https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/the-meaning-of-nakba-israel-palestine-1948-gaza/560294/

For the people of Palestine, the trauma of 70 years ago never ended.

Violence is intensifying in Gaza as the United States opens its new embassy in Jerusalem, a convergence of current politics and long-simmering tensions in the region. Israeli forces opened fire on demonstrators, killing dozens and wounding hundreds more, Palestinian officials said.

May 14 marks the 70th anniversary of Israel’s founding; May 15 is a day Palestinians know as their nakba, or “catastrophe,” the traumatic expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 by Israelis. This event both defined their future of statelessness and occupation, and now forms the basis for their distinct national identity. Many of the chief consequences of the nakba, including the displacement of most Palestinians from their ancestral lands and ongoing statelessness, remain unresolved to this day.

This helps explain the enduring violence between Israelis and Palestinians, which flared up most recently on the border with Gaza. Beginning on March 30, a series of Friday protests billed the “Great March of Return” have seen thousands of mainly unarmed young men confront Israeli forces and border guards. They are blocking these men from the nearby villages, located in what is now Israel, from which many of their families were displaced in the 1940s. At least 85 protesters have died, and well over 5,000 injured, in the unrest. These demonstrations, which will culminate on the 15th, combined with the opening of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, may well become yet another historic flashpoint. And even if the worst does not come to pass this time, sooner or later, it will. Until we come to grips with the political and cultural legacy of the nakba, calm, stability, and normality will elude Israel and the rest of the Middle East.

To understand the nakba is to first confront its sheer scale and totality. Before the nakba, there was a large, deeply rooted, and essentially ancient Arab society in most of what, within a few months, became the Jewish state of Israel. In effect, one day it was there, as it had been for living memory, and the next day it was gone. An entire society, with the exception of relatively small groups in a few places, simply vanished.

After World War I, the League of Nations broke the Ottoman Empire up into territories assigned to different colonial powers. The lands that today constitute Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories were placed under British rule, but with two explicit and incompatible purposes: Britain was already committedto supporting the recently established Zionist movement that sought to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. The mandate reaffirmed that goal, but did not define what a “national home,” such as a Jewish state, meant in practice.

Yet the terms of the Covenant of the League of Nations held that the purpose of mandates was to secure the “well-being and development” of the people living in those territories. The problem was that just under 90 percent of the population of Palestine in 1922, when the British mandate was formally initiated, were Arab Muslims and Christians, with Jews, in many cases recent arrivals, constituting 11 percent. In other words, the project of providing “tutelage” to the people of the territory and preparing them for independence was at stark odds with the project of transforming Palestine into a “national home for the Jewish people,” however that was defined. In both Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration and the Palestine mandate, the overwhelming Palestinian majority was simply referred to as “existing non-Jewish communities,” with “civil and religious rights,” but not political ones.

This meant the British colonial overlords were almost always at odds with both the local Arab population, and also frequently with Jewish leaders. But by the time the British Mandate began to fall apart after World War II, the population of the territory had been transformed: 68 percent were Arabs and 32 percent were Jews (about two-thirds of whom were born abroad). The fledgling United Nations proposed to partition the territory between Arabs and Jews, but even in the proposed Jewish state, gerrymandered to include the maximum number of Jews, there was a virtual Arab plurality. Even after decades of immigration, it still wasn’t possible to carve out a significant portion of Palestine with a solid Jewish majority. The Arabs, and especially Palestinians, angrily rejected partition on the grounds that the overwhelming majority of the people of the country did not wish to see their land divided and more than half of it given to the sovereignty of the Jewish minority who, at the time, made up one-third of the population. Many others were expected to arrive at some future date, all against the wishes of the large majority.

Violence between the two communities, and between both and the British authorities, grew common throughout the 1930s and ’40s, including a fully fledged Arab revolt from 1936 to 1939. But as it became clear that Britain was simply going to leave Palestine in 1948, both sides began jockeying for position. Communal violence broke out into open warfare in the fall of 1947. This set the stage for the nakba.

Fighting intensified in January 1948, and the Palestinian exodus began. Up to 100,000 Palestinians, mainly from the upper and middle classes, fled the cities and towns which were the epicenter of the fighting. Until then, expulsions were rare. But in April 1948, the Jewish forces launched a more concerted campaign of massacre and forced displacement, including the notorious Deir Yassin massacreof about 100 Palestinians on April 9. This spread panic among Palestinians, encouraging them to flee.

When terror didn’t do the trick, Palestinians were forced out by Jewish militias. Early April saw the launch of the “Plan Dalet” military campaign, which sought, in part, the ethnic cleansing of most or all of the Arab inhabitants from areas claimed for a Jewish state. As the British withdrew from Palestine in early May 1948, Israel declared its establishment, and the war intensified with the intervention of several Arab armies. The process of Palestinian displacement also intensified. Yitzhak Rabin, then a young Jewish commander, would later write in his memoir of how he was ordered by David Ben-Gurion—literally with the wave of a hand—to “drive out” the 50,000 civilians in the towns of Lydda and Ramla on June 10 and 11.

When the dust settled, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs, perhaps 700,000 to 800,000 people, had either fled or been expelled. The Palestinians who remained in what was now a Jewish state made up around 18 percent of the population of Israel, and for the next 20 years lived under martial law. The society the Palestinians had composed over the centuries was, for the most part, now gone. Towns and villages were renamed or bulldozed. Property was expropriated en masse through various legal mechanisms. And, most importantly, whether Palestinians fled or were expelled, virtually none were allowed to return. Most Palestinians who left their homes in 1947 and 1948 believed they would one day come back when the fighting stopped, no matter what the outcome. This was a complete delusion. They were gone, and the new Israeli state regarded their absence as the godsend that allowed a Jewish-majority country to suddenly emerge.

This, in brief, is the Palestinian nakba, the collapse and disappearance of an entire society that was politically, militarily, and culturally unprepared for the collision with Zionism, colonialism, and war. But the nakba defined, and continues to define, Palestinian national identity.

At the time of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalism was running strong. The Muslims and Christians in the territories that were about to become Mandatory Palestine overwhelmingly identified as Arabs, but not yet as an ethno-national Palestinian community. They had warmly welcomed the creation of the first, short-lived, pan-Arab state in 1920, before it was crushed by the French. At that time, many if not most Palestinians saw themselves as Arabs and essentially “southern Syrians.” But once that early Arab state ended, they were, in effect, on their own. They had little choice but to begin defining themselves chiefly as Palestinians.

While Palestinians do have cultural features that distinguish them from other Arabs, it is their history and, above all, the nakba and its never-ending aftermath, that firmly separates them from all other Arabs. All Palestinians, including those left behind in Israel, shared this experience. And given that most Palestinians today are either exiles, refugees, or living under Israeli occupation—or, at best, live as second-class citizens of Israel itself—their collective social, political, and historical identity centers almost entirely around the shattering experience of the nakba. No other group of Arabs endured this.

Historians can and do debate who is at fault for this debacle. But it’s irrefutable that Palestinians didn’t merely lose their putative state and political power. At an individual and familial level, they lost their homes and property, in almost all cases for good. Collectively, they lost their society, and were condemned to live as exiles or stateless subjects under the rule of a foreign military. They had a society, and then they didn’t.

The rupture of the nakba cannot be mended. The state of Israel is a reality that will not disappear. Most Palestinians fetishize the right of return, and from a moral and legal perspective, their case is irrefutable. But politically, there is no chance of any such return, except in tiny, symbolic numbers. After decades of fruitless struggle and brutality on all sides, Palestinians have somewhat bitterly come to accept that the nakba cannot be reversed or even really redressed. They accepted that a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state based in the territories Israel occupied in 1967 living alongside the Jewish state, was the only available outcome. But even that has proven unattainable.

The trauma of the nakba cannot be addressed until the rest of the world, and particularly Israel, recognizes its validity and importance. The event does not compare to the Holocaust—very little else does. But Jews and Palestinians are two peoples both marked by definitive historical traumas that define their worldviews. The difference is that the Jewish and Israeli narratives continue to an epiphany of redemption in the founding and flourishing of the state of Israel, while for Palestinians, permanently dispossessed and living in exile or under occupation, the trauma is enduring and still unfolding.

This is especially true in Gaza, which has become a wretched open-air prison for almost 2 million densely packed residents. The humanitarian crisis and pervasive despair there are so dire that even Israeli security officials regard Gaza as a ticking bomb of human misery. If it does not explode on May 15, it will soon.

Hence the nakba is not so much a historical memory for most Palestinians, as a daily, lived experience. Recognizing that and acting on it will be indispensable for understanding the Palestinian perspective, at long last ending the conflict and the nakba, and allowing Jews and Arabs, and the whole world, to finally move on

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/does-washington-have-the-power-to-prevent-nuclear-weapon-proliferation-1.729707

Trump has adopted two radically different approaches to the same conundrum – both with a terrible incentive structure

By scrapping the Iran nuclear deal and agreeing to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12, US President Donald Trump is confronting the same basic question: does Washington have the will or ability to prevent another spate of international nuclear weapons proliferation?

In the 1960s and 1970s, a wave of proliferation took place among rising powers like China, Israel and India. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, except for Pakistan, which was catching up with India, the process stopped. Countries that might have gone nuclear like Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina pulled back while South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan abandoned their arsenals.

However, in October 2006, North Korea conducted its first nuclear test and in 2016 tested a warhead and, apparently, a hydrogen device. Iran was probably about a year away from acquiring its own nuclear weapon when it agreed to postpone or mothball its programme in return for sanctions relief under the nuclear deal.

With Iran and North Korea, Mr Trump has adopted two radically different approaches to the same proliferation conundrum.

Right now, there aren’t many non-nuclear powers pursuing their own weapons. But these two rogue regimes wanted them for the same purposes: to increase their regional clout and impunity and to guard against any externally imposed regime change. Both obviously noted that two other so-called rogue regimes that abandoned their special weapons programmes, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, no longer exist.

Washington has led concerted international campaigns of sanctions and maximum pressure, intended to force Tehran and Pyongyang to abandon these plans. But efforts to coerce North Korea have failed utterly.

Iran was willing to voluntarily accept the 10-to-15 year delays in the nuclear deal, partly because it wanted to focus on developing much more advanced, domestically produced centrifuges than those it already had. That way, any future charge towards a nuclear breakout would get much further and go significantly faster. Tehran needed time anyway and under the nuclear deal, when its restrictions expire, Iran would be no more than four months from breakout.

For the West, too, the Iran deal was essentially a chronological gamble, hoping Iranian policies, politics or ambitions would change during the period of pause. After all, arms control treaties are political instruments that are strictly enforced – until they’re not. Iran’s voluntary enrichment restrictions could have been extended after – or collapsed before – they expired on paper.

Leaving the Iran deal, Mr Trump is hoping that sanctions, combined with other focused, coercive measures, can produce what amounts to regime change in Tehran. That is wildly implausible. There’s virtually no historical precedent for sanctions producing externally driven regime change anywhere and no evidence that there’s a revolutionary situation brewing inside Iran with merely a shove needed to bring the regime down.

The far greater likelihood is that hardliners will be strengthened, at least inside Iran. A concerted anti-Iranian campaign on many fronts might produce a welcome rollback of Iranian hegemony in the Arab world. But it’s hard to imagine the president who so carefully avoided all Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah targets during the recent Syrian missile strike and wants to pull all US troops out of Syria immediately leading such a campaign.

Even if he did and even if it was successful in rolling back Iranian hegemony, the most likely result is a more hardline regime in Tehran and a mad dash towards nuclear weapons. Tehran obviously wants to do as much business with Europe as it can and try to isolate Washington, which it can’t. So the deal might briefly survive but in a zombie-like living death. When it completely collapses, Iran will rush towards nuclear weapons, just as North Korea did.

That appears to have greatly profited Pyongyang. Mr Kim is now referred to by Mr Trump as “very honourable” and “excellent” and is meeting the American president as an equal, merely in exchange for three hostages.

A cold reading of current reality suggests Iran made a big mistake in postponing its programme while North Korea was wise to charge towards hydrogen bombs and intercontinental missiles. That’s a terrible incentive structure.

The most Mr Trump is likely to get from Mr Kim won’t be the mothballing and delays Iran accepted but, along with many false pledges, perhaps a real commitment not to build a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental US. But that won’t stop regional proliferation with Japan and possibly South Korea eventually moving in the nuclear direction. When Iran revives its nuclear programme, neighbours like Saudi Arabia will, as it has said, need to follow suit.

Regime change isn’t a realistic goal. It requires actions on the scale of the Iraq invasion of 2003. Nothing less ever works. That’s almost impossible to imagine in Iran and even more implausible in North Korea.

Mr Trump is flinging honey at North Korea and vinegar at Iran in pursuit of the same non-proliferation goal. In both cases, there’s no sign of any practical plan B, other than old-fashioned containment. Proliferation might ultimately prove unavoidable, unless Mr Trump is ready for some very big wars. Even if he is, the American people certainly aren’t.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-05-11/iraq-elections-are-sure-to-leave-a-mess

Don’t expect a functional government to emerge from a rancid stew of bad law and divisive politics.

After the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the military flareup between Iran and Israel along the Syrian border, national elections in Iraq this weekend will be a crucial test of Iran’s regional influence. But the election will also unfold under the largely unrecognized but ominous shadow of one of the worst electoral court rulings anywhere in recent history.

Iraq’s electoral law is a complex and idiosyncratic method of securing proportional representation in Parliament. The system tends to favor the largest parties and solid voting blocs using a process so arcane that virtually no one outside of professional politicians and statisticians really understands how it works.

That’s bad enough. Even worse is that under existing Iraqi judicial rulings, the most meaningful politics take place after the voting.

Two elections back, in 2010, the incumbent Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a sectarian Shiite Islamist, was narrowly defeated by a secular coalition led by the former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi. Allawi, a nonsectarian Shiite whose al-Iraqiyya coalition included many Sunnis, got 91 seats in Parliament as opposed to 89 for the Maliki coalition. The next largest group had 70.

Most observers assumed that Allawi would therefore be granted the first opportunity to form a government. But for their own strategic reasons, the two dominant foreign powers in Iraq – the U.S. and Iran – both wanted a second term for Maliki.

After numerous legal machinations, including the attempted disqualification of several of Allawi’s candidates, a formula to keep him in power was finally discovered. On March 25, the federal Supreme Court of Iraq issued Opinion 25 of 2010 putting a novel gloss on Article 76 of the Constitution.

The court ruled that right to form a government did not automatically go to the largest electoral coalition, as it does in virtually all countries with parliamentary systems. Instead, the court said, it could go to a bloc that could assemble the largest coalition after the election. On this basis and because neither side had won an outright majority, Maliki, with the backing of the U.S. and Iran, was given the first opportunity and retained his grip on power.

The result was a disaster. The administration of President Barack Obama was mystifyingly determined to stick with Maliki, claiming there were no other real options. Iran also pushed for him to stay in power because of his sectarian Shiite policies and slavishly pro-Iranian attitudes. His second term destroyed the gains of the U.S. military surge against al-Qaeda in Iraq and fueled the rise of Islamic State in Sunni-majority areas of the country.

Maliki’s coalition won the most seats in the 2014 election, but he was so discredited that many of his onetime supporters abandoned him, including the U.S. and Iran.

Using this same ruling, they turned to the current prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who seemingly came from nowhere after the vote. He has emerged as a nationally oriented politician who alone is fielding candidates this year in all Iraqi provinces. Because he managed to undo some of the worst sectarian excesses of Maliki and presided over the defeat of Islamic State, he is expected to win the biggest bloc in Parliament.

However, because of the 2010 ruling, which is still in effect, unless a coalition wins an outright majority, or something very close, the real politics will begin after the voting as politicians scramble to construct the largest possible parliamentary bloc.

The political distortions are obvious. Any group, for example, that wants to camouflage the range of moderates and extremists in its own midst could simply divide before the election, only to reunite immediately afterwards. It becomes easy for all kinds of wolves to don sheep costumes during the election. Parliamentary politics naturally lend themselves to baroque machinations, but this invitation to post-election maneuvering is remarkable and dangerous.

This year that ruling is likely to prove especially problematic because of the extreme level of political fragmentation in Iraq following the collapse of Islamic State.

In the last three elections, the U.S. and Iran both supported Maliki during his two terms and then together turned to Abadi. But because Abadi has adopted a more independent and nonsectarian stance, Iran no longer supports him. Indeed, leaders of Tehran’s ultra-sectarian Iraqi Shiite militia proxies are posing a major electoral challenge.

Iraqi politics are now highly fragmented not only between, but within, sectarian and ethnic communities. There’s virtually no chance of anyone coming close to a parliamentary majority. And because of President Donald Trump’s vow to confront Iran throughout the region, the U.S. and Iran will certainly not be backing the same candidate this time.

The 2010 ruling is likely to make the process of forming a government even longer, more contentious, and more disconnected from the public will. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia, a growing presence in Iraq, will be pitted against an angry and defensive Iran in a fight for influence. From this mess, someone will eventually cobble together a majority, but it is likely to be a dysfunctional crazy quilt of rivals and enemies opposed by Iran, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

The only good news is that because Iraq follows a French rather than an Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, overturning the terrible 2010 legal precedent would be relatively easy. Until that happens, Iraqi politics will be haunted by many demons, including its own Supreme Court’s blunder.

http://www.agsiw.org/gulf-leaders-welcome-jcpoa-withdrawal-but-plan-b-remains-unclear/

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/why-an-attempt-to-fix-not-nix-the-iran-nuclear-deal-with-the-help-of-europe-is-trump-s-only-sensible-option-1.727416

Will Donald Trump walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, as he has threatened, on May 12? In these pages, I explained why it is in his interests to instead craft a new deal with the European signatories and claim to have “fixed” the Iran agreement. However, many signs suggest he’s determined to definitively reject it. That could all be misdirection – or fair warning.

Most conversations now hinge on the binary question of whether Mr Trump will “fix or nix” the Iran nuclear agreement. But in practice he has a wide range of options for rejecting the deal.

Mr Trump has already “decertified” the agreement by declining to assure Congress that the Iran deal is satisfying four provisions of the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. On January 13 and April 13, he withheld such certification, an act that allows Congress to use expedited procedures to quickly reimpose sanctions (which would be a material breach of US commitments under the deal). But Congress hasn’t done that, so the US, like Iran, is still in compliance.

If Mr Trump asked Republicans in Congress to reimpose sanctions on Iran, they certainly would. But he can also act on his own by declining to renew various sanctions waivers, issuing new executive orders to reinstate earlier orders that were revoked to implement the nuclear agreement, or issuing new sanctions through entirely novel executive orders.

Despite his constant threats, Mr Trump has consistently renewed waivers on Iranian sanctions whenever they have come up. However, on January 12, he insisted he wouldn’t do that again unless the agreement was “fixed” to answer his various criticisms. Next Saturday’s date is crucial because it’s the next time certain waivers – those on a 120-day schedule – must be renewed. Other waivers on a 180-day schedule, are due to expire in mid-July.

If he lets any of these waivers expire, key US sanctions will automatically “snap back” into effect, putting Washington in material breach of the agreement with Tehran.

Mr Trump could also use provisions of the agreement itself to walk away. Paragraph 36 outlines a dispute resolution mechanism and states that “if the complaining participant deems the issue to constitute significant non-performance, then that participant could treat the unresolved issue as grounds to cease performing its commitments”. Mr Trump could present the International Atomic Energy Agency and others with “credible and accurate information” involving an “uncured material breach” by Iran and effectively sink the whole deal.

Such an action could only be blocked by the UN Security Council but the US could simply veto any such resolution. Since all the evidence suggests Iran is complying, this path would greatly exacerbate the diplomatic and political costs of a US withdrawal by (probably unsuccessfully) attempting to force other parties, including Europeans, Russia and China, to reimpose the old multilateral sanctions on what they will undoubtedly regard as spurious grounds.

If Mr Trump chooses instead to reimpose unilateral US sanctions, either on his own or through Congress, that, too, will not be simple. His team will have to undo all the administrative de-listing of Iranian entities that was needed to implement the agreement, reimpose revoked sanctions, decide if any new Iranian entities will be included and determine what penalties would apply to US and international violators.

This is where Mr Trump’s decision becomes most complex. If the United States withdraws from the agreement but re-institutes only a small range of sanctions on non-essential Iranian entities and, especially, does not try to penalise European and other international entities doing business with Iran’s core institutions, the nuclear deal could, at least for a time, survive a US rejection. But what would be the point of such a theatrical, hollow exercise?

If, on the other hand, the Trump administration re-sanctioned key Iranian entities such as the Central Bank of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, Iran Air and the National Iranian Oil Company, and attempts to unilaterally enforce third-party sanctions against European entities doing business with Iran, there is little chance that Iran would continue with the agreement. And under such circumstances, there is a high likelihood that Britain, Germany and France, not to mention Russia and China, would blame Washington entirely – and Tehran not at all – for the agreement’s collapse.

It’s hard to imagine how a new round of sanctions can really be effective without US coordination with European and other powers, which would also require a clear understanding of what goals are being pursued. Simply trying to give everyone a binary choice of either doing business with the United States or Iran might be a disaster for Tehran but won’t prove much of a win for Washington either.

If he’s going to scrap the deal, Mr Trump must have a sophisticated plan B for how to alter Iran’s calculations and behaviour. To be effective, that new approach will require international coordination and successfully persuading, not trying to force, other powers to cooperate with it. Which brings us back to the inescapable conclusion: an agreement with the Europeans to “fix” and not “nix” the “worst deal ever” is the only sensible move.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-30/israeli-arab-dispute-palestinian-rights-attacked-by-u-s

Is the West Bank “occupied” by Israel? The State Department has said yes for decades. Suddenly, it says no.

If you issue a report on human rights, the least you can do is avoid damaging, dismissing or denigrating those rights. But that’s exactly what the U.S. State Department just did in the new edition of the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, released on April 20. The targets, no one should be surprised to learn, were the Palestinians.

Ever since the first State Department human rights reports were issued in the 1970s, they always included a section on “Israel and the occupied territories.” But the new document suddenly expunges any mention of occupation, referring instead to “Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza.”

Recognizing that Israel’s presence in lands that came under its control in the 1967 war is a military occupation acknowledges that its expanding settlement project in the West Bank is a human rights abuse.  The Fourth Geneva Convention, which is designed for the “protection of civilian persons during time of war,” prohibits an occupying power, under any circumstances, from transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Supporters of Israeli settlements claim that this article of international law merely forbids forcible or involuntary transfers or expulsions. But the Red Cross’ definitive 1958 explanatory commentary on the original drafting, which took place in the late 1940s, makes clear the purpose of Article 49:
It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfers worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race.

In other words, people living under the control of a foreign army have a right not to have their land taken away from them and given to the population of the victors.

But that’s exactly what Israel has done since 1967, and now more than 600,000 Jewish Israelis live as settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both of which have been clearly identified as occupied territories by United Nations Security Council resolutions and other international legal instruments. Israel calls the territories “disputed” rather than occupied. But the dispute isn’t just between Israel and the Palestinians. It’s between Israel and the rest of the world.

The 5 million or so Palestinians in the occupied territories (East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip) are not citizens of Israel and they don’t have any state of their own. The vast majority aren’t refugees. Many still live in their ancestral towns and villages. Yet they remain stateless, lacking the protections of citizenship.

What they do have in theory are the protections afforded by the Fourth Geneva Convention for persons living under occupation. But if you eliminate the reality of the occupation, you strip away the legal protections.

In other words, the State Department has now joined Israel in declining to admit that Palestinians are protected by the Geneva Conventions from Israeli colonization of their lands.

The ironies are endless. Israel claims the rights of an occupying power to justify its military rule of the occupied territories through checkpoints, firing zones, and an apparatus of discipline and control. If there’s no occupation, then most of what the Israeli military has done in the occupied territories is an outrageous abuse.

But if there is an occupation, then the settlements amount to a violent human rights violation. Try, as a thought experiment, to imagine a nonviolent settlement program. How many Palestinian villagers could be persuaded to voluntarily abandon their property in favor of newcomers from Brooklyn, Latvia or Ethiopia without the Israeli military there to “insist”?

Israel wants to have it both ways, continuously adjusting the status of these areas depending on which set of abuses is being defended. But the rest of the world has rejected this cynical shell game. Until now.

Meanwhile, Palestinians in the occupied territories live under an occupation that restricts everything they do, from the moment they wake until they go back to sleep. They live under martial law, while nearby Jewish settlers live under Israeli civil law. Their movements are curtailed. The most quotidian aspects of their lives are subject to the whim of a foreign army. And various Palestinian authorities notwithstanding, they have no access to the Israeli government that actually rules them.

Now the State Department has issued a “human rights report” that deliberately and cynically strips this almost uniquely vulnerable group of millions of stateless non-refugees from even the minimal protections they get from their legal status of living under foreign military occupation. They aren’t citizens of anything, and now they aren’t even under occupation.

There are plenty of affronts to human rights in the new State Department report. One of the most grotesque is the way it manipulates words to rob Palestinians of the few human rights they have.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/one-president-two-threats-and-three-flawed-deals-how-trump-s-nuclear-victories-will-be-hollow-ones-1.725486

Since he burst onto the New York property market in the 1970s, Donald Trump has fashioned himself as a brilliant deal-maker. In the 1980s he published a ghostwritten book called The Art of the Deal. And from 2003 to 2015, he portrayed a deal-making executive on the TV show The Apprentice. But since he was elected president in 2016, Mr Trump hasn’t actually made any noteworthy deals. Indeed, he has relied entirely on Republican majorities in Congress for the judicial appointments and tax bill which are his only significant achievements.

But now Mr Trump would appear to be on the brink of overseeing not just one but two major new deals, leaving the world with three flawed agreements that can substitute for two disastrous wars, which by any measure is a bargain.

Mr Trump has been threatening to leave the Iran nuclear deal if the European signatories to the agreement – France, Britain and Germany – don’t agree to a tougher stance against Iran. Because it’s actually working well to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, the Europeans are desperate to preserve it.

To stop Washington from pulling out, the Europeans are proposing new sanctions against Iran if it tests missiles of certain kinds and ranges, takes various unacceptable Middle East regional actions, or, as Washington insists, gets within a year of manufacturing a nuclear weapon at any time in the future.

Mr Trump should be able to emerge from this brinksmanship by the May 12 deadline with just such a supplementary agreement with the Europeans.

That wouldn’t change the Iran nuclear deal at all but it would strengthen the western stance towards Iran. Mr Trump could therefore claim that, through this secondary agreement, he has “fixed” what he calls the “worst deal ever” and trumpet a triumph while in fact remaining in precisely the same arrangement with Tehran.

This would be a tacit admission that the nuclear deal has been effective so far in preventing Iran from building a nuclear warhead and simply needed some augmentation. But the master salesman will convince many people he has salvaged victory from defeat. And indeed, getting Europe to be tougher on Iran is useful, although it is hardly comparable in scope to preventing a nuclear-armed Tehran.

An agreement with the Europeans to preserve the Iran deal is almost certainly necessary preparation for Mr Trump’s negotiations with North Korea, which is already a full-blown nuclear power. Some Trump supporters argue that abandoning the Iran deal would demonstrate strength and show that Mr Trump won’t stick with a bad agreement so Pyongyang had better negotiate earnestly. But in all likelihood, it would only tell North Korea not to bother making any serious commitments.

That might well be Pyongyang’s attitude anyway. Mr. Trump says he is pursuing the denuclearisation of North Korea and claims Pyongyang is open to this. But there is no chance whatsoever of Pyongyang giving up its nuclear arsenal.

Nonetheless, a third nuclear agreement is so obvious, unless one is determined to actually resolve the nuclear North Korea conundrum, that even Mr Trump can hardly fail to secure it.

His bombast notwithstanding, war is the last thing Mr Trump wants. The Syria missile strike a few weeks ago showed how carefully he is avoiding conflict. Washington essentially provided the fireworks at Bashar Al Assad’s victory celebration and confirmed that Russian – and even Iranian – deterrence is highly effective. Mission accomplished indeed.

So, along with Kim Jong-un, Mr Trump can announce that North Korea promises to denuclearise while the United States agrees to seek full relations and a peace treaty.

Neither will happen.

But Pyongyang will continue to suspend long-range missile testing and, perhaps genuinely, commit to not pursuing a fully-developed intercontinental missile for the foreseeable future. It will probably also destroy some additional, marginally important nuclear assets. Washington will ease sanctions and stop pressuring China and others to squeeze North Korea. And the two Koreas will intensify their own futile reconciliation talks.

Both Mr Trump and Mr Kim will declare victory and so will many other leaders. Mr Trump will demand a Nobel Peace Prize and, given the wretched track record of the committee, he’ll probably get one, along with Mr Kim.

Two things however, will not happen. North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons. And there will be no genuine reconciliation between Pyongyang and Washington, or Seoul for that matter.

Of the three agreements, the one with North Korea would be the most meaningless and almost fraudulent.

The Iran nuclear deal will continue to function, as it has thus far, despite Mr Trump’s hostility. And the auxiliary agreements with the Europeans will be a limited but welcome toughening of the western stance towards Iran’s nuclear ambitions and non-nuclear malfeasance.

The North Korea agreement will be almost entirely cosmetic but will also be trumpeted as the greatest diplomatic achievement since the Peace of Westphalia.

Mr Trump will then be presiding over three flawed agreements, although the one he lambasts will still be by far the most consequential and meaningful, that nonetheless forestall two devastating and otherwise probable wars.

Since all parties keenly want to avoid those wars, even the artist of the deal ought to be able to connect these dots.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/words-matter-particularly-when-they-rob-palestinians-of-the-protection-of-occupied-status-without-any-citizenship-rights-1.723477

For years, Washington’s standing as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians has steadily eroded, most recently by the unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as “the capital of Israel”. Now comes another massive blow to US credibility with the State Department’s annual human rights reports, which now effectively denies that Israel is an occupying power.

Since the first of such reports was issued in 1977, they have always included a section on “Israel and the occupied territories”. But the document released on Friday instead refers simply to “the West Bank and Gaza”.

That’s not all. The phrase “Israeli-occupied Golan Heights” has also disappeared. Instead there is one section about “Israel, the Golan Heights and problems related to Israeli residents of Jerusalem”. Another section deals with “the West Bank and Gaza” and “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem”.

So not only is the Trump administration relieving Israel of the burden of having to act as an occupying power in a formal and legal sense, as every single UN Security Council and all other relevant international legal documents affirm, but it is effectively imposing the logic of the Clinton Parameters onto Israeli-Palestinian affairs, especially in Jerusalem, with anywhere and anything involving Jewish Israelis rendered “Israel” and everywhere else left an undefined nebula.

This satire of reality is so absurd that if a Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian Arab lived in adjacent apartments, this formula would categorise only the Jewish home as being “in Israel”. In effect, wherever a Jewish Israeli sets foot is, by the logic of this document, “Israel” by virtue of his or her presence there. There is also every effort to avoid the term “settlers” in favour of “Israelis living in West Bank settlements”.

The illogical ethnic bias shot through the report reaches a crescendo in its reference to a July 14, 2017 incident when “three Israeli-Arab attackers shot and killed two Israeli national police officers” at a holy site in the old city of East Jerusalem. All five of these individuals were Israeli and it took place in Jerusalem. Yet the incident is cited several pages deep into the section dealing with “the West Bank and Gaza”.

One might be relieved the report includes an East Jerusalem incident in “the West Bank and Gaza”, where it indeed belongs, even if none are acknowledged as occupied. But by the logic of the report, the Israeli Arab attackers are being denaturalised and the event transferred out of Israel because of the ethnicity of the attackers rather than the location of the attack or anything else.

These linguistic games are significant because Israel’s status as an occupying power in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza confer upon it a very specific set of rights and responsibilities and protections towards the occupied population.

The status of “occupying power” is regularly cited by the Israeli military as the justification for most of what it has done in order to control the occupied territories, including establishing checkpoints, military zones, firing areas, seizing territory and, of course, systematically discriminating between Jews and non-Jews.

But when it comes to settlement activity, which is absolutely prohibited in occupied areas by the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel likes to muddy the issue. That’s what gave rise to this ludicrous model of a free-floating Israel that emerges wherever a settler happens to be standing at any given moment, surrounded by an undefined and unnamed other reality.

Israel and the Trump administration want to have it both ways, whenever that’s convenient for Israel. The problem is, if these areas are not occupied, then most of what the Israeli military has done to the land is an outrageous abuse, not to mention the disenfranchisement and virtual apartheid inflicted on the people. But if there is an occupation, then settlement activity is a massive human rights violation.

Settlements are prohibited by the Geneva Convention because establishing them is an obvious human rights abuse against the occupied people, who have a right not to have their land colonised by invaders. So to see the word and concept of “occupation” and “occupied territories” excised from the State Department report renders the document wilfully blind, morally bankrupt and intellectually indefensible.

But it was also predictable. The most senior person in the State Department who is interested in these issues is the US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who is ardently opposed to a two-state solution and denies there is any Israeli occupation, precisely for that reason.

However, the State Department clearly managed to salvage some references to actual reality, including at least two references to Palestinians from the occupied territories being detained “extraterritorially in Israel”. But this term only makes sense if the detained Palestinians came from a place that was, categorically, not part of Israel at all, so that bringing them to Israel would under those circumstances be considered an extraterritorial move.

There are many other honest and rational sections, as well as a lot of Israeli right-wing and government propaganda that was never included in the past.

One of the biggest affronts to human rights in the whole report comes, sadly, from its own cynical and utterly dishonest move in stripping from Palestinians the protection of being an occupied people without granting them the rights of citizenship and relieving Israel of the responsibilities of occupation without imposing any additional burdens whatsoever.

To view the paper in full, please click here

The Power of Positive Diplomacy: Saudi Outreach in Iraq since 2014

One of the most important and least understood aspects of Saudi Arabia’s evolving proactive foreign and regional policy is its campaign of diplomatic and political outreach in Iraq. After almost a century of relations marked largely by rivalry and occasional enmity, Saudi Arabia felt increasingly frozen out of Iraq’s political dynamics as the country began to emerge from the U.S. occupation. Particularly during the second term of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Riyadh effectively walked away from an Iraqi government that appeared irredeemably under Iranian sway. But even in this period, Saudi Arabia continued efforts to expand relations with the Kurdistan Regional Government in the north and certain Iraqi Sunni Arab constituencies.

Starting in 2014, Saudi Arabia initiated a project to regain a measure of influence in Iraqi politics and policy. Along with the restoration of diplomatic, trade, and other relations that had been frozen for decades, Riyadh’s Iraq initiative has involved building ties with numerous Iraqi Shia Arab leaders, including Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and populist leader Muqtada al-Sadr, both of whom traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2017.

Unlike some of its other recent foreign policy initiatives, Saudi Arabia’s outreach to Iraq has been centered almost entirely on incentives and positive inducements. Along with aid, trade, and other standard forms of outreach, Saudis have emphasized that almost all Iraqi constituencies stand to benefit from a more independent national policy that restores Iraq’s standing in the Arab world and gains a measure of distance from Iran. Riyadh seems to have met with a considerable degree of success in rebuilding ties to Iraq. The May parliamentary elections in Iraq will be the next major development shaping this outreach. But, whatever happens, it is likely that Saudi Arabia will continue to pursue engagement and stronger relations with this crucial neighbor to the north

http://www.agsiw.org/arab-expeditionary-force-syria-far-fetched-u-s-withdrawal/

Some ideas never die. Most recently, the Trump administration, reportedly via a phone call from National Security Advisor John Bolton to Egypt’s acting head of intelligence, Abbas Kamel, proposed the creation of an Arab expeditionary force to be deployed to Syria. In the process, the White House was resurrecting a concept that, for decades, has surfaced periodically in Middle Eastern discourse only to quickly evaporate and then suddenly re-emerge. The idea of a regional military alliance that can represent collective Arab political and security interests in conflicts dates back to at least the 1950s. But the political will to facilitate its creation has never been sufficient to get past the suggestion phase, and it is unlikely to suddenly emerge now, despite U.S. pressure and the dire straits in which the concept of a collective “Arab national interest” finds itself.

President Donald J. Trump began the conversation by telling the Defense Department to begin preparing for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, on the grounds that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant is the only major U.S. interest in the conflict and is virtually defeated. However, just as Trump was calling for this rapid pullout, other U.S. officials were stressing the opposite. The head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph L. Votel, said that in Syria “the hard part, I think, is in front of us.” Votel was referring to the massive task of postconflict reconstruction in a decimated country, particularly the roughly one-quarter of Syria currently under de facto U.S. control. This reconstruction is essential to avoid a dangerous power vacuum and ensure that ISIL does not reconstitute itself or that a similar jihadist group does not replace it.

But he was also referring to another crucial task confronting U.S. interests in Syria, on which Arab and European partners, as well as Israel, are also strongly focused: the need to prevent Iran and its proxies from dominating this strategically vital region in the wake of the collapse of ISIL and the departure of U.S. forces. Control of the Syria-Iraq border is essential to Tehran’s ambitions to create a militarily secured corridor under its control that can serve as a “land bridge” from Iran to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast. Iranian-backed forces already control much of the border region on the Iraqi side. What remains to be determined are the post-ISIL conditions and array of forces on the Syrian side of the border, where fighting is ongoing.

This land bridge would potentially be a revolutionary and game-changing strategic development, and would virtually ensure that Iran emerges from the Syrian conflict as a regional superpower in control of a large swath of territory arcing across the northern Middle East. Preventing this is at least as important to the Arab states, Israel, and others as ensuring that ISIL doesn’t re-emerge. And, if Trump is serious about confronting Iran, he could hardly welcome what would be one of the greatest strategic achievements in all Persian history.

However, in the era of Middle East conflict fatigue in the United States, which began during the administration of former President Barack Obama and continues under Trump’s “America first” agenda, getting out of Middle East conflicts, even precipitously, is highly appealing and extremely popular. Trump reportedly told Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz in a recent phone call that “you [Saudi Arabia and other U.S. allies] want us to stay [in Syria]? Maybe you’re going to have to pay” for that.

Now, with the Bolton phone call, the conversation has developed beyond financial contributions to possible military ones. On April 17, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir suggested that Saudi Arabia was considering contributing forces, saying discussions with Washington “on what type of force needs to remain [in Syria] … and where those forces should come from are ongoing.” Such discussions, in general terms, have been ongoing for years.

During the initial phases of the war against ISIL, warplanes from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates flew numerous missions against ISIL forces. But Saudi and Emirati participation waned after the United States, Turkey, and others began to focus entirely on ISIL and seemed to drop any effort at regime change in Damascus. During the final months of 2015, particularly in the context of the U.S. presidential campaign, there were numerous demands that Gulf Arab countries once again start playing a major role in the campaign against ISIL. In early 2016, Saudi Arabia offered to send ground forces to Syria for that purpose, but Washington stressed that it was asking for more airpower, not troops, from Arab countries and preferred to continue to work with local Kurdish and Arab forces on the ground.

But now, the stakes in Syria are even higher for Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and others in the Arab world, with Iran poised to consolidate a stunning and historic victory. Still, the obstacles to deploying an Arab expeditionary force are enormous. As in the past, Saudi Arabia’s willingness to participate militarily is contingent on a continued U.S. presence in and, implicitly, leadership of any such stabilization campaign in Syria. Therefore, Riyadh is potentially willing to contribute to a U.S.-led mission, but not to try to replace U.S. forces altogether. Saudi and Emirati forces are deeply engaged in a difficult campaign in Yemen against Houthis in the north and al-Qaeda in the south. Given this ongoing conflict, especially with Houthi missiles continuously being launched at major Saudi cities, it’s unlikely they would be either willing or able to shift their military attention to Syria, or that they would be more successful in that context than they have been in Yemen.

Moreover, the political difficulties are daunting. Egypt does not share the profound alarm of the Gulf countries regarding Iran’s role in Syria, and has grudgingly endorsed the continuation of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Therefore, Cairo is unlikely to get involved in Syria, particularly after having avoided any major involvement in the Yemen conflict despite repeated requests from its Gulf Arab allies. Moreover, there are significant political and diplomatic problems if these Arab forces were to be deployed to Syria against the wishes of its government and without any U.N. Security Council mandate. Saudi Arabia has suggested any force contribution must be under the rubric of its multinational “Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition,” but that entity has thus far been structured for intelligence sharing and training, not combat missions. It’s unclear how many coalition partners would be willing to participate in or endorse a military mission in Syria.

Despite these obstacles, this conversation may yet yield some practical consequences. Given the stakes in preventing Iran from consolidating its position in Syria, particularly along the border with Iraq, countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE might be willing to contribute a small number of forces to a coalition effort. And they might be willing to increase their financial support for such a mission and reconstruction in critical areas of Syria. Certainly, they cannot afford to allow Iran to become a regional superpower; and neither can Washington, if Trump and his advisors take their own rhetoric seriously. So, the creation of a multinational military coalition, led by the United States but with others participating in a modest but expanded degree militarily, and financially, might be a way of undertaking the mission with an “America first” patina of greater burden sharing.

The security contractor Erik Prince, who has strong ties to both the Trump administration and the UAE, has been reportedly promoting the creation of a private army to replace many of the U.S. troops if Washington withdraws. That’s a far-fetched idea, but under the circumstances it might help both sides to reconcile their political imperatives with their military and strategic goals. A major mercenary force in Syria probably won’t emerge, but Trump has made it clear the current arrangement is unsustainable, and proposals for an Arab expeditionary force to completely replace U.S. troops in Syria also aren’t realistic. Yet allowing Iran and its proxies, or another extremist group, to arise in eastern Syria is unthinkable. Despite the obstacles, some creative solution, possibly involving Arab troops in Syria under U.S. leadership, will have to be found.