The Hamas-Fatah fake deal is falling through: I was pretty confident it wouldn’t last until September. Looks like I was right. Of course, the AP has already written one hagiography of how awesome Hamas is going to be in the unity government. Hands-off. Won’t impose any of their policies. Not at all. Nope. They’re just joining the cause so they can have a state called Palestine. After that, nothing. Just like the Muslim Brotherhood’s hagiography. Yes, the AP is that gullible. “Islamic group seeks place in a democratic Egypt”… sure. They want democracy. Their younger members are all about the Facebook, you see.

Bashar Assad falling down? Falling down? Falling down? Bashar Assad falling down? Awww, dorktator. (Actually, I have no sympathy at all for him, and hope that the Syrians don’t hate Israel in spite of the indoctrination they’ve had. Not that I think they do. I just hope.)

Just business: While looking at a news article about oil being in a bear market (WOOT!), I noticed that Microsoft is taking over Skype, and as a reward to the people who built Skype into such a desirable tool, they’re firing them now so they won’t have to pay more money if they’re fired when Microsoft takes over. Awesome. Stories like this is what makes me hate large businesses like Microsoft.

Abbas does not have a mandate to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians since his term in office had expired in January.

Nothing like forcing Abbas to negotiate against his will on behalf of a people whom he does not legitimately represent! There is a slight problem here, I think.

And now, Rahm Emanuel says, is the “moment of opportunity” to make peace.

“And the President has been clear what we need to do to seize this moment of opportunity here in the region to finally make peace,” Emanuel said.

“Peace where Israel feels secure and peace that is in balance with the Palestinians aspirations for sovereignty. That is possible,” he said. “It is now the time, given where we are, to basically find that proper balance.”

The “moment of opportunity”? Why, because Hamas is willing to make peace? Really? Because only today, Mahmoud al-Zahar said this:

Senior Hamas official Mahmoud a-Zahar called for West Bank residents to fire rockets into Israel, Israel Radio reported Sunday.

“There is no escaping from these rockets in the West Bank,” Zahar said to the east Jerusalem newspaper al-Quds. “Why should they only be in the Gaza Strip?”

He added that Hamas policy will not change no matter how long the blockade of Gaza continues, and whether or not Hamas will win the next elections in the West Bank.

That Hamas New York Times op-ed is looking more and more like, um, let me think, what’s a delicate way to put this? I know: Complete and utter falsehoods.

So is it a “moment of opportunity” because Mahmoud Abbas is looking for peace? But wait: Fatah just cancelled new local elections because their candidates can’t win. And Mahmoud Abbas says the two-state solution is “eroding.” Oh, and that anti-Israel incitement that Abbas said the Palestinians weren’t behind? Yeah, he was lying.

Or does Rahm Emanuel really mean that there is a “moment of opportunity” because the Obama administration thinks it can blackmail the Netanyahu administration with the threat of withholding a veto of a UN resolution about the Gaza flotilla incident? There is blood in the water, and the sharks are circling. Here’s where the U.S. generally throws Israel a lifeline. Let’s see what happens during the July 6th meetings (and hope that the Hezbullah false flag Mariam expedition doesn’t give the world another fake cause to bash Israel with.

I am not hopeful.

But what is perhaps most significant is what is not in the document.  The original Fatah charter (or constitution) from the 1960s embraced “the world-wide struggle against Zionism,” denied Jewish historical or religious ties to the land, and called for the “eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.”  None of that language is carried over into the new charter, which manages not to mention Israel, Zionism, or Jews at all.

But as Barry Rubin points that’s not necessarily so significant.

Now here’s an important lesson for you. When a radical group is portrayed as moderate based on some position it supposedly has taken or some statement made there has to be a catch somewhere. Here’s the tip-off in this case, a single sentence in the new charter:

“This internal charter has been adopted within the framework of adherence to the provisions of the Basic Charter.”

In other words, every detail of the original charter still holds; nothing is repealed, no error admitted, no explicit change of course accepted.

There is a good reason that there’s no discussion of Israel, Zionism or Jews in this new charter, as it appears to be a guide, in excruciating detail, how to join and remain a member in good standing of Fatah and its various committees and sub-groups. It is not a document that explicitly expresses a political view, though as Barry Rubin writes, one may be inferred.

What is intriguing, however, is that there is a detailed discussion of transgressions of Fatah rules and punishments for doing so. Clearly, if members do anything the leaders don’t like they are going to face severe penalties. Thus it is significant that no Fatah member has been ever disciplined for committing acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians or for making the most extremist statements. Indeed, it isn’t even clear that Fatah has the determination or ability to punish members for collaborating with Hamas against their own leaders.

This document in no way shows any moderation on the part of Fatah and there’s plenty of evidence the other way including last summer’s Fatah elections and Mahmoud Abbas’s anniversary celebration.

BTW, look at the different ways Arab News and the JTA report on this document.

First Arab News.

At its first congress in 20 years, Fatah stressed its commitment to a negotiated peace with Israel. But delegates stopped short of renouncing violence.

“Fatah stresses its commitment to the pursuit of a comprehensive peace but reiterates the Palestinian people’s right to resistance to occupation in all its forms in line with international law,” the new charter said.

Now the JTA.

U.S. Jewish groups, spurred by the Zionist Organization of America, have long called for Fatah, the party of the more moderate leadership of the Palestinian Authority, to renounce the negationist language of earlier charters. The calls have been repeated in a number of congressional resolutions in recent years.

Such language is absent from the new charter, although it maintains a militant tone in its preamble,which says, “You must know that our enemy is strong and the battle is ferocious and long.”

There is no renunciation of the earlier language, and the preamble says the new charter “has been adopted within the framework of adherence to the provisions” of the 1989 charter.

Nonetheless, missing entirely from the charter is the reported language of the 1966 version that called for Israel’s destruction and in the 1989 version that implied Israel’s replacement, albeit through peaceful means.

JTA, then subscribes to all the incorrect conventional wisdom about Fatah and even ascribes to it a change in ideology that has never occurred. Arab News may originate in the sands of Saudi Arabia, but it is the reporter for the JTA who has his head in the sands.

UPDATE: Barry Rubin piles on the JTA.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

As members of Fatah leave their conference preparing to govern their people effectively, they offered what sounds like a tantalizing commitment. They reiterated their commitment to the “peace option.”

We would like very much to take the delegates’ words at face value, and it would be a lot easier to do that if they hadn’t laced their resolutions with terms like “armed struggle.” Even now, Fatah has not spelled out exactly what terms it is offering as a “peace option.” The resolutions passed rarely mentioned “Israel” without the word “boycott” nearby and nowhere has Fatah disavowed its stated goal of destroying Israel — which we believe must be part of any serious regional peace effort.

New York Times editorial – A peace option without peace – August 15, 2009

Actually the New York Times featured no such editorial. Had the editors of the Times bothered to study the record of the Fatah convention – available at MEMRI – they might have made such arguments. Actually the above “editorial” is my spoof of “Being a peace partner,” the Times’s thoroughly dishonest of Prime Minister Netanyahu assuming office back in March.

The media’s incuriousness about what went on at the Fatah conference is remarkable. This willful blindness is really perverse given the tendentiousness with which they cover Israeli politics.

The Washington Post celebrated Netanyahu’s election with an editorial “Israel’s step backwards.”

ISRAEL’S ELECTION last week propelled the country back in time to a political era when the parliament was sharply divided between parties that favored or opposed a two-state settlement with Palestinians. As in the 1980s, the right has the upper hand: Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu appears to have the best chance to become prime minister, even though his party finished second behind the centrist Kadima. Americans who remember Mr. Netanyahu’s last stint as prime minister in the 1990s — and there are several in the Obama administration who were working on Mideast policy then — have to be concerned that he would repeat his strategy of seeking to delay or undermine all peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He might also press for Israeli or American military action against Iran, and he has promised to “topple” and “uproot” Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

The 1990′s, as I recall, was a time when Arafat said many of the right things to the Americans and the international media while fomenting terror against Israel. He was falsely hailed as a peacemaker as he sought and won recognition for a change that he never rmade. Netanyahu didn’t buy that act. If hesitating to give into an unrepentant terrorist is “undermin[ing] all peace negotiations” those negotiations were doomed to failure. Still for all the fears expressed by the Post’s editors in this editorial, they were still somewhat amazed that President Obama apparently accepted their advice. Later they observed that the President was only “Tough on Israel.”

ONE OF THE MORE striking results of the Obama administration’s first six months is that only one country has worse relations with the United States than it did in January: Israel. The new administration has pushed a reset button with Russia and sent new ambassadors to Syria and Venezuela; it has offered olive branches to Cuba and Burma. But for nearly three months it has been locked in a public confrontation with Israel over Jewish housing construction in Jerusalem and the West Bank. To a less visible extent, the two governments also have differed over policy toward Iran.

Still the Post’s editors have yet to pronounce any judgment on last week’s Fatah convention. The extremism on display really renders any Israeli moderation moot. It seems that just because Fatah is the “moderate” party in Palestinian politics, any inconvenient contrary evidence must be disregarded.

For example, little attention has been paid to the man now in position to succeed Abbas as head of Fatah. Here’s how Barry Rubin describes the situation:

Fatah has apparently chosen as its next leader a man, Muhammad Ghaneim, who rejects the 1993 Israel-PLO (Oslo agreement) and the ensuing peace process. He was so passionately opposed even to negotiating with Israel that he refused to go to the Gaza Strip and West Bank with Yasir Arafat in 1994. He refused to participate in the Palestinian Authority which was created by the Oslo agreement. And when he later decided to go to PA-ruled territory—but without denouncing his previous view—Israel blocked it.

It would be as if Russia chose a hardline Stalinist as its next leader and that fact was not deemed worth reporting. Might not this tell us something important about the politics and future policies of Fatah and hence of the PA, too?

Why did all those people—two-thirds of the delegates–vote for him? Ghaneim got 33 percent more votes than did Barghouti, who not only has a personal base of support but the appeal of being a “political prisoner.”

Ghaneim is simply not that personally popular. I can speculate that he is the candidate of hardline Fatah chief Farouq Qaddumi, a man who is close to Syria’s radical dictatorship, who is popular but too old to run himself. But the key reason is that Mahmoud Abbas, PA and PLO leader, and his colleagues told delegates to vote for Ghaneim.

In general Rubin writes:

These two men—Abu Ala and Dahlan—are among the most moderate in Fatah. In their heads, they probably know that a compromise two-state solution is the best way forward for the Palestinians. But they will never have a chance to implement such a policy for two reasons.

First, the movement will always choose a much more hardline leadership—and I don’t necessarily mean as the nominal front man but as the group’s and the West Bank’s real rulers. Already, it is clear that the next leader of Fatah, the PLO, and the PA is Muhammad Ghaneim a man who—and this is no joke—is far more hardline tactically than Arafat. Ghaneim has still not even accepted the 1993 Oslo agreement which Arafat signed and which provides the basis not only for the peace process but for the PA itself.

Second, they know that whatever their personal views they must out-militant everyone else, insisting that there can be no concessions to Israel and that the Palestinians must maintain their demands inflexibly, glorify violence, while competing with Hamas in their inflexibility and radical rhetoric.

Overwhelmed by a belief that peace is near, media outlets pretend that it is only unreasonable Israel inflexibility that prevents a deal, ignore the the extreme elephant in the room. Essential to that belief is that Fatah is moderate and is capable of making a deal. Peace must be near. Fatah must be moderate. So Israel must be intransigent. That’s the apparent reasoning. If the media wasn’t so stuck on moderate, maybe they’d realize that the other two premises they hold are also wrong.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Another important step is that the P.L.O. is to renounce terrorism, according to some officials. But they add that the P.L.O., now outlawed in Israel, is ready to go further, by formally recognizing Israel’s right to exist and revoking sections of its 1964 convenant that call
for Israel’s destruction.

When that happens — and one official said it could be a matter of only a few weeks — Israel and the P.L.O. would recognize each other. The Palestinian group’s leadership would then be allowed to move into Gaza and Jericho, several officials said.

“It would no longer be the same P.L.O.,” one official argued. “It would become in effect a political body and not a terrorist organization.”

And indeed, if it truly had renounced terror and its intent to destroy Israel, the PLO would have been a new organization. Supporting this step we had the late Chaim Herzog.

We also are seeing an exercise in leadership that has followed a completely unconventional route, attended by great dangers; seemingly it is irreconcilable with the approach universally accepted by most Israelis, who put the P.L.O. beyond the pale. What the leadership now maintains is that by the P.L.O. declaring its abandonment of the weapon of terror and its covenant calling for Israel’s destruction, it becomes a political movement with which one can negotiate and argue.

This is a unconventional approach, based on a long-range vision, But then that is what leadership is all about.

Then opposition leader Netanyahu wrote (rather prophetically):

The Rabin Government is now betting the security of Israel on Yasir Arafat’s promises. But his promises are worthless. He has violated every political commitment he has ever made. Since his “breakthrough” promise in 1988 to stop P.L.O. terror, his own Fatah faction has launched more terrorist attacks against Israel than any other Palestinian group. Similarly, he repeatedly “recognizes” Israel for some political gain — only to take it back later.

An armed P.L.O. state looming over Israel’s cities and overflowing with returning “refugees” (a million to start with, says the P.L.O.) is a far cry from a responsible compromise that would give Israel security and Arabs autonomy. Instead of giving peace a chance, it is a guarantee of increased tension, future terrorism and, ultimately, war.

(It is a strange exercise reading these articles. Netanyahu – who was correct – was, and still is often, considered a “right wing demagogue,” whereas those who supported the Oslo accords were considered the voices of reason.)

isabel Kershner reports on the most recent Fatah convention in Bethlehem.

“It speaks about a peaceful solution,” said Sarhan Salaymeh, the mayor of the West Bank town of Al-Ram, who spent 13 years in an Israeli prison. “It is the time for nation building, not fighting,” he said. “The rifle has its own time.”

Yet Fatah, still defining itself as a national liberation movement, is reluctant to fully abandon the gun. In a statement outlining the principles of its new political charter, the party reaffirmed its commitment to achieve a just peace, but said it believed the Palestinians, as a people under occupation, retain the legitimate right of resistance “in all its forms.”

Elder of Ziyon notes that Fatah’s old terminology persists. And Fatah has elected a convicted murderer to its central committee.

Yasser Arafat and Fatah made a down payment on legitimacy by supposedly renouncing terror in 1993. Now 16 years later Arafat’s successor still refuse to eschew terror and yet their international legitimacy persists.

Apparently those who consider “two states for two peoples living side by side peacefully” believe that the formulation is the equivalent of “liquidate the Zionist entity.”

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Some of the younger generation of reformers, who are hoping to increase their power within the movement, complained that the traditional leaders had packed the conference with their own supporters at the last minute.

“They brought their relatives, their secretaries,” said Hussam Khader, a firebrand Fatah leader from Nablus who has long campaigned against corruption in the movement.

Well apparently Kuddar has done more than campaign against corruption. The Guardian sat profiled him last year.

Khader was arrested at his home in March 2003 and convicted of being a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the Fatah movement that played a key role in the second intifada, and of helping fund the group through connections to Hizbullah and Iran. He was sentenced to seven years in jail but released after five and a half. It was his 24th time in an Israeli prison – he was first arrested at age 13 for taking part in a demonstration against the Israeli occupation.

So he funded a terrorist group through Hezbollah and Iran. So “reformer” then isn’t necessarily such an innocuous term in this case.

Khaled Abu Toameh observed recently that Fatah was being radicalized and that …

… one of the most disturbing signs of the growing radicalization of Fatah can be seen in calls by top representatives for a “strategic alliance” with Iran’s dictatorial and fundamental regime.

Kershner doesn’t tell us if Khader is one of those advocating for that alliance, but given his arrest, it’s hardly a stretch to believe that he is. But of course, all we know him as is a “firebrand” reformer.

Later on Kershner writes:

Delegates have come to Bethlehem from as far as Yemen and the United States. They include people as diverse as Sari Nusseibeh, an intellectual from Jerusalem who has championed nonviolence, and Khaled Abu Asba, who took part in a notorious attack in 1978 in which an Israeli bus was hijacked and about three dozen Israeli civilians were killed.

Barry Rubin observed that the AP didn’t report:

… the cheers for terrorists who murdered Israelis but were present at the meeting.

And neither did the New York Times. Again I think it’s safe to assume that Abu Asba was applauded. Kershner, though, simply used him as an example of the “diversity” of those attending the conference. I don’t know that “diversity” is a virtue when it involves including and honoring murderers.

So when Kershner reports that

One point of consensus reached on Thursday was the notion that Israel was responsible for the death of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader and Fatah founder, who died in 2004. In the convention hall, delegates blamed Israel for having kept the ailing Mr. Arafat under siege in his headquarters in the West Bank. Fatah officials said they would continue to investigate the circumstances of his death, and suspicions that Israel poisoned him.

it sounds more bizarre than malicious. It’s indicative that Fatah is still less interested in fighting corruption than in fighting Israel or in creating an independent state. (h/t memeorandum) But without more information – that Kershner could have provided – we can’t get a sense from her report how the Fatah conference has improved or hurt the chances for peace. Given those omissions, my suspicion is that the latter is true. That’s the sort of news that’s not fit to print.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The day was filled with contradictory messages reflecting the disarray in Fatah. A huge poster on the wall bore the legend “Resistance is the legitimate right of our people” alongside a black-and-white photograph from the 1960s of a Palestinian youth with a gun.

Mr. Abbas reminisced about the early years of armed struggle against Israel. But he also stressed the need for new, more appropriate forms of resistance while pursuing negotiations for an independent Palestinian state. He blamed a lack of discipline in part for Fatah’s failures.

A stickler for law and order, Mr. Abbas also proudly noted that Palestinians now wear their seat belts, or face being fined.

I’m not sure what’s contradictory about calls for resistance if Fatah’s platform calls for “restrained violence.” Or does Kershner mean that the call for fastening seat belts was inconsistent with the calls for resistance.

Linda Gradstein reports in the Washington Post

Israeli officials, meanwhile, say they would like to strengthen Fatah as a counterweight to Hamas, which denies Israel’s right to exist.

Both articles play up the “moderation” of Fatah, which Barry Rubin has shown, stretches the definition of the word. Then again there’s a history of re-defining “moderate” when describing Fatah. (Though I give Kershner credit for at least mentioning the presence of the word “resistance.”)

Gradstein also writes:

The Fatah conference opened amid signs that the Obama administration is planning a new push for the resumption of peace talks. A spokesman for Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Tuesday that Barak told a parliamentary committee that the United States will present a new peace plan within weeks and that, in his view, “Israel should accept it.”

Israeli news media say the plan is based on a 2002 Saudi proposal calling for normalized ties between Israel and more than 50 Arab states in exchange for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

How will the supposed “moderation” of Fatah facilitate the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts when Fatah is teaching its next generation that all of Israel is “occupied territory,” when its leaders are encouraging the Arab states not to engage with Israel and even “moderate” Arab states don’t seem to need that exhortation as the daylight the Obama administration has shown them has encouraged them to avoid normalization.

Or to put it succinctly: how can an American diplomatic effort help when even Fatah doesn’t make peace its priority? (And why would any Israeli politician encourage Israel to join in the American effort unlikely to accomplish anything?)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Barry Rubin wrote an informative roundup of the personalities who will be participating. Most importantly he observed:

Of the Fatah Central Committee’s seventeen surviving members, only three can be classified as relative moderates. At least seven can be called radicals—many still oppose the original 1993 Oslo agreement—even in relation to the late PLO, Fatah, and PA leader Yasir Arafat. The remaining seven might be called hardliners whose views are close to those of Arafat, which makes any peace agreement with Israel impossible.

Terror Wonk republishes an old profile of radical Farouk Kaddoumi.

The agenda

According to Dion Nissenbaum, the conference will be about Fatah’s becoming relevant again. But Pinchas Inbari argues that the conference will be about going back to the past:

And here we come to the essence: Fatah retains the armed struggle as a strategy in order to liberate the whole of Palestine and eliminate Israel. Article 12 calls for “the liberation of Palestine completely and the elimination of the state of the Zionist occupation economically, politically, militarily, and culturally.”6 (Indeed, one of the methods mentioned in the Political Program for the “peaceful intifada” is an economic boycott of Israel.)

Article 13 calls for “establishing a sovereign democratic Palestinian state on the entire Palestinian territory that will preserve the legitimate rights of the citizens on the basis of justice and equality without discrimination on the basis of race, religion and belief, and Jerusalem will be its capital.”7 While the Political Program lists the “one-state solution” as an option in case the “two-state solution” fails, the Internal Order document mentions the “one-state solution” as the only solution.
Article 17 says: “The armed popular revolution is the only inevitable way to the liberation of Palestine.”8

Finally, Article 19 notes: “The armed struggle is a strategy and not just a tactic and the armed revolution of the Arab Palestinian people is a decisive factor in the war of liberation and the elimination of the Zionist existence, and the struggle will not end until the elimination of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine.”9

While Fatah’s Political Program tries to accommodate international expectations and seems designed to mobilize international legitimacy for the re-launching of a “peaceful intifada,” Fatah’s “Internal Order” reminds us how deeply ingrained in Fatah is its ideology from the 1960s and 1970s.

The consequences

Israel Matzav sees a possible split in Fatah coming. Media Backspin sees the conference as a possible prelude to a new intifadah (and makes other observations too).

Conclusions

Despite the administration’s push for peace, it appears that there is very little appetite in the Arab world to make peace with Israel. Even Fatah, which presumably would have the most to gain has made it clear through the spoken and written (via memeorandum) word that it prefers terror to peace with Israel. In other words don’t expect much to change. Certainly not for the better.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In the Washington Post’s report:

Israeli officials have, in recent days, pointed hopefully to indications that support for Hamas within Gaza is eroding. Israeli and Palestinian analysts say Israel’s strategy appears to be to weaken Hamas enough that the group has no choice but to sign a truce on Israel’s terms. But there is a risk that approach could backfire.

Rawiya Shawa, an independent Palestinian legislative council member who lives in Gaza City, said attacks on targets such as mosques and university buildings are uniting the population behind Hamas and neutralizing the internal opposition.

(Notice how no news reports say anything like “Hamas’s efforts to wreak havoc on Israel might backfire and lead Israel to destroy the infrastructure that Hamas has worked hard to build.” Only Israel has to worry about backfiring strategies.)

And of course there was Daoud Kuttab’s offensive op-ed (via memeorandum):

While it is not apparent how this violent confrontation will end, it is abundantly clear that the Islamic Hamas movement has been brought back from near political defeat while moderate Arab leaders have been forced to back away from their support for any reconciliation with Israel.

What’s abundantly clear is that it’s not at all obvious that Hamas will benefit from this war. If Israel miscalculates and ends the war unsatisfactorily, it will benefit Hamas just as the war in 2006 benefited Hezbollah. But if Israel significantly degrades Hamas’ capabilities and kills a number of Hamas’ leaders, Hamas will be weakened.

Contrary to what Kuttab wrote, Egypt (which has enable Hamas to re-arm and fortify its offensive capabilities) blamed Hamas for the fighting.

Now Jeffrey Goldberg reports that a friend of his from Fatah, is rooting for the IAF! (via memeorandum)

I’ve been talking to friends of mine, former Palestinian Authority intelligence officials (ejected from power by the Hamas coup), and they tell me that not only are they rooting for the Israelis to decimate Hamas, but that Fatah has actually been assisting the Israelis with targeting information.

(There is some room for skepticism. Would Fatah really admit to helping Israel? Or are they gauging that Hamas is that unpopular? After all Hamas was supposed to be the good government terrorists and they haven’t delivered a better quality of life for Gaza in the past two years.)

And Hamas isn’t necessarily winning hearts and minds in Gaza either:

[Interviewer] “How many were you?”

[Girl] “Seven.In the other room were my mother, my father, my yonger brother and another sister, who is 13 days old. I say, Hamas is the cause, in the first place, of all wars.”

Those concerns about Israel’s offensive backfiring are the hopes of those who doesn’t wish Israel to defend itself. I don’t think that it’s all “abundantly clear” that Israel will end up strengthening Hamas by destroying it.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.