The Gaza Donor’s Conference is taking place in Cairo, under the sponsorship of the Egyptian Government headed by Gen. Al Sisi, but without the presence of Israel.
Jack Cohen
This is ridiculous, since Israel is central to any reconstruction in Gaza, and most of the goods needed for the rebuilding work must be routed through Israel. However, some Arab States, particularly Qatar, refused to attend if Israel was present, and Qatar has pledged to donate b$1 to the reconstruction of Gaza. Since Qatar has been bankrolling Hamas in its war against Israel, this runs counter to the strong opinions expressed by the Western representatives in Cairo, that any donations must be linked to a pledge by the Palestine Authority and Israel to restart peace negotiations. For example, US Secty of State Kerry and Quartet representative Tony Blair made this a feature of their speeches, that there is no point in rebuilding Gaza if we will be back in a few years again asking for donations to rebuild Gaza once again after the next round of hostilities. Gen. Al-Sisi proposed to renew the Arab Peace Initiative, which was unacceptable to Israel in its original form.
But, although the PA was represented at the Conf. by Pres. Abbas, Hamas was also not represented, even by the so-called Unity Government of the PA. So both the actual parties to the recent war are not represented at the conference, so the likelihood of any improvement of the situaton before the resonstruction of Gaza and then another round of hostilities and destruction of Gaza is essentially nil. The only positive feature of the Conf. apart from collecting money to reconstruct Gaza, is that the money should be channeled through the PA, which until now has been excluded from Gaza since the Hamas coup of 2007. If the PA holds the actual funds can they be trusted (a big if) not to allow the funds to be diverted once again to rearming Hamas, rebuilding its attack tunnels under Israel’s border and preparing for the next round of hostilities against Israel. But, since the PA is now in a Unity Govt. with Hamas and since Pres. Abbas has rejected further bilateral negotiations with Israel in favor of unilateral moves at the UN for a Palestine State, this is not likely.
Only two things can be stated with any confidence, first Israel will not attack Gaza without provocation, second Israel will not allow open borders with Gaza that would allow them to import arms, rockets and building materials with which to rebuild their military infrastructure. If the international community wants Israel to remove the blockade of Gaza they must provide believable guarantees that building materials will not be diverted and that arms and other military materiel will not be imported under the guise of reconstruction, as they were in the past. It doesn’t matter how much money is pledged for reconstruction of Gaza, if Israel’s valid security interests are not taken into account, this will be an exercise in futility.
Changing Middle East:
Prof. Uri Rabi, Director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University, spoke at Netanya AACI. This is my brief summary of his talk. His initial message was that the Middle East is not what it used to be. Those who thought that there might be a peaceful era in the 2000s have been very disappointed, including Pres. Obama, who went to Cairo in 2005 to deliver his message of peaceful coexistence. The whole group of military dictatorships that had controlled the Arab World and had maintained the State status quo, namely Libya under Qaddafi, Egypt under Mubarak, Syria under Assad, Yemen, Tunisia and so forth have all been swept away. The outcome of the so-called “Arab Spring” has not been a fluourishing of democracy as the more optimistic thought, rather the reverse. The contested regimes that have emerged from the chaos are anything but democratic, they range from a mild authoritarian regime in Tunisia, through a reversion to military control in Egypt (even though Gen. al Sisi was elected President) to the totalitarian Islamic State, that massacres and beheads opponents.
Perhaps we should have expected something like the Sunni Islamic State, since politics abhors a vacuum, and the abdication of the US role in the Middle East by the Obama Administration, by their withdrawal from Iraq and reduction of forces in Afghanistan left the field to the disgruntled Sunnis. By supporting the pro-Shia regime of Pres. al-Maliki in Iraq and failing to take any direct action against the Assad regime in Syria, the US left the power vacuum that former al Qaeda supporters like al-Baghdad, the self-proclaimed Caliph of the IS, have filled. The eastern Anbar province of Iraq was easy pickings for a Sunni Islamist military organization from Syria. They now control the area from Aleppo in the east to Mosul in the west and have ca. 10 million people under their control. They are a state in the making. The States of Syria and Iraq, which were originally the invention of the French and British imperialists respectively, according to their Sykes-Picot Treaty during WWI, no longer really exist as we knew them.
We all must change our perspective, what we thought we knew before must be jettisoned, we must adapt to a new set of criteria in the Middle East. For example, when he was a graduate student doing research on the Middle East in London Prof. Rabi came across an exchange of corespondence between Winston Churchill, then the Colonial Secretary, and the Deputy High Commissioner in Baghdad Col. Arnold Wilson. In it Churchill questions whether the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shia could be expected to coexist together in the new State of Iraq, Wilson assured him confidently that they can and there would be no problem on that score. Fast forward 100 years and we can see how wrong that prediction was. Actually the only thing that united them was opposition to the British. We must learn that what matters in the Middle East is allegiance to sect (Sunni or Shia), ethnic group (Kurd or Arab) and religion (Christian, Muslim). Democracy, human rights and elections are concerns of the west, not of the east.
Jack Cohen: Born in London, UK, lived in suburban Washington DC area for 30 years, moved to Israel in 1996. He has a web site: Comment From Israel
Jack Cohen
