Category: Palestine 2009

I-P: Borders first– and fast?

The usually well-informed Akiva Eldar has an important piece in today’s Haaretz, reporting this:

    Negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will resume next month on the basis of an understanding that the establishment of a Palestinian state will be officially announced in two years.
    Palestinian and European Union sources told Haaretz that talks will initially focus on determining the permanent border between Israel and the West Bank.
    … It is understood that this will be accompanied by a public American and European declaration that the permanent border will be based on the border of June 4, 1967. Both sides may agree to alter the border based on territorial exchanges.
    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to discuss Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees in the initial negotiation stages will not be allowed to delay the announcement of an independent Palestinian state.
    Likewise, Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and that the Arab world embark on normalizing ties with Israel, will not constitute preconditions to an “early recognition” of Palestine.

Eldar is also reporting that Netanyahu has expressed confidence that he’ll reach an “agreement” on some limited curbs on settlement construction with the Americans, very soon.
If Eldar’s report is accurate, which I assume to be the case, then I think this says some moderately good things about where Obama’s policy is heading.
I understand that Obama’s failure to win– or even, really to fight for– a complete settlement freeze has been very frustrating for the Palestinians But as I noted in this recent IPS piece,

    some seasoned analysts of Israeli-Arab negotiations argue that the main focus for Obama and all others who seek a fair and durable peace in the region should now be not the settlement-building issue, but to start – and win speedy completion of – the negotiation for a final peace agreement (FPA).
    From that perspective, any further prolongation of the fruitless tussle over the settlements can be seen both as a huge time-waster and as a growing drain on Obama’s political capital domestically and internationally.
    These analysts point out that any FPA will necessarily include a demarcation of the final borders between Israel and the future Palestinian state.
    Once those lines are demarcated, the issue of whether and where Israel can build new housing for its people is instantly transformed. After border demarcation Israel can presumably build freely within its own final borders, consistent with international law.
    But outside those borders not only will it be unable to continue its building programmes, but Israeli citizens already living there will rapidly come under Palestinian law.
    And as the FPA goes into effect there will be no more Israeli military occupation of either or the West Bank, and thus no remaining problem, under international law, regarding Israeli settlers in those areas.
    Demarcating a final border for Israel in the West Bank is something that Netanyahu and many of his allies in Israeli’s rightwing government have long been opposed to. Netanyahu’s Likud party traditionally considered the whole terrain between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – and even a stretch of land east of the Jordan – to be part of the Biblical “Land of Israel”.

If Eldar’s account is accurate, here are the good aspects of what Obama seems to be planning:

    1. Going for an agreement on those final-status borders first, and hopefully also fast.
    2. Not getting sidetracked by either endless nickel-and-diming over an interim settlement freeze, or the terrible dead-end of a “Palestinian state with a provisional border,” or Israel’s demands that it needs to receive the Palestinians’ prior agreement to “recognize Israel as a Jewish state”, or whatever.
    3. With regard to the interim settlement freeze idea– which seems as though it’ll go onto operation in only a very limited way– making no mention of any kind of mandatory Arab-state quid pro quos for that. (I see that Saudi Arabia’s very influential Prince Turki al-Faisal today reiterated in the NYT that the Kingdom is not prepared to engage in any normalization or or other peacebuilding measures until “after [the Israelis] have released their grip on Arab lands.” Absolutely no surprise there.)
    4. Having the US and EU declare that the final border will be “based on the line of June 4, 1967”, though with mutually agreeable exchanges.

So, there seem to be much that is laudable and realistic in the plan as reported. Here, though, are one big thing and a number of slightly smaller things that we need to have spelled out before we express any enthusiasm for it:

    One big thing:
    The “borders first” approach will not work unless the border-line and any other necessary arrangements regarding all of Jerusalem are also spelled out in the broader border delineation exercise. This is the case, for two reasons: Firstly because “Metropolitan Jerusalem” now constitutes such a large and such a pivotally placed portion of the West Bank that you literally cannot know what Palestinian-administered area you’re talking about in the West Bank unless you know where the line is and what the supplementary arrangement are for Jerusalem. Secondly, Jerusalem is of crucial political importance to all Palestinians as well as to 1.3 billion Muslims and 13 million Jews around the world.
    My view on what might work in Jerusalem, fwiw, is that the Israelis would get the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and some but not all of the settlement blocs in occupied East Jerusalem, and the Palestinians would get the rest of the Old City and much but not all of the rest of occupied East Jerusalem, with the Palestinian concessions there being compensated with good chunks of land from elsewhere in 1948 Israel… Plus perhaps some kind of special international regime for some Holy Places.
    Anyway, there needs to be a line through Jerusalem. We’re talking about two separate states with separate economies and different trading partners, etc. Over time, perhaps, the two states will want to cooperate, and Jerusalem will be a great locus for that. But for now, a clean divorce is so much better– in Jerusalem, as in the land of Israel/Palestine as a whole– than continuing in any form with the highly coercive and extremely damaging regime that has existed, including at the economic level, since 1967, and also, of course, since Oslo.

And here are the main other things that need to happen to make this path look good:

    1. Obama still needs to spell out, repeatedly, that it is in the United States’ interest to see a sustainable peace agreement secured in a very speedy way… Enough with always trying to justify his diplomatic involvement on the basis that “it’s in Israel’s interest”, or “it’ll help make Israel more secure”, or whatever. Yes, those things will happen. But they will be by-products of him pursuing this final peace agreement for the two even more important reasons that (a) it’s the right and moral thing to do, and (b) it’s in the deeper interests of the US citizenry as a whole… And therefore, that even if the PM of Israel should disagree (shock! horror!) with what Obama plans to do, nonetheless he will proceed, undeterred by that opposition.
    2. He needs to spell out that this whole approach is based on international law and international resolutions… And by the way, he needs to bring other countries/groupings into the “leadership process”, in addition to the US and the EU. This is not, and should not be seen as, a western/NATO project! It should derive its strength, clarity, and legitimacy from the United Nations, including from the resolutions of the UN Security Council.
    3. Based on the preceding two points, he needs to make sure that the “model” of the negotiations is not just one in which “the Israelis and Palestinians get left in a room together to work things out between them.” That can never work. One side is, on the ground, a fearsome military and economic power that is occupying the land of the other. The other is a weak and oppressed (though numerous) group of people who’ve been living under the Israeli fist for many years. That is why both the US’s interest and the principles of international law need to be added into the equation to even things up. So that, for example, the negotiations “land swaps”, the refugee issue, or whatever don’t end up being completely– and over the medium haul, quite unsistainaby– resolved in Israel’s interest.
    4. He needs, obviously, to find a way to include in the diplomacy in some way those parties that were not only excluded but also actively combated and opposed by GWB administration. That includes both Hamas and the five-million-plus Palestinian refugees. On Hamas, there is some modestly good news, in that the Speaker of the PLO’s ‘parliament’, Selim Zaanoun, is supposed to be in Gaza right about now, discussing formulas for bringing Hamas into the PLO… And of course, it is the PLO, not the Determinedly Interim Palestinian Authority, that under the Oslo formula is responsible for negotiating the final peace with Israel. (Even if Saeb Erakat does like to double- or triple-hat himself on occasion); and
    5. Finally, this peace diplomacy on the Palestinian-Israeli track will be a lot more successful if it is seen as part of an intentionally synergizing push for a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, that is, one that involves progress on the Syrian-Israeli track in tandem with– rather than, as in the past, in a considerably degree of competition with– the Palestinian-Israeli track.

Well, there’s my input into this. Let’s hope more than a few of the relevant power-that-be here in Washington listen to me, eh?

Malley on refugees, settlers, etc

I realize I promised to put something on the blog about the presentation that Rob Malley made during Thursday’s discussion of Hussein Ibish’s latest anti-one-state screed. Let me convey just the main points here.
Rob started off by noting that all the attempts to get a two-state outcome that have been undertaken since the conclusion of the Oslo Accord in 1993 have failed. (He later referred to “serial failures.”)
He was, of course, part of the diplomatic team, based in the Clinton White House, that was responsible for many of those failures. (But only a junior member.)
He asserted that, “The one-state solution doesn’t meet even the basic needs of Israeli Jews.”
If I’d had more time, I’d have loved to ask Rob to be a lot more specific. Which basic needs, precisely, of Israeli Jews does he see it as not meeting?
He said, “I haven’t given up on the two-state solution. Rather, I’ve soured on the methods used until now to attain it.”
He (like, I think, both the other people leading the discussion– Hussein Ibish and Aaron Miller) made one or more references to the need to attain a conflict-ending two-state solution.
But he said the US needs to do two main things different in the methodology it pursues, than what it did in the past. (And he, like the others, was still talking very definitely about a diplomacy that would continue to be led by the US.)
The main ideas in what he said were familiar, actually, from the NYRB article he co-authored with Hussein Agha back in June.
His first suggestion for a change in methodology was to ask, “Have we left out some vital actors: on the Palestinian side, the refugees and the Islamists, and on the Israeli side the religious and the settlers?”
He argued that in all the rounds of diplomacy carried out since 1993, members of all those groups were excluded and “treated like lepers.”
“We need to stop doing that,” he said, “Because we will need as much endorsement as we can get from all those groups for any eventual peace deal, because they are so present and so well-mobilized.”
His second methodological suggestion was that the people running the diplomacy should realize that, to be conflict-ending, the final peace agreement “has to deal with the issues of 1948, as well as 1967.”
He defined “the issues of 1948” as consisting, on the Israeli side, of a continuing demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and on the Palestinian side, a “demand that they get acknowledgment and some form of reparation for what happened in 1948.”
These two “methodological changes” are, of course, linked to each other– particularly in their recognition that, to be sustainable, any peace deal has to address the concerns and at least some of the claims of the Palestinian refugees.
It does strike me that the first of his two suggestions– focusing on being more “inclusive” towards the religio-nationalists on both sides and also towards both the Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlers– is a little “unbalanced” in the diagnosis on which it is based: All the peace efforts carried out between 1993 and now have been very attentive indeed to the concerns of Israel’s settlers and religio-nationalists… To the point that all US presidents have endorsed final border lines that would annex huge chunks of settler-populated occupied Palestinian territory to Israel, while the Israeli governments they have negotiated with have always included representatives of Israel’s religio-nationalists; and indeed, Israel’s religio-nationalists, like its settlers, are all fully enfranchised within the Israeli political system…
Whereas on the Palestinian side– ?
The Clinton White House, just like the GWB White House, tried to completely downplay and minimize the concerns and claims of the Palestinian refugees. They worked hard to keep the Palestinians living in their Diaspora– all of whom, of course, are refugees– disenfranchized within the Palestinian system, by pursuing the idea that the Interim PA in Ramallah somehow represented “all” the Palestinian people. And they either encouraged (Clinton) or actively instigated (GWB) extremely brutal crackdowns on the leaders and members of the Palestinians’ principal religio-nationalist movement.
Also, it is a little misleading to claim that the interests of the settlers should in any way correlate with, or should be “balanced off” against, those of the refugees.
The settlers, who now number around 500,000, are people who for varying numbers of years now have been– usually quite wittingly– the beneficiaries of Israel’s highly illegal project to implant, and provide generous subsidies to, settlements that use land and other natural resources stolen from its rightful Palestinian owners.
So it hard to see why the claims of these people “deserve”, in any moral sense, much attention from anyone. Of course, as a matter of common humanity they should be addressed as human equals who need a place to live, preferably inside their own country. And as a matter of political expedience, it is probably wise to do a few things to try to reach out to them.
However, they have been illegally living off the fat of someone else’s land for varying numbers of years now. So let’s not go overboard in efforts to accommodate them, maybe?
The Palestinian refugees, meanwhile, consist of around 6.8 million people— 1.8 million registered refugees currently residing in the West Bank or Gaza, and around five million Palestinian people living in the Diaspora, only about 2.9 million of whom are “registered” with UNRWA.
These are fellow-humans who have been living– the vast majority of them for all their lives at this point– while stripped of the most basic right of residing in their family’s homes.
Many of them– especially, today, those in Gaza, those in Lebanon, and those in Iraq– live in extremely tough situations, in great poverty and subject to continuing threats to their physical wellbeing.
So are all human persons equal? Do we consider that the legitimate claims and concerns of one Palestinian refugee should have the same priority as the legitimate claims and concerns one Israeli settler?
How should we weigh the legitimate claims and concerns of 6.8 million refugees against those of 500,000 settlers?
Why would we ever think it is acceptable to fail to address the legitimate claims and concerns of Palestinian refugees? Why would we think it acceptable to allow any further delay in addressing their concerns, thereby continuing to consign them to the situation of insecurity and impoverishment that so many of them have lived in for 62 years now?
… In the Q&A period of Thursday’s discussion, both my friend George Hishmeh (a longtime refugee from Palestine) and I asked questions about the need to include the refugees in the peacemaking, rather than continuing to exclude them from it. In Malley’s response to me, he referred to the the formula Hamas has proposed, whereby it would allow some non-Hamas negotiator to proceed with negotiating the peace, but any peace agreement conclided should thereafter be submitted to a referendum of all Palestinian people– and Hamas would abide by the results of that referendum..
Malley agreed with my assessment that the Diaspora Palestinians would need to be included in that referendum.
That was good.
However, at some point in the Q&A he also rephrased the point he’d made earlier about Israel “needing” to get some recognition of its status as “a Jewish state”, by talking about “Israel’s need to get recognition as the homeland of the Jewish people.”
That sounded like a serious change. The “homeland of the Jewish people”? All of them? When a Jewish American like Rob Malley is talking like that, is he implying he sees Israel as his homeland, too? I found that reference mystifying, and disturbing.
At the end of his main presentation, he summarized his current expectations thus: “I am not optimistic. Maybe we have to lower our sights for the next few years.” Later, he talked about the possibility of “a longterm interim.”
Very depressing– as if we didn’t have reason enough to be depressed before he spoke…

Trashing one-staters with Hussein Ibish

This morning I dropped by the Woodrow Wilson Center, a serious think-tank here in Washington DC that’s headed by the near-iconic Lee Hamilton. They had a panel discussion that had been convened to help a man called Hussein Ibish launch a book he has just published, titled What’s Wrong with the One-state Agenda?
Now, as longtime JWN readers know, I’m personally agnostic on whether Palestinians and Israelis should aim at a one-state or two-state outcome to their lengthy and very damaging conflict. But I do think that anyone who discusses this topic– or, come to that, any other topic, either– has a duty to be fair-minded, and in particular not to mis-characterize the arguments of his/her opponents.
Sadly, that was just what Ibish was doing this morning. He stated so many things that were untrue about the position of one-state supporters! Here is a partial list of these untruths:
1. That “The one-state idea emerged in some Palestinian circles at the time of the Second Intifada”.

    No. The idea is much, much older in Palestinian politics than that. Indeed, the stated national goal of Fateh and the PLO from 1968 through 1974 was the establishment of a single and secular democratic state (SDS) in the whole area of Mandate Palestine. In 1974, the PLO moved toward reframing its goal as being the creation of a “national authority” in the West Bank and Gaza; but it didn’t jettison the idea of an eventual SDS until 1996. And even after 1996, attachment to the idea of an eventual SDS remained among many secular Palestinian nationalists, inside and outside the historic homeland. Among Islamist Palestinians, there is probably even greater attachment to the idea of a one-state outcome than there is among secular nationalists; but their version of the desired single state is, of course, an Islamist one.

2. “The one-state idea rejects Israelis.”

    Again, no. First of all, we should recall that the original authors of a one-state formula in modern times were brilliant Jewish members of the yishuv in Palestine like Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, both of them pioneers in the effort to establish a Hebrew-language university in Jerusalem. Their concept was for a binational unitary state in the whole of Mandate Palestine. My understanding of the position of the secular one-staters today is that they support essentially that same vision. Back in the 1960s, inside the PLO there were lots of discussions over which of Israel’s Jewish citizens should be “allowed” to remain in the SDS, once established– would it be those who were in Palestine before 1948, or only those there before “the start of the Zionist invasion” (roughly 1917), or which? Now, you don’t hear those very exclusionary discussions among one-state proponents. What you do hear is the idea that the single state they aspire to should no longer be one that privileges Jews over non-Jews– in immigration/naturalization policies, access to land and other national resources, or any other area of public life.

3. “The one-state idea is very confrontational against anything and everything Israeli.”

    This is not true, either. Go look, for example, at the biographies of the people who took part in the most recent big conference on the one-state idea, that was held in the Boston area back in March. Many of them are Israelis– both Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis.
    I have particular respect for Jewish citizens of Israel who are prepared to stand up and reject and oppose the highly discriminatory form of ethnonationalism that their country embodies to this day, as it has since 1948. They are important voices of conscience, on a par with those White South Africans who in the dark days of Apartheid spoke up against the discrimination on which their state was built (and of which they were, as they clearly understood, the unwilling beneficiaries.) But the Palestinian citizens of Israel who speak up for a one-state outcome are equally important. Ibish seemed to forget about their existence completely in his speech. Many of them, including significant intellectual figures like Asaad Ghanem or Nadim Rouhanna, see the one-state formula as meeting their community’s needs much, much more effectively than a two-state formula ever could.

4. “The one-state rhetoric exists on college campuses in the US, the UK, and Europe. But it is not connected to real politics in the US– or indeed, even in Palestine.”

    The implication here is that it’s just a fringe phenomenon, with no real resonance. (Well, if that’s the case, then Ibish is going to have a hard time trying to sell a book that deals with this topic– so he was doing a tight juggling act there: trying to tell this largely inside-Washington audience that the one-state phenomenon was important enough to care about, but still demeaning it as only a “fringe” view.)
    But the fact is, as a political idea within the Palestinian community this idea is neither a “new” one, as noted above, nor a fringe one. Many Palestinians look at it with great realism, understanding that it won’t be easy to achieve it– but also, judging that there is little remaining hope left, now, for the establishment of a viable two-state outcome, and that therefore the other major item that has long been on their menu of possible political goals needs looking at once again…

Well, in sum, Ibish seemed to be carefully assembling and erecting a straw man of how he wanted to portray the one-state idea to this audience, so that then he could rip it down. It was not a seemly performance.
These are matters of deadly, even existential, import for Palestinians everywhere. So I think the least that should be required of anyone trying to have a serious impact within this discussion is the basic sense of fairness of not wilfully mis-characterizing either the arguments or the standing of her or his opponents.
Ibish is a Lebanese-American who gained serious credentials as a Palestinian-rights activist through the good work he did with Electronic Intifada.* But for quite some time now he’s been working with the (Very) American Task Force on Palestine, an organization that just– by a hair– manages not to be a complete sock puppet for the US State Department. For example, both Ibish and VATFP president Ziad Asali, who spoke in the comments section at today’s event, stressed that there needs to be a complete freeze on Israeli settlement building if the plan to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel is to succeed.
And that differs from the State Department position, how? Um, actually, I’m not entirely sure… because of course, the folks in the State Department do also say the same thing from time to time. But they don’t want to take the next step of imposing actual costs on Israel for its continued defiance of this request…
And no, neither do Ibish and the VATFP, it seems. Well anyway, Ibish was openly derisive this morning about the growing worldwide movement to impose some combination of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel.
… The Crisis Group’s Rob Malley was also on the panel. His contribution was much more instructive. Later…
* Update Fri a.m.: Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada sent the following clarification: “While it is true that Hussein and I often wrote articles together in our personal capacities during the second Intifada, Hussein never worked for the Electronic Intifada, and never contributed any articles to EI. EI did on a few occasions republish articles he and I had co-authored for other publications. But we do that with many people. I just wanted to clarify that for the record.” ~HC

B’tselem’s figures on Gaza assault toll

The Israeli human-rights group B’tselem today released its final report on the death toll in Gaza from the highly asymmetrical fighting of last December-January.
Their figures differ a little from those released yesterday by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
PCHR put the complete death toll among Gazans at 1,419. B’tselem put it at 1,387. That’s a difference of 32 people. The difference could perhaps be explained by what they were counting: PCHR was counting the number of Palestinians “killed during the Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip”, while B’tselem was apparently counting Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces.
B’tselem also counted the number of Israelis killed during the 22 days of fighting:

    Palestinians killed 9 Israelis during the operation: 3 civilians and one member of the security forces by rockets fired into southern Israel, and 5 soldiers in the Gaza Strip. Another 4 soldiers were killed by friendly fire.

Given the intensity of combat operations, friendly fire deaths are not particularly surprising.
PCHR counted that 1,167 non-combatants were killed, along with 252 “resistance activists.” It specified that,

    The non-combatants include civilians and civil police officers who were not involved in hostilities, [who are] protected persons of international humanitarian law. Investigations conducted by PCHR indicate that 918 civilians were killed… The civilian victims include 318 children… and 111 women.

B’tselem, by contrast, is not quite so sure how to characterize the conbatant/non-combatant status of the police killed. They write that of those killed,

    773 did not take part in the hostilities, including 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18. Of those killed, 330 took part in the hostilities, and 248 were Palestinian police officers, most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of police stations on the first day of the operation. For 36 people, B’Tselem could not determine whether they participated in the hostilities or not.

There is very little difference between these two reports regarding the numbers of women and children killed. The main differences are in how they distribute the adult male death among combatants and non-combatants.
The B’tselem report notes that this about the Israeli military’s claims about the Palestinian death toll:

    Israel stated that 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the operation and that 60% of them were members of Hamas and other armed groups. According to the military, a total of 295 Palestinians who were “not involved” in the fighting were killed. As the military refused to provide B’Tselem its list of fatalities, a comparison of names was not possible. However, the blatant discrepancy between the numbers is intolerable. For example, the military claims that altogether 89 minors under the age of 16 died in the operation. However, B’Tselem visited homes and gathered death certificates, photos, and testimonies relating to all 252 children under 16, and has the details of 111 women over 16 killed.

Of course, definitions and methodology are very important in such documentation. B’tselem is counting 320 “minors”, meaning presumably under the age of 18, but only 252 “children under 16”. It is also very specific about the methodology it used to verify each claimed death of a minor.
I dare say that when we see the final report in English from PCHR, they too will be specific about the methodology they used. I have great respect for the careful work and documentary objectivity of the PCHR, which is Palestinian and operates under extremely difficult circumstances from its downtown Gaza headquarters. I would imagine that its researchers have the opportunity to do even more meticulous fieldwork than that done by B’tselem, which is based in Jerusalem and has faced many obstacles placed by the Israeli authorities in being able to get its research teams into Gaza.
I was just looking at this news article by AP’s Karin Laub today. It is built around B’tselem’s release of its report.
I really question why she gave such prominence to that report, while making only a fleeting reference to PCHR’s work and not even mentioning it by name? Is it because she is in based in Jerusalem, or because she is reluctant to give any credence to the work of a Palestinian organization?
Anyway, the big discrepancies are not between the reporting of B’tselem and PCHR, but rather those between the reporting of these human-rights groups and the Israeli military.
Especially as regards the numbers of deaths of minors.
Laub reported that,

    The military said Wednesday that it believes B’Tselem’s findings are based on flawed research, including reliance on what it said are exaggerated death tolls by Palestinian human rights groups.

This is a serious libel.
Quite clearly, B’tselem has met that (quite evidently fabricated) “concern” by explicating the time-consuming and sometimes actually dangerous methodology it used in the case of reported deaths of minors.
And what “methodology” did the Israeli military use in its compilation of its numbers.

Israel’s assault on Gaza: The final toll

The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has now published (PDF, in Arabic) its final tally of the human cost of last winter’s Israeli assault on Gaza.
The English version is expected to be out next week.
The report is titled “Targeted Civilians”. The Palestine News Network today published a digest, in English, of PCHR’s main findings today:

    According to PCHR’s documentation, 1,419 Palestinians were killed during the Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip. This number includes 1,167 non-combatants (82.2%) and 252 resistance activists (17.8%). The non-combatants include civilians and civil police officers who were not involved in hostilities, the protected persons of international humanitarian law. Investigations conducted by PCHR indicate that 918 civilians were killed (64.7% of the total number of victims). The civilian victims include 318 children (22.4 % of the total number of victims and 34.7% of the number of civilian victims) and 111 women (7.8% of the total number of victims and 12.1% of the number of civilian victims). According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, at least 5,300 Palestinian were wounded during the offensive. This number includes at least 1,600 children (30%) and 830 women (15.6%); at least 2,430 children and women were wounded, 45.6% of the total wounded.
    According to PCHR’s documentation, IOF completely destroyed 2,114 houses (2864 housing units) affecting 3,314 families (19,592 individuals). They also partially destroyed 3,242 houses, (5,014 housing units) affecting 5,470 families (32,250 individuals). A further 16,000 houses at least sustained various degrees of damages as a result of bombardment and destruction, including the burning of dozens of houses in different areas. Approximately 51,453 individuals were made homeless.
    The latest offensive was the most violent, brutal and bloodiest since the beginning of Israeli occupation in 1967.

The PNN report also includes what looks like a verbatim version of the report’s “Conclusion and recommendations” section.

Hamas-related negotiations moving forward?

The negotiations for a prisoner-exchange agreement between Hamas and Israel seem to have entered a new, more productive phase, with the news– first reported by Xinhua— that Norwegian officials have now joined German officials in nailing down the details of the prisoner swap.
As reported by Xinhua from Gaza, the deal that’s emerging will involve swapping Hamas-held Israeli POW Gilad Shalit for some 1,000 Palestinian prisoners:

    According to the sources, Israel will free 450 prisoners as soon as Shalit is handed to the Egyptian authorities and another 550 prisoners will be released once the soldier arrives in Israel.

Israel currently holds around 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners, many of whom have been in prison– or detained without trial– for many years. Around 30elected Palestinian legislators, most of them from Hamas, are among those held.
Norway’s involvement in the swap now being negotiated, Xinhua said, would include providing a home for some of the Palestinian prisoners whom Israel will not allow to stay inside the occupied territories.
Germany’s involvement in mediating this issue, first revealed about ten days ago, has some political significance. Germany has previously been involved in most of the (often large-scale) prisoner swaps conducted between Hizbullah and Israel. In all these mediations, Germany’s security services have built on experience of fine-tuning the often complex modalities of these swap operations that they gained during some of the spy-swap operations they orchestrated– also between often very distrustful parties– during the Cold War.
Germany’s involvement in the current Hamas-Israel mediation marks a bit of a setback for the Egyptians, who as the past months have dragged on showed that they were either incapable of nailing down the agreement or, actually, rather unwilling to do so.
Israel’s agreement to work through Germany (as well as, still, Egypt) also elevates Hamas’s political standing a bit, nearer to the political standing that Hizbullah has in West European circles.
Hamas head Khaled Meshaal was in Cairo Sunday, where he held talks with the Egyptian officials who are working not just on the prisoner-swap file but also on the attempt to reconcile Hamas with Fateh sufficiently for the two to agree on a joint negotiating position with Israel and on the holding of new Palestinian elections next January.
One of the big issues on the reconciliation agenda has always been how to find a formula whereby Hamas can join the PLO for the first time ever. It is the PLO that will be negotiating the final peace agreement with Israel– if indeed that negotiation ever happens.
Today, PNN reported from Ramallah that Salim Zaanoun, the Fathawi president of the PLO’s “parliament”, the Palestine National Council (PNC), has been in Egypt discussing formulas for bringing Hamas into the PNC. He will next go to Gaza to pursue those discussions.
I am interested by the role that the Egyptian secretary-general of the Arab League, and former Foreign Minister, Amr Moussa is reported as playing in these negotiations. Does this mark a dimunition of the power of the Egyptian intel boss Omar Suleiman, who previously ran them all on his own? I don’t know…
Anyway, it looks as though things are moving in both these negotiation now.
Roughly two or three years too late, I would say… (All that suffering over the years in between!)

An exiled Palestinian visits “home”

I’ve been reading the blog entries that Palestinian-American writer and activist Nehad Khader has been posting about her first-time visit back to her grandparents’ homeplaces (here, etc.)
Amazing, heartfelt writing. (HT: Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.)
Nehad writes:

    I have never felt a more bizarre sensation for intense saddness and simultaneous ecstacy. I was a returnee, and having eaten from the fruits of the land felt like I was taking back what was mine. I also completely put down my guard and found myself laughing while tears rolled down my eyes. I always said I would return to Umm el Zeinat and rebuild, but now I know I will. I’ve had lots of thoughts that I need to comb through and understand. I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life, and now that its happened I cannot wait for it to happen again. My village is there and it still exists, with a few folks left behind to take care of it until we can all reunite.
    In the grand Zionist plan my brother and I were supposed to have forgotten this land. We should not have known that we are from Umm el Zeinat, we should not have stepped foot on it ever again. But in some small way we– and millions like us– have punched a very large hole in the Zionist plan. I had a wonderful conversation today about this with Amin Mohammad Ali, shop owner and brother of Palestinian poet Taha Mohammad Ali in Nazareth. I will write more about this conversation, but I realized that although I am in the “green line” and what is known as Israel proper, the Palestinians here are me and I am the Palestinians here.

Also, see her post about the Palestinian embroidery exhibition she put on in Philadephia before she left on her trip.
New Jewish immigrants to Israel from around the world are all given– in addition, of course, to instant citizenship, the right to reside in the country endlessly, and generous baskets of social benefits– a set of experiences, carefully stage-managed by the state’s Ministry of Absorption, that is supposed to make them feel as though they are coming “home.”
There is not one iota of stage-management in Nehad’s experiences, or of artifice in her reaction to them.
It is intriguing to me how nowadays, Palestinians with western passports are among the most privileged of Palestinians, being abe to travel much more freely among the many places of Palestinian residence– inside Israel, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the OPTs, Gulf countries, etc– than most of the Palestinians who still live in the Middle East.
Indeed, once you get to Gaza or the West Bank, the ability of Palestinians residing in those occupied areas to travel freely to visit close relatives in other places of Palestinian dispersal become almost zero.
Nehad was able to go to Syria, where she had spent her early years in the huge Yarmouk refugee camp. She went to Jordan (and of course found relatives there, too)… and now she’s in Israel.
The experience of being a Palestinian refugee today really is very different from what it was in, say, the 1950s. It’s true that Nehad and other Palestinians with western passports are among the luckiest, regarding the ability to travel. But nowadays, even many Palestinians living in Gaza or Lebanon, in the very worst of all the circumstances faced by Palestinians, can keep in some touch with relatives in other places through the internet, Skype, etc.
True, it is still nowhere near the degree of connectedness that people in rich and middle-income countries are coming to take for granted. But it’s a lot more connectedness than Palestinians had with each other in earlier decades… And of course, this has consequences.
One has been to keep a keep rich and textured sense of Palestinian-ness alive in all these places of dispersion. Another has been to make it just about impossible, in this century, to think of “splitting” the Palestinians currently resident in the OPTs from those of their brethren– including yes, in every family there, close family members– who have been forced to stay in the diaspora.
Thus, the rights, claims, and needs of the diaspora Palestinians cannot simply be ignored in the peacemaking, which is what the Israelis have always wanted– and what US diplomacy over the past 16 years essentially aimed at, too.
The Zionists have just about finished with their massive project of “gathering in” their people. The Palestinians’ roughly parallel project has not yet begun to be implemented.

Israel releases nine of 32 Hamas legislators

The Israeli government today released nine of the 32 Hamas-affiliated legislators, elected in June 2006, whom it had been holding since June 2006.
International law completely prohibits the detention of any persons when they’re captured solely to be held as hostages. But the basic criminality of the action– in the case of the captured legislators or any of the other thousands of Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israel’s infamous detention camps– has never for some reason caused western government to stop giving aid and succor to Israel.
The fact that Israel’s capturing of duly elected legislators— along with the numerous other actions Israel took to punish the winners of the 2006 election and the people who had elected them– went completely unpunished by western governments that proclaim a commitment to “democracy” also revealed most of those governments to be complete and unashamed hypocrites when it comes to taking the side of any Israeli government, even when it significantly violates international law.
But now, the release of these nine legislators signals the possibility that this situation of deep illegality on behalf of Israel and its backers in the international community is starting to be unspooled?
Will the release of these legislators be followed by the release of all the other Palestinian legislators– from Hamas and other parties– who are held by Israel without charge or trial, and in often very abusive conditions?
Will it also be followed by concerted international action to lift the quite inhumane siege that Israel has maintained on Gaza for many years, which was tightened significantly after Hamas’s electoral victory and then once again after the failure of Israel’s assault against Gaza last December to topple Hamas from power?
Since Gaza is still, under international law, a territory that’s under Israeli military occupation, Israel has special responsibilities under IHL for the welfare of the Strip’s residents. The fact that it has not only failed to meet those rsponsibilities but has also maintained a very damaging and inhumane policy of collective punishment against the 1.5 million Gazans for the past 43 months is almost certainly a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, that is, a war crime.
Certainly, all governments around the world that claim to uphold “the rule of law” should intervene vigorously to end Israel’s siege of Gaza. The aid convoys, very limited in capacity, that go to Gaza through Egypt or via the sea should be supported not only by a small number of plucky western activists and NGOs but by all governments that claim to support international law.
Does Israel’s release of these Hamas legislators– which may well have been carried out in response to pressure from western governments– signal that these governments are about to get tougher in their insistence on Israel’s compliance with international law in other ways, too?
I certainly hope so. The deliberately pursued suffocation and squeezing of Gaza by Israel, under the eyes of the watching world, has been a travesty of any concept of international “justice”. President Obama and his officials have “asked” Israel to lessen the conditions of the siege. Israel has done nothing to respond.
So what’s next?

Why Blair wants Dahlan to retake Gaza?

The Mail Online’s Nick Pisa recently put together a great series of photos of Tony Blair, Middle East envoy extraordinaire (very extraordinaire!) reclining and romping aboard various rich people’s luxury yachts between 2004 and roughly last week.
Pisa wrote,

    Tony Blair still has some rich friends. The ex-prime minister was spotted yesterday living it up on board a £150million superyacht as a guest of the world’s fourth richest man…

Blair is, as we know, the person charged by the Quartet with “responsibility” for getting the Palestinian economy up and running. To that end, he and his staff have taken over a whole floor of rooms in the very expensive American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem– even though Blair is only there for roughly six weeks a year…
But of course, with Blair’s penchant for big luxury yachts now well established over the years, he’s going to need somewhere in “Palestine” for his rich friends to come in and pick him up, isn’t he?
Blair’s personal income has been estimated to be above $7 million/year. Average incomes in the OPTs are, I believe, a little lower than that.
Gideon Rachman (to whom goes the HT for the Mail Online story) writes that though there’s been much speculation about Blair becoming the first “President” of the EU, with all the anti-materialist pieties he’s spouting these days it looks more as if he’s running for Pope.
Rachman comments on these pieties:

    I would take it all a bit more seriously if Blair hadn’t spent part of the summer as a guest on “Rising Sun”, a vast yacht, owned by Larry Ellison, the Californian billionaire.

State-building: Palestine

Conventional wisdom here in DC has it that the Palestinians somehow need to “prove” they’re capable of running a state before they’re allowed to have one….
Never mind that the Palestinians are an extremely– one might even say, obsessively– well-educated bunch of people… Never mind that during the 1950s and 1960s, the proto-state administrations that were built all up and down the Arab coast of the Gulf were all established overwhelmingly by Palestinians… Never mind that in Palestine, the PA had built up one entire set of administrative institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, some of which functioned pretty well under the circumstances of occupation– but they were then all smashed to smithereens in the paroxysm of destructive vengeance unleashed by Ariel Sharon in 2002…
No, never mind all that history. The CW here in Washington DC says that the Palestinians, yet again, have to “prove” their capabilities before they can be allowed to have a state. (As if their backwardness in administrative affairs was the major impediment to their gaining their independence!)
And Salam Fayyad is earnestly setting out to supply the required proof to the Americans on this score… and doing this by trying to build (yet again) the institutions of a Palestinian proto-state in, thus far, just the occupied West Bank.
Fayyad’s whole approach has now been very forcefully challenged by the veteran Palestinian social activist Dr Mustafa Barghouthi.
Barghouthi argues for a hard-hitting program of action for national liberation built around these four basic pillars:

    * Resistance
    * Steadfastness
    * National unity, and
    * Global solidarity.

On the crucial issue of resistance, he writes:

    In all its forms, resistance is an internationally sanctioned right of the Palestinian people. Under this strategy, however, it must resume a peaceful, mass grassroots character that will serve to revive the culture of collective activism among all sectors of the Palestinian people and, hence, to keep the struggle from becoming the preserve or monopoly of small cliques and to promote its growing impetus and momentum.

Anyway, go read the whole of his program there.
Dr. Mustafa has considerably more legitimacy and political credibility in Palestinian society than Fayyad. It’s based on the lengthy, dangerous, and visionary work he has pursued since the early 1980s to organize Palestinians throughout the OPTs in the crucial field of grassroots medical relief. Because of his strong and sustained emphasis on grassroots self-organization and self-empowerment he has always been 100 times more “political” than Fayyad. (Hence his strong and now long-sustained call for national unity; a topic on which, at the political level, Fayyad is strangely silent.)
At the end of the article, Barghouthi makes some points about a one-state versus two-state solution that seem a little unclearly written. Maybe I’ll write him and ask for some clarifications.
But the four-point program looks excellent.