Opinion
The Opinion section is strictly focused on providing timely and analytical opinion-editorials, mostly, but not exclusively, drafted by MIFTAH’s writers; it includes op-eds written by non-MIFTAH members exclusively for the organization. The Opinion section is a central feature of MIFTAH’s website, whereby a concrete effort is placed on providing accurate as well as challenging analysis on the situation in Palestine, Israel, as well as in the region
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Misreading The Arab Media
“ARABIC TV does not do our country justice,” President Bush complained in early 2006, calling it a purveyor of “propaganda” that “just isn’t right, it isn’t fair, and it doesn’t give people the impression of what we’re about.” The president’s statement, along with the decision by the New York Stock Exchange to ban Al Jazeera’s reporters in 2003, is a prime example of how the Arab news media have been demonized since the 9/11 attacks. As a result, America has failed to make use of what is potentially one of its most powerful weapons in the war of ideas against terrorism. For proof, in the last year we surveyed 601 journalists in 13 Arab countries in North Africa, the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula. The results, to be published in The International Journal of Press/Politics in July, shatter many of the myths upon which American public diplomacy strategy has been based. Rather than being the enemy, most Arab journalists are potential allies whose agenda broadly tracks the stated goals of United States Middle East policy and who can be a valuable conduit for explaining American policy to their audiences. Many see themselves as agents of political and social change who believe it is their mission to reform the antidemocratic regimes they live under. When asked to name the top 10 missions of Arab journalism, they cited political reform, human rights, poverty and education as the most important issues facing the region, trumping Palestinian statehood and the war in Iraq. Overwhelmingly, they wanted the clergy to stay out of politics. And, aside from the ever-present issue of Israel, they ranked “lack of political change” alongside American policy as the greatest threats to the Arab world. Though many Arab journalists dislike the United States government, more than 60 percent say they have a favorable view of the American people. They just don’t believe the United States is sincere when it calls for Arab democratic reform or a Palestinian state, as President Bush did again this month in Egypt. Make no mistake, the Arab press has many flaws, including being subject to state control; only 26 percent of our respondents said they felt their fellow Arab journalists “act professionally” and only 11 percent said they were truly independent in their work. Nevertheless, Arab news outlets are more powerful and free today than at any time in history. If the next administration is going to try to reach out to the Arab people, it won’t get far by blaming the messenger.
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Facing challenges on all fronts
Palestinian youths form one of the largest sectors of Palestinian society, a sector that is often overlooked and requires close attention when trying to solve the challenges facing it. Broadly speaking, young Palestinians face challenges and conflicts on three fronts: "family" conflicts, "social" conflicts and "political" conflicts. A subject that is rarely broached in Palestinian society is that of family conflicts. There are enough dysfunctional families in society for this to be an issue of serious concern and there is now also a major problem of families that have been separated, especially in the past seven years and as a result of the difficulties imposed on the movement of Palestinians within and between the Palestinian areas. Youths from such families become victims as their insecurities at home affect behavior. It is clear that young people who suffer conflict within their families face a lack of motivation in school and at work, can become violent and generally lack confidence in themselves. Another important challenge Palestinian youth face is the "social" conflict, pitting traditional values against modernity, fundamentalism against liberalism. With developments in technology, youths are very exposed to other cultures and traditions. These new ideas and influences often contradict, or seem to contradict, the values they have been brought up with or that they see around them. Often, young people start to make comparisons and contrasts that don't actually help them realize a transition in their thoughts. Consequently, one of two things is likely to happen: they blindly imitate another culture, leaving them alienated from their surroundings; or they totally reject any outside influence, turning away from new ideas and thoughts. The final and greatest challenge Palestinian youths face is of course the political conflict with Israel. As in so many areas of Palestinian lives, any resolution or progress toward resolution of the many challenges facing young Palestinians will be extremely limited in the absence of a resolution to the one conflict that all Palestinians have to deal with on a daily basis and that affects so many areas of life. The suffocating occupation affects young people in a multitude of ways, whether directly and in the short term in the form of the absence of decent employment opportunities, the inability to move freely from area to area let alone country to country, and the lack of control over their own political destinies, or in the long term, where psychological factors may inflict more damage insofar as the occupation instills a deep sense of mistrust toward authority and creates enormous anger. Witness how young people identify with the suicide bombers of the intifada. Look at the disruptions to normal life that they have to suffer on a daily basis, whether in terms of curfews, fear of simply walking the streets should a military incursion be under way or the humiliation of waiting in endless lines at checkpoints with not even a guarantee that one can cross. This anger is real, deep and will not go away overnight. But the political conflict is evolving now to include more than just Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The growing Palestinian-Palestinian conflict, which started in Gaza, is moving slowly but surely, infiltrating other parts of the land, especially between young people because of their misinterpretation of authority and power. Palestinian youth, like any nation's youth, plays a key role in the development of the country's culture, politics, economy and education. The PA, interested organizations and individuals should work hard to guarantee a peaceful life for active non-violent youths by building their capacities, training them on issues related to society and communication, opening their horizons to other cultures, reinforcing conflict management training courses on a community level and creating a fruitful basis to enable them to achieve their ambitions and improve their skills.- Published 30/7/2007 © bitterlemons.org
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Why Israel Is Backing the Saudi Arms Deal
Israel has come out in support of a multi-billion dollar U.S. arms deal to Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries. I can't remember the last time Israel supported a deal like this. Probably because it never has. So what exactly is going on this time? Earlier this month I was in Nablus, the most radicalized Palestinian town in the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Forces enter it only in force — and preferably in armor. I was standing in the main square when a disabled man on an all-terrain vehicle came weaving through traffic. He bounced across the curb in front of me to avoid a vendor's cart, shouting, "We need Hasan Nasrallah here to impose a little order." I was surprised to hear Nasrallah's name evoked in Nablus. Nasrallah, the secretary general of Lebanon's Hizballah, is a radical Shi'a. Nablus is Sunni, with segments increasingly attracted to Hamas radicalism. I walked around Nablus's old bazaar conducting an impromptu poll. To a person, everyone admired Nasrallah, for how he had fought the Israelis to a standstill in last summer's 34-day war. Just to make sure Nasrallah enjoyed the support he seemed to I asked the head of an Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade cell holed up in Nablus's Balata refugee camp. He is wanted by the Israelis, and constantly moves from house to house to avoid them. When he heard Nasrallah's name, he put his fingers to his lips. "I love that man," he said. The point of all this is that Hasan Nasrallah and Hizballah are the creation of Iran, the tip of Iran's spear pointed at Israel's throat. If anyone still has any doubts about Nasrallah's standing with Iran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent a "greeting card" to Nasrallah to mark the first anniversary of last year's war. As Ahmadinejad put it, "the wonderful victory of the Lebanese people over the Zionist occupiers is a result of faith, unity, and resistance." It's Nasrallah and Iran, then, that moved Israel to break with a 60-year policy of opposing arms sales to the Arabs. And the Israelis make no bones about how we got here: the Bush Administration completely botched the Iraq invasion, allowing Iran to effectively annex Basra and a large part of southern Iraq. The Israelis' nightmare is that there will be some sort of domino effect, the Iranians moving down the Arab side of the Gulf. The Israelis also believe the Iraq fiasco emboldened Iran to incite its Palestinian allies. Israel holds Iran at least partially responsible for Hamas's coup in Gaza. An Administration official, speaking privately, agrees. Today, Iranian couriers cross the border from Egypt into Gaza daily carrying bags of money to keep Hamas afloat. The Israelis want to stop Nasrallah, Hizballah and Iran from making serious inroads into the West Bank. What keeps them awake at night is Iran in the Gulf. If it means our arming Israel's historical enemies, the Gulf Arabs, so be it.
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A negative trend
Understanding the trends among the younger generation is an important way of predicting the future opinions and direction of any nation. It also gives us an early warning capability of negative trends that may be dealt with before it is too late. Palestinian youths are different from most nations' youths. They are especially vulnerable to political factors affecting their reality, including their social and economic situations. Indeed, education and later job opportunities, access to decent health and social services, in addition to access to the special needs of youth like places of entertainment and sports, all depend on the political situation. This explains why Palestinian youths are so political. There are many reasons to believe that the political opinions of Palestinian youths are not average but rather veer to the relatively hard line. First, cross tabulation of poll results conducted in the Palestinian territories since the peace process began show that age is a significant factor in determining answers to political questions such as attitudes to the political process, signed agreements and means of struggle. Second are the results of the frequently conducted student council elections, which have shown steadily growing student support for political factions and groups that oppose the peace process and signed agreements, support violent means of resistance and promote fanatic ideologies. We should take these indicators seriously as predictions of a trend of future radicalization in Palestinian society. Half the population, due to high population growth, is at age 16 and below. The question is what can be done in order to counter such trends and change them into more positive ones? The key word in any answer is "hope". After finishing high school, which is free and compulsory, young Palestinians face great difficulties in finding higher education places because local universities are limited to a few specialties as well as in terms of capacity. Opportunities to study abroad are even more limited, not least because of the expense. At the same time, job opportunities are even more difficult to come by for both school and university graduates, leaving young people at this critical age unemployed, helpless and hopeless. If we add to this the effect of the humiliation resulting from the treatment meted out to them by Israeli soldiers--mostly of the same age--waiting at checkpoints, seeing Israeli bulldozers uproot trees or demolish houses, having family members thrown in prison and hearing horrible tales of torture, it all adds up to an inevitable radicalization of those youths. To reverse these trends requires reversing both the practices and consolidation of the occupation and the dire socio-economic situation. The one will not happen without the other. To improve educational and professional opportunities requires a parallel lessening of the impact of the occupation and ultimately its end. Only then can Palestinian youths busy themselves with the normal preoccupations of their counterparts elsewhere, building careers and families.
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Abu Mazen's White Coup
I cannot describe the events since the formation of a committee to investigate into the defeat of Fatah in Gaza as anything but a second coup that is, following the coup Hamas staged against Fatah in Gaza. However this time, the coup was led by President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader accused of having a weak personality and the incapacity to elicit any change. President Abbas chose the critical time and the appropriate event to finally stage his coup after enduring a long wait since he assumed the presidency in 2004. And thus the most powerful figures in Fatah, including Mohamed Dahlan and Yasser Abd Rabbo, in addition to 60 other senior Fatah officers have either fled or fallen at the first sign that the president meant business. Abu Mazen has abandoned his position as a peaceful leader to become a combatant leader who seems to be leading the new battle himself. Apart from his hesitant decisions, Abu Mazen remains a Palestinian necessity after the Palestinians were orphaned following the death of Yasser Arafat; a nation without a real leadership that is embroiled in war. The Palestinians had become accustomed to Arafat who was their front in the Diaspora and who governed over them internally for 36 years. Abu Ammar succeeded in overshadowing all those who tried to compete with him for the seat of power, including the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin who despite his huge following and popularity still could not take his place, like many others who tried before him. But Arafat was not simply a leader by virtue of heading the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, but rather for a number of traits he possessed, including his shrewdness, focus, decisiveness, reconciliatory approach and the complex alliances he forged on an Arab and Palestinian level. As for Abu Mazen, he inherited the leadership of Fatah without any challenges posed from the leadership of the movement by reason of his seniority and the respect he had gained. However, over the past three years, he has shown no signs of leadership qualities. He did nothing to resolve the recurring internal crises in the Palestinian arena, or even within Fatah itself. Abbas was disdained to the point that emboldened his partners in Hamas against him, despite the fact that he was the one responsible for admitting them to power. In turn, they plotted to kill him then turned against him and seized Gaza in a manner that intended to demonstrate their challenge of Abu Mazen’s leadership. Perhaps this was the last straw that woke the president up, after which he broke his silence and began shooting at his potential opponents. Nabil Amr’s unexpected proactive statement was met with amazement after he made some announcements, before the Friday prayers, that 60 officers in Fatah will be held accountable and that Dahlan had resigned, and before them was the news of the formation of Salam Fayyad’s two governments. The president commenced with a harsh speech in which he revealed that Hamas had made attempts to assassinate him. This series of bold steps could mean a new awakening on Abu Mazen’s behalf, one in which he has come to realize that it was not only his power that was targeted, but that there had also been a conspiracy to take his life. Perhaps these developments might indicate a plan in which Abu Mazan has waited for the right moment to attack his adversaries, both at home and abroad. Should he succeed in his internal coup, Abu Mazen will have taken charge of the full reins of leadership and the absolute right for the Palestinian Authority, especially after shutting the cage on Hamas, which it had willingly backed itself into after seizing Gaza. Hamas put itself on the frontline to face Israeli gunfire and the faces of 1.5 millions Palestinians who require it to provide them with their share of water, electricity, gas, pensions and food. Today, the aftermath of this ‘counter-coup’ has set the scene for Mahmoud Abbas to take action. He has become obligated to adopt reforms, reorganize the order of power and change the bad image that has come to represent Fatah, and finally, to lead the Palestinian people towards their dream project: the Palestinian state.
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Coalition of Evangelicals Voices Support for Palestinian State
In recent years, conservative evangelicals who claim a Biblical mandate to protect Israel have built a bulwark of support for the Jewish nation — sending donations, denouncing its critics and urging it not to evacuate settlements or forfeit territory. Now more than 30 evangelical leaders are stepping forward to say these efforts have given the wrong impression about the stance of many, if not most, American evangelicals. On Friday, these leaders sent a letter to President Bush saying that both Israelis and Palestinians have “legitimate rights stretching back for millennia to the lands of Israel/Palestine,” and that they support the creation of a Palestinian state “that includes the vast majority of the West Bank.” They say that being a friend to Jews and to Israel “does not mean withholding criticism when it is warranted.” The letter adds, “Both Israelis and Palestinians have committed violence and injustice against each other.” The letter is signed by 34 evangelical leaders, many of whom lead denominations, Christian charities, ministry organizations, seminaries and universities. They include Gary M. Benedict, president of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination of 2,000 churches; Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary; Gordon MacDonald, chairman of World Relief; Richard E. Stearns, president of World Vision; David Neff, editor of Christianity Today; and Berten A. Waggoner, national director and president of The Vineyard USA, an association of 630 churches in the United States. “This group is in no way anti-Israel, and we make it very clear we’re committed to the security of Israel,” said Ronald J. Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, which often takes liberal positions on issues. “But we want a solution that is viable. Obviously there would have to be compromises.” They are clearly aiming their message not just at President Bush, but at the Muslim world and policy makers in the State Department. Mr. Sider said he and three other evangelical leaders got the idea for the letter in February at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, where they met Muslim and American diplomats who were shocked to discover the existence of American evangelicals who favored a Palestinian state. Mr. Sider says they will translate the letter into Arabic and distribute it in the Middle East and Europe. “We think it’s crucial that the Muslim world realize that there are evangelical Christians in the U.S. in large numbers that want a fair solution,” Mr. Sider said. In the last year and half, liberal and moderate evangelicals have initiated two other efforts that demonstrated fissures in the evangelical movement. Last year, they parted with the conservative flank by campaigning against climate change and global warming. This year, they denounced the use of torture in the fight against terrorism. Some of the participants in those campaigns also signed this letter. The Rev. Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of Northland Church in Longwood, Fla., said, “There is a part of the evangelical family which is what I call Christian Zionists, who are just so staunchly pro-Israel that Israel and their side can do no wrong, and it’s almost anti-Biblical to criticize Israel for anything. But there are many more evangelicals who are really open and seek justice for both parties.” The loudest and best-organized voices in the evangelical movement have been sending a very different message: that the Palestinians have no legitimate claim to the land. The Rev. John Hagee, who founded Christians United for Israel, was informed of the letter and read most of it. He responded: “Bible-believing evangelicals will scoff at that message. “Christians United for Israel is opposed to America pressuring Israel to give up more land to anyone for any reason. What has the policy of appeasement ever produced for Israel that was beneficial?” Mr. Hagee said. “God gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob a covenant in the Book of Genesis for the land of Israel that is eternal and unbreakable, and that covenant is still intact,” he said. “The Palestinian people have never owned the land of Israel, never existed as an autonomous society. There is no Palestinian language. There is no Palestinian currency. And to say that Palestinians have a right to that land historically is an historical fraud.” Christians United for Israel held a conference with 4,500 attendees in Washington this month, and Mr. Hagee sends e-mail action alerts on Israel every Monday to 55,000 pastors and leaders. There is a crucial theological difference between Mr. Hagee’s views on Israel and those expressed by the letter writers, said Timothy P. Weber, a church historian, former seminary president and the author of “On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend.” Mr. Hagee and others are dispensationalists, Mr. Weber said, who interpret the Bible as predicting that in order for Christ to return, the Jews must gather in Israel, the third temple must be built in Jerusalem and the Battle of Armageddon must be fought. Mr. Weber said, “The dispensationalists have parlayed what is a distinctly minority position theologically within evangelicalism into a major political voice.”
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Israel's incredible shrinking sea
The stark, barren shores of the Dead Sea are dotted with ruins of people's attempts to create paradises: Herod's desert palace of Masada; Qumran, the ancient religious commune near which the Dead Sea Scrolls were found; the shattered homes of the Beit HaArava kibbutz, where in the 1940s Zionist pioneers tried to create a utopian society on land no one else wanted. Thirty years ago, when I first saw it, the Dead Sea - one of the world's saltiest lakes - vaguely resembled a dumbbell. It had two basins, a deep northern one and a shallow southern one. But by the mid-1980s, the southern basin had dried up, leaving a vast expanse of salt flats. The Dead Sea Works, a chemical factory built to extract minerals from the water, had to start piping in water from the northern basin. The luxury hotels and spas to its north created an artificial pond to provide vacationers with a beach. The northern basin is also shrinking. Eerily, the road that runs along its west side retains, like a fossil, the imprint of the sea's outline from decades ago. What were once shoreside amenities now stand forlornly in the middle of the desert, a 300-meter hike from the beach. The problem is that the Jordan River, the Dead Sea's principal tributary, is a trickle once it reaches the sea because Israel, Jordan and Syria siphon off 95 percent of the water for drinking and for irrigation. Over the past century, the water's surface has dropped 80 feet; in the last two decades, the sea has shrunk by a third. Sinkholes have caved into the former seabed, and its water has become saltier, strangling even the unique one-celled microbes that long ago adapted to this poisonous environment. In April, the World Bank asked for bids to study a bold, high-tech solution - a 110-mile-long canal that would channel water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. The project, estimated to cost $5 billion, would have additional benefits - the water cascading from sea level at the tip of the Red Sea to minus 1,400 feet at the Dead Sea would create hydroelectricity. The system would also desalinate sea water - one reason the scheme is popular with the Kingdom of Jordan, which suffers a severe water shortage. Unfortunately, like many bold, high-tech solutions, it would likely have unintended consequences. The Dead Sea has never received water from the Red Sea. The Red Sea's water, less salty and with a chemical composition quite different from that of the Dead Sea, would float on top, creating an environment inhospitable to the Dead Sea's native biota. The reaction between the two kinds of water would most likely cause the precipitation of gypsum, turning the blue sea white, and the release of large quantities of hydrogen sulfide from the lower level. Hydrogen sulfide is rotten-egg gas, not what you want to sniff if you are vacationing at a beachside hotel. The canal itself has been routed through a seismically active region, which means an earthquake could crack it and send saltwater flowing into the surrounding lands. A low-tech alternative solution, promoted by the environmental organization Friends of the Earth Middle East, is to restore the original system and allow fresh water to flow from the Jordan into the Dead Sea. The only way to replenish the water of the Jordan is to radically change the consumption habits of the millions of people, Jews and Arabs, who now drink that water and consume the crops that it irrigates. It means switching to less thirsty crops and creating a system of water salvage and reuse. These are all measures that the countries should take anyway to preserve their water resources. And it is possible to make these changes, with a major commitment on the part of all the countries involved. Unfortunately, their governments are too preoccupied with the rising tide of fundamentalist Islam, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the muck of Iraq and Iran's nuclear dawn to make such an investment of effort and resources. The Red Sea-Dead Sea canal is much easier politically. So the Dead Sea may rise again, but it will be a ghost of its former self.
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The Golan Waits for the Green Light
Since their government has not, Shoshi Anbal and a posse of her fellow Tel Aviv housewives are preparing to engage in diplomacy with Syria. On May 18, they assembled along the Israeli-Syrian frontier to applaud what at the time was Syrian President Bashar al-Asad’s latest iteration of his call for negotiations to end the 40-year standoff over the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967, and indeed the legal state of war prevailing between the two states since 1948. “Asad! Israel wants to talk,” the women chanted. And, less reverently, “Let’s visit Damascus -- by car, not by tank.” Motivating the Israelis who took to the Golan in the name of the Israel-Syria Peace Society is not wanderlust, but fear for their sons, who fought a war on Israel’s northern front in the summer of 2006 that has been fiercely criticized by an Israeli commission of inquiry and the Israeli public at large. In preliminary findings released in early May, the Winograd commission charged Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert with having “made up his mind hastily” to wage war in Lebanon and with dithering in “energetically pursuing paths to stable and long-term agreements” with Israel’s foes. The red-haired Anbal, who helped spearhead the Golan rally, demands that the priorities be rapidly reversed, before her sons find themselves back on the battlefield. Among the other Israeli campaigners are Sami Michael, an Iraqi-born writer still hoping for Syria to return the remains of his brother-in-law, the spy Eli Cohen, who was executed in Damascus, and the prominent novelist David Grossman, whose son was killed in the 2006 Lebanon war. “If President Asad says that Syria wants peace…don’t wait a single day longer,” Grossman advised Olmert at another Israeli protest against the Lebanon war. “When you set out on the last [Lebanon] war, you didn’t wait for even an hour. You charged in with all our might, with all our power to destroy. Why, when there is some sort of flicker of peace, do you immediately reject it?” The peaceniks’ lofty ideals soon fell foul of reality. Hopes that Syrians might answer the Israel-Syria Peace Society with a simultaneous charm offensive on their side of the frontier were dashed when the Syrian authorities denied security clearance. Israel’s police, for their part, directed that the organizers stage a “gathering,” not a “demonstration,” limiting the number of people in attendance to 200 and the number of speakers to three. Yet the activists remain upbeat, confident that much of Israel’s security establishment is on their side. In early summer appearances before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, three out of the four top figures in that establishment, the heads of military intelligence, the National Security Council and the Foreign Ministry, called for engaging Syria. The only dissenter, the Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, expressed caution rather than outright opposition. Asad, he says, could cut ties with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the event of a peace treaty with Israel, but not with Hizballah in Lebanon. A host of ex-officials, including a former director of military intelligence, Aharon Zeevi Farkash, have added their voice to the peace lobby. With a few exceptions, the security establishment accepts that Israel did and therefore can survive without the Golan Heights. The 140 Israelis killed on the frontier in the 20 years before Israel captured the massif are a fraction of the several thousand who have died in the two direct wars and many indirect ones that Israel has fought in the ensuing four decades. Peace backed by an expansive demilitarized zone would offer a better defense. “Israel’s strategic posture would be better if we got down from the Golan and had a large separation between the armies. To cross the terrain to the Israeli border would expose the forces to Israeli air attack,” says Uri Bar-Joseph, a lecturer in intelligence studies at Haifa University. Any tanks escaping aerial bombardment would then have to negotiate narrow, steep ravines on their way to the Sea of Galilee, turning them into sitting ducks. For months, Olmert stood his ground amidst the political pressure, reprimanding a series of ministers, from Defense on down to Infrastructure, when they publicly broke ranks to call for talks. Aides to the prime minister mocked Syria’s leader as an untrustworthy naïf unable to deliver the olive branches he proffered, besieged as he was by a coterie of ruthless, overbearing generals. Yet so rickety has been Olmert’s own edifice that the Israeli premier has found himself prone to being cast in similar terms. Indeed, Olmert might envy Asad his six years in office and his grasp on power, a grasp that, says an Israeli Foreign Ministry official, is “not going to disappear.”
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Palestinians wary of interim statehood
The strategy behind resurgent diplomatic activity to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beginning to emerge, pointing to the goal of interim statehood for the Palestinians before President George W. Bush’s term in office runs out. Within a year, according to some analysts, a new political entity could come into being called the State of Palestine. However, they warned of many potential pitfalls and doubted it would fulfil the aspirations of the Palestinian people. “They want to change the name of the Palestinian Authority to the Palestinian state,” said Hani al-Masri, a West Bank political analyst. “But it wouldn’t change anything on the ground. It would be a state under occupation.” Many Palestinians are wary of a short-term solution they perceive as having more to do with Mr Bush’s legacy and the US’s problems elsewhere in the Middle East than with a lasting settlement of the conflict. The pace of diplomacy has accelerated since Hamas’s takeover of Gaza last month and Mahmoud Abbas’s consolidation of Fatah’s authority in the West Bank. The PA president’s dismissal of Hamas from government has converted him into a “partner for peace” in the eyes of Israel. Mr Bush was similarly supportive when he said this month: “By supporting the reforms of President Abbas and Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad, we can help them show the world what a Palestinian state would look like – and act like.” Since then Tony Blair has been appointed envoy of the international Quartet to oversee reforms and the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan made a joint visit to Jerusalem. Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, this week embarks on her latest shuttle to the region. An international conference, announced by Mr Bush in a speech on July 16, will take place in the autumn, probably in New York. If all goes well, a more substantive session will be held in December. In the meantime the leaders on both sides have been preparing their national constituencies for the consequences of the new strategy. Both Mr Abbas and Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, spoke of the need to define the final outcome of renewed negotiations. Mr Abbas calls it an “end game”, Mr Olmert “an agreement of principles”. For Mr Abbas these principles would include a Palestinian state in pre-1967 borders, the solution of such core issues as the status of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees, “and afterwards, only afterwards, the implementation”. Mr Olmert’s vision is of a state including some 90 per cent of West Bank land, with Israel retaining its big settlement blocks. He would prefer to sidestep the issues of Jerusalem and refugees for now. To sweeten the pill for the Palestinians, Ms Rice said last week that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and secure its future in regions such as Galilee and the Negev. The latter is a policy already embraced by the Olmert government and long sponsored by Shimon Peres, the new Israeli president. Haim Ramon, a close political ally of Mr Olmert, has said Israel should leave most of the West Bank because “the occupation of the territories threatens our very existence, our legitimacy and our international standing”. Mr Ramon was seen as flying a kite for the prime minister, a function Mr Olmert performed for Ariel Sharon, his predecessor, when the latter was planning the controversial 2005 Israeli exit from Gaza. The Olmert government might be tempted to secure a deal with Mr Abbas while he is relatively weak. The Palestinian president previously rejected any interim statehood that would leave borders undefined. A putative interim state would remain hemmed in by Israeli military controls and the army might even insist on retaining a right of hot pursuit. The concept of interim statehood – analysts have taken to calling it Oslo-2 in reference to the autonomy agreements that created the PA but failed to lead to Palestinian independence – faces considerable barriers. Success assumes that Hamas, isolated in the Gaza Strip, will continue with its policy of non-aggression towards Fatah in the West Bank. It also assumes that the Israeli public will buy the idea so soon after a Gaza withdrawal whose aftermath they blame on Palestinian intransigence. Israel and the PA leadership may be tempted to seize the moment because the focus of attention in the Middle East has shifted to Iraq and Iran. As James Wolfensohn, Mr Blair’s frustrated predecessor, said in a recent interview: “Israelis and Palestinians really should get over thinking that they're a show on Broadway. They are a show in the Village, off-off-off-off Broadway.”
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The Seige of Gaza
The Israeli-controlled Erez crossing point into the Gaza Strip looks is like an airport terminal to nowhere. After showing my passport and press pass, I enter the glass, air-conditioned and almost completely empty building and walk down a long corridor at the end of which, instead of a waiting airplane, there's a room with seemingly no exit. Then a metal door mysteriously opens, and I leave Israel. Outside there are no customers officers, no passport control, no port authority, just long caged passageways and a huge empty lot with a couple of taxis baking in the summer sun. This is the quietest border crossing in the Middle East. The Gaza Strip, which is home to about 1.4 million people, is almost fifty day into an Israeli siege. Almost all shipments except for basic humanitarian supplies are barred from entering, and almost nothing comes out. And no one but journalists, members of international organizations like the United Nations, and a tiny number of Palestinians from special professions are allowed to come or go. The Israelis have sealed the crossing in part as a response to the rockets that are regularly launched from Gaza into Israeli towns in the Negev, occasionally killing civilians, and often damaging homes. But the siege is also the key element of an Israeli and American strategy to isolate Hamas, the Palestinian militant group and political party which after a few short days of internecine Palestinian warfare in June, took control of Gaza from its political rival, Fatah. The hope is that by letting Gaza simmer in its own juices, average Palestinians will turn away from Hamas, which has never recognized Israel, and towards Fatah, which is willing to restart the peace process. Unfortunately, the siege of Gaza appears to be having the opposite effect. The damage done to the Gazan economy has in fact been catastrophic. Unemployment is up to about 87 percent . About 79 percent of the population is receiving food from the United Nations. Nasser El Helou, a spokesman for the Chamber of Commerce and a hotel owner, estimated that the Gazan economy -- which is based on light manufacturing, agricultural exports, and the wages brought home by day laborers in Israel -- would collapse within two weeks if the siege continues. But he was also clear about whom he blamed for the situation. "If we are free we should control our own borders," he said. "But we do not control our borders, so the full responsibility is on the Israeli side. " I spent Thursday talking to other business owners -- pragmatic, apolitical people -- who uniformly blamed Israel, the United States and Fatah for the destruction of the Gazan economy. In fact, after years of living with the gangsterism and warlordism that plagued Gaza while it was run by Fatah officials, most are happy with the Hamas takeover. "I blame Fatah and Abu Mazen because they made us live in garbage," said the owner of the largest factory in Gaza, which makes cookies and ice cream, but which is now almost totally shut. "They never wanted to see anyone else prosper. They just wanted to live on top, through corruption." The business owners pointed out that not only joblessness and poverty pushing average people towards extremism, but they also said that the Israeli embargo was destroying the only class of Palestinians who still looked favorably towards Israel: them. Most of them speak Hebrew, have -- or used to have -- Israeli clients, partners, and friends, and most had once looked forward to the day when there would be no trade barriers at all for an independent Palestine at peace with Israel. "The majority of Gazans do not like Israel'" said Amassi Ghazi, the chairman of a company that imports building materials. "Until now only the private sector had good relations with Israel. So please open the border before you loose the last sector, and all Gaza will be enemies of Israel." A Vision for Palestinian Women’s Rights Organizations based on the Global Study on the Implementation of UNSCR 1325
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