Category: Writing and publishing

Now at TPM Cafe!

Big thanks to Josh Marshall and his colleagues at Talking Points Memo, who recently invited me to join the roster of contributors to their excellent discussion forum, TPM Cafe. My first contribution there is this one.
It should seem familiar to devoted JWN readers…. That’s because the lovely deal I have with the TPM folks is that they can pick up any of my posts from here that they want and republish them here.
I am particularly happy about this because TPM Cafe is probably the US blogosphere’s premier spot for discussion of the big public policy issues facing the country. Of which, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is undoubtedly one.
I told Josh– or maybe this was my esteemed friend M.J. Rosenberg, who is also a TMP cafe contributor– that I have admired TPM ever since that time, in December 2002, when my engineer son Tarek told me “Mom, you’ve got to start a blog!”, and I said “A what?” … And he got on his laptop and showed me his favorite, which was TPM.
Josh has been a trailblazer in so many ways, including by developing TPM into an impressive, multi-media space that is both a (benign) empire and a vibrant, policy-discussing community. And throughout the process he has challenged the ‘conventional wisdom’ on all the topics that I care about, both at home and abroad. Including, by having bloggers like MJ, Phil Weiss, Adam Horowitz, Bernard Avishai, and me on the Cafe’s roster he is now significantly pushing forward the national discussion on Palestinian- and Arab-Israeli issues.
… Anyway, only a small proportion of my JWN posts will probably ever end up on the Cafe. So keep on reading here, too!

CSM piece on the AKP in Turkey

Sometimes I feel I exist in a time-warp! Today, the CSM published an opinion piece I wrote a couple of weeks ago, based on my time in Turkey.
I still think its main argument is a really important one. It is that Obama– and a lot of other westerners–

    could learn a lot from Turkey about how a smart Islamist party can be a valued participant in a democracy.

That is such a valuable lesson. The AKP is such an intriguing party!
The reference to Egypt in the intro was because the piece was originally conceived, by me, to coincide with Obama giving The Speech, June 4, in Cairo.
Well, that was eight days ago. An eon in the fast-moving world of Middle East politics these days.
The concluding argument in the piece is this:

    in the Bush years, Washington worked actively to overthrow both Hamas and Hezbollah…
    Several Bush-era officials openly questioned whether the electoral victories of Hamas and Hezbollah actually “proved” that a party could be both dedicated to Islamist principles and democratic rule over the longer term. Turkey’s experience provides intriguing evidence that it can.
    Obama should value Turkey’s views on regional affairs. He may not be ready yet to go along with all the advice he receives from the AKP government in Ankara. But Ankara has much valuable experience that it can share with its NATO ally.

By the way, the dateline of “Adana” came about because I was writing the piece while Bill and I were being conveyed in a rather comfortable touring-car from Kappadokya to Hatay (Antakya)… So at some random point I looked out at the signs on the freeway and figured that the nearest town to where we were was Adana, which I think hosts a large US/NATO air base. I confess I never went into Adana, at all. Just rushed right past it, and rushed through Hatay as fast as we could, too.
And wow, that was just 13 days ago. Feels like two eons.

My book on Syria-Israel talks, being reprinted

I just heard from the good folks at the US Institute of Peace Press that they will be reprinting my 2000 book The Israeli-Syrian Peace Talks: 1991-96 and Beyond.
The book had fallen out of print a couple of years ago, which I thought was a real pity. But one phone call to a friend at USIP and it seems they’re now planning to print up a bunch more copies. (My thanks to that friend!)
This is very timely, given Mitchell’s imminent arrival in Damascus.

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My piece in The Nation on Hamas

… is in the May 25 edition of the magazine. It’s here— but sadly most of it is behind a subscribers-only paywall.
So I guess you’ll need to go buy the mag…
The piece draws heavily on the material I gathered when I was in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank earlier this year. I chart the resilience of Hamas and the continuing decay of Fateh and its non-Islamist allies– noting, among other things, that the aid the US has poured into supporting Fateh has had the effect of hastening the movement’s internal collapse.
I also wrote this:

    Given the current weakness of both Gaza and Ramallah, the center of gravity of the Palestinians’ national leadership has started to move out of the occupied territories: flowing to key centers among the more than 5 million Palestinians living in exile– and also to the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. This shift has big implications, since these are the two Palestinian constituencies whose needs were most notably ignored when Arafat signed the Oslo Accord. Oslo and the negotiations that flowed from it gave very short shrift to the longstanding Palestinian demand that refugees be allowed to return to the homes and properties their forebears fled from in the territory that became Israel in 1948. In addition, Oslo and the entire two-state solution concept are both based on an ethno-nationalist view of statehood that felt threatening to many Palestinian Israelis. In both groups, there is understandable enthusiasm for a unitary, binational state.
    People in Israel’s newly ascendant right have also been touting some alternatives to a two-state outcome. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has revived his former, never feasible idea of a purely “economic” peace with the Palestinians. He and other Israeli rightists also speak of trying to offload the problems of Gaza and the West Bank onto Egypt and Jordan, under what they dub the “regional” approach.
    Since the beginning of his term, President Obama has called for speedy progress toward a two-state solution. But thus far, his administration has done nothing to challenge any of the actions by which Israeli policies make this outcome increasingly impossible. The people of Israel and Palestine are thus perilously poised between very different versions of the future. In the luxurious cafes and shopping malls of Tel Aviv, it is easy to imagine that the present situation can be effortlessly sustained. But for the deeply hurting Palestinians, maintaining the status quo is not an option. Unless Obama moves rapidly to throw US power behind the so- far empty cadence of his rhetoric, Palestinians could soon face another destabilizing crisis.

I’m still on the road in London, which means I haven’t even seen this issue of the mag yet. Any hints from anyone where I might find a copy in London on Monday?

IPS analysis on re-emergence of one-state idea

… It came out yesterday here. Also archived here.
My own main position on one state vs. two states is one of agnosticism. Not least because I’m not a direct stakeholder. Direct stakeholders are around six million Jewish Israelis and more than 10 million ethnic Palestinians– 1.2 million in Israel, four million in the occupied territories, and more than five million in the ghurba (exile/diaspora.)
No democrat can sustain the position that the “vote” of a Jewish Israeli in this central matter ought to count more than that of a Palestinian.
The next political challenge for Palestinians, as I see it, is really to get the diaspora Palestinians (re-) organized and mobilized politically in pursuit of their rights. Starting with, fundamentally, their right to have a say on their nation’s future, after many years of success in the project to disenfranchise them completely. (As I’ve argued for some years now.)
Oslo was a deep stab in the back for them.

My IPS analysis on the Lieberman bombshell

… is here. Also here.
On a related note, we have this from the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information center:

    Dr. Salah Al-Bardaweel, the spokesman of Hamas’s parliamentary bloc in the PLC, reacted to the statements of the new Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who publicly disavowed the Annapolis understandings, saying, “We [in Hamas] weren’t surprised by Lieberman’s statements; however, we consider that such thing should push Fatah faction to review all the feeble agreements it had signed with the Israeli occupation government without bringing any good to the Palestinian people”.
    Hamas and the democratically elected PA government have opposed the Annapolis conference from the first moment, and considered it as a “waste of time”, and a stab in the back of the Palestinian resistance, he underscored.
    “Today, the moment of truth came, and thus, we need a serious and national stand [from Fatah faction] by halting all forms of security coordination with the Israeli occupation, and to reject all security agreements that tore the unity of our Palestinian people”, Bardaweel emphasized.
    On Wednesday, Lieberman underlined that his government won’t be bound by the obligations of the Annapolis conference because it wasn’t ratified by any Israeli cabinet.

Short piece on J’lem on ‘The Nation’ website; DC talks next week

I have a short piece on Jerusalem on The Nation‘s website today. I’ll be working on one more short piece for the website and a couple of longer pieces for the print mag over the month ahead.
Also, in case some of you haven’t looked at the top of JWN’s left sidebar recently, I thought I should tell you about my upcoming stand-alone talk in DC. It’s a sort of trip report– okay, a collection of highlights from my recent trip; and it’ll be at lunch-time on Tuesday, March 31, not April 1, as I’d earlier told some people.
Finally, at the end of next week I’ll be taking part in the G.U Center for Contemporary Arab Studies’ symposium on “Palestine and the Palestinians today”. I’m contributing to the very last of the symposium’s panel discussions, on the Friday afternoon. I’m expecting to have learned a huge amount from the other presenters before then.
The two DC events both require pre-registration.

IPS piece on Egypt’s diplo challenges

I had a new piece up on IPS yesterday, titled ” Pressure Mounts on Egypt to Deliver Results”. You can find it on IPS here and on my analysis-archive here.
I’ll confess I got two small items of fact wrong in the first edition of the piece– the one I sent to IPS. The number of Hamas pols captured by Israel in the West Bank Thursday was reportedly ten, not 20 as I’d written. And it was presumptive incoming Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, not incoming PM Netanyahu, who said not long ago that Egypt could “go to hell.”
I have tried to have these corrections made on the IPS site but it hasn’t happened yet. Hopefully soon. I have made them in my own archived version of the piece.
They do not alter the analysis in any substantial way. Egypt is under pressure from the Palestinians and many other Arabs for its failure to deliver agreements on any of the three negtiations it is currently running, as well as for its continued collaboration with Israel’s project to maintain the tight siege around Gaza.
In the western MSM, the discourse about Middle East regional politics is still completely dominated by the Iran issue; the policies of regional actors are dissected endlessly for whether these actors are “for” or “against” the US-Israeli campaign against Iran. Shorthand for this is the dyad of terms “moderate” and “extremist.”
However, the vast majority of citizens– and quite a few governments– in the Arab world do not see things in these terms. Indeed, they do not consider Iran to be the main threat/challenge that their region faces. They are more concerned about Israel’s coercive power in the region, and in particular its manifestation with regard to the Palestinian issue.
In addition, there is a whole rich history of inter-Arab dealings that has almost nothing to do with the “moderates/extremists” frame into which US commentators like to squeeze the politics of the entire region.
I tried to capture the “Egypt” aspect of this regional dynamic in the IPS piece. Mubarak really is sitting on a hot potato in these negotiations– and he seems, crucially, to be getting little support in his diplomatic efforts from anyone in Washington.

From Have-not to Have (DSL)

JWN readers might recall my laments from years past about the great digital divide in America, between those who have DSL or some form of real broadband and those who don’t. Even made for a sardonic April Fool’s post two year’s ago.
That was then. Today, I got it at last. After years of being ignored, of watching promises of DSL, BPL (power line), microwave, wireless, or cable broadband alternatives go unfulfilled, at last my soon to be taken-over phone company, Embarq, delivered DSL, albeit the “extended reach version.”

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