Palestine Road 35 to Peace
THE HASHEMITE KINGDOM OF WADIS ARABIA? Perhaps we really do need a completely new map for peace. A new thinking of who is without a homeland and who can help now and how.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
The glass half full or half empty.
The various factions that made up the opposition feel a great sense of loss, but their personal political agendas never seemed to be anywhere near as focused and unified as was the Muslim Brotherhood. The various members of the old elite had very little in common with the young disenfranchised who took to the streets to lead the revolution in those early days.
The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, seemed content to watch from the sidelines as the truly brave and dangerous confrontations happened around them. This does not ignore the many decades of repression suffered by millions of members of the Brotherhood over the life of its existence. They just did not seem to be there in the early days of the push for jobs and social equality.
I believe this is because it was indeed primarily, in those early days, about jobs and social equality. These were not agenda's primary to the thinking of the Brotherhood.
It was only, as in Tunisia, when the powers that be pushed back too hard and the focus turned to opposing the ruling elite did the Brotherhood find its way to the streets and to add to the opposition.
Then, as victory for the revolutionary factions, joined by the military intervention, and the old ruling elite finally end did the Muslim Brotherhood begin to push aside the early and courageous pioneers of the revolution.
The beginning themes of jobs and social equality also seemed to be forgotten as well.
Now the question before the Egyptian people is, after this most recent election, does the Muslim Brotherhood have a plan or the goal of job creation and social equality. This will be the paramount problem for the new government going forward.
It was also, in the days just before the Presidential election, that the Supreme Court of Egypt found the recent legislative body to be unconstitutional. How this too plays out will be of extreme importance to the future of Egypt.
It is widely known that a substantial portion of the Egyptian economy is controlled by the upper echelons of the military. Besides what is now assumed to be a firm lock on control of the military itself, the generals are also loathe to relinquish control of their vast economic dominion.
Then there is the economic elite who are still in power after the revolution. Much of the financial wealth is controlled by but a few. Between the elite and the military the economic levers seem to have not changed much even after the revolution.
The political, economic, military and social control of Egypt are all in a great state of flux. The decisions made at this time and the future course for these four goals are of extreme importance to the success of a more open and economically viable Egypt.
And it goes almost without saying that the groups least likely to have a voice in the great decisions to be made are those few who were the first to step forward to demand jobs and social equality.
But just as the Muslim Brotherhood lived in the shadows of minority status in nation after nation across the Arab world, so too are those early groups of youth and religious minorities to be found in virtually every country across the Arab world. They are in many ways exactly the same and in many ways could not be more different.
What they do have is the desire to live a life of economic and social advancement. Just as in the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood, these groups must reach out to their fellow minorities and disenfranchised throughout the Arab world to find common solutions, common voices and the resolve to be found in strength in numbers.
It will, I predict, be this group who will lead sometime in the near future for the unification of many nations of the Arab world. This I predict will happen even more quickly than calls for such unification by members of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region.
In any case, which ever group or groups strive for such unification, those still on the outside looking in, or living in fear of their lives because of their minority status, must be prepared to unite with their fellow minorities to advance and protect the rights of all in any country in which their goals are found in jeopardy.
Reach out now and find those with whom you strive for economic advancement and social equality. Much can be done in unity and numerical strength. The new forms of communication make it easy to do.
Gary Tucker
Monday, November 7, 2011
Comments posted by me in the J Post. Nov 7, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
David Milibank, UK MP. Comments by me about Gaza on his website.
My comments to LA Times article 10/18/2011
The people of Gaza might want to seriously consider an unusual solution to their future. They should think long and hard about becoming the 82nd province of Turkey. Seriously.
Gaza and the West bank as a completely united and totally sovereign advanced nation? Not in my lifetime.
Becoming part of Egypt is also a non starter. Egypts future is in doubt.
Now consider joining Turkey. For Turkey to be invited to establish and then accept such a permanant economic and military presence in the southeast Mediterranean is jut a no brainer. Turkey belongs to NATO so any move on that part would be hard pressed to be countered by the US or the EU. Turkey would be more than capable of establishing a full economic, political and military complex based upon complete sovereinty in Gaza. Cultural differences? Go around them. Israel counter the idea? The solution solves just too many issues.
And nothing diverts attention away from eliminating Israel like Gaza being caught up in creating its own economic miracle. No other non violent solution would give the people of Gaza a sense a resolution with dignity like rapid unparalled dynamic success.
Ironically for the Palestinians of the West Bank and diaspora worldwide, a greatly enhanced Turkic Gaza would be their one true and only long term champion for long term sovereignty and dignified success as well. Embrace it.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Gaza as a Turkish Province or il?
Monday, July 25, 2011
Economist article on Jewish settlers might remain in a Palestinian state.
Israeli settlers on the West Bank
It is conceivable that some Jewish settlers could remain in a Palestinian state
Jul 21st 2011 | NABI SALAH | from the print edition
EVERY Friday and often after school on other days, Israeli soldiers fire tear-gas and sonic bombs at the Palestinian children as they approach a spring. It sits in a valley that separates Nabi Saleh, an Arab village of 500 people half an hour’s drive north of Jerusalem, from Halamish, a religious Jewish settlement. On most nights jeeps roll through the village; over the past 18 months the Israeli army has detained 32 of its children, some as young as eleven. Many have been taken from their beds, kept in pre-trial detention for months, and brought to court in shackles, there to be convicted of stone-throwing.
For some of Halamish’s settlers, irritated by the tear-gas that wafts into their living rooms from across the hill, this is not harsh enough. “The soldiers don’t maim enough Palestinians,” complains Iran Segal. A year-and-a-half ago he put up a sign naming the spring after his father, sparking anger among Palestinians who saw the move as a land-grab. Jewish settlers and Palestinians who used to share a nargila (a water-pipe) at the water’s edge now bicker over ownership of the spring’s goldfish. “When we see Arabs heading towards us we start shouting to get the army to shoo them away,” says a 12-year-old settler.
Israel’s army has long presented itself as holding the ring between two fractious communities in the West Bank, Jewish and Arab, living in what Palestinians see as the heartland of their future state. But as pressure on Israel to pull out mounts, some Palestinians and some Jewish settlers have begun to contemplate what the future might hold, if and when the army leaves. The issue is highly topical, not least because of a new law this month to ban many political boycotts, including those aimed at West Bank settlements.
Some views are, on the face of things, surprisingly flexible. A former head of the Israeli prime minister’s office, who lives in Ofra settlement on the West Bank, backs a single state in which Palestinians and Israelis share full political rights. Other settlers have voiced support for the concept of “parallel states”, in which Jews and Arabs would owe their allegiance to separate parliaments but share a single territory and army. Yet others propose that settlers should stay on the West Bank—under Palestinian rule. “It could be a good solution,” says a local councillor, Ziki Kravitz, who hankers for the time when Jewish settlers and Arab villagers attended each other’s weddings, and wonders how he might keep his assets under Palestinian rule.
It would indeed be easier for the Israeli army to withdraw if there were an alternative to the forced evacuation of Jewish settlers. Under a widely touted compromise, some 200,000-plus of them, not counting those in East Jerusalem, might stay inside an adjusted Israeli border (with Palestinians getting equivalent land-swaps elsewhere). But that would still leave a good 80,000 in the West Bank, most of them well-armed religious Zionists who might resist any eviction with guns.
In 2009 the then chief Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qurei, told his Israeli counterpart, Tzipi Livni, that Jews would be free to live under Palestinian rule. The present prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has signalled his interest in such a proposal. “Some settlements will end up beyond Israel’s borders,” he told both houses of Congress in Washington, DC, in May. Some Western diplomats, frustrated by their failure to persuade Israel to stop settlement-building, might also welcome such ideas to salvage a two-state deal.
Yet raising such fundamental questions jangles many nerves. The Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas has repeatedly sought to block joint projects between Jewish settlements and neighbouring Arab villages for fear that co-operation would make the settlers feel more at home.
Nobody knows how many settlers might want to stay. Opinion pollsters have shied away from taking soundings. Some religious leaders among the settlers preach that both secular Jewish and non-Jewish rule are objectionable. They argue that it is more important to stay on what they deem to be Jewish land, even if it falls under a Palestinian government.
Others, however, vow to fight. “As soon as Palestinian police come through those gates, we’ll open fire,” says a pensioner in Halamish, noting that religious Zionists make up 40% of Israel’s combat units. Some hardline Jewish ideologues in isolated outposts talk of carving out their own theocratic state of Judea. “If the army leaves, we’ll declare a Halachic kingdom [ie, one governed by religious law] in the highlands alongside the secular Jewish one on the coast,” says the rabbi of a settlement called Nachliel.
Other tricky questions remain. Would Jews who stay have to take Palestinian citizenship or could they hold dual nationality? Would settlements remain exclusively Jewish or be open to all Palestinian citizens? How would Palestinian courts deal with claims against settlers who live on land taken from Arabs? Most awkward of all, how would a Palestinian government disarm settlers who insisted on retaining self-defence militias?
Yet the readiness to coexist on both sides may be stronger than is often realised. Noam Arnon, who speaks for the Jews in Hebron, the biggest city in the southern part of the West Bank, once cheered total separation, with settlers fiercely defending their homes in urban areas. Today he marches to protest against the erection of separation barriers around Palestinian villages and insists on visiting shops there. “There’s no reason why Jews can’t conduct themselves normally vis-à-vis Palestinians,” he says, “just as we did in the past.”
from the print edition | Middle East & Africa