Tag: israel/palestine

The Middle East Awaits

It’s always good when an establishment newspaper points out the obvious even when it’s not part of the current election talking points. The NYT did so when it penned an editorial on the criminal neglect of the Middle East peace process, which should have been a priority after the 2000 election, after 9/11 and should be now.

Instead, they have joined in offering Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, virtually uncritical support for whatever military operations or settlement expansions he chooses to undertake. After pronouncing anathemas on the discredited Yasir Arafat, they have stood by waiting for a new, less compromised Palestinian leadership to somehow emerge miraculously to replace him. This is not a policy. It is an abdication of leadership that costs Israeli and Palestinian lives, deepens mistrust and makes an eventual peace that much harder to achieve. Washington cannot afford to remain on such a destructive course. It must work to rebuild its influence as a force for Middle East peace.

Update: It’s also heartening to see that most of the letters published in response to the editorial are supportive.

Scowcroft on Bush and Sharon

That wishy-washy liberal,Brent Scowcroft, tells the Financial Times what he thinks of the relationship between Bush and Sharon:

But speaking to the FT, Mr Scowcroft, 79, went a step further in
attacking some of the president’s core foreign policies. “Sharon
just has him wrapped around his little finger,” Mr Scowcroft
said. “I think the president is mesmerised.”

“When there is a suicide attack (followed by a reprisal) Sharon
calls the president and says, ‘I’m on the front line of
terrorism’, and the president says, ‘Yes, you are. . . ‘ He (Mr
Sharon) has been nothing but trouble.”

Mr Scowcroft also cast doubt on Mr Sharon’s plan to withdraw from
the Gaza Strip, which last week Dov Weisglass, a leading Israeli
adviser, said was intended to prevent the emergence of a
Palestinian state.

“When I first heard Sharon was getting out of Gaza I was having
dinner with Condi (Rice) and she said: ‘At least that’s good
news.’ And I said: ‘That’s terrible news . . . Sharon will say:
‘I want to get out of Gaza, finish the wall (the Israelis’
security fence) and say I’m done’.”

Palestine in formaldehyde

Dov Weisglass, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s key advisor, went public today saying that his administration’s plan was to use the Gaza withdrawal to shelf the peace process and the creation of a Palestinian state. The headline of the Reuters story on this, Israel: Palestinian State Shelved with U.S. Blessing, is telling.

Here is the Weisglass quote from Haaretz:

“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Weisglass, one of the initiators of the disengagement plan, said in an interview for the Friday Magazine.

“And when you freeze that process,” Weisglass added, “you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.

“Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”

“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” he said. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

Remember that this is taking place in the midst of a large offensive by Israel into Gaza. An Arab attempt to get the UN to condemn this was, as usual, vetoed by the US because it was considered “lopsided and unbalanced” and “absolves terrorists in the Middle East.” All of which is another way of saying that the US once again puts its credibility on the line to damage Israel, especially when you could easily have separate resolutions condemning Israel’s offensive and the use of terror by Palestinian groups.

I am also curious about the timing of this announcement in the middle of the last stretch of the US presidential election campaigns. The US has now asked for “clarifications” — which sounds like they might end up pulling out the old chestnut that Israel is “not helpful.” But it would be nice to hear strong condemnations from both presidential candidates, and indeed an attack from the Kerry campaign on Bush’s ineffectual Middle East peacemaking. Elections however make all this unlikely.

It may be that this is really for domestic consumption, a throwaway phrase to placate the extreme Israeli right. But at this point it makes more sense to believe that Sharon, Weisglass and company are the Israeli extreme right — the difference being that while in power they have to try to appear more moderate. Which is why there can never be a peace process while Likud is in power — if Menachem Begin ignored the Palestinian parts of Camp David and Benyamin Netanyahu buried Oslo, Sharon will also kill the roadmap. That his top adviser is willing to say so publicly says a lot about their cynicism — and that they know they’ll get away with it.

Whodunnit?

Hamas: Arab State May Have Helped in Syria Killing:

“We were not convinced initially, this would be treason for an Arab security apparatus to be involved in this,” Hamas Lebanon head Osama Hamdan said of a report in the Al-Hayat daily.

The Arabic daily said an Arab country had given the Israeli spy agency Mossad information about the movements and habits of Hamas leaders abroad.

“Now, because of what happened yesterday or through other information, there are indications that this may be case,” he said.”

I would bet on Jordan, or perhaps even the Syrians themselves. Who else would have that kind of information? And why would they share it with Israel — what would they get in return? Hell, you can’t even dismiss the possibility that it could be Egypt considering the difficulty it is having in negotiating with Hamas these days, and the fact that it will sooner or later have to confront it in Gaza if the pullout takes place. If we’re lucky, we’ll known in ten years. If we’re not, we’ll either never know at all or find out soon enough after someone gets assassinated.

Update: It looks like they think it’s Jordan. And some people do think they will hit back:

Hamas may retaliate by striking outside Israel, ex-ambassador says:

Retaliation against Israelis outside their country could follow last weekend’s assassination in Damascus of a Hamas official, a respected Canadian analyst on the Middle East said yesterday.

“There will be a tendency to explore overseas operations,” said Michael Bell, former Canadian ambassador to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Egypt”

Major Powers Wring Hands Discreetly on Middle East

You gotta love that headline. What a sad state of affairs.

Major Powers Wring Hands Discreetly on Middle East: “Reuters – The world’s major powers wrung
their hands discreetly on Wednesday at the lack of progress
toward peace in the Middle East, chiding Israel and the
Palestinians in equal measure but offering no new ideas.”

CIA study says no Arab-Israeli peace until 2020

Haaretz notes a new study by the CIA’s National Intelligence Council posits that no peace is possible until Arafat’s death and perhaps long after that:

The intelligence estimate casts doubt on the likelihood of a full peace settlement materializing in the years before 2020; nonetheless, should an Israel-Palestinian agreement for a “cold peace” win support among a majority of Palestinians, it would constitute the most significant development in the region since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, improve the Arab world’s attitude toward the U.S., and eliminate a pretext used by Arab countries which are reluctant to implement political reforms, the U.S. assessment claims. Israel, the evaluation adds, will not relinquish nuclear weapons it possesses.

Furthermore:

The Middle East section of this global assessment warns about the possibility of a war between Israel and Syria, or some other Arab state. In such a future war, it is possible that unconventional (biological, chemical or even nuclear) weapons could be used, warns the National Intelligence Council. Such a war would eradicate the softening of Arab attitudes toward the U.S., and also derail efforts to revive progress on the Israel-Palestinian peace track. Another rout of an Arab army by the IDF would cause Arab populations to reconsider the viability of their political regimes.

Surely that was the argument about 1967, but even the viability of Arab political regimes was doubted, there was little opposition movements could do about it, particularly while these governments became clients of the US or USSR. I also wonder if the 2020 date is perhaps a reflection of wishful thinking — certainly the current Israeli government does not seem interested in achieving peace and thinks time is on its side (which has been more or less the policy since 1967, since time allows the creation of facts on the ground.)

You can download the full report in pdf here and take a look at reports for other regions at this page.

Netanyahu on “Arab demographic threat”

Benyamin Netanyahu has pitched in his two cents in the growing debate on the Israeli right over the demographic threat that Palestinians both inside and outside Israel present:

Netanyahu added that Israel does not face a demographic threat from the Palestinians who will be under Palestinian control and will enjoy “self determination” in the future, but rather faces a threat from the Israeli Arab population. He believes that it is of the utmost importance to maintain the Jewish majority in the country and for this the economy must be improved to encourage more Jews to immigrate from the Diaspora and improve the education of “Jew and
Arab, boy and girl, man and woman.” Netanyahu warned that should the Israeli Arab sector grow to 35-40 percent of the population, Israel will become a bi-national country.

MK Ahmed Tibi (Hadash) said in response to Netanyahu’s comments that “the day is not far off when Netanyahu and his cohorts will put up roadblocks at the entrances to Arab villages to tie Arab women’s tubes and spray us with spermicide.”

There has been a number of articles discussing Olmert’s suggestion of a unilateral withdrawal (a concept that was the campaign platform of the Labor Party in the last election) in the Israeli press lately. But this analysis vy Zvi Bar’el says there is no real intention of ending the occupation to solve the demographic threat and that the fence may not be what it
seems.

Since the elections you can hardly find a settler who will talk against the fence. In short order they understood that it’s not a security fence, and certainly not a fence that will protect them, but an original political creation: the de facto slicing up of the West Bank into cantons surrounded by fences. No one knows where the fence starts and where it ends, who’s inside and who’s outside. There is only one thing that’s obvious to anyone who looks at its route: a Palestinian state cannot be established inside these compounds.

Egypt: “A grave and gathering threat” says JPost

This comment piece by Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post is telling of an evolving concern in the Israeli right about Egypt, and especially Egypt after Mubarak.

One of the worst-kept secrets in our region is that aside from Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Egypt is the greatest looming threat to Israel’s national security. As our governing officials pander to Mubarak and his top brass, these men oversee diplomatic and military policies that endanger the very existence of the Jewish state.

But I wouldn’t give too much credence to Glick’s claim that Egypt has achieved military parity with Israel. More interesting is what seems to be Israeli worries about Egypt after Mubarak:

A former senior IDF intelligence officer allows that “Egypt’s military buildup is beyond any proportion to conceivable external threats to Egypt and is a cause for alarm.” Yet, at the same time, he argues that under Mubarak’s dictatorship, Egypt has no interest in moving towards open warfare with Israel. “The problem will arise if a succession crisis ensues after Mubarak’s death.”

This argument, that 75-year-old Mubarak’s despotic rule of Egypt acts as a barrier to protect Israel from his own massive buildup of Egypt’s military forces, is the conventional wisdom on Egypt. It is voiced by officials throughout the political spectrum in Israel and accepted unquestioningly in Washington. The problem is that Egypt’s military is explicit in naming Israel as the intended recipient of the full brunt of its massive might.

Friedman on Olmert

Thomas Friedman’s NYT editorial today has a rather unusual portrayal of Ehud Olmert,a figure on the far Israeli right who is a top Sharon advisor and a former mayor of Jerusalem.

Last week, an earthquake happened in Israel when a leading figure of the Israeli right split away and embraced the logic of the Israeli left and center. The Likud deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, gave a gutsy interview to Israel’s leading columnist, Nahum Barnea of Yediot, in which he indicated that Israel can’t continue occupying the West Bank and Gaza, with all their Palestinians, without losing a Jewish majority and eventually having to argue in the world against the universal principle of one person, one vote. “I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us,” Mr. Olmert said.

But Mr. Olmert is dubious about negotiating with the Palestinians. So, he argued, Israel should consider unilaterally dismantling settlements and withdrawing from most of the territories, including parts of Arab East Jerusalem, to maximize the number of Jews under Israeli control and minimize the number of Arabs.

I’m very dubious about anything Olmert says — he is responsible after all for a great deal of the “judaification” of Arab East Jerusalem — but it is worth noting, in light of the previous post on the demographics of historic Palestine, that this seems to be an issue of rising importance for Israelis. Friedman thinks this is because of the Iraq war, but the facts in themselves are probably enough.