BEIRUT — The 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire that went into effect in Gaza and Israel Friday morning — for half an hour, before collapsing into total war — should remind us what is needed to quickly shift the focus of discussion and analysis about the Israel-Palestine conflict into the rather convoluted realm of many political actors and their strategic aims, all of which are constantly evolving. The desire by most actors to extend a temporary ceasefire into a permanent one would be a constructive endeavor if it forces all concerned to genuinely grapple with the tough underlying causes of the conflict between Palestine and Israel, mainly the wider, older conflict between Zionism and Arabism.

The issues and the actors keep changing, but it is important not to allow a human desire for permanent calm to distort our analyses of why we experience only repeated conflict, and also of the many actors and aims that now flood the stage. The actors include Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Egypt, Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and its Fateh leadership under President Mahmoud Abbas, Gazans who do not support Hamas, West Bank-Jerusalemite Palestinians who do not support Abbas, Israel and its assorted internal ideological movements, Jews around the world, the United Nations, and many others.

They will all weigh in now on a combination of fleeting and even diversionary concerns as well as critical core issues, and we would do well to recognize the important differences among them. One way to do this is to always ask about cause and effect in assessing any party’s behavior. So issues like removing Israel’s siege and blockade of Gaza, ending Israeli aerial attacks against Gazans, closing Hamas’ tunnels and rocket launching sites, demilitarizing Gaza, and other such issues that now dominate these discussions can only usefully be addressed politically if one is clear about whether they reflect an underlying cause of conflict or simply a reaction to some existing problem that either side finds intolerable.

The most important, enduring and powerful driver of this conflict remains the transformation of historic Palestine from a majority Arab land to a majority Jewish one, culminating in 1947-48 in the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion, war-time flight, and exile of half the indigenous Palestinian Arab population. It has been the reason why Palestinians and other Arab states have fought and resisted Israel and Zionism since the 1930s. Gaza, Hamas, rockets and tunnels are only the latest manifestation of an Arab determination to redress those core grievances; from the Israeli side, repeated savage attacks against Gaza, jailing thousands of Palestinians, non-stop colonization of Palestinian lands, Judaization of Arab East Jerusalem, and many other actions similarly reflect a continuation of Israeli priorities in the fundamental Zionism-Arabism conflict that has driven events for nearly three-quarters of a century.

In the short term, this means weighing the Israeli-Zionist demand for the demilitarization of Gaza against the Arab demand for the dezionization of the 1967 colonized occupied territories and redressing the 1947-48 refugeehood of Palestinians — because the resistance movements in Gaza that fight Israel are only a consequence of how Israel has assaulted, occupied, expelled, colonized, killed, jailed, sieged and brutalized the Palestinians for the past 65 years. If Palestinians enjoyed their national rights and lived in peace in their own state and lands, they would have no need to arm and fight Israel.

This also means weighing the Israeli-Zionist demand for returning Gaza to the rule of Mahmoud Abbas against the reality that Fateh-led diplomacy and governance for the past half century, but specifically in the West Bank and Gaza for the past 20 years, has been a massive mediocrity and disappointment for most Palestinians. Israel wants Abbas-Fateh to rule Gaza so it can act as the policeman for Zionist colonization, as it has in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem in recent decades. How can anyone in their right mind ever possibly believe that this is an option that Palestinians will accept without some gains of equal importance for them?

Similarly, the roles of Egypt, Qatar, the United States and others will now enjoy fresh scrutiny, always within the equation that seeks to benefit either Zionism or Arabism in the wider conflict. Most discussions about Arab actors, whether Egypt, Hamas, Abbas, or other Arab governments, tends to ignore the large gap that still defines relations between Arab governments-leaders and their citizens — the same massive and painful gap that sparked the Arab uprisings in late 2010.

A ceasefire, when it happens, could be an important moment during which all sides should courageously explore their willingness and ability to set aside short-term gains for the elusive but tantalizing long-term prize of genuine peaceful coexistence among Palestinians and Israelis who both enjoy equal national rights in their respective sovereign countries. If any real leaders and statesmen and women exist out there who can respond to this challenge, now is the time to stand up and act.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 02 August 2014
Word Count: 819
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BEIRUT — A press report earlier this week said that an Israeli military task force that had studied the network of tunnels that Hamas has built in recent years to infiltrate their fighters into Israel was “stunned by the sophistication” of the extent and complexity of the tunnels system. In turn, I am stunned that the Israelis were stunned, because they seem unable to grasp the nature of the conflict they are engaged in against all Palestinians.

Anyone who uses traditional political, diplomatic or military criteria to analyze the current conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza will only become hopelessly lost, and miss the realities that drive both sides — as the stunned Israelis demonstrate. The intensity and savagery of the fighting, and the will to fight and die if necessary on both sides, takes this round of fighting well beyond all previous ones which ended with cease-fire agreements and a few years of calm, before a new round of fighting erupted.

Things are different now because of the failure of two doctrines that have dominated Israeli-Palestinian relations during the past two decades: the Israeli military doctrine of “mowing the lawn” that requires a hard attack against Palestinian resistance groups and civilian infrastructure in Gaza every few years, and Fateh’s and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ negotiating endlessly with Israel without achieving a peace that results in two states living peacefully together.

Both those approaches have failed to achieve their intended goals. The insincerity of Israel in negotiating a peace agreement was clarified by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, when he stated that even in any peace agreement, Israeli would have to maintain permanent military control of much of the West Bank, which essentially rules out the birth of any viable Palestinian state.

Consequently, the demise of peace talks and the futility of Israel’s repeated attacks against Gaza have shifted this conflict from the realm of the 20th Century Western, liberal, negotiated conflict resolution mode and thrown both sides back into a biblical-era existential battle that can end only in either survival or extinction. The third option that Israel seems to prefer is unworkable and inhuman, because it is essentially a perpetuation of 19th Century colonial rule: a pacified and demilitarized Gazan population that is savagely attacked every time it tries to resist Israeli subjugation, and Israeli military controls defining all other Palestinian borders.

The ancient Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is full of examples and exhortations about the Hebrews/Israelites, Amalekites, Edomites and others annihilating and removing each other from the face of the earth, often with God’s approval, or even divine command. Israelis and Palestinians today understand in their bones the fears of national extermination, exile or decimation, because they have felt it in some manner. Pre-Israeli state European Jews experienced the genocidal crimes of the Nazis and the pogroms of Central Europeans and Russians, and Palestinians in their own world experienced the ethnic cleansing and colonial domination of the Zionists who came and created the Israeli state in a land that was over 93 percent owned and inhabited by Palestinian Arabs. This is not a Bible lesson for both sides; it is a seminar in ugly contemporary history, where you either win and survive, or lose and die.

The intensity and savagery of the Israeli attacks against (mostly) civilians in Gaza are well documented in the media these days, as is the ability of the Palestinian resistance fighters to hit back and kill (mostly) Israeli troops. The problem for Israel is that its overwhelming military strength that allows it to “mow the lawn” every few years has not achieved its goal of a pacified Palestinian population that accepts its subjugated fate.

The sophistication of the tunnel system the Israel now seeks to destroy reflects the determination of the Palestinians living under a colonial-style siege in Gaza to fight back and achieve their freedom, even at the risk of death. It is impossible to miss the fact that during the last half a century every increase in the use of force by Israel has generated an enhanced resistance response by Palestinians, including enhanced will and technical proficiency. The Palestinians do this to achieve three goals that cannot be separated: to stop Israeli military attacks on Gaza, to remove the siege on Gaza and allow its people to live a normal life, and to seek a permanent redress of grievance and end to their refugeehood in an internationally legitimate manner.

The short-term consequences of this round of fighting revolve around how a ceasefire might occur that leads to long-term quiet and normalcy for both peoples. Yet neither side can ignore any more the more important longer-term development, that all concerned must seek a resolution to this conflict that resolves its core claims: How can Jewish Zionists and Christian and Muslim Arab Palestinians live in peace, legitimacy and security in the land they both call home?

Such a conflict that now drives the most powerful survival instincts on both sides cannot be resolved by traditional means, like shuttle diplomacy, American mediation, or confidence-building measures. Returning to the situation of last month is not feasible for Gazans who would remain under siege and attack, while the Israeli, American and Palestinian governments persist in their moribund diplomacy. This round of attacks by Israelis and Palestinians may prove to be most significant for pushing all concerned to seek a permanent resolution of this conflict, rather than letting it fester in 19th Century colonial mode, as has been the case for decades.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 July 2014
Word Count: 916
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BEIRUT — The terrible situation in Gaza focuses today on whether or not the parties can agree on a humanitarian cease-fire that would also trigger negotiations on deeper contested issues in order to try and resolve the underlying conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. This conflict has some common elements with the chaotic situations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and other Arab lands.

Anyone trying to analyze these many conflicts in our region must separate the short-term reactions that drive some people from the more long-term and structural processes normally associated with state-building. So I would place the spread of the “Islamic state” and other hardline Salafist-takfiri movements in Syria-Iraq in the category of short-term, transient movements that were born from the chaos of recent years only; they will not endure, because they lack deeper anchorage in the societies of these countries.

The battles for Kurdish and Palestinian statehood, on the other hand, or the tensions among different regions of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Sudan are more deeply anchored in movements for national rights, autonomy or self-determination that have long been suppressed by the modern Arab or Israeli security state. The process of sorting out such conflicting demands between the central state and the various identities of its citizens often takes many decades, some serious constitutional litigation where available, and a brief or prolonged civil war. The common denominator among all such situations is that wars end and stable statehood takes off only when all the citizens feel that their interests are taken into account in the management of statehood.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has experienced recurring and increasingly vicious bouts of violence because the rights and interests of the Palestinians have consistently been neglected in favor of the rights of Israelis to their own secure state. This lopsided situation that favors Zionist over Palestinian Arab interests has been consistently supported by the major Western powers, including this week in the American ceasefire proposal that reflects Israeli aims much more than it meets Palestinian demands.

As long as this situation persists, it will be impossible to secure a credible short-term ceasefire or to start addressing the deeper underlying issues that define the century-old conflict between Zionism and Arabism. Resolving this conflict requires first of all framing its core elements correctly, which repeated American mediators — whether cloaked Zionists or simply well-meaning amateurs — have never done.

Any serious attempt to end this round of fighting and seek to ensure that it is never repeated must start by grasping the three elements of the conflict that matter to both sides, with equal magnitude — not with the John Kerry approach that frames a ceasefire through the lens of Israeli wishes to remain in Gaza during a ceasefire to destroy the tunnels and other resistance elements that Hamas and allied Palestinians have used to fight back against Zionism’s denial of their rights.

The three fundamental elements that must be dealt with in this case include: 1) stopping the fighting and allowing both sides to go about their daily lives without the threat of being attacked or militarily occupied; 2) implementing the measures agreed in the last cease-fire agreement in 2012 that removed the physical and political siege that Israel, Egypt, the United States and others had imposed on Hamas and Gaza; 3) grappling seriously with a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiation that addresses ending the condition of Palestinian refugeehood as fiercely as it addresses the Israeli demand for Arab recognition and security. This means going back to the events of 1947-48, when the conflict took its present shape of Israeli statehood and Palestinian refugeehood.

This kind of approach that honestly acknowledges the critical issues for both sides is so tough that it has never been attempted seriously. It was the key to successful breakthroughs for peace in other instances of profound nationalist battles, such as in Northern Ireland and South Africa that mirror the identity and rights battles we witness all around the Middle East today.

The Palestinian resistance groups fighting from Gaza, and the thousands of Palestinians demonstrating in the West Bank, are the direct descendants of Palestinians who were made homeless and stateless due to the birth of Israel in 1947-48. Grasping and resolving these root issues is very hard to do for Zionists and Israelis, who refuse to acknowledge their major role in the refugeehood of the Palestinians, along with ignoring that no peace will come to anyone unless the 1947-48 root causes of conflict are resolved equitably.

If Israelis do not see this in the eyes, tunnels, rockets and charred bodies of dead Palestinian infants, and continue with the United States to insist on prioritizing Israeli security over a more balanced approach to ensuring the dual rights for both peoples, then these savage rounds of violence will persist for years. That would be adding stupidity to savagery.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 26 July 2014
Word Count: 798
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BEIRUT — The bizarre role of the United States government in current events in Israel and Palestine has reached such a peak this week that someone in the realm of the absurd should create a prize for this and offer the inaugural one to John Kerry during his stay in Cairo today. Washington’s quest for a ceasefire in Gaza while wholeheartedly supporting and arming Israel’s onslaught against Palestinian civilians reflects the frightening extent of bankrupt Arab diplomacy and exercise of sovereign power as much as it reflects the true nature of American government siding with Israel.

Here is the unreal situation as it played out this week: The American president and secretary of state repeatedly supported Israel’s right to defend itself, the U.S. Senate voted 100-0 to support Israel’s actions and ask for a dissolution of the Palestinian national unity government, John Kerry flew to Cairo to help negotiate a ceasefire while stating that he views Israeli actions in Gaza as legitimate and appropriate, and said that a ceasefire is not enough but should also start to address the “underlying issues.”

The massive contradiction between the wholehearted, virtually universal official American support for the Israeli savagery in Gaza, on the one hand, and the American attempt to mediate a ceasefire, on the other, is rationally incomprehensible and untenable — but it is also a reality that we must live with for some reason that ordinary Arabs and men and women of logic and goodwill around the world cannot understand. This is because the American behavior is beyond comprehension. It is from the realm of the absurd.

Two fundamental problems in the American position mirror the much wider and older problem of how colonized Palestinians and their diplomatically neutered Arab cousins for decades have been unable to counter the brutal use of American and Israeli military power that indiscriminately attacks mostly helpless civilians in places like Gaza and Iraq. The first is that the two principal institutions of power and foreign policy in the United States — the presidency and the Congress — have both proven again and again that they support Israel’s rightwing military excesses absolutely, without exceptions.

We should not be surprised. American leaders and presidential candidates repeatedly affirm that, “there is no daylight between the U.S. and Israel.” We see that in action this week.

The second problem is that Kerry’s desire now to start addressing the “underlying issues” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible to take seriously. Kerry personally just spent a year of intense diplomacy trying to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, and failed. If he was not addressing some of the underlying issues then, what was he doing? If he was addressing them, then he and his team must be incompetent or dishonest as mediators.

Also, the United States government has been virtually the only mediator among Israelis and Palestinians for the past two decades, and has failed. The reasons for these serial failures will become clearer with time, as historians do their work and clarify this. My sense is that a central reason for the failure has been and continues to be the inability of the U.S. government to function as a truly impartial mediator or facilitator, given its intense bias towards the Israeli position, as we see in action this month in Gaza.

So there is zero credibility in Kerry’s remarks now that all parties must start discussing the underlying issues in this conflict. This is more problematic because it now seems clearer than ever that one of the underlying issues here is the long history of intense pro-Israeli bias in the U.S. government, which helps rightwing Zionists perpetuate their colonial policies against Palestine. So perhaps the best thing for John Kerry to do is mediate between his own Congress and President, on the one hand, and the Israeli government, on the other, to seek a modicum of sovereignty and autonomy for Washington in designing its policies towards the Israel-Palestine conflict.

None of this is new, but the shocking manner in which the absolute Zionist chokehold on American lawmakers has reasserted itself this month during the Gaza assault forces us once again to ponder the reasons for this and what can be done about it. Hamas and Hizbollah have offered one option, which is armed resistance. Most Arab state leaders have opted for acquiescence in the face of the Zionist-American furies we see raining bombs on penned-in Palestinian civilians.

There must be a better way, and individuals and institutions across the Arab world and abroad must urgently start exploring the options available, including using the institutions of the international rule of law. Our criticisms of the United States and Israel are also criticisms of our own inadequacies, and we are the ones who must take that sad reality in hand and do something about it.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 July 2014
Word Count: 798
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BEIRUT — What does Israel expect to achieve by attacking Gaza with a large land force, following ten days of attacking from the air and suffering Palestinian counter-attacks by far less effective small rockets? After every Israeli war and invasion that kills hundreds of Palestinians and destroys key elements of the civilian infrastructure, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other resistance groups regroup, replenish their military supplies, increase their technical capabilities and prepare for the next round of fighting with Israel. This reflects accurately the Israeli policy in Gaza of “mowing the lawn,” meaning Israel has to attack Gaza regularly to maintain the status quo, like a homeowner mowing the lawn every few weeks.

It suggests that Israel’s policy of using its military might to achieve permanent calm on its southern border is a failure. This is because Israelis and Palestinians are waging war in three dimensions, not only in military terms, and Israel’s short-term triumph in all three domains now seems to be tilting towards Palestinian advantages.

The three simultaneous battlefields in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the military battlefield, international legitimacy, and the durability and depth of their respective national identities. Israel has been successful in the past 65 years in the first two realms — in militarily establishing, defending and expanding its state, and securing widespread international political support. In both those realms, however, Israel’s advantages are fraying at the edges.

Hizbollah and Hamas have shown how determined resistance groups anchored in strong nationalist support can slowly close the gap in the military technology advantage that Israel has long enjoyed. This will not liberate all of Palestine or existentially threaten Israel, but it does seem to have achieved a deterrent balance of power that freezes the status quo on the ground. When Israel has to repeat its attacks on Gaza every few years without achieving permanent calm — as it used to do similarly in Lebanon against Palestinian and Lebanese resistance groups — it means that its former military superiority has been transformed into a “lawn mowing” strategy in which neither the lawn nor the mower ever fully triumphs.

The deeper dilemma for Israel is that lawn mowing as a long-term strategy is not feasible (let alone morally defensible) because of the deterioration of Israel’s former advantageous position in the two other realms of this conflict. In the realm of international legitimacy, Israel’s repeated savage assaults on Palestinians — whether through occasional military attacks or more routine mass imprisonment, colonization, assassinations, sieges, water theft, and other collective punishments — have generated growing international condemnation of its excessive colonization policies, while maintaining strong support for Israel’s security within its pre-1967 borders. Explicit sanctions against Israeli colonization policies by the European Union and many others add fuel to the fire that threatens to make Israel another South Africa in terms of global boycotts of Israel’s policies in the occupied territories.

The third realm of this conflict — national identity — is the most complex and intangible, but probably has the most impact in the long run. It refers simply to the depth of feeling among both people about their identities as Israelis and Palestinians, and their will to continue battling for their rights and their security. The fundamental problem for Israel that it has never grasped is that the intensity of the individual and collective Palestinian will to resist permanent exile or oblivion, and to keep fighting for national reconstitution and justice, is exactly as strong as the will among Jews who fought Western Christian anti-Semitism for centuries and finally created their Zionist state in Palestine.

The 750,000 Palestinian refugees from the 1947-48 clashes that saw the birth of the state of Israel have now become 4.5 million Palestinians in exile or under Israeli occupation, with another nearly four million elsewhere. Every single one of them has one primary aim in life, which is to work in their own way to find their way back to a life of normalcy, dignity and national sovereignty, and to end the permanent vulnerability that is inherent in their refugeehood.

As happened throughout history with dispersed Jews in conditions of exile and communal fragmentation, some eight million Palestinians today wake up every morning battling the pain of their disenfranchisement and vulnerability — and then they get on with the task of fighting back against their Zionist foe by first of all asserting the inviolable nature of their Palestinian identity.

Israeli military assaults like the one in Gaza these days cause Israel to lose ground in all three domains of this war, because they ultimately enhance Palestinian military resistance, sharped global pressure against Israel’s disproportionate military savagery, and, most importantly, deepen the nationalist identity and will to struggle for justice among all Palestinians, especially those 5- and 10-year old kids in Gaza who will grow up with a single aim in life — vanquish colonial Zionism.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 July 2014
Word Count: 799
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BEIRUT — Words matter, they help us better understand our world and ourselves, especially at complex times such as this latest round of military attacks by Israelis and Palestinians. The prevalent global description and analysis of the fighting is inadequate for anyone who seeks seriously to grasp the three critical dimensions of the fighting — its causes, nature, and consequences.

None of those three dimensions is addressed by the facile nature of politicians’ statements or mainstream media analyses, which tend to emphasize rockets fired by Palestinians from Gaza, Israel’s right to defend itself against such attacks, and speculation about a possible cease-fire or an imminent Israeli ground attack into Gaza.

Words can help, and in this case it is worthwhile examining the words that Palestinians use to describe themselves, if we are seriously interested in understanding the core issues that define this conflict which has manifested itself since the 1930s in so many different ways, all of which lead back to the basic issue at hand: the battle between Zionism and Arabism in Palestine, more particularly the battle between the rights of a Jewish-majority state of Israel and a dismembered and exiled Palestinian community that continues to struggle for its national rights.

The two leading Palestinian political and military groups that have mobilized their public opinion over the past 45 years are Fateh and Hamas. Fateh was founded and for decades headed by Yasser Arafat, and now controls the Palestine National Authority that manages the West Bank under Israeli tutelage; Hamas came into being in the early 1980s and has dominated the Gaza Strip for some years now.

Fateh is a peculiar acronym that comprises, in reverse order, the first three letters of the movement’s name in Arabic, which is Haraket Tahrir Filistin, or the Palestine Liberation Movement. Hamas is an acronym in Arabic for its full name, which is Haraket el-Muqawama el-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement. The two most important action words in their names are “tahrir” and “muqawama”, or “liberation” and “resistance.” In the etymology of Palestinian nationalist, “liberation” and “resistance” are central emotional and political dynamics, because they largely define the nature of Palestinian identity and goals. They are the most important things to understand about how Palestinians feel and behave.

The once-dominant and -vital Fateh movement has become a sad shell of its former self, with some very bright and patriotic leaders who have totally lost touch with their people in Palestine and abroad. Hamas has risen to the fore in recent decades mainly because it has more faithfully reflected the will of Palestinians to resist their occupation and subjugation, and to seek liberation and a normal life in their own sovereign state. Hamas’ core mission is “resistance,” whether through military actions that have little impact on Israel or through trying to organize Palestinians politically to improve their living conditions while they await eventual liberation.

Hamas is a heroic tragedy, simultaneously admirable and sorrowful. It is heroic for many Palestinians because it persists in resisting Zionism’s desire to eliminate Palestinian nationalism and identity as real forces that demand respect, and can be manifested in some kind of national sovereignty in Palestine. “Resistance” to Hamas supporters and others means many things at once. It means consistently asserting Palestinian national rights, and the need to end refugeehood. It means constantly challenging the oppressive status quo that Palestinians suffer, especially in Gaza. It means consistently increasing its technical capabilities in rockets, drones and communications, which allow it to pester and inconvenience Israel more effectively with every new round of fighting.

Yet Hamas is also tragic because its strategy and tactics both result in repeated mass suffering by Palestinian civilians. The state of Israel, being the sovereign manifestation of Zionism, has repeatedly shown that it will viciously attack, assassinate, imprison and imperil all Palestinians, in Palestine, Lebanon or elsewhere, to maintain its hold on the land of Palestine. It is possible that Hamas’ long-term strategy of steadfastness and resistance will succeed one day in forcing Israel to accept its terms, but that remains only a slim possibility; the reality meanwhile is that millions of Palestinians suffer the burden of repeated Israeli attacks on their homes and communities.

Every time Israel savagely attacks Gaza and then accepts a cease-fire, the Palestinian resistance movements soon re-emerge and prepare for the next fight. The lesson they offer is that their will to resist is indomitable, however costly the price.

Exiled and subjugated communities like the Palestinians today usually behave in ways that seem strange to middle class consumers in faraway lands, including fighting apparently futile battles and subjecting their populations to prolonged suffering and death — and then doing the same thing again a few years later. This can only be understood by appreciating the nature of “resistance” and the allure of “liberation” — which means analyzing the Israeli-Palestinian issue accurately as an existential battle between Zionist power and Palestinian national rights that has gone on for almost a century.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 July 2014
Word Count: 824
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BEIRUT — As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One, we can better understand the conditions then by following closely events in Palestine this week. Israeli behavior provides the best window we have into the mindset of Western colonial powers a century ago, when foreigners with superior military equipment and an exaggerated sense of their own national superiority killed, occupied, jailed, confined, defined, slaughtered, exiled, gassed and generally manhandled local Arabs at will, treating them more like animals than human beings.

Israel behaves today against Palestinians like the French, British and Italian colonial powers treated Iraqis, Syrians, Egyptians, Algerians and Libyans a century ago. Israel’s colonization of Arab lands and disproportionate military savagery against Palestinian civilians is a living history lesson on how colonial powers treated the natives as either servants or subversives who had no rights, and dealt with them primarily by repeated shows of force.

Without the explanatory lens of colonial behavior, I see only two ways to understand how every few years Israel enthusiastically unleashes the power of its advanced military machines against an essentially helpless civilian population that has neither escape routes nor shelters from the non-stop bombings from the air. Either Israelis are incredibly stupid people who do not grasp the futility of their repeated attacks that never seem to achieve the acquiescence, passivity and servility they seek from the Palestinians; or they are pathological killers who relish the sight of bombed Palestinian homes, weeping mothers and the burned and dismembered bodies of dozens and dozens of babies and children.

I know that Israelis are neither of these things. They are normal people like all other people. So why do they keep doing what they are doing now, like dropping 400 tons of explosives on defenseless Gazan families in 36 hours? Why do they do this and then return every few years to do the same thing, always seeking to stop the Palestinians’ armed resistance against Israeli occupation and siege, but never succeeding?

More troublingly, why do around 90 percent of the Israeli people support the government’s repeat war policy, making this a mass feature of Zionism in Zion, rather than the freak aberration of a few extremists in power?

They do all this because they are locked in perhaps the world’s longest continuous colonial confrontation, between Jewish nationalism/Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism. They behave exactly like all other colonial powers acted towards the locals they conquered during the 18th-20th centuries. This conflict started in the late 1890s when the First Zionist Congress called for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the promotion of Zionist settlements in that land which was over 90 percent owned and inhabited by Palestinian Arabs. For the next 120 years, Jewish Zionism and Palestinian Arabism have clashed, Zionism has prevailed militarily and in many other ways, but the fundamental equation of colonial domination and indigenous resistance persists.

Zionism’s conflict with the indigenous Palestinian Arabs is now unto the sixth generation, and counting. The 1.5 million Palestinians of 1947 are now around eight million, and counting; and they all resist in their own ways — never forgetting who they are and where they came from, never accepting their dispossession and exile, never acquiescing that they must live eternally in their own Babylonian exile.

Seeing Israel-Palestine and the wider Middle East today through the lens of the destructive consequences of colonial excesses helps us better understand the two dominant phenomena today: the long-term instability and continuing conflicts sparked by colonial adventures a century or more ago, across the Middle East and other parts of the South; and the lingering tensions and violence in Palestine-Israel, which continue in an unbroken legacy from the late 19th century.

Many anti-colonial movements around the world ultimately ended White Western tutelage over vast expanses of the globe — except for Palestine, where the descendants of indigenous Arabs today still battle the descendants of immigrant Zionists (the small indigenous Jewish community that had lived in Palestine for centuries was always part of the local culture, and was not seen as alien or threatening, because the indigenous Jews of Palestine were precisely that — indigenous Jews of Palestine who were neither alien nor threatening, nor colonial in their mindset).

The delayed consequences of colonialism include the astounding variety of political and sectarian violence and chaos that we witness across the region, most viciously in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria and others lands that had been colonized by European powers and then ravaged by their own incompetent and vicious military rulers. These tumults, and the savage battles in Palestine/Israel, suggest that the colonial era has never really ended, and that we still suffer the ugly consequences of White men from the North with powerful guns and fighter planes who feel they can kill thousands of darker people from the South with total impunity — and come back and do it again three years later, and again three years after that, because colonialism never succeeds, and only ends with liberation and self-determination.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 July 2014
Word Count: 835
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BEIRUT—The last two weeks of attacks by Israelis and Palestinians and street clashes in Jerusalem have raised questions about whether Palestinians will launch a third intifada to shake off the Israeli occupation. That is a reasonable expectation, in view of the two previous intifadas and the continuing abuses that Palestinians suffer under the impact of Israeli occupation, colonization and siege policies.

(Actually, we have already had three Palestinian intifadas against foreign domination, in 1936-39, 1987-90, and 2000-2001, so we should more accurately talk about a possible fourth intifada.)

I suspect, however, that this is not the likely or best outcome from the Palestinian perspective. Many expect a new intifada mainly because they cannot imagine the Palestinians generating a different and more effective response to their national subjugation, since their views of Palestinians are restricted to helpless people who can only go on strike or throw stones at Israeli troops.

The Palestinian perspective is very different, for several reasons. The most important is that we have had two intifadas against Israeli occupation and they have generated no significant results in terms of liberation or national rights and reconstitution. Also, intifadas are like civil wars. A country usually only has one, very occasionally two, but never more than that, because such cataclysmic national events cannot be repeated over and over while the situation remains unchanged. Israel uses massive and disproportionate military force and cruel collective punishments against Palestinians who challenge its hold over them, and we see in this week’s attacks against Gaza that Palestinians who resist Israel can expect to get killed, bombed, injured, jailed and see their homes destroyed in large numbers — with total impunity for Israeli actions that in most other situations in the world would elicit calls for war crimes investigations.

The two previous anti-Israeli occupation intifadas generated no lasting improvements in Palestinian national rights due to both the intransigence of Zionism and also to the incompetence of the Palestinian leaderships headed by Hamas and Fateh in Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas and some other smaller resistance groups have demonstrated an impressive capacity to keep firing small rockets and explosive projectiles against southern Israel, despite the decades of massive Israeli air and ground attacks against Gaza. It seems that repeated Israeli attacks like the one underway now only fortify Hamas’ determination to resist, and increase its technical ability to protect it rocket launcher sites. Like all colonial powers, Israel seems to miss the fundamental rule that greater oppression only elicits more fierce resistance.

The problem for Hamas and armed resistance groups, however, is that their policy has not improved the lives of Palestinians, but only made them more difficult. The same goes for Fateh’s two-decades of uninterrupted negotiations with Israel, which similarly have not achieved Palestinian national rights or improved living conditions. Translating popular anger into a new intifada on the streets in the context of these same Palestinian leaderships that dominate today would be a futile effort of mass emotional and political self-expression, with no other consequence other than more violent and increasingly racist Israeli reprisals.

As long as Palestinians are hobbled by their Israeli-induced fragmentation, occupation, dehydration, isolation, siege and economic strangulation, and their own current incompetent leaderships, they will find it very difficult to generate a more effective response to their sustained pain and vulnerabilities. Yet alternatives to this condition have already appeared here and there in contemporary Palestinian political action.

The three most significant options are mass non-violent civil disobedience (which has only been tried sporadically, as in tax revolts), a global boycott and sanctions movement akin to the anti-Apartheid strategy against racist South Africa (which is expanding, but very slowly), and diplomatic-legal action through the United Nations and other international institutions that promote the rule of law and self-determination (which is now possible for Palestine as a non-state member of the UN, but, inexplicably, has not been tried seriously).

Progress in these three arenas ideally should happen simultaneously, and would certainly elicit powerful international support. It could also generate serious soul-searching among Israelis who would have to finally accept the limits of their military power and colonial control mechanisms.

One day, somehow, an effective Palestinian national leadership will emerge that could mobilize all Palestinians and their many supporters around the world and channel their energy into political actions that could achieve meaningful results. Fateh and Hamas have failed to do this, including failing to build on the amazing foundation of mass popular resistance and mobilization that was handed to them twice during the last two intifadas. Palestinians know this, and are too smart to repeat a valiant feat in which mass popular resistance was matched only by ineffective leadership, sharper Israeli colonial assertion, and a mostly indifferent or distracted world.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 July 2014
Word Count: 789
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BEIRUT — We can learn nothing new from analyzing the particular details of the savage attacks that Israelis and Palestinians are carrying out against each other this week. All this has happened many times before in the last 47 years, without any meaningful accountability or deterrence for either side. Hundreds or thousands on both sides have been killed and maimed — many more Palestinians killed by Israelis, given the disproportionate strengths of their military forces — but the cycles of death, resistance and revenge resume with the clockwork regularity of the seasons. This is because like the seasons of nature, the equation of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict operates according to certain inviolable laws: Occupation begets resistance, and resistance prompts a more vengeful and violent occupation.

We can learn some things, however, from these attacks that mostly target innocent civilians on both sides. The first thing is that the power of military technology on both sides essentially has become irrelevant because it does not achieve one’s own long-term goals or change the behavior of the other side. The second is that the dismal quality of political leadership in Israel and Palestine has reached unprecedented lows that leave both peoples in perpetual insecurity, fear and vulnerability.

The Israelis suffer the added new problem of slowly expanding international criticism and sanctions for their occupation policies, reminiscent of the global anti-Apartheid boycotts that help to bring down the racist South African system years ago. The Palestinians for their part suffer the agonies of continued national fragmentation as the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the West Bank remain largely disconnected; and refugee communities in countries like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt endure fresh horrors, including death by siege and starvation in Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus.

The fundamental cause of these repeated cycles of destruction and savagery — and political failure — is the unresolved clash between Jewish Zionism and Palestinian Arab nationalism. The history of this battle since the early 1900s has seen the Israeli military machine grow into a formidable force and a world leader in high-tech killing, while the legacy of Palestinian armed resistance has now been confined to a few thousand armed and determined young men in the Gaza Strip who refuse to acquiesce in their perpetual exile, siege, colonization or surrender.

The much more powerful Israeli armed forces seek once again to pummel the Palestinians into submission, attacking at will a helpless civilian population from the air while laying siege to them by cutting off imports of essential supplies. Israel now threatens to move into Gaza with ground forces, which is a sign of Israeli military failure and political confusion more than anything else — for Israel has repeatedly attacked, occupied and laid siege to Gaza for nearly half a century, and the only result of its heavy-handed militarism is a Palestinian resistance movement with greater technical proficiency and political will.

I find it astounding that a people as intelligent and diligent as the Israelis — especially the military among them — can display such profound stupidity and ignorance in perpetuating decades-long military attack policies against Gaza that have only expanded and fortified the Palestinian resistance movements — to the point today where Palestinian rocket launchers are better protected and concealed than ever before, and the small rockets being fired at Israel have reached Haifa, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport and the Dimona nuclear reactor area.

The cornered Palestinians for their part defiantly brace for more attacks against them, saying they would rather die fighting than live in perpetual bondage to Zionist colonial conquerors. So the battles we witness are the drama of failed warriors whose proven will to fight to the death is not matched by an equally impressive political will to resolve their conflict and live in peace in two adjacent states with equal rights.

The dominant Fateh political movement in Palestine has tried for decades now to negotiate a peace agreement with Israel, without success. This is primarily because Israel refuses to accept the internationally agreed principles related to ending its settlements, withdrawing from occupied lands, sharing Jerusalem and acknowledging refugee rights. Hamas and other smaller armed resistance groups carry on the armed struggle, but their strategy has no more chance of success than Fateh’s.

Armed struggle is a natural and admirable mirror of a people’s determination to be free, but in the case of the Palestinians it regularly only brings savage aerial bombardments raining down on their heads from Israeli warplanes and drones. One must admire Hamas’ resolve and technical proficiency, but they have no significant political results to show for their heroics, and they seem to promise their people only perpetual war.

This is the tragedy of what happens when determined warriors and mediocre political leaders on all sides meet in the arena of clashing nationalisms. This will happen again and again, with the same results, until one day a way is found to end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and secure mutual recognition between states in Palestine and Israel that can live in peace because they enjoy equal sovereignty and security.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 09 July 2014
Word Count: 840
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BEIRUT — The thousands of Arab demonstrators marching in the streets of an Arab capital city this week demanding political reform and the release of their jailed leaders were met with riot police firing tear gas and stun grenades. These events on Wednesday and Thursday nights were typical for a hot summer evening in today’s Arab world, and occur regularly in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and other Arab lands. These events are especially noteworthy, however, because they happened in Kuwait, and because they keep happening there every few months.

The importance of the Kuwait situation in my mind is enormous, for several reasons that transcend the borders or sentiments of Kuwait itself. Kuwait continues to reveal the fundamental political grievances of citizens in a small, quite homogeneous, and wealthy Arab country that has also enjoyed a relatively lively public political sphere for many decades, including an elected parliament and a boisterous press sector. For several years now thousands of Kuwaitis have regularly taken to the streets to demand a more rigorous government response to their allegations of corruption, favoritism, mismanagement and an unrepresentative parliament. Demonstrators also represent several different discontented groups in society, such as youth, tribal groups, Islamists, nationalists and leftists, and not only the tribal followers of the jailed leader — in this case former member of parliament Mussallam Barrak.

The particularities here are that the Kuwait public prosecutor earlier this week had ordered the detention of Barrak for 10 days after he was questioned and accused of allegedly publicly slandering and insulting the supreme judicial council. His hearing in court is set for July 7. Barrak and others accuse former senior officials, including ruling family members, of stealing and laundering tens of billions of dollars.

The charges have led to street demonstrations rather than vigorous parliamentary debates because most opposition groups are no longer represented in parliament, which they boycott in protest against an amended electoral law that they feel favors pro-government majorities. The citizens who demonstrate, and who are gassed, sometimes beaten, and in some instances jailed, represent a critically important dynamic that has defined the uprisings across the Arab world in recent years: the insistence by ordinary citizens that they have rights, that they can peacefully demand those rights in public, that they can achieve those rights through political action, and that they can engage their national leaderships in a political debate that touches even sensitive issues like official corruption by members of ruling families.

Kuwait highlights the new reality that Arab citizens now demand rights from their governments simply on the basis of their being entitled to those rights, and not necessarily because they are poor, suffer uneven access to social services, or have been politically abused and oppressed, as was the case with citizen uprisings in countries like Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and Syria.

Kuwait also speaks of deeper discontents among other citizens in oil-rich Gulf states who can only express their grievances through web sites and social media statements. This is evident in Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, all of which, like Kuwait, try to suppress public political accusations and grievances, even by jailing individuals who Tweet their sentiments critical of state policies.

The demonstrators in Kuwait are not calling for the overthrow of the regime, but rather for constitutional political reforms. The demonstrators this week chanted their demands to reform the judiciary. When such basic, reasonable and non-violent demands are almost totally ignored across most of the Arab world, citizens have only a few options, including expressing themselves through digital social media or via pan-Arab satellite television, or taking to the streets. As with almost every other public protest throughout the world, the actual number of citizens on the street is not the most important factor.

It is irrelevant if 500 or 15,000 demonstrate one night; what matters is that groups of citizens speak out in public on a regular basis, and address their complaints directly to the national leaders. It is likely that those who do take to the streets — for instance, recently in Ukraine, Turkey, Thailand or Burma — represent much deeper and wider legitimate grievances in society that require a political resolution through dialogue, negotiations and credible representation and accountability.

Kuwait remains for me the most fascinating country in the Arab world today because the contestation its citizens pursue is purely political, rather than ethnic, sectarian, economic or social. This contestation also reflects grievances that have defined the entire Arab region for several generations now. Kuwait should be the breakthrough country in the Gulf that mirrors the constitutional advances that Tunisia achieved in North Africa — a peaceful transition to constitutional democratic pluralism that others will applaud and emulate across the region. Until then, Kuwait is an important country to follow and understand.
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 July 2014
Word Count: 802
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757