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The video opens with bearded men traveling in a pickup truck, flying the black IS flag with its distinctive white calligraphy. The driver of the truck pulls up beside another car and honks for the other driver’s attention. The IS guy in the passenger seat leans out the window and asks him, in Hebrew with a comically exaggerated Arabic accent, “Hey bro, how do you get to Jerusalem?” The driver of the car shouts back (in Israeli Hebrew), “Take a left!” Then there’s the slogan, in red Hebrew letters emblazoned on a gray, bullet-marked background: “THE LEFT WILL SURRENDER TO TERROR.” One of the IS guys fires celebratory bullets skyward and the driver peels off, ostensibly in the direction of Jerusalem, as they all shout exultantly in Arabic, “Shukran, ya ward!” (“Thanks, bro!”). The camera pans briefly to the rear of the truck to focus on a popular Israeli bumper sticker that reads, “Anyone but Bibi.” The tagline: “It’s us, or them. Only the Likud. Only Netanyahu.” The snatch of Arabic rap lyrics is excerpted from a song by an Amman-based Palestinian group called Torabyeh: “I want to be buried in the same cemetery that my grandfather was buried in. And since my childhood I’ve been dreaming to be a soldier and as time passed I discovered who I want to belong to: Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, Hamas or…Jabha …”

Netanyahu has for years been promoting his message about the threat to Israeli security posed by Islamic extremism, never missing an opportunity to list Hamas along with the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and even Fatah, mixing them all up so that the average Israeli Jew reflexively associates Arabs and Islam with terror. Like all accomplished populists, he understands the power of repeating a mendacious slogan, and he is an expert at exploiting popular fears and racism.

The popular Israeli narrative is so reactionary and confused these days, that if one were to walk the streets asking average citizens if there was a difference between Fatah and Al Qaeda, most people would be hard-pressed to answer coherently. Go ahead and try to explain to an Israeli audience that Hamas is a small offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, that it is basically a technocratic political party, that it is extremely unpopular in Gaza and that it has nothing to do with expansionist jihadism. Try telling people that if Israel would lift the siege on Gaza, disgruntled Palestinians in Gaza would probably kick Hamas out of power immediately. Just try. The best you can hope for is that you’d be told that you’re a traitor who should go live in Gaza.

by its own reckoning, the attack has resurrected Hamas as a political player in the West Bank. In its attacks on settlers on two consecutive nights in different parts of the West Bank, Hamas demonstrated its reach despite a three-year, US-backed PA military campaign and exposed the fallacy of the PA’s claims to have established security control in the West Bank. “It’s not muqawama (resistance) against Israel,” says ‘Adnan Dumayri, a Fatah Revolutionary Council member and PA security force general. “It’s muqawama against Abbas.”  It also enabled the Islamists to catch seeping popular disaffection across the political spectrum toward a process of negotiations that appeared to Palestinians to be leading into a blind alley of continued Israeli control. Should Abbas fail to negotiate a halt to settlement growth, Hamas in its armed attacks against settlers would emerge from its three-year political wasteland to offer Palestinians an alternative. In contrast to the international media, where the attack was roundly condemned, in Palestine the attack earned plaudits not only from Hamas’ core constituency, but also from a broad swathe of Fatah and secular activists, including some senior actors, disillusioned by 19 years of negotiations based on an ever flimsier framework. Unlike the Annapolis process or the “road map,” the twin Bush administration initiatives that the Obama administration chose to ditch, the current negotiations lack any terms of reference or agreed-upon script. Palestinians ask why Abbas agreed to meet Netanyahu given that none of the Arab targets required to turn proximity talks into direct ones were reached prior to the Obama administration’s announcement of the meeting. When American elder statesman George Mitchell presented the parties with 16 identical questions on the core issues requiring yes or no answers, Israel responded to each with a question of its own. In his August 31 press briefing before the White House meeting, Mitchell again declined to specify if Israel had agreed even to extend its (partially honored) settlement freeze past the September 26 expiration date.

To maintain stability, the president’s men have resorted to an increasingly oppressive hand. The PA’s security forces suppress not only Islamist unrest but general dissent -- in late August disrupting a meeting called to protest the resumption of negotiations. Detainees emerge from prisons testifying to interrogators drilling through kneecaps. For all of Fayyad’s claims to have built institutions, in his bid to maintain power and prevent a vote of no confidence, he has neutered the most important, the Palestinian Legislative Council, Palestine’s prime expression of sovereignty. Local elections, designed to showcase the West Bank as the more democratic half of the Palestinian polity, were annulled after its main faction, Fatah, lost confidence in its ability to win, even though Hamas had declared a boycott

demographically, Israel is shifting further to the right. Far from shocking Israel into a reality check, the killing of nine civilians from Turkey, a purported ally, in international waters generated an outpouring of self-righteousness. Internationally isolated, Israeli Jews shared the feeling that “the whole world is against us,” and in a surge of patriotism redoubled their support for their government. According to a poll conducted a week after the Gaza flotilla incident, 78 percent of Israeli Jews backed Netanyahu’s policy. Support from Israel’s fastest-growing population sectors, the ultra-Orthodox and national-religious camps, topped 90 percent. The simultaneous news of vast natural gas finds off the coast only underscored these national-religious Jews’ sense of divine protection: They had lost one treasure at sea, gentile approval, and been blessed with another. More trusting in God than Obama, Netanyahu’s government is not configured to sign let alone implement a two-state settlement. For all the external hopes that Kadima leader Tzipi Livni might join the ruling coalition, the prospects for a shake-up in Israel’s political map look at least an election away. Even then, without the emergence of a new, more left-leaning religious force, possibly led by the former ultra-Orthodox leader Aryeh Deri, the nationalist coalition looks set to retain power. Fearful of upsetting his national-religious base, Netanyahu -- always alert to instances of Palestinian incitement -- shied away from condemning Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of Shas, the coalition’s fourth largest party, who on the eve of the Washington parley called on God to kill Abbas and similarly evil Palestinians. Provided he retains the confidence of his nationalist camp, domestically Netanyahu looks secure.

Hamas’ supporters also have more pragmatic attitudes toward peace than many imagine. Polls conducted by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the years before and after the 2007 rift show that Hamas followers were not relentlessly pro-violence, contrary to the popular misconception.  A majority of Hamas supporters described themselves as being broadly in favor of the peace process (55 percent on average in the polls conducted from March 2006 to December 2008, compared to 86 percent of Fatah supporters). Moreover, in a March 2006 survey conducted in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip 70 percent of Hamas supporters and 84 percent of Fatah supporters also backed full reconciliation between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples if a Palestinian state were established and recognized by Israel. Paradoxically, according to an October 2010 poll, a larger percentage of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip describe themselves as supportive of the peace process (69 percent), compared to only 58 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank. 

A senior Hamas leader has said that the Palestinian group is close to reconciliation with the rival Fatah movement.

"We are in the final stages now."

The delay has brought Abbas under immense criticism, particularly from the Palestinian group Hamas.

The October 2 postponement in endorsing the UN-sponsored report, listing Israeli and Hamas war crimes during Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip last winter, has angered a majority of Palestinians.

Abbas said that Hamas's criticism of the postponement was aimed at bolstering its own position.

Fatah, the political party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, has accused President Barack Obama of caving in to Israeli pressure and said the hopes Palestinians had for Obama’s administration have “evaporated.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan views the world with both grievance and a sense of opportunity. In a major speech Oct. 1, he assailed the failures of the post-World War II international system, declaring, “There is no chance left for this distorted order, in which the entire globe is encumbered by a handful of greedy people, to continue to exist the way it currently does.”

He described Turkey as a country that “cannot use the same methods as the states that have no roots no traditions, and no morals, and which derive their power from colonialism and greed."

Erdogan’s approach speaks to Turkey’s Islamic and Ottoman past, including in his newly assertive role on the Palestinian issue, as Fehim Tastekin and Adnan Abu Amer report. “We had to leave [Jerusalem] in tears during the First World War,” Erdogan said this week. “It is still possible to come across traces of the Ottoman resistance. So Jerusalem is our city, a city from us.” 

On social media and in public discussions, it has become common to label the PA as “collaborators” and its security forces as the “guardian of Israeli settlements,” while ridiculing the success of the “national project” depicted by PA apologists. Perhaps most strikingly, much of the Palestinian public today openly perceives the PA as an extension of Israeli colonial rule that is incapable of advancing their struggle. And they are correct.

given its inability to reiterate a similar campaign of large-scale ethnic cleansing like in 1948 — due to both local resistance as well as regional and international pressures — Israel has instead embarked on multifaceted strategies of population management and control to keep the territorial-demographic equation in favor of the settler-colonial project. After the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, the priority became to ensure that Israel could continue colonizing the land while excluding the Palestinians from power and concentrating them into tiny slots of territory.

A fundamental pillar of this logic was the creation of a “native” institution charged with controlling Palestinians in densely populated areas. This idea derived from many historical precedents from Africa to Southeast Asia, where colonial powers routinely invented and cultivated local authorities to sustain their rule

While some point to the success of Hamas in containing the Salafist groups, others note that the effort is complicated by the fact that most of the jihadists emerged from the ranks of Hamas. They left after the group decided to participate in Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and beat its secular rival, the Fatah movement. Salafists said Hamas’s decision to participate in the elections derailed it from its Islamic course.

Obama's peace initiative on Palestine suffered a stunning, perhaps fatal, blow last week. Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu rejected out of hand any freeze on the West Bank settlements which the White House had pressed as a necessary first step toward serious negotiations. The Obama plan is now stillborn, never having drawn a hopeful breath.

he will expect to bring the parties into line with only slight resort to coercion. Accordingly, his instinctive avoidance of head-on confrontations will leave him unprepared, psychologically and politically, for the requisite arm twisting with its inescapable political reaction from the Israeli lobby at home.

Obama rushed to say that the settlement matter is not so important after all, just a piece of a complex problem. Just as the "public option" was redefined as "just a sliver" of the overall package. There is no virtue in this approach. It is classic avoidance behavior.

A Hamas delegation is meeting Egyptian officials in Cairo to try to set a new date for the signing of a Palestinian unity deal

Egypt had earlier announced that Hamas and Fatah of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas would travel to Cairo to sign the long-delayed reconciliation deal on October 25-26.

The postponement was requested because of the decision by the Palestinian Authority (PA) delegation at the UN Human Rights Council to drop its backing for an immediate vote on a report on the Gaza war, the Hamas source said.

The Hamas-run interior ministry in the Gaza Strip has ordered Palestinians in the territory not to take part in elections called by Mahmoud Abbas, the West Bank-based president. 

"Any preparations, any committees, any collecting of names will be regarded as an illegal action that we will pursue," he said.

Abbas himself was elected on January 9, 2005, for a four-year term. The Palestinian Authority extended his presidency by one year so presidential and parliamentary elections could be held on the same date, as required by Palestinian Basic Law.

The family of Alaa Abdel Fattah, the British Egyptian political prisoner on a hunger and water strike in prison, was informed by Egyptian officials Thursday that he has undergone “a medical intervention with the knowledge of a judicial authority,” they said.

The United States is a close ally of Egypt and provides more than $1 billion in military aid to the country each year, but has repeatedly criticized its human rights record. Abdel Fattah’s family has made repeated public appeals to the White House to intervene in the case.

Abdel Fattah, who is 40 and a once-prominent activist in the 2011 revolution, has been in and out of prison for the past decade on charges human rights groups decry as attempts to silence dissent. He was sentenced to five years in prison last year after he was found guilty of “spreading false news undermining national security.”

June 30, 2023

aerial assaults reveal a dangerous phase in the evolution of Israel’s occupation. The air strikes are reportedly the first in the West Bank in two decades, awakening the nightmares of many Palestinians who ran for cover or suffered wounds from helicopter attacks during the Second Intifada. In that time, though, aerial warfare became the modus operandi in the Gaza Strip, accelerated by Israel’s withdrawal of its settlements in 2005 and the total blockade of the territory following Hamas’ takeover.

reconfiguration of military rule has intentionally produced a physical and psychological separation between the West Bank and Gaza, abetted by the fratricidal rivalry between Fatah and Hamas. As that distance normalized, the two territories became regarded as disconnected and incomparable. Even well-meaning advocates — in their heavy focus on settlements and annexation — often fell into the trap of forgetting Gaza outside the scope of wartime, deeming it an anomaly in the context of the “one-state reality.” But as many activists, scholars, and experts have warned, the structures used to confine and suppress Gaza are not a deviation from Israel’s methodology, but a natural continuation of it. And that was made clear over the skies of Jenin last week.

To blame the crisis solely on the war in Ukraine would be “barely true,” said Egyptian political economist Wael Gamal. Years of borrowing and investment in megaprojects made Egypt especially vulnerable, he said. Those projects have been championed by President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, who took power in a military coup in 2013 and has made infrastructure development a hallmark of his presidency.

Egypt’s economic troubles, Gamal said, become “deeper every time they go to the IMF and take more loans and cover older loans with new loans.”

Until recently, Ramadan said, he could buy a ton of rice for around 8,000 Egyptian pounds. Now, he said, it costs 18,000 pounds. The cost of his pasta supply has jumped by 6,000 pounds. Even the plastic containers and bags they use to package the meals are pricier than before.