Sari Nusseibeh resigns as President after another Hamas rally at al-Quds University
University President Sari Nusseibeh has resigned from his position at al-Quds University after yet another Hamas rally on the university's campus on Sunday.
Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Tom Gross, who has also posted many pictures of the rally
here).
As you might recall, Brandeis University
severed its relations with al-Quds after another Hamas rally in November.
Brandeis was considering
reinstating those relations, but this may be the final nail in that coffin. Khaled Abu Toameh is now reporting that
purported 'moderate' Sari Nusseibeh has
resigned as university President at al-Quds. The article to which Abu Toameh links is in
Arabic.
Maybe Brandeis could hire Nusseibeh. That would be in character.
Labels: Brandeis University, Hamas, Sari Nusseibeh
Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler
I had a study partner when I was in yeshiva who used to say that oversleeping is a good thing, because it means that you needed the sleep and at least you weren't wasting the time. Today, his wife is a prominent Israeli blogger, whose blog I am sure many of you read. I think of his words to salve my guilt every time I oversleep.
The entire week of starting slichoth at 4:15 am (4:05 on Sunday and 4:30 tomorrow) caught up with me this morning, and I crashed and burned after working (real work - not the blog) for a couple of hours this morning.
I will have more later today, but here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Thursday, October 6. I've had the Kristof piece open all day and may have more to say about it later.
1) Ignorance is no excuse
Nicholas Kristof asks Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy? Given the author and the question you know his answer is "yes." It's hard to imagine a more fact free article than this one. For decades, Palestinian leaders sometimes seemed to be their own people’s worst enemies. Palestinian radicals antagonized the West, and, when militant leaders turned to hijackings and rockets, they undermined the Palestinian cause around the world. They empowered Israeli settlers and hard-liners, while eviscerating Israeli doves. These days, the world has been turned upside down. Now it is Israel that is endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hard line on settlements seems like a national suicide policy.
Kristof is of course parroting Thomas Friedman's "I've never been more worried about Israel's future" plaint. Now of course those Palestinian radicals got their cause on the map. I don't recall folks like Kristof saying, "If they have to turn to terror their cause is illegitimate," the reaction was more like "if they have turn to terror their plight really must be awful." In other words, people like Kristof legitimized Palestinian terror. Netanyahu is, of course, nothing like Kristof's (or Friedman's) ignorant caricature. The man, who in his first term as Prime Minister withdrew from most of Hebron is not, by definition, maximalist. Since the intellectually lazy Kristof simply repeats the idea that Israel is isolated, perhaps it's worth checking out a different view. In Loner, Lee Smith argues that it is the United States that is becoming isolated. After arguing that Israel's position is actually somewhat improved because of the Arab spring, Smith writes: In Syria, the Obama Administration has disdained to play any hand at all. The administration has hesitated to throw its weight behind the opposition movement, and U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford has warned that if Assad’s opponents take up arms they will lose whatever international support they have. In other words, as Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia all make contingency plans for Syria, the White House announces it is out of the picture. Net American gain: zero. By withdrawing from Iraq, the White House has effectively abandoned a vital U.S. interest to Iran. President Barack Obama sought meaningful engagement with the Iranians, but Tehran rebuffed even the administration’s offer to establish a hotline to prevent some minor event from turning into a major conflagration. The Iranian message is clear: There is no reason to talk, since our intent to drive you from the region couldn’t be clearer. Another zero. The White House has shown it will not take the Iranian nuclear issue seriously. Clandestine operations and cyber-warfare are not serious actions taken by a superpower against a state threatening a nuclear breakout: They are sideshows meant to assuage Israel and distract our Arab allies in the Gulf. Accordingly, the Saudis have warned they will go their own way by building their own coalitions against Iran. Even the Palestinian Authority, which exists solely at the pleasure of the U.S. government, and thanks to the munificence of American taxpayers, has decided to strike out on its own at the United Nations.
Take you pick: Kristof whose analysis consists of cutting and pasting tired cliches, or Lee Smith who actually looks at evidence before drawing conclusions. Then think about this: Which one writes for the publication often called "the paper of record?"
2) Moderate is a relative term
Elliott Abrams writes about Sari Nusseibeh and Palestinian Moderation: Nusseibeh, the man of “humane understanding,” a philosopher by training, ends by saying that calling Israel a “Jewish State” would necessarily “arouse fears among Palestinians and Arabs about being ethnically cleansed in Palestine.” One may assume that in that phrase he refers to Israeli Arabs as well as those of the West Bank and Gaza, so he is not only warning of “ethnic cleansing” but engaging in some linguistic ethnic cleaning of his own here: he is referring to Israel as part of “Palestine.” Now, one can argue as Nusseibeh does that Israel should not seek to be a “Jewish State” and should call itself a democratic state with a Jewish majority. What is shocking about Nusseibeh’s view is not that conclusion but the arguments he makes to support it, which proceed from polemics and straw men through double standards and finally reach the accusation that a Jewish State would be a murderous state, ethnically cleansing and eliminating its non-Jewish citizens. This is perilously close to the accusation, made by the kind of Palestinian that Nusseibeh is supposed to loathe, that Israel is a Nazi state. Thus the state of the “peace process” in October 2011. A leader of the Palestinian “moderates” writes articles that make him sound like Khaled Meshal, Hassan Nasrallah, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his description of Israel.
Now that's maximalist. Elder of Ziyon has also critiqued Nusseibeh.
3) Oh to be a nation
The Palestinians are going about getting support for their statehood bid. The New York Times reports, Palestinians Win a Vote on Bid to Join Unesco: The initial approval came in a vote by Unesco’s 58-nation executive board. Full membership would have to be approved by the 193-nation General Conference, which meets later this month. The Palestinians submitted their bid for full recognition to the United Nations Security Council on Sept. 24, while international political leaders continue work to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. “We need the issue of the state of Palestine to be resolved in the U.N. system,” said Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian envoy to the United Nations. Unesco, Mr. Mansour said, “is one place where we can acquire our rightful place among the community of nations as a full member.” Membership would allow Palestinian officials to seek the protection of Palestinian historical sites by the cultural organization, other officials noted. That would create further conflict with Israel. For instance, some of those sites are in east Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed.
Interesting take on UNESCO, which has been actively denying Jewish historical sites. Asaf Romirowsky argues that the effort may backfire: Geographically and demographically, the so-called Palestinian state, which includes Gaza and the West Bank, does not exist. It is divided between Fatah and Hamas, Gazans and West Bankers, so the dream of the contiguous Palestinian state is a farce. Pragmatically, Palestinian statehood would force Palestinians to give up the victimhood status they have been carrying as a "badge of honor" for over 60 years. Then, world public opinion would be forced to judge them as a state and not as the "underdog." It remains politically correct to call for a two-state solution, as the very concept sounds idyllic: Two states living side-by-side in peace and harmony with free trade and a free market of ideas. However, in the real world, we are talking about an environment where on the part of one side there is no recognition of the other's right to exist in the region, period. The majority of Palestinian society remains unwilling to accept Israel's right and today openly call for a one-state solution, a de facto final solution for the state of Israel.
Will losing victim status hurt the Palestinian cause? Maybe in the West, but not among the OIC members. Clearly upgrading membership in the UN is another step in the war against Israel, as Mahmoud Abbas himself boasted in an op-ed in the New York Times last May.
I'm not even sure that Romirowsky is right. So long as they don't actually have a state (as opposed to membership in the UN), I believe that the 'Palestinians' will be able to maintain victimhood status everywhere except the Republican side of the United States.
Labels: Abu Mazen, Elliott Abrams, Lee Smith, Middle East Media Sampler, Nicolas Kristof, Sari Nusseibeh, Soccer Dad, UNESCO
Why there will never be peace between Israel and the 'Palestinians'
Elliott Abrams fisks an al-Jazeera English article by Sari Nusseibeh, whom Abrams rightfully calls 'the most moderate of all Palestinian moderates.' Nusseibeh's article proves - according to Abrams - Israel's difficulties in making peace. I believe that Nusseibeh's article - entitled
Why Israel can't be a Jewish state - shows why there can
never be peace between Israel and the 'Palestinians,' or at least not for the foreseeable future (Hat Tip:
Dan F).
Let us suggest also that having a modern nation-state being defined by one ethnicity or one religion is problematic in itself – if not inherently self-contradictory – because the modern nation-state as such is a temporal and civic institution, and because no state in the world is – or can be in practice – ethnically or religiously homogenous.
This is a classic ‘straw man’ argument, because Israel as a Jewish State would of course not be homogeneous any more than Egypt is homogeneous (it is in fact about 15 percent Christian) while its constitution today states that “Islam is the religion of the state….The principles of Islamic law are the chief source of legislation.” As I have written here previously, there are plenty of states that say flatly “Islam is the religion of the state” and that civil law is based on sharia. Denmark, Norway, and England also have state religions and of course have complete freedom of religion. Nusseibeh argues that this is all fine: it is OK to say “Islam is the religion of the state” but not for Israel to be a “Jewish state” because the latter term suggests “ethnic cleansing.” Given that Israeli Arabs have always been free to speak, vote, and hold office while most of their Arab brethren have been living in dictatorships, this argument is more than a bit of a stretch. Israeli law is mostly British in origin, and Nusseibeh simply ignores the fact that so many Islamic countries state that they base their own laws on sharia. So what he is doing here is simple: applying a double-standard. Recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” implies that Israel is, or should be, either a theocracy (if we take the word “Jewish” to apply to the religion of Judaism) or an apartheid state (if we take the word “Jewish” to apply to the ethnicity of Jews), or both…
This is not analysis but polemic, for the reasons just stated. Nowhere does Nusseibeh state or imply that for a Muslim majority country to say “Islam is the religion of the state” and “Sharia is the basis of our laws” might lead to theocracy or apartheid. There are four states whose very name contains a religious reference: the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Do all of them uniformly practice apartheid and theocracy, in Nusseibeh’s view? Recognizing a ‘Jewish State’….means, before final status negotiations have even started, that Palestinians would have then given up the rights of about 7 million Palestinians in the diaspora to repatriation or compensation; 7 million Palestinians descended from the Palestinians who in 1900 lived in historical Palestine (i.e. what is now Israel, the West Bank including Jerusalem, and Gaza)…
It’s worth noting that Nusseibeh wants compensation not only for Palestinians he believes were forced out of Israel in 1948, nor even for those people and their descendants. Now the figure of those entitled to “return” rises to 7 million and includes anyone whose ancestors lived in what is now Israel in 1900. This is preposterous; what possible right could someone have, for example, whose ancestors moved to Damascus or Cairo in 1940, before Israel came into existence?
Nusseibeh then proceeds to an argument so extraordinary that one blushes to see this “deeply admirable” and “humane” man write it down. If Israel is recognized as a Jewish State, he says, it follows that Israelis will kill all the Arabs who live there. He cites a number of Biblical passages and then delivers this key passage: it remains true that, in the Old Testament, God commands the Jewish state in the land of Israel to come into being through warfare and violent dispossession of the original inhabitants. Moreover, this command has its roots in the very Covenant of God with Abraham (or rather “Abram” at that time) in the Bible and it thus forms one of the core tenets of Judaism as such, at least as we understand it. No one then can blame Palestinians and descendants of the ancient Canaanites, Jebusites and others who inhabited the land before the Ancient Israelites (as seen in the Bible itself) for a little trepidation as regards what recognising Israel as a “Jewish State” means for them, particularly to certain Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox Jews. No one then can blame Palestinians for asking if recognising Israel as a “Jewish State” means recognising the legitimacy of offensive warfare or violence against them by Israel to take what remains of Palestine from them.
That phrase “what remains of Palestine” is part of another argument: “every day the Israeli settler movement is grabbing more land in the West Bank and Jerusalem.” Nowhere does Nusseibeh support that claim, which would require him to prove that the land area of settlements grows literally every day—or if we allow him poetic license every month or even every year. No doubt he thinks the claim so obvious as to beyond the need for proof, but it is not.
Nusseibeh, the man of “humane understanding,” a philosopher by training, ends by saying that calling Israel a “Jewish State” would necessarily “arouse fears among Palestinians and Arabs about being ethnically cleansed in Palestine.” One may assume that in that phrase he refers to Israeli Arabs as well as those of the West Bank and Gaza, so he is not only warning of “ethnic cleansing” but engaging in some linguistic ethnic cleaning of his own here: he is referring to Israel as part of “Palestine.”
For years I have argued, on this blog and elsewhere, that there is no difference between the ultimate goals of Fatah and Hamas. Both wish to extirpate the Jewish state and they differ only on tactics. That the supposed moderate Sari Nussseibeh could write an article that sounds like it was written by Khaled Meshaal (as Abrams correctly categorizes it) proves that I was right all along.
While Abrams' sympathies have always been with Israel, he was also a peace processor under the Bush administration and has always - at least to this point - believed that the creation of a 'Palestinian state' would resolve our dispute with the Arab world. I wonder whether he still believes that, and if so, for how much longer he will be able to continue to believe it. The bottom line is that we have no partner for peace and it is time to stop the charade.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Elliott Abrams, Palestinian refugees, Sari Nusseibeh, two-state solution
Nusseibeh: Let Obama propose a solution and the people vote on it
Sari Nusseibeh, who is the President of al-Quds University, is one of the few 'Palestinians' who might (emphasis on might) believe in a two-state solution, at least as a temporary measure. He has come up with a plan to
force feed such a solution to us.
Al Quds University President Sari Nusseibeh, a longtime proponent of a two-state solution, says he recommended to President Barack Obama that the United States introduce a "vision" for a deal that would be put to a plebiscite vote for Israelis and an electoral vote for Palestinians. "So if the Israelis are asking for a two-state solution on such-and-such basis, they could say, 'Yes, if the Palestinians say yes,' and likewise in the other direction." He believes the populations on both sides would support a two-state plan presented by the United States, although he sees such a move--or any progress at all--as unlikely in the current climate. However, he adds, if there is no forward movement, Palestinians should press to be absorbed into Israel, where even if they do not have the right to vote, they would otherwise have full civil rights "so they could actually live freely, travel freely, work freely, have the rights that humans beings are entitled to have under any kind of system of democracy government."
That excerpt is actually a summary of a much longer interview with Nusseibeh that appears at the URL I linked above. Why won't this work? Let me count the ways....
1. Obama doesn't know enough about the region to propose a workable solution.
2. If what Obama proposes is enough to satisfy the 'Palestinians,' the Israelis will vote against. After four years of intifada and 8,000 rockets from Gaza, there are very few people here who would vote for anything close to what Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat in 2000 (which the 'Palestinians' turned down because it wasn't enough!). When Ehud Olmert made his offer to Abu Mazen in 2008, Abu Mazen should have taken it, because he will never see an offer like that again from Israel.
3. If what Obama proposes satisfies Israel (and probably even if it doesn't), the 'Palestinians' will vote against it. Survey after survey shows that it's not just the leadership that's unwilling to compromise - it's the 'Palestinian people.' Any solution with an end of conflict clause, with no 'right of return,' and with less than 100% of Judea, Samaria and 'east' Jerusalem going to the 'Palestinians' is not going to be enough. Perhaps the 'Palestinians' would have made some small territorial compromise two years ago. But since Obama decided to be more 'Palestinian' than the 'Palestinians' by insisting on a 'settlement freeze' in all of Judea, Samaria and 'east' Jerusalem, they're not going to compromise any more.
4. There is no way a fair election will be held in Gaza under Hamas rule.
5. As to the notion of granting the 'Palestinians' civil rights, any solution that allows them to travel freely without being searched is an invitation for another suicide bombing campaign. There is no way Israel can agree to that.
Anyone need any more reasons this won't work?
Read the whole thing.
Labels: end of conflict, Hamas, Palestinian people, Sari Nusseibeh, territorial compromise
