And indeed, just days after putting Iran on notice that it must "NEVER EVER THREATEN the UNITED STATES", the US president did an about-face in what is becoming a pattern in the Trumpian foreign policy game, and offered to meet Rouhani, without conditions.
Yet the US-Iranian war of words is different from what happened between Kim and Trump. Firstly, it has been voluble and toxic for years, ever since 1979, when the Islamic Republic assumed power after the fall of the Shah and held Americans hostage. Secondly, unlike any of his other foreign policy stances, Trump has been consistent towards Iran, steadily ratcheting up the rhetoric as he condemned the nuclear deal (the JCPOA) as no better than the paper it was written on, and withdrew from it in May, slapping new sanctions on Iran. Importantly, unlike in the case of the North Korea "Rocket Man" tweets, his salvos have been backed by strong statements by both his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his National Security Director John Bolton, indicating there's a strategy behind the bombast.
What is the strategy?
Initially, Trump talked of negotiating a better deal, a tactic designed as much to deny President Obama's legacy as to denounce Iran for undercutting the "spirit" of the deal. Iran's response was mild and as Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, it stayed the course, relishing the unexpected windfall of being viewed by the other signatories as the victim of unreliable American action.As Trump drew closer to Saudi Arabia and Israel, he raised the temperature of the insults and accusations against Iran, referring less often to a new deal. The mounting pressure, at last, galvanised Rouhani and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to respond in kind with threats to close the Hormuz Straits and warnings not to "play with the lion's tail", rhetoric designed as much to counter the US as to save face within the complex layers of Iranian politics that differ so markedly from the one-man rule of North Korea. Though some viewed Rouhani's speech defining peace with Iran as "the mother of all peace" and war with Iran "the mother of all wars" as an invitation to sit down with Washington, Trump made it clear he did not read it that way. His strategy was not containment, but confrontation, with the intent to cause regime change, either by forcing the clerics to change regime behaviour, or destabilising the country so the people themselves change the regime. This was Trump following the strategy of his advisers, who have devised long lists of preconditions that if unmet, mean bombing rather than deal-making.
Does this mean a US-led war is possible? Probably not. Trump's America is too alone. The reasons are three: Europe, Russia, and Syria.
During the Bush Jr years, and even for a time Obama's, war was an option on the table. But that was before the 2015 nuclear deal, which changed everything. It recognised sanctions were not sufficient, and rehabilitated the Islamic Republic, committing the signatories to a partnership with the regime as long as it complied with the JCPOA. The US withdrawal from the deal destabilised its relationship with its European allies, which has only deteriorated with Trump's threats of a trade war and his handling of NATO.
Not surprisingly, in the face of Trump's offer to meet, a suspicious Rouhani has turned to the Europeans, calling on them to proclaim the US as having "illegally" withdrawn from the deal, and stating the ball is in their court.
The US, therefore, can no longer rely on its old partners in Europe to make the strategy of confronting Iran work. Instead, the Trump administration is looking to Saudi Arabia and Israel - its closest friends today - and hoping for a little help from Moscow.
Russia has no interest in a war south of its border
But Russia is in the ascendency, and in no mood to play Washington's game, as was illustrated by the Helsinki meeting between Vladimir Putin and Trump. As the latter was being assailed at home for selling out to Russia, Putin sent a high-level emissary to Tehran to confirm publicly that Iran's presence in Syria was "legal", and distinct from the illegal militias Russia had previously insisted must leave. Cooperation between the two nations in fighting terrorism there, he noted, would continue. Further, Russia's ambassador to Iran, Levan Dzhagaryan, issued a warning to Washington, saying "Work with Iranians can only be done through persuasion, and pressure on Iran will get you the opposite result".
Russia has no interest in seeing war south of its extensive border with Iran. It has a long legacy of diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic and knows that any conflict in the Gulf will detract rather than contribute to its own power in the region. On the Korean Peninsula, South Korea is the intermediary manoeuvring between the two sides, while in the negotiations with Iran, Russia takes on that role - a vastly more powerful and engaged actor with military presence and hard-bitten alliances, and its own increasingly successful agenda of containing American actions and influence everywhere in the Middle East outside the southern Gulf and Israel.
Trump is dependent on Russia in Syria
What's more, Helsinki revealed how dependent Trump is on Russia as he shifts strategy in Syria from containing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or Daesh) group to containing Iran. Unable to himself fulfil a key Israeli request, Trump petitioned Putin to ensure the Iranians would pull back from the south and away from the Golan Heights, so they could not establish an uninterrupted land bridge between Hezbollah's Lebanon and Iran. Showing off his unfettered control over the Syria situation, Putin did so within 24 hours of the summit, confirming him as a reliable statesman concerned for the security of all players in the Syrian theatre, including Israel. Indeed, by hearkening to Israel's cause, he has compromised Washington's dominance in Israel and defanged its position vis-a-vis Iran. He is also the one calling the shots on Syria's reconstruction, placing the American role on a par with the Europeans'.
Dangerous noise
This does not mean the war of words between Washington and Tehran can't escalate, despite the offer of a meeting without preconditions. Trump's new flock of advisers are long-term anti-Iran hawks, and his regional allies Saudi Arabia and Israel have themselves intensified threats to destabilise Iran from within, so as to hasten regime change.
Yet Trump's own interest is in deal-making and self-promotional media marketing. His possible goal of a Nobel Prize would disappear if a war of words turned into war. He's skilled in pivoting towards engagement after volleys of name-calling. He's shown several times how he can turn dangerous noise into successful summits with tricky interlocutors such as Kim Jong Il and, most recently, the EU's Jean-Claude Junker, emerging with agreements and smiles. There is every reason to think Trump feels he can pull off the same miracle with Iran.
The danger here is that the legacy of toxicity runs too deep. Iran too has preconditions.And the opportunities for conflict are multiple. Iran's own rhetorical prowess and ability to withstand American economic and political pressure over the years makes it a different kind of adversary altogether than the others Trump has, however superficially, done his deals with. What's more the region's razor-edge politics are as mercurial as Trump's own. One has only to look at the recent Houthi attack on Saudi tankers in the Straits of Bab al Mandab, which has raised the possibility of outside intervention, to recognise how easily war could erupt through Yemen's back door. Though Trump may perceive himself as leading the charge against Iran, he would be wise to take his own advice: BE CAUTIOUS!
The meeting between Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif and North Koreand Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho was a show of defiance. No less. Iran wants the United States to know it has friends everywhere.
In a social media post on Tuesday night, Javad Zarif wrote that the "world is sick & tired of US unilateralism", adding that "the world won't follow impulsive tweeted diktats. Just ask EU, Russia, China & dozens of our other trading partners."
Iran is right. The world is tired of dollar ditactorship. Enough is enough.
Donald Trump is in enough trouble, legally and politically, to need a war – or so one would think. Sanctions just don’t cut it.
He has a serviceable enemy at hand too, Iran.
American elites have long had it in for the Islamic Republic. They have many reasons, but high on the list is a point of honor: years after it happened, they still want payback for “the hostage crisis,” the government supported humiliation that revolutionary Iranian students inflicted upon the American Empire in the final 444 days of the Carter administration. Nearly everything disappears down the memory hole in “the United States of Amnesia” – except affronts to American authority, which are never forgotten.
The broader American public doesn’t care much for Iran either; the idea that the country is full of terrorists and led by demonic Ayatollahs is deeply entrenched.
There is an Iranian-American lobby, led by people too articulate and thoughtful to make much difference in a political culture dominated by mind-numbing cable networks and Twitter. If it had more rich backers, it might nevertheless have some influence. As it is, its cultural and political impact is slight, and its effect on elections is nil.
Therefore, were Trump to start a war against Iran, or to let Israel go at their “existential threat” du jour, there would be plenty of voters covering his back and many egging him on.
The question therefore arises: with the majority of Americans despising him, with the law closing in on him, and with his base too pathetic to do much more than stoke his ego at vile campaign-style rallies, why not go for it?
The obvious answer is that in addition to the enormous devastation and death that a war with Iran would cause – it would make the Bush-Cheney Iraq War seem almost anodyne in comparison — an Iran War now would create havoc in world energy markets. Iranian oil still counts for something in the world, and Iran could easily put the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint through which much of the world’s oil passes, out of commission.
That is the last thing that a world economy, already teetering on the brink of contraction and already having to contend with the beginning stages of Trump-induced trade wars, needs.
To be sure, Trump knows little and cares less about geography or the global economic order and he has no time for obvious answers; on this as on everything else, it is an axiom of his that the Donald knows best.
And so, if the Donald wants war, then, unless his minions put up too much of a fuss, war it shall be. On this, it seems that his minions are still on board.
The mystery is all the greater inasmuch as, this past spring, Trump assembled a War Cabinet, going so far as to make John Bolton, the vilest and most bellicose neocon in the DC establishment, his National Security Advisor. This was on top of a marginally less noxious conglomeration of Islamophobes and neocon Israel Firsters, already more than eager to do Iran harm.
Russophobia is a “bipartisan” affliction, but Islamophobia, though common enough in Democratic circles, is more of a Republican thing. Should Trump get a hankering to act out against Iran, there is no doubt that the House and Senate, both under Republican control, would be more than happy to go along.
What, then, is holding him back? Vladimir Putin is my guess.
On the other hand, there is the Trump-Netanyahu bromance, a match made in hell, no uqestions about that.
Trump’s real estate cronies couldn’t be happier, and neither could some of his new best friends — Sheldon Adelson, for example, and others of his ilk. Better still, having slept in young Jared’s bed at his felonious father’s house in New Jersey, the Bibster is practically family. Best of all, there is nothing in his accent that could give an America Firster pause; it is straight out of the Philadelphia ‘burbs.
Netanyahu has the vaunted Israel lobby, a mélange of officially “domestic” interest groups that take their marching orders from the Israeli government, at his disposal. It is more likely than not that, if challenged, that dreaded lobby would turn out to be a Paper Tiger, but politicians who live in mortal fear of its power will be the last to know.
But why would the Netanyahu government want to use its stranglehold over the American political class to cause harm to Iran?
Contrary to what the hasbara (Israeli propaganda) is widely made to suppose, the answer has almost nothing to do with the animosity Iran’s political and religious leaders show towards the self-described “nation state of the Jewish people.”
Since the Shah was overthrown, the theocrats and politicians who speak for Iran have been unstintingly anti-Zionist in their public pronouncements. In practice, however, relations between Iran and Israel have been more congenial.
This was certainly the case during the Reagan (Iran-Contra) years, when Iranian anti-Israeli rhetoric was most extreme. At the risk of demeaning the word “gentlemen” (since there were, and still are, none on either side), it was as if there had been a “gentlemen’s agreement” to talk up a storm and then do next to nothing about it.
Before the Iranian Revolution, Palestinians were Israel’s main enemy; it was, after all, their land that Zionists took over. Naturally, Zionists feared that they would want to fight back.
Or, as with other European colonial ventures, the enemy was Arabs generally. Muslims as such generally got off more easily, Persians (Iranians) especially.
For most of the past millennium and a half, relations between Jews and Muslims were a lot better than between Jews and Christians. Now the opposite is true.
For improvements in Jewish-Christian relations, it was mainly the rise of liberalism in early modern Europe and the Evangelical protestantism, which distortes the Bible and creates a Christian Zionism based on the conviction that as the End Time approaches, Jews will either convert or be consigned to Hell for all eternity. It combines anti-Judaism, a theological position, with anti-Semitism, an ethno-racialist doctrine. One would think that self-respecting Zionists would have no time for such demeaning nonsense. But self-respect pales in the face of “reasons of state.” The cynicism of the Zionist establishment is so extreme as to be almost stupefying.
Ultimately, though, Realpolitik is not all that is going on. There is something more like religious fervor involved as well.
For many Jews in Israel and around the world, Zionism long ago superseded the Jewish religion. Thus the state of an imagined community has taken the place of God. The usual raw materials out of which nations are forged – a common language, a common territory, common descent – don’t exactly apply in the case of Israel, which is built in an exclusive religious ground.
Therefore, Zionists hijacked Judaism deploying its symbols and cultural forms for their own nation-building purposes. Because they did, a certain level of sympathy and respect for Persia and all things Persian was built into the Zionist outlook from Day One.
If there were a Jewish conception of hell similar, say, to Dante’s account of Christianity’s, it would of course be filled with the souls of non-chosen peoples from all over the world, along with the souls of Jews "gone wrong" (because they have a sense of reality and justice).
The problem is that Iran has Always been open to Jews, therefor, the vilification of Iran requires effort to generate and sustain. Netanyahu could care less. However much he may feign fidelity to traditional pieties, he, and his co-thinkers, are more interested in “existential threats” than in observances and beliefs.This makes perfect sense. Dietary laws, religious holidays, and Sabbath prohibitions are useless for keeping a fractious citizenry united, and foreign Jews on board. Imagined threats to the existence of the Jewish state are something else altogether.
Iran is a big country with a large, well-trained army, and, though still constrained by the nuclear deal Barack Obama helped negotiate, it is the only serious potential challenger to Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly. It therefore makes a fine existential threat – far and away better than anything else nearby and available.
Israel is not the only “meddling” foreign country trying to lead the United States into a war with Iran, and neither is it the most odious. It goes hand to hand with Saudi Arabia. Corporate media have lately been giving the Saudi leader-in-waiting, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, MBS, good press. Evidently, in their minds, Saudi capitalism is friendly, unlike Russian capitalism, which somehow is not.
They therefore cut MBS a lot of slack. It doesn’t hurt his standing with them that he is a buddy of Jared Kushner’s or that he is said to be a modernizer, with less retrograde views on women than his father and uncles and most of his fellow princes. This is enough to make him seem almost like a class brother to our media moguls and their pundits.
Thus he gets away with things that Netanyahu doesn't do, yet – like threatening Canada with a 9/11 style attack for supporting human rights, and creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Yemen by conducting a brutal, genocidal war there. How pathetic is that! The Saudis in Yemen actually make the butchers of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza – the Israeli army, the self-declared “most moral army in the world” – look good. But corporate media seldom even mention Saudi war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against the peace in Yemen or anywhere else. Neither Israelis.
Israel and the Saudi “regimes” (“regime” is the word our media use to designate governments not in favor) are the worst of the worst in the most retrograde region on earth. The Israelis sell weapons and technology that they steal from otehr countries and the Saudis have plenty of money and they are good customers of American and other Western “defense industries” — death merchants – so, with public opinion in tow, their power over Washington's foreign policy rivals Israel’s.
For that, it helps too that they are also Israel’s ally, at least where Iran is concerned. Neither they nor the Israelis want to talk about it, but the fact remains.
To the Sunni theocrats in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, the Shi’a theocrats in Iran are heretics. Worse, they are also competition.
For the new generation of Saudi leaders, the MBS generation, merely being obscenely rich is not enough; they want to be obscenely rich in a regional hegemon, a country that uses its oil money to become a major player on the world stage.
Too bad for them therefore that the region they want to dominate isn’t big enough for two hegemonic states, their own and the Iranians’. So they made Iran their mortal enemy, as much or more than it is Israel’s. This spells double trouble because, like Israel, they have the means to press Trump’s buttons, to get him to act out.
The battle lines are therefore drawn. The only thing now keeping catastrophe at bay are Trump’s conman instincts, his determination to keep the folks he has hoodwinked on board by giving them, or seeming to give them, what they think they want, and not forcing on them what they neither want nor need. They don’t want a war with Iran, not now and not in any likely future, and there is nothing they need less.
Thus peace – or at least the absence of war – hangs on by a slender thread. The thread is actually Russia. Thanks God Putin is in Moscow. We will know in good time whether this is enough to save Iran, and us all, because nobody wants a third World War.
Inside Story 02/07/18: Is Trump on a relentless quest to corner Iran?
Counting the Cost: Economic Sanctions on Iran
PALESTINA
Update Israeli bombings 10/08/2018
Meanwhile, for more than four months, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been protesting along the fence with Israel, demanding their right to return to the homes and land their families were expelled from 70 years ago.
The Great March of Return rallies culminated on May 15 to mark what Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or Catastrophe - a reference to the forced removal of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages to clear the way for Israel's establishment in 1948.
The mass Friday demonstrations have since continued.
Since the protests began on March 30, Israeli forces have killed at least 172 Palestinians, including 21 children, in the besieged coastal enclave and wounded more than 17,500 people, according to health officials in Gaza. 4.442 were shot with live ammunition. On Friday, August 10, Israeli occupation forces have shot dead two Palestinians, including one volunteer paramedic, according to health officials in the Gaza Strip, as protesters gathered along the Israeli border fence for the 20th Week. Abdullah al-Qatiti, a 26-year-old paramedic, and Saeed Aloul, 55, were shot and killed in southern Gaza on Friday, health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said. Hundreds of others were injured, with 176 being treated on the field and 131 taken to the hospital.
On August 7, 2018, the Committee to Protect Journalists condemned the arrest of at least seven Palestinian journalists in the West Bank since July 30 and called on Israeli authorities to immediately disclose charges against them or set them free."Israel has been relentless in its assault on the Palestinian press. Declaring a media outlet a terrorist organization set the tone for the country's latest crackdown on Palestinian journalists," said CPJ's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, Sherif Mansour, from Washington, D.C. "We call on Israeli authorities to disclose charges against the seven journalists arrested over the past week or release them and allow them to work freely."
As a matter of fact, the Palestinians’ deteriorating conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip makes even long-term optimism difficult. Neither a one-liberal-state nor two-state resolution seems in the offing because (if for no other reason) either would seem to spell political suicide for any foreseeable Israeli government. The one-staters have a good argument against the two-staters and vice versa. Would it really be easier for an Israeli prime minister to evict 400,000 Israeli Jews from the West Bank (leaving aside the more than 200,000 in formally annexed East Jerusalem) than it would be to agree to one secular democratic state in which non-Jews would soon outnumber Jews if they don’t already? I don’t see it.Pessimism is reinforced by the recently passed Nation-State law, according to which the Knesset made fully de jure what had long been true de facto: that Israel belongs to Jewish people only (whether religious believers or not and wherever in the world they may currently live) and that the minority of non-Jewish Israelis should think of themselves as little more than guests living there at the pleasure of the Jewish supermajority.
“The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” the law states. Another part says, “The state will be open for Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles.” Also: “The state shall act within the Diaspora to strengthen the affinity between the state and members of the Jewish people.” And: “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”
And naive people thought laws that specified religious, ethnic, national, or racial groups for special treatment went the way of the dodo bird, at least in western media-oriented countries. Israel is officially a throwback to an unenlightened age.
To add insult to injury, Arabic, the language of 20 percent of the population, was demoted from an “official” language to one having only a “special status.”
If most of this was already the reigning state of affairs, why was the law passed? It was passed to constrain Israel’s Supreme Court. Gone is the wiggle room that the sometimes independent-minded court once had.
The law is now part of Israel’s Basic Law, which functions more or less like a constitution. The new law says, “This Basic Law shall not be amended, unless by another Basic Law passed by a majority of Knesset members.” In other words, there’s no chance in hell of changing it unless Israel’s ruling elite want it changed.
With the case for pessimism so strong, we must take whatever good news we can find. Some of us have longed for the emergence of a charismatic Palestinian figure who, while opposing Israeli oppression and settler-colonialism in all its forms, would also defend individualproperty rights and free enterprise while condemning both outside donor aid as dependence-inducing and the corrupt, authoritarian, and unrepresentative Palestinian Authority (PA).
Such a person has indeed emerged: Khaled Al Sabawi. Al Sabawi has quite a story to tell. In 1948, during the Zionists’ violent ethnic cleansing of Palestine and establishment of the state of Israel, his father’s family was driven from their home and 50-acre farm in the village of Salama, east of Jaffa. The family fled to Gaza, along with many other refugees. Then in 1956, when Israel, Great Britain, and France launched a war against Egypt, the Israeli army invaded Gaza (30 years before Hamas was formed), ransacking and searching the refugees’ homes, including the home of Sabawi’s grandmother and father. When the soldiers found the grandmother’s deed to their home in Salama, they confiscated it and departed. Apparently, that is just what the soldiers were looking for.
When his father grew up and earned advanced university degrees, he moved to Canada to raise his family. But then he moved back to Palestine and established a large insurance company in the West Bank and Gaza. His son Khaled has now done something similar, graduating from the University of Waterloo in Ontario. After switching from computer engineering to geothermal engineering, he embarked on two entrepreneurial ventures: geothermal energy for the Occupied Palestinians Territories and elsewhere in the Middle East and registration of individual property titles in the West Bank. The latter project is called TABO, the Arabic word for “title deed.”
Before the Nakba, the 1948 catastrophic ethnic cleansing and the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians proudly owned homes and land. But much of that land was not registered with the government because under Ottoman rule, that would have made the owners subject to taxation. Some individual parcels were registered in the name of absentee feudal landlords in Beirut and elsewhere, but the residents, that is, the actual Lockean owners, had to pay rent either in cash or kind. (James C. Scott’s book Seeing Like a State explains how governing elites have long used various forms of registration to facilitate taxation and conscription and generally to keep an eye on the people.)
The immediate problem with unregistered land in the West Bank is that Israel might decide to build Jewish settlements on it. The state has long claimed Palestinian properties in the name of the Jewish people. Israel has already built settlements for 400,000 Jews in Area C, which is the 60 percent of the West Bank it rules directly. (Areas A and B have some degree of internal rule by the PA, which polices the Palestinians on behalf of the Israeli government. International law forbids a country to move population into territory occupied during a war.)
An article about Sabawi in Forbes Middle East explained the situation:
In theory, the land [in the West Bank] is untouchable. After Oslo [the 1990s accords that created the PA], the Palestinian territories were divided into three areas: A, B and C, with just the latter falling under direct Israeli control. Al Sabawi works only in Area A, a zone officially under PA administration, but leaves nothing to chance. “If Israel tries to circumvent the agreement[, he says,] they’ll go after land without title deed, because once you have proof of ownership of your land it’s very difficult for anyone to put their hands on it.”
And Al Sabawi is out to keep it that way, securing proud Palestinian land with the papers to prove it.
So his TABO project has the admirable objective of preventing more Israeli settlements on land that Palestinians legitimately own. He and his team work to track down the last owners of properties or their heirs and to plot the boundaries. Forbes reports that “after identifying land for sale from Palestinians who possess inheritance documents but no official papers, Al Sabawi sets about obtaining approval from relevant family members, before determining the borders in a manner more accurate than the ‘this olive tree to that one’ approach.”
“We have to walk every corner of the land with a GPS machine, the head of the village council and every single neighbor,” Al Sabawi said. His work has ruffled feathers, and that may seem unsurprising until you learn that “the challenge did not come from Israel; it came from the Palestinian Authority.”
As he says in his TED Talk: For our outspokenness [that is, his criticism of the PA], however, we paid a heavy price, one that I never imagined. For our criticism of their leadership, individuals within the Palestinian Authority abused their power and suspended all of the title deed transactions of TABO. Think about this for a moment. To punish us for our freedom of expression, powerful individuals within the Palestinian Authority went out of their way to stop and suspend the registration of Palestinian land, thereby preventing the protection of Palestinian land from Israeli settlement expansion.
In a testament to Al Sabawi’s determination, the project has made progress nevertheless. First, he and his team sued the PA for its abuse of power in the International Court of Justice — and won. With that obstacle cleared, they moved ahead.
Forbes says: Three years on from TABO’s launch, the initiative has enabled 250 families, both resident and in the Palestinian diaspora, to own 371 plots of land. Of TABO’s sales so far, 30% have been generated by the diaspora. And the cost falls far short of the million dollar price tag hanging from land just minutes away. TABO offers plots for between $13,900 and $32,000, with interest-free payment financed through the company for up to four years.
That was three years ago. The figures are higher now. Al Sabawi says that TABO has protected more than a million square meters of land, paved over 10,000 meters of roads, and helped more than 400 families to acquire 600 properties.
While the PA has obstructed TABO, so has the Israeli government, which harasses, interrogates, and detains Al Sabawi and his team when they try to travel to the West Bank.
Overcoming these hurdles has been an astonishing achievement. When Al Sabawi appeared on Al Jazeera’s television show The Cafe, host Medhi Hasan said, “Sabawi believes corruption is rife inside the Palestinian Authority and says foreign aid has stunted an independent Palestinian economy.” On the program, Sabawi noted: The Palestinian Authority today has essentially become a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation. When Oslo was created in 1993, and Israel was bearing the economic burden of occupation. It was very expensive, but when the Palestinian Authority was created it essentially started policing the Palestinian cities. But who paid for the bill? All the donor states, the United States, Canada and the entire international community, but Israel fully maintained its occupation. Israel still controlled borders, airspace, water, and pretty much all aspects of life for the Palestinian people, but brought in the Palestinian Authority to manage these cities. So it’s been about 20 years of occupation management, and that’s taken us back significantly, and what it’s created is this entity that’s become, you know, focused more on its self-interest than the interests of the Palestinian people….
[T]he Palestinian leadership … hasn’t served to push Palestinian liberation forward whatsoever. As it stands today, the Palestinian Authority is completely anti-democratic. It has no mandate for the Palestinian people. The people that go and negotiate with Israel, the Palestinian leadership that goes to negotiate with Israel, has no mandate from the Palestinian people. They do not represent them….
Al Sabawi rejects the conventional wisdom that donor aid is indispensable to economic development: As it stands today, about 40 percent of the GDP of the Palestinian territories is accounted for by donor aid. The Palestinian people, as a result of it, also in the Palestinian Authority, have become the highest recipients of foreign aid in the world per capita. In addition to that, there’s an enormous dependence on the Israeli occupation. Ninety-five percent of our energy comes from Israel; 80 percent of our imports come from Israel; 90 percent of our exports go towards Israel. The Palestinian economy is a sub-economy….
Sabawi clearly sees the perverse consequences of so-called aid: It compromises the political and economic independence of the Palestinian people. So if the Palestinian people take an independent road or elect their own government, as they eloquently did in 2006 [in Gaza], so the 80 percent voter turn out, then the donor aid was cut off and the Palestinian people were punished for exercising their democratic rights[,] for being democratic. And just one small point, the situation now, economically, is far worse than it was before. The PA … is forcing Palestinian banks to give 50 percent of their deposits as loan facilities for the Palestinian people. Why? Because OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which is an American foreign policy organisation, came and provided loan guarantees for Palestinian banks, for a push to drive the Palestinian economy to be more debt-based. Now debt has accumulated to $3 billion, consumer debt for Palestinian people…. The Palestinian Authority has created further dependent victims of the Palestinian people as opposed to confront[ing] the Israeli occupation.
Champions of liberty can only hope that Al Sabawi inspires a new generation of Palestinian liberators, one that is dedicated to individual freedom and autonomy through private property and free enterprise.
Being a Palestinian mother
FREE GAZA NOW!
The people of Gaza have been subjected to decades of expulsion, occupation, siege and massacre. They have now seized control of their Fate. They are risking life and limb as they protest nonviolently to reclaim their basic rights. It takes just one minute to send a video showing your support for Gaza in its moment of truth. Do it now! Send your videos to METOOGAZA.COM
I support Gaza: Ilan Pappe
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