EDITOR: The new realities bite hard into Israel’s intransigence
Just the last few days have brought about some very challenging developments for the Israeli defiance of Palestinian rights, and it will be really interesting to see the results of those new elements. The most important ones are of course the opening of the Egyptian side of the Gaza border to Palestinian travelers, which marks the practical end of the stranglehold siege which lasted since 2007.
The second one is the coming together of the PA and Hamas, in a new move for Palestinian unity, and one which looks to be more serious than earlier attempts. That both these developments are originate in Cairo, is just one sign of the new realities, and the Arab Spring dictating the mood and the direction of political change.
Israel, of course, behaves as if it can buck this tide of change. It may well be unable to do so in the new environment which is now shaping itself. Even if Libya stays under US tutelage, as seems likely, most of the other countries’ revolutions in the region are heading the other way. It will certainly will take much more struggle and blood to dislodge Assad in Syria or Yemen’s strongman, but both countries are unlikely to return to the docility which typified them before this January. Even the changes in Palestine would be unthinkable but for the Arab Spring and its centrifugal forces. The US and EU will try all the tricks in the book in order to delay and contain, if not to control these social uprisings, but let us remember they are better at destruction than at building up, so their success will be limited, it seems. It also means that Israel is now going to be seen as the problem that it is – a real stumbling block on the road to democracy, normalisation and just peace in the Middle East.
It may be that the time for change in the Middle East is now knocking on the door, and it will be impossible to delay for long. In Palestine, it means that the time for arguing for the best solution – One democratic, secular state – is now. Let us advance this idea in synchronism with the Arab Spring.
Daniel Barenboim brings ‘solace and pleasure’ to Gaza with Mozart concert: The Guardian
Israeli conductor voices support for non-violence and Palestinian state during performance for schoolchildren and NGO workers
The orchestra arrived with the impact of a presidential motorcade, in armoured cars, with sirens wailing and flanked by dozens of armed men.
It was an unusual overture to a rendition of Mozart. But then, the arrival in Gaza of Daniel Barenboim, the world-famous Israeli conductor and his Orchestra for Gaza – featuring musicians from Paris, Milan, Berlin and Vienna – to play for an audience of schoolchildren and NGO workers was itself far from usual.
The orchestra set off from Berlin on Monday, stopped at Vienna and then landed at El Arish, close to the Egyptian side of the Gaza Strip, on a plane chartered by Barenboim himself.
As an Israeli citizen it is illegal for Barenboim to enter Gaza without a permit, and, as if that wasn’t enough, the recent murder of an Italian peace activist and fears that pro-Osama bin Laden groups in Gaza might seek revenge on western targets meant that the UN security team was on high alert.
Barenboim has previously played in Ramallah and holds an honorary Palestinian passport, and is widely praised for his attempts to reach out across the divide. In Israel, meanwhile, he has been attacked for promoting the work of Wagner.
He told his audience on Tuesday that the people of Gaza “have been blockaded for many years and this blockade has affected all of your lives.”
The aim of his orchestra, he said, was to bring “solace and pleasure” through music to the people of Gaza and to let them know that people all over the world care for them.
Gaza is more accustomed to the sound of explosions, sonic booms and the traditional drums and pipes that accompany its nightly weddings than Mozart. Many religious leaders disapprove of music, and people in general prefer Middle Eastern-style music to Western classical or popular music.
Barenboim drew a burst of applause and then a murmur of appreciation as the orchestra began when he told the audience that they might recognise the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony No 40 as it was the basis of one of the celebrated songs of Fairuz, the most famous living singer in the Arab world.
The orchestra first played Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, which was warmly appreciated, but Barenboim’s speech at the end of the performance went down even better.
“I am a Palestinian ..… and an Israeli,” he told the audience, who applauded the second statement only slightly less than the first. “So you see it is possible to be both.”
He said the Israeli and Palestinian conflict was one between two peoples who believe they are entitled to live on a single piece of land rather than a conflict between two nations about borders, adding that the whole world understood that a Palestinian state should be established on the land that Israel occupied in 1967.
“Everyone has to understand that the Palestinian cause is a just cause therefore it can be only given justice if it is achieved without violence. Violence can only weaken the righteousness of the Palestinian cause,” he said.
Referring to the revolutions in the Arab world and the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, he said that everyone should question their past actions. “Every musician here has played these pieces many times, sometimes hundreds of times. Yesterday we looked at this music as if we had seen it for the first time. We never accept that the next note will played the same way it was played before. Thinking anew is our daily activity. I hope all the people of this region can take note of that,” he said.
Diana Rustum, 12, a pupil at a local UN school said she enjoyed the discipline of the musicians and the melody of the music. “I think it was different from Fairuz but just as beautiful,” she said.
Abdul Rahman Abu Hashem, 12, insisted that he did not get bored during the hour-long performance. “It was very good,” he said.
Obama must bring his daring to Israeli-Palestinian peace: Haaretz Editorial
The death of the spiritual leader of Al-Qaida terrorists won’t extinguish the zealotry surging through their murderous activities against Western targets, including Israeli and Jewish ones, in their attempt to impose Islam on the entire world.
The value of yesterday’s assassination of Osama bin Laden is more symbolic than practical. The Al-Qaida leader has influenced events around the world more than anyone else in the past decade. He ordered the attacks of September 11, 2001, which led to the American military intervention in Afghanistan and indirectly led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
But bin Laden-style terrorism has changed shape over the years. Its headquarters and training bases are still in the Pakistan-Afghanistan region, but its terror cells exist independently, or in loose alliance with distant terror networks. The death of the spiritual leader of Al-Qaida terrorists won’t extinguish the zealotry surging through their murderous activities against Western targets, including Israeli and Jewish ones, in their attempt to impose Islam on the entire world.
All the same, even symbols can have practical ramifications. First and foremost, bin Laden’s assassination will have an effect on U.S. domestic politics. The Republican critics of President Barack Obama will find it harder to carp at him than in the past. While they were wrapping themselves in the national flag, he was taking action – convening secret security meetings, weighing intelligence information and diplomatic angles, making a decision and carrying it out.
It’s true that years of effort are needed to build up the ability to surround an isolated compound, and that the president himself wasn’t the one on the ground or in a helicopter above the compound, but the political risk falls on the one who makes the decision. Obama dared, and won.
This doesn’t assure Obama a victory at the polls in 2012 – George H.W. Bush came out of the first Gulf War victorious, but lost to Bill Clinton a year and a half later – but it’s enough for Obama to deter potential candidates by giving them the impression that it would be a lost cause for them to jump into the race. On the foreign affairs and security front, bin Laden’s assassination will make it easier for Obama to gradually pull out of Afghanistan, as a follow-up to its reduced presence in Iraq, and to cut the Pentagon’s budget.
For Israel, which is in Al-Qaida’s sights, news of bin Laden’s death offers some encouragement. If Obama becomes stronger domestically, that could – and should – drive his administration to make a more aggressive effort to bring peace to the Middle East. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have yet to internalize that, it would be best for them to hear it directly from Obama.
Our freedom is now closer: The Guardian
The popular revolutions across the Arab world have given Palestinians a new sense of hope
Azzam Tamimi
When, at the start of this year, Palestinians around the world marked the anniversary of the 2008-09 Israeli war on Gaza, few could see any hope. The Gaza Strip was still under siege, Palestinian reconciliation seemed out of reach, the Arabs were useless and the US unable, or unwilling, to broker a resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine National Authority (PNA).
Then came the Arab popular revolutions, and the mood among Palestinians switched from desperation to euphoria. Soon after the fall of Hosni Mubarak I visited my old friend, the Hamas leader Khalid Mish’al, in Damascus. He told me he was sure the change in Egypt, which he expected would be followed by similar changes in other Arab countries, meant that it would not be too long before Palestine was free.
My friends in Gaza would tell me the same thing, and so would my relatives in Hebron and the diaspora. They all believed that the Mubarak regime was an impediment to the Palestinian struggle for freedom; once the Egyptian people were free, a genuine democracy in Egypt would support the Palestinians.
At the very least, in the short term, Palestinians believed that post-Mubarak Egypt would not take part in the siege of Gaza, which would all but collapse if Egypt were to open the Rafah crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Indeed, last Friday Egyptian foreign minister Nabil al-Arabi told al-Jazeera that, within seven to 10 days, steps will be taken to alleviate the “blockade and suffering of the Palestinian nation”.
Palestinians monitored the Israeli reaction to the collapse of the Mubarak regime. It did not surprise them to see Israel immensely worried. Mubarak was an ally who contributed to Israel’s security in a very hostile Middle East. The neutralisation of Egypt, and the minimisation of its role in the Palestinian cause since President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978, constituted Zionism’s greatest success since Israel was created 30 years earlier. Rather than spearhead the struggle to liberate Palestine, Mubarak’s Egypt led the so-called Arab moderate camp, an alliance of pro-Israel and pro-US Arab states that included Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, the PNA and the United Arab Emirates.
Palestinians began to imagine what would happen if a popular revolution in Jordan were to bring about a similar change; then one in Saudi Arabia; and perhaps Morocco. Israel would have lost its most important allies in the region and the PNA would be isolated, having been fatally wounded by revelations in al-Jazeera and the Guardian about the concessions its negotiating teams offered in secret to the Israelis.
But although the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions did inspire Arabs to demand political reform or regime change, it was not Jordan, Morocco or Saudi Arabia that saw this the most. There were a few demonstrations, but demands were generally for political reform rather than a change of regime. Instead it was Yemen, Libya and Syria that witnessed the more dramatic protests, which soon escalated into armed struggle in Libya and calls for regime change in Yemen and Syria.
When I saw Khalid Mish’al in February, he did not expect a popular uprising in Syria. He believed the regime was less vulnerable because of its support for resistance in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as its anti-imperialist stance. But solidarity with the Palestinian or Lebanese resistance was not enough to protect any autocratic regime. This worried some Palestinians, and they rushed to express support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime; but Hamas remained silent, to the regime’s displeasure.
While the euphoria created by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions has been dampened by the Libyan experience, seen by many in the Arab region as a revolution gone drastically wrong as a result of armament and western intervention, most Palestinians still believe a new era is coming. The more Arab dictatorships that are replaced by genuine democracies, the closer Palestine will be to liberation. Democracies representing the will of the Arab peoples can only be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.
One immediate fruit of Mubarak’s removal and the uprising in Syria has been the revival of Palestinian reconciliation efforts. Responding to grassroots pressure, both Hamas and Fatah met in Cairo and decided to work for the formation of a unity government and the resolution of disputes over security and elections. Fatah is anxious that it may lose favour with Egypt, while Hamas is anxious it may soon lose Syria as a safe haven. Unsurprisingly, Israel threatened to take action against the PNA if Fatah went through with the deal with Hamas.
For many years Israel claimed to be the only democracy in the region. And yet Israeli politicians appealed to the US to intervene in Egypt to prevent Mubarak’s fall, and campaigned for him to remain in power. Israel clearly believes it can count on Arab dictators who are more interested in power and personal wealth than in serving their nations, let alone serving the Palestinian cause.
Despite its claims of superiority, Israel appears to suffer from the same symptoms that plague Arab dictators; the failure to learn that they need to change before it is too late. It’s been too late for Mubarak, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh. Israel has oppressed the Palestinians for so long, and has incurred the wrath of the Arab masses whose revolutions are bringing hope to Palestinians.
Whichever way one looks at it, the Arab revolutions are the best news the Palestinians have had for decades.
France hints at recognition of Palestinian state ahead of Netanyahu visit: Haaretz
In interview with L’Express magazine, French President Sarkozy says if ‘peace process is still dead in September, France will face up to its responsibilities on the central question of recognition of a Palestinian state.’
French President Nicolas Sarkozy hinted in an interview that France may recognize an independent Palestinian state this year, if peace talks with Israel were not back on track by September.
“If the peace process is still dead in September, France will face up to its responsibilities on the central question of recognition of a Palestinian state,” Sarkozy said in an interview in France’s L’Express magazine.
The French president added that “things have to be brought to a conclusion” before September, when the Palestinians are expected to ask the United Nations General Assembly in September to recognize statehood on all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“We are going to take an initiative before the summer, with the Europeans, to restart, along with the Americans, the peace process,” Sarkozy said. “France wants the peace process to be restarted before the difficult UN meeting in September.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to meet with Sarkozy on Thursday, where his will discuss Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s unity deal with Hamas Islamists as a blow to already dim prospects for peace.
Netanyahu is also due to hold talks in London with British Prime Minister David Cameron on Wednesday.
It will be Netanyahu’s first trip abroad since the surprise announcement last week that Abbas and his long-time rival Hamas had agreed to a unity pact that envisages formation of an interim government and Palestinian elections this year.
“This is a major problem and raises all sorts of questions, and that issue will be very much on the table,” an Israeli government official said on Tuesday.
“If the (Palestinians) are going for a unity government with Hamas, there’s no doubt that’s a step in the wrong direction — a very negative step.”
Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip from Abbas’s Fatah movement in 2007, calls for Israel’s destruction in its founding charter although it has offered a long-term truce in return for Palestinian statehood.
Israel refuses to negotiate with Hamas, and the United States and the European Union also shun the group over its refusal to renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept existing interim Israeli-Palestinian peace accords.
“Obviously, we want the process with the Palestinians to move forward, but up until now their refusal to engage was a problem and now their decision to bring in Hamas, the antithesis of peace, has further aggravated a negative situation,” the Israeli official said, giving an overview of Netanyahu’s stance.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague said on Monday that Britain welcomed the deal to end the feud between the factions.
“Of course lots of details have to be worked out and we will have to judge everyone by their actions and intentions. We will continue to work closely on this,” Hague said during a visit to Cairo.
Netanyahu is due to address a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress in three weeks’ time, and aims to focus on the regional upheaval, Iran’s nuclear program and the Palestinian issue. He has given no specific details of what he will say.
Who will reshape the Arab world: its people, or the US?: The Guardian
Phase one of the Arab spring is over. Phase two – the attempt to crush or contain genuine popular movements – has begun
Tariq Ali
The patchwork political landscape of the Arab world – the client monarchies, degenerated nationalist dictatorships and the imperial petrol stations known as the Gulf states – was the outcome of an intensive experience of Anglo-French colonialism. This was followed after the second world war by a complex process of imperial transition to the United States. The result was a radical anticolonial Arab nationalism and Zionist expansionism within the wider framework of the cold war.
When the cold war ended Washington took charge of the region, initially through local potentates then through military bases and direct occupation. Democracy never entered the frame, enabling the Israelis to boast that they alone were an oasis of light in the heart of Arab darkness. How has all this been affected by the Arab intifada that began four months ago?
In January, Arab streets resounded to the slogan that united the masses regardless of class or creed: “Al-Sha’b yurid isquat al-nizam!” – “The people want the downfall of the regime!” The images streaming out from Tunis to Cairo, Saana to Bahrain, are of Arab peoples on their feet once again. On 14 January, as chanting crowds converged on the ministry of interior, Tunisia’s President Ben Ali and his family fled to Saudi Arabia. On 11 February the national uprising in Egypt toppled the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak as mass rebellion erupted in Libya and the Yemen.
In occupied Iraq, demonstrators protested against the corruption of the Maliki regime and, more recently, against the presence of US troops and bases. Jordan was shaken by nationwide strikes and tribal rebellion. Protests in Bahrain spiralled into calls for the overthrow of the monarchy, an event that scared the neighbouring Saudi kleptocrats and their western patrons, who can’t conceive of an Arabia without sultans. Even as I write, the corrupt and brutal Ba’athist outfit in Syria, under siege by its own people, is struggling for its life.
The dual determinants of the uprisings were both economic – with mass unemployment, rising prices, scarcity of essential commodities – and political: cronyism, corruption, repression, torture. Egypt and Saudi Arabia were the crucial pillars of US strategy in the region, as confirmed recently by US vice-president Jo Biden, who stated that he was more concerned about Egypt than Libya. The worry here is Israel; the fear that an out-of-control democratic government might renege on the peace treaty. And Washington has, for the time being, succeeded in rerouting the political process into a carefully orchestrated change, led by Mubarak’s defence minister and chief of staff, the latter being particularly close to the Americans.
Most of the regime is still in place. Its key messages are the need for stability and a return to work, putting a stop to the strike wave. Fevered behind-the scenes negotiations between Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood are continuing. A slightly amended old constitution remains in force and the South American model of huge social movements producing new political organisations that triumph at the polls and institute social reforms is far from being replicated in the Arab world, thus not posing any serious challenge, until now, to the economic status quo.
The mass movement remains alert in both Tunisia and Egypt but is short of political instruments that reflect the general will. The first phase is over. The second, that of rolling back the movements, has begun.
The Nato bombing of Libya was an attempt by the west to regain the “democratic” initiative after its dictators were toppled elsewhere. It has made the situation worse. The so-called pre-empting of a massacre has led to the killing of hundreds of soldiers, many of whom were fighting under duress, and permitted the ghastly Muammar Gaddafi to masquerade as an anti-imperialist.
Here one has to say that whatever the final outcome, the Libyan people have lost. The country will either be partitioned into a Gaddafi state and a squalid pro-west protectorate led by selected businessmen, or the west will take out Gaddafi and control the whole of Libya and its huge oil reserves. This display of affection for “democracy” does not extend elsewhere in the region.
In Bahrain, the US green-lighted a Saudi intervention to crush local democrats, enhance religious sectarianism, organise secret trials and sentence protesters to death. Bahrain today is a prison camp, a poisonous mixture of Guantánamo and Saudi Arabia.
In Syria the security apparatus led by the Assad family is killing at will, but without being able to crush the democratic movement. The opposition is not under the control of Islamists: it is a broad coalition that includes every social layer apart from the capitalist class that remains loyal to the regime.
Unlike in other Arab countries, many Syrian intellectuals stayed at home, suffering prison and torture, and secular socialists like Riad Turk and many others are part of the underground leadership in Damascus and Aleppo. Nobody wants western military intervention. They don’t want a repeat of Iraq or Libya. The Israelis and the US would prefer Assad to stay as they once did Mubarak, but the dice are still in the air.
In Yemen, the despot has killed hundreds of citizens but the army has split, and Americans and Saudis are trying desperately to stitch together a new coalition (as in Egypt) – but the mass movement is resisting any deals with the incumbent.
The US has to contend with an altered political environment in the Arab world. It is too soon to predict the final outcome, except to say it is not over yet.
Palestinian reconciliation is good news for Mideast peace: Haaretz
By Akiva Eldar
What do they have in common – the hawks of Iz al-Din al-Qassam, the military wing of Hamas; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; his bodyguard, Defense Minister Ehud Barak; and Nobel Peace Prize laureate President Shimon Peres ? They all threw a fit over the reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas.
The protest from the Palestinian rejectionist front is obvious; the Egyptian document is Hamas’ deed of surrender. It obligates the militant organization to accept the authority of the security forces subordinate to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, without giving it any purchase in the political arena.
From Israel’s perspective, the agreement appears to be too good for Hamas political head Khaled Meshal to sign.
So why were Israeli politicians who purport to be peace-loving statesmen so quick to go after Abbas? In the worst case, they realize, the agreement puts paid to the government’s claim that Abbas “represents only half of the Palestinian people.” If the conditions that Abbas set are observed – “one authority, one law, one gun [army]” – this could ruin the main mantra of the Israeli right: “We left Gaza and got Qassam rockets in return.”
The right, knowing that internal Palestinian reconciliation could expedite international recognition for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, intentionally depicts the unity move as anti-Israel. A Fatah-Hamas accord is likely to cool down the Gaza border, but the right is consciously heightening panic by raising the specter of “Qassams in Judea and Samaria.”
In the less-than-worst (or perhaps worse than “worst” ) case, Netanyahu, Barak and Peres did not bother to read the agreement nor wanted to hear Abbas’ clear explication. The document specifies that the Palestinian provisional unity government will only be authorized to deal with the unification and operation of the security forces, the restoration of buildings and infrastructure damaged during Operation Cast Lead and preparations for the election scheduled for May 2012.
Abbas has repeatedly stressed that it was the Palestine Liberation Organization that has signed treaties with Israel since the Oslo Accords, and that the government of technocrats it will appoint will not be able to prevent him from negotiating with the Netanyahu government on the basis of the 1967 borders, territorial exchanges, an agreed solution to the refugee problem and a moratorium on construction in the settlements and in East Jerusalem for a period of three months. Thus, Hamas recognition of the conditions put forth by the Quartet, which include honoring all previous agreements with Israel, is all but meaningless.
If the leaders of the state and their loyal servant in the President’s Residence did read the text of the reconciliation agreement, they did not delve into the conditions that made it possible. Middle East expert Matti Steinberg, currently a visiting scholar at Princeton, would be happy to explain to them that the text is the very same one submitted to Hamas months ago – only its context has changed. Steinberg, who has advised several Shin Bet security service chiefs on Palestinian affairs, could refer them to the loud, pointed criticism voiced by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Islamic scholar of the Muslim Brotherhood – Hamas’ big sister – of the massacre of Sunni Muslims by Syria’s Alawite regime.
The ground is trembling in Syria. Bashar Assad, the patron of Meshal and his colleagues, has become a clone of Muammar Gadhafi in the eyes of the world. Signing the reconciliation agreement is the price paid by the Hamas refugees from Damascus for the trip to Cairo. The decision to open the gates of Rafah, like the pressure on Hamas to sign the treaty, reflect Egypt’s desire to create a context that will enable the Palestinians to resume negotiations with Israel; it will obviate the planned flotilla to Gaza and hurt the tunnel trade that funds Hamas forces in Gaza.
If Israel causes the reconciliation to fail, this would perpetuate the violence along the border with Gaza. Injury to the agreement would rock the delicate relationship being formed with the new regime in Cairo and improve the position of Iran.
The reconciliation agreement and the closing of ranks in the occupied territories are the best news possible for seekers of peace – on both sides of the Green Line. I only hope that Hamas does not get cold feet at the last minute, and that it honors both the spirit and the letter of the agreement.
Gaza is a symbol of occupation, thanks to Israel: Haaretz
Israel’s Pavlovian response to Palestinian reconciliation, which included the usual threats of boycott, is the result of the ingrained anxiety of people who no longer control the process
By Zvi Bar’el
Israel’s Pavlovian response to Palestinian reconciliation, which included the usual threats of boycott, is the result of the ingrained anxiety of people who no longer control the process. For five years, Israel has done everything to change the outcome of Hamas’ watershed victory in the elections in the territories. It did not recognize the Hamas government or the unity government, and of course, it did not recognize the Hamas government that arose after that organization’s brutal takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza became a synonym for Hamas; that is, for terror, and the West Bank stood for the land of unlimited possibilities. Israel made an enormous contribution toward building up Hamas into an institution, not only an organization. The cruel closure of Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, turning Gaza into a battle zone and the saga of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, with Israel continuing to negotiate with Hamas while striking out against it – all this has transformed Gaza into a symbol of the occupation and a focus of international empathy.
Israel, in its diplomatic blindness, saw the product it helped manufacture as a huge diplomatic achievement. Its working assumption was that the split between Gaza and the West Bank would allow Israel to pursue the appearance of negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while fighting another part of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israel interpreted the political conflict between Abbas and Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza and Khaled Meshal in Damascus as an unsolvable ideological conflict and a reality in which, in Israel’s thinking, Palestine is divided not only into two regions, but into two mutually hostile peoples. Israel tortures one side while celebrating with the other at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opening of a shopping center.
Israel has also had partners who helped it make its mistake. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s policy on Hamas, the antagonism between him and Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Iranian aid to Hamas strengthened the misconception that Israel could preserve this schism for its own benefit. Mubarak worked toward Palestinian reconciliation and put together a document that served as the basis for the current rapprochement, Syria supported reconciliation, and Abbas has not stopped talking about and trying to achieve it. But Israel still thinks that only Israel will decide when the two parts of the Palestinian people will unite.
Now, with this policy in its death throes, Israel is telling horror stories in which the Palestinian state becomes a Hamas state, an Iranian proxy and a focus of terror. It is also trying to say that this reconciliation will be the death of the peace process – the same process whose remains are already in the morgue.
These are empty threats. Palestinian terror existed before Hamas came into being, and Fatah has used terror without Hamas as its partner. The Palestinian leadership – with Hamas or without it – will not negotiate with Israel not because it will be a radical Islamic entity, but because it sees no chance of Israeli concessions and does not view Israel as a partner for peace. Israel is deluding itself and anyone still willing to listen to its wailing if it continues to declare that there will be no peace process because of reconciliation.
This self-delusion, and not Palestinian reconciliation, is the clear and present danger to the State of Israel. It draws its power from bygone chapters in history that document Israel’s powerful position internationally, its moral voice and its good name as a peace-seeking nation. This self-delusion refuses to recognize the changing reality in the Middle East, the changing of the guard among leaders and peoples and the self-interested moves of Western powers that are longing for new partnerships in the Middle East to replace the ones that have disappeared. Israel is not included in that new address list. Its good name is being torn to shreds.
But Israel has a rare opportunity to rewind the film back five years – not only to understand that the two parts of the Palestinian people are one entity, but to correct the mistakes it made in 2006. It must deal with the entire Palestinian government, even if that government includes Hamas representatives. Israel can, of course, repeat its mistakes, but then Israel, and not the Palestinian state, will become a country that threatens its own citizens.
Will Goldstone’s retraction provoke another Cast Lead?: Jonathan Cook
by Jonathan Cook
Le Monde diplomatique blog
1 MAY 2011
Richard Goldstone, the international jurist whose now-notorious report on Gaza tarred the Israeli army with war crimes, backtracked unexpectedly and very publicly on 2 April in the pages of the Washington Post.
For 18 months Goldstone had suffered a campaign of character assassination by Israel and its supporters as they sought to discredit his United Nations investigation into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09. Goldstone, a South Africa judge who made his name undermining the legal foundations of apartheid rule and later prosecuting war criminals from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, was quickly cast as the self-hating Jew who had helped to author an anti-Semitic report. His professions of “love for Israel”, made as he defended his role, served only to further incense critics.
Israel had been deeply offended by the allegation from Goldstone’s team that its army – like Hamas, the Palestinian faction that rules Gaza – committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel’s three-week rampage, known as Operation Cast Lead, through the tiny coastal enclave. Cast Lead killed 1,400 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, including more than 300 children; on the Israeli side, 13 died, including 10 soldiers, four of whom were killed by friendly fire.
But Goldstone revised some of the findings of his UN mission in the Post article, concluding that the report would have been different “if I had known then what I know now”. His “reconsideration”, as he termed it, provoked an immediate flood of commentary, some of it claiming that Israel was finally vindicated, while others asked in bafflement what had changed to justify Goldstone’s about-turn.
Dubious premises
Although the Goldstone Report, published in September 2009, broke new ground in holding Israel to account for its army’s methods of conducting warfare, some critics pointed out when it first appeared that the UN panel had ducked the most contentious issue about Cast Lead – whether the operation was legitimate in the first place.
Implicitly, Goldstone’s team needed to accept several dubious premises to back Israel’s view of Cast Lead as an act of self-defence: that Gaza’s occupation ended with the withdrawal of Jewish settlers in 2005, despite Israel’s continuing control of all the borders; that Israel’s subsequent siege of the enclave, a policy of collective punishment of the civilian population, was not itself an act of hostility; and that Israel had to resort to warfare to solve its conflict with Hamas and the rockets the group intermittently fired into Israel.
In fact, Israel had broken a lengthy ceasefire with Hamas several weeks before Cast Lead and then, when the militant group started firing rockets into Israel again, had refused talks to renew the truce. A letter from 30 leading international jurists published by the UK Sunday Times during Cast Lead observed that the operation was actually a war of “aggression, not self-defence, not least because its assault on Gaza was unnecessary.”
Furthermore, as noted by Richard Falk, an American authority on international law at Princeton University, there is much evidence that the Israeli army planned Cast Lead at least six months before the attack and that the timing was related not to pressing Israeli security needs but to political considerations: the ruling Kadima party was facing an election a few weeks later and appeared to want to exploit political paralysis in the US as George Bush handed over the keys of the White House to Barack Obama. Falk also points out that the Goldstone Report ignored the fact that “Israel denied the civilian population of Gaza the option to leave the war zone and become refugees, at least temporarily.”
Goldstone, in fact, limited his efforts to investigating the combat methods used by both sides.
Hamas was accused of war crimes chiefly because it had fired primitive rockets into Israel that targeted civilian areas. Israel’s violations of the laws of war were more extensive. The Goldstone Report found that Israel had attacked mosques, hospitals, apartment buildings, refugee shelters and UN compounds, destroying and damaging thousands of buildings. It had used white phosphorus in densely populated areas. Its soldiers had targeted civilians in dozens of separate incidents, taken human shields, and blocked access to ambulances. And it had attacked infrastructure, including the electricity, water and sewage systems, without a lawful military reason.
In a damning conclusion, the Goldstone report argued that Israel had “viewed disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of many people [in Gaza] as a legitimate means to achieve not only military but also political goals”. Goldstone insisted that Israel and Hamas conduct their own credible investigations into these allegations. Otherwise he threatened to recommend that his report be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to prepare for prosecutions for war crimes.
Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister at the time of the report’s publication, ranked the report as one of the three gravest “strategic challenges” facing Israel, alongside Iran’s suspected nuclear programme and the rockets aimed at Israel by Hamas and the Shia group Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Eighteen months later
In his Washington Post article, Goldstone retracted one of the main findings of his original report – the one that has most irked Israel. A re-examination of Israeli conduct, he wrote, suggested that “civilians [in Gaza] were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”. He also praised the Israeli army for conducting investigations into some 400 incidents during Cast Lead – unlike Hamas which, he noted, had not carried out a single probe.
Goldstone’s timing may have been significant. He offered his reassessment a few days after the UN Human Rights Council, which appointed his fact-finding mission, recommended that the General Assembly refer the Goldstone Report to the Security Council. In doing so, the council initiated a mechanism designed to move the report to the ICC as a prelude to a possible war crimes tribunal.
As expected, reactions to Goldstone’s rethink were polarised. Israel hailed the opinion article a “vindication”, with Netanyahu demanding that the UN consign the Goldstone Report to the “dustbin of history”. The White House backed Israel. It had opposed the Goldstone Report from the outset, both because it reflexively supports Israel in international forums and because it does not want the charge of war crimes levelled against either the US or its allies. Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN, told the foreign affairs committee of the US House of Representatives that the Obama administration would like to “see this entire Goldstone proposition disappear”. The US Senate, meanwhile, passed a resolution calling on the UN to rescind the report. The White House, it was reported, was working behind the scenes to get US allies to add their weight at the UN to get the report withdrawn.
Ranged against Israel and the US were Goldstone’s three distinguished – though until now largely unnoticed – co-authors: Hina Jilani, a prominent Pakistani human rights lawyer; Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics; and Desmond Travers, a former Irish colonel and expert in international criminal investigations. In mid-April, they published a rebuttal to the Goldstone article in the UK Guardian. They rejected the idea the report needed revision “as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions.”
Another notable expert, John Dugard, a South African law professor and the UN former special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, wrote of Goldstone: “It is sad that this champion of accountability and international criminal justice should abandon this cause in such an ill-considered but nevertheless extremely harmful op-ed.”
Even Goldstone, who has mostly kept a studious silence on the controversy he has provoked, was forced to concede that he would not seek the report’s nullification at the UN.
So who was right: was Goldstone’s “reconsideration” an exoneration of Israel or an embarrassing endnote to his illustrious career?
Three issues reassessed
Goldstone’s article raised three significant issues. He observed that Israel had carried out investigations into 400 cases of possible misconduct by its troops. These investigations, he argued, while not ideal, had been done “to a significant degree” – implying that Israel had thereby obviated the need for a referral to the ICC.
Second, he stated that one of the most egregious acts by the Israeli military – in which it shelled a house, killing more than 20 members of the Samouni family sheltering inside – had later been shown to be an “error” made by an officer who misinterpreted an aerial photograph. The soldier was under investigation in an “appropriate process” despite “frustrating” delays.
Third, and most important for Israel, he withdrew the allegation that Israeli war planners had pursued a policy in prosecuting Operation Cast Lead that intentionally put civilians in harm’s way. He ascribed his team’s earlier conclusion to Israel’s failure to cooperate. Now, the Israeli investigations “indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”.
Strangely, most of the Goldstone Report’s allegations of Israeli war crimes were not addressed at all in the Washington Post article. Goldstone also indicated that the Israeli investigations had produced no new public information on which to base a general retraction. But even his three specific reassessments failed to persuade most observers.
On the first point, it was true that Israel had conducted hundreds of investigations. But they had been carried out not by independent investigators but by the military in secret. None of Israel’s inquiries met the criteria set by Goldstone for being considered “effective” in the view of Israeli human rights groups such as B’Tselem, which had assisted Goldstone, or international groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. And despite investigations, only two had led to convictions. In an indication of the skewed priorities of the military tribunals, a soldier found guilty of stealing a credit card was sentenced to seven months, while two soldiers who took a nine-year-old boy as a human shield were each given three-month suspended sentences.
As if mocking Goldstone for his new-found confidence in Israeli justice, Israel’s military advocate general, Avichai Mendelblit, revealed a fortnight after publication of the Washington Post article that the only other major case where a prosecution was known to be pending was to be closed without charges being filed. That case involved the fatal shooting of four Palestinian civilians, including a three-year-old, as they fled their home while waving a white flag. Mendelblit said the soldiers had not fired against orders.
Goldstone’s view was also contradicted by the two UN-appointed experts charged with monitoring implementation of the Goldstone Report. The pair – Mary McGowan Davis, a former New York supreme court justice, and Lennart Aspegren, a Swedish judge – had concluded in their own recent report that Israel’s investigations were not impartial, prompt or transparent.
On the second point, Goldstone referred to the killing of more than 20 members of the Samouni family, while making no mention of the 35 other war crime allegations the UN panel had wanted investigating. Where was the new evidence to justify reconsideration of these cases? Even with the Samouni family, the Goldstone Report concluded that Israeli soldiers “must have been aware of [the Samounis’] civilian status” because they forced the family to assemble in the targeted house. The report added that, even were the killings later shown to be the result of an operational failure, Israel would still be responsible for “an internationally wrongful act”.
And on the third point, about civilians being intentionally targeted, Goldstone appeared to be blatantly misrepresenting his mission’s own conclusions. The Goldstone Report had never suggested that Israel deliberately murdered civilians. “Intentionality” referred to Israel’s apparent policy of using indiscriminate and “deliberately disproportionate” force, and its “systematically reckless” approach to preventing civilian casualties during attacks on built-up areas of Gaza.
‘Going wild’
Goldstone’s team had deduced that this was Israeli policy because of the published comments of senior commanders such as Yoav Galant, who observed that Cast Lead’s goal was to send Gaza “decades into the past”. Similarly, politicians like Tzipi Livni, foreign minister at the time, had stated that Israel was responding to Hamas rockets “by going wild”.
The mission had also paid attention to an Israeli military strategy known as the Dahiya doctrine, named after a suburb of Beirut that Israel levelled during its 2006 attack on Lebanon. This strategy justified laying waste to large swathes of Gaza’s infrastructure, supposedly because it offered support to Hamas, despite the inevitable civilian casualties. In his article, Goldstone cast no fresh doubt on his earlier premise that such an approach to warfare would by definition endanger civilians.
In addition, an Israeli group of ex-soldiers, Breaking the Silence, has collected many testimonies from soldiers who served in Gaza indicating that they received orders to carry out operations with little or no regard for the safety of civilians. Some described the army as pursuing a policy of “zero-risk” to soldiers, even if that meant putting civilians in danger.
Why did Goldstone choose to cast doubt on his own carefully prepared report but then do so in such a shoddy manner that it served only to fuel doubts about his motives?
Goldstone’s friends, much like his enemies, have surmised that he buckled under the relentless pressure of the past 18 months that saw even some members of his own family ostracise him. The nadir was a threat last year from South Africa’s Jewish leaders to picket his grandson’s bar mitzvah if he dared attend. Alon Liel, a former senior Israeli foreign ministry official and long-time friend of Goldstone’s, noted that the “hell” he had been put through contributed to his rethink. “When Israel decided to boycott him, it was an overwhelming insult. ‘I’m a Jewish judge, a respected Zionist – and Israel doesn’t trust me?’ He was a broken man.”
The New York Times quoted other friends arguing that his about-turn reflected his disillusionment with the reponse to the report. He had mistakenly assumed that an even-handed report blaming both Hamas and Israel would pressure the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships into peace talks – much as an earlier commission he headed in South Africa helped to reconcile the white minority and the black majority, paving the way to apartheid’s end. Instead, said Aryeh Neier, another friend, the judge grew angry that his report had become “fodder to people who were looking for anything they could use against Israel”.
Ultimately, Goldstone’s rethink is unlikely to lead to his report being rescinded by the UN. However, it will strengthen the White House’s hand if, as expected, it decides to block the report at the Security Council.
Israeli officials believe Goldstone’s “koshering” of their military inquiries will lift the threat of Israeli politicians and soldiers being arrested on war crimes charges during trips overseas. Goldstone, they say, concluded that Israel fulfilled its obligations to investigate, freeing the international community of the need to intervene. More worryingly, however, Israel also appears to believe Goldstone has removed the danger of the UN investigating any future military operations – so long as Israel promises to conduct a similar internal inquiry. Veteran Israeli analyst Uri Avnery, a peace activist, warned: “Goldstone has now paved the way for another Cast Lead operation which will be far worse.”
Several Israeli government ministers are already calling for a Cast Lead 2. It seems they may yet get their way.
Palestinian reconciliation may lead to Israel’s Palestinian separation: Haaretz
Back in February, Egyptian diplomats predicted that Egypt would help bring about an internal Palestinian rapprochement, but what good is reconciliation if Palestinians from Gaza still won’t be able to travel to the West Bank?
By Amira Hass
As someone who considers herself to be a conservative journalist, I make an effort to refrain from reporting about what will happen in the future. Too many headlines, in my opinion, are about what so-and-so will say and what the fate of so-and-so will be. In the face of competition from the Internet and television, the printed press, afraid of becoming irrelevant, is often forced into making predictions. “I forgot my crystal ball at home” – is how I respond to the question “What will be?” I prefer to focus on what has been done and been said today and yesterday.
Nos, in wake of the internal Palestinian appeasement accord, I regret that I was so conservative. In February, two Egyptian diplomats and one European diplomat predicted to me then that after the revolution, Egypt would succeed in bringing about a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. The European said that former President Hosni Mubarak and General Omar Suleiman were adamant that there be a “reconciliation process” – as in “peace process,” for appearances’ sake, without changing a thing. Preventing a rapprochement, after all, was in line with the desires of Israel and the United States, he pointed out.
Because of the rush of events in Egypt and the news being generated there on a daily basis during the revolution, I kept putting off writing the “Israeli-Palestinian chapter” I had planned on. My reservations about prophecies were also a factor. Had I written the piece then, I would obviously have included the predictions of these diplomats that the peace treaty with Israel would not be affected but that “there would no longer be a situation in which when Israel bombs Gaza, the Egyptian president to host the Israeli prime minister in Sharm-a-Sheikh.”
One of the diplomats forecast that the Egyptian ambassador to Israel might be recalled. Another envisioned Egypt taking a tougher diplomatic approach to Israel. But all three were convinced that there would not be a drastic change in the Egyptian “Rafah policy.” “The easiest thing to do, the most populist, would be to open up Rafah,” one of the Egyptian diplomats told me. Closing the Rafah border crossing was in Egypt’s interest and was not a result of ‘Mubarak’s collaboration with Israel,’ as many charged, the three concurred The two Egyptian diplomats told me there was no chance that the Rafah checkpoint will be opened completely so long as the Erez crossing remained closed and Israel continued to separate Gaza from the West Bank.
All those who support a two-state solution and a Palestinian state comprised of the West Bank and Gaza, they said, would have to ensure freedom of movement for Palestinians between Gaza and the West Bank and the rights of Gazans to visit, remain, study and work in the West Bank. Opening the Rafah crossing without providing the Palestinian residents of Gaza freedom of access to the West Bank would play into Israel’s hands and its plan to “throw Gaza to the Egyptians.” That would obviously be after it failed to sink into the seas on its own, as the late Yitzhak Rabin once wished.
(But recent events provide another opportunity to shout into the void of willful forgetfulness: Ever since January 1991, long before Hamas rose to power, long before the suicide bombings, even before the Oslo accords, Israel restricted the Palestinians’ rights to travel between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. That was when the “caging” of Gaza started, and this cage has gradually become more and more closed over time. In 1997, Israel forbade Gazans to enter the West bank via the Allenby Bridge. Why? Because ever since 1991, when the travel-ban system, misnamed the permits regime, was introduced and when students and businessmen, for example, were not permitted to drive the 70 kilometers that separate Gaza from Ramallah, they would leave from Rafah and enter the West Bank via Jordan. Starting in 2000, Israel declared that those Gazans who were in the West Bank were “illegal sojourners” if their travel permits had expired. As of 2010, the judicial military system defines them as “infiltrators” who face either arrest or expulsion. In 1996, it transpired that Israel, in violation of the Oslo accords, was not allowing the Palestinian Authority to change the ID addresses of Palestinians who had moved from Gaza to the cities of the West bank. )
On the other hand, maybe it was a good thing that I didn’t write that chapter. According to a declaration by Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi, the Rafah crossing is scheduled to open in about 10 days. Contrary to what the two diplomats representing the old Egyptian regime had predicted, the foreign minister is not waiting for the rights of movement between the Gaza Strip and the West bank to be reinstated.
On yet another hand, we still don’t know what this “opening” implies. Will Gazans not have to request an entry visa into Egypt in advance and be granted one immediately upon arriving at the terminal? Or will the visa be granted easily and swiftly, and not merely to “important people,” the sick and the very affluent, as is the case today? Will entire families be able to board a bus in Khan Yunis and travel to Alexandria without coordinating and planning ahead and without enduring the nerve-wracking wait for replies from Egyptian intelligence? Will a goods terminal be built at Rafah (something that would put an end to the tunnel economy )? Will foreign citizens, including Egyptians, be able to enter Gaza via Rafah without the need to pull all sort of strings and without having to show Egyptian Intelligence clearance documents at half a dozen roadblocks on the way from Cairo to el-Arish? That would be the significance of a real “opening.”
There is no doubt that this would improve life for Gazans. But, like a glove, it would also fit Israel’s separation policy.
Premature cheers
Apropos reconciliation, this is what Abu Basil from Rafah had to tell me. (His family is from Bureir on whose lands the kibbutz Bror Hayil was set up ). When his children heard about the reconciliation agreement, they cheered. “Now Aunt Amira [the Jewish aunt] will be able to come and visit again,” they said. It made me laugh, and it made me sad. The children immediately concluded that reconciliation would mean freedom of movement into Gaza. But they didn’t say: “Now we’ll be able to go to the West Bank.” Their imagination does not stretch so far.