the human province

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.

The US government has had to rescind the Fulbright awards for the 7 students in Gaza who won the awards, because Israel won't let them leave the territory:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

...The study grants notwithstanding, the Israeli officials argued that the policy of isolating Gaza was working, that Palestinians here were starting to lose faith in Hamas's ability to rule because of the hardships of life.

..."We are fighting the regime in Gaza that does its utmost to kill our citizens and destroy our schools and our colleges," said Yuval Steinitz, a lawmaker from the opposition Likud Party. "So I don’t think we should allow students from Gaza to go anywhere. Gaza is under siege, and rightly so, and it is up to the Gazans to change the regime or its behavior."

Hadeel Abukwaik, a 23-year-old engineering software instructor in Gaza, had hoped to do graduate work in the United States this fall on the Fulbright that she thought was hers. She had stayed in Gaza this past winter when its metal border fence was destroyed and tens of thousands of Gazans poured into Egypt, including her sister, because the agency administering the Fulbright told her she would get the grant only if she stayed put. She lives alone in Gaza where she was sent to study because the cost is low; her parents, Palestinian refugees, live in Dubai.

"I stayed to get my scholarship," she said. "Now I am desperate."

Now I'm no expert on Islamic militancy, but I'm pretty sure that desperation isn't exactly the quickest route to winning hearts and minds.

McClatchy has an interesting piece on Iranian Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force. The story includes an awfully high percentage of anonymous sources, and the title might be a little hyperbolic, but I think the overall points made are fair enough.

Iran has a lot of sway in Iraq, which is normal. What's silly, though, is that Americans see this as some sort of meddling, because Iranian interests in Iraq are not always the same as American interests (although I'd argue that they coincide much more often than either side would like to admit). If Iran were occupying Mexico or Canada, you can be sure that the US would be "meddling" as well.

As for the actual article, I don't really have too much to add, except that it's important to look at Iranian involvement in Iraq not as a spoiler or as some diabolical force. If the US is going to come to terms with Middle Eastern players (of which Iran has become a major one, due in no small part to American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq), Washington is going to have to look at Teheran (and Damascus and Hezbollah and Hamas, for that matter) as actors who have interests in the region that can't be run over roughshod by America.

This is a reality. So just as when one deals with Zimbabwe, it's necessary to take Pretoria into account, or how when dealing with Burma or North Korea one can't ignore Beijing, the road to peace in Iraq must necessarily pass through Teheran, but not in the way that American hawks would like it to.

Hamas's deputy of the political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, recently had an op-ed in the LA Times outlining his views on recognizing Israel's right to exist and Hamas's charter. He makes a point that it's not necessarily fair to judge an organization or a country based on its charter, citing the US Constitution's codifying of slavery with its counting of "other persons" as three-fifths of a person. This is an attempt by Hamas to distance itself publicly in the American media from the parts of its charter that are deemed beyond the pale by polite company. The difference, however, between the embarrassing parts of the constitution and the Hamas charter is that the former was rectified by passing the fourteenth amendment in 1868. So if Hamas would like to publicly distance itself from unsavory parts of its 20-year-old charter, perhaps the best way of doing so would be to change it.

As for Israel's right to exist, Abu Marzook has some interesting points:

The sticking point of "recognition" has been used as a litmus test to judge Palestinians. Yet as I have said before, a state may have a right to exist, but not absolutely at the expense of other states, or more important, at the expense of millions of human individuals and their rights to justice. Why should anyone concede Israel's "right" to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel took our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees?

Why should any Palestinian "recognize" the monstrous crime carried out by Israel's founders and continued by its deformed modern apartheid state, while he or she lives 10 to a room in a cinderblock, tin-roof United Nations hut? These are not abstract questions, and it is not rejectionist simply because we have refused to abandon the victims of 1948 and their descendants.

[...]

The writings of Israel's "founders" — from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion — make repeated calls for the destruction of Palestine's non-Jewish inhabitants: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places." A number of political parties today control blocs in the Israeli Knesset, while advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens from Israel and the rest of Palestine, envisioning a single Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea. Yet I hear no clamor in the international community for Israel to repudiate these words as a necessary precondition for any discourse whatsoever. The double standard, as always, is in effect for Palestinians.

I, for one, do not trouble myself over "recognizing" Israel's right to exist — this is not, after all, an epistemological problem; Israel does exist, as any Rafah boy in a hospital bed, with IDF shrapnel in his torso, can tell you. This dance of mutual rejection is a mere distraction when so many are dying or have lived as prisoners for two generations in refugee camps. As I write these words, Israeli forays into Gaza have killed another 15 people, including a child. Who but a Jacobin dares to discuss the "rights" of nations in the face of such relentless state violence against an occupied population?

Hamas has an op-ed in today's Times. That sounds funny, doesn't it? Haniya's political advisor, Ahmed Yousef, writes about how Hamas sees the lead up to the short civil war in Gaza:

Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

He then goes on to suggest that any "further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence." He's right, of course, in a certain sense.

Palestinians voted in what was seen as fair elections, and they chose Hamas. The West, and in particular the US, decided that they could not respect the results of a democratic election, schizophrenically withholding all aid from the new government. Israel, in its turn, withheld taxes garnished from Palestinians from their elected government. Fatah, sensing its newfound support from the US, Israel and the EU, refused to hand over security to the new government.

This created two "security forces," one with the legitimacy of democratic elections but wearing ski masks, the other with the trappings of an established Arab state but without the backing of popular elections. And therein lied the main security problem, which was only exacerbated by the West's refusal to give Hamas a chance to govern Palestine or prove that they were incapable of adapting to governance from resistance.

And so here we are now. People are already (and simplistically) splitting Palestine into Hamastan and Fatahland, with some even going so far as to make the argument that now is the time to join the West Bank in a federation with Jordan.

What would happen to Gaza? In most western views, there is an unspoken idea that while dealing with Fatah in the West Bank (the US has already resumed aid), Gaza will be starved into submission. Or maybe it will become a satellite of Egypt, where Mubarak would probably be all to willing to teach the Muslim Brotherhood a lesson in suffering by making an example out of Hamas. These are obviously not solutions, and whether we're talking about creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and telling Hamas to drink the sea in Gaza or making a binational Jordanian-Palestinian state, the fact remains that this is a destruction of Palestinian self-determination and avowal of failure.

So what's the solution? I've said it before, but I'll say it again: one person, one vote, one state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. But first things first: negotiations should immediately be set up for a unity government between Fatah and Hamas -- one in which a joint security force is created. The EU and US should agree to accept the results of Palestinian elections, ending a boycott of Hamas, provided that it sign a 10-year cease fire with Israel (which it has offered to do). It should also be pushed (with economic incentives) to start acting more like a government and less like a militia -- getting rid of the masks would be a good start. (Maybe having an op-ed in the Times is a good sign.) Let Fatah and being in control have a moderating effect on Hamas. And let Hamas start cleaning up some of Fatah's corruption and messy governance. In the meantime, Fatah should accept its role as the loyal opposition, redefining itself as a party whose fall from favor with the average Palestinian should be a stark wake up call for getting their act together. 

Steps should then be made to create a binational state of Israel/Palestine, one that has a constitution that guarantees equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion. Belgium should offer advice on the logistics of such a binational state. The right of return (for Jews suffering from anti-Semitism as well as all Palestinian refugees) will be the official immigration policy of the new state, which will have relinquished control of the Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in return for normalized relations with all Arab states. The borders will be opened, and my Israeli and Palestinian friends will be able to meet me in Tyre or Tel Aviv for a day at the beach.

That's the answer. Following the brief civil war in Gaza, people seem to be waking up to the idea that a two-state solution is a dead letter. Maybe it was possible twenty years ago, but given the "facts on the ground" created by the encroachment of illegal Jewish settlements, it no longer is. Israel's demographic nature, where 20 percent of all Israeli citizens are Palestinians, is another reason why the two-state solution can no longer exist: in 50 years, Israel will no longer have a Jewish majority, even if we disregard the occupied territories.

So almost everyone can agree that the two-state solution is dead, even if we can't agree who killed it (we all did). Almost no one, however, seems capable of making that extra jump in imagination necessary for realizing that a single state for Arabs and Jews is the only feasible and just solution.