Palestine 2008 – Page 6 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Transcript of Jan. 16th interview with Khaled Meshaal

I have now uploaded the full transcript of the one-hour interview I conducted with the head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, in Damascus last month.
I shan’t add any additional commentary here. I have already provided some commentary and context to the interview in various posts here on JWN, and in this recent CSM column. And now, I’m going to be writing a much more comprehensive essay about Hamas’s still-evolving role for Boston Review, where it will run in the May issue.
I’ll just note– though of course our readers here are all so smart that you’ll have figured this out already– that the interview was conducted exactly one week before the bustout from Gaza.
Meanwhile, there is no word from either Gaza or Egypt on the results of the most recent negotiations in El-Arish over an arrangement for the Gaza-Egypt border.

Video of Froman and Amayreh discussing Accord

Haaretz today carries a short video showing Rabbi Menachem Froman and close-to-Hamas Palestinian journalist Khaled Amayreh meeting in the garden of the Cave of the Patriarchs /Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron to sign the ceasefire-plus Accord that, as I had noted here, they recently finished negotiating.
It is a delightful short clip and shows the two men dealing in friendly and cooperative fashion with each other. It was shot, according to the voiceover “last Tuesday”. On the clip, they sit at a picnic table near the Mosque/Cave with the Koran and the Torah on the table in front of them, and sign their Accord.
Amayreh says he spoke with the Hamas caretaker government in Gaza Monday night “and they gave me their total agreement for this document.” He says that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal himself “accepts the document completely.” He adds that the obstacle is the Israeli government, and in particular Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “I am ready to meet with Barak to discuss this with him,” says Amayreh.
Froman says that the documents promises the end to all Palestinian violence including rockets and kidnappings. Amayreh says he cares about the people of Sderot, and he feels the pain of the Israeli boy there who lost his leg to a Palestinian rocket attack earlier this week. “All kids are kids, whether Israeli or Palestinian,” he says.
Watch the video. Spread the word about this important initiative. This is some great news out of the Holy Land; and the ceasefire-plus Accord negotiated by these two very serious men deserves the world’s strongest support.

Discussing Hamas on Capitol Hill

At yesterday’s Capitol Hill panel discussion on “Re-calculating Annapolis” I tried to present the best arguments I could for the US to end its profoundly anti-democratic current practice of working with Israel and others to exclude and crush the organization that won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections, Hamas.
The US, I concluded, should do whatever it can to promote these short- and medium-term goals:

Attentive readers of JWN will be familiar with most of the arguments I made along the way, which I have made here on the blog and in this November 2007 article in The Nation. I also noted that the dedication with which the Bushists have pursued their anti-Hamas agenda since the 2006 elections has very seriously undermined the claims the administration has made that it is somehow (counter to the evidence on the ground) committed to spreading the ideals and practice of democracy around the world, and has made the administration look very hypocritical and opportunistic indeed.
I may or may not have noted in my presentation that the campaign to exclude and crush Hamas– which has included giving full support to all of Israel’s policies of besieging Gaza and undertaking large numbers of extra-judicial executions there and in the West Bank– has actually had the opposite of the desired effect. Hamas has thus far emerged stronger politically than it was back in January 2006. (And meanwhile, the cost that these policies have imposed on the Palestinian people, and also to the Israelis who reside in the south of their country, has been high. In the case of the 1.4 million Gazans, quite horrendous.)
I should have quoted Uri Avnery’s great recent quote that the Olmert government’s actions against Gaza have been “worse than a war crime, they have been a blunder.” But I didn’t have time to. At the very last minute my position on the event’s roster was changed from #5 to #2, so I had to do some very rapid last-minute editing/revising of my comments.
We spoke in this order:

Two of the other panelists, Malley and Levy, presented broadly the same arguments I was making. Whitley is precluded by the nature of his job as a UN employee from expressing political judgments; but the picture he painted of a besieged Gaza facing “a social explosion and an economic implosion”, and being poised “on the verge of a health pandemic”, was grim indeed.
As for our fifth fellow-panelist, Ghaith al-Omari, he was advocating a path very different from that urged by the rest of us. He spoke right after me, and almost his first words were that, “Elections are highly over-rated.” He argued that trying to deal with Hamas, “is neither doable nor desirable.” He acknowledged that Hamas, “represents a real force in Palestinian society and needs to be taken into account.” But, he said, the question was “On what terms should Mahmoud Abbas be expected to reconcile with it?” His answer was that Hamas needed to be further weakened before Abbas could deal with it.
That seemed to me like a clear invitation to the forces currently seeking to punish and crush Hamas to step up their efforts. And this from someone who, though he is not a Palestinian, works for an organization that claims to speak in some way for the Palestinians…
In Rob Malley’s presentation, which came next, he directly challenged the assumption underlying that last argument of Omari’s. “Hamas is getting stronger and Abbas is getting weaker,” Malley warned. “We should not assume that time is our friend.” He also warned that the very difficult situation in Gaza could well be “the crucible of the next Arab-Israeli war.”
He noted that the attempt to isolate Hamas had been aimed at pushing forward the “peace process.” But he noted that had not happened. (A little later, Levy argued that the Annapolis formula “was the best that Condi Rice could win support for from the White House; but it wasn’t actually a recipe for success.”)
The major point at which Malley seemed to diverge from my views is he said he thought Mahmoud Abbas should mediate both the ceasefire asnd the prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. Personally I think that’s a recipe for disaster because (a) Abbas is not even on speaking terms with Hamas at this point; (b) There is anyway an existing mediator between Israel and Hamas on these two issues, and that is Egypt; so neither side “needs” Abbas to mediate for them (they could also communicate directly with each other if they wanted; this has happened in some limited ways in the past); (c) from a national-interest point of view, it actually seems very inappropriate for Abbas to “mediate” between Israel and Hamas; and finally (d), the biggest point of all: Abbas is actually increasingly weak and irrelevant.
Levy made a couple of excellent observations. Firstly, that “We now have no fewer than three U.S. generals in the region working on this issue– and none of them is doing anything that would count as de-escalation of the tensions.” Secondly, that what he had been learning from his Israeli compatriots was that Hamas had discernibly been trying to target military installations with its rockets, while it was Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees who had been sending rockets simply into the (populated) general vicinity of the city of Sderot. “Though Hamas,” he added, “has not intervened to stop them from doing that.”
I was encouraged to hear that Levy’s Israeli sources saw clear evidence of an attempt by the Hamas rocketeers to restrict their targeting to military installations. But that guidance certainly needs to be extended to their people undertaking other kinds of violent operations, too. (Hamas credibly claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing that on February 3 killed an elderly woman in Dimona; the two operatives involved reached Israel from the Hebron area, not from Gaza or Egypt.)
It was significant that though the title of our discussion was “Re-calculating Annapolis”, no-one spent much time looking at the actual (and very sad) record of what has been going on in the post-Annapolic negotiations. I made a point, in my presentation, of noting the political impact of the fact that the Syrians— after having taken the bold step of attending Annapolis– had received nothing but a very cold shoulder from the Bushites in return.
But really, none of us spent any time discussing the minutiae of the current formal “peace process.” Partly because so very, very little has been, in fact, going on. And partly because the whole confrontation over– and the recent bustout from– Gaza has completely eclipsed in importance whatever teeny baby steps forward (or backward) the “peace process” negotiations might have taken.
Talking of which, I found it intriguing to note that Salam Fayyad, the man whom Abbas picked as his Prime Minister after the Israelis had conveniently imprisoned a large number of the Hamas parliamentarians, has not been completely acting the role of compliant US/Israeli puppet. Fayyad’s been here in the US, partly doing family things. But he also gave a couple of policy addresses here in Washington, DC. And in one of them he complained openly that the checkpoints that the IOF maintains inside the West Bank– which were supposed to have decreased in number after Annapolis– “have increased, not decreased.”
Oh, and in further related news, on Tuesday Israel’s housing minister, Zeev Boim, announced plans to build more than 1,100 more new apartments in occupied East Jerusalem.
Under these circumstances, is it really any surprise that Abbas is so rapidly becoming weaker?

Mubarak on the Gaza question

This is the English-language version of an interview conducted on January 30th with Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak by two correspondents from Italy’s La Repubblica. A very well-informed person tells me it’s a good representation of what is known of Mubarak’s views. (Hat-tip to that person.)
Here is how it starts:

That part certainly rings very true. Mubarak’s political patron, Pres. Anwar Sadat, was extremely proud of the fact that in the Camp David negotiations of 1978 he managed to win Israel’s agreement to withdraw its forces from all of the Egyptian territory occupied in 1967. It’s quite clear that Mubarak would not easily agree to any non-Egyptian party infringing on Egypt’s sovereignty now. (The concept of Egyptian sovereignty goes back, um, around 7,000 years or so.)
The whole text of the interview is fascinating. Here are some more highlights:

Hamas has been strengthened by it.

I note that the great Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has described Olmert’s attempt to strangle Gaza’s population in very similar terms, as “worse than a war crime– a blunder.”
Back to the interview:

Nor, I repeat, will I allow Israel, the occupying power, to offload its responsibilities towards Gaza, which is an occupied territory.

A peace broker? I would not call him that…

Now, that is really something, from a guy considered to be a lynchpin of US diplomatic/strategic policy in the Middle East! Earth to Condi! Maybe you should pay some heed to what the Arab allies on whom Washington’s Middle East policy is so dependent think about your peace diplomacy?
Mubarak continues, about Bush:

It is almost as though he had forgotten the lesson of Camp David: President Al- Sadat and Prime Minister Begin would never have achieved an accord if Carter had not spurred them on.

A little later, this:

This is not the time for resorting to threats or to the use of force: That would serve solely to set the Gulf, the Middle East, and the whole world on fire.

At the end of the interview, the authors note that, “Outside the door, the mirrors reflected the profile of the region’s new leading players: A composed and unruffled Iranian delegation stood waiting.”
Well, that interview was conducted ten days ago, and a lot has happened since. In the interview, Mubarak told the reporters that the border with Rafah would be closed “today”– yet it took his security people a further four days to close it; and even then, they were only able to do so with the help of Hamas.
The Egyptian authorities also made some quite heavy-handed attempts to mount a (dis-)information campaign against Hamas, with some writers even calling it something like an “Israeli fifth column” in the region. I’m not sure if that information campaign is still continuing?
The government has also continued its crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting numerous MB organizers around the country.
And security chief Omar Suleiman– sometimes also mentioned as a possible political successor to the ageing Mubarak– has reportedly been in Israel trying to work out a solution to the Gaza issue.
Such a solution, to work, probably needs to include these elements:

A tall order? Yes. If Suleiman can pull this one off, maybe he deserves to be president of Egypt!

Daniel Pipes, making sense?

Every so often people can surprise you. Thus it was today with Daniel Pipes, writing in the Jerusalem Post that Israel should just “offload” Gaza onto Egypt.
What I don’t like about Pipes’s piece is the extremely demeaning way he writes about the Palestinians. “Given that Gazans have shown themselves incapable of responsible self-rule… ” and so on. But here’s the thing about the “parallel unilateralisms” approach– parallel as between Likudniks like D. Pipes, and the people in Hamas, as I wrote about here, back in 2006: participants in that kind of approach don’t have to be all lovey-dovey; they don’t have to like each other, or even particularly pretend that they do. They just need to let each other get on with their lives.
Pipes says that the “disengage from Gaza” project was suggested to him by Rob Satloff of the Washington Institute for Pro-Israeli Policy. He writes that Satloff suggested that Israel announce these three steps:

“a date certain for the severing of Israel’s provision of water, electricity and trade access, free entry for replacement services through Egypt, and an invitation for international support to link Gaza to Egyptian grids.”

And he notes that “Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser, would also detach Gaza from its customs union with Israel and the West Bank.”
This would be music to the ears of many or most of the leaders of Hamas. Interesting. Particularly interesting if Likud comes into power and actually does this.
Parallel unilateralisms is almost the polar opposite of the “integrationist” approach to peacemaking that has been pursued in particular by Shimon Peres and some people in Fateh– with huge amounts of funding from well-meaning people and governments in the west who just love all that encounter-group bonding stuff. However, I worked in one such project, at the non-governmental level, for nearly two years back in the early 1990s; and I can tell you there are a lot of very unhealthy power plays that go on in many or most of them. How could there not be? What you’re talking about, after all, is representatives from one very powerful group, that have passports and resources and nearly all the contacts with the funders, ability to set the agendas, etc etc, and representatives from the other group who have almost none of those advantages…
Thus you had, for example, Shimon Peres who even while he was professing all his “New Middle East” business, was the one who as Prime Minister launched Israel’s extremely lethal 1996 punitive military attack against Lebanon and supported various other uses of quite disproportionate military violence. He wasn’t about to cede any real say in the diplomatic agenda to anyone, no matter how nice he made… And there are power plays and huge vested interests from many of the “mediators” and would-be mediators in the west, too.
I know politics and diplomacy are not the same as interpersonal relations. But they sometimes have a lot in common. Speaking from my experience of my first marriage breaking up, I think it was essential for me– and maybe for my ex, too– to be able to have a “Clean break” from each other. While we still both tried thereafter to deal with each other in a cordial, indeed helpful, way in our management of our continued joint interests (that is, the rearing of our children), once we’d made the decision to divorce neither of us was under any pressure to be “best friends” with each other any more. That would surely have led to some horrendous “Kramer vs. Kramer”-type difficulties. Instead, we both moved on and married other people, and created two new blended families.
The “integrationist” approach has been pursued by Israel towards the Palestinians– without success– since Oslo. Maybe it could have worked in the 1990s, under very different circumstances. (Including some serious and visionary engagement by Bill Clinton in the process, rather than having him just act as in-house attorney for whoever happened to be in power in Israel which was the role he played for eight years there.) But we are 15 years on from Oslo now. The integrationist approach has not worked and it shows no imminent signs of working. Maybe it really is time for a “Clean break”– but of a kind notably different from the one the Likudniks and PNAC-ers proposed back in 1996.
I have Palestinian friends who, when we’ve discussed this matter, have argued passionately that if Gaza “switches” from being tied to the current Israeli-dominated customs union to being linked to Egypt’s economy, then that would signal a disastrous break between Gaza and the West Bank. A long-held mantra of the Palestinian nationalists has been that Gaza and the West Bank are “one political entity.” All previous moves Israel has made at enacting a “Gaza first” approach were strongly criticized.
But Gaza has been disconnected from the West Bank, in practice, for 15 years now. And meanwhile, its people– as also, indeed, the 2.2 million Palestinians of the West Bank– have been suffering hugely from their subordination to Israel’s economic as well as military domination. So if the 1.4 million Gazas have a chance to escape that economic servitude, at last; to break out of the completely anti-humane conditions of economic siege that Israel has imposed upon them and re-open their economy to the world through Egypt: then why should a completely unelected Mr. Salam Fayyad in Ramullah and his many western bankrollers forbid them from doing that?
We should underline the fact that since Oslo it has been forbidden for nearly all Gazans even to visit Jerusalem or anywhere else in the West Bank. Travel between the two territories was far easier before Oslo– even during the height of the First Intifada! It was Oslo that brought the tightened restrictions on travel and trade. Most Gazans alive today have never had the chance even to visit their holy places in Jerusalem.
But– and this is important to note– the fact of this longlasting separation in practice between Gaza and the West Bank has not diminished by one jot the feeling that Gazans have of allegiance to the Palestinian national identity, or their love of and longing for Jerusalem. Similarly, nearly all the millions of Palestinians living as multi-generational refugees in Jordan, and Syria, Lebanon, or elsewhere, also still keenly feel themselves to be Palestinians, who have a special tie to Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. So the argument that if Gazans build new economic ties with Egypt then they will somehow “forget” their Palestinian-ness, seems without merit.
It’s worth remembering, too, that more than 80% of Gaza’s people are also multi-generational refugees from inside current Israel. They are certainly not about to simply forget all those longstanding claims they have against Israel, which are specifically Palestinian claims and are not shared by Egyptians or any other non-Palestinians.
To be honest, I haven’t made my mind up yet– for what it’s worth– as to whether the unilateralist (or more precisely, Egypt-focused) approach to socioeconomic reconstruction and regional diplomacy can offer a viable path forward for Gaza’s people. What I do see is that the “integration with a much more powerful Israel while sporadically trying to disentangle” approach ihas not worked for the Gazans or the West Bankers… Worse than that, it is inflicting visible harms on Gaza’s people (and the people of the West Bank) day after day after day.
Hey, here’s an idea: Why not let the people of Gaza– or, the people of Gaza and the West Bank– have a free and fair vote on this matter? Why, the vote might even take the form of a parliamentary election… (What do you mean they did have just such a vote back in January 2006? They did? So where are all those parliamentarians now? Oh, in Israel’s jails… Ain’t democracy great?)

Amayreh-Froman accord: A way forward for Israel and Palestine?

Today’s Haaretz carries exciting news about a proposal for an Israel-Gaza ceasefire that has been jointly drafted by Khaled Amayreh, a Hebron-area journalist who is close to Hamas (and whose work I have frequently cited here), and Rabbi Menachem Froman of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa.
Haaretz’s Yair Ettinger writes:

gained 100-percent approval

The way Ettinger describes the document, the agreement would include provision for the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who has been held by Gaza Palestinians as a POW since spring 2006 and is now well established as being under Hamas’s general control. It would also include a full tahdi’eh (ceasefire) between Israel and Gaza and some, though not all, elements of a more far-reaching hudna between Israel and Palestine.
Ettinger writes:

The Hebrew and Arabic document contains verses from the Koran and the Bible and states, “God is the greatest of all and He alone can bring an end to the problems between the noble Palestinian people and the distinguished Jewish people in the Holy Land.”

I really love this formulation for dealing with the 120-year-old contest between Palestinians and Jews for control of the Holy Land: Leave that big issue to the Almighty, working in His or Her own time, which is not the same as politicians’ time!
And more immediately, there is this:

Two last quick points here. One is that I’m assuming that in addition to the release of Shalit the document also makes provision for the release of many of the Palestinians held in Israeli detention– who include around 45 of the parliamentarians elected in the free and fair Palestinian elections of January 2006.
On another page, Haaretz tells us that “Hamas has given Israel a letter apparently written by abducted Israel Defense Forces soldier Gilad Shalit… The authenticity of the letter has been examined and sent to the Shalit family.”
So it looks as if the letter was deemed authentic enough to send it on to the family. It seems, too, that Hamas has underlined in this way that it does indeed have control– whether direct or indirect– over Shalit and therefore, by extension, is in a position to assure his release if its conditions for an Israeli counter-release are met.
The Haaretz article gives further details of the negotiations over how many, and which, Palestinians Israel is prepared to release. Olmert is reported to have relaxed his criteria for the release somewhat, but negotiations among Israel’s various security bodies still continue and the writer’s sources say there may not be a deal for a number of months yet.
And finally– this is something of direct relevance to what I was writing yesterday— this morning, a Palestinian suicide bomber who had reportedly crossed into southern Israel across the lightly guarded border with Egypt blew himself up in the Negev town of Dimona, killing one Israeli woman and himself, and wounding 11 other people. A second reported bomber was shot dead at the scene by police before he could detonate his vest.
So here’s a very important aspect of the attack that Haaretz and others report:

the Fatah-allied Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – which claimed responsibility for the attack

But here is my concern: Is there a possibility that Israel’s leaders, politically embattled and embarrassed by last week’s release of the final portion of the Winograd report, might use the Dimona attack as a pretext to hit back hard against the people of Gaza and the newly empowered Hamas leaders there?
Israel’s often pugnacious Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, has reportedly been pushing for a significant military attack against Gaza for some time now. He doubtless has the plans for such an attack all ready to go. Barak has been particularly embarrassed by the fall-out from Winograd because before its publication he had vowed that if the report was critical of PM Olmert then he would lead the Labour Party out of the governing coalition. The report was very critical of Olmert’s leadership during the 33-day war, though not naming him or anyone else by name. Barak has not resigned.
(Btw, I find it fascinating that party discipline in the Labour Party is so weak these days that this was apparently a decision that Barak alone, as party leader, could make. Shouldn’t it have been a party decision? Just asking here… )
I’ll just note that almost exactly 25 years ago, when Defense Minister Areil Sharon was itching for any excuse at all to launch a big attack against the PLO in Lebanon, he used the pretext of an attack made against the Israeli ambassador in London by operatives from the virulently anti-PLO Palestinian faction of Abu Nidal to launch that attack.
Let’s hope wiser heads will prevail this time.
Look at what Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon led to!!!

unilaterally

home-based Palestinian national leaders

A full-scale invasion and reoccupation of Gaza this time round could be expected to have results considerably more counter-productive than that from Israel’s point of view.
That’s why the Amayreh-Froman document and the cautious, tension-calming path forward that it lays out, may gain some traction within Israel in the weeks ahead, just as it already has with the Hamas leadership. Let’s hope so.

Egypt’s diplomacy on Hamas-Fateh and the Rafah crossing

Egypt’s great daily paper Al-Masry Al-Yawm has an important article today describing the intensive efforts Egyptian officials have been making to secure both a (degree of) Hamas-Fateh reconciliation and an agreement with the relevant Palestinian parties– preferably, both of them– regarding the orderly operation of the Rafah crossing point. (Hat-tip Bill. By the way, readers should also note that, in addition to being a great paper, AMAY’s website has an excellently edited English-language version. Kudos to them!)
The authors of the article are Sherif Ibrahim, Fathia al-Dakhakhni and Mahasen el-Senousi.
They write:

And then this important information from Hamas spokesperson Taher al-Nounou:

Hamas accepted European observers at the gate provided that they do not decide when to open and close it, that they live in Arish or Rafah and not go to Israel as they used to. He also stressed on the fact that the Europeans would be back by virtue of a new comprehensive agreement not related to the 2005 one.

the most important issue of the talks – focused on by Egyptian officials – was Egyptian security in Sinai

The close-to-Hamas Palestinian Information Center (PIC) website carried this report from a press conference that Hamas’s former foreign minister Mahmoud Zahhar held yesterday in Rafah.
It said this:

in cooperation between security men of both sides

And this morning AP is reporting from Rafah that,

Hamas police aided with the closure, drawing pistols and arresting Palestinians who were throwing stones at Egyptian troops along the frontier.

It is certainly significant that the Hamas people are working with the Egyptian security forces to establish a stable regime along the Gaza-Egypt border— and doing so even though that involves, right now, working with Egypt to reseal the border, even if this complete resealing is only temporary.
Both sides have reason to fear a continuation of the recent chaotic situation there. The Egyptians have been searching for four Palestinians, suspected of planning suicide attacks against some of Egypt’s economically important tourist resorts, who reportedly crossed from Gaza into Sinai on Friday. AP apparently reported that 12 of the 15 heavily armed Palestinians arrested in the north Sinai town of Arish in recent days were members of Hamas. Very evidently, if the Hamas leadership wants to work out a stable agreement with Egypt regarding the border, it will also have to be able to exert its own control effectively over the situation inside Gaza— including, perhaps especially, over the actions of its own members.
It cannot do that easily if the Rafah border remains open to all-comers, including very possibly provocateurs infiltrated by Israel, or Abu Mazen, or who knows who else.
Also, of key importance: For Gaza’s economic opening to and through Egypt to work, as Zahhar and his colleagues want it to, both the Palestinians and the Egyptians need to be able to control– and keep calm– their respective borders with Israel.
Might the next step the Egyptians take, after finding a way to reconcile Abu Mazen and Hamas and a workable formula for opening one or more crossing points on the border, therefore be to help broker a meaningful ceasefire between Gaza and Israel? Why not?
Meanwhile, though Hamas has indeed today been taking actions– including against its own people– in its decision to work with the Egyptians in resealing the border, it is also showing that it retains and will probably continue to develop its capabilities of mounting nonviolent mass actions around the Gaza issue. That same PIC report that told us about Zahhar’s press conference told us this:

thousands of Palestinian women participated Saturday afternoon in a massive march organized by Hamas’s female supporters at the Rafah crossing

This is one of the many things I love about nonviolent mass action: It involves all members of society, not just the guys! Indeed, to be effective, it really needs to do so.
Back in 2006, I wrote quite a bit about the increasingly important political role being played by Hamas’s well-organized networks of women supporters. That became evident both in the very successful parliamentary election campaign that Hamas mounted in January of that year, and also in some of the new style of nonviolent mass public actions that we saw from the Hamas-organized women later in the year. See, e.g., these two JWN posts from November 2006: 1 and 2.
Too many people in the west– and certainly, nearly the whole of the western MSM– have taken at face value the accusations from Israel and the Bush administration about Hamas (and Hizbullah) being only terrorist organizations. But that view completely misunderstands, or wilfully ignores, the deep roots both organizations have struck among their respective constituencies– roots have been nurtured and sustained through many long years of actions in various fields of nonviolent activity, including a lot of social work and electoral/political organizing. But then, something new happened, it seems to me, when people involved in those kinds of fairly private nonviolent activities take their nonviolent organizing into the mass, open, public sphere and these actions demonstrated that they can have a huge, transformatory effect on the political scene.
One example from Lebanon was the partly organized, partly “spontaneous” mass return of south Lebanese villagers to their villages in the border zone in May 2000. The puppet-run “security zone” that the Israelis had previously maintained there just crumbled overnight.
Another example from Lebanon was the very similar– partly organized, partly “spontaneous”– mass return of south Lebanon’s people to their homes, villages, and towns, on August 14, 2006, the very day the ceasefire went into effect. That human wave of people completely swept away any hopes the Israelis may have had that they and the UN could somehow “prevent” Hizbullah’s people from re-establishing themselves in southern Lebanon– because at that point, nearly all the people who returned were Hizbullah. And, as Ze’ev Schiff (RIP) noted at the time, possession of the battlefield at the time the shooting stops is the very definition of victory. (The IDF had sent in a ground force in those last 60 hours of the war– after the completion of the negotiations for the ceasefire, indeed– precisely with the aim of trying to control as much of the South Lebanon battlefield as possible by the time the ceasefire went into effect. At the purely military level, however, their plans went sorely awry; and on August 13 and 14 the surviving soldiers from their badly mauled invasion force slunk back south across the border in considerable disarray, holding onto no land at all.)
Hizbullah’s women have also, certainly, been seen in quite a number of the party’s public demonstrations and marches, some of them organized into disciplined and slightly militaristic-looking cohorts, and some not.
Hamas women, however, seem to have been developing an even more distinctive and potentially effective role for themselves. They have run in– and in six cases, won– parliamentary elections. And on numerous occasions over the years they have organized all-women demonstrations with a very pointed political intent. Most recently, on January 22, more than 1,000 Hamas-organized women from Gaza swarmed across the Rafah crossing into Egypt in an action designed to publicize the plight of their families as Israel tightened the screws of its siege of the Strip– and also, perhaps, to test the reactions of the Egyptian security forces prior to the big bust-out across the border that was being planned for the following night. (Also worth watching: the second half of this Jazeera/YouTube report on that demo. I would say maybe they need work a bit more on group discipline?)
On that occasion, the Egyptian security forces responded with baton charges and water cannon. But the women’s demonstration, which was widely publicized throughout the Middle East, probably helped many of Gaza’s people to break through any fear they might have had, the next day, regarding the possibility of joining the throngs engaged in the bust-out. So the bust-out itself, when it happened, turned out to be a massive and truly transformative venture.
And now, by mounting another demonstration at the border crossing, it has been the organized women of Hamas, acting nonviolently, who have put the Egyptian authorities on notice that they need to find an agreement that allows the re-opening of the border fence, and soon.
Interesting times. Let’s see what Egyptian diplomacy is able to achieve.

Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan: Bushism in disarray

The past few weeks have not been good ones for the Bush administration’s project of establishing firm, pro-western beach-heads in a broad swathe of western Asia from Gaza to Afghanistan. Afghanistan, which since late 2001 has been ruled by the US-installed and heavily US-dependent Hamid Karzai, is probably the country where the situation seems most dire– for both the pro-Washington political order and the Afghan citizens themselves.
Afghanistan is, by some hard-to-fathom quirk of fate (okay, make that Bushist political necessity), a central part of the mission of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, despite its great distance from the Atlantic ocean. The BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was probably representing the views of many NATO leaders when she wrote yesterday,

for the sake of its own credibility

One question: given that Afghanistan is so important to NATO, and given that the Bush administration has pushed so hard with its plan to deploy an ABM system right next to the Russian border in Poland, why would Russia– or, come to that, China– feel any urgent desire to help NATO pull its chestnuts out of the Afghan fire as that fire burns on?
(Russia and China are both a lot closer to Afghanistan than the USA or any other NATO country. They have their own strong interests in not seeing the return of the Taleban order there. But short of that, I expect they are both quite happy to see NATO’s troops getting ground down there– and in Iraq, as well.)
And talking of Iraq… all that cock-a-hoop talk we heard from the Bushites a month or two ago, about how the surge was “working” and life in Iraq has been slowly returning to normal, has been shown to be a flash-in-the-pan. The US’s own casualty rates rose again in January; and yesterday Iraqi suicide bombers performed two more truly gruesome acts against crowded civilian markets.
And in Gaza, the US-Israeli attempt to besiege Gaza’s entire 1.5 million-strong population back into the Stone Age received a notable blow when the Gazans and their Hamas leaders simply walked en masse back to some form of a new, life-saving economic connection with Egypt.
Today, it is ten days since that bust-out occurred. On most of those days, Egyptian officials have sworn that they were “just about” to re-close the border– but guess what, it hasn’t happened yet. Meanwhile, US puppet Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has steadfastly refused to respond to the invitations issued by both Egypt and Hamas that he join a tripartite discussion on how to restore order at the Gaza-Egypt border. Abbas has lost considerable political popularity by maintaining a stance that looks suspiciously like one that seeks to uphold Israel’s ability to strangle Gaza’s economy whenever it pleases.
Hamas’s leaders actually seem to be taking some interesting leaves out of the Israeli playbook. Firstly, they want to proceed with their social reconstruction project in Gaza unilaterally, mirroring the unilateralism (i.e., no negotiations!) policy steadfastly pursued toward Gaza by Sharon and Olmert. Secondly, Hamas is intent on creating “facts on the ground” along the Gaza-Egypt border, to which they hope the diplomats can subsequently find a solution. Hey, creating “facts on the ground” always– until recently– worked well for Israel! So why not for the Palestinians too?
As of today, the Egyptians are promising they’ll get the border re-sealed on Sunday. We’ll see about that. But even if it is re-sealed for some period of time, the Egyptians, Israelis, and everyone else in the region now understands that Hamas could bust across that border into Egypt any time it feels it needs to in the future. So (a) Israel’s plans to maintain a complete siege have lost much of their relevance, and (b) the incentive for the Egyptians to be able to restore some semblance of order and regulation to the border zone will continue to be huge; and for that, clearly, they need to work with Hamas.
Incidentally, this whole Gaza border issue now also puts the EU on the spot. Back in 2005 the EU rashly agreed to act as Israel’s puppet in policing the one single, people-only crossing point between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah. Basically, the scheme was that EU monitors– who lived in Israel— would sit in the Rafah crossing-point and check the documents of those small numbers of Gaza Palestinians who were allowed by Israel to cross in or out… and they had to transmit all the details of those travelers for prior approval to Israeli officials sitting a mile or two away, inside Israel. And whenever the Israelis wanted to close Rafah, all they needed to do was prevent the EU monitors from traveling to it. Which they have done, almost continuously over the past months.
Now, the Hamas people say (a) they want to have free passage for goods as well as people across the Gaza -Egypt border, and (b) they might agree to have European monitors there– but not if those monitors are beholden in any way to Israel.
How will the EU respond to these demands? Will it continue to kowtow to Washington and Israel? In which case, the Egyptians and Palestinians may well just go ahead and open their own borders. What is the EU’s standing under international law to have any role there, anyway?
A very bizarre arrangement. (Like NATO being in Afghanistan, you might say. More than a whiff of old-style colonialism?)
Anyway, I feel fairly hopeful that the Palestinians and Egyptians can sort out some workable regime for their mutual border. Both nations have a strong interest in the situation not being chaotic. There remains, of course, the not-small challenge of getting Abu Mazen to talk to the Hamas people. (Oh my! Maybe he would risk losing all the hefty amounts of money he and his followers have been getting from Washington and its allies! How could he deal with that blow!) But he’d probably better do it sooner rather than later, if he wants to retain any credibility as a national leader… Um, it’s not as he has done if anything else recently that has brought his people any tangible benefits?
Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan, and what it portends for this strange political animal called “NATO”, has attained new importance on the global scene.
NATO was founded back in the 1940s as the military alliance of the anti-Soviet powers of Western Europe and North America. You might think that after the collapse of not just the Warsaw Pact but also of the Soviet Union itself in the early 1990s, the NATO generals could all have folded up their general’s batons and their flags, and their strategic-planning Power Point presentations and gone home…
You’d be wrong.
NATO was pretty rapidly reborn at that point as, among other things, the main way the US, through its military, worked to hang onto a meaningful role in Europe. That, at a time when the eastward-moving growth of the European Union threatened to make Europe into something that was larger, stronger, non-American, and more self-sufficient. There were also some attempts to rebrand NATO as an alliance of the “democracies”, and in some way an agent of the democratic ideal. It always struck me as very muddle-headed, however– whether in Iraq or anywhere else– to imagine that the projection and use of military power had anything at all to do with being democratic. A commitment to democracy surely requires, above all, a commitment to working hard to resolve one’s political differences, however sharp, through nonviolent means? So the idea that any military alliance could be an agent of democracy, seems distinctly Orwellian.
But now– and this is what the BBC’s Caroline Wyatt was referring to– the over-stretching of military capabilities (and the casualties) that several NATO nations have been experiencing in Afghanistan has sparked off a battle royal among some of the alliance’s leading members. With spring approaching and the Taleban reportedly better organized than ever, Germany’s Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung on Friday brusquely rejected a written plea from US Secdef Robert Gates that Germany send troops to the combat zones in southern Afghanistan. (A strange old world, eh, when an American leader is begging Germany to deploy troops into combat zones outside its own borders?)
NATO members France, Turkey, and Italy have also refused to send their troops to the Afghan combat zones, keeping them instead in provinces less plagued by the Taleban’s recent “surge.” Canada’s government, which has had (and lost) quite a lot of troops in the combat zone, has come under huge domestic pressure and announced it will pull them out in, I believe September.
Britain has had troops in the combat zone all along. But now, a plan to deploy 1,800 Scottish troops there has stirred some pushback from the increasingly independent-minded Scots. And in London, veteran political commentator Simon Jenkins has an anguished piece in the February 3 Sunday Times under the headline Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never win.
Jenkins writes,

They have no strategy for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan.

Nato’s much-vaunted 2006 strategy has not worked…
Kabul is like Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war.

After 87 deaths and two years of operations in Helmand, the British Army cannot even secure one dam.

All of Jenkins’ piece is worth reading. It stands in stark contrast to this nonsense from the WaPo’s resident Bush-apologist, Jim Hoagland, whose main “argument” consists of whining that the problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan are all Hamid Karzai’s and Pervez Musharraf’s fault.
I have argued for a long time now that invading Iraq was definitely “a bridge too far” for the projection of US military power into west-central Asia. (That is a purely “realist” argument. There were also, of course, weighty moral arguments against the venture, from the get-go.)
But I think what we can see now, as we survey the scene from Gaza, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, is that the major projects of the US-led “west” in the region are all in disarray. Partly, this is because of the arrogance with which the Bush administration pursued all its projects in the region (and partly because of the craven toadying to US power on behalf of too many other members of the “west”.) Partly it is because the Bushites always rejected using the UN’s legitimacy whenever they could, preferring to exercise their own “leadership”, as unfettered as possible, over their own self-assembled “coalition of the willing.” But in good part it has also been because of the west’s excessive reliance on the instruments of brute power, rather than consultation and diplomacy. From this point of view, Israel’s imposition of the crushing, anti-humane siege on all the population of Gaza was just as violent as the US’s use of massive air-launched missiles and bombs in Iraq or Afghanistan. (Israel has, of course, also used a lot of heavy ordnance against Gaza, as well as its attempts at siege.)
… So the Bush administration’s military planners are doubtless working late these days, trying to figure out what to do about Afghanistan, what to do about Iraq. Should they follow “the Dannatt rule” and work rapidly to redeploy forces from Iraq to Afghanistan?
Or the other way around?
Right now, they have no good choices. The Bushist conceit– that the US could maintain its “Uberpower” role in the world through the use of its own military power with the help only of those other powers ready to be be swirled along in its wake, and under Washington’s unquestioned leadership– is being revealed for what it has always been: imperial hubris. When will the non-US powers in the world step in and propose a better way forward? When will the US citizenry itself stand up and scream, “Enough! We need a better way!”
I have not been encouraged, frankly, by the calls that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made in the past for “an increase in the overall size of the US military”, as providing any kind of an answer to the problems Washington has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. (I am even less encouraged by the stress the Republican candidates have put on even more militaristic paths forwards.) But at least Barack Obama is saying the US President should talk to– and listen to– its opponents. He has put a lot more emphasis on diplomacy than Hillary; and he certainly doesn’t project the idea– as she does– that he feels he has “something to prove” in being commander-in-chief of the US’s 1.4 million-strong armed forces. He also stressed in Thursday’s debate that he sees the need to provide a clear contrast to the militaristic kinds of policies that the presumed GOP candidate, John McCain, has been advocating.
So Barack Obama may not– okay, he will not– solve all the problems in the US’s relationship with the rest of the world. But he sure looks a lot better than any of the rest of them.
And whoever is president on January 20, 2009, is going to be facing some truly massive challenges.

Al-Ahram Weekly on Egypt and Gaza

I’ve been unbelievably busy with the galley-proofs (or whatever they call today’s functional equivalent of them) of my book. Five chapters down, and two to finish tomorrow… Meanwhile, I see that today’s issue of Al-Ahram Weekly (in English) has as expected a number of informative articles on the thorny Gaza-Egypt question.
This is probably the best general wrap-up of the tricky Egyptian-Palestinian dilemma over Gaza. It includes this:

Meshaal interview at ‘Foreign Policy’ website

A condensed version of my Jan. 16th interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal is now published on the website of Foreign Policy magazine. Under my agreement with them, they have that as an exclusive for two weeks, and I’ll be publishing the (much longer) full version of the interview on Feb. 13th.
It was a real pleasure working with the folks there. From me saying they could have it, to them doing the editing work, etc., and getting it published took somewhere less than six hours. Plus, I think they did a good edit.