Turkish Forum

Category: Middle East & Africa

  • Turkish-Israeli ties sour further

    Turkish-Israeli ties sour further

    ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish-Israeli ties soured further on Saturday after Ankara summoned Israel’s ambassador over an army general’s comments which the Turkish military said could threaten cooperation between the Middle East allies.

    Sat Feb 14, 2009 11:57pm IST

    By Paul de Bendern and Ayla Jean Yackley

    The Foreign Ministry called in Israeli Ambassador Gabby Levy to protest over comments by Israel’s land forces commander, reported in the Haaretz newspaper, who criticised Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus and its conflict with Kurdish separatists.

    “The relevant statements of (Major General) Avi Mizrahi are ungrounded and unacceptable and as such we have requested an urgent explanation from Israeli authorities,” the ministry said in a statement.

    It was the latest sign of tension between Israel and Turkey, NATO’s only Muslim member, who maintain close military ties but whose alliance has been strained by Israel’s offensive on Gaza.

    Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last month angrily accused Israeli President Shimon Peres of “knowing very well how to kill” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    Erdogan told Reuters in an interview late on Friday that he was saddened by the results of the Israeli elections this week, which showed gains by right-wing parties.

    “Unfortunately the election has painted a very dark picture,” he said on board his plane during a campaign trip.

    Erdogan urged the next Israeli government to look at how it conducted policies and actions towards the Palestinians and to lift an embargo on the Palestinians who he said lived in an “open-air prison”. He said Israel’s tough stance was failing.

    “LOOK IN THE MIRROR”

    Mizrahi was quoted by Israeli daily Haaretz as saying Erdogan should have “looked in the mirror” before attacking Peres and that Turkey was not in a position to criticise Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands when it stations troops in northern Cyprus.

    He also accused Turkey of repressing its Kurdish minority and massacring Armenians during World War One.

    The Turkish General Staff said Mizrahi’s remarks were untrue and completely unacceptable and they demanded an explanation.

    “The comments have been assessed at the kind of level that could damage the national interests between the two countries,” the Turkish armed forces said, suggesting military cooperation could be at stake.

    Turkey and Israel have close military cooperation, which includes allowing the Israeli air force to train in Turkey. The two countries also share intelligence and have strong trade ties, including the sale of important military equipment.

    “There are some people saying cut off ties with Israel, but we are not in that understanding. Before taking any such steps, and I’m not saying we are thinking of taking any such steps, we would have to carry out a big study on such a decision,” Erdogan told Reuters through an interpreter.

    He said there were no plans to halt the training agreement.

    Some diplomats and analysts say Turkey’s role as a mediator in the Middle East, and in particular as a neutral negotiator between Israel and Syria, suffered short-term damage because of Erdogan’s fierce criticism of Israel and defence of Hamas.

    Erdogan dismissed such suggestions.

    “I don’t think that way … Turkey is a strong country that has a (unique) international position,” he said.

    “We were not the ones who wanted this negotiations role. In negotiations between Syria and Israel both countries wanted Turkey to be the mediator, that is why we took part in it.”

    Erdogan said critics misunderstood Turkish foreign policy if they thought the government was siding with Hamas or was against Israel. Turkey wanted peace in the region and was defending the helpless, in this case the civilians in Gaza, he said.

    He said the ruling AK Party, which has roots in political Islam, had restored Turkey’s influence in the world and it was only natural that Turkey should use its new-found strength to help solve crises from the Caucasus to the Middle East.

    Erdogan received a hero’s welcome in Turkey and praise in the Arab world after his outburst in Davos, but raised eyebrows among Western diplomats who asked whether Turkey was turning away from the West.

    https://www.reuters.com/?edition-redirect=in

    Turkish military says ties with Israel may be harmed

    Sat Feb 14, 2009 10:55pm IST

    By Ayla Jean Yackley

    ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkey on Saturday called on Israel to explain reported remarks by the head of the Israeli army that questioned Turkish policies towards Kurds and Cyprus, saying ties between the Middle East allies could be at stake.

    The Turkish military’s General Staff said criticism by Israeli Major General Avi Mizrahi, the land forces commander, of Turkey’s occupation of Cyprus and its conflict with Kurdish separatists may have damaged strategic relations.

    The Turkish Foreign Ministry also summoned the Israeli ambassador to protest the comments by Mizrahi, reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

    It was the latest sign of tension between Israel and Turkey, NATO’s only Muslim member, who maintain close military ties but whose alliance has been strained by Israel’s offensive on Gaza.

    Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last month accused Israeli President Shimon Peres of “knowing very well how to kill” in a public debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

    Mizrahi was quoted by Haaretz newspaper as saying Erdogan should have “looked in the mirror” before slamming Peres and that Turkey was not in a position to criticise Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands when it stations troops in northern Cyprus.

    He also accused Turkey of repressing its Kurdish minority and massacring Armenians during World War One.

    The Turkish General Staff, in a statement carried by the state-run Anatolian news agency, said Mizrahi’s remarks were untrue and competely unacceptable.

    “The comments have been assessed to be at the extent that the national interests between the two countries could be damaged,” it said.

    Turkey and Israel’s military co-operation includes allowing Israeli jets to use Turkish airspace for training.

    Erdogan told Reuters on Friday there were no plans to halt that agreement.

    The Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Saturday it had summoned Israeli Ambassador Gabby Levy to receive a protest note that called Mizrahi’s remarks “unacceptable imputations and ravings made against our prime minister and our country”.

    Both the General Staff and the Foreign Ministry demanded an explanation for Mizrahi’s statements from Israeli officials.

    Turkey keeps about 30,000 troops in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus after invading the island in 1974 to thwart a coup attempt by Greek Cypriots. It is the only country to recognise a Turkish Cypriot administration there.

    It has also fought a 25-year war against Kurdish separatists seeking to establish a homeland in the southeast. Turkey denies accusations that it committed genocide against 1.5 million Armenians during World War One.

  • Starting at Home, Iran’s Women Fight for Rights

    Starting at Home, Iran’s Women Fight for Rights

    NYTIMES

    Sima Sayyah

    Protesters last month outside the Palestinian Embassy in Tehran denounced the killing of women and children in Gaza.

    By NAZILA FATHI
    Published: February 12, 2009

    TEHRAN — In a year of marriage, Razieh Qassemi, 19, says she was beaten repeatedly by her husband and his father. Her husband, she says, is addicted to methamphetamine and has threatened to marry another woman to “torture” her.

    Rather than endure the abuse, Ms. Qassemi took a step that might never have occurred to an earlier generation of Iranian women: she filed for divorce.

    Women’s rights advocates say Iranian women are displaying a growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim theocracy, where male supremacy is still enscribed in the legal code. One in five marriages now end in divorce, according to government data, a fourfold increase in the past 15 years.

    And it is not just women from the wealthy, Westernized elites. The family court building in Vanak Square here is filled with women, like Ms. Qassemi, who are not privileged. Women from lower classes and even the religious are among those marching up and down the stairs to fight for divorces and custody of their children.

    Increasing educational levels and the information revolution have contributed to creating a generation of women determined to gain more control over their lives, rights advocates say.

    Confronted with new cultural and legal restrictions after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, some young women turned to higher education as a way to get away from home, postpone marriage and earn social respect, advocates say. Religious women, who had refused to sit in classes with men, returned to universities after they were resegregated.

    Today, more than 60 percent of university students are women, compared with just over 30 percent in 1982, even though classes are no longer segregated.

    Even for those women for whom college is not an option, the Internet and satellite television have opened windows into the lives of women in the West. “Satellite has shown an alternative way of being,” said Syma Sayah, a feminist involved in social work in Tehran. “Women see that it is possible to be treated equally with men.”

    Another sign of changing attitudes is the increasing popularity of books, movies and documentaries that explore sex discrimination, rights advocates say.

    “Women do not have a proper status in society,” said Mahnaz Mohammadi, a filmmaker. “Films are supposed to be a mirror of reality, and we make films to change the status quo.”

    In a recent movie, “All Women Are Angels,” a comedy that was at the top of the box office for weeks, a judge rejects the divorce plea of a woman who walked out on her husband when she found him with another woman.

    Even men are taking up women’s issues and are critical of traditional marriage arrangements. Mehrdad Oskouei, another filmmaker, has won more than a dozen international awards for “The Other Side of Burka,” a documentary about women on the impoverished and traditional southern island of Qeshm who are committing suicide in increasing numbers because they have no other way out of their marriages.

    “How can divorce help a woman in southern parts of the country when she has to return after divorce to her father’s home who will make her even more miserable than her husband?” said Fatimeh Sadeghi, a former political science professor fired for her writing on women’s rights.

    Janet Afary, a professor of Middle East and women’s studies at Purdue University and the author of “Sexual Politics in Modern Iran,” says the country is moving inexorably toward a “sexual revolution.”

    “The laws have denied women many basic rights in marriage and divorce,” she wrote in the book. “But they have also contributed to numerous state initiatives promoting literacy, health and infrastructural improvements that benefited the urban and rural poor.”

    To separate the sexes, the state built schools and universities expressly for women, and improved basic transportation, enabling poor women to travel more easily to big cities, where they were exposed to more modern ideas.

    Ms. Afary says that mandatory premarital programs to teach about sex and birth control, instituted in 1993 to control population growth, helped women delay pregnancy and changed their views toward marriage. By the late 1990s, she says, young people were looking for psychological and social compatibility and mutual intimacy in marriage.

    Despite the gains they have made, women still face extraordinary obstacles. Girls can legally be forced into marriage at the age of 13. Men have the right to divorce their wives whenever they wish, and are granted custody of any children over the age of 7. Men can ban their wives from working outside the home, and can engage in polygamy.

    By law, women may inherit from their parents only half the shares of their brothers. Their court testimony is worth half that of a man. Although the state has taken steps to discourage stoning, it remains in the penal code as the punishment for women who commit adultery. A woman who refuses to cover her hair faces jail and up to 80 lashes.

    Women also face fierce resistance when they organize to change the law. The Campaign for One Million Signatures was founded in 2005, inspired by a movement in Morocco that led to a loosening of misogynist laws. The idea was to collect one million signatures for a petition calling on authorities to give women more equal footing in the laws on marriage, divorce, adultery and polygamy.

    But Iran’s government has come down hard on the group, charging many of its founders with trying to overthrow it; 47 members have been jailed so far, including 3 who were arrested late last month. Many still face charges, and six members are forbidden to leave the country. One member, Alieh Eghdamdoust, began a three-year jail sentence last month for participating in a women’s demonstration in 2006. The group’s Web site, www.we-change.org, has been blocked by the authorities 18 times.

    “We feel we achieved a great deal even though we are faced with security charges,” said Sussan Tahmasebi, one of the founding members of the campaign, who is now forbidden to leave Iran. “No one is accusing us of talking against Islam. No one is afraid to talk about more rights for women anymore. This is a big achievement.”

    Women’s advocates say that the differences between religious and secular women have narrowed and that both now chafe at the legal discrimination against women. Zahra Eshraghi, for example, the granddaughter of the revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, signed the One Million Signatures petition.

    “Many of these religious women changed throughout the years,” said Ms. Sayah, the feminist in Tehran. “They became educated, they traveled abroad and attended conferences on women’s rights, and they learned.”

    Because of the government’s campaign of suppression, the process of collecting signatures has slowed recently, and many women do not want to be seen in the presence of a campaigner, let alone sign a petition. Most feminist groups limit their canvassing now to the Internet.

    But while the million signatures campaign may have stalled, women have scored some notable successes. A group that calls itself Meydaan has earned international recognition for pressing the government to stop stonings.

    The group’s reporting on executions by stoning in 2002 on its Web site, www.meydaan.net — including a video of the execution of a prostitute — embarrassed the government and led the head of the judiciary to issue a motion urging judges to refrain from ordering stonings. (The stonings have continued anyway, but at a lower rate, because only Parliament has the power to ban them.)

  • A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition Marching on the Pentagon

    A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition Marching on the Pentagon


    Want information on the March 21st March on the Pentagon?
    Go to

    Why We’re Marching on the Pentagon
    Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine … Occupation is A Crime

    Please post this event on your Facebook and MySpace pages, and forward it widely to your friends and family.


    Download the 2-sided color ANSWER flyer, which has this statement on the back

    Why are we still marching even after the war criminal George W. Bush has left office? Because the people must speak out for what is right. More than 1 million Iraqis have died and tens of thousands of U.S. troops have been wounded or killed.

    The Iraq and Afghanistan war will drag on for years unless we act now. The cost in lives and resources is criminal regardless of whether the Democrats or Republicans are in charge of the government.

    We must also act to end U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing war against the Palestinian people. The Bush Administration gave the green light and provided the weapons and the money for Israel’s recent war against the Palestinian people in Gaza. More than 5,000 Palestinians were killed or wounded; the majority of casualties were civilians, including hundreds of children, in this high-tech massacre. “We the People” pay the bill as the U.S. provides $2.5 billion a year for Israel’s massive military machine.

    Why We Say “Bring All the Troops Home Now Not Later!”

    If Bush’s war and occupation of Iraq was an illegal action of aggression—and it was—how can the new government say that it can only gradually end the war over a number of years? The Iraqis don’t want foreign military forces running their country. No one would!

    The Pentagon has employed 200,000 foreign contractors (mercenaries) and 150,000 U.S. troops to maintain the occupation of Iraq. They have no right to be there. A few thousand are being brought out of Iraq only to be redeployed to occupy Afghanistan, and the fools in the media proclaim “the war is winding down.” That is not true.

    President Obama decided to keep the Pentagon just as it was under Bush. He even selected Bush appointee Robert Gates to keep his position as chief of the Pentagon. Gates announced that the new administration would double the number of troops sent to Afghanistan. That is certainly not the “change” most people thought was coming following the end of Bush’s tenure.

    These are wars for domination in the Middle East and Central Asia.

    The people of the United States want change. We are sick and tired of wars of aggression waged abroad under false slogans of “national security.” These are wars that reap massive profits for corporate weapons-makers with the promise of winning control over the vast oil and natural gas reserves in the Middle East and Central Asia.

    Working people may have another definition for “national security.” What really makes the people “insecure?” Ask the 2.3 million families who are losing their homes because they are being foreclosed when they can’t pay their steep debts to the banks. Ironically, when these same parasitic bankers couldn’t pay their debts, the federal government rushed in with a $2.5 trillion bailout using our tax dollars.

    Or ask working-class students who are being laid off from their jobs just as tuition costs soar out of reach. What defines “security” for millions of young people whose future is at stake? Do they want tax dollars spent to kill poor people abroad or to finance education?

    We will march on Saturday, March 21, the sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq invasion, to demand that taxpayer dollars be used to meet people’s needs—here and everywhere. This year’s real Pentagon war budget will top $1 trillion.

    This amount could create 10 million jobs, provide healthcare and education for all, rebuild New Orleans, and repair much of the damage done in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. We need money for jobs, housing, health care and education, not for wars of aggression.

    The occupation of Iraq alone costs $12 billion each month. This amounts to $400 million each day, $16.7 million per hour and $278,000 per minute.

    The Pentagon war machine does not act in our interests. Its wars benefit the biggest corporations and banks that seek to control the markets and riches of the Middle East. The people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are not our enemies. They want to live free from colonial-type domination. Only a people’s movement demanding an end to U.S. wars and militarism can win justice for people here and abroad.

    Get Involved

  • Venezuela’s Jews, already uneasy, are jolted by attack

    Venezuela’s Jews, already uneasy, are jolted by attack

    A break-in at a Caracas synagogue on Jan. 31 heightened the concerns of the country’s Jews. (Carlos Hernandez/The Associated Press)

    By Simon Romero
    Published: February 13, 2009

    Listen to Article

    CARACAS, Venezuela: This country’s small Jewish community was already on edge when vandals painted anti-Semitic epithets on the walls of Jewish institutions and businesses last month after President Hugo Chávez cut ties with Israel and called on Jews here to support his description of Israel’s leaders as a “government of assassins.”

    But another episode, the break-in and desecration of a Sephardic synagogue on Jan. 31, intensified the uncertainty among Jews here. Officials are also putting pressure on Jewish leaders to retract criticism of Chávez regarding the attack and to accept the government’s explanation of it as a simple robbery by corrupt members of the intelligence and municipal police forces.

    “The atmosphere of intimidation is terrifying,” said Rabbi Pynchas Brener, 77, a prominent Ashkenazi leader and an outspoken critic of Chávez’s government. “We do not know when this pressure will start to ease up.”

    The government’s handling of the episode has also sown confusion. Chávez has denounced the attack and other forms of anti-Semitism and proclaimed his friendship with Venezuela’s Jews. But he has also asserted that unidentified opponents of his attacked the synagogue to cause disarray before a referendum this Sunday to decide whether Chávez can run for re-election indefinitely.

    “Some sectors of the oligarchy want to overshadow the advances of the revolution with acts of violence,” Chávez said shortly after the attack.

    When the Interior Ministry seemed to contradict his assertion that the attack was an effort to weaken his rule, arresting 11 people and saying robbery was their motive, Chávez shifted his position. He attacked critics who claimed he had created a political atmosphere in which anti-Semitism could flourish, accusing them of harboring the “criminal intent to unleash a religious war in Venezuela.”

    Commentators on state media and pro-Chávez Web sites have taken up with relish Chávez’s initial position that the attack was a plot by his opponents. “The synagogue case seems to us like a media show assembled by the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad,” said Hindu Anderi, a pro-Chávez journalist, in comments published by the government’s Bolivarian News Agency.

    Meanwhile, Mario Silva, the host of a program on state television, issued a menacing call for the rabbi of the desecrated synagogue to express gratitude publicly for a swift investigation.

    “I still have not seen the first declaration from the rabbi of the synagogue saying, ‘Sirs, I am thankful to the government,’ ” Silva said Monday night.

    Silva appeared to get his wish on Thursday in the form of an impromptu ceremony broadcast on state television in which the foreign minister, Nicolás Maduro, appeared at the synagogue to meet with Jewish leaders.

    Elías Farache, a leader of Venezuela’s Sephardic community, read a statement at the ceremony thanking Chávez and Maduro for prioritizing the investigation. “We hope the legal process will shed new light on the motivations behind this case,” Farache said.

    Despite the government’s efforts to put the controversy to rest, a sense of dread still lingers among Venezuela’s 12,000 to 14,000 Jews. That number is down from as many as 20,000 in the 1990s because of emigration.

    Chávez and his government have long been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism, at least since his association with Norberto Ceresole, an Argentine with anti-Semitic views who advised Chávez in the 1990s.

    Chávez later distanced himself from Ceresole but recent statements have led to renewed criticism from Jewish leaders — including one by Venezuela’s ambassador to Russia, who said last year that the brief coup against Chávez in 2002 included “many Mossad snipers, who were Venezuelan citizens but Jews.”

    The warm welcome that Chávez has extended to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has also troubled Jews.

    The tensions intensified last month when Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador to protest the war in Gaza, and senior officials attended a rally at the Sheik Ibrahim Mosque here in Caracas. “Our revolution is also the revolution for a Free Palestine,” Tareck El Aissami, the interior minister, said at the rally.

    On the sidelines of the televised rapprochement on Thursday at the synagogue, one observer, León Benaim, summed up his view of the attack and the government’s reaction to it.

    “The motive was simple,” said Benaim, 73, a Moroccan Jew who moved to Venezuela three decades ago. “It is to threaten and frighten the Jewish community so that we leave.”

    María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.

  • Greeks boycott Israeli fair over Turkish Cyprus attendence

    Greeks boycott Israeli fair over Turkish Cyprus attendence

    Greek Cyprus boycotted international fair in Israel over Turkish Cyprus attendence, Turkish state media reported.

    Thursday, 12 February 2009
    World Bulletin / News Desk

    Greek Cyprus boycotted international fair in Israel over Turkish Cyprus attendence, Turkish state media reported.

    Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) has attended to the International Mediterranean Tourism Fair at Tel Aviv for the first time despite efforts of Cypriot Greeks to disturb.

    Cypriot Greek officials, up to the last minute, tried hard to prevent TRNC to attend the fair. When they could not succeed to prevent, they boycotted the fair which they attended for 15 years.

    The officials of the fair reminded to the Greeks that both sides had had their places at the fairs in Berlin and London, but they could not convince them. However, tourism firms from Cypriot Greeks attended the fair despite their state did not.

    Source:  www.worldbulletin.net, 12 February 2009
  • Gaza’s Future

    Gaza’s Future

    Henry Siegman

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.


    ATTENTION: ARTICLE IS WRITTEN ONE YEAR AGO

    Gaza’s Future

    Henry Siegman 7 February 2008

    The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

    Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

    Olmert’s statement, made shortly before the breakout, that Gaza’s residents could not expect to lead normal lives while missiles from Gaza were hitting Israel would have been perfectly reasonable if Gazan residents had indeed been allowed to live ‘normal’ lives before the most recent tightening of the noose and if it were the case that Gaza’s civilian residents had any control at all over the firing of the missiles.

    As Olmert knows, neither is the case. The siege of Gaza was imposed by Israel because Israel’s government and the US administration intended to undo the results of Hamas’s victory in the elections of 2006. Initially, they thought they could achieve this by arming Fatah’s security forces and encouraging them to promote anarchy in Gaza in a way that would discredit Hamas. When Hamas ousted Fatah security forces, Israel blockaded Gaza in the hope that its population would overthrow Hamas. The Qassam rockets were the consequence, not the cause of these misguided Israeli and US manoeuvres.

    It is not even true that the siege of Gaza and the boycott of Hamas were necessary to get a peace process with Abbas and his Fatah party underway, as Bush and Olmert claimed when they met in Washington in June 2007. Hamas had announced its willingness to submit to a popular referendum any agreement that resulted from permanent status talks between Fatah and Israel. Israel boycotted Hamas because it did not want Hamas to play any role in a peace process, fearing that this would exact a far greater price than negotiations with Fatah from which Hamas was excluded.

    Ironically, Abbas probably has far less flexibility in negotiations with Israel when he is in an adversarial relationship with Hamas. As long as Fatah and Hamas are at war, Hamas will condemn any compromise as Abbas’s collaboration with the enemy. In the best of circumstances it would be hard to conceive of the terms of a peace accord acceptable to both sides: they are entirely out of reach so long as Fatah and Hamas remain unreconciled.

    Certainly the peace process the US and Israel have promoted following the break between Fatah and Hamas has not produced anything other than empty rhetoric and emptier promises. On the ground, absolutely nothing has changed: not in anticipation of the Annapolis conference; not at the conference itself; not following the conference’s conclusion; and not following Bush’s visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah. For all the pomp and ceremony of that occasion and the uplifting talk of adherence to Road Map obligations, not a single so-called illegal outpost has been removed, and the checkpoints that Israel solemnly promised to reduce have in fact been increased. (Whether the intention to deny all new construction in East Jerusalem and in the settlements announced by Olmert’s office as I write these lines will suffer a similar fate remains to be seen.)

    Yet Abbas and Fayyad have pretended that they are engaged in a significant peace process with Israel that could produce, in Bush’s words, ‘a viable, contiguous, sovereign and independent’ Palestinian state by the end of this year. Presumably they know better. If not, the big difference between Fatah and Hamas is not so much that one is committed to a political process and the other to violence, or that one is secular and the other Islamic, but rather that the former lives in a world of fantasy and the other does not.

    Does the situation in Gaza justify the relentless missile and mortar assaults that continue to target Israeli civilians in Sderot? To argue, as Hamas’s leaders do, that these primitive Qassam rockets have resulted in no more than two or three Israeli deaths over the years, while Israeli retaliations cause the daily killing not only of militants but of innocent men, women and children, is not a justification for Hamas’s targeting of Israeli civilians. That Qassam rockets have not fallen on a kindergarten full of children in Sderot is not the result of skilful humanitarian targeting on the part of Islamic Jihad and Hamas militants. It is simply extraordinary luck.

    On the other hand, the immorality of Hamas’s assaults on Israeli civilians is not a licence to bring Gaza’s civilian population to a state of near starvation. The insensitivity that prevents Israelis from seeing that their behaviour towards Palestinian civilians – whether in Gaza or in the West Bank – is not very different from the Palestinians’ targeting of Israeli civilians could not have found more unfortunate expression than in Olmert’s assurance that while Israel ‘will provide the population [in Gaza] with everything needed to prevent a crisis, we will not supply luxuries that would make their life more comfortable.’ What UNRWA’s commissioner-general Karen Abu Zayd sees as a people ‘intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution’ is seen by Olmert as a people deprived of ‘luxuries’.

    In the face of such criticism, Israelis angrily respond that instead of condemning Israel’s policy towards Gaza, their critics would be better advised to demand that Gaza’s citizens remove their Hamas-led government. The absurdity of such a suggestion aside, one has to wonder how Israelis would respond if they were told by Palestinians that instead of condemning Hamas’s terrorist assaults on Israeli citizens, they should remove their own government for failing to end the occupation.

    That said, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the breach in the barrier between Gaza and Egypt has created a new strategic situation. Of course, the barrier separating Gaza from Egypt will be closed again, but it is highly unlikely that the status quo ante can be restored and the absolute closure on Gaza’s population reimposed. As Ha’aretz suggested in an editorial of 24 January, the crisis in Rafah is an opportunity to pursue policies that are ‘more creative than assassinations and starvation’.

    Which brings me to the second of the fundamental realities. The current goal of isolating Hamas and negotiating a peace agreement with Fatah is based on the fantasy that such an agreement can be implemented despite Hamas’s opposition. Hamas is a movement with deep roots and a significant role in Palestinian politics that opposition from Israel and the US can only strengthen. New border arrangements to prevent a serious breakdown between Israel and Egypt cannot be implemented without somehow involving Hamas. And for domestic reasons, it is inconceivable that either Abbas or the Egyptian government would consent to the creation of a new cross-border regime that aims at the continued strangulation of Gaza’s population.

    The inevitability of four-party discussions between Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas presents the US with an opportunity to change course and to encourage Israel to engage Hamas in talks aiming at a ceasefire, the only way to end the Qassam assaults. The talks could then address the question of the acceptance by Hamas of the Arab peace initiative. Of course, there can be no certainty that Hamas would agree: what is certain is that it will never agree while Israel and the US seek its overthrow, and without negotiations that deal with both sides’ grievances.

    Equally important, the issue of Hamas’s recognition of Israel should not be expanded by Israel beyond normal international practice. Israel’s requirement that this recognition include a pronouncement on the Jewish state’s legitimacy, or on its ethnic and religious character, is gratuitous and inappropriate. A simple statement of recognition of Israel’s statehood should suffice. No US government has ever asked anyone to affirm the legitimacy of the dispossession of America’s Indians as a condition for the establishing of normal relations.

    If the Bush administration were to take advantage of the new situation in Gaza to promote internal Palestinian reconciliation it might yet lay the groundwork for an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. If it maintains its current posture, it will remain essentially irrelevant, with far-reaching implications for all the parties to the conflict – not to mention the rest of the world.

    25 January

    Henry Siegman, director of the US Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at SOAS, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.