Lawrence of Cyberia

450 Years

When Ehud Olmert first talked about his "convergence plan", I couldn't help but notice that as far as official Palestinian reaction was concerned, Fatah's response generally seemed much more negative than Hamas'. Not that Hamas actually favoured it - in fact at one point I think that Khalid Mishaal referred to it as "an act of war" - but generally I think that in comparison to Fatah, Hamas' reaction was almost indifferent. And I found that interesting, though at the time I wasn't sure why.

Gershon Baskin had an opinion piece published in yesterday's Jerusalem Post (on the subject of disengagement and convergence) that made me revisit the subject and perhaps gave an explanation for the difference in Palestinian reactions. He writes:

Israel would like to claim that by withdrawing from the territories it is ending its responsibility for the Palestinians by essentially ending the occupation. From the Palestinian perspective, however, the unilateral Israeli withdrawals not only strengthen Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they also create a greater entrenchment of the occupation.

Palestinians believe that if tens of thousands of settlers are removed from settlements east of the separation barriers to settlements that are west of the barrier - but east of the Green Line - nothing will have changed, except for the fact that Israel will be cheating the world in creating an illusion that it is withdrawing from occupied territories.

Most Palestinians, including those closest to Mahmoud Abbas, believe that should Israel actually implement its unilateral plans of convergence, the feasibility of the two-state solution will come to an end and there will be no viability for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

From their perspective, convergence means not only the removal of Jerusalem from the table, but the placing of a noose around the neck of the West Bank. The Jordan Valley will remain under Israel's control, including the crossings into Jordan. The West Bank will be completely sealed off on the west. There will be no territorial link between the two Palestinian territories and no policy of enabling people and goods to move between Gaza and the West Bank through Israel.

Gaza will be strangled except for a tiny air tube in Rafah; and, according to Palestinians, Israel has placed a veto on talks with Egypt to enable Palestinians to develop a cargo transport in Rafah. With this kind of picture in mind, how could any Palestinian support the convergence plan?

The emphasis in that text is mine, and I think it's key. Convergence involves Israel withdrawing settlers (though not the IDF) from the smaller settlements on the eastern side of the wall, into those areas of the Occupied Territories that Israel intends to annex - the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, and the settlement blocs (Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion, Ariel etc). - and then declaring that these are Israel's final borders [Footnote].

The importance of these borders from a Palestinian perspective is that the remnant of land left over after convergence cannot support an independent Palestinian state.

Israel did not choose its major areas of settlement randomly. It did not toss a dart at a map and say, "Yup, let's build one there". The major settlements are where they are because they serve the strategic purpose of controlling those assets and resources that would make a Palestinian state viable. They were put there precisely to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. Whoever controls the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, Maale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion controls the economy, the trade, and the water and arable land resources of the West Bank, which is precisely why the major settlement blocs were put where they are. To tell the Palestinians that they can have an independent state in the Occupied Territories, but deliberately stripped of all the aspects that would allow it to function as an independent state, is effectively to say that there will be not be an independent Palestinian state there.

So what exactly are you left with after this kind of convergence is carried out (which, as I've said in my footnote, I really can't see happening, but I'm just thinking out loud here)? Well, diplomatically you would have an expanded Israel within annexation "final borders" that no-one apart from Israel recognises, and an Israeli-dominated Palestinian statelet with borders that nobody outside Israel gives the time of day to, least of all the Palestinians. In the meantime, the really important changes are taking place on the ground, where you have deeper and perhaps irreversible settlement in the key areas of the West Bank that Israel simply has to get out of if there is to be a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories. And ultimately you end up with a territory that can no longer be split into two feasible parts, with a distinct and growing Palestinian majority on that territory as a whole.

So the end result is, as Gershon Basking mentions, there will be no viability for the establishment of a Palestinian state. But as he points out, it’s more than that: the ultimate result is that there will be no viability for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories, i.e. alongside Israel. And if you take away the prospect of a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories, you are not taking “Palestine” off the table but “Israel and Palestine”, or what we call the two state solution. If you annex the things that make possible a second state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, then you are building a single state. (And, incidentally, doing it in the worst way possible, i.e. by default, rather than by popular choice).

And I think that might explain why “convergence” leaves Fatah more agitated than Hamas.

Israeli journalist Amira Hass once summed up the effective difference between Fatah and Hamas as being 450 years. What she meant was this: Fatah believes that there will be an independent Palestine; that it will exist alongside Israel on the basis of the 1967 borders (and therefore without any substantial implementation of the right of Return); and that it will take about 50 years to achieve this. Hamas also believes there will be an independent Palestine, but believes that Israel will never agree to end the Occupation and is currently too strong for Palestinians to force it; so there will never be an independent Palestine in a two state solution. It believes that the best Palestinians can do now is to resist and be steadfast until the balance of power has shifted against Zionism, which will be ultimately dismantled. So Hamas too thinks there will be an independent Palestine, but this will be on all of Greater Israel/Mandate Palestine, and it will take about 500 years to achieve.

Obviously that’s a simplification in that it leaves out a million variables, the most important one being: What would happen to the viability of Hamas’ vision of the future if there really was a genuine two state solution on offer? But it does I think help explain why Hamas seemed less concerned about the ramifications of convergence than Fatah. From their perspective, if convergence takes off the negotiating table a two state solution that Israel never accepted in the first place, so what?

Footnote: As an aside, I should say that I don't think there is any possibility whatsoever that Israel will be able to fix its borders along those lines. I think Ehud Olmert had hoped to follow Ariel Sharon's policy of "it doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks as long as you have George Bush on board", which is why he placed such emphasis on carrying out convergence by 2008, i.e. by the end of Bush's second term. But Olmert can see as well as anyone else that George Bush is suddenly and horribly turning into the lamest lame duck President that ever waddled lamely back into the Oval Office. Having George Bush on board in 2006 counts for a great deal less than having George Bush aboard in 2003. I think this means that those trappings of the convergence plan that match the underlying mood of mainstream Jewish Israeli public opinion (i.e. a preference for unilateralism and an estrangement from the settler movement) will be carried out - like the building of the Wall and maybe the dismantling of some outposts - but the grander scheme of convergence as the setting of "final borders" is already dead in the water.

So the fact I'm discussing the goals of the convergence plan doesn't imply that I think those goals are realistic.

Miss Me When I'm Gone

I haven’t blogged anything about tomorrow's Palestinian elections which, in U.S. news reporting at least, seem to have been reduced to variations on the theme of ohmygodtheislamofascistsarecoming! Personally, I think that all the talk about trying to exclude Hamas from the democratic process, or threatening to not deal with a government that includes them, or warning that having Hamas in government will harm the peace process (what peace process?), is plain stupid. The primary responsibility of Palestinian political institutions is to reflect and represent Palestinian society – nationalists, leftists and islamists alike - not the wishes of the US or the EU or anyone else. And it is sheer chutzpah for Israel – which has refused to negotiate at all with the PA for five years, and failed to negotiate in good faith with the Palestinians in good faith for much of the previous ten - to try to influence the elections by warning now that it won’t be able to enter into negotiations if Hamas wins the elections. An Israeli government that absolutely relies on the absence of substantive peace talks so that it can pursue its unilateralist policies is warning Palestinians that voting for Hamas will prevent a return to negotiations? Please, spare me.

The one aspect of the election campaign I do want to comment on is the news that the U.S. government is trying to prevent a Hamas victory by channelling $2 million into PA-associated projects in the Occupied Territories, in a late attempt to bolster the Fatah vote. I find that scenario ironic to the point of being laugh-out-loud. Suddenly the U.S. is in a panic because the clean-shaven, nicely dressed, secular nationalist, “good Muslims” of Fatah might lose to “The Islams”. I wonder if anybody in U.S. foreign policy circles is reflecting right now on the fact that if the U.S. had shown any propensity at all to deal in good faith with the Palestinian secular moderates over the last 15 years it wouldn’t now have to resort to a hurried infusion of dirty money to try to keep them in power? As it is, if the U.S. had sat down and tried to formulate a deliberate policy to undermine the credibility of any Palestinian party that promotes a negotiated end to the conflict with Israel – and this means essentially Fatah - it couldn’t have come up with anything more effective than the crooked mediation and the blind eye to Israeli expansionism that Republican and Democratic administrations alike have practised since the Madrid Conference.

Olmert Hopes To Resume Talks; I Hope To Win Lottery

I hereby nominate this as my Misleading Headline of the Week: Olmert hopes to resume talks with Palestinians

The article I linked to is from the Pakistan Daily Times, but that’s not particularly important as the original from Reuters and almost all the papers that picked up on the story up echoed the same hopeful thrust of this headline, suggesting that there is a renewed hope of peace talks now that Ehud Olmert at the helm. The problem is that if you read the whole article, you find that the headline might be technically true, but it’s an awfully optimistic take on what Olmert actually said about the prospects for final status talks:

JERUSALEM: Interim Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Tuesday that he hoped to resume peace negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas after Israel’s March 28 general election. But Olmert said that such talks would depend on Israel’s long-standing demand for Abbas to disarm militant groups, a process the Palestinians are supposed to start under a US-brokered road map to peace.

“I hope that based on the results of their (Jan 25 Palestinian) elections, and after that the results of our elections, I will be able to enter negotiations with (Abbas) on condition that he will uphold his commitments ... for a permanent settlement between us and the Palestinians,” Olmert told reporters. But he added: “That depends on whether he (Abbas) will uphold his commitments to disarm the terror groups, and I hope that he will do this.”

Moshe Dayan's Tractors

"I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let's talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plough someplace where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was."

-- Moshe Dayan, Israel's former Minister of Defence, describing how to provoke a military incident on the Golan Heights. From a 1976 interview with Yediot Ahronot newspaper, given on condition that it not be published till after his death. Cited in Ari Shavit's The Iron Wall, p.236-237.

The Israeli Labour Party's campaign manager, Motti Morel, really went off the reservation last month when he said out loud and unequivocally something that Israelis have generally only muttered under their breath during the last five years, if they have said it at all; namely, that their government directly influences the number of terror attacks Israelis face by deliberately escalating hostilities with the Palestinians when a heightening of tensions suits its own political needs (such as, for instance, during an election campaign):

Labor Party's campaign manager Motti Morel's comments insinuating that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wished to cause a flare up in the territories on Thursday raised a political storm, as Kadima officials urged Labor Chairman Amir Peretz to fire Morel, to prove that he does not support Morels views.

Morel told Israel Radio on Thursday that the renewal of the targeted assassinations policy was intended to cause an escalation of the security situation on the eve of the elections, an escalation which would serve Sharon.

Morel said that Sharon was trying to divert public discourse from the social to the security arena, and intimated that Sharon has the power to influence the number of terror attacks which take place. According to Morel, several months ago, when targeted assassinations were not employed "there were no Qassams and no terror attacks." (Source)

Morel implied that that if the Israeli government really wants to stop the current firing of Qassams by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (AAMB) out of the Gaza Strip, it doesn’t have to resort to escalatory measures like air raids, artillery barrages on "no-go" zones, bombing residential areas to terrorize civilians into fleeing into the Sinai, cutting off electricity to the entire 1.4 million residents of the Gaza Strip or inflicting sonic booms that cause trauma and miscarriages as collective punishment on the entire population. He suggested that if Israel really wants the PIJ and AAMB to stop their current campaign of firing rockets at Israel from Gaza, perhaps Israel should stop its extra-judicial killings of Palestinian militants, a practice it recently resumed, despite the fact that firing of the Qassams has repeatedly over the past year been the militant organizations’ predictable and explicit response to the assassination of their members, e.g.:

The Popular Resistance Committee, a Gaza-based militant group comprised of multiple Palestinian factions, will continue to respond to Israeli assaults with the use of homemade rockets, a spokesman for the group said on Sunday. "While Israel continues to assassinate Palestinian activists we have no choice but to continue rocket fire," the spokesman explained. "We are going to respond to every Israeli attack in order to show them that while our means are simple, our resolve is strong." (Source)

Gaza For Jerusalem

Cartoon: Clay Bennett for the Christian Science Monitor.


Reprising my periodic role as the miserable Cassandra of the peace process, I thought I would dump some cold water on the peace-is-just-around-the-corner-euphoria by mentioning that:

1. Since withdrawing from Gaza, Israel has actually seized more land in the West Bank than the size of the entire Gaza Strip.

2. Even though the Gaza settlements are gone, there are actually today thousands more settlers in the Occupied Territories than there were when the Gaza settlements still stood.

3. Construction of the Wall is proceeding particularly quickly around al-Ram, and settlement expansion is particularly frenetic in the Maale Adumim bloc, as Israel attempts to cut off occupied East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank.

4. This is to preempt the possibility of East Jerusalem ever becoming the capital of Palestine, despite the fact that without a shared Jerusalem there will never be a solution to the conflict.

5. The most recent plans to expand Maale Adumim settlement, involving the construction of 350 more homes for Israelis to settle illegally in the Occupied Territories, have the approval of none other than the Left’s Great White Hope, Amir Peretz.

6. Simply daring to point out that Israel is implementing a de facto annexation of Arab East Jerusalem, and that this is illegal, contrary to the Road Map, and will radicalize both East Jerusalemites and Muslims further afield, makes you “one-sided” and “unrelentingly pro-Palestinian”.

Optimism's important. I'm enjoying as much as anybody the sight of the political realignment in Israel and the drawing in of Hamas to the Palestinian Parliamentary process, and speculating where it might all end. But optimism stops being a plus if you can only keep it up by closing your eyes to what's happening on the ground, and pretending that what you want to see happening really is.

Liberty Fries

During the last month, I have noticed that three of my neighbors have started sporting "Boycott France" bumperstickers on their cars. It seems an odd time to be starting a boycott, now that it is painfully obvious that France was right about the disastrous fallout that a preventative war on Iraq would generate, but you have bear in mind that I live in rural Maryland. Remember how during Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Sagan would point to some distant fleck of light in the night sky and explain that, taking into account the speed that radio waves travel in space, that distant fleck in the outer darkness is only now hearing the news broadcasts about the outbreak of World War II? Well, that's how rural Maryland is. We're only a 30-minute drive from the White House, but somewhere on the road between here and D.C. there is some kind of black hole that swallows news of what is going on in the nation's capital and beyond, and disgorges it sporadically months or years later into the local consciousness.

However you explain it, we are apparently boycotting all things French. Bearing in mind that this is our local restaurant...

(click to enlarge, if you can bear it)

this is our local/only nightspot....

and this is our local purveyor of fine wines...

...it's difficult to imagine that the bottom will fall out of the Brie and Chardonnay market without us. Perhaps it's the kind of boycott that only requires us to give up stuff we never bought in the first place.

Anyway, in honour of the entente transatlantique, I am posting a couple of translations today from the French media (Freedom media?). The first is an interview with Yasser Abed Rabbo, former P.A. Minister of Information and co-author with Yossi Beilin of the Geneva Accord, which appeared in Le Monde on 27 May 2005. It gives Rabbo's assessment of how Abu Mazen has done since his election to the P.A. presidency in January:

Sharon doesn’t like Abu Mazen, because he’s embarrassing. With him it’s difficult to justify the construction of the wall, the expansion of the settlements … But, furthermore, the U.S. has not supported Abu Mazen so far with anything more than kind words. Bush’s statement against the settlement programme changed nothing. In short, both the Israelis and the Americans offer him no help, while at the same time they demand of him the impossible: i.e. launch a civil war by attacking Hamas. It’s impossible because he doesn’t want to, and he isn’t able to. All Palestinians are against it. I’m a moderate, but I’d be against it. If he manages to bring Hamas into the political process, if they respect the ceasefire and the rule of law, what more can you ask? Abu Mazen is a brave man... (Read the rest of the interview here)

The second is an informal interview that PLO chief negotiator Saeb Erekat gave to Ilan Halevy for the January 2005 edition of the Revue d’Etudes Palestiniennes. The journal contains a series of reminiscences about Yasser Arafat, from some of those closest to him:

I think I was one of the last Palestinians to meet Yasser Arafat. I met him for the first time in 1991; it was in Algiers, after the Madrid Conference. I remember that he asked me to give him the kaffiyeh that I’d worn at the Conference, and I gave it to him. Then I complained to him about the attitude of some of the other members of the delegation who, for example, had spent enormous amounts on phone calls, etc. He looked at me and asked me what planet I was from... (Read the whole article here).

Bon appetit!

Blood On Their Hands

The joint Israeli-Palestinian committee for coordinating the release of prisoners from Israeli jails met for the first time on 14 March. The committee was established following the Sharm ash-Sheikh summit of 8 February, where Israel committed to releasing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners from jail as a “goodwill gesture” to advance the peace process. The question of which prisoners should be released quickly became a point of contention with the Palestinian Authority, and Israel scaled back its planned release of 900 Palestinians to the 500 that were actually released on 21 February. The joint committee that began work on 14 March was established to prevent similar controversies occurring in future, by providing a mechanism for cooperatively deciding who should be eligible for release. Most importantly (from the PA’s point of view) the committee establishes the precedent that Israel’s “goodwill gestures” should be coordinated measures that really are designed to build confidence in the political process, rather than unilateral releases of petty criminals that have more to do with easing overcrowding in Israeli jails than improving I/P relations.

The Slightly Less Generous Offer

There's nothing wrong with wanting to be optimistic, especially if that optimism can be construed as the sincere desire of many Israelis to get out of a state of warfare and enter into a state of political negotiations for peace. The problem arises when optimism acts as an anesthetic, and when the optimists make do with talk and take no interest in bulldozers....

True, we should not downplay the importance of repatriating the thousands of Gaza Strip settlers, whose presence and the need to safeguard their safety continually torture the Palestinians. But the test remains what is happening in the West Bank, and what is happening in the West Bank is very close to being a colossal failure: of the Palestinian political and popular struggle, of the Palestinian armed struggle, of European nations who abide by international decisions, of those in the Israeli peace camp who had truly hoped for a two-state solution.

For the peace lovers among both peoples, the test for success was and has remained the ability of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as a single public, to build for themselves an independent and fair future, and not to live scattered among Indian reservations. Meanwhile, between a mass demonstration against the settlements and the optimists' talk in favor of the disengagement, the creation of the West Bank reservations continues undisturbed.

-- Amira Hass, Optimism is one thing, bulldozers another; 2 Feb 2005.

I’m having flashbacks to the Camp David Summit of July 2000, when Ehud Barak Generously Offered to keep 20% of the illegally-occupied West Bank (below left), and to allow the creation of a “Palestinian state” (below right) on the three tenuously-linked and completely surrounded enclaves that remained.

Pity Abu Mazen: Disorganized Thoughts On The Palestinian Election

Today (Sunday) is election day in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Apart from posting a biography of “the other candidate” I haven’t really blogged at all about the Palestinian Authority Presidential race. There are two reasons for that: first, I wrote a long piece about the prospects for the elections shortly after they were announced. A large part of that post was about Marwan Barghouthi, and why I was sure he wasn’t going to run for the Presidency this time. The day I was ready to publish, I logged on to read headlines all over the place announcing his candidacy, so I quietly deleted the offending piece and gave thanks that I had checked the news headlines before publishing, and so saved myself from looking like a complete idiot. Of course, Barghouthi subsequently reversed himself, but by then my blog item was long-since deleted, and I really wasn’t inclined to reconstitute it from memory.

The other reason I have haven’t been able to work up any enthusiasm to blog about the PA elections is that I am convinced that all the happy talk we hear in the U.S. about new beginnings for peace opening up with the death of Arafat and the (presumed, at this point) election of Abu Mazen is utterly, utterly delusional.

Did I Say That Out Loud?

To put it simply: Likud policy toward the Occupied Palestinian Territories is one of illegal expansionism, enabled by racist laws, and enforced by overwhelming military might. Its end goal is to force the indigenous population off its land, so that this land can be annexed to Israel without the inconvenience of having to absorb millions of Muslim and Christian Palestinians, who would be the final nail in the coffin of Israel as a “Jewish democracy”.

Of course, you can’t just come out and say it like that if you are an apologist for current Israeli policies, because ethnic cleansing is a War Crime and a Crime Against Humanity. So you have to invent your own terms of reference for the conflict, and propagandize tirelessly, until you can convince people of good will (who would normally be appalled at such aggression) that what is happening in front of their collective eyes isn’t really happening at all. You do it by pretending that although there is really nothing you would like better than peaceful coexistence, you are unfortunately forced into “security measures” that just happen to relentlessly dispossess the Palestinian population, because you are fighting a “War On Terror”. You are fighting against an inhuman enemy who hates you just because of who you are (remember, anti-Israel = anti-semitic!), not because of what you are doing, and whose capabilities you exaggerate till they become an existential threat that you can use to manipulate the fears of your own people, who remember all too well a recent past in which they really were the victims of a monstrous attempted genocide.

To keep your rationale consistent, there are some words you must never utter...