Palestine 29th Nov 2012 -Strong European Support for Palestinian Statehood Move

November 29, 2012

Strong European Support for Palestinian Statehood Move

By REUTERS

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A Palestinian bid for indirect U.N. recognition of statehood received vows of support from more than a dozen European nations as of Wednesday, and diplomats said this backing may deter Israel from harsh retaliation against the Palestinian Authority for seeking to upgrade its U.N. status.

A Palestinian resolution on Thursday that would change its U.N. observer status from an "entity" to a "non-member state," implicitly recognizing the sovereign state of Palestine, is expected to pass easily in the 193-nation U.N. General Assembly. But Israel, the United States and a handful of other members of are expected to vote against it.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been leading the campaign to win support for the resolution, and some European governments have offered him their support after an eight-day conflict this month between Israel and Islamists in the Gaza Strip, who are pledged to Israel's destruction and oppose his efforts towards a negotiated peace.

The U.S. State Department said Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and U.S. Mideast peace envoy David Hale traveled to New York on Wednesday in a last-ditch effort to get Abbas to reconsider.

"We've been clear, we've been consistent with the Palestinians, that we oppose observer state status in the General Assembly and this resolution," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

She repeated U.S. warnings that the move could hit U.S. economic support for the Palestinians. The Israelis have also warned that they might take deductions out of monthly transfers of duties that Israel collects on the Palestinians' behalf.

The United States and Israel say the only genuine route to statehood is at the negotiating table, through a peace accord hammered out in direct talks with Israel.

Granting Palestinians the title of "non-member observer state" falls short of full U.N. membership - something the Palestinians tried but failed to achieve last year. But it would allow them access to the International Criminal Court and some other international bodies, should they choose to join them. The Vatican numbers among the U.N.'s non-member states.

Hanan Ashrawi, a top Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) official, told a news conference in Ramallah that "the Palestinians can't be blackmailed all the time with money."

"Some rights aren't for sale," Ashrawi said. "If Israel wants to destabilize the whole region, it can. We are talking to the Arab World about their support if Israel responds with financial measures, and the EU has indicated they will not stop their support to us."

ISRAELI RETALIATION MIGHT BE MODERATE

As there is little doubt about how the United States will vote when the Palestinian resolution to upgrade its U.N. status is put to a vote sometime after 3 p.m. EST (2000 GMT) on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority has been concentrating its efforts on lobbying wealthy European states, diplomats say.

With strong support from the developing world that make up the majority of U.N. members, the Palestinian resolution is virtually assured of securing more than the requisite simple majority. But Abbas has been trying to amass as many European yes votes as possible.

"A strong showing in Europe will emphasize to Israel and the United States that the Palestinian Authority is widely seen legitimate," a Western envoy said on condition of anonymity. "It may also give Israel second thoughts about trying to bankrupt the Palestinians for something that is really symbolic."

One senior Western diplomat predicted that at least 120-130 countries would vote for the Palestinian resolution.

As of Wednesday afternoon Austria, Denmark, Norway, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland had all pledged to support the Palestinian resolution. Britain said it was prepared to vote yes, but only if the Palestinians fulfilled certain conditions.

Ashrawi said the positive responses from European states were encouraging and sent a message of hope to all Palestinians.

"This constitutes a historical turning point and opportunity for the world to rectify a grave historical injustice that the Palestinians have undergone since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948," she said.

A strong backing from European nations could make it awkward for Israel to implement harsh retaliatory measures. Diplomats say that Israel seems hesitant to take strong action against Abbas as it would antagonize Western European countries.

But Israel's reaction might not be so measured if the Palestinians seek ICC action against Israel on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity or other crimes the court would have jurisdiction over.

It also seems wary of weakening the Western-backed Abbas, especially after the political boost rival Hamas received from recent solidarity visits to Gaza by top officials from Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia.

Hamas militants, who control Gaza and have had icy relations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, unexpectedly offered Abbas their support earlier this week.

STALLED PEACE TALKS

No European nations announced they would vote against the non-member state move, though several U.N. diplomats said privately that the Czech Republic and Netherlands might be among those that cast no votes. Neither has announced an official position.

Germany said it could not support the Palestinian move though it was not clear if it would abstain, like Estonia and Lithuania, or vote against it.

Europe's undecided countries included European Union members Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden. Several EU members said they were hoping the 27-nation EU would reach a common position on the Palestinian move, though U.N. diplomats said that EU unity was an impossibility.

Peace talks have been stalled for two years, mainly over the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which have expanded despite being deemed illegal by most of the world.

In their draft resolution, the Palestinians have pledged to relaunch the peace process immediately following the U.N. vote.

Britain said it would be willing to support the Palestinian move on Thursday if two conditions were met.

"The first is that the Palestinian Authority should indicate a clear commitment to return immediately to negotiations without preconditions," Foreign Seretary William Hague told parliament.

"The second assurance relates to membership of other specialized U.N. agencies and action in the International Criminal Court," he added.

Rights groups said that stance contradicted Britain's stated commitment to accountability for serious crimes.

Israel and the United States have mooted withholding aid and tax revenue that the Palestinian government in the West Bank needs to survive. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has also viewed options that include bringing down Abbas.

Syria 1st Dec 2012 Tom Friedman nytimes

December 1, 2012
Letter From Syria
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Darkush, Syria

THE scene is almost biblical. You step down through tall reeds, cross the
Orontes River from Turkey in a small rowboat and are received by a local
contingent of the Free Syrian Army, outside the Syrian town of Darkush. One of
them shows you the picture on his cellphone of a Syrian girl who was just taken
across the river to Turkey with what turned out to be fatal wounds from a Syrian
Army helicopter attack on her village. The helicopters, the rebel soldiers say,
dropped barrels with nails and explosives on her house. Meanwhile, over here in
the mud are three fresh graves with bodies that just floated down the river.
Some days it's just an arm or leg that washes up. Although this is "liberated"
territory, in the background you can hear the low drumbeat of shells slamming
into some town over the hills. I ask the rebel local commander, Muatasim Bila
Abul Fida, how he thinks all of this will play out. His answer strikes me as
very honest. "Without the help of Iran and Hezbollah, he would be gone by now,"
he says of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But even after he goes, there
will be a great sorting out. "It will take five or six years," he adds, because
the Islamist parties "want Shariah, and we want democracy."

In my visit along the Turkey-Syria border, I am struck at how so many different
people want so many different things for Syria. It is unnerving. A Christian
businessman from Aleppo tells me that if a real election were held in Syria
today, the besieged President Assad would still win "with 75 percent of the
vote," because most Syrians crave the order that he provided and are exhausted
by war. But a few hours earlier at an impressively run Syrian refugee camp set
up by Turkey outside the Turkish border town of Antakya, I interviewed young
Syrian Sunni Muslim men who had fled from the Assad family's largely Alawite
stronghold of Latakiya, just down the coast. They spoke about the deep
unfairness of the Syrian system and how Alawites were getting an unfair share of
the pie. "When we first protested to demand reforms, the regime did not do
anything," said Yahya Afacesa, "and then we started to shout and demand freedom,
and the regime attacked us. So there was no way to fight the regime peacefully."

He and his colleagues insisted, though, that the problem in Syria was the Assad
family, not the Alawite sect, a Shiite offshoot from which the Assads hail and
which dominates the regime. These are secular young men, and they still took
pride in Syria's multisectarian identity and harmony, which, it should be
remembered, has deep historical roots in this region. Indeed, before visiting
them, I met with the Chamber of Commerce of Antakya. The chamber's president
proudly displays outside his office a poster of more than 20 different churches,
mosques and even a synagogue still operating in his town, which is just a few
miles from the Syrian border. I repeat: There are cultural roots for pluralism
in this region that a new Syrian government could still fall back on — but
there's also the opposite.

A case in point: In Antakya I met two Turkish logistics experts. They spoke
about the "Arab foreign legion" of Islamist fighters from as far away as
Chechnya and Libya who have come through their town and crossed the Orontes to
join the battle in Syria. They scoffed at the idea that Syria will emerge as a
democracy from a war in which its main arms suppliers are the Islamic-oriented
monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The main Saudi and Qatari desire is that
Syria shift from being an Iranian-Shiite-dominated country to a Sunni-dominated
one. Democracy per se is not their priority.

One of the two Turkish experts has another business in Qatar. To get permission
to work and operate in Qatar, he explained, he needs a local Qatari to sponsor
his work permit. "If you have a work permit and you want to leave the country,
you need your sponsor to give you written permission," he noted. "If your
sponsor dies, his son inherits that right." His Qatari sponsor's son is very
young. Yet, "if he says I cannot leave, I cannot leave. I do business [in Qatar]
but I have no rights at all. ... We joke that we are `modern slaves' there. And
this country is trying to bring democracy to Syria?"

These stories illuminate for me the enormous number of crosscurrents and mixed
motives driving this revolution. Without a strong, galvanizing Syrian leader
with a compelling unifying vision, backed by the international community,
getting rid of Assad will not bring order to Syria. And disorder in Syria will
not have the same consequences as disorder in other countries in the region.

Syria is the keystone of the Middle East. If and how it cracks apart could
recast this entire region. The borders of Syria have been fixed ever since the
British and French colonial powers carved up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I. If Assad is toppled and you have state collapse here,
Syria's civil war could go regional and challenge all the old borders — as the
Shiites of Lebanon seek to link up more with the Alawite/Shiites of Syria, the
Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Iran and Turkey try to link up with each other and create
an independent Kurdistan, and the Sunnis of Iraq, Jordan and Syria draw closer
to oppose the Shiites of Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

We could be entering a new age of Middle East border-drawing — the
do-it-yourself version — where the borders of the Middle East get redrawn, not
by colonial outsiders from the top down but by the Middle Easterners themselves,
from the bottom up.

Egypt 2012 05 23 Historical Elections

יום היסטורי במצרים: 52 מיליון אזרחים יבחרו נשיא

ג'קי חוגי 08:33 , 23/05/2012 המהפכה העממית במצרים מגיעה הבוקר לשיא חדש" 52 מיליון מצרים ישתתפו בסיבוב הראשון בבחירות הדמוקרטיות לנשיאות. 13 מועמדים מתמודדים על התפקיד. על-פי ההערכות אף אחד מהם לא יצליח להשיג את הרוב הדרוש - 50% מהקולות - והמצרים ילכו גם לסיבוב הצבעה שני מצרים הולכת היום (ד') ומחר לבחור נשיא, ובפעם הראשונה בתולדותיה, איש לא יודע מי יהיה המנצח. 13 מתמודדים רצים בבחירות האלה, מהם שניים מובילים בעקביות בסקרים - מזכ"ל הליגה הערבית ושר החוץ לשעבר עמר מוסא, והרופא עבדל מונעם אבול פותוח, בכיר האחים המוסלמים לשעבר. נכון לעכשיו, כל האפשרויות פתוחות, וקיים סיכוי גבוהה שיידרש סיבוב שני. הנשיא הבא יצטרך להתמודד עם שלל בעיות שמאיימות למוטט את מצרים, פשוטו כמשמעו: כלכלה שסובלת מבריחת הון ומתקשה להשתקם, מצב ביטחוני מעורער בערים ובמחוזות רחוקים, פוליטיקה עצבנית שמתעצבת מחדש, אבל מעל לכל - 80 מיליון איש שמצפים ממנו לנס. הנשיא הבא לא יהיה חזק כמו מובארק. הסמכויות שלו יוגדרו בחוקה שעדיין לא נוסחה, והוא ייאלץ לעבוד ביחד עם הפרלמנט, שם צפוי רוב לאחים המוסלמים. ישראל בקושי ממקדת תשומת לב במערכת הבחירות הזו, אבל מעניין לשמוע את זקן השבט מוחמד חסניין הייכל. עורך העיתון "אל-אהראם" לשעבר, יועצו של הנשיא גמאל עבדל נאצר, מופיע בטלוויזיה ומזהיר מפני הידרדרות בסיני. "במקרה של מחלוקת קשה עם ישראל", הוא אומר, "תמצא יום אחד כוחות ישראלים בסואץ". סיני, הוא אומר, היא בת ערובה בידי ישראל. הקלפיות ייסגרו מחר ב-21:00 לפי שעון ישראל, וספירת הקולות צפויה להסתיים ביום ראשון לכל המאוחר.

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