Just how inept is Ross as a ‘Mideast expert’??

Short answer: extremely.
In case anyone is in any doubt, they should read the transcript of what Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said at the end of his meeting with Hillary Clinton in Washington yesterday.
The core of what he said there:

    I would be remiss if I didn’t express our thanks and appreciation to President Obama and to Secretary Clinton for their early and robust focus on trying to bring peace to the Middle East…
    It is time for all people in the Middle East to be able to lead normal lives. Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and– we believe– will not achieve peace. Temporary security, confidence-building measures will also not bring peace. What is required is a comprehensive approach that defines the final outcome at the outset and launches into negotiations over final status issues: borders, Jerusalem, water, refugees and security.

This is a resounding slap in the face for the approach of using lengthy “interim” periods and “confidence building measures” (CBMs) that was a hallmark of Israeli-Palestinian conflict management (not conflict termination) diplomacy, as practiced by Dennis Ross for eight years under Pres. Clinton.
CBMs, of course, were a concept first developed in great detail in US-Soviet diplomacy in the ramp-down phase of the Cold War. That, indeed, was the field in which Dennis got his core academic training. He later rebranded himself, never terribly credibly, as a “Middle East expert.” His main credential in this new field ended up being the abysmal record he racked up as a failed “peacemaker” for those eight years in the Clinton administration.
Oh, and then there was the term he served as founding president of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute from 2006 through earlier this year… Did that make him a “Middle East expert”, I wonder?
This whole concept of CBMs has made an eery comeback into Washington’s Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy since the arrival of Dennis Ross in the White House at the end of June.
Laura Rozen blogged last week that she had,

    confirmed that President Barack Obama has sent letters to at least seven Arab and Gulf states seeking confidence-building measures toward Israel, which Washington has been pushing to agree to a freeze of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
    One former senior U.S. official who was aware of the letters said they had been sent “recently” to seven Arab states, including the leaders of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The letters reinforce “the Mitchell message re: the need for CBMs [confidence-building measures] in exchange for [settlement] freeze and to [get] peace talks restarted,” the former senior official said by e-mail.
    “These letters were sent some time ago,” a White House official told Foreign Policy Sunday, when asked about them. “The president has always said that everyone will have to take steps for peace. This is just the latest instance of this sentiment.”
    The official declined to provide a date of the letters, but said, “they’d been reported before a month or two ago.”

Coincidentally– or not– one of the big campaigns that AIPAC is currently running is to get US legislators to sign onto a letter “urging” Obama to push Arab states to give up-front CBMs to Israel…
Arab leaders and their citizens have seen this movie before.
In the 1990s, many Arab states moved to end the “secondary boycott” they had previously maintained against international companies doing business with Israel; and some, like Qatar, even took some other small steps toward “normalization” like opening an Israeli trade office in their capitals. That was entirely predicated on Israel making the real progress that was mandated by the Oslo Accord to concluding a final-status peace agreement with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), before the defined deadline of May 1999.
Never happened. The deadline came and went. The Israeli government just went on waffling, with the ever-eager help of Dennis Ross in the White house. And the Israeli government also kept on shoe-horning additional tens of thousands of new illegal settlers into the occupied territories each year…
In the piece that Roger Cohen has in tomorrow’s NYT magazine on US policy toward Iran, there is a telling vignette that reveals just how deeply Dennis Ross does not qualify as anything even approaching a “Middle East expert”:

    On April 29, in Dammam, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, Ross sat down with King Abdullah. He talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s engagement policy with Iran — and talked and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, according to one U.S. official fully briefed on the exchange, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.

Dennis Ross, let’s remember, supposedly dealt closely with the Saudis throughout the eight years he was Pres. Clinton’s chief Middle East adviser. He also dealt closely with them, though in a subordinate role, when he worked for Sec. of State James Baker during and after the 1990-91 Gulf crisis and war.
But then, he didn’t even really know to deal with them at all, come 2009? He just talked (and talked and talked…) at the Saudi monarch– and couldn’t even deal with the few, to-the-point questions that the king came back to him with?
I don’t know if he tried to raise the issue of CBMs-for-Israel with King Abdullah during that meeting. But evidently, this issue has been pitched to Riyadh as well as other Arab capitals in recent weeks.
And now, Prince Saud has come to Washington to give a definitive and very public answer on the CBMs question.
Of course, it riles the heck out of many Americans, including especially many members of Congress, that they can’t just wave the wand of economic aid over the big Arab oil-exporting countries like Saudi Arabia to get to do what they (and AIPAC) want them to do….
Also significant: In that same State Department transcript, Sec. Clinton uses a significant– and in my view, significantly flawed– way to describe the US’s role in the current Israeli-Palestinian pre-negotiation.
She said,

    There is no substitute for a comprehensive resolution. That is our ultimate objective. In order to get to the negotiating table, we have to persuade both sides that they can trust the other side enough to reach that comprehensive agreement.

This is completely, still, that same “trust-building” or “confidence-building” approach to mediation/negotiation that was used to such dismally unsuccessful effect during the Bill Clinton administration when– acting on Dennis’s advice– Pres. Clinton saw his role as only that of a facilitator trying to build “trust” between the two parties.
No. The US is not just a “facilitator”. The US is a party with a strong and direct national interest in getting all the strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict speedily and finally resolved in a way that is sufficiently fair to all sides that the outcome is sustainable for many generations to come.
So the role of the US “mediator” is not just to “persuade” and nudge the countries to the point where they can “trust each other” (and to do this prior to the negotiation starting???) But rather, the US role should be to:

    1. Reaffirm its own strong interest in a speedy, fair and sustainable end to all dimensions of the Israeli-Arab conflict;
    2. Reaffirm that the outcome it seeks is one based on international law and the longstanding resolutions 242 and 338 of the UN Security Council;
    3. Affirm (for the first time in many decades) its readiness to use all the instruments of national power at its disposal to win the speedy, fair, and sustainable final peace agreements between Israel and all its Arab neighbors; and
    4. Reaffirm that it stands ready to work with its partners in the Quartet to provide all the guarantees the parties might need regarding monitoring all steps of the (most likely phased) implementation of these peace agreements.

In other words, it is at that stage– the stage of implementing the different phases of a final peace whose full content has already been agreed– that the sides themselves can really start to build the “confidence” or trust of the other side…. And the US and its peace-monitoring partners can certainly help that process along.
But to imply that you need full trust between the two sides to the dispute before you expect them even to sit down at the peace table?? That’s nuts!
The process of so-called “confidence building” that Dennis Ross was so happy to see dragging on for years and years in the 1990s did not end up building up any trust at all. Just the opposite. It built mistrust– on both sides. Not least, because people still locked into the dispute on the ground had no idea where the final process was heading– so every little altercation between them became a huge existential issue that had to be fought over “to the death.”
And meanwhile, Ross’s good friends in the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute were able to implant thousands of additional settlers into occupied Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. How “lucky” for them, eh?
This time, someone should tell Sec. Clinton– and best of all her boss, the president– that you don’t need to build full trust between the sides before the negotiation starts.
What you need to build is a healthy and realistic recognition from each of the parties that:

    * the US has its own strong interest in the success of this peacemaking project,
    * the US is prepared to use its national power to secure fair and sustainable final peace agreements between all the parties, and
    * the US stands ready to use its national power to help guarantee the implementation of these agreements.

So now, Pres. Obama, let’s get on with it.
I also note, parenthetically, that Saud al-Faisal seemed to be placing more emphasis on getting the final peace negotiations started than on getting Obama’s demand for a complete Israeli settlement freeze implemented. I think that’s the right emphasis.

Tax-exempt US group sends western Jews to Israeli settlements

Nefesh b’Nefesh is an organization that is tax-exempt in the US that woks to help implant US-origined and European-origined Jews as settlers in Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank.
Big kudos to Mairav Zonszein for writing about NBN in The Nation today.
Zonszein co-publishes the relatively new Ibn Ezra blog with Joseph Dana. The two of them are American-Israeli activists in the great Ta’ayush (‘Coexistence’) organization.
Dana has also posted a good 5-minute video of some interviews the two of them conducted during a recent NBN arrival ceremony at Ben Gurion airport, here. To really understand it, you need to know which of the place-names the NBN people they interview are inside Israel, and which are settlements. Many of the destinations mentioned for NBN-sponsored immigrants are indeed in the occupied West Bank.
Somebody here in the US needs to seriously challenge NBN’s tax-exempt status! On this page on their website they brag about the close relationship they have with the Government of Israel.
Including this:

    Nefesh B’Nefesh is the sole NGO that has authority to certify Proof of Residency for the Bituach Leumi (National Insurance Institute) and is deputized to utilize a portable passport control scanner for the Israel Border Police.

How on earth can an organization like this claim to be “non-political”? And why should I and other US taxpayers be giving a tax break to an organization that is openly defying both international law and our government’s firmly articulated policy regarding expansion of the settler population?

Funnel Cakes….

(this is Scott writing…)
Growing up in Pennsylvania, I’d always assumed that a funnel cake was a Mennonite “thing,” something you could only find at a county fair. (I grew up a sheltered “baptist.”)
Alas, nearly every for-profit food stand at this year’s Albemarle County Fair (south of Charlottesville, VA) has its own version of the deep fried summer treat.
I still recommend locals check out the Mennonite funnel cake stand, which has been there for over 20 years. Not just the best, and cheapest, Mennonite funnel cakes are even “good” for you — if you will. All the four food groups are covered; wheat, milk, eggs, sugar, and…. soybeans (oil). :-} They’re “good” too, as they “tickle your tongue.”
If they’re not too busy, you might even find friends who’ve lived a tour or two around Iran and the Middle East.
Reminds me of how various Iranian cities are known for their own wondrous treats, like Esfahani Gaz, Mashhad’s Nabat, Lahijan’s Kulucheh cookies, and one of my favorites anywhere, Sohan from Qom. (Think peanut brittle made with pistachios and saffron. Yum!)
Back to the humble funnel cake: last night, while beating the eggs into the batter, we hazarded to ponder parallels between (Mennonite) funnel cakes and the Middle East — along the lines of delicately woven lattices of hope and promise, threads of sweet human connections, peacemaking tempting fate in holy-charged conflagration — e.g., blistering 400 degree oil.
Get it wrong, soft goo to charred carbon. Cook ‘em just right, so… heavenly.

Two great new resources on Palestine

Okay, they’re very different, but here they are:

    1. This beautiful essay by African-American poet and author Alice Walker: Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters “the horror” in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel. It is a powerful reflection on some of what Walker experienced as a participant on the recent CODEPINK delegation to Gaza. It takes time to read, but is well worth it.
    When our Quaker group published its 2004 book on the Israel/Palestine conflict we called the final chapter, “Beyond Silence.” Alice Walker goes very beautifully beyond silence in this essay. Including writing about the painful fact that her (Jewish) husband still

      could not tolerate criticism of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians./Our very different positions on what is happening now in Palestine/Israel and what has been happening for over fifty years, has been perhaps our most severe disagreement. It is a subject we have never been able to rationally discuss. He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi. And that he objected to in his own Brooklyn-based family… His mother, when told of our marriage, sat shiva[because of Alice’s skin color], which declared my husband dead. These were people who knew how to hate, and how to severely punish others, even those beloved, as he was, of their own. This is one reason I understand the courage it takes for some Jews to speak out against Israeli brutality and against what they know are crimes against humanity.

    A shorter version of Walker’s essay has been published at Electronic Intifada– HT: Ray Close. But it’s better to read the whole thing.
    2. I told you this would be different. But “Rbguy”, writing his regular diary at “Daily Kos” this week, has done a great job of pulling together the many recent resources in the English language (including one of my own) on the topic of including Hamas in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
    I was planning to do a longer JWN post on all these resources. But then, after reading Rbguy’s diary I realized I really don’t need to.
    Rbguy, btw, is one of the new generation of Jewish-American bloggers and other activists who are certainly ready to “speak out against Israeli brutality” and to join with everyone else who is sincerely brainstorming fair and sustainable ways to end Israel’s long-running oppression of the Palestinian people and all other manifestations of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
    And yes, his writing is also beautiful in its own way!

IPS piece on Fateh’s crisis

IPS published my piece on Fateh’s leadership crisis yesterday. It’s here, also archived here.
The news peg for this was, obviously, Farouq Qaddoumi’s public launching last week of the accusation that Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) had conspired with Dahlan, the US, and the Israelis in the poisoning of Yasser Arafat, and the subsequent ruckus within Fateh.
Fateh’s Sixth general Conference is due to open August 4– just ten days from now– in Bethlehem. Let’s see how that goes. Actually, I’d kind of like to go there and cover it.
I am intrigued by the logistics of the operation. Bethlehem, along with its traditionally Christian sister-towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, is encircled by some particularly ferocious sections of Israel’s 8-meter high concrete Wall. And as I noted when I visited there in late February, access to this enclave is tightly controlled by the Israeli occupation forces… And that is just access from elsewhere in the West Bank! Then, of course, there is access to the West Bank as a whole, which is also controlled by the IOF.
Will Fateh’s members from occupied East Jerusalem be allowed to travel to Bethlehem to take part? Fateh members from Amman or Beirut or elsewhere in the Palestinian diaspora?
It strikes me that for Abbas and his followers, this is sort of a no-win situation. If he wants to get a truly representative group of Fateh leaders and activists together for the conference, he needs Israeli cooperation… But then, especially in the present circumstances, having that cooperation can taint the proceedings very deeply, perhaps irreparably.
The PLO, which is the broader, Fateh-dominated body that claims to speak for all Palestinians, held a meeting of its policymaking National Council in Gaza in 1998. That was at the request of the PM of Israel, then as now Netanyahu, with the express aim that it should over-ride or delete those portions of the PLO’s founding Charter that called for the end of a specifically Jewish state in historic Palestine.
That session was attended by no less a personage than Pres. Bill Clinton. (Woohoo! … Irony alert.) It did not delete but did attempt to over-ride the controversial portions of the Charter.
Other key governance events that have taken place within the OPTs under Israeli occupation have of course included the elections of 1996, 2005, and 2006. Those, however, were all elections merely to administrative/governance positions within the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, rather than relating to the nationwide Palestinian constituency, a clear majority of which consists of Palestinians exiled from their homeland who have no vote in (and no direct interest in) the workings of the PISGA.
Fateh, however, claims to represent a portion of the “nationwide” constituency of Palestinians. So the idea that it will hold its policymaking gathering under the tight control and ever-watchful eyes and ears of the Israeli occupation is strange, to say the least.
But then, let’s face it, Fateh is a strange entity altogether.
—
p.s. I intend to make it a practice to refer to the PISGA by its full name and initials whenever possible, as a way of reminding all of us that this body is not, and was never intending to be, a long-term governance solution for the Palestinians of the OPTs. Indeed it is now seriously past its Sell-by Date, since the text of the Oslo Accords stipulated that by 1999 Israel and the PLO (yes, the PLO, not the PISGA) would have negotiated a final-status peace between them, and presumably any “interim” governance formula would thereafter be phased out.

59 Gazans still missing from war, presumed under rubble

Ma’an news agency had this disturbing report today, in which it listed the names of 59 Gazans still missing since last december’s Israeli assault on the Strip, and presumed still buried under the estimated 1.5 million tons of rubble still left uncleared there.
The listing goes in order of age. The youngest three are:

    1. In’am Ra’fat Al-Masri, 12, Ash-Shati Refugee Camp
    2. Abed Ar-Rahman Ahmad Al-A’tawnah, 15, Al-Faloja
    3. Jihan Sami Al-Helu, 17, Al-Karama Tower

The oldest five are:

    54. Hakmah Abed Ar-Rahman Al-‘Attar, 75, Beit Lahiya
    55. Mahdiaeyah Salman Ayyad, 76, Az-Zaitoun
    56. Eid Jum’a A’yyad, 80, Az-Zaitoun
    57. Mariam Abed Ar-Rahman Abu Thaher, 85, Beit Lahiya
    58. Mariam Mutawe’ Mutawe’, 85, Al-Mughraqa

May their souls rest in peace. But what an outrage that Israel refuses to allow into the Strip the heavy lifting equipment required to locate and extract the mortal remains of these 59 people, so they can be given a decent burial.
Remember the huge lengths Israel goes to to get hold of the body parts of every single Israeli citizen, including airmen downed in combat? Well, Palestinians honor their dead every bit as much. I can barely imagine the pain the families of these missing people must be experiencing.

Afghanistan: “Armed nation building”??

The generally sane and realistic military analyst Tony Cordesman published a 28-page paper (PDF) yesterday on the US war in Afghanistan, which to me merely underlined how deeply un-winnable this US war has become.
Here’s his lead sentence:

    There are no certainties in war, and the tasks that NATO/ISAF and the US must perform in Afghanistan go far beyond the normal limits of counterinsurgency. They are the equivalent of armed nation building at a time when Afghanistan faces major challenges from both its own insurgents and international movements like Al Qa’ida, and must restructure its government and economy after 30 years of nearly continuous conflict.

Armed nation building?
Pack up your guns and come home, guys. Do whatever deals you need to do, to get out of there fast. Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans.
I’m not even sure where this notion of “nation building” came from, within US/western strategic and policy discourse. The current Wikipedia entry on it is suggestive and helpful. For starters, it denotes a clear distinction between the process of nation-building and that of state-building– most notably, by sending you to a different page for the latter.
To me, nation-building implies a process that can only be effectively and sustainably undertaken by the constituent members of the nation itself. It certainly can’t be carried out in any meaningful way by a horde of very heavily armed robo-troops parachuted in from a distant land. It just might be that a group of armed men from outside could do something to help with the process of state-building. (Not that that would make the resulting state recognizably a democratic one, however.) But nation-building, in the sense of building up the ties among a group of people so they feel they all belong to one “nation” and are bound by the obligations of that commitment?
Nah, I’m still not seeing it as a possibility.
I don’t think NATO can succeed at state-building in Afghanistan, either.
… This evening I was on a Press TV show with Larry Korb and Gareth Porter, about Afghanistan and Iraq, both. Larry, who’s a sensible, realist person, seemed fairly supportive of Obama’s decision to increase the numbers of US troops in southern Afghanistan. At one point I asked him what the best outcome was that he could reasonably foresee in Afghanistan. He said something like,

    Well, that in 18 months we would have stabilized things enough there that the process of nation building could be taking root. But if that hasn’t happened by then, we’d have to look at other options.

This is not exactly a gung-ho outlook. But I think that even this outlook is very short-sighted and irresponsible.
Why wait another 18 months, when it is almost certain that the kind of “stability” Larry was looking for won’t be there then… and along the way, how many more Afghan citizens and how many more Americans will have died?
Pres. Obama should start acting now– to reach out to the whole of the rest of the world community, but especially Afghanistan’s neighbors, to ask their help in formulating a plan for a speedy withdrawal of the western troops from the country. Pakistan and Afghanistan both need a lot of help in re-establishing effective governance at all levels. But military troops who are western are just about the worst imaginable tools to help bring this about.
And guess what. There are plenty of other ways for these two countries’ peoples to get what they need.
Sure, many Americans still have a lot of concern about future Al-Qaeda attacks, or about Afghanistan once again turning into the kind of place where Al-Qaeda can find a safe haven for organizing its heinous plots. But once again, the insertion, use, and maintenance of a large western military force in the Afghan-Pakistani border region seems like just about the worst, and most counter-productive way to respond to these concerns.

Visser: Obama gets Iraqis out of boxes; US MSM still don’t

Reidar Visser has an encouraging short report noting on the way that Pres. Obama referred to Iraq’s people(s) yesterday:

    At one point he mentioned “all of Iraq’s ethnic and religious” groups, but in another instance he referred to the “people of all parts of Iraq” and there was no reference to the specific tripartite formula of “Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds” which was prominent only weeks ago during Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit. All in all, his remarks are likely to be seen as unobjectionable by a majority of Iraqis, quire regardless of what they may think of the current Iraqi government.

Excellent.
(Hey, perhaps Obama’s people have been reading Reidar’s and my writings on this topic earlier this month? Here and here.)
But, as Reidar notes, the western MSM still

    remain stuck in their own clichés. Here, reconciliation “between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds” is the only ticket in town, even if this means having to struggle with quotation marks and sometimes even cheat.

Depressing.
I do know as a longtime journo that frequently, when you’re writing under the pressure of deadlines, you need to have handy “labels” that you slap onto various groups, especially in situations of fluid and often fast-moving conflicts. But a reporter and her editors need constantly to be re-examining the helpfulness as well as the effects of those labels. And since the Iraqi story is not particularly “fast-moving” at this time, there’s no excuse at all for the MSM journos not to be doing this.