In 2003, U.S. diplomatist Peter Galbraith resigned at the end of a distinguished, 24-year government career. Over the years that followed, he worked as a contract-based adviser to leaders in Iraq’s Kurdish community, while also arguing passionately in public media that Iraq’s Kurds should be given maximum independence from Baghdad – including full control over any new sources of oil.

But in June 2004, more quietly, Galbraith also established a small, U.S.-registered company, Porcupine, that held a five percent stake in a newly exploited oilfield in Iraqi Kurdistan, a Norwegian daily revealed last Saturday.

The daily, Dagens Næringsliv, had been investigating the increasingly troubled relationship between Porcupine and a privately-owned Norwegian firm, DNO, which partnered with Porcupine in the Kurdish-Iraqi oil project. Journalists at the daily said that discovering that Porcupine’s hitherto secretive owner was Galbraith came as a complete surprise.

Galbraith also won international headlines in another recent Norway-related story. In late September, he broke publicly with Kai Eide, the Norwegian head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMI), over how to respond to allegations of fraud in Afghanistan’s August election.

Galbraith had been working as Eide’s deputy since March. He resigned in late September, accusing Eide of trying to hide evidence of large-scale fraud committed during the election.

There are many parallels between the constitutional/legitimation challenges the U.S. occupation force and its allies face in Afghanistan today and those faced by the U.S. and its allies in Iraq, 2003-08.

One key challenge for U.S. decision-makers is how to generate a local “host nation” government using the democratic processes that most U.S. citizens say they want – but one that is also prepared to work very closely indeed with Washington, which most citizens of the occupied countries are reluctant to do.

Prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Peter Galbraith was a strong voice advocating the invasion. Immediately after the invasion, he was one of three or four high-level U.S. officials and advisers who started designing a completely new Constitution for the country.

(The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 specifies that an occupation force should keep existing governance and constitutional arrangements in place, as far as possible, until it withdraws.)

Galbraith had long been a strong sympathiser of the Iraqi Kurds’ desire for strong autonomy or even complete independence from Baghdad. In his 2006 book “The End of Iraq”, he wrote that he started consulting with the Kurdish leaders on constitutional issues “two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein”.

He continued those consultations through the time of the U.S.’s promulgation of a “Transitional Administrative Law” (TAL) in March 2004 and the adoption of a more permanent new Iraqi Constitution in October 2005.

Adoption of the Constitution was achieved through an Iraq-wide referendum, conducted under the control of the U.S. military.

In both the TAL and the 2005 Constitution, provision was made for any one of the country’s 18 provinces, or a group of them, to declare the formation of a “region” that would have extra powers of self-governance. In practice, the only “region” that has formed is the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), comprised of Iraq’s three majority-Kurdish provinces.

In the TAL, the principles for dividing the country’s oil revenues were left vague. In the 2005 Constitution, it stated that revenues from the country’s existing oil fields, many of which were nearing depletion, would continue to be controlled by Baghdad. It said the “regions” could have a lot more control over any new oil fields to be developed – though the extent of that control was still left vague.

In the meantime, Galbraith and his Porcupine company had acquired their five percent interest in the KRG’s new Tawke oil field, and entered into its partnership there with DNO.

Galbraith also argued hard in the discussions over the 2005 Constitution for a clause defining Iraq’s governance system as a fundamentally decentralised one in which all residual powers lie with the provinces and “regions”. He won that argument, and the clause was put in.

The distinguished Egyptian-American law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl has commented on Iraq’s constitution-writing process that it involved, “a lot of authoritative input by various elements in the U.S. as to not just what the Iraqi commitments are going to be but what the occupying country deems to be acceptable”.

The radical decentralisation of powers that was written into the 2005 Constitution at a time of strong U.S. influence in the country continues to plague Iraq today. This is so even though the U.S. agreed last November to completely withdraw its troops from Iraq; that withdrawal is now well underway, and Washington’s power to exert direct influence over Iraqi politics has eroded considerably.

With Washington’s ability to bolster the Kurds’ position in intra-Iraq negotiations now considerably reduced, the country’s Kurds, who form under 20 percent of the national population, and its majority Arabs have gotten into a series of new tussles for power. Not surprisingly these involve both constitutional issues – and oil.

Iraq is scheduled to hold its next nationwide parliamentary election on Jan. 16, 2010. The current lawmakers had a deadline of last Thursday to finish defining the rules under which the election will be held. They missed it – though there is some hope they can reach agreement on this point within the coming days.

This disagreement is over whether the “lists” that each party or coalition will present in each of the country’s province-sized constituencies will have a list of names that is “closed”, that is unchangeable, or whether on polling day voters can change the order of the names to reflect their own preferences.

This matter pits the Kurdish parties (who want “closed” lists) against all the country’s other parties, who profess to prefer “open” lists.

The Kurdish and non-Kurdish parties are at odds, too, over the potentially explosive issue of how voting rolls will be drawn up in the oil-rich environs of the mixed-ethnicity city of Kirkuk.

The province Kirkuk is located in, Salah ad Din, is not affiliated with the KRG. Most Kurds strongly want to bring it under KRG control, while most members of Iraq’s Arab and ethnic-Turkoman communities strongly oppose that. (Two deadlines for holding a city-wide referendum on Kirkuk’s future, as mandated in the 2005 Constitution, long ago expired.)

Iraq’s Arabs and Kurds are also, not surprisingly, waging a stiff war over control of oil exports and revenues. Last June, the Tawke oil field (in which Galbraith once invested) was the first of the KRG’s new oilfields to come online. Its operators, who reportedly comprised a 55 percent share owned by DNO, a 25 percent share owned by a Turkish company, and a 20 percent stake directly owned by the KRG, started “exporting” oil to the main body of Iraq.

But the Baghdad government refused to pay the Tawke consortium for this oil, arguing that the whole commercial arrangement whereby the KRG had developed the field was quite illegal.

For their part, the Kurdish parties that are still strong in the central government are threatening to hold up a deal Baghdad wants to conclude with a Chinese company to develop some massive oilfields in southern Iraq.

Meanwhile, the KRG and DNO have had their own, apparently serious, falling-out, which is being litigated in London. It was by investigating the facts of that case that Dagens Næringsliv discovered the clear material interest that Galbraith earlier had in the whole KRG-DNO deal.

His Porcupine company was cut out of the deal at some point in 2008, for reasons that remain murky. But that development did not negate the fact that for the preceding four years, while Galbraith was an influential participant in Iraq-related constitutional and political discussions, he also had an undisclosed financial interest in a KRG-authorised oil development venture.

Here in the U.S., Galbraith has long been associated with the “liberal hawk” wing of the Democratic Party, which has argued since the early 1990s that U.S. military power can, and on occasion should, be used to impose a U.S.-defined human rights agenda in various parts of the world.

Many members of this group have been liberal idealists – though some of those who, on “liberal” grounds, gave early support to Pres. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq later expressed their regret for adopting that position.

Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush’s late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Just two months ago, many western commentators were jubilant that Mahmoud Abbas, the U.S.-supported head of both the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the interim Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA), was making a comeback and reducing the influence in Palestinian society of the Islamist movement Hamas.

But a series of events in recent weeks has sent Abbas’s level of support from his people into a nosedive. The most serious has been the reaction among Palestinians to a decision Abbas or someone close to him made to postpone any further U.N. action on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report into the atrocities committed during last winter’s Israel-Gaza war.

Richard Goldstone, a very distinguished South African jurist and war-crimes prosecutor, presented his report to the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva on Sep. 29. It contained a recommendation that the HRC forward the report’s lengthy and detailed findings regarding wrongdoing by both sides to the Security Council for possible further action.

But when the HRC discussed Goldstone’s report on Oct. 1, the PLO’s representative requested that the HRC sit on the report until next March before doing anything further.

Most Palestinians, both within and outside their historic homeland, were outraged. They demanded to know who took that decision, and why. Suspicion rapidly settled on Abbas himself- and it was not allayed by his speedy declaration that the Fatah movement, which he heads, would set up its own internal investigation into how the decision had been made.

Palestinian media came out with two, perhaps overlapping, explanations of what had persuaded Abbas – or someone very close to him – to block any speedy action on the Goldstone Report.

One focused on economic incentives that Israel held out to a well-connected Palestinian company eager to acquire the bandwidth that it needs to set up a new cell-phone service.

The other report, from Shahab news agency, concerned a different, even more insidious form of Israeli blackmail.

Shahab reported that PA/PLO representatives here in Washington were persuaded to drop their support for speedy action on Goldstone after they were played a videotape and an audiotape, reportedly recorded during last winter’s war, in which Abbas and a key security aide, Tayyib Abdul-Rahim, both urged Israel’s leaders to continue and even escalate their attack on Gaza.

Those allegations struck a chord with many Palestinians who, during the war, had noted the refusal of most members of the PLO’s far-flung diplomatic corps to say or do anything to oppose Israel’s lengthy and very harmful pounding of Gaza’s overwhelmingly civilian population.

Inside the West Bank, meanwhile, the PA’s security forces (commanded in part by Abdul-Rahim) suppressed many of the demonstrations that erupted against the war, and arrested scores of Gaza solidarity activists.

It is not clear whether the Israeli government sees the political pummeling Abbas has taken as a result of his Goldstone decision as welcome, because it reduces his ability to negotiate peace in the name of the whole Palestinian people, or as regrettable, given the strength of his opposition to Hamas; but nonetheless necessary, as a way for Israel to ensure the blocking of the process Goldstone recommended.

One thing that is clear is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been very serious about blocking any Security Council consideration of the Goldstone Report. Government spokesmen have launched nasty personal smears against Goldstone, who himself is Jewish, and whose daughter describes him as a committed Zionist.

Netanyahu’s ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, said Thursday that the Goldstone Report is more insidious than the Holocaust denial of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If Goldstone’s recommendations are accepted by the international community, Oren said, this would paralyse western democracies from defending themselves against terrorism.

He also noted the “intense cooperation” his government had received from the Barack Obama administration in fending off the “danger” it judged the Goldstone Report posed to Israel and the west.

Oren and Netanyahu might be feeling good about fending off this “danger”. But the hardball way they – and apparently also U.S. officials – treated Abbas over this affair have considerably complicated the diplomatic game-plan that the Obama administration previously seemed to be following, which relied strongly on building up Abbas’s and Fatah’s political weight relative to that of Hamas.

It is that political balance that has now been tipped – perhaps decisively.

This is a big change since early August, when Abbas won many plaudits from western leaders for having organised a successful “General Conference” for Fatah – the movement’s first such gathering in 20 years.

The combination of that successful Fatah conference and the continued infusion of western funding into the PA, where it is controlled by both Abbas and the technocratic, pro-western Ramallah Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, encouraged some western governments to think that these two men could now marginalise Hamas from having any real impact on peace negotiations.

Now, that plan looks far less feasible. Abbas’s standing has been reduced not only by the decisions he most recently made regarding Goldstone, but also by the compete stasis in Washington’s peace diplomacy, Washington’s failure to win a settlement freeze from Netanyahu, as it had promised to do – and by the humiliating way Abbas was forced to engage in a “three-way” meeting with Netanyahu and Obama at the U.N. General Assembly in late September.

Obama’s special envoy George Mitchell is back in Jerusalem Friday on the seventh or eighth of his quick shuttle tours around the Israeli-Arab region. On Saturday he will be in Ramallah.

Al-Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros reported from occupied East Jerusalem that the city’s Palestinians “are very upset and angry and becoming increasingly disappointed with this new U.S. approach, which is bringing nothing new to the table”.

Meantime, there is increasing talk amongst both Palestinians and many Israelis of the possibility of a new intifada. If this does occur, it is most likely to be sparked by the massive wave of colonisation and linked activities the Israeli authorities have been undertaking in East Jerusalem.

Senior diplomats from neighbouring Arab states have warned that, given Jerusalem’s intense significance for Arabs and Muslims everywhere, the effects of a new, Jerusalem-focused intifada could be felt far beyond Palestine.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Thursday’s seven-party talks in Geneva on Iran’s nuclear programme resulted in a breakthrough agreement on Russian enrichment of materials Tehran needs for nuclear-medical work.

Proponents say that step considerably reduces western fears that Tehran was heading for nuclear weapons, and is a good move toward rebuilding the long-broken confidence between Tehran and most western governments.

It also reveals the degree to which western governments now find they must take due account of non-western powers like Russia and China, rather than continuing to allow their policies to be dictated by the more hawkish tendencies among their own citizenries.

In Geneva, chief Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili said the meeting “created a good opportunity for fresh cooperation to remove international concerns”.

Here in Washington, Pres. Barack Obama described the agreement reached in Geneva as “a constructive beginning”, but noted that further hard work still lies ahead.

Under the Geneva agreement, Iran will export to Russia around 80 percent of the uranium gas that it has now enriched to around three percent of the nuclear-useful U235 isotope. Russia will further enrich it to just under 19 percent and (using some French technology) convert it into the form of solid fuel rods.

The rods will be useful for the nuclear-medical work Iran needs. But the uranium in them cannot, either then or subsequently, be used as feedstock for nuclear weapons.

In Geneva, Tehran also pledged to allow full inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of all its nuclear facilities, including the small facility near Qom whose existence it reported Sep. 21.

IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei is expected to travel to Tehran on Saturday to follow up on the agreements reached in Geneva.

Obama himself had contributed to the constructive outcome in Geneva, in at least two ways. One was through the contacts his negotiators conducted over recent weeks with Russia and others of the six nations that met the Iranians in Geneva – contacts which helped work out the nature of the Russian-French plan.

The six nations are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (P5), plus Germany.

The other way Obama contributed to the talks’ success was by allowing his negotiator there, Undersecretary of State William J. Burns, to hold an informal, 45-minute meeting one-on-one with chief Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Other members of the U.S. team also held similar “side-meetings” in Geneva with their Iranian counterparts, amidst unconfirmed speculation that those talks covered other aspects of the two countries’ relations. (Speculation about more far-reaching negotiations was also fueled by a mysterious, two-hour visit that Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki made to Washington on Wednesday.)

The only time that Pres. George W. Bush allowed a U.S. official to participate in P5+1 talks with Iran was in July 2008. But that official was permitted to interact with the Iranian negotiators only in the full plenary session, and to discuss nothing other than Iran’s nuclear programme.

Those earlier talks reached no agreement – not even on the holding of follow-up talks.

In Thursday’s talks, by contrast, Washington gave the U.S. negotiators far more room for real engagement with the Iranians. That engagement resulted in the attainment of the two agreements which mandate a number of activities that can provide readily verifiable evidence of the good faith (or otherwise) of all sides.

For western governments previously wary that Iran was working to amass enough partially enriched uranium to allow the building of a nuclear weapon within a short time period, the removal of most of Iran’s present stock of three percent-enriched uranium from any possibility of weaponisation buys time in which the broader relationship between Iran and the west can be healed.

In addition, as the Russian-French enrichment plan gets underway, that can provide valuable assurance to the Tehran government that these and other P5+1 governments are willing to help Tehran meet its long-stated needs in the nuclear technology field.

Iran has always said its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes. Supreme Leader Ali al-Khamenei has issued a fatwa (religious decree) describing the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons as “forbidden under Islam”.

Many in the U.S. right wing who believe strongly in the use of U.S. or U.S.-Israeli military power have expressed predictable criticisms of the Geneva agreement. Pres. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, warned darkly that Tehran has now “got the United States ensnared in negotiations”.

However, the fulminations of people like Bolton underline the big changes that have occurred since Obama’s election – not just in the policies pursued by Washington but also in the degree to which Washington policymakers now more clearly understand the shifting balance in world politics.

Russia and China have been wary for more than 20 years now of the western powers’ push to isolate, attack, or even subvert the Islamic government in Iran. In the past, they were also wary of the very similar campaign Washington maintained against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – right up to the point in 2003 when U.S. forces invaded Iraq and directly toppled him from power.

In 2003, Russia and China were unable (both in strictly military terms, and in terms of global power equations) to block the invasion of Iraq. But since 2003, Russia has stabilised its internal governance considerably from the chaotic state it was still in at that time, and China has continued its steady rise to greater power on the world scene.

Two developments over the past year have underlined, for many U.S. strategic planners, the stark facts of the United States’ deep interdependence with these two significant world powers. One was last autumn’s collapse of the financial markets in New York and other financial centres around the world, which revealed the extent of the dependence the west’s financial system has on China’s (mainly governmental) investors.

The other turning point has been the serious challenges the U.S. faced in its campaigns against Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this year, Pakistani-based Islamist militants mounted such extensive attacks against convoys carrying desperately needed supplies to U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan that Washington was forced to sign an agreement with Moscow to open alternative supply routes through Russia.

Russia and China both have significant interests in Iran, which they are now clearly unwilling to jeopardise simply in order to appease Washington.

This year, China is reportedly on track to import 15 percent of its crude oil needs from Iran, up from 12 percent last year. In March, the two countries signed a 3.3-billion-dollar deal to develop some of Iran’s natural gas fields.

Earlier this week, influential former Chinese diplomat Sun Bigan underlined the importance of Middle East hydrocarbon to Beijing in an essay in a state-published, Mandarin-language journal.

“The U.S. has always sought to control the faucet of global oil supplies,” Sun wrote. “There is cooperation between China and the U.S., but there is also struggle, and the U.S. has always seen us as a potential foe.”

Sun recently retired as Beijing’s special envoy on the Middle East. Before that, he served terms as China’s ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.

His comments to the journal underscored the weight that China’s Communist Party rulers now give to the Middle East as a place to prevent any further expansion of Washington’s global power.

The websites of state-controlled Chinese media provide more evidence of Beijing’s growing concern with, and understanding of, the Middle East. On the “Top Stories” page of the “China View” site, no fewer than nine of the top 20 stories Friday were from the region – covering developments in Iraq, and Israel-Palestine, as well as Iran.

Thursday brought dramatic evidence of the growing weight of non-western powers in policies toward Iran. What is still unclear is when there will be evidence of any parallel growth in their influence in Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Eight months after Barack Obama launched his presidency by promising a speedy push for Palestinian-Israeli peace, that effort has stalled badly. And there are now growing fears that the top levels of Obama’s peace team are torn by internal disagreements that may undermine the whole peace effort.

Some of these problems were on view during two high-level appearances Obama made in New York this week.

On Tuesday, speaking to the media after the three-way meeting he held with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Obama notably avoided saying anything about the failure of the high-profile campaign he and his chief peace envoy, George Mitchell, have pursued to “persuade” the Israeli government to stop building settlement housing in the occupied West Bank.

Obama instead announced a new project: the resumption of the long-suspended negotiations between the parties over the terms of their final peace.

Most observers – in Palestine, Israel, and the U.S. – interpreted Tuesday’s events as marking two distinct victories for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Obama had in effect been forced to abandon his campaign for a settlement freeze. And Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the interim Palestinian Authority (PA), was forced to meet with Netanyahu despite previously vowing he would not negotiate with him until the freeze was in place.

For some pro-peace Americans, one bright spot in Tuesday’s encounter was that Obama spelled out to the media that peace is a key interest not just for the parties directly involved, but also for the United States.

In his big speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, Obama pledged his public commitment to the pursuit – though tellingly, not the speedy attainment – of a “just and lasting peace between Israel, Palestine, and the Arab world.”

He also said, “We continue to emphasise that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

However, numerous commentators in both the Arab world and in Israel’s much-diminished “peace camp” noted that since Obama has never moved beyond words in his push to freeze settlement construction, there seemed little reason to hope he would do so in his pursuit of the broader peace settlement, either.

Meanwhile, there have been worrying signs of discord among the team consisting of Obama and top peace-team members. One well-connected Arab observer told IPS that he judged that Obama’s shift in focus from the settlement freeze to the final-status issue signaled the president’s frustration with the approach that Mitchell has used until now.

This observer said he judged Mitchell had paid too much attention to pushing for the settlement freeze, which was only ever seen as an interim step. It was described by Mitchell and others as part of a package – along with some sweeteners from Arab states -that would help build initial confidence between the parties.

But both Netanyahu and the most powerful Arab states balked at providing what Mitchell asked for. Meanwhile, many valuable months have been wasted – months during which settlement building has continued with little pause.

The Arab observer said his understanding of Mitchell’s approach, as demonstrated in his successful mediation in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, was that it involved having negotiators from the warring parties participate in lengthy face-to-face encounters during which their fears and distrust could slowly be melted away.

Another Washington analyst has observed that that approach may have been helpful in Northern Ireland, or South Africa, where the aim was to help warring parties find a way to live together over the long term within a single state.

“But in the case of Israel and Palestine, we’re talking about a divorce,” she said. “All these two need to talk about is the terms of that divorce, and how to do it in a way that works.”

Additional evidence of high-level discord in the White House came in an interview Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, gave to television host Charlie Rose Wednesday night.

Just the day before, Obama had spelled out that peace is “in the interests of the United States”. But Emanuel told Rose a couple of times that the U.S. “can’t want peace more than [the parties] want it”.

That was a formula frequently used during the Clinton and Bush II administrations to signify that, if a difference should emerge between Washington and Israel over the peace diplomacy, then Washington would back down.

Regarding the next steps in the U.S.-led diplomacy, Obama said Tuesday that he had asked Netanyahu and Abbas to send their negotiators to Washington “next week”, and he had asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to report to him on the status of these negotiations in mid-October.

Maan News reported from Israeli-occupied Bethlehem today that Abbas’s top negotiator, Saeb Erakat, would be participating in the talks, due to start Oct. 1.

In Washington Friday, veteran Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi warned that Obama’s failure to win the settlement freeze and the extreme reluctance he showed toward holding Israel in any way accountable for its defiance had weakened not only Obama’s standing among Palestinians and other Arabs, but also that of Mahmoud Abbas.

“The whole process Obama has gone through until now has lost Abu Mazen a lot of credibility with the Palestinian people,” she said, using the name Palestinians use for Abbas.

“For Palestinians it’s very important that our leadership not constantly be the one to give in,” she said.

Ashrawi, who was a member of the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid peace talks, said she thought Obama’s speech to General Assembly Wednesday seemed to “salvage” his policy somewhat. “So, he said the right thing there,” she said. “But now we need to see if he can make the right moves.”

She judged that the latest developments in the diplomacy had weakened Abbas significantly among all sectors of the Palestinian people – including with the grassroots in his own party, Fatah.

For their part, the leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas issued a statement Thursday that urged Abbbas and Fatah to “stop deceiving and misleading the Palestinian people by attaching more hopes on the ‘useless’ negotiations with the Israelis.” The Hamas statement also strongly criticised Obama’s “obvious” bias toward the Israelis.

Fatah and Hamas will be sending high-level emissaries to Cairo on Sunday to take part in yet another in the long series of reconciliation they have held over recent months.

There are few signs yet that the upcoming round of talks will succeed where so many others have failed.

With those two big Palestinian movements still at loggerheads, the Obama administration apparently split and anyway unwilling to confront Israel on key issues, and Israel’s peace movement now a mere shadow of its former vibrant self, the prospects for rapid success in the diplomacy look very dim.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

As world leaders prepare to gather here for the all-star “general debate” at the U.N. General Assembly on Sep. 23, two of them – U.S. Pres. Barack Obama and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – are still tussling over whether to prioritise their anti-Iran campaign or the push for a Palestinian-Israeli peace.

In recent days, there have been big developments in both areas. On Sep. 11, the Obama administration announced that it will take part, along with the other members of the “P5+1” group, in a major round of nuclear talks with Iran scheduled for Oct. 1.

Then on Tuesday, Judge Richard Goldstone presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council a painstakingly investigated report that accused both Israel and some Palestinian armed groups of having committed war crimes during Israel’s assault on Gaza last winter.

That development, along with Netanyahu’s recent announcement of yet more housing starts for West Bank settlers, increased the international pressure on Obama to announce long-awaited new steps in the Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy.

Obama and his special envoy, George Mitchell, have both vowed – ever since Obama’s first days in office, in January – to work hard to secure a final peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that involves establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

But Obama and Mitchell have been notably tight-lipped about the details, and even the timetable, of how they will achieve that. This has led to some speculation that Obama will announce a new diplomatic initiative when, or soon after, he addresses the General Assembly Sep. 23.

Most Israeli governments of recent years, however, have argued that peace diplomacy with the Palestinians should take a determinedly back seat to the effort – which they hope will be spearheaded by the U.S. – to strip Iran of any possibility it could ever develop the technical knowhow to produce nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have argued that they need to see the threat of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons decisively averted before Israel can feel secure enough to even consider making peace with the Palestinians.

The Israelis’ arguments about the primacy of confronting Iran have been echoed by many right-wing and pro-Israeli forces inside the U.S. political elite. For example, advocacy of tough action against Iran has become a major organising and fundraising theme for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC.

Iranian officials argue strongly that their nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only. They note that Iran, unlike Israel, is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and that Israel already has a fearsome, though still clandestine, nuclear arsenal.

Since Obama was inaugurated, he has taken a tack notably different from Israel’s on the relationship between the anti-Iran campaign and Israel-Palestinian peace diplomacy. He has argued that concluding a solid peace between Israelis and Palestinians is desirable both for its own sake and also because it will make it easier for the U.S. to subsequently build a strong international coalition against Iran.

In other words, peacemaking first, and then – if it is still necessary – confront Iran.

In recent days, Obama has taken a number of steps that indicate that he anyway judges the possibility of Iran acquiring an advanced capability to make and deliver nuclear weapons to be smaller than former president George W. Bush judged it to be.

He took that decision to respond positively to Tehran’s invitation to go to the Oct. 1 meeting, along with the other P5+1 governments – China, Russia, France, Britain, and Germany.

On Thursday, he also announced a decision to reduce the scope of the anti-missile system the Bush administration planned to build in Eastern Europe. The mission of the original Bush project was to intercept long-range missiles, possibly including nuclear-tipped ones, that Iran might send over Eastern Europe against targets in the United States.

Obama has moved carefully, if slowly, toward trying to deflect the pressures that Israel and its allies have exerted on him to step up his confrontation against Iran.

But those who urged decisive and speedy action in the peace diplomacy have also been disappointed.

In his first days in office, Obama acted fast to spell out his vision of a final Palestinian-Israeli peace in an interview with a respected Arabic-language television station, Al-Arabiya. Later, in live speeches in Ankara and Cairo, he elaborated on that theme with audiences containing hundreds of Middle Eastern Muslims.

Since January, Mitchell has undertaken five or six very low-key “listening trips” to the Middle East, and Obama and all members of his team repeatedly called on Israel to halt all construction in the settlements in the occupied West Bank – including East Jerusalem.

But the administration has undertaken no visible policy steps at all towards securing either the construction halt or, more importantly, the final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Instead, Mitchell got into a lengthy, inconclusive, and quite diversionary negotiation with Netanyahu on defining some limits – far short of a total freeze – on Israel’s construction in the settlements.

Netanyahu has publicly embarrassed Obama by announcing several rounds of new housing starts in the settlements, and has met no consequences at all for that defiance. Generous U.S. aid in the financial, military, and economic fields continues to flow to Israel unimpeded.

The publication of Goldstone’s report presented another challenge to Washington’s continued support for Israel. Goldstone recommended that both the U.N. Human Rights Council – which Washington finally joined last Monday – and the even more important Security Council should take follow-up actions to ensure Israeli (and Palestinian) accountability.

The U.S. takes over the presidency of the Security Council for the next month. Governments around the world – as well as rights activists – will be watching to see how it deals with Goldstone’s recommendations. The first reactions from Obama’s ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, were very dismissive about them.

Many Arab states, including those that are politically closest to the U.S., meanwhile continue to watch impatiently for sign of real activism from Washington on the peacemaking.

One Arab ambassador told IPS he wants to see Obama speedily announce the time and place of the start of negotiations over the final peace. He noted that many details of such an agreement were nailed down during earlier rounds of negotiation, including those conducted between the Olmert government and the Palestinians last year.

“We could see a final peace agreement concluded by the end of this year,” he said. “And we need to see that. Because then Mahmoud Abbas can go into next January’s Palestinian elections with a more compelling narrative than that of Hamas.”

This envoy said he judged the negotiations should be held inside the U.S., and should have the urgency and political heft of those held in Dayton in 1995, which provided a General Framework Agreement for Peace for Bosnia.

He also emphasised the dangers he saw arising from the confrontational and aggrandising activities being undertaken by ultra-nationalist Jewish activists in several key parts of occupied east Jerusalem, including inside the historic Old City.

“It is absolutely necessary for the U.S. to curb those activities – especially if it wants to keep the support of Arab and Muslim states in its campaign against Iran,” he said. “If there is no deal on Jerusalem, then forget about it. Jerusalem is important for Muslims everywhere.”

The Arab states are one key swing constituency in the tussle of priorities that continues to be waged between Netanyahu and Obama. Thus far, all without exception have been urging action on Israeli-Palestinian peace before any escalation of tensions against Iran.

So, very clearly, have those other significant players in world politics, China and Russia. Both those veto-wielding powers blocked a proposal Washington presented last month to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that would have stepped up the actions the IAEA takes against Iran.

Washington cannot get its way in international bodies as easily now as it has for most of the past 20 years. So the probability of it being able to assemble a tough coalition against Iran is anyway receding.

But that fact does not bring serious U.S. efforts in the peace process any closer. Indeed, by making a strong anti-Iran coalition look unachievable under any circumstances, it may even lessen the motivation of some in Washington to push hard on Israeli-Palestinian peace diplomacy.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

This week, two respected human rights organisations – one Palestinian, one Israeli – each came out with very full reports into the extent of the damage caused by the assault Israel waged against Gaza last winter.

According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which is based in Gaza, 1,419 Palestinians were killed during the fighting, of whom 252 were combatants and the rest noncombatants, including members of the civilian police. Three hundred and eighteen of those killed were, it said, children.

The Israeli group B’Tselem (“In the Image”) tallied 1,387 Gazans killed by the Israelis, including 320 minors. It assessed that 330 of those killed had taken part in the hostilities. B’Tselem also noted that three Israeli civilians and nine soldiers were killed during the fighting.

The Israeli government earlier claimed that 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the fighting, of whom only 89 were minors under the age of 16, while 60 percent were “members of Hamas and other armed groups”.

PCHR and B’Tselem published their latest reports in the lead-up to next week’s widely awaited presentation to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council of the final report on Gaza war casualties prepared by the investigative commission headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone.

PCHR and B’Tselem based their tallies on painstaking field research. (There are some small discrepancies between them. But most can be explained by differences in the definitions used.)

The Israeli government, by contrast, has not revealed the methodology by which – without having any access at all to surviving family members or local officials on the ground – it felt able to compile its much lower tally.

Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the publication of Goldstone’s report, the Israeli government has launched a very tough offensive against all the Israeli and international rights organisations that have been documenting the damage in Gaza.

At the international level, that includes both the Goldstone Commission itself and international citizen groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Judge Goldstone is a practiced investigator of war crimes and other atrocities. He first made his name in the late 1980s by heading a judicial investigation that South Africa’s apartheid government was obliged to establish, to look into allegations of abuses by the South African Defence Force.

He resisted significant pressures to produce a whitewash on that occasion; and the subsequent publication of his findings revealed a lot about the dark underside of the security forces’ behaviour that was not previously known.

In 1993, he became the first prosecutor at the war crimes court the U.N. established for the former Yugoslavia, establishing its entire international investigative operation.

On his latest mission, the Israeli government refused to allow Goldstone to travel to Gaza from Israel. But he and members of his team traveled there via Egypt. They held hearings in Gaza and in Geneva on alleged violations of international humanitarian law during the war committed by both Israel and Hamas and other Palestinian organisations in Gaza.

The publication of their findings next week will be an important event, and is being eagerly awaited by human rights activists and by officials at the many rights organisations that have also worked on this case.

These organisations have all come under particularly sharp attack from the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its supporters since last July, when Netanyahu openly accused them of pursuing an anti-Israel agenda.

Netanyahu’s attack gave great encouragement to a hitherto small Israeli body, itself a non-governmental organisation, or NGO, which is called “NGO Monitor”.

Members of the Netanyahu government and NGO Monitor have launched blistering attacks against Israeli groups like “Breaking the Silence”, which did breakthrough work in publicising accusations made by Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza regarding the laws-of-war violations they saw while there.

NGO Monitor and prominent rightwing Israeli politicians have proposed banning the provision by foreign governments of funding to groups like Breaking the Silence.

At the international level, one of NGO Monitor’s main targets has been HRW. HRW has long been the most influential rights group inside the United States and gained even more influence inside the administration after Barack Obama became president.

On Tuesday, NGO Monitor published an extensively documented, 99-page attack on both the neutrality of HRW’s leadership and staff members and the quality of its work. (Full disclosure: this writer is a member of HRW’s Middle East advisory committee and was also targeted in passing in this report.)

On Wednesday, NGO monitor published a shorter, but equally hard-hitting, attack against the Goldstone Commission.

Meantime, HRW’s standing was dented when, apparently independently from NGO Monitor’s effort, some pro-Israeli bloggers in the U.S. revealed on Tuesday that Marc Garlasco, a key HRW staff member responsible for much of its work on Gaza, had an intense out-of-hours involvement in the hobby of collecting Nazi-era military memorabilia.

HRW’s leaders have tried to keep their attention focused on the broader campaign to reveal the true extent of the laws-of-war violations committed by both sides in Gaza and to try to hold the perpetrators accountable for their acts.

Other organisations worldwide are meanwhile placing more of their focus on the violations of the Geneva Conventions that Israel continues to perpetrate with respect to Gaza – in particular, its continued refusal to allow the passage into the Strip of any goods except those needed for minimal physical survival.

Israel is still, eight months after last winter’s fighting ended, blocking the shipment into Gaza even of basic construction materials, needed to repair the extensive damage the Israeli forces caused to homes, schools, and infrastructure throughout the Strip.

When, or soon after, the U.N. General Assembly convenes in New York later this month, Pres. Obama is expected to launch another round of peace diplomacy between Israelis and Palestinians. But meanwhile, the people of Gaza still suffer.

Judge Goldstone’s revelations about the violations of last winter will not end their suffering. But it may help many people understand their fate better, and thus build the constituency for the speedy securing of a final peace agreement.

Political violence in Iraq killed 456 Iraqis in August, the highest monthly death toll since July 2008. And with the U.S. showing no sign it plans to reverse the troop withdrawal that is now well underway, numerous struggles for power are shaping up inside Iraq.

They involve both competing factions within the country and also, perhaps more ominously, several neighbouring countries.

These levels of violence are deeply entwined, as was shown by the aftershocks of the most deadly of August’s acts of violence: on Aug. 19, unknown parties, suspected to be disgruntled Sunnis, detonated large vehicle bombs outside three Iraqi ministries, killing 95 people and injuring more than 600.

Shortly afterward, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused Syria of giving safe haven to the men who masterminded the bombings, whom he identified as followers of Iraq’s former Baathist rulers. (Close observers of the Iraqi scene are divided on the authenticity of the televised “confessions” on which he based this charge.)

As the heat of Maliki’s accusations rose, he withdrew his ambassador from Syria. That decision was all the more notable since just days earlier he had made a very friendly state visit to Damascus, where he and his hosts signed several important agreements.

In preceding months, Syrian officials had repeatedly stressed that they saw a strong interest in Maliki’s government successfully stabilising its rule throughout Iraq. (Syria also started to work semi-quietly with U.S. military planners to help achieve this.)

But as Maliki escalated his accusations against Syria, the previously burgeoning cooperation between the two governments lay in ruins. Syria, which had been one of the earliest Arab states to recognise Maliki’s government, also withdrew its ambassador from Baghdad.

The Aug. 19 bombings were timed, perhaps deliberately, to be carried out on the anniversary of the massive truck bomb that in 2003 wrecked the U.N. mission in Baghdad, killing its head and many of his staff members.

That earlier bombing marked a turning point in Iraqi affairs. Before it, many non-Iraqis and even many Iraqis hoped that somehow, with the U.N.’s help, Iraq could emerge fairly peacefully from the devastation that the U.S. military had inflicted in its assault and invasion of the country just five months earlier.

After the August 2003 bomb, that hope lay in tatters – and the U.N. greatly downgraded its engagement in Iraqi affairs.

After the Aug. 19 bombings of this year, the hope that Iraq might emerge fairly peacefully from the six-year-long U.S. occupation has been similarly seriously dented.

The three ministries targeted were each known to fall more thoroughly under the sway of Iraq’s big ethnosectarian factions than under Maliki’s direct control. (That was one result of the system of “apportionment” of state positions and patronage among Iraq’s sects and ethnicities that was introduced by the U.S. occupation.)

So it is plausible that strong Iraqi nationalists, whether Baathists or others, who have been very disturbed by the emergence of these factions may have been behind the bombings.

Another possibility, mentioned by more than a few Iraqis, is that forces near to Maliki himself may have had a hand in them, in an attempt to cut down the factions’ power.

In the same period the Aug. 19 bombs were being planned, all the other Shiite factions that in 2006 had helped boost Maliki to power formed a new coalition – but without him, or his Daawa Party. Indeed, Maliki’s party and its non-Shiite allies did much better in last January’s provincial election than any of the other Shiite parties with which it was previously aligned.

“Right now, Maliki seems much happier hanging out with people from the Sunni party he’s allied with than with his previous allies in the Shiite parties,” veteran Iraqi-American political scientist Adeed Dawisha told IPS.

There are further wrinkles in the story. Maliki is very close to the Iranians and receives strong backing from them – but so do just about all the other factional leaders who he is now opposing.

Iran has been a powerful player inside Iraqi politics ever since the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein. Now, as the U.S. military footprint in the country contracts, Iran’s power there is growing very visibly.

This has greatly concerned all Iraq’s Arab neighbours – including Syria, despite the Damascus government’s lengthy de-facto alliance with Tehran.

So one possible explanation for the vehemence with which Maliki accused Syria may be the Iranians urged it on him, in an attempt to deny the Syrians any potential influence over the Baghdad regime.

One notable aspect of the political tempests now swirling around Iraq is that neither in Iraq nor in the U.S. has there been any significant movement calling for the U.S. to delay or reverse its continuing pullout.

In the U.S., much more attention is now being paid to the military’s deeply troubled engagement in Afghanistan.

Under the Withdrawal Agreement that Pres. George W. Bush concluded with the Maliki government last November, all U.S. troops should be out of Iraq by the end of 2011. But significant voices inside and outside the Pentagon are now urging speeding up that timetable, to free up additional troops for Afghanistan.

When U.S. commentators refer to the ongoing violence amongst Iraqis, which is not often, they express some mild regret. But none go on to urge that the U.S. military there should do something active to bolster Iraqi security.

“There really is nothing the U.S. can do in the security sector, at this point,” said Dawisha, whose latest book is “Iraq: A political history from independence to occupation”.

He also judged there is very little the U.S. – or any other outside powers – can do to intervene at the political level, to help Iraq’s 30 million people meet the many other political challenges that lie ahead.

The only outside power Dawisha saw as potentially able to make a small difference for the better was Turkey. He was very dismissive of the idea that the U.N. could do anything useful.

Right now, two major issues top the country’s political agenda. One is the still-simmering contest between ethnic Kurds and ethnic Arabs over Kirkuk, an oil-rich region long coveted by the Kurds. The other is the next round of national elections, scheduled for January 2010.

Dawisha noted that not all the news from inside Iraq is bad.

He pointed in particular to signs that new cross-sectarian and cross-ethnic alliances are now emerging. “One of the most interesting is the ‘Hadba’ alliance that’s being built around the list of that name that did very well in the provincial elections in the northern city of Mosul,” he said. “And now, they’re making plans to field candidates in a number of other provinces, too, in the January elections.”

But the situation remains precarious. “The reconstituted Iraqi security forces have the numbers they need now, and much of the training,” Dawisha said. “But there is still a real risk they could implode if the internal politics can’t be stabilised.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

The Barack Obama administration – perhaps the president himself – will reportedly be launching a new round of authoritative Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations sometime during the upcoming U.N. General Assembly session, which is scheduled to start in New York on Sep. 15.

So far, most media attention has focused on the administration’s ongoing tussle with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel’s continued settlement-building project in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Far less attention has gone to the prospects of the broader effort to nail down a final Palestinian-Israeli peace.

The issues are connected. Israel’s continued construction of its illegal settlements in the West Bank eats deeply into the territory of any future Palestinian state. Even the strongly pro-peace Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the interim Palestinian Authority and the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), has said he cannot take part in final-status talks unless Israel stops building the settlements.

Abbas’s position has been firmly supported by all other Palestinian leaders and parties, including Hamas. (Abbas, however, has said he might “meet” with Netanyahu at the General Assembly even without a complete settlement freeze. But he has not clarified whether this meeting would be in the context of a negotiation or not.)

Israel’s nearly continuous pursuit of its settlement-building project has always been a major factor undermining the confidence the Palestinians might have had in the good faith of the Israeli government.

The settlement-building programme is also a violation of the ‘Road Map’ for peace drawn up in 2002 by President George W. Bush and his partners in the international ‘Quartet’.

However, some seasoned analysts of Israeli-Arab negotiations argue that the main focus for Obama and all others who seek a fair and durable peace in the region should now be not the settlement-building issue, but to start – and win speedy completion of – the negotiation for a final peace agreement (FPA).

From that perspective, any further prolongation of the fruitless tussle over the settlements can be seen both as a huge time-waster and as a growing drain on Obama’s political capital domestically and internationally.

These analysts point out that any FPA will necessarily include a demarcation of the final borders between Israel and the future Palestinian state.

Once those lines are demarcated, the issue of whether and where Israel can build new housing for its people is instantly transformed. After border demarcation Israel can presumably build freely within its own final borders, consistent with international law.

But outside those borders not only will it be unable to continue its building programmes, but Israeli citizens already living there will rapidly come under Palestinian law.

And as the FPA goes into effect there will be no more Israeli military occupation of either or the West Bank, and thus no remaining problem, under international law, regarding Israeli settlers in those areas.

Demarcating a final border for Israel in the West Bank is something that Netanyahu and many of his allies in Israeli’s rightwing government have log been opposed to. Netanyahu’s Likud party traditionally considered the whole terrain between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean – and even a stretch of land east of the Jordan – to be part of the Biblical “Land of Israel”.

In June, Netanyahu finally succumbed to U.S. pressure and expressed grudging support for a tightly circumscribed form of a Palestinian state inside the West Bank. But he and his advisers have indicated they want this state to have, in the first instance, only “provisional” borders that would be open to further modification in the future.

A provisional state like this was in fact envisaged in “Phase Two” of the 2002 Road Map. But the Palestinians are strongly opposed to it. The strongly pro-peace Palestinian analyst Walid Salem has said that establishing such a state would “put Palestinians in a situation that some will consider an international occupation”.

Like most other thoughtful Palestinians, Salem is now urging rapid action towards securing the FPA.

Is it possible to imagine that Abbas and other Palestinian leaders might set aside their insistence on an Israeli settlement freeze for long enough to allow the negotiations over the FPA to resume?

There is a chance they might do this. But they would need to receive enough ironclad guarantees that this next round of negotiations will not end up as damaging and unsuccessful for the Palestinians as the negotiations – allegedly for a final peace – that Pres. Bush launched, with much fanfare, at Annapolis in late 2007.

At Annapolis, Bush vowed he would secure an FPA before the end of his presidency. That never happened. Nor did the settlement freeze as required in the Road Map and reaffirmed at Annapolis.

The Annapolis-launched negotiation was the last in a long series, dating back to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, in which Palestinian leaders were promised that a final peace would rapidly be secured.

What could give the Palestinians more assurance of U.S. seriousness today than they had at Annapolis?

One clue comes from the veteran Palestinian journalist and commentator Rami Khouri, who wrote recently that any realistic attempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict “must affirm the rule of law as defined by U.N. resolutions and international conventions on refugee rights.”

If Obama and his peace envoy, Sen. George Mitchell, could indeed affirm that their peace diplomacy is based on the international rule of law in this way, and also stress that the U.S. has its own strong interests in an Israeli-Palestinian peace and intends to use the instruments of its national power to secure that peace, then those declarations might just provide the assurances the Palestinians need to return to the negotiating table.

It has, however, been a long time since any U.S. president was prepared to state openly that securing an Israeli-Palestinian peace is in the American people’s own interests. Both Pres. Clinton and Pres. George W. Bush avoided ever stating that. Clinton on occasion argued openly that the U.S. “can’t want peace more than the parties themselves.”

As a result, neither he nor the younger Pres. Bush was ever prepared to use pressure against Israel.

Now, there is reportedly a debate inside the Obama administration over how forcefully to articulate and pursue the U.S.’s own interest in the peacemaking.

The well-informed columnist David Ignatius wrote recently that the White House “is debating whether Obama should launch his initiative with a declaration of U.S. ‘parameters’ for a final settlement… But Mitchell is said to favor a more gradual approach, in which Israelis and Palestinians would begin negotiations and the United States would intervene later with ‘bridging’ proposals.”

For 16 years now, Israel’s leaders have become accustomed to exercising a near-veto over any U.S. initiative in the peace diplomacy. Almost any independent U.S. initiative that Obama takes that is not cleared in advance with Netanyahu will almost certainly arouse the ire of both Netanyahu and his supporters in the U.S. Congress.

But how politically weighty would Netanyahu’s supporters turn out to be inside Washington? That is hard to predict. One new factor this year has been that Netanyahu received very little effective support from anywhere in Congress in his tussle with Obama over the settlements.

Veteran political analysts recognise that Obama has many tough battles on his hands right now. But they note he has not yet done much to spell out for voters in either the U.S. or Israel the many benefits to all parties, including Israelis and Americans, of securing a durable and final end to the long-running conflict between Israel and its neighbours.

Between them, Obama and Mitchell – the man who helped Northern Ireland’s warring communities end their own 400-year-long conflict – could surely muster a lot of persuasive power. Along with adroit and focused international diplomacy, such persuasion could yet win the day.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

Former Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has been in Israel and the occupied West Bank this week, stridently criticising Pres. Barack Obama’s policies of pushing for an Israeli settlement freeze and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Huckabee, a former two-term governor of Arkansas, is a leading contender to be the Republican Party candidate in the 2012 presidential election. His voicing of outspoken criticism of Obama while visiting a foreign country has raised many questions here over whether the old U.S. saying that “Partisan politics stops at the water’s edge” still applies.

In addition, the fact that he and House Minority (Republican) Whip Eric Cantor have aligned themselves so closely on the key issue of settlements with Israel’s rightwing government, rather than with Obama, is an indication of a deeper shift in U.S. politics.

It used to be that Israeli governments got more support from the Democratic Party than from Republicans. Now, this rightwing government in Israel is getting deeper and more vocal support from many Republicans than it is getting from most Democrats.

The shift has not been total. Like Huckabee and Cantor, House Majority (Democratic) Leader Steny Hoyer has also been in Israel in recent weeks. And like them, while there he criticised Obama’s policy on settlements.

All three men have been among the numerous U.S. legislators and other politicians who have visited Israel this summer as the guests of pro-Israeli organisations.

However, Huckabee is the only one of these three figures who expressed adamant opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian stat – an outcome that Obama and before him President George W. Bush both supported.

Huckabee is the only one of these prominent visitors to Israel who was hosted there by the American Friends of Ateret Cohanim, an organisation that actively funds the implantation of additional Jewish settlers into occupied East Jerusalem. Cantor and Hoyer had their trips paid for by an organisation affiliated with the big – but much more mainstream – American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC.

Huckabee is also the only prominent U.S. visitor this summer who spent most of his time not in Israel itself but in the settlements in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. One of the places he visited, the settlement outpost Givat Olam, is considered “unauthorised” even by Israel’s very pro-settler government.

He is planning to air two different shows for Fox News this weekend from the settler-controlled Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem.

Writing on his HuckPac blog Wednesday, Huckabee described the cities of Nablus, Bethlehem and Ramallah, located in the heart of the Palestinian West Bank, as parts of Israelis’ “own country”. He added that he believed that Israelis “should be able to live wherever they want in that country”.

He told an AP reporter that he had “no problem” with the idea of the Palestinians getting a state of their own. But he added, “Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic.” He told journalists there were “a lot of places all over the planet” that could host the Palestinian state, though he declined to specify which place he would favour.

Herb Keinon reported in Israel’s conservative Jerusalem Post that Huckabee told Israeli journalists about his religious commitment as an evangelical Baptist pastor.

Huckabee then reportedly said of his fellow-evangelicals, “We are very much of the understanding that if there had not been Judaism, there would not be Christianity… We have no organic connection, for example, to Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and atheism. But we have absolute, total genetic DNA ties to Judaism.”

Keinon wrote that one Israeli journalist wondered aloud whether Huckabee was just “an American version of [Israeli politician] Moshe Feiglin: a marginalised, out-of-office politician on the far right with little national significance.”

But, he noted, “Huckabee does have national significance, even if he is out of office.”

Indeed, on Thursday, Public Policy Polling (PPP) reported that Huckabee, who came second only to John McCain in last year’s Republican primary, now looks like the strongest Republican candidate in 2012.

PPP’s Tom Jensen reported that if the election were held tomorrow and Huckabee and Obama were the candidates, Huckabee would come within three percentage points of Obama: 44 percent to 47 percent.

Many things can change between now and 2012, of course. Right now, Obama is being hammered hard on the health care question, and his national popularity, though still strong, is starting to fall.

Many U.S. progressives who worked hard to get Obama elected are starting to express concern that, on the Palestinian-Israeli issue as on health care, he and his administration seem to have lost the momentum.

On health care, Obama missed a stated deadline of getting Congress to pass reform legislation before the August recess. And when Democratic lawmakers went back to their districts for the recess and tried to discuss health care reform with constituents, many faced virulent opposition from loosely organised networks of rightwing opponents.

But at least, on health care, Obama and his fellow Democrats in the House and Senate have been working hard to formulate and then push for an actual plan. And Obama and his cabinet members have been proactively making their pro-reform arguments heard as widely as possible – even during the recess.

On the Palestine question they have been much quieter.

Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have continued to issue periodic, largely pro forma restatements of the policies Obama articulated several months ago about the need for a settlement freeze and an eventual Palestinian state.

But so far neither Obama, nor Clinton, nor special envoy George Mitchell has done anything to operationalise either of these stated goals.

And thus far, no one in the administration has done anything to tackle head-on the arguments that Huckabee and other influential U.S. figures have been making so loudly about the supposed dangers to Israelis and the U.S. of the president’s Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.

That has allowed Huckabee and the other critics to dominate the airwaves on these issues and to frame the debate just about however they want in the important court of U.S. public opinion.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Mahmoud Abbas, the 74-year-old leader of the Palestinian Fatah movement, registered a significant achievement in holding the movement’s Sixth General Conference, which has been wrapping up its business in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank this week.

But veteran Palestinian analysts say Abbas’s biggest internal political challenges still lie ahead. Many of these challenges, they note, stem directly from the compromises he made to be able to convene the conference at all – and to ensure that it presented the trappings of success in the form of a political platform and leadership elections.

One of the biggest compromises was linked to the decision to hold the conference inside the Israeli-occupied West Bank. That meant there were numerous long time Fatah activists from the demographically weighty Palestinian diaspora – and from Gaza – who were barred from attending by Israel.

An additional 470 Fatah members from Gaza were barred from attending by the Islamist movement, Hamas, which now controls Gaza. Hamas said it would only allow Fatah’s delegates to travel to Bethlehem if Fatah released all or most of the numerous Hamas people it has imprisoned in the West Bank. Fatah refused.

The Fatah members trapped in Gaza took part in the conference’s leadership elections by phone and email.

To no-one’s surprise a large majority of the conference’s 2,241 attendees ended up being West Bankers. For a movement that was founded – around 50 years ago – in the Palestinian diaspora and was based on the urgent political demands of the exiled Palestinians, that fact alone marked a sea-change.

The massive swing to West Bankers’ predominance in the movement was also evident in the first round of elections. Of the 19 people – all male – elected to the Central Committee (CC), one was from Gaza and two from the diaspora. The rest are all West Bankers.

Abbas himself was named head of Fatah by unopposed popular vote, early in the proceedings.

Preliminary CC election results were announced Tuesday – and within hours they had provoked a storm of anger from many long time Fatah members and activists.

One group of Fatah leaders from the diaspora has announced a decision to form a breakaway called “Fatah, the Awakening.” They include Muhammad Jihad, who was a long time CC member until last week – when he found he had not even been invited to the Bethlehem conference.

Two other prominent former CC members have also gone public with their anger. Farouq Qaddumi, now based in Tunis, criticised the decision to convene the conference in the occupied territories from the beginning.

In mid-July, Qaddumi even publicly accused Abbas of having conspired with Israel in the poisoning death of long time Fatah head Yasser Arafat, who died of unknown causes in 2004.

Another veteran CC member, former Palestinian prime minister and long time Abbas rival Ahmed Qurei, did attend the conference. But he was so angered by losing in the CC elections that he then voiced public criticisms of the vote- counting process, saying the electoral fraud was even greater than in Iran’s recent election.

Many western commentators have described the results of the CC vote as representing a turnover of power to a new generation. However the biggest vote-getter, with 1,368 votes, was Muhammad Ghneim, 71, who along with Arafat, Abbas, and Qaddumi was one of Fatah’s earliest leaders. Significantly, Ghneim had also been responsible for drawing up the list of conference attendees.

Coming in second was Mahmoud al-Aloul, a close associate of Fatah founder Khalil al-Wazir, who was killed by Israel in 1988.

Altogether, veteran Fatah “old guard” members made up around half of those elected. And most of even the “young guard” people elected to the CC are in their 50s or 60s – so the prospects for revitalisation do not seem very large.

The two new “young guard” CC members most frequently lauded in western capitals are Marwan Barghouthi, 50, now serving five consecutive life terms in an Israeli prison, and Mohammed Dahlan, 47, a security boss who has worked closely with U.S. and Israeli security planners for several years.

Barghouthi came third in the voting with 1,063 votes, and Dahlan was tenth, with 853.

Supporters of each of these men had hoped they would top the electoral list. By that metric, their performance was a sharp disappointment. According to some reports, Dahlan only made it onto the list of winners at all by cutting last-minute deals with Abbas and other Fatah politicians.

Also, Barghouthi and Dahlan may belong to the same generation, but they have widely diverging views on many issues.

On the now-key question of whether Fatah should reconcile with Hamas, and on what terms, Barghouthi, like most of the other Fatah prisoners in Israeli jails, has been a strong advocate (and practitioner) of reconciling with Hamas, while Dahlan is a strong anti-Hamas hawk.

In 2007, Dahlan was a key actor in a U.S.-backed plan to topple the Hamas government in Gaza by force. The attempt failed. Since then he has been a highly controversial figure in Palestinian politics – including inside Fatah – where some criticise the failure of his anti-Hamas coup attempt and others the fact he tried it at all.

Hussein Agha, a veteran Palestinian analyst based in London, noted that even if the CC’s “young guard” members could agree among themselves on how to revitalise Fatah, they would have a tough time of it. “The movement doesn’t have the kind of internal structures in place that would allow to them to effect real change,” he said.

He added, however, that one result of Abbas’s success in having held the conference – and having overseen the more-or-less successful generation of a new CC – is that now he will have to be much more attentive to the views of this new collective leadership, and be more pro-active in trying to build support from within it, than he ever was with the previous CC.

Prior to this month, Fatah had not held a General Conference since 1989. Over the years since, many of the movement’s mechanisms of internal consultation and discipline fell into disuse.

Abbas in particular, according to many Palestinian analysts, had previously derided calls from Fatah members for more accountability within the movement. But at and since the latest conference he has shown a new attentiveness to the sensibilities of the Fatah base.

That was clearly on display in the “political report” he presented in Bethlehem.

Many long time Fatah supporters who were not at the conference – and even some who were – expressed disappointment that the report provided no critical evaluation of the movement’s successes and failures over the decades since the last conference, and that no-one within the movement was held to account for the failures.

But in the report, Abbas straddled a fine line on the question of whether Fatah should support active, presumably military, resistance to the Israeli occupation. He said that though “legitimate forms of resistance” remained a Palestinian right, still, Fatah remained committed to negotiating a peace with Israel.

His remarks about “legitimate resistance” aroused predictable ire from those in Israel who do not want to negotiate a peace agreement with any Palestinian leaders, however moderate.

In his report, Abbas also spelled out that the Palestinians should only resume final peace talks with Israel after Israel stops its settlement-building programme in the West Bank and releases all the 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners it currently holds.

In fact, this brings Fatah’s positions on the big diplomatic issues, on paper, very close to those of Hamas.

Reconciliation talks between the movements are scheduled to resume in Cairo later this month. But Palestinian analysts note that Abbas – unlike some people in Fatah’s new CC – remains strongly opposed to the reconciliation. And they judge there is little probability the talks will generate a ruling coalition capable of representing the Palestinians in any resumed peace talks – unless Abbas is subjected to much stronger pressure from Washington to make this happen.

For many years now the U.S. and its allies in the European Union have been the main financers of all the Fatah-headed Palestinian institutions.

So does the record of the recent congress make Fatah stronger? Agha gave a nuanced reply. “It made nearly all the people who were at the meeting very happy,” he said. “Remember, some of them haven’t seen each other for many years. So from that point of view the conference was a real achievement for Abu Mazen [Abbas].”

But, he added, “There was no real political discussion in Bethlehem at all. None of Fatah’s many problems were resolved, or even addressed. So the feeling of happiness won’t last for more than two or three months—if that.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Pro-Israeli lobbyists here won the support of 77 senators (out of 100) for a letter sent to President Barack Obama that urged him to “press Arab leaders” to consider making dramatic, upfront peace overtures to Israel.

But one key Arab state, Saudi Arabia, has already clearly communicated its refusal to make any such gestures at this time.

On Jul. 31, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told journalists in Washington that, “Confidence-building measures will… not bring peace. What is required is a comprehensive approach that defines the final outcome at the outset and launches into negotiations over final status issues.”

Saudi Arabia is one of the most influential players in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. But given its pivotal position in international energy markets – and the fact that it has no need of U.S. financial aid – it is almost immune to American pressure.

In their role as “Guardians” of two of Islam’s three holiest cities – Mecca and Medina – Saudi Arabia’s monarchs have always had a strong concern for the welfare of the Muslim institutions in Islam’s third holy city, Jerusalem – and a desire to see a fair and durable final peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

However, like the vast majority of other Arabs, Saudi Arabia’s rulers are currently very wary of getting drawn into any diplomatic process that aims not at securing the final peace treaties between Israel and its Arab neighbours but rather at further, possibly lengthy, “interim” moves.

From the Arab perspective, that focus on endless “interim” steps was what dominated the eight years of former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Arab-Israeli diplomacy – and meanwhile, Israel continued to implant scores of thousands of additional settlers into East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank throughout those years.

Israel’s implantation of additional settlers into the West Bank continued under former U.S. President George W. Bush. Now, there are 500,000 settlers in the West Bank – including more than 200,000 in East Jerusalem alone.

Their presence considerably complicates the quest for a fair and sustainable peace. It is also, under international law, quite illegal. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 forbids any government running a military occupation of land not its own from implanting its own civilians into the occupied area.

The Saudis argue that Israel deserves no special “rewards” for stopping its continued perpetration of this illegal act. They say that the U.S., which gives substantial financial and military aid to Israel, should work to ensure that this stoppage occurs forthwith – and that later, in the context of the final peace accord, the vast majority of the illegally implanted settlers should return to Israel along with Israel’s occupation army.

Many Americans, “have said if the Arabs do something nice for Israel this will somehow get you something in terms of an Israeli gesture – progress towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians,” noted Chas W. Freeman, a distinguished former U.S. diplomat who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia (1989-92) and has a deep knowledge of the kingdom’s affairs.

“In fact absolutely none of the gestures that have been made, including the very important one of the Arab League’s Beirut Declaration of 2002 – the so- called Arab Peace Initiative – has resulted in any positive response from the Israelis. They have been content to pocket whatever has been offered and to do nothing in return.”

Freeman observed that, “There is no predisposition whatsoever – in fact a lot of predisposition to the contrary – on the Arab side to pay for what Israel, in its own interest, ought to do.”

The strength of the Saudis’ opposition to additional interim-focused, confidence-building measures in the Israeli-Arab arena – like the kingdom’s views on several other issues, including Iran – seem not to have been well understood by all members of the Obama administration.

In April, Dennis Ross, an administration official with a shifting and fuzzy – but apparently high-level – portfolio, visited the kingdom and attempted to lecture King Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz about the need to confront “the Iranian threat.” But New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has written that when Abdullah got a word in edgeways and asked some reasonable questions about Washington’s policy, Ross was unable to answer and appeared “a little flustered.”

Ross was the man who throughout Clinton’s presidency had been in charge of all Israeli-Arab peace negotiations, and presumably dealt closely with the Saudis and other Arabs. Observers noted that it therefore seemed strange that he did not know how to deal effectively with the man who, before he became king in 2005, had already been the power behind the Saudi throne for more than a decade.

In early June – the day before the much-publicised address Obama made to the Muslim world from Cairo – Obama made a quick visit to Saudi Arabia and had his first meeting with Abdullah. There are some indications that during that meeting he may have asked Abdullah to undertake some confidence- building steps towards Israel in return for an Israeli halt on settlement- building.

In the Cairo speech, Obama said, “the Arab states must recognise that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.” He called on the Arab states to act “to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, [and] to recognise Israel’s legitimacy.”

The clear implication was that he was asking the Arab states to undertake these actions now, or in return for an Israeli settlement-building halt, rather than as an eventual reward after the conclusion of final peace treaties.

On Jul. 22, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia’s tiny neighbour and ally Bahrain published an opinion piece in the Washington Post in which he called on his fellow Arabs to start sending help to Palestinian institutions and to reach out to the Israeli public – though notably not, at this point, to the Israeli government.

Analysts noted that that initiative from Bahrain was most likely encouraged by the Saudi government – or at least, was cleared with Riyadh.

On Jul. 27, Obama’s senior peace envoy George Mitchell was in Cairo. He told reporters that Washington was eager to secure a “comprehensive” peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. He also asked all the countries in the region to set the “context” for starting these negotiations.

“By comprehensive I mean peace between Israel and Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, between Israel and Lebanon and the full normalisation of relations between Israel and the countries of the region,” he said.

He said, “We’re not asking anyone to achieve full normalisation at this time. We recognise that will come further down the road in this process.” But he added that Washington did want to see “meaningful steps by individual countries.”

However, the statements the Saudi foreign minister made in late July seemed like a clear indication that Saudi Arabia would not be taking such steps in the near future.

Three days later Kuwait’s ruler, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, met with Obama in the White House. He, like the Saudis, spelled out that normalisation with Israel would come about after the conclusion of the final peace, rather than as a lead-up to it.

The Saudis meanwhile seem to have given serious thought to how, exactly, they might help the still-struggling Palestinian institutions in the occupied territories.

The biggest problem there has been the stark conflict between the U.S.- based Fateh party, which administers Palestinian institutions in some portions of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Islamist Hamas party, which governs in Israeli-besieged Gaza.

Back in Feb. 2007, King Abdullah brokered a brief reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas. But the Bush Administration in Washington conspired with some Fateh strongmen to break the terms of that Saudi-brokered deal, which then fell apart.

Now, as Fateh winds up its important Sixth General Conference in Bethlehem, King Abdullah has once again issued a clear call for unity among the Palestinians.

As a few thousand pious Muslims now prepare to leave both Gaza and the West Bank to travel to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj pilgrimage, there is some expectation their Saudi hosts may be able to do some good reconciliation work while they are there.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Pres. Barack Obama has repeatedly declared himself a close friend of Israel. But many Israelis inside and outside their country’s government have now expressed concern about the lack of closeness, or even just of attention, with which they feel Obama is treating them.

What effects might this perceived lack of intimacy have on Obama’s ability to succeed in his goal of securing a final Israeli-Palestinian peace in a timely manner?

This question assumes more importance as many in Washington are predicting that Obama might well announce the terms of a far-reaching new peace push during the weeks that remain before the opening of the U.N. General Assembly’s next session in late September.

Prominent Israeli journalist Aluf Benn recently rang the alarm bells regarding Obama’s perceived lack of attention to Israelis. Writing in the New York Times on Tuesday, Benn complained that Obama “hasn’t bothered to speak directly to Israelis”.

One key effect, he wrote, was that “Six months into his presidency, Israelis find themselves increasingly suspicious of Mr. Obama. All they see is American pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze settlements.”

He wrote that as a result, “Mr. Netanyahu enjoys a virtual domestic consensus over his rejection of the settlement freeze. Moreover, he has succeeded in portraying Mr. Obama as a shaky ally.”

As so often occurs in the ever-shifting dynamic between Jewish Israelis and Jewish Americans, many Jewish Americans see matters very differently. Prominent Jewish American writer Jeffrey Goldberg – who is also an Israeli citizen – noted that in Obama’s big Jun. 4 speech in Cairo, he made a point of stressing the strength of the United States’ long and unshakeable support for Israel.

True, Obama himself has not visited Israel since his inauguration. But several high-level members of his team have been there – many more than once. Just in the past four days, National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones, Defence Secretary Robert Gates, and special Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell have all been in Israel, holding substantive meetings with their counterparts there.

So it is hard to conclude that the Obama administration has not given “enough attention” to Israel, a country of just 7.1 million citizens. But for many Israelis, perhaps the most glaring contrast has been with the extraordinary amounts of attention and close political collaboration they got used to enjoying from both of Obama’s predecessors.

This latter contrast was one sub-theme during the meeting Obama held Jul. 13 with the leaders of 16 leading Jewish American organisations. In the meeting, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, reportedly urged Obama to return to Pres. George W. Bush’s practice of ensuring there was “no daylight” publicly visible between the positions of Israel and Washington.

Obama’s reported reply was to note that during that period of very close U.S.-Israeli alignment, Bush failed to make any meaningful progress in the peacemaking.

Several commentators also noted, regarding the Jul. 13 meeting, that simply by holding it, Obama was already privileging Jewish Americans over other ethnic/religious components of the U.S .population, many of which are considerably larger than U.S. Jewry.

In Benn’s article, he cited a recent Jerusalem Post poll that found that only six percent of Jewish Israelis considered the Obama administration to be pro-Israel, while 50 percent judged that it tilts to the Palestinians.

Others who are worried about Obama’s stance on Israel have noted that in a Pew Global Attitudes Poll conducted in May and June, Israel was the only one of 25 countries surveyed where views of the U.S. had deteriorated since Obama became president.

However, some parts of the Pew poll are much less alarming for Obama than that finding. Pew reported that in mid-2008, 57 percent of Israelis said they thought the U.S. would “do the right thing in world affairs” – while in mid-2009 that figure was 56 percent.

Also, though the Jun. 4 speech caused some decline in Israeli support for Obama, Pew reported that even after the speech, 63 percent of Israelis said they had “favourable” views of the U.S. and 49 percent expressed confidence in Obama’s leadership. The corresponding (and also post-speech) figures among Palestinians were 19 percent and 26 percent.

If Benn’s article drew attention to the possible new problems that have arisen between Jewish Israelis and Obama, another significant rift has been widening in recent years between the attitudes of Jewish Israelis and those of Jewish Americans.

While Jewish Israelis have been shifting ever further rightward – as shown most dramatically in last February’s elections – Jewish Americans have stayed more or less constant for many years now, with over two-thirds of them supporting the Democratic Party.

During last year’s Democratic primary, many Jewish Americans supported Hillary Clinton rather than Obama; but once he won the nomination nearly all the party’s traditional Jewish voters swung behind him.

Since his inauguration, Jewish Americans have given strong support to all the main items on his domestic agenda. And thus far he seems to have kept their strong support for his foreign policy agenda – including for the positions he has adopted on key parts of his Israeli-Arab peace agenda.

Thus, on both the need to establish an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel and the push for a freeze on additional construction in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including occupied east Jerusalem, Jewish Americans have stayed strongly behind Obama.

On the Palestinian state question, Netanyahu did finally, many weeks into his term as prime minister, express some notably luke-warm support for the concept. But on the settlement freeze, Netanyahu has refused to accede to the firm demands for this that Obama and all his officials have made.

According to the latest findings of Tel Aviv University’s “Peace Index” poll, conducted in June, 61 percent of Jewish Israelis expressed support for Netanyahu’s rejection of the freeze. But Jewish Americans have been far less supportive of his position on this issue.

Many Jewish Americans who are active supporters of Israel are affiliated with the powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It is notable that AIPAC, whose leaders have long pursued a strategy of not taking on campaigns in which they might suffer a damaging public loss of face, has thus far chosen not to campaign around the settlements issue.

Meanwhile, other more reliably pro-peace organisations in the Jewish American community like Americans for Peace Now and J-Street have made support of Obama’s stand on the settlements a centrepiece of their increasingly successful nationwide organising.

There are, of course, many connections between pro-peace political action in the U.S. and the attitudes of Jewish Israelis. The Peace Index poll, for example, found that, “when one mentions to the [Jewish Israeli] interviewees the possibility that implementing Netanyahu’s position [on the freeze] could cause a worsening of relations with the U.S. government… only 40 percent still support Netanyahu’s position while a slightly higher rate (48 percent) oppose it.”

(It is also worth noting that the roughly 20 percent of Israeli citizens who are ethnic Palestinians give nearly total support to Obama’s call for a settlement freeze. But the Peace Index poll, like many Israeli opinion polls, does not count the views of this significant minority in the citizenry.)

Meanwhile, there is a strong sense in Washington that the showdown between Obama and Netanyahu over settlements has only been an overture for what will come next.

One Arab-American analyst recently noted that, despite the firmness of his rhetoric on the issue, Obama has still done nothing to operationalise his insistence on the freeze by, for example, linking it to Washington’s continued provision of very generous aid to Israel.

But this analyst and several others hope that instead of keeping his focus solely on the settlement freeze question, Obama will very soon also launch a broad and authoritative international push for a final-status peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Once Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians start looking at the final status borders, there will be context for the settlement discussion. The two should go hand-in-hand,” this analyst said.

He said that Washington “should put its own final-status plan on the table, too. And yes, all this should happen soon. Then let’s see how everyone reacts. That will be the start of real peacemaking.”

And in the context of a real peace push like the one this man is hoping for, Obama would surely have a lot to say to Israelis and everyone else who is directly concerned.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Fifty years ago, a small group of Palestinian teachers and engineers living in Kuwait founded a secretive movement aimed at liberating those portions of previously British-ruled Palestine that became the State of Israel in 1948.

The group they founded, Fatah, went on to dominate the entire Palestinian political scene. In 1969 it took over the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), which had been founded by the Arab states – as a counter to Fatah – a few years earlier.

In 1993, it was Fatah/PLO head Yasser Arafat who signed the ‘Oslo Accord’ with Israel; and the following year Arafat became president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) established in occupied Ramallah.

But for several years, Fatah has been in crisis, and now that crisis is coming to a sharp head. Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is planning to convene a meeting of Fatah’s policymaking General Conference Aug. 4. By insisting on holding it in occupied Bethlehem – which will enable Israel’s security forces to completely control who attends and who does not – he has helped split the group’s historic leadership down the middle.

In mid-July, Farouq al-Qaddumi, a longtime Fatah leader who is senior to Abbas within the movement, lashed out at Abbas, accusing him of having conspired with Israel and the U.S. to poison Arafat, who died of unknown causes in late 2004.

Qaddumi is one of the numerous Fatah activists and leaders who refused to “return” to the still-occupied West Bank and Gaza after Oslo, arguing that to do so would place Fatah too tightly under the thumb of Israel’s occupation regime. He made his recent accusation against Abbas in nearby Amman, Jordan.

The split between these men highlights the much deeper division within Fatah between those who sought, after Oslo, to work with the occupation regime and to get what concessions they could from it, and those who either refused to “return” under the circumstances of occupation or who were barred by Israel from returning.

At present, more than five million Palestinians are forced by Israel to live outside their historic homeland. Many of these exiles are stateless refugees, and many – especially in Lebanon – have lived for decades in very tough conditions. Some 4.3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza, which came under Israeli military occupation in 1967.

(An additional 1.3 million Palestinians live inside Israel, where they have citizenship.)

The split within Fatah between the “insiders” – those who live in the occupied territories – and the “outsiders” has been deeply damaging to the movement. The founding idea of Fatah, back in the 1950s, was to demand the “return” to their original homes and farms of all those Palestinians who had been expelled from them by the infant Jewish/Israeli forces in 1948, or who left them during the intensity of that fighting, and have never been allowed to return home since.

When Israel allowed Arafat, Abbas, and a few thousand PLO administrators and fighters to “return” to the occupied territories in 1994, for the vast majority of the returnees this was still only a very incomplete form of the return they had long sought, since they were still barred from going back to the homes and farms they or their parents had left in 1948.

The split between Qaddumi and Abbas goes back to before Oslo. Abbas had been the main architect within Fatah and the PLO of the whole Oslo approach. His idea, as he said in interviews in the late 1980s, was to show the Israelis so much friendship, and give them so many assurances of concern for their safety, that they “could not avoid” meeting the Palestinians’ demand for an independent mini-state alongside Israel.

At that time Qaddumi was the person on the PLO’s ruling Executive Committee charged with running the PLO’s foreign policy. When Abbas pursued the discussions in Norway that led to the Oslo Accord, he was going behind Qaddumi’s back. But he had the backing of the powerful, but always very manipulative, PLO/Fatah head, Yasser Arafat.

When the PLO concluded the Oslo Accord with Israel in 1993, Qaddumi and his followers inside Fatah were left out in the cold. Now, 16 years later, they are trying to make a comeback. But one very likely outcome of the current stand-off between Qaddumi and Abbas is that Fatah may break into two or quite possibly many more irreconcilable factions.

There are numerous deep political problems among Fatah leaders and activists within the occupied territories, too. Many longtime activists who were indigenous to the West Bank and Gaza and who led the First Intifada (1987-93) quickly came to resent the arrogance and manipulations that they saw the PLO leaders dishing out to them after they took over the territories in 1994.

These internal tensions inside Fatah are by no means new. But they are coming to a head at a very sensitive time for the Palestinians. Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are living under conditions of great stress. They, their compatriots in exile, and their sympathisers around the world are all eager that this stress be relieved in the only way that matters – by seeing an end to Israel’s unprecedentedly lengthy military occupation of these lands, and the establishment of a fully independent Palestinian state there.

Here in Washington, Pres. Obama has pledged his support for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel since his first days in office. But thus far, he has taken no concrete actions to bring this about beyond sending his special envoy, Sen. George Mitchell, to the region on no fewer than five “listening tours”.

If Mitchell is to succeed, he will need to rapidly construct an inclusive and authoritative negotiating forum in which Palestinians will be represented by a team that is responsive to both Fatah and its main political challenger in Palestinian politics, the Islamist movement Hamas.

In late June, Hamas’s head, Khaled Meshaal, affirmed more definitively than ever that Hamas will allow Mahmoud Abbas to conduct the actual negotiations with Israel, so long as any peace treaty that results is submitted to a nationwide referendum of all Palestinians. He has also affirmed Hamas’s support for the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 that calls for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the lands occupied in 1967 and a fair resolution of the claims of Palestinian refugees.

In Ramallah, prominent Fatah parliamentarian Azzam al-Ahmed said Thursday that he believes Fatah has finally found a formula to resolve one of its longstanding points of contention with Hamas. There now seems a reasonable hope that the next Fatah-Hamas reconciliation meeting, scheduled for late August in Cairo, might be successful.

But a big question still hangs over whether Fatah itself can preserve its internal unity until then. Many Palestinian analysts have noted that Hamas, which was born originally in Gaza, shifted its national headquarters to outside the occupied territories back in the mid-1990s. And despite many waves of devastating Israeli assassinations against Hamas leaders and activists, the movement has retained its internal organisational integrity and unity.

This was similar to the path followed by South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), which in the 1960s moved its national headquarters to Lusaka, Zambia, rather than keep it under the thumb of the apartheid regime.

The Fatah general conference scheduled for Aug. 4 will be the sixth such gathering. These conferences are supposed to be held every five years – but the movement’s internal differences have prevented it from holding one since 1989.

Since then, there have been many big political developments, including Oslo and all the disappointments that flowed from it. The number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank has more than doubled. And Arafat and many other long-time Fatah leaders have died -meaning that the participants’ list that Abbas has compiled for the Aug. 4 conference has been challenged by many Fatah factions.

For Fatah’s rapidly ageing leaders, it may be very hard now for them to regenerate the movement’s leadership bodies. Indeed, at a time when the Palestinian people desperately need leaders who can make big and wise decisions, it may be hard for Fatah’s leaders to make any decisions at all.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

The political geography of the modern Middle East has been affected for one hundred years by the appetite of westerners and other outsiders for the region’s hydrocarbons.

On Monday, the region’s “pipeline politics” took another step forward with the signing in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, of an agreement to build a new, 3,300-kilometre gas pipeline called Nabucco, running between eastern Turkey and Vienna, Austria.

The project underlines the new influential role that Turkey, a majority Muslim nation of 72 million people, is playing in the Middle East, and far beyond.

The new project’s name was chosen, Austrian officials said, after the Verdi opera that representatives of the five participating countries – who include Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary, along with the two terminus states – saw together during an earlier round of negotiations in Vienna.

But the name also gives clues to two intriguing aspects of the project’s geopolitical significance. The theme of the opera is the liberation from bondage of slaves held by the ancient Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (‘Nabucco’) – and it is a widely discussed feature of the Nabucco project that many European nations want access to a gas source that is not under the control of Russia.

Last winter, several European nations suffered severe gas shortages after Russia, locked in a tariff dispute with transit-country Ukraine, closed off the spigots completely.

But the other implication of the name is more strictly Middle Eastern. The modern-day home of Nebuchadnezzar is Iraq. Washington has given strong support to the Nabucco project – and one of the reasons U.S. officials give for this support is their hope that once Nabucco is up and running in 2015, Iraq can be one of the nations that reaps large profits by feeding gas into it.

However, construction of the pipeline is estimated to cost some eight billion dollars, and many officials in the participating countries are still unclear where they will get enough gas to make it economically viable.

The Nabucco participants had been hoping that a key feeder state would be one of Turkey’s eastern neighbours, Azerbaijan. But on the eve of the project’s inauguration in Ankara, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev took the CEO of the vast Russian gas company Gazprom to Azerbaijan, where they signed a contract with the state gas company that will force Nabucco to compete hard against Gazprom for any purchase it wants to make from Azerbaijan.

One fairly evident other source for Nabucco’s would be Iran, which is reported to have considerable amounts of new gas coming online in the next five years.

Paul Stevens, an energy specialist with London’s Chatham House think-tank, recently told the Christian Science Monitor that an Iranian deal alone could put the Nabucco project close to operating in the black. But he noted that the current political crisis in Iran makes that less do-able and thus, “makes the immediate commercial goals dimmer for Nabucco”.

On Thursday, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy for Eurasian energy, Richard Morningstar, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington that, “This would be the absolute worst time to encourage Iran to participate in a project like Nabucco, when we have received absolutely nothing in return.”

He did, however, argue that the prospect of inclusion in Nabucco could be one incentive used to help persuade Iran to cooperate with the international community.

Regardless of whether that comes about or not, this week’s formal birth of the long-negotiated Nabucco project underlines modern Turkey’s steady emergence as a significant player in Middle East politics, as well as its continuing role as a bridge between Europe and the countries of the Middle East and the Caucasus.

In many of the Arab countries of the Middle East, as in Bulgaria and some other countries in the Balkans, there was until recently much lingering hostility towards Turkey, based on the resentment earlier generations felt about the harsh way they were treated by the former Ottoman Empire.

But the present-day Turkish republic replaced the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and in the Arab Middle East, the earlier hostility towards Turkey now seems largely to have dissipated.

Even in Syria, which for several decades nursed a strong sense of grievance against Turkey for its 1938 annexation of the northwestern province of Alexandretta (now Hatay), that grievance has now been replaced by generally warm ties – and much admiration of Turkey’s recent economic progress.

In Iraq, there was also for decades strong resentment of Turkey, among both the country’s majority Arab population and from its minority of Kurds, who are concentrated along Iraq’s mountainous northern border with Turkey.

But the moderately Islamist ‘Justice and Development’ Party (AKP) that has governed Turkey since 2002 has built good relations with Iraq’s central government in Baghdad.

It has also built a decent working relationship with the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) – in spite of the sympathy that many Iraqi Kurds feel with their fellow Kurds inside Turkey, who for a long time were treated very badly by Ankara. (In Turkey’s 2007 general election, however, the AKP attracted a clear plurality of support from Turkey’s Kurds.)

Turkey now holds several significant levers of power over Iraq. It controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which together are vital to the wellbeing of Iraq’s people. It provides an important existing pipeline that takes Iraqi oil to a shipping terminal on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

It is the only one of Iraq’s neighbours apart from Iran that has a military capable of deterring other powers – inside or outside Iraq – from launching aggressive military adventures inside the country as the U.S. military draws down its presence there.

Turkey also projects considerable “soft power”- both in Iraq and in the rest of the Muslim Middle East. It strongly opposed the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003, a stance that most Iraqis today strongly appreciate. But it also remains on good terms with Washington, as a much-valued member of NATO. And most Iraqis probably appreciate that pragmatism, too.

The AKP also provides an interesting example, to Islamist parties both in Iraq and further afield, of how an intelligent Islamist party can succeed both at home and abroad.

At home, the AKP government has shown moderation and toleration. In foreign affairs, it remains committed to strengthening Turkey’s ties with the west, including by continuing Turkey’s push to join the European Union.

Now, with the launching of the Nabucco project, Turkey has added to the influence it can exert with many Middle Eastern – as well as European – countries.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

Two key U.S. allies in the Arab world, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are now both facing succession crises that may absorb, or even split, their political elites. This promises a period of political unpredictability ahead in both countries.

It may well also complicate Pres. Barack Obama’s Israeli-Arab peace diplomacy, which is based centrally on the role these two large allies – and one smaller one, Jordan – can play in solving inter-Arab problems, reassuring Israelis, and helping to tempt everyone to the peace table.

Since January, the head of Egypt’s military intelligence, Lieut.-Gen. Omar Suleiman, has been in charge of three key Middle East mediations. He has been mediating between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas over both strengthening the Gaza ceasefire and winning a prisoner exchange between them. He’s also been mediating a chronically elusive reconciliation between Hamas and the other big Palestinian movement, Fatah.

Meanwhile, Washington is hoping this year, as always, that Saudi Arabia can buttress U.S. diplomacy with cash and some political leadership. Saudi Arabia has now won the support of all the relevant Arab leaderships, including Hamas’s political bureau, for a key 2002 peace initiative that promises Israel normal political and economic ties in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in 1967 and a fair resolution of Palestinian refugee claims.

The Saudi king, Abdullah ibn Abdul-Aziz, will be 85 this August. His longstanding crown prince (and half-brother) Sultan ibn Abdul-Aziz, is 83, and was recently hospitalised for several weeks with suspected cancer.

The big question regarding the Saudi succession hangs over whether, and how, the kingship will ever be transferred from the numerous ageing brothers and half-brothers who stand in line after Crown Prince Sultan, to the “next generation” of princes – some of the more senior of whom are already nearing 70 years old.

Earlier this year, King Abdullah named his 76-year-old half-brother Naif ibn Abdul-Aziz as “second deputy prime minister”, a position that places him a likely – but not certain -second in line to throne after Sultan.

When King Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, the founder of the modern Saudi state, died in 1953, he left some 37 sons from his 22 wives. Various of these sons have ruled the kingdom in turn since then.

Many of Abdul-Aziz’s sons had a dozen or more sons of their own. Saudi Arabia has no system of “primogeniture” (first-son succession.) Thus, there are hundreds of possible eventual claimants to the throne. Indeed, the youngest of Abdul-Aziz’s sons, Prince Muqrin, is, at 64, some years younger than several of the next-generation princes who now hope to become king.

There have been no reports that any possible successor monarchs might want to change a foreign policy stance that, since the 1930s, has aligned Saudi Arabia very closely with Washington. But among the country’s political elite, including its princes, there are many differing views on domestic affairs, including oil policies, economic policies, the role of the country’s powerful religious institutions, and the role of women.

These differences are inevitably hard fought over at times of succession, and could at the least distract Riyadh from playing the role in regional diplomacy that Obama wants it to play. (At worst, the kingdom could see a struggle between its many power centres that is even deeper and more debilitating than the one now rocking nearby Iran.)

In Egypt, meanwhile, there have been many recent reports that the country’s 81-year-old president, Hosni Mubarak, is ailing and finally eager to quit. Some reports say he has already told the Saudi monarch he may not even finish serving his current six-year term in office, which ends in 2011.

Mubarak has led Egypt’s 76 million people since 1981. Throughout those years he has always refused to name a vice-president.

Now, one of the two main contenders to succeed him is his 45-year-old second son, Gamal, who has held an important post in the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) since 2002.

(It is not wholly strange that, even in a republic, a son might succeed his father as president. It has happened in North Korea, Syria, several African countries and even -with an eight-year interlude – when George W. Bush became president of the United States.)

Behind the scenes in Egypt, though, the military is still almost the same big force in the political system – and economy – that it has been since 1952. There is a considerable question whether the shadowy power centres in the Egyptian military will support Gamal Mubarak, an investment banker who has no record of service in the military.

The leading military man mentioned for possible next president is none other than Omar Suleiman, the intelligence chief who has been conducting so much of Mubarak’s sensitive Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. (It also remains possible that the military might throw its weight behind another “insider” candidate, not Suleiman.)

The fact that Suleiman has been tasked by Pres. Mubarak with diplomatic jobs that are so important to the broader progress of Washington’s regional peace diplomacy means this diplomacy may well become entangled in any succession struggle that occurs in Cairo.

For example, if – as many well-placed Egyptians claim – Pres. Mubarak strongly wants his son to follow him in office, he may be less than eager to see Suleiman gain public kudos as a successful negotiator. There has been some questioning whether Mubarak may have set Suleiman up for failure by giving him overly strict parameters for his diplomatic chores.

Certainly, though Suleiman has been heading all three of these building-brick negotiations since late January, he has not succeeded in any of them yet.

Egypt’s succession struggle is connected to the broader diplomacy in another way, too. Hamas has nearly always been closely aligned with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB), a broad, nonviolent Islamist movement that is the main challenger to Mubarak’s NDP.

Mubarak has never allowed the MB to participate freely in Egypt’s regime-dominated politics, though during a brief and very partial democratic opening in 2005, its candidates won 88 of the 444 elected seats in the Egyptian parliament.

If Suleiman succeeds in one or more of his diplomatic tasks, then Hamas would immediately gain much more international legitimacy as a valid participant in the broader peacemaking. Many NDP insiders fear that could reflect well on the MB, too.

Ominously enough, the most recent round of reports about Mubarak’s failing health has been accompanied by new arrest campaigns against MB leaders and activists. It is possible that Egypt might see additional political heat during the coming summer months. Jordan is smaller and weaker than Egypt and Saudi Arabia. There at least, the ruling monarch, Abdullah II, has laid to rest – for now – the questions that once swirled around his succession. On Jul. 2 he appointed his son Prince Hussein as crown prince.

Prince Hussein is only 15 years old. But since the king is only 47, there is a good chance the crown prince will not be taking over any time soon. (Or perhaps, ever. Back in 1999 when Jordan’s King Hussein died of cancer, in his very last days he revoked the appointment that his brother, Hassan, had held as crown prince since 1965; and he named Abdullah II his successor, instead.)

But in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, political succession issues are now taking centre stage.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

Pres. Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and peace envoy Sen. George Mitchell have been moving steadily ahead with the campaign Obama launched on his first day in the White House, to broker a comprehensive and sustainable Arab-Israeli peace.

They have been supported in this effort by another quiet but very effective envoy, too: former Pres. Jimmy Carter. Carter, like Mitchell, has just returned from an intensive fact-finding tour of the Arab-Israeli region.

IPS has learned that on Thursday, Carter briefed Mitchell on his findings.

Unlike Mitchell, Carter visited Gaza on this trip. While there he decried the extensive damage that he saw, that was inflicted by Israel during the war of last December-January.

He met Hamas leaders in Gaza, the West Bank, and Syria, and while in Israel he met the Israeli security cabinet and prominent settler leader Shaul Goldstein.

At the official level, this week Sec. Clinton held notably firm on Washington’s demand that Israel cease all settlement construction in the occupied territories, roundly rejecting suggestions from Israeli officials that there should be an exception that could allow for what the Israelis describe as “natural growth”.

News also emerged Thursday that in late May, the Obama administration sent a firm and formal “diplomatic note” to Israel protesting the tight siege it has maintained on Gaza’s 1.5 million people and demanding that Israel allow considerably more goods into Gaza than at present.

A reporter for Israel’s Haaretz daily wrote that the U.S. note demanded that Israel allow more food, medicine and cash into Gaza, along with the basic construction materials that are urgently needed to rebuild the thousands of homes and other structures destroyed and damaged during the recent war.

Washington’s campaign against Israeli settlement construction has been firm and clear for some months now – though critics have noted that this rhetorical firmness has not yet been accompanied by the introduction of any new policy measures to hold Israel actually accountable on this issue.

By adding the Gaza situation to its list of firmly expressed concerns in late May, Washington seemed to be moving closer to a large-scale showdown with Tel Aviv on peace-related questions.

One former high-level official who has pushed for many years for bold U.S. action on Arab-Israeli peace told IPS recently that he wished Obama had been faster, and gone further, in tackling the “big” challenge of brokering final peace agreements between Israel and the three Arab neighbours with whom it still needs one – the Palestinians, Syria, and Lebanon.

But this source, speaking on deep background, said it was his understanding that Obama had judged that a “slow and steady” approach was better.

“Indeed,” he noted, “the good backing the president enjoys in this country for his Arab-Israel policy seems to be holding steady, and even, quite possibly, increasing. So maybe his strategy is working well, after all.”

Jimmy Carter has also worked tirelessly – for decades – for Arab-Israeli peace. On Wednesday, the 84-year-old former president wrapped up a grueling two-week tour that took him to Lebanon, Syria, Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.

One day after his return he had his meeting with senior administration officials here in Washington. That event underlined the change in Carter’s relevance and status in the Obama era. The visits he made to the Middle East while George W. Bush was president were barely tolerated by the administration, which kept him at arm’s length.

While in Lebanon on the latest trip, Carter headed a team of 60 monitors sent by the Atlanta-based Carter Centre, which he founded and still heads, to monitor the country’s Jun. 7 elections.

Carter Centre senior adviser Robert Pastor told IPS that the monitoring mission and the elections both went well. “If all the parties accept the outcome of an election, that makes it successful,” he said, noting that that was the case in Lebanon.

Pastor noted that the election-monitoring mission in Lebanon was relevant to broader peace issues. He said he had met with leaders of the country’s Hezbollah party, which has participated in Lebanese elections since 1992 though it is still on the State Department’s “terrorism list”. (The Hezbollah leaders had, he said, refused to meet with Carter.)

Pastor has designed and headed scores of election-monitoring missions around the world during 25 years with the Carter Centre. He told IPS he is now strongly convinced that Hezbollah “is more interested in participating in the Lebanese political process than in provoking conflict with Israel.”

In Syria, Carter met with President Bashar al-Asad and other officials. Pastor said he judged that those meetings, like the one George Mitchell had with Asad a little later, had been helpful in identifying ways to improve the U.S.’s badly strained relations with Syria.

But it was the meetings that Carter had in Damascus with the overall head of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, and in Gaza with elected Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyyeh, that were the most controversial items on his itinerary.

Carter had met Meshaal in Damascus at least twice before. And back in January 2006, he headed the mission the Carter Centre sent to monitor the Palestinian parliamentary elections held in the West bank and Gaza.

Those were the first Palestinian elections that Hamas, which like Hezbollah is still on the State Department’s “terrorism list”, participated in. All the teams monitoring the elections determined they had been free and fair, and that Hamas had won.

Israel and the Bush administration responded by refusing to deal with the elected government. Israel – with strong backing from Washington – also imposed a tight siege on Hamas’s Gaza home base from then on.

In April 2008, Carter and Pastor carried important messages between Hamas and Israel that helped to midwife an agreement for a six-month ceasefire between the two sides that went into operation two months later. It remained largely successfully in force until early November, and was not renewed.

Pastor said that during his latest round of visits with Hamas leaders, Carter “pushed them very hard” to find a way to bridge the distance between their stated positions and the requirement the U.S. government still has that Hamas meet three preconditions before Washington will talk to it.

These three preconditions were put in place by the Bush administration, and have been kept in place by Obama. They stipulate that Hamas must recognise Israel, renounce violence, and commit to all the agreements previously endorsed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and its offshoot the Palestinian Authority.

“The Hamas leaders are still mulling over Carter’s ideas,” Pastor said.

In a possibly related development, a London paper close to Hamas has revealed that Meshaal will make a big policy speech Jun. 20, in which he will outline a “new strategy”.

In an interview with IPS in Damascus on Jun. 4, Meshaal reiterated Hamas’s desire to be “part of the solution, not part of the problem”. He also restated Hamas’s desire to see the speedy establishment of an independent Palestinian state in all the Palestinian areas occupied by Israel in 1967, and said it would be up to that state to establish the nature of its relationship with Israel.

It is still unclear if there will be a breakthrough in Hamas-U.S. relations any time soon. But Mitchell has now made four visits to the region. With the results of those visits – as well as Pres. Carter’s latest visit – now fully available to them, it is clear the Obama team has some big decisions to make.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Former U.S. senator George Mitchell is due to arrive in Syria’s capital, Damascus, Friday on his first visit there since being named Pres. Barack Obama’s special envoy for Arab-Israeli peace.

In an exclusive interview with IPS in Damascus on Jun. 4, Syria’s foreign minister, Walid Moualem, made clear that Mitchell will receive a warm welcome.

“What we’ve heard about Mitchell’s work on Northern Ireland and on the … Palestinian issue is encouraging to us. We are very ready to work with him,” he said.

“We approve of Barack Obama a lot. The man put a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace back on the agenda. He also intends to pull out of Iraq completely. We are ready to help with that – but we need our conditions in the matter addressed, too.”

Syria’s relations with the United States have been fraught with tension for many years now. In the late 1970s the State Department placed Syria on a list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, where it remains until today.

Then in 2003, as a wave of U.S. triumphalism briefly swept much of Washington after the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. Congress passed the Syrian Accountability and Restoration of Lebanese Sovereignty Act (SARLSA), which imposed additional economic sanctions on Syria. The pro-Israel lobby had pushed hard for that legislation.

One high-ranking official in the George W. Bush White House recently commented that throughout most of Bush’s eight years in office, the U.S. was in “a state of quasi-war” with Syria.

Pres. Obama’s decision to send Mitchell to Damascus indicates that that situation is now changing. But considerable work remains if relations between the two countries are to be put on an even keel.

On May 31, Moualem and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a phone conversation that left Moualem – who was Syria’s ambassador to Washington when Bill Clinton was president – generally encouraged.

“I think Hillary Clinton is a good and effective secretary of state,” he said. “We agreed on a Road Map to normalise U.S.-Syrian relations in all fields… We agreed we have a mutual, shared vision that centers around these three points: to stabilise Iraq; to work for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East; and to cooperate on combating terrorism.”

The fact that he mentioned the two countries’ shared concerns in Iraq before the Arab-Israeli peace process was intriguing, and tracked with what a number of other well-connected individuals in Syria have recently been saying.

Both the Obama administration and the Syrian government have expressed a strong desire to see the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki succeed in stabilising his country. Maliki, like many other members of the current power elite in Iraq, has long ties with Syria.

The two countries share a long and hard-to-control border. A re-eruption of the kind of chaotic civil strife that traumatised Iraq in 2006 would pose a considerable challenge to Syria.

In 2006, well over a million Iraqi citizens fled that strife to become refugees in Syria, which welcomed them as warmly as it could. Most of those refugees are still there, placing a heavy burden on Syria’s economy. Renewed strife in Iraq could affect Syria in many ways – all of them bad.

The Obama administration’s primary interest in avoiding a political breakdown in Iraq stems from its desire that the exit of U.S. troops from that country – scheduled to be completed by the end of 2011 – proceeds without mishap.

Moualem and other well-placed Syrians expressed their desire to help make that happen. But he indicated it would be hard for Syria to cooperate fully if its own interests continued to be ignored as completely as they were by the Bush administration.

Moualem commented, “It’s very strange that you condemn me as a ‘terrorist’ at the same time as you call on me to help you combat terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere. It doesn’t make sense.”

Regarding peacemaking with Israel – the main focus of Mitchell’s mission – Moualem said he thought the best approach would be to resume a peacemaking effort that was pursued by Syria’s northern neighbour Turkey last year.

Moualem’s own involvement in peace diplomacy with Israel goes back many years. In 1994-96 he headed a Syrian negotiating team that came close to completing a final peace agreement – before Israel withdrew its negotiators, in March 1996.

Most recently, between May and December last year, Syrian and Israeli diplomats held “proximity talks” in Turkey. The two teams stayed in separate hotels in Istanbul, while Turkish officials passed messages between them.

Moualem closely monitored those talks from his office in Damascus. In late December, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert joined his country’s team in Istanbul, and Moualem was on standby to travel there too, at short notice, once Syria’s representatives received confirmation that Israel was ready to withdraw completely from all the Syrian land that Israel occupied in 1967.

That has always been a baseline Syrian requirement, in return for which Damascus is prepared to conclude extensive economic and mutual-security arrangements with Israel.

In December, Olmert failed to produce the vital commitment to full withdrawal. A day later, his government invaded Gaza.

Officials in both Syria and Turkey felt they had been misused as part of an elaborate Israeli “strategic deception” project.

Moualem nevertheless told IPS, “We were very happy with the Turkish role… We think that was a good approach: to start with the indirect talks in that way. And then, if we had gotten over the preliminaries with the Turks, the plan was to hand the task of completing the peace agreement over to the Americans.”

“The best way would be to try to repeat this approach now. If this should succeed, the success would belong to Barack Obama – and if we fail, the failure would be ours alone,” he said.

Later, he added, “The most important thing is that there should be a political decision for peace. It is not important to us whether the government [in Israel] is Likud or Labour.”

Regarding the sanctions the U.S. still wields against Syria, Moualem and other Syrian officials expressed some apparent understanding that it might be hard for Obama to take steps like repealing the SARLSA that would need the agreement of the U.S. Congress, which is heavily influenced by the pro-Israel lobby. But he noted there were several steps the administration could take on its own to ease the sanctions Syria is still suffering from.

One step would be to send a U.S. ambassador to Syria. Pres. Bush withdrew his ambassador from Damascus in February 2005, after the killing of Lebanon’s former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. (Many people blamed the killing on Syria, though no solid evidence of that has been found.)

But if Moualem and other Syrian officials might be glad to see a U.S. ambassador back in Damascus, they are not about to beg openly for this to happen. “Having a U.S. ambassador in Damascus is in Washington’s own interest,” presidential adviser Bouthaina Shaaban stressed. “Americans should want to have their own eyes and ears here. It’s a normal state of affairs.”

Another step Obama could take to improve relations would be to ease up on the way his Commerce or Treasury Departments apply the sanctions, in practice. Moualem told IPS, “I am very eager to see a real improvement in our relations with Washington. But nothing has happened yet.”

Regarding Syria’s longstanding good relations with Iran, Moualem asked, “Can the relationship we have with Iran help us to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, or, will solving the Arab-Israeli conflict actually help to reduce the importance of Iran in regional affairs? These are important questions to discuss.”

He added, “Why would the U.S. want to persist in trying to mobilise an Arab-Israeli coalition against Iran? We are talking about peace in the whole region.”

He stressed that Iran “has never opposed any of our peace moves since 1991.”

For 29 years, starting in 1976, Syria maintained a large troop presence in Lebanon, which had originally been encouraged by Washington. But in 2005, after Hariri’s killing, Syria withdrew those troops completely. Earlier this year it exchanged ambassadors with Lebanon.

When IPS talked with Moualem, the latest elections in Lebanon were still three days away. Asked his expectations of them he said, “I hope … the Lebanese people choose people who will represent their interests well. And I wish the Lebanese people well.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

The head of Hamas’s political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, gave a qualified welcome here Thursday to the big speech that Pres. Barack Obama addressed to the Muslim world in Cairo.

“The speech was cleverly written in the way it addressed the Muslim world… and in the way it showed respect to the Muslim heritage,” Meshaal told IPS in an exclusive interview. “But I think it’s not enough. What’s needed are deeds, actions on the ground, and a change of policies.”

His remarks came just hours after the speech, in a wide-ranging interview in one of the Hamas leader’s offices here in the Syrian capital.

In the interview, Meshaal was friendly, quietly self-confident, and thoughtful. He was firm in describing his movement’s positions, including when he restated that he wants Hamas to be treated as “part of the solution and not part of the problem”.

He said he would be happy to meet Sen. George Mitchell, who is expected to arrive in Damascus within the next two weeks for the first time in his capacity as U.S. peace envoy.

“If Mitchell wants to meet me, we’ll welcome him with a cup of fine tea,” Meshaal said with a smile.

This seems unlikely to happen in the near future. In the Cairo speech, Obama restated the three preconditions that Pres. George W. Bush and his allies in the international “Quartet” defined in 2006 for Hamas, before any members of the Quartet – the U.S. European Union, United Nations and Russia – would agree to deal with it.

Meshaal expressed his displeasure with that part of Obama’s speech, noting that in the speech Obama also said he was ready to start talks with Iran, “without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect”.

“Why is Obama ready to deal with Iran without preconditions, but not us?” Meshaal asked. “Obama is using some new words in his rhetoric, somewhat different from what we heard from Bush, but under no circumstances will preconditions be acceptable to us.”

IPS asked Meshaal if he thought some approach like the one Mitchell used to mediate an end to the conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1990s might work in the Palestinian-Israeli arena. In that effort, Mitchell defined a set of principles regarding issues like abstention from violence and commitment to democratic resolution of differences that he applied equally to all sides in the conflict.

Meshaal replied, “Before we get into details, if Mitchell wants to resolve the conflict here, he should talk to everyone. The Northern Ireland principles were the result of dialogue, not of defining preconditions.”

That was when he extended the invitation to Mitchell to come and meet over a cup of tea.

IPS asked whether – and how – he judged that Hamas’s longstanding desire to be seen as part of the solution could be meshed with Mitchell’s mission.

“Yes, we want to be part of the solution, but on the basis of Palestinian rights,” he said. “We have already said we’ll work for the success of any project that ends the occupation of 1967, restores Palestinian rights, and grants to Palestinians our right of self-determination.”

“We need two things from Obama, Mitchell, the Quartet, and the rest of the international community. Firstly, pressure on Israel to acknowledge and grant these rights. The obstacle to this is completely on the Israeli side. Secondly, we need the international actors to refrain from intervening in internal Palestinian affairs. You should leave it to the Palestinians to resolve our differences peacefully. You should respect Palestinian democracy and its results,” he said.

This latter was a reference to the hard-hitting campaign that Israel, the U.S. and its allies have maintained against Hamas ever since its candidates won a strong victory in the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s parliamentary elections in January 2006.

That campaign has included sustained efforts to delegitimise the Hamas-led government that emerged from the elections, attempts by Israel to assassinate the government’s leaders, including during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, and the mission that U.S. Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton has led in the West Bank to arm and train an anti-Hamas fighting force loyal to the U.S.-supported Palestinian leadership in Ramallah.

In his reaction to Obama’s speech, Meshaal referred to the U.S.’s role in this intervention, saying, “Rather than sweet words from President Obama on democratisation, we’d rather see the United States start to respect the results of democratic elections that have already been held. And rather than talk about democratisation and human rights in the Arab world, we’d rather see the removal of Gen. Dayton, who’s building a police state there in the West Bank.”

On Thursday, the tensions between Hamas and forces loyal to the Ramallah-based Fatah Party leadership boiled over into outright fighting in the West Bank town of Qalqilya that left two Hamas fighters and one pro-Ramallah security officer dead.

The deep divisions between Hamas and Fatah have also been seen by many as a major obstacle to lifting Israel’s extremely damaging siege of Gaza, since Israel refuses to open the crossing points into Gaza unless pro-Fatah people control the Gaza side of the crossings.

Meshaal told IPS, “We’re eager for the reconciliation with Fatah. It’s both a political and a humanitarian necessity. But success is unlikely because of outside intervention.”

Attempts to effect a reconciliation have been sporadically underway in Cairo since February, but so far with no success. IPS asked Meshaal if he thought Egypt was unsuccessful as a mediator. “Egypt is not the problem,” he said. “The problem is not the mediator, but the outside intervention.”

He also said that the continuing differences between Hamas and Fatah should not be seen as posing an immoveable obstacle to lifting the Gaza siege. He argued that if the international community really wanted the Gaza siege lifted it could find ways to do this.

Gaza has its longest land border with Israel, which also controls its coastline. It also has a short land-border with Egypt.

IPS pressed Meshaal on an issue of great concern to some Israelis: whether, when he talks about “an end to Israeli occupation” he is referring to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 or to the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948 in what had previously been the area of “Mandate Palestine.”

He replied, “I have said I accept a Palestinian state if Israel withdraws to the pre-1967 line. That doesn’t annul the historical fact of the Israeli occupation of 1948, but Hamas and the other factions have all accepted this solution of a Palestinian state at the 1967 line. But there’s still no Israeli acceptance of this, and no international recognition of this outcome.”

Asked whether the establishment of a Palestinian state in just the areas occupied in 1967 would secure the end of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he responded, “That state is our demand today. When our people are free and have their own state they will decide on this position.”

In a discussion on the right of the numerous Palestinian refugees from 1948, and their descendants, to return to their ancestral homes and lands in what is now Israel, he defined this as meaning that these refugees still have the right to return to their “home villages or towns”.

Hamas is often portrayed in the west as politically inflexible, but on some key issues it has acted in a realistic way that demonstrates its leadership’s ability to adapt its positions to changing realities on the ground.

One of these shifts was its move toward accepting the concept of a Palestinian state in just the West Bank and Gaza. Another was the decision it took in 2005 to participate in the PA’s parliamentary elections, though a decade earlier it had opposed such participation.

Meshaal explained this latter shift by saying, “In 1996, when we opposed the elections it was because they were seen as derived from the Oslo Agreement, which we opposed. But by 2006 Oslo was dead… Also, by 2005-2006 the PA had become a real burden on the Palestinian people, with all its corruption. The Palestinian people wanted Hamas to enter the PA’s institutions, to lift this burden from them, and we had to be responsive to that.”

In his reaction to Obama’s speech, Meshaal welcomed the change from the rhetoric used by Pres. Bush – though he indicated it was not as far-reaching a change as he would have wished. But he also stressed that rhetorical change is not, on its own, nearly enough.

“Obama talked about the Palestinian state, but not its borders,” he said. “He didn’t mention whether it should comprise all the Palestinian land that was occupied in 1967, or just part of it, as Israel demands…”

“Yes, he spoke of an end to Israel’s continuing settlement activity; but can he really get them to stop? Without addressing these issues, the speech remains rhetoric, not so very different from his predecessor’s.”

Meanwhile, any time George Mitchell comes to Damascus and he needs a cup of tea, he knows where he can find one.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

What is the relationship between the United States’ policy towards Iran and its performance on Arab-Israeli peacemaking, including the crucial quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians?

This quest took on new urgency after Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas had his first visit with Pres. Barack Obama in Washington on Thursday. After the meeting, Obama told reporters that “time is of the essence” regarding ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The question of the linkage between the Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy and Washington’s Iran policy assumed new importance this week after Israeli reporter Yossi Melman reported that Dennis Ross, the State Department’s special adviser on Iran, has co-authored a book, due out next month, that scoffs at “the idea that if only the Palestinian conflict were solved, all other Middle East conflicts would melt away” – which was how the two writers defined the ‘linkage’ argument.

Melman observed that it was strange that a man holding those views should be working for a U.S. administration that has made linkage between Iran policy and Israeli-Arab peacemaking a centrepiece of its Middle East policy.

For example, right after his May 18 meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Pres. Obama said, “To the extent that we can make peace… between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”

For his part, Netanyahu seems to hate the idea that any such linkage exists, since that would imply that Israel should engage seriously with the Palestinians if it wants to win full U.S. support for the confrontational policy he favours towards Iran. At that same May 18 press event, Netanyahu said defiantly, “There isn’t a policy linkage, and that’s what I hear the president saying, and that’s what I’m saying too.”

The difference between the two leaders is one of priorities – and also, perhaps, of the substance of their preference regarding Iran.

Obama wants to prioritise progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, arguing that that will help win Arab support for a tougher confrontation against Iran down the road, if that is needed. Netanyahu wants to prioritise taking tough action against Iran, arguing that removing the threat he sees Iran posing to the whole Middle East will make peacemaking with Israel’s neighbours easier down the road.

Regarding substance, Netanyahu has made clear on many occasions that tough action, including quite possibly even direct military action, will certainly be needed to destroy Iran’s ability to produce the nuclear weapons that, he alleges, the Tehran government is working fast to build. (The Iranian government, which has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), claims its current uranium enrichment programme is for peaceful purposes only.)

Obama, by contrast, promised during his election campaign and since that he will make a good faith effort to resolve the U.S.’s differences with Iran through diplomacy. But he has still done little to deliver on that promise. Indeed, as Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett noted in a recent article, he has even continued a semi-clandestine programme that aims at fomenting complete regime change in Tehran.

Obama indicated May 18 that he hoped to be able to start serious discussions with Tehran soon after Iran’s Jun. 12 election. He added that he might have “a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction.” That seemed to fall far short of the demand Netanyahu had voiced that Obama set a strict and speedy deadline for the end of any negotiations with Tehran.

Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have meanwhile pushed forward with their approach of prioritising Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. Clinton has spelled out publicly her and Obama’s view that the Israeli government needs to stop all construction activity in the West Bank settlements, in line with commitments Israel made under the 2002 Road Map, in order to get the peace talks resumed.

Netanyahu has refused to comply. An Israeli government spokesman said Wednesday that though Netanyahu plans to dismantle some small settlement “outposts”, within the older and larger West Bank settlements, “normal activity will continue”.

Many people in the Middle East and elsewhere are watching closely to see how Washington will respond to Netanyahu’s recalcitrance.

The difference between Obama and Netanyahu over whether the Arab-Israeli peacemaking or the Iran question should have priority hangs to a large degree on a judgment regarding the motives of those Arab parties that have continued to resist Israel’s plans for the Middle East over recent years – primarily, Hamas, Hizbullah, and the Syrian government.

Netanyahu and his advisers argue that these three actors resist Israel’s plans primarily because they are tools or proxies for Iran. Thus, they argue, if Iran’s power can be radically decreased, the Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians who have followed these Iran-backed leaders until now can then be easily won over to other leaders with policies more favourable to Israel.

Most people familiar with the politics and society of these Arab communities challenge that assessment. They judge that Hamas, Hizbullah, and Syria’s current government are popular among their followers mainly for reasons other than the support they get from Iran.

All three of these leaderships are seen to deliver valuable public goods to their followers. Additionally, the stance of nationalist dignity and resistance to Israel that they have long adopted is very popular indeed among many members of these (and other) Arab publics.

Hence, these specialists say, though it is true that Iran gives some support to all these parties, that is not the crucial determinant of their popularity. They point to the similar arguments that were made a decade ago – by Netanyahu and other like him – about the support that Saddam Hussein gave to Palestinian and other hardliners.

Back then, supporters of Netanyahu’s Likud party used to argue that ‘the road to peace in Jerusalem lies in Baghdad’. That was one of the arguments, indeed, that along with Pres. Bush’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s WMD, was used to help justify the invasion of Iraq.

But Hussein was toppled, and the nationalist line among the Palestinians only got stronger – to the point that Hamas won the election in 2006.

“The argument made by the Israeli hardliners is very similar today,” one Arab-affairs expert told IPS. “Except now it’s Iran that is blamed for Palestinian militancy, not Iraq. But in fact, the main cause of Palestinian militancy all along has been Israel’s actions, and those are what need to change.”

For now, the eyes of most Middle Easterners are on Washington. How will Obama respond to Netanyahu’s recalcitrance on settlements? What will he say about Israeli-Arab peace issues in the major speech he will deliver to the Muslim world when he goes to Cairo on Jun. 4? What other plans do he and special envoy George Mitchell have to push the peacemaking forward – and to help relieve the 1.5 million people of Gaza of their continuing woes?

Two key Middle East elections are looming, too. Will Hizbullah and its allies do well in Lebanon’s elections on Jun. 7 – and how will Washington respond to that? What will Obama do with Iran after their elections, Jun. 12?

The weeks ahead will be momentous ones for the Middle East. And the way that linkage works, or does not work, between the Israeli-Arab arena and Iran will crucially affect these developments.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

Two soaring bridges link Asia and Europe in this historic city, which straddles the two continents.

For the past few years Turkey has likewise acted as a crucial bridge between the western and Muslim worlds. Turkey is a member of both the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The current secretary-general of the OIC is a Turkish historian.

In early April, U.S. President Barak Obama issued a crucial appeal for understanding between the west and Islam during a visit to the Turkish capital, Ankara.

The Turkish government has been led since 2002 by the moderate-Islamist Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish initials, AKP). Now Turkey, a democratic country of 71.5 million people that has long embraced the separation of church (mosque) and state, looks set to play an increasingly important role in both the Middle East and the broader Muslim world.

In the Arab-Israeli arena, for eight months until last December, Turkey sponsored and hosted a series of breakthrough proximity talks between Israel and Syria. It brought the two nations closer than ever to concluding a final peace agreement. The talks were abruptly ended after Israel invaded Gaza Dec. 28.

In February 2006, Ankara hosted Khaled Meshaal, the national leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas. One month earlier, Hamas had won the elections to the Palestinian legislature.

Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, and prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have both repeatedly called on the international community to respect the results of the Palestinian elections and urged western countries to find a way to deal with Hamas.

In an achievement that indicates Turkey’s weight in world affairs, Turkey has been able to retain its good relations with Israel even while adopting this stance.

On U.S.-Iranian relations, Gul and Erdogan have consistently called for a negotiated resolution of the two countries’ problems. At a conference held by Sabanci University’s Istanbul Policy Centre here Thursday, former diplomat Can Buharli noted that Turkey’s relations with Iran have grown stronger over the past decade.

Turkey is a majority-Sunni country. IPS found no Turkish nationals who agreed with the claim made by some western officials that an Iranian-backed “Shiite wave” is about to take over the Middle East or that Iran’s nuclear programme poses a threat to the region.

Back in 2003, Turkey firmly opposed the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, and refused to allow the U.S. military to use Turkey as a transit corridor for the invasion.

The distinctive position that Turkey now occupies in world affairs is, most Turkish commentators agree, largely a result of the in-depth strategic thought of Dr. Ahmet Davutoglu, who was appointed foreign minister on May 1. Before that, Davutoglu worked as a special adviser to Erdogan, running Turkey’s shuttle diplomacy between Israel and Syria and other initiatives on Erdogan’s behalf.

Some years ago Davutoglu developed the concept that Turkey should have “zero problems with its neighbours.” More recently, he has advocated building on that to strive for “maximum cooperation” with all neighbours.

With some neighbours, like Armenia and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, that approach has proven difficult. But even with those two, Erdogan has considerably improved relations that were previously very tense.

In late April, Turkey concluded a five-point “road map” agreement with Armenia. One of the points stipulated that the two countries will establish a joint historical commission to investigate what happened to the Armenians in Turkey in 1915.

Regarding northern Iraq, Turks now seem confident that they have solid commitments from the ethnic-Kurdish provincial leaders there that they will no longer give sanctuary to fighters from the PKK, a movement of ethnic-Kurdish Turkish citizens that has waged a lengthy armed struggle in eastern Turkey in support of its secessionist goals.

Israel is not an immediate neighbour to Turkey. But even there, Erdogan has worked for maximum cooperation, despite deep differences over Tel Aviv’s policy toward the Palestinians. In January, those differences spilled into the elite halls of the annual Davos conference when Israeli president Shimon Peres raised his voice to Erdogan in a panel discussion – and Erdogan stormed out of the hall.

Peres later called Erdogan to apologise.

For all its attention to the Middle East, Turkish foreign policy is still strongly oriented toward the country’s longstanding goal of joining the European Union.

“We see ourselves as part of the west, without a doubt,” Buharli said. “And our neighbours in the region see us that way, too. Indeed, that is part of what makes us attractive to them.”

The two successive AKP governments in Ankara have brought seven years of unprecedented political stability to a country that throughout the Cold War was plagued by numerous military coups. Many people around the world also view the AKP as an intriguing example of how an Islamist party that commits to democratic principles can become well-integrated into the political life of a democracy.

When Turkey became a nation-state in 1923 ,it was founded on the explicitly secular and Turkish-nationalist principles of its first president, Kemal Ataturk. From then until today, Turkish women have been forbidden to wear Muslim-style headscarves in public universities or government offices.

Ataturk ran the republic as a one-party state, clamping down on political opponents. Under him and until very recently, successive Turkish governments also used the military to ruthlessly suppress any signs of cultural autonomy or political separatism from members of the country’s sizeable Kurdish minority.

Since the AKP came to power in 2002 it has moved ahead carefully on all these once explosive issues. It has not pushed forward its longstanding request that scarf-wearing women be allowed their full economic and social rights.

The wives of both Gul and Erdogan are scarf-wearers, as are around one-quarter of the women one sees on the streets of Istanbul. (The proportion is reportedly higher in the country’s interior.) But here, as in many majority-Muslim countries, young women with and without headscarves mix easily together.

On Kurdish issues the AKP has moved ahead more determinedly – in a constructive, pro-peace way. Earlier this year the public television station started airing programming in Kurdish for the first time.

In general, the AKP has built a strong political base by pursuing a policy of “live and let live” at the ideological level – while also paying attention to the efficient and non-corrupt delivery of good public services to all citizens.

One liberal secularist told IPS that though she was not an ideological supporter of the AKP, “If you are a liberal in Turkey, then the AKP is probably the party that will best support your needs and interests.”

Not all Turkish secularists agree. On Sunday, around 20,000 militant supporters of Ataturk-style secularism demonstrated in Ankara against the AKP and against a wide-ranging investigation the country’s judiciary has launched into a reported anti-government plot hatched in 2007 in what is called the Ergenekon case.

Istanbul residents expressed different opinions to IPS on whether there is any substance to the Ergenekon allegations, or whether the whole affair is an AKP exaggeration or witch-hunt. But they seemed to agree that the judiciary could be trusted to sort out the truth from the many lurid allegations now swirling around the case.

In a country where the rule of law was trampled on so thoroughly until recent years, that trust in the judiciary seems like a significant achievement.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with Pres. Barack Obama in Washington next Monday, amid speculation that their two administrations may be heading for a confrontation worse than any they have known since 1991-92.

In 1991, as today, the U.S. president was determined to bring Israel into peace talks with the Arabs on the basis of “land for peace” deals in the West Bank and the other Israeli-occupied lands. Then, as now, Israel was ruled by a Likud prime minister deeply opposed to ceding any power in the occupied West Bank to the Palestinians.

Then as now, officials in both Washington and Israel were also concerned with another big threat from elsewhere in the region, whose presence strongly coloured their Arab-Israeli diplomacy. In 1991, it was Iraq; today, it is Iran.

There are, of course, other differences between the situations in 1991 and today. But the political jujitsu the U.S. and Israeli leaders pursued in 1991 offers lessons for what we may expect in the weeks and months to come.

Already, in advance of Monday’s meeting, each government has launched a few warning shots across the other’s bow. Netanyahu said he cannot start to deal with the Palestinian issue until after he feels certain that Washington has a foolproof plan to deal with Iran.

He has also, thus far, steadfastly refused to express any support for the “two-state” solution that Obama, like President George W. Bush before him, has defined as the goal between Israelis and Palestinians.

For his part, Obama has stated clearly that the U.S. has its own strong interest in seeing a Palestinian-Israeli peace. That implies that this time – unlike over the previous 16 years – Washington will not allow Israel to dictate the pace and agenda in the negotiations.

Obama and his officials have also spelled out that a Palestinian state must be established in the West Bank and Gaza. And Israel must, they said, make good on the promises it has already made several times, including at the Annapolis peace meet in November 2007, to freeze the construction of new settlement housing.

Despite those promises, building in the settlements continues apace. But thus far, neither the president nor Congress has established any firm linkage between Israel’s compliance with the freeze promise and the extremely generous aid, in many forms, that Washington gives it.

Also, though Obama moved rapidly after his inauguration to name former Senate majority leader George Mitchell as his envoy for Israeli-Arab peace, so far neither man has announced any concrete plan for restarting the peace talks.

Back in the summer and fall of 1991, the situation was very similar. Pres. George H.W. Bush also worked hard to get Israel to freeze settlement construction, and Likud premier Yitzhak Shamir stubbornly resisted those pleas.

At that point, Bush and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, decided to play hardball. Baker went to Congress and explained why a successful peace negotiation was in the U.S. interest, and why an Israeli settlement freeze was essential to that. He asked for, and won, agreement that the U.S. should directly link the amount of loan guarantees it gave Israel to Israel’s spending on the settlements.

Inside Israel, the view grew that Shamir was an obstacle to the good relations with Washington that most Israelis recognise their nation needs. In elections held in June 1992, Shamir’s Likud Party was roundly defeated by the more pro-peace Labour Party. In the U.S., Bush also faced an election in 1992. He, like Shamir, lost his election. But different players in Washington gave intriguingly different explanations of his loss.

Most U.S. voters recall that it was Bill Clinton’s stress on “it’s the economy, stupid” that ensured his victory in 1992. But a small group of influential insiders reportedly persuaded both Clinton and later, the younger George Bush, who followed him as president, that the elder Bush’s insistence on playing political hardball with Israel had contributed strongly to his 1992 defeat.

Several accounts indicate that that impression helped persuade both Clinton and the younger Bush to avoid getting into any open confrontation with the government in power in Israel, and therefore to let Israel set the pace in any peace talks.

Obama has notably broken with those two immediate precedents and seems set on pursuing the older Bush’s more hard-nosed and ‘realist’ approach to Israel. He has some compelling reasons to do so.

The most important is the 140,000-person deployment the U.S. military now has in one Arab country, Iraq. Those troops are, moreover, reliant on lengthy supply lines, many of which run through other Arab countries. The eruption of another full-blown Palestinian-Israeli crisis could place those U.S. lives at risk. (So could the launching, by either Israel or the U.S., of an act of war against Iran.)

Also, after running a very troubled occupation in Iraq for six years, the U.S. has a much deeper and more vivid understanding of the practice of “military occupation” than it did in 1991. Officials have seen that such an occupation cannot be maintained indefinitely – and that ending it often involves dealing with people who were formerly your sworn enemies.

Attitudes towards Israel amongst the U.S. public generally, and among Jewish Americans, have evolved significantly since 1991.

During last year’s election, some pro-Likud groups and networks in the U.S. campaigned harshly against Obama. But he still won a majority inside the Jewish community that was even greater than the one he won from the electorate as a whole.

Inside the Jewish community, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose work closely follows the priorities of the government in power in Israel, for many years easily dominated the lobbying agenda. AIPAC remains strong. But now, several other Jewish-American organisations are directly – and with increasing effectiveness -challenging its monopoly from the pro-peace side.

Within Congress, once a staunch bastion of AIPAC influence, Rep. William Delahunt now has 103 co-sponsors for a key “sense of the House” resolution that expresses support for the two-state solution, and for Mitchell.

Within two weeks after his meeting with Netanyahu, Obama will be receiving Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and interim Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the White House. He will also travel to Egypt on Jun. 4 to make his long-awaited speech “to the Muslim world”.

Somewhere along the way there – or shortly after the Cairo speech – Obama will almost certainly have to reveal what it is, exactly, that he plans to do to win Arab-Israeli peace.

Might this involve, as it did in 1991, the White House going mano-a-mano with a Likud government in Israel? If it did, how would this tussle between the world’s one hyperpower and the Middle East’s stongest (though still small) power work out?

M.J. Rosenberg, the Washington director of the pro-peace Israel Policy Forum, has a clear answer. “If Obama holds firm, it will not be Obama who blinks,” he recently wrote, adding that “American Jews will rally behind him.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

Last month in Prague, President Barack Obama vowed that he would seek a world without nuclear weapons. On Tuesday, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller spelled out that this policy would apply to Israel, as well.

Speaking at a conference on the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Gottemoeller said that “Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea … remains a fundamental objective of the United States.”

Israel is judged to have between 100 and 200 advanced nuclear weapons either ready to deploy, or only a few minutes away from being so.

Gottemoeller’s words sparked speculation that this arsenal might re-emerge as an issue in Israel’s relations with Washington. That would end a 40-year period in which Washington colluded with Israel in maintaining the fiction that Israel’s nuclear weapons capabilities were unknown, and anyway should never be openly discussed.

Throughout those years, Washington was also vigorously combating the acquisition by any other Middle Eastern state of “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), including chemical or biological weapons, as well as the far more lethal nuclear weapons. Many around the world accused Washington of maintaining a damaging “double standard” on nuclear weapons and all other WMD.

Israel has always fended off calls that it join the NPT. Beyond that, most Israeli leaders have gone actively on the offensive against the NPT, arguing that it has not been effective in preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide. (The NPTs many supporters strongly contest that assertion. One hundred and eighty-nine states are members of the treaty.)

When George W. Bush was U.S. president, he seemed largely persuaded by the Israelis’ view of NPT ineffectiveness. His administration downgraded the support Washington previously gave the NPT. The NPT’s approach stresses the ultimate goal of a nuclear weapons-free world, the need for negotiations among nations as a way to get there, and the universality of this effort.

In place of an active commitment to the NPT approach, Bush pursued the very different policy of “counter-proliferation.” That policy stressed U.S. domination of efforts to directly counter the nuclear programmes of countries Washington disapproved of, using a variety of means, including direct military destruction of suspected installations.

Obama’s Prague speech marked a sharp shift back to the NPT approach. And Gottemoeller’s speech then showed that the Obama administration intends to apply it in the Middle East, as well as elsewhere. This will have a strong effect on the administration’s diplomacy regarding both Iran and Israeli-Arab peacemaking.

Regarding Iran, Bruce Riedel, a senior White House official for Middle East and South Asia affairs under both Pres. Bill Clinton and (for one year) Pres. Bush, told the Washington Times this week that, “If you’re really serious about a deal with Iran, Israel has to come out of the closet. A policy based on fiction and double standards is bound to fail sooner or later.”

Regarding Israeli-Arab peacemaking, the Arab states have long argued that if there is to be a durable peace between Israel and all its Arab neighbours, then Israel’s nuclear arsenal will have to be subject to negotiation along with the military capabilities of everyone else in the region.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia have argued strongly, for many years now, for the establishment in the Middle East of a “Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone”, such as already exists in South America. Other states and international bodies like the International Atomic Energy Agency support the wider concept of a Middle East free of all WMD.

Serious advocates of both proposals insist, however, that Israel’s nuclear weapons have to be included in the negotiation.

Now, it looks as if Washington may be preparing to join this movement toward stressing Israeli transparency and accountability. This would take the Obama administration back to the stance adopted by Pres. John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s. Just a few years later, however, in 1969, Pres. Richard Nixon signed off on a policy that Israeli nuclear policy expert Avner Cohen has described as one of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Back in the Cold War, there were many – including key Nixon adviser Henry Kissinger – who argued that colluding with Israel’s nuclear opacity was in the U.S. interest since, if Israel came out openly as a nuclear power, that could spark Soviet arms sales to pro-Moscow allies in the region and raise tensions in the region.

After the Cold War ended, many in the U.S. strategic-affairs community favoured continuing the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They argued that Israel acted as an extension of U.S. power in the Middle East, so its capabilities should be supported, or that the U.S. was so powerful globally that it had no need to put pressure on or embarrass its Israeli ally.

Both those arguments were based on the judgment that U.S. interests always coincide with those of Israel. Now, as Obama and his top aides have started to hint, that judgment may be starting to change.

We can expect to see the extent of the divergence between the two governments during or shortly after the visit that Israel’s newly installed premier Benjamin Netanyahu makes to Washington, May 18.

Already, serious differences have become evident between him and Obama on the crucial issues of Iran and the Palestine question.

Netanyahu and his aides have said that full U.S. cooperation with Israel on actions to prevent Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is a prerequisite for Israel’s cooperation with Washington on Palestinian peacemaking. Obama’s people have argued, by contrast, that Israel’s cooperation with them in the peacemaking is necessary if joint action on Iran is to be possible.

Regarding Palestine, Obama has argued for the speedy conclusion of a final peace between Israel and Palestine that involves establishing a viable, fully independent Palestinian state. Netanyahu has refused to express support for that goal, arguing that the Palestinians have to meet numerous further preconditions before final peace talks can resume.

How might Gottemoeller’s statement on Israel and the NPT play into this mix? Certainly, it sends another powerful message to Netanyahu that he cannot expect his relationship with Obama to be anywhere near as close as the one his three predecessors – Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert – all enjoyed with the man in the White House.

Many advocates of a more evenhanded U.S. policy to the Middle East welcomed Gottemoeller’s statement, seeing it as chipping away the damaging double standard that Washington has long employed in Israel’s favour.

Other commentators, more focused on the need to achieve real progress in the peacemaking between Israel and its Arab neighbours, welcome the signs of a new evenhandedness toward Israel. But they warn that the focus on nuclear questions should not eclipse the need for speedy U.S. actions to curb Israeli settlement construction and get the final Israeli-Palestinians peace talks back onto a hopeful track.

One Palestinian security-affairs analyst here said, “It doesn’t have to be an ‘either-or’. Obama should continue to pursue his nonproliferation agenda. But our priority is to win a decent future for our people, in our homeland. I don’t see Israel’s nuclear weapons, however many there are, as having a direct impact on that. So let’s keep our focus on the peacemaking.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

On Wednesday, a judge at the Hague-based “Special Tribunal for Lebanon” (STL) ordered Lebanon to release four senior Lebanese generals imprisoned since 2005 on suspicion of involvement in killing former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February of that year.

The order from pre-trial judge Daniel Fransen raised new questions about the course the newly opened STL might take. It also caused jubilation – and celebratory gunfire – among those Lebanese who had previously distrusted the court, fearing it was engaged in a U.S.-backed witch-hunt against Syria and all its allies in Lebanon.

Lebanon’s four million citizens go to the polls Jun. 7 in a parliamentary election that will determine the balance in the country’s next government. Ever since Lebanon won independence in 1943 it has been a battleground in which stronger regional – and international – powers have competed, hard, for influence. People and politicians throughout the Middle East will therefore watch the results of the election carefully, to see which way the region’s tides are flowing.

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a 110-minute, drop-by visit to Beirut. Though she claimed the visit was strictly non-political, she made a point of visiting Hariri’s gravesite, sending a potent signal of support for the country’s anti-Syrian politicians.

At a brief press conference elsewhere in the city, Clinton voiced a tough warning against foreign meddling in the elections, seemingly unaware of the irony involved in that stance.

Lebanon has been hailed by some westerners as the oldest democracy in the Arab world. However, the country’s political system is still based on the sectionalisation of voters and candidates according to the religious denomination each inherited from her or his father, as marked on her identity card.

The Lebanese call this system “confessionalism.” It gives the votes of some Lebanese – especially the Christians, who are a numerical minority – much more weight than the votes of others. It has helped to perpetuate a form of political feudalism in which voters tend to be swayed much more by clan allegiance than by the candidates’ political programmes.

It also for many years discouraged the emergence of anything resembling modern political parties. Many entities that look like parties turn out, on closer inspection, to be facades for old-style clan or feudal networks. Several analysts have remarked that the Lebanese body most closely resembling a national political party is the pro-Iranian, and mainly Shiite Muslim, resistance movement Hizbullah.

Hizbullah was formed in the 1980s from networks that actively resisted the Israeli troops who had occupied southern Lebanon since 1982. It is reviled by Israel and the U.S. as only a terror organisation, but it has competed in Lebanese elections since 1992 and has always performed well. It has also on occasion – including now – had members in the country’s government.

In the present decade, Lebanon has seen the tides of a number of different powers swirl across its political landscape.

In 2000, Hizbullah mainly achieved its goal of expelling Israel from the country, and won much support from Lebanese of all religions for doing so. (It maintained, however, that Israel’s continued presence in the small Shebaa Farms area meant Israel still occupied a portion of Lebanon, and this justified Hizbullah keeping its weapons. Israel claims Shebaa is part of Syria, not Lebanon.)

After Hizbullah liberated just about all the south from Israel in 2000, Syrian troops were still in central and northern Lebanon. That deployment had started in 1976 – at the invitation of Lebanon’s government and with the backing of the U.S. and Israel.

After 2000, Syria, Hizbullah, and their other allies were quite powerful in the country. Rafiq Hariri, a key ally of Saudi Arabia, was prime minister and was on very good terms with Syria. As all Lebanese prime ministers have to be, Hariri was a Sunni Muslim.

In 2004 he had a falling-out with Damascus and quit his job. In February 2005 he was killed in a massive car-bomb that his son, Saad, and the Saudis blamed on Syria.

A month after the assassination, close to one million Lebanese rallied, mainly peacefully, against Syria in downtown Beirut. That rally spawned the “March 14” movement (M-14), which received much support from Saudi Arabia and the U.S. It was so successful that within weeks the Syrian troops had left Lebanon completely.

In the June 2005 election, M-14 won 72 of the parliament’s 128 seats. But Hizbullah and its allies still had 35 seats. The strongly anti-Hizbullah factions inside M-14 were unable to persuade the government to demand that Hizbullah disarm completely – especially since Israel continued to violate Lebanese airspace and to hang onto several Lebanese prisoners captured during the 22-year occupation.

In July 2006 Hizbullah captured two Israeli soldiers to use as bargaining chips for the Lebanese detainees. With considerable support from Washington, Israel hit back with a fierce, 33-day assault against not just Hizbullah, but also many vital civilian facilities throughout Lebanon.

Israel’s leaders said their aim was to turn Lebanon’s population against Hizbullah and force the Beirut government to disarm it. But the war backfired badly for Israel. Far from repudiating Hizbullah, Lebanese citizens from all religions rallied round it. Israel was finally forced to conclude a ceasefire embodying almost exactly the same terms that existed before the war.

Hizbullah emerged from the 2006 war bloodied but proud and unbowed, but M-14 still controlled the government.

In spring 2008, the government tried to end a longstanding arrangement whereby Hizbullah gained data from surveillance cameras at Beirut airport. Hizbullah sent its supporters into the Beirut streets to protest. Serious fighting started to erupt between Hizbullah’s mainly Shiite supporters and the Sunni supporters of Saad Hariri.

The Emir of Qatar – a low-key though persistent critic of Saudi Arabia – then intervened. He called Lebanon’s political bosses to his capital, Doha, where he brokered a new governing formula called the Doha Agreement. Under the formula, the pro-Hizbullah bloc – which includes significant numbers of Christian MPs – won 11 seats in the 30-member cabinet. Participants also agreed on the long-overdue appointment of a new president, Michel Sleiman. The preceding arrangements at Beirut airport stayed in place.

Even with a stronger Hizbullah presence in the government, the U.S. continued to provide aid, including military aid, to Lebanon.

Throughout the past decade the main external players in the Lebanese political theater have been the U.S. and Iran, but Saudi Arabia and Syria have also been important influences.

In the post-2004 era, Lebanon experienced considerable fallout from the rupture in relations between Saudi Arabia and Syria. Prior to 2004, that relationship had been steady and strong for many years, despite Syria’s longstanding parallel alliance with Iran.

In the post-2004 years, Lebanon also came close to becoming a tinderbox where the tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims threatened to erupt – as in Iraq – into vicious, open fighting.

Over the past few months, however, the Saudis and Syrians have both done a lot to mend their relationship. The scene thus seems set, for now, for the orderly holding of the June election. The pro-Hizbullah “March 8” bloc (M-8) is expected to do well, and might even win.

Several western governments are already starting to discuss how they might deal with a government that contains an even stronger Hizbullah component than the present one. None of them, so far, is discussing any boycott as extreme or damaging as the one imposed on the Hamas bloc that won the Palestinian elections in 2006.

The latest order from the STL judge may help M-8’s chances in the election. Certainly, it will not hurt them.

Lebanese blogger Qifa Nabki had this wry comment on the affair: “At the end of the day, there is something so fittingly Lebanese about the fact that the pronouncement of a foreign magistrate regarding the culpability of a foreign power should have a significant bearing on a local election.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

A big confrontation is brewing between the United States and Israel’s new government over the Palestine issue.

Since his first days in office, President Barack Obama has expressed clear support for speedy action toward the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Since then, he and his key advisers – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and special envoy George Mitchell – have all quietly but firmly stayed the course in supporting that goal.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly objects. He argues for starting with an “economic peace” for the Palestinians, and discussing sovereignty issues with them only much later – if at all. Though he has stopped short of saying an outright “No” to the Palestinian state idea, his advisers warn that he is adamantly opposed to the emergence of what he and they call “another Hamastan.”

Thus far, this disagreement has not erupted into an open confrontation. Netanyahu has, after all, only been in office since Mar. 31. But it may well become more acute during May, when Netanyahu visits Washington.

Obama has also invited the leaders of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority (PA) to Washington at intervals throughout May and early June. Obama has already, this week, met with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in the White House.

Serious, high-level fact-finding has also been undertaken by Mitchell, who recently completed a third round of “listening visits” to the Middle East.

Some Arab commentators have voiced impatience that, for all this “listening” and for all the rhetorical support the Obama team has given to an independent Palestinian state, they have taken little or no concrete action to achieve it. Several of these analysts also note that on more immediate – but still significant – issues of deep concern to the Palestinians, leading figures in and close to the administration have called on Israel to stop the commission of specific abuses, and Israel has defied those calls with apparent impunity.

That has been the case, they note, with Israel’s ongoing demolition of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, a policy that Clinton publicly called on Israel to suspend. And in Gaza, though powerful Democratic Senator John Kerry called on Israel to allow the passage of much-needed building materials into the Strip, Israel has still refused to do so.

One retired diplomat with long experience in the Middle East commented that episodes of defiance like those are harmful for U.S. diplomacy. “They send a message to Israeli hardliners that they can defy the U.S. and get away with it, while they signal to the Arabs that the U.S. can easily be ‘rolled’ by the Israelis,” he said. “Both ways it harms us.”

In the short press conference he held with King Abdullah Tuesday, Obama signaled he may soon be ready to start ratcheting up the pressure on Netanyahu. “I agree that we can’t talk forever, that at some point steps have to be taken so that people can see progress on the ground,” he said. “And that will be something that we will expect to take place in the coming months.”

He even indicated he might be preparing to link Israel’s behaviour on the peace process to the considerable amounts of financial, military, and political aid the U.S. gives to Israel, saying that what the U.S. can do, regarding Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking, is “create the conditions and the atmosphere and provide the help and the assistance that facilitates an agreement.”

At present, just about all of the aid the U.S. gives Israel is completely delinked from Israel’s performance on the peace process, and is often used by Israel to, for example, build new settlement infrastructure and then implement plans to defend the expanded settlements from Palestinian resistance. The aid Washington gives the PA is, by contrast, entirely linked to the PA’s performance.

Thus far, most of the hardliners in Israel seem to assume it will be easy for Israel to continue to defy Obama.

Israel’s deputy foreign minister (and former ambassador to the U.S.) Danny Ayalon even tried to lay down his own preconditions for the steps the U.S. must take – primarily, continuing to ratchet up the pressure with Iran – before Israel will even consider discussing the items on the U.S.’s peace agenda.

“It’s like Ayalon doesn’t quite understand which one of these countries is a superpower,” the retired diplomat said.

Policies toward Iran have, certainly, become linked to policies toward Palestine in a number of complex ways. Hillary Clinton yesterday told a congressional panel that Israeli recalcitrance on the Palestine issue would make it much harder for the U.S. to win Arab support for continuing the confrontation with Iran.

Netanyahu, for his part, has hinted openly that he might be ready to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Iran – especially if he feels he is under pressure on the peace question. The well-informed Israeli journalist Aluf Benn noted, with some understatement, that this constituted a threat “to disrupt Obama’s ‘new order’ in the region.”

For now, both Obama and Netanyahu are still engaged in “pre-game sparring” and other preparations for the big confrontation between them that may well erupt next month.

For the past 16 years – including during Netanyahu’s earlier term in office, 1996-99 – there has not been any big open rupture between Washington and Tel Aviv over the peace process or any other issue.

Throughout those years, successive Israeli prime ministers could always rely both on the support they had in the White House and on the deep funds of support Israel always had in Congress. Thus, if a president looked as if he might even be considering starting to apply pressure on Israel, the Israelis felt they could always rely on Congress to bring the White House to heel.

But now, the level of support that Israel formerly always enjoyed in Congress, regardless of the content of its policies, has been significantly reduced.

Back in February, Massachusetts Democrat William Delahunt introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that congratulated Mitchell on his appointment and expressed clear support for the two-state solution. The bill now has 101 co-sponsors, and is slowly gathering yet more.

Obama, Clinton, and Mitchell all enjoy considerable support – and considerable political clout – in both houses of congress. The threesome also enjoys considerable support in the country as a whole, including in the Jewish community.

The American Jewish community is much more diverse that it once was. In recent years, several new Jewish organisations have emerged that have agendas that are both pro-Israel and pro-peace.

M.J. Rosenberg is the Washington policy director of one such group, the Israel Policy Forum.

“I guess Netanyahu is counting on pro-Israel organisations in America to line up behind him and not Obama,” Rosenberg wrote recently. “He is wrong.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org .

Three months after the end of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and nearly four months after former prime minister Ehud Olmert started it, the standoff between Israel and Hamas is as unresolved as ever.

Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, nearly all of them civilians, are still in a very tough situation, since Israel still prohibits the shipment into Gaza of many requirements for a decent life – including the building materials needed to repair or rebuild the thousands of homes and other structures the Israeli military destroyed during the war.

But it is already clear that the war has changed many aspects of the complex political dynamics both between and inside the Israeli and Palestinian communities.

Hamas, simply by surviving, has become stronger both within Palestinian politics and throughout the broader Middle East.

In the Israeli elections of early February Olmert’s party was defeated – by representatives of an even more militarist trend in Israel whose rise was fueled, in good part, by the war-fever unleashed among Jewish Israelis by Olmert’s own war.

Meanwhile, the ferocity with which Israel fought the war caused significant damage to the country’s image around the world. In the U.S., unprecedented numbers of civil society groups – including Jewish groups – expressed open criticism of Olmert’s decision to launch the war, even from the war’s very earliest days.

All these developments have been evident during Sen. George Mitchell’s latest visit to the region, which started Wednesday. This was Mitchell’s third visit since he was named U.S. special envoy on Jan. 21. Some of the post-Gaza developments seem to make Mitchell’s peacemaking effort harder. But others, especially the new estrangement between the government of Israel and some of its former strong supporters around the world, open up new possibilities for his mission.

Indeed, in some of Mitchell’s early appearances on his latest trip, he has shown himself more ready than any U.S. official has been for many years to publicly adopt a position – in this case, support of an independent Palestinian state – that is very different from that espoused by the government in power in Israel.

When Olmert launched the war on Gaza on Dec. 27, he was aiming either to destroy Hamas or to inflict so much harm on it that its leaders would bow to Israel’s political demands. Despite the large amount of damage the Israeli military inflicted on the people of Gaza, it did not achieve either of those objectives. Hamas’s long battle-hardened command structure in Gaza remained intact and in place.

(Hamas’s broader, ‘nationwide’ leadership has anyway been located for many years now outside the occupied territories. Thus, the idea of breaking or ‘taming’ the whole organisation by delivering a knockout blow to its units in Gaza was always poorly thought through.)

Instead of being broken, Hamas found that during the war its popularity rose throughout the occupied West Bank and among the five million Palestinians living in exile outside their homeland. It dipped somewhat in Gaza, doubtless because of the punishment the IDF was inflicting on the Strip’s people. But Gaza is roughly half the size of the West Bank. The overall effect was that Hamas became stronger.

Fatah, a movement that in recent years has aligned itself ever more closely to U.S. policies, meanwhile saw its popularity decline.

Indeed, the collapse of Fatah’s internal decision-making structures is now so severe there is a real possibility it might disintegrate altogether. Though the collapse has been underway for some time now, the Gaza war certainly hastened it along.

Fateh has also, ever since 1969, been overwhelmingly the strongest component of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), the secularist body that has authorised all Palestinian peace efforts with Israel to date. Fatah’s decline thus also threatens the survival of the PLO – unless the on-again-off-again ‘unity talks’ that Fatah and Hamas have been pursuing in Cairo can find a formula to bring Hamas into the PLO for the first time ever.

Amid all these political developments, Gaza’s 1.5 million people are still trying to deal with life-situations and livelihoods that were shattered by the recent war. During the war more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. Ten Israeli soldiers and three Israeli civilians lost their lives.

For three years prior to the war, there had been intermittent exchanges of fire between Israel and Palestinian militants – mainly Hamas people – operating from Gaza. In addition, Israel maintained a tight siege around Gaza, in clear contravention of its responsibility as “occupying power” to safeguard the welfare of the Strip’s indigenous residents.

At the end of the war both Israel and Hamas announced parallel (and un-negotiated) ceasefires. That was on Jan. 18. In the absence of any more formal, negotiated ceasefire agreement, the existing ceasefires have remained fragile, and several exchanges of fire have occurred.

But in addition, Israel has considerably tightened the physical siege of Gaza – and this, at a time when the Strip’s residents have extraordinary needs to gain access to the materials they urgently need to rebuild the 5,000 homes and other structures that were destroyed during the war. Those structures included vital water and sanitation facilities, factories, warehouses – and even the parliament.

John Prideaux-Brune, Oxfam’s country director for the West Bank and Gaza, has described Israel’s policy toward Gaza as being one of “intentionally inflicted de-development.”

He told IPS recently, “Israel went on a rampage in Gaza during the war. You can see whole villages flattened, the cows and other livestock killed. They seem to have gone in and removed anything that could have been used for economic development – farms, factories, you name it.” (Israeli sources have said that during the war, the military trucked in 100 heavy-duty bulldozers, especially to undertake this destruction.)

“It seems a mind-numbingly stupid thing for Israel to do,” Prideaux-Brune said. “Where states have succeeded in suppressing terrorism, they have done so through negotiations and fostering economic development.”

He said he hoped western governments would act quickly to persuade Israel to lift the siege. That, he said, would allow Gaza’s people to move back onto a path of economic development rather than continuing to live on handouts.

Many of the humanitarian aid organisations that have been providing ‘emergency’ aid to Gaza (and the West Bank) for many years are now, like Oxfam, becoming more vocal in arguing that the only thing that can really stabilise the very vulnerable situation of the Palestinians of these occupied areas is to find a speedy end to the Israel’s military occupation of their home territories.

Prideaux-Brune said that the Gaza Palestinians are currently suffering from a deliberately inflicted “dignity crisis.”

“So long as Israel controls everything in these people’s lives, they will remain vulnerable,” he said. “Emergency relief aid is no substitute for successful peacemaking, and that is the only way to get to real economic development.”

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

President Barack Obama has spoken out forcefully – including this week, in Ankara, Turkey – in favour of building an independent Palestinian state alongside a still robust Israel. However, many Palestinians have noted that President George W. Bush also, in recent years, expressed a commitment to Palestinian statehood. But, they note, Bush never took the actions necessary to achieve such a state – and neither, until now, has Obama.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to give very generous support to Israel – where successive governments have built Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank and taken other actions that make a viable Palestinian state increasingly hard to achieve.

Many Palestinians and some important voices in what remains of Israel’s now-battered peace camp have concluded that it is now impossible to win the ‘two-state solution’ envisaged by Bush and Obama. This has led to the re-emergence in both communities of an old idea: that of a single bi- national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, in which both Hebrew-speaking Jewish Israelis and Arabic-speaking Palestinians would have equal rights as citizens, and find themselves equally at home.

That goal was advocated most eloquently in the 1930s and early 1940s by Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and other intellectuals at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, most Israelis moved away from it after Israel was established as a specifically Jewish state in 1948.

Later, in 1968, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) articulated a somewhat similar goal: that of building a ‘secular democratic state’, which comprises both pre-1967 Israel and the West Bank and Gaza – which Israel brought under military occupation in 1967.

However, the PLO leaders could never agree on which of the numerous Jewish immigrants brought into Israel before and after 1948 to include in their project. A few years later, in 1974, most PLO supporters – but not all – moved decisively away from the ‘one-state’ model. They started working instead for the two-state model: an independent Palestinian state in just the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza, alongside the Israel state.

For 26 years after 1974, Israel’s governments remained deeply opposed to an independent Palestinian state. All those governments made lavish investments in the project – illegal under international law – of implanting their own citizens as settlers in the occupied West Bank. They annexed East Jerusalem. When pressed on the Palestinians’ future, they said they hoped Palestinians could exercise their rights in Egypt or Jordan – just not inside historic Palestine. This idea has been making a comeback recently – including among advisers to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 1993, Israel finally recognized the PLO, and concluded the Oslo Accord with it. Under Oslo, the two sides created a new body called the Palestinian Authority (PA), designed to administer some aspects of daily life in parts of the occupied territories – though not, crucially, in occupied East Jerusalem.

Even after Oslo, Israeli officials made clear that they had not promised the PLO a full Palestinian state. They also said, correctly, that their rights and responsibilities as a military occupying power would remain in place. The final disposition of the occupied areas would await conclusion of a final peace agreement.

Oslo specified that that agreement should be completed by 1999. Ten years later, that deadline has still not been met – a final peace treaty still seems fairly distant. Meanwhile, Israel has used the 16 years since Oslo to increase both the number of settlers it has in the West Bank and the degree of control it exercises over the economies of both Gaza and the West Bank.

Palestinian-American political scientist Leila Farsakh describes Israel’s policies toward the economies of both areas as “the engineering of pauperisation.” She notes that despite the large amounts of international aid poured into the West Bank, poverty rates there have risen. Most West Bank areas outside the territory’s glitzy ‘capital’, Ramallah, are poor and increasingly aid-dependent. Lavish new settlements housing 480,000 settlers crowd much of the West Bank’s best land, and guzzle its water, Farsakh explains.

In an Israeli population of just 7.2 million, those settlers now form a formidable voting bloc. Attempts to move them out look almost impossible. In the latest round of peace negotiations that Israel and the PA/PLO pursued from 2000 until recently, participants discussed ways to reduce the number of settlers required to move by annexing the big settlement areas to Israel in return for a land exchange. But those boundary modifications look complex, and quite possibly unworkable.

Meanwhile, the negotiation over a small Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza has sidelined the concerns and rights of three important Palestinian constituencies. The 1.2 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel would remain as an embattled minority within an Israeli state still ideologically committed to the immigration of additional Jews. The 270,000 Palestinians of Jerusalem might also still be surrounded and vulnerable. And the five million Palestinians who still – 61 years after they and their forbearers fled homes in what became Israel in 1948 – would have their long-pursued right to return laid down forever.

From 1982 – the year the PLO’s leaders and guerrilla forces were expelled from Lebanon – until recently, the main dynamo of Palestinian nationalism has been located in the Palestinian communities of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. But in recent years, those communities have been severely weakened. They are administratively atomised, politically divided, and live under a palpable sense of physical threat.

Many ‘occupied’ Palestinians are returning to the key defensive ideas of steadfastness and “just hanging on” to their land. But new energy for leadership is now emerging between two other key groups of Palestinians: those in the diaspora, and those who are citizens of Israel. The contribution those groups can make to nationwide organising has been considerably strengthened by new technologies – and crucially, neither of them has much interest in a two-state outcome.

Not surprisingly, therefore, discussions about the nature of a one-state outcome – and how to achieve it – have become more frequent, and much richer in intellectual content, in recent years.

Palestinian-Israeli professor Nadim Rouhanna, now teaching at Tufts University in Massachusetts, is a leader in the new thinking. “The challenge is how to achieve the liberation of both societies from being oppressed and being oppressors,” he told a recent conference in Washington, DC. “Palestinians have to… reassure the Israeli Jews that their culture and vitality will remain. We need to go further than seeing them only as ‘Jews-by- religion’ in a future Palestinian society.”

Like many advocates of the one-state outcome, Rouhanna referred enthusiastically to the exuberant multiculturalism and full political equality that have been embraced by post-apartheid South Africa.

Progressive Jewish Israelis like Ben Gurion University geographer Oren Yiftachel are also part of the new movement. Yiftachel’s most recent work has examined at the Israeli authorities’ decades-long campaign to expropriate the lands of the ethnically Palestinian Bedouin who live in southern Israel – and are citizens of Israel. “The expropriation continues – there and inside the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem,” Yiftachel said, explaining that he did not see the existence of “the Green Line” that supposedly separates Israel from the occupied territory as an analytically or politically relevant concept.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in Tuesday – just one day later his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, set off a firestorm by saying he judged Israel was no longer bound by agreements reached at the late-2007 peace conference convened by the U.S. in Annapolis, Maryland.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit was one of the first to react. He said he would not shake hands with Lieberman until Lieberman reversed his position on Annapolis – and also retracted some public slights he had earlier voiced against Egypt. Given Egypt’s close alliance with the United States, the verbal battle between the two allies spelled big trouble for Washingon’s posture in the Middle East. Lieberman’s words also increased the numbers of voices in the region calling for the U.S. to distance itself from the Netanyahu government.

In Ramallah, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) continued to insist they would not return to the peace talks that were interrupted during Israel’s recent war on Gaza unless Israel followed through on promises – made at Annapolis and elsewhere – that they would halt all new construction in the settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Lieberman also made several other diplomatically inflammatory statements in his first two days in office. He publicly questioned whether Israel had gotten anything of any value from the landmark agreement it concluded in 1993 in Oslo with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). And he said that Israel should base its stance toward Syria on a formula of trading “peace for peace” rather than the traditional formula of “land for peace.”

On those issues, too, the new foreign minister was openly challenging policies long pursued by Washington.

Pres. Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and their top aides have all been in Europe this week, conducting urgent business on the world economy and the hard-pressed relationship with NATO allies. Perhaps for that reason, there has not yet been any official reaction from the administration to Lieberman’s frank and defiant declarations.

On Thursday morning, Lieberman’s office told journalists Clinton had called to congratulate him on his assumption of his new post, and that the two had agreed to meet “as soon as possible.” State Department spokesman Robert Wood refused to say whether Clinton said anything during the call about the statements Lieberman had made the day before.

It is possible that some in the Obama administration may simply be hoping the “Lieberman problem” will quickly go away. On Thursday, Israeli anti-fraud detectives questioned Lieberman for more than seven hours about aspects of his own and his party’s business dealings, the latest in a series of probes that have continued for two years now.

However, many longtime analysts of Israeli affairs doubt whether these police probes, on their own, will cause Lieberman to leave office. They recall that Israel’s last two prime ministers, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, and the last president, Moshe Katsav, were all dogged throughout their terms in office by police probes into alleged improprieties, and none of those probes, on their own, forced any of the men to resign.

When Netanyahu was prime minister in the 1990s, he too was investigated for corruption. The charges damaged him politically at the time. But later they were dropped; and the memory of them did not prevent him emerging as a strong prime minister from the Feb. 10 election. Indeed, Netanyahu has now assembled such a large and ideologically diverse ruling coalition that he looks easily able to play any one or two parties in it off against the others, if necessary.

This makes him captive to none of his individual coalition partners. But of the many parties in his coalition, Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu is one of the strongest. In the hard, inter-party negotiations that follow any Israeli election, Yisrael Beitenu won five seats in Netanyahu’s unprecedentedly large, 33-person cabinet.

To what extent did Lieberman’s undiplomatic words represent the actual preferences on peace-process questions of his boss, Netanyahu? There is considerable suspicion that they very much did. The two men are close. Indeed, before Lieberman formed his own, now-powerful party, he was in Netanyahu’s Likud. He was even Netanyahu’s chief of staff during Netanyahu’s earlier term in office.

After his swearing-in Tuesday, Netanyahu expressed his commitment to re-engaging in “peace negotiations” with the Palestinians, but he has refused to express any support for the goal of the fully independent Palestinian state – alongside Israel – that was defined at Annapolis. He has spoken a lot about trying to conclude an “economic peace” with the Palestinians that would fall far short of full national independence.

Regarding Syria, early on his previous term as prime minister, Netanyahu also said – as Lieberman does today – that his goal was “peace for peace.” Later in that term, Netanyahu engaged in secret negotiations with Syria in which, in return for full peace, he offered Syria a large portion of the Golan Heights, which were occupied by Israel in 1967. But that offer fell short of the complete Israeli withdrawal that Syria has always required, and led nowhere.

Amman-based political analyst Mouin Rabbani told Reuters that Lieberman’s latest comments may well have represented Netanyahu’s real preferences – but that “Netanyahu would have very much liked to fudge things.”

Lieberman’s plain speaking – and the policy stance of the Netanyahu government in general – pose many challenges for the Obama administration as it tries to win the linked goals of revitalising Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts and assembling a strong coalition of Middle East governments with which to confront and contain Iran’s growing power in the region.

The prospects for revitalising talks on the Palestinian track do not look good, anyway. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, a long-time pillar of the negotiation effort, lost a considerable amount of his already weak political support from Palestinians when his last Israeli “peace partner”, Ehud Olmert, acted with such brutality towards Gaza during the recent war.

His U.S.-chosen prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has resigned. Back in February, Fayyad told IPS categorically that the PA should not return to the negotiations unless Israel halted all new construction in the settlements completely. Under Netanyahu, that is not likely to happen.

The State Department’s Wood has said that peace envoy Sen. George Mitchell will be heading back to the Middle East for his third tour in the coming days. Many in Washington are mystified that Mitchell has been so quiet in recent weeks – and also, that he has not yet appointed a functioning staff for his office.

After Mitchell achieved a hard-won success in his earlier peace mediation effort in Northern Ireland, some people started to talk of the role “the Mitchell Magic” had played in bringing the warring sides together. This time around, increasing numbers of pro-peace policymakers and analysts in the Middle East say they cannot wait for magic to happen any more. They say they need Washington to define, and start working wholeheartedly for, its own solution to the problem.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

With Benjamin Netanyahu now close to announcing his government line-up in Israel, the issue of whether and how to include Hamas in Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking is moving to the top of the Middle East agenda.

On Thursday, Brent Scowcroft, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and eight other senior former U.S. officials issued a report that urged Pres. Barack Obama to find a way to include Hamas in the diplomacy. But how can this be done, given Washington’s longstanding prohibition on dealing with Hamas so long as it does not renounce terrorism, commit to all the previous commitments made by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and spell out it formal recognition of Israel?

One hint recently came from Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal himself. In a Mar. 18 interview with Australian journalist Paul McGeough, the Damascus-based Meshaal said, “Judge us by what we do today – not by what was written more than 20 years ago.”

That response came to a question about whether Hamas would be prepared to alter the movement’s 1988 founding charter, which called for Israel’s abolition. But the admonition to “Judge us by our actions, not by our words” could equally well sum up Hamas’s response to all the three of the demands that Washington has made of it.

For example, regarding Washington’s request for a Hamas “commitment” to the PLO’s prior commitments, Hamas reportedly responded that it would be prepared to undertake to “respect” those commitments in practice, but was not ready to express open “commitment” to them as a precondition for inclusion in the diplomacy.

Regarding recognising Israel, Meshaal recently told Henry Siegman – who coordinated the latest “Ten American Elders” initiative – that though Hamas is not ready to recognise Israel, it would be happy to let others in a national unity government negotiate a final peace with Israel that would then be submitted to an all-Palestinian referendum, and it would abide by the referendum’s results. (Siegman also said he got that commitment in writing from Meshaal.)

Meshaal and the rest of Hamas have maintained this position for several years now, including during their participation in a breakthrough 2005 agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and their endorsement of a policy document produced by Palestinian prisoners in Israel in 2006.

For now, though, there still are no Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations – with or without Hamas. Abbas suspended his participation in the negotiations during Israel’s war on Gaza and has said he will make no decision on rejoining them until Israel has a new government.

The negotiations that Abbas’s Fatah movement has been pursuing with Hamas in Cairo over a new Palestinian government have been aimed primarily at achieving a government that can “persuade” Israel to lift its lengthy and damaging siege on Gaza, though ensuring that that government can participate effectively in peace talks with Israel is certainly also an issue.

Hamas’s people have long complained that Fatah’s participation in peace talks so far has been a damaging failure. When Israel and the Fatah-headed PLO concluded the Oslo interim accord in 1993 they agreed to complete negotiations for a final peace by 1999, and the final peace was supposed to be implemented thereafter. Now, 10 years after that deadline, the final peace still has not been negotiated – and meantime, since Oslo, Israel has implanted an additional 200,000 illegal settlers into the West Bank.

In an interview in Hebron earlier this month, elected Hamas parliamentarian Nizar Ramadan told IPS, “Hamas is wise because it doesn’t want to get trapped into… allowing Israel to drag out the negotiations for another 15 years, like the 15 years they have already won from this present PA leadership.” (Three weeks later, Ramadan was among 10 high-level Hamas politicians in the West Bank arrested by Israel and held without charge or trial.)

Hamas can therefore be expected to push for speedy conclusion of the final peace talks – and also, for a complete halt to all settlement construction while these negotiations continue. Indeed, outgoing Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad also insists on a complete halt to settlement building as a precondition for any resumption of the negotiations.

Hamas’s negotiating posture is tougher than Fatah’s in other ways, too. No one in Hamas has given any indication they would consider the kind of border adjustments the Fatah negotiators have proposed – for East Jerusalem and for other parts of the West Bank. And no one in Hamas has given any sign of the extreme flexibility the Fatah negotiators have shown regarding the claims of the six-million-plus descendants of Palestinians made refugees in the fighting of 1948 to return to their family homes and lands in the area that became Israel that year.

Indeed, Hamas’s political style is altogether different from Fatah’s. If Hamas makes concessions, it will not give them to Israel upfront and then simply sit and wait for Israel to reciprocate, as Fatah did. Rather, it can be expected to bargain hard and fast inside a negotiating room, most likely far away from the public eye, while continuing to mount vigorous worldwide campaigns to bolster support for its negotiating position.

And judging by its very good (though not perfect) participation in limited-purview ceasefires in Gaza in 2005 and 2008, if Hamas is fully included in a final-peace negotiation, it can be expected to abide by the terms of a general ceasefire, provided this is one equally required of, and observed by, all parties.

Does a formula that involves including Hamas have a chance of being adopted by either Washington or a Netanyahu government? There are some intriguing indications that it might. A poll the “J Street” organisation commissioned of Jewish Americans at the end of February found 60 percent of respondents favoured the idea of Washington working with a unified Hamas-Fatah Palestinian government.

Some U.S. Jewish organisations and Christian Zionist organisations might continue to lobby strongly against including Hamas. But the numbers from J Street show that if Obama is decisive, clear, and sensitive in explaining a Hamas-including policy, he could hope to win substantial support for it – including within the U.S. Jewish community.

In Israel, meanwhile, the new government that’s shaping up will include members from two significant parties that support a two-state outcome: Labour and the ideologically very diverse Yisrael Beitenu. Plus, crucially, popular support from Israelis for negotiating with a joint Hamas-Fatah government now runs at 69 percent.

And of course, if Pres. Obama shows that he is determined to do what is best for the U.S.’s – and Israel’s – long-term interests, as he understands them, then he has considerable ability both to shape both Israeli public opinion and the structure of the incentives the U.S. offers to Israel for the various choices it makes.

When the outgoing Israeli government launched the Gaza war in December, it was aiming either to weaken Hamas a lot, or completely crush it. It failed to achieve either goal. Support for Hamas increased among Palestinian communities in the West Bank and in many key Arab countries.

And though it dipped among the relatively small population of Gaza itself, still, Hamas’s networks of leaders and activists in Gaza, the West Bank, and throughout the Arab world had proved their ability to withstand even that very lethal ordeal by fire.

Now, diplomats in Washington and the rest of the world are starting to deal with that reality.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak weathered the recent war in neighbouring Gaza much more successfully than many observers had expected, and after the war ended Jan. 18 he emerged as the sole mediator in negotiations over stabilising the ceasefire and other key related issues.

But now, more than two months later, Egypt’s active mediation efforts have still not delivered any of these agreements, whether on the question of the strengthened Gaza ceasefire, a big Hamas-Israel prisoner exchange, or intra-Palestinian reconciliation. With these agreements still unsecured and a more rightwing government taking over in Israel in the coming days, Gaza’s 1.5 million people remain mired in an angry misery that could yet erupt again.

The stakes are high for Mubarak, who has been a key U.S. ally in the region since he came to power 28 years ago. An important Arab summit will be held in Qatar’s capital, Doha, Mar. 29-30, at which his performance on these mediations will be one key topic discussed. Meanwhile, inside Egypt, socioeconomic unrest is rising steadily and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, a close ally of Hamas, still forms the main base of opposition to Mubarak’s rule.

An engaged mediator has been needed to stabilise the Israel-Hamas ceasefire because the two antagonists still refuse to deal with each other directly. When the current fragile ceasefire went into operation in January it happened as the result of two parallel but completely un-negotiated decisions.

Egypt had been the mediator in the largely successful six-month-long ceasefire the parties reached in June 2008, and after the January war it emerged again as the sole mediating channel. One of Cairo’s main interests is to prevent the spillover of the Gaza issue into domestic politics – whether that would happen through renewed warfare between Israel and Gaza or through any repeat of the mass bust-out of Gazans into Egypt that happened in January 2008.

That bust-out of people across Gaza’s seven-mile border with Egypt was motivated mainly by the despair of a civilian population that, ever since Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006, has been subjected to an economic siege, instigated by Israel but also enforced by Egypt.

The hundreds of thousands of Gazans who traveled to Egypt during the bust-out frantically bought basic consumer goods from traders in nearby Egyptian towns. After 16 days, Egypt and Hamas reached an agreement whereby the Gazans returned home and the border was strengthened again.

Hamas’s leaders have always insisted that any ceasefire with Israel must be accompanied by the lifting of the siege. They thought they had secured such a promise with the June 2008 ceasefire, but Israel never performed. This time around Hamas is still insisting, and Israel is still balking. But the situation of Gaza’s people is even more dire, since during the latest war Israel destroyed thousands of homes and many public buildings, including the parliament.

Disregarding strong protests from humanitarian organisations and the much weaker protests of western governments, Israel’s outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has not allowed any construction materials at all into Gaza since the war. He has allowed in only items on a short list of designated “bare necessity” foodstuffs, and some hygiene and medical supplies.

The lifting of the siege is linked to intra-Palestinian reconciliation because Israel says it cannot allow any further opening of the freight crossings into Gaza – all of which it totally controls – unless members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) loyal to the U.S.-backed Fatah head Mahmoud Abbas are present on the other side to receive the goods. Fatah’s security forces were ousted from Gaza by Hamas in 2007.

Negotiators from these two big Palestinian movements have been meeting in Cairo since late February with the aim of forming a unity government for the PA. Israel and the U.S. have said that any new PA government must recognise Israel, renounce violence, and commit to all the agreements concluded by the PA and its parent body, the PLO. The Hamas leaders reportedly said they were ready to “respect” the PA’s previous commitments but not explicitly to “commit to” them.

In a quick visit to Washington Wednesday, Egypt’s powerful security boss Omar Suleiman, who has been running the Gaza-related negotiations for Mubarak, tried to win the Obama administration’s agreement to this formula. He apparently failed, and on Thursday Egypt suspended the intra-Palestinian talks without reaching any agreement on a new government.

Suleiman’s attempt to mediate an Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange have been equally unsuccessful. This is the deal whereby Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit, who has been held as a prisoner-of-war in Gaza since June 2006 and is currently under Hamas’s control, would be exchanged for some hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees.

Israel currently holds between 11,000 and 12,000 Palestinian political prisoners. Like all colonial powers, and like the U.S. in Iraq, it has made broad and prolonged use of mass detentions in its campaign to break the local independence movement.

Some of the Palestinian prisoners, including famed Fatah next-generation leader Marwan Barghouthi, were given the semblance of trials in either military or civilian courts in Israel in which their due-process rights were nowhere near fully respected. Others have simply been held under six-month orders for “administrative” detention, with those six-month detentions frequently being repeated.

Prime Minister Olmert seemed to have a fairly strong motivation to win the release of Shalit and earlier this week it seemed that a prisoner exchange deal was close. But those negotiations also broke down. On Thursday, far from releasing any Palestinian prisoners, Israel’s military dove deep into West Bank towns supposedly controlled by Abbas’s PA and captured an additional 10 Hamas political figures, including four elected parliamentarians.

This brought back to more than 40 the number of members of the PA’s 132-person parliament held by Israel. All those parliamentarians were elected in free and fair elections in 2006. The PA’s parliament has been unable since June 2006 to muster a quorum to conduct its business. Israel’s latest act of political hostage-taking aroused little western protest.

In interviews with IPS in Ramallah and Hebron, three Hamas parliamentarians released in an earlier phase of Israel’s “rotating door” detentions campaign spoke of the hardships their detention had caused – but also of the continued high morale of the Palestinian prisoners. They noted that national unity seemed much stronger among Palestinians inside Israeli prisons than among those in the larger “outdoor prisons” that they said the PA-controlled enclaves in the West Bank had become.

For Egypt’s Mubarak, the failure of his government’s multiple linked mediation efforts comes at a bad time. In the Arab world, his main rival, Syrian President Bashar al-Asad, has quietly been gaining clout. In Washington, Pres. Barack Obama has not helped Mubarak meet any of his negotiation-related challenges, and now seems worryingly disinterested in the whole Palestine question. And in Israel, the presumptive next foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has been openly dismissive of Egypt’s concerns in the past, at one point stating bluntly that “Egypt can go to hell.”

All these developments must make Mubarak very worried. Success in any one of the Palestinian-related negotiations could have strengthened his political standing at home and abroad. But until now, he has had no successes in any of them.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

The British government has announced it will hold talks with the political wing of Lebanon’s Hizbullah. The Barack Obama administration sent two envoys to Syria to discuss steps to improve relations. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has invited Iran to take part in a conference on the future of Afghanistan.

It looks as though the United States and Britain are trying to end the policy of exclusion and – where possible – regime change that the Bush administration and its allies once vigorously pursued against Iran and its regional allies. But how far-reaching have these changes actually been, and what do they mean for the Middle East in the months ahead?

The picture is still mixed. There are many signs that the Obama administration has not yet taken any clear decisions on Middle Eastern issues other than the important decision, announced Feb. 27, that all U.S. troops would indeed – in line with last November’s Status of Forces Agreement – be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

But on Iran, on Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas, and the Palestinian issue in general, no firm direction is yet discernible in Washington. Indeed, mixed signals continue to be heard on these issues from different portions of the Obama administration.

The existence – and some of the dynamics – of these disagreements were visible in the tussle over whether Charles (“Chas”) Freeman would be appointed director of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a talented analyst of global affairs, fell afoul of the Israel lobby for criticisms he had made of Israeli policies. When Lobby-influenced members of congress challenged his appointment, the White House chose not to back him.

On Tuesday, when the White House said and did nothing to respond to his critics, Freeman withdrew from consideration for the job.

This week, too, unnamed “senior administration officials” in Washington were a lot more critical of London’s decision to engage cautiously with Hizbullah than some of their – also anonymous – counterparts had been, when British Foreign Secretary David Miliband first announced the move last week.

Similarly mixed signals have emerged from within the Obama administration on the attempt to include Hamas in the Palestinians’ governing coalition. Back on Feb. 19, U.S. envoy George Mitchell told U.S. Jewish leaders that reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah would be helpful for his upcoming mediation Palestinian-Israeli mediation effort.

But at the conference held in Egypt Mar. 2 on rebuilding Gaza, Clinton stressed that U.S. reconstruction aid would be delivered only to the Fatah-dominated PA.

On Wednesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs underlined that both Hamas and Hizbullah would have to explicitly recognise Israel’s right to exist and renounce what he termed “terrorist activities” before the administration would conduct even low-level contacts with them.

Smart diplomatists could certainly find ways to square these circles – if the president wanted them to. (U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz engaged in just such a process with the Fatah-dominated PLO back in late 1988. The quiet pre-negotiation Schultz conducted then allowed Washington to start its first valuable, though short-lived, dialogue with the PLO.)

Meantime, even just the absence of any clear policy from Washington marks a shift from the stridently clear policy of exclusion that the Bush administration previously maintained against Iran and its perceived allies. This shift has allowed several key U.S. allies in the Arab world to pursue new, more diplomatically nuanced policies toward their compatriots and neighbours.

Egypt, a large-scale recipient of U.S. aid, has pressed ahead with its attempt to broker the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak traveled to Saudi Arabia Wednesday to take part, along with the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, in a reconciliation meeting with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad that marked a clear shift from the isolation that the strongly pro-U.S. rulers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait tried to impose on Assad in recent years.

Already, many commentators in Lebanon are welcoming the fact that a new entente between Syria and Saudi Arabia can help ease tensions inside their own country, which holds parliamentary elections in June. Iranian-allied Hizbullah has run in all Lebanon’s parliamentary elections since 1992 and now holds 14 of the 128 seats. Hizbullah and its numerous allies are expected to do well in the June elections. (Thus, Britain’s shift to political engagement makes a lot of sense.)

Much of what is driving the new moves by pro-U.S. Arab governments to use diplomacy rather than confrontation in their dealings with members of the pro-Iranian camp is a recognition that the anti-Israeli resistance activities of Hamas or Hizbullah are much more popular, including among their own citizens, than the policy of endlessly waiting for Washington to “deliver” a long-awaited peace with Israel that seems never to occur.

Hamas won considerable sympathy in the Arab world – including from Egyptians, Saudis, and Kuwaitis – for the steadfastness it showed during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza. And in 2006, Lebanon’s Hizbullah won similar support from people in many Arab countries for its survival under Israeli fire.

The current moves toward inter-Arab reconciliation are also motivated by concern over the challenges the Arab world now faces from both Israel and Iran.

In Israel, the staunchly nationalistic rightwing parties won big in last month’s election. Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu is expected to announce his governing coalition within the coming days.

Analysts well-connected to the regimes in Egypt and Jordan told IPS recently that the prospect of a Netanyahu government that receives continued backing from Washington will make their own governments’ positions, as known U.S. allies in the Arab world, very hard indeed.

Meanwhile some, but not all, Arab rulers have great concern about the increase in Iranian influence in their region. (Some concern about Tehran’s nuclear programme exists, but it is far less pronounced than that entertained by Israel or the U.S. government.)

Iran’s influence throughout the region expanded hugely the moment the U.S. military destroyed Saddam Hussein’s virulently anti-Tehran regime in Iraq, in 2003. Since then, most pro-U.S. Arab rulers in the Gulf region – though not Egypt, which is more distant – have come to terms with that new reality by routinely including Iran in many Gulf-wide gatherings and activities.

Thus, in recent years there has been a lot more diplomacy going on in the Muslim parts of the Middle East than the simplistic narratives of “moderates versus extremists” crafted by the Bush administration ever indicated.

But the region’s complex political system still faces pressing challenges, especially on the Palestinian issue. Will Washington support the Palestinian parties if they reach a new governing agreement? How will Washington react if Netanyahu, as expected, announces the formation of a hard-right government?

The governments and peoples of the heavily U.S.-influenced Middle East will be watching Washington’s actions closely.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

As the fires of human misery continue to smolder in Gaza, the situation in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem is emerging as another potentially explosive issue in, and far beyond, the Middle East.

The future of the city is considered an issue of prime importance to both Palestinians and Israelis, as well as to their supporters around the world. Jerusalem-related tensions have sparked several earlier rounds of violence between the two peoples, including when former (and future) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu started work on the new East Jerusalem settlement of Har Homa in 1997.

In September 2000, it was a visit by opposition leader Ariel Sharon to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount – accompanied by 1,000 armed security people – that sparked the Second Intifada. Now, Israeli and Palestinian peace activists warn that the provocative actions of government-backed settler activists within Jerusalem could spark yet another serious escalation of tensions.

Some 220,000 Palestinians live in East Jerusalem, which until 1967 was the commercial and administrative hub of the whole West Bank region, of which it is an integral part. Since Israel occupied the city in 1967, successive Israeli governments have implanted vast (and very expensive) Israeli settlements into the city, whose boundaries they also unilaterally expanded.

Now, around 200,000 Israeli settlers live in those settlements, which surround the Palestinian-peopled core of the city. And for some years now settler activists, most of whose money comes from supporters in the United States, have also been building webs of settlement “outposts” deep inside the Palestinian core.

Two current areas of concern are Silwan, where the Jerusalem municipality recently issued demolition orders to the owners of 88 Palestinian homes, to establish a Jewish-history theme park there, and Sheikh Jarrah, where a massive armed police force last November evicted an older couple from their longtime home so that a group of settlers could move in.

That latter eviction occurred at 3:30 a.m. The man of the house, Abu Kamel al-Kurd, was already chronically sick. He and his wife, Um Kamel, moved into a tent on a vacant lot nearby and a few days later Abu Kamel had a heart attack and died. Um Kamel has continued living in the tent, even through the winter cold and storms.

Her campaign to stay in the tent until her home is restored to her has emerged as a potent rallying point of nonviolent resistance to Israel’s plans to continue colonising East Jerusalem. Israeli police have dismantled her tent six times, most recently on Feb. 23. But on each occasion her supporters – who include both Islamist and secular Palestinians – have re-erected it.

Tents like Um Kamel’s have been evocative symbols of the eviction of Palestinians from their homes ever since 1948, when some 750,000 Palestinians were evicted or fled from their homes in what became Israel. (None have been allowed back, despite United Nations resolutions calling for a return.)

Most recently, many of the displaced Palestinians in Gaza – most of them descendants of refugees from 1948 – have once again been living in tents. And across Jerusalem in Silwan, local residents protesting their latest eviction orders, which will affect some 1,500 family members, have also erected a tent as a focal point for their protest.

In an interview in her tent Tuesday, Um Kamel told IPS, “Though we’re forced into tents, we Palestinians don’t seek tents or donations of things like clothes from the international community. All we seek is our rights! No one can overthrow the rights of other people in the way the Israelis do to us… We need all three groups, the Jews, the Christians, and the Muslims to live here together in Palestine, in peace and equality.”

The Palestinians of East Jerusalem have been in a precarious situation for many decades. In late June 1967 the city’s new Israeli occupiers expanded the municipal boundaries and declared that thenceforth Israel’s law would be applied directly to the city. That act of annexation was further cemented by Israel’s Knesset (parliament) in 1980.

Though the annexation was illegal under international law it has never been vigorously protested by the U.S. Indeed, U.S. government officials engage in complex verbal gymnastics to avoid openly acknowledging that – as all the members of the international community agree – East Jerusalem is indeed still occupied territory. This judgment means that all Israeli settlements there are quite illegal, and the city’s indigenous Palestinian residents should receive all the other protections specified in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared Israel’s plans to demolish the homes in Silwan “unhelpful,” and a violation of the U.S.-backed peace plan. But she gave no indication the U.S. would hold Israel accountable for any demolitions.

In fact, the Palestinians’ situation has become progressively worse. Almost immediately after the 1993 Oslo Accords were concluded, the Israeli authorities erected roadblocks and other measures designed to cut off the city’s Palestinians from their compatriots (and often, close family members) elsewhere in the West Bank.

Palestinians from elsewhere in the West Bank were meanwhile suddenly prevented from entering East Jerusalem, and many of the city’s once-thriving institutions – like schools, hospitals, and publishing houses – began to wither.

Until 1993, East Jerusalem had been the national hub of Palestinian politics. After Yasser Arafat returned to the West Bank to establish the new, Oslo-mandated Palestinian Authority (PA), he was forced to do so in nearby Ramallah, not Jerusalem. The Israelis prevented the PA from locating any of its institutions in East Jerusalem and Jerusalem’s people came under mounting pressures to leave their ancestral city.

After Oslo, successive Israeli governments also accelerated their building of new Jews-only settlements inside the city. Har Homa, started by Netanyahu in 1997, now has more than 6,000 residents and vast additional construction projects are now underway there and in nearby Gilo.

In 2001, after the start of the Second Intifada, newly installed Israeli premier Ariel Sharon started solidifying the separation of Jerusalem from the West Bank by building the 30-foot-high concrete walls, punctuated by forbidding cylindrical watch-towers, that now snake around – and sometimes, capriciously, right through – the built-up areas of the city.

The Jerusalem Palestinians always refused to take up Israeli citizenship, arguing that to do so would be an endorsement of Israel’s claim to the whole city. Without citizenship and the voting clout that would come with it, they have suffered grave discrimination at all levels, including in the provision of basic municipal services.

Their voice is excluded from city planning processes. The Israeli authorities prohibit all but a few Jerusalem Palestinians from building on even their own wholly-owned real estate. Eviction orders are routinely issued to Palestinians regarding either homes built long before 1967 or homes built since then whose owners have not gone through the burdensome and expensive process of amassing all the required permits. (Most Israeli Jewish developers meantime receive the government’s strong financial and administrative support for their projects.)

In recent weeks, the settler activists of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah have received strong support from a rightist-dominated municipality to escalate their activities. The municipality has also stepped up its demolitions of Palestinian homes deemed “illegal” in many parts of the city, to the level of two or three per week.

With Netanyahu now poised to return as prime minister, the scene seems set for further confrontations in this city so dear to millions of believers around the world.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

The continuing efforts by Israel’s presumptive next prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to assemble a rightwing-dominated government have sparked serious concern about the effects such a government might have on peace efforts with the Palestinians.

In addition, the fact that Netanyahu has invited Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the openly anti-Arab Yisrael Beiteinu party, to join the government has sparked fears that this government might take harsh actions against the Palestinian Arabs who form over 20 percent of Israel’s citizenry.

Netanyahu’s invitation to Lieberman has also raised the question of whether a government containing Lieberman should be treated any differently than governments elsewhere that might contain racists like the Austrian Joerg Haider or the French Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Netanyahu and his Likud Party have nearly always been strongly opposed to the peace process that ensued from the Oslo Agreement of 1993. When Netanyahu was premier before, from 1996 to 1999, he grudgingly accepted some of Oslo’s working premises. But then and now he remained quite opposed to the idea of an independent Palestinian state emerging in the West Bank and Gaza and worked hard to accelerate the implantation of Israeli settlers into the West Bank, an act that is unequivocally illegal under international law. In a meeting with visiting U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell on Thursday, Netanyahu reportedly declared that his future government would abide by Israel’s international commitments. But he did not specify any of these commitments by name.

Nine miles away from Jerusalem, in an interview Tuesday in Ramallah, Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayad defined the PA’s three conditions for resuming any peace talks with a new Israeli government.

“First, there has to be a complete freeze on the building of settlements everywhere in the occupied territories, including in East Jerusalem, and the removal of illegal settlement outposts,” he told IPS. “This is what the 2002 Road Map dictated, and it was reaffirmed at the Annapolis meeting of November 2007.

“Secondly, Israel has to stop its incursions into the Palestinian areas defined as ‘Areas A and B’ under Oslo and withdraw its security forces in the West Bank to the positions they occupied on September 28, 2000, before the Second Intifada began. We’ve proven we have restored law and order in the Palestinian areas, so they have no reason to intervene.”

“Thirdly, they need to implement their commitments under the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access, which governs access in and out of Gaza, access between Gaza and the West Bank, and the lifting of all roadblocks within the West Bank.”

“The first two of these conditions are non-negotiable for us,” he said. “The third one needs some further interpretation.”

Fayad was installed as PA prime minister by President Mahmoud Abbas on an emergency basis back in June 2007, after forces loyal to the U.S.-backed Abbas were forcibly evicted from Gaza by forces loyal to the elected Hamas government.

Fayad is not a member of either movement. He said he supports the effort now being made by the Egyptian government to broker a working entente between the two big Palestinian movements. He argued that, whether Egypt’s effort succeeds or not, the Palestinians need to hold a new round of both parliamentary and presidential elections as soon as possible, to generate a new, legitimate leadership and to halt the continued deepening of the administrative and social divide between Gaza and the West Bank.

Fayad’s preconditions for new peace talks seem unlikely to be met by a Netanyahu government. (Fayad admitted that even the outgoing government led by Ehud Olmert, considered significantly less hawkish and less pro-settlements than Netanyahu, had actually accelerated the settlement-building programme since Annapolis, when Olmert agreed to call a near-complete halt to the whole project.)

Meanwhile in Israel, negotiations continued over the make-up of the next government. Lieberman has reportedly been seeking to cash in on the “kingmaker” status his party achieved by winning 15 seats in the incoming Knesset by demanding five seats in the cabinet, including either the finance or the foreign affairs portfolio.

Lieberman has recently started presenting himself as notably more supportive of a Palestinian state than Netanyahu. But he remains a strong supporter of continuing to build settlements, so it is unclear what territories would be left for a Palestinian state.

Lieberman has also called for severing from Israel some of the parts of its land that are peopled primarily by ethnic Palestinians, and handing them over to the new Palestinian state, thus leaving Israel as more strongly Jewish than it is now. He makes no mention of consulting over this move with the Palestinian Israelis involved.

His desire for a more starkly Jewish-dominated political system in Israel is linked to the calls he has issued for all citizens to be required to take an oath of loyalty to Israel “as a Jewish state.” Back in 2006, he openly called for the execution of any Arab Knesset member who meets with Hamas; and at Yisrael Beiteinu rallies young supporters openly shout “Death to the Arabs” without any party elders intervening to quiet them.

Lieberman has described the “loyalty oath” he calls for as similar to the loyalty oaths that many western countries require of new immigrants when they become citizens. (He himself immigrated to Israel from Moldova at age 20, in 1978.)

Dr. Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Israeli Knesset who has been a frequent target of Lieberman’s wrath, rejects that comparison. “In Europe or America, those oaths are required when new citizens come voluntarily into the state. We never ‘came into’ Israel. We were here all along, and the state of Israel came forcibly into our lives… Lieberman himself is the immigrant who now comes in and directs his racism against the indigenous people here.”

Tibi, like many other Palestinian Israelis and some members of the now deeply fragmented Israeli peace movement, called loudly for any government containing Lieberman to be boycotted internationally. “But at least,” he said, “if he does win his goal of becoming foreign minister the true face of Israel’s society would be shown to the world.”

Netanyahu’s efforts to form a governing coalition continue. He is in a strong position and has several different options, though excluding Lieberman’s party from the government would be hard, given the party’s weight in the Knesset. There remains a question whether Netanyahu will offer to Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni, the outgoing foreign minister, and Labour Party leader Ehud Barak, the outgoing defence minister, terms that they and their parties can accept.

But even if both these parties join the coalition, it will still be a strongly rightwing, pro-settlements government. This, at a time when on the PA side, there seems a real chance that Fatah and Hamas can finally reach enough of an entente to allow a joint position toward the peace negotiations to emerge.

Achievement of this degree of intra-Palestinian reconciliation would give Sen. Mitchell something to work with in his peace efforts. But given Israel’s continued strong lurch to the right and its long existing record of non-compliance with the requirements of the Road Map and Annapolis, a resumption merely of diplomatic “business as before” no longer looks like a workable option.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

Negotiations for the political endgame of the recent Gaza war have proven much more difficult than – presumably – the Israeli cabinet imagined last December, when it took the final decision to start the war.

Now, the negotiations to stabilise the fragile twin ceasefires that went into effect Jan. 18 have become deeply entangled with the succession struggle inside Israel and with internal problems in the Palestinian leadership that also have many aspects of a succession struggle.

Meanwhile, thousands of Gazan families whose homes were destroyed in the war still huddle for shelter where they can, as Israel continues to bar the entry of even basic construction materials into the Strip. (Cold rain has been buffeting Gaza this week.)

But one possible ray of hope for the chronically beleaguered Palestinians came when the U.S. special envoy on Israeli-Palestinian peace, Sen. George Mitchell, indicated that he favoured ending the previous U.S. policy of fomenting intra-Palestinian division.

The biggest diplomatic development of the week was that Israel’s outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert of the Kadima Party, brought the nearly completed Gaza ceasefire negotiations with Hamas to a screeching halt when he announced Tuesday that no ceasefire could go ahead before Hamas freed its long-held Israeli POW Gilad Shalit.

Inside Israel, that undermined the credibility of chief Israeli negotiator Amos Gilad and the man directing his efforts: outgoing defence minister Ehud Barak, the leader of the Labour Party. Kadima and Labour are both now competing in the political fan-dance over who might be inside the new Israeli government that Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu is trying to form, and who will be out.

Olmert’s move on Shalit also upset Egypt, which has been mediating the Hamas-Israel ceasefire talks and for its own political reasons needs to see them speedily succeed. On Tuesday, an Egyptian government spokesman slammed Olmert’s insertion of the Shalit issue into the negotiations and announced the withdrawal of a trade mission it had sent to Israel.

On the Palestinian side, meanwhile, Olmert’s foregrounding of Shalit raised renewed hopes that the Shalit-related prisoner exchange, when it happens, would free many hundreds of long-held Palestinian political prisoners – among them, fabled next-generation Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouthi.

Barghouthi was a very popular mass leader in both the first and second Palestinian intifadas. In 2002, an Israeli court sentenced him to multiple life terms in prison for having killed soldiers running Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank.

In 2005, from his prison cell, he started to run against Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in the election for president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), but withdrew his candidacy before the vote. While in prison, Barghouthi has also worked hard with other prisoners to bring about an entente between Fatah and Hamas.

Over recent weeks Egypt got itself into the vital, but also high-risk, position of being the main mediator in all three of these diplomatically crucial negotiations: the ones between Israel and Hamas over the ceasefire and the prisoner exchange, and the one between Fatah and Hamas over returning to some form of sustainable working relationship after 19 months of bitter – and considerably U.S.-stoked – enmity.

Egyptian officials had hoped to work systematically through each of these issues in turn. But Olmert’s move has now forced all the issues back into a single ball of intertwined challenges. On Wednesday, Egypt announced that a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation meet scheduled in Cairo for Feb. 22 would be postponed.

The prospects for an intra-Palestinian reconciliation are meanwhile considerably complicated by a deep and worsening crisis inside Fatah. Fatah lost a significant amount of its already shaky public support inside the West Bank, and in the politically important Palestinian diaspora, after Pres. Abbas voiced harsh open criticisms of Hamas in the opening days of the Gaza war.

Veteran Ramallah-based Fatah activist and former parliamentarian Qaddura Fares described the situation inside the movement as “Not just a problem, but a real crisis. It’s a crisis at many levels… There’s a complete leadership vacuum. They don’t lead anything. They have no connection with the people.”

Fares also laid into the diplomatic record of the Fatah leadership. “We have negotiated for 18 years since the Madrid conference, and what have we got? Since 2000 we have gotten only bombs, checkpoints, and more and more settlements from Israel. We need to be ready to stop this charade of negotiations until the Israelis are serious… We are waiting to hear Barack Obama say ‘Yes we can – get to an endpoint in these negotiations’.”

Fares said he was very eager for the Fatah leaders to reach a new working relationship with Hamas. “If they can recognise and work with Israel, why can’t they do the same with Hamas?” he asked.

He expressed confidence that Marwan Barghouthi, if freed, could make a big difference in re-energising the Fatah base, fixing the movement’s internal problems, and helping the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation to succeed. He was careful to note, though, that he judged that Abbas’s term as president – which many people judge expired on Jan. 9 – in fact continues for a further year. So he was not advocating any immediate and total takeover of the movement’s leadership, by Barghouthi or anyone else.

The hopes that Fares expressed in Barghouthi’s capacities are widely though not universally shared by activists, leaders, and analysts here in Ramallah. Some of these Palestinians said the problems in Fatah are too deep for any one man to solve.

Others said that many myths have grown up around Barghouthi because of his imprisonment and the strong stands he took against both the Israeli occupation and the corruption of Fatah’s leaders – but they are still not sure that he has either the vision or the self-discipline of a Nelson Mandela. (One analyst familiar with South African history noted that anyway, Mandela only succeeded because he was all along part of a very disciplined movement, the African National Congress.)

The intra-Palestinian reconciliation moves are very relevant to the effort to stabilise the Gaza ceasefire. Hamas leaders have insisted that, to be sustainable at all, the ceasefire needs to be accompanied by an end to the tight siege that Israel has maintained around Gaza since 2006. But Israel says it will not open the crossings unless the people on the other side of them are officials of the Abbas-led PA.

At this point, Fatah and Hamas need each other – and the people of Gaza desperately need them to end their feud.

Prospects that this might happen increased after George Mitchell told U.S. Jewish leaders Thursday that divisions in the Palestinian community “make dialogue much more difficult.” This was a signal that the Obama administration might well plan to move away from the policy of aggressively backing Fatah against Hamas (including with arms, funds, and military training), that was followed by the Bush administration since 2006.

Palestinian analysts are divided over whether nearly all, or only some, of the intra-Palestinian dispute of recent years could be attributed to that U.S. policy. But they all agree that if the policy ends, the prospects for a workable reconciliation will certainly improve.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.

The tandem un-negotiated ceasefires that Israel and Hamas announced Jan. 18 across the Gaza-Israel front line remain fragile. Local and international efforts to consolidate the truce have stalled, and officials and analysts around the world warn of a high risk of further escalation.

Further complicating the truce stabilisation effort, Israelis go to the polls Feb. 10 in a general election that Binyamin Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud Party, now in opposition, and allies further to his right may well end up winning.

Israel has meanwhile refused to allow even basic construction materials into the Gaza Strip. With thousands of homes and much basic infrastructure in ruins, the situation of the Strip’s 1.5 million people remains dire.

Since Jan. 18, both Hamas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have sent emissaries to Egypt, where intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who brokered the (largely successful) ceasefire that ran for six months through mid-December 2008, has again emerged as the main channel for indirect negotiations between them.

But since Jan. 18 there have also been several exchanges of hostilities between the two sides. And as rockets fired from Gaza, by Hamas or others, have fallen from time to time on southern Israel, Netanyahu has scored points by voicing harsh criticisms of the Olmert government’s “failure to finish the job” against Gaza.

Under strong pressure from Likud and its allies at home, Olmert has so far refused to meet the demands that Hamas has insisted on in Cairo. Hamas’s main demand is that as part of the truce agreement Israel lift the punishing siege it has maintained on Gaza since Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, back in January 2006.

Meanwhile, at the international level, U.S. President Barack Obama’s special envoy to the region, Sen. George Mitchell, completed his first fact-finding tour of Israel, Palestine, and three pro-U.S. Arab countries and reported back to Obama in the White House on Wednesday. Mitchell said he plans to return to the region later this month.

No one in the Obama administration has announced anything substantive about the outcome of Mitchell’s first mission. However, before Mitchell met with Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that Hamas still needed to meet the three tough conditions defined by the Bush administration in 2002 before it could be included in any formal-level diplomacy.

The momentum with which the new administration dove into Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking during its first week in office now seems largely – and worryingly – to have dissipated.

Three major diplomatic challenges face regional powers and the international community regarding the ever-important Palestine question. The first is to stabilise the Gaza ceasefire. The second – which has been receiving increasing recognition from around the world, including from weighty personalities in the U.S. like former Secretary of State James Baker – is to find a way to fold Hamas into the formal peace negotiations, even if only indirectly. The third is to give the final-status peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians considerable new momentum and seriousness.

Robert Pastor has worked very closely with Jimmy Carter on the peace-promotion missions Carter has undertaken in the Middle East in recent years – which included two rounds of discussions that Carter held with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus, Syria, last year. (Carter and Pastor also held intensive talks with Israeli leaders and visited rocket-affected communities in southern Israel.)

Speaking recently at the Washington-based Palestine Centre, Pastor stressed that the strengthened ceasefire agreement for Gaza should be “signed, public, and official; there needs to be a recognised single text… The ceasefire needs to be reduced to its basic elements and should not be freighted down by extraneous issues, such as Israel’s demand that Gilad Shalit’s release be part of it.”

Shalit, a corporal in the Israeli military, was taken as a prisoner-of-war by Gaza-based militants in June 2006, and has been under Hamas’s control since June 2007. Israel meanwhile holds some 12,000 Palestinian detainees, including two dozen elected Hamas legislators from the West Bank. Negotiations for a prisoner exchange have continued intermittently since 2006.

Pastor said the Gaza ceasefire agreement should specify an end to all military actions by each side against the other, Israel’s opening of the crossings into the Strip, and the establishment of a monitoring mechanism in which the Middle East Quartet – the U.S., the United Nations, European Union, and Russia – should be involved.

Pastor provided several details of how, in the case of the six-month Israel-Hamas ceasefire of last year, the absence of an agreed, public text made it hard for Hamas to insist on Israeli compliance when the Israelis reneged on a commitment Hamas thought Olmert had made, to restore the freight passage through the crossings to the level it was at before the siege began in 2006.

He and many others have noted that Hamas and the main secular Palestinian nationalist group, Fatah, now urgently need to get over the sharp conflict they’ve been engaged in since June 2007, so they can get the reconstruction for Gaza speedily underway and to allow for rapid and substantive steps forward in the final peace talks.

Amman-based Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani has noted that objectively, Hamas and Fatah both need each other: Fatah, to share some of the new political legitimacy Hamas gained through the courage and capability it displayed during the recent war, and Hamas, to gain access to international forums and aid channels from which it is currently barred.

However, as Rabbani and others have noted, rebuilding a collaborative relationship between them may not be easy.

Washington-based analyst (and former Palestinian negotiator) Amjad Atallah said he judged that the rift between the two groups had been significantly exacerbated, if not completely caused, by the strong campaign the Bush administration waged against Hamas, in which it enrolled several key Fatah leaders.

“If the new U.S. administration can just stop that campaign, then reconciliation would become a lot easier,” he said.

Regarding the possibility of a resumed and newly energised final-status peace negotiation, all plans for this, whether drafted in Washington or elsewhere, remain on hold pending the outcome of Israel’s Feb. 10 election – and of the weeks-long coalition-forming process that is nearly always required after Israeli elections.

Some pro-peace people, including Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, have said that having Likud in power, with its clearly stated opposition to the establishment of any Palestinian state west of the Jordan River, may make matters clearer in the international arena than they have been under Olmert’s “centre-left” coalition. Levy noted that the Olmert government held endless negotiations about a Palestinian state while still, in practice, building Israeli settlements that reduce the possibility of the Palestinians establishing a viable state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza.

Whether Likud will win the elections, and the effect that might have on negotiations, both remain to be seen. What is clear, though, is that the Gaza War of 2008-09 has had a deep influence on the politics of both the Palestinian and Israeli communities, strengthening hardliners in each. The risks – to the stability of a largely U.S.-dominated regional order, as to the hard-pressed people of Gaza – remain very high indeed.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org

During the three weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, then President-elect Barack Obama vowed he would be ready to engage on the Palestinian question “on Day One” of his presidency.

Now, 10 days into his term, he looks to have made good on that promise. Along the way, he has deftly taken over effective control of the Palestinian file from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, signaling very clearly that he judges this issue to be -along with the economic crisis – one of the two top priorities of his presidency.

The major actions Obama has taken on the Palestine issue are well-known: the calls he made to Arab and Israeli leaders on “Day One”, the naming of former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as special envoy two days later, and then Obama’s own Jan. 26 interview with the al-Arabiya television network, which was the first substantive sit-down interview he gave as president to any network, domestic or foreign.

When Mitchell was named as envoy Jan. 22, it was done by Clinton in the State Department – though she did say he had been named by both the president and herself. Obama was notably also present at that semi-public gathering, and it was then he, not Clinton, who gave a detailed description of Mitchell’s job description. Four days later, when Mitchell was formally dispatched on his speedy first “listening tour” of the region, that tellingly happened in the White House; and once again it was Obama who described what Mitchell’s task on the tour would be.

When Obama nominated Clinton as secretary of state Dec. 1, he expressed his “full confidence” in her and indicated that she would be fully in charge of all aspects of his administration’s diplomacy. His subsequent capture of the Palestine file from her desk was gracious, but notable.

It is significant for two reasons. First, it clearly informs all the interested parties, at home and abroad, that this president – unlike his two predecessors – is from the beginning giving this ever-sensitive issue the level of presidential-level attention that analysts have always said it needs if it is to be successfully addressed.

Second, having effective control of his Palestine policy undertaken by the White House allowed Obama to roll it out, literally, “on Day One” without having to wait for the possibly lengthy congressional confirmation hearings that are required for State Department officials at the relevant level.

Given the tight “message discipline” within the Obama team, it has thus far been impossible to discern the extent to which the Israel-Gaza war, which continued until two days before Obama’s inauguration, affected his thinking on the Palestine question. But the crisis around the war must certainly have shown him the danger of leaving this issue to fester unaddressed, which has been the outcome whenever previous presidents followed the counsel of those who urged waiting for the situation to become “ripe” for resolution, before they engaged seriously with it.

One strong advocate of this “ripeness theory” has for many years been President Bill Clinton’s senior Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross. Back on Jan. 7, the pro-Israel think-tank where Ross has a position as counselor announced he would be joining Clinton’s State Department as a “senior adviser… on a wide range of Middle East issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process to Iran.”

But the announcement was apparently premature. Ross has played no visible role in any of Obama or Clinton’s activities on the Palestine question so far. (He may still, however, play some role on Iran.) George Mitchell, who was the Majority Leader in the Senate from 1989 through 1995, very clearly outranks Ross.

Shelley Deane, a professor at Mitchell’s alma mater, Bowdoin College in Maine, has studied Mitchell’s career closely for many years and now has special access to study the records of the presidentially commissioned investigation committee on the causes of the Second Palestinian Intifada that he submitted in April 2001.

She noted that Mitchell brings to his present task considerable experience in analysing and mediating conflicts, from his days in the U.S. Senate, from his leadership of the – often very thorny – negotiations that in 1998 brought an end to the violence in Northern Ireland, and from that earlier venture into Israeli-Palestinian fact-finding in 2000-2001.

Deane expects Mitchell to search actively for ways to fold Hamas into the diplomatic process as soon as possible, even if in the first instance this would happen not through direct U.S.-Hamas talks but by giving Washington’s go-ahead to the intra-Palestinian reconciliation that Pres. George W. Bush previously worked so hard to oppose.

She said that Mitchell has an approach to peacemaking that stresses strong personal ethics of trustworthiness, discretion, persistence, and unflappability, and a deep commitment to even-handedness and the universality of core principles. Most or all of these are commitments that Obama – who was nicknamed “No-Drama Obama” during his election campaign – also shares.

So, incidentally, does former president Jimmy Carter, who is undergoing a noticeable rehabilitation in Washington after years of being shunned by previous presidents, including President Clinton. Throughout the 28 years of his post-presidency Carter has doggedly advocated for Palestinian – as well as Israeli – rights. Last year he twice met personally with Hamas head Khaled Meshaal in Damascus. During one of those sessions he helped to secure the six-month ceasefire that Hamas concluded with Israel through Egyptian mediation last June.

Carter’s lead Middle East adviser, Robert Pastor, said Thursday that Mitchell’s first priority will be to solidify the still-shaky ceasefire ceasefire that Israel and Hamas both declared – in parallel, rather through any negotiation – on Jan. 20.

“Then, Mitchell and Obama need to turn rapidly to the many other tasks of peacemaking,” Pastor said. “And that includes work on a final-status peace.”

One early challenge to the diplomatic effort will come Feb. 10, when Israelis go to elections. As of now, the rightwing Likud and parties even further to its right look well positioned for victory.

Pastor stressed, however, that Pres. Obama should stick to his guns and keep restating the United States’ own strong interest in reaching a durable two-state outcome, both before and after Feb. 10. “This is too important for U.S. interests for the president to soft-pedal it,” he said.

*Helena Cobban is a veteran Middle East analyst and author. She blogs at www.JustWorldNews.org.