Egypt's uprising and its implications for Palestine

[freepalestine]

Egypt's uprising and its implications for Palestine
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 29 January 2011

http://electronicintifada.net/artman2/uploads/3/110129-egypt-uprising.jpg

Egyptians call for Mubarak's ouster at Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo, 29 January 2011. (Matthew Cassel (http://www.justimage.org))


We are in the middle of a political earthquake in the Arab world and the ground has still not stopped shaking. To make predictions when events are so fluid is risky, but there is no doubt that the uprising in Egypt -- however it ends -- will have a dramatic impact across the region and within Palestine.

If the Mubarak regime falls, and is replaced by one less tied to Israel and the United States, Israel will be a big loser. As Aluf Benn commented in the Israeli daily Haaretz, "The fading power of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's government leaves Israel in a state of strategic distress. Without Mubarak, Israel is left with almost no friends in the Middle East; last year, Israel saw its alliance with Turkey collapse" ("Without Egypt, Israel will be left with no friends in Mideast (http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/without-egypt-israel-will-be-left-with-no-friends-in-mideast-1.339926)," 29 January 2011).

Indeed, Benn observes, "Israel is left with two strategic allies in the region: Jordan and the Palestinian Authority." But what Benn does not say is that these two "allies" will not be immune either.

Over the past few weeks I was in Doha examining the Palestine Papers leaked to Al Jazeera. These documents underscore the extent to which the split between the US-backed Palestinian Authority in Ramallah headed by Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction, on the one hand, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, on the other -- was a policy decision of regional powers: the United States, Egypt and Israel (http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11756.shtml). This policy included Egypt's strict enforcement of the siege of Gaza.

If the Mubarak regime goes, the United States will lose enormous leverage over the situation in Palestine, and Abbas' PA will lose one of its main allies against Hamas.

Already discredited by the extent of its collaboration and capitulation exposed in the Palestine Papers, the PA will be weakened even further. With no credible "peace process" to justify its continued "security coordination" with Israel, or even its very existence, the countdown may well begin for the PA's implosion. Even the US and EU support for the repressive PA police-state-in-the-making may no longer be politically tenable. Hamas may be the immediate beneficiary, but not necessarily in the long term. For the first time in years we are seeing broad mass movements that, while they include Islamists, are not necessarily dominated or controlled by them.

There is also a demonstration effect for Palestinians: the endurance of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes has been based on the perception that they were strong, as well as their ability to terrorize parts of their populations and co-opt others. The relative ease with which Tunisians threw off their dictator, and the speed with which Egypt, and perhaps Yemen, seem to be going down the same road, may well send a message to Palestinians that neither Israel's nor the PA's security forces are as indomitable as they appear. Indeed, Israel's "deterrence" already took a huge blow from its failure to defeat Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006, and Hamas in Gaza during the winter 2008-09 attacks.

As for Abbas's PA, never has so much international donor money been spent on a security force with such poor results. The open secret is that without the Israeli military occupying the West Bank and besieging Gaza (with the Mubarak regime's help), Abbas and his praetorian guard would have fallen long ago. Built on the foundations of a fraudulent peace process, the US, EU and Israel with the support of the decrepit Arab regimes now under threat by their own people, have constructed a Palestinian house of cards that is unlikely to remain standing much longer.

This time the message may be that the answer is not more military resistance but rather more people power and a stronger emphasis on popular protests. Today, Palestinians form at least half the population in historic Palestine -- Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip combined. If they rose up collectively to demand equal rights, what could Israel do to stop them? Israel's brutal violence and lethal force has not stopped regular demonstrations in West Bank villages including Bilin and Beit Ommar.

Israel must fear that if it responds to any broad uprising with brutality, its already precarious international support could start to evaporate as quickly as Mubarak's. The Mubarak regime, it seems, is undergoing rapid "delegitimization." Israeli leaders have made it clear that such an implosion of international support scares them more than any external military threat. With the power shifting to the Arab people and away from their regimes, Arab governments may not be able to remain as silent and complicit as they have for years as Israel oppresses Palestinians.

As for Jordan, change is already underway. I witnessed a protest of thousands of people in downtown Amman yesterday. These well-organized and peaceful protests, called for by a coalition of Islamist and leftist opposition parties, have been held now for weeks in cities around the country. The protesters are demanding the resignation of the government of Prime Minister Samir al-Rifai, dissolution of the parliament elected in what were widely seen as fraudulent elections in November, new free elections based on democratic laws, economic justice, an end to corruption and cancelation of the peace treaty with Israel. There were strong demonstrations of solidarity for the people of Egypt.

None of the parties at the demonstration called for the kind of revolutions that happened in Tunisia and Egypt to occur in Jordan, and there is no reason to believe such developments are imminent. But the slogans heard at the protests are unprecedented in their boldness and their direct challenge to authority. Any government that is more responsive to the wishes of the people will have to review its relationship with Israel and the United States.

Only one thing is certain today: whatever happens in the region, the people's voices can no longer be ignored.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml) and is a contributor to The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568586418/theelectronic-20) (Nation Books).


http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11762.shtml






carlos latuff

http://www.wikinoticia.com/images/es.globalvoicesonline.org/globalvoicesonline.org.wp-content.uploads.2011.01.CarlosLatuff_Egypt_Jan25-375x259.gif

[scarletghoul]

According to STRATFOR, Hamas was originally an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood. If the MB gets power, or any kind of influence, the blockade on Gaza would definitely be ended and the whole regional situation would change completely.

The following is a report from a STRATFOR source in Hamas. Hamas, which formed in Gaza as an outgrowth of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB), has an interest in exaggerating its role and coordination with the MB in this crisis. The following information has not been confirmed. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of concern building in Israel and the United States in particular over the role of the MB in the demonstrations and whether a political opening will be made for the Islamist organization in Egypt.
Related Special Topic Page


The Egypt Unrest (http://www.stratfor.com/theme/egypt-unrest)



The Egyptian police are no longer patrolling the Rafah border crossing into Gaza. Hamas armed men are entering into Egypt and are closely collaborating with the MB. The MB has fully engaged itself in the demonstrations, and they are unsatisfied with the dismissal of the Cabinet. They are insisting on a new Cabinet that does not include members of the ruling National Democratic Party.
Security forces in plainclothes are engaged in destroying public property in order to give the impression that many protesters represent a public menace. The MB is meanwhile forming people’s committees to protect public property and also to coordinate demonstrators’ activities, including supplying them with food, beverages and first aid.


Read more: Red Alert: Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood | STRATFOR (http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110129-red-alert-hamas-and-muslim-brotherhood?utm_source=redalert2&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=110129&utm_content=readmore&elq=c9464b7029034c55854f82d94a6a7c16#ixzz1CX0N91VG )


http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110129-red-alert-hamas-and-muslim-brotherhood?utm_source=redalert2&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=110129&utm_content=readmore&elq=c9464b7029034c55854f82d94a6a7c16

[freepalestine]

According to STRATFOR, Hamas was originally an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood. If the MB gets power, or any kind of influence, the blockade on Gaza would definitely be ended and the whole regional situation would change completely.

http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20110129-red-alert-hamas-and-muslim-brotherhood?utm_source=redalert2&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=110129&utm_content=readmore&elq=c9464b7029034c55854f82d94a6a7c16
as for the links- seems like made up propaganda.

hamas are basically the palestinian branch of m.b.

as for the mb in egypt- they are a major faction(with nearly 20% of national vote??),but their importance gets exaggerrated by u.s./western and zionists.its a scare tactic.just as lebanon with hizbullah(they have only 11% of the vote-3rd largest party in their bloc marc8th,behind FPM and AMAL)
the revolution in egypt is about getting rid of the regime -which is not in the interests of the u.s. (i.e.the suezcanal etc) or isreal

[freepalestine]

WEISS: The road to Jerusalem runs through Tunis and Cairo 28Jan11 (http://australiansforpalestine.com/37599) January 30, 2011

http://australiansforpalestine.com/wp-content/themes/Default/images/share.png (http://addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=ekaha)



by Philip Weiss - Salon (http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/28/weiss_jerusalem_cairo).com - 28 January 2011



The neoconservatives told us that the road to Jerusalem lay through Baghdad. They meant that invading Iraq and installing a democracy there would lead to peace in Israel and Palestine. The way they imagined that peace was a neocolonial landgrab: a greater Israel with portions of the West Bank amalgamated by Jordan. Still, that is what they believed– that creating democracy in Iraq would lead to a peace in Palestine.


These ideas are in smithereens today. The Palestine Papers have revealed that the peace process was a Trojan horse for Israeli expansionism (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/26/palestine-papers-gaza-west-bank) and that even the American client in the West Bank could not accept a future state without Ariel and Ma’ale Adunim, the long fingers of Jewish territory.


And the lessons of Iraq and Tunisia and Egypt are that you don’t install democracy anywhere; no, democracy must arise from the people themselves, you damage the processes of establishing popular will by seeking to impose such a system. The western democratic revolutions also arose from within.


The lesson of Tunisia and Egypt for American foreign policy is that the United States is the most conservative force in the world, in this region. It didn’t see democracy coming because it didn’t want to see it coming to the Arab world and to the palaces we supported. And when democracy did come, the U.S. creditably reversed field in Tunisia, but has stuck by its dictator in Egypt.


Barack Obama’s failure to honor the Egyptian protesters in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, and Joe Biden’s cold negativity toward them last night (they’re not up against a dictator, we can’t encourage them, this is not the awakening of eastern Europe) reveal the unwavering influence of the Israel lobby in our public life, and how conservative that influence is.
The administration’s statements reveal that it prefers stability in Egypt, no matter the cost to civil rights and human rights there, to freedom for Arab people. And why? Because Egyptian stability preserves the Israeli status quo, in which Israel gets to imprison West Bank protesters without a peep from the U.S. government and gets to destroy civilians in Gaza again without a peep from the alleged change-agent in the White House.



Thankfully, P.J. Crowley was forced to reveal the policy (http://mondoweiss.net/2011/01/state-dept-says-democracy-is-ok-for-tunisia-but-not-egypt-because-of-israel.html) yesterday by Shihab Rattansi of Al Jazeera, when he admitted that the difference between the administration’s response to Tunisia and Egypt stems from the fact that Egypt has a peace deal with Israel and has come to terms with Israel’s existence, a model to the region. And this line is echoed all over the American news, when they say that Egypt is helping the “peace process,” a process that has produced only suffering and dispossession for Palestinians.




The hole in the bottom of the world here is the fear that Arabs have not accepted Israel’s existence. They didn’t accept it in 1947 in New York, and they didn’t accept it in 1967 in Khartoum. They always warned that its presence would create instability in the region, and the State Department said it would radicalize Israel’s neighbors, and 60 years on this is more true than ever.

The Arab Peace initiative of 2002 was a great gesture of realism: the Arab states did accept Israel’s existence, on the ’67 lines. But nothing has come of this incredible shift, and Brian Baird tells us (http://mondoweiss.net/2011/01/if-obama-saw-what-white-phosphorus-did-to-the-kids-rehab-room-at-al-quds-hospital-in-gaza-maybe-he-would-become-a-decider.html) that leading American congressmen, tucked in at night by the Israel lobby, didn’t even know about the Arab Peace Initiative, and Israel scoffed at the offer because it had American power behind it.



Now in Tunisia and Egypt, the Arab street has taken the neocons at their word and said, Yes we want democracy, and we will get it. And Arab youth has taken facebook and twitter and done more with these tools than Americans have done, and said we want free speech and social freedom.


And when they get it– if not this year then within ten years, the internet is too dynamic a force, along with Assange and Al Jazeera– when they get it, they will expose the power of the Israel lobby so that even Chris Matthews will have to address the contradictions. For we will be seen to have only one policy, the preservation of a Jewish state, even if that means Jim Crow and apartheid and stamping out democratic movements everywhere and tolerating a prison for 1.5 million innocent people in Gaza.


I waffle about the two state-solution more than anyone, I actually imagined that partition might preserve tranquility, but when democracy comes to Cairo the pressure on Jerusalem to allow equal rights for all citizens will be massive. And the claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East will have completely dissolved.



You see the pressure on Jerusalem beginning in earnest now, from new quarters. You see it in Admiral Mullen’s awareness (http://mondoweiss.net/2011/01/palestine-papers-admiral-mullen-says-palestinian-state-is-a-u-s-cardinal-interest-after-raising-troop-deaths.html) that Americans will come home in wheelchairs until Palestinians have freedom, in Senator Rand Paul’s call for cuts in military aid to Israel.


That pressure must come to bear soon on the Democratic Party. It is the natural home for the recognition of minority rights and the self-determination of formerly-oppressed people. How sad that even Russ Feingold can scarcely talk about Obama’s war when he speaks out to a progressive audience (http://www.thenation.com/article/157719/russ-feingold-speaks-out), and can’t even talk about Palestine. Pathetic.
What we see in Cairo is the destruction of American racist attitudes. A year or so back a Jewish friend said to me that if Jews could take on the Israel lobby and reform American foreign policy, it would be a model for human rights leadership across the world. And I agreed; and we are working at it.

But that was an elitist conceit. The moral leadership in the region is coming not from any American movement in our imperfect democracy, no, we are the most conservative country in the world right now; it is coming from the streets in Tunisia and Egypt.




Philip Weiss is the co-editor of “ The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (http://www.goldstonereportbook.com/).”


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