Palestine - Tag Search

Gregg and I have been wondering for a couple of days how the United States would respond to being publicly embarrassed by an Israeli government that seems bent on continuing with the expansion of illegal settlements even as the West tries to organize highly sensitive negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

We didn't have to wait that long: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called up Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a 43-minute phone conversation on Friday morning to rebuke the Israeli leader about the "deeply negative signal" his government sent by approving more settler homes in East Jerusalem. Could this be the first sign of a tougher Obama administration approach toward Israel?

In the wake of Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Israel, a Knesset committee on Thursday endorsed a change to the country's planning procedures aimed at preventing a similarly embarrassing episode of bad timing from occurring again, the AP reports.

Within 24 hours of Biden's arrival, shortly after the Palestinians had agreed to so-called "proximity talks," Israel approved the construction of some 1,600 illegal homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem.

But the proposed change in the Knesset isn't meant to give greater scrutiny to settlement decisions; it's supposed to ensure that the timing of such announcements isn't as embarrassing in the future.

President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, arrived in Ramallah last night to begin "pre-talks" to the "proximity talks" the United States hopes will occur between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the National reports. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone who has much faith in their ultimate success.

James Rainey, the Los Angeles Times' media critic, waded into the month-old controversy over New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner yesterday, concluding that Bronner should be allowed to remain in his post, despite his son volunteering to join Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.

In his piece, Rainey argues that Bronner is a skilled reporter who should be judged on the content of his journalism, not on potential biases and internal thought processes that nobody besides Bronner himself can fully understand.

Rainey makes a good case for judging journalists by their work, but he also sidesteps the most powerful arguments against Bronner's remaining.

Nearly half of Palestinians would vote for Fatah if presidential elections were held next week, while only around 11 percent would vote for Hamas, according to a survey conducted recently in the West Bank and Gaza.

The poll, which queried 880 Palestinian men and women, found that nearly one third were undecided or would not vote.

The survey was conducted between Feb. 13 - 15. So far, it appears, only Benjamin Joffe-Walt of the Media Line has reported on the results. Our efforts to reach the polling group, Near East Consulting, by e-mail were unsuccessful.

Anwar al-Awlaqi, the Muslim spiritual leader who leaped into the news following revelations of his contact with Ford Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan, gave a rare interview to Al-Jazeera over the weekend in which he laid out his support for attempted Christmas Day airline bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab but said he did not personally order Abdulmutallab's attack.

Meanwhile, an audiotape posted on a jihadi forum, purportedly from the deputy commander of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Sa'id al-Shihri, called on Muslims in the region to "attack and eliminate" American and "Crusader" interests everywhere, according to the BBC.

Nine days after a coalition of human rights groups asked the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government in Gaza to investigate alleged war crimes committed against Israeli civilians during Israel's most recent incursion into the Strip, Hamas has cleared itself of any responsibility.

The speed and result of the Hamas "investigation" is certain not to please Israeli officials or the authors of the Goldstone Report, which recommended that its findings of war crimes on both sides be turned over to the International Criminal Court if Israel and Hamas "failed to carry out credible, independent investigations," according to the AFP.

Years ago, during a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with my father, I tried to illustrate the oppression under which Palestinians spend their daily lives by inviting him to imagine the Mexican army invading and annexing our idyllic Wisconsin neighborhood. How would our family feel if we were stopped, questioned or detained for hours (to say nothing of being injured or even shot) while going to the grocery store, school, or the doctor's office, I asked.

I'm sure it's a rhetorical scenario often employed by those who feel sympathy for innocent Palestinians who have lost control over their own volition. And I don't mean to belittle the other side: Israelis who have endured seemingly constant violent attacks on civilians. But many Americans and other Westerners have now experienced that sensation, or at least the fear it provokes. What we haven't felt is what it's like to live on the Palestinian side.

With that lengthy preamble, I suggest watching this very short film, "No Way Through," about a fictional London (I assume) living in a state of occupation. As Syria News Wire noted, there's a hint of "Children of Men" here.

Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni reversed plans to attend yesterday's annual conference of the Jewish National Fund's United Kingdom branch because a warrant had been issued for her arrest in connection with the 2008 Israeli offensive into Gaza, known as Operation Cast Lead, Al-Quds Al-Arabi has reported.

Sources close to Livni, the leader of Kadima, the largest parliamentary party, told the Jerusalem Post that she decided not to attend because she wouldn't get a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who was traveling. Livni's office first told Haaretz that she had canceled the London event two weeks ago due to a "scheduling conflict."

Hamas political-leader-in-exile Khaled Meshal, usually a denizen of Damascus, was in Yemen a couple days ago, apparently to serve as a mediator between Yemen and Iran, the scholar-journalist tag team over at Waq al-Waq noted in their Wednesday Arabic newspaper roundup.

They link to an القدس (al-Quds) piece by Khalid al-Hammadi on Meshal's presence, but the link doesn't seem to go to the actual story. I found only one other mention of Meshal's visit after a couple Google news searches, in a Spanish-language publication called Aurora, which offers "Everything about Israel and Judaism in Spanish."

Meshal met with Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, according to Aurora, and made some public statements about obstacles in the peace process, vis-a-vis a prisoner exchange for Corporal Gilad Shalit. No mention of Meshal's purported role in tamping down the heated rhetoric between Iran and Yemen, which blames Iran for supporting the Houthi rebels.

I guess the timing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's announcement of a 10-month partial settlement "freeze" should come as no surprise, heading as we are into a long holiday weekend when everyone will be so comatose on tryptophan that a news crawl at the bottom of CNN mentioning Bibi's "freeze" will only seem like a positive contribution by Israel to the peace process.

But the "freeze" can't be very encouraging for the Palestinians, whose hopes were raised after President Obama's Cairo speech and who now see that Netanyahu's administration has squirmed out from beneath the firm demand for a total freeze that started this whole thing. I don't see any official response from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas out on the wires yet, but this AFP story from yesterday probably sums up what he's feeling:

US President Barack Obama is "doing nothing right now" to restart the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said in an interview published Tuesday.

Roughly 20 years after the official fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinian protesters in the West Bank used their weekly demonstration at the town of Na'alin to uproot a portion of the infamous separation wall, Haaretz reports.

Side note: I mentioned below about uses of the phrase "Allahu akbar" in relation to the Fort Hood shooting. You can hear the protesters shouting it in the video when the wall section finally tips to the side. So that would be an example of a positive use.

Gregg has made no secret of his distaste for Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, a guy who seems (at least to me) to be a kind of Cheney to Netanyahu's Bush - an attack dog who doesn't mind adopting seemingly untenable and obstructionist positions.

I've never paid enough attention to Lieberman's antics to really get fired up about the guy, but this wonderful little anecdote in Joe Klein's Time magazine portrait of Hillary Clinton, where Klein talks about the intractable Israeli-Palestinian peace process, drives home exactly how much of an ass he can be:

The Palestinians are weak and divided. The Israelis have been difficult, as always: whenever [Middle East special envoy George] Mitchell raises East Jerusalem in talks with the Israeli Foreign Minister, the Israeli stands up and walks out of the room.

Now that's diplomacy, people.

In today's edition, we move past definitions and start getting into the good stuff - figuring out exactly how screwed the Arab world really is. First up in the cavalcade of depressing facts: Chapter Two of the Arab Human Development Report, which focuses on environmental threats to human security in the region.

First, a brief reminder about the 2009 AHDR: It's all about "human security." We covered the definition of that term in Part One. By approaching the Arab world from the point of view of human security - the problems confronting everyday citizens, rather than the state as a whole - the authors hope to address the roots of a wealth of problems in today's globalized world. Now, let's get started.

In the grand tradition of blogging everything that comes our way, the Majlis is going to wade through the 207-page 2009 Arab Human Development Report and give you chapter-by-chapter analysis. As with Gregg's ongoing blogging of the Goldstone Report, I hope our AHDR reporting can turn this behemoth into an easily digestible and interesting read for all of you.

I skipped the 15-page report summary - we'll get to everything they cover there in more detail - so let's dive right into Chapter One: "Applying the concept of human security in Arab countries."

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set out on a couple media wooing attempts in the wake of a meeting today between himself, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Barack Obama in Washington, D.C. - an attempt to "narrow the gaps" between their views on how to proceed with peace negotiations.

There's not a lot of news out there about how the talks went; probably there weren't any substantial advances, but hey, at least they shook hands. Netanyahu, meanwhile, seemed to do a skillful public relations job.

Almost since the moment Barack Obama took a brash first step into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by calling for a settlement freeze, commentators have been questioning the prudence of his decision. An emerging line of criticism wonders whether Obama is boxed in, or at least mired in the face of both Israeli and Arab obstinacy.

Shmuel Rosner, a Tel Aviv-based columnist and editor who blogs on the Jerusalem Post's Web site (what better qualifications do you need?), is the latest to take up this critique:

At the risk of seeming too hard on the Jews after my earlier post, here's a joke I just got from an e-mail listserv I belong to:

The Palestinian representative to the United Nations sat down to make his first speech at the General Assembly.

"Before beginning my talk, I want to tell you something about Moses. When he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought, 'What a good opportunity to have a bath!' He removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the water. When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished. An Israeli had stolen them."

The Israeli representative jumped up furiously and shouted, "What are you talking about? The Israelis weren't there then!"

The Palestinian representative smiled and said: "And now that we have made that clear, I will begin my speech."

"Our right to this land stems from the fact that God gave it to us, and as long as it is not in our hands, the world will face calamities."

Were it not for the title of this post, one might be inclined to reflexively attribute a quote like that to some raving mad Muslim in the Middle East, like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for example. But hold on a moment, dear reader:

"Once the Jews recognize our rights to this land and stand up for what is ours, that will bring a solution to all the world's problems."

That's right, it's a Jew. Rabbi Elishama Cohen of the "Homesh Yeshiva," to be exact - the subject of part two in New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner's series on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, entitled "The Hard Core."

Gregg mentioned in his roundup this morning that George Mitchell, the United States' special envoy to the Middle East, is meeting with high-level Israeli officials in Tel Aviv today. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, won't be there.

But don't fret: Netanyahu, much as he might like to, isn't ducking Mitchell. He's in Egypt, discussing regional peace and the fate of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

The Jerusalem Post, reporting on Netanyahu's visit, says Israel isn't pleased with the state of peace negotiations: