From: Rashid
Subject: Deborah Orr: The tragic truth about collective punishment
Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:06:22 +0000
Independent.co.uk
Deborah Orr: The tragic truth about collective punishment
Those Palestinians unfortunate enough to live in camps in Lebanon, for example, are not utterly deprived of rights, and dependent on UN aid, because of Israeli policy alone. Pan-Arab policy also dictates that the Palestinians should live in absolute hardship, lest they decide to play into the hands of Israel, by abandoning the struggle and quietly assimilating and getting on with their lives.
It is easy to condemn Israel when it minimises the plain fact of a humanitarian crisis, and claims that in Gaza, the Islamists of Hamas are "making things appear worse". But it is more sensible simply to concede that Israel may, on this occasion, have a case, because it is clearly in the interests of Hamas to do so.
It is the policy of Hamas to highlight and to emphasise the oppression wrought on Palestinians by Israel. It would be far more mystifying if Hamas, as the eyes of the world treat Gaza to one of their sporadic glances, sought to understate matters as much as possible, rather than overplaying them. Hamas, in common with most other Islamist groups, thrives on promulgating the idea of Muslim victimhood, after all.
Hamas embraces this victimhood, engineers it and promotes it. Hamas does not condemn the firing of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel that forms the official and wearily accepted justification for every Israeli incursion into Gaza and every blockade on the Strip. On the contrary, Hamas insists that the firing of the rockets is "symbolic", a feeble and almost metaphysical expression of the Palestinian right to express its hostility to the humiliation and degradation that has been visited on its people.
In this respect, Hamas too colludes in the unleashing of collective punishment. It sees the suffering of Gazans as a tool in the fight for international attention, and a necessary component of the only war it can really afford to wage – the propaganda war. This war, it fights on two fronts – against Israel, of course, but also against Fatah, the secularist group that has become, by default, for now, the acceptable representative of the Palestinian struggle for nationhood.
In an unusual break-out of multilateral agreement, Israel, Fatah, the European Union and the United States all share a desire to isolate Hamas within Gaza, even though all consider themselves to be champions of the democratic cause, and even though Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary election. Never mind that Fatah was until recently the most evil embodiment imaginable of Arab anti-Zionism. Fatah, for all its many faults, was not an Islamist group.
Now, under the ancient rule whereby one's enemy's enemy is one's friend, Israel emphasises whenever it can how much it is itching to get back over to the West Bank and cut a peace deal with Fatah, and how only the agitations of Hamas are stopping this – suddenly easily attainable – situation from coming about.
Yet Fatah is still active in Gaza, even though its attempts to regain power by force have failed. Like Hamas, Fatah has never been above deploying a little sneaky collective punishment against the Palestinians in pursuit of its aims. Fatah, too, has long fetishised Palestinian victimhood, again because it was the only instrument of warfare available. It does not hesitate in augmenting that victimhood, or even question its moral justification for doing so, in the cause of its own political gain.
European funding for the Palestinian Authority, for example, suspended when Hamas won the election, has for a while been back on stream, with Fatah, not Hamas, controlling the portion of it that goes directly into Palestinian hands. Fatah pays the wages of public servants in Gaza, including doctors and nurses. But it has been accused of operating an unofficial policy whereby it requests that all those workers who support Fatah should stay at home if they wish to be paid. It does this in pursuit of the same policy that Israel accuses Hamas of, that of "making things appear worse", this time to the detriment of Hamas.
The saddest, most ironic, thing is that it was just this sort of Fatah realpolitik that allowed Hamas to usurp its political leadership in the first place. Hamas appealed to ordinary Palestinians not by proselytising Islam, but by offering the social support that the Palestinian Authority could have prioritised itself, had it not considered such basic governmental duties to have been strategically counter-productive. The extent to which ordinary Palestinians have been used as political capital in the Palestine-Israeli region is vast and horrible. But it is by no means correct to claim that the Israelis are alone in stooping to this.
The consequences of such manipulation are plain. It is far from outlandish to suggest that the promotion of suicide bombers is merely the most basic expression of the idea that individual Palestinian lives are nothing more or less than weapons of war. Yet there are many other ways in which such attitudes make matters worse for the Palestinians, politically as well as personally.
For many of those who sympathise with the Palestinian cause, it is difficult to understand how Israel can maintain its own collective inability to see the Palestinians as people who are stateless and suffering, just as the Jewish people itself so recently was. Yet the eagerness of the rest of the Arab world, and of the home-grown factions who claim to represent the Palestinians, to treat ordinary people as a malleable, expendable, collective mass, bolsters this attitude rather than challenging it.
At root, in order to maintain its own creation myth, Israel needs to believe that prior to the establishment of Israel there was no Palestine, and that even if there was a Palestine, it was a poor sort of place, let down by its own leaders, rather than obliterated by charter.
The continued Arab belief that it is politically wise to persist in portraying the Palestinians as passive recipients of aid, unable to help themselves or sustain themselves, hugely assists Israel in its ravenous desire to maintain this myth. It helps, in fact, just a little, in the ongoing project of making it an unchallengeable reality.
d.orr@independent.co.uk

Subject: The Guardian: Hamas acted on a very real fear of a US-sponsored coup Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2007 13:29:50 +0000
Hamas acted on a very real fear of a US-sponsored coup


Washington's fingerprints are all over the chaos that has hit Palestinians. The last thing they now need is an envoy called Blair

Jonathan Steele
Friday June 22, 2007
The Guardian


Did they jump or were they pushed? Was Hamas's seizure of Fatah security offices in Gaza unprovoked, or a pre-emptive strike to forestall a coup by Fatah? After last week's turmoil, it becomes increasingly important to uncover its origins.
The fundamental cause is, of course, well known. Israel, aided by the US, was not prepared to accept Hamas's victory in last year's Palestinian elections. Backed by a supine EU, the two governments decided to boycott their new Palestinian counterparts politically and punish Palestinian voters by blocking economic aid. Their policies had a dramatic effect, turning Gaza even more starkly into an open prison and creating human misery on a massive scale. The aim was to turn voters against Hamas - a strategy of stupidity as well as cynicism, since outside pressure usually produces resistance rather than surrender.

The policy shocked even moderate western officials like James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank chief, whom the Americans had appointed to help Gaza's economy before the Hamas election victory. "The result was not to build more economic activity but to build more barriers," he said this week while explaining why he resigned in disagreement with US and Israeli strategy.

It is also well known that Hamas was as surprised by its election victory as everyone else and that it offered its rival, Fatah, a coalition government of national unity. The offer was refused. If this was done initially out of wounded pride, Fatah's rejection of Hamas's regularly repeated overtures increasingly appeared to be coordinated with Washington as part of the boycott strategy.

Reports have been circulating for months of a more sinister side to the boycott. According to them, the US decided last year on a plan to arm and train Mahmoud Abbas's presidential guard in a deliberate effort to confront and defeat Hamas militarily. Israel has already locked up several dozen Hamas legislators and mayors from the West Bank. The next stage was to do the same in Gaza but have Palestinians, rather than Israelis, run the crackdown.

Arming insurgents against elected governments has a long US pedigree and it is no accident that Elliott Abrams, the deputy national security adviser and apparent architect of the anti-Hamas subversion, was a key player in Ronald Reagan's supply of weapons to the Contras who fought Nicaragua's elected government in the 1980s.

Documents doing the rounds in the Middle East purport to have evidence for Abrams's "hard coup" strategy. One text recounts Washington's objectives as expressed in US officials' conversations with an Arab government. These are, among others, "to maintain President Abbas and Fatah as the centre of gravity on the Palestinian scene", "avoid wasting time in accommodating Hamas's ideological conditions", "undermine Hamas's political status through providing for Palestinian economic needs", and "strengthen the Palestinian president's authority to be able to call and conduct early elections by autumn 2007".

The document is dated March 2, less than a month after Saudi Arabia brokered the Mecca agreement under which Abbas finally agreed with Hamas on a unity government. The deal upset the Israelis and Washington because it left Hamas's prime minister Ismail Haniyeh in charge. The document suggests the US wanted to sabotage it. Certainly, according to Hamas officials whom a depressed Abbas later briefed, Abbas was told to scrap Mecca at every subsequent meeting he has had with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert or with US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and Abrams.

Most ominously, the document of US objectives outlined a $1.27bn programme that would add seven special battalions, totalling 4,700 men, to the 15,000 Abbas already has in his presidential guard and other security forces, which were also to be given extra training and arms. "The desired outcome will be the transformation of Palestinian security forces and provide for the president of the Palestinian Authority to able to safeguard decisions such as dismissing the cabinet and forming an emergency cabinet," the document says.

Alastair Crooke, a former Middle East adviser to the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and current head of a research institute in Beirut, points out that Israel blocked some arms deliveries. It was wary of sending too many into Gaza for fear Fatah might lose them, as indeed has happened. In this sense, only part of the plan went ahead. (Britain has played a small part in helping Abbas's security forces. It has provided about £350,000 of "non-lethal" equipment this year for protecting the Karni freight crossing between Gaza and Israel.)

But Crooke says Hamas was irritated that the Mecca deal was being sabotaged, notably by the refusal of Mohammed Dahlan, Fatah's long-time Gaza strongman and head of the Preventive Security Forces, to accept the authority of the independent interior minister appointed to the unity government. "Dahlan refused to deal with him, and put his troops on the streets in defiance of the interior minister. Hamas felt they had little option but to take control of security away from forces which were in fact creating insecurity," Crooke says.

Ahmed Yousef, a Hamas spokesman, confirms the movement thought it had to move fast. In his words, last week's events were "precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office".

While Hamas has successfully blocked the US-Fatah plans for Gaza, Abbas is trying to implement them in the West Bank by forming an emergency government. The policy is doomed since the constitution says such a government can only last 30 days. Parliament has to renew it by a two-thirds majority, and parliament is controlled by Hamas. The only sensible policy for Abbas must be to end the effort to marginalise Hamas. He should go back to the Mecca agreement and support a unity government. Even now, Hamas says it is willing to do so.

Where does all this leave the White House idea to involve Tony Blair as a Middle Eastern envoy? It creates a "coalition of the discredited" - Bush, Olmert and Blair - and sounds like something from a satire since Blair has no credibility with Hamas or most other Palestinians. Better to leave it to the Saudis to revive the Mecca deal, or wait until Abbas realises he has fallen into a trap. Neither common sense nor democratic principles, let alone time, are on Fatah's side.

j.steele@guardian.co.uk



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Palestinian Civil War

I copied the following from my favorite web page: www.whatreallyhappenedl.com by Michael Rodriguez:

The civil war in Palestine is of course a long-held dream of the American and Israeli Right. Israel first secretly supported the sectarian Hamas in order to undermine the secular nationalists of Arafat's PLO; now they openly take sides with Arafat's successors in the Palestinian Authority against Hamas, which -- as always happens -- escaped the control of the puppet-masters who sought to exploit the group for their own ends. But the long-term aim has been achieved: a violently divided Palestinian society, broken down, killing each other off, leaving Israel free to continue its colonization of Palestinian land. As others have pointed out, it's no wonder that the United States so staunchly supports this policy: after all, it's what we did to the Native Americans.
Posted May 19, 2007 10:08 AM PST
Category: ISRAEL

From: My Son
Subject: The Nation: Uneasy Calm in Palestine Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 22:21:43 +0000


This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/gordon


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Uneasy Calm in Palestine
by NEVE GORDON

[from the March 12, 2007 issue]

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshal went to Mecca after more than 130 people had been killed, hundreds wounded and a burning sense of urgency had taken over the Palestinian streets. Gazans had been confined to their homes for days, this time not as the result of an Israeli curfew or aerial attack but rather from fear of getting caught in the crossfire. Palestinian society, it seemed, was on the brink of civil war.

The pressure from below had an impact, and within two days Fatah and Hamas leaders, through the mediation of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, succeeded in accomplishing what they had not managed to achieve during the preceding year: a unity government. Thousands of Palestinians spontaneously filled the streets of Gaza to celebrate what seemed to be a historic moment.

As I write, the clashes have indeed subsided, but it is unclear whether the calm will persist. On the one hand, the agreement's fine points have yet to be hammered out, and the devil is often in the details. On the other hand, what lies ahead does not depend solely on goodwill between Fatah and Hamas.

Most pundits have understood the sectarian clashes as either a struggle over who will control the Palestinian government and resources or as a local manifestation of a much broader international conflict between fundamentalist and secular forces in the Islamic world. Such interpretations, however, have obscured the central role Israel and the United States have played.

Even before Hamas won the January 2006 democratic elections, after which the Quartet of Middle East mediators (the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations) cut off aid to the Palestinians, Israel's closure of the territories had triggered an economic crisis. More than 60 percent of the Palestinian inhabitants were living under the international poverty line of $2 a day, with the World Bank reporting that 9 percent of children were suffering from acute malnutrition. Considering that the financial aid provided to the Palestinians had amounted to almost one-third of the per capita gross national income in the territories, the imposition of economic sanctions has been catastrophic.

The closure and sanctions have not only wreaked havoc on the Palestinian economy but have also helped precipitate the violent clashes among the factions. Indeed, the idea behind the sanctions, which both Israel and the United States have pressured other countries to enforce, is to shape power relations within Palestinian society by adopting a scheme that, for clarity's sake, one could call the Somalia Plan.

For months now the Palestinian Authority has been unable to pay the salaries of its 160,000 employees. These workers provide the livelihoods of more than 1 million people--almost a third of the population. Some 70,000 work for the numerous security organizations, most of which are linked to political factions. Like those employed by civil institutions, such as the education and health ministries, they are deeply angry because they cannot feed their families. But unlike the civilian workers, they are armed. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that a power struggle has erupted. Inadequate resources, economic sanctions, thousands of armed men in distress and foreign support of certain factions are, after all, the ingredients from which warlordism, à la Somalia, is made. Insofar as this is the case, success of the unity government is contingent on ending the economic sanctions.

But here comes the snag: Israel's unilateralist government is not really interested in a negotiating partner and sees Palestinian unity as a threat. Even before the Palestinian leaders returned home, Israel launched a well-orchestrated diplomatic campaign to persuade the Quartet to uphold sanctions. Simultaneously, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that any future negotiations would be informed by a "three no" approach: no to dividing Jerusalem, no to a withdrawal to the 1967 borders and no to a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. Thus, Israel is unwilling to discuss any of the contentious issues that need to be resolved.

The unfolding events also set the stage for making the February 19 Jerusalem summit inconsequential. Nonetheless, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did make some significant statements during her Middle East visit. It is unlikely that a Palestinian state will be created before President Bush ends his term, she told the Palestinian newspaper Al Ayam. And to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz she added that the Palestinian unity government will not be recognized--suggesting that sanctions would continue--until it abides by Israel's three conditions: that the Palestinian government recognize Israel, renounce violence and ratify the Oslo agreements and the road map. While these demands are in many respects legitimate, they could readily be part of negotiations rather than a weapon used to precipitate internal violence and thus destroy Palestinian society.

Ironically, Israel's position is inimical to its own interests. If the internal Palestinian clashes resume and develop into a full-blown civil war, there will be no hope of resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. One has to be extremely shortsighted not to see how the absence of a united Palestinian leadership will undermine all efforts to bring about local and regional peace.