Arab News Blog

A seemingly spontaneous Saudi-Israeli handshake at a European conference on security is mushrooming into what al-Quds al-Arabi calls an "unprecedented" public debate about the extent of official Arab-Israeli relations. The story isn’t especially interesting on its merits: Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (most recently in the news for an ill-considered snub of the Turkish ambassador) seized the opportunity at a security conference in Munich the other day to maneuver former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal into an unprecedented public handshake.

While it might not seem like much, the picture of the handshake has rocketed through Arab politics and has become the focal point for an unusually blunt public discourse on the well-known reality of official Arab ties to Israel. The way the story is playing out is an object lesson in the power of publicity in Arab politics and in the limits of the much-mooted new "alliance" between Arabs and Israel against Iran. It shows both that many Arab leaders are indeed perfectly willing to work with the Israelis, but also that the political costs of this in the Arab sphere remain high — and that Israel’s policies towards Gaza and the Palestinians really do have a cost even if Arab leaders themselves don’t seem to much care.

For the Netanyahu government, the handshake was something of a coup. It allows Israel to claim that its diplomatic isolation is less than it appears, and that the costs of their polices towards Gaza and the Palestinians are less than believed. It offered a rare glimpse of the possibility of normalization with the Arabs at a time when a sense of siege prevails. It reinforces the popular Israeli and American narrative that the Arabs are moving towards alignment with Israel in the face of a common Iranian threat, and that the immobilized peace process does not stand in the way.

At the same time, and for the same reasons, it was deeply embarrassing to the Saudis for Prince Turki to be photographed publicly shaking hands with Israel’s Foreign Minister at a time when Israeli policies and its government are more loathed in the Arab world than ever. A succession of top Saudi officials, including King Abdullah, have repeatedly insisted that there would be no normalization or peace with Israel until it accepted a two-state solution along the lines of the 2002 Saudi Peace Initiative. Prince Turki therefore put out a statement that Ayalon had been apologizing for
insulting the Kingdom, and that the handshake did not mean Saudi recognition of Israel (Ayalon tweeted that this was "as fanciful as Arabian Nights stories").

The Arab media (at least the non-Saudi owned Arab media) is having a field day. Many commentators are taking the opportunity to highlight the extent of official Saudi and Arab contacts with Israel, with Turki in particular identified as a "specialist" in meeting with Israelis at international conferences. Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar uses the "warm greeting" as a window into the long history of open and secret meetings between Arab officials and Israelis. I could give many, many more examples. Calling these meetings an "open secret" overstates their "secrecy"– such contacts have long been reported and discussed. The photograph has crystallized the issue for the moment, as fleeting as the moment is likely to be.

The handshake affair is worth a post because it both reinforces and undermines the emerging conventional wisdom in Washington that the Arab regimes and Israelis are increasingly allies against Iran. Such expectations of an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran are hardly new. The Saudis and Egyptians were more or less openly aligned with Israel in its war against Hezbollah in 2006 (remember Condi Rice’s "birth pangs of the new Middle East"?), and to a lesser extent in the war on Gaza in 2008. Even in public, the "new Arab cold war" of the last few years has fairly openly and directly aligned the conservative Arab regimes with Israel against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the "Resistance" bloc. Much of the official and Saudi-owned Arab media has for years been waging a heavy-handed campaign against the Resistance bloc, implicitly adopting many Israeli frames (Hamas and Hezbollah irrationality and irresponsibility, Arab moderation, Iranian threat).

But the Saudi pushback on the photo also shows the ongoing sensitivity of such relations, and the limits of the official media campaign in support of this supposed Arab-Israeli alignment. The images from Gaza and the ongoing impact of Netanyahu and Lieberman’s foreign policy has more than overwhelmed all the efforts to justify and legitimate such an approach to the broader Arab public. That anger is real, and quite potent in many Arab countries and in the wider Arab public sphere. The Saudis prefer to keep such relations private because of this very real outrage, and the real political costs of being on the wrong side in public.

It’s a common mistake to assume that only the private views of leaders or only public discourse matters. Both levels matter, the private Realpolitik of Arab leaders and the real passions of the Arab public. The depth of the gap between the private views of Arab leaders and the predominant views of the Arab public explains much of the vitriol of the current "Arab cold war". Many Arabs are worried about Iran, no doubt about it, and many in the official camp are deeply hostile to Hamas, Hezbollah, and most other forms of populist opposition. But most also continue to be genuinely outraged by Israeli policies and reject any public relationship. It’s a cliche to say so but also true: don’t expect the much-predicted Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran to ever live up to its hype (at least publicly) without real movement towards Israeli-Palestinian peace.

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A seemingly spontaneous Saudi-Israeli handshake at a European conference on security is mushrooming into what al-Quds al-Arabi calls an "unprecedented" public debate about the extent of official Arab-Israeli relations.   The story isn’t especially interesting on its merits:  Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (most recently in the news for an ill-considered snub of the Turkish ambassador) seized the opportunity at a security conference in Munich the other day to maneuver former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal into an unprecedented public handshake. 

While it might not seem like much, the picture of the handshake has rocketed through Arab politics and has become the focal point for an unusually blunt public discourse on the well-known reality of official Arab ties to Israel.   The way the story is playing out is an object lesson in the power of publicity in Arab politics and in the limits of the much-mooted new "alliance" between Arabs and Israel against Iran.   It shows both that many Arab leaders are indeed perfectly willing to work with the Israelis, but also that the political costs of this in the Arab sphere remain high — and that Israel’s policies towards Gaza and the Palestinians really do have a cost even if Arab leaders themselves don’t seem to much care. 

For the Netanyahu government, the handshake was something of a coup.  It allows Israel to claim that its diplomatic isolation is less than it appears, and that the costs of their polices towards Gaza and the Palestinians are less than believed.  It offered a rare glimpse of the possibility of normalization with the Arabs at a time when a sense of siege prevails. It reinforces the popular Israeli and American narrative that the Arabs are moving towards alignment with Israel in the face of a common Iranian threat, and that the immobilized peace process does not stand in the way. 

At the same time, and for the same reasons, it was deeply embarrassing to the Saudis for Prince Turki to be photographed publicly shaking hands with Israel’s Foreign Minister at a time when Israeli policies and its government are more loathed in the Arab world than ever.  A succession of top Saudi officials, including King Abdullah, have repeatedly insisted that there would be no normalization or peace with Israel until it accepted a two-state solution along the lines of the 2002 Saudi Peace Initiative.  Prince Turki therefore put out a statement that Ayalon had been apologizing for
insulting the Kingdom, and that the handshake did not mean Saudi recognition of Israel (Ayalon tweeted that this was "as fanciful as Arabian Nights stories"). 

The Arab media (at least the non-Saudi owned Arab media) is having a field day.  Many commentators are taking the opportunity to highlight the extent of official Saudi and Arab contacts with Israel, with Turki in particular identified as a "specialist" in meeting with Israelis at international conferences.  Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar uses the "warm greeting" as a window into the long history of open and secret meetings between Arab officials and Israelis.  I could give many, many more examples.  Calling these meetings an "open secret" overstates their "secrecy"– such contacts have long been reported and discussed.  The photograph has crystallized the issue for the moment, as fleeting as the moment is likely to be.  

The handshake affair is worth a post because it both reinforces and undermines the emerging conventional wisdom in Washington that the Arab regimes and Israelis are increasingly allies against Iran.  Such expectations of an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran are hardly new.  The Saudis and Egyptians were more or less openly aligned with Israel in its war against Hezbollah in 2006 (remember Condi Rice’s "birth pangs of the new Middle East"?), and to a lesser extent in the war on Gaza in 2008.  Even in public, the "new Arab cold war" of the last few years has fairly openly and directly aligned the conservative Arab regimes with Israel against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the "Resistance" bloc.   Much of the official and Saudi-owned Arab media has for years been waging a heavy-handed campaign against the Resistance bloc, implicitly adopting many Israeli frames (Hamas and Hezbollah irrationality and irresponsibility, Arab moderation, Iranian threat).  

But the Saudi pushback on the photo also shows the ongoing sensitivity of such relations, and the limits of the official media campaign in support of this supposed Arab-Israeli alignment.  The images from Gaza and the ongoing impact of Netanyahu and Lieberman’s foreign policy has more than overwhelmed all the efforts to justify and legitimate such an approach to the broader Arab public.  That anger is real, and quite potent in many Arab countries and in the wider Arab public sphere.  The Saudis prefer to keep such relations private because of this very real outrage, and the real political costs of being on the wrong side in public.  

It’s a common mistake to assume that only the private views of leaders or only public discourse matters. Both levels matter, the private Realpolitik of Arab leaders and the real passions of the Arab public.  The depth of the gap between the private views of Arab leaders and the predominant views of  the Arab public explains much of the vitriol of the current "Arab cold war". Many Arabs are worried about Iran, no doubt about it, and many in the official camp are deeply hostile to Hamas, Hezbollah, and most other forms of populist opposition.  But most also continue to be genuinely outraged by Israeli policies and reject any public relationship.  It’s a cliche to say so but also true:  don’t expect the much-predicted Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran to ever live up to its hype (at least publicly) without real movement towards Israeli-Palestinian peace. 

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There was a nice edition of the short BBC World Service radio program Witness today, about Osama Bin Laden. It focuses on Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, who met him in the late 1990s.

Listen here for the next seven days. Atwan’s book about al-Qaeda — The Secret History of al Qaeda —includes many of the vignettes he talks about here, and is a pretty interesting non-academic, non-CT oriented, account of Bin Laden and friends. Atwan is funnily self-deprecating as a pampered “five-star journalist” when served “soggy potatoes and rotten cheese.” I wonder if the gebna qadima was al-Zawahri’s contribution.

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There have been positive signals coming out of the Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks between Fateh and Hamas.

Al-Quds al-Arabi tells us that Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal, who met with Egyptian intel chief Omar Suleiman yesterday, signaled his agreement to the main compromise (on voting rules) being proposed by the Egyptians– and that he expects the reconciliation agreement to be completed “next month.”

Well, who knows? There have been so many false alarms before regarding the imminence of this agreement.

However, this time I think Suleiman and his prez may be more motivated than they ever have before to get this agreement completed. Previously, they were really a big obstacle in getting it completed. And Egypt does sit astride the only border Gaza has that is not 100% controlled by the Israelis– Gaza’s short border with Egypt is only around 99% controlled by Israel, under various agreements pursuant to both the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 and the Israel-PA ‘Agreement on Movement and Access’ of 2005… So Egypt also sits, in a very real way, astride the Hamas-Fateh nexus which is so central to lifting the siege of Gaza.

It’s not that, at this point, Suleiman and Pres. Mubarak suddenly want to see Hamas succeeding, or anything. But most likely they– like all Washington’s close Arab allies– are really upset by Obama’s slowness and mis-steps on the peace diplomacy and fearful of the regional explosion to which they might lead… So that may well lie behind their greater focus on succeeding in this mediation this time around.

Hamas also, pretty evidently, wants to see the reconciliation effort succeed. The pro-Hamas website PIC reported today Mishaal told a news conference in Cairo yesterday that, “there was a consensus on various issues between the Palestinian factions and the next round of the national dialog would only address some details.”

PIC also reported that a separate press release from Hamas on Monday,

affirmed that the flexibility demonstrated by its leadership in Cairo did not mean in any way that Hamas gave up its priority represented in the release of all political prisoners from Fatah jails in the West Bank.

That was necessary because the pro-US faction in Fateh recently carried out the arrest/”kidnapping” of a significant Hamas figure from the West Bank called Abdelbasset Al-Haj.

The current Egyptian proposal seems to stipulate a postponement in the holding of PLC elections. Instead of being held in January 2010 as currently scheduled, the new round would be held “sometime in the first half of 2010.” Ma’an has a lot of other details about the Egyptian proposal, here.

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… WINEP’s Schenker wonders… here

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Al-Quds al-Arabi has some good, substantial news articles about the continuing saga of preparations for Fateh’s 6th general conference, due to open tomorrow in Bethlehem.

It seems the conference is still on track to proceed, despite continuing problems regarding both the attendance and the credentialing of the delegates from Gaza.

This QA report tells us that the meeting of the Revolutionary Council (the medium-level body that stands between the Conference and the Central Committee was postponed from yesterday evening to this evening. It also has a host of other details about conference preparations.

Regarding the attendance of the Gaza delegates, there have been reports that both Hamas and Israel have (separately) prevented the travel of these delegates from Gaza to Bethlehem. I don’t think this would actually be a deal-breaking issue on its own– modern videochat/videoconference technology could certainly enable the delegates to take part remotely, though of course all these communications would be visible to everyone in the spy business, including of course the Israelis. But who is Fateh kidding? Of course their conference, like their movement, is already deeply penetrated by the Shin Beth.

Anyway, they already have provision for the ‘involvement’ in some form or another, of more than 200 of Fateh’s longstanding group of prisoners inside Israel’s (smaller) jails, who won’t actually be making it to Bethlehem. So what’s the big deal about whether the Gaza delegates can physically travel to Bethlehem or not?

That same QA report says that reliable Fateh sources in Bethlehem say there are some Gaza-origined Fateh people now in Bethlehem/ the West Bank who are credentialed for the conference– and they spell out that this is a reference to Muhammad Dahlan and his supporters– but who are afraid that if the conference goes ahead they could be called to account for the disastrous failure Fateh suffered at the hands of Hamas in Gaza in June 2007… and that if this looks likely to happen, the Dahlan group would prefer to call the conference off on the pretext of the non-attendance of the delegates who are still resident in Gaza, rather than go ahead with it…

Yes, wheels within wheels within wheels there. I guess that’s what happens when you try to run a political “movement” that has no functioning mechanisms of internal accountability except the sloshing around of huge amounts of US-mobilized money.

Xinhua, meanwhile, reported out of Gaza a short while ago that, Ibraheem Abu al-Najja, described as a Fatah leader in Gaza, told their reporter that,

“We have agreed to go ahead with holding the general conference without Fatah members of Gaza and to append them to the central committee and the revolutionary council after two months,” he told Xinhua.

Abu al-Najja had been in the West Bank but has just returned to the Gaza Strip “to join the Fatah people who were banned from heading for the West Bank.”

I don’t know if that means they’ll go ahead with the video-conference option, or not.

This whole business about who is prevented by Hamas from going to Bethlehem, who is prevented by Israel from going, and of course the continuing Israeli bans on just about everyone else’s travel into or out of Gaza, and on the travel to East Jerusalem of any West Bank Palestinians (or those visiting the West Bank for the conference) is a sort of very vivid and physicalized representation of the degree to which ll three of these parties can hold each other hostage….

Ah, but I don’t notice that anyone is holding any Israelis hostage in that picture, except for the one young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured while he was on a military operation just over three years ago.

So: one Israeli held hostage by Palestinians versus millions of Palestinians held hostage by Israel. That is a good representation of the balance of power on the ground… And therefore, a strong reminder, if such be needed, that just “leaving the two parties to work out the details of a final peace agreement on their own,” as so many people have suggested could only ever lead to an outcome that is highly coercive, unjust, and unstable, and thus an absolute non-starter…

Luckily, there is another basis for securing the peace agreement. That is international law, the resolutions and principles of the United Nations, and the full weight of the international community. So let’s get ahead and use all those tools as soon as possible!

It would help a lot, of course, if Fateh and Hamas could meanwhile speedily reach some kind of an agreement on how they’re going to work together, including in authorizing and monitoring the performance of a Palestinian negotiating team.

(Update #1, in case you missed it, was here.)

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