Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 88 – Info, analysis, discussion

In Ramallah

I’ve never stayed for very long in Ramallah before. I generally preferred to stay in East Jerusalem and then as necessary traverse the ghastly Qalandia crossing point between there and Ramallah, sometimes staying with friends here in Ramallah for a night or two. But this time I decided to make Ramallah my first stop, and to stay here for a week or so, so I can catch up with everything that’s been going on here. It is, after all, three years now since I was last in town.
So yesterday morning, I took a car from Amman down to the Allenby/ King Hussein Bridge. There was almost no-one else seeking to cross– almost as bad a sign as if it had been jam-packed, I think. The deal is you do your Jordan-exit business first, east of the bridge, then take a Jordanian-provided and mandatory shuttle bus across the trickle of water known as the River Jordan, to the Israeli side. But it took nearly an hour for them to gather enough people (ten or so) to justify sending the bus across. I got a bit impatient. But in the bus I found that a fellow-traveler who’s a manager with the (Abu Mazen-controlled) Palestine Investment Fund was also hoping to head up to Ramallah, so we shared a taxi and split the cost of some $120.
Getting in to the West Bank through the Israeli-controlled side was the usual, extremely depressing experience. The Israelis have cadres of young women, presumably doing their national service, whom they use as the “front-line” in many border-control jobs. Many of them love to hang around with each other and with the beefy young guys who also work there, to chat on cell-phones, to stand around admiring each other’s make-up and hair-dos, and to really relish the power they have over all these exhausted-looking Palestinian families whom they have to deal with. The main power they have is to harrass and delay, but it’s backed up by other much more intrusive or fearsome powers, too.
When our bus with ten people rolled in, there were around 60-70 people in the passport-control waiting area, so some of them may well have been waiting since early morning. Just about all of them looked to be Palestinians, since of course just about every Palestinian family in the West Bank has half or more of its family members now living in Jordan. And guess what, people in these families like to get together!!! But to do so, they have to pass through these border-controls that are totally controlled by the cohorts of bored and faintly malevolent young Israelis. Well, that gives just a first glimpse of what then continues to happen to Palestinians inside the West Bank, any time they want to travel from one town or city there to another, I guess.
… If all the Palestinian communities in the occupied territories can nowadays be described as “open-air prisons”– and I believe they can– then Ramallah is probably the “Club Fed”, i.e. the top banana, in this extensive system. Provided you don’t actually need to go anywhere else, provided you have plenty of money (yes, this Club Fed ain’t cheap to live in), and provided you’re capable of completely disabling any sense of solidarity or connectedness you might have with family members, friends, or just plain compatriots who happen to live elsewhere, such as Gaza, you could possibly even live a pretty good life here.
Places that most Ramallah people can’t ever get to include even Jerusalem, which used to be just 12 minutes away by car along the hilltop road. Ramallah’s a historically Christian town, and just about everyone here has family members or close business ties with East Jerusalem. Tough luck. The Wall, with its horrendous– and oh so evocatively looming– watch-towers, stands between.
You are reminded nearly everywhere of the tight noose Israel retains around Ramallah. Like the rest of the West Bank, it is literally a captive market for Israeli produce. Many stores are filled with Israeli-produced goods or with other imports that, having come in through Israeli ports and middle-men give them a nice cut of the profits, too. You can get some great Palestinian fresh produce, and a few locally-manufactured products like Taybeh beer, or some Palestinian-processed foods. But even for those Palestinian industries, their scale is small and many or most of their inputs have to brought in from or through Israel.
… But having said all that, I also have to say that, just for now, I’m getting real pleasure from being here. One big part of that is to reconnect with old friends, which has already started to happen. And the other is just to experience the urban environment in this bustling but airy and beautiful Palestinian Arab city.
I’ve taken a couple of walks now, from my fairly central hotel here up to the “Manara” landmark, around some of the back streets there, and along Main Street a bit. For various reasons– including over the years the actual presence of Israeli occupation troops in the streets, the tensions of various intifadas, or the threat of either of them rolling in at any time– I’ve never really experienced Ramallah as a functioning and flourishing city-center before. I never realized there is a pretty sizeable big produce-market tucked in to the east of the Manara, filling up a number of whole streets with with push-carts piled high with riotously colorful fruits, veggies, and greens. Especially, at this time of year, greens. There are side-streets lined with little stores selling traditional (or made-in-China) housewares: brooms, loofas, knitted string back-scratchers, aluminum pots, etc. Between them are little store-fronts in which people make and sell the very best in Arab street food: felafel carefully made with a dusting of sesame seeds atop each one; kibbeh balls staright out of the deep-fryer; tall pillars of succulently rotating meat for shawerma; stacked rows of whole chickens browning slowly on their automated spits; little meat-pies or cheese-pies; kaak; kunefeh…
Oh, to walk down a street drenched in the smells from all these great foods is a pure delight. Or you turn a corner and the sharp tang of cardamom coffee comes in from somewhere. Or the rich, warm smell of thyme-coated mana’eesh…
There are a lot of cars– yellow taxis everywhere!– and quite a lot of honking that reverberates between the mainly solid stone walls of the city center’s buildings. However, one of the things Abu Mazen’s “Palestinian Authority” has done is put on the streets a large number of pretty well trained traffic cops. Their little whistles punctuate the noise in the city center– as do, too, in the most commercial portion of the city, the loudspeakers that many shop-owners have hung outside their stores, blaring repetitive messages about their “special offers” over and over into the street outside.
One of the best things about Ramallah– as was also true of East Jerusalem, back in the day– is that many of the farm-women you see either selling their produce in the streets or walking purposefully through the crowds to do their business are still wearing their traditional, hand-embroidered dresses. It always amazed me how these women, who spend many months sewing vast swathes and plateaus of these intricate, traditional patterns into their dresses before they get married, would thereafter wear these treasured heirlooms day-in-day-out as they proceeded about what was often very dirty work. Many of the younger women in the street are wearing a simpler, non-embroidered form of hijab. (In the whole broader district around Ramallah, Muslim Palestinians have been in a clear majority for some time now.) But you do still see plenty of women in the older embroidered thobes. That certainly brightens my day.
(I was telling my daughter Lorna a few things about my time in Ramallah in an IM exchange yesterday. She urged me to take and post some photos. I’m a bit reluctant. I feel there’s something a bit exploitative or objectivizing about photography of other people unless it’s as part of a pre-agreed or clearly understood transaction between equals… I feel much more confident about the nature of the transaction if I just write about my experiences, instead.)
I guess the other big observation I have is how generally pleasant the medium- and long-range views from and around Ramallah are. The city is built on a series of hills. Like Amman, which is where I came from yesterday, though the hills and valleys here crowd closer together and are even steeper than the ones in Amman. In both places, as you travel around the city you get many opportunities for pleasing, multi-curved vistas or sweeping views. But here in Ramallah there are many more mature trees interspersed between the buildings. And though there are many fairly undistinguished apartment buildings here of seven or eight stories high, there are still also many gracious older stone houses of two stories or so that are topped with the pyramidal red tile roofs that were once common in this city, as in Lebanon.
(Nowadays throughout most of the West Bank, a cluster of red-tiled roofs is a dead giveaway for an Israeli settlement, since the vast majority of the Palestinians towns and villages here are dominated by buildings that have flat roofs.. much more useful, historically, as additional storage space or a good place to dry your peppers or whatever.)
But the trees and the occasional red roofs here in Ramallah and its twin-city, El-Bireh, make many of the accidental vistas you see as you walk or drive around the place very beautiful indeed.
Club Fed, yes.
And then, there’s Gaza….

Syria’s position strengthening internationally, regionally

Syria’s place in the world community– which the ideologues in the Bush White House did so much to attack and delegitimize– has been strengthening noticeably in the past few days/weeks.
Later this week, Sen. John Kerry, the new chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will visit Syria. Ahead of the visit, he said the Obama administration is eager to talk to Syria. The US has not had an ambassador there since 2005, though it does have an embassy.
From a domestic US perspective, it is extremely important that this rapprochement win solid support in both houses of Congress, since under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby– as well as the Bush administration– Congress has itself been another major driver of the “isolate and attack Syria” campaign.
At a regional level, Syria has won some new influence, too. Yesterday, the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, Prince Muqrin bin Abdul-Aziz, visited Syria where he met President Bashar al-Asad and conveyed from King Abdullah (his older half-brother), a message about “bilateral ties and the importance of consultation and coordination between the two sides”, according to the Syrian official news agency.
A rapprochement between Syria and Saudi Arabia– which have been at loggerheads since the assassination of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri in February 2005– would be extremely significant for the politics of the entire region.
Western spinmeisters and MSM have made a huge point about the depth and alleged intractability of the rift between the alleged “moderates” and “extremists” in the Arab world, a rift that seemed particularly evident during the most recent Gaza crisis.
But most western commentators often have little idea about the depth and complexity of the regional dynamics that continue to underlie regional– and in particular, inter-Arab– relations. I find it interesting that these two regimes, in particular, now apparently see it in their interest to move towards some degree of rapprochement.
The political fallout from the Gaza crisis continues. Egypt has been, I think, somewhat strengthened in its role in the region– as I wrote last week. But so, too, has Syria. So the whole regional system remains dynamic, and certainly not easily reducible to some form of a zero-sum “moderates versus extremists” template.

Israel-Hamas prisoner talks, intra-Palestinian reconciliation, etc

Ha’aretz, Reuters, and others are now reporting that Israel seems close to presenting a prisoner-exchange proposal involving Hamas-held Israeli POW Gideon Shalit and a large number of Palestinian prisoners and detainees that might (imho) win acceptance from Hamas. Conclusion of this prisoner-exchange agreement could then in some way accompany conclusion of the Gaza ceasefire-stabilization agreement between the two parties, the terms of which seem to be just about agreed upon.
Notable among the names mentioned of Palestinians to be released is that of Marwan Barghouthi, a veteran Fateh activist who has often challenged Fateh’s ossified political leadership in the past and who has worked since his imprisonment in an Israeli jail in 2002 to help improve relations between Fateh and Hamas.
Israel’s still-PM Ehud Olmert has insisted that the ceasefire-stabilization agreement can’t be concluded without Hamas freeing Israeli POW Gideon Shalit. Hamas has resisted linking the two issues and has its own very compelling demands for the release of political prisoners and detainees in exchange for Shalit. Indeed, negotiations over that prisoner release have continued, in an on-again-off-again way ever since Shalit, an IDF corporal, was captured by Gaza-based militants back in early summer 2006.
(One further note: Several Hamas leaders have been trying to spread uncertainty about whether Shalit actually survived Israel’s recent assault on Gaza. It is at least possible that he didn’t; but somehow my gut-instinct judgment is that he would have been given as much protection during the war as the top Hamas leaders.)
As I have written before, Egypt, which is now mediating both these parallel negotiations, should be able to find a neat “diplomatic” formula on linking them in an acceptable way, even if only temporally. And indeed, the Haaretz writers write today,

Egyptian officials are now busy on a formula that would allow both sides to claim that their stance [on linking or not linking the two negotiations] was accepted.

The Haaretz article reports that the “troika” that’s still in charge of Israel’s security policy (Olmert, Barak, and Livni) would present a concrete proposal regarding the prisoner-exchange deal to the full cabinet on Wednesday.
The Haaretz writers report,

Of course, it is not Shkirat but the Hamas leadership that is responsible for the Palestinian side of the negotiation. But if Shkirat seems to have that degree of confidence that Barghouthi will be involved, he must have gotten it from somewhere.
Many Palestinian analysts believe that a released Barghouthi could help to save the political fortunes of Fateh, which have been extremely badly battered by the recent Gaza war. If the Hamas leadership is indeed insisting that Barghouthi be part of the present prisoner-exchange deal that indicates to me that they actually want to see the emergence within Fateh of a new kind of leadership with which they could have a functional working relationship, and that that is worth more to them now than the possible downside risk that a re-energized Fateh might win back some support from Hamas.
Certainly, Hamas’s relationship with Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), the current head of Fateh, the PA, and the PLO, has been extremely difficult over the past three years.
Meanwhile, moves toward a new reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas are proceeding, albeit still slowly. At the end of last week high-level (but not top-level) delegations from the two parties had preliminary discussions in– again– Egypt; and more formal and substantive reconciliation talks are scheduled to open there February 22.
The participants in last week’s talks were, from Fateh, former PM Ahmed Quei (Abu Alaa’) and Nabil Shaath, and from Hamas Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar and politburo member Mousa Abu Marzook.
That Al-Manar report linked to there said this about the talks:

Al-Manar is run by Lebanon’s Hizbullah and can therefore be judged somewhat slanted toward the Hamas side. However, the website also has some very solid news reporting, so this piece may be part of that.
(Update at 12:34 p.m.: I just realized the whole Manar report was lifted verbatim off the Jerusalem Post website— though without attribution. Mnar does often do this with news reports its editors think are valuable. I guess the fact that both they and the J. Post stand behind this report gives it added credibility.)
… As a broader observation, I would simply note that it is possible to view the role Fateh has played in recent years as in many ways equivalent to that played in the dying days of South Africa’s apartheid by Buthelezi’s ethnic-Zulu-based “Inkatha Freedom Party”. During the “last throes” of the apartheid regime, the IFP became majorly co-opted by the state security forces in a campaign to terrorize and oppose the ANC at many levels. Despite the enormous numbers of deaths and the the amount of suffering and pain that the IFP inflicted on ANC supporters– especially, I should note, on those ANC supporters who were closest to it, that is, who were themselves ethnic Zulus– the ANC leadership worked hard to always hold out a hand of friendship to Buthelezi and, while criticizing many of the IFP’s actions, never sought to delegitimize his political role.
Many people have described the role Fateh’s security forces have played in recent years as analogous to that of the Nicaraguan Contras– a force that was almost entirely created from outside through US funding and arming. However, I think that viewing Fateh’s role as closer to that of the IFP is more helpful. Buthelezi did have some indigenous political credibility before he became involved with the apartheid regime’s nefarious anti-ANC campaigns. Plus, at the political level, he played one crucial step that helped to stymie the aparheid regime’s big push to solve its problems through the creation of a string of tightly controlled “Bantustans”, or nominally independent Black African “homelands.”
(We can note that Israel was one of the very, very few governments around the world that ever gave formal recognition to the six or seven Bantustans that were established. No other significant government ever did that.)
But Buthelezi– who had many supporters and admirers in the west, including Margaret Thatcher and Ronald reagan– crucially never gave in to the Pretoria regime’s pressures that he declare Kwa-Zulu to be a Bantustan. That political position that he held to really helped the national struggle.
Within Fateh, we can also see that it has significant, pre-existing political legitimacy. Plus, despite Abu Mazen’s lengthy participation in the never-ending tragicomedy of “peace negotiations” with Israel and the many harsh actions he has taken against Hamas, we can see that thus far he has never signed off on any of the extremely humiliating political deals the Israelis have waved before him (though never even finally offered.) And indeed, on February 7, even his very, very pro-US “prime minister”, Salam Fayyad, said he saw no hope that any Israeli leader could come up with a reasonable peace proposal.
Bottom line: closer to the IFP than to the Contras?

Deep US blind spot on international legality

Why is the fact that the U.S. government is contractually obligated to withdraw all its troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011 so frequently ignored in US public discussions?
Last November, duly authorized representatives of the US government– Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker– signed the text of a “Status of Forces Agreement/ Withdrawal Agreement” with the government of Iraq.
When a government changes or is replaced, existing international agreements remain in place unless there is a new, explicit agreement between the parties to rescind or revise them. It couldn’t be otherwise in an orderly international system.
A good part of the problem in the disrespectful and border-line illegal way that Americans have been treating last November’s SOFA/WA stems from Pres. Obama himself. He remains fixated on arguing for the details of the plan on which he ran for office: the plan for a substantial drawdown of US force levels “within 16 months” but the retention of a significant US force in Iraq for an undefined period thereafter.
Understandable and in many ways admirable that a democratically elected leader would try to hold fast to what he had promised during the election campaign.
However, what Obama continues to propose regarding Iraq has already been superseded in international law by the decision the outgoing Bush administration made– on Thanksgiving Day, no less– to commit to the terms of the SOFA/WA.
(I have been interested to note that, as part of its purging of the White House web site, the incoming Obama administration removed from the site the authoritative PDF version of the signed SOFA/WA that had been there up until the Inauguration– and that I had linked to in this Nov. 28th JWN post. Now, if you want to find a copy of the agreement’s final text, as far as I can see you’ll have to go to a non-governmental site this one– PDF, hosted by the NYT. One strong advantage of the earlier White House PDF was that it had the actual signatures on it. It must still exist somewhere in the bowels of the federal government’s archives?)
MY question is: Why is the existence of the November SOFA/WA agreement not much more of an issue than it now seems to be, in the discussions in both Congress and among the US commentatoriat at large?
Why does at seem as if so many members of the US political elite just want to ignore the agreement?
Case in point, today: This lengthy piece by Tom Ricks in Sunday’s Washington Post. Ricks’s main argument is that the US military may well have to end up staying (and fighting) in Iraq for many years into the future. He writes– without expressing any demurral from the views expressed– that:

The quiet consensus emerging among many who have served in Iraq is that U.S. soldiers will probably be engaged in combat there until at least 2015 — which would put us at about the midpoint of the conflict now.

The piece contains sound-bite quotes from a significant number of US and western military and “expert” sources. I don’t know if the people Ricks quoted– who include our friend Reidar Visser– made any mention of the constraints of the SOFA/WA in their conversations with Ricks. But here’s the thing: Nowhere in the piece at all does Ricks either make in his own name, or attribute to any of his sources, any mention of the SOFA/WA.
It’s as though it doesn’t exist. It’s been simply air-brushed out of (this US-centric version of) history.
The reason I’m concerned about this is that I have a lot of respect for the writing and reporting that Ricks has done on the US war in Iraq. So if even someone of his caliber acts as though the SOFA/WA is irrelevant, we are in deep trouble.

Ceasefire stabilization agreement close?

The Egyptian-mediated negotiations between Hamas and the outgoing government of Israel now seem close to achieving agreements on (a) stabilizing the Gaza ceasefire, and possibly also (b) a prisoner exchange involving Hamas-held Israeli POW Gilad Shait and perhaps 1,000 Palestinian political prisoners.
The ceasefire-stabilization agreement seems closer. The pro-Hamas PIC website reported today that,

The “80 percent” of goods relates, I think, to the pre-2006 rate of passage across the Israeli-controlled freight crossing points, which was 750 trucks a day.
Bardawil also gave some details I hadn’t seen before about the guaranteeing and monitoring mechanism associated with this truce-stabilization agreement:

Today, however, some additional last-minute obstacles seemed to arise in the negotiations. AP reported from Gaza this afternoon that,

Having a ceasefire whose terms have been explicitly agreed to by both fighting parties is obviously a lot better than the present situation of having two parallel, un-negotiated and unilateral ceasefires. Having the ceasefire text explicitly attested to by a respected governmental third party (Egypt) is also an improvement on the June 2008 agreement, of which there was never an explicitly agreed and third-party-attested text. Having a mechanism to monitor compliance with the urgent matter of crossings openings is good.
However, this agreement could be weak indeed if there is no provision for monitoring of the ceasefire aspects– which should be applied to both fighting parties.
Also, I am pretty sure the administration of the border crossings from the Palestinian side requires some sort of PA framework within which Fateh and Hamas would work together.
Israeli PM Olmert’s office, meanwhile, has said that he will not sign off on the ceasefire agreement unless the release of Shalit is also part of the deal. Hamas has until now remained adamant that it wants to keep that negotiation– which also involves the release of many Palestinian prisoners– separate from the ceasefire agreement. But if Egyptian diplomacy is good for anything, then surely it should be able to find a way to sequence and/or finesse this issue.
Olmert is said to have a very strong desire to see Shalit freed before he leaves office.
A Palestinian prisoner release on the scale that I heard talked about in Egypt (roughly 1,000 of the 12,000 or so Palestinian political prisoners whom Israel now holds) could, if done right, have the potential for helping smooth the way to the intra-Palestinian reconciliation that is so desperately needed at this point. That’s because inside the Israel’s walled prisons and detention centers (as opposed to in the open-air prisons that all parts of the occupied territories have become), the prisoners from all different factions have found better ways to get along, and to manage the political differences among them, than the people in the wider open-air prisons have.
In particular, in May 2006, prisoner leaders from all the main factions came together and produced the “National Conciliation Document of the Prisoners” which set out what still today looks like an excellent plan for reunifying the Palestinian people around a workable and broad-based plan of political and popular action.
Egypt will also be hosting/mediating the top-level Palestinian reunification negotiation, which is scheduled to start on February 22 in Cairo.
Let’s hope and pray that all these important de-escalation moves succeed. Those of us who are citizens of the US, the EU, and other powerful nations have a special responsibility to make sure our governments allow the Palestinian reconciliation to proceed on terms agreed in a fair manner among the Palestinians themselves, without outside interference.
The project the US government, in particular, has pursued since 2006 to incite, arm, and support one portion of the Palestinian people to fight, Contra-like, against the portion that won the free and fair legislative elections of January 2006 must be ended. That campaign has already inflicted far too much damage on the long-suffering Palestinian people. It did not “succeed” in replacing Hamas in the affections and loyalties of many Palestinians with affection for Fateh. Just the opposite. The support for Fateh is now considerably lower than it was when Bush aide Elliott Abrams launched his highly immoral “Fateh as Contras” project back in 2006.
Meantime, let’s hope the ceasefire-stabilization and prisoner-exchange negotiations achieve success as quickly as possible.

Faux nonviolence ‘missionaries’– and the real thing

Kathy Kelly, no doubt about it, is the real thing. In the 1990s, as one of the leading lights of ‘Voices in the Wilderness’, she made repeated visits to Iraq to document the mass-scale suffering caused by the excruciatingly long-lived US-UK (UN) sanctions campaign waged against the country… In 2003, she was there as a voluntary human witness/shield as the US started its completely illegal invasion of the country.
Now, small surprise, she’s in Gaza, from where she recently penned this amazing piece of testimony. She says people often ask her “how do the Gazans survive?” But she says she finds a happy resilience among many of the children– and turns the question around and asks her fellow-citizens of the US how we survive, knowing the degree of our government’s complicity in Israel’s atrocities.
Then, brilliantly, she asks us to imagine what size of a “tunnel” would be needed to trans-ship all the arms the US has supplied to Israel:

Okay, so in terms of courageous and principled nonviolence activism, Kathy Kelly is undoubtedly the real thing. Go read the whole of that brilliant essay of hers.
And then there are the numerous, extremely ignorant and patronizing liberal hawks, in the US and perhaps also elsewhere, people like Tom Friedman or Nick Kristof, who “preach” to the Palestinians– safely and from a great distance– that they really “ought” to adopt Gandhian principles in their struggle.
Here’s what really irritates me about such people:

1. They are ignorant, arrogant, racist, and defamatory.

this amazing history

all

2. These people have no personal credibility as “apostles of nonviolence.”

within their own countries

Well, pardon the rant. I guess I should have made this into two posts. One on the Friedmans of this world and the other on Kathy Kelly. Her work is so much more interesting and constructive than his!

My IPS pieces on a new blog; JWN blogiversary

A big thanks to readers who offered to help me aggregate and archive my developing corpus of weekly IPS news analyses!
However, once I sat down and thought about the task, I figured it would be just about as easy for me to do what I wanted as to explain to someone what it was I envisaged.
So after about 90 mins work, here it is!
I have been interested in doing this both for my own use– a handy archive I can draw on at will– as well as, as a service to other readers.
For example, there may well be lots of people interested in reading these weekly updates who might not have the energy to plow through the many, often idiosyncratic and varied (some might say scattershot) things that I publish here at JWN. Hard to believe, I know; but I’ve heard that might be the case… So if you know such people, you could just recommend they go over and check out the new blog. Even better, they could subscribe to its RSS feed.
Just one small warning: the appearance of that other blog may yet change radically. Im still playing with the “themes” there. So just don’t be surprised if it suddenly looks very different. The content will still be the same.
Another reason I chose to do the aggregating in that way, and in that place, is because I’m thinking I might migrate JWN over to WordPress sometime. It would be no big difference for you readers, since I’d keep the same now-venerable JWN domain name. So doing the new blog there gave me a bit of a feel for what it’s like editing and publishing in WordPress. Not too bad– though I don’t yet see how to do “Extended entries” there.
By the way, while we’re on the subject of new and old blogs, do you realize my sixth blogiversary here at JWN came and went on Feb. 6th and I didn’t even remember till now!!! That’s so sad. I’ve had a lot of other ‘versaries to think about so far this month: my son’s 31st, one daughter’s 30th, and my sister-in-law’s– well, okay, Emmy, I shan’t tell the whole world which of your birthdays that was. But many happy returns to all of you, and to JWN, anyway.
Gosh, I published that inaugura.l. post, Powell’s Poor UN Presentation six weeks before GWB invaded Iraq. What a lot has happened since then.

One further note about Egypt

I want to clarify regarding this sentence in the IPS piece about Egypt that I filed yesterday… “The arguments the state media made that Egypt should put its own interests first and do nothing that might drag it into a new war with Israel fell on many receptive ears”… I made a deliberate choice to insert that modifier, “many”.
Without any modifier, the impression conveyed would be that the state’s arguments had fallen on ears that were, in general, receptive. The same impression would have been conveyed if I’d used the modifier “most”. I saw no reason to reach that conclusion.
I toyed with the idea of writing “some”, or “a few”; but I think either of those might have under-stated the effect the state’s arguments had. Hence my eventual choice of “many”.
If it sounds very indeterminate, well that’s how it has to be. We honestly cannot know how many Egyptians were swayed by the regime’s arguments, or how many had general predispositions in this direction that were confirmed and/or strengthened by the state’s arguments. Opinion polling and social attitudes research in general are tightly state-controlled, and rarely undertaken, in Egypt…
So let’s leave it at “many”. I certainly don’t want to say “most.” But the effectiveness the state’s arguments achieved during and since the war clearly reached the level of being politically significant.
… Of course, attitudes can also change rapidly in the face of new developments.

My IPS piece on Egypt’s role, and related observations

My latest IPS analysis, ” Egypt’s Star Rising in Regional Politics”, is here.
The key judgment I made there was this one:

If, as all the polls indicate, U.S. ally Fatah was weakened politically by the Gaza war, by contrast Mubarak’s Egypt seems to have emerged from the war with its political position in the region stronger than before.

This was my considered judgment, reached in light of the discussions I held with a small but high-quality and politically broad sample of Egyptian analysts, and the general observations I made as I moved around the city. Including, in the latter category, the fact that the general level of security-forces presence in and around downtown Cairo seemed notably lower than it was when I was last in Cairo, in February 2007.
Those I talked with included Dr. Esam el-Erian, the spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood, a couple of retired high-level officials, Fahmy Howeidy (who’s a veteran, well-informed commentatorial icon of, broadly, the left Nasserists), etc etc. However, the judgment I reached about Egypt having emerged from the war “stronger than before” is not one I heard expressed in those terms by any of the people I talked to. It is my judgment, only; and one to which I gave much careful consideration before I reached it.
To me the clinching piece of evidence was that– for all the harsh criticisms that Hamas’s allies launched against the Mubarak regime during and even before the war– at the end of the day, when the Hamas leaders decided they wanted/needed a ceasefire, it was to Egypt that they turned. And now, as I noted in the IPS piece, Egypt has emerged as the crucial intermediary in the many complex negotiations being conducted in the post-war period: between Hamas and Israel over consolidating the ceasefire; between Hamas and Israel over the possible prisoner exchange; and between Hamas and Fateh over finding their own long over-due rapprochement.
One other key little piece of evidence that I didn’t have room to mention in the IPS piece was the series of large posters I saw plastered on the walls of a couple of the large military encampments that are strategically placed to buffer Cairo International Airport from any oppositional mobs that might gather in the extremely densely populated downtown: Some of them said, quite explicitly, in large white letters “Al-Misr Awalan”– “Egypt First.” This is a sentiment I have never seen so publicly flaunted in Egypt, a country that under Gamal Abdel-Nasser prided itself on being the beating heart of Arab nationalism, third-worldism, pan-African liberation, you name it…
That sentiment of “Egypt First” was certainly broadly promulgated by Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, in the late 1970s as he broke with the Arab consensus and launched his own very personal (and Egypt-first-ish) peace diplomacy with Israel. Then, it was used– though never, I think as explicitly and in-your-face-ishly as today– to shuck off all the criticism that Sadat engendered from the Palestinians and many or most other Arab parties. Later, Sadat– and even more so Mubarak, after he came to power following Sadat’s assassination in 1981– worked to rebuild the country’s ties with the other Arab nations. But now, an explicit version of Egypt-first-ism is back with a vengeance; and Hamas, like everyone else, seems to have little alternative but to carry on working with Egypt.
However, as it pursues its new calling of “regional fulcrum”, the Mubarak regime still faces numerous stiff challenges. One is that Mubarak and his advisers have evidently decided that, to have any chance of success (or perhaps, even just to survive) they need to carve out, and maintain in public, a position that is notably distinct from the one that was Washington’s orthodoxy– at least until last January 20th. Hence, for example, the statement that Egyptian FM Aboul-Gheit made about his hosts in the US State Department yesterday, that I quoted in the IPS piece:

“They understand very well the situation. They know they will have to exert pressure on all sides to achieve the objective of peace…They say that they understand the problem of settlement activities and it has to come to an end.”

Now frankly, who knows if that was exactly what Hillary Clinton and the others who hosted Aboul-Gheit there had told him? But whether it was or not, for Aboul-Gheit to say that– and thereby publicly put the Obama administration somewhat on the spot on the settlements issue– showed a degree of Egyptian boldness in the public pursuit of the pan-Arab peace agenda that I haven’t seen for quite some time.
So if Egypt is to continue to be successful in playing an active, calming, and pro-peace diplomatic role in the region, it is going to require increasing amounts of solid, substantive US support for that role. Most importantly, in terms of some real US activism in “exerting pressure on all parties”, and not just on one party, and in taking substantive steps to end Israel’s continued pursuit of its settlement-construction project in the West Bank (and Golan.)
If such much-needed support for the pro-peace agenda is not forthcoming from Washington, or if– heaven forbid– the Obama people should just continue on diplomatic auto-pilot and not make “a clean break” with the divisive, exclusionary, and blatantly anti-Arab policies of President Bush, then Mubarak’s Egypt could yet, very easily, crash and burn in its new, notably out-front role in regional diplomacy.
Will the Obama administration be up to doing this? Let’s see.
A second challenge the Mubarak regime faces– which I also didn’t have time to delve into in the IPS piece– is the simple, one might even say “age-old”, problem of anno domini. Mubarak is now 80 (not 81 yet, as I’d written in the piece: that doesn’t happen till May.) His current six-year term as President runs through 2011. He has remained in power ever since, as Sadat’s existing vice-president, he easily and constitutionally stepped into Sadat’s shoes after Sadat was brutally assassinated by an Islamist extremist faction in October 1981.
Mubarak himself has never named a vice-president. Since 2000 there has been much speculation the President has been grooming his younger son, Gamal, now 44, to succeed him. In 2002, the Prez named Gamal the General Secretary of the Policy Committee in the ruling National Democratic Party. It’s a pretty safe bet that several figures in the country’s still very powerful and well-funded military– from which Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all emerged into politics– are fairly strongly opposed to any such “dyanstic” concept of political succession in a country that is, after all, supposed to be a republic. (Bush family dynasty in the US, anyone?)
We can note, though, that almost exactly the same dynamics were at work in republican Syria in 2000, when Hafez al-Asad died and his son Bashar was named his successor within hours of his death. In the Syrian case, many analysts at first saw Bashar as only a compromise or transitional figure, and speculated that behind the scenes the powerful generals would soon determine which among them would politely (or otherwise) elbow him aside. But that never happened. Instead, Bashar has not only survived as president for nearly nine years, but has also weathered numerous perilous political storms and built himself a significant nationwide political base… So who knows about Gamal Mubarak?
But anyway– as Fahmy Howeidi and others noted while I was in Cairo– the senescence/succession question is currently an inescapable fact of political life both in Egypt and in another key US ally in the region, Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi monarch, King Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, will be 85 this year. And though he seems to spend just about as much as Hosni Mubarak on hair-coloring products, no amount of boot-blacking on his follicles can hide the fact of his gathering senescence; and there, the succession issue is possibly even harder to predict, and therefore, a cause for even greater uncertainty. Saudi succession story in short: unlike Hosni Mubarak, Abdullah does have a designated successor, in his case Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz etc. But Sultan is only two years younger than the king; and once he goes it seems very likely there will be huge pressure from the next generation of Saudi princes– many of whom are in their 60s and 70s already– for the crown to pass to one of them. (That, though there would probably still be a few more sons of Abdul-Aziz to consider… remember that these Saudi princes, by taking massive numbers of wives in rapdi succession, have a reproductive life that can span 50 or 60 years.)
Of course, you could always say that it would be good thing if all or most of the literally thousands of people who now consider themselves to be “Saudi princes” got a proper job and started contributing productively to human betterment. Yes, you could say that. But for now it seems that most Saudi citizens have not (yet) rallied behind that point of view.
You could also perhaps predict that the advances made in high-end, and very well-funded geriatric care could keep both Abdullah and Sultan ticking over, in a condition that is semi-presentable in public, for another 15 or 20 years. Yes, their health-care system has indeed been very heavily invested in… mainly, one supposes, as a way to try to postpone as long as possible the tsunami of succession conflicts that is almost bound to arrive when these two doughty old survivors exit the scene.
But this does not, I submit, look anything like a stable system of governance in the modern world…
Bottom line, therefore, on the memo to Barack Obama and George Mitchell: Nail down the final portions of this Israeli-Arab peace business before these two weighty pro-US countries enter the shoals of real succession crises. That is, do it as fast as you can!

US opinionators fazed by rise of Israeli right?

Normally, the opinionators of the NYT and other mainstream US media are quick to express their views of every small development in the Israeli-Arab arena. However, the resounding success won by the rightist parties in Tuesday’s general election in Israel left these nabobs uncharacteristically speechless.
What, no pronunciamento from the NYT editorial board today on this latest big development in the land they so love and admire? No word from liberal op-ed icons Nick Christof or Roger Cohen in their contributions today?
Over at the WaPo, similarly, no opinions are expressed. On Israel. Though the editors do take the opportunity to gin up a bit more hostility to Hugo Chavez, over the campaign he has launched to challenge his country’s Jewish citizens to “declare themselves” in opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
So when can we hope that the WaPo will publicly take Israel’s new kingmaker, Avigdor Lieberman, to task for his many racist and bullying utterances against Palestinians and Arabs? When might we see the NYT’s editors calling out Leiberman as the thug he is, and calling forthrightly for using all elements of US power to secure an international-law-based “land for peace” settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
I guess we’d have to wait a long time, in the case of these two venerable pillars of US opinion-making. They like to project an image of themselves as generally “liberal”. But whenever that conflicts with the bedrock support that their owners and lead editors all subscribe to, of any government at all in Israel, then it’s the (veneer of) liberalism that gives way.
I imagine that right now, the leading opinionators at both papers are desperately trying to figure out a way to express themselves on the latest developments in Israel that can somehow reconcile their now starkly competing desires to (a) appear “liberal” and (b) support Israel.
Note that in “opinionators” I am not referring here to known rightwing pro-Israeli op-ed writers like Charles Krauthammer, Bill Cristol, etc. They of course will find ways to explain how “reasonable” both Netanyahu and Lieberman are; and how it is that supporting those ghastly right and ultra-right pols will actually “serve America’s interests in the war on terror”, etc etc. What they write will be mildly interesting… But what I’m most interested in is how the influential people who actually run these and other powerful MSM outlets, and who like to project themselves as “liberal” but hate to criticize Israel publicly, will express them on the latest Israeli election results.
One meme I’m predicting: That the rise of Lieberman and and Netanyahu can somehow (like the suffering of Gaza’s people) all be blamed on Hamas…
For my part, I think that much more of the rise of bellophilia in Israel in general, and of the right and ultra-right parties in particular, can be attributed to many decades of US policies that have given ways too much indulgence to the bellophilic and settlerist sensibilities in the Israeli body politic, abandoning key international and domestic law principles along the way.
That’s what we now need to focus on turning round. And it starts with telling some long-muted truths about the disturbing development of a new fascism in Israel.