AL GORE & JEFF FISHER -DREAM TEAM FOR WORLD PEACE : AZ IMC

Palestine’s crisis exposes America’s ‘democratic’ sham as Bush fumbles for a legacy
Wednesday, 01 August 2007

By Fawaz Turki

Arabs appeared aghast at the spectacle. Or was it that they were stifling a yawn? Search me.

Last week, two senior Arab diplomats, Abdelelah al-Khatib and Ahmad Aboul Gheit, the foreign ministers respectively of Jordan and Egypt, arrived in Israel on an official visit where they held joint meetings with Israeli leaders. They explained that they were there to "extend a hand of peace on behalf of the whole region". There was now, they gushed, an "historic opportunity" for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, to be followed by normalization of relations between Israel and the countries of the Arab world, along the lines set in the Arab peace initiative originally proposed by the Arab League in 2002.

The Western and Israeli media immediately identified the two Arab officials as "envoys" of the Arab League, there to negotiate on behalf of the 22-member group. It did not take long for the League's secretary general, Amr Mousa, to deny that Jordan and Egypt, the only two Arab states that recognize Israel, were at all delegated by his organization to speak on its behalf.

"They are not acting under the banner of the Arab League, nor have they been sent as delegates by the Arab League", he told reporters. "They represent two Arab countries that under certain circumstances had entered into peace accords and official diplomatic relations [with Israel]".

All well and good. But what is behind this flurry of diplomatic activity that, tellingly, began soon after Hamas was isolated in Gaza and a new "emergency government" was formed in the West Bank - a government whose constitutionality remains problematic but whose responsiveness to a truncated peace settlement is clear?

You might say that that flurry began with George W. Bush on July 16 when he revealed Washington's intentions to revive the peace process in Palestine by sponsoring a regional conference this Autumn to which "high-level" Arab and Israeli representatives will be invited. (And if you're guessing who will not be coming to dinner, and you guessed Hamas, you would be right.)

With 18 months left in office, Bush probably thinks he can salvage some sort of legacy in the region, five years after he had given a major speech committing the US to setting terms for a Palestinian state "by 2007", which turned out to be a lot of hot air. Many Arabs distrusted him then, and they distrust him now. This is, after all, the very American president who harped incessantly on "introducing" Arabs to democracy, and yet when Palestinian Arabs held free and open elections a year and a half ago to choose new leaders, his government not only balked at accepting them but mounted a relentless campaign to topple them by preventing donor funds from reaching the occupied territories, including funds from Arab and Islamic countries, which had faced various threats by the Treasury Department to disrupt their international banking transactions were they to find a way around that.

And it was President Bush, it will be recalled, who in April 2004 dismissed the Palestinian people's Right of Return - which stands at the very pivot of these people's historical narrative - as worthless.

"It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue...will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state and the settling of the refugees there, rather than in Israel," he said at the time.

No other American president had evinced such anti-Palestinian sentiments before, pre-empting, as he did, the outcome of final-status negotiations at which that issue would have been of paramount significance."No other American president had evinced such anti-Palestinian sentiments before, pre-empting, as he did, the outcome of final-status negotiations at which that issue would have been of paramount significance.

And no other American president has been so clueless, and not just about our part of the world. How clueless, not to mention inarticulate and bumbling, is the man? Consider in that regard what he had to say, in response to a question by a reporter, on June 15, 1999, about whether he had the know-how and the experience to direct American foreign policy.

"I think what's important for you to know is that I feel I know what to do, I really do," he retorted. "I may not be able to tell you exactly the nuance of the East Timor situation, but I'll ask Condi Rice, or I'll ask Paul Wolfowitz, or I'll ask Dick Cheney. I'll ask the people who have experience."

As he unveiled his plans for the regional conference two weeks ago he said that Arabs should "end the fiction that Israel does not exist" and "send cabinet-level ministers" to visit it.

Now they have - at a time when Israel's army is still mounting nightly raids in most Palestinian towns, arresting and killing activists, its colonists expanding their settlements, its soldiers manning their checkpoints, and its prisons holding 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners.

What it amounts to is that US officials actually see an opportunity in the crisis that currently afflicts Palestinian politics. And crisis it is.

The new "emergency government" in Ramallah cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be identified as legitimate. It becomes legitimate only when it is ratified by parliament. But as is well known, the majority of this parliament's members happen to be Hamas-affiliated, with half of them already in Israeli jails and the other half opting not to turn up to vote - not just to prevent a quorum but because they actually fear for their lives. (In the West Bank, now a Fatah bastion, even lowly City Council officials and small town mayors, who had won election on the Hamas ticket, have been chased out of their offices, and in some cases harassed and beaten.)

So the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has found a ploy to get around that constitutional hurdle. He plans to convene a meeting of the PLO (in the West Bank, no less) to elect new representatives for its National Council, who will in turn override the parliament. Israel, and along with it the US, is so keen on the idea that it has stated publicly that Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), a man they had for years reviled as a terrorist, will be free to arrive in the occupied terrotories for the occasion, without fear of retribution on their part.

Palestinian society these days is a mess - messier than it has been in recent memory. Its people are divided and its hopes for independent statehood mockingly remote. Gaza is under lock and key, its border crossings shut to all but humanitarian aid, left to rot on its own, while the West Bank, conversely, is being groomed for a "provisional state" under Fatah control, with its leaders pliant to outside diktats.

Meanwhile, we are expected to believe all that naive commentary, and not just in the Western media, about the good guys (the moderate folks in Ramallah who mean well by their people) and the bad guys (the irresponsible gangs in Gaza who started a civil war).

And is it not clear what side we should be on?

One wonders whether future political analysts will not look back with puzzled contempt upon all this pretentious trivia.

The origin of the bitter clashes in Gaza, that brought about this mess in the first place, can be traced back to the time in January 2006 when Hamas duly won the popular vote in the elections. It was then that the Quartet, at the urging of the US, imposed those crippling sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, and encouraged Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah man, to effectively bypass the new government. And to do it by all means, including unconstitutional ones.

Abbas, along with sundry Fatah functionaries, did not need a lot of encouragement to begin performing tasks of ever increasing tawdriness in pursuit of that goal.

As Alistair Crook wrote recently in a review article in the London Review of Books: "At the same time [as all this was going on], the West imposed financial sanctions on the government and isolated it politically, insisting on conducting business and channeling funding exclusively through Abbas. In short, instead of helping Fatah through the transition and facilitating Palestinian unity - and taking advantage of a real chance to include Hamas, Islamism's moderates - the international community pursued an aggressive policy of internal division that established the conditions for the recent violence in Gaza. Europeans may wring their hands at what they see on their TVs, but European policy, acting in concert with the US, bears a large measure of responsibility for what has happened."

There was also the question of Fatah stalwarts being bad losers, refusing to accept the results of their own people's democratic choices. Or to accept the fact, more significantly, that the majority of Palestinians had supped their fill of the brazen excesses, corruption, nepotism and, in places, even decadence of Fatah officials who lived high on the hog, in the midst of abject poverty, and traveled around with Samsonites full of cash. The spectacle represented an assault on the sensibility of most self-respecting people. Not surprisingly these leaders were voted out of office.

It was nevertheless a bitter pill they refused to swallow. After so many years of dominating Palestinian politics, Fatah felt it had warrant to rule in perpetuity. Its leaders are, as it were, the Founding Fathers of modern Palestinian nationalism. They, and they alone, are the guardians of the national interest, and Hamas is a mere Johnny-come-lately. They hence refused to acquiesce to the notion, so common as to be pedestrian in democracy, that no political leadership can lay claim to permanence.

The winds of social change and the ebb and flow of political beliefs, even of taste and fashion, are inconstant. Every generation judges political life according to the present bent of its mood. That is, we judge anew - as elections in democratic countries, held a few years apart, would attest.

The United States, a country that never ceases to harp on the sanctity of that political system, does not see it that way. Israel does not see it that way. And now it seems - as they kow-tow to outside pressure, and visit Tel Aviv to speak, unsolicited, "on behalf" of the people of Palestine - some Arab countries don't see it that way either.

Yet another "regional conference" may indeed be planned for the Autumn, to which Palestinian Contras (for what other word would do here?) will be invited. But what looms ahead is a long, grim duel for the soul of the Palestinian nation as a unitary whole. No one can deflect history from asserting its implacable laws, or Palestinians from finding, finally, the clearing where their sense of national selfhood will anchor its meaning.

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Article comments (4)

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... : Aster
Excellent discussion of the situation in Palestine, and of the dubious plans of the US for the region.

August 02, 2007
Loved talking with you at the National Press Club : Jante Degaul
Please sir, lets talk about Richard Cheney and his involvement with
the American Turkish Council and its direct relationship with BayPoint School.

August 07, 2007
The absolute truth about the 2000 election and 9-11 : Jante Degaul
Please click on this link for more info.

http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:npplZHJ9amkJ:nomorefraud.blogspot.com/2006/10/election-fraud-coverup.html jeff fisher election fraud&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

This is the cached site
The site is down now because I am making all efforts to get the entire world
involved. I am a man of peace and my peace plan is what they are also
trying to stop.

My name is Jeff Fisher aka Jante Degaul
godismyguideforever@gmail.com

I am seeking the help of all Arabs now who have
been horrified by what BayPoint School created.

This world multi-national conspiracy must end now.

I have friends in Palestine, Iran, and a few other nations.
They are all about peace.

I want the world to start screaming that Al Gore is the
Duley Elected President of the United States and that
Jeff Fisher will be America's first Secretary of Peace ASAP.

Tell the world that AIPAC, Vice President Richard B Cheney,
Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff and the American
Turkish Council must stop dictating war which they used so
well at BayPoint School since 1996 with hard evidence from 1998.

Plus one more piece of information. Mrs. Hillary Clinton was
involved with BayPoint School since 1997. That information
came from four members of the CIA in early 2006 delivered
to me in San Fransisco and then a few months later, Grand
Rapids Michigan.

President James Earl Carter and President Gerald Ford
worked with me to get this conspiracy exposed.

I need the support of all Arabs now, Christian and Muslim
to unite in a unique passive way to boycott Israel ASAP
until Ehud Olmert decides to ratify my peace plan and then
Israel can have a true peace for the first time.

Please write to Roger Rancourt ASAP
for he has a backup of the peace plan.
realcountscount@gmail.com

August 07, 2007
AL GORE & JEFF FISHER -DREAM TEAM FOR WORLD PEACE : Jeff Fisher
Hello my friend,

We spoke that day at the National Press Club
I told you I come with great joy and news

Can we meet soon.

Cheney is planning on destroying Iran.

I have to stop him with help from my brothers and sisters who desire peace.

Enshala,
Jeff Fisher

Oh yes her the post that will change things fast once the media picks it up.

May Allah grace the winds of the Internet with peace and absolute truth about
BayPoint School

http://arizona.indymedia.org/publish.php
People need to make comments at that site to stop any more Zionists from censuring the absolute truth. Ten days ago someone in Washington DC used a sniper rife but missed me.

I have Christ in my life and we all understand that God is more powerful when you accept the Children of the Book.

August 23, 2007