Imagine representatives of Iran and Israel sitting at the same table discussing how to reach the goal of a Middle East free from nuclear weapons.
It happened.
Back in May 1993 the International Atomic Energy Authority (the IAEA) convened the first of a series of conferences in Vienna on just this subject, and both Iran and Israel attended. Over the four years to 1997 other such conferences and workshops took place.
Nor was this very surprising. As far back as 1980, Israel and Egypt had jointly proposed a resolution in the United Nations on the desirability of establishing the Middle East as a nuclear-weapons-free zone – and the General Assembly decided that henceforth this resolution would be adopted annually without a vote. Moreover, in 1990, UN General Assembly resolution 45/52 had invited all countries of the region, "pending the establishment of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the region of the Middle East, to declare their support for establishing such a zone."
This UN resolution, like the IAEA conferences that followed − the last in November 2011 − petered out without any obviously positive outcome. There is a clear and patent prerequisite to establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East − peaceful relations between all the countries of the region. How else could its implementation be discussed, carried forward and monitored?
But that desirable goal has never seemed remotely within reach. Take Israel out of the picture, and consider the intra-regional rivalries and conflicts in the Middle East over the past 40 years – the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the civil war in South Lebanon, the seizure of Gaza by Hamas, the growth of extreme Islamism exemplified by Al-Qaeda and the subsequent undermining of "moderate" Muslim states. To extend the scope of the argument somewhat in order to make the point, it has been calculated that of the 11 million Muslims killed in conflicts since 1948, some 90 per cent were killed by fellow Muslims.
So when in May 2010, following a conference taking stock of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the five permanent UN Security Council members issued a unanimous statement: "we are committed to a full implementation of the 1995 NPT resolution on the Middle East and we support all ongoing efforts to this end," there seemed nothing new in the reiteration of a long-held aspiration. And indeed the US, Russia, and the United Kingdom, the treaty depository powers and sponsors of the 1995 NPT Resolution, committed themselves to work together with the UN Secretary General to convene a regional conference to discuss the issue in 2012.
This new NPT conference is indeed scheduled to be held in Helsinki later this year, or possibly early in 2013. In preparation for it, Finland's undersecretary of state for foreign affairs is reported to have visited Jerusalem secretly in April for talks about Israel's involvement.
Israel will clearly wish to coordinate its position with the US. The Obama administration is known to support such a conference, since it is in line with their continued efforts to promote the NPT. However, the conference will take place after the forthcoming US presidential election, and it may be that Israel will postpone committing itself one way or the other until the outcome.
The purpose of the conference is ostensibly to discuss how to proceed with banning nuclear arms from the Middle East, but the main item on the agenda is likely to be an attempt by Arab states and Iran to curb Israel's nuclear capability. The first step in this long-running enterprise is always an attempt to create a linkage between Iran and Israel − only if Israel is forced to sign the NPT and declare its nuclear capacity, the argument runs, can Iran be effectively pressured into abandoning its nuclear ambitions.
This proposed "linkage" has, of course, little validity. It is now clear to world opinion that Iran's push to develop nuclear weapons arises from its ambition to dominate the Middle East – to "devour the Arab world,", as Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak once put it. Iran lays claim to Bahrain, and sends weapons to Assad’s regime in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. In truth Israel is irrelevant to these plans, except to serve as a convenient whipping boy from time to time. Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would certainly like Israel out of the way, but Iran will continue with its policies regardless of whether Israel signs the NPT or not.
The "equality norm" is also considered invalid by many observers, who point out that Iran continually threatens to destroy Israel, while Israel has never threatened any state, either with conventional or with nuclear weapons. It is, though, generally recognized that Israel's nuclear capability, whatever it consists of, provides the country with a degree of deterrence against the sort of hazardous situations it faced in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973.
One major question for Israel is whether it can retain its policy of nuclear "opacity" in an increasingly transparent world. With even the US disclosing the number of its nuclear warheads, and completing negotiations with the Russian Federation on new cuts in nuclear stockpiles, how long can Israel refrain from declaring its own nuclear capacity?
One Israeli expert on the subject – Avner Cohen, author of "Israel and the Bomb" – argues that it is time for Israel to consider adopting greater transparency in these matters. But he is cautious in his advice, for he perceives that a sudden announcement by Israel of its nuclear capability would inevitably rack up tensions in the Middle East and be perceived by the rest of the region as an aggressive show of force.
Signing the NPT is probably a non-starter for Israel. The actions of other signed-up members reveal the treaty to be a thing of straw. In the last ten years, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have repeatedly deceived the inspectors of the IAEA and developed nuclear-based weapons programs, thus contravening their obligations. Another signatory to the NPT, North Korea, even expelled IAEA inspectors and completed its secret nuclear weapons program, without any effective Western response.
Israel has long been aware of the limits of the NPT, realizing that to sign it would weaken its position in the region and actually leave it more vulnerable to attack. However, there is no such danger in subscribing to the ideal of a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East – a concept that would require peaceful dialogue between the nations of the region to achieve, and therefore very much an outcome that Israel would desire. Indeed, a poll of Israeli Jews conducted last November by the University of Maryland found that 64 percent of those questioned favored establishing a nuclear free zone in the Middle East, even when it was spelled out that this would mean that Israel as well as Iran would give up the option of having nuclear weapons.
Where current moves fall down is in trying to push Israel into nuclear transparency and signing the NTP − claiming this to be a vital step towards establishing a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East − before there is anything approaching the peaceful relations between the nations of the region that would be essential to achieving it.
There's a phrase that admirably covers this approach to the issue: putting the cart before the horse.
Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post today, 9 August 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=280651&prmusr=xC7UH6yAiXBUzTwsVfhORiTTNMFHXPSj6vh4aMtykB9VdOlZvLyGSm81Z8%2bf8acD
Thursday, 9 August 2012
Wednesday, 8 August 2012
An Israeli referendum?
The one democratic pool into which Israel has never dipped its big toe is the referendum. But then, small and democratic though Israel may be, it’s not a Switzerland where, under the constitution, voters can demand a binding referendum on all sorts of issues, great and small, at federal, cantonal and municipal level. Quite the reverse. The Basic Laws of Israel do not provide at all for holding referendums or popular plebiscites.
That, of course, has not stopped various calls for them over Israel’s 64-year history. As early as 1958, in a bid to reduce the influence of the National Religious Party, Ben-Gurion suggested a referendum on the electoral system. Later Begin toyed with the idea of offering a referendum on proposed laws, provided at least 100,000 citizens requested it. In the 1970s a plebiscite on the future of the West Bank was briefly considered; while in 2005 settlers in the Gaza Strip opposed to the loss of their homes, asked for a national referendum on Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan. Sharon opposed the idea, and the law was instead passed through the Knesset.
Referenda are far from confined to Switzerland. In fact more than forty nations have held them in the recent past, or conduct them as a matter of course from time to time. Close to home, the possibility of a referendum is about to feature in the current struggle in Egypt between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The high constitutional court of Egypt has refused to declare illegal the extraordinary powers granted by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to themselves; at the same time the court has deferred until September a ruling on dissolving the second constituent assembly as it did the first. That first body included parliament members, which is illegal according to the provisional constitution issued by the SCAF after the fall from power of the previous president, Hosni Mubarak.
The second assembly, however, still faces some of the problems of the first, such as parliamentary members elected again and Muslim Brotherhood domination, and so it awaits a ruling from the court on its future. In the meantime, they are hastening to prepare the new constitution in terms heavily favoring the Brotherhood element; including the powers of the president, and downgrading the power and influence of the military. They are hoping to complete the new constitution before the court rules. If so, their constitution will be put to the people in a referendum – and that, it is adjudged, will confer legitimacy on it whatever the court rules.
“If the constitution is drafted in time,” noted Zvi Mazel, former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, on 5 August 2012 in the Jerusalem Post, “it will be submitted to the people in a referendum before the court has made public its decision. It will then be nearly impossible for the court to rule against the democratically expressed will of the people.”
This gambit is precisely the thinking behind the most recent attempt to graft a referendum on to Israel’s Basic Laws.
On Monday, 22 November 2010 the Knesset, by a vote of 65-33, passed into law an Act unique in the nation’s history. In future, any proposal to withdraw from Israeli territory would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority in the legislature. In the event that this was impossible, a national referendum would be mandatory. The law took immediate effect.
Because the law applies only to sovereign Israeli territory, no referendum would be needed to withdraw from any part of the West Bank. However, should the Knesset not approve by a two-thirds majority a pullout from east Jerusalem or the Golan Heights, a referendum would be required, as both have been annexed by Israel. It would also be required if, under a future deal with the Palestinians, Israel ceded land within the pre-1967 lines in exchange for keeping the settlement blocs.
Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke in favour: "A referendum will prevent an irresponsible agreement, but at the same time will allow any agreement that satisfies Israel's national interests to pass with strong public backing." He was convinced, he added, that any agreement he submitted to the Knesset would indeed enjoy such backing.
Then Opposition leader Tzipi Livni said it was a sign of "weak leadership," and Kadima voted overwhelmingly against the bill.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, was highly critical of the new law. "The Israeli leadership, yet again, is making a mockery of international law, which is not subject to the whims of Israeli public opinion. Under international law there is a clear and absolute obligation on Israel to withdraw not only from east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, but from all of the territories that it has occupied since 1967. Ending the occupation of our land is not and cannot be dependent on any sort of referendum."
Erekat’s view, while understandable, takes no account of the political realities. As Israel’s previous withdrawals from occupied territory – notably the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza strip – have shown, when it comes down to evacuating settlements, the government needs the utmost determination in imposing its will against often implacable opposition from its own citizens. But these earlier examples could be as nothing compared with the situation that could develop, if it came to forcible evacuations from West Bank settlements.
Imagine the situation. An Israeli government has concluded a draft peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority involving the swapping of Israeli territory in exchange for retaining some West Bank settlements, but evacuating others. But the government is unable to command a majority for that action in the Knesset. In such circumstances, a national referendum could provide it with enhanced legitimacy for taking the necessary action. Settlers determined to combat government efforts to evacuate them would have a far weaker case if government action were backed by a majority of the nation.
All the same, should the parliamentary vote fail, going to the Israeli public would undoubtedly be something of a gamble.
The law received more than 61 votes, meaning it was passed by an absolute majority of the 120-member Knesset. This will make it harder for anyone to seek to overturn it through the High Court of Justice, because it will eliminate the argument that the law passed with insufficient support for such fundamental, quasi-constitutional legislation.
Knesset House Committee chairman Yariv Levin, whose panel prepared the law, told the plenum before the vote that it "reflects the need to ensure that fateful, irreversible decisions about conceding parts of the homeland to which Israeli sovereignty have been applied" will not be made via dubious political horse trading ("as has happened in the past," he added). Instead it will reflect the will of the people, either by way of a genuine two-thirds majority in the Knesset, or failing that, by a referendum of the nation as a whole. As such, he said, the law will promote national unity, because even opponents will not be able to argue − as they have in the past − that the Knesset's decision was not actually supported by a majority of the public.
And that, in the final analysis, is the nub of the case in its favour. Of course, the sixty-four thousand dollar question is, with the peace process apparently irretrievably log-jammed, will even the prospect of a national referendum ever arise?
Published in the online edition of the Jerusalem Post on 6 August 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=280256&prmusr=9AH3ZN%2br2FJYJiFzaGIS%2fKFNsvKsrCYoNiQRpPxjfopR6%2b4hE36VXY2r9tGo358l
That, of course, has not stopped various calls for them over Israel’s 64-year history. As early as 1958, in a bid to reduce the influence of the National Religious Party, Ben-Gurion suggested a referendum on the electoral system. Later Begin toyed with the idea of offering a referendum on proposed laws, provided at least 100,000 citizens requested it. In the 1970s a plebiscite on the future of the West Bank was briefly considered; while in 2005 settlers in the Gaza Strip opposed to the loss of their homes, asked for a national referendum on Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan. Sharon opposed the idea, and the law was instead passed through the Knesset.
Referenda are far from confined to Switzerland. In fact more than forty nations have held them in the recent past, or conduct them as a matter of course from time to time. Close to home, the possibility of a referendum is about to feature in the current struggle in Egypt between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The high constitutional court of Egypt has refused to declare illegal the extraordinary powers granted by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) to themselves; at the same time the court has deferred until September a ruling on dissolving the second constituent assembly as it did the first. That first body included parliament members, which is illegal according to the provisional constitution issued by the SCAF after the fall from power of the previous president, Hosni Mubarak.
The second assembly, however, still faces some of the problems of the first, such as parliamentary members elected again and Muslim Brotherhood domination, and so it awaits a ruling from the court on its future. In the meantime, they are hastening to prepare the new constitution in terms heavily favoring the Brotherhood element; including the powers of the president, and downgrading the power and influence of the military. They are hoping to complete the new constitution before the court rules. If so, their constitution will be put to the people in a referendum – and that, it is adjudged, will confer legitimacy on it whatever the court rules.
“If the constitution is drafted in time,” noted Zvi Mazel, former Israeli ambassador to Egypt, on 5 August 2012 in the Jerusalem Post, “it will be submitted to the people in a referendum before the court has made public its decision. It will then be nearly impossible for the court to rule against the democratically expressed will of the people.”
This gambit is precisely the thinking behind the most recent attempt to graft a referendum on to Israel’s Basic Laws.
On Monday, 22 November 2010 the Knesset, by a vote of 65-33, passed into law an Act unique in the nation’s history. In future, any proposal to withdraw from Israeli territory would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority in the legislature. In the event that this was impossible, a national referendum would be mandatory. The law took immediate effect.
Because the law applies only to sovereign Israeli territory, no referendum would be needed to withdraw from any part of the West Bank. However, should the Knesset not approve by a two-thirds majority a pullout from east Jerusalem or the Golan Heights, a referendum would be required, as both have been annexed by Israel. It would also be required if, under a future deal with the Palestinians, Israel ceded land within the pre-1967 lines in exchange for keeping the settlement blocs.
Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke in favour: "A referendum will prevent an irresponsible agreement, but at the same time will allow any agreement that satisfies Israel's national interests to pass with strong public backing." He was convinced, he added, that any agreement he submitted to the Knesset would indeed enjoy such backing.
Then Opposition leader Tzipi Livni said it was a sign of "weak leadership," and Kadima voted overwhelmingly against the bill.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, was highly critical of the new law. "The Israeli leadership, yet again, is making a mockery of international law, which is not subject to the whims of Israeli public opinion. Under international law there is a clear and absolute obligation on Israel to withdraw not only from east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, but from all of the territories that it has occupied since 1967. Ending the occupation of our land is not and cannot be dependent on any sort of referendum."
Erekat’s view, while understandable, takes no account of the political realities. As Israel’s previous withdrawals from occupied territory – notably the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza strip – have shown, when it comes down to evacuating settlements, the government needs the utmost determination in imposing its will against often implacable opposition from its own citizens. But these earlier examples could be as nothing compared with the situation that could develop, if it came to forcible evacuations from West Bank settlements.
Imagine the situation. An Israeli government has concluded a draft peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority involving the swapping of Israeli territory in exchange for retaining some West Bank settlements, but evacuating others. But the government is unable to command a majority for that action in the Knesset. In such circumstances, a national referendum could provide it with enhanced legitimacy for taking the necessary action. Settlers determined to combat government efforts to evacuate them would have a far weaker case if government action were backed by a majority of the nation.
All the same, should the parliamentary vote fail, going to the Israeli public would undoubtedly be something of a gamble.
The law received more than 61 votes, meaning it was passed by an absolute majority of the 120-member Knesset. This will make it harder for anyone to seek to overturn it through the High Court of Justice, because it will eliminate the argument that the law passed with insufficient support for such fundamental, quasi-constitutional legislation.
Knesset House Committee chairman Yariv Levin, whose panel prepared the law, told the plenum before the vote that it "reflects the need to ensure that fateful, irreversible decisions about conceding parts of the homeland to which Israeli sovereignty have been applied" will not be made via dubious political horse trading ("as has happened in the past," he added). Instead it will reflect the will of the people, either by way of a genuine two-thirds majority in the Knesset, or failing that, by a referendum of the nation as a whole. As such, he said, the law will promote national unity, because even opponents will not be able to argue − as they have in the past − that the Knesset's decision was not actually supported by a majority of the public.
And that, in the final analysis, is the nub of the case in its favour. Of course, the sixty-four thousand dollar question is, with the peace process apparently irretrievably log-jammed, will even the prospect of a national referendum ever arise?
Published in the online edition of the Jerusalem Post on 6 August 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=280256&prmusr=9AH3ZN%2br2FJYJiFzaGIS%2fKFNsvKsrCYoNiQRpPxjfopR6%2b4hE36VXY2r9tGo358l
Monday, 6 August 2012
The Friends of Israel Initiative
Israel is not without friends. Despite the burgeoning of so-called anti-Zionism within Western liberal opinion (anti-semitism as such is considered not politically correct), who could have predicted that considerable numbers of well-respected figures, virtually all of them non-Jewish, from countries all around the world, would come together to defend Israel against the insidious and growing campaign to delegitimize her, waged by her enemies and supported by numerous international institutions?
More than two years have gone by since the Friends of Israel Initiative (FII) was launched. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the enterprise has received little publicity, and is not yet on the political map. It deserves to be better known.
Who are these people, prepared to take so unfashionable and therefore so courageous a stand?
The "Friends of Israel Initiative" is led by former President of Spain, José María Aznar. The list of members includes Peru's former president Alejandro Toledo, former Italian Senate president Marcello Pera, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, British historian Andrew Roberts, and Northern Ireland's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lord Trimble.
Other members of the Board of FII include former Czech President Vaclav Havel, Spanish former industry minister Carlos Bustelo, French entrepreneur Robert Agostinelli, and Professor George Weigel. With a working budget of almost £1 million a year, FII has been funded by a dozen private donors from Spain, America, Israel, France, Italy and Britain.
It was in May 2010 that José Maria Aznar brought together a high level group in Paris to launch a project aimed specifically at asserting Israel's position as a legitimate democratic sovereign nation, an integral part of the Western world and of fundamental importance to its future. Although the FII acknowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is important, the members of the group are even more concerned about the rising tide of radical Islamism and the prospect of a nuclear Iran, both of which threaten the entire world.
The Mexican newspaper El Financiero defined the purpose of the Initiative as to "reaffirm Western values," and counteract "anti-Semitic criticism of Israel." According to Spain's ABC News Internacional, the Initiative is founded on the conviction that "the campaign against Israel corrodes the international system from within, beginning with the United Nations."
The FII is committed to act consistently and diligently in its effort to disseminate its members’ vision of Israel as a democratic, open, and advanced nation like any other, and that it should be perceived and treated as such.
Israel, the organisation maintains, is a sovereign democracy which like all the others is, of course, capable of making mistakes. Nonetheless, it asserts, this should not be used as an excuse to question Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, or its basic rights as an independent state.
The FII has been officially launched in France, the UK and the USA. At the launch in Washington in September 2010, José Maria Aznar explained more fully the motivation behind the new organisation.
“Israel is under a new kind of attack,” he said. “Not conventional war as in 1948, '56, '67 or ‘73. Not terrorism as we saw in the '70s, '80s and '90s. But a new kind of attack – an attack on Israel’s legitimacy, on her right to exist. A "soft war", where many of its adversaries are employing legal tricks, multinational bodies, and an army of dubious NGOs to present Israel internationally as an illegitimate state, a barbarian state, a state that should be isolated and converted into a pariah state.
“We think this is intolerable. It is unjust, morally wrong, and a strategic risk – not only for Israel and its people, but for all of us. Israel is an integral part of the West, and the weaker it is, the weaker the entire West will be perceived to be.
“Let me be clear. We certainly don't want to defend any particular Israeli government, or any particular set of policies, or any particular party. Israel's institutions are mature enough to defend their choices. We want to stand up for the right of Israel to exist. Judeo-Christian values form the roots of our civilization. Delegitimising Israel undermines our identity, warps our values and put at risk what we are and who we are.
“Letting Israel be demonized will lead to the deligitimisation of our own cherished values. If Israel were to disappear by the force of its enemies, I sincerely doubt the West could remain as we know it.
“Is it craziness for a group of mostly Europeans and non-Jews, to say: Enough. Stop this nonsense of making Israel responsible for all the problems in the region, if not beyond? Enough of the short sightedness which refuses to see Israel as a corner stone of our Western civilization?
“Defending Israel today means strengthening the West, standing up for our values, and supporting their right to exist as a normal country, a fellow democracy and a noteworthy ally in our great western alliance. I hope that you will share our vision, and will help us in bringing reason and decency back to the discussion concerning Israel.”
These are sentiments that ought to command widespread support within the Western community of nations. They combine reason with the most basic appeal of all – self-preservation. Yet the message has evoked little response from opinion leaders the world over.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
More than two years have gone by since the Friends of Israel Initiative (FII) was launched. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the enterprise has received little publicity, and is not yet on the political map. It deserves to be better known.
Who are these people, prepared to take so unfashionable and therefore so courageous a stand?
The "Friends of Israel Initiative" is led by former President of Spain, José María Aznar. The list of members includes Peru's former president Alejandro Toledo, former Italian Senate president Marcello Pera, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, British historian Andrew Roberts, and Northern Ireland's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lord Trimble.
Other members of the Board of FII include former Czech President Vaclav Havel, Spanish former industry minister Carlos Bustelo, French entrepreneur Robert Agostinelli, and Professor George Weigel. With a working budget of almost £1 million a year, FII has been funded by a dozen private donors from Spain, America, Israel, France, Italy and Britain.
It was in May 2010 that José Maria Aznar brought together a high level group in Paris to launch a project aimed specifically at asserting Israel's position as a legitimate democratic sovereign nation, an integral part of the Western world and of fundamental importance to its future. Although the FII acknowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is important, the members of the group are even more concerned about the rising tide of radical Islamism and the prospect of a nuclear Iran, both of which threaten the entire world.
The Mexican newspaper El Financiero defined the purpose of the Initiative as to "reaffirm Western values," and counteract "anti-Semitic criticism of Israel." According to Spain's ABC News Internacional, the Initiative is founded on the conviction that "the campaign against Israel corrodes the international system from within, beginning with the United Nations."
The FII is committed to act consistently and diligently in its effort to disseminate its members’ vision of Israel as a democratic, open, and advanced nation like any other, and that it should be perceived and treated as such.
Israel, the organisation maintains, is a sovereign democracy which like all the others is, of course, capable of making mistakes. Nonetheless, it asserts, this should not be used as an excuse to question Israel’s right to exist, its legitimacy, or its basic rights as an independent state.
The FII has been officially launched in France, the UK and the USA. At the launch in Washington in September 2010, José Maria Aznar explained more fully the motivation behind the new organisation.
“Israel is under a new kind of attack,” he said. “Not conventional war as in 1948, '56, '67 or ‘73. Not terrorism as we saw in the '70s, '80s and '90s. But a new kind of attack – an attack on Israel’s legitimacy, on her right to exist. A "soft war", where many of its adversaries are employing legal tricks, multinational bodies, and an army of dubious NGOs to present Israel internationally as an illegitimate state, a barbarian state, a state that should be isolated and converted into a pariah state.
“We think this is intolerable. It is unjust, morally wrong, and a strategic risk – not only for Israel and its people, but for all of us. Israel is an integral part of the West, and the weaker it is, the weaker the entire West will be perceived to be.
“Let me be clear. We certainly don't want to defend any particular Israeli government, or any particular set of policies, or any particular party. Israel's institutions are mature enough to defend their choices. We want to stand up for the right of Israel to exist. Judeo-Christian values form the roots of our civilization. Delegitimising Israel undermines our identity, warps our values and put at risk what we are and who we are.
“Letting Israel be demonized will lead to the deligitimisation of our own cherished values. If Israel were to disappear by the force of its enemies, I sincerely doubt the West could remain as we know it.
“Is it craziness for a group of mostly Europeans and non-Jews, to say: Enough. Stop this nonsense of making Israel responsible for all the problems in the region, if not beyond? Enough of the short sightedness which refuses to see Israel as a corner stone of our Western civilization?
“Defending Israel today means strengthening the West, standing up for our values, and supporting their right to exist as a normal country, a fellow democracy and a noteworthy ally in our great western alliance. I hope that you will share our vision, and will help us in bringing reason and decency back to the discussion concerning Israel.”
These are sentiments that ought to command widespread support within the Western community of nations. They combine reason with the most basic appeal of all – self-preservation. Yet the message has evoked little response from opinion leaders the world over.
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Thursday, 26 July 2012
The Jihadists
“Know your enemy,” said the ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, “and know yourself – that is the recipe for victory a hundred times over.”
Do we in the civilized world know ourselves?
There is no consensus on most of the big issues that confront us. For example, what is more important to us, individual rights or the protection of society? Or consider Syria today. Should defenceless civilians be sacrificed to the political self-interest of powerful nations? The UN Security Council requires unanimity before it sanctions action against a rogue state − which is a safeguard against arbitrary activity by a clique of nations, but a severe curtailment on effective action. Are we content with that balance?
As for knowing our enemy, we are even more deficient. That the civilised world in general, and Israel in particular, is confronted by loosely-knit world-wide Islamist terrorist groupings − jihadists − intent on disrupting and eventually destroying our way of life, to be replaced by an Islamic Caliphate, that much is widely recognised. What is less well known, perhaps, is that their origins and philosophy are intimately associated with Nazism in its most malignant anti-semitic manifestation.
In a recent article Professor David Patterson traces the modern jihadists’ virulent hatred of Jews, a prime element in their declared philosophy, to three founding fathers: Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, jihadist ideologue Sayyd Quth, and the leader of the Palestinian Arabs from 1920s to the 1940s, the Jerusalem mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.
Al-Banna was an open admirer of Hitler and Nazi methods of anti-semitic propaganda; modern jihadists take their lead from him and repeatedly quote the long-discredited forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as proof of a world-wide Jewish conspiracy, deny the Holocaust and blame the Jews for starting the Second World War.
As Patterson points out, the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg argued that Jews must be annihilated because all Jews were evil and were poisoning the Aryan race; Sayyd Quth followed the same line, giving it an Islamist twist. Jews, he held, were “by nature determined to fight God’s truth and sow corruption and confusion.” Just like the Nazis, the jihadists must eliminate this source of evil that threatens all humanity.
Patterson quotes a televised address, delivered in January 2009, by the Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yacoub.
“If the Jews left Palestine to us,” he said, “would we start loving them? Of course not… They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine… Our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle…until not a single Jew remains on the face of the earth.”
Thus the Islamist message is that hatred of Jews and their extermination is obligatory for Muslims, as it was for Nazis.
Patterson says, and provides chapter and verse for doing so, that the jihadist who more than any other espoused the Nazis’ loathing of Jews, and their aim of exterminating them, was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the one-time mufti of Jerusalem. “He who kills a Jew is assured of a place in the next world” was his rallying cry to the Arabs of Palestine in 1929, when they rose against the British mandate government and went on a frenzy of killing that left 133 Jews dead and many more wounded.
Just two months after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Husseini − having established links with the Muslim Brotherhood − met the Nazi general consul in Jerusalem, Heinrich Wolff, and arranged for the Nazis to provide support for the Brotherhood. He later indicated that the Arab revolt that he instigated in 1936, starting with rioting against the Jews of Jaffa, was engineered with the help of the Nazis.
In October 1937, shortly after the Peel Commission had recommended partition as the best way to resolve the Arab-Jewish conflict, Husseini had his first meeting with Adolf Eichmann and one of his colleagues in the Gestapo’s Department of Jewish Affairs.
He spent the next few years fomenting trouble, an effort that climaxed in May 1941 with his issuing a fatwa announcing a jihad against Britain and the Jews. By November that year he was in Germany, conferring with Hitler. Before the end of the year, Husseini again met Eichmann, now responsible for carrying out the “Final Solution”. Eichmann’s deputy later stated that the mufti was directly involved in its initiation and execution, and in advising Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and its architect.
On 2 November 1943, Husseini declared at a rally in the Luftwaffe Hall in Berlin, “The Germans know how to get rid of the Jews … They have definitely solved the Jewish problem. [This makes] our friendship with Germany… permanent and lasting…” In a series of broadcasts, he proclaimed that there are “considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism.” He enjoined Muslims to “kill the Jews wherever you find them.” As the war turned against Germany, Husseini began to fear that it might end before the extermination of the Jews could be accomplished. He wrote to Himmler twice, urging greater speed in completing the enterprise.
The modern jihadist movement has remained faithful to its origins. The 1968 final version of the Palestinian National Charter envisages no peaceful outcome to the struggle, but − turning facts on their heads − asserts that “claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history”. Jews not only have no place in Israel, but no place anywhere: “Israel is … the geographical base for world imperialism... Israel is a constant source of threat vis-à-vis peace in the Middle East and the whole world.”
Arafat declared that “the end of Israel is the goal of our struggle…Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else.” Following the murder of the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the United Nations recognised the PLO as the representatives of the Palestinians and granted it observer status. Subsequently PLO chief, Salah Khalaf, asserted: “an independent state on the West Bank and Gaza is the beginning of the final solution” – using the chilling Nazi code for the extermination of European Jewry. The phrase was echoed by Fatah leader Sakhr Habash, shortly after Israel left the Gaza Strip.
Hamas, which seized power in Gaza, is entirely rejectionist as far as any accommodation with Israel is concerned, and is involved in a power struggle with Fatah for the hearts and minds of Palestinians. Both need to assert and reassert their commitment to their jihadist origins, so as recently as August 2009 Fatah’s Sixth General Assembly asserted that “the struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.” The Hamas charter expands on the theme of the God-approved duty of every Muslim to kill Jews. A good Muslim mother must prepare her children for the fighting that awaits them, for, as article 28 asserts: “The Zionist invasion of the world…[aims] at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character, and annihilating Islam…Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Muslim people.”
Thus, as Professor Patterson concludes, Hamas, true to its core Nazi beliefs, asserts that “evil is rooted not only in the Jews, but in Judaism itself. The only way to liberate humanity is to cast the satanic Jew into hell − and, as the embodiment of God on earth, Hamas takes the lead in that endeavour. Hamas is humanity’s saviour.”
Patterson declares, not without reason, that by refusing to name the evil they confront, world leaders remain wilfully blind to it. Maintaining that the media are complicit in this, he castigates world leaders for refusing to refer to Islamist fascists as either Islamists or as fascists.
What does his analysis mean for the so-called “peace process”, currently frozen solid and immovable?
It does not mean that the world has to throw its hands in the air and declare that the search for an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians is a pointless exercise. “Know your enemy”, just as “know yourself” is simply an essential precursor to successful action.
Published in the online Jerusalem Post today, Thursday 26 July 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=278983&prmusr=vQcjqrtVILovboAiilX2NiD%2bjulgbQsZC51qGfAN9oiCZTHLISVHyY2r9tGo358l
Monday, 23 July 2012
No One-State Solution
Pursue a left-wing agenda around the political race track long enough and you'll meet a right-wing agenda sprinting at you from the other direction.
Nazism and Bolshevism stood at opposite extremes of the political spectrum and their philosophies were poles apart, yet their regimes bore remarkable similarities to each other: smothering of dissension, persecution of political opponents, insistence that the state was more important than the individual, total disregard for the rule of law, rejection of religion, and so on.
The latest example of this political anomaly are ever-stronger calls from the left and right alike to reject the two-state solution to the perennial Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Partition of the Holy Land emerged formally in 1937 as the preferred way of healing the festering sore of the Arab-Jewish conflict. The British government had been mandated by the League of Nations to administer Palestine and implement its own objective as set out in the Balfour Declaration – namely to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
However, the mandate administration was finding it virtually impossible to keep the lid on the simmering pot of Arab resentment at the influx of Jews into Palestine. As a result, following the Arab revolt of 1936, the British government set up a commission under Lord Peel to examine the situation and come up with a solution. Partition was the central recommendation of the Peel Commission.
Ten years later, following World War II, the two-state concept was also the considered conclusion of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), which recommended as much to the UN General Assembly in 1947.
On November 29 1947 the General Assembly recommended the adoption and implementation of the partition plan. The Jewish Agency accepted the decision; the Arab states rejected it. It is on the record that, in October 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, said that the Arab world had been wrong to do so. “It was our mistake,” Abbas said, in an interview on Israeli television.
Abbas, together with the majority of the world, has proclaimed the two-state solution as the holy grail of the peace process. It is the desired objective according to the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), and it was agreed upon in principle by both the government of Israel and the PA at the November 2007 Annapolis Conference. The rest of the non-Arab world would most likely give it their seal of approval as well.
For some time, it was only the extreme rejectionist elements within the Arab world that repudiated the concept entirely. As we know, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and related factions refuse to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist at all. They set as their target the elimination of Israel and its replacement by an Islamist Palestine, on the lines of the government established by Hamas after they seized power in Gaza.
More subtle forms of eliminating Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish people have gradually emerged. Support among Palestinians for a one-state solution began to grow because it was claimed that their population growth rate would leave Palestinians as a majority in a single state. Then voices from the liberal left in the US, UK, and Israel itself began calling for a single state in Israel and the West Bank (possibly including Gaza), with citizenship and equal rights in the combined entity for all inhabitants of all three territories, without regard to ethnicity or religion.
These and related views formed the agenda of a much-discussed, and much-excoriated, One-State Conference held at the Harvard Kennedy School in May 2012. Panels examined the two-state approach, questioned how a one-state solution would work, and discussed obstacles to its realization.
What was certainly not considered, however, was the concept increasingly advocated by more extreme right-wing voices, both in the US and in Israel by newspaper columnists and bloggers: namely the annexation by Israel of the whole of the West Bank, and the establishment of one state – Israel – in the area.
In pouring scorn on the two-state solution, some columnists point to the declared desire of most Muslim and Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, to see Israel eliminated from the map of the Middle East − as if that in itself were sufficient to damn any such enterprise and to justify Israel defying the world. It is not. Both sides of the dispute may dream their dreams − the Israeli right, perhaps of acquiring sovereignty over the whole of biblical Greater Israel; the Palestinians of eventually gaining sovereignty “from the river to the sea."
The purpose of negotiation is to achieve a compromise that both sides can live with. Advocates of Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria seem blind to the impracticality of what they advocate, to say nothing of the totally negative effect its application would have on Israel’s relations with the rest of the world. Uncommitted world opinion would never endorse a land-grab like this. If anything were to push Israel into the status so ardently desired by its worst enemies – a pariah state – this version of the one-state solution would achieve it.
Of course the other side − the so-called “liberal” one state − would eliminate Israel altogether as the nation state of the Jewish people.
Hobson’s choice. The answer? Neither the one nor the other, but the two-state solution, doggedly pursued and carefully negotiated, with adequate safeguards guaranteeing Israel’s security.
Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post today, Monday 23 July 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=278575&prmusr=keQ9Rw%2fN%2fyJINYq06KmeCfWiWL%2fDUr2Kl1Fk%2bgsr4I%2fUKZTZW2DOPxEYIUVQNh5D
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Hamas in Sinai
Since Operation Cast Lead − Israel’s military incursion into Hamas-occupied Gaza, which ended in January 2009 – Hamas has, in the words of the English poet Alexander Pope, been “willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.” Or at least it has been prepared to embark on truces, formal or informal, aimed at restricting its own rocket attacks. Hamas has also attempted − unsuccessfully − to control fanatic Islamist elements within Gaza that have continued indiscriminately to launch rockets at Israeli civilians.
The Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) presidential victory in Egypt has altered the balance of self-interest – as perceived by Hamas and other jihadist elements. Regardless of the results of the re-run parliamentary elections in Egypt, or the eventual extent of the newly-elected president’s powers, the MB has clearly proved that it has a substantial popular mandate. Its success has, overall, emboldened Hamas not only within the Gaza Strip, but in Sinai as well.
The 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt saw Israel vacate and demilitarize the Sinai – which IDF forces had over-run during the conflict. Since then, the Sinai, which shares a 165-mile border with Israel, has served as an important territorial buffer between the two countries.
On June 18, two gunmen infiltrated Israel from the Sinai and killed an Israeli civilian working on the construction of a border fence. The two gunmen were later killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces. Media reports indicated that the gunmen had received helped from within Gaza. Subsequently, four other militants were killed during two Israeli air strikes into Gaza. Hamas responded by launching rockets at southern Israel. From June 18 to 24 over 150 medium-range rockets, mortar shells and long-range Grad-model Katyushas rockets were fired at southern Israeli communities.
After three days of fighting, however, Hamas’s military wing – the Izz a-Din al-Qassam Brigades – announced that it was willing to accept an Egyptian-brokered truce. Hamas, for the time being, does not see a major escalation of conflict with Israel to be in its best interests.
From the time Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2006, the Sinai became the main smuggling route for weapons, people, and goods into and out of Gaza.
The interregnum following Egypt’s Arab Spring revolution and the subsequent weakening of authority in Cairo opened the large, sparsely populated desert peninsula of Sinai for armed Palestinian groups and global jihadists to mix with Bedouins who were disgruntled with the central Egyptian regime. The fall of Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak, and the political upheavals that followed, have led to a dramatic decline in security in the Sinai. This security decline has led to attacks on the pipeline transporting natural gas from Egypt to Israel and Jordan, the kidnapping of foreign tourists, and assaults against police stations. The Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), tasked with monitoring the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, have also come under attack.
We can only speculate as to the extent of Hamas' involvement in these activities. However, Israel, as a matter of policy, holds Hamas responsible for any hostile activity emanating from within the Gaza Strip – where Hamas is the de facto ruling authority.
Consequently, Israel is investing in a sophisticated fence that will run the length of its border with Egypt to help prevent cross-border attacks and, incidentally, the infiltration of illegal African migrants. Israel is also deploying more Iron Dome missile defense batteries to intercept rockets fired from the Gaza Strip and the Sinai.
The latest round of fighting further illustrates the threat of global jihadi groups in the Sinai. These groups can be linked to like-minded groups in the Gaza Strip, which are nominally under the control of Hamas. These armed groups are exploiting both the weakness of the regime in Cairo and Israel’s reluctance to take military action against them in Egyptian territory – for fear of further eroding Egypt-Israel relations.
Increased lawlessness in the Sinai could trigger conflict between Israel and armed groups in the Gaza Strip – a conflict that will undoubtedly attract Hamas.
If fighting were to erupt in the Sinai, a new area of instability could develop in an already highly unstable region – a new area ripe for exploitation by groups who thrive on destabilization in pursuit of their own self-interests. Chief among these groups is Hamas.
Published in the online Jerusalem Post Magazine today, 17 July:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=277772&prmusr=3Th%2fRwWDQEWKomByxHd8qv38UtMgPG4LvHoJqVxiMWRmdfre3XafGI2r9tGo358
l
Thursday, 12 July 2012
A Sovereign Palestine …
…could be celebrating its 12th anniversary
Shakespeare, as ever, puts the thought most felicitously:
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune:
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”
On 11 July 2000 Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat met at Camp David under the chairmanship of the United States president, Bill Clinton. Their purpose: to reach an agreement on all outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians – a so-called final status settlement. The summit ended on 25 July. If the negotiations had proved successful, we might be marking 25 July 2012 as the twelfth anniversary of the founding of an independent, sovereign Palestine.
What sort of Palestine would it have been?
No official records exist of the final position of the two parties, and the unofficial accounts differ in important respects. So some guesswork and a little creative imagination is called for.
To start with, we must assume that an agreement would have been on the basis of the final set of recommendations that the Clinton team put together, following the formal conclusion of the Camp David meeting. The three leaders met again in the White House that December, and once more in Taba in January, and the plan (known as the “Clinton Parameters”) was formally put to them. Israel accepted it in principle, the Palestinians did not. Let us suppose that they had done so.
If they had, sovereign Palestine would now control 97 per cent of the West Bank plus a Gaza Strip larger by roughly a third, to compensate for the 3 per cent of the West Bank annexed by Israel. Israel would have withdrawn from 63 settlements on the West Bank, all of which would have passed into Palestinian hands, and Palestinian territory on the West Bank would be contiguous, with no cantons. The West Bank would be linked with Gaza by both an elevated highway and an elevated railroad running through the Negev.
Sovereign Palestine would have as its capital a new municipality – Al Quds. The boundaries of Jerusalem would have been re-drawn, and Al-Quds would incorporate the Arab neighbourhoods that had previously been inside Jerusalem's boundaries. It would also encompass adjacent regions such as Abu Dis, el-Azaria, Beit Jala, Anata and A-Ram. The Palestinian state would have religious autonomy over the Temple Mount. The Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City would also be autonomous, though remaining under formal Israeli sovereignty,
The new Palestine would by now have become home to many hundreds of thousands of refugees, all of whom would have the right of return to the Palestinian state. Those returning would have received reparations from a $30 billion international fund set up specifically to compensate them.
How different might the events of the past twelve years have been? Let’s speculate.
There would, of course, have been no second intifada – which means there would have been no sudden increase in terrorist attacks inside Israel, and therefore no need for Israel’s security wall or fence.
Yasser Arafat maintained a firm grip on Palestinian politics. What he said for Arab consumption differed pretty radically from his public utterances in English or his stance on the world stage. Hamas would have had little incentive to set itself up against an Arafat-approved settlement, because the organisation would have been fully aware of his real agenda. For example, Arafat had told an Arab audience in Stockholm in 1996, ‘We plan to eliminate the State of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion… We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem.’
Arafat’s colleague Faisal al-Husseini was even more explicit. He described the Oslo process as a ‘Trojan Horse’ designed to promote the strategic goal of ‘Palestine from the river to the sea’, that is, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean − in short, replacing Israel with Palestine.
So there would have been no take-over of Gaza by Hamas, no indiscriminate firing of rockets on Israeli citizens, no Israeli response in the form of Operation Cast Lead, and no naval blockade of Gaza by Israel. Accordingly, there would have been no “freedom flotilla”, and no Mavi Marmara incident – no death of nine Turkish citizens, and perhaps no freezing of Turkish-Israeli relations in consequence.
There would, of course, have been no need for any ill-fated attempt to secure recognition by the United Nations for a sovereign Palestine, for by now Palestine would have long been a fully-fledged, and no doubt active, member of the United Nations. Palestine would have followed Serbia into membership (they joined in November 2000), and beaten East Timor (September 2002).
Would the new sovereign Palestine have become a base for terrorist attacks on Israel, in pursuit of Arafat’s stated long-term aim – or would shorter-term political and economic realities have exerted their logic? Would self-interest have dictated that the fledgling State co-operate industrially, commercially, economically, financially, militarily, even culturally, as closely as possible with its nearest, flourishing neighbour? By now, would Palestine be thriving under mutually advantageous treaties not only with Israel, but perhaps also with Jordan and Egypt? In fact, would a sovereign Palestine by now be cultivating a prospering economy and be well on the way to becoming part of the developed world? Who may say? But it is a scenario as likely as any other.
Thinking about it, one’s over-riding feeling must surely be a sense of the pity of it all. Consider all the avoidable death and destruction over the past twelve years, both Palestinian and Israeli. And what a wasted opportunity. So felicitous a concatenation of circumstances from the Palestinian point of view is unlikely to present itself again in the foreseeable future, The political wheel has turned. The second intifada, Hamas’s seizure of power in Gaza, internal Palestinian rivalries, even the popular triumphs of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt – all have resulted in a political atmosphere quite different from the heady days of 2000.
So we are unable to wish a sovereign Palestine “Happy 12th Anniversary”. Twelve years ago the Palestinian leadership, not for the first time, signally failed to recognize that “tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” But the future need not be quite as bleak as Shakespeare predicts. Tides have a habit of turning. Let us hope that, next time, those in charge of Palestinian affairs have the courage to seize the opportunity before it is, yet again, too late.
Published in the online Jerusalem Post today, 12 July 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=277102&prmusr=keQ9Rw%2fN%2fyJINYq06KmeCfWiWL%2fDUr2Kl1Fk%2bgsr4I%2fUKZTZW2DOPxEYIUVQNh5D
Friday, 6 July 2012
Should Israel Annex the West Bank?
In politics, the so-called unimaginable can always be imagined; the unthinkable can always be thought.
Next Thursday, 12 July, perhaps as a riposte to the One-State Conference held at the Harvard Kennedy School in May 2012, a conference concerned with applying Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank) is due to take place in Israel. An impressive list of right-wing Israeli speakers, including several Knesset members, has been lined up to discuss the issue from a wide range of angles. The location selected is, somewhat provocatively perhaps, the Machpela Visitors Centre in Hebron.
The Harvard event envisaged the State of Israel being submerged into a new sovereign entity including the West Bank and Gaza, with equal rights for all its citizens. Right-wing voices within Israel − and some elsewhere as well − are becoming increasingly bold in proposing a quite different one-state solution to the perennial Israel-Palestine dispute. They are, quite simply, advocating the annexation by Israel of the whole of the West Bank, ignoring or discounting or downgrading the likely effects of such action.
Speakers at next Thursday’s conference are due, among other matters, to advocate no further concessions by Israel in pursuit of Palestinian involvement in a renewed peace process, to assert Israel’s ancient and biblically-based claim on Judea and Samaria, to set out a programme for extending Israel’s sovereignty over those areas, to explain the legal aspects of such action, to assess the balance of profit and loss of doing so, and to propose ways of winning over public opinion to support such a policy.
Advocates of such political action have in common so blinkered a world view that they see before them only their desired objective, and cannot – or choose not to − appreciate the disastrous consequences of what they are proposing.
Not that their ultimate purpose is necessarily unworthy. Most advocates of this version of the one-state solution are concerned very largely with Israel’s security – indeed, in some respects, its very survival. They point to Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, and Hezbollah’s subsequent launching of Katyusha rockets into northern Israeli towns, together with their continued attacks on Israeli troops positioned beyond the agreed boundary. They see that the result of Israel withdrawing totally from the Gaza Strip in 2005 − undertaken in the expectation of a democratic Palestinian government taking over − was almost immediately undermined by a bloody fratricidal coup organised by Hamas against the Fatah-led Palestinian administration. The result: a veritable torrent of rockets from Gaza rained down indiscriminately on Israeli citizens, until Israel undertook its military incursion into Gaza in 2009.
They see that the founding documents of virtually every Palestinian political organisation includes the aspiration of eliminating Israel altogether from the Middle East. And they fear that the establishment of a sovereign Palestine on the West Bank could result in a new Gaza – a terrorist take-over, and this time within easy striking distance of major Israeli towns and cities, including Tel Aviv.
All of which may partly explain what they propose and why they propose it, but certainly cannot condone the politically disastrous effects.
World opinion in general could surely never accede to, or endorse, a land-grab of this sort by Israel, nor the flagrant violation of the Oslo Accords − officially signed on behalf of Israel by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres − that it would represent. Israel would have de-legitimised herself, would be roundly condemned by friend and foe alike, and would have laid herself open to punitive economic, commercial and financial sanctions, if nothing worse.
It is no secret that an ideal Middle East, from the Muslim point of view, would contain no Jewish state. Many Arab politicians cling to this aspiration to retain their appeal to the hotter-heads among their followers. Polls of Palestinian opinion, however, reveal a quite different picture. The majority of Palestinians now accept that Israel is here to stay, and yearn for a happy, peaceful, reasonably prosperous life for themselves and their families. In a recent poll conducted in the West Bank and Gaza, only 13.5 per cent of those questioned thought that “violent action” was the best way to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian State. No less than 84.4 per cent of those questioned thought that when their children were their own age there would “definitely”, “possibly” or “likely” be peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.
The effect on the Arab world in general, and Palestinian opinion in particular, of removing forever the hope of an eventual sovereign Palestine, would be a recipe for a “1984” scenario of constant, unending conflict in the region, with no hope of resolution. This is certainly not the future that most Israelis or Palestinians want.
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
The Two-State Conundrum
Letter in The Jerusalem Post, June 27, 2012
Sir
In his latest piece (“Stupid, Seditious or Suicidal?” – Into the Fray, June 22), Martin Sherman hits out in all directions. He castigates the Israeli Left as imbecile or iniquitous, the Israeli Right as impotent or insincere, and the rest of those who disagree with him, including Dennis Ross and Peter Beinart, as Arab-appeasers and Muslim-mollifiers − to say nothing of his current favoured term of abuse: “two-staters”. Which doesn’t leave all that many to endorse his favoured recipe for the future.
He does not expound on this recipe in his current piece, but those who follow his lucid, rational, sometimes brilliant, but essentially impractical and politically naïve, arguments week by week, will know that he is all for his version of the one-state solution. In short, he advocates an Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. The inevitable consequence of such a move on world opinion, not that any Israeli government in its right mind would contemplate it, would be to confirm Israel in the status so ardently desired by her worst enemies – a pariah state.
It seems to me that Sherman, justifiably in many ways, sees a future Middle East through the prism of copper-bottomed, guaranteed security for Israel; but he discounts all other considerations. Most of the rest of the uncommitted world, while not dissenting from that objective, sees a future Middle East as containing a sovereign Palestinian state.
How to achieve the one without forfeiting the other − that is the political conundrum that has to be cracked.
Yours
Neville Teller
Sir
In his latest piece (“Stupid, Seditious or Suicidal?” – Into the Fray, June 22), Martin Sherman hits out in all directions. He castigates the Israeli Left as imbecile or iniquitous, the Israeli Right as impotent or insincere, and the rest of those who disagree with him, including Dennis Ross and Peter Beinart, as Arab-appeasers and Muslim-mollifiers − to say nothing of his current favoured term of abuse: “two-staters”. Which doesn’t leave all that many to endorse his favoured recipe for the future.
He does not expound on this recipe in his current piece, but those who follow his lucid, rational, sometimes brilliant, but essentially impractical and politically naïve, arguments week by week, will know that he is all for his version of the one-state solution. In short, he advocates an Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria. The inevitable consequence of such a move on world opinion, not that any Israeli government in its right mind would contemplate it, would be to confirm Israel in the status so ardently desired by her worst enemies – a pariah state.
It seems to me that Sherman, justifiably in many ways, sees a future Middle East through the prism of copper-bottomed, guaranteed security for Israel; but he discounts all other considerations. Most of the rest of the uncommitted world, while not dissenting from that objective, sees a future Middle East as containing a sovereign Palestinian state.
How to achieve the one without forfeiting the other − that is the political conundrum that has to be cracked.
Yours
Neville Teller
Monday, 11 June 2012
Preconditions for Peace Talks
“Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?”
So sings the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland, and a pretty apt metaphor it is for the Palestinian Authority’s indecision over the past two years about joining (and subsequently re-joining) the peace talks.
Back in January 2010, at the behest of newly-elected President Obama, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, imposed a 10-month freeze on construction in all West Bank settlements. The idea was to create a positive cooperative atmosphere in which peace negotiations might be fostered. For nine of those ten months PA President Mahmoud Abbas havered and wavered. From time to time he announced additional conditions as essential pre-requirements even for so-called “proximity” discussions (that is, negotiations using a third-party go-between). When the Arab League endorsed the proximity talks idea, however, these preconditions were unceremoniously dumped. So, with US special envoy George Mitchell as the convener, proximity talks indeed started in March 2010 as a precursor to full face-to-face discussions.
Following months of delicate negotiations, Abbas and Netanyahu sat down together in September 2010 for the first session of what was announced as discussions that would lead to a peace accord between the two parties within twelve months. Held in Washington under the auspices of the United States, the meeting was chaired by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. To provide cover for Mahmoud Abbas, who was exposing himself to the hostility of a considerable proportion of the Arab world, Egypt’s President Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan had been persuaded to attend. Abbas was thus not facing Israel alone. Two major Arab nations were at his side, endorsing his decision to talk peace.
But by the time the parties had agreed to meet in person, too much of the precious ten-month construction moratorium had been used up. Netanyahu, heading a fragile coalition, was dependent on right-wing elements within his cabinet that were utterly opposed to any renewal of the freeze. President Abbas, on the other hand, now insisted that any extension of the direct peace talks was dependent on construction remaining frozen in the West Bank. This Netanyahu was unable to deliver, and the moratorium duly came to an end on the appointed day. The peace initiative followed soon afterwards – and Abbas and Netanyahu have not met from that day to this.
But since then Mahmoud Abbas − despite his attempt to outflank negotiations altogether last autumn, by unsuccessfully seeking United Nations recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state − has on several occasions pronounced himself perfectly willing to reopen negotiations, provided Israel meets certain conditions. These have been widened now to include a complete freeze on all settlement building in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and an acceptance by Israel of the pre-Six Day War boundaries as the basis for a new sovereign Palestinian state. Lurking in the background are also a demand for the “right of return” of some 4 million Palestinians, the establishment of East Jerusalem as the capital of a new state, and an outright refusal to acknowledge Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
In parallel, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly offered to reopen negotiations without preconditions of any sort. His offer is to put everything − all the outstanding issues between the parties − on the table.
The latest set of PA delaying tactics emerged after President Abbas met France’s new President, François Hollande, last Friday (8 June). In addition to the settlement freeze, President Abbas now added two further demands as the price Israel must pay for the PA to enter, not formal negotiations be it understood, but informal talks.
“We recently told them that if Israel agreed to free prisoners and allow us to re-arm the police, then we would again sit at the same table as Netanyahu,” said Abbas at a press conference in France, adding as qualification: “if Mr Netanyahu agrees, then we will establish a dialogue, but that doesn’t mean a negotiation.”
At the same press conference a few minutes later, the preconditions changed again.
“The ball is now in Netanyahu’s court,” said Abbas. “The moment he agrees to stop settlement construction and accepts the borders of the two states, we will go directly to the negotiations to discuss the remaining final-status issues.”
So what is it that will bring Abbas to the negotiating table – freeing prisoners, arming the PA police, accepting the borders of the two states, stopping settlement building? All – or some? And if some, which ones?
Incidentally, in response Israeli spokesman Mark Regev said: “Israel remains ready for the immediate resumption of peace talks without any preconditions.”
As for Israel’s continued building within settlements on the West Bank, following a peace accord the larger neighbourhoods, such as Gush Etzion, Pisgat Ze'ev and Modi'in Ilit, will − even according to quoted PA positions − almost certainly remain in Israeli hands. So whether building recommences in those areas or not can be of little practical concern to the Palestinian cause.
Take this thought one stage further. It is generally accepted that in the event of a final agreement, a range of smaller Israeli settlements will have to be evacuated and handed over to the new sovereign Palestine, just as settlements were evacuated when Israel withdrew from Gaza. Yes, there is going to be an almighty row inside Israel when, or if, that day arrives. But if it does, it will only have arrived following a referendum of the entire Israeli population, which will have voted in favour of whatever agreement has emerged from the final negotiations.
Given the democratic nature of the Israeli state, it can be taken for granted that a fair number of settlements would indeed be evacuated and handed over to the Palestinian Authority to be incorporated into the new Palestine. If that is so, one might ask, why are the Palestinians objecting all that vigorously to new building in these smaller settlements? After all, they might argue, the more construction the settlers undertake, the more will eventually fall into Palestinian hands when the hand-over deal takes place.
Of course, all the preconditions that Abbas can devise mean little to the rival Palestinian government in Gaza controlled by Hamas, the Islamist and terrorist entity viscerally opposed to any recognition of, let alone negotiations with, Israel. Hamas opposes Abbas’s acceptance of the two-state solution (since one of the two states would be Israel), just as it opposed the PA approach to the United Nations last year seeking recognition for a sovereign Palestinian state within the old 1967 boundaries. The corollary of a Palestine within the pre-Six Day War boundaries is an Israel outside them, and this is anathema to Hamas and its supporters − Iran, Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria. All attempts to effect a rapprochement between Hamas and its bitter rival, Fatah, which runs the PA, have proved fruitless, so whenever Abbas speaks, and whatever he says, he is representing only part of the Palestinian body politic. In short, a significant element of any future Palestinian state is not involved in any of the moves towards peace talks.
One precondition, therefore, rarely mentioned as essential for effective peace negotiations, is for PA President Abbas to resume full political and administrative control of Gaza. Someone might slip that into the list, next time around.
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?”
So sings the Mock Turtle in Alice in Wonderland, and a pretty apt metaphor it is for the Palestinian Authority’s indecision over the past two years about joining (and subsequently re-joining) the peace talks.
Back in January 2010, at the behest of newly-elected President Obama, Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, imposed a 10-month freeze on construction in all West Bank settlements. The idea was to create a positive cooperative atmosphere in which peace negotiations might be fostered. For nine of those ten months PA President Mahmoud Abbas havered and wavered. From time to time he announced additional conditions as essential pre-requirements even for so-called “proximity” discussions (that is, negotiations using a third-party go-between). When the Arab League endorsed the proximity talks idea, however, these preconditions were unceremoniously dumped. So, with US special envoy George Mitchell as the convener, proximity talks indeed started in March 2010 as a precursor to full face-to-face discussions.
Following months of delicate negotiations, Abbas and Netanyahu sat down together in September 2010 for the first session of what was announced as discussions that would lead to a peace accord between the two parties within twelve months. Held in Washington under the auspices of the United States, the meeting was chaired by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. To provide cover for Mahmoud Abbas, who was exposing himself to the hostility of a considerable proportion of the Arab world, Egypt’s President Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan had been persuaded to attend. Abbas was thus not facing Israel alone. Two major Arab nations were at his side, endorsing his decision to talk peace.
But by the time the parties had agreed to meet in person, too much of the precious ten-month construction moratorium had been used up. Netanyahu, heading a fragile coalition, was dependent on right-wing elements within his cabinet that were utterly opposed to any renewal of the freeze. President Abbas, on the other hand, now insisted that any extension of the direct peace talks was dependent on construction remaining frozen in the West Bank. This Netanyahu was unable to deliver, and the moratorium duly came to an end on the appointed day. The peace initiative followed soon afterwards – and Abbas and Netanyahu have not met from that day to this.
But since then Mahmoud Abbas − despite his attempt to outflank negotiations altogether last autumn, by unsuccessfully seeking United Nations recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state − has on several occasions pronounced himself perfectly willing to reopen negotiations, provided Israel meets certain conditions. These have been widened now to include a complete freeze on all settlement building in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and an acceptance by Israel of the pre-Six Day War boundaries as the basis for a new sovereign Palestinian state. Lurking in the background are also a demand for the “right of return” of some 4 million Palestinians, the establishment of East Jerusalem as the capital of a new state, and an outright refusal to acknowledge Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
In parallel, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has repeatedly offered to reopen negotiations without preconditions of any sort. His offer is to put everything − all the outstanding issues between the parties − on the table.
The latest set of PA delaying tactics emerged after President Abbas met France’s new President, François Hollande, last Friday (8 June). In addition to the settlement freeze, President Abbas now added two further demands as the price Israel must pay for the PA to enter, not formal negotiations be it understood, but informal talks.
“We recently told them that if Israel agreed to free prisoners and allow us to re-arm the police, then we would again sit at the same table as Netanyahu,” said Abbas at a press conference in France, adding as qualification: “if Mr Netanyahu agrees, then we will establish a dialogue, but that doesn’t mean a negotiation.”
At the same press conference a few minutes later, the preconditions changed again.
“The ball is now in Netanyahu’s court,” said Abbas. “The moment he agrees to stop settlement construction and accepts the borders of the two states, we will go directly to the negotiations to discuss the remaining final-status issues.”
So what is it that will bring Abbas to the negotiating table – freeing prisoners, arming the PA police, accepting the borders of the two states, stopping settlement building? All – or some? And if some, which ones?
Incidentally, in response Israeli spokesman Mark Regev said: “Israel remains ready for the immediate resumption of peace talks without any preconditions.”
As for Israel’s continued building within settlements on the West Bank, following a peace accord the larger neighbourhoods, such as Gush Etzion, Pisgat Ze'ev and Modi'in Ilit, will − even according to quoted PA positions − almost certainly remain in Israeli hands. So whether building recommences in those areas or not can be of little practical concern to the Palestinian cause.
Take this thought one stage further. It is generally accepted that in the event of a final agreement, a range of smaller Israeli settlements will have to be evacuated and handed over to the new sovereign Palestine, just as settlements were evacuated when Israel withdrew from Gaza. Yes, there is going to be an almighty row inside Israel when, or if, that day arrives. But if it does, it will only have arrived following a referendum of the entire Israeli population, which will have voted in favour of whatever agreement has emerged from the final negotiations.
Given the democratic nature of the Israeli state, it can be taken for granted that a fair number of settlements would indeed be evacuated and handed over to the Palestinian Authority to be incorporated into the new Palestine. If that is so, one might ask, why are the Palestinians objecting all that vigorously to new building in these smaller settlements? After all, they might argue, the more construction the settlers undertake, the more will eventually fall into Palestinian hands when the hand-over deal takes place.
Of course, all the preconditions that Abbas can devise mean little to the rival Palestinian government in Gaza controlled by Hamas, the Islamist and terrorist entity viscerally opposed to any recognition of, let alone negotiations with, Israel. Hamas opposes Abbas’s acceptance of the two-state solution (since one of the two states would be Israel), just as it opposed the PA approach to the United Nations last year seeking recognition for a sovereign Palestinian state within the old 1967 boundaries. The corollary of a Palestine within the pre-Six Day War boundaries is an Israel outside them, and this is anathema to Hamas and its supporters − Iran, Hezbollah and Assad’s Syria. All attempts to effect a rapprochement between Hamas and its bitter rival, Fatah, which runs the PA, have proved fruitless, so whenever Abbas speaks, and whatever he says, he is representing only part of the Palestinian body politic. In short, a significant element of any future Palestinian state is not involved in any of the moves towards peace talks.
One precondition, therefore, rarely mentioned as essential for effective peace negotiations, is for PA President Abbas to resume full political and administrative control of Gaza. Someone might slip that into the list, next time around.
Friday, 18 May 2012
The New Palestinian Government
The Palestinian Authority (the PA) is nominally the governing body of the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. However the world knows that, following the elections of 2006, Hamas seized control of Gaza in a bloody fratricidal coup, and has been the de facto ruling authority ever since, remaining at daggers drawn with its political rival, Fatah, which controls the PA. The latest in a long line of attempts to foster a formal accord between the two took place on the 6th of February 2012 in Qatar’s capital city, Doha.
Efforts at reconciliation between the two power blocs within the Palestinian body politic began as early as 2008. Five rounds of talks held in Cairo failed to achieve agreement. A sixth meeting, held in June 2009, was intended to pave the way for final reconciliation on the 7th of July. It never happened. All the same, Egypt continued hosting intermittent joint discussions between the parties in the forlorn hope of achieving a breakthrough – forlorn, because all such efforts are attempts at reconciling the irreconcilable.
Insofar as Mahmoud Abbas has embraced the concept of the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has consistently engaged with Israel – even if to no obvious effect, as yet – and went so far in September 2010 as to sit down at the same table with Israel’s prime minister and talk peace, in Hamas’s eyes the PA has placed itself beyond the pale. For Hamas remains what it has always been – an extreme Islamist and terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel.
Hamas, which includes in its official charter the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has never endorsed the two-state solution, since to do so would be to recognise Israel. For the same reason Hamas opposed Abbas’s attempt, in September 2011, at gaining United Nations’ recognition of Palestine within the old 1967 borders. Recognising Palestine within the 1967 borders would, by extension, mean recognising Israel outside them. Nor has it accepted the three minimal requirements for official recognition demanded of it by the Middle East Quartet, representing the US, the UN, Russia and the EU. These are recognizing Israel’s right to exist, abandoning terrorism, and accepting previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements – all of which are accepted by the PA.
Nevertheless, in February 2012 these irreconcilable differences appeared to have been overcome. After several rounds of discussion, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and the leader-in-exile of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, formally signed the Doha Declaration. which called for the formation of a national consensus Palestinian government whose main mission would be to prepare for presidential and parliamentary elections and rebuild the Gaza Strip. Abbas was appointed interim prime minister of the new joint Hamas-Fatah unity government.
The reaction of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was instant. “You can’t have it both ways,” he said, addressing Mahmoud Abbas. “It’s either a pact with Hamas, or it’s peace with Israel.”
Of course he was quite correct, and in little more than three months the Doha declaration has been revealed as a slap-dash papering over of cracks, and incapable of providing a lasting accommodation.
Abbas and his spokesmen insist that at Doha Hamas agreed to honour all previous agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel, and accept that being part of a united Palestinian government means recognising Israel. But Hamas officials themselves have repeatedly denied this, and their various leaders have failed to unite behind the Doha deal. Senior Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip, including Gazan Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mahmoud al-Zahar, criticised the agreement from the start, and signs soon emerged of a growing split within the movement.
By swearing in a new Palestinian government in the West Bank on 16 May, Mahmoud Abbas and the PA have acknowledged the validity of Netanyahu’s options – engage with Hamas or engage with Israel – and openly declared their choice. It is to continue their struggle against Hamas, and perhaps to re-engage in negotiations with Israel that might lead to an accord. For following an exchange of letters between Israel’s prime minister and the Palestinian President, Abbas is travelling to Cairo today, Friday 18 May, where he is scheduled to hold talks with Mohamed Tantawi, the de facto ruler of Egypt. He will also visit Amman for talks with King Abdullah, and the tour could also include Qatar and Saudi Arabia. PLO executive committee member Wasel Abu Yusef said that Abbas was planning on requesting a meeting of the Arab League to discuss the Israeli reply to his letter.
Meanwhile Salam Fayyad, the West Bank Palestinian leader widely credited with developing and boosting the Palestinian economy over the past few years, though anathema to the Hamas leadership, remains prime minister. His previous additional role as finance minister is now taken by Nabil Kassis, a former university president who will have to deal with the challenge of steady decline in donor funds. The PA is relying on foreign aid to cover a 2012 budget projected to reach nearly $1.7 billion. Most of the aid comes from the European Union, the United States and Arab countries.
The new cabinet consists of representatives of Fatah, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Palestinian Democratic Union, as well as independent figures. It includes six female ministers – the largest number of women to serve in a PA cabinet.
Prior to the swearing-in ceremony of the new government in Ramallah, Abbas told a news conference that the incoming government "will be dismissed immediately" if the political partnership with Hamas is consummated. It looks as though the new Palestinian government is safely installed for its full term.
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
Likud and Kadima - A Winning Team?
Israel's new Likud-Kadima unity government is a bold initiative that opens the way for interesting developments, both domestic and external. There is logic in the coalition of the two parties. Kadima is in a real sense the child of Likud - a hard-line party, which itself softened its ideas with time and experience. Kadima embodied a hard-nosed look at demographics - the realisation that it was not in Israel's best interests to continue governing a huge Arab minority that could easily turn into a majority. Thus was born major non-Labour support for the two-state solution.
Talk of a possible conjoining of Israel's Likud and Kadima parties was in the air as early as July 2010 (see my blog of 9 July 2010: 'A Peace Deal by 2011?' ). But with Tzipi Livni leading Kadima the idea came to nothing. She was intent on remaining the official opposition, hoping for a political opportunity - that frustratingly remained out of reach - to oust Likud and take over the reins of power. Her replacement as chairman of Kadima by Shaul Mofaz has opened the door to this new configuration of Israel's political kaleidoscope.
A major effect must be to reduce considerably prime minister Netanyahu's dependence on the support of the religious right-wing parties. They - in particular, but not exclusively, Yisrael Beitenu - not only consistently restricted his freedom of manoeuvre during the peace negotiations of 2010, but placed positive obstacles in his path.
The main reasons for forming this new alliance are internal and domestic - to do with devising new rules for ensuring that most young haredi men undertake some form of national service - but the new unity government will inevitably adopt a new approach to any peace initiatives that might arise between now and the autumn of 2013, when a general election becomes mandatory. Neither Likud nor Kadima offer the same hard-line support for the settler movement as the more right-wing religious parties. This in itself will open the way for greater flexibility, should any moves towards new peace negotations make an appearance. Let us hope they do.
Talk of a possible conjoining of Israel's Likud and Kadima parties was in the air as early as July 2010 (see my blog of 9 July 2010: 'A Peace Deal by 2011?' ). But with Tzipi Livni leading Kadima the idea came to nothing. She was intent on remaining the official opposition, hoping for a political opportunity - that frustratingly remained out of reach - to oust Likud and take over the reins of power. Her replacement as chairman of Kadima by Shaul Mofaz has opened the door to this new configuration of Israel's political kaleidoscope.
A major effect must be to reduce considerably prime minister Netanyahu's dependence on the support of the religious right-wing parties. They - in particular, but not exclusively, Yisrael Beitenu - not only consistently restricted his freedom of manoeuvre during the peace negotiations of 2010, but placed positive obstacles in his path.
The main reasons for forming this new alliance are internal and domestic - to do with devising new rules for ensuring that most young haredi men undertake some form of national service - but the new unity government will inevitably adopt a new approach to any peace initiatives that might arise between now and the autumn of 2013, when a general election becomes mandatory. Neither Likud nor Kadima offer the same hard-line support for the settler movement as the more right-wing religious parties. This in itself will open the way for greater flexibility, should any moves towards new peace negotations make an appearance. Let us hope they do.
Ha'aretz vs the Jews
In the Jerusalem Post of 4 May 2012 Martin Sherman, in a piece titled “Haaretz vs the Jews” castigates the Left for running an “unambiguous campaign for the conversion of Israel from the 'nation state of the Jews' to 'a state of all its citizens.' But the one surely does not preclude the other. The choice is not between a Zionist Greater Israel and a post-Zionist state denuded of its Jewish identity. I remind Martin Sherman of Israel’s Declaration of Independence which, while unequivocally endorsing “the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country”, states:
The State of Israel will … foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants… it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.
Israel can and must retain its identity as the nation state of the Jewish people. But this is entirely compatible with the aspiration of the founding fathers to respect the rights of minorities and to strive for equality on every level for all the country's citizens.
A letter from me to this effect appears in the Jerusalem Post of 8 May 2012.
The State of Israel will … foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants… it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.
Israel can and must retain its identity as the nation state of the Jewish people. But this is entirely compatible with the aspiration of the founding fathers to respect the rights of minorities and to strive for equality on every level for all the country's citizens.
A letter from me to this effect appears in the Jerusalem Post of 8 May 2012.
Sunday, 6 May 2012
Gunter Grass
This Must Be Said
Allan Massie, writing in the London Daily Telegraph on 26 April, makes a valid point. To understand history, it is necessary to appreciate the context in which events occurred and the pressures influencing people’s behaviour. I am, therefore, content to suspend judgement on Gunter Grass’s teenage Nazi past. What I find unforgiveable are his current distorted and frankly antisemitic views, as expressed in his recent poem “What Must Be Said”. In it he declares that Israel is the major obstacle to world peace and is planning a first nuclear strike against Iran “to extinguish the Iranian people.” But this is surely viewing the world through a totally warped lens. Is it not Iran that is alarming the world by continuing to develop its nuclear capability? Was it Israel that threatened to wipe Iran off the map, or the other way around? Surely it is Iran that is providing military and financial support to Assad in Syria, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Perhaps it is Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s continual denial of the Holocaust that pleases Gunter Grass. Whatever his reasoning, he proclaims the aggressor the victim, and castigates the victim of threats of annihilation as an aggressor.. No amount of empathy with Gunter Grass’s past can justify this biased view of today’s world.
Allan Massie, writing in the London Daily Telegraph on 26 April, makes a valid point. To understand history, it is necessary to appreciate the context in which events occurred and the pressures influencing people’s behaviour. I am, therefore, content to suspend judgement on Gunter Grass’s teenage Nazi past. What I find unforgiveable are his current distorted and frankly antisemitic views, as expressed in his recent poem “What Must Be Said”. In it he declares that Israel is the major obstacle to world peace and is planning a first nuclear strike against Iran “to extinguish the Iranian people.” But this is surely viewing the world through a totally warped lens. Is it not Iran that is alarming the world by continuing to develop its nuclear capability? Was it Israel that threatened to wipe Iran off the map, or the other way around? Surely it is Iran that is providing military and financial support to Assad in Syria, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Perhaps it is Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s continual denial of the Holocaust that pleases Gunter Grass. Whatever his reasoning, he proclaims the aggressor the victim, and castigates the victim of threats of annihilation as an aggressor.. No amount of empathy with Gunter Grass’s past can justify this biased view of today’s world.
Thursday, 7 April 2011
Israeli Peace Initiative (IPI)
I thought I closed this blog officially on 31 December 2010. [The book based on it: "One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine" was published on 1 June 2011]. However, the announcement of Wednesday, 6 April 2011 of the Israeli Peace Initiative was too significant a development to allow to pass unremarked. Accordingly, I exceptionally posted this additional piece. Since then I have been adding an occasional article as matters of particular interest have caught my attention.
What is the IPI?
• The Israeli Peace Initiative is a peace proposal launched by a group of public figures in Israel, including former generals and others.
• It presents itself as an Israeli response to the Arab Peace Initiative promoted by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the Arab League in 2002.
• It outlines the terms for final status agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon, and the normalisation of relations between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.
The principles for peace in the document include:
> A Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank based on 1967 borders with 1:1 land swaps not exceeding 7% of the West Bank.
> Jerusalem shared as the capital of two states with special arrangements for shared sovereignty in the Old City.
> Refugees to receive financial compensation from the international community and Israel with the right of return only to a Palestinian state but with ‘with mutually agreed-upon symbolic exceptions.'
> Peace with Syria to be based on a staged Israeli withdrawal from the Golan and agreed security arrangements.
> Peace with Lebanon based on existing borders and Lebanon exercising ‘full sovereignty over its territory through the Lebanese army.'
> Regional security arrangements and economic cooperation based on the creation of a ‘Middle East Economic Development Bloc'.
> The gradual normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab and Islamic states that would commence at the start of negotiations.
Who is behind it?
The initiative was launched by a group of public figures in Israel, who perceive the current deadlock in the peace process to be damaging for Israel. They include:
* Yaakov Peri - Former Shin Bet (Israeli internal security) chief
* Amram Mitzna - Retired IDF general and former leader of Israeli Labour party
* Danny Yatom - Former head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service
* Amnon Lipkin Shahak - Former IDF Chief of Staff and former Knesset member
* Yuval and Dalia Rabin - Children of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
* Adina Bar Shalom - Daughter of Shas Rabbi and spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef
* Professor Aliza Shenhar - President of Emek Yezreel College
* Idan Ofer - Israeli business mogul
Here is the Israeli Peace Initiative in full:
The Israeli Peace Initiative (IPI)
in response to the Arab Peace Initiative (API)
Proposal - April 6, 2011
The State of Israel,
*Reaffirming that Israel's strategic objective is to reach a historic compromise and permanent status agreements that shall determine the finality of all claims and the end of the Israeli Arab conflict, in order to achieve permanent and lasting peace, lasting and guaranteed security, regional economic prosperity and normal ties with all Arab and Islamic states,
*Recognizing the suffering of the Palestinian refugees since the 1948 war as well as of the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, and realizing the need to resolve the Palestinian refugees problem through realistic and mutually agreed-upon solutions,
*Realizing that wide-scale multilateral economic cooperation is essential in order to ensure the prosperity of the Middle East, its environmental sustainability and the future of its peoples,
*Recognizing the Arab Peace Initiative of March 2002 (API) as a historic effort made by the Arab states to reach a breakthrough and achieve progress on a regional basis, and sharing the API statement that a military solution to the conflict will not achieve peace or provide security for the parties,
Therefore Israel accepts the API as a framework for regional peace negotiations and presents the IPI as an integrated response to the API, and as a vision of the regional final-status agreements to be negotiated and signed between the Arab states, the Palestinians and Israel, based on the following proposed principles:
1) CONFLICT RESOLUTION PRINCIPLES
The key principle of all regional peace agreements shall be Israeli withdrawals, guaranteed security, normal relations and end of all conflicts, while recognizing the security needs of all parties, the water resources challenges, the demographic realities on the ground, and the interests and needs of the followers of the three monotheistic faiths;
Furthermore, the Israeli Palestinian conflict shall be resolved on the principle of two states for two nations: Palestine as a nation state for the Palestinians and Israel as a nation state for the Jews (in which the Arab minority will have equal and full civil rights as articulated in Israel's Declaration of Independence). On this basis, the following parameters are proposed:
1a) Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Statehood and Security
A sovereign independent Palestinian state shall be formed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on territories from which Israel withdrew. The state shall be demilitarized, exercising full authority over its internal security forces. The International community shall play an active role in providing border security and curbing terrorist threats.
2. Borders
The borders shall be based on the June 4, 1967, lines, with agreed modifications subject to the following principles: the creation of territorial contiguity between the Palestinian territories; land swaps (not to exceed 7% of the West Bank) based on a 1:1 ratio, including the provision of a safe corridor between the West Bank and Gaza, under de facto Palestinian control.
3. Jerusalem
The greater Jerusalem area shall include the two capitals of the two states. The line shall be drawn so that: Jewish neighborhoods shall be under Israeli sovereignty; the Arab neighborhoods shall be under Palestinian sovereignty; special arrangements shall be implemented in the Old City, ensuring that the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall shall be under Israeli sovereignty; the Temple Mount shall remain under a special no-sovereignty regime ("God Sovereignty"), with special agreed-upon arrangements, ensuring that Islamic holy places shall be administered by the Moslem Waqf, and Jewish holy sites and interests shall be administered by Israel. The implementation of these arrangements will be supervised by an Israeli-International committee.
4. Refugees
The solutions for the Palestinian refugees shall be agreed upon between Israel, the Palestinians and all regional parties in accordance with the following principles: Financial compensation shall be offered to the refugees and the host countries by the international community and Israel; the Palestinian refugees wishing to return (as mentioned in UNGAR 194*) may do so only to the Palestinian state, with mutually agreed-upon symbolic exceptions.
1b) Israeli-Syrian Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Borders
Israel shall withdraw from the Golan to a border-line to be designed based on the June 4, 1967 status, with agreed minor modifications and land swaps based on a 1:1 ratio, reflecting the 1923 international border. The agreement shall be mutually implemented in stages, based on the Sinai model, over a period not to exceed 5 years.
2. Security Arrangements
A comprehensive security package shall be mutually agreed, defining, inter alia, the scope of demilitarized zones on both sides of the border and the deployment of peace keeping international forces.
1c) Israeli-Lebanese Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Borders Israel and Lebanon shall establish permanent peace based on UNSCR 1701**, subject to which Israel concluded its withdrawal to the international border.
2. Lebanese Sovereignty
In addition to the full implementation of UNSCR 1701, Lebanon shall exercise full sovereignty over its territory through the Lebanese army.
1d) State of Peace
In each of the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian and the Israeli-Lebanese peace agreements the respective parties agree to apply between them the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law governing relations among states in time of peace; to settle all disputes between them by peaceful means; to develop good neighborly relations of co-operation between them to ensure lasting security; to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other and from forming any coalition, organization or alliance with a third party, the objectives or activities of which include launching aggression or hostility against the other party.
2) REGIONAL SECURITY PRINCIPLES
1. The parties will create regional security mechanisms, addressing shared threats and risks arising from states, terrorist organizations, marine pirate groups, and guerrilla organizations. to ensure the safety and security of the peoples of the region.
2. The parties shall build regional frameworks to jointly fight against crime and environmental threats.
3) ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PRINCIPLES
Based on significant economic support by the international community, the parties shall implement wide-scale regional cooperation projects in order to ensure the stabilization, viability and prosperity of the region, and to achieve optimal utilization of energy and water resources for the benefit of all parties. Such projects will improve transportation infrastructure, agriculture, industry and regional tourism, thus addressing the rising danger of unemployment in the region. In the future, the parties shall create the "Middle East Economic Development Bloc"(inviting all Middle Eastern countries to join), aiming at reaching a special status in the EU, the US and the International Community.
4) STEPS TOWARDS NORMAL RELATIONS PRINCIPLES
Israel, the Arab States and the Islamic States commit to implement gradual steps towards establishing normal relations between them, in the spirit of the Arab Peace Initiative, which shall commence upon the launching of peace negotiations and shall be gradually upgraded to full normal relations (including diplomatic relations, open borders and economic ties) upon the signing of the permanent status agreements and throughout their implementation.
* United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194
was passed on December 11, 1948. It consists of 15 articles, the most quoted of which are:
Article 7: protection and free access to the Holy Places
Article 8: demilitarization and UN control over Jerusalem
Article 9: free access to Jerusalem
Article 11: the return of refugees
**United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701
was a resolution intended to resolve the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. Approved by both the Lebanese and the Israeli Cabinets, the ceasefire came into effect on Monday, 14 August 2006.
What is the IPI?
• The Israeli Peace Initiative is a peace proposal launched by a group of public figures in Israel, including former generals and others.
• It presents itself as an Israeli response to the Arab Peace Initiative promoted by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and endorsed by the Arab League in 2002.
• It outlines the terms for final status agreements between Israel and the Palestinians, Syria, Lebanon, and the normalisation of relations between Israel and the rest of the Arab world.
The principles for peace in the document include:
> A Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank based on 1967 borders with 1:1 land swaps not exceeding 7% of the West Bank.
> Jerusalem shared as the capital of two states with special arrangements for shared sovereignty in the Old City.
> Refugees to receive financial compensation from the international community and Israel with the right of return only to a Palestinian state but with ‘with mutually agreed-upon symbolic exceptions.'
> Peace with Syria to be based on a staged Israeli withdrawal from the Golan and agreed security arrangements.
> Peace with Lebanon based on existing borders and Lebanon exercising ‘full sovereignty over its territory through the Lebanese army.'
> Regional security arrangements and economic cooperation based on the creation of a ‘Middle East Economic Development Bloc'.
> The gradual normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab and Islamic states that would commence at the start of negotiations.
Who is behind it?
The initiative was launched by a group of public figures in Israel, who perceive the current deadlock in the peace process to be damaging for Israel. They include:
* Yaakov Peri - Former Shin Bet (Israeli internal security) chief
* Amram Mitzna - Retired IDF general and former leader of Israeli Labour party
* Danny Yatom - Former head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service
* Amnon Lipkin Shahak - Former IDF Chief of Staff and former Knesset member
* Yuval and Dalia Rabin - Children of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
* Adina Bar Shalom - Daughter of Shas Rabbi and spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef
* Professor Aliza Shenhar - President of Emek Yezreel College
* Idan Ofer - Israeli business mogul
Here is the Israeli Peace Initiative in full:
The Israeli Peace Initiative (IPI)
in response to the Arab Peace Initiative (API)
Proposal - April 6, 2011
The State of Israel,
*Reaffirming that Israel's strategic objective is to reach a historic compromise and permanent status agreements that shall determine the finality of all claims and the end of the Israeli Arab conflict, in order to achieve permanent and lasting peace, lasting and guaranteed security, regional economic prosperity and normal ties with all Arab and Islamic states,
*Recognizing the suffering of the Palestinian refugees since the 1948 war as well as of the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries, and realizing the need to resolve the Palestinian refugees problem through realistic and mutually agreed-upon solutions,
*Realizing that wide-scale multilateral economic cooperation is essential in order to ensure the prosperity of the Middle East, its environmental sustainability and the future of its peoples,
*Recognizing the Arab Peace Initiative of March 2002 (API) as a historic effort made by the Arab states to reach a breakthrough and achieve progress on a regional basis, and sharing the API statement that a military solution to the conflict will not achieve peace or provide security for the parties,
Therefore Israel accepts the API as a framework for regional peace negotiations and presents the IPI as an integrated response to the API, and as a vision of the regional final-status agreements to be negotiated and signed between the Arab states, the Palestinians and Israel, based on the following proposed principles:
1) CONFLICT RESOLUTION PRINCIPLES
The key principle of all regional peace agreements shall be Israeli withdrawals, guaranteed security, normal relations and end of all conflicts, while recognizing the security needs of all parties, the water resources challenges, the demographic realities on the ground, and the interests and needs of the followers of the three monotheistic faiths;
Furthermore, the Israeli Palestinian conflict shall be resolved on the principle of two states for two nations: Palestine as a nation state for the Palestinians and Israel as a nation state for the Jews (in which the Arab minority will have equal and full civil rights as articulated in Israel's Declaration of Independence). On this basis, the following parameters are proposed:
1a) Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Statehood and Security
A sovereign independent Palestinian state shall be formed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on territories from which Israel withdrew. The state shall be demilitarized, exercising full authority over its internal security forces. The International community shall play an active role in providing border security and curbing terrorist threats.
2. Borders
The borders shall be based on the June 4, 1967, lines, with agreed modifications subject to the following principles: the creation of territorial contiguity between the Palestinian territories; land swaps (not to exceed 7% of the West Bank) based on a 1:1 ratio, including the provision of a safe corridor between the West Bank and Gaza, under de facto Palestinian control.
3. Jerusalem
The greater Jerusalem area shall include the two capitals of the two states. The line shall be drawn so that: Jewish neighborhoods shall be under Israeli sovereignty; the Arab neighborhoods shall be under Palestinian sovereignty; special arrangements shall be implemented in the Old City, ensuring that the Jewish Quarter and the Western Wall shall be under Israeli sovereignty; the Temple Mount shall remain under a special no-sovereignty regime ("God Sovereignty"), with special agreed-upon arrangements, ensuring that Islamic holy places shall be administered by the Moslem Waqf, and Jewish holy sites and interests shall be administered by Israel. The implementation of these arrangements will be supervised by an Israeli-International committee.
4. Refugees
The solutions for the Palestinian refugees shall be agreed upon between Israel, the Palestinians and all regional parties in accordance with the following principles: Financial compensation shall be offered to the refugees and the host countries by the international community and Israel; the Palestinian refugees wishing to return (as mentioned in UNGAR 194*) may do so only to the Palestinian state, with mutually agreed-upon symbolic exceptions.
1b) Israeli-Syrian Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Borders
Israel shall withdraw from the Golan to a border-line to be designed based on the June 4, 1967 status, with agreed minor modifications and land swaps based on a 1:1 ratio, reflecting the 1923 international border. The agreement shall be mutually implemented in stages, based on the Sinai model, over a period not to exceed 5 years.
2. Security Arrangements
A comprehensive security package shall be mutually agreed, defining, inter alia, the scope of demilitarized zones on both sides of the border and the deployment of peace keeping international forces.
1c) Israeli-Lebanese Conflict Resolution Parameters
1. Borders Israel and Lebanon shall establish permanent peace based on UNSCR 1701**, subject to which Israel concluded its withdrawal to the international border.
2. Lebanese Sovereignty
In addition to the full implementation of UNSCR 1701, Lebanon shall exercise full sovereignty over its territory through the Lebanese army.
1d) State of Peace
In each of the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian and the Israeli-Lebanese peace agreements the respective parties agree to apply between them the provisions of the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law governing relations among states in time of peace; to settle all disputes between them by peaceful means; to develop good neighborly relations of co-operation between them to ensure lasting security; to refrain from the threat or use of force against each other and from forming any coalition, organization or alliance with a third party, the objectives or activities of which include launching aggression or hostility against the other party.
2) REGIONAL SECURITY PRINCIPLES
1. The parties will create regional security mechanisms, addressing shared threats and risks arising from states, terrorist organizations, marine pirate groups, and guerrilla organizations. to ensure the safety and security of the peoples of the region.
2. The parties shall build regional frameworks to jointly fight against crime and environmental threats.
3) ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PRINCIPLES
Based on significant economic support by the international community, the parties shall implement wide-scale regional cooperation projects in order to ensure the stabilization, viability and prosperity of the region, and to achieve optimal utilization of energy and water resources for the benefit of all parties. Such projects will improve transportation infrastructure, agriculture, industry and regional tourism, thus addressing the rising danger of unemployment in the region. In the future, the parties shall create the "Middle East Economic Development Bloc"(inviting all Middle Eastern countries to join), aiming at reaching a special status in the EU, the US and the International Community.
4) STEPS TOWARDS NORMAL RELATIONS PRINCIPLES
Israel, the Arab States and the Islamic States commit to implement gradual steps towards establishing normal relations between them, in the spirit of the Arab Peace Initiative, which shall commence upon the launching of peace negotiations and shall be gradually upgraded to full normal relations (including diplomatic relations, open borders and economic ties) upon the signing of the permanent status agreements and throughout their implementation.
* United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194
was passed on December 11, 1948. It consists of 15 articles, the most quoted of which are:
Article 7: protection and free access to the Holy Places
Article 8: demilitarization and UN control over Jerusalem
Article 9: free access to Jerusalem
Article 11: the return of refugees
**United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701
was a resolution intended to resolve the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict. Approved by both the Lebanese and the Israeli Cabinets, the ceasefire came into effect on Monday, 14 August 2006.
Saturday, 1 January 2011
One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine
"A Mid-East Journal" closes
I began this blog early in January 2010, and I wrote the last piece on 30 December. My intention from the start was to follow the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of the peace process during a period that I thought might prove a turning point in the history of both Israel and Palestine – and then to produce a book about the events that I had lived through and described.
As 2010 dawned, it seemed to me possible that the year might prove seminal in the long-drawn-out process of finding an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians. Although many of the negative factors that had frustrated past efforts were still present, the signs that meaningful negotiations might be resumed and brought, eventually, to some sort of favourable outcome seemed more hopeful than for many years.
Within its first days in office, the new US administration had clearly marked the Middle East as a priority for its attention. It was on 22 January 2009, in a special ceremony in the White House, that newly-elected President Barack Obama named George Mitchell his "special envoy to the Middle East". The event, attended also by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was widely interpreted as a determination on Obama's part to involve himself and his new administration in working for, and in finally achieving, a settlement to the long-running Arab-Israel dispute.
At the ceremony Mitchell said that, along with Obama and Clinton, he believed the objective of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state living side by side was possible, and that the conflict, old as it was, could be resolved
Obama charged his Middle East envoy to return to the Middle East, and to seek a "comprehensive peace". By that, Mitchell soon made clear, he meant not only a settlement of the Israel-Palestine impasse, but also peace between Israel and Syria, and between Israel and Lebanon, and a normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world as a whole – ambitious objectives indeed, and certainly not susceptible of achievement in the space of one short twelvemonth. Some sort of breakthrough in the long-lasting Israel-Palestine dispute did, however, seem a possibility.
It was in March 2009 that the Obama administration explicitly incorporated into US policy the 2002 Arab League peace plan, originally mooted by Saudi Arabia, under which the Arab world undertook formally to recognise Israel and enter into normal relations with her, in exchange for Israel's withdrawing from territories captured in the 1967 war. Three months later President Obama, in an unprecedented move, reached out to the Muslim world in a speech in Cairo.
In what must still be regarded as an historic address, Obama said the "cycle of suspicion and discord" between the United States and the Muslim world must end. He called for a "new beginning"; both sides needed to make a "sustained effort... to respect one another and seek common ground". The US bond with Israel was unbreakable, he said, but the Palestinians' plight was "intolerable".
Fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way one chooses to regard the matter, water continued to flow under the bridge. Events overtook aspirations. For example, it quickly became apparent that all the overtures in the world counted for nothing against the reality of Iran's nuclear ambitions.
As regards the position of the Palestinians, the West Bank, administered by the Palestinian Authority, had been enjoying unprecedented economic growth – something between 5% and 7% was the World Bank's estimate for 2009. Meanwhile the Islamist terrorist organisation Hamas, having seized control of the Gaza Strip in a bloody internecine coup d'état, remained virtually at war with Fatah, its rivals within the Palestinian Authority, and deeply opposed to any accommodation with, or even recognition of, Israel.
Considering itself at war with Israel, Hamas had pursued a consistent policy of firing rockets from Gaza, indiscriminately hitting anything within range. Supplied with ever more sophisticated weaponry from Iran and Syria, Hamas's attacks started reaching deeper and deeper into Israel. Finally, in December 2008 – after Barack Obama had won the Presidential election, but before his inauguration – Israel launched its short, sharp and devastating Operation Cast Lead against the Hamas regime.
The legacies of that conflict were a virtual cessation of the rocket incursions, accusations that Israel's attack had taken too little account of the impact on the civilian population, and a continuing blockade of the Gaza Strip by both Israel and Egypt – Egypt being as keen as Israel to prevent Hamas boosting its military capabilities. Israel's blockade, which allowed a regular though restricted flow of humanitarian aid through the main land crossings, extended also to a naval blockade aimed at preventing the import of weaponry and related materials by sea.
A possible additional legacy of the conflict – though this is difficult to assess – was that Hamas had agreed to Egypt acting as a mediator in talks aimed at the release of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured in June 2006 by Hamas in a cross-border raid and held prisoner in the Gaza Strip ever since.
In Israel the intensive peace talks with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, that had occupied the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, during the final months of 2008, came to a sudden end with Israel's strike against Hamas in the December. In any case, Olmert was already acting in a caretaker capacity, following his resignation after charges of corruption, and Israel was awaiting new elections. These produced a change of government, and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu finally headed his new – and rather fragile – coalition in March 2009.
The following months saw Israel's right-wing prime minister, and America's new Democrat president, attempting to bring apparently irreconcilable political perspectives on the Middle East into some sort of congruence. On the face of it they succeeded. Against the odds, before the end of 2009 Netanyahu had formally accepted the two-state solution as the desired outcome of any future peace deal, and had, moreover, instituted a ten-month moratorium on building in the settlements of the West Bank.
This was the overall position at the start of 2010 – sufficiently encouraging, it seemed to me, to give hope of some sort of breakthrough during the course of the year. And so I decided that for twelve months, starting on 1 January 2010, I would follow the ups and downs in what could scarcely at the time be called a "peace process". How much, if anything, would be achieved during the year? Would my initial feeling that we were on the brink of a breakthrough be realised? These were the questions that my articles would eventually reveal.
So I created the blog “A Mid-East Journal”, and posted the pieces as I wrote them. Taken together, they trace the tortuous progress of the early efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table, recording the occasional gleams of hope and the predictable setbacks, and then, when the principals were finally brought face-to-face, both the depressing cynicism of many about the prospects of success, and the uplifting determination of a few to maintain the process, whatever the setbacks – and there were many. The articles record also events in the region that impacted on the peace process – the Gaza flotilla episode, the “Mossad assassination” in Dubai, the Lebanon border incident, the rocket attacks on Israel.
Of course the breakthrough that seemed so enticing a possibility in January – and virtually within grasp in September, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down at the same table with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for their first direct face-to-face talks in nearly two years – had by December apparently turned to dust and ashes.
The peace process had certainly stalled. Yet it had not foundered. President Obama had invested so much in his Middle East policy that he could not – indeed he simply refused – to acknowledge defeat. As the year ended, behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity led by the US administration was fast and furious, while in front of the curtain US special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, had virtually reopened the initial, pre-breakdown, "proximity talks" phase – a version of shuttle diplomacy aimed at keeping dialogue between the principal parties open.
At the same time a new factor in the complex equation had emerged – moves by the Palestinians towards a form of "unilateral declaration of statehood", initially by seeking recognition from international bodies and friendly states for a sovereign Palestine within the boundaries that existed just prior to the Six Day War in 1967. Practical considerations of many sorts probably militate against success in this enterprise on its own, but as a psychological means of exerting pressure on the right-wing within Israel's coalition government, it may prove effective.
Whatever the outcome of this, and of the many other initiatives afoot at the end of the year aimed at trying to break the Israeli-Palestinian log-jam, it is clear that when eventually the first history of the sovereign state of Palestine, and the next history of the sovereign state of Israel, come to be written, the events of 2010 will prove of major significance in both stories – and I hope my book, “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” will provide those future historians not only with the facts that underlay the events of 2010, but also background to and commentary on the facts.
Details of “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” can be found at:
http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=1390
I began this blog early in January 2010, and I wrote the last piece on 30 December. My intention from the start was to follow the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of the peace process during a period that I thought might prove a turning point in the history of both Israel and Palestine – and then to produce a book about the events that I had lived through and described.
As 2010 dawned, it seemed to me possible that the year might prove seminal in the long-drawn-out process of finding an accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians. Although many of the negative factors that had frustrated past efforts were still present, the signs that meaningful negotiations might be resumed and brought, eventually, to some sort of favourable outcome seemed more hopeful than for many years.
Within its first days in office, the new US administration had clearly marked the Middle East as a priority for its attention. It was on 22 January 2009, in a special ceremony in the White House, that newly-elected President Barack Obama named George Mitchell his "special envoy to the Middle East". The event, attended also by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was widely interpreted as a determination on Obama's part to involve himself and his new administration in working for, and in finally achieving, a settlement to the long-running Arab-Israel dispute.
At the ceremony Mitchell said that, along with Obama and Clinton, he believed the objective of a Jewish state and a Palestinian state living side by side was possible, and that the conflict, old as it was, could be resolved
Obama charged his Middle East envoy to return to the Middle East, and to seek a "comprehensive peace". By that, Mitchell soon made clear, he meant not only a settlement of the Israel-Palestine impasse, but also peace between Israel and Syria, and between Israel and Lebanon, and a normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world as a whole – ambitious objectives indeed, and certainly not susceptible of achievement in the space of one short twelvemonth. Some sort of breakthrough in the long-lasting Israel-Palestine dispute did, however, seem a possibility.
It was in March 2009 that the Obama administration explicitly incorporated into US policy the 2002 Arab League peace plan, originally mooted by Saudi Arabia, under which the Arab world undertook formally to recognise Israel and enter into normal relations with her, in exchange for Israel's withdrawing from territories captured in the 1967 war. Three months later President Obama, in an unprecedented move, reached out to the Muslim world in a speech in Cairo.
In what must still be regarded as an historic address, Obama said the "cycle of suspicion and discord" between the United States and the Muslim world must end. He called for a "new beginning"; both sides needed to make a "sustained effort... to respect one another and seek common ground". The US bond with Israel was unbreakable, he said, but the Palestinians' plight was "intolerable".
Fortunately or unfortunately, whichever way one chooses to regard the matter, water continued to flow under the bridge. Events overtook aspirations. For example, it quickly became apparent that all the overtures in the world counted for nothing against the reality of Iran's nuclear ambitions.
As regards the position of the Palestinians, the West Bank, administered by the Palestinian Authority, had been enjoying unprecedented economic growth – something between 5% and 7% was the World Bank's estimate for 2009. Meanwhile the Islamist terrorist organisation Hamas, having seized control of the Gaza Strip in a bloody internecine coup d'état, remained virtually at war with Fatah, its rivals within the Palestinian Authority, and deeply opposed to any accommodation with, or even recognition of, Israel.
Considering itself at war with Israel, Hamas had pursued a consistent policy of firing rockets from Gaza, indiscriminately hitting anything within range. Supplied with ever more sophisticated weaponry from Iran and Syria, Hamas's attacks started reaching deeper and deeper into Israel. Finally, in December 2008 – after Barack Obama had won the Presidential election, but before his inauguration – Israel launched its short, sharp and devastating Operation Cast Lead against the Hamas regime.
The legacies of that conflict were a virtual cessation of the rocket incursions, accusations that Israel's attack had taken too little account of the impact on the civilian population, and a continuing blockade of the Gaza Strip by both Israel and Egypt – Egypt being as keen as Israel to prevent Hamas boosting its military capabilities. Israel's blockade, which allowed a regular though restricted flow of humanitarian aid through the main land crossings, extended also to a naval blockade aimed at preventing the import of weaponry and related materials by sea.
A possible additional legacy of the conflict – though this is difficult to assess – was that Hamas had agreed to Egypt acting as a mediator in talks aimed at the release of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captured in June 2006 by Hamas in a cross-border raid and held prisoner in the Gaza Strip ever since.
In Israel the intensive peace talks with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, that had occupied the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, during the final months of 2008, came to a sudden end with Israel's strike against Hamas in the December. In any case, Olmert was already acting in a caretaker capacity, following his resignation after charges of corruption, and Israel was awaiting new elections. These produced a change of government, and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu finally headed his new – and rather fragile – coalition in March 2009.
The following months saw Israel's right-wing prime minister, and America's new Democrat president, attempting to bring apparently irreconcilable political perspectives on the Middle East into some sort of congruence. On the face of it they succeeded. Against the odds, before the end of 2009 Netanyahu had formally accepted the two-state solution as the desired outcome of any future peace deal, and had, moreover, instituted a ten-month moratorium on building in the settlements of the West Bank.
This was the overall position at the start of 2010 – sufficiently encouraging, it seemed to me, to give hope of some sort of breakthrough during the course of the year. And so I decided that for twelve months, starting on 1 January 2010, I would follow the ups and downs in what could scarcely at the time be called a "peace process". How much, if anything, would be achieved during the year? Would my initial feeling that we were on the brink of a breakthrough be realised? These were the questions that my articles would eventually reveal.
So I created the blog “A Mid-East Journal”, and posted the pieces as I wrote them. Taken together, they trace the tortuous progress of the early efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table, recording the occasional gleams of hope and the predictable setbacks, and then, when the principals were finally brought face-to-face, both the depressing cynicism of many about the prospects of success, and the uplifting determination of a few to maintain the process, whatever the setbacks – and there were many. The articles record also events in the region that impacted on the peace process – the Gaza flotilla episode, the “Mossad assassination” in Dubai, the Lebanon border incident, the rocket attacks on Israel.
Of course the breakthrough that seemed so enticing a possibility in January – and virtually within grasp in September, when Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down at the same table with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for their first direct face-to-face talks in nearly two years – had by December apparently turned to dust and ashes.
The peace process had certainly stalled. Yet it had not foundered. President Obama had invested so much in his Middle East policy that he could not – indeed he simply refused – to acknowledge defeat. As the year ended, behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity led by the US administration was fast and furious, while in front of the curtain US special Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, had virtually reopened the initial, pre-breakdown, "proximity talks" phase – a version of shuttle diplomacy aimed at keeping dialogue between the principal parties open.
At the same time a new factor in the complex equation had emerged – moves by the Palestinians towards a form of "unilateral declaration of statehood", initially by seeking recognition from international bodies and friendly states for a sovereign Palestine within the boundaries that existed just prior to the Six Day War in 1967. Practical considerations of many sorts probably militate against success in this enterprise on its own, but as a psychological means of exerting pressure on the right-wing within Israel's coalition government, it may prove effective.
Whatever the outcome of this, and of the many other initiatives afoot at the end of the year aimed at trying to break the Israeli-Palestinian log-jam, it is clear that when eventually the first history of the sovereign state of Palestine, and the next history of the sovereign state of Israel, come to be written, the events of 2010 will prove of major significance in both stories – and I hope my book, “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” will provide those future historians not only with the facts that underlay the events of 2010, but also background to and commentary on the facts.
Details of “One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine” can be found at:
http://www.troubador.co.uk/book_info.asp?bookid=1390
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