'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Hamas, Carter, the Egyptian mediation, etc

I have a big family weekend this weekend. So not much time to blog about Jimmy Carter's meeting with Khaled Meshaal, or this report, by the WaPo's Glenn Kessler, on info that the Egyptian foreign minister gave yesterday about the state of the negotiations his government has been mediating between Hamas and the Israeli government. ("We're making good progress...")

Regarding the Carter-Meshaal meeting, the new information has been that Carter conveyed to Meshaal a request that Israeli deputy PM Eli Yishai of the Shas Party made when Carter met with him Wednesday to meet with Hamas himself, in order to discuss the prisoner-swap issue. But according to this Haaretz report, Yishai was clear that he did not intend to complicate the government's diplomacy by discussing the ceasefire question or other questions with Hamas.

My upcoming Boston Review article on the rise of Hamas and some of the broad diplomatic implications of that is now in final editing. It pushes further the analysis I made in this 2006 BR article about the emergence of "parallel unilateralisms" being pursued by Hamas and Likud.

Given the new role being played by Yishai and the undoubted weight of Shas as a voting bloc (currently, 12 seats in the Knesset) and social phenomenon within Israeli society, I should probably factor them-- and perhaps some of the Israeli far-right parties-- much more into my analysis as it develops.

Shas is certainly a fascinating phenomenon, in general. It is the main religious party of the mizrachi ("eastern") Jews. In fact, nearly all the Shas people are Jews "ingathered" into Israel from Arab countries. So it is particularly interesting to see the parallels between their modus operandi and emergence and that of Hamas-- though Shas has often been able to get its hands into the trough of national budgets and several of its past leaders have been engaged in corruption, which makes it different from Hamas on both counts.

To me, the most interesting question is the importance that Shas gives to defining a formal national border between Israel and a portion of the West Bank that would be under Palestinian "sovereignty." In the past, Shas's people were mainly concentrated inside Israel proper, and its concerns were mainly for the level of social spending and services provided to the mizrachi communities there-- spending which was very strongly negatively impacted by the huge government investments in the West Bank settlements. My impression, though, is that in recent years many members of the Shas base, like so many observant ashkenazi Jews, have been moving into West Bank settlements-- perhaps mainly in and around East Jerusalem.

Can any readers point me in the direction of good materials to read about recent political and demographic developments regarding Shas?? If so, that would be really helpful.

Anyway, regarding Carter, AP's Bassem Mroue is reporting that he went back for a further one-hour meeting with Meshaal this morning, after spending four hours with him yesterday.

Mroue writes, that this morning Hamas's deputy politburo head Musa Abu Marzouk

said Carter and Mashaal discussed a possible prisoner exchange with Israel, as well as how to lift a siege imposed by the Jewish state on the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Carter, who brokered the 1978 Israeli-Egyptian peace, is trying to secure the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Abu Marzouk's politburo colleague Mohammed Nazzal said yesterday that Hamas leaders from Gaza would be traveling to Syria today to confer with Meshaal, and that Carter ""will be informed of Hamas' response in the coming days."