AxisMundi Jerusalem
Inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories
Gridlock in the Mideast
Want to know how it feels to be George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East? Try getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah on a typical weekday at the rush hour. And experience stalemate, frustration, competitive selfishness, blind fury and an absence of movement that even the most stubborn and blinkered of West Bank bus drivers might see as a metaphor for the peace process that is going nowhere fast right now.
It took me 2 full hours to drive the 100 metres (yards) or so from the Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank barrier around Jerusalem to reach the relatively open main street through Qalandiya refugee camp, the gateway to Ramallah. The reason? Well, at its simplest it’s traffic chaos caused by anarchy, a vacuum of law and order. Look further, as with much else in the Middle East, and you get a conflicting and contrasting range of explanations.
Traffic coming through the Israeli checkpoint must merge with that arriving on a main road that follows the West Bank barrier on the Palestinian side. Just beyond the checkpoint, where these two flows merge, they must also cross with traffic going in the opposite direction, from Ramallah, either into the checkpoint or along the barrier. The snag? No traffic lights, no traffic police, no nothing (barely smooth tarmac and certainly no painted junction lines) at the crossroads. The result? Check out the picture above.
Why does it happen? For many Palestinians, the cause as in so many other respects is Israel. Take away the checkpoint and the Jewish settlements protected by further military posts and traffic would circulate much more easily. For Israelis, the checkpoints, barrier and so on are the result of Palestinian violence during the Intifada of the first part of this decade. Bad traffic is the price ordinary Palestinians are paying. Dig further, and each side will come up with a long line of causes and counter-causes going back many decades, if not millennia. Stuck in a jam at Qalandiya checkpoint, you have time to muse on all of them, believe me.
There are a few nuances. Palestinians point out that the violence of the Intifada has died away. But Israelis note that a security guard was wounded in a stabbing at Qalandiya only on Sunday. As I sat imprisoned in a car on Monday, boys aged 14 or less took advantage of the inability of Israeli jeeps to drive out and grab them to lob stones into the checkpoint. Palestinians complain that Israeli troops have authority over the roads around the checkpoint under the Olso accords of the 1990s, but in fact show little or no interest in managing traffic beyond the confines of the checkpoints search bays. Palestinians argue that they manage traffic pretty well in Ramallah itself. A minor economic upswing in the past few months in the West Bank, grudgingly attributed at least in part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of easing security roadblocks, seems to have contributed to bringing more cars onto the roads. Traffic lights and traffic cops keep reasonable order in the Palestinian cities. But out in the no man’s land close to the Israeli barrier, they are not allowed to operate.
What else can you learn sitting tight for a couple of hours breathing other people’s exhaust fumes? 1. Yasser Arafat is still popular, as attested to by some nifty graffiti art on the wall itself. 2. It’s an ill wind that blows no good in the Middle East – enterprising young men were hawking gum, cigarettes and sunglasses with rather more success than usual to the stranded motorists. 3. Brutally selfish pig-headedness seems to pay, after a fashion, in these parts. The guys with the baddest attitude and least regard for their fellow man or woman, seem to get to the front of the queue, and no one seems able to stop them.
That’s a pretty sad lesson to take away, but one that Mr Mitchell may be becoming familiar with as he struggles to coax anything looking like compromise from any of his interlocutors. However, if one can find any positives, perhaps it is this. I did eventually get across the crossroads, even if it did take a big chunk of my afternoon. And I did so quicker than I might have done if total anarchy had prevailed. For, in time, at least, in this small, ugly, scarred spot of the Middle East, ordinary people did come to the rescue. Groups of men from the refugee camp, with no obvious authority but the odd chequered headscarf, leather jacket or a don’t-mess-with-me moustache, started directing the traffic, blocking everything from cheeky Suzukis to belching 16-wheelers with their bodies and forcing apart the gridlocked mess to start the process of clearing the backlog. A few thousand years after Moses and the Red Sea, another miracle in the Middle East. Mr Mitchell may have to hope for one. But at least the good folk of Qalandiya camp showed that, just maybe, such things really can happen around here.
Effort vs. Action
U.S. President Barack Obama’s surprise Nobel Peace Prize win last Friday has generated mixed and wary reactions from the Israeli and Arab public.
(Read our FACTBOX on reactions from the Arab Streets in Iraq, Iran, and Gaza.)
A Twitter search for ‘Obama’, and ‘Nobel’ in Hebrew returned thousands of Hebrew-speaking users sarcastically tweeting their shock and doubt at the news. @shaiinbal tweeted, “Another proof that the Nobel Peace Prize has been used as a political tool. Obama has yet to help resolve the Middle East Conflict. But he might!”. (Read our Q&A on whether the Nobel is a “Peace” or “Political” prize.)
Another tweeter @CandyFlossGirl wrote, “Hope the peace for which Obama received the Nobel Prize will be a bit more successful than the peace for which Rabin and Arafat received the prize.”
Tariq Alhomayed, editor-in-chief of the Arabic daily newspaper Asharq al-Awsat called Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize a “down payment” for future action:
“When I was at primary school, my maternal grandfather would give us a small amount of money as a gift on the first day of our exams. My grandfather, may God rest his soul, used to say to us, “Whoever fails must give me back the money… it is apparent that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize came as a “down payment” and as a way of [expressing] encouragement and goodwill, especially as Obama himself said that he considered the prize a “call to action.” If Obama achieves [something] then he will have deserved the prize, no doubt, but if he doesn’t, then who knows whether he should return it just as we had to return our grandfather’s money if we failed [our exams] when we were young!”
Using puns against Obama’s election campaign slogans “Change we can believe in” and “Yes, we can,” an Israeli pundit, Gideon Levy, wrote in a scathing editorial for the left-leaning daily Haaretz that Obama did not deserve the prize at all, only at most “a conditional award, an IOU”. In a more tame editorial, the Haaretz staff called Obama’s win “more an award for the hope of peace than a sign of recognition for making peace”.
Oh dear.
According to Europe, the most important thing about peace is that effort made to reach it. Not the actual results or work that is done.
Bad news for Gaza and the West Bank.
Especially if Israel decides to say “we made the effort, now be happy with what you have. We no longer care. Launch missiles at Israel at your peril”.
Evaluating Obama
The limelight this week was on U.S. President Barack Obama who made his debut at the United Nations in New York brokering his first summit of Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Tuesday and delivering his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday. (Read more here.)
Reviews of his performance are in from the Middle East and they are not in the main favorable.
The first round of reviews analyzing the three-way summit, noted Obama’s usage of “restraint” over “freeze” – withdrawal of a demand for a full stop on West Bank settlement expansion. They maintained a pessimistic attitude towards the U.S. president, questioning his ability to revive peace negotiations. Israeli newspapers ran headlines such as “The Road to Nowhere,” “The Cold Summit,” and “Obama-Show”.
An op-ed in Yedioth Ahronoth called the meeting “artificial,” and a photo opportunity organized to “create an image of leadership and commitment to securing an Israeli-Palestinian deal”.
“The trilateral summit, or more accurately its photos, was meant to demonstrate leadership ability and personal commitment by the president to prompting revolutionary changes in Israel’s ties with the Arabs. Here you go, the president managed to bring together leaders who did not want to do it,” wrote Eytan Gilboa, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University. “Yet the forced summit, in New York and not at the White House, during the UN’s General Assembly and not as an event in and of itself, served to demonstrate the president’s weakness rather than his power.”
A columnist at the Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, saw the summit more as “a farewell souvenir photo” . Pointing to Obama’s election campaign, his record as a master of strategic politics, and various policy issues he is juggling at the moment, Rami G. Khouri forecast no rapid developments. “More likely, I suspect, will be the emergence of a slow process where Obama clears other pressing concerns from his desk – health care and the economy should be on a good course by December – before turning to the Middle East again, probably with a different set of characters in the picture,” he wrote.
Good point Joe, he gets it to about the same level as our last president did. Both completely clueless.
The Democrats like warmongering with sanctions (Obama-Iran, Clinton-Iraq) and Republicans like warmongering with bombs (Bush 1-Iraq, Bush 2-Iraq/Afghanistan).
Both have the same result, get the middle east to hate us and make people want to blow themselves up to kill. Also ends up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
The Iran question, again
It seems last week’s focus, settlement expansion, has given way to this week’s prime focus: Might Israel attack Iran?
Last week the Arab media found Israel’s refusal to cease settlement expansion unsurprising and affirmative of what they said was Israel’s unwillingness to pursue a peace settlement with the Palestinians. An op-ed in Al Ahram Weekly, an English-language newspaper in Egypt, questioned the Arabs’ ability to challenge Israel: “Will they have the courage to shift the focus back from the Israeli-instigated ‘Iranian threat’ to the clear and present Israeli danger to the region?”
Lebanon’s Daily Star echoed the argument that Israel was using a perceived Iranian threat as a diversion to its greater “Machiavellian design”.
“The strategy that they employ is simple: Draw attention away from the issue of Israeli occupation and toward Iran, which they portray as a far greater threat to regional security,” the paper wrote in an editorial. “Campaigns that rely on this method tend to downplay the destabilizing impact that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory has on the region, and argue that the Islamic Republic is the main – or indeed the only – source of regional violence.”
Former Israeli deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh said Israel might be compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear sites if international powers had not agreed to impose sanctions by the end of this year, while the current Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said a nuclear Iran would not constitute a threat to Israel’s existence – since Israel would act first to pre-empt such a threat.
America and Israel (good bed fellows) want a war with Iran so badly they can’t see straight. All the talk about nuclear weapons and the denial of the Holocaust are just to scare people into supporting a war. Folks, don’t buy into this nonsense! Didn’t the government do the same thing with Iraq prior to invasion?
Hopeless or Hopeful?
The trilateral summit tomorrow at the United Nations in New York will be the first time the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian president will be meeting since the suspension of peace talks last December, but nobody’s waiting with bated breath. According to our latest article, the inability to reach an agreement on a settlement freeze and Israelis and Palestinians accusing each other for the lack of efforts to revive peace negotiations, continue to be the bumps in the road to peace. (Read our FACTBOX about Israel’s settlements.)
After the U.S. envoy George Mitchell’s week-long shuttle diplomacy ended last week without obvious result. He had attempted to break the negotiation deadlock between the two sides, any chance of bringing three leaders together for dialogue – albeit “without preconditions” and promise for resumption of negotiations – should seem to be an occasion worth anticipating. (Read more of our coverage here.) Israeli newspapers, however, were not encouraged, calling the summit “the flight to nowhere” and projecting it would be “solely symbolic”.
Prominent Israeli commentator Nahum Barnea called the trilateral summit “not a meeting; not even half a meeting,” and “a joke at the expense of an American president who tried to get involved in Mideast politics and was stung”.
Avi Issacharoff in a news analysis for Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz, called the summit “a much sought-after photo-op” for the Obama administration:
“… Three leaders shaking hands, seemingly getting back to negotiations. This would come against the backdrop of the White House’s resounding failure to force Israel’s agreement to a complete settlement freeze or to persuade Arab states to make even tentative steps toward normalization with Israel, so a picture of the three leaders together will look like an extraordinary achievement,” wrote Issacharoff. “It might even help Obama and his administration to get the stalled peace process moving, however slowly.”
Did they hoard? Yes. Are they evil? No. It is our responsability to know this difference.
Insulting the intelligence
Good morning, children.
Today we are going to learn about two common rhetorical tricks that help greatly with the cynical manipulation of arguments.
First, disingenuousness. The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines disingenuous as “lacking in frankness, insincere, morally fraudulent”, in the sense of pretending not to know what you in fact know very well.
Second, the straw man argument. Wikipedia defines this as misrepresentation of an opponent’s position, to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the straw man) and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original proposition.
Today, thanks to Mr Netanyahu, we have one handy slice of well-worn rhetoric to illustrate both rhetorical tricks.
I often wonder if the anti-Israel propagandists at Reuters like Douglas Hamilton and Alistair MacDonald sit around the table at Starbucks on Oxford Street sipping on lattes and dreaming up new and contemptible ways to slander Israel and its leaders.
At various points in their histories, sovereignty over New York, London, Paris, and Rome was also in dispute. The same holds true with Prague, Toronto, Istanbul, Pittsburgh, and today, Belfast, Gibraltar, and Jerusalem.
Jerusalem has been invaded, conquered, and colonized over a longer period of time than any other city in the world but only one nation can lay original claim to sovereignty and that is the Jewish nation. Despite numerous bloody conquests and expulsions, there has always been a Jewish presence in Jerusalem and the city has had a majority Jewish population since the 19th century. The fictitious “city” of East Jerusalem – which Reuters correspondents guilefully capitalize in an effort to demarcate as separate from the rest of the city – is home to the most sacred Jewish antiquities and, despite ethnic cleansing by Jordan between 1948 and 1967, 42% Jewish by population.
Of course, neither Douglas Hamilton nor any of the other Reuters crop will tell you the above nor will they explain that the 1947 UN resolution to internationalize Jerusalem was to be followed 10 years later by a vote among the city’s residents on the issue of sovereignty – a vote it is clear the Jewish majority in Jerusalem would have held in favor of Israel.
In these willful refusals to report the truth, it is Hamilton who is guilty of “insulting the intelligence”.
Two-state solution
He finally said it — in Hebrew — “shtai midinot l’shnai amim”, or, “two states for two peoples”.
Breaking a barrier that appeared to be as much psychological as political, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the phrase, while spelling out his conditions for Palestinian statehood, in his opening remarks at the weekly meeting of his cabinet on Sunday.
Under U.S. pressure, Netanyahu publicly endorsed for the first time, in a major policy speech on June 14, the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. But in that Hebrew-language address he refrained from uttering what has become the mantra of U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace efforts — “two states for two peoples”.
Just a month earlier, briefing journalists in Washington on his White House talks with U.S. President Barack Obama, Netanyahu made a point of heading off any suggestion he had bowed on the statehood issue.: “I did not say two states for two peoples,” he said.
In recent weeks, Netanyahu has used the phrase in private talks with visiting foreign officials, a spokesman said. And in a June 23 interview with the mass-selling German Bild newspapaper, Netanyahu made clear that ”… on the question of whether we favour two states for two peoples, we say yes.”
Now he’s said the same in his native language to his own people — “We’ve achieved national consensus over the idea of two states for two people” – while hanging tough on his terms for statehood that included demlitarisation of a Palestinian state and Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
There is a lot of deception and misunderstanding in the media, regarding the conflict in the middle east. I suggest you to see this web site, actually a YouTube channel, which explains what is behind the creation of Palestinian state in mountains of Samaria: It will not solve anything, but will endanger Israel Jordan and Europe as well.
Most alarming I find the films at top right where one sees the Muslim leaders repeating over and over their aim is to islamize the world. It is not about Palestine or Iraq or whatever: It is about Jihad.
—– The link to the mentioned above YouTube channel is:
http://www.youtube.com/user/justicevspro paganda
—– Highly recomended !!!
Managing the message
Gone were the track suit, the back-slapping and the wise-cracking, all part of Ehud Olmert’s casual demeanor when he used to fly to the United States for White House talks and stand in the back of a chartered El Al plane, fielding questions from the travelling press.
His successor as Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, managed the media very differently this week during his first visit to the White House since taking office on March 31.
It began with a meet-and-greet on the flight to Washington and an admonishment from Netanyahu’s spokesmen that the prime minister would not be answering any questions. ”Bibi”, in a dark business suit, and his wife Sara walked down the aisle and shook hands with each and every reporter. Testing the “no-question” rule drew a “no comment” along with a firm handshake.
With Netanyahu at odds with U.S. President Barack Obama over Palestinian statehood, a cornerstone of Washington’s Middle East policy, shifting the media focus to common ground appeared to be part of a game plan for message management. For Netanyahu, that meant getting the point across back home that, in his words, he and Obama saw “eye-to-eye” on the need to prevent Tehran from developing nuclear weapons.
Just hours after landing in Washington, Netanyahu sent his national security adviser, Uzi Arad, to speak to the travelling press in time for the evening TV news in Israel. The prime minister, he said, would stress in his talks with Obama the next day the need for urgency in dealing with Iran.
Score one for Netanyahu when at their meeting on Monday – preceded by preparatory talks between the prime minister’s top advisers and Obama’s team on finding points of agreement — the president for the first time set a rough timetable, of about a year, for his diplomatic outreach to Iran.
The West Bank Archipelago
US President Barack Obama told his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their White House meeting that “under the roadmap and under Annapolis that there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements. Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward. That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that, but it’s an important one and it has to be addressed.”
To give an idea of just how difficult it will be take a look at this extraordinary map designed by French cartographer Julien Boussac. It might look like Indonesia or the Caribbean at first glance, but the map is a fanciful reworking of what is actually happening in the West Bank with the blue/water areas representing areas under full Israeli control with the dark and light green ‘islands’ representing areas where the Palestinian Authority exerts some control.
This puts me in mind of high school geography and studying the amazing engineering feat of land reclamation in the Netherlands – where polders and dykes enabled the Dutch to push back the North Sea and expand their living space.
For the Palestinians politics and diplomacy, not polders and dykes, are going to be needed to reclaim the land they want for a future state in a feat even more spectacular than anything those Dutch engineers could pull off.
And for the settlers – as we explain here – they think there’s no point even thinking about it. In this video, settlers in Efrat, between Jerusalem and Hebron, comment on the issue, preceded by the reaction from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.
Are you ready to rumble?
There haven’t been any official announcements yet, but it appears Benjamin Netanyahu will be heading to Washington in early May for his first meeting as Israel’s prime minister with President Barack Obama. There’s also been talk, so far unconfirmed, of an Obama visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank in June. The above photo was taken when the two men met in Jerusalem last July, when Obama was the Democratic candidate for president and Netanyahu, head of the right-wing Likud party, served as opposition leader in Israel’s parliament.
So what do you get when a conservative Israeli leader who has shied away from endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state comes face-to-face with an American president who keeps on reaffirming that goal? Confrontation — at least according to this article in Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper.
An analysis by Reuters’ Washington-based Arshad Mohammed addresses the issue, noting that Netanyahu’s far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has described the U.S.-backed Israeli-Palestinian peace process as being at a “dead end“.
Actually, when Mitchell goes from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem to Ramallah, he goes through the Beit El settlement where Israel operates a DCO and a checkpoint for VIPs only.
Thus Mitchell, and other international diplomats, do not see the chaos and abuses of Qalandiya or other checkpoints. It is set up to hide that reality from them.
That is why George Bush (upon his first, last and only visit to Ramallah) could make the disgusting joke, based on his actual observation of the Beit El DCO, that the checkpoint “wasn’t that bad”. For the international VIPs (and some Palestinians VIPs) it really isn’t “that bad”. But for the majority it is. In fact, most Palestinian residents of the West Bank cannot access Qalandiya checkpoint at all unless they have special permits issued by the Israeli military.
The observation of chaos (let’s not conflate that with anarchy, please!) at Qalandiya is on the money, as is the observation that the Israeli Border Police (a branch of the Israeli military) that are stationed there, could really care less about the gridlock. But peel back more layers of the onion and find the reality is much more stark.
It’s a basic problem of apartheid. There is one system for Israelis and their international visitors (complete with new roads and the rule of law) and another for the Palestinians (where gridlock festers and military rule is imposed). It is always harder to see the reality when you benefit from it, isn’t it?