I've been unbelievably busy with the galley-proofs (or whatever they call today's functional equivalent of them) of my book. Five chapters down, and two to finish tomorrow... Meanwhile, I see that today's issue of Al-Ahram Weekly (in English) has as expected a number of informative articles on the thorny Gaza-Egypt question.
This is probably the best general wrap-up of the tricky Egyptian-Palestinian dilemma over Gaza. It includes this:
For Egypt to secure a prompt and legal operation of the borders it would need to either secure the consent of Hamas for the re-instatement of the borders agreement suspended by the Hamas control of Gaza or alternatively to introduce a new agreement acceptable to both sides and passable by Israel and the international community. Either scenarios, however, would require a Hamas-Fatah agreement, if not full reconciliation.
"I call upon all the Palestinian people, with all their factions, to prioritise the need to end the suffering of the Palestinian people," President Hosni Mubarak said earlier this week before calling for a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation to be hosted by Cairo.
Mubarak's call for Palestinian reconciliation is not exactly new. Egypt has tried, on and off, during the past few months to mend the many cracks in the Palestinian rank -- but with no success at all.
Mubarak's call for Palestinian reconciliation this time, however, carries a new firmness. "Before, Egypt wanted to mend the Palestinian differences to secure Palestinian unity at time of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. Now, it is much more than that. Egypt wants to make sure that Palestinian affairs and differences will be contained within the Palestinian territories and will not spill over to neighbouring Egyptian territories as we have seen during the past week," the Egyptian official commented.
Mubarak's call for Palestinian unity was met with overt and covert criticism from American and Israeli officials who make no secrete of their wish to isolate and eventually ostracise Hamas. It was, however, supported firmly by the Arab League and mildly by the Europeans.
For their part, Hamas officials were quick to make a vocal and repeated welcome of Mubarak's call for Palestinian dialogue. It was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who declined the Egyptian initiative, almost in a rough way...
If you want to know what actually happens in communities that get caught up in a paroxysm of inter-group violence, and what it feels like to live in such a community, go over to the Kenyan Peacework blog today and read this post from Dave Zarembka, a US Quaker who lives with his Kenyan Quaker wife Gladys in Kipkarren River, in western Kenya.
All of Dave's emails about the violence that has swept Kenya since the deeply contested January 27 election have been posted on the KP blog (which I earlier wrote about here), and are worth reading. In this one he writes, in particular, about the role played in fomenting the climate of violence-- and the commission of actual acts of horrendous violence-- by the rapid spreading of fear-inducing rumors and the parallel spreading of great clouds of unknowing.
He gives several examples of this, and reports several things that have been happening in his town in the past couple of days. Including this:
None of this, of course, is reported by the media since no one has reporters of any kind in the area. Are those who have died in Lugari District accounted for in the national total which
is now officially 850? I doubt that many of them are. There are hundreds and hundreds of little places like Lumakanda, Turbo, and Kipkarren River. What is the real truth of what is happening in all these communities?
Send Dave and Gladys a thought or a prayer. Read (and perhaps send your comments to) that blog post there at KP. Circulate that post or other KP posts to all your friends who might be interested. And do whatever you can, wherever you are, to urge your government to work with Kenya's people to restore calm, security, and hope to a country now bleeding badly from this internal violence.
I am trying to imagine the physiological distortions the members of the Winograd wound themselves up into when they issued this crazed judgment on the decisionmaking in the last days of the 33-day war, and have been unable to:
"The ground operation did not reduce the Katyusha fire nor did it achieve significant accomplishments, and its role in accelerating or improving the political settlement is unclear," said Winograd. "Also unclear is how it affected the Lebanese government and Hezbollah regarding the cease-fire."
"The manner in which the ground operation was conducted raises the most difficult of questions," he continued.
However, the panel found that the decisions that motivated the political echelons to approve the offensive were acceptable.
That last ground assault on Lebanon not only did not realize any objectives on the ground-- it also was launched after the terms of the final ceasefire had been agreed by Israel on August 11, so it did not affect the terms of the ceasefire. In addition, because it was such a tactical fiasco, it ended up delivering far from the intended final, "uber-deterrent" message. Instead it showed that the ground forces' readiness and planning were garbage. Remember all those news pictures of the exhausted, ill-equipped, and defeated Israeli ground force troops staggering back south across the border on August 14 and 15? And it had led to those 33 quite avoidable deaths of Israeli soldiers.
Until recently, Israel has had a fairly solid reputation among the western democracies for, at least, being able to establish serious national commissions charged with investigating past mistakes. For all its shortcomings, the Kahan Commission into the the Sabra and Shatila massacres was one such body.
Now, with the recent final findings of the Or Commission into the October 2000 killings by the police of 10 or 11 Palestinian Israelis, and this latest report form the Winograd Commission, we see that even this once strong feature of Israel's governance system has become badly degraded.
In US military and political circles, people like to talk about the importance of doing "lessons learned" exercises. In Britain, more realistically, they tend to call them "lessons identified"-- since learning is yet another stage, that requires some active intelligence going in.
But in the Israel of the Winograd Commission, they don't even want to identify the lessons to be learned from the past? Interesting, indeed.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today announced that the days of Israel, which he calls the "filthy Zionist entity", are numbered and the said "entity" will fall soon or later.
AFP reports this:
"It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall," he said. "The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered."
Referring to Israel as "the Zionist entity" rather than the name it has as a recognized public entity in the international arena is also abhorrent.
Isn't it also the case that that, at a time when Iran's negotiators are dealing with the latest round of Security Council diplomacy concerned with their nuclear program, and when Iran clearly seems eager to build warmer relations with states like Egypt, which has a longstanding peace agreement with Israel-- then to have the country's president spouting off such abhorrent hate speech must be quite unhelpful to such efforts?
I've been very interested, over the years, to study the relationships among what the Arabs call the "Jabhat al-Mumana'a"-- the "blocking front" of regional states and parties dedicated to blocking the implementation of Israeli-US hegemonist plans for the region. The main members of this front are Iran, Syria, Lebanon's Hizbullah, and Palestine's Hamas.
We should note that none of the other members of the JM refer to Israel in the same demeaning, hateful way that A-N does. First of all, the leaders of all the other JM members refer overwhelmingly to "Israel", not to the "Zionist entity". Secondly, they don't use hateful descriptors like "filthy" when referring to it. Thirdly, they show varying degrees of readiness to deal with Israel as an established fact in the region.
For example, Syria participated in a lengthy, and actually remarkably productive process of face-to-face peace negotiations with Israel from 1991 through 2000. President Bashar al-Asad, like his father before him (since 1973 or so), has always stood ready to negotiate a final peace agreement with Israel. Syria sent a representative to the regional peace talks held in Annapolis, Maryland, last November.
Hizbullah has battled Israel's armies mightily, mainly on the land of its own native Lebanon. But it has also, from 1996 on, shown itself ready to participate in indirect ceasefire negotiations with Israel and then-- with one notable exception, in July 2006-- to abide by the ceasefires thereby agreed. (And Israel has been a frequent violator of those ceasefires.)
Regarding Israel's longterm stature as a mainly-Jewish state in the region, Hizbullah's leaders have repeatedly abstained from pronouncing on that, saying that that is a matter for the Palestinian people, not the Lebanese people, to decide.
As for Hamas, its leaders talk frequently and easily about "Israel." They certainly accept-- and are sometimes eager for-- the idea of limited cooperation on ceasefires and other matters, though with the general proviso that these be negotiated through third parties, not directly. Regarding Israel's longterm stature in the region, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal repeated to me just two weeks ago the organization's readiness to conclude a hudna of undefined length with an Israel that had withdrawn from all the Palestinian lands occupied in 1967 and had satisfied all the Palestinians' rights including the right to return.
Hamas's position is quite evidently different from that of, for example, PA president Mahmoud Abbas. Different, too, from the kinds of peace settlement envisaged by the vast majority of that fast-fading breed, the Israeli peaceniks, at this time. But it is also notably different from the hateful, almost specifically genocidal position articulated by Ahmadinejad.
I can't imagine why Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei allows A-N to carry on like this.
Maybe the subtle ploy there is to make the other members of the Jabhat al-Mumana'a look moderate by comparison?
A condensed version of my Jan. 16th interview with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal is now published on the website of Foreign Policy magazine. Under my agreement with them, they have that as an exclusive for two weeks, and I'll be publishing the (much longer) full version of the interview on Feb. 13th.
It was a real pleasure working with the folks there. From me saying they could have it, to them doing the editing work, etc., and getting it published took somewhere less than six hours. Plus, I think they did a good edit.
Y-net News tells us that today, one day before the long-delayed release of the Winograd Commission's second report, Ehud Olmert spoke in the Knesset about "the loneliness of the leader."
He did so, as part of the Knesset's special commemoration of the centenary of the birth of renowned Zionist terror leader Yair Stern, the eponymous leader of the Stern Gang. Go read the thoughts of the besieged Olmert on that man. Also, look at the very suggestive picture of the lonely Olmert that they have on the page there.
And talking of lonely leaders, Akiva Eldar has a fascinating little vignette in today's HaAretz, about Mahmoud Abbas's recent meeting with a clutch of Kadima politicians.
Eldar writes,
Having to keep Abu Ala' around in the Muqata really can't help. The two of them were keen competitors for the mantle left by Arafat's death. They were keen competitors even while the Old Man was still alive.
That "scorn" that Eldar writes about on Abu Ala's lips reminds me of the way that, when I had lunch with Arafat in the Muqata in early 2004, the two long-time Arafat courtiers Saeb Erakat and Yasser Abed Rabboo were almost openly mocking their boss. They were talking over him and treating him like a dotty old buffoon. (Which he may have been by that point. But it was very unseemly to see the way those two men treated the Palestinians' national leader.)
More of Eldar's description of Abbas's recent meeting with the Kadima pols:
Eldar wrote that long-time Labour Party bully-boy and Infrastructure Minister Benjamin ("Fuad") Ben-Eliezer already thinks that Abbas is useless, and has for some time now been pushing the government to release imprisoned Fateh leader Marwan Barghouthi, so he can become the interlocutor instead. He wrote that Ben-Eliezer had told Olmert that:
And a final point of considerable interest in Eldar's piece:
According to information obtained by Israel security sources, Arafat was talking about a march on Jerusalem. The IDF contemplated a scenario of thousands of unarmed Palestinian civilians marching from Ramallah, Jericho and Bethlehem toward the barriers that surround Jerusalem, waving peace placards at television cameras from around the world. They wondered what an officer should do when his soldiers are stuck amid hundreds of Palestinian women and children carrying posters and making their way toward a Jewish settlement. And what should they do when processions set out from all West Bank towns, toward the Jewish settlements that surround them?
My column under that title is in Wednesday's CSM. (Also, archived here.*)
The bottom line is here:
Washington needs to find a way to talk to the leaders of the movement. Longtime friends in Egypt can help establish a channel. The war-shattered peoples of Gaza and of southern Israel need Washington to help, not hinder, the reaching of a cease-fire.
* Also, excerpted by Al-Jazeera, in Arabic, here. (Hat-tip Ahmed.)
More evidence is emerging that, in undertaking January 23's mass civilian bust-out from Gaza, Gaza's elected Hamas leadership was seeking not only to deal with the immediate humanitarian crisis brought on by Israel's tough siege of Gaza but also to throw down a sharp political challenge to the US-Israeli plans for the region.
Up to January 23, those plans rested strongly on maintaining Fateh's Mahmoud Abbas as the sole leader, decisionmaker, and representative for the Palestinian people. They dealt with the "inconvenient" facts of the legitimacy Hamas had gained from its victory in the 2006 elections, and its continuing popularity among large segments of the Palestinians, by waging harsh efforts to exclude Hamas from any decisionmaking role while also trying to turn the Palestinian population against it by means of the intentional collective punishment inflicted on the people of Gaza.
Now, with the bust-out, Hamas has turned the tables, and it is Abbas himself who looks besieged. At least, he looks so at the political level-- though he and his followers continue to get hefty economic handouts from the US and other western powers.
Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal is now on an official visit to Saudi Arabia, discussing the Kingdom's plans to patch up Hamas-Fateh relations. It was just last February that the Saudis concluded the "Mecca Agreement" between the two sides, which led to the formation of National Unity Government. The Bush administration and its network of handsomely compensated "allies" in Fateh were very unhappy with that arrangement, and they worked hard to undermine it. In June it did fall apart, when Hamas took what Khaled Meshaal described to me as a pre-emptive, defensive action to prevent US-backed Fateh operative Muhammad Dahlan from launching an anti-Hamas coup in Gaza. (There was, in truth, plenty of blame to go all around.)
We can imagine that Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, who had invested considerable national and personal prestige in brokering the Mecca Agreement was not happy with the way it fell apart-- or with those actions from both sides that hastening its unraveling. But now, Meshaal is the one in Riyadh, while Abbas remains shuttling between Ramullah and West Jerusalem, where he sits looking sad and uncomfortable in his meetings with Ehud Olmert, who is also sitting on his own political knife-edge at home this week.
Meshaal is expected to proceed from Riyadh to Cairo, where President Mubarak has invited both him and Abbas for talks aimed at (a) inter-Palestinian reconciliation and (b) reaching an Egyptian-Palestinian agreement to regulate the Gaza Egypt border. Meshaa accepted all parts oif Mubarak's invitation. Abbas has turned down the invitation to meet with Meshaal in Cairo, though he said he might go to Cairo and hold his own parallel talks there with the Egyptians.
The immediate issue is what the regime will be for controlling the Gaza-Egypt border going forward. Hamas leaders have been frank for the past two years that their aim is to wrest Gaza out of the economic thralldom that Israel has maintained over it-- and the occupied West Bank-- since 1967. The latest manifestation of that thralldom was the Paris Agreement of 1994, which was an offshoot of the 1993 Oslo Agreement. Under Paris, the whole economy and society of Gaza and the West Bank were folded into a single "customs envelope" with Israel that got controlled by-- guess who!-- Israel. Thus, Israel explicitly retained the right to control all movement and goods and persons in and out of the two occupied territories.
Paris was supposed to apply only during the five-year "transitional period" that would follow Oslo, pending the conclusion and implementation of a final peace agreement between Israel and the PA. But guess what, that final peace agreement never got negotiated, so here we are 15 years after Oslo and there is still a "transition"....
It was the Paris Agreement, concluded between Israel and the PA, that enabled Israel to progressively tighten the screws of the siege it has maintained on Gaza in recent years. It has been Paris that has allowed Israel to maintain tight control over the movement of goods and persons not just into and out of the occupied West Bank, but also within the West Bank itself, thereby stifling the hopes for real economic development-- or even a normal life-- for the West Bank's residents. Small wonder that the Hamas people have wanted to do whatever they can to take either (or both) of the occupied territories out of the Paris Agreement. Neither Hamas nor Egypt was a party to the Paris Agreement...
It remains to be seen whether Hamas can somehow succeed in its long-articulated goal of bringing about a stable escape from the thralldom of Paris and reconnecting Gaza's 1.5 million residents to the world economy through Egypt, instead.
Its attempt to do this poses, as noted above, a sharp political challenge to Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak is sitting on his own potential political volcano at home, given that: (a) he is getting old, and the question of political succession in Egypt's ossified, one-party-dominated political system is a huge one; (b) the best-organized political movement in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which is also the mother-organization for Palestine's Hamas; and (c) popular sentiment in Egypt is extremely hostile to the pro-western stance Mubarak has maintained throughout his political life, and extremely sympathetic to the Palestinians in general, and Hamas in particular.
Hence, the decision Mubarak's security people evidently made back on Wednesday and Thursday that they could not re-seal the border with Gaza by brute force.
Since then, Egyptian officials have tried to cast their repeated decisions to continue keeping the border somewhat open in purely humanitarian terms, though it very evidently has strong political underpinnings, too. As we can see from Mubarak's decision to invite Meshaal, as well as Fateh, to visit Cairo for talks.
Meshaal is not the only regional actor now eager to make a splash in Cairo. Hamas's longtime allies in Iran now say they are close to restoring diplomatic relations that have been broken since, I think, late 1980. (That was the year when Egyptian Islamist Khaled Islambouli assassinated Egypt's previous pro-western president, Anwar al-Sadat. The new revolutionary regime in Iran immediately started glorifying Islambouli, including naming a street after him in Tehran. That has been a sticking point in relations ever since... )
I see that the Iranian official news agency is also describing the currently accelerating Cairo-Tehran contacts in largely "humanitarian" terms. I am not fooled.
Over the days ahead, the diplomacy around the Gaza-Egypt issue will be significant and very intense. And these days will also, in Israel, be seeing the long-delayed publication of the Winograd report. So it'll be an interesting week.
As of now, it looks as if the two clear losers of the currtent swirl of events are (a) Mahmoud Abbas, and (b) the Bush administration's ability to sustain its agenda in the region. The only clear winner, for now, is Hamas-- though we cannot know the extent of its "victory" yet; and there will almost certainly be further surprises ahead, for everyone.
The outcomes for all the other actors involved-- Mubarak, the Saudis, Olmert, Israel's further-right parties, the Iranians-- remain in play. Interesting days ahead.
Readers may or may not be aware that the largest body of Quakers anywhere in the world is in Kenya. I have thought and prayed a lot for them during the very damaging inter-group violence that has plagued their country since the highly contentious (and most likely, illegally "stolen") election of last December 27.
What can members of a religious group that is deeply committed to nonviolence (pacifism) do when their home communities become caught up in a self-cycling paroxysm of violence, hatred, and fear?
Two or three days ago, a Quaker from Massachusetts called Mary Gilbert started sending me a large amount of information from the Friends (Quakers) in Kenya, about what they were trying to do there. Mary wanted me to post this on JWN. But it was so much information that I encouraged her to start a new, special blog to follow this situation. Never having blogged before, she had some initial trepidation to overcome. But now, in record time and with great courage and skill she has done it. Great work, Mary!
I am delighted to recommend to you all the new blog: Kenyan Peacework.
I'm imagining that Mary will be keeping it updated with further bulletins from Quakers working in Kenya, as they come in. Looking at it today, I was delighted to learn that the Kenyan Quakers have been holding a conference over these past three days (January 25-27) to pray on, discern, and coordinate their ongoing reactions to the crisis. Read the Jan. 26 report from that conference here.
I've been particularly interested in reading the reports sent out by David Zarembka. Dave is a long-time Quaker whom I know fairly well. Though he grew up in the US, his wife Gladys is Kenyan, and he has worked in Kenya and nearby countries a lot over the years. Last year, he and Gladys moved (back) to Kenya to live full-time there. He is an astute observer of the situation.
In this January 21 report he wrote:
Although there were no demonstrations over the weekend, the violence did not subside. Once the genie of violence gets out of the bottle, it is very hard to put it back in...
To summarize, the election results were the spark for the violence. The tinder was all the alienated youth in Kenyan society. As time goes on the ethnic dimension will increase and attacks will lead to counter-attacks. As attacks become successful in forcing people to leave the Rift Valley, the violence becomes self-reinforcing leading to more attacks. At this point we must be thankful that the attackers have only traditional weapons--clubs, bows and arrows, machettes, and spears. If they had guns (which, if the violence continues, they will soon acquire in one way or another) the the death toll would soar and soar. Even now I am not sure that a political settlement will end the violence in the countryside, although it would give the security forces a greater chance to deal with it...
Television footage showed fearful, if not shameful, looters and their accomplices returning beds, sofa sets and other items after rumours that victims had deployed witch doctors to punish the thieves."
The Kenyan papers had other explanations for the return of the goods. First, the government had declared an amnesty period of two days during which anyone who returned looted goods would not be prosecuted. This was reinforced by the Imams who preached in their mosques that people should return stolen goods. The fact that this peacemaking effort by the Moslems also contradicts the violent jihadists stereotype that Moslems are not peacemakers is perhaps why this was omitted from the "witchcraft report." Christian preachers also advised the return of stolen goods. The Kenyan reports had no mention of the alleged witchcraft...
I am sure that their work would benefit a lot from more funding! If you're able to make a donation, the "African Great Lakes Initiative (AGLI)", which Dave Z. has been working with for many years now, has this web-page through which you can make secure online donations. It also has mailing info for where to send a US check.
One of KP's posts-- this one-- has information about another emergency fund established by friends of the Quaker projects in Kakamega, in western Kenya. I am not as familiar with the organization described there as I am with AGLI, but I am sure they do a great job, too.
Give what you can-- of money, of loving concern, and of prayers.
And again, a big thanks to Mary Gilbert for her fabulous work there.
In western countries and in much of the west-dominated "international community" news reports, commentaries, and statements by diplomats tend to present the Gaza-Israel conflict as some kind of two-sided issue in which on the one hand you have the siege (collective punishment) that Israel has been maintaining against the people of Gaza and on the other, the use by militant factions in Gaza-- now including Hamas-- of Qassam rockets against Israel.
And that's all that gets mentioned.
Israel and its allies like to keep the emphasis on the Qassam rockets and the casualties and disruption they have inflicted on southern Israel. Some liberal organizations in the west put more emphasis on the illegal collective punishment aspects of the Israeli siege of Gaza-- though they are nearly all careful to also criticize the Palestinians' firing of the Qassam rockets. The impression often left is that these two kinds of infraction are more or less commensurable, and that if only the Palestinians would give up firing their rockets then Israel would be able to ease up on the siege... End of story.
What gets left out of this account of what's happening are two important other dimensions:
All these breaches of international humanitarian law can be classified as war crimes. And the casualties have been high. According to pages 6-7 of the 2007 Annual Report of the Israeli rights organization B'tselem (PDF here), in the two years 2006-2007 no fewer than 379 of the 816 Gaza Palestinians killed by the Israeli security forces were not engaged in hostilities at the time, and of a further 37 it could not be determined whether they were or were not participating in hostilities.
On this page of B'tselem's website we can learn, meanwhile, that between June '04 and July '06, fourteen civilians in Israel were killed by the Qassams. (B'tselem judges that the Qassams themselves constitute an "illegal weapon", because of their lack of targetability. I am not sure about that.)
This detailed listing in Wikipedia tells us today that four people in Israel have been killed by Qassams since July '06, for a total of 18 since June 2004.
I feel great concern for the families of each of those killed in those attacks. I feel exactly equal concern for the families of each of the 379 non-combatant Gaza Palestinians killed by the Israeli state's army since January '06. (Actually, more than 379, since the IDF have killed numerous noncombatants in Gaza since January 1 this year.)
If the "international community" is exercised about Palestinian military actions that have killed 18 noncombatants in Israel since June 2004, how much more exercised should it be about Israeli military actions that have killed 379 Palestinian noncombatants since January 2006?
2. The Gaza Palestinians still have some very serious and long-unmet political claims against Israel that some of them have been trying to pursue through their use of violence. They and the vast majority of members of the international community consider that, though Israel withdrew its forces and settlers from the heart of the Gaza Strip in 2005, still, its attempt to maintain strict control over all the Strip's land and sea boundaries, and its airspace, mean that Israel still bears the responsibilities of an occupying power in the Strip under international law. These include a responsibility for the welfare of the people living in the Strip.
Under international law, residents of an occupied territory have a right to resist occupation, including by violent means. The actions of the French maquis or of numerous other resistance organizations throughout history fall into this category. The resisters are, of course, required to use the same due diligence as any other combatants to try to avoid harming civilians.
In the immediate future, we need to see three things happening between Israel and the Gaza Palestinians:
2. A prisoner-exchange agreement that frees both the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and a large enough number of the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel that the exchange itself can also become a confidence-building measure. (In the past, Israel's stinginess in releasing Palestinian prisoners-- even after agreements have been concluded on this matter-- has often turned the whole business into a confidence-draining measure instead;) and
3. An end to the siege of Gaza, so that its 1.5 million people can finally get back onto the path of social and economic development and capacity-building rather than still being driven back into the debilitating and humiliating state of having to rely on international relief and hand-outs.
It is possible, though at this point highly unlikely-- see my note #1 below-- that the Israeli government will forcefully intervene sometime in the near future to break the link between the Gaza Strip and Egypt that was opened up in such an amazing way on Wednesday through the organized, nonviolent mass action of Gaza's people.
Barring such an intervention, the new direct link between Gaza and Egypt that has been opened up will become in one way or another institutionalized.
Until Wednesday, there was no direct link. The only "direct" crossing point between the two territories, at Rafah, was overseen on the Palestinian side by an EU monitoring group who did their monitoring on behalf of the Israelis, transmitting information about the people crossing through a videolink to Israeli officials working at the nearby "Keren Shalom" freight crossing point linking Gaza and Israel. Rafah was only for persons, not goods; and under the terms of an earlier US-brokered agreement between Israel and the PA, Israel was able to define the limits on who could use it, namely only residents of Gaza crossing in and out, and only I believe with prior approval for their crossing from Israel.
Thus, for example, Gaza Palestinian resident Laila el-Haddad, could on occasion cross in and out with her parents and child. But her Palestinian husband Yassine, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and carries only the laissez-passer that Lebanon issues to Palestinian refugees, could not enter Gaza with his wife and child(ren)-- through Rafah or through any other point.
Anyway, at Israeli insistence, the Rafah crossing has been completely closed for some months now.
Now, the situation at Rafah, and indeed along the length of the 7-mile border between Gaza and Egypt, has changed completely. Today, nobody is exercising any degree of control over the border. But the only bodies with forces nearby who could possibly exert control over it relatively easily are Hamas and the Egyptian government. That is the new reality.
On Wednesday, I wrote that the mass bust-out from Gaza of that day "raises the intriguing possibility that the elected Hamas leaders may now seek to implement a plan they have long had to re-open Gaza's connection with the world economy through Egypt, rather through Israel." Yesterday, Jonathan Edelstein contributed this thoughtful commentary on that possibility. Both he and I referred to the interviews I conducted in Gaza back in March 2006 with the then- newly elected Hamas parliamentary leaders, especially Hamas veteran Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, with whom I had a fairly lengthy interview in English at that time.
It's worth going back and seeing what he said in that interview, which I wrote up most fully here. It's also worth going to the longer article I published afterwards in Boston Review, in which I explored the emergence of what I called "parallel unilateralisms" between Olmert-ist Israel and the (Hamas-led) Palestinians.
The key difference between this approach to conflict reduction and social stabilization in Israel and Palestine and the "Oslo" approach is that, while the latter depends centrally on folding the Palestinians into an Israeli-dominated economic order and imposing a strongly Israeli-weighted resolution of the conflict onto the Palestinians, a parallel unilateralisms approach sees the two societies each focusing on pursuing its own economic capabilities including economic links with the outside world, while allowing most of the remaining issues of contention between them to remain, for now, unresolved.
My 3/18/06 JWN write-up of the interview with Zahhar included this:
The Paris agreement also allows Israel to control all aspects of bilateral trade between the two entities, a fact that it has exploited by treating the Palestinian areas as a captive markets for its own goods while placing extremely high, often insuperable, barriers on the Palestinians' ability to export their goods to Israel.
Zahhar spoke with calm determination about the prospect of Gaza breaking out of the Paris Agreement. "An opening of our trade links to Egypt and through our seaport is a first option for us," he said.
If we push ahead with regard to opening our border with Egypt, we can certainly make it work to the benefit of both sides. You know, in September, right after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza,when our border with Egypt was unsecured-- we learned that our people spent $8 million in El-Arish in just ten days, because the prices of everything in Egypt are so much lower than the prices the Israelis impose on us here.
He was harshly critical of the record of the Fateh-dominated security services...
2. If Hamas is successful in pursuing and institutionalizing the Zahharist vision of unilateralism, the situation in Gaza would have many parallels with that in Hizbullah-dominated South Lebanon. With the Cairo government playing the same alliance role to Hamas that the Beirut government back in the Hariri days played to Hizbullah? There are some evident differences. But the relationship between Hamas and Cairo will be key. One problem being, though, that the present government in Cairo feels itself strongly threatened by Hamas's long-time brothers in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Maybe this can only work if there is a new form of entente between Mubarak and the MB in Cairo? Might the Gaza bust-out force this outcome onto Mubarak?
3. Fateh and its supporters remain, I think, deeply hostile both to Hamas (goes without saying) but also to the idea of Gaza "going it alone" in any way. They want to find a way to reassert Ramullah's rule over Gaza. The Hamas people have reached out to Abu Mazen to ask him to negotiate a new crossing(s) arrangement with Egypt. (Unclear how genuine that invitation to cooperation was?) But Abu Mazen has turned them down. The stage is set for a new form of strategic competition-- this time, perhaps, between the "development model" of Hamas-ruled Gaza and that of the Israel-and-PA-ruled West Bank.
4. I find Zahhar's argument that Gaza and the WB were already split from each other, so Hamas going it alone in Gaza is not a splittist move, quite convincing. Also, though Palestinians have lived under many different administrations in the region for 60 years now-- under Israeli occupation, under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation before that, as (second-class) citizens of Israel, as exiled refugees outside their homeland, etc... still, the vast majority of them have not abandoned their feeling of being part of one unified Palestinian people.
5. Re the possibility of Egypt moving in assertively to re-close the border: No, I don't see it as ever being able to close it up as tightly as it had done prior to January 23. Naturally, both Egypt and Hamas have an interest in having some form of control-line either along the existing international border or somewhere close. But Egypt cannot now, I think, return to its previous situation of being Israel's sub-contractor in maintaining the total noose of siege around Gaza. Mubarak tried to maintain that role on Tuesday, but finally decided it put him in an untenable position.
6. Jonathan wrote about the possible conditions for encouraging "foreign investment" in a liberated-from-Paris Gaza. I don't think we even need to go as far as considering "foreign" investment. But we can look first and foremost at the prospects for Palestinian investment in the Strip if it enters an economic arrangement with Egypt.
One of the problems the "Oslo" economic plans always encountered was that the many fairly wealthy Palestinians around the world were reluctant to invest very much in Gaza or the West Bank because the territories still remained under Israel's control in the economic and all other domains. They didn't want their big investments to be held hostage by Israel. And the events of April 2002, when Sharon sent his army in to demolish large numbers of the infrastructural and other economic facilities in both territories showed how right they were to be wary. In a Gaza that is on a state of "no negotiations but some degree of mutual deterrence" with Israel, anyone's investments could still-- as we saw in Lebanon in 2006-- be hostage to an outburst of very destructive Israeli "shock and awe-ism." But still, maybe Israel could move away from that? (Okay, perhaps a big "maybe" there; but I'm trying to think aloud here... )
7. Gaza has a very well-educated population that is thickly connected to the outside world. Every Gaza family has family members who are "outside"-- whether as migrant workers, teachers, bankers, or whatever. (Hence, btw, the huge joy these families felt this week on being able at last to reconnect with loved ones from whom they have long been separated through Israel's maintenance of the movement controls and the even tighter recent siege.) These are huge assets for anyone contemplating the economic rehabilitation of Gaza. It is not a basket-case.
8. Water and sewage issues will of course be, as Jonathan mentioned, a massive constraint on any sustained growth. One of the first priorities must be to completely rehabilitate the sewage-disposal system, which is in terrible, life-threatening condition. Israel certainly has a continuing responsibility to provide Gaza with adequate supplies of water. The amounts and terms of this water supply can no doubt be negotiated in some way. Water-course-wise, the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza all sit on a series of underground aquifers in which, in general, the water flows from east to west. Right now Israel controls water usage in the West Bank. (Giving, as we know, hugely disproportionate amounts of water to its coddled Jewish settlers there.) It also sits astride the aquifer that flows under Gaza, and by its own depletion of that aquifer has wrecked the quality of the water available to Gaza. A system of water usage based on the equality of all human persons and the provision of water to national communities on a basis proportional to their population, needs to worked out as soon as possible.
Our Israeli commenter JES wrote here yesterday that it was notable how little attention was being paid in Israel to the momentous developments in Gaza. Today, Haaretz has a significant editorial chastizing Israel's leaders for their lack of attention to Wednesday's bust-out and underlining the effects the bust-out has been having on the political balance in the region. Its title is quite simply The siege of Gaza has failed.
For my part, I have been struck by the degree to which the bust-out has shown the Hamas leadership's new ability to seize the strategic initiative, to conceive of a bold and unexpected plan, to maintain operational secrecy around implementation of the plan, and to integrate nonviolent civilian mass organizing into its strategic planning.
I also want to note this analysis from HaAretz's long-time regional affairs correspondent Zvi Bar-el, which in many respects I agree with.
He writes:
But domestic Egyptian considerations gained the upper hand. Hence, too, the tremendous media effort Egypt made this week to establish that they, and no other Arab party, had convinced Israel to lift the sanctions a bit - for example, to transfer fuel and also convoys of medicine to the Strip. The other "Arab party" that claimed the credit was Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas... Khaled Meshal thanked both sides for their efforts, but made it clear that letting through a few more shipments of fuel did not constitute a solution to the problem of the siege.
The firing of Qassams on Sderot and the response by the Israel Defense Forces, both in killing Palestinians in the Zeitoun neighborhood and in the total closure that was imposed this week, have created a new equation, one that has become so familiar in Lebanon, in which Hamas comes out the winner no matter what. It can determine the number of Qassam rockets that are fired on the town and thus determine a criterion for "relative quiet," "calm" or "noise." It will thus dictate the Israeli response on the ground, and through that - the Arab reaction. Meshal can also determine whether to establish "Grapes of Wrath-type understandings" with Israel concerning Gaza, by means of the hudna (cease-fire) or tahadiyeh (temporary truce) that he has proposed and that has won support in Israel. In this he would also serve to further weaken the status of Abbas, who is not able to stop even one single Qassam.
Meshal has succeeded in proving to Israel, to the leaders of the Arab world and to the Quartet (the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations), that it will be impossible to discuss the Annapolis resolutions or any other political proposal without Gaza, which is to say - without him.
Abbas realized this week that as long as there is someone in Gaza who is dictating the mood in all of Palestine, he himself will not be able to be seen in an embrace with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni again. On Tuesday he did declare that the political negotiations must go on despite the events in Gaza."
The events in Gaza have made clear to Abbas is that even if he does agree to enter into a political dialogue with Hamas, the points that the organization has accumulated this week, thanks to the suffering of the residents of the Strip, will enable it to dictate the terms of that dialogue.
It is no wonder that Hamas is again voicing its demand to hold early elections for the Palestinian parliament,
Anyway, back to the HaAretz editorial. It says:
Then this:
While hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are streaming into Egyptian Rafah and Hosni Mubarak is having trouble reestablishing the border, while Hamas has succeeded in ending the siege of Gaza via a well-planned operation and simultaneously won the sympathy of the world, which has forgotten the rain of Qassam rockets on Sderot, Israel is entrenching itself in positions that look outdated. The prime minister speaks about the need to continue the closure on Gaza, and the cabinet voices its "disappointment" with Egypt - as if there were ever any chance that the Egyptians would work to protect Israeli interests along the Philadelphi route [i.e., the 7-mile border between Gaza and Egypt] instead of thinking first of all of their own interests. The failure of the siege of Gaza, which the government declared only a week ago to be "bearing fruit," and especially the fear that this failure will lead to a conflict with Egypt, requires the government to pull itself together and prove that it has been graced with the ability to solve crises and to lead, not merely to offer endless excuses for its leadership during previous crises.
As hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were streaming into Sinai by car and making a mockery of Israel's policy in Gaza, the prime minister gave a speech at the Herzliya Conference that sounded disconnected from reality. There is little point in extolling the quiet on the northern border when a diplomatic and security crisis for which Israel has no solution is taking place in the South. The Qassam fire is continuing, the policy of sanctions on Gaza has collapsed and Hamas is growing stronger politically, militarily and diplomatically. It is clear to everyone that reestablishing the border along the Philadelphi route will be impossible without its consent. The confusion that characterized official Israeli responses to the international media shows that the developments in the Gaza Strip took the government completely by surprise.
In his speech, Ehud Olmert declared: "Mistakes were made; there were failures. But in addition, lessons were learned, mistakes were corrected, modes of behavior were changed and, above all, the decisions we have made since then have led to greater security, greater calm and greater deterrence than there had been for many years." Olmert was referring to the Winograd report. But he categorically ignored the fact that what was happening in the South completely contradicts his statements. If that is what learning lessons looks like, if that is what deterrence means, the Olmert government has precious little to boast about.
This might also lead, to some extent, to a revival of Israeli unilateralism. After the initial shock, some senior Israeli officials began spinning the bust-out as an opportunity for Israel to disengage from Gaza economically, and I don't think that's entirely spin. There's some interesting analysis along those lines in today's Yediot.
As for Bob Spencer's speculation that Gaza might "become some sort of loosely associated part of Egypt," I wonder if it might end up more the other way. I did some speculating of my own about the Gaza-Sinai relationship in late 2005, at the time the Rafah crossing reopened and before the rocket-closure-raid cycle started developing its own logic. The key points were that Gaza has six times the population of North Sinai governorate, that there was more money in Gaza than in that part of Egypt, that Egyptian security control in that region was tenuous and that the ports of al-Arish and Port Said had the potential to become a key Palestinian import-export route. All these, except possibly the second, remain true, and given that it will be a political impossibility for Mubarak to re-close the border (although he has built walls against his own Bedouin citizens), Sinai al-Shamaliyya might end up becoming a de facto Palestinian economic appendage. Interesting times.
I'll close by questioning received wisdom, noting a legal paradigm shift, and indulging in some wild speculation.
Questioning received wisdom: I think we've been wrong all along in describing the siege of Gaza as an Israeli siege. In fact, ever since Israel left the Philadelphi route, it's been an Israeli-Egyptian siege, and Egypt has maintained its end for its own reasons. Hamas correctly perceived Egypt as the military and political weak link, and chose to break the siege at the Egyptian border. I've actually wondered why it took so long; there have been partial breaches of the wall before, and I remember thinking at the time that Hamas would gain an advantage by widening them. Maybe it wasn't yet ready, but I think it's now very clear that they and Israel were never the only players.
The paradigm shift: now that the Egyptian border is open, Gaza can no longer be regarded as Israeli-occupied territory. Some scholars such as Dugard maintain that the occupation continued after the 2005 withdrawal because Israel continued to control the access points. I've argued in the past that international law precedents, such as the ICJ's judgment in the DRC-Uganda case, don't support this interpretation and that the occupation ended once Israel gave up effective control on the ground. At this point, however, the argument is moot: as long as the Egyptian border stays open, Gaza can't seriously be regarded as occupied even under Dugard's interpretation. This would mean that the law of belligerent occupation no longer applies to Gaza, although the humanitarian law of war, including the provisions relating to siege, still do. Israel is no longer legally responsible (note: legal and moral responsibilities aren't necessarily the same) for the general welfare of Gaza, or for supplying its people with goods like electricity or fuel.
And now the wild speculation: On the hopeful side, this is a potential chance for Gaza to get its act together. The Palestinians have, to put it bluntly, choked on Gaza several times, and neither the PNA nor Hamas has been able to control the place sufficiently to govern it or to institute an effective cease-fire. Israel has been partly responsible for this state of affairs but so has Palestinian infighting and the prevalence of splinter militias. If Hamas can re-establish an economy in Gaza and use the popularity that it has surely gained from this move to consolidate its authority, then it might be able to work out a mutual cease-fire on the Israeli border, position itself as a responsible diplomatic player, and maybe even reduce the perceived risk of Gaza by enough to attract foreign investment. This would in turn increase the pressure on both Israel and Fatah to move toward ending the occupation in the West Bank, because otherwise Hamas would be able to point to its success in Gaza as the only viable alternative.
Working against this is the fact that Egypt will now take a major security interest in Gaza, given that a linkup between Hamas and the Egyptian ikhwan is Mubarak's worst nightmare. As noted above, it's politically impossible at the moment for him to close the border, but he isn't going to just leave a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated political organization alone. I think we can expect to see Egyptian security forces infiltrate Gaza in the near future, primarily in covert roles, and there's a potential for major disruption if this turns into an undeclared Hamas-Egypt war.
Of course, the reverse might also happen - that Hamas would expand its security interests to include north Sinai. If the route to al-Arish becomes its lifeline, then it will want to protect its access to that route, and might find allies among the local Bedouins who are in effective revolt against the central government. I think Hamas wants to avoid this kind of entanglement, which is why it's trying so hard now to come to an agreement with Egypt on border control, but I don't think the possibility of Hamas strongholds or patrols in Sinai can be ruled out. This in turn would raise tensions along the Israel-Egypt border due to the increased possibility of infiltration.
There is now an opportunity for the Gaza crisis to either resolve into a new metastable arrangement, or to expand. I know which one I hope will happen, and I also know that I'm afraid the other will.
Anyway, two more observations: First, I wonder if Hamas will open Gaza to the Palestinians living in the Lebanese refugee camps, who are the worst-off of the refugees and have recently been hard hit by the Lebanese security forces. If Hamas wants propaganda victories - which it obviously does - then that could be a big one, and possibly a humanitarian victory as well.
Second, water will continue to be the bottleneck for Gaza even if the border stays open. It can get fuel, food and other supplies either from Egypt or through Port Said and al-Arish (the latter of which has recently been upgraded), but Egypt can't supply water given its own scarcity, and importing the volume that Gaza needs to develop would be logistically difficult. This may preclude a complete economic disengagement between Gaza and Israel, at least in the immediate term. Do you have any idea how Hamas intends to go about resolving this situation?
Gosh, I wish I had time start thinking more about all the questions you raise... But I really don't as I'm crashing on several deadlines. It would be great for everyone else to jump on in with their responses to these questions.
Hamas's Palestine Information Center has these items:
Mishaal underscored that Egypt did not sign the agreement in 2006 regarding the management of the Rafah crossing; thus, it is not bound by it, adding that Hamas is ready to cooperate with Egypt and the PA leadership to regulate the borders between Egypt and Gaza.
He said that the PA presidency would not negotiate Hamas over anything until it revokes results of its "coup" and would not negotiate with it over the crossings in particular because it had nothing to do with the issue!
Haneyya had expressed readiness in a televised address on Wednesday to hold an urgent meeting with "brothers in Egypt and Ramallah" to agree on preparations for opening the Rafah border terminal and other crossings surrounding the Gaza Strip.
For its part, the Fatah faction refused Haneyya's invitation.
Debka-file started reporting at 9:38 a.m. GMT today that early today,
The Multi-National Force and Observers (MFO) was created in 1979 as a US-led "coalition of the willing" force tasked with monitoring implementation of the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. If the force is now being redeployed (=withdrawn) from the area bordering Gaza, that is already a major development. But now, in addition, Egypt and Washington are discussing evacuating the El-Gorah base, which is one of the MFO's two main operating bases?
The political crisis in Cairo provoked by yesterday's bust-out of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai seems to be much deeper than I had previously thought.
(By the way, when I linked to a Debka-file report on the Gaza-Egypt situation in this JWN post yesterday, the URL there was the same as the URL linked to above. DF should understand that it's confusing for readers when they almost completely change the content of a published file after publication! I imagine that very diligent readers who want to find the whole text of the earlier DF report could do so by searching through caches?)
I just want to add to all my previous posts here on the Gaza Palestinians' bust-out of earlier today that the political ground for this intriguing new move was sown in good part by President Bush's amazingly maladroit trip around the Middle East over the past two weeks.
During the trip, Bush underlined again and again his intense concern for Israelis, their security, and their every last little whim. But he turned a notably deaf ear to the pleas he heard from all his most ardent Arab friends that he do something to demonstrate some concern for the hardships being suffered by the Palestinians and some real resolve to stop, for example, Israel's continued illegal encroachments on Palestinian land and the harsh-- and also illegal-- collective punishments it has been imposing on the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank for many years now.
Bush even attempted to publicly "joke" about of the hundreds of much-hated checkpoints/chokepoints that have been choking any semblance of ordinary life in the West Bank for many years, and jovially urged the Palestinians to just "forget about" the whole string of UN resolutions that underline what their rights to their own lands and to a decent life thereon really are.
During Bush's visit to the region, Israel escalated its military attacks against the Gaza Palestinians. Much of the media in Syria and Lebanon, where I was until yesterday, was full of commentary to the effect that Bush gave Israel a "green light" to do that and also to tighten the screws of the siege it has maintained on Gaza for many years now.
Is it in any wonder that in these circumstances Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak evidently feels he can do nothing to intervene to re-close the wall between Gaza and Egypt, and no other Arab leaders are prepared to step forward to help to stem the tide of Hamas's growing power?
Here's how Israel's Debka-file reported* on today's Gaza bust-out:
By demolishing the 10-km concrete barrier dividing the Gaza Strip from Egyptian Sinai, Hamas, backed by 200,000 Palestinians who surged across Wednesday, has acquired a new stronghold outside Israel’s military reach.
But the Egyptian president replied that his main worry is not the Palestinian issue but concern that his own opposition, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, may adopt Hamas tactics and stir up trouble in his cities. Mubarak said he would leave the situation in northern Sinai as it is for the time being.
I see that Hamas's spokesman in Gaza, Dr. Sami Abu Zuhri, has meanwhile described Egypt as,
The spokesman pointed out that the leadership of Hamas along with the Palestinian government in Gaza is conducting contacts with the Egyptian leadership to rearrange some issues about the Rafah crossing and also to find solutions to end the suffering of Gaza people.
---
* Update Thursday morning: I just tried to revisit that Debka-File URL linked to there and found that the content quoted here has been replaced by some other extremely important content, which I comment on here.
...that last week in Damascus I interviewed Hamas head Khaled Mishaal and Palestinian Islamic Jihad head Ramadan Shallah.
More-- including as soon as possible a link to the audio from both full interviews-- to follow.
My first bottom line: Mishaal very definitely talked about being interested, under certain circumstances, in a ceasefire between Gaza and Israel. (However, he notably didn't tell me about any plans for an imminent "bust-out" from Gaza! Why didn't he tell me all their secret plans, I wonder?)
I'm just working on making the best possible plan to report on/disseminate what I got in these interviews. They provide a good complement and updating to a lot of my earlier reporting on Palestinian issues (and also, to the reporting I did in February 2007 on the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.)
This report from the London Times's James Hider strongly indicates that the demolition of vast long stretches of the wall between Gaza and Egypt had been long planned by Gaza's present Hamas rulers. Hider writes-- and the accompanying photo also indicates-- that,
That meant that when the explosive charges were set off in 17 different locations after midnight last night the 40ft wall came tumbling down, leaving it lying like a broken concertina down the middle of no-man's land as an estimated 350,000 Gazans flooded into Egypt.
Hider also writes:
Mr Haniya called for the border crossing to be reopened "on the basis of national participation," meaning that Hamas would be prepared to cede some control to President Abbas and his Fatah-led government in the West Bank. "We don’t want to be the only ones in control of these matters," Mr Haniyeh said, speaking from his Gaza City office live on Hamas TV.
Here is a Reuters report of the conference's first day.
The Hamas people argue that their actions are not aimed at undermining Palestinian national unity. But very evidently the big bust-out from Gaza is a major embarrassment to PA president Mahmoud Abbas, who has so far had little or nothing to show for his insistence on pursuing the Palestinians' grievances only through the US-sponsored peace talks with Israel. Abbas has been able to do little but sit idly by, voicing occasional and unheeded protests, while Israel tightened its siege around Gaza over recent weeks.
I spent the past few days in Beirut. (I got back to the US yesterday.) It strikes me that Hamas's opening of Gaza's wall with Egypt could make the situation between Egypt and Israel somewhat analogous to that between Lebanon and Israel?
Recall also the plans Gaza's Hamas leaders have long talked about their hope of reconnecting Gaza to the outside world through Egypt rather than through Israel, as I wrote about here and here and elsewhere.
What is clear already is that the Gaza bust-out has considerably upped the political stakes for Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak. His regime's survival may now be at stake.
Who can reimpose order on the Gaza-Egypt situation? Israel? I doubt it. Egypt? Very risky indeed. Fateh without coordinating with Hamas? Impossible. A hastily assembled NATO peacekeeping force? Forget about it...
This is, it strikes me, Hamas's bid to become included in the decisionmaking order. I truly don't see any resolution to the present situation without Hamas being a party to it.
This story will continue to be big.
At dawn this morning, Palestine-Israel time, masked gunmen set explosive charges that felled much of the high wall that has separated Israeli-occupied Gaza from Egypt since the conclusion of Israel's peace with Egypt in 1979. That opening burst a massive hole through the situation of tight siege that Israel has maintained on Gaza's 1.5 million people since 2000.
Gaza's people were quick to take advantage. If you look at the sat photo at the bottom of this BBC news report you can see for about one-third of its length, the Gaza-Israel boundary cuts through the edge of the heavily populated city of Rafah. (Built-up zones appear as brown on the image.) People from throughout Gaza crossed into Egypt to buy basic commodities to take back into the Strip. We can only speculate over what other kinds of goods are being carted into the Strip, but they may well include military supplies.
Hamas's "caretaker government" in Gaza, elected in a free and fair territories-wide election in January 2006, reportedly moved quickly to take control of the blasted-apart border, closing all of it except for two gaps, over which it maintained control.
This development raises the intriguing possibility that the elected Hamas leaders may now seek to implement a plan they have long had to re-open Gaza's connection with the world economy through Egypt, rather through Israel, which has sustained a monopoly on all of Gaza's links with the outside world since it brought the Strip under Israeli military occupation in 1967. (I wrote about how Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahhar discussed that plan in a March 2006 interview with me, here and elsewhere.)
These developments will also, quite evidently, affect the political situation inside Egypt, where Hamas's allies from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood form the main opposition to the .US-backed president Hosni Mubarak. Demonstrators in Egypt have been stepping up their demonstrations calling on Mubarak to lift the siege of Gaza.
Yesterday and today Mubarak hit back with harsh repression, detaining scores of MB activists and beating protesters in Cairo's central Tahrir Square with sticks.
On Tuesday, Hundreds of Palestinian women and children organized a mass, nonviolent confrontation with the Egyptian troops tasked with maintaining the Israeli-coordinated siege at the previous sole crossing-point between Gaza and Egypt, at Rafah. At the behest of the Israelis and Americans, Egypt had been keeping that crossing completely closed in recent weeks.
Also of great note: People I talked with during my just-completed trip to Lebanon and Syria all said that public opinion in the Arab world believes strongly that during President Bush's recent visit to the region he gave a "green light" to Israel to escalate its campaign of military and economic violence against Gaza.
On Tuesday night, the UN Security Council considered the issue of the tight Israeli siege against Gaza. This report from Xinhua makes clear that the "draft presidential statement" prepared by the SC's current president, Libya, dealt only with Israel's collective, economic violence against Gaza's people and not with either Israel's disproportionate use of military violence against targets in Gaza or the use by Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups of primitive, almost untargeted rocket fire against targets inside Israel.
But even though the draft statement dealt only with the immediate humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and not with either aspect of the military confrontation between the two sides,US representative Zal Khalilzad still said it was "unacceptable."
Twelve Israeli civilians have died because of ordnance launched from Gaza in the past seven years. 360 Palestinian civilians-- along with some 450 accused Palestinian "militants"-- are reported to have died because of Israeli military attacks against Gaza within just the past two years. Khalilzad and far too many other members of the western political elites tend to mention only Israel's casualties from the ongoing military confrontation between the two sides, and fail to mention the far greater number of civilian Palestinian casualties from it.
So last night, the Security Council was unable to come out in support of any statement at all about the Gaza crisis. They are supposed to discuss it again today...
Meantime, I'd love to know whether any negotiations, and of what kind, are underway between Egypt and Hamas?
I have been reading the latest round of upsetting reports (portal here) on the horrendous effects on Gaza's 1.45 million people of the greatly escalated collective punishment that the US-funded and US-backed Government of Israel has been inflicting on them in recent days.
The fact of this collective punishment is not new. It has been sustained in a systematic and intentional way since 2000, if not before. It saw one noticeable escalation after the Palestinians' January 2006 parliamentary elections-- in what was quite clearly a move to punish the Gaza Palestinians for the choice they made in those elections. It saw a further escalation in the past two weeks-- even while President Bush was touring the region expressing promises about the imminent arrival of "independence" for the Palestinians.
Three things are going on between the well-established and well-supported State of Israel and the extremely vulnerable and effectively stateless community of Gaza Palestinians:
2. The State of Israel's pursuit of continued military operations against suspected militants inside Gaza, using its army's very considerable firepower in a way that has also-- and quite predictably-- killed and wounded many Palestinian noncombatants. And
3. The use by Palestinian militants from a number of organizations including, now, Hamas of military operations, generally of a very low-tech variety, and including the launching of primitive-- and in practice, almost untargetable-- rockets of a low degree of lethality against areas of southern Israel that include both civilian and some military targets.
The Israeli paper HaAretz recently noted that 810 Palestinians were killed by the IDF in Gaza in the two years 2006 and 2007, with some 360 of those judged by HaAretz to have been civilians. Meanwhile, in the seven years since 2001 twelve people in Israel have been killed by military actions launched from Gaza. That's how asymmetrical the military aspect of this contest in. International actors who treat the IHL violations of the two sides as broadly commensurate fail to understand that.
And then, in addition to their very numerous casualties from that military contest, the Palestinians are also suffering the casualties from the collective punishment regime imposed on them by Israel.
So what has been the response to this situation from governments, intergovernmental bodies, and non-governmental organizations in the currently dominant "western" portion of the world?
From the US government: silence.
From the US-based "human-rights" organizations, as far as I can see: silence.
From the EU's Commissioner for External Relations, Bentita Ferrero-Waldner today, this:
However, the recent decision to close all border crossings into Gaza as well as to stop the provision of fuel will exacerbate an already dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and risks escalating an already difficult situation on the ground...
Notice, too, the unsatisfactory nature of the policy prescription she ends with:
I wonder what she calls the things Israel has been doing to the Palestinians? Non-violence?
Here was UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-Moon's statement on Friday:
Of particular concern today, in addition to the upsurge in violence, is the decision by Israel to close the crossing points in between Gaza and Israel used for the delivery of humanitarian assistance...
The Secretary-General expresses his deep concern that the hostilities taking place on the ground will undermine the hopes for peace generated by the political process begun at Annapolis.
Speical kudos, meanwhile, should go to Oxfam for their continued following of the (anti-)humanitarian effects of Israel's continued tightening of the blocade on Gaza, including this statement today.
And to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, John Dugard, for this statement from January 18, which rightly foregrounds the effects on Palestinian civilians of Israel's military actions in Gaza and is worth quoting in its entirety:
But it is also worth recalling just why the UN felt it needed to appoint a special rapporteur on the situation of the people of the OPTs. That was, I think, precisely because the members of the UN General Assembly recognized the particularly vulnerable situation of people who are still stateless and cannot rely on having any state intervene to protect their interests or even their lives.
Kudos, too, to B'tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and its allies, who have been petitioning the Israeli High Court to issue an interim order requiring Israel to allow the return of the supply of fuel oil to Gaza to its usual level. This request, B'tselem says, "was filed as part of a petition against the sanctions on the Gaza Strip, from October 2007."
And meantime, let's not forget the many dimensions of the assault that Palestinians in the West Bank continue to suffer at the hands of the military occupation regime that has ruled over them for 40.5 years now.
AFP reported yesterday that,
The Jewish population increased to 282,362 in January this year compared to 268,163 in January 2007 and 253,371 in the first month of 2006.
The figures exclude a further 200,000 or so settlers in east Jerusalem which Israel annexed following its capture in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
Among the spin-off benefits of a US-Iran hotline, as suggested by R.K. Ramazani in the previous entry, is the possibility that it "could help restore Iran-U.S. diplomatic relations...." As he explained,
"Contrary to widely held myths, Iran has never closed its door to diplomatic relations with the United States. Khomeini left the door ajar "if America behaves itself," that is, if the United States refrains from imposing its will on Iran. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, subscribes to the Khomeini line, saying that Iran's lack of contacts with the United States "does not mean that we will not have relations indefinitely."
Yet just this past week, the hawkishly neoconservative "Committee on the Present Danger" (CPD) repeats the myth. In an essay proclaiming that "It takes two to tango," to have a diplomatic relations, to have a "grand bargain," the Iranians are portrayed as not being willing to dance. To the contrary, CPD invokes segments from a recent speech by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenehi:
“Cutting ties with the United States is one of our basic policies,” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, told students in the central city of Yazd just days ago. And while “[w]e have never said that they will be cut for ever,” Khamenei explained, “[t]he conditions of the U.S. government are such now that it is harmful for us to resume relations... Despite some talkative people’s claims, it has no benefit for the Iranian nation.”
CPD concludes that this "pours more than a little cold water on the suggestion that Washington should push for an immediate rapprochement with Tehran... (as) the ruling ayatollahs don’t seem interested in mending fences."
This is selective and disingenuous cherry picking for a negative spin. Here's the full passage of the January 3rd speech in question, without ellipses, as made available via BBC World Service.** (see note below) This is from a translation of a long report provided by Tehran Radio (Voice of the Islamic Republic). Emphasis added and my comments follow:
The leader of the Islamic revolution [Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamene'i] referred to relations with America and said: The cutting of relations with the US is one of our principle policies. However, we have never said that these relations will be suspended indefinitely. On the contrary, the US government's present state is such that the establishment of such relations is currently to our detriment. So we should not pursue such relations.The leader outlined the harm of establishing relations with the US and reiterated: First, the establishment of such relations will not lessen the danger posed by the US because that country had political relations with Iraq when it attacked it. Secondly, the establishment of these relations will prepare the ground for the growth of Americans' influence in the country and the travel of their intelligence officers and spies to and from Iran. As a result, this is why contrary to the claims made by some talkative people [inside the country] these relations have no benefit for the Iranian nation. Undoubtedly, when the day comes that relations with America will benefit the Iranian nation, I will be the first person to endorse these relations.
The leader added: Some accuse us of promoting enmity with America. However, that country's enmity towards the Iranian nation is not based on the [Iranian] president and other people's harsh interpretations. On the contrary, they are against the principles of the Iranian nation and such a thing has existed since the beginning of the Islamic revolution.
I have been reading Khamenehi speeches and Friday Prayer Sermons for 24 years, dating to when he became President amid the Iran-Iraq War. Khamenehi has long been more adaptable in his "open door foreign policy" pronouncements than commonly understood in the west. (I may prepare a full article just on this narrow, yet critical question about Iran's "dance" with the question of if and under what circumstances it can renew ties to America.)
Yet to be brief on just this speech, consider:
1. Quite in line with Professor Ramazani's analysis, Khamenehi yet again emphasizes that there's no automatic bar to improving ties to the US. Characteristically, he cites the revolutionary hallmark, the cutting of the old ties to America, what became the signature "neither East nor West" revolutionary dictum, so that Iran might be independent and "self-confident," that it might be free from the relations between "the lion and the lamb." All that not forgotten, "we have never said that these relations will be suspended indefinitely."
2. The standard objections and grievances to current US policy are noted. Talks and relations in themselves can bring dangers to Iran, despite the hopes of "talkative people" (e.g., Iranian reformists and pragmatists in Iran).
3. Khamenehi also delivers a back-handed lame defense of Iran's lightning-rod President when he notes that America's enmity towards Iran predated Ahmadinejad's "harsh interpretations." The fact that Khamenehi is even referencing Iranian criticisms of Ahmadinejad for "promoting enmity with America" startled many observers, and was interpreted as quite a slap.
4. Totally left out of the CPD report is the not so subtle message to America: "The US government's present state is such that the establishment of such relations is currently to our detriment." Hint, hint America: it doesn't have to be this way. The US government might change, and it logically then follows that better relations might not be to Iran's detriment.
5. As a friend suggested in a closed forum, it may also be that Khamenehi is signaling Iranian contenders in the pending Parliamentary and Presidential elections that they may campaign more creatively on foreign policy, to shield them from ideological "heat."
6. Shamelessly omitted from the CPD essay is Khamenehi's kicker: "Undoubtedly, when the day comes that relations with America will benefit the Iranian nation, I will be the first person to endorse these relations."
That day may be sooner that the CPD and neocon naysayers think - say, if somebody reminds Bush Jr. of Bush Sr.'s inaugural Address (the one about "goodwill begetting goodwill") or, by this time next year, when two new Presidents are in the wings.
(**Footnote: Curiously, the US government's parallel translation service - the Open Source Center (formerly FBIS) data base available to the public via World News Connection - does not include the report on this speech. I've seen this happen before -- somebody at OSC and WNC owes us an explanation)
R.K. Ramazani weighs in with an essay on how to prevent military incidents at the Strait of Hormuz from catalyzing war between Iran and the United States. Ramazani, known widely as "the Dean of Iran Foreign Policy Studies," quite literally "wrote the book" on this subject, The Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. What he wrote on the eve of the Iranian revolution remains a compelling read.
In his current essay, Ramazani, an Emeritus University of Virginia Professor of Government & Foreign Affairs, sets out the stakes and his key argument.:
"The recent naval encounter between the US and Iran extended their cold war for the first time to the strategic Strait of Hormuz. Such incidents could escalate into armed conflict, with catastrophic consequences for the world economy, especially the price of oil. To prevent such escalation, Washington and Tehran should establish a "hot line" and an Incident-at-Sea agreement as Washington and Moscow did during the Cold War."
The need for such a de-conflict mechanism (a regular theme here at jwn) was amply demonstrated by Bush Administration rhetoric:
"... instead of calming down the situation and seeking a creative way of preventing such encounters from escalating into confrontation in the future, the Bush administration increased tensions by exaggerating the episode as if it were a real crisis.President Bush depicted the maneuver of the Iranian speed boats as "a provocative act," linked it to America's dispute with Iran over the nuclear issue, and declared that Iran was, is and continues to be a threat if it is "allowed to learn how to enrich uranium." Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates categorically dismissed the view that the Iranian sailors had behaved in a fully proper manner, and the State Department formally protested the actions of the Iranian patrol boats. "
The Republican Presidential candidates, Ron Paul notably excepted, were besides themselves with fevered war talk. While evidence is emerging that the Administration consciously "embellished," if not blatantly fabricated key aspects of the incident, Ramazani focuses on the strategic context and the need for caution:
"Such hyperbolic charges reveal a dismal lack of understanding of Iran's unmatched geo-strategic position at the Strait, and of the conception held by the Iranian leaders about the Strait's security in times of peace and war. Recognizing Iran's vital interest in the Strait is a crucial first step to establishing a hot line between Washington and Tehran.Geo-strategically, the narrow and shallow Strait of Hormuz constitutes, as I coined it in 1979, the world's "global chokepoint." Oil tankers carrying Gulf oil exports must pass through the Strait before traversing the Bab al-Mandab and Suez Canal waterways to the Eastern Mediterranean or the sea lanes of the Strait of Malacca in the Pacific Ocean.
As the dominant Persian Gulf power at this "chokepoint," Iran stands as the "global gatekeeper" for world oil markets. Iran's territorial water abuts the entire eastern shore of the Strait, and numerous Iranian islands dot the sea lanes of the Strait. "
Some financial analysts last summer lamely tried to downplay the significance of the Strait of Hormuz today, claiming that the US could withstand oil shocks were a hot war in the Gulf break out. One remembers the argument that invading Iraq would be a "self-funding" war.
Such "optimism" avoids a sober look at just how much oil transits the Strait of Hormuz. Consider figures from the US Government's Energy Information Agency. According to the EIA, "oil flows through the Straits of Hormuz account for roughly two-fifths of all global crude oil and petroleum product tanker shipments."
That is, 40% of the world's oil traffic by sea must first pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Various alternate pipelines across Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula, even if they could accommodate extra traffic and be kept open in time of conflict, cannot possibly take up the 17 million barrels per day presently exiting via the Hormuz Strait. Never mind the analysts, the oil traders know better: the very talk of military clashes in Hormuz sent oil futures spirally up another 10%.
Yet in this regard, Iran and the world community have a shared set of interests. The world needs the oil; Iran needs to export it. Any Iranian leader, of any political stripe, would agree -- with one caveat:
"Iran considers the safe passage of all ships through the international waters of the Strait as inseparable from its vital interest in the security of the Persian Gulf. Iran's oil, the backbone of its economy, needs to be exported through the Strait. Ideologically Iranian policy makers view the Strait as a "divine blessing" and strategically they see it as Iran's "key asset" in any "defensive war."Tehran is committed to the right of transit passage for all ships through the Strait. Yet any prolonged obstruction of Iran's oil exports by perceived enemies such as the United States could prompt Iran to retaliate by blocking the Strait. This guiding principle was set by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the Iraq-Iran war. He warned that if Iran's oil exports through the Strait were interrupted by hostile acts, Iran would prevent "the passage of a single drop of petroleum from there" to world markets.
Hojatolislam Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the Speaker of the Iranian parliament during the Iraq-Iran war, considered "such an eventuality unlikely." But he warned those Americans who doubted Iran's capability that Iran could effectively close the Strait by creating "a wall of fire" over it, firing its guns from Qeshm and Lark islands near the Strait, and launching air-to-sea missiles from planes, and from underground depots."
In other words, if Iran can't export its oil, it would retaliate by attempting to prevent all exports from passing through its front yard. In short, as Iran sees it, oil exports through the Strait should be safe for all, or safe for none.
"The danger of an escalating incident at the Strait has expanded exponentially in recent years. Iran's military capabilities have increased dramatically, rendering it more able than ever to close the Strait, if at all necessary. On the American side, the Bush administration has massively expanded the presence of American warships in the Persian Gulf, in the wake of war in Afghanistan and Iraq."
War-gamers will no doubt debate whether Iran can fully block oil traffic at the two mile wide navigable channel, if the gauntlet is laid down. And oil speculators will fantasize about how high oil prices will jump were such a test to be even tried. Sanity counsels we ought to endeavor to avoid tempting such fates.
"Whether or not the recent maneuvers of Iranian speed boats were timed to occur just before the anti-Iranian Bush visit to the Middle East, the fact remains that the risk of an "accidental war" has grown considerably. Bush's efforts to rally Sunni Arab states against Shia Iran meet with disbelief, as these countries recognize all too well that Bush's threat of "serious consequences" against Iran, if effected, will harm them and the international community as well."
So regardless of who provoked or escalated the recent incident, "The creation of a hot line between Washington and Tehran... will help prevent future incidents from turning into armed hostilities. " I gather there are senior players on both sides who wish to see such a hotline established. It seems to me that the only objections will come from those determined to see a hot war.
Beyond the immediate goal of preventing a war, Ramazani closes his essay by suggesting four additional benefits such a hot line could simulate:
"First, this can be a catalyst for a broader Incidents-at-Sea agreement between the two countries encompassing the entire Persian Gulf. During the Cold War, the U.S. signed an Incidents-at-Sea agreement with the Soviet Union to avoid accidental warfare by deepening the military-to-military communication between the various parties. The agreement was successful in minimizing the number of incidents between ships and aircraft of the two navies, thus reducing the danger of the inadvertent escalation of a minor incident at sea into something far more serious.
Second, it could aid the establishment of a collective regional security system in the Persian Gulf, including, I propose, neutral patrol boats under the flag of the United Nations."
(I've written several times, including here, about Ramazani's proposals for hybrid security arrangements for the Persian Gulf.)
"Third, it could help restore Iran-U.S. diplomatic relations in the long run. Contrary to widely held myths, Iran has never closed its door to diplomatic relations with the United States. Khomeini left the door ajar "if America behaves itself," that is, if the United States refrains from imposing its will on Iran. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, subscribes to the Khomeini line, saying that Iran's lack of contacts with the United States "does not mean that we will not have relations indefinitely."
Fourth, the increased hostilities between Iran and America redounds to the benefit of Iran's hawks. Conversely, the reduction of such animosity by any means, including a U.S.-Iran hot line, could help Iran's doves who want relations with the United States. More importantly, it could aid their strugg