http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/Aug/23/Palestinians-set-their-crosshairs-on-educational-reform.ashx#axzz0xNEtTlEY

In an important new move, the Palestinian Authority has recently begun highlighting education as one of the main centerpieces in the next phase of the state and institution building program. Under the leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas, the PA understands that an effective and progressive educational system is essential for economic and social development, building a functional state, and laying the groundwork for peace with Israel.

On August 8, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad gave a speech emphasizing the importance of improved education in combating fanaticism, promoting culture, and developing analytical capabilities in Palestinian society. He called educational improvement a “key priority” of the state and institution building program and “one of the most important criteria for measuring its success.”

In his speech, Fayyad singled out three essential aspects of education that need special attention. These were bold observations that are striking, not only in the Palestinian context, but in the Arab context at large.

First is the crucial need to respond to the decline of language skills and competency, particularly in Arabic. What this rightly suggests is that while in the early decades after 1948 much of Palestinian society responded to their predicament and the creation of the refugee problem by turning to education, the level of education among Palestinians has been in a kind of freefall in the last couple of decades, especially in the Occupied Territories. The turning point was probably the outbreak of the first Intifada in which energies began to be channeled away from education in favor of political activism.

Second, the PA believes there is an “urgent need” to promote analytical capabilities and critical thinking among Palestinian youths and students. Palestinian education, as with much of the rest of the Arab world, relies too much on the rote memorization and the simple ingestion of raw data or received wisdom rather than the cultivation of critical thinking and analytical skills. The PA is clearly concerned about the need for the future Palestinian state to focus on its human capital as a key resource for development and prosperity.

Without analytical and critical abilities promoted by an effective educational system, human capital is reduced simply to highly structured labor rather than a modern, creative, dynamic society that can thrive without major natural resources or luxurious arable lands for agriculture.

In his third and closely related point, Fayyad spoke about the need to use education to combat the growing prevalence of narrow-minded rigidity, enforcement through spurious appeals to supposed religious or cultural traditions, in both Palestinian thinking and social conduct. As an example he cited the increasingly widespread practice of avoiding handshaking between men and women which he said was not related to any real religious doctrine or traditional mores but nonetheless was becoming “not only accepted but expected.” Obviously, this handshaking taboo is only one example of many manifestations of the kind of reactionary tendencies he wants Palestinian education to combat and is a symptom of the overall constriction in Palestinian culture and attitudes he rightly finds alarming.

Hamas, the primary enforcer of such attitudes among Palestinians, was predictably enraged and said Fayyad was seeking to corrupt the youth of Palestine and destroy its culture.

Obviously the education sector is of key strategic and political importance. It not only helps shape social attitudes, it’s an essential function of government that must be carried out as effectively as possible. And, of course, it is precisely through providing education and health services over the years that extremist groups like Hamas in Gaza have won political support and spread its ideology among people who need those services. The Palestinian leadership seems well aware that it must urgently do more to provide these services themselves, and more importantly do it in the right way to create a Palestinian society that can thrive in the modern world.

This new plan for intervention is exceptionally important to lay healthy foundations for a successful, viable Palestinian state that could live in peace with Israel.

But more importantly, it is impressive and unusual in the Arab context to find a serving prime minister, with the support of the president, openly attacking what might be called the closing of the Arab mind, and to find a government proposing concrete plans to combat reactionary trends and promoting analytical skills and critical thinking. It’s not just the Palestinians who need to learn such lessons, it’s the entire Arab world.

http://www.mepei.com/in-focus/602-israel-and-palestine-between-alternatives

Although, a very strong international consensus has emerged, over the past two decades, that the only practicable means of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a negotiated agreement allowing for two states to live side-by-side, in peace and security, little progress has been made towards that goal.

Even the new designation by the United States of resolving the conflict as a national security priority and strategic imperative has yet to provide any grounds for greater optimism.

It is also clear to most sensible observers, that the only plausible alternative, to a negotiated peace agreement is an intensified conflict, that is likely to drift away from a political dispute between two national groups about land and power, in a limited territory, and towards a broader and intractable religious conflict, over holy places, and the will of God.

Both, the importance, and urgency of resolving this conflict have never been more widely accepted and yet the obstacles – opposition from extremists on all sides, the growing settler population, the difficulty of compromise on Jerusalem – seem as daunting as ever.

American policy since the fall of 2009 focused on attempting to revive direct negotiations, on the apparent assumption, that they will, then produce, a dynamic of their own and open new diplomatic possibilities. At the time of writing, the Palestinian leadership is still seeking a formula to allow it to agree to direct negotiations in spite of powerful domestic political opposition.

Yet, it would appear that in effect, the United States has created a quid pro quo, although not between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but between each of the parties, and the Americans.

The Palestinians have no choice but to reenter direct negotiations because they need American support to achieve almost anything, and their only real tool, at the moment, to improve their hand vis-à-vis Israel, is to leverage the American national security interest in resolving the conflict. So their agreement is virtually guaranteed.

On the Israeli side, it seems that President Barack Obama left no doubt in the mind of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that the United States will not accept new land expropriations in the West Bank or settlement activity in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem after the so-called “settlement moratorium” expires on September 26.

Indeed, Interior Minister Eli Yishai has publicly complained that Netanyahu will only permit building in the large settlement blocs, and other areas, that are generally considered part of a future land swap. So, counterintuitively, it is actually possible there will be less settlement activity in the 10 months, following the end of the moratorium, than during the 10 months of its supposed enforcement.

However, it is very difficult to imagine, under the present circumstances, any major breakthrough emerging from direct negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leaderships that are both politically weak and appear to have so many irreconcilable differences about final status issues, above all Jerusalem. For this reason, Palestinians are no longer content to rely solely on diplomacy, which requires Israeli cooperation, and American determination.

In August 2009, the PA cabinet adopted a program of unilateral Palestinian state and institution building in the occupied territories. The idea is to create the framework, and the institutions, of a future state, in spite of the occupation and in order to end the occupation. It could be considered the Palestinian answer to Israeli settlement activity: unilateral changes on the ground, but in this case, consistent with international law, not threatening to any legitimate Israeli interests, and promoting, rather than hindering the prospects for peace.

Obviously, Palestinians are going to acquire great deal of international financial aid, technical support and political protection, if this policy is going to emerge as the game changing strategy it ought to be. It offers a parallel track, complementary to diplomacy, which can move the ball forward in very significant and even potentially dramatic ways when negotiations move very slowly, if at all. Unless there are unexpected breakthroughs, it may be that the most important role of the negotiations, at this stage, is to support and legitimate the state and institution building program.

However, since the conflict can only be resolved by a negotiated agreement, at some point, that dynamic would have to be reversed and the state building effort serve as a complement to a suddenly reinvigorated diplomatic track. Ultimately, what is required is convergence between the bottom-up approach of the state building program, and the top-down international diplomacy, that will ultimately resolve the conflict through a negotiated agreement.

Almost all the relevant parties have the right stated policy, in favor of a two state solution. Even Prime Minister Netanyahu acknowledged this goal in his speech last year at Bar Ilan University. For their part, the PLO and PA leaderships have gambled everything on eventually achieving a peace agreement with the Israelis, and, if this policy fails neither organization is likely to survive the blow.

The problem across the board, not only in Israel and among the Palestinians, but in the United States and elsewhere, is to reconcile policy with politics that continue to prevent serious movement towards a negotiated resolution. The best course of action for the United States is to maintain its special relationship with Israel based on assurances of Israeli security, but make it clear to the Israelis, that ending both the conflict and the occupation are essential to American national security and are not optional.

The Obama administration is right to insist that Palestinians reenter direct negotiations, but they should recognize that the Palestinians are correct that to succeed, they must be based on clear and specific terms of reference, and that a mechanism, probably American-led, for holding the parties accountable for fulfilling their agreements is absolutely essential.

Palestinians must understand that the main leverage they have, at the moment, is the American interest in ending the conflict, and must therefore be as cooperative, and forthcoming, with the United States, as possible. It is essential that they present themselves as real partners to the United States in the pursuit of a peace agreement, willing to take bold, risky and costly political actions that serve the interests of this partnership.

Israelis have a simpler task: as a society, they have to honestly ask themselves what their vision of the future is. No one can say with any certainty what the present Israeli government really wants the situation to look like in the next two or three decades, and this ambiguity, while it may be politically convenient for politicians, is preventing Israeli society for making the difficult choices it must, in its own interests.

As for the international community, at large, it can, through the Quartet, continue to play an important role in supporting American efforts at the diplomatic level.

But, for the meantime perhaps even more importantly, it must greatly intensify support for Palestinian state and institution building in the West Bank. Preparing for independence will allow the Palestinians to bring that independence forward, and creating effective state institutions makes it far more likely the state will eventually be established. More importantly, this work is essential to ensure that the Palestinian state is a successful, stable, secure and well functioning one, something both Israelis and Palestinians need to be convinced of, if a peace agreement is to finally be achieved.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/hamas_many-splendored_contradictions

Hamas was in the news last week, accused by Egypt of having been behind the rocket attacks from the Sinai against the Israeli town of Eilat and the Jordanian town of Aqaba. This, once again, told us something about the paradoxes of the Islamist group.

From its inception, Hamas has been oriented toward both Palestinian nationalism and broader regional Islamist forces, especially since it is a core Muslim Brotherhood party. These two tendencies have usually worked at cross-purposes, since the Palestinian national interest is inconsistent with any version of a regional Islamist agenda. Such dynamics are further complicated by the fact that Hamas is the only Sunni Islamist party in the Arab world to be simultaneously part of the Muslim Brotherhood network and the largely Shia pro-Iranian alliance.

Hamas’ conduct needs to be viewed in the context of its primary strategic aim, which is to politically defeat the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority, and replace them as the primary agent for the Palestinian national movement. While the PLO and PA also find themselves in a zero-sum contest for power with Hamas within Palestinian society, their aims are much broader, particularly creating the conditions for Palestinian independence.

Those who do not recognize the central importance of Hamas’ dual identity as both a Palestinian nationalist and a regional Islamist organization, or the fundamental incompatibility between the agendas being pursued by Hamas and the PLO, tend to stress the importance of Palestinian national reunification. The fact is, however, that such reunification is completely impossible as long as both of these organizations remain viable contenders for the leadership of the Palestinian national movement. Their most fundamental difference – whether Palestinians should seek a negotiated peace with Israel – is compounded by disagreements about the nature of Palestinian society and much more. One vision is eventually going to win out over the other as the unifying and dominant Palestinian national strategy.

Indeed, it is probable that Hamas’ future will be largely determined in the West Bank, rather than in Gaza. Its role as a spoiler cannot be underestimated, but Hamas’ long-term fortunes depend on an irrevocable failure of the national strategy of negotiations and of the PA state- and institution-building program. If either or both of these policies succeed, Hamas’ single-minded promotion of the strategy (though certainly not always the practice) of violent resistance and insistence on the non-recognition of Israel – even in the context of Palestinian independence – will become increasingly hollow and unappealing. If the PLO and PA strategies unequivocally fail, however, there is little to prevent Hamas from inheriting practically uncontested the leadership of the Palestinian movement and transforming it from a nationalist to an Islamist one.

It was in this context that Hamas condemned the recent Arab League decision to approve direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO and has been urging Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas not to pursue talks with Israel. Indeed, many speculated that the recent rocket attacks launched from Gaza and Sinai were either Hamas or Hamas-inspired attempts to undermine prospects for such talks.

Hamas leaders have also urged Palestinians in the West Bank to kidnap Israeli settlers, and have generally encouraged anti-Israeli violence in the West Bank, while largely suppressing it in Gaza. In the past, various Palestinian extremist groups, above all Hamas, have exhibited a kind of de facto alliance with extreme right-wing forces in Israel to take actions that reinforce the violent conflict whenever diplomacy threatens to make progress toward a peace agreement.

Hamas’ opposition to a peace agreement serves both its own domestic interests and those of its regional allies and patrons. In the Palestinian context, while Hamas leaders are no doubt aware that independence in the occupied Palestinian territories is the most ambitious goal to which Palestinians can plausibly aspire, they cannot acknowledge this as long as they are in a contest for power with a secular, nationalist rival. If both Hamas and the PLO openly seek the same outcome of ending the occupation, the principal difference between them would be Hamas’ extreme social and religious conservatism, which is not a path to majority status in present Palestinian society.

Hamas’ policies are deeply advantageous to their fellow Muslim Brotherhood parties across the Arab world, as well as their patrons in the regional pro-Iranian alliance. Gaza, after all, is the only territory in the region in which Sunni Islamists have been able to seize and maintain power for any length of time. Muslim Brotherhood parties in opposition in countries like Egypt and Jordan would benefit enormously, maybe even decisively, in their quest for power, and at least would enjoy a surge of legitimation should the Palestinian cause become an Islamist one led by Hamas. Iran and its allies have a vaguer but also powerful stake in undermining the regional status quo and promoting the so-called “culture of resistance.”

For the Palestinian people and cause, however, Hamas’ policies are disastrous. They have split the Palestinian movement into two irreconcilable camps, led to international isolation and the blockade of Gaza, fueled extremism on the Israeli right and undermined international confidence that Palestinians really seek a negotiated peace with Israel. What Palestinians urgently need is an end to the occupation, which can only be achieved through a two-state solution. The last thing they need is for their cause to become the centerpiece of a regional Islamist campaign to topple governments or a plaything in the hands of a cynical Iranian hegemonic agenda.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/16/while_no_ones_looking_the_palestinians_are_building_a_state

In the world of Palestinian politics, the recent weeks have been a study in contrasts. The international media has trained its focus off the shores of Gaza, where the flotilla fiasco has generated dramatic images of dead civilians and battered Israeli soldiers. The politics of this incident reflect the traditional sturm und drang of the Palestinian national movement: full of grand gestures and transformative ambitions that might result in bloodshed and embarrassment for Israel, but make no substantive contribution to Palestinian liberation.

But in Bethlehem, far away from the television cameras and breathless news reports, 2,000 Palestinian financiers also gathered recently at the second Palestine Investment Conference to quietly go about the business of building the economy of a viable Palestinian state. They discussed almost $1 billion in new projects targeting high-growth sectors, including information and communications technology, housing, and tourism. The politics of the conference represent a paradigm shift quietly taking place in the West Bank under the leadership of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in which Palestinians are increasingly turning to the mundane, workaday tools of governance and development as their principal strategy for ending the occupation.

This strategic transformation is the result of a conundrum facing the Palestinian leadership, which has gambled its political future on a two-state agreement with Israel. If they fail, it is likely that both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) will permanently fade from history and the national movement will be captured by Islamists led by Hamas. Even PLO leaders, however, are still extremely skeptical about the ability of diplomacy to yield significant short-term progress, given the hard-line attitude of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Therefore, Palestinians have gravitated toward solutions that avoid exclusive reliance on diplomacy, which depends on American determination and Israeli seriousness, or slipping back into counterproductive, self-defeating violence.

The most important of these initiatives is the state- and institution-building program adopted by Fayyad’s cabinet last August. This program marks an attempt to build the administrative, infrastructural, and economic framework for a Palestinian state — not only in spite of the occupation, but as a means of confronting it. The plan calls for every PA ministry to meet a series of administrative and institutional goals, from economic and infrastructural developments to good governance and transparency measures. A budget document released in January added even more details to the program. The idea is that, if you build the state, it will come.

Palestinian nationalism had previously been conceived of as largely a top-down affair, concerned with success on the battlefield or at the highest levels of international diplomacy. But rather than seeking an impossible military victory or waiting for the sudden achievement of a major peace treaty, the state-building program seeks to create Palestine as a practical reality. Even as they continue to insist on their moral right of self-determination, Palestinians are seriously taking up their practical responsibilities of self-government.

Palestinians have also adopted nonviolent tactics designed to confront the occupation — particularly the PA’s boycott of settlement goods and mass protests against abusive occupation practices, such as the West Bank separation barrier. These tactics are designed to ensure that both Israelis and Palestinians understand that the state-building approach is not, as is sometimes claimed, a form of collaboration or “beautifying” of the occupation, but rather a sophisticated form of resistance to it. This approach also seeks to achieve clarity on the status of the occupied territories and confront Israelis with a simple question: Is this land going to be part of our state, or is it a part of yours?

This strategy is making quiet but significant progress. Last year, the PA completed more than 1,000 community development programs. It has created the nucleus of a Palestinian central bank and developed a transparent and accountable system of public financing. Hundreds of major development and public-private initiatives are under way, including at least two major telecommunications companies and the first planned Palestinian city. With significant international support, the framework of the Palestinian state is starting to take shape before our eyes.

The bedrock of the state-building program is the new security services trained by multinational forces Palestinians have deployed 2,600 officers in five major West Bank cities, ensuring unprecedented levels of law and order and facilitating the removal of a number of Israeli checkpoints. Israelis themselves have commended the effectiveness of the forces and praised their security coordination with Israeli forces. The combination of security improvements, increased access and mobility for Palestinians, and the PA’s economic development projects led to a growth rate of 8.5 percent in the West Bank last year, one of the highest in the recession-plagued world economy. Perhaps even more significantly, about half of the PA’s budget is now provided by Palestinian taxes and not international support.

In addition to this paradigm shift in the West Bank, Palestinian diplomacy is finally back on track after a difficult 12 months. Abbas’s June 9 visit to the White House revealed that the PLO is presenting itself, for the first time in many years, as a real political partner to the United States. Abbas was able to achieve broad agreement with President Barack Obama’s administration on most key points, including the necessity of easing the siege of Gaza without benefiting Hamas and reaching an agreement that, though direct Israeli-Palestinian talks are important, more political and diplomatic preparation is still required before they can be launched.

There have been some significant failures, of course, particularly regarding the problem of Hamas’s grip over Gaza. Hamas stymied plans to hold national elections in January and July, which represented the only viable peaceful option for reunifying the Palestinian national movement. For the foreseeable future, therefore, national reconciliation appears to be a slogan rather than a practical possibility. The PLO and Hamas currently agree on absolutely nothing, from how to deal with Israel to the cultural and religious foundations of Palestinian society. The future of Hamas will likely be determined by the success or failure of the PA’s state-building project, and its diplomatic efforts. A decisive failure of the new Palestinian tactics will probably make an Islamist takeover inevitable, but its success will discredit Hamas and weaken the organization’s appeal.

The recent Gaza flotilla disaster and Israel’s unconscionable and counterproductive blockade of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza poses a significant challenge to the PA’s strategy. In the coming months, its leadership will attempt to deny Hamas the ability to reap political benefits from Gazans’ suffering. Particularly after Israel’s bloody attack on the flotilla, PLO leaders are determined to help find a way to ease the siege without strengthening their rivals. They think that the blockade has primarily strengthened Hamas’s grip on power in Gaza and are calling for a new way to separate the interests of Hamas and ordinary Gazans.

Palestinian strategy must contend not only with the fallout from the flotilla debacle, but with the constant stresses imposed by the occupation’s continued restrictions on Palestinian economic development and the meager progress of diplomatic negotiations. RecentWorld Bank and IMF studies confirm that, though the institution-building project is meeting its stated objectives, under present conditions it can only go so far: The occupation must continue to recede for it to develop further. This means that increased Israeli cooperation is essential. The PA’s state-building approach and its nonviolent tactics are means for achieving progress on the ground, but in the end they cannot be a substitute for a negotiated agreement.

Although the flotilla fiasco and international outrage concerning Gaza may be more dramatic, all parties have an interest in ensuring the success of the groundbreaking developments in the West Bank. International support and Israeli cooperation are essential for this project to realize its full potential. If that happens, the creation of a viable Palestinian state might attract more than a few newspaper headlines of its own soon enough.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jun/07/israel-must-clarify-palestine-status

While world attention has been heavily focused on efforts to break the siege of Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank are pursuing a series of new, nonviolent, strategies challenging the Israeli occupation. What they are primarily seeking, and what the Israeli government is desperately trying to avoid, is clarity about the status of the occupied territories.

Palestinians are insisting that Israel cannot continue to treat theterritories occupied in 1967 in a selective manner, regarding settlers and settlements as unambiguously “Israeli” but the Palestinian population as fundamentally alien and outside Israel. The new Palestinian strategies are pressing the uncomfortable but unavoidable question: are these territories part of Israel, or not?

Throughout its policies in the occupied territories, Israel picks and chooses according to its convenience, maintaining an untenable ambiguity regarding the legal and political status of the territory and its residents. This ambiguity begins with the legal and political status of the population of the territories. While Israeli settlers live under Israeli civil law and with all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, Palestinians live under Israeli civil and military administration with a very different set of laws and without the rights or responsibilities of citizenship. This structure based on dual registers of reality in the same space extends throughout the entire system of the occupation.

The recent flap over Israel’s OECD membership is an excellent case in point. Israelis were outraged that Palestinians would object to Israel’s attempt to join the organisation, but the Palestinians were making an important point: Israel includes the prosperous, heavily subsidised, settlement economy in all of the “national” economic statistics it submitted for OECD membership, but excludes all aspects of the Palestinian economy that struggles under occupation. It’s not just a question of veracity of Israel’s figures. It is a demand to know on what basis Israel can consider the settlements part of the “Israeli” economy but surrounding Palestinian villages not.

Clarity is also the ultimate aim of the boycott of settlement goodsrecently launched by the Palestinian Authority. The boycott serves many purposes, including bolstering the Palestinian economy and harnessing Palestinian spending power in developing its own society.

However, it is unlikely that the boycott will really damage the economic viability of settlements, which are heavily subsidised and are ideological rather than for-profit enterprises. Probably the most important function the boycott performs is to focus everyone’s attention on the clear distinction between settlement goods and legitimate Israeli products, and thereby isolate and highlight the distinction between Israel itself and the settlements.

Israel’s infuriated reaction to the boycott is a clear indication of how uncomfortable it is with such clarity. The political dangers were illustrated recently when two large Italian grocery chains took a principled decision not to sell settlement products, only to discover that Israel refused to clearly label settlement goods or distinguish them from “Israeli” products generally. As a consequence, the companies decided not to sell any Israeli exports on the grounds that there is no clarity.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s protestations that the boycott is only hurting the Palestinians themselves rings extremely hollow. If that were true, why are he and his colleagues so upset by it? Israelis indignantly ask Palestinians: are you partners or are you enemies? The answer is simple: partners in peace, security and all legitimate matters, yes; partners in occupation and settlements, no.

Palestinians cannot be expected to acquiesce to, much less subsidise, their own oppression and they have every right to peacefully and lawfully challenge the occupation and demand clarity.

The same logic ultimately applies to the PA state and institution building programme. By developing the framework of Palestinian statehood, the programme forces Israel into the clarity of a simple choice: either gradually and however grudgingly cede more and more attributes of sovereignty in greater and greater parts of the occupied territories to the PA in order to allow the programme to develop, or kill it. The state building programme cannot survive stasis. It requires continuous, even if gradual, expansion. It asks Israel a simple question: are the occupied territories ultimately your country or ours?

Israel is alone in not recognising that it is the occupying power in the territories conquered in 1967. Heretofore its policies have been structured around obfuscation that allows the settlements and the settlers to occupy a legal and political space indistinguishable from Tel Aviv and its inhabitants, except, of course, for all the special subsidies and privileges they are accorded, while all aspects of Palestinian life are characterised by occupation. The Palestinian point is that there cannot be two legal and political registers: a virtual Israel that exists wherever an Israeli settler happens to be and an ambiguous, unresolved occupation everywhere else.

Because peace will depend on ending the occupation, it also requires clarity about the occupation. Palestinians are doing themselves, the world, and ultimately the Israelis as well, a big favour in rejecting Israel’s fog of ambiguity and demanding simple, necessary clarity.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/May/20/The-US-may-have-no-Plan-B-but-the-Palestinians-do.ashx#axzz0oTbuh0Gs

The Obama administration was successful in arranging for the resumption of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations through “proximity talks,” which began recently. However, expectations in all quarters are understandably low for any near-term breakthrough. Consequently, Palestinians have been systematically developing a new set of peaceful strategies to achieve independence and advance a resolution to the conflict.

Since the United Nations General Assembly meeting in the fall, the whole thrust of American policy has been to try to get the parties back into negotiations, with the apparent hope that this would generate its own dynamics and open spaces up for significant progress.

The idea of “proximity talks” in which Americans would speak alternately to Israeli and Palestinian negotiators who would not meet directly, came out of the administration’s efforts to find a way for the Palestinians to return to negotiations with Israel without a complete settlement freeze. This is, of course, an unfortunate throwback to the pre-Madrid era. An even worse throwback is the renewed Palestinian reliance on “approval” from the Arab League for what ought to be strictly Palestinian decisions regarding negotiations with Israel.

With expectations for the talks being what they are, all parties are wondering whether or not the Americans have a Plan B. Washington is currently embroiled in significant debates about the alternatives. One camp is urging the possible development of a broad-ranging and specific US peace plan. Another is cautioning against raising expectations and counseling that no significant progress is possible under the present circumstances. A third possibility is for the United States to internationalize the process by calling a peace summit at the end of the year in the event of a continued stalemate.

The Palestinian leadership is committed to negotiations, but has no confidence it can achieve anything significant immediately given the present political climate and makeup of the Israeli Cabinet. At the same time, Palestinian officials are resolutely opposed to armed struggle or a return to another violent intifada. Because of this conundrum, they have been developing a series of creative alternative strategies designed to complement diplomacy and provide additional sources of momentum toward peace.

The most important of these is the state and institution building program adopted in August 2009 by the Palestinian Authority Cabinet, which includes creating a fully functioning bureaucracy and the institutional, economic and infrastructural basis for a successful, independent Palestinian state.

The idea is that as negotiations proceed slowly for the meanwhile, Palestinians can build the framework of their state, making independence not just a theoretical possibility but a potentially practical reality. It calls the bluff of all parties, challenging them to assess if they were ever serious about their stated commitment to a peace based on a Palestinian state.

In addition, the Palestinian Authority has been increasingly promoting nonviolent protests and civil disobedience in the West Bank targeted at the occupation. These protests, such as those at villages affected by the West Bank separation barrier, highlight abusive Israeli policies, and confront the occupation in a proactive but peaceful manner.

A third tactic in this emergent peaceful strategy to confront the occupation is to develop various economic measures aimed at ridding the Palestinian economy of settlement goods, encouraging European and other states to boycott settlement products, and preventing Palestinians from working in settlements. The aim here is to replace the settlement elements of the Palestinian economy with indigenous ones. This would provide alternatives to the Palestinians subsidizing the settlements themselves while simultaneously expanding the Palestinian economy.

All these measures are designed to emphasize the distinction between Israel itself and the occupation, and focus attention on the contradictory nature of the interests of most Israelis on the one hand and extremist settlers on the other. Palestinians are saying to ordinary Israelis, “Our policy is not aimed at you or your country but at the extremist settlers whose activities, because they are antithetical to peace, are in the end are as damaging to you as they are to us.”

All this means that, while the Palestinian leadership is committed to a negotiated agreement, it is not relying solely on American leadership or Israeli sincerity; instead, it is developing parallel, complementary tracks that Palestinians can control and that bolster diplomacy.

All the parties seriously committed to a two-state agreement, especially the international community, should welcome and support these new Palestinian initiatives, especially the state and institution building program.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/mar/24/binyamin-netanyahu-palestine-us

The Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is not being honest with his fellow Israelis by insisting that settlement building is compatible with a peaceful future between Israelis and Palestinians, or that the colonisation of occupied East Jerusalem “in no way harms” Palestiniansand is not in any sense different from building in Tel Aviv.

Limiting or freezing settlement construction has been at the heart of all recent peace efforts because the settlements make the borders of a future Palestinian state more difficult to conceptualise, let alone determine, and increase the frequently belligerent Israeli constituency opposed to meaningful territorial compromise.

At the political level, they make permanent status negotiations very difficult for the Palestinian leadership because of the legitimate Palestinian fear of being once again drawn into a peace process that is all process and no peace. During the Oslo era in the 1990s, when Palestinians believed they were negotiating an end to the occupation, in fact the number of Israeli settlers more than doubled. Because of this experience and the practical problems settlements create for the creation of a Palestinian state, settlement building undermines the viability and credibility of negotiations and negotiators. Settlement activity ensures that the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is not a manageable flat plane but rather is a downward spiral of ever-increasing complication, bitterness and difficulty.

However, in his present coalition Netanyahu is surrounded by people to his political right who are committed to settlement activity, especially in occupied East Jerusalem. While he presented the partial, limited settlement moratorium to the United States as a major concession, his government has taken numerous steps to ensure continued expansion of the Israeli presence in much of the West Bank and above all in Jerusalem. The recent confrontation with the Obama administration over new settler housing units in Jerusalem announced during the US vice president Joe Biden’s trip to the region reflected the unbridgeable divide between Washington’s expectations and the demands of the rightwing parties in Netanyahu’s coalition.

The confrontation has placed Israel settlement activity under an even more powerful microscope than it already has been. Israeli colonisation of East Jerusalem is not just a Palestinian problem now, it has become an American problem as well, and that is a serious complication for any Israeli leader who wants to preserve political relations with the Obama administration.

It appears that the confidential new US-Israel understandings that defused the confrontation involved Israel’s agreement that upcoming negotiations will include all core issues, including Jerusalem, something Netanyahu had been trying to avoid for many months. Proximity talks are therefore now likely to be structured in the way Palestinians have wanted, and not on Israeli terms. Netanyahu also reportedly agreed to ease the siege of Gaza. Finally, although details on the new understanding regarding settlement activity in Arab East Jerusalem are quite murky, clearly it is going to be more politically difficult and costly for Israel from now on.

Obviously, all of this is far short of a real settlement freeze, and serious progress on peace is eventually going to require that. However, the confrontation has delivered significant gains to the Palestinians. The bottom line is this: the Palestinians had been willing, although extremely reluctant, to go back into proximity talks without a clear agenda or terms of reference. Now, they will be able to go into them with much more satisfactory arrangements. Clearly this is a gain to be built upon, not squandered.

http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=27195&lan=ar&sid=0&sp=0&isNew=1

واشنطن العاصمة – يشتد النقاش، في الوقت الذي يضغط فيه الفلسطينيون على المجتمع الدولي لتحقيق التزاماته بضمان إنشاء دولة فلسطين المستقلة إلى جانب إسرائيل، حول طبيعة الدولة الجديدة. يتوجب على الفلسطينيين، لصالحهم، أن يخالفوا التوجه الإقليمي السائد المتعلق بالسياسات الدينية، وأن يضمنوا منذ البداية إنشاء دولة علمانية بشكل حازم لا تراجع عنه.

ليس هناك من تساؤل بأن الفلسطينيين هم، بشكل عام، شعب محافظ متديّن. إلا أن هذا يشكل سبباً أكبر لاعتناق شكل علماني من أشكال الحكم. لا تعني الحكومة العلمانية الإلحاد الرسمي أو مهاجمة المعتقدات والمؤسسات الدينية أوالعداء تجاه الإيمان الديني والممارسة الدينية، وإنما تعني الحياد التام للدولة في الشؤون الدينية، وبالتالي الحفاظ على الحريات الدينية لكافة المواطنين. وهي تعني حرية جميع الطوائف الدينية من تدخّل الدولة، وكذلك حرية الدولة من سيطرة أية سلطة دينية.

يعتبر المجتمع الفسطيني مجتمعاً متغاير الخواص بشكل بارز. هناك نسبة عالية من المسيحيين من طوائف مختلفة، لعبوا دوراً رئيسياً في الحركة الوطنية وفي المجتمع بشكل عام. سوف تعمل أية محاولة لإنشاء هيكل حكومي يرتكز على المبادئ الدينية الإسلامية من حيث المبدأ على تهميش الفلسطينيين المسيحيين إن لم يكن التمييز ضدهم أواستثناءهم.

أعرب العديد من القادة الفلسطينيين عن استعدادهم السماح للمستوطنين الإسرائيليين اليهود الذين يرغبون بالبقاء في فلسطين والالتزام بقوانين الدولة الجديدة أن يفعلوا ذلك. يثير ذلك احتمالات وجود أقلية يهودية في فلسطين كذلك. ومن المحتمل أن تصر إسرائيل، وليس فلسطين، على إخلاء كامل المستوطنات، بسبب الصعوبات التي ستبرز أمام أية حكومة إسرائيلية في حال بقاء يهود أو إسرائيليين في الدولة الفلسطينية الجديدة ومواجهتهم لأية صعوبات ذات أهمية. إلا أن استعداد القادة الفلسطينيين احتضان أقلية يهودية كمواطنين أو مقيمين على قدم المساواة تحت القانون يشكل مبدأ هاماً يجب الحفاظ عليه.

سوف تكون الحكومة العلمانية بالطبع أساسية في توفير معاملة متساوية للمسيحيين الفلسطينيين بل وحتى الأقليات اليهودية تحت القانون، ووصول متساو إلى كافة حقوق ومكتسبات المواطَنة. تشكل العديد من دول الشرق الأوسط، بما فيها إسرائيل، أمثلة يجب عدم تكرارها في التعامل الاجتماعي والوضع السياسي للأقليات الدينية، حتى عندما تتوفر الحريات الدينية رسمياً.

هناك تنوع هام حتى داخل المجتمع الإسلامي الفلسطيني. يتراوح المسلمون الفلسطينيون في تبعيتهم بين العلمانيين سياسياً والمتشددين دينياً، إلى الإسلاميين (وفي بعض الحالات الإسلاميين المتطرفين)، إلى المسلمين غير الراغبين بممارسة دينهم. هناك كذلك مجموعات هامة من الملحدين واللاأدريين في كل من الجاليتين الفلسطينيتين المسلمة والمسيحية.

شكلت القيم العلمانية تاريخياً سمة رئيسية للحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية، والتوجه الحديث نحو إعادة تعريفها بتعابير دينية، إلا أن الأمر جاء معاكساً بشكل كامل. كان لتكثيف الطروحات الدينية، تصاحبها مستويات متزايدة من التشدد المسلّح والعنف أثناء الانتفاضة الثانية، وبدفع من الإسلاميين بشكل رئيسي، وعلى رأسهم حماس، وبمشاركة من الوطنيين الذين سعوا لعدم تهميشهم في مجال الشرعية الدينية، كان لها نتائج كارثية على الحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية.

كذلك كان هناك ما يماثل عملية تقديس النضال على الجانب الفلسطيني من حيث تصاعد التعصب الديني الزائد في المجتمع الإسرائيلي، رغم كونه أقل وضوحاً وإنما مماثل في تشدده. ويشكّل التحول بعيداً عن النزاع، والذي يتميز بالتنافس على الأرض والسلطة بين مجموعتين عرقيتين وطنيتين، كما كان الحال عليه حتى الآن، وباتجاه حرب دينية حول مشيئة الله والسيطرة على المواقع الدينية، يشكل تهديداً إلى كل من الإسرائيليين والفلسطينيين على حد سواء. النزاعات السياسية عرضة للتوصل إلى اتفاقيات متفاوض عليها، ولكن الحروب الدينية ليست كذلك.

لقد أوصينا أنا وزملائي في فريق العمل الأمريكي من أجل فلسطين ومنذ فترة طويلة بأن تكون الدولة الفلسطينية ديمقراطية وتعددية، منزوعة السلاح وحيادية في النزاعات. وبالطبع، حتى تكون الدولة تعددية بشكل صحيح لا يمكن أن تسيطر عليها وجهة نظر دينية واحدة، وأنما يجب أن تسمح بأوسع مجال ممكن من التعبير عن التنوع الديني.

تعتبر جميع المجتمعات متغايرة الخواص فيما يتعلق بالإيمان، وهذا هو الوضع الواضح في المجتمع الفلسطيني. وهذا واحد من أسباب كون الحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية تاريخياً علمانية سياسياً رغم الطبيعة الورعة دينياً لمعظم المجتمع الفلسطيني. يتعرّض المبدأ لتهديد خطير نتيجة لتنامي السياسة الدينية، ولكن يجب الدفاع عنه بعزم وتصميم.

يجب أن تمثل أية دولة تستحق النضال من أجل إنشائها، جميع مواطنيها بشكل متساوٍ، ويتطلب هذا إنشاء فلسطين تكون فيها الدولة حيادية في القضايا الدينية، أي أن تكون حكومة علمانية.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/feb/02/palestinian-state-build-israel

Two weeks ago the Palestinian Authority issued a detailed budget for thestate and institution-building programme it adopted last August. The programme calls for Palestinians to unilaterally build the administrative, economic and institutional framework of an independent state in spite of the Israeli occupation and as a peaceful, constructive means of countering it.

This agenda might be conceptualised as the Palestinian answer to Israeli settlement-building by creating positive, unilateral new facts on the ground that restructure the strategic equation, but with the crucial difference that, unlike settlement activity, it is consistent with international law, welcomed by the international community, and promotes rather than hinders prospects for a peace agreement.

The new document, Palestine: Moving Forward, Priority Interventions for 2010, spells out priorities for the Palestinian government in the coming year, and includes cost estimates and funding status. Building on the August cabinet document, this detailed financial agenda is a clear guide to what the Palestinian government seeks to accomplish and how this can be supported financially, technically and politically by all those seeking to promote peace based on the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The major priorities outlined emphasise “the building of central and local government institutions that are essential to the establishment of a modern and sovereign state of Palestine”, upgrading of public services, the development of “strategically significant infrastructure”, and measures to “improve and promote the image of Palestine internationally”. The programme is ambitious, but those who closely follow events on the ground in the occupied West Bank will know that projects are already under way and things are beginning to happen in both the public and private sectors. Among numerous examples are the first planned Palestinian city in the West Bank and the first private equity fund aimed at developing small and medium-sized Palestinian businesses. However, as a new document demonstrates, too many items are either unfunded or have funding pending.

The Palestinians require international support to succeed in their attempt to prepare for successful independence and changed the strategic landscape in favour of peace. Financial and technical assistance is indispensable, as is political protection for the programme from the United States. In a recent Cif article, Ben White outlined the obstacles to this programme posed by the Israeli occupation, and these serious concerns demonstrate the extent of political protection, as well as financial and technical support, the plan will require if it is to succeed.

International interest in the agenda as a parallel track to diplomacy is growing, but the programme deserves a good deal more attention than it has received thus far. Billions of dollars have been pledged in international support for the PA but little has been delivered and the Palestinian government continues to live hand to mouth. This is utterly unacceptable, and contributes to both instability and lack of progress towards peace.

The Palestinian ability to transform international support into serious governmental programmes has been demonstrated by the success of the new security forces, a model of cooperation that needs to be extended to all levels of administration and institution building in the occupied territories. Israel was initially deeply suspicious of the new security forces, however the programme received financial, technical and political backing from the United States and went forward nonetheless. There is now an Israeli consensus that the security force programme was a positive development, and this process can be repeated in sector after sector.

For Palestinians, a crucial challenge has been to put meat on the bones of the skeleton released in August, and the new priorities document is a creditable and timely second step. Now, however, as they seek international funding and support, almost every item in the new budget will eventually require its own detailed outline if donors, funders and partners are to be fully engaged.

While it is essential for all parties to continue to pursue the top-down diplomatic agenda that will shape the terms of peace, it is just as important for the international community to move quickly to support this bottom-up state and institution-building plan that will complement, reinforce and protect the diplomatic track, and ensure that the Palestinian state, when it is established, will be functional and successful. It can also serve as an alternative source of momentum in the direction of peace if diplomacy is at an impasse or yielding too few results too slowly.

The PA has provided the international community with an unparalleled opportunity that is also a test of its commitment to peace in the Middle East. If the real commitment is there, international actors must launch a multi-year, coordinated and global effort to help the PA build the infrastructure of the Palestinian state everyone says is the key to peace.

The question is: do we really mean what we say about the importance of peace based on the creation of a Palestinian state, and are we willing to act on it?

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/01/palestine_must_be_a_secular_state.html

As Palestinians press the international community to live up to its commitment to ensuring the establishment of an independent Palestine alongside Israel, conversation is intensifying about the character of this new state. In their own interests, Palestinians should buck the regional trend towards religious politics and ensure, from the outset, that it is firmly and irrevocably a secular state.

There is no question that the Palestinians are, in general, a relatively conservative and religious people, but this is all the more reason to embrace a secular form of government. Secular government does not mean official atheism, iconoclasm or hostility towards religious belief and practice. It means rather the strict neutrality of the state on religious matters and, therefore, the upholding of religious freedom for all citizens. It means the freedom of all religious communities from state interference, but also the freedom of the state from the dominance of any one religious authority.

Palestinian society is strikingly heterogeneous. A very significant percentage of Palestinians are Christians of numerous denominations, and they have played a major role in the national movement and in society generally. Any move to establish a government structure based on Muslim religious principles by definition would marginalize if not discriminate against or exclude Palestinian Christians.

Numerous Palestinian leaders have expressed the willingness to allow Jewish Israeli settlers who wish to remain in Palestine and abide by the laws of the new state to do so. This raises the prospect of a Jewish minority in Palestine as well. It is likely that Israel, rather than Palestine, would insist on a complete evacuation of settlements, because of the political difficulties arising for any Israeli government should Jews or Israelis remaining in the new Palestinian state encounter any significant difficulties. However, the willingness of Palestinian leaders to embrace a Jewish minority as equal citizens or residents under the law is an important principle that ought to be upheld.

Obviously, a secular government will be essential to affording Palestinian Christian and possibly also Jewish religious minorities equal treatment under the law and equal access to all the benefits of citizenship. Numerous Middle Eastern states, including Israel, serve as examples not to be emulated in the social treatment and political status of religious minorities, even when freedom of religion is officially afforded.

Even within the Palestinian Muslim community, there is significant heterogeneity. Palestinian Muslims range in orientation from the politically secular but religiously devout, to the Islamist (and even in some cases extreme Islamist), to the religiously disinclined. There are also significant constituencies of atheists and agnostics within both the Palestinian Muslim and Christian communities.

Historically, secular values have been a major feature of the Palestinian national movement, and the recent trend towards re-defining it in religious terms has been almost entirely counterproductive. Driven mainly by Islamists led by Hamas, but also engaged in by nationalists seeking not to be outbid on religious legitimacy, the intensification of religious rhetoric, accompanied by increasing levels of militarization and violence during the second intifada, had disastrous results for the Palestinian national movement.

This sanctification of the struggle on the Palestinian side has been matched by a less well-recognized but equally fanatical and dangerous rise in religious zealotry in Israeli society. The shift away from a conflict characterized by the competition for land and power by two ethno-national groups, as it has thus far largely been, and towards a holy war over the will of God and control of sacred spaces is profoundly threatening to both Israelis and Palestinians alike. Political conflicts are amenable to negotiated agreement. Holy wars are not.

My colleagues and I at the American Task Force on Palestine have long recommended that the Palestinian state be democratic, pluralistic, non-militarized and neutral in conflicts. Obviously, for a society to be genuinely pluralistic, it cannot be dominated by one religious opinion but must allow for the greatest possible expression of religious diversity.

All societies are heterogeneous on matters of faith, and Palestinian society is obviously so. This is one of the reasons why historically the Palestinian national movement has been politically secular in spite of the relatively devout nature of much of Palestinian society. This principle is being seriously threatened by the rise of religious politics, but it must be resolutely defended.

Any Palestinian state worth struggling for and establishing must represent all of its citizens equally. This requires the establishment of a Palestinian system in which the state is neutral on religious matters, in other words a secular government.