Bahrain FM calls for regional grouping of Arabs, Israel Wed Oct 1, 6:54 AM ET
DUBAI (AFP) - The foreign minister of staunch US ally Bahrain has called for the creation of a regional grouping of Arab states with historic foe Israel, as well as Iran and Turkey, a newspaper reported on Wednesday. Israel, Iran, Turkey and Arab states should sit together in one organisation, Sheikh Khaled bin Ahmad al-Khalifa was quoted in the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat as saying.Aren't we all members of a global organisation called the United Nations? Why not (come together) on a regional basis? This is the only way to solve our problems. There's no other way to solve them, now or in 200 years.Al-Hayat, which interviewed the Bahraini chief diplomat in New York, said he had proposed the establishment of a regional bloc in a speech to the UN General Assembly.The tiny Gulf kingdom is a major ally of the United States and has a free trade agreement with Washington. It also hosts the US Navy's Fifth Fleet.Bahrain's crown prince, Sheikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, met Israeli officials during World Economic Forum summits in 2000 and 2003, while Sheikh Khaled met Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni at the UN last year.But political groupings in Bahrain, which is ruled by a Sunni dynasty and has a Shiite majority, resist any attempt at normalisation of ties with Israel.Only two Arab countries -- Egypt and Jordan -- have full fledged peace treaties with Israel. Bahrain's Gulf neighbour Qatar, another close US ally, is one of a handful of Arab countries to maintain political contacts with the Jewish state.
Forging ties with Israel without a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is generally unpopular among ordinary Arabs.Why don't we sit together even if we disagree, even if we don't recognise each other? Let's be in a single organisation in order to overcome the difficult stage through which the Middle East is passing -- a stage that remains hostage to the past, Sheikh Khaled told Al-Hayat, referring to the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict.Told that his proposal might be perceived by some as a dream since it was hard to see hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sitting alongside Israel, Sheikh Khaled, whose country occasionally has problems with Iran, said: If this is perceived as a dream, well, many dreams have become reality.
Olmert's Lame-Duck Epiphany About Palestinian Peace By SCOTT MACLEOD
Wed Oct 1, 6:00 AM ET
He is a former leader in the rightist Likud Party who for decades staunchly believed that the West Bank and Gaza Strip belonged to the Jewish people and that the territories, along with the Golan Heights, should remain part of Greater Israel forever. Along with former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert gradually came to understand that this was a fantasy. They broke away from Likud and created the centrist Kadima (Onward) Party three years ago. Now, as Olmert hands the reins to Tzipi Livni and leaves office amid a corruption scandal, he's made a series of stunning departure statements that form a swan song of historical importance. Peace advocates, Israeli dreamers, Arab skeptics and U.S. mediators in a future McCain or Obama Administration should read his words carefully and take note.The political lame duck's views expressed in interviews and public comments reveal the sweeping reversals that have taken place among some of Israel's ultra-nationalists. Olmert says Israel should withdraw from almost all of the West Bank and Golan Heights. A former mayor of the undivided capital of the Jewish state, he now advocates dividing Jerusalem with the Palestinians. He wants to keep some of the Jewish settlements that adjoin Israel's pre-1967 border but accepts giving the future Palestinian state Israeli territory in a land swap with a close to 1-to-1-ratio. The notion of a Greater Israel no longer exists, Olmert says, and anyone who still believes in it is deluding themselves.
True, these are not radical views. Former Labour PM Ehud Barak put something like this on the table at Camp David negotiations with the Palestinians eight years ago. What Olmert is saying today broadly conforms to the thinking of Israeli Labour politicians, mainstream Palestinian and Arab leaders, and U.S. officials, as well as the international community. What is important is the source, content and context of Olmert's statements.Olmert is no Arab-loving pacifist. As Prime Minister, he ravaged half of Lebanon in 2006 in a military offensive after Hizballah killed and kidnapped Israeli soldiers. He has unmercifully turned the screws on Hamas-controlled Gaza. Olmert's comments reflect a profound shift toward realism among Israeli rightists, akin to what Palestinian and Arab nationalists started going through three decades ago, when Israel was in the prime of its strategic strength. The shift is evident not only in Olmert's prescription for a peace settlement, but also in his severe critique of a righteous Israeli mind-set that has turned out to be self-destructive.
Forty years after the Six-Day War ended, we keep finding excuses not to act, Olmert says. "We refuse to face reality ... The strategic threats we face have nothing to do with where we draw our borders ... For a large portion of these years, I was unwilling to look at the reality in all its depth. Saying Israel would not attack Iran unilaterally to stop Tehran's nuclear program, Olmert scoffs, Part of our megalomania and our loss of proportions is the things that are said here about Iran. We are a country that has lost a sense of proportion about itself.Olmert is by no means agreeing to a surrender. Yet, after Israel's failure to impose its will on Arab opponents by force over four decades, he's crying uncle. We invested our mental resources and thoughts in how to build Judea and Samaria, yet history made clear to us that the state of Israel has other realistic and viable options, he says. The state of Israel's future won't be found in intermixing with the Palestinians, but rather, is to be found in unpopulated regions that are desperate for our entrepreneurship and innovation.Palestinian demands, Olmert is acknowledging, won't go away. Recall, the Likud Party, with which Olmert made his career, always refused any dealings with the PLO or even to recognize its demands for Palestinian independence. Indeed, Sharon invaded Lebanon in 1982 with a grand vision of redrawing the Middle East map with no place for a Palestinian state. The expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank proceeded rapidly in the ensuing decades. With his about-face, Olmert effectively acknowledges that the Palestinian uprisings of 1987 and 2000 succeeded in forcing Israel to address Palestinian rights. Everybody, including Camp David host Bill Clinton, loved to blame Yasser Arafat for the collapse of the peace process. When Sharon succeeded Barak as Prime Minister in 2001, he began implementing a unilateral vision of a settlement by ending Israel's occupation of Gaza. Yet for the last year, at the tragically belated coaxing of the Bush Administration, Olmert, who replaced the ailing Sharon in 2006, has been quietly engaged in a revival of negotiations with Arafat's successor. Like Olmert's willingness to enter those talks, his swan song amounts to an admission that Israel never went quite far enough in accommodating the Palestinians' basic requirements for peace.
The realism behind Olmert's change of heart is of tremendous import, summed up by one sentence: The international community is starting to view Israel as a future binational state. In other words, forget about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats to wipe Israel off the map. Echoing views he initially expressed in 2003, Olmert reasons that without an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, the Jewish state faces the self-inflicted, mortal danger of being destroyed by demographics, overwhelmed by Muslim and Christian Arabs demanding political representation. Olmert fears that the international community could ultimately favor a one-state solution, thus spelling the death of the two-state partition that has been at the core of an acceptable Israeli-Palestinian solution for decades. Time is not on Israel's side, Olmert says. I used to believe that everything from the Jordan River bank to the Mediterranean Sea was ours ... But eventually, after great internal conflict, I've realized we have to share this land with the people who dwell here - that is, if we don't want to be a binational state.In the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Aluf Benn disparages the Israeli Prime Minister's epiphany, saying Olmert is an excellent commentator, but he lacks the firmness to execute his ideas. Sadly, that seems to be the case. Yet Olmert, on the eighth anniversary of the second Palestinian intifadeh, has done history a valuable service by puncturing some myths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If future negotiators, as well as American mediators, abandon their fantasies as Olmert has done, a peace that truly benefits all parties is much likelier to come.
NY judge: PLO can't disguise terror as war By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press Writer Tue Sep 30, 4:43 PM ET
NEW YORK - The Palestine Liberation Organization can't win dismissal of a lawsuit by victims of bombings in Israel by claiming the attacks were acts of war rather than terrorism, a judge ruled Tuesday. U.S. District Judge George Daniels said the 2004 lawsuit on behalf of victims and their families can proceed toward trial. It seeks up to $3 billion in damages from attacks between January 2001 and February 2004.
Daniels rejected the PLO's argument that two machine-gun attacks and five bombings were acts of war. The Jerusalem-area attacks killed 33 people and wounded hundreds, including scores of U.S. citizens.Daniels said the attacks targeted public places — not military or government personnel or interests. Two bombings were on downtown streets; others occurred at a crowded bus stop, a cafeteria at the Hebrew University and a passenger-filled civilian bus.The use of bombs in these circumstances indicates an intent to cause far-reaching devastation upon the masses, the judge said, with a merciless capability of indiscriminately killing and maiming untold numbers in heavily populated civilian areas.Such attacks upon non-combative civilians, who were allegedly simply going about their everyday lives, do not constitute acts of war, he said.Daniels also said the violence meets the legal definition of international terrorism.The lawsuit alleges that the PLO carried out the attacks to pressure the United States and Israel to submit to its demands and to terrorize, intimidate and coerce the civilian population of Israel into acquiescing to its political goals.The judge also rejected arguments that the PLO was entitled to sovereign immunity or that the lawsuit must be brought in Israel rather than the United States. It was brought under the Antiterrorism Act of 1991, which provides U.S. residents, their survivors and heirs civil remedies in U.S. courts if they are injured by international terrorism.Lawyers on both sides did not immediately return telephone messages for comment.
Israel army buys self-destruct cluster bombs: radio Tue Sep 30, 2:12 PM ET
JERUSALEM (AFP) - The Israeli army is equipping itself with self-destruct cluster bombs in order to lower the number of civilian victims of this type of weapon, used in the 2006 war in Lebanon, military radio said. The army has reduced its purchases of US made cluster bombs, instead buying Israel-made M-85 cluster bombs, which contain a mechanism to destroy themselves if they fail to explode immediately on impact, according to the report.Cluster munitions spread bomblets over a wide area from a single container.The United Nations estimates that a million cluster bombs were dropped on Lebanon by Israel between July 12 and August 14 in 2006 in the conflict with Hezbollah.About 40 percent of these did not explode on impact and are spread among villages and orchards in the south of Lebanon.According to a UN report in June, at least 38 people have been killed and 217 wounded by bomblets exploding since the end of the fighting.The Israeli government's Winograd Commission of enquiry into the mistakes of the Lebanon war recommended the army use fewer cluster bombs in future to reduce civilian injuries.In May, delegates from 111 countries agreed a landmark treaty in in Dublin to ban the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions by its signatories.However, the agreement lacked the backing of major producers and stockpilers including Israel, China, India, Pakistan, Russia and the United States.
West Bank settler violence challenges Israel By Mohammed Assadi
Tue Sep 30, 9:19 AM ET
ASIRA AL-KIBLIYA, West Bank (Reuters) - Armed with guns, slingshots, knives and stun grenades, Jewish settlers pelted the house of Palestinian Nahla Makhlouf with stones, uprooted young trees and painted the Star of David on her walls. In Makhlouf's West Bank village of Asira al-Kibilya, Palestinians brace for possible attack by their Jewish settler neighbors from nearby Titzhar almost every weekend. But the latest attack exceeded their expectations.They sprayed some sort of tear gas through the window. It smelled strong and made our eyes run and made it hard to breath, especially for my baby, said the 33-year-old mother of four.Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reacted strongly to the September 13 attack, saying he would not tolerate pogroms by Jewish extremists who are determined on religious grounds to stop Israel swapping occupied land for peace.Last week, an outspoken Israeli critic of the settlements was wounded by a pipe bomb outside his Jerusalem home, in what Olmert said was evidence of an evil wind of extremism, of hatred, of violence threatening Israeli democracy.Settlers and the Israeli army said the Asira assault was triggered by the wounding of a nine-year-old settler boy by a Palestinian whom he had disturbed in the act of setting fire to a house in the Yitzhar settlement while the family was away.But settler vigilante violence is growing, according to a recent U.N. report, which recorded 222 incidents in the first half of 2008, versus 291 in all of 2007.
HARDLINE
Some half a million Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, including Arab East Jerusalem. Their presence, viewed by major powers as illegal under international law, is partly shielded by a 790 km (490 mile) barrier Israel has been building since 2002.In a newspaper interview on Monday, Olmert broke new ground by urging Israel's withdrawal from almost all the territories captured in the 1967 Middle East war in return for peace.But Olmert says Israel plans to keep major settlements in the West Bank in any peace deal, and would have to compensate the Palestinians for land lost.The Palestinians say they cannot have a viable country of their own if it is chopped into pieces by Israeli settlement islands and the snaking walls and fences of the new barrier.U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called the settlements an obstacle to peace which must go.Some settlers justified the attack on Asira, saying the army failed to protect them against a violent infiltration.If the Israeli army had done what it should, maybe this wouldn't have happened. They should either have prevented that infiltration or carried out a raid after, Renana Cohen said.Dani Dayan of Israel's mainstream settlers' organization says the Arabs do not want peace. A Palestinian state would be a launching pad from which they would conduct ethnic cleansing against the Israelis, he argues. Many Israelis feel the same.
Most settlers oppose vigilante violence. But most agree that withdrawal would be a sure recipe for war, as Dayan puts is, because there will no peace-loving Palestinians taking over.A younger, more aggressive breed of religious ideologues vows a violent response to any eviction threat, warning a heavy price would be exacted for any bid to close settlements down.
NO PROTECTION
Residents of Asira say the settlers need no provocation or pretext. Attacks on Asira date back three years, Makhlouf said. Palestinians complain of unremitting harassment, such as the burning of their olive trees and stoning attacks on farmers in the fields, as a prelude to land-creep and confiscation. The garden and rooftop of Makhlouf's neighbor, Ahmed Dawood, were littered by stones rained onto his house in the settler rampage. The water tank was holed by four bullet. Dawood's son and a laborer in his field were shot and wounded. The army, he said, made no effort to stop the attack. I complained to the soldiers and they shouted back Get inside and started shooting, he said. We have nothing to protect ourselves with. We just take precautions such as putting metal grids on the windows. But the solution is to have them uprooted from here.Asira's predicament is well known to Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, who gave Makhlouf a small video camera in 2007 to document violence. The lens was knocked off focus by a rock in the latest attack but still provided an audio record. Yoav Gross of B'Tselem said the settlers can be heard giving the army a one-minute ultimatum to act against the Palestinians or they would do the job themselves. They started counting one, two, three..., he said. They were giving orders to the soldiers, not the other way around.One Israeli human rights lawyer, Michael Sfard, says most soldiers do not realize they have not only the right but also the duty, as the occupying power, to defend Palestinians. Settler attacks may rise in the upcoming olive harvest, when Arab farmers work the groves close to settlement perimeters. One Palestinian woman in Asira was stocking up on corrosive cleaning fluids to throw at the attackers next time they visit. They have the army to protect them even while they are attacking us, said the woman, who was afraid to give her name. But we have no one to defend us.(Editing by Douglas Hamilton and Samia Nakhoul)
Israelis welcome Jewish New Year By SHAWNA OHM, Associated Press Writer
Mon Sep 29, 2:18 PM ET
JERUSALEM - Israelis ushered in the Jewish New Year on Monday with festive family dinners — and a warning from their outgoing prime minister that they'll have to return virtually all the land captured in 1967 to win peace with the Palestinians and Syrians. Ehud Olmert, who is giving up his office amid a corruption investigation, also exchanged holiday greetings with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. The Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashana, coincides this year with Eid el-Fitr, one of the holiest days on the Muslim calendar.The two leaders have been meeting regularly in recent months trying to work out a peace accord that would end their long conflict and give the Palestinians their own state. But the talks have not produced tangible results, and many Israelis and Palestinians are skeptical about prospects.For many Israelis, the year that ended Monday was also disappointing in other ways. Top leaders, including Olmert, and a one-time president, Moshe Katsav, have been forced out by scandal.From the public, Israeli standpoint, the year that ends this evening should perhaps be erased from collective memory, columnist Eitan Haber wrote in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot.We are divided, skeptical, disbelieving, facing the greatest leadership crisis there has ever been here, added another Yediot columnist, Yair Lapid.Rosh Hashana, which began at sundown, ushers in 10 days of soul-searching capped by Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. But the New Year holiday itself is a time for festive meals, which traditionally include an apple dipped in honey to symbolize a sweet new year.
Israel closed off the West Bank until late Wednesday, barring Palestinians from entering Israel. It is a measure common during Jewish holidays, to deter possible attacks by Palestinian militants.The Gaza Strip, the other Palestinian territory, has been virtually sealed off since June 2007, when the Islamic militant group Hamas seized control by force. The vast majority of the territory's 1.4 million Palestinians have been trapped there since then.In his farewell interview as prime minister, Olmert said Israel will have to give up nearly all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem if it wants peace with the Palestinians, who plan their state for those areas and Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.Olmert also said Israel would have to leave the Golan Heights, a militarily strategic high ground that looks down on northern Israel, to obtain peace with Syria.The comments were the clearest sign to date of Olmert's willingness to meet the demands of Israel's longtime enemies in peace talks. But their significance was uncertain, since his days in office are numbered and negotiations will soon become the responsibility of a new Israeli leader.Palestinians, meanwhile, prepared for Eid el-Fitr, the three-day holiday marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Eid el-Fitr will start here Tuesday.In Gaza, outdoor markets were selling nearly all the supplies needed for the holiday, but prices were up sharply, compared to the period before the start of the blockade. Gazans get many of their supplies through smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border.A tunnel operator, who would identify himself only as Abu Nidal, said he had been working double time in the run-up to the holiday.
Before we used to enter 1, 2 tons a day of goods in general, he said. These days, from 5 to 6 tons. He added that the smuggled goods range from clothes and chocolate to balloons.Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics released its annual population figures to mark the New Year. It said 7.34 million people live in Israel, including 5.54 million Jews, or 75 percent of the population. There are 1.48 million Arabs, about 20 percent, and 315,000 members of other groups.The annual population growth rate held steady at 1.8 percent. The Arab population grew at a faster rate than the Jewish population, 2.6 percent compared to 1.6 percent.
