Israeli politics is not moving against history only but is challenging world politics as well. Although the first Knesset of the newly born “state of Israel” voted on December 13, 1949 to move the seat of government from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and despite Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem on June 27, 1967, which the UN Security Council declared “null and void,” both unilateral declarations have never been accepted and recognized by the international community, not even by the U.S., Israel’s strategic guardian.

More recently, while millions of Christians were celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, and the birth of Christianity in Jerusalem, the scene of Jesus’ resurrection following his death by crucifixion, which is the cornerstone of Christian faith, the Knesset was, on Christmas day, scheduled to consider a draft law that would declare Jerusalem “the capital of the Jewish people” and the capital of Israel at the same time.

The fact that the ruling elite in Tel Aviv has made a prior recognition of Israel as a “Jewish” state a precondition for making peace implicitly and consequently applies to Christians as well, otherwise how could any observer interpret the still simmering crisis with the Vatican over the holy places in Jerusalem. The “Fundamental Agreement” signed by both sides on December 30, 1993, as well as an agreement on the recognition of the civil effects of ecclesiastical legal personality, signed on November 10, 1997, have yet to be ratified by Israel’s Knesset. Some in the Israeli media has been recently accusing the Vatican of seeking to hold control of “Jewish holy sites” in Jerusalem.

The Vatican in the past supported making Jerusalem a corpus separatum, an international city in accordance with the UN Resolution 181 of 1947; Israel’s non-compliance delayed Vatican’s formal recognition of Israel until 1993.

More recently, the Vatican renewed calls for an internal agreement to protect the holy places in Jerusalem. Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican’s Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and Vatican’s former foreign minister, declared:

There will not be peace if the question of the holy sites is not adequately resolved. The part of Jerusalem within the walls – with the holy sites of the three religions – is humanity’s heritage. The sacred and unique character of the area must be safeguarded and it can only be done with a special, internationally-guaranteed statute.

The only perceived threat to the holy places against which the Vatican is seeking protection comes from the Israeli politics of exclusion. Rabbi David Rosen, member of the Israeli delegation to the negotiations with the Vatican told the Israeli daily Haaretz on January 17, 2010 that Israel “has not been faithful to the pacts of 1993.”

The precondition of recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” is rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel’s partner in peace accords, and its self-ruled Palestinian Authority, the 22-member League of Arab States and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC); in a statement he issued on December 26, 2011, the Secretary-General of the 57-member states of the OIC, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, condemned the Israeli draft law that declares Jerusalem “the capital of Israel and the Jewish people” as “a direct assault on the Palestinian people and their inalienable and clear rights” and “a flagrant violation of international law and international legitimacy resolutions,” which affirm that Jerusalem is part of the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel in 1967. PLO representatives considered the Israeli draft law a “declaration of war” and a recipe for igniting a religious conflict. The Islamic–Christian Commission in Support of Jerusalem, in a statement, said if the Israeli draft law is passed it would make Jerusalem “for Judaism and Jews only, which means there would be no freedom of worship in the land of worship.”

Israeli attorney and founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem, a Jerusalem-based NGO, Daniel Seidemann, wrote on November 30, 2011: “Cumulatively, Israeli policies in East Jerusalem today threaten to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a bitter national conflict that can be resolved by means of territorial compromise, into the potential for a bloody, unsolvable religious war. This threat derives from Israel’s dogged pursuit of the settlers’ vision of an exclusionary Jewish Jerusalem.”

“… Today, Israel must choose between two visions of Jerusalem. On the one hand, it can continue pursuing an exclusive, largely fictitious rule over an already divided, bi-national city — exposing Israel to virtually universal censure and imperiling the two-state solution. On the other hand, it can pursue policies that can make Israeli Jerusalem, Yerushalayim, a thriving national capital, recognized by all, existing side-by-side with but politically divided from the Palestinian capital in Jerusalem, al Quds. To those who cherish Israel and understand what is truly at stake, the choice is clear,” Seidemann concluded.

What is much more important than excluding “a conflict that can be resolved by means of territorial compromise,” is that the Israeli politics of exclusion in Jerusalem, which could be summarized by Judaization of the holy city, is a roadmap to de-Arabizing, de-Islamizing, de-Christianizing, de-historizing and de-humanizing Jerusalem, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, and this could not be anything but a roadmap to hell.

Absolutely this is unsustainable Israeli politics.

While the Tunisian military has made a decision to side with its people, the United States has yet to decide what, and whom, to support among the revolting masses led by influential components like communists, Pan-Arabists, Islamists, left wingers, nationalists and trade unionists. The natural social allies of U.S. capitalist globalization, privatization and free market have been sidelined politically as partners and pillars of the deposed pro–U.S. Zein al-Abideen Ben Ali’s regime.

The remaining pro–U.S. liberalism among Tunisians are overwhelmed by the vast majority of the unemployed, marginalized or underpaid who yearn for jobs, bread, balanced distribution of the national wealth and development projects more than they are interested in upper class western-oriented liberalism. Taken by surprise by the evolving political drama in Tunisia, the U.S. cannot, by default, contribute to a revolution for bread at a time its economic system is unable to provide for Americans themselves. However, it can play a detrimental role in contributing to a real Tunisian revolution for freedom by making an historic U-turn in its foreign policy.

In June 2005, the then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told an Arab audience at the American University in Cairo that, “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region — and we achieved neither.” But Rice did not elaborate to add that this same policy was, and is, still the main source of instability and the main reason for the absent democracy.

Her successor incumbent Hillary Clinton has on January 13 in Qatar postured as the Barak Obama Administration’s mouthpiece on Arab human rights to lecture Arab governments on the urgent need for democratic reforms, warning that otherwise they will see their countries “sinking into the sand.” But Clinton missed to point out that her administration is still in pursuit of its predecessor’s advocacy of democracy through changing regimes in Arab and Muslim nations by means of military intervention, invasion and occupation, an endeavor that has proved a failure in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Israeli–occupied Palestinian territories, as well a policy that was and is still another source of regional instability and absence of democracy.

The Tunisian Intifada has proved that democracy and regime change can be homemade, without any U.S. intervention. Ironically any such U.S. intervention now is viewed in the region as a threat of a counterrevolution that would preempt turning the Intifada into a revolution. U.S. hands-off policy could be the only way to democracy in Tunisia. But a hands-off policy is absolutely not a trade mark of U.S. regional foreign policy. However, the United States has a choice now in Tunisia, but it is a choice that pre-requisites a U–turn both in the U.S. approach to Arab democracy and in its traditional foreign policy.

The U.S. risks to loose strategically in Tunisia unless it decides on a historic U-turn, because politically the Tunisian Intifada targeted a U.S.–supported regime and economically targeted a failed U.S. model of development. On November 13, 2007, Georgetown University Human Rights Institute and Law Center hosted a conference to answer the question, “Tunisia: A Model of Middle East Stability or an Incubator of Extremism?” But Tunisia now has given the answer.  Tunisia is neither; it is an indigenous Arab way to democracy and moderation.

Indeed the U.S. has now a choice in Tunisia. The Arab country which is leading the first Arab revolution for democracy is now a U.S. test case. Non–U.S. intervention would establish a model for other Arabs to follow; it would also establish a model U.S. policy that would over time make Arabs believe in any future U.S. rhetoric on democracy and forget all the tragic consequences of American interventions in the name of democracy. But this sounds more a wishful thinking than a realpolitik expectation.

A U.S. long standing traditional policy seems to weigh heavily on its decision makers, who are obsessed with their own creation of the “Islamist threat” as their justification for their international war on terror, which dictates their foreign policy, especially vis a vis Arab and Muslim states, to dictate a fait accompli to their rulers to choose between either being recruited to this war or being condemned themselves as terrorists or terrorism sponsors, and in this process exclusion policies should be pursued against wide spread representative Islamic movements. The U.S. perspective has always been that Arab Democracy could be sacrificed to serve U.S. vital interests and Arab democracy can wait! But the Tunisian Intifada has proved that Arab democracy cannot wait anymore.

Exclusion of popular Islamic movements while at the same excluding democratic reforms until the war on terror is won has proved a looser U.S. policy. The U.S. exploitation of the “Islamist threat” now is not convincing for Arab aspirants for democracy, who still remember that during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union the U.S. exploited the “communist threat,” then “Pan-Arabism threat,” to shore up autocratic and authoritarian Arab regimes. In Tunisia, the prisons of the pro–U.S. regime were always full long before there was an Islamic political movement: “In the 1950s prisons were filled with Youssefites (loyal to Salah Ben Youssef, who broke away from Bourguiba’s ruling Constitutional Party); in the 60s it was the Leftists; in the 70s it was the trade unions; and in the 80s it was our turn,” leader in-exile of the outlawed Islamic Nahda movement, Rachid Ghannouchi, told the Financial Times on January 18.

“When Nahda was in Tunisia … there was no al-Qaeda,” Ghannouchi said, reminding one that in the neighboring Algeria there was no al-Qaeda too before The Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was outlawed. In the Israeli–occupied territories, outlawing and imposing siege on the Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas,” which won a landslide electoral victory in 2006, should be a warning that the only alternative to such moderate Islamic movements is for sure the extremist al-Qaeda like undergrounds. Jordan proved wiser than the U.S. decision makers by allowing the Islamic Action Front to compete politics lawfully. Recruiting fake Islamic parties to serve U.S. policies as the case is in Iraq has not proved feasible impunity against al-Qaeda. The United States has to reconsider. Exclusion of independent, moderate and non-violent Islamic representative movements, unless they succumb to U.S. dictates, has proved U.S. policy a failure. U.S. parameters for underground violent unrepresentative Islamists should not apply to these movements.

The U.S. decision makers, however, still seem deaf to what Ghannouchi told the Financial Times: “Democracy should not exclude communists … it is not ethical for us to call on a secular government to accept us, while once we get to power we will eradicate them.” This is the voice of Arab homemade democracy; it has nothing to do with the U.S.-exported democracy.

Ironically this sudden western awakening to the plight of Christian Arabs comes at a time when all Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, are crushed by U.S. and Israeli military occupation or foreign political hegemony, but worse still, when they are in the grip of a social upheaval in the very states that are by will or by coercion loyal to this alliance, where unbalanced development and an unemployment rate more than double the world average are pushing masses onto the streets to challenge the legitimacy of their own pro–west governments. Exactly at this time, when Arab masses need their “social” unity for national liberation, sovereignty, liberty and freedom, a European campaign is being waged to divide them along religious and sectarian lines.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy — who, on December 9, 2009, wrote in Le Monde defending a Switzerland vote banning Muslim mosques from building minarets and made a national fuss on banning less than two thousand French citizens from wearing Niqab — said on January 6 that he “cannot accept” what he described as “religious cleansing” of Arab Christians. His Foreign Minister, Michele Alliot-Marie, wrote to the EU’s foreign affairs baroness, Catherine Ashton, asking for the union to draw up a plan of action in response. France took the initiative to call a meeting of the UN Security Council last November 9 to discuss international protection of Iraqi Christians. On December 22, Italy’s foreign Minister Franco Frattini said his country was presenting a resolution to the UN to condemn their “persecution.” Together with his French, Polish and Hungarian counterparts, Frattini wrote a joint letter to Ashton asking her to table the issue at the foreign ministers meeting on January 31 and to consider taking “concrete measures” to protect them. On December 17, the German Bundestag passed a resolution defending the freedom of religion around the world, but viewed with “great concern” the resolution of the UN Human Rights Council on March 25 last year against the “defamation of religions” because it “undermines the existing human rights understanding.”

The European political reaction sounds excessively selective in its concern over an allegedly missing right of the freedom of religion of the Christian minority in a region where civil and human rights for the Muslim majority are missing thanks in the first place for the support the regional governing regimes, which confiscate these same rights, receive from the U.S.–European alliance, and the European selectivity allegedly in defense of the “threatened” existence of the Christian Arab minorities speaks louder when it is compared with the deafening European silence over the threatened existence of the Arab and Islamic cultural identities of the majority, let alone the European incitement against both identities, a double standard that explicitly invokes suspicious questions about the credibility and sincerity of the European “rights” concerns and about the real political goals behind these pronounced concerns. For example, more than 300 mosques were attacked, some of them of a UNESCO World Heritage Center standards, hundreds of Muslim clerics were murdered, millions of Muslims were forced either to migrate internally or immigrate externally in the U.S.–occupied Iraq, and the plight of Iraqi Christians has been, and still is, merely a side show of the overall destruction of the whole state there, but the European rights consciousness did not, and still does not, find it worth a similar call for defense and protection.

Unfortunately, this traditional European divide–and–rule policy in the Arab world, as it was the case for centuries, is today finding ample papal blessing from the Vatican to justify itself, not in the eyes of Arabs, but in the eyes of its own audiences. President Sarkozy’s whistle blower cry this January 6 that Christians in the Arab–Islamic world are victims of a planned ‘religious cleansing,” came on the backdrop of the Vatican’s Pope Benedict XVI repeated call on the world leaders to rise up for the protection and “defense of the Christians in the Middle East.” It is a cry fraught with the connotations of the historical precedent of the Vatican–blessed Fourth Crusade, which consisted mainly of a crusading army originating from areas within France and which was diverted from invading Egypt by sea to the sacking of Constantinople, the capital of the political and spiritual rival, the Orthodox Church, to which the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Arab–Muslim world belong, instead of “liberating” Jerusalem from Muslims.

Pope Benedict XVI’s wilful or careless indifference towards exploiting his church concerns by “secular” politicians like Sarkozy to serve their down to earth goals, or towards exacerbating Islamophobia, which, in turn, fuels Christianphobia, is reminiscent of how the older Sarkozy–type “Christ–abiding” and non–secular politicians concealed from the bulk of the crusading army a letter from Pope Innocent III, who made the new Fourth Crusade the goal of his pontificate, warning against the diversion of the crusade, forbidding any atrocities against “Christian neighbors” and threatening excommunication. In as much as the indifference of the crusader pope to carry out his threat had led to the demise of the Byzantine Empire, the fall of Constantinople in the hands of the Muslims less than three hundred years later and turning the crusades into a war against the rival church more than against the Muslims, the indifference of the present day Pope Benedict XVI is threatening to counterproductively achieve the demise of Christian existence in the “East,” which he has made, it seems, the goal of his pontificate.

Ever since the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, Arab Christians in the Muslim world have been wary of the messages and emissaries of Rome as a cultural spearhead of foreign invasion and hegemony. Even a Catholic loyal to the Vatican like the incumbent Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Fouad Twal, had this to tell the Israeli Haaretz exclusively four days before Benedict XVI’s “pilgrimage” to the Holy Land in September 2009: “The thing that worries me most is the speech that the pope will deliver here. One word for the Muslims and I’m in trouble; one word for the Jews and I’m in trouble. At the end of the visit the pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.” Patriarch Twal’s fears were vindicated last week when Egypt recalled its Vatican envoy for consultations over the Pope’s remarks on Egyptian Copts: The “new statements from the Vatican” are “unacceptable interference” in Egypt’s “internal affairs,” the Egyptian foreign ministry said in a statement. Syrian analyst, Sami Moubayed, recently wrote that similar papal remarks were to the “fundamentalists .. a blessing in disguise.”

Pope Benedict XVI, since he occupied the papacy seat, seems totally insensitive to the worries of his representative in Jerusalem.  He  doesn’t seem short of words and seems careful not to miss an opportunity to utter provocative anti-Muslim pronouncements that place both his church clergy and followers on the defensive among both their Christian as well as Muslim compatriots. However, he places them in a more critical position by his helplessness to find any words or an opportunity in his latest torrential rhetoric about the protection of Christians and their plight in Holy Land itself, where they have been victims of actual ethnic and religious cleansing for more than sixty years now since the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, when the state of Israel was declared independent on the ruins of their homes.

From a regional perspective, both Christian and Muslim, the very existence of Christians is threatened, besieged and gradually cleansed by the Israeli military occupation in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity – - where Christ was born, spread the word of God, love and peace and crucified. The papal silence on this simple fact of life is much louder in the region than the Pope’s pronounced appeals for the defense and protection of Christians on the peripheries of the birthplace of Christianity, in Iraq, Egypt or Lebanon, for example, because when the center of Christian gravity crumbles in Jerusalem, the periphery supports would not hold for long and even the important St, Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican would be a pale substitute, and the center of Christian gravity in Jerusalem is almost totally Judaized, and is off limits to the Christians both in the Palestinian cradle of Christianity as well as to their brethren on the Arab and Muslim periphery, unless they are granted an Israeli military permit to visit, which is rare and very tightly selective.

Viewed from Christian regional perspective, the papal appeals for their protection could hardly be described other than contradictory, if not hypocrite, particularly in view of a Vatican’s document in July 2007, approved by Benedict XVI, which declared Catholicism as “the only true church of Christ” and “other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches.”

So, “what” Christians is Pope Benedict appealing to defend and protect? A year earlier, Coptic Pope Shenouda III denied there was any dialogue or contacts with the Vatican although thirty three years before both sides agreed to form joint committees for bilateral dialogue. With the exception of Armenian church as a late newcomer, but nonetheless an independent church, the Coptic, Orthodox, Chaldean, Assyrian, Syriac, Melkite and other Eastern communions have existed and coexisted among, and with, Arabs since the earliest days of Christianity, because they are Arabs either by ethnicity or by culture and they are the overwhelming majority of Christians in the Middle East and an integral part of the Arab society.

Islamophobia is warning that Muslims are “returning” to Islam, but is it not top on the agenda of Pope Benedict XVI to return Europe to Christianity? “We must reject both secularism and fundamentalism,” the Pope said in his annual address on Christmas Day, but is it not secularism that the Pope, Europe and the U.S. are preaching now to de-Arabise and de-Islamise Arabs? This double standard ironical western contradiction deprives their calls for the protection of Arab Christians of whatever credibility it might still have in the Arab eyes. Their “protection” will prove counterproductive sooner or later. Christianphobia that fuels anti– Christian blind terror is an already active byproduct.

The ‘Church of Islam’

Commenting on the Synod of Middle East Christian leaders that convened in the Vatican last October, the spiritual leader of the Melkite “Catholics,” Patriarch of the Church of Antioch, Gregorios III, had this to say, quoted by the Lebanese Daily Star last December: “The Synod for the Middle East is a Synod for Arab countries, for Arabs, a Synod for Arab Christians in symbiosis with their Arab society. It is a Synod for the ‘Church of the Arabs’ and ‘Church of Islam’.” The adviser to the Muslim Sunni Mufti of Lebanon, Dr. Mohammad Al–Sammak, who was invited to the Synod, recognized the Arab identity of Christians in the Middle East: “I cannot live my being Arabic without the Middle Eastern Christian Arab .. They are an integral part of the .. formation of Islamic civilization,” he told the Synod.

Politically and religiously these Christians have been on the other side of the Vatican – blessed old or modern western conquests, and politically and religiously they have been all along protected by Arabs and Muslims; otherwise, they would not have survived. Their existence is now under threat because the existence of their Arab–Islamic incubator is on the line, besieged either by direct military occupation in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan or by economic sanctions and political hegemony; their existence was not threatened when the Arab–Islamic state was an empire and a world power, nor was it threatened during the crusades despite the atrocities committed by their western co-religious crusaders, which would have invited a reprisal had it not been for the teachings of Islam, itself.

The U.S.–led world war on terror targeting mainly Arabs and Muslims is perplexing western pro–law, peace and human rights audiences by smoke–screening their governments’ military adventures and modern crusades, which is the real action that created terrorism as the only possible reaction expected by the overpowered nations. However, the invading creator and the created terrorists in their bloody divide are smoke–screening also any possible resurface of the forgotten Islamic covenants that protected the indigenous two thousand–year old Arab Christians since the advent of Islam in the seventh century. In the year 628 AD, a Christian delegation from St. Catherine’s Monastery, in Egypt’s Sinai, met Prophet Mohammad and requested his protection. The Prophet granted them a protection charter.

Dr. Muqtedar Khan, Director of Islamic Studies at the University of Delaware and a fellow of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, wrote this about the charter:

The document is not a modern human rights treaty but even though it was penned in 628 A.D., it clearly protects the right to property, freedom of religion, freedom of work, and security of the person. A remarkable aspect of the charter is that it imposes no conditions on Christians for enjoying its privileges. It is enough that they are Christians. They are not required to alter their beliefs, they do not have to make any payments and they do not have any obligations. This is a charter of rights without any duties! The first and the final sentence of the charter are critical. They make the promise eternal and universal. By ordering Muslims to obey it until the Day of Judgment the charter again undermines any future attempts to revoke the privileges. These rights are inalienable.

In the year 631, Prophet Muhammad received a delegation of sixty Christians from Najran in the Prophet’s mosque in Medinah, allowed them to pray in the mosque, and concluded the “covenant to the Christians of Najran” treaty which granted them religious and administrative autonomy as citizens of the Islamic State. In 637, Islamic Caliph Omar ibn al – Khattab granted the similar “Covenant of Omar” to the Patriarch of Jerusalem Sophronius.

However, neither Islamophobians nor their terrorist Islamists have any interest but to dump these Islamic ideological covenants for the protection of Arab Christians. No Arab Christian fears for his life from his Muslim neighbor or his government, but he or she definitely fears these two protagonists, who are both foreign to his history and culture. No foreign protection of Arab Christians could match the protection and solidarity they received from their Muslim compatriots both in Iraq and Egypt following the bombings of a church in Baghdad on October 31 and a church in Alexandria on New Year Eve. In the latter case there were reports of Muslim human shields to protect the Christmas religious celebrations of Egyptian Christians, let alone the solidarity statements by both outlawed Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya and the Muslim Brotherhood and the thousands of police deployed for the same purpose, in a remarkable show of national unity and historic coexistence.

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), scheduled to meet in the UAE on January 19, will discuss the situation of Christians in member states, according to Lebanon parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri. On this background, there are also reports that Egypt will ask the Arab League economic summit this month to discuss foreign, and, in particular, western interference in Arab Affairs. European offers of protection are already backlashing.

The only real threat to the existence of Arab Christians showed for the first time when the European colonialism first, then the U.S. imperialism, self–appointed western powers as their protectors. It is noteworthy that in both the Iraqi and Egyptian cases the native Christian Arabs are now paying the heavy price of the U.S. anti–Pan–Arabism of both the late Jamal Abdul Nasser and Saddam Hussein. Their plight started with the forcing of pro–U.S. regimes in both countries.

To describe the latest attacks against Christians as a plan of “religious cleansing,” as President Sarkozy has done, suggests a persecution that doesn’t exist; this is “not the case in the Middle East at the moment,” it is “not supported by the wider community,” said Fiona McCallum of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, who is a specialist on the Christian communities in the Middle East, adding: “It’s important to also note that immigration takes place from the region from both Christians and Muslims as well.”

But the report has backfired to put the very survival of PA’s presidency of Mahmud Abbas in the balance and make both adversaries come out winners with Abbas himself as the only looser, thanks to the blundering of the U.S. Administration of President Barak Obama, who seemed to shoot his own diplomacy in the legs by undermining the leadership of the only rubber-stamping ally of his country among the Palestinian polity, and “threatening” as well his own “global public diplomacy options” and “scrupulously graduated approach to whatever passes for a Middle East Peace process.¹

On April 3, the HRC adopted (following the adoption on January 12, 2009 of resolution S-9/1 by the HRC at the end of its 9th Special Session) a legislation sponsored by Cuba, Egypt and Pakistan, representing the Non-aligned Movement (NAM), the Arab League (AL) and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) respectively, and established the UNFFMGC “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.” Goldstone reported violations of both laws, with recommendation to the UN Security council to adopt the findings, the conclusions thereof, including the recommendation that if either Israel or the authorities in Gaza did not conduct their own impartial investigations of the findings within six months, the UN Security Council should take the matter to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Immediately, Netanyahu mobilized his diplomacy, the U.S. Jewish and Zionist lobbyists to recruit Obama’s administration into a bilateral front against the report, because its advance would, in his words, “strike a fatal blow to the (Palestinian and Arab-Israeli) peace process” and because the report’s fate depends “to a large extent on the attitude of the United States.” The U.S. was forthcoming. On September 27, Israeli Haaretz reported that Israeli and American diplomats went to the UN General Assembly “to bury” the 574-page Goldstone Report, and as a result “it appears all but certain” that the report “will not reach any binding international forums.” The U.S. Jewish weekly, the Forward, agreed. Israelis blackmailed the U.S. by a very thinly veiled threat that the report would be a precedent carrying a “hidden danger” to U.S. war record against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan: It “basically makes it illegal for democratic countries to defend themselves against terrorism,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, at a meeting during which he asked her to remove the Goldstone report from the UN’s agenda. Spokesman of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Jonathan Peled, was more vocal: “We need to make sure this report does not endanger the U.S. and other countries,” he said.

U.S.-Israel Collusion

The U.S. Administration picked up from there to act as Israel’s proxy. It indicated it will oppose any effort by the HRC to move the report to the U.N. Security Council and all efforts to refer the report’s findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for investigation and possible prosecution. A top White House official told Jewish organizational leaders in an off-the-record phone call that the U.S. strategy was to “quickly” bring the report to its “natural conclusion” within the HRC and not to allow it to go further, indicating that the Obama administration is ready to use the U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council to deal with any other “difficulties” arising out of the report, adding that his administration also has made clear to the Palestinian Authority that Washington is not pleased with a PA petition to bring the report’s allegations against Israel to the ICC, Jewish participants in the call told Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) on September 23. A week earlier, Susan Rice, described the UNHRC mandate as “unbalanced, one sided and basically unacceptable. We have very serious concerns about many of the recommendations in the report. We will expect and believe that the appropriate venue for this report to be considered is the Human Rights Council and that is our strong view.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York City that Washington considered the “mandate” for the commission and its subsequent report to be “one-sided,” adding that Washington “has grave concerns about the recommendations,” and that the “appropriate” venues to deal with its recommendations are “the institutions within Israel” and “within the international system is the Human Rights Council.”

Similarly, her Assistant for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Michael Posner, called the report “deeply flawed.” Speaking to the Human Rights Council on September 29, Posner said the United States was “confident that Israel, as a democracy with a well-established commitment to the rule of law, has the institutions and ability to carry out robust investigations into these allegations.” (The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem documented 773 cases where Israeli forces killed civilians not involved in hostilities during the December-January Israeli war on Gaza, but found that Israel has to date convicted only one soldier of a crime – for stealing a credit card.)

On October 1, U.S. presidential envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, reportedly approached a senior PA official and Hillary Clinton called Mahmoud Abbas in a climax of “intensive diplomacy,” which indicates that the pressure was coordinated at the U.S. White House level. Amira Hass reported in Haaretz that Abbas capitulated to American pressure after a visit from the American consul-general on the same day, and phoned Geneva. Pakistan’s representative Zamir Akram told the 47-member Council that the co-sponsors of the resolution wanted the vote to be postponed until the next session in March. The next day, U.S. Assistant Secretary, Esther Brimmer, confirmed the U.S. diplomatic intervention and told reporters: “We discussed with [Human Rights] council members – and in particular, we discussed with council members and the state of Israel, as well as the Palestinian Authority – how to approach the Goldstone report.” A senior U.S. official told AP that the Palestinian decision came after “intense diplomacy” by Washington to convince the Palestinian leadership that going ahead with the resolution would harm the Middle East peace process, and “The Palestinians recognized that this was not the best time to go forward with this.”

Viewed from the Middle East, the United States, which had signed agreements with more than seventy nations worldwide to ensure that American military are immune against national and international persecution in cases of human law violations, was perceived as providing a similar shield that would ensure that the Israeli military are similarly immune and above the international law, and has embroiled the Palestinian Authority in this network of political protection of Israeli suspects of human rights violations against its own people in the Gaza Strip.

A “Palace Revolt”

U.S officials cite the resumption of the peace process as their casus belli. George Mitchell, arrived in the region last Thursday on his fifth tour this year. But the outcome counterproductively boiled down to strengthening the hands of the forces of the opposing camp, namely the Netanyahu government and Hamas, who came out winners, and weakening to the breaking point the pro-U.S. and pro-peace forces, in particular Abbas and his autonomous PA, the only looser.

Coming on the backdrop of the U.S. “intense diplomacy,” which similarly brought Abbas to New York for a summit meeting with Netanyahu and Obama on September 22 against his will and his proclaimed demand for freezing Israel’s Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank as a precondition for any meetings with Netanyahu, which also had lost Abbas “a lot of credibility with the Palestinian people” (according to Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Abbas-led executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization – PLO), the Obama Administration while acting as the proxy for Israel on Goldstone report has devastated whatever remained of his credibility.

The deferral of the HRC vote on the report has created a palace revolt against Abbas. ABC on October 6 reported he “is in dire political trouble. The U.S. ally is being accused by Palestinians of colluding with Israel and the United States.” His veteran coalition partners of the PLO factions have condemned the move as a moral, national and political “crime.” His government of Premier Salam Fayyad said in a statement Monday that, “We mustn’t give up the opportunity to go after those who committed war crimes during Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.” Fayyad rejected a resignation in protest by his economy minister Basem Khoury, an independent Christian businessman. His mainstream Fatah movement was divided between those who condemned the move and those who justified it but nonetheless considered it a mistake that must be undone. Many Fatah leaders held Abbas personally responsible. Fourteen Palestinian human and civil rights NGOs joined the protest, demonstrated and expressed their bitter feelings of betrayal of their nine-month old efforts. Palestinian Diaspora were more free to raise hell over his “national treason;” the council of Palestinian organizations in Europe called on Abbas to step down. Vocal voices called for his resignation. Other voices called for the dissolution of the PA. For the first time in history, an Israeli Palestinian political party (Balad, led by Jamal Zahalka, an MP) called for the immediate dismissal of Mahmoud Abbas. In Beirut’s Daily Star, Rami Khouri wrote: “Abbas caved in to US pressure, making it clear that he was more concerned about his relations with Washington than relations with, well, his own people.” Abbas’ statement that Arab states were aware of his move in Geneva drew a backlash from a major “peace partner” like Egypt, whose foreign minister, Ahmed Abu el-Gheit, had no waste of time in confirming that his country had no knowledge beforehand of the Palestinian decision. Squeezed into a corner, the Abbas presidency finally had to admit on record that the Palestinian leadership was “mistaken,” according to the spokesman of the PLO’s executive committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, and chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat. The “investigation committee” ordered by Abbas to determine who was responsible for his own decision to defer the HRC voting on the report to next March highlighted only the credibility debacle he is facing now. His decision to redress the “mistake’ and again approach the UNHRC for an emergency session to vote on the report has only complicated this debacle further, positioning him on a collision course with the U.S. and making Mitchell’s mission to make progress toward resuming Palestinian-Israeli talks more unlikely.

Abbas’ internal and external politics were in no less disarray than U.S. politics. Sending George Mitchell on his fifth trip to the region this year would neither contain the damage nor would it revive a good faith for resuming the peace process whose momentum has been defused by the fallout from Goldstone report’s diplomatic controversy. The inter-Palestinian reconciliation efforts sponsored by Egypt, which is an indispensable precondition for a successful resumption of peace talks, received a blow that might prove fatal; Cairo reportedly received a request to postpone the October 26 deadline for signing the Palestinian accord agreement. Obama came out a looser with both Israelis and Palestinians: Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren said on October 8 that in Israeli polls, Obama is scoring the lowest ever; a survey published last month by the International Peace Institute, headed by Terje Larsen, the former UN envoy to the region, has found that the U.S. has 80 percent unfavorable rating from the Palestinians, 70 percent do not support Obama and 56 percent do not expect him to achieve progress in the “peace process.” Obama who has just prematurely won the Nobel prize for peace and was recently applauded for announcing a more cooperative approach to the United Nations has shot himself in the legs by recurring to the traditional U.S. threat of “vetoing” the world community. Similarly his pronounced intention of a turnabout in U.S. approach to human rights, symbolized by his decision to close the Guantanamo detention center, has antagonized the world human rights community, first by ignoring more than 300 American civil organizations grouped in the coalition of The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which urged his administration to vote in favor of Goldstone’s report in an open letter signed by more than 150 organizations, and second by ignoring a similar plea by a world community of more than 300 organizations. The weaker and less credible Abbas and Obama are perceived, and the stronger Netanyahu becomes, the less credible any efforts for peace making will look, and vice versa.

Abbas Insecure

Palestinian consensus on condemnation has created a volatile environment of insecurity for Abbas. An ongoing personality assassination process has put his personal safety in jeopardy. In the behind the scenes intrigues of the Middle East politics, he might pay with his life for rubber-stamping U.S. advice, to be the second potential victim after late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for “putting all their eggs in U.S. basket.”

Forcing a voluntarily pro-U.S. regime into a de facto U.S. puppet arbitrarily is the sure way to undermine it literary, or practically when it becomes — as a result of a wide spread opposition — incapable of delivery. This could only be interpreted in either one of two ways. Either the United States has decided to “remove” Abbas as it had done with his predecessor Arafat and replace him in another “change of regime,” or Washington has gravely miscalculated, which is unforgiveable in view of the fact that the Palestinian polity and society are completely vulnerable to U.S. intelligence collecting agencies. It’s worth noting in this context that the U.S. man in the PA, the western donors’ favorite and veteran of the World Bank, Salam Fayyad, has been almost completely distanced from being politically tarnished by the fallout of both the New York trilateral summit meeting and the Goldstone furor. A third interpretation could not be ruled out. For Obama to move forward with his vehemently pursued plan to resume the Palestinian-Israeli talks, he might have found it more easier to further weaken Abbas into dropping his proclaimed conditions for going along with the resumption of talks after Obama’s efforts failed to bring Netanyahu to toe his line on freezing the expansion of Israel’s colonial settlement enterprise in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank of River Jordan.

Obama’s description of anti-Americanism as “reflexive” does not apply to Arabs, in general, and Palestinian anti-Americanism, in particular. An Arab and Islamic consensus has welcomed him at least with the benefit of doubt. The Palestinian regime has been successfully “changed,” particularly since the “removal” of late leader Yasser Arafat, into a pro-U.S. one, with U.S.-trained and Israeli-armed security forces. Most of the Arab rulers are either “allies” or strategic “friends,” and since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, U.S.-channeled finances that bypass governments have sponsored burgeoning pro-U.S. civil society NGOs, which are aggressively promoting American liberal values at the grassroots level among Arabs and Palestinians without competition except from similar European-funded bodies. Wide spread Arab and Palestinian anti-Americanism, which is squandering these assets, is U.S.-made and not Arab-made; it is the product of U.S. foreign policies in the region. Cornering Abbas’ leadership into an impossible embarrassing situation was only the latest example.

1. According to Ian Williams in Foreign Policy in Focus on September 23, 2009.

On the second anniversary of Blackwater’s massacre of Iraqis in Baghdad’s Al-Nusur Square, CBS on September 17 asked in a detailed report: “Why Is Obama Still Using Blackwater?” The answer could obviously be found in exhausting the U.S. “volunteer” military manpower stretched out to the maximum to sustain the two U.S.–led wars on Iraq and Afghanistan.

This military manpower debacle leaves Obama with either one of three options: More privatization of both wars and consequently more “blackwaters”, “nationalization” of both wars through “Iraqization” and “Afghanization”, which nonetheless could not disengage the U.S. neither militarily nor financially from both theaters neither in the short term nor in the foreseeable future, or resorting to conscription to sustain a war that has so far proved unwinnable both on Iraq and on Afghanistan after nine years and seven years respectively.

However all three options seem unfeasible. Conscription as the last resort is absolutely an option that would immediately be dismissed because unless it is dictated by a clear-cut threat to national security it will not be accepted as an indispensible measure of self defense, let alone conscribing Americans for a war on Iraq that has been unpopular with them since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, or for the war on Afghanistan that is increasingly becoming unpopular among them, according to the latest CNN Poll of Polls (58% against), and is gradually eroding Obama’s popularity, which dropped to 50% from 57% in July (Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll on September 23).

The other two options, namely privatization or nationalization of both wars, are evidently contradictory. While Iraqis or Afghanis may swallow a delayed withdrawal of foreign military troops until they can develop their own defense forces, they will in no way accept a mercenary alternative to such troops in the meantime, nor would they perceive collaborators who were brought into both countries by the invading armies themselves as turned “nationalists” overnight.

Obama’s strategy as was announced on the inauguration of his administration was to exit U.S. combatants from Iraq and move these same combating resources to Afghanistan to solve his military manpower problem, but exit from Iraq is proving untenable and the war on Afghanistan is proving unsustainable without immediate commitment of substantially more troops.

Obama has now to choose between two failures, either a failure in Iraq or a failure in Afghanistan, because a “successful outcome” in the latter theater “is going to require a major U.S. reinforcement,” but “fast redeployment in Afghanistan hurts us in Iraq. It comes at a price … at the cost of the risk of failure in another theater (i.e. Iraq),” according to Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow with the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) for defense policy on March 2.

Obama is now obviously stuck between what he described as the U.S “war of choice” on Iraq and the U.S. “war of necessity” on Afghanistan, which practically has become His “war of hard choice” – according to Richard Haas, the CFR president in a recent article. Both wars however are still insistently sustained by Obama whose exit strategy from both is still blurred in Iraqi and Afghani eyes as much as in U.S. eyes.

Viewed from the battle grounds of the U.S. global wars on terrorism or otherwise, which ironically are only fought in the Middle East, Obama’s strategies seem indecisive and confused. On Iraq, he pledged in his UN speech to “ending the war” and “to remove all American troops by the end of 2011,” but “responsibly,” until the Iraqis “transition to full responsibility for their future,” which practically translates to a long term strategic commitment.

Meanwhile on Afghanistan he is still wavering and meandering not to rush to a sizeable reinforcement to avoid what Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in country, warned against in a confidential report, recently leaked: “Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it … The overall effort is deteriorating. We run the risk of strategic defeat.” But Obama will not yet surge troops there until he has “the right strategy” and will not send “young men and women into battle, without having absolute clarity about what the strategy is going to be.”

Nine months in office, Obama is still wondering: “Are we doing the right thing?” “Are we pursuing the right strategy?” If Obama has yet to decide on a strategy on Afghanistan, in hindsight, one might ask: why did he send there seventeen thousand additional troops earlier this year!

For too long now the Middle East has been paying in blood for U.S. experimental and contradictory foreign policies, which ostensibly seek peace where war is the only option to make the Israeli occupying power, for instance, succumb to a just and lasting peace in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and launch war where peace is only attainable through an end to U.S.-led wars as the cases are in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, Obama at the UN on Wednesday seemed poised to promise the Middle East more of the same when he pledged he “will never apologize” for defending the interests “of my nation,” and yet lamented “anti-Americanism,” which is exacerbated by sustaining such counterproductive policies.

However, the Pope will be stepping into “a diplomatic minefield,” where the Catholic highest spiritual authority will be unmercifully scrutinized by the protagonists of the one hundred year old Arab – Israeli conflict for the Holy Father’s every step, word and handshake, which would force him into the defensive in an impossible balancing act that will rule out any hope his presence is supposed to inspire, especially among the down-trodden Arabs of Palestine, whether those who are “Israelis” living as second class citizens since 1948 or those Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation since 1967.

Even the pontiff’s own Catholic diminishing flock in the Holy Land seems in controversy over the timing and the itinerary of his pilgrimage. “We will ask him why he came, what he intends on saying … and why he isn’t coming to Gaza,” Father Manuel Mussalam, the pastor of the only Catholic church of about 300 believers in Gaza, out of 3000 Christians in the Israeli besieged Mediterranean strip, was quoted by AFP as asking. “We’ll tell him that this is not the right moment to come and visit the holy places, while Jerusalem is occupied,” Mussalam added.

In November 2006, long before Gaza Strip came under the control of the Islamic movement Hamas, which is cited as the casus belli for the Israeli latest three – week bloody and destructive war on Gaza as well as for the nine – year old Israeli military blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians since 2000, Father Mussalam described the situation there: “Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft… They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope and no love. These actions are War Crimes!”

Vindicating Mussalam’s statement, the World Bank reported on April 24 that a serious environmental threat is evolving in Gaza where only one tenth of water meets the world health standards, a fact that is responsible for a quarter of the disease cases, and creating a water crisis similar to that in Sudan and Congo.

Nonetheless, the Holy See is determined to rule out Gaza from the Pope’s itinerary. In a recent letter to the Vatican 40 prominent Christians from the occupied Palestinian territories appealed to the Holy See to add Gaza to his itinerary. They could not understand how the Pope has been to Auschwitz to pray for the people murdered there, “as a duty to truth and to those that suffered,” as he said, but could not similarly heal the wounds of those who are still suffering in Gaza.

The Vatican cites security reasons, according to the spokesman of the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, Father Peter Madros. Israel recently barred the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Franco, from Gaza. But security did not prevent Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General from visiting Gaza when the guns were still smoking, nor did it prevent Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, to name only a few.

The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop Fouad Twal, in an interview provided by the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land and published by Zenit.org on April 22, acknowledged that the Pope’s trip has undoubtedly a “political dimension”: “We mustn’t fool ourselves: there is 100% a political dimension … everything will have a political connotation. Here we breathe politics, our oxygen is politics.” But Twal has three explanations. First, “it is difficult to find a good balance and to maintain it.” Second, “imagine the negative consequences it would have on the pilgrimage industry, if the Pope himself was afraid of coming on pilgrimage.” Third, “what should be done? Wait for better times … until the Palestinian question is resolved? I’m afraid that two or three Sovereign Pontiffs will pass before it is definitively settled.”

The three reasons Twal cited are shocking, but his conclusion devastates whatever hope the papal visit might inspire: “The more the Vatican is a friend of Israel, the more it will be able to draw profit,” otherwise, “we will all lose, we Christians and we Arabs”!

When His Holiness is to meet on April 14 with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has dispelled all hopes for even the resumption of a peace process, let alone peace, both by his on-record political platform as well as by the composition of his extreme right ruling coalition, and when he will meet with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, the spiritual capital of Christianity and Islam which his Israeli hosts are determined to Judaise as theirs only eternal capital, and to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the Islamic Al-Buraq Wall as the Jewish Western (Wailing) Wall of the Temple, and when Israel forces his protocol team to drop from the list of his Arab audience in Nazareth the Palestinian mayor of Sukhnin, Mazen Ghanaim, because he rallied against the Israeli war on Gaza, then the itinerary of his pilgrimage could be described as anything but being apolitically balanced when Gaza is ruled out.

In his Easter message on April 12, Benedict XVI noted the world food shortage, the financial turmoil, the old and new forms of poverty, the disturbing climate change, the violence and deprivation, “the ever present threat of terrorism,” to conclude that, “it is urgent to rediscover grounds for hope,” and urged his audience to spread the kind of hope that inspires courage to do good even when it costs dearly. But his oversight that did not make him mention military occupation and the long standing refugee problem emanating therefrom, as it is the case in Palestine, to where he is heading as a pilgrim, dispels any hope that he will say, let alone do, anything that would inspire hope.

U.S. and European diplomats are reiterating the Israeli propaganda justification: “What would any normal country do if they were threatened by rocket fire? They would act.” U.S. President Barak Obama was the last western leader to uphold this Israeli claim. “But Israel is not a normal country, it is an occupying country,” former Palestinian-Israeli member of Knesset Azmi Bishara said. Moreover what country would tolerate an eight-year siege and not consider it an act of war without any national reaction? Why should western diplomacy judge Palestinians in Gaza as universally abnormal.

Western diplomacy is building on the Palestinian reaction in self-defense as the igniting cause of violence and on the Israeli aggressive action as the resulting effect. It is a non starter. It could win EU high representative Javier Solana, the international middle East quartet of peace mediators’ envoy Tony Blair, who are regular visitors to the region, and U.S. newly appointed Middle East envoy George Mitchell some audience among their Arab and Palestinian peace partners who might still hope that the United States and the European Union may yet be able to deliver on their two-state promise, but this audience was not and is still not the key player in Gaza. Israeli and Hamas’ non-abiding reaction to the UN Security Council resolution 1860 proved British Foreign Secretary David Miliband right when he said immediately thereafter that “peace is made on the ground while resolutions are written in the United Nations.”

Hamas has survived the Israeli “Operation Cast Lead,” which failed to remove it as a key player, to remain the only player on the ground in Gaza and not only as a key player there as well as a major much stronger player among Palestinians in the West Bank and the Diaspora. To build their diplomacy for a “durable and sustainable” ceasefire on the recognition only of the Israeli player while bypassing or sidelining the other protagonist is a dead end approach that could only encourage more Israeli aggressive actions and would for sure invoke more Palestinian violent reaction.

Unfortunately this has been the focus of UN resolution 1860, the so-called Egyptian initiative, the recent European summit meetings with Arab and Israeli leaders, the Israeli-U.S. memorandum of understanding of January 19, George Mitchell’s Middle East eight-day tour, a focus that President Obama had subscribed to two days after his inauguration. It might not be too long before western diplomacy regrets this approach. Hamas should be “engaged … as there could be no solution to the issue” by keeping it out in the cold, Nathan J Brown, an expert from Carnegie Endowment, was quoted as saying by Indian The Hindu on January 25, a view shared also by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

In historical perspective, nothing proves the Israeli action and the Palestinian reaction more than the very existence of Hamas. While founding the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was the reaction of the Palestinian refugees in exile to the Israeli action of forcing them out of their homeland in 1948, the founding of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in Gaza was the Palestinian reaction to the Israeli military expansion in 1967, which led to the occupation of the rest of historic Palestine.

More recently, the Palestinian reaction managed to develop some locally made primitive rockets in self-defense, and to smuggle in some “Grad” systems, which Israel used in addition to the tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt borders as justification for military action, while imposing a media blackout to hide the horrible humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza as the result of its eight-year old blockade of the territory, which left the besieged Palestinians with one of two choices: Either to starve slowly to death or die instantly en masse in “Operation Cast Lead.” Israel imposed siege, in itself an act of war, as a collective punishment against Gaza civilians. U.S. and European strong advocates of Humanitarian Intervention, led by French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, who call now for such interventions in Darfur, Myanmar and Zimbabwe and who did intervene militarily for humanitarian reasons in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, have kept mum on Gaza.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt hit directly at the root cause of the Gaza conflict. “They will dig tunnels out of desperation and there will be no way of stopping all these tunnels if you don’t open up the border,” he said. Bildt was joined by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who urged ending “Gaza’s economic isolation by reopening the crossings that link it to the outside world.” European leaders seem to have finally awakened to the real equation of cause and effect in the conflict. However they are calling for opening Gaza border crossings as a sideshow, as the effect and not as the root cause of Palestinian reaction, as a prerequisite for a “durable and sustainable” ceasefire and not as an obligation that Israel must abide by in its capacity as the occupying power under international law, as merely a humanitarian outlet for the besieged civilian population and not as a national right of the Palestinians in Gaza Strip in the context of the Israeli unilateral military redeployment from the coastal strip in 2005.

The outgoing US president “personally” sponsored Resolution 1850, which on the surface was intended to placate Palestinian negotiators before Bush’s meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas on 19 December. Bush has failed to fulfil his twice-made promise to usher in a Palestinian state, once by the end of 2005 and the second time by the end of this year. The resolution was intended to ensure Palestinian negotiators remain committed to the “Annapolis process” in which Bush’s failure to produce positive results is no less dismal than his failure to fulfil his promises to the Palestinian president by means of securing a UN rubber stamp on the process. The UN’s backing of the Annapolis process is supposed to preempt any attempt to wriggle out of it on the part of a new Israeli government. According to recent opinion polls, the most likely victor will be Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu, who has made no secret of his opposition to the Annapolis process and vision. But as its record amply demonstrates Israel has never respected UN resolutions, confident that regardless how grossly it abuses them it will enjoy the backing of Washington.

Israel’s unreserved welcome of the resolution betrays the fact that this gesture, ostensibly in favour of the Palestinian negotiators, is in essence a parting gift from Bush to the Israeli occupying power. The Israeli Foreign Ministry statement lauded the Security Council for having “endorsed, for the first time, the three Quartet principles as the basis for international legitimacy and support for any Palestinian government”. The resolution was an expression of the council’s “unequivocal support for direct bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, in the framework of the Annapolis process, in accordance with principles agreed by the parties themselves and represented to the Quartet, including the principle that any agreement will be subject to roadmap implementation, which requires first and foremost the dismantling of the terror infrastructure”. By “terrorist infrastructure”, of course, the statement means the Palestinian resistance. It should also be borne in mind that Israel’s agreement to the roadmap comes with a codicil of 14 “reservations” approved by Washington in Bush’s notorious letter to Ariel Sharon of 14 April 2004, and which the Palestinians have dubbed “the second Balfour declaration”. No surprise, therefore, at the Foreign Ministry’s barely restrained jubilation at what it described as “an unequivocal message to the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza” and the Security Council’s “endorsement of core Israeli principles for the peace process”.

The statement also included Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s comment on the resolution: “Today’s Security Council resolution constitutes international endorsement for the Annapolis process in keeping with the guiding principles established by the parties, namely: direct bilateral negotiations between the parties, without international intervention, and according to the principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, a commitment to the Quartet principles — recognising Israel, ending terror and accepting former agreements — as well as conditioning implementation of any future agreement on the implementation of the roadmap.” She adds, pointedly, “the Security Council’s clear support is a vote of confidence in the process that Israel is advancing with the legitimate Palestinian leadership and that has no substitute.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian negotiators found nothing in the resolution clear enough to warrant a warm official welcome. They therefore restricted themselves to generalities and ambiguities in the hope of disguising the peril looming over the Palestinian cause from the UN’s decision to confer legitimacy on the Annapolis project, which is intended to prolong and exacerbate Palestinian rifts. The resolution simultaneously imperils what the Palestinian president has called the PLO’s “national project” because it renders that project, the PLO and the PA, dependent upon a peace process that has been stunted in substance but the duration of which remains open. It is difficult to see such a process achieving any progress, all the more so since the UN resolution did not invoke Article 7 of the UN Charter, which would have made it binding on all parties. The most PA officials could come up with was that the resolution was “encouraging”.

The only possible interpretation of this welcome (which was not shared by important Fatah and PLO leaders such as Farouk Qadoumi and Taysir Qubaa) is that the Fatah leadership has seized upon the Security Council’s “commitment to the irreversibility of the bilateral negotiations” that began in Annapolis on 27 November 2007 (Resolution 1850, Article 1) as a potential weapon to wield in the face of its rival in the national rift and as a means to press forward with a negotiating agenda that is rejected by Hamas and other major factions in the PLO, as well as by the majority of Palestinians according to polls conducted by research centres in Ramallah, Nablus and Bethlehem. Bush’s farewell gift to Israel thus promises to become another obstacle to add to already existing domestic obstacles to any successful national dialogue.

In order to better appreciate the price the Palestinians will pay for continuing with the Annapolis process and the roadmap it might be useful to cite US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s remarks to the Security Council in defence of the resolution: “Reforms in the Palestinian Authority in 2003 had inspired hope, yet they had proved to be superficial, and the hope deceptive.” (Does anyone out there remember that Arafat was PA president at the time?) “The Palestinian elections in January 2005 and the Israeli disengagement from Gaza later that year had provided hope that had soon been ended by the election victory of Hamas in 2006. Finally, after Hamas had usurped power in Gaza in 2007, it had become clear to all that there was no alternative to the Bush vision.”

Rice’s disregard of the Palestinian people’s right to choose their leaders, her declaration from the most important international forum that elimination of Arafat and, now, Hamas, is the price the Palestinians have to pay to achieve her president’s utopian vision, recalls the arrogance her president displayed six years ago. On 4 June 2002, at the height of Israeli incursions into PA territory which culminated in the siege on Arafat’s compound and eventually his death, Bush called for a new Palestinian leadership and declared, “When the Palestinian people get a new leadership, new institutions, and new security arrangements with their neighbours [he meant the Israelis of course, not the Arabs], the US will support the creation of a Palestinian state.”

This is recent history. When we place Resolution 1850 in its context, we can better appreciate how generous a gift Bush left Israel.

Manaf told the Associated Press (AP) he interviewed Addouri “on the battlefield.” The “dialogue” was conducted “with a commander in his lion’s den and among his soldiers,” in the “war zone” and on the “combat field while weapons were talking,” Manaf said in his introduction. Addouri spoke in his capacity as “the Supreme Commander of the Jihad and Liberation Front, the Pan-Arab Secretary General of the Al-Baath Arab Socialist Party and the Secretary of Iraq Region,” the Egyptian editor added.

AP said “Addouri is believed to play an important role in financing” the resistance, “though little is known about how directly he leads fighters on the ground.” However, the U.S. occupying power, as well as Iran and the Iranian-allied regime Washington brought about in Baghdad after the occupation, have been keen to downplay the role played by Addouri and his party in the national resistance and instead highlight the marginal role played by Al-Qaeda, which was brought into Iraq for the first time ever thanks to U.S. and other Islamists.

If history could illuminate current events, Addouri’s reference to this “blackout” media policy is vindicated by the precedent of the U.S.-British planning for the coup that brought down the Iranian leader Mohamed Musaddiq’s government in August 1953, which installed the Shah in power.

“One key aspect of the plot was to portray the demonstrating mobs (against Musaddiq, which was “a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. The mob was paid for by American dollars.”) as supporters of the Iranian Communist Party-Tudeh … As in every other British and US military intervention until the collapse of the USSR, the ‘communist threat’ scenario was deployed as the Official Story … The real threat of nationalism (and dirtier aims like protecting oil profits) were downplayed or removed from the picture presented to the public.”¹ In Iraq, the U.S. propaganda machine has only replaced the “communist threat” by that of Al-Qaeda.

Manaf, in his introduction, noted how much Addouri was a dedicated religious man, very well versed in Islamic theology and Arab history, and familiar with Sufism. His Arab and Islamic culture was reflected extensively in his answers, which were full of quotations from the Holy Quran and the sayings of historic Arab and Muslim leaders, a fact that makes the translation of his interview into English an impossible mission sometimes.

Addouri identified Al-Baath as a “revolutionary organization, a brave and innovative leadership, an armed revolutionary Jihadist organization; it represents a fearless army and glorious armed forces.”

Denying media reports about his ill health (born July 1, 1942), Addouri confirmed that, “I am in good health and at the height of the Jihad spirit,” adding that, “today, I believe I am immigrating to God and His Prophet,” and “left the world, myself and its fortunes behind my back” to be totally dedicated to and “garrisoned for God and for His Sake” until “either victory or martyrdom.”

Three Chapters of Resistance

“Our resistance and battle with the (U.S.) occupier is not new,” Addouri said. “It started during the early years of Al-Baath formation to expand and deepen after the glorious Tammuz (July) revolution of 1968 … Prior to 2003, the imperialist enemy used local forces from Iraq, and the (Arab) nation sometimes; other times it used regional powers to fight us on its behalf. When its local and regional instruments failed to stop the Pan-Arab renaissance march of Iraq, the U.S. enemy directly entered the field of struggle and combat, amassed great powers, and led the invasion and occupation by itself.”

He identified three stages of the Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led invasion and occupation. “The first chapter was the official showdown, when the regular formations of the brave armed forces stood up to the U.S. invasion; then the launch of the popular confrontation against the invasion, which inter-wined with this chapter. The popular, official and military integration occurred immediately and the people’s war of liberation started during the first week of the invasion, as was planned by the leadership and according to its strategy.”

During this second chapter of the resistance formations from the civil organizations of the party, Fedayeen Saddam and volunteers took part in carrying our “martyrdom operations.” The “glorious women of Iraq participated in the first formations of the popular resistance.” Some of those women carried out “martyrdom operations, the first of which was the heroic operation carried out by two women in Baghdad on the third day of the occupation; another operation was carried out by a glorious Iraqi woman in Al-Nassiriyah south of Iraq.”

The “third chapter is sustaining the resistance and continuing the battle until the liberation of Iraq.”

Addouri said that during the occupation more than one million and three hundred thousand Iraqis fell martyrs, and “so far the number of Al-Baath martyrs in this battle amounts to one hundred and twenty thousand.”

He sees “this historic decisive showdown,” which he described as “the holy battle,” as the “fate and the responsibility of Al-Baath as much as it is the responsibility of the great people of Iraq and its Jihadist national, Pan-Arab and Islamic powers, and the free people of our (Arab) nation and humanity as a whole,” all who were “targeted by the invasion.”

Ready to Negotiate U.S. Withdrawal

Addouri sounded definitely confident of victory and reiterated that the U.S.-led occupation has already been defeated, and “in despair is looking for an exit.” The resistance “has destroyed the alliance of evil, the parties of which are escaping one after another. Only (U.S. President George W.) Bush remains blundering in his debacle,” he said.

Replying to questions about the truth in media reports that there were “contacts between you and the Americans,” whether he made any “direct or indirect contact with official U.S. authorities,” whether “you are willing to negotiate with the Americans” and if the answer was positive “what are your negotiating terms,” “would you lead the negotiations personally” or would authorize others to negotiate, would such negotiations be bilateral (between Al-Baath and the U.S.) or in the name of the resistance “front,” and whether he was sure that the yield of the negotiations would correspond to the real weight of the resistance on the ground, “as the saying goes, you cannot reach at the negotiating table farther than your artillery can reach,” Addouri said:

“Friends and foes” are very well aware of our strategy, which was made public by the media; “Al-Baath doesn’t negotiate with anybody at all if they don’t recognize this strategy beforehand, and will negotiate neither with America nor with intermediaries or friends except on this basis. If the enemy recognized this strategy we will sit with them directly, negotiate with them, and help them exit our country without loosing face and will facilitate their exit. Prior to this recognition, there are no negotiations with the occupying enemy.”

“Al-Baath will meet with whoever it decides to meet, except with the Zionist entity (Israel) and the government of collaborators in the Green Zone … We will be happy when the enemy is convinced of its defeat, accepts our strategy, sits with us to negotiate a program for its implementation,” he added.

Addouri detailed his strategy, indicating that “any negotiations with the invaders without it represents a desertion and treason, and is refused by all national, Pan-Arab and Islamic factions of the resistance.”

(1) An official pronounced recognition of the armed and unarmed national resistance, including all its factions and (political) parties, as the sole legitimate representative of the people of Iraq.

(2) An official declaration of unconditional withdrawal from Iraq by the U.S. leadership.

(3) Declaring null and void all the political and legislative institutions, as well as all the laws and legislations issued by them, since the occupation, with the deBaathization law in the forefront, and compensating all who were adversely affected by them.

(4) A stop to raids, prosecutions, arrests, killings and displacement.

(5) Release of all prisoners of war (POWs), prisoners and detainees without exception and compensating all for their physical and psychological damage.

(6) Reinstating the army and the national security forces in service in accordance with their pre-occupation laws and regulations, and compensating all who were adversely affected by dissolving them.

(7) A pledge to compensate Iraq for all the material and moral losses it incurred because of the occupation.

Iraqi Tactics of Guerrilla War

Addouri detailed his concept of “the people’s war of liberation and the guerilla war,” advised the resistance fighters to “adhere to the principles and rules” of this kind of war and listed fifteen “most effective” tactics to hurt the enemy. First, he said, “appear quickly behind, in front and on the sides of the enemy as dictated by the nature of the place, time, climate of the operation, and the type and nature of the target, then hit quickly and disappear quickly before the enemy could have time to react.”

Second, “In planning, implementing and selecting of the target take care to hit a kill in the enemy,” he added. Third, “your weapon is your life, so take care to keep it always ready and away from the eyes of the enemy and its spies.” Four, “protect the security of information … as a red line or a holy matter” and trust nobody “because trust is endless in society.” Five, “the enemy is blind without spies, so exert all efforts to disclose and liquidate them.” Six, “don’t be taken away by your successive victories” or attracted by “showing off” or loose your self-control by praise of your heroic acts, to be a big mouth boasting of your success, “noting that the enemy is hunting you at all times, so keep discreet, disguised and vigilant.” Seven, “inflict the biggest losses in the ranks of the enemy and decrease to the minimum your own losses.” Eight, “make your hands heavy at the enemy during their rest hours” and make “no place safe” for them and give them no time to recover.”

Nine, “the supply lines are the enemy’s lifeline,” so “concentrate on and cut” these lines. Ten, “concentrate on the enemy’s bases, camps and headquarters day and night” to “break its morale.” Eleven, “take your time to deal with high extreme accuracy with the traitors and spies to avoid hurting innocents.” Twelve, “expand the circle of monitoring, following up and hunting the enemy … so it doesn’t surprise us.” Thirteen, “sustain your traditional ties with your relatives, neighbors, neighborhood and friends and make these ties deeper and more intimate, but don’t make any of them feel you have a mission they don’t understand” and “help them to overcome the details of daily life hardships, which are so many nowadays” so they will protect you when in trouble and don’t hand you over to the enemy; they are “your safe armor and honest cover.”

Fourteen, “let belief in God … be our strong starting point.” Fifteen, “fight for the sake of God the enemies of God … until the tyrant … invaders are defeated, until the clear-cut victory, the liberation of the homeland, and raising the flag of ‘There Is No God but The God’ and bringing back the ‘Flag of God Is the Greatest’ to fly in Iraq skies,” Addouri confirmed.

Other Excerpts

Manaf: It is noted that the Iraqi resistance started immediately after the desecration of the Iraq land by the U.S. forces. How could it (the resistance) have started and grown so quickly?

Addouri: “Al-Baath Arab Socialist Party is the party of Iraq and the Arab nation … It did not lay arms or stop fighting even for an hour during day and night and its Jihadist march did not stop any time … It wasn’t surprised by what happened, but increased … its determination not to be exhausted to relentlessly fight the invaders, their stooges and spies whatever the sacrifices are and regardless of how long it would take until full victory and the liberation of Iraq.”

Role of Army Rank and File

Manaf: What role the officers and ranks of the Iraqi armed forces play in resistance?

Addouri: Today they play “a heroic and decisive role in the march of the resistance. In addition to their Jihadist fighting role through their own formations … under the flag of the General Command of the Armed Forces, they are, in accordance with the guidance of the party’ (Al-Baath) leadership and the General Command of the Armed Forces, dispersed into other Jihad factions where they act as field commanders, planners, technicians, makers and developers of most of the various weapons of the resistance. They represent the soul of the resistance and the secret of its innovations, accurate performance and victories.”

New ‘Unprecedented’ Methods

Manaf: What distinguishes the Iraqi resistance? How was it able to fight the occupier in open areas?

Addouri: “The resistance depended on the rules and principles of people’s wars and the guerrilla war, after developing its fighting methods and tactics, and was innovative in its logistic and special operations. More important, it has adapted the Iraqi environment to serve the people’s war. Through practice, it has developed” those rules very much “to move quickly” so to make “all the land is ours and all the time is ours,” and to be up to date to what is new by the enemy in order to “confront it with innovative new of our own.”

“We have made and innovated new ways and methods unprecedented in the people’s wars of liberation, or even in the intelligence sciences … I cannot go into more details for security reasons; this is what kept the resistance” and its leadership a ” mysterious secret, humiliating the enemy, its collaborators and spies.”

Al-Baath Live and … Recruiting

Manaf: Do your resistance formations disperse equally to cover the area of Iraq now or they are concentrated in certain areas and governorates?

Addouri: “The party (Al-Baath) is more than half a century old in Iraq … the organization of Al-Baath today … is stronger many times than it was before the occupation … (I will not elaborate) for reasons Al-Baath will speak out on time.” Today the party disperses in all the cities, villages, plains, mountains and deserts of Iraq; outside Iraq it also disperses among Iraqis wherever they are in every Arab or foreign country.”

After the occupation, despite “the strict conditions” for joining the party and the deBaathization campaign, “thousands joined the party, mostly young people aged between 16 and 25. Tens of thousands of other Iraqis joined the resistance factions led by Al-Baath.”

“In the end the National, Pan-Arab and Islamic Front emerged; Al-Baath is one of its basic pillars.”

No outside Support

Manaf: The Iraqi resistance is unique in the fact that it has no Arab, regional or international incubator or support; how could Al-Baath have provided for sustaining the resistance strong and escalating?

Addouri: Our resistance … not only has no incubator outside the borders of its country, but what is worse and more bitter is that 99 percent of the influential world powers are either directly involved with the enemy against it or sympathize with the enemy; the one percent, which sympathizes with the resistance, turned its back to it fearing its enemies, but God provided for it and made it in no need for them. The people of Iraq have provided their money and offspring; it is an inexhaustible source.

Manaf: Some say the role of Al-Baath in the resistance is limited. What is the size of the Al-Baath-led resistance?

Addouri: The occupying enemy and its regional and local partners have launched a genocide against the Baathists, their families, supporters and sympathizers. The collaborators’ constitution, which was prepared by the CIA, includes a Nazi racist article stipulating the liquidation of Al-Baath as an organization, thought and persons.

They targeted by physical liquidation, destruction and displacement the society of the party to the sixth neighbor.

One of the most important and dangerous deBaathization methods, after assassinations and physical liquidation of Baathists, is the attempt to completely censor the role of Al-Baath on the field as a resisting party and an armed resistance, and to smear it image and role.

Had Al-Baath not been the initiator of resistance since the first day of the invasion and occupation, and had it not acted as if the battle is its own and the cause is its own cause, the world could not have seen the emergence of the strongest national resistance immediately following the invasion.

The other Jihad factions emerged after the resistance was deeply rooted in confronting the occupier and undermining its strategy; some of them were formed and started to act three years after the occupation.

Operations Documented on CDs

“The backbone” of the “wide and strong base of Jihad today is the resistance of Al-Baath and the national, Pan-Arab and Islamic forces, with those members of the Higher Command of Jihad and Liberation in the forefront, who cover the whole area of Iraq,” from Um-Qaser in the south to Zakho in the north and from al-Qaem in the west to Khanqeen and Mandali in the east.

This resistance is targeted by imposing a media, economic and political siege on it to black out its military operations, political activities and its destructive physical and psychological influence on the soldiers of the occupying power and its forces in Iraq.

“Don’t you see how the invaders, collaborators, traitors, spies, renegades … despite their differences on many other things, have agreed to censor its role and action and instead inflated … the claim that it (the resistance) is terrorism?”

“I have documented over the past five years on CDs thousands of operations against the enemy … while the enemy is highlighting the role of other groups, some of which was directly formed or via intermediaries by the occupation itself, and some other were formed by foreign powers hostile to Iraq … who kill the people on ID” (Addouri explicitly was referring to sectarian militias formed by Iran, but did not mention Iran by name).

Pluralistic Future System

Manaf: How do you perceive the ongoing political process in Iraq? What is you comment on reported reconciliation conferences under the auspices of the League of Arab States?

Addouri: No truce with those … and (we’ll) resist whatever entity is established under occupation and in its service, first among them the traitors’ government in the Green Zone.

Manaf: Do you have a strategy to administer the ruling of Iraq after the liberation?

Addouri: Since the first day of the occupation Al-Baath called for “the unity of the resistance as a historical necessity.” With endeavor and persistence the party succeeded in forming the “National, Pan-Arab and Islamic Front in 2005″ then the “Jihad and Liberation Front for armed factions (33 armed resistance factions according to him) on the field in September 2007. Both fronts are open to all anti-occupation armed and political forces” to achieve more unity during the liberation and post-liberation.

Al-Baath has never adopted a one-party stance; it doesn’t “believe in and refuses the one party theory.” However in the past, and “for objective circumstances,” it offered “the theory of the leading party.”

“Al-Baath deeply and principally believes in the creation of a pluralistic national democratic system in which power is democratically rotated on the basis of ballot boxes through free, transparent and fair elections.”

Every deviation from this in the past “falls within the context of the mistakes” of the Al-Baath march.

Committed to Turkish Autonomy

Manaf: What is your program to deal with the Kurdish question after liberation?

Addouri: We are confident that our Kurdish people will not get their national and cultural rights … except within the unity of … a free, liberated, independent and prosperous Iraq … Al-Baath Party will remain committed to the historical March 1970 statement and the 1974 Law of Autonomy as the basis for dealing with the national, cultural and political rights of our Kurdish people in Iraq.

Manaf: Recently the anti-U.S. occupation “Freedom and Justice Party of Kurdistan” was publicly founded; what role do you expect this party to play in Kurdistan?

Addouri: Two Kurdish parties were founded in the name of freedom and justice party of Kurdistan, one chaired by Johar al-Hirki, the son of a prominent Iraqi Kurdish family, which is loyal to the people of Iraq, and the other chaired by the “brother fighter” Arshad Zibari. Both have made a lot of sacrifices from their families and tribes against the occupation and in defense of Iraq freedom and independence.

The birth of both parties will contribute to strengthening and expanding the Kurdish national movement against the occupation and its stooges.

1. Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit, Vintage, 2003.

While all media attention is focused on Hamas in the tightly sealed off Gaza Strip, the real battle of the inter-Palestinian political strife is being fought in the West Bank, where Israeli and American efforts are trying to secure the survival of the Fatah – led Palestinian Authority (PA) and preempt the repetition of the scenario that left Hamas in control of the besieged Mediterranean coastal strip.

Betting the survival of the PA as well as his own presidency on a faint hope that the U.S. Administration might deliver on their promises to revive the peace process with Israel, Abbas is risking a Palestinian infighting in his power base in the Israeli occupied West Bank in the hope that the continued outbreak with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and outlawing their military wings could help international friends to convince Israel to translate the “diplomatic process” he is conducting with the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into an honest and serious negotiations over the final status issues, the only diversion to the prevailing status quo that could spare the West Bank a flare up of violence.

In spite of all his reservations on U.S. President George W. Bush’s vague proposal for an international conference in the fall to revive the peace talks, to which neither he nor other potential participants have yet received any invitation, Abbas seems desperately determined to pursue his faint hope that the world community might yet intervene to make something out of the November event. His Fatah-led PA is similarly optimistic on betting all on the outcome of the coming gathering, which nothing concrete has leaked so far to support its success prospects to vindicate their optimism or to dispel the pessimistic expectations of the overwhelming majority of Palestinian, Israeli and Western observers.

Reviving a Partner

On July 16, Bush set off a flurry of diplomatic motion when he proposed to hold a conference this fall to help resume the Palestinian – Israeli peace talks, deadlocked since the collapse of the trilateral Camp David summit meeting late in 2000, but so far this diplomatic flurry has been much ado about nothing. The aim of this diplomatic flurry is to lay the ground for a successful conclusion of the proposed international gathering. However the Bush administration’s refusal over several years to bring serious attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict has ranked high; Bush’s proposed conference is promising to change nothing.

The U.S. and Israeli officials have been repeatedly on record to pre-condition the convening of the proposed conference and their support to Abbas on sustaining his outbreak with Hamas. A hint by the Italian Premier Romano Prodi about having a dialogue with Hamas and an outright call for such a dialogue by the British House of Common’s Foreign Affairs Committee in August drew sharp criticism from Livni as a “huge mistake” that “will only cripple the process of reconciliation and will halt the current positive momentum,” according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev.

Israel has ruled out Abbas as a peace partner since his election in January 2005; the U.S. has done nothing essential to make the Israelis reconsider. It was left to Hamas to convince both sides to come to their political senses. The Islamic movement’s landslide electoral victory in January 2006 and control of the Gaza Strip in mid June this year have only prodded them to reconsider tactically how to keep Abbas in place lest a similar scenario carries Hamas close to Israeli door steps in the West Bank.

The PA is overreacting in their anti-Hamas measures to assure that the new diplomatic momentum continues; the majority leader in the Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives Steny Hoyer emerged from a meeting with Palestinian premier Salam Fayyad in Ramallah on August 14 to tell reporters: “Mr. Fayyad made very clear that Hamas could not and would not be a partner in moving forward.” Abbas and Fayyad are resisting huge Palestinian, Arab and Muslim pressure to sustain their rejection of dialogue with Hamas, which is also demanded by Russia, Norway, India and the Non-Aligned Movement; they have so far aborted at least eight mediation efforts to restore Palestinian unity, which was also recommended by the International Crisis Group (ICG) early in August.

The U.S. sponsors of the upcoming conference are not leaving prospects to good faith and hopeful wishes; the success for the U.S. Administration is judged by convening the conference and not by any results it may yield because the White House and the State department planned it as a public relations event on the one hand and as a “banana” to bring in Arab heavy weights like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to meet face to face with Israel, in a public show of Arab normalization with Israeli officials, allegedly to boost Olmert’s fragile political standing at home to encourage him to take the next step towards peace.

Bush is urging Olmert to make “concessions” to Abbas to avert a Hamas takeover in the West Bank. Reportedly, Olmert is now forthcoming to cooperate with Abbas in writing something like a “framework agreement” that will lay down the principles of an agreement that may be achieved later on, but without details or a time-table or guarantees, which is a non-starter for a breakthrough. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s expectation of a possible early election next year and his recent assertion that Israel would not be ready to make a large-scale pullback from the West Bank for at least 2 1/2 years raise more doubts than assurances.

After meeting with Olmert in the West Bank town of Jericho in August, the two men met again in Jerusalem later in the month, met for a third time also in Jerusalem on Tuesday and said they will be meeting again this September before another encounter during a Palestinian – Israeli business conference in Tel Aviv in October, where they will meet also with the special envoy of the Quartet of the U.S., U.N., EU and Russia, Tony Blair. Between September 16–19 both men will receive the visiting U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; her Assistant for Near Eastern Affairs, David Welch, paid both men a visit ahead of Rice’s planned visit. Later in September Abbas will head for New York.

Two-pronged Effort

The Americans are now leading a two-pronged effort to strengthen Abbas – the Washington conference is planned to present the “political horizon,” while Quartet envoy Tony Blair — who arrived in the region last week for a ten-day visit but hardly a word was heard from him — and U.S. Security Coordinator Keith Dayton are working to rehabilitate and bolster the PA’s security and civilian institutions in the West Bank. Visits by the Japanese Foreign Minister, Taro Aso, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Italian top diplomat Massimo D’Alema, Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner were perceived as contributing to Blair’s and Dayton’s mission. The European Union’s foreign ministers meeting last week for two days in Portugal, which currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency, discussed measures to make their mission a success.

Israeli daily Haaretz on September 12 reported the United States will host the conference in Washington, D.C., in November, the week before Thanksgiving. Rice will chair the meeting, which “will seek to win support for arrangements being drafted” by Olmert and Abbas “but will not have any negotiating role” the daily said, adding that Rice and her Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, initiated the “political horizon” or “shelf agreement” whose implementation will be put off until the Palestinian Authority (PA) is strong enough to carry out. Olmert agreed to the plan.

U.S. and Israeli officials seem faithful to a sixty-year old strategy of managing the conflict. Recently they seem to have taken the advice of an old hand in this strategy like the veteran U.S. peace negotiator Dennis Ross, who wrote in The New Republic on July 16: “There does need to be a sense of possibility about peace with Israel. A process, negotiations, dialogue, and the promise of changes on the ground will count for a lot. Ironically, I did not find the Palestinians I spoke with–and the number is now over 40 in my two visits here in the last six weeks–wanting to raise false expectations. No one expects an immediate breakthrough and resolution of the permanent status issues.”

“Over the years, the Palestinians have learned that for Israelis, nothing is more permanent than the temporary,” Akiva Eldar wrote in Haaretz on August 24. In their effort to find a formula for bridging the temporary and the permanent, Olmert and Vice Premier Haim Ramon have adopted the method of “constructive ambiguity,” which allows each side to have its own interpretation. In the case of temporary borders, the compromise formula is expected to stipulate temporary borders in the first stage, but with no declaration of statehood until there is an agreement on final borders.

The United Nations and the Vatican voiced optimistic hope that the fall conference could yet deliver a long – awaited revival of the peace process. The conference raised new hopes and created a “particularly favorable context” for progress in the “crisis that has lasted 60 years and that continues to spread grief and destruction,” a Vatican statement said on September 6. The U.N.’s top Middle East envoy, Michael Williams, added a warning against failure to hopeful prospects: “There is a hope now which has been absent for almost seven years. A setback at this stage could have serious consequences,” Williams told the Security Council recently; he cited among the “signs of hope” the proposed conference, the revival of a pan-Arab peace initiative, “and, perhaps above all,” the dialogue between Abbas and Olmert.

Ruling out Syria, Hamas Non-starter

Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and international critical analysts question Bush’s proposal as a public relations ploy that aims at luring moderate Arab governments into a U.S. – led political, diplomatic and, probably later, a military Arab – Israeli camp of moderates to serve the U.S. strategy against what he had earlier termed as an Iranian – Syrian “axis of evil” and to help save whatever could be saved for Americans in Iraq should the anti-war escalating campaign inside the United States force him to consider an exit strategy. Critics highlight the fact that Bush’s proposed gathering is increasingly sowing divisive discord both among Arabs and Palestinians.

On the official level, during a regular Arab League (AL) meeting held recently in Cairo, Arabs said the U.S. initiative must be dealt with cautiously. AL Secretary General Amr Moussa said that the conference, if fails, would pose a threat to Arab interests and regional stability. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned that if the conference fails to produce a breakthrough, the negative repercussions would affect the whole region, increase feelings of frustration and strengthen extremism. Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Abul Gheit, on September 12 said it was imperative to set an agenda for the conference to clarify the goals and participants, the foreign ministry said in a statement. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who early this month toured France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in efforts to energize the peace process, said after meeting with Blair in Amman on September 9 the conference should lay out a working plan with a “specific timetable.” Arabs and Abbas are demanding that Syria be invited to secure the success of the conference, but not Hamas.

All those involved in the current diplomatic flurry recognize Abbas as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and all rule out dealing with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip. How then will any agreement signed with Abbas be accepted by Hamas as well? For example how can they, and Abbas, begin handling the rocket and mortar shell fire directed at Israeli targets from Gaza, like the one that hit the southern Israeli military base of Zikim on Tuesday and wounded at least fifty soldiers? Or with whom they are to negotiate the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit from his Palestinian captivity in Gaza?

Ruling Syria or Hamas is a non-starter; ruling both out only casts doubts on the sponsors’ real goals; do they intend to prove later that Abbas could not deliver and consequently is not qualified as a partner as an excuse to absolve themselves of commitments they might take upon themselves during the upcoming conference?

Abbas, Olmert Don’t See Eye to Eye

Judging by Abbas – Olmert meetings, despite the reports that the two sides had agreed to set up negotiating teams to advance their talks, neither side issued a statement, announced any breakthroughs, had anything in writing or reported a tangible progress, but both sides confirmed they did not address any details of the final status issues. Chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erakat, denied any exchange of memos of understanding. Ynet had quoted a senior political source in Olmert’s Office as saying, “at this point no agreement has been reached” and made it clear that “it is too soon to tell if such an agreement would find its way to the proposed conference,” probably in Washington.

However Abbas and Olmert still do not see eye to eye to what their dialogue should deliver to secure the success of the proposed conference. Abbas demands they should reach a “framework agreement” for a “declaration of principles” with a timeline and mechanisms for implementation on the final status issue, including the core issues of borders, Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian refugees, ahead of the conference. “A genuine project for peace should be presented to this conference so it can serve as a basis for negotiations and reach towards a final settlement,” Abbas told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah last week. “We are concerned that November 15 will come — if this will indeed be the date for this international conference — without arriving at a specific agreement on all the issues,” then “this meeting will be described as a failure. We do not want a meeting that results in merely a statement. We do not want a meeting that will end up a failure for everybody.”

But Olmert seeks agreement on a broadbrush “declaration of principles” that would be a general statement of intent rather than a concrete diplomatic commitment. On August 3 Olmert said even he was not sure he would be able to reach a deal with Abbas on statehood principles ahead of the November international meeting.

“I have been holding meetings with Abu Mazen (Abbas) and I hope that in the near future this will lead to a … joint declaration. If we can achieve a draft by November, we will achieve it, but I am not sure we will be able to do that,” he told reporters. His government’s spokesperson, Mir Eisen, said: “We think that the Palestinian Authority needs to build itself, its government, its security forces, before we define this state.”

Earlier, Abbas had said the proposed conference would be a “waste of time” if it focused solely on a “declaration of principles.” He even hinted indirectly to boycotting the event: “If there is a clear framework including final status issues, we will welcome this and go to the [November] conference,” he added. Reportedly, Olmert is now forthcoming to cooperate with Abbas in writing something like a one-page “framework agreement” that will lay down the principles of an agreement that may be achieved later on, but without details or a time-table or guarantees for implementation, which is a non-starter for a breakthrough.

“I am really terrified that these meetings and the meeting in November … will create the illusion with a certain part of our publics, on both sides, that peace is possible and both leaders are capable,” Nazmi Al-Jubeh, a Bir Zeit University professor and one of the Palestinian negotiators on the Geneva Accord, told The Globe and Mail on August 29, warning the collapse of such an illusion “will lead us into another kind of intifada.”

In an interview with the “Palestine-Israel Journal” (Vol.14 No.2 2007), former PA security adviser, Jibril al-Rajoub, responded to U.S. President George W. Bush’s call for an international peace conference: “The Palestinian people are fed up with good will statements we have been hearing them for years now. We are looking to see something moving on the ground. We are looking for practical mechanisms to start implementing the Road Map and the Bush vision, and international legitimacy.” On the appointment of Tony Blair as the Quartet envoy, he said: “as far as I know, his mandate has nothing to do with politics.”

Many Israelis are skeptical as well. “The Bush initiative is a basic strategic pitfall, premised on driving a wedge between Mahmoud Abbas’ “moderates” and Hamas’ “extremists,” former Israeli foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, wrote in ynetnews.com on August 17. In an article titled, “Saving President Abbas,” Israeli leader of Gush Shalom wrote on June 23: “At present, all Olmert’s actions are endangering Abbas. His embrace is a bear’s embrace, and his kiss is the kiss of death… If I might offer some advice to Abbas, I would call out to him: Run! Run for your precious life! One touch of Olmert’s hand will seal your fate!” But Abbas has been embracing Olmert on a biweekly basis for almost six months now!?

Ironically they are counterproductively citing security and peace making as their casus belli, but they are creating on the ground an explosive humanitarian disaster that could blow off the local as well as the regional security in a way that precludes any credible efforts towards reviving a deadlocked peace process, moribund since 2000. Human rights and morality as well as realpolitics are facing a critical test in the Gaza Strip, where the culprits of the tragic status quo perceive a “window of opportunity.”

According to Yoram Meital, Chairperson of the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies & Diplomacy at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University (ynetnews.com on August 6), the first to point to this “window of opportunity” was the U.S. president, George W. Bush, who last month vaguely proposed an ambiguous public relations “international” conference on Middle East in the fall with the aim of advancing the peace process. In parallel, the Israeli prime minister suggested an “agreement of principles” for a final-status deal with the Palestinians. On August 8, Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni joined Bush’s new “vision” on the opportunity: “Gaza creates a security threat for us, while the other part (West Bank) controlled by the new Palestinian government (of Salam Fayyad) can create an opportunity,” she said.

A flurry of diplomatic traffic followed. Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the region and met with Palestinian President Mahmoud abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert before they held their latest bimonthly meeting in Jericho, the special envoy of the Quartet of the U.S., U.N., EU and Russia Tony Blair also made a regional visit, which coincided with another historic and first of its kind by the foreign ministers of Egypt, Ahmed Aboul Ghei, and Jordan, Abdul-Ilah Khatib, to Israel to present the Arab Peace Initiative of the League of Arab States. None of these events cared to put the looming disaster in Gaza on the agenda.

Ignoring the time bomb that is clicking in Gaza, their message was conveyed by way of default and contrast. Making the life of Palestinians under the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank look easier, economically promising, and diplomatically and politically in interacting contact with the civilized world is meant to be a contrast for comparison by their compatriots in the “liberated” Gaza Strip, locked in by the Israeli military siege, the economic blockade and the political and diplomatic isolation.

‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts’

To confirm their message and sustain the inter-Palestinian divisive status quo, Bush recently unveiled a U.S. aid package for the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, which is expected neither to alleviate the economic distress in the West Bank nor avert the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, but would exacerbate the Gaza’s isolation as well as its political rift with the northern compatriots.

Bush promised to provide the Palestinians with $190 million in aid and $80 million in security assistance. The biggest chunk — $140 million — is the budget that is already scheduled for the UNRWA. The other $50 million of the $190 million in aid is money attached to political conditions to be channeled through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think-tank based in Washington, said: “The president continued to promote deepening divisions among the Palestinians, insist on preconditions to a two-state solution and display an unwillingness to outline his own parameters for an Israeli-Palestinian endgame deal,” Levy told IPS.

Linda S. Heard in an opinion column on Online Journal on August 2 quoted “an old expression that goes, ‘Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,’ which has its origins in Virgil’s rendition of the Trojan horse legend. Another translation reads ‘Trust not their presents, not admit the horse’ … change the word ‘Greeks’ to ‘Americans’ (and) the warning may well be valid today.”

More than ten billion dollars of donors’ aid since 2000, $6 billion of European taxpayers’ money given in aid to Palestinians between 1993 and 2004, an annual average of $350-450 million injected into the PA from 1994-2000 and about $650 million annually from 2001-2007, which amounts to over $7 billion, more per capita than anyplace in the world except for Israel, which is heavily subsidized by the U.S., have all failed to stave off the current collapse of the Palestinian economy, polity and society or to secure a permanent opening of even one border crossing between Gaza and the outside world.

All those billions of donors money were squandered in vain, because: “The Palestinians have been too grateful and too helpless for too long to be critical of the political agenda of their donors who have practically nailed them down as political hostages to the donors’ money, which was promised initially to help build an independent Palestinian state, but ended up as a political instrument effectively used by the Israeli occupying power,” as this author wrote in the Middle East Times on September 7, 2006.

“The internal political crisis is only a result of the deeper economic and humanitarian crisis, which is crushing the Palestinian people to the brink of a “social revolt,” especially in the “ticking time bomb” of Gaza Strip, and the donors-sustained Palestinian Authority (PA) to the brink of collapse since the donors tightened the Israeli military siege by imposing a suffocating financial blockade early in the year. The ensuing Palestinian divide is being further exacerbated by the donors’ public siding with one party of the divide, to the detriment of the people whom the donors are trying in vain to reach out for,” this author added. Less than one year on, this donors’ role is reinforced.

Had Gandhi Been Alive

Only an international nonviolent resistance project, “The Free Gaza Movement,” is “taking action” to alert the world public opinion to the threatening status quo in Gaza to hopefully awake to the danger simmering there and defuse the clicking time bomb. Up to 100 international volunteered Palestinian, Israeli, American, European, African and Asian rabbis, imams, Christian and Buddhist clerics, British MPs, entertainment celebrities, and internationally known journalists as well as Nakba and Holocaust survivors will sail from Cyprus to Gaza in 2 to 6 seagoing vessels of 12 to 60 passengers each, prospectively on August 15.

Their declared mission is to: “1. To open Gaza to unrestricted international access, i.e. Palestinian sovereignty, 2. To demonstrate that Israel still occupies Gaza, despite its claims to the contrary, 3. To show international solidarity with the people of Gaza and the rest of Palestine, 4. To demonstrate the potential of nonviolent resistance methods.” More than 35 organizers from 13 countries have consulted Greenpeace among others for logistical support to sail safe through expected highly risky Israeli security impediments and restrictions.

The Daily India, on August 4, reported that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi alias Mahatma Gandhi, the world’s spiritual leader of nonviolence and “Father of the Indian Nation,” would have headed for the Gaza Strip to fight for the freedom of Palestinians had he been alive, says his 72-year-old grandson. According to Professor Rajmohan Gandhi, the son of Devdas Gandhi, the Mahatma’s youngest son, “If he (Mahatma Gandhi) was around today, my grandfather would have been in the Gaza Strip, shoulder-to-shoulder with the Palestinians.”

Warnings Fall on Deaf Ears

None of the same or lesser caliber figures is even thinking of heading for Gaza, but several prominent humanitarian spokesmen and women have at least voiced their warnings against the unfolding humanitarian disaster there, including the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, his Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, John Holmes, the acting director of World Bank activities in the Palestinian Authority territories, Faris Hadad-Zervos, who warned of a “severe humanitarian impact,” exacerbation of “the economic crisis,” and “risk of virtually irreversible collapse” of the “pillars of Gaza’s economy.”

Commissioner General of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Karen AbuZayd, warned that, “the Gaza economy will collapse” unless the crossings are “opened for exports and not just for imports.” Director of the UNRWA in Gaza, John Ging, noted that 1.1 million of Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on international aid and the impending humanitarian crisis could overwhelm U.N. resources. The United Nations has suspended vital construction projects such as homes, schools and sewage treatment in Gaza. “Some $93 million [£46 million] of projects are on hold because cement and other building supplies have run out,” said Ging. UNRWA’s construction projects employ 121,000 people in a territory where about 80 per cent of people live on $2 a day. Michael Williams, a coordinator for the U.N.’s regional efforts, told the Security Council early this month that 75 percent of factories have closed since June. He quoted World Bank data that since June, 68,000 jobs have been lost in the teeming strip.

Oxfam warned against the “increasing desperation of Gazans as shortages of fuel, water and food are reported” and that “thousands of refugees across Gaza will face imminent cuts in water and sewage services if more fuel is not provided in the coming days and weeks.” The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, in an “Urgent Appeal from Israeli Human Rights Groups to Israeli Defense Minister,” raised its alarm” “Open Gaza’s Borders to Prevent a Humanitarian Crisis.”

Food shortage is another great cause for concern. UNRWA officials are anxious about running down their reserves. The World Food Programme has also been noticing growing food insecurity in Gaza. The cancellation of the Gaza customs code by Israeli authorities also meant that more than 1,300 containers of commercial materials destined for Gaza remained stranded at Israeli ports, and essential items such as milk powder, baby formula, vegetable oil and medical supplies were now in short supply.

“There is no doubt, Gaza is becoming aid-dependent,” said Liz Sime from CARE International. “They want aid in the form of job-creation programs.” Such programs may remain a “pipe dream” if the borders stay shut, Sime said. The Association of Palestinian Businessmen warned that if the closure continues, at least 120,000 workers in Gaza could lose their jobs; more than 65.000 already did. Oxfam’s Michael Bailey agreed. If the crossings between Gaza and Israel aren’t opened soon, “the slide into all-out dependency will be swift and inevitable,” he said.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on August 3 that the vast majority of import-dependent industries have temporarily closed down and only 10 per cent of Gaza’s industries remain partially functional. “We need to see all crossings at least as operational as they were before 9 June, or risk facing serious social, economic and humanitarian concerns,” the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, John Holmes, warned in a press release. Gazan industry is based on enterprises ninety-five percent of which rely on the importation of raw materials. On July 26 The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) meeting in Geneva demanded that Israel comply with the Protocol on Economic Relations between the Government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Palestinian Authority Ambivalent

U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross on August 1st warned in the New Republic: “We cannot ignore that providing assistance to Gaza now requires someone to deal with Hamas. It need not be us, but total isolation and a cut-off could produce a humanitarian disaster. If we don’t want others in the international community to feel compelled to establish normal contacts with Hamas, we need to forge an international consensus on how to deal with the realities in Gaza,” Ross wrote, adding: “There is a need to avoid a humanitarian crisis. There may be a need to permit at least some limited commerce to prevent a complete economic collapse.”

However all warnings are falling on deaf Israeli, American, European, Arab and even Palestinian ears. For example no word has so far been heard from the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, the Swiss Jean Ziegler, to draw attention to the hunger in Gaza. May be he is waiting for hunger to bite more or waiting for an “official” word from the Palestinian Authority (PA), or others, to act on the looming disaster, a word that politics would expectedly play a game of brinkmanship with hunger to make Gaza “scream” before the outcry is voiced out as a state of emergency, despite the “state of emergency” declared by the PA on June 14 for political reasons. The PA’s passive ambivalence seems to keep similar human rights organizations with enough excuse to stay disconnected.

Senior Abbas aide and Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said it would be “short-sighted” to try to exploit the Gaza closure for political gain: “No one thinks like that in Abbas’ office.” Separately, Nimr Hamad, an adviser to Abbas said: “We need to differentiate between punishing the people of Gaza and weakening Hamas. We don’t want the people to suffer.”

However, at least by default the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah seems ambivalent vis-à-vis the Gazans’ plight. Objecting they had not been in advance consulted about it, they welcomed on July 30 the withdrawal of a statement proposed to the U.N. Security Council, drafted by Qatar and Indonesia, on the situation in Gaza, demanding the reopening of all Gaza crossing points, a move that would ease the isolation of Hamas as well as the deploring conditions there. The draft was withdrawn, but the PA had to contain the diplomatic blundering arising therefrom.

The PA’s former foreign minister, Nabil Shaath visited Indonesia as a special envoy for President Abbas; Gaza needed humanitarian assistance, he said and appealed to the international community to help end Israel’s siege, saying in Jakarta the siege is “pushing Palestinians towards starvation.” Shaath sounded contradictory with the measures taken by the PA on the ground, described by Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly on 2-8 August as bringing the conflict to “the limits of absurdity.”

Abbas suspended the Gaza Strip attorney general’s work and ordered the police to stop working. Instructions were issued not to implement court verdicts, and forbade the courts to collect money, paralyzing the civil courts. Each of the two governments fails to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other’s security agencies. The PA warned its employees not to continue working in Gaza; while guaranteeing their rights, it has threatened those who go to work with “breaking the law and the legal and administrative measures of the government,” in orders issued by the Ministry of Transportation in the Fayyad government. “Why did the Fayyad government order its police not to report to their units and threaten those undertaking their duties with loss of pay? They are destroying the judiciary,” said the director of the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Al-Sourani, a lawyer.

The PA Salam Fayyad’s government announced the weekend to be on Friday and Saturday while the Gaza government of Ismael Hanniyah, which Abbas dissolved, still observes the weekend on Thursday and Friday. The health sector was paralyzed as each of the two governments has appointed a director for the major hospitals in the Gaza Strip; moreover the Ramallah government has issued an order for fees not to be collected for examinations, treatment, and other health services, so that they do not go into the Haniyeh government’s treasury. Yet the other government has asked patients to pay fees, albeit with flexibility. There is also fear that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip will not be able to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca this year because each of the two governments has an agency for pilgrimage and each is conducting a lottery to select those who will be allowed to undertake the journey. It has become possible for Gazans to drive their cars without licences; the Ramallah government has issued instructions to close all PA license offices in the Gaza Strip. Most recently the Fayyad government delayed announcing the high school matriculation exam results and threatened not to recognize the results of exams held in the Gaza Strip as they have not been authorized by the Ministry of Education in the Ramallah because the Haniyeh government does not have the right to approve the results because it is an “illegitimate” government.

Moreover, and more importantly, the PA was not sending the right message for international humanitarian intervention. On July 10 President Abbas linked Hamas, now ruling in Gaza, to al-Qaeda: “Yes, through Hamas, al-Qaeda has entered Gaza and through Hamas, al-Qaeda is protected,” he told Italian Rai TV in Rome. Earlier he decreed to outlaw the military wing of the Islamic movement as a “terrorist” organization. These and similar introductory statements were necessary to demand that an international force should be deployed in the Gaza Strip to allow humanitarian aid to be delivered, as if Hamas, and not Israel, was responsible for blocking the flow in of the urgently needed aid. Most likely the catastrophic evolution of the humanitarian crisis could unfold before his proposal is seriously considered by the world community.

The Case for Military Intervention

Israeli officials, who had all along rejected older Palestinian similar demands as a buffer force to spare Gazans the still ongoing Israeli military incursions, were quick this time to promote Abbas’ controversial demand internationally, which is widely opposed internally by Palestinians.

Most likely therefore is that if military intervention was to come it will be Israeli and not international. Since Hamas took over in Gaza in June media reports were ample on a possible Israeli large scale military operation there. “With Gaza being defined as a hostile entity and its whole population as allied to Hamas, there is no doubt that it will be, in the near future, the target of a brutal Israeli aggression: eventual military incursions, bombardments and starvation. This is why our top priority, in Israel as well as throughout the world, is to organize solidarity with Gaza and its population,” Michel Warschawski, a journalist who co-founded the Alternative Information Center (AIC) in Israel, wrote on July 12 (Global Research, ZNet).

Israel acknowledges the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza but blames Hamas for it. “I am not saying the situation in Gaza is good,” said Shlomo Dror, from Israel’s Ministry of Defense, but he was “not convinced” the economy would irreversibly collapse: “We are working to prevent a humanitarian crisis. But if the Palestinians have complaints, they should put pressure on Hamas.”

On July 16, Sari Bashi, the executive director of the Israeli human rights group, GISHA, said Israel was violating international law by strangling economic activity in Gaza; she was inflicting “collective punishment” on the 1.5 million Palestinians by closing the main commercial crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip at Karni. “This amounts to the implementation of a policy of collective punishment which is in breach of international law because it involves the intentional inflicting of suffering on a civilian population,” Miss Bashi said (Telegraph).

Refuting Israel’s security pretexts, Bashi earlier told the Voice of America: “Israel has legitimate security interests in protecting its personnel at Karni crossing, but those security interests are being used as a pretext to keep Karni closed. Karni can be opened; people in the private sector have offered to secure the crossings to coordinate re-opening the crossings but they need Israeli cooperation in order to do so.”

Israel completely controls the Gaza air space and territorial waters. The Gazan foreign trade is conducted almost solely with Israel or via Israeli ports through five border-crossing points under Israeli control (Erez, Karni, Nahal Oz, Sufa, and Kerem Shalom), closed since June 10.

The Rafah crossing point with Egypt, the only outlet of Gaza to the outside world, was closed in June, stranding more than 6.000 returning Palestinians on the Egyptian side for more than two months, which resulted in the death of 33 of them according to the U.N.; more than 90 people, many of them seriously ill, who went to Egypt for treatment, were trapped at the airport, according to a joint statement by 12 human rights organizations active in PA territories.

The major player in Gaza’s evolving tragedy is the Israeli occupying power, who has shuttered the security of the Palestinian people and the peace of their life and mind since Israel trespassed into their territory over the borders demarcated by the United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947 and is displacing ever since more than four million refugees who constitute now more than 75 percent of the Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. “This” expanded Israel is now sarcastically citing a security threat to tighten the screws of the siege her crushing war machine has been imposing on an area torn by her blockade and military onslaughts very long before Hamas even came into being to overrun Gaza in June this year.

“They hope that, with progress in the West Bank, stagnation in Gaza and growing pressure from ordinary Palestinians, a discredited Hamas will be forced out or forced to surrender. They are mistaken … as long as the Palestinian schism endures, progress is on shaky ground. Security and a credible peace process depend on minimal intra-Palestinian consensus,” an “executive summary” of the International Crisis Group concluded on August 2. Similarly, it would be disingenuous in the extreme to minimize the role of the U.S. and the European Union in particular. “Through their words and deeds, they helped persuade important Fatah elements that the unity government was a transient phenomenon and that their former control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) could be restored … Paradoxically, the more successful the strategy of strengthening Abbas, the greater Hamas’s motivation to sabotage it,” the ICG added.

Indian diplomats proudly highlight the fact that their country’s democratic and secular tradition has so far spared India the atrocities of the U.S . – led global war on terrorism and similarly proudly note that so far al-Qaeda has failed to recruit or implicate anyone of the Indian world’s second largest Muslim community, after Indonesia, in their schemes or activities.

The communist – leftist factor has had a decisive role in attracting grassroots anti – globalization, anti – American and anti – Israeli grievances into the traditional democratic channels of the Indian secular system away from violent Maoist and Islamist extremism; however the politics of India’s internally liberal economics and external pragmatic U.S. and Israeli ties risk also polarizing the democratic communist – leftist front, the national third mainstream political movement, and might make their role more difficult as well as more critical in neutralizing the violent Maoist and Islamist threats.

While the Islamist threat is looming, the Maoist is already an Indian security headache. According to a Christian Science Monitor report on August 28 last year, the Maoist insurrection is spreading across India “like an oil stain across paper,” already affecting 14 of India’s 28 States (Chatisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Asma, Uttaranchal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Maharashtra and Bihar). In figures, that means the Maoists are in control in 165 districts out of the total of 602 into which the country is divided. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recognized the Maoist advance on August 23rd 2006 when he declared to Parliament that the Maoists “have become the biggest internal challenge to security that India has,” the Monitor reported. Undoubtedly Maoists and Islamists will find in the Indian foreign and internal politics of liberal economics precious ammunition for their anti-American propaganda as well as for their internal “struggle.”

Already India’s foreign policy and globalization – oriented liberal economics are creating cracks in the so far united communist – leftist front. The Communist Party of India (CPI) has recently moved for a review of Left parties’ outside support to the ruling coalition of the Congress – led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), but The Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M), with 44 seats of the New Delhi Parliament’s total of 543, was wisely not for such a move, lest it would bring down the Government: “At this juncture, it [review] would be counterproductive,” said a political developments report, adopted by the central committee of the CPI-M at a June 24-26 meeting.

The Left has been critical of Singh government’s economic and foreign policies and is working for a “political alternative,” the head of the CPI-M, Prakash Karat, told Reuters in an interview recently, adding that the ruling coalition had failed internally to curb rising food prices and was not addressing poverty and lack of investment in the countryside while following unpopular economic policies.

Externally the leftists see that a nuclear deal with the U.S. would or at least could compromise the ruling coalition’s commitment to “independent foreign policy.” India’s National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan was expected with a high-ranking delegation in Washington for talks on July 16-18 to clinch a nuclear deal with the U.S. to coincide with the second anniversary of the landmark July 18 agreement,” the Indian Express reported; two major sticking points has been U.S. reluctance to allow India to reprocess spent atomic fuel, a crucial step in making weapons-grade nuclear material, and to continue nuclear tests. The Indian leftists criticize these U.S. conditions as constraints on India’s sovereign decision making. They also protested a port call in Chennai in early July by the nuclear-powered USS Nimitz, a first by a U.S. aircraft carrier.

Moreover they view the deal as courting India away from a potential alliance with Russia and China to counterweight the U.S. global hegemony. They note also that the U.S. administration began the process of agreement with India on the nuclear issue in March 2006, putting an end to the 30-year embargo on nuclear material she imposed on India in 1974, at the same time she began her nuclear crisis with Iran, with whom India has strategic oil interests.

During the last 18 years, India has been gradually dismantling its centralized economy and privatizing its main sectors under the wing of a battery of laws to protect Direct Foreign Investments, especially those from the United States that have now increased from US$76m to US$4bn.

The accelerated pace of the growing ties with Israel was another foreign policy point of criticism by Indian leftists and communists. On July 18 The Times of India reported a “crucial milestone in growing Indo-Israeli military ties” to lift-off from the space centre at Sriharikota an Israeli spy satellite called TechSar, weighing about 260 kg, by a four-stage Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).

Earlier there was the $2.5 billion project to develop a medium range SAM for use with India’s land forces and the Israeli Barak missile system $350 million deal, which the Indian Navy chief, Admiral Arun Prakash, strongly defended in a statement on May 15, saying there was “nothing comparable” to it anywhere in the world, which was objected to by none other than President APJ Abdul Kalam and claimed as its major victim former defense minister George Fernandes in a widely reported corruption scandal.

Communist – led Left on the Move

Reversing an historical trend worldwide, the Indian communists and leftists have been gaining more ground and making progress in a very hostile political and economic environment where globalization – oriented liberals are ruling and responding to the strategic overtures of the United States, the leader of globalization, irrespective of the their affiliation to the Congress or the Janata parties.

At least economically the dividing lines between the mainstream parties of the Congress and Janata have become blurred since 1991 when the leading member of the Congress, Manmohan Singh, became the finance minister of the Janata – led government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, long before securing his party’s nomination for premiership in 2004, a position he still occupies ever since.

An economist by profession and a veteran of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as his country’s central bank, Singh, the first ever Sikh prime minister of India, is considered the most educated and one of the most qualified and influential prime ministers in India’s history, mainly because of the liberal economic reforms he initiated in 1991 and the Indian economic liberalization, which have become established under his premiership since May 22, 2004; he got rid of several socialist policies and opened the nation to foreign direct investments, thus paving the way for stronger relations with the U.S. and Israel, the biggest and the most controversial achievement of his legacy.

Most likely because of the context of this hostile environment, the Indian communists and leftists, who have been closely involved in the presidential and vice presidency elections on July 19 and in August respectively, are gaining ground and making progress while at the same time opposing both the political and economic strategic opening to the U.S. and Israel as well as standing up to the victimization of millions of Indians by the official opening to globalization by the government’s liberal economics.

Ironically the Indian cornerstone of liberal economics and U.S. and Israeli –oriented politics, that is the government of Dr. Singh, is uplifted to survive only by the 61 legislative votes, representing more than 120 million voters, of the Left Front in the federal lower House of parliament. Today, for the first time in India’s history, the federal government in New Delhi remains in power thanks to the Left Front, who decided to support the coalition government led by the Congress from the outside.

This anti – “Red Scare” realpolitic fact of Indian politics is a credit to the world’s largest democracy, which compares positively with the second largest democracy of the United States, where communists and leftists are still screened to deny them employment in the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the administration, in line with the 1950s McCarthyism that is supposed to be a defunct “security” practice a long time ago.

Lost in the lively turbulent diversity of the Indian pluralistic society — where monotheistic and non-monotheistic religions and sects sometimes violently clash and other times indulge in dialogue within or outside the limits of secular jurisdiction, national languages in the hundreds coexisting with that of the British colonialist who was “non-violently” forced out leaving behind his English tongue, the unjust four – sect social system that is ironically a national trade mark of the world’s largest democracy, the economic widening gap between the rich and the poor, the continental contradictory landscape between the heights crowned with snow around the year and the arid land of deserts in a country sliced here and there by “sacred” rivers overlooking the Indian Ocean that took its name from her — the outsider often misses the important fact of life of a political system whose democratic credibility allows communist endeavors to prosper in the sea of a national capitalist liberalism swimming in an ocean of globalization after the collapse of the international communist system.

In West Bengal, the communist – led Left Front last June celebrated the 30th anniversary of being successively elected to govern more than 80 million Indians since June 21, 1977, a record electoral success not only in India but also in any parliamentary democracy worldwide. “Consolidate This Alternative,” the People’s Democracy urged on June 24 in an editorial, which MP Sitaram Yechury, the leader of the parliamentary group of The Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPI-M) and member of the party’s Politbureau, told this writer that he had written. The Left Front also governs in the states of Kerala and Minipur.

The communists are partners also in the ruling left fronts in Tripura and Tamil Nadu but have no cabinet ministers of their own. On grassroots level they lead mass organizations like the All India Trade Union Congress, All India Youth Federation, All India Students Federation, National Federation of Indian Women, All India Peasants Organization and the All India Agricultural Workers.

The Communist Party of India – Maoist is outlawed, but the CPI-M and the CPI are recognized by the Election Commission of India as “national parties,” and to date, they are the only national political parties that have contested the mainstream Congress and Janata in “all the general elections using the same electoral symbol.” They lead what is known in Indian media as the Left Front, which supports the Indian National Congress – led UPA coalition government in New Delhi, but without taking part in it; their support is conditional on committing to the Common Minimum Programme that pledges to discontinue disinvestment, massive social outlays and an independent foreign policy. (Wikipedia)

Communists are old hands in India. They set up their party early the 1920s, but were outlawed by the British colonial power until Britain allied herself with the former Soviet Union during the WWII and lifted the ban on Indian communists. After the independence in 1947 they resorted to “armed struggle” against local kings and sultans and their people’s army and militia briefly ruled the Hyderabad kingdom before they were brutally crushed out to drop violence ever since. They were the first opposition party to win state elections and rule in Kerala in 1957, an achievement that was criticized by their Chinese and other international comrades. The Indian Chinese war in 1962 split them between “internationalists” and “nationalists.” The split was institutionalized in 1964 with two party congresses.

Foreign Policy is another area where the Indian and American “democracies” diverge, noted Teresita Schaffer, director for the South Asia Program with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the former US deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia and former ambassador to Sri Lanka: “Both nations have different views about how their common democratic heritage should affect foreign policy. For Americans, it is natural to want to advance democracy. For India, however, democracy is not necessarily a product suitable for export. Democratic institutions are a source of great pride, deeply ingrained in how Indian government, politics and society work, yet one aspect of India’s anti-colonial history that remains strong is its passionate commitment to maintaining and respecting national sovereignty. India not only resists external interference, but is reluctant to make a public issue of other countries’ systems of government.”

Non-Alignment on Balance

The divergence on foreign policy between the world’s two largest democracies emanates from India’s anti-colonial legacy, which led New Delhi since independence to strictly tiptoe delicate “non-alignment” policies during the “cold war” era of the bipolar Soviet – U.S. world politics. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union India embarked early in the 1990s on her liberal economics and pragmatic foreign policy, but nonetheless remained honest to her anti-colonial policies to carefully avoid being dragged into the U.S. – led global war on terrorism in a way that could embroil her in the American overseas military adventures and in what many Indian diplomats still condemn as “imperialist” endeavors. Indian foreign policy accordingly is still committed to her traditional solidarity with the world’s national liberation movements.

However the Indian independence advocates of all political spectrum, with the communist and leftist third mainstream political movement in the forefront, are now pondering for how long New Delhi could resist the realistic outcome of the interaction between her globalization – oriented liberal economics and her pragmatic foreign policy. India’s traditional non-alignment is on the balance with potential strategic implications: “A flourishing Indo-Israeli relationship has the potential to make a significant impact on global politics by altering the balance of power, not only in South Asia and the Middle East, but also in the larger Asian region,” Harsh V. Pant wrote as early as December 2004 in volume No. 8 of the Israeli MERIA.

India’s traditional solidarity with the Palestinian people is the best example of a wider solidarity with the world’s national liberation movements, but, “With India-Israel bilateral engagement deepening, New Delhi’s status as a friend of the Arabs is being steadily eroded. Although India continues to maintain a ‘studied neutrality’ between Israel and the Palestinians, it is doing a balancing act. And even a balancing act is a significant shift, given India’s unambiguous support to the Palestinian cause for many decades,” Sudha Ramachandran wrote in Asia Times on June 26, 2002.

Indian communists are very well aware of their historical responsibility to preempt the potential alignment of their country’s non-aligned foreign policy; they are careful to maintain their ideological and international solidarity relations with their comrades worldwide as well as with the national liberation movements, in particular the Palestinian national struggle.

On the 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories in Israel’s 1967 “war of aggression,” Sitaram Yechury, member of the CPI-M’s Polit Bureau and leader of his party’s parliamentary group accepted the joint invitation of the Communist Party of Israel and the Palestinian (formerly communist) People’s Party for a three – day programme in Jerusalem on June 4, named “the Jerusalem Initiative,” which was also attended by 27 international delegations from 12 countries including 7 women organizations and representatives of the communist parties of the U.S.A., Britain, Italy, Portugal, Greece and France, the Socialist Left Party of Norway, Red-Green Alliance of Denmark, The Left Party of Germany, AKEL of Cyprus and RJD of India.

Yechury returned to India to educate tens of millions of communists and leftists on the Palestinian national struggle for self-determination in lectures, conferences and three articles published by the party’s “People’s Democracy” and republished or reported by a network of communist and leftist media. He told this writer, who met with Yechury in the Palestinian West Bank town of Ramallah and in New Delhi, that his party and friends collected hundreds of thousands of dollars as a donation to the Palestinian people to help them survive the suffocating two-year old economic siege imposed on them by the Israeli occupying power and her strategic U.S. ally.

“Forty years later, Jerusalem still a divided city,” CNN reported on June 7. Israel officially claims that the “eternal” capital of Israel was irreversibly “reunified” and will remain “undivided.” However “the mantra is accurate only as myth,” Kevin Peraino wrote in the Newsweek on June 4. Geographical, demographic, legal and political realities on the ground dispel Israeli claims as no more than day dreaming of an occupying power determined to continue challenging those realities as well as the world community who sees peace can only make or break in Jerusalem.

Israel is refutably invalidating her “unification” claims by unmercifully “dividing” the city with a concrete barrier, condemned by Palestinians as “the Apartheid Wall,” which is expected to be finished by early next year. She claims, “The fence is not political. It is not a border. It is only a security fence,” according to Nezah Mashiah, an official at Israel’s “Defense” Ministry who oversees the project. The ‘Wall” has absorbed 88,000 Jewish settlers in eastern Jerusalem but cut off 55,000 Palestinian Jerusalem tax payers, says the Israeli Peace Now. Asking anybody to draw a map of today’s municipal boundaries would be an impossible mission; Israeli urban planners and security experts are already having a headache in deciding the route of the “security barrier.”

The division was recently highlighted by a move to create an Arab-Palestinian municipality council independent of the Israeli Jewish city council imposed on Jerusalem since 1967, which coincided both with a U.S. Congress motion to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to the Holy City and with Israeli celebrations in the city to mark the 40 anniversary of its “reunification” on June 5 that year, celebrations that were boycotted by all the diplomatic corps accredited to the Hebrew state.

Since Israel cut Jerusalemites off their Palestinian compatriots in 1993 she did everything possible to finish off their civil organization that could preserve their national identity, from the Orient House to the Association of Palestinian Writers. But recently more than 53 institutions grouped together under the Jerusalem Association of Civil Institutions, have announced their intention to form a separate and independent municipality: “All U.N. resolutions since 1948 are based on the fact that Jerusalem is occupied territory, and that the occupation has no right to change its legal status, its geographical character or demographic makeup, and it is the right of its residents to take the necessary steps to organize and maintain their civilian lives,” they said in a statement last week; a similar message was sent to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

UN Security Council resolutions 252, 267, 271, 298, 476 and 478 – passed without U.S. objections during both Democratic and Republican administrations – specifically call on Israel to rescind its annexation and other efforts to alter the city’s legal status. Article 5 of resolution 478 specifically calls on all UN member states not to recognize Israel’s annexation efforts. U.N. Security Council resolution 242, long seen as the basis for Arab-Israeli peace, emphasizes the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.”

Self-contradictory U.S. Policies

Ironically however U.S. lawmakers were not only trivially insensitive to international legitimacy when they overwhelmingly endorsed and celebrated one of Israel’s spoils of her 1967 conquests by calling on the President on June 5 to make good on the 1995 Jerusalem Act, but were also self-contradictory when they days later passed another congressional resolution reaffirming the United States’ “commitment to a true and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on the establishment of two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security, and with recognized borders.”

Similarly, the Israel Zionist Council has petitioned the Government to amend the “Basic Law: Jerusalem, Capital of Israel,” known as the (former prime minister Menachem) Begin law, which was passed on 30 July 1980 and reads: “Jerusalem, Capital of Israel: 1. Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel. Seat of the President, the Knesset, the Government and the Supreme Court: 2. Jerusalem is the seat of the President of the State, the Knesset, the Government and the Supreme Court.” Seems unsatisfied with this text, the Zionist Council is seeking to have the words “and the Jewish people” added after the words “capital of Israel.” Justifying the move, Professor Uzi Arad, Head of the Council’s strategic department was quoted by The Jerusalem Post as saying the change is “a reflection of the political, social, historic and moral situation that exists in any case.”

U.S. President George W. Bush was more realistically adaptable to the world community’s sensitivities and on June 1 extended a waiver of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act on moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, “to protect the national security interests of the United States,” the White House said in a statement. The waiver came days before the U.S. House of Representatives on June 5 passed without opposition a non-binding resolution calling on Bush to make good on the 1995 Act. The Senate was set to follow suit. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America commended the bipartisan resolution “relating to the 40th anniversary of the reunification of the City of Jerusalem.”

European major donors to Bush’s “vision” of a two-state solution were more balanced, though miserably less decision-makers, than their American co-sponsors of the envisioned plan and more sensitive to peace-making than the Zionist leaders of Israel. Germany, the rotating presidency of the European Union, in a letter from the German foreign ministry to the Speaker of the Knesset, Dalia Itzek, refused to attend the Israeli official 40 th anniversary celebrations of “reunifying” Jerusalem, where no single foreign embassy retains premises anymore and where the celebrations were also boycotted by all foreign envoys.

‘Israelization’ Accelerated

Regardless however, Israel is sustaining her unabated “Israelization” plans inside and outside the Holy City’s municipal borders, and is encouraged by the congressional support as well as by a U-turn in the policies of the administration of her US strategic ally and the helpless European inaction to confuse her real intentions of bulldozing the two-state vision first of all in Jerusalem with the same bulldozers that are wiping out the Palestinian reality in the city and trying to create a new Israeli reality there.

“The Palestinian dream to see East Jerusalem become the capital of Palestine, which in the early 1990s appeared within reach, now appears further than ever from being attained … What’s left of the future capital of the Palestinian state are heaps of ruins, a political phantom; a surrounded city, encircled by settlements and isolated from the rest of the West Bank, a city that had already been dying for 15 years before the separation fence came to finish it off,” Dr. Hillel Cohen wrote in his new book, “The Market Square Is Empty: The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem, 1967-2007.” (Quoted by Sayed Kashua, “Loosing Jerusalem,” Haaretz, June 10, 2007)

The first public proof of Israel’s real intentions was unfortunately American and surfaced with the letter of guarantees, condemned by Palestinians as “Balfore Declaration II,” President Bush wrote to the comatose former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on April 14, 2004, whereby Bush subscribed to Israel’s interpretation of the status quo in the West Bank, Jerusalem inclusive, and ruled out a return to June 4, 1967 armistice line of 1948, the return of Palestinian refugees and dismantling there of the illegal Jewish colonial settlements, home to 450.000 settlers, as “unrealistic,” in a 180 degrees U-turn drawing on an almost bipartisan congressional consensus on the U.S. policy vis-à-vis the Israeli settlements, which were all declared illegal by previous administrations.

Bush’s letter was a par excellence example of words-versus-deeds policies because the content thereof is in a head-to-head contradiction with his “vision” of the two-state solution. No wonder then that Israel embarked on her unilateral plans to divide the occupied West Bank between the occupying power and the occupied people, who are left with 42 percent of the area for their promised state, but the division move stopped short of encompassing Jerusalem, a city spared for unifying Israelization plans.

The latest Israelization move was a governmental plan to move all ministries and government offices to Jerusalem, except the “Ministry of Defense,” to house at least 10.000 staff in premises that will be built on 125.000 square meters to be cut off the Palestinian-owned area where Palestinians hope to set up the capital of their envisioned state.

Moroccan King Mohammed VI, who chairs the Al Quds (Jerusalem) Committee of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference OIC) and whose country is home to the largest Jewish community in any Arab or Muslim country, warned against such a move; the Arab monarch urged the heads of State of the U.N. Security Council member countries, Pope Benedict XVI and presidents of the EU and EC, among others, to use their “good offices” to persuade Israel “to renounce any measure that would in no way serve the cause of peace in the region and in the world.”

The Israeli government also has recently allocated $90 million over eight years until 2013 for maintaining the Israelization of the Old City, $79 million to attract non-profit groups and NGOs into the city and $50 million for the Jewish municipality to help bring in more settlers, whose numbers rocketed from zero to more than 210.000 since 1967, while indigenous Arab citizens are completely cut off western Jerusalem and left with only 9% of the municipal area to accommodate the natural growth of those of them who so far survived what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe termed as Israel’s “ethnic cleansing.”

According to the Israeli activist Jeff Halper and the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Israel’s “Jerusalem metropolis” covers 10% of the West Bank, 440 sq. km., where 75% of the West Bank settlers live in colonial settlements extending from the Latron (Beit Shemesh) in the West, through Kiriat Sefer to Ramallah in the North then Southeast through Maale Adumim almost to the Jordan River; thence, southwest, the metropolis is due to include the Palestinian cities of Bait Sahour, Bethlehem and the settlements blocks of Efrat and Gush Etzion, thence Westwards to Beitar Ilit, Tzur Hadassa and Beit Shemesh.

Maintaining the current Israeli demographic, urban and political plans for the Holy city “means no viable Palestinian state, no Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and thus no viable two-state solution,” said Saeb Erekat, who heads the Negotiations Affairs Department of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel’s partner to the Oslo Accords. “Greater Jerusalem” breaks the territorial contiguity needed for a viable Palestinian state by separating the southern part of the West Bank from the northern part.

Proclaiming the conquered city as the prize of all prizes of Israel’s 1967 conquests, former “Defence” Minister Moshe Dayan said that year: “We have united Jerusalem… We have returned to the holiest of our holy places, never to part from it again.” But the euphoria of 1967 is fading away as a “wasted victory,” as The Economist had marked the 40th anniversary, and increasing numbers of daring souls are voicing more realistic warnings and calls to say “the once unthinkable: that Jerusalem may never truly be united,” according to Kevin Peraino in the Newsweek, who quoted historian Tom Segev as saying: “All these dreams of 1967 were actually illusions.”

In a May 15 op-ed in the New York Sun (“Mounting Figures”), the writer Hillel Halkin marked the 40th anniversary of the “reunification” of Jerusalem by calling for its division, citing among other reasons that in the post-1967 municipal borders there are 28 Arab villages, and concluding his op-ed with a bold call on Israel to relinquish Islam’s third holiest site of Al-Aqsa Mosque compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount, claiming its retention is an imperative “felt more strongly by religious Muslims than by religious Jews.”

Other whistle blowers are citing demography as the reason. Latest Israeli surveys and studies exaggerate the forecasted Arab population numbers, saying they increased at more than twice the rate of its Jewish inhabitants over the last decade and predicting that only 60% of the “capital”‘s residents will be Jews by 2020. The American-Israel Demographic Research Group’s 2,400-word study on May 15, titled, “Realities on the Ground: Jerusalem 2007 – 2025,” could be a reference. Accordingly they prefer division to preserve the Jewish purity of the Jewish unilaterally-declared capital. However unification advocates promote the same unconfirmed statistics as a justification for persisting with what Ilan Pappe describes as the ethnic cleansing strategic policies. The “Realities on the Ground: Jerusalem 2007-2025,” concludes however, citing data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, that for the first time since 1948, Israel holds a strong demographic advantage in Jerusalem: “There is no inherent demographic crisis for Jerusalem’s Jews.”

Historical Trend: Message of War

Illusions or no illusions Israel seems stubbornly clinging to biblical “promises.” “The international community has sought to re-establish the status quo ante (in Jerusalem) as part of a political settlement,” the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dore Gold, wrote in The New York Sun on June 8, but “A completely new international legal reality emerged since 1967,” he added. Finding solace in U.S. backing, he quoted U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in 1967, Arthur Goldberg, as saying: “Resolution 242 in no way refers to Jerusalem and this omission was deliberate.” He also quoted former secretary of state, George Shultz, as saying in 1988 that Israel “will never negotiate from or return” to the 1967 lines, before he cited Bush’s letter to Sharon in April 2004. But Gold missed to note that none of them was a representative of international law or legitimacy.

Gold was in fact merely confirming an Israeli historical trend. Israel’s policies and plans in Jerusalem are building on an historical trend that has its base precedent in the immediate aftermath of the British mandate, which on May 15, 1948 left the fate of Palestine and Palestinians to the unmerciful whims of the Zionist leaders and the overwhelming military superiority of their paramilitary troops and terrorist gangs who came to lead the Jewish people.

That was the first of several major Israeli missed opportunities to trade victorious conquests for peace. Earlier the Zionist Jewish leadership missed minor opportunities like the Jewish self-rule proposal of late Jordanian monarch King Abdullah I. The recently proposed Arab Peace Initiative to trade the Israeli conquests of 1967 for a full and collective peace with the 22-member League of Arab States was the recent major missed opportunity.

On the basis of the principle of “land-for-peace” as stipulated by the U.N. Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 that were adopted after the 1967 and 1973 wars respectively, the international community has developed the currently deadlocked and dormant Arab-Israeli peace process, the cornerstone of which is creating a viable and independent Palestinian state living in security and peacefully alongside Israel.

Only the Israeli military occupation of Arab lands on June 5, 1967 made possible the two-state option, which was originally decided by the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution 181 of 1947, but was precluded the following year by Israel’s military victory in the Arab-Israeli war, which created the Palestinian refugee problem and resulted in her first military expansion.

Had Israel used her conquered land then as a bargaining chip and traded her conquests for peace on the basis of the two-state solution of resolution 181, which ruled out Jerusalem to an international status not subject to the jurisdiction of either state, the conflict might not have dragged on to the present time.

But Israel did not, and since then set out a precedent that her military onslaughts and conquests are irreversible and won’t be reversed, at least not voluntarily, unless she is forced to. If this precedent is to serve as indicator of her stance vis-à-vis her conquests of 1967, it will explain her policies in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past 40 years.

However, by upholding this historical trend Israel is only sending the wrong message to the Arab-Palestinian side of the conflict, namely that she will never cede the spoils of her conquests unless forced to. Proving the point was her converging back from the Sinai following the 1973 war, from southern Lebanon following 18-year of stubborn resistance and from the Gaza Strip after proving uncontrollable.

This is a message of war, not peace.