On Our Way to Palestine… Tuesday, May 17 2011 

Israel and Lebanon and Middle East and Palestine , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 6:34 pm

“You know what scares Israel more than Arab armies or Iranian nukes? Palestinian refugees simply walking home.” - Seen on Twitter on Nakba Day

Sunday marked the Nakba — or day of “catastrophe” in Arabic — referring to the 1948 declaration of Israel when more than 700,000 Palestinian civilians were made homeless overnight.

In remembrance of the Nakba, last weekend thousands of Palestinians and their supporters marched from Syria (video), Gaza, Jordan, the West Bank, Egypt and Lebanon toward Israel’s borders, and were — in most cases — thwarted, sometimes violently, from reaching their destination by Arab security forces.

Israeli troops in turn injured, killed and arrested scores of demonstrators demanding their Right of Return in Qalandia, East Jerusalem, the Erez Crossing, Golan Heights and Maroun el Ras.

Today, Palestinian refugees and their descendants number around 5 million worldwide.

Nour Samaha, a 28-year-old freelance Swiss-Lebanese writer based in Beirut for the past 18 months, participated in the Lebanese Nakba march to Palestine. Her story, posted on Facebook, is riveting: Nour’s day begins with smiles and excitement, and ends with rage, shock and disillusionment. Most compelling for me though is that as the violence of the day unfolds, well-meaning young protesters don’t run scared — they get angrier:

“The more bodies were pulled away from the fence, whether dead or wounded, the more we, as a crowd, wanted to be there. To help, to support, to get angry, to chant, to do whatever was necessary to defend.”

From Tahrir Square to Pearl Square one wonders at the courage of the Arab youth who stand firm in the face of live bullets and truncheons. Are they crazy? So many of these brave organizers and participants are middle class and/or educated — they have much to lose.

Nour’s story — told in her own words below — illustrates how easily a simple yearning for justice can morph into a non-negotiable determination to wrench that prize any which way. The real lesson for Arab autocrats and Israel is that violence against today’s protesters can no longer gain them the upper hand for very long. Something new is in the air and it’s wildly contagious — spreading from Tunis to Manama, Benghazi to Maroun el Ras:

Sunday 15th May, 2011.

7.30am, Nada calls. “The buses are already full and they told us if we want to hitch a ride we’d have to stand the whole way down, is there space with you?” The buses are full? Big smile on my face. “Of course!” Quick change of plan, and I wait for Rana before we set off to pick up Nada and Lara and join Ahmad in Khalde.

After a stop for coffee, we began our journey down, with Ahmad leading our two-car convoy. It was very unlikely we would get lost though, because every kilometre or so we’d pass half a dozen buses decked out with Palestinian flags, clearly heading in the same direction as us. And if somehow we missed those, someone had kindly taken the time to signpost the entire journey down with directions to Palestine. I guess for future reference, you know, after we’ve liberated it and we can make plans to hang out in Haifa for the weekend. Forward planning; I like.

Adorned with keffiyehs, and draping flags out of the car window, we laughed at those who had predicted the worst for us that day, rather, exchanged ideas of how we would cross the border fence. “What did you hear?” “Someone said they’re going to shoot at us.” “They wouldn’t dare!” “I wonder how many of us are going to show up?” “I wonder how many of THEM are going to show up?” “Look! More buses!” Nada told us she had promised her father that she won’t be the first person to break across the border, “but I will be the second!”. Ohh yay, I get to be the first. (more…)

 

Kill the “Peace Game” Saturday, Jan 8 2011 

Foreign Affairs and Israel and Middle East and Palestine and peace process and US Foreign Policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 9:12 pm

The Palestine-Israel conflict is no pesky regional skirmish. This century-long battle over territory threatens to draw the entire global community into its bowels if it is not dealt with soon, and the only way out of the current paralysis is to kill the “peace process” once and for all.

There is no other way to end our dependence on the “process” – hoping that another tweak here or there might be the one to produce a breakthrough. No it won’t, and we need to destroy this addiction in order to think straight for a change.

Some realities to consider:

Nineteen years of a drawn out “peace process” has seen the establishment and institutionalization of a “peace industry” so gargantuan and far-reaching that it makes the United Nations look like a nimble start-up operation.

From Madrid to Oslo to Annapolis to the Quartet, we are hampered by agreements, roadmaps and conditions that create a thicket of red tape and limit our maneuverability. Layer upon layer of superficial “process” obscures the path forward. Which is why we are standing quite still.

Playing Games with Peace

Even the participants are fake. The Palestinian “Authority” – well – has none. We squeezed out the elected body and inserted our own players. When we throw eve-of-peace-talks ceremonies at the White House, we invite Egypt and Jordan, who have absolutely nothing of substance to contribute. And we studiously ignore all the parties that count – Hamas and Syria are fundamentally unavoidable in any settlement.

Welcome to the Middle East Peace Game – in which we get to choose the players, make up the rules and set the time table.

Excluded from The Game is anything remotely resembling an actual solution, or any meaningful negotiation around the contentious core issues. We don’t want this game to end. Like NATO and the other Cold War games we set up – we are not sure exactly how to dismantle them and have long since forgotten the end goal. The goal, it seems, is to simply stay in “play.”

So here we are at the start of 2011, entering the 20th year of the “Peace Process.” The reality of establishing two states died years before the idea did – just around the time we realized that Israel had used the peace process to sneak in half a million Jewish settlers into the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, thereby ending the land-for-peace basis of any lasting agreement.

Bad Assumptions = Bad Results
Established by the Oslo Agreement to allow Palestinians to begin a process of self-governance, the Palestinian Authority (PA) instead turned out to be a nifty way to remove Israeli troops from the daily grind of confrontation, whilst quite brilliantly allowing Palestinians to administer their own occupation.

And we threw money at our handpicked Palestinian leadership – creating graft, corruption and a sense of entitlement the likes of which has not been seen since the CEO of Halliburton became Vice President of the United States. In the process, we cordoned off the “opposition” into a hellhole called Gaza, and sought to destroy them by punishing an entire civilian population.

So focused were we on establishing players and rules, not for one honest second did we drill down on the core issues required to resolve this most divisive conflict. These were: 1) determining the borders of Palestine and Israel; 2) determining the status of East Jerusalem 3) determining the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees; 4) determination of sovereignty issues – water and air space rights; security…

The Peace Process Industry instead created a thousand other issues to be addressed first: who is in charge of guarding the grove of olive trees below that hill, around the corner from Abol Abed’s house? Who is going to ride in the second car when the PA president visits a town in Sector C? Who is going to collect taxes from the Palestinian worker building a gazebo for a Jewish settler family in illegally confiscated land? And other such numbing minutae. (more…)

 

Israel’s Human Shields and Live Bait Wednesday, Oct 27 2010 

Foreign Affairs and Human Rights and Israel and Middle East and Palestine and peace process and US Foreign Policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 4:22 pm

“Sharmoota!” hisses the Jewish settler as she presses up against the bars of a Hebron home where she has forced a Palestinian woman to take cover. “Whore” in Arabic, the shameful word hangs in the air like verbal dynamite – and shocks again and again as rapid-fire “Sharmootas” are spat out at their victim. An Israeli soldier stands by and watches this provocation. He does nothing. Video 1, Video 2

Young teenage settlers hang around outside a Palestinian schoolhouse, waiting for the stream of Arab mothers and their children to make their way home. The settler youths – all girls – shriek abuses at the frightened Palestinian kids, kick the elders and pull headscarves off the heads of pious women – “terror games” to pass time on a Jewish holiday, all under the watch of armed Israeli soldiers who do not intervene. Video

There are 500,000 illegal Jewish settlers in occupied Palestinian territories today – a number that has increased five-fold since the US-sponsored “peace process” began 19 years ago.

  • Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, August 12, 1949, 6 UST 3516, provides, in paragraph 6: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

 

Peace advocates contend that this Israeli push to “settle” Jews in the occupied territories reflects the determination of an increasingly right-wing government to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Logic dictates that the physical presence of half a million Jews in illegal settlements and outposts – connected through a maze of Jewish-only roads – has stealthily destroyed the possibility of a land-for-peace compromise. And Israel’s government has spent $17 billion on settlements since occupation began.

But here’s something we don’t talk about readily. Why would consecutive Israeli governments heavily subsidize and incentivize the relocation of young families – women and children – into hostile environments? Why would Israel – which claims security dangers wherever there are Palestinian populations – deliberately and systematically place its Jewish civilian population in “harm’s way?”

The settlers are Israel’s human shields and live bait.

“Naatzi! Naaaatzi!” This word, amazingly enough, is a settler favorite. “Nazis!” they screech at foreign TV crews, while waving their infants around. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,” they chant as they provocatively try to stop Palestinians from harvesting their olive crops. And the IDF soldiers wait and watch – occasionally intervening to push a frustrated and humiliated Palestinian objector away from a taunting, threatening Jewish settler.

Eventually, a half-crazed Palestinian will fight back, even kill some settlers. Israeli authorities immediately step in and claim the “Security Risk” has increased and more Palestinian land has to be confiscated to ensure Israel’s security. More Palestinians are detained, harassed, punished. More Palestinian homes are occupied or demolished. See how that works? Unleash your craziest Jews onto a Palestinian civilian population until someone blows a fuse and hits back. Then use that as the pretext to encroach further into the lives and onto the land of Palestinians.

Jewish settlers. Half a million of them in 121 illegal settlements and 102 illegal outposts. Human shields and live bait for Israel. The Jewish state’s frontline army for depopulating Palestinian land.  (more…)

 

A Candid Conversation With The Arab League’s Amr Moussa – Peace Talks, One-State, Hezbollah, Iran and…”Foreign Fingers” Wednesday, Oct 27 2010 

Foreign Affairs and Middle East and peace process , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 3:53 pm

I met with Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa at his elegant quarters in the heart of Cairo last week — on the eve of the League’s crucial meeting with Palestinian Authority Chief Mahmoud Abbas to decide on direct talks with Israel.

Moussa’s career has gone from strength to strength since I first briefly met him as Egypt’s ambassador to the United Nations in the early 1990s. He was named Egypt’s foreign minister not too long after, and then moved on to head the Arab League. Some say he had become too popular on the Egyptian street, and this was President Hosni Mubarak’s way of sidelining a potential competitor.

There have been whispers about Moussa running for Egypt’s highest political office in elections next year, particularly as rumors swirl about Mubarak’s losing battle with cancer. But the Arab League chief is firmly focused on the most contentious issue in the Middle East right now – the troubled, never-ending “peace process” between Palestinians and Israelis.

In a candid conversation with Moussa just hours before the first Arab foreign minister arrived, he addressed a broad array of hot issues in the region – carefully, but passionately too. A decade in this prestigious – though some may argue, largely impotent – post, Moussa, still has fire in his belly and the determination to do something about it.

What was clear from our discussions was that the Arab “world” is reaching the end of its patience with the regional status quo and the 19-year-long US-sponsored peace process. If genuine and well-intentioned negotiations do not emerge in the very near future, the direction of the region is up for grabs. And Moussa has some ideas as to where it should go.

First though, some thoughts on the Arab League itself – its accomplishments, and even its relevance in the face of decades-long regional stagnation and the difficulties in gaining consensus among 22 different nations:  (more…)

 

Israel’s Settlements are on Shaky Ground – LA Times Monday, Jun 29 2009 

Uncategorized , , , , , , , , Sandboxer 5:42 am

Sarah Leah Whitson in the LA Times:  “The debate over Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is often framed in terms of whether they should be “frozen” or allowed to grow “naturally.” But that is akin to asking whether a thief should be allowed merely to keep his ill-gotten gains or steal some more.”

 

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