Matlock and Meshaal

One of the pleasures of co-leading CNI’s recently completed, 17-day study tour of the Arab-Israeli region was the fact that the other co-leader was Amb. Jack Matlock, who’d been Pres. Reagan’s last ambassador to the Soviet Union.  Matlock’s wife, Rebecca, was also a pleasure to have in the group. In addition to taking photos for us, she was just a constant font of kindness and good humor.

When we had our Nov. 4 meeting in Damascus with the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, there was a fascinating exchange between Jack Matlock and Khaled Meshaal in which Meshaal revealed (yet again) both his sense of humor– and the sense of relaxed self-confidence that comes with being able to express that in a large group– and his awareness of the need, as a political and potential national leader, not to have that sense of humor misunderstood.

Matlock initiated the exchange in question, at some point soon after the opening pleasantries had been exchanged.  He gave a fairly lengthy and very thoughtful presentation in which he reviewed some of the experiences he had had in the late 1980s, as Reagan’s ambassador to Moscow, at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev was starting to introduce some really serious reforms within the Soviet Union, and meantime the citizens of the three Baltic nations, which had been subsumed within the Soviet Union for many years, were starting to become eager to exercise their independence.

Obama: Don’t take Hoagland’s disastrous advice!

Jim Hoagland is one of the most influential of the US commentators who actively agitated to push Washington into the disastrous decision to invade Iraq.  He hasn’t apologized to anyone for that yet.  But now, he is still hard at work, in his regular, handsomely compensated column in the Washington Post, making the equally disastrous argument that there is nothing Washington can or should do to help end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and that “only an Israeli decision” can bring about the two-state outcome that Pres. Obama says he’s committed to.

Hoagland reaches this bizarre—one might even say, defeatist—conclusion by characterizing the US government, from the get-go in the column the WaPo is running today, as an “outsider” in the Israel-Palestine dispute.

Would that the US were indeed such an outsider!  How much easier matters would be if Washington had not, for several decades now, been an actively partisan, staunchly pro-Israel participant in the dispute.

Some brave, truthful members of Congress

Our ‘Political Pilgrimage’ group got back to Washington DC Monday night; we had CNI’s annual dinner Tuesday night; and I’ve been catching up on numerous things since then.  But I do want to share some intriguing good news that came in during our 17-day absence on the PP tour.  (Also, be assured that we are planning to put a lot more items here on the blog about what we learned on the tour– in written, photographic, and also videographed form…. This will happen throughout the coming weeks.)

Meanwhile, the good news.

It comes from my dear buddies (and former colleagues) at the DC-based Friends Committee on National Legislation, who made a point of carefully tracking the statements made on the House floor in the discussion over the infamous anti-Goldstone bill that was passed by the House of representatives on November 3.  Sadly, the bill, which was heavily pushed by AIPAC and other portions of the “status quo lobby”, passed by a vote of 344 to 36 with 22 members voting “present”.

To Gaza and back to Cairo

On Friday, eight members of our group made it– after a very long wait at the Egyptian border– into Gaza. We arrived at our hotel there at around 10 p.m.

Yesterday (Saturday), the UN folks in Gaza had organized a great itinerary for us. We visited an UNRWA school and Shifa Hospital; then the UNRWA folks took us on a tour of northern Gaza, where we saw some of the extent of the destruction the Israelis wrought during last winter’s assault on Gaza.

Remember that the Israelis have allowed no construction materials or equipment, and no demolition equipment, into Gaza since the end of the war. So the destroyed houses, factories, workshops– and the completely destroyed American International School– all still stand there looking more or less as they did when the parallel-unilateral ceasefires went into operation on January 17.

Fayyad and Abu Amr on the crisis

Yesterday, our group had a 40-minute off-the-record discussion with the very pro-American PA prime minister Salam Fayyad.  We also had a much longer discussion with Ziad Abu Amr, a political independent who was foreign minister in the PA’s short-lived national unity government in 2007– and also a close confidante of President Mahmoud Abbas.

Both were extremely gloomy and expressed a strong sense of how they feel the whole of the PA’s very pro-American leadership now feels deeply betrayed by the Obama administration.

Abu Amr said:

Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] has been playing completely by the book.  The PA has been killing Palestinians to prove that he is prepared to serve Israel’s security interests. What did he get in return? Only a continuation of setttlements, home demolitions, land expropriations…

If this continues, he will not and should not continue in office.

He noted that Abbas has not yet actually resigned (though we have certainly heard plenty of rumors that that might be under consideration.)

“If Abu Mazen resigns,” he said,

under the Palestinian Basic Law– which I helped to draft back in the 1990s– the speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council would take over. That is Aziz Dweik. So let th Americans deal with him.

Dweik, who was recently released from an Israeli prison, is the parliamentarian from the Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform Party who was elected speaker of the PLC after the free and fair PA election of January 2006.

Abu Amr also told us,

Abu Mazen feels betrayed and fooled by the Americans… There is no way the Palestinians can do any more than they have done…

If Abu Mazen resigns under circumstances of crisis, then no-one could replace him– or, would want to…

The problem is, the Americans have abandoned the Road Map. What Hillary Clinton said about the Israeli government having made “unprecedented concessions” was against the Road Map, against Annapolis, and against Oslo.

More, later…

Preparing for Gaza

I am in Cairo preparing for the delegation’s arrival here from Tel Aviv on Thursday night. Our plan is to leave for Gaza on Friday (the 13th!) morning, spend Saturday in Gaza and return later in the day. That gives us all day Sunday for appointments in Cairo, before we leave for Washington, DC early on Monday morning.

In order to enter Gaza from Egypt, we had to request permission several weeks ago from the Egyptian Foreign Ministry to pass through Rafah, the only crossing point between Egypt and Gaza. Al-hamdulillah, they granted us permission! Now we are frantically trying to set up appointments.

This is my first time in Cairo, so I’m comparing what I see with how people told me it is. The tour company booked us in a nice hotel in Garden City, an affluent section that abuts the Nile and is full of mammoth hotels full of Westerners, swimming pools, casinos, neon lights, and fireworks. While most of the city is as noisy, crowded, and dirty as people say Cairo can be, Garden City seems like Las Vegas on the Nile — still noisy and crowded, but less dirty.

One obvious source of Cairo’s problems is the ridiculously large number of cars. The resultant pollution hangs in the air and turns the buildings brown and black. This part of the city, at least, was not designed to accommodate pedestrians — sidewalks end abruptly, there are no traffic lights, no stop signs, no crosswalks. I paid 25 Egyptian pounds (about $5) to take a taxi three blocks today just so that I wouldn’t get run over. I wonder how much of the problem is due to generous government fuel subsidies, which bring the price of gasoline down to $1.20 per gallon.

Here are two pictures of the view of the Nile from my balcony:

An Arab ally begins to doubt Obama

On Sunday our delegation met with Bishr Khasawneh, the chief of staff of the Foreign Ministry in Jordan. It is clear from what he told us that Jordan, a U.S. ally and one of the so-called Arab moderates, is beginning to worry about recent changes in President Barack Obama’s policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Khasawneh argued that the president had started his first year in office on particularly strong footing. Obama signaled his commitment to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict by naming George Mitchell as his envoy for Middle East peace within 24 hours of taking office. He also made speeches, in Turkey and Cairo, that emphasized two points that Bush administration policy had ignored: 1) the critical importance of implementing a two-state solution and 2) the regional context of the conflict.

The need for a change in American policy is overdue, he said, after “good faith and confidence have eroded over eight years of stagnation” in the peace process. The Arab side has demonstrated its willingness to make peace with Israel and give it the legitimacy it deserves, by continuing to support the Arab Peace Initiative for the last seven of those years. Even after the Gaza war had such a deep, negative psychological impact on the region, all 22 Arab states and 57 Muslim states kept it on the table at the Doha summit in March. The time is ripe for American leadership.

Khasawneh said that the Obama administration had chosen the right issue, settlements, on which to challenge Israel and move the process forward. Jewish settlements, he said, had made the Palestinian portions of the West Bank into “isolated cantons.” Allowing their continued expansion while pressing for negotiations made no sense. Gesturing to the cup of coffee on the table, he argued that one person cannot negotiate with another over dividing a cup of coffee while one person continues to drink from the cup.

The new Obama position seems to be to push for final status talks despite allowing Israel to continue building settlements. Khasawneh argued that the administration appears ready to include enough loopholes in the proposed settlement “freeze” as to make the agreement meaningless. Israel is fighting with the U.S. over which loopholes should be included, as though the freeze is a negotiable concession to the Palestinians. Instead, Khasawneh argued, Israel should agree to implement a settlement freeze as a way of finally giving a positive response to the Arab Peace Initiative.

The key for Obama is to regain the momentum that he helped generate in the beginning of his first year by continuing to demonstrate his leadership on the settlement issue and breaking with the policies of his predecessor. Khasawneh suggested he can do that by promoting the Arab Peace Initiative as one basis for negotiations and by refusing to allow settlement expansion to continue at the same time that he calls for final status negotiations.

Settlers, settlers, settlers

Our group of CNI “political pilgrims” is in Jerusalem now. Yesterday we drove down to Hebron, where we received a warm welcome from Dr. Nabil Ali Jaabari, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Hebron University, and many other leading members of the university’s faculty. We had good discussions with them– and also with some of the very articulate English-language and English-lit students at the university. Then, some folks from the university helped organize a trip to downtown Hebron for us.

We wandered through the maze of small, stone-paved streets of the historic center of this important Palestinian city. Many of the stores there were shuttered tight shut in the middle of the day: they have been abandoned by  their owners, on a longer- or shorter-term basis, because of the harassment they’ve faced from the hundreds of Israeli settlers who have moved into the heart of the town. In some streets, only one or two stores were still open, doing a very lack-luster amount of business, while around them tens of stores stood closed, a few with some hate-graffiti on them in Hebrew.

There’s one section of the  souk where the settlers have moved into apartments directly overlooking the market-lanes and for some years now have periodically tossed trash and various other noxious substances down into the market. There, the store-owners long ago rigged up netting above the market-lanes to protect their customers from the trash.  Today, the nets sag down, heavy with garbage items including old clothes, rags, bottles, stones, and so one.

While in Hebron, we went into the two separate portions of the historic old stone worship space, long used as a mosque, but now with a portion of it reserved for Jewish worship.  At the entrances to both sides, there is a very heavy Israeli military presence, with young, machine-gun-toting soldiers presiding over multiple security checks. In the Muslim worship space, you can still see the bullet holes from where the (deranged?) American-Jewish settler Dr. Baruch Goldstein ran amok with his army-issued machine-gun in 1994, killing more than two dozen Muslims who were praying there.

Oh, what a pity that PM Rabin didn’t take advantage of that incident to evacuate all the settlers who had started to move into the heart of downtown Hebron.  Their numbers have grown greatly in the 15 years since then, and their provocations against the city’s Palestinians have continued. And then, of course, it has taken a non-trivial part of the Israeli military to be there to protect them.

As we drove the 25 miles to Hebron and back (along a mainly “settler” road), the speed and extent of the land-grabbing the Israelis have been involved in, in recent years, throughout the southern West Bank were only too obvious. Har Homa is now a massive urban area– and nearly all of it has been built since 2000. Efrata, Kiryat Arba, and various other very large settlements were all too evident from the road.

Those extensive land grabs have clawed great chunks of West Bank land out of the Palestinians’ hands and have led to the dicing up of the Palestinian areas by means of the road networks and wall/barrier systems constructed for the benefit of the settlers.  These circumstances of loss of resources and progressive loss of the possibility of self-governance have led to a dull but deep anger among many of the Palestinians we’ve met so far.  But the activities of the settlers who have thrust their outposts into the heart of heavily populated Palestinian cities seem to me to be the ones that continually threaten to explode the whole situation here.

In that respect, the actions of the two very ideological settler organizations Ateret Cohanim and Elad that are at work in Jerusalem seem particularly dangerous.

This afternoon, we took a tour of many of the southern and eastern parts of the present “Jerusalem” with Sarah Kreimer, deputy director of the Israeli NGO Ir Amim.  She did a great job showing us where the settlers have been building numerous, extremely provocative outposts right inside historically Palestinian neighborhoods over the past ten or so years– in Ras al-Amoud, Silwan, Nof Zion, etc.

In many of the places Sarah took us, you could see the wall/fence system snaking around the hills and valleys.  In some places, as she noted, it divides Jewish Israeli “communities” (i.e., settlements) from Palestinian communities.  But in a large portion of east Jerusalem, it divides Palestinians from Palestinians.

She gave us all copies of this map at the start of the tour, which was really helpful. But Ir Amim has many other helpful maps available at their website, here.

We’ve also had some other really informative experiences and discussions since we got into Jerusalem 48 hours ago. But I am way too tired to write anything more about them.

Views from Jordan

Our group has been in Jordan for about 25 hours at this point, having spent a fascinating day doing mainly touristic things in Syria, yesterday.

We had discussions with three very interesting people here:

Adnan Abu-Odeh, a former Minister of Culture, Jordanian ambassador to the UN, member of the Senate, and head of the Royal Diwan;

Mouin Rabbani, a brilliant analyst of Palestinian politics; and

Abdulilah al-Khateeb, who was Jordan’s former foreign minister.

Abu-Odeh and Khateeb both expressed their horror at the degree to which the Obama administration’s recent (mis-)steps on Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking have undercut all the pro-American “moderates” in the region.

Abu-Odeh said,

Now, we are in a period of disillusionment. Back in spring, I was speaking in Louisville, Kentucky, and I said we have to wait and see about  Obama, to see if he can face up to the Israeli lobby.  And he hasn’t.

He also warned that,

the continuation of settling means there will be no Palestinian state. If the American administration talks about a two-state solution and tolerates settlements, then it is lying.

He also gave a potent critique of the strategies adopted by Egypt and Jordan when they decided to make peace with Israel, believing that they could thereby help the Palestinians, “because Israel wouldn’t want to jeopardize its relations with us by continuing to oppress the Palestinians.  But it didn’t happen!”

Khatib argued strongly against the wisdom of any US or Israeli attack on Iran.  “If you look at the effects of the US attack on Iraq, you can see why we don’t want anything at all like that,” he said.  “For a Jordanian citizen, we find ourselves trapped between two nuclear powers. Iran is a major power in the region. We welcome seeing it play that role through inclusion and discussion rather than coercion.”

On the peace process, he said the big contest now is “between those who want a process and those who want real peacemaking.”

For his part, Rabbani said he had never had any illusions that Obama would be very different than Pres. Bush in his policy on the Palestine Question, so he hadn’t had to deal with much disillusionment.

He and the others all said a lot more really interesting things but I don’t have time to blog about them all here.

Another big day tomorrow!

Hamas Leader Open to Future Relations with Israel

By Carlton Cobb, Team Coordinator for CNI’s Fall 2009 ‘political pilgrimage’

During a two-hour meeting with the CNI delegation in Damascus yesterday, the head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, told us:

It is not just to ask Palestinians to amend their charters without real change on the ground. Let us get our rights. Then we could discuss many issues, such as changing the Hamas and PLO charters or relations with Israel.

This came in response to a question posed by CNI Executive Director Helena Cobban, who asked him whether, in the context of Hamas winning the kind of peace agreement it seeks, the organization might consider amending its 1988 founding charter.

In the same round of questioning, Cobban had also asked whether Hamas would consider that the agreement it seeks, which is one based on Israel’s return to within its borders of June 4, 1967, would be understood by Hamas as one that ends the Palestinians’ decades-long conflict with Israel.

In other words, what is written in the Hamas charter seems under some circumstances to be negotiable. Meshaal’s answer was significant because it reflects a possible shift in Hamas strategy. The Hamas charter calls for a Palestinian state that replaces Israel and includes all of British Mandate-era Palestine.

Most Israelis equate this position with the destruction by force of Israel and, by extension, Jews. They argue that the Hamas position amounts to a call for a second Jewish Holocaust.

Meshaal’s statement demonstrated a willingness to accept Israel in the context of a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas, and the Palestine Liberation Organization before it, had previously emphasized the goal of replacing Israel by refusing to use the word “Israel” and instead using the term “Zionist entity,” implying that the state is illegitimate and temporary. Throughout our meeting, however, Meshaal chose to use the word “Israel” and almost never used the word “Zionism” or “Zionist.”

The last part of the statement quoted above demonstrates an implicit recognition of Israel, one of the three conditions that Israel and the Quartet have imposed on Hamas before agreeing to recognize it.

It is important to note that the PLO also held the same position of non-recognition of Israel for many years and only agreed to amend its charter under significant American and Israeli pressure. Meshaal noted that despite revising its position in 1996, the PLO still has not achieved a Palestinian state and, in fact, lost  popularity among Palestinians because of it.

A recurring theme of Meshaal’s answers was the difference between words and action. He downplayed the significance of the Hamas charter by pointing out that it was written in the “early days” of Hamas. Over time, Hamas has developed its political agenda, by agreeing to join the 2006 Palestinian Legsilative Council elections and accepting a solution to the conflict based on the 1967 borders. Hamas actions, he argued, should be more important than what is written in its charter.

He likewise argued that U.S. President Barack Obama should be judged by his actions and not his words. He expressed support for Obama’s speech in Cairo and said that Hamas was “ready to cooperate with Obama,” but that Obama’s Cairo speech was a “mirage” that had yet to become real. In his assessment, Meshaal felt that pressure from Israel and the “Israeli lobby” in the United States had caused Obama to back down far faster than Hamas had expected.