July 15, 2008 4:11

'Security threat' turns Blair back from Gaza

So what was the “specific security threat” that kept Tony Blair out of Gaza today? The visit by ex-British prime minister and special Middle East peace envoy Blair would have been a boon for Hamas, the rulers of Gaza. Blair was pointedly not seeing any Hamas officials --only traders and UN officials and touring a sewage plant-- but he would have been the highest profile diplomat to visit the blockaded Palestinian territory since Hamas seized it in June 2007.

Let’s see…who didn’t want Blair going to Gaza? The Israelis can’t have been too enthused about his visit; any visitor is struck by the devastation and poverty of the besieged enclave. But the Israelis aren’t the only ones. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas can’t have been too pleased about it, either. Abbas is already playing second banana to Hamas in Gaza and is sulking over the fact that Hamas in large part has managed to keep up its end of the bargain and stop militants from lobbing rockets into southern Israel –-upping their credibility among Palestinians and Arab states. Abbas’s Fatah militia still has many sympathizers in Gaza capable of carrying out mischief –-or worse-- against Blair.

It was the Israelis, Time was told, who warned Blair’s delegation to cancel the trip because of the vague and all-encompassing term "security threat". The UN security experts had previously cleared the visit, and examined every step that Blair’s convoy would take as it moved through the blasted-out rubble around Erez crossing into northern Gaza where he was to inspect a waste water project and talk to traders about how the year-long economic-blockade has crippled them. The security team encountered nothing suspicious.

Hamas didn’t mind that Blair snubbed them. It was good PR to have him in Gaza, so Hamas went all-out setting up checkpoints and security patrols along the route that Blair was to travel inside Gaza. A Hamas spokesman said it knew of no security threat to the ex-prime minister and blamed “Israel and other parties” who didn’t want Blair to witness “the catastrophe of the siege on Gaza”.

I'll bet that Blair won’t be knocking at the gates of Gaza any time soon, no matter if the threat is real or invented.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

July 15, 2008 12:04

The Syrians Take Paris

For the head of state of a former French colony, an official visit to Paris is always a good chance do a little shopping, take in some culture, and impress the folks back home. So it was for Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria (which was once ruled by France under a League of Nations Mandate.) Over the past weekend, Syrian state television has been beaming round the clock images of the Syrian President and his tres chic First Lady making the scene in the City of Light: Bashar at a summit for Mediterranean leaders, Asma at the Louvre and Centre Pompidou, and both of them as official guests of French President Nicholas Sarkozy at Bastille Day celebrations on Monday. From all the high wattage smiles, it's clear they're having a blast.

And well they should. Not so long ago the Syrian First Couple were personae non gratae in Western capitals. The U.S., which accuses Syria of sponsoring terrorism, led an effort to isolate the country diplomatically and economically. And in a rare instance of Franco-American harmony, France had its own grudge against Syria: the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hiriri, the former Lebanese prime minister and close friend of former French President Jacques Chirac, an act for which many in the West blamed Syria.

But now Syria is back in style. The invitation to Paris is ostensibly a reward for the the start of indirect peace talks between Syria and Israel (through Turkish mediation.) But it's also recognition that attempts to isolate Syria have failed, and that the West needs Syrian help for resolving some of the biggest problems in the Middle East. For its part, Syria wants to come even further out of the cold. While in Paris, President Assad told French television that in the event of direct talks under American sponsorship, there could be peace between Syria and Israel within two years. So on the Fourth of July 2010, will Bashar be celebrating Independence Day in Washington?

Maybe, but maybe not. Of all the Middle Eastern conflicts, the rift between Israel and Syria would appear to be the easiest to mend. Israel would just have to return the Golan Heights, a rocky Syrian plateau that Israel captured in 1967. If Israel had a strong leader with a popular mandate (admittedly a big if) this wouldn't be impossible given that Israeli settlement in the Golan is relatively sparse and the Heights are no longer so strategically important thanks to advances in Israeli defense technology. But the tougher question is what Israel should get in return for the Golan.

Israel and the U.S. want more than just an end to a state of war between Syria and Israel. They also want Syria to stop supporting anti-Israeli militant groups in Palestine and Lebanon (Hamas and Hizballah respectively.) In other words, they want Syria to break away from its strategic partnership with Iran, the senior member of what's sometimes referred to as the Rejectionist Crescent, the arc of governments and militias stretching from Teheran to Gaza that opposes American and Israeli dominance in the Middle East.

But Syria isn't going to abandon Iran, according to figures close to the Assad regime here in Damascus. It's not just that the elite of Iran and Syria have a long history of cooperation going back to 1979 when Syria was the first country to recognize the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran. It's also because Syria has no reason to switch sides just when its team is winning. From the fiasco of America's invasion of Iraq, to Hamas' victory in Gaza, to Hizballah's victory in Lebanon, Iranian and Syrian power is on the rise in the Middle East. Defying America and Israel is the most popular position in most of the Arab world, and has helped keep the Assad regime in power all these years. Why change now?

The Assad regime only wants a package deal, a grand bargain between Syria and Iran on the one hand, and America and Israel on the other, that would settle the cold war for the Middle East. This means that the United States would have to give up once and for all its project for a "new" Middle East, and its penchant for regime change. That might happen on its own in November if Barack Obama becomes president. But a package deal would also have to solve the Iranian nuclear issue, map out the future of post-American Iraq, solve the Syrian-Israeli conflict, the Lebanese-Israeli conflict, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict all in one go. Would any American president, or any world leader, be able to pull that off in two years? Despite President Assad's rosy prediction, it's hard to imagine him shaking hands in the Rose
Garden anytime soon. But at least he'll always have Paris.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus

July 10, 2008 11:17

The Remains of Dalal Mughrabi

Dalal Mughrabi was 19 years old in 1978, when she told he parents she was going to visit friends and left their Beirut apartment for the last time. Her parents, Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, didn't know that their daughter, a young nurse with coltish looks and good grades, had a secret life. But three days later, they watched on television as an Israeli army officer -- future Prime Minister Ehud Barak -- shot bullets into Dalal's already dead body as it lay on a road in Herzilyah, Isarel.

Today, almost every Palestinian knows who Dalal was: a commando commander, the first famous female fighter, an icon of the Palestinian resistance. On that fateful mission in 1978, she led 11 other militants by boat from south Lebanon into northern Israel where they captured a bus and tried to drive it to Tel Aviv and ram it into the Israeli parliament. Trapped by an Israeli army unit led by the young Barak, Dalal declared an independent Palestinian state and fought for some dozen hours before destroying the bus and many of those inside. Dalal's attack killed some 70 Israelis -- including about 35 civilians of whom 13 were children -- and one American photographer who was taking pictures of wildlife.

Now, 30 years after her death, Dalal is the middle of the the Arab-Israeli conflict once again. Her body -- currently held by the Israeli government -- is set to be returned to Lebanon along with the bodies of other dead Palestinian and Lebanese fighters as part of a prisoner and body exchange between Israel and Hizballah, the Lebanese militant group. The problem is that the Mughrabi family -- and Palestinians in general -- want her body to remain on Palestinian soil and her grave to be a symbol of Palestinian nationalism. Which is perhaps why the Israelis want her body off their hands.

The problem of what to do with Dalal is unlikely to de-rail the Hizballah-Israeli exchange on its own. Dalal's family say they have an assurance from the German official mediating the deal to find some way of returning it, but it's more likely Hizballah and the family will have to accept it. Yet the messiness of this fight over a dead girl, like the morbid nature of an exchange of bodies, is an example of how the conflict between Arabs and Israelis is alive and raw.

For Israelis, the prisoner exchange is bound to leave a sour taste. The country wants the return of two soldiers captured by Hizballlah in July 2006. That attack sparked a massive Israeli counter-strike intended to save the prisoners and destroy Hizballah for good. The second Lebanon War, as the 33 day struggle is called in Israel, failed at both goals. Israeli intelligence officials recently declared that the two soldiers are probably dead. Many Israelis are wondering why the government is releasing live dangerous militants in exchange for dead bodies, while some Israeli politicians, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, are saying that the army needs to go back and finish Hizballah before it gets any stronger.

Meanwhile, Hizballah is positively glowing. It is touting the exchange as proof that it was right to capture those two Israeli soldiers in 2006, and that it was victorious in the war that ensued. But rather than resting on its laurels, the group has rearmed and refortified its positions, and after a recent political victory against the weak pro-American Lebanese government, is in a stronger poistion than ever before. Hizballah also has plenty of other grievances with Israel besides prisoners in Israeli jails. Beirut is still covered with posters of Imad Mugniyah, the Hizabllah operations chief whose assassination earlier this year Hizballah blames on Israel. One such poster of Mugniyah reads: "The account is still open and has not been settled." It also shows a missile blasting towards Israel.

But the legacy of Dalal Mughrabi should give both sides pause. Dalal's operation was the most brazen of a series of attacks against Israel staged by the PLO in the 1970's after the militant group found safe haven in Lebanon, which is home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. Three days after Dalal's raid, Israel launched Operation Litani, the first big Israeli operation against the PLO in Lebanon in a series that would culminate in a full scale invasion -- the first Lebanon war -- in 1982. Though tactically successful (the Israelis drove the PLO out of Lebanon in 1982) Israeli military operations in Lebanon have been strategic failure. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon (which lasted until 2000) sparked the creation of Hizballah, the Lebanese Resistance group that is far more dangerous than the PLO ever was.

Hizballah inherited the old PLO's mission: the destruction of Israel and the creation of a Palestinian state by force. Which is itself a futile goal. Thousands of deaths, countless operations and several wars have followed in the wake of Dalal's mission in 1978, and yet the Palestinian state she declared for a few hours on the costal road is still nowhere in sight.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

July 10, 2008 9:05

A South African in Hebron

AFP/Getty Images Palestinian schoolgirls taking a shortcut to avoid Hebron settlers

It is hard to avoid talk of Jimmy Carter’s comparison of Israel with Apartheid South Africa. So I thought I’d check in with a visiting delegation of South African politicians, human rights activists, clergymen, and professors who toured Israel at the West Bank. The first stop, as it often is for VIP visitors to Israel, was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum.

I’ll let one of the delegates --Andrew Feinstein, a former parliamentarian from the African National Congress and a Jew-- tell his story. “My mother was the only one of 11 brothers and sisters who wasn’t killed at Auschwitz, so the museum visit was extremely emotional for me. There were words at the entrance to Yad Vashem, something like: ‘A country is to be judged not on what it does but on what it tolerates’ and I thought: How true.’”

Feinstein and the 22 others spent Wednesday in Hebron, and those words came back to haunt him. “To me, what I saw in Hebron, defiles the memory of the Holocaust and the name of Judaism.” Strong words, and not ones that Feinstein uses carelessly.

First, he says, the Israeli army arrested three Israeli organizers from a human rights group called Breaking the Silence, in an obvious effort to turn back the delegation from the city where less than a thousand settlers, and their IDF bodyguards have succeeded in paralyzing Palestinian life in the heart of Hebron. The Jewish settlers then charged the South Africans with a megaphone. “One of them shouted with the megaphone right in my ear: ‘Just like you’re killing children under Apartheid, I’m killing my enemy,’ Feinstein recounts. “Strange. The settler didn’t even know that Apartheid was long over.”

Next, they were taken to an old and sick Palestinian woman who recounted how the settlers routinely harass and intimidate her to leave so they can occupy her house. They were shown a video of Jewish settler children hurling rocks at tiny Palestinian schoolgirls while Israeli soldiers looked on, doing nothing. “I understand Israel’s fears for its security but that doesn’t justify what they’re doing in the name of Judaism. That famous phrase: “Never Again”, was never just about the Jews. It was about all of humanity."

And is Israeli practicing Apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories? Feinstein replies: “No, historically, it’s very different. But there’s a massive imbalance of rights, with many instances of Israelis de-humanizing Palestinians, and that’s the basis of all racism.”

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

July 6, 2008 10:56

Guns and Buns and Old Glory

Besides being a bastion of Hizballah supporters, the densely packed, semi-bombed out Shia Muslim-dominated suburbs of Beirut are also one of the most entrepreneurial, business-oriented parts of Lebanon.

A couple weeks ago, my assistant Rami -- who lives in the suburbs -- told me about a new restaurant that had opened up near him. "Guns and Buns" read the glossy, camouflaged menu. "No way," I thought. "Hizballah is opening a Hooters!"

Sadly, it turns out Guns and Buns isn't a strip club or a Hooters knock-off, just a fast food joint. The aforementioned buns are merely hamburger rolls, and the guns are part of a Soldier of Fortune-esque marketing theme. The place is decorated with sandbags, and the happy meal platters are named after well-known firearms.

Yet more evidence of the violent nature of Lebanese, or their genius for advertising? I'm inclined to see this as another nail in coffin of the clash of civilization thesis. Most people in southern Beirut -- Hizballah supporters though they may be -- know our corn-fed, high caliber/low brow popular culture, and God help them, they love it. They love our buns. Heck, they love our guns. They just wish we weren't giving them to Israel.

Since the suburbs are also a good place to shop for bargains, I asked the overworked Rami to look around his neighborhood for fireworks and American flags for my Fourth of July cookout on Friday. Fireworks -- in fact explosives of many kinds -- are pretty easy to find in the suburbs, but American flags less so. Several shocked storekeepers later (responses ranged from "What are you joking?" to "But America wasn't playing in the European Cup!"), Rami finally found one party supply store that stocked paper and plastic American flags. Why? American flag-burning demonstrations, of course.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut