Probably the most significant take-away from the past few days of U.S.-Israeli dialog is to shed light on the true intentions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding peace with the Palestinians. Although Netanyahu finally allowed the phrase “Palestinian state” to pass his lips for the first time almost two years ago, this past week in Washington provided further confirmation of what had been apparent all along: that whatever conception Netanyahu may have of such a “state,” it is not a formula having any chance of becoming the basis for—to use Netanyahu’s own words from his joint appearance with President Obama on Friday—“a peace that will be genuine, that will hold, that will endure,” or probably even what most of the rest of the world would consider a state. Netanyahu is smart enough to realize this, which is to say he is content to let the status quo endure indefinitely. Israel will maintain that status quo through brute force—military force within the territories, and political force in Washington.
The drop-the-veil moment during this past week was the importunate lobbying by Netanyahu’s government before President Obama delivered his Middle East speech on Thursday at the State Department (and doesn’t that say something right there—where else would one see a foreign government get in the last lobbying licks on a president’s speech, even at the expense of delaying the speech?) to omit any mention of the 1967 borders as the basis for negotiating land swaps and an eventual territorial settlement. The president mentioned that anyway, and in the joint appearance on Friday Netanyahu said nothing about land swaps, instead denouncing the 1967 borders as not being a suitable basis for anything. As Mr. Obama correctly noted in his address to AIPAC on Sunday, there was nothing new in his mention of 1967-borders-with-swaps. It has long been recognized as the only formula that has any hope of being the basis for a successful negotiation. It has been the basis for several official proposals, including one by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. It also has been at the center of several unofficial proposals, including ones from people whose concern for Israel cannot be doubted (such as a plan offered by David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy).
So for Netanyahu, not only is the land allotted to the Jewish state in the UN partition plan of the 1940s not enough, and not only is the larger territory that became the State of Israel with what we call the 1967 borders not enough. Even with land swaps that would extend Israel farther into the West Bank and include the large majority of the settlements Israel has constructed on land seized in the 1967 war, that would still not be enough for him. How much would be enough? One can speculate on what crumbs of land would be left to the Palestinians, but speculation is not required to have an idea based on Netanyahu’s own statements of what such a “state” would entail: Israeli control of the airspace, no military of its own, and, as the prime minister mentioned on Friday, a “long-term” Israeli military presence along the Jordan River. It sounds like a bantustan that would make Bophuthatswana look like a paragon of sovereignty. But trying to envision the details of such an entity is pointless because it is a non-starter very likely intended to be rejected.
Musa Abumarzuq, deputy head of Hamas’s political bureau in Damascus, writes:
The birth of the Cairo reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas was slow and painful. But Palestinians welcomed its arrival. The tragic division which occurred in our national movement constituted a chapter we hope will never happen again. It never occurred to us that a time would come when we would turn against fellow Palestinians.
Today, the reconciliation exposes the Israeli occupation as the real spoiler of peace. The Israelis have reneged on every agreement signed with the Palestinian Authority. Now we have forged this historic agreement and buried the hatchet, they are threatening our people with dire consequences.
While we were ensconced in Cairo trying to finalise the agreement, Israel embarked on a diplomatic offensive to persuade European governments to withdraw economic assistance to the Palestinian Authority.
As western governments have, individually and collectively, welcomed the democratic changes taking place in the Middle East, they should support a similar transformation in Palestine. Any attempt to short change my people would have no legitimacy. The events marking the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba have shown that no amount of victimisation, wars and blockade will deter us from the path of freedom. The world must remember the core issue of our cause is the right of every refugee to return to their home – a right enshrined in international law. As others were allowed to exercise this right, we demand the same for our people.
The Congress of the United States consists of 100 senators and 435 members of the House of Representatives; in effect, just 535 Americans are blocking efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. Why? Forget the pious guff about Israel being the region’s “only democracy” and a “valued friend and ally” of Washington. In the corrupt and dysfunctional US political system, where legislators are outnumbered by special interests, from the gun lobby to Big Pharma, the Israel lobby – specifically, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) that brags on its website about being “the most important organisation affecting America’s relationship with Israel” – has a financial stranglehold on both main parties. According to William Quandt, a former adviser on the Middle East to the Nixon and Carter administrations, “70 per cent to 80 per cent of all members of Congress will go along with whatever they think Aipac wants”.
It is Aipac that polices congressional votes on Israel, demands unconditional US support for the occupation of the West Bank and insists that Israel remain the largest single annual recipient of US foreign aid ($250 a year per Israeli, compared to $1 a year per African). Consider this: the upper and lower houses of Congress are more divided, polarised and partisan than in any other period in recent history. Democrats and Republicans agree on nothing. Except Israel.
Presidents who have tried to pressurise the Israelis – from Reagan to Obama – have found themselves attacked not just in the Knesset but in Congress. In the words of Paul Findley, a Republican from Illinois who served in the House of Representatives for 22 years before being
defeated by an Aipac-funded candidate in 1982: “Congress behaves as if it were a subcommittee of the Israeli parliament.” The irony is that there is far more heated debate about Israel’s actions on the floor of the Knesset than on Capitol Hill. “For 35 years, not a word has been expressed . . . in either chamber of Congress that deserves to be called debate on Middle East policy,” Findley wrote in 2002.
On 2 May 2002, after Ariel Sharon’s invasion of the West Bank and the destruction of the Jenin refugee camp, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly approved resolutions expressing “solidarity with Israel” – 352 to 21 in the House, 94 to two in the Senate.
On 20 July 2006, eight days after the start of Israel’s war against Lebanon, Congress passed a resolution endorsing Israeli military action by a vote of 410 to eight. On 9 January 2009, as the Palestinian death toll from the Israeli air assault on Gaza topped 700, the House of Representatives passed a resolution “reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas”. The margin was 390 votes to five.
These comically one-sided resolutions illustrate the power and influence of the Israel lobby on Capitol Hill – and the way in which craven legislators in both main parties blindly throw their support behind any and every act of belligerence. As Uri Avnery, the Israeli author and peace activist, once remarked: if Aipac “were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 senators and 300 congressmen would sign it at once”.
In today’s Hebrew Israeli daily Yediot, Yaron London writes:
Few believe in the possibility of making peace within our lifetime, though some imagine that an unwieldy hudna [truce] can be imposed. Our situation among the nations, many believe, is incurably deteriorating. The world is closing in on us, and even the US, our only ally, is losing its patience with us and redefining its map of interests. In a recent poll, one quarter of the Americans support stopping the aid to Israel, and another quarter wish to make the aid conditional upon “progress in the peace process.” Since we are not moving toward peace and since the American Jews are gradually losing their interest in us, it is difficult to hope that the support of our friend is assured.
We dare not think about the collapse of the state due to the pressures that burden it, but there is almost no doubt that the pressures will heighten and place it at great risk. If we do not wish to cling to foolish truisms (“we survived Pharaoh, we’ll survive this too”) or unsubstantiated beliefs (“God will not forsake his people”), it is our duty to think about how we will act if the worst scenario should materialize. The worst scenario means facing the situation of South Africa in the apartheid years: A pariah state, which is under economic boycott and political ostracism. There are already clear signs of this.
If we do not accept the advice of the advocates of compromise, decent right wing politicians should inform us of the price that we will be called upon to pay if we should insist on the positions that they hold. The price will be imposing the rules of conduct of a besieged community: Increasing the strength of the central government, which will be the only one capable of enforcing a strict regime, canceling the free economy and reducing human rights. It is not pleasant to live in such a country, but an unpleasant life is better than putting a stop to life. If we know what lies in store for us, perhaps it will be easier for us to adjust to the unbelievable.
The fear of siege lies in many people’s hearts, but preparation for the worst of all possible situations does not conform to the psychology of the masses, which contradicts the interests of the politicians. They aim their messages to assuage the concerns of the citizens, because concern and frustration are the bread and butter of the opposition. Concerned citizens should send a sharp and clear message to the government: Speak the truth to us.
If there’s one way of registering that President Obama could be saying something of significance while he’s addressing AIPAC, it’s during those passages when he gets no applause.
This morning he got plenty of applause when he assured the pro-Israel lobby that a negotiated border between Israel and a Palestinian state will not end up being the 1967 border.
But when he outlined the degree to which the regional and wider international environment has changed and implicitly acknowledged that Israel and the US are out of step with these changes, the audience was silent.
[A] new generation of Arabs is reshaping the region. A just and lasting peace can no longer be forged with one or two Arab leaders. Going forward, millions of Arab citizens have to see that peace is possible for that peace to be sustained.
And just as the context has changed in the Middle East, so too has it been changing in the international community over the last several years. There’s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations. They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab World — in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe. And that impatience is growing, and it’s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world.
Before Obama arrived at the Washington DC convention center where AIPAC is assembled, AIPAC supporters gathered outside were heard yelling through a bullhorn: “Kill Obama.” I’ve seen no reports of anyone getting arrested for trying to incite the assassination of the president.
Ron Kampeas summed up the mood in this way: “When Obama is in the room, AIPAC is supportive. When he is out of the room, skeptical.”
Some prominent Jewish Americans are rethinking their support for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election bid after he effectively called on Israel to give back territory it has occupied since 1967 to Palestinians.
The backlash after Obama’s keynote speech on the Middle East has Democratic Party operatives scrambling to mollify the Jewish community as the president prepares to seek a second term in the White House.
Obama on Thursday called for any new Palestinian state to respect the borders as they were in 1967, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to tell him bluntly that his vision of how to achieve Middle East peace was unrealistic.
“He has in effect sought to reduce Israel’s negotiation power and I condemn him for that,” former New York Mayor Ed Koch told Reuters.
Koch said he might not campaign or vote for Obama if Republicans nominate a pro-Israel candidate who offers an alternative to recent austere budgetary measures backed by Republicans in Congress.
Koch donated $2,300 to Obama’s campaign in 2008, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.
“I believed that then-Senator Obama would be as good as John McCain based on his statements at the time and based on his support of Israel. It turns out I was wrong,” he said.
Despite the stormy reaction to Obama’s remarks, some commentators noted talk of the 1967 borders was nothing new.
“This has been the basic idea for at least 12 years. This is what Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were talking about at Camp David, and later, at Taba,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote on The Atlantic website.
“This is what George W. Bush was talking about with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. So what’s the huge deal here?”
Exit polls from the 2008 election showed 78 percent of Jewish voters chose Obama over his Republican rival Senator McCain.
“I have spoken to a lot of people in the last couple of days — former supporters — who are very upset and feel alienated,” billionaire real estate developer and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman said.
“He’ll get less political support, fewer activists for his campaign, and I am sure that will extend to financial support as well.”
Barack Obama gave a major speech on the Middle East on Thursday, May 19, and it is clear from the subsequent commentary that he impressed few people. The main reason for this is that he did not say much new or indicate that there would be any serious changes in US policy in the region. It was essentially more of the same with some tweaking here and there. Nevertheless, he did manage to anger some people. For example, Israel’s hard-line supporters were outraged that he said: “Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” For them, the 1967 borders are “Auschwitz borders” and thus can never serve as a basis for negotiations.
Many Palestinians, on the other hand, did not like Obama’s assertion that it made little sense for them to go to the UN General Assembly this September and win recognition for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. Surely they also noticed that shortly after saying “every state has the right to self-defence, and Israel must be able to defend itself,” the president said that the Palestinians would have to be content with “a sovereign non-militarised state,” which means that they would not be able to defend themselves against Israel – or any other state for that matter. Hypocrisy appears to be wired into the DNA of US foreign policy makers.
Obama’s failure to impress and move US Middle East policy in new directions raises the intriguing question: Did he blow an opportunity to give a truly important speech at what appears to be a plastic moment in history? I think not. The sad fact is that Obama has remarkably little manoeuvre room on the foreign policy front. The most important item on his agenda is settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there he knows what has to be done: Push both sides toward a two-state solution, which is the best outcome for all the parties, including the United States. Indeed, he has been trying to do just that since he took office in January 2009. But the remarkably powerful Israel lobby makes it virtually impossible for him to put meaningful pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is committed to creating a Greater Israel in which the Palestinians are restricted to a handful of disconnected and impoverished enclaves. And Obama is certainly not going to buck the lobby – with the 2012 presidential election looming larger every day.
Last weekend, as tens of thousands of unarmed refugees marched toward Israel from all sides in a symbolic effort to reclaim their right of return, the world suddenly discovered the power of Palestinian nonviolence. Much like the “Freedom Flotilla,” when nine activists were killed during an act of nonviolent international disobedience almost a year ago, the deaths of unarmed protesters at the hands of Israeli soldiers drew the world’s attention to Palestine and the refugee issue.
The world shouldn’t have been so surprised. The truth is that there is a long, rich history of nonviolent Palestinian resistance dating back well before 1948, when the state of Israel was established atop a depopulated Palestine. It has just never captured the world’s attention the way violent acts have.
Indeed, by the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, well before the establishment of the state of Israel, and during a period when the Jewish population of historic Palestine had yet to reach 10 percent, the native Arabs of Palestine could already see that their hopes for self-determination — in a homeland where they constituted a vast majority — were being jeopardized by their soon-to-be colonial master.
Resistance to Zionism during this period was characterized by various efforts led by elite members of Arab society who raised awareness about the dangers Zionism posed. Just before the war, Palestine saw a huge spike in new newspapers, and writers and editors such as Ruhi al-Khalidi, Najib Nassar, and Isa al-Isa regularly zeroed in on the threat of Zionism to Palestinian life. Diplomatic efforts to lobby the mandatory government ensued while concurrently peasants occasionally clashed with the European newcomers, but violence was largely localized and communal and took place amid larger, more peaceful, and political efforts to resist Zionist aims.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, had he not died before 1967, would surely have been disappointed to hear it said that he and fellow Zionists who fought to create a Jewish state had such meager success that in its first two decades of existence, Israel was barely an improvement on Auschwitz.
It’s hard to know who should be more offended by that assessment: the victims of the Holocaust or Israel’s founders?
In his response to President Obama’s suggestion that Israel should — with mutually agreed land swaps with Palestinians — retreat to its 1967 borders, Benjamin Netanyahu says that such a move would place Israel behind “indefensible” borders.
Netanyahu is alluding to a phrase now employed by many on the right that he himself once invoked: “the borders of Auschwitz.”
In the New York Times, Robert Mackey and Elizabeth Harris explain:
That resonant phrase, which suggests that Israelis would face genocide should they withdraw fully from the land they have occupied since the end of the 1967 war, is based on a mangled version of a remark made by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1969. According to Haaretz, Mr. Eban told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel in that year: “We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.”
Israeli leaders have frequently used some version of this phrase to invoke the existential dread of the Holocaust when pressed to withdraw from the occupied territories as part of a peace agreement.
In 2002, Ariel Sharon told William Safire that a proposed Saudi peace plan was unacceptable because, “Israel cannot return to the ‘67 borders. Abba Eban long ago called them ‘Auschwitz borders’; Israel would not be able to exist.”
A decade earlier, when another Israeli leader, Yitzhak Shamir, expressed his outrage when the administration of President George H. W. Bush called for a freeze on Jewish settlements in the occupied territories — in exchange for $10 billion in American loan guarantees — The Times reported that a senior official in the prime minister’s office, a young Benjamin Netanyahu, complained that Israel was being asked to accept, “the borders of Auschwitz.”
Writing about the use and abuse of this phrase in 2007, the Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston observed that the right-wing Israeli politicians who had frequently invoked Mr. Eban to support their refusal to cede territory were less likely to mention another of his famous maxims: “Israel’s birth is intrinsically and intimately linked with the idea of sharing territory and sovereignty.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can feel satisfied while flying to Washington Thursday night. U.S. President Barack Obama has granted Netanyahu a major diplomatic victory.
In return for his call for the establishment of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps, without defining the size of these lands, Obama accepted Netanyahu’s demands for strict security arrangements and a gradual, continuous withdrawal from the West Bank.
He suggested beginning negotiations on borders and security arrangements, and delaying discussions on the core issues such as Jerusalem and refugees.
More importantly, Obama scornfully rejected the Palestinian initiative to attain recognition at the United Nations and to isolate Israel, demanded the Palestinians return to negotiations, and called on Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist. These points came straight out of the policy pages of the Prime Minister’s Bureau in Jerusalem. Netanyahu could not have asked for more: Obama outright rejects Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ recognition campaign, as well as the Palestinian reconciliation agreement.
It seems that the new Fatah-Hamas unity has saved Netanyahu from a much more aggressive and binding speech on the part of Obama.
Obama could have also delivered his Mideast speech during the impending AIPAC conference, which he will attend this coming Sunday.
After returning to the White House having delivered his much anticipated Middle East speech, I imagine President Obama now eagerly awaits news on how quickly and handsomely he will be rewarded by nervous campaign donors who were still unsure about his loyalty to Israel. The cash will no doubt now start rolling in.
As for security, every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat. Provisions must also be robust enough to prevent a resurgence of terrorism; to stop the infiltration of weapons; and to provide effective border security. The full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign, non-militarized state.
Every state has the right to self-defense, unless it’s a Palestinian state. In a Palestinian state the primary responsibility of its security forces will be to protect Israel.
In his speech on the Middle East, Obama gave the Palestinians nothing and gave Israel a lot, which means he strengthened the status quo, which Israel is perfectly happy with and only the Palestinians want to change. By saying the Israeli-Palestinian border should be based on the ’67 line, he just repeated what Clinton said publicly about a year ago (and what her husband said in the White House a decade ago). What was new, or at least newer, was his endorsement of Netanyahu’s call for a “non-militarized” Palestine – which is a contradiction to a sovereign Palestine, something Obama claimed also to support. And by mentioning the need to stop the smuggling of weapons into Palestine, he might have been giving a nod to Netanyahu’s demand to keep the Israeli army on the Jordan Valley. Also, he repeated his opposition to the Palestinians’ plan to seek recognition from the UN in September. In all, a very, very good day for the occupation. But I think Obama just lost the Palestinians. Abbas cannot go along with this prescription, none of them can. They have to go to the UN, they have to go ahead with the popular resistance, to go out into the street en masse – to the settlements, to the army outposts, to the fence, and hope for the Tahrir effect – to win the world to their side – and for this, they must remain non-violent – and shame Israel in the eyes of the world and force Obama and the other timid Western leaders to force Israel to end the occupation. There’s just no other way. I’d thought that maybe after killing Bin Laden, Obama would have the political capital to pressure Israel. Whether he has it or not, he’s too timid, or too election-minded, to use it. To the cause of peace and justice in Israel and Palestine, he just became a write-off.
Who could have predicted that after two years, Obama’s greatest achievement is that he increasingly makes George Bush look like a man of substance.
To my ear, the best worst paragraph in the speech was this:
That is the choice that must be made – not simply in this [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, but across the entire region – a choice between hate and hope; between the shackles of the past, and the promise of the future. It’s a choice that must be made by leaders and by people, and it’s a choice that will define the future of a region that served as the cradle of civilization and a crucible of strife.
At least when Dubya delivered a vacuous statement like this, he’d make it a bit more entertaining by mangling a few words or making an inappropriate facial expression.
We have before us the example of George Orwell, the eccentric British author of 1984, whose real name was Eric Blair. What’s interesting about Orwell (or, perhaps, simply predictable) is that he adopted his pen name to save his respectable parents the disgrace of having to admit that their son didn’t work for a living, but was (oh, the humiliation) . . . a writer. And the irony: this same Orwell spent years toiling over a story whose theme is that it’s possible to erase the past by a simple act of denial. Thus, Winston Smith (“1984″‘s main character) is told in a torture chamber of the “Ministry of Love” that his belief that his country, “Oceania” was, at one time, not at war with Eastasia is a delusion: “Oceania is at war with Eastasia,” he is told. “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”
Orwell would tell us that those who read “1984” and put it aside in relief (“thank God we don’t live in a world like that”), miss the point. The past is altered continuously, even perniciously–and now (some 63 years after the book’s publication) no more constantly than when it comes to the Middle East. “Mubarak is a moderate,” “we have always supported democracy in Egypt” and “the Arabs aren’t interested in peace” are perhaps not as insidious as “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia,” but they’re damned close. The beauty of these phrases (as Winston Smith learned) is that if you utter them often enough, they actually become true. Hence, we described former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as a moderate so often that we actually came to believe it–and were taken by surprise when we discovered the Egyptian people didn’t agree. So? So now we’re worried that the current revolution will deny the Egyptian people their fundamental rights. Unlike with Mubarak–who was chock full of them.
Human beings are good at this kind of thing, as it turns out, because adopting these phrases (“we have always supported democracy in Egypt”) helps us evade responsibility for the state of the world. Then too, it’s easier to follow the script than to utter the truth–“Mubarak is a tyrant, but what the hell, we supported him anyway,” “we’ve never given a fig for democracy in Egypt” and (finally) “it’s not the Arabs who aren’t interested in peace, but Israel.” It’s this last phrase that seems most pertinent now, when the-take-it-or-leave-it 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is being discussed (again), as a possible resolution of the Arab-Israel (and, hence, the Palestinian-Israeli) conflict.
ROBERT SIEGEL (NPR host): And I’d like to ask you to begin with what has been a major difference between Fatah and your group, Hamas. Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza, spoke the other day of the Palestinians’, and I quote, “great hope of bringing to an end the Zionist project in Palestine.”
About a week earlier, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said in Cairo that the goal of your movement is a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with Jerusalem as its capital. Which is it that Hamas seeks, a two-state solution alongside Israel or an end to the state of Israel altogether?
GHAZI HAMAD (Deputy Foreign Minister, Hamas): I think there is all kind of contradictions because maybe people understand that the occupation is a reflection of the Zionist movement, and I think the declaration of Hamas is very clear. We accept the state and ’67 borders. This state should be independent. It was chosen as the capital for Palestine and the right of return for the refugees.
But I think that Israel will not accept this because Israel reject all the demands of the Palestinian people because they believe that they have to have a Jewish state and Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and no right of return. So I think we’ll still have a big struggle and big disputes.
SIEGEL: But just to clarify, if Israel were to accept a two-state solution in which Palestine would be in Gaza and the West Bank and have its capital in Jerusalem, is that an acceptable aim that Hamas is striving for, or is that in and of itself insufficient because there would still be a state of Israel?
Mr. HAMAD: Look, we said frankly we accept this state and ’67 borders, but the question now should be directed to Israel. We need clear answer from Israel because Netanyahu said that we will not go back to the ’67 borders. We will not (unintelligible) settlements. So we still the victims of the occupation. (NPR)
The United States slapped sanctions on Syrian President Bashar Assad and six senior Syrian officials for human rights abuses over their brutal crackdown on anti-government protests, for the first time personally penalizing the Syrian leader for actions of his security forces.
The White House announced the sanctions Wednesday, a day before President Barack Obama delivers a major speech on the uprisings throughout the Arab world. The speech is expected to include prominent mentions of Syria.
The Obama administration had pinned hopes on Assad, seen until recent months as a pragmatist and potential reformer who could buck Iranian influence and help broker an eventual Arab peace deal with Israel. (AP)
Tanks shelled a Syrian border town for the fourth day Wednesday in a military campaign to crush demonstrations against President Bashar al-Assad, under mounting Western pressure to stop his violent repression of protesters.
Troops went into Tel Kelakh Saturday, a day after a demonstration there demanded “the overthrow of the regime,” the slogan of revolutions that toppled Arab leaders in Egypt and Tunisia and challenged others across the Middle East.
Assad had been partly rehabilitated in the West over the last three years but the United States and European Union condemned his use of force to quell unrest and warned they plan further steps after imposing sanctions on top Syrian officials. (Reuters)
“While much attention has been focused on rebel efforts in eastern Libya and in the city of Misurata, rebels have held control of most of the Nafusah Mountain region since the unrest began in February,” my colleagues Sergio Peçanha and Joe Burgess explain in the introduction to a fascinating, richly informative graphic on the fighting there.
Last month, after the rebels in these remote mountains made an unexpected show of strength, seizing a border post along the Tunisian frontier, my colleague Scott Sayare reported that “the region’s isolated hamlets were among the first to join the uprising,” fueled by simmering resentment from a Berber community which was neglected by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Arab nationalist regime.
Despite the fact that even rebel fighters in the region estimate their ranks at just a few hundred ill-equipped and untrained young men, they have someone held off attempts by government forces to reimpose Tripoli’s rule. (New York Times)
NATO kept up its bombing campaign against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi over the weekend, hitting missile launchers and other targets around Tripoli. The rebels say they welcome military support, but they would like something more: formal diplomatic recognition for their transitional government.
Some special guests flew in recently for the rebels’ weekly pep rally in Benghazi — delegates from areas of western Libya that are still under Gadhafi’s control. The delegates came to take their seats in the 30-seat National Transitional Council — a kind of proto-parliament.
Eastern Libyans like Mansour Makhlouf are glad to see them.
“Gadhafi’s people are spreading rumors that we are divided. But we’re not divided — we are all brothers,” Makhlouf says. (NPR)
The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has asked a three-judge panel to issue arrest warrants for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, his second-eldest son, Saif al-Islam, and his intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo described the evidence against the three men as “very strong” in a press conference on Monday and said he believed Libyans eventually would turn them over to the court.
The filing against Gaddafi comes just three months into the uprising against his 41-year rule, which evolved from peaceful protests in major cities to an armed rebellion based out of the east. Gaddafi’s regime has brutally attempted to suppress the opposition movement by shelling rebellious cities, and imprisoning and torturing those who speak out. (Al Jazeera)
For hours and hours, I didn’t know what to make of it: Tribute FM is the first ever English language radio station in Libya. And it sounds just like Magic. Diana Ross . . . the Jackson Five . . . the Temptations . . . some German rap . . . Easy Like Sunday Morning . . . just as you’re nodding along, thinking “this is nice, I wonder if they have a phone-in,” you remember: this is probably the most radical statement of a successful revolution coming out of any radio, anywhere in the world. It is a huge moment for a country in which not just English but most European languages have been invisible for decades.
Before Muhammad, Aman and two others launched Tribute in Benghazi last week, “English wasn’t frowned on, it was completely illegal,” Muhammad tells me by phone. “It was taken out of schools, it got to the point where nothing in English was available in the city. You couldn’t advertise in English, you couldn’t read a newspaper in English.”
It is a measure of how isolating this was for young Libyans that setting up a radio station would be such a priority as the fighting continues, the stream of refugees is unabated and Gaddafi has not, as yet, surrendered. (The Guardian)
For many years now, we’ve heard American commentators bemoan the violence of the Palestinian national movement. If only Palestinians had learned the lessons of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, we hear, they’d have had their state long ago. Surely no Israeli government would have violently suppressed a non-violent Palestinian movement of national liberation seeking only the universally recognised right of self-determination.
Palestinian commentators and organisers, including Fadi Elsalameen and Moustafa Barghouthi, have spent the last couple of years pointing out that these complaints resolutely ignore the actual and growing Palestinian non-violent resistance movement. For that matter, they elide the fact that the first intifada, which broke out in 1987, was initially as close to non-violent as could be reasonably expected. For the most part, it consisted of general strikes and protest marches. In addition, there was a fair amount of kids throwing rocks, as well as the continuing threat of low-level terrorism, mainly from organisations based abroad; the Israelis conflated the autochthonous protest movement with the terrorism and responded brutally, and the intifada quickly lost its non-violent character. That’s not that different from what has happened over the past couple of months in Libya; it shows that it’s very hard to keep a non-violent movement non-violent when the government you’re demonstrating against subjects you to gunfire for a sustained period of time.
In any case, if you’re among those who have made the argument that Israelis would give Palestinians a state if only the Palestinians would learn to employ Ghandhian tactics of non-violent protest, it appears your moment of truth has arrived. As my colleague writes, what happened on Nakba Day was Israel’s “nightmare scenario: masses of Palestinians marching, unarmed, towards the borders of the Jewish state, demanding the redress of their decades-old national grievance.” Peter Beinart writes that this represents “Israel’s Palestinian Arab Spring”: the tactics of mass non-violent protest that brought down the governments of Tunisia and Egypt, and are threatening to bring down those of Libya, Yemen and Syria, are now being used in the Palestinian cause.
So now we have an opportunity to see how Americans will react. We’ve asked the Palestinians to lay down their arms. We’ve told them their lack of a state is their own fault; if only they would embrace non-violence, a reasonable and unprejudiced world would see the merit of their claims. Over the weekend, tens of thousands of them did just that, and it seems likely to continue. If crowds of tens of thousands of non-violent Palestinian protestors continue to march, and if Israel continues to shoot at them, what will we do? Will we make good on our rhetoric, and press Israel to give them their state? Or will it turn out that our paeans to non-violence were just cynical tactics in an amoral international power contest staged by militaristic Israeli and American right-wing groups whose elective affinities lead them to shape a common narrative of the alien Arab/Muslim threat? Will we even bother to acknowledge that the Palestinians are protesting non-violently? Or will we soldier on with the same empty decades-old rhetoric, now drained of any truth or meaning, because it protects established relationships of power? What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets?
Why did thousands of Palestinians yesterday converge upon Israel’s borders? Partly because Syria’s war-criminal leader, Bashar al-Assad, and his ally, Hezbollah, wanted them to. But there’s more to it than that. Palestinians also marched from Jordan and Egypt, whose governments did their best to stop the protests. In fact, they marched from every corner of the Palestinian world, in a tech-savvy, coordinated campaign. What hit Israel yesterday was the Palestinian version of the Arab spring.
Something fundamental has changed. I grew up believing that we—Americans and Jews—were the shapers of history in the Middle East. We created reality; others watched, baffled, paralyzed, afraid. In 1989, Americans gloated as the Soviet Union, our former rival for Middle Eastern supremacy, retreated ignominiously from the region. When Saddam Hussein tried to challenge us from within, we thrashed him in the Gulf War. Throughout the 1990s, we sent our economists, law professors and investment bankers to try to teach the Arabs globalization, which back then meant copying us. In a thousand ways, sometimes gently, sometimes brutally, we sent the message: We make the rules; you play by them.
For Jews, this sense of being history’s masters was even more intoxicating. For millennia, we had been acted upon. Mere decades earlier, American Jews had watched, trembling and inarticulate, as European Jews were destroyed. But it was that very impotence that made possible the triumph of Zionism, a movement aimed at snatching history’s reins from gentiles, and perhaps even God. Beginning in the early 20th century, Zionists created facts on the ground. Sometimes the great powers applauded; sometimes they condemned, but acre by acre, Jews seized control of their fate. As David Ben-Gurion liked to say, “Our future does not depend on what gentiles say but on what Jews do.” The Arabs reacted with fury, occasional violence, and in Palestine, a national movement of their own. But they could rarely compete, either politically or militarily. We went from strength to strength; they never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
That world is gone. America and Israel are no longer driving history in the Middle East; for the first time in a long time, Arabs are. In Tahrir Square, Egypt’s young made a revolution. President Obama bowed to reality and helped show Hosni Mubarak the door; Benjamin Netanyahu stood athwart history, impotently yelling stop. Now Egypt’s leaders are doing its people’s will, bringing Hamas and Fatah together in preparation for elections. Hamas and Fatah are complying because they fear their own Tahrir Square. They sense that in Palestine too, a populist uprising stirs; that’s part of what yesterday’s marches were about. For American and Israeli leaders accustomed to Palestinian autocrats and Palestinian terrorists, this is something new. Netanyahu and his American backers are demanding that Obama rewind the clock, but he can’t. The Palestinians no longer listen to functionaries like George Mitchell. They have lost faith in American promises, and they no longer fear American threats. Instead, they are putting aside their internal divisions and creating facts on the ground.
At least 353 people were injured, one of them critically, when Egyptian security forces attacked a pro-Palestine demonstration outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo on Sunday night, according to witnesses and the Health Ministry.
Activists told Al Jazeera that army and internal security troops used tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition to disperse thousands of protesters who had gathered to mark the 63rd anniversary of the “Nakba” or “catastrophe” – the day in 1948 that Israel declared its independence and thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled form their homes.
At least two protesters were shot by live ammunition, while others were hospitalised after inhaling tear gas or being hit by rubber-coated steel bullets, some of which penetrated the skin, witnesses said.
Several people have been killed and scores of others wounded in the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, Ras Maroun in Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as Palestinians mark the “Nakba”, or day of “catastrophe”.
The “Nakba” is how Palestinians refer to the 1948 founding of the state of Israel, when an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled following Israel’s declaration of statehood.
At least one Palestinian was killed and up to 80 others wounded in northern Gaza as Israeli troops opened fire on a march of at least 1,000 people heading towards the Erez crossing between the Gaza Strip and Israel.
A group of Palestinians, including children, marching to mark the “Nakba” were shot by the Israeli army after crossing a Hamas checkpoint and entering what Israel calls a “buffer zone” – an empty area between checkpoints where Israeli soldiers generally shoot trespassers, Al Jazeera’s Nicole Johnston reported from Gaza City on Sunday.
Sixty years ago in Battir, my small hillside village near Jerusalem, I witnessed the chaotic collapse of the British Mandate administration in Palestine and the beginning of the Nakba.
The previous months had been decisive ones for the fate of Palestine, although we did not yet know it. The Jews, fed up with British procrastination in fulfilling Balfour’s promise of letting them transform our homeland into their “national home,” launched a bloody campaign of terror both against the British and the Arabs. The Jewish militias targeted the British to speed up their departure from Palestine, and hit the Arabs to quell the rising resistance to Zionist colonization. Violence broke out in early 1947, after the British announced that they would leave Palestine by 15 May 1948. When the United Nations passed its partition resolution on 29 November 1947, the violence began to lurch into full-scale war.
Battir’s 1,200 inhabitants were wracked by uncertainty. There were hopes that things would turn out all right, but fear dominated as the atmosphere became bleaker by the day.
I vividly remember the stories of horror which haunted the people of Battir, such as the attack on the railway station in Jerusalem on 21 October 1946. The train was their lifeline to the city where they marketed their produce and bought their supplies. People also walked to Jerusalem and often traveled by car on the unpaved road that ran parallel to the railway line, though that was much harder. A few months earlier a Jewish bomb attack on Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which served as the British headquarters, killed 91 people and injured dozens. Later, after the partition vote, when the Zionist forces began their armed campaign to seize Palestine, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews in the land they both claimed.
Electronic Intifada has created an interactive map showing the Palestine villages destroyed in Nakba.
I never heard the word Nakba before the nineties. It was simply not present in the Israeli language, or in the popular culture. Naturally, we knew that some Arabs left Israel in 1948, but it was all very vague. While we were asked to cite numbers and dates of the Jewish waves of immigration to Israel, details on the Palestinian parts of the story were sketchy: How many Palestinians left Israel? What were the circumstances under which they left? Why didn’t they return after the war? All these questions were irrelevant, having almost nothing to do with our history—that’s what we were made to think.
Occasionally, we were told that the Arabs had left under their own will, and it seemed that they chose not to come back, at least in the beginning. Years later, I was shocked to read that most of the notorious “infiltrates” from the early fifties were actually people trying to come back to their homes, even crossing the border to collect the crops from their fields at tremendous risk to their life – as IDF units didn’t hesitate to open fire.
We were made to think they were terrorists…
It’s hard to explain the mechanism which makes some parts of history “important” or some elements of the landscape “interesting.” I can only say that looking back, I understand how selective the knowledge we received was. But there is more to this. I think we all chose not to think about those issues. Even after the New Historians of the nineties made the term Nakba a part of modern Hebrew and proved that in many cases, Israel expelled Palestinians from territories it conquered in ‘48, we were engaged in the wrong kind of questions, such as the debate on whether more Palestinian were expelled or fled. The important thing is that they weren’t allowed to come back, and that they had their property and land seized by Israel immediately after the war (as some Jews had by Jordan and Syria, but not in substantial numbers). Leaving a place doesn’t make someone a refugee. It’s forbidding him or her from coming back that does it.
On hearing the announcement of Senator George Mitchell’s resignation as special envoy for Middle East peace, I skype-messaged the news to a friend in Israel known for her biting sarcasm. Her response was quick in coming and did not disappoint: “Mitchell is still the envoy, who knew?”
There’s been quite a lot happening in the Middle East recently, and the Israeli-Palestinian equation has not been left untouched. Yet the special envoy for Middle East peace has not been to the Middle East since mid-December.
Sen. Mitchell was prone to remind audiences that in his last stint as a peace envoy, working on Northern Ireland, he had “700 days of failure and one day of success.” Resignation day marked Sen. Mitchell’s 842nd day on the Middle East peace beat, but this time around there were no “days of success.” Mitchell’s original appointment came on Obama’s second full day of office and was greeted in certain quarters with some enthusiasm and hope (including by this writer). In 2001, working with a strong back-office, he had produced the Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Report, noteworthy for its depth and sophistication of analysis. It is hard not to conclude that this time around, Sen. Mitchell has disappointed.
Not all of the blame belongs at Mitchell’s door, of course. Throwing an envoy at a problem, even one with a distinguished record, is no substitute for a smart, strategic policy. Apparently the first misstep of the Obama administration on Mideast peace was its failure to step back and conduct a thorough review of what had already been tried, why things were so stuck, and to look at the structural flaws in the peace process they had inherited.
Friday’s announcement of George Mitchell’s planned resignation as the U.S. mediator in the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to be yet another sign of the disarray and failure in President Obama’s handling of the Middle East. Recently, two articles provided a troubling inside look at the ineptitude that makes Mitchell’s departure unsurprising. A New Yorker piece on the Arab Spring by Ryan Lizza describes Obama’s navigation between realists and idealists, and tags him (per the article’s title) as “The Consequentialist.” Perhaps “The Cluelessist” is more like it.
Lizza’s article this month and “Obama Seeks Reset in the Arab World” by Mark Landler in the New York Times this week relay the narrative of the president’s spinmeisters: the Middle East poses devilishly complicated challenges, and Obama is struggling with them as well as can be expected. Lizza lets an Obama adviser get away with making the concept of “leading from behind” sound like a tool of noble statesmanship rather than a cowardly cop-out. Yet, as Obama prepares to give a foreign policy speech as early as next week, the reporting in these two articles — and now Mitchell’s resignation — add up to an unflattering portrait of a White House wandering the Middle East without a map.
One of the signs is the White House’s effort to erase Obama’s misjudgments from the record. In Egypt, the truth is that the White House failed to see the writing on the wall and foolishly stood by the brutal and corrupt Mubarak regime to the end. As Lizza writes, “Obama decided not to call for Mubarak to step down… Obama’s instinct was to have it both ways.” While Obama supposedly sympathized with the protesters, he clearly didn’t want to alienate other pro-American dictators or risk destabilization in a major Arab country that had made peace with Israel.
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