Friday, October 20, 2017

Why Trump Quit UNESCO | Hamas Fatah Unity: What to Expect | Wrong Iran Strategy | More ..

The Palestine Chronicle

Daily News & Commentary on Palestine. Your Trusted Newspaper Since 1999.

Weekly Newsletter. October 20, 27, 2017. Visit our website: English; French. To help us, click here.

The Real Reasons Trump is Quitting UNESCO

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

At first glance, the decision last week by the Trump administration, followed immediately by Israel, to quit the United Nation's cultural agency seems strange. Why penalize a body that promotes clean water, literacy, heritage preservation and women's rights?

Washington's claim that the UN's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) is biased against Israel obscures the real crimes the agency has committed in US eyes.

The first is that in 2011 UNESCO became the first UN agency to accept Palestine as a member. That set the Palestinians on the path to upgrading their status at the General Assembly a year later.

It should be recalled that in 1993, as Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo accords on the White House lawn, the watching world assumed the aim was to create a Palestinian state.

But it seems most US politicians never received that memo. Under pressure from Israel's powerful lobbyists, the US Congress hurriedly passed legislation to pre-empt the peace process. One such law compels the United States to cancel funding to any UN body that admits the Palestinians.

Six years on, the US is $550 million in arrears and without voting rights at UNESCO. Its departure is little more than a formality.

The agency's second crime relates to its role selecting world heritage sites. That power has proved more than an irritant to Israel and the US.

The occupied territories, supposedly the locus of a future Palestinian state, are packed with such sites. Hellenistic, Roman, Jewish, Christian and Muslim relics promise not only the economic rewards of tourism but also the chance to control the historic narrative.

Israeli archaeologists, effectively the occupation's scientific wing, are chiefly interested in excavating, preserving and highlighting Jewish layers of the Holy Land's past. Those ties have then been used to justify driving out Palestinians and building Jewish settlements.

UNESCO, by contrast, values all of the region's heritage, and aims to protect the rights of living Palestinians, not just the ruins of long-dead civilizations.

Nowhere has the difference in agendas proved starker than in occupied Hebron, where tens of thousands of Palestinians live under the boot of a few hundred Jewish settlers and the soldiers who watch over them. In July, UNESCO enraged Israel and the US by listing Hebron as one of a handful of world heritage sites "in danger". Israel called the resolution "fake history".

The third crime is the priority UNESCO gives to the Palestinian names of heritage sites under belligerent occupation.

Much hangs on how sites are identified, as Israel understands. Names influence the collective memory, giving meaning and significance to places.

The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe has coined the term "memoricide" for Israel's erasure of most traces of the Palestinians' past after it dispossessed them of four-fifths of their homeland in 1948 - what Palestinians term their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

Israel did more than just raze 500 Palestinian towns and villages. In their place it planted new Jewish communities with Hebracaised names intended to usurp the former Arabic names. Saffuriya became Tzipori; Hittin was supplanted by Hittim; Muyjadil was transformed into Migdal.

A similar process of what Israel calls "Judaisation" is under way in the occupied territories. The settlers of Beitar Ilit threaten the Palestinians of Battir. Nearby, the Palestinians of Sussiya have been dislodged by a Jewish settlement of exactly the same name.

The stakes are highest in Jerusalem. The vast Western Wall plaza below Al Aqsa mosque was created in 1967 after more than 1,000 Palestinians were evicted and their quarter demolished. Millions of visitors each year amble across the plaza, oblivious to this act of ethnic cleansing.

Settlers, aided by the Israeli state, continue to encircle Christian and Muslim sites in the hope of taking them over.

That is the context for recent UNESCO reports highlighting the threats to Jerusalem's Old City, including Israel's denial for most Palestinians of the right to worship at Al Aqsa.

Israel has lobbied to have Jerusalem removed from the list of endangered heritage sites. Alongside the US, it has whipped up a frenzy of moral outrage, berating UNESCO for failing to prioritize the Hebrew names used by the occupation authorities.

UNESCO's responsibility, however, is not to safeguard the occupation or bolster Israel's efforts at Judaisation. It is there to uphold international law and prevent Palestinians from being disappeared by Israel.

Trump's decision to quit UNESCO is far from his alone. His predecessors have been scuffling with the agency since the 1970s, often over its refusal to cave in to Israeli pressure.

Now, Washington has a pressing additional reason to punish UNESCO for allowing Palestine to become a member. It needs to make an example of the cultural body to dissuade other agencies from following suit.

Trump's confected indignation at UNESCO, and his shrugging off of its vital global programs, serve as a reminder that the US is not an "honest broker" of a Middle East peace. Rather it is the biggest obstacle to its realization.

(A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)

- Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.jonathan-cook.net.

Wrongful Rhetoric and Trump's Strategy on Iran

By Kathy Kelly

Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had "an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs" at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel's capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included eleven years of solitary confinement.

Yesterday, reading about President Donald Trump's new strategy on Iran, Vanunu's long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling came to mind.

Donald Trump promised to "deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon." But it is Israel, which possesses an estimated 80 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200, which poses the major nuclear threat in the region. And Israel is allied to the nation with the world's largest nuclear arsenal: the United States.

Israel doesn't acknowledge its nuclear arsenal publicly, nor does Israel allow weapons inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities. Along with India and Pakistan, Israel refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. And it has used conventional weapons in numerous destabilizing wars which include aerial bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.

Vanunu, designated by Daniel Ellsberg as the "the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear era," helped many people envision nations in the region making progress toward a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.

In fact, Iran's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jawad Zarif, spoke eloquently about just that possibility, in 2015, holding that "if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction." "Iran," he added, "is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy."

Significantly, since the "Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action" pact with Iran was concluded in 2015, the International Atomic Energy Association has steadily verified Iran's compliance with inspections. Iran has accepted around-the-clock supervision by IAEA officials. What's more, "Iran has gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium," according to Jessica Matthews, writing for the New York Review of Books. Matthews continues:

It has also eliminated 98 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, leaving only three hundred kilograms, less than the amount needed to fuel one weapon if taken to high enrichment. The number of centrifuges maintained for uranium enrichment is down from 19,000 to 6,000. The rest have been dismantled and put into storage under tight international monitoring. Continuing enrichment is limited to 3.67 percent, the accepted level for reactor fuel. All enrichment has been shut down at the once-secret, fortified, underground facility at Fordow, south of Tehran. Iran has disabled and poured concrete into the core of its plutonium reactor-thus shutting down the plutonium as well as the uranium route to nuclear weapons. It has provided adequate answers to the IAEA's long-standing list of questions regarding past weapons-related activities.

What do the Iranians think of the U.S. government? Ordinary Iranians might well think that whatever discontent they have with their own government the U.S. is their most implacable and most immediate enemy. Invective like Trump's recent words could be a precursor of disastrous invasion. Many Iranians remember the U.S.-backed coup that ended their democracy in 1953, and they remember the fierce U.S. support given to Saddam Hussein in the brutal eight years of the Iran-Iraq war.

Noam Chomsky rightly names the U.S. Shock and Awe attack against Iraq as the greatest destabilizing force at work in the Middle East. "Thanks to that invasion," writes Chomsky, "hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed - Iraqis have compared the destruction to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century - leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS. And all of that is called 'stabilization.'"

Trump's record of statements and of cabinet appointments suggests that regime change in Iran is a long-term goal. Despite massive involvement in funding and fomenting terrorism on the part of Saudi Arabia, Trump's evolving strategy for the Middle East strangely emphasizes Iranian impacts on the region, particularly regarding the conflict in Yemen.

Yemen is entering conflict-driven famine, with a correspondingly lethal cholera outbreak, making it the worst of the region's "Four Famines," now widely recognized as collectively the worst starvation crisis in the 72-year history of the United Nations. "In Yemen," says Trump, "the IRGC, (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp), has attempted to use the Houthis as puppets to hide Iran's role in using sophisticated missiles and explosive boats to attack innocent civilians in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as to restrict freedom of navigation in the Red Sea." It is Saudi Arabia and its UAE ally, with crucial U.S. backing, that have been intensely bombing Yemen since 2015 and maintaining a punishing Red Sea blockade against shipments often vital to famine relief. "The Saudi-led coalition's ships are preventing essential supplies from entering Yemen," according to an October 11, 2017 Reuters report. The report goes on to assess the dire consequences, for Yemen, caused by blocking and delaying ships carrying food and medicine. It documents many cases in which vessels were thoroughly searched, certified not to be carrying weapons, and still not allowed to enter Yemen.

In a time when 20 million people face starvation, it's particularly obscene for any country to pour resources into nuclear weaponry. Mordechai Vanunu took extraordinary risks and endured incredible suffering to rescue the human species from the foolhardiness of building and maintaining nuclear arsenals. I wonder if people worldwide can rise to a level of courage and seriousness needed to simply recognize, and then, where possible, act in response to the world's real threats. Within the U.S., can several decades of U.S. government bipartisan lying about Iran be overcome with saner, more humane narratives? Can the threat of U.S. invasion be lifted long enough to allow Iran's people a window for once again considering democratic reforms? Silence about these issues seems ominous. But silence can be broken.

We have Vanunu's courageous example. Let's not waste the precious time we have in which to follow it.

- Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org), a campaign to end U.S. military and economic wars. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

LIKE US on FACEBOOK and FOLLOW US on TWITTER

What Is Behind the Hamas-Fatah Reconciliation?

By Ramzy Baroud

Egypt's enthusiasm to arbitrate between feuding Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, is not the outcome of a sudden awakening of conscience. Cairo has, in fact, played a destructive role in manipulating Palestinian division to its favor, while keeping the Rafah border crossing under lock and key.

However, the Egyptian leadership is clearly operating in coordination with Israel and the United States. While the language emanating from Tel Aviv and Washington is quite guarded regarding the ongoing talks between the two Palestinian parties, if read carefully, their political discourse is not entirely dismissive of the possibility of having Hamas join a unity government under Mahmoud Abbas' direction.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's comments in early October validate this assertion. He did not categorically reject a Hamas-Fatah government, but demanded, according to the Times of Israel, that "any future Palestinian government must disband the terror organization's (Hamas') armed wing, sever all ties with Iran and recognize the State of Israel."

Egyptian President, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, too, would like to see a weaker Hamas, a marginalized Iran and an agreement that puts Egypt back at the center of Middle East diplomacy.

Under the auspices of the Egyptian dictator, Egypt's once central role in the region's affairs has faded into a marginal one.

But the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation is giving el-Sisi a window of opportunity to rebrand his country's image which has, in recent years, been tarnished by brutal crackdowns on his country's opposition and his miscalculated military interventions in Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.

In September, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly conference in New York, el-Sisi met Netanyahu publicly for the first time. The exact nature of their talks was never fully revealed, although media reportspointed that the Egyptian leader has attempted to sway Netanyahu into accepting a Hamas-Fatah unity deal.

In his speech at the UNGA, el-Sisi also made a passionate, impromptu appeal for peace. He spoke of an 'opportunity' that must be used to achieve the coveted Middle East peace agreement and called on US President Donald Trump to "write a new page of history of mankind" by taking advantage of that supposed opportunity.

It is difficult to imagine that el-Sisi, with limited influence and sway over Israel and the US, is capable of, single-handedly, creating the needed political environment for reconciliation between Palestinian factions.

Several such attempts have been tried, but failed in the past, most notably in 2011 and in 2014. As early as 2006, though, the George W. Bush Administration forbade any such reconciliation, using threats and withholding of funds to ensure Palestinians remained divided. The Barack Obama Administration followed suit, ensuring Gaza's isolation and Palestinian division, while it also supported Israel's policies in this regard.

Unlike previous administrations, Donald Trump has kept expectations regarding the brokering of a peace agreement low. However, from the outset, he took Israel's side, promised to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and appointed a hardliner, David Friedman, a Zionist par-excellence, as US ambassador to Israel.

No doubt, last June, Trump signed a temporary order to keep the US embassy in Tel Aviv, disappointing many of his pro-Israel fans, but the move is by no means an indication of a serious change of policies.

"I want to give that (a plan for peace) a shot before I even think about moving the embassy to Jerusalem," Trump said in a televised interview recently. "If we can make peace between the Palestinians and Israel, I think it'll lead to ultimate peace in the Middle East, which has to happen."

Judging by historical precedents, it is quite obvious that Israel and the US have given a green light to Palestinian reconciliation with a clear objective in mind. For its part, Israel wants to see Hamas break away from Iran and abandon armed resistance, while the US wants to get 'a shot' at playing politics in the region, with Israeli interests being paramount to any outcome.

Egypt, being the recipient of generous US military aid, is the natural conduit to guide the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation component of the new strategy.

What strongly suggests that powerful players are behind the reconciliation efforts is how smooth the entire process has been so far, in complete contrast with years of failed efforts and repeated agreements with disappointing outcomes.

What primarily seemed like another futile round of talks hosted by Egypt, was soon followed by more: first, an initial understanding, followed by a Hamas agreement to dissolve its administrative committee that it formed to manage Gaza's affairs; then, a successful visit by the National Consensus Government to Gaza and, finally, an endorsement of the terms of national reconciliation by the two most powerful Fatah bodies: The Fatah Revolutionary Council and the Central Committee.

Since Fatah controls the Palestinian Authority (PA), the latter endorsementadvocated by Mahmoud Abbas was an important milestone needed to push the process forward, as both Hamas and Fatah readied themselves for more consequential talks in Cairo.

Unlike previous agreements, the current one will allow Hamas to actively participate in the new unity government. Top Hamas official, Salah Bardawil confirmed this in a statement. However, Bardawil also insisted that Hamas will not lay down its arms, and resistance to Israel is not negotiable.

US-Israel-Egyptian power play aside, this is, indeed, the crux of the matter. Understandably, Palestinians are keen to achieve national unity, but that unity must be predicated on principles that are far more important than the self-serving interests of political parties.

Moreover, speaking of - or even achieving - unity without addressing the travesties of the past, and without agreeing on a national liberation strategy for the future in which resistance is the foundation, the Hamas-Fatah unity government will prove as insignificant as all other governments, which operated with no real sovereignty and, at best, questionable popular mandates.

Worse still, if the unity is guided by tacit US support, an Israeli nod and an Egyptian self-serving agenda, one can expect that the outcome would be the furthest possible one from the true aspirations of the Palestinian people, who remain unimpressed by the imprudence of their leaders.

While Israel invested years in maintaining the Palestinian rift, Palestinian factions remained blinded by pitiful personal interests and worthless "control" over a militarily occupied land.

It should be made clear that any unity agreement that pays heed to the interest of factions at the expense of the collective good of the Palestinian people is a sham; even if it initially 'succeeds', in the long term it will fail, since Palestine is bigger than any individual, faction or a regional power seeking Israel's validation and US handouts.

- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is 'The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story' (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

DO YOU SPEAK FRENCH? Visit our French website:
http://chroniquepalestine.com/