By Rime Allaf

May 18, 2011

New York Times (Online)

In the space of a couple of weeks, Arabs were reminded of two issues that had become rather insignificant for them over the years, especially following the invasion of Iraq; first, the existence — and the demise — of the infamous leader of Al Qaeda, and second, the existence — and the resignation — of the latest U.S. envoy to the Middle East.

Likewise, U.S. statements relating to Arab affairs have not been well received since President Obama’s public backtracking on the issue of Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land, and Arab anger has increased with each successive American position on the nascent Arab revolutions. From initial shock in Tunisia, to hesitant generalities about demonstration rights in Egypt and Yemen, to practical silence when the heaviest repressions began in Bahrain and Syria, the U.S. position did not shine by its principles. Apart from the blatant case of Libya, one could be tempted to surmise that the U.S. was suddenly uninterested and uninvolved in the Arab world.If many were surprised by the overt self-congratulatory reactions to Osama Bin Laden’s killing, even taking into account the enormous impact of 9/11 on the American psyche, most did not even register George Mitchell’s announcement that he was giving up his position. Indeed, in a region sweltering in the rising heat of the Arab spring, the focus has been on uprisings driven by secular popular movements, joining people from every political, social and ideological background in a common struggle against the tyranny of stagnant, corrupt regimes. In such settings, from the Atlantic to the Gulf, Arabs have had no time for extremists preaching archaic messages, and Bin Laden’s voice had neither been played nor heard in the newly baptized liberation squares in various capitals.

But for better or for worse, the U.S. is not only still interested, it is increasingly involved in the affairs of the Arab world, trying to recover the ground lost after the fall of two strong allies. While Ben Ali’s departure may have momentarily shaken its relation with Tunisia, the fall of Mubarak threatened to change much more than its alliance with Egypt, as the revolutionaries continue to denounce the country’s perceived subservience to Israel, to demand the opening of the border with Gaza, and to support the Palestinian cause in all its ramifications.

The U.S. will be working to adapt to the new leaderships quickly and to work around new alliances, including the recent reconciliation between the two leading Palestinian factions, Fatah and Hamas. While the declared U.S. goal remains to achieve peace in the region and to support peoples’ aspirations, there is little point in re-appointing an envoy to the region if the U.S. continues its current policy of acquiescence to all Israeli demands — and to all Gulf regime demands as well.

Indeed, short of someone with the moral caliber and the independence of a Nelson Mandela, no envoy will ever achieve anything if he is merely in damage-control mode — or, worse, in election mode. The message to the Arab world would be clear: the U.S. only cares when it’s about oil, and when it’s about Israel.

It doesn’t need to be mission impossible, and there is always the minute chance that President Obama will begin laying the ground for a legacy of which others have only dreamed. On Thursday, addressing an Arab audience which has rejected empty rhetoric, the U.S. president can declare that all people will be treated equally in their quest for justice and freedom; that all regimes and all governments will be treated equally if they deny them those rights; that a better, fairer settlement than the one Israel was pushing, and the Palestinian Authority was willing to take, will be imposed; that international law stands above all else; and that nobody is above those principles.

It’s a dream, but somebody’s gotta have it.

By Tony Karon

May 16, 2011

Time Magazine (Online)

Welcome to the post-peace process: The drama that unfolded on Israel’s boundaries on Sunday as 12 Palestinians were killed in a wave of unarmed civil disobedience was but a taste of things to come. That was the warning from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Sunday night, and he’s certainly got reason to worry: Rather than pin their hopes on a moribund peace process, Palestinians have begun instead to align themselves with the Arab Spring  by pressing for their own rights through acts of people power. Even if there’s no immediate followup to Sunday’s protests, they represent a political crisis of epic proportions, not only for Israel and the United States, but also potentially even for the Palestinian leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas (and even, possibly, for his new Hamas partners in government).

Israel’s security establishment has always seen mass unarmed civil disobedience as far more threatening than rocket fire or suicide bombers, because military responses to non-military challenges weaken Israel’s diplomatic and political standing. The protests also represent a challenge for Abbas, whose proclivity to compromise on issues such as the rights of Palestinian refugees in order to achieve an agreement with Israel is not shared by those taking to the streets.

And while Sunday’s protests that turned deadly on the border with Lebanon and on the cease-fire line with Syria will have suited the agenda of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, those refugees — whose families have lived in squalor since their dispossession by Israel in the conflict over its founding in 1948 — do not need the Assad regime to spur them to stake their (often downplayed) claims in the outcome of any Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Not that there is any Israeli-Palestinian peace process left to speak of. Just last Friday, Obama’s Middle East Special Envoy, Sen. George Mitchell, gave up the pretense that defined his position and resigned. And Sunday’s events were a sharp reminder that the collapse of the peace process does not mean ordinary Palestinians are simply going to accept their lot. Indeed, the conflict is now heading into uncharted waters in which many of the assumption of the past two decades are called into question.

Of 1967 and 1948

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday that the protestors’  “struggle is not over the 1967 borders but over the very existence of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be resolved.” He’s not wrong: The reason Palestinians use the term “catastrophe” – “Nakbah,” whose annual commemoration was the theme of Sunday’s protests – to describe the moment of Israel’s emergence as a nation state  in 1948  is the fact that more than half of the Palestinian Arab population  lost their homes and land in the process of Israel’s creation. Indeed, it’s that dispossession that drove the formation of the modern Palestinian national movement, which was not originally pursuing statehood on the 1967 lines, but the recovery of that which was lost in 1948. The idea of accepting Palestinian statehood in the territories occupied by Israel in the war of 1967 (the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem) was, for the PLO, a compromise pushed by Yasser Arafat and adopted in 1988, a reluctant acknowledgement of the intractable military facts on the ground (that Israel could not be militarily defeated) prompting an acceptance of the partition principle that Palestinians had rejected forty years earlier.

It’s the refugee issue, also, that sits at the heart of the reluctance by Hamas to formally recognize Israel. As I wrote five years ago,

In the Western and Israeli narrative, Israel’s creation is seen as redress for centuries of Jewish suffering in Europe culminating in the Holocaust. In the Palestinian and Arab narrative, Israel’s creation meant the violent displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and another Arab humiliation at Western hands. So, while May 15 is celebrated by Israelis as Yom Haatzmaut (independence day), the Palestinians mark the same day as the somber anniversary of Al-Nakbah (the catastrophe), the moment when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost everything.

Even President Mahmoud Abbas has always insisted on a refugee “right of return” as part of a two-state solution. Israel has steadfastly refused to accept responsibility for the plight of the Palestinian refugees, and sees their return as representing a mortal “demographic” threat to Israel’s ethnic-Jewish majority — hence Netanyahu’s reference to Israel’s very existence. There had been  plenty of indications, while negotiations had been under way, that Abbas was willing to fudge the issue by securing a “right of return” to a Palestinian state rather than to homes lost inside what is now Israel. But neither Abbas nor any other Palestinian leader had dared tell the refugees themselves that they wouldn’t be going back to where their forebears had lived – and Sunday’s demonstrations signal that the Arab Spring may have made it even more difficult for Abbas to compromise on the refugee issue.

So, Netanyahu is right: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can’t be resolved by addressing only what happened in 1967, while ignoring what happened in 1948. And, of course, the failure of the two sides to agree even on resolving 1967 makes even more unlikely, at this point, a resolution of the entire conflict by mutual consent. Because 1948 – with the achievement of a Jewish-majority state intimately connected with the displacement of  hundreds of thousands of Arabs – is precisely where the two people’s narratives are at their most mutually exclusive.

Palestinian Independence from the U.S.

During the two decades of the peace process, Palestinian leaders had assumed  that despite ups and downs, Washington would eventually deliver Palestinian statehood alongside Israel. The self-evident collapse of that assumption has prompted a Palestinian declaration of strategic independence from Washington — hence Barak’s warning on Sunday, of more, and worse, to come. Abbas in February resisted pressure from Obama to refrain from going ahead with a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity. He has ignored U.S. policy on Hamas to create a unity government with the organization, and is once again planning to ignore Washington’s objections by asking the UN General Assembly in September to recognize Palestinian sovereignty over all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

But this is uncharted territory: Part of the bargain of the U.S.-led peace process was that  the Palestinian leadership would keep the peace and keep the heat off Israel, in exchange for the promise of statehood through the negotiation process. Absent the promise of achieving statehood by that route, even the current security status quo on the West Bank, under which Abbas’ security forces shield Israel from both terror attacks and, often, also from unarmed protest actions, is now called into question.

Palestinian Independence from Abbas?

Were the protest actions seen on Sunday to mushroom into people-power intifada, it would potentially undermines the authority of both President Abbas and his new Hamas governing partners. (At least Abbas managed to get Hamas on board before this broke out, because otherwise the Islamists would have an incentive to stoke the fires to undermine Abbas; now they may actually have an incentive to restrain protest action to protect their own control over their Gaza bailiwick.)

Even if Abbas may like to see protest action and approaches to the U.N. as simply strengthening his own bargaining position,  it’s unlikely that the protestors share his negotiating agenda, nor will they be easily persuaded to stop their actions in deference to the security cooperation between Abbas’ forces and the Israelis. And, as General Keith Dayton, the U.S. officer tasked with building Abbas’ security forces, warned in 2009, without the achievement of Palestinian statehood by 2011, the ability of those units to enforce the peace would come into question because they see themselves as the security forces of a Palestinian state, not a gendarmerie protecting the status quo.

A Crisis for Israel, a Crisis for Obama

As Israeli commentator Aluf Benn wrote on Sunday,

“the nightmare scenario Israel has feared since its inception became real – that Palestinian refugees would simply start walking from their camps toward the border and would try to exercise their ‘right of return.’ Israel prepared for demonstrations of Nakba Day in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, in the Galilee and the Triangle, but instead it was the Palestinian diaspora that tried to climb its fences. More than an intelligence lapse, the situation highlighted the limits of power.”

While Israel’s military power dwarfs that of every regional rival, it remains vulnerable on the political front. And that’s where Palestinians are likely to push in the coming months.

For President Obama, Sunday’s protests highlight the difficulty he faces in composing the speech he’s scheduled to give at the State Department on Thursday with the aim of  “resetting” relations with the Arab world. Administration officials had said that he would want to focus on the killing of Osama bin Laden and on the Arab Spring, but wouldn’t have much to say on the stalled peace process. But the weekend’s events, not only on Israel’s front-lines, but also in Cairo where tens of thousands of people demonstrated in support of the Palestinians, ought to have sounded a warning: Believing that the U.S. can realign itself with the newly empowered Arab public while maintaining unconditional support for Israel in the face of a challenge by Palestinians may simply be wishful thinking.

By Robert Malley

May 4, 2011

Washington Post

The impact on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the most debated aspect of the “unity” deal between the two principal Palestinian movements, Fatah and Hamas, but it is almost certainly the least significant. So far, U.S. reactions to the unexpected agreement have been predictably negative, with Washington warning against forming a reconciled government with an unreformed Hamas. In so doing, it appears to view this deal through the obsolete prism of a moribund peace process and a frozen conflict between a moderate and militant axis. Instead, it should assess the agreement against the backdrop of a fast-changing Middle East.

Twice before the world has sought to prevent the Islamists from governing — after Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections and, a year later, when it formed a coalition with Fatah. Twice, the world made a mess of things. The balance sheet is unequivocal: Hamas remains entrenched in Gaza; Fatah is no stronger; and, without elections or genuine pluralistic political life, democratic institutions in the Palestinian territories have rusted.

The most persuasive case against unity has been that it would dash prospects for Israeli-
Palestinian negotiations. Even then, this was never a particularly convincing argument. For it was hard to imagine a fractured national movement reaching a peace agreement, let alone implementing and sustaining it. Palestinian reconciliation was more likely a prerequisite than an obstacle to peace.

But now? The peace process is lifeless. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have not met in months. Palestinians, convinced that they will get nothing from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and little from the United States, are focused on getting the U.N. General Assembly to endorse their call for statehood. In this context, Netanyahu’s insistence that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas is the emptiest of threats.

What’s most intriguing about the unity deal is the regional environment in which it is taking place. The parties did not suddenly overcome mutual distrust. Rather, both are feeling the aftershocks of the momentous changes sweeping the Middle East.

For Abbas, the fall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt represents the loss of a key ally and the collapse of the “moderate” axis to which he belonged. A unity deal — popular among Palestinians — could shore up Fatah and the Palestinian president’s domestic and regional standing at a time when their main selling point (a negotiated peace with Israel) lies in tatters.

For Hamas, Mubarak’s fall likewise was decisive. An Egyptian government more in tune with public opinion coupled with a more powerful Muslim Brotherhood — Hamas’s parent organization — augurs a far warmer bilateral relationship. Growing unrest in Syria is another factor. The embattled Syrian regime, having offered safe harbor to Hamas’s leadership for a decade, wants to collect the rent — through overt signs of loyalty and support. Hamas has officially backed the regime but tepidly, out of reluctance to alienate its power base of Palestinian refugees and conservative Sunnis in Syria and beyond. Hamas calculates that even without immediate regime change, the Syrian regime inevitably will be transformed, its brutal crackdown having eroded much of its domestic credibility and regional influence. Tilting toward Cairo, a more important actor in the long run and more legitimate among Hamas’s constituency, was the safer bet. Accepting the Egyptian-brokered deal was a first step.

For political and legal reasons, the Obama administration cannot embrace a unity government. But Washington should at least refrain from reflexively viewing such a body as a setback and seeking to undo it. Instead, it should keep an open mind and ask hard questions about what the deal says about the region:

Beyond discomfort at Cairo’s improved relations with Hamas, is it not in America’s interest to see an influential Egypt critical of Israel yet committed to its peace accord; whose relationship with the United States is strong but not servile, and whose stances are more consistent with domestic and regional opinion? Might this not weaken Iran, which benefited from using Mubarak’s regime as a foil, and whose regional weight will deflate with the rise of a credible Arab counter-model? How would attempts to torpedo the agreement affect relations with this new Egypt — and, more broadly, with a newly assertive Arab public? Is Washington better off if Hamas feels compelled to drift from Tehran and Damascus toward Cairo? If the Muslim Brotherhood plays a more central role in Egypt, how might it influence Hamas? How might U.S. engagement with the Brotherhood influence that influence?

There are many implications to the unity deal. If we persist in viewing the new politics of the Middle East within the paradigm of old, we risk overlooking the most interesting ones.