Olmert Lays Cards on the Table- but how is the deck stacked after the Gaza War?

Here is what Obama's ace Middle-East envoy was told by Lame duck PM Ehud Olmert, according to the Israeli press today, when the Israeli leader laid all his cards on the table:

Israel promised to remove 60,000 settlers from the West Bank; to withdraw to the 1967 borders with border revisions so that it keeps the large settlement blocs and in return, to give the Palestinians equal territory in southern Israel; to divide Jerusalem and to transfer East Jerusalem neighborhoods to Palestinian sovereignty while establishing an international authority for the holy places; to ensure territorial contiguity for the Palestinian state by means of elevated or underground roads between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; Israel would not take in any refugees. Shimon Shiffer notes that political figures realize that this news requires all the candidates for prime minister to relate to it, particularly Kadima candidate Tzippi Livni, as she was a full partner to the negotiations.

The Palestinian Authority is said to have backed away from the negotiation table once they learned that Israeli elections are to be held in February. The West Bank Palestinians indicated they are unwilling to trust the current negotiators because it is the incoming government who would be implementing any promises--- or not. But there are signs that political pragmatists may be prevailing inside Gaza after three weeks of war, and a lasting truce may be hammered out if Hamas "unclenches its fist", in the parlance of the new US president, and cuts a deal. Without crossings open for trade as well as aid, the tunneling on the southern border will be almost impossible to stop.

"We want to be part of the international community," Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad told The Associated Press at the Gaza-Egypt border, where he was coordinating Arab aid shipments. "I think Hamas has no interest now to increase the number of crises in Gaza or to challenge the world."... Hamas politician Mushir Al-Masri, a staunch hard-liner, sounded a conciliatory note."We have our hands open to any country ... to open a dialogue without conditions," he said — clarifying that does not include Israel.

Proxies definitely are needed in these complex negotiations between politicians who won't speak to one another. Olmert also said that Israel would refuse to open the crossings into Gaza as long as the Franco-Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, is a Hamas hostage. Many Palestinians feel he is their trump card, and the only motivation for Israeli

It's instructive to look at the most recent fallout from the vaunted Northern Ireland peace agreements, for which special Middle East envoys George J Mitchell and Tony Blair have garnered enormous prestige as resolvers of blood feuds. Blood money may not be the way to buy peace or reconciliation, it turns out. In Belfast, relatives of IRA victims are saying "Not so fast" about accepting across-the-board payments of 12,000 pounds from the government.

Yesterday, a chaos of grief and recrimination re-erupted at a news conference after the announcement of payments to relatives of all 3700 people killed in "The Troubles". It is not so easy to resolve 30 years of sectarian violence that blighted Northern Ireland. The payment scheme was to include families of bungling IRA bombers who blew themselves up. On hearing this, some Protestants went ballistic, screaming at Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, a paramilitary-turned-politician. (The violence so far has been verbal, thankfully, but this does not bode well for a peace settlement to endure.)



Cards may be on the table, but the house of cards that shuffling diplomats are constructing threatens to collapse at any moment. ANd we wonder what is tucked up the sleeves of the various players. Oy veh.

Tony Blair's take on the Peace Process

Tony Blair, who became a special envoy to Israel/OPT for the Quartet on the day he resigned as British Prime Minister, blathers about the Middle East situation in a Guardian Q-A this weekend. He's been in the job for less than a year and only spends a few days a month in the region. (Mostly cosseted in the American Colony Hotel.) Blair plans to head for Yale University this autumn to teach a class in Religion and the Globalized World. (There is speculation that George W Bush, an ardent admirer of the Rottweiler Pope Benedict, may follow his poodle and soon covert to ROMAN CATHOLICISM!)

Tony sez:

"In my view the whole problem with the peace process up to now has been that people have thought you construct the deal and the facts on the ground will change. My view is that it is as much [that] you have to change the reality on the ground to create the space for the political deal to work.

"People say to me 'Well we have had all these agreements in the past' [but] Oslo was not an agreement, it was agreement to have an agreement. In my view you could work out the right problem on territory, refugees and Jerusalem but you cannot get a deal when the Israelis feel they have a massive unanswered security challenge and the Palestinians feel the weight of the occupation to change the two realities the two sides have.

"Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness [were] people that came from a past that was about the armed struggle [in Northern Ireland], but who had real vision imagination and leadership to make the transition. The question is how do you create the circumstances for that leadership to be successful in the Palestinian context. If the moderates show leadership, they will be strengthened. If they cannot they won't.

"In the Middle East at the moment the issue is not whether people are talking to Hamas or not, because the Egyptians already are. I hope we can get a different strategy for Gaza so that as we get a ceasefire, we are [also] progressively reopening the crossings, allowing in not just humanitarian aid but also goods and services - that would be a step forward.

"The issue is not a failure of communication. In the Northern Ireland situation it is true there were all sorts of informal contacts with the IRA but proper talking began only when there was a ceasefire. I have been very clear about what has to happen to ease the restrictions on the lives of Palestinians on the West Bank, but it does not help the cause of peace when we are trying to pressure the Israelis to let fuel in and extremists come from Gaza and kill the Israelis bringing the fuel in. If the terrorism stopped the whole situation would be so much easier to resolve.

"Their purpose is to destroy and disrupt the peace process in my view the best response to that is to go ahead with the peace process. Let us not be foolish about it - it is a deliberate act of strategy to inflict trauma by putting rockets into the town aimed deliberately and indiscriminately at civilians.

"My strategy is not to do the economic at the expense of politics but it is to accept that unless you deal the facts on the grounds - insufficient security capability on behalf of the Palestinians and the weight of the occupation on the Palestinians, then you will not create the space for politics to work. The tracks have got to work alongside one side another.

"The package I agreed with the Israelis gives us the opportunity radically to change some of the facts on the ground - reducing or speeding some of the 20 or so strategic roadblocks. If you don't start somewhere, you will get nowhere. There may well be a role for independent and international support for security at a later time, but it will not be now."

The Middle East and the end of the Bush administration

"In the last year there has been intensification of focus. Condi Rice has made many many visits, President Bush himself has been twice. There is no doubt at all that there is a big engagement by the Americans on this. I still think progress is going to happen even under the remaining part of this presidency. What is really important for the next president is that this does not go to the bottom of the intray. It's fundamental to what is going on in the whole Middle East. This is a region in transition, there is massive potential for it to go right and [also] for it to go badly wrong.

Blair's Middle-East muddling and double standards

Chris Patten, co-chairman of International Crisis Group and chancellor of Oxford U, is no slouch on international affairs. His recent comments on the distracted performance of Middle East envoy Tony Blair in the performance of his "initial day job" are frank and cut close to the bone. The goal is "a peaceful Palestinian state next door to a secure Israel in a region united in prosperity and stability." How to achieve this remains a conundrum, and Blair's own brand of shuttle diplomacy, spending only a few days a month on this daunting task, will not yield any Northern Ireland-style breakthroughs. An excerpt follows:

... Blair has just made a useful comment on Palestine and Israel, which deserves to be taken seriously. Throughout the long years of this bloody tragedy, we have tried to inch our way to a settlement through confidence-building measures or, in the case of the long dead "road map," through pushing both parties to take parallel steps toward an agreement. Some observers, not least hard-headed Israeli peace campaigners, have suggested a different approach.

You will never succeed, they say, if you try to bob and weave your way slowly toward an end game. Instead, you should jump straight into a final deal. And, since you won't get the two sides to agree to it, you'll have to impose it from the outside.

But that ambitious outcome is easier described than achieved. While Israeli public opinion has usually appeared to run well ahead of its political leaders in the approach to peace, it is difficult to see how one could act over their heads. They need to be pushed and shoved into a successful negotiation. What would it mean to go straight to Palestinian statehood?

Presumably, Blair is not proposing to the Palestinians the creation of a state before an agreement is reached on final borders. There cannot be a Palestinian state without dealing with West Bank settlements. If you don't believe me, just visit the West Bank and see, for example, how the proposed suburban Israeli development of East Jerusalem stabs through the heart of Palestinian territory toward the Dead Sea. How can you have a viable state carved up by fences, military roads, and barbed wire?

Any Palestinian state should be within the 1967 borders (as adjusted through negotiation). Peace activists on both sides solved that in the Geneva initiative. Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak came close to doing so at Camp David almost eight years ago.

Moreover, a Palestinian state would not only comprise the West Bank and Gaza, but presumably would also have to accommodate the principal political parties in each area. Attempts to destroy Hamas — whether politically or physically — have not worked and cannot work. The Americans and Europeans committed a major error in conspiring to destroy the Fatah-Hamas national unity government, which was created largely thanks to the diplomacy of Saudi Arabia and other Arab League countries.

I hope that Blair is saying that to his American friends. His greatest achievement was the peace deal in Northern Ireland. That historic triumph depended on bringing in Sinn Fein politicians — leaders of the Irish Republican movement who in many cases could not be distinguished from the IRA, which bombed, shot, and maimed civilians in pursuit of its political goals.

Why should what worked in Northern Ireland — indeed, what was pressed on Britain by the United States — be unthinkable in the Middle East? Are we in the West guilty of double standards yet again?

I abhor any and every terrorist act, by Hamas or anyone else. I have had friends killed by terrorists. But since when were sentiment and moral denunciation sufficient ingredients of a policy? And when did a disproportionate military response to terrorism ever work?

The third challenge in establishing a Palestinian state is to create the institutions of statehood: Hospitals, ports, airports, roads, courts, police stations, tax offices, and government archives. When I was a European commissioner, we provided funds from European taxpayers to pay for these things. Then we saw them systematically trashed by Israel's response to the second Intifada.

How did destroying driving licenses in Palestine preserve Israeli security? How was it preserved by digging up runways, uprooting olive trees, and fouling wells?

A Palestinian state will need to be built from the bottom up. And what is built should not be destroyed.

Tell-tale Treadmill tactics of the Peace Envoys

Regular gym patrons of the iconic American Colony Hotel have been grousing about the dearth of equipment. It's practically a skeletal workout room now that minions of Tony Blair, the peace envoy who recently booked the whole top floor of East Jerusalem's Orientalist lodging for the duration of his job, moved one of the two treadmills near his suite. The nerve! He snatched half the resources for himself. This does not bode well.

After all, Blair is only in town one week out of every four. He also ropes off seven of the prime parking spots as well, my mole-cum-gym rat informs me.
Blair's people may have been inspired by the strong-arm tactics of Dr Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State who appropriated one of the elliptical exercisers at the David Citadel gym on her most recent visit. That's so Israeli patrons won't complain when the weight room is shut down by her secret security men. (Did protocol include wiping down her machines in the hotel gym? Reports vary.)
Obviously, to be properly prepared for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, diplomatic efforts must include a cardio-fitness regimen, so that an envoy is ready for the inevitable run-around. Israelity bites.

Armageddon any closer? Fire and Brimstone drive Bush's policy in Middle East

http://endtimesworldnews.punt.nl/upload/armageddon.jpg
Tony Blair appears eager to get started on his latest task: picking up the pieces in the Middle East. Some analysts suggest that Blair, who has proved to be the most religious British leader of the century, has openly sympathized with the coded political-religious language that born-again President George Bush habitually uses, as well as with Bush's faith-based efforts to entwine religion and government. The result? Doomsday just got closer, as America contemplates war without end against satanic forces of evil. Theocracy has increasing appeal for Middle America, warns a special report that was released today on Truthout. Here's an excerpt, and note that it is worth reading the entire article for insights on Iran, Middle East Wars and End-Time Prophecy. It's all about Prophets and profits.

Christian Zionists have become Israel's main tourist revenue, shepherding groups to the holy land to see the sites of Armageddon and the Second Coming.

Professor Norton Mezvinsky, an expert on Israeli affairs, is emphatic on one point: although a succession of Israeli prime ministers has courted the American end-timers (the Christian Zionists) and declared them Israel's "greatest friends," the Israelis don't accept the end-time theology one wit. They are also aware that it is anti-Semitic. (For one thing, they interpret the Bible as claiming that only 144,000 converted Jews will be allowed to survive the Apocalypse.) However, Mezvinsky says, the Israelis also know that the end-time Christian Zionists are a lobby that can deliver US support for Israeli hard-line positions on arms, West Bank settlements, negotiations with the Arabs, and Iran.

It's Official: Blair's the new Mid-East Peace Envoy

It took 24 hours for the Quartet to sing from the same page, but the job of Middle East Peace Envoy has been accepted by Britain's Tony Blair, the man who took ten years to convert Cool Brittannia to Cruel Brittannia in the view of most Middle Easterners. It remains to be seen whether he waives the rules for conflict resolution in this seething troublespot. Will he deal with Hamas? (Mahmoud Abbas, the West's choice for Palestinian President insists on 'no dialogue with putschists, murderers and terrorists') Will the man who helped quell the troubles in Northern Ireland make any difference in the land of Guns and Moses?

"He's not superman, doesn't have a cape," White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters.

"He's not designed to be doing that. What he is designed to do is to work as an aggressive facilitator"

Ah, so that's what Blair is meant to be. Bush assured a London tabloid that "Blair ain't my poodle", and now the White House has clarified what kind of cute animal tricks it has in mind.

One of Blair's last meetings as Prime Minister was office with California's musclebound Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is as close to a superhero as US politics can get. His Austrian father famously was in the SS. The wartime exploits of Gustav Schwarzenegger, a brownshirt and "Chained Dog", have caused critics to hound the Republican politician, who clinked glasses with the ex-Nazi Kurt Waldheim at his own wedding banquet. Arnie has been able to make nice with conciliatory visits to Jerusalem, after these revelations, and even can negotiate family feasts with a bunch of Kennedys (his in-laws). The larger-than-life politician may be able to lend Blair some handy diplomatic catch phrases, ie "Hasta la Vista, Baby..." to replace that one that Ms Condi Rice seems to have worn out: "I'll be back!"
Tony is eagerly changing hats for this new role, says the BBC.