Category: Palestine 2006

Israeli aircraft sent two missiles into the offices of recently elected Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh in the wee hours of this morning (Sunday).
That report, by the AP’s Ravi Nessman, includes this:

After the airstrike on his office, Haniyeh met [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas for an hour, his office said, discussing the Israeli attacks and efforts to keep the government functioning despite the arrests. Haniyeh issued a statement calling for foreign intervention to stop the Israeli offensive.
“The international community must shoulder its responsibility,” he said.

Now, at a time when the Palestinian communities, their governmental institutions, and their vital infrastructure are being directly targeted by the Israeli forces is quite patently a time for national unity. And both these men seem to understand this.
It’s important to note, too, that the latest escalation in lethal violence– for most of which the Israeli government is reponsible– came in the immediate wake of Haniyeh’s Hamas and Abbas’s Fateh reaching a significant political agreement.
It’s true that militants on the Palestinian side also played a small part (along with the government of Israel) in fueling the current escalation, when they went ahead with the plan to attack Israeli soldiers by using the Gaza tunnel, and when others of them kidnaped and murdered a young settler in Gaza.
But why did the Israelis and their friends in the Bush administration “respond” to those incidents so massively?
Seemingly– and I believe this is more true of the Bushites than for the Israeli government– because they wanted to use this opportunity to try to take down the Haniyeh government.
Haaretz’s usually very well informed defense correspondent Aluf Benn has a piece in the paper today saying:

The United States government has laid down three rules for the current Israel Defense Forces operation in the Gaza Strip, according to senior sources in Jerusalem: No harming Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas; no harming civilians and avoid damaging infrastructure.

If this is indeed the case, then there is a notable omission from that list: It includes President Abbas (elected in January 2005) but does not include either PM Haniyeh (elected January 2006) or any other members of his team.
In other words– Washington is saying it’s okay to go after the Hamas people.
The rest of Benn’s piece is also interesting:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni will brief the cabinet on the international situation. Livni has been providing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with daily updates and is in touch with the UN secretary-general, the coordinator of foreign policy in the European Union and the foreign ministers of Italy, Spain and Qatar.
Foreign Ministry officials expressed satisfaction over the weekend with the results of their efforts to obtain international legitimacy for Israel’s operations.
…Overall, there is understanding for Israeli actions. The fact that Israel waited for some time after the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit before responding militarily and the fact that no Palestinian civilians have been killed in the operations have also helped.
Israel’s “public diplomacy” efforts, aimed at getting the Western media to support the IDF operations have also borne fruit.
The American newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post have published editorials that placed responsibility for the crisis on Hamas.

But at the end of the day, this isn’t “about” the WaPo or the NYT, is it? It’s about Israelis and Palestinians and how they can live together in some way in the land to which they both lay claim, in a way that is safe and supportive for all of them… For that to happen, you have to have an authoritative, politically legitimate leadership within each national community that is prepared to negotiate a fair final peace agreement with the leaders of the “other” side.
In the political agreement Hamas and Fateh reached last week, they came close to producing such a leadership on the Palestinian side.
But now, the Bushies want to torpedo that agreement by inciting Israel to go against Hamas?
Of course, it won’t work in the way that some of them seem to hope. Indeed, for the Bushites even to suggest, to anyone, that they favor the “protection” of Abbas’s life but not that of the elected Hamas leaders will act yet again within Palestinian public opinion to undercut whatever political legitimacy Abbas might still have left.
(Echoes of the story about the big financial help from the US government in the lead-up to the January election.)
But meanwhile, the Israeli government seems significantly more ready than the Bushites to use negotiations– as well as force– in their dealings with the Palestinians…
This is bizarrely reckless behavior by Washington. Especially at a time when 130,000 US troops are perched in very vulnerable positions, at the end of very vulnerable supply lines, within the frequently hostile environment of Iraq, for Washington even to consider that an escalation between Israelis and Palestinians might be in its interest is callous in the extreme. And not just to the Palestinians (whose infrastructure is indeed being hit on a continuing basis, despite the bleats of protest from Washington, and causing loss and serious degradation of the lives of civilians) but also to the US soldiers stationed in Iraq whose lives, unlike those of the family members of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc, are directly in harm’s way.

The situation in Gaza (and much of the West Bank) seems to be horrendous.
This UN OCHA report for June 30 provides some figures for the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli violence across the Gaza border:

Since 26 June Palestinians have fired 20 homemade rockets towards Israel and the IAF have conducted 50 air strikes. The IDF has resumed and intensified artillery shelling since 28 June firing over 500 shells in the last two days primarily on the north and eastern borders with Israel.

The report detailed the results of just two of those 50 air strikes:

An IAF air strike on 28 June destroyed all six transformers of the only domestic power supply plant in the Gaza Strip. This plant provided 43% of Gaza’s daily electricity supply (90 of the 210 megawatts). The remaining supply is provided by the Israel Electrical Corporation (IEC).
Approximately 700,000 Gazans living in the middle governorate, and in the western and southern parts of Gaza City were initially without electricity. Currently, the Gaza Electrical Distribution Company (GEDCO) is load-sharing the remaining electricity supply from Israel among Gaza’s 1.4 million population resulting in intermittent power to households across the Gaza Strip.
GEDCO estimates that it will take more than nine months to procure replacement transformers which need to be made to order. Alternative options of procurement within Egypt are being explored. The replacement cost of the six destroyed transformers is estimated by GEDCO at US$15 million.
… Most of the 132 water wells managed by the [Coastal Municipalitiesd Water Utility] were powered through the destroyed GEDCO national electrical grid. Given the reduced electricity supply, generators are being increasingly relied upon to power water wells, threatening sufficient daily water supply to Gazan households.
During an IAF air strike on a bridge between Nuseirat camp and Moghraga in the Gaza Strip on 28 June, a water pipeline serving approximately 155,000 inhabitants of Nuseirat, Bureij, Maghazi and Suweida communities was fractured. Water supply was completely cut, but according to the CMWU, the pipeline has now been repaired.
The CMWU is concerned that they will not have the materials to repair future damages to pipe networks arising from any further Israeli military actions. They have had a number of containers with equipment, spare parts and materials at Karni crossing for over three months waiting to enter the Gaza Strip…

Laila el-Haddad blogged briefly about the situation earlier this week:

I’ve just spoken to my grandmother in Khan Yunis, who confirmed the entire Strip has plunged into darkness, with people stocking up on food and supplies. The electricity of course has also been cut off in hospitals and clincs, though I’m not sure how long the generators can last.
Friends in Gaza City also tell us that terrorizing sonic boom attacks have resumed, stronger than before, full force, by low-flying jets breaking the sound barrier throughout the night over the civlian population- -illegal in Israel, the united States, and most all of the world.

Much or perhaps all of the massive escalation that Israel has been mounting over recent days has to do with the fact that Palestinian militants of the Popular Resistance Committees– including, according to some reports, some members of Hamas– were able last Sunday to undertake a rather daring operation in which they tunneled under the Gaza-Israel border, went through the tunnel in the wee hours, surprised a slumbering Israeli tank crew, killed two of them, and were able to capture a third gunner, Corporal Gil’ad Shalit. (Two of the Palestinians were killed during the operation.)
In the West Bank, meanwhile, another group of Palestinian militants kidnaped and killed a young, male Israeli settler and murdered him.
Israel’s use of massive force against the Palestinian areas (and its threat of considerable further force, plus a possibly broad ground incursion into Gaza) are designed to forcefully “persuade” the PA’s government to turn Shalit back over to them. However, the groups claiming to hold Shalit have said they will release him only in return for the release of 1,000 of the Palestinian prisoners now in Israeli jails and the cessation of Israel’s military campaign against Gaza.
This latest round of escalation has caused immense difficulties for all the main political leaders on both the Israeli and the Palestinian sides of the line. But most, perhaps, for Israeli PM Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Have Israel’s violent actions during the past week succeeded either in securing the safe release of Cpl. Shalit or, more broadly, in weakening Hamas’s PA government? No.
AP’s Diaa Hadid wrote this yesterday:

Israel hopes displays of military might will pressure Palestinians into turning against the Hamas-linked militants who abducted an Israeli soldier.
But the tactic could backfire — many Palestinians rallied around Hamas on Friday as Israel continued to bombard the Gaza Strip with warplanes and ground artillery.

He has some revealing quotes and vignettes to back up that conclusion (and one that shows that the rallying round Hamas is not unanimous.) Here are a couple of his vignettes:

Abu Kayed, a 50-year-old unemployed restaurant worker, tried to sell his camel to pay for food and rent. His family counts on help from Hamas-backed charities.
“Hamas is more popular now than it has ever been,” said Kayed, who has six children. “I don’t understand why all the world is crying out for one soldier. We Palestinians are treated like dust.”
Some Gazans, however, blamed Hamas for their troubles.
“I was expecting my situation to be very good” after the Israeli withdrawal, said Ismail el-Shaikh, a 22-year-old who works in a pizza parlor. “I thought the beaches would be open. I thought I would travel, and I expected more economic projects to enter Gaza.”
“That didn’t happen,” he added. “Hamas came instead and the situation is more difficult.”

As always, then, what is important in Gaza today is not the “mere” matter of military superiority, devastating though military technology can be to the lives and wellbeing of individuals. But as always, what is important in Gaza– as in US-occupied Iraq– is the way all this military superiority plays out at the political level.
(Clausewitz 101.)
So far, it doesn’t seem to be playing out very well for Israel– or, in Iraq, for the United States.

AP’s Steven Weizman reported today that

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday he had given the go ahead for a shipment of weapons to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose loyalists are engaged in bitter infighting with the militant Islamic Hamas.
… “I authorized last night the transfer of arms and ammunition to chairman Abu Mazen in order to strengthen his presidential guard, so he can strengthen his forces against Hamas,” Olmert said, referring to Abbas by his widely-used nickname.

This is quite tragic. Of course, if Olmert had really wanted to strengthen Pres. Abbas’s position vis-a-vis Hamas, he and the then-active Ariel Sharon had every opportunity to do so throughout all of 2005, when Abbas was the duly elected PA president and he had a pliant Fateh person, Abu Alaa’, as prime minister. For all that year (and until now) Abbas begged and beseeched Sharon and Olmert to give him something politically, in terms of meaningful peace negotiations or elements of the content thereof, that he could take to his people and show them thereby that his approach was fruitful for them.
But Sharon and Olmert steadfastly refused to give Abbas anything at all. Indeed, they left him looking quite impotent in front of his people.
And now they want to give him arms to fight Hamas?
What I would love to hear from Abu Mazen at this point is a clear statement “No! I don’t seek arms from Israel for this or any other purpose!” … And also, some real progress on the national reconciliation talks with the Hamas leadership…

The western media have given quite a lot of attention to the agreement reportedly concluded recently by leaders of the various political factions among the 7,000-plus Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. As far as I can see, the best and most complete text of this agreement in English seems to be this one, published yesterday by AP.
Most of the (western) commentary around this document has presented it as a strong political weapon in the hands of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of Fateh. Certainly, Abbas himself has tried to package it that way, giving Hamas a public “ultimatum” that he would give them ten days to accept the plan, and if they didn’t then he would submit it to popular referendum. (It is not even clear to me whether he has the right to organize such an ultimatum? Help, anyone?)
But I’ve read that AP version of the prisoners’ plan, and it seems to me its political content is at least as favorable to the Hamas view of the world as it is to Pres. Abbas’s– perhaps more so.
(In which case, his “threat” to submit the plan to a popular referendum might have just about the same degree of effectiveness as a politically coercive threat as Sen. Biden’s “threat” to the Iraqis that if they don’t shape up and do what he tells them then maybe the US will have to pull out of Iraq?)
Let’s look at that version of the agreement in some detail.
AP tells us that the signatories were, for fateh, Marwan Barghouthi, and then other named prisoner leaders from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the PFLP. Here’s what they tell us about the content:

1. The Palestinian people at home and in exile seek to liberate their land and realize their right of freedom, return and independence, and their right to self-determination, including their right to establish an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital on all the land occupied in 1967, guaranteeing the right of return for the refugees, liberating all the prisoners and detainees, drawing upon our people’s historic right in the land of our ancestors, the U.N. charter, international law, and what international legitimacy guarantees.

There is little there for Hamas to disagree with. They can agree to establishing a palestinian state within all the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967 fairly easily if there is no requirement there at all that they “recognize” or indeed say anything at all about Israel’s right to exist within the rest rest of the area of Mandate Palestine.
But of course, the content of that #1 clause is distinctly different from what Abbas concurred with during the Camp David and Taba negotiations, in the Geneva Initaitive, etc– in relation to all of which fora he had signaled his readiness to make significant concessions from this “historic” (and international-law-based) Palestinian position…

2. Expediting the realization of what was agreed upon in Cairo in March 2005 regarding developing and activating the role of the PLO, and the joining of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in this organization as the legitimate and sole representative of the Palestinian people wherever they exist; … the national interest constitutes that a new national council [PNC] be formed before the end of 2006 in a way that guarantees the representation of all the forces, factions, national and Islamic parties, and groups everywhere, all sectors, institutions, and personalities on the basis of proportional representation, attendance, and effectiveness in the political, struggle, social, and popular domains, and in protecting the PLO as a wide frontal framework, a comprehensive national coalition, and a national framework that assembles all Palestinians at home and abroad as a higher political reference.

This one could look like a Hamas concession, given Hamas’s long-held opposition to Fateh’s claim that the PLO is the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people. On the other hand, giving the PLO this leading role was already agreed during the early 2005 negotiations for the tahdi’eh, so this is not new. I’m not sure whether the idea of re-forming the PNC “on the basis of proportional representation, attendance, and effectiveness in the political, struggle, social, and popular domains” is new or not. But that clause would certainly tend to favor Hamas over the chronically ineffective Fateh.
Then we come to–

Continue reading “The Palestinian prisoners’ plan: whose political weapon?”

I got home from Kansas to find the heavy envelope containing my six copies of the edition of Boston Review that contains my big article on Hamas. Then today I checked their website, and it’s there too. Actually, here.
It’s an intriguing-looking issue altogether. I read the article on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood with interest, and look forward to reading the pieces on Venezuela and Argentina. Managing Editors Josh Cohen and Deb Chasman have been doing a super job of building the mag up into a really good, thoughtful place for consideration and discussion of policy issues both global and national. Josh is on the point of leaving MIT, which has hosted BR for many years now. He’s going to teach at Stanford instead– on the far side of the country. But I gather he will still keep his editorial role at BR, which is great. I admired his work on democratic theory long before I ever even knew he was an editor as well…
Back to my piece. The first half is my big wrap-up of the important points from the interviews and reporting I did during my Feb-March trip to Palestine and Israel. Haniyeh, Zahar, etc. Much (but not all) will be familiar to attentive JWN readers. In the second half, I did something new and just interviewed myself, teasing out in Q&A format some of the implications of the sea-change in Palestinian politics that the Hamas electoral victory in Januray represented.
I asked myself questions like:

Will the Hamas government be able to exert its control over the whole of the West Bank and Gaza, including the many lawless Fateh offshoots?
How will Israel and the international community react to Hamas’s attempt to establish a PA government?

I consider a lot more questions there, too. (All I can remember is that I wrote most of the piece on a long plane-trip. I can’t even remember which one.) Anyway, you should read the whole thing.
I wrote the first draft of the piece, oh my, maybe back in late March? Then it sat for a while, according to BR’s bimonthly publishing schedule; then it got tossed between me and an editor a couple of times, and updated… At the end of all that work I pleaded with Josh and Deb to be allowed to have a dateline put on it. Given how fast political developments move in Palestine, I wanted the “closing date” for updates to be quite clear.. So the dateline is May 1.
It still holds up pretty well, though May is now far advanced.
Anyway, I’ll finish this post now. Tomorrow I’ll have one about more current Palestinian developments.

Yesterday morning I went to a very interesting small conference jointly organized by the Woodrow Wilson International Center and the American Task Force on Palestine. Former PA Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabboo was speaking, and so was former PA Culture Minister Ziad Abu Amr. These are both smart, articulate people whom I’ve known for many years, so I was eager to hear their views– especially on current relationships between Fateh and Hamas.
(I see that the Fateh and Hamas prisoners have just negotiated a joint political platform, which was presented to Abu Mazen. It reportedly included acceptance of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas leaders not in pirson said they hadn’t seen it and couldn’t comment…Anyway, joint political discussions between the two leaderships are due to start in Ramallah soon.)
Ziad and Yasser both gave excellent presentations. Both men are much closer to Fateh than to Hamas, politically. But they both made impassioned pleas to the western nations to end the very harmful siege that has been imposed on the PA-held areas and on the Hamas government. Both said the move made by the Quartet Monday to create a Trust Fund to allow some external funding to go into the PA areas did not go near nearly far enough. Both also argued forcefully that pressure and exclusion would only strengthen the support for Hamas inside the PA areas and the region, and that a policy of political inclusion is the only way to force Hamas to test its political claims and reveal their weaknesses.
Both men pointed with anguish to the terrible, and very humiliating, treatment Pres. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has received at the hands of the Israelis and the Americans. They underlined that Hamas has now given Abu Mazen an explicit mandate to negotiate in the peace process, and that support for a negotiated peace leading to a viable two-state outcome remains high among Palestinians.
Ziad said at one point, “Hamas has made it clear that a two-state solution is fine, even though this doesn’t end their more ‘ideological’ or sentimental claim to the whole of the land– which is exactly the same as the Likud or Kadima people say.”
… Anyway, I certainly haven’t done justice there to the presentations those two gave. The other speakers included Nabil Amr, who is more of a Fateh apparatchik, Israeli journo Nahum Barnea, former Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval (who gave a speech worthy of the hardline territorial maximalist that he has always been; no change there), and former Foreign Ministers from Israel, Egypt ,and Jordan: Shlomo Ben-Ami, Ahmed Maher el-Said, and Marwan Muasher. Later, Saudi Ambassador to the US Prince Turki al-Faisal gave a “Keynote Address”.
I was particularly interested to hear how Ahmed Maher, Muasher, and Turki spoke about Hamas– since a big part of the US-Israeli campaign against Hamas thus far has concentrated on trying to get the Arab states to joint the economic siege on the Hamas-led government, while the Hamas ministers have had some (limited) success in breaking that aspect of the siege.
Ahmed Maher said he judged that clashes between Fateh and Hamas “are dangerous for the stability not just of the Palestinians but also for Israel and the whole region.” He argued that “Fateh should support– everyone should support– the incorporation of Hamas into the political system. We all need to understand we have no right to choose the leaders of the Palestinians.”
He noted that the US negotiated with the North Vietnamese even before there was a ceasefire. He urged the US to relaunch serious peace negotiations. “So maybe you can’t have direct negotiations, but you should have the Quartet playing an active role in mediation. Hamas has accepted a hudna. It has accepted to let Abu Mazen negotiate. There is something to build on.”
When Muasher spoke, he stressed that it was complete fallacy that Hamas’s electoral victory in January interrupted an ongoing peace process. “There was no peace process!” He also said it was a fallacy that Hamas was elected primarily on the basis of its anti-peace program. “People voted for Hamass mainly because they were dissatisfied with the way the PA had been running before then.” He said the implementation of the unilateral plan described by Olmert would result in the institutionalization of a Palestinian ghetto, and asked whether that could possibly be in Israel’s interest.
He and Prince Turki both laid a lot of stress on the value of the “Beirut Declaration” of 2002 and urged that pushing that forward– including, as an early step, winning Hamas’s support for it– would be the best way forward. (That declaration, which was supported by all the Arab states then and since calls for Israel’s withdrawal from all the land it gained control of in June 1967; the creation in the West Bank and Gaza of an independent Palestinian state; a “mutually agreed” resolution of the Palestinian refugee question on the basis of UN resolution 194; the complete ending of the state of hostility between Israel and all Arab states; the establishment by Arab states of normal peaceful relations with Israel; and the establishment of a regional security order.)
There was some discussion in the conference as to whether the “Road Map” declared by Pres. Bush in 2002 was dead or not. All (except Shoval) agreed that the target dates defined in it needed to be updated if it is to have any relevance. All the Arab speakers stressed the importance of negotiating a final resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even if implementation is in stages; and said that the indeterminacy of the Oslo approach to negoptiations had been a real weakness of it.
Anyway, more on this later…

In my piece on Hamas for Boston Review, the dateline for which was May 1, I had written that the continuation of the harshly damaging boycott on allowing any material or financial aid to reach the PA-held areas was most probably a function of the continuing (as of then) absence of a new government in Israel… And that most likely once a Kadima-led government had been formed and started to stabilize itself it would quietly put out the word to the Bush administration and the pro-Israelis in Congress to ease up on the boycott….
(This, in line with the way the US government became persuaded to change its views on talking with the PLO, back in 1993: In other words, only when the word goes out from the Israeli government– and in line with that, also from their allies in Washington’s powerful pro-Israel lobby– do the US administration and the leaders of the US Congress “dare” to change their policy. Which, on that earlier occasion, they did with truly breathtaking rapidity.)
So guess what. Today, suddenly we learn that a viciously anti-Palestinian piece of legislation called HR 4681, that had been proposed in the House of Representatives by the rightwing Islamophobe Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), has suddenly been taken off the floor and will not be considered this week.
Interesting, huh?
This, the same day that the WaPo published a piece from their Israel-Palestine correspondent Scott Wilson in which he writes,

A full collapse of the Palestinian Authority … could bring on a larger political and financial role for Israel in the Palestinian territories, which it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. That could complicate the agenda of Israel’s new government, which is preparing to evacuate isolated Jewish settlements in parts of the West Bank.
“Nobody needs the collapse of the Palestinian Authority,” a senior Israeli security official said in a recent briefing, speaking on condition of anonymity. “When I say nobody, I mean nobody.”

Last week, Marc Perelman wrote this in the NYC Jewish weekly, the Forward:

Efraim Halevy is no dove.
The bluntly speaking former Mossad chief, a key adviser to former prime minister Ariel Sharon who supported harsh retaliation against Palestinian terror, is a supporter of the Iraq War who issues dark warnings about the dramatic increase in Europe’s Muslim population. So, there were more than a few puzzled looks at a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations last week when Halevy spoke out about the need to engage Hamas.
Twice he warned his audience that “we’ll be seeing things we have not seen before,” a seeming allusion to potential talks between Israel and Hamas.

If you want to find out all of my reasoning on why I’d thought a Kadima-led government, once established, might start urging the US government to ease up on the suffocation of the PA, you’ll have to wait till the BR piece comes out. But you can find a foretaste of my theory of “parallel unilateralisms” if you go back and read this March 9 column on the topic
By the way, Ori Nir also had a good piece on the shaky international state of the boycott campaign in last week’s Forward. He wrote there:

Bush administration officials say that the pressure on Hamas will either bring about a gradual change in the movement’s belligerent positions or accelerate the collapse of its government. On the other hand, according to diplomatic sources in Washington, America’s European allies are not pressing for regime change in the territories.
“I have never come across anyone in Europe who wants to engineer the fall of Hamas’s government, both because it’s counterproductive and because we don’t want to tamper with a clean election,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior adviser for political and academic affairs to Washington’s European Commission Delegation.

Like I said, interesting days…
—
Addendum, Tuesday 10 p.m.:
So, this evening there was a surprise announcement from NYC that the Quartet members have all agreed to form a special “Trust Fund” to supply funding to the people of the PA areas. That AP piece says,

The new fund is supposed to administer only money for basic human needs. But both European and U.S. diplomats said that at some point it might be used to pay salaries for urgently needed doctors or teachers or for other services that the Hamas government otherwise would be expected to provide…

Did I call it or what?? Last Thursday, Israel formed its government. Today, just five days later, we see what that AP writer calls “a slight softening of the hard U.S. line against financial engagement with Hamas.”
It is true that this “Trust Fund” money is not supposed to go to its recipients through the Hamas government. But it will presumably go through NGOs (and also may help pay the salaries of government employees.) Regardless of the exact modalities in that regard, what seems indisputable is that if a decent level of efficient, non-currupt human services are to be provided to the Palestinians, then Hamas-affiliated networks will be centrally involved with that effort…
(As I wrote in this Salon article.)
Next up: Watch as the Hamas government takes Gaza out of the Paris Agreement and into a new economic relationship with the world through Egypt. Exiting from Israel’s economic stranglehold is a great way for the people of Gaza to get off the international welfare rolls…

Jim Wolfensohn, the former World Bank President who has worked for the past year as the representative of the “Quartet” in furthering Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, has stepped down.
As is clear from this transcript of the press conference he and Condi Rice gave yesterday, he is not being replaced.
So is the “Quartet” now going to disband?
The Quartet, which comprises the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia, was formed in 2002, in response to the crisis in Israeli-Palestinian relations of spring of that year. (That included Ariel Sharon’s extremely lethal assault on the institutions of the PA, and a number of Palestinian suicide bombers who blew up Israeli civilians and soldiers.)
Back then, remember, the political map of the world looked quite a bit different. The US stood at the apex of glopbal sympathies and global power. Under the Quartet arrangement, the other three parties all knowingly subordinated themselves to the Bush administration’s “leadership” in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking….
At the time, that “leadership” was manifested mainly in Washington’s generation of something called the “Road Map to Peace”, which had a number of fuzzy deadlines on the way to a quite indeterminate future… Regardless of the Road Map’s many evident flaws, however, the UN, EU, and Russia all rallied around it.
All the fuzzy deadlines spelled out in it have passed, of course. And though Sharon and his government paid a tiny amount of lip-service to the Road Map, they went ahead with their completely unilateral exercise in boundary-drawing, regardless. So the Road Map is, these days, yet another sad casualty of the international “community’s” decision to subordinate itself to the Bush administration on this matter.
RIP.
… Well, the Road Map may have been flawed from the very beginning. But Jim Wolfensohn is probably a very decent man. That much seems clear from the text of the Monday press conference. For example, he said,

[I]t would surprise me if one could win by getting all the kids out of school or starving the Palestinians. And I don’t think anyone in the Quartet believes that to be the policy, although sometimes it is made to appear that that’s what it is. I think that’s a losing gambit.

He did, of course, also say, right after that:

But I do think that the Palestinians need to understand that it is not business as usual. Here you have a Palestinian group which has said that it wants to destroy its neighbor. I think the Palestinians need to understand and to accept that the future has to be one where the issues, however difficult, need to be resolved, but that you don’t start by telling the other side that you’re going to shoot them. I find that quite understandable and I think the situation that we’re now in is to try and find our way through that situation to a point where there can be a negotiated solution that is acceptable to both sides.

Meanwhile, the reporters over at Bloomberg’s have gotten hold of the text of Wolfensohn’s final report to the Quartet. They wrote this today:

“Over the past few years, the international community has spent about $1 billion annually on assistance to the Palestinians, much of it directed at ensuring that credible and well-functioning Palestinian institutions are built,” according to Wolfensohn’s report, a copy of which was provided to Bloomberg News by e-mail. “Will we now simply abandon these goals?”
… The report includes a warning that failure to address Palestinian economic and government problems may cause “other Middle Eastern states and political organizations” to have a greater role in the region, with “regional repercussions.”

Well, I won’t be sorry to see the Quartet fall apart. It’s long past time that the United Nations– and indeed, also, the EU and Russia– returned to some respect for the requirements of international law, including international humanitarian law, regarding the Palestinian question. Enough pussyfooting around and kowtowing to the Great Imperial Master in Washington and its ally, Israel’s Machine of Military Coercion. Let’s see the international “community” develop some strong strategies to win an outcome in which both Israelis and Palestinians can flourish.
If international diplomacy is truly focused on that goal, in an evenhanded way, then the diplomats of the world will not find either Hamas or anyone else on the Palestinian side blocking that outcome, or resorting to further violence. But the structural violence of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank (and of Gaza’s access points) has to end.

On my third and last day in Amman I
had a number of good, quick
meetings…  Including one with Mouin Rabbani, a very smart guy who tracks
Palestinian developments for the International Crisis Group.  He suggested baldly that “some elements in Fateh” might now be
preparing to act as Palestinian “Contras”….

Well, I suppose I should be neither surprised nor shocked.  Back
when I was in Ramallah in late February, the veteran DFLP leader Abu
Laila (Qays Abdel-Kareem) told me he thought one reaction of the Fateh
leaders to the humiliation of the electoral defeat at the hands of
Hamas– and to the serious factionalizing and backbiting within their
own ranks that caused, accompanied, and followed that defeat– would
likely be to try to whip up an anti-Hamas campaign as a way, as much as
anything, of trying to mobilize their own followers and distract them
from the campaign to do real reform inside Fateh…  And yes,
there certainly are some big external funders and supporters out there
who are poised to support anything that might help to undermine
Hamas.  (Chiefly, the US government.)  So the combination of
those two factors could indeed add up to a Contras-type situation. If
anyone in Fateh is  desperate enough to go that far…

I’ve just been reading this well-reported
article on the post-election developments inside Fateh.  It’s by
Charmaine Seitz, who’s a
freelance journalist based in Jerusalem. She writes that the
series of Fateh leadership meetings held soon after the Hamas victory
identified two key goals for the party/movement: “
first,
to work for early elections that would cut
short the government’s usual four-year term, preferably in a matter of
months, and second, to ensure that Fatah wins the second time
around.” 

(You’ll note that these goals, including the timeline sketched therein,
already fit in with the “strategy” outlined by some pro-Israeli
Americans soon after the Hamas victory was announced.  And indeed,
as Seitz noted, they were predicated on an assumption that the Hamas
government would be met with an international boycott… 
A boycott orchestrated from where, I wonder?)

Seitz writes about the PA president and Fateh leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu
Mazen) that:

Continue reading “Fateh’s role after its electoral calamity”