Obama to Barak: I am committed to Israel’s security: Haaretz
U.S. President Barack Obama held an impromptu meeting with Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Monday, during which Obama affirmed his country’s “unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.”
According to a White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Obama “dropped by” a Monday morning meeting between Barak and U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones.
Obama also reasserted his administration’s determination to achieve regional peace, “including a two-state solution with a secure Jewish state of Israel living side by side in peace and security with a viable and independent Palestinian state.”
Barak and the American leaders discussed challenges to regional security,
how to deal with threats faced by both the U.S. and Israel and how
to move forward toward a comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Municipal officials in Jerusalem said Monday that the government had effectively frozen construction of settlements in disputed East Jerusalem despite its public posture that building would continue. U.S. officials had no immediate comment.
Settlement building has been a large sticking point since Israel infuriated Washington last month by announcing a major new housing development in East Jerusalem during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden.
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley would not discuss what Israel was telling the United States about construction.
“We have asked both sides to take steps to rebuild trust and to create momentum so that we can see advances in the peace process,” Crowley told reporters.
“We’re not going to go into details about what we’ve asked them to do, but obviously this is an important issue in the atmosphere to see the advancement of peace.
U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, on Sunday said he held “positive and productive talks” with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in an effort “to improve the atmosphere for peace and for proceeding with proximity talks.
Mitchell is expected back in the region next week.
Obama last June also unexpectedly dropped by a meeting between Barak and Jones, despite it not having been on his official schedule.
Last year’s unplanned encounter came after senior American officials harshly criticized Netanyahu and his policies, causing tension between the Obama administration and Israel’s government.
Palestinians ban settlement goods: Al Jazeera online
The move is part of a campaign to discourage trade with companies in the West Bank settlements [AFP]
Palestinian officials have passed a new law outlawing the sale of goods made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The law, under which offenders could face up to five years in jail or a fine of up to $14,000, was signed by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, on Monday.
The move is part of a campaign launched earlier this year to clear Palestinian markets of settlement goods and encourage other countries to ban trade with companies in the settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.
“There’s an international consensus that the settlements are illegal and therefore it is unacceptable to support them,” Hassan al-Awri, Abbas’s legal adviser, told the Reuters news agency.
The campaign does not include products from Israel proper, which Palestinians rely on.
Palestinian government officials estimate the annual sale of goods from Israeli-run companies in the settlements totals up to $500 million per year.
Palestinian boycott
Monday’s ban came nearly six months after the Palestinian Authority called on the public to boycott several large supermarket chains in the West Bank for carrying Israeli products.
The decision targeted upscale markets in the West Bank city of Ramallah, in an attempt to pressure the stores to discontinue the sale of fruits and vegetables grown and processed in Israeli settlements.
Palestinians consider these settlements the most serious threat to their aspirations for statehood.
In December of last year, Britain called on UK supermarkets selling goods from the West Bank to state explicitly on labels whether the content had come from Israeli settlements or Palestinian-owned farms.
The recommendation, issued by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), is not a legal requirement.
But Israeli officials and settler leaders reacted angrily to the decision, saying it would lead to a boycott of their goods.
Until now, food has been labelled “Produce of the West Bank”, but Defra’s voluntary guidance said labels should give more precise information, like “Palestinian produce” or “Israeli settlement produce”.
Products from the Israeli settlements include cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fruit and textiles.
European Union law already requires a distinction to be made between goods originating in Israel and those from the occupied territories, though pro-Palestinian campaigners say this is not always observed.
Abbas: I don’t want to declare unilateral statehood: Haaretz
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday said he opposes the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, in an exclusive interview on Channel 2 news.
Abbas’ remarks contradict comments made by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, who told Haaretz earlier this month that Palestinians would have an independent state by August 2011.
“We stand by agreements,” Abbas said regarding the unilateral declaration of statehood.
In the Channel 2 interview, the Palestinian leader also extended his hand in peace to the Israeli people, asserting that he is prepared to work with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is committed to returning to the negotiating table next month. Abbas said he hopes to get Arab League approval for indirect talks on May 1.
Abbas said it his duty to work with Netanyahu who was “chosen by the Israeli people and elected by the Knesset.”
Netanyahu responded by saying he “commends any willingness to resume peace talks.”
U.S. special envoy to the Mideast, George Mitchell, was in the region over the weekend in a push to restart indirect talks between the two sides, which are scheduled to resume by mid-May.
Abbas also addressed Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, saying that a building freeze has always been a precondition for talks with Israel.
He insisted in the interview that Palestinians would not be able to force the right of return for Palestinian refugees on Israelis within the context of a peace agreement, but that he seeks a “just solution.”
The two sides should abide by what has been outlined in the road map for peace regarding the refugee issue, Abbas said.
Abbas also spoke about captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, saying he opposes the imprisonment of the Israeli soldier just as he opposes the imprisonment of 8,000 Palestinian prisoners.
He added that he has offered for Hamas to transfer Shalit to the Palestinian Authority in order to broker a deal that would be acceptable to both sides.
EDITOR: Israel continues its extrajudicial murders
The Israeli murder squads never stop; one day they are in Dubai, another in Gaza, then in the West Bank. The killing goes on, illegal, immoral and also illogical, as this produces more militants and more militancy. But maybe that is what they want?
Israel troops kill Hamas militant: BBC
Mr Suweiti was accused of attacking Israeli forces in the West Bank
Israeli troops have killed a senior Hamas militant in a raid on a house in the West Bank.
Ali Suweiti, 42, was killed during a gun battle in the village of Beit Awa, the Israeli military said.
Troops from the Israel Defense Forces, Border Guard and security service Shin Bet surrounded the house and militants opened fire on them, a spokesman said.
Mr Suweiti was wanted for his alleged role in a 2004 gun attack on a border patrol in which a soldier was killed.
“A force surrounded the building in which Suweiti was hiding and called on him to surrender,” a statement from the Israeli Defence Force said.
“Suweiti refused and opened fire at the forces, who then used engineering tools in addition to firing at the building’s exterior wall, in order to cause him to surrender. The terrorist continued to fire at the force, and was ultimately killed.”
The building he was in was demolished by the Israeli forces.
Israeli soldiers raid the house in which Ali Suweiti was said to be hiding
Mr Suweiti’s uncle, Mahmoud, told the Associated Press news agency that Israeli soldiers surrounded the house before dawn on Monday.
He said his nephew ignored calls by the troops to surrender and soldiers opened fire on the building.
Mr Suweiti was involved in five attacks on Israeli border guards between 1999 and 2004, the Israeli military said.
In 2004 he took part in an ambush on a border patrol jeep, killing 20-year-old policeman Yaniv Mashiah, the IDF said.
The IDF said they had tried to arrest him in 2007 but he escaped.
Netanyahu: Israel not planning military action against Syria: Haaretz
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday said that Israel is not planning military action against Syria, despite rumors to the contrary.
“There is no truth to the suggestion that Israel is planning a military move against Syria,” Netanyahu said at the Likud party meeting, adding that the rumors were likely spread by Iran and Hezbollah as an attempt to distract the international community from the bid to impose sanctions on Iran.
“Iran is continuing its race to attain nuclear weapons,” the prime minister said. “The international community is formulating an agreement to impose sanctions against Iran, but I don’t see it happening in the coming month.”
Earlier this month, the Syrian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Israel was preparing a military strike against Syria by accusing Damascus of supplying Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon with long-range Scud missiles.
“Israel aims from this to raise tension further in the region and to create an atmosphere for probable Israeli aggression,” the statement said, adding that “the Syrian Arab Republic denies these fabrications.”
Netanyahu added that he hoped sanctions against oil exports would be implemented, as they would “create a real problem for the Iranian regime and force it to rethink whether it wants to continue developing its nuclear program.”
Netanyahu also said he believes the United Nations Security Council will not approve sanctions in their current formula, but said, “the U.S. is capable of doing it [passing sanctions] in an effective manner outside of the UN, and I am convinced that major other countries will join them.”
Meanwhile, a top Syrian official said earlier Monday accused Israel of trying to undermine Syria’s ties with the United States by claiming that Damascus is supplying Hezbollah with Scud missiles.
Presidential adviser Buthaina Shaaban said “the missiles are too big to be moved undetected in a tiny country like Lebanon where Israeli reconnaissance planes fly overhead on daily basis.”
In an article published Monday in the daily Tishrin, Shaaban described the allegations as “ridiculous.”
Syria has denied the charges, as has Lebanon’s Western-backed prime minister.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has said the Obama administration is still committed to improving ties with Syria despite its deeply troubling moves to aid Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrilla group.
Israel’s Big and Small Apartheids: Jonathan Cook
An Entrenched System
By JONATHAN COOK
This is the text of a talk delivered to the fifth Bilin international conference for Palestinian popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21.
Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state.
That is not surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable — if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little.
I say “a little”, because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews — another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit.
So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently.
First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship.
A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab”. For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli”. That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight — and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why?
Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.
This differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians.
That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”
Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority.
There would be many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the same rights as Jews? Would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the occupation? In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely that the status quo could be maintained.
In other words, the whole edifice of Israel’s apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds its apartheid rule in the occupied territories. They stand or fall together.
Next, let us look at the matter of land control.
Last month I met an exceptional Israeli Jewish couple, the Zakais. They are exceptional chiefly because they have developed a deep friendship with a Palestinian couple inside Israel. Although I have reported on Israel and Palestine for many years, I cannot recall ever before meeting an Israeli Jew who had a Palestinian friend in quite the way the Zakais do.
True, there are many Israeli Jews who claim an “Arab” or “Palestinian” friend in the sense that they joke with the guy whose hummus shop they frequent or who fixes their car. There are also Israeli Jews — and they are an extremely important group — who stand with Palestinians in political battles such as those here in Bilin or in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. At these places, Israelis and Palestinians have, against the odds, managed to forge genuine friendships that are vital if Israel’s apartheid rule is to be defeated.
But the Zakais’ relationship with their Bedouin friends, the Tarabins, is not that kind of friendship. It is not based on, or shaped by, a political struggle, one that is itself framed by Israel’s occupation; it is not a self-conscious friendship; and it has no larger goal than the relationship itself. It is a friendship — or at least it appeared that way to me — of genuine equals. A friendship of complete intimacy. When I visited the Zakais, I realised what an incredibly unusual sight that is in Israel.
The reason for the very separate cultural and emotional worlds of Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel is not difficult to fathom: they live in entirely separate physical worlds. They live apart in segregated communities, separated not through choice but by legally enforceable rules and procedures. Even in the so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in distinct and clearly defined neighbourhoods. And so it was not entirely surprising that the very issue that brought me to the Zakais was the question of whether a Palestinian citizen is entitled to live in a Jewish community.
The Zakais want to rent to their friends, the Tarabins, their home in the agricultural village of Nevatim in the Negev — currently an exclusively Jewish community. The Tarabins face a serious housing problem in their own neighbouring Bedouin community. But what the Zakais have discovered is that there are overwhelming social and legal obstacles to Palestinians moving out the ghettoes in which they are supposed to live. Not only is Nevatim’s elected leadership deeply opposed to the Bedouin family entering their community, but so also are the Israeli courts.
Nevatim is not exceptional. There are more than 700 similar rural communities — mostly kibbutzim and moshavim — that bar non-Jews from living there. They control most of the inhabitable territory of Israel, land that once belonged to Palestinians: either refugees from the 1948 war; or Palestinian citizens who have had their lands confiscated under special laws.
Today, after these confiscations, at least 93 per cent of Israel is nationalised — that is, it is held in trust not for Israel’s citizens but for world Jewry. (Here, once again, we should note one of those important consequences of the differentiated citizenship we have just considered.)
Access to most of this nationalised land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organisations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure that such communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens, precisely as the Zakais and Tarabins have discovered in the case of Nevatim. The officials there have insisted that the Palestinian family has no right even to rent, let alone buy, property in a “Jewish community”. That position has been effectively upheld by Israel’s highest court, which has agreed that the family must submit to a vetting committee whose very purpose is to exclude them.
Again, the 1973 UN Convention on the “crime of apartheid” is instructive: it includes measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups … [and] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”
If Jewish and Palestinian citizens have been kept apart so effectively — and a separate education system and severe limits on interconfessional marriage reinforce this emotional and physical segregation — how did the Zakais and Tarabins become such close friends?
Their case is an interesting example of serendipity, as I discovered when I met them. Weisman Zakai is the child of Iraqi Jewish parents who immigrated to the Jewish state in its early years. When he and Ahmed Tarabin met as boys in the 1960s, hanging out in the markets of the poor neighbouring city of Beersheva, far from the centre of the country, they found that what they had in common trumped the formal divisions that were supposed to keep them apart and fearful. Both speak fluent Arabic, both were raised in an Arab culture, both are excluded from Jewish Ashkenazi society, and both share a passion for cars.
In their case, Israel’s apartheid system failed in its job of keeping them physically and emotionally apart. It failed to make them afraid of, and hostile to, each other. But as the Zakais have learnt to their cost, in refusing to live according to the rules of Israel’s apartheid system, the system has rejected them. The Zakais are denied the chance to rent to their friends, and now live as pariahs in the community of Nevatim.
Finally, let us consider the concept of “security” inside Israel.
As I have said, the apartheid nature of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens is veiled in the legal, social and political spheres. It does not mirror the “petty apartheid” that was a feature of the South African brand: the separate toilets, park benches and buses. But in one instance it is explicit in this petty way — and this is when Jews and Palestinians enter and leave the country through the border crossings and through Ben Gurion international airport. Here the façade is removed and the different status of citizenship enjoyed by Jews and Palestinians is fully on show.
That lesson was learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed this month. Residents of a village near Nazareth, they had been life-long supporters of the Labor party and proudly showed me a fading picture of them hosting a lunch for Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. But at our meeting they were angry and bitter, vowing they would never vote for a Zionist party again.
Their rude awakening had come three years ago when they travelled to the US on a business trip with a group of Jewish insurance agents. On the flight back, they arrived at New York’s JFK airport to see their Jewish colleagues pass through El Al’s security checks in minutes. They, meanwhile, spent two hours being interrogated and having their bags minutely inspected.
When they were finally let through, they were assigned a female guard whose job was to keep them under constant surveillance — in front of hundreds of fellow passengers — till they boarded the plane. When one brother went to the bathroom without first seeking permission, the guard berated him in public and her boss threatened to prevent him from boarding the plane unless he apologised. This month the court finally awarded the brothers $8,000 compensation for what it called their “abusive and unnecessary” treatment.
Two things about this case should be noted. The first is that the El Al security team admitted in court that neither brother was deemed a security risk of any sort. The only grounds for the special treatment they received was their national and ethnic belonging. It was transparently a case of racal profiling.
The second thing to note is that their experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Palestinian citizens travelling to and from Israel. Similar, and far worse, incidents occur every day during such security procedures. What was exceptional in this case was that the brothers pursued a time-consuming and costly legal action against El Al.
They did so, I suspect, because they felt so badly betrayed. They had made the mistake of believing the hasbara (propaganda) from Israeli politicians of all stripes who declare that Palestinian citizens can enjoy equal status with Jewish citizens if they are loyal to the state. They assumed that by being Zionists they could become first-class citizens. In accepting this conclusion, they had misunderstood the apartheid reality inherent in a Jewish state.
The most educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal record.
Israel’s apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. And at the point where that privilege is felt most viscerally by ordinary Jews to be vulnerable, in the life and death experience of flying thousands of feet above the ground, Palestinian citizens must be shown their status as outsider, as the enemy, whoever they are and whatever they have, or have not, done.
Apartheid rule, as I have argued, applies to Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. But is not apartheid in the territories much worse than it is inside Israel? Should we not concern ourselves more with the big apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza than this weaker apartheid? Such an argument demonstrates a dangerous misconception about the indivisible nature of Israel’s apartheid towards Palestinians and about its goals.
Certainly, it is true that apartheid in the territories is much more aggressive than it is inside Israel. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the apartheid under occupation is much less closely supervised by the Israeli civilian courts than it is in Israel. You can, to put it bluntly, get away with much more here. The second, and more significant, reason, however, is that the Israeli system of apartheid in the occupied territories is forced to be more aggressive and cruel — and that is because the battle is not yet won here. The fight of the occupying power to steal your resources — your land, water and labour — is in progress but the outcome is still to be decided. Israel is facing the considerable pressures of time and a fading international legitimacy as it works to take your possessions from you. Every day you resist makes that task a little harder.
In Israel, by contrast, apartheid rule is entrenched — it achieved its victory decades ago. Palestinian citizens have third or fourth class citizenship; they have had almost all of their land taken from them; they are allowed to live only in their ghettoes; their education system is controlled by the security services; they can work in few jobs other than those Jews do not want; they have the vote but cannot participate in government or effect any political change; and so on.
Doubtless, a related fate is envisioned for you too. The veiled apartheid facing Palestinians inside Israel is the blueprint for a veiled — and more legitimate — kind of apartheid being planned for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at least those who are allowed to remain in their Bantustans. And for this very reason, exposing and defeating the apartheid inside Israel is vital to the success of resisting the apartheid that has taken root here.
That is why we must fight Israeli apartheid wherever it is found — in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin. It is the only struggle that can bring justice to the Palestinians.
Abbas outlaws goods produced in Israeli settlements: Haaretz
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday banned trade in goods made by Israelis living in West Bank settlements, stepping up a campaign to build support for an international ban.
“President Abbas today issued a law banning trade in goods made in settlements,” Abbas’s legal adviser Hassan al-Awri told Reuters.
Offenders will face jail sentences and fines that vary according to the amount of settlement goods found in their possession, he said.
The move is part of a campaign launched in January to “cleanse” Palestinian markets of settlement goods.
It is also aimed at encouraging European Union member states to ban trade with enterprises in the settlements, which are considered illegal under international law.
“There’s an international consensus that the settlements are illegal and therefore it is unacceptable to support them,” al-Awri said.
The campaign does not include products from Israel proper, on which Palestinians rely. Campaigns by some local groups to boycott all trade with Israel have had very little success.
Palestinian officials estimate that Israeli-run companies in the settlements sell goods worth $500 million per year into the West Bank market, from construction materials to nuts.
Campaigners believe that cutting off this trade will undermine settler viability in the territories that Palestinians want for a state.
Beating the Mideast’s Black Hole: NY Times
JERUSALEM — The U.S. Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, has come and gone, again, with peace talks still on hold and one Israeli commentator, Yossi Sarid, musing that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a black hole that swallows up goodwill ambassadors through the ages.”
I can’t argue with that. Cold wars come and go, new technologies transform the world, but the clash of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in the Holy Land defeats resolution.
Right now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thinks Palestinians are “up a tree” (a eucalyptus tree, to be precise) and Palestinians think Netanyahu’s a deceitful bully (the lead Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, characterized his tone as, “Come here, boy, we know what’s best for you.”)
Feeling optimistic already? I confess I am — or rather, the complete despair about the “peace process” with which I arrived in Israel has eased. O.K., that’s not exactly optimism, but in the Middle East small mercies count.
Mitchell’s trip was not unproductive. My understanding is that proximity talks will start again next month, with Mitchell’s team shuttling between the sides. Israel will refrain from provocations of the Ramat Shlomo kind (those planned 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem) and will promise to get substantive, on borders above all. Palestinians will promise to, well, show up.
But that’s not the reason for my improved mood: It’s hard to celebrate proximity talks when Palestinians and Israelis have often held direct talks. No, I detect three developments. The first is Obama. The second is Fayyad. The third is what Danny Ayalon, the deputy Israeli foreign minister, called “the sugar-coated poison pill” of the Israeli status quo. I’ll take them in order.
Last week, a letter from President Barack Obama was conveyed to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. In it, I understand, Obama spoke of his very strong commitment — unprecedented commitment — to a two-state peace and said that if Israel seriously undermines trust between the two parties, the United States will not stand in the way of a United Nations resolution condemning that.
No American definition of what such trust-undermining acts might be was offered, which is why Erekat pressed Mitchell in their meeting last Friday on what would constitute “provocative actions” by Israel.
But it seems clear that any reprise of the Ramat Shlomo debacle, which infuriated Obama, would meet American criteria. The bottom line to Israel is: Hold the building, hold the tenders and hold any other provocations while Mitchell shuttles.
Obama’s recalibration of U.S. Middle East diplomacy is ground-shifting. He’s being pummeled from the usual quarters but he’ll stay the course because he’s a realist and because soldiers have told him that, with 200,000 plus American forces in Muslim countries, getting to Israel and Palestine living side-by-side in peace is a vital U.S. national security interest. Calculation, not conscience (although there’s a little of that), is driving policy.
There’s real change in nascent Palestine, too. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, is the most important phenomenon in the Middle East.
Fayyad is obsessed with security — an obsession reflected in the now ubiquitous Palestinian Authority police on the West Bank — and with building state institutions and the economy. He’s not interested in Palestinian “victimhood.” Narratives do not a family feed. He wants a future. He believes nonviolence is the way to get there. He’s receiving some help from Netanyahu on the economy (but needs more) and security cooperation is ongoing.
Over time, Fayyad can reassure Israelis that they’ll get a reliable state over the border, not some Iranian Trojan Horse. Palestinian institution-building is the best answer to Israel’s “no interlocutor” argument.
Within Israel, a booming economy and day-to-day tranquility would suggest peace is a low priority. But polls show a majority feel the country’s moving in the wrong direction; rampant corruption scandals alone cannot explain that. As Ayalon told me, “We do not have an eastern border.” Countries without defined borders have a hard time believing they’re moving in the right direction.
That tells me Netanyahu has potential interest, Hamas and its vile videos about the kidnapped Gilad Shalit notwithstanding, in getting from status quo to permanent status.
Mitchell believes that. He was asked about Netanyahu during his visit and, according to notes I saw, responded: “I believe Netanyahu is serious, capable and interested in reaching an agreement. What I cannot say is if he is willing to agree to what is needed to secure an agreement.”
That meeting concluded with Mitchell saying: “You asked if I think Netanyahu is serious. They ask the same question. You are an expert on Palestinian and Israeli politics. They are the same. But no one in the world knows American politics better than me, and this I will say. There has never been in the White House a president that is so committed on this issue, including Clinton who is a personal friend, and there will never be, at least not in the lifetime of anyone in this room.”
Don’t give up just yet even if history, and Hamas, say peace is a pipe dream and Mitchell next in line for that “black hole.”
Netanyahu must stop East Jerusalem construction if he wants peace: Haaretz Editorial
After the latest round of talks with Special U.S. Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, a cautious hope is emerging that indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians, with American mediation, will begin in the first half of May. As reported by Haaretz on Sunday, U.S. President Barack Obama has invited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to the talks, although he has not been able to secure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a public and explicit commitment to a total freeze on construction for Jews in East Jerusalem for the duration of the negotiations. Obama asked Abbas to settle for an informal understanding that Israel would refrain from announcing “significant actions” in the eastern part of the city.
It seems that the Obama administration has grasped that Netanyahu’s worldview and the composition of his coalition make it difficult for him to declare a building freeze in the capital. Abbas already stated a few months ago that he would not insist on an explicit Israeli declaration that the construction freeze in the settlements applied to East Jerusalem as well. But he did stress that he expected Netanyahu to do everything within his power to avoid provocations relating to planning and construction in the parts of Jerusalem that are east of the Green Line, such as the recent approval of 1,600 residential units in Ramat Shlomo.
The prime minister must apply to himself his demand from the Palestinians, and discard all preconditions for the start of negotiations. As was agreed at the November 2007 Annapolis Conference, the future of Jerusalem, like the issues of the borders, the refugees and security, is an integral part of the discussions on the final status. As was to be expected, the Palestinians have once again rejected the idea of declaring a state within temporary borders in exchange for postponing the issue of Jerusalem to the later stages of the negotiations.
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The importance of ending the dispute and ensuring Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state makes it necessary to restrain the politicians and real estate developers who are eyeing building sites in East Jerusalem. If Netanyahu genuinely has this interest at heart then he must exercise his authority over his ministers and his coalition partners to ensure that the peace process is renewed and that the talks are held in a positive, comfortable atmosphere.
Gaza’s calm determination: The Electronic Intifada
Norman Finkelstein, 26 April 2010
Young Palestinians climb over the ruins of their destroyed home after Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. (Matthew Cassel)
To preserve my sense of purpose, and keep the Palestine struggle from becoming a lifeless abstraction, I need periodically to recharge my moral batteries by reconnecting with the actual people living under occupation and by witnessing firsthand the unfolding tragedy. From each trip I invariably carry away a handful of stark images that I fix in my mind’s eye to dispel the occasional hesitations about staying the course. When the memories begin to fade I know it is time to return.
And so, in June 2009, six months after Israel’s invasion, I joined a delegation that journeyed to Gaza for a brief visit. Though I had been to Gaza before, most of my time during previous trips to the region was spent with friends in the West Bank. Israel has prohibited me from entering the country for ten years, thereby making it impossible for me to visit the West Bank, allegedly because I am a “security” risk. An editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz titled “Who’s Afraid of Finkelstein?” cast doubt on the decision’s premise — “Considering his unusual and extremely critical views, one cannot avoid the suspicion that refusing to allow him to enter Israel was a punishment rather than a precaution” — and went on to argue against banning me. Nonetheless it is unclear if or when I will be able to see my Palestinian friends again. In the meantime, going to Gaza via Egypt at least enabled me to get some feeling for developments on the ground.
Having just spent several months perusing Mahatma Gandhi’s collected works, and deeply inspired by his commitment to living the life of the impoverished masses, I had resolved to rough it in Gaza. But this was easier said than done. Along with several other delegates I volunteered to stay at a Palestinian family’s home rather than a hotel. Dressed to the nines, hair gelled, and reeking of cologne, several Palestinian youths met our group to select their home-stays. They departed first with one young female member of our delegation, then another, then another. The only candidates left hanging at the end of the evening were middle-aged men. We checked into the hotel.
It would be untrue to say that I was terribly jolted by the devastation that I encountered everywhere in Gaza. During the first intifada I had passed time with families in the West Bank living in tents beside the rubble of their former dwellings. Israel would routinely detonate the family residence of an alleged activist in the dead of night after giving the occupants just minutes to evacuate. Soon after the 2006 war I toured Lebanon. Many of the villages in the south had been flattened. The Dahiyeh district of Beirut resembled photographs from bombed-out cities during World War II: large craters where apartment houses and offices once stood, the occasional shell of a building in the distance. So by now I have become somewhat inured to Israel’s calling card to its Arab neighbors.
Nonetheless a few memories from that trip to Gaza remain etched in my mind with particular sharpness. I remember an 11-year-old girl peering out of thick-lensed glasses while she lingered beside the American International School that had been demolished. Speaking in perfect English (her father was a physician and her friends ranked her the top student in the class) the girl wistfully remembered that it had been the best school in Gaza. I also recall the evening we met with government officials in a tent beside what had previously been the Palestinian parliamentary building and was now just a pile of smoldering rubble. Although the devastation was apparently designed not just to subdue Hamas but also to humiliate it, the representatives seemed oblivious to any slight to their dignity from having to convene in such reduced circumstances. And I can still see the huge rectangular depression in the heart of the Islamic University campus where the science and technology building once stood. An administrator recalled with pride tinged by melancholy that, just prior to the attack, the university had installed cutting-edge equipment for biological research in the building.
No Palestinian I met evinced anger or sorrow at what happened. People appeared calmly determined to resume life, such as it was, before the invasion, although the continuing blockade plainly weighed heavily on them. A young hijab-clad guide sitting next to me on a bus one night casually mentioned that her fiance had been killed on the last day of the invasion, and then punctuated her statement by staring, dry-eyed, into my pupils. It was neither an accusation nor an appeal for pity. It was as if Israel’s periodic depredations were now experienced as a natural disaster to which people had grown accustomed; as if Gaza were situated in the path of tornadoes, except that in Gaza every season is tornado season. Some demented mind in an air-conditioned Tel Aviv office conjures up poetic names for its numberless “operations.” Why not a little truth in advertising just this once and call them “Operation Attila the Hun,” “Operation Genghis Khan,” or “Operation Army of Vandals?”
The female head administrator of a children’s library housed in a magnificent edifice that would be the envy of any major city in the United States offered some painful reflections. (Watching the children hard at work in the library, I secretly breathed a sigh of relief that whether wittingly or by miracle Israel had not inflicted on it the same fate as the American International School’s.) She was one of seven siblings all of whom had obtained advanced degrees, and, apart from her, had left for greener pastures abroad. She had studied in Great Britain but against her parents’ recommendation decided to return to her home. She recalled questioning her decision when, on her way to work one day, Israeli soldiers forced her to wade waist-deep in mud to get past a checkpoint.
Our delegation consisted mostly of Americans. Originally I assumed that I was the only Jew on the delegation, but after making several discreet inquiries I began to wonder whether anyone on the delegation was not Jewish. So far as I could tell Gazans did not care much about our pedigrees, although, to my mortification, the rector at the Islamic University introduced me as a “Holocaust survivor.” I politely corrected him: “tenure-battle survivor.” Did I really look 90 years old?!
Hamas has a fearsome reputation, but it met its match with the feisty feminists leading our delegation. Among their complaints, forthrightly expressed, was that Hamas did not allow the delegation sufficient freedom of movement at night. Although Hamas eventually gave ground my sympathies went out to them, and not just because in these verbal bouts they appeared the underdogs. It is not as if Gaza had a lively nightlife. Furthermore, Israeli ships still fired on Gaza every night, and Hamas feared that Israel (or its Palestinian underlings) might create an incident to discredit it. It is also not as if Hamas’s security concerns lacked plausibility: after all we were Americans, and US intelligence agencies have been complicit in the repression of Hamas.
I had several meetings with Hamas officials and cadre. It was later conveyed to me that those I met were mostly from Hamas’s “moderate” wing, although I cannot say exactly what distinguished them from members of the “hard-line” wing, and a lot of the speculation on this matter appears poorly informed. In his dispatch from Gaza The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright knowingly told readers that Gaza-based Hamas leader and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh is a “moderate” who has “spoken of negotiating a long-term truce with Israel,” whereas Damascus-based head of the Hamas politburo Khaled Meshal is a “hard-liner” who is “more likely to initiate radical, destabilizing actions.” But Meshal, the “hard-liner,” has repeatedly called for a diplomatic settlement with Israel.
At each of the parleys with Hamas members I repeated the same message: the current diplomatic posture of Hamas seemed in alignment with representative political organizations, respected juridical institutions, and major human rights groups. Many Hamas members appeared genuinely surprised when I rattled off the “pro-Palestinian” positions espoused by these mainstream bodies. If I was correct, then Hamas should couch its political platform in their language because the chink in Israel’s armor is its diplomatic isolation. Hamas must hammer away the critical point that Israel is the real outlier in the international community and obstacle to peace: not “Hamas says,” but “the UN General Assembly resolution supported by 160 nations says”; not “Hamas says, but “the International Court of Justice says”; not “Hamas says” but “Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International say.”
My interlocutors seemed earnest and willing to listen. (They even heard out in good humor the head of the delegation when she implored them to shave their “scary beards” to improve Hamas’s image in the West.) Although Hamas sought to emulate Hizballah’s victory in 2006, after the massacre it perhaps sunk in that Israel cannot be defeated by shooting firecrackers and Roman candles at it. When I was leaving Gaza, US President Barack Obama had just arrived in Cairo to deliver his landmark address. Hamas sent a letter to him partly informed by our conversations.
For most of the time in Gaza, our delegation was guarded by young Hamas militants. As we parted ways at the end of the visit I felt moved and obliged to state publicly that in my opinion none of them was deserving of the death Israel has attempted to inflict on them. I am aware that according to the “laws of war” they are “legitimate” military targets. But in a rational world the locution “laws of war” would make as much sense as “etiquette of cannibals.” It is probably true that violent conflicts would be more lethal and destructive in the absence of these laws, but it is also true that, in their pretense of neutrality, they obscure fundamental truths. Whether from conviction, frustration, or torment, these young men have chosen to defend their homeland from foreign marauders with weapon in hand. Were I living in Gaza, still in my prime and able to muster the courage, I could easily be one of them.
This essay is the fifth chapter (“Inside Gaza”) of Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, This time we went too far, available from OR Books.
Norman G. Finkelstein’s books include Beyond Chutzpah, The Holocaust Industry, A Nation on Trial and Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.
Israeli forces shoot two Palestinians, international activist in Gaza: The Electronic Intifada
Press release, International Solidarity Movement, 26 April 2010
The following press release was issued by the International Solidarity Movement on 24 April 2010:
At a nonviolent demonstration attended by 150 persons this morning, against the forceful cessation of farming within what Israel defines as a “buffer zone,” two Palestinian demonstrators and one international activist were shot without warning. Israeli soldiers opened fire on the visibly unarmed demonstrators from the border fence. Nidal al-Naji (18) was shot in the right thigh. Hind al-Akra (22) was hit with shrapnel in the stomach and is undergoing emergency surgery. Bianca Zammit (28) from Malta was filming the demonstration when she was shot in her left thigh. The wounded have been treated at al-Aqsa hospital where they stayed overnight; Zammit has been kept in at al-Awda hospital for observation.
Roughly 200 demonstrators, men and woman, including six International Solidarity Movement activists, marched from al-Meghazi towards the Israeli fence closing off the Gaza Strip shortly after 11am. After being met with live ammunition upon cresting a ridge, some demonstrators continued walking forward. This group included six women, two ISM activists and approximately 30 men, roughly 20 of whom reached the border fence. At approximately 11:50am Zammit was shot while filming the demonstration between the ridge and the fence, at a distance of roughly 80-100 meters. Hind al-Akra, who was standing between the ridge and the fence, was shot in the stomach and a Nidal al-Naji was shot near the fence. Demonstrators carried the wounded back across rough terrain to taxis for transport to al-Aqsa hospital.
The nonviolent demonstrations are held in protest against the arbitrary decision by Israel to instate a 300-meter buffer zone as a no-go area for Palestinians where a shoot-to-kill policy is implemented. Different demonstrations at the crossings of Erez in Beit Hanoun, Nahal Oz, al-Atatra and Rafah now take place weekly, and are growing in number despite at least five persons being shot over the last month, some injured and killed as far as two kilometers away from the border.
The Popular Campaign for Security in the Buffer Zone, an umbrella organization that includes organizations representing farmers and Gaza residents living near the border, and also a number of political parties, are present at many of these demonstrations.
Those venturing to the border regions to gather rubble and steel do so as a result of the siege on Gaza which, along with Israel’s 23-day winter war on Gaza, has decimated Gaza’s economy, including 95 percent of Gaza’s factories and businesses, according to the United Nations. Additionally, these recycled construction materials are vital in Gaza where the Israeli-led siege bans all but under 40 items from entering.
The siege prevents vitally needed construction materials from entering Gaza, where more than 6,400 houses were destroyed or severely damaged during the Israeli war on Gaza which killed over 1,500 persons, mostly civilians of which more than 400 were children. Nearly 53,000 houses sustained lesser damage, hospitals, medical centers, schools, kindergartens and mosques were among the other buildings destroyed and damaged during the 23 days of bombings and ground invasion by Israel.
Israel-Palestine conflict: Imposing solutions: The Guardian Editorial
Reason for optimism could be found in hints last week that Palestinian negotiators were considering inducements to start talking
Peace talks in the Middle East could be about to resume this week after a gap of 16 months. The optimism, if such a concept applies to this moribund lifeform, is contained in hints last week that Palestinian negotiators were considering inducements to start talking: the release of 1,000 prisoners, the lifting of some roadblocks, the easing of the Gaza blockade. The Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu has refused to halt settlement construction in East Jerusalem, and his partial freeze on construction in the West Bank is anyway due to expire, so the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will not talk directly with him. After two decades which saw meetings between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, the fact that a Palestinian leader universally deemed to be more pliant than his predecessor can only engage in indirect talks shows how deadlocked the conflict has become.
Former true believers in the peace process are renouncing their faith. Aaron Miller, an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations who served six US secretaries of state, is one of them. Arguing against many of the memos he penned to past political masters (after the Wye River accords which were never implemented, he declared the move toward peace was irreversible), Mr Miller now questions whether the conflict is capable of a negotiated solution and if it isn’t, whether it should continue to be regarded as central to the stability of the region. There are ample grounds for thinking that neither Mr Netanyahu nor Mr Abbas can negotiate a solution, one because he won’t and the other because he can’t.
In his refusal to consider the core issues – East Jerusalem, and the right of return, being just two on which no one could imagine Mr Netanyahu conducting any meaningful negotiations – the Israeli premier is doing those Palestinians who have renounced violence a favour. Sooner or later they are going to say that as Israel reneges on previous agreements – Camp David, the road map, Annapolis – they are better off not negotiating at all. Mr Abbas came close to this yesterday when he urged President Barack Obama to impose a solution. This has a certain logic to it. Hints at how close Mr Abbas and Ehud Olmert had got, the last time there were direct talks between the two sides, left the impression that the solution is there to be grasped and the script already written, if only the actors could be found to speak the words. The row over building in East Jerusalem has dispelled that illusion. The solution is not there. After 17 years of intermittent negotiation but continuous settlement in the West Bank, there is zero trust between the two sides.
So what will the proximity talks be about if they go ahead this week? It will not be the first time that Mr Netanyahu has miscalculated US politics, but he could be thinking that if only he strings this out to November when he hopes the Republicans will gain control of the House of Representatives, then the pressure will be off him. He will have defanged the Democratic president. Mr Obama could just as easily think that the harder he pushes, the greater the chance of forcing Ehud Barak to leave the coalition. Mr Barak has said it is in Israel’s interest to build a Palestinian state.
Either way Mr Obama could be clearing away any last hope in the viability of the peace process, before coming up with his own plan. That would be based on the guidelines for a permanent status agreement which were offered by Bill Clinton in 2000, known as the Clinton Parameters. It would then be endorsed by the EU, UN and Russia, who would then have to implement it. Having declared the solution of the conflict vital to US interests, Mr Obama can hardly walk away. Mr Netanyahu would kick and scream against an imposed plan, but that is the consequence of rejecting lesser demands now.
• This article was amended on 26 April 2010, to eliminate the stray “not” in a phrase referring to “[issues] on which no one could not imagine Mr Netanyahu conducting any meaningful negotiations”.
Who killed the Mideast peace process?: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
It is hard to believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu genuinely assumed that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas would buy the used goods he was selling, a “state with temporary borders.” Even the man who came up with the idea, President Shimon Peres, had stashed it along with his other shelved plans. He told Netanyahu that no life-loving Palestinian leader would accept temporary borders without a deadline for permanent ones.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered a formula that would give the Palestinians territory equal to that that Israel occupied in June 1967 (including, of course, the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem). If Netanyahu were sitting in the Muqata today, would he agree to anything less?
In an interview with Channel 2, Netanyahu, perhaps inadvertently, revealed that he has no intention of giving up Israeli control over all the territories. If Israel were to withdraw from the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, they would be taken over by hostile elements who would threaten the capital’s residents, he said. Unfortunately, the interviewers neglected to remind him that Ramallah is a Qassam’s trajectory away from French Hill, and that the distance between the Shoafat refugee camp in “unified” Jerusalem and the city center is the same as that between Qalqilya and the Kfar Sava mall.
If the prime minister really had been willing to transfer territory to the Palestinians, he could have gone through with the Wye River Accord. A dozen years ago, he himself signed a commitment to give the Palestinians control over 13 percent of Area C. But the past is too far off; at the 100th birthday of his father, the younger Netanyahu declared, “Anyone who does not know his past does not understand his present, and therefore cannot predict the future.”
He proudly said that his father foresaw the 9/11 disaster. There was no mention as to whether he foresaw the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, or the Arab Peace Initiative, however.
The past that has shaped Netanyahu’s present personality and future policy is overflowing with the graves of forefathers, the wars of the Jews and the horror of the Holocaust. All he wants is to convince us that the Palestinians are refusing to make peace. When his deputy Moshe Ya’alon was still in active duty, he promised to burn into the Palestinians’ consciousness the notion that terrorism does not pay. Now that terrorism is ebbing, he is helping Netanyahu burn into Israelis’ consciousness that the Palestinians are responsible for holding up the negotiations.
Netanyahu fears that giving the Palestinians concessions will bring down his government. He is not bothered by the political cost of missing a chance for peace. He just wants to get U.S. President Barack Obama off his back. As Major General (res.) Uri Sagie, who was Military Intelligence chief, stated in Halohem, the journal of the disabled veterans’ association, “Israel whips itself over military failures in wars, but does not evaluate itself over strategic political failures.” Two important commissions investigated the wars in Lebanon.
One examined the massacre at Sabra and Chatila in 1982, and the other the confrontation with Hezbollah in 2006. No commission has yet to investigate missing out on peace with Syria (and Lebanon) in 2000, which led to the unilateral withdrawal and the surrender of the territory [of southern Lebanon] to Hezbollah.”
Sagie, who negotiated with the Syrians on behalf of Ehud Barak, says that it was “a major strategic political failure for Israel.” Netanyahu was also not required to answer to the public on the failure of his exchanges with then-Syrian president Hafez Assad, through his friend, Ron Lauder.
No politician or body was asked to explain the failure of political efforts on the Palestinian track, starting from the problems the day after the Oslo Accords, through the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the outposts affair.
Nearly 50 years late, the Begin government appointed a public commission of inquiry to look into the murder of Chaim Arlosoroff. It is not too late to investigate who killed the peace, if for no other reason so that the leaders can see and be awed. Or perhaps the Palestinians alone are guilty, and the dream of two states for two peoples is a left-wing hallucination? Do we not deserve to know?