shadiahm 's List: Middle East

• People keep repeating that Hamas’s charter is opposed to the existence of Israel. Yes it is, but Hamas has not stood by its charter for the best part of the last ten years. Hamas has recognized the Oslo peace process, which it said it would oppose. It has taken part in democratic elections, which it has won. It has de facto recognized the two-state solution by seeking to be elected as the government of the Palestinian Authority. It has not struck outside historic Palestine; it never has. So to dismiss it as a terrorist group that has to be stamped out misses entirely the point of its position in Palestinian society.
• Rather than describe Hamas as a terrorist group, I would say they’re a group that uses terror as a weapon and I think there’s a significant difference there. You’ll find a lot of Israeli commentators, amongst others, can understand and make in their writing. There is a difference there.
• But it’s when they see their land being taken, when they see their water resources being consumed, when they see Gaza being converted into a prison, they believe in violence. It’s a part of the world where all sides are very familiar with the notion of revenge and vengeance.
• In the writing of the narrative, the objective of the spin on all sides is to cast the other side in simple, bad terms. Make it all black, make it all white, try to airbrush out the gray. Now there’s a lot of gray that has to be dealt with and has to be considered.
• And reporters and commentators, a lot of them writing about it these days get locked into that bigger narrative that is being crafted around them and, in quite in a deliberate way, for them.
• One of the lines that many Israeli commentators use is that Israel is still fighting the seventh day of the Six-Day War, with good reason.
• But he is a moderate in terms of what? He is a moderate in terms of the militants in Hamas, but in the eyes of the Palestinian people?
• if in fact it is

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• When the Taliban countered that they were happy to give up Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, if the U.S. could produce any evidence for the allegation, the U.S. scoffed.
• The second and even more dangerous accomplishment of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was to elevate the Taliban, al-Qaeda and anyone willing to resist U.S. aggression to the status of heroes or freedom fighters.
• By the same logic, who stood between Afghan civilians and the NATO aerial bombardments that killed about 3,000 people? The Taliban.
• And it's not just that the Afghan population believes that the Taliban resistance is legitimate; that resistance is legitimate under international law. No less important a document than the United Nations charter gives the Taliban and other Afghans the right to legitimate self-defense against U.S. aggression.
• Obama has prescribed more military operations in Afghanistan.
• Withdrawing troops.
• Working with the various Afghan factions to begin negotiations. Wars are rarely stopped on the battlefield, and those that are have a tendency to break out again after a few years.
• Once stability and security are guaranteed in Afghanistan, beginning the attack on fundamentalism in earnest.

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• "It comes down to a simple question: do Obama, Emanuel, and whoever else they appoint realize that being "pro-Israel" today means openly opposing the occupation and using American influence (and leverage) to reverse (not just halt) the settlement project and bring about a viable Palestinian state? "

• 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.
• For many years Hamas has said that Dahlan’s forces routinely tortured detainees. One alleged method was to sodomize prisoners with soda bottles.
• Afterward, according to the official, Rice underlined her position: “So we’re agreed? You’ll dissolve the government within two weeks?”
• The irony of the blockade on foreign aid after Hamas’s legislative victory, meanwhile, was that it prevented only Fatah from paying its soldiers.
• It is unclear whether, as president, Abbas had the constitutional authority to dissolve an elected government led by a rival party, but the Americans swept that concern aside.
• From Hamas’s perspective, the Action Plan could amount to only one thing: a blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup.
• Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas’s chief spokesman, says the leak in Al-Majd convinced the party that “there was a plan, approved by America, to destroy the political choice.”
• Israel, meanwhile, is no safer.
• In Gaza, the exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and ammunition—including the new Egyptian guns supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.
• “They say they won’t talk to Hamas,” says one such expert, “but in the end they’re going to have to. It’s inevitable.”

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• "What's been lost in the political noise is a consistent finding … of a small to moderate rise in the nonviolent, regular causes of death,"
• suddenly you realize why CNN and the Washington Post don't want to be the entity saying that more than twice as many people have died in Iraq as have died in Darfur," Roberts told me. "That's just not going to win you many friends."

• "I think it will be suspended," Qureia said. "What is happening in Gaza is a massacre of civilians, women and children, a collective killing, genocide," Qureia added. "We can't bear what the Israelis are doing, and what the Israelis are doing doesn't led the peace process any credibility."

• We will   continue fighting in order for the danger to the residents to end."

• By defending Malley, those who knew his work best have drawn attention to a fact US aspirants to high office usually feel it is essential to ignore – Hillary Clinton's lavish praise for the West Bank separation barrier as currently routed springs to mind – namely that it is not necessarily "anti-Israel" to criticise Israeli policy from time to time.
• You are pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian but you cannot be both. This of course conveniently buries a key argument – one heard far more in Israel than in US debate – that an urgent end to the occupation is in Israel's as well as the Palestinians' interest.
• This is all the more perverse, now that the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has suggested publicly that the failure to negotiate a peace with the Palestinians may imperil Israel's very existence as a Jewish state. Yet it remains hard to imagine a US politician bold enough to say the same thing without risking his own electability.
• Yet is it really "anti-Israel" to do so when a growing clutch of Israeli ex-generals, academics, and Israel's most celebrated novelist Amos Oz – all serious Zionists who unlike AIPAC's most hawkish members actually live there – also want talks with Hamas on one issue or another?

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• Maj-Gen Almog had planned to visit the UK in September 2005 to pay various social and charitable calls on Jewish communities in Solihull, the West Midlands, and Manchester. As his plane touched down at Heathrow, a call from the Israeli embassy in London warned him that police were waiting to arrest him. The general and his wife refused to leave the plane. Two tense hours elapsed, while Det-Supt John MacBrayne, a senior counter-terrorism officer in charge of the operation, agonised over what to do.
• He is not the only senior Israeli in its sights. Just over a year ago, the Israeli army's former chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, was arrested in New Zealand, after Hickman Rose took out a private case against him over the assassination of Sheikh Shehadeh. The case was ruled out by New Zealand's attorney general.
• "He apologised for a judicial process," Mr Maynard said. "This case was not a stunt; it was an effort to bring Almog to justice in a place where he would have a fair trial, because he has complete immunity in Israel. To have it thwarted, and then to have an apology, is incredible."

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• If Lebanese analysts expected Wednesday that the assassination of Mughniyah would result in positive gestures of political reconciliation on the part of Nasrallah, especially after Sa'ad Hariri called for "national unity," it would seem that Thursday's competing rallies and speeches have brought Lebanon one step closer to a violent confrontation. It is not the ridicule of his rivals that is now threatening Lebanon, but Nasrallah's ability to determine, at any given moment, whether the country goes to war or keeps the peace.      

• Despite the scepticism of many US journalists permanently stationed in Iraq, television and newspaper newsrooms in New York and Washington (in London they are more sceptical) have largely bought into the idea that "the surge" – the wider deployment of 30,000 extra US troops since February 2006 – has succeeded.
• But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.
• "The problem," complained one American correspondent in Baghdad, "is that newsrooms back home have two mindsets – 'War Rages' and 'Peace Dawns' – and not a lot in between."
• The "surge" – the 30,000 extra US troops implementing a new security plan in Baghdad – has helped to make Baghdad safer. In effect, they have frozen into place the Shia victory of 2006. The city is broken up into enclaves sealed off by concrete walls with only one entrance and exit.
• "People say things are better than they were," says Zanab Jafar, a well-educated Shia woman living in al-Hamraa, west Baghdad, "but what they mean is that they are better than [during] the bloodbath of 2006. The situation is still terrible."

• Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. "You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants," adds Zanab Jafar, "because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school." New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.

  For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.
• "About twice as many people are being killed as the government admits."
• The picture Bush evoked is similar to that often seen in Hollywood Westerns when outraged townsfolk and farmers, driven beyond endurance by the crimes of a corrupt sheriff or saloon owner and their bandit followers, rise in revolt. In reality, in Iraq the exact opposite has happened. The Awakening Council members of today are the "terrorists" of yesterday.
• Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the "surge". It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen "as a big black spot on Google Earth".
• But for millions of Iraqis like Bassim, the war has robbed them of their homes, their jobs and often their lives. It has brought them nothing but misery and ended their hopes of happiness. It has destroyed Iraq.

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• The Israeli government, sad to say, seems oblivious to history and apparently its library of CNN game tapes is empty.
• It is not about the shelling of Sderot. Israel began applying sanctions on the Palestinians immediately following the Hamas legislative elections of June 2006.
• In the past two years 45 Israelis were killed in terror attacks while 810 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by the IDF in response.
• In other words, the Israelis produced precisely the situation they did not want. They kept out home heating oil and sugar while ultimately allowing Hamas to smuggle in God only knows what!
• Israel cannot divest itself of responsibility for Gaza simply by declaring it. Is Israel prepared to let Gaza control all its borders, its air space, and its sea lanes? Is it prepared to rule out military intervention in Gaza in response to continued attacks? Of course not. Israel wants to divest itself of all humanitarian responsibility for Gaza while maintaining control.
• As it was, Israel just picked up and left, handing Hamas the opportunity to increase its support by claiming that it drove Israel out, weakening Abbas and setting the stage for the shelling of Sderot and the ultimate Hamas takeover of Gaza.
• That state will not be a gift to the Palestinians, nor will it be a reward for good behavior. What it will be is a solution to a problem that plagues Israelis and Palestinians alike (while seriously damaging America’s interests worldwide).

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• Israel has claimed since the summer of 2005, when it withdrew its occupying soldiers and settlers from Gazan territory, that it was no longer responsible for conditions of life in Gaza because it was "no longer occupying" the territory. But that was a lie. International law defines occupation in the context of an outside power controlling the borders and territory - which Israel continued to do, through control of Gaza's borders, border-crossings, air space, coastal waters, underground, economy, electricity - and through constant military attacks, assassinations, and arrest raids. Gaza remains occupied. (There is an interesting question regarding Hamas' political legitimacy, despite the unacceptable militarization of their fight with Fatah last summer. If most Gazans believe the Hamas-led government in Gaza is oppressive or extremist, forcing Islamization on an unwilling population, they would have simply taken the opportunity to stay in Egypt once they crossed the border. But that didn't happen.)

• Authentic Worship:

   

    Serving the Neighbor’s Need

• But it is more likely that Olmert, Abbas, and Mubarak -- all weak and discredited leaders -- will seek to hold onto power by clinging to the United States, which has a long record of opposing Palestinian-Israeli peace.

• Anticipating, negatively, the stance taken by Mr Vilnai, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Israel might seize the chance to sever Gaza from the West Bank, which he insists are inseparable elements of a future Palestinian state. This could have grave consequences for the US-backed peace process initiated at last year's Annapolis summit, he warned.

• The term "outpost," with its implication of "temporary," is a meaningless one. The falsity of the distinction between a legal settlement and an illegal settlement − as if anyone recognized the legality of the veteran settlements, and as if the outposts had been established in violation of government decisions and not with the government's active help - has by now become obvious.
• The outposts are the essence of the Israeli bluff.
• For 40 years now, Israel has been settling in the occupied territories while pretending that it is prepared to withdraw at any moment if only a chance for peace develops. With its own hands, Israel has been rendering the two-state solution irrelevant, while declaring to all and sundry that this is the only possible solution.
• 89 outposts in the West Bank
• Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's declaration that he will work to take down the outposts, as he has promised President George W. Bush, is tantamount to empty words.
• Bush's visit to Israel and Olmert's talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are meaningless as long as the facts on the ground - the outposts that keep expanding - clearly show just how unserious the Israeli government's declarations are, and to what extent the U.S. administration is collaborating with it.

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