Category: Palestine 2010

A sterling line-up of Palestinian policy analysts has now launched Al-Shabaka (‘The Palestinian policy network’), which looks like an on-line think-tank that will be timely policy papers by these people and others.
The first three papers on the site are:
* How sovereign a state?, by Camille Mansour, who looks at the gaps that, if negotiations start under currently foreseeable circumstances, would still exist between “a ‘moderate’ Israeli position [and] a Palestinian stance guided by the objective of achieving a sovereign Palestinian state, and briefly explores whether these gaps might be bridgeable.
Mansour, a longtime professor of international relations at the Sorbonne and Birzeit University, writes, “The analysis reveals how unlikely it is that a truly sovereign Palestinian state can come about as a result of negotiations in the present circumstances.”
* The Dangers of Disaggregating Sovereignty by Diana Buttu, who was legal advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team from 2000 to 2005, including during the 2001 round of negotiations at Taba and Israel’s unilateral evacuation from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
Buttu is openly critical of the way her former bosses in the PLO leadership conducted the negotiations in that period.
She writes:

Israel’s approach to Palestinian sovereignty is best demonstrated in the period following its unilateral evacuation from the Gaza Strip. As was its approach during bilateral negotiations, Israel retained essential elements of sovereignty after its pullout, while also arguing that a new international standard be developed to cover an entity that is no longer considered to be occupied yet lacks the elements of full sovereignty (somewhat akin to the Bantustans of South Africa that only the apartheid government of South Africa recognized as being states).
… The experience following Israel’s unilateral evacuation from the Gaza Strip sheds light on its future plans for the West Bank. It is hoped that Palestinian negotiators will learn from their experience of negotiations with Israel and realize that the sum of the disaggregated parts can never be greater than the whole.

* Finally, development economist Samer Abdelnour has a paper titled A New Model for Palestinian Development. The model he advocates has the name ‘Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks.’ A more old-fashioned name for it might be ‘Swaraj’, the name Gandhi gave to the economic model he established when the British were still in India, as a way to build continuing resilience among India’s people, their skill-levels, and the basis of the future independent Indian state.
Abdelnour also asks some good questions about whether the western-aid-dominated and quintessentially top-down model being pursued by Salam Fayyad can actually do what the Palestinians need.
So: a great start from Al-Shabaka. Keep it up, friends!

The distinguished Palestinian historian and analyst Yezid Sayigh gave a tremendous talk Friday at the Palestine Center in Washington DC, where he reported on a recent, four-day visit to Gaza and assessed the situation and standing of the two rival Palestinian administrations in Gaza and Ramallah.
While he started off by noting that both the administrations have succeeded in stabilizing themselves since the terrible rift that occurred between them in June 2007, a lot of the content of what he said seemed clearly to indicate that he thinks the Hamas-led administration in Gaza has been significantly better at achieving more public goods at less cost than the Fayyad administration in Ramallah.
Sayigh is Professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and is currently a visiting senior fellow at the crown center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He is also the author of the magisterial 1997 book Armed Struggle and the Search for a State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993, from Oxford University Press.
Kudos to Brandeis for having brought someone of Sayigh’s stature and breadth as a scholar to stay there for this semester. And special kudos, of course, to the Palestine Center for hosting this talk. You can see the whole video of it, I think, here.
I can’t do complete justice to the talk here, so I urge you to go and listen to it yourselves. But I wanted to share my impressions of some of his key insights and get them into the written-in-English public arena.
The original event was supposed to feature two speakers: Sayigh talking about Ramallah and Khaled Hroub, from Cambridge, UK, talking about Hamas. However, Hroub could not get his flight to DC– because of the BA strike, I think, rather than any ‘Flying While Arab’ security issues. So Sayigh stepped in and gave us his analysis of both administrations; and we were lucky to hear it.
He referred to Ismail Haniyyeh’s government in Gaza as “the elected government” and the Fayyad government in Ramallah as “the emergency government.” Later he made a point of noting that– while he has great personal affection for Salam Fayyad– the Fayyad government is wholly unconstitutional, while he described the Haniyyeh government as “partly constitutional.”
He underlined, regarding the Fayyad government, both the unconstitutionality of the way it was established and has been maintained since June 2007, and the rights-abusng nature of many of the practices of the security forces that are supposedly under Fayyad’s command.

Continue reading “Yezid Sayigh on Hamas, Fayyad”

So now, Washington’s “leadership” of the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy looks poised to rush forward to… 1949, and the proximity talks that Ralph Bunche convened in Rhodes that year.
Haaretz’s reporters tell us there,

the American administration is hoping the sides will declare the beginning of indirect talks [on Sunday] morning, ahead of the arrival of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.

These “proximity talks” have been touted by U.S. officials as some kind of big deal, even though they are a major step back from what Obama was promising when he came into office 14 months ago.
The P.A. leadership has until now merely been asking that, if the Netanyahu government wants to talk, it should first comply with its own commitments under the 2002 Road Map. But they’ve gotten no support from Washington for that position, and Washington has been putting big pressure on Abu Mazen, including through Egypt, Jordan, etc., with the aim of getting him back into talks– any talks, never mind about what!
The problem is not whether the two “sides” talk to each other; or how close they are when they take; or what shape table or configuration of hotel they might employ. The problem is getting Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
When Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, was Pres. G.H. W. Bush concerned about getting Iraqi and Kuwaiti leaders into a room together– or in rooms in the same hotel together– to “negotiate” a resolution? Of course he wasn’t… Although, just possibly, there might have been a negotiated outcome to have been had. But he never gave anyone a serious chance to explore that avenue. Five and a half months after Saddam’s forces moved into Kuwait, the international alliance that Bush brought together acted swiftly to evict them.
In the OPTs, the occupation has now gone on for nearly 43 years.
Israel has no more claim to the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan than Iraq had to Kuwait. Claims of “holy places” and such don’t confer sovereign rights. Everywhere in the world, people have places they consider somehow sacred in other countries… and they go to visit them on pilgrimages. That’s how it is.
International law concerns itself with quite different matters; and in the matter of the Israeli-occupied lands the Security Council has clearly stated the inacceptability of Israel’s acquisition of those territories by force.
… In Palestine meanwhile, Abu Mazen’s apparent decision to take part in the upcoming “proximity talks” farce has come in for a lot of criticism, including from one rather unexpected source: Muhammad Dahlan.
Maan News reported today that,

If the American policy is to “waste time pretending we are in negotiations” as Israel continues to build settlements and claim Palestinian heritage sites, Dahlan said, there is no point to go ahead with the talks.
“We have been sick of the occupation for years, and sick of negotiations since 2000,” he said, referring to the start of the Second Intifada following civil unrest around a failure of the Oslo Accords.

Oh dear. It looks as if the project to rebuild Fateh’s organizational integrity that was pursued with such fanfare last summer didn’t do quite as well as hoped.

Last month, uber-Zionist commentator Martin Kramer openly argued (Youtube here) the “political aim” of Israel’s sanctions on Gaza is

to break Gaza’s runaway population growth… That may begin to crack the culture of martyrdom, which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men.

He also claimed there that there is “some evidence” that this anti-natalist campaign was succeeding.
(What on earth evidence is he talking about? When I was in Gaza last November, the UN folks there told me that in the first ten months of 2009, 43,000 babies had been born to Gaza’s population of 1.5 million. Kramer is just plain wrong, as well as deeply immoral… What a pathetic “analyst” he is, eh?)
There has been considerable discussion (e.g. from Abunimah, Cole, Silverstein) as to whether what Kramer said constituted genocidal incitement, support for the racist “eugenics” concept, or just plain old racism. Regardless of which it was, it was disgusting and racist.
Kramer was also accusing “the west” of “providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status”. What??
Now, it’s true that UNRWA– like the UNHCR, which provides relief services to refugees everywhere else around the world– does not cut off the food support it gives to women, if they become pregnant. Both agencies also provide special nutritional support, as needed, to nursing mothers; and once children are weaned both agencies put them onto the rolls to receive the appropriate amount of nutritional support– and public-health and educational services, as required, as well.
Why would that shock anyone?
Do we want the UN’s refugee agencies not to do that?
Or is it only UNRWA that Kramer wants to stop providing such services? Someone should ask him if it is Palestinian refugees against whom, uniquely, he wants to discriminate… or whether refugees from Congo, Cambodia, Nepal, Somalia, Afghanistan, and everywhere else from which there are refugee flows should also be subjected to his “eugenicist” plan.
This issue does raise, of course, a couple of related subjects that Martin Kramer might prefer not to talk about. One is that in every situation of prolonged inter-group conflict, the communities that are party to that conflict tend to adopt extremely pro-natal policies. This has certainly been the case in Rwanda, over many decades. There, as in Israel/Palestine, leaders of both the competing communities judge that the conflict will eventually be resolved either through fighting or through the ballot-box. Either way, numbers are an asset…
A second thing Kramer might prefer not to talk about is the fact that Jewish Israelis– and in particular the religio-nationalists who form the heart of the settler movement in the West Bank– are certainly huge beneficiaries of a whole series of extremely pro-natalist governmental policies and subsidies (which are underwritten by the US government’s economic aid to Israel, at a rate considerably higher than the rate the US government dribbles out aid to UNRWA.)
Shall we talk about large families among ultra-orthodox Jews, in Israel and around the world?

Here’s a piece in the February 18 New York Times about the recent death of Mrs. Yitta Schwartz of Kiryas Joel, NY, who when she died last month at age 93,

left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants.

Did the NYT reporter, Joseph Berger, take Mrs. Schwartz to task for the effect her fecundity might have on Mother Earth? No, he described it instead as “a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.”
To be fair to Mrs. Schwartz and the particular Hasidic group she was a member of, the Satmar, I should note that (1) She was born in Hungary and during WW-II was sent, along with her husband and her then-six children to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they lost one child, and (2) the Satmars are mostly anti-Zionists, which is why Mrs. Schwartz and most of her 2,000 descendants now live in New York state, rather than the occupied West Bank.
However, there are now numerous other communities of Hasidic Jews who follow social/marital injunctions from their rebbes that are every bit as pro-natalist as the Satmars’, but that are Zionist, or that anyway take advantage of the many wonderful subsidies and incentives that the Israeli government provides in order to have them go and settle in the West Bank.
I also note the significance of that throwaway line from the NYT reporter, to the effect that Mrs. Schwartz’s fecundity was “a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.” On this reasoning, why would having a large family, for Palestinians, not equally be seen– especially in the context of the still-continuing conflict– as “a thumb in the eye of the Zionist expropriators”?
… Either way, I certainly think that for Mother Earth’s sake, all excessive procreation, whoever engages in it, needs to be brought sensitively, sustainably, and rapidly to an end. I submit, though, that this is highly unlikely to be achieved in situations of prolonged inter-group conflict, so long as the conflicts themselves are not resolved (for the reasons given above.)
So to me, this adds yet another reason– let’s call it an environmental reason– why this conflict between Israelis and Palestinians needs to be speedily ended.
But so long as it isn’t ended please let’s not beat up disproportionately on the Palestinians for pursuing something like the same kind of pro-natalist instincts that the Israeli government is certainly very aggressively promoting, on the Jewish-Israeli side.