Category: Palestine 2008

I have a big family weekend this weekend. So not much time to blog about Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Khaled Meshaal, or this report, by the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler, on info that the Egyptian foreign minister gave yesterday about the state of the negotiations his government has been mediating between Hamas and the Israeli government. (“We’re making good progress…”)
Regarding the Carter-Meshaal meeting, the new information has been that Carter conveyed to Meshaal a request that Israeli deputy PM Eli Yishai of the Shas Party made when Carter met with him Wednesday to meet with Hamas himself, in order to discuss the prisoner-swap issue. But according to this Haaretz report, Yishai was clear that he did not intend to complicate the government’s diplomacy by discussing the ceasefire question or other questions with Hamas.
My upcoming Boston Review article on the rise of Hamas and some of the broad diplomatic implications of that is now in final editing. It pushes further the analysis I made in this 2006 BR article about the emergence of “parallel unilateralisms” being pursued by Hamas and Likud.
Given the new role being played by Yishai and the undoubted weight of Shas as a voting bloc (currently, 12 seats in the Knesset) and social phenomenon within Israeli society, I should probably factor them– and perhaps some of the Israeli far-right parties– much more into my analysis as it develops.
Shas is certainly a fascinating phenomenon, in general. It is the main religious party of the mizrachi (“eastern”) Jews. In fact, nearly all the Shas people are Jews “ingathered” into Israel from Arab countries. So it is particularly interesting to see the parallels between their modus operandi and emergence and that of Hamas– though Shas has often been able to get its hands into the trough of national budgets and several of its past leaders have been engaged in corruption, which makes it different from Hamas on both counts.
To me, the most interesting question is the importance that Shas gives to defining a formal national border between Israel and a portion of the West Bank that would be under Palestinian “sovereignty.” In the past, Shas’s people were mainly concentrated inside Israel proper, and its concerns were mainly for the level of social spending and services provided to the mizrachi communities there– spending which was very strongly negatively impacted by the huge government investments in the West Bank settlements. My impression, though, is that in recent years many members of the Shas base, like so many observant ashkenazi Jews, have been moving into West Bank settlements– perhaps mainly in and around East Jerusalem.
Can any readers point me in the direction of good materials to read about recent political and demographic developments regarding Shas?? If so, that would be really helpful.
Anyway, regarding Carter, AP’s Bassem Mroue is reporting that he went back for a further one-hour meeting with Meshaal this morning, after spending four hours with him yesterday.
Mroue writes, that this morning Hamas’s deputy politburo head Musa Abu Marzouk

said Carter and Mashaal discussed a possible prisoner exchange with Israel, as well as how to lift a siege imposed by the Jewish state on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace, is trying to secure the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Abu Marzouk’s politburo colleague Mohammed Nazzal said yesterday that Hamas leaders from Gaza would be traveling to Syria today to confer with Meshaal, and that Carter “”will be informed of Hamas’ response in the coming days.”

My good friends Hussein Agha and Rob Malley have a thoughtful and generally intelligent article on the current (sad) state of the formal Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” in the latest New York Review of Books. They do a good job of describing the Bush administration’s bizarre strategy of trying to get Olmert and Abbas to reach what is called a “shelf agreement” by the end of this year– that is, a full final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement that will be signed, ratified through referenda held in both national constituencies– and then, quite simply, be set on a dusty shelf someplace “until circumstances permit” its implementation.
If this is a recipe for anything, it is most surely a recipe for kicking all the many political problems any US president faces in doing Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy along into the next presidency. That is, even if supposing the whole project doesn’t crash long before that…
As I say, Agha and Malley do a good job of describing that. But it’s where they voice their own proposals for what might be done to improve the strategy that they look a bit as though they’re trying to re-arrange a few last deckchairs on the Titanic. They make the generally laudable suggestions that a way has to be found to include Hamas and if possible also Syria into the negotiating process, and make some excellent arguments as to why these steps would be good. Where they are considerably less sound, though, is on limning out what incentive those two important actors might have for joining the process as it is currently structured (and therefore, what changes might be necessary in the process if indeed they are to be persuaded to join.)
Hussein and Rob also keep their general diplomatic/political horizons incredibly tightly focused within the purview of a US-dominated global and regional environment. For example, at one point they argue that the peacemaking approach has “always” been one of choosing whether the Syrian track or the Palestinian track should go first, and the assumption they can’t both be pursued together. But that has really only been the case since 1992 or so. At the Madrid conference of 1991, remember, both parties were well-represented (even if the Palestinian delegates there were still only acting within the fig-leaf of a “joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.”) But the idea that only one lucky contestant– either the Palestinians, or the Syrians– is allowed through the diplomatic gate at any one time is certainly a creation of the post-Cold War, “unipolar” era. Prior to that, there had always been strong pushback, including from the Soviets and other international actors including most Europeans, to that noticeably divide-and-rule approach… And such pushback may well return again.
Personally, I have always argued for a “comprehensive” approach to this peace diplomacy, in which all the complex intertwining tradeoffs can be explicated and resolved together and the state of hostility between Israeli and all of its neighbors be ended once and for all. In the present circumstances, it may even be necessary to aim for this comprehensive peace within the even broader regional context of concluding a comprehensive Mesopotamian and Gulf peace, as well.
Which brings me to the failure of the NYRB duo to even consider that the global/regional environment within which Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts are pursued is already changing, and can certainly be expected to change even more rapidly over the 3-5 years ahead.
I get a little tired of all the deckchair-arrangers who don’t even look at the important broader questions of

(1) Whether the US can indeed continue to “lead”– that is, as this “leadership” has been exercised until now, exercise complete unilateral veto power over– all the remaining Israeli-Arab peacemaking tasks?
(2) Whether the US should continue to play that role; i.e. on what grounds do the peoples of the region and the world allot this important task to this distant country, and why should US presidents continue to set themselves up for all the hassle and hostility involved in this, anyway? And finally–
(3) Whether a more legitimately constituted, UN-led and explicitly UN-anchored diplomatic intervention that embodies global values and is not tied into the partisan, often exclusionary diplomatic agenda of a single, distant power would not, indeed, bring much, speedier, more reliable, and more sustainable benefits to all the parties concerned? (And yes, that includes the citizenries of both Israel and the US as well as the Palestinians and the other Arab parties.)

Right now, we are still in the era of the US’s unipolar near-hegemony over the Middle East, though I don’t this will be the case for very much longer. I have heard any number of Palestinians who, like Hussein Agha, are close to the Fateh leadership, talk very patronizingly about their compatriots from Hamas. (In fact, I seem to recall that was a big theme in the long conversation I had with Hussein in London’s Holland Park a year ago.) These pro-Fateh people say things, “Oh, those Hamas people just really don’t understand how the world works. But maybe one day they’ll learn, and then they’ll be more like us.” My response to that is generally to say that in my experience, the Hamas people certainly do understand the present balance of power in the region– but rather than adapting themselves simply to work within in it, as most Fateh people decided to do many years ago, they are seeking to transform it. A very different mindset, indeed.

With all the current commotion about ex-president and Nobel Peace
Laureate Jimmy Carter’s plans to visit Hamas head Khaled Meshaal in
Damascus,  most of the attention has been focused on Carter and
his motivations for undertaking the meeting.  Little has been paid
to Meshaal’s motives for hosting it. Indeed, most of the western media
shows little interest in the question of who Meshaal is, and what Hamas
stands for, beyond simply parroting the fact that Hamas is a “terrorist
organization” that has refused to meet Israel and the US’s demands that
it recognize Israel and foreswear violence before anyone should even
start to talk to it.

That sounds, of course, extremely similar to the view expressed for
many years by the Pretoria government (and Maggie Thatcher) about South
Africa’s ANC which, like most other national liberations movements over
the years– and Hamas today– maintained parallel networks for military
and for civilian, mass-organizing activities.  In Pretoria’s case,
it wasn’t till Prime Minister P.W. Botha and then his successor
Frederik De Klerk finally figured that it was a non-starter to demand
complete the ANC’s complete physical and ideological disarmament before talks were even
started, that the historic negotiations with the ANC got off the
ground…

Anyway, as steadfast JWN readers are aware, back in January I
conducted a lengthy interview
with Meshaal in Damascus.  Based on that interview and other
research I’ve done on Hamas in recent years, I have an analytical
article about Hamas that will be in the upcoming edition of Boston
Review. But as finally edited, that piece ends up saying
little about Meshaal.  So I thought I would take some out-takes
from that article, add a little more material of my own, and write
something here more specifically about him and his role in the
movement…

Khaled Meshaal has been the head of Hamas’s political bureau since
1995. He was
born in 1956 in the village of Silwad, near
Ramallah. When I interviewed him I found him thoughtful
and articulate, but also defensive and generally inflexible.  The
views he articulated were very different from what Israel and the
United Stated government want him to say, though he did express an
interest in concluding a speedy tahdi’eh
(ceasefire) with Israel.  He also
said he and Hamas could still consider the idea of negotiating a deeper
hudna (armistice) with
Israel– a proposal that, just possibly, could be expanded to mesh with
the “two-state” model for peacemaking currently being negotiated
(without much success) between Israel and the Palestinian leadership
under President Mahmoud Abbas.

In a short, informal discussion after the main interview, I raised the
issue of the casualties that Hamas’s campaign of rocketing southern
Israel from Gaza has inflicted among Israel’s civilian population.
Meshaal denied that Hamas’s own rocketeers target civilian
communities.  (At a panel discussion
held on Capitol Hill in February, former Israeli peace negotiator
Daniel Levy gave some intriguing corroboration on this point, citing
the judgment of senior Israeli security officials that Hamas generally
tries to target its rockets onto military facilities inside Israel–
though it does not do nearly enough to stop its smaller allies in Gaza
from targeting Israeli civilian communities.) 

For what it’s worth, I reiterated to him a message that I am sure many
human rights organizations have conveyed to him before, namely that
like any state or non-state organization that undertakes armed
operations for political reasons, Hamas is obliged under international
law to exert strenuous efforts to avoid civilian casualties. He
listened thoughtfully, talked about the many civilian casualties
inflicted by Israel’s operations, and expressed the hope that a
reciprocal ceasefire could soon be concluded.

Meshaal  has generally been best known in the west for an incident
that occurred in 1997 when Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu
sent a two-man Mossad squad to Amman, Jordan, to kill him.  The
agents used a slow-acting lethal chemical, believed to be Fentanyl,
which they injected into his left ear in a public street.  But
they were clumsy and were arrested shortly after delivering
the injection.  Over the hours that followed, Meshaal’s
blood-oxygen level
plummeted, while King Hussein rushed to negotiate a deal whereby
Netanyahu sent over the antidote to the chemical.  The antidote
worked.  Then, to win his agents’ release from Jordanian prisons,
Netanyahu had to release from Israeli prisons more than 40 Palestinian
prisoners including Hamas’s historic founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who
had served nine years of a 15-year term.  (In 2004 the IDF killed
the paraplegic
Yassin in Gaza with a Hellfire missile.)

But who is Khaled
Meshaal?  After Israel invaded the West Bank in 1967, he left his
home village with other family members, joining the stream of West
Bankers
who crossed rickety bridges into Jordan, fearful of the brutality that
they expected from their new Israeli occupiers.  His father, like
hundreds of thousands of
other Palestinians, was already working in Kuwait and after some time
in Jordan the teenage Khaled joined him there.  He attended
Kuwait’s prestigious Abdullah
al-Salim Secondary School, where
he joined the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  Later,
he studied physics at Kuwait University, then worked as a teacher in
Kuwait—as
many of Fateh’s founding members had done in earlier decades.

Inside Palestine,
Yassin and other long-time MB members spent the first 20 years of
Israel’s
occupation of Gaza
and the West Bank, focusing their energies on building networks of
Islamist religious, social, and
educational institutions in the two Israeli-occupied territories. 
It was only after the first intifada erupted
in 1987 that the MB founded an overtly political organization, the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya
(Islamic Resistance Movement), usually known  as ‘Hamas’, which
also means ‘Zeal’.  Since the early 1980s the Palestinian MB’s
parent body, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, had kept a commitment to
work only nonviolently within Egypt’s political system.  But Hamas
rapidly developed its own armed wing, and from 1987 worked through
parallel militia-based and nonviolent, community-based structures in
the occupied territories.

The Israelis hit back
hard, launching successive broad waves of arrests against Hamas’s
operatives in the occupied territories.  In 1989 the movement
decided that, given the extreme vulnerability of its networks inside
Palestine, it should move its overall headquarters operation
elsewhere.  For a number of years its leadership structure was
fairly widely distributed as it searched for a stable base for
operations, preferably close to the occupied territories.  In
1990,when
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, most of Kuwait’s
large Palestinian community, including Meshaal, fled to Jordan. 
He took over Hamas’s Jordan bureau.  In 1993, Hamas finally
reached a formal agreement with Jordan to host its leadership operation
there.  At that point, Meshaal was the deputy to political bureau
head Musa Abu Marzuq.  Two years later, Abu Marzuq was arrested in
New York after making the error of judging he could safely relocate to
the United States. Meshaal took over as head of the political bureau at
that point.

Relations with Jordan
continued to be stormy.  Finally, at the end of 1999, Meshaal and
the rest of the Hamas leadership were all kicked out of the country.
After a short sojourn as “guests” of the Emir of Qatar, they concluded
a new headquarters agreement with Syria.  Meshaal has lived there
ever since, though he has traveled to numerous countries in and far
beyond the Arab world on official business…

(One excellent source
on Meshaal and the broader history of Hamas that I have drawn on here
is Azzam Tamimi’s recent
book: Hamas:
A History from Within. Hamas’s own English-language website is here. You can access some of my earlier writings on Hamas through this portal.)

Guess who is reportedly going to Damascus to meet Khaled Meshaal.
An excellent decision by Pres. Jimmy Carter.
I don’t know where so many Americans got the idea that simply by talking to someone, you’re signaling to them that you totally agree with them.
Or, indeed, the idea that it can be in any way legitimate to marginalize and seek to crush a movement that was duly elected to be the leadership of its people in a free and fair election, and has repeatedly signaled its readiness to reach a reciprocal ceasefire even with a neighbor who has caused its people considerable harm.

I wrote here Thursday about why Jerusalem plays a special role within the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as a whole. I didn’t write much about the ever threatened physical-planning situation faced daily by the roughly 250,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. (Population figures are here.)
The respected DC-based organization the Foundation for Middle East Peace has recently published an excellent map that shows in some detail how the building and further expansion of new settlement mini-nodes is being used to carve up the Palestinian-populated heart of occupied East Jerusalem. As the map shows, this is the case both within and outside the historic walled Old City. The map is best read alongside the accompanying article on the topic (which sadly is not linked to on the current web version of the map.)
As the article says, the map,

illustrates the broader territorial context of Israel’s settlement program in the heart of East Jerusalem where land and land use are the central instruments of containment, control, and margininalization of the Palestinian community. Large scale residential settlement, a key feature employed by Israel elsewhere in East Jerusalem in its effort to divide and contain the Palestinian community, anchors both the targeted small scale settlement and the creation of open areas around and with in areas of Palestinian habitation that are the key features of Israeli policy in this critical and sensitive area.
In the north, the structural cohesion of Palestinian neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and Wadi Joz is eroded by a variety of means—the construction of Ma’alot Dafna in what was formerly no man’s land, the placement of government offices and institutions, the creation of open or “green” spaces, and the establishment of small civilian settlement areas.
Isolation of this area from the Old City is visible in efforts to employ similar instruments along and within the northern perimeter of the Old City…

I guess the only change I’d make in their description is to use the term “designate” rather than “create” when it talks about parks and open or “green” spaces. It is not that the Israeli planning authorities actually “create” any beautiful parks in these spaces for the equal-opportunity enjoyment of all the city’s residents. Rather, here as elsewhere throughout the occupied territories, they simply slap a land-use designation of “designated Green space” or “designated park” onto a chunk of Palestinian land, whether privately or publicly owned– but it is all Palestinian land, either way– expressly in order to render the development of that land by any Palestinian individual or entity as “illegal”.
Quite frequently, having kept land in that status for a number of years, the Israeli planning authorities will then suddenly “discover” it need not be kept green after all, but can be developed– into yet another Jews-only settlement. So those green designations are very frequently used as a way of, in effect, putting Palestinian land “into the bank” for Israel’s future development uses.
The abuse of allegedly pro-green planning orders is a long-time staple of the Zionist venture, and has sometimes also served to give it a welcome “progressive” image in the west. Many of my Jewish-American friends remember saving their US cents as children so they could buy trees for “Jewish forests in Israel”. Too bad that so many of these forests– like Canada Forest, down by Latrun– were actually established on recently destroyed Palestinian villages and farmlands…
Anyway, back to Jerusalem, and the FMEP map. I find it very disturbing to see represented there the degree of geographic threat now posed to the Sheikh Jarrah and Salah ad Din Street neighborhoods– and of course, to the Old City. The FMEP article notes, “the effort to establish small but significant Jewish residential and institutional centers [in portions of the Old City other than the traditional ‘Jewish Quarter’] whose isolation from one another is, in part answered by the creation of passageways both under and above ground.”
It seems like the situation of Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem may soon be as physically threatened as that of their compatriots in the historic central souq (market) area of Hebron.

Jerusalem is one of my favorite cities in the whole world. Not just because of the spectacular integrity of the Old City, as a concept and a reality. Not even because it has an intriguing little street called “Queen Helena Street”… (Boy, did the eponymous Queen H.have a lot to answer for, in terms of getting Christianity entangled into the affairs of imperial governance, the subsequent development of so-called “Just War” doctrine, and so on… Maybe I should just change my name??)
In the summer of 1989, Bill the spouse and I took our then-four-year-old daughter to live in the old Palm House at the American Colony, in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, for most of the summer. My father, a very sincere and traditional Anglican believer, came to stay with us there for ten days or so. Every morning he would set out with his milord English panama hat and his milord English walking stick and walk with complete equanimity around the whole of the city, centering himself on the sites of pilgrimage that spoke to him in a far deeper or anyway different way than they speak to me. It was during the first intifada, and a couple of my sisters were concerned about his safety. I said No, I think he’ll be quite safe and have a great time– which he did. The nearest he came to suffering serious injury was when one of the lemons fell off the big lemon tree in the garden at the Palm House and hit him on his shoulder. (It narrowly missed falling directly, and more helpfully, straight into his gin and tonic.)
So yes, I understand that Jerusalem is special in different ways to everyone.
It breaks my heart that so many Palestinians, who have a love for the city that is considerably deeper and more rooted in history than my own, are prevented from visiting it even once. That includes Palestinians from the rest of the West Bank, from Gaza, and from the whole of the Palestinian diaspsora– apart from those lucky few who have the kinds of foreign passports that allow them to visit Israel. Israel claims that all of Jerusalem, including the eastern part of the city that contains the whole of the historic, walled “Old City”, all of which was occupied along with the rest of the West Bank by their army in 1967 and has been under occupation rule ever since, is an integral part of, indeed, the capital of, the State of Israel.
As I’ve written here before, the Israelis’ exclusion of the Palestinians of the rest of the West Bank, and of Gaza, from Jerusalem is a situation that they imposed mainly after the conclusion of the Oslo Agreement in 1993.
What I really want to write about here, though, is three key ways in which I see Jerusalem as being special as a political issue, and what that means for the present, post-“Annapolis” peace process.
Here they are:
(1) This one is fairly well-recognized. Jerusalem is of great personal and political importance to the majority of both Jewish and Muslim believers around the whole world. (It is also of importance to Christian believers but not, I think, in a way that is currently as politically pressing as the way it is important to Jews and Muslims around the world.) So that is around 14 million Jewish people around the world– and around 1.5 billion Muslim believers– who consider the status of Jerusalem to be an extremely important issue.
It takes considerable ignorance, lack of empathy, or arrogance, to imagine that the interests of the world’s Muslim believers in Jerusalem’s wellbeing, including their right to conduct pilgrimages and maintain buoyant religious, educational, and social institutions there, can simply be swept under the carpet or marginalized forever. That was well proven back in 2000 when Egypt and Saudi Arabia, majority-Muslim states that are staunch US allies, expressed strong objections to the concessions that President Clinton was demanding from Yasser Arafat over the Jerusalem issue, and those objections helped scupper Clinton’s whole, very last-minute and ad-hoc attempt to broker a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement.
Do we have any reason to imagine that those two governments or any other strategically significant Muslim countries in the world would be prepared today to support any final-status arrangement for Jerusalem that might emerge from the (im-)balance of power within the present Palestinian-Israeli-US negotiations?
I doubt it.
(2) “Jerusalem”, however defined, is anyway the current major deal-breaker at the purely territorial level for any possibility of a viable two-state solution. Israelis define “Jerusalem” very broadly, as including all the many settlements they have implanted in a broad swathe around the area that, prior to 1967, constituted municipal East Jerusalem. And Israelis have a broad (though not total) consensus that they will never leave that swathe of settlements. Indeed, even since Annapolis they have continued to defy the world, and to tweak Washington, by announcing and then rapidly starting to implement successive new large-scale building plans there.
So it is not only the sensitivities of the Muslim world regarding the historic core of Jerusalem that stand in the way of a two-state final peace agreement. (Those sensitivities could, just possibly, be met through some combination of special status for the Holy Places and large religious and educational institutions, or whatever.) But Israel’s continued insistence on biting a gargantuan chunk out of the rest of the West Bank and digesting it into what they think of as “Jerusalem”, and therefore refuse to withdraw from, makes it almost impossible to build the basis for a viable Palestinian state in just the divided portions that remain of the West Bank, along with Gaza.
(3) Finally, for the chronically fractured Palestinian national community itself, Jerusalem is important as a crucial “bridge” between the Palestinians within the occupied territories as a whole, and those within Israel itself. Jerusalem’s 180,000 Palestinians live in a very vulnerable situation. During the first intifada, the leaders of their community played a central role coordinating the numerous acts of self-assertion and defiance that lay at the heart of that intifada. Leaders of the Palestinian cities, towns, and villages from throughout the West Bank and Gaza (and also from Israel itself) could easily travel to East Jerusalem to plan their efforts. Faisal Husseini (RIP), Hanan Ashrawi, Sari Nuseibeh, and other Jerusalemites were the main public face of the intifada, holding their press conferences in the National Palace Hotel, or meeting with Secretary of State Baker or other dignitaries….
And then, after Oslo, Israel walled East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank; walled Gaza off from the whole world, including East Jerusalem; and started clamping down on the all the Palestinian political institutions in Jerusalem, starting with Orient House.
When Arafat “returned” to the West Bank, he did so to Ramallah, not to Jerusalem. Always jealous of any other, possibly competing centers of power, he connived in the marginalization of Faisal Husseini and all the other Jerusalem community leaders.
Meanwhile, from the Israeli governmental side, successive Israeli governments from 1967 on have promulgated the myth that East Jerusalem is “an integral part of the state of Israel.” They tried, but generally failed, to impose Israeli identity cards on all the city’s Palestinians. They bring to their land-use planning processes there exactly the same kind of discriminatory Zionist vision that they use in their land-use planning inside 1948 Israel– that is, a process completely dominated by Jewish interests, that marginalizes or excludes any equal consideration of the voice or interests of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs.
Thus we have the phenomenon of the Israeli government demolishing Palestinian housing in Jerusalem that is deemed to be illegal– in exactly in the same way that it demolishes the housing of many “bedouin” Palestinians who are citizens of and within the State of Israel. (See HRW’s recent report on this.)
Now, it is true that the Israeli government demolishes Palestinian housing in the West Bank and Gaza, too. But usually, these days, those demolitions are not done on the basis of highly discriminatory and exclusionary zoning practices, but for reasons that are either punitive, “military”, or just plain vindictive. It is the discriminatory zoning practices I am interested in here, and the way in which they make the Palestinians of Jerusalems into a sort of bridge constituency between the Palestinians who are residents of the rest of the occupied territories, and those who are citizens of Israel.
Israel’s insistence that East Jerusalem is “part of Israel” has meant that the 1.2 million citizens of Israel who are ethnic Palestinians have very free access to East Jerusalem. Indeed, some Palestinian Jerusalemites say that over recent years the Palestinian Israelis who make a point of trying to visit the city as often as they can, and to spend their discretionary income in Palestinian shops, restaurants, and other establishments there, have provided an important economic lifeline for their ever-threatened community, especially in the Old City.
So here’s where this seems to lead: What the Israelis have done in and around Jerusalem has (a) made the achievement of a two-state solution considerably harder, if not impossible, while it has also (b) laid the basis for a new form of unification of the Palestinian people: one that unites the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel with their cousins and brothers who are residents of the occupied territories.
Interesting…

Sorry I’ve been very busy and haven’t had a moment to catch you all up with the fascinating saga of the Fateh-Hamas negotiations in Sana’a, Yemen…
Al-Jazeera English tells us that negotiators Azzam al-Ahmed (F) and Mousa Abu Marzouk (H) concluded a seven-point deal on Saturday (March 22), though the signing ceremony was on Sunday.
The AJE report tells us it was a seven-point agreement, and presents it to us as such, though sadly it lists only these SIX points:

• Gaza must be returned to how it was prior to the Hamas takeover last June
• Agreement to hold early elections
• Resumption of dialogue on the basis of the 2005 Cairo agreement and the Mecca agreement of 2007
• Respecting the Palestinian Law and Basic Law and adherence to it by all parties
• Reconstruction of the Palestinian security institutions
• All Palestinian institutions to be free of any factional discrimination, subject to the law and the executive authorities.

Well, seven points or six points– almost immediately after agreement was announced, some people in Abu Mazen’s office denounced and repudiated it. This, though Azzam Ahmed is a serious political figure within Fateh. Monsters & Critics tells us that Abu Mazen aide Nimr Hammad huffed that Ahmed “had not been authorized” to sign the Sana’a Agreement. Israel’s Y-net News had a quote from Abu Mazen aide Yasser Abed Rabboo criticizing Ahmed, too.
That latter report, which I think was an AP report, quoted Abu Ala’ (Ahmed Qurei’) as saying that Azzam Ahmed had been trying to get through to Abu Mazen by phone to discuss some fine points in the agreement but couldn’t because Abu Mazen was busy meeting with– you guessed it, Dick Cheney, at the time.
So this is where the picture becomes a little clearer for me. Cheney and Condi Rice have, after all, been modeling for their eager students and proteges in Fateh just how to ‘run’ a diplomatic effort through legerdemain and completely chaotic messaging.
Remember how, earlier this month, the secretary of State was in Brussels telling a press conference that she supported Egypt’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire-plus agreement between Israel and Hamas?
Well, now, apparently Cheney’s gone to the Middle East to say the administration doesn’t support any effort to engage with Hamas, after all.
If the Israeli government wants a deal with Hamas, I am sure it will just go ahead and nail one down, Dick Cheney or no Dick Cheney. In Tuesday’s Ha’aretz, Amos Harel and Yuval Azoulay tell us that an Egypt-mediated “calm for calm” situation has been generally holding for some days now across the Gaza-Israel border. Or rather, that Hamas and Israel are abiding by it, “even though Islamic Jihad occasionally launches rockets into Israel.”
Other portions of that report indicate that some people in the Israeli Defense Ministry are pursuing an intense campaign to “lower expectations” about any kind of more solid ceasefire emerging with Gaza. But if Hamas does succeed in keeping the Gaza-Israel border calm (i.e. no rockets), what would be the justification for Israel’s continued maintenance of the siege?

The NYT’s handsomely compensated diplomatic reporter Helene Cooper is “only” 13 days behind Just World News in reporting that Egypt has gotten some support from the US State Department in its continuing efforts to negotiate an Israel-Hamas ceasefire.
Strengths of my reporting over hers:

1. I had a reference and a link to the extremely revealing comment Rice made in a March 6 press conference in Brussels, when she said she “had talked to the Egyptian leaders and expressed confidence that their efforts could promote the US-backed peace talks.” I also linked to the AFP report that spelled out that Rice’s remarks were in response to a question “about reported talks between Cairo and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.” Cooper made no mention of this at all, though it was the most public (even if still slightly guarded) expression of support any administration official has ever made for the Israel-Hamas negotiations, and was therefore key to her story. And it’s all there in the public record!
2. I had links and references to some excellent reporting by Al-Masry al-Yawm’s Fathiya Dakhakhni that spelled out Hamas’s negotiating position in some detail. Cooper seemingly couldn’t give a toss.
3. I explored in some detail Egypt’s reasons for undertaking this mediating role despite the considerable reservations that President Mubarak entertains towards Hamas. (With lots of hyperlinks.) No toss here from Cooper, either.
4. I scooped her by 13 days.

Strengths of her reporting over mine:

1. She wrote her piece after mine and therefore was able to incorporate into it the whole “story” about the trouble the State Department got into by publishing on a sort of “quasi-official” blog a question about whether the US government should seek to “engage” Hamas, and the furious response that elicited from a Congressman who’s on the House Appropriations Committee and expressed outrage that the question had even been asked. (The State Dept spokesman rapidly put up a comment to the effect that they were merely asking the question, not defining policy.)
2. She got direct quotes from two Israelis who have been in Washington and support the idea of engaging with Hamas. (I could have gotten those quotes but I’ve been busy with a bunch of other things, as attentive readers will be aware.)
3. She got paid for her work on this story. (H’mm, I’m not actually sure if this makes her work better or not. Probably it’s a wash.)

One intriguing thing that is underlined yet again by Cooper’s story is the extreme difficulty any US administration will always have even talking about thinking about engaging with Hamas– unless the Government of Israel has already done so first.
This is so like the whole story of the PLO back in the 1980s and early 1990s! Back then, it was the Norwegians, bless their dear misguided hearts, who did the preparatory intermediation. Nowadays its the Egyptians. I actually explored some of the strange and– from the American point of view– completely dysfunctional dimensions of that tail-wags-dog phenomenon in my article in The Nation last November.
Maybe Helene Cooper could helpfully go read that one, too?

The plan hatched by Condi Rice and Elliott Abrams to train up a Palestinian ‘Contras’-style force under the auspices of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has fallen into a significant degree of chaos. The WaPo’s Ellen Knickmeyer and Glenn Kessler went to Muwaqqar, Jordan, where some 1,050 Palestinian security men are supposed to be being trained, and this is what they reported:

Weeks into the course, which began in late January, U.S. and Jordanian instructors had yet to receive essential training equipment, including vehicles, two-way radios, dummy pistols, rifles and batons, and a U.S.-designed curriculum, Americans with close knowledge of the program said. Because of Israeli concerns, the group of more than 1,000 Palestinian trainees has not been outfitted with pledged body armor or light-armored personnel carriers. The shortages and delays have forced U.S. and Jordanian trainers to improvise their way through the program, including purchasing pistol-shaped cigarette lighters for use in arrest drills and using their own cars for driver training. One of the Americans said, “In short, we are faking it.”

Read the whole thing. Many of the details are hilarious and/or tragic, depending how you look at them.
I think the most tragic aspect is that the trainees are probably destitute Palestinians from the diaspora– perhaps from Jordan, or perhaps some of the scores of thousands of Palestinians summarily kicked out of Iraq… And maybe they were so ill-educated or ignorant that when they signed on they thought they were doing something glorious and nationalistic? Or maybe for some of them this was the only way they could figure out how to get back home to their homeland?
So there is, certainly, a tragic personal aspect to the story. The politics, however, are almost pure farce.
Basically, the pro-Likud people and other Arabophobes in the U.S. Congress– that means, quite a large proportion of the members– can’t imagine trusting Israel’s Palestinian “partners” in Fateh enough to give them even decent flak jackets or other basic equipment for gendarmerie-type training…. And then there’s the ever-present “contractor”, in this case DynCorp, who no doubt is eager to skim off its high percentage from the deal. So the training sounds as though it’s nonsense: the Contras meet the Keystone Cops sort of thing.
Knickmeyer and Kessler note that,

The courses here are the first extended training of Palestinian recruits since June, when hundreds of Fatah graduates of a U.S.-backed, 45-day crash course conducted in Egypt were deployed against Hamas fighters in Gaza.
Hamas routed the Fatah forces in the strip in five days, leaving Hamas in charge of Gaza and Abbas, a Fatah leader, governing the West Bank.

It is extremely uncertain whether these latest 1,050 trainees would do any better.
Look, I have a suggestion. Israel does actually need a Palestinian “partner for peace.” That is, it needs a Palestinian party or movement or administration that is capable of preserving calm on the Palestinian side and reining in the many thousands of Palestinians who have been driven towards rash and violent acts by the degree of horrendous suffering that the IOF has inflicted on them and their families. And Hamas does look as if it has been paying a lot of attention precisely to building up such forces, especially in Gaza… (Remember that Crisis Group report that gave many details about how internal political and inter-clan violence in Gaza went down significantly after the Fateh forces left.)
Of course, no Palestinian force– whether Fateh, or Hamas, or the Palestinian Boy Scouts– could be expected to play the role of policing the Palestinian side of the equation without being offered its own serious stake in the situation thus being “secured.”
But why all this money being shoveled to DynCorp to train Fateh’s forces, when they have little hope of securing anything– unless they do so in coordination with Hamas?
Well, the Likudist influence in Congress may not, in the end, prove to be a wholly bad thing. It’s a strange old world we live in.