Category: Palestine 2003-05

Okay, yesterday I was complaining here that the US MSM hasn’t paid much attention to the 1.38 Palestinians of Gaza– or to their 6-million-plus compatriots in other places– amidst all the coverage of the “fate” of the handsomely compensated 8,500 Israeli settlers now being required to leave the Gaza Strip.
Today, Greg Myre of the NYT has a fairly well-done piece on the aspirations of the Gaza Palestinians. It is a good job, and very welcome. However, in general the amount of coverage that NYT has given over, say, the past two months to 8,500 people who’ve been enjoying a heavily subsidized lifestyle to live in colonies illegally established on land under military occupation versus that given to the territory’s 1.39 million indigenous residents has still been very disproportional.
Myre’s piece notes that,

Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, the militant Islamic group that has carried out many of the deadliest attacks against Israel, are both claiming credit for the Israeli withdrawal, and they may hold rival events.

Obviously, the way that that plays out over the days ahead will be very interesting. Yesterday or the day before Hamas did come to some agreement with Abu Mazen on allowing the Israeli withdrawal to happen in as orderly a fashion as possible. I think we can surmise that this is in the joint interest of Hamas, Abu Mazen, and Ariel Sharon…
But evidently, Hamas wants to claim the Israeli withdrawal has been forced by the militant actions it has sustained against the Israelis for many years, while Abu Mazen will want to claim it is a fruit only of his diplomacy.
Expect some truly massive Palestinian street rallies in the cities and towns of Gaza– and quite likely, also of the West Bank– as the Israelis withdraw from Gaza. They will probably dwarf the gathering of some 100,000 Israeli settler activists that was held in Tel Aviv recently.
By the way, regarding the nature of media coverage, the BBC website has an interesting “diary” by a Gaza-based, 47-year-old PA employee called Hakeem Abu Samra who says, among other things,

My father and cousin have owned about 60 dunums of land [about 15 acres] close to the border between Gaza and Israel since 1936, when the whole area was still under British Mandate.
We have not been on that land since 1970, when we got a military order forbidding us from entering the area.
This land was sliced into three by streets connecting the four settlements built there, including Dugit, the one nearest to us.
It was very upsetting for our family – especially as our grandfather had died on that land, shot by Israeli soldiers on patrol in 1956, two years before I was born.
I cannot describe what it is like to see your land, to be near to it, but to be forbidden from entering it. You cannot put it into words.
Seeing settlers on our land, planting their crops, making money, it is like someone has stolen something from you.
These people hurt me and my family, they built their house on my family’s land and kept it for nearly 40 years.
My father and cousin have since died, but my brothers and my cousin’s brothers are looking forward to seeing the settlers leave and getting the land back.
Once we get the land back, we will look for compensation from the International Court of Justice.
But most importantly, once we get rid of the occupation in Gaza we hope to live just like human beings, as in any other country.
We want to be safe and free, to be left alone to take care of ourselves.
We can live as good neighbours, so Israel should stop bothering our lives.

The BBC also has a “diary” by a soon-to-depart Jewish settler, that it launched one day before Abu Samra’s. (Why?) This guy, Pesach Aceman, displays all the self-referential provincialism of pampered colonists similarly subjected to decolonization in other parts of the world over the past half century. Interesting in that regard, perhaps…
An example:

We hear that the Palestinians are preparing thousands of flags to fly from the abandoned Jewish houses, synagogues and shops. How disgusting and how painful this will be. What will it do to the kids and young teenagers to see this on the TV news?

No hint there that the category “kids and young teenagers” would actually, in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, nowaadays include more young Palestinians than young Israelis– and that just about every young Palestinian seeing Palestinian flags flying over previous Israeli settlements is going to be completely delighted at the sight. No, for Pesach Aceman and his pampered ilk, the category “kids and young teenagers” would necessarily only apply to Israelis, with the Palestinians remaining, for him, apparently quite invisible.
Oy vey.
The NYT, by the way, today has an interactive map feature that’s interesting to look at. You can click on various points and get seatellite images of what’s underneath. In this way you can get an idea of how many thousands of dunums of land within the settlements’ perimeters have been turned into greenhouses.
(I note, though, that the NYT interactive feature has zero clicking points above Palestinian population centers… Are they too insignificant to care about, I wonder?)
Re the greenhouses, Haaretz is reporting that the economic envoy to the Palestinian-Israeli talks, Jim Wolfensohn, has pulled together a deal that will reward the plantation owners of the “Gush Katif” settlement bloc with $14 million, as the “purchase price” for 75 percent of their greenhouses.
It can often really hurt the feelings of earlier victims when their victimizers get handsome payoffs simply for agreeing to stop their acts of victimization. In this case, the PA objected most strenuously to the idea that US aid funds earmarked for the Palestinians should be used to help buy out (= “reward”) the Israeli settler plantation owners.
So now, Wolfensohn has found $14 million of “private money” to fund the purchase. The greenhouses in question will be transferred to “a PA company.”
I’m not sure how necessarily desirable or how stable over the longer term this arrangement is. Many private Palestinian landowners have title to lands that were used by the settlements. Their claims need to be discussed. Also, why should we assume that PA ownership and the pursuit of a set of economic projects that met the colonists’ economic needs though not necessarily those of the Palestinians, are what is required?
Well, this is how it’ll work out for now. Those Gush Katif plantation owners will make out like bandits. They’ll pocket both the Israeli government compensation for their houses (in which they have already lived a heavily subsidized life for many years now), and now the international money being paid for their (also previously subsidized) greenhouses. The PA will get its hands on an economic project of some present viability. Jim Wolfensohn will look like a talented philanthropist.
But I imagine the real issues over the socioeconomic development of Palestinian Gaza, and the question of who gets to exercize political control over it, all still lie ahead.

I have a column in the Christian Science Monitor today on the imminent pullback of Israel’s troops and settlers from Gaza.
It was a hard column to write, for a number of reasons… Not least of which was that the calendar for doing it kind of snuck up on me this month. (I have a “regular” slot on the second Thursday of each month, plus can suggest as many additional pieces– most of which also run on Thursdays– to my editors there as I want.)
One of the basic underlying theses of this piece is that pure surface area is not, in itself, what determines the “viability” (or otherwise) of a state in modern times. Rather, it is the presence or absence of extrenally imposed constraints on the ability of that state to build economic relations with other states around the world. The two paradigms I was looking at were (1) Singapore and (2) South Africa’s Bantustans.
Singapore has a very restricted surface area (693 square kilometers). Gaza’s is even more restricted (360 sq. km.) Gaza is certainly heavily peopled, but its population density is not as high as Singapore’s. Singapore’s GDP per capita is $27,800; Gaza’s is c. $600; and Israel’s is $20,800.
The South African Bantustans were all located on economically marginal chunks of the RSA’s land… But South Africa is a huge country; so even those Bantustans had considerably more territory than Gaza’s– plus, I think, a lower general population density. But what hampered them most from registering significant social, economic, and political development was the chokehold that South Africa maintained on their borders (and also on the functioning of their security services.)
It was those South African restrictions on the Bantustans’ ability to conduct independent relations, including economic relations, with the outside world that led just about every other government in the world– with the exception of Israel!— to completely reject SA’s claims that those ten territories qualified as “independent states.”
Nowadays, Israel still seeks to maintain controls over all of Gaza’s borders. Along the short border with Egypt, it will subcontract some of the routine patrolling tasks to the Egyptian Army. But it still crucially seeks to maintain its own hand over the crossing-point between Gaza and Egypt, just as it seeks to maintain control over Gaza’s airport (once it has been rebuilt– Sharon’s armies having destroyed its EU-built runways back in 2002) as well as over the Gaza seaport, once rebuilt (ditto) and all other access along Gaza’s lengthy coastline onto the Mediterranean.
Israel also seeks to exert control over all of Gaza’s border with itself. That is its right. If Gaza had real independence none of its other borders with the outside world would be any of Israel’s damn’ business.
So why are European and other western governments lining up to laud Sharon’s “courageous” move to create a small, tightly controlled Bantustan in Gaza? Beats me. Especially since it has always been quite clear to everyone that Sharon has agreed to undertake this pullback from Gaza in place of doing anything positive to respond to those portions of the EU-US-UN-Russian-sponsored “road map” that require Israel to make non-trivial troop withdrawals in the West Bank.
It has also been quite clear to everyone who has followed Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy in any depth that an Israeli “concession” regarding the territory of Gaza will never satisfy the Palestinians’ quite legitimate demands to exercize their national independence over the whole of the Palestinian territory that was occupied in 1967— that is, Gaza plus the West Bank, including East Jerusalem– with or without minor and mutually agreed territorial adjustments with Israel.
Remember, the whole land of the WB plus Gaza still only constitutes around 23 percent of the land of historic (British mandate-era) Palestine– and considerably less, too, than the area of the Palestinian Arab state envisaged in the Partition Plan adopted by the UN back in 1947. So to the Palestinians– some millions of whom are refugees from inside the Israeli lines of 1948-49– ceding their claim to exercize political control over the other 78 percent of their ancesrtal homeland was already a big deal. It was a move that was hotly contested within the Palestinian arena when it was first proposed by the PLO leadership 30-plus years ago; and has periodically been contested since then, too.
Therefore, to expect that the Palestinians will at any point be “satisfied” with just Gaza alone– which contains just 1.3% of the land of Mandate-era Palestine– has always been a completely unrealistic proposition.
Add to that the fact that some 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees from inside 1948 Israel, whose demand for some satisfaction of their claims to ancestral properties that they and their forebears left behind during their conflict-driven flight from them in 1948 is currently completely ignored by Israel, and you’ll see that Sharon’s Gaza pullback is not destined to provide anything like a situation of longterm or even medium term stability.
Indeed, there is a distinct possibility that the pullout of Israeli soldiers and settlers might prove to be only a prelude to the establishment of an ugly free-fire zone inside Gaza, in which the IDF can escalate its bombings and incursions as much as it wants– without, at that point, any fear of the Palestinians making life a little hard for the settlers and Israeli troops stationed until now throughout the Strip.
I hope to heck that that is not the outcome (or one hidden intention) of the imminent pullback… But it is certainly a distinct possibility.
I guess one of the other important things I refer to in my column is the degree to which the western MSM has concerned itself with the settler-driven narrative of giving huge exposure to the “battle” inside Israeli society over the fate of some 8,500 Jewish Israelis whose residence inside occupied Gaza has anyhow all along been illegal under international law— while it has given little play at all to the effects of this pullout on what I called the “fates and dashed hopes” of the eight million or so Palestinians worldwide… By that, I meant their hopes for a viable and robust independent national state.
So there you have it… The western MSM thinks that 8,500 Jewish Israelis somehow count for more than eight million Palestinians??? To me, that really is an important part of what has been going on here– and of what Sharon and his friends in the Israeli settler movement have really “achieved”.
To which, all I can say is: “Human equality now!”

For many months now, the Palestinian villagers of Bil’in, west of Ramallah, have been organizing a variety of totally nonviolent mass actions to protest the devastating Separation Barrier that the Israelis have been building right up against their village, which cuts many of the villagers off from their families’ ancestral lands. They’ve faced various forms of brutality from the Israeli occupation forces along the way.
Last Thursday, April 28th, they had yet another action: a march toward bulldozers preparing the land for the Barrier. Some 1,000 Palestinians and 200 Israeli peace activists showed up. But that time, the Israelis launched a sinister new tactic: they had infiltrated some of their people, dressed as “Arabs”, into the body of protesters to act as agents provocateurs. These agents started throwing stones at the Israeli forces lined up in front of them– which then gave the Israelis “permission” to fire back…
According to the website of Uri Avnery’s “Gush Shalom” (Peace Bloc), the Israeli forces responded using “new means of riot control, such as specially painful plastic bullets covered with salt, pepper bombs and more.”
How did the participants in the peace action discover that the stone-throwers were agents? Easy. As soon as the guys started throwing stones, the organizers of the march moved toward them and reminded them that the rules of the action were “complete nonviolence; no stone-throwing!”
At which point the stone-throwers turned around and grabbed hold of the organizers who had approached them and dragged them across to the Israeli lines where they were arrested.
It is an outrage. In my book, a provocateur like that– and the commanders who organized the whole provocation maneuver– are entirely responsible for all the violence that they spark.
I’m not even sure if the men arrested last Thursday have been released yet.
On May 1, Electronic Intifada reported that they were still being held. Here’s what EI said about the April 24 action:

Continue reading “Israeli hawks worried by nonviolence now?”

Two phenomena– both intimately linked to the settlement-implantation project that was Ariel Sharon’s most serious commitment throughout most of the years since 1967– are now combining to undermine any chance that a viable two-state outcome might somehow be plucked from the dense demographic intermingling now existing in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
The first of these phenomena is the Israeli government’s determination to go ahead with constructing 3,500 new housing units in the crucial “E-1” area between East Jerusalem and the (already illegal) Israeli mega-settlement of Ma’ale Adumim– a decision that Ha’Aretz describes as a “provocation”.
The second is the growing prospect that militants among the angry settlers in both the West Bank and Gaza might now escalate their violence in protest against the government’s planned Gaza withdrawal to the level of something approaching an inter-Jewish civil war.
These two developments are connected– in a number of ways. One is that you can realistically assume that the Israeli government’s announcement at this time of its intention to proceed with the E-1 construction– plans for which have existed for several years already, but not hitherto been implemented– was designed in part to “reassure” the great bulk of Israeli settlers who live in the West Bank that the big plan to continue settlement-building there will continue, even after the withdrawal from Gaza.
Over 400,000 settlers live in the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, while only around 8,500 live in Gaza.
Another way in which the developments are connected is through the Israeli government’s long-sustained policy not just of driving and implementing the settlement-implantation policy on its own account (or, more precisely, that of US taxpayers)– but more than that, on numerous occasions in the past, Ariel Sharon and many other government members and government leaders have winked at, or even actively encouraged, the “excesses” committed by militants among the settlers thus implanted.
When settlers have set up illegal “outposts” outside the boundaries of existing settlements, those outposts rapidly gained access to government services and (most of them) became entirely regularized. Settlers have nearly always been allowed to carry their guns wherever they go: when they have used their weapons and their “ubermensch” status under Israeli law to attack, humiliate, harrass, and on occasion murder people from the area’s indigenous Palestinian population, the most they have generally received has been a slap on the wrist. In short, the settler militants have been indulged, subsidized, and generally treated like spoiled children in Israel’s otherwise much more law-abiding society– and this, apparently, as part of a sustained government policy.
Is it any surprise that now, when the government tries to say “No!” to these always-pampered adolescents, the adolescents should turn round in confusion and with some violence in their hearts?
(If settler violence does escalate, I fear for the security of Palestinians in geographically isolated places who are as likely as–or perhaps, even more likely than–the Israeli government forces to be the target of enraged settler mobs… In general, when social order breaks down, it is the weakest and most vulnerable people who end up getting hurt the most.)
I want to return, quickly, to the question of why the E-1 construction is so important. E-1 lies between East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim. MA is a settlement of (now) some 40,000 people that spreads eastward down the rocky hills toward the Jordan Valley. If E-1 is built, it will connect MA demographically to the great solid walls of Jewish-settler population that successive Israeli governments have already built around most of occupied East Jerusalem.
Given the present Israeli government’s clearly stated intention of continuing to hold on to all the large, Jewish-settled parts of the West Bank in any future peace settlement (an intention that received virtually total support from President Bush last April), proceeding with settlement construction on E-1 has two consequences:

(1) The portion of the West Bank left for the Palestinians becomes clearly cut into two by the E-1-MA axis, and
(2) The 150,000 or so Palestinians who have been able to cling to their families’ ancestral homes in East Jerusalem will be even more solidly cut off than at present from their family members and compatriots in both the northen West Bank and the southern West Bank.

At that point, all hopes that the Palestinians could win true national sovereignty over a land base that would have both the territorial and the political prerequisites of a viable national state would be dashed. All they could hope for at that point (and has it perhaps arrived already?) is a resource-poor, heavily politically constrained little “statelet”…
As we all know, the word for such an entity is “Bantustan”.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it here again: any viable two-state solution requires the establishment of two viable states. A situation that leads to the creation of one heavily armed, land-grabbing behemoth and one (or more) Bantustans is not viable and not stable.
Perhaps a delegation from the Verligte (enlightened) branch of South Africa’s Afrikaaner community could travel to Israel and start explaining some of those facts of life to people in the Israeli public and government?
Yes, the Afrikaaners had their own extremist bitter-enders. But thank G-d that finally–after 40 years of ghastly internal repression and numerous very damaging military adventures outside their borders– the vast majority of Afrikaaners came to understand that a continued reliance on colonial domination of the neighbors is not, in the modern world, a good path to ensuring any community’s wellbeing.
So far, a large majority of Jewish Israelis still continue to express clear support both for the withdrawal/evacuation from Gaza and for the establishment of a decent two-state outcome… But these relatively “Verligte” Israelis haven’t become nearly as strongly mobilized as the settler militants.
Meron Benvenisti thinks they are are not about to become so.
So what are the prospects? I would say, pretty bad. It looks to me as though the settler militants might actually succeed in hoisting Sharon on the petard of his own decades-long dedication to the expansion of the settlement project. Don’t get me wrong: I do, strongly, hope that Sharon can succeed– first, in his plan to withdraw all Israelis from Gaza (and please, may he make that a total withdrawal); and then, after that, in rapidly negotiating a decent, workable final-status outcome with Abu Mazen.
But does Sharon actually seek a “decent, workable outcome” with the Palestinians? The decision he has made most recently on E-1 indicates strongly that he does not.
If the Bush administration wants to work seriously for the success of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, it has to draw a quite unequivocal and unbreachable line in the sand over the E-1 construction plans. (It would also help a lot if Bush and his people started spelling out their own clear vision of what a viable and hope-filled two-state outcome would look like, and expressing their firm commitment to concluding the final-status talks that embody this vision by the end of 2005.)
But if the administration doesn’t establish the E-1 issue as a clear Red Line for US policy, then anything else it might do is just (pardon the phrase) pissing in the wind.

Pity the poor members of the Fateh bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council, who were elected to their positions at the height of post-Oslo optimism in January 1996 and will face re-election again this summer… If you were a Fateh legislator (as the majority of the PLC members have been), how on earth would you go about defending your movement’s decidedly lack-luster performance since 1996– on practically the whole range of issues, from diplomacy to the economy, to corruption, to the failure to ensure the people even the barest modicum of personal security?
Well, if you were a Fateh legislator you’d probably be working overtime right now to position yourself as a tough defender of the people’s interests, someone who is definitely not about to be duped by yet another Palestinian government made up of Arafat cronies and retreads…
So when PM Abu Alaa’ put together just such another government and presented it to the PLC earlier this week– no dice! (What a tin ear the guy has, eh?)
He tried again, yesterday, after rejigging a few names. Still no dice. It took Abu Mazen swooping in late last night to caucus with the Fateh legislators before they could all finally agree on a list.
Uber-“crony” Saeb Erakat got demoted. Nabil Shaath got shifted sideways. Dahlan did well. Surprisingly, one of the people from the earlier list who made it was Arafat nephew Nasser al-Kidwa, as new Foreign Minister. Actually, not so surprising, since by general agreement Kidwa has done a very competent job representing the PA/PLO at the UN.
Still, to me, the interesting thing was not the details of “who’s up” and “who’s down”, as much as the deft little show of political force that Abu Mazen put on, coming in at the moment of apparent crisis and doing the political work with the legislators that Abu Alaa’ had been unable or unwilling to do.
You’d think that Abu Alaa’ would have been a litttle swifter about seeing the need to meet the legislators at least part-way? After all, they will all be “on trial” together, as the Fateh movement, come the PLC elections in July… and Hamas has already given them some nasty surprises in two small rounds of municipal elections since December.
It’s great to see something like real national politics, with issues of re-electability and being held accountable, taking place among the Palestinians. Still, the whole process will only have real, lasting meaning if they get a truly viable chunk of land in which to conduct it. Does Abu Mazen (unlike his predecessor) have a winning strategy to win that for them? Not clear yet.

Today’s NYTimes has an intriguing interview with Abu Mazen that’s well worth reading. (I think you have to register to do so. Go thru Bugmenot.)
In digesting Abu Mazen’s comments at the top of the article, reporter Steve Erlanger wrote that, “The new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview this weekend that the war with the Israelis is effectively over”, a theme that was picked up in the headline.
I scanned eagerly down the text to find the exact way in which AM had worded this. But I found no actual quoted text that related to Erlanger’s attention-grabbing lede. What I did find was this:

Mr. Abbas said the war with the Israelis would be over “when the Israelis declare that they will comply with the agreement I made in Sharm el Sheik…”

… which I believe has a somewhat different, more conditional sense to it.
Never mind about that perplexing error, though. The AM remarks as quoted were significant enough.
He clearly signaled that his prime political focus will be on getting final-status negotiations started (and completed) as rapidly as possible:

Although the road map mentions the option of declaring a sovereign “Palestinian state within provisional borders” while talks continue about a final settlement, Mr. Abbas said, “If it is up to me, I will reject it.” Palestinians will see an interim solution as a trap, replacing a final settlement, and “peace will not prevail anymore in the region,” he said.
“So it’s better for us and for the Israelis to go directly to final status,” he said. “I told Mr. Sharon that it’s better for both sides to establish this back channel to deal with final status and go in parallel with the stages of the road map.”

This fits completely with the assessment that Rob Malley and Hussein Agha had made in this late January article (which was also in the NYRB.)
Erlanger evidently asked AM how Sharon had responded to the suggestion to open a back channel to work out the details on final-status issues. He reported that AM laughed, and said Sharon had not responded:

“But we’ll talk more about it. Maybe he didn’t like it. We have to repeat it more and more in our ongoing negotiations.”

In the lede, Erlanger also wrote that AM had said that :

the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is speaking “a different language” to the Palestinians. Mr. Sharon’s commitment to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle all Israeli settlements there and four in the West Bank, despite “how much pressure is on him from the Israeli Likud rightists,” Mr. Abbas said, “is a good sign to start with” on the road to real peace.
“And now he has a partner,” Mr. Abbas said.

Then later, this:

Was the armed intifada of the last four and a half years a mistake? “We cannot say it was a mistake,” he said. “But any war will have an end. And what is the end? To sit around the table and talk. And they [Hamas and Islamic Jihad] realize that this is the time to come to the table and talk and negotiate.”

For now, AM made quite clear that his immediate priority was to secure the release of as many of the Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel, as possible. (There have been big, Hamas-led demonstrations in Gaza about this, over the past week.)
Prisoner releases have also, of course, been a big issue inside nearly every other transformational negotiation in recent decades.
Up near the top of the piece, Erlanger has a little reference to AM having said that, “The Americans were talking to him ‘in a very helpful way’.” I did not, however, see that expanded anywhere later in the text.
I have to say, for myself, I haven’t spent any time with Abu Mazen face-to-face for many years now. But just the way he has been carrying himself in the past couple of months is extremely impressive. He suddenly seems to have significant new amounts of self-confidence. That, allied with his natural modesty and self-deprecating nature, seem to give him a relaxed way of being in which he doesn’t have to be shrill and accusatory in order to be firm and get his view across.
I like the way he talked about Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in general:

Continue reading “Abu Mazen in the NYT”

Go straight here. Read why Eyad Sarraj, a dedicated children’s psychiatrist, human rights activist, and the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, titled this op-ed piece, This time, I’m hopeful.
By the way, I hope you got the chance to go over and read my CSM column, Thursday. The title of that one was, Hope takes root, again, in Mideast.
Sarraj writes of a recent encounter he had with the press:

“Do you really trust Hamas to stop terror?” one of the journalists asked me. “Even when they announce that they are not bound by the agreement?”
To his obvious shock I replied, “Yes.”
I have spent many years observing Hamas at close range as it has grown from a small Islamic religious movement into a major army. I have been debating politics with its leaders and members for a long, long time. That experience leads me to believe that Hamas will very soon transform into a political party and will seriously contemplate taking over the government by democratic means.
There are sound reasons for my optimism. The first is that Hamas finally has an incentive to halt terrorist activity. For years, its raison d’etre has been military action. But Hamas has just achieved an astounding victory in municipal elections in the Gaza Strip, winning 70 percent of the seats in local councils. Fatah, the ruling party that had long dominated the political scene, was roundly defeated. Hamas has a guaranteed political future when it chooses to abandon the armed struggle.
Furthermore, close observers have noted important signs of change within Hamas over time. From remarks made by its spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, before his assassination last year, we understand that Hamas is now prepared to accept a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And as the recent elections showed, Hamas now participates fully in the democratic process — something that it once called a Western conspiracy, and even a sin.
Hamas is becoming more organized, more sophisticated and more confident in itself. For example, in the first intifada, Hamas was quick to charge people with collaboration with Israel and to kill them. That was a sign of insecurity. The Hamas of today pledges not to kill fellow Palestinians, but instead urges the Palestinian Authority to enforce its laws.

Sarraj says he sees reasons for optimism on the Israeli side, as well:

Continue reading “Eyad Sarraj: hopeful in Gaza”

This, from Imshin, made me laugh out loud today. Particularly the part where Al-Aqsa Brigades commander Zakariya Zubeidi is quoted calling “Arik” Sharon “a real man”.
Zubeidi continued:

When there was war in the Jenin (refugee) camp he [Sharon] came here to the headquarters himself. With a weapon, a helmet, everything. He was up front, like me. He killed us, yes, but I see him as a military commander. He

I just wrote a CSM column today, coming out Thursday. As I worked through it, I came to this amazing conclusion. How about if a stable peace between Israelis and Palestinians ends up getting made this year between an Israeli coalition headed by Sharon and a Palestinian coalition dominated by Hamas? (And under the sponsorship of, George W. Bush?)
Okay, let’s leave aside Bush for the present. Just think of the other two. Would that be a reciprocal “Nixon to China” move, or what?
(On the other hand, maybe for Mao, receiving Nixon was equally much of an ideological breakthrough? )
As I say in my column– the best folks to make peace with are, after all, your present enemies….

I went to hear Dennis Ross giving a presentation today. Dennis was the person who was in charge of the Palestinian-Israeli “file” for the first Prez Bush, and then for two terms of President Clinton. He is a fairly hard-headed person who pursues a manipulative and paternalistic approach to peacemaking, but I have to admit that a personal level I like the guy. When I was researching my book on the Syrian-Israeli peace talks of 1991-96, he was very helpful and gave me an intelligent and thoughtful interview for the project.
It was the way he talked about the Iranian nuclear program that provoked me into the thoughts that I blogged about here. But mainly, I’ve been thinking about what he said about the current opportunities in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
He was quite clear in arguing that this time around, unlike in 2003, the US should absolutely not let Abu Mazen down. “We have an enormous stake in having Abu Mazen show that his way ‘works’,” he said at one point. I agree.
Well, there were many parts of what Dennis said that I quite agreed with. But there were other aspects that, in different circumstances I would definitely have challenged. For example, he talked about the need to have some kind of a monitoring mechanism for any hudna (ceasefire) if it is to work– but was talking solely in terms of having a US institution do the monitoring.
Hey, what about the Quartet, Dennis?
Well, he did mention the possibility of the “Multi-National” Force now in Sinai having a role in some of the monitoring. But that force is nearly 100% American at this point.
Also, he said that, “Just about everybody knows what the shape of a workable deal looks like: it looks much like the Clinton Plan of late 2000.”
Well, yes, maybe…. But as he noted, Prez Bush is not on board that approach yet. Plus, even if he were, he would still need to have a clear strategy for how to bring Sharon (or another Israeli leader) around to it as well. Or even, how bring the Israelis to comply with Bush’s own baby, the ‘Road Map’, for starters. Dennis didn’t mention any of those real challenges…

Continue reading “Meanwhile in Palestine and Israel”