Category: Palestine 2009

Mahmoud Abbas is supposed to be the head of the Fateh movement, as well as of the PLO (!) and the US-supported Palestinian Authority (PA.)
Yesterday, Abbas swore in a new PA ‘government’, headed as before by the strongly US-backed Salam Fayyad… and most members of Fateh’s own parliamentary bloc opposed the move and refused to join!
This is a further illustration of the fact I have mentioned before, that Fateh no longer has any coherent internal organization at all– let alone one that could make any strategic or tough decisions or exercise other functions of national “leadership.”
And the more money the US and its friends shovel into the PA project, the faster the internal disintegration continues.
This commentary from Ma’an News tries to unpack Abbas’s reasoning for forming the new “government”. The one I find most convincing is that Abbas and his American masters/friends figured it would look bad if he turned up in Washington May 28 without having some kind of a Potemkin government in tow. (My somewhat liberal paraphrasing there.)
The Fateh PLC bloc’s grounds for objection are interesting. They center primarily around the legitimacy of the move. I guess that back in June 2007, when Abbas appointed the first Fayad government, he was still uncontestedly the PA President; and he claimed a right under the PA’s Constitution to form an “emergency” government.
But even that was supposed to last for only 30 days.
Also, Abbas’s mandate as President ran out last January.
I find it interesting that the Fateh LC members are standing up on the basis of the PA’s Constitution. The PA was only ever meant to be a short-term (five-year), transitional body, pending conclusion of the final agreement that would– all palestinians hoped– give the the full powers of an indpendent state.
Surely that would have been the time to work out a proper Constitution?
Instead of which, a lot of people became heavily invested in fashioning a constitution for this transitional body, the PA; and now both Hamas and the Fateh parliamentarians have become very attached to it.
All of which is almost completely meaningless–Potemkin politics; a misleading substitute for the real thing– unless there is a strong and workable final-status deal involving real national independence… and soon!

On Monday, I blogged some excerpts from the informal interview I had with the close-to-Hamas scholar and media mogul Dr Azzam Tamimi, earlier in the day.
He read the blog post, and emailed me that he found the comments there very interesting. He added, “In fact the question about what comes after Hudnah is answered in my book.”
He then copied into the email the following text which he describes as “an excerpt from the draft of my book.” I think he was referring to this book, Hamas: Unwritten Chapters, which is due to be published this July here in London. (It seems to be an updated edition of this 2007 volume.)

What comes after hudnah?
by Azzam Tamimi
Hamas is silent about what happens when a long-term hudnah signed with the Israelis expires. While its leaders have left open the length of the hudnah term, considering this to be a subject for negotiation with the Israelis once they accepted the principle, they generally suggest that the future should be left for future generations.
It is usually assumed that a long term hudnah will likely last for a quarter of a century or more. That is seen as too long a time for someone to predict what may happen afterwards. There will always be the possibility that the hudnah will come to an end prematurely because of a breach. If that happens it is highly unlikely that the breach will come from the Hamas side for the simply reason that it is religiously binding upon the Islamic side to honor the agreement to the end unless violated by the other side. Should the hudnah last till the prescribed date, one scenario is that those in charge then will simply negotiation a renewal.
Another scenario that is prevalent within the thinking of some intellectual Hamas quarters is that so much will change in the world that Israel as a Zionist entity may not want, or may not have the ability, to continue to be in existence. As a matter of principle Muslims, Christians and Jews can live together in the region as they lived together for many centuries before. What Islamists usually have in mind is an Islamic state, a Caliphate, which is envisaged to encompass much of the Middle East in an undoing of the fragmentation the region was forced to undergo due to 19th century colonialism and then in accordance with the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The entities created in the process became separate ‘territorial states’ in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman order in the second decade of the 20th century. While Israel as an exclusive state for the Jews in Palestine is something an Islamic movement such as Hamas can never recognize as legitimate, the Jews can easily be accommodated as legitimate citizens of a multi-faith, multi-racial state governed by Islam. The post-Israel scenario, which has become a subject for debate within the movement, is one that envisages a Palestine, or a united Middle East, with a Jewish population but no political Zionism. This is a vision inspired by the South African reconciliation model that brought Apartheid to an end but kept all communities living together. Zionism is usually equated to Apartheid and its removal is seen as the way forward if Muslims, Christians and Jews were ever to coexist in peace in the region. It would be impossible for such a scenario to translate into a reality without a long-term hudnah that for the life time of an entire generation provides communities and peoples in the region the opportunity to restore some normalcy into their lives.
Those who are skeptical about the hudnah may argue that it means nothing but a prelude to finishing Israel altogether. But without hudnah too the Palestinians will still dream of the day on which Palestine, their country, is free and their right of return to their homes is restored. Without a hudnah there is no guarantee that they will cease to pursue that end using whatever means that are at their disposal. The advantage of the hudnah is that it brings to an end the bloodshed and the suffering because of the commitment to do so for a given period of time. In the meantime, let each side dream of what they wish the future to look like while keeping the door open for all sorts of options. Under normal circumstances, the best option is the least costly option.

Interesting that the one recorded think-tank in Washington where US general Keith Dayton, who’s been training the PA’s armed forces for the past 2.5 years, goes to speak is the AIPAC spin-off shop, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Robert Dreyfuss has a good little report of the discussion (HT: Mondoweiss).
Anyway, Dreyfuss was there for The Nation.
He tells us that Dayton reassured his audience that,

Each recruit is vetted by US security forces (i.e, the CIA), then vetted by Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence arm of Israel, and then by Jordan’s super-efficient intelligence service, before they begin their training in Jordan. Dayton made it quite clear that the Palestinian units thus trained are primarily deployed against two targets in the West Bank: against criminal gangs, and against Hamas.

Dayton bragged about how effective his forces had been at keeping the West Bank quiet during Israel’s turn-of-year assault on Gaza. (Oh dear. He somehow forgot to mention that this had been achieved in good part by the PA’s forces undertaking widespread arrests and leaving many of those arrested imprisoned for long periods without trial.)
Then, interestingly, this:

Dayton warned the 500 or so WINEP listeners that the troops can only be strung along for just so long. “With big expectations, come big risks,” said Dayton. “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state, when you’re not.” To my ears, at least, his subtle warning is that if concrete progress isn’t made toward a Palestinian state, the very troops Dayton is assembling could rebel.
Dayton was responding to a question from Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative former deputy secretary of defense, who now hangs his hat at the neocon-dominated American Enterprise Institute. “How many Palestinians see your people as collaborators?” Wolfowitz asked. In answering Wolfowitz, the general acknowledged that Hamas and its sympathizers accuse the Palestinian battalions of being “enforcers of the Israeli occuption.” But he stressed that each one of them believes that he is fighting for an independent Palestine. The unstated message: the United States and Israel had better deliver. Thus the two year warning. Which, to me, sounds spot on with the Obama administration’s timetable.

I am fascinated by Dayton’s assessment of the motivation and aspirations of his (Shin Bet-vetted) recruits.
When I was in Palestine earlier this year, Mustapha Barghouthi and others told me that the Ramallastan forces had recently been subjected to an extremely broad (anti-)ideological purge, in which just about all the “old PLO fighters” who had come back in to the West Bank with Arafat and Co. in 1994 had been pensioned off; and the only new recruits being allowed into the forces were youngsters who had failed their tawjihi school-leaving exam.
Dayton reportedly claimed that his trainers were capable of creating “new men”. (That does sound eerily Maoist, doesn’t it?) But even with that intensive training, I imagine many of the recruits would still, over time, be subject to the nationalist sentiments of their friends and families all around them.
So Dayton would need a body capable of identifying and stamping hard on any signs of ideological dissidence– or even just any hint of nationalism or any other ideology– in his force’s ranks, wouldn’t he?
I guess that was why, back in March, we saw this amazing piece of news. It told us that, “The Jericho School of Military Intelligence graduated its first class of recruits on Wednesday.”
Everywhere in the Arab world, the first task of so-called “military” intelligence is to identify and brutally suppress any hints of dissidence in the military’s own ranks.
And so, between the “security” (insecurity) forces, the lengthy terms of incarceration without trial, and the creation of an upgraded “military intel” branch, the Ramallastan statelet is rapidly acquiring many of the most notable attributes of other dictatorships around the world…
Um, but without even having any national sovereignty.
Back to Dayton, though.
He started his job under Bush. The idea behind it was, I think, twofold. First to create a force that could undermine, combat, and hopefully suppress Hamas– which became more especially urgent after Hamas won the elections in 2006.
Dayton worked with Dahlan for 18 months. But Dahlan completely flubbed his job of wresting Gaza away from the control of the elected government.
The other part of Dayton’s job was to use the building of a pro-US internal-security force as a building-block on the (very long) road to a possible Palestinian independence.
Actually, under Bush and his dreadful sidekick Tony Blair, all these “capacity-building” projects in the West bank were used as a substitute for any US/western pressure on Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, so the Palestinians could exercise their national independence there.
It was always an approach that was not only patronizing in the extreme, but also mendacious. Patronizing, because Palestinians have founded states and established and run well-functioning state bodies in many countries up and down the Gulf. They have the expertise and know-how how to do this– and could certainly teach the Americans a thing or two, if asked.
Mendacious, because it was a substitute for the diplomatic activism that has always been needed.
So now, Dayton is still doing his job. He personally seems convinced that he can’t maintain the “deliberate time-wasting” aspect of it up forever.
I wonder how he would react if Fateh and Hamas succeed in achieving national reconciliation and a new national unity government gives his forces different ROE?
As of now, Dayton reports to Mitchell– one of four people who does so directly. That is, on balance, good, because it underlines the subservience in a democracy of the military to the civilian leaders.
One problem with him being a prominent deputy on the Mitchell team, though, is that he is the one there with the most extensive experience of the situation on the ground… And his perspective on matters there is necessarily skewed, by the nature of the task he is doing.
How much does he really understand about the (largely pro-Hamas) political dynamics of the place he is working in?
It would be a LOT better if the Mitchell team had other people on it who know a lot more about Palestinian politics, who could complement the outlook of this manipulative, Maoist-style “man remaker.”
The trouble is that 16 years of ideological purging within the US State Department, carried out at the instigation of WINEP’s founder Martin Indyk and his many well-connected allies, has really reduced the numbers of people in there who are at a pay-grade anywhere close to Dayton’s, who have the intellectual freedom and experience to be able to supplement his assessments.

Today, I was able to have a fascinating short talk with Dr. Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian-British thinker and media mogul who was the author, most recently, of Hamas: A history from within.
One of my continuing research interests is the story of how and why Hamas made the decision to enter the elections for the PA legislature in 2006 after they had refused to participate in the rounds of elections held under the PA’s framework prior to that… Does this mean that Hamas supports the PA project? … If so, why did its views on the project change? … How deep is its current loyalty to the project?
So this morning I put some of those questions to Tamimi.
His reply was:

It’s not that they support the PA project. But they realized they needed to deal with the status quo. They needed space to operate in.
What allowed them to participate in the 2006 election was Sharon’s implementation of theunilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Until Sharon did that, the PA was completely a product of Oslo. But Sharon killed Oslo, and then the PA had an opportunity to become something a little different. The thinking of the Hamas people was, “We’ve liberated Gaza, and now we’re about to liberate the West Bank.”
Also, in one sense, Hamas had no choice but to participate, because if they hadn’t, the PA would have stayed in the hands of those very corrupt people who were controlling it.

He said there had been long discussions inside Hamas before they reached the 2005 decision to run in the elections. “There always are long discussions! It means that Hamas does sometimes miss opportunities… ”
He said that Hamas political bureau head Khaled Meshaal, whom he has known since both were youngsters in Kuwait together, is a strong supporter of Hamas’s consensual style of decisionmaking: “He’s a very careful person, not a gambler.”
Tamimi was pretty strongly convinced that nothing would come out of the Fateh-Hamas reconciliation talks that are intermittently being conducted in Cairo. He said he thought the Egyptians were the main ones blocking agreement, describing the generally very polite contest of wills between Hamas and Egypt as “a game of finger-biting.” (Maybe, this is like a game of chicken?)
“The Egyptians want to force Hamas to compromise, but Hamas will never compromise,” he said.
He judged there were two main reasons for the Mubarak regime’s intransigence: firstly, their concern that bringing Hamas openly into the regional diplomatic/political game would strengthen the Egyptian Muslim Brothers; and second, because they see supporting Mahmoud Abbas as a project of great importance. This, despite (or because of?) Abbas’s currently extreme political weakness.
We talked a little about Mubarak’s boosting, and manipulation, since January of a new form of “Egypt first” (al-Misr Awalan) nationalism that is tinged with a strong streak of anti-Palestinianism.
Tamimi said that this sentiment, which he called “illusionary nationalism” had affected even some of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers to some degree.
I asked his view of– and expectations from– Obama.
He said he liked and admired him as a person:

But he is not just a person, now. He’s the president, with all the compliactions that institution involves.
If he pursues the Clinton way once again, once again it won’t work out. That would be, if he continued to always put Israel’s interests first and just throw a little something to the Palestinians, but still strictly within the specifications laid down by israel.
Obama needs to recognize the strong shift in Palestinian society. Hamas now represents Palestinian society, not Fateh, and not the PLO.
Hamas wants peace– but a peace based on a truce, not on recognition.

I asked him whether he did not see a point of possible convergence between Hamas’s longstanding project of entering into a “truce” (hudna) arrangement with Israel and the “two-state” outcome now being pursued by the US and most of the international community.
He argued that he saw a clear difference, that centered around the recognition of Israel that would have to be involved, for the Palestinians, if they agreed to the two-state project as it is currently being proposed.
So for him, the question of recognizing Israel— or rather, refusing to recognize Israel– is key.
He said,

The world needs to think about what the demand for us to recognize Israel really means. For me as a Palestinian, if I say I recognize Israel, then I’m saying that what happened to my people in 1948 was legitimate, and this I will never say.
We can proceed by having a de-facto relation between us. In that way, we could have a longterm peace, even without any recognition of Israel.
Hamas says it would need a total withdrawal to the lines of 4th June 1967 for that truce to go into effect. Israel might say they would need security guarantees. We’re open to discussing that. But honestly, the best security guarantee they could have would be Hamas’s signature on a truce document, because once they have that it becomes a religious obligation for all Palestinians to respect the truce.

I observed that this did still sound a lot like a version of the two-state solution.
He replied,

No, I don’t like to speak about a two-state solution, because that implies it’s the end of the story. I talk about a de-facto two-state situation, which might last 10 years, or 5 years, or 20 years. But it is still not the end of the story.

He said he thought Pres. Obama had introduced some policy changes on some issues, like Iran.

But on Palestine, Obama has just still been promising the same things that George W. Bush promised.
George Mitchell is a good person, too. But now he’s made how many trips to the region– ? And he still hasn’t met anyone from Hamas.
He has to meet them! He has to sit and listen to the way they see things. Wasn’t that how he won his success in Northern Ireland– by reaching out and including the IRA and Sinn Fein?

Anyway, it was an interesting conversation… More later, I hope.

Al-Hayat had an interesting article today (Arabic), combining reports of Hamas’s positions from their correspondents in both Damascus and Gaza… (HT: the spouse.)
From Damascus, the Hayat people report that Khaled Meshaal “sent an implicit political message to Pres. Obama” when he told a press conference held by the “Palestinian National Conference” in Damascus that,

Hamas and most of the Palestinian forces accepted, through the 2006 document of national agreement [that would be, I think, the Prisoners’ Document] the principle of establishing a fully sovereign Palestinian state on all the land occupied in 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital, after the dismantling of all the settlements, and along with attainment of the Right of Return and [the state having] full sovereignty over the land and airspace and borders and crossing-points.
He stressed that his movement “still rejects the conditions of the international Quartet because they are oppressive and they cannot lead to the attainment of Palestinian interests.”

The Hayat reporters judged that another important implied political message to Obama came from Taher al-Nunu, the spokesman for the still-besieged Haniyeh government, when he stressed the government’s readiness to abide by a renewed tahdi’eh with Israel.
Nunu’s statement came a day before Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak is due to meet with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh. Mubarak’s intel chief Omar Suleiman has been the sole mediator in the “proximity talks” that have continued between Hamas and Israel since the end of the Gaza war over the two topics of strengthening the still-fragile and un-negotiated brace of ceasefires that went into operation January 18, and the prisoner exchange issue. Egypt is also the main mediator in the still-limping reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fateh.
Nunu went out of his way– on behalf of, I assume, Haniyeh and the whole Hamas leadership– to express support for Egypt’s role in all these peace efforts. Egypt will also, of course, be the place where Obama will make his big “speech to the Muslim world” early next month.
For my part, I’m hoping Obama will use his time in Egypt to nudge his hosts along to more speed and success in all the negotiations they have been sponsoring, which have thus far not resulted in any successes and have left the 1.5 million people of Gaza in terrible distress.
(Question: What will Obama say about Gaza when he is in Egypt? Kind of embarrassing if he gets that close to Gaza and doesn’t even mention it… Of course, it would be even better if he had the guts to go and visit it… Obama at the Rafah crossing: “Mr. President, this wall must come down!”)
Anyway, Nunu also said this:

The [Haniyeh] government considers that ending the occupation and lifting the siege are the keys to bringing about stability and arriving at a just peace in the region that will return to our people their legitimate rights…
Th Palestinian government appreciates the efforts the Egypt is making in more than one matter, especially regarding the issues of the [Palestinian] national dialogue and the tahdi’eh, and the efforts to bring about security and stability in the region.

On a related note, I’ve found a possible source for the mysterious Haaretz report I blogged about earlier today, which said this:

The Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas will not accept a two-state solution as a means to end the conflict with Israel, the movement’s Damascus-based politburo chief Khaled Meshal said Saturday.
Meshal said that Hamas rejects the two-state solution but could still be part of a national unity government if a Palestinian state is established based on 1967 borders.

What I have found is this report on the close-to-Hamas PIC website. It’s datelined Damascus, and is their report of the same Meshaal press conference the Hayat team was reporting on (which was also attended by Ahmed Jibril.)
The PIC report says this:

[Meshaal] denied accepting a two-state solution during an interview with the American press [most likely the recent NYT interview], adding that he said that Hamas accepted the establishment of a fully sovereign state on the 1967 occupied lands with Jerusalem as its capital after dismantling all settlements and endorsing the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

This is slightly (but still significantly) different from what Haaretz reported.
My understanding of Meshaal’s present position is that he accepts the Palestinian state on all the Palestinian land that was occupied by Israel in 1967. But he has not yet said whether he considers that that is the end of the Palestinian state’s territorial claims. That is the sense in which he has not yet accepted a two-state solution. At this point, though, I don’t think he has ruled it out.
Obviously, this needs to be further clarified.

Some time ago I did scan– from, I believe, one of the volumes of the TRC report– a map showing the fragmented nature of the apartheid plan’s Bantustans. So here, without further ado, I present that one and the recent “Palestinian archipelago” map. Sorry about the poor quality of the scanning…

I imagine that by now most JWN readers have seen the thought-provoking nautical representation (shown below) by French cartographer Julien Bousac of the land mass that is (as of now) left to the Palestinians of the West Bank…
Bousac comments on that page that,

To make things clear, areas ‘under water’ [in the map] strictly reflect C zones, plus the East Jerusalem area, i.e. areas that have officially remained under full Israeli control and occupation following the [Oslo] Agreements.

He also seems fully aware of the irony/paradox of using a “romantic” kind of imagery like this to represent a grim reality.
I think this is a great device. One shocking aspect is, of course, that it demonstrates that the whole area of occupied east Jerusalem is “under water”, i.e. unavailable for Palestinian land-use or development planning purposes.
However, readers should be aware that Bousac’s map still considerably under- over-represents the amount of West Bank land that is available to the Palestinians, since he marks the large areas of the southeastern West Bank that have been arbitrarily designated by Israel as “nature reserves” as being somehow “above water.”
You can find another representation of what is currently available to the Palestinians if you look at the small map in the bottom-left corner of this larger (PDF) map from UN-OCHA. Only the areas left white in that small map are now available to the Palestinians.
I note that designating land as a “nature reserve” is a trick the Israelis have often used to render it unavailable for Palestinian development. That sort of it puts it into a lock-box for them. Then, when the occupation authorities discover they have the budget or need to develop it for themselves, as settlements or whatever, they speedily “un-green” it– and presto, it is available for Israeli development. Many Palestinians have, as a result, become pretty cynical about Israel’s claims that it “cares for” the enviroment of the land that both peoples claim to love.
Sari Hanafi is a Palestinian sociologist who has been arguing that what the Israelis have been pursuing towards the Palestinians living in the area of Mandate Palestine constitutes a policy of “spaciocide”:

the Israeli colonial project is ‘spacio-cidal’ (as opposed to genocidal), in that it targets land for the purpose of rendering inevitable the ‘voluntary’ transfer of the Palestinian population, primarily by targeting the space upon which the Palestinian people live. This systematic destruction of the Palestinian living space becomes possible by exercising the state of exception and deploying bio-politics to categorize Palestinians into different groups, with the aim of rendering them powerless…

Other examples of spaciocide abound around the world… including Saddam Hussein’s draining of the marshes.
Anyway, here, for those who haven’t seen it yet, is a small version of Bousac’s map.