WarSclerotic

Why George Mitchell failed.

Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader in the US, failed to achieve peace between the two sides. There’s no disgrace in that – the line of failed envoys is long and well-known. He successfully brokered peace in Northern Ireland, but couldn’t even get things started in the Middle East.

The question is, why?

Obviously, it’s impossible to solve a problem without addressing and treating its true cause. Approaching the Arab-Israeli conflict from the perspective that it is about land, so that giving more land to the Palestinians will solve the problem, is a failed endeavor.

Israel has already given Egypt the whole of the Sinai, and got nothing in return except a cold peace and rising anti-Semitism in the country. Similarly the disengagement from Gaza did not magically lead to a decline in the wave of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.

Pro-Palestinian Muslim demonstrators across the world repeatedly use the chant “Khyber Khyber Ya Yahood… Gaish Muhammad Sawfa Yaood,” which reminds the Jews that the army of Muhammad is coming back for a repeat of what was done to the Jewish Khyber tribe.

According to authentic Islamic history books, the Islamic army, led by Muhammad, annihilated the Jewish tribe of Khyber, raping its women and killing all its men.

Such barbaric statements against the Jews have been used by many in the Muslim world, and even inside the US and Europe. Sadly the chant was also used on Friday by thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

The Hamas charter also calls for the destruction of Israel. This violent principle has its roots in the traditional Islamic teaching, based on Hadith books, that encourages the killing of all Jews before the end of days.

Until US envoys to the Middle East realize that the problem in the eyes of the Palestinians and their supporters is not the borders of Israel but the very existence of the country, all future missions will similarly fail. Solving the Arab-Israeli conflict must be done initially at the theological rather than the political level, as the former is impeding the latter.

It is unfair to ask Israel to trust those who shamefully advocate the killing of Jews, and claim that Islamic annihilation of the Jews by an Islamic army is a model that must be emulated today.

The problem is not only in the existence of violent teachings in historical Islamic texts, but also in the dangerous desire of many Islamists and violent Islamic scholars to revive such violence in modern times. Violent texts exist in other religions as well, but we do not generally see such destructive desire to use the texts to justify killing others, and we rarely hear about modern scholars of other faiths who advocate using such texts literally.

The problem is that this disastrous anti-Semitic religious dimension is not limited to verses in books, but is also propagated by a powerful media machine that utilizes vicious, Nazi-style propaganda across the Muslim world. Publishing dehumanizing cartoons in the mainstream media, and blaming Jews for nearly every problem in the world has become much too common in the leading Arab media over the past few decades.

It is virtually impossible to promote any form of peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict without reducing such levels of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world.

Until future envoys to the Middle East understand the religious dimension of the problem, and that the Arab- Israeli conflict is not about borders but about the existence of the state of Israel, all future attempts to make peace in the area will fail.

The writer is an Islamic thinker and reformer, and a one-time Islamic extremist from Egypt. He was a member of the terrorist organization JI with Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, who later became the second-in-command of al-Qaida. He is currently a senior fellow and chairman of the study of Islamic radicalism at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. http://www.tawfikhamid.com

Israel to file UNSC complaint against Syria, Lebanon.

  The Israeli Mission to the United Nations announced Monday that it will submit a complaint to the UN Security Council against Syria and Lebanon for breach of council resolutions and violation of international law following Nakba Day events at the northern border Sunday.

Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Sunday commented on the border protests during her meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, saying, “The attempt to infiltrate into Israel is a clear manifestation of the lack of acceptance of Israel’s sovereignty as a country.”

“Israel must defend its sovereignty. This is a significant change in the security situation in the region,” she said.

Meanwhile, Lebanon on Monday filed an official complaint with the UN Security Council against Israel following its “killing and wounding of civilians rallying in the town of Maroun a-Ras near the Israeli border,” the Lebanese National News Agency reported.

According to the report, the complaint said “Lebanon considered the assault as a hostile act,” and “Israel violated Lebanese sovereignty and disregarded UN resolutions.

The complaint called on the UNSC to pressure Israel to stop “its hostile and provocative policies against Lebanon” and to “hold it accountable for killing civilians.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon late Sunday night called for restraint following the deadly day of border demonstrations.

“The secretary-general is deeply concerned that a significant number of people have been killed or injured,” Ban’s office said in a statement. “He calls on all concerned to show restraint and refrain from provocations so as to prevent escalation of tensions and ensure civilians are not killed or injured.”

Noting that the border breach originated from the Syrian side, Ban said he was “acutely conscious of the unsustainable status quo in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is only thrown into sharper relief by the profound political changes now under way in the region.”

He added that there is an “urgent need for a just, lasting and comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.”

Arab Protesters Descend On Israeli Borders.

MAJDAL SHAMS, Golan Heights — Mobilized by calls on Facebook, thousands of Arab protesters marched on Israel’s borders with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza on Sunday in an unprecedented wave of demonstrations, sparking clashes that left at least 15 people dead in an annual Palestinian mourning ritual marking the anniversary of Israel’s birth.

In a surprising turn of events, hundreds of Palestinians and supporters poured across the Syrian frontier and staged riots, drawing Israeli accusations that Damascus, and its ally Iran, orchestrated the unrest to shift attention from an uprising back home. It was a rare incursion from the usually tightly controlled Syrian side and could upset the delicate balance between the two longtime foes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who heads to Washington at the end of the week, said he ordered the military to act with “maximum restraint” but vowed a tough response to further provocations.

“Nobody should be mistaken. We are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty,” he declared in a brief address broadcast live on Israeli TV stations.

The violence showed Israel the extent of Arab anger over the Palestinian issue, beyond the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, and came at a critical time for U.S. Mideast policy.

President Barack Obama’s envoy to the region, George Mitchell, resigned Friday after more than two years of fruitless efforts. The U.S. president may now have to retool the administration’s approach to peacemaking. Obama is expected to deliver a Mideast policy speech in the coming week.

Deadly clashes also took place along Israel’s nearby northern border with Lebanon, as well as in the Gaza Strip on Israel’s southern flank. The Israeli military said 13 soldiers were wounded, none seriously.

Sunday’s unrest – which came after activists used Facebook and other websites to mobilize Palestinians and their supporters in neighboring countries to march on the border with Israel – marked the first time the protests that have swept the Arab world in recent months have been directed at Israel.

The events carried a message for Israel: Even as it wrestles with the Palestinian demand for a state in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem – areas Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war – there is a related problem of neighboring countries that host millions of Palestinians with aspirations to return.

The fate of Palestinian refugees is one of the thorniest issues that any Israeli-Palestinian peace deal will have to address.

Palestinians were marking the “nakba,” or “catastrophe” – the term they use to describe their defeat and displacement in the war that followed Israel’s founding on May 15, 1948. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted. Today, the surviving refugees and their descendants number several million people.

Each year, Palestinians throughout the region mark the “nakba” with demonstrations. But never before have marchers descended upon Israel’s borders from all directions. The Syrian incursion was especially surprising.

Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 war, and Syria demands the area back as part of any peace deal. Israel has annexed the territory. Despite hostility between the two countries, Syria has carefully kept the border quiet since the 1973 Mideast war.

Around midday, thousands of people approached the frontier, hoisting Palestinian flags, shouting slogans and throwing rocks and bottles at Israeli forces. When hundreds of people burst across the border fence into the Israeli-controlled town of Majdal Shams, surprised soldiers opened fire.

Syrian forces did not intervene – and Syrian officials reported four people were killed, and dozens wounded.

Rioters paraded through the town, flashing Syrian ID cards and holding Palestinian flags.

“This was a surprise for everyone. I have been here my whole life and never saw anything like this,” said Khatib Ibrahim, a 51-year-old resident who watched the clashes unfold as he worked in his family’s grove.

The Israeli army said more than 100 people were sent back to Syria by the time the unrest died down several hours later.

Israeli defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information, acknowledged the military was caught off guard by the violent marches.

Officials also said there were strong signs that Syria and its Iranian-backed Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, orchestrated the unrest.

“The Syrian regime is intentionally attempting to divert international attention away from the brutal crackdown of their own citizens to incite against Israel,” said Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokeswoman.

Israel’s military spokesman, Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, told Channel 2 TV he also saw “fingerprints of Iranian provocation and an attempt to use ‘nakba day’ to create conflict.”

Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV was in place to film much of the day’s clashes, and defense officials said the activists were bused in from Palestinian refugee camps throughout Syria. Many of them held European passports and told interrogators they had been flown in from abroad for the march.

“It’s our land,” one of the infiltrators, Sufian Abdel Hamid, told Israel’s Channel 2 TV. “We won’t stop trying to come back.”

An explosion of unrest along the border could play into the hands of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has faced two months of popular protests against political repression and rights abuses in his country. The uprising, in which human rights groups say more than 800 people have been killed, is the most serious challenge to the Assad family’s 40-year dynasty.

Assad has cast himself as the only person who can bring stability to Syria – a country with a volatile mixture of religions and sects, and with a hostile neighbor in Israel.

About 25 miles (40 kilometers) to the west, Israeli troops clashed with a large crowd of Lebanese demonstrators who approached that border. The military said it opened fire when protesters tried to damage the border fence. Security officials in Lebanon reported 10 dead.

It was the deadliest incident along the volatile border since Israel fought Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas during a monthlong war five years ago.

Sunday’s shooting erupted at the tense border village of Maroun el-Rass, which saw some of the fiercest fighting in 2006. Thousands of Palestinian refugees traveled to the village in buses adorned with posters that said: “We are returning.” Many came from the 12 crowded refugee camps in Lebanon where some 400,000 Palestinian refugees live.

Hundreds of Lebanese soldiers, U.N. peacekeepers and riot police deployed heavily in the area, taking up positions along the electrified border fence and patrolling the area in military vehicles. Young Hezbollah supporters wearing yellow hats and carrying walkie-talkies organized the entry to the village and handed out Palestinian flags.

In Cairo, a security official said more than 1,000 protesters tried to push their way past a tight security cordon toward the Israeli Embassy, located on the top floor of a building. Egyptian soldiers guarding the embassy fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. One protester burned an Israeli flag.

There was also violence in a predictable location – Gaza.

Palestinian medics said 125 people were wounded when demonstrators in the Gaza Strip tried to approach a heavily fortified border crossing into Israel. One man was killed by an Israeli sniper. The military said he was trying to plant a bomb.

In Jordan, meanwhile, police blocked a group of protesters trying to reach the border with Israel. In addition, hundreds of West Bank Palestinian threw stones at Israeli police and burned tires at a checkpoint outside Jerusalem before they were dispersed.

Inside Israel, police were on high alert for disturbances among the country’s large Arab minority, and Israeli police spokeswoman Sigal Toledo said a deadly traffic incident involving an Arab truck driver in Tel Aviv was “most likely” an attack.

The truck plowed through a crowded street, crashing into a bus, several cars and pedestrians, killing one and injuring 16 others. Police said the 22-year-old driver claimed it was an accident, but a witness said he had to subdue the man and that he was shouting slogans against Jews.

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Associated Press writer Zeina Karam in Maroun al-Rass, Lebanon, Elizabeth Kennedy in Beirut, Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City, Gaza Strip, and Jamal Halaby in Southern Shuneh, Jordan, contributed to this report.

Arab spring, Persian winter.

  It is still too early to tell whether the waves of change sweeping over the shores of North Africa and the Middle East will erode the foundations of autocracy or, conversely, whether they will merely substitute secular authoritarianism with Islamist totalitarianism. It is clear, however, that no regional regime is immune to their impact, not even the Islamic Republic of Iran, the self-proclaimed vanguard of the permanent world revolution.

Iran’s pro-democracy movement, the Green Movement, prides itself on having ignited the Arab upheavals by staging large-scale demonstrations in Iran in the wake of the fraudulent June 12, 2009 presidential election. The Arab upheavals, in turn and to some degree, revived the Iranian opposition at a time when the regime’s suppression of the opposition seemed total.

On February 6, Hojjat al-Eslam Mehdi Karrubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leaders of the Green Movement, in a joint letter asked the Interior Ministry for a permit to demonstrate “in solidarity with popular movements of the region, especially the liberation-seeking revolts of the people of Tunisia and Egypt.”

Not surprisingly, the permit was denied, and the two opposition leaders, together with former president Mohammed Khatami, were put under house arrest. Ignoring the demonstration ban, the opposition rallied on February 14 and March 1 with calls for Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i to follow in the footsteps of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators: “Mubarak, Ben Ali, it is now the turn of Seyyed Ali [Khamene’i]”, “Khamene’i, Mubarak, congratulations with your marriage!” and “Whether those in Iran with motorcycles, or those in Cairo with camels, death to the dictators!”

However, the regime in Tehran had learned valuable lessons from the post-presidential election antiregime demonstrations. The Intelligence Ministry unleashed a new round of arrests of protest organizers who had not been detained during earlier demonstrations. In affected neighborhoods, the cell phone network was cut off and the speed of the Internet was reduced to a bare minimum, which further restricted communications with the outside world. Apart from this, coordination in containing the protests between law enforcement forces, the Basij Resistance Force, the Revolutionary Guards, and vigilante organizations was far more synchronized than during earlier demonstrations.

Leaders of the Green Movement, on the other hand, do not seem to have learned any lessons. As the opposition in the Arab world mobilizes the public for street protests, Karrubi and Mousavi ask the Interior Ministry for a “demonstration permit.”

As the opposition in the Arab world urges the demonstrators to remain in the streets, Karrubi and Mousavi urge the demonstrators to go home. As the opposition in the Arab world calls for overthrow of the dictators, Karrubi and Mousavi continue to talk of reforming the regime within the framework of the constitution. As the Arab opposition calls for democracy, Karrubi and Mousavi call for a return to the “era of the Imam,” referring to Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s reign of terror in the 1980s. In this light, it is hardly surprising that the Arab opposition has proved much more successful than the Iranian opposition.

The waves of change are indeed sweeping across the shores of the Middle East and North Africa. However, the Islamist regime in Iran is better geared to suppress internal dissent than other regional autocracies and, therefore, has better prospects of surviving the crisis – at least for now. But as long as the regime is unwilling or incapable of allowing Iranians to become masters of their own destinies by liberalizing the Iranian political system, the results may be increased repression and the surfacing of more radical opposition movements inside Iran.

The writer is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.