Starting Points: Israel

Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts

Apr 8, 2010

Discussions, but no decisions, on an Obama plan for Mideast peace

Image by Barack Obama via Flickr

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 8, 2010; A08

Senior Obama administration officials have discussed whether President Obama should propose his own solution to the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, including in a recent meeting between the president and seven former and current national security advisers, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

But officials, confirming a report Wednesday on the March 24 session by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, said there has been no decision to offer such a plan, either in the coming months or later this year. Officials said a presidential peace plan -- as opposed to "bridging proposals" that would be offered during peace talks between the two sides -- has long been considered an option for Obama. But they said the administration, now locked in tense talks with Israel about making confidence-building overtures to the Palestinians, is focused on arranging indirect talks between the two sides.

Some officials said the notion that Obama could offer his own plan might undercut those nascent efforts, because it could lead to a backlash among Israel's supporters and encourage the Palestinians not to make any concessions to Israel. Israeli officials have long opposed the introduction of an unilateral American plan, while Arab officials have pressed hard for one, saying it is the only way to break the impasse.

Jordan's King Abdullah II, who will visit Washington next week, recently told the Wall Street Journal that he will push Obama to offer his own plan because "tremendous tension" in the region over the failure to resolve the conflict has resulted in a "tinderbox that could go off at any time."

Still, it is notable that Obama would attend a discussion of such a concept with outside advisers. The president had popped into a meeting that national security adviser James L. Jones regularly holds with six of his predecessors at the White House when the subject turned to the Middle East. Brent Scowcroft, a national security adviser to Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush, made the case for an American-designed proposal and was supported by other participants in the room, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton.

Obama, however, did not tip his hand on whether he supported the idea, participants said.

The basic parameters of a peace deal are well known and would probably closely resemble the "Clinton parameters," offered by Clinton 10 years ago in the waning days of his presidency: land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for much of the land taken by Jewish settlements in the West Bank; billions of dollars in compensation to the Palestinians for giving up the right to return to their homes in Israel; an Israeli capital in West Jerusalem and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, with an agreement on oversight of religious sites in the Old City.

Advocates of an American plan say the two parties are incapable of making such concessions themselves; the current Israeli government, for instance, won't halt Jewish construction in East Jerusalem despite intense U.S. pressure. But detractors say such a plan is only a recipe for putting pressure on Israel, while even some supporters caution that the timing must be right -- such as in the midst of viable peace talks -- or else the impact of the gesture might be wasted.

A major stumbling block to any peace plan is that 1.5 million people -- almost 40 percent of the Palestinian population -- live in the Gaza Strip, now controlled by the Hamas militant group, which rejects any peace talks as well as the very existence of Israel. That was not the situation when Clinton offered his proposal, which envisioned a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, joined by highways.

Apr 6, 2010

Israeli Rights Groups View Themselves as Under Siege - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Leaders of some of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations say they are working in an increasingly hostile environment and coming under attack for actions that their critics say endanger the country.

The pressure on these groups has tightened as the country’s leaders have battled to defend Israel against accusations of war crimes, the rights advocates say, raising questions about the limits of free speech and dissent in Israel’s much vaunted democracy.

“Over the years, in a variety of international arenas,” said Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, “it was key for Israeli officials to say, ‘Yes, there are many problems, perhaps even abuses; however, we have a strong, vibrant civil society with a plethora of voices and we are very proud of that.’

“It is inconsistent to make those statements and at the same time create a situation that colors us as traitors in the public eye.”

Governments and the watchdog organizations that monitor them have rarely seen eye to eye. But rights advocates say that to many conservatives and leaders of Israel’s right-leaning government, the allegations of war crimes against the Israeli military that followed the Gaza war in the winter of 2008-9 have turned human rights criticism into an existential threat that is chipping away at the country’s legitimacy. And officials have been blunt in their counterattacks.

The chief catalyst was the United Nations report last fall on the war in Gaza, by a fact-finding mission led by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone. The report accused Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since identified what he calls the “Goldstone effect,” meaning the delegitimization of Israel abroad, as a major strategic threat.

Last summer, he attacked a leftist organization, Breaking the Silence, that published allegations by unnamed Israeli soldiers about human rights violations during the war, as selectively anti-Israel.

Some international rights groups that have been critical of Israel, like Human Rights Watch, have said Israel’s government was “waging a propaganda war” to discredit them. A senior Netanyahu aide affirmed in an interview last year that Israel was “going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups.”

Israeli rights advocates say that such comments by officials have fostered an atmosphere of harassment. While they do not accuse the government of orchestrating a campaign against them, they point to a number of seemingly unconnected dots that they say add up to a growing climate of repression.

In Sheikh Jarrah, the East Jerusalem neighborhood where several Palestinian families have been evicted from their homes and replaced by Jewish settlers, the police have arrested dozens of Israelis attending peaceful protests in recent months. Mr. El-Ad was detained for 36 hours in January, along with 16 other activists, after he explained to the police that their decision to break up a rally had no legal grounds. One organizer of the protests was arrested at his parents’ Jerusalem home on a night in late March, and released three days later.

Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an advocacy group that focuses on freedom of movement for Palestinians, said her organization was harassed last year by the Israeli tax authorities. She said they questioned why Gisha should be tax exempt when that status was meant for organizations that promoted the public good. Eventually, she said, the authorities backed down.

Then an ultra-Zionist nongovernmental organization called Im Tirtzu (Hebrew for ‘If you will it’ — the first part of Theodor Herzl’s famous maxim) attacked a major organization, the New Israel Fund, which channeled about $29 million to Israeli groups in 2009, including some Arab-run, non-Zionist groups. The fund describes itself as pro-Israel and says it does not agree with all the positions of the groups it helps, but it supports their right to be heard.

Im Tirtzu published a report in January asserting that 92 percent of the quotes from unofficial Israeli bodies supporting claims against Israel in the Goldstone report were provided by 16 nongovernmental organizations financed by the New Israel Fund.

The New Israel Fund dismissed Im Tirtzu’s findings as a fabrication, saying most of the references it cited had nothing to do with Gaza during the Israeli offensive.

Still, for three weeks, Im Tirtzu plastered billboards across the country with posters featuring a crude caricature of the New Israel Fund president, Naomi Chazan. The posters depicted her with a horn attached to her forehead (in Hebrew, the word for fund also means horn) and bore the legend “Naomi Goldstone Hazan.”

Perhaps the most alarming sign to rights advocates was a preliminary vote in Parliament supporting a bill that called for groups that received support from foreign governments to register with Israel’s political parties’ registrar, which could change their tax status and hamper their ability to raise money abroad. It swept a preliminary vote in the 120-seat Parliament in February with 58 in favor and 11 against.

Proponents say the bill is needed to improve transparency. “Up until now they have enjoyed a halo effect as highly regarded human rights watchdogs,” said Gerald Steinberg, an Israeli political scientist and president of NGO Monitor, a conservative watchdog group financed by American Jewish philanthropists. “They were not seen as political organizations with biases and prone to false claims. Now, they are coming under some kind of scrutiny.”

But rights organizations say that they are already required to list publicly the sources of their funding, and that the bill is actually intended to stifle dissent.

Right-wing organizations like those encouraging Jewish settlement in Arab areas of East Jerusalem receive the overwhelming share of their financing from individuals and philanthropies whose identities are often not disclosed.

For now, the bill has effectively been blocked until its proponents reach agreement with the Labor ministers in the governing coalition, who are trying to water it down.

But Ms. Chazan said the bill could not be finessed.

“This law has to disappear,” she said. “It is the single most dangerous threat to Israeli civil society since its inception.”

For Ms. Chazan, a vibrant and diverse civil society is the bedrock of Israeli democracy, and what being Israeli is all about. “We love this country and we want it to be decent,” she said. “We believe the more decent Israel is, the better chance it has of surviving.”

But Mr. Steinberg says that organizations like the New Israel Fund, with their deep pockets and multiple petitions to Israel’s Supreme Court, have “distorted the marketplace of ideas.”

“Part of what is going on now,” he said, “is a sense that this is getting out of control.”

Israeli Gag Order Begins to Slip in Security Leak Case - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

A young Israeli journalist is scheduled to go on trial in Israel in mid-April on accusations of serious security offenses, possibly including espionage, according to Israelis familiar with the case.

A court-imposed gag order has prevented any reporting of the case in Israel, but on Tuesday, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge sharply criticized the forced news blackout, saying in a radio interview that it must be fought, and stirring a public furor.

The journalist, Anat Kamm, 23, is accused of having copied Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter. She apparently had access to the documents during her compulsory military service.

Observers have speculated that the recipient was Uri Blau from the liberal Haaretz newspaper, and that he used the documents as the basis for a 2008 exposé.

Ms. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three months. After leaving the military, she had been working for Walla!, a Hebrew Web site partly owned by Haaretz.

Constrained by the gag order, the Israeli news media has so far made only cryptic references to the case. On March 9, for example, The Seventh Eye, an electronic journal of media affairs published by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research body in Jerusalem, ran an item saying simply that Ms. Kamm was about to go on unpaid leave from Walla!, without explaining why.

The popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot suggested in its April 1 edition that readers search the Internet with keywords “Israeli journalist gag” in order to learn about an affair of interest to Israelis that could only be reported on abroad. And on Tuesday the same newspaper ran a translation of an article by the American journalist Judith Miller on the case, with all the details that would have violated the gag order literally blacked out.

If Ms. Kamm is found guilty, informed observers said she could face up to 15 years in jail.

The case has already received extensive coverage abroad. Details began to emerge in mid March on a blog called Tikun Olam, or Repairing the World, by an American writer, Richard Silverstein. The New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the British newspapers Guardian and Independent newspapers and The Associated Press have also written about the affair.

According to The Independent, Mr. Blau, the Haaretz reporter suspected of having used the confidential military documents, is currently “hiding in Britain”.

The article by Mr. Blau at the center of the storm was published in November 2008. It focused on an episode in June 2007 in which two Palestinian militants belonging to the extremist Islamic Jihad group were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. The military said at the time that the two were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces.

However Mr. Blau noted that months before, one of the two militants, Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha, had been marked as a target for assassination by the Israeli army’s Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank.

Mr. Blau’s article suggested that Mr. Malaisha’s killing contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling from December 2006 that strictly limited the circumstances in which the military is permitted to carry out preemptive strikes. Haaretz printed copies of Central Command documents stating that Mr. Malaisha and two other Islamic Jihad leaders were eligible targets alongside the report.

Israeli news media were not even allowed to mention that there was a gag order in place, according to Uzi Benziman, the chief editor of The Seventh Eye. But in a Tuesday morning interview with Army Radio, Dalia Dorner, the retired Supreme Court judge who is now the president of the Israeli Press Council said the gag order handed down by a magistrate’s court was “regrettable,” and should be fought all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Ms. Dorner’s comments opened the floodgates to Israeli debate about the imposition of such gag orders, though the court ruling still prevented any discussion of the actual case.

Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, said that Israel’s treatment of suspected criminal offenses in the security realm was “draconian.” By isolating the suspect and preventing any public debate, he said, the authorities could more easily pressure the suspect to accept some measure of guilt, arrive at a plea bargain and settle the case “with no noise.”

Mr. Kremnitzer also criticized the ease with which courts in Israel hand out gag orders.

“Only the poor Hebrew readers do not know what is going on,” he said of Israelis unable to read foreign reports about the case in English. “It is an absurd situation,” he said.

The Haaretz newspaper and Israel’s Channel 10 are fighting to lift the gag order. Mibi Moser, the lawyer representing Haaretz, said there would be a court hearing on the matter on April 12, if the gag order was not lifted before.

Mr. Moser is also representing Mr. Blau of Haaretz, though he refused to give any details of that aspect of the case.

Apr 2, 2010

Foreign Policy Association - Resource Library: Israel and Palestine - Two States for Two Peoples: If Not Now, When?

Source: FPA Features
Author: Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace

[DOWNLOAD PDF]

The Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace is comprised of professional and academic members with strong interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some have been intensely engaged with this subject for decades. Others have closely followed the conflict within the context of their professional work in conflict resolution, international law and international relations, religion, and U.S. foreign policy.

The Group's principal contribution is the jointly written Policy Statement entitled "Israel and Palestine - Two States for Two Peoples: If not Now, When?" The Statement stands as a collegial, collective enterprise that represents a consensus view of the group.

Prior to drafting the policy statement each member undertook to research and write a background paper on one of the topics important to the statement.

[DOWNLOAD PDF]

Policy Statement of Boston Study Group on Middle East Peace

Palestinian Refugees
Herbert C. Kelman and Lenore G. Martin

West Bank Settlements and Borders
Henry Steiner

Jerusalem
Harvey Cox

The Challenge of Mutual Security
Stephen M. Walt

The Right Time, As Ever
Alan Berger

U.S. Presidents and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Augustus Richard Norton

Timeline and Glossary of Israeli-Palestinian Conflict & Peacemaking
Everett Mendelsohn

Contributor Bios

Alan Berger, an editorial writer at the Boston Globe, has been writing about the Middle East and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking efforts since 1982. He has interviewed many of the principals and policymakers. And has not yet lost hope.

Harvey Cox is Hollis Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard University. He teaches courses on religion and society in the Divinity School and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, among them a course on the history, religion and culture of the city of Jerusalem. He has worked with the Middle-East Peace Program of the World Council of Churches, and has lectured at both Jewish and Palestinian institutions in Israel.

Herbert C. Kelman is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus, and co-chair of the Middle East Seminar at Harvard University. He was the founding Director (1993–2003) of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. A pioneer in the development of interactive problem solving, he has been engaged for nearly 40 years in efforts toward the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Lenore G. Martin is the Wyant Professor at Emmanuel College in Boston. She is co-Chair of the Middle East Seminar co-sponsored by Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Her publications analyze national security in the Gulf, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the larger Middle East and Turkey. She researches, lectures and travels throughout the Middle East and Turkey.

Everett Mendelsohn is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Harvard University. For more than forty years he has been actively involved in Israeli-Arab/Palestinian peace making first as chair of the Middle East program of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) and then as Chair of the Middle East Program of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' program on International Security. He is author/co-author of A Compassionate Peace: A Future for Israel, Palestine and the Middle East (1982, rev. ed.1989); Israeli-Palestinian Security: Issues in the Permanent Status Negotiations (1995).

Augustus Richard Norton is a Professor in the Departments of International Relations and Anthropology at Boston University, and Visiting Professor in the Politics of the Middle East at the University of Oxford. He served for a dozen years on the United States Military Academy faculty, and was a career Army officer, retiring as a Colonel. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and in 2006 was an adviser to the Iraq Study Group (“Baker-Hamilton Commission”). His most recent book is Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has on-the-ground research experience in eight Middle East countries, including Egypt, Israel, Iraq and Lebanon, as well as Gaza and the West Bank.

Henry Steiner, Jeremiah Smith, Jr., Professor Emeritus at Harvard Law School, founded the School's Human Rights Program and directed it for 21 years. His writing addresses a broad range of international human rights issues. Steiner has taught courses and lectured in over 30 countries, including Israel, the West Bank-Gaza, and three Arab states.

Stephen M. Walt is Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine. His recent writings include Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005) and (with John Mearsheimer), The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007). His daily weblog can be found at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com.

[DOWNLOAD PDF]

Additional Resources:

Maps of Israeli Settlements

Source: Peace Now

Potential Land Swap Between Israelis and Palestinians

Source: Haaretz

Timeline Map

Source: Foundation for Middle East Peace

*The authors are responsible for factual accuracy and for the views expressed. FPA itself takes no position on issues of U.S. foreign policy.

Associated with: Middle East, Research and Analysis Links

Download Related Materials

Israel and Palestine - Two States for Two Peoples: If Not Now, When? (774K) [download]

Mar 16, 2010

US-Israel Showdown?

Image via Wikipedia

posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 03/15/2010 @ 11:56am

The Israel lobby is mobilizing for what might turn into the most significant confrontation between the United States and Israel since, well, the Suez War of 1956, when President Eisenhower told Israel -- and its covert allies, the UK and France -- to halt the unprovoked assault on Egypt. Since then, US-Israel conflicts have been relatively small and tied to side issues, such as the fight over President Reagan's sale of AWACS surveillance aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s or President Bush's showdown with Israel in the early 1990s, when the United States threatened to withhold loan guarantees to Israel after a right-wing Israeli government stone-walled the peace process.

This time, if President Obama plays his cards right, he could bring down the extremist government of Bibi Netanyahu. But that depends on whether Obama displays the guts and gumption necessary for a full-frontal challenge to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its allies.

In a piece written for Mother Jones last year, I outlined the vulnerability of AIPAC et al. to a direct challenge from Obama, especially with the emergence of J Street, the "pro-Israeli, pro-peace" Jewish lobby.

A year ago, it seemed possible that Obama was headed in that direction. He'd nominated the even-handed George Mitchell as his Israel-Palestine special representative, to the discomfort of AIPAC. He'd installed a number of aides at the White House, including General Jones, Mara Rudman, and others who had sympathies with the Palestinians and with the Israeli pro-peace camp. Obama launched a major effort to rebuild US ties with the Muslim world, including his June speech in Cairo, that all but required a stronger US effort to force concessions from Israel. And he'd ordered a showdown with Israel over its illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian lands, demanding outright that Israel stop building them.

Image via Wikipedia

Nearly all of that collapsed. Mitchell got nowhere. Netanyahu bluntly rejected the settlements demand, kept building them, and faced no consequences. And, worst of all, Obama utterly failed to put forward an American peace plan to restart the talks. What was needed then, and now, is for Obama to outline what a final settlement of the conflict will look like: a return to the 1967 borders (with some land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, the removal of Israeli encampments from the West Bank, a sovereign Palestinian state, a deal over the Palestinians' right to return to their land (including a Saudi- and Gulf-financed compensation package), and probably some sort of US security guarantees for Israel.

Obama didn't deliver. He never stated the end goal. Now, he has another chance. His new opportunity was handed to him last week when Netanyahu's government slapped visiting Vice President Biden in face by announcing, during a high-stakes, delicate trip, a plan to build 1,600 new Jewish homes in occupied East Jerusalem. In the aftermath of that event, the entire Obama administration has been mobilized against Israel. The key question is not whether Obama and Co. will slam Israel rhetorically, as they've done, buy whether there will be concrete consequences for Israel and whether the Obama team will finally relaunch the all-but-dead peace process by declaring the president's own vision of the terms that Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab states must agree to.

As the New York Times editorialized last week, following the Biden visit fiasco:

"We also hope that if progress lags, the administration will be ready to put forward its own proposals on the central issues of borders, refugees, security and the future of Jerusalem.
"Mr. Obama has another chance to move the peace process forward. This time he has to get it right."

Biden, of course, used the word "condemn" in reacting to Israel's defiant action, saying: "I condemn the decision." Then rhetorically at least, the US got even nastier. Hillary Clinton -- who, like Biden, prides herself as being militantly pro-Israel -- used the word "insult" in slamming Israel: "The announcement of the settlements on the very day that the vice president was there was insulting," said Clinton.With Obama's approval, she delivered a 45-minute tongue lashing to Netanhayu over the phone. And yesterday David Axelrod, the White House political adviser chimed in, saying: "What happened there was an affront. It was an insult."

Netanyahu, while faking an apology, insists -- as does his entire right-wing regime -- that it won't change policy or back down.

The lobby is mobilizing. AIPAC, in a defensive statement, called the whole thing a "distraction," and it added:

"AIPAC calls on the Administration to take immediate steps to defuse the tension with the Jewish State. ... The Administration should make a conscious effort to move away from public demands and unilateral deadlines directed at Israel."

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, a knee-jerk defender of everything Israel does, accused the US of a "gross overreaction" to the Israeli insult, adding:

"We are shocked and stunned at the Administration's tone and public dressing down of Israel on the issue of future building in Jerusalem. We cannot remember an instance when such harsh language was directed at a friend and ally of the United States. One can only wonder how far the U.S. is prepared to go in distancing itself from Israel in order to placate the Palestinians in the hope they see it is in their interest to return to the negotiating table."

And a panoply of Israel's best friends in Congress are trying to preempt an Obama response to the Israeli insult that goes beyond rhetoric, too. Representive Shelley Berkley (D.-Nevada) called the Clinton-Axelrod statements part of an "irresponsible overreaction," and the ever-reliable John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House, told Commentary that "the tone and substance we are seeing emerge as a pattern for this Administration are both disappointing and of great concern."

Various neocons are weighing in, too. Writing in the Washington Post, Elliott Abrams accused the Obama administration of "mishandling" relations with Israel, adding: "The Obama administration continues to drift away from traditional U.S. support for Israel." In the same vein, Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, expressed alarm about a "tectonic drift" pushing the US and Israel apart, concluding:

"Israel and the United States have been drifting apart for some time, though that pace has accelerated during the Obama administration. The currents that have set Washington and Jerusalem on different courses are complex and cannot be boiled down to one failed mission (that of Vice President Biden) nor an indifferent president (Barack Obama). There is a generational shift underway, driving apart post-Zionist Israel and 21st-century America."

And Robert Satloff of the militantly pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy warned the administration not to tilt away from Israel after the insult to Biden:

"It would be shortsighted for the administration to use this episode as an opportunity to reward the Palestinians. ... And it would be an analytical blunder for the administration to believe that this incident is an opportunity that could precipitate Netanyahu's political demise."

Underlying all this is not just the reaction to an insulting announcement during the visit of Vice President Biden. Instead, at a more fundamental level, the Obama administration is beginning to realize that Israeli intransigence -- and the Netanyahu government, in particular -- is a major obstacle to US policy in the region, from Iraq to Iran to the struggle against Al Qaeda. It still remains to be seen if the White House the courage to do anything about it. In 2009, it didn't. But this is 2010.

Mar 1, 2010

Israeli-Palestinian West Bank Success Story Offers Hope

By Joe Klein

Sometimes the prosaic can be breathtaking. I am standing in the new showroom of a company that manufactures plumbing supplies in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Mansour Izgayer, one of three brothers who own the factory, is giving me a tour of his business and his life. He and his brothers were living in the U.S. when peace seemed to break out in the Middle East after the 1993 Oslo accords. They decided to return home, as did many other members of the Palestinian diaspora. They built their company, Royal Industries & Trading, persistently, even after the prospects for peace shattered in the second intifadeh and it became near impossible to do business in the midst of a war zone, near impossible to move their products through Israeli checkpoints. It still isn't very easy, but the past few years have been much better. A new Palestinian government quietly began to restore order and emphasize economic growth. Israel removed many, but not all, checkpoints. Royal now has 360 employees, new product lines — fireplaces, welcome mats — and a new wing, complete with an assembly hall. It has an on-site mosque and a cafeteria. The Izgayer brothers' story is at the heart of the new optimism and old frustrations that mark the West Bank territory of Palestine. (See TIME's Middle East covers.)

A young woman enters the showroom, walking confidently toward us and smiling. "Very nice to meet you," she says. "I'm new here." She does not shake my hand; she is religious, dressed in a hijab and bulky overcoat. Her name is Samiya abu-Rayyan, and she is a bit of a miracle as well — a graduate of a new program, Education for Employment (EFE), that trains young Palestinians in how to get and keep jobs. She is a graduate of Hebron University, but she was entirely unprepared for the workplace. "I had many interviews, but I didn't know how to introduce myself," she says. EFE taught her everything from how to fill out a job application to how to deal with an angry boss — and how to look someone in the eye and smile, even though that ran counter to the tradition in which she was raised. She learned some business English and marketing as well. After several months of training, she interviewed with a bank and the plumbing company and received offers from both. She chose Royal because the Izgayer brothers offered a religiously conservative working environment and because of the company mosque. (See pictures of 60 years of Israel.)

And here is another odd, but inspiring, thing: Samiya would not have her new skills if it were not for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. On that day, a Jewish American real estate magnate named Ronald Bruder was desperately searching for his daughter, who worked in downtown New York City, near ground zero. His daughter turned up safe, but the shock and panic stirred him. "I started reading and thinking about the Middle East," Bruder told me recently. "And what I came to was this: if people were gainfully employed, maybe they wouldn't be so angry at us." Bruder began to travel the region, asking questions. "It was the Minister of Education in Jordan who told me, 'If you really want to help, what we need is soft skills.' I didn't know what soft skills were," Bruder said. "Now they're my life." In fact, they are the sort of skills that Samiya abu-Rayyan has acquired.

Bruder started EFE's first program in Jordan in 2006, but he quickly expanded to Morocco, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, plus Gaza and the West Bank. EFE's graduates number only in the dozens in the West Bank, but more classes are about to begin in Hebron and Ramallah. "We can expand pretty rapidly," he said, "if there are jobs for the people we graduate."

Watch TIME's video about Mike Huckabee's tour of Israel.

See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East.

The West Bank GDP grew at around 8% in 2009, although that was an improvement on practically no economic activity at all. "We started from utter lawlessness, virtual disintegration in 2007," says Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Prime Minister — an economist who graduated from the University of Texas and spent much of his career at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Palestinian Authority had been sundered by the Hamas coup in Gaza; Fayyad — a technocrat's technocrat — freely admits that governance in the West Bank had long been marked by corruption and ineptitude. "The only way to gain Palestinian statehood," Fayyad says, "was to start building the institutions of a credible state."

The first job was to regain control of the streets, which were in the hands of criminal gangs and radical militias. With the help of U.S. General Keith Dayton, the Palestinians trained five brigades (2,500 troops) of a new national-security force — with two more in the pipeline — and began training local police. "We started with Nablus, the most lawless city," says Fayyad. "Our policy was zero tolerance. Anyone who committed a crime was an outlaw, regardless of party affiliation." It seems to have worked. Nell Derick Debevoise, an American woman who works with an excellent pre- and after-school program in Nablus called Tomorrow's Youth, told me, "When I first got here, you couldn't walk the streets or go to the Old City. Now you can. In fact, there are some good restaurants opening there." (See the top 10 news stories of 2009.)

Security, Fayyad assumed, was one prerequisite of economic development. Another was transparent governance. "We're firing incompetents and thieves in the government. You can't be taken seriously unless you fire people," Fayyad says. As a result, "we're beginning to see some economic growth. Cement consumption is up 30%." Part of the growth has been funded by aid from the U.S., Europe and the Islamic world, which helps pay the salaries of government workers and funds new infrastructure projects. In 2008, Fayyad held a conference in Bethlehem, looking to begin the next phase — private development — and got some takers, including a Palestinian developer named Bashar Masri who is building an entire new city for 50,000 just outside Ramallah. "We could not have done this without Fayyad's reforms," Masri told me. "I mean, you deal with the police or with bureaucrats. They don't ask for a bribe. That never happened in Palestine before."

But the progress is taking place in the context of repression: the West Bank still has many aspects of a low-security prison. Israel controls the borders, the airspace, the water supply and the electricity. As you drive from Ramallah north to Nablus, illegal Israeli settlements and outposts command the tops of many hills — an infestation that most Palestinians, rightly, consider a continuing invasion of their land. Even the most optimistic Palestinians assume that the real Israeli plan is to wait them out, keep building settlements and force as many Palestinians into the diaspora as they can. Benjamin Netanyahu's recent decision to declare sites in the Arab cities of Hebron and Bethlehem Jewish historical landmarks seemed a provocation intended to cause the sort of mass violence that has destroyed the hopes of responsible Palestinians in the past. Fayyad's progress is as fragile as plate glass; the next rock thrown could shatter it. (See TIME's photo-essay "Life in the West Bank Settlements.")

"We are working hard. In fact, we have met every one of the obligations that we were assigned by the road map," says Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, referring to the peace process instituted by George W. Bush. Many Israelis, including members of the Netanyahu government, privately agree that the West Bank Palestinians, who had famously kicked away every good chance for peace they were offered, have finally gotten their act together. There has been no significant violence directed at Israel from the West Bank. Even the Hamas-controlled border with Gaza has been quiet. "On the other hand, what have the Israelis done to meet their road-map obligations?" Abbas continues. "What have they done with regard to stopping illegal settlement on our land?"

That is a very good question. Abbas and Fayyad plan to have all the components of a functioning Palestinian state in place in the West Bank by the summer of 2011. At that point, a different question arises — not just for Israel but for the U.S.: What obstacles are there to recognizing a legitimate state of Palestine? What excuses do we have left?

Feb 24, 2010

Israeli politician Livni hails Dubai Hamas killing

Mr Mabhouh died in his hotel room in Dubai last month

Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni has applauded the controversial killing of a Hamas commander in a Dubai hotel by suspected Israeli agents.

"The fact that a terrorist was killed, and it doesn't matter if it was in Dubai or Gaza, is good news to those fighting terrorism," she said.

It is thought to be the first time a top Israeli has made such a comment.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in his room on 20 January, having been electrocuted and suffocated.

His alleged killers used fake British, Irish, German and French passports, according to the authorities in Dubai, which released pictures of the suspects, none of whom were caught.

Mr Mabhouh was one of the founders of Hamas's military wing.

The Israeli secret service Mossad has been widely accused of carrying out the killing but Israel has repeatedly asserted there is no proof its agents were involved.

'Fighting terrorism'

Mrs Livni, the former foreign minister who leads the parliamentary opposition for the Kadima party, did not indicate who was behind the killing.

"The entire world must support those fighting terrorism," she told a Jewish conference in Jerusalem.

"Any comparison between terrorism and those fighting it is immoral."

The current Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, responded to allegations of a Mossad plot last week by saying: "Israel never responds, never confirms and never denies."

Dubai security cameras picked up 18 members of what local police believe was a hit team.

Diplomatic tension between Western states and Israel has grown over the killing.

Hamas man's son Mosab Hassan Yousef 'was Israeli spy'

Image via Wikipedia

By Patrick Jackson
BBC News

The son of a jailed Hamas leader who converted to Christianity and moved to California has gone public to say that he spied for Israel.

Speaking before the release of a book about his life, Mosab Hassan Yousef made the assertion in an interview for Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

A former deputy head of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service told BBC World Service he had been one of its agents.

But a Hamas leader dismissed the report as a slander on the Islamist group.

Mr Yousef, 32, is a son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior Hamas figure in the West Bank, who is currently serving a six-year prison sentence in an Israeli prison.

He provided very important information like hundreds of others fighting against terror,
Gideon Ezra, former deputy leader of Shin Bet

If the younger Yousef's revelations are true, and he did play a role in preventing Hamas attacks on Israel, it will be an embarrassment for the group, which prides itself on its tight discipline and shuns the Palestinian Authority because of its peace negotiations with Israel.

While the Yousef case dates back several years, there have been suggestions the group was betrayed more recently when Hamas figure Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated in Dubai on 20 January.

'Slander and lies'

Mosab Hassan Yousef converted to Christianity and moved to the US in 2007.

The book he co-wrote, Son of Hamas, is due to be published there shortly.

SHIN BET
Referred to officially as Shabak in Hebrew or the Israel Security Agency in English
Charged with defending against terrorism, subversion and espionage
Interrogates suspected militants at special centres across Israel
Has been accused of using torture against Palestinians
Shin Bet seeks speakers of Farsi

"He provided very important information like hundreds of others fighting against terror," Gideon Ezra, formerly deputy leader of Shin Bet and now a member of the Knesset for the Kadima party, told BBC World Service.

Mr Ezra said the younger Yousef had been persuaded to spy for Israel while being held in prison himself.

Earlier, senior Hamas leader Ismail Radwan condemned Haaretz's report as "baseless slander" aimed at the elder Yousef.

"The Palestinian people have great confidence in Hamas and its struggle and they will not be fooled by this slander and these lies of the Israeli occupation," he told AFP news agency.

Haaretz journalist Avi Issacharoff, who wrote the original article, told the BBC Mr Yousef was not prepared to give any further media interviews as of Wednesday morning.

News of his religious conversion in 2008 shocked many Muslims in the Gaza Strip and he was condemned by some for his "apostasy".

'Prized source'

Mosab Hassan Yousef was considered Shin Bet's most reliable source in the Hamas leadership, earning himself the nickname "the Green Prince" because of the colour of the group's flag and his pedigree as the son of one of the movement's founders, Haaretz writes.

One of his Israeli "handlers" told the paper that he had saved many lives, with one of his insights "worth 1,000 hours of thought by top experts".

"The amazing thing is that none of his actions were done for money," the handler, named in the book as "Captain Loai", added.

Speaking to the newspaper by phone from California, Mr Yousef appeared to be still brimming with enthusiasm for Israel's fight against Hamas.

"I wish I were in Gaza now," he was quoted as saying. "I would put on an army uniform and join Israel's special forces in order to liberate [Israeli hostage] Gilad Shalit."

Gideon Ezra told the BBC that it was not easy for Israel to penetrate Hamas but it was "doing its best".

His country, he argued, had no choice but to recruit agents within Palestinian militant groups in order to avoid attacks, though he added that the security situation in the West Bank had improved under the Palestinian Authority from Israel's perspective.

Asked about his own experience of recruiting Palestinian agents, he said there were many motives for them to turn spy.

"It depends on each person," he added. "You can't do it through threats. If they don't do it willingly, you can't force them to be your informant."

Jan 23, 2010

Hezbollah's relocation of rocket sites to Lebanon's interior poses wider threat

Image by Paul Keller via Flickr

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 23, 2010; A06

BEIRUT -- Hezbollah has dispersed its long-range-rocket sites deep into northern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, a move that analysts say threatens to broaden any future conflict between the Islamist movement and Israel into a war between the two countries.

More than 10,000 U.N. troops now patrol traditional Hezbollah territory in southern Lebanon along the Israeli border, and several thousand Lebanese armed forces personnel also have moved into the area. A cross-border raid by Hezbollah guerrillas in summer 2006 triggered a month-long war that prompted the United Nations to deploy its force as part of a cease-fire.

The United Nations is confident that the dense presence of its troops in the comparatively small area is helping lower the risk of conflict and minimizing Hezbollah's ability to move weapons across southern Lebanon, but analysts in Lebanon and Israel say the U.N. mission is almost beside the point.

Hezbollah's redeployment and rearmament indicate that its next clash with Israel is unlikely to focus on the border, instead moving farther into Lebanon and challenging both the military and the government. The situation is important for U.S. efforts in the region, whether aimed at curbing the influence of Hezbollah's patrons in Iran or at persuading Syria to moderate its stance toward Israel and its neighbors.

Hezbollah "learned their lesson" in 2006, when vital intelligence enabled the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the group's long-range launch sites in the first days of the conflict, said reserve Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, a former head of IDF intelligence. In effect, he said, "the 'border' is now the Litani River," with Hezbollah's rocket sites possibly extending north of Beirut.

In a December briefing, Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the IDF head of operations, said some Hezbollah rockets now have a range of more than 150 miles -- making Tel Aviv reachable from as far away as Beirut. The Islamist group has talked openly of its efforts to rebuild, and Israel estimates that Hezbollah has about 40,000 projectiles, most of them shorter-range rockets and mortar shells.

The group "has been fortifying lots of different areas," said Judith Palmer Harik, a Hezbollah scholar in Beirut. With U.N. and Lebanese forces "packed along the border," she said, "we are looking at a much more expanded battle in all senses of the word."

Just a matter of time?

The border has been relatively quiet since the 2006 war, a fact that officials with the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon attribute at least partly to the 400 or so patrols they send out each day to search for weapons stores and prevent border violations.

Armored U.N. vehicles sit at the entrance to southern Lebanon, alongside Lebanese army and intelligence checkpoints; blue-flagged U.N. troops occupy mountaintop posts that Hezbollah used as firing sites in 2006.

"We are covering every square inch," said Maj. S.K. Misra, a spokesman for the battalion of India's 3/11 Gurkha Rifles corps that patrols southeastern Lebanon. "It's impossible for anything to move."

At the same time, debate is raging in political and military circles between those who argue that the damage to each side in 2006 has created a sort of respectful deterrence between Israel and Hezbollah and those who say it is only a matter of time before violence erupts again.

Hezbollah lost hundreds of fighters in the conflict and was put on the defensive in Lebanon, where some questioned whether the group's vow to continue "resistance" against Israel was worth letting an unregulated paramilitary organization effectively make decisions about war and peace.

With Iran backing and supplying Hezbollah and the United States backing and supplying Israel, "the battlefield is Lebanon," said Marwan Hamadeh, a Lebanese member of parliament and supporter of a government coalition that is trying to curb Hezbollah's arms and limit Syrian and Iranian influence in the country. "This is where the Iranian missiles sit, and this is where the Israeli air force can reach."

Israel, meanwhile, lost more than 100 troops and uncharacteristically large numbers of tanks, helicopters and other equipment -- prompting it to rewrite its war doctrine and adjust its perception of Hezbollah's militia. Military analysts now see Hezbollah not as primarily a guerrilla force but as an organization that practices "hybrid war," mixing classic guerrilla tactics with the strategy, equipment and capability of a standing army.

In a 2008 report for the U.S. Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, analysts Stephen D. Biddle and Jeffrey A. Friedman concluded that Hezbollah had performed more effectively in 2006 than any of the Arab armies from Egypt, Syria or Jordan that had fought conventional wars with Israel over the years, and better in some ways than the Iraqi army in its two wars with the United States.

A wider struggle

In Beirut, politicians and analysts agree that the group has only grown stronger since 2006. As they hear Hezbollah's secretary general, Hasan Nasrallah, speak of a conflict that will "change the face of the region," many assume that the IDF will not allow the organization to rearm, recruit and train much longer before striking.

In Israel, Hezbollah is seen as part of a wider struggle for regional influence between Iran and U.S.-allied moderate Arab states, given the group's ties to Iran and Syria and arms supplies assumed to run through both countries.

There is no reason the current calm cannot continue, said retired Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a former Israeli national security adviser who is now a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies.

But if a conflict does break out, "Israel will not contain that war against Hezbollah," Eiland said. "We cannot."

Given Hezbollah's capabilities, he said, "the only way to deter the other side and prevent the next round -- or if it happens, to win -- is to have a military confrontation with the state of Lebanon."

Jan 20, 2010

Imposing Middle East Peace

By Henry Siegman

This article appeared in the January 25, 2010 edition of The Nation.

January 7, 2010

This article is based on a longer study commissioned by the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre in Oslo.

PETER O. ZIERLEIN

Israel's relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if it did not relinquish "almost all the territories, if not all," including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem.

Olmert ridiculed Israeli defense strategists who, he said, had learned nothing from past experiences and were stuck in the mindset of the 1948 war of independence. "With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop," he said. "All these things are worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"

It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles--although denied by Israel's government--that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.

It is not only the settlements' proliferation and size that have made their dismantlement impossible. Equally decisive have been the influence of Israel's settler-security-industrial complex, which conceived and implemented this policy; the recent disappearance of a viable pro-peace political party in Israel; and the infiltration by settlers and their supporters in the religious-national camp into key leadership positions in Israel's security and military establishments.

Olmert was mistaken in one respect, for he said Israel would turn into an apartheid state when the Arab population in Greater Israel outnumbers the Jewish population. But the relative size of the populations is not the decisive factor in such a transition. Rather, the turning point comes when a state denies national self-determination to a part of its population--even one that is in the minority--to which it has also denied the rights of citizenship.

When a state's denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population's ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens--while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army--is not democracy but its opposite.

The Jewish settlements and their supporting infrastructure, which span the West Bank from east to west and north to south, are not a wild growth, like weeds in a garden. They have been carefully planned, financed and protected by successive Israeli governments and Israel's military. Their purpose has been to deny the Palestinian people independence and statehood--or to put it more precisely, to retain Israeli control of Palestine "from the river to the sea," an objective that precludes the existence of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state east of Israel's pre-1967 border.

A vivid recollection from the time I headed the American Jewish Congress is a helicopter trip over the West Bank on which I was taken by Ariel Sharon. With large, worn maps in hand, he pointed out to me strategic locations of present and future settlements on east-west and north-south axes that, Sharon assured me, would rule out a future Palestinian state.

Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, then defense minister, described Israel's plan for the future of the territories as "the current reality." "The plan is being implemented in actual fact," he said. "What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank." Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv whose theme was finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Dayan said: "The question is not, What is the solution? but, How do we live without a solution?"

Prime Minister Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would leave under Israel's control Palestine's international borders and airspace, as well as the entire Jordan Valley; would leave most of the settlers in place; and would fragment the contiguity of the territory remaining for such a state. His conditions would also deny Palestinians even those parts of East Jerusalem that Israel unilaterally annexed to the city immediately following the 1967 war--land that had never been part of Jerusalem before the war. In other words, Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would meet Dayan's goal of leaving Israel's de facto occupation in place.

From Dayan's prescription for the permanence of the status quo to Netanyahu's prescription for a two-state solution, Israel has lived "without a solution," not because of uncertainty or neglect but as a matter of deliberate policy, clandestinely driving settlement expansion to the point of irreversibility while pretending to search for "a Palestinian partner for peace."

Sooner or later the White House, Congress and the American public--not to speak of a Jewish establishment that is largely out of touch with the younger Jewish generation's changing perceptions of Israel's behavior--will have to face the fact that America's "special relationship" with Israel is sustaining a colonial enterprise.

President Barack Obama's capitulation to Netanyahu on the settlement freeze was widely seen as the collapse of the latest hope for achievement of a two-state agreement. It thoroughly discredited the notion that Palestinian moderation is the path to statehood, and therefore also discredited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, moderation's leading Palestinian advocate, who announced his intention not to run in the coming presidential elections.

Netanyahu's "limited" freeze was described by the Obama administration as "unprecedented," even though the exceptions to it--3,000 housing units whose foundations had supposedly already been laid, public buildings and unlimited construction in East Jerusalem--brought total construction to where it would have been without a freeze. Indeed, Netanyahu assured the settler leadership and his cabinet that construction will resume after the ten-month freeze--according to minister Benny Begin, at a rate "faster and more than before"--even if Abbas agrees to return to talks. In fact, the Israeli press has reported that the freeze notwithstanding, new construction in the settlements is "booming." None of this has elicited the Obama administration's public rebuke, much less the kinds of sanctions imposed on Palestinians when they violate agreements.

But what is widely believed to have been the final blow to a two-state solution may in fact turn out to be the necessary condition for its eventual achievement. That condition is abandonment of the utterly wrongheaded idea that a Palestinian state can arise without forceful outside intervention. The international community has shown signs of exasperation with Israel's deceptions and stonewalling, and also with Washington's failure to demonstrate that there are consequences not only for Palestinian violations of agreements but for Israeli ones as well. The last thing many in the international community want is a resumption of predictably meaningless negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas. Instead, they are focusing on forceful third-party intervention, a concept that is no longer taboo.

Ironically, it is Netanyahu who now insists on the resumption of peace talks. For him, a prolonged breakdown of talks risks exposing the irreversibility of the settlements, and therefore the loss of Israel's democratic character, and legitimizing outside intervention as the only alternative to an unstable and dangerous status quo. While the Obama administration may be reluctant to support such initiatives, it may no longer wish to block them.

These are not fanciful fears. Israeli chiefs of military intelligence, the Shin Bet and other defense officials told Netanyahu's security cabinet on December 9 that the stalled peace process has led to a dangerous vacuum "into which a number of different states are putting their own initiatives, none of which are in Israel's favor." They stressed that "the fact that the US has also reached a dead-end in its efforts only worsens the problem."

If these fears are realized and the international community abandons a moribund peace process in favor of determined third-party initiatives, a two-state outcome may yet be possible. A recent proposal by the Swedish presidency of the European Union is perhaps the first indication of the international community's determination to react more meaningfully to Netanyahu's intransigence. The proposal, adopted by the EU's foreign ministers on December 8, reaffirmed an earlier declaration of the European Council that the EU would not recognize unilateral Israeli changes in the pre-1967 borders. The resolution also opposes Israeli measures to deny a prospective Palestinian state any presence in Jerusalem. The statement's endorsement of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's two-year institution-building initiative suggests a future willingness to act favorably on a Palestinian declaration of statehood following the initiative's projected completion. In her first pronouncement on the Israel-Palestine conflict as the EU's new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Baroness Catherine Ashton declared, "We cannot and nor, I doubt, can the region tolerate another round of fruitless negotiations."

An imposed solution has risks, but these do not begin to compare with the risks of the conflict's unchecked continuation. Furthermore, since the adversaries are not being asked to accept anything they have not already committed themselves to in formal accords, the international community is not imposing its own ideas but insisting the parties live up to existing obligations. That kind of intervention, or "imposition," is hardly unprecedented; it is the daily fare of international diplomacy. It defines America's relations with allies and unfriendly countries alike.

It would not take extraordinary audacity for Obama to reaffirm the official position of every previous US administration--including that of George W. Bush--that no matter how desirable or necessary certain changes in the pre-1967 status may seem, they cannot be made unilaterally. Even Bush, celebrated in Israel as "the best American president Israel ever had," stated categorically that this inviolable principle applies even to the settlement blocs that Israel insists it will annex. Speaking of these blocs at a May 2005 press conference, Bush affirmed that "changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to," a qualification largely ignored by Israeli governments (and by Bush himself). The next year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was even more explicit. She stated that "the president did say that at the time of final status, it will be necessary to take into account new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, but under no circumstances...should anyone try and do that in a pre-emptive or predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status."

Of course, Obama should leave no doubt that it is inconceivable for the United States not to be fully responsive to Israel's genuine security needs, no matter how displeased it may be with a particular Israeli government's policies. But he must also leave no doubt that it is equally inconceivable he would abandon America's core values or compromise its strategic interests to keep Netanyahu's government in power, particularly when support for this government means supporting a regime that would permanently disenfranchise and dispossess the Palestinian people.

In short, Middle East peacemaking efforts will continue to fail, and the possibility of a two-state solution will disappear, if US policy continues to ignore developments on the ground in the occupied territories and within Israel, which now can be reversed only through outside intervention. President Obama is uniquely positioned to help Israel reclaim Jewish and democratic ideals on which the state was founded--if he does not continue "politics as usual." But was it not his promise to reject just such a politics that swept Obama into the presidency and captured the amazement and respect of the entire world?

About Henry Siegman

Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

Apr 8, 2010

Apr 6, 2010

Apr 2, 2010

Table of Contents

Contributor Bios

Additional Resources:

Mar 16, 2010

posted by Robert Dreyfuss on 03/15/2010 @ 11:56am

Mar 1, 2010

Feb 24, 2010

Jan 23, 2010

Jan 20, 2010

By Henry Siegman

January 7, 2010

About Henry Siegman