Ever since — with much fanfare in Washington — Israel entered into direct talks with the Palestinian team led by acting president Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinians have insisted that the continuation of the talks would hinge on a continuation of a nominal settlement freeze due to expire on Sunday. Thus far, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has yet to agree to extend the so-called freeze. (With East Jerusalem excluded and work continuing on 3,000 housing units, it was never an actual freeze.)
The New York Times now reports that the Israelis want to cut a deal: that the US should release the infamous Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in exchange for a three-month extension of the freeze. An Israel Army Radio report is cited which “said a private individual had been asked to try to gauge the potential of such an offer ‘discreetly and informally’ with American officials.”
Why are the Israelis being so coy as to require the use of an intermediary at a time when Israeli and US officials are in constant direct communication?
Since 1987, Pollard, a US citizen who became an Israeli citizen in 1995, has been serving life in prison for spying on behalf of Israel. Israeli leaders and the Israel lobby in the US have subsequently engaged in a long-running campaign for his release. In 2007 Benjamin Netanyahu made a campaign pledge that if he became prime minister he would seek Pollard’s release.
At the end of the nineties there were hints, Israelis claimed, that Bill Clinton, at a critical juncture during Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, might be willing to yield to their requests. The US intelligence community immediately voiced strong objections.
The President’s willingness to consider clemency for Pollard so upset the intelligence community that its leaders took an unusual step: they began to go public. In early December, four retired admirals who had served as director of Naval Intelligence circulated an article, eventually published in the Washington Post, in which they argued that Pollard’s release would be “irresponsible” and a victory for what they depicted as a “clever public relations campaign.” Since then, sensitive details about the secrets Pollard gave away have been made public by CBS and NBC.
In the course of my own interviews for this account, the officials who knew the most about Jonathan Pollard made it clear that they were talking because they no longer had confidence that President Clinton would do what they believed was the right thing — keep Pollard locked up. Pollard, these officials told me, had done far more damage to American national security than was ever made known to the public; for example, he betrayed elements of four major American intelligence systems. In their eyes, there is no distinction between betraying secrets to an enemy, such as the Soviet Union, and betraying secrets to an ally.
Officials are loath to talk publicly about it, but spying on allies is a fact of life: the United States invests billions annually to monitor the communications of its friends. Many American embassies around the world contain a clandestine intercept facility that targets diplomatic communications. The goal is not only to know the military and diplomatic plans of our friends but also to learn what intelligence they may be receiving and with whom they share information. “If a friendly state has friends that we don’t see as friends,” one senior official explained, sensitive intelligence that it should not possess — such as that supplied by Pollard — “can spread to others.” Many officials said they were convinced that information Pollard sold to the Israelis had ultimately wound up in the hands of the Soviet Union.
Pollard has now served 23 years in jail. Let’s suppose President Flexibility likes the chiropractic manipulation the Israelis now want to give him. What does the US get in return?
The charade of Israeli-Palestinian talks gets dragged on until after the mid-term elections. Maybe during that time the administration can get a marginally useful story about how it’s advancing the peace process.
But let’s be even sunnier in our outlook. Let’s suppose that after an extension, the US then wins an unimaginable victory: an Israeli agreement to a permanent settlement freeze.
Big deal.
As a new map produced by Americans For Peace Now makes clear, Israelis already have their feet firmly planted throughout the occupied West Bank. Freezing settlement growth really does nothing to end the occupation.
Phil Weiss caught this remark from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she headed for a meeting with Israel’s President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem last week:
[Peres] understands better than most the fundamental reality facing the State of Israel, that the status quo is unsustainable — now, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be sustained for a year or a decade, or two or three, but fundamentally, the status quo is unsustainable — and that the only path to ensure Israel’s future as a secure and democratic Jewish state is through a negotiated two-state solution, and a comprehensive regional peace.
As Jesus is reported to have said, fundamentally “the meek shall inherit the earth.” He declined to say when.
And as Dr Martin Luther King Jr said: “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” It might bend in that direction, but will it actually get there? Or is it more like a rainbow bending towards a pot of gold?
Israelis — and anyone else who lives outside the US — probably balk at the idea that Americans can teach them lessons on the principle of sustainability. As a nation that is home to more cars than people and whose 5% of the global population consume 25% of the world’s energy resources, we’re hardly in a position to say we understand much about sustainability.
Still, when it comes to this assertion — that the status quo is unsustainable, what might at this point be called the signature of Obama’s approach to the Middle East conflict — what is worse is that a deceptive catch phrase has been received as though it carries real diplomatic weight.
Firstly, to say that the status quo is unsustainable obscures the fact that the Israel has always rejected the status quo. Expansionism views the status quo as something that can be perpetually modified to ones advantage.
Secondly, this image of unsustainability hints at some kind of moral universe bending towards a two-state solution. The unsustainable must give way to the sustainable in accordance with a natural ordering process, right?
Maybe in a cosmic sense — maybe with the same inevitability with which the meek shall inherit the earth.
Meanwhile, the struggle for justice in this world, is a struggle against deeply entrenched injustice — injustice largely deaf to the appeals and concerns of its critics.
The arc of history bends more easily towards acquiescence than justice. Grievances are less often rectified than they are soothed. Thus Israel has less interest in peace with the Palestinians than it has in the pacification of a restless and sometimes violent population.
Justice, won rather than found, has less to do with the status quo being unsustainable than it has with the defiance of those unwilling to tolerate injustice.
AFP reports that Israel’s foreign minister hopes to complete the process of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and push Israel’s remaining Palestinian population out of the Jewish state:
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday proposed that in a future peace deal the Palestinians should take his country’s 1.3 million Arabs and let Israel keep its West Bank settlements.
“Our guiding principle in negotiations with the Palestinians must not be ‘land for peace’ but an exchange of territories and populations,” Lieberman told reporters as he arrived for Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile, Associated Press reports on Jews emigrating from Israel to Germany.
Nirit Bialer, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, welcomes listeners in Hebrew to a one-hour radio show of music, talk and interviews. The setting isn’t her native Israel but a radio station in the heart of the German capital — and hundreds of Israeli Berliners are tuning in.
The city from which Hitler unleashed the genocide of 6 million Jews is now attracting a small but growing community of Jews from Israel for whom it embodies freedom, tolerance, and an anything-goes spirit.
“Berlin has become a real magnet for Israelis — everybody wants to move here,” said Bialer, 32, whose Friday noon “Kol Berlin,” Hebrew for “the voice of Berlin,” started three years ago and is something of an institution for young Israelis in Berlin.
[…]
The Israelis who come to stay are looking to work, study, party and make art, and don’t seem to care much about the Nazi past. They arrive on student visas, overstay tourist permits or have German or other European ancestry that entitles them to citizenship. Many start families with German partners, far from the tensions of the Middle East.
“I love Israel, but I just couldn’t live there anymore — it’s like a small village and so militaristic,” explained Lea Fabrikant, a photography student who arrived two years ago.
“Most of all, I needed freedom and space, and I found it here.”
Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Michael B. Oren, argues in his Sept. 15 Times Op-Ed article that Israelis want peace, and I believe him. They’ve said so often enough. But the Israelis want lots of other things too.
For instance, they want the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In addition, they want the Palestinian aquifers situated beneath the West Bank, and they want to preserve their racial privilege in the Jewish state. They also want to shear the Gaza Strip from Palestine.
Most of all, the Israelis want Palestinian quiescence in the face of Israeli wants. Those wants have made the two-state solution impossible to implement.
For decades, the Israelis have taken what they want from the Palestinians. Consequently, there are about 500,000 settlers in Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Today, the Israelis are discovering that what one wants and what one can afford sometimes diverge.
Some Israelis — but apparently not Oren — are beginning to realize that the deep, irreversible colonization of territory comes with a price: the end of the Jewish state as it is. It’s a painful lesson to learn, especially after decades of superpower indulgence. America’s obsequious coddling turns out to have been a curse for the Jewish state. Serious cost-benefit analyses around occupation policies — collectively, apartheid — were evidently never conducted.
The world is changing before our eyes. Five years ago the anti-Israel movement may have been marginal. Now it is growing into an economic problem.
Until now boycott organizers had been on the far left. They have a new ally: Islamic organizations that have strengthened greatly throughout Europe in the past two decades. The upshot is a red and green alliance with a significant power base. The red side has a name for championing human rights, while the green side has money. Their union is what led to the success of the Turkish flotilla.
They note that boycott is an especially effective weapon against Israel because Israel is a small country, dependent on exports and imports. They also point to the success of the economic boycott against the apartheid regime in South Africa.
The anti-Israel tide rose right after Operation Cast Lead, as the world watched Israel pound Gaza with bombs on live television. No public-relations machine in the world could explain the deaths of hundreds of children, the destruction of neighborhoods and the grinding poverty afflicting a people under curfew for years. They weren’t even allowed to bring in screws to build school desks. Then came the flotilla, complete with prominent peace activists, which ended in nine deaths, adding fuel to the fire.
But underlying the anger against Israel lies disappointment. Since the establishment of the state, and before, we demanded special terms of the world. We played on their feelings of guilt, for standing idle while six million Jews were murdered.
David Ben-Gurion called us a light unto the nations and we stood tall and said, we, little David, would stand strong and righteous against the great evil Goliath.
The world appreciated that message and even, according to the foreign press, enabled us to develop the atom bomb in order to prevent a second Holocaust.
But then came the occupation, which turned us into the evil Goliath, the cruel oppressor, a darkness on the nations. And now we are paying the price of presenting ourselves as righteous and causing disappointment: boycott.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Sunday fiercely attacked the diplomatic process with the Palestinians that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu began in Washington last week, telling Israel Beiteinu activists in the capital that a peace deal is “unachievable.”
In a lengthy address to more than a thousand supporters at the Rimonim (formerly Shalom) Hotel, Lieberman criticized previous governments and his own for not learning the lessons of 17 years of failed diplomatic negotiations.
He said he gets asked all the time why he is against hope, and he responds that he is for hope but against illusions.
“It must be understood that signing a comprehensive agreement in which both sides agree to end the conflict and end all of their claims and recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people is a goal that is not achievable in the next year or in the next generation, so any historic compromises or painful concessions won’t help,” he said.
The best that could come out of the talks was a long-term interim agreement with the Palestinians, Lieberman said.
He promised that his party would fight against further construction freezes and unilateral concessions.
“Seventeen years should be enough time to realize what is and is not possible. I know there is pressure to continue the freeze, but I don’t know a single reason to do so.
Israeli settlers in the West Bank are legitimate targets since they are an army in every sense of the word, a senior Hamas official told the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper on Saturday, adding that Palestinians were still committed to an armed struggle against Israel.
The comment by Ezzat al-Rashk, a member of Hamas’s political office, came in the wake of recent attacks against Israeli citizens in the West Bank.
On Tuesday, four Israelis were killed when unknown assailants opened fire at a vehicle they were traveling in near the West Bank city of Hebron. The following night, two Israelis were wounded in a similar shooting attack at the Rimonim Junction near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
[…] “Attacking settlers is a natural thing,” al-Rashk told Al-Hayat on Saturday, saying the “Zionist settlers are the occupation’s first reserve military force.”
“They are now a real army in every sense of the word, with more than 500,000 automatic weapons at their disposal, on top of the basic protection by the [Israel Defense Forces],” the Hamas official said.
Al-Rashk also referred to the ongoing attempt to relaunch talks between Israel and the PA, saying they were noting more “than a media circus through which the U.S. administration wants to market its policy.”
Another Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, the organization’s Lebanon spokesperson, told the London-based newspaper that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was willing to forfeit “99 percent of the Palestinians’ rights, saying negotiations were over before they even began.
Israel should adapt to the 21st century. Is that really a utopian idea?
As Tony Judt succinctly distilled the issue a few years ago: “The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
President Obama’s “bold” departure from the position of his predecessor is that he has repeatedly asserted — as he did again on Wednesday — that “the status quo is unsustainable — for Israelis, for Palestinians, for the region and for the world.”
An occupation that has continued for 43 years has certainly proved very durable — sufficient reason for half a million Israelis to defy the claim that the status quo is unsustainable as they carry on living in the West Bank.
The focus of skepticism should in fact be focused less on the sustainability of the status quo than on the realistic prospects for a two-state solution. Such a resolution appears no more imminent now than it did when it was first proposed 73 years ago. In that period whole empires have risen and fallen and yet we’re still supposed to imagine that a Palestinian state is lurking just over the horizon?
As the Zionists have understood all along, it is the facts on the ground that shape the future and none of these facts point towards a partition of land upon which two people’s lives are now so deeply intertwined.
One state already exists. The challenge ahead is not how it can be divided, but how all those already living within its borders can enjoy the civil rights that belong to the citizens of all Western states — the part of the world to which Israel’s leaders so often profess their deepest affiliation.
George Bisharat lays out the one-state solution as being far from a utopian vision but, on the contrary, what might turn out to be the path of least resistance.
A de facto one-state reality has emerged, with Israel effectively ruling virtually all of the former Palestine. Yet only Jews enjoy full rights in this functionally unitary political system. In contrast, Palestinian citizens of Israel endure more than 35 laws that explicitly privilege Jews as well as policies that deliberately marginalize them. West Bank Palestinians cannot drive on roads built for Israeli settlers, while Palestinians in Gaza watch as their children’s intellectual and physical growth are stunted by an Israeli siege that has limited educational opportunities and deepened poverty to acute levels.
Palestinian refugees have lived in exile for 62 years, their right to return to their homes denied, while Jews from anywhere can freely immigrate to Israel.
Israeli leaders Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have admitted that permanent Israeli rule over disenfranchised Palestinians would be tantamount to apartheid. Other observers, including former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, have said that apartheid has already taken root in the region.
Clearly, Palestinians and Israeli Jews will continue to live together. The question is: under what terms? Palestinians will no more accept permanent subordination than would any other people.
The answer is for Israelis and Palestinians to formalize their de facto one-state reality but on principles of equal rights rather than ethnic privilege. A carefully crafted multiyear transition including mechanisms for reconciliation would be mandatory. Israel/Palestine should have a secular, bilingual government elected on the basis of one person, one vote as well as strong constitutional guarantees of equality and protection of minorities, bolstered by international guarantees. Immigration should follow nondiscriminatory criteria. Civil marriage between members of different ethnic or religious groups should be permitted. Citizens should be free to reside in any part of the country, and public symbols, education and holidays should reflect the population’s diversity.
Although the one-state option is sometimes dismissed as utopian, it overcomes major obstacles bedeviling the two-state solution. Borders need not be drawn, Jerusalem would remain undivided and Jewish settlers could stay in the West Bank. Moreover, a single state could better accommodate the return of Palestinian refugees. A state based on principles of equality and inclusion would be more morally compelling than two states based on narrow ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, it would be more consistent with antidiscrimination provisions of international law. Israelis would enjoy the international acceptance that has long eluded them and the associated benefits of friendship, commerce and travel in the Arab world.
The main obstacle to a single-state solution is the belief that Israel must be a Jewish state. Jim Crow laws and South African apartheid were similarly entrenched virtually until the eves of their demise. History suggests that no version of ethnic privilege can ultimately persist in a multiethnic society.
The status quo, though sub-optimal, presents no imminent danger to Israel. What Israelis want from an agreement is something they have learned either to live without (Palestinian recognition) or to provide for themselves (security). The demographic threat many invoke as a reason to act — the possibility that Arabs soon might outnumber Jews, forcing Israel to choose between remaining Jewish or democratic — is exaggerated. Israel already has separated itself from Gaza. In the future, it could unilaterally relinquish areas of the West Bank, further diminishing prospects of an eventual Arab majority. Because Israelis have a suitable alternative, they lack a sense of urgency. The Palestinians, by contrast, have limited options and desperately need an agreement.
In any event, Abbas will return to a fractured, fractious society. If he reaches a deal, many will ask in whose name he was bartering away Palestinian rights. If negotiations fail, most will accuse him of once more having been duped. If Netanyahu comes back with an accord, he will be hailed as a historic leader. His constituency will largely fall in line; the left will have no choice but to salute. If the talks collapse, his followers will thank him for standing firm, while his critics are likely in due course to blame the Palestinians. Abbas will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Netanyahu will thrive if he does and survive if he doesn’t. One loses even if he wins; the other wins even if he loses. There is no greater asymmetry than that.
Videos of Palestinian leaders asking the Israeli public to join them as “partners for peace” were coordinated and co-implemented by the Palestinian arm of the Geneva Initiative, the organization’s director confirmed.
The first phase in a mass-media campaign – funded by USAID – “aims to counter the myth that there is no partner on the Palestinian side,” director of the Israeli branch Gadi Baltiansky explained.
Three clips were released on Israeli TV on Sunday featuring Palestinian members of the peace delegation to Washington, each declaring themselves a “partner for peace.”
“Shalom to you in Israel, I know we have disappointed you, I know we have been unable to deliver peace for the last 19 years,” chief PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat says in his short appearance, while Yasser Abed Rabbo warns of the “dangers for both of us” if talks fail.
Following attacks on Israeli settlers in the West Bank on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported:
Mahmoud Ramahi, a Hamas lawmaker based in the West Bank, said he believes this week’s attacks were likely calculated to cause a rift between Palestinian Authority security forces and Israeli forces and show that Hamas is still a vibrant force on the ground that cannot be ignored.
“This proves that the only way to deal with Hamas is for the Palestinian Authority to sit with Hamas and make a reconciliation deal to build a common strategy. Hamas is a reality,” he said. “The United States and the Palestinian Authority have to sit and talk with it.”
Hamas’s political leaders, such as Mr. Ramahi, say they aren’t privy to discussions within the group’s military wing. That apparent division underscores the diffuse power structure the group cultivates. Hamas’s military wing claimed responsibility for both of this week’s attacks and on Thursday promised more.
The orders to carry out the attacks could have come from any number of different power centers. The group’s top leaders are based in Damascus. The leadership there tends to adopt a harder, more militant line. But it is also thought to be heavily influenced by Syria, which can, if it desires, rein the group in, according to analysts.
The group’s leadership in Gaza, which has to live with any retaliation from Israel, has tended to be more pragmatic and moderate. Just hours before Tuesday’s attack, Hamas authorities in Gaza arrested a group of militants from another faction inside the territory trying to fire rockets into Israel.
This week’s attacks could also have been ordered or carried out by a militant cell operating on its own initiative. Israeli security officials believe a small number of militants in the West Bank are directly controlled by Hezbollah or Iran. In the past, Hamas’s leadership has claimed responsibility for attacks carried out by other factions, said retired Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari, a former Israeli intelligence officer who has been studying Hamas for a quarter century.
“Hamas’s infrastructure in the West Bank has been very heavily hurt by ongoing operations by the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army the last two or three years, and not many cells are left there that can operate,” said Gen. Harari. “If it’s really Hamas, then this is a sleeping cell that they kept for special occasions.”
Hours before peace talks were set to begin in Washington, Jewish settlers defiantly announced plans on Thursday to launch new construction in their West Bank enclaves in a test of strength with Palestinian Islamists.
Naftali Bennett, director of the settlers’ YESHA council, told Reuters settlers would begin building homes and public structures in at least 80 settlements, breaking a partial government freeze on building that ends on September 26.
“The idea is that de facto it (the freeze) is over,” Bennett said, criticizing the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian talks as aiming for a “phony peace” and rejecting Palestinian demands for a halt to settlement building on land they want for a state.
If the political purpose behind this week’s attacks on Israeli settlers in the West Bank is still hard to decipher, it seems the message they sent out was directed more to Palestinians in the West Bank than to the parties currently gathered in Washington.
Nicolas Pelham considers Hamas’ resilience as a political force and notes that the recent attacks “earned plaudits not only from Hamas’ core constituency, but also from a broad swathe of Fatah and secular activists, including some senior actors, disillusioned by 19 years of negotiations based on an ever flimsier framework.”
In its attacks on settlers on two consecutive nights in different parts of the West Bank, Hamas demonstrated its reach despite a three-year, US-backed PA military campaign and exposed the fallacy of the PA’s claims to have established security control in the West Bank. “It’s not muqawama (resistance) against Israel,” says ‘Adnan Dumayri, a Fatah Revolutionary Council member and PA security force general. “It’s muqawama against Abbas.” It also enabled the Islamists to catch seeping popular disaffection across the political spectrum toward a process of negotiations that appeared to Palestinians to be leading into a blind alley of continued Israeli control. Should Abbas fail to negotiate a halt to settlement growth, Hamas in its armed attacks against settlers would emerge from its three-year political wasteland to offer Palestinians an alternative.
In contrast to the international media, where the attack was roundly condemned, in Palestine the attack earned plaudits not only from Hamas’ core constituency, but also from a broad swathe of Fatah and secular activists, including some senior actors, disillusioned by 19 years of negotiations based on an ever flimsier framework. Unlike the Annapolis process or the “road map,” the twin Bush administration initiatives that the Obama administration chose to ditch, the current negotiations lack any terms of reference or agreed-upon script. Palestinians ask why Abbas agreed to meet Netanyahu given that none of the Arab targets required to turn proximity talks into direct ones were reached prior to the Obama administration’s announcement of the meeting. When American elder statesman George Mitchell presented the parties with 16 identical questions on the core issues requiring yes or no answers, Israel responded to each with a question of its own. In his August 31 press briefing before the White House meeting, Mitchell again declined to specify if Israel had agreed even to extend its (partially honored) settlement freeze past the September 26 expiration date.
Even the architects of the new process admit their concern that time is against them. Unveiling his plans for statehood within a year at a Ramallah press conference in late August, Fayyad warned that “every day that this conflict is not resolved there are more facts on the ground that make a two-state solution less likely.” Yet public incredulity is eroding confidence not only in a future peace deal, but also in the Palestinian leadership itself. The less Fayyad and Abbas deliver, the more tenuous their legitimacy, and the more Israel’s doubts about their reliability as neighbors become self-fulfilling. (Typifying the extent to which the leadership is removed from grassroots sentiment, the PA sponsored a groveling televised address from PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat to Israelis on the eve of the talks, in which he assumed Palestinian responsibility for the previous peace process failures. “Shalom to you in Israel. I know we have disappointed you,” he said. “I know that we have been unable to deliver peace for the last 19 years.”) Outside Abbas’ headquarters, Fatah activists derisively draw a distinction between the Fatah of the sulta, or regime, and that of Yasser Arafat. And away from Ramallah’s cafés, in the back streets of Jenin, which Fayyad’s proclaimed economic boom has yet to reach, talk of revolution and intifada is again in the air. Without something tangible to show for his continued pursuit of negotiations, due to resume in the rosy after-dinner glow in Washington, even the president’s advisers predict that Abbas and his political institution are finished.
The London-based Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat newspaper interviewed the Gaza-based senior Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar who struck a conciliatory tone in his remarks about Mahmoud Abbas.
Al-Zahar, speaking by telephone to Asharq al-Awsat said: “our policy has always been to let the negotiations continue, and we have not devoted one day of our work to stopping them”. Al-Zahar added: “There is a portion of the Palestinian people [Fatah and its supporters], who are in favor of negotiations in order to impose their political program, and we are convinced that this political program will not bring what is needed. The question then is: why take responsibility for undermining something that has already failed? In relation to our program of resistance, as you can see the West Bank has buckled under overwhelming pressure. Therefore, our program’s activities relate to the level of pressure imposed on the Palestinian people in the West Bank”.
In response to a question about whether he meant what he said, that the synchronization of the terrorist attack with the launch of the negotiations was just a coincidence, he said: “Coincidence or no coincidence, it was the decision made by people in the field [Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas]. Some say [the timing of the attacks] was intentional, that is not true. When people are presented with opportunities, as well as the means and targets, they act”. He went on to say that: “any attempt to try and belittle these actions, and link them to the negotiations, is not true at all”.
Al-Zahar believes that the vision of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas regarding the negotiations is: “like our vision. The issues [that will be raised] and their results are already known. Jerusalem: Israelis are united on the issue of Jerusalem and the Palestinian negotiator will not get anything from them. Secondly: refugees, can convince the discarded refugees in Jordan, Syria or Lebanon [to accept what is being proposed]? As for the [issue of] water, there is no indication that Israel will give up the groundwater located in the West Bank”.
In response to a question regarding the reasons which prompted Mahmoud Abbas to go to Washington to negotiate, if his vision was the same as that of Hamas, al-Zahar claims that “if there is a call from Washington, he must go”. He added that “Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] will not do what Abu Ammar [Yasser Arafat at Camp David] did, in that he will not give up on the principles and the issue will be over”.
If the Obama administration had been as visionary as Obamamania promised it might be, Chas Freeman might not have merely been briefly offered the post of chair of the National Intelligence Council; he could have become a fine Secretary of State. Instead, the Israel lobby made sure he gained no position at all, but by doing so ensured that he would retain the freedom to speak with more candor than any government official ever dares.
In a speech he delivered yesterday in Norway, Freeman laid out the US role in seeking and obstructing Middle East peace, with a clarity and style rarely found in foreign policy discourse.
Islam charges rulers with the duty to defend the faithful and to uphold justice. It demands that they embody righteousness. The resentment of mostly Muslim Arabs at their governing elites’ failure to meet these standards generates sympathy for terrorism directed not just at Israel but at both the United States and Arab governments associated with it.
The perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States saw it in part as reprisal for American complicity in Israeli cruelties to Palestinians and other Arabs. They justified it as a strike against Washington’s protection of Arab governments willing to overlook American contributions to Muslim suffering. Washington’s response to the attack included suspending its efforts to make peace in the Holy Land as well as invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. All three actions inadvertently strengthened the terrorist case for further attacks on America and its allies. The armed struggle between Americans and Muslim radicals has already spilled over to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and other countries. Authoritative voices in Israel now call for adding Iran to the list of countries at war with America. They are echoed by Zionist and neo-conservative spokesmen in the United States,
The widening involvement of Americans in combat in Muslim lands has inflamed anti-American passions and catalyzed a metastasis of terrorism. It has caused a growing majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims to see the United States as a menace to their faith, their way of life, their homelands, and their personal security. American populists and European xenophobes have meanwhile undercut liberal and centrist Muslim arguments against the intolerance that empowers terrorism by equating terrorism and its extremist advocates with Islam and its followers. The current outburst of bigoted demagoguery over the construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque in New York is merely the most recent illustration of this. It suggests that the blatant racism and Islamophobia of contemporary Israeli politics is contagious. It rules out the global alliances against religious extremists that are essential to encompass their political defeat.
Freeman went on to say:
Vague promises of a Palestinian state within a year now waft through the air. But the “peace process” has always sneered at deadlines, even much, much firmer ones. A more definitive promise of an independent Palestine within a year was made at Annapolis three years ago. Analogous promises of Palestinian self-determination have preceded or resulted from previous meetings over the decades, beginning with the Camp David accords of 1979. Many in this audience will recall the five-year deadline fixed at Oslo. The talks about talks that begin tomorrow can yield concrete results only if the international community is prepared this time to insist on the one-year deadline put forward for recognizing a Palestinian state. Even then there will be no peace unless long-neglected issues are addressed.
Peace is a pattern of stability acceptable to those with the capacity to disturb it by violence. It is almost impossible to impose. It cannot become a reality, still less be sustained, if those who must accept it are excluded from it. This reality directs our attention to who is not at this gathering in Washington and what must be done to remedy the problems these absences create.
Obviously, the party that won the democratically expressed mandate of the Palestinian people to represent them — Hamas — is not there. Yet there can be no peace without its buy-in.
Peacemaking must engage those who are willing to use violence. Yet this assertion — whose truth is so obvious — is still being treated as a bold idea.
The narrative of peace promoted through the Bush era and still being propagated by Obama, suggests that peace is somehow produced by rallying together everyone who is willing to denounce violence — as though those who are willing to use violence will lose that capacity if they can be sufficiently marginalized. But on the contrary, political marginalization invariably has the opposite effect as those whose grievances are ignored, look for increasingly extreme means to make themselves heard.
If there’s just one lesson we can draw from the last decade it is this: utter the word “terrorism” and thought grinds to a halt, perceptions become blinkered and the power of human intelligence is suddenly put on hold.
Consider the attack near Hebron in the West Bank yesterday in which four Israelis were gunned down by Palestinian gunmen.
A report in the Jerusalem Post conveys a particularly harrowing moment in the attack’s aftermath as volunteers from Zaka, the Israeli community emergency response network, arrived at the scene of the shooting.
Zaka volunteer Momy Even-Haim was dispatched to the scene of the attack with his colleagues, when to his horror he discovered that his wife was among the dead.
“We saw a crying volunteer, and at first we did not understand what was happening — he has seen many disasters before,” Zaka volunteer Isaac Bernstein told The Jerusalem Post.
“Then he started shouting, ‘That’s my wife! That’s my wife!’ We took him away from the scene immediately,” Bernstein added. Even-Haim was taken to his home in Beit Hagai by his colleagues.
Tragedy takes infinite forms. Those in closest proximity can never be expected to respond rationally but from a distance, rationality is not only possible — it is essential.
Instead though, this attack — like so many before — has produced a series of highly predictable knee-jerk responses.
The White House issued a statement saying:
The United States condemns in the strongest possible terms the terrorist attack today perpetrated by Hamas in which four Israelis were killed in the southern West Bank. We express our condolences to the victims’ families and call for the terrorists behind this horrific act to be brought to justice. We note that the Palestinian Authority has condemned this attack. On the eve of the re-launch of direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, this brutal attack underscores how far the enemies of peace will go to try to block progress. It is crucial that the parties persevere, keep moving forward even through difficult times, and continue working to achieve a just and lasting peace in the region that provides security for all peoples.
Is Washington already ahead of Israel in identifying the culprits?
That seems unlikely. Much more likely is that the White House is content to parrot press reports in which representatives of Hamas are quoted claiming responsibility for the attack. If Hamas claims responsibility, its claim will be accepted at face value; if it were to deny responsibility, it’s denial would be treated with skepticism. That’s the way the “analytical” process works.
Israeli press reports are less clear on the matter.
In Haaretz, Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel report:
Even though no official claim of responsibility was made, the investigation by the security services of Israel and the Palestinian Authority suggest that the culprits were a cell which identifies itself, more or less, with Hamas. Fauzi Barhum, one of the spokesmen for the group in the Gaza Strip, did not openly claim responsibility for the attack, but hinted that his group was behind the shooting.
“The resistance continues everywhere,” he said.
In recent months the Hamas leadership in the Gaza Strip and Damascus has pressed West Bank-based teams of gunmen to resume the attacks in an effort to make it more difficult on the Palestinian Authority and stir up tension with Israel.
Two months ago a large Hamas network was uncovered in the southern Hebron Hills, a “sleeper cell” that was revived, whose members are suspected of murdering an Israeli policeman in a similar shooting incident, along the same route, several kilometers from the spot of last night’s terror attack.
A cell which identifies itself “more or less” with Hamas — that’s pretty vague. Moreover, a previously unknown group calling itself the Al-Haq (“Rights”) Brigades has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s shooting, according to the Ma’an news agency.
As for Issacharoff and Harel’s claim that a Hamas cell was responsible for the June Hebron Hills shooting, that also is far from clear. When suspects were arrested by Israel’s internal security services, Shin Bet, Haaretz reported:
It is unclear… who is responsible for the establishment of this group, which is reportedly affiliated to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. Israeli security sources have been examining the possibility that the gunmen behind the June 14 attack were from various Palestinian militant groups.
Whether or not Hamas had a role in yesterday’s attack it is too soon to tell. And even if some or all of the gunmen turn out to belong to the movement does not necessarily reveal a great deal about the level of command and control or political motives for the attack.
Whatever the motives, the outcome itself has opened political opportunities to each constituency that now portrays itself as a victim.
Given that the attack took place in an area controlled by the IDF, President Abbas could have taken the opportunity to point out that the attack underlines the fact that there can ultimately be no security solution to the political conflict. Instead, Palestinian security services have been quick to launch what is being described as one of the largest arrest waves of all time in the West Bank.
Hamas lawmaker Omar Abdel-Raziq said more than 150 members had been detained, and others had been summoned to police stations for questioning.
He accused Abbas of trying to please the Israelis.
“These are political arrests,” he said. “They are trying to tell the Israelis that they are capable of doing the job after the attack.”
At the funerals of the four Israelis killed, settler leaders took the opportunity to push for settlement expansion, call for vengeance (a call which has already been acted upon), deny the existence of the Palestinian people and make a thinly-veiled appeal for ethnic cleansing:
Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba eulogized the victims saying that “this is a grave tragedy for the families, for the people of Israel and for the state. God, avenge the spilled blood of your servants.”
“There is an army, which must be used,” Rabbi Lior continued. “The mistake is to think that an agreement can be reached with these terrorists. Every Jew wants peace, but these evildoers want to destroy us. We need to give them the right of return and return them to the countries from which they came.”
When President Obama tries to press Benjamin Netanyahu to extend the so-called settlement freeze, the Israeli prime minister will no doubt tell him solemnly that in light of recent events, his hands are well and truly tied.
They shoot and we build has become the settlers’ slogan — one that is almost certainly to Netanyahu’s liking.
Update: In a conversation I just had with Hamas expert, Mark Perry, he made the point that when it comes to identifying armed militants in the West Bank, the Al Qassam Brigade (affiliated with Hamas) and the Al Aqsa Brigade (affiliated with Fatah) are virtually indistinguishable in most of the area, but particularly in Hebron. The clearest differentiation in armed groups is between those who are on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll and those who aren’t.
Mark also pointed out that if the Obama administration was not trapped inside its own terrorism rhetoric, they could point out that the attack underlines the unnecessary vulnerability that Israeli’s expose themselves to by grabbing Palestinian land and building settlements.
On the eve of US-brokered Palestinian-Israeli peace talks which begin on Thursday, Sharmine Narwani went to Damascus to interview the Hamas political bureau chief, Khaled Meshaal.
Sharmine Narwani: There is debate about whether Hamas accepts the premise of a two-state solution — your language seems often vague and heavily nuanced. I want to ask if you could clarify, but I am also curious as to whether it is even worth accepting a two-state solution today when there has been so much land confiscation and settlement activity by Israel in the West Bank and East Jerusalem?
Khaled Meshaal: Hamas does accept a Palestinian state on the lines of 1967 — and does not accept the two-state solution.
SN: What is the difference between the two?
KM: There is big difference between these two. I am a Palestinian. I am a Palestinian leader. I am concerned with accomplishing what the Palestinian people are looking for — which is to get rid of the occupation, attain liberation and freedom, and establish the Palestinian state on the lines of 1967. Talking about Israel is not relevant to me — I am not concerned about it. It is an occupying state, and I am the victim. I am the victim of the occupation; I am not concerned with giving legitimacy to this occupying country. The international community can deal with this (Israeli) state; I am concerned with the Palestinian people. I am as a Palestinian concerned with establishing the Palestinian state only.
SN: Can you clarify further? As a Palestinian leader of the Resistance you have to give people an idea of what you aspire to — and how you expect to attain it?
KM: For us, the 20 years of experience with these peace negotiations — and the failure of it — very much convinces us today that the legitimate rights of Palestinians will be only be gained by snatching them, not by being gifted with them at the negotiating table. Neither Netanyahu nor any other Israeli leader will ever simply gift us a Palestinian state. The Palestinian Authority has watered down all its demands and is merely asking for a frame of reference to the 1967 borders in negotiations, but Netanyahu has repeatedly refused to accept even this most basic premise for peace. Nor will America or the international community gift us with a state — we have to depend on ourselves and help ourselves.
As a Palestinian leader, I tell my people that the Palestinian state and Palestinian rights will not be accomplished through this peace process — but it will be accomplished by force, and it will be accomplished by resistance. I tell them that through this bitter experience of long negotiations with the Israelis, we got nothing — we could not even get the 1967 solution. I tell them the only option in front of us today is to take this by force and by resistance. And the Palestinian people today realize this — yes, it has a steep price, but there is no other option for the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people tried the peace process option but the result was nothing.
Israelis might argue about whether the settlements are going to destroy Zionism or help it survive; they differ much less when it comes to their views about Palestinians.
Gadi Taub is ringing the now familiar alarm bell that without a swift end to the occupation, Zionism itself will be in jeopardy. Salvation depends on partition.
The most pressing problem with the settlements is not that they are obstacles to a final peace accord, which is how settlement critics have often framed the issue. The danger is that they will doom Zionism itself.
If the road to partition is blocked, Israel will be forced to choose between two terrible options: Jewish-dominated apartheid or non-Jewish democracy. If Israel opts for apartheid, as the settlers wish, Israel will betray the beliefs it was founded on, become a pariah state and provoke the Arab population to an understandable rebellion. If a non-Jewish democracy is formally established, it is sure to be dysfunctional. Fatah and Hamas haven’t been able to reconcile their differences peacefully and rule the territories — throwing a large Jewish population into the mix is surely not going to produce a healthy liberal democracy. Think Lebanon, not Switzerland.
In truth, both options — and indeed all “one-state solutions” — lead to the same end: civil war. That is why the settlement problem should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, beginning with Israel’s. The religious settlement movement is not just secular Zionism’s ideological adversary, it is a danger to its very existence. Terrorism is a hazard, but it cannot destroy Herzl’s Zionist vision. More settlements and continued occupation can.
On the other side of the debate are Israelis such as Naftali Bennett, Benjamin Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and the recently named director-general of the settler advocacy group the Yesha Council.
When it comes to assessing the prospects for anything to be accomplished in the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian talks, Bennett succinctly describes the power equation and thus the reason the talks will go nowhere: “It’s in their interest more than ours. We’re doing just fine.”
Bennett challenges much of the conventional wisdom about settlements and settlers — not surprising perhaps because he lives inside Israel and was a high-tech millionaire before entering politics.
He says: “My vision is 1 million Jews living in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], putting an end to the notion that we can have a Palestinian state in the heart of Israel.”
With over half a million Jews already planted inside the occupied territories, that vision is more than half way towards being realized. “Anyone considering the notion of expelling 80,000 or 150,000 Jews (from the West Bank) today should know that it’s simply impossible,” Bennett declares.
“We view Judea and Samaria as the bulwark of Israel, and Israel as the bulwark for the West against Islamic terrorism. We are the security shield of Israel. That’s fundamentally how people in Judea and Samaria see it. People see it as a mission to maintain and protect this area for the Jewish people.”
Since he rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, the Los Angeles Times asks Bennett what alternative he envisions:
The alternative is peaceful coexistence on the ground and simply strengthening the current, very positive trends with the economy and security. Removing the roadblocks. Giving Palestinians political rights to vote for themselves. If they want to reach an agreement with Jordan to give them citizenship, so be it. If we need to make adjustments to make life better, we can.
Many Palestinians say the status quo is unfair and not acceptable.
There wouldn’t be apartheid. They’d rule themselves and we’d rule ourselves. We’d drive on the same roads. Arabs have fairly good lives. The overwhelming majority of the Palestinian people want peaceful coexistence. It’s just their leaders who are not OK with it.
It’s not perfect. They want a full-blown state. But it’s a zero-sum game. If they have a state, we’ll cease to exist. That’s the best we can do.
What’s interesting in looking at these contrasting Israeli views of the settlements is that beneath the divergence in analysis, there is an Israeli consensus: they see no real basis for Palestinian self determination. Palestinians would undermine the effective functioning of any democracy other than a Jewish-controlled “democracy,” but they can rule themselves so long as they don’t imagine they can have their own fully sovereign state.
Whether viewed from the left or the right, the one thing most Jewish Israelis seem to agree on (even if they differ in how bluntly they will state this) is that they regard Palestinians as their inferiors.
Update: Following a shooting attack in which Palestinian gunmen killed four Israelis outside the Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron on Tuesday, settlement leaders were quick to call for talks due to start in Washington on Wednesday, to be cancelled.
The head of the Mount Hebron Regional Council, Tzvika Bar-Hai, called on Netanyahu to cancel the Washington talks.
“There is no place for negotiations with those who respond with deadly fire to our hand outstretched for peace,” he said.
“It is time for the leaders of Israel to wake up from the illusion of false peace,” Bar-Hai added.
“We’re talking about one of the worst terrorist attacks in the past few years,” said Naftali Bennet, director-general of the Council of Jewish Communities of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.
“We’re asking that the prime minister immediately turn the plane around and come back to Israel. It’s not possible, while we’re holding funerals, that he can stay there. And we’re calling on him, tomorrow morning, to renew the building in Judea and Samaria,” he said.
The council announced Tuesday night that it would respond to the attack by unilaterally ending the construction freeze and starting to build on Wednesday.
A Yesha Council statement said: “The Zionist answer is to build and support. They shoot and we build. Each does as he believes.”
Although a spokesman for Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, claimed responsibility for the attack, Ynet reported:
Earlier on Tuesday, Hamas Spokesman Fawzi Barhum addressed the attack but did not claim responsibility for it.
“The attack was not meant to impede direct negotiations which failed prior to even starting. This is a natural response by the Palestinian resistance to the enemy’s crimes, and is proof that despite the resistance’s persecution by the security services and despite Israel’s crimes, the Palestinians are capable of responding to these crimes,” he said.
Barhum stressed that the attack was the type of response “which the enemy and occupation should expect. The Palestinian resistance is alive, well and kicking.”
The opponents of Park51, the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” have decided that the litmus test for identifying “good Muslims” is to ask them whether they regard Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Andy McCarthy, one of the lead knights in the crusade to stop “the Islamization of America,” strikes the latest blow — this time against a rather guileless Imam Dawoud Kringle. This is how McCarthy recounts the crucial part of his “debate” on the fair-and-balanced Fox News:
Then came the moment of truth: the very simple question, “Is Hamas a terrorist organization?” Have a look at the YouTube clip below. Like his friend Imam Feisal Rauf, Imam Kringle won’t answer the question. I pressed him, pointing out that it is a very simple question. And it is: Quite apart from the fact that Hamas is formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law, Hamas’s own charter makes abundantly clear — indeed, wears like a badge of honor — that Hamas exists solely for the purpose of driving Israel out of Palestine by violent jihad. Yet the imam cannot bring himself to say Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Perhaps Kringle would have held surer footing if he had first addressed the reliability of the US government in identifying terrorists.
It was only two years ago that Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were removed from the US terrorism watch list — that was 15 years after Mandela had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The terrorism watch list — like the Nobel Peace Prize — is not in and of itself a reliable indicator of someone’s current willingness to use violence in pursuit of a political cause.
Likewise, the fact that in the 1980s the Reagan administration regarded Afghanistan’s mujahideen as “freedom fighters” — not terrorists — had everything to do with who they were fighting (the Soviets) and nothing to do with the methods they employed or the causes those particular jihadists might subsequently espouse.
Terrorism and terrorist — as everyone knew until they suddenly forgot on 9/11 — are mutable designations that more clearly specify the relationship between the designator and the designee than they say much else.
Is Hamas a terrorist organization? As far as the US government is concerned, the answer it yes. It’s on the list. Yet not all organizations listed terrorist are the same — and like most objective foreign policy analysts, the US government like every other government knows this: these organizations are as diverse in their political aims as they are in their geographical distribution.
Hamas has been presented with a set of conditions which, if fulfilled, would allow it to participate in the peace process. In other words, even from the perspective of those governments who currently describe it as a terrorist organization there is an exit ramp for Hamas to shed its “terrorist” label. In contrast, there are no conditions under which any government will enter talks with al Qaeda.
Contrary to what McCarthy and others insinuate, Hamas and al Qaeda are not two peas in the same pod. They are in fact sworn enemies.
But given that so far no one has pointed to any direct connection between Park51 and Hamas, one has to wonder why those affiliated with the proposed Islamic center are being asked their views on the Palestinian movement?
The answer has much less to do with Park51 than it does with the myth that America’s interests are indistinguishable from those of Israel.
Whether McCarthy describes himself as a Zionist, he is certainly pushing a Zionist agenda when he claims: “Hamas exists solely for the purpose of driving Israel out of Palestine by violent jihad.”
In fact, Hamas’ leadership has explicitly supported the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders if Israel ends the occupation. But this politically pragmatic position is one that McCarthy and his ilk refuse to acknowledge because it conflicts with a narrative that pits Israel and its allies against an ideologically unyielding and anti-Semitic foe. Characterize the conflict that way and there is no compromise a peace-loving Israel could make which would satisfy its enemies.
Indeed, elsewhere McCarthy has made it clear that he subscribes to the right-wing Zionist school of thought which sees a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as contingent solely on the ability of Israel to crush its opponent.
As he wrote during the war on Gaza: “What Israel needs is to be allowed to win: to finish the grisly work of ‘breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel,’ as Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit so aptly put it.”
As for Palestinian national aspirations in general, McCarthy says: “On the political front, it is high time to acknowledge the failure of the fantasy that the Palestinians are legitimate actors worthy of statehood and its privileges.” He says: “we must halt the mindless ‘two state solution’ rhetoric.” Scorning those who he calls “democracy devotees,” McCarthy says: “Let’s be blunt: we are looking at a generation or more before the Palestinians might be prepared to assume the obligations of sovereignty. So we should stop talking about it.”
Daniel Luban in an article in which he describes Islamophobia as the “new anti-Semitism,” notes the central role that McCarthy has assumed as an ideologue now marshaling opposition to Islam in America.
The mosque furor is only the most recent and revealing demonstration of the anti-jihadists’ political influence; from the beginning of the controversy, McCarthy and his allies have dictated the terms of debate on the right. In his July 28 statement attacking the Islamic center, Newt Gingrich cited [McCarthy’s book] The Grand Jihad and framed the controversy in McCarthy’s terms of Western civilization under siege from creeping sharia. More recently, the American Family Association — a leading fundamentalist Christian group — cited the book to argue that no more mosques should be built anywhere in the United States because “each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government.” A campaign spearheaded by Pamela Geller, the right-wing blogger who was previously most notorious for publishing a lengthy piece alleging that Obama is the illegitimate child of Malcolm X, will place ads on New York City buses opposing the Islamic center. On September 11, she and Gingrich will lead a major rally against the center that will also feature [Geert] Wilders, the Islamophobic Dutch politician. What was once a lunatic fringe now appears to be running the show, aided and abetted by mainstream figures like Gingrich.
It is quite possible that the next Republican president will also be a party to what can justly be called the new McCarthyism; for that reason alone, McCarthy and his allies deserve our attention. But even more important is the impact of this steady stream of anti-Muslim vitriol on the popular consciousness. Cynical politicians like Gingrich may know that all the talk of the Islamic center as a “9/11 victory monument” and of ordinary Muslims as stealth sharia operatives is mere agitprop designed to win votes in an election year, but ordinary citizens may take them at their word and act accordingly.
Given that McCarthy and his cohorts want to associate Park51 with Hamas, it’s worth considering what Hamas has to say about the plans for the Islamic center.
In an interview on New York’s WABC radio (audio can be heard here), Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas who is in the Gaza political leadership, was asked by Aaron Klein to comment on the construction of the center.
Without addressing the question directly, Zahar chose to respond by pointing out that Muslims in America are like Muslims elsewhere, living in accordance with Islam, fasting (during Ramadan), praying and so forth. He then went on to say that Hamas is being misrepresented by those who would liken it to the Taliban and that it is recognized across the Islamic world as a moderate organization.
Klein, however, wanted to focus on the mosque controversy and returned to that question:
Klein: What do you think about the new initiative to build a mosque near the World Trade Center in New York, which is a major point of controversy on all sides?
Zahar: We have to build the mosque as you are allowed to build the church and the Israeli are building their holy places. We have to build everywhere — in every area we have muslims, we have to pray, and this mosque is the only site of prayer especially for the people when they are looking to be in the group — not individual.
Muslims should be allowed to worship in mosques, just like Christians going to church and Jews going to the synagogue.
Not much controversy there, right?
Well, the New York Post seemed eager to pour fuel on the fire by inserting a few words implying that Hamas (and Muslims in general) are engaged in territorial expansion.
A leader of the Hamas terror group yesterday jumped into the emotional debate on the plan to construct a mosque near Ground Zero — insisting Muslims “have to build” it there.
“We have to build everywhere,” said Mahmoud al-Zahar, a co-founder of Hamas and the organization’s chief on the Gaza Strip.
“In every area we have, [as] Muslim[s], we have to pray, and this mosque is the only site of prayer,” he said on “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” on WABC.
Zahar actually said, “In every area we have Muslims, we have to pray,” which is to say, wherever Muslims live they have a religious obligation to gather for prayer and they do this in mosques.
The New York Post twisted this into: “In every area we have, [as] Muslims[s], we have to pray,” which conjures up a completely different picture. Lower Manhattan is now an area that Muslims claim as their own — at least the New York Post appears to want to promote this lie.
Those who now man the barricades in response to what they call the Islamization of America, reveal in the shadow of their fears the scope of their ambitions.
On 9/11, four groups of hijackers took control of four aircraft resulting in the horrific deaths of 3,000 people. The same day, another group of hijackers took control of the aftermath of the attacks and began a war in which hundreds of thousands have died and millions been displaced. The campaign of those hijackers continues and Park51 is merely its latest target.
If you’re wondering how seriously to take the latest peace process gambit, this, from the Los Angeles Times, sums up the spirit of the latest move:
One White House official on Friday described peace talks as a “tradition” in which every American president must participate.
“This is something that there has been a long-standing U.S. commitment to engage with the Israelis and Palestinians on,” said John Brennan, assistant to the president for counter-terrorism and homeland security. “Previous administrations have dedicated much effort and energy to this, and the Obama administration is carrying this tradition on.”
There is little confidence — close to none — on either side that the Obama administration’s goal of reaching a comprehensive deal in one year can be met.
Instead, there is a resigned fatalism in the air. Most analysts view the talks as pairing the unwilling with the unable — a strong right-wing Israeli coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with no desire to reach an agreement against a relatively moderate Palestinian leadership that is too weak and divided to do so.
“These direct negotiations are the option of the crippled and the helpless,” remarked Zakaria al-Qaq, vice president of Al Quds University and a Palestinian moderate, when asked his view of the development. “It is an act of self-deception that will lead nowhere.”
And Nahum Barnea, Israel’s pre-eminent political columnist, said in a phone interview: “Most Israelis have decided that nothing is going to come out of it, that it will have no bearing on their lives. So why should they care?”
That such a dismissive tone comes not from the known rejectionists — the Islamists of Hamas who rule in Gaza and the leadership of the Israeli settler community in the West Bank — but from mainstream thinkers is telling of the mood.
Some Israelis who have spent their professional lives on peace talks with the Palestinians were upset by the fear that failed talks could prove worse than no talks. Yossi Beilin, for example, who left politics in 2008 after years as a leftist member of Parliament and government minister, said Friday that the Obama administration was wrong to set a one-year goal without consequences.
“I think this is a huge mistake by the U.S. administration,” he said by telephone. “There is not a chance in the world that in a year — or two or three — peace can be achieved. The gap between the sides is too big. Netanyahu did not come to power to divide Jerusalem or find a solution to the Palestinian refugees.”
In another blow to Israeli shares, the Harvard Management Company notified the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday that it had sold all its holdings in Israeli companies during the second quarter of 2010. No reason for the sale was mentioned. The Harvard Management Company manages Harvard University’s endowment.
Harvard Management Company stated in its 13-F Form that it sold 483,590 shares in Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Nasdaq: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) for $30.5 million; 52,360 shares in NICE Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: NICE; TASE: NICE) for $1.67 million; 102,940 shares in Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP) for $3.6 million; 32,400 shares in Cellcom Israel Ltd. (NYSE:CEL; TASE:CEL) for $1.1 million, and 80,000 Partner Communications Ltd. (Nasdaq: PTNR; TASE: PTNR) shares for $1.8 million.
Some commentators plausibly argue that Harvard’s decision was purely financial and not a political decision. Indeed, were it actually an explicit act of divestment there would surely have been a carefully crafted statement explaining their decision.
Even so, the effectiveness of the BDS movement may well depend less on persuading capital to move with principal (it never does) but on companies, institutions, artists and other players coming to the self-interested conclusion that doing business with Israel is bad for business.
The prefix anti- has become tarnished — no longer the signal of vital dissent. To be anti-war is to be dismissed as belonging to an ineffectual movement that paraded its political impotence until the marching lost all conviction and withered away. To be anti-American or anti-Israel is to be condemned as an enemy of civilization. To be an anti-Zionist is to be cast as someone with no regard for the rights of the Jewish people. And meanwhile, behind all these variants of opposition lurks the most dangerous negation of all: anti-Semitism.
You say no and we say yes. Who can escape seeing the appeal of being on the side of yes — even when it’s far from clear what this yes is supposed to affirm?
In a speech Chris Hedges delivered in New York City last Thursday at a fundraiser for sponsoring a U.S. boat to break the blockade of Gaza, he made a point worth heavily underlining when it comes to defining the oppositional antonyms that we use to define the issue of Palestine. This is not a struggle between yes and no.
Addressing secret informants in the room who were undoubtedly there gathering intelligence for the Israeli government, Hedges said:
You may have the bulldozers, planes and helicopters that smash houses to rubble, the commandos who descend from ropes on ships and kill unarmed civilians on the high seas as well as in Gaza, the vast power of the state behind you. We have only our hands and our hearts and our voices. But note this. Note this well. It is you who are afraid of us. We are not afraid of you.
This indeed is the most telling marker — not one that distinguishes those who are for or against but one that separates the fearful and the fearless.
To stand up in the name of justice is to align oneself with something bigger than ones own interests. The fearful cling to the things they are in jeopardy of losing. They defend an inequity that is inherently unstable. Their resistance is against balance and against a natural order. It is they who are most loudly saying “no” — even while calling it “peace.” Their resistance is through opposition to inevitable change.
The challenge to the fearful is this: you say you want to protect yourself from danger, yet you have allowed fear to become your closest companion. Do you not see that fear itself poses a greater threat to life than all the perils you name? Think less about how you can feel safe and you might discover how you can become less afraid.
* * *
Chris Hedges:
When I lived in Jerusalem I had a friend who confided in me that as a college student in the United States she attended events like these, wrote up reports and submitted them to the Israel consulate for money. It would be naive to assume this Israeli practice has ended. So, I want first tonight to address that person, or those persons, who may have come to this event for the purpose of reporting on it to the Israeli government.
I would like to remind them that it is they who hide in darkness. It is we who stand in the light. It is they who deceive. It is we who openly proclaim our compassion and demand justice for those who suffer in Gaza. We are not afraid to name our names. We are not afraid to name our beliefs. And we know something you perhaps sense with a kind of dread. As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government.
You may have the bulldozers, planes and helicopters that smash houses to rubble, the commandos who descend from ropes on ships and kill unarmed civilians on the high seas as well as in Gaza, the vast power of the state behind you. We have only our hands and our hearts and our voices. But note this. Note this well. It is you who are afraid of us. We are not afraid of you. We will keep working and praying, keep protesting and denouncing, keep pushing up against your navy and your army, with nothing but our bodies, until we prove that the force of morality and justice is greater than hate and violence. And then, when there is freedom in Gaza, we will forgive … you. We will ask you to break bread with us. We will bless your children even if you did not find it in your heart to bless the children of those you occupied. And maybe it is this forgiveness, maybe it is the final, insurmountable power of love, which unsettles you the most.
And so tonight, a night when some seek to name names and others seek to hide names, let me do some naming. Let me call things by their proper names. Let me cut through the jargon, the euphemisms we use to mask human suffering and war crimes. “Closures” mean heavily armed soldiers who ring Palestinian ghettos, deny those trapped inside food or basic amenities—including toys, razors, chocolate, fishing rods and musical instruments—and carry out a brutal policy of collective punishment, which is a crime under international law. “Disputed land” means land stolen from the Palestinians. “Clashes” mean, almost always, the killing or wounding of unarmed Palestinians, including children. “Jewish neighborhoods in the West Bank” mean fortress-like compounds that serve as military outposts in the campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. “Targeted assassinations” mean extrajudicial murder. “Air strikes on militant bomb-making posts” mean the dropping of huge iron fragmentation bombs from fighter jets on densely crowded neighborhoods that always leaves scores of dead and wounded, whose only contact with a bomb was the one manufactured in the United States and given to the Israeli Air Force as part of our complicity in the occupation. “The peace process” means the cynical, one-way route to the crushing of the Palestinians as a people.
“Attacking settlers is a natural thing,” al-Rashk told Al-Hayat on Saturday, saying the “Zionist settlers are the occupation’s first reserve military force.”
The most pressing problem with the settlements is not that they are obstacles to a final peace accord, which is how settlement critics have often framed the issue. The danger is that they will doom Zionism itself.
On the other side of the debate are Israelis such as Naftali Bennett, Benjamin Netanyahu’s former chief of staff and the recently named director-general of the settler advocacy group the Yesha Council.
