Lettre 13

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a Muslim issue. It is a dispute over land, it is about an occupation that must end and it is about a people who deserve a state. But it is not a religious dispute. Clerics, rabbis, priests and any one else who claims religious authority for his opinion should stay out of it. As a Muslim, I’m particularly eager to keep our clerics away from Palestine.

The conflict has been one of the most jumped upon bandwagons in both the Arab and the Muslim world – but framing it in religious terms serves no one’s interest, least of all the Palestinians. With the Islamist Hamas at the helm of the Palestinian government the temptation is great to lose ourselves in the religious kaleidoscope they would love to wrap around the conflict. But just as Islamists are more about power than religion, so is the conflict less about religion than land.

Mona Eltahawy, Qaradawi Damages Palestine’s Cause by Turning Global Issue Into Islamist Weapon, muslimwakeup.com

Somber assessment on Iraq by Thomas Ricks, the Washington Post correspondent in Iraq. He thinks the American have no control on the events, and that they will be there for two decades. And last, but not least, there is no easy solution for this fiasco, and that’s why he thinks that Iraq is a tragedy.

On Point with Tom Ashbrook, Thomas Ricks on Iraq Today (mp3)

Darryl Li: This is life in a ‘disengaged’ Gaza: It is not enough to be locked into an open-air prison by Israel. Nor to be turned into a beggar by the international community for voting in a democratic election. Nor to be torn apart by internal feuding. Now Palestinians have to drown in their own shit? I can’t wait to hear the latest excuse about how this, too, is their own fault.

A vivid account on the history that is behind the collapse of Gaza’s northern sewage treatment where five palestinians dies.

Laila El-Haddad, The Death Swamps, Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation

Powerful analysis from Roni Ben Efrat reprinted from CHALLENGE magazine.

Here, once again, Hamas reveals a characteristic lack of consistency. We saw this first a year ago, when it chose to take part in elections that were based on an infrastructure provided by the Oslo Accords. It accepted the Oslo framework without the content. Now it deepens its entrapment by entering a unity government, hoping to gain Western funds without accepting Western conditions. Saudi Arabia has won a brief span of glory, but what about the Palestinian people?

The election of Hamas did not bring a change of direction. Even if we acknowledge that the movement is not corrupt, it offered no alternative to the donations state. On the contrary, the notion of charity rather than work is a principle of the Hamas movement. Now this notion has become the basis of the entire unity government. Unless the latter can thaw Western coffers, the streets will again erupt.

Roni Ben Efrat, The Mecca Charity Show, electronicintifada.net

On Saudi diplomacy, see also this podcast from On Point with Tom Ashbrook.

On Point, The New Saudi Pushback, wbur.org (mp3)

Deep analysis on the political dance around the Mecca accord. A fascinating narrative by Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry on how the Saudi diplomacy distanced itself from the US to try to end the infighting between Hamas and Fatah. Infighting partly supported by the US diplomacy (Elliot Abrams from the NSC and the neocons) against Condi Rice. So, it seems to me that the infighting inside the White House are doing a spill over on the Middle East.

Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry, How the Saudis stole a march on the US, atimes.com

Another good read is this analysis on Barack Obama’s position toward Israel from Ali Abunimah.

On Friday Obama gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Chicago. It had been much anticipated in American Jewish political circles which buzzed about his intensive efforts to woo wealthy pro-Israel campaign donors who up to now have generally leaned towards his main rival Senator Hillary Clinton.

Reviewing the speech, Ha’aretz Washington correspondent Shmuel Rosner concluded that Obama “sounded as strong as Clinton, as supportive as Bush, as friendly as Giuliani. At least rhetorically, Obama passed any test anyone might have wanted him to pass. So, he is pro-Israel. Period.”

Although, Abunimah think that Obama is more favorable to Palestinians than what he profess now, the interesting part of this article is, in my opinion, the conclusion.

Obama has also been close to some prominent Arab Americans, and has received their best advice. His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy. Money and votes, but especially money, channelled through sophisticated and coordinated networks that can “bundle” small donations into million dollar chunks are what buy influence on policy. Currently, advocates of Palestinian rights are very far from having such networks at their disposal. Unless they go out and do the hard work to build them, or to support meaningful campaign finance reform, whispering in the ears of politicians will have little impact. (For what it’s worth, I did my part. I recently met with Obama’s legislative aide, and wrote to Obama urging a more balanced policy towards Palestine.)

Only if enough people know what Obama and his competitors stand for, and organize to compel them to pay attention to their concerns can there be any hope of altering the disastrous course of US policy in the Middle East. It is at best a very long-term project that cannot substitute for support for the growing campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions needed to hold Israel accountable for its escalating violence and solidifying apartheid.

Ali Abunimah, How Barack Obama learned to love Israel, electronicintifada.net [via SyriaComment]

Fascinating interview with Seymour Hersh on Open Source with Christopher Lydon following its piece The Redirection (New Yorker). What is scary is that you get the feeling that the White House is playing with fire while being delusional and ignorant of the history/culture of the Middle-East. The fact of the matter for Sy Hersh is that the White House is a major contributing factor in pitching whole religious/ethnic groups against themselves, pursuing interests that maybe make sense in the short-term, but will bring more instability in the Middle-East in the long-term.

I must say that sometimes I find Sy Hersh sounding too much like if he was revealing a plot with black helicopters hovering over it, that his analysis are too much based on individuals but, overall, he presents solid arguments on how the US administration is misguided and improvising regarding its Middle-East policies.

Open Source, Making the Rounds with Seymour Hersh (mp3)

A very good round-up by Zvi Bar’el of Haaretz about what the Palestinians are enduring in Iraq.

This is not the nation’s largest minority, but it is apparently the most persecuted. Testimony by Palestinian refugees to journalists and human rights organizations paints a very grave picture: Iraqi gangs break into Palestinian homes at night and demand the residents leave within 24 hours. In isolated cases, Palestinians have been kidnapped on the street or at work, and their bodies have been found several days later, in ditches or garbage cans.

Unlike the 2 million Iraqi refugees who have left their homeland, Palestinians usually carry no documents bearing witness to their Iraqi citizenship, or anything that would permit them entry into neighboring Arab states, like Jordan or Syria.

Zvi Bar’el, Refugees, twice over, Haaretz.com

Palestinians are also part of a larger trend as Patrick Cockburn shows in The Independent:

Iraq’s minorities, some of the oldest communities in the world, are being driven from the country by a wave of violence against them because they are identified with the occupation and easy targets for kidnappers and death squads. A “huge exodus” is now taking place, according to a report by Minority Rights Group International.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says 30 per cent of the 1.8 million Iraqis who have fled to Jordan, Syria and elsewhere come from the minorities.

Patrick Cockburn, ‘Exodus’ of Iraq’s ancient minorities, The Independent

Meanwhile, Rami G. Khouri is predicting that the Arab world is at a historic crossroad and that the current modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in circa 1920 has started to break down, in what we might perhaps call the Great Arab Unraveling. He adds that the way the US is pursuing its policy in the Midlle-East produce a murky picture.

The pervasive incoherence of this bizarre picture makes it perfectly routine for Arab monarchies to support Salafist terrorists, for Western democracies to ignore the results of Arab free elections, for Iranians and Arabs, and Shiites and Sunnis, to work hand in hand while also fighting bitter wars, for Islamists and secular Arabs to join forces, for freedom lovers in London and Washington to support seasoned Arab autocrats, for Western and Arab rule-of-law advocates to sponsor militias, and for Israel and the US to perpetuate Israeli policies that exacerbate rather than calm security threats and vulnerabilities in the region.

Rami G. Khouri, Prepare for the Great Arab Unraveling, The Daily Star

There’s an excellent introduction on Shiism by Mike Shuster of NPR available as a podcast.

Mike Shuster, The Partisans of Ali: A Series Overview, NPR (mp3)

See also the reading list.

I discovered the hard way that in PHP5 there are no obvious ways to detect if some XML is well-formed, especially if you want to deploy on Unix/Windows platform and don’t want to access the shell directly.

Adding to this problem, I discovered also that the DOM and simplexml extensions can’t use the PHP5 exception handling to trap the errors when the XML is not well-formed. Using simplexml or the DOM extensions against not well-formed XML, the errors generated by these extensions are not trapped and are displayed immediately.

It’s possible to load with the DOM or the Tidy extensions not well-formed XML, and then repair it on the fly. But what if you need to detect not well-formed XML and provide a message stating the error?

Fortunately, after some research, I found that you could use the libxml functions (PHP 5.1 and over) to test XML well formedness and trap XML errors. So, I wiped out this little function called get_xml_object (see here for the inspiration) that allow me to trap errors when simplexml is used to parse XML. The function is quite simple, by default, you provide a path to a XML file. If you want to use a string, just add another argument after the first parameter (it can’t be anything, but here’s I chose “string” for clarity sakes). You can also replace the simplexml extension by the DOM extensions if you prefer this extension to parse XML.

The function get_xml_object will return an array that contains two keys, errors and xml. In this example, $result=get_xml_object($s, "string"), $result is an array. If there are no errors, $result['errors'] will be set to null. If everything is ok, $result['xml'] will contains a simplexml object that you can then manipulate with the simplexml extension.

$s = "tag>hello world</tag>";
// $s = "<tag>hello world</tag>";

function get_xml_object ($xml, $xmlFormat="file") {

  $xml_object = null;
  $result = array ("errors" => null, "xml" => null);

  libxml_use_internal_errors (true);
  $xmlFormat == "file"  ? $xml_object = simplexml_load_file ($xml)
                        : $xml_object = simplexml_load_string ($xml);

  if (!$xml_object) {
     $errors = libxml_get_errors();
     foreach ($errors as $error) {
         $error_msg = "Error: line: " . $error->line
                    . ": column: " . $error->column . ": "
                    . $error->message . "n";
     }
     libxml_clear_errors();
     $result["errors"] = $error_msg;
  } else {
    $result["xml"] = $xml_object;
  }
  return $result;
}

$result = get_xml_object ($s, "string");

if ($result['errors']) {
  var_dump ($result['errors']);
} else {
  var_dump ($result['xml']);
}

Zvi Bar’el, one of my favorite political analyst have a somber evaluation of the situation one year after the election of Hamas.

(…) even if Haniyeh starts wearing a skullcap and Khaled Meshal begins humming Hatikva, and even if Abbas makes it mandatory to teach the heroic story of Masada in Palestinian schools, Israel does not want and is unable to propose a diplomatic alternative that would lead to the establishment of an independent and democratic Palestinian state. It does not want to - because any such proposal would mean a withdrawal from most of the territories and the dismantling of most of the settlements. It is unable to - because there is no government of Israel. After all, even when it appeared that there was a government in Israel, not a single measly illegal outpost was removed; this is a non-government that has transformed the disengagement from Gaza from a national trauma to a housing trauma; and in Hebron, or in Mount Hebron to be more precise, the sovereign provides free protection to a bunch of hooligans.

Zvi Bar’el, As long as we impose sanctions, Haaretz.com

It seems to me that the Palestinians are hostage of their political representatives notwithstanding the Israel intransigence and the completely stupid response from the Quartet to the election of Hamas.

It is the first time in history, according to the UN’s John Duggard, that an occupied people have been subject to international sanctions, especially sanctions of this magnitude and rigor.

And then there’s that other story: the one about a people forgotten in all of this. Who will relay their narrative?

Laila El-Haddad, Hamas in power: one year on, Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation

See also Laila El-Haddad’s interview that narrate the social dislocation in Gaza. (mp3)

Jimmy Carter still amazes me. He gave a conference about his last book (Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid) at an American nondenominational Jewish university and received a standing ovation.

Nathaniel Popper, Carter Wins Over Student Crowd at Brandeis, Receives Ovation, Forward.com

See also Jimmy Carter defends new book on Middle East for the podcast of this conference (mp3)

SyriaComment.com: What is New about Bush’s New Strategy?

Sacrificing political stability in Somalia for three al-Qaida operatives is terrible math. Even more troubling is the continued escalation toward Iran. Beefing up Gulf defenses by sending additional battle ships to the region, leaked Israeli plans to use nuclear bunker busters against Iran’s facilities, and promises to provide Patriot missiles to the Arab Gulf states all suggest that Bush is expanding the battle field in the hope that US fortunes in Iraq will be reversed if Washington can claim victory elsewhere. The problem with this strategy is that it builds on the erroneous presumption that the US is in a war against “evil.” Rather than disaggregating struggles in Palestine, the Horn of Africa, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq in order to deal with each separately, Washington is stubbornly gluing them together in one super war on radical Islam. We are pretending they are all directed by al-Qaida and a nebulous enemy of freedom and liberty. This is not the enemy that exists. There is no command central. Moreover, we cannot destroy an idea with firepower. By pursuing this false war with greater determination, the US is ensuring failure with greater determination.

This an excellent recapitulation on all the battle fronts the White House is opening in the Middle-East (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) and the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia/Somalia). It’s quite scary. You have the feeling that there’s no check and balance from the Congress, and that Bush/Cheney will be able to do as they like.

The drums of war are even more beating here if you believe Zbigniew Brzezinski:

…this is what really worries me. There are hints in the president’s speech and in Rice’s testimony today about the possibility of escalation, not necessarily in the number of troops, but in the range of the military operations, namely perhaps against Syria or Iran.

And the incident with the Iranian consulate, the rhetoric about Iran, the increasing temptation to blame our failure on the Iranians and the Syrians could push us in that direction. And there are a lot of people still around here, particularly the neocons, who would like us to have a crack at Iran.

and

I think it reflects, on the one hand, desperation, on the other hand, a kind of fanatical commitment which I think is detached from reality.
Jim Lehrer: From the United States?
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Of the United States and of presidential leadership. And don’t forget that, even the existing policy, short of the widened war with Iran and Syria, does not have the support of the three still-living former presidents, and one who recently died, who went public on record as opposing the current policy.

And that means a total exclusion of any rational regional effort to get a political process going of the kind that the Baker-Hamilton commission spoke and which I think very rightly advocated.

Online NewsHours: Plan to Increase Troop Numbers Comes Under Broad Scrutiny (mp3)