Terror in Sinai

       For what is formally a demilitarized zone, the Sinai peninsular has recently been the scene of some exceptionally ferocious military activity. 

       The obligation to keep the peninsular demilitarized was laid on Egypt by the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, as a corollary of the requirement on Israel to withdraw completely.  Since 1981 these stipulations, together with the other provisions of the treaty, have been monitored by an international peacekeeping force set up by agreement between the US, Egypt and Israel. 

       The Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) is a 13-nation organisation of well over 1500 personnel, with a remit to “supervise the implementation of the security provisions of the Egyptian-Israeli Treaty of Peace and employ best efforts to prevent any violation of its terms."  Headquartered in Rome, it has developed a complex military command and institutional structure – so elaborate, that it issues its own medals to all personnel who complete a 6-month stint in the Sinai.  It does not, apparently, issue medals for gallantry in action – which is just as well, for it would have little cause to do so. The MFO has been conspicuous for its lack of visibility in the past few months.

       It is, in fact, difficult to conceive precisely what role the MFO envisages for itself in current circumstances where, ever since Egypt’s president Mohamed Morsi was toppled, militant groups have been killing members of the police, soldiers and civilians on a daily basis in the Sinai peninsular.  The last entry on the “News” page of the MFO’s impressive multi-page website is the fact that on April 9, 2013 Australia became a donor to the organisation.  Nothing about how, early last week, two Egyptian soldiers were shot and killed near the town of Sheikh Zawid.  Or that on  August 8 terrorists attempted to bomb a police training base in El Arish – fortunately  the bombs detonated earlier than terrorists had planned, killing four would-be attackers. Or that on the 9th, an Egyptian base in the city of Rafiah, near Gaza, came under attack from a mixture of gunfire, rocket-propelled grenade missiles, and mortar shells.

Mohammad Fayez Farahat, from the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, believes that ever since the fall of Egypt’s ex-President Mubarak in early 2011 all kinds of extremist groups have been recruiting fighters, gathering arms and trying to establish an Islamist state on the Sinai. Recently, he says,  organizations like Jahish al-Islam or Ansar Beit al-Makdis have emerged, some affiliated with Al Qaeda and most linked with extremist groups in the Gaza Strip.

The map of terrorist organizations in Sinai  includes dozens of groups scattered across the peninsular. Some are connected to external groups: al-Qaeda branches from Iran and Yemen, World Jihad, Hezbollah in Lebanon and, last but not least, Gaza. There are also armed Bedouins in the region, disaffected with the Egyptian government, who subsist by smuggling people, goods and weapons.

Eilat in the south of Israel, has been under fire from Sinai on several occasions. An attack on August 5, 2012, was particularly spectacular: armed fighters attacked an Egyptian army post, killing 16 soldiers and bursting through the Israeli border in a hijacked army vehicle. In the resulting gunfight, at least five assailants died. In April 2013 two Grad rockets were fired at the town from Sinai, and only last week, Eilat airport was temporarily closed due to an unspecified security threat. The following day, a cell of armed Islamists in Sinai was killed by an air strike. Reports suggested that an Israeli Air Force drone, in cooperation with Egyptian forces, had been responsible for the strike.

Most recently, on August 12 Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system successfully intercepted a rocket fired at Eilat. Palestinian sources reported that the extremist Salafist group Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, which operates from Sinai, claimed responsibility.

Sinai has become increasingly lawless and violent since the fall of Egypt’s president Mohammed Morsi. Recently Israel has given Cairo a green light to reinforce its troops in the border region, and in a bid to restore order, Egypt’s military has deployed significant forces in Sinai.
       
       Events in Egypt are clearly a critical factor in the increased violence emanating from Sinai.  The overthrow of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) president and government have resulted in a determined effort by the MB to restore the previous regime. Extremist jihadist groups sympathetic to the MB have been swept up into the struggle against the military overlords of Egypt’s interim government, and in particular against General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who masterminded the coup and is now deputy prime minister.

       One report has it that, immediately following the July 3 overthrow of president Morsi, six MB officials smuggled themselves into the Gaza Strip to lead an uprising against the new interim government. The group, headed by Mahmud Izzat Ibrahim, is reported to have set up a command post at the Gaza Beach Hotel for operations against Egyptian military and security targets, in collaboration with Hamas and armed Al Qaeda-linked Salafist Bedouin in Sinai. The group planned their revolt to spread quickly out from Sinai to Egypt proper and topple the interim rulers in Cairo.

General el-Sisi, for his part, knows that the Brotherhood’s underground command center in the Gaza Beach Hotel must be destroyed – and for effective action in the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian military needs help from Israel’s Defense Forces, just as the IDF needs the Egyptian army to counteract the al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists in Sinai who are dedicated to attacking Israel as well as Egypt.

On August 11, the Egyptian military reported that an operation had been launched against armed groups in the Sinai believed to have been plotting attacks on security forces and other targets. The assault, which involved Apache helicopters striking areas south of Sheikh Zuwaid in north Sinai, resulted in the death of at least seven people, and the arrest of six others.

Israel’s Defense minister commented: “The Egyptian army is fighting first and foremost to defend Egyptian citizens and sovereignty. We will not let rumors and speculation impair the peace relations between our countries.”

Where has the MFO been in all this ferocious activity?  There has been little sign of it – scarcely surprising, since reports indicate that its personnel are holed up in its northern Sinai base, on maximum alert.  More than this, it is reported that the MFO’s 30-year presence in Sinai may be drawing to a close, and that the organisation is awaiting evacuation, lock, stock and barrel, to Europe. A rather ignominious end to an international peacekeeping operation with a reasonably successful record. 

Now it is up to Egypt and Israel, acting together in the spirit of the Peace Treaty, to restore order to the Sinai and eradicate those bent on achieving their undesirable ends through remorseless terror. 

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 14 August 2013: 
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Terror-in-Sinai-323028?prmusr=xUf%2bXuuTkauubLsL%2fFP%2bAFe9T7MVfNkZ4rpify6W3rwvSk%2fscRWsh1uZMeE84zjw
 Published in the Eurasia Review, 14 August 2013:

http://www.eurasiareview.com/14082013-terror-in-sinai-oped/

What's wrong with the Human Rights Council?

The Human Rights Council is a body still in its infancy.  Set up only seven years ago by the UN General Assembly, it had one over-riding purpose – to rectify the egregious faults of its predecessor body, the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR).  The UNCHR had been a working body of the United Nations virtually from its foundation in 1946, but over its 60 years of existence it had accrued a raft of objectionable practices which finally made the organisation totally unacceptable to governments and activists alike.

Among its more unseemly usages was to include flagrant human rights violaters among its members and, moreover, to elect such people from time to time  to chair the commission − representatives of countries like Zimbabwe, Algeria, Syria, Libya, Vietnam and China, all states with extensive records of human rights violations. These individuals, by opposing resolutions to the commission which condemned human rights violations, in effect sustained and promoted despotism and repression throughout the world.

            Another major criticism of the commission was its compliance at being used as a platform from which to castigate selective targets.  Chief among the objects of this blatant politicisation was Israel.  An analysis in 2002 revealed that the commission had devoted no less than 33 per cent of its country-specific resolutions to condemning Israel in one way or another. 

A by-product of this was the commission’s brazen failure to apply the UN charter's standards across the board. When issues such as the stoning of women, honor killings, mutilations, and the apostasy death penalty were raised during the 60th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2004, officials from certain Muslim-majority states rejected any criticism as “interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state."

All this finally became too much even for the General Assembly, which eventually voted to disband the old commission and to set up a shining new United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in its place. 

How has the new body been doing?

It is perhaps, significant, that UNHRC is UNHCR with just one letter transposed.  In short, in the council’s early years you could barely see the difference.

For example, from the time of its foundation in 2006 until 2012, the new council had published no less than 48 reports condemning Israel.  During the same period there were 9 reports on Syria’s mass killings of its own citizens, three on the terrorist-supporting repressive régime in Iran, and not one on China, which is far removed from granting its billion citizens basic human rights.

More than this, the council voted on 30 June 2006 to include as a permanent feature of every session a review of alleged human rights abuses by Israel − a  resolution sponsored by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Calling on the council to avoid the selectivity that discredited its predecessor, Human Rights Watch urged it to look at international human rights and humanitarian law violations committed by Palestinian armed groups as well. This proposal was not followed through.

As a result of all this, eminent UN figures like UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, his predecessor in office Kofi Annan, and  former High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, have criticized the council for acting exactly like the old commission − namely, following the political agenda of some of its members as opposed to advancing human rights. Specifically, in 2006, Kofi Annan argued that the Council should not have a "disproportionate focus on violations by Israel… The Council should give the same attention to grave violations committed by other states as well."  In 2007, Ban Ki Moon said: "The Secretary-General is disappointed at the council's decision to single out only one specific regional item, given the range and scope of allegations of human rights violations throughout the world."

Which countries’ representatives currently sit in judgement on the human rights record of democratic Israel? The UNHRC’s current membership includes Congo, Uganda, Libya, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Qatar, Indonesia, and Malaysia − none with human rights records to be particularly proud of. 

In short, the old UNCHR and the new UNHRC seemed in effect Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the Council’s decision in March 2012 to establish an international investigative committee on the West Bank settlements was the last straw as far as Israel was concerned.  Israel’s then-Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, severed all ties with the UNHRC.

However the new council has at least one saving grace - its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process. This procedure, which envisages all 193 UN member states having their human rights record reviewed every four years, is widely regarded as a cornerstone of the global human rights system.  After breaking with the council, Israel threatened to become the first state to boycott the UPR process.

A number of Western democratic countries feared that this would set a damaging precedent, and provide states such as Iran and North Korea with an excuse not to participate in the UPR.  Acknowledging the validity of this argument, Israel decided not to boycott its UPR, but asked for the process to be postponed until October 2013.

The UNHRC chair is currently occupied by Switzerland, and in May 2013 Swiss Foreign Minister Didier Burkhalter visited Israel to discuss the renewal of Israel’s cooperation with the council.  During the discussions Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Zeev Elkin asked for the cancellation of the council's "Article 7," which stipulates that every conference must include a separate discussion on human rights in Israel – a requirement laid on no other UN member. In addition Israel was interested in joining the Western European and Others Group (WEOG). Currently Israel is not a member of any such group.

Following the discussions, an Israeli official flew to Geneva to negotiate a memorandum of understanding with the UNHRC aimed at renewing ties between Israel and the council.  As a result, in June Israel’s ambassador to the UNHRC, Eviatar Maner, wrote to the council’s president, Remigiusz Henczel: “I wish to cooperate with you with a view to positively resolve all outstanding issues in Israel’s complex relationship with the Human Rights Council and its mechanisms.”

At its meeting on 11 June Henczel told the council about Israel’s letter, and the council endorsed the postponment of Israel’s review until October. Henczel said he hoped Israel would have agreed to cooperate by the scheduled October 29 date for its review.

So the signs look hopeful, both for the re-establishment of relations between Israel and the UNHRC, and – not before time – for a conspicuous reversal of the immoderate obsession with Israel displayed by both the council and its predecessor.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 11 August 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Whats-wrong-with-the-Human-Rights-Council-322706

The Hong Kong solution

US Secretary of State John Kerry has sternly warned the world’s media to desist from idle speculation about the progress of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.  All parties to the discussions are sworn to secrecy, he announced, and authoritative statements will emanate from him and him alone.  He must have known he was whistling in the wind.  With information deliberately withheld, speculation and rumour are bound to flourish.

Even before substantive discussions began, there was a widespread feeling that the parties to the current negotiations have been round the course many times, and that something innovative or new was required to break through long-standing and apparently immutable positions.

Around the time of the last serious attempt at face-to-face discussions, something out of the ordinary was indeed being aired – something that received very little news coverage at the time, possibly because the talks themselves collapsed so completely.

Direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) began in Washington on 2 September 2010 in an atmosphere of high expectation.  At that meeting George Mitchell, Obama’s special Middle East envoy, announced that Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, had agreed to meet again in a fortnight, and every two weeks after that.

And then everything ground to a halt.  Israel’s “goodwill gesture” − a 10-month moratorium on construction in the West Bank − came to an end, and Netanyahu’s fragile coalition would not countenance its resumption.  Abbas declared that he could not continue with negotiations unless all construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem was halted.  Total impasse.

But the start of face-to-face discussions had apparently generated some innovative thinking. A very odd, but apparently serious, possibility was reported by the London-based newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat on 29 October 2010.  The paper reported that in its secret negotiations with the American administration aimed at clarifying the nature and demarcation of a Palestinian state, Israel had been discussing the option of leasing land in east Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley from the Palestinian state for up to 99 years.  Palestinian sources apparently confirmed the story.

According to one of the sources, this initiative, which he said was "American, not Israeli," had been on the table for a while "in order to reach common ground with the Israeli side regarding the borders issue, and to reach an agreement on what will remain under Israeli sovereignty."  When quizzed, officials in Washington refused to confirm or deny the report.

Could this possibility re-emerge?  Has it legs strong enough to stand?

The prime example of one sovereign state leasing territory from another is, of course, Hong Kong.  In the full flood of its imperial expansion, Britain defeated China in the Opium Wars, and China was forced to cede both Hong Kong and the peninsula of Kowloon. During the following decades, Hong Kong flourished, but the island lacked resources such as water and farmland, and Britain pressed China to cede more land. In 1898 it succeeded in gaining rights in areas known as the New Territories on a 99-year lease, due to expire in 1997.

To complete the story, as 1997 approached, it became clear that should Britain attempt to hand back only the New Territories, China would demand Hong Kong and Kowloon as well.  So, in late-1984, an agreement was reached: China would take over the entire colony on 1 July 1997, but Hong Kong's unique free enterprise economy would be maintained for at least 50 years. Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China with the official slogan, "One country, two systems".

Does the Hong Kong model provide any sort of template for a future Israeli-Palestinian accommodation?  Of course, extremer right-wing Israeli political opinion will immediately demand: “Why on earth should we lease our own land from the Palestinians?”  But if this ever was a US proposal, it was clearly designed to address Israel's key security concern.  Netanyahu had made it clear that any peace deal must incorporate border security for Israel, to prevent both weapon smuggling and infiltration by Hamas or other extreme Islamists into a new sovereign Palestine.  The leaseback option, it might have been opined, could provide a medium- to long-term solution to that problem, providing sufficient  breathing space (up to a century) to allow Israel and the PA to finalise the borders of the new state.

But there is nothing new under the sun − so it is not perhaps surprising to find that as long ago as 2005 a plan was seriously being discussed within the Israeli Labor Party for the biggest Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank to be "leased" from the Palestinians. 

The London Independent newspaper reported in December 2005 that a group advising Amir Peretz, then Labour Party leader, had been considering a proposal for a long-term leaseback of the main settlement blocs on the model of the 99-year Hong Kong  agreement.  Clearly the proposal was an attempt to square the circle between Palestinian insistence that any two-state solution should broadly conform with Israel's pre-1967 borders, and the view of a wide segment of Israeli opinion that as many settlements as possible should remain in Israeli hands. 

Since then, however, Abbas has on several occasions acknowledged that in any final agreement the major Israeli settlements would probably remain in Israeli hands, subject perhaps to a land-swap deal.  The same, though, would not be true of the plethora of smaller settlements scattered across the West Bank, and it may be that a lease-back deal affecting some of them could form part of a final accord.
         The Hong Kong precedent is not a blueprint for achieving a wholesale Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.  It might just provide a useful, if temporary, element in constructing a workable solution.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 6 August 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/The-Hong-Kong-Solution-322198?prmusr=mn6GPEivKn%2b0bSloftzfFl8OSK6jgoqG3tQvELs%2b5X2M4tAiXZRBOP6LAMyf2vrm 

Getting rid of Hamas

The immutable political law of “unforeseen consequences” is already in operation. The reopening of the Israel-Palestine peace process has set in train a series of unanticipated and surprising developments, and what can only be described as a new political atmosphere. 

For example, on Thursday August 1, newspapers in Israel featured a quite startling picture. Taken the day before inside Israel’s parliament building, the Knesset, it featured an Israeli and a Palestinian flag draped behind three men – Abdullah Abdullah, Muhammad Madani, and Hilil Bar.  The first is the head of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the second a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, and the third an Israeli MK. The photograph was taken to record a meeting between Israeli members of parliament and the Caucus on Ending the Israeli-Arab Conflict.  A Palestinian flag on display inside the Knesset!  Several distinguished Israeli prime ministers must have been turning in their graves.

Nor was this the only bewildering aspect of the occasion, for during the meeting Muhammad Madani, a representative of the Palestinian Authority (PA), announced that when the Caucus visits Ramallah, the West Bank headquarters of the PA, the Israeli flag will be raised, for the first time in many years.  If this indeed comes to pass, it will reflect a remarkable change of mood within the Palestinian camp.

US Secretary of State, John Kerry, in launching the renewal of the peace process, emphasised that every aspect of the negotiations would be kept secret, and that  authoritative reports of progress would emanate from him and him alone.  Far from inhibiting media conjecture, Kerry’s remarks were, of course, bound to foster them, and press speculation is already running riot.   Wildly conflicting reports are appearing, ranging from a confident assertion that PA President Mahmoud Abbas has said that negotiations would focus first on borders and security before moving on to the other core issues, to another which suggests that the agreed framework for negotiations will see all core issues discussed simultaneously, to yet a third to the effect that US Secretary of State John Kerry believes that Israel will be able to keep 85 per cent of the major West Bank settlement blocs in a final agreement.

Among the multitude of conjectures, one report appears to have some real substance behind it – namely that US General John Allen is hard at work developing a security plan for incorporation into a final Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.  Allen was appointed last May by US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel as special envoy on security issues.

It is indeed on the subject of security for the two sovereign states – Israel and Palestine – that the most astonishing of the “unforeseen consequences” has emerged.  On August 1 the PA Minister for Religious Affairs, Mahmoud Habbash, actually issued a fatwa requiring Palestinians to revolt against Hamas and end its control over Gaza.

Habbash has, of course, put his finger on one of the major problems facing the current peace initiative, and it has nothing to do with settlements, borders, refugees or Jerusalem.  The plain fact of the matter is that the PA’s writ runs only in the West Bank; it has no locus in the Gaza strip, which is under the de facto government of Hamas.  As long as Hamas remains in control of Gaza, seized in a bloody coup directed against Fatah back in 2007, Mahmoud Abbas and his team can speak only for the Palestinians in the West Bank. 

That in itself is sufficient of an embarrassment for the President of the PA, operating on the world stage in support of a sovereign state of Palestine which, presumably, is intended to include Gaza.  The schism, however, runs deeper than that.  During the political ups and downs of the past few years, Hamas has shown itself more than once to be in serious contention with Fatah for control of the whole Palestinian body politic.  Hamas’s radical Islamist administration in Gaza is not to the liking of all Palestinians, but its rejection of the two state solution, or indeed of any kind of recognition of Israel, appeals to a wide swathe of Palestinian opinion.  Building on this favourable street image, Hamas has been trying to infiltrate its supporters into the West Bank in an attempt to undermine President Abbas’s administration.  Israel and the PA have cooperated in combating attempts to stir up feeling against the Fatah government in the West Bank.

In short, Hamas is a thorn in the flesh of Mahmoud Abbas and the PA.  They realise that a peace settlement which excludes Gaza, a vital part of any future Palestinian state, would be of limited value.  For the sake of the PA’s credibility in the current negotiations, as well as to ensure its future political and military security, it would be of the greatest value if the Hamas administration in Gaza could be overthrown and the rule of the PA re-established.  Incidentally – but not perhaps irrelevant in the current changed political climate – the removal of Hamas, and the establishment of an effective PA administration, would relieve Israel of the constant threat of indiscriminate rocket attacks.

The timing of the “Get rid of Hamas” fatwa is particularly opportune.  Hamas, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), has never been in a weaker position.  The MB’s loss of power in Egypt has exacerbated the divisions within the Hamas leadership which, reports indicate, is split three ways, all bitterly at odds. 

The three segments are, it is alleged, headed respectively by the head of Hamas’s political wing, Khaled Meshaal; Gaza’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh; and pro-Iranian, pro-Hezbollah Mahmoud a-Zahar, along with military commanders Mohammed Deif and Marwan Issa and the Hamas representative in Turkey, Saleh al-Aruri, who is also in charge of Hamas operations on the West Bank.

Meshaal, fearful perhaps of a deal between Egypt’s MB and the military, which has sealed off many of the tunnels between Gaza  and Egypt and may be preparing for an onslaught against Hamas, advocates breaking off relations with the MB.  Haniyeh, wholly focused on holding on to power in Gaza, no longer defers to the authority of the non-resident Meshaal, lodged in Damascus until the Syrian conflict, and recently thrown out of Qatar.  A-Zahar advocates an immediate alliance with the Shia Muslim Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis, and the restoration of Iran’s financial and military support for Hamas’s so-called armed struggle against their common enemy, Israel.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand” – words of wisdom from the Book of Matthew.  The call to Muslims from a leading Palestinian to topple Hamas’s unstable structure may not fall on deaf ears.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 4 August 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Getting-rid-of-Hamas-322006?prmusr=4yOUHlpveYMQn2SuRHCkEsTS2B7PjErGHsk5vaPTQ3U8EgUSdodC1fQaOaQ3LKtb

Published in the Eurasia Review, 4 August 2013:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/05082013-getting-rid-of-hamas-oped/

What is Israel asking of the Arab world?

The answer is: Not much more than the Arab world is prepared to give.

Thanks to the unremitting efforts of US Secretary of State John Kerry, the first tentative steps towards a resumption of the Israel-Palestine peace process took place on Monday, July 29 2013, when Israeli and Palestinian representatives sat down together in Washington to talk about talks. That matters have reached this stage is due, without any doubt, to Kerry’s dogged persistence, to his refusal to be discouraged by the dauntingly difficult task of bridging the gap between Israeli and Palestinian aspirations, and to his unquestionable diplomatic skills.

The ultimate objective to which both parties are signed up is the so-called “two-state solution” – an outcome, underwritten by the UN, the EU, and the Quartet, which is anathema alike to Islamist fundamentalists like Hamas, the de facto government of the Gaza strip, and to right-wing politicians and media commentators in Israel.

For the former, the concept of a sovereign Palestine living alongside a sovereign Israel is totally unacceptable. They regard the whole area “from the river to the sea” (ie from the Jordan to the Mediterranean) as Arab territory to which Israel has no right. Their aim is to eradicate Israel from the Middle East altogether and, as is the case in several Muslim states, to ensure that no Jews remain in the area. “Judenrein”, with its chilling Nazi connotations, is entirely apt to describe their purpose. Indeed, the connection between earlier Islamist leaders and the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, and their common stance on the “Final Solution”, is well documented. All that can be expected from Islamist fundamentalists, their eyes set on restoring the Caliphate and eventually subjecting the whole world to Sharia law, is constant opposition to Israel’s presence, manifested by periodical resort to “armed struggle” waged indiscriminately on civilians in, and sometimes outside, Israel.

For their part, the Israeli right-wing regard as legally flawed the contention of the UN, the EU and the Quartet that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal. They contend that the international agreements under which the whole of Mandate Palestine was designated as the area in which Jewish settlement was to be encouraged have never been abrogated, but were indeed reinforced by the UN Charter. There is therefore no legal foundation for banning Jewish families from choosing to live in the ancient heartland of Judea and Samaria. Additionally, they maintain, the fourth Geneva Convention, the basis for declaring that West Bank settlements are illegal, has been misinterpreted, since no mass transfer of civilian populations into the area has occurred. Moreover, the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank would impose an unacceptable security risk on Israel, which would be reduced to a width of only about 15 kilometres at its narrowest, and which could provide a future militant Palestinian administration with a base from which to attack Tel Aviv, other major population centres and Ben Gurion airport with ease.

Despite the extremist arguments on both sides, the representatives of Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) have signed up to the two-state solution as the ultimate objective of the current bid for an agreement. For the PA, a successful outcome would result in the establishment of an internationally welcomed sovereign state of Palestine within legally defined borders. To be realistic, however, for many, if not most, on the Palestinian side, this would represent only a stepping-stone towards the ultimate dream of an Israel-free Middle East – an aspiration lodged deep in the founding charter of Fatah, the leading party within the PA.

In effect, it is this unrealistic illusion that Israel is asking the Arab world in general, and the PA in particular, to abandon. Israel is saying: “We are here to stay. Acknowledge the fact. The Jews have returned to their ancient homeland. Israel is the national home of the Jewish people. But it is a democratic state with freedom of religion and equal rights for all its citizens, Jewish or not, enshrined in its Declaration of Independence.” Asking the Arab world to accept this is not asking the impossible, but the task is akin to bringing a vast oil tanker, proceeding steadily on its way, to a shuddering halt, and hauling it round to go forward in a new direction. It can be done, but it would take a determined effort.

There is no doubt that an intense Judeophobia is lodged deep within Islam (not reciprocated, incidentally, within Judaism in respect of Islam). It is akin to the endemic anti-Semitism that has characterised much of Christianity for most of its two thousand year existence. Strenuous efforts in the past few decades by the Catholic church, initiated by Pope John Paul II, have done much to effect a change of attitude in that branch of Christianity. Much remains to be done, both within Catholicism and within the wider Christian world, but a start has been made.

Within the Muslim world there is little evidence of a change of attitude. Rabid anti-Jewish propaganda emanates from many of the politicians and the media outlets in Muslim countries, and children are imbued with anti-Jewish sentiment in the schoolroom. Any sort of Jewish connection to the Holy Land in general or Jerusalem in particular is denied – though a simple glance into the Old Testament should be enough to counter such illusory assertions. And yet, it is an undeniable historical fact that in many places, and for many centuries, Muslim and Jew lived peaceably side by side. What has happened can again come to pass – the precedent is there.

What Israel asks of the Arab world is a radical change of attitude. It is strange, but true, that just such a change of attitude is actually on offer, originally only from the representatives of the 22 Arab states that surround Israel, but subsequently widened to include all 57 Muslim nations worldwide. The Arab Peace Initiative, announced by the Arab League in 2002 and readopted several times since, offers Israel an end to the Arab–Israeli conflict, a peace agreement and the establishment of “normal relations”, ie mutual diplomatic representation, and open trade and cultural relations. Despite the original requirements written into the Initiative, already modified at the instigation of John Kerry. In practical terms and in current circumstances the quid pro quo for this highly desirable state of affairs is simply for a mutually acceptable peace agreement to be signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Over to you John Kerry, Martin Indyk – newly appointed US Middle East special envoy – and the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators assembled in Washington.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 30 July 2013:

http://www.jpost.com/Experts/What-is-Israel-asking-of-the-Arab-world-321526?prmusr=%2bwnI30OIpMP2Y5hQTnMVgpqdtQ1rGvlOpdMA%2fKyATsUJvaeYs0gK6Kx13so7mMLo

Published in the Eurasia Review, 30 July 2013:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/30072013-what-is-israel-asking-of-the-arab-world-oped/

Is Assad winning by default?

Ask your man-in-the-street in the West what he knows about Islam, and you are likely to get a blank stare. Many people are aware that the religion has two main branches – Sunni and Shi’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” – the implication being that a state of tolerant acceptance has been reached between two major branches of the religion. However true that may once have been, it demands significant qualification in 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 and bloody intra-Christian religious conflicts that ravaged Europe on and off for three centuries. In Islam now, as in Christendom then, doctrinal differences have been transmuted into political altercation, which in turn have inevitably become a no-holds tussle for power and domination.

Across the Middle East tensions between Sunni and Shia are being increasingly inflamed in what has been dubbed a “new regional Cold War”, to use the evocative phrase of Toby Dodge, a reader in international relations at the London School of Economics. In this overarching struggle, as columnist David Blair has pointed out, Iran and Saudi Arabia are the key antagonists: the former, staunch upholders of the Shi’ite tradition of Islam; the latter guarding the Sunni Arab heartland and its holiest places. Both use the language of sectarian loyalty to rally supporters and demonise foes.

The great fault line that runs through Islam is the key to what is happening in Syria, where the Sunni-Shi'ite partition has been polarized, and the so-called “Cold War" has hotted up.

The régime of Syrian president Bashar Assad represents the Alawite tradition of Shi’ite Islam. Assad's fall would cost Iran 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, on Tehran’s instructions, Hezbollah has been flinging more and more troops into the battle. Some 150,000 Hezbollah fighters – created, funded and armed by Iran – are now estimated to be in the thick of the Syrian civil war. Assad’s recent successes are due in no small measure to their presence. They may even have helped him turn the tide.

On the Sunni side of the battlefield are ranged the forces of the official opposition who draw support from the 70 per cent of Syrians who are Sunni. They are being armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with Jordan providing vital supply lines. But joining in the battle are also a vast number of Sunni jihadists, Islamists and extremists, including Al-Qaeda, all of them seeking long-term advantage out of the current chaos, none concerned one jot about the cause of those seeking to rid themselves of the despotic Assad régime.

This explains why the West, although anxious to see Assad’s downfall, and with it Iran’s excessive influence in the region, hesitates to offer more than token support for the rebels. Weapons supplied indiscriminately to the anti-Assad forces, they fear, would almost certainly find their way into the hands of Al-Qaeda and its associates, with unforeseeable consequences both in the Middle East, and further afield. So while the US, the EU and the UN hesitate – “willing to wound,” as 18th century poet Alexander Pope so aptly puts it, “but afraid to strike” – Assad has been strengthened, perhaps to the point where he could survive, and thus enhance Iran’s dominance in the region and Hezbollah’s stranglehold on Lebanon’s body politic.

The great divide in Islam goes back to the very origins of the religion. When the prophet Muhammad died in 632, he left an Islamic state on the Arabian Peninsula of about one hundred thousand followers. He also bequeathed a dispute over who should succeed him and lead the fledgling religion and nation. 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. Shi’ites, on the other hand, favoured Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and he and his successors are called Imams. The two branches of the religion have developed along their chosen paths ever since.

The imbalance in the numbers of followers of the two segments is another aspect of Islam that is little known. Something approaching 90% of the world's one billion Muslims are Sunni; only some 10%–20% are Shia. Although a minority in many Muslim countries, they constitute a majority only in the states known as the “Shia Crescent” – Iran and Lebanon, Azerbaijan and Bahrain, where a Shia-majority population lives resentfully under a Sunni monarchy sustained by Saudi Arabian troops.

Syria’s revolution is a Sunni-led rebellion against the Shia-associated government, but it has become a magnet for global jihadists pursuing their own intra-Islam conflict: Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas on Assad’s side; Al Qaeda, militants from Iraq and Turkey, and Sunni extremists from as far afield as Europe for the opposition. Fundamentalism in one branch of Islam has inevitably fostered fundamentalism in the other, as sects in each camp seek to outdo one another in their religious zeal. The Syrian conflict has become a paradigm of the division between the Sunni and Shi’ite branches of Islam.

It is surely not beyond the wit of man to evolve a way to strengthen the genuine anti-Assad opposition forces, while ensuring that any weaponry supplied is kept beyond the reach of terrorist elements on the rebel side. The Syrian Opposition Coalition, and the Supreme Joint Military Command (SMC), are two interconnected but independent bodies that are designed to impose a top-down national strategy and governing structure for the political and military arms of the Syrian opposition. Instead, the two bodies have displayed a limited ability to manage or control the myriad of opposition groups and civilian councils in Syria. They need to get a grip on the situation. Improved structure within the opposition forces and the imposition of a strict code of discipline would be a good start.

All the same. continued procrastination by the West will simply mean that one day Assad could well emerge, bloodied but unbowed, from the conflict, Syria would have become an Iranian satellite, and Hezbollah, whose military wing has just been declared a terrorist organisation by the EU, would be immensely strengthened within Lebanon and beyond.

Is that, in Shakespeare’s immortal words, “a consummation devoutly to be wished”?

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 28 July 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Islams-great-divide-Is-Assad-winning-by-default-321270?prmusr=g6XDWOQ9KEuktpQ68Jh%2bXVQgaqzzzfuu1DqIj7w98CCPLrmceiQXav6LAMyf2vrm

Israel and Palestine - keeping it secret

How annoyed they are, those left out of the loop, those not privy to the intensive negotiations led by US Secretary of State John Kerry with a favoured few from the Israeli and Palestinian camps, which have led to the announced resumption of peace talks – negotiations necessarily, and most wisely, kept entirely secret.

The annoyance is widespread. Prominent Palestinian Authority (PA) figures like Nabil Amr immediately declared their “frustration” at the fact that President Mahmoud Abbas had agreed to recommence peace discussions with Israel without letting the world know the ins and outs of what he has conceded – or, indeed, what might have been conceded to him – to reach this accord. It is too soon for groups within the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to start accusing Abbas of “betraying the Palestinian cause” – though doubtless the accusation will be levelled in due course – but several, ignorant of the agreement reached for restarting talks, have already criticised the PA for doing so.

Hassan Khraisheh, deputy speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, knowing nothing but suspecting the worst, accused Abbas of abandoning his previous preconditions for resuming talks – recognition of the pre-1967 lines and a full freeze on settlement construction – in return for “bribes,” including the release of a number of prisoners, economic benefits and work permits for Palestinians. In the opinion of Mohamed Dahlan, a leading Fatah operative and political foe of Abbas, the PA president has committed “political suicide” by agreeing to return to the talks with Israel. “Political suicide” is only a step or two away from “assassination”, and Abbas, no doubt well aware of this, has taken care to cover his back as much as possible by obtaining the agreement of the Arab League to the renewed peace talks.

Inevitably wilder extremists within the divided Palestinian camp, like Hamas and the Salafi jihadists, have condemned the resumption of the peace process root and branch. Yusef Rizka, political adviser to the Hamas prime minister, said reinstituting negotiations under US and Israeli terms was tantamount to “treason” – assuming, with absolutely no grounds for doing so, that Abbas had given everything and gained nothing.

Another Hamas official, Salah Bardaweel, declared that the resumption of the negotiations unconditionally and under Kerry’s terms – although he had no grounds on which to base either assertion – was designed to “liquidate the Palestinian cause in return for secondary privileges for Palestinian Authority leaders.”

Meanwhile, clearly determined to maintain the veil of secrecy over the give and take that has led to the resumption of talks, Abbas’s office issued a statement on July 20 authorising only two officials to speak on behalf of the PA and PLO: Nabil Abu Rudaineh, Abbas’s spokesman, and Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary-general of the PLO. Neither has revealed any details of the agreement, but Rabbo has emphasised that much has still to be clarified before Abbas takes his seat at the table.

The annoyance at being kept in the dark is not confined to the Palestinian side. In Israel officials have been instructed to refrain from commenting on the Palestinian claims, or on any details regarding the resumption of talks, and this is not to the liking of some prominent figures. The fact that the negotiations and their outcome is “shrouded in fog” is frustrating for the media, too, but the Americans are clearly keen on keeping a tight lid on this early bargaining.

There will be problems enough if substantive talks do eventually get under way, for their objective will be the “two-state solution”, and vital elements within the Israeli coalition, like Bayit Yehudi, parts of Likud, and Yisrael Beytenu, are currently opposed to a peace agreement on these lines.

They may be somewhat placated by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s assurance, given on Sunday 21 July at a cabinet meeting held at the Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, that before any agreement hammered out between Israel and the PA is signed and sealed. it would be the subject of a national referendum.

The details of the formula which Kerry brokered in order to bring the two sides together remain intentionally unspecified. As Kerry said: “the best way to give these negotiations a chance is to keep them private… Any speculation or reports you may read in the media are conjecture, because the people who know the facts are not talking about them."

Wise words, for any attempt to conduct delicate negotiations in the full glare of public scrutiny is doomed from the start. Privacy is the essential pre-requisite for the ticklish business of step-by-step compromise leading to an outcome that both sides can live with and, more to the point, sell to their respective constituencies.

It is at this latter hurdle that Abbas may stumble. Unlike the situation in Israel, where every nuance of a possible peace deal is discussed ad nauseam, Abbas has not done enough to prepare his party, his government or his people for a scenario in which he negotiates a deal with Israel which yields somewhat less than the full package of Palestinian demands. Yet that is the nature of negotiation – give a little, take a little, but end up with the bulk of what you are seeking. The Palestinians have trembled on the brink of just such a situation at least twice before – Oslo in 1993 and Camp David in 2000, to say nothing of the near Olmert-Abbas accord in 2008. On each occasion the Palestinians have wavered – and retreated, in the face of a vociferous and uncompromising rejectionism from within their own ranks.

So it is a precarious tightrope on which Abbas has now taken a tentative step. Secrecy is essential if negotiations are to be successfully conducted, but when leading figures, the media and the public are kept out of the picture, they cannot be expected to develop a stake in the process and the outcome. If Abbas hopes to carry the majority of his people with him, he will have to enthuse them at some point about the enterprise on which he has embarked.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 23 July 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Israel-and-Palestine-keeping-it-secret-320785?prmusr=AoihQvxymDWX58nrtjyU6O9JJjwSDTxCtaZyfScGfSIuaAfUHJorx0FQx1pDT9j%2f

Published in the Eurasia Review, 25 July 2013:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/25072013-israel-and-palestine-keeping-it-secret-oped/

Saudi Arabia moves centre stage

Suddenly the world’s spotlight has turned onto a player in the Middle East political drama who, until quite recently, has been assigned only a modest role. Out of the blue, commentators have taken to describing Saudi Arabia as “the region's most powerful influence-peddler” and “a mid-east powerhouse”. The Arab kingdom that straddles most of the Arabian peninsular and, despite its enormous oil-fuelled wealth, has never seemed a contender in the power struggles of the Middle East, has suddenly become critically influential.

In a telephone call on Saturday July 13, US President Obama and Saudi King Abdullah shared concerns about the effect on the region of Syria's civil war. They agreed to continue supporting the rebels seeking to overthrow the Assad régime. Obama and Abdullah also found themselves in broad agreement about the situation in Egypt. Immediately after Islamist President Mohammed Morsi was removed from power, Abdullah had sent the military a message of congratulation. Obama told the king he hoped for an inclusive, democratic process to be set in train in Egypt, to allow a return to civilian government.

This meeting of US and Saudi Arabian minds, particularly on the subject of Egypt, is not perhaps very surprising in view of the reports circulating in a variety of media about collusion by both parties in the military coup.

As for US involvement. political commentator Dean Andromidas, writing in the Executive Intelligence Review of July 12, 2013, claims that the Egyptian Army kept its American counterparts fully informed about its plans to remove Morsi by no later than July 1. In discussions between Egyptian and US military leaders, the report goes, the US insisted that the Egyptian Army must not allow itself to be tarred with the brush of “military coup”. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces must not resume power itself, but needed to create a civilian interim government and move immediately to the drafting of a new constitution and popular elections. Which is precisely what occurred.

DEBKAfile is a Jerusalem-based military intelligence website covering the Middle East. “We start where the media stop”, it proudly announces. Last week it declared: “The Egyptian military high command was not working alone when its operations headquarters put together the July 3 takeover of power from the Muslim Brotherhood: it was coordinated closely down to the last detail with the palaces of the Saudi and United Arab Emirates (UAE) rulers and the operations rooms of their intelligence services.”

As he ordered the military into action, DEBKA asserts, coup leader General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi had two Saudi-Gulf commitments in his pocket. First, should the Obama administration cut off the annual US aid allocation of $1.3 billion, Saudi Arabia and the UAE would make up the military budget’s shortfall. And secondly. the Saudis, UAE and other Gulf nations would immediately start pumping out substantial funds to keep the Egyptian economy running. The Egyptian masses would be shown that, in a properly managed economy, they need not go hungry, as many did under Muslim Brotherhood rule.

On Tuesday July 9, Abdullah opened his wallet and offered El-Sisi $5 billion in aid. Saudi Arabia's neighbour and ally, the UAE, added $3 billion more, while Kuwait offered $4 billion.

Saudi Arabia’s new-found influence now extends also into the Israeli-Palestinian dispute by way of the Arab League’s “peace plan”, the 2002 initiative of then Crown Prince Abdullah, now King Abdullah, of Saudi Arabia.

On March 20, 2002, a few days ahead of a summit of the Arab League, Abdullah electrified the assembled Arab foreign ministers by floating a peace plan for Palestine-Israel. Basically, he called for peace with Israel in return for Israel withdrawing from all territories captured in the 1967 war and a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee crisis based on UN Resolution 194 (a sort of "right of return" or, for those who do not want to go back, agreed compensation). The quid pro quo for Israel’s acceptance of the plan would be that all 22 Arab States would consider the Arab–Israeli conflict over, sign a peace agreement and establish normal relations. The plan was adopted and has subsequently been ratified several times by the Arab League.

Shortly after President Obama took office for the first time, George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East, announced that the new administration intended to "incorporate" the Arab League’s peace plan into its Middle East policy – an intention subsequently upheld by Obama’s new Secretary of State, John Kerry.

On the last day of April 2013, Kerry and US Vice-President Joe Biden hosted an Arab League delegation, which included senior officials from Saudi Arabia, to discuss the principles of the Arab peace plan. One of Israel’s basic objections had always been the idea of establishing the border of a sovereign Palestine along the cease-fire line of the Israeli and Jordanian armies in 1949 – which is what the 1967 boundary was. John Kerry managed to persuade the Arab League delegation to soften its stance on this issue. After their meeting, Qatari Prime Minister Sheik al-Thani announced that the delegation had accepted an interpretation of the Arab peace proposal which included the possibility of “comparable,” mutually agreed and “minor” land swaps between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Emphasising Saudi Arabia’s growing self-confidence, and highly revealing of its strategic thinking, on July 10 a new and strange story surfaced. Images analysed by security experts at IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review have revealed a hitherto undisclosed surface-to-surface missile base deep in the Saudi desert at al-Watah, around 125 miles south-west of the capital, Riyadh. Analysts who examined the photos spotted two launch pads, one with markings pointing north-east towards Tehran – and one north-west towards Tel Aviv. They are designed, according to Jane’s, for Saudi Arabia's arsenal of lorry-launched DF 3 missiles, which have a range of 1,500-2,500 miles and can carry a two-ton payload.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have a common enemy in Iran, which has long seen Saudi Arabia as a rival power in the Gulf, and has sought to undermine it. Experts fear that if, as seems increasingly likely, Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, Saudi Arabia would seek to follow suit, for both the Middle East and the world would have become even more unpredictable than at present. Saudi Arabia does not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel, but it has long maintained discreet back-channel communications in its efforts to promote stability in the region.

All the same, Saudi Arabia is clearly preparing itself for all eventualities.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 17 July 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Saudi-Arabia-moves-center-stage-320107?prmusr=Ly%2fHWLwzDa9bpe8tJbshaaFkmBNM9xDAaM4EJvzSociHTnrzJAjeb281Z8%2bf8acD

Published in the Eurasia Review, 17 July 2013:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/17072013-saudi-arabia-moves-centre-stage-oped/

Egypt's military adventure

As ever, Shakespeare puts it perfectly:
                                       What's in a name? That which we call a rose
                                        By any other name would smell as sweet.

What has happened in Egypt is, frankly, a coup d’état. The army has overthrown the elected government and arrested the president and the leaders of what was the governing party, the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the US administration has so far studiously avoided designating recent events as a military coup, and the UK has been equally bashful.

This “American paralysis” as Peter Oborne, chief political correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph puts it, results from an obscure piece of US legislation, the Foreign Assistance Act, which stipulates that US aid shall not be awarded “to any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by a military coup or decree”.

If Mohammed Morsi was not the “duly elected head of government”, and if he was not “deposed by a military coup or decree”, then words have ceased to have their meaning, and black is white. However, since Washington has no desire – regardless of which entity has its hands on the levers of power – to sever its military support for Egypt, and with it Egypt’s continued maintenance of its peace treaty with Israel, it is important that the words “military coup” are not uttered in Washington, or it seems in London, intent as it is on not causing embarrassment to its US ally.

The US Foreign Assistance Act does not specify that subsequent actions by the instigators of a military coup can mitigate the effect of the legislation. If such a loophole existed it could be argued that, on engineering the overthrow of the administration, army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi did not assume power himself – as his predecessor, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, had done back in the 1950s – but quickly installed the president of the supreme constitutional court, Adli Mansour, as interim head of state, assisted by an interim council and a technocratic government.

A day later Mansour named 76-year-old economist and former finance minister Hazem el Beblawi as transitional prime minister, and former United Nations nuclear agency chief, Mohamed El Baradei, as deputy to the president. The interim administration announced that it would set to work to devise a new constitution leading to parliamentary and presidential elections.

Do these semi-democratic moves – semi-democratic because all are taken under the aegis, and with the approval, of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – justify Washington’s hesitation to designate the events as a military coup? The US would be happier, perhaps, to dub them “Egypt’s military adventure”. After all, an adventure trail can lead you to all manner of unexpected places – and a truly democratic outcome is perhaps one possibility.

Not if the Muslim Brotherhood has its way, however. Riding high as it was only a month ago, its president. Mohammed Morsi, was systematically using his mandate to seize authoritarian powers, including legislative and executive powers that were beyond judicial oversight, and was well on his way to entrenching the profoundly undemocratic rule of the Muslim Brotherhood on Egypt. The patience of a goodly proportion of the secular-minded Egyptian public finally snapped. On July 4, Tahrir, an independent Egyptian daily, ran an English-language headline at the top of its front page, addressing US President Obama directly: "It's a Revolution ... Not a Coup, Mr Obama!"

Further justification, perhaps, for Washington’s reluctance to call a spade a spade – a stance certainly not shared by the ousted Muslim Brotherhood. They have no difficulty with the word.

"We will continue our peaceful resistance to the bloody military coup against constitutional legitimacy," they announced, vowing to defy the military's removal of President Morsi, and to continue to resist until he is reinstated. They insist they will never work with the interim rulers.

The explanation of what has occurred might lie deeper than is generally assumed, for there have been rumours of collusion by the US in the overthrow of the Morsi administration. If true, this might explain Washington’s subsequent espousal of Egypt’s interim administration and its clear intention to continue its military and financial support.

A Reuters report on July 3, citing unnamed Egyptian military sources, stated: "Army concern about the way President Mohamed Morsi was governing Egypt reached the tipping point when the head of state attended a rally packed with hardline fellow Islamists calling for holy war in Syria."

According to Washington sources, the Egyptian Army kept its American counterparts fully informed about the plans to remove Morsi by no later than July 1, the day that the top Egyptian commanders made their decision to move. After an estimated 8-10 million Egyptians turned out in mass peaceful rallies on June 30, demanding Morsi's removal, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces determined that it was its "civic duty" to deliver on the popular demands.

It is also alleged that the subsequent semi-democratic moves by army chief el-Sissi followed discussions between Egyptian military leaders and their American counterparts, including Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, JCS Chairman Dempsey, and Central Command head General Lloyd Austin. During these deliberations the US made it clear that the Army could not take power directly, but needed to create a civilian interim government and move to the drafting of a new constitution and popular elections immediately.

Nor do the rumours stop there. The well-informed Israeli website DEBKA noted: “The Egyptian military high command was not working alone when its operations headquarters put together the July 3 takeover of power from the Muslim Brotherhood: it was coordinated closely down to the last detail with the palaces of the Saudi and UAE rulers, and the operations rooms of their intelligence services.”

Egypt’s latest military adventure has only just got under way. The overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood president and administration seems to have won the support of the US, the UK and a number of Arab regimes fearful of Islamist extremists. Egypt is likely to move forward from this point, rather than back as the Muslim Brotherhood would wish, for de facto administrations usually triumph over de jure ones. In politics, as we have surely learned over the past century, “might makes right”.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 16 July 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/PArticle.aspx?id=320000&prmusr=IscazfkQ9d7yinWxrxZdLWFcIj9C%2f8ej%2ffz8OJ4Y372mtPcaeViS%2bf6LAMyf2vrm

Published in the Eurasia Review, 13 July 2013:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/12072013-egypts-military-adventure-oped/

Egypt and Hamas part company

Just two days after the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, the new interim government in Egypt closed the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip indefinitely, and Nilesat – an Egyptian company that controls a number of Egyptian communications satellites – removed Hamas TV, Al-Quds, from the air.

Hamas, the de facto government in the Gaza Strip, is an off-shoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the politico-religious organisation to which Morsi belonged. When Morsi was first returned to power a year ago, the leaders of Hamas clearly believed that they had gained an invaluable ally in their self-imposed “armed struggle” against Israel. For example, it is not generally known that in July 2012, just after Morsi came to power, Hamas was seriously considering a unilateral declaration of independence for the Gaza Strip, hoping for support from the MB Egyptian government. Arab newspapers like Al-Arabiya and Al-Hayat reported that the possibility of establishing a self-supporting Islamist Palestinian state of Gaza was seriously discussed between Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Egypt’s then-President Mohammed Morsi.

On this occasion Hamas was to be disappointed in its bid for fraternal support. Becoming complicit with Hamas was not in Egypt’s best interests – not even for a MB president. Egypt was relying on a new $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund and a $6.4 billion support package from the EU, to say nothing of a hefty package of loans and grants from the USA. So the half-baked secession plan came to nothing.

All the same MB’s accession to power in Egypt much emboldened Hamas, not only within the Gaza Strip, but in Sinai as well, an important territorial buffer between Egypt and Israel since their 1979 peace treaty.

During the summer of 2012 a number of armed attacks were launched from Sinai on Israel, and in each case support from Hamas in Gaza was suspected. In one incident two gunmen, later killed in an exchange of fire, infiltrated Israel and killed an Israeli civilian working on the construction of a border fence. Media reports indicated that the gunmen had received helped from within Gaza. When Israel responded with two air strikes into Gaza and four other militants were killed, Hamas launched medium-range rockets, mortar shells and long-range Grad-model Katyushas rockets at southern Israel.

One result of Egypt’s Arab Spring revolution was to encourage armed Palestinian groups and global jihadists to penetrate the large, sparsely populated desert peninsula of Sinai, usually from the Gaza strip and supported by Hamas, and to mix with Bedouins disgruntled with the central Egyptian regime. What followed were attacks on the pipeline transporting natural gas from Egypt to Israel and Jordan, the kidnapping of foreign tourists, and assaults against police stations. The Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), tasked with monitoring the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, also came under attack.

One major incident, occurring early in August, reflected the growing boldness of Hamas and the Islamist extremists whom Hamas supported. After killing about 15 Egyptian security personnel at a base in the border town of Rafah, the jihadists used a pickup truck filled with explosives to breach the Egypt-Israel border, then drove an armored vehicle more than a mile into Israel before being struck by a missile fired from an Israeli military plane. Up to eight heavily armed militants were killed. A statement from the Egyptian military said 35 militants were involved and "elements from the Gaza Strip" aided the attack by firing rockets, suggesting co-ordination between Hamas and Sinai militants.

This access of bravado led Hamas to institute an unrestrained expansion of indiscriminate rocket attacks on southern Israel, until the situation became intolerable and Israel mounted its short, sharp retaliatory response – Operation Pillar of Defense. If the Hamas leadership believed that by provoking armed conflict with Israel, the MB government of Egypt would spring to their aid and involve the Middle East in another major conflict aimed at eliminating Israel, they were sadly disappointed. They did however, reap a quite unforeseen advantage from their common MB heritage with the new Egyptian government.

For it was Morsi, in conjunction with the US, who engineered the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in November 2012, opening the way for Hamas’s shaky, yet triumphalist, claim of victory. For a brief time, thanks to Egypt’s brokerage, Hamas bestrode the world stage, the standard bearers of the anti-Israel “armed struggle”.

With the overthrow of Morsi and the MB government in Egypt, Hamas is again experiencing the disapproval of its ill-considered militant activities that marked the previous Mubarak regime. The Gaza-Egypt border at Rafah is closed, the tunnels used for smuggling goods and weaponry out of Egypt are being blocked, and the Hamas leadership is once more out in the cold, facing opposition within Gaza from Salafists who are even more extremist than it is itself.

Hamas must be pinning its hopes on the activities of MB supporters within Egypt. On July 7 Egyptian Salafi jihad issued what it described as a "clarion call for Islamic revolution". "Anyone who knows an advocate or a sheikh or a revolutionary,” said the statement, “should call him to urge him to mobilise."

Since the generals ousted Morsi there has already been an upsurge in militant violence, particularly in Sinai, long a hotbed of Hamas-supported jihadist activity. Intelligence reports have warned of a build-up of weapons, some stolen from Gaddafi arms stores in Libya, some headed for Gaza but held up by the block on smugglers' tunnels.

On the night of July 5, a group of Islamists seized the North Sinai governor's palace in the Mediterranean town of El Arish, raising the black Islamist flag. Earlier, jihadists attacked military checkpoints, a police station and El Arish airport. Five police and a soldier were killed. On July 6, gunmen killed a Coptic Christian priest in El Arish, a sign of the sectarian tensions bubbling under the surface. Brotherhood leaders and clerics had attacked Christians for joining anti-Morsi protests, and the decision by Pope Tawadros, leader of the Coptic church, to back Morsi's removal inflamed feelings further, even though he was joined by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar University.

In short, the one-time dream by the Hamas leadership of a Egypt-Gaza Muslim Brotherhood axis has faded. Armed struggle – and this time not at all confined to Israel – is once again the order of the day.

Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 9 July 2013:
http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Egypt-and-Hamas-part-company-319234?prmusr=NYtIXCjO%2bLgXBmqJjM4C9JMrIndEoKywQn1PQhrmAQ%2byaKqlJq5D2G81Z8%2bf8acD

Published in the Eurasia Review, 9 July 2013:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/09072013-egypt-and-hamas-part-company-oped/