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Egypt Activists Accuse Police of Torture

By NADIA ABOU EL-MAGD
Associated Press Writer
May 26, 2006

CAIRO, Egypt — Egyptian police allegedly tortured two protesters -- sexually assaulting one of them -- after a peaceful demonstration in support of pro-reform judges, a lawyer and an opposition group said Friday.

Activist Mohammed el-Sharkawi, 24, was sodomized "using a rolled up piece of cardboard for nearly 15 minutes," his lawyer Gamal Eid told The Associated Press.

"Almost all of el-Sharkawi's body is bruised, swollen, or cut," Eid said. "I haven't seen such brutality and sadism since 1995," he added, referring to a period when the state mounted a crackdown on Islamic militants.

The alleged assault occurred Thursday night after el-Sharkawi was taken to a Cairo police station, the lawyer said. The lawyer said El-Sharkawi told him about the incident when Eid was permitted to attend an interrogation session later that night.

Interior Ministry officials were not available for comment.

An Associated Press reporter on Thursday saw more than 15 men in plainclothes grab el-Sharkawi and punch and kick him after he participated in a peaceful protest outside of the Journalists' Syndicate in downtown Cairo.

The demonstrators were expressing solidarity with about 300 judges who were staging a sit-in outside the Supreme Court at the same time. The judges called for full independence of the judiciary in response to the hauling of two judges before a disciplinary panel for telling the media that their colleagues condoned fraud in last year's elections.

Throughout Thursday's protest, el-Sharkawi was silent as he held sign that said: "I want my rights back."

El-Sharkawi is a member of Youth for Change, affiliated with the political opposition movement Kifaya, which means Enough.

A Kifaya statement on its Web site alleged police tortured another protester, Kareem el-Sha'er.

"He was kidnapped from his car and then taken to the same police station where he was tortured," Eid said.

On Friday, state prosecutors ordered el-Sharkawi and el-Sha'er detained for 15 days, accusing them of insulting President Hosni Mubarak, incitement and illegal assembly.

Reporters Without Borders described el-Sharkawi and el-Sha'er as bloggers and condemned their arrest and alleged abuse. The Paris-based press freedom watchdog also said plainclothes police sprayed Los Angles Times reporter Hossam el-Hamalawy with tear gas as he covered the protest.

"The eyewitness accounts we have received about the arrests of the bloggers and the attack on the L.A. Times reporter are very disturbing," the group said in a statement.

El-Sharkawi and el-Sha'er were detained three days after they had been released from one month's incarceration for an earlier peaceful demonstration.

Kifaya says 60 of its activists arrested in April are still being held.

The United States recently criticized Egypt's handling of the pro-reform protests.

A Million Iraqis Flee War-Torn Country For Haven In Jordan

By David Enders
Washington Times
May 27, 2006

AMMAN, Jordan -- Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq more than three years ago, as many as 1 million Iraqis have fled to Jordan to escape lawlessness or to find jobs.

The flight has created an exile community that is well in evidence at the Mecca Mall, where many of Amman's well-heeled go to shop. Rich Iraqis float in and out of the stores while poorer Iraqis are working 12-hours shifts to finish a new addition to the shopping center.

"If the security situation was 50 percent better, I would go back," said Suma Mohamed, who left the restive Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya with her husband and daughter a year and a half ago. On this day, she was shopping for housewares in Amman.

Mrs. Mohamed is fortunate -- she has residency in Jordan, a boon open to Iraqis who have at least $150,000 stashed in a Jordanian bank.

Many of the Iraqis that pour in and out of the country are granted three-month visas at most, and sometimes as few as three days. Jordanian officials have tightened their rules in the wake of suicide bombings carried out by Iraqis in Amman last November.

Mrs. Mohamed's husband is a businessman, and made the decision to leave after his brother's house was raided by the U.S. military and his brother was detained for nine months.

Others have come to Jordan to escape the kidnappings and assassinations that are rampant in Iraq and often target doctors and other professionals.

Mustafa Al-Hiti is the former dean of Baghdad University's College of Pharmacy, and after surviving a pair of assassination attempts in 2003, he decided to move his family to Jordan, where he now runs a pharmaceuticals company.

Mr. Hiti has tried to remain active in his country's future, however -- despite living mostly in Amman. He won a seat in parliament in December's elections with the National Dialogue Party, a grouping of secular Sunnis headed by Saleh Mutlaq.

Mr. Hiti said he is planning to go back to Baghdad later this month.

"The destruction is exponential in some parts of Baghdad," he said, describing his last trip to the Iraqi capital. "The people go home at six."

The influx of Iraqis has created some grumbling among Jordanians, especially as their country faces shortages of resources and rich Iraqis drive up prices. But Mrs. Mohamed said Jordanians on the whole are still supportive.

"They understand the problems Iraqis are having," she said. "Iraqi children are allowed to attend public schools here if they can't afford private ones." Mrs. Mohamed's family lives in Umm Udhaina, a expensive neighborhood in Amman.

"More people are arriving from Iraq every day," she said.

In a sense, exile is part of the Iraqi experience, as political purges during the past four decades have at one time or another forced one group or another to flee.

But the end of the 1991 war brought on the international isolation of the Iraqi state and a new kind of flight, one that drove out people with no politics, simply in hope of escaping a crumbling country.

'75 Kissinger Memo Discounted Israel

By Calvin Woodward, Associated Press
Washington Times
May 27, 2006

The United States reached out to hostile Arabs three decades ago with an offer to work toward making Israel a "small friendly country" of no threat to its neighbors and with an assurance to Iraq that the U.S. had stopped backing Kurdish rebels in the north.

"We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel," then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told his Iraqi counterpart in a rare high-level meeting, "but we can reduce its size to historical proportions."

A December 1975 memo detailing Mr. Kissinger's probing conversation with Foreign Affairs Minister Saadoun Hammadi eight years after Iraq severed diplomatic relations with Washington is included in some 28,000 pages of Kissinger-era foreign policy papers published in an online collection yesterday.

George Washington University's National Security Archive released the collection, drawn from papers available at the government's National Archives and obtained through the group's Freedom of Information requests.

In it, Mr. Kissinger tells Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in June 1972 that the United States, mired in Vietnam, probably could live with a communist government in South Vietnam as long as that evolved peacefully. "If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina," he said.

He also hints that the United States, newly courting China, would consider a nuclear response if the Soviets were to overrun Asia with conventional forces.

At the time, Chinese-Soviet tensions were sharp and the United States was playing one communist state against the other as best it could while seeking detente with its main rival, Moscow.

The transcript of Mr. Kissinger's meeting with Mr. Hammadi in Paris sheds light on a little-known maneuver that spoke to America's broader effort to win friends in the Arab world even as it was giving military support to the Jewish state.

The meeting was frank and open -- diplomats' preferred description of any such meeting but in this case, true. And Mr. Hammadi, a friend of the Soviets, was a tough sell.

"We are on the other side of the fence," Mr. Hammadi asserted. "What the United States is doing is not to create peace but to create a situation dominated by Israel."

Mr. Kissinger pressed: "Our attitude is not unsympathetic to Iraq. Don't believe; watch it."

He said U.S. public opinion was turning more pro-Palestinian and U.S. aid to Israel could not be sustained for much longer at its massive levels. He predicted that in 10 or 15 years, "Israel will be like Lebanon -- struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world."

Mindful of Israel's nuclear capability, a skeptical Mr. Hammadi peppered Mr. Kissinger with questions, including whether Washington would recognize Palestinian identity and even a Palestinian state. "Is it in your power to create such a thing?"

Mr. Kissinger said he could not make recognition of Palestinian identity happen right away but, "No solution is possible without it."

"After a settlement, Israel will be a small friendly country," he said.

Mr. Kissinger said U.S. officials had believed Iraq was a Soviet satellite state but had come to a "more sophisticated understanding now. We think you are a friend of the Soviet Union but you act on your own principles."

Saddam Hussein was then vice president, in control of internal security and oil.

When Mr. Hammadi persisted with complaints about U.S. support for the Kurds, Mr. Kissinger brushed them off by saying, "One can do nothing about the past."

"Not always," Mr. Hammadi countered as the meeting closed and he escorted Mr. Kissinger to the door.

Washington and Baghdad renewed relations after the start of the Iran-Iraq war; Mr. Hammadi became prime minister in the Saddam era.

The collection, also available in microfiche, consists of some 2,100 memorandums of Mr. Kissinger's secret conversations with senior officials abroad and at home from 1969 to 1977, serving under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

William Burr, senior analyst for the research group, said the papers are the most extensive published record of Mr. Kissinger's work, in many instances offering insight into matters that the diplomat ignored or merely touched on in his prolific memoirs.

Undercover Work Deepens Police-Muslim Tensions

By ANDREA ELLIOTT
The New York Times
May 27, 2006

It is no secret to the Muslim immigrants of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that spies live among them.

Almost anyone can rattle off what they regard as the telltale signs of police informers: They like to talk politics. They have plenty of free time. They live in the neighborhood, but have no local relatives.

"They think we don't know, but we know who they are," said Linda Sarsour, 26, a community activist.

It is another thing for them to be officially revealed. Over the last several weeks, during the trial of a Pakistani immigrant who was convicted on Wednesday of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station, Muslims in Bay Ridge learned that two agents of the police had been planted in the neighborhood and were instrumental to the case.

They absorbed the testimony of an Egyptian-born police informer who had recorded the license plate numbers of worshipers at a mosque. They heard that an undercover detective, originally from Bangladesh, had been sent to Bay Ridge as a "walking camera."

The trial's revelations, and its outcome for the defendant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, have brought a bitter reckoning among Muslims in the city. Many see the police tactics unveiled in the case as proof that the authorities — both in New York and around the nation — have been aggressive, even underhanded in their approach to Muslims.

And despite the conviction of Mr. Siraj, who was found guilty on all four of the counts he faced, some Muslim leaders remain convinced that he was entrapped, including an imam who knew the informer and had found him to be suspicious.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly declared the verdict a milestone in the city's fight against terrorism. Muslim leaders say they support efforts to safeguard the country, but many believe that the Siraj case may have set back another battle that the police have been waging: to win their trust and cooperation.

In Bay Ridge, Palestinian, Syrian and Egyptian immigrants have long engaged in their own form of surveillance, trying to discern the spies in their midst. It is a habit imported from the countries they left behind, where informers for the security services were common and political freedoms curtailed.

In the years since Sept. 11, as word of informers spread among the smoky sheesha cafes and tidy mosques of Bay Ridge, a familiar fear has fallen over the neighborhood. It asserts itself quietly, in the hush of conversation and the wary stares that pass between strangers.

"It's like a police state here," said Omar Maged, 34, an assistant teacher at a public high school. "We do not feel that we are living in the most free country in the world."

In the wake of the trial, police officials sought to dispel the notion that they are taking aim at the Muslim community.

Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman, said undercover officers were used only to investigate reports of possible criminal activity. This was the case, he said, with the detective involved in the investigation of Mr. Siraj. The officer had been sent to live in Bay Ridge for two years.

"The notion that he was in there gratuitously observing the Muslim community is false," Mr. Browne said.

The relationship between law enforcement and Muslims has long been fragile.

After Sept. 11, Muslims came under immediate and intense pressure by the authorities. Hundreds of men were detained for questioning and thousands nationwide were placed into deportation proceedings.

Over time, a necessary, if uncomfortable relationship emerged between Muslims and the police watching over them. Efforts were made by both camps to cultivate trust.

"We've been repairing the cracks steadily and gingerly," said Wael Mousfar, the president of the Arab Muslim American Federation.

These days, police officers introduce themselves at Ramadan dinners and town hall meetings. Federal agents sit on committees with Muslim activists and hold workshops with imams.

Last month, the Police Department hired a Turkish immigrant to work as a full-time liaison with the Muslim community.

But the Herald Square case gave pause to some of the Muslims involved in the outreach.

"This is a real setback to the bridge building," said Michael Dibarro, a Jordanian immigrant who until recently worked as a clergy liaison with the Police Department. "We had meaningful meetings. We thought we were going somewhere with this."

Others complained of what they see as a two-tiered approach by the authorities: on one level it is public, and on another, it is hidden.

"They want to formally be introduced to the community but they don't need to be," Ms. Sarsour said. "They already have their informants among us."

On May 12, in the middle of the trial of Mr. Siraj, Mr. Kelly met with 150 Muslims at a youth center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He showed them a 25-minute video that the Police Department created to train new officers to be sensitive toward Arabs and Muslims. He said he was there to hear their "concerns about issues of public safety," according to a transcript of his speech.

Only after several questions did anyone mention the trial. Debbie Almontaser, a board member of a Muslim women's organization, told Mr. Kelly that she was saddened that the police had resorted to "F.B.I. tactics," and that she thought this was polarizing the Muslim community.

Applause swept the room.

Mr. Kelly told the audience he could not comment on the case.

Whether it will seriously hinder relations between the authorities and Muslims in New York remains to be seen. Some were doubtful.

"This is a chance to enhance our relationship with the police," said Antoine Faisal, the publisher of Aramica, an Arabic and English language newspaper based in Bay Ridge. "These people are being paid to do their job."

An air of suspicion hung over Bay Ridge well before Mr. Siraj was arrested in August 2004. Some people stopped attending the neighborhood's two major mosques, preferring to pray at home. Others no longer idle on the street after work.

"The vibe is not the same anymore," said Omar, 22, a Yemeni immigrant who works at a bookstore and gave only his first name. "We're exposed."

Conversations are often carefully scripted. Several people interviewed said they no longer discussed politics in public.

"When you sit down and politics comes to your head, you think, 'Who's around?' " said Mohammad Gheith, 17, a high school senior who often visits the smoke-filled Meena House Cafe on Bay Ridge Avenue.

Several blocks away, at a grocery store along Fifth Avenue, Mahmoud Masoud said he sensed the presence of informers.

"Sometimes you look a person in the eye, there's a feeling," said Mr. Masoud, 65, a Palestinian immigrant. "You can say anything you want, but don't curse the system. That's what they care about."

Others in the neighborhood said they understood the need for informers, and were not bothered by their presence.

"They have to watch the community," said Osama Elsakka, 41, an Egyptian immigrant who drives a limousine. Mr. Elsakka said that he would readily inform the police if he heard something suspicious, even if some of his friends considered this a betrayal.

"I'm trying to defend the image of my religion," he said, explaining that he thought that a person who entertains thoughts of terrorism is not a true Muslim. "If someone is doing that, they've been brainwashed."

On Wednesday afternoon, after Mr. Siraj's parents and uncle heard the verdict, they drove to the uncle's Islamic bookstore, on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge. It was there that their son first had encountered Osama Eldawoody, the informer, who lived on Staten Island and earned about $100,000 for his work with the police.

They pulled down the metal gate and locked the front door. It was hours before the store's regular closing time.

"They hate us Muslims," said Mr. Siraj's mother, Shahina Parveen, steadying herself on her husband's arm. "My son is innocent. Eldawoody is criminal," she said, yelling out the last word.

After they drove off, several men gathered for the afternoon prayer at the mosque next door, the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. Mr. Eldawoody had often prayed with them.

The imam of the mosque, Sheik Reda Shata, said that he became suspicious after Mr. Eldawoody tried to draw him into an illicit business deal in 2003 — what he now believes was an effort at entrapment. Police officials said this was false.

When Mr. Siraj was arrested, Mr. Eldawoody disappeared from the neighborhood.

The imam said Mr. Siraj should have "cared more for the country he lived in," but did not deserve a lifetime prison term, which he could face at sentencing.

"He is a young man with very little experience in life and he was entrapped, and that's obvious," he said. "The informer tried to entrap me and it didn't work."

Countdown to Apartheid

Olmert's (and Elie Wiesel's) Roadmap
By JEFF HALPER
May 25, 2006

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's address to both houses of Congress was perhaps the most skilled use of Newspeak since George Orwell invented the term in his novel /1984/. (He had help: author and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel reportedly drafted large sections of the speech.) Just as Orwell's totalitarian propagandists proclaimed WAR IS PEACE and Israeli government signs placed at the Wall (sorry, fence) at the entrance to Bethlehem greet Palestinians with the blessing PEACE BE UNTO YOU, so Olmert declared in Washington: UNILATERAL REALIGNMENT IS PEACE.

Because of Olmert's use of Orwellian language (can anyone, including President Bush or members of Congress, explain to us what "convergence" and "realignment" mean?), we must listen carefully to what is said, what is not said and what is meant.

What was said sounds fine if taken at face value. Olmert, extending "my hand in peace to Mahmoud Abbas, the elected president of the Palestinian Authority," declared Israel's willingness to negotiate with him on condition that the Palestinians "renounce terrorism, dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, accept previous agreements and commitments, and recognize the right of Israel to exist." If they do so, Olmert held out Israel's commitment to a two-state solution.

What wasn't said? While reference to a Palestinian state sounds forthcoming, two key elements set down in the Road Map defining that state were missing: an end to the Israeli Occupation and the establishment of a /viable/ Palestinian state. "A settlement," says the text of the Road Map to which Olmert and Bush constantly declare their allegiance, "will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel. The settlement willend the occupation that began in 1967."

Olmert's "convergence plan" (now renamed a "realignment plan" because it sounds better in [Newspeak] English), based on the massive "facts on the ground" Israel continues to impose unilaterally with overt American support, cannot possibly give rise to a viable Palestinian state. The "Separation Barrier," which will be declared Israel's permanent "demographic border," takes 10% of the West Bank. That may not sound like much, but consider this: It incorporates into Israel the major settlement blocs (plus a half-million Israeli settlers) while carving the West Bank into a number of small, disconnected, impoverished "cantons"--hardly the basis for a viable state. It removes from the Palestinians their richest agricultural land and /all/ the water.

The convergence plan also creates a "greater" Israeli Jerusalem over the entire central portion of the West Bank, thereby cutting the economic, cultural, religious and historic heart out of any Palestinian state. It then sandwiches the Palestinians between the Barrier/border and yet /another/ "security" border, the Jordan Valley, giving Israel /two/ eastern borders. Palestinian freedom of movement of both people and goods is thus prevented into both Israel and Jordan but also internally, between the various cantons. Israel will also retain control of Palestinian airspace, the electro-magnetic sphere and even the right of a Palestinian state to conduct its own foreign policy.

The Road Map, like international law regarding the end of occupations in general, also insists on a negotiated solution between the parties. Olmert made a great issue of Palestinian terrorism (playing on American sensibilities to this buzz-word), placing pre-conditions on negotiations. Israel is willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, he said, of it renounces terrorism, dismantles the terrorist infrastructure, accepts previous agreements and recognizes the right of Israel to exist (a right Israel has not recognized /vis-à-vis/ the Palestinians). What is not mentioned is Israel's Occupation which, regardless of an end to terror and negotiations, is being institutionalized and made permanent. For neither security nor terrorism are really the issue; Israel's policies of annexation are based on a pro-active claim to the entire country. Virtually no element of the Occupation--the establishment of some 300 settlements, expropriation of most West Bank land, the demolition of 12,000 Palestinian homes, the uprooting of a million olive and fruit trees, the construction of a massive system of highways to link the settlements into Israel proper or the tortuous route of the Barrier deep in Palestinian territory--can be explained by security. Terrorism on /all/ sides is wrong (let it be noted that Israel has killed four times more civilians than the Palestinians have), but to demand that resistance cease while an occupation is being made permanent is unconscionable.

And, finally, what was meant? Apartheid. The "A" word was missing from Olmert's speech, of course, but the bottom line of his convergence plan is clear: the establishment of a permanent, institutionalized regime of Israeli domination over Palestinians based on separation between Jews and Arabs. Within 6-9 months, according to Olmert's timeline. Olmert may believe that Jews can succeed where Afrikaners failed, but history teaches us that in the end injustice is unsustainable. And convergence/realignment is nothing if not manifest injustice.

Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a candidate, with the Palestinian peace activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He can be reached at jeff@icahd.org.

What Olmert heard

BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL
May 25, 2006

IN ITS PUBLIC phases, the Washington debut of Ehud Olmert as Israeli prime minister seemed a success. His address to a joint meeting of Congress yesterday was received warmly. His press conference Tuesday with President Bush suggested an affinity between the two leaders. Olmert's domestic audience could assume that his plan to withdraw from outlying West Bank settlements and unilaterally establish permanent borders for Israel had not met with an outright rebuff.

As usual, however, it was in Olmert's private talks with Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that the important understandings were reached -- or not reached. About these decisive transactions there are only veiled hints in the leaders' public statements and in carefully crafted, selective accounts doled out by officials of both governments.

These hints point to a cooperative atmosphere but also a healthy administration skepticism about Olmert's still-preliminary proposal to draw Israel's final borders unilaterally. The most telling sign of Bush's reluctance to endorse Olmert's plan came in a statement Bush made standing alongside Olmert in the East Room of the White House.

``While any final-status agreement will be only achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes and no party should prejudice the outcome of negotiations on a final-status agreement," Bush said, ``the prime minister's ideas could be an important step toward the peace we both support."

This was a polite way of warning Israel that even though it may have no Palestinian negotiating partner at present, and even if Bush eventually accepts a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from select West Bank settlements, the unchanging US position is that a final-status peace agreement must be negotiated between Israelis and Palestinians. A sound corollary of this stance is that Israel must not undertake any unilateral measure that could bar a negotiated agreement on permanent two-state borders.

The sage principle Bush was affirming is that any division of the land must be approved and accepted by both sides.

This means Olmert cannot come to Washington to negotiate a final-status agreement. The road map for Mideast peace that was sponsored by the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia as well as the United States -- and that Bush continues to commend to Israel as the unaltered basis of US policy -- requires Israel to negotiate its permanent borders only with Palestinians, not with Americans.

If this is the message Olmert takes away from his Washington trip, it will have been a worthwhile visit for him, for Israel, and for the Palestinians.

Trouble spots threaten perfect storm of global crises - study

· Defence experts warn of worsening world security
· Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan identified as flashpoints
Simon Tisdall
The Guardian (UK)
May 25, 2006

A British soldier from 16 Air Assault Brigade on patrol in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Photo: John D McHugh/Getty

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the west's growing confrontation with Iran, and efforts to divest North Korea of its nuclear weapons are all approaching crucial turning points that could combine to create a perfect storm of simultaneous international crises, independent defence experts said yesterday.

Launching the International Institute for Strategic Studies' (IISS) annual assessment of global security threats, John Chipman, its director general, said: "Many parts of the world are engaged in brutal combat ... Overall, the dangerous triptych of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran continues to dominate the security agenda as do the wider, iconic problems of terrorism and proliferation."

The warning came as crucial talks on Iran were held in London, Tony Blair and the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, pursued a planned troop handover in Iraq, and Taliban attacks on Nato troops in Afghanistan intensified.

Dr Chipman said the new Iraqi government faced "fundamental challenges" that could quickly overwhelm its attempts to hold the country together and invite regional intervention. "It is doubtful that a collective sense of Iraqi nationalism can survive in a context of increasing sectarian violence and the continuing security vacuum. Democracy has exacerbated Iraq's ethnic and religious tensions, with voters largely dividing along Sunni, Shia and Kurdish lines."

The parliamentary committee charged with amending Iraq's unfinished constitution was unlikely to deliver political compromise but was certain to become the focus of new acrimony, especially among Sunnis. "The danger is clear: an increase in instability, violence and radical Islamism," Dr Chipman said.

"There is a great deal of worry about the speed at which the Iraqi army and police forces have been stood up," said an Iraq specialist, Toby Dodge. He described Mr Blair's troop withdrawal timetable, due to begin in July, as "optimistic" and predicted it could lead to greater insecurity this year.

Presenting the report, entitled The Military Balance, Dr Chipman warned of a rising Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan aimed at British and Nato troops who are replacing some US forces. "This year will be crucial for Afghanistan as well as for Nato as it expands its mission into the south," he said. "The Taliban are likely to increase their operational tempo - not least because they know that casualties among European Nato states may mobilise domestic opinion against the war."

British-led efforts to eradicate Afghanistan's heroin production also "carry high risks to international forces as they will come into direct confrontation with the local population and the Taliban".

The IISS said North Korea had obtained enough plutonium to build between five and 11 nuclear weapons and long-running talks to induce Pyongyang to disarm were at an impasse.

In an implicit criticism of Washington's policy of ostracism and financial sanctions, Dr Chipman said North Korea had concluded that "the Bush administration is not serious about negotiations and [has] hostile intent".

The US approach had also caused splits with its partners in the six-party talks. Meanwhile, Pyongyang continued to move towards additional nuclear weapons capabilities.

The report also highlighted growing US concerns about China's military build-up and intentions, quoting the findings of the recent US Quadrennial Defence Review. It said China was "a power at a strategic crossroads that is still pointing largely in the wrong direction and which has the greatest potential to emerge as a military rival to the US".

A Two-State Disaster

Youssef Ibrahim
New York Sun
May 26, 2006

A new Palestinian state, carved out of Gaza and the West Bank and governed by Palestinian Arab jihadists, would be a recipe for disaster. Indeed, drawing up a two-state solution now would be tantamount to opening the gates to barbarians. A hastened pullout would unleash a wave of Islamic fundamentalist terror on Israel as well as Arab lands, without resolving anything for Palestinian Arabs. Palestinian Arabs are far from ready to run anything - let alone a country in the tinderbox that is the Middle East.
A few days ago, Egypt asserted that the perpetrators of the most recent deadly bombings of tourist resorts in the Red Sea were trained, equipped, and "weaponized" ideologically as well as physically by Muslim Palestinian jihadists in Gaza and the West Bank. The last thing anyone wants to do is give such folks a green light to widen the scope of their operations. No responsible party can give such people an area of operation under the name of Palestine.
Should anyone allow this, Israel will be the last to suffer from it. With superb intelligence and technology, it will take care of itself. The question should instead be about the Arabs who live in Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and beyond. Most of them are governed by failed regimes, teetering on the brink of collapse with jihadists nipping at their heels and corruption eating their entrails. Giving Muslim fundamentalists a base in Palestine from which to operate and finish off these dying regimes would be unconscionable.
A two-state Palestinian-Israeli solution may be possible one day. But not today. The Palestinian Arabs, who just elected a radical, mindless, bloody Islamic fundamentalist regime, Hamas, as their first freely elected government, have not demonstrated they deserve further indulgence. (New York Sun)

Israel's 'Realignment'

Ehud Olmert's hope to win U.S. support for a new Israeli border offers President Bush both opportunity and peril.
The Washington Post
Friday, May 26, 2006; A20

THOUGH THEY paid lip service to continued Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in effect inaugurated an entirely different process at their White House meeting Tuesday -- one in which Israel will parley with the United States about the new borders it intends to draw for itself. Despite his promise to pursue talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Mr. Olmert has made clear that he doesn't believe Israel will be able to work with the Palestinian Authority anytime soon. Even if a credible partner appeared, Mr. Olmert might prove reluctant. Like his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, he opposes some of the compromises Israel would have to make to achieve a peace settlement.

Mr. Olmert has now won Mr. Bush's de facto consent to pursue a unilateral "realignment," in which Israel would draw a border of its own choosing in the West Bank, dismantle some of the settlements that lie beyond it and thereby "guarantee Israel's security as a Jewish state with the borders it desires," as the prime minister put it. Mr. Bush called these ideas "bold," adding that they "could lead to a two-state solution." But as Mr. Olmert acknowledged, there is one crucial condition: Israel cannot successfully impose its plan on the Palestinians unless it has "the comprehensive support of the United States and the international community."

That means that in the remainder of his term, Mr. Bush will have the opportunity to encourage an Israeli redeployment that would open the way toward the Palestinian state he called for four years ago. But he could also cripple the prospects for that settlement if he provides a U.S. imprimatur for a realignment that disregards essential Palestinian interests. Left to his own calculations, Mr. Olmert probably would settle on such a strategy. According to reports in the Israeli press, he is thinking of dismantling only a small fraction of the West Bank settlements that lie beyond the boundary fence Israel is constructing, which means that settlers and the army would remain in the Palestinian territory indefinitely. He also intends to annex all of Jerusalem's Old City and most of its Arab neighborhoods, even though a previous Israeli government recognized that a peace settlement will require divided sovereignty in the city.

Mr. Bush has already accepted the idea that large settlement blocks near the present border will be incorporated into Israel. But U.S. officials in the past have expressed skepticism about parts of the emerging Israeli plan, including the extent of West Bank territory to be taken. Those points should be pressed: The closer Mr. Olmert comes to adopting the territorial map that was negotiated by Israelis and Palestinians after the Camp David talks of 2000, the better will be the chances that the realignment will lead to a real peace. Mr. Bush said Tuesday that an Israeli-Palestinian peace "will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes, and no party should prejudice the outcome of negotiations." As his administration plunges into what will probably be months of detailed discussions with Israel about the realignment plan, it will be imperative to defend those principles.

"Victory"? Forget it

Bush is trying to keep Americans from abandoning his disastrous war by claiming victory is at hand. But even his own generals know that's a lie.
By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon
05/25/06

When new Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al-Maliki unveiled his government last week, five months after his country's elections, and was unable to appoint ministers of defense and interior, President Bush hailed it as a "turning point." And that was just one month after Maliki's mentor, former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jafaari, to whom he had been loyal deputy, installed in the position through the support of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, was forced to relinquish his office through U.S. pressure.

Bush has been proclaiming Iraq at a turning point for years. "Turning point" is a frequent and recurring talking point, often taken up by the full chorus of the president ("We've reached another great turning point," Nov. 6, 2003; "A turning point will come in less than two weeks," June 18, 2004), vice president ("I think about when we look back and get some historical perspective on this period, I'll believe that the period we were in through 2005 was, in fact, a turning point," Feb. 7, 2006), secretary of state and secretary of defense, and ringing down the echo chamber.

This latest "turning point" reveals an Iraqi state without a social contract, a government without a center, a prime minister without power and an American president without a strategy. Each sectarian group maintains its own militia. Each leader's influence rests on these armed bands, separate armies of tens of thousands of men. The militias have infiltrated and taken over key units of the Iraqi army and local police, using them as death squads, protection rackets and deterrent forces against enemies. Reliable statistics are impossible, but knowledgeable reporters estimate there are about 40 assassinations a day in Iraq. Ethnic cleansing is sweeping the country. From Kirkuk in the north to Baghdad in the middle to Basra in the south, Kurds are driving out Turkmen and Arabs, Shiites are killing Sunnis, and the insurgency enjoys near unanimous support among Sunnis. Contrary to Bush's blanket rhetoric about "terrorists" and constant reference to the insurgency as "the enemy," "foreign fighters are a small component of the insurgency," according to Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Patrick Cockburn, one of the most accurate and intrepid journalists in Iraq, wrote last week in the Independent of London that "the overall security situation in Iraq is far worse than it was a year ago. Baghdad and central Iraq, where Shia, Sunni and Kurd are mixed, is in the grip of a civil war fought by assassins and death squads. As in Bosnia in 1992, each community is pulling back into enclaves where it is the overwhelming majority and able to defend itself."

While Prime Minister Maliki has declared his intention to enforce an unused militia-demobilization decree proclaimed by the now disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority in 2004, he has made no gesture beyond his statement, and no Iraqi leader has volunteered to be the first test case of demobilization. The New York Times Wednesday cited an American official on the absence of action on this front: "'They need to begin by setting examples,' an American official in Baghdad said of the Iraqi government. 'It is just very noticeable to me that they are not making any examples.' 'None,' the official said. 'Zero.'"

Maliki's inability to fill the posts of minister of defense and minister of the interior reflects the control of the means of violence by factions and sects unwilling to cede it to a central authority. Inside the new government, ministries are being operated as sectarian fiefdoms. The vacuum at the Defense and Interior ministries represents a state of civil war in which no one can be vested with power above all.

In his speech on Monday referring to another "turning point," President Bush twice spoke of "victory." "Victory" is the constant theme he has adopted since last summer, when he hired public opinion specialist Peter Feaver for the National Security Council. Feaver's research claims that the public will sustain military casualties so long as it is persuaded that they will lead to "victory." Bush clings to this P.R. formula to explain, at least to himself, the decline of his political fortunes. "Because we're at war, and war unsettles people," he said in an interview with NBC News last week. To make sense of the disconcerting war, he imposes his familiar framework of us vs. them, "the enemy" who gets "on your TV screen by killing innocent people" against himself.

In his Monday speech, Bush reverted yet again to citing Sept. 11, 2001, as the ultimate justification for the Iraq war. Defiant in the face of terrorists, he repeated whole paragraphs from his 2004 campaign stump speech. "That's just the lessons of September the 11th that I refuse to forget," he said. Stung by the dissent of the former commanders of the U.S. Army in Iraq who have demanded the firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush reassured the audience that he listens to generals. "I make my mind up based not upon politics or political opinion polls, but based upon what the commanders on the ground tell me is going on," he said.

Yet currently serving U.S. military commanders have been explicitly telling him for more than two years, and making public their view, that there is no purely military solution in Iraq. For example, Gen. John Abizaid, the U.S. commander, said on April 12, 2004: "There is not a purely U.S. military solution to any of the particular problems that we're facing here in Iraq today."

Newsweek reported this week that the U.S. military, in fact, is no longer pursuing a strategy for "victory." "It is consolidating to several 'superbases' in hopes that its continued presence will prevent Iraq from succumbing to full-flown civil war and turning into a failed state. Pentagon strategists admit they have not figured out how to move to superbases, as a way of reducing the pressure -- and casualties -- inflicted on the U.S. Army, while at the same time remaining embedded with Iraqi police and military units. It is a circle no one has squared. But consolidation plans are moving ahead as a default position, and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has talked frankly about containing the spillover from Iraq's chaos in the region."

Yet Bush continues to declare as his goal (with encouragement from his polling expert on the NSC) the victory that the U.S. military has given up on. And he continues to wave the banner of a military solution against "the enemy," although this "enemy" consists of a Sunni insurgency whose leadership must eventually be conciliated and brought into a federal Iraqi government and of which the criminal Abu Musab al-Zarqawi faction and foreign fighters are a small part.

Bush's belief in a military solution, moreover, renders moot progress on a political solution, which is the only potentially practical approach. His war on the Sunnis simply agitates the process of civil war. The entire burden of progress falls on the U.S. ambassador, whose inherent situation as representative of the occupying power inside the country limits his ability to engage in the international diplomacy that might make his efforts to bring factions together possible. Khalilzad's tentative outreach to Iran, in any case, was shut down by Washington. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for her part, finds herself in Bulgaria, instead of conducting shuttle diplomacy in Amman, Jordan; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Ankara, Turkey; and Tehran. The diplomatic vacuum intensifies the power vacuum in Iraq, exciting Bush's flights of magical thinking about victory: I speak, therefore it is.

Bush doesn't know that he can't achieve victory. He doesn't know that seeking victory worsens his prospects. He doesn't know that the U.S. military has abandoned victory in the field, though it has been reporting that to him for years. But the president has no rhetoric beyond "victory."

Bush's chance for a quick victory in Iraq evaporated when the neoconservative fantasy collapsed almost immediately after the invasion. But the "make-believe" of "liberation" that failed to provide basic security set in motion "fratricidal violence," as Nir Rosen writes in his new book, "In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq," based on firsthand observation of the developing insurgency in the vacuum created by U.S. policy.

Indeed, Bush's nominee for director of the CIA, Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency, in his confirmation hearings, acknowledged the neoconservative manipulation of intelligence to make the case for the Iraq war and disdained it. Asked by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., about the administration's efforts to tie Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida, Hayden replied: "Sir, I -- as director of NSA, we did have a series of inquiries about this potential connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government. Yes, sir."

The exchange continued:

Levin: Now, prior to the war, the undersecretary of defense for policy, Mr. [Douglas] Feith, established an intelligence analysis cell within his policy office at the Defense Department. While the intelligence community was consistently dubious about links between Iraq and al Qaeda, Mr. Feith produced an alternative analysis, asserting that there was a strong connection. Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith's office's approach to intelligence analysis?

Hayden: No, sir, I wasn't. I wasn't aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war. No, sir, I wasn't comfortable.

Hayden then explained at length the difference between working from the facts and trying to cherry-pick data to support a hypothesis. He made clear that the administration had engaged in the latter. Levin asked: "Now, I believe that you actually placed a disclaimer on NSA reporting relative to any links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. And it was apparently following the repeated inquiries from the Feith office. Would you just tell us what that disclaimer was?" Hayden answered: "Yes, sir. SIGINT neither confirms nor denies -- and let me stop at that point in the sentence so we can stay safely on the side of unclassified. SIGINT neither confirms nor denies, and then we finished the sentence based upon the question that was asked. And then we provided the data, sir." In the language of the agency, in other words, Hayden would not lend support to the Bush's administration's twisting of intelligence.

On May 15, Karl Rove, Bush's chief political advisor, gave a speech revealing one of his ideas about politics. "I think," he said, "there's also a great utility in looking at game changers. What are the things that will allow us to fundamentally change people's behavior in a different way?" Since Sept. 11, Rove has made plain that terrorism and war are the great game changers for Bush.

But while war may be the game changer for Bush's desire to put in place a one-party state, forge a permanent Republican majority, redefine the Constitution and the relationships of the branches of the federal government, and concentrate power in the executive, Bush has only the rhetoric of "victory." He has not stated what would happen the day after "victory." Although a victory parade would be his political nightmare, now the absence of victory is his nightmare. With every proclaimed "turning point," "victory" becomes ever more evanescent. He has no policy for victory and no politics beyond victory.

Violence Aside, Baghdad Is Broken

Water runs only an hour a day, power is on for 4 hours, and sewage runs in the streets
By Anna Badkhen
San Francisco Chronicle
May 24, 2006

Baghdad -- "Leaving aside security," Kassim the carpet salesman asked rhetorically, "when you come home, what do you need?" He ticked off the answers on the fingers on his right hand: "Electricity. Water. Food."

"Getting any of this in Baghdad is a problem," he said.

The Iraqi Shiite's elegant, two-story house in the busy central Baghdad district of Karrada gets power four hours a day -- "one hour on, six hours off," said Kassim, a divorced father of three.

Running water is available for one hour, between 1 and 2 in the morning. Kassim pours the water into giant plastic jugs he stores in his bathroom, kitchen and on the rooftop.

"It's a good thing that I go to bed late," he said.

Three years after the U.S. invasion, during which most of the Iraqi capital's infrastructure collapsed, rudimentary services here remain sporadic at best.

Decades-old water treatment plants that were supposed to have been fixed during postwar reconstruction meet only 60 percent of Baghdad's needs, said Lt. Col. Chris Hall, whose unit, attached to the 101st Airborne Division, is helping Iraqis rebuild power and water facilities.

Garbage chokes the city of 4.5 million people. Trash collection is erratic or nonexistent, depending on which part of the city you live in. Insurgents use heaps of garbage to hide roadside bombs. More than 300 garbage collectors have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months, city officials say. Insurgents target them because they work for the government.

"Once we hoped to plant gardens in the medians and on street corners; now we throw our garbage there," said a Sunni woman who lives in the affluent western Jihad district. (The Chronicle agreed not to identify the woman and other Iraqis interviewed for this story because they feared for their safety.)

Garbage clogs sewage pipes, causing raw sewage to overflow into the streets and fill the air with the stench of decay. In the Shiite slums of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad, residents live in dwellings made of bits of corrugated metal, chunks of concrete and rusted oil canisters. Snowy white egrets skim the surface of putrid, greenish-black pools of sewage in the streets.

While much of the violence in Baghdad has taken place in the western part of the city, Sadr City is not immune. Five people were killed there Tuesday when a car bomb exploded at the entrance to a police station.

"It was a horrible scene," Hussein Abdul-Hady, a 20-year-old student, told the Los Angeles Times. "Bodies without hands; people were running in chaos, screaming."

Throughout the city, scores of gas stations have shut down after suicide bombers began targeting them. Outside stations still open, lines of cars stretch sometimes for more than a mile, waiting for gasoline that has quadrupled in price since before the invasion.

Food, for those who can afford it, is plentiful, but shopping is a risky endeavor. Many shop owners have shut their stores, fearing they would be targeted by religious militias who stage brazen daytime kidnappings and killings for no apparent reason other than their victims' religious roots. Others have joined the mass exodus of Baghdad residents who have moved out of the city to flee the endemic violence.

The Sunni woman from Jihad said her brother and husband take turns driving her to shop for food in Mansur, a Sunni neighborhood to the south, because she considers it safer than Jihad.

Kassim said he crosses the street when he sees any car approach the Bab-e-Sharji market, where he buys the rugs he resells, mostly to American soldiers on one of the U.S. military bases in Baghdad.

"What if it's a bomb?" he asked. "You can't trust anyone in Iraq today."

In the predominantly Shiite, largely poverty-stricken eastern Baghdad, religious leaders like the firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr feed off the popular disenchantment with the collapsed infrastructure, using it to draw support for their militias, said Col. Tom Vail, commander of the 506th Regimental Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, which patrols this area.

"They get their power from the deprivation on the east side of Baghdad," said Vail, whose combat team controls most of eastern Baghdad. "They want to show that all good things come from Muqtada al-Sadr's militia and all the bad things come from the (U.S.-led) coalition."

U.S. and Iraqi officials say al-Sadr's Mahdi Army and militias loyal to other Shiite clerics have infiltrated the national police. Some of the militias -- although no one has pointed specifically at al-Sadr's -- are operating death squads, contributing to the sectarian violence that has swept the country since the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shiite Askariya Shrine in Samarra. Dozens of black funeral banners draped on walls and windowsills around the capital mark the toll of violence.

Lt. Col. Hall hopes the new Iraqi government will help improve matters.

"Since the ministries have been seated, I've seen a greater willingness to partner with the coalition on these issues," Hall said. He said a multibillion-dollar project to repair sewage facilities in Baghdad is under way, and U.S. forces are working on creating power stations in the capital.

But the combination of fear of being associated with an American-led effort, and militant Shiite leaders' attempts to portray it as a failure, complicates reconstruction plans, which have already been plagued by poor security and mismanagement, U.S. military officials say.

Several weeks ago, according to U.S. soldiers, Mahdi Army members cordoned off a medical clinic U.S. contractors were building in Sadr City after U.S. forces said they would not put a marble facade on the structure.

"They would rather have no clinic at all than a U.S.-built clinic that looked like all the other buildings in Baghdad," said 2nd Lt. Jesse Augustine, 24, a civil affairs officer from St. Nazianz, Wis., who is attached to the 4th Brigade Support Troops Battalion of the 506th Regimental Combat Team.

"Any signs of (our) effectiveness would fly in the face of their propaganda," said another civil affairs officer, Capt. Tom Dieirlein, 38, from New York.

On Tuesday, Augustine and Dieirlein were inspecting one of the projects U.S. forces are helping rebuild: the two-story Tamuz clinic in the heart of Sadr City.

Two Iraqi workers were slowly applying a fresh coat of white paint on a first-floor wall, and the marble stairs to the second floor glistened in the bright afternoon sun. Outside the clinic, in the streets where remnants of food rotted in blue and orange plastic bags, impoverished residents piled out of the dilapidated stucco houses to gawk at the Americans.

As the soldiers were leaving, they tossed some peach-colored beanie bears and a blue-and-white soccer ball to the children who had gathered outside.

An elderly woman in a black abaya cloak stretched out her hands toward the humvees, pleadingly, as though a child's toy could make her life in Baghdad easier.

An Arab backlash against Hamas?

The Washington Times
May 25, 2006

In the wake of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's visit to Washington, press attention continues to focus almost entirely on the latest chapter in a story that began with Hamas' creation nearly 19 years ago: the terrorist organization's conflict with Israel. But the mainstream media thus far has largely overlooked another story, one which doesn't fit the ordinary paradigm of Arab vs. Jew: the fact that Hamas' relations with Jordan are worsening, and the same may be about to occur with Egypt.
Two recent events deserve considerably more attention then they have been receiving thus far: Jordan's announcement last month that it had uncovered a Syrian-backed Hamas plot to attack the kingdom; and Egypt's announcement on Tuesday that the terrorists who carried out the April 24 bombings that killed 24 people in Dahab, a Sinai resort town trained for the operation in Gaza.
Hamas' most serious problem is with Jordan, where security forces last month arrested 20 of its members. Amman accuses Hamas of smuggling detonators, rocket launchers and explosives into the country from Syria, and of attempting to recruit Jordanians to send to Iran and Syria for "military training." Authorities said they believe that Hamas was planning attacks against unspecified targets in Jordan. "The foiled plots by Hamas elements against officials and installations in Jordan were in the final stages of execution," Jordanian government spokesman Nasser Joudeh said. "Interrogations of suspects proved that they received instructions from a Hamas leader...who is now in Syria."
Security officials in Jordan have said they have a tape-recorded conversation between Khaled Meshaal, the Damascus-based chief of Hamas' ruling council, and a member of the terror cell targeting Jordan. When Jordanian television earlier this month broadcast confessions by three of the detained Hamas members, it included video of Katyusha rockets -- some with Persian inscriptions on them. Iran, Syria and Hamas all deny they had any connection to an anti-Jordanian plot, and Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki travelled to Amman last week in an attempt to smooth over relations between the two countries.
Egypt's Interior Ministry said Tuesday that the three suicide bombers who attacked Dahab last month had been sent by an Egyptian jihadist to Gaza for training in bomb-making techniques, and that police had detained a number of Egyptians who trained in Gaza, one of whom admitted receiving a congratulatory message from "Palestinian elements" after the bombings were carried out.
Egypt has yet to say officially which Palestinian organization in Gaza was to blame for the Dahab attacks, but officials speaking on background have accused Hamas and a Hamas-linked group called the Popular Resistance Committees of providing shelter for one of the planners. Egypt has asked the Palestinian Authority to arrest this person.
In sum, Hamas's relations with neighboring Arab governments are deteriorating.

A Viable Palestinian State

The New York Times
May 25, 2006

It's long been clear that getting a workable, feasible Palestinian state out of two geographically separate masses of land in the desert will be an uphill battle. Now, because of two culprits and one enabler — Hamas, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and President Bush — that hill is becoming a mountain.

Mr. Bush handed Mr. Olmert the perfect welcome-to-Washington gift on Tuesday: conditional support for Israel's plans. Mr. Olmert wants to go ahead with Ariel Sharon's misbegotten plan to unilaterally redraw the borders of what could eventually be Palestine. The key word here is unilaterally, because the Israelis are prepared to do this without any input from the Palestinians. They would be left to try to cobble together a country out of whatever remained behind.

To a significant degree, the Palestinians put themselves in this spot by electing Hamas to run their government, and the Bush administration is right to refuse to legitimize a government dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But Mr. Bush should not punish the Palestinian people by endorsing any unilateral proposal — doing that would punish them for exercising their democratic right to vote.

Mr. Olmert's proposal has two parts, and the first one is fine: to withdraw Israeli settlers and troops from vast areas of the occupied West Bank. That's a worthy goal, and one that has been way too long in coming.

The problem is with the second part of the proposal: to retain several large settlement blocs in the Palestinian West Bank. That's a recipe for disaster.

Anyone who has ever really looked at a map of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza can see how hard it will be to form a Palestinian state. Even a future Palestine that includes all of the West Bank and Gaza is still going to be in two pieces with Israel in the middle, separating Gaza from the West Bank.

To get an idea of this, imagine a map of Manhattan. The West Bank would be, very roughly, East Harlem and the Upper East Side. Gaza would be Battery Park City, far to the southwest. Now imagine trying to create a fully functioning city with its own economy out of those pieces while an entirely independent, antagonistic city remained in between.

Yet that is what the Palestinians will have to do if they even manage to get back to the 1967 borders. (If the Sharon-Olmert plan, now tentatively blessed by Mr. Bush, goes into effect, they won't achieve that.) If Mr. Olmert moves forward with his plan to retain large settlement blocs in the West Bank, the Palestinians may well lose huge parts of their "Upper East Side" and be left trying to form a country out of what's left, and their "Battery Park City."

Speaking to Congress yesterday, Mr. Olmert said Israel was willing "to negotiate with a Palestinian Authority." He added, "In a few years they could be living in a Palestinian state, side by side in peace and security with Israel."

We'd like to see that, too. We only hope that Mr. Olmert and Mr. Bush realize that there will not be peace in the Middle East unless the Palestinians have a say in creating a state that can function.

Bush Democracy Doctrine, 2003(?)-2006, R.I.P

by Jim Lobe
IPS-Inter Press Service
May 24, 2006

WASHINGTON - Less than 18 months after U.S. President George W. Bush declared in his 2005 Inaugural Address his unequivocal commitment to the "ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world", tyrants, particularly in the Islamic world, are taking heart.

From North Africa to Central Asia, top U.S. officials are busy embracing dictators -- and their sons, where appropriate -- even as they continue to mouth the pro-democracy rhetoric that became the hallmark of the administration's foreign policy pronouncements, particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq failed to turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction or ties to al Qaeda.

Particularly notable in just the past month have been White House receptions for Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's heir-apparent, his son Gamal; the praise lavished by Vice President Dick Cheney on Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev during a recent visit to Almaty; and last week's normalisation of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

"You add up all the pieces, and the message to the world is, 'We have a lot of other business than just democracy in this region'," according to Thomas Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) here. "And that business means friendly relations with all sorts of autocrats."

Whether due to the ever-tightening oil market, the sweeping electoral victories by Islamist parties in Egypt, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, or geo-strategic manoeuvring against Iran, Russia and China, the administration now appears to have all but abandoned its "freedom agenda" in favour of a new "realism" not much different from that practiced by successive U.S. administrations during the Cold War.

And, in a scenario familiar to veterans of Washington's Cold War machinations against democratic but suspiciously left-wing governments, the administration is focusing its efforts at "regime change" against those Middle Eastern governments which, besides Israel, enjoy the greatest popular and electoral legitimacy in the region -- namely, Iran and the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Moreover, the administration's neo-conservative supporters, who were the first to justify the Iraq invasion as part of a grand strategy to "transform" the Middle East into a democratic region presumably far more hospitable to Israel and the West, have become noticeably less enthusiastic, particularly since HAMAS's sweeping election victory in the PA.

They now argue that the administration was wrong to press free elections on the region's rulers as a way of promoting democratic change in the absence of years, perhaps decades, of gradual liberalisation.

"...(A)n intense focus on holding elections everywhere as quickly as possible ...has been a mistake because, although elections are part of the democratic process, they are never a substitute for it," wrote former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky whose 2004 book, "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror", was personally and repeatedly endorsed by Bush himself as the inspiration for his 2005 Inaugural Address.

That address marked the high point of the administration's freedom rhetoric, which Bush had launched in earnest in February 2003 in a speech at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where he first cited an analogy between the democratisation of occupied Germany and Japan and what Washington intended for Iraq.

During her confirmation hearings as secretary of state on the eve of the 2005 inaugural, Condoleezza Rice also insisted that Bush had "broken with six decades of excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the hope of purchasing stability at the price of liberty".

"As long as the broader Middle East remains a region of tyranny and despair and anger," she argued, "it will produce extremists and movements that threaten the safety of Americans and our friends."

Indeed, for some months after the inaugural, it appeared that the policy was more than mere rhetoric.

Encouraged by the momentum created by the ballot victory of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the smooth running of elections in Iraq in January and the subsequent "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon, the administration exerted unusually strong pressure on the elder Mubarak to release jailed opposition leader Ayman Nour and enact major constitutional changes. It also pressed Saudi Arabia and the emirates on their reform programmes, and even gave up access to a key military base in Uzbekistan, a strong ally in the "global war on terror", after the massacre last May of hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Andijan.

As the situation continued to go downhill in Iraq, Hizbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood did particularly well in elections in Lebanon and Egypt, respectively, and tensions with Iran arose after the upset win of right-wing candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, Washington's enthusiasm began to fade.

The Palestinian election in January -- which Washington had insisted go forward despite Abbas' and Israel's concerns that HAMAS would win -- appears to have marked a turning point. As noted shortly afterward by the chairman of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, Henry Hyde, "There is no evidence that that we or anyone can guide from afar revolutions we have set in motion."

In the last few months, the return to Realpolitik has been remarkable, even if the rhetoric remains largely unchanged.

"It will be business as usual," said Marina Ottaway, another democracy specialist at the Carnegie Endowment. "I think we can expect that the rhetoric and the funding for democracy-promotion activities through the Middle East Partnership Initiative -- activities that are not dangerous to the regimes in power -- will continue, but what we aren't going to see too much of is high-level pressure on those governments to carry out reforms ...and certainly not pressure on any country to rush into elections."

"What has happened is what the realists predicted -- that Israel and pro-American regimes in the region would be threatened by the democracy drive," said Anatole Lieven, a foreign policy specialist at the New America Foundation.

"If you try to carry out democratisation while pursuing policies that the vast majority of Muslims detest and in countries where economic development is stagnant, democracy will of course lead to anti-American radicalism," he added.

In addition to the strength of Islamist parties throughout the Middle East, the growing competition with Russia and China over energy supplies and pipelines and the looming confrontation with Iran also help explain the administration's fading enthusiasm for democratisation, particularly in the Gulf and among Iran's Central Asian neighbours, such as Azerbaijan.

"The administration is trying to convince these countries to be allied with us against Iran," noted Ottaway. "When you want them to help you, it's not a good time to be critical."

Indeed, almost exactly one year after the Andijan massacre, the Pentagon is urging a major reassessment of relations with Uzbekistan, apparently in hopes of regaining access to the Khanabad air base, particularly in light of Russia's recent success in acquiring access to bases there.

West Bank Pullout Gets a Nod From Bush

By JIM RUTENBERG and STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
May 24, 2006

WASHINGTON, May 23 — President Bush offered conditional support on Tuesday for Israeli ideas for a substantial withdrawal of settlers from the West Bank, but insisted that the new prime minister, Ehud Olmert, first exhaust all possibilities for a negotiated solution.

With concern rising over Iran's nuclear program, Mr. Bush reconfirmed the United States commitment to defend Israel against attack, and said that he, too, wanted to exhaust all diplomatic options before discussing any military attack.

"Our primary objective is to solve this problem diplomatically," Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Olmert spoke at a joint news conference at the White House after a meeting here, their first since Mr. Olmert became prime minister. The two men said they also planned to meet later in the White House residence, without their advisers.

Mr. Bush praised Mr. Olmert's "bold ideas" for another unilateral Israeli withdrawal from occupied territory. But he said a negotiated agreement "best serves Israelis and Palestinians and the cause of peace."

Mr. Olmert said that "we will make a genuine effort to negotiate with the Palestinian side," and that "we accept the sincerity of Mahmoud Abbas," the Palestinian president, whom he plans to meet soon.

But with the Palestinian Authority led by Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group, Mr. Olmert said, "We hope he will have the power to be able to meet the requirements necessary for negotiations between us and the Palestinians."

Mr. Bush said, "What worries me is that Hamas says it wants to destroy Israel."

"I assured the prime minister that our position is steady and strong — that Hamas must change," he said. "No country can be expected to make peace with those who deny its right to exist, and who use terror to attack its population."

But if negotiations are not possible or successful, Mr. Olmert said, Israel will move ahead on its own. "We will not wait indefinitely," he said.

Mr. Olmert ran for election on a promise to try to set the permanent borders of Israel by finishing the separation barrier between Israel and the Palestinians and by pulling out Israeli settlers — as many as 70,000 — who live in the West Bank beyond the barrier.

Another 175,000 Israelis, plus another 200,000 in East Jerusalem, live beyond the 1967 boundaries. But Mr. Olmert says Israel intends to keep those large settlement blocs.

The United States has said a final agreement should recognize new realities on the ground. But Mr. Bush has also emphasized that final borders cannot be imposed but must be negotiated, and that neither side should do anything to prejudice those negotiations.

"While any final status agreement will be only achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes," Mr. Bush said, "the prime minister's ideas could be an important step toward the peace we both support."

Officials of both countries emphasized that they did not have high expectations that Mr. Abbas would be able to generate the conditions for a resumption of talks on the peace plan called the road map.

The Palestinians have agreed to abandon terrorism and dismantle militant groups that operate outside the Palestinian Authority. But Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, and defends the right of Palestinian groups like Islamic Jihad to fight the Israeli occupation. Hamas leaders recently praised an Islamic Jihad suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, while Mr. Abbas called it despicable.

"When we say, 'Abandon terror,' we mean that it's not enough to renounce terror, that's just words, but there have to be actions on the ground to show that they've given up terrorism as a legitimate tool," a senior American official said.

But Mr. Olmert and the Israelis have barely begun planning a pullout, which he has now chosen to call realignment. Israeli officials say they will need six months to a year to prepare their plans, which they will do in discussions with the Americans, talks that will provide a window to test the possibility of negotiations with Mr. Abbas.

"It's our view that this window is one reason the Israelis can say honestly that there is time to evolve on the Palestinian side, since they're not ready to move," the senior American official said. "It's a lucky circumstance."

The official supported the Israeli contention that the Palestinians were not yet ready for the negotiations that Mr. Bush called for.

"The question is whether there's an evolution, either of Hamas or the power relationships with the Palestinian Authority, such that such a negotiation would be advisable," the American official said. "Olmert made it clear that it's not advisable today, and the president said clearly that Israel is not able to negotiate with Hamas."

Mr. Olmert's visit to the White House was his first as prime minister, and his aides were pleased with the warmth of the reception.

He and Mr. Bush were scheduled to spend about 45 minutes in private discussions on Tuesday night — a chance to bond, but also to have a serious discussion about Iran and about how both countries might respond if diplomacy there fails.

Mr. Bush recognizes that a visit from the Israeli prime minister provides a chance to remind his Republican supporters and American Jews, many of whom vote Democratic, about his staunch support of Israel during a crucial election year.

Negotiations took place over the last week or so on how Mr. Bush would characterize Mr. Olmert's proposal for withdrawal, with the Americans eager not to be seen to support what the Palestinians would call an Israeli land grab of occupied territory.

Having first suggested that Mr. Olmert's ideas were "interesting," the negotiators moved to "constructive" and finally to "bold," which pleased the Israelis.

The Americans have many questions, however: how many settlers will go; where the barrier will run; what will happen to the Israeli development plans for an area called E1, which would cut off East Jerusalem from the West Bank; how the Israeli Army would be deployed in the areas Israel abandons, or whether it would be withdrawn entirely.

Still, there was some disappointment among Israeli officials that Mr. Olmert's plan, which to them is more risky and ambitious than Ariel Sharon's pullout of 9,000 settlers and troops from Gaza, was greeted cautiously in Washington.

There was little new on Iran. Both men agreed that Iran must not be allowed to become a nuclear power. "We determined that the Iranian regime must not obtain nuclear weapons," Mr. Bush said.

Israel says it believes that Iran is only months away from developing the know-how to enrich uranium. Mr. Olmert said: "This is a moment of truth. It is still not too late to prevent it from happening."

Mr. Bush concentrated on his diplomatic efforts to get Russia and China to agree to possible sanctions against Iran in the United Nations Security Council. "We're spending a lot of time working with our Russian friends in particular, to make it clear to them that Iran is showing no good faith" in negotiations, Mr. Bush said.

He faced a new complication on Tuesday, when the House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for withholding support from Hamas until it acknowledges Israel's right to exist and expels any members with ties to terrorism.

The House was calling for the United States to withhold funds for United Nations agencies that assist the Palestinian Authority at a time when even the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, has voiced concern that its economic isolation — intended to weaken it — is having a rallying effect in the territories.

The White House opposes the resolution as too constraining. The White House press secretary, Tony Snow, said the administration expected it to take a different form after consultation with the Senate.

To hurt or help Hamas

No one wins if the Palestinian Authority collapses.
Los Angeles Times
May 24, 2006

AS ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER Ehud Olmert chatted with President Bush on Tuesday during his first official visit to the United States, the Palestinian territories he left behind were degenerating into anarchy that could lead to civil war. That may have been the aim when the two leaders cut off the flow of money to the Palestinian Authority after Hamas — a group committed to the destruction of Israel and listed by the United States as a terrorist organization — won parliamentary elections in January. But neither Israel nor the United States is going to like the result if the Palestinian government collapses.

Much of the Palestinian Authority's $1.9-billion annual budget is funded by foreign aid, which the United States and the European Union are no longer supplying. The government also relies on tax revenue collected by Israel, amounting to about $55 million a month, which has been cut off. As a result, the Palestinian Authority's 165,000 employees haven't been paid in more than two months.

The deprivation, combined with an intense political rivalry between the Islamist Hamas and the secular Fatah party led by President Mahmoud Abbas, have sent armed militants into the streets and sparked high-level assassination attempts and open gun battles between the factions.

As with everything involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there's no easy way to defuse the crisis gripping the Palestinian Authority. Western governments are correct in withholding aid from Hamas, which must be compelled to renounce terrorism and accept Israel's right to exist. At the same time, the loss of outside assistance is causing enormous hardship and further destabilizing an already shaky government.

Terrorism thrives amid anarchy; the collapse of the government would undo years of effort to prepare the Palestinians to manage a state of their own and probably would only strengthen Hamas and other terrorist groups.

Finding the right way to provide humanitarian aid while not supporting Hamas is a tricky challenge, though the European Union is on the right track. On Tuesday, government ministers endorsed an aid package that would funnel money to U.N. aid agencies and the International Red Cross. That's far preferable to the approach being taken by Congress. The House approved a measure Tuesday that would cut most U.S. aid to nongovernmental organizations working in the Palestinian territories and deny visas to members of the Palestinian Authority. This ham-handed attempt to appear tough on terror, opposed by the Bush administration, would cause needless suffering to the innocent and goes too far in micromanaging U.S. contacts with the Palestinian Authority.

Olmert's main goal during his visit to Washington was to persuade Bush to sign on to his plan to withdraw from most West Bank settlements while keeping the larger outposts intact so they eventually would be included within Israel's borders — something Olmert wants to do without the Palestinians' approval. Bush praised the notion in principle but implied that Israel really should come to a negotiated solution.

Bush was right not to give a full endorsement; it's far too soon to consider such unilateral action, which would inflame the Arab world.

If the Palestinian government can be kept from falling apart, it may yet produce a more responsible negotiating partner.

The incredible shrinking Palestine

Israel is whittling away at Palestinians' land again, but it needs the U.S. to sharpen the knife.
By Sandy Tolan,
Los Angeles Times
05/21/06

THE HISTORY of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be glimpsed through a series of maps.

First is the sepia-toned map of Palestine under the British Mandate, circa 1936. On its surface it suggests one unified country where Arab and Jew can live together between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. This is the map that some Palestinians still place on their walls: A whole Palestine, representing the dream of an independent, secular, democratic and Arab-majority state. Many Israelis still see this map as representing their dreams too: Eretz Yisrael, the whole Jewish homeland.

Second is the United Nations partition map of November 1947, which divided Palestine into two states — one for Arabs (who were to get 44% of the territory) and one for Jews (who were given 54.5%), with Jerusalem and Bethlehem under international stewardship. For Zionists, it was a triumph born of the Holocaust and the belief in much of the world that Jews needed and deserved a haven.

For Arabs, who were the majority population, it was a disaster. Why, they asked, should their homeland become the solution to the Jewish tragedy in Europe? They fought the partition, and in the 1948 war that followed, 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out and became refugees.

After Israel's 1948 War of Independence, a third map emerged, based on additional territory captured by Israel. Palestinians lived in the West Bank and Gaza, under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, on 22% of old Palestine — or outside of the historic territory entirely, often in U.N. refugee camps set up in neighboring Arab countries.

The fourth map was drawn after Israel's stunning victory in the 1967 Middle East War. It showed yet more territory — the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and the Sinai peninsula — under Israeli occupation. Soon dozens of little dots, representing Israeli settlements, would be added to each of these areas. (In the early 1980s, Israel withdrew from the Sinai, and last year from Gaza.)

Now comes the new Israeli prime minister to Washington, carrying yet another map. When Ehud Olmert meets with President Bush on Tuesday, he will present a new page for the Middle East atlas, in which, according to recent reports, Israel will have pulled up stakes from some of the occupied West Bank but will still control large portions of it. Palestinians would end up with less than 20% of their original dream for the whole of Palestine.

Olmert will try to convince the White House that in the absence of a "partner for peace," this Israeli plan to draw its final borders, and to wall off his people from the Palestinians, is in the best interests of peace and stability in the region.

Yet the implementation of Olmert's unilateral "convergence" plan could have the opposite effect. By annexing West Bank lands (including the giant, densely populated settlements in Palestinian territory outside Jerusalem), claiming Jerusalem's Old City and its holy sites exclusively as Israel's own, drawing a new "security border" along the Jordan Valley and, according to David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, keeping the military occupation in place in the West Bank at least for the time being, convergence would essentially kill the Palestinian dream of self-determination. Given the history of the last six decades, this plan is unlikely to lead to peace or stability.

U.S. officials should be especially careful not to embrace a unilateral and incendiary "solution," especially at a moment when it is too early to be sure which direction the Hamas-run Palestinian government will take. Many observers hope that the more moderate elements in the government of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh will prevail, that talks can be restarted and that Hamas may ultimately accept Israel's right to exist.

In a May 4 speech to the Israeli Knesset, Olmert presented his plan as a compromise of the historic Zionist dream to possess the entirety of a Jewish homeland. Part of the convergence plan calls for dismantling Israeli settlements where about a quarter of the 240,000 West Bank settlers live. "Only a person in whose soul Eretz Yisrael burns knows the pain of letting go of our ancestral heritage," Olmert declared in presenting his Cabinet to the parliament.

Yet "convergence" doesn't just represent the end of the dream of Eretz Yisrael; it also represents an abandonment of what for nearly four decades has been the central hope for many Palestinians and Israelis seeking coexistence: U.N. Resolution 242, which was adopted in 1967 after the Six-Day War and called for Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the war in exchange for, essentially, Arab recognition of Israel. This became the basis for the "two-state solution."

For Yasser Arafat, the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader, accepting the existence of Israel , and the 78% of historic Palestine that it held, was a monumental compromise. But convergence would leave the Palestinians with less land yet again — certainly less than in any deal based on Resolution 242 and the 1993 Oslo peace accords.

Under convergence, according to a report by Makovsky, Israel would retain 8% of the West Bank for expansion of three large settlement blocs, and more land for a "security border" in the Jordan Valley. At least 60,000 settlers would be removed from more remote settlements in the occupied territories to the large settlement blocs on the other side of the "security barrier" that Israel has been building (but still on the West Bank). Palestinians in the remaining portion of the West Bank would live between the "security border" and the "security barrier."

The convergence plan also would deny the Palestinians' dream of having East Jerusalem, including the Old City's Haram al Sharif, the third holiest site in Islam, as the capital of their state. Although returning some parts of East Jerusalem to Arab ownership, a fixed border along Olmert's lines would divide neighborhoods and families, and Israel would retain control over the Old City, including its holy sites. These are red lines for both Palestinians and Muslims worldwide and a central reason for the collapse of the talks at Camp David.

Given its details, it is hard to understand how convergence could lead to long-term peace and stability, to say nothing of fairness. Western diplomats have already begun expressing concerns that a unilateral solution will not last. "The Israelis want to build a wall and imagine that there are no people behind it," Marc Otte, the European Union's special representative for the Mideast peace process, told the Israeli paper Haaretz. "That is an illusion. Everything will come back to them. You cannot lock the door and throw away the key." Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has frequently criticized Hamas, has warned that convergence would lead to war within a decade.

U.S. backing would be essential to implementing Olmert's plan, and essential to that would be Olmert's ability to convince the American government that he has "no partner for peace." This claim has proved convenient for Olmert as he seeks to draw his own map unilaterally. But U.S. officials should not be lulled into accepting a unilateral "solution" that seems destined to prolong the conflict.

SANDY TOLAN'S most recent book is "The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East ."

U.S. Uneasy About Israel's Plans for West Bank

Withdrawal Without Negotiation Could Pose Problems for Bush Administration, as Well as Arab Neighbors
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post
Tuesday, May 23, 2006; A04

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert won election on a platform of withdrawing from most of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. But when he makes his first official visit to the White House today, U.S. officials said the message from President Bush will be: Don't fulfill your campaign promises too quickly.

Olmert's plan would build on the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip that the Israeli government engineered last year -- and which the administration avidly supported at the time. The Israeli government has said it needs to take unilateral steps in the West Bank because it has had no partner for peace since the unexpected victory in Palestinian elections by the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas -- which is dedicated to Israel's destruction.

But the new plan, which probably involves the departure of at least 60,000 people from 72 settlements, comes at a delicate moment for the Bush administration.

The financial crisis that has engulfed the Palestinian territories since Western nations cut off funding for the Palestinian Authority has begun to weaken support in Europe for a tough response. Moreover, many European officials fear Olmert's plan is an attempt by Israel to set permanent borders without negotiating with the Palestinians -- at a time when the Bush administration is struggling to win European support for unified action to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions. Israel's Arab neighbors also are alarmed at the idea, believing it will encourage radicalism among the Palestinians.

King Abdullah of Jordan wrote to Bush last week to express concern that unilateral action by Israel could undermine Jordanian security. Jordanian Ambassador Karim Kawar said that because the Gaza withdrawal had not been negotiated, Hamas was able to claim credit and win the elections.

Bush administration officials have been reluctant to provide a full-throated endorsement of Olmert's ideas -- but also are not closing off options. In the view of some of them, Olmert's plan contains the seeds of a potential Palestinian state, since it would result in the end of much of the settlement activity on the West Bank.

But the notion of such an outcome by fiat makes U.S. officials uneasy, because it may appear as though the United States is endorsing a land grab. Olmert has pledged to retain significant settlements near Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank.

In late March, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave the administration's most extensive statement on Olmert's concept, saying: "Everyone would like to see a negotiated solution."

But, after noting that the Americans needed to learn more about the plan, Rice appeared to offer encouragement when she added: "I would note that if you're going to have a negotiation, though, you have to have partners. And the Palestinian government that has just been sworn in does not accept the concept of a negotiated solution. . . . On that basis, with that government, it's going to be hard to imagine a negotiation."

A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House, said that President Bush will be asking lots of questions about the plan, which has been described as "convergence," "conversion" and "realignment." The official listed more than a dozen possible questions, including whether the Israeli military would stay after the settlers left, whether Israel would retain control of the Jordan Valley, whether Israel has consulted with Jordan, and what would be the legal status of the fence and wall that Israel is building around Palestinian areas on the West Bank.

Bush has pledged support for the creation of a Palestinian state, and the U.S. official added that a critical question would be whether Olmert's plan is compatible with a two-state solution. He said that if the answer is yes, Bush wants Olmert to explain how it is compatible. The administration went through a similar period of questioning about the Gaza plan, after it was first announced by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- and ultimately concluded that it was consistent with a negotiated solution, even though it was a unilateral action.

But U.S. officials said a West Bank withdrawal would be bigger, more complex and fraught with more difficulties. It should not be assumed that this time the administration would reach the same conclusion, they said.

In recent weeks, U.S. officials have pushed the Israelis to engage more with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who retains a role in the Palestinian government even though his Fatah party lost the legislative elections.

Israeli officials have made little secret of their view that Abbas is weak and cannot fulfill commitments -- Olmert told CNN on Sunday that "Abbas doesn't have even the power to take charge of his own government" -- but U.S. pressure appears to be having an effect. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni met with Abbas in Egypt yesterday.

U.S. officials say Abbas can still play a role, though they are dubious about his demand to begin final-status negotiations. They appear to be suggesting to the Israelis that they must at least make the appearance of seeking a Palestinian partner before they can declare none exists.

It's Not Hamas Terror Israel Fears

The 1988 Compromise Revisited
By ELAINE C. HAGOPIAN
CounterPunch
May 22, 2006

A political bombshell was unloaded on Israel and the U.S. on November 15, 1988 by the Palestine National Council (PNC), the PLO's legislative body. That "bombshell" has now been resurrected by the Hamas Government. It was the famous Palestinian historic compromise embodied in the Palestinian Declaration of Independence announced publicly on that November day in Algiers.

What was that historic compromise? Its two main features were:

1) acceptance of the post-1967 war UNSC Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967 which inherently included recognition of Israel but made no mention of a Palestinian state. In fact, 242 was purposefully left without reference to extant UN resolutions regarding Palestinian statehood and refugee right of return; and

2) it rooted the Declaration in the November 29, 1947 UNGA Resolution 181 which recommended partition of Palestine into Arab (Palestinian) and Jewish States.

The latter action was intended to thwart the deficiency of 242 regarding Palestinian statehood. However, the PNC/PLO explicitly accepted the 1967 Israeli-occupied territories of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem (22% of pre-1948 Palestine) as the territorial limit of the state instead of the 45% allocated under the 1947 partition plan. These two features: recognition of Israel on 78% of historic Palestine and acceptance of the territories for Palestinian statehood constituted the essence of the historic compromise.

Although the PNC/PLO never gave up the Palestinian refugee right of return after the 1988 Declaration and throughout the Madrid/Oslo process (1991- 1993), they downplayed that right. Therefore, from 1988 on, and specifically during the Madrid and Oslo negotiations, Israel had a golden opportunity to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians by a two-state solution on terms favorable to itself. The 1949 cease fire lines drawn after the 1948 war which encompassed the Israeli conquered 78% of Palestine would have basically become Israel's borders; and the 1967 Israeli occupied Palestinian territories would have become a Palestinian state. It became clear after the 1967 war that Israel had no intention of surrendering the occupied territories. This was made evident by the internal Israeli debate which ensued after the war. The Whole Land of Israel Movement representing the left/right spectrum of Israeli political views insisted on keeping the territories as part of Eretz Israel. Others toyed with keeping strategic areas while working out an arrangement with their sometime collaborator, Jordan. The immediate transformation and unification of East Jerusalem with Israeli West Jerusalem boded ill for any withdrawal. Thereafter, Israeli colonization of Palestinian territories commenced. Israeli settlers now number more than 400,000 in East Jerusalem (annexed earlier) and the West Bank.

How was Israel able to ignore international law, the Geneva conventions, and U.N. Resolutions on Palestinian rights? In large part it was both U.S. tacit support and the way in which Israel interpreted the post-1967 war UNSC Resolution 242. The resolution was written in such a way as to ignore and provide the basis for ultimately expunging the extant 1947 partition plan. UNSC 242 became the only "legal" framework for negotiations. In effect, 242 offered Israel the opportunity to expand territorially and institutionalize itself in the region in spite of its colonial/occupier character without having to address Palestinian national and refugee rights. The resolution called for

"Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State (emphasis added) in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries (emphasis added) .".

Palestine was/is not a state. When asked about its intent to abolish the partition plan that called for two states and to give leeway to Israeli goals, the author of 242, Lord Carradon, struggled with a non-convincing disclaimer although admitting 242 was intended to allow Israel to extend its 1967 "borders" into the occupied territories to establish "secure boundaries". Since then, U.S. and Israeli diplomats have tried repeatedly to cancel U.N. resolutions regarding Palestine except for 242.

Although 242 provided great leeway for Israeli interests, it did affirm "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war". It also called for "Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories [not 'the' territories] occupied in the recent conflict." UNSC 242 was written under Chapter VI (Pacific Settlement of Disputes) of the U.N. Charter and was therefore without formal means of any withdrawal implementation. Only Chapter VII (Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression) includes mechanisms of implementation. In any case, Israel did not view the Palestinian territories as occupied since they were never recognized as a state before the 1967 war. Jordan had absorbed East Jerusalem and the West Bank into the Hashemite Kingdom after the 1948 war, but Jordan's action was not recognized internationally. Egypt administered Gaza but did not absorb it. Hence, if the Palestinian territories were not part of any state, Israel claimed that it was occupying no one's territory. As such, Israel maintained that it was not required to withdraw except by choice and voluntary agreements. The argument collapses on the obvious illegality of Israeli annexation (1981) of the occupied and colonized Syrian Golan Heights.

During the Oslo process, Arafat conceded much to Israel, allowing it to set terms regarding areas it would withdraw from and the "powers" it would allow the Palestinian Authority. Arafat thought that in the end he would get the historic compromise with minor adjustments. He was mistaken; his concessions eroded the terms of the compromise. He kept conceding land and power until July 2000 at Camp David when he realized he was set up to close out all legal files--including the right of return of Palestinian refugees - on Palestine and accept a truncated and fragmented state. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) succeeded Arafat and has been basically ignored by the Israelis. There are and have been no "peace" negotiations since July 2000, only Israeli unilateral actions admitted as means to safeguard Jewish demographic majority in an enlarged Israel. In the meantime, the Palestinians in the territories are being walled in and economically and socially suffocated.

What is the Israeli gripe with Hamas? It is not terrorism. Israel knows, as did white South Africans, French Algerians, British Kenyans, that terror tactics are part of anti-colonial, anti-occupation resistance. When there is a will to resolve the conflict, terrorism--resistance and state--are eventually abandoned. What bothers Israel about Hamas is that Hamas wants to turn the clock back to the 1988 historic compromise. For more than fifteen years of the "peace process", Israel has succeeded in preventing the emergence of a viable Palestinian state based on the compromise. Hamas has brought the focus back to the compromise--a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the occupied territories free of settlements and military occupation. It is also affirming the never abandoned legal and inalienable right of the refugees to return to their original homes in historic Palestine.

By demonizing Hamas and starving Palestinians, Israel hopes to destroy Hamas as the elected party representative of the Palestinian will. Israel is again ignoring the opportunity to have a viable two-state solution and is de facto laying the groundwork for greater chaos and violence. Trying to prop up Mahmoud Abbas who has little or no credibility among his people to oppose Hamas will fail. Israel will then have to take responsibility for the Palestinian population which ultimately, far down the line, will lead to one state in Israel and the 1967 occupied Palestinian territories based on equal citizenship for both peoples. Too bad that can't happen now.

Elaine C. Hagopian is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Simmons College.