NOVANEWS

 
Dear Friends,

Some heavy stuff in the 5 items below.

But I begin with the lightest—well only in a sense.  The Guardian and Btselem handed out cameras to families in E Jerusalem to record their lives and experiences,  The result is videos—5 Palestinians and 2 Israelis tell their stories.

In item 2 Amira Hass reports on the considerable cost to international aid budges of travel restrictions.

In item 3 (‘The untold story of the deal that shocked the ME’) Robert Fisk gives a blow by blow account of what led Fatah and Hamas to join hands.

In item 4 Joseph Massad analyzes in “Under the Cover of Democracy” the destructive methods and aims in the Middle East of neo-liberal economics.

Lastly, in item 5 George Friedman analyzes which borders would give Israel security.  He and I agree on one thing: borders are inconsequential to Israel’s security.  But he also argues that the pre 1967 borders offer the most security.  He assumes throughout that Israel will continue to exist as a state.

Tomorrow less talk and more reports about what is happening on the ground here.

Meanwhile,
Goodnight.
Dorothy
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1. The Guardian,
June 08, 2011

Living in East Jerusalem – a video interactive
Five Palestinians and two Israelis used cameras provided by the Guardian and B’Tselem human rights organization to record video diaries about their lives and experiences in East Jerusalem

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/east-jerusalem

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2.  Haaretz,
June 7, 2011



West Bank travel restrictions take their toll on international aid budgets
European, American taxpayers supporting aid groups paying at least $4.5 million additional expenses a year to overcome Israeli restrictions.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/west-bank-travel-restrictions-take-their-toll-on-international-aid-budgets-1.366429

By Amira Hass
Tags: West Bank Palestinians Gaza

The European and American taxpayers supporting the work of international aid and development organizations in the occupied territories are having to pay at least $4.5 million additional expenses a year to overcome Israeli restrictions on free movement, according to a new report released today by the Association of International Development Agencies ‏(AIDA‏)
The report, which covers over 50 European and American agencies working on the ground in both Gaza and the West Bank, was commissioned in an attempt to estimate just how financially damaging to the organizations the Israeli movement limitations were.

A survey conducted among the organizations in January and February found that a third of the organizations have added a full-time position to deal exclusively with the Israeli authorities which issue travel permits within the West Bank, to and from the Gaza Strip and to Jerusalem.

Ninety-two percent of AIDA members who need permits for West Bank staff to enter Gaza say that they are often denied or put on hold; 79% said they faced difficulties in securing entry permits to East Jerusalem.

Over 73 percent of the organizations say their international teams face difficulties in securing travel permits to Gaza, and almost 25 percent said their request to enter Gaza was declined or held up for a considerable period of time. Very often the permit would arrive after the original reason for the trip was no longer relevant.

A third of all the organizations and nearly half of the organizations with annual budgets exceeding one million dollars reported they are forced to support a parallel office doing the same work in different locations only dozens of miles from each other, as a way to overcome limitations on movement. A similar percentage of the organizations found themselves forced to hire foreign employees, at a higher cost, instead of hiring more suitable Palestinian workers.

The time wasted waiting for permits or standing in line at checkpoints, the extra jobs, the video conference calls and all other means of coping with limits on movement cost at least $4.5 million a year.

AIDA is an umbrella organization of 84 development and aid NGOs, which together employ some 2,000 Palestinians and 320 foreign nationals. AIDA said two-thirds of these organizations wielded budgets of more than a million dollars a year. Most are registered with the Israeli Social Affairs Ministry, some with the Interior Ministry, and many are also registered with the Palestinian Authority.

Most of the organizations within AIDA work with the most disempowered parts of the Palestinian population. In Gaza, these are mostly farmers’ families living in the several hundred meters wide “buffer zone” along the border with Israel, or fishermen’s families who’ve had their fishing field significantly reduced by the Israeli Navy. In the West Bank it’s mainly herdsmen and other communities in Area C, in the areas affected by the separation barrier and in East Jerusalem.

The Coordinator of Government Activities in the territories said yesterday the report has not yet been forwarded for its review, while a government source said many of the organizations within AIDA were not recognized by the Social Affairs Ministry, and that the report failed to make detailed complaints of specific cases.
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3. The Independent,
7 June 2011

Revealed: the untold story of the deal that shocked the Middle East

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/revealed-the-untold-story-of-the-deal-that-shocked-the-middle-east-2293879.html

Exclusive by Robert Fisk

Secret meetings between Palestinian intermediaries, Egyptian intelligence officials, the Turkish foreign minister, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal – the latter requiring a covert journey to Damascus with a detour round the rebellious city of Deraa – brought about the Palestinian unity which has so disturbed both Israelis and the American government. Fatah and Hamas ended four years of conflict in May with an agreement that is crucial to the Paslestinian demand for a state.

A series of detailed letters, accepted by all sides, of which The Independent has copies, show just how complex the negotiations were; Hamas also sought – and received – the support of Syrian President Bachar al-Assad, the country’s vice president Farouk al-Sharaa and its foreign minister, Walid Moallem. Among the results was an agreement by Meshaal to end Hamas rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza – since resistance would be the right only of the state – and agreement that a future Palestinian state be based on Israel’s 1967 borders.

“Without the goodwill of all sides, the help of the Egyptians and the acceptance of the Syrians – and the desire of the Palestinians to unite after the start of the Arab Spring, we could not have done this,” one of the principal intermediaries, 75-year old Munib Masri, told me. It was Masri who helped to set up a ‘Palestinian Forum’ of independents after the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas originally split after Hamas won an extraordinary election victory in 2006. “I thought the divisions that had opened up could be a catastrophe and we went for four years back and forth between the various parties,” Masri said. “Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) asked me several times to mediate. We opened meetings in the West Bank. We had people from Gaza. Everyone participated. We had a lot of capability.”

In three years, members of the Palestinian Forum made more than 12 trips to Damascus, Cairo, Gaza and Europe and a lot of initiatives were rejected. Masri and his colleagues dealt directly with Hamas’ Prime Minister Hanniyeh in Gaza. They took up the so-called ‘prisoner swap initiative’ of Marwan Barghouti, a senior Fatah leader in an Israeli jail; then in the winds of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the youth of Palestine on 15 March demanded unity and an end to the rivalry of Fatah and Hamas. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had always refused to talk to Abbas on the grounds that the Palestinians were not united. On the 16th, he made a speech saying that he was “thinking of going to Gaza”. Masri, who was present, stood on a chair and clapped.

“I thought Hamas would answer in a positive way,” he recalls. “But in the first two or three days after Abbas’ speech, it gave a rather negative response. He had wanted an immediate election and no dialogue. Hamas did not appreciate this.” Abbas went off to Paris and Moscow – to sulk, in the eyes of some of his associates. But the Forum did not give up.

“We wrote a document – we said we would go to see the Egyptians, to congratulate them upon their revolution. So we had two meetings with the Egyptian head of intelligence, Khaled Orabi – Orabi’s father was an army general at the time of King Farouk – and we met Mohamed Ibrahim, an officer in the intelligence department.” Ibrahim’s father had won renown in the 1973 war when he captured the highest ranking Israeli officer in Sinai. The delegation also met Ibrahim’s deputies, Nadr Aser and Yassir Azawi.

Seven people from each part of Palestine were to represent the team in Cairo. These are the names which will be in future Palestinian history books. From the West Bank, came Dr Hanna Nasser (head of Bir Zeit University and of the Palestinian central election committee); Dr Mamdouh Aker (the head of the human rights society); Mahdi Abdul-Hadi (chairman of a political society in Jerusalem); Hanni Masri (a political analyst); Iyad Masrouji (businessman in pharmacuticals); Hazem Quasmeh (runs an NGO) and Munib Masri himself.

The Gaza ‘side’ were represented by Eyad Sarraj (who in the event could not go to Cairo because he was ill); Maamoun Abu Shahla (member of the board of Palestine Bank); Faysal Shawa (businessman and landowner); Mohsen Abu Ramadan (writer); Rajah Sourani (head of Arab human rights, who did not go to Cairo); ‘Abu Hassan’ (Islamic Jihad member who was sent by Sarraj); and Sharhabil Al-Zaim (a Gaza lawyer).

“These men spent time with the top brass of the Egyptian ‘mukhabarat’ intelligence service,” Masri recalls. “We met them on 10 April but we sent a document before we arrived in Cairo. This is what made it important. In Gaza, there were two different ‘sides’. So we talked about the micro-situation, about Gazans in the ‘jail’ of Gaza, we talked about human rights, the Egyptian blockade, about dignity. Shawa was saying ‘we feel we do not have dignity – and we feel it’s your fault.’ Nadr Asr of the intelligence department said: ‘We’re going to change all that.’

“At 7.0 pm, we came back and saw Khaled Orabi again. I told him: ‘Look, I need these things from you. Do you like the new initiative, a package that’s a win-win situation for everyone? Is the Palestinian file still ‘warm’ in Cairo? He said ‘It’s a bit long – but we like it. Can you pressure both Fatah and Hamas, to bring them in? But we will work with you. Go and see Fatah and Hamas – and treat this as confidential.’ We agreed, and went to see Amr Moussa (now a post-revolution Egyptian presidential candidate) at the Arab League. He was at first very cautious – but the next day, Amr Moussa’s team was very positive. We said: ‘Give it a chance – we said that the Arab League was created for Palestine, that the Arab League has a big role in Jerusalem’.”

The delegation went to see Nabil al-Arabi at the Egyptian foreign ministry. “Al-Arabi said: ‘Can I bring in the foreign minister of Turkey, who happens to be in Egypt?’ So we all talkled about the initiative together. We noticed the close relationship between the foreign ministry and the intelligence ministry. That’s how I found out that ‘new’ Egypt had a lot of confidence – they were talking in front of Turkey; they wanted (italics: wanted) to talk in front of Turkey. So we agreed we would all talk together and then I returned with the others to Amman at 9.0 pm.”

The team went to the West Bank to report – “we were happy, we never had this feeling before” – and tell Azzam Ahmed (Fatah’s head of reconciliation) that they intended to support Mahmoud Abbas’s initiative over Gaza. “We had seven big meetings in Palestine to put all the groups there and the independents in the picture. Abbas had already given us a presidential decree. I spoke to Khaled Meshaal (head of Hamas, living in Damascus) by phone. He said: ‘Does Abu Mazzen (Abbas) agree to this?’ I said that wasn’t the point. I went to Damascus next day with Hanna Nasser, Mahdi Abdul Hadi and Hanni Masri. Because of all the trouble in Syria, we had to make a detour around Deraa. I had a good rapport with Meshaal. He said he had read our document – and that it was worth looking at.”

It was a sign of the mutual distrust between Hamas and Abbas that they both seemed intent on knowing the other’s reaction to the initiative before making up their own minds. “Meshaal said to me: ‘What did Abu Mazzen (Abbas) say?’ I laughed and replied: ‘You always ask me this – but what do you (italics: you) want? We met with Meshaal’s colleagues, Abu Marzouk, Izzat Rishiq and Abu Abdu Rahman. We reviewed the document for six and a half hours. The only thing we didn’t get from Meshaal was that the government has to be by agreement. We told him the government has to be of natiuonal unity — on the agreement that we would be able to carry out elections and lift the embargo on Gaza and reconstruct Gaza, that we have to abide by international law, by the UN Charter and UN resolutions. He asked for three or four days. He agreed that resistance must only be ‘in the national interest of the country’ – it would have to be ‘aqlaqi’ – ethical. There would be no more rocket attacks on civilians. In other words, no more rocket attacks from Gaza.”

Meshaal told Masri and his friends that he had seen President Bashar Assad of Syria, his vice president Sharaa and Syrian foreign minister Moallem. “He said he wanted their support – but in the end it was the word of the Palestinian people. We were very happy – we said ‘there is a small breakthrough’. Meshaal said: ‘We won’t let you down.’ We said we would communicate all this to Fatah and the independents on the West Bank and to the Egyptians. In the West Bank, Fatah called it the ‘Hamas initiative’ — but we said no, it is from everybody. After two days, Meshaal said he had spoken to Egyptian intelligence and they like what we have offered.”

The talks had been successful. Meshaal was persuaded to send two of his top men to Cairo. Masri’s team hoped that Abbas would do the same. Four men – two from each side – travelled to Egypt on 22 April. A year earlier, when there was a familiar impasse between the two sides in Egypt, the Moubarak regime tried to place further obstacles between them. Meshaal had fruitlessly met with Omar Sulieman – Mubarak’s intelligence factotum and Israel’s best friend in the Arab world – in Mecca. Sulieman effectively worked for the Israelis. Now all had changed utterly.

On the day Abbas and Meshaal went to Cairo, everyone went except the two rival prime ministers, Fayad and Hanniyeh. Hamas agreed that over the past four years, the Israelis had seized more of Jerusalem and built many more settlements in the occupied West Bank. Meshaal was angry when he thought he would not be allowed to speak from the podium with the others – in the event, he was – and Hamas agreed on the 1967 border, effectively acknowledging Israel’s existence, and to the reference to the ‘resistance’; and to give Abbas more time for negotiation.

If Hamas was in the government, it would have to recognise the State of Israel. But if they were not, they would not recognise anything. “It’s not fair to say ‘Hamas must do the following’, Masri says. “The resistance must also be reciprocal. But as long as they are not in the Palestinian government, Hamas are just a political party and can say anything they want. So America should be prepared to see Hamas ageeeing on the formation of the government. That government will abide by UN resolutions – and international law. It’s got to be mutual. Both sides realised they might miss the boat of the Arab spring. It wasn’t me who did this – it was a compilation of many efforts. If it was not for Egypt and the willingness of the two Palestinian groups, this would not have happened.” In the aftermath of the agreement, Hamas and Abbas’ loyalists agreed to stop arresting members of each side.

The secret story of Palestinian unity is now revealed. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu’s reaction to the news – having originally refused to negotiate with Palestinians because they were divided – was to say that he would not talk to Abbas if Hamas came into the Palestinian government. President Obama virtually dismissed the Palestinian unity initiative. But 1967 borders means that Hamas is accepting Israel and the ‘resistance’ initiative means an end to Gaza rockets on Israel. International law and UN resolutions mean peace can be completed and a Palestinian state brought into being. That, at least, is the opinion of both Palestinian sides. The world will wait to see if Israel will reject it all again.


Profile: Munib Masri

* The Masri family have been in the Palestinian resistance all their lives. As a small boy Munib Rashid Masri, from a respected family of Palestinian merchants, was demonstrating against British rule in Palestine and plans for the creation of Israel.

* Three of his children fought with Arafat’s PLO in southern Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli invasion. “All our family believe it is our job to bring Palestine back,” he says. “I gave all my life to Palestine.”

* He was introduced to Yasser Arafat in 1963 by the PLO leader’s deputy, Abu Jihad – Khalil al-Wazzir, later murdered by the Israelis in Tunis – and helped to smuggle money and passports to the guerrillas, but got on well with King Hussain of Jordan.

* With Arafat’s permission, he briefly became Jordan’s unpaid Minister of Public Works after the collapse of Palestinian forces in Black September in 1970; he rebuilt one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan when the fighting ended. Much later, he would three times refuse to be Arafat’s prime minister.

* After the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, Masri encouraged 15 Palestinian business people – he was one of them – to set up a $200m company called Padico.

* The investment company is now valued at $1.5bn, running telecoms, tourism and a stock market, responsible for the wellbeing of 27 per cent of the Palestinian economy – and 450,000 Palestinians.

Q & A: The events that led to the historic handshake

Q: How did the split come about? The rift between Fatah and Hamas, known among Palestinians as “Wakseh”, meaning ruin or humiliation, emerged when Hamas won a sweeping majority in the 2006 elections. Hamas ran on a change-and- reform ticket and had garnered broad support through its social programmes. Anger with corruption within Fatah, and frustration with President Mahmoud Abbas’s lack of progress on the peace process helped propel them to victory. The election result stunned US and Israeli officials, who had repeatedly said they would not work with a Palestinian Authority which included Hamas, and led to sanctions and a Western-led boycott. Security forces, still under Fatah’s control, refused to take orders from the government and the US continued to fund Fatah. In 2007, the two sides briefly formed a unity government but it collapsed as masked gunmen took to the streets of Gaza. A state of emergency was announced and President Abbas dismissed Hamas’s Ismail Hanniyeh as Prime Minister, swearing in a new emergency cabinet in the West Bank. Hamas seized control of Gaza, while Fatah held on to the West Bank, leaving a de facto split as both sides traded accusations about the legality of each other’s rule.

Q: What was the impact of the rift on the peace process? The split between Hamas and Fatah effectively stalled the peace process, with Israel refusing to negotiate with a divided Palestinian leadership, which was forced to focus on putting its own house in order. However, with both sides reunited the prospect for peace is not necessarily more positive. The “Palestinian Papers”, diplomatic cables leaked to Al Jazeera in January, showed Mr Abbas had offered far-reaching concessions during talks with Ehud Olmert’s government, but to no avail. It is unlikely concessions so favourable to Israel will make it to the negotiating room again if Hamas has a seat at the table. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had used the rift as a reason not to negotiate, now says he will not speak to Mr Abbas if Hamas is included in the Palestinian government.


Q: What were the details of the agreement? In Gaza, dozens took to the streets to celebrate the Egyptian-brokered pact, signed on 4 May, which brought an end to four years of bitter rivalry. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said he was ready to “pay any price” to reconcile the factions. The deal envisaged a caretaker government with the task of preparing for parliamentary and presidential elections. Egypt has set up a committee to oversee the deal, but the unity government has a rocky road ahead, with potential pitfalls over how to integrate Hamas’s military wing into the security services. For years, Egypt sponsored reconciliatory talks in Cairo – but to no avail. It was the renewed vigour of the Arab Spring that finally led to the historic handshake.Loveday Morris


Like Robert Fisk on The Independent on Facebook for updates
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4. Al Jazeera,
June 08, 2011

Under the cover of democracy
 
US and its allies assist will be using neoliberal economic policies to make sure new Arab governments stay in line.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/06/2011689456174295.html

Joseph Massad

In many Arab countries, especially Egypt, the World Bank makes sure that the country’s wealth is in the hands of the governing elite [GALLO/GETTY]

For decades during the Cold War, the rhetoric of US and Western European imperial power was one of promoting democracy around the world. Indeed, as the Soviet model became attractive to many countries in Asia and Africa (not to mention Latin America) ridding themselves of the yoke of West European colonialism, the US system of apartheid, known as Jim Crow Laws or racial segregation, was less than a shining example for people who just liberated themselves from European racial supremacy that was used to justify colonial rule. As is well known, it is this that prompted the United States to begin the road to end its apartheid system, signaled by the famous legal case of “Brown vs the Board of Education” in 1954, which set the stage to desegregate schools in the American South.

But as US action around the world aimed at eliminating the recently won right to self-determination for the peoples of Asia and Africa under the guise of “Western democracy” fighting “totalitarian communism”, which left a trail of millions murdered by the US and its allies (starting with Korea and moving to the Congo, to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and from Guatemala to Brazil to Argentina, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Chile, to Southern Africa and the Middle East), the cruel US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade have hardly changed this anti-democratic trend. Yet two important victories are always touted by supporters of US foreign policy on the democratic front: namely, the fall of the Soviet Union and the ensuing “democratisation” of Eastern Europe, and the end of Apartheid in South Africa. The US hopes that its policies in both places will guide it to achieve similar ends for those uprisings of the Arab world that it cannot crush.

Profits and impoverishment

The people of the Eastern bloc wanted to maintain all the economic gains of the Communist period while calling for democratisation. The US, however, sold them the illusion of “Western democracy” as a cover for their massive US-imposed impoverishment and the dismantling of the entire structure of social welfare of which they had been beneficiaries for decades. Thus in a few short years, and through what Naomi Klein has dubbed the “Shock Doctrine”, Russia went from a country which had less than 2 million people living under the international poverty level to one with 74 million people languishing in poverty. Poland and Bulgaria followed suit. As billionaires increased and the margin of profit for US corporations skyrocketed in the former Eastern bloc, with the help of illustrious imperial organisations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the US, under international pressure, moved steadily to conclude a deal to end political apartheid in South Africa.

If the people of the Eastern bloc had to sacrifice their welfare states and their livelihoods in exchange for the outright pillage of their countries by Mafia-style capitalism, the people of South Africa were sold political “democracy” in exchange for the intensification of economic apartheid and the complete surrender of the country’s economic sovereignty. While the business class became infinitesimally more racially diverse (as its US precedent pretended to do since the 1970s), the impoverished classes remained racially uniform. Today’s South Africa is so saddled by debt and is signatory to so many economic agreements and protocols, that it can neither redistribute the racialised private property of the country (protected by its constitution), anymore that it can provide wage increases under its obligations to the IMF, which insists on wage “restraint”. The massive racialised poverty of the country has only deepened its economic apartheid under the cover of the “end” of political apartheid.

In the Middle East, the Oslo agreements, signed around the same time that US-style democracy was being imposed on Eastern Europe and South Africa, were even worse. The Palestinian Authority moved (under US and Israeli instructions) to demobilise Palestinian civil society, which was enormously strengthened during the first intifada. Western-funded non-governmental organisations appeared on the scene in force. The NGOs co-opted the intelligentsia, the technocracy, and most of all erstwhile activists into the service of a Western agenda that rendered these foreign NGOs the new local “civil society”, while Western governments financed the corrupt Palestinian Authority that continued to collabourate with the Israeli occupation. Poverty reigned supreme in much of the West Bank and all of Gaza and continues to destroy the lives of Palestinians there. Iraq, meanwhile, was being also transformed from its reduction to the stone age by US bombs into a US-imposed mafia-style “democracy” while the entire welfare benefits that existed under Saddam were withdrawn. Iraqi oil was handed over to American corporations in the ongoing American pillage and destruction of that country.

Other Arab countries, especially Egypt, were being flooded with Western-funded NGOs as the IMF and the World Bank were ensuring that local wealth is firmly in the hands of international capital and a small, local, subservient business class that supports the local dictatorships. A large number of women and labour activists, human rights and political activists, minority rights and peasants rights activists were no longer to be found defending the poor and the oppressed among whom they lived, but were now found on the payroll of these Western-funded NGOs, masquerading as civil society. While this demobilisation of Arab civil society ultimately failed to forestall popular Egyptian and Tunisian rage against two of the most corrupt regimes of post-independence Asia and Africa (or even Latin America), the US and its Saudi and Qatari allies are devising a new economic package to “support” the recent uprisings, especially Egypt’s larger and much more important economy.

Strengthening the rich

We got wind of US magnanimity early on. Indeed on the first day of the ouster of Mubarak, whom the Obama administration supported till his very last day in office (and beyond), the New York Times reported that “the White House and the State Department were already discussing setting aside new funds to bolster the rise of secular political parties.”A few days later, on 17 February, 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared “I’m pleased to announce today that we will be reprogramming $150 million for Egypt to put ourselves in a position to support our transition there and assist with their economic recovery,” she told reporters. “These funds will give us flexibility to respond to Egyptian needs moving forward.” A month later on March 16, Clinton declared on behalf of the US government that “we also think there are economic reforms that are necessary to help the Egyptian people have good jobs, to find employment, to realise their own dreams. And so on both of those tracks – the political reform and the economic reform – we want to be helpful.”

Indeed preparations ” to be helpful” were completed by the Obama administration and its European and Saudi-Qatari allies by May 19, the date Obama delivered his speech. He declared:

First, we’ve asked the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to present a plan at next week’s G8 summit for what needs to be done to stabilise and modernise the economies of Tunisia and Egypt. Together, we must help them recover from the disruptions of their democratic upheaval, and support the governments that will be elected later this year. And we are urging other countries to help Egypt and Tunisia meet its near-term financial needs.
 

If this was not enough, Obama offered a laughable gimmick to ease the $35 billion debts of Mubarak’s Egypt on the Egyptian people by “relieving”post-Mubarak Egypt “of up to $1 billion in debt and work with our Egyptian partners to invest these resources to foster growth and entrepreneurship.”But relief of $1 billion must be countered with help to indebt Egypt further. So Obama, in the same breath and without irony, declares, “we will help Egypt regain access to markets by guaranteeing $1 billion in borrowing that is needed to finance infrastructure and job creation…we’re working with Congress to create Enterprise Funds to invest in Tunisia and Egypt.”

As the impoverishment of Eastern Europe created massive wealth for new local elites and their US and Western European corporate masters, Obama asserts that America’s financial assistance “will be modeled on funds that supported the transitions in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a US government finance institution, will soon launch a $2 billion facility to support private investment across the region. And we will work with the allies to refocus the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development so that it provides the same support for democratic transitions and economic modernisation in the Middle East and North Africa as it has in Europe.” But this is not all, the United States will also “launch a comprehensive Trade and Investment Partnership Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa.” Recognising that Saudi and American avarice was such that all oil profits have found themselves pumping the European and American economies since the 1970s to the detriment of the region itself which languished under IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies (cuts in subsidies and wage decreases for the poor, increase of subsidies for the rich, restricting the rights of the working class, ending protectionism and selling the country off to international capital, raising food prices), causing the ongoing upheavals, Obama now wants a portion of the oil profits to be reinvested within the Arab world. He explained that

We will work with the EU to facilitate more trade within the region, build on existing agreements to promote integration with US and European markets, and open the door for those countries who adopt high standards of reform and trade liberalisation to construct a regional trade arrangement. And just as EU membership served as an incentive for reform in Europe, so should the vision of a modern and prosperous economy create a powerful force for reform in the Middle East and North Africa.
 

Obama along with France and Britain moved quickly. At the end of May, leaders of the Group of 8 wealthiest industrialised nations pledged to send billions of dollars in aid to Egypt and Tunisia. France’s Sarkozy declared that “he hoped the total aid package would eventually reach $40 billion, including $10 billion from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait”. Meanwhile, Qatar has been talking to oil-rich Gulf partners about a new plan to create a Middle East Development Bank to support Arab states in transitions to democracy. Its plan has been inspired, according to newspaper reports, by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development “that helped to rebuild the economies and societies of eastern bloc countries at the end of the cold war.” The projected Middle Eastern development bank reportedly envisages tens of billions of dollars of yearly lending for political transitions. Qatar is seeking the support of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates for the initiative. Indeed the Saudis had already made a $4 billion grant to the Egyptians and the IMF just announced a $3 billion loan to the country. Yet, Youssef Boutros-Ghali, Mubarak’s finance minister, who had been lauded by none other than the IMF as a most efficient finance minister, and who was named in 2008 by the IMF itself as chairman of its International Monetary and Financial Committee, has fled the country and was just sentenced to 30 years in prison by an Egyptian court on corruption charges. A week before the fall of Mubarak last February and before his flight from the country, Boutros-Ghali resigned his IMF position. But the IMF is not deterred. Its “help” to Egypt will continue unhindered by such trivial matters. Moreover, as part of the effort to crush the popular demonstrations and the demands for democratisation in Jordan, Saudi Arabia also granted $400 million “to support Jordan’s economy and ease its budget deficit”. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Cooperation Council (recently dubbed the Gulf Counter-revolutionary Club) had also extended, a few weeks earlier, an invitation for the only two surviving monarchies outside the Gulf, Jordan and Morocco, to join as members.

Neutralising the poor

But if the US deal in Eastern Europe was to impoverish the majority of people under the cover of democracy so that US businesses can pillage their economies, and if its deal in South Africa was about safeguarding and maintaining the same level of racialised pillage of the country by South Africa’s whites and the international business partners also under the cover of democracy, what is the form of political-economic exchange being transacted in the Arab world?

Clearly in countries where the US-Saudi counterrevolutions have triumphed, the aim is to maintain the same level of imperial pillage led by the US while pacifying the mobilised population and strengthening local elites (Bahrain, Oman, and Jordan are the primary examples here) or rescue the retinue of collapsing dictatorships (whether allies of the US or not) to lead regime transition and resume their partnership with the US politically and economically (Libya, Yemen, and even Syria are primary examples). But what about Egypt and Tunisia where a substantial number of the entourage of the overthrown regimes are also targeted by the uprisings for their corruption and complicity in the violence unleashed by the anciens regimes? It is there where the US-Saudi axis wants to focus its efforts.

Business elites who miraculously escaped formal charges in Egypt, and they are legion, have expressed much concern about demonstrations and strikes disrupting the economy (and their profits). Billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who fancies himself a supporter, if not a leader, of the uprising, and whose father and brothers were also transformed into billionaires in a few short years after they partnered with USAID during Sadat’s “infitah”or “open door” policy, and especially following the US invasion of the region in 1990/91, along with many other “honest” businessmen and women are ready to carry the torch for the US in “democratic” Egypt as they had done faithfully under Mubarak. Sawiris founded a new political party and now refuses to join the ongoing Friday demonstrations, which, he claims, are weakening the economy. He recently declared that “it was wrong to accuse all of the country’s businessmen of wrongdoing,”insisting that “many are honorable people who helped create jobs for Egyptians”. The US and Obama have also been celebrating young business executives like the naive Stockholm Syndrome sufferer Wael Ghonim (Stockholm Syndrome is the only acceptable excuse for Ghonim’s spending the majority of his famous TV interview crying and defending, rather than condemning, his secret police interrogators). Ghonim was touring the US speaking to international bankers as well as to World Bank economists, as a “leader” of the Egyptian uprising at the behest of the Google corporation itself.

But most Egyptians and Tunisians, unlike East Europeans under Communist rule, are poor already. As the main form of apartheid that rules Egyptians and Tunisians, unlike their South African black and poor counterparts under political Apartheid, is an economic and class apartheid, what then would granting US-style democracy to them be in exchange for?

The answer is simple. There is an increasing understanding among US policy makers that the US should ride the democratic wave in the region in those countries where it cannot crush it, and that in doing so, it should create political conditions that would maintain the continued imperial pillage of their economies at the same rate as before and not threaten them. Saudi money followed by American money and IMF and World Bank plans and funds are all geared to supporting the business elites and the foreign-funded NGOs to bring down the newly mobilised civil society by using the same neoliberal language of structural adjustment pushed by the IMF since the late 1970s. Indeed, Obama and his business associates are now claiming that it is the imposition of more neoliberal economic policies that is the main revolutionary demand of the people in Egypt and Tunisia, if not the entire Arab world, and which the West is lovingly heeding. That it is these same imperial policies, which were imposed on Poland by the IMF (and produced Solidarnosc in 1980), and ultimately led to the fall of the Soviet Union, as they marched onwards to impoverish the entire globe, with special attention to Africa, the Arab World, and Latin America, is glossed over as socialist whining. In this sense, the US will ensure that the same imperial economic policies imposed by international capital and adopted by Mubarak and Ben Ali will not only be maintained, but will be intensified under the cover of democracy.

Moves to limit economic protests and labour strikes are ongoing in Egypt and Tunisia. Once elections are held to bring about a new class of servants of the new order, we will hear that all economic demands should be considered “counterrevolutionary”and should be prosecuted for attempting to “weaken” if not “destroy” the new “democracy”. If, as is becoming more apparent, the US strikes alliances with local Islamist parties, we might even hear that economic protests and opposition to neoliberal imperial economic policies are “against Islam.” The US-imposed “democracy” to come, assuming even a semblance of it will be instituted, is precisely engineered to keep the poor down and to delegitimise all their economic demands. The exchange that the US hopes to achieve by imposing some form of liberal political order on Egypt and Tunisia is indeed more, not less, imperial pillage of their economies and of the livelihoods of their poor classes, who are the large majority of the population. The ultimate US aim then is to hijack the successful uprisings against the existing regimes under the cover of democracy for the benefit of the very same local and international business elites in power under Mubarak and Ben Ali. How successful the US and its local allies will be will depend on the Egyptian and Tunisian peoples.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor for Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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5.  Forwarded by Micah

Israeli borders and national security

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