Arab News Blog

UPDATED: Tomorrow morning’s Ha’aretz is reporting the UK and Ireland are asking Israel about the identity theft involved in the false passports; while a Ha’aretz editorial questions whether the whole affair raises questions about the safety of Israeli immigrants’ identities, since some genuine immigrants’ names appeared on the passports. Just yesterday Avigdor Lieberman was coyly saying there was “no proof” that Israel was behind the hit.

Half the Middle East bloggers and websites and many others all over the Internet have already posted this, but just in case some of my readers haven’t seen it, the Dubai police compilation of closed-circuit camera videos of the hit team that killed Hamas figure Mahmud al-Mabhouh in Dubai is like watching something out of John LeCarre. So I’ll post it too. It’s in three parts. Some are comparing it to the film Munich, but it also serves to remind us of how ubiquitous surveillance cameras have become. All three videos take up close to a half hour.

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Well, on Thursday I was finally able to get out of Washington… I had a long layover in Munich yesterday and got here to Malta, to the U.N. conference on Palestine, about an hour after the start of the session I was scheduled to speak in… No matter, they were running hopelessly behind schedule, so the session started around 20 minutes after I appeared. I didn’t have time to print out my presentation but delivered it by read it on my laptop. Not ideal, but not too bad, I felt.

Wow. I’m really impressed with the U.N. information system. They already have a press release out about the session I took part in, and you can read there the words I would have delivered in dulcet tones had I not been rushing a little through the end of my presentation on Jerusalem. (I gave them the text on a thumbstick. Must get it back.)

Working on the paper, which I did Wednesday and in the Munich transit lounge yesterday, really helped me think through several things about the Jerusalem Question that have been rattling around inside my head for a while now. I argued there that thinking seriously about how to establish a fair and sustainable governance system in Jerusalem could actually help everyone perform the same task regarding the whole of the area of Mandate Palestine… And numerous people– going back to early work that Naomi Chazan, Rashid Khalidi, and others did ways back in the 1980s, and continuing until today– have done some good, often very fair-minded and visionary work on Jerusalem issues.

Within a two-state model for the whole of Mandate Palestine, Jerusalem could be either divided or shared under some form of a corpus separatum model, and I explored in the paper how we might design a CS 2.0 for Jerusalem that would not have the imperialistic overtones of CS 1.0. Dividing it between the two states would almost certainly be a horrendous process, and could lead to the prolongation of many of the gross inequities of the existing, settler-dominated order things there. (See, for example, the Geneva Initiative’s proposal for how to divide Jerusalem.)

It also would still require a huge amount of coordination between the governments of the two states– something that Mick Dumper underlined in this important recent essay.

Wouldn’t it be better, therefore, to go back to the old CS model and explore how that could work in the two-state context– which was, after all, the context in which the CS idea was first presented, during the Partition Plan of 1947, which remains the UN’s last definitive word on territory and governance issues in the whole of Mandate Palestine.

I note, too, that the EU has recently, slightly tentatively, revived its interest in the CS idea.

So you could look at how to devise a fair, sustainable CS model for Greater Jerusalem in the context of a two state solution… and each of the two states could indeed have its national capital well within the city.

My idea of this is laid out a bit more in my paper. As soon as I’ve cleaned it up a bit, I’ll upload it here for you all to see.

Alternatively, once you’ve done all that work on how to govern Jerusalem, why bother with preserving those other territorial units within Mandate Palestine (the rest of the independent states of Israel and Palestine)? Why not just expand the concept of the shared Jerusalem to the whole area and have one state in it that is equitably shared, accountably governed, and to which everyone with a legitimate claim on the land could return?

… Anyway, those were some of my ideas. I also underlined the perilous, extremely oppressive situation in which Jerusalem’s 260,000 Palestinians are currently forced to live and the hair-trigger nature of the situation in the city, which must be of great concern to the whole world community.

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The Munich Security Conference added little to prospects of peace in the Middle East, reports Dina Ezzat from Munich
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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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Burried in this WaPo story, here

“… Political directors of the six nations negotiating with Iran held a conference call Friday to discuss their next steps, but diplomats reported that the group is divided over whether and how to seek new sanctions.

“If in the future, hypothetically, if new sanctions are imposed, we are sure that sanctions should be limited to nonproliferation only and not be expanded to cultural, humanitarian, economic parts of Iranian activity,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said at the Munich conference…”

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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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We’re still digging out here from the big storm and the Federal Government (and MEI which follows the Feds) will be closed tomorrow, though I’ll be posting here. First though, in case you missed it, one of the big subjects of discussion in the region is the handshake at a security conference in Munich between Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Dany Ayalon and Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal (former head of Saudi Intelligence, former Ambassador to London, former Ambassador to the US — and he was a year ahead of me at Georgetown). Here’s Ha’aretz here, Kuwait’s Al-Qabas here, Jerusalem Post here, and Prince Turki’s explanation of the handshake to the Saudi Arab News here.

It’s in the first six or seven seconds of this YouTube video; Turki is obviously seated in the front row and Ayalon is on his way to join the panel.

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Munich, Feb 6 (DPA) Taliban-linked extremism in Afghanistan is blossoming because of Western intervention there and is set to spread to India, Central Asia and Arab states, Iran's foreign minister has warned.
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If you follow the Middle East online, unless you limit yourself to the Arab side of the fence, you’ve probably run across some of the commentary from pro-Israeli bloggers, Israeli media, neocon bloggers, and conservative bloggers generally denouncing Joe Stork of Human Rights Watch. I don’t normally get into personalities here at this blog: not my thing. I did write a couple of posts noting that Chas Freeman, back when he was nominated for the National Intelligence Council, was not the Israel-bashing ogre his opponents portrayed.

Now, like a lot of people who’ve been around the Middle East community in Washington for a long time, I know Joe Stork. Not well — certainly not as well as I know Chas Freeman, which isn’t all that well either — but I’ve known Joe since the late 60s or early 70s when he was a founding father of MERIP Reports, the ancestor of the current MERIP Middle East Report. Joe has always been somewhere to my left politically, often considerably so. In the earlier days, he and I were both no doubt farther left than we are today. I haven’t seen Joe in several years, and aside from random meetings at receptions or on the street haven’t had an extended conversation with him in this decade. So I’m not defending Joe’s positions today. He’s perfectly capable of doing that himself.

What I do want to note is that the attacks on him seem to be a classic case of shooting the messenger. Joe, Deputy Director for Middle East and North Africa at Human Rights Watch, was the author of a much-headlined report HRW issued, claiming that there were instances of Israel Defense Forces shooting white-flag-carrying Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.earlier this year. Here’s HRW’s press release, and here’s the 63-page report in HTML and also in PDF. And here’s an HRW response to criticisms of the report’s contents.

I have not read the full report. I intend to do so, but suspend judgment on its contents until I have read it, and Israel’s responses to it. When allegations of war crimes are made, they should be investigated and judged, based on evidence and testimony. If the allegations are unfounded, they should be dismissed. If otherwise, Israel should investigate them, as it often has when similar allegations of violations of the laws of war by the IDF have been raised.

But while there has been some effort on the Israeli side to refute the basic content of the charges or to impeach the witnesses, there has also been a concerted attempt to blame the messenger and attack Joe Stork ad hominem without addressing the content of his report. And most of the attacks focus on things he said or wrote over 30 years ago, and one thing he did not even sign, if he had any connection with it at all.

The Israeli daily Ma’ariv did a report on the HRW report which focused heavily on Joe Stork’s background, and made the rather sensational charge that he had personally defended the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes. The Ma’ariv article is translated in this Commentary piece by Noah Pollak. Others have noted that the “defense” of Munich was in an unsigned MERIP editorial which also said that the morale-boosting element did not justify the violence. But of course, quoting out of context is a common tactic in ideological disputes. But to directly attribute this to Joe Stork seems a bit extreme, but even if he signed off on it (as he well may have) it was 37 years ago. Has anyone asked if he agrees with the point today? The editorialists just seem to say he never “repudiated” his earlier statement, which wasn’t signed by him in the first place. Joe has never to my knowledge been a strong defender of Israel (especially its human rights policies), but I’ve also never heard from him the sort of radical ideas attributed to him in these attacks.

Now, MERIP in their early days were, indeed, old 60s radicals who first called themselves the “MERIP Collective” and were pretty Marxist in their rhetoric. Joe was one of them. But so were Joel Beinin, who has been President of the Middle East Studies Association; Judith Tucker, Editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Director of Academic Studies at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies; and Eric Hooglund, a predecessor of mine as Editor of The Middle East Journal. Bill Clinton didn’t inhale, but he figured out a way to finesse his 60s background. I doubt if very many Baby Boomers who graduated in the late 60s or early 70s would like their entire body of expressed opinion in that era to be aired publicly today.

I also remember, however, going to a party MERIP held in (perhaps) the late 70s or early 80s, though I’m not quite sure why I was invited. It may even have been at Joe Stork’s house. Much of the conversation was about mortgages. I realized then, that if MERIP was talking about mortgages, the 60s were over.

As I said, Joe can defend himself. But it strikes me as both disingenuous and downright unfair to 1) accuse Joe Stork of holding the same positions he held in the early 1970s; 2) attribute to him a position taken by an anonymous editorial in his magazine and then 3) leave out the qualifiers that denounce the violence.

Or, to put it another way: is this really your best response to the unwelcome message: to attack the messenger? Let’s leave Joe Stork out of it and respond to the allegations.

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Statement by 40 Engaged Scholars

‘Human Beings are Members of a Whole’

Protecting the Iranian Civil Society

Human beings are members of a whole,

In creation of one essence and soul.

If one member is afflicted with pain,

Other members uneasy will remain.

If you have no sympathy for human pain,

The name of human you cannot retain.

–A poem by the Persian poet Sa’adi (1210 – 1290)

gracing the entrance of the Hall of Nations

of the United Nations building in New York City

If we speak out against the threat of force against Iran (regarding the nuclear conflict) and warn against a military strike, we cannot be silent on the use of force in Iran itself against its own civil society. For solidarity with the civil society and a peaceful order in the region constitute the primary concern of our efforts. If we condemn foreign sanctions against the Iranian people, we deplore all the more domestic sanctions directed at peaceful demonstrators, journalists, trade unionists, professors, students and others. Thereby the government deprives itself from the domestic basis needed against foreign threats.

Not only as individuals but also conjointly as a group of engaged scholars, we want to announce our resolute protest against the brutal clampdown of demonstrators and against the mass arrests, and strongly advise a peaceful dialogue with the civil society. We call upon the government to release all political prisoners of the last few weeks – amongst them many professors – and to seek dialogue with precisely those persons as moderators of the civil society. Freedom of opinion and the right to demonstrate – cornerstones of the UN Charter of Human Rights to which Iran is a signatory – are being massively violated in today’s Iran.

We strongly remind that the state of siege and the continuing threat of force that have emanated from foreign governments once again fatally demonstrate how thereby the space for a democratic development in Iran are being reduced.

At the same time, we deplore the slanted and misleading depictions of the recent events in Iran in some international media. As supporters of the Iranian civil society, we stress the genuine nature of the protests by the Iranian democracy movement. Composed of various societal strata, the demonstrators first and foremost have advocated free elections and freedom of expression.

Also, it is astonishing that precisely those who have supported crippling sanctions and pushed for preventive strikes against Iran whereby civilians have been and would be harmed, suddenly speak about solidarity with the Iranian people. They only will be convincing when they stand up against sanctions and the threat of force and advocate a peaceful dialogue in the region.

Signed by:

1. Dr. Behrooz Abdolvand, Free University of Berlin & Academic Advisory Board of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)

2. Prof. Gilbert Achcar, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

3. Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London

4. Ahmad Ahgary, Association of Iranian Scientists and Engineers in Germany (VINI)

5. Prof. Mohammad Ala, Persian Gulf Taskforce & Iran Heritage

6. Tariq Ali, writer, London

7. Dr. Katajun Amirpur, Jesuit School of Philosophy in Munich

8. Dr. Matin Baraki, University of Marburg & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

9. Angelika Beer, Co-Chair of the EastWest Institute’s Parliamentarian Network for Conflict Prevention and Human Security, Brussels

10. Dr. Bettina Bouresh, Archive of the Regional Authority (Landschaftsverband) Rhineland, Germany

11. Reiner Braun, International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

12. Prof. Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University

13. Prof. Hans-Peter Dürr, Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) 1987 & Patron of the International Munich Peace Conferences

14. Prof. Abbas Edalat, Imperial College London & Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)

15. Ali Fathollah-Nejad, University of Münster & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

16. Prof. Sasan Fayazmanesh, California State University, Fresno

17. Prof. Ali Gorji, University of Münster

18. Homeira Heidary, “Panorama Hindukush” Festival, Cologne

19. Foaad Khosmood, University of California at Santa Cruz & CASMII International Steering Committee

20. Prof. Mohssen Massarrat, University of Osnabrück & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

21. Naz Massoumi, convenor of Campaign Iran, London

22. Prof. Georg Meggle, University of Leipzig

23. Prof. Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh, Tarbiat Modares University of Tehran & Urosevic Research Foundation, London

24. Tobias Pflüger, former MEP (German Left Party) & Information Agency Militarization (IMI), Tübingen (Germany)

25. Daniel M. Pourkesali, U.S. Board of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran (CASMII)

26. Prof. Ahad Rahmanzadeh, University of Bonn & & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

27. Sanaz Raji, University of Leeds & London School of Economics and Political Science

28. Lt. Col. Jürgen Rose, German Air Force, Munich

29. Prof. Werner Ruf, University of Kassel & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

30. Prof. Dr. Nader Sadeghi, George Washington University, Washington D.C.

31. Prof. Muhammad Sahimi, University of Southern California, Los Angeles

32. Dr. Sabine Schiffer, Institute for Media Responsibility (IMV), Erlangen (Germany)

33. Dr. Yvonne Schmidt, University of Graz & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

34. Prof. Ursula Schumm-Garling, Sociologist, Frankfurt

35. Miriam Shabafrouz, German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Hamburg

36. Siba Shakib, author & filmmaker

37. Prof. Albert Stahel, University of Zurich & Academic Advisory Board of CASMII

38. Dr. Rainer Werning, political scientist & author (Germany)

39. Kaveh Yazdani, University of Osnabrück (Germany)

40. Azadeh Zamirirad, University of Potsdam (Germany)

End/ (Not Continued)

Cont’d (click below or on “comments”)

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