the human province

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

CNN International just aired a press conference with Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Most of the statements were platitudes and made no new headway, but there's one thing that I did notice that I hadn't remarked before. Both Bush adn the reporters insisted on calling Abu Mazen "President Abbas." Bush also insisted on saying that a Palestinian state couldn't "look like Swiss cheese." This is the second time I've heard this remark from him. If it's not disingenuous, it's an important caveat to the idea of a two-state solution and has a folksy charm that's much more specific than the adjective "viable" that's often used to describe a future Palestinian state.

Otherwise, the American University of Beirut was full of students wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs in support of Gaza today. Interestingly enough, none of the Lebanese students I spoke with seemed to think that their support for their neighbors should extend to the Palestinians who were killed (around 50) or displaced (over 30,000) last year in Nahr el-Bared. They told me that the government had the right to go in and destroy the camp in order to root out the terrorists. When I asked them what the difference was between that and when Israelis use almost identical rhetoric, they insisted that the two situations had nothing in common. One student insisted that Palestinians didn't deserve any rights in Lebanon.

As usual, Lebanese solidarity with Palestinians seems to be more about opposing Israel than supporting Palestinians. Ya haram.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

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.

Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

"[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

"The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

"I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

"What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

CNN International just aired a press conference with Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Most of the statements were platitudes and made no new headway, but there's one thing that I did notice that I hadn't remarked before. Both Bush adn the reporters insisted on calling Abu Mazen "President Abbas." Bush also insisted on saying that a Palestinian state couldn't "look like Swiss cheese." This is the second time I've heard this remark from him. If it's not disingenuous, it's an important caveat to the idea of a two-state solution and has a folksy charm that's much more specific than the adjective "viable" that's often used to describe a future Palestinian state.

Otherwise, the American University of Beirut was full of students wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs in support of Gaza today. Interestingly enough, none of the Lebanese students I spoke with seemed to think that their support for their neighbors should extend to the Palestinians who were killed (around 50) or displaced (over 30,000) last year in Nahr el-Bared. They told me that the government had the right to go in and destroy the camp in order to root out the terrorists. When I asked them what the difference was between that and when Israelis use almost identical rhetoric, they insisted that the two situations had nothing in common. One student insisted that Palestinians didn't deserve any rights in Lebanon.

As usual, Lebanese solidarity with Palestinians seems to be more about opposing Israel than supporting Palestinians. Ya haram.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

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.

Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

"[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

"The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

"I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

"What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

CNN International just aired a press conference with Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Most of the statements were platitudes and made no new headway, but there's one thing that I did notice that I hadn't remarked before. Both Bush adn the reporters insisted on calling Abu Mazen "President Abbas." Bush also insisted on saying that a Palestinian state couldn't "look like Swiss cheese." This is the second time I've heard this remark from him. If it's not disingenuous, it's an important caveat to the idea of a two-state solution and has a folksy charm that's much more specific than the adjective "viable" that's often used to describe a future Palestinian state.

Otherwise, the American University of Beirut was full of students wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs in support of Gaza today. Interestingly enough, none of the Lebanese students I spoke with seemed to think that their support for their neighbors should extend to the Palestinians who were killed (around 50) or displaced (over 30,000) last year in Nahr el-Bared. They told me that the government had the right to go in and destroy the camp in order to root out the terrorists. When I asked them what the difference was between that and when Israelis use almost identical rhetoric, they insisted that the two situations had nothing in common. One student insisted that Palestinians didn't deserve any rights in Lebanon.

As usual, Lebanese solidarity with Palestinians seems to be more about opposing Israel than supporting Palestinians. Ya haram.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

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.

Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

"[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

"The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

"I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

"What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

CNN International just aired a press conference with Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Most of the statements were platitudes and made no new headway, but there's one thing that I did notice that I hadn't remarked before. Both Bush adn the reporters insisted on calling Abu Mazen "President Abbas." Bush also insisted on saying that a Palestinian state couldn't "look like Swiss cheese." This is the second time I've heard this remark from him. If it's not disingenuous, it's an important caveat to the idea of a two-state solution and has a folksy charm that's much more specific than the adjective "viable" that's often used to describe a future Palestinian state.

Otherwise, the American University of Beirut was full of students wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs in support of Gaza today. Interestingly enough, none of the Lebanese students I spoke with seemed to think that their support for their neighbors should extend to the Palestinians who were killed (around 50) or displaced (over 30,000) last year in Nahr el-Bared. They told me that the government had the right to go in and destroy the camp in order to root out the terrorists. When I asked them what the difference was between that and when Israelis use almost identical rhetoric, they insisted that the two situations had nothing in common. One student insisted that Palestinians didn't deserve any rights in Lebanon.

As usual, Lebanese solidarity with Palestinians seems to be more about opposing Israel than supporting Palestinians. Ya haram.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

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.

Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

"[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

"The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

"I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

"What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

CNN International just aired a press conference with Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Most of the statements were platitudes and made no new headway, but there's one thing that I did notice that I hadn't remarked before. Both Bush adn the reporters insisted on calling Abu Mazen "President Abbas." Bush also insisted on saying that a Palestinian state couldn't "look like Swiss cheese." This is the second time I've heard this remark from him. If it's not disingenuous, it's an important caveat to the idea of a two-state solution and has a folksy charm that's much more specific than the adjective "viable" that's often used to describe a future Palestinian state.

Otherwise, the American University of Beirut was full of students wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs in support of Gaza today. Interestingly enough, none of the Lebanese students I spoke with seemed to think that their support for their neighbors should extend to the Palestinians who were killed (around 50) or displaced (over 30,000) last year in Nahr el-Bared. They told me that the government had the right to go in and destroy the camp in order to root out the terrorists. When I asked them what the difference was between that and when Israelis use almost identical rhetoric, they insisted that the two situations had nothing in common. One student insisted that Palestinians didn't deserve any rights in Lebanon.

As usual, Lebanese solidarity with Palestinians seems to be more about opposing Israel than supporting Palestinians. Ya haram.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

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.

Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

"[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

"The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

"I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

"What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.

I've been surprised in the last few weeks to see how much attention the Nakba is getting during the run up to the 60th anniversary of the catastrophe and the founding of the Jewish state. While interpretations differ, it has at least been getting mentions in publications like The New Yorker and the New York Times.

That said, I knew it was only a matter of time before something really reactionary and stupid came out in a magazine like Commentary. Well, Efraim Karsh offers up exactly what we needed in his "True Story" of what happened in 1948. Following his recent comments on the "Jordanian option," I recently marveled how someone who is ostensibly a scholar of the region could be so out of touch with Arabs and the Arab political scene, but this latest piece takes the proverbial cake.

According to Karsh, before 1948, the Palestinians never had any problem with the idea of becoming a minority in their own land and otherwise would have been perfectly happy living as a second class majority in a Jewish state. In fact, Zionists wanted nothing more than all Arabs to stay in their homes and live happily ever after in a pastoral paradise. Unfortunately, the evil Jew-hating "Arab leaders" had to dash all these wonderful hopes and spur the Palestinians to war, despite the fact that they wanted nothing more than to live in a Jewish state. Why even Vladimir Jabotinsky wanted nothing more than peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence: According to Karsh:

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing “throughout all sectors of the country’s public life.” The words are those of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today’s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness “to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.”

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa.”

It just so happens that this is the same Jabotinsky who thought that the Jewish state should encompass both sides of the Jordan and who in his famous essay, "The Iron Wall," had this to say:

If [the reader] should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight.

...Any native people -- its all the same whether they are civilized or savage -- views their country as their national home, of which they will  always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He goes on to say that no voluntary agreement with the Arabs is possible:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population -- an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

...All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This is what Jabotinsky thought of the Arabs, not just in Palestine but in Jordan as well. To the consternation of modern day Zionists, he saw the Zionist state in explicitly colonial terms, equating it with other European colonial endeavors.  

Now I've got a certain respect for Zionists like Jabotinsky who call a spade a spade. What I don't appreciate are scholars like Karsh who insist on whitewashing the creation of Israel to absolve the state of any wrong-doing. In his world, the Yishuv did nothing wrong; all blame for the problems of Arabs can be squarely placed at the feet of "Arab leaders." He ignores the much more frank assertions of the Zionist leaders themselves, like Ben-Gurion who once asked:

Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.

In any case, Karsh disagrees with the scholarship done by Israeli "new historians" like Pappe, Morris and Shlaim, who all show that the old myths of Palestinians leaving their homes because of radio broadcasts sent out by their leaders are conveniently simplistic and just not true. While there is some disagreement as to whether the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was pre-planned and deliberate, ad-hoc and hasty or unintentional but finally welcome, the issue is ultimately beside the point when it comes to Palestinians' right of return. Either you believe that one has the unalienable right to leave one's country and return, or you don't.

CNN International just aired a press conference with Bush and King Abdullah of Jordan. Most of the statements were platitudes and made no new headway, but there's one thing that I did notice that I hadn't remarked before. Both Bush adn the reporters insisted on calling Abu Mazen "President Abbas." Bush also insisted on saying that a Palestinian state couldn't "look like Swiss cheese." This is the second time I've heard this remark from him. If it's not disingenuous, it's an important caveat to the idea of a two-state solution and has a folksy charm that's much more specific than the adjective "viable" that's often used to describe a future Palestinian state.

Otherwise, the American University of Beirut was full of students wearing black and white Palestinian keffiyehs in support of Gaza today. Interestingly enough, none of the Lebanese students I spoke with seemed to think that their support for their neighbors should extend to the Palestinians who were killed (around 50) or displaced (over 30,000) last year in Nahr el-Bared. They told me that the government had the right to go in and destroy the camp in order to root out the terrorists. When I asked them what the difference was between that and when Israelis use almost identical rhetoric, they insisted that the two situations had nothing in common. One student insisted that Palestinians didn't deserve any rights in Lebanon.

As usual, Lebanese solidarity with Palestinians seems to be more about opposing Israel than supporting Palestinians. Ya haram.

Akiva Eldar has a very non-explicit opinion piece in Ha'aretz about the nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I have the feeling that Israeli laws on its "secret" nuclear program prevent him from being more explicit, but he nonetheless poses a question that I've been asking for some time now:

How can a country, which according to endless foreign reports has kept secret for years several atomic weapons, manage to rally the international community in a struggle against a neighboring country that insists on acquiring nuclear energy? What do Israeli politicians answer to those asking why Iran should not be allowed to acquire the same armaments that are already in the arsenals of neighboring countries, like Pakistan and India? The common response is that "Iran is the sole country whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declares openly that he intends to destroy the state of Israel." This argument is a double-edged sword, par excellence, used by a country that sports a radiant nuclear glow (according to foreign press reports, of course), and who has a senior minister, one assigned to dealing with strategic threats, who has threatened to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Again without being explicit, he calls for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, but he says that this should be done "when the conflict is resolved," which seems a little too much like waiting for Godot to me. History has shown that countries that get the bomb are very unlikely to give it up (with the exception of South Africa). So if Israel waits until Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan all have the bomb, a nuke-free Middle East will never happen, because while the chances of Israel giving up the bomb seem slim, the chances of getting all those other states to give it up are nil.   

This is probably so obvious that it doesn't need to be said, but then again, if it didn't need to be said the media wouldn't keep committing the petty sin of calling regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt "moderate." What about Riyadh makes it more moderate than Teheran? It's just as religious, human rights are just as bad (if not worse) and it's much less democratic. So why does the western media insist on calling regimes like that moderate?

What they seem to mean is allied regimes, not moderate regimes. There's nothing moderate about Saudi Arabia, so let's stop pretending there is and call a spade a spade. Riyadh is an American ally -- and probably not a very good one at that. As any number of the unsavory regimes the US is friendly with should tell us, moderation and good relations are not at all the same thing.

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.

Ha'aretz has an interview with King Abdullah of Jordan. In it, he confirms that Jordan is thinking about starting a nuclear program:

"[T]he rules have changed on the nuclear subject throughout the whole region. Where I think Jordan was saying, 'we'd like to have a nuclear-free zone in the area,' after this summer, everybody's going for nuclear programs.

"The Egyptians are looking for a nuclear program. The GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] are looking at one, and we are actually looking at nuclear power for peaceful and energy purposes. We've been discussing it with the West.

"I personally believe that any country that has a nuclear program should conform to international regulations and should have international regulatory bodies that check to make sure that any nuclear program moves in the right direction."

In other words, you're saying that you expect Israel to join the NPT [non-proliferation treaty].

"What's expected from us should be a standard across the board. We want to make sure this is used for energy. What we don't want is an arms race to come out of this. As we become part of an international body and its international regulations are accepted by all of us, then we become a united front."

This sort of a nuclear proliferation in the Middle East was obvious but not inevitable. (I've brought it up before here and here.) As I've mentioned before, the Middle East should be a nuclear free zone, but since Pakistan, India and Israel all have nuclear weapons (and Iran is most likely doing it's best join the club), it seems inevitable that the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and now Jordan will follow suit.

Such an explosive region is already problematic, but I find the prospect of all the players being armed with nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting.