Category: Palestine 2007

Ahmed Yousef, a senior political advisor to recently ousted Palestinian Ismail Haniyeh, scored an impressive double victory today by having slightly different op-ed articles published in both the WaPo and the NYT.
More on the content of these two significant articles later. But first, we should note that the existence of these two soberly argued articles indicates a couple of very important things that are often overlooked in the US discourse: First, that the Hamas leaders are eager to reach out to and engage intellectually with the US mainstream discourse, and secondly that they have maintained a good capability to do this, even in circumstances of great tension and difficulty for all Palestinians, in Gaza and elsewhere.
Regarding their desire to engage with the US discourse, there have of course been numerous other examples of this, including earlier op-eds that Haniyeh himself, Mousa Abu Marzook, and other Hamas luminaries have published in the WaPo and the NYT. The decision to reach out and engage is not a trivial matter– and maybe, amidst all the anti-Israeli and anti-US anger that pervades much of the Hamas base, it was not an easy one to take.
Regarding the ability of the Hamas leaders to continue to pursue their intellectual-engagement decision, even in very tumultuous times, this is also significant.
A noticeable amount of the discourse in the US “big media” these days about the situation in Gaza and the role played by Hamas has focused heavily on (and quite possibly disproportionately magnifies) the negative aspects of the situation. Mainstream commentators seem to want to portray Hamas-controlled Gaza as a wild place, ungoverned except by wild men in scary ski masks, while painting the (currently Fateh-dominated) West Bank as a potential haven of stability.
However, on Monday, Karen AbuZayd, who’s the head of the UN agency, UNRWA, that’s responsible for providing basic humanitarian needs to the refugees who make up a large proportion of the Palestinian population in both areas, announced that,

we are now operating in Gaza as we did before the recent violence… UNRWA is working at full capacity once again, delivering services to a population that has been so badly affected by chronic insecurity.

And in the West Bank city of Nablus, the World Food Program reported on Saturday that unidentified armed men “ransacked the well-marked warehouse this morning, stole several tons of WFP food and looted office equipment including computers and fax machines.”
Of course, considerable problems remain in both territories. A number of Fateh-related families and Palestinians eager to be reunited with families in the West Bank have been camped out for many days now at Israel’s dreadful, always-inhumane, cattle-yard/crossing at Erez. The plight of these families is terrible. Many of them have expressed strong (and currently, probably untestable) fears regarding their fate if they remain in Hamas-controlled Gaza; and the Israeli authorities have also treated them extremely badly, and in clear, very racist violation of all international codes regarding the obligation of states to offer a safe refuge to people suffering from a well-founded fear of persecution in their homelands.
Plus– and this is very relevant in the context of the present topic– Hamas-affiliated gunmen have attacked pro-Fateh media installations in Gaza and Fateh-affiliated gunmen have attacked pro-Hamas media installations, and one journo associated with one of these, in the West Bank. See PCHR’s report on these serious violations of the freedom of the press, here. Plus, of course, BBC’s Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston is still one of the many thousands of people in today’s Middle East who are being quite unjustifiably deprived of their liberty.
So, on to the content of Ahmed Yousef’s two pieces:

Continue reading “Hamas, the US big media, and the world”

I have been scouring the web, trying to gain a deeper understanding of what’s been going on in Palestine. So far, the very best account and analysis that I’ve found is this document, which was posted yesterday on the site of the (Gaza-based) Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. I suspect it was written by the Centre’s extremely dedicated and professional director, Raji Sourani.
Its title is No Alternative to Political Dialogue; PCHR’s Position towards the Current Crisis in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian National Authority. I believe this correctly describes the problem. There is both a crisis inside Gaza, and a crisis in the PA.
PCHR has been doing careful, well-documented human rights monitoring and advocacy work in Palestine for around 20 years now. This is how the “No Alternative” text describes the recent clashes in Gaza:

The Gaza Strip has recently witnessed an unprecedented escalation in the violence between the Hamas and Fatah movements. Last week, as the fighting came to a head, Hamas decided to resolve the conflict militarily by taking over all Palestinian security headquarters and sites and seizing complete control over the Gaza Strip through its military wing – Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades. The fighting claimed the lives of 146 Palestinians (36 of them are civilians), including 5 children and 8 women, and wounded at least 700 others.
According to PCHR’s documentation and observations, this latest armed conflict between the two movements has been accompanied by grave breaches of provisions of international law related to internal armed conflicts, particularly Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Under Common Article 3, each party to an armed conflict not of an international character is bound, at a minimum, to treat persons taking no active part in the hostilities humanely, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms. It also prohibits “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; taking of hostages; outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; and the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court.” It also calls for humane treatment of the wounded and medical patients.
In violation of these international standards, the fighting was accompanied by many cases of willful killings, extra-judicial executions, and firing at combatants after their capture. According to eyewitnesses, a number of the wounded were killed inside hospitals; reprisal kidnappings and torture of persons affiliated or suspected of being affiliated with a party to the conflict were also reported. Although most civilians were confined to their homes for the duration of hostilities, numerous unarmed civilians also became victims of the fighting. The status of civilian structures, including houses and tower apartment buildings, was not respected and such locations were often used by the hostile parties during the fighting. As a consequence, many civilians were forcibly placed in a combat area, increasing their suffering and risk of injury. Many casualties were ultimately reported among civilians, including women and children.
Additionally, the access of medical crews and firefighters to combat areas to evacuate the wounded and extinguish fires was severely restricted (see PCHR’s press releases during and after the fighting).

Here, for example, was a PCHR press release issued during the fighting, on June 14. It detailed several law-of-war violations without, in most cases, specifying which side had committed them. (I imagine it must have been very hard to ascertain that, in many cases.) In one case, that report specified that”Hamas gunmen” had committed violations, as follows:

At approximately 16:00 [on 13 June], Hamas gunmen stormed the house of Atef Baker, a Fatah operative, near Beach Camp. They fired indiscriminately inside the house, killing two women and seriously injuring 4 others. The women killed are Jehan Nayef Baker (18) and Heba Sobhi Baker (30). And at approximately 17:00, Hamas gunmen surrounded a number of Baker clan members in the same area, and fired at them. Three Baker clan members were killed: Mansour Omar Baker (47), Mohammad Suliman Baker (28), and Hamada Samir Baker (18).

But here is the way the clashes and their effect on civilians were characterized in the report’s introductory paragraph:

The clashes erupted on Thursday, 7 June 2007, and have led to the death of tens of victims from both sides as well as innocent civilians. Gaza and Khan Yunis were the scene of unprecedented violence. Most victims fell in these two places, especially during Hamas control of the compounds of the National Security Forces and General Intelligence. It is regrettable that both sides were more brutal in bringing civilians into the conflict by taking positions on the roofs of houses, preventing food from reaching civilians, firing at peaceful demonstrations, and preventing civilians from access to healthcare. In addition, they targeted hospitals and transformed them into battle grounds, attacked medical crews, and prevented health workers from carrying out their duties. Life was paralyzed throughout the Gaza Strip, including the areas that did not witness clashes. Houses of members of both sides were destroyed and set on fire or targeted by projectiles in a policy of collective punishment to subdue the other side.

Then, regarding the crisis inside the PA that has been sparked by the Gaza fighting, the “No Alternative” report says this:

After Hamas took over security headquarters and sites and seized complete control over the Gaza Strip, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued 3 decrees on Thursday evening, 14 June, dismissing Prime Minister Ismail Haniya; declaring a state of emergency in all Palestinian National Authority (PNA) controlled areas; and forming a government to enforce the state of emergency. On 17 June, President Abbas issued two more decrees, one suspending the enforcement of articles 65, 66 and 67 of the Basic Law (the temporary constitution of the PNA), and the other one outlawing the Executive Force (formed by the Ministry of Interior in 2006) and Hamas’s militias “because of their insurrection against the Palestinian legitimacy and its institutions…”
In response to Hamas’s actions, Israel has closed all border crossings with the Gaza Strip, halting all international commercial transactions. As a result, Palestinian civilians have rushed to shops, bakeries and fuel stations to buy their basic needs, in the wake of expectations of a possible humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Rafah International Crossing Point between the Gaza Strip and Egypt—the sole outlet for the Gaza Strip to the outside world, which Israel already subjects to sporadic and lengthy closings—has now been completely and indefinitely closed.
Parallel to the incidents in Gaza, supporters of Fatah movement in the West Bank have carried out a series of retaliatory attacks against members, supporters and institutions of Hamas. Such attacks have targeted health and cultural associations, charities, press offices, television and radio stations, sports clubs, and various local councils that have been run by Hamas following local elections. According to PCHR’s documentation, at least 50 public and private institutions have been attacked; 3 persons, including a child, have been killed; and at least 60 persons have been kidnapped since Wednesday, 13 June 2007.
In light of these accelerating developments in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), particularly in the Gaza Strip, PCHR stresses the following:
1) PCHR condemns the use of military means to resolve the conflict between Hamas and Fatah movements, particularly the decision to resolve the conflict militarily through the seizure of Palestinian security headquarters and sites in the Gaza Strip by the [Hamas-run] Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades. Although PCHR is aware of the legitimacy of the government and its right to fully have its constitutional powers, and conscious of the security problems that preceded and the urgent need to reform the security establishment, there is no justification for the use of Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades in the military conflict and in the take over of the security establishment, which will only frustrate reform of the security establishment.
2) Steps taken by President Mahmoud Abbas in response to these events violate the Basic Law and undermine the Basic Law in a manner that is no less dangerous than what is happening in Gaza, especially as:
A. The President has the right to declare a state of emergency and to dissolve the government in accordance with Chapter 7 of the Basic Law, but according to the Law, the dissolved government shall serve as an acting government until the formation of a new government that must be approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).
B. The Basic Law does not give the President any authority, even during a state of emergency, to suspend the enforcement of any provision of the Law concerning the PLC’s authority to grant confidence to the government, and he does not have the authority to dissolve or interrupt the work of the PLC during the period of emergency (article 113). The Basic Law is superior to all laws, from which all powers, including those of the President and Prime Minister, are derived, and it must not be undermined or suspended in all circumstances.

3) Steps taken by the President are likely to complicate the crisis rather than solving it. The President’s response may lead to further isolation of the Gaza Strip and throw its 1.5-million residents into the unknown by subjecting them to international sanctions. There is also concern that a de facto political situation may develop in which the Gaza Strip is cut-off from the rest of the OPT.
4) The current crisis in the PNA is a political rather than a constitutional or legal one. There is therefore no alternative to dialogue based on real partnership, respect for the results of the legislative elections that were held in January 2006, and putting the interests of the Palestinian people above the narrow, factional interests of the conflicting parties.
5) In the context of such a dialogue, it is important to stress the need to reconstruct the Palestinian security establishment on professional and national foundations, to ensure its independence and not to push it into any hideous factional conflicts so that it may be able to carry out its constitutional duties to defend the homeland, serve the people, protect the society, and ensure security and public order.
6) The only party that benefits from the continuation of the current crisis is Israel and its occupation forces, which continue to create new facts on the ground, especially in the West Bank through the construction of the Annexation Wall and settlements, which undermine any possibility of establishing a viable, independent Palestinian state within the OPT.
7) The humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, which has been deteriorating due to the Israeli siege and the suspension of international aid to the PNA, will further deteriorate with the closure of all border crossings and the halting of international economic transactions.
8) The current Palestinian crisis is a new Nakba (in reference to the dispersion of the Palestinian people in 1948) that if not immediately stopped, will only grow as expectations of more economic and social strangleholds fuel concerns over massive emmigration from the Gaza Strip. All Palestinian political factions and civil society groups must therefore bear the historical responsibility to end this crisis and prevent this new Nakba, which has been created by Palestinians on the 59th anniversary of the Nakba of 1948.
9) The international community and Arab States are invited to take immediate steps to prevent this catastrophe by pressing for political dialogue between the Hamas and Fatah movements, as well as all other political factions, and to end this crisis which threatens the PNA and the Palestinian people as a whole.

Well, on this last score, good luck to anyone urging the “international community”, as presently constituted, to press for the immediate resumption of political dialogue between Hamas and Fateh! Right now, Mr. 3% (Ehud Olmert) is in Washington DC, crowing with Mr. 30% (George W. Bush) about the “opportunity” the Hamas-Fateh split presents for (their endless, always inconclusive version of) the peace process… and Mr. 30% has hurried to send more financial aid to help prop up Abu Mazen and Fateh.
However, there are three big problems with providing such speedy, one-sided US support to Fateh at this moment:

(1) It makes even more of a mockery than we have seen before, of all the Bushites’ earlier pronouncements about the depth and sincerity of their support for democratization of the Palestinian polity;
(2) It makes Fateh look even more than before like the cat’s-paw of the Israelis and the Bushites in the Middle East– not a good thing for anyone at this point;and
(3) All this aid will make no difference at all to Fateh’s political fortunes with the Palestinian public unless (a) Fateh can show itself capable of using the aid in a way that is accountable, well-governed, and speedily makes a demonstrable contribution to the public good, and (b) the Fateh leaders can show palpable achievements in other key areas of the Palestinians’ quality of life– primarily, the freeing of the Palestinian communities in both the West Bank and Gaza from the socio-economic strangulation that Israel continues to maintain over both territories, and by making palpable progress in the peace negotiations with Israel.

Regarding #3 there, neither ‘a’ nor ‘b’ looks likely.
I see that already, within even a few days of the debacle Fateh suffered in Gaza, its ever-jockeying array of second-level bosses have already resumed their longheld practice of working against each other in very public and very damaging ways. Primarily, many Fathawis seem to have their knives out against Mahmoud Abbas’s strongly US- and Israeli-backed “national security advisor”, Mohammed Dahlan.
In that Haaretz report there, Avi Issacharoff wrote:

Palestinian sources said that the subject came up at a meeting of 20 council members in Ramallah on Sunday. According to sources, some of the council members said they believed that Dahlan should be relieved of his duties as part of Fatah’s efforts to regain strength on the Palestinian street.
Among those attending the meeting were Jibril Rajoub, Ahmed Ghanem, Mohammed al-Horani, Samir Shehada, and other prominent Fatah members. “We hope that Dahlan will be removed,” one of the participants said. “We hope this will help stop the atrocities that Hamas is perpetrating in the Gaza Strip.
Dahlan is among those responsible for this debacle, and even his own men are saying that he had deserted them along with Fatah’s top-brass in the strip.”
[The charismatic and long-imprisoned Fateh operative Marwan] Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences in Hadarim Prison, released a statement from prison yesterday in which he demanded that Fatah’s leadership in the strip be replaced with other operatives currently in the region.

Indeed, the political situation inside the West Bank seems to be very far from the anti-Hamas triumphalism that is being portrayed in some of the western mainstream media. Some western analysts and politicians seem eager to paint a picture in which all of Fateh and a large proportion of the Palestinian people are locked into bitter, irreconcileable hatred and fear of Hamas, such as can easily be harnessed to the US and Israel’s further campaigns against the organization. But even within Fateh, this seems not to be the case.
The fact is– as the PCHR document so aptly described it– the Palestinian political situation is in a deep crisis. Both President Abbas and the Hamas-led legislature have earned a notable degree of democratic legitimacy in the fairly recent past. That is a basic fact to remember.
And now, for Abbas to summarily dismiss the Haniyeh-led National Unity Government by declaring a “State of Emergency” may seem to buy him a little time. But the Palestinian Basic Law allows him to rule through his own hand-picked PM, under his own, unilaterally declared State of Emergency, only for 30 days before the SOE has to be renewed “with the consent of two-thirds the Legislative Council.” (Answer to qu.6 in that PDF file of commentary by Nathan Brown there.) And even under the SOE, his powers are strictly limited.
So after 30 days, he requires the cooperation of the Legislative Council… This, while significant numbers of elected Hamas deputies have been detained by the Israeli Military Occupation.
Where is the concern expressed in the US or other western countries about those detentions? And how on earth can any democracy-respecting government anywhere support Abbas in extending the SOE beyond the allowed 30 days if he can do so only by having an Israeli-picked subset of the elected deputies ready and able to support that extension?
… Anyway, I have a lot more to say about this topic, but no time now to say it. One aspect I want to pursue is the ways in which the West Bank is different from Gaza– and the ways in which it is not as different as many of the “instant” commentatoriat here in the US seems to think.

Some good, if very sobering, reporting on the events in Gaza from AP’s Sarah el Deeb is here.
Doubtless JWN readers are aware that yesterday and today there were fateful battles in Gaza during which the US-backed and US-armed Fateh forces were routed by the better disciplined and better organized forces loyal to Hamas. There have also been some less decisive clashes in the West Bank, where Fateh is relatively much stronger (though no better organized) than in Gaza.
Deeb writes that Fateh head, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,

fired the Hamas prime minister and said he would install a new government, replacing the Hamas-Fatah coalition formed just three months ago. Abbas’ decrees, which he issued in Ramallah [in the West Bank], won’t reverse the Hamas takeover of Gaza. Instead, his moves will enable Fatah to consolidate its control over the West Bank, likely [as she claims] paving the way for two separate Palestinian governments.
At a news conference in Gaza City early Friday, deposed Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh rejected Abbas’ declaration, calling it “hasty” and saying he would maintain the unity government. Haniyeh said the situation was “not suitable for unilateral decisions.”
He said the Hamas militia would impose law and order “firmly, decisively and legally.” He also rejected the idea of a Palestinian state in Gaza only, run by Hamas.
In Damascus, one of the exiled leaders of Hamas, Moussa Abu Marzouk, also rejected setting up an Islamic state there. “Gaza will remain Gaza and there will be no changes in its future and will continue to be linked to the West Bank,” he said.

Sarah El Deeb is not the only commentator in the Anglosphere– and perhaps elsewhere?– who has started to write about the possibility of Gaza becoming even more deeply politically split off from the West Bank. The two territories have already been functionally split from each other for several years, due to Israel’s refusal to honor agreements mandating the nearly free flow of goods and persons between them. All diplomatic agreements regarding the OPTs have meanwhile stressed again and again that the two territories form “one political unit”, but of course that hasn’t stopped Israel from trying to split them apart, for many years– and nor has it stopped Israel from strying to split East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank, and indeed from dividing the rest of the West Bank into a large number of sometimes hermetically sealed-off tiny cantons (or large-ish prisons.)
Anyway, the fears– or possibilities, or in some cases desires– that are currently being expressed in much of the Anglosphere center on the possibility of the emergence of a “Hamastan” in Gaza. I guess some western commentators think the name sounds cute and indicates how “in style” they are? They use the term despite the insistence of the leaders of the elected Hamas plurality in the Palestinian parliament that this is absolutely not their intention…
Deeb wrote:

Fatah’s old demons — corruption, petty quarreling, lack of leadership — led to its dismal performance in Gaza. While disciplined Hamas systematically hoarded weapons, Fatah’s Gaza leader, Mohammed Dahlan, preferred travel and West Bank politics to preparing for the inevitable showdown with the Islamic militants. Dahlan returned Thursday from Egypt, where he stayed several weeks after knee surgery. But instead of going to Gaza, he headed for Ramallah.
Many West Bank Palestinians, watching the fall of Gaza on their TV screens, pinned the blame on Abbas, whom they see as indecisive and detached. During Hamas’s assaults in Gaza this week, no prominent Fatah leader was in the coastal strip to take command.
“Hamas has leadership, a goal, an ideology and funding,” said Gaza analyst Talal Okal. “Fatah has neither leadership, nor a goal, a vision or money.”

The Guardian’s Ian Black had these pieces of reaction from respected (but generally secularist) Palestinian commentators:

“The government will remain, but it does not govern. It will be there, but is incapable of doing its job,” predicted Bir Zeit university’s Ali al-Jarbawi. “The situation will be completely paralysed.”
Palestinians see the Gaza crisis as the disastrous outcome of years of failure: of the Oslo peace process, Hamas’s electoral win and the international sanctions imposed as a result. “If you have two brothers put into a cage and deprive them of basic essential needs for life, they will fight,” said the Palestinian foreign minister, Ziad Abu Amr. Many say the Palestinian Authority is already effectively dead.

Al Jazeera’s English website featured a story saying that UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-moon was considering the possibility of despatching a UN force to Gaza:

Ban said Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, had raised the idea with him in a phone conversation on Tuesday and noted that Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, had also brought it up.
“I need to consider more in detail with the countries concerned,” he said…

That Jazeera story also noted that many Fateh fighters had either fled to Egypt or surrendered en masse to the Hamas side, which is what I’d expected.
Haaretz’s Aluf Benn is reporting that,

In the wake of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, United States said Thursday that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush will now work to prevent the violence from spilling over to the West Bank. The U.S. therefore aims to accelerate the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to allow Abbas to present some achievements.

H’mmm. Wouldn’t you say it’s about three (or 30) years too late to suddenly say, “Oh, we have to give Abu Mazen some diplomatic achievements?”
Anyway, Benn goes on:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also intends to tell Bush that Hamas’s coup d’etat must be contained in the Gaza Strip, and not allowed to occur in the West Bank as well, a government official told Haaretz on Thursday.
The American administration is also interested in improving living conditions in the West Bank to demonstrate to the Palestinians that they are better off under Fatah than Hamas.

Benn notes that Hamas’s takeover in Gaza will dominate the discussions the two very lame ducks– Olmert and Bush– will have when Olmert goes to the White House next Tuesday:

in this context, Olmert will discuss the possibility of deploying a multinational force in Gaza with both Bush and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The security cabinet, however, has not yet decided on its stance regarding the deployment of such a force, and will address the issue only after Olmert returns…

So there you have it: US-fueled death and destruction in Palestine; a continuing complete stasis in the peace negotiations; and the UN and the world community it represents is expected once again to stand aside and wait on the pleasure of this government in Israel whose only imperatives seem to be (a) to somehow hang on in office, and (b) to obstruct any meaningful peace negotiations while Israeli concrete-mixers continue their transformation of the West Bank into a vast network of lavish, Israelis-only settlements punctuated by large numbers of hellish Palestinian Bantustans.
There really is a better way to end this state of fearfulness and violence in Israel/Palestine, and to bring security, hopefulness, and a decent life to everyone concerned. Engaging seriously in negotiations over how to build a peaceful, equality-based social order among all these people– whether in two states of equal standing, or in a single binational state– is the place to start.

What is 20 years? What is 40 years? (What is 59 years?)
Twenty years ago, in the summer of 1987, I spent quite a bit of time in Israel and Palestine, with Bill the spouse and our daughter Lorna, who was then two. I think that was the first time I met the Israeli strategic-affairs writer Ze’ev Schiff, who was already a ‘grand old man’ of the Israeli military-affairs scene. I was researching my third book, The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, so he was one of the people I interviewed there.
Earlier that summer, the IDF’s ‘Civil Administration’ Branch, the arm of the military responsible for actually running the military rule over the occupied territories and their inhabitants, had brought out a glossy little publicity booklet to “celebrate” the many achievements of that rule. It had a photo of a field of waving grain on the cover, and photos of smiling Palestinians inside.
Ze’ev wrote scathingly about it in HaAretz, I remember. “It’s so short-sighted and basically untrue!” he said when I talked to him later about the article.
(Looking back from today, I would say it was very similar to all the occupation-lauding p.r. materials produced by the US military and their flacks in their early months in Iraq.)
Six months after my 1987 visit to Palestine and Israel, the first intifada broke out. With it, the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza rose up as a single, fairly well-coordinated body to say “Enough!” of rule by foreign military occupiers.
The vast, vast majority of what the Palestinians did in that intifada was nonviolent, pro-independence, civilian resistance. It took the IDF and their political masters six years to break it– a feat that they finally accomplished only when they concluded the “Oslo” interim accords with the PLO, and exchanged formal recognition with the PLO.
But Oslo did not bring to either side what it needed. For Palestinians it did not bring final-status peace talks according to the mutually agreed schedule. It did not bring an end to having their land expropriated by the Israeli settlers. It brought a considerable worsening in the situation of the 180,000 or so Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem… And to Israelis it brought no end to either their conflict with the Palestinians, or their state of chronic insecurity. In 1996, a series of very lethal suicide bombs that anti-Oslo Palestinian militants from Hamas and from Fateh’s militant wing set off in Israeli cities shook many Israelis to their core.
I don’t think I went to Palestine or Israel in 1997. I know I was there in 1995; I went there to write a series of articles about the draconian new measures the Israelis were taking in and around East Jerusalem. Basically, they were working fast, in that post-Oslo period, to cut the city’s Palestinian population off from their compatriots, cousins, schoolmates, and business partners in the rest of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. This cutting-off was achieved in three ways: with the erection of new roadblocks to control the movement of Palestinians into and out of the city; with the issuing of new administrative orders that separated the life of the Jerusalem palestinians from that of their compatriots just outside the city’s boundary; and with the construction of vast, fortress-like new “Israelis-only” settlements that sliced around the city to further cut its Palestinians from their confreres in the Palestinian hinterland.
It was a grim time to be there. I should dig out my notes of the lugubrious conversations I had with Faisal Husseini, a gentle and visionary leader for all the Palestinians of the West Bank, who felt marooned in his office in the faded beauty of Jerusalem’s Orient House. He was continually being besieged there by ultra-nationalist Israeli extremists who set up a little tent camp right outside the entrance. The Israeli government did little or nothing to restrain them. He also felt nearly completely marginalized by Yasser Arafat who was busy preening for the international diplomatic corps in nearby Ramallah.
Well, that was 1995. In 1999, the deadline set in Oslo for the ending of the final-status talks between the two sides came and went. (In Washington, Clinton’s advisor Dennis Ross still talked endlessly about the need for a “process”, rather than for actual peace.)
The occupation continued.
In September 2000 the second intifada broke out– more violent on both sides than the first one. In 2002, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent tanks and planes in to destroy nearly all the fragile institutions of “limited self-government” that the PLO had been allowed to establish after Oslo. That was almost exactly 20 years after he bloodily destroyed the institutions the PLO had established in West Beirut.
Faisal Husseini died in May 2001.
Today, the second intifada has been going for more than six and half years and it still hasn’t been suppressed, though goodness knows the Israelis have inflicted massive punishment on the Palestinians in their attempts to achieve that.
Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in March 2004, and his successor Abdel-Aziz Rantissi a month later. Yasser Araft died in November 2004.
… Back in 1967, I was 14 years old. I remember sitting at home in England and watching news footage of the Six-Day War on our family’s black-and-white t.v. It came with all kinds of cheerleading in the commentary, for “plucky little Israel” and its very brave and wily fighters.
In 1977, I was 24. I was hard at work covering the massacre-studded civil war in Lebanon. The year before, I had covered the fall of the Palestinian refugee camp at Tel el-Zaatar, in East Beirut, to the Falangist militia forces. I still have the clippings from the Sunday Times of the part where the “plucky” young Falangist leader Bashir Gemayyel told us– before he led our group of western journos into the corpse-strewn wasteland of the camp– that “I am proud of what you are going to see there.”
That was what he said. It was all on the record. Six years later, after Gemayel had been assassinated, Ariel Sharon led his vengeance-seeking followers into two more Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut– in Sabra and Shatila. And Sharon later claimed he “did not know” that those Falangists might be seeking to kill Palestinians indiscriminately once they got into the camps.
In the summer of 1977, I was newly pregnant with my first child. My husband of that time and I drove our new Fiat 127 from Beirut to England, where I did a pregnancy test and was able to announce our happy news to my family.
Now my son Tarek is nearly 30.
What is 30 years? What is 40 years? What is 40 years of a military occupation rule that is a burden both to the occupier and to the occupied?
But most especially for the occupied.
Here in the US, our government has been maintaining a military occupation rule over the people of Iraq for four years. Both occupying bodies– the Israeli and the American– have sought to use divide-and-rule to decrease the chances of a successful nationalist resistance emerging. In Iraq, that divide-and-rule has already, after just four years, had devastating consequences. In occupied Palestine, there has as yet been only a little of the kind of terrible, internecine fighting that occupied Iraq has seen, though recently Gaza has teetered on the brink of something like that. But for Palestinians, for all the years I’ve been going there, it has been the steady grinding effect of the many administrative controls and rules imposed against them by the (completely unaccountable and anti-democratic) occupation authorities that have– along with the every day visible expansion of the racist settlement proejct– worn them down… Year after year after year after year.
That, and the intense concern about the fate of their brothers and cousins in very vulnerable positions in the ghurba (the Palestinian diaspora)… in Lebanon, still today, in Iraq, or Jordan, or Kuwait…
Is there still hope for two viable states there west of the Jordan, in Israel and Palestine? I hope so. But the insidious and continuous spread of the settlement project has made it harder and harder to see how a viable two-state outcome can be won. Maybe all that is possible now is something like the unitary binational state that Martin Buber and Judah Magnes both called for long ago?
Right now, though, no-one in the “international community” is even talking about moving to any kind of a swift final outcome. So in the absence of any truly hope-inspiring diplomacy, it just looks like more of the same.
Unless, the people on both sides can come up with a new pardigm. Perhaps one day soon, they might start to really understand that violence– whether direct physical violence of weapons or the grinding, anti-humane violence the oppressive occupation– can never solve their problems. Neither side can wipe the other out…
So where is the principled and visionary leadership from the “international community” that tells them all that this conflict needs to get resolved fast– and indeed that it can be resolved, speedily and satisfactorily, on the basis of the well-known principles of international law and in a way that allows both these peoples to be safe and to flourish?
I do not want to be here 10 years hence, writing a follow-up to this same essay.

So much to discuss and think about… Check out Laila el-Haddad’s great writing from Gaza. Also this report from today’s WaPo, spelling out quite clearly that,

Israel this week allowed the Palestinian party Fatah to bring into the Gaza Strip as many as 500 fresh troops trained under a U.S.-coordinated program to counter Hamas…

How tragic for two generations of secular Palestinian nationalists that the organization that has dominated their movement for 40 years has now turned into an almost exact replica of the “Inkatha Freedom Party” that was armed, financed, and supported by the apartheid regime in South Africa to battle the ANC in the waning days of apartheid. Those clashes killed thousands upon thousands of Black South Africans… and for what?
Now, these Fateh units armed and trained by the US are being sent in to torpedo the National Unity Government that the Palestinian political leaders had painstakingly negotiated and put together with the help of the Saudis… and for what?
Divide and rule. It’s the oldest game in the playbook of imperial powers and sometimes the only one they know how to play.

Here is my column in the May 10 Christian Science Monitor. (It’s also here.) The title is The UN must drive Middle East peace and the subtitle is Global stability can no longer be held hostage to the claims of Israeli settlers.
In it I argue, by clear implication, that the US no longer has the political credibility required to continue to dominate Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking… This, in the context of the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza– and the Syrians of Golan– having had to endure rule by foreign military occupation.
I argue:

the Israeli-Palestinian issue remains one with crucial impact on global stability. The time has come for the United Nations and other world powers to tell Washington that the near-monopoly the US has exercised over Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy for most of the past 40 years needs to end…

But while the Palestinians and Israelis all desperately need to see the definitive end of the 40-year-long occupation– a transition that can only take place in the context of a final peace agreement being concluded between them– Condi Rice and the administration she works for continue merely to fiddle away with tweaking a tiny, tiny part of the interim peace agenda: namely, the extensive system of extremely tight movement controls that Israel has imposed over the Palestinians of the West Bank in recent years– as too, around all the borders of Gaza.
How draconian are these movement controls?
Well, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) regaularly publishes a whole booklet of very detailed maps that show you exactly where all the IOF-staffed checkpoints, baricades, earth barriers, trenches, gates, and barriers are, that choke each Palestinian sub-community off from its neighbors. Here‘s the April 2007 version of the booklet. But be warned it’s a vast, vast PDF file. If you want to look at just one of those maps, go to p.7 of that PDF file and look at the one for Nablus. The blue roads are the “apartheid roads”– that is, the roads on which Palestinian traffic is either prohibited or strictly restricted. The purplish blobs are the Israeli settlements– and the lighter purple areas around them are the lands the settlements have expropriated. The yellow-toned areas are the areas with Palestinian population or cultivation.
As I note in the column:

Today, as many as 440,000 Israeli settlers live among the nearly 2.5 million Palestinians of the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem.)
The size of this settler population considerably complicates the search for a solution. The settlers now form more than 5 percent of Israel’s electorate. And their appropriation of huge quantities of the West Bank’s land and water makes it hard to imagine how any viable Palestinian state could be established on the land that the settlers have not (yet) taken.

… Earlier today, the World Bank issued this report that looked at the effect that the whole Israeli-imposed movement-control system has had on the Palestinian economy.
The report’s Executive Summary notes,

Beginning in December 2004, … all parties (including the Government of Israel (GOI) and the Palestinian Authority (PA)) agreed that Palestinian economic revival was essential, that it required a major dismantling of today’s closure regime and that closure needed to be addressed from several perspectives at once…
Currently, freedom of movement and access for Palestinians within the West Bank is the exception rather than the norm contrary to the commitments undertaken in a number of Agreements between GOI and the PA. In particular, both the Oslo Accords and the Road Map were based on the principle that normal Palestinian economic and social life would be unimpeded by restrictions. In economic terms, the restrictions arising from closure not only increase transaction costs, but create such a high level of uncertainty and inefficiency that the normal conduct of business becomes exceedingly difficult and stymies the growth and investment which is necessary to fuel economic revival.
… In the West Bank, closure is implemented through an agglomeration of policies, practices and physical impediments which have fragmented the territory into ever smaller and more disconnected cantons. While physical impediments are the visible manifestations of closure, the means of curtailing Palestinian movement and access are actually far more complex and are based on a set of administrative practices and permit policies which limit the freedom of Palestinians to move home, obtain work, invest in businesses or construction and move about outside of their municipal jurisdiction. These administrative restrictions, rooted in military orders associated with the occupation of West Bank and Gaza (WB&G), are used to restrict Palestinian access to large segments of the West Bank including all areas within the municipal boundaries of settlements, the “seam zone”, the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, restricted roads and other ‘closed’ areas. Estimates of the total restricted area are difficult to come by, but it appears to be in excess of 50% of the land of the West Bank. While Israeli security concerns are undeniable and must be addressed, it is often difficult to reconcile the use of movement and access restrictions for security purposes from their use to expand and protect settlement activity and the relatively unhindered movement of settlers and other Israelis in and out of the West Bank.
While GOI has shown a willingness to consider a relaxation of specific restrictions, including the provision of several hundred permits to unique categories of Palestinians such as businessmen, or the removal of certain physical impediments, incremental steps are not likely to lead to any sustainable improvement. This is because these incremental steps lack permanence and certainty and can be easily withdrawn or replaced by other restrictions. Moreover, sustainable economic recovery will remain elusive if large areas of the West Bank remain inaccessible for economic purposes and restricted movement remains the norm for the vast majority of Palestinians and expatriate Palestinian investors. Only through a fundamental reassessment of closure, and a restoration of the presumption of movement, as embodied in the many agreements between GOI and the PA, will the Palestinian private sector be able to recover and fuel sustainable growth.

And here, if you are interested, is the WB’s report on the dire fate the Palestinian economy suffered in calendar 2006.
It says:

After having experienced a modest recovery in 2003–05, the Palestinian economy suffered another decline in 2006, as a result of the domestic and international political difficulties. Although hard data are scarce, real GDP is estimated to have fallen within a range of 5 to 10 percent in 2006, less than initially had been feared, but still leaving average real per capita GDP at almost 40 percent below its 1999 level.
…The worsening political and security situation has clearly been detrimental to economic growth. Production has been lost due to outright destruction of physical infrastructure and assets, or dampened by the numerous closures and checkpoints, the shortage of funds to finance government spending, as well as by the increased uncertainty about the Palestinian territories’ prospects.

The surest way to end this uncertainty? To have the Security Council speedily declare that Israel’s military occupation of these areas must end forthwith on the basis of the well-known principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, as spelled out in numerous previous SC resolutions, and on the basis of the Palestinians gaining their sovereign independence in the West Bank and Gaza and concluding a final peace with Israel.
Forty years of living under the yoke of a foreign military: It’s enough!

Anthony Shadid has a great piece of reporting in today’s WaPo from one of the bleak ‘temporary’ camps at the Jordanian-Iraqi border in which 1,300 Palestinians who fled from Iraq shortly after the US invasion have now been trapped for nearly four years.
Shadid interviews 52-year-old Samir Abdel-Rahim who arrived in Ruweished ‘camp’, about 40 miles inside Jordan, in the middle of the bleak desert that separates Amman from Baghdad.
Shadid writes:

“If you don’t leave my house, I will burn it down — you and your family inside,” Abdel-Rahim, bearded and balding, said he was told by his landlord in the Baghdad neighborhood of Hayy al-Salam.
On May 4, 2003, he left with his family [wife and four children] and his brother’s family, buying bus tickets for the equivalent of about $7.
“We didn’t have a choice,” he said.
For a brief time in 2003, Jordan allowed Palestinians, including Abdel-Rahim’s family and a few hundred others, into the Ruweished camp, built about 40 miles from Iraq to house a feared influx of Iraqis fleeing the U.S.-led invasion. Jordan then closed the border. In summer 2006, Syria allowed more than 300 Palestinians into al-Hol camp, on its side of the frontier. Then, like Jordan, it sealed the border again….
U.N. officials say both countries fear the precedent that would be set by allowing in more Palestinian refugees.
“The line is drawn — that they’re not going to admit them, that they’re not going to absorb one more,” said Robert Breen, the representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Jordan. “If you open up for some, the rest are going to come.”
The Palestinian Authority has offered the refugees sanctuary, but Israel, which controls the borders of the West Bank and Gaza, has denied U.N. requests to resettle them in the Palestinian territories, he said.
“I can’t recall ever having seen this kind of situation in such a bleak environment,” Breen said. “They can’t go backward, and they aren’t moving forward. They’re literally stuck in the desert — no way back, and nowhere to go.”
… “If there were a one in a hundred chance that we could have lived safely in Baghdad, we would have never left,” Abdel-Rahim said.
The New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch has said that Shiite militias have murdered dozens of Palestinians in Baghdad and that Interior Ministry forces have arbitrarily arrested, beaten and tortured others. The group said entire communities of the 15,000 Palestinians still there have received threats of eviction. Rumors abound that Palestinians, as Sunni Muslims, have served as suicide bombers and supporters of the insurgency.
“They have been systematically brutalized,” said Anita Raman, a reporting officer with UNHCR in Amman.
“You kill a Palestinian, and what is the consequence?” she added.
…Abdel-Rahim had applied to go to Canada. He pulled out the letter he had received from the Canadian Embassy.
“You have not provided sufficient evidence that you have a well-founded fear of persecution nor that you have been and continue to be seriously and personally affected by civil war, armed conflict or massive violation of human rights,” it read in part.
The last line concluded: “I am therefore refusing your application.”
“I would have to die, my husband would have to be killed, or my children would have to be slaughtered in front of my eyes, so that I’d have the right to leave this place,” his sister-in-law said. “Is that logical?”

So this is what it feels like to be stateless– that is, to belong to a group that does not have any state that recognizes that you are its citizen and is capable of intervening to ensure that your most basic rights as a person– or even your existence– as a person is safeguarded.
It strikes me that the leaders of a Jewish state, of all the states in the world, should well understood the extreme vulnerability of the condition of statelessness, and should be open to allowing the Palestinian Authority to offer a refuge in the areas under its control to these very distressed Palestinians???
Anyway, Shadid’s piece is all worth reading.

Laila el-Haddad has a great post on her blog about the collapse of the dam holding back a sewage lagoon in northern Gaza, which sent a flood of human excrement surging into nearby communities. The flood killed two toddlers, two elderly women, and one other person.
Laila writes:

It was bound to happen. All of the major humanitarian organizations issued endless reports and warnings about its imminent flooding. But even if the funding was available, the permission to expand and renovate the facility was not granted by the necessary “Authorities” who built it (on a major acquifer) in the first place.
I’m referring to the collapse and flooding of Gaza’s northern sewage treatment facility, known locally as the “Death Swamps”, which you can see here on wikimapia…
“This was not only foretold, it happened twice before, in 1988 and 1993,” tells me human rights consultant, and friend, Darryl Li, who has worked for Israeli, Palestinian, and International HR groups. Darryl’s last trip was in August, to this very facility…
The facility stopped functioning entirely in the weeks after the power cutoff last year (when Israel bombed Gaza’s power plant), and later functioned at very low efficiency levels with generators. Water level consuquently rose dangerously high.
The embankments of the cesspool have also been the target of frequent Israeli shelling, threatening their integrity, says Li.

She also quotes Li as saying:

“This is life in a ‘disengaged’ Gaza: It is not enough to be locked into an open-air prison by Israel. Nor to be turned into a beggar by the international community for voting in a democratic election. Nor to be torn apart by internal feuding. Now Palestinians have to drown in their own shit? I can’t wait to hear the latest excuse about how this, too, is their own fault.”

Anyway, go read the whole thing.

Last December, when the co-chairs of the Iraq Study Group presented its recommendations to President Bush, the Prez angrily swept them aside, placing his emphasis instead on the planning for his own much-trumpeted ‘surge’.
Well, the surge has been underway for some weeks– and it seems increasingly clear that the Bushites are now, in addition,backing into some degree of compliance with at least two of the ISG’s key recommendations! They have already held some preliminary official contacts with both Iran and Syria, and more are to follow. And they have launched a new round of Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy that may yet show some signs of robustness.
The politics of this Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy are particularly interesting. At this point, after Fateh’s entry into a coalition government with Hamas, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has acquired considerable new political strength. Even if domestic support for the bicephalous PA government is not quite the 96% support that PA Info Minister Mustafa Barghouthi claims, it is still extremely high.
In addition, this Palestinian leadership is now– quite unusually– backed by a wall-to-wall coalition of Arab states. The Arab leaders will soon be convening at a summit meetingin the Saudi capital, Riyadh; and the central issue on their agenda there is an effort to push forward the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy on the basis of the key peace plan that an earlier Arab summit endorsed, back in Beirut in March 2002.
But here’s where the structure of this round of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy gets complex: Both Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and the US Prez himself are extremely weak with their respective publics. Did I see somewhere that political support for Olmert had dropped to around 3%? Anyway, it’s extremely low. And Bush’s job-performance and ‘favorability‘ ratings have both been hovering down between 30 and 37 percent throughout most of this year.
Bush, at least, can’t resign. (And I’m interested to see that the ratings given to our newly elected Congress are just about as low as Bush’s numbers. So the Dems have no particular reason to feel triumphalist at this point, either.) But Olmert can resign, and may well be forced to at some point over the next three months. So this all raises a number of intriguing questions:

(1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert as such, since the guy is so evidently a very lame duck?
(2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next government that comes into power in Israel?
(3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public? and
(4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?

One approach I think we might adopt is to stop calling the Arab peace plan the “Arab” peace plan. Why should it not be the world’s plan for bringing peace to this very tormented part of the world? Indeed, let us hear what reasonable objection any other governments in the world– or indeed, the UN as a body– have to this peace plan?
Here, in a nutshell, is what the 2002 peace plan does:

(a) It calls on Israel to withdraw completely to the territory it held prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the establishment in the Palestinian portion of the occupied territories a “sovereign independent Palestinian state… with East Jerusalem as its capital”;
(b) It calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194”; and
(b) It promises, in return, that all the Arab countries– including, presumably, the sovereign Palestinian state to be created– will determine that the Arab-Israeli conflict has been finally ended, and these parties have no outstanding claims against Israel. They will also all sign peace agreements with Israel; will “provide security for all the states of the region”, including Israel; and will establish “normal relations” with Israel.

I note that the withdrawal clause is in full accord with UN Security Council resolutions on the matter, which all mention the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
The main objections I have heard to this plan have been over that withdrawal clause… and over the clause that addresses the refugee issue. UNGA Resolution 194 did, in its clause 11, state that the General Assembly,

11. Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible;
Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation…

Pro-Israeli figures in the US have often argued that the implementation of this clause would result in Israel suddenly becoming demographically “swamped” by a flood of Palestinian returnees. For its part, ever since the GA adopted Resolution 194 in December 1948, Israel has staunchly asserted its right, as a sovereign state, to regulate any entry of persons into its borders (though this right surely cannot simply over-ride the right– enshrined in the Universal declaration of Human Rights– of all persons to be free to leave the country of their birth or to return to it); and in practice, Israel has refused to allow the vast majority of the Palestinian refugees from 1947-48 to return to the homes and farms that they fled during that war.
It is surely evident to everyone that a workable (i.e. sufficiently “fair”) resolution of the refugee issue needs to agreed upon– and accepted by the great mass of the four million Palestinian refugees themselves– if any Arab-Israeli peace process is to be final and stable. Luckily, Resolution 194 itself specifically mentions a number of alternatives to outright “Return”. These include the payment of “compensation… for the property of those choosing not to return”, and “resettlement” (i.e., either where they currently are, or in third countries.) R-194 also specifies, for those choosing “Return”, that they commit to living at peace with the neighbors they will find around them after their return– and also, that this return be undertaken “at the earliest practicable date”…
So it does seem to me that within the context of a comprehensive peace agreement some package of different options– each with a different “compensation” component attached, and perhaps with varying implementation timetables– could be offered to each Palestinian refugee family (however defined), and this would still be in line with both resolution 194 and the longstanding norms regarding the kinds of outcomes that are offered to refugees in other situations around the world.
In other words, the reference to R-194 need not be seen as a barrier to other people and governments expressing their support for the “Arab” peace plan. And nor, in my view, should the reference to a full Israeli withdrawal.
Which among us, after all, is prepared to stand up today for the claim that it is indeed quite okay for nations to acquire new territories purely through the exercise of physical force??
If we want to go back and see what the United Nations itself has ever said, in a more positive vein, about the “national complexion” of the lands of West Bank and Gaza, then we need to go back to the 1947 Partition Plan, under which the whole territory of Gaza was declared to be part of the “Arab State in Palestine”; so was most of the West Bank– except for that chunk in the middle that, according to the Partition Plan, was deemed to be included (along with West Jerusalem) in the internationally administered “corpus separatum” of Jerusalem. A large area of further land that the Partition Plan also allocated to the “Arab State in Palestine” was conquered by Israel during the fighting of 1947-48; no-one in any rounds of diplomacy in the past 50-plus years has ever requested that Israel withdraw from and cede those areas. Israel’s control of them has been essentially uncontested for many decades now.
… The “Arab” peace plan has the huge advantage that– notably unlike the interim (and largely failed) accords concluded at Oslo in 1993– its clauses are all firmly rooted in the resolutions of the United Nations and in the norms of international law. For example, Oslo implicitly condoned the continuation of the support Israel gave to the illegal settlement-implantation project in the occupied territories– and quite explicitly gave open support to the settlement project by stipulating the construction of a whole network of settler-only highways throughout the West Bank. But the 2002 Peace Plan makes no mention of the settlers at all. If the assumption of the plan’s framers was that all the settlers should simply summarily leave the land of the future Palestinian state, still, perhaps the modalities of that relocation could also be subject to some negotiation… (And anyway, how many of the settlers would really want to stay in place under Palestinian sovereignty, and without the whole vast basket of special favors that they currently receive from Israel?)
The 2002 Peace Plan also has the great advantage– again, in clear contrast to the tragic, failed, and very damaging experiment of Oslo– that it speaks directly and solely to the issue of the final-status agreements that have always been so urgently required on both the Israeli-Palestinian and the Israeli-Syrian tracks. Oslo spoke only to the Palestinians, excluding the Syrians. Regarding the Palestinians it said nothing specific at all regarding the content of the final status, so when setbacks occurred, everyone on both sides immediately feared the worst about the intentions of the “others”, and very destabilizingly acted on those fears.
So now, let’s go back to those four questions near the head of this post:
(1) Why should any Arab negotiator feel obliged to make concessions to Olmert?
I don’t think any of them should.
(2) What can Arab negotiators and others do to structure the incentives for Israeli voters in a way that does the most to ensure a pro-peace outcome from the next governmental change in Israel?
This is the more important campaign that pro-peace figures and responsible leaders in the Arab countries and elsewhere should be focusing on. The fact is, there are currently about 180,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem, about 246,000 elsewhere in the West Bank, and 17,500 in Golan. These Israelis constitute a very significant voting (and opinion) bloc within the Israeli system.
In addition, though Olmert is currently weak, it is a sad fact that by far the strongest force that’s challenging him is from the right wing. After the political/military setbacks that Olmert government suffered last summer in Lebanon, the political mood in Israel seems deeply unsettled, uncertain, and fearful; and the pro-peace “left” that was once such an evident presence within the Israeli system is now only a tiny, weak shadow of its former self.
One of the actions that would have the greatest potential to focus the attention of Israel’s long-pampered Jewish population on the need to engage in serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians and Syrians (and through the Syrians, with the Lebanese, too), would be if the US government started showing its serious interest in the need for an peace that is comprehensive, final, sustainable, and based on the solid tenets and norms of international law.
It is probably quite unrealistic to expect that President Bush or any of his officials will come out any time in the foreseeable future and express open support for the “Arab” peace plan. We have heard him talking about the need for a Palestinian state (with no date or other details attached to that), and we have heard Condi Rice talking, rather tentatively, about the need for “a political horizon.”
It would, however, be much more reassuring and helpful to hear administration officials start talking openly and directly about the need for a peace that is “comprehensive and based on international legality.” They should certainly all be requested to do this; and if they refuse to, they should be asked for their reasons for this refusal. And then, beyond merely talking about the need for such an approach, they should be challenged to use the many levers of power they have over Israel (not only financial aid, but also access to markets, military cooperation, etc etc) to underline that message. In other words, the conditionality that used once to exist as between Israel’s activity in the settlement sphere and Washington’s granting fo special favors to Israel should certainly be reinstated.
Experience shows that when Washington undertakes such actions, it really does affect the political behavior of Israelis in the desired way.
But Arabs who are serious about their peace plan should also figure out ways to try to “sell” it to Israelis– or at least, to make sure that it gets clearly and directly explained to them, and in as humanly convincing a way as possible… I know that after the apparent failure of all the heavily funded “people-to-people” efforts the Palestinians engaged in with Israelis in the 1990s, the desire to repeat such ventures dwindled considerably. But still, the need for a sustainable and comprehensive peace is now so urgent that no effort to try to win the support of Israelis– or at the very least, to reduce the ranks of the Israeli hard-liners– should be spared…
(3) What can the Arab negotiators do to win maximal support for their approach to peacemaking from the ever-skeptical American public, and from others?
In the present era of participatory politics, no peace plan can be expected– in the USA, or indeed anywhere else– merely to “sell itself”. Persuading the great mass of the US’s extremely powerful voting public of the fairness and essentially constructive nature of the 2002 Peace Plan will take a major, and very well-considered “marketing effort.”
And when I say “marketing effort”, the one thing I certainly do not mean by that is that some official in the Saudi Embassy in DC might put out a huge contract for this job with some slick “marketing” firm somewhere in the country and sit back and think the job is done.
Oh no. I have seen ways too many similar contracts go out in the past, with their results ending up being absolutely nothing (or, indeed, quite frequently risibly counter-productive, as longtime JWN readers might recall my having remarked in the past.)
What’s needed is a serious effort to engage politically with a broad range of opinion-makers throughout the country… And the great thing right now is that, for a number of reasons, the US citizenry may well be in a good mood to connect with such a message, for the following reasons:

(a) The terrible outcome to date in Iraq has prepared the US public to really “hear” many messages about the Middle East that it may well not have been ready to “hear” properly prior to 2003. The parallels between the disastrous consequences of the US decision to use force in Iraq and the Israelis’ repeated recourse to force in the occupied territories are evident. So is the role that strongly pro-Israeli figures played in jerking the US into the war in Iraq in the first place.
(b) The US now has many experiences of its own in trying to run a strongly contested military occupation. US citizens are in a much better position than they were before 2003, to really understand what military occupation is; how unsustainable and damaging it is over the long run– to all concerned!– and to understand that ending the situation of rule by foreign military occupation, wherever it occurs, is the only legitimate, moral, and in the long term feasible way to proceed.
(c) Some important steps have already been taken in recent months to open up the whole, very necessary intra-US discussion on the huge role and damaging effects of the country’s strong and very well-organized pro-Israel lobby. I wrote about the role of the lobby in the chapter on the US-Israel relationship that I published in my 1991 book on Israel, Syria, and the superpowers… But that didn’t attract much attention then. Now, the work of Walt and Mearsheimer, of Jimmy Carter, and Tony Judt, has opened huge additional public space in which the discourse-suppressing, truth-distorting role of the lobby can be dispassionately discussed. More importantly, by allowing discussion of the lobby’s role, this also allows a much franker and more reality-based discussion among Americans of the facts of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

…And finally,
(4) What can anyone else in the world system do to maximize the chances of success of the current round of peacemaking?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. As may be clear from the above, I do think that the US remains an important player in world affairs. But I also think it’s time for Americans and everyone else in the international community to break out of slavish adherence to the idea that it is somehow only right and “natural” that the US should continue to exercise near hegemonic control over all the modalities of Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
It is not.
In fact, it’s a pretty extraordinary state of affairs if one government, distant from the scene and representing less than five percent of the world’s people, should be judged to have any “right” to control all aspects of a diplomatic task as central to the stability of the whole of humanity as this one.
For this reason, I am at this point probably not among those who think it would be helpful for the US to put forward its own plan. For if we say that it would be desirable and helpful for Washington to do this, aren’t we just merely perpetuating the view of Washington as constituting the main focal point of any peace diplomacy?
How on earth did it get to the point that the United Nations would agree to be a junior partner of Washington in that strange arrangement called the “Quartet”?
So here’s my Four-point Diplomatic Plan for Palestine:

(1) Scrap the ‘Quartet’ with its ridiculous power arrangements and its continued adherence to that inane and by now quite outdated ‘Road Map to Nowhere’;
(2) Have the Security Council appoint a responsible envoy tasked with urgently convening authoritative negotiations over the terms of the final-status peace agreements on all the remaining ‘tracks’ of Arab-Israeli diplomacy– that is, between Israel and respectively Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians;
(3) Scrap the name the ‘Arab’ Peace Plan and let the Arabs energetically work to get global adherence to the terms of the 2002 Peace Plan, while sympathetically exploring the concerns that others might have about it and brainstorming with them on ways that those concerns can be met;
(4) Send Condi Rice and her sad and outdated set of very vague and woolly ideas home.

So there you have it…