Palestine 2009 – Page 8 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Palestinian elections? Not the first priority

I see that my friend Marc Lynch— and perhaps some other people– have gotten a little excited over the new statement by PA/Fateh/PLO head Mahmoud Abbas that he is “ready” to have elections and even to hand over executive and legislative power to Hamas, if it should win.
I think this is a bad way forward.
For anyone who wants to be able to pull a “two state solution” out of the present demographic morass in the West Bank, the top priority now is not the holding of elections to the body whose proper full name– as Mustafa Barghouthi consistently reminds us– is the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority (PISGA). It is, rather, the speedy and effective conclusion of a final-status peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
The PISGA, commonly called the “PA”, has been in existence for 15 years now. Its lifespan was originally only meant to be five years.
The 15 years since Yasser Araft and his PLO cronies returned to the West Bank and Gaza, and the 16 years since the conclusion of the Oslo Accord that allowed them to do so, have all seen the pouring of considerable additional concrete into Israel’s settlement-building project in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
That cement continues to be poured. And it will continue to be poured so long as the Palestinians can be fooled into thinking that the petty politics of who controls this interim self-governing authority has any lasting importance.
We Americans have seen in Iraq, in 2004-2005, how an occupying power can use the promise of an imminent “election” to postpone dealing with much more important and far-reaching demands of those who call for liberation from foreign rule.
We have also seen in Iraq how the the occupying power can use “the election gambit” to foment and deepen divisions within the ranks of the occupied people.
Elections are necessarily divisive. The last thing the Palestinian people need right now is for further divisions to be sowed among them.
Yes, there should be a Palestinian vote at some point, hopefully soon. But that vote should be, first and foremost, the referendum over whether to accept or reject the final peace agreement that the Palestinian leadership has negotiated with Israel.
That is the only vote that counts. If the negotiations are speedily concluded it could be held sometime before the end of 2010.
That is certainly what we should all be aiming for– rather than wasting time with planning for and holding yet another round of elections for the interim authority.
Votes for the “legislative” or the “executive” branch of the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority are, after all, only ever as meaningful as Israel allows.
Which, as we saw with the result of the January 2006 vote, was not at all.
So why go through that whole charade again? For what? For that fragile, largely impotent, and always Israel-dependent body called the PISGA/PA?
So if the priority is to conclude the negotiations over the final peace agreement, then who can do that?
Hamas has already said they’re happy for Mahmoud Abbas to go ahead and do the negotiating– provided the final result is submitted to a nation-wide referendum, whose results they say they are quite prepared to abide by.
Personally, I don’t think Abbas has the energy, the spine, or the imagination to conclude the final peace negotiation on his own. He needs a negotiating team that is considerably stronger and more results-focused than the coterie of second-rate (and largely discredited) figures who have done the negotiations with him over the past 16 years. As I suggested here, he could bring in a new team of well-regarded independents who could do the job with and for him.
People who are as well-regarded in the general Palestinian street as Dr. Haidar Abdel-Shafei was back at the time of Madrid. I am not going to name names (though gosh, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi’s name does keep popping into my mind…. Along with a couple of others.)
Get the peace deal! That has to be the priority.
Then, hold the vote on the results. Not the other way round…. We’ve all seen, too tragically, where that other path has led over the past 15 years.

Women in the war zone: Gaza

Kudos to the BBC for publishing an agonizing (and agonized) short interview with Tihani Abed Rabbu, described as “bereaved mother’ in Gaza. Scroll down here to find it.
(But can anyone at the BBC tell me on what basis they placed her interview last and lowest on the page beneath two that seemed far less interesting to me– but that were conducted with, you guessed it, men… And guess what, the first of the men theyfeatured was an outspoken critic of Hamas. I wonder why that placed that one at the top??)
Anyway, scroll on down and read about the anguish of a mother from, obviously, the Abed Rabbu family, whose compound was afflicted so harshly by the Israeli war of last December/January.
Imagine the anguish of this woman, seeing not only the effects the Israeli assault has had but also the effects within her own family of the continuing Hamas-Fateh split– one that has been so assiduously cultuvated by Israel and its western backers.
Here is some of what she says:

I have reflected for many years now on the importance of the experiences that women residents of war-zones have to go through when the war comes into the heart of their communities and frequently, including in this case, right into their families.
These reflections arose from the experience I myself had, trying to work as a journalist and run a household and co-raise my young children in the heart of the war-zone that Beirut was back in those days. In my husband’s family– as in Ms. Abed-Rabbu’s– there were supporters of both the different sides in the internal Lebanese war. I can deeply relate to her desire that those rifts be healed.
Too frequently decisionmakers in the MSM simply marginalize women’s experiences. But women’s work in holding families together in very tough times lies at the heart of the social resiliency that can either save or break a community that’s in conflict. So it is not only a compelling ‘human interest’ story– it is also at the heart of the big ‘political’ story regarding whether, for example, the people of Gaza or South Lebanon end up bowing to Israel’s very lethally pursued political demands, or not.
Maybe the BBC could, at the very least, elevate Ms. Abed-Rabbu’s story to the top of that page?

Iraq: An occupation recedes

Congratulations to my Iraqi friends on the occasion of the significant (if not quite total) withdrawal of US military occupation rule from your cities and towns that has been taking place today according to the November 2008 Withdrawal Agreement between our two governments.
I wish you all the very best as you continue working to reconstruct lives, communities, and a nation that have been harmed very severely indeed by the actions and decisions of my government and its military (as well as by others.)
I am so sorry that we in the peace movement were unable to prevent the disastrous (and lie-based) decision our government took to invade your country in 2003. We tried, but we were not strong enough.
I hope that the rest of the US withdrawal, as mandated in the Withdrawal Agreement, goes ahead smoothly.
The PDF of the Agreement’s text can now be found here.) It stipulates, Article 24 (1) that:

All United States forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.

I hope, additionally, that we in the US peace movement can work effectively with our fellow citizens here to persuade our government to pay due reparations to your country for the harm we have caused you– though of course many of these harms can never be adequately “repaired.” The 600,000-plus Iraqi citizens killed by and as a result of the US invasion and occupation cannot be brought back to life. I mourn the loss of their lives and send compassion and love to the family members and friends they left behind.
But our government is now, even if with painful slowness, doing the right thing in withdrawing the troops and ending their occupation of your country. We shall try to make sure the rest of the withdrawal occurs according to, or in advance of, the agreed timetable.
Foreign military occupation is always, in itself, a major infringement of the rights of the residents of the area occupied. How could it be otherwise when military rule is established over an entire civilian population– and this military is, furthermore, in no way directly accountable to or connected by ties of common nationality to the residents of the occupied area?
As we Americans withdraw our military occupation regime from Iraq, we must equally work to ensure that Israel, a state to which we have given– and continue to give– an extraordinary level of all kinds of support, likewise speedily ends the military occupation regime that it has maintained for 42 years over the residents of the non-Israeli territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan; and that it withdraws its troops from those areas back inside its own borders.
The US has committed many bad–indeed, under international law, illegal– acts during its six years of occupation so far in Iraq. These included the mass detentions and the major abuses in the detention facilities; the complete (and quite illegal) transformation of the political and economic order in the country; use of excessive force in numerous military engagements; and so on.
However, one violation of international law it did not commit was to seek to implant its own citizens as settlers inside Iraq.
During Israel’s 42-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza it has committed all or nearly all of the same abuses the US committed in Iraq. (Including, after the free and fair Palestinian election of January 2006, it decided to work to overthrow the results of that election; and outrageously, it received full backing from Washington in that endeavor.) But in addition to all those violations of international law, successive Israeli governments since 1967 have also worked systematically to implant large numbers of their own citizens into the occupied areas.
This has constituted a major and ongoing infraction of the natural rights of the Palestinians and the Golani Syrians to the free use of their own land’s resources. It has also made the act of withdrawing from the occupied areas, as international law stipulates must happen, that much harder for any Israeli government to contemplate. But that is the fault of all those Israeli citizens who for 42 years now have participated in, profited from, supported, or condoned the settlers’ project. Now, Israelis need to take the settlers back into their own country.
When I was growing up in England in the 1950s and 1960s our country was also facing the demographic consequences of seeing an empire retract. English settlers had gone to many countries under British rule, in good faith and with the full backing of the British government. Many had lived in those other countries for some generations. Now, they had to face the choice of either living under the newly independent national governments of those countries, or of returning “home” to an England that many of them had never even seen before.
For the Israeli settlers, returning “home” to Israel will be, by comparison, an easy matter. They all know Israel well. They will not have to move far. Those who want to stay in their current settlement homes may be offered the chance to do so– but they would have to live peaceably as foreigners under the government of an independent Palestine and would have no special privileges at all over their Palestinian neighbors. It is also possible that the PLO/PA may negotiate a land swap arrangement that would transfer some portion of the settlement areas to Israeli rule; but many of the current settlers would not be covered by it.
Anyway, that is the Palestinian issue– though we Americans can understand what occupation rule means a lot better now that we have had six disturbing years of our own foreign-occupation rule in Iraq to look back on. So let’s wish the Palestinians and Israelis well in their pursuit of a fair and durable agreement that mandates not only peace but also the end of foreign military occupation and the complete withdrawal of the troops that have maintained it.
Today, though, is primarily a day for congratulating Iraqis (and Americans) on their progress towards this goal.

Meshaal responds to Obama, Take Two

Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has now told the whole world what he told me (and a little before me, Joe Klein) on June 4.
Namely this (from Al-Jazeera):

What’s new there from what he told me is his spelling out that Hamas welcomes the movement toward a dialogue without [pre-]conditions. I think that was already highly implicit in what he told me. The Word Doc of the complete transcript of my interview with him is here.
I guess the other thing that’s notable about today’s statement is that it was addressed primarily to an Arabic-language audience. So it is significant, and of course good, that he’s saying the same things to both English-language and Arabic-language audiences.

How effective is Obama’s Palestine policy?

I have been among the many criticizing Obama for moving WAYS too slowly on Arab-Israeli and specifically Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking. However, evidence is now emerging that his “slow and steady” approach is bearing some significant fruit:
Item #1: Marc Lynch, just back from a quick trip to Israel and the West Bank, blogged this last night:

only

Item #2: On Tuesday, JTA reported this:

some 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September, and only about 44 percent of voters believe the United States should support Israel — down from 71 percent a year ago

Item #3: Rep. William Delahunt’s “Sense of the House” bill that spells out support for a two-state solution and for George Mitchell’s peace mission, now has 105 co-sponsors, reflecting the success of the campaign that the White House and several pro-peace organizations have undertaken to slowly and steadily build congressional support for thse positions.
These are all key pieces of evidence that Obama’s strategy is working… Though it has until now been, as I said, a painstakingly slow one.
I completely recognize that the removal of, actually, just a handful of the roadblocks with which the Israeli occupation stifles normal life, including normal economic life, in the West Bank is a thin ‘achievement’ indeed. (The PDF of the UN-OCHA’s latest weekly update on the situation is here.) Also, steps like that or, for example, an increase in the number or types of goods Israel allows into Gaza each week, are incredibly easy to reverse.
We can recall, too, what the cocky Likudnik strategic thinker Efraim Inbar told me about what he expected from Obama when I spoke with him back in March:

“The Americans may push us some, so we’ll remove one or two outposts or one or two roadblocks. We’ll play with the Americans.”

And meantime, the occupation as a whole grinds on and on and on… and so does Israel’s expropriation of additional amounts of Palestinian land, its construction of additional blocks of settler-only housing, and its continued maintenance of military law over the 2.3 million Palestinians of the West Bank and of a punishingly tight siege against the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza…
It is that big problem of the occupation that Obama has set himself to tackle. And so far he’s taken only baby steps toward doing so.
But here’s the important thing: In taking those baby steps and in presenting the Palestinian-Israeli issue in the way he has to the US public and Congress, Obama has actually succeeded in building up, rather than diminishing, the support his approach in the US public and Congress. That is unprecedented for US Presidents trying to move towards a more even-handed Arab-Israeli peace policy.
One of my friends who works this issue intensely reports that Sen. Mitchell has actually spent just as much time “working” key members of Congress on the issues as he has doing fact-finding in the Middle East.
However, I don’t think anyone in or out of the administration judges that “just” getting a few more West Bank roadblocks removed, or a few settlement outposts theatrically “demolished” (only to be re-erected someplace else the very next day, as has often happened in the past), or “just” getting the Israeli military’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) to add beans into the “diet” of the Gazans this week, or potatoes next week, or whatever, is going to solve this problem.
Everyone understands this is above all a political/diplomatic problem; and if Obama and Mitchell don’t take some significant steps at the level of authoritative diplomatic engagement pretty soon, then the whole, still perilously fragile balance in the Arab-Israeli region could still, oh so easily, explode.
That, at a time when the US military is working overtime to finetune the modalities of a safe exit from Iraq, the situation in Iran remains extremely murky, and NATO’s entire situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan is poised on a logistical knife-edge.
So the actions Obama and Co. have taken until now– expressing a firm stand on Israeli settlement construction (though not, actually, doing anything yet to hold Israel accountable on that score), and expressing a firm stand on opening up the crossings into Gaza (again, without any actions to implement it)– are in a sense an overture to the main, that is diplomatic, act that should, and I believe will, follow.
They have also served to both test and prepare public opinion in both the US and Israel for the main act. (And the results of that ‘testing’ would, I think, encourage them to move ahead even more boldly.)
But when will they make the big diplomatic move? Nobody knows. This team has proven incredibly good at holding its cards close to its chest.
It’s also good at using a little tactical deception when it wants to. For example, until today, nobody has a clue whether Dennis Ross’s latest move– over to the National Security Council, from the State Department, is a move up, sideways or into some form of bureaucratic sidelining. As Politico’s usually very well-informed Ben Smith writes: “As for how much influence he’ll have, we’ll have to wait and see.”
For my part, I believe Ross will now come more effectively than before under the command of General Jim Jones, who runs a tight ship on the NSC. But as Smith says, we’ll have to wait and see.

Me in the CSM, on bringing in Hamas

The piece I wrote on this topic Monday is now on the CSM website.
As JWN readers might guess, I had a lot more I wanted to say about this subject. I also wanted to include a little paragraph about Jimmy Carter’s great role. But that 800-word limit is deadly.
Maybe later today I’ll have a bit of energy left to expand on some of the arguments in the piece, here on JWN. But meantime, go read it; link to it on your blogs; and let’s discuss the arguments it makes, here on JWN with our usual courtesy.
This topic needs a lot more exposure and discussion than it’s gotten within the US until now.

US, Syria, Iran, Hamas

The Obama administration has decided to return a US ambassador to Syria, the WaPo’s Scott Wilson reports today. This is a long overdue move– see below. However, the timing of the announcement does seem to link it to the ongoing turmoil inside the Iranian regime.
The always very well informed David Ignatius, writing (also in today’s WaPo) about US policy responses to the developments in Iran, says,

As the mullahs’ grip on power weakens, there are new opportunities to peel away some of their allies. The United States is moving quickly to normalize relations with Syria, and there’s talk of working with the Saudis to draw elements of the radical Palestinian group Hamas away from its Iranian patrons, toward a coalition government that would be prepared to negotiate with Israel. Observes a White House official: “Iran’s allies in the region have to be wondering, ‘Why should we hitch our wagon to their starship?’ ”

It has, of course, long been a dream of some Israelis and allies of Israel that they could “flip” Syria away from its sturdy, 30-year alliance with Iran. “Peeling them away” is a less crude and possibly more nuanced version of the same idea.
Ignatius links the administration’s current overture toward Syria, and its consideration of an overture toward Hamas, centrally to its desire to take maximum advantage of the current political problems in Tehran. I would note, however, that these moves have been under active consideration in the administration since considerably before the hotly disputed June 12 election in Iran.
From that perspective, announcing the moves in the context of linking them to the situation in Iran might be very canny politics within the US. But it is not the whole story.
Indeed, when I was in Damascus earlier this month, there were already many signs of a growing thaw in the long frozen US-Syria political relationship.
It has also been an open secret for some time now that Obama, Mitchell, and Clinton are very eager that the Palestinian movements– especially the ‘Big Two’, Fateh and Hamas– find a way to settle their differences enough to allow a unified Palestinian delegation to take part in negotiations for a final peace with Israel. Mitchell said as much in his first conference call with Jewish-American leaders back in early February. And his determination– along with, presumably, that of the person who appointed him, Pres. Obama– that this happen seems only to have grown since then.
Including that Mitchell gave an attentive hearing to former Pres. Jimmy Carter when Carter went to brief him June 18 about the discussions he had had over the preceding week with Hamas leaders in Damascus, the West Bank, and Gaza.
In my recent blog post on Fateh’s woes, I made one suggestion as to how a Palestinian negotiating team that enjoys the confidence of both the big parties might be constituted. Such a team might or might not include Fateh’s Mahmoud Abbas.
When I interviewed Hamas head Khaled Meshaal in Damascus June 4, he restated Hamas’s longstanding position that it is happy to have Abbas do the negotiating with Israel– but on the condition that any final deal negotiated should be submitted to a Palestinian-wide referendum thereafter. Hamas, he said, would abide by the results of that referendum.
Personally, I think it would be better to find a way to get Hamas more involved in the negotiating– even if only indirectly– from a far earlier stage than that. Hence my suggestion that a person or persons whom they trust be fully included on the negotiating team from the beginning.
Either way, folding Hamas into the diplomatic strategy is something that has to be done, given their real weight in Palestinian society. And it’s something the Mitchell team has been wrestling with from the get-go. Let’s hope the current turmoil in Iran gives Mitchell and Obama a new opportunity to “sell” this idea to the many folks in Congress and the US public who are still very wary of the “the H word.”
We can note, though, that there is significant support in Israel for talking with Hamas directly. The last time Tel Aviv University’s Tami Steinmetz Center recorded the answer to this question, in its February 2009 poll, it found that 45% of Israelis supported this. In other, earlier polls, pollsters found that an even stronger percentage of Israelis supported negotiating with a Palestinian team that included both Fateh and Hamas.
Regarding the new US opening to Syria, we should remember that it was Pres. Bush who decided to withdraw the US ambassador from Syria; and he did so, in February 2005, in response to the specific situation in Lebanon. Former PM Rafiq Hariri had just been assassinated there, and much of the evidence about that seemed to point towards Syria.
A lot has happened– in Lebanon, in Syria, and in the US– since then.
Back in February 2005 Syria still had some 35,000 troops in Lebanon, the remnant of a peacekeeping force that went into the country in 1976 with Washington’s blessing. After the Hariri killing, a broad movement of Lebanese arose that called for the withdrawal of those troops; and that withdrawal was duly completed in April 2005. After subsequent developments inside Lebanon, that included a nasty assault from Israel, elections, further discussions, and a new government, Lebanon and Syria agreed for the first time ever to have normal diplomatic relations with each other and exchange ambassadors.
That step took place earlier this year.
Meanwhile, the “evidence” that the Bushites and others had relied on to pin blame for the Hariri killing on Syria seemed to largely unravel. Earlier this year, four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals who had been imprisoned in Lebanon since 2005 were released by order of the UN’s Special Tribunal for Lebanon. So there really has been little continuing rationale for Washington not to have an ambassador in Damascus. And meanwhile, Syria is a regional player of considerable significance in both the Iraqi and the Arab-Israeli theaters.
In recognition of that, Sec. of State Clinton called Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem May 31, and they agreed on a ‘Road Map’ for improving relations. Ten days later peace envoy Mitchell made his first visit to Damascus.
You can find my June 12 account of the recent history of the US-Syrian relationship here. My thoughts on the need to include Syria in the Arab-Israeli negotiations are here. My compilation of the 18-year record of Syria’s attempts to negotiate its own final peace with Israel is here. And my June 4 interview with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem is here.
It is intriguing, though, to see that we finally have a president who recognizes the importance of diplomacy and has the capacity and agility to start to rebuild a whole host of important relations that had, basically, been shredded by the Bushites.

Jimmy Carter’s new role

My latest IPS news analysis on this topic is here, and also archived here.
It includes the mini-scoop that yesterday, just one day after returning to the US from his grueling two-week tour around the Middle East, the 84-year-old former President from Plains met with senior administration officials here in Washington DC. (Update: The senior officials he met with included Sen. George Mitchell, as is spelled out in the updated version of the IPS story.)
In the piece, I also note that that meeting,

underlined the change in Carter’s relevance and status in the Obama era. The visits he made to the Middle East while George W. Bush was president were barely tolerated by the administration, which kept him at arm’s length.

On a related note, I can’t believe that on Tuesday, Laura Rozen blogged a post under the title “Obama’s Jimmy Carter problem”.
She is being seriously under-informed by the people she talks to, if she thinks that is how people in the current administration view Carter.
She quotes one of the many anonymous sources that she likes to rely on– described only as “a Washington Middle East hand”– as saying:

Just like with President Clinton, Carter is becoming a huge problem and a growing concern for Obama… They are very pissed with him.

Later in the piece she quotes by name Aaron David Miller, whom she describes as a “veteran U.S. Middle East peace negotiator.” He might, of course, be the same person as the “Washington Middle East hand.”
But why should she quote Miller on anything to do with Arab-Israeli affairs, in light of his role at the heart of the Dennis Ross-led peace-processing effort that spectacularly failed over the course of 12 years to bring anything resembling peace to the Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Israelis?
Pretending to know something about what Carter has been working on as well as about Palestinian politics (!) Miller is reported, by name, as superciliously noting that if Carter is working toward opening up an eventual dialogue between Obama and Hamas:

that’s a key to an empty room right now given everything that Obama is trying to do with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ] Netanyahu and [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas… In fact, the way to lose both of them and much of Congress to boot would be to do precisely what the former president recommends.

Memo to Laura and Aaron: don’t you feel a little silly shooting your mouths off about matters that you seem to know little about?
Also, to inform yourselves a bit more about Palestinian politics, you could try reading this recent JWN post, and some of the expert sources I linked to there.
Bad-mouthing Jimmy Carter is a “sport” that, sadly, has a long history in Washington DC. It was definitely participated in by most leading figures of the Clinton administration, as well as by George W. Bush’s people.
So now that Carter is indeed getting access to senior figures in the Obama administration– and his ideas are gaining a respectful and engaged hearing there– some of those same tired retreads from the Clinton years (like Aaron Miller) are at it again.
But luckily not, it appears, the only member of the Clinton family who has any real pull these days.
Another good quick resource on the latest Carter trip to the Middle East is this CSM report, Tuesday, by Erin Cunningham. She was one of the small number of reporters who picked up on the fact of his visit with Israeli settler leader Shaul Goldstein.
Finally, what Carter has been trying to deal with for more than three years now– ever since, in fact, those January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections that he monitored and that, lest we forget, Hamas roundly won— is really the next big issue for people in the peace-and-justice community to come to terms with… That is, the phenomenon that Nathan Brown calls “the green elephant in the room”: namely, Hamas.
In Northern Ireland, George Mitchell was successful in persuading the British government, and most of the British people, that they needed to bring the IRA into the peacemaking if it was ever to succeed.
For many British people, that was not easy to stomach, I assure you. I remember going back to visit my family in England in those years in the 1980s when there were regularly IRA bombs on the London Tube… and even that nearly successful attempt against the life of PM Thatcher, in Brighton.
But by quiet diplomacy, Mitchell succeeded in bringing all the relevant parties, including the British government, the “Loyalists” and Sinn Fein, aboard his process there. And now, the number of British people who regret having brought the IRA/Sinn Fein into the process is extremely small indeed.
We peace and justice activists in the US need to learn a little humility. We need to listen to the Palestinian people– to all of them, not just the ones who may happen to “look like us” or share our lifestyles.
Large numbers of Palestinians support Hamas; and that support is pretty deep, as well as wide. Just like large numbers of Israelis support their religious parties. Hamas has already proven its popular support at the voting booth.
(And then, lest we forget, our government responded by turning round and helping Israel to smash Hamas and all the Palestinians of Gaza very hard in the teeth. Go, democracy, eh? Our government has a lot to apologize for on this count… )
One way to start to rectify matters now is to find a good, forward-looking way to deal Hamas into the peacemaking diplomacy. Both because it’s the right thing to do, and because the diplomacy certainly won’t get anywhere without Hamas. (Go back and check my earlier JWN post about the parlous state of Fateh, if you doubt that.)
Like dealing with the IRA or back in the day the ANC or any other liberation movement: It seems hard, but in large part that’s because of the lengthy campaign of demonization our government(s) and MSM have engaged in for many long years now.
… So let’s give Jimmy Carter and his suggestions a fair and supportive hearing. And let’s have a lot less of this know-nothing bad-mouthing behind closed doors that passes for “Middle East expertise” in too much of Washington.

Meshaal interview transcript

I have now finished transcribing the recording I made of my June 4 interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, and am happy to make it available here.
I just compared what I have in the transcript with the news report and analysis of the interview that I published with my esteemed friends at IPS on June 5. Actually, looking back at that, I think I did a pretty good job (with the help of the two sets of notes taken during the interview by myself and Bill the spouse) of capturing– and providing background explanations for– the major points in the interview.
So why bother with producing a transcript, you might ask? (And I did ask, given that I hate transcribing from audio. Plus, the quality of this audio wasn’t too great. Memo to self: next time take an actual mic. Apple MacBook mics might be good but they ain’t that good.)
One reason I do it is that I am a root-and-branch empiricist. By working so closely with the audio I got a much better sense of many aspects of the interview that I’d forgotten about, including details about his rhetorical and inter-personal style and some significant points of substance.
For example, I think it was important to be reminded of the concern he expressed about US actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Also, in this exchange,
Q: If you had the Palestinian state in the whole of the territories occupied in 1967, would that be the end of the conflict?
A: This is what we’re demanding today. After our people has liberated itself and has established its independent state, it’s the state that afterwards will decide its position.

I think neither Bill nor I had taken down the important point that he said it was the Palestinian state that would decide whether its own establishment had terminated the conflict. In the IPS version, I had it as the “Palestinian people.”
Also, in general, I think it’s worthwhile to make this transcript, like the one of my January 2008 interview with Meshaal, available as service to the public.
There is a lot more commentary I can do on this latest transcript. Including, I’d like to make some comparisons between this one and the last one, and with the other documented interviews Meshaal has given over the past couple of years.
My quick bottom line on the interview as a whole is that it aptly illustrates the truth of the capsule judgment made in this recent paper from USIP: “Hamas: Ideological rigidity and political flexibility”. (Btw, USIP put up a whole new website this week, so the link I gave earlier for this important paper doesn’t work. This one does, I think.)
On the “political flexibility” front, in the interview I was really trying to probe the decisionmaking that went into Hamas’s crucial 2005 decision to participate in the PA parliamentary election of 2006… and I got a little way forward with that.
But I still have a bunch of follow-up questions I would really like to ask Meshaal!!
Anyway, I have a piece that I’ll be doing for the CSM next week on Hamas, and some other good Hamas-related assignments coming up. So all my work on the transcribing will not go to waste…

Nathan Brown weighs in on Fateh

I sent the piece on Fateh that I posted here yesterday to Nathan Brown, a longtime Palestinian-affairs analyst who teaches at George Washington University here in DC, and he was kind enough to send me the following reaction, for publication.
You should read this in conjunction with the contribution that Mouin Rabbani sent in to the discussion yesterday. It is all, really, one continuing forum so I’m sorry in a way that I’ve broken it up this way, though I wanted to give Nathan’s views due prominence and attention. ~HC.

By Nathan Brown.
I couldn’t agree with you more on the shape that Fatah is in. And you’re absolutely right that I had little to say on the subject in my recent commentary. But that’s not because I don’t see the problem of Fatah decay as important; it’s just because I got tired of saying it. (See “Vain Hope Number 3” in this paper, published in January by the Carnegie Endowment.) )
There are two places where my thinking may be slightly different from yours. First, I think there is—or at least there was—a potentially strong international contribution to Fatah reform. I actually think that the US could have made a difference in 2006 had it delivered the message to Abu Mazin that Fatah revival was a priority. That pressure, plus the shock of losing the election, might have made a difference. I got the impression then that there were middle level cadres in Fatah who were looking for that kind of effort. But it didn’t take place, with the US focusing instead on undermining Hamas right away and then in 2007 on Fayyad and security reform. The result was that Fatah came to resemble—I wrote somewhere else—a group of passengers squabbling over seats at the Captain’s table on the Titanic. I worry that now it might be too late to undertake such an effort.
Second, regarding your idea of an international conference with well-reputed non-partisan Palestinians—this is a promising idea I don’t think I’ve heard recently. But I am not sure I would see it as an alternative to Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. I wonder if such leaders would have the political space to operate unless supported (or at least tacitly accepted) by some kind of national consensus. Without that, there is a strong danger that any progress they made diplomatically would get them sucked in to the same discrediting process that happened with the first Fayyad government. So I am not sure it would work if Fatah and Hamas both set out to undermine it. But it’s an idea that is worth discussing.
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Okay, now my response to that:
First, I think it’s incredibly hard to imagine that the US could ever have made a constructive contribution to internal reform inside Fateh, or any other Palestinian movement. At any time at all, given the US’s highly anomalous position as the main backer of Israel in the region and in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. But more especially so during the era of ideological arrogance and know-nothingism known as the Bush presidency. (I.e, including 2006.)
And I’m not sure at all that it would be possible even today, under Obama.
Secondly, you’re right that people of good faith need to do some more brainstorming about the proposal I suggested, that we might, for brevity, call “the Dr. Haidar move.” Its success and relevance would depend on there being evident forward movement in the push for a final peace agreement. And certainly it could not be done in the absence of some form of effective support for it from Hamas and most of the other factions including whatever remains of Fateh.
So it would run in parallel, if you like, with ongoing efforts to resolve the Palestinians’ internal political problems rather than replacing them. (And it could add urgency and a sense of realism to those efforts, if the peacemaking really is moving forward.)
But at least doing the Dr. Haidar move means people don’t all need to get hung up on getting a solid intra-Palestinian reconciliation prior to, and as a precondition for, the peacemaking…