Obama’s rockin’ first world tour– and call for action

He’s been doing so well, and it’s churlish of me not to have mentioned it before. (I’ve been busy.)
But oh man, it really feels great no longer to have a president who makes you cringe every time he opens his mouth!
There are still several areas of Obama’s policy that cause me great concern:

    1. He is being ways too slow in doing anything concrete to lay out clear and principled markers for Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. (Repeating the mantra about the strength of the US’s support for a two-state solution is completely not enough! Let’s have some consequences out there!)
    2. He’s terrifyingly– and actually, quite unrealistically– warlike in his policies in Afghanistan.
    3. On the whole economic crisis he has surrounded himself far too much with the bankerist types who got us into this whole darn mess in the first place. Larry Summers??? Send him and the rest of the bankerists packing!
    4. Why is he so supportive of the provocative “missile defense shield” in Central Europe?

… But despite those caveats, which are not trivial, I think that over all he’s doing an excellent job.
I just read the speeches he gave in Prague yesterday, and in Ankara today.
In Prague he spelled out his unequivocal support for the goal of a nuclear-weapons free world, set out some generally good first steps toward that goal, and promised to take them. So now, we can hold him to those steps.
In Ankara, first of all it is good he went there, to the giant, majority-Muslim nation at the eastern end of NATO. Second, it’s excellent that the Turkish government had invited him, even after knowing the comments he’d made earlier about the Armenian genocide.
I thought he dealt with the Armenian question and just about all the other issues he spoke about in his speech very deftly, honestly, and compassionately.
On Arab-Israeli issues he said this:

    In the Middle East, we share the goal of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. Let me be clear: The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security. That is a goal shared by Palestinians, Israelis and people of goodwill around the world. That is a goal that the parties agreed to in the road map and at Annapolis. That is a goal that I will actively pursue as president of the United States.
    We know the road ahead will be difficult. Both Israelis and Palestinians must take steps that are necessary to build confidence and trust. Both Israelis and Palestinians, both must live up to the commitments they have made. Both must overcome long-standing passions and the politics of the moment to make progress towards a secure and lasting peace.
    The United States and Turkey can help the Palestinians and Israelis make this journey. Like the United States, Turkey has been a friend and partner in Israel’s quest for security. And like the United States, you seek a future of opportunity and statehood for the Palestinians. So now, working together, we must not give into pessimism and mistrust. We must pursue every opportunity for progress, as you’ve done by supporting negotiations between Syria and Israel. We must extend a hand to those Palestinians who are in need, while helping them strengthen their own institutions. We must reject the use of terror, and recognize that Israel’s security concerns are legitimate.

So okay, now let’s have some actual accountability for the Israeli government– as well as, as usual, for the Palestinians– regarding their actions in the occupied territories.
We need to flood the White House and the offices of our congressional representatives with urgent requests that the US do these things:

    1. Require Israel to open the crossings into Gaza for the passage of construction materials, humanitarian goods, and all goods needed to rebuild a normally functioning economy. This is Israel’s responsibility as occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which requires a lot more than “just” humanitarian aid for Gaza, as for the West Bank. It requires a normally functioning economy. The US should push for no less than that.
    2. Cease all construction work in the settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, forthwith, and all work on infrastructure projects that support the settlement: “Not one brick.”
    3. Push for the immediate release of from Israeli jails of all the elected Palestinian legislators.
    4. Fully support all international efforts to investigate alleged grave rights abuses committed during the recent war in Gaza.

More on Hamas and the PA

In the presentation I gave at the Georgetown conference Friday afternoon, one of the main issues I was exploring was the notable shift the Hamas leadership had made, sometime between the 1996 PA legislative elections, which they boycotted, and the 2006 elections, in which they participated– as it turned out, extremely successfully.
The context for them taking the decision to participate was, I think, that of the Sharon government’s 2004-05 decision-and-implementation of the plan to undertake a unilateral (i.e. un-negotiated) pullout of all settlers and troops from Gaza. Also, the horrendous wave of decapitation attacks to which Hamas was subjected in early 2004: Yassin, Rantisi, etc…
The un-negotiated nature of the Israeli pullout was viewed by Hamas people as a great victory for the Hamas strategy of multi-faceted resistance to Israeli occupation as opposed to the strategy Fateh has adopted for many years now, of just about total reliance on negotiations while dismantling all the instruments of resistance, whether mass-popular or military.
In 2005, in addition, Hamas participated along with Fateh and most of the other much smaller Palestinian movements in a joint “unilateral” cessation of hostilities in the Gaza theater, that was designed above all to allow Sharon to implement his pullout plan without the IDF troops being subjected to Palestinian fire as they exited.
The 2005 unilateral ceasefire was also an essential precondition for the holding of orderly PA legislative elections in January 2006, since it’s just about impossible to hold elections that have any political legitimacy in a situation where there are ongoing hostilities.
Anyway, one of the issues I was probing in my Georgetown presentation, and that I’m reflecting on a lot more right now, was the “depth” if you like of the commitment that Hamas has displayed from 2005 on to the PA project. And that commitment continues until now, despite the huge suffering that Israel, the US, and all the US’s hangers-on in the world inflicted on Hamas, its supporters, and the Palestinian people as a whole as a result of Hamas’s victory in the 2006 elections.
The depth of that continuing commitment is what is remarkable to me. (Though it has seldom if ever been remarked upon by most people in the west.)
The PA project, remember, is the child of the Oslo Accord, which was an agreement between Yasser Arafat’s PLO and the Government of Israel. “Buying in” to the PA project in any way therefore implies strong buy-in to the legitimacy of the existence of the State of Israel. It involves strong buy-in to the goal of a two-state outcome, which has always been the most that any Palestinian could expect to achieve from the Oslo process.
Participating in the 2006 PA legislative elections therefore signified an evident break with Hamas’s longstanding refusal to buy in to the two-state project in any meaningful way.
But now, the PA project looks increasingly, to Palestinians both inside and outside the OPTs, as much worse than a failure: a catastrophe. Yet Hamas’s people continue to express their commitment to it.
My judgment is that Hamas, unlike Fateh, has a still-intact Plan B to fall back on once they judge that the whole PA project has irrevocably failed. Not that it is an easy Plan B. But as we have seen, religious people find it easier to bear suffering on earth than most people who do not have that strong faith as their guiding light and their help in times of distress.
But the continuing commitment they have to the PA– and, also, by clear implication, to the survival of Israel– is still something worth a lot more exploring.

My recent talk at the Palestine Center

… is now up on their website, here.
I’ve watched the first one-third of it, and noticed that at about 9m50s I mis-spoke, saying “counter-intelligence” instead of “counter-insurgency” when describing the security doctrine under which Israel has quadrillaged the whole of the occupied West Bank.
Apart from that, it looked like a good representation of what I wanted to say at the event, which was held March 31.
My big thanks, again, to the Palestine Center for hosting me there, and also for shooting and webhosting the video record of it.

Highlights from the Georgetown Univ. conference on Palestine

I was extremely privileged to be one of the speakers in the conference the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies held Thursday and Friday on “Palestine and the Palestinians Today.” (If I haven’t blogged much the past couple of days, that is why, especially as I was trying to take good notes. Also, I got a big migraine along the way there…. C’est la vie.)
Anyway, just quickly I want to share some highlights.
Yesterday, there was a really good exchange between Ali Abunimeh of Electronic Intifada and Amjad Atallah, a Palestinian-American who’s working with Daniel Levy at New America. (He’s replaced the viciously anti-Hamas Jordanian person Ghaith al-Omari in that slot, which is something of an improvement, though imho not enough of one.)
Amjad was trying to argue that Palestinians should do a lot more to organize at the grassroots, and that Palestinian-Americans in particular should “start” reaching trying to reach out explain their case to people inside and outside government in the US, and that there’s a real chance the US government can become a main ally for the Palestinians once some relatively small misunderstandings have been cleared up. That brought forth howls of protest from Ali and several others at the conference who have actually been doing such organizing and outreach work for many years already (much more than Amjad), and who seemed generally less optimistic than him that it would be easy to swing the weight of the US corporate and decisionmaking elite behind the Palestinians’ cause.
Amjad did make a couple of good points, though. He said that Fateh and Hamas seem to be arguing right now over “who gets to run which parts of the PA administration on behalf of the Israelis” He noted that this was very similar to what happens, in fact, inside the Israeli jails as well. (Or, as I would call them, the Israeli “small jails”, as opposed to the Israeli “big jails” which are what Gaza and all the tiny enclaves in the West Bank have become.
Ali made a strong pitch for stepping up the BDS work (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions); and said it has been starting to have some small victories in this country already– more so, in Europe.
His best throw-away line was to decsribe the title of Martin Indyk’s recent book Innocent Abroad as “the most dishonest book title in the history of writing.” Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Anyway, that was a good exchange.
Another highlight was a panel, also yesterday, with the anti-Zionist Jewish Israelis Gabi Piterberg and Oren Yiftachel. You may recall that i blogged here recently about the review Gabi had in the LRB on some of the recently translated works of the Hebrew-language novelist S. Yizhar. So I was really pleased to meet him. He’s a historian, and his paper was on the history of the concept of “settler colonialism” as a discrete form of colonialism that has been largely under-studied, for reasons he explained; and on why he believes that concept is the one most applicable to the history of the Zionist settlement project in the Middle East.
He had some really powerful historical examples, including looking at the shift from what he called the “French style” of (labor-exploiting) colonialism that was applied during the “First Aliyah”, under the “Rothschild model”, and how that was then dropped in favor of “pure settler colonialism” under Ruppin and Oppenheimer during the Second Aliyah…
The difference being whether you want to keep a large body of indigenes whose labor you plan to exploit, or whether you just seek to uproot, expel, and if necessary genocide them.
Anyway, he looked at various periods in the history of Zionist colonization projects both within and outside the Green Line– and continuing on both sides of the line until today.
Yiftachel is a geographer at Ben Gurion University, in Beersheva/B’ir Sab’a, whom I had met once before– a long time ago. He’s been working on the situation of the Bedouin Palestinians of southern Israel, a group that, despite being citizens of the State of Israel, are subject to nearly continuous attempts to uproot them from their ancestral lands.
He said he had documented 77 ways in which the state claims it can “legally” expropriate the lands of the Bedouin Palestinians– and that in some cases, four or five of these might be applied simultaneously to the same plot of land.
In the Naqab/Negev area of southern Israel some 55,000-60,000 homes of Bedouin Palestinians have been declared “illegal” and are subject to demolition at the whim of the authorities. Therefore– this is my comment here– their situation as a community is very similar to that of East Jerusalem Palestinians, where the very present threat of home demolitions that may be carried out at any point, at the whim of the authorities, serves as a potent factor that keeps the whole community in a state of constant dread.
The Bedouin Palestinians are citizens, which gives them a few more rights than the EJ Palestinians.
One of the most potent parts of Yiftachel’s presentation was a short series of photos he showed, of the high glass towers of “modern” downtown Beersheva gleaming in the mid-background, while in the foreground were the rude makeshift shacks of Bedouin villagers previously dispossessed but intent on hanging on to their lands.
His description of the situation was “creeping apartheid.”
Sarah Roy gave a very hard critique of the role the “international community” has played in aiding, abetting, and underwriting the costs of all of the strategies of de-development, dispossession, humiliation, and control that Israel has pursued in both Gaza and the West Bank. She ended with a few heartbreaking comments she had heard from friends in Gaza… “People have no sense of protection, no sense of safety, or of rules… We have lost all sense of the ordinary and have no way of thinking how we can regain it.”
She also noted that the old argument that Israeli peaceniks used to make, that Israel cannot have both peace and occupation, now seems to have been disproven for the Jewish-Israeli public. They live in peace, they maintain the occupation– and indeed, the costs of maintaining the occupation, which used to be a constraining factor for Israel, have all now, since Oslo, been lifted from Israel, and are borne by the US and its allies.
She talked about Israel’s “engineering of the Palestinians into becoming perpetual beggars, in both the West bank and Gaza”, and how the international donors have shifted their focus from an emphasis on building up Palestinian capacities for self-determination to focusing just on keeping them alive while controlling them. (She aptly described the procedures whereby aid is delivered into Gaza as being like delivering food to animals in a corral.)
Oh my, there were so many excellent panels! I wish i could write about all of them. I did see that the organizers were videotaping everything, so I hope the tapes of the individual seessions will be made available as soon as possible.
I was on the very last panel, along with Daniel Levy and Saree Makdisi (son of Jean said Makdisi). Saree gave an excellent presentation of his critique of the ethnonationalist underpinnings of the two-state concept, and his arguments for the one-state concept. I wish we’d had a lot more time to brainstorm on exactly how people might get from the present situation to building a powerful and inclusive movement for the one-state outcome.
Daniel surprised me a bit, since I’d always previously heard him as a very articulate advocate of the two-state solution; but he sounded a lot more nuanced and realistic than I’d expected.
His main argument, I think, was for what he called a “Godfather option”: that the US should, after broad consultations, put its own plan on the table and “Make Israel and everyone else an offer they can’t refuse.” He said this need not– and probably would not– look exactly like any of the plans that have previously been discussed, at Camp David 2, Taba, Geneva, or wherever. That was interesting, given that he played a big role in the Geneva back-channel “shadow talks.”
He was much more critical of the traditional Israeli peace movement than I’ve ever heard him before, describing Liebermanism as the bastard child of the fact that so much of the Israeli peace movement used the ‘demographic’ argument to try to make its case.”
He said, I think, that there remains a clear possibility of further ethnic cleansing. (I didn’t gather whether that was from inside or outside the Green Line… should have asked.)
I spoke a bit about my recent trip to the Middle East, with some observations on the main Palestinian political movements, and also on the geographic shifts in the balance of power inside the Palestinian movement.
Oh, I just saw that the video of the talk I gave at the Palestine Center Tuesday, which covers some of the same material, is up on the PC’s website.
Good for them.
Now, I wonder if I can bear to watch myself.
(My own impresssion is that, just in terms of presentational and time-management skills, I did better at the Palestine Center that at the GU event. At the GU event, yesterday, I tried to cram too much in.)

My IPS analysis on the Lieberman bombshell

… is here. Also here.
On a related note, we have this from the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information center:

    Dr. Salah Al-Bardaweel, the spokesman of Hamas’s parliamentary bloc in the PLC, reacted to the statements of the new Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who publicly disavowed the Annapolis understandings, saying, “We [in Hamas] weren’t surprised by Lieberman’s statements; however, we consider that such thing should push Fatah faction to review all the feeble agreements it had signed with the Israeli occupation government without bringing any good to the Palestinian people”.
    Hamas and the democratically elected PA government have opposed the Annapolis conference from the first moment, and considered it as a “waste of time”, and a stab in the back of the Palestinian resistance, he underscored.
    “Today, the moment of truth came, and thus, we need a serious and national stand [from Fatah faction] by halting all forms of security coordination with the Israeli occupation, and to reject all security agreements that tore the unity of our Palestinian people”, Bardaweel emphasized.
    On Wednesday, Lieberman underlined that his government won’t be bound by the obligations of the Annapolis conference because it wasn’t ratified by any Israeli cabinet.

Land Day: A key date for Palestinian Israelis

Today is Land Day, a date that is observed by Palestinian citizens of Israel (and Palestinians everywhere) to commemorate a notable confrontation on March 30, 1976, in which Palestinian Israelis first came together on a nationwide basis to try to preserve their already deeply eroded rights to their own land.
In that confrontation, Palestinian-Israeli organizers coordinated the holding of a nationwide nonviolent strike to protest the government’s issuing of yet another official order for the expropriation of land from Palestinian communities inside Israel. The (Labour) government tried to break the strike by sending the military– not just regular police units– into Arab towns and villages and forcing their residents to break the strike. In the fighting that ensued six unarmed demonstrators were shot dead and many more were were wounded.
Jonathan Cook has a great account of that day’s events in The National today. You can read it here.
Indigenous Palestinians currently make up around 1.2 million (20 percent) of Israel’s citizenry, and their political heft within the Palestinian national movement has been growing in recent years.
1976 was really the first time Palestinian Israelis had come together to fight for a cause of core national importance. The next major confrontation between them and the Israeli authorities came in October 2000, when the security forces intervened with excessive violence against demonstrations organized by Palestinian Israelis in northern Israel in protest at the IDF’s actions against Palestinians in the very-near-by occupied West Bank. Twelve Palestinian Israelis and one West Bank Palestinian were killed by the security forces there, giving rise to the government’s appointment of the “Or Commission” to investigate the causes of the whole affair.
The Or Commission confirmed what every Palestinian Israeli knew: that the security forces’ violence had been excessive and the longstanding grievances of their community as one systematically discriminated against in many areas of public life were real.
(You can find more English-language documentation about the systematic discrimination Israel practices against its Palestinian citizens on this portal at the HRW website, or through the website of the Israeli organization Adalah.)

Why only Hamas can save a ‘Jewish state’ (if it wants to)

My own view on the Hamas question, which has now been interestingly raised in the US by Henry Siegman’s Group of Ten, is actually that only Hamas can deliver a durable two-state outcome in Israel/Palestine– if it should choose to. And therefore that if Jewish Israelis and their supporters around the world want to save the idea of Israel as “a Jewish state”, then only Hamas can do that for them.
If Hamas chooses to do that, which is of course another question…
This conclusion is something I’ve arrived at increasingly over the past two months. Basically, a lot of it has to do with the near-total implosion of Fateh as a coherent political force, whose results I witnessed while I was in Palestine and neighboring countries on my latest trip.
Anyway, I’ll be talking a lot more about this during the two events I’m speaking at in DC next week… (Details are here. Pre-registration is required for both.)

US security mandarins urge action on Palestine peace

Two important op-eds in the major US MSM today.
In this one in the NYT, Roger Cohen reports on a new initiative in which ten significant American national-security mandarins have now spelled out the steps they urge Pres. Obama speedily to take, to win a sustainable two-state solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict.
The ten include Brent Scowcroft and Zbig Brzezinski, along with Lee Hamilton, Chuck Hagel, Tom Pickering, and other luminaries.
The web version of Cohen’s piece has a link to the PDF of the whole policy paper the ten have now handed to Obama, via group member Paul Volcker, who is a key Obama economic adviser (and former Chairman of the Fed.)
Cohen writes that he believes that the paper’s approach is also generally in line with that of national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones,who has considerable familiarity with Palestinian issues, as well as special envoy George Mitchell.
The paper urges speedy US intervention in the diplomacy including the articulation of a specifically American vision of the outcome.
It also urges what it describes as A More Pragmatic Approach Toward Hamas and a Palestinian Unity Government, as follows:

    A legitimate, unified and empowered Palestinian side to negotiate with Israel is of importance if any agreement is to be reached and implemented. Direct U.S. engagement with Hamas may not now be practical, but shutting out the movement and isolating Gaza has only made it stronger and Fatah weaker. Israel itself has acknowledged Hamas is simply too important and powerful to be ignored.
    In brief, shift the U.S. objective from ousting Hamas to modifying its behavior, offer it inducements that will enable its more moderate elements to prevail, and cease discouraging third parties from engaging with Hamas in ways that might help clarify the movement’s views and test its behavior.
    Finally, cease discouraging Palestinian national reconciliation and make clear that a government that agrees to a ceasefire with Israel, accepts President Mahmoud Abbas as the chief negotiator, and commits to abiding by the results of a national referendum on a future peace agreement would not be boycotted or sanctioned.

In his article, Cohen explains that Henry Siegman, the now London-based American figure who has organized this initiative, recently traveled to Damascus to meet Hamas head Khaled Meshaal:

    Meshal told him, and put in writing, that although Hamas would not recognize Israel, it would remain in a Palestinian national unity government that reached a referendum-endorsed peace settlement with Israel.
    De facto, rather than de jure, recognition can be a basis for a constructive relationship, as Israel knows from the mutual benefits of its shah-era dealings with Iran.
    Israeli governments have negotiated a two-state solution although they included religious parties that do not recognize Palestinians’ right to statehood.
    “But,” Siegman said, “if moderates within Hamas are to prevail, a payoff is needed for their moderation. And until the U.S. provides one, there will be no Palestinian unity government.”

Some parts of the Group of 10’s detailed proposal seem highly unlikely to be workable, including the idea that for 15 years after the signing of a peace agreement a US-led NATO force supplemented with forces from other countries including Israel should be responsible for security in the demilitarized Palestinian state.
But the urgency expressed in the proposal and the way it proposes finding a way to include Hamas in the diplomacy both seem excellent.
… Meantime, over in the WaPo, David Ignatius has a piece on a small but significant subset of the “problem” of the US’s current stance on matters Palestinian. Namely the fact that numerous organizations based in the US and registered with US tax authorities as “philanthropies” have in fact been funneling huge amounts of money into Israel’s completely illegal settlement-building project in the occupied territories over the past decades.
As David points out, official US aid monies cannot in general be used by Israel on its settlement projects in the occupied territories. But the US “charities” that are supporting Israeli settlements get a tax break from the IRS because of their charitable status; so the amount of that tax break is in effect being contributed to the recipients by the US taxpayer.

Bantustan Days, Part 8: Two more Hamas MPs (since arrested)

On March 2, I had the opportunity to conduct a short
interview in Hebron with local parliamentarians Dr. Azzam
Salhab, a professor of religion at Hebron University,
and Nizar Ramadan.

The two were among the nine members of the
Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform list that swept all nine Hebron-area seats
in the PLC elections of January 2006. Their election
was all the more remarkable because for four months
prior to the election they had been held in prison in Israel on vague charges
of “membership in an illegal organization” (as opposed to, for example, charges
connected with the commission of specific acts.) A strange
imprisonment because Israel and its western backers had been very eager to get
pro-Hamas people involved in the electoral process.
During the only
previous round of PLC elections, back in 1996, Hamas was still so deeply
opposed to the whole Oslo/PA process that they sat the elections out. Their
decision to take part in the 2006 election was widely hailed by westerners as a
constructive development…

Until Hamas won, that is.

So Salhab and Ramadan and the
handful of other Palestinian parliamentarians who were elected from their jail
cells inside Israel were kept in prison even after the election.  In June 2006 they were joined there by
scores of other elected legislators from the West Bank, who were simply taken
hostage by Israel to be used as “bargaining chips” in the negotiation to win
the release of Israeli POW Gilad Shalit,
who was captured and held by Palestinian groups in Gaza.

This February, amidst a flurry of rumors that the
long-drawn-out prisoner-exchange negotiations were about to be successfully
concluded, Salhab and Ramadan were among the handful
of captive legislators who were freed. Well, “freed” from the small prison they
had been held in inside Israel to one of the larger, open-air prisons into
which the West Bank has now been transformed for its 2.3 million Palestinian residents.

These negotiations have been conducted between Israel and
Hamas in Egypt, with the Egyptian government acting as intermediary. Last week
they hit another roadblock; and in the wee hours of March 19 the Israeli
military burst into Hebron and several of the other supposedly PA-controlled
areas of the West Bank and arrested ten leading Hamas political leaders. Salhab and Ramadan were among the four PLC members taken in
that raid. So I consider myself quite fortunate to have been able to conduct
the interview with them March 2. I only wish I’d been able to stay longer to
talk with them.

The interview took place mainly in Arabic, in the office the
two men maintain on a main road near the center of Hebron. One other local
political figure joined us a few minutes into the interview. Since I never
learned his name I shall call him merely A.B.

I started by asking how Salhab and
Ramadan saw the political situation after the recent Gaza war. “It was not a
war,” Ramadan immediately replied. “It was simply a fierce Israeli attack on
Gaza.”

The two men said they were hopeful about the prospects of
success in the intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks then underway in Cairo.
“It will be good to bring the two wings of occupied Palestine together,”
Ramadan said, spreading his hands some to represent wings and spelling out that
he was speaking about the geographically separated West Bank and Gaza.

I asked what hopes they had from the new US administration.

Ramadan replied,

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 8: Two more Hamas MPs (since arrested)”