Doha. We’ve been at the World Press Freedom Day event here.)
In particular, he told me a bit about the personal fact-finding trip he made in September 2006 to Damascus, to talk with the Hamas leaders there. After undertaking that trip, he went to Israel and the occupied territories, traveling around quite widely and talking to lots of people there, too.
I’ve looked for an online version of things Sparks wrote at the time about the trip, but have so far been able to find only the account that appears in the bottom half of this January 2007 article.
Sparks was quite forthright in telling me thought the situation in the occupied territories is “like apartheid– or worse.”
In the piece I linked to he wrote,

    When I ceased to be Editor of the Rand Daily Mail and other papers and became a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post el al, I decided to visit the ANC in exile and check out those preconceived impressions. As I think you know, it was an eye-opening experience for me to discover how sophisticated and pragmatic they were. It was an experience that changed my entire outlook on what should happen in my own country.
    Recalling that, I decided to do the same with Hamas. So last September, on my own account and for my own personal interest, I flew to Damascus and spent two days at Hamas headquarters talking to their exiled leaders. Again it was an eye-opening experience to hear their side of the story and
    discover the degree to which they, too, are sophisticated, pragmatic people who I believe are the only ones capable of negotiating a peace agreement that could stick – since, like the ANC, they are the only ones whose control extends to the people with the guns.
    I came away with five hours of tape recorded conversation with these key leaders whom the authorities of both Israel and the US refuse to speak to – because they are “terrorists.” I don’t know of any other Western journalist who has done this. Why? Why haven’t these men and women who have preached to me over so many years about the importance of balanced reporting and getting “the other side of the story” done what I, with no funding or backing of any big organization, did?

Well, Allister, I have done it– also, like you, with no funding or backing from any big organization.
Anyway, I wanted to blog quickly here about a couple of the things he told me that struck a particular chord.
He said that when he was in Damascus, he had several long conversations with Mousa Abu Marzook, often described as Hamas’s deputy leader. (Khaled Meshaal was busy in meetings, but Sparks had one or more conversations with him by phone while he was there.)
He said that in those talks, he pitched to Abu Marzook the idea that if Hamas was successful in getting a hudna with (and therefore a meaningful degree of independence from) Israel, then they would most likely need to have numerous joint committees to coordinate various aspects of life… and that over time the work of those committees might become increasingly important, and the relations between Israel and Palestine would evolve into something like the EU, and later on into a single confederated body, something like Switzerland…
He said Abu Marzook expressed considerable interest in that idea. Later, when Sparks was in Israel, he pitched it to our mutual friend Yossi Alpher, who’s a ‘peacenik’ of the Left-Zionist variety, who had been born in the US and migrated to Israel as a young adult.
Sparks said that Alpher looked at him, absolutely aghast and finally stuttered, “But then we wouldn’t have Jewish state! It would be like living in a diaspora again– and this time, in such a dangerous place!”
Sparks remembered the word “diaspora” in there, very clearly. It is, obviously, a very strange word to use, since Yossi would still have been living in exactly the same place he’s living now.
Also, if the Israeli-Palestinian would have been solved for some time by that point, why would he think it would still be “dangerous”?
Sparks said he started to try to tell Alpher that he understood, perhaps, some of his consternation because he had watched the intense fear with which the Afrikaaners in his own country used, back in the bad old days, to view the prospect that their own political control over all of South Africa might one day have to be ended or diluted.
“I would have told him that the situation of the Afrikaaners in South Africa now is far better than it was in the days of apartheid. They are doing so well there these days! But I couldn’t tell him because he was still just too flabbergasted by the audacity of what I had proposed. I must say i was surprised by the vehemence of his reaction.”
Sparks then proceeded to tell me a number of things about the Afrikaaners and their culture that I hadn’t known before. He said that most of the Afrikaans-speaking ‘Whites’ had stayed in South Africa after the transition to democracy. (The country’s English-speaking “Whites”, by contrast, had many other options elsewhere– in Britain, Canada, Australia, the US, or New Zealand. So a greater proportion of them than of the Afrikaaners left once they’d lost their cushy, uber-privileged spot inside the system.)
He added,

    The Afrikaaners had no other place to go. South Africa was the only place they had to call ‘home.’ And since 1994, there has been a real flowering of Afrikaans-language culture in the country. Lots of poets and writers from their community who had started to write in English have been returning to Afrikaans. Did you know that the fourth largest media conglomerate in the whole world is one that started out as a small, regime-backed Afrikaans-language newspaper?

This is, by the way, the company that owns “News24” in South Africa… Allister said it also now owns a good chunk of People’s daily in China, and of Chinese Central TV. Who knew?
Oh, and on why the present situation in Palestine is worse than apartheid, he made these points:

    1. The land area of the Palestinian “archipelago” is so much more fragmented, and so much smaller in toto, than that of any of the Bantustans;
    2. “There was never a bloody great Wall around any of these Bantustans, let alone inside them, cutting them into even smaller fragments.”
    3. “The apartheid regime probably really did want the Bantustans to succeed. They invested much more in them than most people realize… But of course, even with all that investment, the project could never have succeeded.”

We also talked a little bit about Sparks’s former colleague (employee?) Benji Pogrund, another left Zionist who’s noticeably less of a peacenik than Alpher. I am interested in the fact that both Alper and Pogrund are people who made a conscious decision to immigrate to Israel when they were already adults. (In Pogrund’s case, already a very mature adult indeed.) For both of them, living as they previously did, in pretty darn secure places with good continuing prospects, migrating to Israel represented a conscious decision to participate in the Zionist project… So for them, perhaps, the concept of “Israel as a Jewish state” is something they’ve invested a lot in and believe in quite defiantly… Whereas most, or perhaps all, of the Jewish-Israeli supporters of a one-state (South African style) solution that I know are people who grew up in Israel…
Anyway, one big thought I had was that it would be excellent to bring Allister to the US to do some speaking gigs about the Palestine situation. He hasn’t been there since February 2006, when he did this interview with Amy Goodman. (At the very end there, he expresses some some support for the one-state idea.)
And since then, he’s been to Damascus, gained a lot more information, insight, and wisdom into the Palestine situation.
If not a live interview, why not a good, well-organized video-conference? He really is someone who can add some deep experience and valuable perspective to this whole discussion.
Do it soon, somebody!

New reports on press and other freedoms

I meant to mention this AFP report in my last post, but I’m tired so the brain is working a little groggily at this point.
It says this:

    Press freedom declined around the world last year, deteriorating for the first time in every region, according to a study released by Freedom House.
    The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), meanwhile, unveiled its list of “10 worst countries to be a blogger,” naming Myanmar, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Tunisia, China, Turkmenistan and Egypt to its “dishonor roll.”
    Out of the 195 countries and territories covered in the Freedom House study, 70, or 36 percent, were rated “free,” 61 (31 percent), were rated “partly free” and 64 (33 percent) were rated “not free.”
    Freedom House, which is funded by the US government and private groups and has been conducting an annual study of press freedom since 1980, said that 72 countries were rated free the previous year.

The Freedom House report is particularly interesting on Israel and the OPTs:

    It said Israel, Italy and Hong Kong slipped from free to partly free status in 2008.
    Among the worst-rated states were Belarus, China, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Iran, Laos, Libya, Myanmar, North Korea, the Palestinian territories, Rwanda and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe.

So much for the hopes of all those Palestinians who had hoped, back in the day, that Oslo would lead to the “liberation” of at least a part of Palestine.

Some notes from UNESCO klatch, Doha

I got into the hotel at 1:30 a.m. last night, grabbed five hours sleep, wrote my presentation for the conference I’m at, which is jointly hosted by UNESCO and the Doha Center for Media Freedom, then have been in the conference all day. Haven’t seen much of Doha except driving through town late last night and a glimpse into the Gulf from my hotel room this morning.
We’ve had some excellent presentations, including most notably from veteran South African journo Allister Sparks. He described the current state of political discourse inside his country as “robust and passionate”, and noted that the turnout in the country’s recent election was 77.3%.
He spoke about South Africa’s deep and multi-layered multiculturalism “with eleven official languages and about the same number of religions”, and its legacies of so much violence and pain and wounding as a result of centuries of colonialism and decades of apartheid. He said he is opposed to “political correctness”, and strongly supports frankness; he called for “robust journalistic independence.”
He identified a particular problem with “cultural conformity”, in which journos come to think like and share the worldview of a small circle of contacts, often people with power, access to whom they guard jealously. The prime examples he gave of this came from the US: the behavior of the MSM press in the US in “parrotting” th administration’s accusations about WMDs… Also, Brian Ross’s uncritical use of the original, waterboardng-excusing interview with John Kiriakou; the US MSM’s pussyfooting around the semantics of calling the Israeli Wall a “separation barrier”; and its whole treatment of Hamas.
“So there’s a total communications breakdown on the issue of greatest concern to peace in the region.”
Guess he doesn’t read my stuff. Well, I’m not publishing much in the MSM any more…
Qatar is such a strange place. (Okay, what I’ve seen of it.) They have this Doha Center for Media Freedom that’s doing some very constructive and gutsy things around the world– but the press here is almost completely unfree. Just about all the work here, as in the other princedoms up and down this shore of the Gulf, is done by imported contract labor, which gives the whole place an uncomfortable, apartheid-y feel.
I see that Steve Clemons traveled here today– he’s going to another conference here, organized by Steve Spiegel of UCLA.
(Steve C. had a short post on his blog about Qatar a few minutes ago, but it’s just been taken down. Interesting…. It’s still on my RSS reader, but I won’t publish it if he doesn’t want to. Yes, there is a laudable desire not to say anything critical about one’s hosts. But where, I wonder, does that cross the line into engaging in “cultural conformity” with hosts who are engaging in some practices of, I think, justifiable concern?)
My main fascination with the Qataris is not because they have scads of money. It’s not because they manage the amazing trick of longterm hosting of both Al-Jazeera and important nodes and elements of the US military’s presence in the Gulf. It’s not because they have bought and installed little boutique versions of several big-name US universities… No, it’s because they’ve been doing some very imaginative and constructive things diplomatically to reduce tensions in the Middle East. Including, most laudably, brokering Lebanon’s Doha Agreement of last May.
In addition, they have been patiently trying to help Hamas break out of the Egyptian-imposed attempts to keep it isolated.
Also, I have to say that Al-Jazeera’s smashing of the near-total domination the “west” used to exercise over the global information/discourse environment has been an amazing achievement. AJE’s managing director, Waddah Khanfar, spoke this afternoon about their media ethics, approach to newsgathering, and stress on empowering the best field reporters they can find. I thought it was a great presentation, and goes a long way to explaining AJE’s success.
… I will have to write up my notes for the presentation I gave at a later date. I also want to write up some notes from the good discussion I had with Fleming Rose, the Danish editor who published the “Prophet” cartoons. I think neither of us persuaded the other to change her/his mind, but it was a good conversation, anyway.

Hariri court orders generals’ release; case in disarray

A judge in the Hague-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon today ordered the release of the four senior members of Lebanon’s internal security services who were arrested shortly after the February 2005 assassination of Rafiq Hariri and have been held in prison since then.
Bloomberg’s Massoud Derhally reports:

    Judge Daniel Fransen of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon said the four generals held in Lebanon since 2005 are to be freed because there isn’t sufficient evidence to continue their detention, given that some witnesses have modified or retracted their statements. Proceedings were aired live from The Hague by Arab and Lebanese broadcasters and on the Internet.
    There were “inconsistencies in the statements of key witnesses” and a “lack of corroborative evidence to support these statements,” Fransen said.
    Former Canadian Deputy Attorney General Daniel Bellemare, who took over the investigation last year and became the court’s chief prosecutor on March 1, said he wouldn’t appeal the ruling.
    The judge ordered the immediate release of Mustafa Hamdan, former head of the Presidential Guard; Jameel al-Sayyed, the former general security chief; Ali al-Hajj, the former internal security head; and Raymond Azar, the former army intelligence director.

The Special Tribunal is a new kind of a mixed, national-international court that was established specifically to deal with the Hariri case. When the leaders of Lebanon’s US-backed ‘March 14’ movement worked for its establishment, they hoped that it would add the weight of the international community to the campaign they were trying to wage against Syria’s influence inside Lebanon, with which the four arrested generals were associated.
However, once the cool, fact-based analysis of Bellemare and Fransen were brought to bear on the case, the evidence against the four generals was judged too thin to justify their continued incarceration.
Hariri’s son Saad, one of the leaders of M-14, said he accepts and respects the STL’s decision.
Derhally quotes LAU prof and Hizbullah expert Amal Saad-Ghorayeb as saying,

    “This verdict underlines how politicized the investigation was… It also discredits the Lebanese judiciary and the politicians who accused these generals.”
    The ruling has “far-reaching political implications,” she said. “It may weaken the pro-Western coalition in the upcoming elections and strengthen Hezbollah and its allies.”

Hizbullah’s Al-Manar website reported (in somewhat tortured English), that:

    The decision was… immediately hailed by the national opposition that announced the day “a day of joy for the Lebanese,” regretting that such decision be made by the international justice not the Lebanese one.
    In this context, Hezbollah issued a statement in which it hailed the international tribunal’s decision to release the officers after a long arbitrary decision imposed unfairly by the March 14 authority without any charges. Hezbollah recalled that the detention of the four officers brushed aside all laws and legal procedures and caused a status of attenuation and politicization of one of the most important authorities responsible for the maintenance of life and law in the country which is the judicial authority.

The site also listed a number of Lebanese politicians who hailed the decision, including former president Emile Lahoud, former PM Selim al-Hoss, Vice President of the Higher Shiite Council Sheikh Abdul Amir Qabalan , etc.

Obama opens timid discussion with Congress on Hamas

The Obama administration has launched a tiny first discussion with Congress over the issue of dealing with Hamas. Administration officials did this, according to this piece in Monday’s LA Times by Paul Richter,by seeking a change in existing legislation that forbids the US from giving aid to any PA government that contains Hamas members.
Richter writes:

    U.S. officials insist that the new proposal doesn’t amount to recognizing or aiding Hamas. Under law, any U.S. aid would require that the Palestinian government meet three long-standing criteria: recognizing Israel, renouncing violence and agreeing to follow past Israeli-Palestinian agreements.
    Hamas as an organization doesn’t meet those criteria. However, if the rival Palestinian factions manage to reach a power-sharing deal, the Obama administration wants to be able to provide aid as long as the Hamas-backed members of the government — if not Hamas itself — meet the three criteria.

This tracks, by the way, with other information I have received, that the administration is still sticking exactly to the “three conditions” defined by the US and its allies/satraps in the so-called “Quartet”, immediately after Hamas won the PA elections in 2006.
Richter quotes Nathan Brown, a prof at George Washington University, as describing the administration’s request as “gutsy.” I don’t think it’s gutsy. Gutsy would be to come out and say the US respects the results of the 2006 election and intends to explore all possible ways of working with the duly elected Palestinian government– just as it works with the duly elected government in Israel that contains some extremely rightwing figures and is headed by people who are much more opposed to a two-state solution than is Hamas.
I do think the administration’s move is a tiny and realistic move in the right direction.
Realistic, because without making some move like this the US could pretty rapidly find it has dealt itself out of having any real influence at all in the Palestinian political sphere.
As it is, the portion of US aid that goes into the PA’s budget is already, I think, much smaller than the EU’s aid. (And I see that Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi has been in Ramallastan and Israel recently.)
Plus, as I have noted elsewhere, the net effect of all of the US-mobilized aid that’s been poured into Ramallastan in recent years has been to further feed the culture of clientilism and corruption that has become rampant in the Fateh-controlled (Ramallah) wing of the PA, and thus to hasten the internal disintegration of Fateh and its secular allies.
With all that US-mobilized money that has been poured into Ramallah since 2006, Hamas’s popularity in the West Bank has only been rising, and now easily tops that of Fateh!
(Bottom line: It’s not the aid itself that wins influence. Aid when allied to correct policies would have a much better chance of doing so.)
…Anyway, inside Washington, the administration’s move sparked exactly the kind of knee-jerk response you could expect from some heavily AIPAC-influenced members of congress.
Richter reports,

    Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) said the proposal sounded “completely unworkable,” even if the individual Hamas-backed officials agreed to abide by U.S. conditions.
    “You couldn’t have the leadership of a terrorist organization pick the ministers in the government, with the power to appoint and withdraw them, and answering to them,” he said.

What’s notable to me, though, is the absence of any knee-jerk condemnation, up to this point, coming from anyone with any real clout in congress. (Schiff is the congressman from one of the LA Times’ home constituencies, and was quoted for that reason rather than because he has any huge clout in congress.)
Officials in Israel were described in this Haaretz piece as “surprised” by the Obama administration’s move– and also, of course, opposed to it.
The pro-Hamas PIC website somewhat over-interpreted the move.
Regarding the possibility of progress in the long-drawn-out intra-Palestinian reconciliation process, the PIC website has this fairly detailed report, published under the title “Hamas: The fourth dialog round made slight progress and will resume next month.”
It included this:

    [Hamas official] Dr. Ismail Radwan said that the current round of reconciliation talks in Cairo ended with a joint meeting between delegations of Hamas and Fatah in the presence of Egyptian intelligence director Omar Suleiman and it was agreed upon to resume the talks on May 16.
    Dr. Radwan underlined that the two parties agreed on the importance of the one package solution either with respect to the referential authority, security, the government or elections.
    The Hamas official also pointed out that the two parties agreed on the necessity of the PLC’s work, and the respect of the majority within the council and the mechanism of proxies it approved.
    In the same context, Palestinian informed sources told the PIC on Tuesday that during a closed meeting attended by Suleiman, the delegations of Hamas and Fatah agreed on the formation of an interim referential national authority to oversee the rebuilding of the PLO composed of factions, independents and the executive committee.
    … In a joint statement issued Tuesday during their meeting, the alliance of Palestinian forces, which are composed of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Al-Sa’ika, the popular front-general command, the popular struggle, the Palestinian liberation front, Fatah-Intifada and the communist party, rejected all calls for the recognition of the Israeli occupation and the international quartet’s terms, or the commitment to the agreements signed with Israel.

Anyway, let’s see what happens between now and May 16.

Netanyahu and the ‘Palestinian state’ card

Israel’s former failed prime minister and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, is now saying that PM Netanyahu

    will present the U.S. administration a diplomatic plan in line with the principle of “two states for two nations” during his upcoming visit to Washington.

Until now, Netanyahu has refused to commit himself to agreeing with the Obama administration that statehood for the Palestinians is the way forward for peace. So now, Barak is indicating Netanyahu may be a bit “flexible” on the statehood issue. (Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, however, remains strongly opposed. Oops.)
But here’s the thing. It is not the word “state” that’s important, regarding the outcome. South Africa’s Bantustans were also called “states”, remember.
It is the content of the sovereignty and decision-making powers, the independence of the decision-making process, and the territorial and economic foundations that support this independence that are important.
So people should not get hung up on the word “state”– and certainly, they shouldn’t suddenly rush to crown Netanyahu with a peacemaker’s laurels if he should deign to say the Palestinians might be able to have one.
Look at the content of any proposal made, not just its name.
A couple other things to bear in mind:
1. Past PM Olmert also said he believed in a Palestinian “state.” His concept of it was very restrictive, including of course territorially. The fact that he accepted the notion of a Palestinian state did not mean his proposals regarding the final settlement were in any way acceptable.
2. Ten years ago, Barak won a strong victory in the polls against Netanyahu, and replaced him as PM. On that occasion, Barak won by promising Israelis that he was the man who could conclude a final peace with the Palestinians “within six to nine months.” Eighteen months later his premiership collapsed into chaos with that pledge still unfulfilled.
Worse than that, the peremptory and bullying way he conducted his peace “diplomacy” with the Palestinians ensured that the Camp David II summit was a disaster. Barak then loudly blamed PA leader Yasser Arafat for the failure and said Israel “had no partner for peace.” (Clinton, quite shamefully, completely backed him up on that.)
Leaders and activists in the real Israeli peace movement say that Barak’s behavior at that time was a stab in the heart for their movement, from which it has still, nine years later, not recovered.
This time, Barak is “promising” that the Netanyahu government will have peace with the Palestinians “within three years.” He has no credibility.