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Dilemmas of hopes for a future Palestinian state

May 13, 2016

Update from AIJAC

May 13, 2016

Update 05/16#03

While a two-state solution remains the only realistic hope for long-term resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this Update features some recent pieces highlighting some of the barriers to creating a Palestinian state that will both be humane toward its inhabitants and able to exist in peace alongside Israel. It also includes a new article highlighting how the Israeli military is shaping Israel’s approach to conflict management until serious peace negotiations can resume.

First up is American analyst Grant Rumley, who highlights a worrying trend toward growing authoritarianism in the Palestinian Authority (PA). Rumley highlights a series of developments showing how  PA President Mahmoud Abbas is cracking down hard on critics, journalists, alternative power sources, and even unions – and even creating an apparently entirely unconstitutional hand-picked “Palestinian constitutional court” to reinforce his ability to rule by presidential decree. Rumley argues that the US and other international players are too invested in Abbas to challenge anything he is doing – even though it is threatening the viability of any future Palestinian state. For all the details, CLICK HERE

Next up, noted Palestinian affairs journalist Khaled Abu Toameh highlights the evidence that Iran remains determined to control any future Palestinian state – presumably to make sure it continues violent confrontation with Israel. He highlights the secession of Palestinian groups Iran has created or supported – Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and recently, Al-Sabireen – and the changing fortunes of each over time as Teheran sought to find the perfect client to achieve its goals. Abu Toameh argues that the apathy of the international community to these Iranian efforts, especially in the wake of the nuclear deal with Iran, risks a likelihood that Iran “will puppeteer any Palestinian state that is created in the region” for its own ends. For his complete argument, CLICK HERE

Finally, Washington Institute scholars David Makovsky and Gabrielle Chefitz offer analysis of how the IDF is playing a key role in shaping how Israel is relating to the Palestinians on a day-to-day basis today. Noting the controversy in Israel over the manslaughter trial of a soldier who shot dead an already disarmed Palestinian attacker in March, they also discuss how the IDF has been urging policies designed to improve the lives of Palestinians in a variety of ways – including increased work permits, easing restrictions on imports to Gaza and opening a new crossing there, improving security coordination with the PA, etc.  They argue this may even be of political use to Israeli PM Netanyahu, who has to deal with political forces to his right in his own cabinet and coalition, and can thus use IDF recommendations to institute policies he would otherwise have trouble implementing in the face of political opposition. For this important article in full, CLICK HERE. Meanwhile, Shmuel Rosner writes in the New York Times about how the unifying role of the IDF in Israel may arguably be eroding in the wake of the controversy over the arrested soldier and other recent political controversies over statements by senior IDF officers.

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Article 1

Barack Obama’s West Bank Strongman: Mahmoud Abbas

By Grant Rumley 

Newsweek, 5/1/16 


Mahmoud Abbas Obama Israel Palestinian Territories West Bank

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the General Assembly at the United Nations, New York, November 29, 2012.Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Amid all the preparations for a French-led conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace in the next year, Western officials continue to turn a blind eye to the increasingly autocratic tendencies of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

In the past year alone, Abbas has cracked down on journalists, teachers, and political rivals without serious rebuke from Europe or the U.S. Indeed, Western leaders have only two apparent demands for the Palestinian leader: continue to maintain security coordination with Israel, and pay lip service to the moribund peace process. So long as Abbas continues to check these boxes—and his recent interview on Israeli television confirmed he would—his Western flank is secure.

Abbas knows this all too well. Since the collapse of the U.S.-led peace negotiations in 2014, he has tested the limits of Western leniency. As the Obama administration withdrew from the day-to-day slog of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, Abbas gradually tightened his hold on Palestinian civil society. He is now 11 years into a four-year term, with no sign of stepping down. And now, he’s set up an entirely new judiciary body to reinforce his rule. Earlier this month, Abbas issued a presidential decree forming a Palestinian constitutional court that would, naturally, confirm his own presidential decrees. The nine members of the court are all hand-picked by Abbas.

His rivals say the move was illegal. They allege that the new judiciary body is simply a vehicle to muscle his edicts into law and circumvent a parliament that has been defunct since a political stalemate with the terrorist group Hamas first began in 2006. In bypassing the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) parliament, Abbas’s rivals say he seeks to ignore the clause in Palestinian law that states power is to go to the speaker of the parliament—currently a member of Hamas—in the event of a sudden vacation of his post. One critic called the move “uspicious” and an attempt to replace one institution with another; a member of Hamas called it an attempt to “liquidate” his political rivals. Their complaints fell on deaf ears: Within days of issuing the decree, Abbas swore in the new judges at the PA’s headquarters.

Abbas’s critics should know by now that resistance to his rule is futile. When a member of his own Fatah party accused one of his ministers of corruption last month, Abbas issued a warrant for her arrest. The parliamentarian, Najat Abu Bakr, then sought refuge for two weeks in the parliament building until senior party leaders intervened. Similarly, when a member of his own Fatah party challenged him over peace process tactics in 2013, Abbas simply replaced him with his intelligence chief. When the No. 2 official in the Abbas-led Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) challenged him last summer, Abbas fired him and appointed his long-time peace negotiator Saeb Erekat to the position. When two other political parties in the West Bank—the U.S.-designated terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP)—challenged him earlier this month, Abbas slashed their funding. And when the governor of Nablus criticized the PA’s leadership earlier this week, Abbas fired him.

Political rivals aren’t Abbas’s only targets. The largest West Bank protest in years occurred in February when approximately 50,000 teachers marched on Ramallah. The protests accompanied a large-scale teacher strike—which shut down classes for months—over the PA’s refusal to honor previous agreements between the government and the teacher unions regarding salaries. In an attempt to prevent the teachers from marching on the capital, PA security forces arrested the heads of the union, set up checkpoints to restrict travel to Ramallah, and threatened legal action against the teachers if they didn’t return to work. The PA’s blatant assault on the protestors caused one prominent Palestinian journalist to write that the PA, “really should not continue to exist.”

Meanwhile, a Palestinian watchdog group found that 60 percent of the nearly 200 violations of media freedoms in 2015 occurred in the PA-controlled West Bank as opposed to the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. Since the start of 2016 alone, Abbas’s security forces have arrested journalists for reporting on security coordination with Israel, television presenters for criticizing Abbas, and photojournalists for unknown reasons. When a German news channel grilled PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah on the dismal state of press freedoms last month, Hamdallah conceded merely that, “mistakes can happen anywhere.” Yet it seems “mistakes” are becoming standard practice for Abbas and his camarilla.

Abbas clearly sees a window of opportunity in the last year of Obama’s term. The previous two U.S. administrations made pushes for peace in the last year of their terms, but the Obama administration shows little eagerness to seriously reinvest in bilateral talks. This tacit withdrawal from peacemaking is fueling Abbas’s consolidation of power at home and his belief that he can further isolate Israel, particularly given Obama’s animosity toward Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the willingness of European allies to support his campaign of “internationalizing” the Palestinian issue. Indeed, Abbas knows that now is the time, as the next American administration might not be so indulgent.

The failure of the U.S. and Europe to address Abbas’s autocratic tendencies could have a devastating effect on the long-term prospects for a viable Palestinian state. As one former Bush administration official remarked in 2013, Palestinian self-governance—with free and fair elections—were “a powerful argument that it was time for Israel to stop governing Palestinians.” In other words, Abbas’s increasingly tyrannical government in the West Bank does not only handicap political expression—it also sets back the very legitimacy of the Palestinian national project.

Grant Rumley is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Article 2

Iran’s Plans to Control a Palestinian State

by Khaled Abu Toameh

Gatestone Institute, May 9, 2016 

  • The Iran nuclear deal, marking its first anniversary, does not appear to have had a calming effect on the Middle East.

  • Iran funnels money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they share its desire to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic empire. The Iranian leaders want to see Hamas killing Jews every day, with no break. Ironically, Hamas has become too “moderate” for the Iranian leadership because it is not doing enough to drive Jews out of the region.

  • More Palestinian terror group leaders may soon perform the “pilgrimage” to their masters in Tehran. If this keeps up, the Iranians themselves will puppeteer any Palestinian state that is created in the region.

The Iran nuclear deal, marking its first anniversary, does not appear to have had a calming effect on the Middle East. The Iranians seem to be deepening their intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general and in internal Palestinian affairs in particular.

This intervention is an extension of Iran’s ongoing efforts to expand its influence in Arab and Islamic countries, including Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon and some Gulf states. The nuclear deal between Tehran and the world powers has not stopped the Iranians from proceeding with their global plan to export their “Islamic Revolution.” On the contrary, the general sense among Arabs and Muslims is that in the wake of the nuclear deal, Iran has accelerated its efforts to spread its influence.

Iran’s direct and indirect presence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon has garnered some international attention, yet its actions in the Palestinian arena are still ignored by the world.

That Iran provides financial and military aid to Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad has never been a secret. In fact, both the Iranians and the Palestinian radical groups have been boasting about their relations.

Iran funnels money to these groups because they share its desire to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic empire. Like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas and Islamic Jihad agreed to play the role of Tehran’s proxies and enablers in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

 

Iran used to funnel money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they share its desire to eliminate Israel and replace it with an Islamic empire. Relations between Iran and Hamas foundered a few years back, when Hamas leaders refused to support the Iranian-backed Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad. Pictured above: Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal (left) confers with Iranian “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei, in 2010. (Image source: Office of the Supreme Leader)

But puppets must remain puppets. Iran gets nasty when its dummies do not play according to its rules. This is precisely what happened with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Relations between Iran and Hamas foundered a few years back over the crisis in Syria. Defying their masters in Tehran, Hamas leaders refused to declare support for the Iranian-backed Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad. Things between Iran and Hamas have been pretty bad ever since.

First, the Assad government closed down Hamas offices in Damascus. Second, Assad expelled the Hamas leadership from Syria. Third, Iran suspended financial and military aid to Hamas, further aggravating the financial crisis that the Gaza-based Islamist movement had already been facing.

Islamic Jihad got it next. Iranian mullahs woke up one morning to realize that Islamic Jihad leaders have been a bit unfaithful. Some of the Islamic Jihad leaders were caught flirting with Iran’s Sunni rivals in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. Even worse, the Iranians discovered that Islamic Jihad was still working closely with their erstwhile allies in the Gaza Strip, Hamas.

Iran had had high hopes for Islamic Jihad replacing Hamas as Tehran’s darling, and major proxy in the Palestinian arena. But here were Islamic Jihad leaders and activists working with their cohorts in Hamas, in apparent disregard of Papa Iran.

The mullahs did not lose much time. Outraged by Islamic Jihad’s apparent disloyalty, Iran launched its own terror group inside the Gaza Strip: Al-Sabireen (The Patient Ones). This group, which currently consists of several hundred disgruntled ex-Hamas and ex-Islamic Jihad members, was meant to replace Islamic Jihad the same way Islamic Jihad was supposed to replace Hamas in the Gaza Strip — in accordance with Iran’s scheme.

Lo and behold: it is hard to get things right with Iran. Al-Sabireen has also failed to please its masters in Tehran and is not “delivering.” Palestinian sources in the Gaza Strip say that Iran has realized that the investment in Al-Sabireen has not been worthwhile because the group has not been able to do anything “dramatic” in the past two years. By “dramatic,” the sources mean that Al-Sabireen has neither emerged as a serious challenger to Islamic Jihad or Hamas, and has not succeeded in killing enough Israelis.

So Iran has gone running back to its former bedfellow, Islamic Jihad.

For now, Iran is not prepared fully to bring Hamas back under its wings. Hamas, for the Iranians, is a “treacherous” movement, thanks to its periodic temporary ceasefires with Israel. The Iranian leaders want to see Hamas killing Jews every day, with no break. Ironically, Hamas has become too “moderate” for the Iranian leadership because it is not doing enough to drive Jews out of the region.

That leaves Iran with the Islamic Jihad.

In a surprise move, the Iranians this week hosted Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Shalah and senior officials from his organization, in a renewed bid to revive Islamic Jihad’s role as the major puppet of Tehran in the Gaza Strip. Islamic Jihad officials said that the visit has resulted in the resumption of Iranian financial aid to their cash-strapped organization. As a result of the rift between Islamic Jihad and Iran, the Iranians are said to have cut off nearly 90% of their financial aid to the Palestinian terror organization.

Some Palestinians, such as political analyst Hamadeh Fara’neh, see the rapprochement between Iran and Islamic Jihad as a response to the warming of relations between Hamas and Turkey. The Iranians, he argues, are unhappy with recent reports that suggested that Turkey was acting as a mediator between Hamas and Israel.

Other Palestinians believe that Iran’s real goal is to unite Islamic Jihad and Al-Sabireen so that they would become a real and realistic alternative to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Whatever Iran’s intentions may be, one thing is clear: The Iranians are taking advantage of the nuclear deal to move forward with their efforts to increase their influence over some Arab and Islamic countries. Iran is also showing that it remains very keen on playing a role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one that emboldens radical groups that are bent on the destruction of Israel and that share the same values as the Islamic State terror group.

Iran’s latest courtship of Islamic Jihad is yet another attempt by the mullahs to deepen their infiltration of the Palestinian arena by supporting and arming any terror group that strives to smash Israel. For now, it seems that Iran’s scheme is working, largely thanks to the apathy of the international community, where many believe that Iran has been declawed by the nuclear deal.

But more Palestinian terror group leaders may soon perform the “pilgrimage” to their masters in Tehran. If this keeps up, the Iranians themselves will puppeteer any Palestinian state that is created in the region. Their ultimate task, after all, is to use this state as a launching pad to destroy Israel. And the Iranians are prepared to fund and arm any Palestinian group that is willing to help achieve this goal.

Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.

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Article 3

The Israeli Defense Forces Fill the Void

The Military Steps Into the Diplomatic Vacuum With the Palestinians

By David Makovsky and Gabrielle Chefitz

Foreign Affairs, May 6, 2016

Next week, Israel will be transfixed by the trial of Elor Azaria, a sergeant in the Israeli Defense Forces who was indicted for manslaughter in the Jaffa Military Court for allegedly shooting a Palestinian stabber who was wounded and lying motionless on the ground. The whole incident, which took place in Hebron in March, was captured on video and quickly went viral.

Immediately after the shooting, right-wing politicians rose to Azaria’s defense, noting that the Palestinian was no innocent. After all, he had tried to stab an Israeli first in what was one of more than 200 similar cases since October. They have accused the government of abandoning the soldier; many say that he feared that the Palestinian assailant had an explosive device. Meanwhile, Knesset House Committee Chairman David Bitan, a member of the right-wing Likud Party, kicked off a campaign to petition the Israeli president to pardon Azaria. Education Minister Naftali Bennett, from the right-wing Jewish Home Party, has also publically supported him.


Israeli soldier Elor Azaria is greeted by friends and relatives as he arrives to his home in the city of Ramle near Tel Aviv April 22, 2016.

Throughout the controversy, the Israeli security establishment has remained steadfast. Following the incident, Gadi Eisenkot, the IDF chief of staff, took the unusual step of writing a letter to all soldiers, in which he defended the trial and noted that “safeguarding the IDF’s values is not a right but a duty.” For him, a major principle is at stake: Israel has rules of engagement that should not be ignored. Some right-wing politicians have urged the IDF to adopt a shoot-to-kill policy in cases of threat, rather than current policy, which dictates using the minimum force required to neutralize the threat.

In this, even Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, who is considered a hawk on Palestinian issues, has backed Eisenkot. “The IDF chief, and not gang leaders, will determine the rules of engagement,” he said. After depictions of Yaalon’s face in the cross-hairs went viral on social media, Yaalon said, “The good of the country is more important than my own.”

The incident captures the IDF’s growing involvement in the Palestinian issue. Seeing a diplomatic vacuum in Israeli politics since the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2014, the IDF has increasingly worked to assert itself as a guardian of democratic values and a stabilizer in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. As the citizens’ army, the IDF has long viewed itself as acting above the political fray, able to look strategically at the needs of the state, rather than getting bogged down by political considerations. To be sure, the forces have no interest in taking the place of diplomats and hammering out a final agreement with the Palestinians, but the top brass knows how quickly the Palestinian situation can escalate.

Supporters of Elor Azaria take part in a protest calling for his release in Tel Aviv, Israel April 19, 2016.

And so the IDF has promoted initiatives to ease the situation. For example, in February, the Israeli defense establishment announced a plan to allow 30,000 more Palestinians to work in Israel, despite the continued escalation in stabbings of Israelis. Eisenkot has repeatedly stressed the need for distinguishing between those who stab and the general population and the harm to Israeli interests that would come from preventing Palestinians from working in Israeli towns or West Bank industrial zones. “There are 120,000 Palestinians who provide livelihood for 600,000–700,000 family members. It’s a moderating influence, and I think it is in our interest to allow this,” Eisenkot said, in a rare speech, in January at the annual conference of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies.

Further, on Monday this week, Yaalon announced that Israel would reopen the Erez crossing, one of the main crossing points into the Gaza Strip, which has been closed for the past eight years. “It is in our interests that a significant amount of truckloads of food continues to go to Gaza,” Yaalon said in a statement indicating the military’s concern about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. “It is our interest that Gazans live in dignity, both from a humanitarian point of view and because this is a way to protect the peace, in addition to existing security deterrents.”

Yaalon acknowledged that Hamas does use some of the materials that make it into Gaza to rebuild destroyed tunnels and stockpiles, and for a short while Israel did stop the supply of cement for residential reconstruction. Yet the IDF seems to believe that homelessness in Gaza could contribute more to extremism than cement, and so it has championed the rebuilding of Gaza, allowing around 900 trucks carrying goods from reconstruction materials to bring food and medicine into Gaza each day. In doing so, the IDF also helped make the Palestinians understand that they would have something to lose in any future conflict.

Along with easing restrictions on access and movement in the West Bank, the Israeli defense establishment has stressed the importance of strengthening the PA security forces and maintaining security cooperation, even as Palestinian negotiators say the bilateral security talks are suspended. (Such pauses have been announced before on the Palestinian side, but the security coordination has continued.) In March, Eisenkot briefed the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on talks between IDF officials and their Palestinian counterparts. The talks had involved a plan for reducing Israeli military incursions into and gradually reestablishing full Palestinian control over the Palestinian urban areas, known in diplomatic parlance as Area A. The 1995 interim agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip (known as Oslo II), placed Area A under PA civil and security control. This arrangement remained in effect until the second intifada, in 2000, when suicide bombs and other forms of violence convinced Israel that Area A was no longer sacrosanct. It thus went into Palestinian urban areas in a bid to defeat the uprising.

Reestablishing Palestinian control has long been a contentious issue. The IDF insists that it avoids entering Palestinian urban areas unless absolutely necessary, such as cases in which the IDF feels it cannot share a very sensitive intelligence source with Palestinian counterparts (an argument Palestinians believe is used rather too frequently). Under the new proposal, the IDF would agree to end all operations in Area A except for “ticking time bomb” cases.

Although Area A talks are now stalled because of political conditions on both sides, the Israeli defense establishment’s initiative reflects growing concern that the Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation could collapse—along with the Palestinian Authority—as well as a heightened willingness to do something about it. To be sure, Bennett and other politicians have publicly opposed the Area A talks, but the IDF has pushed forward.

However, the IDF is not detached from the Israeli cabinet. Key to this complex relationship is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is often caught between the political right and the defense establishment that is convinced that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored. For him, it is convenient that the IDF publicly recognizes what he already knows to be true but is hesitant to say because of pressure both within his coalition and from external forces calling for further concessions.

As head of a center-right coalition, in other words, Netanyahu has an easier time acceding to the assessment of the Israeli defense establishment than actively leading such initiatives. For now, Netanyahu has been willing to defer to the IDF. For example, on Wednesday, the prime minister’s bureau released a statement noting that the issue of returning terrorists’ bodies to their families would now be under the purview of the defense minister and the public security minister. In the past, Netanyahu has been vocal in his opposition to such a policy. Right-wing politicians say that returning the bodies generates politically charged funerals. However, the defense establishment believes that withholding the bodies generates even more Palestinian resentment. Meanwhile, as right-wing attacks against Eisenkot intensify, it could get harder for Netanyahu to give the IDF room to work.

In Eisenkot’s recent letter, he reminded his soldiers that the fate of Israel depends on both its strength and its righteousness, evoking the words of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. It is too bad that his style of leadership, embodied by today’s defense establishment, is not to the liking of some Israeli politicians today.

DAVID MAKOVSKY is the Director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute. He served on Secretary of State John F. Kerry’s negotiating team during the 2013–2014 Israeli-Palestinian talks. GABRIELLE CHEFITZ is a research assistant at the Washington Institute.
 

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