Israeli Watch

Rami G. Khouri

It’s hard to know who appears more ludicrous and despicable, the Palestinian Fateh and Hamas leaderships allowing their gunmen to fight it out on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, or an American administration saying it supports the “moderates” in Palestine who want to negotiate peace with Israel.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas Thursday to underline American support for “moderates” committed to a negotiated peace with Israel, such as President Abbas. She also called leaders of “moderate” Arab states to rally their support for Abbas against Hamas. Surrealistically, this was happening when Hamas forces were routing Fateh’s security forces to take control of all public facilities in Gaza, and President Abbas was proving that the sort of Arab “moderation” he represents has little anchorage in reality any more, and little credibility with its own people above all.

Abbas declared a state of emergency Thursday and dismissed the Palestinian government, but the facts on the ground are that the Palestinian government is a fiction, and his state of emergency is a state of imagination. The “moderation” of Abbas and his Fateh movement was a noble nationalistic cause three decades ago. But Fateh’s own incompetence and creeping corruption — especially after taking control of the West Bank and Gaza after the Oslo accords of 1993 — have turned the movement into an embarrassment that is little more than a pathetic poster child and crippled errand boy for the American State Department.

Continue reading ‘Paying the price of double standards’

Saree Makdisi

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Four decades of control established and maintained by force of arms — in defiance of international law, countless UN Security Council resolutions and, most recently, the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague — have enabled Israel to impose its will on the occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in its own image.

The result is a continuous political space now encompassing all of historic Palestine, albeit a space as sharply divided as the colonial world (”a world cut in two”) famously described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Indeed, Fanon’s 1961 classic still enables an analysis of Israel and the occupied territories as fresh, insightful and relevant in 2007 as the readings of Cape Town or Algiers that it made available when it was first published.

Israel maintains two separate road systems in the West Bank, for example: one for the territory’s immigrant population of Jewish settlers, one for its indigenous non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian) population.

The roads designated for the Jewish settlers are well maintained, well lit, continuous and uninterrupted; they tie the network of Jewish “neighborhoods” and “settlements” — all of them in reality colonies forbidden by international law — to each other and to Israel. The roads for the West Bank’s native population, by contrast, are poorly maintained, when they are maintained at all (they often consist of little more than shepherds’ trails); they are continuously blockaded and interrupted. A grid of checkpoints and roadblocks (546 at last count) strangles the circulation of the West Bank’s indigenous population, but it is designed to facilitate the free movement of Jewish settlers — who are, moreover, allowed to drive their own cars on the roads set aside for them, whereas Palestinians are not allowed to drive their cars beyond their own towns and villages (the entrances to which are all blockaded by the Israeli army).

Continue reading ‘For a Secular Democratic State’

Ghassan Khatib

The eruption of internal clashes between Fateh and Hamas last Sunday in Gaza was a renewal of the fighting that blighted the Strip in the months before the agreement to form a unity government. It came as little surprise since tensions have been running high and the Mecca agreement failed to deal with the underlying causes.

From the beginning, Hamas’ armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, adopted a highly critical position of that agreement and the subsequent unity government. Prominent members argued that the Mecca agreement involved political concessions that would expose Hamas to public criticism since the platform of the Palestinian national unity government marked a significant departure from the Islamist movement’s original political positions.

In fact, an interesting debate has emerged inside Hamas since its election victory in early 2006. Immediately after that election, Hamas was united around the idea that the movement could combine forming a government and undertaking any consequent political task with continuing the resistance. With time, and with the difficulties in running the government, those in Hamas who won the election and assumed positions in the government started to realize the difficulties in combining governance with resistance.

That view was not shared by the military cadres, who argued that sacrificing the resistance for the sake of running the Palestinian Authority would undermine the popularity of Hamas,

Continue reading ‘A complication of adverse conditions’