Category: Palestine 2007

Gideon Levy had a fascinating article in Haaretz yesterday, reporting this:

The group of reservist paratroopers returned all astir: Hamas fought like an army. The comrades of Sergeant-Major (Res.) Ehud Efrati, who fell in a battle in Gaza about two weeks ago, told Amos Harel that “in all parameters, we are facing an army, not gangs.” The soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces were impressed by their enemy’s night vision equipment, the tactical space they kept between one another – and their pants even had elastic bands to make them fit snugly around their boots.

Levy’s very sensible reaction to this is unequivocally that this is good news for Israelis:

the news the soldiers brought is … encouraging on several other levels. According to their descriptions, a Palestinian Defense Force has emerged. Instead of a rabble of armed gangs, an orderly army is coalescing that is prepared to defend its land. If it makes do with a defensive deployment against Israeli incursions, we will again have no moral claim against them: Hamas is entitled to defend Gaza, just as the IDF is entitled to defend Israel.
The coalescence of an army also ensures that if Israel tries to reach an accord with the Hamas government – the one and only way to stop the firing of Qassams – there will be someone in Gaza to prevent the firing. An armed and organized address in the chaos of Gaza also means good news for Israel. But the respect the reservists felt for the way Hamas fought is liable to trickle down deeper. “The Palestinians never looked like this,” the surprised soldiers told Haaretz. Perhaps we will finally stop calling them “terrorists” and refer to them as “fighters.” A bit of respect for the Palestinians and, in particular, an end to our dehumanization of them is liable to mark the beginning of a new chapter.

Well, I certainly hope he’s right that an increased “respect” for the Palestinian Hamas forces will trickle through to larger number of Israelis (though I would not as yet bet my farm on it.)
I do recall that back in 1982, an earlier generation of IDF reservists also discovered a “new” level of respect for the Palestinians fighters who were dug in around Beirut, during the punishing siege the IDF maintained around that city for ten long weeks. (Q.v., the Schiff and Yaari book, “Israel’s Lebanon War”, or any number of other contemporary sources.)
And then, during the first intifada, many Israelis expressed some grudging respect for the Palestinians who maintained a largely nonviolent, mass civilian uprising against the occupation for many years, despite Rabin’s “Iron Fist” and other brutal punishments.
Recently, however, it has been mainly the forces of Hizbullah who’ve won some “respect” from the Israelis, not particularly any Palestinians.
Levy makes an excellent point, though, about the need for a coherent force to be able to maintain order in Gaza– especially under today’s extremely stressed (and distressed) circumstances there.
I suspect, though, that very few of Levy’s countrymen will immediately agree with him that “Hamas is entitled to defend Gaza, just as the IDF is entitled to defend Israel,” though that is certainly a courageous, fairminded, and generally admirable sentiment. (Of course, “defending” both territories through nonviolent means on both sides of the line would be highly preferable to having them both use of military force.)
Levy writes:

Perhaps the reservists’ reports will dissuade the defense minister from carrying out his plan to conquer Gaza and will motivate Israel to try, for the first time, a different approach with Hamas – negotiations. [One would certainly hope so, though I am less hopeful of this than Levy seems to be. ~HC] Only the recognition of Hamas’ strength is liable to persuade Israel to be cautious about another operation, and only its military buildup will make us understand the full stupidity of the boycott policy that was designed to weaken Hamas…

In his ending, he eerily echoes some of the arguments I made in this recent JWN post, about the problematic absence of any “mutually hurting stalemate” between the Israelis and Palestinians at the present time. He writes:

Ours is a country that has been ready to make concessions only after blood is spilled. Since the interim accords following the Yom Kippur War and through the withdrawal from Lebanon and the disengagement, Israel has needed a relatively strong enemy to get its act together. If not for Hezbollah, we would still be in Lebanon; if not for Hamas, we would still be in Gaza.
Now the time has come for the next chapter: Did we think leaving Gaza and imprisoning it was enough for life in Israel to be hunky-dory? Hamas comes along and reminds us that this does not suffice. The West Bank is quiet in the meantime? Until an organized and strong resistance movement is revived there, we will not consider evacuating even one little outpost. We will conduct talks every two weeks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, we will go to Annapolis, but we will not discuss, heaven forbid, the “core” issues there. And our terrific lives will continue, while in the West Bank the masses will crowd together at the checkpoints for hours, be subject to humiliation and risk their lives every time they go outside.
These words are not meant to encourage another wave of Palestinian terror. They are intended to try to motivate us, for the first time, to move beyond our usual habits and reach the conclusion – this time without bloodshed – that the occupation cannot continue forever. Perhaps the news about the elastic bands on the Hamas men’s pants will do it for us, and the next cycle of violence will be averted.

Anyway, regardless of Levy’s possibly over-optimistic prognosticating, I think many of the analytical points he makes in the piece are valid… And the facts he reports– about the impressions those seasoned IDF soldiers had of Hamas’s upgraded organizational capabilities– are extremely important.
One depressing prospect is, of course, that instead of reacting to these reports the way Levy clearly hopes, the Israeli political leadership will react in exactly the opposite way: that, egged on by Elliott Abrams and the rest of the Bushites, they will argue instead that Hamas is engaged in a “dangerous, Iranian-backed military buildup in the heart of Gaza that needs to be snuffed out immediately.”
(In March 2006, when I talked with the hawkish Israeli figure Dore Gold in Jeruslaem, that was almost exactly the tenor of the argument he made to me about Hamas’s then-recent victory in the parliamentary elections… Except that in his extremely fevered and fearmongering version of the matter, the Hamas people– along with their alleged Iranian “backers– were also on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons… Are we scared enough yet?)

You have to believe how weak the US is in the Middle East when the administration claims that winning support from longterm US-aid-recipient Egypt for its latest Palestinian-related initiative is actually some kind of an achievement.
In that NYT account, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit is quoted as saying of Condi Rice:

”She says that she is determined, and the president of the United States is determined to have a breakthrough during the remaining year of this administration… We have to believe them. I cannot doubt them.”

Precisely. This very precarious, fin-de-regime government of Egypt apparently judges that it has little alternative but to profess ¨belief¨ in Condi Rice.
However, forty years and four months after the start of Israel´s occupation rule over the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan, Rice still says she doesn´t ¨believe¨ in a timeline for getting a final-status agreement on the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian tracks.
So how many more decades does she want these occupations to run? How many more illegal settlers does she want to give Israel time to implant into the occupied lands?

I know I haven’t written much about the– extremely belated and highly opportunistic!– Israeli-Palestinian peace “initaitive” that Pres. Bush and Secretary of State Rice have been pursuing ever since Hamas pushed the (US-backed) Fateh “Contra” units out of Gaza in June and Fateh’s PA President Mahmoud Abbas formed a rump PA government in Ramallah shortly afterwards.
The main reason I haven’t written anything until now is that I was very busy writing my latest book, which is on global issues, not specifically on Palestinian or even Middle Eastern issues. Then, too, the twists and turns in Palestinian politics are hard to write about clearly and succinctly. (I just finished writing a piece that is largely on this question, that “The Nation” commissioned from me way back when. It proved a more complex writing job than I expected– largely because of the need to whittle down into a limited number of words the huge range of factors that need to be mentioned.)
Anyway, right now I am supposed to be on vacation. Indeed, I’m writing this from the courtyard of beautiful small Pension in Granada, with views looking over toward the Alhambra. Hard to focus on the twists and turns of current Jewish-Arab politics, though I suppose that if there’s a good place to gain perspective on such matters– as well as to reconnect with the idea that there is a universe in which constructive Jewish-Arab cooperation is possible– then this might well be it.
So now, I’ve been reading a few news items on this topic that have piqued my interest; and yes, I do have a few thoughts.
Richard Boudreaux and Paul Richter have this piece in today’s LA Times. They write this from Jerusalem:

After prodding the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table for the first time in nearly seven years, the Bush administration now confronts a stalemate that threatens to undermine the latest peace initiative and further diminish American influence in the Middle East.
… The administration’s effort is hobbled by stark differences between two sides with weak leaders who face hawkish opposition at home and cannot even agree on what kind of joint document to strive for as a basis for the conference.
… On Monday, when the negotiating teams that Olmert and Abbas had appointed last week held their first working session, it was clear that the sides remained far apart. The talks were suspended, and the parties are looking to Rice and her team to bring proposals to bridge their differences.
But it remains to be seen whether the Americans will be willing to take such an activist role.
Bush, sympathetic to Israeli arguments that no outsiders should try to dictate the Jewish state’s security needs, has in the past directed Rice to leave it to the two sides to see what they could work out.
… If the sides are too far apart, he said, the administration might decide to delay the November conference to reduce its downside risk.
But that would create another risk. Propagandists for Hamas, Syria and other potential spoilers — the militant forces Bush is trying to weaken — would inevitably exploit a delay or any outcome that gave the Palestinians less than what Abbas seeks.
Abbas and his Fatah movement are preparing for such a letdown. One advisor said the movement was debating whether to continue with open-ended negotiations brokered by Rice or snub Washington by returning to a power-sharing deal with Hamas and even engaging in new armed attacks against Israel.
“The November meeting is going to be a threshold event for Abbas,” said Mouin Rabbani, a senior Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. “If he doesn’t bring home the goods, he faces a crisis of credibility and will have to compensate by seeking agreements with rival Palestinian factions. He would be weaker, and Hamas would be stronger.”

I have huge respect for Mouin’s judgment. But I am not as certain as he seems to be that Abbas (Abu Mazen) would necessarily respond to a failure in November by going back into a coalition deal with Hamas– and one in which, this time around, his hand would be even weaker than it was during the last such deal, concluded under Saudi auspices in early February. After all, in the past, when political and diplomatic developments have not gone as he hoped, Abbas has on a couple of occasions merely retreated from public life, in a blue funk. And I think there’s a distinct possibility that he might do that again, if Bush and Rice prove themselves totally incapable of delivering anything worthwhile for him.
If Abu Mazen does respond in this way, that would of course provoke yet another huge internal crisis for Fateh. He might meanwhile be settling back into a semi-retirement in Qatar, where he spent many previous years of funkdom. (And as for being “President” of the PA? Well, let’s face it, the President of the PA doesn’t have any real powers anyway, apart from running some internal workings of the string of ghettoes into which the IDF has penned the Palestinians ever since Oslo. He probably would not miss the job.)
It is a very interesting time, right now, for the fate of the US’s until-now hegemonic role in the Middle East. More and more of the cards are getting stacked up against the US-Israeli alliance. This means, of course, that there’s a chance of some extremely rash action from one or the other, or both of them, as they chafe within the limitations that are increasingly building up around them.
There is, of course, a lot more to be said about this Bush/Rice peace “initiative.” For any number of reasons, I have always found it hard to judge that the initiative was serious, at all. Primarily because of the extremely opportunistic and reactive circumstances in which it was born. But also because this formula of simply having an extremely weak and widely repudiated (by his own people) Palestinian leader sit down with his people’s jailers and expecting the two “sides” to be able to reach anything like a sustainable peace agreement is pure pie in the sky. (“Like putting a kindergarten child into the ring with a sumo wrestler and expecting a fair fight,” in the memorable words that Palestinian human-rights lawyer Jonathan Kuttab once used.)
That approach of keeping the negotiations determinedly “bilateral” between the two sides, along with the approach of seeking to negotiate in the first instance only an interim deal or even, heaven forfend, another airy-fairy “Declaration of Principles”, was completely discredited by the failed record of the diplomacy of the 1990s. If that record showed anything it showed that:

1. Diverting the negotiating energy into interim deals, or even interim-of-an-interim deals, while leaving the final status undetermined– as happened at and after Oslo– is a clear recipe for uncertainty on all sides, tension, violence (on all sides), failure, and disappointment.
2. The outlines of a politically sustainable final agreement are already fairly well known– though the balance of forces between the two sides has shifted somewhat away from Israel’s favor since the (non-governmental) “Geneva Accord” was concluded at the Track Two level in 2003.
3. Left alone, the two sides cannot negotiate a sustainable agreement. This is especially the case if, while it claims it is “leaving the field clear for bilateral negotiations”, the US continues to shovel huge amounts of nearly unconditional political, military, and financial aid into Israel.
4. The principles of international law– including the Geneva Conventions’ provisions against the building of settlements in occupied land and the general principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force– have just as much relevance in the Palestinian arena as anywhere else, and indeed can provide useful signposts to the content of a legitimate and sustainable final peace agreement.

(Meanwhile, if anyone is interested in the views and judgments on the Palestinian issue of an increasingly deranged Tony Blair, you can read them here. Among the inanities he mouthed there were this: “If you cannot reach a deal with the current Palestinian leadership … then the Palestinian with whom you will be able to reach an agreement has not yet been born,” and this: “He said that he took on the role of helping resolve the conflict in June because of ‘my sense of a mission’.” Nonsense on stilts, Tony dear. Go home and apply some cold compresses to your fevered brow.)

I recently read and enjoyed the informative and generally very well argued review article on three recent books on Palestine that the British conflict-resolution entrepreneur Alastair Crooke has in the latest issue of the London Review of Book. I really must try to get hold of all three of the books he’s reviewing there, which are respectively written by Azzam Tamimi and Sara Roi, and edited by Jamil Hilal.
In the article, Crooke well describes the depressing record of the damaging machinations that the US and the Europeans have undertaken in their attempts to bring down first of all the hopes the Palestinians’ elected Hamas leaders had of creating a broad unity government under their leadership last year, and then the national unity government that Hamas and Fateh jointly established through the Mecca Agreement of last March.
I have two small quibbles with Crooke’s analysis. One is where he describes the US-European plan to build a Fatah militia around Dahlan that could confront Hamas militarily as being part of a plan to engineer a “soft coup d’état” against the Hamas-led government. Not much “soft” about that plan, as far as I can see. Especially not in view of the fact that it was also linked to the continuing Israeli-US efforts to put intense economic pressures on the Palestinians (pressures which have killed vulnerable members of the Palestinian community), as well as Israel’s continual crackdowns on Hamas leaders and activists in the OPTs, including the IOF’s arrest of tens of elected Hamas legislators from the West Bank.
A second, bigger criticism I have of Crooke’s analysis has to do with his judgment that,

now that Fatah has been humiliated the grass-roots are unlikely to be in a mood to support anyone who argues for a working partnership with Hamas. It is one thing to be perceived by fellow Palestinians as a Western proxy: to be regarded as a failed Western proxy is far worse.

First of all, the judgment in that first sentence simply is not true. Dahlan’s threatening moves against Hamas, and Hamas’s successful counter-strike against Dahlan has not led– as it seems Crooke was supposing it would– to any “circling of the Fateh wagons” around Dahlan. Quite the opposite. As I wrote near the bottom of this recent JWN post, and as Khaled Amayreh wrote in this piece in Al-Ahram Weekly, the humiliation that Dahlan’s (US-armed) people suffered in Gaza two weeks ago quite predictably led to an intensification of the infighting within the perennially fractious Fateh movement.
And as part of that infighting, very weighty voices inside Fateh like those of Hani al-Hassan, Farouk Al-Qaddoumi, Jebril Rajoub, Marwan Al-Barghouti, and Ahmed Hellis have criticized Dahlan and started to call for an urgent rapprochement with Hamas.
Crooke’s follow-on sentence there also seems a little puzzling. Mainly, perhaps, because all the “Western proxies” that have arisen within the Palestinian movement over the past years have not only quite evidently failed in any efforts they have made to protect the lives, dignity, and property of the Palestinians, but they have also been clearly seen by the vast majority of Palestinians (including, in lucid moments, by many of these people themselves) to have thus failed. This is, after all, one of the main causes of the massive loss of morale and the ideological and organizational collapse within Fateh. Ask a Fathawi what he or she is fighting for, and how their current leadership’s actions are getting them towards that goal, and in many cases all you’ll get is wry giggle of embarrassment. (Same with many NDP officials in Egypt, by the way.)
Anyway, as I said, these are relatively small criticisms of Crooke’s review. Otherwise, it is certainly well worth reading.

Efraim Halevy, who was head of the Mossad 1998-2002 and Sharon’s National Security Adviser for a year thereafter, has an important article in this week’s New Republic in which he argues that– given the “dire straits” in which the Mahmoud Abbas camp finds itself, and the “dire straits” the Americans find themselves regarding Palestine– it will likely soon be necessary for a “Plan B” that involves concluding some form of “a long-term ceasefire” with Hamas (in Gaza) and Fateh and Hamas (in the West Bank.)
You can read the fulltext version of Halevy’s article here.
I find this article particularly interesting because if, as I suspect, Halevy represents a significant body of opinion in the Israeli security establishment, then we might indeed see Israel returning to some form of the intentionally “unilateralist” approach to the Palestinian question that marked its policy under, in particular, Sharon… and see this, moreover, in the context of a working agreement with the predominant trend in the Palestinian body politic– that is, Hamas– that would “allow” Hamas also to pursue its project of Palestinian rebuilding in a parallel but also unilateral fashion.
Which is where things looked as if they might be headed back in early March 2006, when I was able to spend a few days in Gaza and interview some Ismail Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahhar, and emerged with the clear sense that the project they sought there was to be able to pursue their own form of unilateralism in parallel with the Israelis. (See most that reporting pulled together in this mid-2006 Boston Review article. You can find some more detailed field-reporting of the interviews there here and here.)
In the BR piece, I wrote:

Over the past nine months, the Israelis and the Palestinians have each witnessed far-reaching political upheavals. The specifics have been different, but both resulted from strong shifts in popular opinion against the concept of a negotiated peace. This repudiation was confirmed for Palestinians by Hamas’s surprise victory at the polls in January and for Israelis by the waning of the Labor Party and its former allies in the peace camp and the swift rise of Kadima, whose rallying cry has been the pursuit of unilateralist “solutions” in Gaza and the West Bank.
In the best-case scenario for the next few years, we would see each side forming a stable administration (with the Palestinians able to control all the unruly factions) and in parallel deciding to focus on domestic matters while postponing the conclusion of a final peace.
Certainly, inside both societies, many, many people are ready to simply turn their backs on the members of the other nation…

So here is Halevy, today:

in the likely event that the joint Israeli-American plan worked out in Egypt to support Abbas and isolate Hamas fails, it will be necessary to move to Plan B. This plan is predicated first and foremost on accepting realities on the ground and turning them to the best possible advantage. Hamas has demonstrated that when in distress, it is pliable to practical arrangements on the ground. Therefore, parallel to maintaining pressure on Hamas on a daily basis, isolating it regionally and internationally, contacts should be established with Hamas to see if a long-term armistice with it can be obtained. It must be a tough eyeball-to-eyeball exercise in which Hamas is brought to a point where its self-interest dictates such an understanding. An armistice will entail provisions for maintaining security, ending arms smuggling into the Strip, et cetera. Until this is achieved, constant military pressure must be maintained. In scope, this could resemble the original armistice agreements negotiated and agreed to by Israel and the Arab states after the War of Independence in 1948-1949. At that time, too, the Arab states refused to recognize Israel–just as does Hamas today–but they nevertheless signed binding agreements with it. Armistice would not be a political determination of the conflict but a down-to-earth method of reducing tensions–a goal most essential, inter alia to American interests in the Middle East at large.
Parallel to this, identical agreements should be negotiated with Fatah in the West Bank. Fatah cannot pretend to represent Gaza, and it would be hard put to acquiesce in accepting Hamas, again as a limited player. Yet, should it refuse to do so, Fatah might face a West Bank implosion. This it cannot afford. Inter-Arab support for this construction must be sought. Both Fatah and Hamas must commit themselves to this arrangement at the highest Arab state level. It must ultimately be consecrated at the U.N. Security Council with strong U.S. support…
Should current policy in Washington and Jerusalem and Ramallah flounder, Plan B should be on the table for consideration six months from now.

Of course, history can never simply be respooled and replayed. If Zahhar, Haniyyeh, and Co. sounded strongly as though they might be ready for such a vision when I spoke with them in March 2006, that doesn’t mean they would be equally ready now. Between then and now, a lot of additional harm has been inflicted on the Palestinians, quite deliberately, by Israel and the US, with the express intention of trying to persuade the Palestinians to turn against the Hamas leadership that had emerged as the result of a free election campaign and fairly conducted elections… And then, there was the arming, training, and activation of the Palestinian ‘Contras’ under Dahlan’s command (and doubtless with the planning help of the Svengali of the original Contras scheme, Elliott Abrams.)
Hamas and the broad networks of Palestinians who support it showed that neither the lethal, anti-humane pressure of the economic siege nor the military pressure of the Dahlanists could force them to cry “uncle.”
Also, the US position in the whole region has deteriorated quite significantly from what it was 15 months ago.
But still, it is interesting to see Halevy coming back with that proposal there.
Interesting, too, to see the clear-eyed way in which this very well-informed Israeli securocrat challenges the Bushists’ ignorantly perky assessments of the situation in the region with his own battalions of facts:

Hamas is indeed in dire straits. But, unfortunately, it is not the only party to be experiencing a tough predicament. Whereas Mubarak initially condemned the Hamas takeover, naming it a military coup directed against Abbas, he clearly changed his tune a day after the summit and said he would be sending back his military mission to Gaza the moment things cooled down. He even hinted that there might still be room for reconciliation between the rival Palestinian factions. Similar sentiments were echoed by Qatar (the Arab states’ representative on the U.N. Security Council), Russia, and others.
The Ramallah government of Salam Fayyad is apparently also in dire straits. In recent days one commander after another has been dismissed for incompetence in the recent Gaza debacle. There have been arrests in the West Bank of Hamas operatives by government forces, but all know that, were it not for Israel’s almost daily incursions, security cannot be maintained. Israel wishes to move “hard and fast,” as Livni said, in tandem with Abbas; but what timetable can Abbas offer for establishing complete and effective control of the West Bank? When and how can he restore authority in Gaza? Can he negotiate a political settlement with Israel ignoring Gaza? How many real divisions does he have here and now? How many will he have in six months’ time? And if, as he said this weekend, he will hold new general elections isolating and banning Hamas from participation, what credibility will the results have in the eyes of the public? Can he hold credible elections in the West Bank alone if, as is clear, he cannot restore any vestige of his authority in the Gaza Strip. His call this weekend, in Paris, for the dispatch of an international force to take over control of Gaza and to facilitate the participation of the Gazans in the planned elections is testimony to the world of fantasy in which he is now functioning. Nobody will send troops into Gaza to uproot Hamas, and Abbas must surely know this because his French hosts made this clear to him.
Further afield, the United States is similarly in dire straits…

On a related note, in this earlier post I wrote about the shambolic state of internal disarray inside Fateh since the debacle in Gaza two weeks ago. How deep is that disarray? I would say, very deep indeed, with the main piece of evidence on that coming from the fact that Fateh co-founder and longtime leader Hani al-Hassan felt obliged to criticize those Fateh factions (read Dahlan) that had taken money and weapons from the US and Israelis in order to fight Hamas… And then, Abu Mazen felt obliged to fire Hassan from his role as “presidential advisor.”
The tireless Badger has helpfully given us more details, in English, of what Hassan said on Al-Jazeera on June 28:

Moderator: In statements on the program “No boundaries”, Hani al-Hassan, a member of the Fatah central committee, accused a faction within the [Fatah] movement of associating itself with the plan laid down by General Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator between Israel and the Palestinians, the gist of which plan was to ignite the fires of internal fighting. But he also said Hamas went [beyond what was necessary] in its reaction to the events in Gaza.
Tape of al-Hassan interview: “What Dayton was trying to accomplish was to find a faction that believes in internal fighting; but what was surprising to us in Fatah was that Hamas went beyond reacting to the Dayton faction, and this was a big surprise, because the actual takeover of power in Gaza did damage to the democratic idea”.
Moderator: Hani al-Hassan also stressed that what happened in Gaza was the collapse of the plan of the American general Dayton.
Tape of al-Hassan interview: “What really collapsed was the Dayton Plan, and what collapsed with it was the small group of his collaborators who believed in the American point of view. As for the Fatah movement, the Fatah movement did not collapse in Gaza, because 95% of it has no relationship with that Plan.”

If Abu Mazen really has broken definitively with Hani al-Hassan– or, the other way around– then that is huge. At this point, and given his very long history in the Fateh movement (which you can read about in my 1984 book on the early years of Fateh, still in print today!) Hassan probably has a lot more credibility among Palestinians both inside– and perhaps even more crucially, outside– the homeland than anything Abu Mazen can muster.
I shall watch with interest the further fallout inside Fateh… Or maybe, I’ll go back and re-read my December 2005 lament to the “current, cascading collapse of Palestinian secular nationalism.”

AP is reporting that BBC reporter Alan Johnston has been freed by Hamas from the clutches of the Gaza sub-clan/militia that has held him for nearly three months now, and that he is now in Hamas’s hands.
Great news, if confirmed. Even better news for him and his family once he gets home to Scotland.
I admire Johnston tremendously.
Of course, there is still the possibility of many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip… Let’s hope the Israelis don’t choose tonight to launch some big new attack on Hamas, eh?
And no word yet on whether any of the other literally thousands of people in the Middle East who have been unjustifiably deprived of their liberty will see a similar liberation any time soon.

1. Diplomacy is not mainly about talking to people you agree with, but to people you disagree with.
2. They won a free and fair parliamentary election in 2006. Fateh’s Mahmoud Abbas won a free and fair presidential election in 2005. Outsiders have no credibility when they seek to include one of these parties while excluding and indeed also attacking the other.
3. For 18 months or more in 2005-6 Hamas participated in good faith in a ceasefire against Israel even though the ceasefire was not reciprocated by Israel either formally or informally.
4. When the British government finally realized it could not “defeat” the IRA by force but needed to explore reaching a political agreement with the IRA / Sinn Fein, they set as the only two preconditions for any party entering peace talks that it should (a) engage in good faith in a ceasefire and (b) demonstrate that it had at least some significant mandate from the electorate. The peace negotiations thereby started met with eventual success.
5. When the (White) South African government finally realized it could not “defeat” the ANC by force but needed to explore reaching a political agreement with the ANC and other anti-apartheid parties, they set as the only two preconditions for any party entering peace talks that it should (a) engage in good faith in a ceasefire and (b) be prepared to participate in good faith in an election. The peace process thereby started met with fairly rapid and amazingly far-reaching success.
6. In both those peace processes, and countless other successful peacemaking ventures around the world, the idea that one party– and one party only– should have to completely demobilize and disarm, and make significant concessions on its core political doctrine, before it could be admitted to any peace talks had already been proven to be a non-starter for many years before the more flexible, limited– and successful– view of the pre-requisites of peacemaking was adopted.
7. Everyone around the world should be opposed to acts that constitute terrorism, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other serious laws-of-war violations. As part of a reasonable ceasefire process, all parties should indeed be asked to foreswear the use of such vile, anti-humane tactics. (Though this would be strictly entailed in any meaningful ceasefire commitment, anyway.) However, the tactic of labeling one party to a contest as “terrorist” and arguing that that disqualifies it from inclusion in any peace diplomacy, while completely ignoring the very serious laws-of-war violations committed by other parties (a) is intrinsically inequitable and erodes respect for the integrity of the principles underlying the whole process, and (b) was shown to be completely unsuccessful in South Africa, Mozambique, and elsewhere. Getting stuck in the discourse of counter-“terrorism” blinded Maggie Thatcher and others to the reality of the situation in South Africa. In the Arab-Israeli arena, recourse to this same tactic has paralyzed the ability of the main western powers to play any constructive role in the diplomacy.
8. Hamas is very different from Al-Qaeda. Westerners need to to pursue intelligent policies that differentiate between, on the one hand, Islamist political movements that are rooted within and answerable to an identifiable national or sub-national community, and are willing to prove their links to this community by participating in good faith in free and fair elections (see #2 above), and on the other, Islamist movements that have no such community anchor or answerability but instead roam nihilistically across the world stage sowing destruction and tension wherever they go. If we and our leaders can’t engage in this kind of intelligent differentiation, then we’ll end up merely pushing additional tens or hundreds of millions of Muslim men and women into the ideological embrace of the nihilists.
9. Western governments already engage in intention-probing diplomacy with many international actors whose actions are far more damaging than those of Hamas. (Such as North Korea.) I understand the concern many people have with those parts of Hamas’s core ideology that threaten Israel’s existence; and indeed I share a good part of that concern. But Hamas leaders have talked about their readiness to enter into even a very lengthy, politically endorsed ceasefire with Israel (the tahdi’eh, which is a more serious undertaking than the merely operational hudna that they already engaged in for a long time, though it did not bring them any reciprocation.) Why should that Hamas proposal not be diplomatically probed?
10. The Palestinian issue cannot be resolved if the policy of excluding and attacking this significant component of the Palestinian body politic is maintained. Hundreds of millions of people around the world (Arabs, Muslims, and others) continue to consider this issue one of major significance in the encounter between the Western countries and the rest of the world. Realism, including the realism of compassionate and principles-based conflict termination, dictates that Hamas should be urgently included in the peace-seeking diplomacy.
(JWN readers who haven’t yet read the article I published about Hamas in Boston Review last summer might want to do so. It used much material from the reporting trip I had made to Gaza and Israel in February/March 2006. Several aspects of the situation have changed since then, of course. Principally, Hamas showed itself able to withstand the tight siege imposed around its strongholds in Gaza, and Fateh’s main leadership showed itself more willing than I had judged possible to accept the role of Inkatha/Contras that was being offered to it. Still, the broad political facts of the unconquerability of Hamas and the need to include it in any peacemaking effort that is serious both still remain. This, notwithstanding the hoopla in some of the western media over the current diplomacy, that involves a very small number of not terrifically representative Middle Eastern leaders.)

I got a wonderful item in the mail this week: the latest issue of 
the Palestine-Israel Journal, a
quarterly, now co-edited by (Palestinian) Ziad AbuZayyad and (Israeli)
Hillel Schenker, that’s been coming out since 1994.

This issue is focused on the situation in and prospects for Jerusalem,
40 years after the Eastern half of the city, including its historic,
walled “Old City” area, came under Israeli occupation in 1967. 
You can read some of these articles online (the portal is here.)  I
think it’s a pity they didn’t also make freely available there the
article in which former City Council member Meir Margalit writes quite
explicitly, and with apparent personal contrition, about the ways in
which the  Israeli-dominated City Council has practiced, and
continues to practice, systematic discrimination against the 35% or so
of Jerusalem’s current residents who are Palestinian Arabs.

For example, Margalit writes (pp.24-25),

His exploration of the mindset of the Israeli officials who administer
what is, in intent as well as in effect, a very racist policy, as well
as his comparison of this with the mindset of officials implementing
European colonial policies in Asia and Africa, are very interesting and
could well have been developed even further.

Menachem Klein’s short reflection on his his own personal journey–
from having been a religious nationalism-infused teenager who in 1971
proudly took part in establishing a new Jewish settlement near
Bethlehem to being a convinced peacenik who worked with Yossi Beilin
and Yasser Abed Rabbo on drafting the “Geneva Initiative”– is also
well worth reading.

The paper edition also carries the transcript of an intriguing
round-table discussion on the Jerusalem question among eight of the
city’s sons and daughters– four of them Israelis, and four Palestinian.

I just note, yet again, the degree to which discussions that are held
on these weighty issues on the Palestinian-Israeli agenda among the
people most directly concerned can frequently be so much more calm and
realistic than the one-sidedness, ideological rigidity, and
name-calling that one so frequently encounters in discussions of these
issues in the US.

So anyway, go and get hold of the paper version of this issue of the PIJ if you possibly
can!  (Ordering instructions are there, on their website.) 
The articles on Jerusalem in this volume, in particular, will make an
excellent addition to any library in the west.