Tag: israel/palestine

The Guardian profiles former Israeli Arab lawmaker Azmi Bishara and looks at the rising self-assertion of non-Jewish Israeli citizens:

Before his resignation, his Balad party held only four seats in the Knesset in a country where many Arab Israelis still tend to vote for the mainstream political parties, particularly Labour – now part of the ruling coalition. Even Bishara admits there is not widespread public support for his ideas among his own community. One opinion poll earlier this year found that three-quarters of Arab Israelis would support a constitution describing Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

However, in recent months, that has begun to change. For a start, racism against Arabs in Israel is rising, according to at least one recent poll. In a survey for the Centre Against Racism, a poll of Jewish Israelis found that more than half believed it was treason for a Jewish woman to marry an Arab man; 40% said Arabs should no longer have the right to vote in parliamentary elections; and 75% opposed apartment blocks being shared by Jews and Arabs.

At the same time, more and more prominent Arab Israelis are adopting ideas similar to Bishara’s and proposing a fundamental challenge to the Jewish nature of the state. Four separate documents have emerged since December, each making a similar case. Adalah, a human rights group, issued a draft constitution that said Israel should be defined not as a Jewish state but as a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural state”. It called for an end to the Law of Return, which gives automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, and it called on Israel to “recognise its responsibility for past injustices suffered by the Palestinian people”.

Mobilizing the Arab population of Israel is perhaps the best way left to force a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – it’s pretty clear that most Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, ghettoized and radicalized over 40 years of abuse, are not able to do it.

Israeli textbook states Arab view:

The Israeli government has approved a school textbook that for the first time presents the Palestinian denunciation of the creation of Israel in 1948.

The book, to be used only in Israeli Arab schools, notes that Palestinians describe the event as a “catastrophe”.

“Both the Israeli and Palestinian versions have to be presented,” education minister Yuli Tamir said.

The book was condemned by right-wing politicians but hailed by Arab Israelis who say all schools should use it.

Separate schools, separate schoolbooks. But don’t call it an apartheid state. (Why on earth the spin on this article, notably the headline, is positive is beyond me.)

The New Yorker has a profile of Avrahum Burg, the former Knesset speaker turned anti-Zionist, that’s well worth reading even if it contains obvious faults and biases, notably in the first two paragraphs. It also contains some excellent examples of how the Zionist meta-narrative brooks no dissent and savages its opponents by qualifying critiques as “unutterable”:

Soon after the interview was published, Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, said that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery, in Jerusalem, reserved for national leaders. “He had better search for a grave in another country,” Schneller said. One letter to the Jerusalem Post compared Burg to young people who, after military service, go off to India to find their spiritual selves in an ashram. “Yesteryear, Burg would have been disowned as at least a lunatic,” the columnist Sarah Honig wrote in the same paper. “The grave danger is that today he gives voice and lends insidious quasi-respectability to what was heretofore unutterable. By tomorrow, the uncontrollable infestation he spreads might confer outright legitimacy on Israel’s delegitimatization.” If and when Israel’s borders changed, Honig continued, “Burg probably won’t stick around to risk the ensuing slaughter. The new Wandering Jew will pack his sinister seeds and propagate his wicked wandering weeds from afar.”

In some ways I think this article — notably the themes of Holocaust exploitation and the power of the US Lobby — would not have been possible before Norman Finkelstein’s books and the “lobby” essay by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

It’s nearly confirmed:

Tony Blair has landed a major diplomatic job as the international Middle East peace envoy, responsible for preparing the Palestinians for negotiations with Israel. His role, to be announced today, will be largely to work with the Palestinians over security, economy and governance.

Working from an office in Jerusalem, and possibly another in the West Bank, Mr Blair will become the special representative for the Middle East quartet of UN, EU, US and Russia. The announcement comes on the eve of his departure from Downing Street tomorrow and is privately welcomed by Gordon Brown.

The arrangement, which has been under preparation for weeks, is due to be agreed at a meeting of the quartet today.

His job is to “prepare” the Palestinians? Further details:

It was being stressed last night that Mr Blair’s role – in the short term at least – would not be to act as a mediator between the Palestinians and the Israelis, or to become a negotiator for the road map to peace. He might, however, be responsible for trying to persuade the Palestinians to accept the conditions for ending the international boycott of Hamas.

I like this conceit in the piece that he would have more success and be in a less antagonistic position with the Bush administration than previous envoys — such as James Wolfensohn or Alvaro de Soto. Because it would be an illusion that Blair or anyone else would be able to go against the White House, and what it really means is that he sees more eye-to-eye with the Bushies than his predecessors. Which is not A Good Thing.

Some interesting discussions of the “Fatah never thought” theory, in preparation for a later post:

Conflict Blotter:

Fatah never fought. Gaza was essentially handed over to Hamas. Soldier after soldier said they felt betrayed and abandoned by their leadership. There was a seemingly willful lack of decision making by the senior most political leadership. Up and down the Gaza Strip from the first moments of fighting, the military leadership disintegrated while the political leadership remained eerily silent.

Ousted Fatah loyalists in Gaza widely suspect a political decision was made early on in Ramallah to surrender the Gaza Strip to Hamas in order to extricate Abbas, Israel and the US from the seeming intractable pickle they were facing as infighting spiraled, living conditions worsened, and the peace process seemed hopelessly stuck. With the Palestinian territories now split, the US, Israel and Abbas suddenly have way forward, without compromising to Hamas.

The Economist:

Why did Hamas go for broke this time? And why was its victory so quick and total? Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, a lobby in Brussels, thinks the combination of economic boycott, domestic discontent, criticism from radical groups abroad, the growing threat from Fatah and splits within Hamas itself meant that people who used to think time was on their side began to think it was working against them.

Fatah, meanwhile, seemed unprepared. Some of its top people in Gaza were away, Mr Dahlan among them. Mr Abbas, sitting in the West Bank, did not declare a state of emergency until Hamas militants were ransacking his Gaza home. Mid-level Fatah officers complained bitterly about lack of leadership. “We had orders not to fire except in self-defence,” says one, whom Israel allowed to flee to the West Bank. Now he sits in the lobby of Ramallah’s smartest hotel, nervously smoking with his fellow fugitives and endlessly repeating stories of Hamas’s brutality.

Indeed, some Fatah officers suspect their leaders’ apathy was deliberate. Letting Hamas win Gaza has a certain logic to Fatah. No sooner had Mr Abbas sworn in a new government under Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official well-liked in the West, than America, the European Union and Canada lifted their 15-month-old boycott, and Israel said it would consider releasing frozen PA tax revenues, removing some of the internal checkpoints that stifle the West Bank’s economy, and holding more meaningful talks with Mr Abbas. Thus, runs the theory, Mr Abbas will reap the praise for a better life in the West Bank, while Gazans’ well-being will be at the mercy of a now-isolated Hamas.

So it was all planned, was it? Qaddoura Fares, one of Fatah’s younger leaders in Ramallah, lets out a short, dry laugh. “If only!” More likely, agrees Diana Buttu, a former adviser to Mr Abbas, the famously diffident Palestinian president wanted to avoid a showdown, and simply did not expect Hamas to go so far.

The Observer, in an interview with Hamas military commander Abu Obieda:

Despite his months of planning for such a war, Abu Obieda was surprised by the speed of the victory: ‘I expected it to take one month. That is what we planned for and trained for. But then at the beginning, all the Fatah commanders escaped their compounds in ambulances and left for Egypt. They left their men to die. Who could do that?’

At one battle, for a security compound – where his men later found weapons, ammunition and food that would survive a three-month siege – he listened on a radio to Fatah fighters on nearby rooftops begging their commanders for more ammunition that never came. ‘They all had left,’ Abu Obieda said. ‘The Fatah fighters are brave but would you fight for a commander who left you alone to die for his war?’

McClatchy:

In five days of fighting, Fatah never put up a real fight. The question is why not.

In interviews with McClatchy Newspapers during and after the fighting, Fatah foot soldiers said they felt abandoned as they realized that there’d be no counterattack, not even a last-ditch defense.

Some of them thought incompetent political leaders had done them in. But this land has long been fertile soil for conspiracy theories, and others wondered whether Abbas had deliberately ceded the Gaza Strip to Hamas in an attempt to isolate the radical Islamic group and consolidate his power in the much larger West Bank.

“There was total frustration and disappointment,” said one Abbas security officer who was among the last to abandon the presidential compound on Thursday night, June 14, and asked to be identified only as A.R. because of fear of retaliation. “We felt like there was a conspiracy to hand over Gaza to Hamas.”

Whether it was conspiracy or collapse, Fatah’s downfall in Gaza has created an unexpected opportunity for Israel, the United States and others to re-establish full relations with Abbas and the pro-Western emergency cabinet he’s installed to replace the elected, Hamas-dominated Palestinian government.

Got any more?

Great — a Bush lapdog with a long track record of anti-Palestinian policy-making sent to negotiate peace: Blair May Become Special Mideast Envoy – washingtonpost.com

Some readers have written to ask why I am not writing about the recent events in Palestine. The main reason, aside from not having internet access over the last few days, is that I am not there and do not follow events there very closely. For fresh analysis and reporting, you could do no better than head over to my friend Charles Levinson’s Conflict Blotter, which is shock-full of interesting tidbits such as this timeline of the recent clashes. I have some thoughts on how this links in to bigger regional issues, but that will have to wait.

I actually think the most important document you can read to understand the current crisis is Alvaro de Soto’s recently leaked UN report, revealed by the Guardian, in which he illustrates the sheer cravenness of US and Israeli policies towards the conflict, basically suggesting that the UN (and European countries) should withdraw from the sham that is the Quartet. The report is basically explosive, and considering this is widely believed to be one of the most important conflicts on the planet, it is an extremely important story. It has been fairly widely reported by the European press since the Guardian broke it. I just checked the websites of the New York Times and the name “Alvaro de Soto” does not show up at all in the past week; the Washington Post printed a story on page A16 last Thursday (I subscribe to the Post’s daily mailing list and to its mideast RSS feed and did not see it).

Below are clippings from a variety of sources, some very anti-Palestinian, but they illustrate well one thing: that the leaders of Fatah, by and large, may have not had control of a real state but were cut from very much the same cloth as most other Arab leaders.

Hamas Takes Over Gaza Security Services – New York Sun

World Net Daily’s Aaron Klein first broke the story of the document stash yesterday, publishing an interview with a spokesman for the Hamas allied Popular Resistance Committee, Muhammed Abdel-El. He told Mr. Klein, “The CIA files we seized, which include documents, CDs, taped conversations, and videos, are more important than all the American weapons we obtained the last two days as we took over the traitor Fatah’s positions.”

A CIA spokesman yesterday declined to comment. But a former CIA operations officer who worked in the Middle East, Robert Baer, said it was a major blow to Fatah, the party founded in 1966 by Yasser Arafat that America sought to prop up during the Oslo process as the CIA and Egyptian security services trained its members in the hopes that they would take action against jihadists such as Hamas.

“They are going to identify Fatah with the CIA. Fatah equals CIA is not a good selling point. They are going to show a record of training, spying on Hamas, that’s about it. It’s what we all knew. But the point is they have undermined the secular Palestinians for a long time. No one wants to be publicly associated with the CIA in the Middle East, except for maybe the Albanians,” Mr. Baer said.

Mr. Baer said that most of the training the CIA provided in the Oslo years, aid codified in the Wye River Accords in 1998 between America, Israel and the Palestinian Authority, was fairly low level. “What we did was throw money at them. We give them dumb training, soft interrogation techniques, reports writing. All this stuff is a total waste of time. They will never get to the point where they do anything more than transmit a report verbally to someone they trust. That is just the culture.”

PA Chairman Abbas issues decree outlawing Hamas armed militias – Haaretz

According to the current plan, Abbas will continue to refuse to negotiate with Hamas or to reach a compromise with the movement’s leadership. This weekend he turned down a request to meet with Khaled Meshal. The emergency cabinet of Salam Fayad is sure to obtain broad Arab and international support. Since it contains no Hamas members, the boycott against the PA will be lifted and it will receive financial and diplomatic support from the whole world. This weekend, representatives of Abbas asked a number of non-partisan Gazan figures to join the new cabinet but so far none has agreed.

The blockade of the Gaza Strip will continue, under the plan framed by Abbas. Israel and Egypt will provide a small amount of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents, but the government of Ismail Haniyeh – dissolved by Abbas – will continue to be viewed as illegitimate in the eyes of the international community. Gaza’s borders will be nearly hermetically sealed, with only limited emergency supplies and intermittent water and electricity provided by Israel. The intention is to maintain the siege on Gaza for a few weeks – not to defeat Hamas or to reoccupy the strip, but to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a compromise according to terms dictated by Abbas.

Abbas sought and received Egypt’s blessing for this plan, in contrast to Cairo’s firm and public opposition to Abbas’ Plan B, which called for introducing an Arab or international force into Gaza. The Egyptians explained that such a move would provoke resistance from Hamas and would turn Gaza into Baghdad.

Abbas aide: Fayad completed formation of emergency gov’t – Haaretz

Hamas’ Damascus-based political leader Khaled Meshal said Friday his group does not want to seize power in the Palestinian Authority, and that the group recognizes Abbas as the head of the PA.

“Hamas does not want to seize power … We are faithful to the Palestinian people,” Meshal said, promising to help rebuild Palestinian homes damaged in the months of bloody infighting.

“What happened in Gaza was a necessary step. The people were suffering from chaos and lack of security and this treatment was needed,” Meshal continued. “The lack of security drove the crisis toward explosion.”

“Abbas has legitimacy,” Meshal said, “There’s no one who would question or doubt that, he is an elected president, and we will cooperate with him for the sake of national interest.”

How Hamas turned on Palestine’s ‘traitors’ – The Observer

Discreetly, Hamas had forged links with members and former members of Fatah with whom it was happy to deal. It had drawn up a list of buildings belonging to the security forces of Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to be overrun, and lists of Fatah loyalists it blamed for the murder of Hamas members. Finally, it had briefed journalists on the Hamas-controlled television channel al-Aqsa TV on the message to broadcast to Gaza’s 1.4 million people to reassure them, as the fighting turned from clashes to an all-out assault on Fatah-held positions.

It was a message that would dramatically underline the nature of last week’s assault. It was not an attack on Fatah, the broadcasts would insist, or Gaza’s people. Instead, those under attack, the supporters of Gaza’s head of the Preventive Security Force, Mohammed Dahlan, were ‘collaborators with Israel and the US and traitors’.

What they did not say, but what was understood by all Gazans, was that the leadership of Hamas has a more personal grudge against the deeply unpopular Dahlan. Specifically, they blamed him for ordering a series of killings of members of Hamas that in their view had fuelled the cycle of violence that stepped up
after Hamas swept Fatah from power in January last year.

The reality is that the only people who are really behind Salam Fayyad are the European and US diplomats who have long sung his praises behind the scenes to any journalist prepared to listen. So yesterday President Bush and the other members of the Quartet got what they wanted. Abbas trooped dutifully in to see the US consul-general in Jerusalem with Mohammed Dahlan, the man widely credited with beginning the cycle of violence in Gaza, in tow. And when they emerged, the boycott of US monies to the Palestinian government had been lifted.

Israeli official: Dayton failed – Jerusalem Post

As security coordinator between Israel and the PA, US Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton was responsible for training and financing equipment used by the Presidential Guard, Abbas’s elite force that was in charge of the Rafah and Karni crossings. During last week’s fighting in Gaza, the forces proved their ineffectiveness and together with the rest of the Fatah military and political wing, failed to demonstrate a real opposition to Hamas.

“Dayton’s plan completely failed,” a senior defense official said. “The Presidential Guards which he was responsible for were easily run over by Hamas.”

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with a noted analyst of Palestinian politics. We were talking about the dynamics of the Hamas-Fatah fighting. I asked him what he thought would happen if Dahlan is assassinated. He paused, thought a while, smiled and then answered: “Palestine is liberated.”