https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/freedom_above_all_means_the_freedom_to_be_wrong

The proposed Quran-burning spectacle, which was planned by an extremist Florida pastor for this year’s anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then canceled due to overwhelming opposition from the American mainstream, is an excellent example of how the First Amendment protects free speech in the United States.

The planned action would have been gratuitous, offensive, blasphemous and almost unanimously opposed by other Americans. But it was also absolutely protected under American law. A very large body of legal rulings over many years has established that the symbolic burning of American flags in protest against government policies is protected speech under the First Amendment. The same would apply to burning the Quran, or anything else that is symbolic, no matter how deeply it offends some people’s sensibilities.

On the other hand, the government’s response, which ultimately proved decisive, was not to attempt to censor or restrain this provocative act, but rather to employ its own free speech rights. Senior officials repeatedly and pointedly insisted that the burning, along with being deeply offensive, was actually dangerous and, most immediately, might place the lives of American troops, particularly in Afghanistan, in danger. The turning point was probably a phone call to the pastor by Robert Gates, in which the defense secretary reportedly insisted that this would be an act that might cost American lives. In other words, the government appealed to shame and patriotism in dissuading the preacher from going forward with his highly provocative plan.

This was a good outcome, but it certainly wasn’t optimal. One hopes in vain to live in a society in which extremists avoid provoking each other in a counterproductive and obnoxious manner, but every country has its fools. The appropriate response, but one that unfortunately doesn’t seem available at the moment, is for everyone to collectively shrug at a weirdo burning a large pile of paper on a historic anniversary. So what?

However, religious people often don’t take this view. But if something like the Quran is the word of God or is holy in some meaningful way, it doesn’t require angry mobs to defend it from nut cases. Demagogues can’t resist tapping into potential outrage in order to promote their agendas by whipping up emotions. And, it has to be said, a violent response to provocative and obnoxious speech is totally unjustifiable.

It is extremely important that the American mainstream was able to stop this provocation by persuasion, rather than by employing some kind of enforced restraint that would have jeopardized free speech. Martin Peretz, the publisher of The New Republic magazine, proposed seeking a court injunction to prevent the Quran burning. Commentator Pat Buchanan went further, suggesting that the preacher be arrested on spurious charges of “sedition.” Such actions would have not only been unconstitutional, they would have undermined the single most important freedom protected under American law, which, if upheld, would have effectively established new coercive powers of censorship.

Any offended Muslims who would have welcomed such moves would have been seriously misguided. In the long run, religious, ethnic and other minorities in any society invariably pay a higher price for a loss of liberty than majorities do, for obvious reasons.

It’s not an intuitively easy concept to grasp, but the only freedom that really counts is the freedom to be wrong. If virtually everyone agrees that something makes sense, it need not be protected by absolute guarantees of personal liberty. It’s only when an action or concept seems obviously and completely wrong, even immoral, to large majorities and social mainstreams that it requires a robust constitutional defense. The important point that the Quran burnings might have cost American and other lives was an argument based on dissuasion, not an instance of using the power of the state to prevent the burnings. If one accepts the principle that speech can be restrained because of a nebulous and potential social harm, it’s hard to see where, logically, that kind of censorship would become invalid.

Yet the controversy does demonstrate that there is a powerful rise in Islamophobia in American culture. Angry opposition to the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” and to numerous mosque-building projects around the United States, as well as other disturbing developments, illustrate there is more Islamophobic sentiment in the country today than there was in the first two or three years following the 9/11 attacks.

There is still a great deal of resistance to this bigotry on the part of mainstream American society, but the Islamophobic narrative has gained considerable cultural and political ground in the past few years. This is largely a function of the reinforcement of the idea that Islam and Muslims in the United States are a physical or cultural threat to American society, or both, independent of any actual events.

If Islamophobia was essentially a reaction to terrorist outrages and other provocations, it would have been at its zenith in the first years following the 9/11 attacks, not nine years later with no similar incidents occurring in the intervening period.

Narratives drive the reception and interpretation of events, not the other way around. The US government and the American mainstream may have prevented the Quran-burning spectacle, but the evidence that the Islamophobic narrative is gaining ground in American cultural and political life is irrefutable. The only rational response is for American Muslims to work with their fellow citizens to create and promote alternative narratives, which will be based on the same free speech rights that would have protected the aborted Quran burnings.

http://www.islamcomment.org/twoseas/?p=64

The controversial planned Islamic community center in lower Manhattan, a few blocks from the “ground zero” site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrates a rather large gap between the perceptions of many if not most Western Muslims and their non-Muslim compatriots, and the difficulty of balancing sensitivities and rights.

The project itself was an extremely dubious idea from the outset, particularly given the fact that it was virtually inevitable that the Islamophobic right would try to twist this into yet another source of tension between American Muslims and the broader American society. The backers of the project did, and continue to do, a woeful job of framing it in any way that might avoid alienating much of American society (even the name they chose, “Córdoba House,” is exceptionally ill-conceived for reasons that ought to be obvious, upon reflection, to anybody).

Only those living in a bubble would fail to understand what was likely to happen, but this group seems to inhabit just such an isolated cultural and political space. It seems evident they didn’t consult with anybody serious before launching the project and, if they did, they certainly didn’t get or heed any good advice. Instead of loudly and proactively framing the project in a way that might foreclose the inevitable Islamophobic attacks, the field was left essentially open to the ultra-right blogosphere to define and frame the issue, giving rise to the myth of the “ground zero mosque,” at which point the whole thing became toxic and, for American Muslims, disastrous.

Tension continued to run high leading up to the ninth anniversary of 9/11 yesterday, fueled also by lunatic preachers threatening to burn Qurans and other provocative actions and comments. One has to ask why this random ninth anniversary of September 11 terrorist attacks would be so much more charged than previous ones, and I think the answer clearly has to do with the rise of an Islamophobic narrative that is largely unconnected to actual events and has independently developed a powerful cultural and political force by virtue of repetition and dissemination.

Unless some kind of violent incident takes place to reframe the debate, the whole issue has played itself out some while back, and had already achieved its full cultural and political impact by, at the latest, Pres. Obama’s second remarks on the subject (in which he reaffirmed the legal right to but not the wisdom of the project). By then, the two narratives — one holding that defending religious and private property rights is essential to American traditions of freedom and tolerance; the other ranging from some assertion or other that this was “insensitive” all the way to claiming that this will be some kind of gloating victory monument to Osama bin Laden — had been fully established and most people who were going to be inclined one way or the other had already essentially chosen sides. At that point, the actual cultural or political impact was more or less completed, unless something dramatic happens to reframe people’s attitudes.

No one doubts that the community center backers have absolute First Amendment and private property rights (subject to zoning) to develop a cultural center in the building in question. Objections from more mainstream critics, leaving aside overt bigots and hysterics who ascribe all kinds of unfounded extremist motivations to the project, have focused on the question of sensitivity. But almost all of the standard objections to the project do involve at least some level of Islamophobic assumption, requiring some degree of conflation between the 9/11 criminals and Al Qaeda with Islam and Muslims generally. On the other hand, clearly the backers of the project suffered from serious lack of sensitivity at least insofar as they did not understand the need to frame it properly or how to do that. Their mishandling of the situation has been a major part of the problem from the beginning.

Many people in the American Muslim community would hold that no one should ask for permission in exercising such a well-established American right or care what their fellow citizens think about the exercise of such basic rights. This is a profoundly mistaken attitude. Even legal rights that are practically unchallengeable come with social responsibilities (free-speech rights are a great case in point, such as deliberately inflammatory Quran burning spectacles which are certainly protected by the First Amendment and are also certainly repugnant and indeed dangerous). The mark of a healthy, well-adjusted community is not a decontextualized defiant assertion of rights, but is instead a balancing of rights with social responsibilities includes a due regard for the sensitivities of fellow citizens.

The project itself was not necessarily, and indeed should not have been, any kind of affront to the sensitivities of most Americans, but there was always a deep risk that it could be perceived that way and allowing it to be defined by extremist bigots ensured that it would be. The responsibility in this case was not necessarily to refrain from the project altogether, although that’s certainly what I would have advised if I had been asked, but at very least to create a powerful and proactive messaging strategy to mute and blunt voices seeking to promote outrage over it.

Another important display of responsibility might have been to quickly engineer a positive solution to the controversy (and I can think of many) once it got going, seizing the moral high ground, being magnanimous and at the same time not appearing to capitulate to bullying. It wouldn’t have been that hard, but it would’ve required some courage, selflessness and genuine vision. Among other things, such gestures would have severely disrupted the Islamophobic narrative of Muslim “encroachment” into (implicitly Christian) American cultural space, and could have transformed a dangerous situation into a positive one.

American Muslim religious and cultural (and, if they ever get any, political) leaders, in the urgent interests of their own community, are going to have to start to develop a much more sophisticated understanding of the cultural and political context in which they operate. It may not be fair when it comes to defending essential rights such as freedom of religion, but it’s the bottom-line reality. Even more urgently, they’re going to have to develop a much stronger understanding of how the Islamophobic narrative actually functions, in the long run to successfully counteract it and in the short run to, at the very least, stop inadvertently playing into it on a regular basis.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/legitimize_hamas_and_kiss_the_plo_goodbye

With the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, numerous voices in the United States have been urging the inclusion of Hamas in international diplomacy, a focus on Palestinian unity, or some formal American outreach to the Palestinian Islamist group.

There are many different ways of arriving at such a position. One is to allege, as MJ Rosenberg of Media Matters has, that without Hamas there is no chance of any Palestinian leadership being able to deliver on a peace agreement. This ignores the extent to which Hamas’ appeal relies on cynicism and despair about peace, and the likely surge of legitimation for any leadership that can secure independence for the Palestinians.

Another assumes that Hamas is somehow more “authentic” than the Palestine Liberation Organization because it is a violent revolutionary group. Some have transferred sympathy for left-wing revolutionaries of the past to this ultra right-wing fundamentalist organization precisely because it is violent and revolutionary. The preposterous assertion of Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, that both Hamas and Hezbollah are part of the “global left” is only true if the left is reduced to those militantly opposed to the status quo, in which case almost all religious fanatics and almost everyone on the extreme right would be perfectly valid candidates for inclusion.

A third begins by emphasizing democracy, and confusing democracy with elections only (though elections are a sine qua non of democracy), without due attention to the need for transparent, accountable institutions. George Washington University professor Nathan Brown has recently argued that because there have been no Palestinian elections in years so that terms in office have expired, there are two equally illegitimate and authoritarian Palestinian Authorities, one in Ramallah and the other in Gaza.

Arguments assuming that elections alone are what matter and that ignore why there can be no elections (Hamas is blocking them because it rightly fears the results), and that also ignore differences in legitimacy and repression between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas rule in Gaza, invariably end up becoming a brief for Hamas’ aspirations within Palestinian society. They also make Hamas at least co-equal with the PLO as a legitimate international representative of the Palestinian people.

Harvard professor Stephen Walt recently suggested that if peace negotiations fail, “Hamas will be in a strong position” to lead “a Palestinian campaign for political rights within [a] single state, based on well-established norms of justice and democracy.” Walt doesn’t seem to understand what Hamas is, what it believes in, what it opposes, or the implications of its regional affiliations. The idea that Hamas might become a civil-rights movement for international standards of justice and democracy is simply laughable.

It was particularly ridiculous given that Walt and others were expressing similarly naïve or disingenuous opinions either right before, or in Walt’s case right after, Hamas showed its true colors once again by attempting to sabotage the current peace negotiations – which the organization fears might succeed in ending the conflict before it can unseat the PLO. This Hamas did by murdering four Israeli settlers in a drive-by shooting; it claimed “full responsibility” for the killings, called them “heroic,” vowed to repeat the crime (and tried to the very next day), and declared all Israeli settlers to be “legitimate military targets.”

If this didn’t cut through the fog of the “constructive ambiguity” employed by Hamas leaders through a relentless pattern of contradictory statements designed to appeal simultaneously to hard-core Islamists and Western sympathizers, I can’t imagine what will. Actions are the surest test of any ideology, not a mountain of contradictory rhetoric.

All these analyses ignore the likely consequences of international moves to legitimize Hamas and accord it similar status to the PLO, without Hamas agreeing to accept the terms laid out by the Middle East Quartet. These include recognition of a two-state solution, renunciation of terrorism, and acceptance of the legitimacy of existing Palestinian agreements.

The first consequence is that legitimizing Hamas would provide the Israeli extreme right with much more effective arguments in support of the occupation and the settlements as forward defenses in an existential conflict. These Israelis would claim that there is no Palestinian partner to negotiate with because Hamas insists it will never recognize Israel.

Second, recognition would lead to renewed isolation of all of the Palestinians and the occupied territories if the international community continues to view Hamas with deep suspicion; or it would signal a death blow to the PLO and, by extension, the whole Palestinian secular nationalist movement; or indeed it could lead to both.

Third, the rise of Hamas would alienate almost all the Arab states (with the possible exceptions of Syria and Qatar) who face Muslim Brotherhood or similar opposition groups attempting to overthrow their governments. It would likely lead to Palestinian isolation in the Arab world as well.

Palestinian national unity is crucial, but on whose terms will this unity be achieved? The square peg of jihad and martyrdom until victory cannot fit into the round hole of negotiations with Israel for a two-state solution. International legitimacy and recognition is a major asset to any party. Those who urge the United States and others to provide that gratis to Hamas will be doing so at the expense of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority, favoring the Islamists in the internal Palestinian contest.

That is the first thing honest commentators who advocate such a path need to admit to themselves, and to everybody else.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704476104575439441883157542.html

Many contentious issues could bedevil the Israeli-Palestinian
negotiations that began Wednesday, but on one subject both sides can
largely agree: The state-building program launched last year by
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has made measurable
progress. While the terrorist group Hamas rules in the Gaza Strip,
Palestinians in the West Bank are trying to build the framework of a
future state.

The West Bank economy grew by 8.5% last year (according to the
International Monetary Fund), despite the global recession and
regional factors inhospitable to foreign investment. Palestinian GDP
for the third quarter of 2009 was $1.24 billion, up from $1.18 billion
a year before.

Real estate in the West Bank is booming. Property prices in Ramallah
have risen 30% in the last two years, according to local developers.
In July, construction began on Ramallah’s Ersal Commercial Center, a
$400 million project expected to create thousands of new jobs. And a
joint Palestinian-Qatari company is currently building Palestine’s
first planned city, Rawabi, a high-tech suburb with business and
commercial districts and 5,000 homes. A further accelerant to the
housing market will be a new $500 million mortgage fund, established
by the Palestine Investment Fund, which will begin issuing loans later
this year.

These promising trends are reflected in the Palestine Securities
Exchange, especially its main Al Quds Index, which in June experienced
a 5% market capitalization increase to reach $76.8 million. According
to the Portland Trust, four out of the five main sectors of the PSE
increased in 2009, with banking up by 30.6%. That’s one reason the
European Investment Bank last December made a $6.4 million “anchor”
investment in Palestine’s first venture capital fund. The fund will
target export-oriented information and communications technology
businesses, which represent the only area of the Palestinian economy
that has seen almost uninterrupted growth over the past decade.

Enticing foreign capital is a main goal of the PSE. Last March, the
exchange (and the Palestine Telecommunications Company) took an
investor road show to London, with further tours planned for New York,
Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Like the Jewish Agency in the
years before Israel achieved statehood, the PSE has strategically
targeted members of a far-flung and prosperous diaspora. Among other
things, it recently established a $25 million mutual fund for Chilean
Palestinians, who constitute the largest Palestinian exile population
outside of Jordan.

The sine qua non for economic expansion has been the creation of the
new Palestinian security services, which are a model for the
state-building program in general. Palestinian forces have restored
law and order in now-thriving towns like Jenin and Nablus and have
coordinated effectively with Israeli forces, allowing Israel to remove
a significant number of roadblocks and checkpoints.

Palestinian state-building also includes institutional and civil
society reforms. The most recent was an intervention in the field of
education announced on Aug. 8. Mr. Fayyad identified three key goals
for reforming the curriculum: improving language skills, including
Arabic; promoting analytical and critical thinking; and combating
fundamentalism and extremism. The aim is not only to create future
generations of entrepreneurs and thinkers, but to ensure that they’re
accustomed to notions of peaceful coexistence with their Israeli
neighbors.

The state-building program has qualities of perestroika—efforts to
separate party from government and to replace a patronage-based
government designed to satisfy political constituencies with a
technocratic meritocracy. As part of this, the Justice Ministry
recently announced that it will seek increased separation of powers
and protection from political interference in legal cases, which has
been a persistent problem in recent years.

Mr. Fayyad’s efforts have generated significant opposition from within
the ranks of Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority. As
an independent, Mr. Fayyad is held in suspicion by some of the
Arafat-era old guard. He is, however, supported by Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas.

In other quarters—including in a recent report by Washington’s
Carnegie Endowment—Mr. Fayyad has been criticized for running his
state-building program outside the context of Palestinian democracy,
since the terms of all elected officials have expired and no new
elections have been held. (Hamas adamantly opposes any new national
elections, as they have every reason to fear the results, and Fatah
has proven unable to organize more limited municipal elections.)

This criticism misses the fact that Mr. Fayyad and his program are
neither causes nor symptoms of the lack of elections, and the
state-building efforts go on in spite, rather than because, of the
electoral impasse. Moreover, although elections are important,
democracy does not consist merely of polling but requires transparent
and accountable institutions. Mr. Fayyad’s state-building program is
creating the institutional framework that is essential to a
functioning democracy.

To be sure, Mr. Fayyad is somewhat compromised by being the appointee
of Mr. Abbas, rather than an elected representative. And he has made
some miscalculations, such as trying (unsuccessfully) to block
Israel’s recent admission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, which was widely seen by Israelis as unnecessarily
provocative.

But the important point is that Palestinians have taken up the
responsibilities of self-government while pushing for the right of
self-determination. As direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations
continue, the U.S. and the rest of the international community have a
vital interest in providing the technical, financial and political
support needed so that this project succeeds.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/09/01/contested_settlement

Israeli settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian territories has proved to be among the most serious irritants in the U.S.-Israel relationship. It is also one of the most significant obstacles to a negotiated settlement. But with direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations kicking off this week and Israel’s partial settlement freeze set to expire in a few weeks, the issue is once again poised to come to the forefront of the Middle East peace process.

President Barack Obama’s administration has already found itself entangled in this issue twice this year — first when Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel in March, and again when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington later that month. In both cases, Israeli officials announced controversial settlement projects in Palestinian areas of occupied East Jerusalem in a manner that was deeply embarrassing to the Obama administration. During his Israel visit, Biden condemned the settlement construction as “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now” in one of the most public manifestations of the perceived rift that had emerged between the United States and Israel since Obama’s inauguration.

Israeli settlement construction is also rapidly climbing the ladder of Palestinian concerns. Palestinian leaders vividly recall the longyears of negotiations in the 1990s, during which the number of Israeli settlers doubled from 200,000 to 400,000, and now have almost reached half a million. The Palestinian nightmare is that additional years of fruitless talks will provide a stable environment for another major expansion of settlements, which would permanently foreclose the creation of a viable Palestinian state.

From his first day in office, Obama attempted to launch a major effort to restart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that would begin with an Israeli commitment to freeze all settlement activity. Netanyahu, however, deftly shifted the subject from the West Bank to Jerusalem, on which he had much more support from members of the U.S. Congress and in Israel. In response to U.S. pressure, he issued a partial, 10-month moratorium on settlement construction, which did not include Jerusalem and contained many loopholes, such as the grandfathering of no less than 3,000 settlement housing units deemed to have been started before the freeze began on Nov. 25. This allowed Netanyahu to successfully triangulate between U.S. concerns and the demands of his right-wing coalition partners, but the moratorium will expire on Sept. 26, forcing the prime minister to find another method for remaining in both sides’ good graces.

After spending most of last year attempting to get Netanyahu to agree to a complete settlement freeze, the Obama administration came to the belief that the contentious settlement issue was toxic for U.S.-Israel relations and an impediment to the resumption of direct talks. Obama effectively took the issue off the table following the U.N. General Assembly meeting last fall, when he declared that the United States still regarded further settlement activity as illegitimate, but was now focusing on restarting direct negotiations.

The Palestinians, having adopted the U.S. demand for a complete freeze, consequently were placed in an impossible situation. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, after all, was unable to back down on this demand as easily as Obama.

To restart direct talks, the Obama administration therefore needed to find a formula that would allow the Palestinians to return to direct negotiations without a complete settlement freeze. Furthermore, any deal needed to strike a compromise that would prevent the talks from collapsing following the Sept. 26 expiration of the partial moratorium.

Many informed observers have suggested that Obama and Netanyahu reached a private and tacit understanding to resolve this conundrum during the Israeli prime minister’s White House visit on July 6. The two leaders may have reached an agreement that Israel need not extend the moratorium but that Israel will still, in practice, restrict building to Jewish areas of Jerusalem and large settlement blocs in the West Bank. These areas are understood by all parties to be the likely subject of a land swap in the event of a final-status agreement. Obama and Netanyahu’s deal, as long as it remained unspoken, would preserve Netanyahu’s viability with his domestic right-wing constituency while also preventing new land expropriations or incendiary projects in Arab areas of Jerusalem from derailing negotiations.

With the Aug. 20 announcement that direct talks were set to resume, it appeared that all sides were prepared to live with such an arrangement. However, several spoilers on Israel’s far right have emerged to try to kill the understanding by making it public. Interior Minister Eli Yishai, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and dissidents within the prime minister’s own Likud party have strongly opposed any such arrangement and hinted that Netanyahu had privately accepted this formula.

As early as Aug. 11, Yishai told the Jerusalem Post, “I believe that [Netanyahu] will resume building only in the blocs as a gesture” and said he opposed and would try to block any such de facto policy. The same Jerusalem Post article cited sources close to Netanyahu as saying that one of the appeals of such a policy is that it would satisfy both the Labor and Likud parties and that “Netanyahu had made a point of planting trees… in three ‘consensus’ areas: Ariel, Ma’aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion,” suggesting this policy was already being observed in practice.

These strong Israeli public statements on settlements prompted an inevitable but ill-advised Palestinian reaction. On Aug. 23., chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat made a pronouncement that any resumption of settlement building would lead to a Palestinian walkout from the talks, saying that “Israel has a choice: 12 months of peace, or settlements and no peace. They cannot have both.” President Abbas has suggested several times that an extended settlement freeze was once again a precondition for the continuation of negotiations, though that is going to be an extremely difficult policy for the PLO to follow in practice, given the diplomatic costs such a move would entail, especially with regards to its relations with the Obama administration.

For now, Netanyahu appears to have been able to hold off the right-wing offensive. Yet, this episode highlights the pitfalls that the Obama administration will face on the settlements issue as it tries to push negotiations forward in the future. There is a very powerful constituency within Israel — including within the state bureaucracy — for settlement expansion. Many observers argue that the pro-settlement constituency in Israel is one of the most effective in the country — permeating the bureaucratic apparatus that makes day-to-day decisions on settlement construction and using the mechanisms of Israel’s parliamentary system to act as kingmakers for prime ministers like Netanyahu who can ill afford to confront them. More importantly, no Palestinian leadership can make the painful compromises necessary for peace while Israel undertakes major settlement expansions.

Both sides can theoretically gain sufficient diplomatic space for the talks to proceed by agreeing to a formula in which Israel only builds within areas generally understood by all parties to be the likely subjects of a land swap. However, it is an open question whether Israel’s society and its government are capable of restraining themselves in this manner when such a significant constituency regards settlement expansion as an essential and even sacred duty. As Foreign Minister Lieberman put it on Aug. 25: “There is no reason to continue to freeze settlement.… We’ve done enough and we got nothing in return.”

The Obama administration will need to devise some method for containing the damage from this uncompromising Israeli posture, regardless of the Sept. 26 moratorium expiration. If it is unable to broker a compromise that satisfies its own concerns and that of the Israelis and Palestinians, it will be widely seen in the Middle East as a failure of both U.S. leadership and, more specifically, for the president himself. While the negotiations may or may not survive such a failure, it would be an extremely disturbing omen for the president’s ability to broker an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and, more broadly, to succeed in his very ambitious agenda throughout the region.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/in_search_of_the_invisible_arab_lobby

This week HarperCollins released a new book by Mitchell Bard called The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, an obvious and ham-handed effort to counter the influential 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Mearsheimer and Walt’s book was flawed in some significant ways. It wrongly identified pro-Israel groups as among the most important forces pushing the United States to invade Iraq in 2003 and ignored divisions within Jewish pro-Israel circles, especially the “pro-peace” camp represented by Americans for Peace Now and J Street.

However, the essential phenomenon they were describing is unassailably and obviously real: there is an extremely influential, although in many ways diverse, set of actors and organizations supporting Israeli interests in the United States. No one with a modicum of honesty and a passing familiarity with Washington, or with US policy for that matter, could deny this.

Indeed, the special relationship between the United States and Israel, based on an American commitment to Israel’s security, is not a matter of serious political debate or contest in the US and is essentially settled. Within that framework, there is obviously space for a wide range of approaches and attitudes, but the fundamental commitment of the United States to Israel and its most basic interests is, for the foreseeable future, beyond serious challenge.

Bard’s book, in contrast, is built on an absolute chimera: the notion that there is an “invisible” and powerful “Arab lobby” that undermines both American and Israeli interests in Washington. When I first looked at it, I had to wonder whether it was intended as a satire or a work of imaginative fiction. It turns out to be a gigantic stockpot in which anything and everything remotely connected to Arabs, Arab interests, criticism of Israel, or even criticism of US foreign policy in the region, is very carelessly tossed and set to bubble away in the hope of producing some sort of cohesion. It never happens.

The Arab Lobby is not only profoundly paranoid and silly, it’s also unbelievably sloppy. Bard includes a large amount of information, some accurate, some irrelevant, some inaccurate, and some even fanciful. An example of this dreadful carelessness is his identification of me as “ADC’s communications director” in the present tense, even though I have not worked at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee since 2004. Sadly, the book is littered with this kind of elementary error and bears all the hallmarks of a cut-and-paste job without any real fact checking or analysis.

Worse, The Arab Lobby reflects the author’s zero-sum mentality on Israeli-Arab relations, and on those involving Jewish-Americans and Arab-Americans. Bard simply divides reality into two sets of binary categories: pro-Jewish and Israel versus pro-Arab and Palestinian. This may have been an accurate reflection of political realities several decades ago, but at present it is simply wrong. Since the United States, Israel and the Palestinians all need the same thing to secure their fundamental national interests – a negotiated peace agreement that ends the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the Israeli occupation – there is in fact no clear binary of interests. To the contrary, the mutuality of interest in peace is becoming ever more apparent.

Bard’s paranoid attitudes are summed up in his symptomatic misrepresentation of the American Task Force on Palestine, at which I have been a senior fellow for the past five years. He acknowledges ATFP’s groundbreaking principled, pragmatic and constructive positions, but couches them in language that leaves readers in no doubt that it is all a ruse thinly disguising a concealed extremism. In Bard’s zero-sum world, it would have to be, wouldn’t it?

Time and again, the reader is torn between the impression that Bard is trying to create a large, invisible, elitist, and secret anti-Israel and anti-American “lobby,” and his frequent admissions that organized Arab groups in the United States – and even lobbyists representing the only Arab state with influence in Washington, Saudi Arabia – have had very limited impact on US policy and almost none at all on Congress.

In other words, the book oscillates very unsteadily between fantasy and reality. Bard finds himself trapped between an uncontrollable urge to boast about the effectiveness of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC (though he has the unmitigated chutzpah to describe the pro-Israel lobby as “mythical”), while also presenting it as deeply threatened by this secret pro-Arab alliance. Bard then depicts the latter as enormously influential (though what policies it has influenced he is somewhat at a loss to identify), and in the same breath contemptuously dismisses organized Arab and Muslim-American efforts as utterly ineffectual.

For all of its evident flaws, Mearsheimer and Walt’s book was highly influential because it was a rare effort by credible scholars to analyze a reality that everyone knows but avoids talking about. Inevitably, it generated considerable anger. Bard’s book, on the other hand, is unlikely to provoke anything other than mirth, not least among those of us supposedly involved in this “many-headed hydra” he is “exposing.”

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/direct_talks_yes_but_with_state-building_too

The resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in early September offers significant opportunities and pitfalls for all parties.

For the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement of the talks represents the culmination of almost a year of intensive diplomacy. Whether or not the United States has a backup plan if talks founder is entirely unclear. The administration’s assumption appears to be that direct talks will generate their own dynamics; but if they don’t, it’s not evident what the next American step will be.

Nonetheless, the administration deserves credit for having revived diplomacy, which was interrupted for several years, under inauspicious circumstances. In a rare, extremely significant joint display of support for these efforts, the American Task Force on Palestine issued a statement welcoming negotiations in conjunction with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group that represents a range of mainstream Jewish-American organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, Hadassah, the Union for Reform Judaism, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, among others. The statement endorsed a two-state solution and urged the parties to show courage, flexibility and persistence.

Crucially, Clinton indicated that the United States was pursuing a multi-track policy. She stressed the need to “to help Palestinians build the institutions of their future state, an effort which must continue during the negotiations.” Washington has understood that diplomacy must be augmented with state-building in the West Bank, for political and strategic reasons, and that this is not merely an economic development project, but also an indispensable component in the quest to end the conflict.

It is also a sign of American recognition of a point Palestinians have been implicitly making for a year now: that early progress in top-level diplomacy is unlikely given the political weaknesses of leaderships on both sides and the enormous differences between them on aspects of a final-status agreement, especially the future of Jerusalem. Therefore, constructing the framework of a Palestinian state at this juncture might be as significant, if not actually more so, than what can be achieved at the bargaining table, at least initially.

For the Palestinians, the Quartet statement was essential to making the return to negotiations politically palatable. In particular, the Quartet’s reference to a one-year timeline recognizes Palestinian concerns that talks should not be open-ended. The statement affirms that talks “can” be concluded within a year, but not that they “should” or “must” be. It is an aspirational sentiment rather than a set deadline, but acknowledges legitimate Palestinian concerns.

Palestinians have received other assurances and guarantees both verbally and in writing, but these have not been made public. However, it does not appear that they have yet secured an effective enforcement mechanism that can hold the parties accountable for fulfilling their commitments. This has been an important Palestinian position, and will undoubtedly be a prerequisite for success as talks continue. It is probably the single most important role the US can play at this stage, but implementing it will mean overcoming significant Israeli resistance.

As for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the achievement of direct talks without any public preconditions – notwithstanding the obvious private commitments that have been made to Washington on a number of issues, including settlements – represents both an important victory and, potentially, a very dangerous development.

Until now, Netanyahu has been generally able to triangulate between the demands of his right-wing coalition partners and Washington’s expectations based on American national interests. If the Palestinians play their cards right, such maneuvering should become more difficult to sustain, and it would appear that the PLO position on final-status conditions is much closer to the American one than is the Israeli position. This is a new and unusual development, although it does not undermine the special relationship between Israel and the United States.

There is a consensus in Washington that it is essential, not optional, for the US to help achieve an end to the conflict, therefore to also end the Israeli occupation. This potentially provides the Palestinians with crucial leverage over Israel. However, to take advantage of this, the Palestinians must convince the Americans that they are strategic and political partners, willing to take politically costly decisions in the interests of reaching common objectives.

While major progress at the early stages of negotiation is extremely unlikely, so is a spectacular meltdown, as neither party wants to be perceived as having sabotaged the negotiations. The ability to assign blame for failure is probably the single biggest card that the US possesses, though it will be highly reluctant to use it, especially against Israel. However, it should be enough to keep the balls in the air for now, allowing state-building in the West Bank to steadily improve the strategic landscape in which negotiations take place, while also laying the groundwork for a successful peace agreement.

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.