Just World News with Helena Cobban

I’m continuing to pull together and crystallize the many things I learned on my just-concluded trip. My big bottom line is an enhanced understanding of why the still-current US approach to the Palestine Question of “West Bank First/ Fateh Only” will not and cannot work.
Firstly, “West Bank First” hasn’t worked thus far, and if current circumstances continue to prevail there is no hope it can be made to work. The problem in Ramallastan is not a lack of funding. It is actually that in a situation of the political incoherence of Ramallastan’s political leaders, Israel’s continued tight quadrillage of the whole of the West Bank, and the complete non-performance of the final-status negotiations with Israel, more funding going to Ramallah only further fuels the corruption there, which only makes the whole WBF strategy less, not more, workable.
(We need to discuss what would constitute the WBF strategy “working.” From the point of view of its American advocates, they would consider that it “works” if it strengthens support for Fateh and reduces support for Hamas. From the point of view of the West Bank’s 2.5 million people, it would “work” if it made their lives better or at least bearable. For the vast majority of them, it hasn’t.)
Secondly, the “Fateh Only” prong of the WBF/FO strategy. Hillary Clinton, her coterie, and their predecessors in the Bush administration clearly thought “Fateh” was, or could be revived into being, a coherent political organization. It is not and cannot be. Indeed, the continued injection of US and US-mobilized funds into Ramallah has only hastened and aggravated the political implosion of Fateh.
… And now, as its response to the suffering of the people of Gaza, the Obama administration is about to pour an additional $600 million into Ramallah??
Talk about bizarre and wrongheaded.
My main hope at the moment is that Hillary Clinton is only a sort of unthinkingly holdoverish, default-mode epiphenomenon in Obama’s diplomacy and that someplace in the bowels of the Old Executive Office Building– or wherever else he has established his office since Dennis Ross kicked him out of the seventh-floor suite in the State Department– Sen. Mitchell is right now sitting down with his aides to craft a very different and much more effective policy towards the Palestinians.
I’m judging that the Prez may well not want to come out with a final policy toward the Palestinians until he sees exactly what kind of a government Netanyahu is going to put together in Israel. I’d urge him not to wait on this. With or without Livni in the Israeli government (and the Obama-ites evidently still hope it can be “with”) we can’t expect any real change either in Israel’s policy toward final-status issues or in its actual, extremely stifling, coercive, and land-grabbing practices in the West Bank. Or, come to that, in its harshly punitive, inhumane, and illegal practices toward Gaza.
Anyway, the main driver of Washington’s WBF/FO policy has always been, ever since its inception under Prez. Bush, to continue the exclusion of Hamas from the political/diplomatic process. It really hasn’t been because they “love” Abu Mazen, or because they actually support the establishment of a viable Palestinian state in just about the whole of the West Bank (and later, also Gaza), with only minor territorial adjustments made in a very small number of places… No, it’s been to continue to keep out of the political process the party that won the PA’s last legislative elections back in 2006, and that has a good shot of winning the next round, too.
WBF/FO hasn’t “worked”, and cannot work. A new policy is needed. How about… (gasp!) a real commitment to finding a way to recognize the political realities in Palestinian society and include Hamas in the political process, instead??
Can this be done? Yes we can.

I was traveling Sunday and thus missed this important piece in Sunday’s Haaretz by Akiva Eldar and Ami Issacharoff that says,

The United States will only recognize a future Palestinian unity government if Salem [sic] Fayyad is reappointed prime minister, according to a message relayed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to European and Arab leaders at last week’s donor summit in… Sharm el-Sheikh.

Flourish of the chapeau to Bernhard of MoA for pointing that out.
Clinton’s reported ‘message’ is of course extremely relevant to the whole question of the meaning of the Fayyad resignation, that I discussed here yesterday.
First, though, let’s stand in amazement at– yet again– just the entire neo-colonialist chutzpah of a power that still believes it has somehow has the right to choose who should be the leaders of distant nations.
The article contains this:

Western diplomats confirmed over the weekend that Washington has relayed messages to Hamas, via a European country that… intimated that a future unity government in the Palestinian Authority must be composed of technocrats who are members of neither Hamas nor Fatah, apart from Fayyad. Even though Fayyad is not officially a member of Fatah, the U.S. administration sees him as the leading candidate to replace Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas following the election that is due to be held within the next 12 months. While Marwan Barghouti enjoys wide popular support, Washington does not believe he is ready to assume the mantle of leadership. Fayyad, who studied in the United States and was a senior staffer at the World Bank for several years, is trusted by the administration and the international financial establishment.

Talk about chutzpah!
Memo to members of the democracy-loving public around the world: The PA already has a prime minister, whose party was elected in an election judged by international monitors to be free and fair. That election was held in 2006, and the prime minister is Ismail Haniyeh.
So now Pres. Obama’s secretary of state apparently believes that she– like Bush/Condi before her– somehow still has a ‘right’ to determine who the prime minister and/or president of the PA should be?
That is what I, as a citizen of the US and a citizen of the world, object most strongly to.
Memo to Barack Obama: This is not the way that the vast majority of your supporters elected you to act in the world!
… As noted in my post yesterday, Hamas reacted with extreme skepticism to the news of Fayyad’s ‘resignation’ (from a position that he did not legitimately hold, anyway.)
I had written that I thought there was a chance that Fayyad had resigned, Saturday, as PA prime minister because he hoped thereby to increase his chances of remaining as PM in a national unity government in which Hamas would be a strong presence. And the forthrightly nationalist positions he has espoused over the past couple of weeks strengthened that possibility.
I still believe this may well have been his motivation.
I also believe that Fayyad is a basically well-meaning person of significant intellectual honesty. Remember, it has been this honesty that all along has been his main attraction for the Americans (especially amidst the roiling mire of corruption and dishonesty that mark his Fateh colleagues in the heavily US-backed Ramallah ‘government’.)
So my assumption is that the clear nationalist positions that Fayyad expressed to me in the Feb. 24 interview, and that he also reportedly expressed to Hillary Clinton herself in their meeting in Ramallah exactly one week later, were his actual views.
As too was the desire he clearly enunciated to see Fateh and Hamas reach a workable national agreement.
Of course, having people in Hillary’s entourage ‘leak’ to Haaretz that the whole resignation thing was a carefully orchestrated US ploy could significantly reduce the chances of Hamas agreeing to work with Fayyad… But that leaking might itself have been the ploy.
So who knows how this will turn out?
What I know is this:

1. The 1.5 million people of Gaza desperately need Hamas and Fateh to reach a working entente so that the rebuilding of their shattered homes and infrastructure can commence.
2. Fateh is still in extremely deep trouble, having substantially collapsed from the inside due to its leaders’ corruption, their complete inattentiveness to the challenge of raising up successor generations, and the complete (US-induced) failure of the ‘peace’ diplomacy that has been their raison d’etre since 1988.
3. There are recent precedents in both Iraq and Lebanon in which US-supported ‘leaders’ have quietly been co-opted by the nationalist forces to act in alliance with them rather than at the behest of their US paymasters. Hamas’s people have always had a good working relationship with Hizbullah, in particular; so we can assume that “the Fouad Siniora option” might well have occurred to them as a way of dealing with Fayyad.

So watch this space as the story develops.
And a note to my US compatriots: We really do need to raise our voices to our leaders at all levels to say that colonialist interfering like that reportedly engaged in by Hillary’s people is not what we elected our government for! Palestinians inside and outside Gaza desperately need to have leaders who are accountable to them, not to Washington.

In a small hotel in East Jerusalem last week, I met a Norwegian aid worker with many years of experience working in occupied Palestine, who told me the following story:
She and some colleagues went to visit a project their organization was running in one of the West Bank villages hard hit by the many land grabs Israel has undertaken since the 1993 conclusion of the “Oslo” agreement between Israel and the PLO. They met with a gathering of canny village elders, one of whom greeted them by saying this: “Welcome! Well, as you know we are simple people, and not all of us are good at reading your way of writing. But when we look at the word ‘Oslo’ the way you write it, it is clear to us that it begins with a zero and ends with a zero… ”
That is indeed a great reading of the meaning of “Oslo” (the agreement) from the Palestinian point of view.
Remember that Oslo was only ever planned to be an interim arrangement, with a fixed term of five years starting from the 1994 “return” of the PLO’s leaders to occupied Palestine from the previous exile in distant lands; at the end of that five-year period, the intention stated in the Oslo agreement was that implementation would thereafter begin of the final-status peace between the two peoples that would meanwhile have been fully negotiated.
Instead of which, ten years after that 1999 deadline and nearly 16 years after “Oslo” itself, the Palestinian people are still trapped in the deliberate indeterminacy and ambiguity of Oslo, with no final agreement anywhere in sight.
And meantime, throughout those 15.5 years, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank has more than doubled; an entire parallel road system has been installed in the West Bank for the benefit of (and the nearly exclusive use of) the settlers; the lengthy and brutal barrier has been erected, often snaking deep within the West Bank; East Jerusalem has been sealed off from its natural West Bank hinterland and surrounded not only with the Wall but also with thick rings of new Israeli settlements; Gaza has been first strangled and then pounded physically into misery and despair; and the Israeli government continues to announce plans for vast numbers of new settlements and new demolitions of Palestinian homes.

Continue reading “Readings of ‘Oslo’, and some eroding Israeli taboos”

Is Salam Fayyad—a Palestinian economist who was
‘parachuted’ into the position of Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister
under strong US influence in June 2007—now following in the footsteps of
Iraq’s Nuri al-Maliki and Lebanon’s Fouad Siniora by declaring a new degree of
independence from US tutelage and a new level of commitment to the broad
national interests of his own people?

On March 7, Fayyad announced he had tendered his resignation
to PA president Mahmoud Abbas. He explained that he was stepping down so he would
not be an obstacle in the formation of a national unity government that would
enjoy the support of both the big Palestinian political movements, Fateh and
Hamas.

However, in recent weeks Fayyad has given several indications
that his attitude towards the always halfhearted peace diplomacy of the United
States—the country in which he has spent most of his adult life—has become more
critical. This raises the intriguing possibility that he might re-emerge as PA
prime minister even within a national unity government in which Hamas would
have strong influence.

Thus far, however, Hamas spokesmen have remained
skeptical of Fayyad’s motives, with one of them describing his resignation as
just another “tactical maneuver” by the Americans.

(Update Tuesday 7 a.m.: Hamas’s skepticism about the meaning/intention of Fayyad’s resignation would seem to have been considerably justified by the leaks coming out of Hillary’s entourage to the effect that the resignation, and the manner in which he effected it, was actually just “a tactical move, designed to pressure Hamas into softening its opposition to Fayyad serving as prime minister in a unity government.” But perhaps the leaks themselves, rather than or even in addition to the resignation itself, were the ploy? I discuss that possibility and some of its implications at greater length here.)

In an interview I conducted with Fayyad on February 24, when
he was already clearly contemplating his resignation move, he expressed a newly
tough nationalist position on Israel’s non-compliance with commitments its
government has made to the international community on halting settlement
construction, halting IDF incursions into PA-controlled areas of the West Bank,
and removing barriers to access to Gaza, between Gaza and the West Bank, and
within the West Bank itself.

(Fayyad also reportedly
made many of these same arguments to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when he
met her in Ramallah on March 3.)

In the interview with Just World News, Fayyad said,

My worries continue about my plan to gain freedom for our people so we can live in harmony with all our neighbors, including Israel. The prospects of gaining this goal are now receding. If Israel goes ahead with its plan to develop the E-1 area, that will be the end of our hopes for a two-state solution.

Also, what is happening in Jerusalem is very worrying, with the Israelis’ threat to demolish 88 houses in East Jerusalem.

… The international community has
invested heavily in the two-state solution, and not only financially. If the
two-state solution is to keep its credibility as an option three things need to
happen:

First, there has to be a complete
settlement freeze everywhere in the occupied territories including East
Jerusalem, and there has to be the removal of settlement outposts in line with
the 2002 Road Map as was also reaffirmed at Annapolis. This is not negotiable.

Second, Israel has to change its
behavior in the West Bank. It has to stop the incursions into Areas A
and B, and return to the positions of September 28, 2000, as also called for in
the Road Map. We have proved we have restored law and order throughout the West
Bank, so they have no pretext to send their own forces in, and every time they
do that it undermines us very seriously.

Third, regarding access issues, we
need to see the implementation of the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access,
including not only access into Gaza but also the link between Gaza and the West
Bank and restoration of freedom of movement inside the West Bank.

The first two of those requirements
are non-negotiable. The third one maybe needs some further interpretation.

If we look at the peace process
like a private company then I would say that unless those requirements are met,
I personally would not buy stocks in this company!

Fayyad is not a member of either Fateh or Hamas.  After many years working as an
economist in the U.S., including with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, in 1995 he
went to Ramallah to head the mission IMF sent to help the infant PA establish its financial and
economic system. In 2001, he switched to being the PA’s finance minister.

Continue reading “Fayyad interview; and the meaning of his resignation”