Mideast Media Sampler 05/19/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Who's in charge?

Articles in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post highlight the behind the scenes maneuvering in the administration. How much of each article is accurate is unclear. It seems that members of the administration are angling to be seen as the "good guys" who are encouraging the administration to accept the historical changes in the Arab world. I haven't examined each one closely enough, but there may be inconsistencies between the articles. The Wall Street Journal reported in Power Shifts on Foreign-Policy Team :

The Obama White House has moved to exert greater civilian control over the military, challenging the views of the top brass in some areas, officials say. At the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's State Department, together with a more assertive White House National Security Council, has taken a lead in crafting America's response to the greatest geopolitical challenge since the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

Underscoring this shift is Mr. Obama's choice of venue to deliver the address: the State Department. The address Thursday morning—which is late afternoon, Cairo time—will be the president's first major policy address from the home base of U.S. foreign diplomacy. The military's standing in the White House reflects lingering tensions with some of Mr. Obama's civilian advisers that grew out of a 2009 debate over escalating the war in Afghanistan, according to senior U.S. officials and foreign diplomats. 

When popular revolutions began sweeping the Arab world, many in the military, which has been generally cautious about intervention, were reluctant to see longstanding Arab allies, such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, pushed out.

The Washington Post's Obama faces pressure from allies on eve of speech Thursday on Middle East policy doesn't seem as certain that the State Department is dominant. Regarding the Middle East the Post reports:

Advisers describe one camp, led by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, arguing for Obama to set out a specific set of principles to resolve the conflict, including setting final borders, dividing Jerusalem and finessing the emotional question of whether Palestinian refugees should have the right to return to homes inside Israel....A more general statement would mark a victory for national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon and Vice President Biden, who have long professional histories with Middle East adviser Dennis B. Ross, a veteran of the Clinton administration’s peace efforts.Ross favors giving Israel more time to assess the region’s changing politics before adding new pressure to return to negotiations.

(What the heck is a "professorial history?" And who would ever describe Biden that way?)

An earlier paragraph is kind of disturbing:

U.S. officials have also said it is too early to tell what kind of Palestinian government will emerge from the agreement between the secular Fatah movement, which recognizes Israel, and Hamas, the armed Islamist movement designated a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel.

"[T]oo early?"

A similar article Focus Is on Obama as Tensions Soar Across Mideast in the New York Times reports:

Mr. Obama, who is set to address Americans — and, more significantly, Muslims around the world — from the State Department on Thursday morning, may yet have something surprising up his sleeve. One administration official said that there remained debate about whether Mr. Obama would formally endorse Israel’s pre-1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations over a Palestinian state, a move that while not necessarily a policy shift, would send an oratorical signal that the United States expected Israel to make concessions.  

But Mr. Obama did not plan to present an American blueprint for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, White House officials said, and it remained unclear if he would even endorse a Palestinian state on pre-1967 lines, a move opposed, administration officials said, by his chief Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross. Mr. Obama did seek to increase pressure on Syria by imposing largely symbolic sanctions on its leader, President Bashar al-Assad, in the wake of the bloody crackdown on political protests there.  

White House officials declined to say whether Mr. Obama would go further in Thursday’s speech and call on Mr. Assad to resign. 

It's good to know that as assumptions about the Middle East are being challenged, there's a constant belief that Israeli concessions will bring peace and stability to the region. Just like after 2000 when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon and 2005 when Israel withdrew from Gaza.


2) The anti-Tom

Thomas Friedman in Bibi and Barack:

Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu of Israel is always wondering why his nation is losing support and what the world expects of a tiny country surrounded by implacable foes. I can’t speak for the world, but I can speak for myself. I have no idea whether Israel has a Palestinian or Syrian partner for a secure peace that Israel can live with. But I know this: With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel’s future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs — between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world — Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.
I repeat: It may not be possible. But Netanyahu has not spent his time in office using Israel’s creativity to find ways to do such a deal. He has spent his time trying to avoid such a deal — and everyone knows it. No one is fooled.

Jackson Diehl in Mahmoud Abbas’s formula for war

Two weeks ago, Abbas blew up four years of U.S.-sponsored institution building, relative peace and growing prosperity in the West Bank by signing a “reconciliation” agreementwith the Hamas movement — a deal that probably will obligate him to fire his progressive prime minister, release scores of jailed Hamas militants and bond his security forces with Hamas’s Iranian-equipped army. On Tuesday, he published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he committed himself to seeking a U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September. 

It was, as the Times put it in a separate news story, “a declaration of war on the status quo.” Abbas’s new strategy is radically different: The U.N. vote, he wrote, will “pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights bodies and the International Court of Justice” — in other words, sanctions. 

Meanwhile, there will be a change in Palestinian doctrine. The new goal will be one on which Abbas and Hamas can agree: not a peace treaty leading to statehood but statehoodfollowed by negotiations, “a key focus” of which “will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees” — whose return to Israel would mean its demise. “Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another,” Abbas declared. This is a formula for war — or “the third intifada,” as Palestinians are already calling it.

It follows that Friedman is the one being fooled. And in a devastating paragraph, which eviscerates the Friedman's way of thinking, Diehl writes:

Embedded in these demands is what might be called the soft bigotry of wishful thinking about Arab strongmen. U.S. and European leaders indulgently swallow the private assurances they receive from suit-wearing, English-speaking men like Abbas, rather than judging them by their actual behavior. Until this week Western governments have clung to the idea that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is secretly a “reformer,” even as he guns down his own people. Similarly, Obama persists in telling Jewish leaders and members of Congress that “Abbas is ready to make peace”; it follows that Netanyahu is the problem.

I guess this is consistent with the "too soon" feeling in the administration about the Hamas/Fatah merger.


3) Naqba nostalgia

Naqba Day is covered by many in the MSM with a great degree of sympathy. The nostalgia of Palestinians for their "lost" past is highlighted:

They waved Palestinian flags and held up huge replica wooden keys to homes they fled or were expelled from during the Arab-Israeli war which accompanied the creation of the Jewish state. 

Barry Rubin provided a much different perspective on 1948.

But al-Husseini rejected partition and so did all of the Arab states. While Jordan wanted to make a deal and Egypt’s government wasn’t enthusiastic, they all had to go along with al-Husseini’s intransigence, their hysterical public opinion, and the other Arab states’ pressure. The Arab League’s leader, a Nazi agent during World War Two, bragged that the Jews would be massacred. The Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with the Nazis during the war and were subsidized by them before the war, sent volunteers to fight the Jews. 

And so a Palestinian Arab army, whose three chief commanders had all fought for the Nazis during World War Two, went to war against the Jews using Nazi-supplied weapons (provided for the Palestinian Arab revolt in 1939 and for an Egyptian revolt that never happened in 1942). They lost. 

In Europe those who are nostalgic for the war against the Jews in the 1930's and 40's are called skinheads. In the Middle East they're called dispossessed. The presence of Jorg Haider who had an unhealthy yearning as a junior partner in the Austrian government rendered that government a pariah; Mahmoud Abbas, whose thesis was a form of Holocaust denial, on the other hand is considered a peace partner.

This post by Matthew Knee at Legal Insurrection makes the point:

The existence of Al-Nakba Day is also a reminder that "The Occupation" is not the problem and 1967 borders are not the solution. Al-Nakba Day is about the existence of Israel – and thus the existence of nearly all the Jews who remain in the Middle East. To those who fully accept the Nakba narrative, there is unlikely to be a path to peace compatible with the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish State. Until Israel's neighbors accept Israel's right to exist as a Jewish State, peace will not be possible.

There's a very nice accompanying slide show.

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