Tag: israel/palestine

EU summit on Middle East conflict

This gets little attention at the moment, as the dispute with Iran over its nuclear program and international assistance to Lebanon dominate international diplomacy headlines, but I was disappointed by the outcome of the summit of the EU foreign ministers.

It was hosted in Finland (which is currently performing EU presidency), and the Finish foreign minister made an interesting remark before the summit, indicating a softening of the EU’s stance on Hamas.

Disappointingly, he draw back soon afterwards, saying that Hamas would have to accept preconditions before any talks, including the recognition of Israel. While there was certainly debate on integrating Hamas, this shows that there is no majority amongst EU members.

But if the EU wants to launch an initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the shadow of the other regional issues, it needs to do find a more pro-active stance on Hamas, then just replacing the Palestinian authority by paying cash sums to the population.

However, the EU appears to increasingly see itself as the main player in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as several European nations are preparing to send strong troop contingents to Southern Lebanon, and as the Bush administration is busy with November elections in Iraq and elections to Congress.

Arab NGOs want Israel out of UN

A coalition of Arab human rights organizations are starting a movement to freeze Israel’s UN membership. I looked quickly through the list, and while some major ones are missing, the list does contain some of the most courageous rights groups in the region. Here’s an excerpt from their statement, and links to download the press release containing the full list of NGOs.

It is not longer possible that Arab human rights organizations ignore the governmental approach, both Arab and western, towards the Israeli practices considering them in isolation and overlooking the systematic policy they follow.
It is time we consolidate a more progressive and positive approach towards those practices and the continuous violations by the successive Israeli governments throughout their history.
We look forward to serious and tangible actions that aim to expose this Israeli state, isolate it and work towards freezing its membership in the UN.
We realize that this is a difficult and long term task that has to being by simple and slowly mounting, although clear and solid, actions.
We take this statement to be an initial and simple step on the way towards this achievement of this task. We wish it to be the beginning of an international campaign that may involve, among others, regional and international meetings and joint actions.

I leave it to readers to debate whether this is useful or not. You may want to keep in mind the current situation in Gaza.

English:
It is time to freeze Israel’s membership in the UN (1)-1.doc

Arabic:
تجميد عضوية اسرائيل-1.doc

Hamas to launch satellite TV station

It looks like Hamas may launch its own regional satellite television station:

Gaza, 28 August: Ramattan news agency learned today from sources close to Hamas that the movement plans to launch its satellite television channel on 1 October.

About a year ago, Hamas launched its private television station, Al-Aqsa Television, but the station remained an experimental terrestrial channel. The station served Hamas in the legislative elections that were held early this year, and helped it win most of the parliamentary seats by airing propaganda and reports on Hamas’s leaders, candidates and political programme.

According to sources close to the television station, its will begin its trial broadcast through Nile Sat, in early October, adding that it would become the first party-owned Palestinian satellite channel.

It is noteworthy that more than one private Palestinian television channel is expected to be launched during the next few months.

Source: Ramattan News Agency website, Gaza.

There several things that are remarkable about this. First, if it goes ahead on NileSat, it will mean the Egyptian government is agreeing to this — possibly as another bargaining chip in Cairo’s ongoing negotiations with various Palestinian factions. Secondly, as the article points out, this will be the second time that an Arab political party (especially one that remains essentially in opposition, even if it won elections and formed a government) gets its own satellite channel — the first is Hizbullah’s Al Manar, which is getting plenty of attention these days.

Of course, it could be that this channel will be too poorly funded and vulnerable to Israeli attacks (on the physical studios, for instance) to amount to much. But it has the potential to become an influential source of information in the Arab world, much as Al Manar has during the Lebanon war. And there’s no shortage of emotionally-charged news coming from the Occupied Territories…

Hamzawy: Democracy lost

That Amr Hamzawy — he’s so hot right now (you have watched Zoolander, haven’t you?):

This widening ideological divide between ruling elites and oppositions will make it more difficult to adopt political reform measures, which require at least some consensus and flexibility on both sides. More troubling is that the positions of putatively democratic Arab opposition movements on the war in Lebanon have exposed their totalitarian and populist tendencies. There is a great difference between adopting a rational discourse that rightly condemns the Israeli military for its crimes against civilians and criticizes unconditional American acceptance of the war, and cheering the death of Israeli civilians as a step toward the destruction of the “Zionist entity.” This goes beyond the tendency of Islamist and pan-Arab opposition movements to opportunistically capitalize on popular feelings to rally support. It shows that these movements lack a key characteristic of reformist political forces: a willingness to combat ideologies of hatred and extremism rather than using them for political advantage.

Furthermore, although they call for democratic reform in Arab countries, Islamist and pan-Arab movements have failed to acknowledge the fundamentally non-democratic nature of the actions of Lebanon’s Hizbullah. By unilaterally making a decision of war and peace on July 12, Hizbullah confiscated the right of Lebanon’s government, of which it is part, to determine the country’s fate. Israel’s response , by targeting infrastructure and the civilian population, was surely extreme, legitimizing resistance; however, Hizbullah acted like a state within a state, taking advantage of the weakness of Lebanon’s formal institutions and transgressing the principle of consensual decision-making.

The regional shadows of the war in Lebanon will persist for many years. They may well be a long and painful reminder that the hope for any near-term democratic transformation of the Arab world was perhaps the greatest loser in a war that produced tremendous damage on all sides.

Harsh words indeed. While I agree with him that Hizbullah acted irresponsibly on 12 July, it’s quite a stretch to say that it took a decision of war and peace. It was Israel that took the decision to escalate the conflict into a full-scale war. As for the opposition being opportunistic in capitalizing on the Hizbullah-Lebanon war for local advantage, I don’t really see that as a problem (they’re politicians, after all) as much as some of the delusions about this war. But there is a real concern in that the opposition does not realize that cheering for Hizbullah is a dead-end street: there is no real support in Egypt (and I suspect in all other Arab countries) for going to war against Israel. The need for a rational discourse about the region is indeed great, and it would have been nice to see less grandstanding from certain parts of the Nasserist left (which does indeed have totalitarian impulses). But it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument: can you have a quality democratic debate in the absence of democracy and when the only avenue open to dissidents is populism? Rational debate lost out on all sides here: in both the Arab world and in Israel (actually, particularly in Israel), jingoism triumphed.

Alterman: Likudniks take on the Jews

Eric Alterman on how neo-cons and Israel Firsters are attacking American Jewry for putting America’s interests before Israel’s:

Things can become a little confusing when the same neocons who insist it is ipso facto anti-Semitic to ask what role Israel plays in their calculations instruct American Jews that they are paying too much attention to their own country’s best interests and not enough to Israel’s. Writing in–of all places–The Weekly Standard, David Gelernter attacks American Jews for their “self-destructive nihilism” in remaining “fervent supporters of an American left that is increasingly unable or unwilling to say why Israel must exist.” (This is nonsense about the vast majority of the left, of course, but ignore that for a moment.) Gelernter argues that “grassroots Democrats are increasingly dangerous to the Jewish state (not to mention the American state).” Note that the question of the “American state” is literally a mere parenthetical to Gelernter’s principal concern–the well-being of Israel. Over at National Review’s “The Corner,” Mona Charen can be found making the same sneering argument. She calls American Jews “stubborn and downright stupid” because they “despise George W. Bush and will donate time and money to any Democrat in 2008, while Bush is indisputably the most pro-Israel president in the history of the United States.” Again, it’s highly “disputable,” but never mind that. More to the point is the fact that Bush’s presidency–a complete and utter failure by virtually any empirical measurement–is also deemed irrelevant. It’s Israel alone that matters, according to these anti-American conservatives. (And woe unto American Jews when Christian America starts paying attention to their unpatriotic perfidy.)

What’s most immediately worrisome about the neocons’ long march through our institutions of government is the possibility that they may succeed a second time. According to Sidney Blumenthal’s reporting in Salon, neocon staffers for Dick Cheney and the NSC’s point man on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams (Norman Podhoretz’s son-in-law), “have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries.” They are looking, according to this NSC source, “to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.”

Four wars simultaneously? Led by this crew? After what we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan? Is it me, or are the people who run this country dangerously out of their minds?

Reminder to self: move to South America (but not too close to Castro or Chavez).