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Barack Obama is another stock character in the cyclical political theater embraced by the liberal class. Act I is the burst of enthusiasm for a Democratic candidate who, through clever branding and public relations, appears finally to stand up for the interests of citizens rather than corporations. Act II is the flurry of euphoria and excitement. Act III begins with befuddled confusion and gnawing disappointment, humiliating appeals to the elected official to correct “mistakes,” and pleading with the officeholder to return to his or her true self. Act IV is the thunder and lightning scene. Liberals strut across the stage in faux moral outrage, delivering empty threats of vengeance. And then there is Act V. This act is the most pathetic. It is as much farce as tragedy. Liberals-frightened back into submission by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party or the call to be practical-begin the drama all over again. We are now in Act IV, the one where the liberal class postures like the cowardly policemen in “The Pirates of Penzance.” Liberals promise battle. They talk of glory and honor. They vow not to abandon their core liberal values. They rouse themselves, like the terrified policemen who have no intention of fighting the pirates, with the bugle call of “Tarantara!” This scene is the most painful to watch. It is a window into how hollow, vacuous and powerless liberals and liberal institutions including labor, the liberal church, the press, the arts, universities and the Democratic Party have become. They fight for nothing. They stand for nothing. And at a moment when we desperately need citizens and institutions willing to stand up against corporate forces for the core liberal values, values that make a democracy possible, we get the ridiculous chatter and noise of the liberal class. The moral outrage of the liberal class, a specialty of MSNBC, groups such as Progressives for Obama and MoveOn.org, is built around the absurd language of personal narrative-as if Barack Obama ever wanted to or could defy the interests of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase or General Electric. The liberal class refuses to directly confront the dead hand of corporate power that is rapidly transforming America into a brutal feudal state. To name this power, to admit that it has a death grip on our political process, our systems of information, our artistic and religious expression, our education, and has successfully emasculated popular movements, including labor, is to admit that the only weapons we have left are acts of civil disobedience. And civil disobedience is difficult, uncomfortable and lonely. It requires us to step outside the formal systems of power and trust in acts that are marginal, often unrecognized and have no hope of immediate success.The liberal class’ solution to the bleak political landscape is the conference. This, along with letters and cries of outrage circulated on the Internet, is its preferred form of expression. Conferences, whether organized by Left Forum, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun or figures such as Ted Glick-who is touting a plan to lure progressives, including members of the Democratic Party, into something he calls a “third force”-are where liberals go to feel good about themselves again. These conferences are not fundamentally about change. They are designed to elevate self-appointed liberal apologists who seek to become advisers and courtiers within the Democratic Party. The conferences produce resolutions no one reads. They build networks no one uses. But with each conference liberals get to do what they do best-applaud their own moral probity. They make passionate appeals to work within systems, such as electoral politics, that have been gamed by the corporate state. And the result is to spur well-meaning people toward useless and ultimately self-defeating activity.”What we need is an alliance which consciously incorporates elected Democrats as well as elected Greens and independents, as well as groups, or individual leaders and members of groups, like Progressive Democrats of America and the Green Party,” Glick proposes. “More than that, this alliance eventually needs to support and work to elect candidates running both as Democrats and progressive independents, and maybe even an occasional Republican.”The Tikkun Conference held in Washington last June was another pathetic display of liberal apologists begging Obama to be Obama. The organizers called on those participating to “Support Obama to BE the Obama We Voted For-Not the Inside-the-Beltway Pragmatist/Realist whose compromises have led to a decrease in his popularity and opened the door for a revival of the just-recently-discredited Right wing.” Good luck.The organizers of the Left Forum conference scheduled for this March at Pace University in New York City also communicate in the amorphous, high-blown moral rhetoric that is unmoored from the actual and real. The upcoming Left Forum conference, which has the vacuous title “Towards a Politics of Solidarity,” promises to “focus on the age-old theme of solidarity: the moral act of imagination underpinning working-class victories everywhere. It will undertake to examine the new forms of far-reaching solidarity that are both necessary and possible in an increasingly global world.” The organizers posit that “the potential for transformative struggles in the 21st century depends on new chains of solidarity-between workers in the rich world and workers in the global south, indigenous peasants and more affluent consumers, students and pensioners, villagers in the Niger Delta and environmental campaigners in the Gulf of Mexico, marchers and rioters in Greece and Spain, and unionists in the United States and China.” The conference “will contribute to the intellectual underpinnings of new and tighter forms of world-wide solidarity upon which all successful emancipatory struggles of the future will depend.” The conference agenda, which sounds like a parody of a course catalogue description, includes the requisite academic jargon of “moral act of imagination” and “chains of solidarity.” This language gives to the enterprise a lofty but undefined purpose. And this is a specialty of the liberal class-to grandly say nothing. The last thing the liberal class intends to do is fight back. Left Forum brings in a few titans, including Noam Chomsky, who is always worth hearing, but it contributes as well to the lethargy and turpitude that have made the liberal class impotent.The only gatherings worth attending from now on are acts that organize civil disobedience, which is why I will be at Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., at noon March 19 to protest the eighth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Veterans groups on March 19 will also carry out street protests in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. You can link to the protests here. Save your bus fare and your energy for events like this one. Either we begin to militantly stand against the coal, oil and natural gas industry or we do not. Either we defy pre-emptive war and occupation or we do not. Either we demand that the criminal class on Wall Street be held accountable for the theft of billions of dollars from small shareholders whose savings for retirement or college were wiped out or we do not. Either we defend basic civil liberties, including habeas corpus and the prosecution of torturers or we do not. Either we turn on liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party, which collaborate with these corporations or we do not. Either we accept that the age of political compromise is dead, that the corporate systems of power are instruments of death that can be fought only by physical acts of resistance or we do not. If the liberal class remains gullible and weak, if it continues to speak to itself and others in meaningless platitudes, it will remain as responsible for our enslavement as those it pompously denounces. Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

By Chris Hedges

24 January, 2011 

TruthDig.com

Palestinian Authority proposed that only a handful of the nearly six million Palestinian refugees be allowed to return.

By staff and agencies

It is not clear if, or how, “The Palestine Papers” were edited, and very little new information can be found in the documents.

The accumulation of restrictions under the rubric “demilitarization” amounts to nothing more than a new occupation.

When do the demands of demilitarization of a state transcend over sovereignty, to become the imposition of another form of occupation? At its limit, demilitarization is occupation: and sovereignty becomes nothing more than a meaningless banner, flapping in the wind, over a police state.

The Palestine Papers reveal Israel’s negotiator, Tzipi Livni in May 2008 discussing the scope of Palestinian demilitarization with her Palestinian counterparts:

Livni: “First: demilitarization – what you call limited arms. The equation is that on one hand you will have some limited arms for law and order and for fighting internal terrorism. But there is no need – and we cannot afford – a Palestinian army.”

Erekat: “Do I have a choice of who to place on my territory?”

Livni: “No.”

Erekat: “Do you see your army in our territory?”

Livni: “We don’t see ourselves in the territory except for limited cases, like early warning stations and the Jordan Valley… (Jordan Valley) not as territory, but a presence at the border.”

Erekat: “Can I choose where I secure external defence?”

Livni: “No… in order to create your state you have to agree in advance with Israel – you choose not to have the right of choice afterwards. These are the basic pillars.”

Livni makes it absolutely clear with that phrase: “You choose not to have the right of choice.”

The right of choice, of course, is basic to the concept of sovereignty. The basic pillars Livni talks about are no army, no air force, and basically no capacity for external defence. Ahmed Qurei, the chief negotiator is quite unperturbed by this ban, making it clear that he is in confrontation with Hamas and Hezbollah, rather than with any ‘external’ threat. This, of course, is not a problem, Livni is content “for strong police for law and order but not external threats”. The Israelis are happy for the PA to have a strong police state.

Let us be clear: Israel is demanding full spectrum military dominance in the air, on land – and with no capacity for Palestinians to protect themselves in any way whatsoever from either air attack, incursion, or missile attack. Implicit in Livni’s demand is a claim to impunity to pursue whatever military action against Palestinians, Israel may choose to launch: complete freedom of action.

Qurei is too busy making cracks about Hezbollah already being the government in Lebanon, to protest much. He wants arms to fight Hamas, not to defend Palestinians from Israel.

“Nothing more than a new occupation”

But this picture cannot be viewed in isolation to the other aspects of control that Livni is seeking: Israel is demanding control over the borders, control on who may enter and exit the Palestinian state, effective joint control over the internal security apparatus, Israeli vetting of applicants to the security apparatus, restrictions on who may stand for election in the Palestinian state, control over press ‘incitement’, control over the mosques, control over Palestinian airspace and even control over its electro-magnetic field.

These restrictions come on top of an American and European counter-insurgency project that has already set in place an economic oligarchy that is collaborating closely to co-ordinate with Israeli commercial interests.

They are additional too to policies already in place to crack down on any dissent. In the language of one British document, included among The Palestine Papers, the objective being to ‘degrade’ the capabilities of opponents to the PA; to disrupt their communications, to intern their members, to close their civil and charitable organisations, to remove them from public bodies, and to seize their assets.

Whereas to call for the ‘demilitarization’ of a Palestinian state may seem innocuous – and was treated as such by the PLO negotiators – the accumulation of restrictions under the rubric ‘demilitarization’ – amounts to nothing more than a new occupation. The experience of Gaza since 2006 illustrates clearly what can be the result when Israel exercises full military freedom of action against an undefended territory, when it additionally controls the crossings and the borders, when it controls the passage of foodstuffs, when it controls economic resources such as electricity, diesel and cooking gas. Palestinians become their captives.

Israelis may no longer be physically present in Gaza – aside from their temporary incursions – but Gaza is not free, and it is not sovereign. At its limit demilitarization simply is occupation by another name.

Alastair Crooke

Last Modified: 25 Jan 2011 19:35 GMT

Alastair Crooke is the founder of Conflicts Forum, an international movement which engages with Islamist movements broadly. He is the organiser of US and European unofficial dialogues in 2005 with Hezbollah, Hamas and other Islamist movements, and a former special Middle East adviser to European Union high representative Javier Solana. He facilitated various Israeli-Palestinian ceasefires during 2001-2003, and was instrumental in the negotiations leading to the ending of the siege of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. He is a former member of Britain’s MI-6 intelligence service.

Source: Al Jazeera

The release of some 1,700 secret documents has exposed the so-called peace process as a criminal farce, part of a permanent US-Israeli conspiracy against the basic rights of the Palestinian people.

The papers, which consist of minutes of negotiating sessions, diplomatic correspondence, memos, maps and other materials dating from 1999 to 2010, were obtained by the Al Jazeera television network. They present a devastating portrait of all sides engaged in the last decade of US-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) of Mahmoud Abbas is exposed as wholly subservient to US and Israeli interests. It is desperate to salvage an agreement that will secure it the fiction of a Palestinian state at the expense of every historic aspiration of the Palestinian people, which it represses and lies to in a bid to cement the privileges of a small wealthy layer.

To this end, as the documents make clear, the PA’s negotiators were prepared to accept the devouring of East Jerusalem by Zionist settlements, repudiate the right of exiled Palestinians to return to their land, and participate in mass transfers of Arab populations, a form of ethnic cleansing designed to meet Israel’s goal of a demographically secure “Jewish state.” All of this was done behind the backs of the Palestinian people.

 For their part, the Israelis emerge as ruthless and brutal in their determination to suppress the Palestinians and expropriate every possible inch of their land. Absolutely uninterested in reaching any agreement, they utilize the negotiations to extract ever greater concessions from their pliant Palestinian counterparts, while establishing new “facts on the ground” in terms of ever-mushrooming Zionist settlements in the occupied territories.

As for Washington, under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama alike, US diplomacy assumes a criminal character in relation to the Palestinian question, just as it does throughout the Middle East. Negotiators routinely side with Israel on all substantive issues, while treating the Palestinians with unconcealed contempt. Any attempt by the latter to raise basic issues of international law or even previous commitments made and unceremoniously broken are dismissed as “unrealistic” and foolish.

The arrogance and hostility with which imperialism treats not only the Palestinians but every oppressed people and the working class all over the world was summed up in a remark by then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and recorded in one of the transcripts. Dismissing claims on behalf of the millions of Palestinians condemned to exile, statelessness and bare subsistence in squalid refugee camps, Rice commented, “Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time. You need to look forward.”

The continuity of this vicious attitude toward the plight of the Palestinians was made clear by Rice’s successor, Hillary Clinton, who is recorded in a transcript from the fall of 2009 as demanding to know why Palestinians acted as if they were “always in a chapter of a Greek tragedy.”

None of this will come as a revelation to millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and the millions more scattered in exile in Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere. Their daily life of Israeli military strikes, roadblocks, land expropriations and countless humiliations is testament to the fraud and failure of the so-called “peace process.”

Nonetheless, just as the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on the corruption and torture practiced by the regime of President Zine El Abadine Ben Ali fueled the mass revolutionary uprising that has overthrown it, the documents published by Al Jazeera pose a mortal threat to the survival of the corrupt and authoritarian regime headed by Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

The Palestinian Authority reacted with rage to the publication of the documents, calling them “a bunch of lies” and “fabricated.” Meeting in Cairo with President Hosni Mubarak, PA President Abbas charged that the documents published by Al Jazeera were “intended” as a “mixup,” attributing Israeli negotiating positions to the PA’s own negotiators.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, charged that Al Jazeera was trying to “trick and mislead the simple citizen” and suggested that it was acting on behalf of the Islamist movement Hamas, the PLO’s rival, which governs the Gaza Strip.

The leading Fatah faction of the PLO organized a demonstration outside Al Jazeera’s offices in Ramallah, which were hit by vandalism. Some officials have suggested the station will be closed down in the West Bank.

For its part, Hamas said that the documents expose “the level of the Fatah authority’s involvement in attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause, particularly on the issue of Jerusalem and refugees, and its involvement against the resistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

The claims that the documents are forged or that Israeli positions are misrepresented as those of the Palestinian negotiators are not credible. The most incriminating material is contained in the transcripts of negotiating sessions in which the source of these positions is unmistakable. In addition to Al Jazeera, the British Guardian newspaper, with which the network shared the material, has vouched for their validity.

Among the most significant of the revelations in the papers released by Al Jazeera are the concessions offered by the PA’s negotiators on core issues, which stood in stark contrast to official positions upheld by the Palestinian movement for decades.

These included:

• An offer to allow Israel to retain control of all but one of its settlements in East Jerusalem, effectively ceding control of nearly all of what was to have been the Palestinian capital to the Israelis. Under international law, all of these settlements are illegal. The Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qureia, is quoted in a transcript from a May 2008 negotiating session as describing the concession as “unprecedented” and something that “we refused to do” at Camp David.

• An offer to settle for a “symbolic number” of refugees expelled in 1948 to be allowed to return to Israel, reportedly 100,000 over 10 years. Such a proposal would effectively renounce the rights of more than five million stateless Palestinians.

• An offer to place control of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount site in Jerusalem’s old city, which includes the Dome of the Rock and al Aqsa mosques, under control of a joint committee. In making the proposal, which renounced claims previously defended by Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, the PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, is quoted as declaring sarcastically, “The only thing I cannot do is convert to Zionism.”

Other documents illustrate the intimate collaboration between the Palestinian Authority and US and British intelligence in suppressing militant factions in the occupied territories and conspiring to overthrow Hamas in Gaza. The documents indicate that the PA was given advance warning of the 2008-2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza and bargained with the Israelis over the selection of Palestinian prisoners to be released with the open aim of boosting its image over that of its Islamist rivals.

All of these concessions produced precisely nothing from either Israel or its US ally. In an apparently emotional protest to Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, during an October 2009 meeting in Washington, Erekat is recorded as saying, “Nineteen years of promises and you haven’t made up your minds what you want to do with us… We delivered on our road map obligations. Even Yuval Diskin [director of Shabak, Israel’s internal security service] raises his hat on security. But no, they can’t even give a six-month freeze [on settlements] to give me a fig leaf.”

Washington, he complained, was interested only in “PR, quick news, and we’re cost free.” He warned that the failure of the “peace process” to produce anything for the Palestinians was undermining the usefulness of the PA in advancing US policy. “What good am I if I’m the joke of my wife, if I’m so weak.”

As for the Israeli side, the documents quote then-Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in a 2007 meeting providing a remarkably frank description of Tel Aviv’s negotiating strategy, which has been guided by a determination to prevent any possibility of a viable Palestinian state. “The Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the [Palestinian] state,” she said.

A similarly frank assessment as to the one-sided and fraudulent character of the “peace process” was offered by a former Israeli negotiator in an interview with the Guardian.

“What’s so striking is not so much the nature of the concessions, it’s that year after year they’re pursuing the same strategy which not only shows itself to have failed but showed itself to be on a slope of constant Palestinian slippage,” said the ex-negotiator, Daniel Levy. “They knew that the Israelis were pocketing whatever they gave, building more settlements and then saying: we need more land.”

Levy continued: “The Palestinians never extracted themselves from that structurally losing proposition, especially the expectation that the Americans would deliver Israel because the Palestinians thought they were the ones being reasonable in the negotiations. But it didn’t happen and it didn’t happen. The Americans constantly sided with the unreasonable side and the Palestinians kept digging themselves deeper and deeper in to this losing proposition.”

This assessment was confirmed by the reaction of the current government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the Al Jazeera report. It immediately seized upon the documents dealing with the sweeping concessions offered in relation to East Jerusalem to brand public demands by the Palestinian Authority for a freeze on construction there as “ridiculous.”

The released papers “show that the Palestinian demand over the last year and a half to freeze construction in Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem is ridiculous, since it is clear that they had already conceded the aforementioned neighborhoods in negotiations during Olmert’s tenure,” the Israeli daily Haaretz quoted Israeli officials as saying.

The reality is that, no matter how great the concessions offered by the Palestinian side, neither Israel nor Washington have been interested in a settlement. The “peace talks,” which have now broken down over Israel’s refusal to provide even a temporary and partial freeze on new settlements, have served only as a means of exerting control over the Palestinian population and furthering imperialist intrigues in the broader Middle East.

In Washington, the State Department said it could not vouch for veracity of the documents, but acknowledged that they would nave an impact. “We don’t deny that this release will, at least for a time, make the situation more difficult than it already was,” said spokesman Philip Crowley. “But again, we are clear-eyed about this. We always recognized that this would be a great challenge. But it hasn’t—it doesn’t change our overall objective.”

Among the revelations contained in the documents is that the Obama administration tailored its policy even more closely to that of Israel than the Bush administration. In talks between Obama’s envoy Mitchell and Palestinian negotiator Erekat in the autumn of 2009, Mitchell pushed the PA to cede to Israel’s refusal to recognize the 1967 borders as the basis for negotiations on a Palestinian state.

When Erekat protested that the 1967 borders were part of the 2003 Road Map and had been specifically endorsed by the Bush administration barely a year earlier, Mitchell said Washington was not bound by these commitments.

“Again I tell you that President Obama does not accept prior decisions by Bush,” the US envoy declared. “Don’t use this because it can hurt you. Countries are bound by agreements—not discussions or statements.”

The documents released by Al Jazeera have laid bare the real character of the so-called “peace process,” which has been totally misrepresented by the media. From the beginning, it has served not as a means of ending the six-decade plight of the Palestinian people, but rather of legitimizing endless violence against them and of furthering US interests in the Middle East.

The prostration of the PA leadership exposed by these transcripts signals the dead-end of bourgeois nationalism throughout the Middle East and internationally.

The historic demands of the Palestinian people cannot be resolved through the pursuit of imperialist support for a bantustan-style statelet in the occupied territories. Only the mobilization of the working class—Palestinian and Israeli—and its unification based on a socialist and internationalist program can provide a way out of the present impasse and prevent a new round of murderous warfare.

By Bill Van Auken

25 January, 2011

WSWS.org

The ‘Palestine Papers’ being published this week by al-Jazeera confirm in every detail what many Palestinians have suspected for a long time: their leaders have been collaborating in the most shameful fashion with Israel and the United States. Their grovelling is described in grim detail. The process, though few accepted it at the time, began with the much-trumpeted Oslo Accords, described by Edward Said in the LRB at the time as a ‘Palestinian Versailles’. Even he would have been taken aback by the sheer scale of what the PLO leadership agreed to surrender: virtually everything except their own salaries. Their weaknesses, inadequacies and cravenness are now in the public domain.

Now we know that the capitulation was total, but still the Israeli overlords of the PLO refused to sign a deal and their friends in the press blamed the Palestinians for being too difficult. They wanted Palestine to be crushed before they would agree to underwrite a few moth-eaten protectorates that they would supervise indefinitely. They wanted Hamas destroyed. The PLO agreed. The recent assault on Gaza was carried out with the approval of Abbas and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, not to mention Washington and its EU. The PLO sold out in a literal sense. They were bought with money and treated like servants. There is TV footage of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton at Camp David playfully tugging at Arafat’s headgear to stop him leaving. All three are laughing. Many PLO supporters in Palestine must be weeping as they watch al-Jazeera and take in the scale of the betrayal and the utter cynicism of their leaders. Now we know why the Israel/US/EU nexus was so keen to disregard the outcome of the Palestinian elections and try to destroy Hamas militarily.

The two-state solution is now dead and buried by Israel and the PLO. Impossible for anyone (even the BBC) to pretend that there can be an independent Palestinian state. A long crapulent depression is bound to envelop occupied Palestine, but whether Israel likes it or not there will one day be a single state in the region, probably by the end of this century. That is the only possible solution, apart from genocide.

By Tariq Ali

On January 23, Al Jazeera released breaking news on its extensive “Palestine Papers” coverage, introducing them, saying:

It “obtained more than 1,600 internal documents from a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations,” writer Gregg Carlstrom explaining that:

“Over the last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” They include “nearly 1,700 files, (and) thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of” peace process negotiations.

Included (from 1999 – 2010) were “emails, maps, minutes of private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations….”

Releasing them from January 23 – 26, they reveal information about:

— the PA’s willingness to concede all East Jerusalem settlements except one;

— PA “creativ(ity)” about Islam’s third holiest site, Haram al-Sharif (Nobel Sanctuary), what Jews call the Temple Mount;

— compromise on the right of return, suggesting abandonment beyond token amounts;

— numerous details of PA-Israeli “cooperation,” suggesting complicity and unconditional surrender to Israeli demands; and

— private late 2009 PA-US negotiator exchanges when Goldstone Report discussions were ongoing at the UN.

Because of obvious sensitivity, Al Jazeera will keep source information confidential as well as how documents were obtained.

In a January 23 London Guardian article, Karma Nabulski headlined, “This seemingly endless and ugly game of the peace process is now finally over,” saying:

“It’s over. Given the shocking nature, extent and detail of these ghastly revelations from behind closed doors (shows none) of the villains on the Palestinian side can survive it….A small group of (duplicitous) men who have polluted the Palestinian public sphere with their private activities are now exposed.”

In fact, the PA is infested with traitors, some more recent like Salam Fayyad. As appointed prime minister, he’s Israel’s man in Palestine as a previous article explained, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/01/salam-fayyad-israels-man-in-palestine.html

President Mahmoud Abbas’ treachery way predates him also discussed in a previous article, accessed through the following link:

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2010/10/palestinian-authority-traitors-serving.html

Jeffrey Blankfort called him a “double agent (serving) his Israeli and US masters in plain sight.” Saying he’s “Israel’s sheriff,” Edward Said called him “colorless, moderately corrupt and without any clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white man.”

As chief Oslo negotiator, he surrendered unconditionally to Israeli demands, Said explaining:

“the fashion-show vulgarities of the (1993) White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance, (and) the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.”

It was unilateral surrender, a Palestinian Versailles. They got nothing for renouncing armed struggle, recognizing Israel’s right to exist, letting it colonize Palestine, and leaving major unresolved issues for later final status talks, including self-determination, the right to return, the future of settlements, borders, water rights, and status of Jerusalem as sovereign Palestinian territory and future home of its capital.

Under Arafat, a new PA was established as Israel’s enforcer. At Oslo, Abbas arranged it, getting nothing except White House photo-ops and undisclosed personal favors. Nearly two decades later, they’ve still gotten nothing under him as president, serving his Israeli and US masters.

Main PA Negotiators/Traitors

Besides Abbas, they include:

(1) Saeb Erekat: Since the 1991 Madrid Conference attempt to restart the peace process, he was involved. Thereafter, he took part in every major negotiation, including Oslo and what followed. Overall, he participated in 116 meetings with Israeli, US, and European officials, and for the past two years, served as chief negotiator.

(2) Ahmed Qurei: From 2003 – January 2006 elections defeating Fatah for a new Hamas government, he was Palestinian prime minister. After leaving office, he became chief PA negotiator until late 2008. The documents suggest political infighting reduced his status.

(3) Maen Areikat: In 1992, he began working with Hanan Ashrawi, at the time, official spokeswoman of the Palestinian delegation to peace talk negotiations. In 1998, he served as PLO director general of the Negotiations Affairs Department, supervising its Negotiations Support Unit, providing legal, policy, communications and technical support to Palestinian negotiators. He’s currently heads the PLO mission to the US representative.

(4) Mohammed Dahlan: After Oslo, he headed the PA’s Preventive Security Service in Gaza. In the 1990s, his soldiers were accused of torturing Hamas prisoners. As a notorious Palestinian strongman, he’s perhaps its most controversial figure. In 2007, he headed the failed CIA-funded attempt to unseat Hamas in Gaza, and since August 2009, he’s been an elected member of Fatah’s Central Committee.

Erekat’s Yerushalayim/Haram al-Sharif Solution

As chief PA negotiator, he “suggested unprecedented compromises on the division of Jerusalem and its holy sites,” including ceding control to an international committee. Palestinians accused Israel of Judaizing East Jerusalem as well as pursuing destructive excavations to undermine the al-Aqsa mosque’s foundation, damaging its structural integrity, perhaps intending to destroy it.

Documents reveal that during an October 21, 2009 meeting with George Mitchell and other US negotiators, he said:

“It’s solved. You have the Clinton Parameters formula. For the Old City sovereignty for Palestine, except the Jewish quarter and part of the Armenian quarter….the Haram can be left to be discussed – there are creative ways, having a body or a committee, having undertakings, for example, not to dig (under the mosque). The only thing I cannot do is convert to Zionism.”

Haram’s status was seldom considered. As late as a July 2, 2008 meeting, Israeli negotiators were told discussing it was off-limits and that they couldn’t bargain on Jerusalem. Yet Erekat and those under him did so, “regardless of the tactical consequences.”

A month later, at a June 30, 2008 meeting, he said:

“It is no secret that on our map we proposed we are offering you the biggest Yerushalayim in history. But we must talk about the concept of Al-Quds (Jerusalem). (We) have a detailed concept (and) it’s doable.”

He seemed willing to accept an international overseeing arrangement, what never before was considered, fearing it would be a first step to losing it entirely and angering the entire Arab world. As chief negotiator, he “appeared totally disconnected from his own people, as well as his wider Arab and Muslim constituency.”

He was “so consumed by the negotiations that he became oblivious of the import of his remarks among Arabs, Muslims, and – most of all – his own people. Even among some Israelis, this seemed infantile.” According to Israeli lawyer Danied Seidemann:

“(A)ny attempt to construe the API (Arab Palestine Initiative) in a manner that falls short of ‘full-stop’ Palestinian or Arab sovereignty on the Haram/Mount would be an exercise in self-delusion.”

World Headlines

On January 14, Haaretz News Agencies headlined, “Abbas: Concessions in Palestine papers came from Israel, not us,” saying:

He “denied offering secret concessions to Israel and said that reporting of purportedly leaked documents” mistakenly presented Israeli positions, not those of his negotiators. Calling it a “mix-up,” he said it was “intentional….We say things very clearly, we do not have secrets.”

Clearly embarrassed like Abbas, Ahmed Qureia, chief 2008 negotiator, said “many parts of the documents were fabricated, as part of the incitement against the (PA) and the Palestinian leadership.” He denied making duplicitous offers, calling reports about Erekat “lies and half truths.” In fact, they came from his own verbatim comments.

On January 24, Haaretz writer Akiva Eldar headlined, “Lieberman’s map for future Palestinian borders is a joke,” calling it:

“a predetermined ritual: The government refuses to freeze settlement construction, the Palestinians freeze the negotiations, (Netanyahu) blames (Abbas), the international community presses Israel, Netanyahu/Lieberman/Barak (leak) ‘a new political program,’ (and) Palestinians reject it.”

With nothing constructive in it, it’s like trying to make eggs out of omelets or caterpillars out of butterflies.

BBC headlined, “Excepts: Leaked Palestinian ‘proposals,’ ” saying:

Their negotiators offered unprecedented concessions, including willingness “to accept Israel’s annexation of all but one of its settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem.” They also “show how the Palestinians offered concessions on” Haram.

“They could not be independently verified and the chief Palestinian negotiator has dismissed them as a ‘pack of lies.’ “

The last refuge of a scoundrel caught red-handed is lying about it, revealing even greater treachery.

On January 23, London Guardian writers Seumas Milne and Ian Black headlined, “Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process,” saying:

Offered concessions sent “shockwaves (across Occupied Palestine and) the wider Arab world.” Revelations include:

— unprecedented “confidential concessions,” including on some of the most sensitive issues;

— Israeli leaders asking “some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state;”

— intimate “covert cooperation between Israeli security forces and the” PA;

— British intelligence’s “central role (in) drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas…;”

— how PA “leaders were privately tipped off about” Cast Lead, showing their complicity and willingness to go along; as well as much more.

Most revealing is “the weakness and growing desperation of PA leaders (to) reach agreement or even halt (settlement construction) temporarily,” undermining “their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals.” In addition, Israeli negotiators showed “unyielding confidence,” and US politicians “dismissive(ness) towards Palestinian representatives,’ mere pawns to manipulate freely.

After the revelations, former Palestinian negotiator Diana Butto demanded Erekat resign, saying he “must step down and if he doesn’t it will only serve to show just how out of touch and unrepresentative the negotiators are.”

On January 23, New York Times writers Ethan Bronner and Neil MacFarquhar headlined, “Word of Palestinian Concession in 2008 Roils Mideast Debate,” saying:

New details emerged as Washington “is facing unusual pressure from its Arab and European allies, and even some former top American officials, not to veto a draft Security Council resolution reaffirming the longstanding international view” that Israeli settlements are illegal.

Of course, it’s far more than a “view.” Fundamental international laws affirm it, including Fourth Geneva prohibiting an occupying power from transferring its own population into territories its controls or changing their demographic makeup. Moreover, on March 22, 1979, UN Security Council Resolution 446 determined:

“that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

At the time, Washington abstained. Now it obstructs by vetoing anything detrimental to Israel. According to Maged Abdelaziz, Egypt’s UN ambassador:

“The statements by the secretary of state and the American administration are that ‘We are against settlements and we are not going to do anything about (them) and we don’t want you to do anything about (them). We will let Israel do what they want. We will wake up one day to find that the two-state solution has become a dream that is unachievable.”

That day, in fact, long since passed, given how untenable division is after Israel expropriated all choice land and plans total Jerusalem Judaization, one home demolition and stolen dunam at a time.

On January 23, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said “The US government is reviewing the alleged Palestinian documents released by Al-Jazeera. We cannot vouch for their veracity.” Later he added that Washington “remains focused on a two-state solution and will continue to work with the parties to narrow existing differences on core issues.”

So far, Obama and Netanyahu said nothing, and on January 24, Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal was silent.

In contrast, Financial Times contributor Nadia Hijab headlined, “Leaks will cripple Palestinian authority,” saying:

“It is likely to deal a death blow to an American-led peace process already on life support, and hasten the end of the” Oslo-created PA. Al Jazeera’s revelations confirm what’s been “clear to Palestinians for decades: their leadership” has conceded virtually all their rights, getting nothing back in return. Ahead are “two plausible options,” likely neither of which will be taken:

— dissolving the PA, uniting all factions (including Hamas), and refocusing on liberation, the only viable goal; or

— “continu(ing) down the road of hoping” pressure will get Israel to yield what it never did before.

Because of PA treachery, it looks “increasingly (like) a hollow shell, that may soon be blown away. The winds are coming from Tunisia. Palestine may be next.”

A Final Comment

Haaretz writer Akiva Eldar said Al Jazeera’s bombshell “trump(ed) WikiLeaks.” Perhaps so if duplicitous peace talks end, exposed Israeli/US perfidy weaken their influence internationally, PA credibility crumbles, then self-destructs, inspiring Palestinians to unite under viable leaders, choosing liberation as their goal.

Achieving those objectives won’t come easily or soon, but what’s more important than seizing a rare opportunity for change. Tunisian winds are spreading regionally. Thousands are demonstrating in Tunis, other Tunisian cities, Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and may erupt anywhere from Morocco to Egypt to Occupied Palestine.

Sustained grassroots anger brings change, and what better reasons than poverty, unemployment, repression, occupation, and suffocating conditions under siege. Maybe exposed PA treachery created a rare chance seldom possible. Now’s the time to seize it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

Nazareth: For more than a decade, since the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000, the mantra of Israeli politics has been the same: “There is no Palestinian partner for peace.”

This week, the first of hundreds of leaked confidential Palestinian documents confirmed the suspicions of a growing number of observers that the rejectionists in the peace process are to be found on the Israeli, not Palestinian, side.

Some of the most revealing papers, jointly released by Al-Jazeera television and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, date from 2008, a relatively hopeful period in recent negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

At the time, Ehud Olmert was Israel’s prime minister and had publicly committed himself to pursuing an agreement on Palestinian statehood. He was backed by the United States administration of George W Bush, which had revived the peace process in late 2007 by hosting the Annapolis conference.

In those favourable circumstances, the papers show, Israel spurned a set of major concessions the Palestinian negotiating team offered over the following months on the most sensitive issues in the talks.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, has tried unconvincingly to deny the documents’ veracity, but has not been helped by the failure of Israeli officials to come to his aid.

According to the documents, the most significant Palestinian compromise – or “sell-out”, as many Palestinians are calling it – was on Jerusalem.

During a series of meetings over the summer of 2008, Palestinian negotiators agreed to Israel’s annexation of large swaths of East Jerusalem, including all but one of the city’s Jewish settlements and parts of the Old City itself.

It is difficult to imagine how the resulting patchwork of Palestinian enclaves in East Jerusalem, surrounded by Jewish settlements, could ever have functioned as the capital of the new state of Palestine.

At the earlier Camp David talks, according to official Israeli documents leaked to the Haaretz daily in 2008, Israel had proposed something very similar in Jerusalem: Palestinian control over what were then termed territorial “bubbles”.

In the later talks, the Palestinians also showed a willingness to renounce their claim to exclusive sovereignty over the Old City’s flashpoint of the Haram al-Sharif, the sacred compound that includes the al-Aqsa mosque and is flanked by the Western Wall. An international committee overseeing the area was proposed instead.

This was probably the biggest concession of all – control of the Haram was the issue that “blew up” the Camp David talks, according to an Israeli official who was present.

Saeb Erekat, the PLO’s chief negotiator, is quoted promising Israel “the biggest Yerushalayim in history” – using the Hebrew word for Jerusalem – as his team effectively surrendered Palestinian rights enshrined in international law.

The concessions did not end there, however. The Palestinians agreed to land swaps to accommodate 70 per cent of the half a million Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and to forgo the rights of all but a few thousand Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian state was also to be demilitarised. In one of the papers recording negotiations in May 2008, Erekat asks Israel’s negotiators: “Short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defence?” The Israeli answer was an emphatic: “No.”

Interestingly, the Palestinian negotiators are said to have agreed to recognise Israel as a “Jewish state” – a concession Israel now claims is one of the main stumbling blocks to a deal.

Israel was also insistent that Palestinians accept a land swap that would transfer a small area of Israel into the new Palestinian state along with as many as a fifth of Israel’s 1.4 million Palestinian citizens. This demand echoes a controversial “population transfer” long proposed by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister.

The “Palestine Papers”, as they are being called, demand a serious re-evaluation of two lingering – and erroneous – assumptions made by many Western observers about the peace process.

The first relates to the United States’ self-proclaimed role as honest broker. What shines through the documents is the reluctance of US officials to put reciprocal pressure on Israeli negotiators, even as the Palestinian team make major concessions on core issues. Israel’s “demands” are always treated as paramount.

The second is the assumption that peace talks have fallen into abeyance chiefly because of the election nearly two years ago of a rightwing Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu. He has drawn international criticism for refusing to pay more than lip-service to Palestinian statehood.

The Americans’ goal – at least in the early stages of Mr Netanyahu’s premiership – was to strong-arm him into bringing into his coalition Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist opposition party Kadima. She is still widely regarded as the most credible Israeli advocate for peace.

However, Ms Livni, who was previously Mr Olmert’s foreign minister, emerges in the leaked papers as an inflexible negotiator, dismissive of the huge concessions being made by the Palestinians. At a key moment, she turns down the Palestinians’ offer, after saying: “I really appreciate it”.

The sticking point for Ms Livni was a handful of West Bank settlements the Palestinian negotiators refused to cede to Israel. The Palestinians have long complained that the two most significant – Maale Adumim, outside Jerusalem, and Ariel, near the Palestinian city of Nablus – would effectively cut the West Bank into three cantons, undermining any hopes of territorial contiguity.

Ms Livni’s insistence on holding on to these settlements – after all the Palestinian compromises – suggests that there is no Israeli leader either prepared or able to reach a peace deal – unless, that is, the Palestinians cave in to almost every Israeli demand and abandon their ambitions for statehood.

One of the Palestine Papers quotes an exasperated Mr Erekat asking a US diplomat last year: “What more can I give?”

The man with the answer may be Mr Lieberman, who unveiled his own map of Palestinian statehood this week. It conceded a provisional state on less than half of the West Bank.

By Jonathan Cook

25 January, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

What the Tunisian Revolution and WikiLeaks Tell Us about American Support for Corrupt Dictatorships in the Muslim World

Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to make bad choices that will ultimately harm American interests and standing abroad. State Department cable traffic from capitals throughout the Greater Middle East, made public thanks to WikiLeaks, shows that U.S. policy-makers have a detailed and profound picture of the depths of corruption and nepotism that prevail among some “allies” in the region.

The same cable traffic indicates that, in a cynical Great Power calculation, Washington continues to sacrifice the prospects of the region’s youth on the altar of “security.” It is now forgotten that America’s biggest foreign policy headache, the Islamic Republic of Iran, arose in response to American backing for Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the despised Shah who destroyed the Iranian left and centrist political parties, paving the way for the ayatollahs’ takeover in 1979.

State Department cables published via WikiLeaks are remarkably revealing when it comes to the way Tunisian strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and his extended family (including his wife Leila’s Trabelsi clan) fastened upon the Tunisian economy and sucked it dry. The riveting descriptions of U.S. diplomats make the presidential “family” sound like True Blood’s vampires overpowering Bontemps, Louisiana.

In July of 2009, for instance, the U.S. ambassador dined with Nesrine Ben Ali el-Materi and Sakher el-Materi, the president’s daughter and son-in-law, at their sumptuous mansion. Materi, who rose through nepotism to dominate Tunisia’s media, provided a 12-course dinner with Kiwi juice — “not normally available here” — and “ice cream and frozen yoghurt he had flown in from Saint Tropez,” all served by an enormous staff of well-paid servants. The ambassador remarked on the couple’s pet tiger, “Pasha,” which consumed “four chickens a day” at a time of extreme economic hardship for ordinary Tunisians.

Other cables detail the way the Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans engaged in a Tunisian version of insider trading, using their knowledge of the president’s upcoming economic decisions to scarf up real estate and companies they knew would suddenly spike in value. In 2006, the U.S. ambassador estimated that 50% of the economic elite of Tunisia was related by blood or marriage to the president, a degree of nepotism hard to match outside some of the Persian Gulf monarchies.

Despite full knowledge of the corruption and tyranny of the regime, the U.S. embassy concluded in July 2009: “Notwithstanding the frustrations of doing business here, we cannot write off Tunisia. We have too much at stake. We have an interest in preventing al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other extremist groups from establishing a foothold here. We have an interest in keeping the Tunisian military professional and neutral.”

The notion that, if the U.S. hadn’t given the Tunisian government hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid over the past two and a half decades, while helping train its military and security forces, a shadowy fringe group calling itself “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb” might have established a “toehold” in the country was daft. Yet this became an all-weather, universal excuse for bad policy.

In this regard, Tunisia has been the norm when it comes to American policy in the Muslim world. The Bush administration’s firm support for Ben Ali makes especially heinous the suggestion of some neoconservative pundits that George W. Bush’s use of democratization rhetoric for neo-imperialist purposes somehow inspired the workers and internet activists of Tunisia (none of whom ever referenced the despised former US president). It would surely have been smarter for Washington to cut the Ben Ali regime off without a dime, at least militarily, and distance itself from his pack of jackals. The region is, of course, littered with dusty, creaking, now exceedingly nervous dictatorships in which government is theft. The U.S. receives no real benefits from its damaging association with them.

No Dominoes to Fall

The Bush administration’s deeply flawed, sometimes dishonest Global War on Terror replayed the worst mistakes of Cold War policy. One of those errors involved recreating the so-called domino theory — the idea that the U.S. had to make a stand in Vietnam, or else Indonesia, Thailand, Burma and the rest of Asia, if not the world, would fall to communism. It wasn’t true then — the Soviet Union was, at the time, less than two decades from collapsing — and it isn’t applicable now in terms of al-Qaeda. Then and now, though, that domino theory prolonged the agony of ill-conceived wars.

Despite the Obama administration’s abandonment of the phrase “war on terror,” the impulses encoded in it still powerfully shape Washington’s policy-making, as well as its geopolitical fears and fantasies. It adds up to an absurdly modernized version of domino theory. This irrational fear that any small setback for the U.S. in the Muslim world could lead straight to an Islamic caliphate lurks beneath many of Washington’s pronouncements and much of its strategic planning.

A clear example can be seen in the embassy cable that acquiesced in Washington’s backing of Ben Ali for fear of the insignificant and obscure “al-Qaeda in the Maghreb.” Despite the scary name, this small group was not originally even related to Usamah Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, but rather grew out of the Algerian Muslim reformist movement called Salafism.

If the U.S. stopped giving military aid to Ben Ali, it was implied, Bin Laden might suddenly be the caliph of Tunis. This version of the domino theory — a pretext for overlooking a culture of corruption, as well as human rights abuses against dissidents — has become so widespread as to make up the warp and woof of America’s secret diplomatic messaging.

Sinking Democracy in the Name of the War on Terror

Take Algeria, for instance. American military assistance to neighboring Algeria has typically grown from nothing before September 11th to nearly a million dollars a year. It may be a small sum in aid terms, but it is rapidly increasing, and it supplements far more sizeable support from the French. It also involves substantial training for counterterrorism; that is, precisely the skills also needed to repress peaceful civilian protests.

Ironically, the Algerian generals who control the strings of power were the ones responsible for radicalizing the country’s Muslim political party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Allowed to run for office in 1992, that party won an overwhelming majority in parliament. Shocked and dismayed, the generals abruptly abrogated the election results. We will never know if the FIS might have evolved into a parliamentary, democratic party, as later happened to the Justice and Development Party of Turkey, the leaders of which had been Muslim fundamentalists in the 1990s.

Angered at being deprived of the fruits of its victory, however, FIS supporters went on the offensive. Some were radicalized and formed an organization they called the Armed Islamic Group, which later became an al-Qaeda affiliate. (A member of this group, Ahmed Ressam, attempted to enter the U.S. as part of the “millennial plot” to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, but was apprehended at the border.) A bloody civil war then broke out in which the generals and the more secular politicians were the winners, though not before 150,000 Algerians died. As with Ben Ali in neighboring Tunisia, Paris and Washington consider President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika (elected in 1999) a secular rampart against the influence of radical Muslim fundamentalism in Algeria as well as among the Algerian-French population in France.

To outward appearances, in the first years of the twenty-first century, Algeria regained stability under Bouteflika and his military backers, and the violence subsided. Critics charged, however, that the president connived at legislative changes, making it possible for him to run for a third term, a decision that was bad for democracy. In the 2009 presidential election, he faced a weak field of rivals and his leading opponent was a woman from an obscure Trotskyite party.

Cables from the U.S. embassy (revealed again by WikiLeaks) reflected a profound unease with a growing culture of corruption and nepotism, even though it was not on a Tunisian scale. Last February, for example, Ambassador David D. Pearce reported that eight of the directors of the state oil company Sonatrach were under investigation for corruption. He added, “This scandal is the latest in a dramatically escalating series of investigations and prosecutions that we have seen since last year involving Algerian government ministries and public enterprises. Significantly, many of the ministries affected are headed by ministers considered close to Algerian President Bouteflika…”

And this was nothing new. More than three years earlier, the embassy in Algiers was already sounding the alarm. Local observers, it reported to Washington, were depicting President Bouteflika’s brothers “Said and Abdallah, as being particularly rapacious.” Corruption was spreading into an increasingly riven and contentious officer corps. Unemployment among youth was so bad that they were taking to the Mediterranean on rickety rafts in hopes of getting to Europe and finding jobs. And yet when you read the WikiLeaks cables you find no recommendations to stop supporting the Algerian government.

As usual when Washington backs corrupt regimes in the name of its war on terror, democracy suffers and things slowly deteriorate. Bouteflika’s flawed elections which aimed only at ensuring his victory, for instance, actively discouraged moderate fundamentalists from participating and some observers now think that Algeria, already roiled by food riots, could face Tunisian-style popular turmoil. (It should be remembered, however, that the Algerian military and secret police, with years of grim civil-war experience behind them, are far more skilled at oppressive techniques of social control than the Tunisian army.)

Were oil-rich Algeria, a much bigger country than Tunisia, to become unstable, it would be a strategically more striking and even less predictable event. Blame would have to be laid not just at the feet of Bouteflika and his corrupt cronies, but at those of his foreign backers, deeply knowledgeable (as the WikiLeaks cables indicate) but set in their policy ways.

The Ben Alis of Central Asia

Nor is the problem confined to North Africa or even anxious U.S.-backed autocrats in the Arab world. Take the natural gas and gold-rich Central Asian country of Uzbekistan with a population of about 27 million, whose corruption the U.S. embassy was cabling about as early as 2006. The dictatorial but determinedly secular regime of President Islam Karimov was an early Bush administration ally in its Global War on Terror, quite happy to provide Washington with torture-inspired confessions from “al-Qaeda” operatives, most of whom, according to former British ambassador Craig Murray, were simply ordinary Uzbek dissidents. (Although Uzbeks have a Muslim cultural heritage, decades of Soviet rule left most of the population highly secularized, and except in the Farghana Valley, the Muslim fundamentalist movement is tiny.) Severe human rights abuses finally caused even the Bush administration to criticize Karimov, leading Tashkent to withdraw basing rights in that country from the U.S. military.

In recent years, however, a rapprochement has occurred, as Washington’s regional security obsessions once again came to the fore and the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s northwest tribal belt ramped up. The Obama administration is now convinced that it needs Uzbekistan for the transit of supplies to Afghanistan and that evidently trumps all other policy considerations. As a result, Washington is now providing Uzbekistan with hundreds of millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts, a recipe for further corruption.

Last spring, one Central Asian government — Kyrgyzstan’s — fell, thanks to popular discontent, which should have been a warning to Washington, and yet U.S. officials already appear to have forgotten what lessons those events held for its policies in the region. As long as ruler Kurmanbek Bakiev allowed the U.S. to use Manas Air Base for the transit and supply of American troops in Afghanistan, Washington overlooked his corruption and his authoritarian ways. Then it turned out that his regime was not as stable as had been assumed.

Here’s a simple rule of thumb in such situations: bad policy creates even worse policy. The Obama administration’s mistake in ramping up its Afghan War left it needing ever more supplies, worrying about perilous supply lines through Pakistan, and so vulnerable to transit blackmail by the ruling kleptocracies of Central Asia. When their populations, too, explode into anger, the likely damage to U.S. interests could be severe.

And keep in mind that, as the State Department again knows all too well, Afghanistan itself is increasingly just a huge, particularly decrepit version of Ben Ali’s Tunisia. U.S. diplomats were at least somewhat wary of Ben Ali. In contrast, American officials wax fulsome in their public praise of Afghan President Hamid Karzai (even if privately they are all too aware of the weakness and corruption of “the mayor of Kabul”). They continue to insist that the success of his government is central to the security of the North American continent, and for that reason, Washington is spending billions of dollars propping him up.

Corruption Triumphant in the Name of Counterterrorism

Sometimes it seems that all corrupt regimes backed by the U.S. are corrupt in the same repetitive way. For instance, one form of corruption U.S. embassy cables particularly highlighted when it came to the Ben Ali and Trabelsi clans in Tunisia was the way they offered “loans” to their political supporters and family members via banks they controlled or over which they had influence.

Since these recipients understood that they did not actually have to repay the loans, the banks were weakened and other businesses then found it difficult to get credit, undermining the economy and employment. Thanks to the Jasmine revolution, the problem finally is beginning to be addressed. After the flight of Ben Ali, the Central Bank director was forced to resign, and the new government seized the assets of the Zitoune Bank, which belonged to one of his son-in-laws.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, Da Kabul Bank, founded by Karzai ally Sherkan Farnood, was used as a piggy bank for Karzai’s presidential campaign and for loans to members of his family as well as the families of the warlords in his circle. Recipients included Karzai’s brother Mahmoud Karzai and Haseen Fahim, the son of his vice president and former Northern Alliance warlord Marshal Mohammad Fahim. Some of the money was used to buy real estate in Dubai. When a real estate bust occurred in that country, the value of those properties as collateral plummeted.

With recipients unable to service or repay their debts, the bank teetered on the edge of insolvency with potentially dire consequences for the entire Afghan financial system, as desperate crowds gathered to withdraw their deposits. In the end, the bank was taken over by an impoverished Afghan government, which undoubtedly means that the American taxpayer will end up paying for the mismanagement and corruption.

Just as the Ben Ali clique outdid itself in corruption, so, too, Karzai’s circle is full of crooks. American diplomats (among others) have, for instance, accused his brother Wali Ahmed of deep involvement in the heroin trade. With dark humor, the American embassy in Kabul reported last January that Hamid Karzai had nominated, and parliament had accepted, for the counter-narcotics post in the cabinet one Zarar Ahmad Moqbel. He had earlier been Deputy Interior Minister, but was removed for corruption. Another former Deputy Interior Minister evidently even informed embassy officials that “Moqbel was supported by the drug mafia, to include Karzai’s younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai and Arif Khan Noorzai.” This is being alleged of Afghanistan’s current counter-narcotics czar!

Or take the example of Juma Khan Hamdard, whom Karzai appointed governor of Paktya Province in the Pashtun-dominated eastern part of Afghanistan. A little over a year ago, the embassy accused him of being the leader of “a province-wide corruption scheme.” He is said to have been “the central point of a vast corruption network involving the provincial chief of police and several Afghan ministry line directors.”

According to that WikiLeaks-released cable, Hamdard’s network had set up a sophisticated money-skimming operation aimed at milking U.S. funds going into reconstruction projects. They gamed the bids on the contracts to do the work and then took cuts at every stage from groundbreaking to ribbon-cutting.

In addition, Governor Hamdard was reported to have longstanding ties to the Hizb-i Islami militia/party movement of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar, one of the Pashtun guerrilla leaders trying to expel the U.S. and NATO from the country, who, U.S. officials claim, is in turn in a vague alliance with the Taliban. Hamdard allegedly also has a business in Dubai in which Hikmatyar’s son is a partner, and is accused in the cable of funneling jewels and drug money to Hikmatyar loyalists. As with Tunisia, the public rhetoric of counterterrorism belies a corrupt and duplicitous ruling elite that may, by its actions, foster rather than forestall radicalism.

Harsh Truths

For a superpower obsessed with conspiracy theories and invested in the status quo, knowing everything, it turns out, means knowing nothing at all. WikiLeaks has done us the favor, however, of releasing a harsh set of truths. Hard-line policies such as those of the Algerian generals or of Uzbekistan’s Karimov often radicalize economically desperate and oppressed populations. As a result, U.S. backing has a significant probability of boomeranging sooner or later. Elites, confident that they will retain such backing as long as there is an al-Qaeda cell anywhere on the planet, tend to overreach, plunging into cultures of corruption and self-enrichment so vast that they undermine economies, while producing poverty, unemployment, despair, and ultimately widespread public anger.

It is not that the United States should be, in John Quincy Adams’s phrase, going out into the world to find dragons to slay. Washington is no longer all-powerful, if it ever was, and President Obama’s more realistic foreign policy is a welcome change from George W. Bush’s frenetic interventionism.

Nonetheless, Obama has left in place, or in some cases strengthened, one of the worst aspects of Bush-era policy: a knee-jerk support for self-advertised pro-Western secularists who promise to block Muslim fundamentalist parties (or, in the end, anyone else) from coming to power. There should be a diplomatic middle path between overthrowing governments on the one hand, and backing odious dictatorships to the hilt on the other.

It’s time for Washington to signal a new commitment to actual democracy and genuine human rights by simply cutting off military and counterterrorism aid to authoritarian and corrupt regimes that are, in any case, digging their own graves.

By Juan Cole

25 January, 2011

TomDispatch.com

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Cole discusses Washington’s backing of corrupt autocratic regimes globally, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here

Palestinian Authority proposed that only a handful of the nearly six million Palestinian refugees be allowed to return

At the Bourj el Barajneh refugee camp in southern Beirut, a centre for the elderly serves as an oasis from the overcrowded, filthy conditions outside its metal doors.

The right of return

On a recent Thursday morning, a group of men and women in their 60s and 70s gathered around a table to colour and draw pictures, while others solved crossword puzzles. One woman sitting in the corner focused intently as she embroidered a traditional Palestinian dress. The Active Ageing House in the refugee camp is a place where they can pass time, socialise and share meals.

They are known as the “Children of the Nakba” – a generation of Palestinians that witnessed, and survived, the forced expulsion and violence in 1948 committed by Zionist paramilitaries on behalf of the nascent state of Israel.

They each have a story about how they or their parents managed to escape their homeland over 60 years ago – and their wounds are still raw.

Some six million Palestinian refugees are scattered around the world, including more than 400,000 in Lebanon. Here, they are deprived of basic rights, not permitted to buy or sell property, and are banned from more than 70 job categories. Mired in abject poverty, they are dependent on an increasingly incapable United Nations agency for aid.

A “symbolic number” of returnees

The Palestine Papers show that Palestinian Authority (PA) negotiators were prepared to make major concessions on the refugees’ right of return: on the numbers potentially allowed to return to their homes in what is now Israel; on whether refugees would be able to vote on any peace agreement; and on how many would be able to settle in a future Palestinian state.

In an email Ziyad Clot, a legal adviser to Palestinian negotiators on the refugee file, writes, “President [Mahmoud] Abbas offered an extremely low proposal for the number of returnees to Israel a few weeks only after the start of the process.”

The papers also reveal that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proposed that 1,000 Palestinian refugees be allowed to return annually to Israel over a period of five years – totalling just 5,000, a tiny fraction of those displaced after Israel’s creation.

On January 15, 2010, Erekat told US diplomat David Hale that the Palestinians offered Israel the return of “a symbolic number” of refugees.

According to the documents, not only did Palestinian officials offer a low figure of returnees, the chief negotiator of the PLO, Saeb Erekat, said that refugees would not have voting rights on a possible peace deal with Israel.

Notes of a meeting on March 23, 2007, between Erekat and then-Belgian foreign minister Karel De Gucht, reveal that Erekat said, “I never said the Diaspora will vote. It’s not going to happen. The referendum will be for Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Can’t do it in Lebanon. Can’t do it in Jordan.”

While Erekat conceded the rights of Palestinian refugees to determine their own fate, during such meetings Israeli negotiators made clear their vision for the refugees.

In a negotiation meeting on January 27, 2008, then-Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, told her Palestinian counterparts, “Your state will be the answer to all Palestinians including refugees. Putting an end to claims means fulfilling national rights for all.”

Erekat seemed to buy into this idea. In a meeting with US diplomats, including Special Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, on October 21, 2009, Erekat said, “Palestinians will need to know that five million refugees will not go back. The number will be agreed as one of the options. Also the number returning to their own state will depend on annual absorption capacity”.

So even a future Palestinian state could not accommodate the millions of displaced who would want to settle there.

Al Jazeera spoke with three dozen refugees in the Burj al-Barajneh camp, from ages 16 to 88, and they all expressed the same sentiment: They want to return to their native homeland, and to have a say in any final settlement between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and Israel.

Shafiqa Shalan, 60, who was born in Burj al-Barjnah, said she would not agree to being settled in Palestine. “What’s the difference?” she said. “We’re refugees in Lebanon and we would be refugees in the West Bank. So we might as well stay here. I would not consider it my home. My homeland is the village where my parents were expelled.”

That sentiment was echoed among younger residents of the camp. Ruwaida Al-Daher, 47, who was also born in Bourj el Barajneh, said, “We ask for the right of return because he who has no country has no dignity. We live like dogs here. But I would still oppose going to the West Bank or Gaza. Why would I go back to any place but my hometown?”

Al-Daher said she would not want to become a Lebanese citizen if that were offered to her under any peace deal – and that Palestinian negotiators had no mandate to make concessions on her behalf.

“The right of return is a personal right. It’s sacred,” she said. “No one can cancel it or take it away.”

“We’re going to die here”

Hussam Assairy, a 22-year-old who works as a mechanic in the camp, said he would move to his grandparents’ hometown of Haifa if given the chance

I would rather live in the camp,” he said, “than to become a Lebanese citizen and give up my Palestinian nationality”. As for voting on any future deal, he said, “Every Palestinian should be able to vote. Palestine is not just for those living there. It’s ours too”.

“It’s ours more than there’s,” Sara Ghannoum, 20, interjected. “They’re able to live there, while we’re deprived of that.”

For the refugees at Bourj el Barajneh, returning to their hometowns is the only conceivable option.

“I am willing to walk to Palestine, to my country,” says 76-year-old Kamel Shraydeh. “I think about this day and night, because as the saying goes, ‘The one who walks in a strange land gets lost.’” All these decades later, Lebanon remains a foreign place he cannot call home.

Despite these dreams, many have resigned themselves to a life spent in the camps. Over breakfast at the elderly center, a group of women reflected on their decades in Bourj el Barajneh.

“We were born here and we grew old here,” said Asiya al-Ali, 65. “And we’re going to die here,” Sha’alan added with resignation.

Even so, throughout the camp, refugees cling to hope that someday their situation will change – and there are signs that they place that hope in their leadership, which has shown that it’s willing to compromise the right of return.

Filling them with hope are posters on the crumbling walls bearing the image of a smiling PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and the words: “Firm on Principles”.

By Laila Al-Arian

25 January, 2011

Aljazeera