August 2, 2007
Palestinian prisoners; Israeli diplomats
Life for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is getting steadily worse. On Wednesday, an Israeli official told me that the Gaza economy is in a “state of total collapse”. Travel for Palestinians on the West Bank is incredibly arduous because of the huge number of Israeli road-blocks.
But – right now – many Palestinians seem more pre-occupied by the internal dispute between Hamas and Fatah than by the Israelis. I got a sense of the bitterness of the dispute when I visited Issa Qaraqe, a Fatah legislator, in his offices in Bethlehem.
Qaraqe runs the Palestinian Prisoners Association, which tries to look after the interests of the 11,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails. He himself was imprisoned for 10 years and then released in 1993. On his office wall is a large poster of Bobby Sands, the first IRA hunger-striker to starve himself to death in a British prison.
But Qaraqe’s take on Hamas is almost as dark as the version you will get from the Israeli foreign ministry. He is not uncritical of his own organisation – and will admit that Fatah has committed human-rights violations and made huge political errors. But Hamas, he says, are Islamist fanatics and the tools of Iran. He says that while Fatah have a secular, democratic and nationalist view of the Palestinian problem, Hamas “approach the Palestinian issue as a religious question, not a national question.” He claims that Gaza is in the early stages of “Talibanisation” – and points to the destruction of the statue of the unknown soldier in Gaza, likening it to the Taliban’s destruction of Buddhist statues.
This is all contentious stuff. Hamas officials point out they won democratic elections and they are at pains to present a moderate and welcoming face to the foreigners who are trickling back into Gaza. UN people and visiting journalists say that security in Gaza is much improved, since the Hamas takeover. But Qaraqe’s hardline take on Hamas accurately reflects the views of Abu Mazen, the Palestinian president. UN people say that the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is even more insistent on cutting off Gaza economically than the Israelis.
All this leaves the Israelis themselves sitting pretty – at least for now. Few Israelis I’ve met seem to have any real expectations for the latest peace initiative, which they assume will run into the sand.
Israeli officials remain obsessed by the “Iranian threat” – in particular Iran’s support for Hamas and its nuclear programme. By contrast, they seem oddly relaxed about the debacle in Iraq. If the Israelis provoked the Iraq war – as many conspiracy theorists allege – they seem curiously detached about its disastrous outcome.
One official analyst explained that they cannot start producing internal papers about what will happen when the Americans pull out – because they will inevitably leak and cause embarrassment. But, when they focus on the problem, the Israelis do see plenty of reason to worry. In particular, they are anxious that the likeliest outcome is that the US leaves behind a weak Shia-led government that is in Iran’s pocket – thus hugely expanding Iran’s regional clout. And they blame the Americans naïve pre-occupation with democracy for this outcome. When I asked one Israeli official what the best outcome in Iraq would be, he replied – “Find a pro-western Sunni strongman, who will reconstitute the Baath party, hold the country together and keep Iran in check.” I don’t think he was joking.
It is very striking that the Israelis – at least at the level of diplomats and analysts - do not share the Bush administration’s belief in democracy promotion. The term “neo-con” is bandied about with as much contempt as in left-wing London salon. The Israelis see their region in cold, Kissingerian balance-of-power terms. They seem frustrated that America is not doing more to woo Syria away from Iran – something they once again blame on Bush’s tiresome crusade for democracy. As far as the Israelis are concerned, elections in their region have so far brought them an Iraqi government in Iran’s pocket and Hamas. They are not keen to press on with the experiment.
Mr. Rachman, what is actually growing faster, Palestinians in Israeli prisons or Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory ?
Posted by: Hans Suter | August 2nd, 2007 at 11:12 am | Report this commentDear Mr. Rachman,
Whilst you are close by, can you please gauge the size of the egg on the faces of those in charge of Western policy in Lebanon as a result of the Lebanese by-elections and the defeat of Amin Gemayel?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/fab8b9c2-43fe-11dc-90ca-0000779fd2ac.html
Is the egg on their faces the size of that of an Ostrich’s or is it the size of an American football?!
When are those in Washington, Paris and London going to stop pretending that the current Lebanese government is legal and legitimate when even under the rickety existing constitution it lacks legitimacy?
Moreover, are the EU/US going to sanction and punish the Lebanese for rejecting their candidate in the way that they try to starve Palestine for electing Hamas?
Viva democracy and down with colonialism!
P
Posted by: Pacifist | August 6th, 2007 at 4:30 pm | Report this commentIsrael is sanguine about Iraq only because the mess in Iraq exactly suits Israel. They want the Muslim Middle East to break up into as many weak, divided, bickering statelets as possible so that there can be no challenge to Israel’s hegemony. After all, the Zionist state finds it increasingly hard to persuade sane Jews to give up their nice lives in the West and go live in Israel and there are only so many impoverished Ukrainians and Russians who are prepared to suddenly “discover” that they had Jewish roots in exchange for a few shekels. So if you cannot grow yourself, you might as well break up your enemies.
The hype about the “Iranian threat” is also exactly because the Israelis want to fool the Americans, once more, into doing their dirty deed for them and attack and break up the Iranian state in the way that they did to the Iraqi state.
This position is supported by the crypto-Israelis who masquerade as “Americans” and, under the banner of being NeoCons, claim that their propensity for inviting violence against the opponents of Israel is all to do with their “American Nationalism” and nothing to do with their patent “Israel-First” attitudes.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Americans (the ones with loyalty to America) should guard against being fooled twice by the enemy within.
P
Posted by: Pacifist | August 6th, 2007 at 4:53 pm | Report this commentPacifist - the conspiracy article was published two weeks ago: You risk becoming Passe-fist.
Posted by: PL | August 7th, 2007 at 6:18 pm | Report this commentHi PL,
This particular conspiracy has passed the realms of theory and can be observed as a daily fact.
Shalom,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | August 8th, 2007 at 11:55 am | Report this comment“The Israelis see their region in cold, Kissingerian balance-of-power terms.”
This concurs with what I normally hear when discussing the Middle East with Israeli friends.
However I would like to point out that this is not just cold pragmatism, because the implicit presumption that Arabs do not have the same human rights as Israelis is based on a more emotional sense of the Arabs having less value. This appears to me to be a mix of ‘enemy’ attitude and plain racism.
Israelis must question this attitude from a moral and tactical standpoint. Morally they should recognise that all people have equal rights. Tactically they should understand that the current approach will never yield real peace and relies on military supremacy only. They should be very concerned at how hard military power is failing to maintain control in Iraq and Lebanon.
Of course not only Israelis need to change their approach, but this post concerns their particular case.
Posted by: Oscar D | August 12th, 2007 at 6:57 pm | Report this commentDear Oscar D,
Since you fail to question Arab attitudes towards Israelis, does this ‘implicitly presume’ that they are morally defensible? That the suicide bombers of Hamas and their supporters recognise that all people have equal rights? That tactically their approach will yield real peace?
From what I know of attitudes on both sides of the conflict, there are far more Israeli empathisers with the Palestinian Arabs than the other way round.
Posted by: PL | August 12th, 2007 at 7:40 pm | Report this commentDear PL,
I tried to preempt your objection with
“Of course not only Israelis need to change their approach, but this post concerns their particular case.”
You should not interpret my unbalanced critcism as anti-Israeli bias. In a way it is the opposite, in that I expect that members of the educated and functioning Israeli society should be able to see sense more easily than the poor under-educated Palestinians and are therefore more worthwhile to argue with, as well as more likely to be reading this.
Many Arabs need to change their attitudes too. Recent opinion polls show that Palestinians in particular widely support suicide bombings against civilians, which is indefensible.
One should be careful with solely pointing to Hamas’ behaviour as a way of brushing off criticism towards Israeli policies or attitudes. This way anything can be justified as long as it is not as immoral or irrational as their suicide bombings.
Instead, Israelis should try to think constructively about how to normalize relations with the neighbours. This is what I mean by real peace. It was done in Europe after WWII, I think the Middle East could do it too.
Posted by: Oscar D | August 14th, 2007 at 3:03 am | Report this commentDear Oscar D,
I salute your even-handed attitude and I believe if there is going to be any progress, then both sides have to stop demonising each other.
However, I can’t help wondering what percentage of Israelis support the attacks by the IDF on Palestinian civilians. How many Palestinian school children have died as a result of Israeli tanks and helicopters targeting them? Is supporting suicide bombing against civilians nefarious only because suicide bombers use a primitive, relatively ineffective weapon or is assaulting civilians wrong even when it is done by state of the art weaponry like the Americans and Israelis do?
In other words, is it your weapon of choice that makes you a terrorist or is it the action you carry out, even with sophisticated and expensive weaponry? Do we condemn individual terrorists only or are we prepared to condemn large scale state terrorism also?
Best regards,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | August 14th, 2007 at 10:30 am | Report this commentDear Pacifist,
Let me explain to you the difference between a nation’s actions of self-defence and actions of terrorism:
1. The IDF does not intentionally attack civilians; the suicide-bombers do.
2. The IDF uses sophisticated weaponry exactly in order to enable its forces to hit their targets - militants who purposefully camouflage within built-up areas - with pinpoint precision. In contrast, the suicide-bombers’ use of ‘primitive’ weapons (like the knives that were used to hijack the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Centre) are intended to spread as much devastation as possible. (Witness too the use of metal parts within the explosives.)
Dear Pacifist, If you can draw parallels between these two sets of actions - then you are no pacifist.
Posted by: PL | August 14th, 2007 at 4:34 pm | Report this commentDear PL,
It is funny how many times the “precision” weapons of IDF kill civilians, including hitting places like girls’ schools. Also we saw that during the Lebanon-Hizbollah conflict of last year, the dead Lebanese were mainly civilian whereas the dead Israelis were mainly soldiers.
Now, let’s leave that aside.
What do you think about the use of cluster bombs by the IDF? Here are two reports by the BBC (aka Bush-Blair-Corporation) and Human Rights Watch:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5299938.stm
http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/07/24/isrlpa13798.htm
Isn’t that terrorism?
BTW, sadly, I shall be away for nearly a week but I look forward to hearing what you say on my return.
Thanks,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | August 14th, 2007 at 5:31 pm | Report this commentThe indefensible use of cluster bombs during last year’s war in Lebanon, was one of the reasons Lt Gen Halutz was forced to resign. I am still awaiting the resignation of Mr Hasan Nasrallah - for having instigated all this devastation and bloodshed.
Posted by: PL | August 14th, 2007 at 9:37 pm | Report this commentHi PL,
Blaming somebody else (particularly the victim) is not a sign of civilised, peace-loving people.
Unless you take me for a complete fool, you will agree that:
1-) USrael were looking for an excuse to attack the Hezbollah because they thought they could finish it off as a prelude for a bigger attack on Iran.
2-) Dan Halutz (who I am ashamed to say is of Iranian-Jewish parentage) did not resign because of committing war crimes against the Lebanese. He resigned because he was the scapegoat for the way Israel, despite overwhelming superiority in arms and men could not defeat a ragtag army of 3,000 Hezbollah militia.
3-) The use of cluster bombs in Lebanon is just one recent, irrefutable, independently verified act of terrorism by the State of Israel. It is by no means the first one and it shall not be the last one.
4-) Israel is in breach of over 60 U.N. resolution and is the prime outlaw, rogue state in the region. However, due to the influence of the Jewish lobby in the US (and the West), Israel always gets away with its misdeeds.
5-) The possession of nuclear weapons by Israel is the primary motive of the states threatened by Israel to want to obtain them. The only reasonable way to stop the region from descending into nuclear madness is to declare it a nuclear free zone for all including Israel and the US.
Have a nice weekend.
P
Posted by: Pacifist | August 17th, 2007 at 2:29 pm | Report this comment