Palestine 2008 – Page 2 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Obama and Arab-Israeli diplomacy

There has been a lot of speculation in Washington these past weeks about the content of the Arab-Israeli stance we might expect to see from the Obama administration. I have followed this speculation as closely as just about everyone, and have the following observations to make:
1. It is still far too early to make any concrete predictions at all. All we know so far is the content of the top-level appointments he announced on December 1, to his foreign affairs and national security team, and the prominent mention he made in that announcement of the need to find “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
2. What we still do not, very significantly, know is how exactly the responsibilities will be divided between Hillary Clinton at State, and Gen. Jim Jones as NSC adviser. All we know is that Hillary asked for, and got, an assurance that she would have direct access to the Prez whenever she needs it. Which is not at all the same as saying that she will over-rule Jones, who will have direct access to the Prez as a matter of course and who is expected to play a strong role as NSC adviser.
3. One of my working assumptions is that Hillary might be expected to be more accommodationist than Jones to whatever government is in power in Israel, and more reserved than him about articulating the United States’ own strong interest in the conclusion of a final, conflict-ending, and claims-ending peace in the region. I might be wrong. But she has been a close and good friend of AIPAC for a long time now. Jones, meanwhile, gained important, firsthand experience into the (previously often dysfunctional) dynamics of the US-Israel-Palestine triangle during his work on revamping the PA’s security apparatus in Jenin. He is a high-level military man with considerable leadership experience, not someone whom Hillary can easily roll right over. (Also, his military experience and stature will be an important asset to Obama as Obama tries to figure out how to deal with the Israelis.)
4. Dennis Ross has worked hard to get himself “mentioned” as possible Arab-Israeli diplomacy czar in many publications in the US, Israel, and elsewhere (including, today, here.) Dennis has been a staunch Clinton-ite ever since he opportunistically jumped ship straight from George Bush I’s failed re-election campaign in ’92 to the Clinton camp. He did a workman-like job on Israeli-Arab diplomacy so long as he was closely supervised by Sec. of State Jim Baker, but once he rose higher on the feeding chain his own preferences were always for (a) lengthy delay in the conclusion of a final peace agreement– argued for in the name of “ripeness theory” and the need for very lengthy “confidence building” before the final negotiations even start; and (b) trying to split the Arab parties off from each other and play each off against the others in a classic “divide and rule” way.
5. However, despite all this “mentioning” and other forms of speculation, we still really do not know anything about how Obama intends to pursue his stated goal of a speedy move toward a final Israel-Palestine peace. And I suspect much of that “mentioning” might backfire.
6. We will not know the content of the policy until we hear additional substantive statements from the President-elect and/or see the next echelon down of Middle-East-relevant appointments being announced, with the lines of their responsibility also clearly established.
7. Given the urgency with which Obama spoke about the need for a final Israel-Palestine peace he may well have hoped to have more pieces of that policy (as in #6 above) in place by now. But the economic crisis has been overwhelming everything else on his agenda in the past couple of weeks. We still have 37 days to go before the inauguration. I am sure we will learn more before then.

Welcome new thinking on the Palestine Question

In Washington today former deputy speaker of Israel’s Knesset Naomi
Chazan had some great advice for President-elect
Obama. Noting that Israel’s election comes just 20 days after Obama’s
inauguration, she said Obama should wait 20 days before announcing the
US’s new policy on the Arab-Israeli peace– “but he shouldn’t wait any
longer than 21 days.”

The US might, she said, present its own peace plan. (She didn’t spell out whether Obama should do that right then, or a little later.)

Chazan– who is one of the smartest and most well-grounded people I
know, of any nationality or gender– also argued
convincingly that the whole process that goes back to Oslo and running
right through Annapolis “has dead-ended.” She said the whole way the
“peace process” has been framed and organized since Oslo needs to be
reframed, and gave some excellent suggestions on how to do this.

She was speaking along with Daniel Levy at the New America Foundation,
at an event co-hosted by the strongly pro-peace New Israel Fund, of
whose board she is president.

Chazan provided these three examples of the kind of reframing
she envisaged:

“We need to recognize
the asymmetry there is both on the ground and at the negotiating table,
between the Israelis and Palestinians, and find ways to rebalance that.
So far, since Oslo, the negotiations have all tended to create a false
idea that there is symmetry between them. There isn’t.” Later,
Levy amplified that point, saying that just leaving the two
sides in a room together to deal with everything through bilateral
negotiations wouldn’t work. Chazan agreed. Both of them said the US
needs to play a much more activist role in the negotiations than it did
in the whole “process” from Oslo through Annapolis.
“We need to go back to looking at the root causes of the
conflict. There’s always been this idea that doing this would be
unhelpful to the negotiations, but actually there are ways it could be
helpful.” Later, in response to a question about the Palestinian
refugee issue, she spelled out that rather than dealing with it just in
a distant and sort of technical way, if the Israeli government would
agree to make some kind of public acknowledgment that Israel’s actions
had “helped to create” the problem and wanted to join with others in
finding a solution, that was the kind of action that could help move
the whole process forward.
“We could also think of trying to separate the issues of
ending the occupation and dismantling the settlements.” In the
discussion period she noted that the fact that settlement dismantlement
had always, in the Oslo-to-Annapolis process, been an explicit item on
the agenda gave the settlers and their supporters a big cause to
mobilize around and, in effect, gave them a veto over the whole
negotiation. “But how about if we didn’t say anything explicit at all
about the settlements or the settlers but just reached an agreement by
which Israel would withdraw completely to the Green Line or a line near
it with negotiated changes, handing the area over in the first instance
to an international or NATO force, perhaps without doing anything
explicit to dismantle the settlements? What would the settlers do then?
They lose their veto.”

Chazan’s visit to Washington is timely indeed. As I noted here
on Monday, when Obama announced his foreign policy team in Chicago
earlier that day, he also made prominent mention of the need to work
rapidly “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Continue reading “Welcome new thinking on the Palestine Question”

Israel attacks Gaza, demonstrates it is still the ‘occupying power’

The Israeli military has sent ground forces deep into Gaza over the past two weeks, and has killed 17 Palestinians, and wounded uncounted others. In what even longtime Israeli flack Ron Ben-Yishai admits are retaliatory attacks, Palestinian rocketeers from Gaza have wounded an unknown number — presumed small– of residents of southern Israel, but killed none. This (highly asymmetrical) exchange of attacks has spread fear on both sides of the international border between Gaza and Israel.
In addition, the Israeli government recently tightened yet further the siege it has maintained around Gaza since the election nearly three years ago of a Hamas-dominated parliament in Gaza and the West Bank. The siege has contributed to the deaths of more than 200 Gaza Palestinians and has prevented the other 1.5 million residents of the Strip from leading anything like a normal life.
This BBC report tells us that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israeli PM Olmert in a recent phone call to lift the siege.
Yesterday, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Judge Navanethem Pillay, issued a hard-hitting statement calling for an immediate end to the blockade of Gaza. It said:

It must end now.

Here in the United States, apologists for the Israeli government have argued since 2005 that Israel “ended the occupation of the Gaza Strip” that year, and that therefore since then it has borne no continuing responsibility for the welfare of the Strip’s residents such as is required of any “foreign military occupying power” under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
But since 2005, Israel has continued to maintain tight control over all avenues and channels through which the Gazans might have contact with the outside world, and it has maintained it still has a “right” to intervene militarily in Gaza whenever it chooses.
Those two aspects of Israel’s policy put the lie to its claim that it has “ended” the military occupation of the Gaza Strip that it has, actually, maintained continuously since June of 1967.
If Israel were not, in fact, the military occupier of this territory then either the blockade it has maintained around it or the repeated military actions it has mounted against it would be considered under international law as overt acts of war that would allow the legitimate (indigenous) government of Gaza to request any and all forms of international military aid to counter and suppress those hostile acts.
But few actors in the international community believe that the democratically elected administration in Gaza has this right. Indeed, the BBC report on the Gaza situation quotes an un-named an Israeli official as describing Israel’s latest ground-force incursion into Gaza as “a routine operation”, i.e. not an act of war as such.
Routine???
The people of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan have had to live under the vagaries, aggressions, harsh repression, and downright dispossession that have marked Israel’s military occupation rule of these territories for 41.5 years now. It is time for all these military occupations to end.
Why, even the United States’ military occupation rule over Iraq is now scheduled to end at the end of 2011, after lasting less than eight years! How can the international community allow Israel’s rapacious and inhumane occupations to continue?

Gaza at crisis point

On Thursday, November 13, the UN agency UNRWA announced that because of Israel’s continued tight closure of the border with Gaza, it would have to stop the distribution of basic foodstuffs on which fully half of Gaza’s 1.5 million people have long been forced to rely.
The Gaza-Israel border has also, over the past ten days, seen an escalation of military action between the two sides. Between November 6 and 12, Israeli armed forces killed four Palestinians, injured seven more. Rockets launched by Hamas against Israel injured one elderly Israeli woman.
Of course, the armed actions by each side also sowed terror among the members of the communities targeted.
These armed actions by both sides seem to undermine the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire that went into operation between Israel and Hamas back in June– though not all observers agree about that (see below.)
Meanwhile, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has continued to perpetuate the US-originated myth that what is happening between Israel and Gaza is only Palestinian armed action versus Israeli blocading. In that statement Ban quite ignored the fact that Israel has also been engaging in armed action along that border, and has thereby played its part in fueling the cycle of direct armed violence while it has also continued to perpetrate extreme ‘structural’ violence against all the Palestinians of Gaza.
Ban’s subservience to Washington on the Palestinian question still seems quite extreme. I did, however, note what might have been one small glimmer of hope: When he was in Egypt on November 8-9 he met with leading representative of the other three members of the “Quartet”: Russia’s foreign minister, the US Secretary of State; and no fewer than three leading representatives of the EU (Solana, Ferrero-Walodner, and Kouchner.) At the press conference the Quartet reps held after their meeting, it was Ban who got to read out their statement.
Does this mean that leadership within the Quartet is quietly passing from Washington to the UN? I certainly hope so! It wouldn’t be a day too late. Unlike the US, the UN has the full weight and legitimacy of the international community behind it in its actions towards the Middle East. Its work is fully based on international norms and is not biased towards any one country in the region.
Regarding the status of the Hamas-Israel ceasefire, meanwhile, Haaretz’s Amos Harel and Ami Issacharoff write in Sunday’s paper that:

Hamas has successfully conveyed the message that it has overpowered Israel and will soon be able to return to the cease-fire [tahadiyeh] from an advantageous position.

chances are growing of the cease-fire going back into effect.

For its part, the Chinese news agency Xinhua now carries a “news analysis” piece datelined Gaza November 16, that quotes a number of Palestinian analysts who judge,

I am intrigued to note the degree to which Xinhua has beefed up its English-language coverage of Middle East affairs in recent years. Check out their latest offerings on this portal page.
I take this as an indication that China’s CP rulers are investing quite a lot in trying to understand the region much better– as well to educate their own public about it, and to disseminate a made-in-China version of the news from the Middle East to a broader global public.
Sounds like a possible precursor to deeper diplomatic involvement in the affairs of the region, don’t you think? Let’s hope so. All the non-US members of the UN’s veto-wielding P-5 group need to start taking a lot more active responsibility for the peace of the whole Middle East.

European parliamentarians invite Hamas and Fatah lawmakers to Strasbourg

A delegation of Members of the European Parliament headed by Cypriot MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides that’s currently visiting Gaza has invited all elected Palestinian parliamentarians to visit the European Parliament, seated in Strasbourg, next spring.
Triantaphyillides told Reuters that,

“We don’t care who they are as long as they are members of the Legislative Council…We don’t ask if they are members of Hamas or members of Fatah. The PLC was elected in 2006 and it was democratically elected.”

Yes, indeed it was. But ever since that election– which was certified as free and fair by, among others, EU election monitors and the US-based Carter Center– European government have followed the US and Israel in their quite anti-humane and shameful campaign of punishing the entire Palestinian people for the choice they expressed that day.
That is nearly three years of punishing siege (in Gaza) and campaigns of arrests, ill-treatment, draconian movement controls, and continued illegal land seizures (in the West Bank), that the Palestinians have suffered since then.
The Reuters writer editorializes a bit bit there when he/she writes that Triantaphyllides’s invitation, “appeared to be little more than a symbolic gesture since Israel has jailed some 40 of Hamas’s lawmakers and allows few Gazans to leave the coastal territory.” I think that’s interpreting the facts and editorializing in an unjustifiable way.
It’s quite possible that the MEPs’ invitation is entirely serious, and that they’ll be going back to Strasbourg and to their own countries determined to step up their campaigns to have EU governments use their undoubted trade leverage to persuade Israel to release the elected Palestinian lawmakers from their quite illegal detention.
Let’s hope so. And meantime we who are US citizens should step up our efforts to have the US government do the same.
Holding elected lawmakers in detention without charge or trial for any length of time, let alone as long as these men and women have been held? It’s barbaric.
How can any government that claims to support “democracy” not protest this practice most forcefully?
(Additional note: I see that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has diplomatically said that Hamas “is ready for dialogue with any incoming US president.” He also said, “”I am confident that we are ready to deal with any presidential candidate, but we will always stick to our rights. We acknowledge that the United States is powerful, but we are more powerful on our territory.”)

Olmert’s late-term epiphany on Iran and Palestine

It was not quite Saul the tax-collector on the road to Damascus but it was almost like that. Ehud Olmert, still nominally in office as Israel’s PM but leaving very soon, told Yediot Aharonot that:

These positions all sound like ideological bombshells, especially for someone who grew up and spent most of his life in rightwing nationalist parties.
In Haaretz today, Aluf Benn dismisses Olmert’s statement as “too little, too late.” Personally, I don’t think it’s too little. I think on every point he showed real insight and courage. (Except perhaps when he said Syria would have to cut all its ties to Iran, Hamas, and Hizbullah as part of a peace agreement.)
But to say the things he said about Israel’s “megalomania” regarding its own powers and its ability to deal with the Iranian challenge alone? That was even more significant than what he said about the peace process with the Palestinians.
Here in the US, there are numerous people in the Jewish community who are doveish on the peace process but very hawkish on Iran. I wish they could say things about Israel and Iran similar to what Olmert said.
Benn was quite right in noting that, if Olmert sincerely holds the beliefs that he now– right at the end of a 30-month term as PM– espouses, and if he has held them for a whole now (which is a reasonable assumption)… then why did he take so many decisions and actions while he was in power that undermined the policies he now espouses?
Especially regarding the implantation of additional tens of thousands of new Israeli settlers into the West Bank.
Benn writes:

Sharon … was the only leader willing to stand up to the settlers and evacuate them from their homes. Actions, not words. Olmert is a hero in a newspaper interview, but in reality has been a marionette of the settlers just like the leaders who preceded him.

By the way, Benn notes– as the NYT account linked to above does not– that in the interview Olmert also strongly opposed a new IDF incursion into Gaza.
… Anyway, it is now ways too late for Olmert to have any hope of implementing the kind of policy toward the Palestinians that he describes in the interview. His successor has already been chosen: Tzipi Livni. And Israel is in an inter-regnum period that may last some months as she works to assemble her new governing coalition.
But during the inter-regnum, Olmert does remain in power. It is significantly reassuring to me that for the few months ahead the reins of power in Israel are held by someone who looks prepared to withstand the kinds of pressures that others might put on him, to launch an Israeli military strike against Iran.
But as Aluf Benn says, it’s actions not words that count. So let’s hope that Olmert sticks to– and continues to argue in public for– the policy of restraint toward Iran that his recent words represented.

Curtains for Middle East ‘Quartet’?

It has been evident for several years now to people who watch the Palestinian situation closely that this strange bird the Middle East ‘Quartet’ that was tasked in 2002 with midwifing a speedy peace between Palestinians and Israelis and improving the lives of the Palestinians has failed. Miserably.
Now, a coalition of 21 western and international aid agencies that work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has issued a stinging report that confirms that conclusion.
This matters.
During the six years the Quartet has existed, Israel’s implantation into the West Bank of colonial settlers and the completely segregated infrastructure that supports them has continued, and even in the past year accelerated. The Palestinians have continued to live lives tightly circumscribed by fences, repressive regulations, widespread arrest campaigns,and economic strangulation. A peace agreement is nowhere in sight.
I have always thought the Quartet was quite inappropriately constituted. It unites, under the explicit “leadership” of the US government, the government of Russia, the European Union– and the United Nations itself. It is a complete distortion of the relationship between the US and the UN to imagine that the UN, which represents the interests of all of humanity, should in any matter be actually subordinated to the supervision of the US government, which “represents” the interests of less than five percent of humanity.
That subordination needs to be ended by the Security Council.
So the US has a veto in the Security Council, and might be expected to use it in such a vote, just as it has used it so many times in the past to block international efforts to protect Palestinian rights?
Let it try.
The world is changing. If the US wields a veto to keep the UN in subordination to itself over this vital issue in world affairs, the consequences would likely be enormous.

Egyptian delegation to break Gaza siege

The plan, as described on Hamas’s website here, could be huge. It will almost certainly have a much bigger impact than the two-small-ship siege-busting effort undertaken from Europe last month. That latter effort did a lot to focus European (and to a lesser extent, US and other western) attention on the gross injustices of Israel’s punitive, 30-month siege of Gaza. But in terms of actually either delivering goods to Gaza or changing the policies of the source-country governments, it did very little.
The Egyptian siege-busting project is being organized by a group from “the Egyptian judges club [association], parties, and popular forces,” and will aim to cross into Gaza from Egypt on October 9. Here’s what the Hamas website says about it:

I have wondered for a while now why the many popular and political forces in Egypt who are strong sympathizers of the Palestinians, and who have chafed under the knowledge that their government has gone along with Israel’s plans to maintain a tight siege around Gaza, have not done more to challenge the siege from their side of the border. It is true that Gaza is a five-hour drive from Cairo, so organizing a convoy of siege-busters in a country in which the military-security forces play such a strong role is no small matter… I guess I simply concluded that these pro-Palestinian Egyptians– okay, primarily, the leaders of Egypt’s powerful but badly repressed Muslim Brotherhood– had judged that the time was not right to challenge the regime’s power, and its intent to keep its relations with Israel good at all costs, in this very head-on way.
Now, it seems, that calculus has changed.
The fact that the convoy organizers have announced their plans so publicly and so far in advance is a key tactic of nonviolent mass organizing, a strategy to which the Egyptian MB has been committed since the mid-1980s. What can or will the Cairo government do to stop them– especially during the holy month of Ramadan– that will not itself make the situation worse? Possibly, a lot worse?
This convoy could succeed in getting huge amounts of much-needed goods into Gaza. It could succeed in opening the Rafah crossing for considerably longer than just a few hours. And most crucially, at a time when Egypt is suffering fin-de-regime jitters that could well be a lot worse than any it has suffered since 1952, this project could put the MB and its agenda into a position in Cairo that is much stronger than anyone in the fortress-like US embassy there (and their Israeli allies/overlords) can be happy with.
Savvy JWN readers will know that Hamas was originally, back in 1987, a project of the Palestinian branch of the MB. Back in January, when Hamas felled the high barrier walls between Gaza and Egypt and organized the big “bust-out” of deprived Gazans across the felled walls to buy some badly needed basic supplies, Egypt’s ageing president Hosni Mubarak made a huge and partially successful effort to portray that bust-out as an “invasion” of Egypt’s national territory by those repressed, hunger-driven– and almost completely unarmed– souls.
You can access some of the commentary I wrote about that whole series of incidents, and about the crucial role that Egypt plays in the long-range planning of the Hamas leaders, here.
But now, it looks as though what the MB and its allies are planning for next month is a “bust-in” into Gaza, instead.
Watch this story as it develops.

Selling the tahdi’eh

The Hamas-Israel ceasefire (tahdi’eh) went into operation today, thank God. But not without– as I forecast yesterday– some last-minute salvoes from each side.
The tahdi’eh is scheduled to last in the first instance for six months. According to the agreement, which was mediated by Egypt, the reciprocal cessation of attacks between Gaza and Israel will be followed in short order by Israel taking significant steps to ease and then lift the economic siege it has maintained on Gaza for two years; by steps to open the Rafah personal-transit crossing between Gaza and Egypt; and by completion of the negotiation on a prisoner exchange.
Until very recently, Israel’s leaders were adamant that they would not deal with Hamas, and Hamas’s leaders– who still do not grant Israel any of the legitimacy it craves as a Jewish state– remained very wary indeed of having any dealings with it. Since the leaders on both sides have promulgated these views very widely among their own people for many years, they have now necessarily had to accompany the release of the news about the ceasefire with their own efforts to explain to their respective followers how and why this ceasefire is acceptable.
This work of psychological leadership, or “message management”, is a necessary concomitant of all moves that leaders anywhere make from hostility to de-escalation or peacemaking. But studying it in this case is particularly interesting.
One perception the leaders on both sides have to combat is the idea that in reaching this de-escalation step they are displaying the “weakness” of their side vis-a-vis the other. In Hamas’s case, the movement addressed that concern directly yesterday. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported that,

The Hamas Movement on Wednesday affirmed that it signed the calm agreement out of strength and not out of weakness and that it would abide by all articles of the agreement as mediated by Egypt.

PIC also reported the (not completely unjustified) attempt by a Hamas spokesman to frame the conclusion of the ceasefire as a positive achievement for the movement:

Note, in that statement, too, how Abu Zuhri, whose statements until recently would drip with scorn or skepticism regarding the credibility and trustworthiness of Israel’s leaders, is now also assuring his Palestinian listeners that “both parties are committed to the agreement.”
For the vast majority of the Gazans listening to him, the promise that the commercial crossings between Gaza and Israel will be “completely open” within two weeks will obviously come as a huge relief, and– like the cessation of Israeli armed attacks that the ceasefire also involves– a real benefit of the ceasefire. So from that point of view, the challenge that Hamas has faced in “selling” the tahdi’eh to its public has been relatively easy.
In Israel, where only a small proportion of the public has been adversely affected by the long-continuing (and highly asymmetrical) exchanges of fire with Gaza, the leaders’ selling job has been considerably harder. Israel’s leaders have therefore been trying to sell the tahdi’eh to their people in a different, much more convoluted way and, I would say, with notably less enthusiasm than the Hamas leaders.
Haaretz tells us this:

Continue reading “Selling the tahdi’eh”

Bad timing

On the day that Israel announces it’s agreed to participate in a reciprocal ceasefire with Hamas in Gaza, Ziad Asali, the head of the “American Task for Palestine” (more rightwing American than Palestinian, as a task force) has an anti-Hamas op-ed in the rightwing Washington Times.
It’s titled “Miscalculation: How Hamas wastes Palestinian lives.”
Asali and others associated with the ATFP have been working hard in Washington DC in recent months, urging the US (and Israel) to take even tougher measures to try to “punish”, exclude, and crush Hamas.
Oops, who miscalculated now?