Category: Palestine 2007

Congratulations to the negotiators of Fateh and Hamas who have been able to reach agreement on a governmental list that will be presented to the Legislative Council for a (now merely formal) vote of approval on Saturday.
In the ultra-sensitive post of Interior Minister will be Hani al-Kawasmi. The head of Fateh’s parliamentary bloc, Azzam Ahmed, will be vice-premier to Ismail Haniyeh’s premier. My old buddy Ziad Abu Amr will (as previously agreed) be the Foreign Minister; Salam Fayad will be at Finance. Mustafa Barghouti will be information minister, etc etc…
There are some great choices here.
The Hamas website in Arabic tells us that French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy has sent an official message to Abu Amr congratulating him on the formation of the national unity Government and expressing the hope that the two could hold a meeting soon (no date given), in either Paris or the OPTs.
(The text of the ‘appointment letter’, agreed in Mecca February 9, by which PA Pres Mahmoud Abbas formally invited Haniyeh to form this new unity government, and which sets out the politica parameters for the government, is here.)
I want to recall that almost exactly 12 months ago, when I was in Palestine, the Israelis (and Americans) issued threats “of the most serious nature imaginable” against Ziad Abu Amr, in the event he would agree to join a Hamas-led government; and the threats worked.
This time around, the US has far less coercive power in the region, in general, and Hamas and the Palestinian people have proven that they can’t be broken by the quite inhumane siege that Israel and the US (and also, I note the US-backed governments of Egypt and Jordan, and also nearly all the rest of the international community) maintained around the OPTs. So things are noticeably different.
In Israel, however, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said his government would continue to boycott the PA government and encourage other countries to do the same because its program falls short of the conditions that the US-dominated “Quartet” set for its acceptance:

“Unfortunately the new Palestinian government seems to have said no to the three benchmarks of the international community,” Regev said. “Accordingly, Israel will not deal with this new government and we hope the international community will stand firmly by its own principles and refuse to deal with a government that says no to peace and no to reconciliation.”

One thing that always strongly puzzled me about the “Quartet” was why on earth the United Nations– which is supposed to be the organization that upholds fairness and the over-arching rule of law at the global level, ever allowed itself to be drawn into acting as the subordinate of the Bush administration in the Bushites’ very one-sided pursuit of a pro-Israeli agenda.
Maybe now, finally, enough European and other powers will be distancing themselves from the one-sided approach of the Bushites that the UN can start playing a much more constructive role in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy?
In fact, maybe it’s time– coming up as we are for 40 years into Israel’s very damaging pursuit of its settlement projects in the OPTs and in Syria’s Golan region– for the U.N. Secretary-General to convene an authoritative international conference to resolve finally, once and all, all the still-unresolved tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict, on the basis of international law and the UNSC’s many well-known resolutions.
Why would any sane person want to stand in the way of that?

Today’s three-way meeting in Jerusalem seems to have failed even more seriously than I and many others had been expecting. AP’s diplomatic writer Anne Gearan reports that,

Talks between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, initially billed as a new U.S. push to restart peace efforts, ended Monday with little progress other than a commitment to meet again.
… Neither Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas nor Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert joined Rice as she delivered her statement [which had lasted precisely 90 seconds], and she left the room without taking questions from reporters.
…State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said there is no date for another three-way meeting.

Gearan also wrote,

Speaking later, Olmert said he and Abbas agreed to maintain an open channel of communication “which would focus primarily on the need to improve the lives of the Palestinian people in various areas, and of course a continued war on terror by the Palestinian Authority — in practice — to bring terror to a complete halt.”
Abbas and Olmert also discussed possibly extending a 3-month-old cease-fire covering the
Gaza Strip to include the West Bank, said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

I will just note, regarding the avowals one repeatedly hears from Israeli leaders that they intend to work “to improve the lives of Palestinians”, that

(1) This has long been a code whereby Israelis signal that though they may– or may not– be prepared to talk about a few surface economic issues with the Palestinians, still at the same time they continue steadfastly to refuse to discuss the central political demands the Palestinians raise regarding their sovereignty, national independence, national borders, the status of Jerusalem, etc. I recall that at one “track two” gathering between Israelis and Palestinians that I helped organize back in 1991, one of the (Likudnik) Israelis trotted out this line and the Palestinians were already furious. One of the Palestinians there exclaimed, “You consider us just like animals in a pen who might require some feed from time to time, but you never think of us as humans with full political rights!”
It’s still the same today. (And of course, in the interim, the Israelis have succeeded in implanting additional hundreds of thousands of their citizens into the illegal settlements in the occupied territories, and have furthered the project of the systematic economic de-development of the Palestinians.)
(2) Despite the fact that we’ve heard all these Israeli avowals that they will try to improve the Palestinians’ daily lives so many times before, their track record on following through by attending to even the Palestinians’ basic humanitarian needs is atrocious.
It was Secretary Rice herself who “brokered” the “Karni Agreement” back in November 2005, under which the Palestinians of Gaza were to have assured passage for goods through the Karni crossing with Israel, plus the rapid organizing of convoys of buses for people to travel between Gaza and the West Bank, etc, etc.
What came of that one?? Almost nothing. What price did Rice and her boss impose on Israel for its anti-humanitarian foot-dragging on that? Absolutely none! So why should anyone take seriously these even vaguer avowals of concern for the Palestinians’ wellbeing being made by Olmert today?

Regarding the prolongation of the ceasefire: Yes! That would be great! But please let it be reciprocal, monitored by a trusted third party, and be considered as a gateway to the swift convening of a final-status peace conference between the two governments.
Approximately 39 years and six months of time that should have been used to broker a final peace between them has already been wasted. The world– and especially the hard-pressed Palestinians both inside and outside their historic homeland– should not be expected to wait for very much longer.
A final-status peace conference. That is the best alternative to failed attempts at (highly coercive) summitry.

As I write this– 10:30 a.m. Monday by Cairo time– U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The first thing to note is that all three of these officials represent political trends that are currently extremely weak within their respective countries.
So in this summit of three weak reeds, can any of the three expect to gain any strength from the support that the other two may– or may not– be able to offer them?
Of these three political trends, Mahmoud Abbas’s is currently (at his domestic level) the least weak. This might seem paradoxical. But his Fateh movement is the only one of these three three trends that has actively engaged with its domestic critics and done the hard work of reaching an agreement for internal entente; he did that through the Mecca Agreement that he concluded with Hamas last week.
By contrast, the administration that Rice represents has done almost nothing to try to reach a workable entente with the domestic critics whose rising power and new willingness to challenge the administration havey been much in evidence in the past two months. And as for Olmert, his complex governing coalition is limping along with little direction, plagued by internal problems and having still failed to recover any of the sense of direction it lost when its main original project– the pursuit of unilateralist “convergence” in the West Bank– was rendered irrelevant by the Hizbullah victory of last summer. (For details of which, see here.)
Though Abu Mazen is currently domestically stronger than the other two summiteers, his ability to give support to the other two weak reeds there is, of course, severely constrained by the terms of that same Mecca Agreement which represented, essentially, his conceding to the reality that Hamas is noticeably stronger and better organized in Palestinian society than is Fateh.
The Mecca Agreement represented a significant set-back to the US-Israeli plan to weaken or break Hamas’s power by using Fateh against it. (Just as, in Iraq at the end of December, the US plan to weaken or break Moqtada Sadr’s power by using SCIRI and other Iraqi Shiite forces against it was also blocked by the indigenous political forces there.)
These days, regarding Palestine, Rice is evidently fnding it hard to come to terms with the Palestinians’ new attainment of national entente. Al-Jazeera English tells us today that she told the Palestinian daily paper Al-Ayyam that: “This is a complicated time, and it has been made more complicated by the (Palestinian) unity government, but I’m not deterred…”
She has been going out of her way to “lower expectations” regarding the outcome of the summit. (Note to Rice: You think anyone even had any expectations of it in the first place?) She has made clear that she intends to coordinate closely with the Israelis throughout all the new bout of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy of which today’s summit is supposed to be a key first step– and that she thinks the parties are nowhere near to reaching any lasting diplomatic agreement. (See her interview with Aluf Benn in today’s HaAretz.)
Here in Egypt I found veteran journalist and commentator Fahmi Howeidy quite scathing regarding his expectations from the summit. He told me:

When Rice visited the region before and said she wanted to reach a final agreement on the Palestinian issue I said that she was not here primarily for the sake of the Palestinians but to try to shore up the Americans’ position in Iraq. It’s the same thing today!
They just want to try to convince the Arabs that they’re doing something about Palestine, in order to help them build an Arab coalition that could support their policies in Iraq– or towards Iran. It’s all a show!

Did he think the Arabs would be taken in?

Look, for the Arab regimes, it’s not a problem. They don’t need to be persuaded, because they have already stated their support for Bush. Even President Mubarak has said he supports Bush’s ‘surge’ policy. But what the administration needs to do is to convince the Arab people. This, they can’t do, because the Arab people aren’t stupid!”

So, back to my main question: can any of these three weak reeds receive meaningful support from the other two at today’s summit?
However much support Abu Mazen might want to give to Rice or Olmert (and I suspect that isn’t very much, anyway), he is constrained by the terms of the Mecca Agreement– and by the very strong support it has received from within Palestinian society– from making any further concessions to Rice and Olmert at this time.
As for whether they will do anything to support him? That doesn’t seem to be on the horizon, either. In her interview with Benn Rice still seemed quite inflexible regarding the Bushites’ demand that the Palestinian government meet all three of the Quartet’s extremely tough conditions, and she expressed her complete unwillingness to respond to Abu Mazen’s strongly stated request to move rapidly into negotiations of the final-status settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
So I guess that means the answer there would be a “No.”
(I’ll try to update this later in light of any public statements issued after the summit and the lunch that will follow it.)

I’ve been a huge admirer of Laila el-Haddad ever since I first read the brilliant blog Raising Yousuf (Unplugged) that she writes, mainly from her family’s longtime home in Gaza City… Then, around a year ago, I got to meet her there. She and her parents were SO welcoming, and I just loved meeting and talking with them all (as well as her too-cute-for-words little rascal, Yousuf.) And we’ve kept in pretty good touch since.
Now, Haaretz journo Ofri Ilani has also caught a case of Lailamania and has written a story about Laila and her blog, which is running in today’s paper. To write the story, Ilani evidently cruised the archives of Laila’s blog. She also interviewed Laila by phone. (L is currently spending a bit of time in North Carolina, where her spouse, Yassine, is doing his medical residency at Duke University Med School.)
At the end of the article, Ilani quotes Laila musing a little on the risks a person exposes herself to when she (or he) discloses a lot about herself through blogging:

“Some [comments on the blog] have been very vitriolic and hateful, to the point where I’ve had to initiate comment moderation. I’ve had people say: ‘Yousuf’s a beautiful boy; it’s too bad he has such a horrible mother who is raising him to become a suicide bomber like all other Palestinians.’ It makes you realize you are throwing yourself out there as cannon fodder, and you have to learn to live with the consequences of putting yourself out there like that. That is the price you pay for opening your door to the world.”

I know I’m not the only person who is really, really glad that Laila has been strong enough to take on those risks and persist in getting her voice out to the world. It’s great her voice is being made available to the readers of HaAretz, which is a significant Israeli daily newspaper that publishes (slightly different) editions in both Hebrew and English.
Interesting that on their English-language website, the piece is listed under “Arts and Leisure.” This seems a little demeaning. Laila’s voice is an important testimony to all aspects of the lives of the Palestinians of Gaza and of the Palestinian ghurba (diaspora)– daily life, politics, etc. But categorizing this article about the blog as “Arts and Leisure” makes it seem as though Laila just does it in her spare time, having taken it up as an alternative to reading novels or doing crossword puzzles, or whatever. Why is women’s work, and the contribution we make to the public sphere, so frequently demeaned and marginalized in one way or another, I wonder??
Oh well… It is nonetheless great news that HaAretz ran the story. (You can check out the comments afterwards for many examples of the kind of vitriol to which Laila gets exposed. Including, the very first one of all from a commenter who boldly asserts– based on zero evidence– that contrary to what Laila had written, based very much on her own intensely lived experience of these matters, that “Her hubby is free to enter [Gaza] thru Rafah… “)
I really don’t like HaAretz’s comments discussions at all. They are filled with anti-Arab hatred and propaganda points that, like that one, are totally unbacked by any evidence. They disseminate (and expose) some of the very worst parts of Israel’s public discourse… I really don’t know why HaAretz runs them without any discernible moderation at all.
But that’s a small quibble. The main point is: Good that they ran the piece, and good that Laila has a calm and persuasive voice that makes some Israelis, at least, want to take her words seriously.
Nice work, Laila!

Jan Benvie, the very inspiring staff member of Christian peacemaker Teams (CPT) with whom I had the honor of working at our nonviolence workshop in Amman last October, is back in the field with CPT, in Hebron, occupied Palestine. Here’s a press release CPT put out on Friday over her name:

CPT RELEASE
Conference in Hebron
by Janet Benvie
26th January 2007
On the 25th of January nearly 200 Palestinians and international peace activists, including CPTers Bill Baldwin, Bob Holmes and Dianne Roe, participated in an open-air conference beside the Israeli military checkpoint at the top of Shuhada Street in Hebron. The conference was the second event organized by Palestinian ISM in Hebron, calling for the Israeli military to open Shuhada Street, in accordance with an Israeli High Court decision in December 2006. (see http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/809722.html )
There was an almost carnival atmosphere about the peaceful event, as young and old, Palestinian and international, gathered together to listen to speeches and to chant, sing and dance. Everyone was united by the desire for freedom, justice and peace.
People held placards that called for freedom of movement, an end to the illegal Israeli occupation and an end to settler violence, as well as for the opening of Shuhada Street. Palestinian residents of Tel Rumeida, the community most severely affected by the closure, spoke eloquently about the harsh living conditions caused by the movement restrictions enforced by the Israeli military. A local school headmistress spoke about the difficulties her students face every day trying to get to and from school. A twelve-year-old boy from Tel Rumeida, spoke about his experiences of growing up in a land under military occupation.
Shuhada Street used to be one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The Israeli army has prevented Palestinians from using the street for the past six years, and has also enforced the closure of all the stops and stall on the street. This has had a profound, detrimental effect on the livelihood of thousands of Palestinian families.
CPTer Jan Benvie later spoke with an Israeli peace activist, in another area of Hebron, who told her that he had been prevented from passing through the checkpoint to join the conference. The military often prevent Israeli peace activists, who want to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, from entering Hebron.
Last week, on Thursday 18th January, the Israeli police prevented some 150 Peace Now (an Israeli peace group) activists from traveling to Hebron. The Israeli’s wanted to protest in Hebron against settler violence, following the airing of a video showing a settler verbally attacking a Palestinian family. (see http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3350480,00.html )
Issa Amro, a Palestinian nonviolent activist, and one of the conference organizers, told CPT that they plan to hold weekly events until the Israeli army abides by the court ruling.
Photos of this conference, and other events in Hebron, may be viewed at: http://www.cpt.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=hebron