Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 142 – Info, analysis, discussion

Support democratic principles in Egypt!

Reuters is reporting from Cairo that Egypt’s biggest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood says that only 50 or 60 of the thousands of its members who have tried to register as candidates in the April 8 local elections have been allowed to do so.
Reuters reports this:

Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak receives considerable financial, military, and “security sector” support from the US and from other western democracies. Now is a time for democrats in western and other countries to stand up. Do we support democracy in other countries only when it brings to power people who agree completely with our own views? Or do we support the participation in it of all parties and movements that agree to abide by the rules of the democratic game, first and foremost among them being an agreement to settle differences through nonviolent means?
Regarding the use of violence and violent intimidation sin the prent confrontation between the Mubarak regime and the opposition political forces in Egypt, look at any of the pictures of what is happening at the candidate-registration places and read any of the accounts of what is happening, and you decide: which side is trying to use violence and intimidation?
Western governments should inform Mubarak that the aid they give him is completely conditional on him allowing these long-planned elections to proceed in a free and fair manner. Otherwise, what kind of “democracy” is it that these governments proclaim?

Will this Israel-Hamas de-escalation continue?

Barak Ravid and Amos Harel of Haaretz tell us that PA President Mahmoud Abbas told al-Arabiyya t.v. that

Hamas has asked Israel to refrain from killing its leaders, and the leaders of militant movement Islamic Jihad. Abbas said “I think that Israel has agreed or will soon agree.” He added that the details of the agreement will likely emerge in the coming days.

I couldn’t find it on Arabiyya’s English-language site and didn’t have time to look on their Arabic-language site.
All the reporting I’m seeing today (read below) indicates that:

here

the announcement

It is worth noting, too, that as Husni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt acts in this matter it is acutely aware of the rising pressure it faces from its own, very strongly pro-Hamas citizenry.
AP reports from Jerusalem today that officials there say that PM Olmert,

to allow Egypt to proceed in mediation talks.

This is an intriguing follow-up to what I was reporting here on Saturday, namely that the Egypt-mediate Israel-Hamas negotiation seemed to be making serious progress.
Haaretz’s Ravid and Harel write this:

if today people go to school in Ashkelon without Grad-type [rockets], or sit in Sderot and Sapir College without Qassams, I wouldn’t propose complaining about any quiet day

A separate piece in Haaretz, co-written by Harel and Ami Issacharoff, gives details of the decline in Gaza-sourced rocketings of southern Israel in recent days, though they concluded this didn’t seem to have been the result of a specific agreement between Israel and Hamas. They wrote:

Since last Friday, one or two rockets have been fired each day.

As for the Hamas-linked Palestine Information Center, yesterday it reported from Cairo that,

Today the PIC reported from Damascus that “Mohamed Nasr, a member of the Hamas political bureau, categorically denied that his Movement had reached an agreement on a truce with the Israeli occupation through Egypt.” But Nasr also said that the negotiations in Egypt were ongoing.
If the present “lull” can indeed be hardened into a formally agreed– and hopefully also credibly monitored— ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that will be excellent news: for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, and for the prospects of a much broader calming of tensions throughout the whole region.
In the context of such a calming, everyone concerned about the region’s wellbeing can proceed with due haste to the broader kinds of negotiation that were urged by the Iraq Study Group: one on the terms of (and context for) the US withdrawal from Iraq, and the other on a sustainable and comprehensive final Arab-Israeli peace agreement on all outstanding tracks.
Neither of those two broader negotiations can even start to be addressed so long as the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, and so long as Israel maintains its completely inhumane siege of Gaza. Therefore let’s hope the most recent de-escalation continues, accelerates, and deepens.

Good recent resources on Palestinians and nonviolence

Ten days ago I had the pleasure of attending a book event for Mary E.
King, in connection with the recent publication of her book A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian
Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Nation Books,
2007). Mary is a long-time friend and colleague, and this book is
a compendious mine of information on its subject.

Once I decided to write something here about Mary’s book, I thought it
would also be a good idea to discuss with the people who were my
collaborators and co-authors in the International Quaker Working Party
on Israel and Palestine of 2002-2004, to see if we could also put up
onto the web the great
chapter on Nonviolence in our 2004 book When the Rain Returns:
Toward Justice and
Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel. So I consulted with Tony Bing, who was the principal author of that
chapter and with the 12 other– mainly Quaker– people who were the
other co-authors of the book project; and now, I am happy to be able to do this.
(Sadly, our friend Misty Gerner, who was a wonderful colleague on the
project, passed away in 2006. So I consulted with her widower and
literary executor, Phil Schrodt, in her place.)

The good news, therefore: You can now access our Nonviolence chapter here in HTML format and here as a Word doc.
Please note the licensing conditions at the top there — as well as the
instructions for how you can order a copy of the whole of our book,
which is certainly still worth reading!

… Mary King brought to her book a long engagement in both the
practice and the study of nonviolence. Back in the early 1960s
she was one of “a tiny handful” of white women from the northern
American states who traveled to the south to work with the Southern
racial eqaulity movement called the “civil rights movement” that was
led by Martin Luther King, Jr.. Her memoir of those days, Freedom Song, later won the Robert
F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. Her second book was Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
which surveyed not only the nonviolent freedom movements led by those
two men but also half a dozen more recent nonviolent movements for
radical social change. Along the way she also got a doctorate in
the topic of the role of nonviolence in international relations.
She has been closely involved in Middle Eastern issues for many years
and has done numerous projects with President Jimmy Carter’s Carter
Center. Indeed, Carter contributed a short Foreword to Mary’s
latest book.

Reading the book brought back so many memories for me! The first
intifada, which ran from 1987 through 1993, truly was a time of
enormous social, organizational, and ideological excitement for the
Palestinians of the occupied territories– as it was, too, for those
Israeli sympathizers who were mounting their own nonviolent actions
within Israel, with a view to “Ending the Occupation” and “Bringing the
Troops Home.” I spent two periods of time in Palestine and Israel
in those years: one visit that lasted two months or so, as I recall it,
in the summer of 1989, and then a shorter visit in 1992.
Actually, in 1989, I started off doing some research oin the nonviolent
movements on both sides of the Green Line– work that was
subsequently published in two articles in the short-lived “Wolrd
Monitor” monthly magazine… (I should really look them out and re-read
them.) But then I became fascinated with the relationship between
the people inside the OPTs who were running and leading their own
intifada there and the PLO leadership that was stuck in distant Tunis;
and I published an article on that topic in the Spring 1990 issue of
the Middle East Journal.

A couple of aspects of Mary’s book are particularly noteworthy.
One was the way she was able to convey just how widespread and
all-encompassing the mass organizing was that lay at the heart of the
resilience the Palestinians showed in the first intifada. For
example, she has a whole chapter on “Women at the forefront of
nonviolent struggles” during the intifada, and another on the
“Movements of students, prisoners, and work committees.”
Actually, a really good complement to these chapters is Joost
Hiltermann’s classic 1993 book Behind the Intifada which
provided a very rich account of the development of the many kinds of
mass organizations in the OPTs in the years before 1987 as well as (as
I recall it) during the early years of the first intifada.

Another notable aspect of Mary’s book is that at many points it
underlines the huge role that was played during the first intifada by
the activist Palestinian intellectuals who were based in occupied East Jerusalem.
Back in those days, the “special” status the Israelis acorded to East
Jerusalem by virtue of their claim that it was “part of” Israel meant
that the city’s 150,000 indigenous Palestinian residents had broad
freedoms to travel, both inside Israel and throughout the West Bank;
and even down to Gaza– that their compatriots in the rest of the
occupied territories did not have. Because of those freedoms, and
because East Jerusalem really still was in so many ways the historic
business, religious, and educational hub of the whole of the West Bank,
as it had been since the nakba
of 1948, the city’s community leaders played a huge role not only in
coordinating but also in leading the actions of the first intifada.

As I have noted several times before, it was only after Oslo that the
Israelis started erecting a ring of steel around East Jerusalem,
cutting it off in any way they could think of from its historic West
Bank hinterland and forcing many aspects of the city’s life to wither
on the vine. Since Israel was at the same time also building the
fence that started to completely enclose Gaza, the residents of East
Jerusalem then became effectively shut off from that other main
concentration of the “also-occupied” among the Palestinians.
Thus, since Oslo, the Jerusalem Palestinians have been cast into a
cut-off form of limbo, and their once-proud institutions have been
either suffocated or– as in so many cases– shut down completely by
the occupation authorities, even while the building of Jews-only
settlements and Israeli ministries and other forms of national
institutions has continued apace within every corner of the city…

So there is a particular poignancy to reading Mary’s account of the
crucial and exciting leadership role the Jerusalem Palestinians played
in the first intifada.

Her book is very broad, very detailed, and meticulously
researched. I might wish, though, that she had taken the story a
couple of steps further and added a couple of chapters about what
happened at the end
of the first intifada, that is, effectively, what happened with the
September 1993 signing of the Oslo Accord and then, hot on its heels,
the “Return” of the PLO leadership from Tunis to the OPTs. In our
chapter on Nonviolence in When the
Rain Returns we wrote quite a lot about that, because we judged it to be an important part of the whole long story of
nonviolence activism among the Palestinians.

Regarding what became of the Palestinians’ use of, and attitudes
towards, nonviolence as the intifada ground on and on, we wrote:

… As the intifada dragged on
into its fourth and fifth years with no respite in sight, the
Palestinians’ use of physical violence mounted–both against the
Israelis and to try to resolve differences of opinion inside
Palestinian society. National unity
started to erode, as national exhaustion set in.
The activists and leaders of the intifada
had all along resisted the urgings of Israeli and U.S. government officials
that they negotiate their own future themselves, without involving the
exiled PLO. “Only the PLO can represent
us,” they stated repeatedly. In 1993, they
got what they had asked for: Israel did finally conclude
the Oslo Accords directly with the PLO. Once
Arafat and his colleagues “returned” to the occupied territories,
however, they proved a hugely damaging disappointment for the people
there. Long used to the secretive,
authoritarian ways of an exile-based underground, Arafat almost
immediately felt threatened by the network of community organizations
he found in Gaza and the West Bank. As Raji
Sourani reminded us in Gaza,
Arafat then set about
working to dismantle the very community-based organizations whose
grassroots activism had brought him back to his homeland.

We also have a whole section there on the debate that raged inside the
Palestinian movement on the question of nonviolence, in the decade
after 1993.

More from Rabbani on Fateh

My esteemed colleague Mouin Rabbani was kind enough to send me a speedy and thoughtful response to the comments I wrote here, a couple of days ago, about the short article he wrote on Fateh in the latest issue of the “Arab Reform Bulletin”. Here it is, with his permission but under a headline composed by myself. ~HC

More notes on Fateh
By Mouin Rabbani
1. Fragmentation: I entirley agree with you. The point I sought to make is not that fragmentation into multiple, competing power centres is a new phenomenon, but that it has ‘progressed’ markedly in recent years relative to earlier periods – particularly since 2000 and especially so after Arafat’s death. Poor choice of words on my part.
As for your point that such an organisational structure may have been only way for Fatah to proceed in earlier eras I’m not sure I agree. While it doubtless served the agenda of being everything to everyone and thus played a role in Fatah’s ability to establish and maintain supremacy of the national movement, more disciplined and coherent forms of organisation are not so difficult to envisage. More importantly, I don’t think you can separate the relatively functional ‘controlled decentralisation’ – if you will – of the 1970s and 1908s from the endemic and accelerating fragmentation of more recent years.
2. Spinal cord analogy: I chose this because I believe that Fatah in its multiple forms collectively still represents the center of gravity of the Palestinian movement, and that the quadraplegic current status of the national movement is the result of the desultory state of this spinal cord.
3. Nature of challenges of 6th General Conference: I entirely agree it is not “merely a logistical, organisational problem”. I was pointing out that this is one, important aspect regarding the convening of the GC, not that it is either the more important one or even the most important dimension of Fatah’s broader crisis. So no disagreement between us here.
4. Return of exile leaders: Personally I fully concur with the decision of some key leaders to refuse to return to a partially self-governing occupied territory masquerading as a state in formation because in their view this would confer legitimacy on Oslo. As you point out in some cases such decisions were voluntary, in others leaders and cadres were prepared to return but blocked by Israel and/or sabotaged by members of the Palestinian Oslo elite inciting Israel against erstwhile comrades. Qaddumi like Hawatmeh falls somewhere in between – an initial refusenik, he later expressed an interest in returning and deals to this effect were ultimately vetoed by Israel (Netanyahu if I recall correctly).
Finally, yes, as you surmise I sought in this article to focus primarily on issues relating to the convening of the GC rather than Fatah’s broader crisis, though the two are obviously related. I am as it happens currently working on a broader examination of the latter.

M.E. peace mission for Annan, Carter, & Robinson

The group of visionary retired world leaders called The Elders has announced that three of their number– Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and former Irish President Mary Robinson– will be undertaking a peace-focused fact-finding mission in mid-April.
The announcement says the three,

will listen to all parties in the countries.

I am intrigued by the way they describe their mission there. They notably make zero mention of the very disappointing “Annapolis” peace process. Indeed, it also looks as if that last sentence there was sort of tacked on as a later addendum to what otherwise looks like a very appropriately open-ended, listening-focused mission.
The very best of luck to them. If it would help them, I’d be very to send along any of my writings on the conflicts and the prospects for peace in Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine. That would include numerous posts here on JWN, or articles elsewhere, especially my longer articles in Boston Review since 2001; my 2000 book on Syrian-Israeli peace diplomacy; or the 2004 book that I worked on with 13 other Quakers that was basically the result of a three-week listening-centered mission we conducted in Israel and Palestine in 2002.
The very best of luck to them. I have great respect for all three of these leaders. I have had the honor of meeting and interviewing both Robinson (when she was at the UNHCHR in Geneva) and Carter. I certainly hope that on this mission these Elders make a point of meeting, and listening carefully to, all the relevant parties in the region including those who are currently judged to be “off-limits” to the diplomats of the US and its allies on the (highly politicized) grounds that they are terrorists. I’ll read the report they produce with huge interest.

Progress in the Gaza ceasefire talks?

The western MSM has been fixated on Thursday’s tragic, unjustifiable killings of eight students at a West Jerusalem yeshiva (Jewish religious school), and to a lesser extent on the effect that those killings might have on the Annapolis-launched “peace process.”
But they’re missing the main story. The really serious and interesting peace (or rather ceasefire) negotiations are not the Annapolis-launched ones. Those have led nowhere. So far they’ve resulted only in: the proliferation, rather than removal, of IOF checkpoints and Israeli settlements in the West Bank; and the continuation of acts of violence against Israeli civilians. The serious and potentially much more fruitful negotiations are the ones that have apparently been gathering pace in recent weeks between the Olmert government and the leaders of Hamas, through the mediation of Egypt.
Fathia el-Dakhakhni of the independent Egyptian daily Al-Masry al-Youm has the story in today’s paper.
It seems like this negotiation is not yet poised on the brink of a breakthrough. But it does seem serious. What I found fascinating and significant in Dakhakhni’s story were two main things:
1. She had yet another reference to the fact that this negotiation is “US-backed.” She writes that Condi Rice, who was in Egypt as well as Israel and Ramallah this past week, “said she had talked to the Egyptian leaders and expressed confidence that their efforts could promote the US-backed peace talks.”
I checked the record, and here is AFP’s account of what Rice told reporters in Brussels, Thursday. That account is a little fuller than the State Department’s own version. Specifically, the AFP account spells out that Rice’s remarks were in response to a question “about reported talks between Cairo and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
2. Dakhakhni also gives details of the way that Hamas’s Gaza spokesman Taher al-Nono describes the movement’s negotiating position at this point. Dakhakhni wrote that a delegation representing both Hamas and Islamic Jihad met on Thursday in Egypt with Egyptian government officials, and presented their terms for a ceasefire to them. She quoted Nono as saying that the Egyptian side had given no immediate response, but had told the Palestinians to “expect a response to our suggestions soon.”
As to the content of those “suggestions”, Nono told Dakhakhni that the Haniyeh-led Palestinian “caretaker government”, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad all have a single, “clear” position regarding the ceasefire, and they established three three conditions for the ceasefire with Israel:

We should note that Rice’s comments, as reported above, were made before the news broke about the killings in the Jerusalem yeshiva. It is entirely possible that Olmert’s position regarding the talks with Hamas– and therefore also that of Rice, who acts primarily, though perhaps not always solely, as his emissary– has changed since then.
The Hamas leadership certainly dented its bona-fides as a negotiator with the confused response it displayed to the yeshiva killings. The Hamas-linked Palestinian Information Center website still describes the killings as a “heroic operation”, though the Hamas leaders have also been at pains not to claim the movement’s responsibility for it. The perpetrator of the killings, who may well have acted alone, was 24-year-old Ala Abu Dehaim, a resident of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. He was shot dead during the melee that accompanied his lethal rampage.
The yeshiva killings have probably made it harder, at least in the immediate future, for Olmert to justify to his people a policy of concluding a ceasefire with Hamas concerning Gaza. But if Olmert is indeed serious about going for a ceasefire with Hamas over Gaza, perhaps he should also have thought that many of his own government’s escalatory decisions of recent weeks made retaliation from enraged Palestinians, whether in East Jerusalem, in other portions of the occupied West Bank, or elsewhere, considerably more rather than less likely? If both sides are serious about pursuing this ceasefire option, then surely they both need to think rather carefully about all the many implications this approach has on other aspects of policy.
A final, very important note about Egypt’s role in all this. As I wrote here not long ago, President Mubarak seems to really hate the idea of Gaza becoming closely integrated with Egypt in any political way. This is primarily because of the long and close political ties between Hamas, which now runs Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are his own main– and currently very threatening– opposition group.
But it is the very closeness of these ties and the current strength of the MB within Egyptian society that are also, right now, forcing Mubarak to do something to alleviate the suffering of Gaza’s 1.45 million people. However much he wants to, he cannot simply turn his back on their plight.
These twin factors are what seem to be motivating his recent decision to build a sturdy, presumably unbreachable, wall between Gaza and Egypt. In the context of the existence of such a wall it will be far more possible for him and Hamas between them to control and regulate the passage between Egypt and Gaza. I think both leaderships were quite dismayed about some of the things that happened during the 11-day period in Jan-Feb when there was no barrier and no regulation at all. Hundreds of Egypt’s own homegrown and very violent and unpredictable jihadi militants crossed from Egypt into Gaza, considerably complicating Hamas’s ability to exert its control over Gaza’s relatively lengthy border with Israel. And other unwelcome passages of people and goods– in both directions– no doubt also occurred. As I wrote here February 3,

For Gaza’s economic opening to and through Egypt to work, as [leading Hamas member Mahmoud] Zahhar and his colleagues want it to, both the Palestinians and the Egyptians need to be able to control– and keep calm– their respective borders with Israel.

Finally, regarding Egypt, everyone should stay closely attuned to the popular pressures that are continuing to mount against Mubarak’s regime. This is, certainly, a matter of great importance to the prospects of a successful Israeli-Hamas ceasefire. But it is also of far, far wider importance to the strategic balance within the whole region!
Two other reports in today’s English language AMAY give a small glimpse into the depth of this crisis. This one is about the long-continuing, economic-related unrest in the industrial region of Mahalla el-Kubra. And this one is about highly politicized sermons and associated disturbances inside the Al-Azhar mosque during yesterday’s prayer.
It is notable that in Egypt– as in Lebanon and most likely numerous other Arab countries– popular unrest is currently being mobilized around the two issues of:

The ageing Egyptian president probably feels that today he is sitting atop an increasingly explosive mix; and no doubt he tried to convey some of that sense of discomfort/threat to Condi Rice during their recent meeting.
Cairo. Watch that space.

‘Survival’ and how we think about war

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, of which I’ve been a
member for some 20 years, is this year celebrating its 50th
birthday. To mark the occasion they’ve published a special
issue of their quarterly journal Survival,
under the title “The Bush Years and Beyond.” It is a generally
excellent edition, by a short and informative account by British
strategic-studies grandee Michael
Howard of the history of the IISS. Of special note there:
that back in 1958, the IISS was founded to provide a specifically
British kind of counterpart to pre-existing US think-tanks like the
Rand Corporation; and that the British Council of Churches was one of
the organizations that– moved by the ethical concerns some of its
leaders had over the whole question of Britain’s nuclear arsenal–
participated in founding the IISS

Since 1958, the IIS has changed in many ways. It has tried hard
to become much more international, even if with only mixed success. And
it has become far less concerned with the big ethical/philosophical
questions around nuclear war and warfare in genera, and far more in
thrall to the big defense contractors who are well represented in the
membership, and far less connected to any religious bodies or
individuals. (Regarding Quakers, I know of only one other apart from
myself who is an IISS member. And I confess that I am unaware if
any other members of IISS bring any specifically religious
sensibility to their engagement with it, though doubtless there are
some who do.)

Be those broader fact as they may be, there are a number of excellent
articles in this anniversary edition of Survival. Far and away the
most thought-provoking, in my view, is “Strategy and the Limitation of
War”, by Hew Strachan of All
Souls College, Oxford. Strachan’s article is an excellent and
much-needed exploration of how
specialists, policymakers, and commentators think about different forms
of war. He notes that the way wars are described almost
inevitably frame the way that we think about them. He notes, in
particular, that the rhetoric that members of the Bush administration
have generated about the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) and about this
being a “long war” is at one and the same time:

(1) actually unknowable, since no-one
knows the length of a war going in (though I would add that inasmuch as
people enter a “long war” mindset, the use of the term from the get-go
might itself act as a powerfully self-fulfilling prophecy); and

(2) an intellectually slovenly and in practice very counter-productive
way of aggregating under the “long war/GWOT” rubric situations,
clashes, and armed confrontations that in reality often have little to
do with each other.

Strachan is particularly percipient when he describes how the legacies
of the “total war” thinking of the Cold War shaped the way that most
western strategic theorists approached the challenges posed by the
attacks of September 11, 2001. He writes:

Continue reading “‘Survival’ and how we think about war”

Obama, Clinton, (and Samantha Power)

Personally, I have not a moment’s doubt about Barack Obama being ready “from Day One” to be President of the United States. I have spoken with numerous people who know him and his work far better than I do, and who have held lengthy discussions with him about national-security affairs, whose word regarding his readiness I trust. One of them is that canny and well-tested “Realist” and situational hawk Zbig Brzezinski.
What Obama brings to the role of “Commander-in Chief” that is distinctive is his readiness– eagerness, even– to completely re-frame the crucial challenge of our time, which is:

“How should we seek to redefine and clarify the relationship between the US citizenry and the other 95% of the world’s people?”

Up till now, Obama has shown his commitment to a moving determinedly away from fear-mongering; toward a calm and quietly self-confident reassessment of America’s place in the world; and toward– as he and I have both defined this– “Re-engagement” with the rest of the world on a new, more authentic, and much more respectful and egalitarian basis.
(I certainly hope he doesn’t shift his stance on these issues now.)
Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has recently entered in a big way into the distinctly Bushist business of fear-mongering, much-spreading, and tinpot bellicosity.
Honestly, I don’t believe any Democratic candidate can out-McCain McCain on that basis. The only way to win– and the only way to set our country on the right track– is to change the terms of our national conversation about security affairs, completely.
If I have full confidence in Obama as Commander-in-Chief, I should add that right now I have a little less confidence in the idea that his key foreign-policy advisor Sam Power is “ready” for any high-level job involving the conduct of diplomacy. In an “unguarded moment” in a press interview in the UK yesterday– where she has gone to promote her new book– Power described Hillary Clinton as “a monster.” She also told the interviewer, Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, that, “”We f***** up in Ohio…”
Neither of those locutions is the language a diplomat of any rank would use. Power– herself a former hard-hitting journalist– is quite evidently “a breath of fresh air” in the usually very stuffy world of international diplomacy. She is also extremely smart. But not quite smart enough to have avoided that language in a press interview.
Of the two statement she made to Peev, the only one she took back was the one about Clinton being a monster. In a statement released by Obama’s campaign she said: These comments do not reflect my feelings about Sen. Clinton, whose leadership and public service I have long admired.” She also said she “regretted” that remark. (Perhaps she should also have expressed regret over the language used in the other remark, too.)
I really do like and admire Sam Power. She has come under fire recently for some criticisms she voiced back in 2002 about the atrocities the IOF committed during its seizing of Jenin camp. I am strongly inclined to defend her. But if she really aspires to operate at the highest levels of US diplomacy– as I assume she well might, in an Obama presidency– then she needs to think a little more carefully before she speaks, and to use her undoubted skills in conceptualizing and wordsmithing to make sure she expresses herself in more temperate tones.

What is Fateh FOR?

The excellent Palestinian political analyst Mouin Rabbani recently left the International Crisis Group. Their huge loss. But already he has published a very informative piece of analysis on Fateh’s very convoluted attempts to convene the sixth session of its policy-setting General Conference, which appears in the latest edition of the Arab Reform Bulletin.
He notes, “Much has changed since Fatah held its Fifth General Conference in 1989.” Indeed it has! Not only the passing of Yasser Arafat– along with, as Rabbani notes, that of fully one-third of the other 21 members of Fateh’s allegedly highest decisionmaking body, its Central Committee. But also the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the broad frame that the whole Cold War provided to Arab-Israeli issues. And the First US war in the Gulf and the Madrid conference. And that whole small matter called “Oslo” and the disappointments that it engendered, including Israel’s integration of considerable additional portions of the West Bank into its string of colonial settlements…
And the rise of Hamas and the worldview and strategy it has presented, in stark contrast to those of Fateh. And the building of the Apartheid Barrier in the West Bank. And Israel’s determinedly un-negotiated exit from both South Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. And the 2003 Iraq war and the subsequent degradation of US influence in the Middle East. And the transformation of substantial portions of Fateh into US-financed kapo forces within the Palestinian movement. And the 33-day war of 2006…
And, and, and… The head positively spins to recall all the Palestine-related events that have occurred since 1989!
Yes, it is probably high time that Fateh held another General Conference. Though as Rabbani explains, having it be successful– or even, having it happen at all– will not by any means be easy. Read the whole of his analysis there (it is not long) to discover why.
He writes,

Fatah in recent years has fragmented, not just into two or three rival camps but into multiple, competing power centers. These power centers (generally associated with individual leaders engaged in constantly shifting alliances) consist of networks based on patronage, shared history, geography, foreign sponsorship, ideology, policy, or various combinations of the above.

This is generally true. However, I don’t think it’s true to say this is only a phenomenon of recent years. In my experience, Fateh has always consisted of “multiple, competing power centers.” To a great extent, this was by design– for reasons both understandable (and perhaps even laudable) as well as less savory. So long as Fateh was an underground movement, reweaving the fabric of Palestinian nationhood out of a (refugee) population that was dispersed and very vunlerable, and still daily tasted the bitterness of exile, dispossession, and defeat, having multiple overlapping networks was probably the only way to proceed. But that model of organization made no sense at all– in fact, became actively counter-productive– once the leaders of the movement had made the “Return” to the homeland, as they were finally able to do in 1994, after Oslo.
Okay, make that a “Return” to a tiny portion of the homeland.
But still, once they were back in the homeland, they confronted the rooted, much more settled population of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza– the communities whose steadfastness and heroism during the First Intifada had brought Arafat and his cronies back into the negotiating business and back into the homeland, in the first place.
So did Arafat and the cronies then look at the relatively very effective new forms of organizational model that the Palestinians in the homeland had developed, recognize their strength, integrity, and resilience, and transform the whole of Fateh into a new nationalist organization based on that model?
They did not. Indeed, one of the first thing Arafat and his circle of enablers did after they got back to the OPTs in 1994 was to set about dismantling as many of the community-based grassroots organizations as they could. Those they could not dismantle, they sought to co-opt. And in the post-Oslo years Arafat had access to enormous great pots of money to distribute in the form of patronage.
Rabbani concludes his analysis thus:

The stakes are extremely high. If Fatah fails to hold the General Conference—and in the process to make the necessary leadership reforms and formulate a meaningful national program—in 2008, it is probably finished as a movement. Despite the rise of Hamas, Fatah remains the spinal cord of the Palestinian national movement, and its disintegration could only mean further Palestinian paralysis.

I’m trying to think through this “spinal cord” analogy a little more… On reflection, I still don’t think it’s an apt analogy. A “spinal cord” would imply that this entity is commanded by a single, unified intelligence, which then distributes its messages through different limbs and organs? But at this point Fateh has no single, unified intelligence. It has survived since the seismic shock of 1993 only by having its members everywhere– inside the homeland and outside it– “agree to disagree”.
But even that is understating the depth of the ideological and political chasms inside Fateh. For example, Rabbani writes that, ”

Organizational preparations for the General Conference rest with a committee led by the Tunis-based FCC member Abu Mahir Ghnaim, whose refusal to enter the occupied territories prior to their liberation has meant that preparations within the West Bank and Gaza Strip are the responsibility of Fatah’s Department of Organization and Mobilization … currently headed by FCC member Ahmad Qurai (Abu Alaa)…

But then he treats this situation as if it is merely a logistical, organizational problem. It is not! The refusal of many weighty members of the Fateh leadership to return to the OPTs while they were still under Israel’s control– and also, the inability, under the terms of Oslo, of most of Fateh’s historic followership from the refugee camps of Lebanon and elsewhere in the diaspora to be allowed to do so– is certainly no mere “organizational” matter. It is a symptom of the extremely harsh ideological divides within the organization.
Back in 1993-94, perhaps Arafat and the cronies thought they could fudge those disagreements. After all, wasn’t Oslo supposed to result, within five years from January 1994 in the conclusion of a final-status peace agreement with Israel? So if Abu Mahir Ghnaim refused on grounds of ideological purity to enter the West Bank “under Israeli occupation”, or if 10,000 Abu Fulan’s and Um Fulan’s from the Fateh base were still prevented by Israel from entering the West Bank under the terms of Oslo– then surely, that did not really matter very much? At the time, Abu Mazen and the rest of the Inside Ramallah gang were quite confident that– if only they showed the Israelis the necessary degree of love!– by 1999 they would end up with their fully independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. And then Abu Mahir Ghnaim, and Abul-Lutf, and all those thousands of Abu Fulan’s and Um Fulan’s from the diaspora could all come flooding “home”… Well, either to the new Palestinian state, or perhaps even for some of them, under some form of negotiated “return” agreement with Israel, to their original homes inside Israel.
None of it happened. It has all been a tragedy for everyone involved. (Thanks, Bill Clinton and your 7-year procrastinating in the diplomacy there! More of the same if the Missus gets elected, I fear?)
But the political bottom line for Fateh at this point is that it is both absolutely imperative and, in my judgment, absolutely impossible for this venerable movement to define exactly what it is for. And I mean that in both philosophical and in functional terms: What does it stand for? What is it good for?
I respect Mouin Rabbani’s work a lot and I understand that, most likely, in this piece he focused on the organizational nuts and bolts of the preparations for Fateh’s Sixth General Conference because that is what the people at the Arab Reform Bulletin asked him to do. But I hope that in a next article he will address some of the bigger political questions?

Israel’s restrictions on reporters

Thanks to McClatchy’s Dion Nissenbaum for informing all readers of the specifics of the restrictions imposed on all Israel-based reporters covering the conflict with Gaza.
Of course it is a nearly universal practice of parties to an armed conflict to restrict media coverage of many aspects of the conflict. But it is very useful for readers/consumers of the reporting that results to remain aware that there are several significant aspects of the events that we are prevented from seeing or reading about.
For example, in Dion’s list, #2 is perhaps especially important for readers to be aware of:

2. The IDF Censor will not authorize reports of rocket hits at IDF bases and/or strategic installations.

This, in line with the Israeli authorities’ long-sustained practice of trying to describe the rocket attacks launched against it by Hamas and other groups in Gaza as being “targeted”– inasmuch as they are targeted at all– only against civilian neighborhoods.
When I was in the recent panel discussion with Daniel Levy on Capitol Hill, one of the notable things he said was that his information from Israel was that Hamas’s rockets attacks had clearly been targeted at military installations, while it was the non-Hamas organizations that had sent rockets (whether “targeted”, or more randomly, was unclear) into civilian neighborhoods.
We can note the precedent of the way the hits inside Israel from Hizbullah’s rockets were reported by the Israel-based media in the 33-day war of 2006. There, too, the reporting was overwhelmingly of civilian casualties, though I do recall some reporting of military casualties, most particularly of the numerous IDF soldiers killed while mustering in Kfar Darom. I believe the IDF censor’s rules have been tightened since then.
Regarding Hizbullah’s targeting practices in 2006, we should also note the report on this topic released last November by the Nazareth (Israel) -based Arab Association for Human Rights.
The AAHR report was based on “the testimonies of 80 Arab residents interviewed by the HRA, documenting 20 Arab communities that were hit by an estimated total of some 660 rockets, killing 14 civilians directly.” The AAHR researchers found that:

In the present conflict, if no Israel-based journos are allowed to report any hits on Israeli military installations, then the myth of all the Gaza Palestinian groups “targeting civilians” can be maintained.
At the very least, Israel-based journos should persistently be asking the IDF’s military briefers to give broad figures about the proportion of Palestinian rockets that fall within, say, one kilometer of a military installation, even if the censorship precludes them from reporting on any details of these hits.
If they do not do this, then surely they are simply colluding in the work of the Israeli hasbaristas in packaging the Palestinian rocketeers as being irreparably evil and inhumane. (A number of western journalists used to collude with with Israel’s hasbara efforts for many years. The phenomenon is probably less widespread now than it once was.)