Arab News Blog

Breaking news: late Wednesday evening in Cairo, Abu Mazen and his buddies at the Arab League decided there will be no ‘proximity talks’ between the PLO and Israel.

I’m kind of interested in the way Abu Mazen is getting Amr Moussa to front for him these days. It does indicate a serious lack of his own confidence in the depth of his support among Palestinians… But that matter is tangential to the main story here, which is–

The Amazingly Unsuccessful ‘Diplomatist’ Joe Biden!

Biden, lest we forget, is the man who in an interview with George Stephanopoulos last July, publicly gave Israel carte blanche to attack Iran whenever it wanted.

Biden was also, back in the pre-2003 day, one of Ahmed Chalabi’s main supporters in the U.S., and an enthusiastic backer of the idea of partitioning Iraq.

Since he became Vice-President, Biden has had a role “orchestrating” Washington’s Iraq policy on behalf of the president… Well, we’ve seen how that’s been going… To be fair, that is not as horrendously badly as it might have been going… But it hasn’t been going brilliantly, either– certainly not as brilliantly as most of the US MSM have been saying.

Biden has not done a particularly good job there, I think.

But he has really been bombing in Palestine.

Yes, of course we can and should lay the primary blame for what’s been happening in Jerusalem this past couple of days squarely on the Israeli government, the body that greeted Biden, on his first visit to Israel as vice-president, with not one but two announcements about the construction of new settler housing.

Notable that Yossi Sarid writes in Thursday’s Haaretz that,

Don’t believe Benjamin Netanyahu for one moment when he says he “never knew” [about the 1,600 new settler housing units announced Tuesday.] The Jerusalem planning committee is only too aware of what the bosses want, and the government has decided to step up construction in greater Jerusalem. Dispossession and taking possession, kicking out and moving in – that’s what it’s all about.

Sarid also gave us these additional details about Biden’s time in Israel:

This is one visit Joe Biden will not quickly forget. First he was compelled to sit through 25 minutes of an annoying speech in his honor by our president. Shimon Peres really believes that he is the destination for pilgrims from all over the world who drink in his musings and are intoxicated by his vision.

Later, Biden was given a certificate memorializing his mother, but the glass broke. Once again, Bibi didn’t pay attention, leaned on it and shattered it. No fear, his speeches have always diverted attention from such mishaps. And finally, to add a finishing touch of infuriating disgrace, the Haredi neighborhood Ramat Shlomo was dumped on the vice-presidential head.

Truth be told, the Obama administration just about asked for this slap. In Jerusalem, the lesson has been learned that the White House doesn’t fulfill its obligations – it just goes through the motions by issuing insincere rebukes.

Insincere rebukes, indeed.

Juan Cole and Pat Lang, two very seasoned analysts of Middle eastern dynamics, are just two of the people who say that, on hearing of the new settlement construction, Biden should simply have ordered up his plane and left Israel, rather than sitting there, going through the rest of the charade of the visit, while saying something on the record about how the Obama administration “condemns” the new construction.

I’m assuming Biden decided on this course of action after consultation with Washington. (He took 90 minutes to decide what to do.) Do he and his boss the Prez have no idea how disgusted most of the people in the world are with the fact that, though from time to time Washington might say something critical of Israel– meantime Washington never holds Israel to serious account, for anything, including “grave breaches of international humanitarian law” like implanting its settlers into occupied territories?

And the U.S. Congress continues to shovel money to Israel. U.S. diplomacy continues to get completely bent out of shape by defending Israel’s actions in every international forum, at every turn, and by zealously pursuing Israel-driven agendas throughout the entire Middle East, including with regard to Iraq and Iran.

And these actions by the administration and Congress put the lives of U.S. service-members deployed around the world, often in pursuit of Israel-driven agendas, in significant additional risk.

Regarding Biden, Pat Lang has this intriguing little vignette in his latest post:

I was in Biden’s senate office on one occasion when Biden’s Zionism boiled over in a truly repulsive display of temper. I was there with my Arab employer to visit the senator… The Arab made some pro forma positive reference to the “peace process.” Biden flew into a rage, grew red in the face and shouted that this was an insincere lie and that his guest knew that it was only Arab stubbornness that prevented “little Israel’ from living in peace. His “guest” sat through this with what dignity he could manage. I would have walked out on him if I had been alone.

Assuming that the vignette’s true– and I tend to trust Lang on that– it reveals quite a few disturbing things about Biden. Not just the guy’s knee-jerk pro-Israelism, which is endemic just about everywhere in Congress, with a few notable exceptions. But also his evident lack of any diplomatic skills. I mean, why fly into a pro-Israeli rage like that if an Arab guest should happen to mention the “peace process”? What on earth good was he hoping to achieve by doing that? Nothing that I can think of– except to vent his own feelings.

… And meanwhile, George Mitchell, Mr. “Senior Peace Envoy”, has completely dropped off the map.

It is honestly not clear to me at all, right now, what it is that Obama and his people are hoping to achieve in the Arab-Israeli arena. Their entire “peace diplomacy” is in shambles. It’s as if Obama really doesn’t care any more about any of the lofty– but oh-so-important– goals he articulated back in the first days and weeks of his presidency. But he should realize that letting his “peace diplomacy” fall into disarray, as he has now done, is something that will have consequences far, far beyond Israel and Palestine. And quite possibly, more rapidly than anyone in Washington realizes.

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Welcome to the Middle East Channel! 

Some of you may have wondered why I haven’t been posting much lately.  Part of the reason is that I’ve been working hard on putting together the Middle East Channel at ForeignPolicy.com.  Creating this site has been my dream for a long time.  With today’s launch, it’s finally come true, after half a year of hard work, with the enthusiastic support of the leadership at Foreign Policy  and a vibrant partnership with Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah’s Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.  It’s also sponsored by the Project on Middle East Political Science, a new network of political scientists specializing in the Middle East which I have been putting together with the support of a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation — much more on that soon! 

I can’t think of a better way to explain what we’re trying to than to quote in full the "Welcome" post which we’ve put up to announce the Middle East Channel:

The world is hardly lacking for opinions about the
Middle East. But quantity should not be mistaken for quality: Too much of the
public debate about the issues of the Middle East is dominated by partisan
bickering and poorly informed punditry.

Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel is something
different: a vibrant and decidedly non-partisan new site where real expertise
and experience take priority over shouting, where the daily debate is informed
by dispassionate analysis and original reporting all too often lacking from the
stale and talking-point-laden commentary that sadly dominates most coverage of
the region today. Its contributors range from academics to former policymakers,
from journalists on the ground to established analysts — with an emphasis on
introducing voices from Middle East itself. Most importantly, the Middle East
Channel comes to you doctrine-free, open to political viewpoints of all kinds –
but demanding honesty, civility, and genuine expertise.

Our scope is broad: Israel and its neighbors, Iran’s
nuclear program and domestic politics, Iraq, Islamist movements, the Gulf,
Turkey, and North Africa, and the struggle for reform and democracy. The
Middle East Channel will highlight links between issues and areas of this diverse
region of 400 million — as well as provide a unique perspective on America’s
challenges there. We’ll have regular interviews with Middle East and Washington
players, sharp commentary on the news of the day, and original analysis of new
ideas and trends in the region.

The Middle East Channel is edited by Marc Lynch
of George Washington University and the Project on Middle East Political
Science and Amjad
Atallah and Daniel Levy,
co-directors of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.
Lynch, who writes the Abu
Aardvark Middle East blog on ForeignPolicy.com, is an expert
on Arab media and politics and is the author most recently of Voices
of the New Arab Public: Al-Jazeera, Iraq, and Middle East Politics Today.
Atallah is an expert in the law of conflict and post-conflict situations and a
former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team. Levy was an advisor to
former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and is a leading commentator on
Israeli politics and Middle East peace.

You can follow the site on Twitter,
sign up for our RSS
feed,
and subscribe to our twice-weekly email updates to get the latest on what’s
happening on the Middle East Channel and beyond.

I’ll still be blogging here under my own name, while co-directing and co-editing the Middle East Channel.  Feel free to send me your ideas for stories or feedback.   Here we go!  

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So now, Washington’s “leadership” of the Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy looks poised to rush forward to… 1949, and the proximity talks that Ralph Bunche convened in Rhodes that year.

Haaretz’s reporters tell us there,

the American administration is hoping the sides will declare the beginning of indirect talks [on Sunday] morning, ahead of the arrival of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.

These “proximity talks” have been touted by U.S. officials as some kind of big deal, even though they are a major step back from what Obama was promising when he came into office 14 months ago.

The P.A. leadership has until now merely been asking that, if the Netanyahu government wants to talk, it should first comply with its own commitments under the 2002 Road Map. But they’ve gotten no support from Washington for that position, and Washington has been putting big pressure on Abu Mazen, including through Egypt, Jordan, etc., with the aim of getting him back into talks– any talks, never mind about what!

The problem is not whether the two “sides” talk to each other; or how close they are when they take; or what shape table or configuration of hotel they might employ. The problem is getting Israel to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

When Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, was Pres. G.H. W. Bush concerned about getting Iraqi and Kuwaiti leaders into a room together– or in rooms in the same hotel together– to “negotiate” a resolution? Of course he wasn’t… Although, just possibly, there might have been a negotiated outcome to have been had. But he never gave anyone a serious chance to explore that avenue. Five and a half months after Saddam’s forces moved into Kuwait, the international alliance that Bush brought together acted swiftly to evict them.

In the OPTs, the occupation has now gone on for nearly 43 years.

Israel has no more claim to the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan than Iraq had to Kuwait. Claims of “holy places” and such don’t confer sovereign rights. Everywhere in the world, people have places they consider somehow sacred in other countries… and they go to visit them on pilgrimages. That’s how it is.

International law concerns itself with quite different matters; and in the matter of the Israeli-occupied lands the Security Council has clearly stated the inacceptability of Israel’s acquisition of those territories by force.

… In Palestine meanwhile, Abu Mazen’s apparent decision to take part in the upcoming “proximity talks” farce has come in for a lot of criticism, including from one rather unexpected source: Muhammad Dahlan.

Maan News reported today that,

If the American policy is to “waste time pretending we are in negotiations” as Israel continues to build settlements and claim Palestinian heritage sites, Dahlan said, there is no point to go ahead with the talks.

“We have been sick of the occupation for years, and sick of negotiations since 2000,” he said, referring to the start of the Second Intifada following civil unrest around a failure of the Oslo Accords.

Oh dear. It looks as if the project to rebuild Fateh’s organizational integrity that was pursued with such fanfare last summer didn’t do quite as well as hoped.

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On Wednesday morning, three suicide bombers attacked the HQ of the provincial government, a police station, and a hospital in Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province east of Baghdad, killing at least 16 persons and wounding over 40. (The report of the explosion at the government building comes via Aljazeera Arabic.) The attack was probably undertaken by militant Sunni Arabs intent on creating an atmosphere of fear intended to keep voters home on the coming Sunday.

Diyala is a mixed province with a slight Sunni Arab majority. The Shiite minority, however, dominated its politics from 2003-2008, possibly with help from neighboring Iran. In response, Sunni Arabs launched a determined insurgency, making Diyala one of the more dangerous provinces in the country.

In January 2009, a Sunni Arab-dominated provincial council came to power. In the aftermath, however, arrest warrants were issued by the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad for several provincial council members, who were suspected of links to insurgent guerrilla groups, and who had to go into hiding. The police and military in Baquba are disproportionately Shiite, which is one of the reasons the Sunni Arab guerrillas would have attacked them.

On February 26, a forum participant had posted a statement attributed to an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of the radical Sunni Arab ‘Islamic State of Iraq,’ which ridiculed Iraq’s elections. Translated by the USG Open Source Center, it said,

‘” The Islamic State in Iraq Will Participate in the Iraqi Elections, using their own methods. They (the Islamic State in Iraq) have picked several apostate figures that its soldiers will vote for, either with an explosive device or an explosive belt, God willing.

“The Initial Results of Elections According to Jihadist Sources

“The Ministry of War of the Islamic State of Iraq has won first place in the jihadist elections in the Land of the Two Rivers, and destroyed most of the election posts.

” The Electoral Program of the Al-Qa’ida Organization

“1- Purifying and liberating the land of the caliphate (governing system) from the Crusaders and applying God’s Shari’ah [religious law] in the Land of the Two Rivers.

“2- Establishing an Islamic state and getting rid of the legislators and legislative councils based on infidel democracy.

“3- Expanding the field of jihadist work to liberate Muslim countries from occupation, especially the Al-Aqsa Mosque[in Israeli-ruled Jerusalem], the cradle of prophets and messengers, and purifying it of the cowardly Zionists, following in the steps of Salah al-Din [Saladin].

“4- Applying God’s Shari’ah on Earth, establishing an Islamic caliphate, and unifying the Muslim point of view under the banner of monotheism and jihad.’

Opinion polling shows that only a tiny minority of Iraqi Sunni Arabs find these ideas attractive, and support for them has fallen dramatically in recent years.

As though a resurgence of Sunni Arab radicalism were not enough, the Associated Press has gotten hold of a warrant issued by Iraq’s Supreme Court for the arrest of Shiite clerical leader Muqtada al-Sadr, dated February 7 of this year. The surprise renewal of the warrant, originally issued under the American administration of Paul Bremer in 2004, threatens to roil Iraq. Sadr stands accused of ordering the killing of Majid al-Khoei on April 10, 2003, on the latter’s return to the holy city of Najaf from exile in London. Al-Khoei was killed by enraged mobs of nativist Sadr followers in part because his return seemed to have been sponsored by London and Washington, D.C. That the death was an assassination ordered by al-Sadr as opposed to the spiralling out of control of an urban mob has not been proven.

The American-inspired arrest warrant was allowed to lapse as part of the Bush administration’s truce with the Shiite leader. His Sadr Movement came to be a significant player in parliament, with over 10% of the seats, and his Mahdi Army militia was at one point in control of significant swathes of southern Iraqi cities as well as the capital. The Sadr Movement is part of the National Iraqi Alliance, which groups several important Shiite religious parties, and which seems set to gain between a sixth and a fifth of seats in the parliamentary elections scheduled for the coming Sunday.

The al-Maliki government denied that it had engineered the reemergence of the arrest warrant, and indeed denied that the warrant existed.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports in Arabic that the Sadr Movement blamed al-Maliki for the issuance of the warrant and called it ‘psychological warfare’ against the Sadr Movement.

There is now certainly a suspicious pattern whereby the major challengers to al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition have run into sudden and unexpected legal problems in the run-up to the election. Salih Mutlak, a Sunni Arab ally of Iyad Allawi’s National Iraqi List, was disqualified from running on grounds that he was too close to the banned Baath Party that had been led by Saddam Hussein. The move potentially weakened the Iraqiya List.

Now the National Iraqi Alliance is being targeted for demoralization, with one of its chief leaders indicted anew on a 6-year-old charge that had seemed to lapse. Ironically, the Sadr Movement’s support had catapulted PM al-Maliki into power in spring of 2006, before the two broke with one another in summer 2007 over al-Maliki’s unwillingness to set a timetable for US withdrawal and to cease teleconferencing with President George W. Bush.

Iraqis point out that few major Iraqi politicians have clean hands, as McClatchy reports.

The greatest danger of these political maneuverings is that they may reignite guerrilla and militia violence in Iraq, and possibly impede the scheduled withdrawal of the US military. Both Sunni Arab guerrillas and Mahdi Army militiamen have been major sources of instability in Iraq at some points in the past six years. Some Sunni Arabs are worried about a resurgence of sectarian violence.

On the other hand, experienced Iraq hand Nir Rosen believes that all the talk about the reemergence of sectarian conflict is completely overblown. One reason Rosen may be right is that the Sunni Arabs decisively lost the civil war and were largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so it is not clear that they have the social base to put up a further fight.

Aljazeera English reports on the campaign techniques being used in Iraq:

End/ (Not Continued)

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Al Jazeera/ English/ here

“…. In the video, al-Balawi also accused Jordan of providing information for the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, in 2006 as well as that of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah commander who died in a car bomb in Damascus in 2008.

“The Jordanian intelligence apparatus has a record which emboldens them to such behavior, but with Allah’s permission, after this operation, they will never stand on their feet again,” he said.

Al-Balawi, a doctor, hailed from the same hometown of Zarqa as al-Zarqawi and was a prolific contributor to jihadist websites.

But he was never able to realise his dream of joining the jihad until he was arrested by Jordanian security.”

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Killing of ‘ruthless’ Abu Sayyaf commander inflicts major blow on Al Qaeda-linked group, military says.
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In the New Yorker/ here

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“”… unknown persons detonated a bomb under the monument, which is located at Abu Ali Mustafa Square in the Be’r al-Na’ja area of Jabalya city. The monument depicts Abu Ali Mustafa as well as George Habash, founder of the PFLP. The explosion resulted in the destruction of
Habash’s portrait. Ten days earlier, unknown persons had painted the monument with tar”" (thanks Asa)

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Washington long ago—under Henry Kissinger– elbowed the United Nations completely out of the lead role that, by all rights, it should play in spearheading the search for lasting peace between Israel and all of its neighbors, including the Palestinians. And under George W. Bush, Washington was even able to formalize the subordination of the U.N. to Washington’s diktats in the matter, through its inclusion as a junior member in that new and at some levels quite anomalous outfit, the “Quartet”.

But the U.N. is not only a set of principles and policies; it is also, certainly, a bureaucracy. And there are two little chunks of it whose budgets are still justified primarily in terms of the contribution they can make to the pursuit of Palestinian rights.

This means holding conferences. Lots of them. The Division on Palestinian Rights is sponsoring the one I have just been participating in, here in Malta. Next month, they’re having one in Vienna; and in May they’ll be in Istanbul. The pace seems dizzying.

So you can certainy ask, “What are all these conferences good for?” And when I am at one—this one has been my third—there are always some periods of time when I ask that question. These usually come when some elderly Palestinian or other Arab participant bloviates, usually from the floor, for ways longer than is necessary or helpful.

But still, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war, so one grits one’s teeth and bears it.

These gatherings do also have some significant uses, however. I would describe them roughly as follows:

1. They are useful as locations for networking. Hey, today I got to have lunch with Alon Liel, an Israeli peace negotiator whom I’ve long wanted to meet, and Mohammad Barakeh, M.K., an ethnic Palestinian who is the head of Hadash, the former Israeli Communist Party, which is the premier joint Arab-Jewish party in the whole Israeli political spectrum. I couldn’t easily have done that if I stayed home in Washington DC, could I? I also met around half a dozen other really interesting people, and reconnected with numerous people whom I’d known before in one context or another.
2. They are useful as a way of keeping alive the idea that the principles of international law still, in spite of all the backsliding of recent decades, need to be applied to this conflict as much as to any other. That gives a glimmer of hope to many Palestinians. Not that international law has ever really done much for the Palestinians in modern time. But it yet might. And meantime, the sloughing off of the international-law framework, as was intentionally undertaken by successive U.S. administrations from Kissinger on (and by Norway, circa 1993), has very palpably harmed Palestinian lives and interests. So let’s keep the international-law framework alive, and carry on blowing fresh air onto its embers from time to time!
3. They are useful as a way of continually exposing new audiences in different places around the world to the facts of life—and to some of the high-ranking actors—in the Palestinian-Israeli arena.
4. They also usefully help to (re-)build the constituency, both among the Palestinians and Israelis themselves and in the rest of the world, for the international-law approach.

Well, for all these reasons, the right wing in Israel really hates these conferences. Heck, they hate everything to do with the United Nations and the whole idea of an international law regime that starts from the concept that everyone in the world is equal.

So guess what happened with the present conference. In addition to Liel and Barakeh, the conference organizers had invited at least three other significant Israeli figures, including the Israeli co-head of the Geneva Initiative, Yossi Beilin, former Education Minister (and current MK) Yuli Tamir, and an MK from the Kadima Party. But heavy-handed pressure from Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign ministry was successful in “persuading” Tamir and the Kadima MK not to take part. So from Israel the only participants we had were Barakeh, Beilin, and Liel.

—

Mohammad Barakeh, by the way, is under constant pressure from the Israeli authorities. He has a court appearance due in early March, when he has to answer a total of four charges the state prosecutors have brought against him. They are all, he told us, related to intensely political actions he took. “What about parliamentary immunity?” I asked him over lunch. “Did they take it away from you?” He replied that it hadn’t been taken away completely; but the regulations were changed so that if he wants immunity he has to ask the court for it. And he said he didn’t want to do that: He thought it would just give the government yet another chance to attack him.

(I’d met Barakeh once before, when our mutual friend Abu Leila—Kays Abdul-Karim, a Palestinian parliamentarian from the DFLP—introduced us during one of the regular weekly anti-Wall protests in Bil’in, last March. But there was too much tear-gas around for us to have any kind of a conversation then.)

—

One notable aspect of these U.N. conferences is that the Palestinian representation at them is highly skewed toward towards Fateh and its current allies. This is because Fateh still strongly dominates all the organs of the PLO, the body that runs the “official” Palestinian diplomatic effort worldwide. Thus, if you meet a Palestinian ambassador anywhere around the world, you can know that he (or in rare cases she) either is a long-time Fateh stalwart, or is beholden to Fateh in some way, or—in the rare cases of people of independent mindset—is constantly wrestling with her or his conscience as well as with the Fateh bosses in Ramallah.

This fact, and the fact that the Arab-state participants at these events are also stalwarts of their respective countries’ ruling parties or cliques, gives the proceedings a sometimes bizarre and unrealistic flavor.

Case in point: The extreme rarity of any mention during the sessions I attended, of the horrendous current situation in Gaza, or of Hamas.

Certainly, Hamas got no mention at all that I heard (and I didn’t get into the room till mid-afternoon of the first of the two days) from any of the Palestinian or other Arab participants. The only mentions I heard came from the representative of the Russian Federal Government, Mr. Ziad Sabsabi and from Dr. George Vella, the Maltese MP who chairs the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean’s ad-hoc Committee on the Middle East. (PAM was co-sponsoring this conference.)

Sabsabi spoke right after the U.S. Ambassador to Malta, Douglas Kmiec, contributed a slightly preachy lecture to the proceedings this morning. On balance, it was great that Kmiec took part in the proceedings at all, in notable contrast to Washington’s attitude to these UN conferences under both G.W. Bush and also, I think, Bill Clinton. (Kmiec went to lengths to negotiate an arrangement whereby he did not have to—gasp!—sit under the big conference banner proclaiming that this was a U.N. conference on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, but instead could speak from a specially organized lectern. Sabsabi sat at the long podium, under the banner, with all the rest of the presenters.)

Kmiec went to some lengths to lambast Hamas for its “undemocratic” record and mindset. Sabsabi, by contrast, spoke with great approval about the visit Hamas head Khaled Meshaal recently made to Moscow and the many helpful things he had said there. That was an interesting vignette right there.

One of the speakers whom I missed by flying in late for the meeting was the Turkish Deputy prime Minister, Cemil Cicek. Turkey is like Russia in that it maintains relations with hamas. Cicek didn’t mention Hamas directly in the printed version of his remarks that I picked up, though he did say a couple of sentences about the need to heal the rift between the two big Palestinian movements.

Cicek was also—along with Vella and Sabsabi– one of the few delegates to talk about Gaza. According to the printed version of his remarks, he said,

I also deem it our collective responsibility to help address the suffering and hardship the Gazans are facing. One year on from the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the wounds of the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza are yet to be healed. This is unacceptable.

This certainy reminded me of what happened when his boss, Rejep Tayyip Erdogan, was in Washington DC in December. Erdogan talked there at great length about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and publicly called on the U.S. and everyone else to work to lift the Israeli siege on the Strip. Afterwards, one Arab guy who was there noted to me that you would never find an Arab head of state prepared to say such things in public in Washington… Well, neither did you find many of the Palestinian or other Arab participants in this UN conference who were prepared to speak out about it. That was left, instead, to participants from Russia, Turkey, and Malta. Strange old world we live in.

I wonder, though, why there seemed not to be any representatives from Syria at the meeting. Was it because there were Israelis present? If so, that would be a pity, because as it was, the Arabs who dominated the proceedings were more-or-less “official” Egyptians and Jordanians (and pro-Fateh Palestinians).

All of that led to the fact that none of them wanted to say a word about Gaza or Hamas. So what could they talk about? Really, what all of them wanted to do was re-rehearse all the age-old Palestinian and Arab grievances against Israel from decades past.

—

Of course, if Fateh and Hamas can ever get their reconciliation agreement, then sharing power within the PLO will be a crucial part of that… And that might finally lead to the official “Palestinian” representation in international diplomacy having a more reality-based, up-to-date, and relevant character.

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Jarret Brachman, Abu Musab al-Suri Still Matters Online, 6 Feb 2010 "Al-Suri’s work is still running rampant through the forums"
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