Category: Palestine 2008

There will be no handshakes and back-patting on the White House lawn, and no turn-on-a-dime lionizing of this Palestinian leadership by the pillars of the world Jewish community. But the tahdi’eh (ceasefire) agreement that Israel has now confirmed it has agreed to with Hamas may well bring a long-needed degree of calm to both Gaza and southern Israel. And if it holds, it could serve as a foundation stone for an entirely new kind of Israeli-Palestinian relationship over the years ahead.
The rest of the day today, Wednesday, may yet see some fighting, perhaps even a last-minute esclation, as we saw along the Israel-Lebanon border in the 40 hours before the August 2006 ceasefire there went into effect. The Hamas-Israel tahdi’eh is scheduled to go into force at 6 a.m. local time Thursday, 15 hours from now, so hopefully not too many more lives will be uselessly lost before then.
Here’s the deal. Ever since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006, the government of Israel– with considerable support from the US-led portions of the “international community”– has maintained and progressively tightened an inhumane and illegal economic siege on Hamas-dominated Gaza, while government leaders have said they would lift the siege only if Hamas and its allies stopped the sporadic rocket attacks they’ve been launching against southern Israel.
But the economic siege and the Hamas rocketings were not the only thing that was going on there. The Israeli military has also, until now, clung hard to a claimed “right” to exercise full freedom of military action in Gaza, and has undertaken many forms of very destructive military actions against militants and others in the Strip. (Remember that the sheer weight and lethality of the ordnance it has used there has far outweighed anything Hamas or anyone else had access to.) In recent years, Israel has also assassinated more than 120 alleged “terror leaders” in the Strip, many of them political leaders, and in the process killed a far greater number of innocent passers-by or family members.
So Hamas, not unreasonably, has demanded that any ceasefire it agree to should be equally binding on Israel.
In 2005 and early 2006, Hamas, like Fateh but unlike some of the smaller Palestinian groups in the Strip, largely complied with a Fateh-Hamas agreement unilaterally to refrain from taking any military action against Israel. That unilateral (Palestinians-only) ceasefire allowed Israel to undertake its withdrawal of troops and settlers from Gaza without major incident. It also allowed the orderly holding of the Palestinian elections of January 2006.
But once Israel had pulled its settlers out of Gaza, it felt no hesitancy about using its military to hammer Gaza hard whenever it pleased.
For Hamas, the idea of returning to a unilateral, Palestinians-only ceasefire with Israel was quite untenable. For them, winning reciprocity in the ceasefire aspect of the deal was vital. Now, they have won it. That is a significant achievement, won after much suffering.
There remains a major potential problem in that the compliance of the two sides with this ceasefire has no monitoring mechanism that I know of. Therefore, ill-wishers either side of the line could still provoke an incident unless the two parties are both willing and able to police it very robustly. If Hamas is to be able to do that, it will probably need some upgrading of its command and control structures, though it has already shown itself fairly capable of exerting discipline throughout the Strip over the twelve months since it chased the ragtag (and US-armed) Fateh bands and hangers-on out of the Strip.
The government of Egypt, which used its longstanding diplomatic relationship with Israel to good advantage to mediate this ceasefire agreement, might well be able to also play a continuing monitoring role? Perhaps even on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border? I’m not sure if that has been discussed yet, but it still could be.
Anyway, if the ceasefire succeeds, the Gaza issue will continue to be an increasingly large issue within Egyptian politics. As it will be, of course, if the ceasefire should catastrophically fail.
If this tahdi’eh goes forward as planned, the Israeli economic siege on Gaza will be progressively lifted, started pretty soon. At some point, the Rafah Crossing between Gaza and Egypt will also be re-opened– but this time, according to the reports I’ve seen, notably without any Israeli monitoring role there at all. But with an EU role. An interesting diminution of Israel’s control over Gaza’s borders, if true.
Also, during the week ahead, if the tahdi’eh proceeds, negotiations on the prisoner exchange involving Gilad Shalit and some 350-plus Palestinian detainees will go into high gear. In Palestine as in Iraq, the mass detention of native peoples is one of the ways in which foreign occupying forces try to exert and maintain their control. Don’t think for a minute that, in a huge proportion of these cases, there is any reason for these detentions other than the drive to control the natives, subvert their understandable movements for independence from foreign rule, and use them as hostages in negotiations.
But if this tahdi’eh thereby becomes what I call a tahdi’eh-plus, it might also lead towards some form of longer-term hudna (armistice) between Israel and the Palestinians of the West Bank… that is, to some version of a two-state solution. Or, it could lead to a situation in which– as both Hamas and Israel’s Likud desire– the border between the West Bank and Israel dissolves completely and a new kind of polity arises throughout the whole of Mandate (pre-partition) Palestine.
But that’s for the future. For now, just keep hoping and praying for the success of this tahdi’eh. It will bring vitally needed relief to the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza, and to their neighbors in southern Israel. And it might provide enough calm inside both national communities for the members and leaders of both to start planning their future in the tiny slice of land between the sea and the Jordan River in a more rational, equitable, and sustainable way.

Haaretz publishes this today:

Israel has agreed in principle to an Egyptian-mediated proposal for a cease-fire and the opening of intensive talks for the release of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, security and government sources said yesterday.
The sources said that Defense Ministry official Major General (res.) Amos Gilad has relayed Israel’s positions to Egyptian intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman.
A delegation of Hamas leaders is to meet today in Cairo with Suleiman to hear Israel’s position. The delegation is headed by the Damascus-based deputy chief of Hamas’ political wing, Musa Abu Marzuk, and senior Hamas leaders from Gaza. According to the outlines of the deal, Egypt will announce that Hamas and the other armed groups in Gaza have decided on a cease-fire, and Israel will stop responding to fire from Gaza. Israel has not agreed to Hamas’ demand to extend the cease-fire to the West Bank but has told the Egyptians that quiet in Gaza will reflect on the chances for quiet in the West Bank as well.
Israel has also refused to agree to Hamas’ demand that the cease-fire agreement include an opening of the border crossings into Gaza, but has said it will ease the economic blockade of the Strip.
The Rafah crossing is under Palestinian-Egyptian control. However, Egypt reportedly wants to open it only as part of the agreement with Israel. Israel apparently wants to delay the opening of the Rafah crossing until significant progress is made in a prisoner swap.
Hamas spokesmen last week said Shalit would be released only in exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, and not as part of the cease-fire agreement.
Yesterday the London-based Arabic daily Asharq Alawsat reported that Israel had agreed to forego a link between Shalit’s release and the cease-fire. Shalit’s father, Noam Shalit, said Israeli officials have assured him that his son’s release is an integral part of cease-fire discussions.
Israel is reportedly willing to exchange Shalit for 450 terrorists, to be released in two stages…

For background, see my my recent writings on Hamas, including my recent Boston Review article and full; text of my January interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, accessible here.
More commentary later tonight, inshallah. Timing obviously interesting in view of Condi’s visit?

Time.com’s Tim McGirk reports from Jerusalem today that:

both Israeli and Palestinian sources expect that by the middle of next week, a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas brokered by Egypt may go into effect. It won’t be announced as such – Israel is squeamish about officially striking a deal with what it deems a terrorist group – but if it goes ahead, Hamas will strong-arm its own fighters and those belonging to Islamic Jihad into halting the barrage of rockets aimed at the farming communities and towns of southern Israel. In exchange, Israel is expected to refrain from targeted killings of Hamas operatives, and will hold off on mounting any major assault into Gaza. Israel will also commit itself to gradually lifting the blockade on goods reaching Gaza’s besieged inhabitants.
Israel is still pressing for the accord to include the release of Corporal Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas for almost two years now since his capture on the Israeli side of the boundary with Gaza, but Hamas sources say negotiations over Shalit’s freedom will start later. The militants are demanding that Shalit be traded for “over 400” Palestinians being held in Israeli jails. So far, Israel is refusing, saying it will only release around 70 prisoners who were not involved in deadly attacks.

Over the past three months, we have several times come close to seeing this reciprocal ceasefire (tahdi’eh) deal nailed down… but none of those earlier alerts were borne out.
Let’s hope this one is.
If you haven’t yet read my recent Boston Review article on Hamas, that gives considerable background about this negotiation, you can find it here.

So now PA President Mahmoud Abbas has decided to join the long stream of US Middle East allies– including Israel, Egypt, and Qatar, and the UAE, etc etc– who are having political dealings with Hamas.
Elliott Abrams, one of the key authors of the policy to “marginalize and if possible crush” all states and parties critical of the Bushist policy in the region, must be tearing his hair out.
Hamas’s Ismail Haniya, head of the Palestinian government elected in 2006, “told a press conference that his government was ready to respond favorably to any Arab or international effort to initiate national dialogue in the Palestinian arena.”
Still no news yet, though, on completion of Israel’s tahdi’eh-plus negotiations with Hamas.
For background on all this, you can go to my recent Boston Review article on Hamas.

Long-time JWN commenter Bernard Chazelle has written and web-published a thoughtful description of, and reflection upon, a recent substantial trip he made to Israel and Palestine. (Or to Palestine/Israel? Or to Pal-sreal, or Is-lestine, or whatever you want to call, um, you know, that chunk of land that the British ruled for a while as “Mandate Palestine”.)
Chazelle’s description is first-class, and definitely well worth reading by anyone who wants to understand the deadening effect all those Israeli roadblocks have on the lives of the West Bank Palestinians. He didn’t even get in to Gaza to give us a description of life there…
After re-reading the reflective “Essay” that occupies the second portion of the web-page, I have to say that I disagree with some of his analysis and conclusions. Specifically, I’m not sure that the game-theoretical approach he uses to the “problem” of the negotiations works very well since it seems to generally assume that each of the two political leaders is a monolithic actor.
Also, I think he is simply not accurate when he writes this:

To blame the lobby [for the dysfunctional nature of the US-Israeli relationship], however, one needs to make the case that US policy would be notably different in its absence. The evidence is thin. [I dispute that.] Israel has been the linchpin of Pax Americana in the Middle East since June 1967: Cold War then; Carter Doctrine now. The lobby may rejoice in this but can’t take credit for it.[I dispute that, too. I think the pro-Israel lobby can take a great deal of credit for it.]

These are serious issues, which I’m sure we can usefully discuss a lot more. But most JWN readers will anyway, like me, get a lot of value out of reading the whole of Chazelle’s piece.

South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu is in Gaza on a fact-finding mission that he, along with LSE professor Christine Chinkin, is conducting on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council.
He– and also, presumably, Chinkin– entered Gaza from Egypt through the Rafah international crossing point.
Yesterday, he met with elected Palestinian PM Ismail Haniyeh. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported that, in a press conference that he and Haniyeh held in Gaza, Tutu called for an end to targeting civilians in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Today, Tutu travelled to the north-Gaza town of Beit Hanun where an Israeli attack in November 2006 killed 19 Palestinian civilians (including five women and and eight children) in their own homes. AFP reports that Tutu described his team as “quite devastated” by the accounts he heard in Beit Hanun from survivors of the attack.
It was that incident in Beirut Hanun that Tutu’s team was primarily sent to report on. The team originally planned to investigate the situations both in Beit Hanun and in Israeli places subjected to Hamas rocket attacks, but the government of Israel has continued to deny them the necessary visas and permissions. Indeed, the team was only able to get to Beit Hanun, via Rafah, after Israel’s vise-like control over the Rafah crossing-point was lifted last June, though the modalities for any broader and more more meaningful re-opening of Rafah– such as would allow actual Gazans to connect more easily with the global economy and with family members living in the Palaspora– have yet to be agreed.
AFP says that after hearing the harrowing reports from the Beit Hanun survivors,

Tutu commented that the purpose of the visit was to gather information to write a report for the UN Human Rights Council, “but we wanted to say that we are quite devastated”.
“This is not something you want to wish on your worst enemy,” added the retired Anglican archbishop of Cape Town.

It also notes this:

In February, the Israeli army announced that no charges would be brought against Israeli soldiers over the attack.
After conducting an internal investigation, Israel concluded that the shelling of the civilians’ homes was “a rare and grave technical error of the artillery radar system”.
The army said it had been aiming its artillery at an area from which Palestinian militants were firing rockets at Israel but, due to the technical problem, the shells instead hit two homes.

This explanation from the Israeli authorities handily underlines one of the serious problems with the whole notion of focusing only on stopping acts of violence that target civilians.
Both Israel and Hamas say that they do not deliberately target civilians, and there is evidence that, on both sides, this claim is now largely though not completely true. However, “technical errors,” as that Israeli report described the phenomenon, happen. Perhaps they happen more frequently in the case of Hamas’s very primitive rockets. (So should we therefore be calling for an upgrading of Hamas’s capacity to target its rockets more precisely?) It is also the case that some of the non-Hamas groups in Gaza are less focused than Hamas on trying to target only military facilities on the other side.
But if there is a “targeting capability gap” between the forces on the two sides of the Gaza-Israel border, we should recognize that there is also a truly gargantuan “lethality gap” between the two forces, too.
So when the Israeli forces– whether through a mere “technical error of the artillery radar system” or through a much more serious, and potentially justiciable, case of inattention to the potential for such an error– end up mistargeting their ordnance, it has effects that are considerably more harmful to the civilians living in the combat-zone.
Also, just look at the sheer number of artillery shells, missiles, mortar shells, high-impact bullets, etc, that Israel uses during any escalation of hostilities with Gaza. If each piece of ordnance has just a tiny chance of suffering “targeting error”, then the greater the number of pieces of ordnance you launch, then the more the chance of error happening increases. This is not hard-to-understand “rocket science”. It’s the simple arithmetic of aggregating probabilities. Plus, if soldiers are shooting off large numbers of rockets, shells, big bullets, etc during any battle, then the complexity of managing that amount of fire mounts as well, so the probability of “targeting error’ mounts somewhat more than arithmetically.
Month after month after month , the highly lopsided mortality figures– for civilians– on each side of the Gaza-Israel border underline these disparities in the lethality and sheer number of pieces of ordnance used.
It strikes me, therefore, that while all the well-intentioned humanitarians around the world continue to try to stress the principle of trying to “avoid targeting civilians”, that will not on its own do much to reduce the actual harm that this conflict has caused to civilians over recent months and years. What we need to focus on, rather, is finding a way to end the hostilities themselves. In the first instance this might be just a limited tahdi’eh (ceasefire.) But once that ceasefire is won, enormous further efforts immediately need to be invested in finding a final and sustainable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in all its dimensions.
The conflict itself inflicts continuing harm on civilians, primarily on Palestinian civilians around the world whose families are split up, properties expropriated, immediate environment darkened by the threat of further attack, rights denied, etc. The conflict also inflicts harm on Israeli civilians by harming some of them directly and by forcing them all, too, to live in an atmosphere of dread and threat and preventing them from concluding normal neighborly relations with the peoples living all around them.
… But anyway, it is a great first step that Tutu and his team have visited Gaza, that they’ve talked to Haniyeh, and done something to bring the ghastly experiences of the survivors of the Beit Hanun massacre to world attention. This, coming shortly after Pres. Jimmy Carter’s recent groundbreaking visit with overall Hamas head Khaled Meshaal.
So let’s now move rapidly on from here to a robust ceasefire, and then a final peace?
Do you think final peace is unlikely and/or unattainable? Desmond Tutu could probably tell you a few things about how determined and well-organized action taken by a principled coalition acting across national borders can make radical transformations from conflict to basic peace happen much sooner than anyone once thought possible.

My latest long article on Hamas is now up on the Boston Review’s website. The full title is Breakout: Hamas and the end of the two-state solution.
Of course, you should read every word of it. But if for some hard-to-fathom reason you don’t have time, here’s the “conclusion”:

even with a [Gaza-Israel] ceasefire, what are the prospects for peace over the next five to ten years? Most likely there will be a “two-entity” situation, with one of these entities being a small, quasi-state administration operating in Gaza and the other an Israel that is unable to disentangle itself from the West Bank. Neither of these entities would be a settled state, secure within stable and recognized borders.
This hardly constitutes an enduring, solution. Israel cannot maintain its current, extraordinarily repressive measures against the 2.3 million Palestinians of the West Bank over the long run. And if it cannot meet the West Bankers’ demands for self-determination and the liberation of their territory, then the West Bankers might turn to demanding full equal rights for themselves within the Israel that threatens to engulf them. Meanwhile, the claims of the five million or so Palestinians who are [diasporic] refugees either from pre-1967 Israel or from the West Bank for, first and foremost, a return to their families’ homes and farms, or failing that proportionate compensation, will continue. It is worth remembering, too, the high proportion of Gazans who come from refugee families. Even a Gaza that becomes economically rehabilitated to some degree will not abandon the broader Palestinian movement. And Jerusalem will always remain a touchstone issue—for Palestinians and for a billion other Muslims around the world, just as for Jews in Israel and beyond.
As Israel reaches its 60th birthday this May, its citizens have reason to be proud of many of the state’s achievements. But it has still failed to find a fair and sustainable accommodation with the Palestinians who were the earlier residents of its land, and this failure will plague its relations with its neighbors and others around the world until it is resolved…

Actually there is whole lot in the piece other than that that’s worth reading.
I found the piece really hard to write, in good part because of the long lead-time involved in all this dead-tree publication business. I guess I get spoiled with the instant publication-gratification I get used to here on the blog.
A careful reader will note that the date-stamp embedded into the text is April 24. Throughout a lot of the writing and the lengthy revising of this article, the prospects for Hamas reaching a ceasefire agreement with the Olmert government were pitching and yawing wildly up and down. (Nautical terms there, folks.)
That made it particularly hard to write.
As of now, May 15, Olmert has been losing power within the coalition so rapidly in recent weeks that the prospects for the tahdi’eh with Hamas that he was exploring much more seriously back in April seem to have plummeted again. Guess that’s how it goes, though goodness only knows the situation of Gaza’s 1.45 million people remains extremely difficult indeed.
Anyway, since George Bush thrust the whole “we should never talk to Hamas!” issue into the public limelight today, I would like to remind JWN readers of the following two articles I wrote last year, that laid out the arguments why we should, indeed, do so:

Facing Hamas and Hizbullah, from The Nation, on November 2, 2007, and
Ten reasons to talk to Hamas, from JWN, June 25, 2007.

George Bush made a foolish and very self-destructive error when he simply lumped Hamas and Hizbullah in with Al Qaeda as “terrorists” who– like the Nazis in 1939– should be shunned and crushed by the US and everyone around the world. As you’ll see in those articles, there are considerable and politically very significant differences between, on the one hand, Hamas and Hizbullah, and on the other Al-Qaeda. Also, to liken either of these movements with a Nazi apparatus that controlled the resources of an entire, powerful, European state at the time is the height of historical ignorance, and folly…

McClatchy’s perceptive Jerusalem correspondent Dion Nissenbaum has a great post on his blog today titled “Bush/Olmert: A meeting of lame ducks.” (Though he does note the term was actually coined by Yedioth Aharonoth.)
Later in the post, Dion writes:

Once Bush leaves, Israeli leaders are expected to step up their [military] operations in Gaza… The military leadership once opposed a ground operation as a potential tar pit. Now, according to Maariv, they see it as inevitable.

I have one word for them. Not just a tar pit, but a sinkhole. And a sinkhole that will suck in not just Israel’s military power but also such shreds as remain of Washington’s once near-hegemonic position of influence within the Middle East.
Can anyone imagine that if, just a short time after a “triumphalist”, extremely pro-Israeli GWB visit to Israel, Israel launches a big, very damaging military attack against Gaza, that wouldn’t have a major impact on the US’s standing around the region?
Meanwhile, it certainly seems that the three-months-long negotiations over a Gaza-Israel ceasefire (tahdiyeh), that Olmert has been conducting with Hamas, with Egypt’s mediation, are currently at a dead-end after the failure of Egypt’s security boss, Omar Suleiman, to nail them down last week.
It looks as though Hamas is preparing some interesting options, too. In this post on the Palestine Info Center website yesterday they called on their Gaza followers to join a march to the Erez checkpoint tomorrow.
I was intrigued that in the short, videotaped “welcome address” that Israeli Prez (and 1996 war-launcher) Shimon Peres had on the website of the grandiose “Facing Tomorrow” conference that Prez. Bush will be addressing today, Peres talked glowingly about “a frontierless world, a world without frontiers…” (The site is here. I’m sure you can find that welcome address if you dig around a little.)
I thought it was pretty strange for Peres to talk that way, given that the hall the conference is being held in is less than three miles from some of the tallest and most impenetrably concrete portions of the Separation Barrier that Israel has put up between itself and the Palestinian communities of the West Bank. But maybe tomorrow we can expect Peres to leap out of the conference hall and go to engage in a Berlin-style orgy of wall-smashing in order to build the “frontierless” world he is forecasting?
The only other explanation for his words is that, like his guest George W. Bush, he inhabits some kind of strange, alternative universe in which the mere “facts on the ground” such as the rest of the world sees and deals with, have no substance and no meaning? And, like Bush, he confidently expects the rest of us to agree with him that “the emperor has lovely clothes!”
Meanwhile, in other Jerusalem-related news, Akiva Eldar tells us that

The Jerusalem municipality has begun the process of approving a plan for a new [Jews-only] housing complex, including a synagogue, in the heart of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan south of the Old City.

And Dion Nissenbaum tells us that:

Hours before Bush arrived, Israel’s Shas party, a crucial coalition partner, said that Olmert would approve hundreds of new homes in the West Bank soon after Bush heads home.
The boast was denied by Israel’s Housing Ministry, but… This time around, according to Israel’s Maariv newspaper, Bush has given Olmert the OK for the construction.

So it looks as though no-one in either the present Israeli or US administrations really gives a hoot about about the “two-state solution”, the political viability of the Abbas-Fayyad leadership, or anything else they sometimes claim to care about regarding the Palestinian issue?

So Hamas has now signed on to a ceasefire/truce plan with Israel that covers in the first instance only the Israel-Gaza front, but with a proposal that this be extended to the West Bank according to a fixed (but at this stage undisclosed) timetable.
This is in line with the expectations I reported on here on Tuesday.
In the Reuters report that’s linked to above, Jonathan Wright writes that,

Israel said it was ready for “quiet” at the Gaza border, but that it would require a complete halt to attacks by Hamas on Israelis, a stop to cross-border rocket fire from all Palestinian groups and an end to weapon smuggling into Gaza.
“We can’t have a period of quiet that will just be the quiet before the storm,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
[An un-named Palestinian official close to the talks] said Hamas made any truce conditional on Israel opening all of Gaza’s border crossings and halting military action in the territory.
The Islamist group had backing from other Palestinian militant factions in the enclave, he added.

With this agreement, both sides would seem to win a significant portion of what they sought. Israel wins the cessation of attacks on its people from Gaza. Hamas wins Israel’s agreement that this ceasefire be reciprocal (no small feat), and also the lifting of the siege of Gaza.
But each side has things it wants to win that it still has not. Primarily, for the Israelis, the release of Gilad Shalit (which will be part of a prisoner exchange); and for the Palestinians, the extension of the tahdi’eh to the West Bank (in their locution, this would constitute a “comprehensive” ceasefire.”)
Egypt’s intel chief Omar Suleiman has been the main intermediary in these negotiations. Al-Masry al-Yawm‘s Fathiyya Dakhakhni reported today that Suleiman is due to travel to Israel pretty soon to resume negotiations on these remaining issues.
No word yet on whether Hamas has specified the length of the timetable within which they want to win the extension of the ceasefire to the West Bank, far less what that length might be.
Wright attributes to Egypt’s official MENA news agency a quote from an un-named senior Egyptian official to the effect that this truce “would contribute to talks between Israel and the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as to reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.” That I doubt. In fact, coming just as Abu Mazen is about to meet Bush here in Washington, it considerably undercuts Abu Mazen’s position by showing the whole world that Israel considers it more important to negotiate a tough deal with Hamas rather than to make nice with him in the US-sponsored formal peace talks.
At this point, I imagine that many Israeli officials are concerned first and foremost about securing a degree of calm in their country as they prepare for their 60th anniversary celebrations. Hamas and its allies are the ones with the ability to deliver– or withhold– that calm. Abu Mazen is not.
One main issue ahead will be that of responsibility for verifying the ceasefire. This is crucial to its robustness. I hope Omar Suleiman has made provision for that. Because without verification, any small (or large) mischief-maker on either side of the line could easily torpedo it. Maybe if, under the terms of the siege being lifted, the EU regains a (possibly slightly differently configured) monitoring presence at Rafah, then an expanded EU mission could also provide ceasefire verification?
Let’s wait and see.

This morning, Egypt’s prestigious semi-official daily Al-Ahram reported that the much-needed, Egypt-mediated Israel-Hamas ceasefire (tahdi’eh) agreement may be on the point of getting nailed down. Given the extreme reluctance with which Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak even got drawn into playing the intermediary role in the first place– and the fact that until just a few days ago his media were still engaging in a heavy anti-Hamas propaganda campaign– this latest news is significant indeed.
(Might it also signal that the key Egyptian mediator, security boss, Omar Suleiman has been doing a few things that push the boundaries of whatever mandate he got from his Prez? If so, that would be potentially even bigger news…)
This negotiation has been going on since mid-February. In the past ten days it has been conducted in parallel with Jimmy Carter’s visits to Hamas leaders and to Israel. Obviously we still need to learn a lot more about the interactions between these two processes, though all sides have been quite clear that Carter has not been involved in the ongoing, Egypt-mediated negotiations on the three topics of the tahdi’eh, the prisoner exchange, and lifting the siege Gaza siege.
The Reuters report linked to above tells us,

Hamas plans to give Egyptian mediators its final response on Thursday to a proposed truce with Israel, a Hamas official said on Tuesday.
Egypt’s state newspaper al-Ahram reported a preliminary agreement had been reached on “achieving a period of calm with the Israelis”.
A Palestinian official familiar with the Islamist group’s talks with Egypt said he expected Hamas to agree to a reciprocal truce with Israel “in the Gaza Strip, at this stage”.
Hamas, which controls the coastal territory, had said it also wanted a ceasefire to cover the occupied West Bank, where the rival Fatah faction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds sway.
Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said the group would present its final response to Egypt on Thursday.
He declined to comment on its content but said any ceasefire should be based on “ending the aggression against the Palestinian people” and securing the opening of Gaza border crossings.

At this point, it seems the incipient agreement– if it is nailed down– will concern only the reciprocal ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, and some aspects of lifting Israel’s tight economic and vital-life-inputs siege on Gaza. Left out for now are the components of extending the tahdi’eh toi the West Bank, and the prisoner-exchange deal.
Israel’s Ha’aretz reports that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has approved Suleiman’s Gaza-only agreement. And citing the Ahram report it said that Suleiman

will soon present the outline of the agreement to officials in Jerusalem, and Hamas will soon present the agreement to Islamic Jihad officials for approval.

So what we have had in parallel with this still-incomplete news is the news that Jimmy Carter has gotten a new commitment from Meshaal regarding what looks like an enhanced hudna-type arrangement that could be strong enough to allow Hamas, under certain conditions, to support a two-state outcome. Here is the BBC video of an interview conducted yesterday with Carter on the subject. Here is the pro-Hamas Palestinian Information Centre’s account of what Meshaal said on the topic at a press conference yesterday.
Here is what the PIC site reports:

Khaled Mishaal has affirmed on Monday that his Movement was amenable to establishing a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital but without recognizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
Mishaal… also emphasized the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland in occupied Palestine.
He also explained that his Movement has “politely” turned down a request by former US president Jimmy Carter to announce a unilateral ceasefire for 30 days, underlining that the Palestinian rocket attacks on IOF positions and on the Israeli settlements around the Gaza Strip were “reaction rather than an action”.
He noted that Hamas had declared a unilateral ceasefire more than once in the past, but the Israeli occupation government had never respected or reciprocated those steps.
Mishaal and Carter met twice in the Syrian capital over the past couple of days despite strong objection from the US administration and the Israeli occupation government.
“Our main objective of reaching a comprehensive truce with the IOA [Israeli Occupation Army] was to protect our Palestinian people, to lift the siege, and to open the Rafah crossing point, which spurred us to reject Carter’s proposal“, asserted Mishaal during the conference.
As far as the case of the captured IOF corporal Gilad Shalit was concerned, Mishaal explained that his Movement has disagreed to a suggestion made by Carter to swap Shalit with 71 Palestinian prisoners in addition to children, women prisoners, and the kidnapped PA lawmakers and ministers.
“The issue of the prisoners is very sensitive and concerns almost every Palestinian household; hence, we told Carter that we prefer to follow up the issue through indirect negotiations and via the mediators, especially the Egyptian mediator, in order for us to secure the number we have had tabled”, underlined Mishaal.
However, he added, Hamas has agreed to a request from Carter to transmit a letter form Shalit to his family to reassure them of his well-being despite the fact that the Israeli occupation authorities maltreat Palestinian captives and deny them family visits.
With regard to holding a referendum on a possible PA-Israeli peace agreement, Mishaal pointed out that the National Harmony Document, which was signed by all Palestinian factions including Hamas and Fatah on 2006 was transparent in obliging the PA negotiating team to subject any possible peace deal with Israel to either a transparent and free popular referendum where all eligible Palestinians voters inside and outside of Palestine are to vote on it; or to present the agreement before a duly elected Palestinian national council for voting.
But he noted that there could be no plebiscite amidst the current political rift in the Palestinian arena, underscoring that “national reconciliation should precede any popular referendum”.
Concerning the opening of the vital Rafah crossing point, Mishaal underlined that the crossing point should be permanently opened being a purely Palestinian-Egyptian crossing point.
Yet, he explained that his Movement had briefed Carter on all the negotiations Hamas officials had with the Egyptians over this point, underlining that Hamas was agreeing to a formula where Egypt, Hamas, the PA leadership, and the EU observers would operate the border terminal, and that the EU observes are to be based in Egypt and not in “Israel”.
… Finally, Mishaal underscored that Hamas was and still is amenable and open for Palestinian national reconciliation with all its obligations, including the formation of a national unity government, restructuring the PA security apparatuses on healthy basis, and respecting fundamentals of the political game in the PA among other obligations.

So has Jimmy Carter’s visit to the region been, on balance, helpful to reducing tensions and edging the parties towards more flexible positions? I would say, undoubtedly yes– but not in the straight-line way that I imagine Carter himself would probably have preferred.
What Carter has helped to achieve is to show that Hamas is a serious political organization that is worth engaging with. For example, Meshaal’s declaration about the “enhanced hudna” is a serious statement of the Hamas position– though I note that it actually is not different in substance from what Sheikh Ahmad Yassin proposed, regarding a hudna some 10-plus years ago.
Also, if the international community as a whole were serious about the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, and about the integrity of the UN’s Partition Plan of 1947, which accorded none of the currently occupied Palestinian territories to the Jewish state, then its representatives could certainly engage in a further negotiation with Hamas regarding how the principles of the hudna plan could be further stretched to become consonant with international law, including the prolongation of the hudna to become a permanent arrangement, and the agreement by the Palestinian state to grant full recognition to all its neighbors, including the Jewish state.
So there is, potentially, a mesh between an enhanced hudna and a two-state outcome.
I have to note, however, that neither Hamas nor the dominant forces in Israeli society are particularly attached to the two-state outcome… That is why it now looks as if both Hamas and the Olmert government are heading for what I call the “two-entity” situation instead. That is, a Palestinian entity in Gaza that is not a state but has some of the attributes of a quasi-state, and an Israeli entity that is also not a settled state since it is unable to define its own borders and remains burdened down by its continuing entanglement in the affairs of the West Bank.
But Carter, bless him, was still operating mainly within the paradigm of the “two-state” outcome, so it was on the elements of that that he was primarily trying to push Hamas. But Meshaal and his colleagues– like the majority forces in the current Israeli government– have been more focused on the established Egypt-mediated negotiations on other matters. Regarding those other matters, Hamas was notably unwilling to give anything concrete to Carter at this time, turning down his proposals regarding the prisoner-exchange deal,and (yet another) unilateral ceasefire.
But on the ceasefire (tahdi’eh) front, things do now seem to be moving through the Egypt channel. Watch that space.
Should Carter feel disappointed with what he has achieved? I don’t think so. Demonstrating a strong commitment to talk with and– even more importantly– listen to all parties is always a valuable practice, and it is one that, sustained over time, can build sturdier bridges of understanding and trust. And he has put another few planks on just such a valuable bridge, including one running between Hamas and Israel’s Shas.
Thank you for your commitment and work, Jimmy Carter.