The tragic shooting has spawned plenty of hysteria but little discussion about what we should do about potential Islamic terrorists in our midst.
By Jonathan Zimmerman
The Christian Science Monitor
November 6, 2009
New York - Can we talk?
That is, can Americans really communicate? The word means, literally, "To make common." And at times like this, I wonder if it's possible.
I didn't hear about the Fort Hood shootings until several hours after the news broke, but when I did, much of what I heard wasn't true. Some people told me that the suspect, Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan was a "convert" to Islam; others, that he had several Muslim accomplices; still others, that he had links to Al Qaeda.
False. False. False.
I got home to find the Internet aflame with vitriol, much of it directed at Islam itself. "Hasan is a BLACK MUSLIM," read a typical blog post. "This was a sleeper Muslim cell terrorist attack ... WITH MORE TO FOLLOW.... Unite AGAINST Islam now people!"
But I also found posts defending Hasan, who was reportedly facing overseas deployment. "They wanted to send him away to kill his own brothers and sisters in Iraq," one post screamed. "I would have done the same thing!"
Finally, others argued that any discussion of Hasan's ethnic or religious background was itself a form of discrimination. "I think giving out the Middle Eastern sounding name of the perpetrator is hate speech," a blogger argued. "No doubt this will give ammunition to patriotic Americans who value national security over diversity."
But that's precisely the discussion that we need to have: how to balance security and diversity, unity and freedom. How can we keep our country safe, but still respect the cultures of its different peoples? How can we join hands as a nation, but remain free as individuals?
And it's the same debate we've been having since 1776, when a Congressional committee suggested e pluribus unum — "out of many, one" — for our new national seal. But this discussion — like any real dialogue — requires agreement on a few basic ground rules: civility, reason, and tolerance.
During wartime, to be sure, Americans have often lost sight of these values. Consider attacks on German-Americans during the World War I, when several states banned the speaking of German in schools and on the streets. Or think of the internment of Japanese-Americans — and the confiscation of their property – during World War II.
The Internet attacks on "Islam" since Thursday's tragedy lie firmly within this tradition of nativism, bigotry, and hysteria. The shooter was Muslim, and what else do you need to know? Apparently, not much.
But irrationality and bad faith are hardly exclusive to the political right. The Fort Hood shootings have also triggered bouts of left-wing hysteria.
An extreme variation takes the form of the old syllogism, "My enemy's enemy is my friend." You don't like the war in Iraq; neither did Hasan; ergo, he must be OK in your book.
Never mind that Hasan gunned down more than three dozen innocents, or that he reportedly defended suicide bombers in Web postings. He's against all the right things, so you're for him.
More commonly, left-wing posters have refused to acknowledge any tension between freedom and security — or any threat to the United States from radical Islam. Hence the bizarre attacks on news organizations for noting Hasan's ethnic and religious background, as if any such information is irrelevant.
It isn't. There are people living here who want to commit acts of terror, and more than a few of them are radical Muslims. And Texas has seen its fair share.
In 1993, Kuwaiti immigrant Eyad Ismoil was living in Dallas when he was recruited to drive a bomb-laden van into a parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Five years later, Lebanese-born Wadih el Hage — Osama bin Laden's personal secretary – was arrested in Tarrant County, Texas, for his involvement in the bombings of two US embassies in Africa.
After 9/11, a federal jury convicted five members of a Texas-based Islamic charity of funneling money to terrorists. And just last month, authorities arrested a 19-year-old Jordanian immigrant, Hosam Smadi, for allegedly attempting to blow up a Dallas skyscraper.
None of that means that Hassan was part of a terrorist conspiracy, of course, or that we should view every Islamic immigrant with suspicion. But it does mean that we have a serious security problem on our hands. And it's simply irrational to deny it.
Indeed, by wishing the problem away, we put off the discussion that we so urgently need. What should we do about potential Islamic terrorists in our midst? How can we protect national security and individual liberty, all at the same time?
These are tough questions, as old as the republic itself. But we'll never get good answers unless we really talk about them. So far, it's not clear that we can.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of "Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory."
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The CIA’s Bureaucracy Problem (and my comments)
By Ishmael Jones
National Review
November 5, 2009
An Italian court recently sentenced 23 CIA employees in absentia for their role in the 2003 Abu Omar rendition.
We should capture terrorists anywhere, any time, but we should get the job done right and with a minimum of bureaucracy. Real spying is inexpensive and requires few people. The basic act of espionage is a single CIA officer meeting a single source — a person with access to secrets on terrorists or nuclear proliferators, for example — in a dingy hotel room in a dysfunctional country.
Any CIA operation that is revealed to the public, however, shows these telltale signs: The operation looks busy, a lot of people are involved, and large amounts of money are spent. Often you’ll hear the CIA accused of being risk averse. I agree. However, risk aversion is a complex concept. The CIA will sometimes conduct risky operations in order to achieve a more important goal: looking busy. In the Abu Omar operation, 21 Agency employees flew to Italy to abduct a single terrorist suspect — as an eminent scholar put it, “21 people to get one fat Egyptian!” — who was already under surveillance by the Italian police. The 21 people stayed in five-star hotels and chatted with headquarters on open-line cell phones, all at great expense and awful tradecraft. The number of people managing the operation from headquarters was enormous. But it was a successful operation in that it spent a lot of money, made a lot of people look active, and suggested the CIA’s willingness to take risk.
CIA officials are quick to deny that the organization is risk averse by pointing to risky operations that went wrong. This darker, more complex, passive-aggressive aspect of risk aversion seems to say: We can certainly do risky operations, but here’s what happens when you make us get off our couch and do them.
Take a look at any CIA activity that is revealed in the future and ask yourself: Was this a traditional, inexpensive intelligence operation involving a meeting between a CIA officer and a human source to gather intelligence? Or was this an operation designed to spend a lot of money, to make a lot of people look busy, and to give the appearance that the CIA is willing to take risk?
Whenever we see CIA employees released from bureaucracy, we see success. The tactical intelligence production within Iraq is excellent; the early Afghan campaign, featuring no offices and a flat chain of command, just a few guys and bags of money, was extraordinary.
“Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.
Mark says:
I post this article for several reasons. First, I highly recommend Jones' book, referenced above. At the very least, it provides insights into the fact that that the CIA is, probably before anything else, another large bureaucratic government agency.
Second, this article illustrates how bureaucratic politics, organizational drivers (rewards and punishments), and risk aversion can be as important, if not more important, than the goals and objectives of the organization, i.e., the CIA. Or, perhaps the stated public goals and objectives of the organization do not necessarily match or coincide with the bureaucratic goals and objectives of the organization?
Third, this article stands as a retort to the conspiracy mongers who think the CIA is an all-powerful, all-knowing entity responsible for everything that happens. Then again, the fact that the article was written by a former CIA agent would just be proof that it's another example of CIA disinformation to confuse and blind the naive public. Right?
National Review
November 5, 2009
An Italian court recently sentenced 23 CIA employees in absentia for their role in the 2003 Abu Omar rendition.
We should capture terrorists anywhere, any time, but we should get the job done right and with a minimum of bureaucracy. Real spying is inexpensive and requires few people. The basic act of espionage is a single CIA officer meeting a single source — a person with access to secrets on terrorists or nuclear proliferators, for example — in a dingy hotel room in a dysfunctional country.
Any CIA operation that is revealed to the public, however, shows these telltale signs: The operation looks busy, a lot of people are involved, and large amounts of money are spent. Often you’ll hear the CIA accused of being risk averse. I agree. However, risk aversion is a complex concept. The CIA will sometimes conduct risky operations in order to achieve a more important goal: looking busy. In the Abu Omar operation, 21 Agency employees flew to Italy to abduct a single terrorist suspect — as an eminent scholar put it, “21 people to get one fat Egyptian!” — who was already under surveillance by the Italian police. The 21 people stayed in five-star hotels and chatted with headquarters on open-line cell phones, all at great expense and awful tradecraft. The number of people managing the operation from headquarters was enormous. But it was a successful operation in that it spent a lot of money, made a lot of people look active, and suggested the CIA’s willingness to take risk.
CIA officials are quick to deny that the organization is risk averse by pointing to risky operations that went wrong. This darker, more complex, passive-aggressive aspect of risk aversion seems to say: We can certainly do risky operations, but here’s what happens when you make us get off our couch and do them.
Take a look at any CIA activity that is revealed in the future and ask yourself: Was this a traditional, inexpensive intelligence operation involving a meeting between a CIA officer and a human source to gather intelligence? Or was this an operation designed to spend a lot of money, to make a lot of people look busy, and to give the appearance that the CIA is willing to take risk?
Whenever we see CIA employees released from bureaucracy, we see success. The tactical intelligence production within Iraq is excellent; the early Afghan campaign, featuring no offices and a flat chain of command, just a few guys and bags of money, was extraordinary.
“Ishmael Jones” is a former deep-cover officer with the Central Intelligence Agency. He is the author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, published last year by Encounter Books.
Mark says:
I post this article for several reasons. First, I highly recommend Jones' book, referenced above. At the very least, it provides insights into the fact that that the CIA is, probably before anything else, another large bureaucratic government agency.
Second, this article illustrates how bureaucratic politics, organizational drivers (rewards and punishments), and risk aversion can be as important, if not more important, than the goals and objectives of the organization, i.e., the CIA. Or, perhaps the stated public goals and objectives of the organization do not necessarily match or coincide with the bureaucratic goals and objectives of the organization?
Third, this article stands as a retort to the conspiracy mongers who think the CIA is an all-powerful, all-knowing entity responsible for everything that happens. Then again, the fact that the article was written by a former CIA agent would just be proof that it's another example of CIA disinformation to confuse and blind the naive public. Right?
An Uncomfortable Truth (and my comments)
By Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times "At War: Notes From the Front Lines" Blog
November 10, 2009
JURM, Afghanistan – I got a lesson on a recent reporting trip in northern Afghanistan in what not to say to a mullah.
I will admit my guard was down. I had been talking to extremely reasonable Afghans at a school in an impossibly beautiful landscape, above a blue river with mountains on all sides. I was not expecting a lecture on jihad and the sins of the West.
But there it was, shot like a rocket from the mouth of Shamsullah, a 36-year-old mullah, who had been trained in a madrasa in Karachi, Pakistan.
He began with the familiar refrain that one of my Iraqi colleagues once famously termed “the answering machine,” because the message of the hard core never varies (with some regional differences). The colonialist West is trying to enslave Islam. Pakistan is an infidel state because its day of rest is Sunday, not Friday. It calls its capital Islamabad, but its courts are not Islamic. All bad.
He asked why I was not able to speak Dari, and then he snidely remarked, “They are all like that.” He meant that colonialists like me always have minions to assist. True, sort of.
“We not only hate Americans,” he said, squinting at the sun, “We hate all foreigners.”
But he made clear his opinion that it was American imperialists who unlawfully controlled Afghanistan and propped up a puppet, President Hamid Karzai.
Fine, but who did he vote for?
“Karzai,” he said with a smile.
But wasn’t he an American puppet?
“He refused to obey the orders of America,” he said, unsure of where this was going.
The real reason, in his own words, is that he, Shamsullah, is loyal to a rich former warlord who is Mr. Karzai’s ally, and he voted exactly how that man told him. He said this with pride.
By now we were driving him home to his village in our S.U.V. Walking would normally take him two hours. We sat in silence for a while. He took the front seat. We were two women in the back, and negotiating seating arrangements would have been tricky.
Suddenly he turned around to face us and said brightly: “If they held the election tomorrow, Hekmatyar would win.”
He was referring to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the militant Afghan leader who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, a man who is a living lesson for the United States. Once an American ally — the C.I.A. funneled millions of dollars in weapons and aid to him through Pakistan’s intelligence service – he is now on American wanted lists for his support of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He is believed to live in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city where Shamsullah lived for two years.
“Do you know who Hekmatyar is?” he asked me, grinning.
I do not know what came over me. Perhaps it was pent up frustration at having absorbed hundreds of answering machines messages over six years. The proper answer in this situation would have been: Hekmatyar is a glorious mujahedeen hero! But on this day, I said what was on my mind.
“He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.,” I said loudly over the hum of the car’s engine.
As I spoke, Shamsullah’s face cracked. His grin vanished. He swung his head away angrily and glared out the window, his body rigid. It was as if his brain had simply rejected the information. But the process had made him very angry.
My colleagues were pinching me. Their eyes were big and alarmed. The C.I.A. is the most despised institution in this part of the world, and everybody knows that you should never utter its acronym to anyone, never mind a militant mullah.
Soon after, we reached his village. I tried to make up for my mistake, but he was not buying it. Somehow the exchange had felt secretly exhilarating. He got out stiffly, thanked us for the ride and walked up the hill away from us. He did not look back or wave. We drove away as fast as we could.
Militant mullahs do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy. It happens in all faiths. But in recent years the world I have inhabited has been here, and every once in a while I reserve the right to leave the script.
Mark says:
I can understand her frustrations and the feelings that were pent up for so long and the need to respond just once to puncture someone's hypocrisy in such circumstances. I've been in similar situations, though I hasten to qualify that by emphasizing that it was not in Afghanistan and it was not with people who could kidnap or kill me (or at least I didn't think so at the time on a few of those occasions back in my youth).
But I think she was lucky this time to get away with it. It made her feel better, but I'm very sure that his views were not changed one iota. If anything, he will look for an opportunity the next time he may encounter her to get his revenge for her one upmanship.
I might suggest that, rather than challenging him so directly by stating, "He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.," she could have phrased it as a question. Then again, maybe not.
The New York Times "At War: Notes From the Front Lines" Blog
November 10, 2009
JURM, Afghanistan – I got a lesson on a recent reporting trip in northern Afghanistan in what not to say to a mullah.
I will admit my guard was down. I had been talking to extremely reasonable Afghans at a school in an impossibly beautiful landscape, above a blue river with mountains on all sides. I was not expecting a lecture on jihad and the sins of the West.
But there it was, shot like a rocket from the mouth of Shamsullah, a 36-year-old mullah, who had been trained in a madrasa in Karachi, Pakistan.
He began with the familiar refrain that one of my Iraqi colleagues once famously termed “the answering machine,” because the message of the hard core never varies (with some regional differences). The colonialist West is trying to enslave Islam. Pakistan is an infidel state because its day of rest is Sunday, not Friday. It calls its capital Islamabad, but its courts are not Islamic. All bad.
He asked why I was not able to speak Dari, and then he snidely remarked, “They are all like that.” He meant that colonialists like me always have minions to assist. True, sort of.
“We not only hate Americans,” he said, squinting at the sun, “We hate all foreigners.”
But he made clear his opinion that it was American imperialists who unlawfully controlled Afghanistan and propped up a puppet, President Hamid Karzai.
Fine, but who did he vote for?
“Karzai,” he said with a smile.
But wasn’t he an American puppet?
“He refused to obey the orders of America,” he said, unsure of where this was going.
The real reason, in his own words, is that he, Shamsullah, is loyal to a rich former warlord who is Mr. Karzai’s ally, and he voted exactly how that man told him. He said this with pride.
By now we were driving him home to his village in our S.U.V. Walking would normally take him two hours. We sat in silence for a while. He took the front seat. We were two women in the back, and negotiating seating arrangements would have been tricky.
Suddenly he turned around to face us and said brightly: “If they held the election tomorrow, Hekmatyar would win.”
He was referring to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the militant Afghan leader who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, a man who is a living lesson for the United States. Once an American ally — the C.I.A. funneled millions of dollars in weapons and aid to him through Pakistan’s intelligence service – he is now on American wanted lists for his support of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He is believed to live in Peshawar, Pakistan, a city where Shamsullah lived for two years.
“Do you know who Hekmatyar is?” he asked me, grinning.
I do not know what came over me. Perhaps it was pent up frustration at having absorbed hundreds of answering machines messages over six years. The proper answer in this situation would have been: Hekmatyar is a glorious mujahedeen hero! But on this day, I said what was on my mind.
“He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.,” I said loudly over the hum of the car’s engine.
As I spoke, Shamsullah’s face cracked. His grin vanished. He swung his head away angrily and glared out the window, his body rigid. It was as if his brain had simply rejected the information. But the process had made him very angry.
My colleagues were pinching me. Their eyes were big and alarmed. The C.I.A. is the most despised institution in this part of the world, and everybody knows that you should never utter its acronym to anyone, never mind a militant mullah.
Soon after, we reached his village. I tried to make up for my mistake, but he was not buying it. Somehow the exchange had felt secretly exhilarating. He got out stiffly, thanked us for the ride and walked up the hill away from us. He did not look back or wave. We drove away as fast as we could.
Militant mullahs do not have a monopoly on hypocrisy. It happens in all faiths. But in recent years the world I have inhabited has been here, and every once in a while I reserve the right to leave the script.
Mark says:
I can understand her frustrations and the feelings that were pent up for so long and the need to respond just once to puncture someone's hypocrisy in such circumstances. I've been in similar situations, though I hasten to qualify that by emphasizing that it was not in Afghanistan and it was not with people who could kidnap or kill me (or at least I didn't think so at the time on a few of those occasions back in my youth).
But I think she was lucky this time to get away with it. It made her feel better, but I'm very sure that his views were not changed one iota. If anything, he will look for an opportunity the next time he may encounter her to get his revenge for her one upmanship.
I might suggest that, rather than challenging him so directly by stating, "He was an Afghan mujahedeen who took money from the C.I.A.," she could have phrased it as a question. Then again, maybe not.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Together for peace
American Arabs and Jews, while deft at attacking each other at times, have proven they can cooperate to build a vision of a better future, writes James Zogby*
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
29 October - 4 November 2009
On Sunday, 25 October, representatives of over three dozen Arab American and American Jewish community organisations met in Washington to make clear their shared commitment to comprehensive Middle East peace. Hosted by J Street, which calls itself the US's "pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby", and the Arab American Institute, "the research and policy arm of the Arab American community", the event was joined by Tina Tchen, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
The message that the leaders and activists who gathered hoped to send, via this summit, was that despite their different starting points, both agree on the goal of a two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and are supportive of President Obama's peace making efforts, to date.
This is not the first time Arab Americans and American Jews have joined forces. I personally will never forget how after the September 1993 Rabin-Arafat signing ceremony on the White House lawn, president Bill Clinton and vice-president Al Gore brought together the leaders of both communities urging them to support peacemaking. Despite the euphoria of the moment, joint effort was difficult for some, requiring, as it did, a break with long-established patterns of behaviour.
Organisations in both communities knew how to oppose each other, but learning how to work together was new. However, as we were to discover, if peacemaking was our goal, then learn we must, as for peace to succeed there has to be a constituency that supports peace.
For his part, Gore launched Builders for Peace, a private sector initiative that brought together 150 Arab American and American Jewish business leaders who were given the challenge of working together in an effort to grow the Palestinian economy in support of peace. As Gore would often say, while economic progress was no substitute for peace, without improvement in the daily lives of people it would be impossible to sustain the work of peace.
To lead the effort, Gore asked former Congressman Mel Levine and myself to serve as co-chairs. In some ways we were an odd couple, since before that time we had only come together when we clashed during my testimony before his congressional committee, or when we appeared opposite one another, on Crossfire-style TV shows, debating US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But as Mel would note, while he and I might not have agreed on the past, we did agree on where we needed to go in the future. And that was sufficient to build our effort and our working relationship.
Because of a myriad of problems, ranging from Israeli-imposed impediments to economic development and Palestinian problems with corruption, Builders for Peace didn't succeed as we had hoped. But what did work was the experience of joint Arab American and American Jewish cooperation. Friendships were developed that have stood the test of time.
The intervening 16 years have not been kind to peacemaking. Thousands have died. Terrorism and repression have taken a bloody toll. Settlements and new barriers to peace have been erected and Israeli and Palestinian attitudes have been hardened. Extremists on both sides have gained ground while the hopes of many for peace have been dashed.
What hasn't changed, however, is the imperative for peace and the commitment of many to make it real. No doubt, conditions today are more difficult than they were 16 years ago. But we have a new US president who appears committed, despite overwhelming odds, to unravel this knot and find a way forward. He has noted that he is mindful of the fact that advancing towards peace "is important to Arab Americans, important to American Jews, and important to me" and has added that it is "important to the national security interests of the US".
While the prospects for peace, in fact, appear dim, the Arab American and American Jewish leaders who gathered in Washington agreed that it is worth the effort. We are both cognizant of the reality that our commitment to joint action in support of the president and peacemaking is not shared by all in our communities. Given the prevailing mood, there are some on both sides who look with suspicion on such cooperation. Some of us have been called "traitors" or "sell-outs", but such rhetoric misses the point.
Those of us who come together, in fact, remain faithful to the different historical narratives told by our respective communities. But we are not willing to let the story end there. We know that a way forward must be found, in order to reconcile these competing histories and to replace the current reign of terror and oppression with peace and justice. We are unwilling to be condemned by the scourge of the past, but seek a way to create a better future. And we know that in the end, our two communities, the people of the Middle East and our country will be better served by peace than by the continuing conflict.
That is why we came together, and why we will remain together, until, God willing, there is a just and lasting peace.
* The writer is president of the Arab American Institute.
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
29 October - 4 November 2009
On Sunday, 25 October, representatives of over three dozen Arab American and American Jewish community organisations met in Washington to make clear their shared commitment to comprehensive Middle East peace. Hosted by J Street, which calls itself the US's "pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby", and the Arab American Institute, "the research and policy arm of the Arab American community", the event was joined by Tina Tchen, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.
The message that the leaders and activists who gathered hoped to send, via this summit, was that despite their different starting points, both agree on the goal of a two-state solution to the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and are supportive of President Obama's peace making efforts, to date.
This is not the first time Arab Americans and American Jews have joined forces. I personally will never forget how after the September 1993 Rabin-Arafat signing ceremony on the White House lawn, president Bill Clinton and vice-president Al Gore brought together the leaders of both communities urging them to support peacemaking. Despite the euphoria of the moment, joint effort was difficult for some, requiring, as it did, a break with long-established patterns of behaviour.
Organisations in both communities knew how to oppose each other, but learning how to work together was new. However, as we were to discover, if peacemaking was our goal, then learn we must, as for peace to succeed there has to be a constituency that supports peace.
For his part, Gore launched Builders for Peace, a private sector initiative that brought together 150 Arab American and American Jewish business leaders who were given the challenge of working together in an effort to grow the Palestinian economy in support of peace. As Gore would often say, while economic progress was no substitute for peace, without improvement in the daily lives of people it would be impossible to sustain the work of peace.
To lead the effort, Gore asked former Congressman Mel Levine and myself to serve as co-chairs. In some ways we were an odd couple, since before that time we had only come together when we clashed during my testimony before his congressional committee, or when we appeared opposite one another, on Crossfire-style TV shows, debating US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But as Mel would note, while he and I might not have agreed on the past, we did agree on where we needed to go in the future. And that was sufficient to build our effort and our working relationship.
Because of a myriad of problems, ranging from Israeli-imposed impediments to economic development and Palestinian problems with corruption, Builders for Peace didn't succeed as we had hoped. But what did work was the experience of joint Arab American and American Jewish cooperation. Friendships were developed that have stood the test of time.
The intervening 16 years have not been kind to peacemaking. Thousands have died. Terrorism and repression have taken a bloody toll. Settlements and new barriers to peace have been erected and Israeli and Palestinian attitudes have been hardened. Extremists on both sides have gained ground while the hopes of many for peace have been dashed.
What hasn't changed, however, is the imperative for peace and the commitment of many to make it real. No doubt, conditions today are more difficult than they were 16 years ago. But we have a new US president who appears committed, despite overwhelming odds, to unravel this knot and find a way forward. He has noted that he is mindful of the fact that advancing towards peace "is important to Arab Americans, important to American Jews, and important to me" and has added that it is "important to the national security interests of the US".
While the prospects for peace, in fact, appear dim, the Arab American and American Jewish leaders who gathered in Washington agreed that it is worth the effort. We are both cognizant of the reality that our commitment to joint action in support of the president and peacemaking is not shared by all in our communities. Given the prevailing mood, there are some on both sides who look with suspicion on such cooperation. Some of us have been called "traitors" or "sell-outs", but such rhetoric misses the point.
Those of us who come together, in fact, remain faithful to the different historical narratives told by our respective communities. But we are not willing to let the story end there. We know that a way forward must be found, in order to reconcile these competing histories and to replace the current reign of terror and oppression with peace and justice. We are unwilling to be condemned by the scourge of the past, but seek a way to create a better future. And we know that in the end, our two communities, the people of the Middle East and our country will be better served by peace than by the continuing conflict.
That is why we came together, and why we will remain together, until, God willing, there is a just and lasting peace.
* The writer is president of the Arab American Institute.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Hussein Ibish on the Fantasy World of One-Staters
Interview by Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic
November 3, 2009
Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, "What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda?" which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It's useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters.
I spoke to Ibish about his arguments last week, shortly after he spoke at the J Street conference. Here is an edited version of our conversation:
Jeffrey Goldberg: What were your impressions of the conference?
Hussein Ibish: It was impressive as a first step. My impression is that there's still quite a bit of message-cohesion and message-formulation to be done. It seemed to me to be an insufficiently coherent group of people. The range of people was so large.
JG: You mean on the Zionist spectrum?
HI: I mean people ranging from the sort of centrist-center left, all the way to post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, who were there, too. It's not ultimately a group that's going to form, I think, a functional coalition. Right now, they're finding their feet. This is normal, it's inevitable — but at a certain point, I think they have to clarify what they are, who their constituency is, what they stand for, who they are, who they're not. They've been more successful in creating a space for themselves as a new voice that is compelling, but at other moments it's looked like where they were simply positioning themselves as the alternative to AIPAC. And my sense of things is that, initially, that they would look too much to their rivals. But sooner rather than later, they're going to have to just move on and start to define themselves in a much more coherent and pro-active way, not just in contrast to the traditional Jewish organizations but also to distinguish themselves from people in the Jewish community whose criticism of Israel makes them anathema to the mainstream of the community. They can't go there and I think they've tried not to go there.
JG: You can't be Zionist and non-Zionist at the same time, in other words.
HI: Exactly. I think it's essential for them. For us, it's not important.
JG: Well, isn't it important to have a pro-Israel, pro-two-state organization in Washington that's credibly Jewish?
HI: It is. But I believe that all of the mainstream organizations are moving in that direction. I think begrudgingly, without enthusiasm, I think they're all getting there, because I think ultimately the only organization that I can think of that is absolutely opposed to a two-state agreement are on the far right, the Zionist Organization of America, which is in favor of the occupation without reservations and, on the left, Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a one-state group all the way and without reservation. It seems to me everybody else occupies some space in the middle without being one-staters and without being flag-waving pro-settlers.
Now, the question is, from our point of view, what's really important is that the Jewish community have a range of dynamic organizations that are effective in advocating for peace based on two states, number one. And number two, that we can work with everybody who is in favor of a two-state solution without any other preconditions. I mean, we don't want to get involved in intra-Jewish rivalries. We want to work with everyone who wants peace based on two states. It's as simple as that. We don't have a huge stake in where J Street ultimately positions itself, but I will say this: The more mainstream it can become, the more powerful and important it will be. I think they should be as mainstream as possible, they should avoid the impression they sometimes give that they're perhaps not being sensitive to fears about Israel's security. There's a real appetite for a more robust, more aggressively pro-peace organization in the Jewish community. But from our perspective, the only people we don't want to talk to are the one-staters and the pro-occupation groups.
JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.
HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.
JG: I don't think you need an auditorium. Talk about these guys, the Tony Judts…
HI: I don't want to be too hard on Judt. Judt put out this argument and then he immediately admitted that it was utopian, that it wasn't serious and he was just doing a thought experiment. And since then, he basically has more or less withdrawn from the conversation Judt has not been a person who suggests that this is a realistic plan and a serious proposal for the future.
There are two fundamental flaws with pro-Palestinian strategic thinking that focuses on the idea of abandoning two states and going for a single state. The first is the question of feasibility, and it's hard to argue with that. Obviously anyone who is familiar with this sees the difficulty, and I would be the first to say that success is not assured by any means. Even a two-state agreement looks, at the moment, like something of a long shot. The difference between the two-state solution and everything else is that yes, it's a long shot, but it would work. And if we could conceivably get it, if we did get it, it would solve the conflict.
The fundamental argument that the one-staters seem to be making, which is that we can't possibly get Israel to end the occupation and relinquish their control of the 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) but we will inevitably succeed in getting them to relinquish one hundred percent of the territory under their control. This is a problem of logic. The second thing is that once you've realized this, obviously what you've done is set yourself the task of convincing Jewish Israelis to voluntarily do this. The idea of coercing the Israelis into this through military force is absurd, and it could only really be done through voluntary persuasion. What the one-staters argue, actually, is that they don't have to do that. What they're going to do, they say, is bring the Israelis to their knees.
JG: South Africa style?
HI: Well, South Africa style, except we don't have a South Africa equation here.
JG: But they believe they do.
HI: They believe that through the application of what they call BDS - Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - globally that they can crush the will of the Israelis and break the Zionist movement. To me, even if you believe that boycotts were plausible, which I don't, certainly I don't think the American government and institutions and corporations would participate.
JG: You have to move from the American consensus that supports supplying Israel with the best weaponry to not just a military cutoff but a complete cutoff and boycott. It's very hard to picture.
HI: Anyone who thinks that is plausible in the foreseeable future doesn't understand the nature of the American relationship with Israel. The commitment of the U.S., not just the government but American society, is to the survival and security of the Israeli state. And then there's another aspect, which is the extent to which Israeli institutions, organizations and corporations are interwoven at a very fundamental level with many of those in the U.S.
JG: Right, Intel and Google…
HI: I'm talking about corporate, governmental, intelligence, military, industrial, scientific ties. The point is that you can only take talk of boycott and sanctions seriously if you really don't understand any of this. And if you don't understand any of this, then you're living in a fantasy world. So here's the thing: Obviously the only real task for one-staters is to convince Jewish Israelis to agree to their solution. But instead of trying to do that, they engage in the most hyperbolic discourse about the badness of Zionism, the badness of Jewish Israelis, the rightness and primacy of not just a Palestinian narrative, but the most strident traditional Palestinian narrative, and the most tendentious Palestinian narrative, the one that places blame for the conflict entirely on the side of the Israelis, that casts Israel as the usurper and what they call in one-state circles now the "temporary racist usurping entity." These are the ones, by the way, who won't talk about my book. There's a refusal to acknowledge or read my book. I've nicknamed my book "the temporary racist usurping book."
These people are trapped in the language of the Fifties and Sixties. You're talking about a worldview is anachronistic in the most fundamental sense. It doesn't recognize any of the changes that have taken place since then. For example, the strategic situation that's emerged in the Middle East, where the Arab states and the Arabs generally have a lot of other things to worry about other than Israel. This is a world in which a lot of Gulf states are extremely concerned about Iraq, and where there are Arab states — Jordan and Egypt — that have treaties with Israel, where Syria has a motive to be civil with Israel that is unpleasant but completely stable, and where it's a very different environment than simply the Arabs and Israelis are enemies. The other thing that they've missed completely, and this is sort of the amazing thing, is the total transformation in American official policy toward the Palestinians over the past 20 years. Twenty-one years ago, there was no contact ever between the U.S. and the PLO. No contact, zero, and now Palestinian statehood is the consensus American foreign policy and it is a national security priority under Obama. People in the House, key positions like the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East, Gary Ackerman, Nita Lowey on Appropriations — all of them Jewish American members of Congress, stalwart supporters of Israel, and all of them committed to peace based on two states. And all of them, by the way, who were on the host committee of the American Task Force on Palestine gala last week.
JG: You've reached the Promised Land.
HI: Except that we haven't achieved the results.
JG: Yes, there's that. But you're on the road.
HI: Exactly. The transformation in American attitudes is almost mind-boggling, an official American attitude on ending the occupation, which has been the traditional goal of the Palestinians. And at this very moment, a group of Palestinians turns around and says, 'Sorry, not good enough, we want it all. Not only is a single Palestinian state not achievable, it's not desirable, it's not acceptable, it's not enough, we want it all.'
JG: Who are the leaders of the movement?
HI: People like Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Ghada Karmi, Omar Barghouti.
JG: And you think they're succumbing to fantastic dreams. This is the traditional criticism of Palestinian politics over the past sixty years, that it's very hard to separate out the dreams from…
HI: It goes back further than sixty years. It's an article of Palestinian nationalist faith that is almost one hundred years old, which is that demography is destiny, demography is power. This notion that if we just sit here, on the land, have children, are steadfast and don't agree to anything, then political power ultimately will flow to us. In the twenties, they believed if we do that, then, just by virtue of our presence in the land, our numbers, our demography, Israel will never be established. After Israel was established, it was just, "Well if we're steadfast and we don't agree, then Israel will be reversed." Then it was, "Well if we just do this, then independence will come in the occupied territories." Now the latest version is if we're just steadfast, we can create a South Africa-like model and we will reverse the war of 1948 at the ballot.
JG: But I have to tell you that for people like me, this is a real worry. This goes with the argument that the settlements are the vanguard of one-statism.
HI: Now there is some truth to this. I think it's useful for people like (Ehud) Olmert or people like yourself to point out that with the occupation going the way it is, there won't be a Palestinian state, and then Israel will be in a situation where it is neither meaningfully Jewish nor meaningfully democratic. I think you could claim that already, if you talk about the de facto Israeli state rather than Israel in its normally perceived borders, that is already the case and it will be increasingly so. Now here's the thing: The alternative, though, is not going to be a single state in the foreseeable future. It's possible we could get there, but it won't be a solution, it will be an outcome. There's a big difference. An outcome of a horrible, brutal, bloody civil conflict that drags on for generations, because even though this demographic issue and the legitimacy issues are crises for Israel, I don't think they result in the dissolution of the Israeli state.
JG: In other words, most Israeli Jews would rather have a Jewish state than a democratic state.
HI: Yes, it's obvious. And I think that what you would get is a protracted civil war that is essentially an intensification of the civil war we've had. So I do say the single state is a potential eventuality, but it would be the outcome of a horrible scenario. Look, the idea that if the current round of talks breaks down and Obama gives up and the U.S. gives up and we all give up, then the alternative is a Gandhian non-violent struggle of sanctions and boycotts that will somehow bring Israel to its knees, that is not the way it's going to go. We know the way it's going to go.
JG: Each intifada is more violent than the last.
HI: And more religious. You'll end up with two sets of bearded fanatics on both sides fighting over holy places and God. It will be a complete disaster. And I think the Israelis will end up ultimately dealing with forces not only beyond its borders, but beyond its comprehension in the long run. This has the possibility of turning into not an ethno-national war but a religious war between the Muslims and the Jews over the holy places with the whole concept of Palestine gone and the Jewish population of Israel in a very unenviable situation, protected in the end only by its nuclear weapons. It's a nightmare.
JG: So you have three scenarios. One, the one-state solution: Somehow the Jews and the Arabs decide, even though their narratives completely contradict each other, that we'll be like Belgium, where we don't have to really like each other but we'll be fine. The second alternative is the one you described of basically endless war. The third is the two-state solution. But, sorry to say it, we don't seem that close right now. You have an Israeli government who seems extremely hesitant to pull down any settlements, you have a Hamas government in Gaza, just for starters.
HI: What you do with Hamas, in my view, is you make the situation such that Hamas has to choose, and you do this by creating progress and by creating momentum — and there are two ways of creating momentum. One is diplomatically, which right now, seems difficult. The other is through the Fayyad plan, which is state building in the occupied territories. That would have a very powerful effect. It is extremely important that we use that idea as a means of gaining momentum, that the Israelis do not block it, that the U.S. protect it politically, and that the Arabs, Europeans and the Israelis support it technically and financially. This is a way of really moving forward in a manner that is complimentary and not contradictory to the diplomatic process, and I think people who suggest that this is some kind of capitulation or some kind of collaboration are dead wrong. This is a very powerful way of effectively resisting the occupation without doing anything violent. Israelis may fool themselves into thinking that this is just economic peace, but it's not; it's Palestinians preparing for independence.
Now with regard to Hamas, I definitely don't think it would be wise for the West to open up dialogue with Hamas under the present circumstances. I think that would simply reward them and it would benefit them in their competition with the PLO and there's a stark choice that Palestinians are facing between two strategies: an Islamist violent strategy and a secular nationalist negotiation strategy. I think it's very important to bolster the second and to make the first appear what it actually is: Non-functional.
The Atlantic
November 3, 2009
Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, "What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda?" which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It's useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters.
I spoke to Ibish about his arguments last week, shortly after he spoke at the J Street conference. Here is an edited version of our conversation:
Jeffrey Goldberg: What were your impressions of the conference?
Hussein Ibish: It was impressive as a first step. My impression is that there's still quite a bit of message-cohesion and message-formulation to be done. It seemed to me to be an insufficiently coherent group of people. The range of people was so large.
JG: You mean on the Zionist spectrum?
HI: I mean people ranging from the sort of centrist-center left, all the way to post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, who were there, too. It's not ultimately a group that's going to form, I think, a functional coalition. Right now, they're finding their feet. This is normal, it's inevitable — but at a certain point, I think they have to clarify what they are, who their constituency is, what they stand for, who they are, who they're not. They've been more successful in creating a space for themselves as a new voice that is compelling, but at other moments it's looked like where they were simply positioning themselves as the alternative to AIPAC. And my sense of things is that, initially, that they would look too much to their rivals. But sooner rather than later, they're going to have to just move on and start to define themselves in a much more coherent and pro-active way, not just in contrast to the traditional Jewish organizations but also to distinguish themselves from people in the Jewish community whose criticism of Israel makes them anathema to the mainstream of the community. They can't go there and I think they've tried not to go there.
JG: You can't be Zionist and non-Zionist at the same time, in other words.
HI: Exactly. I think it's essential for them. For us, it's not important.
JG: Well, isn't it important to have a pro-Israel, pro-two-state organization in Washington that's credibly Jewish?
HI: It is. But I believe that all of the mainstream organizations are moving in that direction. I think begrudgingly, without enthusiasm, I think they're all getting there, because I think ultimately the only organization that I can think of that is absolutely opposed to a two-state agreement are on the far right, the Zionist Organization of America, which is in favor of the occupation without reservations and, on the left, Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a one-state group all the way and without reservation. It seems to me everybody else occupies some space in the middle without being one-staters and without being flag-waving pro-settlers.
Now, the question is, from our point of view, what's really important is that the Jewish community have a range of dynamic organizations that are effective in advocating for peace based on two states, number one. And number two, that we can work with everybody who is in favor of a two-state solution without any other preconditions. I mean, we don't want to get involved in intra-Jewish rivalries. We want to work with everyone who wants peace based on two states. It's as simple as that. We don't have a huge stake in where J Street ultimately positions itself, but I will say this: The more mainstream it can become, the more powerful and important it will be. I think they should be as mainstream as possible, they should avoid the impression they sometimes give that they're perhaps not being sensitive to fears about Israel's security. There's a real appetite for a more robust, more aggressively pro-peace organization in the Jewish community. But from our perspective, the only people we don't want to talk to are the one-staters and the pro-occupation groups.
JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.
HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.
JG: I don't think you need an auditorium. Talk about these guys, the Tony Judts…
HI: I don't want to be too hard on Judt. Judt put out this argument and then he immediately admitted that it was utopian, that it wasn't serious and he was just doing a thought experiment. And since then, he basically has more or less withdrawn from the conversation Judt has not been a person who suggests that this is a realistic plan and a serious proposal for the future.
There are two fundamental flaws with pro-Palestinian strategic thinking that focuses on the idea of abandoning two states and going for a single state. The first is the question of feasibility, and it's hard to argue with that. Obviously anyone who is familiar with this sees the difficulty, and I would be the first to say that success is not assured by any means. Even a two-state agreement looks, at the moment, like something of a long shot. The difference between the two-state solution and everything else is that yes, it's a long shot, but it would work. And if we could conceivably get it, if we did get it, it would solve the conflict.
The fundamental argument that the one-staters seem to be making, which is that we can't possibly get Israel to end the occupation and relinquish their control of the 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) but we will inevitably succeed in getting them to relinquish one hundred percent of the territory under their control. This is a problem of logic. The second thing is that once you've realized this, obviously what you've done is set yourself the task of convincing Jewish Israelis to voluntarily do this. The idea of coercing the Israelis into this through military force is absurd, and it could only really be done through voluntary persuasion. What the one-staters argue, actually, is that they don't have to do that. What they're going to do, they say, is bring the Israelis to their knees.
JG: South Africa style?
HI: Well, South Africa style, except we don't have a South Africa equation here.
JG: But they believe they do.
HI: They believe that through the application of what they call BDS - Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - globally that they can crush the will of the Israelis and break the Zionist movement. To me, even if you believe that boycotts were plausible, which I don't, certainly I don't think the American government and institutions and corporations would participate.
JG: You have to move from the American consensus that supports supplying Israel with the best weaponry to not just a military cutoff but a complete cutoff and boycott. It's very hard to picture.
HI: Anyone who thinks that is plausible in the foreseeable future doesn't understand the nature of the American relationship with Israel. The commitment of the U.S., not just the government but American society, is to the survival and security of the Israeli state. And then there's another aspect, which is the extent to which Israeli institutions, organizations and corporations are interwoven at a very fundamental level with many of those in the U.S.
JG: Right, Intel and Google…
HI: I'm talking about corporate, governmental, intelligence, military, industrial, scientific ties. The point is that you can only take talk of boycott and sanctions seriously if you really don't understand any of this. And if you don't understand any of this, then you're living in a fantasy world. So here's the thing: Obviously the only real task for one-staters is to convince Jewish Israelis to agree to their solution. But instead of trying to do that, they engage in the most hyperbolic discourse about the badness of Zionism, the badness of Jewish Israelis, the rightness and primacy of not just a Palestinian narrative, but the most strident traditional Palestinian narrative, and the most tendentious Palestinian narrative, the one that places blame for the conflict entirely on the side of the Israelis, that casts Israel as the usurper and what they call in one-state circles now the "temporary racist usurping entity." These are the ones, by the way, who won't talk about my book. There's a refusal to acknowledge or read my book. I've nicknamed my book "the temporary racist usurping book."
These people are trapped in the language of the Fifties and Sixties. You're talking about a worldview is anachronistic in the most fundamental sense. It doesn't recognize any of the changes that have taken place since then. For example, the strategic situation that's emerged in the Middle East, where the Arab states and the Arabs generally have a lot of other things to worry about other than Israel. This is a world in which a lot of Gulf states are extremely concerned about Iraq, and where there are Arab states — Jordan and Egypt — that have treaties with Israel, where Syria has a motive to be civil with Israel that is unpleasant but completely stable, and where it's a very different environment than simply the Arabs and Israelis are enemies. The other thing that they've missed completely, and this is sort of the amazing thing, is the total transformation in American official policy toward the Palestinians over the past 20 years. Twenty-one years ago, there was no contact ever between the U.S. and the PLO. No contact, zero, and now Palestinian statehood is the consensus American foreign policy and it is a national security priority under Obama. People in the House, key positions like the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East, Gary Ackerman, Nita Lowey on Appropriations — all of them Jewish American members of Congress, stalwart supporters of Israel, and all of them committed to peace based on two states. And all of them, by the way, who were on the host committee of the American Task Force on Palestine gala last week.
JG: You've reached the Promised Land.
HI: Except that we haven't achieved the results.
JG: Yes, there's that. But you're on the road.
HI: Exactly. The transformation in American attitudes is almost mind-boggling, an official American attitude on ending the occupation, which has been the traditional goal of the Palestinians. And at this very moment, a group of Palestinians turns around and says, 'Sorry, not good enough, we want it all. Not only is a single Palestinian state not achievable, it's not desirable, it's not acceptable, it's not enough, we want it all.'
JG: Who are the leaders of the movement?
HI: People like Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Ghada Karmi, Omar Barghouti.
JG: And you think they're succumbing to fantastic dreams. This is the traditional criticism of Palestinian politics over the past sixty years, that it's very hard to separate out the dreams from…
HI: It goes back further than sixty years. It's an article of Palestinian nationalist faith that is almost one hundred years old, which is that demography is destiny, demography is power. This notion that if we just sit here, on the land, have children, are steadfast and don't agree to anything, then political power ultimately will flow to us. In the twenties, they believed if we do that, then, just by virtue of our presence in the land, our numbers, our demography, Israel will never be established. After Israel was established, it was just, "Well if we're steadfast and we don't agree, then Israel will be reversed." Then it was, "Well if we just do this, then independence will come in the occupied territories." Now the latest version is if we're just steadfast, we can create a South Africa-like model and we will reverse the war of 1948 at the ballot.
JG: But I have to tell you that for people like me, this is a real worry. This goes with the argument that the settlements are the vanguard of one-statism.
HI: Now there is some truth to this. I think it's useful for people like (Ehud) Olmert or people like yourself to point out that with the occupation going the way it is, there won't be a Palestinian state, and then Israel will be in a situation where it is neither meaningfully Jewish nor meaningfully democratic. I think you could claim that already, if you talk about the de facto Israeli state rather than Israel in its normally perceived borders, that is already the case and it will be increasingly so. Now here's the thing: The alternative, though, is not going to be a single state in the foreseeable future. It's possible we could get there, but it won't be a solution, it will be an outcome. There's a big difference. An outcome of a horrible, brutal, bloody civil conflict that drags on for generations, because even though this demographic issue and the legitimacy issues are crises for Israel, I don't think they result in the dissolution of the Israeli state.
JG: In other words, most Israeli Jews would rather have a Jewish state than a democratic state.
HI: Yes, it's obvious. And I think that what you would get is a protracted civil war that is essentially an intensification of the civil war we've had. So I do say the single state is a potential eventuality, but it would be the outcome of a horrible scenario. Look, the idea that if the current round of talks breaks down and Obama gives up and the U.S. gives up and we all give up, then the alternative is a Gandhian non-violent struggle of sanctions and boycotts that will somehow bring Israel to its knees, that is not the way it's going to go. We know the way it's going to go.
JG: Each intifada is more violent than the last.
HI: And more religious. You'll end up with two sets of bearded fanatics on both sides fighting over holy places and God. It will be a complete disaster. And I think the Israelis will end up ultimately dealing with forces not only beyond its borders, but beyond its comprehension in the long run. This has the possibility of turning into not an ethno-national war but a religious war between the Muslims and the Jews over the holy places with the whole concept of Palestine gone and the Jewish population of Israel in a very unenviable situation, protected in the end only by its nuclear weapons. It's a nightmare.
JG: So you have three scenarios. One, the one-state solution: Somehow the Jews and the Arabs decide, even though their narratives completely contradict each other, that we'll be like Belgium, where we don't have to really like each other but we'll be fine. The second alternative is the one you described of basically endless war. The third is the two-state solution. But, sorry to say it, we don't seem that close right now. You have an Israeli government who seems extremely hesitant to pull down any settlements, you have a Hamas government in Gaza, just for starters.
HI: What you do with Hamas, in my view, is you make the situation such that Hamas has to choose, and you do this by creating progress and by creating momentum — and there are two ways of creating momentum. One is diplomatically, which right now, seems difficult. The other is through the Fayyad plan, which is state building in the occupied territories. That would have a very powerful effect. It is extremely important that we use that idea as a means of gaining momentum, that the Israelis do not block it, that the U.S. protect it politically, and that the Arabs, Europeans and the Israelis support it technically and financially. This is a way of really moving forward in a manner that is complimentary and not contradictory to the diplomatic process, and I think people who suggest that this is some kind of capitulation or some kind of collaboration are dead wrong. This is a very powerful way of effectively resisting the occupation without doing anything violent. Israelis may fool themselves into thinking that this is just economic peace, but it's not; it's Palestinians preparing for independence.
Now with regard to Hamas, I definitely don't think it would be wise for the West to open up dialogue with Hamas under the present circumstances. I think that would simply reward them and it would benefit them in their competition with the PLO and there's a stark choice that Palestinians are facing between two strategies: an Islamist violent strategy and a secular nationalist negotiation strategy. I think it's very important to bolster the second and to make the first appear what it actually is: Non-functional.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Historians Reassess Battle of Agincourt
By James Glanz
The New York Times
October 25, 2009
Maisoncelle, France — The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.
No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.
But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.
The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.
Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean prose and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.
“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.
The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.
The approach has drastically changed views on everything from Roman battles with Germanic tribes, to Napoleon’s disastrous occupation of Spain, to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. But the most telling gauge of the respect being given to the new historians and their penchant for tearing down established wisdom is that it has now become almost routine for American commanders to call on them for advice on strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, Iraq and other present-day conflicts.
The most influential example is the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” adopted in 2006 by the United States Army and Marines and smack in the middle of the debate over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the United States Central Command, drew on dozens of academic historians and other experts to create the manual. And he named Conrad Crane, director of the United States Army Military History Institute at the Army War College, as the lead writer.
Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts, the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population, regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be.
Mr. Crane said that some of his own early historical research involved a comparison of strategic bombing campaigns with attacks on civilians by rampaging armies during the Hundred Years’ War, when England tried and ultimately failed to assert control over continental France. Agincourt was perhaps the most stirring victory the English would ever achieve on French soil during the conflict.
The Hundred Years’ War never made it into the field manual — the name itself may have served as a deterrent — but after sounding numerous cautions on the vast differences in time, technology and political aims, historians working in the area say that there are some uncanny parallels with contemporary foreign conflicts.
For one thing, by the time Henry landed near the mouth of the Seine on Aug. 14, 1415, and began a rather uninspiring siege of a town called Harfleur, France was on the verge of a civil war, with factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs at loggerheads. Henry would eventually forge an alliance with the Burgundians, who in today’s terms would become his “local security forces” in Normandy, and he cultivated the support of local merchants and clerics, all practices that would have been heartily endorsed by the counterinsurgency manual.
“I’m not one who sees history repeating itself, but I think a lot of attitudes do,” said Kelly DeVries, a professor of history at Loyola College in Maryland who has written extensively on medieval warfare. Mr. DeVries said that fighters from across the region began filtering toward the Armagnac camp as soon as Henry became allied with their enemies. “Very much like Al Qaeda in Iraq, there were very diverse forces coming from very, very different places to fight,” Mr. DeVries said.
But first Henry would have his chance at Agincourt. After taking Harfleur, he marched rapidly north and crossed the Somme River, his army depleted by dysentery and battle losses and growing hungry and fatigued.
At the same time, the fractious French forces hastily gathered to meet him.
It is here that historians themselves begin fighting, and several take exception to the new scholarship by Ms. Curry’s team.
Based on chronicles that he considers to be broadly accurate, Clifford J. Rogers, a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point, argues that Henry was in fact vastly outnumbered. For the English, there were about 1,000 so-called men-at-arms in heavy steel armor from head to toe and 5,000 lightly armored men with longbows. The French assembled roughly 10,000 men-at-arms, each with an attendant called a gros valet who could also fight, and around 4,000 men with crossbows and other fighters.
Although Mr. Rogers writes in a recent paper that the French crossbowmen were “completely outclassed” by the English archers, who could send deadly volleys farther and more frequently, the grand totals would result in a ratio of four to one, close to the traditional figures. Mr. Rogers said in an interview that he regarded the archival records as too incomplete to substantially change those estimates.
Still, several French historians said in interviews this month that they seriously doubted that France, riven by factional strife and drawing from a populace severely depleted by the plague, could have raised an army that large in so short a time. The French king, Charles VI, was also suffering from bouts of insanity.
“It was not the complete French power at Agincourt,” said Bertrand Schnerb, a professor of medieval history at the University of Lille, who estimated that there were 12,000 to 15,000 French soldiers.
Ms. Curry, the Southampton historian, said she was comfortable with something close to that lower figure, based on her reading of historical archives, including military pay records, muster rolls, ships’ logs, published rosters of the wounded and dead, wartime tax levies and other surviving documents.
On the English side, Ms. Curry calculates that Henry probably had at least 8,680 soldiers with him on his march to Agincourt. She names thousands of the likely troopers, from Adam Adrya, a man-at-arms, to Philip Zevan, an archer.
And an extraordinary online database listing around a quarter-million names of men who served in the Hundred Years’ War, compiled by Ms. Curry and her collaborators at the universities in Southampton and Reading, shows that whatever the numbers, Henry’s army really was a band of brothers: many of the soldiers were veterans who had served on multiple campaigns together.
“You see tremendous continuity with people who knew and trusted each other,” Ms. Curry said.
That trust must have come in handy after Henry, through a series of brilliant tactical moves, provoked the French cavalry — mounted men-at-arms — into charging the masses of longbowmen positioned on the English flanks in a relatively narrow field between two sets of woods that still exist not far from Mr. Renault’s farm in Maisoncelle.
The series of events that followed as the French men-at-arms slogged through the muddy, tilled fields behind the cavalry were quick and murderous.
Volley after volley of English arrow fire maddened the horses, killed many of the riders and forced the advancing men-at-arms into a mass so dense that many of them could not even lift their arms.
When the heavily armored French men-at-arms fell wounded, many could not get up and simply drowned in the mud as other men stumbled over them. And as order on the French lines broke down completely and panic set in, the much nimbler archers ran forward, killing thousands by stabbing them in the neck, eyes, armpits and groin through gaps in the armor, or simply ganged up and bludgeoned the Frenchmen to death.
“The situation was beyond grisly; it was horrific in the extreme,” Mr. Rogers wrote in his paper.
King Henry V had emerged victorious, and as some historians see it, the English crown then mounted a public relations effort to magnify the victory by exaggerating the disparity in numbers.
Whatever the magnitude of the victory, it would not last. The French populace gradually soured on the English occupation as the fighting continued and the civil war remained unresolved in the decades after Henry’s death in 1422, Mr. Schnerb said.
“They came into France saying, ‘You Frenchmen have civil war, and now our king is coming to give you peace,’ ” Mr. Schnerb said. “It was a failure.”
Unwilling to blame a failed counterinsurgency strategy, Shakespeare pinned the loss on poor Henry VI:
“Whose state so many had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed.”
The New York Times
October 25, 2009
Maisoncelle, France — The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.
No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.
But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.
The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.
Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean prose and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.
“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.
The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.
The approach has drastically changed views on everything from Roman battles with Germanic tribes, to Napoleon’s disastrous occupation of Spain, to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. But the most telling gauge of the respect being given to the new historians and their penchant for tearing down established wisdom is that it has now become almost routine for American commanders to call on them for advice on strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, Iraq and other present-day conflicts.
The most influential example is the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” adopted in 2006 by the United States Army and Marines and smack in the middle of the debate over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the United States Central Command, drew on dozens of academic historians and other experts to create the manual. And he named Conrad Crane, director of the United States Army Military History Institute at the Army War College, as the lead writer.
Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts, the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population, regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be.
Mr. Crane said that some of his own early historical research involved a comparison of strategic bombing campaigns with attacks on civilians by rampaging armies during the Hundred Years’ War, when England tried and ultimately failed to assert control over continental France. Agincourt was perhaps the most stirring victory the English would ever achieve on French soil during the conflict.
The Hundred Years’ War never made it into the field manual — the name itself may have served as a deterrent — but after sounding numerous cautions on the vast differences in time, technology and political aims, historians working in the area say that there are some uncanny parallels with contemporary foreign conflicts.
For one thing, by the time Henry landed near the mouth of the Seine on Aug. 14, 1415, and began a rather uninspiring siege of a town called Harfleur, France was on the verge of a civil war, with factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs at loggerheads. Henry would eventually forge an alliance with the Burgundians, who in today’s terms would become his “local security forces” in Normandy, and he cultivated the support of local merchants and clerics, all practices that would have been heartily endorsed by the counterinsurgency manual.
“I’m not one who sees history repeating itself, but I think a lot of attitudes do,” said Kelly DeVries, a professor of history at Loyola College in Maryland who has written extensively on medieval warfare. Mr. DeVries said that fighters from across the region began filtering toward the Armagnac camp as soon as Henry became allied with their enemies. “Very much like Al Qaeda in Iraq, there were very diverse forces coming from very, very different places to fight,” Mr. DeVries said.
But first Henry would have his chance at Agincourt. After taking Harfleur, he marched rapidly north and crossed the Somme River, his army depleted by dysentery and battle losses and growing hungry and fatigued.
At the same time, the fractious French forces hastily gathered to meet him.
It is here that historians themselves begin fighting, and several take exception to the new scholarship by Ms. Curry’s team.
Based on chronicles that he considers to be broadly accurate, Clifford J. Rogers, a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point, argues that Henry was in fact vastly outnumbered. For the English, there were about 1,000 so-called men-at-arms in heavy steel armor from head to toe and 5,000 lightly armored men with longbows. The French assembled roughly 10,000 men-at-arms, each with an attendant called a gros valet who could also fight, and around 4,000 men with crossbows and other fighters.
Although Mr. Rogers writes in a recent paper that the French crossbowmen were “completely outclassed” by the English archers, who could send deadly volleys farther and more frequently, the grand totals would result in a ratio of four to one, close to the traditional figures. Mr. Rogers said in an interview that he regarded the archival records as too incomplete to substantially change those estimates.
Still, several French historians said in interviews this month that they seriously doubted that France, riven by factional strife and drawing from a populace severely depleted by the plague, could have raised an army that large in so short a time. The French king, Charles VI, was also suffering from bouts of insanity.
“It was not the complete French power at Agincourt,” said Bertrand Schnerb, a professor of medieval history at the University of Lille, who estimated that there were 12,000 to 15,000 French soldiers.
Ms. Curry, the Southampton historian, said she was comfortable with something close to that lower figure, based on her reading of historical archives, including military pay records, muster rolls, ships’ logs, published rosters of the wounded and dead, wartime tax levies and other surviving documents.
On the English side, Ms. Curry calculates that Henry probably had at least 8,680 soldiers with him on his march to Agincourt. She names thousands of the likely troopers, from Adam Adrya, a man-at-arms, to Philip Zevan, an archer.
And an extraordinary online database listing around a quarter-million names of men who served in the Hundred Years’ War, compiled by Ms. Curry and her collaborators at the universities in Southampton and Reading, shows that whatever the numbers, Henry’s army really was a band of brothers: many of the soldiers were veterans who had served on multiple campaigns together.
“You see tremendous continuity with people who knew and trusted each other,” Ms. Curry said.
That trust must have come in handy after Henry, through a series of brilliant tactical moves, provoked the French cavalry — mounted men-at-arms — into charging the masses of longbowmen positioned on the English flanks in a relatively narrow field between two sets of woods that still exist not far from Mr. Renault’s farm in Maisoncelle.
The series of events that followed as the French men-at-arms slogged through the muddy, tilled fields behind the cavalry were quick and murderous.
Volley after volley of English arrow fire maddened the horses, killed many of the riders and forced the advancing men-at-arms into a mass so dense that many of them could not even lift their arms.
When the heavily armored French men-at-arms fell wounded, many could not get up and simply drowned in the mud as other men stumbled over them. And as order on the French lines broke down completely and panic set in, the much nimbler archers ran forward, killing thousands by stabbing them in the neck, eyes, armpits and groin through gaps in the armor, or simply ganged up and bludgeoned the Frenchmen to death.
“The situation was beyond grisly; it was horrific in the extreme,” Mr. Rogers wrote in his paper.
King Henry V had emerged victorious, and as some historians see it, the English crown then mounted a public relations effort to magnify the victory by exaggerating the disparity in numbers.
Whatever the magnitude of the victory, it would not last. The French populace gradually soured on the English occupation as the fighting continued and the civil war remained unresolved in the decades after Henry’s death in 1422, Mr. Schnerb said.
“They came into France saying, ‘You Frenchmen have civil war, and now our king is coming to give you peace,’ ” Mr. Schnerb said. “It was a failure.”
Unwilling to blame a failed counterinsurgency strategy, Shakespeare pinned the loss on poor Henry VI:
“Whose state so many had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed.”
Thursday, October 22, 2009
No way home: The tragedy of the Palestinian diaspora
You might think Palestinian refugees would be welcomed by their Arab neighbours, yet they are denied basic rights and citizenship
A special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels
The Independent (United Kingdom)
22 October 2009
It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.
Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel — and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe — this one at hands of the Arab governments. "Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines," a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, "the refugee population constitutes a time bomb."
The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible — or less dangerous. Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.
In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children — and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries — combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities — recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe. Along with dispossession and marginalisation has come a new and frightening turn away from the traditional forms of nationalism that once dominated the refugee camps towards the radical pan-Islamic ideology of al-Qa'ida.
Daniel C Kurtzer, who has served as US ambassador to both Israel and Egypt and now advises the Obama administration, says that all American governments have resisted dealing with what he calls the most sensitive issue in the conflict — the normalisation of the status of the Palestinians — through a right of return to Palestine, or citizenship in other countries. "The refugees hold the key to this conflict's settlement," he says, "and nobody knows what to do with them."
In the unlikely event that President Obama's vision of a swift and final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict materialises, millions of Palestinians would still live in decaying refugee camps whose inhabitants are forbidden from owning land or participating in normal economic life. The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948".
•••
The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA's mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA's grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, "The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees," and must "make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings" — the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan. For all the easy criticism that can be levelled at UNRWA, it is hard to see how many Palestinian refugees would have survived without the agency's help.
The responsibility for the legal dimensions of their fate lies elsewhere, as UNRWA Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd made clear at UNRWA's anniversary ceremony in New York on 24 September, before an audience that included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Queen Rania of Jordan — herself a Palestinian. "The protracted exile of Palestine refugees and the dire conditions they endure, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territory, cannot be reconciled with state obligations under the UN Charter," AbuZayd said. The result for the refugees, AbuZayd said at a forum the previous afternoon at the Princeton Club, is a "suspended state of existence" for which no one seems willing to accept political responsibility. The rest of the discussion, moderated by Ambassador Kurtner, made clear that anticipated solutions to the Palestinian refugee problem had failed to emerge — leaving a community in crisis.
"You can't ignore an entire people because it's awkward or inconvenient," says Dr Karma Nabulsi, a lecturer at Oxford and a former Palestinian representative at the UN. In the period immediately after Oslo, she added, Palestinian refugees in Arab countries hoped to be repatriated to areas governed by the Palestinian Authority. Today, despair has replaced that initial optimism. "What young Palestinian would want to resettle in Gaza or in the West Bank?" she asks.
Sharing a panel with Dr Nabulsi, the doveish former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami, who negotiated directly with Yasser Arafat at the failed Camp David meetings in 2000, asserted that Israel has suppressed narratives that would make clear its responsibility for the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948. Indifference to the refugees' plight, he added, was shared by Israel's negotiating partner in the Oslo years — Yasser Arafat. "He was not a refugee man," Ben Ami said flatly. "He was much more centred on the question of Jerusalem. I heard him say to [Mahmood Abbas] in my presence, 'leave me alone with your refugees'."
It is no secret that certain Arab regimes saw the Palestinians under Arafat's leadership as an unwelcome occupation that stripped Jordan bare and destroyed Lebanon. Similarly, Arafat often used the threat of destabilisation and assassination to get Arab regimes to fund the Palestinian cause. Still, the record of Arafat's Palestinian Authority in its territories during the 1990s attests to the truth of Ben Ami's observation, which applies both to Arafat's Fatah and to Hamas. Despite $10bn in foreign aid, not one refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza has been replaced by modern housing. On the West Bank, chances for normal Palestinian communal life have been shattered by Israeli settlements, arrests, checkpoints and roadblocks, and by 15 years of abuses by Fatah. Even under the best of circumstances, an influx of refugees would further destabilise a Palestinian economy that is kept afloat by the world's highest per capita receipts of foreign aid.
Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. "Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers," he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. "What we need is a refugee summit," he says. "I'm looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon."
After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected — whether or not their children's children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom — just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?
A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests — but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.
•••
Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country's property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by "any person not a citizen of a recognised state" — meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.
Right-wing Christians and Shi'ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country's armed forces, reaffirmed "Lebanon's categorical refusal of naturalisation", a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: "The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen ... at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist." His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah's spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. "The threat of tawtin is genuine," Hodroj explained. "It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region."
The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed "catastrophic" by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon's divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, "our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement".
Yet the results of this horrifying policy may not be confined to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In his book Everyday Jihad, about the experience of refugees in the Ain al-Hilweh camp, home to an estimated 70,000 Palestinians, the French scholar Bernard Rougier describes the results of decades of exclusion and marginalisation which have severed the refugees from any connection to a lost homeland — or the country in which they were born. As a result, he says, many Palestinians have abandoned a failed nationalism for the radical millenarian ideas associated with al-Qa'ida. "Palestinian salafist militants have devoted themselves to defending the imaginary borders of identity," Rougier writes, "declaring themselves the protectors and guardians of the cause of Sunni Islam worldwide."
Visitors to the Ain al-Hilweh camp are immediately made aware that they have entered another world. While Lebanese army checkpoints ring the camp, the Lebanese state has no presence inside. Food, water and other basic services are provided by UNRWA, while armed factions openly display weapons in muddy alleyways and recruit generations to serve under their banners. It is easy to see why the secular promise of Palestinian nationalism has faded and why the promise of a Muslim paradise without borders might take its place. One of the 9/11 hijackers dedicated a poem to Ain al-Hilweh's most prominent jihadist in his videotaped will, and dozens of Palestinian fighters from the camp joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq.
"The situation is the camp is deteriorating," Rougier told us, when we asked about whether things were getting better or worse for the Palestinians of Lebanon. Bound by their absolute opposition to tawtin, he says, Lebanese leaders are creating a radicalised Palestinian population that will eventually have to be absorbed into Lebanon, despite having little or no allegiance to the state.
Sahar Atrache, lead author of the ICG report on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, agrees. "Palestinians refugees in Lebanon lack means of socio-economic advancement and are bereft of hope," he says. "They are vulnerable on all counts — politically, legally and above all physically. The status quo is good neither for the refugees nor for Lebanon itself."
•••
While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa'ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them "the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality". More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.
While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.
The major focus of Syrian interest in the Palestinian refugees has long been as an extension of the Assad regime's policy towards its neighbours — Israel and Lebanon. Damascus has long hosted a variety of Palestinian terror groups that rejected the Oslo process, including Ahmad Jibril's Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). More significantly, Damascus is also the political and logistical centre for Hamas. "Syria's support for armed Palestinian groups is key to pressuring Damascus' neighbours, most notably Israel and Lebanon," says Andrew Tabler, author of the Syria-watching blog Eighth Gate.
Syria increases its leverage inside Israel by weakening Fatah and strengthening Hamas. In Lebanon, Syrian military and political interference has turned the refugee camps into "security-free islands" (juzur amniya) where bombers can be recruited, bombs manufactured, and plots can be directed beyond the reach of the Lebanese army and police. "Life for the Palestinians was deliberately frozen for political manipulation," concludes Lebanese analyst Tony Badran. "Syria has no interest in normalising that situation."
While Syria imposes a measure of security on its Palestinian neighbourhoods, it foments insecurity and violence in Lebanon and Gaza, splitting the Palestinian polity and fuelling the misery of Palestinians throughout the region.
•••
Jordan is the only Arab nation that has integrated large numbers of Palestinians as full-fledged citizens. This is due not only to the unification of the East Bank and West Bank of the Jordan River valley under Hashemite rule between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 until Israel's occupation of West Bank in 1967, but also to the luck of having had an enlightened monarch committed to the compassionate treatment of the estimated 100,000 refugees who crossed the Jordan River during the nakba in 1948. Israel's occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war triggered a second exodus of 140,000 refugees into Jordan.
Today, almost 2 million of Jordan's 6 million people are registered Palestinian refugees, the largest concentration of current and former refugees in the Palestinian diaspora — and increasingly, tensions have deepened between the Palestinians and the "East Bank" establishment. This summer in Amman, ambiguous declarations by the recently appointed minister of the interior, Nayef al-Kadi, who is widely perceived to be anti-Palestinian, led many Jordanians of Palestinian origin to fear they would be stripped of Jordanian identity numbers. Speaking to the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat, al-Kadi confirmed that some Palestinians would be stripped of citizenship, ostensibly to counter Israeli plans to turn Jordan into Palestine. "We should be thanked for taking this measure," he said. "We are fulfilling our national duty because Israel wants to expel the Palestinians from their homeland." Panic about their status spread quickly among the Palestinian community.
In interviews this month, senior Jordanian officials sought to quell such fears, while also suggesting there was at least some substance to al-Kadi's explosive suggestion. Faisal Bakr Qadi, the director of the Interior Ministry's office of Inspections, said Palestinians in Jordan were not being systematically stripped of citizenship. Rather, he explained that the government's current review of Palestinian national status dated back to 1988, when King Hussein, in response to demands by Palestinian and Arab leaders, disengaged administratively from the West Bank. Palestinian refugees, he said, meaning those who came to Jordan in the 1948 exodus, were to remain "full Jordanian citizens". "Displaced" Palestinians, or those who had come in 1967 and afterwards, would be able to maintain their yellow identity cards and numbers and de facto citizenship, provided they returned to the West Bank to renew the Israeli passes that permit them to go back and forth between Jordan and the West Bank.
Since 1983, he said, Jordan had given the coveted yellow cards — which enable Palestinians to work without special permits, pay local tuition rates in school, and enjoy full government services — to 280,000 Palestinians, whereas it had "frozen" the cards — or downgraded their status — of only 15,856 people. So far this year, he said, 9,956 cards were upgraded, 291 downgraded.
While many diplomats doubt these numbers, Jordanians insist there is no plot or plan to expel or deny citizenship to Palestinians who have lived virtually their entire lives in Jordan. "We want to ensure that when and if the peace process succeeds in establishing an independent Palestinian state, Palestinians living in Jordan will be in a position to choose their citizenship by having their status in order in both Jordan and Palestine," said an official close to King Abdullah.
Yet the distinctions that seem meaningful in Amman are not clear to some of the almost 94,000 Palestinian residents of Baqa'a, the largest of the 10 official refugee camps run by the UN. Some Palestinians in Baqa'a complain about the "new regulations" and the lack of identity cards that enable them to work without special permits and educate their children in public schools. Anxiety about the future pervades this ramshackle suburb at the northern edge of Amman, which began as an emergency relief centre after the 1967 war and is now a sprawling mini-city with its own basic shops, shawarma (sandwich) stands, and services. Many of the people we spoke to claimed that they knew someone, or had a relative, neighbour and friend whose identity card had been revoked, or whose status had inexplicably been changed.
For many of these refugees at the bottom of Jordan's social and economic pecking order, life without papers means hiding from the police who constantly patrol their camp's streets, being too poor to send any of your eight to 10 children to college, a lifetime of menial labour, and only a threadbare dream of returning to a homeland that most of them have never seen. There is strong suspicion of the state, but also of their neighbours, who are divided into "'48 people" and "'67 people". "Some of the newcomers would give away Al Aqsa for a Jordanian identity card," says Heba, a mother of eight, mentioning Islam's celebrated mosque in Jerusalem, one of its holiest shrines.
"We're Jordanians," says her son, Mustapha, a slender, 20-year-old in a bright orange T-shirt emblazoned with meaningless words in unknown languages. "This is the best place in the world," he says, pointing around the bare living room whose worn rugs and threadbare pillows cover the floor on which he and all his siblings sleep. "We would never leave here. But I'm loyal to my country, and I would like to visit it one day."
He seems perplexed when asked which is his country — Jordan or Palestine. "We have no security here, but we are Jordanians," replies Mustapha, who lounges on a mattress in a two-storey cement house down the road while one of his five daughters offers tiny glasses of steaming herbal tea and cardamom-scented coffee. "Everything I have is here. This house. My car. My job. What would I have in Nablus or Be'ersheba?" he declares. "My children know nothing but Jordan. And we will stay here."
That determination, echoed repeatedly through the dilapidated cement homes that line Baqa'a's gravelly streets and dust-filled shops, is precisely what terrifies Jordan's East Bank establishment. Jordanians have reason to fear their Palestinian guests. Many Jordanians have not forgotten "Black September", the civil war launched by Arafat's Fatah organisation in 1970 which nearly toppled King Hussein's kingdom.
Moreover, having grown accustomed to their near monopoly on jobs provided by the government, Jordan's largest employer, Jordanians fear demands for political equality from Palestinians, most of whom would probably choose to remain in Jordan, relinquishing their "right of return' in favour of compensation. An end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would surely threaten Jordan's informal division of power: East Bankers dominate the army, the security services and most civil-service posts, while Palestinians are disproportionately represented in business. Palestinians may advise the king in the royal court, but there has been only one Palestinian prime minister, who served for eight months. Palestinians now comprise only 23 of Jordan's 110 MPs.
"The closer we get to a solution," says Adnan Abu Odeh, a Palestinian who was one of King Hussein's royal court chiefs and also held other important government posts, "the more anxious society becomes. We are approaching a moment of truth."
A special report by Judith Miller and David Samuels
The Independent (United Kingdom)
22 October 2009
It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.
Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel — and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe — this one at hands of the Arab governments. "Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines," a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, "the refugee population constitutes a time bomb."
The fact that the divided Palestinian political leadership is silent about the mistreatment of the refugees by Arab states does not make such behaviour any less reprehensible — or less dangerous. Some 250,000 Palestinians were chased out of Kuwait and other Gulf States to punish the Palestinian political leadership for supporting Saddam Hussein. Tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Iraq were similarly dispossessed after the second Gulf war.
In 2001, Palestinians in Lebanon were stripped of the right to own property, or to pass on the property that they already owned to their children — and banned from working as doctors, lawyers, pharmacists or in 20 other professions. Even the Palestinian refugee community in Jordan, historically the most welcoming Arab state, has reason to feel insecure in the face of official threats to revoke their citizenship. The systematic refusal of Arab governments to grant basic human rights to Palestinians who are born and die in their countries — combined with periodic mass expulsions of entire Palestinian communities — recalls the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe. Along with dispossession and marginalisation has come a new and frightening turn away from the traditional forms of nationalism that once dominated the refugee camps towards the radical pan-Islamic ideology of al-Qa'ida.
Daniel C Kurtzer, who has served as US ambassador to both Israel and Egypt and now advises the Obama administration, says that all American governments have resisted dealing with what he calls the most sensitive issue in the conflict — the normalisation of the status of the Palestinians — through a right of return to Palestine, or citizenship in other countries. "The refugees hold the key to this conflict's settlement," he says, "and nobody knows what to do with them."
In the unlikely event that President Obama's vision of a swift and final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict materialises, millions of Palestinians would still live in decaying refugee camps whose inhabitants are forbidden from owning land or participating in normal economic life. The only governing authority that Palestinians living in the camps have ever known is UNRWA — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established by the UN on 8 December 1949 to assist 650,000 impoverished Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, UNRWA has been battling budget cuts and strikes among its employees as it struggles to provide subsidies and services to Palestinian refugees, who are defined as "persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948".
•••
The inclusion of the descendants of Palestinian refugees as refugees in UNRWA's mandate has no parallel in international humanitarian law and is responsible for the growth of the official numbers of Palestinian refugees in foreign countries from 711,000 to 4.6 million during decades when the number of ageing refugees from the 1948 Israeli war of independence in was in fact declining. UNRWA's grant of refugee status to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original Palestinian refugees according to the principle of patrilineal descent, with no limit on the generations that can obtain refugee status, has made it easy for host countries to flout their obligations under international law. According to Article 34 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, "The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalisation of refugees," and must "make every effort to expedite naturalisation proceedings" — the opposite of what happened to the Palestinians in every Arab country in which they settled, save Jordan. For all the easy criticism that can be levelled at UNRWA, it is hard to see how many Palestinian refugees would have survived without the agency's help.
The responsibility for the legal dimensions of their fate lies elsewhere, as UNRWA Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd made clear at UNRWA's anniversary ceremony in New York on 24 September, before an audience that included Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Queen Rania of Jordan — herself a Palestinian. "The protracted exile of Palestine refugees and the dire conditions they endure, particularly in the occupied Palestinian territory, cannot be reconciled with state obligations under the UN Charter," AbuZayd said. The result for the refugees, AbuZayd said at a forum the previous afternoon at the Princeton Club, is a "suspended state of existence" for which no one seems willing to accept political responsibility. The rest of the discussion, moderated by Ambassador Kurtner, made clear that anticipated solutions to the Palestinian refugee problem had failed to emerge — leaving a community in crisis.
"You can't ignore an entire people because it's awkward or inconvenient," says Dr Karma Nabulsi, a lecturer at Oxford and a former Palestinian representative at the UN. In the period immediately after Oslo, she added, Palestinian refugees in Arab countries hoped to be repatriated to areas governed by the Palestinian Authority. Today, despair has replaced that initial optimism. "What young Palestinian would want to resettle in Gaza or in the West Bank?" she asks.
Sharing a panel with Dr Nabulsi, the doveish former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami, who negotiated directly with Yasser Arafat at the failed Camp David meetings in 2000, asserted that Israel has suppressed narratives that would make clear its responsibility for the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948. Indifference to the refugees' plight, he added, was shared by Israel's negotiating partner in the Oslo years — Yasser Arafat. "He was not a refugee man," Ben Ami said flatly. "He was much more centred on the question of Jerusalem. I heard him say to [Mahmood Abbas] in my presence, 'leave me alone with your refugees'."
It is no secret that certain Arab regimes saw the Palestinians under Arafat's leadership as an unwelcome occupation that stripped Jordan bare and destroyed Lebanon. Similarly, Arafat often used the threat of destabilisation and assassination to get Arab regimes to fund the Palestinian cause. Still, the record of Arafat's Palestinian Authority in its territories during the 1990s attests to the truth of Ben Ami's observation, which applies both to Arafat's Fatah and to Hamas. Despite $10bn in foreign aid, not one refugee camp in the West Bank or Gaza has been replaced by modern housing. On the West Bank, chances for normal Palestinian communal life have been shattered by Israeli settlements, arrests, checkpoints and roadblocks, and by 15 years of abuses by Fatah. Even under the best of circumstances, an influx of refugees would further destabilise a Palestinian economy that is kept afloat by the world's highest per capita receipts of foreign aid.
Daniel Kurtzer agrees no one is likely to make a deal that includes a substantial return of the Palestinian diaspora. "Most Palestinian refugees know it, as do the settlers," he says. So rather than wait for American mediators or Arab states to impose solutions on them, the Palestinians themselves should begin to tackle the diabolically difficult issues inherent in the resolution of their political and economic future. "What we need is a refugee summit," he says. "I'm looking for a real conversation that must start internally and soon."
After 60 years of failed wars, and failed peace, it is time to put politics aside and to insist that the basic rights of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries be respected — whether or not their children's children return to Haifa anytime soon. While Saudi Arabia may not wish to host Israeli tourists, it can easily afford to integrate the estimated 240,000 Palestinian refugees who already live in the kingdom — just as Egypt, which has received close to $60bn in US aid, and has a population of 81 million, can grant legal rights to an estimated 70,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. One can only imagine the outrage that the world community would rightly visit upon Israel if Israeli Arabs were subject to the vile discriminatory laws applied to Palestinians living in Arab countries. Surely, Palestinian Arabs can keep their own national dream alive in the countries where they were born, while also enjoying the freedom to work, vote and own property?
A practical solution to the crisis of the Palestinian refugees in Arab countries will focus on Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, which together play host to approximately 3 million of the estimated 4.6 million Palestinian refugees living outside the West Bank and Gaza. While each of these countries has chosen different legal and political approaches to the 1948 refugees and their descendants, they share a political desire to sublimate the rights of Palestinian residents, treating them as unwanted guests or as tools to be used in pursuing wider political interests — but rarely as fully-fledged members of society. Lebanon, where Palestinians led by Yasser Arafat are widely blamed for having sparked the 1975 civil war, is the worst offender against international norms. Yet even in Jordan, which is in many ways a model for the humane treatment of a large refugee population, Palestinians today feel markedly less secure than they did two decades ago, or even five years ago.
•••
Outside of Iraq, whose Palestinian population fled en masse after the fall of Saddam, nowhere has the situation of the Palestinian refugees worsened so dramatically as in Lebanon. Since the early Sixties, Palestinians there have been barred from working in medicine, dentistry and the law. In 2001, the Lebanese parliament adopted an amendment to the country's property laws that prohibited the acquisition of real estate by "any person not a citizen of a recognised state" — meaning the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Palestinians who had acquired real estate prior to 2001 were barred from bequeathing property to their children.
Right-wing Christians and Shi'ite radicals alike support discriminatory legislation that further impoverishes Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with the stated goal of preventing them from beginning the process of naturalisation, known as tawtin. In his inaugural speech in May, 2008, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman, a Christian and former head of the country's armed forces, reaffirmed "Lebanon's categorical refusal of naturalisation", a statement echoed by the former Lebanese ambassador to the US, Nassib Lahoud, who told us recently in Beirut: "The confessional balance does not allow these things to happen ... at the moment the Palestinians are citizens of a state that does not exist." His sentiments were echoed by Hizbollah's spokesman on the Palestinian question, Hassan Hodroj. "The threat of tawtin is genuine," Hodroj explained. "It is one of the ways in which Israel, backed by the US, is endangering the region."
The fact that the living standard of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has been deemed "catastrophic" by both UNRWA and by the Lebanese government can therefore be understood as a deliberate result of official state policy that is supported by all parties across Lebanon's divided confessional spectrum. As a member of the Lebanese parliament, Ghassan Moukheiber, explained in an interview with the ICG, "our official policy is to maintain Palestinians in a vulnerable, precarious situation to diminish prospects for their naturalisation or permanent settlement".
Yet the results of this horrifying policy may not be confined to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In his book Everyday Jihad, about the experience of refugees in the Ain al-Hilweh camp, home to an estimated 70,000 Palestinians, the French scholar Bernard Rougier describes the results of decades of exclusion and marginalisation which have severed the refugees from any connection to a lost homeland — or the country in which they were born. As a result, he says, many Palestinians have abandoned a failed nationalism for the radical millenarian ideas associated with al-Qa'ida. "Palestinian salafist militants have devoted themselves to defending the imaginary borders of identity," Rougier writes, "declaring themselves the protectors and guardians of the cause of Sunni Islam worldwide."
Visitors to the Ain al-Hilweh camp are immediately made aware that they have entered another world. While Lebanese army checkpoints ring the camp, the Lebanese state has no presence inside. Food, water and other basic services are provided by UNRWA, while armed factions openly display weapons in muddy alleyways and recruit generations to serve under their banners. It is easy to see why the secular promise of Palestinian nationalism has faded and why the promise of a Muslim paradise without borders might take its place. One of the 9/11 hijackers dedicated a poem to Ain al-Hilweh's most prominent jihadist in his videotaped will, and dozens of Palestinian fighters from the camp joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq.
"The situation is the camp is deteriorating," Rougier told us, when we asked about whether things were getting better or worse for the Palestinians of Lebanon. Bound by their absolute opposition to tawtin, he says, Lebanese leaders are creating a radicalised Palestinian population that will eventually have to be absorbed into Lebanon, despite having little or no allegiance to the state.
Sahar Atrache, lead author of the ICG report on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, agrees. "Palestinians refugees in Lebanon lack means of socio-economic advancement and are bereft of hope," he says. "They are vulnerable on all counts — politically, legally and above all physically. The status quo is good neither for the refugees nor for Lebanon itself."
•••
While Palestinian refugees and their descendants inside Syria are not allowed to vote or hold Syrian passports, they are free from the overt discrimination that has turned Lebanon into a recruiting ground for al-Qa'ida. The legal status of Palestinians inside Syria is defined by a 1956 law that states that grants them "the right to employment, commerce, and national service, while preserving their original nationality". More than 100,000 of the estimated 450,000 Palestinians in Syria live in or around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which long ago became a neighbourhood of Damascus.
While Palestinians are reasonably well integrated into the Syrian socio-economic structure, according to the scholar Laurie Brand they do not have the right to vote, nor can they stand for parliament or other political offices. Palestinians are barred from buying farmland and prohibited from owning more than one house. The female descendant of a Palestinian refugee can become a Syrian citizen by marrying a Syrian man. The male descendants of Palestinian men and their children are barred from acquiring Syrian citizenship, even if they marry Syrian women.
The major focus of Syrian interest in the Palestinian refugees has long been as an extension of the Assad regime's policy towards its neighbours — Israel and Lebanon. Damascus has long hosted a variety of Palestinian terror groups that rejected the Oslo process, including Ahmad Jibril's Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC). More significantly, Damascus is also the political and logistical centre for Hamas. "Syria's support for armed Palestinian groups is key to pressuring Damascus' neighbours, most notably Israel and Lebanon," says Andrew Tabler, author of the Syria-watching blog Eighth Gate.
Syria increases its leverage inside Israel by weakening Fatah and strengthening Hamas. In Lebanon, Syrian military and political interference has turned the refugee camps into "security-free islands" (juzur amniya) where bombers can be recruited, bombs manufactured, and plots can be directed beyond the reach of the Lebanese army and police. "Life for the Palestinians was deliberately frozen for political manipulation," concludes Lebanese analyst Tony Badran. "Syria has no interest in normalising that situation."
While Syria imposes a measure of security on its Palestinian neighbourhoods, it foments insecurity and violence in Lebanon and Gaza, splitting the Palestinian polity and fuelling the misery of Palestinians throughout the region.
•••
Jordan is the only Arab nation that has integrated large numbers of Palestinians as full-fledged citizens. This is due not only to the unification of the East Bank and West Bank of the Jordan River valley under Hashemite rule between the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 until Israel's occupation of West Bank in 1967, but also to the luck of having had an enlightened monarch committed to the compassionate treatment of the estimated 100,000 refugees who crossed the Jordan River during the nakba in 1948. Israel's occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war triggered a second exodus of 140,000 refugees into Jordan.
Today, almost 2 million of Jordan's 6 million people are registered Palestinian refugees, the largest concentration of current and former refugees in the Palestinian diaspora — and increasingly, tensions have deepened between the Palestinians and the "East Bank" establishment. This summer in Amman, ambiguous declarations by the recently appointed minister of the interior, Nayef al-Kadi, who is widely perceived to be anti-Palestinian, led many Jordanians of Palestinian origin to fear they would be stripped of Jordanian identity numbers. Speaking to the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat, al-Kadi confirmed that some Palestinians would be stripped of citizenship, ostensibly to counter Israeli plans to turn Jordan into Palestine. "We should be thanked for taking this measure," he said. "We are fulfilling our national duty because Israel wants to expel the Palestinians from their homeland." Panic about their status spread quickly among the Palestinian community.
In interviews this month, senior Jordanian officials sought to quell such fears, while also suggesting there was at least some substance to al-Kadi's explosive suggestion. Faisal Bakr Qadi, the director of the Interior Ministry's office of Inspections, said Palestinians in Jordan were not being systematically stripped of citizenship. Rather, he explained that the government's current review of Palestinian national status dated back to 1988, when King Hussein, in response to demands by Palestinian and Arab leaders, disengaged administratively from the West Bank. Palestinian refugees, he said, meaning those who came to Jordan in the 1948 exodus, were to remain "full Jordanian citizens". "Displaced" Palestinians, or those who had come in 1967 and afterwards, would be able to maintain their yellow identity cards and numbers and de facto citizenship, provided they returned to the West Bank to renew the Israeli passes that permit them to go back and forth between Jordan and the West Bank.
Since 1983, he said, Jordan had given the coveted yellow cards — which enable Palestinians to work without special permits, pay local tuition rates in school, and enjoy full government services — to 280,000 Palestinians, whereas it had "frozen" the cards — or downgraded their status — of only 15,856 people. So far this year, he said, 9,956 cards were upgraded, 291 downgraded.
While many diplomats doubt these numbers, Jordanians insist there is no plot or plan to expel or deny citizenship to Palestinians who have lived virtually their entire lives in Jordan. "We want to ensure that when and if the peace process succeeds in establishing an independent Palestinian state, Palestinians living in Jordan will be in a position to choose their citizenship by having their status in order in both Jordan and Palestine," said an official close to King Abdullah.
Yet the distinctions that seem meaningful in Amman are not clear to some of the almost 94,000 Palestinian residents of Baqa'a, the largest of the 10 official refugee camps run by the UN. Some Palestinians in Baqa'a complain about the "new regulations" and the lack of identity cards that enable them to work without special permits and educate their children in public schools. Anxiety about the future pervades this ramshackle suburb at the northern edge of Amman, which began as an emergency relief centre after the 1967 war and is now a sprawling mini-city with its own basic shops, shawarma (sandwich) stands, and services. Many of the people we spoke to claimed that they knew someone, or had a relative, neighbour and friend whose identity card had been revoked, or whose status had inexplicably been changed.
For many of these refugees at the bottom of Jordan's social and economic pecking order, life without papers means hiding from the police who constantly patrol their camp's streets, being too poor to send any of your eight to 10 children to college, a lifetime of menial labour, and only a threadbare dream of returning to a homeland that most of them have never seen. There is strong suspicion of the state, but also of their neighbours, who are divided into "'48 people" and "'67 people". "Some of the newcomers would give away Al Aqsa for a Jordanian identity card," says Heba, a mother of eight, mentioning Islam's celebrated mosque in Jerusalem, one of its holiest shrines.
"We're Jordanians," says her son, Mustapha, a slender, 20-year-old in a bright orange T-shirt emblazoned with meaningless words in unknown languages. "This is the best place in the world," he says, pointing around the bare living room whose worn rugs and threadbare pillows cover the floor on which he and all his siblings sleep. "We would never leave here. But I'm loyal to my country, and I would like to visit it one day."
He seems perplexed when asked which is his country — Jordan or Palestine. "We have no security here, but we are Jordanians," replies Mustapha, who lounges on a mattress in a two-storey cement house down the road while one of his five daughters offers tiny glasses of steaming herbal tea and cardamom-scented coffee. "Everything I have is here. This house. My car. My job. What would I have in Nablus or Be'ersheba?" he declares. "My children know nothing but Jordan. And we will stay here."
That determination, echoed repeatedly through the dilapidated cement homes that line Baqa'a's gravelly streets and dust-filled shops, is precisely what terrifies Jordan's East Bank establishment. Jordanians have reason to fear their Palestinian guests. Many Jordanians have not forgotten "Black September", the civil war launched by Arafat's Fatah organisation in 1970 which nearly toppled King Hussein's kingdom.
Moreover, having grown accustomed to their near monopoly on jobs provided by the government, Jordan's largest employer, Jordanians fear demands for political equality from Palestinians, most of whom would probably choose to remain in Jordan, relinquishing their "right of return' in favour of compensation. An end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would surely threaten Jordan's informal division of power: East Bankers dominate the army, the security services and most civil-service posts, while Palestinians are disproportionately represented in business. Palestinians may advise the king in the royal court, but there has been only one Palestinian prime minister, who served for eight months. Palestinians now comprise only 23 of Jordan's 110 MPs.
"The closer we get to a solution," says Adnan Abu Odeh, a Palestinian who was one of King Hussein's royal court chiefs and also held other important government posts, "the more anxious society becomes. We are approaching a moment of truth."
Monday, October 19, 2009
The Truth, Not Antiques, is Buried in Nahr al Bared
By Rima Merhi
Asharq Al-Awsat (London)
October 17, 2009
When I worked with the Lebanese government two years ago, we launched a media campaign that made three promises to the Palestinians: “The reconstruction of Nahr al Bared camp is definite, displacement is temporary and return is guaranteed.”
Lebanon must deliver these promises. To every politician in my country, I say if the team of officials you sent a few years ago to the camps left in tears, what have you left for the victims of Nahr al Bared who have been shoved in prefabricated steel containers for two years?
Buried in the rubble of Nahr al Bared is the truth, not antiques. Only this truth will protect the lives of Lebanese soldiers, the victims of Nahr al Bared, and the security of Lebanon.
More than forty interviews with major stakeholders this summer left me in no doubt that there had been no real investigative reporting by the media on Nahr al Bared, especially that the Lebanese army had denied access to journalists during the crisis.
People in Lebanon still wonder who is behind Fatah al Islam. How did Shaker al Abssi, the leader of this group, escape when the Lebanese army was besieging the camp for over 100 days? Why are the testimonies of Fatah al Islam detainees still withheld from the public? Why was military commander of Nahr al Bared operations assassinated? What happened to the army spy linked to Nahr al Bared? Who was responsible for the looting of Palestinian homes and the racist graffiti written on their walls? Are there antiques in Nahr al Bared or is it another excuse to delay reconstruction?
Lawyer Nizar Saghieh believes the Lebanese government should call for a national investigation into Nahr al Bared. “At the very least, it would be an admission by the government that many questions remain unanswered,” he said.
These unanswered questions lie at the heart of deteriorating Lebanese-Palestinian relations post Nahr al Bared.
Until this day, no one can enter or leave Nahr al Bared — including over 15,000 inhabitants who live amidst the ruins — without a permit. The army continues to control all four main entry and exit points.
When I obtained a permit from the Lebanese army to visit the camp this summer, it became very clear to me why the army wanted a DVD copy of everything I recorded before publication.
I found thousands of Palestinians literally shoved in door-to-door type steel containers — initially used as emergency housing in 2007. They freeze in the winter and burn in the summer. Up to six human beings, including children, sleep on the floor, eat, and live in the same space. The tiny “bathroom” consists of a hole in the ground with no shower or bath. Beside the bathroom is a kitchenette where streams of cockroaches, ants and flies enjoy leftover food.
This is not the point where we point a finger at the UNRWA. It’s unfair to blame the organization for all the ailments of Palestinian society in Lebanon, especially that some UNRWA staff died on the job attending to the needs of Palestinians in the crisis. The refugees remain the primary responsibility of the international community at large. In collaboration with the Lebanese government, UNRWA remains accountable and committed to improving living standards, but the needs of refugees are many times beyond available resources.
At a time when swine flu cases have been reported in Lebanon and winter is approaching, this situation also poses a potential health hazard, especially given the number of Lebanese and foreign social workers who walk in and out of the camp everyday.
Alarmed, I went searching for a hospital and came across a 24-hour emergency unit — the Palestinian Red Crescent. I walked past it four times before I realized the roof made of zinc and covered with stones was it! I found two beds, frequently used by the doctors due to housing shortages, and a small “lab.” I stood motionless as thirsty flies from the window nearby took a dive in the blood samples being tested.
I was petrified of catching a virus or disease that I would bring back home to my family and friends. But I had to have deep respect for the doctor who risked his life everyday and burned in the heat without AC, consoled by the mere fact that he could drive critical patients to neighboring hospitals around the clock.
Clearly, the reconstruction of hospitals and clinics, access to healthcare, education and proper personal hygiene is critical in Nahr al Bared.
With the help of the international community, many shops in Nahr al Bared have opened including bakeries, grocery stores, pharmacies, and even a place offering internet access and a mobile phone shop among others.
But army checkpoints are killing economic revival at a time when Nahr al Bared was known to have excellent trade and social relations with its surrounding area. The emotional damage is also so severe that some Palestinians have referred to Nahr al Bared as another “Nakba”.
Surely, we owe these Palestinians an explanation for what really happened in Nahr al Bared. And we owe an explanation to the families of almost 200 soldiers who were killed in this battle.
The quest for the truth must not die, and Nahr al Bared shall rise again. You can put a price on an antique, but the hopes and dreams of thousands of refugees living in despair are priceless. The truth, which will foster transparency and accountability so we can build Lebanon, is priceless.
Rima Merhi is the first Lebanese to win the Gebran Tueni fellowship at Harvard. Rima participated in the media and relief committees presided by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to manage the Nahr al Bared crisis in 2007.
Asharq Al-Awsat (London)
October 17, 2009
When I worked with the Lebanese government two years ago, we launched a media campaign that made three promises to the Palestinians: “The reconstruction of Nahr al Bared camp is definite, displacement is temporary and return is guaranteed.”
Lebanon must deliver these promises. To every politician in my country, I say if the team of officials you sent a few years ago to the camps left in tears, what have you left for the victims of Nahr al Bared who have been shoved in prefabricated steel containers for two years?
Buried in the rubble of Nahr al Bared is the truth, not antiques. Only this truth will protect the lives of Lebanese soldiers, the victims of Nahr al Bared, and the security of Lebanon.
More than forty interviews with major stakeholders this summer left me in no doubt that there had been no real investigative reporting by the media on Nahr al Bared, especially that the Lebanese army had denied access to journalists during the crisis.
People in Lebanon still wonder who is behind Fatah al Islam. How did Shaker al Abssi, the leader of this group, escape when the Lebanese army was besieging the camp for over 100 days? Why are the testimonies of Fatah al Islam detainees still withheld from the public? Why was military commander of Nahr al Bared operations assassinated? What happened to the army spy linked to Nahr al Bared? Who was responsible for the looting of Palestinian homes and the racist graffiti written on their walls? Are there antiques in Nahr al Bared or is it another excuse to delay reconstruction?
Lawyer Nizar Saghieh believes the Lebanese government should call for a national investigation into Nahr al Bared. “At the very least, it would be an admission by the government that many questions remain unanswered,” he said.
These unanswered questions lie at the heart of deteriorating Lebanese-Palestinian relations post Nahr al Bared.
Until this day, no one can enter or leave Nahr al Bared — including over 15,000 inhabitants who live amidst the ruins — without a permit. The army continues to control all four main entry and exit points.
When I obtained a permit from the Lebanese army to visit the camp this summer, it became very clear to me why the army wanted a DVD copy of everything I recorded before publication.
I found thousands of Palestinians literally shoved in door-to-door type steel containers — initially used as emergency housing in 2007. They freeze in the winter and burn in the summer. Up to six human beings, including children, sleep on the floor, eat, and live in the same space. The tiny “bathroom” consists of a hole in the ground with no shower or bath. Beside the bathroom is a kitchenette where streams of cockroaches, ants and flies enjoy leftover food.
This is not the point where we point a finger at the UNRWA. It’s unfair to blame the organization for all the ailments of Palestinian society in Lebanon, especially that some UNRWA staff died on the job attending to the needs of Palestinians in the crisis. The refugees remain the primary responsibility of the international community at large. In collaboration with the Lebanese government, UNRWA remains accountable and committed to improving living standards, but the needs of refugees are many times beyond available resources.
At a time when swine flu cases have been reported in Lebanon and winter is approaching, this situation also poses a potential health hazard, especially given the number of Lebanese and foreign social workers who walk in and out of the camp everyday.
Alarmed, I went searching for a hospital and came across a 24-hour emergency unit — the Palestinian Red Crescent. I walked past it four times before I realized the roof made of zinc and covered with stones was it! I found two beds, frequently used by the doctors due to housing shortages, and a small “lab.” I stood motionless as thirsty flies from the window nearby took a dive in the blood samples being tested.
I was petrified of catching a virus or disease that I would bring back home to my family and friends. But I had to have deep respect for the doctor who risked his life everyday and burned in the heat without AC, consoled by the mere fact that he could drive critical patients to neighboring hospitals around the clock.
Clearly, the reconstruction of hospitals and clinics, access to healthcare, education and proper personal hygiene is critical in Nahr al Bared.
With the help of the international community, many shops in Nahr al Bared have opened including bakeries, grocery stores, pharmacies, and even a place offering internet access and a mobile phone shop among others.
But army checkpoints are killing economic revival at a time when Nahr al Bared was known to have excellent trade and social relations with its surrounding area. The emotional damage is also so severe that some Palestinians have referred to Nahr al Bared as another “Nakba”.
Surely, we owe these Palestinians an explanation for what really happened in Nahr al Bared. And we owe an explanation to the families of almost 200 soldiers who were killed in this battle.
The quest for the truth must not die, and Nahr al Bared shall rise again. You can put a price on an antique, but the hopes and dreams of thousands of refugees living in despair are priceless. The truth, which will foster transparency and accountability so we can build Lebanon, is priceless.
Rima Merhi is the first Lebanese to win the Gebran Tueni fellowship at Harvard. Rima participated in the media and relief committees presided by Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to manage the Nahr al Bared crisis in 2007.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Egypt Ponders Failed Drive for Unesco
By Michael Slackman
The New York Times
September 29, 2009
CAIRO — For days after Egypt’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, failed in his bid to lead the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Egyptian newspapers and government officials presented the defeat as a sign of Western prejudice against Islam and the Arab world, the product of an international Jewish conspiracy.
“America, Europe and the Jewish lobby brought down Farouk Hosni,” read a headline in an independent daily newspaper, Al Masry Al Yom. The foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, criticized “international Judaism and Western powers” in a television interview. Mr. Hosny himself helped stoke those sentiments, saying, “There was a group of the world’s Jews who had a major influence in the elections who were a serious threat to Egypt taking this position.”
All of Egypt, indeed all of the Arab world, was talking with one voice of outrage and insult. Or so it seemed.
While no one here would argue that Israel and its supporters played no role in Mr. Hosny’s defeat to a Bulgarian diplomat, many people said that his failure was at least as much a sign of Egypt’s long, slow slide as the center of Arab culture, thought and influence. They said the defeat might represent a rejection of Muslims and Arabs, but perhaps more importantly a rejection of their authoritarian leaders.
Mr. Hosny, a favorite of President Hosni Mubarak, was roundly despised by many members of the nation’s cultural elite, who say he did little or nothing in his 22 years as culture minister to encourage cultural development and did much, particularly through the enforcement of strict government censorship, to stunt it.
In the independent newspaper Shorouk, Fahmy Howeidy wrote: “I am not exaggerating when I say that the failure of Mr. Farouk Hosny is not due to his hostility against Israel, as it was said, but the important reason that contributed to his failure is he represents a country that ranks among the politically failed states, where a monopoly of power and governing the state under emergency rule for more than a quarter of a century, where it suppresses public freedom, affects the image of its candidate.”
The defeat provoked a degree of quiet soul-searching here. The state’s retreat to anti-Zionism and to some extent, anti-Semitism, underscored for many here the region’s collective political impotence, a failure of Arab leaders to form a powerful regional bloc capable of winning support from power brokers in Washington, London or Paris that has lasted decades.
The pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi wrote that Mr. Hosny’s loss “comes as yet another confirmation of the Arab world’s — and Egypt’s in particular — backslide on the international arena, and the general lack of respect towards it in all areas, not exclusively culture.”
Mr. Hosny, 71, is a well-known figure in Egypt. He has been the minister for more than two decades. Oddly enough, considering the charges of anti-Semitism that derailed his candidacy, he has never been known as a strong opponent of normalizing ties with Israel.
True, he has resisted a warm peace, refused to visit Tel Aviv and was quoted as saying that he would burn Israeli books if he found them in a library. But proponents say he took these actions as the bare minimum to defend himself from a population that views Israel as the enemy.
Throughout his candidacy, Mr. Hosny struggled to mute the charges of anti-Semitism, efforts that caused many people in Egypt to wince as they watched a stalwart of the state apologize, to Israel no less. And they winced again, when he blamed a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy for his loss.
“He did not take an anti-normalization stand until the end,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, an independent Egyptian blogger and journalist. “The moment he lost he came back and started saying some of the most foul anti-Semitic statements against the Jews, confirming what the West had said about him.”
Mr. Hosny lost his bid for Unesco, but tried to turn that into a victory at home, returning as a victim, and for the state-run media a hero. The charges of a Western, Jewish-Zionist conspiracy may have been amplified by a government eager to limit its embarrassment after having staked its credibility on Mr. Hosny.
But they are not new, said Hala Mustafa, editor in chief of the weekly magazine Democracy and a member of Mr. Mubarak’s governing party. When it comes to domestic politics, she said, Egyptian officials often try to present themselves as anti-Israeli, even while serving as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.
Ms. Mustafa has been squeezed by that dual identity.
In her capacity as an editor and academic in the state-financed Ahram Center, she recently met with Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, Shalom Cohen. She has since been tarred in the press as a “normalizer,” and the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate has tried to blacklist her. Ms. Mustafa said she saw the state’s rush to blame Israel for Mr. Hosny’s loss as stemming from the same forces busy attacking her.
“We have been under this propaganda for 30 years,” she said. “Like Egypt doesn’t have a peace treaty with Israel? Like Egypt does not play a peace role between Israel and the Palestinians? If that is Egypt’s role, why are we not allowed to play the same role?”
There is another view, too, one that was published in English, allowing, perhaps for a degree of candor not found in the Arabic news media. Writing in the English-language Daily News, the chief editor, Rania al-Malky, suggested that Mr. Hosny might have done as well as he did because he was Arab and Muslim, not because he was qualified. His defeat, she wrote, should not surprise anyone.
“I will say this at the risk of being branded unpatriotic, but no matter where you stand on the political spectrum,” she wrote, “you must admit that the Egyptian administration did not deserve to win this bid. How can a 22-year minister of a country where culture, education, health and science have regressed to the Dark Ages become the head of Unesco?”
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.
The New York Times
September 29, 2009
CAIRO — For days after Egypt’s culture minister, Farouk Hosny, failed in his bid to lead the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Egyptian newspapers and government officials presented the defeat as a sign of Western prejudice against Islam and the Arab world, the product of an international Jewish conspiracy.
“America, Europe and the Jewish lobby brought down Farouk Hosni,” read a headline in an independent daily newspaper, Al Masry Al Yom. The foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, criticized “international Judaism and Western powers” in a television interview. Mr. Hosny himself helped stoke those sentiments, saying, “There was a group of the world’s Jews who had a major influence in the elections who were a serious threat to Egypt taking this position.”
All of Egypt, indeed all of the Arab world, was talking with one voice of outrage and insult. Or so it seemed.
While no one here would argue that Israel and its supporters played no role in Mr. Hosny’s defeat to a Bulgarian diplomat, many people said that his failure was at least as much a sign of Egypt’s long, slow slide as the center of Arab culture, thought and influence. They said the defeat might represent a rejection of Muslims and Arabs, but perhaps more importantly a rejection of their authoritarian leaders.
Mr. Hosny, a favorite of President Hosni Mubarak, was roundly despised by many members of the nation’s cultural elite, who say he did little or nothing in his 22 years as culture minister to encourage cultural development and did much, particularly through the enforcement of strict government censorship, to stunt it.
In the independent newspaper Shorouk, Fahmy Howeidy wrote: “I am not exaggerating when I say that the failure of Mr. Farouk Hosny is not due to his hostility against Israel, as it was said, but the important reason that contributed to his failure is he represents a country that ranks among the politically failed states, where a monopoly of power and governing the state under emergency rule for more than a quarter of a century, where it suppresses public freedom, affects the image of its candidate.”
The defeat provoked a degree of quiet soul-searching here. The state’s retreat to anti-Zionism and to some extent, anti-Semitism, underscored for many here the region’s collective political impotence, a failure of Arab leaders to form a powerful regional bloc capable of winning support from power brokers in Washington, London or Paris that has lasted decades.
The pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi wrote that Mr. Hosny’s loss “comes as yet another confirmation of the Arab world’s — and Egypt’s in particular — backslide on the international arena, and the general lack of respect towards it in all areas, not exclusively culture.”
Mr. Hosny, 71, is a well-known figure in Egypt. He has been the minister for more than two decades. Oddly enough, considering the charges of anti-Semitism that derailed his candidacy, he has never been known as a strong opponent of normalizing ties with Israel.
True, he has resisted a warm peace, refused to visit Tel Aviv and was quoted as saying that he would burn Israeli books if he found them in a library. But proponents say he took these actions as the bare minimum to defend himself from a population that views Israel as the enemy.
Throughout his candidacy, Mr. Hosny struggled to mute the charges of anti-Semitism, efforts that caused many people in Egypt to wince as they watched a stalwart of the state apologize, to Israel no less. And they winced again, when he blamed a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy for his loss.
“He did not take an anti-normalization stand until the end,” said Hossam el-Hamalawy, an independent Egyptian blogger and journalist. “The moment he lost he came back and started saying some of the most foul anti-Semitic statements against the Jews, confirming what the West had said about him.”
Mr. Hosny lost his bid for Unesco, but tried to turn that into a victory at home, returning as a victim, and for the state-run media a hero. The charges of a Western, Jewish-Zionist conspiracy may have been amplified by a government eager to limit its embarrassment after having staked its credibility on Mr. Hosny.
But they are not new, said Hala Mustafa, editor in chief of the weekly magazine Democracy and a member of Mr. Mubarak’s governing party. When it comes to domestic politics, she said, Egyptian officials often try to present themselves as anti-Israeli, even while serving as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians.
Ms. Mustafa has been squeezed by that dual identity.
In her capacity as an editor and academic in the state-financed Ahram Center, she recently met with Israel’s ambassador to Egypt, Shalom Cohen. She has since been tarred in the press as a “normalizer,” and the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate has tried to blacklist her. Ms. Mustafa said she saw the state’s rush to blame Israel for Mr. Hosny’s loss as stemming from the same forces busy attacking her.
“We have been under this propaganda for 30 years,” she said. “Like Egypt doesn’t have a peace treaty with Israel? Like Egypt does not play a peace role between Israel and the Palestinians? If that is Egypt’s role, why are we not allowed to play the same role?”
There is another view, too, one that was published in English, allowing, perhaps for a degree of candor not found in the Arabic news media. Writing in the English-language Daily News, the chief editor, Rania al-Malky, suggested that Mr. Hosny might have done as well as he did because he was Arab and Muslim, not because he was qualified. His defeat, she wrote, should not surprise anyone.
“I will say this at the risk of being branded unpatriotic, but no matter where you stand on the political spectrum,” she wrote, “you must admit that the Egyptian administration did not deserve to win this bid. How can a 22-year minister of a country where culture, education, health and science have regressed to the Dark Ages become the head of Unesco?”
Mona El-Naggar contributed reporting.
Hosni and the Zionist Plot
By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed
Asharq Al-Awsat (London)
October 10, 2009
Following the Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni’s failed bid to head UNESCO, many people stated that this loss was a catastrophe and blamed it on an international Zionist plot, even though it was nothing more than competition for an international position.
The following week, US President Barack Obama received a real blow when the city of Chicago lost the competition to host the 2016 Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Barack Obama made a personal visit to Copenhagen, Denmark, together with some influential personalities and media figures to support the Chicago bid for the Olympics. However, he returned home in his giant jet disappointed. “You can play a great game and still not win…” Obama said. He did not call it a conspiracy and place the blame on others even though he is the most powerful president in the world in terms of influence, and his country’s chances of hosting the international Olympic Games were higher by virtue of Chicago’s sports facilities and its huge financial resources in comparison to the other three competing cities. Obama lost simply because this time the majority voted for another country and this is the kind of thing that happens in any competition.
What I mean is that after years of experiencing the same thing over and over, we still insist on giving Israel a title it does not deserve and that title is the “force majeure” of all Arabs. Anybody who knows public work, including political work, must be aware that Israel’s assumed capability is a false notion including the defeat of Minister Hosni, which was nothing more than a competition that could have been lost by the best candidate.
The belief that the Egyptian Minister of Culture’s failure to win the UNESCO position is a catastrophe belittles Egypt as well, as it is too big a state to value itself on a temporary post. In the same way, this also exaggerates the value of the UNESCO post, as it is merely a cultural organization that cannot be compared to the UN or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is headed by an Egyptian.
I read some of what was written about Minister Hosni and the false accusations cast against him of hatred and book burning and this is nothing more than the opinions of some people that every minister, or anyone in a public position, should be used to. As for voting for the UNESCO position, this was political action being practiced and in most cases it is subject to each country’s considerations. But to accuse Israel of being behind it means we would be awarding Israel a championship medal it does not deserve.
We should be used to defeats as long as we aspire to win; this is part of life, unless we choose to stay at home and refrain from entering competitions, in which case there would be no winners or losers.
Egypt is the most populated Arab country, and one of the developing countries with the most figures assuming international posts even though the country is not the biggest in terms of size or population, or richest in natural resources. This in itself is enough to make one feel satisfied rather than bitter or angry. As for Israel — which is great in our eyes only — its figures have not assumed a single international post at any organization in its entire history.
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is general manager of Al-Arabiya television and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat.
Asharq Al-Awsat (London)
October 10, 2009
Following the Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni’s failed bid to head UNESCO, many people stated that this loss was a catastrophe and blamed it on an international Zionist plot, even though it was nothing more than competition for an international position.
The following week, US President Barack Obama received a real blow when the city of Chicago lost the competition to host the 2016 Olympic Games to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Barack Obama made a personal visit to Copenhagen, Denmark, together with some influential personalities and media figures to support the Chicago bid for the Olympics. However, he returned home in his giant jet disappointed. “You can play a great game and still not win…” Obama said. He did not call it a conspiracy and place the blame on others even though he is the most powerful president in the world in terms of influence, and his country’s chances of hosting the international Olympic Games were higher by virtue of Chicago’s sports facilities and its huge financial resources in comparison to the other three competing cities. Obama lost simply because this time the majority voted for another country and this is the kind of thing that happens in any competition.
What I mean is that after years of experiencing the same thing over and over, we still insist on giving Israel a title it does not deserve and that title is the “force majeure” of all Arabs. Anybody who knows public work, including political work, must be aware that Israel’s assumed capability is a false notion including the defeat of Minister Hosni, which was nothing more than a competition that could have been lost by the best candidate.
The belief that the Egyptian Minister of Culture’s failure to win the UNESCO position is a catastrophe belittles Egypt as well, as it is too big a state to value itself on a temporary post. In the same way, this also exaggerates the value of the UNESCO post, as it is merely a cultural organization that cannot be compared to the UN or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is headed by an Egyptian.
I read some of what was written about Minister Hosni and the false accusations cast against him of hatred and book burning and this is nothing more than the opinions of some people that every minister, or anyone in a public position, should be used to. As for voting for the UNESCO position, this was political action being practiced and in most cases it is subject to each country’s considerations. But to accuse Israel of being behind it means we would be awarding Israel a championship medal it does not deserve.
We should be used to defeats as long as we aspire to win; this is part of life, unless we choose to stay at home and refrain from entering competitions, in which case there would be no winners or losers.
Egypt is the most populated Arab country, and one of the developing countries with the most figures assuming international posts even though the country is not the biggest in terms of size or population, or richest in natural resources. This in itself is enough to make one feel satisfied rather than bitter or angry. As for Israel — which is great in our eyes only — its figures have not assumed a single international post at any organization in its entire history.
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is general manager of Al-Arabiya television and former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat.
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