Well-Made World 36

al-Ahram's Khaled Amayreh reports on the impending reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah, preparations for which have seen the previously-unlikely release of a number of Hamas supporters from Palestinian jails or the custody of Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority. Most significant in this attempted rapprochement is the likelihood that any joint statement of agreement issued by the two factions will be based on the so-called Prisoners' Statement of 2006, which originally called for a release of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and Israel's full retreat from lands occupied in 1967.

Ilan Pappe, now at Exeter, offers to the Inter-Press service some general thoughts on the current state of Israeli-Palestinian affairs, the 2008 election in the US, and the prospective role of Islam in the daily lives of Palestinians.

Patrick Cockburn fills in some details of a new Iraqi-American security agreement. George Bush wants it signed by 31 July; Moqtada al-Sadr sees in it a ploy to put "an American in every house."

As reported earlier this week, John McCain and Barack Obama find themselves both supporting the FISA amendment, which would not only legalize the Bush administrations warrantless wiretaps but would obscure entirely the breadth and scope of the program since it was instituted after 11 September. This constitutes a stark reversal of position for both men. Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, speaks to The Real News's Zaa Nkweta.

Ehud Olmert, the failure of Annapolis, and the One State Solution

Unbelievable interview with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is featured in today's edition of Haaretz. Well, maybe not so unbelievable. Olmert is quoted as saying that as soon as a "South African style" struggle for equal voting rights is realized in Israel/Palestine, whereby the whole of the Palestinian population both inside the Green Line and in the Occupied Territories is recognized along one man/one vote lines, "the state of Israel is finished." Aside from officially establishing the thoroughly racist nature of the Israeli state--no surprise to anyone with half a brain--Olmert makes some other fascinating moves in the interview. He claims that any "peace process" will require "patience and sophistication" on the part of the Israelis (time not healing all wounds, but rather enabling apartheid walls and illegal settlements to become facts on the ground); he also lambastes an already-embarrassing "leader," Mahmoud Abbas, calling him "a weak partner [in the peace talks], and, as Tony Blair says, [one who] has yet to formulate the tools and may not manage to do so." Loyal NE readers, may we be the first to inform you: we are through the looking-glass.

Olmert's interview makes a recent "declaration" in the Electronic Intifada (co-written, among others, by Joseph Massad, Ilan Pappe, and Ali Abunimah) seem all the more poignant, if not utterly impossible in practice. In the piece, its authors make all the historically legitimate arguments as to why the "One-State Solution" is the only honest and fair one available; yet, and especially in the light of Olmert's Haaretz interview, it fails to acknowledge that, at the "official" level of Israeli politics, it is a complete and utter non-starter. Such is the paradox faced by the One-Staties: a thoroughly legitimate premise that is, it seems, impossible to realize.

Well-Made World 15

US

• Gilbert Achcar, a favorite of No Empires, provides a balance sheet on Washington's surge, as George Bush announces that all additional US troops mandated by the surge are in place. A writer for the Socialist Resistance website is Achcar's interlocutor, and while the questions asked may leave one wanting, Achcar's responses are illuminating, particularly as he traces shifts in the strategic/political thinking of Moqtada al-Sadr and Hassan Nasrallah.
• The Israeli paper Haaretz features a section called "The Israeli Factor: Ranking the presidential candidates," which ranks the American presidential candidates by how Israel would fare should he/she be elected. Unsurprisingly, front-runners Clinton and Giuliani are at the top of the list, Giuliani for turning down a $10 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, after the prince suggested US policies in the Middle East (and Palestine in particular) might have played a factor in the attacks. (We're surprised someone from the Saudi monarchy was allowed to insinuate even THAT much.) You may recall Giuliani's much-lauded outburst at the second Republican debate not long again after Ron Paul (not included in the Haaretz list) suggested that a cause for 9/11 might have been the fact "we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years." "That's really an extraordinary statement," Giuliani shot back. "As someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq; I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11." No Empires cannot help but be blown away by the fact our fellow New Yorker gets away with this shit. Notably, Barack Obama sits at the low end of the scale--despite his recent overtures toward AIPAC-- but the lowest rating went to Republican Chuck Hagel, who called for an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon last summer.

Middle East

• Just sworn in as the head of a Palestinian emergency cabinet, Salam Fayyad is already telling Palestinians in Gaza, "'You are in our hearts, and the top of our agenda." No complaints from him, however, when Israel cut off fuel supplies to Gaza gas stations, and not a peep in the face of reports that Ehud Barak--he who, as prime minister, gave the go-ahead to Ariel Sharon's "right-of-ownership walk-about" (the phrase is David Hirst's) on the Temple Mount, accompanied by scores of Israeli security forces, sparking the (ongoing) second Intifada--now, as defense minister, plans to launch a military operation in Gaza within weeks.
• Ilan Pappe, in a piece for the Electronic Intifada, decries the Western media's abandonment of any historical context in its coverage of recent events in Gaza, and calls for an explicit rejection of any framing of these events under the auspices of a "global war on terror." He also reminds us that the Strip--not just since last week, but since Oslo--has been conceived of as a completely separate "geo-political entity" by Israel, the United States, and the capitulationist Palestinian "leadership."
  

Well-Made World #14

US

• No Empires still hates Lee Bollinger. He was terrible as our university president, and only gets worse when it comes to placating the ADL and friends.
• NE could not pass this one up. Turns out that, since 1994, the US military has been researching the use of, shall we say, "unconventional," non-lethal weaponry. The highlight of this article is the revelation of one US hope to develop a bomb that would cause uncontrollable sexual urges among (male) enemy forces. "Let's watch these men fuck, and then kill them!"--is this how it would have gone? For more on enduring racist assumptions about Arab sexuality, from Andre Gide to Abu Ghraib, as well as an eloquent work of intellectual history, see Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs, Chicago, 2007.
• Manhattan judge Charles S. Haight Jr. reverses his recent rebuke of NYPD surveillance tactics, dealing a blow to organized dissent in the city No Empires calls home.

Middle East

• Huge developments in Israel/Palestine over the last twenty-four hours. The Western "strategy" of isolating a democratically-elected government is playing out to devastating effect in the Gaza Strip, amid recent intense factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Abu Mazen has, unsurprisingly, dissolved the fragile unity government in Palestine and declared a state of emergency; what is surprising, however, is that Fatah appears to have been so thoroughly routed, given its links to Muhammad Dahlan and his millions in arms, courtesy of Washington. No Empires is prone to believe Hamas spokesmen who say that they were pressed to ensure that Dahlan's thugs (the National Security Forces) did not act as a supra-governmental force--though this, of course, does not mean we condone the violence, which of course plays right into Washington's and Jerusalem's hands.
• The Palestine Center for Human Rights documents, and condemns, the recent violence in the Occupied Territories, going so far as to apologize for their staff's inability to fully cover events as they unfold, given the starkly dangerous atmosphere in which they are working.
• Alvaro de Soto, former UN coordinator for the Middle East (as of yesterday) discusses Palestine/Israel in his End of Mission Report, claiming that the one-state solution is gaining ground, and also that Western refusals to deal with democratically-elected Hamas officials may lead to a weakening of democratic impluses amongst Palestinians. Full text of his speech can be found here.
• Not long after Desmond Tutu compares the situation in Palestine to South African apartheid, Israel walks all over him once again. Despite Tutu's efforts to investigate the carnage wreaked at Beit Hanoun last year, Itzhak Levanon shrugs it off, playing the part of the broken record. As usual, he cites "imbalanced and one-sided resolutions" in the UN council, "which utterly ignores the fact that we live with terrorism every day and that more than 3,000 Qassam rockets have been launched into Israel since we withdrew from Gaza," adding that "a large part of these missiles have been launched precisely from towns such as Beit Hanoun." Towns such as Beit Hanoun, No Empires asks? Cheap rhetorical devices abound.
  
• As you may well know, No Empires loves Ilan Pappe. Thank you JL.
• And finally, Amira Hass on the current situation in Gaza.

Europe

• Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, responds in full to the exiting Prime Minister's repudiation of his paper, wondering if Blair would have gone so far if the Independent hadn't been so scathingly critical of Blair and Bush's march toward Baghdad.
  

Well-Made World #9

• In Russia, gay rights activists are attacked by neo-Nazis, under the eyes of the police--and then the beaten activists are arrested.
• Israeli historian and No Empires hero Ilan Pappe's latest piece for Electronic Intifada, in parts one and two.
• Virginia Tilley on the academic boycott of Israel.