September 23, 2009
White House Pivots in Mideast Peace Bid
By HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER

UNITED NATIONS — President Obama, who has met immovable resistance from Israel over his demand for a full freeze on settlements in the West Bank, is largely setting that issue aside as a first step toward restarting Middle East peace talks.

Rather, Mr. Obama, unable to extract that concession from Israel or other confidence-building moves from Arab states, seems intent to press Palestinians and Israelis to negotiate all the difficult issues between them toward a final deal that has eluded negotiators, and bedeviled American presidents, since President Jimmy Carter brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1979.

The pivot toward tackling issues that include the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the borders of a future Palestinian state greatly increases the stakes for an administration that has found even small advances to be beyond reach. It also risks making Mr. Obama appear ineffective in having not gained a tangible early goal of his Middle East policy.

But it also seems to reflect the president’s impatience with the slow pace of the peace negotiations and a pragmatic, if also potentially perilous, desire to move forward on something that he has made a hallmark of his foreign policy agenda.

“It is past time to stop talking about starting negotiations; it is time to move forward,” Mr. Obama said Tuesday after meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly’s opening.

“Permanent status negotiations must begin and begin soon,” Mr. Obama said, flanked by Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas. “So my message to these two leaders is clear: despite all the obstacles, all the history, all the mistrust, we have to find a way forward.”

For Mr. Obama, Tuesday was a day in which he saw firsthand the difficulty of transferring the enormous good will his election generated overseas into concrete concessions from America’s allies on his foreign policy agenda.

In a meeting with President Hu Jintao of China, Mr. Obama tried to get the Chinese government on the same page as the United States on Iran policy. He told Mr. Hu that if scheduled nuclear talks between world powers and Iran next month did not result in a breakthrough — and administration officials were pessimistic that they would — then the United States would want China’s support for tougher sanctions against Iran.

But administration officials said it remained unclear whether the Chinese would sign on to tougher sanctions if and when the time came.

Obama administration officials insist that they are not giving up on efforts to get a complete freeze on construction in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Nor, they said, do they plan to stop exhorting Arab governments to make diplomatic gestures toward Israel as a way to jump-start peace talks.

“Our objective all along has been to relaunch meaningful final status negotiations in a context that offered the prospect for success,” Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the region, George J. Mitchell, later told reporters. “We have never identified the steps requested as ends in themselves.”

But the administration, for four months, has explicitly demanded a settlement freeze from Israel, saying that it was necessary to help get Arab leaders to buy into the peace process.

In May, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who attended Mr. Obama’s meetings Tuesday with Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu, said of Mr. Obama, “He wants to see a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions.” Such exceptions refer to waivers that children of settlers receive from the Israeli government to build houses near their parents, something the Israeli government has adamantly refused to stop.

Since then, administration officials have focused their efforts on achieving a freeze, at considerable expense to Mr. Obama’s standing in Israel. His approval ratings there dropped into the single digits as he increased pressure on the Israeli government.

Mr. Mitchell has carried Mr. Obama’s message to Mr. Netanyahu over months of meetings, prodding the Israeli government to agree to a slowdown in construction of settlements. But Mr. Netanyahu, seeking to mollify his right-wing governing coalition, refused to stop “natural growth” or settlement construction in East Jerusalem, which Israel views as part of its capital.

During the meetings on Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama told Mr. Abbas and other Palestinian officials that he would not be able to deliver right away on a settlement freeze, but that he would push Israel to move forward quickly on final status negotiations, according to Arab officials with knowledge of the meetings.

Mr. Obama told the Palestinians that he would push the Israelis to have “clear terms of references for the negotiations,” one Arab official said, referring to the fear among many Palestinian officials that Mr. Netanyahu might try to enter negotiations without agreeing to specifically address entrenched issues like the fate of Jerusalem and the status of Palestinian refugees.

Mr. Obama himself expressed his impatience with the pace of the peace process, as well as in the limited successes it had yielded so far.

“Palestinians have strengthened their efforts on security, but they need to do more to stop incitement and to move forward with negotiations,” Mr. Obama said on Tuesday. “Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the Palestinians and have discussed important steps to restrain settlement activity. But they need to translate these discussions into real action on this and other issues.”

He added that “it is time to show the flexibility and common sense and sense of compromise that’s necessary to achieve our goals.”

“Permanent status negotiations must begin and begin soon,” he said. “And more importantly, we must give those negotiations the opportunity to succeed.”

The White House is also trying to box in Mr. Netanyahu, administration officials said, by using his own unwillingness to agree to resolve the interim issue — in this case, a settlement freeze — to force him to a place he has indicated he really does not want to go yet: the final status talks.

“They are blocking off his escape hatches,” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator. “They’re saying, if you can’t do the interim, then we’ll do the final status.”

Ziad Asali, head of the American Task Force on Palestine, called Mr. Obama’s move on Tuesday “a positive step.”

“This is something the Palestinians definitely want,” he said.

Israeli officials, for their part, expressed satisfaction that Mr. Obama was letting up the pressure on settlements. “The administration recognizes that Israel has made major concessions in the absence of any substantive concessions on the part of the Arabs,” said Michael B. Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

Obama Chides Israel, Arabs

See how Obama's speech compares with some of his predecessors' addresses on the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

Parsing the Prez's speech: How many times did he use certain words?
In a wide-ranging speech in Cairo, President Barack Obama said the U.S. is committed to working in partnership with countries in Middle East.

Netanyahu’s Embrace of Mark Twain

A posting in the New York Times blog The Lede. Emphasis added.

May 20, 2009, 1:23 pm

By Robert Mackey

Earlier this week a two-paragraph article on the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, on how a book by Mark Twain might factor in the quest for Middle East peace, sparked a brush fire of commentary from bloggers and journalists. The Haaretz report suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel planned to give President Barack Obama an excerpt from Twain’s travel memoir “The Innocents Abroad,” during their meeting in Washington. The fact that both the White House and the the prime minister’s spokesman told The Lede on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu’s gift to Mr. Obama was another book, a Bible, reminds us that blogging is a lot easier if you don’t have to base your posts on confirmed reports. A cartoon from American Publisher in 1872, showing Mark Twain on the trip to the Middle East described in his “Innocents Abroad.”

Still, our digging into the matter revealed that Mr. Netanyahu is just one of several people who have argued in recent years that the part of Twain’s book describing his visit to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1867 helps to prove that the Arab presence in what is today Israel was so insignificant before the arrival of Zionist pioneers that modern Palestinian claims on the land are unfounded.

As Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin wrote in a blog post suggesting that Mr. Obama should read Twain’s book:

Twain’s recollections of his post Civil War tour of the Mediterranean are an apt subject of reflection for Obama as he attempts to force Netanyahu to accept a Palestinian state. The Palestine Twain visited was a backwater of the Ottoman Empire whose inhabitants had no sense of a separate national identity. Though Palestinian nationalism is a reality that Israel must contend with today, it originated and gained traction solely as a reaction to the return of large numbers of Jews to the country.

In fact “Innocents Abroad” is so popular with Zionists that the chapters from Twain’s travelogue on the Middle East have been translated into Hebrew and published as a separate book, called “Pleasure Excursion to the Holy Land.”

Nine years ago, in a book of his own, “A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations,” Mr. Netanyahu cited some of the observations in “Innocents Abroad,” about how sparsely populated certain parts of the land were at the time of Twain’s visit, as proof of “what every civilized and educated person knew at the close of the nineteenth century: that the land was indeed largely empty.” Mr. Netanyahu quoted several passages from Twain’s book to support his argument that, even decades after the American writer visited the Holy Land, “this wasteland of Palestine,” with “its miniscule Arab presence, making use of virtually none of the available land for the people’s own meager needs, could hardly be considered a serious counter to the claim of millions of Jews the world over to a state of their own.”

To help convince his readers that the British had indeed given “a people without a land a land without a people,” in his book Mr. Netanyahu leaned heavily on quotes from Twain’s book, beginning with this one (all ellipses and punctuation are Mr. Netanyahu’s own):

Stirring senses… occur in this [Jezreel] valley no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent — not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.

Next, Mr. Netanyahu cited this Twain’s description of the Galilee in 1867:

These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of bareness that never, never, never, do shake the glare from their harsh outlines…; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms. … A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. … We reached [Mount] Tabor safely. … We never saw a human being on the whole route.

Mr. Netanyahu also supported his contention that Twain found “more of the same” in what the American described as “the barren mountains of Judea,” by quoting this passage:

Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago. … [Bethlehem,] the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sand “Peace on earth, good will to men,” is untenanted by any living creature.

Whatever the merits of taking selected observations of a comic novelist as solid demographic evidence 130 years after the fact, Mr. Netanyahu might be faulted for constructing the paragraphs above by stitching together fragments of Twain’s account, with heavy use of ellipses. For instance, in the description of the Galilee quoted above, Mr. Netanyahu separated Mr. Twain’s thoughts about Tiberias and his description of a journey to Mount Tabor by ellipses and just one line of text, while in fact, as Frank J. Menetrez has pointed out in an analysis of how Twain’s text has been used by other Zionist authors, in “Innocents Abroad” there are “12 pages and numerous intervening paragraphs” between those two scenes.

Detail from the first cover of “The Innocents Abroad.”

Mr. Netanyahu was not the first person to embrace “Innocents Abroad” in support of the argument that 19th century Palestine was a “wasteland.” As John Kearney wrote on the blog Mondoweiss on Monday, Twain’s “portrayal of the Holy Land as a filthy, backwards, empty place,” was cited by Joan Peters in her book “From Time Immemorial,” in 1984. All three of the passages from Twain quoted above from Mr. Netanyahu’s book appeared first in Ms. Peters’ book.

In his post on Mondoweiss, Mr. Kearney argued that Twain’s book was “hardly a survey,” and noted that “Today there are still large, non-agricultural areas in the West Bank and Israel where you can drive and not see a soul.”

Apart from the demographic argument though, there is no doubt that Twain had a lot of unfavorable things to say about Arabs, and was not shy of saying them. In a column in Haaretz on Wednesday, the Israeli historian Tom Segev noted that:

Netanyahu took historian Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador-designate to Washington, with him on his trip. Oren wrote a fascinating book on American attitudes toward the Middle East, in which he says the Muslims disgusted Twain: “No number of negative adjectives, it seems, could express Twain’s disgust.”

That said, in Mr. Oren’s book, “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present,” he points out what some Israeli champions of Twain may have missed, that the writer was equally scathing about most of the world’s people, including Americans. According to Mr. Oren:

Twain indeed resembled earlier American visitors to the Middle East, yet one characteristic distinguished his writing from that of all other tourists. Whereas his predecessors looked at the region and saw in its brutality and backwardness an inverse image of their own tolerance and refinement, the mirror, for Twain, showed Americans to be equally small-minded and crude.

Mr. Oren also wrote that, in an essay against the anti-Semitism, which he wrote after being himself mistaken for a Jew, “Twain nearly defeated his purpose by mentioning the Jews’ alleged love of money and their reluctance to serve their country in war.” Such are the perils of embracing the criticism of your enemies by a comic happy to offend every member of his global audience.

Even if, as it seems, Mr. Netanyahu did not come to Washington bearing Twain’s book as a gift for Mr. Obama, the report in Haaretz did point a few American political reporters to the anti-Arab passages of “Innocents Abroad.” In a blog post on Monday, ABC’s Jake Tapper quoted this part of Twain’s description of Jerusalem under Muslim rule, which was far from flattering:

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently—the eternal “bucksheesh.” To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.

An illustration from the first edition of “The Innocents Abroad.”

Qaddafi Runs Cold and Warm

World Briefing | Middle East
Qatar: Qaddafi Runs Cold and Warm

What at first appeared to be a tirade by the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, against King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the Arab summit meeting in Doha, Qatar, turned out to be an effort to end a six-year feud. After denouncing Saudi Arabia as “a British creation with American protection,” Colonel Qaddafi said that the dispute was ended and that he was prepared to exchange visits. The two leaders then met for about 30 minutes and appeared to have reconciled, in time for Saudi Arabia to attend next year’s summit meeting, in Libya.

Iraq rally for Bush shoe attacker

At a press conference in Baghdad, President Bush was attacked by a shoe-throwing man.

Thousands of Iraqis have demanded the release of a local TV reporter who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush at a Baghdad news conference. Crowds gathered in Baghdad's Sadr City district, calling for "hero" Muntadar al-Zaidi to be freed from custody. Officials at the Iraqi-owned TV station, al-Baghdadiya, called for the release of their journalist, saying he was exercising freedom of expression. Iraqi officials have described the incident as shameful.

Bush ducked; the shoes sailed over his head harmlessly.

The Iraqi government has demanded an on-air apology from his employer. An Iraqi official was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the journalist was being interrogated to determine whether anybody paid him to throw his shoes at President Bush. He was also being tested for alcohol and drugs, and his shoes were being held as evidence, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In another story I read that Bush said the shoes were a size 10.

The shoes missed as Mr Bush ducked, and Mr Zaidi was immediately wrestled to the ground by security guards and frogmarched from the room. "This is a farewell kiss, you dog," he yelled in Arabic as he threw his shoes. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

Obama 'favourite global candidate'

I have long felt this way: what an impact Obama being president will have around the world, and in the US, and the Americas.

Obama 'favourite global candidate'
The race to be the next president of the United States has captivated the imagination of not just a vast majority of American citizens, but of people worldwide, according to a new report commissioned by Al Jazeera.

In depth

Read the full poll results here

Arab unity

Al-Jazeera has a story on Arab unity. It is fascinating to see how a wholly different culture sees things.

The Camp David accord is seen in the US, and, I suppose, in 'the West' as a major accomplishment that ushered in peace between Israel and Egypt. But there is this on the website:

Camp David a blow to Arab unity - Former US negotiator says Egypt's treaty with Israel weakened Arab nationalism.

This picture seems to show all of Arabia, including Israel, Mauritania, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia as Arab.

Muslim troops help win Afghan minds

This is a fascinating story. While perhaps one might expect that some Arabs would see fit to help Afghanis, to see Arab soldiers serving next to US and UK troops is startling. Troops from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been delivering humanitarian aid to their fellow Muslims and, on occasion, fighting their way out of Taleban ambushes. Until now, their deployment has been kept so secret that not even their own countrymen knew they were here.

Little wonder. Political and social pressures make US troops seem the enemy. Misperception, propaganda, a heavy colonial hand, all play a role. Yet it remains true that Afghanistan is a battle ground -- as, in fact, it has been for centuries.

Soldiers from the United Arab Emirates, a confederation of Arabic states, are in Afghanistan flighting against the forces and the effects of the Taleban.

We try to convince the people about the US, about British. They came here to give you peace. UAE Maj Ghanem al-Mazroui