Palestine 2009 – Page 5 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

IPS piece: ‘Republicans Attack Obama on Palestine Policy’

… is here, and also archived here.
It deals primarily with Huckabee but also with other important US pols who went on partisanly sponsored junkets to Israel and the OPTs in recent weeks (Cantor, Hoyer, etc.)
I had some quotes in the piece from the J. Post’s Herb Keinon. He had an excellent piece of reporting in Thursday’s paper. It seems like he had accompanied Huckabee on some of his trips around various (completely illegal) Jewish settlements– including ones in occupied E. Jerusalem and one “unauthorized” settlement outpost.
He’s clearly making a bid for Evangelical grassroots support in the US and assuming that evangelicals are overwhelmingly pro-settler.
Herb Keinon is worth reading. It seems that he (in the form of the un-named “Israeli journalist” he refers to) couldn’t believe that an ultra-rightist like Huckabee might actually be someone with some influence/following in US politics…
Also definitely worth reading on Huckabee are Spencer Ackerman and Matt Duss (1 and 2.)

Sam Bahour on economic realities of occupation

The prominent Palestinian-American business executive Sam Bahour has an op-ed in today’s WSJ that gives the lie to all the hasbara that Netanyahu, Oren, Friedman, etc have been putting out regarding the alleged “amazing green shoots” of the West bank’s economy.
Bahour knows whereof he writes:

Until West Bank Palestinians gain free and open access to the world economy, beyond the markets of the occupying power, major enterprises in Palestinian towns will suffer.

He has more data and examples there.
His conclusion is particularly sobering if you keep in mind that he is someone who has worked hard for 15 years to try to make the “economic peace” approach work:

Absent a political framework to secure Palestinian freedom and independence, “economic peace” initiatives only facilitate the crime of occupation.

Btw, it looks as though there’s a concerted campaign by the hasbaristas to stack the comments board linked to Bahour’s piece. (At one point, one of them even writes: “this apologist has gotten short shrift here. nicely done folks.”)
So maybe instead of, or in addition to, posting comments here, JWN readers should go over and post some comments there.

Salafist extremists lash out at Hamas

Scott Sanford of Jihadica has helpfully collected and summarized some of the early reactions from salafi extremists to last Friday’s confrontation between Hamas and the salafist Jund Ansar Allah group in southern Gaza.
By the application of vastly superior force, Hamas won that battle, though at some cost. The JAA’s leader and several of its fighters were killed and the movement has now, presumably been effectively suppressed.
One of the salafist strategists Sanford cites is Akram al-Hijazi, a Palestinian who yesterday launched this tirade against the Hamas leadership on Al-Fallujah Islamic Forums yesterday.
Three days ago, Hijazi posted this tirade against Hamas on the forum.
I haven’t had time to read these texts in detail. But Sanford tells us that Hijazi argues that the present Hamas leadership has abandoned the “true path” that was established by Hamas founder Skeikh Ahmed Yassin and the movement’s second leader in Gaza, Abdel-Aziz Rantisi.
In this way, Hijazi is making a play for the sympathies of Hamas rank-and-filers who may be disgruntled with the diplomatic-political tack taken by the current leadership.
Of course, Yassin was the originator of the idea that it would be a good idea to have a “hudna” (truce) of some possibly lengthy period with Israel, during which the Palestinians could run their own government in the post-liberation territories of the West Bank (including E. Jerusalem) and Gaza. That is still the version of the “two-state solution” advocated by the Hamas leadership.
Yassin also cooperated with Israel in several ways during his life. Much more than Meshaal and the rest of the current leadership ever have! So the idea that salafists somehow represent the “true path” of Yassin does not have a lot of prima facie credibility…
However, the potential attractiveness of the salafists to Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere– who see themselves confined by Israel in the open-air prisons that are what Gaza and the West Bank have become, and who see their just claims for liberation, national independence, and the settlement of decades-old refugee claims all just endlessly denied, derided, and shunted aside as Israel’s colonization of the West Bank continues apace– cannot for a moment be denied.
Nehemiah Strasler had a good piece in Haaretz on this topic on Tuesday.
He wrote,

when the oppression increases and there is nothing to lose, the adversary doesn’t surrender and grovel. Just the opposite. He becomes more radical.

—
By the way, just a small geographic note. I know there’s a Fallujah in Iraq, and there’s also a Fallujah in southern Palestine (maybe now in Israel?), which was one of the limits that the Egyptian army reached in 1948. Was one of them named after the other? Does anyone know?

Huckabee’s pro-settler stance part of bigger US shift

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is in Israel this week. He’s making a point of touring many of Israel’s (illegal) settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. (Richard Silverstein has one version of Huck’s settlement-focused itinerary in this very informative blog post.)
While visiting with Jewish settlers in occupied east Jerusalem today, he said the U.S. should not “be telling Jewish people in Israel where they should and should not live.”
At the same time that Huckabee is hanging out with people in the Israelis settlements, so is another figure from the US rightwing, Orly Taitz, known as the “Queen Bee of the birther movement”– that is, the movement of those rightwing Americans who are obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama was not born in the US and is therefore ineligible to be president.
Like Huckabee, Taitz has strongly criticized Pres. Obama’s campaign to persuade Israel to halt its settlement-building program.
The participation of these two figures from US politics in the orbit of Israel’s settler extremists is part of a deeper shift in US politics. It used to be that just about all of the US Democratic Party was staunchly pro-Israel and would line up like clockwork to defend Israel’s perceived interests, including against any policies of the US administration that might seek to curb Israeli expansionism and militarism.
Back then– oh, let’s say through the end of the 1990s– if you’d hear much open criticism of the Israeli government’s policies from participants in US national politics, it would nearly always come from Republicans.
But over the years things have been slowly changing. (Though still incompletely, as for example here.)
Now, almost no-one in the Democratic Party is prepared to side with this government of Israel against Obama’s extremely reasonable campaign on the settlements issue. And it is the right wing in the country– including not only such seeming nutters as the Israeli-American Orly Taitz but also someone much nearer the GOP mainstream like Mike Huckabee– who are at the forefront of the campaign to “defend” the Israeli government against the policies of the US president.
There are a number of reasons for this shift, which in my view is long overdue. Speaking as someone who is both an upholder of Palestinian (as well as Israeli) rights and generally on the left of the US political spectrum, I can say that for many, many years it felt pretty darn lonely in the camp of “PIPs”– Americans who are Progressive, Including on Palestine. The camp of Americans who were PEPs– Progressive, Except on Palestine– always seemed so much larger. Until the past few years.
(I think this PIP/PEP nomenclature was developed by the estimable Phil Weiss, who is definitely at the forefront of today’s PIPs.)

Hamas cracks down on Islamist extremists in Rafah

At noon prayers yesterday in a mosque in the Gaza Strip city of Rafah, a salafist (Islamist extremist) preacher called Abdul-Latif Musa made a fiery appearance surrounded by heavily armed guards– and the Hamas police in the city cracked down hard on this show of defiance.
A lengthy gun-battle ensued, in which, according to Ehab Al-Ghussain, the spokesman of the PA interior ministry in the Gaza Strip, Musa, nine of his supporters, six Palestinian police officers, and six civilians were killed.
Some other reports said two of the dead were young girls– also, that around 120 people were injured in these firefights. Another report said that among those killed in the fighting was Mohammed al-Shamali, the Hamas military chief for southern Gaza,
Musa was the head of a small faction, called Jund Ansar Allah (Soldiers of the partisans of God), which was generally affiliated with Al-Qaeda and first surfaced in Gaza in mid-2008. JAA militants were reported as having acted for some months as a tough ‘morality police’ at various places in the Strip, threatening to close internet cafes and other public places and terrorizing Gazans sitting in mixed groups on the beach, etc.
In June, they launched a fairly large-scale– but unsuccessful–attack against the Israeli crossing point at Nahal Oz. In it they used suicide bombers riding horses and trucks.
In today’s JAA action, Musa and his armed followers went into the mosque in Rafah and announced the establishment of an “Islamic emirate (princedom)” in Gaza, under his control.
This open challenge to the authority of the elected Hamas government in the Strip made a Hamas crackdown inevitable. In his announcement Ghussain said that Interior Ministry officials and local preachers and Ulamas had previously “tried to convince the militants to return to the straight way, and to lay down their arms but to no avail.”
Ghussain also said that Musa “had good relationship and coordination with the PA security forces in Ramallah city [and accused] those forces of attempting to destabilize peace and order in the besieged Strip after they failed to enter the tiny Strip.”
For their part, the newly elected Central Committee of Fateh blamed Hamas for having allowed all kinds of foreign fighters to enter into the Gaza Strip.
There has been no suggestion, however, that Musa himself is not Palestinian, and no evidence that any of his followers are (were) non-Palestinian, apart from one of his aides, known as Abu Abdullah al-Suri, said to be a Palestinian from Syria.
The tensions between on the one hand Hamas and on the other Al-Qaeda and its affiliates go back a long way. Al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman Zawahiri has frequently criticized Hamas for being far too moderate. For their part, Hamas’s leaders have always been at great pains to differentiate themselves from Al-Qaeda.
Indeed, the content of Hamas’s programs is very different from Qaeda’s. Hamas has numerous very experienced social-service arms that have provided much-needed services to Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere for many years now. It actively supports the inclusion of women in public life (and has four elected women MPs.) Oh yes, it also participates in elections at both the local and national levels, and has expressed a clear desire to be included in the US-led peace diplomacy in the region.
Also, Hamas has shown its ready and willing on numerous occasions to abide by a ceasefire with Israel, sometimes on a unilateral basis, sometimes on an indirectly negotiated reciprocal basis, and sometimes– as since last January– on the basis of an exchange of un-negotiated ceasefires with Israel.
The JAA’s demonstrated willingness to break that ceasefire and thus risk bringing the wrath of Israel’s military once again upon all of Gaza must have been a special concern for the Hamas leaders.
How should westerners think about an organization like Hamas that cracks down, with apparent success and at considerable cost to itself, on an armed salafist organization like the AAJ?
Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation observed today that, “Anywhere else but in the Israel-Palestine context Hamas would be the US ally getting training, equipment, and covert ops help, and Washington would mount a PR campaign to explain why Hamas is the moderate alternative fighting Al-Qaeda.”
He pointed, by way of example, to Sec. Clinton’s recent meeting in Nairobi with Somalia’s president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed. The US military waged a tough war against the Islamic Courts Union, which Sheik Ahmed heads– until it became clear that the ICU was the only force in Somalia capable of standing up against the extreme-Islamist Al Shabaab movement.
But Palestine is different. There, the dictates of US politics have determined– until now– that the US government has to continue to quarantine, exclude, and actively oppose Hamas.
The JAA’s emergence in Gaza over recent months is not really a surprise. Hamas was indeed weakened to a noticeable extent by the assault Israel launched against it– and the whole of gaza– last winter. Israel inflicted some non-trivial damage on the police formations with which Hamas has tried to police its side of the border and of the ceasefire, though now, seven months later, they have had some time to rebuild.
Many westerners and Israelis have expressed the hope in the past that if only Hamas could be weakened, then the forces of the US-backed Fateh movement would get stronger. That has always been a dubious proposition. The well-informed International Crisis Group has warned for some time (e.g. in this March 2008 report) that if Hamas gets weakened in the Gaza Strip, then the forces that take up the slack are far more likely to be Islamist groups that are far more extreme than Hamas, rather than Fateh.
That report also noted that after Hamas’s expulsion of Fateh’s armed forces from the Strip the preceding June, Hamas was able to restore public security to those areas of the Strip that, while Fateh was there, were riddled with various forms of crime, inter-clan feuding, and other violence.
Over the past 4-5 years Hamas has made some significant moves towards a political/diplomatic stance of considerably more flexibility than hitherto. Including, it participated in– and succeeded in– the PA’s parliamentary elections of 2006.
But over that same period, Hamas’s most significant political base, in Gaza, has been subjected to repeated hardships, attacks, and gross indignities. So from the sociological/psychological viewpoint, too, it is not surprising that some Gazans are tempted to start criticizing the Hamas leaders from the extremist viewpoint.

Fateh Rev. Council list

Ma’an has now published a list of “all 81 newly elected members of the [Fateh] movement’s 130-member strong Revolutionary Council”, tallying for which finished in Bethlehem this evening.
I thought that participants in the Fatah conference were voting for 80 names, so I’m not clear either where the idea of having 81 elected members came from or, indeed, how the other 50 (0r 49) members get designated.
If anyone has information about that, please post it here.
It’s possible the 81st person was included because of a tie at the bottom of the list of winners, as with the Central Committee election results announced earlier?
The CC list ended up with 19 winner, all of them male. Maan tells us that the RC list, “includes 11 women, one Jew and at least three Christians. The Jew is Israeli-British academic and longtime peace activist Uri Davis (#31).
I’m glad to see that Afif Safiyeh won election (#22). He is a very smart and experienced diplomatist who’s been removed from a number of key PLO “ambassadorial” positions (Washington, Moscow) because of his well-known support for speedy reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas.
Anyway, I need to study this list a bit more.

West Bank Palestinians and Golan Syrians at joint camp

I was intrigued to see the news from Maan that a summer camp has brought some 350 Palestinians from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and from inside Israel, along with Syrian indigenes from the Golan together in Bethlehem this week.
Many people in the US seem quite unaware that there is a strong human dimension to Israel’s 42-year-long military occupation of Syria’s Golan region. Thus, while the Palestinian issue is understood by most westerners to include some very tough issues of the serious violations of basic human rights that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has inflicted on the 4.3 million Palestinian residents of those regions, the Golan issue– when it is discussed at all in the west– is discussed overwhelmingly as “purely” a strategic issue.
Little or no attention is paid to the harms that have been imposed and continue to be imposed on either (a) the 18,000 indigenous Syrian residents of Golan whose lives have been severely constrained by the imposition of firstly Israeli military law and since 1981 Israeli civilian law on the towns, villages, and farms in which they live, or (b) the more than 500,000 Syrian citizens who in the chaos that surrounded the collapse of the Syrian army’s positions in Golan in 1967 fled from their homes and farms in the region, deeper into the Syrian interior– or who are descendants of those IDPs from 1967.
You can learn more about the Syrian Golanis here.
The way Golan is discussed in the west, it is as though that entire fertile plateau was always empty of people until the Israeli settlers came along and started to “make the plateau bloom.” Yet another version of the old Zionist myth of a “land without a people for a people without a land”!
The Syrian government, for its part, has never made a big deal at all of the plight of the indigenous Syrian residents of Golan– either those who stayed in 1967, or those who left. I once asked a Syrian colleague about whether there was anything that you might call a “Golan lobby” inside Syria, that agitates there for the restoration of the rights of the Golanis. He explained that there are no special-interest lobbies inside Syria– on Golan or anything else. (I kind of knew that, already.)
Also, if the Damascus government were to launch a big international campaign about the human rights of the Golan Syrians (whether displaced, or “occupied”), then other Syrians could start to ask for more concern for their rights, as well.
But whether the Damascus government takes up this issue as a human rights issue (and not just one of “the restoration of Syria’s national sovereignty over the Golan), or not, there still is a human rights issue… And those of us who are citizens of countries that have been strong backers of Israel throughout the 42 years of Israel’s occupation of Golan need to take our share of the responsibility for ending the systematic rights abuses that running a military occupation always entails– in Golan, just as in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, and in Gaza.
Golan is like East Jerusalem, in that fairly early on in its 42-year military occupatin Israel imposed an Anschluss (annexation) on it. That happened in 1981; and since then, Israel has considered it just a regular part of Israel.
In Golan, the Israeli authorities went to great lengths, in 1981-2, to try to impose Israeli citizenship on the indigenous residents. In East Jerusalem, they haven’t ever undertaken much of a campaign to do this– probably because in E. Jerusalem there are some 270,000 indigenous residents, who would constitute one-third of the city’s voters and be a non-trivial voting bloc in Israel’s national politics, as well. The numbers in Golan are that much smaller.
Plus, most of the Syrian Golanis are Druze. The Israeli state authorities probably feel they have done a pretty good job of ensuring that Israel’s own (Palestinian) Druze community has been sufficiently bought off that it doesn’t cause them many problems; and they probably hoped that it would be fairly easy to assimilate the Golan Druze in with the Israeli-Palestinian Druze…
But that proved not to be the case. The vast majority of the still-resident Syrian Golanis have resisted having Israeli citizenship thrust upon them, though I think they have had Israel’s “Druze” education system thrust upon them, along with many other Israeli state institutions and regulations. This, while they maintained their Syrian citizenship. The Israelis and the ICRC have enabled some contacts to continue between these Syrians and their sisters and cousins residing on the other side of the disengagement line. I think a number of Syrian Golanis go to study in Damascus each year. Syrian Golani apple farers have been able to sell their beautiful produce to Syrian wholesalers, etc.
… So anyway, I’m interested to learn about the Bethlehem summer camp. I don’t know if this is the first year it’s been run; but it seems like an excellent initiative. Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation (with or without being Anschlussed), Palestinians who are citizens of Israel, and Syrian Golanis living under occupation/Anschluss all have a lot in common; but of course the Israeli authorities have always tried to maintain a strong policy of “divide-and-rule” among them. So it’s good these young people can find a way to get together among themselves.
Let’s hope that next summer, youth from Gaza can participate as well.
And that the summer after that, Israel’s occupation of all these parts of the Arab world will have ended once and for all.
(A note on the timeline here: the US has formally agreed to end its entire military occupation of Iraq by the end of 2011. That withdrawal is complicated by the sheer logistics of trucking all that military materiel out of Iraq. The logistics of trucking all Israel’s military materiel out of the West Bank and Golan are nowhere near as complex! The logistics of moving all the Israeli settlers out of the West Bank and Golan may be a little more complex… But the Israeli government, which put them in there in blatant violation of international law can doubtless find a way to do that… But anyway, I’ll give them two years to complete the process… )

Jewish-Israeli Knesset member gassed– by IOF

The leftist MK Dov Khenin took part in Bil’in’s weekly anti-Wall demonstration yesterday, and along with all the other protesters– Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals– he was subjected to the truly vile tear gas the IOF troops there use, as well as to the rubber-coated metal bullets and sound-bombs that the IOF uses.
When I was in Jerusalem last March, Daphna Golan noted that when Khenin ran in Tel Aviv’s mayoral election last November, he won one-third of the vote, and his Hadash (communist) party won more seats in february’s Knesset elections than the veteran pro-peace party Meretz. Khenin really does seem like an exemplary Israeli activist for human equality and justice.

The definitive word on ‘confidence building measures’

… comes from Ezzedine Choukri in this great piece in Al-Ahram Weekly. (HT: Abdulmoneim Said Aly at MEI on Thursday.)
Choukri’s piece is an excellent illustration of the thinking by most Arabs on the “CBM” issue that I was describing in this recent piece (and this recent JWN post.)
It’ also a lot funnier and more poignant than what I wrote.
Choukri draws a prolonged analogy between the challenges of Israeli-Arab peacemaking and those of a village elder seeking to mediate a marriage contract between two families in his native Egypt:

the bride’s family gets angrier as they feel they were taken for a ride (again) and eventually lock the bride at home. And those who always opposed the marriage on both sides feel vindicated in their prejudice: “this marriage will never take place,” they say; “if they can’t even agree on these tiny matters, how are they going to face common life with all its challenges?”

This last paragraph represents a viewpoint that’s extremely widespread in the Arab world. In light of the experience of the past 16 years of US insistence on “CBMs” and ridiculous, time-wasting “interim measures” it is the only logical position there is.
Secure the final peace agreements now!

My IPS piece on results of Fateh conference

… is here. Also archived here.