Palestinian Territories

Freed Palestinian prisoners wave to people during a rally celebrating their release in Gaza City October 18, 2011 (Mohammed Salem/Courtesy Reuters). PLO chairman Mahmoud Abbas returned to Ramallah last month from New York triumphant, having defiantly stood up to the United States and others by submitting Palestine’s application for statehood to the United Nations Security Council. Yesterday, in contrast, Abbas doubtlessly felt politically deflated as he welcomed newly freed prisoners whose release was engineered by his two political adversaries--Hamas and Israel. Such are the vagaries of rapidly shifting Israeli-Palestinian politics. One moment Abbas is up, the next he feels compelled to host his rivals’ supporters whose violent actions ran precisely contrary to his own political approach. Last week I provided a first look at the immediate implications of the Shalit exchange. Now, as the dust settles further from the drama of the prisoner exchange, certain realities come into clearer focus: First, despite the increased flexibility just demonstrated by both Israel and Hamas in closing the deal, the prisoner exchange does not presage a new peace opening between the two bitter foes as some suggest. The Gaza-Israel border just became even more dangerous. Hamas and other radical groups have called for additional kidnappings of Israeli soldiers and settlers to serve as bargaining chips. And senior Israeli military officers have begun ordering their soldiers not to be taken captive alive, even if that means injuring or killing their fellow comrades in arms to thwart a Palestinian abduction operation. At a more strategic level, Israel will probably seek to reestablish its deterrence and military supremacy vis-à-vis Hamas. This means Israel will strike heavily against targets in Gaza should militant groups there launch projectiles into Israel or appear to be preparing any abduction operations against Israeli targets. Second, the prospects for serious Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are, if anything, dimmer in the period ahead. Recall, Abbas’s request for statehood has not gone away, and is making its way through the Security Council bureaucracy. Should it come to a vote, the Palestinians will either fail to get the necessary nine votes in favor, or the United States will veto it. In either case, a defiant Abbas will feel even more inclined to take it to the United Nations General Assembly and the certain attainment of non-member statehood status. This will likely trigger a strong Israeli (and possibly American) counter reaction that will hardly grease the wheels for renewed talks. Such UN actions, and possible Israeli counter responses, increase the prospects for renewed Israeli-Palestinian violence on the ground. Third, popular sentiment is once again pushing Palestinian leaders across the Hamas-Fatah divide to renew their unity efforts. Wide-scale demonstrations in March in both Gaza and the West Bank precipitated last spring’s Fatah-Hamas unity deal. There is a simple reason the deal was not adopted: neither Hamas’s nor Fatah’s leaders really want it. Hamas is happily ensconced controlling Gaza, and Mahmoud Abbas’s people exclusively control the West Bank. Neither particularly wants to share with the other. This will be all the more the case after the prisoner exchange. Nonetheless, both sides will go through the motions of further reconciliation talks to appease public opinion. Still, important opportunities exist for improving the situation through creative action. First, Quartet envoys are set to meet next Wednesday in Jerusalem with Israeli and Palestinian representatives as called for by the Quartet’s September 23 statement laying out stepping stones to and a timeline for resumed negotiations. These diplomats have their work cut out for them. It is still imperative, in light of the increasingly volatile atmosphere, that a pathway be created back to negotiations. But the Quartet’s September 23 statement also called for the diplomats to “consult and identify additional steps they can actively support towards Palestinian statehood individually and together.” In other words, the international community should focus not just on diplomacy but also on the more fruitful state-building actions that Prime Minister Fayyad has shepherded over the past three years. This focus on building Palestinian capacity has produced significant economic growth and reduced donor dependency as recognized by the World Bank, IMF, and other international bodies. Accountable and effective Palestinian security services have made the streets of once no-go areas like Jenin, Nablus, and Hebron safe for Palestinians. And it has created effective Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation—the sine qua non for real diplomatic progress. In light of emerging political challenges and increased volatility, now is not the time for benign neglect. The international community, along with Israel and the Palestinian Authority, should focus on rapid, practical, on-the-ground steps to help mitigate increasing dangers resulting from the Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange. A new window of opportunity for peace has not opened. But preventing a potentially explosive situation is important while the parties’ immediate priorities are focused on areas other than diplomacy.

http://youtu.be/r-3SaVYUFH4 CFR.org just posted a short video interview I did on the recent deal brokered for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. To view this video on YouTube, click here.

A Palestinian schoolboy walks past a mural depicting captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in the Gaza Strip (Ismail Zaydah/Courtesy Reuters) It is hard to believe, but it has been five and a half years since Gilad Shalit was taken prisoner in Gaza.  He is finally coming home in a deal that one of my Israeli friends called “problematic,” but nevertheless worthwhile to win Shalit’s release.  Much of the commentary (at least, best that I can tell from Istanbul) has focused on how much of a win the deal is for the Netanyahu government and why Hamas agreed to release perhaps one of its most important bargaining chips. I’ll leave it to my Israel-Palestine expert friends to get into the finer details of the agreement.  I am most interested (surprise) in the Egyptian role.  It remains unclear exactly how much influence Cairo had on Hamas, but the Egyptians facilitated the talks between the Israelis and Hamas representatives and a German mediator.  Perhaps they weren’t much more than the caterer; yet, reading in between the lines, it seems that the Egyptian role was more than this.  Could it be that Egypt is 2 for 2 in its post-Hosni Mubarak Palestine diplomacy?  This would be quite an achievement for a country generally regarded to be in some state of disarray. I would not want to discount the critical facts that Hamas—whose patrons in Damascus and Tehran are under pressure—and the Israelis needed an agreement, which was critical to getting a deal.  Still, the fact that the Egyptian-Hamas relationship has evolved since Mubarak’s fall, no doubt, helped bring the parties along.  Whereas the prime directive for Mubarak and his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, who controlled the Palestine-Israel file, was to do everything possible to undermine Hamas, Egyptian officials have now struck a more constructive tone.  Evincing a willingness to work with Hamas to first bridge the divide between the Gazan and West Bank authorities (still a problem to be sure) and now resolve the Shalit issue seems to vindicate the argument that if you want to get anything done on the Palestine front, you have to deal with Hamas, like it or not.  It also vindicates Egypt’s slowly changing foreign policy that is putting some daylight between Washington and Cairo on a number of issues.  As I have written before, this divergence is the logical outcome of political processes that the downfall of Mubarak set in motion.  For all the concern in Washington these days about the end of the strategic alignment between the United States and Egypt , there is an interesting—even tantalizing—possibility that some distance between the two countries might actually make Cairo a more appropriate interlocutor for Washington than it has been over the last 30 years. N.B.  For those of you who may not have noticed, my book The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square is now out (please click on the title for the book’s webpage).  You might be interested in the mini-documentary that I put together with the help of my talented colleagues from CFR’s Media department.  Please click here: Egypt’s Democratic Quest: From Nasser to Tahrir Square.  Please let me know what you think of both the book and the video.

Aviva Shalit, the mother of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, attends a news conference at a protest tent outside the residence of Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem June 26, 2011 (Ronen Zvulun/Courtesy Reuters). As of this posting, the Israeli cabinet is still meeting in an emergency session to discuss a deal aimed at securing the release of Gilad Shalit, abducted by Hamas in June of 2006 on the Israeli-Gaza border. Details remain scant. Initial reports suggest more than 1,000 Palestinians, currently held by Israel, would be exchanged in return for Corporal Shalit. While it is early to speculate too widely with so little still known, I will nonetheless venture a few initial conclusions on what such a deal would mean. First, Shalit’s release would lift an enormous burden for Shalit, his family, and indeed, Israel. For all walks of Israelis, Shalit has been everybody’s son, the regular conscript brutally held hostage in isolation, without even Red Cross access. On my daily commute to the Quartet Mission which I headed in Jerusalem, I would pass the round-the-clock protest tent pitched outside Prime Minister Netanyahu’s residence. This nonstop demonstration was manned by Israelis from throughout the country, intent on pressing Netanyahu to bring Shalit home. This tent was, presumably, the first thing the prime minister would see on his way to work, and the last thing he would see as he returned home. For Israelis, the overriding message is that their government will go to extraordinary lengths to bring the country’s soldiers back home. This is critical to maintaining the morale of an army manned by conscripts and reservists drawn from most segments of the nation’s population, other than Arab Israelis. It is even more essential if the army is to remain one of the few venerated institutions in Israeli society. Nonetheless, for a prime minister who wrote a book arguing for an uncompromising approach to terrorism, this is a heavy price to pay. It signals that Israel will indeed negotiate, albeit under duress, for hostages and with an organization that most of the world regards as terrorists. Hamas will benefit politically from this deal, particularly within intra-Palestinian politics. They will argue that their hard-line approach pays greater dividends than the nonviolent tactics employed by Fatah’s leader Mahmoud Abbas. The deal will provide Hamas greater legitimacy for having successfully negotiated a deal with Israel by proxy, and will increase the calls for renewed Hamas-Fatah unity discussions. Having just secured so many prisoners, Hamas will likely not be very compromising toward its Fatah rivals. And Abu Mazen will now feel even further compelled to push forward in his statehood bid at the United Nations. Noteworthy are reports that the deal was negotiated by Ahmed al-Jabari, the head of Hamas’ military wing, and one of the most hard-line elements within the organization. This indicates that the Damascus-based “outside” leadership, already weakened by the unrest sweeping Syria, does not call the shots on the ground, and that it is the militants among the “insiders” who direct events in Gaza. Finally, it is significant that the recent Israeli-Hamas negotiations over Shalit were brokered in Cairo by the Egyptian intelligence services. Thus, despite the Mubarak regime’s toppling and the recent instability in Cairo, Egypt’s security services continue to play a critical negotiating role between the two adversaries. Indeed, a post-Mubarak Egypt that is seen as less hostile to the Muslim Brotherhood will likely enjoy better relations with Hamas, and may therefore enjoy more influence. That the Egyptians were sufficiently trusted by both Israel and Hamas to help broker a deal is encouraging, and suggests that Egypt can continue to play a critical role in stabilizing and mitigating the violence between Israel and neighboring Hamas-controlled Gaza.

This week the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) admitted the Palestine National Council to a new status, as a “Partner for Democracy.” As a news story explained, The new "Partner for Democracy," which was given until now only to the Moroccan parliament in June of this year, is intended, PACE said, for parliaments from regions neighboring the Council of Europe who wish to benefit from the Assembly’s experience of democracy-building and to debate common challenges. Now, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe consists of people elected to their national parliaments. The Council of Europe, with forty-seven member countries, claims that it “seeks to develop throughout Europe common and democratic principles based on the European Convention on Human Rights and other reference texts on the protection of individuals.” So it is fair to ask whether the Palestine National Council (PNC) deserves to be honored by the PACE, and is similarly reflective of or devoted to democracy. What is the PNC? It is not the Palestinian parliament; that is called the PLC or Palestinian Legislative Council, and is in theory elected by the people living in Gaza and the West Bank. One has to add “in theory” because elections haven’t been held since 2006 and the terms of all members have expired. The PNC is instead part of the PLO. As Al Jazeera helpfully explains, “The PNC is the highest authority in the PLO and is considered to be the parliament of all Palestinians inside and outside of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including Jerusalem…. it should be mentioned that the functioning of the PNC is irregular, and is constrained by regional developments and political climates.” Irregular is a polite way of putting it. The members of the PNC are not and have never been elected. No one is quite sure who is a member and who is not, nor how many members there are right now. It last met two years ago. No need to belabor the point: it is simply scandalous that the PNC was admitted to any form of relationship with the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly. No doubt the PACE members thought they were doing something nice, friendly, and pro-Palestinian, in the immediate aftermath of the Palestinian effort at UN membership in New York. But in honoring the PNC this way they have in fact done what Western democrats have so often done over the decades, when Arafat was alive and since: they have not been willing to apply normal democratic standards to Palestinian political life. Once again they have engaged in what George W. Bush in a wholly different context called “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and in so doing have abandoned those Palestinians truly engaged in a struggle for democracy.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 66th United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. headquarters in New York, September 23, 2011 (Courtesty REUTERS/Mike Segar). PLO Chairman (and Palestinian Authority President) Mahmoud Abbas came to the United Nations last week, seeking membership in that body for a new state of Palestine. This entire maneuver did not help the Palestinian cause, as I argued in an article in National Review. "His statehood project depends on Israel and the United States, and to a lesser extent on the Europeans (and a bit of Gulf Arab financing). His U.N. gambit has annoyed or offended all of those parties."  The article continues: But the most striking evidence of Abbas’s error came in the Quartet statement (from the U.S., the U.N., the EU, and Russia) released Friday night, after Abbas and Netanyahu had spoken. In the past two and half years, every Quartet statement has reflected Obama’s obsession with construction in the settlements and has demanded a freeze. The statements have also often reflected the Obama administration’s tilt toward the Palestinians and against Israel. But not this one. Instead it reflected both Obama’s own U.N. speech, tilting the other way as the American elections appeared over the horizon, and EU annoyance with Abbas. This Quartet statement did not even mention settlements, not once, and instead simply laid out a long timetable for negotiations. The Quartet statement “reiterated its urgent appeal to the parties to overcome the current obstacles and resume direct bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without delay or preconditions,” thereby rejecting the Palestinian demand that a construction freeze come first. The EU and the United states have criticized a recent Israeli announcement of additional construction in Jerusalem, but the point remains: a freeze is no longer viewed as a legitimate precondition for negotiations. The Abbas UN speech was, as my article discusses, harsh and unlikely to advance the cause of peace.  It certainly contained no words to the Palestinian people preparing them for the difficult compromises that peace will require of both parties.

Bill Clinton made some intemperate and inaccurate remarks about Israel last week, and I discussed them in an article in The Weekly Standard.  It begins this way: Bill Clinton today blasted Benjamin Netanyahu, blaming the Israeli prime minister for the lack of progress toward peace with the Palestinians. The errors and misstatements in Clinton’s interview with bloggers are sufficient to change his reputation from that of a firm supporter of Israel into that of a firm supporter of Israelis who agree with his twisted version of the facts. Clinton simply blames the Israeli right for killing peace efforts. He appears entirely—in fact, embarrassingly— unaware of what has actually happened to the Israeli right over the last ten years, where the change has been extraordinary. Read the whole article here.

  Anti-government protesters shout slogans during a rally to demand the ouster of Yemen's President Saleh in Sanaa (Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi/Courtesy Reuters) Gregory Johnson on Saleh’s return to Yemen. Khodor Salameh writes on “the joke of Palestinian statehood.” Qifa Nabki on the issue of proportional representation to Lebanon’s next elections.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah attends a cabinet meeting in Riyadh March 24, 2008 (Courtesy Reuters). Saudi Arabia has just announced that it will donate $200 million to the Palestinian Authority. This is very good news. First, the PA needs the money to meet payroll expenses, and in recent months has been able to pay only half salaries on two occasions. The Saudi gift should keep the PA solvent to the end of the year, when combined with other expected aid. Second, this shows a continuing Saudi commitment to Prime Minister Fayyad’s effort to build the institutions of an eventual Palestinian state. This strengthens Fayyad’s hand politically, because it is reasonable to think that were he not guiding the expenditure of this money the Saudis would be even more reluctant to give it. Third, the Saudi gift may lead others in the Gulf to be more generous as well. Why did the Saudis give this much, and why now? That remains unclear. I hope they were embarrassed by their failure to give the PA much support this year: prior to this week they had given Jordan $1.4 billion and the Palestinians only $30 million. Perhaps they thought this supported the Palestinian moves at the UN. Whatever the reason, the effect is good. The theatrics at the UN will not bring Palestinian statehood any closer. Building state institutions from the ground up will, and that requires supporting serious work by the PA.

Palestinian President Abbas’s plan to seek statehood status at the UN next week has spurred new crisis-diplomacy efforts, but political pressures on all sides could make a deal hard to come by, says analyst Ziad Asali.

In this year of the Arab Spring, the views of Arab citizens are supposed to be taken into account instead of the desires of their autocratic rulers. A curious exception is Palestinians, who have no formal way to express their views; their rulers in Hamas and Fatah keep canceling or delaying elections. So the only way to gauge what they think is through opinion polls, imperfect as they are. And here we find a remarkable gap between what the PLO/Fatah leadership is up to and the actual desires of real live Palestinians. Two significant examples have recently appeared. First there is public opinion with respect to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s current UN gambit. A poll this month reveals that there is not very enthusiastic support: The Preferable Option: Upon answering the question: "Which, in your opinion, is the preferable option for the future of Palestine? Is it going to the United Nations for the recognition of the Palestinian state without concluding a peace agreement with Israel, or going back to the negotiation table with the Israelis for the sake of a permanent peace with them and then resort to the UN?", (35.4%) said "going to the UN for the recognition of the Palestinian state without concluding a peace agreement with Israel", and (59.3%) see as preferable option "going back to the negotiation table with the Israelis for the sake of a permanent peace with them and then resort to the UN", whilst (5.3%) said "I don’t know." So Abbas’s move in the UN is not only not compelled by public opinion but not even much supported by it. Another poll, taken earlier this year, is even more significant. It reveals that much of the PLO rhetoric and of the received wisdom about Jerusalem has no echo among the Arabs who live there. Here is part of the summary: According to face-to-face surveys conducted according to the highest international standards, more Palestinians in east Jerusalem would prefer to become citizens of Israel rather than citizens of a new Palestinian state. In addition, 40 percent said they would probably or definitely move in order to live under Israeli rather than Palestinian rule. Three-quarters of east Jerusalem Arabs are at least a little concerned, and more than half are more than a little concerned, that they would lose their ability to write and speak freely if they became citizens of a Palestinian state rather than remaining under Israeli control. The author of the paper, Dr. David Pollock of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, summarizes one of his conclusions as follows: “For people who tend to assume that a fair and practical solution for the Jerusalem issue is for the Arab neighborhoods to become part of Palestine and the Jewish neighborhoods to become part of Israel, these findings suggest that this could be somewhat problematic from the point of view of the people who actually live in east Jerusalem.” That’s putting it mildly. The paper is well worth reading, and sets the actual opinions of real live Palestinians in Jerusalem against the rhetoric, ideology, and demands of their rulers in Ramallah and received opinion in most Western capitals. It would be ironic indeed if a partition of Jerusalem between Israel and Palestine saw tens of thousands of Palestinians flee “their” new country. (Would UNRWA adopt them as new Palestinian refugees, by the way?) Unable to cast ballots to determine Palestinian policy, they might vote with their feet. One path out of such a mess would be to ask the 300,000 Palestinians who live in nineteen Jerusalem neighborhoods what they want as part of any future peace deal. We might find that many of them, like Israelis, want a united Jerusalem that is part of Israel. The partition of Jerusalem might be shown by such a vote to reflect the demands of Palestinian politicians rather than the majority of actual Palestinians actually living there. All such polls are a reminder that so long as they lack a working system of representative democracy we have no way of knowing what Palestinians really want. In 1974 the UN decided that the PLO was "the representative of the Palestinian people” and the Arab League calls it "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” But it isn’t. We should not accept at face value that Hamas or Fatah spokesmen and officials speak for anyone or anything except their own personal and organizational interests.      

A visit to London for a conference and several panel appearances this week has not inspired much optimism about Israeli-Palestinian developments. In an article today in The Weekly Standard, I report what I found and suggest that the UN gambit is a damaging move by the PLO/Fatah top brass. Going to the UN is a diversion and “This is in large part a failure of leadership, so long the Palestinian curse—from Haj Amin Al Husseini through Arafat to the Fatah crew today. Moderate views exist and moderate voices are heard. Those who understand the need to build their state from the bottom up do exist as well, have achieved a great deal, and do have serious popular backing. If the Fatah leaders took up the cause of building their own state instead of tearing down their neighbor’s, peace could be achieved.”  The article is here.    

It’s a small thing, to be sure, but not without significance. As of now, Gaza and the West Bank are in different time zones. The difference in time is symbolic of the gap between the two places politically and socially, and of the inability of anyone to figure out what to do about it. “Unity” discussions between Hamas and Fatah are going nowhere. The leadership on both sides appears to me to be quite happy with things as they are, and happy to hide behind their divisions as the excuse for refusing to hold elections. So while the PA/PLO rushes to the United Nations for the symbolic declaration of statehood, a more telling symbolic event has already occurred. Yes, I know that national unity is possible despite time differences: look at the United States. But the distance between Washington and Honolulu is five thousand miles. From Gaza to Ramallah is about fifty.