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112. Arafat's FInal Chance? President Bush's Speech: Textual Analysis
- Author:
- Robert Satloff
- Publication Date:
- 04-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- In his Rose Garden speech yesterday, President George W. Bush jumped head-first into the waters of Middle East diplomacy by committing the prestige of his administration to the achievement of an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire and, ultimately, to "ending the conflict and beginning an era of peace." Analytically, the most important innovation in the president's speech was his clear differentiation between the Palestinian people and the flawed, failed leadership of Yasir Arafat; absent was any hint of the recent days' mantra that Arafat remains indispensable to peacemaking. At the same time, however, the administration stopped short of breaking new ground operationally, relying instead on the prestige of the presidency, the persuasive powers of the secretary of state, and the implied threat to turn to other, as-yet-unnamed "responsible Palestinian leaders" to take the reins of power in the event this last-chance diplomacy fails to stem the terrorism and violence of recent days. Along the way, the president's decision to mesh political objectives with the goal of a ceasefire risked both an erosion of U.S. credibility in Mideast diplomacy and even more terrorism by giving Palestinians reason to believe that violence does succeed in chipping away at U.S. conditions for high-level political engagement.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Arab Countries
113. Special Policy Forum Report: From Beirut to Jerusalem: The Arab Summit, Zinni, and Cheney
- Author:
- David Makovsky, Robert Satloff, and Shibley Telhami
- Publication Date:
- 03-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- The Saudi initiative for Israeli-Palestinian peace — soon to be presented at the upcoming Arab Summit in Beirut — is in part a tool to address tensions in Saudi relations with the United States after the September 11 attacks. A more important motivation for the initiative, however, is that the Saudi ruling family is concerned about the Saudi public's reaction to the escalation of violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories. In a recent poll, 63 percent of the Saudi public named the Palestinian situation as the single most important issue for them, and an additional 20 percent placed it among the top three most important issues. These statistics should not be taken too literally, but they are an indication of the growing influence that the Palestinian issue has on Saudi and other Arab perceptions of how the Arab world is treated by the West.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Washington, Middle East, and Arab Countries
114. Designating the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades
- Author:
- Matthew Levitt
- Publication Date:
- 03-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- Responding to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades' latest suicide bombing — which threatened to undermine the third straight peace mission of Middle East envoy Gen. Anthony Zinni — the State Department broke with tradition and announced the group's pending designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), even before Congress completed the process leading to its official listing in the Federal Register. More telling than this break in procedure, however, is al-Aqsa's intimate relationship with Yasir Arafat's own Fatah organization, the dominant faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the various Palestinian security forces. Long hesitant to probe too closely into terrorism conducted by Fatah elements for fear of delegitimizing the PA as a peace partner, the State Department's addition of al-Aqsa to the FTO list underlines both the sharp rise in al-Aqsa terrorist tactics and Washington's post-September 11 zero tolerance for terrorism.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Middle East, and Arab Countries
115. Special Policy Forum Report: Demographics in the Israeli-Palestinian Dispute
- Author:
- Arnon Soffer
- Publication Date:
- 03-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- Beyond the current violence and terrorism lies a demographic reality in the Arab-Israeli dispute which might in the future transform the politics, economics, and geography of the region. The demographics may affect U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, and Arab Countries
116. Entering the Refugee Camps: The Israeli Counterterrorist Offensive in the Gaza Strip
- Author:
- Nitsan Alon
- Publication Date:
- 03-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- Over the past month, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted a large-scale operation in several cities and refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, beginning on the night of February 27 and ending nearly three weeks later with the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Bethlehem and Bet-Jalla on March 18. This operation was unique in several ways: the scale of activity was the largest of the current conflict; it included simultaneous action in several areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, using ground, air, and naval forces; and it included massive penetration into areas under full Palestinian control (Area A) and, most notably, into refugee camps, long considered almost out-of-bounds for security forces (even those of the Palestinian Authority [PA]). A careful look at the operation and its outcome, however, shows that the rationale behind it does not represent a shift in Israeli military strategy, but merely a more robust implementation of it.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, and Arab Countries
117. Hizballah's Vision of the Lebanon-Israel Border
- Author:
- Avi J. Jorisch
- Publication Date:
- 03-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- On February 28, Hizballah fired 57mm-antiaircraft missiles at Israeli planes flying over the Shebaa Farms area. According to Hizballah information officer Hassan Azzedin, "the current line of Israeli withdrawal ('blue line') is not consistent with the international boundary and not recognized by the Lebanese government. That's why we're pursuing the path of resistance." Indeed, Hizballah claims that Israel continues to occupy sovereign Lebanese territory, and the organization makes this claim the basis for what it considers legitimate resistance. What, then, is Hizballah's vision of where the Lebanon-Israel border should lie?
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Middle East, Israel, Arab Countries, and Lebanon
118. The Seizure of Gaza-Bound Arms: Political Implications
- Author:
- David Makovsky
- Publication Date:
- 01-2002
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- Israeli naval commandos seized the Gaza-bound freighter Karine-A in the Red Sea last Thursday, exposing a cargo hold containing fifty tons of munitions. The seizure took place in international waters some 300 miles off of Israel's southern coast, between Sudan and Saudi Arabia. The ship's captain, Omar Akkawi, later participated in an interview with Reuters and several television networks invited by Israeli authorities to the prison where Akkawi was being held; in the interview, he named Adel Awadallah of the Palestinian Authority (PA) as head of the operation. Akkawi also identified himself as both a long-time member of Yasir Arafat's Fatah and a naval advisor to the PA's Ministry of Transport; the PA subsequently confirmed the latter fact. In front of the reporters, Akkawi disclosed his instructions to first collect arms at a specified point off of Iran's coast and then sail through the Red Sea and Suez Canal to the Mediterranean. He also confirmed that one of the men who helped load the arms onto his ship was a member of the Iranian-backed Hizballah, and that one of his own crew members had been trained by the group.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Iran, Sudan, Middle East, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Arab Countries, and Saudi Arabia
119. Global Conditions and Global Constraints: The International Paternity of the Palestinian Nation
- Author:
- Dietrich Jung
- Publication Date:
- 07-2001
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies
- Abstract:
- In a recent article, Michael Mandelbaum depicted Middle Eastern states as the most combative members of the international community. He painted the picture of a region in which “traditional motives for war – gold and God – are still alive” (Mandelbaum 1999). In line with this rather stereotypical perspective, the Middle East is often viewed as a zone of conflict, in which competition for scarce resources (“gold”) inevitably leads to violent encounters between actors that are guided by irrational ideas (“God”). The long and bloody history of the Palestine conflict has contributed a lot to coroberating this image of a region in which violence seems to be endemic. In terminating the so-called Middle East Peace Process, the current “Al-Aqsa Intifada” marks another violent step in this conflict that has frequently escalated to warlike proportions in the form of popular unrest, communal riots, anti-colonial insurgencies, guerilla and terror attacks, as well as civil and inter-state wars. Yet behind these waves of violence and counter-violence, we can easily discern patterns of a kind of nationalist conflict with which European history is far more familiar than the stereotype of Middle Eastern irrationality admits. Despite the academic obsession with proclaiming the “end of territoriality” and the “decline of the nation-state”, the Palestine conflict represents a painful but vivid remnant of those national conflicts that politically characterized the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution and International Organization
- Political Geography:
- Europe, Palestine, and Arab Countries
120. Ceasefire Monitoring and the U.S. Role: What Powell Did and Didn't Say
- Author:
- Robert Satloff
- Publication Date:
- 07-2001
- Content Type:
- Policy Brief
- Institution:
- The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
- Abstract:
- As car bombs inside Israel and the Israeli targeting of Islamic Jihad operatives postpones for another day the start of the seven-day "no incident period" arranged by Secretary of State Colin Powell last week, yesterday's retaliatory attack by Israeli F-16 aircraft against a Syrian radar station in the Bekaa Valley highlights another theme of the Powell visit — the role of third-party monitors in the Arab-Israeli arena. Indeed, Israel's reprisal for Hizballah's missile attacks in the Shebaa Farms area across the international border provides a timely reminder about the limitations of monitoring conducted by peacekeeping forces such as the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. Moreover, it underscores the key missing ingredients in virtually all Middle East monitoring arrangements: the willingness to engage in open, public, truthful, and non-politicized verification of compliance/non-compliance and the creation of effective enforcement mechanisms.
- Topic:
- Conflict Resolution
- Political Geography:
- United States, Middle East, Israel, and Arab Countries