The fight for the West Bank

Over and above Israel's "Pillar of Defense" action against Hamas, the Palestinian body politic itself is engaged in a fratricidal struggle for the hearts and minds of the Palestinian “man-in-the-street”.

In one corner sits the Fatah party, which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA) and is the effective government of the Palestinian area of the West Bank. Its leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, whatever his ultimate ambitions may be, declares himself in favour of a negotiated peace settlement with Israel based on a two-state solution.

In the other corner, in volatile and belligerent mood, crouches Hamas, which seized power in the Gaza strip in 2007 and has been the de facto government there ever since. Hamas refuses to recognise the State of Israel, condemns any peace settlement which does so, and believes in “the armed struggle” designed to remove Israel from the map of the Middle East.

Whether the two groups are all that far apart in their ultimate objectives is a moot point, for Fatah’s official emblem portrays crossed rifles and a hand grenade superimposed on a map of the old Mandate Palestine, with no indication of Israel’s existence. Not surprising, perhaps, since the word “Fatah” means “conquest by means of jihad.”

Yet Fatah and Hamas are in a fight, perhaps to the death, for ultimate control of the Palestinian cause.

Fatah, founded in the early 1960s by Yasser Arafat, initially concentrated on terrorist raids on civilian Israeli targets. In 1968 it took over control of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (the PLO), and it was the PLO that was party to the peace negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995.

The original idea was that the Accords would last for a five-year interim period, during which a permanent agreement would be negotiated. In fact, they are still the effective basis of the governance of the West Bank.

If the PA can claim legitimacy, the same cannot be said of its president, Mahmoud Abbas. His status is challenged, indeed denied, by Hamas.

Abbas, who became president of the PA in 2005, was elected to serve until 9 January 2009. But as the time drew close, Fatah and Hamas were unable to agree the details of new elections. So the due date came and went, and Abbas, by diktat, extended his presidential term for a further year.

When this second deadline also expired without a further election, the PLO simply declared that Abbas would remain president until new elections, whenever that may be. Hamas refused to recognise this indefinite extension, or to regard Abbas as legitimate president. So the de facto Hamas government in the Gaza strip declared that in their view Aziz Duwaik, Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council since January 2006, was acting PA President. Duwaik won his spurs, in Hamas’s eyes, by having served a three-year term in an Israeli jail for his involvement with the terrorist organisation.

And still no date has been fixed for new Palestinian elections. Details would need to be agreed between Fatah and Hamas, and the two bodies seem further apart than ever.

Hamas, always seeking to extend its power base beyond Gaza to the West Bank, has been emboldened by a number of factors. The Arab Spring, and especially its outcome in Egypt with the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), boosted its self-confidence, for Hamas is itself an offshoot of the Egyptian MB. President Morsi may not have become a second Ahmadinejad, endorsing the most extreme of terrorist activities against Israel − indeed, rather the reverse − but Hamas’s direct and indirect support of jihadist actions in Sinai and out of the Gaza strip, have increased since his election.

More recently, responsibility for the continuous barrage of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza is being claimed by a new grouping of extremist Sunni Islamists, the Mujahideen Shura Council of Jerusalem (MSC). Hamas appears content - for the moment, at least - to turn a blind eye to their activities, and those of other salafist jihadis operating from within Gaza, since they boost Hamas's credibility with their own constituency.

Then, President Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad have been facing major internal problems in the West Bank. With the rising cost of living as the catalyst, riots have been occurring throughout the West Bank. Dozens of police officers and civilians were injured in clashes involving several thousand protesters, roads were blocked by burning tyres and rubbish bins, and strikes by taxi and bus drivers paralysed the West Bank's public transport system. Palestinian security forces, who kept a low profile during the first days of demonstrations, began using teargas and stun grenades to disperse demonstrators.

Battening on these propitious signs, Hamas has recently stepped up its activities in the West Bank aimed at challenging the Fatah government, both by direct action, and perhaps via elections, if or when they eventually occur. It has been infiltrating supporters into the West Bank, recruiting university students through a program called "Kutla," which entails spreading jihadi ideology among them and, through its “Da'wa” social aid program mixed with indoctrination, attempting to enhance its standing among the general population. Last week Israeli security forces arrested around 30 Hamas activists in the Ramallah area, suspected of heading a command cell aimed at increasing the strength of Hamas in the West Bank.

The PA itself, equally opposed to Hamas’s attempts to increase its influence in the West Bank, arrested dozens of Hamas activists in the area in September. For Mahmoud Abbas realizes that until he prevails in this struggle with Hamas, he stands on the world stage with one arm tied behind his back. When he addresses the UN General Assembly later this month, he will be speaking only for West Bank Palestinians; his writ does not run in an integral part of any future Palestinian state. The fight against Hamas is one conflict he simply cannot afford to lose.

The paramount question for Abbas is, how does he regain control of Gaza?

Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post magazine, 15 November 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=292046&prmusr=LeH8jE5CC%2bWVYGZSJdcClsFH%2fpZVDuhhgqzf%2fooZBSW7T1i2W4OOKREYIUVQNh5D

A secret Palestinian peace deal

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas created something of a stir recently by declaring in a TV interview that he had given up the idea of returning to his home town Safed. He also said, quite unequivocally, “I believe that the West Bank and Gaza is Palestine, and the other parts are Israel.”

His remarks were treated with the usual scepticism by opponents of the two-state solution. But he had been equally clear when, in October, he met with representatives from the three leading Israeli political parties - Kadima, Labour and Likud − who support the Geneva Initiative.

“I could have made peace with Olmert,” Abbas is reported to have said “We reached agreement on all the core issues. I’m sure that if negotiations had continued, within two months we would have reached an agreement.”

He was referring to the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks, initiated amid high hopes in Annapolis on 27 November 2007. And what he probably had in mind was the fact that those talks spawned not one, but two potential peace deals, before they finally collapsed in December 2008, in the wake of Israel's strike against the Hamas régime in the Gaza Strip.

One of the deals was the well-publicised offer from Ehud Olmert, made in the dying days of his premiership. The other – little referred to in the media, but revealed in an interview in April 2009 by chief PA negotiator, Saeb Erekat – was a far-reaching, written peace proposal submitted by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the Israeli government during the final days of the Bush administration. In his interview. Erekat disclosed that he made a secret trip to Washington on 18 December 2008 in order to present a copy of the document to President George W Bush.

Parallelling each other in recriminations, Abbas claims that he asked Israeli premier, Ehud Olmert, to reply to this secret proposal in writing, but Olmert failed to do so. Olmert makes precisely the same charge against Abbas. In an interview in November 2009 he said that he showed Abbas a map embodying the full offer he had made for territorial compromise on both sides. Abbas wanted to take the map away. Olmert agreed, so long as they both signed it. It was from Olmert's point of view, a final offer, not a basis for future negotiation. But Abbas could not commit. Instead, he said he would come with experts the next day.

"But," said Olmert, "the next day Saeb Erekat rang my adviser and said: ‘we forgot we are going to Amman today, let's make it next week.’ I never saw him again."

The details of Olmert's final offer are well known. The territorial solution would start from the situation obtaining on the ground just prior to the Six Day War, but modifications on both sides would allow Israel to keep the biggest Jewish settlement blocks, including some suburbs of Jerusalem. This would have involved Israel claiming about 6.4 % of Palestinian territory in the West Bank. In return there would be a swap of land to the Palestinians from Israel as it existed before 1967.

"I showed Abu Mazen how this would work to maintain the contiguity of the Palestinian state," said Olmert "I also proposed a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza. It would have been a tunnel fully controlled by the Palestinians but not under Palestinian sovereignty, otherwise it would have cut the state of Israel in two."

Olmert's solution for Jerusalem was for the city to be shared – Jewish neighbourhoods to be under Jewish sovereignty, Arab neighbourhoods under Palestinian sovereignty so that they could be the capital of a Palestinian state. As for the sites within the old city sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians, they would be jointly administered by five nations: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the United States.

The Palestinian right of return would be resolved by Israel accepting an agreed number of Palestinians − 1,000 a year for five years was suggested. “In addition,” said Olmert, “we talked about creating an international fund that would compensate Palestinians for their suffering."

For his part, Saeb Erekat, speaking of the proposal submitted by Abbas, said that it dealt with all the core issues of the conflict, including Jerusalem and borders. Given the extent and depth of the negotiations between Olmert and Abbas during 2008, the two plans could not have been that far apart. And indeed, in his interview, Erekat claimed that it was the "most advanced offer" ever made by Palestinians, echoing Olmert's similar claim from the Israeli side.

“There was a proposal of Mr Olmert.” said Erekat. “There was a proposal from President Abbas. I went to the US secretly and handed over what we proposed in writing. History will show that President Abbas is a man of courage and commitment. We no longer need negotiations. We need decisions.”

His implication is clear. The two parties had been within a whisker of reaching an historic agreement. The spade work has in fact been done. Why reinvent the wheel?

One good reason might be that much water has flowed under the bridge since 2008, and that the Middle East has become a very different place. If actually resurrected and put to their respective constituencies, would either proposal now stand up to democratic scrutiny?

So yes, the bare bones of a final agreement are probably in place. The trick would lie in putting flesh on the bones and then, trusting the outcome is no Frankenstein's monster, breathing life into it.

Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post magazine, 12 November 2012: http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=291479&prmusr=7D98BKR9FaYJKYn5WLe6cLuANtGZxcq2bLTh7XpgT/Ctc0Ghc0XYVUFQx1pDT9j/

The leaked Palestine Papers – round two

Many a true word is spoken in jest.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they remain the same) is a witty epigram from the pen of one-time editor of Le Figaro, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr. It sums up the feeling of déja vu generated by the flurry of excitement over Mahmoud Abbas’s recent interview on Israel’s TV Channel Two.

The President of the Palestinian Authority was born in Safed, in northern Galilee. In 1948 he and his family left for Syria during the Israel-Arab conflict. During the TV interview Abbas said that he had visited Safed once − “but I want to see Safed. It’s my right to see it. But not to live there.”

The Palestinians have long demanded that Israel grant the ‘right of return’ for Palestinians to land and property situated in Israel that they or their families lived on prior to 1948. Abbas’s comments during the interview have been generally regarded as a more flexible stance on the issue.

Israel’s President Shimon Peres commented that his “courageous words prove that Israel has a real partner for peace.” Former prime minister Ehud Olmert, said that his words “should prove to the Israeli public that we do have someone to talk to and we can negotiate.” Former foreign minister Tzipi Livni said: “these are the statements we heard in the negotiating room.”

What Tzipi Livni was referring to, and what all three had in mind, were the years of painstaking step-by-step negotiations that culminated in the oh-so-near agreement of 2008 between then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas – the innermost details of which were revealed to the world when a huge collection of secret documents suddenly became public in January 2011. They became known as the “Palestine Papers”.

Between 23 and 26 January 2011 thousands of secret documents, generated during peace talks between IsraeI and the Palestinians over the ten years 1999 to 2010, were published by Al-Jazeera. In order to protect its source, Al-Jazeera redacted sensitive portions, but it was strongly suspected that the whole cache of nearly 1,700 files − which included minutes of meetings, e-mails, 153 reports, 54 maps and no less than 64 draft agreements − had been leaked to Al-Jazeera by a former disgruntled member of the Negotiations Support Unit headed by Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat.

The documents obtained by Al-Jazeera were shared in advance of publication with the UK newspaper The Guardian − notorious for its anti-Israel stance − in an effort to ensure the wider availability of their content. Taken as a whole, the leaked papers revealed how far negotiations had gone in reaching agreement on the major issues at stake for both parties. In particular, perhaps, they demonstrated that the realistic two-state solution under consideration had largely settled the border issue and superseded the call for “a right of return” of some 5 million Palestinians.

The Guardian chose to portray the slow, painstaking process of negotiating a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a major betrayal of the Palestinian cause. It went to town castigating the Palestinian leadership as “weak and craven” for offering concession after concession to the Israelis, surrendering “land which the Palestinians have lived on for centuries.”

“Plus ça change…” The Guardian’s take on Mahmoud Abbas’s recent TV interview was to repeat the charge that the Palestinian cause was being betrayed. Their headline read: “Mahmoud Abbas outrages Palestinian refugees by waiving his right of return,” and their story was accompanied by a picture of a giant Abbas photograph being burned by so-called “Palestinian refugees”, though the five indistinct figures portrayed do not appear particularly outraged.

The newspaper asserts that “the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is facing widespread condemnation and anger in the Palestinian territories and abroad after he publicly waived his right to return to live in the town from which his family was forced to flee in 1948.”

To counter Abbas’s further statement: “I believe that the West Bank and Gaza is Palestine and the other parts are Israel,” the Guardian quotes Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas ruler in Gaza: "No one has the right, whoever he is … to give up an inch of Palestinian land," and Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, who said the president's statement did "not represent in any way the views of the Palestinian people".

Condemned for procrastinating and condemned for acting, castigated as hard-line and castigated for softening his line, harried by activists in the West Bank and harried by Hamas in Gaza, it seems as though Abbas simply cannot do the right thing. There is always some vested interest that will never be satisfied. Perhaps that’s part of what makes the Palestine-Israel dispute one of the most intractable in modern history.


Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post magazine, 8 November 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=291045&prmusr=kKzCmF46zE4u76Zn8D8REUMJbvVct%2by8ih1nAcgTG851%2fkOcH6uULdGaMAzTOnKQ

Talking Turkey and the EU

It was in April 1987 that Turkey knocked on the EU’s door and asked to be let in. Twenty-five years later, Turkey is still lingering on the threshold.

One key factor barring the way to Turkey’s full membership occurred many years before it applied.

The population of Cyprus has historically consisted of about 75 per cent Greek and 25 per cent Turkish origin. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Greek Cypriots began to press for Enosis − union with Greece. Matters came to a head in 1974 when the military junta then controlling Greece staged a coup in Cyprus and deposed the president. Five days later, Turkey invaded and seized the northern portion of the island. The Turkish invasion ended in the partition of Cyprus along a UN-monitored Green Line. In 1983 the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus declared independence. Turkey is the only country in the world which recognises it.

Greece itself was admitted to the EU as far back as 1981; Cyprus (the portion, that is, not occupied by Turkey) became a full member in 2004. So one major stumbling block to Turkey’s accession is the fact that the country is at daggers drawn with two established EU members.

But that is only one stumbling block among several. Also to be considered is the direction that Turkey has been taking on the international scene since its current government came to power.

From the time Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister in 2003, Turkey's old secularist, pro-Western stance began to change, and support for Iran and the Islamist terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah began to dominate Turkey's approach to foreign affairs.

Erdogan, a charismatic politician, acquired his pro-Islamist sympathies while still at university. In 1998, when mayor of Istanbul, they earned him a conviction for inciting religious hatred, and he went to jail for several months. All the same, in 2002 his Islamist AKP party won a landslide victory in the elections, and Erdogan became prime minister.

Rooted as he is in hard-line Islamism, Erdogan's unqualified condemnation of Israel's incursion into Gaza in November 2008 came as no great surprise. Nor did his refusal to accept the 2011 UN report into the Mavi Marmara affair, which concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza strip was legal, and raised "serious questions about the conduct, true nature and objectives of the flotilla organizers, particularly IHH” – a Turkish Islamist organisation supported by the government.

A report on Israel-Turkey relations prepared by the Centre for Political Research concluded that: "for Erdogan, Israel-bashing is a way of bolstering his status with Islamic and Middle Eastern states, which Turkey would like to lead."

An Islamist axis led by Turkey? Only a few years ago the idea would scarcely have been feasible. Today the mere possibility represents one further obstacle on Turkey’s path towards full membership of the EU. For there is rooted opposition among a tranche of EU members to the very idea of clutching an Islamist viper to their Judeo-Christian bosom.

Chief among them is Germany. “Accepting Turkey to the EU is out of the question,” said Angela Merkel in 2009, and there is no reason to believe that she has changed her mind. Her chief of staff, Ronald Pofalla, said on his website: “I ask myself how a country that discriminates against Christian churches could be a member of the EU.” The most that German opinion-leaders would like to offer Turkey is “privileged partnership” in the EU.

France under president Nicolas Sakozy was equally rooted in its opposition to Turkey’s accession. With the change of president to socialist François Hollande, Turkey hoped, in the words of Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu, that “a new course in Turkish-EU relations will gain momentum”. But Hollande, during his presidential election campaign, said that while France has long accepted the principle of Turkish accession to the EU, major conditions have not been met and may not happen for several years.

Austria – perhaps recalling that Muslim forces of the Ottoman empire twice stood at the very gates of Vienna, beseiging the city − have proved strong opponents to Turkey’s entry to the EU. The USA and the UK, on the other hand, with shorter memories, apparently discount the threat that Islamism poses to the West and remain strong supporters of Turkey’s bid.

But is Turkey as committed to joining the EU as it once was? After all, Turkey’s economy is booming, while the EU is in dire financial straits. Moreover, Kristina Karasu, writing in Der Speigel, points out that following the AKP’s overwhelming re-election in June 2011, Turkish desire for reforms has stalled.

“Even as Prime Minister Erdogan likes to position his country in the Arab world as a role model for Muslim democracy,” she writes, “thousands of Kurds, students and more than 100 journalists are sitting in jail in Turkey based on what are sometimes absurd charges.”

For the Turkish bid to be successful, EU member states must unanimously agree. In December 2011, a poll carried out across Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the UK, revealed that 71 percent of those surveyed were opposed to the EU admitting Turkey as a full member.

A hesitant bridegroom and a bashful bride. The prospect of an early marriage is not bright.

Published in the online Jerusalem Post magazine, 1 November 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=290134&prmusr=vGyFx8wnu5nh7fgDD%2fTY0R%2ftGf3p%2bMvaPrUYHf7X2WB59NqSJPYJZXT02LqhGLgh

The Latin American anti-Israel nexus

36 member nations of the UN General Assembly do not recognise Israel.  Most are what might be termed “the usual suspects” − states with Muslim majorities ranging down the alphabet from Afghanistan to Yemen. A thought-provoking exception to the standard pattern is provided by four countries situated south of the United States − Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

What binds these four rejectionist Latin American states in their anti-Israel stance? One factor is long-standing opposition to the domination of the region by their super-power northern neighbour, the USA; a second is the stirring of this pot by a mischief-making Iran intent on advancing its own global strategy.

Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in August 2005, Iran has been engaged in extending and strengthening its relations with vulnerable Latin American states. Chief among these have been Venezuela and Bolivia, though Nicaragua, Cuba and also Ecuador have been on their shopping list. To gain political, economic, cultural and religious influence in the region, Iran has been using every opportunity to exploit these countries’ desire to combat what they see as “American imperialism”.

Ahmadinejad found a willing disciple in the shape of Hugo Chávez, who had been president of Venezuela since 1999 and whose policies from the start were defiantly anti-American. Iran’s visceral hatred of Israel, the US’s solid ally in the Middle East, was easily implanted in him. Venezuela severed relations with Israel in 2008 in the wake of Israel’s incursion into Gaza to counter Hamas’s continual rocket attacks. Since then Chavez’s anti-Israel pronouncements have become increasingly paranoid. At a rally in June 2010, he announced: “Israel is financing the Venezuelan opposition. There are even groups of Israeli terrorists, of the Mossad, who are after me trying to kill me.”

As for Cuba, its long-lasting stand-off with the United States made it a prime target for Iran’s wider strategy in the region. Anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist attitudes, common in communist regimes, were present in Cuba from the start of their Revolution in 1959. Approximately 94 percent of Cuba’s Jewish population fled after the Revolution, Those that remained found themselves discriminated against, along with other religious groupings, though in a curious and anomalous twist, protection against national, religious and racial hate was also a part of the Cuban criminal code.

Overt anti-Israel sentiment came to the fore in Cuba’s foreign policy just before the 1973 Yom Kippur war. In September 1973 Fidel Castro embraced both Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat at the fourth Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Algiers, and formally broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. Next year Castro invited Arafat to Cuba, and provided advance training for the Palestine Liberation Organisation and other Palestinian military organizations.

Opposing Israel became one outlet through which Fidel Castro could express his hatred of the power concentrated in the United States. Little has changed in that respect since Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, took over the presidency. Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, in his whistle-stop tour of Latin America in January 2012 which, as well as Cuba, took in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Ecuador, made that clear enough.

As far as Nicaragua is concerned, it was the accession of the Sandanista junta in July 1979 that changed a close and flourishing relationship with Israel − and, indeed, with the United States − to fierce hostility. The Sandanistas took Marx and Engels as the source of their political philosophy. In 1982 the Sandinista government severed diplomatic relations with Israel, but with the ousting of the Sandinista regime in 1990, ties with Israel were restored.

All the same, Iran began reaching out politically to Nicaragua, actively supporting the Sandanista’s efforts to regain power. Finally, in the elections of November 2006, Sandanista Daniel Ortega became President for the second time. Ahmadinejad traveled to Managua to attend his inauguration. In June 2008, Ahmadinejad hosted Ortega in Tehran to discuss ways to increase their countries’ cooperation. It was following the Mavi Marmara incident, on 2 June 2010, that Nicaragua again broke off all relations with Israel.

Where Bolivia is concerned, reasonably harmonious diplomatic relations with Israel ended with the elections of December 2005, the triumph of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), and its leader, Evo Morales, becoming President. Bolivian politician and journalist José Brechner has described Morales as: “the classic barbarian leader similar to those of other times, but with foreign support.”

Brechner records how Morales initiated his friendship with the Muslim world well before he came to power − he was the proud recipient of the Gadaffi Award, and the Libyan dictator’s “Green Book” became his new bible. The old one was soon discarded once he came to power, as he cosied up to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs from Iran.

Slavishly imitating Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Morales broke first with the United States in 2008, and then with Israel in June 2010.

In late May 2009, a secret dossier drafted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry on Iran’s activities in Latin America was leaked to the press. The report claimed that “since Ahmadinejad’s rise to power, Tehran has been promoting an aggressive policy aimed at bolstering its ties with Latin American countries with the declared goal of ‘bringing America to its knees.’”

Recognising or not recognising Israel is only one move of a pawn in this larger game being played out between a Latin America nexus, backed by its Islamist games-master, and its powerful northern neighbour.

Published in the online Jerusalem Post magazine, 28 October 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=289546&prmusr=%2fQM7Pejzu9hu4B3U4B3weHxyjEwNIHF0MzjLdxsivIdxeLWQrKlxvax13so7mMLo

Palestinians' bid to recognise Israel

Later this year, on 29 November, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), plans to ask the UN General Assembly to vote on recognizing Palestine as a sovereign state within the pre-1967 borders. If successful, this would have the effect of upgrading the PA delegation at the United Nations from non-member ‘observer entity’ to non-member ‘observer State’. The PA hopes that the convincing majority which the make-up of the General Assembly guarantees it, will pave the way for widespread recognition of a Palestinian state.

But an intriguing anomaly lies at the heart of Abbas’s projected bid.

In their zealous backing for the Palestinian cause, do all the supportive nations fully appreciate the implications of recognizing a Palestinian state within pre-1967 borders? For, simply put, the corollary of a sovereign Palestine within 1967 borders is a sovereign Israel outside them.

Hamas, the de facto government of the Gaza strip – an integral element in any future Palestinian state − understands completely the implications of what Abbas proposes to do, and is totally opposed to it. Hamas utterly rejects the concept of two states in the Holy Land. It believes there should be just one − a fundamentalist Islamist state, with Israel eliminated from the map of the Middle East.

To be brutally honest, that is probably what Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party also want (Abbas has been pictured on a number of occasions next to a map of the old British Mandate Palestine surmounted by the Palestinian flag, and with no mention of Israel; he has, moreover, said many times that he will never acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state). It is only that the Fatah-led PA choose to reach their ultimate objective by more devious means than total refusal to recognize the existence of the “enemy” while simultaneously pursuing armed resistance to it.

Some 36 countries represented in the UN General Assembly, not all of them with Muslim majorities, are more in sympathy with Hamas than with Fatah, for they do not recognize Israel as a state. They range from Algeria to Venezuala, Bolivia to Pakistan. Moreover, Egypt’s new president is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an extreme Islamist organization supported by Hamas. Turkey supports the Brotherhood. So does Libya and Tunisia. So does Hezbollah, lodged firmly in Lebanon’s body politic.

Do these and like-minded states actually appreciate that support for a sovereign Palestine in a two-state solution is support for the sovereignty of Israel? And if they do, how many will oppose Abbas’s bid for recognition? My guess is none, for all believe that in granting Abbas the recognition he seeks, they will be giving Israel a poke in the eye. And how many will follow through the logic of Palestinian recognition of Israel by doing so themselves? Unfortunately, logic is not in great supply in international diplomacy.

The fact is Abbas is not only fighting for recognition of a Palestinian state; he is fighting a rearguard action against Hamas to retain control of the West Bank.

When Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, the idea was that Abbas as PA President, would call free and fair elections across the Palestinian body politic. The elections gave Hamas 74 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, and the ruling Fatah party 45. Without an overall majority, President Abbas accordingly formed a national unity government led by Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

But sharing power with Fatah 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. Abbas responded by dissolving the national unity government and forming an emergency government led by Salam Fayyad, based in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Efforts at reconciliation between the two power blocs within the Palestinian body politic began as early as 2008, but they consistently failed. All such efforts are attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable. For in Hamas’s eyes, Abbas’s peace initiatives − ineffective though they have been − have placed the PA beyond the pale. Hamas remains what it has always been – an extreme Islamist and terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel. It is also committed to winning the power struggle within the Palestinian body politic, overcoming Fatah, and taking control of the whole of the Palestinian entity.

So Abbas, in making his UN bid, will be speaking only for West Bank Palestinians, and only for those prepared − for the present at least − to live alongside a sovereign Israel. Of course, in by-passing face-to-face negotiations and taking unilateral action, Abbas will have thrown a spanner in the diplomatic works of the peace process. Every agreement between the two sides, including the Oslo Accords which currently govern relations between them, has at its heart the premise that negotiations between the parties is the only acceptable path to a settlement.

Abbas has embarked on a perilous journey. If he gets his UN recognition for a sovereign Palestine within the 1967 boundaries, he will ipso facto have confirmed Palestinian recognition of Israel. He is gambling that a PA success at the UN will, in the eyes of the Palestinian man-in-the-street, out-trump Hamas’s persistent refusal to recognize Israel or relinquish its indiscriminate rocket attacks on the civilian population. For the battle against Hamas is one battle that Abbas must win.

It’s a long shot.

Published in the on-line Jerusalem Post magazine on Monday, 22 October 2012:
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/Article.aspx?id=288794&prmusr=KSPJwKgC4VZRA6oHteb%2b7LCG9eaOIgxLqJ%2buckPbx4uA3nUD%2fkDMvhEYIUVQNh5D

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.