A just peace or no peace
by Ismail Haniyeh

Israeli unilateralism is a recipe for conflict – as is the west’s racist refusal to treat Palestinians as equals

Ismail Haniyeh
Friday March 31, 2006
The Guardian

Do policymakers in Washington and Europe ever feel ashamed of their scandalous double standards? Before and since the Palestinian elections in January, they have continually insisted that Hamas comply with certain demands. They want us to recognise Israel, call off our resistance, and commit ourselves to whatever deals Israel and the Palestinian leadership reached in the past.

But we have not heard a single demand of the Israeli parties that took part in this week’s elections, though some advocate the complete removal of the Palestinians from their lands. Even Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party, whose Likud forebears frustrated every effort by the PLO to negotiate a peace settlement, campaigned on a programme that defies UN security council resolutions. His unilateralism is a violation of international law. Nevertheless no one, not even the Quartet – whose proposals for a settlement he continues to disregard, as his predecessor Ariel Sharon did – has dared ask anything of him.

Olmert’s unilateralism is a recipe for conflict. It is a plan to impose a permanent situation in which the Palestinians end up with a homeland cut into pieces made inaccessible because of massive Jewish settlements built in contravention of international law on land seized illegally from the Palestinians. No plan will ever work without a guarantee, in exchange for an end to hostilities by both sides, of a total Israeli withdrawal from all the land occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; the release of all our prisoners; the removal of all settlers from all settlements; and recognition of the right of all refugees to return.

On this, all Palestinian factions and people agree, including the PLO, whose revival is essential so that it can resume its role in speaking for the Palestinians and presenting their case to the world.

The problem is not with any particular Palestinian group but with the denial of our basic rights by Israel. We in Hamas are for peace and want to put an end to bloodshed. We have been observing a unilateral truce for more than a year without reciprocity from the Israeli side. The message from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to the world powers is this: talk to us no more about recognising Israel’s “right to exist” or ending resistance until you obtain a commitment from the Israelis to withdraw from our land and recognise our rights.

Little will change for the Palestinians under Olmert’s plan. Our land will still be occupied and our people enslaved and oppressed by the occupying power. So we will remain committed to our struggle to get back our lands and our freedom. Peaceful means will do if the world is willing to engage in a constructive and fair process in which we and the Israelis are treated as equals. We are sick and tired of the west’s racist approach to the conflict, in which the Palestinians are regarded as inferior. Though we are the victims, we offer our hands in peace, but only a peace that is based on justice. However, if the Israelis continue to attack and kill our people and destroy their homes, impose sanctions, collectively punish us, and imprison men and women for exercising the right to self-defence, we have every right to respond with all available means.

Hamas has been freely elected. Our people have given us their confidence and we pledge to defend their rights and do our best to run their affairs through good governance. If we are boycotted in spite of this democratic choice – as we have been by the US and some of its allies – we will persist, and our friends have pledged to fill the gap. We have confidence in the peoples of the world, record numbers of whom identify with our struggle. This is a good time for peace-making – if the world wants peace.

· Ismail Haniyeh is the new Palestinian prime minister and a Hamas leader. Email: ihaniyyeh@hotmail.com

Another brick in the wall
by Robert Fisk

While journalists continue to perpetuate the Potemkin-like landscape of the Middle East, the truth is, as long as Israel continues to steal Palestinian territory, it cannot expect Hamas to recognise it as a state, writes Robert Fisk
April 3, 2006

By Robert Fisk

We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that the dream of “Greater Israel” has finally been abandoned.

West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last year. The Zionist claim to all of Biblical Israel has withered away.

Likud, the nightmare party of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, has been smashed by the Gaullist figure of the dying Ariel Sharon, whose Kadima Party now embraces Ehud Olmert and that decaying symbol of the Israeli left, Nobel prizewinner Shimon Peres.

This, at least, is the narrative laid down by so many of our journalists, “analysts” and “commentators”. But it is a lie.

Only in paragraph two – or three or four – of the grovelling news reports from the Middle East do we read that Olmert’s not very impressive election victory will allow him to “redraw” the “frontiers” of Israel, a decision described as “controversial” – the usual get-out clause of newspapers that wish to avoid the truth: that Israel is about to grab more land and claim it to be part of the state of Israel.

The wall
Yes, true, the smaller and more vulnerable Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian-owned land may be abandoned – stand by for more of the grief and tears that we witnessed in Gaza. But the rest – the great semi-circle of concrete that runs around east Jerusalem, for example – will not be depopulated.

Let’s start with the wall. It will soon run from top to bottom of the occupied Palestinian West Bank – and it is going to stay.

It is higher in the long sectors where it has been completed (east of Jerusalem, for example) than the Berlin Wall. Yet journalists go on calling it a “security barrier” or a “fence” – because the as-yet-uncompleted sectors of the wall are still coils of barbed wire.

This is part of the dream world that editors and reporters have constructed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It exists in the same Potemkin landscape that allows journalists to call the occupied Palestinian territory “disputed territory” – after former US secretary of state Colin Powell ordered his diplomats in the region to use this mendacious phrase – and to call Jewish colonies illegally built on Arab land “settlements” or, my favourites now, “Jewish neighbourhoods” or “outposts”.

It is the same stage on which Israelis are killed by Palestinians, which they are, but on which Palestinians die in anonymous “clashes”. (With whom – and killed by whom – exactly?)

And each of these little lies, of course, contains a kernel of truth. The occupied territories are “disputed” between Israelis and Palestinians, the first claiming that God gave them the land, the second producing land deeds to prove that the law entitles them to their own property.

If illegal colonies such as Maale Adumim are built adjacent to Jerusalem – itself illegally annexed by Israel – then of course they are “neighbourhoods”. And since the wall – which has gobbled up 10% more Palestinian land for the Israelis – is to prevent suicide bombers (and has been fairly successful in doing so), it is a “security barrier”.

I seem to recall that the East Germans called the Berlin Wall – or “Berlin Fence” as I suppose we would have to call it if built by the Israelis – a “security barrier”.

Forget the illegality of occupation, then, and the illegality of stealing someone else’s home and land, and the illegality of building a wall that thieves yet more property from the 22% of mandate Palestine that the Palestinians are supposed to negotiate for.

Let me be frank. If I were an Israeli I, too, would have built a wall to prevent the suicide executioners of Islamic Jihad and, earlier, of Hamas.

But I would have built it along the international frontier of Israel – not used the wall as a cheap method of stealing more land.

Illegal

Indeed, under UN Security Council Resolution 242, which is meant to be the foundation of any peace, the acquisition of land through war is stated to be illegal. The wall itself is illegal. The International Court also ruled it to be illegal. And Israel ignored this ruling. So, of course, did the US.

But now the burden of all this post-election theft is to be placed upon Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

This colourless, helpless man, who presided over the Palestinian Authority’s continuing corruption, is supposed to persuade the new Hamas government to accept all of Israel’s land-grabs, to pick up where the Oslo process left off (which still left Jerusalem exclusively in Israeli hands), and to abandon all violence – which means to surrender whenever Israeli troops raid refugee camps or cities in the West Bank.

The point is that Hamas members have been as assuredly elected representatives of the Palestinians as Olmert and his forthcoming allies in government are representatives of Israelis.

But this does not allow them to make any “controversial” plans to redraw their “border” with Israel, not even to insist that Israel withdraws – or redeploys – to its internationally recognised borders. (I’m talking about the pre-1967 frontier, not the 1948 one.)

They cannot demand fulfilment of UN Resolution 242 because President George W Bush has already made it clear that the vast Jewish colonies east of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem itself, will remain in Israeli hands.

Sure, 14 of the 24 Hamas ministers have been in Israeli prisons. But what are Palestinians supposed to think when they realise that 15 Israeli generals have been elected to the new Knesset, along with six secret service agents?

Yet even this is not the point. If the Israelis want Hamas to acknowledge the state of Israel, then Hamas should be expected to acknowledge the state of Israel that exists within its legal frontiers – not the illegal borders now being dreamt up by Olmert.

We will have to abandon the idea that Ariel Sharon – an unindicted war criminal after his involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres – was really going to give up the major Jewish colonies built illegally on Arab land or the illegal annexation of Jerusalem.

Certainly, Olmert is not going to do that.

He is going to create wider frontiers for Israel and steal – let’s call a spade a spade – more Arab land in doing so.

The US will go along with this next illegal land-grab. But will the European Union? Will the UN? Will Russia? Will Tony Blair?

Israelis deserve peace and security as much as Palestinians. But “new” and expanded “controversial” Israeli frontiers will not bring peace or security to either. – The Independent

Feminist movement akin to separatist movement
by Dr Azly Rahman
Mar 23, 06 4:39pm

Letter writer JS Shaari presented an interesting and thought-provoking opinion defending the idea that “feminism is not about male-bashing”.

However, I must caution that it must not be taken as representing that of all females. The Malaysian feminist movement itself is presenting itself like a separatist movement struggling for self-determinism. Besides this, they must decide what kind of feminism they are going to be defined as.

In the West, we see so many variants of feminism, from struggling for universal suffrage to the rights to same sex marriage. This doctrine has evolved like products in the American shopping mall – there is feminism for a variety of causes. Each one has its own shelf life. Each one can be transported globally, as convenient as the American Empire wants to transplant “liberal democracy” the world over.

All most often assume that females are the oppressed sex, without taking into consideration the pattern of kinship, the pattern of social reproduction, and the complex social structure as it pertains to the development of changing roles in society. The writer misunderstood my intention due to the lack of careful reading.

It is clear in my article that Malaysian feminism is developing into such a doctrine of male-bashing and I think males are beginning to be increasingly uncomfortable with such an accusation. Herein lies the growing fascination of the Malaysian feminist movement – to take the excesses of what Western feminism has to offer and to use confusingly as a platform for their struggle.

What is even worse is that the argument that men are shackling women is beginning to be spread to girls growing up amongst feminist parents. The girls will grow up confused – as their feminist parents have been – of what constitutes a family life. This is going to be a dangerous trend that will retard the development of an ethical civilization. One need not be a feminist to be a champion of universal human rights, if feminism is itself a misunderstood idea amongst Malaysian feminists themselves.

Let there be no mistake in my propositions enshrined in my article. I applaud what some enlightened peacemakers, males and females, are trying to do with the Islamic Family Law. It need not be a “female” struggle exclusively.

The work of Malaysian feminists is admirable in the area of protecting the rights of women that are abused and unfairly treated in relationships. In fact we should teach girls to continue to continue their struggle against “digressive forces in society” that are pushing humanity backwards. In Africa it is a about genital mutilation, in Malaysia it is about something less clear.

The problem though is that Malaysian feminism is an elitist movement and trapped in its gender-specific shackle that looks merely at a limited number of issues without looking at the structural violence governing those issues. Because its members are mainly from elites of the upper and upper-middle class predominantly, their view may be limited to looked at “bourgeois-type” of issues that mirror the “struggles” of their Western counterpart.

Whatever that is fashionable in the West becomes transplanted as ideology of the Malaysian feminist movement. Feminism of this sort does not have its originality and it cultural-specificity, not to mention it being devoid of the understanding of class issue within the context of political economy.

The Malaysian feminist’s understanding of feminism itself lacks depth. It lacks the understanding of the metaphysical depth of the relationship between man and woman in the complex yet harmonious relationship between Man, Woman, and Human Nature.

Why would Islam say that “paradise is at the mother’s feet” if Islam does not value the role of women? Why would the mother be regarded metaphysically higher in status than the father in the scheme of relationship between Man and Woman? Isn’t this notion of the metaphysical and mystical nature of women enough for feminism to be debunked and cease to exist as yet another irrelevant “isms”? Why do we call this planet Mother Earth if there is more philosophical worth in the “feminine” aspect of natural evolution of this universe?

Even in the legend of Si Tenggang, human beings get turned to stone for being ungrateful to the mother. Read the legend of Batu Belah Batu Bertangkup. In it, children gets swallowed by a “cave” merely for the crime of not saving/reserving the “telor tembakul” for the mother enslaved by the economic condition she was in (perhaps in a society in which the Sultans get to eat caviar for breakfast). Such powerful examples of the power of the female which the Malaysian feminists have to start reading up on. Such an elevated status women were accorded even in times of pre-Tun Teja.

Malaysian feminists, in order not to be trapped by the ideology of “myopic feminism” must read the excesses of feminism as embodied in the characters of individuals I call “historical feminists” such as Mumtaz Mahal who made Shah Jahan insane, Cleopatra (who was actually a Greek) who brought the downfall of Mark Anthony, and Marie Antoinette who brought the separation of King Louis XVI’s head from his body through Dr Guillotine’s invention.

What makes this exclusive club of feminists think that the majority of Malaysian women are oppressed? Who are the ones not happy with the self they inhabit – the Malaysian feminist, or the females the feminists are “fighting the rights” for? This is a classic postmodernist/ post- structuralist example of the process of “Othering” – who speaks for the “other females”?

There is so much one, especially the self-professed Malaysian feminist, needs to learn of the genealogy, historicity, and post-structurality of feminism before one embraces it blindly as yet another transplanted Malaysian bourgeoisie country-club movement. Is it not a movement of the privileged few who are merely armchair human right activists cheered by international media interested in seeing how much a nation can be fragmented through subtle neo-colonialist strategies?

Again it not merely gender but class and caste that is the issue. I suggest Malaysian feminists deconstruct themselves and refocus their struggle to question the fundamental nature of our social ills – the prolonged existence of the system of corporate crony capitalism that is privileging the children of those in power.

There is no need for the Malaysian feminist to exist only to become yet another smokescreen to a larger issue.

The writer can be contacted at: aar26@columbia.edu.

Marina sparks debate with ‘Apartheid’ remarks
Patrick Goodenough
International Editor

(CNSNews.com) – Malaysia is considered one of the most moderate nations in the Muslim world, but the daughter of a former prime minister has sparked a row by comparing discrimination against Muslim women in her country with the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid.

“As non-Muslim women catch up with women in the rest of the world, Muslim women here are only going backwards,” Marina Mahathir wrote in a newspaper column.

Marina, a women’s rights and HIV/AIDS campaigner, was referring to new family laws that will make it easier for Muslim men in Malaysia to take multiple wives and claim property after divorce.

Under Islamic law (shari’a), Malaysian Muslim men already are allowed up to four wives. But the new legislation will give them more rights to claim assets after divorcing a wife, to seize property belonging to existing wives, and lessen their obligation to pay maintenance.

Organizations that came out against the proposals were attacked for promoting “western”-style gender equality, and parliament passed the legislation at the end of last year.

In multi-ethnic Malaysia, where Muslims comprise about 60 percent of the population, the proposed new laws will only apply to Muslims.

Marina wrote that, more than a decade after apartheid had ended in South Africa, an “insidious” form of discrimination was developing in Malaysia, between Muslim and non-Muslim women.

“Non-Muslim Malaysian women have benefited from more progressive laws over the years while the opposite has happened for Muslim women,” she said.

The article was due for publication last Wednesday, International Women’s Day, but The Star newspaper – for which she has long been a regular columnist – held it because of the controversial content.

Marina then published it on the Internet, with a note saying: “For the first time in some 17 years, The Star is refusing to publish my column … they said that the powers-that-be there think it’s too tough on the government and it’s not the right platform etc.”

The column eventually was published on Friday.

Marina’s “apartheid” accusation stung in a country which as a leader in the developing world saw itself at the forefront of the international campaign against racial segregation in South Africa.

The Muslim Professionals Forum (MPF) accused her of doing “a great disservice to a country praised by many as a model Muslim nation.”

“Her prejudiced views and assumptions smack of ignorance of the objectives and methodology of the shari’a, and a slavish capitulation to western feminism’s notions of women’s rights, gender equality and sexuality,” two female founding members of the forum, Farah Pang Abdullah and Siti Jamilah Sheikh Abdullah, said in a response.

The MPF statement itself sparked further discussion on Internet websites.

“Nowhere in the Koran does it say that we must suspend our intellect or reason in matters religious,” wrote one contributor to the debate. “On the contrary, we are told to exert ourselves fully (meaning use our brain) to fully understand our Holy Book.”

Some of Marina’s critics noted that in Malaysia, women play a relatively prominent role in the public and business sectors.

In an earlier column, Marina challenged that perception, saying that although 60 percent of undergraduates are female, only 23 percent of administrators and managers in the Malaysian workplace are women, and women are paid 47 percent of what men earn for the same job.

“Despite what looks like progress for women in our country, the participation of women in the workplace has not changed in 30 years.”

Her column also drew attention further afield. An editorial in the Khaleej Times, a daily newspaper in the United Arab Emirates argued that any discrimination faced by women in Muslim countries has nothing to do with Islam but with “pre-Islamic customs and traditions.”

“At a time when there are already enough misconceptions about Islam and Muslims, such an irresponsible remark by a Muslim woman can send a wrong message to the world,” it said.

“It’s unfortunate that a great faith that actually granted and recognized the just status of woman recognizing her rights and which transformed her status in Arabian society should be blamed for something that has nothing to do with it.”

Some critics of Marina said it was ironic that she was speaking against discrimination when her father, veteran former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, oversaw racial policies aimed at benefiting Malays, the majority Muslim ethnic group.

The “bumiputra” policies were introduced in the early 1970s following race riots, and were designed to give the ethnic majority a greater share of the country’s wealth, disproportionately controlled by ethnic Chinese.

The affirmative action policies include quotas for government jobs, admission to educational institutions and ownership in business. Stock exchange listing requirements also benefit Malays.