Israel-Palestine: "Proximity Talks" and US Vice President Biden

Here's the background: last Friday, US Mideast Special Envoy George Mitchell's deputy, David Hale, said Israeli-Palestinian understandings since the Annapolis talks would not be binding.

Following the approval of two conditions (the outlines of a border deal with Israel and a complete Israeli settlement construction freeze) by the Palestinian Liberation Organization executive committee, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that he hoped for direct negotiations in the near future, but reiterated that any permanent settlement would require recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and a long-term guarantee of Israel's security.

Thus, the clear difference between two disputants' mentalities: on one hand, Ramallah is considering indirect talks as a basis to be consolidated in order to move to the next round of direct talks; on the other hand, West Jerusalem sees indirect talks as a way to block preconditions.

In the midst of Defense Minister Ehud Barak's permission for the construction of 112 housing units in the settlement of Beitar Ilit, despite the construction freeze in the West Bank settlements, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrived Israel on Tuesday while Mitchell moved to Ramallah for further talks.

Biden, on early Tuesday, met President Shimon Peres. He said that the agreed resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks provided a "moment of real opportunity" for peace and added:

The interests of both the Palestinians and the Israeli people, if everyone would just step back and take a deep breath, are actually very much more in line than they are in opposition.

Then, Biden talked to PM Netanyahu. He said that "historic peace will require both sides to make historically bold commitments" and gave the golden statement:

There is no space between the United States and Israel when it comes to Israel's security.

When it came to the Iranian issue, Biden said: "We're determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and we're working with many countries around the world to convince Tehran to meet its international obligations and cease and desist." President Peres harshly targeted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He stated that Ahmadinejad must face "total" international isolation and added:

A person like Ahmadinejad, who calls openly to destroy the state of Israel, cannot be a full member of the United Nations.

A man who calls for acts of terror, and who hangs people in the street ... he should be placed in his proper definition. He cannot go around almost like a cultural hero.

Ahmadinejad has to be isolated and not be welcomed in the capitals of the world.

Middle East Inside Line: Mitchell Arrives, East Jerusalem Protests, Hamas's Shrinking Power?

Mitchell in the Region: On Saturday, U.S. Mideast special envoy George Mitchell met Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Tel Aviv. He will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday.

Before any formal shaking of hands, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas escalated the rhetoric. In contrast to his acceptance of four months of "proximity talks",  Abbas said that "the peace process has almost reached a dead end" because Netanyahu has refused to stand by compromise offers made by his predecessor. Abbas continued:

UN’s Top Gaza Official: “Israel Creating Generation of People Nourished on Despair”

Despite a temporary, partial freeze on building in the West Bank, the expansion of Israeli settlements, as well as an Israeli heritage plan announced last month to include West Bank religious sites threaten ... to open the door to a dark future that awaits us all.


The Israeli government continues to procrastinate to gain time and strengthen its control of the occupied territories to prevent any realistic possibility of establishing an independent, viable ... state of Palestine.

In response, Netanyahu not only dismissed calls for Israel to give up control of all of Jerusalem, but he said that an early deal for a Palestinian state is unlikely, given the strength of Abbas' rivals in Hamas.

Demonstrations in East Jerusalem: About 5,000 left-wing activists and Palestinians gathered Saturday to protest the eviction of four Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The demonstration was peaceful. Protesters carried Palestinian flags and chanted "Stop the destruction of homes" and "There is no sanctity in an occupied city."

Hamas Losing Control?: According to the London-based newspaper A-Sharq Al-Awsat, Hamas's senior military commander Ahmed Jabri has admitted losing control in Gaza in a letter to Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal. He said that "recently a series of explosions has raised fears in Gaza" and "Gaza had descended into anarchy".

Jabri allegedly claims Hamas is convinced that extremist "jihadi" Islamist movements are behind the bombings.

Haaretz's Middle East Security Survey adds:

The recent calm on the Israel-Gaza border could be deceiving. Hamas is not firing rockets into Israel and is also preventing more radical groups from launching rockets. At the same time, Hamas is coping with the domestic threat posed by radical groups that identify with Al-Qaida. Recent reports from Gaza indicate that these groups are getting stronger, at the expense of Hamas.

It is possible that Israel, which until now has viewed Hamas as its biggest enemy in Gaza, needs to take into account that within a couple of years Hamas will be the moderate force in Gaza protecting the calm while a monstrous and more dangerous threat is growing in the form of the ultra-radical groups.

Middle East Inside Line: US Warns Palestine, New Israel Proposal on Iran, Turkey's Reaction to US "Genocide" Resolution

USWarning to the Palestinian Authority: According to a document sent by Washington to the Palestinian Authority and obtained by Haaretz on Friday, the Obama Administration will assign blame and take action if indirect talks fail due to one side's fault. After clearly stating Washington's position for "a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian State with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967", the report continues:

We expect both parties to act seriously and in good faith. If one side, in our judgment, is not living up to our expectations, we will make our concerns clear and we will act accordingly to overcome that obstacle.

Lieberman's Proposal to Washington on Iran: Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Thursday that he doubted the United Nations would follow through with Western demands for harsher sanctions over Iran's contentious nuclear program, and he urged the United States to impose an embargo similar to the one it has held on Cuba for the last 50 years. He claimed that the Iranian regime would collapse in a year with such an embargo. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon is flying to Washington on Monday to present the foreign minister's proposal.

Turkey's Reaction over US Votes Condeming Armenian "Genocide": On Thursday, the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted 23-22 to call the World War I-era killing of Armenians "genocide". Minutes after this vote, passing the resolution to the full House, Namik Tan, the Turkish Ambassador to Washington, was withdrawn, and Washington's ambassador to Ankara, James Jeffrey, was called to the Foreign Ministry for talks. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said: "We expect the US administration to, as of now, display more effective efforts. Otherwise the picture ahead will not be a positive one."

Both Barack Obama and Jeffrey expressed their displeasure with the vote; however, Ankara continues to declare this is a matter of "honour".

At the press conference, when asked whether consequences might include the withdrawal of soldiers from Turkish Afghanistan or the closure of the American base at Incirlik, Davutoglu said: "Of course, we will evaluate the situation as the Government. We will also talk to our President and the opposition."

However, a diplomatic source from Israel said that Ankara did not turn to West Jerusalem for help in Washington to fight the resolution.

Mr Obama's War on Terror: Military Tribunals, Indefinite Detention, No Due Process

I recently heard a well-placed US Government representative say flatly and firmly, in response to a question about the still-far-from-closed Guantanamo Bay facility, that the Obama Administration is not pursuing "indefinite detention" of those imprisoned at Gitmo and elsewhere. Hmm....

Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon: 

The Obama administration has made explicitly clear its intention to deny civilian trials to scores of detainees, by sending some to military commissions and imprisoning others indefinitely without any charges.  And for those cases where it has deigned to provide real due process -- such as its decision to try the 9/11 defendants in a criminal court -- it is moving in the wrong direction.  Obama officials are clearly signaling their intention to reverse that decision and instead place those defendants before military commissions, and yesterday, yet another piece appeared -- this time in Politico -- describing the beautiful, loving, cooperative relationship between [Obama Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel and [Republican Senator] Lindsey Graham, which is now "embracing a wide-ranging deal pitched by Graham that would shut down the prison [at Guantanamo]; provide funding to move detainees to Thomson, Ill.; keep the Sept. 11 trials out of civilian courts; and create broad new powers to hold terror suspects indefinitely."  And the endless cavalcade of Rahm-planted, Rahm-Was-Right articles (see the latest from the [Washington] Post today) invariably features his opposition to civilian trials for accused Terrorists as proof of his Centrist though mistakenly rejected wisdom.  

 

In contrast to America's still-growing refusal to accord basic due process to accused Terrorists, consider how Pakistan treats foreigners whom it apprehends within its borders on serious charges of Terrorism:   

SARGODHA, Pakistan -- Prosecutors seeking to indict five Americans on terror-related offenses presented their case to a Pakistani judge Tuesday, laying out charges including waging war against Pakistan and plotting to attack the country, a defense attorney said.The men, all young Muslims from the Washington, D.C., area, were arrested in December in Punjab province not long after reaching Pakistan. . . . The men could be indicted on as many as seven charges during their next hearing on March 10, lawyer Hamid Malik told The Associated Press. The judge ordered the defense to review the prosecution report presented in the Sargodha town court and to prepare a rebuttal.  

If there's any country which can legitimately claim that Islamic radicalism poses an existential threat to its system of government, it's Pakistan.  Yet what happens when they want to imprison foreign Terrorism suspects?  They indict them and charge them with crimes, put them in their real court system, guarantee them access to lawyers, and can punish them only upon a finding of guilt.  Pakistan is hardly the Beacon of Western Justice -- its intelligence service has a long, clear and brutal record of torturing detainees (and these particular suspects claim they were jointly tortured by Pakistani agents and American FBI agents, which both governments deny).  But just as is true for virtually every Western nation other than the U.S., Pakistan charges and tries Terrorism suspects in its real court system. The U.S. -- first under the Bush administration and now, increasingly, under Obama -- is more and more alone in its cowardly insistence that special, new tribunals must be invented, or denied entirely, for those whom it wishes to imprison as Terrorists (along those same lines, my favorite story of the last year continues to be that the U.S. compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it suspected of drug smuggling and thus wanted to assassinate [just as we do for our own citizens suspected of Terrorism], only for Afghan officials -- whom we're there to generously teach about Democracy -- to object on the grounds that the policy would violate their conceptions of due process and the rule of law).  Most remarkably, none of this will even slightly deter our self-loving political and media elites from continuing to demand that the Obama administration act as self-anointed International Arbiter of Justice and lecture the rest of the world about their violations of human rights.

Iraq: We're Staying --- US Military Challenges Obama's Withdrawal Plan

Within days of President Obama's inauguration last January, I began writing of a military attempt to "bump him" on three fronts: preventing the closure of Guantanamo Bay, getting more troops in Afghanistan, and delaying the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

Well, the commanders, backed by key individuals in the Executive and the complications of Congress, succeeded on the first two matters. And, days before Iraq's national elections, they are pressing again on the third. General Raymond Odierno, the commander of US forces in Iraq and a man who (a la General David Petraeus) has learned how to work the press, started telling favoured reporters that Obama's August date for removal of most combat troops might not be tenable. Prominent columnists like Thomas Friedman and Thomas Ricks soon rolled out the arguments for sticking around.



In contrast to last year, this is not yet a head-on clash with the President; Odierno and his allies, possibly including Petraeus, now head of the US Central Command for the region, are working around him through media channels. But it does set up a challenge for Obama, especially if expected political complications with the elections occur: does he again give way on policy to his military brass?

Ranj Alaaldin writes for The Guardian of London:

Yesterday came the first signs of the inevitable in Iraq: a prolonged
presence of US troops beyond the status of forces agreement deadline of 2011.


President Obama has promised to get all combat troops (ie most of those still in the country) out of Iraq by August this year. But Thomas Ricks of Foreign Policy magazine has revealed that the top US military commander in Iraq, General Ray Odierno, has asked Obama to keep a combat force in the north for longer than that.

Odierno's request suggests that a somewhat flexible approach will be taken towards the remaining 40,000 to 50,000 troops. The general has asked for a combat brigade to remain in Kirkuk, the ethnically mixed, oil-rich and volatile disputed territory. But the problem of Kirkuk will not be
resolved by the end of 2011 and it may never be peacefully resolved at all (see the Falklands, the other oil-rich disputed territory that has had
historic battles fought over it, where disputes exist over the rights to
its oil and also where the UN, as with Kirkuk, has been called to look
into).

If Obama does indeed give his approval then it is likely to be a reflection of the US troop presence in Iraq over the next five, possibly
10, years. Yet, we may well be seeing the South Korea-style permanent military presence taking root here, both as a counter-measure against the impenetrable Iranian influence in the country as well as a measure to keep the peace; since Kirkuk could decide whether Iraq collapses or survives, a prolonged military presence in Iraq focused around the province, as well as other northern areas like Mosul and Diyala – where joint US-Kurd-Arab military patrols have been initiated – can be justified.

How will this be sold to the American and Iraqi public? As I explained to
the LSE Ideas Middle East programme, the remaining 35,000 to 50,000 troops are expected to carry on in "advisory" capacities, code for "on standby" if things get really bad and a status more acceptable to a public largely critical of any "combative", and therefore seemingly aggressive, military mandate. Iraqis may welcome this so long as the US keeps out of everyday Iraqi life, stays in the background as the Iraqi security forces become more assertive and generally improve, and so long as it leads to improved security.

Politically speaking, there will be some, especially among the Sunnis who deride Iran's influence and the Shia hold on power, that deem a strong US presence a necessary and imperative counter-measure against other domestic and external forces that have a degree of power far superior than their own.

It is election time in Iraq and the nation is gripped with the campaigning
process as they prepare to cast their vote in less than 10 days. For this reason, the US administration is doing well to wait before coming out officially to extend the deadline – lest it hurt any allies, potential or
otherwise – and it is likely to wait up to two months after the election
as the political framework settles. For these reasons, it is unlikely that
the revelation will have any bearing on the elections.