It is time someone in the mainstream media (besides my hard-working friend Scott MacLeod, here and here) took to task Dennis Ross, the AIPAC man who served the first Bush Adminsitration and then Clinton as a Middle East mediator, before returning to the AIPAC fold — but who is treated by the U.S. media as some sort of yoda figure, the fount of jedi wisdom in managing the Middle East.
Having presided over the failure of the U.S. to secure an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, he now puts himself forward as a sage among sages (lately by writing a book about “statecraft” in which he introduces some of the .101s of diplomacy as if these were prophetic revelations, and always evading the policy failures he helped author). More insidious, however, are his efforts to shape the U.S. response to the current situation in the Palestinian territories.
That the U.S. should be talking to Hamas is blindingly obvious to anyone who believes in settling conflicts peacefully, and there are plenty of reasons to believe Hamas is open to a pragmatic dialogue — not least the fact that it’s leaders keep stressing the fact that they want to talk. But Ross exposes the hardline gatkes he has on beneath that pragmatic suit in his latest contribution to the New Republic (where Likudnik gatkes are something of a uniform, I suppose.)
Ross opens thus: “It may be fashionable among some in Washington or even Tel Aviv to believe that it is time to talk to Hamas. But to the members of Fatah and the Palestinian independents in the West Bank with whom I have been meeting, it surely is not. What you hear from them is that Hamas is made up of killers; that they want to be part of a larger Islamist empire; that they are already trying to bring Iran to Gaza; and that the worse thing to do now is to reward Hamas with recognition.”
Do you think we were born yesterday, Dennis? Have you bothered to ask yourself what the agenda of these Fatah members and Palestinian independents you are taking to might be? And why it is that they’re sounding like they’re running for office in the U.S. and seeking AIPAC endorsement? Could it be, Dennis, that you’ve managed to unearth a Palestinian Chalabi or two? Mazeltov, it took you long enough… “Hamas is made up of killers…” That’s straight out of Bush’s mouth. And what of Fatah, Dennis? No killers in Fatah? And does this mean that the Palestinian electorate has opted to be ruled by killers? (I guess that would be a convenient propaganda line for the purposes of those, like yourself, Dennis, who have now deemed it necessary to shut down Palestinian democracy.)
“They want to be part of an Islamist empire…” Puhleeze. No serious student of Hamas sees it as affiliated with the Qaeda vision, Dennis, and its leaders have made abundantly clear that their is a national and nationalist project. It has always refrained from attacking the U.S. and rebuffed efforts to enlist it for any “global jihad.” Its refusal to recognize Israel has nothing to do with religion — in fact, if you went to the Fatah base now and asked them if they would withdraw that recognition if they could, as much as half would answer yes. (That’s pretty much what happened in a Western funded survey of Palestinian opinion six months into the Western financial siege.)
Hamas’s number 2, Abu Marzook, recently explained its position in an L.A. Times Op Ed:
The sticking point of “recognition” has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel’s “right” to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?
Why should any Palestinian “recognize” the monstrous crime carried out by Israel’s founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.
… Israel, which has never formally adopted a constitution of its own but rather operates through the slow accretion of Basic Laws, declares itself explicitly to be a state for the Jews, conferring privileged status based on faith in a land where millions of occupants are Arabs, Muslims and Christians.
You may not agree, Dennis, but don’t tell me this man is arguing on the basis of some sort of intractable religious logic; it’s simple nationalism grounded in the lived history of the Palestinians.
Ross even falls into the crudest Likudnik habit of linking Qaeda-style jihadism and Iranian ambitions. Hamas, he warns us, via his Palestinian sources, “has already begun to bring Iran into Gaza.” Right, and al-Qaeda, too, according to Abbas, crying wolf in the hope of getting what he wants out of Washington. (Iran and al-Qaeda are fighting each other in Iraq, are we now to expect similar outbreaks in Gaza? This is just daft. The idea that Hamas is “Shiite” has long been a propaganda standard among Fatah gunmen, but it has no basis in reality. )
Dennis, you know very well that Hamas is not Hizballah; its ideological orientation comes from the Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the Sunni Arab countries; its ties with Iran are secondary, although it is happy to get Tehran’s support. You also know very well, Dennis, that most of Hamas’s external funding came from the Gulf Arab states. But, of course, the Bush Administration cut off all that funding, not by convincing the Arabs not to send it, but by making the price of doing so being cut out of the U.S. banking system. So, you cut all of Hamas’s sources of funds other than Iran, and then you run to the rooftops shouting, “Look, they’re getting money from Iran!” Mazeltov, again, Dennis, you’re really good at this.
Dennis’s sources, who I can only imagine must be from that handful of corrupted Fatah chaps who have thrown in their lot with the U.S. — but who are increasingly beleaguered even within Fatah as more and more of the leadership looks to distance itself from Washington and reconcile with Hamas, must be getting a little desperate. He writes:
“For that reason, you also hear criticism of the Saudis who are pressing Mahmoud Abbas to reconcile with Hamas and forge a new national unity government. Indeed, I was struck by the almost unanimous sentiment that the reconciliation talks which both the Saudis and Egyptians are pushing–and Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh favor–will not change Hamas’s behavior. Instead, the story goes, Hamas will use them as a tactic to try to build its international acceptability. Worse, it would use a new national unity government to try to do in the West Bank what it has now done in Gaza.”
The Saudis and Egyptians hate Hamas, and are threatened by it, but they’re not stupid, Dennis. They’re pressing for rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas because they know that Hamas is currently more representative than Fatah of the Palestinian people, and that there is neither peace nor stability to be achieved by maintaining the fiction that Mahmoud Abbas can speak on behalf of the Palestinians without the consent their elected government. If there was any other way to make Hamas disappear, Dennis, you can be sure the Saudis and particularly the Egyptians would jump at it.
Ross tells us that the Palestinians are predominantly secular, and were more alienated from Fatah than attracted to Hamas. Well, yes, Dennis, and Hamas seems to know and respect that. They don’t appear to be trying to enforce Shariah law in Gaza, do they? But what Dennis the Sage appears to avoid is to ask the question why are Palestinians alienated from Fatah?
Yes, Dennis, I know, you’ll tell yourself that the answer is corruption, even as the Administration continues to coddle the most corrupt element in Fatah. But the true answer is simply that Fatah lost its way; the Palestinian electorate could see that its path of negotiation, much of it under Ross’s stewardship, had only brought the Palestinians more settlements and checkpoints. They could see that Sharon had no intention of ending the occupation. And frankly, I think many of their leaders tacitly recognized that Fatah had abandoned its national goals, which accelerated the onset of an “every man for himself” ethos of corruption.
Ross claims that “creating new institutions in the PA will inevitably build the credibility of the PA and, by extension, the credibility of Fatah.” Uh, Dennis… You can’t build the PA’s institutions while ignoring its legal and democratically elected government. Prime Minister Fayyad may be quite the favorite in Washington, but he has a little problem — his government has not been, nor will it be approved by the Palestinian legislature. It is not really a legal government, Dennis. You either build democratic institutions, or you build Fatah — how on earth can you even suggest that the two are interchangeable?
Plainly, Dennis Ross is scrambling for logical arguments to support a patently flawed policy. He gets even more when he suggests that it’s crucial for the Fatah old guard to step aside and be replaced by a new generation of leaders capable of rebuilding the organization’s credibility. Good idea, Dennis. Except that the next generation of Fatah leaders, led by Marwan Barghouti from his Israeli prison cell, are advocating the exact opposite of your Fatah sources — they want Fatah to distance itself from the disastrous U.S. positions and reconcile with Hamas.
What Dennis Ross is advocating is a strategy that repeats all of the worst mistakes of the past decade of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and is bound to fail. Sooner or later, the U.S. and Israel will be forced to reckon with the political choices of the Palestinians, which will mean, among other things, talking to Hamas. And when that happens, you can be sure Dennis Ross will say yes, but it wasn’t the right time in the summer of 2007, which will be more self-serving evasion. The only difference between now, and the moment when the U.S. and Israel recognize reality, will be in how many people’s lives will be ruined .
We Americans hardly remember the incident now, but it was not so long ago. On February 8, 2003, at the 39th Munich Conference on Security, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld presented the American case for the war in Iraq . “Diplomacy has been exhausted,” he said. After he took his seat, an uncomfortable silence filled the hall and attention turned to German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. An otherwise stoic and understated man, Fischer discarded his prepared comments and spoke bluntly, and in English. “Excuse me,” he said, “I am not convinced.” As Rumsfeld sat, silent, Fischer even wagged his finger. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that any European diplomat had dared lecture an American.
And they had “liberated” our “holiest” site, an old stone wall in East Jerusalem pocked with pubic clumps of weeds, into whose cracks and crannies I was told that Jews could insert notes to be read by God — like a hotel message cubby. (Let’s just say that by the time I got there, at age 17, this bubbemeis about holy stones and a celestial post office only fueled my atheism.) Not only that, they’d made Israel “safe” by “liberating” the whole of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. In six days! A miracle, like the creation story in Genesis! (Of course, many years later, I would learn that it hadn’t even taken that long; Israel had attacked first and effectively won the war in the opening hours by destroying its enemy’s air forces on the ground — Six Days just sounded like a good name for a war given the creation story.)
But the news out of Israel in those mid-year months in 1967 was infinitely reassuring. Israel’s dramatic victory had proved that we, the prickly little state or the Jewish boys in their white Phys-ed (we called it PT) vests and shorts, were not to be fucked with. (I remember a similar effect a decade later, after the audacious raid on Entebbe had freed a group of passengers held on a hijacked Air France plane in Uganda — by then, my friends and I were literally accepting congratulations on Israel’s behalf.) And, I know anecdotally as much as anything else, that anyone ever called a “Jewboy” anywhere in the world walked a lot taller after the first week of June in 1967.
The word “Arab” became synonymous, on the playground and in the classroom, with incompetence and idiocy. “Don’t be an Arab!” I heard a teacher exclaim, more than once in response to a student’s failure to properly carry out his instructions. And, three years after the 1967 war, when the apartheid regime celebrated the tenth anniversary of South Africa’s formal independence from Britain, the ceremony in my school playground saw my Jewish friends and I, in our blue Habonim shirts and scarves and kakhi shorts, line up alongside the boy scouts and the Voortrekkers (the fascist Afrikaner youth movement) to salute the flag and proclaim our loyalty to the Republic (even though the whole point of Habonim was to persuade us to emigrate!). A regime rooted in vicious anti-Semitism and explicit admiration for the Nazis had now come to recognize Israel and its local supporters as a fighting ally in their epic struggle, couched in Cold War language, between white peoples and peoples of color.
Sensing the escalating conflict between the Arab population and the European Jewish settlers who had been allowed by the British, since their conquest of Palestine in 1917, to settle there and establish the infrastructure of statehood — and moved by the impulse to create a sanctuary for the survivors of the Holocaust while avoiding giving most of them the choice of moving to the U.S. or other Western countries — the U.N. recommended in 1947 that Palestine be partitioned, to create separate Jewish and Arab states. The Zionists were disappointed by the plan, because they had hoped to have all of Palestine become a Jewish state. And the fact that it left Jerusalem, where 100,000 Jews lived, within the territory of the Arab zone, albeit run as an international city, was particularly irksome. But the Zionist leadership also knew that the plan was as good as they were going to get via diplomacy, and accepted the plan. (The rest, of course, they would acquire in battle, in 1948 and 1967, in wars that they could blame on their enemies — after all, 40 years after the 1967 war, during which time Israel has been at peace with the enemy it faced on that flank, the West Bank remains very much in Israeli hands, with close to half a million Israelis settled there.)
For Jews of my generation who came of age during the anti-apartheid struggle, there was no shaking the nagging sense that what Israel was doing in the West Bank was exactly what the South African regime was doing in the townships. Even as we waged our own intifada against apartheid in South Africa, we saw daily images of young Palestinians facing heavily armed Israeli police in tanks and armored vehicles with nothing more than stones, gasoline bombs and the occasional light weapon; a whole community united behind its children who had decided to cast off the yoke under which their parents suffered. And when Yitzhak Rabin, more famous as a signatory on the Oslo Agreement, ordered the Israeli military to systematically break the arms of young Palestinians in the hope of suppressing an entirely legitimate revolt, thuggery had become a matter of national policy. It was only when some of those same young men began blowing themselves up in Israeli restaurants and buses that many Israel supporters were once again able to construe the Israelis as the victim in the situation; during the intifada of the 1980s they could not question who was David and who was Goliath. Even for those of us who had grown up in the idealism of the left-Zionist youth movements, Israel had become a grotesque parody of everything we stood for.
Not only does the Israeli position make nonsense of all talk of peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians — and Blair, rabid Bush sycophant though he may be, must surely be aware that he has signed on for a humiliating postcript to a failed career on the global stage — but it also fundamentally challenges the manner in which Palestinian political rivalries are being cast in the Western media right now. You’d think that the fact that BBC reporter Alan Johnstone was freed by Hamas this week after 16 weeks as a hostage held by a criminal gang that enjoyed the protection of the very Fatah security forces that were recently driven out of Gaza would give some pause for thought. Don’t bet on it. In any event, the idea that the West is backing Fatah as a moderate force for achieving Palestinian national goals is equally derided on the Palestinian side. They know all too well that the regime of Mahmoud Abbas is being boosted in order that it can more effectively play the role of gendarme, eliminating threats to Israel and policing the status quo. Israel simply has no intention of withdrawing to its 1967 borders; there is no “political horizon” to rationalize this policing role, it is simply an end in itself.
Sending Tony Blair on a “peace mission” to tutor the Palestinians in governance is a cruel joke. The previous occupant of the job, Jim Wolfensohn, quite precisely because he recognized that Palestinians could not build effective institutions under conditions of occupation and financial siege. Besides, it isn’t the state of Palestinian institutions that is the main obstacle to peace. In fact, if he was going to do any serious mentoring to restore a peace process, his office wouldn’t be in Ramallah, but in Washington, D.C. 
Bush and Condi would now have us believe that in fact some kind of opportunity has arisen to promote “peace” between Israel and the Palestinians by starving the Gazans and ignoring the political party in which Palestinian voters placed their confidence 18 months ago, while pumping cash into a new authoritarian regime under U.S. tutelage headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. The Administration has “no good options”, the New York Times tells us, although the truth is that’s only if you accept the limits set by the Administration’s extremists who have ruled out the obvious option — talking to Hamas. (Gasp!) Instead, they are pursuing a policy that is dysfunctional and ultimately self defeating because it is based on eight connected fallacies… (Click on the link below to read the whole thing) 
Guest columnist Sean Jacobs flips through the new Vanity Fair Africa edition, guest-edited by Bono, and wonders why there are so few African voices in this “rebranding” of their continent. Why Madonna is sniffing Maya Angelou, and why Queen Rania of Jordan is on the cover along with the guest editor? And also why George W. Bush and Condi Rice are deemed important friends of Africa. 
Guest contributor Antony Loewenstein, an Australian Jewish anti-Zionist, is a generation younger than me, but he’s further evidence of the fact that the efforts of the nationalists to police Jewish identity in a way that enforces a narrow Zionism are failing. The sweet smell of Jewish dissent is suddenly everywhere in the air, most recently last week when Avram Burg released his new book, renouncing Zionism and warning of its dangerous consequences for his Judaism and his humanity — it’s not exactly every day that a former Speaker of the Knesset turns around and rejects the very principle of a “Jewish State.” So Loewenstein’s view certainly reverberates in Israel! 
Ever since Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections 18 months ago, Washington has insisted that President Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a Abu Mazen) remains the sole legitimate leader of the Palestinians. Abbas was certainly democratically elected back in 2005, although it was not exactly a competitive election. The only challengers that would have represented a credible alternative in voters’ eyes — Hamas, and imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti (who, opinion polls found, would have handily trounced Abbas if he’d made good on his threat to run), stayed out of the race. But when Hamas entered the legislative elections six months later, it swept home in a stunning repudiation of Abbas and Fatah. Still, Hamas did not deny Abbas’s legitimacy; it simply demanded that it’s own, based on a democratic mandate, be recognized.
No, Hamas is the legitimate government in Gaza, and in the West Bank for that matter. There may be a debate to be had over whether its decision to move against Fatah’s militias was ill-considered, but there’s no question in the minds of Hamas — and even of many Fatah activists in Gaza and the West Bank — that its target was not the government or the Fatah organization, but a political-military faction within Fatah headed by the warlord 
Fatah’s defeat at the polls last January, and its military rout last week in Gaza, are symptoms not simply of corruption and organizational decay, but of the political failure that has allowed those conditions to fester. 
Let’s just say the affable Abu Mazen is not exactly Central Casting’s idea of a Middle Eastern “strongman,” and what Washington calls his “indecisiveness” is, in fact, an instinct for political consensus-building. Those who know him say he’s never been comfortable with what the U.S. has demanded of him, and the fact that even now, Washington continues to talk directly to Dahlan. It’s widely known that the only leader that can restore Fatah’s political fortunes is Marwan Barghouti, currently jailed for life in Israel. It looks like Abbas will tell the Israelis and Americans that if they want to help him, they’ll free Barghouti. Israeli leaders are already indicating that the answer will be no, because they don’t know if Barghouti will “help” Abbas. Indeed, I’d say it’s a safe bet (given his centrality to brokering Hamas-Fatah unity efforts from within prison) that were he freed, his priority would be to restore the unity government, and move Fatah away from the disaster it has become under U.S. tutelage. Already, there is growing resentment of the U.S. option that Abbas has taken, and there’s a growing demand from within the Fatah leadership — including from Barghouti — for Dahlan to be axed. In short, the ever-hapless Abbas will find himself caught between Condi Rice, the warlord Dahlan, and the remnants of his movement led by Barghouti seeking a rapprochement with Hamas. And Abbas will simply retire to his home in Qatar.
Because the West Bank remains under occupation, Hamas fighters are forced to operate underground, although its political leaders are out in the open — many of them have been arrested by Israel or kidnapped by Hamas in recent weeks. Fatah’s security forces certainly have more guns in the West Bank and are less prone to be overrun. But that may not be Hamas’s strategy — the Islamists remain politically strong in many key West Bank towns (after all, they won the election, and only one quarter of the electorate is in Gaza), and they can expect a growing rebellion within Fatah against the U.S.-Dahlan-Abbas line. Hamas retains the political momentum among the Palestinians, and what the U.S. has planned is likely to strengthen rather than weaken Hamas politically — it always does, after all. The U.S. has failed to recognize that it’s open support for a Palestinian faction is a political kiss of death. Whatever illusions the U.S. leadership likes to weave about itself, the Palestinian street knows that Washington is part of their problem, rather than part of its solution. So, Fatah’s grip on the West Bank, measured in hearts and minds, is, in fact, tenuous, and likely to weaken in the face of the new U.S. policy.
When the U.S. and Israel talk about “helping” Abbas, they mean money to buy support and guns to kill opponents. But Abbas has always made clear, and continues to do so, that the only “help” that can boost his political support among Palestinians is for Israel to release Palestinian prisoners, remove checkpoints and begin uprooting settlements in the West Bank. But Israel is lead by a mournful chump despised by more than 95% of his electorate, and the contenders waiting in the wings to replace him are Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak (what was that Bob Dylan line about “there’s no success like failure”?) No government in Israel for the foreseeable future is going to be able to cut a credible peace deal based on the 1967 borders, nor even to muster the political strength to help Abbas by easing Israeli security restrictions, and if even they did so while starving Gaza, it’s inevitable that Hamas would send a couple of suicide bombers through the West Bank and that would be the end of relaxing restrictions. The only way Israel might take some of these steps would be if pressed by the U.S., but with the shadow of AIPAC hanging over Washington in an election year, that remains unlikely. And so the Israelis and Americans will fail Abbas once again, and damn him in the eyes of his own people.
The Palestinians are not stupid, and they know exactly who is denying them resources as punishment for choosing a government deemed unacceptable to their enemies. A year ago, Palestinian opinion polls found that even close to half of those who identified themselves as Fatah supporters believed that the Hamas government should not buckle to international pressure to recognize Israel. Hamas will not suffer politically as a result of Israeli-American efforts to starve and bludgeon the Palestinians into submission. Indeed, open support from the U.S. has become something of a kiss of death for Palestinian leaders, as the last election showed, where Washington suddenly began pumping money into Fatah.
That’s another self-serving myth of the neocons and Likudniks, who’ll also tell you that Hamas is a cat’s paw for Iran or al-Qaeda, or some combination of the two. Hamas is a national political resistance movement, inspired by an Islamist ideology, that has combined guerrilla warfare and terrorism with the provision of social services and, more recently, parliamentary participation. It is a movement with different factions pressing in different directions, but far more disciplined and coherent than any of its rivals. Its ideological roots are in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, of which it is essentially an offshoot. As such, it is at loggerheads with al-Qaeda, which has engaged in public mud-throwing against Hamas — Ayman Zawahiri publicly castigated Hamas in one of his broadcasts for its decision to participate in democratic politics, and Hamas told Zawahiri it had no need for his advice. Iran certainly supports Hamas to the extent that it is able, but it has little if any strategic influence over the organization. (Iran supports the Iraqi government, too.) Indeed, the great fear of many of the Arab regimes was that the isolation of Hamas pursued by the U.S. would, in fact, make it more dependent on Iranian aid, and therefore give Tehran more influence. But if that did occur, it would be the fault of those who refused to listen to and engage with Hamas, and instead seek to isolate and destroy it.