“The Middle East Conflict”: Mind your language!

November 30, 2009 – 11:27 pm

It is inaccurate, distorting, even misleading, to call the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis the “Middle East conflict” or the “Arab Israeli conflict.” At a minimum, the Middle East includes Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and UAE. Other definitions may go further to include Libya, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but even if we stick to the smaller set of countries, the usage of this term can be problematic.

Jordan and Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, they maintain diplomatic relations, and even before the peace treaties, relations between the governments of Jordan and Israel were friendly. As far as Iraq is concerned, it is true that historically, Saddam’s Iraq had been in conflict with Israel. Iraq also supported the Palestinian resistance movements financially and politically. But since that time, and especially after 2003, Iraq has been too occupied with its own problems to have an actual conflict with Israel.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and UAE don’t enjoy formal diplomatic relations with Israel, but neither have they engaged in actual conflict. The practical life of the average citizen in any of those countries is not in the slightest impacted by Israel (or vice versa). The only other countries in the Middle East that have a palpable problem with Israel today are Lebanon and Syria. On any average day, the life of a Lebanese or a Syrian is nowhere impacted by Israel, though. Existentially, it is the Palestinian’s day-to-day life, particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, that is made unnecessarily so much more difficult, if not unbearable, by the Jewish State. Read More »

By Feature Writer | Posted in current affairs, israel, palestine, society | Comments (2)

Arab reaction to Obama’s Middle East policy

August 17, 2009 – 9:39 pm

By all accounts, the new American administration is moving at a frenetic pace in trying to break the seemingly interminable deadlock between Israel and the Arab world. Recent press reports suggest that George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy, is reaching a critical point in his negotiations with the Netanyahu government and the Palestinian authority.

Amid this whirlwind of activity, it is fair to say that the average Arab’s assessment of US policy is rather puzzled. Arabs have gotten used to the US government’s absolute bias towards Israel, a bias that reached its ultimate climax under the forgettable George W. Bush.

President Obama has spoken a different language. He seems genuinely focused on trying to build a bridge over the long years of mistrust between the Arab masses and the US political establishment.

Read More »

By Nasser Ali Khasawneh | Posted in israel, palestine, politics | Comments (5)

A Palestinian State? Interpreting Netanyahu’s Speech

June 25, 2009 – 9:16 pm

Professor Nigel Ashton, who recently spoke to Jonathan Mok about the life and legacy of King Hussein, returns to answer questions about Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech and what it means for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jonathan Mok: How should the Netanyahu speech be interpreted?

Nigel Ashton: Beyond uttering the words ‘Palestinian state’ Netanyahu has not yet conceded the creation of an entity which would have genuine sovereignty. His concept of ‘demilitarisation’ is so wide ranging that any Palestinian state created under it could not be deemed to have full control over its territory and would therefore not be sovereign. Nevertheless, he has at least conceded that peace negotiations cannot proceed on the basis of his opening position which amounted to little more than a form of economic autonomy. So there has at least been some movement in his position even if so far this is limited.

JM: It appears that the Arab world has been silent in response to Bibi’s speech. How do you perceive the apparent lack of interest?

Read More »

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Will the West Boycott Netanyahu?

March 2, 2009 – 7:27 pm

Of course not – not in the heady days of double-standards and fear mongering

File this one under Diplomatic Pipedream: “As a result of the recent Israeli elections, the West will boycott the rejectionist, quasi-racist new government of Binyamin Netanyahu and cripple the economy with punitive sanctions – just as it did with Hamas in 2006.”

Some hope this is. The appointment of Israel’s new Prime Minister hardly raised an eyebrow in Washington, despite his stated distaste for the idea of a Palestinian state on Israel’s side of the River Jordan, his torpedoing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s and his belief that the savage bombing campaigns in Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza this year represented the worst of lily-livered liberalism. Even support from Avigdor Lieberman, a settler-dwelling immigrant from Moldova who would rather there be no Palestinians in Israel, and no state to house them in either, has yet to provoke a diplomatic question mark.

Compare that with Hamas’s victory in Palestine three years before, which was regarded as nothing short of genocide in the making. The free and fair elections – at the height of the neo-con drive for liberal democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, remember – were instantly delegitimised, the new government ostracised and more than four million people subject to a repressive economic blockade that came on top of an already crippling occupation. Read More »

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Israel and Gaza Aftermath: Interview with Dr. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman

January 29, 2009 – 3:44 pm

Dr. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman is an Associate Scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is also the Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and editor of its Tel Aviv Notes. He is an author and editor who has specialized in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Dan Shvartsman: What are the big themes you take out of the Gaza conflict, and the initial days of the aftermath?

Dr. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman: This latest round is over. Just the way the (2nd) Lebanon War ended in summer of 2006, and since then the ceasefire has held almost perfectly, so too in this case I think that it’s fairly likely that we won’t see another round like we just saw any time soon.

What did each side achieve from this? Israel went into this determined not only to end the rocket fire, but to also change the “rules of the game”. That “Hamas shoots rockets, we shoot back,” and this tit-for-tat doesn’t change Hamas’s behavior. Beyond that, I think there was also a general desire for Israel to strengthen its deterrent posture. There was a feeling here that Israel’s deterrent posture over the last years has weakened.

I think a central goal of this operation was to send a clear message to the rest of the region and the world that it wasn’t going to allow an Iranian client-state to develop on its borders.

Hamas turned out to be far weaker than anticipated. In that regard, Israel has significantly improved its deterrent posture. It’s not just that they hit them hard, but also the incorporation of the diplomatic elements. At least on paper, the support for a change in the strategic parameters governing the Gaza area, the support for Israel’s desires is considerable. The French are patrolling off the shores of Gaza, the Americans signed a memorandum of understanding, they’re training Egyptian troops dealing with smuggling, they’re talking about interdicting Iranian ships in the Gulf of Aden.

The Egyptian participation in this sort of Western framework is a gain for Israel as well. It remains to be seen whether this framework will have real teeth and do what it’s supposed to do. So from that regard, one can say that Israel’s achievements in this operation were considerable.

They came at costs, obviously. Israel’s image has been damaged to a considerable extent among public opinion. There’s no question that more hate towards Israel will have been generated by this operation, which doesn’t bode well if you talk about the need for a long-term reconciliation.

You can even suggest the possibility that radical forces might become even stronger, particularly among Palestinians; there’s a possibility of splintering off from Hamas to represent even more Islamist, jihadi, Bin Laden-type radical views, which would make Hamas look like a positively moderate force in comparison.

Dan: How does Hamas come out of this? Read More »

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Size Matters: Why Arab Parties in Israel Were Banned, and More

January 25, 2009 – 12:23 am

Israel is small. An obvious statement to make, a resoundingly reductive one from an American fresh out of the states, and perhaps an unnecessary reiteration of basic fact, but a statement I have just made. And a pervasive reality in the way Israel operates.

Israel is small in size of course, which is why the intractable conflict between Palestinians and Jews drags so long. But it’s also small in the way things work, as if the sort of soundstages from which America has exported its slick culture haven’t quite been built up as smoothly in Israel, so that you can see the wires from which the angels fly, the cameramen behind the screen, and the clumsy movements of the actors on and off screen.

It is inevitable that a population of 7.3 million will feel compact, as if you might run into Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the street someday and not blink. In fact, one drives by Barak’s high-rise apartment in North Tel Aviv on main highways. Without tremendous pull and with a little bit of patience and luck, a high school senior can get an interview with President Shimon Peres.

But then there is the smallness of the way the government and political parties operate. The way the war, while launched in response to the ending of a cease-fire set up long before President Obama was an inevitability, wrapped itself up tidily just before his inauguration, down to the targeting of his swearing-in ceremony as the deadline to pull out the troops. Read More »

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Plumb and Plumberer

January 15, 2009 – 11:53 am

Why Joe the Plumber and the increased democratisation of the media can only signal a further decline in journalistic objectivity.

We in the media have, to use the obvious pun, plumbed new depths. While distillation of the news to fit the location or political inclination of the audience is hardly a new phenomenon, accelerated in the past 15 years by the rise of conservative talk radio and the infamous idiocy of Fox News, the recruitment of Joe the Plumber to report from Southern Israel during that country’s bombardment of Gaza offers a further refinement of the trend – world events presented through the filter of everyman ignorance. Bias in the media is no longer a matter of partisan affiliation but academic faculty.

Joe Wurzelbacher was, of course, the blue-collar middle American – regular, representative and conspicuously unintellectual – who confronted Barack Obama’s tax plans on his lawn during a campaign stop. With the tide of popular opinion swinging inexorably towards Obama, Wurzelbacher’s down-home, go-get-’em street corner democracy became a beacon of hope for the reactionary right; his name, if not always his bar-room-brawling face, was rarely out of the debates and stump speeches as the election date neared. Alongside the twitching imbecility of Sarah Palin, the wholesomeness of uninformed American insularity was the Republican Party’s sole remaining strategy.

It failed, and failed abysmally. But neither Palin nor Wurzelbacher appear to be any less in demand as a result. And after more run-outs on Fox – apparently Joe’s qualified to run the rule over the intricacies of the financial bailout and Obama’s CIA chief pick – the man was suddenly being flown by an outfit called Pajamas TV to Israel to cover the conflict from the town of Sderot.

Pajamas TV is a right-wing blog whose mission statement includes “exposing both bias and deception by the typically liberal Main Stream Media”. And as Roger Simon, one of their contributors, argued that as the American press – yes, the American press – was obviously an extension of Hamas, only Joe the (previously passportless) Plumber could redress this grievous imbalance for the fact hungry nation.

Leaving aside the issue that a news organisation can instruct a reporter as to the conclusions he must come to before he even arrives at his assignment, the use of someone who is neither well-versed nor remotely impartial to cover such a conflict underlines two new trends in news consumption: Read More »

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Gaza Going Off the Rails: Why Israelis Need to Stop and Think

January 11, 2009 – 1:46 pm

Entering the third week of war, the problems with the Israeli-Gaza conflict have surpassed questions of justification or objectives. Leaving aside who’s right (nobody), or when and how this war will end, or whether there will be a winner (no), or whether the achievement of Israel’s goals will outweigh the damage done to their international reputation or the shift in regional alliances and moods, the essential problems with this war have begun to scream in my ear.

The problems strike me when I drive in the north and see the Russian language campaign ads for Tzipi Livni. Livni, the centrist, supposedly noble candidate of Kadima, has responded to snide comments and allaying Russian-immigrant fears about her gender by advertising her “manhood to change the country.” In Hebrew, the ad substitutes “manhood” for “guts.” Either way, she has something to prove in this war.

They strike me when I read editorials from international news sources or take comments from friends back home, who think this war was calculated to take advantage of the last space before Barack Obama comes to power, or of the run-up to the February elections, or the Christmas season lull. It has nothing to do with that, I insist: When Israel and Hamas made their truce last summer, Obama’s presence was hardly inevitable, and Hamas was the one firing rockets in the week after the ceasefire ended. At the very least, Israel is fighting for their own security reasons and not out of bald-faced political opportunism, I contest. But the longer the war drags on, the more I doubt. Read More »

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Yes We Can: A Letter to Obama from an Arab-American

January 8, 2009 – 1:59 pm

Dear President Elect Obama,

I was born outside your state capital of Springfield, Illinois to Jordanian parents who in turn were children of Palestinians in exile. I am an US educated attorney who has spent long hours and days following and studying American culture, history and politics. I have always been fascinated by the dynamics of American society and the promise of the American dream. Therefore, as I followed your campaign over the past year not only did I become deeply moved by your message, but also grasped the historical significance of your victory. Like many of my fellow Arab and Muslim brothers and sisters across the world I celebrated your victory with tears of joy and with screams of jubilation.

Of course our joy was not driven by any misconceptions that your victory would magically alter American policies toward the Middle East. These policies have, and will continue to be, blindly supportive of Israel’s hegemony and its barbaric abuse and erosion of the inalienable rights of Palestinians – which unfortunately has been on full display over the past fortnight. Read More »

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If I Were An Israeli…

January 6, 2009 – 8:37 pm

About ten years ago, just before Ehud Barak was elected Prime Minister of Israel, he was asked by Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy what he would do had he been born Palestinian. Barak replied frankly: “I would join a terror organization.”

I admired that honest answer as it showed that he may have understood the mentality of many of his Palestinian occupied subjects. He was elected on the basis of going ahead with the peace process and I always thought that if he really understood the Palestinian mentality he would do his utmost to prevent young people like from joining terrorist organizations.

Alas, he didn’t achieve peace back then, nor do his actions now show that he really understood the Palestinian mind. Being myself a Palestinian and knowing how many of my people think, I dare put myself in the shoes of an Israeli citizen and try to reach any new conclusions. Read More »

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