Is Israel the enemy?

Arab News, founded in 1975, is an English-language newspaper with a wide and diverse readership across the Arab world. The publication proudly asserts that its website receives hundreds of thousands of hits every day. Emanating from Saudi Arabia, its news and comment sections cover the global scene in most of its aspects – political, economic, social, sporting. Printed at state-of-the-art facilities in Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam, Arab News can be found on newsstands throughout the Middle East.

Last Saturday, 6 October, a strange and uncharacteristic article appeared in its pages under the by-line of Abdulateef Al-Mulhim. Al-Mulhim, a retired Commodore of the Royal Saudi Navy, is a regular contributor to Arab News and to various on-line sites. It may be relevant to record that he served extensively in the United States, part of the time at the Maritime College of the State University of New York.

Watching the Al-Arabiya TV network, the most respected news outlet in the Middle East, and seeing reports and pictures of starvation in Yemen, massive destruction and mass slaughter in Syria, an under-developed Sinai, car bombs in Iraq and devastation in Libya, Al-Mulhim was struck by an unusual, not to say unorthodox, thought. None of all that destruction, all those atrocities, had been caused by an outside enemy (the outside enemy). They were the work of the very authorities that were supposed to protect and safeguard the people of those countries. So nothing if not clear-thinking, Al-Mulhim asked himself, who is the real enemy of the Arab world?

“The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered their sworn enemy,” he wrote, adding wryly, “an enemy whose existence they never recognized.”

The Arab world has many enemies, he asserted, “and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people. These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.”

Al-Mulhim proceeded to outline the history of the major Arab-Israeli conflicts, concluding that the Arabs gained nothing from them but hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. “And now,” he says, “with the never-ending Arab Spring the Arab world has no time for the Palestinian refugees or the Palestinian cause, because many Arabs are refugees themselves and under constant attacks from their own forces.” He declares that Syrians are fleeing from their own country, not because Israeli planes are dropping bombs on them; “it is the Syrian Air Force which is dropping the bombs.”

Finally, Al-Mulhim turns to Israel, comparing it to the disarray of so many of the Arab states. “What happened to the Arabs’ sworn enemy?” he asks. His answer?

“Israel now has the most advanced research facilities, top universities and advanced infrastructure. Many Arabs don’t know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than many Arab states, and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy more political and social rights than some places in the Arab World. Wasn’t one of the judges who sent a former Israeli president to jail an Israeli-Palestinian? The Arab Spring showed the world that the Palestinians are happier and in better situation than their Arab brothers who fought to liberate them from the Israelis. Now it is time to stop the hatred and wars, and start to create better living conditions for the future Arab generations.”

There is no doubt at all that it was courageous of Al-Mulhim to say what he said, and to do so under his own name (though no more, perhaps, than might be expected from an ex-navy commodore). And with fundamentalist groups vying with each other in their zeal to impose their own versions of Islam on the Arab world, it was equally brave of Arab News to print it.

Now, it is churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth, but the fact is that Al-Mulhim’s article was written in English for an English-language newspaper. Is it too much to expect that a version in Arabic is reprinted in another of the 29 publications produced by the Saudi Research & Publishing Company?

Probably.

The Great Islamic Divide: Sunnis vs Shi’ites

Ask most people in the West what they know about Islam, and you are likely to get a blank stare. Many are aware that the religion has two main branches – Sunni and Sh’ite − but as for the differences between them, or where each is mainly practised, most people haven’t a clue.

Classic explanations of Islam’s great divide usually include a statement like: “The so-called division of Muslims between Shia and Sunni is akin to the differences between Catholics and Protestants.” However true that may once have been, it needs qualification in the light of current circumstances. The Sunni-Shi’ite division is now far from “so-called”, and the present situation within Islam can best be compared to the intensive intra-Christian religious conflicts that ravaged Europe on and off for three centuries. Doctrinal differences have been transmuted into political altercations, and these have inevitably turned into a struggle for power and domination.

It is estimated that 75–90% of the world's one billion Muslims are Sunni, while only some 10–20% are Shia. Sunnis form the overwhelming majority in most Muslim countries; Shia make up the majority only in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and Bahrain (collectively known as the Shia Crescent).

The Sunni-Sh’ite divide has been polarized by the civil war in Syria. Up to quite recently Shi’ite dominance in the Middle East was growing rapidly. But now that Syrian President Assad's régime, dominated as it is by members of the Shi’ite offshoot sect of Alawites, seems in danger of being overthrown, the balance of power in the region has shifted. Both Iran and Hezbollah have seen their reputations damaged, for their support for Assad runs counter to their support for Arab Spring uprisings elsewhere.

Tehran stands by the Assad regime in order to protect what it calls the “axis of resistance” in the region – Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza strip being the other members of the axis along with Iran and Syria. Assad's fall would cost Iran − a Shia-Muslim but non-Arab state − an invaluable foothold in the heart of the Arab world. Hezbollah, the Shia-Islamist terrorist organization lodged in the body politic of Lebanon, would lose its main protector, and also the route through which it receives vital Iranian weapon supplies. So would Hamas in Gaza.

Syria’s revolution is a Sunni-led rebellion against the government, but it is certainly not confined to internal Syrian elements. Naveed Hussain of the International Herald Tribune has described how Syria has become a magnet for global jihadis, including Al Qaeda, which has sent some 6,000 militants from Iraq and Turkey to help topple the régime. Nor is that all. Hussain points out that Sunni extremists from as far afield as Europe are trickling into Syria to join their ideological affiliates, Jabhat al-Nusrah (Al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch) and Ahrar al-Sham (radical Salafists), in a “jihad” against the “heretical regime” of Bashar al-Assad. The recent increase in suicide bombings and kidnappings is the signature of jihadi tactics.

In fact, the Syrian conflict has become a paradigm of the division between extremist Sunni and extremist Shi’ite elements within the Muslim world.

When did this great divide in Islam first appear? It goes back to the very origins of the religion. When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, he left a community of about one hundred thousand Muslims organised as an Islamic state on the Arabian Peninsula. He also bequeathed to his followers a dispute over who should succeed him and lead the fledgling state. His followers could not agree on whether to choose bloodline successors or leaders most likely to follow the tenets of the faith.

The group now known as Sunnis went for the latter option, and chose Abu Bakr, the prophet’s adviser, to become the first successor, or caliph, to lead the Muslim state. Shi’ites, on the other hand, favored Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Ali and his successors are called Imams. They not only lead the Shi’ites, but are considered to be descendants of Muhammad. The two branches of the religion have developed along their chosen paths ever since.

Historian R Scott Appleby, who has written extensively on modern religions, explains that for Sunni Muslims the loss of the caliphate after World War I was a devastating blow. Up to that moment, the caliph had been continuously present as guardian of Islamic law and the Islamic state. In 1924 the first President of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk constitutionally abolished the institution. and transferred the caliphate’s powers to the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, the parliament of the newly formed Turkish Republic.

The end of the caliphate saw the emergence of Sunni fundamentalist leaders in nations like Egypt and India, in various attempts to provide a viable alternative. Then in 1928 the Egyptian schoolteacher Hasan al-Banna founded the first Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Sunni world, the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus Sunni religious fundamentalism was born from a combination of doctrinal differences and political action.

In the case of the Shi’ites, Martin Kramer has shown how a basic reinterpretation of Muslim history and ancient texts underpinned the thinking of Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the overthrow of the Shah in Iran in 1979 and opened the gates to a upsurge in Shi’ite fundamentalism.

Subsequently, fundamentalism in one branch of Islam inevitably fostered fundamentalism in the other, as sects in each camp sought to outdo one another in their religious zeal.

Now, equally inevitably perhaps, the two camps are at each other’s throats.

Obama and Israel - an end-of-term assessment

Cast back to those heady first days of the Obama administration. One can well imagine how the thinking went inside the White House. Here is the first black president of the USA, a man with connections in the Muslim world and a “black power” background – surely he can achieve things that no other US president could attempt, bringing his unique perspective to bear on some of the world’s most intractable problems. He can reach out a hand of friendship to the Muslim world, seek a new understanding, dispel deeply-ingrained suspicions, turn a new leaf. Hence his speech in Cairo on 4 June 2009. “It’s worth a try” must have been the feeling within the administration at the time.

“This,” as Scott Wilson reminded us in the Washington Post, “was the change that Obama had promised — a new approach to old problems.”

Now, of course, the effort seems to have been doomed from the start, and the outcome has been truly devastating. As Charles Krauthammer puts it:

“From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A US ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan…. Iran repeatedly defies US demands on nuclear enrichment, then, as a measure of its contempt for what America thinks, openly admits that its Revolutionary Guards are deployed in Syria. Russia, after arming Assad, warns America to stay out, while the secretary of state delivers vapid lectures about Assad meeting his international  “obligations.” The Gulf states beg America to act on Iran; Obama strains mightily to restrain - Israel.”

Some commentators, viewing the past from today’s perspective, now condemn Obama as an out-and-out enemy of Israel from the start. That is scarcely a sustainable point of view. Despite this attempt of his at establishing a “new deal” with the Muslim world, Obama never turned his back on Israel, as he reminded his Jewish electorate last March, at the annual AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference:

“…you don't just have to count on my words. You can look at my deeds. Because over the last three years, as president of the United States, I have kept my commitments to the state of Israel. At every crucial juncture at every fork in the road we have been there for Israel. Every single time.”

And he went on to enumerate them. US-Israeli military and intelligence cooperation never closer; joint exercises and training never more robust. Despite a tough budget environment, US security assistance to Israel has increased every year. And there’s the administration’s record on the Israeli-PA peace process. Despite a variety of setbacks, throughout 2010 the administration persisted, and indeed achieved a worthy success in September when it brought the parties to the same table, pledged to achieving an agreement.

That too, though, quickly fell apart – and the Obama administration, through its repeated insistence on a construction freeze throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem, forced Mahmoud Abbas into a corner on the issue, and thus bears a share of the responsibility for its failure. Abbas was left unable to fudge the issue − as it had been fudged so many times in the past, without affecting PA-Israeli negotiations. For truth to tell, construction in West Bank areas that are virtually certain to remain in Israel’s hands in any final settlement is not an issue worth scuttling peace talks over − while Israeli construction in areas likely to be handed over to a new sovereign Palestine could only be of eventual benefit to them.

Black mark there, then, for Obama. But subsequently, by word and deed, he has shown that he remains Israel’s friend. As he put it, fairly and memorably, in his AIPAC speech:

“When the Goldstone report unfairly singled out Israel for criticism, we challenged it. When Israel was isolated in the aftermath of the flotilla incident, we supported them. When the Durban conference was commemorated, we boycotted it, when one-sided resolutions are brought up at the Human Rights Council, we oppose them. When Israeli diplomats feared for their lives in Cairo, we intervened to save them. When there are efforts to boycott or divest from Israel, we will stand against them. And whenever an effort is made to delegitimise the state of Israel, my administration has opposed them. So there should not be a shred of doubt by now when the chips are down, I have Israel's back.” [or in English English: "I stand behind Israel".]

Where Obama failed from the start was in recognising the nature and the aims of the Iran administration, and the extent to which extremist Islamist views, such as those of the Muslim Brotherhood, had captured Muslim public opinion across the Middle East.

A final verdict on Obama’s “engagement” with the Muslim world? Brave, but foolhardy. And if fate and the American electorate grant him a second term as President, the world will doubtless discover that that lesson has been well and truly learned.

The struggling Palestinian economy

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is facing a severe financial crisis. It is substantially in arrears in paying suppliers, and during 2012 Israel twice transferred advance payments to the PA to allow Authority employees’ salaries to be paid on time. In the past few weeks the PA’s financial difficulties have manifested themselves in strikes and riots across the West Bank, triggered by substantial rises in living costs and taxes while wages remain frozen.

These popular protests were targeted at first at Salam Fayyad, the embattled prime minister, then widened to encompass the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas. Latterly protesters have begun demanding that both resign.

The current Palestinian fiscal crisis has been caused primarily by a shortfall in donor aid. Foreign donors are key to propping up the Palestinian economy, but those pledges are not coming through in their full amounts. However, the PA also failed by a substantial amount to meet its own budgetary estimates which, in any case, projected a financial gap of more than $150 million.

Last week, following a World Bank report warning of a deepening Palestinian fiscal crisis, the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee − international donors to the PA, which of course include Israel − met in New York. Israel informed the committee of steps it had taken to relieve the financial pressure on the PA. These included the advanced transfer of NIS 380 million in taxes – customs revenues collected by Israel on the PA’s behalf – to enable the PA to pay the salaries of civil servants.

The Israeli delegation also announced that an extra 5,000 permits have been granted for West Bank Palestinians to work in Israel, with an additional 2,000 given overnight permits. It is estimated that over 100,000 Palestinians are earning their livelihoods directly from Israel, receiving salaries typically double those in the West Bank, where the average monthly wage has been stuck for a long time at something less than 2000 shekels. Israel also reported that it had approved more than 300 Palestinian development projects in Area C – the part of the West Bank under full Israeli control – and that it was making progress with new master plans for the Area. Development in Area C is regarded as important by the international community for the future economic development of the PA.

Why should Israel continue to bail out a near-collapsing West Bank economy? Because the alternative − a possible victory by Islamist Hamas in its fratricidal struggle for power against Fatah – would be a far worse scenario from Israel’s point of view.

Which also explains Israel’s Foreign Ministry announcement confirming Israel’s intention to become involved in developing the Gaza Marine gas field, expected eventually to generate revenues that could contribute dramatically to Palestinian fiscal sustainability.

In 1999 British Gas was given the go-ahead by the PA to explore for natural gas off the coast of the Gaza strip. Israel was always envisaged as being the purchaser of any natural gas reserves discovered. By 2007 two exploratory wells had been located: Gaza Marine, the main field, some 36 kilometers west of Gaza City, and a second smaller field straddling the boundary between Gaza‘s and Israel’s territorial waters. The reserves in the two wells are estimated at 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

To put this in context, exploration for natural gas in Israel began more than a decade ago. By December 2010 Noble Energy had discovered both the Tamar and the Leviathan gas fields off the coast of Haifa. Tamar is estimated to hold about 8.4 trillion cubic feet of gas; Leviathan, around 17 trillion.

Until Gaza Marine can be exploited, however, the PA’s financial position is dire − and the financial corruption which has dogged the PA since the days of Yasser Arafat, and which has not been eradicated, does not help matters.

Last June a PA court in Ramallah sentenced Mohammed Rashid, a former advisor to Yasser Arafat, and three other former PA officials in absentia after they refused to appear before the court. Rashid, who served for nearly twenty years as Arafat's financial advisor, received a 15 year jail sentence after being found guilty of embezzlement and money laundering. He was also fined $15 million and ordered to give back $34 million which he and others had stolen.

One month later the US House of Representatives’ Council on Foreign Relations held a hearing on corruption within the PA. In a paper placed before the council Elliott Abrams, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies, quotes Fathi Shabaneh, the man charged with rooting out public corruption within the PA, who resigned in 2010:

“In his pre-election platform, President Abbas promised to end financial corruption … unfortunately, Abbas has surrounded himself with many of the thieves and officials who were involved in theft of public funds and who became icons of financial corruption.”

Abrams sees Fatah’s future ability to defeat Hamas as tied to public perceptions of whether Fatah remains a home to corruption. That perception may also explain the falling away of international pledges of financial aid, on which − at least for the present − the PA’s financial viability depends.

Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post, 1 October 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=286315&prmusr=Vo0puH%2bGQrN9Imh7OU7uXnoMwbvz%2bPosNtkZAoJRmpWRaEAbJBTOahEYIUVQNh5D

Justice for Palestinians

At around the time the state of Israel came into being, something over half the non-Jewish population of what used to be called “Palestine”, some 750,000 people, left their homes – on good advice or bad. Officially designated “refugees”, they and their families have been shamefully treated ever since.

A highly relevant factor in their unhappy history is that the UN body established to assist them (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – UNRWA) began its work in May 1950, seven months ahead of the establishment of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). As a result, Palestine refugees have been designated and treated quite differently from − and much worse than − all other refugees, the world over, ever since.

For whereas a main function of UNHCR has been to resettle those millions of unfortunate people who have left their homes, willingly or unwillingly, over the years (voluntary repatriation, local integration and resettlement are UNHCR’s three key solutions). a major effect of UNRWA’s humanitarian activities has been not only to maintain millions of people in their refugee status decade after decade, but to expand the numbers as generation has succeeded generation. The number of Palestinians registered by UNRWA as refugees has mushroomed from 750,000 in 1950 to 5 million today, since it was UNRWA that bestowed refugee status upon "descendants of Palestine refugees," regardless of how much time had elapsed. It has been estimated that by 2050 the number of UNRWA’s “Palestine refugees” will reach just short of 15 million.

Refugees who take up citizenship in another country lose their refugee status. As a matter of historic fact, the term “Palestine refugees” was defined by UN Resolution 194 to include Jews who fled from their homes after the 1948 conflict, such as the those who had lived in the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem. They, together with some 600,000 Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Arab lands, were quickly resettled in Israel, and took up Israeli citizenship, thus officially ceasing to be refugees (which, of course, does not affect their claims for reimbursement of property, businesses, money and possessions seized by the governments of the countries in which they resided).

Not so the unfortunate Arab refugees who made their way to nearby Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, for example, where today some three million of them and their descendants are living as “registered refugees”, (registered, that is, by UNRWA), about half of them still occupying some 58 refugee camps. For, from the moment that the State of Israel came into being, Arab leaders determined to use the Palestine refugees as a pawn in the deadly game of trying to eradicate the Jewish state from the map of the Middle East. To resettle and absorb these people into their new places of residence would remove a formidable bargaining chip from the table, and have the effect of legitimising Israel. For its part, UNRWA went along with this policy, washing its hands of any involvement in “final status” considerations.

The result? Jordan today contains nearly two million Palestine refugees, of whom 338,000 are still living in camps. When Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1950, it granted Jordanian citizenship to all who were resident in those areas. However, most of the original refugees continued to live in camps in Jordan, relying on UNRWA assistance for sustenance and constituting more than a third of the kingdom's population of 1.5 million. As for Arab Palestinians who moved to Jordan from the West Bank, they were issued yellow ID cards to distinguish them from the those living in Jordan’s "official 10 refugee camps". Since 1988, thousands of those yellow-ID card Palestinians have had their Jordanian citizenship revoked. The official reason? To prevent them losing their status as “Palestine refugees”.

In Lebanon an Amnesty International study has described registered Palestine refugees as living in "appalling social and economic conditions".

Following Lebanon’s civil war in 1990, the 400,000 Palestine refugees living there were systematically deprived of basic human rights. They were barred from 73 job categories including professions such as medicine, law and engineering. They were not allowed to own property, were denied access to the healthcare system and even needed a special permit to leave their refugee camps. Unlike other foreigners in Lebanon, they were denied access to the Lebanese health care system. Refusing to grant them work permits or permission to own land, the Lebanese government said repeatedly that it would not allow Palestine refugees to settle.

A very partial relaxation of these harsh conditions was granted In June 2005, when the government removed some work restrictions for a few Lebanese-born Palestinians, enabling them to apply for work permits and work in the private sector.

As regards Syria, there are nearly half a million Palestinian refugees in that benighted country, and they have become totally embroiled in the civil war. Many have been on the run for nearly a year and a half. While there is no question that Syrian refugees are going through a truly horrific experience, the fate of Palestinian refugees is markedly worse. Palestinians are without the basic rights of passport-holding Syrian citizens – they are stateless and in legal and political limbo. "Stuck", "stranded" and "imprisoned" are some of the terms used to describe the condition of Palestinian refugees, ill-treated and subjugated by their "Arab brethren".

As for the hundreds of Palestinian refugees who have fled Syria to Jordan, they have been crammed into a poorly equipped facility known as Cyber City, about 90 kilometres north of the capital, Amman. Human Rights Watch and other organizations have condemned the mistreatment of refugees in Cyber City, reporting forced deportations back to Syria, and the prisoner-like status of those who have remained in Jordan.

All in all, the “Palestine refugee” story is one of heartless exploitation of Arabs by Arabs – the callous manipulation of powerless victims for political ends, without any regard to their welfare or human rights. This inhumanity must be brought out into the open, the UNRWA farce of “refugee status” unto the third and fourth generation must be ended, and steps must be taken to allow people and their families who may have lived in a country for up to fifty years, to settle and become full citizens.

Published in shortened form in the on-line Jerusalem Post magazine, 27 September 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=286128&prmusr=TPiKOkfgMso6YgglGoc3FWbQ1j6BKlSSLrz%2buTrYpbjreY2DmMQW3xEYIUVQNh5D

Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and Fatah: a house divided

Al-Qaeda is at daggers drawn with Hezbollah. As Zvi Bar’el, Ha’aretz columnist, puts it, a new ally has joined Israel in the struggle against Hezbollah.

Al-Qaeda is a Sunni organisation. Taking over as commander of the Syrian branch earlier this year, Majd al-Majd controls some 6,000 militants who entered Syria from Iraq and Turkey to support the Sunni-led rebellion against the Assad regime.

Hezbollah, on the other hand, is essentially Shi’ite, and has been sending militants to Syria to support government forces. Majd al-Majd is flaming mad. In a recent broadcast he said: “sending your sons from Lebanon so that they fight on the side of the criminal régime in Syria, kill our sons and frighten our wives, is considered support for the oppressor against the oppressed, and fully participating in a crime… Hezbollah’s existence is a threat to Lebanon’s security.”

Once launched on his condemnation of Hezbollah, Majd al-Majd let fly with all barrels. The assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri in February 2005 had led to immediate suspicion of the involvement of the Syrian government assisted by their allies, Hezbollah. A special tribunal on Lebanon was established by the United Nations in 2006 to investigate the murder, and over the following years a series of leaks indicated that the evidence was pointing to certain individual Hezbollah leaders as being directly involved. In August 2010, in response to notification that the UN tribunal would soon indict some Hezbollah members, Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah secretary-general, counter-accused Israel of having fomented the assassination.

Now Majd al-Majd, exemplifying the old saying: “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”, flung an uncharacteristic bucket of whitewash over Israel – and ensured that some covered the United States as well: “The claim of the Shiite leaders that Israel and the United States are responsible for the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri and for sparking the rebellion in Syria are baseless. The ones behind the murder were the leaders of Hezbollah…”

But this internecine struggle, if we may regard it as such, is not confined to an Al-Qaeda−Hezbollah spat. Majd al-Majd’s organisation in Syria is competing with another jihadist group headed by a Jordanian salafi, Muhammad Al-Shalabi, also known as “Abu Sayyaf”. Abu Sayyaf says he is controlling hundreds of fighters who have flocked to his standard from all over the Arab world, including “fighters from Al-Qaeda”, and has taken to claiming responsibility for a number of military actions in Syria for which Majd al-Majd also lays claim. In consequence a power struggle is now taking place between the two organisations, to muddy still further the already murky waters of the Syrian civil war.

This latest example of fraternal relations between Islamist terrorist militants only serves to remind us of another long-running feud in that fierce and bloody world − the unresolved, and possibly unresolvable, struggle between Hamas and Fatah.

This conflict, also sometimes referred to as the Palestinian Civil War or the Conflict of Brothers, is called “Wakseh” among Palestinians, meaning humiliation, ruin, and collapse as a result of self-inflicted damage.

In September 2005, as Israel completed its evacuation of the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority was planning elections. The hope was that Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank and in east Jerusalem, would be able to vote and then govern themselves, and a significant step would have been taken towards achieving the two-state solution.

The elections, held indeed on 25 January 2006, were for the Palestinian Legislative Council, the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority. The Islamist organisation, Hamas, won 74 seats; the ruling Fatah 45. Without an overall majority, President Mahmoud Abbas accordingly formed a national unity government led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

But sharing power with the Fatah nationalists did not suit Hamas. In four days in mid-June 2007 their ‘Executive Force’ seized control of the entire Gaza Strip in a bloody coup d'état, sweeping away key security services and the national militia. President Abbas responded by dissolving the national unity government and forming an emergency government led by former Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, based in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Forlorn efforts at reconciliation between the two power blocs within the Palestinian body politic began as early as 2008 – 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, the PA has placed itself beyond the pale in Hamas’s eyes. 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 was revealed as a slap-dash papering over of cracks, and incapable of providing a lasting accommodation.

Abbas and his spokesmen insisted that at Doha Hamas agreed to honour all previous agreements signed between the Palestinians and Israel, and to accept that being part of a united Palestinian government means recognising Israel. But Hamas officials themselves repeatedly denied this − Gazan Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and Mahmoud al-Zahar, criticised the agreement from the start. 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.

But now the internal struggle has turned against the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself. With the rising cost of living in the West Bank as the catalyst, riots were reported this week in Hebron, with dozens of police officers and protesters injured in clashes with several thousand protesters. There have also been protests in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Jericho, with roads blocked by burning tyres and rubbish bins. Strikes by taxi and bus drivers have paralysed the West Bank's public transport system. More than 24,000 union members are estimated to have undertaken strike action.

When the main target of the demonstrators was initially the prime minister Salam Fayyad, and there were widespread calls for him to resign, the protests were welcomed by PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, as the “Palestinian spring.” More recently, however, protesters have also begun calling for Abbas to go, and attacking corruption within the PA. Palestinian security forces, who kept a low profile during the first days of demonstrations, are now using teargas and stun grenades in an attempt to disperse demonstrators.

Not a happy state of affairs as far as the Palestinian camp in general, or the Islamist entity in particular, are concerned. For some, comfort from the situation can be found – perhaps inappropriately − in the New Testament. For was it not Matthew who reported the aphorism: “If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”?

America and Israel – the ties that bind

The two main contenders for the US presidency are falling over themselves declaring their support for Israel. 

Already passing into the historical annals is the “oops!” omission from the 2012 Democratic Convention platform of the mention of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of any reference to God at all. Following an intervention by President Obama, to say nothing of’ the whoops of joy at the lapse from Mitt Romney and other Republicans, the Democrats hurriedly corrected both omissions.

The incident should cause no raised eyebrows outside the United States, for to most of the world the ties between Israel and the States seem inexplicably strong. On March 4, for example, at the AIPAC conference , President Obama declared: “America's commitment to Israel's security is unshakeable. Our friendship with Israel is enduring.”

Eight days later, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced: “In a Romney administration, the world will know that the bond between Israel and America is unbreakable."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been equally unequivocal two years earlier, at the very start of the Obama presidency,: "We have a close, unshakeable bond between the United States and Israel,” she said,

This “enduring friendship,“ this "close unshakeable, unbreakable bond", however normal and natural it may seem within the USA itself, is a great puzzle to many people in the UK, Europe and beyond. Anti-American political views, which are endemic in many Western countries, are often exacerbated by this solid US support for Israel, which they find perplexing, if not inexplicable.

The "reds under the beds" theorists, of whom there are many, of course ascribe it to the result of some malign Zionist conspiracy, whose aim is to achieve heaven-knows-what sinister ends – all on a par with the notorious, and long-discredited, forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", incorporated in the charter of Hamas and still quoted as a sort of gospel by extremist Islamist spokesmen.

Others more prosaically nominate the "enormously powerful Jewish lobby at the heart of the Washington machine," referring to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC is indeed powerful, and has proved very successful during both Democratic and Republican administrations in achieving its main objective: to ensure that American support for Israel remains strong.

But why should American policy-makers allow US policy to be shaped by such lobbying?

The current international dynamic suggests a whole host of reasons, including Israel's strategic position in the heart of the Middle East. Israel's western values and democratic traditions provide a strong and reliable base from which to counter Iran’s nuclear ambitions and other extreme Islamist activity in the region – notably from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, to name but two. Current American perceptions see potential threats not only to US interests, but actually to homeland security, from these sources and their international connections.

Considerations such as these have developed over the years, but they are essentially peripheral to a more fundamental rationale for that “enduring friendship” and "close and unshakeable bond" between the USA and Israel that is such a mystery to many. I am referring not to the so-called "Israel lobby", but to the Jewish connection to the body politic of the USA.

Visit the Jewish museum in Philadelphia (or the National Museum of American Jewish History, to give it its full title), and you find in an early display cabinet a letter of greetings to the leader of the Hebrew Congregation of Philadelphia signed by George Washington. A little further down sits a letter from Abraham Lincoln to the head of his Jewish community, thanking him for his loyal address. The fact is that the history of the United States is quite unlike that of any other western country, and that Jews were part and parcel of the foundation of the nation. The US is a nation of immigrants, and the Jews were there from the start.

In fact, the connection runs even deeper, for most of the early immigrants left their native shores in order to escape religious persecution. The national identity of the United States is embedded in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and belief in God is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence. The Bible is a cornerstone of the American national structure. Early fundamentalists, no less than those of today, would base their support of the Zionist dream on the Old Testament, its account of the release of the Jews from slavery and their journey, under God's guidance, to the "promised land, flowing with milk and honey".

The Jewish population of most nation states is minute. France has the largest in Europe, and there Jews represent some 0.8 % of the total population. In the UK there are something less than 300,000 Jews out of a total population of some 61 million – that is less than 0.5 %. But while Jews in European countries are counted in their thousands, in the States they number millions. Estimates vary but, according to some, more Jews live in the United States than in Israel. So Jewish opinion counts in the States, and both major political parties court it. Jews notoriously disagree among themselves on almost everything, and they spread their political favours accordingly. Nevertheless, a majority would certainly be in support of Israel's continued secure existence, no matter how opposed they might be to the policies of any individual Israeli government.

So the world had best acknowledge that, for better or worse, the USA has two self-imposed international obligations, regardless of who occupies the White House: its special relationship with the UK, and its enduring friendship and close, unshakeable bond with Israel.


A shorter version of this article appears in the on-line Jerusalem Post of September 13, 2012:
https://www.jpost.com/magazine/opinion/america-and-israel-the-ties-that-bind

Justice delayed is justice denied

A redress long overdue

Word is that the Israeli government is about to launch an initiative designed to bring the world’s attention to the long-neglected issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.

Knesset legislation passed in 2010 already obliges any government conducting peace negotiations with the Palestinians to include compensation for these Jewish refugees in any deal. Unfortunately there has been no opportunity to bring the issue forward in that context, since the whole peace process has been on ice since the failure of the face-to-face talks of September 2010. Now a new effort is being initiated, and not before time.

Thriving Jewish communities existed in the Middle East and North Africa a thousand years before the rise of Islam. In 1945, there were approaching a million Jews living in the various Arab states. But as the UN General Assembly moved towards acceptance of the recommendation to partition British-ruled mandated Palestine, increasingly hostile measures were being taken by the Arab nations against their Jewish communities. Following adoption of the Partition Plan by the UN, Arab governments started confiscating Jewish property. Simultaneously riots and massacres broke out against Jewish communities throughout the Arab world. Jewish-owned stores and synagogues were looted and burned, hundreds of Jews were killed, thousands were imprisoned.

As Israel declared its independence in May 1948, the Arab League Political Committee drafted a series of recommendations for all Arab and Muslim countries on how to take action against the Jews in their countries. Among other recommendations, the citizenship of Jews was to be revoked, and they were henceforth to be considered citizens only of the newly established Jewish state. Their assets were to be confiscated, their bank accounts frozen, and property worth millions of dollars nationalized. Severe restrictions were to be imposed on their employment, and many lost their means of livelihood. Between 1948 and 1951, about 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands, and approximately 600,000 sought refuge in Israel. There has never been any offer of compensation from the Arab governments which expropriated their possessions.

The current estimate is that there are something less than 8,000 Jews left in the ten Arab countries which were originally home to nearly a million.

More to the point, perhaps, it was estimated in a report issued last April by Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon that today close to half of Israel's Jewish citizens, including their descendents, came from Arab countries. Many of these families once owned property, businesses, possessions and financial assets in their countries of origin which were simply abandoned.

Dealing with how the parallel Palestinian and Jewish refugee problems should be treated in any future peace negotiations, this government report makes a series of recommendations which have not so far received a great deal of public attention. Three would be particularly central in any negotiations leading to a possible solution of the Arab-Israel dispute.

The first of these proposes an agreement, to be concluded between Arab countries and the international community, to provide compensation for both Palestinian and Jewish refugees. To achieve this, an international fund should be created, based on President Clinton's suggestion from the 2000 Camp David agreement and Congress Resolution 185 of 2008, which was initiated by the advocacy organisation “Justice for Jews from Arab Countries”. This fund will also deal with the issue of Jewish property still in the hands of Arab and Muslim countries.

The second major suggestion is that most Palestinian refugees should be rehabilitated in their place of residence, just as the Jewish refugees were rehabilitated in theirs - Israel. However, the insistence of some Palestinian refugees to be given a right of return would be resolved by their immigration into the future Palestinian state that will be established through a peace agreement. The State of Israel would not accept the principle of a Palestinian "right of return" into Israel; it would accept the concept of compensation, to be provided through an authorized third party.

Finally, it was proposed that the Foreign Ministry, led by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, lead a promotional campaign on the issue of Jewish refugees. This is the campaign that has just been announced, and in a sense has already started to bite, for it has evoked an immediate response from Palestine Legislative Council (PLC) member Hanan Ashrawi. In an article published in a number of Arab outlets, she asserts that Jews who migrated from Arab lands to Israel, “which is supposed to be their homeland,” are not refugees. Their claim. she writes is “a form of deception and delusion”.

Her argument is disingenuous on a number of counts. Jews who migrate to Israel willingly are one thing; Jews persecuted to the point of fleeing for their lives is quite another. Moreover a “national homeland” is not equivalent to an individual’s home. If someone born in a particular country, with family roots there perhaps going back generations − in short, a national of that country − has his property and goods confiscated, his home destroyed and his family threatened. and he flees to some other country, he falls fairly and squarely within the definition of “refugee”. Whether the person in question happens to be a Jew, and whether the country he flees to happens to be Israel, is totally irrelevant.

For the international definition of a refugee is a person who ‘‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country’’. This definition, Congress Resolution 185 states, “clearly applies to Jews who fled the persecution of Arab regimes,” and indeed on January 29, 1957, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), determined that Jews fleeing from Arab countries were refugees that fell within the mandate of the UNHCR. Moreover, United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, calls for a ‘‘just settlement of the refugee problem’’ without distinction between Palestinian and Jewish refugees.

In short, people − whoever they are − who are unwillingly uprooted from their homes are entitled to the status “refugee”.

As for those Jews whose refugee status has been ignored for decades, at last their case is to be given a public hearing. Next Monday, September 10, an all-day international conference is to be held in Jerusalem on the topic: “Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries.”

Justice delayed is justice denied. The time is more than ripe for a determined effort to secure general recognition of the rights of these Jewish refugees, and for a redress of the wrongs they have suffered for so long.

NAM Summit - A Bad Day at Black Rock

Politics is an endlessly fascinating pursuit. The unexpected seems always to be lurking around the next corner ready to spring out at you, as confident predictions fail to materialise and expectations are so often dashed.

For example. the summit conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) held last week in Tehran, could reasonably have been expected to be a major propaganda coup for Iran and its Islamist leadership. The chairmanship of the movement for the next three years was to pass from Egypt to Iran, and this would surely provide President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a golden opportunity to address the world from a prestigious soapbox, with the authority of the 120 nations represented by NAM to back him up.

The promotional possibilities for Iran of the unique occasion seemed even more enhanced when the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, decided to attend the summit, ignoring the pleas of the United States and Israel to boycott the event. After all, the chairman-to-be, Ahmadinejad, stood in flagrant breach of UN resolutions concerning Iran’s nuclear development, and his country was subject to stringent sanctions in consequence. Why should the Secretary General provide a cloak of respectability for him to hide under?

Iran’s leadership must also have been rubbing their hands at the thought of Egypt’s newly-elected President Mohamed Morsy, a long-time member of the Muslim Brotherhood, visiting Tehran. Morsy's visit would be the first by an Egyptian president since the two countries broke off diplomatic relations in 1979, following Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. Although Morsy’s spokesman emphasized ahead of time that he would spend only four hours on Iranian soil, including getting stuck in traffic, Iran's leaders relished the opportunity to demonstrate solidarity with the Arab Spring.

In the event, Iran’s two expected promotional triumphs turned to dust and ashes before their very eyes.

The assault was led by Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, who publicly denounced his hosts for their persistent threats to destroy Israel and their denial of the Holocaust. And he called on the ayatollahs to co-operate fully with the UN over its nuclear program, which most Western intelligence agencies believe is aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

“I urge all NAM members to work within the principles of the UN Charter to resolve disputes peacefully,” he said. “We must prevent conflict between all UN member states. And from this platform – as I have repeatedly stated around the world − I strongly reject threats by any member state to destroy another, or outrageous attempts to deny historical facts, such as the Holocaust. Claiming that another UN Member State, Israel, does not have the right to exist, or describing it in racist terms, is not only utterly wrong, but undermines the very principles we have all pledged to uphold.”

Ban couldn’t have spoken more clearly, and Ahmadinejad’s nose was very publicly put out of joint.

If the Iranian leadership hoped to recoup the situation by parading the new Egyptian President, Mohamed Morsy, before the world as supporting Iran’s international standing as hosts of the NAM summit, those hopes too were soon dashed. For when President Morsy addressed the summit − and much, no doubt, to the dismay of his hosts − he strongly supported the Syrian opposition against Iran's ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"Our solidarity with the struggle of the Syrian people against an oppressive regime that has lost legitimacy,” he said, “is an ethical duty as it is a political and strategic necessity."

The words were scarcely out of his mouth, when Syria’s delegation staged a mass walk-out.

Sitting directly beside Ahmadinejad, Morsy said: "I am here to announce our full and just support for a free, independent Syria that supports a transition into a democratic system and that respects the will of the Syrian people for freedom and equality at the same time, preventing Syria from going into civil war or going into sectarian divisions."

It perhaps goes without saying that Iranian state media did not report the anti-Syria parts of Morsy's speech or the walk out by the Syrian delegation. Iran had pinned high hopes on Morsy's visit - the first by an Egyptian head of state in more than 30 years. The two countries have had no formal diplomatic ties since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution, because of Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Once Morsy, known as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, became president, Tehran had not only hoped to resume full diplomatic relations, but also to attract Cairo as an ally to keep the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad in power. Morsy’s speech at the NAM summit put paid to all such hopes.

So, all in all, a bad day at black rock, as far as the expectations of Iran’s leaders from the NAM summit were concerned. The event left egg on their faces, which it will take some time and effort to remove.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the subversion of the West

“Jihad and preparation for Jihad are not only for the purpose of fending-off assaults and attacks against Muslims by Allah's enemies, but are also for the purpose of realizing the great task of establishing an Islamic state, strengthening the religion and spreading it around the world..."
                     Jihad is the Way by Mustafa Mashhur
                     Leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, 1996 – 2002

“The presumption is that the duty of jihad will continue … until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule.”
                     “The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror”
                       by Prof Bernard Lewis

Who could have predicted that a little-reported civil disturbance in Tunisia just before Christmas 2010 would have produced results as cataclysmic as those we have been living through?

The ousting of Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011 set the spark to the tinder box and then, like an uncontrollable forest fire, popular action spread with extraordinary speed across the Middle East and North Africa. Who, even with the inestimable benefit of hindsight, would claim as inevitable a self-generated revolution in Egypt, causing the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak in February?

Two Arab leaders ousted, and the unprecedented revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests next swept across Libya. The Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, and killed in October 2011. Then Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in exchange for immunity from prosecution. allowed himself to be replaced as president of Yemen by Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi in February 2012.

Meanwhile the revolutionary torch was being flung from state to state, and popular demonstrations sprang up also in Algeria, Bahrain, Djibouti, Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Oman. Minor incidents occurred in Kuwait, Lebanon. Mauritania, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Western Sahara. And now we have a virtual civil war in Syria.

For decades accepted liberal Western opinion had held that the Israel-Palestine issue was the one festering sore in the Arab body politic. Solve that, nodded the wise heads, and all would be sweetness and light in the Arab world. The so-called “Arab Spring” has demonstrated that this is far from the case – that the causes of popular disaffection among the Arab masses run deep, and that the Israeli-Palestinian problem is largely irrelevant to them, concerned, as they now are, to free themselves from the shackles of repression, human rights abuses, state censorship, and the other trammels of the dictatorships or absolute monarchies under which most of them exist. For once it has not been possible for these rulers to blame the usual scapegoat, Israel, for the troubles that now beset them. Their problems are largely of their own making, and will have to be resolved without recourse to the traditional external whipping-boy.

Out of all this turmoil in the Arab world, one clear winner is emerging − the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). In both the parliamentary and the presidential elections held in Egypt following the overthrow of President Mubarak the MB won decisive victories, and President Mohamed Morsy became the first member of an Islamist party to become head-of-state of an Arab country. He was not in office long before he moved decisively to emasculate the body that had effectively ruled Egypt and was seeking to retain a degree of power – the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. The Brotherhood’s grip on the reins of power in Egypt is now tight. Other Middle East rulers may well be considering their own situations in relation to the MB.

For the Muslim Brotherhood spans the Middle East and – jumping on the bandwagon of the Arab Spring − includes contingents in Libya and Tunisia. It is also active in Jordan. It holds power in Gaza, and is seeking to overthrow Fatah, which rules the West Bank. It has the support of Islamist Turkey, while in Syria the MB-funded Tawhid Brigade is actively combating Assad’s military forces in Aleppo. Qatar and its world-wide media empire, Al-Jazeera, are firm supporters.

Nor do the MB’s activities and influence end in the Middle East. Political author Lorenzo Vidino has demonstrated how since the early 1960s, Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathisers have “moved to Europe and slowly but steadily established a wide and well-organised network of mosques, charities and Islamic organisations”. The organisation has active branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and numerous other European countries.

Why should this often stealthy, but steady and sure, expansion of influence and activity by the MB concern the Western world?

The answer lies in the basic aims and purposes of the Brotherhood. Founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, he declared quite simply: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” As a start, Al-Banna wrote that the Islamic flag must be raised again in the territories once ruled by Islam. “Thus Andalusia (Spain), Sicily, the Balkans, the Italian coast, as well as the islands of the Mediterranean…must return to the embrace of Islam.”

Seeking to bring about this Islamic aspiration through political means, the MB’s motto is: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. And death for the sake of Allah is the highest of our ambitions.”

The ambition of the Muslim Brotherhood is boundless. Its goal, stated quite openly by its leaders, is to create situations in which Sharia law can be imposed on states, which can then unite and expand. In working towards this end the organisation has demonstrated ruthlessness as well as patience, supported terrorism as well as democratic political action,.

As Vidino pointed out, the MB’s success in Europe, “their acceptance into mainstream society and their unchallenged rise to power would not have been possible had European élites been more vigilant, valued substance over rhetoric, and understood the motivations of those financing and building these Islamist organizations.”

He asks why Europeans have been so naïve.

“Bassam Tibi,” he writes, “a German professor of Syrian descent and an expert on Islam in Europe, thinks that Europeans fear the accusation of racism. Radicals in sheep's clothing have learned that they can silence almost everybody with the accusation of xenophobia. Any criticism of MB-linked organizations is followed by outcries of racism and anti-Muslim persecution.”

And so the Western world seems to be sleep-walking towards, if not positively embracing, the elimination of its own cherished freedoms and way of life. Politicians and opinion-formers seem not to care that the MB is infiltrating democratic Western countries and piggy-backing to increased power and influence in the Middle East on the back of the Arab Spring.

One organisation that seems to have realised the danger, and conceived a strategy aimed at countering this slow creep of Islamism is the "Friends of Israel Initiative" (FII), founded by former President of Spain, José María Aznar. Its members include 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, Northern Ireland's Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Lord Trimble, and former Czech President Vaclav Havel, among others.

The body was formed in 2010 with the purpose of ending the delegitimisation of Israel on the world stage, because its members perceived Israel to be an integral part of the West, a cornerstone of Western civilisation, and they judged that the weaker Israel is, the weaker the entire West will be perceived to be.

“Judeo-Christian values form the roots of our civilization,” said José Maria Aznar at the launch of the FII in the United States. “Delegitimising Israel undermines our identity, warps our values and put at risk what we are and who we are…. Defending Israel today means strengthening the West.”

Their message needs to be heeded. Israel is the exposed vanguard of the West. It needs to be protected and supported, not attacked and delegitimised, if the slow undermining of our values by the MB and its associates is be contained and reversed.

A shorter version of this article was published in the on-line Jeruslaem Post magazine on Monday 15 October 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=287904&prmusr=04aHevrCIoHcYhqnhGvfTWANLUU84CA%2fQPMxbKeAonWZrl5uThuRpEFQx1pDT9j%2f

NAM - a dangerous irrelevance

If ever there was an organization that had outlived its raison d’être, it is the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The 16th summit of NAM will be held at the end of this month under the auspices of its new chairman, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

NAM is a fossil leftover from the Cold War, and like the Cold War itself, NAM should have been consigned to the pages of history long ago. Founded in Belgrade in 1961, it was conceived as an instrument to enable states in the developing world to steer a middle course between the two superpowers of the time – the USA and the Soviet Union.

Its founding fathers were Yugoslavia’s then-president Josip Broz Tito, India’s Jarwahala Nehru, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Indonesia’s Sukarno. Like the original rationale for the movement, these leaders are long gone and the world’s geopolitical landscape has shifted radically since.

Yet even in its heyday, the movement didn’t demonstrate much logic or cohesion. Members of NAM fought each other (vide Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980) or, in clear defiance of their basic aims, lined up with one or the other of the superpowers − a situation that eventually blew up in the movement’s face when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. As a result, NAM’s member countries were split into Muslim states and those that were supported by the Soviets.

Representing the hopes of smaller, developing countries to achieve some sort of clout on the world stage, the NAM membership consists of no less than 120 nations - some 55 percent of world population. In the words of Fidel Castro, NAM’s purpose is to "struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony.”

To paraphrase Castro, this means opposition to Western values as well as a rooted opposition to the US and Israel. It is perhaps not surprising to learn that of NAM’s 120 member states, 32 states do not even recognize Israel.

Leaders such as Kim Jong Un of North Korea and Egypt’s President Mohammad Morsy have both announced their intention to attend the international summit. Following these announcements, the US State Department spokesperson opined, “Iran is going to try to manipulate the NAM summit and the attendees to advance its own agenda.”

Iran’s own “covert” agenda, of course, is to continue defying the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in its ever-accelerating quest to acquire nuclear weapons and achieve domination of the Middle East. Its “overt” agenda is to eliminate Israel from the map of the Middle East. Needless to say, if Iran succeeds in garnering support from 120 nations and 55 percent of the world’s population for either of these twin ambitions, it would deal a grievous blow to Western interests.

The scope of golden opportunities that NAM’s revolving chairmanship has afforded Iran is almost endless. And Iran will have the power to speak in the name of all NAM states over the next 3 years. In all likelihood, Iran will begin by building support from NAM countries ahead of Ahmadinejad’s slated address to the UN General Assembly in September. No doubt the president hopes to have better luck than he had in 2011 when, during the course of his diatribe, diplomats from more than a dozen countries walked out.

One would think that all of this would provide a good enough excuse for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to exclude himself from the summit. Unfortunately, Ban showed himself to be remarkably coy, and far from announcing in no uncertain terms that he would not be attending such a summit, he procrastinated for as long as possible before finally accepting the invitation to attend.

One wonders if Ban actually believes Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, who recently assured the world that the purpose of the forthcoming conference was to “eliminate world problems and help resolve ongoing crises.” One further wonders precisely which issues “central to the global agenda” will be solved in Tehran.

The statement of Seyyed Mahmoud Madani, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative, seems nearer the mark: “The world has accepted the Islamic Republic as a country that has stood up to the bullying powers and is capable of confronting them.”

Let's hope the "bullying powers" are taking note.

Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post today, 23 August:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=282339&prmusr=iq9aYf2QvwTHFnYbrma4rbMy%2fOfA2n93MJOcFRw%2beTCKYJQ7KAFkqo2r9tGo358l

Israel and Iran − a tangled tale

Relations between the Jewish people and the Persians (or Iranians, as they have become) have certainly had their ups and downs.

It may seem irrelevant to go back nearly three thousand years, but it is worth noting that on the one hand, in the Persian monarch Cyrus the Great, the Jewish people found one of their greatest friends. Some fifty years after the Babylonians had overthrown the ancient Kingdom of Judah, destroyed the first Temple and carried off the Jewish inhabitants, Cyrus conquered Babylonia. He not only allowed Jews to return to their native land, but he ordered the rebuilding of the Second Temple.

On the other hand, only half a century later, in Haman, vizier to the Persian King Ahasuerus, Jews encountered one of their greatest enemies – on a par, perhaps, with Hitler in the modern era. For like Hitler, Haman’s hatred of Jews was visceral, and he attempted to have the whole Jewish population of the far-flung Persian empire, which included Jerusalem, slaughtered – a fiendish plot thwarted by the courage of the Jewish Queen Esther and her uncle, Mordechai.

Jumping to more modern times, the ambivalence persists. From the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 until the Iranian Revolution and the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, Israel and Iran maintained close ties. After Turkey, Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel as a sovereign nation. In those early years Israel viewed Iran − a non-Arab power on the edge of the Arab world − as a natural ally, and fostered the relationship as part of the strategy favored by Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, of an alliance of the periphery.

After the Six Day War in 1967, Iran supplied Israel with a significant portion of its oil needs and Iranian oil was shipped to European markets via the joint Israeli-Iranian Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. Israeli construction firms and engineers were active in Iran, and military projects − though kept secret − are believed to have been wide-ranging, including an Iranian-Israeli attempt to develop a new missile.

A sea-change in Israeli-Iranian relations appeared to follow the ousting of the Shah in 1979 and the coming to power of the Islamist Ayatollah Khomenei, but − as in most political scenarios − all was not exactly as it seemed.

Khomenei became Supreme Leader of Iran in December 1979. Less than a year later, on 22 September 1980, Iraq launched a simultaneous invasion by air and land into Iranian territory, hoping to take advantage of the continuing chaos in the country following the revolution. One of the factors influencing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was his fear that Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority would be influenced by the Iranian revolution to rise against him. Saddam also had ambitions to replace Iran as the dominant state in the Persian Gulf.

If there was a consistent theme running through Gulf politics, it was the rabid hatred that the Khomeini régime professed for all things Israeli, which it lumped together with all things Western in general and all things American in particular. Linked to his all-encompassing enmity for the Zionist state was the Ayatollah's oft proclaimed objective to “liberate” Jerusalem. Yet it was to Iran that American and Israeli made weapons consistently found their way throughout the conflict, and the various arms for-hostages deals saw Israel acting as honest broker. Israel seemed to have adopted a clear pro Iranian stance. What could explain a country persistently supporting its declared enemy?

When the Iran Iraq conflict broke out in September 1980, most of the Arab world lined up in support of Iraq – the solid, centralist, Moslem state that had sent a fighting contingent to support the Arab cause in all the major conflicts with Israel. Syria, however, did not fall into line. Influenced, perhaps, by his long standing personal hostility to Saddam Hussein, perhaps by the ancient split between the Ba'athist parties in the two countries, Syria's President Hafez el-Assad, supported by Libya's Gaddafi, threw his weight behind Iran.

But this pro-Persian axis represented little threat to Israel. From Israel's point of view it was the pro-Iraqi line up that was the key to the situation. Iraq represented the Arab enemy – six divisions of it – and was supported by the bulk of the Arab world including Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Iran's military machine was rudimentary compared to Iraq's, and was heavily dependent on US weaponry, originally purchased by the Shah. In fact, according to the then speaker of Iran's Parliament, Ali Akbar Hashem Rafsanjani – probably the most powerful man in Iran after Khomeini – Iran had been obliged throughout the conflict to continue to buy American weapons on the open market. Israel represented an additional source of supply.

What was the thinking behind this Israeli strategy? Israeli military intelligence perceived a long term interest in keeping open channels with Iran, especially those which fostered the flow of military materials. The change of régime from Shah to Ayatollah could not, it was argued, alter the geopolitical realities. Iran did not, like Iraq, have a long history of open conflict with Israel, and in 1980, of course, the full scale nature of the Islamic fundamentalist philosophy and its translation into unrestrained revolutionary action was not yet fully appreciated. More to the point, Khomeini would not live forever and, the argument ran, his régime was unlikely to persist unaltered after his death.

So the strategy was to hold off an Iraqi victory and keep the channels with Iran open, in the hope of re establishing effective working relationships with more moderate elements, if or when they emerged − precisely the arguments now being used to justify the delaying tactic of an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Back in 1980, however, redressing the military balance in Iran's favour seemed a useful step.

However, Israel's policy, which made some sort of sense at the start of the conflict, became progressively less relevant as Iran gained the upper hand. The old argument about keeping Israel's enemies occupied in fighting each other lost its point once an Iranian victory began to seem possible.

Meanwhile Israel's reported arms sales to Iran did not go unchallenged inside Israel itself. There was a degree of public unease at the thought that the interests of Israel's arms dealers might be dictating the country's foreign policy, though cash from arms deals with Iran certainly provided a useful addition to Israel's balance of payments.

Despite continual calls for an end to the conflict by the UN Security Council, hostilities continued until August 20, 1988, when Iran announced its unconditional acceptance of a ceasefire.

By an unhappy coincidence, at the very moment the Iranians were making their announcement, an Israeli Defence Force intelligence officer was briefing the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee on the unlikelihood of an early end to the conflict. Members emerged from the committee room to a patent demonstration that the country's intelligence community had been caught napping. The committee re convened to grill senior officers about the failure. Harsh words spilled over into the media. The ashes of past intelligence errors, both of omission and of commission, were raked over. Some political analysts tried to point out the impossibility of predicting the unpredictable, but the military intelligence services had been undeniably humiliated.

Their humiliation was, if anything, deepened by the failure of events to turn out as they had predicted, for the death of Ayatollah Khomenei in June 1989 in fact made no difference. His successor, Ayatollah Khameini, was if anything even more hardline in his Islamist fervour and his anti-Israel rhetoric.

And yet, a recent article by David Blair in the London Daily Telegraph suggests that, just as Iran and Israel had a covert relationship for much of the Eighties, so one should be in existence today.

Writing of the 1980s, Blair says: “The back channel between Israel and Iran was handled by David Kimche, a former deputy head of the Mossad, who was then director general of the Israeli foreign ministry. For years," claims Blair, "Kimche held secret meetings with the Islamic republic’s leaders, sometimes in European cities, sometimes in Tehran. Even after his official retirement from government service in 1989, Kimche remained a regular visitor to Tehran."

To cope with the threat of an Israeli, and possibly an American, strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, Blair writes: "we must hope that two carefully chosen interlocutors, one American 'mountain climber' and one Iranian (and, who knows, perhaps even an Israeli) are meeting regularly in a neutral setting.

"Their talks," he adds, "would be entirely secret. And quite right too."

If such a back channel is indeed open and functioning, it would certainly represent yet another unexpected twist in the tangled tale of Israeli-Iranian relations.

Israel considers

This letter was published in the London Daily Telegraph today, 21 August 2012

Sir
     I can assure Professor Wade Mansell (Letters, August 20), that the debate here in Israel about the pros and cons of a possible pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities is intense. Iran’s leaders are committed to wiping Israel from the map. Only on Sunday Ayatollah Khamenei categorised Israel as a “cancerous tumour”; on Friday President Ahmadinejad declared that Israel was an “insult to humanity” that needed to be wiped out. A government’s main duty is to protect its citizens, and Israel has learned that it can rely on no other nation to do so. Nevertheless, voices within Israel urging caution are strong. Meanwhile, in anticipation of a possible use by Iran of chemical weapons, gas masks are being issued to all who want them.
     Yours
     Neville Teller

A nuclear Iran - how does Israel respond?

Rafsanjani is a name that has a familiar ring to it, but I suspect is difficult for most people to pinpoint. In fact, he is a predecessor of Iran's President Ahmadinejad, serving from 1989 to 1997.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani enjoyed a rather colorful career. He was elected chairman of the Iranian parliament around the time that the Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1980, and he served in that office until its cessation in 1988. Throughout that time he was also the de facto commander-in-chief of the Iranian military. In 1989 he stood as president.

During most of his time in office he was as hard-line on both the subject of Israel and Iran’s development of nuclear weapons as his current successor, Ahmadinejad. Since then, though, he has become increasingly estranged from the ruling junta in general, and Ayatollah Khamenei in particular. He has repeatedly made it known that he is in disagreement with the leader over how the country is run.

Last January his daughter, Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former MP and a critic of the government, was sentenced to six months in prison for "making propaganda against the ruling system". Her trial took place behind closed doors, and according to the website Mashregh News, she has been banned from taking part in political, cultural and media activities for five years.

Nor is this the only brush the Rafsanjanis have had with the government. Efat Maraashi, Rafsanjani's wife, was the first person, in an interview on the day of the disputed 2009 presidential election, to order the people to take to the streets if the vote was rigged. A group of senior members of Rafsanjani's party, including Hossein Maraashi, Mrs Rafsanjani's cousin, were detained after the elections.

In Rafsanjani’s famous Friday Prayer sermon, which coincided with the 2009 summer protests. he called for national reconciliation, the release of political prisoners and freedom of the press. That there were an estimated 1.5 million worshippers attending that Friday Prayer was a bitter pill for Khamenei to swallow. In January, Rafsanjani's official website was blocked by the Iranian judiciary for its refusal to remove the transcription of the sermon.

So it would appear that Rafsanjani is his own man, and not afraid to speak his mind. In February 1987 Rafsanjani addressed Iran's Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), in an astonishingly frank manner about Iran’s intentions in the nuclear field:

Regarding atomic energy, we need it now... Our nation has always been threatened from outside. The least we can do to face this danger is to let our enemies know that we can defend ourselves. Therefore, every step you take here is in defense of your country and your evolution. With this in mind, you should work hard and at great speed.

In a speech given in December 2001 he was equally candid:

If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.

Last week, Haaretz correspondent Ari Shavit published an interview with a key figure in Israel’s security establishment, in which the dilemma for Israel was clearly spelled out:

What does Rafsanjani say? He says that between the Muslim world and Israel there is no balance, and therefore there will also be no balance of deterrence. Israel is not … Japan, that absorbed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and within 15 years became a world power. Israel is a one-bomb state. After a single atom bomb, it will no longer be what it was or what it was meant to be. A single atom bomb is enough to finish off the Zionist story. In contrast, says Rafsanjani, the Muslim world has a billion and a half people and dozens of countries. Even if Israel strikes back hard at the country that dispatched the bomb, Islam will remain intact. A nuclear war will not make the Muslim world disappear, but it will do irreparable damage to Israel.

For this security expert, these words seems to be enough to spell out the necessity for Israel to take unilateral military action against Iran – not to wipe out its nuclear programme, mind, for that would be impossible, but at least to postpone its ultimate objective of producing a nuclear missile capable of reaching Tel Aviv for a couple of years. In those 2 years, he adjudges, the basic interests of the international community regarding Iran will not change, and so the continued combination of sanctions, diplomatic pressure and the intelligence battle will greatly increase the odds that the Iranian regime will fall before Iran goes nuclear. He did not specify whether he looked to Rafsanjani as a key figure in engineering a change of régime, but it is worth noting that Rafsanjani and his family have become progressively alienated from the government, and he is too powerful a figure in the country to be simply crushed.
.
That is the expert's judgement, but it is as suspect as the options of doing nothing, or waiting to co-ordinate action with the Americans, when the time comes that the necessity to do so overwhelms them. But there is no evidence available in the public arena that Israel is indeed able, by means of military strikes, to delay the Iranian nuclear program by two years – or, for that matter, at all – especially when the political fallout for military action is so enormous.

Which is not, of course, any reason for Israel to sit on its haunches while the nation that is dedicated to wiping it from the pages of history prepares to do so. Nor, we may be assured, is Israel doing so. What is thus called for is coordination, timing, and intensive diplomatic activity involving the numerous nation states – many of them Muslim − that greatly fear Iran’s intentions.

Back in September 2010, the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) published a well-documented report detailing concerns in Kuwait and the Gulf over the threat currently posed by Iran to them. “More and more voices in the Kuwaiti press and public,” it reported, “describe Iran as a threat to the security and stability of the Gulf states.” This it ascribes to “events, reports, assessments, and rumors regarding hostile Iranian activity in the Gulf.”

Among these it lists: the discovery of a money laundering operation in Bahrain connected to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC); the arrest of 250 operatives in Bahrain suspected of membership in terror cells, and reports that similar cells exist in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; the uncovering of an Iranian espionage network in Kuwait; reports about Iranian plans to occupy the Gulf states and to assassinate senior military commanders and media figures in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf and in Lebanon; and assessments that Iran's influence in the region will grow in the wake of the US withdrawal from Iraq. “The sense of threat generated by all these factors,” states the report, “is compounded by the advances in Iran's nuclear program.”

As a result, the Institute reports, columnists and public figures in Kuwait are united in their assessment that Iran intends to take over the Gulf States, and are speculating about the nature of this takeover, how it might be implemented, and ways to address the threat.

Iranian-Israeli political analyst, Meir Javedanfar, believes that Iran is worried not only by the possibility of a military strike by Israel, but also by the Israeli government’s ability to justify it. As Javedanfar sees it, if Israel had a consensus of world opinion on its side, this would severely curtail Iran’s ability to justify its own retaliation. The State of Israel, he concludes, should not forget that it “has the diplomatic option of significantly hurting the regime in Tehran.”

Let us hope wise counsels within the Israeli government are noting this sort of advice as well as the more gung-ho voices that may be louder, but not necessarily more perceptive. Back then the world ignored Rafsanjani’s frightening decrees, but now it’s time for the world to realize that the same mistake cannot be repeated with his successor.

Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post 15 August, under the title "Radical then, radical now."

http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=281302&prmusr=2VjB1H7OXi3BPS6jiACcq2%2f1bVPCbFp6gEiwaiwepVaSENFEkKXJoax13so7mMLo

Differing dreams

This letter appears in the Jerusalem Post today, 14 August 2012

Sir
I know, I suspect you know, and Martin Sherman certainly knows, that the ultimate dream of Palestinian leaders, “moderate” and extremist alike, is an Israel-free Middle East (“The alchemy of Palestinian nationhood” Into the Fray August 10). As he points out, there is no secret about it. In paying lip-service to the two-state solution, and even perhaps working towards it, any Palestinian leader would still have his eye on the eventual goal.

But then, as Sherman does not point out, much of the liberal Western world believes that many Israeli politicians, and perhaps up to 50 per cent of the Israeli public, dream of a Greater Israel which incorporates the whole of Judea and Samaria − and perhaps chunks of Lebanon and Jordan, to boot − within its boundaries.

Sherman asks why Israel’s leadership has been unable to expose the two state solution as a flimsy falsehood. He does not ask why the members of the Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia), both individually and collectively, endorse it, nor why much of the rest of the Western world goes along with it as well. The fact of the matter is that, no matter how deviously attained, the case for a sovereign Palestinian state has been made, as far as the majority of liberal opinion is concerned.

Politics is a hand-to-mouth kind of business. Ultimate objectives are rarely attainable, let alone attained. Whatever the differing dreams of the principals in peace negotiations might be, the achievement of an agreement would create such a totally new situation that all bets about the possible future would be off. Provided sufficient safeguards were built into the terms of the accord, a two-state solution might indeed provide Israelis and Palestinians with the peace, and the chance to live normal lives, that both sides in the dispute crave.

Neville Teller