The Palestinian boycott of settlement products is starting to have an impact -- but not just on settlers.
Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, went to a Ramallah supermarket yesterday to launch the PA's new inspection campaign. 66,000 shops across the West Bank will be checked for settlement goods. Those in compliance with the boycott will get a certificate; those in violation will receive a fine, potentially worth several thousands of dollars.
Well, that didn't take long. The new week is less than a day old, and Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations that just officially began already seem to be sinking under the weight of that old bugaboo: settlement construction.
The Obama administration is counting on a carefully-timed sequence of events to jump-start "proximity talks" between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas will present a formal proposal for indirect talks when the Arab League's peace process committee meets on May 1. The Arab League already endorsed the talks early last month, but withdrew its support just over a week later after Israel approved new construction in Ramot Shlomo.
A new military order scheduled to go into effect tomorrow in Israel could give the Israeli government sweeping authority to deport hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank.
The new order is actually a revision of a 1969 directive aimed at keeping "infiltrators" out of the West Bank. The original version defined "infiltrator" as "a person who entered the area knowingly and unlawfully after having been present in the east bank of the Jordan, Syria, Egypt or Lebanon following the effective date."
An updated version of the order -- first reported this weekend by Ha'aretz's Amira Hass -- would change the definition to "a person who entered the area unlawfully following the effective date, or a person who is present in the area and does not lawfully hold a permit."
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas wants Palestinian Authority and Fatah officials to burn their sex tapes (عربي).
If you haven't been following the PA sex scandal: Abbas' chief of staff, Rafiq al-Husseini, was allegedly caught on tape soliciting sex from a female job applicant. The tape was made by a former Palestinian intelligence officer, who said he wanted to expose corruption in the PA, and surfaced after it was aired on an Israeli television station. That led an official inquiry and charges of corruption.
U.S. president Barack Obama will ask Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a four-month freeze on new construction in occupied East Jerusalem in exchange for a push for direct talks with the Palestinian Authority, according to a report in Ha'aretz.
The award for curious news story of the day goes to this piece from Politico's Josh Gerstein, who reports that a federal magistrate in Washington, D.C., has denied an effort by the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to get Atlantic writer and stubborn, fiery Israel-defender Jeffrey Goldberg to testify on their behalf in a case brought by a Jewish settler.
My suspicion is that the Palestinian Authority views "proximity talks" as a test for the Obama administration's willingness to impose consequences on Israel. PA officials have hinted at using the talks to "reveal Israel's true intentions to the world."
And the administration seems to understand that dynamic: Ha'aretz reports this morning that Washington "will assign blame" if the talks fall apart.
The Arab League -- meeting today in Cairo -- voted to endorse "proximity talks" between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. American mediators, presumably led by George Mitchell, will shuttle between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
I'm not even really sure where to begin writing about the latest on the Mahmoud al-Mabhouh assassination. The story really jumped into the spotlight today, largely because of the revelation that more than half of the 11 people wanted for Mabhouh's murder used real identities -- but fake passports.
Dubai police identified six of Mabhouh's killers as British passport holders Michael Lawrence Barney, James Leonard Clarke, Jonathan Louis Graham, Paul John Keeley, Stephen Daniel Hodes, and Melvyn Adam Mildiner.
And it turns out that all six are real people -- British citizens living in Israel. The killers used their identities on forged passports; the names, birthdays and other biographical information were accurate, but the signatures and photographs were not, according to British authorities. Mildiner actually appeared on Israel's Channel 10 news today, and said he hasn't left the country in two years.
The Dubai police department today released photos of the 11 people allegedly responsible for assassinating Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month -- and the chief of police says he's close to issuing arrest warrants for the group.
Everyone in the group held European passports, according to police: six British, three Irish, one French and one German. The lone woman in the group had an Irish passport. The Ma'an News Agency (عربي) and Al-Jazeera (عربي) both report that the group included two Palestinians; one of them reportedly met with the group's leader, a Frenchman named Peter.
Lt. Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim, Dubai's police chief, says both Palestinians were arrested in the UAE as they were leaving for trips to China and the Sudan. Tamim said one of them acted as a "spotter" for the assassination.
Well -- not exactly. The Palestinian Authority announced today (عربي) that it arrested six "al-Qaeda sympathizers"; the men reportedly had a cache of explosives and were planning to attack targets in the West Bank.
But Brig. Gen. Ibrahim Ramadan, the head of preventive security in Jenin, said that men have no known connections to al-Qaeda. They're allegedly inspired by Osama bin Laden -- but they were operating autonomously.
As a postscript to last week's, uh, post about Salam Fayyad's Herzliya speech, Abdel Bari Atwan has an absolutely savage column (عربي) in today's Al-Quds Al-Arabi. For Arabic speakers, the whole thing is worth a read -- it does a good job capturing the disconnect between the Palestinian Authority's official position on peace talks and the Palestinian public's opinion.
Obama's State of the Union address last night didn't spend much time on foreign policy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn't come up once. White House officials weren't even thinking about it: On a conference call with reporters before the speech, press secretary Robert Gibbs said he "didn't remember" whether the Middle East process was included in the text.
It came up today, though, in a town hall meeting in Tampa, Florida. A woman in the audience asked Obama a pointed question about U.S. policy in the region.
Palestinian officials are reportedly considering a proposal (عربي) for direct -- but low-level -- talks with Israel.
Israeli and Arab media say George Mitchell suggested the talks during his visit to the region last week. A team of ministers from both sides would discuss "confidence-building measures," like the transfer of territory from Israeli to Palestinian security control. The meetings would not include Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.
The U.S. is reportedly pressuring Abbas to restart talks, either directly at a lower level, or indirectly (through Mitchell) at a high level.
Israel's Channel 10 news reported yesterday on the peace deal Ehud Olmert offered to the Palestinian Authority in 2008. The channel also described a separate deal offered by then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni, which was apparently less generous than Olmert's offer.
Both reports come just days after Olmert's lengthy interview with The Australian (which we analyzed last week).
So here's my question. The Israeli PR machine is obviously trying hard to push this story; why? Olmert, I'm sure, is trying to rehabilitate his corruption-stained image. But is there a broader political goal here, too? Like trying to portray the PA as obstructionist?
You can see the broad outlines of Netanyahu's 2010 strategy emerging: He claims that the PA ignored his unprecedented partial settlement freeze, just like it ignored Olmert's and Livni's peace offerings in 2008; he condemns it for refusing to negotiate; and he writes off any further meaningful talks.
That's the word from Gaza's health ministry, which confirmed today that five people have been infected with swine flu. Authorities are concerned about a possible outbreak, because the Gaza government only has about 1,000 doses of H1N1 vaccine -- not enough to vaccinate Gaza's 8,000 health care workers, let alone the general population.
Officials in Gaza blame the shortage on the Hamas-Fatah rivalry: They say the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank has more vaccine, but refuses to send additional doses.
Gaza's medical infrastructure is in tatters because of the years-long Israeli embargo -- though, ironically, the embargo is also responsible for keeping the virus out of Gaza until now.
One of our regular commenters, the enigmatic "i," makes this point about yesterday's post on settlement expansion in the West Bank:
None of the settlements you mentioned are going to be part of a Palestinian state. So, this post is rather strange.
It's true: Most if not all of the settlements in question will become part of Israel in any two-state peace deal. But they're still settlements -- meaning that they're on the wrong side of the Green Line -- so any new construction will be viewed as undermining Israel's partial settlement freeze.
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.
We haven't written about a possible Gilad Shalit deal in, oh, two months, so I think we're long overdue for some speculation.
Reports today say Shalit could be released by the end of the week, in exchange for several hundred Palestinian prisoners. Israel reportedly agreed to free an extra 160 prisoners whose release had been previously vetoed. (That means they're probably militants.) The deal could happen as soon as Friday, the start of Eid al-Adha, according to reports.
Hamas officials are in Cairo today for a meeting with Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence chief, to discuss the deal.
