infinite hope

Palestinian officials plan to ask the United Nations to recognise an independent Palestinian state within 1967 borders if there is no progress in the peace process by September.

The idea is strongly opposed by Israel and its close ally, the United States.

Here is a guide to what is likely to happen and its significance.

PARIS – French President Nicolas Sarkozy says he will support a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence if peace talks with Israel don’t restart by September, dealing a tough setback to Israel’s campaign to isolate the incoming Palestinian unity government.

The comments published Thursday — similar to a message from Britain a day earlier — suggest Europe may be inching toward a watershed moment, joining those in favor of recognizing Palestine even if there is no peace deal with Israel.

However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reiterated Thursday that she is opposed to any unilateral move.

“We (Germany) don’t think unilateral steps are further helpful,” she said after meeting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin.

Sarkozy’s comments were published shortly before his meeting with visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is touring Europe to rally opposition against the Palestinians decision to form a unity government. Netanyahu says it is impossible to talk peace with a government that is set to include the Islamic militant group Hamas.

But so far, Netanyahu appears to be making limited progress. Western governments have called on Hamas to moderate its views, but are also urging Israel to make a new push for peace.

Read more…

kohenari:

And, having just written about why Netanyahu’s economic proposals intended to improve conditions in both the West Bank and Gaza made a great deal of sense, I came across the following in Haaretz:

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said in a press statement the proposal “is just only tricks and procrastination of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

In a second article, Erekat’s quote continued:

“What Netanyahu should do, if he wants to build confidence, is immediately stop settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem and recognize a Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967.”

I understand the Palestinians’ desire for an immediate freeze on settlement construction and immediate recognition of a Palestinian state … but I can’t imagine that at least the second of these two important things will happen in the absence of negotiation.

This proposal — rejected so quickly by the Palestinian Authority — seemed to offer a great deal to the Palestinian Authority, specifically, and to the Palestinian people in general.

As the New York Times reported:

Israel has agreed to begin discussions on the development of a Palestinian Authority gas field adjacent to an Israeli gas field off the coast of Gaza, which need to be developed simultaneously. Future revenues from the Palestinian field will go to the authority, Mr. Netanyahu said.

Israel also agreed in principle to allow the development of electricity, sanitation and water projects in Gaza, including the introduction of desalination plants, with the intention of making Gaza “independent of Israeli infrastructure,” Mr. Netanyahu said. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

In addition, Israel is supposed to approve additional construction projects and new procedures for the controlled entry of construction materials into Gaza.

Among the proposals for the West Bank, Israel said that it would speed up the building process for schools and health clinics in Israeli-controlled areas and that it approved in principle the extension of the Palestinian Authority’s security presence to seven towns in areas under Israeli security control, a longstanding authority demand.

Israel also said it encouraged projects for the improvement of infrastructure in Arab neighborhoods of Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.

What, precisely, seemed like “tricks and procrastination” in this proposal?

It’s clear that the real sticking point is the construction of settlements, which would not be halted by anything announced in this economic proposal. But it certainly seems odd to reject an offer that promises a great many things that have been demanded by the Palestinian Authority — and that would be of assistance to it (and to its people) — simply because one hasn’t yet been given, without any negotiation, everything that one has demanded.

It calls to mind those well-worn phrases about throwing out the baby with the bathwater or cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

This is baffling. I wonder how the Palestinian people feel about this. 

Several of the proposed steps relate to Gaza, where the authority’s rival, the Islamic militant group Hamas, holds sway. But Israel said that the beneficiaries of the improved infrastructure there would be the Gaza population, the Palestinian Authority and Israel itself.

Significantly, Israel has agreed to begin discussions on the development of a Palestinian Authority gas field adjacent to an Israeli gas field off the coast of Gaza, which need to be developed simultaneously. Future revenues from the Palestinian field will go to the authority, Mr. Netanyahu said.

Israel also agreed in principle to allow the development of electricity, sanitation and water projects in Gaza, including the introduction of desalination plants, with the intention of making Gaza “independent of Israeli infrastructure,” Mr. Netanyahu said. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

In addition, Israel is supposed to approve additional construction projects and new procedures for the controlled entry of construction materials into Gaza.

Among the proposals for the West Bank, Israel said that it would speed up the building process for schools and health clinics in Israeli-controlled areas and that it approved in principle the extension of the Palestinian Authority’s security presence to seven towns in areas under Israeli security control, a longstanding authority demand.

Israel also said it encouraged projects for the improvement of infrastructure in Arab neighborhoods of Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem. The Palestinians and most countries of the world do not recognize Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state.

The measures were announced before they had been formally presented to the Palestinian Authority, and there was no immediate response from the Palestinian side. Many details still have to be fleshed out in discussions over the next few months, and sounding a note of caution, Mr. Blair said, “Obviously, agreement to all this is not the same as implementation.” He added that “none of this is a substitute for a credible political process.”

Short-lived negotiations stalled in September after a 10-month Israeli moratorium on building new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank expired.

The Palestinians say they will not resume negotiations without an additional settlement freeze and clear terms of reference for the talks. Israeli officials have proposed offering alternative gestures and incentives as a way of coaxing the Palestinians back into negotiations. But there was no suggestion in the Netanyahu or Blair statements made Friday, or in a document outlining the new measures that was provided to The New York Times, that their implementation was conditional on a resumption of talks.

Read more…

…Once the most politicised people in the Arab world, Palestinians have been rendered amongst their most docile since Salam Fayyad, a World Bank official, was installed as the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister in 2007. Buffeted by Western funding and diplomatic support, the winds of change sweeping the West Bank have seen the Palestinian parliament muzzled, elections cancelled, and political parties whither. The most prominent signs of institution-building are the lugubrious new concrete fortresses of the security forces looming over Palestinian city centres.

The campaign which the PA initially launched against Hamas has broadened to encompass dissenters of all hues. Students at the shiny new campus of Nablus’ Najah University, once a hive of activism, snigger when asked about politics, and once publicity-seeking academics shy from giving their name, or even interviews. One speaks of empty seats marking where students have disappeared. Lecturers speaking out of line have been detained too; one says he was beaten. “Students film us on mobile phones,” says a reformed lecturer. “There’s not much we can do. It’s how students finance their studies.” Powerless and estranged, a striking number of Palestinians say they no longer bother to tune into news bulletins.

But Palestinian leaders can ill-afford to take their rule for granted. This is a conflict which has regularly sprung surprises. Al-Jazeera’s mockery of Palestinian negotiators, though overplayed, taps into mounting frustration that their leaders are more answerable to Israel and their Western patrons than their subjects. More than ever, Palestinians abroad—not only Hamas—are hailing their rule as illegitimate and unrepresentative. “The Palestinian Authority was only supposed to last five years,” says Karma Nabulsi, a UK-based Palestinian academic, referring to the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian interim agreement intended to pave the way for statehood.

The frustration is compounded by the fact that the Palestinian negotiators have so little to show for their efforts. Barack Obama’s deadline for statehood is barely seven months away with scant sign it will come to fruition. “How can it happen when even Israel’s most moderate government refused our most generous concessions,” says Hani al-Masri, a Palestinian commentator. Friendly banter with Israelis that might seem acceptable when the two sides are approaching a deal smacks of a sell-out when juggernauts loaded with pre-assembled homes for more Jewish settlers clog their roads.

Read more…

The New York Review of Books, Occupation of the Territories: Israeli Soldiers’ Testimonies 2000-2010

Throughout the territories, young soldiers interviewed in the book often find themselves protecting rampaging settlers and covering up their violence. For example:

I was guarding, and I see in the middle of my shift, around the afternoon, an old man with a cane coming down, an Arab from Abu Sneina, the old man looked 60 plus, with a cane, he gets to the Abu Sneina intersection, to Gross square, and all of a sudden three 16-17 year-old [settler] kids jump on him, they take him down to the floor within a second. They take a stone, open up his head. They start kicking him on the floor, opening up his head. A 60 year-old man with a stream of blood from his head…. An officer came on patrol, he didn’t know what they did, so he didn’t catch them. They just ran. And immediately the company medic came and started bandaging the old Palestinian, and we took him out in an ambulance…. It shocked me.

Afterwards I went to the officer really with my eyes tearing. A soldier for 7 months in the army, I didn’t understand what was going on here. I said to him that it can’t be like this, that we can’t protect them [the settlers], I didn’t understand how it could be. I was very shocked by that incident, it destroyed everything for me…. The soldiers don’t talk with each other about these things, there is no serious discussion in a company of combat soldiers. The male atmosphere, everything is jokes, and they treat everything with a lack of seriousness and all in all they try to get through the shit together. Because again, I told you, on the scale of unfortunate ones, you are pretty unfortunate as a soldier in Hebron. You are a sacrifice yourself.

I understood that basically everything that goes on there, [Palestinian] kids, 14 years old, 8 years old who die for no reason, innocent, where settlers go into their homes and shoot at them, and settlers go crazy in the streets and break store windows and beat up soldiers and throw eggs at soldiers and lynch the elderly, all of these things don’t even make it to the media. There is a small and isolated world in Hebron, the Avraham Avinu [settler] neighborhood sits alone in Hebron, more soldiers protect it than people live there. The people who live in that neighborhood do whatever they want, the soldiers are forced to protect them …

And it exists here in the State of Israel, and no one knows about it, and no one wants to know, and no one reports about it. People prefer not to know and not to understand that something terrible is happening not far from us, and really no one cares. And the soldiers there are unfortunate and the Palestinians are super-unfortunate. And no one helps them.

…President Obama’s challenge in Cairo in June 2009 that the “United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements” laid down a strong marker. But it has seemed designed to continue the flimsy distinction between the “illegitimacy” of settlements and their “illegality” under the Fourth Geneva Convention and the practice of all U.S. presidents for the past 30 years of avoiding condemnation of Israeli settlements as “illegal” in the U.N. and elsewhere under international law. 

It was not always this way. After the 1967 war and until 1981, all U.S. administrations condemned settlements as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In 1978, an opinion by the State Department’s Legal Advisor formalized this, echoing an opinion in 1967 by Theodor Meron, legal counsel to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which all Israeli governments have rejected, that “settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention” — which Israel had signed. 

But in 1981 President Reagan disagreed with his predecessors, saying in a press conference that settlements were “not illegal,” and the former U.S. policy lapsed. Reagan was influenced by advisors who supported Israel’s right to the Occupied Territories and others who thought IDF-defended settlements would protect Israel’s security. Nevertheless, neither the Reagan administration nor any successor adopted a new legal analysis supporting the legality of settlements, and the 1978 State opinion remains on the books.

The U.S. policy since 1981 of finessing the legal issue, blocking U.N. action, and, with rare exceptions, soft-pedaling U.S. opposition to settlements until President Obama’s strenuous effort to win a freeze, has been very costly. At the time of Reagan’s about-face, there were only 16,000 settlers in the West Bank, compared to over 300,000 today, and 59,000 in East Jerusalem compared to over 200,000 today. This huge growth makes an Israeli-Palestinian peace vastly more difficult, even as Egypt and Jordan have made peace, the Palestinian leadership has opted for a two state formula, and the Arab League has offered normal relations to Israel in return for a negotiated peace.

The traditional U.S. policy of blocking the U.N. and application of international law, thus protecting Israel from its own dangerous policies of occupation, is a dysfunctional anachronism. It does no favor to Israel, whose future as a Jewish, democratic state is at risk. It contradicts the Obama administration’s own opposition to settlements, and it forfeits a useful lever in persuading Israel to change its policy. Rather than bowing to domestic political pressures, and clinging to the view that the U.N. and international law have no role to play, the U.S. should rejoin the virtual international consensus on these issues, stand up for its own declared interests, and vote for the proposed Security Council resolution.

An older (2009) article, but it pertains to the discussion that was going on the other day. Bernstein repeated his criticisms in this speech at the University of Nebraska a few months ago.

AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.

The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.

But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers. Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.

Thoughts?

So sad. 

JERUSALEM — A 14-year-old boy was arrested Monday as the prime suspect in the largest fire in Israel’s history, a four-day inferno that left 42 people dead, devoured 10,000 acres of forest and forced Israel to request international assistance.

The boy, from the Carmel area, where the fire began, admitted under questioning that he had been smoking a tobacco water pipe, or narghile, and had thrown away a hot coal that set off the fire, said Micky Rosenfeld, a police spokesman. He fled the scene, and without sounding any alert, went back to school, Mr. Rosenfeld said.

Two other boys from the same area, 14 and 16, who the police said were suspected of starting the wildfire through negligence, were released to house arrest on Monday. The two, who are brothers, were not identified because they are minors. Relatives and their lawyer have denied that the boys were involved in starting the blaze, and their connection to the third boy was unclear.

The fire, which broke out in the forested hills near Haifa, in northern Israel, on Thursday, was mostly extinguished by Sunday evening, with officials crediting assistance from an international fleet of more than 30 firefighting aircraft and the so-called Supertanker, the world’s largest fire-extinguishing plane.

The death toll had stood at 41 until Monday, when the highest-ranking woman on the Israeli police force, who was critically injured in the fire, died.

Many Israelis had been closely following the condition of the woman — the police chief of Haifa, Deputy Commander Ahuva Tomer, 52 — as she hovered between life and death for four days. Ms. Tomer had become a national symbol in the fight against the ravaging fire. A police spokesman said that she had been promoted posthumously to the rank of brigadier general.

Ms. Tomer was interviewed Thursday, while sitting at the wheel of her police car, by an Israeli television reporter minutes before she set out and was caught in the flames. She had been traveling behind a busload of cadets training to become prison service officers, who had been sent north to help evacuate a prison threatened by the blaze. The bus and Ms. Tomer’s car were engulfed by flames as the rapidly spreading inferno was fanned by strong, unpredictable winds. Witnesses described the victims as being suddenly surrounded by walls of fire.

All 42 victims — including most of the cadets, two police officers and a 16-year-old boy from Haifa who was a volunteer with the fire service — were killed in the same firetrap.

The devastating toll has prompted fury that those in the government responsible for the fire services failed to ensure that they were equipped to handle the raging forest fire.

Israel, with its hot summers and paucity of rain, is prone to brush fires. A recent fire in the Golan Heights that burned for more than a day and scorched several thousand acres was set off by hikers who burned their toilet paper. Other fires have been started by stray shells used during military training.