Mideast Media Sampler 06/02/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Gas Pains

The New York Times reports on the Egyptian failure to continue supplying gas to Israel, Dispute Grows as Egyptian Gas Is Still Not Flowing to Israel.

Despite the passive voice in the headline the reporting seems pretty solid.

More than a month after saboteurs blew up an Egyptian pipeline supplying natural gas to Israel, the line is repaired but gas is not flowing and foreign shareholders of the company suspect politics to be the reason. They are threatening legal action against Egypt. 
American and Thai shareholders in the pipeline have demanded urgent consultations to avoid resorting to binding arbitration based on trade treaties. One letter to Egyptian ministries from an American company with an Israeli chairman threatens a lawsuit of $8 billion. 

I had not realized that the aid promises of President Obama had conditions attached.

The gas deal has been an integral part of the two countries’ relations and has been supported by Washington. President Obama recently offered Egypt $1 billion in loan guarantees and $1 billion in debt relief on the condition that it meets its commitments. The United States has told Egypt that its security obligations in the northern Sinai are among its commitments, an American official said. 

This is disturbing, though it's unclear if this man is still a judge or if he is in any related to the legal aspects of the case.

A former deputy chief of Egypt’s court of appeals, Judge Mahmoud al-Khodheiri, recently expressed a common sentiment about the gas deal in an interview with Al Jazeera. “I consider the export of gas to Israel an act of treason, and we should stop it,” he said. “I salute the people who bombed the gas pipe because this is my blood that is being transferred to the enemy.” 

The reporter, Ethan Bronner also includes this important detail, to show that the idea that Israel is getting a below market deal is false.

There is no international benchmark price of natural gas because its price depends largely on how the gas is transported and how far it travels. So while Germany pays $7 per million B.T.U.’s to Russia and Israel $3 to $4 per million B.T.U.’s to Egypt, Germany also pays $4 to $5 per unit in transport costs and fees along the way whereas Israel only pays $1. The net profit to Egypt from Israel’s payments is the same or better than that to Russia from Germany, he said. 

2) Syrian opposition

Tony Badran has had some fascinating tweets about Syria recently, including this

For instnce, Assad's current decree covers those sentenced under decree 59 of 2008, which dealt with, uh, building violations.

and this:

Asad's decree excluded those convicted of belonging to “an organization that aims to change the social and economic status of the state.”

And one of Assad's former guests has turned on him too, according to Badran:

In addition, Al Jazeera hit Assad in a sensitive spot, turning his so-called “resistance” credentials against him, when former Arab Member of the Knesset Azmi Bishara – who until recently was feted in Damascus as a symbol of Arab resistance – criticized the regime, including Assad’s inheritance of power from his father, on the air and ridiculed its narrative depicting the uprising as a foreign conspiracy. As far as Assad is concerned, that Bishara, who resides in Doha, was allowed to use the Al Jazeera platform meant this was official Qatari policy.

The New York Times reporters that children are among those killed.

Syrian military forces killed 42 people Wednesday, including a 10-year-old boy and 4-year-old girl, in raids on a string of towns around the central city of Homs as the government continued trying to crush a three-month-old popular uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, human rights activists said. 

Babylon and Beyond reports that a Facebook page in memory of 13 year old Hamza Khatib has become a center of the Syrian opposition's attention.

The Facebook page created in memory of Hamza Khatib, a 13-year-old boy who died last week, allegedly tortured and killed in state custody, has become a focal point for opposition to four decades of rule by the Assad family in Syria.  The teenager, who protesters say was brutally abused before being slain in custody, has become a symbol of the pro-democracy protests, Syrian activists said.

Physically, though, opposition figures have gathered in Turkey.

On Wednesday, the movement to transform Syria appeared to take a critical step forward in an unlikely spot: With this sunny beach resort town as a backdrop, about 300 Assad opponents gathered at a hotel to try to give structure and voice to a movement that has been leaderless and disparate. 

The Washington Post features an editorial, The slaughter in Syria:

On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch made an important contribution to knowledge about the events in Daraa, a town and its surrounding province in southwestern Syria where mass protests first erupted on March 18. Based on interviews with more than 50 residents and a review of dozens of videos, the group concluded that at least 418 people have been killed there over the course of 10 weeks and that the regime’s “abuses qualify as crimes against humanity.”

The report is stomach-turning in its account of what was inflicted on the community of 80,000 and its suburbs. The trouble began, it says, when 15 young boys, aged 10 to 15, were arrested for anti-regime graffiti; when they were finally released, they were “bruised and bloodied after what they described as severe torture in detention.” As mass protests swelled, “security forces deliberately targeted protesters,” who bared their chests and carried olive branches to show their peaceful intentions. A mosque where many took refuge was assaulted on March 23, leading to the deaths of 30.

The end of the editorial explicitly criticizes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her weak response to the ongoing violence in Syria.


3) Thomas Friedman's lost decade, part 2

Yesterday, I critiqued Thomas Friedman's latest column, The Bin Laden Decade.

Subsequently I saw two observations that were relevant.

One was from Barry Rubin, in Why Borders Matter.

Yet that’s precisely the point. It is because Israel CANNOT ASSUME AND HAS GOOD REASON NOT TO ASSUME that an agreement with the Palestinian Authority would lead to lasting peace. This is the factor that is generally left out of Western calculations that simply cannot comprehend Israel’s position on the issues.

Central to Friedman's column is a (false) premise that there is no good reason Israel hasn't made peace with the Palestinians. For Friedman, if only Israel would come to an agreement it would have peace and the attendant benefits including security. But an agreement is just a signed piece of paper and it would require Israel to make tangible concessions for that peace of paper, which could be reversed.

The second observation comes from David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy

I responded that current Israeli right-wing politics would have been literally unbelievable to an Israeli leftist twenty-five years ago. A Labor government led by a non-peacenik general withdrew Israeli force from Lebanon and offered to split Jerusalem, and with Yasser Arafat no less! Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza! Benyamin Netanyahu accepts a two-state solution! The purported rightist Avigdor Lieberman advocates large-scale territorial exchange with the Palestinians, including parts of pre-1967 Israel! What Israeli leftist circa 1986 could have even dreamed of such progress?

In short, while the Israeli left has largely collapsed under the weight of Oslo, the Israeli right has moved to positions once associated with the center, even the center-left and beyond. The Netanyahu government is far less “right-wing” than Yitzhak Shamir’s twenty years ago.

Another of Friedman's assumptions is that the only reason Israel's hasn't made peace is because the current Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu won't, for apparently ideological reasons. Bernstein's recounting of the political situation in Israel shows how mendacious this view is. What's remarkable isn't just how much Israel's position has changed in 17 1/2 years, but how little the Palestinian views have changed in the same time. Mahmoud Abbas still refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state and instead plays word games when he's pressed on the topic.

Thomas Friedman is not serious. Instead of assimilating information and applying to situations he writes about, he acts as if a clever turn of a phrase or neologism are the same thing as analysis.

4) It's a legal matter

Last week, Alan Baker and a group of lawyers sent a letter to Secretary General Bin Ki Moon of the UN.

An international group of some 60 attorneys, including former Foreign Ministry legal adviser Alan Baker, has appealed to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to prevent a General Assembly resolution on unilateral Palestinian statehood, based on the pre-1967 lines.

In a letter dated Wednesday, the attorneys noted that such a resolution would be a violation of all past agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. They added that it would also contravene UN resolutions 242 and 338.

The letter contains 9 points, including this one:

6. The Palestinians entered into the various agreements constituting what is known as the "Oslo Accords" in the full knowledge that Israel's settlements existed in the areas, and that settlements would be one of the issues to be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations. Furthermore, the Oslo Accords impose no limitation on Israel's settlement activity in those areas that the Palestinians agreed would continue to be under Israel's jurisdiction and control pending the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.

I did a search on Alan Baker and Palestinians in Google. Other than the Jerusalem Post, not a single newspaper seems to have picked up on this story. Given that any legal challenge to Israel seems to make the news, it's odd that no major newspaper could be bothered with Baker's initiative.

5) Pew 1

Recently Pew released a survey of Twitter and Facebook and found that in the wake of PM Netanyahu's visit to the United States, users of bothoverwhelmingly supported Israel.

Pesach Benson remarks:

I’m forever getting emails grousing at how the Israeli government was not/is not/will never be P.R. savvy. I often share that frustration. Today, I’m comforted that Israel’s message resonated in the majority of 478,000 blog posts, tweets and status updates.But more than that, I’ve long-felt that it’s up to Israel’s supporters to empower themselves: to become more knowledgable about the Mideast conflict. It’s about speaking up for Israel at school, at work, online, diving in and getting involved.

I do wonder how Pew broke down pro-Israel. Would J-Street, for example, have been included on the pro-Israel side? Based on the criteria mentioned I suspect not. To some degree, this shows a failure of the MSM. People who realize their views are being ignored are more likely to look for and use a platform for broadcasting them. 

If you want to see how out of touch the media is look at Peace without Partners at a blog hosted at the New York Times. As in the case of the Baker letter, it doesn't appear that any major American news organization mentioned this Pew study.

The tweet mentioned at the end of Pesach Benson's post reminded me of (actress) Patricia Heaton's tweet. 

6) Pew 2


How's that Muslim outreach working? Has consulting with Friedman and Zakaria yielded any benefits?

Barry Rubin reads a recent Pew poll and answers, "no."

Technorati Tag: Middle East.