Big thanks to Josh Marshall and his colleagues at Talking Points Memo, who recently invited me to join the roster of contributors to their excellent discussion forum, TPM Cafe. My first contribution there is this one.
It should seem familiar to devoted JWN readers…. That’s because the lovely deal I have with the TPM folks is that they can pick up any of my posts from here that they want and republish them here.
I am particularly happy about this because TPM Cafe is probably the US blogosphere’s premier spot for discussion of the big public policy issues facing the country. Of which, Arab-Israeli peacemaking is undoubtedly one.
I told Josh– or maybe this was my esteemed friend M.J. Rosenberg, who is also a TMP cafe contributor– that I have admired TPM ever since that time, in December 2002, when my engineer son Tarek told me “Mom, you’ve got to start a blog!”, and I said “A what?” … And he got on his laptop and showed me his favorite, which was TPM.
Josh has been a trailblazer in so many ways, including by developing TPM into an impressive, multi-media space that is both a (benign) empire and a vibrant, policy-discussing community. And throughout the process he has challenged the ‘conventional wisdom’ on all the topics that I care about, both at home and abroad. Including, by having bloggers like MJ, Phil Weiss, Adam Horowitz, Bernard Avishai, and me on the Cafe’s roster he is now significantly pushing forward the national discussion on Palestinian- and Arab-Israeli issues.
… Anyway, only a small proportion of my JWN posts will probably ever end up on the Cafe. So keep on reading here, too!
Meshaal interview transcript
I have now finished transcribing the recording I made of my June 4 interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal, and am happy to make it available here. I think neither Bill nor I had taken down the important point that he said it was the Palestinian state that would decide whether its own establishment had terminated the conflict. In the IPS version, I had it as the “Palestinian people.”
I just compared what I have in the transcript with the news report and analysis of the interview that I published with my esteemed friends at IPS on June 5. Actually, looking back at that, I think I did a pretty good job (with the help of the two sets of notes taken during the interview by myself and Bill the spouse) of capturing– and providing background explanations for– the major points in the interview.
So why bother with producing a transcript, you might ask? (And I did ask, given that I hate transcribing from audio. Plus, the quality of this audio wasn’t too great. Memo to self: next time take an actual mic. Apple MacBook mics might be good but they ain’t that good.)
One reason I do it is that I am a root-and-branch empiricist. By working so closely with the audio I got a much better sense of many aspects of the interview that I’d forgotten about, including details about his rhetorical and inter-personal style and some significant points of substance.
For example, I think it was important to be reminded of the concern he expressed about US actions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
Also, in this exchange,
A: This is what we’re demanding today. After our people has liberated itself and has established its independent state, it’s the state that afterwards will decide its position.
Also, in general, I think it’s worthwhile to make this transcript, like the one of my January 2008 interview with Meshaal, available as service to the public.
There is a lot more commentary I can do on this latest transcript. Including, I’d like to make some comparisons between this one and the last one, and with the other documented interviews Meshaal has given over the past couple of years.
My quick bottom line on the interview as a whole is that it aptly illustrates the truth of the capsule judgment made in this recent paper from USIP: “Hamas: Ideological rigidity and political flexibility”. (Btw, USIP put up a whole new website this week, so the link I gave earlier for this important paper doesn’t work. This one does, I think.)
On the “political flexibility” front, in the interview I was really trying to probe the decisionmaking that went into Hamas’s crucial 2005 decision to participate in the PA parliamentary election of 2006… and I got a little way forward with that.
But I still have a bunch of follow-up questions I would really like to ask Meshaal!!
Anyway, I have a piece that I’ll be doing for the CSM next week on Hamas, and some other good Hamas-related assignments coming up. So all my work on the transcribing will not go to waste…
Theo-bureaucracy in action: Israel
And while so many of us are watching the workings of a powerful theobureaucracy so dramatically exposed in Tehran, let’s not forget this…
Israel’s perennial debate over ‘Who is a Jew’ took another nasty turn this week when a judge on the High Rabbinical Court, Rabbi Avraham Sherman, reportedly said that new immigrants to Israel who want to be accepted as Jews according to Orthdox Jewish religious law, “halakha”, are “in the vast majority gentiles who want to convert out of self-interest.”
Sherman also accused the Orthodox rabbis who want to convert these immigrants of suffering from a “false and distorted perspective, a lack of understanding of halakha.”
This was the lead item in a report by Yair Ettinger in today’s Haaretz.
The question of “Who is a Jew” may seem to outsiders to be one for individuals and their congregations to decide. But that’s not so in Israel, a country founded on the idea that people duly recognized to be “Jewish” have a whole range of privileges not accorded to those who aren’t. For example, any person duly recognized as Jewish has the right to immigrate and gain citizenship, no further questions asked.
Important questions of allocation of resources within the state also hang on whether a person is Jewish or not. For example, the “Israel Land Administration” controls over 90% of the land in Israel, and though the country’s High Court has ruled that non-Jewish citizens should have the same rights of access and usage of these lands as Jewish people, in practice the bodies that administer the lands continue to practice systematic discrimination against people, including Israeli citizens, who are not Jewish. Further details available on the Adalah website, including here.
(Moreover, many of those lands and properties are lands that were owned by Palestinians before 1948, from which they were expelled that year. The state of Israel has prevented those Palestinian refugees– now numbering more than six million– from returning to their families’ properties ever since. See “right to immigrate” above.)
So when discussing the question of “Who is a Jew”, Israel’s state and religious authorities are decidedly not talking “only” about a matter of an individual’s conscience, belief, or religious practice. They are talking about significant questions of access to resources and other benefits accorded by the state.
“Duly recognized as Jewish” is thus obviously, in Israel, an important category. But who has the power to grant this “recognition”? This has been a particularly acute issue regarding the half million or so formerly-Soviet immigrants who poured into Israel in the 1990s whose Jewishness was open at the time to significant question.
Ettinger gives us these additional details about the event at which Rabbi Sherman was speaking. It was the Eternal Jewish Family International (EJFI)’s second Jerusalem Conference on Universal Conversion Standards in Intermarriage, that ended Wednesday in Jerusalem:
- Most of the participants were ultra-Orthodox communal rabbis from around the world, many of whom work in outreach programs.
For three days [at the conference] the state’s conversion programs were attacked by rabbis, including civil servants here – religious court judges (dayanim) and chief municipal rabbis – and by the visiting participants.
Sherman spoke at the conference at length on the ultra-Orthodox view on hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are not considered Jewish according to halakha. He believes they should not be converted, and certainly not in the special conversion courts set up under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Office, headed by Rabbi Haim Druckman.
“There is no logic to telling tens of thousands of goyim [non-Jews] who grew up on heresy, hate of religion, liberalism, communism, socialism, that suddenly they can undergo a revolution deep in their souls. There is no such reality,” said Sherman. His ruling, he said, was based on the writings of the greatest of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv. “A large percentage [of the converts] did not intend on accepting the mitzvot when they accepted conversion,” he said in his address to the conference.
Rabbi Yosef Sheinin, the chief rabbi of Ashdod, told the conference on Tuesday about immigrants from the former Soviet Union: “When they want to marry, they will do everything possibly to deceive. They are to be assumed to be cheaters.”
The conference also dealt with fighting Jewish assimilation, but the crisis sparked by Sherman’s annulling the conversions of Rabbi Druckman’s conversion courts took a central role. Druckman is a leading religious-Zionist rabbi.
So it seems there are still a lot of sharp differences between Sherman and the hierarchy he represents, on one side, and the “special conversion courts” set up by the PM’s office, on the other. Even Israel’s High Court has been brought in to try to rule on the dispute.
So long as Israelis want their country to be centrally defined by its status as “a Jewish state”, such disputes seem likely to continue.
My views are that theocracy (and the theobureaucracy that accompanies it) are everywhere enemies of the free exercise of conscience, and that theobureaucratic considerations should never, in any state, be allowed to undermine the important principle of the equality of all citizens under the law.
Israel’s citizens– all of them, including that large minority who are ethnic Palestinians or who for other reasons are not “duly recognized as Jewish”– need to sort out this question among themselves at some point. And preferably in a forum that is quite free of the intervention of powerful theobureaucracies that may not even in any significant sense be considered Israeli.
As a US citizen, I must say I’m still not sure why my tax dollars should go to support a state that practices such a deeply engrained form of theobureaucratically enforced discrimination.
Evidence of Iran Discontent
I appreciate that some respected observers remain doubtful about the extent of the protests in Iran. Yet as I (Scott) see and sense it, the evidence has been building for several days that popular disquiet over the recent elections returns is nationwide, in all regions, across all socio-economic, ethnic, regional, and linguistic groupings.
Two quick items for consideration:
1. Five pictures from Esfahan, Iran’s second largest city (and among my favorite places in all the world), showing perhaps a million protesters jammed into and spilling out of the world famous Imam Square. (aka maidaan-e naqsh-e jehaan)These pictures were forwarded to me via a western based Iran scholar, who received them directly from a relative in Esfahan.
To grasp how huge Imam Square is (80,000+ square meters), try visualizing a football field, turn it sideways at one “narrow” end of Imam Square, and then add 14 (fourteen) more football fields after it. Or for the google maps generation, try this image.
That Esfahanis might show up in such large numbers to protest does not surprise me, as a week ago, I highlighted a huge rally in the same spot for Musavi during the campaign. (See these pictures.)
2. An important oped essay by my long time friend Eric Hooglund, syndicated by Agence Global, entitled “Iran’s Rural Vote and Evidence of Election Fraud.”
Professor Hooglund (now of Bates College) is an authority on the subject, having lived in and frequently traveled to rural Iran for nearly four decades. He literally witnessed Iran’s revolution unfold, as he was there working on a dissertation later published as Land and Revolution in Iran. Earlier this year, he wrote a splendid review of 30 years of post-revolutionary rural development achievements and problems for Middle East Report. He was again in Iran recently, and I know of no one with a broader network across Iran’s diverse rural landscapes.
In his oped, Hooglund – Eric – challenges the widely heard media refrain of Ahmadinejad’s strength being “rural” by giving us details of what is happening in just one of the villages he knows well. (though I understand he prudentially changed names.) I encourage readers to read the whole essay, to find out why even in a rural village, Ahmadinjad had become quite unpopular, and why it is now “seething” with “palpable moral outrage” over the irregular handling of the local ballots and by the results.
Eric has shared with me multiple accounts of similar anger building all across the country. Eric also adds a critical distinction: the disquiet he senses is not so much a blanket referendum against the system, but for reform from within it, and that’s the hope they saw in candidate Musavi, even as he indeed is one of the elite. Yet within that political elite, a profound division has erupted., as Eric well summarizes it,
“over how Iran should be governed: a transparent democracy where elected representatives enact laws to benefit the people or a ‘guided democracy’ in which a select few make all decisions because they do not trust the masses to make the right ones.”
This dispute exposes core fissures at the heart of the system that cannot be easily swept back under the Persian carpet. The smoldering discontent will not be easily extinguished, and it’s far too early to declare a winner in the deeper contest.
Today (Thursday) will likely be an interesting further barometer of these pressures.
The definitive account of Lebanon’s first ‘national dialogue’ session
… is here, by Qifa Nabki.
I mean, we could all use some light relief sometimes, right?
Nathan Brown weighs in on Fateh
- I sent the piece on Fateh that I posted here yesterday to Nathan Brown, a longtime Palestinian-affairs analyst who teaches at George Washington University here in DC, and he was kind enough to send me the following reaction, for publication.
You should read this in conjunction with the contribution that Mouin Rabbani sent in to the discussion yesterday. It is all, really, one continuing forum so I’m sorry in a way that I’ve broken it up this way, though I wanted to give Nathan’s views due prominence and attention. ~HC.
By Nathan Brown.
I couldn’t agree with you more on the shape that Fatah is in. And you’re absolutely right that I had little to say on the subject in my recent commentary. But that’s not because I don’t see the problem of Fatah decay as important; it’s just because I got tired of saying it. (See “Vain Hope Number 3” in this paper, published in January by the Carnegie Endowment.) )
There are two places where my thinking may be slightly different from yours. First, I think there is—or at least there was—a potentially strong international contribution to Fatah reform. I actually think that the US could have made a difference in 2006 had it delivered the message to Abu Mazin that Fatah revival was a priority. That pressure, plus the shock of losing the election, might have made a difference. I got the impression then that there were middle level cadres in Fatah who were looking for that kind of effort. But it didn’t take place, with the US focusing instead on undermining Hamas right away and then in 2007 on Fayyad and security reform. The result was that Fatah came to resemble—I wrote somewhere else—a group of passengers squabbling over seats at the Captain’s table on the Titanic. I worry that now it might be too late to undertake such an effort.
Second, regarding your idea of an international conference with well-reputed non-partisan Palestinians—this is a promising idea I don’t think I’ve heard recently. But I am not sure I would see it as an alternative to Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. I wonder if such leaders would have the political space to operate unless supported (or at least tacitly accepted) by some kind of national consensus. Without that, there is a strong danger that any progress they made diplomatically would get them sucked in to the same discrediting process that happened with the first Fayyad government. So I am not sure it would work if Fatah and Hamas both set out to undermine it. But it’s an idea that is worth discussing.
—-
Okay, now my response to that:
First, I think it’s incredibly hard to imagine that the US could ever have made a constructive contribution to internal reform inside Fateh, or any other Palestinian movement. At any time at all, given the US’s highly anomalous position as the main backer of Israel in the region and in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. But more especially so during the era of ideological arrogance and know-nothingism known as the Bush presidency. (I.e, including 2006.)
And I’m not sure at all that it would be possible even today, under Obama.
Secondly, you’re right that people of good faith need to do some more brainstorming about the proposal I suggested, that we might, for brevity, call “the Dr. Haidar move.” Its success and relevance would depend on there being evident forward movement in the push for a final peace agreement. And certainly it could not be done in the absence of some form of effective support for it from Hamas and most of the other factions including whatever remains of Fateh.
So it would run in parallel, if you like, with ongoing efforts to resolve the Palestinians’ internal political problems rather than replacing them. (And it could add urgency and a sense of realism to those efforts, if the peacemaking really is moving forward.)
But at least doing the Dr. Haidar move means people don’t all need to get hung up on getting a solid intra-Palestinian reconciliation prior to, and as a precondition for, the peacemaking…
Contested elections, human welfare, world peace
I have two big concerns regarding the situation in Iran. The first is for the wellbeing of the 65 million Iranians and the health and integrity of their society, and the second is for the avoidance of hostilities between my country and theirs.
Regarding the wellbeing of Iranians and the health of their society, it is heart-wrenching to see the violence being deployed there, most of which is, I believe, being used by supporters of Mr. Ahmadinejad. But it is also heart-wrenching to see the depth of the social and fissures within Iranian society that are revealed by the street scenes.
Here in the U.S. we had a deeply contested election back in 2000– one that I still think was “stolen” by the Supreme Court on behalf of George W. Bush… On that occasion, our country became deeply divided, and there were scenes of heated wrangling around those Florida vote-counting halls and courthouses.
But thank G-d neither side was deploying baseej thugs to intimidate and beat up the other side. And finally, after many weeks of that wrangling, the Supreme Court ruled and those of us who wanted a different outcome all went home.
We also had some deep social/political fissures over the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. I remember how lonely it was in the early months of the war, standing on the street corner in Charlottesville, VA, with our little band of pro-peace demonstrators, and getting yelled at by non-trivial numbers of passers-by. But again, no-one was actually beating us up there… And the consensus of national opinion slowly swung around to our viewpoint on the war, which we could witness directly in the gathering amounts of support we got as we stood on the corner week after week after week.
In both those cases, underlying the sharp political differences among our country’s citizens were differences in social outlook that were often equally as sharp, if not sharper.
So how is it now in Iran, and how will it be in the weeks ahead? Can the two sides there– and the heavy-duty political forces that stand behind each of them– find a way to get through their present differences, including by building, as necessary, a new form of internal social compact?
The news from Tehran that Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i is calling a meeting of all the presidential candidates and that Guardianship Council is ready to undertake a partial recount of the votes suggests that some such resolution may be possible, though the time-frame for it is still extremely unclear.
I deeply hope this comes about– for the sake of Iran’s people, and for the sake of world peace, too. A prolonged and worsening political stand-off in Iran could tempt opportunists in Israel or elsewhere to start suggesting something along the lines of “Great! Now is the time to move in for a swift bout of regime change”, using all kinds of provocateurs or other special-ops type people, or even a bombing of suspected nuclear sites.
I sincerely hope that no such plan is launched. Sure, under some circumstances it might “succeed” in the short run. But then what? We’ve already seen most graphically in Iraq that removing a regime you disagree strongly with is only one, very easy first step… And then, what do you do afterwards?
The same with “taking out” a nuclear facility or two. (An action that would swiftly rebound, of course, against the US forces strung out in very vulnerable positions along the whole Gulf.)
Prolonged political instability and uncertainty in Iran could tempt malevolent outsiders to undertake many different kinds of mischief. But our country needs Iran’s cooperation more than ever right now– in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Recently, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett reminded us that Obama has actually been continuing with some of the plans the Bush administration had put in place that were designed to destabilize the Iranian regime from various angles.
In the present circumstances those plans need to be stopped immediately.
Americans and our government should be quite forthright in urging de-escalation of the violence inside Iran. Part of that stance also involves urging Iranians (inasmuch as any of them are listening to us) to work speedily and creatively with each other to find a resolution to their current crisis that is both fair and sustainable. What we should not do is try to “call” their election for them, or otherwise interfere in their affairs.
Also, of course, as a footnote here, our country’s credibility in calling for de-escalation anywhere in the world– but especially in that region– is considerably dented given Washington’s own massive use of violence in the recent past in Iraq and its continuing recourse to violence and escalation in Afghanistan. So maybe we ought to think harder about our government’s behavior, too?
Rabbani comments on the Fateh post
Here are the comments Mouin Rabbani made on what I posted here today:
- On the whole I agree with you – particularly your debunking of the five myths.
Some additional points:
– I think a sixth “myth” you could have added is that Abbas is Fatah and Fatah is Abbas. I think people have a tendency to overlook the extent of the separation between Abbas and his entourage on the one hand and Fatah (however defined) on the other. It is all but complete. If previously people could vote for Hamas in PA elections to protest the failures of Fatah, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that today a vote for Fatah is a vote against the PA. The top echelons of the PA, the security forces, even to an extent the PLO have been massively de-Fatahised since 2005. I’ve always believed that upon assuming office Abbas saw his main obstacle as not Hamas, but Fatah, and has worked assiduously since to incapacitate (what is left of) it. While there were various compelling reasons for him to seek the political integration of Hamas into the Palestinian political system in 2005-2006, I remain convinced that using it to cut Fatah down to size was one of his primary calculations (this backfired disastrously, of course, but then again has he done anything that hasn’t?).
– I disagree with you that inviting independents is a viable option. Who selects them? In 1991 they were appointed by the PLO. Today there is no legitimate Palestinian leadership that could fulfill a similar role. I therefore remain convinced that for Palestinians achieving consensus on a new leadership and joint political program remains an absolute priority. This is, I hope, shorthand for the rejuvenation of the PLO. For what it’s worth I am also convinced that reconciliation (particularly between Fatah and Hamas) cannot be achieved so long as Abbas remains in a position of power, and that his removal from office is a precondition for this to succeed.
Thanks for the contribution there. And definitely thanks for adding ‘Myth #6’, a significant addition to the list.
On how a negotiating “team” of political independents might be constituted in the current circumstances, I certainly agree that Dr. Haidar and Co., back in 1991, were named from PLO-Tunis. (Though Arafat never did wholly trust or empower them– or anyone else. Hence, in their case, his interest in the whole Oslo gambit, as devised by… Mahmoud Abbas.) I guess this time around, if one could find honest and smart Palestinian independents who could get enough of a popular mandate just by virtue of who they are and considerable prior coordination with Hamas and all the factions, then to a large degree it would be up to them to continue to build their own mandate from there on…
In several of the decolonization processes the Brits participated in in the 1950s and 1960s this was the approach used… I guess we’d need to think through the issues a bunch more.
But anyway, Mouin, thanks for adding your wisdom in here. And since I trust your judgment so much I feel really good that you apparently agreed with my basic thesis that the crisis inside Fateh is a real problem for everyone involved in the peacemaking venture– including, at this point, Hamas.
Fateh’s woes an obstacle to diplomacy
Many Israelis and their supporters just love to argue that they “have no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. (And therefore that, with “deep regret”, an Israeli government that wants nothing more to make peace, currently finds itself unable to do so… Cue the violins.)
I have generally given these pleadings short shrift. I mean, if an Israeli government came forward and put a good-faith and reasonable offer to make peace on the table, then there would certainly be a Palestinian party on the other side of the table ready and willing to negotiate.
Now, however, I think there is a non-trivial problem on the other side of the table. And no, at this point this is not mainly– as many people argue– Hamas, with its well-known obduracy on the “three preconditions” that’s the obstacle, but rather Fateh.
(Regarding Hamas, Paul Scham and Osama Abu-Irshaid have a fascinating report, PDF, that came out recently that probes the evident political/diplomatic flexibility that coexists with ideological rigidity in its practice. I too shall be writing about this in the days ahead.)
Fateh’s “problem”, from the peacemaker’s viewpoint, is not its ideological obduracy but rather its now near-total lack of any internal structure or ability to make decisions.
Fateh has never, really, had any ideology beyond a vague general commitment to “national liberation.” And all of that commitment became rapidly wasted away after the majority of the movement’s leaders skipped ahead of the queue of the other waiting Palestinian refugees and “returned”– to Ramallah and Gaza– in 1994. (I’m just now reading Sara Roy’s brilliant 2007 book Failing Peace, in which she describes in exquisite and painful detail how that worked out in post-1994 Gaza.)
Carter in Gaza: Meets Haniyyeh
Here’s the Ma’an version:
- De facto Palestinian Prime Minister Isma’il Haniyeh said on Tuesday he would support any real proposal to establish an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital.
Haniyeh’s comments came during a joint press conference in Gaza City with former US president Jimmy Carter. “I will exert pressures towards realizing this dream,” said Haniyeh.
Meanwhile, he said that his government in cooperation with other Palestinian factions to maintain ceasefire, yet border crossing should be opened to guarantee continuation of ceasefire.
On the Shalit issue, one interesting development has been that Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, the “De facto foreign minister” (as Ma’an would probably put it– I would be more likely to say “foreign minister in the elected Hamas government”), has given an interview directly to Israel Radio on the topic.
Ma’an tells us this:
- Mahmoud Az-Zahhar said in an interview with Radio Israel that Hamas will consider the possibility of delivering the message [from Shalit’s father] to Shalit.
He said that if Israel is interested in putting an end to the Shalit issue, they have to release Palestinian prisoners especially those demanded by Hamas. He said Israel is less interested in a prisoner swap as much as they are interested in knowing Shalit’s location in order to free him in a military raid.