Monthly Archive for May, 2007

Daily Times Editorial, Pakistan

Hamas and Fatah spent the whole of Wednesday killing each other’s men till the count reached 20, and Israel had nothing to do with these killings. The Gaza Strip saw four days of utter mayhem as these armed groups clashed. After having killed 40, including some innocent people, the two sides have now reached a ceasefire that no one believes will hold. Hamas and Fatah are together in the “national unity” government running the Palestinian Authority. Israel, not wanting to be a mere witness, joined in and killed a Hamas militant. After that a revenge strike was launched into Israel.

The two feuding parties had gone to Saudi Arabia and agreed to a “national unity” government so that the regional Arab states could put forward a new initiative to resolve the Palestinian issue with Israel. This was the Makkah Agreement that has fallen apart. But this is not the first time that the Saudis have tried to put Muslim warriors together and failed: the fractious mujahideen who engaged in history’s most terrible civil war in Afghanistan in the decade of the 1990s had similarly gone to the Holy Land and sworn to bind their differences.

Continue reading ‘Palestine’s lethal schism’

Ghassan Khatib

The American benchmarks plan that was recently submitted to both Israelis and Palestinians is a very significant step. It marks an important and useful change of gear for American involvement in the conflict in an apparent effort to arrest the deteriorating economic and political Palestinian situation.

It doesn’t, however, include anything new at all. The benchmarks are components of past agreements that the parties, mainly Israel, have failed to fulfill to date.

Some of these benchmarks simply set new dates for old commitments. Most of these were already stipulated in the Agreement on Movement and Access that was negotiated during and after the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza Strip settlements in 2005 with the help of the then special envoy of the Quartet, James Wolfensohn, and brokered by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The rest relate to security issues, particularly Gaza-related security requirements.

Nevertheless, the benchmarks plan is important in that it indicates that Washington has begun to understand that the economic deterioration in the Palestinian territories is a major factor in the radicalization of the population and consequent violence. If Israeli sanctions and restrictions–the main cause of this dire economic condition–aim at combating violence and “terrorism”, then in fact they have backfired and are producing just the opposite.

The Americans along with other international actors have realized, rightly, that Israeli reluctance to implement the original AMA has contributed dramatically to the economic deterioration in occupied Palestinian territory. The World Bank alluded to this in its recent report, “Movement and Access Restrictions in the West Bank: Uncertainty and Inefficiency in the Palestinian Economy”, concluding that Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement, which to the Bank have no security justification, are responsible for the economic deterioration and for preventing the success of any efforts toward economic recovery.

Continue reading ‘New dates, old commitments’