https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/a-strategic-us-approach-is-required-to-counter-the-muslim-brotherhood-1.857100

After meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi last month, US President Donald Trump has been contemplating designating the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO). However, many experts have been pointing out the pitfalls of such a broad categorisation, so the issue remains unresolved.

The State Department maintains a list of formally designated FTOs, the main purpose of which is to criminalise dealings with those groups by Americans. The operative law from 1996 was intended to make otherwise lawful activity criminal, if it in any way benefited designated organisations, including charitable and educational efforts, and any kind of advice, even about how to stop being a terrorist group.

When the US wants to directly punish a foreign individual or group with sanctions, that is mainly done by the Treasury Department. This State Department FTO list is political and often symbolic. It brands contact with entities such as Hamas and Hezbollah as unacceptable, under penalty of law.

It is easy to see the appeal of designating the Muslim Brotherhood, since it is indeed the main source of ideology behind almost all Sunni Islamist terrorism. There would be no Al Qaeda or ISIS, if not for the Brotherhood.

It is also accurate to compare the Brotherhood to a gateway drug for terrorism. If only one in 10 Brotherhood members graduates to Al Qaeda, that is one too many.

And while it has become easy for young radicals to bypass a Brotherhood phase, the group’s ideology is still the fount of many of the basic ideas and aims, such as the restoration of a caliphate, that animate the most violent Sunni extremists.

But that doesn’t make this a good idea. The Brotherhood, writ large, isn’t an organisation at all, but a loose network that encompasses entities with many different orientations and conduct within a broader context.

So, the practical meaning of the designation of a monolithic Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation would be up for grabs, unless the specific standalone, vertically integrated groups were clearly defined. Lack of such clarity will ensure endless confusion.

The US government could designate the Egyptian Brotherhood, the oldest Brotherhood group, but that organisation itself hasn’t engaged in much recently documented violence. It makes more sense to single out breakaway factions or groups with ties to the Brotherhood that have unquestionably conducted systematic mayhem, such as Harakat Sawa’d Misr (HASM) and Liwa Al Thawra, both of which the State Department made Specially Designated Global Terrorists last year. That allows the Treasury Department to freeze and block their assets, along with other sanctions, but its less far-reaching than an FTO designation.

If the Egyptian Brotherhood itself was designated without significant new documentation of direct responsibility for violence, that might undermine the credibility of the entire list and make it appear not just political but arbitrary.

A blanket designation of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in general would also cause no end of legal headaches.

Who, precisely, would it include? How could it be enforceable? Would it target all those who acknowledge being Brotherhood affiliates? What about those who deny that? What happens if a group insists they no longer are, or never were, affiliated with the Brotherhood? Who judges that? What’s the standard?

More importantly, there are Brotherhood-influenced or purportedly formerly Brotherhood-affiliated parties in some aspect of the governments of numerous US allies.

Would the US extend the Lebanon model in which it deals with the government, but not individual Hezbollah ministers?

So, it is unlikely that a blanket designation will be issued, and, though it is possible that the Egyptian Brotherhood in general could be designated, it is wiser to add groups such as HASM, with a sustained record of terrorism.

But this debate again raises the issue of how to deal with political Islamism. The Brotherhood is unquestionably a radical movement, and hardly pacifist.

History shows it is prepared to engage in wholesale violence when it finds that useful, as Hamas in particular has shown. But most Brotherhood parties have preferred a political to a violent approach to gaining and holding power, because they believe that will be more effective.

Yet the ultra-religious do exist and there should be an acceptable role for them in national politics. Otherwise, some will surely take up arms.

The traditional Brotherhood model has three primary characteristics that are strictly incompatible with law, order and stability: it is revolutionary, conspiratorial and transnational.

Some increasingly post-Islamist groups, such as Ennahda party in Tunisia, maintain that they are no longer any of those things. They say they are not revolutionary, because they accept the existing constitution. They are not conspiratorial because they obey the law and do everything in the open. And they are no longer part of any transnational agenda.

If true, such transformations should be welcomed.

Mainstream Arab politics should be open to religious conservatives, and even former Brotherhood parties and members, who are not violent and are genuinely no longer revolutionary, conspiratorial or transnational.

Any group that truly adopts such changes does not belong on a list of terrorist organisations. It belongs in the political process of its own country, according to national laws and, hopefully, always in the loyal opposition.

https://forward.com/opinion/423659/how-palestinians-should-react-when-trump-unveils-his-peace-plan/

With the Donald Trump/Jared Kushner “peace plan” probably to be released in June, Palestinians are facing a terrible conundrum. To save their national project, they must defend the terms of reference for peace formally agreed upon in the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles. But it’s not going to be easy, because the whole point of the Trump/Kushner project appears to be to destroy those terms and replace them with a new framework that inexorably leads not to two states but to some version of a Greater Israel.

If Palestinian leaders say “no” to the plan, which is certainly what Trump, Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are counting on, the US and Israel can start to build a new framework that dispenses with any two-state logic. This intention is already evident in Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and in Netanyahu’s intensified settlement building, pledge to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, and suggestion that Palestinians can only aspire to a “state-minus,” whatever that means.

Palestinians could say “yes” to a new American proposal to avoid being frozen out of an unfolding process that, in effect, will determine their future. But given what Kushner and other administration officials have said, the Trump plan is likely to impose new and highly disadvantageous terms that dispense with the 1993 agreement. Palestinians absolutely cannot endorse or accept anything of the kind.

So, what should the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — which is universally recognized as the sole diplomatic representative of the Palestinian people — do when neither “yes” nor “no” is a viable answer?

What the PLO needs to say is, “yes, but…”

They need to be very clear that what they are saying “yes” to is any opportunity to talk with Israel and the US, but not to the substance of any such proposal. When the plan is presented, it will surely be floated with the outline of the series of talks designed to implement it. Palestinians should show up at every opportunity but make it crystal-clear that they are participating specifically to remind Israel, the United States and the whole world that both countries are already signatories to the 1993 DOP. Its framework logically leads only to a Palestinian state, and doesn’t permit several of the most pernicious recent actions, specifically the American recognition of all of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The DOP specified several core disputes, most notably Jerusalem, as “final status issues” to be resolved only by agreement and not by any unilateral action. Despite their shenanigans, both Israel and the Palestinians kept the 1993 framework viable for almost 25 years. In a cruel twist of ironic fate, it was the United States, which is a signatory guarantor of the DOP, that finally shattered this solemn covenant by recognizing all of Jerusalem, without qualification, as Israel’s capital.

Moreover, Trump has repeatedly insisted he has taken Jerusalem “off the table” so that “we don’t have to talk about it anymore.” Such unilateralism abrogates the entire document and renders its operating logic irrelevant.

But the Trump plan is likely to go much further.

It has become alarmingly clear that the main purpose of the Trump/Kushner effort is not to create a new paradigm for peace. Instead it is primarily designed to ensure that the existing Oslo framework and its two-state architecture cannot be resurrected by any future administration.

The designers of this new US plan — Kushner, special envoy Jason Greenblatt and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman — are all dedicated advocates of a Greater Israel. They are plainly hoping to drive a stake through the heart of the undead Palestinian national entity to ensure that it can never again haunt their nightmares.

For Palestinians, this is arguably the greatest national threat since the 1967 war. After the 1967 war, it became obvious that a state in the territories Israel has just occupied (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip) had to be the focus of Palestinian national aspirations. Since then, an independent state there has been their de facto goal, though they were slow to admit it to themselves and others.

The Trump policy assumes this Palestinian dream is another dead letter. These Manhattan real estate mavens are treating the Palestinian national movement as if it were a bankrupt venture to be liquidated at political pennies on the national dollar.

Hence the Kushner and Greenblatt rhetoric about “making Palestinian lives better” and economic development rather than human rights, political freedom and national independence. Of course, there’s no way that Palestinian Muslims and Christians will agree that only Jews can have national and political rights in the emerging Greater Israel — especially when both populate it in equal numbers — as Netanyahu and Israel’s notorious “Nation-State Law” insist.

Systematically denying Palestinians genuine equality and authentic independence simultaneously is not something they, or any people, would ever accept.

So, in the long-term interests of all parties, the best way for Palestinians out of the trap set by the Trump/Kushner proposal is to say “yes, but…” and enthusiastically attend every possible meeting while loudly insisting that they are there to remind the others of the commitments in the 1993 DOP. They should speak of little, if anything, else. They must never stop asking how any new proposals are fully consistent with those signed agreements, as well as with UN Security Council resolutions, including 242, 338 and 1397, the last of which specifically calls for the creation of a Palestinian state (all voted for, and indeed drafted, by the United States).

Since the US and Israel have agreed to a set of solemn and binding obligations about the framework for Israeli-Palestinian peace, there’s an excellent alternative for Palestinians from falling into the traps of either saying “no,” and letting the two other parties go ahead without them, or saying simply “yes,” and appearing to endorse a set of new and unacceptable terms of reference.

There’s a way to simultaneously sit at the table, and reinforce their commitment to peace, without allowing any of that to happen. And that’s to say “yes, but we are here to discuss the already agreed-upon terms, how to implement them and how or if any new proposals fit into that established framework. By the way, here’s a copy of the signature page.”