Palestine 2007 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Tahdi’eh, and fading of two-state prospects

AP reports the following details about the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) deal that Hamas says it has now reached with Israel, with Egypt mediating:

In Ha’aretz, Amos Harel and Jack Khoury report that

The deal looks just about certain to go into effect.
It is notable that the latest steps of this negotiation were completed while Secretary of State Condi Rice was still in the region. The government of Israel has now spent some time engaging in “proximity talks” with both Hamas and Syria. Rice’s proteges inside both the Lebanese and Palestinian political systems have been engaging very seriously with, respectively Hizbullah and Hamas. And her proteges in Iraq have been engaging very seriously with Iran.
So the Quarantine Wall that Rice and Pres. Bush have been working hard to maintain around Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, and Iran now looks to be in very bad shape indeed.
We might (or by now, actually, might not) recall that just last November, Rice and Bush stage-managed a huge Mideast summit conference in Annapolis, Maryland, at which they pledged their very best efforts to try to win a final-status peace agreement between Israel and the Fateh leaders of the Palestinian Administration by the end of this year.
But the Israelis now apparently pay so little heed to Washington’s efforts that Rice’s visit to Israel this week passed almost unremarked by the Israeli media, according to the CSM’s Ilene Prusher.
If the Israeli side does indeed proceed with the tahdi’eh plan as publicized by Hamas, that is of course yet another serious setback for Fateh. Fateh is anyway, as noted above, engaged in its own effort to reconcile with Hamas. If Hamas has the tahdi’eh in its pocket, then that will strengthen its hands in those internal negotiations.
Conclusion of the tahdi’eh will also, more broadly, drive yet another political nail into the coffin of the two-state solution. Though goodness knows, thousands of other nails have already been driven into its coffin in recent months, with all the announcements from Israel of yet more contracts going out to build large numbers of new housing units in the colonial settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank.
As I wrote in the Boston Review article, what you may therefore see emerging in Israel/Palestinian instead of two states is two “entities”, with one of them being the Hamas-ruled, sub-state entity in Gaza and the other being an Israel that still finds itself unable to disentangle itself from the West Bank.
Over the longer haul, this is not a stable situation. But if Israelis are unable to withdraw from the settlements they have planted deep throughout the West Bank, then they must expect Palestinian claims inside 1948 Israel to grow stronger in response; and over time, a (binational) one-state outcome will likely become increasingly compelling…

Israel: a ceasefire with Hamas, or more militarism?

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer yesterday became the third member of the Israeli government– after Shaul Mofaz and Ami Ayalon– to support the idea of negotiations with Hamas over a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel. Ben-Eliezer also told Israel’s Army Radio that he thought Olmert might well be open to such a deal.
Like Mofaz, Ben-Eliezer is also a former high-ranking IDF officer and a former defense Minister. He was also, 2001-2002, leader of the Labour Party when it was in a coalition government led by Ariel Sharon. (Ayalon). For his part, Ayalon was the head of Israel’s naval forces and later head of the Shin Bet spy service. These men are notably not soft-‘n’-fuzzy peaceniks. Okay, well maybe Ayalon has become a bit of one over the ones. But neither Mofaz nor Ben-Eliezer is.
In an eery example of what the Indian peace mediator Dr. Ranabir Samaddar recently noted was a common pattern in negotiations between a government and a non-governmental group, several men in the IDF’s current leadership have been arguing that “Hamas is only open to negotiations because we have started hitting Gaza; therefore we should hit even harder!”
Mofaz is the only former-Likudnik Kadima Party person among the three pro-negotiations ministers; the other two are from Labour. Meanwhile the leader of the Labour Party, current defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Labour’s Methuselah-like State President (and former war-launching PM) Shimon Peres are reported to remain opposed to any negotiations with Hamas.
The question of whether there or are not ongoing ceasefire talks, and if so, whether they will lead anywhere, remains murky. From the Israeli side, the government has come under considerable pressure in recent months to “do something” about the primitive but occasionally damaging home-made rockets that (mainly non-Hamas) militants in Gaza have been launching against locations inside Israel– and about the 18-month holding by Gaza militants of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. But as PM Olmert and all of Israel’s military and political leadership learned in Lebanon in 2006, it is not easy to figure out what you can “do” against a determined, well organized population, to decisively and lastingly win you your desired political goals, if the only weapon you have is a bloated and mega-lethal military force.
Can Israel step up its air or naval attacks against Gaza? Not easily– and especially as long as Bush and Rice seem determined to keep alive the picture that they are “seriously engaged” in brokering a Palestinian-Israeli peace.
Can Israel do more to impose economic collective punishment on the people of Gaza? Not easily.
Can Israel send in the ground forces to rapidly “root out” all the Palestinian militants, and rescue Shalit in some kind of heroic, Entebbe-like way? Clearly not. If they had had any confidence they could use ground forces for either of these missions, they certainly would have done so a long time ago… Instead, the repeated, relatively small-scale ground-force raids they have made into Gaza (1) have not succeeded in either silencing the rocketeers or rescuing Shalit, and (2) have apparently persuaded the IDF’s leaders that a bigger ground-force raid would not succeed, either.
Also, as the IDF and political leaders seem clearly to judge at this point, mounting a complete physical re-occupation of the whole of Gaza at ground level would be several bridges too far for the IDF (and the country.) So the options available to Olmert and Co. seem to be limited to two:

Of course there are questions as to whether Hamas would be prepared to actually conclude, as opposed to talking about concluding, such an agreement, and also whether it would be capable of enforcing its side of any such deal.
On the latter question, the Crisis Group has recently published this very thorough report on one of the major issues in internal Gaza politics, that is the power-balance there between Hamas and the many local “families” or clans whose feuds and vendettas have often in recent years dominated the Strip’s (in-)security situation.
The inter-“family” violence remained particularly virulent in Gaza so long as those big clans there could try to maneuver between the Fateh and Hamas militias’ presence. (I wrote about this some here, in 2004.) Indeed, the ICG report also makes clear that Fateh played quite a large– if not always intentional– role in increasing the armament level of the families quite considerably. However, after the Hamas takeover in Gaza in June, Hamas moved quickly to try to contain and disarm the families. The report notes that these moves met with some resistance. But it also says, (p.16),

The stabilisation and pacification was widely welcomed by the public. The sight of clans receiving their come-uppance delighted many…

We could nlote the strong analogy here between Hamas’s anti-warlord activities in Gaza, and those launched by the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia in 2005-2006.
And now, we should also remember that it is almost exactly a year since the Bush administration worked actively with the Somali warlords and the government of neighboring Ethiopia to send in an Ethiopian military force to oust the ICU from power.
Since December 2006, the situation in Somalia, which had become somewhat stabilized under the ICU, has deteriorated catastrophically…
UN-OCHA reported yesterday that the number of people “displaced from Mogadishu since the end of October due to ongoing conflict between Ethiopian/Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces and anti-government elements” has now reached 265,000… Read the whole of that report
to learn more about the human costs suffered by some of the world’s most indigent and hardest-pressed communities when the US pursues its militarized (and warlord-supporting) form of anti-Islamism at their expense.

Hamas-Israeli ceasefire ahead?

AP’s Sarah el-Deeb has an intriguing story on the wire today with background about a ceasefire proposal that Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh transmitted Tuesday to a reporter for Israel’s Channel 2 t.v., Suleiman al-Shafi. This, while Haaretz reports today that Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz– who was previously first the IDF chief of staff and then briefly Defense Minister– has said publicly that, “Israel should not rule out indirect negotiations with Hamas in an effort to halt Qassam rocket fire at southern Israel.”
Interesting if the ceasefire overture should work out, huh? I shan’t hold my breath for it– yet. Defense Minister Ehud Barak still seems to be making some fairly hard-line noises about Gaza… But who knows?
Deeb writes:

For Israel’s government, the “ungovernability” of Gaza since PM Sharon undertook his intentionally un-negotiated withdrawal from the Strip in 2005 has always been a problem. (As, in Lebanon, after a slightly different form of ungovernability problem, after then-PM Barak undertook his intentionally un-negotiated withdrawal in 2000.)
In both cases, those Israeli leaders were arrogant enough to think that if, after having the IDF/IOF rule over great chunks of other people’s lands in a very brutal way for many years they just upped and pulled their troops out in an un-negotiated way, then they would thereafter be bound by none of the form of international commitments that would have been involved had they sought to negotiate their departure… And thus, they would retain considerable flexibility to be able to re-enter the evacuated terrain at will or use other violent methods against it in an attempt to quash the emergence of any bodies seeking revenge or even just some plain accountability for the many preceding years of suffering, or using violent means to continue to pursue some of their significant but still notably unaddressed grievances against Israel.
In Lebanon, that “un-negotiated withdrawal” tactic worked– to a degree. After the 2000 withdrawal a form of mutual deterrence rapidly emerged between Israel and the Hizbullah forces that had been responsible for making Israel’s lengthy occupation of the country too painful to be continued. But we can also note that, though there were never any formal negotiations between Israel and Hizbullah, in fact in both 1993 and 1996, Israel was only able to extricate itself from very damaging military positions inside Lebanon by concluding indirect ceasefires with Hizbullah that had been negotiated through the good offices of the governments of the US, Lebanon, and Syria.
Regarding Gaza, Israel has remained generally steadfastly opposed to concluding any kind of similar indirect negotiation with Hamas. Heck! It was even quite unwilling to do so with Pres. Mahmoud Abbas when he was still in charge of Gaza back in 2005.
Regarding Gaza, there is an additional question over how any indirect negotiations could be conducted. I highly doubt that Abu Mazen would want to be the conduit for them; but the Egyptian government might well be ready to do that.
As for the US, whose illustrious president is going to be visiting Israel very soon: what could we expect his attitude to be to the prospect of Israel engaging in some form of indirect negotiations with Hamas? Well, you could (re-)read the opening paragraphs of my recent Nation article on the need to talk to Hamas and Hizbullah to see what I think about that…

WaPo: two good pieces on (refugee) Palestinians

Every so often, the WaPo does some real good. They are doing so this weekend, with the publication of two articles that throw some much-needed light on the intense harm that the 60-year record of no-peace in the Middle East continues to inflict on the Palestinians.
The first of these is Scott Wilson’s piece of news reporting in today’s paper on some aspects of how the 1.4 million Palestinian residents of Gaza have been suffering under the brutally tight economic siege that Israel has maintained on them since– well, at some level, since 1967, though the screws tightened noticeably in 2000, then again in 2002, and even more so right after the Palestinian legislative elections of January 2006 gave a robust plurality to an organization not to Israel’s liking, namely Hamas.
Wilson focuses his reporting on the effects the siege has had on the deaf Palestinian children who receive teaching and some bare social services through the amazing organization Atfaluna (“Our children”). Long-time JWN readers may recall that for some years now, I have been involved with a group here in Virginia that helps to sell the beautiful craft products that Atfaluna’s people create. This fall, againk they were miraculously able to fulfill the order we had placed. But Wilson says they are fast running out of the necessary raw materials– as well as out of the batteries the kids need for their hearing-aids and many other basic services.
He also writes about dialysis patients at a nearby clinic having their sessions cut from three times a week to twice a week, about cancer patients dying because they are refused entry to Israeli hospitals, and about the anger of the Palestinians at the collective punishment to which they continue to be subjected– despite all the fine words voiced at the recent Annapolis conference.
(And yes, he gives quite appropriate coverage to the arguments made by Israeli officials as to why they have been maintaining this siege on Gaza. Does the WaPo always feel similarly obliged to cover the arguments that Palestinians make when they undertake actions that harm Israelis? I think not. But I’m glad Wilson does this here. It underlines the conundrum people and governments face when they take actions to deal with their own insecurities that– by increasing the insecurity of others– end up simply increasing and entrenching the security “threat” that they themselves face. Strategic analysts give this piece of elementary human-affairs logic the fancy name of “security dilemma.”)
Wilson quotes Gerry Shawa, the formidably effective and visionary American-Palestinian woman who runs Atfaluna as saying of the Israelis: “I hold each of them responsible, just as they obviously seem to hold all of us responsible…If the Israeli government really has the power and the desire to change, well, this is pushing me in exactly the opposite way — over the edge.”
… The second good WaPo piece is this heavily reported piece of “commentary” from Nir Rosen about the situation of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. It will be in Sunday’s paper, but is already available on the web.
Nir describes some of the scenes he witnessed over the summer in and around the refugee camp at Nahr al-Bared, near the north Lebanese city of Tripoli, at the time when the Lebanese army was bombarding the whole camp in its brutal campaign against the extremists of a splinter group called “Fateh al-Islam.”
He wrote:

Nir also writes about the broad political background to this story:

This is a great piece of political reporting by someone who most certainly understands everything that is writing about. Kudos to Nir, and to the editor of the WaPo’s weekly “Outlook” section of (mainly) political commentary for publishing it.
For my part, I would add simply that these two articles both underscore the great importance of making sure that the issue of the Palestinian refugees gets adequately dealt with during the whole of the post-Annapolis peace negotiations, and that it is not simply left to the end, which was one of the major reasons for the failure of all previous peace efforts. A strong numerical majority of the Palestinian people have been forced by the Israelis or others to live either as exiles completely outside their ancestral homeland, or as refugees from their ancestral homes though still technically within the boundaries of Mandate Palestine, or both. (Somewhere around 80% of the population of Gaza is made up of refugees, so it is likely that a high proportion of the kids in Atfaluna’s programs there come from refugee families.)
There is no way, politically, that any final peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians can “stick” and provide a sustainable base for longterm peace if the claims of the refugee Palestinians are not addressed in a way that the vast majority of these chronically mistreated people judge to be satisfactory. This is not an impossible task– though it gets harder by the day, and will continue to do so as long as Israel continues to seize and hold onto control of additional portions of the West Bank area that, along with seriously over-crowded Gaza, is the only area left in which to base the independent state that was promised to the Palestinian Arabs back in 1947.
I wrote recently on JWN about one effort, made by something called the “Aix Group”, to craft a mutually acceptable resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue. Go check that out– and some of the other points I made in that blog post.

Washington losing struggle for Abu Mazen’s soul?

Al-Hayat had an interesting report (in Arabic there) today saying that leadership sources in Hamas confirm that they have reached a “memorandum of understanding” with Fateh in preparation for the imminent resumption of dialogue between the two movements.
Does this look like some major steps back toward the Mecca Agreement for peaceful power-sharing between the two Palestinian movements that was achieved with Saudi mediation (and financial backing) back in February? Not surprising if it does, since Hamas’s website reports today that Hamas’s Damascus-based overall leader Khaled Mishaal has now traveled to the Saudi capital “to discuss means of restoring Palestinian national dialogue.”
To me, this indicates that the Saudis are most likely pretty disappointed with the Annapolis meeting of November 27 and the notable lack of any serious US engagement with the peacemaking at and since that meeting
When Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal attended Annapolis, from his country’s perspective it was making a huge up-front concession to the Israelis by agreeing to be there in the negotiating room with them before Israel has even done anything to announce a clear commitment to undertake significant withdrawals from the Arab territories it has occupied since 1967. The Saudis also went out on a limb, and probably paid quite a lot of hard cash, to help “persuade” the Syrians and other Arab governments to participate in Annapolis. (Though they were noticeably unable to persuade the Iraqis or Kuwaitis, both of which governments no doubt felt that Iran’s close proximity and power and strongly expressed opposition to Annapolis outweighed any Saudi urgings that they should attend.)
The Bush administration responded to the goodwill Riyadh had shown in the run-up to Annapolis by (a) showing blatant disrespect to the Syrians at Annapolis, and (b) doing nothing visible at all to push the peace process any further forward after the confab. Indeed, Pres. Bush has said nothing further in public about Israeli-Arab peacemaking since about noon on Nov. 28. As though his job has now been done?
For its part, Israel responded to Annapolis by announcing its decision to build 300 additional settler-only housing units in the occupied Arab land of Jebel Abu Ghneim, which it renamed Har Homa. Condi Rice responded to questions about that announcement that by bleating sheepishly that she had “sought further clarifications from the Israelis” regarding their plans.
Where is the vision? Where is the commitment? Where is the leadership that is so sorely needed if the peacemaking that was launched at Annapolis is ever to succeed?
Not visible in Washington.
So the Saudis seem to have returned to their original Plan A, and to be retracing the steps they took back in January to craft a new– hopefully more sustainable– Fateh-Hamas agreement.
Some in Washington may be very angry with this attempt. For my part, I think having a unified Palestinian body politic is the only way there is to then move forward to achieving a sustainable Palestinian-Israeli agreement. A politically very weak Abu Mazen (1) will not be strong enough in the negotiations with Israel to withstand or do anything to counter the overbearing demands that the Israelis continue to place on him (with a lot of help from Washington and lapdog-in-chief Tony Blair), and (2) will not be strong enough within the Palestinian community to be able to make any agreement he should happen to reach with Israel “stick.”
A unified Palestinian movement could strengthen its position considerably through the sustained pursuit of massive non-violent civil action in defense of Palestinian rights. That takes vision, discipline, and above all national unity. If Fateh and Hamas can reach a strong agreement on how to proceed, between them they could mobilize tremendous amounts of support from governments and peoples around the world as a way to counter Israel’s reliance on (a) military and administrative domination, and (b) its tight links with some power centers in Washington. And between them, if they remain united, Hamas and Fateh could make any agreement they reach with Israel stick, and stick well.
Readers may want to go back and read this JWN post from late June (shortly after the Fateh-Hamas rift over Gaza), titled “Ten reasons to talk to Hamas,” and this article I had in The Nation in early November on the need to engage politically with both Hamas and Hizbullah.
Former Israeli spy chief Efraim Halevy and former US Secretary of State Colin Powell are just two of the prominent figures internationally who now argue that Hamas should be engaged with politically and not only through the barrel of a gun.
—
Update Monday morning:
Haaretz is reporting that “Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s adviser Ahmed Yousuf told Haaretz that he sent a rare letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declaring that Hamas was interested in opening dialogue with the U.S. and the European Union.” On another page, Haaretz carries what it describes as the text of Yousuf’s “Open Letter”, though the provenance of this text is not clear and it is not on Hamas’s own main English-language website or, from a quick glance, their Arabic site.

Olmert pokes finger in Annapolis’s eye

In a clear challenge to the agreements reached in Annapolis, the Israeli government yesterday announced its plan to build more than 300 new homes in the east Jerusalem settlement of Har Homa. At Annapolis, the two parties reaffirmed their agreement to comply with the steps laid out by the 2002 Road Map while they negotiate their final peace agreement. One of the provisions of the Road Map is a halt to building in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
According to that AP news report linked to there Olmert’s spokesman, Mark Regev, said yesterday,

“Israel makes a clear distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem… Israel has never made a commitment to limit our sovereignty in Jerusalem. Implementation of the first phase of the road map does not apply to Jerusalem.”

Well, Israel may make a “clear distinction” between the West Bank and Jerusalem, but the rest of the world does not. The rest of the world considers East Jerusalem to be part of the West Bank and, like the rest of the West Bank, to be occupied territory.
Therefore, the moves that successive Israeli governments have taken over the years to (1) unilaterally expand the boundaries of Jerusalem; (2) implant hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers– and because of the role of various all-Jewish Quangos in this process, these settlers are only Jewish Israelis– into new housing developments built exclusively for them there; (3) implant several headquarters complexes for Israeli government bodies; and (4) re-define the Jews-only settlements in East Jerusalem as merely “neighborhoods”, like any other neighborhoods in a city– all these steps have been illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
In the context of a peace settlement the base-line position in international law is that all these steps should be reversed. If Israel wants to not reverse any of them, it should negotiate that non-reversal with the Palestinians and any other interested parties.
(In the UN Partition Plan of 1947, the whole of an even larger Jerusalem– east and west– was supposed to have been a special international zone, being administered as a “separate body” from both the Jewish state and the Arab state planned for Mandate Palestine.)
The US government’s position on the status of East Jerusalem has become increasingly slippery over the years. Several recent US presidents, including Bill Clinton, have said they don’t necessarily see settlement-building in East Jerusalem as illegal, though US presidential and State Department spokespeople usually bend themselves into pretzels rather than give a definitive answer on this question. And of course, in his infamous April 2004 letter, Pres. G.W. Bush told PM Sharon that he thought the large existing settlement blocs in the West Bank should stay under Israeli control. (And by extension that could be thought to apply also to the E. Jerusalem settlements.)
In taking these increasingly pro-Israeli positions on Jerusalem, US presidents have nearly always been under strong pressure from the US Congress, where AIPAC and its associated group of pro-Israeli lobbying groups have had great success in “selling” the idea that the expanded Greater Jerusalem should remain under Israeli control forever. As, too, that the US administration should move its embassy in Israel which, like the embassies of nearly all the other governments in the world has always been “diplomatically” been located in Tel Aviv, to a site in East Jerusalem.
But the last time I checked, neither the US Congress nor the US administration had any mandate from the rest of the international community to be able to issue authoritative judgments on the status of Jerusalem. Am I wrong?
… And in related news, President Bush has announced that he will make a trip to the Middle East in January, and he is highly likely to visit both Israel and Palestine while he is there… And the Israeli military has announced it has completed the planning for a “large offensive” in Gaza.
Will all these things be happening at the same time? Will the Israelis stage a repeat in Gaza of their stunningly “successful” (irony alert there, folks!) July 2006 assault against Hizbullah in Lebanon? Will Bush use his visit to the region to urge the international community, as Rice did in July 2006, to “give Israel the time it needs to complete the job”?
God help the people of Gaza and God help all of us if this is what is planned. An all-out Israeli assault on Gaza would sink the few remaining hopes any of us has that the “two-state” outcome aimed for at Annapolis will ever come to pass.

My CSM op-ed on post-Annapolis diplomacy

Today’s Christian Science Monitor carries the op-ed I wrote (last Friday morning) about the post-Annapolis diplomacy. The title is For Mideast peace, think bigger; Regional stability involves more than the Israelis and Palestinians. You can also find it here.
Specifically, I call in the piece for:

Regarding the Syrian-Israeli track– an issue I have worked on a lot over the years, in addition to my work on Palestinian-Israeli issues– I give three reasons why it is important to pay attention to that track, as well as the Palestinian one.
Regarding the international dimension, even as I was writing the piece Friday morning, US Ambassador to the UN Zal Khalilzad was being forced humiliatingly to withdraw the text of a Security Council resolution he had proposed the night before, that would have expressed the SC’s “support” for the Annapolis process. That was a strong indication that the (anti-UN, anti-Syrian) hardliners in Dick Cheney’s office were muscling in on the decisionmaking in Washington and showing their willingness to ride roughshod over the decisions and strategies adopted by Secretary of State Rice and her people, of whom Khalilzad is one.
Not good news, to say the least.
Another very worrying indicator is that ever since Olmert and Abbas had their final photo-op at the White House Wednesday, Bush himself has done little or nothing to sustain the pro-peace momentum created by the Annapolis confab. I was really shocked, for example, to see that his weekly radio address Saturday made zero mention of it. That is unconscionable!
If I were Condi, I would resign. But I shan’t be holding my breath for that. After all, one of her main mentors was that perennial “good soldier” Colin Powell…
In this JWN post that I wrote on the day of Annapolis itself (11/27), I wrote: “with the broad turnout [Bush] succeeded mainly in creating extra pressure on his own administration to perform effectively in the diplomacy started in Annapolis. All those invitees are all now, to one degree or another, invested in the process… ” I also speculated that the time might well soon come when the other members of the “Quartet”, who at Annapolis itself were consigned to the role merely of a praise-singing Greek Chorus, would seek a much more active role for themselves in the diplomacy.
Those other three Quartet members are : Russia, the EU, and the UN.
Russia– where President Putin won a strong victory in yesterday’s referendum– is planning to host the next substantive political follow-up to the Annapolis confab, in Moscow, early next year. That important Nov. 29 news report from Robin Wright and Michael Abramowitz notes that the Syrians and Russians are hoping to revive the Syrian-Israeli track at that meeting. (Note also, this report on the growing Russian role, from Haaretz’s Ben Caspit.)
In Washington, Cheney and the neocon ultras who surround him– and also Elliott Abrams– are known to be particularly hostile to any move that might loosen the isolation in which they want to keep both Syria and Iran trapped. (Remember that in the iconic neocon document on the Middle East, “A Clean Break” (1996), Syria was defined as the central target.)
Regarding the Annapolis and post-Annapolis peace diplomacy in general, I was extremely skeptical during the lead-up that the gathering there would be anything more than a content-free photo op. And indeed, I still entertain the strong concern that that may, indeed, be what George Bush and his vice-president still want Annapolis to be.
However, the breadth of the participation in Annapolis caught my attention and fascinated me. It really did a lot to reframe “Annapolis” as being the very last chance Washington has to make good on 33 unbroken years of promises that Washington, and Washington alone, is the power capable of brokering a sustainable Israeli-Arab peace.
In my CSM piece, I noted that,

All major world powers today have large stakes in the [Arab-Israeli] region. They need the peacemaking to succeed. If Bush’s current peace gamble fails, that will seriously dent America’s power and standing around the whole world.

Of course, Washington’s international standing has already been dented very seriously indeed by its fatal strategic over-reach in Iraq. But a widely watched and understood demonstration of its failure to “deliver” on Israeli-Arab peace would certainly continue that process.
The world’s non-US powers are meanwhile in something of a bind. They need the Middle East not to erupt into any further chaos and bloodshed. They need a successful and sustainable settlement of all strands of the Israeli-Arab conflict. They are not, in any conceivable combination, capable of achieving this on their own, without the cooperation of the US. But the US refuses to cooperate with them and continues, arrogantly, to arrogate to itself the “right” to monopolize the post-Annapolis diplomacy. (As spelled out in the final para of the “Joint Understanding” reached by Israel and the PA at Annapolis.)
In my op-ed, I concluded by writing: “The stakes could not be higher. The world watches, and hopes.” Perhaps I should have added that if those hopes are rebuffed, then the non-US powers will most likely soon start planning their own alternative approach.

After Annapolis: Bring the Syrians back in!

The bicycle is going forward, over rough ground, and very shakily. It might lose momentum at any time. And then, how many of those now perched atop it will tumble to the ground?
Or, is there anything those now aboard it can do to give it some real forward momentum?
This is an interesting question. George Bush may have thought that, by succeeding in getting so many participants to come to Annapolis, he would put added pressure on the Israelis and Palestinians– well, especially the Palestinians– to make the concessions that would be needed for a diplomatic success.
He may have thought that by getting such a broad turnout he would succeed in increasing the diplomatic isolation of Iran.
I think, though, that with the broad turnout he succeeded mainly in creating extra pressure on his own administration to perform effectively in the diplomacy started in Annapolis. All those invitees are all now, to one degree or another, invested in the process. (In the case of the Saudis, I would say that in both cash and political terms, they are are, actually, invested very heavily in it at this point.)
But the Brits, the Russians, the Chinese (as a permanent member of the UNSC), the EU, and the UN itself are all also heavily invested in the post-Annapolis “process”. And not, mainly, by virtue of their having gone to the confab itself, though that is definitely a part of it. But also by virtue of all those parties having very strong interests of their own in Middle Eastern stability, and the fact that post-Annapolis is now “the only game in town” for defusing and resolving the potentially extremely destabilizing Israeli-Palestinian crisis… And it is, as is now quite clear, a very high-stakes game indeed. As of today, the goal has been defined: a final-status agreement between Israel and Palestine before the end of 2008.
So the Bush administration, as the party that prepared, stage-managed, and hosted this gathering, is now in the hot seat. And if Washington cannot perform well in the diplomatic tasks ahead of it, then those other parties, who may have been invited along to Annapolis to play the role of Greek Chorus, may well come to the conclusion that the stage director is wrecking the play– and is causing grievous harm to their own interests in the process– and they, or a sub-group of them may feel they need to move in and take over the show.
This peacemaking business will certainly not be easy, whoever does it. Of course, the rifts within the Palestinian community are huge. (And so will be the rifts inside Israel if the government moves significantly towards the kind of “painful compromises” that Olmert talked about in his speech.)
One thing I really wish Bush had done that could have made a significant difference in the dynamic of the negotiation was to spell out clearly and compellingly that the goal of this process is to have an Israel that is– finally!– at peace with all of its neighbors… an Israel that is no longer threatened by invasion but has straightforward and constructive working relations with not just all its neighbors but also all the Arab states beyond them, too. This is, I know, a good part of the intention of the Arab Peace Plan of 2002. But it corresponds to a much older and deeper dynamic, too: the idea that an Israel that is at peace with all its Arab-state neighbors will have a lot more of the self-confidence required to make those “painful concessions” to the Palestinians who are currently lodged with their necks under the IDF’s boots.
That’s why I think it is a huge pity that Bush was so peremptory and dismissive of the Syrians at Annapolis. In fact, he didn’t even mention Syria in his address, and neither did Olmert or Abu Mazen. [Correction, Wed. evening: Abu Mazen actually did mention the need to end the occupation of Syrian Golan, and the need for “Arab-Israeli” peace as well as Palestinian-Israeli peace. Sorry about my too-fast reading of it last night. ~HC] Olmert mentioned “normalization” with Arab states– but he didn’t mention the vital other part of that equation, which is a successfully negotiated final peace agreement with all of Israel’s Arab neighbors, and Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied lands in Syria and Lebanon, as well as Palestine.
If a comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace is to be reached, that requires active engagement on the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese tracks. And Syria is not a small or weak power. It has considerable influence inside the political communities in both Lebanon and Palestine. Bringing the Syrians fully into the process at Annapolis would have served the cause of peacemaking on all three of the remaining “tracks” and would have transformed the political dynamics of the whole Near East.
By contrast, tricking the Syrians into coming to Annapolis– which is what it looks like right now– and then giving them the cold shoulder once they got there will end up serving nobody’s interests. Doing that may well end up riling a number of the other “big powers” who were represented at Annapolis. And it almost certainly portends further trouble down the road for the hard-pressed people of Lebanon.
I would love for someone to explain to me why the idea of a truly comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, one that ends the state of war that has existed for decades now between Israel and all three of these Arab neighbors, was not enthusiastically embraced and proclaimed in Annapolis by Bush (or, come to that, by either Olmert or Abu Mazen). Does this idea– which seems so inspiring and so powerful to me– somehow induce fear in the members of the Bush administration?
I suppose some people might say, “Well, it’s going to be hard enough to get a decent peace between just the Israelis and Palestinians– but trying to get an Israeli-Syrian peace and deal with the hornet’s nest of Lebanon all at the same time would make the task impossible!” But I think that reaction seriously mis-states the dynamic at work here, which I see roughly in the way I outlined above. Remember, too, that (1) the Syrians have tremendous power– if they are thus motivated–to help bring aboard the peace train (or bike, to keep my metaphors somewhat straight here) numerous Palestinians and Lebanese who would otherwise be inclined to oppose the idea of concluding a final peace agreement with Israel. And (2) just the broad reframing of the whole peace project, by itself– the proclamation that “the goal here is to end the state of war in this whole region and to build it up into a region in which everyone has the chance to live and to thrive in peace”– could have a powerful political effect in communities exhausted and drained by so many decades of war. Especially if it is the whole world, except Iran, who is saying this.
The “vision thing”: that’s what Pres. Bush the Elder used to talk about sometimes, in fairly derisive terms. But I don’t think this particular peace bicycle has any chance of moving forward without it. So if the bike collapses shakily to the ground, who will be the ones falling off?

Condi’s conversion, Bush, etc

Two fascinating pieces in today’s NYT.
This one by Elisabeth Bumiller chronicles Condi rice’s conversion from being a big Israeli-Arab negotio-skeptic to now being the cheerleader for Bush’s extremely belated venture into peacemaking there.
After describing how derisive both Bush and Rice were back in 2001 of the whole idea of the US having an active role in israeli-Palestinian mediating, Bumiller wrote,

When Ms. Rice became secretary of state in the second term, she told Mr. Bush in a long conversation at Camp David the weekend after the 2004 election that her priority would have to be progress in the Middle East. It was a turning point in more ways than one; Mr. Arafat died a few days later. Although Ms. Rice said in an interview that she had set no conditions when she took the job, her aides said that she had known that her relationship with the president would give her far greater influence to push an agenda, including peacemaking in the Middle East, than Mr. Powell’s…

Her first two major judgment calls in the Palestinian arena showed mainly her lack of ability to judge it. Those were (1) the active support she gave to Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and (2) the active support she gave to the Palestinian elections of January 2006. In the first case, the fact that the Israeli withdrawal was unilateral meant that (a) it did nothing to establish a negotiating-type relationship between Sharon and Abu Mazen, (b) Israel remained quite free from any negotiated-and-agreed commitments to the Palestinians, so it retained a free hand to continue very oppressive and sometimes lethal policies in both the West bank and Gaza, and (c) it weakened Abu Mazen politically by making him look irrelevant to Palestinians.
How many of those outcomes were foreseen or intended by Rice, I wonder?
Regarding the Palestinian elections, I think she made completely the right decision– but she totally misjudged the outcome, which was a rout for Fateh. (In part, because of factor ‘c’ above.) And then, instead of swallowing hard and dealing with the outcome, she backed Olmert in his pursuit of extremely punitive policies against the Palestinians.
And then, in the summer of 2006, she (or her boss?) made decisions regarding Israel’s lethal assault against Lebanon that were both ethically horrendous and very counter-productive from a policy point of view.
So we cannot at this point say that her track record as Bush’s chief manager on Israeli-Arab affairs has been a good one.
Bumiller also has this description of the motivations for Condi’s current activism in the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace:

I am really surprised and saddened to see that her aides apparently didn’t say a word there about Condi finally realizing that peace is an extremely necessary and valuable thing for both Israelis and Palestinians to work for… They just seem to be presenting her as this machiavellian manipulator.
(Bumiller also has a really hackneyed quote from previous longtime– and failed– “peace processor” Dennis Ross in which he says, “This administration has too often engaged in stagecraft, not statecraft.” Like Dennis was any good at statecraft during all those years he presided over a string of failed negotiations?? Note that I exempt from that criticism the work Dennis did in helping prepare the Madrid conference of 1991– but at that point, he was acting mainly as a gofer for Jim Baker, rather than running the show himself.)
The second interesting NYT piece is also by Bumiller. It is this short-ish exploration of Rice’s relationship with Bush. Turns out she tries to be his nanny, too, not just the nanny to the whole of the rest of the world… and he sort of jokes about the extent to which she “tells” him what to do. It sounds like a bizarre and very unhealthy way to run a country.
And finally, we have this, from the president himself when he was meeting with Abu Mazen earlier today:

The United States cannot impose our vision, but we can help facilitate.

That is such nonsense! There is a tremendous amount the US could do, both by working other nations in the security Council and by re-structuring the pattern of the incentives and disincentives it gives to Israelis and Palestinians (i.e. carrots and sticks), in order to push for the US’s own reading of what is a just, legitimate, and sustainable outcome between Israelis and Palestinians. The US is a great power, for goodness’ sake, and seldom holds back from telling any other country in the world how to run its business.
But in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, all Bush aspires to do is to “help facilitate” the negotiations between these two extremely mismatched parties.
If he sticks with this approach, and if the adults in the international community don’t step in and take the process over from him as he falters, then this Annapolis-launched process will be going, very dangerously, nowhere.
Why can’t he simply say, forthrightly and frankly, that the US has its own strong interests in the speedy attainment of a fair and sustainable final peace agreement– all of which is true– and will be working hard with all concerned parties to achieve that?

Annapolis: Saudi and Palestinian dimensions

Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal said today in Cairo that he will attend the Annapolis meeting. I think this is a good decision. It will allow him to give the extremely helpful, Saudi-initiated “Arab Peace Plan of 2002” a good and serious presentation there.
That AP story by Salah Nasrawi also notes that Prince Saud said that at Annapolis he “would not take part in a ‘theatrical show,’ such as handshakes with Israeli officials, saying the gathering must make serious progress.” That is fine, too. Under his plan, the Arab states would all engage in full normalization of relations with Israel simultaneously with Israel undertaking its withdrawal from all (or nearly all) the lands its army occupied in 1967. (Many Israelis and their friends want to have this recognition/normalization performed upfront. Of course they might want that. But I can’t see why they would reasonably believe that anyone else would support that request.)
Regarding the core issues of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, I see that Amira Hass has another piece in Haaretz today in which she explains why many Palestinians consider the PA’s negotiating stance to be a weak, overly appeasing one. I think this is a further commentary on the Nov. 17th negotiating Draft (note that’s a PDF there) that she had received recently– the one in which the Israeli and Palestinian sides could not even agree whether it should be a “Joint document” or a “Joint statement.” There were also, at that point, many other remaining disagreements between the two sides.
Also in today’s Ha’aretz is an intriguing account by Akiva Eldar of the conclusions reached by members of something called the Aix Group, a group of Israeli, Palestinian, and “international” experts that has been trying to unravel the many economic strands that would be involved in a satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue.
The group recommends that Palestinian refugees from 1948 should be allowed to choose their place of permanent residence, but implementation of that should be subject to the sovereign wishes of the state involved; and an alternative package of full compensation would be offered to those not returning to their original homes and properties in what is now Israel. The total amounts of compensation involved would, the group estimated, come to “between $55 and $85 billion.”
Exploratory work like that– based on updated surveys of the extent of Palestinian property claims against Israel, like those recently produced by Prof. Michael Fischbach here in the US– is really helpful. If a Palestinian-Israeli final peace agreement is to be sustainable, it must of course be sold to a sizeable majority of the people in both national communities, and must provide a basis for the new Palestinian state that is viable in both economic and political terms.
Maybe a formula like that proposed by the Aix Group, which involves overwhelmingly compensation to the refugees rather than actual physical return, could work out. But I believe it only really has a chance of working provided the territorial base of the Palestinian state is broad enough and coherent enough to accommodate Palestinian aspirations for a viable state. That is, it cannot be eaten into in the West Bank by the massive blocs of illegal Israeli settlements, as solidifying the line of the current Israeli “security” barrier into the final state boundary would do. Most of the areas currently occupied by those settlements would therefore have to come under the authority of the Palestinian state.
In addition, a permanent passage between the West Bank and Gaza needs to be assured. Completely free interaction between Palestine and the world economy– notably, NOT an interaction mediated always through Israel, as in the Oslo formula– needs to be guaranteed. And of course, a workable formula needs to be found for Jerusalem.
Much of the work of brainstorming possible formulas on all these issues has already been done. You can see a survey of proposals on Jerusalem, for example, in the 2004 book on the Israeli-Palestinian question that I worked on, along with a group of fellow Quakers from around the world.
Mainly at this point, what is needed is for the leaderships on both sides to show that they really are committed to finding a robust and sustainable solution that meets the needs of all the people iinvolved– around 8 million-plus Palestinians and 7 million-plus Israelis– sufficiently fairly.
Given that gross population data, an outcome that ends up giving the Palestinian state a land base that is in any significant way inferior to the 23% of Mandate Palestine that makes up the West Bank and Gaza, would seem very far from able to meet this requirement.
So there’s a lot of work to do at the bilateral level. And a lot of hard decisions that the US government will need to take, especially regarding the degree to which it plans to continue underwriting Israeli intransigence in this peacemaking.
There are also numerous other regional issues that need to be addressed. To see my comments on some of them, read my previous post here.