Abbas: Obama, Mitchell Useless, Settlements Not So Bad

In an interview with Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq Alawsat, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas hints that he was making more headway with Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni than he is with Obama and Mitchell and that in reality, Obama insisting on a settlement freeze puts Abbas in an awkward position. He can't very well publicly say that a settlement freeze is not necessary in order to continue negotiations, but he tells Asharq Alawsat's journalists that in previous negotiations with Olmert, he was prepared to ignore the issue, at least temporarily.

And that's not all. This article is filled with fascinating tidbits about the insides of such a complicated negotiation. Here are some important parts and my take on them.

[Asharq Al-Awsat] Would it have been possible to reach an agreement with Olmert alone?
[President Abbas] I believe it would have been possible that I go up a little, and he comes down a little. It was possible to find a solution. He said that he would give me 100 percent.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] This is important and fundamental?
[President Abbas] He said 100 percent. He would take from this side, and I would take from that side. He presented maps to me. The maps included that he would take the settlements blocs (in the West Bank) in exchange for territories in the north, west, and south of the West Bank, in addition to territories to the east of Gaza.

So basically this is a territory swap he's talking about. Israel gets to keep the settlements they've built already and Palestine gets land that is not currently being used by anyone.

Wait. Not used by anyone? Don't we mean used by Palestinian residents of Israel? No.

[President Abbas] In a distant region (from the triangle region), because I explained from the beginning that I would not accept anyone (from the Palestinians of Israel). We were doing well. God is my witness, he was all right; he said to me: You will not find anyone other than me; and I said to him: But you will find someone other than me.

I guess Palestine has enough people. This brings a whole new angle to the argument about the Right of Return.

[President Abbas] Obama laid down the condition of halting the settlements completely. What could I say to him? Should I say this is too much? Moreover, halting the settlements is the second article of the Road Map, and it is something I want. At the end they blame me, and they say that the condition of halting the settlements was not on offer during the negotiations with Olmert. Bear in mind that at every meeting with Olmert the issue of the settlements was discussed.

And regarding Abbas' repeated threats to step down as president and his newest announcement that he will not seek re-election:

[Asharq Al-Awsat] Is not this decision tantamount to running away from the battle?
[President Abbas] Is the issue merely one of clinging to the chair? The chair does not matter to me.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] This is despite the fact that there is no alternative to you at this stage?
[President Abbas] It is wrong to say that there is no alternative. How can you say that there are 8 million Palestinians, but there is no alternative?
(Erekat [chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel]: I believe that the president did not say I do not want to be a candidate because he was scheming, maneuvering, or fed up).
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Or he might be sulking as he used to sulk in the past?
[President Abbas] No it is not sulking.

Hilarious. In what other situation would you find a journalist accusing a president of sulking during a private interview?

Moving along, Abbas says that Iran is standing in the way of a reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas (the former rules the West Bank and that latter is in charge of the Gaza strip).

[President Abbas] Brother, they saw the Egyptian document before we saw it, they agreed to it, and then we signed, but they refused to sign. Why, because there are regional sides that do not want this.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What are these sides?
[President Abbas] Iran is the first one. This is indisputable.

And here Abbas idealizes a bit. I think the situations he refers to have improved in the past several years, but naturally he is overemphasizing his success at reform.

[Asharq Al-Awsat] What can a Palestinian State offer?
[President Abbas] It can offer a democratic state that has equality and transparency. I challenge anyone to say that there was a single case of corruption in the Palestinian Authority in the past two or three years. I mean a single case of corruption.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Does this include political detentions?
[President Abbas] Or a single political detention.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Does this mean that all the detentions are not political?
[President Abbas] The detentions are carried out in cases of weapons, security, money smuggling, or money laundering. I challenge anyone to prove otherwise.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What about the issue of women?
[President Abbas] Women are equal to men. On every occasion we emphasize the need to advance women. The proof of this is that the Legislative Council has allocated a quota for women, whether the others like it or not; one of every three members of the Legislative Councils has to be a woman. This also applies to the local councils.

There is much too much in this interview for me to paraphrase everything, so I urge you to read the whole thing if you have an interest.

Everyone Hates Lieberman

Israel's opposition leader Tzipi Livni responded to FM Lieberman's recent statements by saying he, "erased in 20 minutes years of efforts to advance the peace process."

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Friday accused Foreign Minister Avigdor Liebermanas having "erased in 20 minutes years of efforts to advance the peace process" when he declared that Israel was not bound by commitments it made at a 2007 summit in Annapolis to pursue creation of a Palestinian state

In an interview with Israel Radio, the Kadima chairwoman said she had expected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to announce that he did not share Lieberman's expressed sentiments, and was disappointed that such clarification was not made.

Meanwhile, outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert said on Thursday that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process kick-started in Annapolis bolstered international recognition of Israel.

But on the upside, Lieberman is now being investigated for fraud, which is awesome because it means at the very least, he will lose some credibility among his base of support. Best case scenario, he steps down.

Ha'aretz writes:

Police questioned Avigdor Lieberman as part of a corruption investigation on Friday for the second time since he was sworn in as foreign minister earlier this week.

Fraud squad detectives questioned the foreign minister, who is also chairman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, for more than five hours and said another round was likely in the coming week.

On Thursday, Lieberman was questioned for more than seven hours over suspicions of bribery, money laundering, fraud and breach of trust, less than a day after he took office.

Lieberman, of course, " denies any wrongdoing and says the probe is politically motivated." As much as I would love to see him investigated right out of office, I hope the investigation is not politically motivated. Because the fact is, his appointment is a symbol of one of my favorite concepts: freedom of belief. That being said, Lieberman has been investigated since 2007 and is suspected of laundering "large sums of money," so I think it's unlikely this latest round of questioning is connected to his appointment as Foreign Minister.

Lieberman Makes Me Sad

Prime Minister Netanyahu, who began his official premiership today, appointed Avigdor Lieberman, of the Yisrael Beitanu party as foreign minister.

Can we just take a minute to examine what this means?

Lieberman is the very same politician who advocates forced expulsions of Israel's Arabs and who, at the very least, has been pushing for this population to face a tough choice: swear their loyalty to the Zionist state or have their citizenship revoked. To the outsider, this may seem natural. After all, why should defectors get to live in a state they oppose? However, it is possible to oppose Zionism and still support Israel.

Have we not many American citizens who love this country but oppose capitalism? Wanting to change some aspects of your government is not the same thing as wishing the whole state to disappear.

But Lieberman and his cronies, thinking as they do, are motivated by fear. And in a world where everyone is out to get you, you have to do whatever you can to stay on top. In Lieberman's view, the only way to be safe is to be the most powerful, or alternately, for everyone around you to be just like you.

Despite Netanyahu's mumblings about peace, his government is likely to take a hard line approach to peace efforts. Which basically means he will try to bully the Palestinians into submission. Like Operation Cast Lead, Bibi will apply pressure in all the most sensitive places so that giving Israel whatever it wants seems like the only option.

There is virtually no way peace will be made between Israel and Palestine without dismantlement of the settlements, and peace talks cannot even be taken seriously until Israel stops expanding existing settlements.

But this won't happen with Lieberman as foreign minister. He rabidly supports the settlement of the West Bank by Jewish Israelis.

It seems like what I wrote back in August is coming to fruition. Palestinian Authority officials said peace talks with anyone but Tzipi Livni would fail.

Bibi Makes Headway

The AP announced today that Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right leader of Israel's Yisrael Beitanu party, has joined the Likud coalition, headed by former Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu. This virtually guarantees that Netanyahu will become the next Prime Minister, which is as much a victory for Israel's right as Obama's was for America's left.

Tzipi Livni, leader of the centrist Kadima party and PM hopeful, was also asked to join the coalition, but her response was in the negative:

"Today the foundations were laid for an extremist right-wing government under the leadership of Netanyahu," Livni's office quoted her as telling a meeting of Kadima members. "That is not our way and there is nothing for us in such a government ... We must be an alternative of hope and go into opposition."

The victory of these far right parties means more delays for peace talks, since Netanyahu does not value peace efforts in their current form. He prefers to use force as leverage to get the Palestinians to agree to his terms. This may put him at odds with President Obama, who has vowed to push for peace in the region on more liberal terms.

The Idiot's Guide to Israeli Elections

Israel's much-awaited national elections happened yesterday, and while I must admit pleasant surprise that Kadima was so successful, when I looked at the breakdown of voting records, I was not at all surprised.

The two major contenders for ruling coalition/Prime Minister status were Kadima and Likud. Kadima is headed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who has made mouth noises about evacuating some West Bank settlements in a "land for peace" deal with the Palestinians. She is basically considered moderate, but the only visible leader willing to make concessions for peace. Likud is a right wing party headed by former Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who makes no pretenses at all about his unwillingness to make concessions for peace. He believes in force and "Greater Israel," meaning the West Bank should belong to Israel, not Palestine.

Other major players in this year's elections were the Labor party and Yisrael Beitanu, which is a hardcore right wing party led by Avigdor Lieberman, who openly advocates that Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent should have their citizenship revoked. His party has also discussed forced expulsions.

(On a side note, Lieberman is right to be panicky about Israel's Arabs- studies show that they will outnumber Jewish citizens within the next 10 to 20 years.)

The minor players this year were the various religious parties, the Arab parties, and the peacenik parties. But they played a very important role: the Israeli blogosphere was abuzz this past week with religious voters saying they planned not to vote for religious parties because that would only give Kadima more power. A comparable situation in the U.S. would be a lefty activist suggesting that a vote for the Green Party is the same as a vote for the Republicans.

This Ha'aretz article breaks down voting by city, party, ethnic group, whatever you like. What it revealed was this-

• Residents of settlements in the West Bank voted mostly for Likud (perhaps because of the analogy I just explained) but also for Yisrael Beitanu.
  
• Residents of Southern Israeli towns, who have been bombarded with Gaza's missiles for several years, voted mostly the same as the settlements, but with quite a few votes for Kadima.
  
• Residents of major city centers like Haifa and Tel Aviv voted mostly for Kadima and Labor.
  
• Jerusalem voted about equally for Likud and the religious parties.
  
• Wealthy areas around Tel Aviv voted about equally for Likud and Kadima
  

In addition to the by-city breakdown, the Ha'aretz data also shows that Kibbutzim voted mostly for Kadima, Labor, and Meretz (which one could call a socialist and/or peacenik party) and that Bedouin communities voted overwhelmingly (and when I say overwhelmingly, I mean 80%) for the Arab parties.

As it stands now, Kadima has 28 seats in parliament to Likud's 27, which makes Tzipi Livni the Prime Minister by default, provided she can set up a ruling coalition. However, preliminary results show that Likud has had more success with that. And let's not forget that Livni was given the chance to put together a coalition last summer, thereby avoiding the election alltogether, but she was unable to do it then.

We shall soon find out.

Gov't Report Reveals Corruption at Highest Levels

With Israeli elections just around the corner, we can safely assume that all major political developments are at least in part one group or another's attempt to win favor with the electorate. Operation Cast Lead was one example of political maneuvering, and quite possibly the most significant one of this election. It has seemed to achieve its goals of creating a sense of national unity, feelings of patriotism, and a strong distrust of outsiders and their criticisms. In short, the country has been put in a war mood.

This is good for Prime Minister candidate Bibi Netanyahu, who has already held the office from 1996 to 1999, as leader of the conservative Likud party. Support for the latest Gaza war and Israelis' tendency to go insular when they are threatened has made his success much more likely.

This could be the reason a secret government report revealing settlement construction to be illegal and corrupted has recently been released, even though it was completed over two years ago. What's more is that the research was done by the Israeli government and at the behest of former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, another right-wing candidate for Prime Minister in this election.

Ha'aretz writes:

An analysis of the data reveals that, in the vast majority of the settlements - about 75 percent - construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued.

Now, let's deconstruct this in order to fully realize the significance. Building without permits is a pretty piddly violation. If building without permits was the only accusation we could make against the Israeli government, I wouldn't have anything to write about. What makes this significant is that Palestinian homes built without permits are demolished, oftentimes without warning, meaning the residents not only lose their home, but many of their possessions as well. Before the appearance of this report, government spokesmen could make all the excuses they want about these demolitions, but now, they can no longer claim Palestinians receive equal treatment in this regard.

Moving on:

The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents.

The government admits that it knowingly builds on the property of the West Bank's Palestinian residents.

The Ha'aretz article, besides a summary of the report, includes interviews with settler leaders and Housing Ministry officials. Not surprisingly, they all pass the buck higher and higher, until it becomes clear that decisions regarding the illegal building come from the very heights from which the order to compile the report was given. Nevermind why Shaul Mofaz would order a report written that could very well cost him the election, the question is: who released the report to the public, two years after its completion?

The answer, if I may speculate, comes from the left. If Operation Cast Lead hurt Tzipi Livni's chances in the election, this report does the same to her right-wing competitors. If the electorate knows their government is out looking for trouble, support of the Gaza war could wane, thus giving Livni the boost she needs at the polls.

Lola Does Livni

I'm getting a little bit excited about Tzipi Livni. So far she's doing well at creatively and compassionately pursuing peace while not upsetting certain right-wingers who have stalemated peace efforts in the past. She is still in the process of setting up her government so her attitude might not be permanent, but we can hope.

In Haaretz today:

"I do not believe in far-reaching proposals and an attempt to expedite matters, especially in light of the political situation," Livni, the prime minister-designate, told [French Foreign Minister] Kouchner on Sunday.

She was referring to Olmert's peace plan that offers Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, small areas of territory, the latter of which belongs to Syria.

About Palestinian disapproval of the offer:

Livni's explanation was a criticism of Olmert. "Abu Mazen [Abbas] in his present political situation cannot accept such an agreement," she said. "The political situation in Israel also does not allow it to be signed."

Livni also argued that blaming the Palestinians for refusing to accept Olmert's offer does no good. "We can say this is their fault - but what will that do?" she said. "We had the same thing after Camp David in 2000 and look where that got us."

Once upon a time I asked for a politician that is more concerned with actually accomplishing things than with being right. Could she be the one? The bigger person. The one to stop pointing fingers.

Olmert's Last Gasp

Haaretz announced today that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is finally being indicted for corruption charges. Olmert has been under investigation for suspicion of bribery since early May of this year.

Last month, when the bribery investigation reached critical mass, Olmert agreed to step down as soon as an election for leadership of the Kadima party was held. The two front runners for the party are Tzipi Livni, a politician on par with Obama in that she has great potential but has not been tested, and Shaul Mofaz, a man Palestinian leaders said would "derail the peace process."

Two weeks ago, Livni agreed to release 200 Palestinian prisoners in a show of good faith to faciliate peace negotiations.

And today, in one of his last gasp efforts to leave a meaningful legacy, Olmert proposed to prepare for the eventual evacuation of Israeli settlers from the West Bank.

He wasn't saying they should actually evacuate. He's just saying they should be prepared. An ounce of prevention or what have you.

But Mofaz made his opposition to the proposal known right away:

"The bill weakens the position of Israel in all future negotiations and I will not lend my hand to it," said Mofaz, a frontrunner in this month's Kadima leadership battle.

Note that Olmert suggested that the government should prepare for the evacuation of settlers living east of the security fence, not settlers living east of the green line, otherwise known as the pre-1967 border.

Nevertheless, suggesting that Israelis be evacuated from anywhere in the West Bank is not an advisable action for any Israeli politician whose retirement isn't already imminent. The last Israeli politician who made formal land concessions to the Palestinians was assasinated.

Israel's Leadership Under Hot Debate

With Israeli Prime Minister Olmert stepping down amid numerous accusations of bribery, Kadima party leadership is now being debated. Olmert vowed that he would resign as soon as a new leader of his party was chosen. The winner of that primary will then be named Prime Minister.

One of the frontrunners for party leadership is Shaul Mofaz, a native of Iran, who recently denounced his home country as "the root of all evil" and hinted at the ever-present option of attacking Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment.

He then pledged to oversee peace talks with the Palestinians personally and vowed he would produce actual results.

In Haaretz:

"I have more years of experience than others. I will give the negotiations with the Palestinians utmost priority. I will do my best to advance them and to achieve results, and that's a promise. I will put all of my weight behind it and will deal with it personally," he said.

"They know me, after all," Mofaz continued, "Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas], [Palestinian Authority Prime Minister] Salam Fayyad and [PA chief negotiator] Saeb Erekat. They'll say that everything I promised, I delivered. True, I don't go easy in negotiations, I'm not a man of words - I'm a man of actions and I promise to bring results. It won't happen in two days and maybe not in a year, but there will be results."

Then he continued to blather on in a very convincing fashion about why the peace talks are important.

"For years I experienced the hardship of war, the suffering of battles and the loss of friends, subordinates and commanders .... Kadima under my leadership will continue the path of previous prime ministers who worked to bring peace and security for Israel," Mofaz said.

But then the Palestinian Authority issued a statement about Mofaz's candidacy that makes me think he doesn't know what he's talking about. Just maybe.

In a Haaretz article titled, "PA: Mofaz as head of Kadima would be disaster for peace":

A victory by Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz in next month's Kadima Party leadership race would be a disaster for the peace process, senior Palestinian Authority officials say.

The officials said that an American-Palestinian plan for the continuation of the process is contingent on Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni winning the primary. A Mofaz victory, in contrast, would send the talks into a deep freeze, given his hawkish views.

But in a dangled carrot, the newspaper does reveal an opportunity for Israel and the PA to help each other:

The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan reported Tuesday that a list of the Palestinians Abbas wants released, which also includes many others of the longest-serving prisoners, was given to Livni during her meetings in Washington with the head of the PA negotiating team, Ahmed Qureia. Qureia told Livni that the release of these prisoners would play an important role in bolstering the PA's status among the general Palestinian public.

I think it was Sun Tzu or some other Chinese genius who said that you cannot win without helping your opponent save face. And here Israel has an opportunity to do just that. The question is whether the cries of the right wing warhawks will drown out the logic speaking quietly from inside this option.