Category: Palestine 2009

Fayyad, Maliki, the Americans

Over the weekend I finished reading the 37-page program that Salam Fayyad, the PM in the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PA) produced for the new, and still western-funded ‘government’ that he heads in Ramallah.
Readers can find the text of the program here. (HT: John Knight.)
It is a typical technocrat’s document– lengthy, larded with Jargon-of-the-Month formulations, and resembling nothing so much as the overly wordy “workplans” that people applying for grants from western funding organizations are required to submit to them. (Wonder why?) Much of it even sounds very admirable: lots of emphasis on things like “accountability” and “good governance” and other equally worthy goals.
But to note only that is to completely miss the point of this document, I think. Despite the strong emphasis on technocracy, this is an intensely political document. Indeed, the skirting of the most evident political issues facing the Palestinian people is, in a sense, the main point of this document. It embodies the politics of “anti-politics”; that is, it aims to provide an alternative to the division between Fateh and Hamas that currently– along with, of course, Israel’s continued massive campaign against all manifestations of Palestinian rights or interests– plagues the Palestinian people.
That is what we should expect, perhaps, of Fayyad, a personally decent man who made the choice to be parachuted into Ramallah as, essentially, the tool of the Americans back in 2005.
He’s been playing a complicated game ever since. He is not a man with a history in any branch of the extremely lengthy and hard-fought campaign of resistance to Israeli occupation. He comes without his own political network, and has to rely almost completely on the US-mobilized funding that comes to him as PM of the PA in order to try to build support from Palestinians.
In the 2006 parliamentary elections, he and Hanan Ashrawi were the only two people elected to the parliament from the list that they’d formed. Hamas won those elections handily, of course. Fayyad and all other non-Hamas people were warned strongly away from participating in the Hamas-backed government. However, in the National Unity Government formed in March 2007, he was named Finance Minister– indicating, presumably, that he had the confidence of both Fateh and Hamas at that time.
But in June 2007, when the US-backed forces of Fateh/Contra leader Dahlan launched the disastrous coup that broke up the NUG, Fayyad was the US-backed figure who was thereafter installed in Ramallah as ‘Prime Minister’, in a completely unconstitutional way.
So for him now to speak of “accountability” and “good governance”, etc is inherently non-credible.
He has, however, been trying to pull off what we might call the “Nuri al-Maliki move”. Over in Iraq, Maliki was installed as Prime Minister as a result of elections administered by the occupying US military and according to constitutional “rules” that had been largely dictated by the US occupation. Nonetheless, Maliki has tried to carve out a space for independent Iraqi decisionmaking that is not totally dominated by Washington; and he has had some success in that, I think.
Most notably, during the tough negotiations of last fall over the SOFA agreement long demanded by the Americans, Maliki succeeded in transforming the SOFA into a Withdrawal Agreement; and he got written into it a date certain for the complete withdrawal of all US forces from the country, which the Bushites had never wanted.
So the first question has to be: Is Maliki’s success in that regard replicable by Fayyad (or anyone else) in Palestine?
There are structural differences, to be sure. The US, when it intervenes in Palestinian politics, does so not as the direct occupying power– as it has done in Iraq– but as a sort of proxy for the Israeli occupying power. The consequence of this is that regardless of what Keith Dayton or other Americans who work very closely with Fayyad might want to do, actually the IOF is a far bigger presence. And though the Americans might want to see Fayyad “succeed” as a PM, there’s a large chunk of opinion in the Israeli political elite that really does not want to see any Palestinian administration “succeed” anywhere west of the River Jordan, whether in Ramallah or Gaza City.
That’s one big difference.
Another difference that stems from the fact that in Palestine the US is really a proxy for the real occupier whereas in Iraq it was the real occupier is that in Iraq, the dynamics of the situation got around to the place where even the people in the Bush administration ultimately judged that it was in the US’s interest to withdraw from the damaging and expensive confrontation in Iraq, and therefore from Iraq itself. So they had, if you like, an increasingly strong incentive to see Maliki (or someone!) succeed in building something of a sustainable indigenous governing capacity there.
In Palestine, however, the US is taking no losses in blood or even, in any direct way, treasure, from the continuation of the occupation. Hey, they and the Israelis even got the Europeans to pick up most of the tab for running the apparently endless occupation! (And the occupying army’s own forces, meanwhile, are suffering almost no casualties there.)
But this indicates that the US has correspondingly less strong of an interest in “withdrawing” from its role in Palestine, and therefore less of a motivation for seeing a sustainable indigenous government “succeed”. It becomes more optional for them, if you like.
Though in the broader regional and international context, I would say that the American people’s interest in seeing a fair and sustainable resolution of the Palestine Question is quite compelling. But that’s a broader argument; and maybe it doesn’t hit the decisionmakers in the Obama White House with quite the same urgency as the need to stanch the erosion of US blood and treasure in Iraq but getting the heck out of the country has done to them, and even before them, the Bushies.
So, can Fayyad pull off the “Nuri al-Maliki move”?
Other factors, I think, intervene as well. Maliki had two distinct advantages when it came to arm-wrestling with the Americans who’d installed him. (And we should remember that he wasn’t even their first choice. He was imposed on them back in early 2006 by a situation in which the Americans already demonstrated their inability to control all the key levers of political power inside Iraq.)
The first of his advantages has been the parliament there. despite all the evident problems in the electotal system, nonetheless the parliamentarians developed some real capability as a force overseeing some of the key actions and initiatives of the Maliki government. As I understand it, it was largely the very nationalist-minded pressure from the parliamentarians that stiffened Maliki’s spine on the SOFA issue and resulted in him winning the Withdrawal Agreement.
Fayyad, for obvious reasons, looks unlikely to be able to rely on allies in parliament to act as a counter-weight to US pressure.
And the second of Maliki’s “advantages” in his relationship with his country’s occupiers– I put that word in scare-quotes, advisedly– has been the strong influence that Iran won inside the Iraqi political system from the very moment that the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein. I am not privy to the extent to which Maliki (like most other figures inside the current Iraqi political firmament) has become reliant on Iranian help in, often, even the most basic aspects of personal and political survival. But the fact that the Iranians have been able to sustain webs of significant influence throughout just about all the different parts of the reconstituted Iraqi forces means that most Iraqi pols today are not completely reliant on the Americans for their physical survival. Which of course, has made it easier for them to “stand up to” the Americans on key issues like the WA.
Iran’s influence deep within Iraq’s security structures is, however, a very mixed “blessing” for many Iraqis: one that will most likely cause deep problems within the country for many years to come.
Fayyad, for his part, has no such “counter” to any pressures the Americans and Israelis might put on him…

Neve Gordon and BDS: Update

Most JWN readers are probably well aware of the firestorm of controversy that erupted after Neve Gordon, the chair of the Politics Department at Israel’s Ben Gurion University published this op-ed in the L.A. Times August 20, in which he argued that if a two-state outcome in Israel/Palestine is to be won then outsiders must engage in a widespread campaign of Bycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) to this end.
After he published that, BGU president Rivka Carmi circulated a letter saying, among other things,

    “…This kind of Israel-bashing detracts from the wonderful work that is being done at BGU and at all Israeli universities. Academics who entertain such resentment towards their country are welcome to consider another professional and personal home.”

The thinly veiled threat in her letter then aroused much further condemnation from supporters of academic freedom around the world.
Now, Sydney Levy has an excellent update at Muzzlewatch about all the reactions to the Neve Gordon affair.
Gordon has received some good support from fellow-academics at BGU and around the world. Levy tells us that Prof. Uri Ram, that head of BGU Sociology and Anthropology Department, has stated that,

    Should he be fired as head of the Political Science department due to his political opinions I shall call on all department heads in the University to resign as well, in support of Gordon and in protest of the violation of his rights, civil freedom and the University establishment in Israel.”

It is certainly true that BGU has for many years hosted a faculty that is far more open-minded in its views than the faculties at most of Israel’s heavily state-controlled universities. Check out the list of their “Notable faculty members” here.
It includes such voices of conscience as Oren Yiftachel and Danny Rubinstein.
I should add that during the many years when Benny Morris was quite unable to get a job in the history department of any other university in Israel because of the work he had done uncovering Israel’s expulsionist campaigns against the Palestinians in the war of 1947-48, it was finally BGU that offered him a position. (His formerly leftist political views, as we know, later swung radically to the right.)
Yiftachel, Rubinstein, and (the earlier version of) Morris all found a welcome at BGU so long as it was run by the social-justice-minded economist Avishay Braverman. Bt a couple of years ago he left BGU to run for election near the top of the Labour Party’s list. Now he is one of the handful of leading Labourites who have followed Ehud Barak into the Netanyahu government.
Meanwhile, BGU’s presidency was taken over by Rivka Carmi, a physician. Her commitment to academic freedom seems extremely thin– especially compared with Braverman’s.

Saturday reading: Two plans for the West Bank

One of the docs I’m reading today is the full text of the “Fayyad Plan”, aka the Program of the Thirteenth PA Government. If you recall that the PA was formed in 1994 to be the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, you can see how far behind the curve the US-led peace process has fallen…
Fayyad’s plan is not yet online as far as I can see. But I’ll let y’all know as soon as it is.
The second doc I’m reading today is certainly online. It’s a series of blog posts on the Haaretz website by a woman from San Mateo, California called Allison Speiser.
Her most recent post, on August 20, was titled “Making Aliyah to the West Bank: Touchdown!”
“Making Aliyah” is the “cute” way that Zionists and their supporters refer to the act of emigrating from other countries to Israel. Under Israeli law, any Jewish person who does so gets instant citizenship and a package of “absorption” benefits. Palestinian indigenes expelled from the country 61 years ago are still not, however, allowed to return to their homes there.
Other notable posts from Speiser this year have included these:

She seems like an interesting person. She apparently gave the limit of $2,300 to Obama’s election campaign last year. She refers repeatedly to “the West Bank”, instead of saying “Judea and Samaria/ Yehudah ve Shomron” as the hardline Israeli ethnonationalists do.
In her latest post, she writes,

    When you watch the steady stream of cars and buses in each direction, it is hard to imagine that anyone would think of this area as anything other than just another part of Israel – and yet there are clear signs that we are in a separate place. The West Bank.
    I still think about the signs, posters and graffiti that I saw in our first few days here. There is graffiti stating ‘Kahane was right’, ‘Gush Katif – we won’t forget and we won’t forgive’ and other notations indicating the right-wing leanings of the residents here. Bumper stickers tell a similar tale. There were also printed posters telling America to mind its own business and some hardline statements toward Obama and his recent demands on Israel. Seeing these posters as a brand new olah from America gave me mixed feelings – or perhaps just a weird feeling.

There is something interesting going on in her mind. She “saw” those apparently disturbing signs of her new neighbors’ rightwing views “in our first few days here”– but apparently she doesn’t still “see” them today? Does she perhaps, actually physically “see” them but not any longer pay them any heed? Has their presence become somehow normalized for her?
Then this:

    I wonder how I will deal with the big picture questions my kids will ask about bombs, rockets and what the green line is all about. I wonder how I will explain to them why some people use the term “Occupied Territory.” I wonder how I will explain to my kids what a “Palestinian” is.
    I feel strongly that this land is ours, that we have every right to live here and that we must do everything possible to hold on to this land. I want my kids to feel the same way I do, and to ascribe to the same beliefs as I do – doesn’t every parent? But I also feel that it’s important to teach all sides of the story so that people learn to look at an issue from all angles.

Oh my, look at those quotes around the “Palestinian”, and the “occupied territory.” But at least, she seems to be trying to keep something of the liberal values she apparently grew up with in California.
In the March post, she gave us a possible clue as to why– of all the possible places a new immigrant to Israel could choose to go and live– she (and I assume also her husband, though he seems oddly absent from her descriptions of the decision-making) decided to go and live in a West Bank settlement.
The post starts with an evocation of the highly stage-managed episode in late summer 2005 when the Sharon government evacuated the (yes, always quite illegal) Jewish settlements from Gaza…
Then, she writes,

    Although it was not me sitting on the roof then, and it was not me being led away, it’s a scenario that is not all that hard to imagine in my life. And I do imagine it. This summer, we will move to Israel. In all likelihood, we will move to a small yishuv (town) in the Shomron (northern West Bank) outside of the security fence still being built. We will be moving outside of the major blocs that many agree will be part of any future pull out.
    In 1967, Israel was viciously attacked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria also contributed in some way to the offensive. At the end of the war, Israel had gained control of several key pieces of land including the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. They attacked Israel, Israel won the war and won control of land. Borders are redrawn at the end of many, many wars. Anywhere else in the world, and that would be the end of the story. But not in Israel.
    The status of the land often referred to as “occupied territory” is complicated, lacks a simple solution that would satisfy all sides and is beyond the scope of this post. To that end I encourage everyone to do their homework, become informed members of the conversation. I do plan on making my home on land that I feel should belong to Israel, but I will also abide by any final decision made by the Israeli government. While the debate rages on, I’ll continue to protest, demonstrate, vote and argue. I hope that the government will see things my way and keep the land. But at the end of the day, I know its also important for us to be strong as one people and move forward as one people. So if that day in August ever does come, I’ll sit peacefully on top of my roof, make sure that my point was heard… and then wait for them to take me away.

So it strikes me her decision to migrate directly from San Mateo, California to a settlement in the West Bank may well have been motivated by financial considerations, more than conviction.
By going to this settlement, she becomes assured of: (a) higher social benefits and lower housing costs for herself and her family than if they’d moved to someplace inside Israel, and (b) a good prospect that, as part of the eventual settlement with the Palestinians, they will get a handsome “relocation” pay-off from the government– and financially underwritten no doubt, then as always, by Mr. & Ms. US taxpayer.
By the way, the comments under that March blog post are pretty interesting.

Obama team needs to align its rhetoric NOW

In the pronouncements he made at the very beginning of his presidency, Obama said– quite correctly– that the United States has its own strong interest in seeing the speedy conclusion of a fair and durable Palestinian-Israeli peace.
But in yesterday’s press briefing, Assistant Sec. of State P.J. Crowley said the following:

    Our objective is to get them vested in formal negotiations. And in those formal negotiations, we will tackle the hard issues that we know exist, and get not only to the finish line, but get across the finish line.
    Ultimately, this is not a process by which the United States will impose conditions on Israel, on the Palestinian Authority, on other countries. This is – ultimately, the judgment as to both getting to negotiations and getting to a successful conclusion is something that the parties will have to make. We, the United States, are prepared to help them.

On the face of it, this looks just like the characterization of the US role as nothing more than that of a “facilitator” that lay at the core of the failures of both the Clinton administration and the GWB administration to secure the Final Peace Agreement between Israel and Palestine.
If the US just “facilitates” the mediation– while continuing to give Israel unparalleled assistance in the financial, security, and political spheres– that adds up to nothing more than being complicit in Israel’s continued grave violations of international law in the occupied territories. US aid to Israel needs to be made tightly conditional on Israel complying with the demands of international law and of US diplomacy.
Of course, Crowley has spent just about all of his career in the State Department in a situation where mouthing these kinds of things was what was required if an employee there wanted to have any chance of promotion. So perhaps it’s not surprising he’s still mouthing them.
Haaretz’s Natasha Mozgovaya reported that the White House “had nothing to add” to Crowley’s comments.
So many people who should be paying attention are on vacation these days!
The Obama administration will certainly not succeed in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy if it sticks to the “facilitator” role. Crowley and everyone else who speaks for it needs to start quietly but consistently reassuring Americans and everyone else that the administration will be firmly pursuing our own country’s undoubted interest in this matter, including through the considered use of all the instruments of policy at its command.

Eyal Weizman’s “Hollow Land”– Read it!

I’ve been reading a most amazing book: Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, by the Israeli architect and social activist Eyal Weizman. (He is on the board of the excellent human rights organization B’tselem.)
This book is so much more than a work of dry architecture criticism! It is a deeply engaged, thoughtful, and far-reaching exploration of many of the ways in which physical “space” impacts and is impacted by Israel’s ongoing projects of colonial implantation in Palestine.
I started reading it for the excellent chapter it has on the Israelization/Judaization of Jerusalem, and was transfixed by this sentence about planning norms in the city under Israel’s control (p.47): “For the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem, unlike the Jewish residents, hardly anything was ever planned but their departure.”
One of the the things I really like about the book is the illustrations. There are scores of them, most of them in color; and they’re excellently integrated into the text. If you’ve never been to the OPTs and want to gain a vivid idea of the topography of the place– as well as its geography of human control, displacement, and spatiocide– then this book is a great place to start.
He has a whole chapter on checkpoints, which makes horrible, grisly reading, given how massively these locations of control deform the everyday life of all the West Bank’s Palestinians. It’s prefaced by a simple, full-page photo taken within the Allenby Bridge crossing point between the occupied West Bank and Jordan. The photo is taken from over the shoulder of a PA passport-control officer, looking out through the (presumably bullet-proof) glass at a receding tide of glum-faced Palestinian supplicants.
In the caption, photographer Miki Kratsman recalled about taking the shot that,

    When I positioned myself over the shoulder of the Palestinian border policeman to take this photograph, I suddenly heard voices calling behind me: ‘Zooz! Zooz!’ (‘Move! Move!’ in Hebrew). Only then did I realize that behind the mirror [behind her] were the Israelis. When I tried to take a photograph of the mirror I was removed from the terminal by the angry Palestinian policeman.

Weizman has, of course, chapters on the Wall and on settlements. He also has two brilliant chapters on the human topography of the Israeli way of war. One of these is on “innovations” developed by the IOF in urban warfare, and the other on the IOF’s use of Palestinian airspace in war–with a long segment on the use of airborne platforms, usually drones, to undertake targeted killings.
Both these latter chapters are quite extraordinary, since Weizman seems to have gained the confidence of several high-ranking IOF generals sufficiently to get them to talk with great apparent frankness about the way they view the use of both ground-space and airspace in their operations.
In the book’s Postscript he writes:

    Anyone living in, visiting Israel or living under its regime is well aware of the diffusion of the military in all spheres of life. Many officers and soldiers were willing to talk, mostly anonymously, about military operations, tactics, and procedures. Among the most fertile sources for this work were interviews with Shimon Naveh, a retired officer and former director of the military Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI). I thank him for being forthcoming…

Indeed he was. A large portion of the material in the two chapters on urban warfare and air war came from Naveh, who I think retired as a Brigadier-General and from his colleague Aviv Kochavi, who was commander of the Gaza front in 2005-06.
It seems that Weizman was interviewing Naveh and Kochavi at a time when they and much that they had created through OTRI was suddenly becoming somewhat discredited within the Israeli military. It was a tumultuous time in the IDF general staff in 2005-2006. Naveh, Kochavi, and the whole OTRI institution had apparently been operating under the patronage of former chief of staff, accused war criminal, and present vice-premier Moshe Ya’alon. Then, when Dan Halutz took over as chief of staff in 2005 he dismantled OTRI. But I guess that Naveh felt that many of the lessons he had been teaching Israeli officers at OTRI were being taken by them into the war against Lebanon in July-August 2006….
But, as Naveh acknowledged in an October 2006 interview that Weizman cites (p.214), “The war in Lebanon was a failure and I had a great part in it. What I have brought to the IDF has failed.”
Well, it failed in Lebanon where Hizbullah had built up a very smart and disciplined network of defensive formations that were relatively well-armed– at least, well-armed in comparison to the Palestinians of the refugee camps of Jenin and Balata where Naveh and his people had developed their ghastly tactics of control, even if not at all well-armed, in comparison with the IDF.
Weizman gives us numerous examples of the high-end, “structuralist” and “post-modernist” intellectualizing that Naveh brought to his planning of the assaults the IDF launched against several densely populated Palestinian areas in 2002-2006…
One of OTRI’s big innovations was to plan “swarming” raids in which the Israeli soldiers would advance from several points around the perimeter of, say, a refugee camp, towards the middle, all at once– and in many cases moving right through the homes of the camp’s terrified Palestinian residents, while those residents were still cowering wherever they could within whatever was left to them of their homes.
Read his fuller description of what happened in those raids, on p.194.
He concludes with this:

    The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine, as in Iraq, as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation…

Then, on p.217, he writes very perceptively about the IOF’s theories regarding where exactly it needs to be:

    One of the primary aims of the new tactics developed by OTRI is to release Israel from the necessity of being phsyically present within Palestinian areas, but still able to maintain control of security. According to Naveh, the IDF’s operational paradigm should seek to replace presence in occupied areas with a capacity to move through them, and produce in them what he called ‘effects’, which are ‘military operations such as aerial attacks or commando raids … that affect the enemy psychologically and organizationally.’ The tactics developed at OTRI and other institutes with IDF command, thus have the aim of providing tools for replacing th older mode of territorial domination with a newer ‘de-territorial’ one, which OTRI called ‘occupation through disappearance.’

Of course, the prime example of this approach is Gaza.
Weizman makes clear, too, that the IOF’s concept of the Wall in the West Bank is that it should be permeable from west to east, even while it is expressly designed to block permeability from east to west. (Another “one-way mirror”, we could say.)
Anyway, I could write a lot more about this excellent book. Just the chapter on the IOF’s use of assassination as a policy of the Israeli state is worth re-reading several times…
In describing in great– and very helpfully illustrated– detail the technical nuts and bolts of how, exactly, Israel has been pursuing its policy of spatiocide, control, and exclusion against the Palestinians, this book makes a fine complement to Jonathan Cook’s Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair.

Settlements– or the final peace?

There has been a lot of chirping and noise in the media about whether Sen. George Mitchell and Israeli PM Netanyahu might be close to some kind of a deal on a cutback in the Israeli settlement construction, and on what terms.
See Haaretz, the Jewish Daily Forward, the Guardian, etc.
Mitchell and Netanyahu met in London yesterday, and issued a terse statement that made clear that the “conversation” between them will continue. (As Laura Rozen also noted.)
But surely, what all of us should focus on and press for at this point is not the settlement freeze but rather the central goal of speedily securing a final peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis (and FPAs between Israel and Syria and Lebanon, respectively, as well; though those can be far easier to nail down.)
Yes, I know that Israel’s continued perpetration of the grave breach of the Geneva Conventions that’s constituted by its implantation of civilian residents into the occupied West Bank is an impediment to the resumption, let alone the completion, of the negotiations for an Israeli-Palestinian FPA.
But let’s keep some perspective. Any FPA will include a detailed map of the final border between Israel and the long-overdue Palestinian state. At that point, Israel can presumably build anything it wants– consonant with not infringing anyone’s rights– in the area that will lie on its side of the border. But on the Palestinian side of the finally delineated border, Israelis should expect that not only will there be no new settlement construction, but beyond that, the settlers already living there will have to either leave or, if they remain, to do so as law-abiding residents under Palestinian sovereignty.
Problem solved.
According to some reports, Obama is planning to have won final agreement on the FPA within the two years. These very condescending– and actually, inaccurate– writers in the Guardian claim that this timetable is “viewed as unrealistic by Middle East analysts.”
Well, I’m a Middle East analyst of lengthy experience, and I don’t view this timetable as unrealistic, at all. Indeed, given the huge volume of preliminary work that’s been done on all the issues connected with the FPA, I think it could be completed within nine months or less– if Obama has the backbone to really push for it.
That would involve him working closely with all the partners in the international community who want to see this peace concluded. In the first instance, all these pro-peace forces should reach and declare their agreement on the basis in international law and diplomacy on the basis of which the peace talks will be convened. This includes, of course, all the relevant resolutions of the United Nations and other provisions of international law.
All relevant parties, including of course both Israelis and Palestinians should then be invited to participate in the peace talks to be convened on the internationally agreed basis. And if one party– Israel, say– should balk at the terms of reference for the resumed peace talks, then the Security Council would be apprised of that and would proceed as it sees fit.
Israel’s unilateral reluctance to take part in a diplomatic effort that is based on well-known norms of international law and practice cannot be allowed to impede the progress of the peace effort.
This is the battle that Obama needs to be prepared to fight, if he really wants to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict– not a shadow “battle” over whether, in the interim before the securing of the FPA, Israel would be “allowed” to build 200 or 300 settler housing units here or there.
Remember that these “battles” over a possible settlement freeze have already eaten up the first seven months of Obama’s current term. And they have achieved little, except perhaps to educate a few additional members of the US Congress about the harsh reality of Israel’s ongoing, quite illegal land-grab in the West Bank.
These “battles” over a settlement freeze are real time wasters! Obama should go for the FPA right now.
And yes, I do fully understand that the participation of every Israeli government since 1967 in the project to implant settlers, illegally, into East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank, and Golan, has continued without a break through all of those years. And that it even accelerated after the Oslo “interim” accord of 16 years ago.
I understand, too, how deeply the presence of the always pampered settlers and the continued, government-fueled growth in their numbers offends the Palestinians of the OPTs and sows ever deeper despair in their hearts as they watch the territorial base of their longed-for state being eaten up and concreted over before their very eyes.
Danny Rubinstein had a great quote from a Palestinian in 2006: “I look out of the window and see my death getting near.”
I understand, too, how hard it is for Mahmoud Abbas, or Salam Fayyad, or any Palestinian leader to agree to sit down and talk with an Israeli government so long as Israel’s perpetration of these atrocities continues day by day.
But that is why, if the peace talks are to succeed, they need to be held on the clear basis of UN resolutions and international law and practice. Having those principles as the basis for the negotiation will give Palestinians some of the assurance that they need that the international community will be supporting their legitimate rights in the negotiation.
Because we all need to understand, too, that continuing to describe the negotiation only— or even mainly– as a bilateral encounter between Israelis and Palestinians, one in which perhaps the Americans play only a very thin role as “mediators” or “facilitators”, is a sure recipe for diplomatic failure. And the US government, if it acts in such a “facilitating” role, would be fully complicit in all the conflict that would inevitably ensue.
So let’s have international law restored to its rightful position as the basis of this negotiation. Let’s get the negotiation for the FPA started.
And most important of all– 16 years after the briefly flickering “promise” of the Oslo “interim” accord– let’s get the final peace agreement between these two long war-battered peoples concluded.

Palestinians and Israelis reclaiming a village’s memory

I just got the latest mailing from the great Israeli organization Zochrot, about a tour they organized last Saturday to the ruins of the Palestinian village al-Damun.
This report is written is such a vivid and humanistic way, it really brings to life the pain and other emotions of those ethnic-Palestinian Israelis who took part! (Scroll down to see the photos there, too.)
The report says,

    All those who participated in the tour received a copy of the booklet, “Remembering al-Damun,” prepared especially for the occasion. The refugees requested many additional copies to send to those who were exiled from their land and now live in other countries. Most of them are in Lebanon, and some are in Europe and the United States. “This booklet will reach Canada,” said one of the refugees. In 1948 lived in al-Damun more than 1500 residents. About half of them remained in Israel, and, together with their descendents, live nearby, but they’re forbidden to return and are unable to reclaim their property.

So those are the Palestinians who, along with the courageous Jewish Israelis of Zochrot, were interested in rediscovering and marking the remnants of al-Damun village on Saturday.
The other sons and daughters of the village– the ones from families that crossed the not-distant border with Lebanon during the fighting of 1948– have not been allowed to return anywhere near their ancestral homes in the 61 years since then, and have been living stateless in the ever-insecure refugee camps and gatherings of Lebanon.

Hints of Obama’s peace plan–but a notable J. Diehl mistake

Jackson Diehl broke some important news in today’s WaPo:

    As the U.N. General Assembly meets in late September, Obama aims to announce the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with “confidence-building” steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments. Though Obama will not offer a specific American “blueprint” for a peace settlement — as a number of Arab governments have urged him to do — he will probably lay out at least a partial vision of the two-state settlement that all sides now say they support, and the course that negotiations should take. More significantly, he intends to set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal — something that will please Arabs but may irritate Israel.

This is not new. At Annapolis in November 2007, Pres. Bush also “announce[d] the opening of a new negotiating process between Israelis and Palestinians, along with ‘confidence-building’ steps by Israel, the Palestinian Authority and a number of Arab governments.”
And there, too, Bush, “set an ambitious timetable for completing the peace deal.” It was by the end of his presidency.
Now, here we are, seven months after the expiration of that deadline, and not even one concrete step has been taken along the path back to securing the final peace agreement.
Also, in the nearly two years since Annapolis, Israeli settlement construction has continued apace– quite in defiance of what Bush requested of the Israelis there.
So forgive me if I’m not yet impressed by what Diehl is reporting.
David Ignatius– whose political savvy I trust a bit more than I trust Diehl’s– confirms that there are big peace-diplomacy moves being planned. But he described them a bit differently:

    The Arab-Israeli breakthrough that Obama has been seeking since his first day in office will near the make-or-break point this week as his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, meets with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. If they can agree on terms for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, that would open the way for talks on creating a Palestinian state.
    But along the way, there’s politically draining haggling…
    The White House is debating whether Obama should launch his initiative with a declaration of U.S. “parameters” for a final settlement. The Arabs favor such a statement, as do many U.S. experts such as Brzezinski. But Mitchell is said to favor a more gradual approach, in which Israelis and Palestinians would begin negotiations and the United States would intervene later with “bridging” proposals.

So according to Ignatius, the settlement freeze is still in active play as a gateway to be traversed before Obama gets the parties back to the final-status talks. That’s a bad strategy, in my view.
Ignatius is also telling us that the administration is divided on whether to present a US peace plan now, or not.
Diehl ends his piece with some serious– and I would say quite possibly deliberate and ill-intentioned– mistakes of both facts and analysis.
He writes:

    Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who turned down a far-reaching peace proposal by Israel’s previous government less than a year ago, is still insisting he won’t begin talks without a complete settlement freeze. And Hamas, which governs 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, remains implacable in its refusal to recognize Israel.
    The recalcitrance that Obama has already encountered is a reminder of the famous maxim of former secretary of state James A. Baker III, considered a master of Middle East diplomacy. The United States, he said in 1991, “can’t want peace more than the parties.” In taking on the issue now, Obama is, in essence, trying to prove that wisdom wrong. If he succeeds he will probably deserve to be called a president who can do everything.

Here are the mistakes of analysis:

    1. Diehl says that the peace proposal Olmert made to Abbas was “far-reaching”. The implication is that it was also “generous”, and that Abbas was foolish or recalcitrant to turn it down– and therefore can’t be expected to be flexible today. From everything we know about the peace proposal Olmert made to Abbas (e.g. from the end of this article) it didn’t look at all “generous”– and by most standards it was not at all “far-reaching.” But Diehl’s echoing of the old “Palestinian leader turns down a generous Israeli offer” trope is intended once again– as after the whole Camp David 2 debacle in 2000, to paint even the most “moderate” Palestinians as intractable.
    2. Diehl writes that Hamas remains implacable in its refusal to recognize Israel True. But no-one in Israel or the west is recognizing them, either– or, recognizing and being prepared to respect the victory they won in the 2006 elections. In a successful peace negotiation, exchange of recognitions usually comes as part of the end of the peace agreement. It should not be required upfront– and certainly not only in a unilateral way…. And meanwhile, Diehl says nothing at all about the serious moves that Hamas has made to communicate its very real interest in supporting negotiations for a two-state outcome. Once again, Diehl’s lazy shorthand here lays an inappropriate amount of blame on Palestinians.

But finally, there was Diehl’s most egregious and most telling mistake– a mistake of raw fact. That was when he attributed to Sec. James Baker the terrible little dictum about “the United States can’t want peace more than the parties.”
That was not Baker. That was Clinton and Pres. George W. Bush.
This mistake matters.
Why? Because as Diehl wrote, Baker was indeed a master of Middle East diplomacy. But he won his very real achievements in that field by pursuing a policy based on the very opposite of the quite irresponsible sentiment expressed in that phrase.
Under Clinton and Bush II, by contrast, those leaders’ easy reliance on the “can’t want a peace more.. ” mindset meant that they never vigorously pushed for anything in the diplomacy on the basis that securing a fair and durable peace was in the strong interest of Americans.
That was what led to the reliance of those two presidents on the idea that “the parties” should just be left to negotiate the terms of a peace settlement just between themselves.
In the context of the Palestinians, whose entire country is under Israel’s military occupation, that approach is crazy. The very best it could ever lead to would be something like the deals that Marshall Petain or Vidkun Quisling struck with the occupying Nazis.
Did anyone expect the Emir of Kuwait simply to sit in a room alone with Saddam Hussein in August 1990 and “negotiate” a peace with him, with no other parties or considerations of international law intervening?
Small wonder that first of all Arafat and then even the very pro-peace-minded Mahmoud Abbas turned down the extremely pusillanimous and demeaning deals that were all they were ever offered under those circumstances.
And thus, small wonder than neither Clinton nor Bush II ever presided over the securing of a final peace.
And meanwhile, throughout all those 16 years, Israel’s implantation of additional Jewish settlers into the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) continued apace… And so did the anger of Muslims and others around the world who saw the US as continuing to bankroll and support every action of the Israeli government.
Where was international law in all this? Where were the resolutions of the United Nations? Where was firm and principled US diplomacy?
Out of the window!
So please, Jackson Diehl, let’s have no more of your mendacious re-writing of history.
A fair and durable peace in the Arab-Israeli region is certainly in the interests of Americans and everyone else in the world who upholds fairness and international law, and is offended to see it being flouted on a daily basis by Israel in the occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan.
And if any particular “party”, such as the Netanyahu government in Israel, does not see such a peace as being in its own interest?
Then the US, whose fate and reputation in the world is necessarily tied very closely to Israel’s behavior, will just have to “want” the peace more than that party; and should proceed with the policy steps that are necessary in order to win it.
Those steps would certainly not include continuing to give Israel generous financial, political, and military help that is quite unlinked to Israel’s behavior in the occupied territories.
And yes, it was James Baker and his president who were the most recent US leaders
to make that point clear, and to establish that conditionality quite firmly within US policy.

Reading Sari Hanafi on refugees, spatiocide, Jerusalem, etc.

I had a few good research experiences this morning. The first was that I was looking for something else online but ended up reading this chunk out of a chapter the brilliant Palestinian researcher Sari Hanafi wrote on the sociology of a Palestinian return, in Rex Brynen and Roula Rifai’s 2007 book Palestinian Refugees: Challenges of Repatriation and Development.
The 25-page chunk that Google Books gave me there had a lot of really interesting, thoughtful material in it. Hanafi talked about the advantages of using the term “return migration” rather than repatriation, given that repatriation (which is the technical term used in most refugee studies) is really an entire “migration” of its own… He talked about the important concept of “enduring transnationality” for many Palestinian refugees, whether they return or not… He drew on huge amounts of both sociological and economic data, gathered both by the Shaml institute that he headed in Ramallah for several years and by other organizations.
Wow.
So anyway, the chunk that Google Books gave me ended before the end of the chapter and without giving me any of Sari’s footnotes. But I clicked on “Find it in a Library” and yes, indeed, the whole– very expensive!– book is available in the U.Va. library, which is around 2/3 mile from where I am now sitting.
Okay, so finding that chunk of text, and finding that the whole book can– I hope!– be in my hands before nightfall were two good experiences…
I had originally been doing a Google search on Sari because I know he was the originator of the important concept of spatiocide (aka spaciocide) and also, I think, of the important term biopolitics…
Googling for “spatiocide” I then found these two pages (1 and 2), which are both about a 2006 book titled City of Collision: Jerusalem and the Principles of Conflict Urbanism.
Since I am very interested in both Jerusalem and urban planning issues, this books looks fascinating! Sadly, however, the nearest library that it’s in is 4100 miles away, in Frankfurt. I think I’ll have to buy it and then maybe donate it to U.Va., which has a huge architecture school…
Okay, I’ve just made that purchase. (Stop me before I buy more books!)
Now I need to go back and read the review essay by Oren Yiftachel that I was reading before I got distracted by the whole Sari Hanafi thing.