Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "state"
Madame Secretary, when will we have peace? And bathroom breaks?
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
Published: March 4, 2009 15:25 ET
RAMALLAH — The further back you are in a motorcade, the more bemused the expression on the faces of the pedestrians watching you speed by. When I passed them, the people of this Palestinian city stared with slack jaws, as though they wondered if the parade of shiny black Chevrolet Suburbans would go on forever.
I was in car 22. Of 24.
But the people on the sidewalk weren’t the only ones scratching their heads.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic caravan looped through the biggest Palestinian city in the West Bank on Wednesday. No doubt she’d maintain that she laid important diplomatic groundwork for the Obama Administration’s new path in the Middle East.
But the dozen Washington-based journalists who follow her wherever she goes complained that they’d been frozen out of the behind-the-scenes details just as abruptly as the stymied motorists forced to watch her drive by under the baleful stares of red-bereted Palestinian soldiers toting AK-47s.
Even before the journalists left Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in the morning, one correspondent for a prominent East Coast daily whined that he felt “like we’re the traveling Russian press.”
Throughout the day, correspondents griped to Hillary’s troop of press people that they didn’t know what she was telling the Palestinian prime minister and president in her closed-door meetings.
And these are people with lots of time to complain.
Because when you’re “inside the bubble” with the Secretary of State, there’s a lot of sitting around with nothing to do but whine about how little you have to do.
I jumped into my U.S. Embassy Chevy beside the King David at 8.45 a.m. Jerusalem time. I saw Hillary for six, maybe seven, minutes at 12.20 p.m. Eventually there was a 20-minute press conference which ended at 3 p.m.
Other than that, as Yasser Arafat used to say, “a big nothing.”
Of course, the State Department’s operation is impressive. Private security contractors with distinctly military demeanors and names like “Mac” and “Witt” run that 24-car motorcade with a precision not usually evident in the Middle East. Mac promised to throw himself on top of me if the convoy were attacked. Then an attractive, young USAID official jumped into the seat beside me. I saw Mac's attention to security shift focus. I was on my own.
Clearly, no one wanted to be late for the motorcade — Mac and Witt wouldn’t wait. With some minutes to go before departure, press people from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv were faced with the most important question of the day that the traveling press actually were allowed to pose: “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?”
(This was a major feature of the day and apparently one of the most significant considerations for people who must parse a few minutes of often anodyne diplospeak and manage to get an 800-word article out of it. You don’t want to be sighing at the urinal when Hillary’s ticking off the details of how she made a big peace breakthrough in the Middle East. Nor do you want to be wriggling with discomfort in the motorcade. I counted six occasions in five hours when Hillary’s press aides were asked to advise on bathroom breaks.)
While Witt and Mac kept Beyonce at a modest volume in the front of the Suburban, the motorcade came through the checkpoint into northern Ramallah. “Trailerpark,” Mac said mysteriously into the microphone on his lapel. “Hatbox, hatbox.” Secret service code words, apparently.
We pulled up at the Council of Ministers. The traveling press was shown into a room with a table 20 yards long. The reporters were told they’d have to wait a half hour and wouldn’t get a chance to see Clinton and the Palestinian prime minister, let alone ask a question.
It was the table around which the Palestinian cabinet meets. But no one seemed interested in finding out where they actually were. A network correspondent sat in the prime minister’s chair and played with the on-off button on his microphone. A few others asked me about the top-notch spread of baklava laid out for us. Yet it seems travel inside the bubble isolates you not only from the world outside, but also from the very place where you are. I’ve never seen a group of people whose fingers were so glued to the toggles of their BlackBerrys.
The next stop was the kind of photo op journalists detest. A school funded by the State Department called AMIDEAST that provides English classes to underprivileged Palestinian kids mostly from refugee camps. The place is so praiseworthy journalists are guaranteed to hate it. Particularly after Hillary emerged to tell us that she’d confided in a few of the Palestinian kids inside that as a little girl she’d wanted to be an astronaut.
I was ready to shout “Hatbox,” but a Reuters correspondent gamely yelled a serious question about Israeli settlement construction on Palestinian land. Clinton twice told her she wouldn’t answer.
She did say that an independent Palestinian state with highly qualified graduates of the AMIDEAST school ready to confront the 21st century and live up to its international responsibilities was “absolutely—uh, probable.” Perhaps in the diplomatic world that qualifies as a big vote of confidence. Let’s hope.
There were occasional remarks among the more forgiving of the correspondents that Clinton’s predecessor Condoleezza Rice took some time to understand the needs of the traveling press, before she instituted “round tables” at which the reporters could grill her during the trip. Meanwhile one of the Secretary’s press aides cheerily promised that once they arrived at Clinton’s next stop, Brussels, “we’re all going to have chocolate-covered nuts. That’s going to be fun, isn’t it?”
It almost made me sorry I’d be breaking off to return to Jerusalem, when the rest of the group went to the airport.
But first there was the highlight of the day, the meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. We pulled into the Muqata, the office complex where Arafat was kept under siege during the intifada. It’s no longer bombed out and Arafat’s tomb is topped by an apparently computer-generated cube of the kind that seems popular with architects of museums and headquarters of big organizations these days. The Muqata, of course, is both.
The traveling press waited with local journalists for an hour while Hillary lunched with Abbas. The local journalists smoked cigarettes in the sun out in the courtyard. The traveling press maintained their bubble, tapping away on laptops in the seats assigned to them.
A correspondent for a leading daily in the nation’s capital boasted of the “flaming email” he’d sent to one of Hillary’s aides about the lack of access to the secretary of state. A pair of wire service reporters asked if there was time for a visit to the bathroom. The blue-blazered traveling reporters from the Washington bureaus popped the earpieces on their simultaneous translation modules into place. They sat there with them attached to their ears for 20 minutes, listening to the translator whispering to a colleague. Perhaps it made them feel like macho Witt and Mac with their lapel microphones and the curly wire leading from the back of their jackets up to their ears. Meanwhile, the local press, the reporters who live here, chatted mostly in Arabic and had no need of the translation, anyway.
By the time Clinton and Abbas arrived, I had counted the tiles on the ceiling of the massive press room twice and was admiring the banner behind the stage. It was a photo of Abbas, who appears to be scowling past the emblem of the Palestinian Authority at a grinning Arafat like a wife whose husband has come home from the bar with all his wages spent.
Within a minute of the end of the conference, the traveling press had been whisked into the motorcade. I sat next to a major network correspondent this time.
“How do you handle this day after day?” I asked.
She made a gesture as though to slit her throat.
“Are you traveling on to Brussels?” I said.
“I’m going to Baghdad,” she said. “I’d rather be in Iraq than have another day of this.”
The motorcade turned right at the Ofer Checkpoint, headed for Ben-Gurion International Airport. Our car cut left for Jerusalem. “Mouse, Duck, breaking off,” said Mac, his finger on his lapel microphone.
The traffic was backed up for three miles on the highway, waiting for the motorcade to pass. I hoped those drivers had asked to go to the bathroom before they hit the road.
Published: March 4, 2009 15:25 ET
RAMALLAH — The further back you are in a motorcade, the more bemused the expression on the faces of the pedestrians watching you speed by. When I passed them, the people of this Palestinian city stared with slack jaws, as though they wondered if the parade of shiny black Chevrolet Suburbans would go on forever.
I was in car 22. Of 24.
But the people on the sidewalk weren’t the only ones scratching their heads.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic caravan looped through the biggest Palestinian city in the West Bank on Wednesday. No doubt she’d maintain that she laid important diplomatic groundwork for the Obama Administration’s new path in the Middle East.
But the dozen Washington-based journalists who follow her wherever she goes complained that they’d been frozen out of the behind-the-scenes details just as abruptly as the stymied motorists forced to watch her drive by under the baleful stares of red-bereted Palestinian soldiers toting AK-47s.
Even before the journalists left Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in the morning, one correspondent for a prominent East Coast daily whined that he felt “like we’re the traveling Russian press.”
Throughout the day, correspondents griped to Hillary’s troop of press people that they didn’t know what she was telling the Palestinian prime minister and president in her closed-door meetings.
And these are people with lots of time to complain.
Because when you’re “inside the bubble” with the Secretary of State, there’s a lot of sitting around with nothing to do but whine about how little you have to do.
I jumped into my U.S. Embassy Chevy beside the King David at 8.45 a.m. Jerusalem time. I saw Hillary for six, maybe seven, minutes at 12.20 p.m. Eventually there was a 20-minute press conference which ended at 3 p.m.
Other than that, as Yasser Arafat used to say, “a big nothing.”
Of course, the State Department’s operation is impressive. Private security contractors with distinctly military demeanors and names like “Mac” and “Witt” run that 24-car motorcade with a precision not usually evident in the Middle East. Mac promised to throw himself on top of me if the convoy were attacked. Then an attractive, young USAID official jumped into the seat beside me. I saw Mac's attention to security shift focus. I was on my own.
Clearly, no one wanted to be late for the motorcade — Mac and Witt wouldn’t wait. With some minutes to go before departure, press people from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv were faced with the most important question of the day that the traveling press actually were allowed to pose: “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?”
(This was a major feature of the day and apparently one of the most significant considerations for people who must parse a few minutes of often anodyne diplospeak and manage to get an 800-word article out of it. You don’t want to be sighing at the urinal when Hillary’s ticking off the details of how she made a big peace breakthrough in the Middle East. Nor do you want to be wriggling with discomfort in the motorcade. I counted six occasions in five hours when Hillary’s press aides were asked to advise on bathroom breaks.)
While Witt and Mac kept Beyonce at a modest volume in the front of the Suburban, the motorcade came through the checkpoint into northern Ramallah. “Trailerpark,” Mac said mysteriously into the microphone on his lapel. “Hatbox, hatbox.” Secret service code words, apparently.
We pulled up at the Council of Ministers. The traveling press was shown into a room with a table 20 yards long. The reporters were told they’d have to wait a half hour and wouldn’t get a chance to see Clinton and the Palestinian prime minister, let alone ask a question.
It was the table around which the Palestinian cabinet meets. But no one seemed interested in finding out where they actually were. A network correspondent sat in the prime minister’s chair and played with the on-off button on his microphone. A few others asked me about the top-notch spread of baklava laid out for us. Yet it seems travel inside the bubble isolates you not only from the world outside, but also from the very place where you are. I’ve never seen a group of people whose fingers were so glued to the toggles of their BlackBerrys.
The next stop was the kind of photo op journalists detest. A school funded by the State Department called AMIDEAST that provides English classes to underprivileged Palestinian kids mostly from refugee camps. The place is so praiseworthy journalists are guaranteed to hate it. Particularly after Hillary emerged to tell us that she’d confided in a few of the Palestinian kids inside that as a little girl she’d wanted to be an astronaut.
I was ready to shout “Hatbox,” but a Reuters correspondent gamely yelled a serious question about Israeli settlement construction on Palestinian land. Clinton twice told her she wouldn’t answer.
She did say that an independent Palestinian state with highly qualified graduates of the AMIDEAST school ready to confront the 21st century and live up to its international responsibilities was “absolutely—uh, probable.” Perhaps in the diplomatic world that qualifies as a big vote of confidence. Let’s hope.
There were occasional remarks among the more forgiving of the correspondents that Clinton’s predecessor Condoleezza Rice took some time to understand the needs of the traveling press, before she instituted “round tables” at which the reporters could grill her during the trip. Meanwhile one of the Secretary’s press aides cheerily promised that once they arrived at Clinton’s next stop, Brussels, “we’re all going to have chocolate-covered nuts. That’s going to be fun, isn’t it?”
It almost made me sorry I’d be breaking off to return to Jerusalem, when the rest of the group went to the airport.
But first there was the highlight of the day, the meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. We pulled into the Muqata, the office complex where Arafat was kept under siege during the intifada. It’s no longer bombed out and Arafat’s tomb is topped by an apparently computer-generated cube of the kind that seems popular with architects of museums and headquarters of big organizations these days. The Muqata, of course, is both.
The traveling press waited with local journalists for an hour while Hillary lunched with Abbas. The local journalists smoked cigarettes in the sun out in the courtyard. The traveling press maintained their bubble, tapping away on laptops in the seats assigned to them.
A correspondent for a leading daily in the nation’s capital boasted of the “flaming email” he’d sent to one of Hillary’s aides about the lack of access to the secretary of state. A pair of wire service reporters asked if there was time for a visit to the bathroom. The blue-blazered traveling reporters from the Washington bureaus popped the earpieces on their simultaneous translation modules into place. They sat there with them attached to their ears for 20 minutes, listening to the translator whispering to a colleague. Perhaps it made them feel like macho Witt and Mac with their lapel microphones and the curly wire leading from the back of their jackets up to their ears. Meanwhile, the local press, the reporters who live here, chatted mostly in Arabic and had no need of the translation, anyway.
By the time Clinton and Abbas arrived, I had counted the tiles on the ceiling of the massive press room twice and was admiring the banner behind the stage. It was a photo of Abbas, who appears to be scowling past the emblem of the Palestinian Authority at a grinning Arafat like a wife whose husband has come home from the bar with all his wages spent.
Within a minute of the end of the conference, the traveling press had been whisked into the motorcade. I sat next to a major network correspondent this time.
“How do you handle this day after day?” I asked.
She made a gesture as though to slit her throat.
“Are you traveling on to Brussels?” I said.
“I’m going to Baghdad,” she said. “I’d rather be in Iraq than have another day of this.”
The motorcade turned right at the Ofer Checkpoint, headed for Ben-Gurion International Airport. Our car cut left for Jerusalem. “Mouse, Duck, breaking off,” said Mac, his finger on his lapel microphone.
The traffic was backed up for three miles on the highway, waiting for the motorcade to pass. I hoped those drivers had asked to go to the bathroom before they hit the road.
Netanyahu holds his line
Israeli Prime Minister ignores Obama and reiterates same policies
by Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post
JERUSALEM — It’s as if Obama never happened.
Less than two weeks ago President Barack Obama laid out his plans for the Middle East in a speech in Cairo. He called for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, among other things.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately announced that he’d make a key policy address in Tel Aviv. Commentators wracked their brains figuring out how Bibi, the nickname by which the Likud leader is known, would walk the tightrope between his nationalist coalition — which is very supportive of the West Bank settlements and disdains the idea of a Palestinian state — and Obama, who had made it clear that he sees the settlements as Israel’s main contribution to the failure of peace efforts.
But Netanyahu outsmarted them all. No smokescreen, no artful diplospeak, no talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Nothing but old-school Bibi.
The big policy speech turned out to be filled with typical nationalist rhetoric about the settlements. The olive branch held out to the Palestinians was loaded with the kind of conditions Netanyahu surely knows are unacceptable in Ramallah — let alone Gaza.
“We would be prepared to reach agreement as to a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state,” Netanyahu told his audience at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
He said “Palestinian state,” but he added an adjective that grates rather hard on the Palestinian ear: “demilitarized.” For Netanyahu that’s important because a militarized Palestinian state would, as he sees it, be much as Gaza is today, with the capacity to rain missiles on Tel Aviv and the country’s international airport. It could make a military alliance with Iran, like Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and Hamas in Gaza. We’ve all seen how that turned out for Israel.
To Palestinians, a demilitarized state sounds like no state at all. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu would “wait a thousand years to meet a Palestinian who’d accept his conditions.”
As for Obama’s gripe about settlements, Netanyahu seemed at first to be edging toward a compromise, something so cunning in its apparent straightforwardness that no one would notice he’d refused to comply with the American demands. “We have no intention of founding new settlements,” he said.
Well, that’s not the heart of Obama’s argument. He doesn’t want to be deflected by Israel pulling out of a few remote hilltop outposts. The U.S. wants even existing settlements to stay as they are — not growing by so much as a single brick — until the future of the land on which they stand is decided.
But Netanyahu trotted out the same formula Israel has always used for evading a settlement freeze: so-called natural growth. “We must give mothers and fathers the chance of bringing up their children as is the case anywhere in the world,” he said.
In other words, if children grow up in a settlement, Israel is bound to build a home for them there when they want to have their own place, so they don’t have to move elsewhere to find accommodation.
As if their parents didn’t move to the settlements from somewhere else.
As if Barack Obama didn’t insist there be no “natural growth” in the settlements.
No one expects Netanyahu to go head to head with Obama. The speech wasn’t intended as a gauntlet in the face of the U.S. But the Israeli prime minister is sailing pretty close to the White House wind.
It all played well with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. “It was a Zionist speech from his faith and heart,” said Limor Livnat, a leading Likud hawk. “I’d have preferred he hadn’t said ‘Palestinian state,’ but it was a good speech.”
The country’s rather lackluster opposition recognized that Netanyahu hadn’t given ground to Obama. “The speech was typical Netanyahu,” said Ofer Pines, a legislator from the Labor Party (Labor is part of the coalition, but some of its lawmakers including Pines refused to join the government.) “He said a very small ‘Yes,’ and a very big ‘No.’ He’s really only talking to himself.”
Except he’s not the only one listening. There must surely have been bemusement in Washington, as officials watched the speech, waiting for Netanyahu to adjust his previous positions.
Wait on. The Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, he said. Jerusalem, too, “would be the united capital of Israel.” He didn’t even offer to open the checkpoints into Gaza to let in construction material to rebuild the city ruined in the war between Israel and Hamas at the turn of the year.
The most optimistic of assessments — at least among those who oppose Netanyahu — was that the speech was just words. “It’s not what he says, it’s what he does after this that interests me,” said Haim Ramon, a legislator from the opposition Kadima Party.
Obama will surely second that.
by Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post
JERUSALEM — It’s as if Obama never happened.
Less than two weeks ago President Barack Obama laid out his plans for the Middle East in a speech in Cairo. He called for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction, among other things.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately announced that he’d make a key policy address in Tel Aviv. Commentators wracked their brains figuring out how Bibi, the nickname by which the Likud leader is known, would walk the tightrope between his nationalist coalition — which is very supportive of the West Bank settlements and disdains the idea of a Palestinian state — and Obama, who had made it clear that he sees the settlements as Israel’s main contribution to the failure of peace efforts.
But Netanyahu outsmarted them all. No smokescreen, no artful diplospeak, no talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Nothing but old-school Bibi.
The big policy speech turned out to be filled with typical nationalist rhetoric about the settlements. The olive branch held out to the Palestinians was loaded with the kind of conditions Netanyahu surely knows are unacceptable in Ramallah — let alone Gaza.
“We would be prepared to reach agreement as to a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state,” Netanyahu told his audience at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv.
He said “Palestinian state,” but he added an adjective that grates rather hard on the Palestinian ear: “demilitarized.” For Netanyahu that’s important because a militarized Palestinian state would, as he sees it, be much as Gaza is today, with the capacity to rain missiles on Tel Aviv and the country’s international airport. It could make a military alliance with Iran, like Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border and Hamas in Gaza. We’ve all seen how that turned out for Israel.
To Palestinians, a demilitarized state sounds like no state at all. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Netanyahu would “wait a thousand years to meet a Palestinian who’d accept his conditions.”
As for Obama’s gripe about settlements, Netanyahu seemed at first to be edging toward a compromise, something so cunning in its apparent straightforwardness that no one would notice he’d refused to comply with the American demands. “We have no intention of founding new settlements,” he said.
Well, that’s not the heart of Obama’s argument. He doesn’t want to be deflected by Israel pulling out of a few remote hilltop outposts. The U.S. wants even existing settlements to stay as they are — not growing by so much as a single brick — until the future of the land on which they stand is decided.
But Netanyahu trotted out the same formula Israel has always used for evading a settlement freeze: so-called natural growth. “We must give mothers and fathers the chance of bringing up their children as is the case anywhere in the world,” he said.
In other words, if children grow up in a settlement, Israel is bound to build a home for them there when they want to have their own place, so they don’t have to move elsewhere to find accommodation.
As if their parents didn’t move to the settlements from somewhere else.
As if Barack Obama didn’t insist there be no “natural growth” in the settlements.
No one expects Netanyahu to go head to head with Obama. The speech wasn’t intended as a gauntlet in the face of the U.S. But the Israeli prime minister is sailing pretty close to the White House wind.
It all played well with Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. “It was a Zionist speech from his faith and heart,” said Limor Livnat, a leading Likud hawk. “I’d have preferred he hadn’t said ‘Palestinian state,’ but it was a good speech.”
The country’s rather lackluster opposition recognized that Netanyahu hadn’t given ground to Obama. “The speech was typical Netanyahu,” said Ofer Pines, a legislator from the Labor Party (Labor is part of the coalition, but some of its lawmakers including Pines refused to join the government.) “He said a very small ‘Yes,’ and a very big ‘No.’ He’s really only talking to himself.”
Except he’s not the only one listening. There must surely have been bemusement in Washington, as officials watched the speech, waiting for Netanyahu to adjust his previous positions.
Wait on. The Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, he said. Jerusalem, too, “would be the united capital of Israel.” He didn’t even offer to open the checkpoints into Gaza to let in construction material to rebuild the city ruined in the war between Israel and Hamas at the turn of the year.
The most optimistic of assessments — at least among those who oppose Netanyahu — was that the speech was just words. “It’s not what he says, it’s what he does after this that interests me,” said Haim Ramon, a legislator from the opposition Kadima Party.
Obama will surely second that.
Review: The thriller that reminds us why Euro politics matter
The Budapest Protocol, by Adam Lebor
(Reportage Press)
Sometimes a journalist comes across something so powerful that it seems bigger than the project he’s researching. Usually it’s put aside to serve as the basis for a future project, a magazine article or another nonfiction book.
Sometimes it takes such a grip on the writer’s imagination that there’s only one way to go. The novel. I know, because it’s how I turned from Middle East correspondent to the author of Palestinian crime fiction. Journalism seemed so limited by comparison, so unlikely to grab people and tell them “Pay attention, this really matters” the way a novel can.
That’s what happened to Adam Lebor in 1996 when he was researching his acclaimed “Hitler’s Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide.” He stumbled upon a World War II intelligence dossier addressed to the US Secretary of State. It detailed a French agent’s report on German contingency plans for the economic takeover of Europe, should the Third Reich fail.
Lebor asked himself the question: what if the industrialists who intended to found this Fourth “economic” Reich had tried to do so, after the war? What if they had succeeded? (“What if,” as Stephen King notes in his “On Writing,” is the best place from which to start a thriller.)
From his vantage point as a correspondent based in Budapest, Lebor was able to see the massive inroads amounting more or less to takeover of post-Soviet economies by German and Austrian conglomerates. Add to that the growing centralization of the European Union and the introduction of its single currency forcing the economies of most of Europe to toe a single line, and you start to see why the Red House Report gripped him so.
The result is the chillingly real thriller “The Budapest Protocol,” published in the UK this month.
Alex Farkas, a local journalist, uncovers the economic conspiracy, which – as the novel unfolds – is focused on the election campaign of one of the conspirators as President of Europe (a post that many Brussels types would gladly see become reality). Farkas discovers plans for a new Holocaust against the Gypsies, which with the rise in these poor economic days of a neo-Nazi right-wing in Hungary is another of the novel’s moments of eerie realism.
What really drives Farkas, though, is the sinister murder of his grandfather, a survivor of the Budapest ghetto and a former dissident. That gives the novel the personal underpinning that elevates it above pure conspiracy theory. In fact, it makes it a first-rate thriller comparable to Robert Harris’s “Fatherland.” The novel reminds us that the politics of Europe remains more charged than the dull image the Brussels technocrats have lulled us into.
I’ll bet you’re sorry now you didn’t vote three weeks ago in the Euro elections. You will be after you read this novel.
Just like the (good?) old days
With US diplomats roaming the streets of Jerusalem, it's like the intifada never happened.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — It’s like the intifada never happened.
American diplomats mobbed the streets of Jerusalem this week. Even Iran point man Dennis Ross, whose sad-sack demeanor was a frequent feature of the Oslo peace process, stopped by to keep the U.S. defense secretary, the Mideast peace envoy, and the national security adviser company.
Meanwhile, in Palestinian politics, where hatred of Israel once brought everyone together for secret terror summits, Hamas again hates Fatah, which hates Hamas and also dislikes itself. In Israel, the two most powerful men are Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.
Just like the old days. Before the five years of violence known as the intifada that began in September 2000, when Palestinian riots turned into gunbattles and the Israeli army reoccupied all the Palestinian towns it had evacuated during the previous seven years of the peace process.
Except there’s one reminder this week that the intifada actually did take place: Fouad Shoubaki is still screwed.
The man who ran military procurement and budgets for Yasser Arafat was convicted by an Israeli military court Wednesday of handing on $7 million worth in arms to the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which used the weapons to kill Israelis during the intifada.
The court also found Shoubaki guilty of paying $125,000 (from Arafat) to fund the voyage of a ship called the Karine A. When Israeli commandos from the Shayetet 13 — the equivalent of the Navy Seals — captured the Karine A in January 2002, it was carrying 50 tons of guns, missiles and material, loaded on board by Hezbollah operatives off the Iranian coast.
Though the intifada was 15 months old at the time the Karine A was captured, many in Washington and other world capitals became convinced that Arafat really did think he was at war with Israel. They stopped talking about “putting the peace process back on track.” Until recently.
The Palestinians put Shoubaki in jail in Jericho. The Israelis said all along that he was just a fall guy being held for appearances sake. In 2006, when it seemed Shoubaki might be released, the Israelis raided the Jericho jail and captured him. His trial lasted three years.
In the court, Shoubaki claimed to “have sought peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis and to build neighborly relations.” He said he was close to current Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who’s considered a moderate in favor of peace talks with Israel (although he won’t talk to them just now).
But the court also heard that Shoubaki admitted some unneighborly actions during his interrogation by the Israeli domestic security service, the Shin Bet.
He was the go-between for Arafat’s contacts with Imad Mughniya, a top Hezbollah operative believed to have been behind the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed more than 300 people. (Mughniya, whose bloody resume was much longer than can be detailed here, died in a car bomb in Damascus in February last year. Hezbollah factions, the Syrian government and the Israeli Mossad have all been blamed for his killing at one time or another.)
Shoubaki maintained, under interrogation, that he was just following orders. Arafat signed off on all the payments and it was a time of war, so Shoubaki can’t be held responsible, he argued. At his sentencing next month, the 70-year-old looks certain to get life.
Shoubaki’s activities seem to belong to a distant era, now that the Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank are following orders from their U.S. adviser, Gen. Keith Dayton, and Israeli officials describe cooperation as better even than during the Oslo period.
But it’s only a few years, really. Many of the same people are in power on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. The same is true of much of the U.S. negotiating team. While they may not be capable of messing up on the scale Arafat managed in the early years of the intifada, there are signs that what seemed like momentum two months ago is fizzling.
The U.S. had demanded a freeze on construction in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Special envoy George Mitchell was here this week trying to get the Israelis to agree to a partial freeze. Israeli officials say the Americans are now attempting to get the Israelis to stop some construction in return for a removal of restrictions in certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlements.
But such new construction will take up Palestinian land just like the settlements whose expansion Israel is on track to halt. And the settlements which will get the green light are where the building is most frenetic, because of high birth rates among ultra-Orthodox communities.
The Palestinians, too, are repeating the mistakes that led them to bring the Oslo edifice down about their own heads. A meeting set for next week in Bethlehem to reform the ruling Fatah faction may not go ahead, and even if it does it won’t sweep away as many corrupt old hacks as the party’s young guard wants.
Last time that happened, the young leaders decided to destroy the peace process, which formed the power base of the old cadres, so that Arafat would have to turn to them for support. It didn’t work out, of course, but there are plenty who might want to have another shot.
Shoubaki may be going to jail forever, but his old pals might soon need his Rolodex.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — It’s like the intifada never happened.
American diplomats mobbed the streets of Jerusalem this week. Even Iran point man Dennis Ross, whose sad-sack demeanor was a frequent feature of the Oslo peace process, stopped by to keep the U.S. defense secretary, the Mideast peace envoy, and the national security adviser company.
Meanwhile, in Palestinian politics, where hatred of Israel once brought everyone together for secret terror summits, Hamas again hates Fatah, which hates Hamas and also dislikes itself. In Israel, the two most powerful men are Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.
Just like the old days. Before the five years of violence known as the intifada that began in September 2000, when Palestinian riots turned into gunbattles and the Israeli army reoccupied all the Palestinian towns it had evacuated during the previous seven years of the peace process.
Except there’s one reminder this week that the intifada actually did take place: Fouad Shoubaki is still screwed.
The man who ran military procurement and budgets for Yasser Arafat was convicted by an Israeli military court Wednesday of handing on $7 million worth in arms to the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which used the weapons to kill Israelis during the intifada.
The court also found Shoubaki guilty of paying $125,000 (from Arafat) to fund the voyage of a ship called the Karine A. When Israeli commandos from the Shayetet 13 — the equivalent of the Navy Seals — captured the Karine A in January 2002, it was carrying 50 tons of guns, missiles and material, loaded on board by Hezbollah operatives off the Iranian coast.
Though the intifada was 15 months old at the time the Karine A was captured, many in Washington and other world capitals became convinced that Arafat really did think he was at war with Israel. They stopped talking about “putting the peace process back on track.” Until recently.
The Palestinians put Shoubaki in jail in Jericho. The Israelis said all along that he was just a fall guy being held for appearances sake. In 2006, when it seemed Shoubaki might be released, the Israelis raided the Jericho jail and captured him. His trial lasted three years.
In the court, Shoubaki claimed to “have sought peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis and to build neighborly relations.” He said he was close to current Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who’s considered a moderate in favor of peace talks with Israel (although he won’t talk to them just now).
But the court also heard that Shoubaki admitted some unneighborly actions during his interrogation by the Israeli domestic security service, the Shin Bet.
He was the go-between for Arafat’s contacts with Imad Mughniya, a top Hezbollah operative believed to have been behind the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed more than 300 people. (Mughniya, whose bloody resume was much longer than can be detailed here, died in a car bomb in Damascus in February last year. Hezbollah factions, the Syrian government and the Israeli Mossad have all been blamed for his killing at one time or another.)
Shoubaki maintained, under interrogation, that he was just following orders. Arafat signed off on all the payments and it was a time of war, so Shoubaki can’t be held responsible, he argued. At his sentencing next month, the 70-year-old looks certain to get life.
Shoubaki’s activities seem to belong to a distant era, now that the Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank are following orders from their U.S. adviser, Gen. Keith Dayton, and Israeli officials describe cooperation as better even than during the Oslo period.
But it’s only a few years, really. Many of the same people are in power on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. The same is true of much of the U.S. negotiating team. While they may not be capable of messing up on the scale Arafat managed in the early years of the intifada, there are signs that what seemed like momentum two months ago is fizzling.
The U.S. had demanded a freeze on construction in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Special envoy George Mitchell was here this week trying to get the Israelis to agree to a partial freeze. Israeli officials say the Americans are now attempting to get the Israelis to stop some construction in return for a removal of restrictions in certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlements.
But such new construction will take up Palestinian land just like the settlements whose expansion Israel is on track to halt. And the settlements which will get the green light are where the building is most frenetic, because of high birth rates among ultra-Orthodox communities.
The Palestinians, too, are repeating the mistakes that led them to bring the Oslo edifice down about their own heads. A meeting set for next week in Bethlehem to reform the ruling Fatah faction may not go ahead, and even if it does it won’t sweep away as many corrupt old hacks as the party’s young guard wants.
Last time that happened, the young leaders decided to destroy the peace process, which formed the power base of the old cadres, so that Arafat would have to turn to them for support. It didn’t work out, of course, but there are plenty who might want to have another shot.
Shoubaki may be going to jail forever, but his old pals might soon need his Rolodex.
