Just World News with Helena Cobban
Info, analysis, discussion – to build a more just world
I’ve been really busy these past couple of weeks– plus, figuring out too much new technology. So, to catch up a little, here are the last two pieces of News Analysis that I wrote for IPS:
Read and enjoy. Or not; it’s up to you.
I just read the transcript of Pres. Obama’s address at the State Department today. That’s the one where he appointed former Sen. George Mitchell as Special Envoy for Middle East peace, and former Amb. Richard Holbroooke as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mitchell is a good choice. He has a good feel for the needs of brokering peace in tricky situations, which he helped do in Northern Ireland. And he knows quite a lot about the Israel-Palestine issue from his earlier work investigating the causes of the Second Intifada.
Plus, as a former Senate Majority Leader, he has the political stature that will be required to cajole people from both sides– and even Israel’s well-entrenched ‘Amen Corner’ in the US Congress– towards the decisions that will be needed to build durable final peace agreements.
Of course, it’s also a good sign that perennial “Israel-right-or-wrong” cheerleader Abe Foxman actually criticized Mitchell for being “too even-handed” between Arabs and Israelis. (I have it on good authority that there was a time when “even-handed” was thought of in Washington as a good description of what was needed in US diplomats working on Israeli-Arab issues. But it certainly hasn’t generally been seen as a good thing for as long as I’ve lived in the country– since 1982. Let’s hope we’re returning to a decent respect for even-handedness and basic fairness.)
I am seeing some excellent early actions from Obama. On the day he was inaugurated he phoned the leaders of the PA, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt– starting with the PA’s (time-expired but who’s counting?) President, Mahmoud Abbas. That was one early sign of his concern for moving fast on Arab-Israeli issues. Today’s appointment of Mitchell is another, even stronger one.
Plus, I think it’s excellent that on his second full day in office the President went to the State Department to join Sec. Clinton in making these announcements. That’s a strong signal of the value he places in the work of diplomacy that the State department’s employees do.
Regarding Mitchell’s appopintment, of course a lot remains to be revealed. One telling sign was that the hawkish Clinton adviser Dennis Ross, whose strongly pro-Israeli think-tank had previously announced that he would be kind of super-adviser for the whole region stretching from the Middle East to Afghanistan, reportedly wasn’t even present at tofday’s announcement. (Maybe, though, he’ll end up working more on Iran issues? Who knows?)
Clinton said at the State Department event that “the president and I have asked [Mitchell] to be the special envoy for Middle East peace.” That leaves it a little unclear who he’ll report to, which is a key detail.
When Obama spoke, he said this about Mitchell’s task:
This is pretty good as a starting US position.
I was also interested to see that Pres. Obama went into considerably greater detail about Mitchell’s task than Sec. Clinton did. So that might well indicate that Mitchell will be reporting more to him (through National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones) than to Clinton.
If you’re in DC Thursday evening, come along to a panel discussion on the Gaza crisis that I’m participating in, at Georgetown University, at 6:30 p.m.
The other participants are:
The discussion is organized by GU’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and will be held in McNair Auditorium, in Old North Building on the main campus.
Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as our president at noon today– Hurrah! … Four hours before that, I and four (mainly Quaker) friends from Charlottesville who slept over in our apartment in Washington had finished our mammoth “survival-dressing” operation and ventured out into the sub-freezing air to start our trek to the National Mall.
As we walked along streets from which, today, all moving vehicles had been banned we merged with other groups and then converged into ever broader and broader streams of humanity. We surged across Constitution Avenue onto the National Mall at around 18th Street and turned left on the Mall so we could get as close to the Capitol Dome end of it as possible. At one point the whole river of humanity had to get over a line of yard-high concrete barricades, which we did by helping each other across.
At our “hoi polloi” end of the mall there were no security checkpoints, though I assume the police were watching people very closely from the few temporary elevated watch-towers I saw, and from the ground. Some of the streets along which we’d walked had National Guard Military Police units strung lightly along them, but the security on and around the Mall was light.
The excitement built as the crowds around us grew denser. We made our way with increasingly difficulty around the northern shoulder of the hill on which sits the vast obelisk of the Washington Monument, hoping to reach at least the east side of 14th Street. But it was not to be. The entire section of the Mall east of 14th Street was already, at 8:45, filled to capacity and they were letting no more people in there. So we were stuck back on the eastern slope of the Washington Monument’s hill– facing the Capitol Building, which gleamed light-golden around 1.3 miles away.
We had a large Jumbotron screen on which we could see the details of what was happening there… and all around us an ever-thickening crush of humanity. A large preponderance of hardy young and middle-aged adults, but several families with kids aged seven or over. (Families with younger kids, and older people, had been warned to think carefully before coming, because of the lengthy waits expected, and the cold, the cold, the cold.)
So from around 9 a.m. through 11:15 we stood there. We got to know the people standing around us a bit– one family had come from Oregon, a young woman and her mother from Washington State. The crowd immediately around us was around 25% African-American and also contained a large group of Latinos. The Jumbotrons replayed the tape of the big concert held at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, which sparked sporadic waves of singing, swaying, or quasi-dancing among the crowd. A light sun peeked through. But still, it was cold, cold, cold. I pulled on my second pair of gloves and my third pair of legwear. The six layers on my upper body just sufficed.
At around 11:15 the Jumbotrons switched to showing us the things that were happening in real-time, in and around the Capitol Building. Various dignitaries arrived and were announced. A few of us raised a loud cheer for Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter. The Clintons got a louder cheer (but not from me.) The arrival of George W. Bush got deeps boos from our understandably partisan crowd. We saw the Obama daughters; Laura Bush with Michelle Obama… then out came “the President-Elect” to the delight of all.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts flubbed the administration of the oath of office, but that didn’t seem to matter. After Obama took the oath, many people in the crowd hugged each other, and there were some tears.
We then listened carefully to his Inaugural Address. He started off with a couple of quick grace notes to the man he had now replaced in office (yay!)… But just about all the rest of the speech was a pointed and powerful indictment of the value and policies pursued by Bush– though Obama never mentioned Bush by name during the rest of the speech.
I thought it was a great speech: serious, somber, inclusive. I do still have a problem with mentions of the concept “American leadership”, given the terrible straits into which this concept has led the world over the past 17 years. But it is sort of “boiler-plate” in the official rhetoric of the country at this point. But the main things I liked about the speech were the serious commitment he expressed to restoring the rule of law (“we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals”) and its emphasis on fairness, mindfulness, and inclusivity (“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth… “) He made an indirect reference to the formerly enslaved (“We were lashed by the whip”), but I wish he had made a parallel reference to the indigenous people of the country.
But what he said, directly, to the Muslim world and to the people of the world’s low-income nations sounded good, respectful, and serious.
Soon after he finished the address, our group and many others turned to start to leave. Because of the crowds, it took a long while to straggle back to Constitution Avenue. As we walked we heard the chopper carrying the departing Bush fly overhead, and gave a cheer for that departure.
… Anyway, I’m pretty tired right now. I am really happy I was able to be a part of it.
Then I came back to the apartment and saw the new White House website, too. Wow, this is starting to feel real.
So if “inaugurating” is about getting the “augurs”– the heavenly signs; the karma– more rightly aligned, then I think that task has been achieved today. But there’s still a huge amount more work to do.
Marc Lynch, a generally sensible young “rising star” in the world of US Arabists, today blogged about his “four suggestions for the Obama administration.” Three of his suggestions are helpful, though not terribly new. The fourth– on the Palestinian/Gaza situation– seems actively dangerous since in it he resurrects from what I had thought was a well-deserved death the old canard of “ripeness theory.” … As in, “Oh no, we can’t possibly talk about final-status issues in the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy right now because the situation isn’t ‘ripe’ for resolution.”
The original author of ripeness theory in this context was Richard Haass, who not long thereafter got “mugged by reality” and disavowed the whole idea. But the theory lived on, most especially in the words and works of Dennis Ross, peace “processor” extraordinaire, who for 12 long years in the Bush I and Clinton administrations used that argument– along with a second, Cold War-derived argument about the need for lengthy “confidence building measures”– to delay and delay the moment at which the US government or anyone else might actually get serious about promoting a final-status peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Meanwhile, as we all know, the pro-settler forces in the Israeli political elite used those delays to their great advantage to push further and further forward their project of planting settler colonies throughout the whole of the West Bank (and throughout Syria’s Golan.)
What a crock that whole theory of “ripeness” turned out to be.
But now, here was Marc Lynch today, writing about the Palestinian situation:
Well, Marc, I’m guessing that by “the current Palestinian leadership” you mean Mahmoud Abbas. (Though after the past four weeks he looks far less leaderly than Haniyeh, Meshaal, and Co.) But guess what, both Abbas and Hamas are now talking about the need for a new Palestinian national unity government… They look serious about getting their political ducks in a row in preparation for the challenges ahead.
It’s on the Israeli side that it now looks far more questionable whether there is indeed a “partner for peace.”
But regardless of those problems, the ghastly crisis from which we’re just now emerging provides just the kind of impetus and motivation that true, far-reaching– i.e. final-settlement-seeking– peace diplomacy so sorely needs. There truly is no excuse for not pushing ahead… And surely the whole world community (and not just the decisionmakers here in Washington) has now vividly seen the danger of simply letting the Palestinian-Israeli situation continue to fester for any further length of time.
Ripeness theory: It’s ripe for burial. Right now.
I seem to have been incredibly busy since I left Damascus last Thursday evening. I’ve also been on an emotional roller-coaster, torn between the mounting excitement around Barack Obama’s inauguration tomorrow–Washington DC is abuzz with visitors, activities, parties, and high hopes– and my continuing deep sadness and concern over the horrors in Gaza.
Plus, there have been significant developments in the Gaza story, which I’ve tried to blog here.
But I just want to write something quick now, before the experience becomes too faded, about the amazing evening we spent in Damascus last Tuesday…
The small delegation of which I was part was invited to an event at the Zeitoun Church, near the Eastern Gate of the Old City of Damascus, in which a joint Christian-Muslim choir sang hymns sacred to their two religions and some patriotic songs, accompanied by traditional Arabic instruments and, at one point, by two “whirling dervishes.”
This was the Alfarah Chorale, organized by Father Elias Zahlawi. Also present was the (Sunni Muslim) Grand Mufti of Syria, Ahmed Bader Hasoun, who told us a little about the meaning of some of the dervishes’ sacred gestures.
If I shut my eyes I can almost see the rhythm of the dervishes’ vastly swirling white skirts. I can see the great enthusiasm in the faces of the “Christian” portion of the chorale, which stood in three lines across the back of the stage in the same kind of quasi-ecclesiastical garb a choir in a US church might wear. I can see the broad smiles of the half dozen yellow-clad, hijab-wearing women in the “Muslim” portion of the chorale. I can hear the plaintive tones of the flute, the lute, and the zither. I can feel the insistence of the hand-drums; admire the deep tones of the Muslim men singers over on the left.
The music was tremendous! Extremely accomplished and moving. The choristers seemed to be singing in six or seven parts, and they all reveled in the sound they made together. Sometimes the Christians sang alone; sometimes the Muslims. But mainly they sang together, whether it was sacred songs or more secular patriotic ballads.
Both the Mufti and Father Zahlawi spoke about the great value of the coexistence among faiths and communities that Syria has hosted for many centuries now, and how this can be a model for other nations everywhere. They spoke about how they valued their memories of the Jewish community that used to enrich their lives in Syria– nearly all its members left for the west some years ago… And about how they would love to welcome its members back to Syria.
Mufti Hasoun smiled broadly as he gave a special shout-out to “Barack Hussein Obama” on the occasion of his imminent inauguration as president of the US, and expressed the hope that Washington’s ties with Syria could rapidly be improved.
But it’s the rich and soaring tones of the singers, the wide skirts of the sacred dancers, and the low voice of the hand-drums that stay with me now.
We have a ceasefire in Gaza, however fragile. And tomorrow we’ll have a new president here in the US. Many things that seemed hard to imagine last Tuesday now seem much more possible.
… Just 18 hours of George Bush’s presidency still to go…
Palestinian journalist Laila el-Haddad has done a stupendously good job of blogging the Gaza war, despite the handicaps of (a) being the primary caregiver for her and her husband’s two young children, and (b) having to deal with her enormous concern for her parents, both retired physicians, who have been in their Gaza City home throughout all this time, and for all her other relatives and friends in Gaza.
She and her kids are currently living with her husband who’s doing a medical residency at Duke University in North Carolina. I know a little, from my own experience having to look after my young kids in a distant country while our former home in Beirut was being severely bombed by Israel back in 1982, how tough all aspects of that situation are. But Laila has dealt with it superbly– for the benefit and illumination of all the rest of us.
If you haven’t read Laila’s blog recently, do go and do so. She has brought together so many important aspects of the war, including with the numerous updates from and about her parents.
Imagine being in the situation she was in Saturday, when she received from her father what he thought might be his last communication with his loved ones outside the Strip…
Thank God for the internet. Thank God for brave and caring people like Laila and her father, Dr. Moussa (Abu Tarek) el-Haddad.
Because the war on Gaza has turned out to be very “good” for Labour leader Ehud Barak’s popularity, boosting his chances in the Feb. 10th election… But Barak has seemingly taken most of that support away from Kadima, which previously was the main challenger to Likud’s lead in the opinion polls. So now, Likud’s lead is even stronger. (Despite Barak’s “war boost”, Labour still lags far behind the two front-runners… )
I actually predicted this, verbally, a couple of weeks ago. Wish I’d blogged it at the time.
The war was all along a win-win prospect for the ever-hawkish Likud. It strengthened and stoked the hard-line racism and bellophilia that’s so widely present in (much of) Israeli society. Which strengthens Likud and the parties even further to its right. Plus, basically, there’s no way that either Labour or Kadima could out-Likud Likud. So Likud was bound to do well out of their horrendous attempt to do so with the recent war…
That is the situation that now so urgently needs turning around by determined and principled action on behalf of all the international community, to rein in these murderous impulses unleashed in Israeli society. The US government, which has been Israel’s main enabler, backer, and international shield through all its wars of choice from 1982 through 2008/9, needs to start taking responsibility for its actions. The US policy on Arab-Israeli issues over the past 27 years has enabled and allowed all those Israeli “wars of choice.” It has also enabled and allowed the pursuit by successive Israeli governments of a colonial settlement-planting project in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian lands that has caused huge amounts of harm to the land’s rightful residents and has considerably complicated the search for a sustainable final peace agreement.
The time to secure that final peace is now. Not next year, but now.
This morning the time-expired PA president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fateh, called for the establishment of a Palestinian national unity government. The political endgame of Israel’s 22-Day War against Gaza has begun in earnest on the Palestinian side.
(On the Israeli side, the whole war can be understood as an internal political game, with the “end” of that game being focused on the general election of February 10.)
All wars are about politics: Clausewitz 101. In Israel’s 22-Day War against Gaza, one major war goal was– as Olmert and others repeatedly said– to “change the situation” regarding the politics of Gaza and the rest of Palestine. That was, to change it in a radically anti-Hamas and probably pro-Fateh way.
Remember that ever since Hamas’s victory in the January 2006 parliamentary elections, Israel and its Bush administration backers have waged a strongly anti-Hamas campaign, including maintaining the brutal siege of Gaza, arming and training Fateh militias and police in order to set them against Hamas, attempting (but failing to bring off) a coup against Hamas in Gaza in 2007, etc, etc.
The 22-Day War was a continuation of that anti-Hamas campaign.
The IDF’s violent and damaging rampage against Gaza did not, however, succeed in either crushing Hamas or forcing it to surrender. But it did considerably weaken the political situation of Mahoud Abbas and his Fateh colleagues– both within the Palestinian public and among the broader Arab and Muslim publics.
So that is the importance of Abbas’s terse call for a Palestinian national unity government.
Last night, elected Hamas PM Ismail Hanniyeh declared the outcome of the war a “victory” for the Palestinian people. He added that this victory would be,
So both major Palestinian parties are now expressing their support for, apparently, a speedy reconciliation between them. This is excellent, even though the terms of the reconciliation remain to be worked out.
The last time the two sides attempted national reconciliation it was through the (Saudi-sponsored) Mecca Agreement of February 2007. Under that agreement, Haniyeh was the PM but the crucial Foreign Affairs portfolio was given to pro-Fateh independent Ziad Abu Amr, and there was a clear understanding that Hamas would encourage the Abbas-Abu Amr team to negotiate the very best possible peace deal with Israel that should then be submitted to a Palestinian national referendum.
It was that agreement that was ripped apart by Fateh’s Washington-instigated coup attempt in Gaza just four months later.
After foiling the coup attempt, the Gaza-based Haniyeh then established his own, Hamas-dominated PA government in Gaza while Abbas formed a rival, US-supported PA government in the West Bank and resumed his participation in the chronically unending “peace” negotiations with Israel.
Abbas’s term as elected PA president ran out on January 9, so there are now considerable questions about the legitimacy of his claim to “represent” Palestinians.
Hamas, now relatively strengthened by its survival of Israel’s assault on Gaza, now looks as though it is inclined to throw the badly weakened Abbas a political lifeline. (This would parallel the policies that Hizbullah, in Lebanon, pursued toward Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora in the aftermath of the– politically very similar– Israeli assault on that country in 2006.) Hamas may well now allow Abbas to “front” for a unified Palestinian participation in all the big diplomacy that lies ahead, while Hamas can focus more of its energies on the much-needed tasks of physical and social reconstruction in Palestine.
The constitutional situation within the PA is badly complicated by the fact that Israel has held in prison since 2007 either all or nearly all of the two dozen pro-Hamas parliamentarians, elected in January 2006, who were resident in the West Bank. That includes Parliament Speaker Aziz Dweik.
It strikes me that a first demand for the Palestinian national unity government– one that democrats around the world should support unconditionally– is that Israel should immediately release all the elected Palestinian parliamentarians whom it now holds captive. (Possibly, their release could be part of a broader detainee-release program that would also involve Israel’s Hamas-held POW, Gilad Shalit.)
Meanwhile, as noted above, the political endgame of the war on the Israeli side will be continuing until February 10, and quite possibly after that, during the cumbersome coalition-forming process that follows all elections in Israel. The Likud party has been chafing in opposition in Israel as Kadima and Labour have led this highly popular (in Israel) war. Immediately after the ceasefire started, its leaders quite predictably started criticizing the Kadima-Labour team for “not having gone far enough, and not having finished the job.”
It’s not clear yet what effect this pressure from Likud will have on the stability of the– tenuous, un-negotiated, and parallel– brace of ceasefires that went into operation yesterday. But I fear it can’t be a good one.
What is clear to me is that almost-President Obama should, as an early order of business very soon after his inauguration tomorrow, start laying out a specifically American vision of the urgency of securing a final peace between Israel and all its neighbors, along with some of the principles on which this peace should be based. They should include the folloowing:
Obama should, ideally, lay out these ideas in a public speech that he personally gives on the subject considerably before February 10, so that the strength of this inspiring new US president’s commitment to this vision will be clear to Israeli voters before they go to the polls.
(Previously, I’d expressed some support for Naomi Chazan’s argument that for the US to try to do something to “influence” Israel’s voters on February 10 could well end up back-firing. Now, however, in light of the urgency of the Gaza crisis and its worldwide repurcussions, I think Obama really needs to try to do this. Every action or gesture he takes that can strengthen the hand of the pro-peace forces in Israel and the rest of the region is very urgently needed.)
Politics and diplomacy: These are what this war has been all about. Now let’s see the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the US all at least get their own houses in order. As for the Israelis– whose deep bellophilia has shocked much of the world over the past three weeks– let’s just hope that they have time to reflect, in the three weeks ahead, on the proposition that war, truly, is not the answer to their problems.
Their country’s war against Gaza might have made many of them “feel good” over the past three weeks. But at what cost, at what cost? Certainly, it has not made the prospects for longterm good relations with their Palestinian neighbors any easier, at all.
So now we have, finally, a ceasefire in Gaza that is reciprocal but not negotiated and not durable at all.
People and governments around the world should pay some attention to ensuring the durability of this ceasefire and also– certainly– to providing the massive relief effort that the survivors of the Gaza assault so desperately need.
But please let’s not see people getting hung up on side-issues like “how to police the Gaza tunnels.” There should be no tunnels between Gaza and Egypt, or between Gaza and anyplace else, since the tunnels were only ever a side-effect of the siege/blockade to which Gaza was subjected. Now, the emphasis must be on:
Some friends have told me this is premature, dangerous, and un-doable because the state of relations between Hamas and the Fateh/PA leadership remains so tense and/or uncertain. I think that is a very dangerous argument, since it is one that– once again!– permits a postponing of the international effort that is needed more urgently than ever before to secure the final peace.
In many episodes in the lengthy history of British de-colonization, the withdrawing (British) power and its allies actually helped to form the coalition with which Britain negotiated the withdrawal agreement. These coalitions of nationalist forces– many of which had previously been fighting against each other, quite often at the active instigation of the colonial power– came together in the course of the independence negotiation, partly in response to the positive momentum that the negotiation itself generated.
All that is needed in the broad negotiation are some basic and universally applied ground-rules such as: As many parties as possible should be included, provided they agree to a ceasefire during the course of the negotiation (though disarmament prior to talking is not a necessary requirement); All parties should be willing to prove their support by participating in a peaceful election or referendum; No topics of concern are out of bounds…
So let the negotiations for all three remaining strands (Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian, Israeli-Lebanese) of the final peace begin! Within weeks! Let’s see the international community– including the US– commit to reaching final agreement on this comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace accord within nine months. A nice gestational period. But actually, one that is also quite doable since so much of the legwork on the details of a final peace was completed during the 1990s.
At the Annapolis summit in November 2007, President George W. Bush (remember him?) and Condi Rice promised that they would reach a final peace agreement on just the Palestinian track “within a year.” They did not succeed, for a large number of reasons. Firstly, they didn’t really try very hard. Secondly, they were never prepared to apply even-handed pressure to both “sides” in the negotiation. Thirdly, they were meanwhile working hard not just to exclude Hamas and its allies from the negotiation but also, indeed, to encircle and crush Hamas, despite the fact that it represents a considerable portion of the Palestinian public. Fourthly, they were trying to engage only the PA/Fateh in the negotiation while preventing any kind of parallel Syrian-Israeli negotiation from progressing. Fifthly, they really weren’t serious.
But another failure of the whole post-Annapolis effort was a failure of the rest of the international community. All the other, non-US powers seemed quite content to let the US continue to monopolize the (mis-)handling of this important item on the international agenda.
The “Quartet” has only ever, up until now, been a mechanism used by Washington to harness the power of others in the international community to its own goals and policy.
Now, if it continues to exist, the Quartet must become much more effectively a coordinating body for the entire international community.
Actually, why do we need a Quartet at all? Why not just let the UN Security Council run this last, sorely needed phase of the too-long-running Israeli-Arab “peace process.”