This is how Fatah and Hamas reconciled

[Catherina]

antloewenstein Antony Loewenstein
Blog post: This is how Fatah and Hamas reconciled http://bit.ly/mC0VfB
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Robert Fisk has the story:

Secret meetings between Palestinian intermediaries, Egyptian intelligence officials, the Turkish foreign minister, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal – the latter requiring a covert journey to Damascus with a detour round the rebellious city of Deraa – brought about the Palestinian unity which has so disturbed both Israelis and the American government. Fatah and Hamas ended four years of conflict in May with an agreement that is crucial to the Paslestinian demand for a state.

A series of detailed letters, accepted by all sides, of which The Independent has copies, show just how complex the negotiations were; Hamas also sought – and received – the support of Syrian President Bachar al-Assad, the country’s vice president Farouk al-Sharaa and its foreign minister, Walid Moallem. Among the results was an agreement by Meshaal to end Hamas rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza – since resistance would be the right only of the state – and agreement that a future Palestinian state be based on Israel’s 1967 borders.

“Without the goodwill of all sides, the help of the Egyptians and the acceptance of the Syrians – and the desire of the Palestinians to unite after the start of the Arab Spring, we could not have done this,” one of the principal intermediaries, 75-year old Munib Masri, told me. It was Masri who helped to set up a ‘Palestinian Forum’ of independents after the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas originally split after Hamas won an extraordinary election victory in 2006. “I thought the divisions that had opened up could be a catastrophe and we went for four years back and forth between the various parties,” Masri said. “Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) asked me several times to mediate. We opened meetings in the West Bank. We had people from Gaza. Everyone participated. We had a lot of capability.”

http://antonyloewenstein.com/2011/06...mpaign=Twitter

[anaxarchos]

What I haven't seen is the common program. Have Fatah and Hamas agreed to seperate the program of miltary and political struggle from the issues internal to the Palestinisn state? I haven't been able to determine if agreement was reached on these subjects ("secularism" above all) or whether these issues have been deferred.

Have you seen anything on this subject?

[Catherina]

I've looked on and off but haven't seen details.

"The two sides signed initial letters on an agreement. All points of differences have been overcome," Taher Al-Nono, a Hamas government spokesman in Gaza, told the Reuters news agency.

...

"At the end, you could say that President Abbas has lost his patron in Egypt, which is President Mubarak, and Hamas is more on less facing almost similar trouble now, with Bashar Al-Assad [Syria's president] facing his own trouble in Damascus.

"So with the US keeping a distance, Israel not delivering the goods on the peace process and the settlements, it was time for Palestinians to come together and agree on what they basically agreed on almost a year and a half ago."

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/mi...119845721.html

The press keeps conveniently overlooking the fact that Abbas term' expired in 9 January 2009 and he "unilaterally extended his term for another year and continues in office even after that second deadline expired."

I think only time will give us an honest answer

"We have agreed to form a government composed of independent figures that would start preparing for presidential and parliamentary elections," said Azzam al-Ahmad, the head of Fatah's negotiating team in Cairo.

"Elections would be held in about eight months from now," he said, adding the Arab League would oversee the implementation of the agreement.

...

Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas leader who participated in the talks, said Wednesday's deal covered five points, including combining security forces and forming a government made up of "nationalist figures."

He said Hamas and Fatah would free respective prisoners.

...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...73Q50820110427

I think they're keeping the details to themselves but I smell a strong whiff of democracy in the air.

[PinkoCommie]

Strange, that isn't the funk I smell at all.

An initial reading of the Palestine Papers supports Rose’s account and provides details of hitherto unknown secret, high-level “Quadripartite” meetings among Israeli, American, Egyptian and Palestinian officials whose explicit goal appears to have been to undermine the national unity government. The essential point here is that part of the PA — loyal to Mahmoud Abbas and backed by the US — was actively plotting with Israel and its allies against the legitimately-constituted unity government.

Two documents in the Palestine Papers contain minutes of these meetings.
http://electronicintifada.net/conten...gaza-coup/9200

Palestine Papers: Why I blew the whistle
The mislabeled "peace talks" were instrumental in creating divisions amongst Palestinians, compelling me to speak out.
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/

So long as the ruling class keeps the dialogue bound by the presupposition of the existence of a Jewish Supremacist state, there is no oeace nor justice to be had.

Zionism = Lebensraum


A senior legal official who secretly warned the government of Israel after the Six Day War of 1967 that it would be illegal to build Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories has said, for the first time, that he still believes that he was right.

The declaration by Theodor Meron, the Israeli Foreign Ministry's legal adviser at the time and today one of the world's leading international jurists, is a serious blow to Israel's persistent argument that the settlements do not violate international law, particularly as Israel prepares to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the war in June 1967.

The legal opinion, a copy of which has been obtained by The Independent, was marked "Top Secret" and "Extremely Urgent" and reached the unequivocal conclusion, in the words of its author's summary, "that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

Judge Meron, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia until 2005, said that, after 40 years of Jewish settlement growth in the West Bank - one of the main problems to be solved in any peace deal: "I believe that I would have given the same opinion today."

Judge Meron, a holocaust survivor, also sheds new light on the aftermath of the 1967 war by disclosing that the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, was " sympathetic" to his view that civilian settlement would directly conflict with the Hague and Geneva conventions governing the conduct of occupying powers.

Despite the legal opinion, which was forwarded to Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, but not made public at the time, the Labour cabinet progressively sanctioned settlements.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...al-450410.html




In his latest work, renowned Israeli author and academic Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine) does not mince words, doing Jimmy Carter one better (or worse, depending on one's point of view) by accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity beginning in the 1948 war for independence, and continuing through the present. Focusing primarily on Plan D (Dalet, in Hebrew), conceived on March 10, 1948, Pappe demonstrates how ethnic cleansing was not a circumstance of war, but rather a deliberate goal of combat for early Israeli military units led by David Ben-Gurion, whom Pappe labels the "architect of ethnic cleansing." The forced expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians between 1948-49, Pappe argues, was part of a long-standing Zionist plan to manufacture an ethnically pure Jewish state. Framing his argument with accepted international and UN definitions of ethnic cleansing, Pappe follows with an excruciatingly detailed account of Israeli military involvement in the demolition and depopulation of hundreds of villages, and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arab inhabitants. An accessible, learned resource, this volume provides important inroads into the historical antecedents of today's conflict, but its conclusions will not be easy for everyone to stomach: Pappe argues that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today, and calls for the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and an end to the Israeli occupation. Without question, Pappe's account will provoke ire from many readers; importantly, it will spark discussion as well.
http://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansi.../dp/1851684670




In the Ottoman tax registers of 1596, the village is listed as forming part of the nahiya (subdistrict) of Jira in the liwa' (district) of Safad. The population is recorded as 288 Muslim households and 140 Muslim bachelors, together with 7 Jewish households and 1 Jewish bachelor. The village paid taxes on goats, beehives, a water-powered mill, and a press that was used for processing olives or grapes. - Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah (1977). Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in the Late 16th Century. Erlanger Geographische Arbeiten, Sonderband 5. Erlangen, Germany: Vorstand der Fränkischen Geographischen Gesellschaft. p. 177.

The village was attacked by the Israeli forces in Operation Hiram on 30 October 1948. Israeli historian Benny Morris has documented that Alma was the one village in the area where the villagers were uprooted and/or expelled by the Israeli forces, in spite of the fact that they had not offered any resistance. - Morris, Benny (2004). The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press.

In 1949, the Israeli moshav of Alma was built about 0.5 km east of where the built-up portion of the former village was located.

Lucy Dawidowicz’s anthology The Golden Tradition Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe (orig. 1967) It consists of over 50 snippets of memoirs of Jewish thinkers and activists from the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, and what’s striking is how few of them are Zionists. The vast majority are assimilationists, “privately” religious, or socialists of one stripe or another.

Even among the early Zionists, many appear to have shared the conviction of the influential Zionist thinker Ahad Ha’am (1856-1927) that the Jewish community in Palestine needed to serve as a “spiritual center” nourishing global Judaism. It did not need to become a Jewish nation-state. University of Montreal history professor Yakov Rabkin doesn’t overstate the case when he claims that Zionism-as-Jewish-statehood “was a minority movement shunned by most Jews.”

And even after Hitler’s rise to power, many prominent Zionists (including political philosopher Hannah Arendt, theologian Martin Buber, and Hebrew University President Judah Magnes) were calling either for one secular, democratic state from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, or for some sort of Arab-Jewish confederation. “Underlying their Zionism,” U. Mass. political science professor Leila Farsakh recently explained, “was a quest for a Jewish renaissance . . . with a determination to avoid injustice in its achievement.”
http://www.radicalmiddle.com/x_onestate.htm


The provisions requiring registration, however, were "extensively ignored."16  The peasants were semi-literate and accustomed to a traditional society in which custom and oral evidence were sufficient to support an individual's claim to property.17  Landholders saw no great need to register their claim and often did so only when they wanted to sell it to another party.18

Indeed, the peasants had strong incentives to not register or to under-register their land. One incentive was the tradition of mistrust of or opposition to government — what Granott calls the "indolence which characterizes the peasants' attitude towards official regulations" — and the desire to avoid granting unnecessary legitimization to the government.19  A second incentive was evasion of current and potential taxes on registered property.20  A third incentive to avoid registration was evasion of registration fees21 or penalties and fines for late registration.22  A fourth incentive was evasion of military conscription based on or traced through land holdings.23

Making matters worse, the land was registered piecemeal — that is, the status of a tract of land was recorded only when the owner had it registered. There was no cadastral survey,24 and "in most cases there were no measurements or maps and it was impossible to determine the boundaries of the properties."25  Claims to disputed lands brought later were therefore all the more difficult to prove.
Hence land was often not registered in the name of its "rightful owner." As long as the peasants were able to continue working their land, the registration did not concern them. But the problems arose not just because the land was not registered; they arose also because the land was often registered in the name of someone other than the rightful owner. This occurred several ways.
http://www.beki.org/landlaw.html

In short the "we bought Israel fair and square" meme falls flat when one considers the coming in a flash of capitalist imperialism to those pushed off their land between the Ottoman land registration laws of 1858-9 and the second Aliyah.

Everything that has come since that period of mass immigration leading to the mass terror that founded the Apartheid nation is just a sort of neo-lebensraum.

There is no justice in presupposing a Jewish Supremacist state.


"What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties....we must strike mericilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguist between guilty and innocent."
January 1, 1948 - Diary of David Ben Gurion

On April 9th of that year, the Jewish supremacists killed anywhere from 108 to 254 men, women and children at Deir Yassein in pursuit of their ethnically pure state.

And nothing but nothing has ever changed.

[Catherina]

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

I feel the same about the PA's complicity and corruption so none of what you wrote is a surprise (enlightening but not a surprise) but I have more faith in Hamas' political astuteness and unwillingness to betray the original cause.

Totally ignored in the US Press, was a key Egyptian demand that Gaza be freed. The Egyptian activists aren't backing down and they're cornering their current leaders into throwing them this *breadcrumb*. After 60 years, I think the Palestinians are so sick of where they are that Fatah is walking a really tight rope. If they betray the Palestinians one more time, I think they'll end up lynched.

We Won't Give A Fucking Inch
- HK & les Saltimbank

From the slums of my projects
To the depths of your suburbia
Oor reality ia the same
And revolt is brewing everywhere

In this world there's no place for us
We don't look the part
We're not to the manor born
Not on daddy's plastic

Homeless,Unemployed, workers
Farmers, immigrants, Undocumented
They wanted to divide us
And they succeeded

As long as it was every man for himself
Their system could prosper
But one day, inevitably, we woke up
Now. their heads have to roll

We're Not Giving A Fucking Inch

They spoke about about equality
And like fools we believed them
"Democracy" makes me laugh
If we had had it we would have known it

What's the worth of our votes
Up against the law of the market?
They say "my dear fellow countrymen"
But we're fucked all the same

And what's the worth of human rights
Up against the airbus sale?
The bottom line, there's only one law, in sum:
"Sell yourself more to sell more."

The republic is a whore
Walking the street of dictators
We no longer believe
Their beautiful words
Our leaders are liars

We're Not Giving A Fucking Inch

So stupid, so trite,
To speak of peace and brotherhood
When the homeless are dying in the streets
And the undocumented are being driven out

They throw crumbs to us proles
Just shit to calm us down
So they won't attack millionaire bosses
"Too important for our society"

It's crazy how they're protected
All the rich and powerful
Not to mention the help they get
For being the friends of the president

Dear comrades, dear "voters"
Dear "citizen-consumers"
The alarm has rung
It's time
To reset to zero

As long as we're fighting, there's hope
As long as we're alive, we'll fight
As long as we're fighting, we're standing
Here's the key
We're standing, we won't give an inch

The passion for victory runs in our blood
Now you know why we're fighting
Our ideal, more than a dream
Another world, we have no choice

We're Not Giving A Fucking Inch


Not a single motherfucking godamn inch

[PinkoCommie]

"I have more faith in Hamas' political astuteness"

Gimme a fucking break.

Choosing between reactionary "sides?"

Pass,thanks.

Fuck picking one reactionary bigot "side" versus another.

Imperialism loves that shit.

[Catherina]

I do. Can't help it. It has nothing to do with their ideology. Fatah is as corrupt and complicit as it gets without a care for the people. You should see the luxurious hilltop neighborhoods Fatah lives in, neighborhoods that are never bombed and given advance warning before any Israeli attacks on Gaza occur. There's a reason Hamas was elected in a landslide and has been so demonized in the press.