Interview on the UN Palmer report on Mavi Marmara raid

New York-based writer (among other vocations) J.A. Myerson interviewed me yesterday about the just-released United Nations Palmer report on the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara.  Excerpts:

J.A. Myerson: The New York Times is reporting that it has obtained a copy of a United Nations review, which comes out tomorrow, regarding Israel’s raid on the Mavi Marmara, when Israel killed nine people, including an American. The primary findings of the review appear to be a) that Israel used excessive force when it boarded the flotilla but that some force was apparently justified, given the hostility that Israeli commandos encountered upon boarding, and b) That Israel’s blockade of Gaza, which the flotilla was trying to break, is justified and appropriate. Among opponents of the blockade of Gaza, of which you and I are two, it’s an accepted truism that one reason to oppose the blockade is its illegality. What is the argument that the blockade is illegal, if that is indeed what you believe, and what is your response to the UN review contesting that description?

Alex Kane: The full naval-land-air blockade that the Gaza Strip is under was instituted first following the 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories when Hamas won what were widely acknowledged to be democratic elections. One justification for the blockade that Israel cites is that Hamas is holding Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier, in captivity. Israel also contends that the blockade exists for security reasons.

But what’s clear under international law, under the Geneva Conventions, is that collective punishment is illegal, and the blockade of Gaza is illegal because it constitutes collective punishment. Israel is punishing every single person in the Gaza strip, roughly half of whom are under the age of 18, for having voted in democratic elections and for the political positions that Hamas espouses.

The blockade is also, as Yousef Munayyer of the Palestine Center pointed out last June, in violation of Part V Section II (102) of the San Remo Manual on International Law, which prohibits blockades a) that have the sole purpose of starving the civilian population or denying it other objects essential to its survival; or b) under which the damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade.

Numerous UN reports and bodies have deemed the blockade illegal as collective punishment. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said so, Richard Goldstone in the Goldstone Report said so, the independent Human Rights Council report on the raid on the Mavi Marmara said so, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has said so. So we can play a numbers game, in that there are far more instances of respected international bodies as well as respected human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International that have deemed the blockade illegal, and now we have this one panel saying that it is legal.

The other thing is that you have to look at the makeup of the panel tasked with this investigation of the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara and the five other ships that were part of the first Freedom Flotilla. The big red flag that people should focus on is the fact that Álvaro Uribe of Colombia was one of the two supposedly independent observers on this committee. Uribe cannot plausibly be thought of as impartial on issues of human rights. He has himself been implicated in numerous human rights abuses as president of Colombia and he is also an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel. So that also calls into question the impartiality of this panel, which was the one panel of inquiry that the UN set up that Israel agreed to cooperate with.

JAM: If this panel is reputed by its commissioning body to have been impartial and the makeup of the body indicts is as being impartial, that suggests that it was commissioned in order not to be impartial, in other words that it was commissioned in order to deliver these results. How do you account for that?

AK: Yes. That’s an accurate assessment.

You have to go back to right after the flotilla incident in 2010. After this happened, when nine people ended up dead and dozens injured, Israel came under a huge amount of pressure in a variety of ways, both from states and from global civil society in the form of the BDS Movement. My reading is that, in order to deflect this pressure, and after some prodding by the Obama Administration, Israel finally agreed to cooperate with this panel. This is a first for Israel. Israel does not often cooperate with the UN, so you have to wonder what was going on behind closed doors and what was said to Israel to make it suddenly cooperate with the UN, especially about an issue as politically charged as its raid on the flotilla.

Another important thing to note is that the mandate of the panel coming out with this report did not give the panel much power. It did not call witnesses, it did not collect documents. It was called a fact finding mission. And it seems like the panel has collected the Israeli side and the Turkish side and kind of plopped it in this report. That’s what I gather the report was. The point of it was not to be an independent investigation that was designed to get to the bottom of who was at fault, who was wrong, what should happen.

Read the full interview here.

Bipartisanship at last: U.S. politicians line up to castigate Palestinian unity deal

In stark contrast to partisan wrangling over the budget and women’s rights, Democrats and Republicans are lining up to demand the cut-off of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority as a response to the reported unity deal between Hamas and Fatah.  Expect the Obama administration to take heed and agree with Congress–especially with the 2012 elections approaching.

The rhetoric from both sides of the aisle is uniform.  It’s the Israel lobby’s line.  It’s telling, for example, that a staunch Republican and neoconservative pro-Israel hawk like Jennifer Rubin would approvingly quote an otherwise reliable liberal like Representative Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York:

The purported deal, which does not require Hamas to accept Israel’s right to exist, or the binding nature of prior Palestinian commitments, or even to require Hamas to temporarily forgo violence against Israel (as if it were some kind barbaric of addiction, or compulsion), is a recipe for failure, mixed with violence, leading to disaster. It is a ghastly mistake that I fear will be paid for in the lives of innocent Israelis.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, similarly said:

The reported agreement between Fatah and Hamas means that a Foreign Terrorist Organization which has called for the destruction of Israel will be part of the Palestinian Authority government. U.S. taxpayer funds should not and must not be used to support those who threaten U.S. security, our interests, and our vital ally, Israel.

Interestingly, though, there are some, if not many, analysts and activists in solidarity with the Palestinian cause that will be happy with a cut off of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority (for different reasons than Congress).  U.S. aid, which has gone to train the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, has contributed deeply to the split between Hamas and Fatah.

As Ali Abunimah noted for the Electronic Intifada, “in The Palestine Papers, the main concern of Ramallah officials was always to maintain Western financial aid to the PA, and not to make any agreement with Hamas that would jeopardize American and European financing for the PA.”  The Western financial aid has been used to crack down on Hamas.  But if U.S. and European aid is cut off, perhaps the Palestinian Authority would no longer imprison Hamas members and quash dissent.  That would go a long away towards true Palestinian unity.

Human Rights Watch: Israel and Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes in latest fighting

Judge Richard Goldstone’s article in the Washington Post continues to attract attention from many different quarters, and has put the question of war crimes committed in Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009 back in the spotlight.  But what hasn’t received nearly enough attention is that the latest round of fighting in the Gaza Strip has resulted in more war crimes, according to a report from Human Rights Watch.

Hamas’ attack on an Israeli school bus “appeared to have deliberately fired at the school bus, a protected civilian object under the laws of war, in an act that amounts to a war crime,” the report reads.

The release from Human Rights Watch also includes details of four investigations they carried out into Israeli violations of the laws of war.  Here’s an excerpt dealing with one investigation:

In the first incident, on April 7, an apparent Israeli missile attack injured an ambulance crew member and damaged an ambulance marked as such while the crew was evacuating two men who had been wounded in an Israeli strike. The attacks occurred near the non-operational Gaza Airport, in the southeastern corner of Gaza, east of the city of Rafah and close to the Egyptian border. Reliable independent security reports said that an Israeli tank had previously fired at the area, wounding two men, and that a helicopter later fired missiles at the area.

The ambulance driver, Musa Obayyed, 35, told Human Rights Watch that the crew received a call at around 5:45 p.m. to evacuate several wounded men from the area. Obayyed said that the area was not in the “buffer zone” near the perimeter fence, where medical crews need to coordinate access in advance by contacting the International Committee of the Red Cross, which then coordinates with the Israeli military.

“The sky was full of different kinds of military aircraft at the time, but we didn’t hesitate, and the area was full of civilians when we arrived,” he said. “We were several meters from an injured man and were just about to get out of the ambulance when an explosion hit next to us.”

The attack injured Hassan al-Hela, 41, a member of the medical crew, in his right forearm, and blew out two of the ambulance’s windows. The crew did not observe what fired at them, but the only Israeli fire reported in the area that afternoon and evening was from tanks and aircraft. There were no reports of Palestinian rocket or mortar fire in the area at the time. Human Rights Watch observed numerous small holes of between three and five millimeters in diameter in the side of the ambulance at the Red Crescent Center in Khirbat al-Adas, where the crew had taken it. The damage appeared consistent with shrapnel from a small missile. Human Rights Watch was not able to examine shrapnel from the strike, but the damage was consistent with small, cubic shrapnel from the aerial drone-launched missiles that Human Rights Watch examined during the 2008-09 Gaza conflict.

Customary laws of war provide that medical units, including paramedics and ambulances, must be respected and protected in all circumstances. Medical workers engaging exclusively in medical work in the presence of combatants do not forfeit their protected status, and only lose their protection if they commit, outside their humanitarian function, acts harmful to the enemy. A deliberate attack on a medical crew or an ambulance being used solely for medical transport would constitute a serious violation of the laws of war, amounting to a war crime.

“The laws of war have protected medical personnel from attack for nearly 150 years,” Whitson said. “Israeli responses to Palestinian attacks cannot show reckless indifference to civilians.”

Read the full release here.

Corporate media delete U.S. role in Hamas-Fatah split

In response to the youth of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank rising up on March 14 and 15 to call for Palestinian political unity, both the leaders of Fatah and Hamas pledged to enter into talks aimed at reconciliation.  Most recently, President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah “met with senior Hamas officials to discuss a proposed trip to Gaza and efforts to mend internal Palestinian division by forming a unity government,” the Ma’an News Agency reported.

With those talks came a spate of articles in the U.S. corporate media about the efforts at reconciliation.  But in providing background on why these talks are happening, and the roots of the split between Hamas and Fatah, media outlets have deleted the crucial role the U.S. played in fomenting that split.

The New York Times explained that:

[Abbas had] not set foot in Gaza in the four years since a brief, bloody civil war there sent him and his Fatah colleagues fleeing to the West Bank…Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections in early 2006, and, for a brief time, Fatah and Hamas had a national unity government. But tensions between them led to the fighting and a break in communications.

TIME magazine’s Karl Vick similarly put it this way:

Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the Fatah party that governs the West Bank, has accepted an invitation from rival Hamas to travel to the Gaza Strip. The visit would be the first since Hamas drove Fatah operatives out of Gaza in 2007 — throwing some off from the tops of buildings — in the turmoil that followed Hamas’ surprise victory in elections months earlier.

All of these accounts don’t mention where the “turmoil” and the breakup of the short-lived national unity government between Hamas and Fatah following the 2006 elections came from.  The expose of the Bush administration’s role in the split by David Rose in Vanity Fair remains essential reading for those wanting to understand the roots of the split.

Some crucial excerpts:

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza…

Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says…

Without this back story, why there is a bitter Hamas-Fatah split remains obscured.  The least the U.S. media could do is provide a sentence explaining these facts.

Is another ‘Cast Lead’ in the offing?

Are we witnessing the stirrings of a new, large-scale Israeli military operation?  Haaretz today reports that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Wednesday that the Israel Defense Forces would continue to use ‘firm determination and assaults’ on Gaza…[Netanyahu said:] ‘It could take the form of exchanges of fire, it could continue for a particular length of time.’”

Indeed, the stars seem to be aligning for another brutal Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip two years after “Operation Cast Lead” killed some 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, and completely destroyed 3,000 homes in what Judge Richard Goldstone termed a “deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

Eerie parallels between the period leading up to “Cast Lead” and the situation now exist, and there’s nothing to stop Israel from launching another assault, given that the United States has sent the world the message that Israeli war crimes will go unpunished.

First, the parallels.  In the months leading up to the 2008-09 assault on Gaza, a tenuous truce held between Hamas and Israel as Hamas stopped firing rockets at Israeli communities and attempted to reign in other armed groups in Gaza from doing so.  An August 2008 WikiLeaks cable that describes a visit by Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Egypt reports:

Regarding the Tahdiya ["calm" in Arabic], Hacham said Barak stressed that while it was not permanent, for the time being it was holding. There have been a number of violations of the ceasefire on the Gaza side, but Palestinian factions other than Hamas were responsible. Hacham said the Israelis assess that Hamas is making a serious effort to convince the other factions not to launch rockets or mortars. Israel remains concerned by Hamas’ ongoing efforts to use the Tahdiya to increase their strength, and at some point, military action will have to be put back on the table. The Israelis reluctantly admit that the Tahdiya has served to further consolidate Hamas’ grip on Gaza, but it has brought a large measure of peace and quiet to Israeli communities near Gaza.

Despite this “peace,” Israel decisively broke the truce on November 4, 2008 when they raided Gaza and killed six members of Hamas, leading to an increase in Hamas and other armed groups’ rocket attacks on Israel.  According to a January 2009 report by investigative journalist Gareth Porter, Israel rejected a Hamas ceasefire offer in December 2008.

After the assault ended in January 2009, a tenuous lull, punctuated by sporadic violence on the Gaza-Israel border, has held.  In January 2011, Hamas again attempted to reign in other armed groups from firing at Israeli communities.

But now this lull seems to be breaking down.  The Israeli daily Haaretz reports on what has occurred in the last week:

The current tensions began exactly a week ago when Israel launched an air attack on a Hamas base in the ruins of the settlement of Netzarim, killing two Hamas men. That attack came in response to a Qassam fired from Gaza that landed in an open area. Hamas then responded with a barrage of 50 mortars on communities south of the Gaza Strip.

Israeli attacks on Gaza over the last few days have left eight people dead, including five civilians, and another twelve civilians have been wounded.  The air strikes came after Hamas offered a truce--events that bear a striking resemblance to what occurred in the run-up to “Operation Cast Lead.”

What makes a renewed assault seem more possible is the fact that strident warnings are coming from Israeli leaders.  Tzipi Livni, the head of the opposition party Kadima and who was the foreign minister during the 08-09 Gaza assault, recently said that “the right way to contend with [the recent rocket attacks] is through force, as Israel did during Operation Cast Lead and after it.”  Both the Vice Premier and and the culture minister have voiced similar warnings.

The frightening warnings and attacks on Gazan civilians could stop if the international community would pressure Israel.  But what’s to stop Israel if they have U.S.-guaranteed impunity?  The Goldstone report recommended that proceedings against Israelis and Palestinians who committed war crimes occur if domestic systems do not uphold international law.  No high-level officials, on the Palestinian or Israeli side, have been held accountable.  The U.S. has ensured that Israeli leaders who committed war crimes will get off free.

A promise of law is that the deterrent effect of punishment may prevent future crimes.  That promise goes out the window if there is no punishment–exactly what happened after the publication of the Goldstone report.

 

 

 

Palestinian unity movement’s goal strikes at heart of Israeli occupation strategy of divide and conquer

The slogans are simple enough:  “the people want an end to the division,” tens of thousands of young protesters in Gaza and the West Bank chanted as their protest movement demanding Palestinian political unity kicked off March 14.

But beneath the simple slogan is an audacious goal that would strike at the heart of a key Israeli strategy used to maintain their 44-year-old occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  The goal, if realized, of a true united political front against the occupation is one giant step toward ending Israeli dominance over the lives of Palestinians.

“We want democratic representation first and foremost and then move to nonviolently challenging the occupation,” Fadi Quran, a Palestinian youth activist, notes on the Institute for Middle East Understanding’s profile page of activists involved with the pro-unity movement.  “We’re trying to move toward that goal. March 15th is seen not as an end in itself but the beginning of a new generation of struggle.”

Quran and his cohort are going to have to contend with some major forces working against them.

The deep divide between the West Bank and Gaza is something that is an official Israeli goal.  As Israeli blogger Noam Sheizaf reported in September 2010, an Israel Defense Forces document states that a “security and diplomatic objective” of Israel is to separate Gaza from the West Bank.  Israeli journalist Amira Hass has documented how “the total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics”–an achievement that closes the door on the possibility of a viable Palestinian state.

This territorial split–which began in the 1990s, according to Hass–has been compounded by the political split between the Islamist movement Hamas, which is in control of Gaza, and the Western-backed Fatah, which controls the West Bank.  And while the division was cemented in 2007, following the Hamas rout of Fatah forces in Gaza after a U.S.-backed Fatah coup failed, its roots run deeper.

When the Palestine Liberation Organization was still seen as the major threat to the occupation regime during the 1980s, Israel and the U.S. “encouraged the rise of the Palestinian Islamist movement,”  according to Stephen Zunes, the chair of the Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of San Francisco.  For example, Zunes notes, “while supporters of the secular PLO were denied their own media or right to hold political gatherings, the Israeli occupation authorities allowed radical Islamic groups to hold rallies, publish uncensored newspapers and even have their own radio station.”

The situation is reversed now, but the classic colonial principle of “divide and conquer” remains.  When the PLO was co-opted as a result of the Oslo peace process, Hamas began to be seen as the major threat to the Israeli occupation.

The political split, encouraged by Israel and the United States, reached its zenith when Hamas, following the 2006 Palestinian elections, took over Gaza after winning what amounted to a brief civil war there following a U.S.-backed Fatah attempt to overthrow Hamas.

The fact that Israel and the U.S. have sought to sow the seeds of division in Palestine throughout the past three decades attests to the importance of the strategy.  The occupation regime would be under real threat if there was a united Palestinian intifada aiming to kick Israel out of the occupied territories–something that the youth movement in Palestine recognizes.

The March 15 movement to end the division has to contend with two separate power structures (not including the Israeli occupation) seemingly intent on holding on to the perks of power and privilege as long as they can.  Both the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas have cracked down on the pro-unity protests.

It remains to be seen if the youth protesters will be able to persevere over the next few weeks and force their political leadership to take heed of their calls for unity.  What is clear, though, is that the road to a free Palestine runs through a united Palestinian front.

 

Cracks Appear in the Gaza Blockade

This piece originally appeared in the Indypendent’s latest issue.

The popular revolution that ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak has focused renewed attention on Egypt’s role in the blockade of the Gaza Strip. For nearly four years Egypt has aided Israel and the United States in strangling Gaza’s economy, but there are small signs that the siege may be easing.

“The world keeps watching as Gaza is blockaded,” said Mousheera Jammal, a Palestinian activist in Gaza who has been involved with organizing against the clampdown, but “there is hope because of the Egyptian youth.”

On March 6, a delegation organized by Tahrir 4 Gaza successfully crossed the Egyptian border into Gaza and delivered a “symbolic 50-pound bag of cement.” It was the “first bag of cement not approved by Israel” and that hadn’t come through smuggling tunnels, according to a press release from Tahrir 4 Gaza.

Organizers had to contend, however, with a recalcitrant Egyptian military which is currently running the show in Egypt. Posts by activists on tahrir4gaza.net claimed the military pressured them to “reschedule the event,” and that authorities warned bus companies against transporting delegation members to the border.

Organizers are now planning to bring 30 tons of cement into Gaza as part of a series of trips that would “eventually culminate in the permanent opening of the border to people and goods between post-revolutionary Egypt and Palestine,” according to delegation head Ahmed Elassy.

Since 2007, both Israel and Egypt have imposed a crippling siege on the 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to undermine the government led by Hamas, which won elections in January 2006 for the Palestinian parliament and the following year defeated a coup launched by the U.S. and Israeli-backed Fatah.

Cementing its role as junior partner in U.S. and Israeli dominance in the region, Egypt shut the Rafah crossing along Southern Gaza, closing a critical point of access for trade, goods and people.

Palestinian attorney and analyst Noura Erekat explains that Egypt’s cooperation with the blockade is largely due to pressure from the United States and Israel, as well as a view shared with Israel that the Islamist Hamas movement is a threat.

Yet the revolution in Egypt has altered this equation. Prominent Egyptian figures such as Arab League General Secretary Amr Moussa and Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei have spoken out against the blockade. The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest opposition group, is also against the blockade. And Egypt’s Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi has called for an end to the siege.

The key player is Egypt’s military, however. It has close ties to Israel, receives $1.3 billion a year in U.S. military aid and is ruling the country by decree while elections are organized.

The Palestinian Ma’an News Agency reported March 6 “getting out of Gaza is harder than ever.” The agency stated that the “blacklist” — Palestinians who are banned from entering Egypt — “has got longer since the Egyptian revolution, quashing hopes that the new regime would lift the siege.”

According to observers, the Egyptian military’s position on the blockade, and its insistence on allowing only 300 Palestinians per day to leave Gaza stems from various factors.

Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies told The Indypendent that Egypt’s rulers fear any further opening of Rafah could provide impetus for Israel to throw Gaza into Egypt’s lap. Egypt occupied Gaza for nearly two decades starting in 1948. Following its sweeping victory over Arab states including Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel began the direct military occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, among other lands.

Israel has been hoping to rid itself of responsibility for Gaza for “a long time now, and I would think that the military would be very aware of that,” said Hijab. “The military will probably walk a fine line between loosening up the blockade without inheriting Gaza.”

Noura Erekat adds, “Given the considersations that this new regime will have, and the threats that it will face, it can’t [decide to lift the blockade] in a vacuum.” Those threats include Israel’s powerful military as well as the possibilities of  strict conditions on or cuts to U.S. military aid. The worst-case scenario, according to Erekat, could be Israeli forces threatening to police the border themselves on the Egytian side.

“Fundamentally, the official position is the same for now,” wrote Issandr El Amrani, and Egyptian journalist, in a March 7 blog post on arabist.net. “Egypt has a moral responsibility to address the humanitarian situation in Gaza, as well as encourage the international community to pressure Israel into lifting the siege.”

Will Mideast revolts force U.S. to talk to Islamists?

Since at least the Clinton administration, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has propped up dictatorial regimes that were favorable to U.S. and Israeli interests while refusing to engage with the forces of political Islam.  Could the current wave of uprisings shaking the Middle East and North Africa force the U.S. to deal with Islamist movements that are integral parts of these societies?  That’s what journalist and author Mark Perry argued in a recent Palestine Center panel discussion–a development that would have far-reaching implications for Palestine, among other countries.

Upcoming elections in Egypt could be the first major test for the Obama administration on whether the U.S. will respect the democratic will of Egyptians, regardless of whether the Muslim Brotherhood makes electoral gains.

The Muslim Brotherhood, while promising to not field any presidential candidates for elections scheduled for later this year, is certainly angling to be a part of a new Egyptian government.

The Obama administration has sent mixed signals on their stance on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ominously warned against Egyptians allowing their revolution to be “hijacked,” a veiled reference to the Muslim Brotherhood.  But President Obama, in a speech given after Hosni Mubarak stepped down, said that “all” Egyptian voices must be brought “to the table.”  In an interview with Fox News‘ Bill O’Reilly, Obama said that he thinks “that the Muslim Brotherhood is one faction in Egypt. They don’t have majority support in Egypt but they are well organized and there are strains of their ideology that are anti U.S., there is no doubt about it.”

This is what Perry, the author of Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with its Enemies, said on the subject:

We’re going to have to deal with the governments that emerge from what I think is an unstoppable revolution across the region, and that means talking to political Islam.  We’re not going to be able to not talk to Hamas after we talk to the Muslim Brotherhood and we’re going to have to talk to them.  So, once we start down that road, of recognizing the political currents and movements that matter in the region, everything else will follow.

Still, it’s clear the pro-Israel lobby, and the American right, will continue to line up against talking to any Islamist movement.

The Palestine Cables: Egyptian VP Suleiman, Israel’s favorite, wants ‘Gaza to go ‘hungry’ but not ‘starve”

This is the latest installment of my column on WikiLeaks and Israel/Palestine at Mondoweiss.  You can read all the installments here.

The Israeli establishment is pleased to see that Omar Suleiman, the former head of Egypt’s intelligence services who was recently appointed to be Egypt’s first vice president, is angling to continue the Mubarak regime.  As reports circulate that Hosni Mubarak may step down tonight, examining Suleiman, Mubarak’s presumed successor, seems all the more important.  State Department cables released by WikiLeaks show that Suleiman directs Egypt’s policies on Israel/Palestine, policies that are in line with Israeli goals:   weakening Hamas, continuing the blockade of Gaza and halting Iranian influence.

In fact, Israel has explicitly voiced that Suleiman–spelled “Soliman” in the diplomatic cables–is their favored choice to assume the helm of the Egyptian presidency once Mubarak is gone.  An August 2008 cable from the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv reads:

[Arab Affairs Adviser David] Hacham was full of praise for Soliman, however, and noted that a “hot line” set up between the MOD and Egyptian General Intelligence Service is now in daily use…Hacham noted that the Israelis believe Soliman is likely to serve as at least an interim President if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated. (Note: We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman.)

Egypt has been Israel’s chief partner in the devastating blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has caused Gaza’s economy to be on the “brink of collapse,” as a UN spokesman put it yesterday.  Suleiman is quoted in a December 2007 cable as wanting the blockade to cause “Gaza to go ‘hungry’ but not ‘starve.’”  80 percent of the people of Gaza rely on UN aid to survive.

The leaked “Palestine Papers” published by Al Jazeera provide more details on  Suleiman and Egypt’s complicity in the siege.  As Abdullah Al-Arian, writing in Al Jazeera, notes:

Throughout the documents, Suleiman in particular is singled out as the point person whom Israeli and American officials could count on to execute their agenda of dividing the Palestinian factions or pressing the PA for greater concessions…

In early 2007, as the siege on Gaza had crippling consequences on the lives of Palestinians, negotiators complained that Egyptian leaders were duplicitous, speaking publicly in support of allowing goods into Gaza, but in reality, “it remains blocked on the ground …. This is a general problem with the Egyptians”.

An internal report from April 2007 confirms these suspicions. The Agreement on Movement and Access states: “Although there has been political agreement by Omar Suleiman and President Mubarak on allowing exports through, this agreement has never been translated into operational reality.”

Suleiman, and the Mubarak regime, have also been intent on weakening Hamas in the wake of the party being democratically elected in the 2006 Palestinian elections.  The Dec. 2007 cable reports:

In their moments of greatest frustration, Tantawi and Soliman each have claimed that the IDF would be “welcome” to re-invade Philadelphi…Mubarak and his security chiefs viscerally want Hamas “to fail.”

A separate April 2009 cable reports:

On reconciliation, Soliman explained, the ultimate goal was to return the Palestinian Authority to Gaza, as “Gaza in the hands of radicals will never be calm.”

Suleiman’s viewpoint on Iran also lines up with Israeli goals.  An October 2007 cable reports that “Omar Soliman takes an especially hard line on Tehran and frequently refers to the Iranians as ‘devils.’”

Only serious dissent on the Palestinian street will change the game: Former PLO negotiator Diana Buttu on the ‘Palestine Papers’ and the Egyptian uprising

This interview was originally published in Mondoweiss.

The publication of nearly 1,700 leaked files by Al Jazeera on negotiations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority has been largely overshadowed by the uprising in Egypt. But that doesn’t mean they don’t matter for the future of Israel/Palestine.

I recently caught up with Diana Buttu, a former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Negotiations Support Unit, a team that is mentioned throughout the “Palestine Papers” and where it is suspected the leak came from. Buttu discussed the meaning of the “Palestine Papers,” what they say about the “peace process,” and the current Egyptian uprising and what it may mean on the Palestinian street.

Alex Kane: Could you talk about your overall take on the leaked documents that have been published by Al Jazeera?

Diana Buttu: Having now gone through a lot of the documents—of course, not all of the documents, but many of them—the overall impression that I’m left with is that of a very powerful party, which is Israel, trying to continue their control and authority over a very weak party being the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But the story doesn’t just stop there.

I think that it’s become, at least clear to me and perhaps to others, that this mantra we’ve been hearing for many, many years—that we all know what a solution is going to look like, we all know what a settlement is going to look like—is actually not the case, particularly when you read the transcripts of the Israeli officials. That’s one major thing that I come away with.

The second major conclusion that I walk away with is that of a PLO leadership stubbornly sticking to one strategy, and only one strategy: negotiations, and only negotiations, despite the fact that there are so many other options out there. It’s as though they’ve cornered themselves by demanding negotiations, and then when they actually happen, they didn’t have any other strategy to get out of negotiations in the event that Israel was going to be stubborn.

AK: What would you say these revelations mean for the entire “peace process”?

DB: I don’t think there really is a “peace process.” There’s been a lot of process, but not a whole lot of peace, and I just don’t think that things are going to change. It hasn’t changed over the course of the past 17 years. I don’t think this is going to make the United States wake up, and it’s certainly not going to make the Israelis wake up, and in fact I don’t think the PLO will wake up, unless there’s some very serious dissent, and I just don’t see that happening right now, even though diaspora Palestinians are quite upset about what’s going on. But we haven’t seen that translate into anything on the streets of Palestine. I don’t think this is going to change anything in the “peace process.” They’re going to continue doing this over and over again because this is the way they’ve done it for the past 17 years, and unless there is a sea change of opinion that makes the PLO stand up and take notice or makes any of the other parties stand up and take notice, I’m afraid that it’s just going to be the same old, same old.

AK: Given that there’s been a muted reaction on the Palestinian street at the same time that there’s an uprising going on in Egypt, do you see any possible connection between these events in the future?

DB: Right now I don’t see that there’s going to be a connection. It’s important to step back: part of the reason why we’re seeing a muted reaction in Palestine is because of the way the documents were presented. Whether you believe the documents or you don’t believe the documents—and I have no reason to question the documents, particularly after members of the PLO have come out and verified the authenticity of the documents—the main problem is that they were presented in somewhat of a sensationalist way.

One example that I can give is that Al Jazeera tied the assassination of al-Madhoun, who is a member of Fatah, of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, to the Palestinian Authority (PA), and they tried to claim that because the Israelis made a request for this man to be assassinated, that somehow the PA acquiesced or condoned his killing. That’s a bit of a stretch. There is a lot of security cooperation that takes place between the PA and Israel—and it’s outrageous, it includes torture and mass arrest—but there was really no proof to bring it to the level that the PA was actually collaborating with Israel over this man’s killing.

And so, in the way that the documents were presented, the debate in Palestine now has not turned into a debate over the main issues, which are accountability, transparency, red lines, whether we should believe in this negotiations process, and whether the PLO has adopted alternative strategies. None of that is going to take place because instead the debate is currently over whether Al Jazeera crossed the line. And until we see something different, where it’s not a question of shooting the messenger, but we have the message that’s presented in a coherent way without the sensationalism, then I don’t think we’re going to have any real debate any time soon, unfortunately.

AK: Would you say that there’s been a marked shift in the negotiating posture of Palestinians since you last were part of a team involved in negotiations, is that shift represented in the “Palestine Papers,” and lastly, if so, what does that shift represent?

DB: Yes, there’s definitely a shift, and the reason why there was a shift is twofold. One is that the second intifada took place, and the PLO was suddenly stuck. Rather than capitalizing on the intifada, and the people power that it brought them, they ended up somehow being apologetic for the intifada and therefore backtracked on some positions. What were the positions they backtracked from? At the time that I was there, there was still a claim for the right of return.

It’s interesting, if you look at the documents from roughly 2000-2004, the positions that are taken are actually quite principled in some instances. For example, there is a demand for the right of return. There is the notion that all of the settlements are illegal. There is then a little bit of a backtrack by saying “land swaps,” but on a one-to-one basis. And so you see this kind of principled position, but then there’s a backtracking, and one of the reasons was the intifada and the complete failure on the part of the PA to use the intifada to their advantage, to actually harness popular support and alter their negotiating position.

The second reason, and I think this is the much more dangerous reason, is that during the period that I was there and a little bit after, you saw initiative after initiative come forward, and all of these initiatives, while never accepted by the PLO directly, were tacitly accepted by the PLO. For example, the Geneva Initiative was something that was never adopted by the PLO, and yet, you see a couple of things that are interesting. The first is those commercials you saw with Erekat and others in which they come forward and say “I need a partner”—those were all sponsored by the Geneva Initiative. And if you see, for example, the statements that American officials have come forward and said, they’ve all been saying the same thing, which is that “this reflects what happened during the negotiations.” But it didn’t. It reflects what happened after the negotiations fell apart. It was their own initiatives that they were putting forward—the Nusseibeh-Ayalon initiative, the Geneva Initiative—and this is where it becomes dangerous, because the Americans and others seem to assume that silence equals acquiescence. And unfortunately, the PLO falls into the trap of de facto acquiescing to these initiatives, when they align themselves with these things, such as they did with the various commercials, and when they don’t come out and completely reject them. I think this is why we’re now seeing a shift. While there were principled positions, if you believe in a two-state solution, the PLO has consistently undermined its own position because they didn’t really know how to deal with the intifada and because they never really objected to these major initiatives that were put on the table.

AK: And lastly: I know that you don’t think the papers will have a huge impact on the ground, but with the combination of what the “Palestine Papers” revealed and the unrest and uprising in Egypt, do you think that any of this popular anger in Egypt might be translated onto the street in Palestine and directed at either the PA or Israel?

DB: Optimism is one thing, but if I’m to speculate, I think the answer is going to be no. And I think it’s important to keep in mind that what’s going on in Egypt is a little bit different than what’s happening in Palestine, and there’s a lot of issues mitigating against another uprising.

The first is that the government of Salam Fayyad has tried to do a good job, using donor funds, to create a middle-class, and to give credit, and all of these sorts of things, and they’ve largely managed to silence a lot of dissent.

The second major factor is that there is a very repressive police regime that is now in place. It hasn’t been in place for as long as the Mubarak regime was in place, but nonetheless this is something new for Palestinians.

A third factor is that people aren’t really examining the merits of the papers, but rather in the way they were presented.

And the fourth thing is that the Palestinian street is already very divided, and if there’s one message that people are calling for, it’s that of national unity. And I think that people fear that going against the authority will somehow serve to undermine any attempts at national unity, even though there really are none right now. There also may be a fear factor of not wanting Hamas to take over.

It’s not ripe in the same way that Egypt was ripe. Again, not to say that it won’t happen. I just don’t think it’s going to happen in the short term.