Sixty-three years ago, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy was forced to leave his home in the Galilean city of Safed and flee with his family to Syria. He took up shelter in a canvas tent provided to all the arriving refugees. Though he and his family wished for decades to return to their home and homeland, they were denied that most basic of human rights. That child’s story, like that of so many other Palestinians, is mine.

This month, however, as we commemorate another year of our expulsion — which we call the nakba, or catastrophe — the Palestinian people have cause for hope: this September, at the United Nations General Assembly, we will request international recognition of the State of Palestine on the 1967 border and that our state be admitted as a full member of the United Nations.

Many are questioning what value there is to such recognition while the Israeli occupation continues. Others have accused us of imperiling the peace process. We believe, however, that there is tremendous value for all Palestinians — those living in the homeland, in exile and under occupation.

It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued. Indeed, it was the descendants of these expelled Palestinians who were shot and wounded by Israeli forces on Sunday as they tried to symbolically exercise their right to return to their families’ homes.

Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled.

Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.

Our quest for recognition as a state should not be seen as a stunt; too many of our men and women have been lost for us to engage in such political theater. We go to the United Nations now to secure the right to live free in the remaining 22 percent of our historic homeland because we have been negotiating with the State of Israel for 20 years without coming any closer to realizing a state of our own. We cannot wait indefinitely while Israel continues to send more settlers to the occupied West Bank and denies Palestinians access to most of our land and holy places, particularly in Jerusalem. Neither political pressure nor promises of rewards by the United States have stopped Israel’s settlement program.

Negotiations remain our first option, but due to their failure we are now compelled to turn to the international community to assist us in preserving the opportunity for a peaceful and just end to the conflict. Palestinian national unity is a key step in this regard. Contrary to what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asserts, and can be expected to repeat this week during his visit to Washington, the choice is not between Palestinian unity or peace with Israel; it is between a two-state solution or settlement-colonies.

Despite Israel’s attempt to deny us our long-awaited membership in the community of nations, we have met all prerequisites to statehood listed in the Montevideo Convention, the 1933 treaty that sets out the rights and duties of states. The permanent population of our land is the Palestinian people, whose right to self-determination has been repeatedly recognized by the United Nations, and by the International Court of Justice in 2004. Our territory is recognized as the lands framed by the 1967 border, though it is occupied by Israel.

We have the capacity to enter into relations with other states and have embassies and missions in more than 100 countries. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union have indicated that our institutions are developed to the level where we are now prepared for statehood. Only the occupation of our land hinders us from reaching our full national potential; it does not impede United Nations recognition.

The State of Palestine intends to be a peace-loving nation, committed to human rights, democracy, the rule of law and the principles of the United Nations Charter. Once admitted to the United Nations, our state stands ready to negotiate all core issues of the conflict with Israel. A key focus of negotiations will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on Resolution 194, which the General Assembly passed in 1948.

Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another, however, and not as a vanquished people ready to accept whatever terms are put in front of us.

We call on all friendly, peace-loving nations to join us in realizing our national aspirations by recognizing the State of Palestine on the 1967 border and by supporting its admission to the United Nations. Only if the international community keeps the promise it made to us six decades ago, and ensures that a just resolution for Palestinian refugees is put into effect, can there be a future of hope and dignity for our people. (Source)

Mahmoud Abbas is the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the president of the Palestinian National Authority.

Is Israel a strategic asset or liability for the United States? Interesting question. We must thank the Nixon Center for asking it. In my view, there are many reasons for Americans to wish the Jewish state well. Under current circumstances, strategic advantage for the United States is not one of them. If we were to reverse the question, however, and to ask whether the United States is a strategic asset or liability for Israel, there would be no doubt about the answer.

American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25 percent of Israel’s defense budget (depending on how you calculate this). Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products. Uniquely, Israeli companies are treated like American companies for purposes of U.S. defense procurement. Thanks to congressional earmarks, we also often pay half the costs of special Israeli research and development projects, even when – as in the case of defense against very short-range unguided missiles — the technology being developed is essentially irrelevant to our own military requirements. In short, in many ways, American taxpayers fund jobs in Israel’s military industries that could have gone to our own workers and companies. Meanwhile, Israel gets pretty much whatever it wants in terms of our top-of-the-line weapons systems, and we pick up the tab.

Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel total over $140 billion since 1949. This makes Israel by far the largest recipient of American giveaways since World War II. The total would be much higher if aid to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and support for Palestinians in refugee camps and the occupied territories were included. These programs have complex purposes but are justified in large measure in terms of their contribution to the security of the Jewish state.

Per capita income in Israel is now about $37,000 — on a par with the UK. Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it. Annual U.S. government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren’t available to any other foreign country.

These military and economic benefits are not the end of the story. The American government also works hard to shield Israel from the international political and legal consequences of its policies and actions in the occupied territories, against its neighbors, or – most recently – on the high seas. The nearly 40 vetoes the United States has cast to protect Israel in the UN Security Council are the tip of iceberg. We have blocked a vastly larger number of potentially damaging reactions to Israeli behavior by the international community. The political costs to the United States internationally of having to spend our political capital in this way are huge.

Where Israel has no diplomatic relations, U.S. diplomats routinely make its case for it. As I know from personal experience (having been thanked by the then Government of Israel for my successful efforts on Israel’s behalf in Africa), the U.S. government has been a consistent promoter and often the funder of various forms of Israeli programs of cooperation with other countries. It matters also that America – along with a very few other countries – has remained morally committed to the Jewish experiment with a state in the Middle East. Many more Jews live in America than in Israel. Resolute American support should be an important offset to the disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented security and prosperity.

Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us. Yet it’s pretty much taboo in the United States to ask what’s in it for Americans. I can’t imagine why. Still, the question I’ve been asked to address today is just that: what’s in it — and not in it — for us to do all these things for Israel.

We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning. It began with President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to personal sentiment and political expediency. We had an arms embargo on Israel until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater. In 1973, for reasons peculiar to the Cold War, we had to come to the rescue of Israel as it battled Egypt. The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly. And then there’s all the time we’ve put into the perpetually ineffectual and now long defunct “peace process.”

Still the US-Israel relationship has had strategic consequences. There is no reason to doubt the consistent testimony of the architects of major acts of anti-American terrorism about what motivates them to attack us. In the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus “the American people … on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people ….” As Osama Bin Laden, purporting to speak for the world’s Muslims, has said again and again: “we have . . . stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of ourdisagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine ….” Some substantial portion of the many lives and the trillions of dollars we have so far expended in our escalating conflict with the Islamic world must be apportioned to the costs of our relationship with Israel.

It’s useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours. Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with “host nation support” that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory. They store weapons for our troops’, rather than their own troops’ use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them

Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them. Perhaps it can’t. It is so estranged from everyone else in the Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it. Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection. It has no allies other than us. It has developed no friends. Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others. Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole. The notion that Israeli taxpayers might help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even those undertaken at Israel’s behest, would be greeted with astonishment in Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill.

Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational concepts. But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel that was initially proposed y our men and women in uniform. All originated with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf. Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.

Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses. There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that. Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat. Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study. Israel’s army, however, has had lessons to impart. Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan. Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns. These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious. Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not. I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify.

It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the money and weapons to fight them on its own. Leave aside the question of whether Israel’s battles are or should also be America’s. It is no longer true that Israel does not ask us to fight for it. The fact that prominent American apologists for Israel were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq does not, of course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure. But the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran explicitly to protect Israel and to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Their advocacy is fully coordinated with the Government of Israel. No one in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country pressing Americans to go to war over this.

Finally, the need to protect Israel from mounting international indignation about its behavior continues to do grave damage to our global and regional standing. It has severely impaired our ties with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. These costs to our international influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the economic and other burdens of the relationship.

Against this background, it’s remarkable that something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States. Perhaps it’s just that as someone once said: “people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Be that as it may, the United States and Israel have a lot invested in our relationship. Basing our cooperation on a thesis and narratives that will not withstand scrutiny is dangerous. It is especially risky in the context of current fiscal pressures in the United States. These seem certain soon to force major revisions of both current levels of American defense spending and global strategy, in the Middle East as well as elsewhere. They also place federally-funded programs in Israel in direct competition with similar programs here at home. To flourish over the long term, Israel’s relations with the United States need to be grounded in reality, not myth, and in peace, not war.

Prepared remarks during the Nixon Center debate. Source.

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A short history of the Jews since 1900 and the beginnings of Zionism in the world.

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The Guardian had an exclusive story on how South Africa negotiated the purchase of nuclear weapons from Israel in the 1970s, and that there are documents that prove that Israel in fact had the weapons, which they have never confirmed or denied. The paper has three pages on the news plus an opinion piece by Gary Younge regarding the Israeli government’s attacks on Richard Goldstone over his UN report on Israeli behaviour towards Palestinians.

Putting aside the nuclear weapons issue, the quotes included in this feature will confirm what many already believe about the attitudes of Israel and why it made a ready ally of old South Africa:

For years after its birth, Israel was publicly critical of apartheid and sought to build alliances with the newly independent African states through the 1960s.

But after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, African governments increasingly came to look on the Jewish state as another colonialist power. The government in Jerusalem cast around for new allies and found one in Pretoria. For a start, South Africa was already providing the yellowcake essential for building a nuclear weapon.

By 1976, the relationship had changed so profoundly that South Africa’s prime minister, John Vorster, could not only make a visit to Jerusalem but accompany Israel’s two most important leaders, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, to the city’s Holocaust memorial to mourn the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

Neither Israeli appears to have been disturbed by the fact that Vorster had been an open supporter of Hitler, a member of South Africa’s fascist and violently antisemitic Ossewabrandwag [“Ox-wagon guards”, a pro-German Afrikaner nationalist group of the 1940s] and that he was interned during the war as a Nazi sympathiser.

Rabin hailed Vorster as a force for freedom and at a banquet toasted “the ideals shared by Israel and South Africa: the hopes for justice and peaceful coexistence”.

A few months later, the South African government’s yearbook described the two countries having one thing in common above all else: “They are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples.”

Pro-Israeli Jews often express outrage when non-Jews compare Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Apartheid, and they often have excuses which are trivial facts whose significance they exaggerate, such as that Black South Africans were South African citizens while Palestinians are not Israeli citizens. (In fact, many Black South Africans were stripped of their citizenship and reassigned the citizenship of their “homelands”.) So much of Israeli policy in the West Bank in particular resembles Apartheid – the theft of the most fertile lands and water, for example, but some of it is their own invention, such as the wall to divide Palestinian villagers from their own farms and from each other, the Israelis-only highways and so on. (Source)

Fredrick Tobin, who has been jailed on the charges of questioning the holocaust, has said that the holocaust is supported by three claims: the claim that Germany under Hitler’s control systematically killed Jews, the claim of gas chambers, and the claim that 6 million Jews were killed. He said that none of these are true.

In 1945 after Nazi Germany was defeated by the allied forces a trial was ordered to punish the German generals, officers and those known to have cooperated with Nazi Germany and the third Reich of Adolf Hitler. The trial of Nuremberg as it is known in history was also to help the Jewish community get back at the Germans for what is called the “Holocaust”.

Text books tells us that 6 million Jews died as a result of the holocaust and that they all died in concentration camps and after torture, miseries and all kinds of punitive treatments given to them. They were men, women and children said to have been killed by the Germans under Hitler’s rule. There are however many other historians and university professors as well as Germans themselves and at times Jews who find it important to question the holocaust and the use of the holocaust by the Jewish community to gain sympathy 60 years after the events.

And this is where problems start for those wrongly said to be in denial of the holocaust. The critics are not necessarily in denial as they feel they have the right to question history on the exactitude of events. However, the people who question the holocaust are denied their rights and freedom to do so in what seems to be a total embargo on any forms of criticism of the holocaust.

This limits the freedom of the people who lives in regimes and countries that claims high and loud to be the defenders of the freedoms and liberties of the people. There seem to be total freedom for these people to criticize others, criticize Islam in particular but they are NOT allowed to criticize the Jews, Judaism and the Holocaust and their freedoms – so cherished and adored like a goddess – suddenly finds its limitations: Holocaust is off limit!

The limitations of the people who are supposed to be free in their countries in the West – which includes America, the EU and Australasia – does not end with the strict limitations imposed on them with regards to the holocaust. They are also not able to criticize Israel and its continued use or abuse of the events 60 years ago to promote Judaism and Israel as a legal entity.

Besides the limitations imposed on them, the “free” thinkers of the western world faces jail term and even more if they persist in presenting to the world a different view of what the holocaust is all about. The political conspiracy of the West to protect the Jewish community and their use of the holocaust to protect themselves from their own crimes against the Palestinians is more than obvious.

Those who feel it right to question the very motives of the use of the holocaust to preserve Israel and protect it of all its crimes against humanity in Palestine and the occupied territories are condemned severely by the “freedom” lovers in America, Europe and Australia or New Zealand.

The so called freedom of speech in the west is supposed to allow people to think freely and to act freely too according to their beliefs but the big question is why can’t they protest or question the holocaust. They can however question the deaths of 2 million Iraqis (corrected from 12 millions which was a typing error) – killed by the US and the EU and the UN – thanks to their sanctions against the tiny Arab country.

They are however allowed to criticize Islam and the Muslims for whatever good or bad they represent and they are to get away if they call Muslim names or draw pictures, cartoons of Muslims and their Prophets and the companions of the Prophet. They are also given gold medals if necessary or big pay checques if they do write books against Muslims and against Islam.

Yet if they do the same against the Jews and the holocaust, they are jailed, they stripped of their honorability and they are banned from writing on the holocaust ever again if they do not want to lose even their nationality!

They become outcast and they are kicked out of their realm by a set of laws that exist within the EU and in the US if they write or criticize the holocaust. But they are protected by another set of laws that allows them to criticize Islam.

What is it with the holocaust that they cannot think against it or present a different view – which is the basis of freedoms – of the holocaust? There must be something secretive about it in order for the west, the champion of freedoms, to be afraid about that it imposes such tough fines and jail sentences against writers, thinkers and even artists who are against the ‘protective’ custody given to holocaust.

Whether the Jews and the West want to protect Israel because of the 6 million killed (that is what they say) during the said holocaust is another story but why do they not allow people to speak freely on what they think the holocaust means to them? Strange it is for the West to impose such black outs on a subject that was supposed to be an open book for anyone to review.

If the holocaust was supposed to be viewed without contest then it surely mean it did not happen the way it is declared it happened and that probably not as many Jews died out of holocaust and gas chambers as they claim had happened!

In the name of press freedom and freedom of speech and of anything else you may think of, the right must be given to everyone to decide if they believe or not in the holocaust!

Fredrick Tobin, who has been jailed on the charges of questioning the holocaust, has said that the holocaust is supported by three claims: the claim that Germany under Hitler’s control systematically killed Jews, the claim of gas chambers, and the claim that 6 million Jews were killed. He said that none of these are true.

According to his beliefs, Auschwitz was a transfer center where Jews were led out of Europe to establish themselves in Palestine. The Austrian born historian also said it would have taken a much longer time for the Germans to kill 6 million Jews in 4 years during WWII.

Regarding the claimed 6 million Jews killed at the time of World War II, he has said that this is a mythical number. He said one time Jewish historians claimed that four million were killed, then this number decreased by 1 to 1 and a half million. Now they announce that the number of Jews who were killed in the Second World War to be 500,000. But, they continue to propagate that 6 million were killed.

He was jailed for questioning the Holocaust and he insist that anyone who questions the holocaust will be jailed because there is something wrong with the holocaust. Hence we can conclude that there is a limitation in the freedom of the press and freedom of speech in the West and it its limitations starts with the holocaust!

Another professor Robert Faurisson, 76, who has two citizenships in England and in France, was a professor at Leon University in France. But, in 1989 France forced him to end his teaching career due to his beliefs about the holocaust and the genocide that happened to the Jews. He did not agree that Germans were killing Jews by millions and this landed him in big trouble.

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Mohamed S. Kamel

Most of us remember 1948’s catastrophe, The Nakbah; the days when almost 900,000 Palestinians were forced to flee their homes and become refugees, the worst refugee crisis in history. Citizens, that should have been refugees for a few days ended up being so for 60 years and amount to more than 4 millions.

But this Nakbah did not start in 1948 it started long before; and it is well known to many of us but not to all.

The Nakbah really started in 1825, in Arrarat, when Mordechai Emanuel Noah[i] purchased the Grand Island, near Buffalo New York, as a homeland for demoralized Jews.

The Nakbah was renewed in 1890, with the scandal known as “The Dreyfus Affair” [ii]. That political scandal, with anti-Semitic overtones, is what divided France from the 1890s to the early 1900s. It involved the wrongful conviction for treason, in 1894, and the degradation and imprisonment on Devil’s Island, of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young and promising French artillery officer who was in advanced training with the Army’s General Staff.

The anti-Jewish sentiment that rocked the west from Europe to North America was the real reason behind the Nakbah and the real start. But the Nakbah practically started in 1897, when Theodore Herzl[iii] met with Mordechai Emanuel Noah and both converted the people’s yells in Dreyfus’ convection “Death to the traitor, death to the Jews” into a project of a Jewish state.

Herzl wrote: “A Jewish state” — this is the only solution to anti-Semitism. Herzl decided to work hard so that the Jews could have a state of their own. He hardly saw or spent any time with his family. His friends thought he was crazy. They did not believe it was possible to establish a state for the Jewish people. Orthodox Jews argued that it is forbidden to establish a Jewish state, because only Hashem will return the Jews to the land of Israel. The Jews were scared that if they began to desire their own state – this would lead to even more hatred. But Herzl did not give up.

They did not get the help they were looking for in the beginning. When Herzl met with important people, leaders and ministers of influential European countries (Germany, England, Turkey and Russia), he wanted them to help the Jews get a legal right (charter) to establish a state of their own.

Herzl invited representatives of the Jewish communities from all over the world to the first Zionist congress in 1897 in Basel (Bazel), Switzerland. The representatives at the congress decided that they wanted to establish a home land (state) for the Jewish people.

The British offered them what was commonly known as the “Uganda Project[iv]” before the Sixth Zionist Congress (Basel, August 1903), carrying the majority (295:178, 98 abstentions), then Argentina in 1904′s declaration, but both failed to be sold to the Jewish people.

While Herzl did not live to see the rejection of the Uganda plan or even the Argentina plan, his successor chose Palestine, where they can convince Jews to immigrate to the Promised Land.

In 1906, the Zionist congress decided that the Jewish homeland should be Palestine.

So Palestine was not the goal because of religious reasons but rather became the reason to reach a state.

They tried with the Sultan of Turkey, but the Sultan refused to cede Palestine to Zionists. They tried with Egypt to get Al ‘Arish, in the Sinai Peninsula, adjoining southern Palestine, but failed yet again.

The Zionist movement started out secular then turned into a coalition between Jewish religious and seculars where the religious side attracts the Christian Zionist.

The opposition to Zionism from Torah leaders was initially almost universal. These authorities rejected Zionism as a heresy without genuine basis within Judaism, and in conflict with the teachings of the Torah. In 1892, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, at that time the most representative Jewish personality in America, denounced, in a Montreal conference, the Zionist project as entirely antithetical to the spirit and letter of Judaic teachings:

“We totally disapprove of the initiative aiming at the creation of a Jewish State. Attempts of this type highlight an erroneous conception of the mission of Israel … that the Jewish Prophets were the first to proclaim … It aims at a Messianic time when men recognize belonging to one great community for the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.”[v].

This movement is still alive and has it is own supporters[vi] even within the state itself[vii].

Because the establishment of the Jewish state would need the approval or the collapse of Ottoman Empire, European Jewish offered Europe their support in the WWI in return of their right in Palestine. So the result was the Balfour Declaration in 1917[viii]. That declaration was made in a letter from Arthur James Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation. The “Balfour Declaration” was later incorporated into the “Sèvres Peace Treaty[ix]” with Turkey and the Mandate for Palestine.

Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country”.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely

Arthur James Balfour

In spite of all this, the immigration rate to Palestine was very low and they did not meet their real goal for the establishment of the state until the early thirties.

This era was marked by the raise of the Nazism movement and the threat from Germany’s new plan for an obligatory displacement of Jewish from Europe to Madagascar, where they can establish a Jewish homeland, in what is known as “Madagascar Plan”[x]. Such plan and all the discrimination against Jews in Europe was the success start of the mass immigration to Palestine.

The other problem faced by the Zionist’s plan was the Arab Jews, who were living a reasonable wealthy life in their countries[xi]. The Zionist movement is in real need for them for two reasons. First, the political argument for Jewish state will not be acceptable as long as there are Jews living a peaceful life in Arab countries. Second, the project needs finance and by them living in their native lands, the Arab countries, no finance would be wired to the new born state.

The huge example about this issue was the “Lavon Affair”, where a failed Israeli covert operation in Egypt known as Operation Susannah occurred, in which Egyptian, American, British and manly Jewish owned targets in Egypt were bombed in the summer of 1954[xii].

Some people might consider it a pro-Palestinian propaganda but it is the history and the reality. Even Zionists cannot deny it.

To recover from this Nakbah, we have to recognize the cause and work for justice. We have to remember that it is the Palestinian’s land. Still, at the same time, we have to recognize the reality.

Recognizing the reality does not mean giving up the land and the rights but struggling to achieve a real justice and long stand solution to the problem.

There is a big different between wishing and what could be done. In real life, there is no “Undo” but there is; let us do it.

Many of today’s Jewish recognize the grave mistake done on behalf of their name and we have to work with them hand in hand to return the golden era when Jews and other Arab were living side by side in harmony in peace and full citizenship. Let us promote the one state solution, the only solution by applying the South Africa model and live two people in one state [xiii].

So it is not 60 years it is long before, but is it going to stop here?

* Mohamed S. Kamel: is a Freelance writer, the editor of I.N. Daily http://indaily.net/, co-founder of the Canadian Egyptian for Democracy (CEFD), Alternative Perspective Media (APM-RAM) and the Canadian Muslim Forum (FMC-CMF), could be reached at mskamel@fmc-cmf.com

[i] Dreyfus Affair
[ii] ibid.
[iii] Theodor Herzl
[iv] British Uganda Program
[v] http://www.mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq30.html#_ednref32
[vi] http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/
[vii] http://www.doublestandards.org/jaz1.html
[viii] Balfour Declaration of 1917
[ix] Treaty of Sèvres
[x] Madagascar Plan
[xi] Naiem Giladi, The Jews of Iraq
[xii] Lavon Affair and What Really Happened: Lavon Affair
[xiii] Jewish Opposition to Zionism and Are All Jewish Zionist?

Sixty years after the Naqba, the catastrophe, Palestinians are still without a state. They are living under occupation, many are in refugee camps, others are scattered around the world, and a part of the Palestinian people are no more than second class citizens in Israel itself. The Palestinian struggle to achieve freedom and independence is therefore firstly a struggle to exist as a people. In this endeavour, resistance is essential. Resistance through memory, resistance through unwavering demands for their rights, resistance against open or covert attempts to displace them and take their land from them.

But what sort of resistance?

Armed resistance to occupation is legitimate and legal under international law, under the strict condition that it does not target civilians. But as someone who truly believes in the sanctity of human life, and as a doctor who always puts human life first, I have an inherent belief that non-violence is a fundamental philosophical choice.

Besides this, in a more practical way, I think that armed resistance is a narrow and elitist approach, involving only a select few and leaving the rest of the people out. And it is based on the assumption that armed force is the only force that exists in the world.

This is wrong. The decolonization struggle in India and the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa clearly proved that non-violence is a force too, and a much more powerful one. When a whole people moves, it is an irresistible force.

And this is our choice for Palestine.

I lead the Palestinian National Initiative (Al Mubadara), a political party and social movement dedicated to involving people — all people — in a mass, popular, non-violent resistance movement to obtain our rights as Palestinians.

This choice may seem utopian after sixty years of conflict and so much violence and bloodshed. But this is only an appearance, because the media only reports on acts of violence, creating the misleading impression that violence prevails. This is exacerbated by the dominant Israeli narrative which consistently portrays Palestinians as aggressors and not as a people under occupation struggling for freedom, justice and independence.

In truth, Palestinians are masters of non-violence. They have been resisting the all-pervasive violence of a forty-one year old military occupation every day since it began. Forty-one years of resilience, of silent and stubborn efforts to live a normal life, to work, to raise children, to love and to exist, simply to exist, despite the hundreds of checkpoints, the incursions, the arrests, the killings, the house demolitions, the land dispossession, the discriminatory laws, the arbitrary and unjust actions of the Israeli military.

In such a situation building a school, choosing to become a doctor, cultivating your ancestral olive grove are all acts of resistance.

The Palestinian people made the strategic choice of non-violence decades ago. Now they need a leadership ready and willing to fully embrace this strategy, to capitalize on past experience and achievements in order to bring this formidable popular commitment to the next level: to switch from passive to active resistance; to start again a fully fledged, popular, mass non-violent resistance movement like the one that existed during the first intifada.

To achieve this goal, we need to engage with people, to convince and mobilize them, to reach a critical mass. And we need to defeat our greatest enemy: hopelessness. But we have a strategy.

The Palestinian National Initiative bases all its work on four pillars: 1 – Involving and organizing the people at the grassroots level. 2 – Helping people to stay where they live, providing support to their resilience and giving them the means to continue to resist in this most fundamental way, that is, to exist on their land. 3 – Working hand-in-hand with a strong international solidarity movement, which provides practical support and more importantly, moral support and hope. 4 – Working for a unified Palestinian leadership.

Today, in 2008, Palestinians are facing one of the most difficult periods in their history. The Gaza Strip is under a relentless and inhuman siege which began in January 2006, after HAMAS’ electoral victory in free and fair elections carried out under international observation. And Israel has been tightening this siege ever since, pushing the people of Gaza into an artificially created humanitarian catastrophe with the silent consent of the international community. The West Bank is more divided than ever, with the Apartheid Wall and settlements swallowing more and more Palestinian land. East Jerusalem is under threat of being entirely cut off from its Palestinian hinterland by new Israeli settlements carefully thought out to achieve the illegal annexation of the city.

And the Palestinian leadership, weakened and divided, could not react to the Annapolis meeting in any constructive manner. Palestinians are now engaged in an Israeli-controlled peace process which justifies holding 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza under siege, lacking electricity, fuel and even food. What kind of peace can this produce?

Today, Palestinians need your solidarity. The vocal few who have chosen non-violent resistance and the silent majority who have made the same choice, but are too exhausted, dispirited or weak to actively involve themselves in the struggle, both need your support. It is time for the people of the world to make their voices heard.

Expressing solidarity with the Palestinians who have chosen non-violence comforts them in their choice and strengthens their conviction. Your active solidarity means that you too are choosing non-violence.

Together, let us build a just and lasting peace for all, Palestinians and Israelis alike, based on justice, democracy and respect for human rights.

George Bush and Gordon Brown are right: there should be no nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The risk of a nuclear conflagration could be greater there than anywhere else. Any nation developing them should expect a firm diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions on Israel?

Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I also believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of economic pressure and bribery, from doing so (a military response would of course be disastrous). I believe that Bush and Brown – who maintain their nuclear arsenals in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty – are in no position to lecture anyone else. But if, as Mr Bush claims, the proliferation of such weapons “would be a dangerous threat to world peace”(1), why does neither man mention the fact that Israel, according to a secret briefing by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, possesses between 60 and 80 of them?(2)

Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of “nuclear ambiguity”: neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear weapons. But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction(3). The fiction of ambiguity is fiercely guarded. In 1986, when the nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu handed photographs of Israel’s bomb factory to the Sunday Times, he was lured from Britain to Rome, drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents, tried in secret and sentenced to 18 years. He served 12 of them in solitary confinement and was banged up again – for six months – soon after he was released.

But in December last year, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert accidentally let slip that Israel, like “America, France and Russia” had nuclear weapons(4). Opposition politicians were furious. They attacked him for “a lack of caution bordering on irresponsibility.”(5) But US aid continues to flow without impediment.

As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was developing a nuclear device (what it didn’t know is that the first one had already been built by then).(6) The contrast to the efforts now being made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker.

At first, US diplomats urged the government to make its sale of 50 F4 Phantom jets conditional on Israel’s abandonment of its nuclear programme. As a note sent from the Near East Bureau to the Secretary of State in October 1968 reveals, the order would make the US “the principal supplier of Israel’s military needs” for the first time. In return it should require “commitments that would make it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go nuclear.”(7) Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required: France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.

Twenty days later, on November 4th 1968, when the assistant defense secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to Washington), Rabin “did not dispute in any way our information on Israel’s nuclear or missile capability”(8). He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin announced that the proposal was “completely unacceptable to us”(9). On November 27th, Lyndon Johnson’s administration accepted Israel’s assurance that “it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons”(10).

As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken even before it was made. A record of a phone conversation between Henry Kissinger and another official in July 1969 reveals that Richard Nixon was “very leary of cutting off the Phantoms”(11), despite Israel’s blatant disregard of the agreement. The deal went ahead, and from then on the US administration sought to bamboozle its own officials in order to defend Israel’s lie. In August 1969, US officials were sent to “inspect” Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant. But a memo from the State Department reveals that “the US government is not prepared to support a “real” inspection effort in which the team members can feel authorised to ask directly pertinent questions and/or insist on being allowed to look at records, logs, materials and the like. The team has in many subtle ways been cautioned to avoid controversy, “be gentlemen” and not take issue with the obvious will of the hosts.”(12) Nixon refused to pass the minutes of the conversation he’d had with the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to the US Ambassador To Israel, Wally Barbour(13). Meir and Nixon appear to have agreed that the Israeli programme could go ahead, as long as it was kept secret.

The US government has continued to protect it. Every six months, the intelligence agencies provide Congress with a report on technology acquired by foreign states that’s “useful for the development or production of weapons of mass destruction.” These reports discuss the programmes in India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and other nations, but not in Israel(14). Whenever other states have tried to press Israel to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US and European governments have blocked them(15). Israel has also exempted itself from the biological and chemical weapons conventions(16).

By refusing to sign these treaties, it ensures that it needs never be inspected. While the IAEA’s inspectors crawl round Iran’s factories, put seals on its uranium tanks and blow the whistle when it fails to cooperate, they have no legal authority to inspect facilities in Israel(17). So when the Israeli government complains, as it did last week, that the head of the IAEA is “sticking his head in the sand over Iran’s nuclear programme”(18), you can only gape at its chutzpah. Israel is constantly racking up the pressure for action against Iran, aware that no powerful state will press for action against Israel.

Yes, Iran under Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. The president is a Holocaust denier opposed to the existence of Israel. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran responded to Saddam Hussein’s toxic bombardments with chemical weapons of its own(19). But Israel under Ehud Olmert is also a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. Two months ago it bombed a site in Syria (whose function is fiercely disputed). Last year it launched a war of aggression against Lebanon. It remains in occupation of Palestinian lands. In February 2001, according to the BBC, it used chemical weapons in Gaza: 180 people were admitted to hospital with severe convulsions(20). Nuclear weapons in Israel’s hands are surely just as dangerous as nuclear weapons in Iran’s.

So when will our governments speak up? When will they acknowledge that there is already a nuclear power in the Middle East, and that it presents an existential threat to its neighbours? When will they admit that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one? When will they demand that the rules they impose on Iran should also apply to Israel?

Published in the Guardian, 20th November 2007

References:

1. George Bush, 17th October 2007. Press Conference by the President. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/10/20071017.html

2. US DIA, July 1999. The Decades Ahead, 1999-202. Extracted at: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/index.html

3. Luke Harding and Duncan Campbell, 13th December 2006. The Guardian.

4. Greg Myre, 12th December 2006. In a Slip, Israel’s Leader Seems to Confirm Its Nuclear Arsenal. New York Times.

5. Yossi Beilin, quoted by Luke Harding and Duncan Campbell, ibid.

6. The archive can be viewed here: http://www.gwu.edu:80/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/index.htm

7. Parker T. Hart, NEA, 15th October 1968. Memo to the Secretary of State. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-02.pdf

8. Department of Defense, 4th November 1968. Memorandum of Conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-03a.pdf

9. Department of Defense, 8th November 1968. Memorandum of Conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-03b.pdf

10. Paul C Warnke, Assistant Secretary of Defense, 27th November 1968. Letter to Yitzhak Rabin. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-03d.pdf

11. Henry Kissinger and Elliot Richardson, 16th July 1969. Phone conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-12.pdf

12. Department of State, 13th August 1969. Memorandum of Conversation. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-16b.pdf

13. Harold H. Saunders, the White House, 8th December 1969. Record of the President’s Talk with Golda Meir. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-26.pdf

14. Joseph Cirincione, 11th March 2005. Iran and Israel’s Nuclear Weapons.

http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=3217

15. No author given, 20th September 2006. Arab states urge IAEA to slam Israel for atomic arsenal. Haaretz.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/765538.html

16. It has signed but not ratified the CWC. It has not signed the BWC.

17. Mohamed ElBaradei, 27th July 2004. Interview with Al-Ahram News. http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Transcripts/2004/alahram27072004.html

18. Shaul Mofaz, deputy prime minister, quoted by Tim Butcher,12th November 2007. Israel calls for sacking of IAEA’s ElBaradei. Daily Telegraph.

19. http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iran/cw/index.html

20. Correspondent, 17th March 2003. Israel’s Secret Weapon. BBC Two. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/correspondent/transcripts/17_03_2003.txt

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind.

I checked the date – no, it was not 1 April (April Fool’s Day) – but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being “our” Middle East envoy.

(Tony) Blair?

That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region – he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail – is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world’s last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

Of course, he’ll be in touch with Mahmoud Abbas, will try to marginalise Hamas, will talk endlessly about “moderates”; and we’ll have to listen to him pontificating about morality, how he’s absolutely and completely confident that he’s doing the right thing (and this, remember, is the same man who postponed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year in order to share George Bush’s ridiculous hope of an Israeli victory over Hizbollah) in bringing peace to the Middle East…

Not once – ever – has he apologised.

Not once has he said he was sorry for what he did in our name.

Yet Blair actually believes – in what must be a record act of self-indulgence for a man who cooked up the fake evidence of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” – that he can do good in the Middle East.

For here is a man who is totally discredited in the region – a politician who has signally failed in everything he ever tried to do in the Middle East – now believing that he is the right man to lead the Quartet to patch up “Palestine”.

I suppose Blair has his uses. His unique blend of ruthlessness and dishonesty will no doubt go down quite well with our local Arab dictators.

And I have a suspicion – always assuming this extraordinary story is not untrue – that Blair will be able to tour around Damascus, even Tehran, in his hunt for “peace”, thus paving the way for an American exit strategy in Iraq.

But “Palestine”? The Palestinians held elections – real, copper-bottomed ones, the democratic variety – and Hamas won.

But Blair will presumably not be able to talk to Hamas.

He’ll need to talk only to Abbas’s flunkies, to negotiate with an administration described so accurately this week by my old colleague Rami Khoury as a “government of the imagination”.

The Americans are talking – and here I am quoting the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack – about an envoy who can work “with the Palestinians in the Palestinian system” to develop institutions for a “well-governed state”.

It was James Wolfensohn who was originally “our” Middle East envoy, a former World Bank president who left in frustration because he could neither reconstruct Gaza nor work with a “peace process” that was being eroded with every new Jewish settlement and every Qassam rocket fired into Israel.

Does Blair think he can do better?

What honeyed words will we hear?

I bet he doesn’t mention the Israeli wall which is taking so much extra land from the Palestinians. It will be a “security barrier” or a “fence” (like the famous Berlin “fence” which was actually called a “security barrier” by those generous East German Vopo cops of the time).

There will be appeals for restraint “on all sides”, endless calls for “moderation”, none at all for justice (which is all the people of the Middle East have been pleading for over the past 100 years).

And Israel likes Tony Blair.

Indeed, Blair’s slippery use of language is likely to appeal to Ehud Olmert, whose government continues to take Arab land for Jews and Jews only as he waits to discover a Palestinian with whom he can “negotiate”, Mahmoud Abbas now having the prestige of a rabbit after his forces were crushed in Gaza.

Which of “Palestine”‘s two prime ministers will Blair talk to?

Why, the one with a collar and tie, of course, who works for Mr Abbas, who will demand more “security”, tougher laws, less democracy.

Once, our favourite trouble-shooter was James Baker – who worked for George W’s father until the Israelis got tired of him – and before that we had a whole list of UN Secretary Generals who visited the region, frowned and warned of serious consequences if peace did not soon come.

Kurt Waldheim visits – especially to the late King Hussein – came to nothing, of course. But Waldheim’s ability to draw a curtain over his wartime past does have one thing in common with Blair. For Waldheim steadfastly, pointedly, repeatedly, refused to acknowledge – ever – that he had ever done anything wrong.

Now who does that remind you of?

Boycotts are the weapons of the weak in conflicts. Their chief importance, unlike Miami rhinoplasty, lies in their ability to raise public awareness and arouse disapproval. Yet, going by the paranoid reaction to the academic boycott of Israel, it might as well have been a declaration of nuclear war. No peaceable action in recent times has provoked so much anger and hostility as this British-based boycott.

In the wake of the British University and College Union’s vote at its annual general meeting on May 30 to initiate a national debate on boycotting Israeli academic institutions, a wave of hysteria engulfed Israel and its friends. Articles appeared, before and after the vote, denouncing the UCU resolution and its initiators, and heated correspondence is still ongoing. Threats were made against members of the boycott group by pro-Israel organizations and individuals, and campaigns were mounted to defeat the boycott. Costly one-page advertisements appeared in The Times and The Guardian carrying scores of eminent signatories opposing the boycott.

Photographs of the boycott’s “ringleaders”, like those of wanted criminals, appeared on the front page of the major British Jewish weekly, The Jewish Chronicle, which also carried a distressed article by Britain’s chief rabbi condemning the boycott as an anti-Semitic “witch-hunt”. The Daily Mail’s Jewish columnist Melanie Phillips declared “the age of reason” over. The Jewish-American lawyer and fierce warrior for Israel Alan Derschowitz has teamed up with his British counterpart, Anthony Julius to take legal action against British supporters of the boycott. While this would not be valid in British law, its aim is clearly to intimidate.

The fuss has not abated yet and more battles lie ahead this autumn as pressure is put on the UCU to ballot its members individually in the hope they will reject the motion passed by conference.

Two major misconceptions lie at the base of this response, both deliberately fostered. The first misconception is that the boycott is aimed against Israeli academic individuals, and the second, and more important, that it is anti-Semitic.

With regards to the first misconception, the boycott in fact calls for a ban on dealings with Israeli academic institutions, for example, not participating in joint research, conferences or other collaboration with them. In a malicious misrepresentation of this position, opponents claim that the boycott will end the free exchange of ideas with individual Israelis and encourage discrimination against them in British academia. By suppressing “free speech”, this would end any hope of change in Israel’s policies that academics could have brought about, an erroneous argument that has galvanized opposition in Britain to the boycott.

The second charge of anti-Semitism follows closely on this. The allegation is that the real reason for the boycott is hatred of Jews, a new outbreak of an old gentile affliction. Nothing is more designed to provoke and mislead than this charge, which, its authors know, antagonizes all Jews and many non-Jews.

In fact of course, the imputation of anti-Semitism is a red herring, as so often when Israel is criticized, and its aim as always is to deflect criticism. In the case of the British boycott committee, it is particularly inapt, since most of the members are Jewish. The campaign started in 2004 with a letter that two British academics, Hilary and Steven Rose, published in The Guardian calling for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions in support of a similar call by Palestinian civil society organizations. These, representing a majority of Palestinian academics and other professionals, had united to form a campaign for boycotting Israel because of its repressive polices against them.

The Guardian letter spearheaded a growing demand for Israel to be called to account for its policies, soon joined by many academics in Europe and beyond. Support was particularly strong in South Africa, which had lived through a similar boycott during the apartheid era, and was especially sympathetic to the boycott’s rationale and aims. Since that time, the boycott and divestment campaign against Israel has grown, resulting in the Association of University Teachers’ Union voting for a boycott against two Israeli universities at its meeting in 2005. Thanks to a vigorous pro-Israel campaign against it, the decision was overturned within a month. But the issue did not go away, and resulted in the vote for the boycott two years later by the newly formed UCU which had absorbed the AUT.

Academic boycotts are not new to Britain. In 1965, a boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa was initiated by 34 universities in response to a call for solidarity by the African National Congress. After a prolonged British campaign, the boycott was adopted as policy by the AUT in 1988 and remained in place until the end of apartheid.

The academic boycott against Israel is no different. Israel’s well-documented repression of Palestinian academic life and victimization of Palestinian teachers and students is a scandal to be denounced by all those who claim to care about academic freedom. Rather than rushing to Israel’s defense in a situation so perverse and immoral, all efforts should be directed toward boycotting all Israeli institutions. Only by making Israel a pariah state, as happened with South Africa, will its people understand they cannot trample on another people’s rights without penalty.

“Be certain that Yasser Arafat’s final days are numbered, but allow us to finish him off our way, not yours. And be sure as well that … the promises I made in front of President Bush, I will give my life to keep.” Those words were written by the Fatah warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose US- and Israeli-backed forces were routed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month, in a 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz and published on Hamas’ website on 4 July this year.

Dahlan, who despite his failure to hold Gaza, remains a senior advisor to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, outlines his conspiracy to overthrow Arafat, destroy Palestinian institutions and replace them with a quisling leadership subservient to Israel. Dahlan writes of his fear that Arafat would convene the Palestinian legislative council and ask it to withdraw confidence from then prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, who had been appointed earlier in 2003 at Bush’s insistence in order to curb Arafat’s influence. Dahlan wrote that “complete coordination and cooperation by all” was needed to prevent this, as well as “subjecting [Arafat] to pressure so that he cannot carry out this step.” Dahlan reveals that “we have already begun attempts to polarize the views of many legislative council members by intimidation and temptation so that they will be on our side and not his [Arafat's].”

Dahlan closes his letter to Mofaz saying, “it remains only for me to convey my gratitude to you and the prime minister [Ariel Sharon] for your continued confidence in us, and to you all respect.”

This letter is a small but vivid piece of evidence to add to the existing mountain, of the conspiracy in which the Abbas leadership is involved. In the month since Abbas’ appointment of a Vichy-style “emergency government” headed by Salam Fayad, historic Fatah leaders, such as Farouq Qaddumi and Hani al-Hassan have signalled their opposition to Abbas’ actions, specifically rejecting his order that Palestinian resistance fighters disarm while Israeli occupation continues unchallenged.

This underscores that the split among Palestinians today is not between Hamas and Fatah, nor between “extremist” or “moderate,” or “Islamist” or “secular,” but between the minority who have cast their lot in with the enemy as collaborators on the one hand, and those who uphold the right and duty to resist on the other.

Israeli leaders, at least, are crystal clear about what they expect from their Palestinian servants. Ephraim Sneh, until recently deputy defense minister, expresses the consensus view of the Israeli establishment:

“The most urgent and important mission for Israel at this time is preventing a Hamas takeover of the West Bank. It is possible to do this by weakening Hamas through visible diplomatic progress; helping the effective and successful functioning of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad’s government; and the creation of conditions for the total failure of the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip” (“How to stop Hamas,” Haaretz, 17 July 2007).

Sneh makes clear that “in order to emerge victorious, military campaigns and arrests are not enough — it is imperative to bring about [Hamas'] political-public defeat via another Palestinian element.” This element is Fatah. Sneh lists a number of measures designed to achieve this, including employing more Palestinians as low-wage laborers in the Israeli economy, releasing Fatah prisoners and giving back Palestinian tax money stolen by Israel — but says absolutely nothing about stopping the construction of Jewish-only Israeli colonies, ending military occupation and abrogating racist laws and practices. With characteristic vagueness he only asserts that “it is necessary to embark on a discussion with the Palestinian president about the principles of the permanent status agreement.” Fourteen years after Oslo, this is not likely to convince too many skeptics.

Since the Oslo accords were signed, Israel has done all it can to undermine the prospects of Palestinian statehood, consistently hobbling the Palestinian Authority. What lies behind Israel’s determination to prop up Abbas’ quisling leadership? Why not just let it all collapse and declare victory?

Israeli leaders know that shoring up support for an ethnic “Jewish state” depends on concealing the reality that Jews are no longer the majority population in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip — the territory controlled by the Israeli state. Israel needs the fig leaf of a Palestinian sovereign to take millions of Palestinians off its books, the way apartheid South Africa attempted to deploy the cover of “independent Black homelands” — Bantustans — to prolong white rule and give it a veneer of legitimacy. If the Palestinian Authority collapses, Fatah which has no popular base, will collapse with it.

As for Hamas, it stands at a crossroads. It can survive the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, but what will it become? It grew from a segment of Palestinian society — poor, religiously mobilized masses, yet it draws much broader support for its resistance against Israel from Palestinians orphaned by their turncoat leaders and hungry for a principled alternative. Hamas has the choice to articulate an agenda that can live up to the aspirations of Palestinian society in all its diversity, or it can leap into the traps that are being set for it.

Hamas leaders have made exemplary statements in favor of pluralism, genuine democracy, and the rule of law, and were rightly proud of the release of BBC journalist Alan Johnston. But they must be judged by their actions, and there are discouraging signs. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights has reported several cases of abuse, kidnapping and torture by members of Hamas’ Executive Force, and the death of a prisoner held by Hamas’ military wing. It is true that these incidents do not occur in a vacuum — Israel and its Fatah allies continue to engage in far more widespread murder, torture and kidnapping directed at Hamas members, and Hamas is engaged in a struggle for survival. But Hamas earned legitimacy by promising to end the ugly practices of Israeli-backed Fatah militias. It must fulfill that promise or see its hard-earned support disappear. At the same time it must begin to articulate a vision for the future that takes into account the reality of 11 million Israeli Jews and Palestinians living in a small country. We know what Hamas is against, but no one is clear what it is for.

Hamas is edging towards accepting a two-state solution just as the reality is beginning to dawn even on stalwarts of the Oslo peace process industry that the two-state solution, needed to save Israel as an enclave of Jewish privilege, is slipping out of reach. As a two-state solution “is becoming less likely,” observes Aaron David Miller, a 25-year veteran of the State Department and senior Clinton Administration official at the 2000 Camp David summit, “there is more talk among Palestinians of a one-state solution — which of course is not a solution at all, and which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.” (“Is peace out of reach?,” The Los Angeles Times, 15 July 2007).

Haaretz columnist Danny Rubinstein predicts that “sooner or later Hamas will fail in its war against Israel. But that [doesn't] mean that there will then be a return to the days of Oslo and the two-state vision.” Rather, he fears, “there will be increasingly strong demands by Palestinian Arabs, who constitute almost half the inhabitants of this land, who will say: Under the present conditions we cannot establish a state of our own, and what remains for us is to demand civil rights in the country that is our homeland. They will adopt the slogans of the struggle of the Arabs who are Israeli citizens, who demand equality and the definition of Israel as a state of all its citizens.” (“Nothing to sell the Palestinians,” 16 July 2007). Thus we can see that Abbas is now Israel’s last best hope in the struggle against democracy. Such a pathetic coalition cannot stand in the way of liberation.

American foreign policy in the Middle East experienced yet another major setback this month, when Hamas, whose Palestinian government the United States had tried to isolate, routed the rival Fateh movement in Gaza. In response, Israel sealed Gaza’s borders, making life even more unbearable in a place wracked by violence, poverty and despair.

It is important that we recognise the source of America’s failure, because it keeps recurring, making peace between Israel and Palestine more difficult. The roots of failure lie in the US and Israeli governments’ belief that military force and financial repression can lead to peace on their terms, rather than accepting a compromise on terms that the Middle East, the rest of the world and, crucially, most Israelis and Palestinians, accepted long ago.

For 40 years, since the Six-Day War of 1967, there has been one realistic possibility for peace: Israel’s return to its pre-1967 borders, combined with viable economic conditions for a Palestinian state, including access to trade routes, water supplies and other essential needs.

With small and mutually acceptable adjustments to those borders, these terms would enable peaceful co-existence of two states side by side. Perhaps three-fourths of both Israelis and Palestinians support this “land for peace” compromise, while one-fourth holds out for complete victory over the other side.

Rejectionists on both sides repeatedly undermined efforts to realise that compromise. Starting in the early 1970s, religious Israeli settlers and hardline Israeli nationalists pushed Israel into a disastrous policy of creating and expanding settlements on Arab lands in the West Bank, in violation of common sense and international diplomacy. That policy blocked peace ever since, setting the stage for decades of bloodshed.

Nor have extremists on either side shrunk from political murder. Islamic militants killed Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian peacemaker, while a Jewish militant killed Yitzhak Rabin, the would-be Israeli peacemaker. Violent extremists on both sides have ratcheted up their actions whenever the majority succeeded in getting closer to peace.

For the past 10 years, the greatest practical barrier to peace has been Israel’s failure to carry out any true withdrawal to its 1967 borders, owing to the political weight of hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and the religious and secular communities that support them. This remains the crucial truth; the rest follows as tragedy.

Even when the US or Israel have tabled peace offers, such as at Camp David in 2000, they have included convoluted ways to sustain the West Bank settlements and large settler populations, while denying an economically viable and contiguous Palestinian state.

The most recent debacle began when President George W. Bush called for Palestinian democracy in 2004, but then refused to honour the democratic process.

Dear Mr Blair,

The last two international peace envoys to the Middle East – Alvaro de Soto who represented the United Nations and James Wolfensohn who represented the UN plus others – shared one thing in common.

They both quit, driven crazy by the job.

In the spirit of finding a way for you to avoid the same fate, I write with what I hope are helpful suggestions about your new post-Premiership role as Middle East envoy.

First, you are going to have to change. As a prime minister who came to power through media spin and who was never shy to appear in front of camera, you are going to have to learn to embrace silence.

The issues are too complex and the egos of the regional leaders, Arab and Israeli, Muslim, Christian and Jewish, too delicate for you to feed half-digested gobbets of news each day to the world’s media.

You will have to learn that in the Middle East patience not profile is a blessing.

Second, you are going to have to tighten up on your use of language. At last year’s Guildhall after-dinner speech you said this: “Terrorism is dedicated to one end: to stop democracy flourishing in Arab and Moslem countries; to foster sectarian division; to drive out the possibility of reconciliation between people of different faiths.” It was the sort of solecism (One end cannot also have three ends) you can get away with when speaking to an audience that has just dined well, but in the Middle East it would get you roasted.

In November 2005 Condoleezza Rice, America’s foreign policy chief, took days to persuade Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to sign up to what was, basically, a simple agreement on border crossings.

Insiders who attended the negotiations revealed every word and punctuation mark were parsed to the ‘n’th degree for any possible implicit meaning.

It might also be helpful to recall the 2005 agreement remains stillborn and its clauses about opening up the border unfulfilled.

Third, you must rethink your relationship with President George W. Bush.

As the leader of Britain, your dealings with him were, naturally, driven by your perception of Britain’s strategic position.

That led to such encounters as the “Yo, Blair” meeting when you volunteered to go to the Middle East instead of Miss Rice because you were, by your own admission, more diplomatically expendable than the US Secretary of State.

You said: “Obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.” As a peace envoy you will no longer be able to see yourself as simply a tool of American foreign policy. You will be representing not just America or Britain but the international community, including the UN and the European Union.

When it comes to the Israel-Palestine issue, America’s dogged support of Israel has, in the eyes of many outsiders, been one of the main obstacles to a negotiated peace settlement.

When Mr de Soto took early retirement this year he grumbled his role as a UN negotiator had been hampered by constant diplomatic “pummelling” from America.

And in their infamous open letter of April 2004, 52 former British ambassadors and senior diplomats said the Israel-Palestine issue was stalled largely because America endorsed policies that were “one-sided and illegal”.

No other nation has more influence – for good and bad – in the Middle East than America and you are going to have to carefully rethink your relationship with Washington.

If handled artfully, your close personal relationship with President Bush could be your most powerful tool as a peace envoy, encouraging him to alter his backing for those “one-sided and illegal” policies.

But until you do, leaders of Arab nations in particular will be sceptical that you are simply Mr Bush’s poodle being given a run in the Middle East.

Finally, you will have to be prepared to do the unexpected.

When Mr Wolfensohn feared Israeli settlers were going to vandalise their industrial greenhouses in Gaza just before Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 he did the most extraordinary thing.

He put £300,000 of his own money into a fund to buy the greenhouses so they could be transferred to Palestinian farmers.

It was an expensive and generous gesture although it did not ultimately pay off. The greenhouses were looted by a Palestinian mob in their euphoria at Israel’s withdrawal.

It is a good model for what you can expect as Middle East peacemaker. It will be risky and, most likely, doomed to failure.

The boycott by Israel and the international community of the Palestinian Authority finally blew up in their faces with Hamas’ recent bloody takeover of Gaza. Or so argues Gideon Levy, one of the saner voices still to be found in Israel. “Starving, drying up and blocking aid do not sear the consciousness and do not weaken political movements. On the contrary … Reality has refuted the chorus of experts and commentators who preached [on] behalf of the boycott policy. This daft notion that it is possible to topple an elected government by applying pressure on a helpless population suffered a complete failure.”

But has Levy got it wrong? The faces of Israeli and American politicians, including Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush, appear soot-free. On the contrary. Over the past fortnight they have been looking and sounding even more smug than usual.

The problem with Levy’s analysis is that it assumes that Israel and the US wanted sanctions to bring about the fall of Hamas, either by giving Fatah the upper hand so that it could deal a knockout blow to the Palestinian government, or by inciting ordinary Palestinians to rise up and demand that their earlier electoral decision be reversed and Fatah reinstalled. In short, Levy, like most observers, assumes that the policy was designed to enforce regime change.

But what if that was not the point of the sanctions? And if so, what goals were Israel and the US pursuing?

The parallels between Iraq and Gaza may be instructive. After all, Iraq is the West’s only other recent experiment in imposing sanctions to starve a nation. And we all know where it led: to an even deeper entrenchment of Saddam Hussein’s rule.

True, the circumstances in Iraq and Gaza are different: most Iraqis wanted Saddam out but had no way to effect change, while most Gazans wanted Hamas in and made it happen by voting for them in last year’s elections. Nevertheless, it may be that the US and Israel drew a different lesson from the sanctions experience in Iraq.

Whether intended or not, sanctions proved a very effective tool for destroying the internal bonds that held Iraqi society together. Destitution and hunger are powerful incentives to turn on one’s neighbor as well as one’s enemy. A society where resources — food, medicines, water and electricity — are in short supply is also a society where everyone looks out for himself. It is a society that, with a little prompting, can easily be made to tear itself apart.

And that is precisely what the Americans began to engineer after their “shock and awe” invasion of 2003. Contrary to previous US interventions abroad, Saddam was not toppled and replaced with another strongman — one more to the West’s liking. Instead of regime change, we were given regime overthrow. Or as Daniel Pipes, one of the neoconservative ideologues of the attack on Iraq, expressed it, the goal was “limited to destroying tyranny, not sponsoring its replacement … Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition’s responsibility nor its burden.”

In place of Saddam, the Americans created a safe haven known as the Green Zone from which its occupation regime could loosely police the country and oversee the theft of Iraq’s oil, while also sitting back and watching a sectarian civil war between the Sunni and Shia populations spiral out of control and decimate the Iraqi population.

What did Washington hope to achieve? Pipes offers a clue: “When Sunni terrorists target Shiites and vice-versa, non-Muslims [that is, US occupation forces and their allies] are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy but not a strategic one.” In other words, enabling a civil war in Iraq was far preferable to allowing Iraqis to unite and mount an effective resistance to the US occupation. After all, Iraqi deaths — at least 650,000 of them, according to the last realistic count — are as good as worthless, while US soldiers’ lives cost votes back home.

For the neocon cabal behind the Iraq invasion, civil war was seen to have two beneficial outcomes.

First, it eroded the solidarity of ordinary Iraqis, depleting their energies and making them less likely to join or support the resistance to the occupation. The insurgency has remained a terrible irritation to US forces but not the fatal blow it might have been were the Sunni and Shia to fight side by side. As a result, the theft of Iraq’s resources has been made easier.

And second, in the longer term, civil war is making inevitable a slow process of communal partition and ethnic cleansing. Four million Iraqis are reported to have been forced either to leave the country or flee their homes. Iraq is being broken up into small ethnic and religious fiefdoms that will be easier to manage and manipulate.

Is this the model for Gaza now and the West Bank later?

It is worth recalling that neither Israel nor the US pushed for an easing of the sanctions on the Palestinian Authority after the national unity government of Hamas and Fatah was formed earlier this year. In fact, the US and Israel could barely conceal their panic at the development. The moment the Mecca agreement was signed, reports of US efforts to train and arm Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas became a newspaper staple.

The cumulative effect of US support for Fatah, as well as Israel’s continuing arrests of Hamas legislators in the West Bank, was to strain already tense relations between Hamas and Fatah to breaking point. When Hamas learned that Abbas’ security chief, Mohammed Dahlan, with US encouragement, was preparing to carry out a coup against them in Gaza, they got the first shot in.

Did Fatah really believe it could pull off a coup in Gaza, given the evident weakness of its forces there, or was the rumour little more than American and Israeli spin, designed to undermine Hamas’ faith in Fatah and doom the unity government? Were Abbas and Dahlan really hoping to topple Hamas, or were they the useful idiots needed by the US and Israel? These are questions that may have to be settled by the historians.

But with the fingerprints of Elliott Abrams, one of the more durable neocons in the Bush administration, to be found all over this episode, we can surmise that what Washington and Israel are intending for the Palestinians will have strong echoes of what has unfolded in Iraq.

By engineering the destruction of the unity government, Israel and the US have ensured that there is no danger of a new Palestinian consensus emerging, one that might have cornered Israel into peace talks. A unity government might have found a formula offering Israel:
# limited recognition inside the pre-1967 borders in return for recognition of a Palestinian state and the territorial integrity of the West Bank and Gaza;
# a long-term ceasefire in return for Israel ending its campaign of constant violence and violations of Palestinian sovereignty;
# and a commitment to honor past agreements in return for Israel’s abiding by UN resolutions and accepting a just solution for the Palestinian refugees.

After decades of Israeli bad faith, and the growing rancor between Fatah and Hamas, the chances of them finding common ground on which to make such an offer, it must be admitted, would have been slight. But now they are non-existent.

That is exactly how Israel wants it, because it has no interest in meaningful peace talks with the Palestinians or in a final agreement. It wants only to impose solutions that suit Israel’s interests, which are securing the maximum amount of land for an exclusive Jewish state and leaving the Palestinians so weak and divided that they will never be able to mount a serious challenge to Israel’s dictates.

Instead, Hamas’ dismal authority over the prison camp called Gaza and Fatah’s bastard governance of the ghettoes called the West Bank offer a model more satisfying for Israel and the US — and one not unlike Iraq. A sort of sheriff’s divide and rule in the Wild West.

Just as in Iraq, Israel and the US have made sure that no Palestinian strongman arises to replace Yasser Arafat. Just as in Iraq, they are encouraging civil war as an alternative to resistance to occupation, as Palestine’s resources — land, not oil — are stolen. Just as in Iraq, they are causing a permanent and irreversible partition, in this case between the West Bank and Gaza, to create more easily managed territorial ghettoes. And just as in Iraq, the likely reaction is an even greater extremism from the Palestinians that will undermine their cause in the eyes of the international community.

Where will this lead the Palestinians next?

Israel is already pulling the strings of Fatah with a new adeptness since the latter’s humiliation in Gaza. Abbas is currently basking in Israeli munificence for his rogue West Bank regime, including the decision to release a substantial chunk of the $700 million tax monies owed to the Palestinians (including those of Gaza, of course) and withheld for years by Israel. The price, according to the Israeli media, was a commitment from Abbas not to contemplate re-entering a unity government with Hamas.

The goal will be to increase the strains between Hamas and Fatah to breaking point in the West Bank, but ensure that Fatah wins the confrontation there. Fatah is already militarily stronger and with generous patronage from Israel and the US — including arms and training, and possibly the return of the Badr Brigade currently holed up in Jordan — it should be able to rout Hamas. The difference in status between Gaza and the West Bank that has been long desired by Israel will be complete.

The Palestinian people have already been carved up into a multitude of constituencies. There are the Palestinians under occupation, those living as second-class citizens of Israel, those allowed to remain “residents” of Jerusalem, and those dispersed to camps across the Middle East. Even within these groups, there are a host of sub-identities: refugees and non-refugees; refugees included as citizens in their host state and those excluded; occupied Palestinians living under the control of the Palestinian Authority and those under Israel’s military government; and so on.

Now, Israel has entrenched maybe the most significant division of all: the absolute and irreversible separation of Gaza and the West Bank. What applies to one will no longer be true for the other. Each will be a separate case; their fates will no longer be tied. One will be, as Israelis like to call it, Hamastan, and other Fatahland, with separate governments and different treatment from Israel and the international community.

The reasons why Israel prefers this arrangement are manifold.

First, Gaza can now be written off by the international community as a basket case. The Israeli media is currently awash with patronizing commentary from the political and security establishments about how to help avoid a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including the possibility of air drops of aid over the Gaza “security fence” — as though Gaza were Pakistan after an earthquake. From past experience, and the current menacing sounds from Israel’s new Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, those food packages will quickly turn into bombs if Gaza does not keep quiet.

As Israeli and US officials have been phrasing it, there is a new “clarity” in the situation. In a Hamastan, Gaza’s militants and civilians can be targeted by Israel with little discrimination and no outcry from the international community. Israel will hope that message from Gaza will not be lost on West Bank Palestinians as they decide who to give their support to, Fatah or Hamas.

Second, at their meeting last week Olmert and Bush revived talk of Palestinian statehood. According to Olmert, Bush “wants to realize, while he is in office, the dream of creating a Palestinian state.” Both are keen to make quick progress, a sure sign of mischief in the making. Certainly, they know they are now under no pressure to create the single viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza once promised by President Bush. An embattled Abbas will not be calling for the inclusion of Gaza in his ghetto-fiefdom.

Third, the separation of Gaza from the West Bank may be used to inject new life into Olmert’s shopworn convergence plan — if he can dress it up in new clothes. Convergence, which required a very limited withdrawal from those areas of the West Bank heavily populated with Palestinians while Israel annexed most of its illegal colonies and kept the Jordan Valley, was officially ditched last summer after Israel’s humiliation by Hizballah.

Why seek to revive convergence? Because it is the key to Israel securing the expanded Jewish fortress state that is its only sure protection from the rapid demographic growth of the Palestinians, soon to outnumber Jews in the Holy Land, and Israel’s fears that it may then be compared to apartheid South Africa.

If the occupation continues unchanged, Israel’s security establishment has long been warning, the Palestinians will eventually wake up to the only practical response: to dissolve the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s clever ruse to make the Palestinian leadership responsible for suppressing Palestinian resistance to the occupation, thereby forcing Israel to pick up the bill for the occupation rather than Europe. The next stage would be an anti-apartheid struggle for one state in historic Palestine.

For this reason, demographic separation from the Palestinians has been the logic of every major Israeli policy initiative since — and including — Oslo. Convergence requires no loss of Israel’s control over Palestinian lives, ensured through the all but finished grid of walls, settlements, bypass roads and checkpoints, only a repackaging of their occupation as statehood.

The biggest objection in Israel to Olmert’s plan — as well as to the related Gaza disengagement — was the concern that, once the army had unilaterally withdrawn from the Palestinian ghettoes, the Palestinians would be free to launch terror attacks, including sending rockets out of their prisons into Israel. Most Israelis, of course, never consider the role of the occupation in prompting such attacks.

But Olmert may believe he has found a way to silence his domestic critics. For the first time he seems genuinely keen to get his Arab neighbors involved in the establishment of a Palestinian “state”. As he headed off to the Sharm al-Sheikh summit with Egypt, Jordan and Abbas this week, Olmert said he wanted to “jointly work to create the platform that may lead to a new beginning between us and the Palestinians.”

Did he mean partnership? A source in the Prime Minister’s Office explained to The Jerusalem Post why the three nations and Abbas were meeting. “These are the four parties directly impacted by what is happening right now, and what is needed is a different level of cooperation between them.” Another spokesman bewailed the failure so far to get the Saudis on board.

This appears to mark a sea change in Israeli thinking. Until now Tel Aviv has regarded the Palestinians as a domestic problem — after all, they are sitting on land that rightfully, at least if the Bible is to be believed, belongs to the Jews. Any attempt at internationalizing the conflict has therefore been strenuously resisted.

But now the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office is talking openly about getting the Arab world more directly involved, not only in its usual role as a mediator with the Palestinians, nor even in simply securing the borders against smuggling, but also in policing the territories. Israel hopes that Egypt, in particular, is as concerned as Tel Aviv by the emergence of a Hamastan on its borders, and may be enticed to use the same repressive policies against Gaza’s Islamists as it does against its own.

Similarly, Olmert’s chief political rival, Binyamin Netanyahu of Likud, has mentioned not only Egyptian involvement in Gaza but even a Jordanian military presence in the West Bank. The “moderate” Arab regimes, as Washington likes to call them, are being seen as the key to developing new ideas about Palestinian “autonomy” and regional “confederation.” As long as Israel has a quisling in the West Bank and a beyond-the-pale government in Gaza, it may believe it can corner the Arab world into backing such a “peace plan.”

What will it mean in practice? Possibly, as Zvi Barel of Haaretz speculates, we will see the emergence of half a dozen Palestinian governments in charge of the ghettoes of Gaza, Ramallah, Jenin, Jericho, and Hebron. Each may be encouraged to compete for patronage and aid from the “moderate” Arab regimes but on condition that Israel and the US are satisfied with these Palestinian governments’ performance.

In other words, Israel looks as if it is dusting off yet another blueprint for how to manage the Palestinians and their irritating obsession with sovereignty. Last time, under Oslo, the Palestinians were put in charge of policing the occupation on Israel’s behalf. This time, as the Palestinians are sealed into their separate prisons masquerading as a state, Israel may believe that it can find a new jailer for the Palestinians — the Arab world.

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.

Even in this moment of utter failure and complete humiliation — his presidential compound occupied, his guards dispersed, his government non-existent, his orders meaningless, his people sanctioned and starved — the quintessential Arab moderate Mahmoud Abbas found himself being defined in public by the American Secretary of State primarily in terms of his willingness to negotiate peace with Israel. Nevertheless, he persists, somewhat heroic and moving at one level, but overall a tragic and hapless figure whose ineptitude is matched by his irrelevance — except in the eyes of the American government that uses him as a convenient prop for its make-believe diplomatic games in Palestine. Even the Israelis long ago gave up on Abbas and his sclerotic Fateh movement, which has spawned the same sort of local militias and militant gangs that plague many other dysfunctional Arab countries.

The first lesson of this Palestinian catastrophe is about the Palestinians themselves, who must endure a fate that reflects the quality of their own leadership. Fateh dominated the Palestinian national movement since its inception over 40 years ago and forged a unified national movement, with realistic diplomatic goals based on a two-state solution that garnered great international support. All this was systematically wasted and negated in the past decade. Gaza looks like the ravaged Somali capital Mogadishu, because its political turmoil is slowly mirroring the Somali legacy of a disintegrating state replaced by feuding warlords.

Hamas shares some of the blame for this also, but much less than Fateh, because Hamas has only shared power for just over a year, and then only barely, because of the international financial boycott. We don’t know if Hamas will do a better job than Fateh, because it has not had the time to prove itself. Perhaps we will find out in the months ahead.

Another lesson we should draw from this situation is the devastating impact of Israeli, American and British hypocrisy, which has proved to be the historical midwife of Palestinian incompetent and violent self-rule. As long as Israel and its Western backers persist in their shameful double standards — demanding Palestinian moderation while accepting Israeli colonization and settlements, promoting Arab democracy while trying to strangle to death a democratically-elected Palestinian government, pressuring the Palestinians to negotiate agreements while wholeheartedly backing Israeli unilateralism that shuns negotiations — a credible, legitimate Palestinian government can never take root. It is a law of both physics and politics that deceit begets chaos, and delusion fosters destruction.

All concerned must collectively break this cycle of Israel’s brutal occupation and colonization, Palestinian domestic incompetence and self-destruction, American-British-led Western hypocritical complicity, and detached Arab ineptitude. The combination of these four dynamics persisting for years on end has been a catastrophe for all, resulting in radicalization and an increasing resort to militancy on all fronts.

Two things are needed to get the Palestinians out of this tragic fighting pit they have allowed themselves to become. The first is to acknowledge that they reached this low point through a combination of their own pedestrian politics and the low-grade morality of many others. The second is to engage the Palestinians primarily on the basis of their own rights and needs, rather than only as the expedient instruments of Israeli demands and American fantasies. If not, what you see is what you get.