A (Mediterranean) Sea Change

The admission is just this side of stunning for anyone who pays even idle, passing attention to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians - but in all likelihood the overture made by Hamas on Friday - that Israeli forces were not responsible for a massive blast that killed seven of its fighters and a baby in the Gaza Strip, by saying that the explosion occurred as militants were preparing for "a jihad operation" - can be interpreted as an act of reaching out in peace by the Palestinians of Hamas.

Initially, Hamas blamed Israel for the blast that leveled the house and injured up to fifty people. In response, militants fired dozens of rockets and mortar rounds at Israel in the hours following the explosion. And naturally the rest of the story follows...Israel retaliated to the mortars by targeting militants.

And then, a piano dropped on my head...or it might as well have.


On Friday, the Islamist movement's armed wing issued a statement/admission: "Members of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades were trying to prepare for a jihad operation" when six members of the brigades were killed in the blast in Beit Lahya.

Despite preparations for further conflict, both sides on Thursday outlined their conditions for a truce with each other.

The Hamas leader, Ismail Haniya, speaking from Gaza said that any truce must include, "a lifting of the [Israeli] siege, with a precise timetable for opening the crossing points [out of Gaza] and a list of the categories of products that will enter the Gaza Strip."

"It is important that the Rafah terminal [between Gaza and Egypt] be part of the project for calm. The Israelis and others have insisted that the Rafah terminal not be included" in an eventual deal, he added.

The Israelis have been linking the opening of Rafah – the only outlet for Gaza that does not pass through Israel – to the freeing of Corporal Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas and others in a cross-border raid two years ago.

What is really noteworthy in this is that this is the first time Hamas has demanded a timetable for opening the crossings and a list of products since Israel imposed the blockade after the Islamist movement seized control of Gaza from forces loyal to Abbas last June.

And this post could go on for at least a thousand dissertations or at least as many pages as there are books in the old testament...but none of what would be contained therein is as important as this...HAMAS ADMITTED THEY WERE TO BLAME FOR AN INCIDENT IN GAZA.

I don't care what your politics or motives are...that is an undeniable peace overture.

~~BG

Jimmy Carter Acts Like a Statesman Again

What is a statesman? Is it a soothing presence like James Baker, willing to lend his name to things like "The Iraq Study Group" so that the United States can ignore what was offered as advice in exchange for an extra six months of pretending the war in Iraq is going well? Or is it something more like Jimmy Carter, who stands up and delivers knock out blows to the collective consciousness of people who pay attention to what's going on?

Chris Floyd nails it:

Here's a thought experiment. Try to imagine a major American political figure boldly calling on Europe to break with the United States, unilaterally lift the blockage on Gaza and negotiate directly with Hamas, the democratically-elected government of Palestine.

He then goes on to reveal -- from his access to the most highly classified intelligence -- that Israel, far from being at risk from "destruction" by Iran or anyone, possesses a minimum of 150 nuclear weapons: the first time that any such high-level U.S. official has ever publicly confirmed the existence of Israel's arsenal, much less detailed its size.

What's more, this Establishment renegade then calls for the complete withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, combined with pledges of massive aid to rebuild Iraq "from the destruction we've caused."

Yes, Jimmy Carter did just that over the weekend. Did any of that appear in your newspaper or on your television? Chances are, if it ever does, it will be accompanied by the sneering presence of someone who has worked tirelessly to provide political cover to the Bush Administration. Think of a Fox News roundtable and a wholesale condemnation of Carter, accompanied by sneering and leering and misinformation.

What did Jimmy Carter do that was so wrong? He met with people and used his status as a former President to advocate for peace. Then, he had the temerity to follow through on what he had promised. And, he had the courage to speak about what he was doing:

Although it is 27 years since he left the White House, Carter recently met Hamas leaders in Damascus. He declared a breakthrough in persuading the organisation to offer a Gaza ceasefire and a halt to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel if Israel stopped its air and ground strikes on the territory.

Carter described western governments' self-imposed ban on talking to Hamas as unrealistic and said everyone knew Israel was negotiating with the organisation through an Egyptian mediator, Omar Suleiman. Suleiman took the Hamas ceasefire offer to Jerusalem last week.

Israel was still hesitating over the ceasefire, Carter confirmed yesterday. "I talked to Mr Suleiman the day before yesterday. I hope the Israelis will accept," he said.

While being scrupulously polite to the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who represent the Fatah movement, he was scathing about their exclusion of Hamas. He described the Fatah-only government as a "subterfuge" aimed at getting round Hamas's election victory two years ago. "The top opinion pollster in Ramallah told me the other day that opinion on the West Bank is shifting to Hamas, because people believe Fatah has sold out to Israel and the US," he said.

Carter said the Quartet's policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams "a very militant supporter of Israel". The ex-president, whose election-monitoring Carter Centre had just certified Hamas's election victory as free and fair, addressed the Quartet for 12 minutes at its session in London in 2006. He urged it to talk to Hamas, which had offered to form a unity government with Fatah, the losers.

That, in a nutshell, is what a statesman does. This, in a nutshell, is what delusional neocons do:

Confidential documents obtained by "Vanity Fair" magazine have surfaced that appear to show that the U.S had planned to overthrow the Hamas-led Palestinian government shortly after they won their election in 2006.

In one of the documents, from March of 2007, detail a plan to remove Hamas by force. By supplying weapons and money to rival Fatah fighters, the U.S could install the movement into power, even though Hamas was democratically elected.

Sources at the U.S. State Department and Palestinian officials corroborate the documents, which revealed the plans were to be implemented by the State Department.

[SNIP]

The report confirms long-standing allegations by Hamas and other Palestinian officials that the U.S has been supplying arms and money to Fatah, so that fighters could "bring down the government". Even some senior Fatah officials themselves have accused the U.S of "meddling" in Palestinian affairs.

The magazine said that Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams "were entrusted with provoking a Palestinian civil war", and also quoted a former U.S Intelligence officer--experienced in covert planning--as saying that the plan was "close to the margins" of legality, but "probably wasn't illegal".

Your State Department at work. These are the people who are enabled by the people who sneer at Carter. These are the people who were supposed to bring dignity and honor back to Washington. And, once can just hear the "anti-Semite" charges cranking up, courtesy of the likes of Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz. Floyd notices that Carter let loose with a bombshell:

Carter's unprecedented explicitness regarding Israel's nuclear weapons somehow escaped the notice of the Guardian -- which sponsored the festival and conducted the interview -- but The Times picked it up:

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark...is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line.

But Carter, who as president had full access to America's secret knowledge about Israel's arsenal, steamrolled right over the long-held public line. The existence of this arsenal is of course the true context of Middle East relations: the fact that Israel can "obliterate" any of its antagonists in a matter of minutes, while none of them poses, even remotely, a similar "existential threat" to Israel. Yet the entire U.S. "bipartisan foreign policy establishment" gears much of its Middle Eastern policies around the professed goal of guaranteeing the survival and security of Israel.

The plain fact is that Israel is more than capable of guaranteeing its own survival. As for its manifold security problems, these might be better addressed by a more realistic, pragmatic engagement with its neighbors, and with the Palestinians locked down under its control. But as long as Israeli leaders can count on the full backing of the United States -- financially, diplomatically and militarily -- no matter what they do, they will have no incentive to come to any viable terms, and can continue their own dominationist policies, which over the years have only bred more suffering, more radicalization and more intransigence in their opponents.

How can it be wrong to point out that what is happening in Gaza is a humanitarian nightmare? Are all of the people complicit in the crimes of a militarized few? Wouldn't it make sense to reach out to the suffering and encourage them to get involved in the political process? Or is it too late, given that the Bush Administration has meddled in the affairs of these people to an extent that has blown away any possible chance of American influence?

I think the most important question is not whether there really are 150 nuclear weapons in Israel's arsenal. The most important question is whether any of them are scattered or deployed throughout the world for strategic reasons.

Either way, how much of a threat can Iran really be to a country with 150 nuclear weapons?

This is not the sort of thing that fosters peace

Miyasar Abu Maatak gathered her six children around the breakfast table this morning, like mothers worldwide do every morning, before sending their families out into the world. But Miyasar Abu Maatak's kitchen table was in Gaza, where the only guarantee is that everyone is in peril pretty much every second of every day.

As the family ate breakfast, their house exploded, killing the mother and four of her children, one an infant, only fifteen months old.

Palestinian witnesses and the IDF offer differing accounts of what, exactly, happened to level the house and kill five innocents.

Palestinian witnesses insist that a shell fired from an Israeli tank struck the families dwelling, and the IDF insists that an Israeli tank fired on and hit two militants who were carrying heavy arms, and when the shell hit them, the ordinance they were carrying exploded, blew back and destroyed the house behind them.

But does it really matter how their house exploded?

Not so far as I can tell. A mother and four of her children are just as dead, and two more children are gravely injured and if they survive they may have significantly compromised quality of life, especially in a troubled community like Gaza. It doesn't matter whose arms killed them. Do you think that the grieving father and husband, who escaped death or injury by virtue of running an errand to the market, cares whether the explosion was caused by an Israeli shell directly, or indirectly? His children and his wife are gone. In less time than it took for him to run an errand, his life is upended, his heart not merely broken, but shattered.

What the fuck does it matter which finger-pointing thug is right?

A thug pointing the finger is still a thug.

And what the hell else do you call anyone, no matter which fable they embrace so fervently they can easily kill the "other" and call it collateral damage? You have two warring factions with no regard for civilian lives who have the pat response when something like this happens that "we have to retaliate against (circle one) Hamas terrorists/Israeli aggression."

I am just so fucking sick of this. I have been wailing about it since 1983, when I walked into the membership warehouse on Speedway in Tucson with my friend Linda Kovacs, to learn that the barracks in Beirut had been attacked between leaving home by the back gate of Davis-Monthan and arriving at our shopping destination. I could not leave the bank of teevees - one of my husbands best friends from highschool was a Marine in Beirut. The last time we saw him before departing for D-M, my husband, upon learning he had enlisted in the Marines in 1982, said "I hear Beirut is lovely this time of year." That was a tense 24 hours before we heard from his mother that he was okay.

Almost 25 years of wailing in grief and working for peace, still to no avail.

Can we listen to Moishe Dyan yet? You want to make peace, you talk to your enemies, not your friends. We know this to be true. Why the fuck, all these years on, do we still refuse to listen?

Although I am perhaps the least religious person you will ever encounter, I close this post with a prayer for peace. Oseh Shalom, Gaza.

Your Secretary of State in all her incompetent glory

What I wouldn't give for a competent State Department right now.

Condoleeza Rice is still parroting the party line, that Annapolis was the beginning of a grand lasting peace, and the Bush administration can broker a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians - even as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rebuffed her, refusing to publicly commit to restarting peace talks with Israel.

This annoyed the Bush administration no end. The official Bush position is that his refusal to agree to return to the table lends credence to Hamas, whose political arm took control of Gaza after a brief civil war that deposed the Palestinian Authority to the West Bank last June. They accuse Abbas of handing Hamas a "tactical victory" by "allowing it to hijack Arab-Israeli peace negotiations."

As for Abbas, he seems to be enjoying standing up to Israel and the United States for a change. So I'm not holding my breath that he is going to be in a rush to comply just cuz Condi sez. And I'm sure not betting the farm on the Bush administration brokering any sort of lasting peace! In fact, the mere notion that these incompetent nincompoops even deign to peddle that line of bullshit makes me snort with derision. They are leaving office with a Middle East legacy, all right. But it most certainly is not the one they envision.

Annapolis

After seven years of diplomatic neglect, George Bush has set aside a day - yes, one day - tomorrow - to try to work out the intractable six-decades-long Israel/Palestine problem.

What, pray tell, do they think they can accomplish in one day? Ask the people in the Middle East and you discover that Arabs and Jews can indeed agree on at least one thing: When asked that question, they all answer "Not much."

Oy vey. Even the choice of location is damning: The United States Naval Academy is the setting, and the motto of the Navy is "Don't give up the Ship" - invoking tenacity and determination, not diplomatic acumen and compromise. In Arabic, "Ana" means "I" and people the world over know the word "police." A Saudi humorist joked that the choice of location was an arrogant message from Bush to the Middle East "I am the police."

The question of borders has plagued both Israel and the neighbors for over 40 years, since June 4, 1967; and the implementation of the Six Day War armistice. Since then, conservative, some would say fundamentalist whack-job, settlers have made the occupied territories their home. Kicking them out of the West Bank will not be as easily achieved as the same feat was two years ago, when the settlers were evicted from Gaza. The Gaza Strip is not biblically significant. Jews do not have deep emotional or historical attachments to Gaza. Not so the West Bank, which is historically, theologically and emotionally significant to most Jews worldwide - let alone the "fundamentalist whack jobs" I just referenced. I can't see removing them without violence. The issue of borders certainly isn't going to be achieved in a day.

And you can't talk about the borders without acknowledging the 800-pound-gorilla playing the zither in the sitting room: Jerusalem.

On paper, the equation balances. The Arab neighborhoods would fall under Palestinian control, and the Jewish neighborhoods would be controlled by Israel. Except it gets dicey real quick - the neighborhoods are intertwined.

Ask any chemist - when you are working with volatile compounds, the slightest variation from the recipe and it will blow up in your face. And what cocktail could be more volatile than the 35 acres of the walled city of Old Jerusalem? All three of the major monotheistic religions consider Old Jerusalem and the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount to be sacred ground.

The problems are exacerbated by Christianist Zionists (who should make with the butting out already) who stick their noses where they don't belong and urge their constituencies to pressure the Israeli government to take Jerusalem off the negotiating table. Fortunately, we are making headway, and even the occasional Zionist Rabbi Is waking up and smelling the coffee. But before any Jew throws in with that lot, remember they are mentally ill. They want to precipitate Armageddon and damn us all to their hell. Those Jews who wake up pissed every morning that the Messiah didn't come last night find natural allies in them. The rest of us find ulcers, migraines and anxiety. Again we have a problem that's going to take more than a day to sort out.

And then you have nearly four and a half million Palestinians living in limbo, many still in refugee camps. And everyone, Jew and Arab alike, needs to be scolded by my grandmother for being obstinate jackasses and using the Palestinian people as pawns, especially the Arab world. They really screwed the Palestinians in 1948, the bastards. All of the Arab neighboring states should be held accountable. They are every bit as culpable as Israel in contributing to the suffering of the Palestinian people and need to be called out on that publicly. There is plenty of sin and blame to go around. Everyone has behaved abominably and nobody gets a pass. This can't even be mentioned at Annapolis. Hell, it would take a good 6 months of Arabs storming the door every time that little bit of reality comes up and is said aloud. I shake my head in disbelief. They offer a day? Oh, the humanity...

And how the hell do they even bring up security in the time allowed?

This is why I don't often write about Israel and Palestine. It's damned infuriating. No one is asking me, but if anyone did, I would say Frost was employing irony; good fences do NOT make good neighbors. The first order of business should be to tear down that damned fence and fill in the trenches, and restore the 10% of the territory that it's construction seized.

Then I would say let Gaza go to Egypt. Give the West Bank to Jordan. Give the Golan Heights to Syria, and let a disinterested third party settle the border with Lebanon, and nobody would get to whine about it. And suck it up. Learn to live with a divided Jerusalem.Until everyone concerned learns how to act, I would make Old Jerusalem a U.N. protectorate. Don't like it? Learn how to act.

But no one is asking me. Probably because they are afraid I would tell them.

UPDATE FROM COMMENTS: Pale Rider is spot on as usual.

You can't make this shit up:

[Indeed! You gotta get this...BG]

"Annapolis" was named after Queen Anne of England:

Queen Anne was the last of the Stuarts, the second daughter of James II and his first wife Ann Hyde.

She was shy, conscientious, stout, gouty, shortsighted and very small.

Anne was 'homely', and she did not have a particularly happy married life. Her husband, Prince George of Denmark, was a drunk and a crashing bore!

Prince George was a gross, rather ridiculous figure, even King James, Anne's father, remarked "I have tried him drunk and I've tried him sober, but there is nothing in him".

And:

Alex Haley, the late author of the world-famous account of his family entitled Roots, was able to trace back the arrival of his ancestors, who had been kidnapped from Africa, to the Annapolis City Dock. Although Maryland was formally a slave state, many of its citizens opposed the institution. Archaeologists have found that there was a large, free African American population in the area before the Civil War.

Rice and Gates are off to the Middle East on a Salvage Operation

On Monday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will leave on a highly unusual joint mission to the Middle East. They leave with three objectives, and low expectations.

They need to persuade Iraq’s neighboring states to do more to help stabilize the country, they need to counter the growing influence of Iran in the region, and they hope to get some significant motion going on the development of a peace plan between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Lofty goals, but not likely to be very successful. The United States has little or no credibility in the region. The U.S. has caused massive death and instability in Iraq, and strengthened al Qaeda; they have also failed to calm the strife in Lebanon, bolster the Palestinian Authority, or bring pressure to bear on Syria.

Quite the contrary – U.S. policies have fanned the flames of Sunni extremism, and strengthened Iran. Those are the two things that cause the greatest consternation among the moderate Arab countries, because those are the two entities that threaten their grip on power.

Also not playing well to the locals is U.S. support for the ill-fated Israeli war against Hezbollah last summer. Continued attempts to undermine the popularly-elected Hamas in the Gaza strip. "The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas." Couple that failed strategy with United States’ continued support for Mubarak in Egypt, it pretty much puts the lie to claims that the United States “fosters Muslim democracy.”

The leaders of friendly states have lost faith in the Bush administration and do not believe he will deliver on his promises. Therefore, they are reluctant to risk anything for Bush. “Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

One needn’t read Runes to see other signs of discord in the administration.

On the eve of the trip, unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times that Washington believes Saudi Arabia has been unhelpful in Iraq by not supporting Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government. The administration publicly disavowed the report, but said that Saudi Arabia could do more to help. The leaked complaint seems unlikely to make life easier for Rice and Gates when they arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, early in the trip.

Pentagon and State Department officials said the trip is intended to reassure Arab leaders that the U.S. will uphold its security commitments in the region, and meanwhile, Arab diplomats in Washington resolutely maintain that they need more than reassurances. They have heard a lot of proposals and reassurances, but they have not seen a clear plan for peace or security in the region. The U.S. promises a more active role, but consistently fails to deliver. Arab diplomats in Washington voiced skepticism – anonymously – that the trip would be fruitful.

More than what Rice and Gates say on the trip, “[P]eople will be monitoring the debate in Washington. Everybody is watching that very closely and then will draw their own conclusions.” said one anonymous diplomat.

“There is no clarity,” another diplomat said on condition of anonymity, because he didn't want to disagree publicly with the administration. “The trip in and of itself is not important. What’s important is that the administration commit to dealing with the substantive issues.”

Rice and Gates have their work cut out for them. With 18 months left in office, it will be difficult to reshape the way the region sees the United States, said William Quandt, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, who as an aide to President Jimmy Carter helped craft the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

“I don’t think they have a real strategy that has much chance of working,” Quandt said. Gates, who joined the administration in December, “may be able to calm things down a little. But that won’t change the course.”

The two Secretaries will attend meetings together in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then they will part company. Gates will visit “other gulf states” and Rice will head for Israel and the Palestinain territories to meet with Mahmood Abbas and Israeli leaders. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to the popularly-elected Hamas, which now controls Gaza, but Rice has steadfastly maintained that there will be no dealing with the Hamas, which is the U.S. classifies as a terrorist organization.