US Palestine strategy in doubt as Abbas loses popular support.

Israel may think it has scored a double victory. It successfully managed to shelve any attempt to carry out the recommendations of the Goldstone report that there should be further action re Israel's alleged war crimes in the Gaza incursion. Earlier Abbas had supported further action. Israel's second victory was to ensure that a developing attempt to create a unified opposition to Israel with Hamas has been scuttled.
However, at the same time Abbas has lost whatever meagre credibility he had with the Palestinians. He may very well end up being thrown out or having to resign unless he changes tune again. Furthermore, the peace process will be going nowhere. The Israelis may not mind this however. But the worst possibillity is that the Intifada will start up all over again.


Antiwar.com

US Strategy in Doubt as Abbas Loses Popular Support
Posted By Helena Cobban
Just two months ago, many western commentators were jubilant that Mahmoud Abbas, the U.S.-supported head of both the Palestine Liberation Organization (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 paralyze 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 organized 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 marginalize 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 colonization and linked activities the Israeli authorities have been undertaking in East Jerusalem.
Senior diplomats from neighboring 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.

Palestinian negotiator says peace talks with Israel ''suspended'

This is hardly surprising. In any event the last thing that Israel is interested in at this point is negotiating peace. It is interested in doing as much damage as it can on Hamas before reacting to international condemnation for the attacks on its own Gaza prison. There are bound to be numerous Palestinians who have only revenge in mind and heart after this so that even if Israel does manage to find some Palestinians to bargain with it will not stop the counter attacks since no Palestinian authority will have the power to control these militants as Israeli seems to demand. It would seem that Israel is also contemplating a ground invasion. This is bound to cause more losses for the Israelis and of course many for the Palestinian side in this very asymmetric warfare.


Palestinian negotiator says peace talks with Israel "suspended"
www.chinaview.cn 2008-12-29 22:19:29

RAMALLAH, Dec. 29 (Xinhua) -- Chief Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia said on Monday the peace negotiations with Israel "are suspended" in protest against the intensive Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.
"It is impossible to hold peace negotiations with Israel, while its army is committing massacres against our people in the Gaza Strip," Qureia told reporters in the West bank city of Ramallah.
The "talks with Israel which are sponsored and supported by the United States are now suspended due to the awful bloody scene that the Gaza Strip is witnessing these days," he said.
Hamas, which has been ruling the Gaza Strip since mid June last year after it routed President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah security forces, has slammed the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) for not stopping the talks with Israel.
"There are no peace negotiations and there will be no negotiations at this time while Israel is attacking the Palestinian people," said Qureia, who is also a senior Fatah movement leader.
On Monday, five Palestinians were killed, including a senior leader of the Islamic Jihad (Holy War) movement's armed wing, in the latest Israeli air strike on southeast Gaza Strip, medics and witnesses said.
The witnesses said an Israeli air-to-ground rocket struck a car in the village of Abbasan, east of the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, killing at least five people, two of them militants.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Jihad said in a statement sent to reporters that Ziad Abu Tir, a senior militant leader of the group's armed wing, Saraya al-Quds, was killed in an Israeli air strike on his car in the village.
Mo'aweya Hassanein, chief of emergency and ambulance services in the Palestinian Health ministry, said 320 Palestinians were killed and over than 1,400 wounded since Saturday morning in the Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.
Israel on Saturday launched an unprecedented and intensive operation on the Gaza Strip, saying the operation targets Hamas movement and all its political and military arms.
Since Saturday morning, Israel carried out over 300 air strikes on security buildings, mosques, metal workshops, underground tunnels near Gaza-Egypt borders and houses.

Fisk: Security council resolution 242

An interesting article showing how Israel managed to lobby for loose wording in a resolution and ever since has used that wording to justify not withdrawing from territories taken in war. Of course Israel has also simply ignored many UN resolutions whenever it sees fit.







Robert Fisk’s World: One missing word sowed the seeds of catastrophe
No one in 1967 thought the Arab-Israeli conflict would still be in progress 41 years later
Saturday, 20 December 2008
A nit-picker this week. And given the fact that we're all remembering human rights, the Palestinians come to mind since they have precious few of them, and the Israelis because they have the luxury of a lot of them.
And Lord Blair, since he'll be communing with God next week, might also reflect that he still – to his shame – hasn't visited Gaza. But the nit-picking has got to be our old friend United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. This, you'll recall, was supposed to be the resolution that would guide all future peace efforts in the Middle East; Oslo was supposed to have been founded on it and all sorts of other processes and summits and road maps.
It was passed in November 1967, after Israel had occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and Golan, and it emphasises "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict".
Readers who know the problem here will be joined by those who will immediately pick it up. The Israelis say that they are not required to withdraw from all the territories – because the word "all" is missing and since the definite article "the" is missing before the word "territories", its up to Israel to decide which bits of the occupied territories it gives up and which bits it keeps.
Hence Israel can say it gave up Sinai in accordance with 242 but is going to keep East Jerusalem and much of the West Bank for its settlers. Golan depends on negotiations with Syria. And Gaza? Well, 242 doesn't say anything about imprisoning one and a half million civilians because they voted for the wrong people. No one in 1967 dreamed that the Israeli-Arab conflict would still be in ferocious progress 41 years later. And as an Independent reader pointed out a couple of years ago, the Security Council clearly never intended the absence of a definite article to give Israel an excuse to stay in the West Bank. Alas, our reader was wrong.
I've been going back through my files on 242 and discovered a most elucidating paper by John McHugo, who was a visiting fellow at the Scottish Centre for International Law at Edinburgh University. He points out that pro-Israeli lawyers have been saying for some years that "Resolution 242 unanimously called for withdrawal from 'territories' rather than withdrawal from 'all the territories'. Its choice of words was deliberate... they signify that withdrawal if required from some but not all the territories".
McHugo is, so far as I know, the only man to re-examine the actual UN debates on 242 and they make very unhappy reading. The French and Spanish versions of the text actually use the definite article. But the Brits – apparently following a bit of strong-arm tactics from the Americans – did not use "the". Lord Caradon, our man at the UN, insisted on putting in the phrase about the "inadmissability of the acquisition of territory by war" in order to stop the Israelis claiming that they could cherry-pick which lands to return and which to hand on to. Britain accepted Jordan's rule over the West Back – the PLO were still shunned as super-terrorists at the time – but it did no good. Abba Eban, Israel's man on the East River, did his best to persuade Caradon to delete both "the" and the bit about the inadmissability of territory through war. He won the first battle, but not the second.
That great American statesman George Ball was to recount how, when the Arabs negotiated over 242 in early November of 1967 – at the Waldorf Astoria (these guys knew how to pick the swankiest hotels for political betrayal) – the US ambassador to the UN, Arthur Goldberg, told King Hussein that America "could not guarantee that everything would be returned by Israel". The Arabs distrusted Goldberg because he was known to be pro-Zionist, but Hussein was much comforted when US Secretary of State Dean Rusk assured him in Washington that the US "did not approve of Israeli retention of the West Bank". Hussein was further encouraged when he met President Johnson who told him that Israeli withdrawal might take place in "six months". Goldberg further boosted his confidence. "Don't worry. They're on board," he said of the Israelis. Ho ho.
It's intriguing to note that several other nations at the UN were troubled by the absence of "the". The Indian delegate, for example, pointed out that the resolution referred to "all the territories – I repeat all the territories – occupied by Israel..." while the Soviet Union (which knew all about occupying other people's countries) stated that "we understand the decision to mean the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all, and we repeat, all territories belonging to Arab states and seized by Israel...". President Johnson rebuffed the Soviets and bluntly refused to put the word "all" in the resolution. Bulgaria, not surprisingly, said much the same as the Soviets. Brazil expressed reservations – rightly so – about "the clarity of the wording". The Argentinians "would have preferred a clearer text". In other words, the future tragedy was spotted at the time. But we did nothing. The Americans had stitched it up and the Brits went along with it. The Arabs were not happy but foolishly – and typically – relied on Caradon's assurances that "all" the territories was what 242 meant, even if it didn't say so. Israel still fought hard to get rid of the "inadmissability" bit, even when it had got "the" out.
Ye gods! Talk about sewing the seeds of future catastrophe. Well, Colin Powell, when he was George W Bush's secretary of state, gutlessly told US diplomats to call the West Bank "disputed" rather than "occupied" – which suited the Israelis just fine although, as McHugo pointed out, the Israelis might like to consider what would happen if the Arabs talked about those bits of Israel which were not included in the original UN partition plan as "disputed" as well. Besides, George W's infamous letter to Ariel Sharon, saying he could, in effect, keep large bits of the West Bank, set the seal on Johnson's deception.
McHugo mischievously adds that a mandatory warning in a city that says "dogs must be kept on the lead near ponds in the park" clearly means that "all" dogs and "all" ponds are intended. These days, of course, we use walls to keep dogs out. Palestinians, too.