Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Ready for the big vote? (Chip East)
Who backs Palestine UN bid? Ehud Olmert, among others (+video)
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas looks set for a rare diplomatic victory tomorrow: An upgrade of Palestine to "observer state" status at the UN.
While the US and Israel have strongly opposed the move, and the UK has said it will abstain from the vote unless Mr. Abbas promises not to use his new status to bring war crime allegations against Israel in front of the International Criminal Court, there appear to be more than enough votes in the UN General Assembly for the motion which, in its current draft, expresses little more than support for the fundamental aspects of efforts towards a two state solution that have existed for decades now.
The draft resolution to be voted on at the UN says, among other things:
"Reaffirms the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to independence in their State of Palestine on the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967;
Decides to accord to Palestine non-member observer State status in the United Nations, without prejudice to the acquired rights, privileges and role of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the United Nations as the representative of the Palestinian people, in accordance with the relevant resolutions and practice;
Expresses the hope that the Security Council will consider favourably the application submitted on 23 September 2011 by the State of Palestine for admission to full membership in the United Nations;
(and) Affirms its determination to contribute to the achievement of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and the attainment of a peaceful
settlement in the Middle East that ends the occupation that began in 1967 and fulfills the vision of two States: an independent, sovereign, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine living side by side in peace and security with Israel on the basis of the pre-1967 borders.
The US State Department has said the upgrade will be counterproductive, and some Israeli politicians have mooted cutting off the disbursement of tax receipts to the Palestinian Authority and even seeking to topple the PA in retaliation. The Israeli government has downplayed the issue in the past few days, with spokesman Mark Regev telling the New York Times that passage of "a one-sided anti-Israel resolution" by the General Assembly "should come as a surprise to nobody" and "ultimately, what we will see at the United Nations is diplomatic theater. It will in no way affect the realities on the ground.”
In the short term, at least, Mr. Regev is almost certainly correct. The moribund peace process is likely to remain so. Still, not everyone in Israel is in agreement. Bernard Avishai was in touch with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert today, and in a piece for The Daily Beast's Open Zion channel, writes that Mr. Olmert thinks the move could eventually kick-start a healthier dialogue:
“I believe,” Olmert wrote me, intending his statement to be made public, “that the Palestinian request from the United Nations is congruent with the basic concept of the two-state solution. Therefore, I see no reason to oppose it. Once the United Nations will lay the foundation for this idea, we in Israel will have to engage in a serious process of negotiations, in order to agree on specific borders based on the 1967 lines, and resolve the other issues. It is time to give a hand to, and encourage, the moderate forces amongst the Palestinians. Abu-Mazen"—an alias for Abbas—"and Salam Fayyad need our help. It's time to give it.”
Is Olmert just chasing the past? Isn’t the antagonism between Hamas and Israel’s “consensus” now the only relevant reality? Nonsense. What makes Abbas irrelevant is not Hamas “steadfastness,” but his failure to garner sufficient American backing for the principles he and Olmert worked through over 36 meetings in 2008: principles for resolving Jerusalem, borders, security and refugees consistent with the positions taken by previous American administrations, but which Netanyahu refuses to accept as a basis for new negotiations.
I wrote yesterday about Abbas's seeming irrelevance, and hopes that the UN bid could bring some political momentum back his way, which lately has seemed to all be in Hamas' direction.
But all this also brought back to mind the attacks against Obama in May 2011 for advocating the same thing (following in the footsteps of President George H.W. Bush, whose advocacy for a two-state solution on the basis of the pre-1967 armistice lines was dismissed by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1992 as the "borders of Auschwitz.") What did Obama say then?
"The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps." What does that mean? Well, in practice it means the Israelis and the Palestinians would negotiate bits of a future Palestinian state that would not follow the 1967 borders, with some Israeli settlement blocs presumably being swapped for other bits of Israeli land. 1967 is just a starting point.
That's been the general working idea for the last four US presidencies, including two Republican administrations. Yet not only was (Mitt) Romney striking out at Obama as having undermined Israel's "ability to negotiate peace" but others were reacting with outrage. Mike Huckabee complained of Obama's "betrayal" of Israel.
Huckabee also fell into a camp that apparently misunderstood what Obama said. He complained that Obama "made a grievous mistake by suggesting borders of Israel go back to pre-1967 borders." As did Tim Pawlenty, a fellow Republican presidential aspirant ("Obama's insistence on a return to the 1967 borders is a ... very dangerous demand.") As explained earlier, that's not what Obama said.
Well now the UN is cementing its long-standing position. Some Israelis like Mr. Olmert see the move as in their country's best interests. President Obama still holds his position, though he's standing in the way of the UN move as a favor to Mr. Netanyahu and Israel.Today, US officials lobbied Mr. Abbas to back off. No luck.
Something is about to happen. Will it change much? Who knows. But Palestine's status at the UN thus far doesn't seem to have been helping the so-called peace process.
What could it hurt?
Anti-Mursi protesters chant anti-government and anti-Muslim Brotherhood slogans as they gather at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Nov. 27. Opponents of President Mohamed Mursi rallied in Cairo's Tahrir Square for a fifth day on Tuesday, stepping up calls to scrap a decree they say threatens Egypt with a new era of autocracy. (Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters)
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood sets constitution showdown for tomorrow
At 10 a.m. in Cairo tomorrow (3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time), Egypt's battle between Islamists and a loose coalition of secular politicians and political activists over the country's new constitution looks set to come to a head.
The Muslim Brotherhood announced that the country's constituent assembly will hold an up or down vote then on a new draft constitution that has roiled Egyptian politics for months. If it passes a body that appears packed with Islamist politicians, most of those from the Brotherhood, the constitution will then be put to a national referendum. One caveat is that, in the coinage of political scientist Marc Lynch, Egyptian politics since Mubarak have resembled Calvinball, with rules and deadlines and statements shifting constantly.
Nevertheless President Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood politician who became the country's first freely elected president last June, appears committed to his current course. He's gambling the move will defuse an increasingly tense situation on the streets of Cairo. In the past week he's boldly (or recklessly, depending on your point of view) moved to break the constitutional impasse.
At the end of last week he issued a decree removing judicial oversight from the process, since he feared Egypt's judges would nullify the constituent assembly much as they'd nullified the election of parliament in June. That move had secular political forces warning that he was setting himself up as a dictator. The Brotherhood shot back that it was only a temporary move to ease passage of a constitution.
A sprawling constitution
But the constitution was the real issue all along. Secular Egyptians feared that Morsi and his Islamist allies were crafting a basic legal text that would move the country starkly in the direction of Islamic law, and argued that it was being drafted by a group that was far from representative of Egyptian society. From their point of view, they've been given two options: Live with Morsi holding all executive and legislative power, with broad immunity from judicial interference to boot; or, approve the constitution he favors.
Politicians on the assembly like Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister and Arab League chief who unsuccessfully ran for president, complained in recent weeks they weren't being given anywhere near sufficient time to review an ever-changing, expanding document, that at last count had over 230 articles.
Drafts of the sprawling constitution have been filled with vague, at times contradictory language, while also calling Islamic law (sharia) "the" basis for Egyptian law rather than "a" basis, a crucial distinction. Further, they've envisioned a role for the unelected Islamic jurists of Al Azhar University in settling some constitutional matters.
What precisely will be voted on tomorrow? At this point, it's unclear. Egyptian newspapers are reporting more changes made in the past few days, including one report that a change has enshrined the military's controversial power to try civilians in military courts in some circumstances. In the absence of a clear public document with a chance for the public to review, rumors will fly and confusion will reign.
What will happen next?
The Brotherhood, responding to the over 100,000 anti-Morsi protesters who gathered in Tahrir Square yesterday, has been calling for a "million man march" on Saturday in support of the president and his constitutional moves and to "protect the achievements of the revolution." The anti-Morsi protesters, many of them the original organizers of the protests and marches that drove Hosni Mubarak from power in February 2011, have vowed to be on the streets Saturday too. It's an explosive situation, with many analysts and activists in Cairo warning that it could come to blows.
Where is the military in all this? Unclear. But if there is chaos on the streets, the chances of the military returning to the open role in Egyptian politics that it only recently vacated can't be ruled out.
And what of the referendum? Issandr El Amrani, a keen analyst of Egyptian politics, is worried, pointing out that Egypt's judiciary, which veered toward open revolt against Morsi in the past few days, is key to the organization of Egyptian elections.
"Even if it's approved tomorrow, there has to be a referendum on it. Victory is not guaranteed and a referendum will take at least a couple of weeks to organize. The supervisory commission to run it would be difficult to form, because it has to include senior judges who would likely boycott it, and judges are supposed to also be present at polling stations. All this points to a royal mess, a constitution that has no legitimacy among a big part of the public, and gives the opportunity to the Salafis — whose votes the Brothers now need to approve the latest draft — to introduce modifications to the text."
The Salafis are the Islamist faction that, when it comes to the role of women in society and the overall interpretation of the sharia, are to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood.
For the moment, it looks like the Muslim Brotherhood, which has long been the best organized popular political force in the country, has won this round.
But at what cost for Egypt and its stability?
Egyptian protesters clash with security forces near Tahrir square, in Cairo, Wednesday, Nov. 28. (Khalil Hamra/AP)
Egypt's political turmoil dimming chances of democratic transition
Remember when there was a so-called "Egypt transition process?" An orderly series of democratic steps to set the country on a better path than the one it left behind? It went like this: A short period of military rule to be followed by parliamentary and presidential elections, a drafting of a new constitution, and a referendum to ratify it.
Well, the notion of an orderly process has been in question for some time. Military rule lasted far longer than promised, the promised new parliament has still not arrived, and Egypt is in many ways, more tumultuous today than it was in the heady days of January and February 2011 when millions threw off their fears of the police state and pushed Hosni Mubarak out of power.
And events of the past few days seem to have settled it: Egypt's process is now an ad hoc, chaotic mess, and the prospects for a democratic order emerging from this still rolling transition have dimmed substantially.
To see that, all you had to do was look at the rowdy hundreds of thousands who took to the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities yesterday, in some places sacking the local offices of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that propelled President Mohamed Morsi to power earlier this year. (Gert Van Langendonck, who was in Tahrir yesterday, says the protest in that location was calm and orderly. Still, other parts of downtown witnessed violence, as did at least three other Egyptian cities.)
In Tahrir Square they were shouting the same slogans against Mr. Morsi, brought to power less than five months ago through a free election, that they shouted against Hosni Mubarak after his 30 years at the helm of a military dictatorship.
"The people demand the fall of the regime!" chanted the throng of Tahrir protesters, many of whom had cast their vote for Morsi in June to prevent the candidacy of Ahmed Shafiq, a close political ally of the ousted Mubarak.
A tad impatient? Perhaps.
But it's been almost 22 months since Mubarak was pushed out and all the transition has accomplished has been the creation of a Muslim Brotherhood president who voted himself near dictatorial powers last week. There was a parliamentary election (dominated by the Brotherhood but with plenty of secular factions obtaining seats as well) but the results were annulled by an Egyptian court in June.
Morsi and Islamist allies to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood (the Nour Party's Salafis) look set to ram through a new constitution that will push Egypt hard in the direction of becoming an Islamic state. An ally of Morsi's on the constitutional drafting committee said the committee hopes to be done tomorrow with a final draft and put it to a popular referendum soon. That's not going to mollify the opposition whose principal complaint is that the new constitution will be an Islamist imposition on all the people of Egypt.
And from the outside looking in, there is clearly a thirst for political alternatives to the Brotherhood from secular-leaning Egyptians, but so far the opposition has been unable to unite into anything like an organized force against the country's ascendant Islamists.
As a practical matter, that has left average Egyptians with two choices for political participation: Backing Morsi, or going to Tahrir to raise their voices in protest.
A 'temporary' move?
President Morsi insists his powers are temporary, and his spokesmen have insisted he has had little choice but to work around judges who are holdovers from the Mubarak area that stood in the way of a new constitution. They say he won the presidency fair and square, and should be given time to lead Egypt in a new direction.
But human history has far more examples of extraordinary powers "briefly" assumed that stretched into various authoritarianisms than of those used to create democracies. And the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi are busy cutting deals with the institutions of Mubarak's state – his still politically powerful military and various ministries – to cement their power. Most of the so-called liberals who were in the constitutional assembly (the body that is supposed to draft a new constitution) walked off the job, claiming that Islamists were simply ignoring them.
Now, large swathes of Egyptian's judiciary are promising to go on strike in protest of Morsi's actions. The judges, like many appointed bureaucrats from the Mubarak era, have had far more input into politics lately than opposition politicians or the public, and so may get somewhere, though the battle lines are hardening.
Nathan Brown, a leading constitutional scholar, is worried. Writing in the Egypt Independent, he points out that Morsi has a point, but that doesn't make the situation any less fraught.
The president was reacting to real problems when he immunized his decisions and the Constituent Assembly from judicial oversight. The Brotherhood had been heavy-handed in picking the Constituent Assembly, but it did so fully within the rules drafted last year. And it is not clear that the opposition would have been satisfied with any compromise over the composition of the body or its work. The Brotherhood’s complaint — that many critics were averse to allowing election results to have any impact on the document or its authors — is firmly grounded.
... Morsy’s defense of his moves as designed to support democracy unfortunately recall the remark attributed to an American soldier during the Vietnam War: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”... But while the crisis is not fully a product of the actors’ intentions, Egyptians will not find a path forward unless their leaders find within themselves an intention to resolve their differences through compromise. The constitutional process is badly broken, but it can still be repaired.
Morsi has insisted, for now, that he's not going to change course. And that potentially puts Egypt on an even more dangerous path. While the Brotherhood told its supporters to stay off the streets during yesterday's big anti-Morsi protests, in order to avoid clashes, the group has called for mass demonstrations in support of Morsi on Saturday, which could lead to clashes.
Rhetoric getting heated
The rhetoric of various officials around Morsi has also grown more heated. A spokesman for the Brother's Freedom and Justice Party wrote today that it's "Very sad to see 'genuine opposition' allied with 'corrupt Mubarak cronies.'" One of the Brotherhood's official Twitter account wrote yesterday that if the "opposition thinks the significance of today is # of Tahrir protestors... they should brace for millions in support of the elected" Morsi while dismissing the Tahrir protests as composed partly of "pro-Mubarak felols" (felol means "remnant" and is used derisively to denote Mubarak cronies and hangers on).
With the "process" gummed up, the opposition interested only, it seems, in using street power to prevent Morsi's agenda from moving forward, and Morsi currently the only official in Egypt with any democratic legitimacy, the stage looks set for a showdown. And what then? Sufficient rioting might bring the military back into the political forefront again.
Or even a long enough showdown with the judges. It was only in August that Morsi issued decrees asserting civilian authority over the military's in the political transition. His moves last week were precipitated by fears that the courts were about to roll all that back.
For now, more chaos and confusion seems certain. All else is cloudy.
Flying high?
Syria's Jabhat al-Nusra militia looks pretty serious
Video was placed on YouTube today of Syrian rebels celebrating a crushing victory in Mayadin, a town in Syria's oil-rich northeast last week.
The cameraman is traveling in a convoy of fighters from the Jabhat al-Nusra, the main jihadi fighting group in eastern Libya and one that has attracted veterans of both the war against Muammar Qaddafi in Libya last year and of the wars against the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Though the men are clearly delighted with their victory and seizure of a temporary government artillery base in Deir al-Zour Province, with shouts and smiles as a captured tank charges along the desert sand next to the road, there is very little of the random shooting in the air and other goofing off common among rebel militias. Though the scene looks chaotic, these fighters are disciplined as such groups go.
That's hardly surprising. Islamist militias have been the most committed and capable fighters of the wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Syrian Euphrates river towns like Mayadin have strong tribal and general cultural ties to Iraqi Euphrates river towns to their southeast, like Haditha, Ramadi, and Fallujah. It was in those tough Sunni Arab towns, clinging to a narrow river valley in the middle of the desert, where Al Qaeda-inspired fighters found their most success during the US war in Iraq, and they were helped from their cousins to the north. Now the Iraqis, and other jihadis, are returning the favor.
Dave Enders was in Mayadin for McClatchy Newspapers when the Islamist fighters won the month-long battle for the base, which had been a feed plant until the start of the war. He describes a committed battle in which the supply chain for the Syrian Army defenders eventually broke down, forcing a retreat. He called it a "key victory that will allow (the rebels) to move next to the airport near the provincial capital (Deir al-Zour), one of the last positions the Syrian military controls in the province," and describes how reinforcements eventually arrived by road to evacuate the surviving government troops:
"The rebels withstood multiple air strikes, and on Wednesday (Nov. 21) they decided to make a final assault on the base. A helicopter that had been dropping weapons and food to the surrounded soldiers had failed to appear for three days, and rebels laid in wait for it with a pair of rockets they had captured from the Syrian military in an earlier battle. But instead of the helicopter, the reinforcements arrived via a nearby highway. The flags that were hoisted by the rebels at the base were not the one used by rebels groups that have pledged allegiance to the secular Free Syrian Army. Rather it was a black flag flown in particular by Islamist groups that are heavily involved in the fight against the government in this province. One building at the captured base flew the flag of Jabhat al Nusra, a group of fighters that have called openly for the establishment of a Syrian state based on Islamic law and that some fear has ties to al Qaida."
Three days without resupply for besieged troops? That's not a good sign for Assad.
Another potentially bad sign is the apparent use of a surface-to-air missile against a Syrian government helicopter recently. Tom Peter reported for us last week that by and large, rebels rely on generally ineffective "dushka" heavy machine guns to protect against the government's air assets. But now it appears that rebels aligned with the Free Syrian Army have scored their first hit of a government helicopter with a surface-to-air missile (hat tip to Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch), with video released online of the shot:
The uploader claimed the shot was made near Aleppo, and near Aleppo is where rebels reported securing a cache of surface-to-air missiles earlier this month. The missiles look like Russian-made Strela-2s, a type of heat-seeking missile that's been in service sine the 1970s.
Yesterday. And today. (Nasser Ishtayeh)
How lonely must it be to be Mahmoud Abbas?
As Israel veered close to a ground invasion of Gaza last week, with Israeli warplanes and artillery pounding Gaza, and Hamas directing rocket fire towards Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the first time ever, one name was on nobody's lips: Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr. Abbas may be president of the Palestinian Authority and the head of Fatah, the political party founded by Palestinian Liberation Organization icon Yasser Arafat. But during days of shuttle diplomacy involving Hamas, Israel, the US, Egypt, and other regional powers, Abbas was basically the lonely guy in the corner, hoping someone would eventually ask him to dance.
With the exception of a brief visit from Hillary Clinton, no one ever did. Now in the West Bank today, Abbas's Palestinian Authority is presiding over the exhumation of Mr. Arafat's body (his widow has been insisting of late that his 2004 death was the result of polonium poisoning) while Hamas negotiates with Israel via Egyptian intelligence officials over further easing of the economic blockade of Gaza.
In short, Abbas is rapidly becoming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict's forgotten man. The moribund "peace process" that Abbas has championed for more than 20 years has not led to the creation of a Palestinian state, nor stopped the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank that have steadily chipped away at the size of a theoretical future state. Attacks inside Israel and against settlers have plummeted since the end of the second intifada seven years ago and he's recognized Israel's right to exist, yet restrictions on Palestinian movement within the West Bank remain severe.
Cooperation versus confrontation
Abbas has been highly cooperative with the Israeli military and police in the West Bank. In the eyes of many Palestinians, he has secured Israeli interests at the expense of their own.
The West Bank is more prosperous than hemmed-in Gaza and able to trade with Israel. But Abbas' support, and that of his prime minister Salam Fayyad, has been steadily eroding while Hamas has once more taken up the mantle of the brave "resistance."
The Islamist Hamas, which took control of Gaza after drubbing Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections (largely due to an electorate fed up with Fatah corruption and abuses of power), now seems a more vital political force than its bitter rival. Senior Hamas leaders have been claiming vindication for their policy of confrontation with Israel over Fatah's commitment to negotiation.
In a swipe at Fatah, Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy head of Hamas' political bureau, told the Associated Press last week that negotiations with Israel not backed by the threat of arms are doomed to fail. To be sure, what concessions, if any, Israel will actually deliver as part of the ceasefire are uncertain.
Gulf Arab states have been shifting their attentions from Fatah to Hamas in recent years. In October, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar, became the first Arab head of state to visit Gaza since Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007 and promised $400 million in aid.
Hamas has largely been backed by Iran in the past decade. After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US by Al Qaeda, the US put pressure on Saudi Arabia and other close friends among the Sunni Arab monarchies of the Gulf to cut support from what the US deems a terrorist organization and they mostly complied. Shiite and ethnically Persian Iran, in the middle of its own cold war for influence with the likes of Saudi Arabia, happily stepped into the breach, providing the longer range missiles that today threaten Tel Aviv. Iran's ally Syria, too, became a major backer of the group.
Hamas reaching out to Sunni Arabs
But now Hamas is reaching out once more to the Sunni Arabs with whom it has more natural ties. The Sunni-led uprising against the Assad dictatorship Syria has strained the alliance with Iran. Hamas' exiled leaders who had made Damascus their base for years decamped earlier this year and sided with the uprising, even as Iran continued to staunchly back Assad.
"Iran's position in the Arab world, it's no longer a good position," because of its support for Assad in Syria, Abu Marzouk told reporters yesterday. "Iran asked Hamas to adopt a closer position to Syria. Hamas refused, and this has affected our relationship with Iran."
He might as well have said to the Saudis: "We're waiting by the phone." Will Saudi Arabia grasp an opportunity to permanently wean Hamas off Iran? They may, and if so Abbas will find himself with one fewer friend.
What can he do to swing some political momentum back in his direction? The odds of even a partial Israeli settlement freeze any time soon are zero, with that country's elections coming up and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeing no percentage in making concessions to the PA anyways. So that leaves unilateral action – precisely the course Abbas is now pursuing.
Bid at United Nations
He's vowed to seek a vote at the UN General Assembly on Thursday on granting Palestine "observer state" status at the UN, an upgrade from its current "observer entity" status. While this sounds like semantics, the upgrade would give Palestine more standing in front of UN bodies – for instance the ability to make complaints to the International Criminal Court in the Hague. The move has infuriated the US and Israel and they've been lobbying furiously to have Abbas pull back, even though it's one of the few steps he can take to bolster his own secular, more Israel-friendly movement Fatah over Hamas.
Israel has been threatening to cut off the flow of tax receipts to Abbas' and Fayyad's government in response. And the US isn't mincing words.
"We’ve obviously been very clear that we do not think that this step is going to bring the Palestinian people any closer to a state, that we think it is a mistake, that we oppose it, that we will oppose it," State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said yesterday. "Secretary [of State Hillary Clinton] was very clear with President Abbas when she was in Ramallah last week that our position on this has not changed, and we are continuing to make that clear, not only directly to President Abbas and the Palestinians, but also to all of our UN partners as well."
Ms. Nuland went on to say: "We think it’s going to be complicating and potentially a step backwards in terms of the larger goal, which is a negotiated solution."
If Abbas does back down, it will once again appear as if he's acting entirely at the behest of the US. Not something to improve his standing in the current climate.
After UN vote, then what?
Could the UN deliver the big win Abbas desperately needs? Perhaps. France's Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told his country's parliament today Paris will vote "yes" for Palestine at the UN, and recognition of a state along 1967 borders at the UN would be a symbolic victory. Raucous, happy crowds in Ramallah after a successful vote? No doubt.
But what then? The Obama administration has threatened to cut Abbas off financially in retaliation for pursuing observer status at the UN. Congress is on board too. When Abbas flirted with a UN bid last year, Congress suspended $200 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority. Israel too, has threatened financial sanctions, and some senior officials have gone further. Right-wing Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman prepared a document calling for the "dismantling" of the Palestinian Authority in retaliation for a successful UN upgrade.
Cutting off money would be devastating in an economy where most employment is driven by the PA. That could leave Abbas with a symbolic victory, but real financial and political pain and more people viewing the Hamas approach to Israel as the right one.
That outcome would presumably horrify the US and Israel, but sometimes it appears that the efforts of years have guided outcomes in precisely the direction they had hoped to avoid. When Hamas first started to emerge in Israeli-occupied Gaza in the 1980s, Israel viewed the religious movement as a useful foil to Fatah, a group that could divide Palestinian loyalties and weaken their major enemy.
Twenty years later, Hamas is the major enemy. Fatah, and Abbas, are staring at obsolescence.
Pictured in this June 2007 file photograph, Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince has begun a bold new business venture, leading a group of Chinese investors on a hunt for natural resources and investment opportunities in Africa.. (Sara D. Davis/AP/File)
Prince of Blackwater heads to Africa
Erik Prince, the man who founded Blackwater, the private military contractor that became synonymous with mercenary excess during the Iraq war, has apparently begun a bold new business venture: He's going to be investing with a group of unnamed Chinese government-linked companies in resource extraction and infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa.
At least that's according to the South China Morning Post, which published an exclusive interview with Mr. Prince yesterday. The paper says Mr. Prince has founded an investment company called Frontier Resource Group earlier this year as an "Africa-dedicated investment firm partnered with major Chinese enterprises, including at least one state-owned resource giant that is keen to pour money into the resource-rich continent."
Prince made a fortune during the early and extremely fat years for contractors of the global war on terror, thanks to political connections and an appetite for risk. Roughly $2 billion of US contracts in Iraq flowed through the company. But the name "Blackwater" eventually grew tarnished under the weight of alleged corruption and murder in the field. It was Blackwater employees who were who were ambushed and killed in Fallujah in 2004, sparking the US assault on that Iraqi town that helped further polarize the war. In 2007, panicking Blackwater guards unleashed a barrage of fire in Nisour Square in Baghdad, killing 17 civilians.
The massacre cemented Iraqi fury at private military contractors and set the stage for the Iraqi governments refusal to allow US forces to remain in Iraq with immunity from local prosecution, something that forced the US departure at the end of last year. By the time Prince sold out of Blackwater in 2010, which he'd renamed "Xe" in an attempt to dissociate his venture from its unsavory public image, US government contracts were drying up. In April 2010, five senior Blackwater executives (not Prince though) were indicted on weapons violations and making false statements to law enforcement.
When Prince sold the business in Dec. 2010, The New York Times reported it was because the State Department had threatened not to do business with the firm as long as Prince was associated with it.
But Prince has since found other governments to do business with. He had moved to the United Arab Emirates, a low-tax monarchy on the Persian Gulf, were he grew close to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. While there, he worked on the creation of the Puntland Maritime Police Force, a private militia designed to conduct anti-piracy operations in Somalia.
In July of this year, the UN Security Council called the Force "the most brazen violation of the [Somalia] arms embargo by a private security company." The UN said the force had over 1,000 men under arms and wrote: "This private army disingenuously labelled a “counter-piracy” force, has been financed by zakat contributions mainly from high-ranking officials from the United Arab Emirates, including the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The Government of the United Arab Emirates, however, has officially denied any involvement in the project." (Zakat is charitable tithing in Islam).
The anti-piracy militia was ultimately abandoned by its funders, leaving a new, well-armed, and semi-organized group in the mix of competing militias in the Horn of Africa.
But Prince still sees his future on the continent. The Frontier Resources Group remains headquartered in Abu Dhabi, but he told the SCMP that "Africa is so far the most unexplored part of the world, and I think China has seen a lot of promise in Africa." He told the paper that his Africa fund has raised $100 million in private equity so far and argued that investors will be wise to place their bets on his new venture.
"We are the search radar for [Asian investors] in Africa because we have the expertise and we know how to measure and control the risks," Prince said.
It will be interesting to follow the upcoming chapters of Prince's business life, which already read like something out of a John Le Carre novel.
Mr. Hearst, too, had strong opinions on editorial independence. (Library of Congress)
Rupert Murdoch's Jewish problem. And his Egyptian one.
One of the pleasures of following Rupert Murdoch's account on Twitter is that the brief notes left there seem to have been written by the man himself.
Unlike hundreds of political and celebrity twitter feeds that maintain only the thinnest pretenses of being written by their supposed owner (either that or Senator Lindsey Graham is one of the greatest multitaskers of all time), you're really getting Mr. Murdoch, unfiltered.
Unlike say, with Israel's ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, whose Twitter account last night deleted a tweet in which the ambassador had said Israel was willing to sit down with Hamas if rocket fire stopped from Gaza, explaining: "The earlier tweet about my CNN interview was sent erroneously by a staffer."
No, Murdoch is Murdoch, which is what makes two tweets of his from last night so interesting. The first: "Can't Obama stop his friends in Egypt shelling Israel?" And the second: "Why Is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?"
I'm not sure what great friends Obama has in Egypt. It's true that the US didn't stand in the way of the Egyptian uprising that saw longstanding dictator Hosni Mubarak driven from power in 2011. And the Obama administration has been seeking to craft a workable relationship with the new civilian government of President Mohamed Morsi, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, since.
But A. US influence is limited in Egypt, given the hostility of a large swath of President Morsi's constituency to the US and its strong military support for Israel; And, B. (And this is the important bit.) Egypt is not firing anything at Israel.
Israel is taking missile and mortar fire from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, of course. But that's much as has been happening since 2001, with all but one of those years occurring when Mr. Mubarak was in power in Egypt. Though Egypt then, as now, has some influence over events in Gaza (it hosted failed talks on a failed cease-fire attempt overnight) Hamas very much marches to its own drummer. Hopefully someone at Fox News will fill Murdoch in.
The second quote from Murdoch up above is equal parts troubling and illuminating. He seems to believe that the owners of media outlets should require their reporting to conform to their owners political preferences and world-views, rather than reflect observed reality. It's fair to assume that's what happens at his sprawling press holdings, particularly his US-based flag-ship Fox News.
That's the illuminating part. The troubling part is his apparent belief that Jewishness should be synonymous with support for the current Israeli government, even for Jewish-Americans. It's long been an anti-Semitic trope in US and European life that Jews are not truly loyal to the countries of their birth and citizenship, that for them Israel comes first. Such false claims are rightly pushed back on. Then there's the frequently made anti-Semitic claim that the "Jews control the media," usually made within various conspiracy theories.
Imagine if Murdoch's sentence was turned around, but used the same logic: What if he had asked: "Why is Jewish owned press so consistently pro-Israel in every crisis?" That statement would rightly be decried as anti-Semitic.
Murdoch apologized, sort of, today: " 'Jewish owned press' have been sternly criticised, suggesting link to Jewish reporters. Don't see this, but apologise unreservedly."
There is of course a lively debate among Jewish Americans, and Jews in Israel, about the rightness and wrongness of Israeli government behavior. In the pages of the Jerusalem Post you will find an editorial-line closer to Mr. Murdoch's heart, and in the pages of Haaretz a general approach that he would disapprove of.
But no matter. Murdoch forthrightly speaks his mind and that's refreshing and unusual. It's a useful data-point to consider when consuming news produced by his employees.
Smoke rises during an explosion from an Israeli forces strike in Gaza City. Israel bombarded the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip with nearly 200 airstrikes early Saturday widening a blistering assault on Gaza rocket operations by militants to include the prime minister's headquarters, a police compound and a vast network of smuggling tunnels. (Hatem Moussa/AP)
As rockets fly, the Gaza image and propaganda war grinds on
The blossoming Gaza war is even more than most wars about image and propaganda. Israel wants to set an image of implacable resolve to confront and destroy Hamas "terror." Hamas wants to set an image of implacable resolve to confront Israeli "terror" and "occupation." Both are trying to sway the political discourse inside the other's territory with this image-making.
Both their acts of violence and their propaganda, mostly online, are the tools with which they try to do that.
Every day since Wednesday, the ante has been upped. Israel assassinates Al Qassam Brigade (Hamas's military wing) chief Ahmed Jabari to send a message that rocket fire from Gaza must stop. The response? A barrage of missile fire from Gaza in the past four days, 737 rockets and mortars in all, more than the 723 fired over the course of the first 10 months of the year. The message from Hamas: You attack us, we respond even harder.
Israel intensifies its air campaign over Gaza. Hamas's response? Launching long-range rockets from its arsenal that it had withheld from use until now, firing at both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Tel Aviv, Israel's largest city and commercial hub, was threatened with aerial assault for the first time since 1991, when Saddam Hussein launched scud missiles toward the town. For Jerusalem, it was a stunning development: the first air raid sirens to sound there in history. The message from Hamas: We are developing a deterrent that we're willing to use on population centers.
The Israeli response to that? Calling up reservists and laying the ground work for an invasion of Gaza. While the decision has not been taken to go in, the posturing in that direction has put the situation on a knife's edge, since a ground assault would likely be a bloodier replay of the three-week Israeli invasion of Gaza in 2008 that ended with 1,200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead, and massive destruction to Gaza's infrastructure.
Israel insists its targeting is precise and focused on militants. Hamas makes no such claim, and, in fact, can't; the rockets fired from Gaza are the very definition of indiscriminate, hugely imprecise and more likely to kill civilians than anyone else. Hamas counters that far more of its civilians die at Israeli hands than vice versa, and its rockets the only tools at their disposal.
Israel has taken a hyper-aggressive approach to the war itself and its online image. With the decision to target civilian facilities of the Hamas government in Gaza today (the four-story office of Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza City was leveled, for instance), it appears to be sending the message to all Hamas officials that they're vulnerable to assassination. Fear, in many Israeli leaders' thinking, is the best weapon to force Hamas to give up its sporadic armed campaign against the Jewish state.
That may prove wise, or deeply unwise. Hamas in its own propaganda insists that it won't be deterred from resistance by the blood of "martyrs." And the historically disproportionate death toll when Gaza fights Israel (which has been maintained so far this time, with 3 Israelis killed against 40 Palestinians since Wednesday) tends to feed hatred against the Jewish state and a desire for revenge inside Gaza. That is, more willing recruits to fight.
But at least one can grasp the Israeli point of view, the frustration that leads to hope that intense bombing will create peace. Harder to understand is the Israeli online media strategy, which seems designed to preach exclusively to the choir with hyper-macho bluster.
The country has been rolling out gun-camera video of many of its aerial attacks inside Gaza, apparently to make the case that it uses precision targeting. The first such video issued was of the Wednesday assassination of Hamas commander Mr. Jabari as his car drove through one of Gaza City's narrow streets, the single event that led to the current state of war.
But will this help it to convince international folks without strong allegiances, or who may lean a little in a pro-Palestinian direction, to see things Israel's way? After the killing of Jabari, the IDF released a poster of him with the word "Eliminated" in big, white letters. When sharing a video of an attack on a Hamas commander's home in Gaza today that appeared to be hosting a weapons cache, judging by secondary explosions, an IDF spokesman included the twitter hashtag #stoptherockets. (There are other air strikes on Gaza in which no secondary explosions are apparent).
He obviously mean the rocket fire from Gaza, which has surged since Wednesday. But Israel's fire into Gaza has been far more lethal than vice versa. In another tweet on Thursday, the official IDF spokesperson's account shared a video of a rocket being fired from a residential area inside Gaza with the comment, "Would you raise your child in such a neighborhood?"
I'm quite certain that most Gaza parents are not at all happy about that, but it's not as if they have much choice. The majority of Gaza's 1.5 million residents today are Palestinian refugees who were pushed into the strip upon Israel's creation in 1948 and their descendants. Gaza is not allowed to have an airport or a seaport, and only a trickle of people are allowed to leave through either Egyptian or Israeli territory each year. Moving is quite simply not an option.
More interesting still was the threat issued on Wednesday: "We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead." Hamas members are well aware they're targets. The point of the twitter conversation is to speak to a broader audience.
After the three week Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009, Israel's international reputation took a hit because of the large number of Palestinian civilian casualties. Its sprawling media operation created since in part reflects frustration that the country is being unfairly maligned, and a belief that better military communication can fix that. Writing for Foreign Policy, Michael Koplow thinks they're going about it the wrong way:
"But the IDF's barrage of tweets indicates that it has not learned some important lessons from its last major incursion into Gaza. Operation Cast Lead, carried out in December 2008 and January 2009, was a tactical military victory that came at a costly price. The large numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties and images of destruction led to a renewed and vigorous effort to isolate Israel in the international community. The highest-profile example was the United Nations' Goldstone Report, conducted by South African judge Richard Goldstone, which damaged Israel immeasurably. The report was such a disaster for Israel that in 2009 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it one of the three biggest threats Israel was facing, alongside a nuclear Iran and Palestinian rockets. The aftermath of Cast Lead also brought a renewed fervor to the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement, which seeks to isolate and delegitimize Israel, and generally placed a harsher spotlight on Israeli efforts to deal with Hamas. In all, Israel beat Hamas on the battlefield but lost the war of public opinion, which in some ways was the more important one.
... The IDF is doing two things through its Twitter campaign that are replicating the same public relations mistakes it made the last time around. The first is a strategy of playing to its own base... Second, and more saliently, the reason Israel suffered so badly in the court of public opinion following Cast Lead is because there was a perception that Israel was callous about the loss of Palestinian life that occurred during that operation."
Indeed, the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg refers to the IDF's war via Twitter as the "Hamasization" of Israel's public relations.
Hamas's propaganda is, if anything, even more aggressive and ham-handed, hence Goldberg's comment. The @alqassambrigade Twitter account is generally accepted as an English language outlet for Hamas's military wing (though there is some room for doubt) and has not only issued its share of chest-thumping and threats, but frequently inaccurate information. On Friday, the account falsely claimed that an Israeli jet had been shot down over Gaza.
More usually are simply absurd claims like this one from yesterday, saying the war is "going well in achieving historic goals, Liberation of occupied Palestine started ... we are coming IDF." Hamas does not have the ability to take any of the fight to the IDF, let alone defeat Israel.
In a nutshell, the propaganda campaigns are talking past each other, flying over the heads of anyone who could be reached by either side's message, and firing up their own already fired-up base.
That's a recipe for more war, not less.
Palestinian firefighters try to extinguish a fire after an Israeli air strike on the building of Hamas's Ministry of Interior in Gaza City, Nov. 16. (Mohammed Salem/Reuters)
For both Hamas and Israel, there are reasons to escalate (+video)
Israel and Palestinian militants in the besieged Gaza Strip are veering dangerously close to getting locked into a cycle of retaliation and revenge that could run for weeks.
Though many are wondering why both sides don't simply stand down now to avoid further loss of innocent life (since, after all, it's fairly clear that a major shift in the status quo will be the outcome of the bombardments that are now in their third day), the grim logic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is convincing men on both sides that more death is what's needed now to secure their own interests.
For Hamas, the Islamist militant group and political party that has governed Gaza separately from the West Bank based Palestinian Authority since 2007,the pressure comes in weighing its reputation of resistance and endurance against the mounting human cost to civilians. Standing down completely, capitulation, would look weak to many of its supporters, perhaps opening a door for other militant groups in the Gaza Strip, like Islamic Jihad, to accrue more power for themselves.
For Israel, the costs in life to its own side are lighter than for its much weaker foe, but still serious enough. Three Israeli civilians died when a rocket hit their apartment building in Kiryat Malachi in southern Israel on Thursday morning. (See the Monitor's report from Kiryat Malachi Thursday.) Meanwhile, 19 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli mortar and air strikes, the balance of them civilians, since the war began on Wednesday.
But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his war cabinet have in some ways locked themselves into a broader conflict, based on the public logic they have provided in the past few days: Rockets from Gaza are intolerable, and force must be used to stop them. Since there have now been 500 or so rockets fired at Israel since the assassination of Hamas military leader Ahmad Jabari on Wednesday, compared with 723 in total fired in the first 10 months of the year, that logic of escalation of force calls for yet more escalation.
Further, Hamas fired long-range Fajr rockets, known to be in their arsenal but never used before, in response to Israeli's bombing raids yesterday. Those longer-range rockets struck within eight miles of Tel Aviv, Israel's business and cultural capital, and both yesterday and today, air raid sirens wailed throughout the coastal Mediterranean city for the first time since 1991, when Iraq's Saddam Hussein lobbed scud missiles at Israel during Gulf War precipitated by his invasion of Kuwait. And in the late afternoon, the first air raid sirens in memory were reported to be going off in Jerusalem.
Hamas being able to threaten Tel Aviv from the air is, as they say, a game-changer. The Tel Aviv metropolitan area is home to about 40 percent of Israel's 7.7 million people, and its cafes and beach life have long provided a comfortable cocoon, far from conflicts over Israeli settlements in the West Bank or the threats of Hamas in Gaza.
The residents of southern Israel, near Gaza, have long lived with the terror of rocket attacks, and in many ways have grown used to it. The residents of teeming Gaza, hemmed in by both Israel and Egypt, are likewise used to the terror of far more powerful Israeli bombs that rain down on towns and cities in response to Palestinian rocket attacks.
Where the red line lies
But a permanent extension of that envelope of fear to Tel Aviv, which attracts foreign investment to its high tech industries, would be intolerable for Israel. It could have an impact on both investment in the country and on the immigration of Jews to Israel, who are often urged to make aliyah (return) to the Jewish state under the argument that it's the only place where Jews can be truly safe.
That's why 16,000 Israeli army reservists were called up this morning. If more long-range rockets strike deep into the center of Israel, the argument for a ground incursion will grow stronger for Netanyahu. The IDF says most of the 300 bombs it has fired into Gaza have targeted long-range launching sites and warehouses for the Iranian made Fajr rockets. But has it got most of them? Or just a few?
The costs of escalation are also clear, beyond the casualties. The last Israeli war with Gaza was in 2008, then as now within weeks of the election of President Obama. The war, which Israel called Operation Cast Lead, claimed 13 Israeli lives and more than 1,200 Palestinian lives. Yes, Israel now has the Iron Dome defense system, which has shut down about 100 Israeli rockets so far at a cost of $40,000 a pop (the least expensive of the Palestinian rockets cost about $500). But all missile defense systems are prone to being overwhelmed by sheer numbers, if the opponent has sufficient supply.
Damage to international image
While Israeli's political support from the US remains staunch -- the Obama administration has placed responsibility for the outbreak squarely on Hamas's shoulders and repeatedly said that Israel has the right to defend itself -- the enormous imbalance in casualty rates when Israel fights Palestinians always does damage to the country's international image, which in the long term can extract a political toll.
And the region is a far different place than it was in 2008, when Hosni Mubarak led Egypt and could be counted on to quietly back Israel against Hamas. Now, Egypt is led by the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi. Hamas was originally an offshoot of the Brotherhood, and they are ideological kindred spirits. Today, Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil briefly entered Gaza at the Rafah border, an unprecedented visit at a time of conflict. He toured Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and met with Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
"We are all behind you, the struggling nation, the heroic that is presenting its children as heroes every day," Mr. Qandil said at the panicked hospital, filled with casualties. The LA Times reported that an emotional Qandil held up a blood-stained sleeve, saying it came from one of the wounded, as Haniyah said ""That's Palestinian blood on Egyptian hands."
This is not to say that Egypt is going to break its longstanding peace agreement with Israel or get directly involved in the conflict. But the Morsi government will be under pressure not to be as reliable a guardian of its Sinai border with Gaza as Mr. Mubarak was after this latest outbreak of hostility. That border is, after all, where much of the weapon and financial resupply of Gaza passes through. Mr. Morsi warned today that Israel should stop offensive operations now or "it won't be able to stand up to" Egypt's anger.
And there were already signs that Gaza was better armed and prepared this time around than in 2008. Then, about 600 missiles were fired at Israeli during three weeks of fighting before a truce was called. So far, 500 missiles have been fired in three days, 80 percent of the total four years ago.
To be sure, peace could still break out. Perhaps the Egyptians, or the Turks, can convince Hamas that their point has been made. Perhaps the US can convince Israel of the same.
But why the logic of peace seems obvious to outsiders, combatants run along different logic. This crisis will run for days yet.
Tami Shadadi surveys the damage to her house in the southern town of Sderot Monday, Nov.12, after it was hit by a rocket fired by Palestinian militants in Gaza on Sunday. (Amir Cohen/Reuters)
How many rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel this year?
(This has been updated/corrected since first posting. Thanks to Ben McCombe for pointing out that I conflated "incidents" with raw claims of rocket and mortar fire in the Shabak's reporting).
There's been some confusion over the frequency with which missiles are fired at Israel from the Gaza Strip, the official reason the Israeli government gave for launching its offensive on Gaza yesterday, which started with the assassination of senior Hamas militant Ahmed Jabari in Gaza City.
Palestinian officials in the Gaza Strip have reported 13 dead in the violence. On the Israeli-side, the first three Israelis of the year to be killed by rocket fire, which has intensified substantially in the past 30 hours.
We're seeing the old adage that violence begets violence. Israel says there have been 275 rocket and mortars fired (updated total at 12:45 US eastern time on Thursday) from Gaza since Mr. Jabari was killed yesterday. That's a huge proportion of the total so far this year, prompted by the very thing that it was officially designed to stop it. How big? At least 25 percent, and probably more. Israel's Shin Bet internal security agency reported 451 total mortar and rocket "attacks" this year through Oct. 31 (though in some of these cases the "attacks" contained more than one rocket fired). The past week, however, has seen nearly that many.
The escalation cycle, so far, in brief:
On Nov. 5, an unarmed Palestinian man was shot and killed by Israeli forces as he crawled near the heavily armed Israeli border fence with Gaza. His family said he was mentally ill. On Nov. 8, Palestinian militants from one of the Popular Resistance Committees (not under Hamas control) engaged with an Israeli military unit that had entered Gaza. An Israeli miltary spokesman said the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) responded by firing at "suspicious locations" and in the process killed Palestinian 12-year-old Ahmed Abu Dagah.
On Nov. 10, Palestinian militants fired an antitank missile at an Israeli military jeep near the border, wounding four soldiers. The Israeli reprisals for that attack left five Palestinians dead that day: two teenagers playing soccer, two attendees at a funeral where the mourning tent was hit by an errant Israeli tank shell, and one Palestinian militant who was trying to fire a missile at Israel. Israeli officials claimed at least 100 more rockets were fired at Israel on Nov. 10 and 11.
I distilled the numbers of mortar and rocket attacks published by the Shin Bet in its monthly reports for January-October (sample report here.) I share them below because I haven't found a handy link to these totals, and there are lots of claims and counter-claims about the real numbers. (Update: I've added the individual rockets and mortars fired below.as well as the "attack" totals).
Month Rocket and mortar "attacks" Total rockets and mortars fired
Oct. 92 171
Sept: 18 25
Aug. 16 24
July: 19 27
June: 94 218
May: 6 6
April: 8 8
March: 156 192
(This March surge followed a series of Israeli strikes on Gaza on March 9, one of which assassinated Zuhir al-Qaisi, a top leader of the Popular Resistance Committees. Another 14 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli airstrikes. On March 9, and March 10, Palestinian militants fired at least 95 rockets at Israel in retaliation.)
February: 28 37
January: 14 15
Total: 451 723
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