Category: Gaza08-09

Swiss parliamentarians visit Gaza

Kudos to the delegation of Swiss parliamentarians who are visiting Gaza at the invitation of the duly elected Palestinian legislative Council.
That Maan news report also notes that Switzerland was,

    the only European country to support the draft UN resolution from the Human Rights Council that condemned Israel’s “grave human rights violations in the Palestinian territories.”
    The delegation reinforced their earlier stance during their visit, saying what they saw was evidence of war crimes.
    On the assassination of de facto Minister of the Interior Sa’id Siyam, the delegation noted the illegality of assassination for political purposes under international law. They further condemned the assaults on the members of PLC, including the continued detention of PLC speaker Aziz Dweik.
    On arriving to Gaza the delegation was received by PLC member Ismail Al-Ashqar of Hamas, and Head of the Committee of Security and Internal affairs in the PLC Salem Salamah. The Gazan leaders expressed their discontent over Europe’s silence over the Gaza war, adding that it “gave Israeli the justification to continue its destruction and war against the Palestinians.”
    He demanded the Swiss and European parliaments pressure the international court to ensure Israeli war criminals are brought to a speedy trial.

I have thought for a while now that Switzerland, Norway, and Turkey are three countries well positioned to try to open good channels of communication with Hamas. (Qatar, China, and Russia could also provide valuable help in this.)
Those of us around the world who support national self-determination for oppressed, colonized, and occupied peoples, and the respect of democratic principles need to focus centrally on these values in the weeks and months ahead. While it is good for human-rights organizations to focus on Israel’s war crimes, I worry there’s a chance that too much energy will be expended in that essentially bacward-looking task rather than on the broader, forward-looking task of doing all the political things that are necessary to secure a final peace agreement between israel and all its neighbors within the shortest time possible.
At the end of the day, it is only a final peace agreement that includes ending the occupation(s) and the Palestinians winning their true national independence that can assure the ending of this situation of occupation and control by a despotic foreign military power. If the occupation isn’t ended and a final peace secured, then the tragedies and atrocities of the past months will be followed by repeat performances as sure as night follows day.
Anyway, even though there is currently a situation of fragile ceasefire, this is still a situation in which the rights of the Palestinians– in Gaza, in the West Bank, and those in exile– are being significantly abused on a major and continuing basis.
End the occupation! Secure the final peace!

Ill-disciplined IOF left its mark in Gaza

Amnesty International has a new blog carrying extracts from field reports made by its researchers. In this post, Friday, Donatella Rivera writes about the physical detritus the IOF soldiers left behind them in many of the private homes they took over and occupied in Gaza. (HT: Badger of Missing Links.)
She wrote:

    Every one of these houses we visited was in a shocking state. All the rooms had been ransacked, with furniture overturned and/or smashed. The families’ clothing, documents and other personal items were strewn all over the floors and soiled and, in one case, urinated on. In one house in the Sayafa area in north Gaza, several cardboard boxes full of excrement were left in the house – although there was a functioning toilet which the soldiers could have used.
    Walls were defaced with crude threats written in Hebrew, such as “next time it will hurt more” and, in one house, a drawing of a naked woman…

This is very reminiscent of the traces left behind by IOF soldiers on various rampages including in West Beirut in 1982, where the excrement was often left on the belongings of city residents.
Rivera added this:

    Chris Cobb-Smith, the military expert in our team who was an officer in the British Army for 20 years, was staggered at what he saw and the behaviour and apparent lack of discipline of the Israeli soldiers.
    “Gazans have had their houses looted, vandalised and desecrated. As well, the Israeli soldiers have left behind not only mounds of litter and excrement but ammunition and other military equipment. It’s not the behaviour one would expect from a professional army,” he said.

No, indeed it is not. And nor are the numerous, well-reported incidents in the Gaza rampage in which IOF soldiers shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range.
Col. Pat Lang provided a partial explanation for the IOF’s lack of discipline in this early-January blog post.
Writing about the close contacts he had with Israeli military during his time as a professional US soldier, he observed that, unlike in the US when it had a mainly conscript army, the IDF/IOF does not routinely have any professional cadre of well-trained sergeants capable of enforcing discipline and standards– including standards of keeping within the requirements of the Laws of War– on the often poorly trained infantry brigades made up of reservists or conscripts.
Regarding the conscript units in the IOF ground forces, he wrote:

    As a result, a non-reserve infantry or tank company in the field consists of people who are all about the same age (19-22) and commanded by a captain in his mid 20s. What is missing in this scene is the voice of grown up counsel provided by sergeants in their 30s and 40s telling these young people what it is that would be wise to do based on real experience and mature judgment. In contrast a 22 year old American platoon leader would have a mature platoon sergeant as his assistant and counselor.
    – As a result of this system of manning, the IDF’s ground force is more unpredictable and volatile at the tactical (company) level than might be the case otherwise. The national government has a hard time knowing whether or not specific policies will be followed in the field. For example, the Israeli government’s policy in the present action in the Gaza Strip has been to avoid civilian casualties whenever possible. [Well, its stated policy, anyway… ~HC] Based on personal experience of the behavior of IDF conscripts toward Palestinian civilians, I would say that the Israeli government has little control over what individual groups of these young Israeli soldiers may do in incidents like the one yesterday in which mortar fire was directed toward UN controlled school buildings.
    … One might say that in war, s–t happens. [See above ~HC] That is true, but such behavior is indicative of an army that is not well disciplined and not a completely reliably instrument of state policy. In my travels in the west Bank in March of 2008, it was noticeable that the behavior towards Palestinian civilians of IDF troops at roadblocks was reminiscent of that of any group of post-adolescents given guns and allowed to bully the helpless in order to look tough for each other. I think the IDF would be well advised to grow some real sergeants.

I think this provides a valuable part of the explanation of what happened in Gaza. But the other part, surely, has to do with the racism that’s so prevalent in Israeli society: the sense that the Palestinians– living in Gaza or elsewhere– are not really fully human, and certainly not deserving of the basic human decency that all fellow-humans deserve.
Back in West Beirut in 1982, my recollection is that it was some of the apartments owned by the more middle-class Palestinians there that got trashed (and excrement-dumped) the worst… As though the IOF soldiers, were so taken aback to see Palestinians living lives that looked just as clean and well-ordered as their own (or cleaner?) that they felt the need to trash all that cleanliness and good order… to drag the Palestinians down into the muck where they felt they all belonged.
(See also this account by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen of what the IOF soldiers did in the home of a little girl called Mona– along with killing both her parents, that is.)
I am just recalling, too, that in Caroline Elkins’s excellent book about the British military’s colonial campaign against the Kenyan independence movement in the 1950s, one of the notable punishments meted out in the massive concentration camps the British erected was to force those stalwarts who refused to bow to their demands to run around for hours, in public, with leaking buckets of excrement on their heads. As Elkins wrote, part of the intention seemed to be to buoy up the view of the British and other soldiers there– who might otherwise have been forced to have some grudging admiration for the steadfastness and dignity of their captives– that the captives really were just muck-covered sub-humans, after all.
Regarding the IOF, one of the stated goals of those who launched this latest Israeli “war of choice” was to “restore the credibility of Israel’s military deterrent” by demonstrating that the Israeli ground forces– which had performed extremely poorly, from a military point of view in Lebanon in 2006– had now been rebuilt and were “back in tip-top condition.”
Militarily, well, yes perhaps that is so. But after all, what on earth use could tank battalions ever really be, militarily, within the close and crowded confines of Gaza’s cities and refugee camps? And massed infantry was never sent in, lest– presumably– too many Israeli soldiers’ lives should get lost to Palestinian fighters well dug into their very familiar and complex home terrain.
So actually, what got proven about the ground forces at the level of military capability? Not very much.
But at the moral level, a lot was proven, namely their ill-discipline (including in leaving useful military goods behind them) and the wanton brutality, arrogance, and vengefulness with which they behaved.
I am repeatedly surprised by the wilful blindness of Israeli political and military leaders who can’t see that these traits and behaviors are massively counter-productive to their people’s longterm wellbeing. How on earth do they think that such behaviors will help make the region in which they live more peaceful and thus provide the basis for Israel’s own longterm security?
Ah well, I guess that critique is equally applicable at the “macro” level, in terms of the decision the Israeli pols made, in the first place, to launch yet another in the now-lengthy series of its wars of choice that attempt to force their neighbors to submit to their will. This was the sixth such war since 1982. And none of them has ever, from 1982 on, turned out well for Israel in the political-strategic arena.
But it’s important not to lose sight of the micro level, either. For in the crucible of the micro level of the way actual human persons relate to each other a long-overdue regional peace can be significantly hastened– or once again delayed.

BBC bows shamefully to Israeli pressure…

… on airing a philanthropic appeal for aid for Gaza… while even the British government urges it not to.
Go figure.
We can note that the British government– like the US government, the Egyptian government, and all the other governments of the world– has connived shamefully, for the past three years, in the Israeli government’s completely anti-humane campaign to starve the 1.5 million people of Gaza into submission. But now, something seems to be changing on this score– perhaps– in the halls of Whitehall. As well as, perhaps, in Washington.
Let’s hope we can now see the world’s governments all start working together to re-connect the lives and economy of Gaza properly to those of the outside world. And that Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza, which has caused its people so much suffering, can now be ended.
But the BBC, meanwhile, still seems intent on going along with the Israeli-bred idea that the provision of outside aid– even of very urgently needed emergency relief aid– should be a political football, subject only to the whims of the Israeli occupying/besieging power.
What an outrage.
Today, the representatives of the Palestinian government that was elected in a free and fair election in January 2006 are now in Egypt, are in Cairo where tomorrow they’ll conduct talks with the Egyptian government on the modalities of re-opening the Rafah crossing point between Gaza and Egypt.
An anonymous source (presumably from Hamas) told Reuters’s Nidal Mughrabi that Hamas is,

    willing to accept the presence of members of [Mahmoud] Abbas’s presidential guards, with a special arrangement he did not disclose. Leaders of the group have in the past said they could also accept European monitors on certain conditions that does not allow the international observers to have a say over the operation of the crossing.

So Hamas, Fateh, Israel, and Egypt have all returned to negotiating all the same issues they have been fighting about for the past year or more.
Except that this time around, the negotiating positions of both Egypt and Fateh are considerably weaker than they were a year ago.
And meantime, if the latest declarations from the British government and President Obama are anything to go by, the international consensus that Israel used to enjoy for its policy of Endless Punitive Siege against Gaza seems to be eroding significantly.
Shame on the BBC!
Anyone who wants to give support to the coalition of very mainstream British charities that has had its appeal for Gaza turned down by the BBC can do so here.

IPS articles from Syria and Washington, DC

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.

Obama moves fast on M.E. diplomacy

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:

    He will be fully empowered at the negotiating table, and he will sustain our focus on the goal of peace.
    No one doubts the difficulty of the road ahead, and George outlined some of those difficulties. The tragic violence in Gaza and southern Israel offers a sobering reminder of the challenges at hand and the setbacks that will inevitably come.
    It must also instill in us, though, a sense of urgency, as history shows us that strong and sustained American engagement can bridge divides and build the capacity that supports progress. And that is why we will be sending George to the region as soon as possible to help the parties ensure that the cease-fire that has been achieved is made durable and sustainable.
    Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel’s security. And we will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against legitimate threats.
    For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens. No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people, nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror.
    To be a genuine party to peace, the quartet has made it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel’s right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements.
    Going forward, the outline for a durable cease-fire is clear: Hamas must end its rocket fire; Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza; the United States and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot rearm.
    Yesterday I spoke to President Mubarak and expressed my appreciation for the important role that Egypt played in achieving a cease-fire. And we look forward to Egypt’s continued leadership and partnership in laying a foundation for a broader peace through a commitment to end smuggling from within its borders.
    Now, just as the terror of rocket fire aimed at innocent Israelis is intolerable, so, too, is a future without hope for the Palestinians.
    I was deeply concerned by the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life in recent days and by the substantial suffering and humanitarian needs in Gaza. Our hearts go out to Palestinian civilians who are in need of immediate food, clean water, and basic medical care, and who’ve faced suffocating poverty for far too long.
    Now we must extend a hand of opportunity to those who seek peace. As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime, with the international and Palestinian Authority participating.
    Relief efforts must be able to reach innocent Palestinians who depend on them. The United States will fully support an international donor’s conference to seek short-term humanitarian assistance and long-term reconstruction for the Palestinian economy. This assistance will be provided to and guided by the Palestinian Authority.
    Lasting peace requires more than a long cease-fire, and that’s why I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security.
    Senator Mitchell will carry forward this commitment, as well as the effort to help Israel reach a broader peace with the Arab world that recognizes its rightful place in the community of nations.
    I should add that the Arab peace initiative contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative’s promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all.
    Jordan’s constructive role in training Palestinian security forces and nurturing its relations with Israel provide a model for these efforts. And going forward, we must make it clear to all countries in the region that external support for terrorist organizations must stop.

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.

Marc Lynch resurrects discredited ‘ripeness’ theory

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:

    it’s hard to imagine a situation less “ripe” for resolution, the current Palestinian leadership is in no position to deliver anything, and the Gaza war will leave deep scars. Instead, focus on the realities on the ground as they are, not as we would like them to be, and put U.S. diplomatic and material support into building more solid foundations for a renewed peace engagement.

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.

Kudos and hugs to Laila and her family

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…

    Loved ones :
    I thought to take few moments on the generator to write this email to you, It might be our last communication. The Israeli army has been heavily bombarding everything in GAZA now. They escalated their attack intensively after 4 AM. Tal El-Hawa is on fire ( I will attach photos that I took of smoke from burning buildings), they just fired a missile on one apartment in a huge apartment building in front of our house ( Borj Al-Shorook) I guess Laila knows it. Phosphorus bombs now are fired everywhere on houses and on people. UNRWA’s main stores in GAZA were hit.
    Hundreds of people are trapped in burning buildings in Tal El-Hawa and Al-Sabra and everywhere in GAZA. It is clear now that these people decided now to finish everyone and everything in GAZA strip. I still have faith in Allah.

Thank God for the internet. Thank God for brave and caring people like Laila and her father, Dr. Moussa (Abu Tarek) el-Haddad.

Why Likud is laughing…

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.

Palestinian politics and the rest of the war’s political endgame

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,

    a springboard towards the restoration of national unity and the launch of internal dialog in order to reach genuine and comprehensive national reconciliation.

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:

    — Land for peace, and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war;
    — Security for all the people of the region, including both Israelis and Palestinians;
    — A complete end to the use of force between Israel and its neighbors, with the establishment of robust and accountable mechanisms that can verify that aggressive actions are not being prepared;
    — Jerusalem to be shared as a focal point for respect, coexistence, and dialogue among all the world’s nations and religions…

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.

Ceasefire, thank God. Now to the final peace.

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:

    1. re-opening Gaza fully and safely to the outside world, and
    2. moving with greatest speed and seriousness to the securing of the final peace agreement between Israel and all its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians.

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.”