Mideat Media Sampler 08/05/2011

From DG:

1) Occupied Andalusia

A few weeks the Jerusalem Post reported, 'Spain will recognize Palestinian state on 1967 lines'

The Palestinian Authority announced on Thursday that Spain has decided to recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines before September. A spanish diplomat told Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath that Spain would support making the state of Palestine a UN member.

There's some irony in reading Soren Kern's Muslim Countries Financing Jihad in Spain

Spanish authorities say Arab countries are flooding mosques in Spain with a host of anti-Western literature. For example, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs in Qatar has distributed a document in Spanish titled "Mohammed: The Ideal Prophet" which states: "Europe today still considers that the white race is superior to that of color. Europe, with all its pretensions to enlighten and lead … is still behind Islam."

It also strikes me that Islamaphobia may not be Europe's greatest social problem right now. 

2) Seller's remorse

Three years ago, Martin Peretz was among candidate Obama's most vocal proponents. Now he's showing some regrets. (via Martin Kramer)

Among the president’s enthusiastic 2008 followers there appears to be no recognition that he has failed at every foreign venture he has attempted. Indeed, the question of Darfur, the litmus test issue for young true-believers in the campaign that never quite became a presidential venture, has been spun off to a principled do-nothing bureaucrat who has not been able (or, for that matter, tried) to persuade any African or Arab government to treat the Sudanese president, indicted on charges of genocide by the International Criminal Court at The Hague, as being subject to arrest wherever he goes, which he is. 

There is no embarrassment when this head of state arrives anywhere in the region, and there is nothing that embarrasses Omar al-Bashir, neither mass murder nor rapine nor the theft from his people of some $9 billion in cash, according to WikiLeaks documents. Darfur, which should have been the simplest rendezvous with destiny, was unceremoniously dropped from the president’s agenda. Given this, why should we have expected anything more of Obama on more intricate matters? As for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, she travels around the world with all kinds of truisms that have not the semblance of conviction behind them, let alone the threat of force to back them up. So she is mostly talk. Hosni Mubarak was “family.” That was a choice she made. Unlike with her brothers, this family was not. With Bashar al-Assad, it was a little different. Hillary and her boss had the idiot idea that the monstrous president of Syria was a key to Arab-Israeli peace—or, if not a “key to,” a “prerequisite for.” He has now brutalized his own people so ruthlessly that, if ours were a parliamentary system, Obama would long ago have had to resign. He actually grasped nothing about the Syria in which he invested so much of his cachet.

3) The unilateral declaration stunt

Steven Rosen argues that the Palestinian effort to get a state declared by the UN, violates international law because the competing factions - Fatah and Hamas - make a functioning state impossible.

The Fatah Palestinian entity in the West Bank also could meet the legal requirements for statehood, and it would have more international support. It has a functioning government in the Palestinian Authority (PA), a permanent population, and international relations with a very large number of states. It also controls a defined territory, which comprises what are called areas A and B as defined under the Oslo II agreement of September 1995, plus additional territory subsequently transferred by Israel in agreed further redeployments. (Area A is the zone of full civil and security control by the Palestinian Authority, and Area B is a zone of Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian security control.) The Fatah West Bank entity within these lines also could be recognized as a state under international law. 
But Fatah, the PA, and the broader PLO do not seek statehood for this West Bank entity that arguably could meet the legal requirements. Their minimum demand is a state that includes Gaza along with the West Bank, the eastern part of Jerusalem, and all the other parts of mandatory Palestine that were under Jordanian and Egyptian control before 1967. Fatah, the PA, and the PLO are demanding title to lands and authority over populations they do not control, being as they are under the rule of Hamas and Israel. 

Unlike the two Palestinian entities that already exist, either of which could be recognized as a Palestinian state because they seem to fulfill the legal requirements, the Palestinian entity that a General Assembly majority will recognize as a state this September does not actually exist on Earth. It is imaginary and aspirational, not real. And it does not meet the legal requirements. 

Asaf Romirowsky and Efraim Karsh show the inherent contradictions that have been part of the Palestinian claims during the peace process.

The public diplomacy of Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, also ran contrary to the letter and spirit of 242. The Palestinians have consistently misrepresented the resolution as calling for Israel's complete withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines, while claiming that its stipulation for "a just settlement of the refugee problem" meant endorsement of the Palestinian "right of return"—the standard Arab euphemism for Israel's destruction through demographic subversion. They also sought to undermine the resolution's insistence on the need for a negotiated settlement, seeking time and again to engineer an internationally imposed dictate despite their commitment to a negotiated settlement through the Oslo process.

When Israel offered at the American-convened July 2000 peace summit in Camp David to cede virtually the entire territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state and made concessions with respect to Jerusalem, Arafat responded with a campaign of terror unmatched in the history of the Jewish state. Seven-and-a-half years later, at yet another U.S.-sponsored summit, Mr. Abbas rejected Israel's offer of a Palestinian Arab state in 97% of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and categorically dismissed the request to recognize Israel as a Jewish state alongside the would-be Palestinian state, insisting instead on full implementation of the "right of return."

Since the inauguration of the Obama administration, Mr. Abbas has dropped all remaining pretenses of seeking a negotiated settlement, striving instead to engineer international enforcement of a complete Israeli withdrawal without a peace agreement, or, indeed, any quid pro quo. Were the U.N. General Assembly to fall for the Palestinian ploy, it will not only reward decades of duplicity, intransigence, and violence and betray its own formula of "land for peace," but will be introducing a new and dangerous stage in the century-long feud between Arabs and Jews: that of "land for war."

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