BEIRUT — If George Mitchell is to have any chance to succeed in using American engagement to prod a just and lasting Arab-Israeli peace agreement, he will have to make a very fundamental decision very soon:

Is his main task and that of U.S. foreign policy to please Israel by shunning Hamas at any cost, or is it to identify and work to implement the equal rights of Israelis, Palestinians and other Arabs to statehood and security?

It is no surprise that Israeli officials and their political hirelings and hit men in the international media and American policy community have launched a campaign to try to perpetuate the role of the American government as subserviently implementing Israeli policy. The main focus of this effort is to prevent Hamas from becoming a legitimate partner in the pre-negotiating process now underway.

Attacking or defending Hamas diverts attention from the core issue to be resolved: the simultaneous and equal national rights of Israelis and Palestinians. Mitchell should be careful to not allow himself to be dragged into the Israeli-defined game of arguing over Hamas, its tunnels, or other side issues. This will only guarantee diplomatic stalemate and failure.

Every move the United States has made to date since Barack Obama’s inauguration hints at a desire to reposition Washington as a more impartial and decisive mediator in Arab-Israeli peace-making. This will be a gradual, incremental process if it indeed is taking place. It seems to have started with the few signs of change we have seen and heard from the Obama team:
• Naming the respected, independent and impartial Mitchell as the Middle East peace envoy rather than a pro-Israeli operative.
• Moving immediately after inauguration to grapple with Arab-Israeli peace-making.
• Obama personally attending the State Department ceremony appointing Mitchell; and speaking out personally and clearly on the suffering of Palestinian civilians; and insisting that reopening the Gaza borders for humanitarian aid and normal commerce must occur simultaneously with the cessation of Hamas attacks on Israel.

The Obama interview with Al-Arabiya television is another signal that the United States will approach Arab-Islamic world matters in a more constructive, less abrasive manner than the previous administration. None of this is a sharp reversal of U.S. policy, but all of it collectively represents a discernible shift in tone, focus and substance.

Nothing major will happen until Israelis and Palestinians sort out their domestic leaderships. Israel’s elections on February 10 will clarify who leads that country, and the Palestinians will soon launch a process of national political reconfiguration and re-legitimization that will include some combination of a technocratic transitional government, new elections, and a national unity government.

Hamas will play a central role in that process because it enjoys four cumulative sources of legitimacy:
• Its legacy of providing basic social services to families in need.
• Its opposition to the corrupt and inefficient national stewardship of Fateh.
• Its victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections.
• Its recent armed resistance against Israel, which admittedly came at a heavy cost to Gaza society as a whole.

These four separate strands of its actions confer on it powerful legitimacy that simply cannot be wished away, despite the valid criticisms that many Palestinians and others make of it.

Mitchell’s and America’s decision to avoid dealing with Hamas at any cost would be the death-knell of their mediating hopes. Hamas cannot be avoided any more than the United States could avoid the Viet Cong or the British could avoid the IRA. Hamas is legitimate because of its actions, but mostly because it raises the issues that concern all Palestinians: in the short run, insisting on living in peace, normalcy and dignity rather than in an Israeli-made prison; in the longer run, resolving the conflict with Israel by addressing its root cause in Arab eyes, the status and rights of the Palestinian refugees who were exiled by the 1948 war. This is where peace will be made — not in the diversionary world of tunnels that Israel wants us to enter and get lost in.

Legitimacy demands diplomatic engagement and political inclusion, and there is simply no way around this. The path to mediating success therefore requires bringing into the negotiating process the national demands and national issues that Hamas represents. This can happen through the mechanism of a Palestinian National Authority unity government, or through the institutions of a revamped Palestine Liberation Organization.

The United States and Israel miserably missed the solid opportunities to engage constructively with all Palestinians after Hamas’ 2006 election victory and the 2007 Palestinian national unity government. This is a third opportunity, and Washington and the world should not miss it again by allowing themselves to be railroaded into a diplomatic graveyard by Israel’s rabid and often racist insistence on enjoying greater, and priority, rights to security, land and nationhood than the Palestinians.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 January 2009
Word Count: 807
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DUBAI — OK, here’s my definitive litmus test for the resilience and depth of Dubai as a serious place that can continue to expand economically after weathering the current global economic recession:

How many abandoned cars actually are parked at Dubai airport?

In a land of superlatives and seemingly endless hyper-growth, the scale of the stories circulating about the number of abandoned cars at the airport is equally gigantic. In the past few weeks in Beirut, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, I have heard friends and acquaintances report authoritatively that, variously, 15,000 or 10,000 or 6,000 cars have been parked and abandoned at the airport by their foreign owners. These people lost their jobs, did not have enough money to complete their car payments, and found the easiest way out was to park their car at the airport and leave town for good.

The variety of stories circulating about this little drama is matched by the range of reports one reads and hears in the Gulf about the real state of the local economies in Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Dubai and other emirates – from deep disaster, to a manageable two-year recession, to a simple little blip in the charts that will see economic growth only drop slightly from nine to six percent, or something of that magnitude that totally removes any impact of a global economic collapse — miraculously detouring around these enchanted lands.

The abandoned cars are a good barometer of two important dynamics: Some core, critical facts and figures about their economies are simply not known to the public, but at least the gap in verifiable data is bridged by splendid rumors.

Foreign and local investors need to know the truth about these economies that have grown so impressively in large part due to surplus oil wealth shifting into speculative investments in real estate projects. If investors have doubts about the economic facts of these sheikhdoms and emirates, they will quickly send their money to other markets where the facts are known. Investors do not mind bad news about economic losses or retrenchment. What they despise and fear is being left in the dark about economic realities.

Also, providing accurate, verifiable information about the realities of the economic downturn in the Gulf may be the first major “political” test these countries face in modern times. They can cement relations between citizens and their state on the basis of something more enduring than short-term materialism. If they can speak honestly to their own citizens and provide them with a clear, comprehensive picture of current conditions and expected trends, they will have enriched the entire Arab world with an example of true pioneering development and state-building that is much more meaningful than a shopping mall or a Hummer showroom.

We need one Arab government — just one — that will react to the current global and regional economic recession by speaking the truth to its people, disclosing real unemployment rates, debt buy-outs, contraction or expansion trends, and other such things. I have not seen such an example to date, but I suspect that the first Arab government that musters the courage to speak honestly to its people will reap a reward of rare and incalculable proportions: the trust of its people. I would like to hear one sheikh, emir, king, sultan, president-for-life, or wise and vanguard-beloved leader of the dazed and pulverized masses explain the true extent of the economic crisis that is upon us, and ask for citizen participation in weathering the storm and generating ideas for coming out of it in decent shape.

The various emirates throughout the Gulf region that have grown at breakneck speed in the past three decades are having to adjust to supply-and-demand economic realities after living through nearly four decades in which they thought that they operated by different rules. These statelets have enjoyed sufficient income to keep their citizens living happily for the most part, and also to offer jobs to millions of guest workers while generating spectacular speculative investment opportunities for all those who dared to gamble. Now that the speculative bubble has burst, citizens, guest workers and rootless investors alike need some accurate news about just how bad or manageable things really are.

Anybody can be a popular leader by offering endless commercial contracts when the oil wealth is flowing non-stop. But only real leaders succeed when times are hard, oil income is down, economies are shrinking, and they maintain their credibility by telling their people the truth about the difficult times.

The current economic recession is a moment that cries out for an Arab leader who can speak truthfully to his people on the issues of the day that really matter, including how many abandoned cars may be parked at the airport. I suspect that the chances of this happening in the emirates and sheikhdoms of the Gulf is probably higher than in any other Arab region – if the Gulf’s self-image of pioneering, orderly, humane national development is a fact rather than mostly an image.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 28 January 2009
Word Count: 829
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BEIRUT — The Obama administration to date has given four early but mostly clear signs about its intended policies towards the Middle East — especially the Arab-Israeli conflict that remains the core issue in the region. All four signs suggest that the Obama administration will be both more activist and fairer to all concerned than the perpetual disaster-making machine that was the George Bush/Condoleezza Rice team.

The four signs are Obama’s inaugural address, Hilary Clinton’s confirmation hearing testimony before Congress, the appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy to Arab-Israeli peacemaking, and Obama’s remarks at the State Department Thursday.

Three of the four signs mainly reflect a softer and slightly more balanced tone on Arab-Israeli peacemaking, Iran, and general relations with Islamic societies. The fourth and most important signal — the appointment of George Mitchell — indicates the U.S. plans to be substantively involved in peacemaking, on a sustained basis, with direct support from the president. This was enhanced by the phone call to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Obama’s first day in office.

From his inaugural address pledge to “seek a way forward with the Muslim world” on the basis of “mutual interests and mutual respect” and to “work with old friends and former foes” to reduce the nuclear threat, Obama probably plans an early engagement with Iran, where the interests/respect balance is critical for success. Focusing on Iran and Arab-Israeli peacemaking simultaneously is a wise move, because these two issues impact powerfully on the entire region.

The Mitchell appointment is the most clear and positive sign of a sensible approach to the Middle East in the Obama administration. The most important aspect of it is that Obama did not appoint Dennis Ross to the position. Ross and his colleagues at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), along with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), represent the most extreme side of pro-Israeli lobbying and advocacy in Washington. They reportedly had been working overtime to get Ross appointed again as point man for Arab-Israeli issues. Appointing Mitchell is a positive sign that Obama seeks a more serious, fair, and credible Middle East foreign policy.

George Mitchell himself is a man of immense credibility, achievement and diplomatic diligence. His successful approach to peacemaking in Northern Ireland will assist him immensely in addressing the Middle East. Mitchell’s strong card is his insistence on bringing all legitimate parties into the negotiating process on the basis of renouncing violence, and crafting a resolution that responds simultaneously to the minimum and core needs of each side.

He will find that the United States is already locked into some positions that will hamper the search for peace, such as refusing to speak to Hamas and Hizbullah until they change their policies and behavior towards Israel. This is one of the legacies of the WINEP-AIPAC-Ross-influenced foreign policy-making process in Washington, which appeared usually to allow Israeli interests to drive U.S. policy.

Unfortunately for the pro-Israeli zealots and their front men in Washington, this approach has not worked, and has worsened conditions for Israel, the United States, the Palestinians and many others. A new approach is needed, and we may be seeing early hints of this in the Obama-Clinton policies that are slowly taking shape.

In the world of diplomacy, nuanced shifts, however small, are a form of body language that should be read correctly. Obama-Clinton will not make unilateral radical changes in the United States’ Middle East policies now, given the need to consult with the parties involved and other allies.

It is significant, though, that on his second day in office the American president publicly acknowledged Palestinian suffering in a way that virtually no other American politician has dared to do in the past month, and pledged to work for a permanent ceasefire that provides security for Palestine and Israel while also lifting the Israeli siege on Gaza and allowing a normal flow of commerce and aid.

Simply by articulating the core needs of both sides in the same statement, while repeating the standing positions on Hamas and pledging American humanitarian and reconstruction assistance in Gaza, Obama signals a small shift in tone. The coming months will reveal if this presages a more balanced policy. I believe it is significant, especially when combined with Obama’s naming of Mitchell and repeating that the United States will be engaged in a serious and sustained manner, with his personal support.

This is as good a start as we in the Arab world could expect from the new administration in Washington. Obama asked the Arabs to put life into their 2002 peace plan, which he said has some positive elements. The Arab world has an opening here that it should exploit, by responding to Obama’s request. And they should also make a counter-request that Arab moves be matched simultaneously by Israeli and American moves.

The most important of which is to engage with all legitimate Palestinian leaders and deal with the Palestinian issue as one of national rights, not merely charity for humanitarian needs.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 January 2009
Word Count: 834
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BEIRUT — The distressed state of the Arab world was on full display last week on two fronts: The massive Arab emotional reaction against Israel’s ferocious attack on Gaza, and the slightly ridiculous holding of three separate Arab summit meetings — with not a single practical result expected from any of them. The deeper reality that plagues the Arab world is that the average Arab citizen faces an unsatisfying choice between a brand of Islamist-nationalist military resistance that triggers enormous Israeli attacks and Arab death and destruction, and a brand of Arab autocratic governance that breeds mediocrity, corruption and perpetual vulnerability and dependence.

The choice is stark: Hamas or Fateh in Palestine; Hizbullah or Hariri in Lebanon; Mubarak & Son or Muslim Brothers in Egypt — and the list continues through every Arab country. The slow gravitation and polarization of the modern Arab state system over the past three generations into two broad camps of status quo conservatives and resistance fighters is more apparent than ever, and equally frustrating.

The powerful Islamist-nationalist resistance and social-political movements that have come into being in recent decades are first and foremost a response to the poor performance and low credibility of the power elite that has dominated the modern Arab world. Movements like Hamas and Hizbullah have gained additional strength and legitimacy from fighting the Israeli occupation, which the established Arab power structure has not done very well in most cases, despite half a dozen wars since 1948.

“Resistance” rings powerfully in the ears of ordinary Arab men and women, as we can witness on television screens throughout the region these days. Resistance will continue as long as oppression and occupation persist. But perpetual resistance means constant warfare and repeated Israeli destruction of Lebanese and Palestinian society, given Israel’s superiority in conventional weapons and its barbaric willingness to inflict severe pain on civilian populations. The world’s powers largely turn a blind eye to, or tacitly support, Israel’s savagery against Palestinians and Lebanese, as we witnessed in 2006 and today. Europe and the United States actually joined Israel in its long-term material blockade and political strangulation of Gaza after Hamas’ electoral victory in 2006.

The dominant political culture of the ruling Arab elites is totally frozen in the face of Israeli power and brutality, unable to either confront or embrace Israel, or confront or embrace the Arab Islamists. The epitome of Arab incoherence has been on display these weeks in the inability even to agree to a meeting of Arab heads of state on the Gaza predicament that resonates so deeply in Arab hearts and minds.

What should we make of Arab regimes and ruling elites that are unable to confront Israel, unwilling to challenge the United States, and unanxious to show support for Hamas and Hizbullah-style Islamist resistance movements? As long as they remain totally frozen like this, they will continue to find themselves slowly being challenged by a combination of non-state actors that grow into parallel states.

Hamas’ resistance to Israel today, like Hizbullah’s ability to fire rockets and fight Israeli ground troops for 34 days in 2006, is emotionally powerful and politically significant. But it is not a viable long-term recipe for statecraft, nationhood or political governance. The will and capacity to resist foreign occupation ideally generate respect from the enemy, which triggers a shift into a search for political solutions for the conflicts that gave rise to the need for resistance in the first place.

The current ceasefire in Gaza is to meet the key needs of both sides, ending the immediate causes of the fighting. Hamas has stopped firing mini-rockets into southern Israel, and Israel has stopped killing Palestinians and strangulating them economically. Now what?

If both sides feel victorious in their own eyes, as seems likely, we will see the region return to the trend it has witnessed for several decades: Ordinary Arab men and women will find themselves before the unsatisfying choice of supporting militant Islamist resistance movements or sclerotic and largely incompetent regimes such as those in Egypt and the West Bank. No viable middle ground can emerge between the intemperate appeal and power of both the resistance and the reactionaries.

Hamas emerges from the Gaza war with heightened political support in the short run, but faces calls for a shift towards political struggle so that the people of Gaza do not again suffer such massive pain, death and destruction. Hamas will reply that only its willingness to fight Israel and suffer attacks forced Israel to lift its siege, and the same attitude will prod Israel to negotiate seriously one day. Multitudes will cheer both positions.

The post-Gaza political battle to come in the Arab world will be far more complex and far-reaching than the military attacks that Gaza has witnessed in the past three weeks.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 January 2009
Word Count: 800
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BEIRUT — Just as the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from Gaza three years ago triggered a tumultuous series of political developments that brought Palestinians and Israelis to this latest war and political confrontation, the unilateral Israeli ceasefire in Gaza that started early Sunday morning will usher in profound political changes that will transform the regional landscape for years to come.

The historic changes are already underway in three parallel arenas: within Palestinian society, between Palestine and Israel, and between the Middle East and the Western powers. And all three have been on display this week, with four (!) different Arab summit meetings in four cities (Riyadh, Doha, Sharm esh-Sheikh and Kuwait City) — where the military battle between Gaza and Israel continues as political battles of regional and global implication.

An ideological struggle started in the 1970s: That was when the pan-Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 60s died, organized Palestinian guerrilla groups challenged Israel and some Arab regimes, and Iranian Islamist-nationalists overthrew the Shah of Iran. The past 30 years in the Middle East have witnessed a tug-of-war between two broad camps of people and movements: those who would anchor their nationalism and development in the indigenous Arab-Islamic, Iranian-Islamic, or Turkish-Islamic identities; and those who would link their fate to the material and military inducements of vassal-like acceptance of American and Israeli interests.

The battle for Gaza captures all these elements simultaneously in a way that has never been so clear before. On the one hand, Israel relies on American, European, and some Arab support as it tries to bludgeon and starve the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, and tries to replace the surging Hamas with the wilted and discredited Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas.

On the other hand, half a dozen major Arab, Iranian, and Turkish actors, and a clear and growing majority of regional and world public opinion, support Palestinian rights. This support is sometimes reflected in explicit support for Hamas, but mostly in solidarity with the Palestinian civilians who have stood their ground in the face of Israel’s gruesome onslaught.

The unilateral Israeli ceasefire will emphasize and aggravate these trends, and will set the stage for a prolonged political struggle – a struggle that will mirror the dynamics we have witnessed on the battlefield for the past three weeks.

The core issue to watch in the coming weeks and months is the balance between Israel’s desire for unilateral control and dominance versus the Palestinians’ determination to achieve liberation from the Israeli-American-led siege of Gaza and desire for explicit political legitimacy by formal diplomatic engagement.

The core problem in the short run has been the Israeli desire to make unilateral decisions that affirm its total control of the situation without engaging the rising power of the Hamas movement and allied Palestinian Islamists and nationalists. Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967, colonized it unilaterally, brutalized it unilaterally, pauperized it unilaterally, withdrew unilaterally, laid siege to it unilaterally, and now has attacked it and ceased-fire unilaterally. Every one of Israel’s unilateral actions in recent years has failed to achieve its objectives — and this unilateral ceasefire is also likely to fail.

The lesson that Israel seems too frenzied or stubborn to learn is that resolving the underlying Palestinian-Israeli conflict needs a negotiated agreement between two sides — and cannot be achieved unilaterally. The historic importance of Hamas rests on its challenging Israel’s unilateralist penchant in a manner that previous Palestinian movements — especially Yasser Arafat’s Fateh — could not or dared not do.

Hamas took advantage of the Israeli withdrawal and siege of Gaza to prepare for a military faceoff. Hamas knew it could not match Israel’s superior firepower and technology, but it calculated correctly that it would gain politically by taking its stand — and a beating — and still emerge as the most credible Palestinian leadership.

Hamas’ willingness to absorb Israel’s military overkill and remain on its feet mirrors Hizbullah’s experience in Lebanon in 2006. It must be dealt with — if not today then in a few months down the road — because it represents the sort of legitimacy that few other Arab leaderships can boast. The cost in civilian lives and infrastructure has been high, which means it will be reluctant to go through the war experience again any time soon – again, similar to Hizbullah after it emerged on its feet from 34 days of fighting.

Hamas’ most important immediate goal remains relieving the Israeli-American siege of Gaza, which is likely to develop from the diplomatic discussions to come in the weeks ahead. Israel will have to stop attacking and strangulating Gaza, in return for Hamas holding its fire against southern Israel.

Both sides will say they achieved their key goals — but Hamas will be the bigger political winner in the wake of the fighting. It will now have to use its greater political capital to operate more subtly in domestic, regional and global forums, where it will enjoy much more credibility, legitimacy and impact.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 January 2009
Word Count: 821
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BEIRUT — If the Israeli attack on Gaza that started 18 days ago was designed partly to send a message to incoming U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. Congress in the past week seems to have joined the battle to handcuff the new president and lay down the law for him, even before he takes office.

Obama has tried to remain aloof and stay out of the political battle over the Gaza war by making no substantive statements about it. Israel and its many supporters in Washington have different plans for him. He stayed away from the war, but they have brought the war to him — shoving it down his throat as his first pre-incumbency lesson in how American presidents behave vis-à-vis Israel’s desires — if they wish to remain in power.

The House of Representatives voted last Friday by 390-5 for a resolution that completely backed Israel in its onslaught against Gaza, specifically affirming “Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza”. A day earlier, the Senate overwhelmingly supported Israel and its right to defend itself against terrorism.

Such extraordinary one-sided support for Israel by the United States Congress mirrors the same position taken by the administration. Both President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in press meetings that Hamas was to blame for the current war and the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, and that any ceasefire had to ensure that Hamas stopped attacking Israel. They seemed incomprehensibly blind to Israel’s combined strangulation of and assault on Gaza. (And as this goes to press, comes the story of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert bragging about forcing George Bush and Condi Rice to abstain from the UN call for a ceasefire that Rice helped draft.)

This almost irrational absolute support for Israel in both the legislative and executive branches of the U.S. government occurs while a chorus of international condemnation of Israel for using excessive force includes calls by some United Nations officials and respectable non-governmental organizations to investigate whether Israel has committed “war crimes.”

Israel is using the two arsenals it is most comfortable with — military force to kill, injure, terrorize and displace thousands of Palestinian civilians, and the equivalent political overkill to bludgeon the American political establishment into total submission.

After six decades of trying, Israel has been unable to turn Palestinians into vassals and subservient slaves — but it has succeeded in transforming an otherwise impressive American political governance system into a herd of castrated cattle who cower before the threats that Israel’s Washington-based henchmen and hit men hold over them.

Gaza will get its ceasefire soon, but will Washington ever find relief from the choking stranglehold of Israel’s political thugs?

These Congressional votes in the past few days were not an unusual event, sadly, but rather a routine reaffirmation of the chokehold that Israel enjoys over the elected representatives of an otherwise healthy democracy. For example, two years ago, when Israel attacked Lebanon with similar ferocity, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 410-8 to support the Israeli onslaught and to condemn Hamas and Hizbullah for “unprovoked and reprehensible armed attacks against Israel.”

Two years before that, in 2004, the House voted 407-9 to support President Bush’s position that it was “unrealistic” for Israel to return completely to its pre-June 1967 borders.

On no other foreign policy issue does the U.S. Congress collectively stick its head in its back pocket, turn off its power of independent judgment, and disregard the impact of its decisions on how the United States is perceived around the world. Nowhere else in the world does the U.S. Congress vote according to the interests of a foreign country, rather than according to the U.S. national interest. This kind of blind, whole-hearted plunge into a maelstrom of pro-Israeli fanaticism and zealotry reflects precisely how strong the pro-Israeli lobby is in the United States, and how weak are the voices of reason, balance and justice as drivers of American foreign policy.

This is the distorted reality that Obama will inherit in a week’s time, and what an ugly thing it is. It captures the worst of all worlds all rolled into one — the vicious, hysterical force of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States that buys and terrorizes politicians as easily as buying bags of peanuts at a circus; the anemic, mindless and spineless Arab governments who stand naked before Israel and the United States, and shameless before their own people; and the American political establishment that behaves on this issue, with a handful of brave and decent exceptions, in a most un-American manner in the face of the omniscient pro-Israeli forces that decide if they live or die politically.

None of this is surprising or new. It only amazes me that Americans expect us to take them seriously and not to laugh — or throw up — when they preach to us about promoting democracy.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 January 2009
Word Count: 821
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BEIRUT — We now have the interplay between warfare and diplomacy in Gaza, which is a better situation to be in than witnessing only warfare. Yet one of the telling things about the complexity of the current fighting in Gaza is that one does not quite know what to call it. Is it the Israel-Hamas war? The Israel-Gaza war? The Israel-Palestine war?

This matters, because knowing the exact nature of the protagonists doing the fighting and the real underlying issues improves our chances of coming to grips with the full nature of the conflict — an essential first step to resolving it permanently. Military action by both sides will never resolve the core of the conflict, but diplomacy could if it tackled the most important issues for each side. The UN resolution approved Thursday does not seem to cover all the important issues.

Nearly two weeks into the Israeli assault on Gaza, the UN Security Council resolution approved Thursday calls for “an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire” that would lead to the “full withdrawal” of Israeli forces from Gaza, the passage of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians and an end to the trafficking of arms and ammunition into the territory.

This is a welcomed move if it stops the immediate killing and suffering, but it will not achieve anything lasting because it does not address the core issues in the conflict. I would list these as: From the Israeli side, ending attacks by miniature missiles and other small, home-made projectiles into southern Israel; and from the Palestinian side, ending Israel’s attacks on and strangulation of the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli aim of ending Palestinian attacks on southern Israel was achieved before and could have been achieved again through the established truce mechanism that Hamas has adopted, and had widely respected several times in recent years. Hamas has also offered Israel a long-term truce, lasting ten years or more.

This is not recognition of Israel, which is a precondition Israel and its Western supporters insist that Hamas accept before they will talk to it. In Hamas’ diplomatic body language, though, a long-term truce means that it would no longer fight Israel militarily, and would open the door for credible negotiators on both sides to explore opportunities for a negotiated permanent coexistence or formal peace. Hamas has also stated that any negotiated peace accord should be ratified by a referendum of the Palestinian people — the mirror image of Israelis submitting their peace agreements with the Arabs to their parliament.

If stopping attacks from Gaza were really the key main aim of the Israeli government, this could have been achieved without the human and political cost of the current war. It seems more realistic to see the Israeli goal as trying to crush Hamas, and end any active political or military resistance to Israel’s domination of all historic Palestine, including the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

Here is where the name of this little war becomes more relevant. Calling it the Israel-Hamas war is not fully accurate, because Hamas is only one of several important groups that represent the political struggle and national sentiments of the Palestinian people. Hamas is doing most of the fighting, but the political battle with Israel reflects the concerns, rights and aspirations of all Palestinians. That struggle has two main dimensions: the immediate one is ending the siege, starvation and assault on Gaza by Israel, and the longer term one is negotiating a fair and definitive resolution of the problem of the Palestinian refugees of 1948, who were evicted from the land that now forms the state of Israel.

Israel has used such barbaric tactics against Hamas and the civilians of Gaza because it wants to wipe out forever any Palestinian insistence on dealing with the core national and human issues that emerged from the 1948 war and the creation of Israel. Hamas is a troubling reminder for Israel that the state of the Jewish people was created on the ashes of the indigenous Palestinian Arab community — the community that is now the refugee population of Gaza and other regions in the Arab world. Israel is not just bombing Hamas facilities; it is trying to bomb into oblivion the idea that any single Palestinian man, woman or child can stand up and demand the end of their national dismemberment and exile.

Diplomatic efforts to end the current fighting will succeed if they redress the immediate imbalance in the mutual rights of Israelis and Palestinians to live in security. A UN resolution that stops Hamas attacks and closes the tunnels from Egypt while keeping in place the Israeli starvation siege of Gaza will not work.

It is hard to know how much more death, destruction and suffering the Palestinians in Gaza can withstand. This we do know, however: Wars happen for specific reasons and causes, and they end when those reasons and causes are addressed.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 January 2009
Word Count: 820
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BEIRUT – Of course, the immediate consequences of the Israeli assault on Gaza are felt primarily by the Palestinians in Gaza. But the political shockwaves will be felt throughout the Arab world in forms that cannot be easily predicted today. The Israeli attempt to inflict patricide — the killing of a country — on Gaza emphasizes a series of transformational trends that have been clear throughout the Arab region for about the past quarter century.

The most important trend concerns the reconfiguration of power, legitimacy and activism in the modern Arab state. As governments in existing Arab states effectively ignore what is happening in Gaza — to judge by their political immobility — we will continue to witness the weakening impact, control and even the legitimacy of many of those regimes. We will also continue to see the rise of non-state actors who become so strong and credible that they should be called parallel states.

Street demonstrations by angry Arabs no longer have political significance, because the fear, rage, and desire for action by ordinary men and women throughout the Middle East have been mobilized by a combination of Islamist and tribal movements that now form the center of gravity of Arab political identity — in those expanding spaces that are not dominated by the modern Arab police state.

Hizbullah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Muqtada Sadr’s movement in Iraq, and others are some leading examples of this phenomenon. Hamas in Gaza is probably the most significant, because it is a major part of the core Palestinian-Israeli conflict that has expanded into a wider Arab-Israeli conflict. It is a sacred landscape that incorporates Jerusalem, and is holy to all Muslims and Arabs, Christians included. And in the past two years, it is the only place in the history of the conflict where Palestinians have had a brief opportunity to establish a sovereign statelet of sorts — with their own institutions and security operations, largely free from direct Israeli attacks or controls, or hindrances from fellow Arabs.

The coming weeks will reveal what is happening in the battles in Gaza, and the political ramifications to follow. What is already obvious, though, is that Gaza represents the first time ever that Palestinians who controlled their own society decide to make a stand against Israel’s repeated attempts to kill, occupy, starve, arrest, and destroy them as a coherent society.

The picture is not pretty in any dimension:
• the internal Fateh-Hamas fighting among Palestinians in 2007-2008;
• the mutual attacks between Hamas and other Palestinians and Israel;
• the insolvency of the Israeli negotiations with the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas;
• the stunning immobility of the Arab governments and leaders; and,
• the world’s complicit inattention to Israel’s attempt to starve and strangulate Gaza’s population in the past two years, since Hamas won the parliamentary elections in January 2006.

Most of this is not new. The one and only truly new phenomenon today is that several thousand armed and trained Palestinians under the command of Hamas and some smaller resistance groups have taken a stand in their homeland. They have shown that they are prepared to fight to the death to defend themselves against Israel’s might and America’s explicit support for Israel.

The 60-year-old, continuing, and intensifying Israeli assault on the people and land of Palestine has crossed so many thresholds that it has finally started to elicit reactions from many quarters of the Arab world which refuse to acquiesce in their own continued humiliation, colonization, marginalization, or in the worst case, such as Gaza today, their own extermination.

The majority of Arab people and others around the world sympathize with Hamas and the Palestinian people. But they are helpless to do anything other than march in solidarity. Most Arab and foreign governments fear movements like Hamas that mobilize masses of citizens, take charge of their own destiny, and openly resist and confront the American-backed power structures around them.

How this little war ends will have an enormous impact on trends in the region. If Hamas emerges standing on its feet, with an internationally-monitored cease-fire that stops attacks by both sides and also reopens Gaza’s borders to normal economic activity, this will be seen as a victory for Hamas. It will also bolster the popularity of the Hizbullah-Hamas model of armed resistance predicated on the will and capacity to fight a stronger foe.

Israel historically has never been able to come to terms with Palestinian nationalism. It has never seen the Palestinians as people who should enjoy the same quality of life and national rights as Jews, Zionists, and Israelis.

Gaza is the first bunch of assertive Palestinians operating on sovereign Palestinian soil. They have elicited an Israeli attempt at patricide, and at the same time, a widespread popular support throughout the Arab region. Both of those trends will strengthen Islamist-nationalist movements, and further degrade some existing Arab state structures.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 January 2009
Word Count: 817
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BEIRUT — Many analogies are being made between the ongoing Israeli attack against Hamas in Gaza and the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah in Lebanon. Here are the most important ones, in my view.

The first is about provenance: Hamas and Hizbullah did not exist before around 1982. Their birth and strength must be understood largely as a response to Israel’s occupation and colonization policies in Palestine and Lebanon, alongside other secondary reasons.

Hamas and Hizbullah are the ideological step-children of the Likud Party and especially Ariel Sharon, whose embrace of violence, racism and colonization as the primary means of dealing with occupied Arab populations ultimately generated a will to resist. The trio currently carrying on Sharon’s legacy of brutality — Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni — seem genetically blind to the fact that the more force and brutality Israel uses against Arabs, the greater is the response in the form of more effective resistance movements that have wider public support.

The second analogy is about technical proficiency. Hizbullah and Hamas have both consistently increased their determination and ability to use assorted rockets and missiles to harass and attack Israel. More importantly, they are better able to protect their rocket launchers from pre-emptive Israeli attacks.

The number of Israeli dead in recent years is in the low hundreds, compared to the thousands of Palestinians that Israel has killed. But destruction and dead body counts are not the most useful criteria to use in this analysis. The real measures of what matters politically are the nagging Israeli sense of vulnerability, and the Palestinian sense of empowerment, defiance, and capacity to fight back.

It is a gruesome but tangible victory for Hamas simply to be able to keep firing 30 or 40 rockets a day at southern Israel, while Israel systematically destroys much of the security and civilian infrastructure in Gaza. The David and Goliath story is being reversed — in exactly the same region in southern Palestine/Israel where the story took place in the Bible.

The kind of frustration and impotence in Israel is reflected in its bombing attacks on the Islamic University and the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza — symbols of the sort of modernity and democracy that Israel and the United States claim they seek to promote in the Arab world, but which, in practice, they find much easier to bomb. Palestinians and Lebanese pay a very high price for their steadfastness, resistance and “victories” — but until someone offers a more cost-effective way of dealing with Israel’s violence in this conflict, we are likely to see this cycle of warfare continue for some time.

The television images of dead children and other innocent civilians in Gaza generate a tremendous will to fight among Palestinians and supporters throughout the Arab world and beyond. Israelis remain blind to the fact that Arabs respond to brutality the same way the Israelis do. A majority of Israelis polled this week supports the continuation of attacks against Gaza, despite the high civilian death toll. Israelis seem to feel that they have the right to respond to attacks against them by using indiscriminate violence against Palestinian civilians — but Palestinians do not have the same right to respond when they are attacked by Israel. Why the double standard? One consequence of this racist, barbaric attitude by many Israelis, especially those in government, has been the birth, development and strength of Hamas and Hizbullah, and their ability to fight back with enough proficiency to force Israel to accept a ceasefire.

The third analogy is about the convergence between religion, nationalism, governance and politics. In both Palestine and Lebanon, the prevailing secular political systems proved dysfunctional, corrupt and unable to protect the society against Israeli aggression or domestic strife and criminality. Movements like Hamas and Hizbullah developed in large part to fill the vacuum in efficient governance, security against Israeli attacks, and domestic order. They have achieved mixed results, with success in some areas but also an intensification of warfare and destruction in others.

Trying to discredit these movements by accusing them of one primary transgression — i.e., they use terrorism, attack civilians, carry arms, cozy up to Syria and Iran, espouse an Islamist agenda — will not discredit or destroy them. This is because of the structural manner in which they fulfill multiple roles that respond to the real needs of their citizens and constituents in the realms of governance, local security, national defense, and basic service delivery — responsibilities that their secular national governments failed to fulfill.

The combination of these attributes makes it very hard for Israel to “defeat” Hizbullah and Hamas in their current configuration, regardless of how much death and destruction Israel rains on their societies. These two Islamist-nationalist movements reflect a long list of mostly legitimate grievances that must be addressed if peace and security are ever to reign in this region.

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.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 January 2009
Word Count: 818
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BEIRUT — When diplomacy fails to deliver in the Middle East, other options come to the fore, usually in some form of violence practiced in different ways by both sides. The current violence is by Israel’s armed forces, which are waging a fierce and disproportionate attack against mostly unarmed civilians in the Gaza Strip — killing hundreds at a time, injuring thousands, and destroying huge elements of the Palestinian civilian infrastructure – for the fifth or sixth time in the past 50 years. This follows Israel’s strangulation of the territory that causes hardships for every civilian by reducing the flow of food, medicine and essential needs.

Hamas wages war for its part by firing its imprecise homemade rockets into southern Israel, which traumatize Israelis more than they actually hurt or kill them. It used to send suicide bombers into Israel, killing scores at a time, but this tactic receded in recent years — though it may reappear again in response to the Israeli attack on Gaza.

If we wish to chart a way out of the cycle of death and destruction, the critical first step is to acknowledge that we are faced with an active war waged by two parties, using very different tools and tactics. Blaming Hamas only — as the Israelis and the United States continue to do — is a sure formula for intensifying the fighting, rather than reducing it. Recent decades have proven this beyond doubt.

The prevalent Israeli-orchestrated theme — parroted most shamefully by an emasculated American media and political elite — is that Hamas fires rockets at Israel without provocation, after Israel left the Gaza Strip a few years ago. The reality is that Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza, but has waged relentless, brutal war against Gaza’s people and its Hamas leaders, through economic blockades, assassinations, bombings, and other means.

Active, bilateral Palestinian-Israeli warfare — not unilateral Hamas rocketry — is the correct context in which to understand and analyze the current situation. The problem that Israel faces is the same one that has faced all colonial regimes or foreign invaders throughout history — its use of massive military force against a weaker, mostly defenseless civilian population over time only generates a fiercer will to resist.

More problematic is that Jews themselves, throughout history, have used guerilla and terror tactics similar to those used by Hamas today. The best examples are probably the pre-1948, pre-state days when Zionist terror groups attacked both Palestinian and British targets, and the 2nd century BC Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid-Hellenist rulers of the region, when the Jewish priest Mattathias and his five sons successfully led forces using guerrilla tactics that would be called terrorism today. (The victory, which founded the Hasmonean dynasty, is celebrated annually as Hanukkah).

Olmert, Livni, Barak and other Israeli leaders suffer the same quandary that plagued the Seleucid Emperor in 167 BC at the start of the Maccabean Revolt — indigenous political and military forces fighting against foreign domination enjoy a legitimacy that cannot be eliminated by military force. The more the foreign imperial or colonial oppressor uses military power against the indigenous guerrillas and their society, the stronger the guerrillas emerge, and the more support they gain among the civilian population for what becomes a war of resistance, survival, and, ultimately, national liberation.

It is a perplexing sign of sheer stupidity, blindness or massive collective amnesia among Israelis today that they cannot see the parallels between their Jewish liberation struggle in the historic land of Palestine and the current liberation struggle that is now led almost solely by Hamas. They cannot crush, eliminate or decapitate Hamas. They can only come to terms with it, and negotiate an end to violence by both sides.

Imperial power and indigenous nationalism can go on fighting for decades, to no avail. The answer in cases like this requires several known steps: Both sides must reach the point where they admit that military power cannot resolve political-national disputes. Both sides admit they can go on fighting for many years, and that a negotiated compromise for coexistence is the only possible humane and lasting resolution to a war between two legitimate populations and fighting forces. This is what happened in Vietnam, Northern Ireland, South Africa and many other conflicts where rational leaders asserted themselves over the depraved criminals, stubborn fools, and sick killers in their midst.

Hamas and Israel will fight for some time; then they will agree to a ceasefire. This will only confirm what we already know — but what Israelis and their mostly mindless, shameless, and spineless American sidekicks refuse to admit.

Hamas and Israel have proven their manhood, their political legitimacy, their staying power, their technical prowess, and their capacity to kill civilians. Now they have to agree on a long-term ceasefire, and let the new political landscape of the Arab-Israeli conflict play itself out in an arena where sensible statesmen and stateswomen prevail — rather than the fools and charlatans who reign today.

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.

Copyright © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 December 2008
Word Count: 818
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