The real history of Israel’s movement controls in the OPTs

I just went to an excellent briefing that the Israeli saint (and journo) Amira Hass gave to Human Rights Watch about the background to the extremely intrusive and life-strangling system of movement controls that Israel has maintained on the 3.5 million Palestinians of the occupied territories for the past 17 years.
The central point of Hass’s briefing was to focus on the importance of a key administrative change the occupation authorities made on January 15, 1991. For the 20 years prior to that, the basic approach of the occupation authorities had been to promote the idea of “open borders” between Israel and the OPTs. (That, in line with the approach Moshe Dayan had pioneered earlier, whereby Palestinians would be encouraged to work in Israel and to satisfy themselves with some economic gains, in the hope they might forget about their national cause.)
From the early 1970s through January 1991, Hass noted, the prevailing idea was that the Palestinians of the OPTs should have freedom of movement within the West Bank and Gaza, between them and Israel, and between the two of them, as well. Thus, as she recalled– as I have, too– that during the first intifada, organizers and activists would move freely between the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and Israel.
In those days, some Palestinians, as individuals, had restraining orders that forbade them to move from their house, or their town or city. But those were exceptions, made on a name-by-name basis by the IOF.
On January 15, 1991, all that changed. Overnight, the prevailing approach was changed to one whereby Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza were prohibited from entering Israel— and even from entering occupied East Jerusalem, which Israel claimed as its own. That meant also that West Bankers could not visit Gaza, and vice versa.
At that point, only those Palestinians who could get specific, named permission from the IOF were allowed to cross those boundaries. Freedom of movement was transformed from a basic right, to a privilege granted only to a few.
At the time, Hass said, that big change wasn’t much noted because it was part of a much wider clampdown imposed on the OPTs as Israel geared up (or hunkered down?) for the First Gulf War. She said everyone simply assumed that when the war was over, the whole clampdown would be lifted. But the new system of movement controls never was lifted. Indeed, over the years that followed 1991 it was fine-tuned and extended by its IOF administrators; and later, a whole system of truly Orwellian checkpoints and movement control centers was constructed deep inside both territories, on the basis of that administrative change.
Hass noted, crucially, that that change in the movement control philosophy was enacted more than two years before the first ever Palestinian suicide bombing against a target in the West Bank, which occurred in 1993, and more than three years before the first suicide bombings against Israeli civilians inside Israel– which occurred in April 1994, in response to Baruch Goldstein’s massacre in the Hebron Mosque, as the suicide bombers and their masters described their action at the time.
She also talked a lot about the close connection between the movement control regime in the West Bank and the still-continuing Israeli settlement project there.
Another good point she made was to describe the pressure the IOF places on all the OPT’s Palestinians as the “boil the frog slowly” approach…
… On a related note, I see HRW has a new press release out today that criticizes Israel’s the tight restrictions Israel has been placing on the delivery of fuel into Gaza. The criticism is voiced in the fourth paragraph down in these terms:

    The restrictions on electricity and fuel to an effectively occupied territory amount to collective punishment of the civilian population, a serious violation of international humanitarian law. Unlawful attacks by one side to a conflict do not justify unlawful actions by the other.

I find that wording a little flimsy, though it’s better than nothing. Also, the photos they use to accompany the release are far from being the most compelling a person could have taken.
But I think the release has a more serious problem when it says this, right up near the top:

    Israel’s stated goal is to exert pressure on Hamas, the de facto authority in Gaza, to stop firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian-populated areas in Israel – attacks that constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian law. But the energy cuts have had no discernible impact on Hamas’s ability to carry out these attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians. Instead, they have had a terrible impact on civilian life in Gaza, crippling sanitation facilities and curtailing access to schools, hospitals, and other services essential for the civilian population.

I don’t believe that it is of any concern to a human rights organization whether the collective punishment that Israel has mounted against the Palestinian population has “worked” in the way the Israeli authorities stated they wanted it to, or not. Collective punishment is a deliberate attempt by one party to a conflict to entangle the civilian population of the other party in its pursuit of the conflict. And it is therefore, quite simply, illegal. Whether it “works” or not, in the way stated by its perpetrators, is immaterial to whether it is legal or not. (If HRW judged that it “worked”, would that mean that they would applaud it?)
It is fine for the press release to report on what Israel states its goal to be with the fuel-cuts and other aspects of its collective punishment. But HRW’s response to that should simply be that collective punishment of this sort is always illegal, regardless of the validity (or otherwise) of the stated goal, and regardless of the efficacy (or otherwise) of the collective punishment in question from bringing about achievement of the goal.
HRW should cut out nearly the whole of that second sentence there and move up its criticism of this illegal act. Perhaps in the following terms:

    Israel’s stated goal is to exert pressure on Hamas, the de facto authority in Gaza, to stop firing rockets indiscriminately into civilian-populated areas in Israel – attacks that constitute a serious violation of international humanitarian law. But restrictions on electricity and fuel to an occupied territory constitute collective punishment of the civilian population, a serious violation of international humanitarian law. They have had a terrible impact on civilian life in Gaza, crippling sanitation facilities and curtailing access to schools, hospitals, and other services essential for the civilian population…

So, Human Rights Watch, if illegal acts can be described as “working” in some sense, does that make them less illegal and more justifiable for you? I think you have a problem in your argument there.
Excellent, though, to have organized that informative session with Amira Hass. Thanks for that.

Petraeus’s nomination to Centcom: Not all bad?

The news that Pres. Bush has nominated Gen. Petraeus to be head of Centcom raises some interesting possibilities.
Petraeus is best known for three things: For having kowtowed in a fairly craven fashion to Bush for much of the past two years; for having overseen the whole, very politically motivated “surge” campaign in Iraq; and for having co-authored the new Army/Marines Counter-insurgency manual.
When he goes to Centcom, he will be in a whole new ball-game of responsibility for a command that stretches far wider than Iraq. Crucially, he will have some big decisions to make regarding the allocation of resources between the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters.
Some commentators have speculated that he will seek to “take” to the US operation in Afghanistan the kinds of COIN lessons he applied in Iraq. I think that gets it seriously backwards. Actually, many of the lessons they’ve been trying to apply in Iraq were ones that were first developed and applied, albeit on a very small scale, in Afghanistan. The PRTs approach, etc. So the command in Afghanistan doesn’t really need, from their point of view, to “learn” the COIN lessons that Petraeus was using in Iraq. The problem in Afghanistan is not the approach. It is the resources— men and materiel– that the US military is able to put into pursuing the approach.
I believe that Petraeus has a generally good grasp on the demands of COIN. So now, he is going to have responsibility for allocating those resources. He will be faced up sqaure and centrally against “the Dannatt question”. That is, how should the military’s increasingly thinly stretched resources be allocated as between Iraq and Afghanistan?
Maybe Petraeus could be the person who, understanding the problems and now to gain responsibility for averting disaster in the whole of the Centcom theater of operations, might be the respected military leader who tells the political bosses that some tough choices have to be made?
Mainly, one tough choice, as framed earlier by Gen. Dannatt: that we cannot hope to “win” (or avoid disaster) in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore we have to choose…
Interesting possibilities ahead?

Hamas-Israel ceasefire near? (Also, Carter)

This morning, Egypt’s prestigious semi-official daily Al-Ahram reported that the much-needed, Egypt-mediated Israel-Hamas ceasefire (tahdi’eh) agreement may be on the point of getting nailed down. Given the extreme reluctance with which Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak even got drawn into playing the intermediary role in the first place– and the fact that until just a few days ago his media were still engaging in a heavy anti-Hamas propaganda campaign– this latest news is significant indeed.
(Might it also signal that the key Egyptian mediator, security boss, Omar Suleiman has been doing a few things that push the boundaries of whatever mandate he got from his Prez? If so, that would be potentially even bigger news…)
This negotiation has been going on since mid-February. In the past ten days it has been conducted in parallel with Jimmy Carter’s visits to Hamas leaders and to Israel. Obviously we still need to learn a lot more about the interactions between these two processes, though all sides have been quite clear that Carter has not been involved in the ongoing, Egypt-mediated negotiations on the three topics of the tahdi’eh, the prisoner exchange, and lifting the siege Gaza siege.
The Reuters report linked to above tells us,

    Hamas plans to give Egyptian mediators its final response on Thursday to a proposed truce with Israel, a Hamas official said on Tuesday.
    Egypt’s state newspaper al-Ahram reported a preliminary agreement had been reached on “achieving a period of calm with the Israelis”.
    A Palestinian official familiar with the Islamist group’s talks with Egypt said he expected Hamas to agree to a reciprocal truce with Israel “in the Gaza Strip, at this stage”.
    Hamas, which controls the coastal territory, had said it also wanted a ceasefire to cover the occupied West Bank, where the rival Fatah faction of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds sway.
    Sami Abu Zuhri, a senior Hamas official in the Gaza Strip, said the group would present its final response to Egypt on Thursday.
    He declined to comment on its content but said any ceasefire should be based on “ending the aggression against the Palestinian people” and securing the opening of Gaza border crossings.

At this point, it seems the incipient agreement– if it is nailed down– will concern only the reciprocal ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, and some aspects of lifting Israel’s tight economic and vital-life-inputs siege on Gaza. Left out for now are the components of extending the tahdi’eh toi the West Bank, and the prisoner-exchange deal.
Israel’s Ha’aretz reports that Hamas head Khaled Meshaal has approved Suleiman’s Gaza-only agreement. And citing the Ahram report it said that Suleiman

    will soon present the outline of the agreement to officials in Jerusalem, and Hamas will soon present the agreement to Islamic Jihad officials for approval.

So what we have had in parallel with this still-incomplete news is the news that Jimmy Carter has gotten a new commitment from Meshaal regarding what looks like an enhanced hudna-type arrangement that could be strong enough to allow Hamas, under certain conditions, to support a two-state outcome. Here is the BBC video of an interview conducted yesterday with Carter on the subject. Here is the pro-Hamas Palestinian Information Centre’s account of what Meshaal said on the topic at a press conference yesterday.
Here is what the PIC site reports:

    Khaled Mishaal has affirmed on Monday that his Movement was amenable to establishing a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital but without recognizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
    Mishaal… also emphasized the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland in occupied Palestine.
    He also explained that his Movement has “politely” turned down a request by former US president Jimmy Carter to announce a unilateral ceasefire for 30 days, underlining that the Palestinian rocket attacks on IOF positions and on the Israeli settlements around the Gaza Strip were “reaction rather than an action”.
    He noted that Hamas had declared a unilateral ceasefire more than once in the past, but the Israeli occupation government had never respected or reciprocated those steps.
    Mishaal and Carter met twice in the Syrian capital over the past couple of days despite strong objection from the US administration and the Israeli occupation government.
    “Our main objective of reaching a comprehensive truce with the IOA [Israeli Occupation Army] was to protect our Palestinian people, to lift the siege, and to open the Rafah crossing point, which spurred us to reject Carter’s proposal“, asserted Mishaal during the conference.
    As far as the case of the captured IOF corporal Gilad Shalit was concerned, Mishaal explained that his Movement has disagreed to a suggestion made by Carter to swap Shalit with 71 Palestinian prisoners in addition to children, women prisoners, and the kidnapped PA lawmakers and ministers.
    “The issue of the prisoners is very sensitive and concerns almost every Palestinian household; hence, we told Carter that we prefer to follow up the issue through indirect negotiations and via the mediators, especially the Egyptian mediator, in order for us to secure the number we have had tabled”, underlined Mishaal.
    However, he added, Hamas has agreed to a request from Carter to transmit a letter form Shalit to his family to reassure them of his well-being despite the fact that the Israeli occupation authorities maltreat Palestinian captives and deny them family visits.
    With regard to holding a referendum on a possible PA-Israeli peace agreement, Mishaal pointed out that the National Harmony Document, which was signed by all Palestinian factions including Hamas and Fatah on 2006 was transparent in obliging the PA negotiating team to subject any possible peace deal with Israel to either a transparent and free popular referendum where all eligible Palestinians voters inside and outside of Palestine are to vote on it; or to present the agreement before a duly elected Palestinian national council for voting.
    But he noted that there could be no plebiscite amidst the current political rift in the Palestinian arena, underscoring that “national reconciliation should precede any popular referendum”.
    Concerning the opening of the vital Rafah crossing point, Mishaal underlined that the crossing point should be permanently opened being a purely Palestinian-Egyptian crossing point.
    Yet, he explained that his Movement had briefed Carter on all the negotiations Hamas officials had with the Egyptians over this point, underlining that Hamas was agreeing to a formula where Egypt, Hamas, the PA leadership, and the EU observers would operate the border terminal, and that the EU observes are to be based in Egypt and not in “Israel”.
    … Finally, Mishaal underscored that Hamas was and still is amenable and open for Palestinian national reconciliation with all its obligations, including the formation of a national unity government, restructuring the PA security apparatuses on healthy basis, and respecting fundamentals of the political game in the PA among other obligations.

So has Jimmy Carter’s visit to the region been, on balance, helpful to reducing tensions and edging the parties towards more flexible positions? I would say, undoubtedly yes– but not in the straight-line way that I imagine Carter himself would probably have preferred.
What Carter has helped to achieve is to show that Hamas is a serious political organization that is worth engaging with. For example, Meshaal’s declaration about the “enhanced hudna” is a serious statement of the Hamas position– though I note that it actually is not different in substance from what Sheikh Ahmad Yassin proposed, regarding a hudna some 10-plus years ago.
Also, if the international community as a whole were serious about the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force, and about the integrity of the UN’s Partition Plan of 1947, which accorded none of the currently occupied Palestinian territories to the Jewish state, then its representatives could certainly engage in a further negotiation with Hamas regarding how the principles of the hudna plan could be further stretched to become consonant with international law, including the prolongation of the hudna to become a permanent arrangement, and the agreement by the Palestinian state to grant full recognition to all its neighbors, including the Jewish state.
So there is, potentially, a mesh between an enhanced hudna and a two-state outcome.
I have to note, however, that neither Hamas nor the dominant forces in Israeli society are particularly attached to the two-state outcome… That is why it now looks as if both Hamas and the Olmert government are heading for what I call the “two-entity” situation instead. That is, a Palestinian entity in Gaza that is not a state but has some of the attributes of a quasi-state, and an Israeli entity that is also not a settled state since it is unable to define its own borders and remains burdened down by its continuing entanglement in the affairs of the West Bank.
But Carter, bless him, was still operating mainly within the paradigm of the “two-state” outcome, so it was on the elements of that that he was primarily trying to push Hamas. But Meshaal and his colleagues– like the majority forces in the current Israeli government– have been more focused on the established Egypt-mediated negotiations on other matters. Regarding those other matters, Hamas was notably unwilling to give anything concrete to Carter at this time, turning down his proposals regarding the prisoner-exchange deal,and (yet another) unilateral ceasefire.
But on the ceasefire (tahdi’eh) front, things do now seem to be moving through the Egypt channel. Watch that space.
Should Carter feel disappointed with what he has achieved? I don’t think so. Demonstrating a strong commitment to talk with and– even more importantly– listen to all parties is always a valuable practice, and it is one that, sustained over time, can build sturdier bridges of understanding and trust. And he has put another few planks on just such a valuable bridge, including one running between Hamas and Israel’s Shas.
Thank you for your commitment and work, Jimmy Carter.

Fear and violence: Lessons from John Woolman

Today I co-taught the sixth of seven classes I’m committed to teaching to the second- and third-graders in our Quaker meeting’s First Day School (Sunday school.) My co-teacher, Linda Goldstein, and I had done some pretty good things with the kids in the earlier classes, but we hadn’t fixed on a firm plan for today’s class till half-way through the week, when a light went off in my head and I told Linda, “Hey, we really should do at least one session on John Woolman!” She agreed.
So we have four seven- and eight-year-olds in our class. One has pretty severe autism, so a teenage member of the meeting sits with him, which is great.
There is so much of interest about John Woolman’s life and writings that all American kids– not just the relatively small number of Quaker kids– shoulkd know about and understand. Since the unit we’re teaching is on peace and peacemaking, I decided to focus primarily on the incident when, during the big war of the 1760s between, on the one hand, the Anglo settlers in North America and on the other, the French settlers and some of their allies among the Native Americans, when John Woolman decided to head out west from Philadelphia to try to actually meet with, and understand the viewpoint of some of the “Indians” there…
And then– but let’s let John Woolman tell this in the words of his own journal (p.272-3 from the e-text here):

    On reaching the Indian settlement at Wyoming [this is a place in Central Pennsylvania– not in the state of Wyoming!], we were told that an Indian runner had been at that place a day or two before us, and brought news of the Indians having taken an English fort westward, and destroyed the people, and that they were endeavoring to take another; also that another Indian runner came there about the middle of the previous night from a town about ten miles from Wehaloosing, and brought the news that some Indian warriors from distant parts came to that town with two English scalps, and told the people that it was war with the English.
    Our guides took us to the house of a very ancient man. Soon after we had put in our baggage there came a man from another Indian house some distance off. Perceiving there was a man near the door I went out; the man had a tomahawk wrapped under his match-coat out of sight. As I approached him he took it in his hand; I went forward, and, speaking to him in a friendly way, perceived he understood some English. My companion joining me, we had some talk with him concerning the nature of our visit in these parts; he then went into the house with us, and, talking with our guides, soon appeared friendly, sat down and smoked his pipe. Though taking his hatchet in his hand at the instant I drew near to him had a disagreeable appearance, I believe he had no other intent than to be in readiness in case any violence were offered to him…

I always find this to be an amazingly powerful story.
We talked with the kids a little about John Woolman, what his family and community were like as he grew up in New Jersey, and then why he had decided to try to go and meet some Indians. A fear-stoked war-fever was running pretty high in Philadelphia and the rest of the Anglo settlements of the eastern seaboard at the time, so what John Woolman decided to do was very gutsy. (I’m thinking Jimmy Carter here.)
We talked a little about how scary it must have been for JW, traveling in an area with people whose language he did not speak. (Though I also found this page, that has downloadable audio clips of some common phrases in the Lenape language, which the kids found pretty interesting.) And we talked about how, for the Lenape people there, JW’s arrival might have seemed pretty scary, too.
We did a great little role-play– though unfortunately I got one of the key details wrong, in that I had misremembered it as being the Lenape man who was in the house, and JW who was approaching it, though from the journal it was clearly the other way round… But still, the essence of the story was the same: the two men had many reasons to be wary or even fearful of each other. The Lenape man had a weapon, and on seeing JW, pulled it out from under his coat. JW had to decided pretty quickly how to try to defuse the tension, and this is what he did: “I went forward, and, speaking to him in a friendly way, perceived he understood some English. My companion joining me, we had some talk with him concerning the nature of our visit in these parts; he then went into the house with us, and, talking with our guides, soon appeared friendly, sat down and smoked his pipe…”
Moreover, JW was at pains to attribute a non-hostile motivation to the other man’s baring of his weapon: “I believe he had no other intent than to be in readiness in case any violence were offered to him.”
We talked a little bit about other choices JW could have made. Or what if he himself has also had a weapon? Might he then have reacted differently? What role does fear play in stoking violence, etc?
Of course, there is also much, much more in John Woolman’s testimony that is worth exploring. He had such a broad, indeed, “systemic” analysis of the relationshiop between the Native Americans and the white settlers. Read the last paragraph of p.271 and the first paragraph of p.272 there. He also, in other chapters of his journal, shows a very sophisticated understanding of the terrible ills and wrongs of slavery, the relationship between slavery and warmaking, the relationship between greed and violence, and so on…
Much more to think about, write about, and discuss.
… The kids in our Quaker meeting are such a blessing! Ever since 9/11 we’ve had a steady flow of new young families coming into our meeting. The parents, in general, seem eager to find a place where they can help raise their kids in a way that helps them resist the pressures of the violence-laden society all around us. We also have lots of great Quaker elders, including half a dozen who are active Friends in their 90s… Today, we sang John McCutcheon’s great “Happy Birthday” song to Dieta Raisig, to mark her upcoming 92nd birthday. “It makes me think of the good old days… ”

“Re-engage!”– the book is here!

Yesterday I got my hands on the first copies of my upcoming book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush. It is so exciting! Paradigm Publishers have done a fabulous job editing and producing it to a punishingly rapid schedule.
Those of you who have placed advanced orders for the book can now expect them to arrive pretty soon.
The official publication date is still May 15th. The folks at Paradigm and FCNL, and I, are all working hard to give the book a great launch, and then speedy and effective nationwide promotion. If you would like to help us with this, send me an email, as we’re still in the planning stage.
More details about the launch and promo events will be on the book’s website soon.

Hamas, Carter, the Egyptian mediation, etc

I have a big family weekend this weekend. So not much time to blog about Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Khaled Meshaal, or this report, by the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler, on info that the Egyptian foreign minister gave yesterday about the state of the negotiations his government has been mediating between Hamas and the Israeli government. (“We’re making good progress…”)
Regarding the Carter-Meshaal meeting, the new information has been that Carter conveyed to Meshaal a request that Israeli deputy PM Eli Yishai of the Shas Party made when Carter met with him Wednesday to meet with Hamas himself, in order to discuss the prisoner-swap issue. But according to this Haaretz report, Yishai was clear that he did not intend to complicate the government’s diplomacy by discussing the ceasefire question or other questions with Hamas.
My upcoming Boston Review article on the rise of Hamas and some of the broad diplomatic implications of that is now in final editing. It pushes further the analysis I made in this 2006 BR article about the emergence of “parallel unilateralisms” being pursued by Hamas and Likud.
Given the new role being played by Yishai and the undoubted weight of Shas as a voting bloc (currently, 12 seats in the Knesset) and social phenomenon within Israeli society, I should probably factor them– and perhaps some of the Israeli far-right parties– much more into my analysis as it develops.
Shas is certainly a fascinating phenomenon, in general. It is the main religious party of the mizrachi (“eastern”) Jews. In fact, nearly all the Shas people are Jews “ingathered” into Israel from Arab countries. So it is particularly interesting to see the parallels between their modus operandi and emergence and that of Hamas– though Shas has often been able to get its hands into the trough of national budgets and several of its past leaders have been engaged in corruption, which makes it different from Hamas on both counts.
To me, the most interesting question is the importance that Shas gives to defining a formal national border between Israel and a portion of the West Bank that would be under Palestinian “sovereignty.” In the past, Shas’s people were mainly concentrated inside Israel proper, and its concerns were mainly for the level of social spending and services provided to the mizrachi communities there– spending which was very strongly negatively impacted by the huge government investments in the West Bank settlements. My impression, though, is that in recent years many members of the Shas base, like so many observant ashkenazi Jews, have been moving into West Bank settlements– perhaps mainly in and around East Jerusalem.
Can any readers point me in the direction of good materials to read about recent political and demographic developments regarding Shas?? If so, that would be really helpful.
Anyway, regarding Carter, AP’s Bassem Mroue is reporting that he went back for a further one-hour meeting with Meshaal this morning, after spending four hours with him yesterday.
Mroue writes, that this morning Hamas’s deputy politburo head Musa Abu Marzouk

    said Carter and Mashaal discussed a possible prisoner exchange with Israel, as well as how to lift a siege imposed by the Jewish state on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace, is trying to secure the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Abu Marzouk’s politburo colleague Mohammed Nazzal said yesterday that Hamas leaders from Gaza would be traveling to Syria today to confer with Meshaal, and that Carter “”will be informed of Hamas’ response in the coming days.”

Palestinian choice on dealing with a hostile status quo

My good friends Hussein Agha and Rob Malley have a thoughtful and generally intelligent article on the current (sad) state of the formal Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” in the latest New York Review of Books. They do a good job of describing the Bush administration’s bizarre strategy of trying to get Olmert and Abbas to reach what is called a “shelf agreement” by the end of this year– that is, a full final-status Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement that will be signed, ratified through referenda held in both national constituencies– and then, quite simply, be set on a dusty shelf someplace “until circumstances permit” its implementation.
If this is a recipe for anything, it is most surely a recipe for kicking all the many political problems any US president faces in doing Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy along into the next presidency. That is, even if supposing the whole project doesn’t crash long before that…
As I say, Agha and Malley do a good job of describing that. But it’s where they voice their own proposals for what might be done to improve the strategy that they look a bit as though they’re trying to re-arrange a few last deckchairs on the Titanic. They make the generally laudable suggestions that a way has to be found to include Hamas and if possible also Syria into the negotiating process, and make some excellent arguments as to why these steps would be good. Where they are considerably less sound, though, is on limning out what incentive those two important actors might have for joining the process as it is currently structured (and therefore, what changes might be necessary in the process if indeed they are to be persuaded to join.)
Hussein and Rob also keep their general diplomatic/political horizons incredibly tightly focused within the purview of a US-dominated global and regional environment. For example, at one point they argue that the peacemaking approach has “always” been one of choosing whether the Syrian track or the Palestinian track should go first, and the assumption they can’t both be pursued together. But that has really only been the case since 1992 or so. At the Madrid conference of 1991, remember, both parties were well-represented (even if the Palestinian delegates there were still only acting within the fig-leaf of a “joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.”) But the idea that only one lucky contestant– either the Palestinians, or the Syrians– is allowed through the diplomatic gate at any one time is certainly a creation of the post-Cold War, “unipolar” era. Prior to that, there had always been strong pushback, including from the Soviets and other international actors including most Europeans, to that noticeably divide-and-rule approach… And such pushback may well return again.
Personally, I have always argued for a “comprehensive” approach to this peace diplomacy, in which all the complex intertwining tradeoffs can be explicated and resolved together and the state of hostility between Israeli and all of its neighbors be ended once and for all. In the present circumstances, it may even be necessary to aim for this comprehensive peace within the even broader regional context of concluding a comprehensive Mesopotamian and Gulf peace, as well.
Which brings me to the failure of the NYRB duo to even consider that the global/regional environment within which Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts are pursued is already changing, and can certainly be expected to change even more rapidly over the 3-5 years ahead.
I get a little tired of all the deckchair-arrangers who don’t even look at the important broader questions of

    (1) Whether the US can indeed continue to “lead”– that is, as this “leadership” has been exercised until now, exercise complete unilateral veto power over– all the remaining Israeli-Arab peacemaking tasks?
    (2) Whether the US should continue to play that role; i.e. on what grounds do the peoples of the region and the world allot this important task to this distant country, and why should US presidents continue to set themselves up for all the hassle and hostility involved in this, anyway? And finally–
    (3) Whether a more legitimately constituted, UN-led and explicitly UN-anchored diplomatic intervention that embodies global values and is not tied into the partisan, often exclusionary diplomatic agenda of a single, distant power would not, indeed, bring much, speedier, more reliable, and more sustainable benefits to all the parties concerned? (And yes, that includes the citizenries of both Israel and the US as well as the Palestinians and the other Arab parties.)

Right now, we are still in the era of the US’s unipolar near-hegemony over the Middle East, though I don’t this will be the case for very much longer. I have heard any number of Palestinians who, like Hussein Agha, are close to the Fateh leadership, talk very patronizingly about their compatriots from Hamas. (In fact, I seem to recall that was a big theme in the long conversation I had with Hussein in London’s Holland Park a year ago.) These pro-Fateh people say things, “Oh, those Hamas people just really don’t understand how the world works. But maybe one day they’ll learn, and then they’ll be more like us.” My response to that is generally to say that in my experience, the Hamas people certainly do understand the present balance of power in the region– but rather than adapting themselves simply to work within in it, as most Fateh people decided to do many years ago, they are seeking to transform it. A very different mindset, indeed.

U.S. speculators took multi-billion dollar incomes from sub-prime crash

Obscene! Read the whole of this article on how some male US speculators pulled in multi-billion-dollar takings from their activities in so-called hedge funds in 2007, and weep.
The top HF speculator was John Paulson, who took in $3.7 billion in personal income (after expenses) from the fund that he managed. That is more than the GDP of each of 60 nations and territories in 2005, as listed here by Nationmaster. Among those nations was Niger, population 14 million.
The second HF speculator, by 2007 income, was George Soros– $2.9 billion.
The author of the article, David Cho, explained that Paulson,

    amassed his winnings by “shorting” securities linked to subprime mortgages. In a short sale, the investor borrows securities — in this case, subprime mortgages that were widely held by banks, brokerages and other investors — and sells them to another buyer. Later, the investor must buy those securities back and return them to the original lender. As the subprime market collapsed, the value of the securities fell, and Paulson was able to pocket the difference. The lenders were stuck with the losses.
    Several hedge fund managers, including Philip Falcone,… also profited from the mortgage crisis by betting that subprime debt securities would plunge in price. Falcone earned $1.7 billion last year. Others made fortunes by betting that the prices of commodities such as oil, sugar and corn would rise.

So basically, the speculative bets these men made helped fuel the massive current rash of foreclosures of the homes of low-income Americans and the even more devastating rise in world commodity prices.
Cho attributed many of the facts in his article to something called Alpha Magazine. I imagine that would be this article there. He explained that the explosion of income by HF managers to this degree is a phenomenon of just the past few years. He described how top donors within the US’s money-drenched political system had recently beaten back an attempt to have these HF manager incomes taxed just as other individuals’ incomes are, at a top rate in the US of 35%, rather than 15%, as they currently are.
He also wrote that Daniel Strachman, described as an HF “consultant”,

    was skeptical of raising taxes on hedge fund managers, saying they should be rewarded for taking huge risks. Most managers have their own money in their funds and suffer massive losses when their investments go bad.
    “It’s clear somebody has to win and somebody has to lose,” he said. “It’s not pretty at all because people say, ‘Oh my God. Look how much money these guys are making while people are losing their homes and are complaining about the cost of eggs and sugar.’ But so what? We don’t live in a society that is pretty all the time. That’s why it’s capitalism.”

Capitalism, however, involves choices. These can be made by the relevant governments and citizenries in a responsible way, or in a callous and inhumane way. The way they are currently made within both the US and world financial systems quite clearly falls into the latter category. It is time for deep reform. (But we shouldn’t count on George Soros to fund the campaign for it, I think.)

WaPo pulls a Lee Bollinger on Mahmoud Zahhar

Today’s WaPo contains a hard-hitting op-ed from Hamas’s Mahmoud Zahhar, the foreign minister in the Gaza-based PA caretaker government. Zahhar is leading a six-man Hamas delegation that yesterday crossed from Gaza into Egypt with the objective of meeting Pres. Jimmy Carter there today. Carter is then expected to proceed to Damascus, to meet overall Hamas head Khaled Meshaal there, tomorrow.
Of note in Zahhar’s op-ed:

    1. He writes nothing there about the possibility of a limited ceasefire (tahdi’eh) with Israel, over Gaza. This indicates to me that he thinks the probability of reaching such an arrangement have plummeted.
    2. He strongly criticizes the campaign “the US-Israeli alliance” has waged to “negate the results of the January 2006 elections.” A justifiable criticism.
    3. He applauds Carter for saying that Hamas needs to be at the negotiating table “without any preconditions” if any peace effort is to succeed.
    4. But he also lays out a stiff Hamas precondition: that “the starting point for just negotiations” is that Israel should “first” withdraw completely to the pre-1967 borders.
    5. He goes to some length to connect the Palestinians’ present struggle with Jewish history, comparing the present actions of Gaza’s people with the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and speaking of his respect for the “modern proponents of tikkun olam.”
    6. He writes movingly of his two sons, killed in the struggle against Israeli occupation, and describes a long time-frame for the Palestinian struggle: “Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begin, and adversity has taught us patience.”

It’s good that the WaPo published this piece, allowing this senior Hamas leader to speak in his own words on their pages. But the paper’s editors evidently decided to take a leaf out of the “hosting etiquette” book written by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, when he invited Pres. Ahmadinejad to speak there recently. Speaking in their own voice on the editorial page the editors launch a diatribe against Zahhar– and even more so against Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas. In doing that, they twist Zahhar’s words to give them the worst possible meaning.
One example of that: Zahhar wrote, “Last week’s attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West.” As any cursory glance at the news reports would reveal, that attack was carried out by a non-Hamas group. But the WaPo editorial accuses of Zahhar of having “endorsed” the attack, which his carefully chosen wording explicitly did not do– and it even accuses Hamas of having carried it out. It also accuses Hamas of “deliberate targeting of civilians, such as the residents of the Israeli town of Sderot.” That, despite reports from Israelis in the know like Daniel Levy that the security forces judge that Hamas avoids targeting civilians.
Again and again, the editorial twists Zahhar’s words and Hamas’s over-all position. But its authors seem to be doing this mainly in order to fuel the particular object of their ire and derision, Jimmy Carter. What a sad situation.
There is a mean-spirited and extremely biased “gotcha” aspect to the way the WaPo treated Zahhar on its pages– very similar to the way Bollinger treated Ahmadinejad. There were a hundred ways the paper’s editors could have published Zahhar’s essay while dissociating themselves from any suspicions readers might have had that they supported his views– but without resorting to twisting his words to use them to launch their own very vicious attack on Carter, as they did.
Meanwhile, two stories on the paper’s news pages give a fairly well-reported picture of the situation in both the West Bank and Gaza. In this story, Griff White writes about the recent death in the Fateh securoity forces’ custody of the pro-Hamas West Bank preacher Sheikh Majid al-Barghouthi.
White writes:

    eyewitness accounts, photographs, video and an independent Palestinian investigation released this month suggested that he was tortured to death during his February detention.

He also gives considerably more background to the case, starting his article with this:

    When the preacher’s body arrived at the hospital, his back was scarlet where he had been whipped with pipes. His legs were black with bruises. His wrists were sliced open and bloodied…

In a separate story, White wrote about the latest escalation in Gaza:

    Eighteen Palestinians — many of them civilians — and three Israeli soldiers were killed Wednesday during fierce clashes in the Gaza Strip, marking the deadliest day of fighting in more than a month…

One of those killed was Fadel Shana, a 23-year-old cameraman with the Reuters news agency.

Who is Khaled Meshaal?

With all the current commotion about ex-president and Nobel Peace
Laureate Jimmy Carter’s plans to visit Hamas head Khaled Meshaal in
Damascus,  most of the attention has been focused on Carter and
his motivations for undertaking the meeting.  Little has been paid
to Meshaal’s motives for hosting it. Indeed, most of the western media
shows little interest in the question of who Meshaal is, and what Hamas
stands for, beyond simply parroting the fact that Hamas is a “terrorist
organization” that has refused to meet Israel and the US’s demands that
it recognize Israel and foreswear violence before anyone should even
start to talk to it.

That sounds, of course, extremely similar to the view expressed for
many years by the Pretoria government (and Maggie Thatcher) about South
Africa’s ANC which, like most other national liberations movements over
the years– and Hamas today– maintained parallel networks for military
and for civilian, mass-organizing activities.  In Pretoria’s case,
it wasn’t till Prime Minister P.W. Botha and then his successor
Frederik De Klerk finally figured that it was a non-starter to demand
complete the ANC’s complete physical and ideological disarmament before talks were even
started, that the historic negotiations with the ANC got off the
ground…

Anyway, as steadfast JWN readers are aware, back in January I
conducted a lengthy interview
with Meshaal in Damascus.  Based on that interview and other
research I’ve done on Hamas in recent years, I have an analytical
article about Hamas that will be in the upcoming edition of Boston
Review. But as finally edited, that piece ends up saying
little about Meshaal.  So I thought I would take some out-takes
from that article, add a little more material of my own, and write
something here more specifically about him and his role in the
movement…

Khaled Meshaal has been the head of Hamas’s political bureau since
1995. He was
born in 1956 in the village of Silwad, near
Ramallah. When I interviewed him I found him thoughtful
and articulate, but also defensive and generally inflexible.  The
views he articulated were very different from what Israel and the
United Stated government want him to say, though he did express an
interest in concluding a speedy tahdi’eh
(ceasefire) with Israel.  He also
said he and Hamas could still consider the idea of negotiating a deeper
hudna (armistice) with
Israel– a proposal that, just possibly, could be expanded to mesh with
the “two-state” model for peacemaking currently being negotiated
(without much success) between Israel and the Palestinian leadership
under President Mahmoud Abbas.

In a short, informal discussion after the main interview, I raised the
issue of the casualties that Hamas’s campaign of rocketing southern
Israel from Gaza has inflicted among Israel’s civilian population.
Meshaal denied that Hamas’s own rocketeers target civilian
communities.  (At a panel discussion
held on Capitol Hill in February, former Israeli peace negotiator
Daniel Levy gave some intriguing corroboration on this point, citing
the judgment of senior Israeli security officials that Hamas generally
tries to target its rockets onto military facilities inside Israel–
though it does not do nearly enough to stop its smaller allies in Gaza
from targeting Israeli civilian communities.) 

For what it’s worth, I reiterated to him a message that I am sure many
human rights organizations have conveyed to him before, namely that
like any state or non-state organization that undertakes armed
operations for political reasons, Hamas is obliged under international
law to exert strenuous efforts to avoid civilian casualties. He
listened thoughtfully, talked about the many civilian casualties
inflicted by Israel’s operations, and expressed the hope that a
reciprocal ceasefire could soon be concluded.

Meshaal  has generally been best known in the west for an incident
that occurred in 1997 when Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu
sent a two-man Mossad squad to Amman, Jordan, to kill him.  The
agents used a slow-acting lethal chemical, believed to be Fentanyl,
which they injected into his left ear in a public street.  But
they were clumsy and were arrested shortly after delivering
the injection.  Over the hours that followed, Meshaal’s
blood-oxygen level
plummeted, while King Hussein rushed to negotiate a deal whereby
Netanyahu sent over the antidote to the chemical.  The antidote
worked.  Then, to win his agents’ release from Jordanian prisons,
Netanyahu had to release from Israeli prisons more than 40 Palestinian
prisoners including Hamas’s historic founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who
had served nine years of a 15-year term.  (In 2004 the IDF killed
the paraplegic
Yassin in Gaza with a Hellfire missile.)

But who is Khaled
Meshaal?  After Israel invaded the West Bank in 1967, he left his
home village with other family members, joining the stream of West
Bankers
who crossed rickety bridges into Jordan, fearful of the brutality that
they expected from their new Israeli occupiers.  His father, like
hundreds of thousands of
other Palestinians, was already working in Kuwait and after some time
in Jordan the teenage Khaled joined him there.  He attended
Kuwait’s prestigious Abdullah
al-Salim Secondary School, where
he joined the Muslim Brotherhood (MB).  Later,
he studied physics at Kuwait University, then worked as a teacher in
Kuwait—as
many of Fateh’s founding members had done in earlier decades.

Inside Palestine,
Yassin and other long-time MB members spent the first 20 years of
Israel’s
occupation of Gaza
and the West Bank, focusing their energies on building networks of
Islamist religious, social, and
educational institutions in the two Israeli-occupied territories. 
It was only after the first intifada erupted
in 1987 that the MB founded an overtly political organization, the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya
(Islamic Resistance Movement), usually known  as ‘Hamas’, which
also means ‘Zeal’.  Since the early 1980s the Palestinian MB’s
parent body, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, had kept a commitment to
work only nonviolently within Egypt’s political system.  But Hamas
rapidly developed its own armed wing, and from 1987 worked through
parallel militia-based and nonviolent, community-based structures in
the occupied territories.

The Israelis hit back
hard, launching successive broad waves of arrests against Hamas’s
operatives in the occupied territories.  In 1989 the movement
decided that, given the extreme vulnerability of its networks inside
Palestine, it should move its overall headquarters operation
elsewhere.  For a number of years its leadership structure was
fairly widely distributed as it searched for a stable base for
operations, preferably close to the occupied territories.  In
1990,when
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, most of Kuwait’s
large Palestinian community, including Meshaal, fled to Jordan. 
He took over Hamas’s Jordan bureau.  In 1993, Hamas finally
reached a formal agreement with Jordan to host its leadership operation
there.  At that point, Meshaal was the deputy to political bureau
head Musa Abu Marzuq.  Two years later, Abu Marzuq was arrested in
New York after making the error of judging he could safely relocate to
the United States. Meshaal took over as head of the political bureau at
that point.

Relations with Jordan
continued to be stormy.  Finally, at the end of 1999, Meshaal and
the rest of the Hamas leadership were all kicked out of the country.
After a short sojourn as “guests” of the Emir of Qatar, they concluded
a new headquarters agreement with Syria.  Meshaal has lived there
ever since, though he has traveled to numerous countries in and far
beyond the Arab world on official business…

(One excellent source
on Meshaal and the broader history of Hamas that I have drawn on here
is Azzam Tamimi’s recent
book: Hamas:
A History from Within. Hamas’s own English-language website is here. You can access some of my earlier writings on Hamas through this portal.)