Mouin Rabbani & Chris Toensing on Obama's Middle East Policies

I've been without power or heat at home since early Tuesday morning, and came in to the office today to do a bit of email. No time for serious posting. In the meanwhile, read this latest Middle East Report Online, from the inestimable Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing.

Here's a pithy excerpt:

The real test for Washington will therefore be not how often Mitchell shuttles to and around the region, but how rapidly it acts to freeze Israeli settlement expansion in all its forms and reverse Israeli impunity in the Occupied Territories. If the issue of settlements, the elephant in the room left unmentioned by the speakers at the State Department on January 22, has still not been seriously addressed by the time Mitchell returns from his first trip (and in 2001, recall, he only said Israel should “consider” a freeze if the Palestinians effectively disarm), it will be time to write the two-state paradigm’s definitive obituary.

The problem is that the death notice will not be accompanied by a birth announcement for a binational state. With the vast majority of Israelis committed to retaining a Jewish state, and the vast majority of Palestinians in response demanding that their ethnicity be privileged in their own entity, a South African-type transformation on the Mediterranean is at best many years away. The more likely scenario, for the coming years, is a descent into increasingly existential, and regionalized, conflict.

In Annapolis, Conflict by Other Means

A new MERO, by Robert Blecher and Mouin Rabbani, of the International Crisis Group. An excerpt:

The squeeze on Hamas in the West Bank is less obvious to the naked eye, but no less real. There have been widespread arrests of suspected Hamas activists, pressures on NGOs and charities affiliated with the movement, and politically motivated hirings and firings -- all of which have generated an atmosphere of intimidation paralleling that experienced by Fatah in the Gaza Strip. Hamas leaders in the West Bank claim that certain government employees, accused of Islamist sympathies, have been denied salaries on the pretext they were “acting against legitimacy.” But it is not only Hamas that is affected, as a Nablus transportation worker complained: “I used to work as a policeman in Jenin. I left in 2000 when the intifada started. Now that things seem to be settling down, I tried to get my job back when the new [interim] government [under Salam Fayyad] started working. I was refused on flimsy and false pretexts. Finally, after I really pushed it, the officer asked me, ‘What is your political affiliation?’ I told him, ‘Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.’ He knew that’s what I was going to say. It was no secret. But at least he was honest: ‘That’s why you’re not getting your job back. Affiliate with Fatah and we’ll rehire you.’”

What about Israel's poisoning of Khaled Mashaal?

Kelley reminded me today that all the media discussion about Russian security forces' probable poisoning of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in London never mentions the Israeli Mossad's poisoning of Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, in Amman in September 1997. The Israeli Mossad agents were captured in Amman, and King Hussein called President Clinton to tell him that the Israelis would be executed if Israel did not supply the antidote. Clinton called Israeli PM Bib Netanyahu, and a Mossad agent administered the antidote, and Meshaal survived.

Meshaal was eventually expelled from Jordan and now resides in Damascus. He has been the leader of Hamas since the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in March 2004. After Hamas' victory in Palestinian elections in January 2006, Meshaal declared that Hamas was ready to negotiate a "just peace" with Israel, but since the abduction of an Israeli soldier in June, he appears to advocate a harder line vis-à-vis Israel than PM Haniyeh.

As usual, the US media is simply not allowed to bring such parallels up.

Tags: Israel, Palestine