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.

On Sept. 1, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad celebrated with the residents of Qarawat Bani Hassan the inauguration of a mile-long road linking the small West Bank village to a spring its residents consider the lifeline of the community. It was called Freedom Road.

While Fayyad was on a trip to Japan this week, hoping to get more funding for his two-year “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State” program, of which building that road was one project, Israel on Wednesday destroyed the road, which is located in Area C of the West Bank.

According to the Oslo breakdown of the West Bank, Area C, which makes up more than 60% of the West Bank land, remains under full Israeli military control. But Area C is also an important segment in Fayyad’s state building program, crucial to his dream of setting up the necessary infrastructure for a viable Palestinian state by August 2011.

Israeli officials had informed Fayyad and the village residents that they would not allow the road because it was located in an area under its full control.

According to the village mayor, the Israeli army tried to stop construction on the $335,000 road, paid for by the Palestinian Authority, several times. But they continued with the project, and when the road was completed, Israeli officials informed the mayor two days before the inauguration that he had one week to destroy the road or the army would be sent in to do so.

But Fayyad snubbed the Israeli threat and proceeded with the official inauguration ceremonies.

Israel did not act until about three months later, when Fayyad was abroad, and bulldozers were sent in.

Fayyad on Thursday took time off from his busy schedule in Japan to denounce the Israeli step as “an act of sabotage.” He said, “Israel’s destruction of Freedom Road in Qarawat Bani Hassan will only strengthen the will of our people to continue on the road to freedom.” He vowed to rebuild the road.

The spring, to which the road was built, is located near an illegal Israeli settlement outpost called Havat Meir.

— Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank