Just around the same time this news came out, I made a presentation at a small panel discussion on Syria organized by the Washington, DC-based Middle East Institute. My charge was to survey the various regional dimensions of the ongoing events in Syria. I ended up focusing mainly on the role Turkey potentially might play in helping to facilitate the successful transition to a functioning and egalitarian democracy in Syria that I believe would be far and away the best outcome for the country’s 21 million people. The following are notes based on the most important things I said there…

Turkey has, of course, the longest of its land borders (over 500 miles long) with Syria; and this is also the longest land border that Syria has with any neighbor. Each country is an important geographic “gateway” that links the other country with a significant hinterland behind it. Straddling that border, too, are the ethnic Kurds whose political role and status is a significant issue for both countries. In addition, as I have seen very vividly during visits to Syria in recent years, Syria’s people and government alike all seem to have very warm attitudes toward Turkey, seeing it as a compelling model for the kind of country that they would like Syria to become.

Meanwhile, as we know, the political situation inside Syria has become extremely tense and violent over the past three months. Demonstrations and protests have proliferated in many Syrian provincial towns and cities and  in the outer suburbs of Damascus, too.  The country’s Baathist rulers have cracked down– not as hard. certainly, as Pres. Hafez al-Asad did in 1982; but still, by now, somewhere over 1,000 protesters (and a very small number of security men) have been killed. The protests show few signs of abating, though their intensity seems to rise and fall from week to week. Pres. Bashar al-Asad has promised undefined “reforms” but has done little if anything to follow through on those promises– certainly, nowhere near enough to persuade his opponents of the seriousness of his offer. My assessment from a distance, actually, is that the regime doesn’t really know what to do to deal successfully with this brand-news kind of Arab Spring-inspired activism. But nor do the protesters yet seem to have any clearly defined political goals, or any clear idea of how to organize to realize them.  The country seems locked in a bloody impasse.

Back in the 1990s, I wrote quite a few columns in Al-Hayat in which I compared the minority-dominated systems of rule then existing in both Syria and Iraq with the system in apartheid South Africa.  Back then, Syria and Iraq both had (extremely competitive and mutually vindictive) Baath Party governments that professed strong adherence to the Baath (‘Renaissance’) version of secular Arab nationalism. But behind that political facade, both those governments and their ruling parties were in fact dominated by a tight clique coming from a minority religious group: In Iraq’s case, the Sunni Arabs, and in Syria’s the Alawites– members of a Shiite-related sect centered in the mountains near the Mediterranean coast northwest of Damascus.

Anyway, back then I was writing a bit about how the transition from a minority-dominated system to a fully functioning democracy had been effected through broad-ranging and very negotiations in South Africa, in the hope that people might start to plan a similar transition in the two Baathist countries. In Iraq, as we know, there was never a negotiated transition to democracy. Rather, there was an extremely violent U.S. military attack and occupation that brought in its train unbelievable amounts of further violence that, cresting in 2006-07, tore the country apart and sent millions of its people into exile.  Organizing a successful negotiated transition to democracy has to be a better path than that!  Better, too, that the terrible military impasse in which Libya’s people are now trapped… I well know from the time I spent not only working but also living in Lebanon during so many years of that country’s civil war in the 1970s that wars– and especially civil wars– are extremely inimical to the rights and wellbeing of civilians. (A fact that far too many liberal hawks, sitting in their comfy armchairs in extremely stable and secure western nations seem never to have even entertained.)

But how to start in organizing a successful negotiated transition to democracy? South Africa, in many ways, showed us the way during those years 1990-94. However, the record of South Africa also shows us how far Syria currently is from being able to achieve this on its own…

The story of the transition in South was not, as many in the west would have it, one of two “heroic” men, Nelson Mandela and Frederik W. De Klerk, sitting down together and somehow sorting it all out between them and then walking away with Nobel Peace Prizes. Rather, it was a story of the two movements/parties of which these men were disciplined members as well as leaders. (The actual overall leadership of the ANC at the time was located in Lusaka, Zambia; and it was only after getting the go-ahead from Oliver Tambo there that Mandela did anything serious in the negotiation at all.)  And a lot of the story transpired in the years before the negotiations in Pollsmoor prison started, as the leaders on both sides came to realize three things:

1. That there was no solution to the problems they faced that could be imposed on the other by brute force;
2. That the best way forward would be building on very simple and inclusive principles of human equality and a concept of equal co-citizenship of the one country they all loved, rather than division, secession, exclusion, or partition; and
3. That they would need to pursue a path that was not dominated by vengeance and punitive score-keeping but rather by the need to allow everyone a “fresh start” going forward in the new order.

Of course, as soon as we list these factors that between them led to a successful negotiated transition to democracy in South Africa, we can see that most of them do not obtain in Syria. In a sense, the worst lacuna is the fact that in Syria you don’t have those two experienced and disciplined large movements facing off against each other. (Though to be honest, the South African situation wasn’t as clearcut as that, either. There, there was also the extremely large and lethal ‘third force’ of the regime-supported Inkatha Freedom Party. There were also many very active ‘extremists’ in both the Boer and the African-nationalist communities… All those forces had to be taken into consideration and dealt with politically as the transition proceeded. But the core negotiation– after several different formulas were tried– was the one that involved only the ANC and De Klerk’s National Party.)

Regarding the three ‘realizations’ listed above, I think the situation in Syria is probably a bit better– well, more certainly, regarding the first two of them. I think it should be clear to smart people in both leaderships that they don’t really have an option to quash the power of the ‘other’ side through brute force; and probably all of them are committed at some level (or could be persuaded to become so) to equal co-citizenship in a country that remains united. The non-vengeance thing is trickier. In particular, it is trickier nowadays because you have all these phalanxes of liberal hawks in the west, who are still fairly influential in the ‘international community’, who believe that strict score-keeping and ‘accountability’ mechanisms should be applied to leaders of color throughout the whole world (even if not to their own leaders.) In South Africa, an essential factor that allowed the success of the country’s big negotiation over democratization was that miscreants on all sides were offered amnesty in return for full truth-telling. Since 1994, however, the emergence of the International Criminal Court and the whole norm of international criminal prosecutions– which nearly always have been used as a weapon by the west against non-western nations– has established a situation in which the amazing, extremely inspiring transition that occurred in South Africa that year would not now be possible.

And we all saw how “well” the post-transition criminal prosecution thing went for the people of Iraq, right– with that politically very divisive travesty of a criminal proceeding against Saddam Hussein and the disgusting hanging that it ended in…

Ah well. At least Syria is not a member of the International Criminal Court; so at least Syria has a chance of not getting caught in the kind of trap the Ugandan government and people found themselves in when the government desperately needed to negotiate an end to their crisis with the LRA, but the ICC rules wouldn’t allow them to do so for the longest time.

But still, the bottom line on the prospects for a negotiated transition to democracy in Syria is still that this is something that the political forces inside Syria look almost certainly incapable of undertaking on their own, in the way the South Africans were able to. The Syrians, in short, need some kind of outside body that is ready and willing to convene the needed “big” negotiation among the contesting sides– and not only to convene it, but also to shepherd it energetically to success and to mobilize (including, if necessary, from others) whatever financial or intellectual resources are needed to incentivize the Syrian participants to bring this negotiation to a successful conclusion.

Well, I guess that would be Turkey.

Turkey is uniquely positioned to play this role for a number of reasons:

• That long common border– and the high incentive that gives Turkey to see that Syria doesn’t devolve into political chaos or sociopolitical breakdown (fitna);
• Turkey has good relations with both the government and the embers of the opposition in Syria and is well-regarded by both; and
• It has its own impressive record of a near-complete transition effected over the past 15 years, from being a military-dominated state to one in which the civilian leaders have effective control of the military and civil society has a significant and recognized role in society; and
• Its impressive record in building a robust constitutional democracy in a majority Muslim state– one in which nearly all minorities feel secure and included and one that has provided the framework for extremely strong economic growth.

This is not an insignificant challenge for Turkey’s government (which will also be going into its own general elections on June 12!) In the discussion after today’s panel, I said I thought the country’s ruling AK Party– which has been accused of pursuing a “neo-Ottoman” policy of seeking active outreach to the countries of the former Ottoman Empire– really had no idea that this outreach would make such strong demands on Ankara’s political and diplomatic leaders, so soon!  I honestly think the AK leaders thought they could just extend their power and influence in Arab countries in the way they have done for many years now through the areas of the former Soviet Union– by the active extension and strengthening of economic ties.  But no. Now, both Libya and Syria are seeking Ankara’s help in negotiating something to do with resolving their present crises… though it is not yet clear in either case what exactly it is that is being sought– either from the government in power, or from the opposition movement(s)– or, indeed, from Ankara.

It looks as though what is planned for next week in Antalya is only a process to get the Syrian opposition organized.  I think that’s an excellent step. But on its own it is not nearly enough. The real negotiation that needs to occur is the one between the opposition and the regime that will establish the terms for the fully democratic system going forward.

Most people in the MSM commentatoriats in the west are still talking about a very different kind of “negotiation” for Syria: One that aims at achieving only a single outcome, the “exit” of Pres. Asad.  We discussed this a little at this morning’s session. I think it’s a wrongheaded approach for two reasons. One is that it relies far too much on this western notion of the one “bad actor”. Western commentators just love to personalize (and then demonize) their opponents. “Asad must go!” “Qadhafi must go!” … and so on. But what difference would it really make if Pres. Asad left Syria, but the rest of the Baathist regime remained in power?

The other reason that demanding the “exit” of the president as a precondition for everything else is that actually, it would probably be a lot better to have him in the negotiation tent and wielding his influence to persuade the many people who still follow him that it is both safe and honorable to proceed with this negotiation toward full democracy. If he is forced out, who will play that role?  If the ANC had insisted in South Africa that De Klerk “had to go” before they would engage in serious negotiations, how would they have ever have persuaded the majority of the Boers that the process would be a safe one for them? And for goodness sake, the sufferings that the apartheid regime had visited on the Blacks of South Africa for so long were considerably worse than what Syrian Baathists have inflicted on their opponents. It was not easy for the ANC leaders to persuade all their followers and allies that the negotiations with De Klerk and Co. were a good idea; but I am sure glad they did so.

(More on this, when I have time… )

And then, there was the Carl Gershmann (NED)- financed, Astroturf-like “movement” in Gaza whose actions seemed designed above all to embarrass and undermine Hamas.

Now, it looks as if the civilian mass organizing is occurring within the Palestinian body politic, and among the Palestinians’ brothers and sisters who are citizens of other Arab states, in a new and significant way. This organizing is going on inside and outside the OPTs– including in Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon– and the main theme in it (as articulated by the activists in Lebanon) is “The people demand the return to Palestine.” (Ash-sha3b yurid al-aw3da ila filas6een.)

This is a bit of a riff on the main– and stunningly successful!– slogan of the popular movements in Tunisia and Egypt: “The people demand the overthrow of the regime.” In both Jordan and Lebanon there are many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose internationally recognized (Univ. Dec. of Human Rts., etc) right to return to the land of their birth has has been prevented by Israel from 1948 until this day. Indeed, over recent decades, successive Israeli governments have refused even to allow the Palestinians to place their refugees’ “right of return” on the negotiating agenda in any meaningful way: Not only they can’t implement the return; they are not even allowed to talk about it!

For the 7-8 million Palestinians around the world who are currently prevented by Israel from returning to the land that they or their immediate forebears were exiled/”cleansed” from in 1948, the right of return has always been a central focus of longing and political activism.  The PLO grew up in the Palestinian diaspora, and was organized centrally around the demand of the right of return. But with the 1993 Oslo Accord, PLO leaders Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas, and Co. traded their support of that demand for something that turned out to be no better than a mess of potage: their own personal “return”– but to Ramallah, not to Jerusalem; and that of a small number of their chosen followers. And the “right”– always heavily circumscribed, and sometimes simply quashed/rescinded, by Israel– to administer a few municipal-type things in and around Ramallah.

The demands and very burning needs of the Palestinian refugees whose support had boosted Arafat, Abbas, and Co. to political prominence were simply jettisoned. As were the demands and burning needs of the broad networks of Palestinians within the OPTs whose steadfast support for the exiled PLO leaders always successfully blocked the plans the U.S. and Israel had to groom an “alternative leadership” from within the OPTs. But once Arafat and Co. returned to Ramallah, they clamped down fast and hard on the till-then semi-autonomous networks of civilian activists that had run the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-93.)

And let us remember that that intifada– and the early weeks of the Second Intifada, in Sept.- Oct. of 2000, which like the First Initfada (uprising) were also overwhelmingly nonviolent and marked by the lengthy and widespread reliance on civilian mass organizing, though by the end of 2000, Israel’s terrible and lethal counter-violence successfully drove many of the shabab into the big tactical mistake of using their own violence, too.

So now, civilian mass organizing of the kind pioneered in the 1980s by the Palestinians of the OPTs, seems to be coming in a big way to the Palestinians of the immediate diaspora– acting in alliance with their sisters and brothers from the Arab states that have hosted them nigh these many decades. As I chronicled in great detail in the study of the PLO that I published in 1984 with Cambridge U.P., the earliest impulses of those who formed the guerrilla groups that took over (and became) the PLO in 1968-69 were all for armed action against Israel. It was the Palestinians of the OPTs who really pioneered civilian mass organizing.

Anyway, what is happening now is significant, and it may well end up being huge. Citizens of the Arab states that have seen the flowering of the Arab Spring never– as Tom Friedman and others claimed– “forgot” or turned their backs on the Palestinian issue… And now, with the promise that arose as a result of the recent Fateh-Hamas agreement, there is to be a democratization of the internal governance, carried out among the entire Palestinian national community, worldwide. Stay tuned.

Bottom line: I plan to blog here till my CTO can help me fix the MT version of JWN.

Can Obama stand up to Israel?

It won’t be easy, but President Obama must hold Israel to account, both for the two-state solution and the safety of US troops around the world.

from the November 24, 2009 edition of The Christian Science Monitor

Washington – President Obama urgently needs to distance Washington from the provocative – and illegal – actions the Israeli government has been undertaking in Jerusalem.

He needs to do this to save the two-state solution that he supports between Israelis and Palestinians. He needs to do it, too, because it will help protect US troops around the world. Jerusalem is a core concern for many of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims, and with US forces now facing tense situations in several majority-Muslim countries, Washington has a stronger need than ever to keep the goodwill of the peoples of those lands.

This is one of the main findings from a study-tour of the region I co-led earlier this month. In Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and the West Bank, strongly pro-US leaders underlined to us the importance of Jerusalem to their own political fortunes and those of other American allies throughout the Muslim world.

Israel took control of the eastern portion of Jerusalem, including the historic, walled “Old City,” in the 1967 war. Since then, Israeli governments have invested heavily in implanting Jewish settlers into East Jerusalem, while squeezing out the area’s indigenous Palestinians, both Muslims and Christians.

In recent months this campaign of ethnic transformation has intensified. On Nov. 16, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans for the construction of 900 new housing units in the southeast settlement of Gilo. He reportedly did this right after Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the region, George Mitchell, had pleaded with him not to. But aside from expressing “dismay,” have we seen any visible consequences from Washington? Not yet.

Today, Jerusalem is a tinderbox. If it ignites, American interests will be at risk, because Washington is seen as acquiescing in Israel’s harmful actions there.

In decades past, when policy differences arose between Israel and the United States, many of Israel’s supporters argued that it was on the front line against terrorism, so Americans should not second-guess its judgments or policies.

That was never a wholly convincing argument. But now, the situation has turned quite around. Today, it is American men and women who are on the front lines and it is their – and our – interests that are most at risk.

By not holding Israel to account, Washington is needlessly – and recklessly – offending hundreds of millions of Muslims on whose goodwill our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere depend.

While in Jerusalem, we saw Israel’s destructive policies firsthand. The Jewish state is:

•Expanding the large Israeli-only settlements that ring the city to the east, north, and south.

•Supporting smaller settler “outposts” in the heart of Jerusalem’s remaining Palestinian enclaves.

•Completing the 24-foot-high Separation Wall that encloses many Palestinian portions of the city and slices through the center of others.

•Delegating responsibility for archaeological excavations in sensitive areas to settler organizations that have worked feverishly – and quite unscientifically – to push tunnels right under the historic “Muslim Quarter” of the walled Old City.

•Making it almost impossible for the city’s Palestinians to expand their housing stock, and conducting regular demolitions of Palestinian housing it deems “illegal.”

All these Israeli actions are themselves illegal under international law, since Israel controls East Jerusalem and the surrounding West Bank only as a military occupying power, not a rightful sovereign government.

Imagine if, when the US military occupied Baghdad after 2003, Washington had taken steps like these! Fortunately, it didn’t. Instead, it steadily delegated authority back to Iraqis themselves.

The US is far and away Israel’s biggest external supporter. The aid America gives to her allies should not be unconditional but used to uphold US interests. In the Middle East, that means US dollars and diplomacy should support a fair and sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians and the rule of law in an otherwise chaotic world.

It’s true that over the years many Americans have become persuaded that Greater Jerusalem has been “unified,” that it all belongs to Israel, and indeed is “Israel’s eternal capital.”

The rest of the world – and international law – doesn’t agree. What people in other countries see is Israel thumbing its nose at international law as it works to transform the city’s ethnic composition.

This is disastrous for Washington’s peace diplomacy, which has always been based on the principle that the city’s final disposition should be negotiated, rather than unilaterally determined through the creation of new facts on the ground.

In his landmark Cairo speech to Muslims in June, Obama said he would “personally pursue” a two-state solution “with all the patience and dedication that the task requires.” Today, Obama may feel that the political price of standing up to Israel – which few US presidents have done – is too high. It is high – but the risk that continued acquiescence to Israel’s policies in Jerusalem poses to American lives (and those of Palestinians and Israelis) is now even higher. This is Obama’s chance to set a new, just course for the Middle East on a firmly pro-American basis.

He can do this by linking US aid to Israel to its compliance with international law in the city, by supporting action by the UN Security Council to uphold international standards there, and in other ways.

The 250,000 remaining Palestinians of Jerusalem desperately need this action. So does Obama’s peace diplomacy.

And so, too, do the 200,000-plus US service members deployed today in tense, majority-Muslim lands.

Helena Cobban, a longtime correspondent and columnist for the Monitor, was recently appointed executive director of the Washington-based Council for the National Interest.

But in June 2004, more quietly, Galbraith also established a small, U.S.-registered company, Porcupine, that held a five percent stake in a newly exploited oilfield in Iraqi Kurdistan, a Norwegian daily revealed last Saturday.

The daily, Dagens Næringsliv, had been investigating the increasingly troubled relationship between Porcupine and a privately-owned Norwegian firm, DNO, which partnered with Porcupine in the Kurdish-Iraqi oil project. Journalists at the daily said that discovering that Porcupine’s hitherto secretive owner was Galbraith came as a complete surprise.

Galbraith also won international headlines in another recent Norway-related story. In late September, he broke publicly with Kai Eide, the Norwegian head of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMI), over how to respond to allegations of fraud in Afghanistan’s August election.

Galbraith had been working as Eide’s deputy since March. He resigned in late September, accusing Eide of trying to hide evidence of large-scale fraud committed during the election.

There are many parallels between the constitutional/legitimation challenges the U.S. occupation force and its allies face in Afghanistan today and those faced by the U.S. and its allies in Iraq, 2003-08.

One key challenge for U.S. decision-makers is how to generate a local “host nation” government using the democratic processes that most U.S. citizens say they want – but one that is also prepared to work very closely indeed with Washington, which most citizens of the occupied countries are reluctant to do.

Prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Peter Galbraith was a strong voice advocating the invasion. Immediately after the invasion, he was one of three or four high-level U.S. officials and advisers who started designing a completely new Constitution for the country.

(The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 specifies that an occupation force should keep existing governance and constitutional arrangements in place, as far as possible, until it withdraws.)

Galbraith had long been a strong sympathiser of the Iraqi Kurds’ desire for strong autonomy or even complete independence from Baghdad. In his 2006 book “The End of Iraq”, he wrote that he started consulting with the Kurdish leaders on constitutional issues “two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein”.

He continued those consultations through the time of the U.S.’s promulgation of a “Transitional Administrative Law” (TAL) in March 2004 and the adoption of a more permanent new Iraqi Constitution in October 2005.

Adoption of the Constitution was achieved through an Iraq-wide referendum, conducted under the control of the U.S. military.

In both the TAL and the 2005 Constitution, provision was made for any one of the country’s 18 provinces, or a group of them, to declare the formation of a “region” that would have extra powers of self-governance. In practice, the only “region” that has formed is the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), comprised of Iraq’s three majority-Kurdish provinces.

In the TAL, the principles for dividing the country’s oil revenues were left vague. In the 2005 Constitution, it stated that revenues from the country’s existing oil fields, many of which were nearing depletion, would continue to be controlled by Baghdad. It said the “regions” could have a lot more control over any new oil fields to be developed – though the extent of that control was still left vague.

In the meantime, Galbraith and his Porcupine company had acquired their five percent interest in the KRG’s new Tawke oil field, and entered into its partnership there with DNO.

Galbraith also argued hard in the discussions over the 2005 Constitution for a clause defining Iraq’s governance system as a fundamentally decentralised one in which all residual powers lie with the provinces and “regions”. He won that argument, and the clause was put in.

The distinguished Egyptian-American law professor Khaled Abou El Fadl has commented on Iraq’s constitution-writing process that it involved, “a lot of authoritative input by various elements in the U.S. as to not just what the Iraqi commitments are going to be but what the occupying country deems to be acceptable”.

The radical decentralisation of powers that was written into the 2005 Constitution at a time of strong U.S. influence in the country continues to plague Iraq today. This is so even though the U.S. agreed last November to completely withdraw its troops from Iraq; that withdrawal is now well underway, and Washington’s power to exert direct influence over Iraqi politics has eroded considerably.

With Washington’s ability to bolster the Kurds’ position in intra-Iraq negotiations now considerably reduced, the country’s Kurds, who form under 20 percent of the national population, and its majority Arabs have gotten into a series of new tussles for power. Not surprisingly these involve both constitutional issues – and oil.

Iraq is scheduled to hold its next nationwide parliamentary election on Jan. 16, 2010. The current lawmakers had a deadline of last Thursday to finish defining the rules under which the election will be held. They missed it – though there is some hope they can reach agreement on this point within the coming days.

This disagreement is over whether the “lists” that each party or coalition will present in each of the country’s province-sized constituencies will have a list of names that is “closed”, that is unchangeable, or whether on polling day voters can change the order of the names to reflect their own preferences.

This matter pits the Kurdish parties (who want “closed” lists) against all the country’s other parties, who profess to prefer “open” lists.

The Kurdish and non-Kurdish parties are at odds, too, over the potentially explosive issue of how voting rolls will be drawn up in the oil-rich environs of the mixed-ethnicity city of Kirkuk.

The province Kirkuk is located in, Salah ad Din, is not affiliated with the KRG. Most Kurds strongly want to bring it under KRG control, while most members of Iraq’s Arab and ethnic-Turkoman communities strongly oppose that. (Two deadlines for holding a city-wide referendum on Kirkuk’s future, as mandated in the 2005 Constitution, long ago expired.)

Iraq’s Arabs and Kurds are also, not surprisingly, waging a stiff war over control of oil exports and revenues. Last June, the Tawke oil field (in which Galbraith once invested) was the first of the KRG’s new oilfields to come online. Its operators, who reportedly comprised a 55 percent share owned by DNO, a 25 percent share owned by a Turkish company, and a 20 percent stake directly owned by the KRG, started “exporting” oil to the main body of Iraq.

But the Baghdad government refused to pay the Tawke consortium for this oil, arguing that the whole commercial arrangement whereby the KRG had developed the field was quite illegal.

For their part, the Kurdish parties that are still strong in the central government are threatening to hold up a deal Baghdad wants to conclude with a Chinese company to develop some massive oilfields in southern Iraq.

Meanwhile, the KRG and DNO have had their own, apparently serious, falling-out, which is being litigated in London. It was by investigating the facts of that case that Dagens Næringsliv discovered the clear material interest that Galbraith earlier had in the whole KRG-DNO deal.

His Porcupine company was cut out of the deal at some point in 2008, for reasons that remain murky. But that development did not negate the fact that for the preceding four years, while Galbraith was an influential participant in Iraq-related constitutional and political discussions, he also had an undisclosed financial interest in a KRG-authorised oil development venture.

Here in the U.S., Galbraith has long been associated with the “liberal hawk” wing of the Democratic Party, which has argued since the early 1990s that U.S. military power can, and on occasion should, be used to impose a U.S.-defined human rights agenda in various parts of the world.

Many members of this group have been liberal idealists – though some of those who, on “liberal” grounds, gave early support to Pres. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq later expressed their regret for adopting that position.

Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush’s late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.

But a series of events in recent weeks has sent Abbas’s level of support from his people into a nosedive. The most serious has been the reaction among Palestinians to a decision Abbas or someone close to him made to postpone any further U.N. action on the recommendations of the Goldstone Report into the atrocities committed during last winter’s Israel-Gaza war.

Richard Goldstone, a very distinguished South African jurist and war-crimes prosecutor, presented his report to the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva on Sep. 29. It contained a recommendation that the HRC forward the report’s lengthy and detailed findings regarding wrongdoing by both sides to the Security Council for possible further action.

But when the HRC discussed Goldstone’s report on Oct. 1, the PLO’s representative requested that the HRC sit on the report until next March before doing anything further.

Most Palestinians, both within and outside their historic homeland, were outraged. They demanded to know who took that decision, and why. Suspicion rapidly settled on Abbas himself- and it was not allayed by his speedy declaration that the Fatah movement, which he heads, would set up its own internal investigation into how the decision had been made.

Palestinian media came out with two, perhaps overlapping, explanations of what had persuaded Abbas – or someone very close to him – to block any speedy action on the Goldstone Report.

One focused on economic incentives that Israel held out to a well-connected Palestinian company eager to acquire the bandwidth that it needs to set up a new cell-phone service.

The other report, from Shahab news agency, concerned a different, even more insidious form of Israeli blackmail.

Shahab reported that PA/PLO representatives here in Washington were persuaded to drop their support for speedy action on Goldstone after they were played a videotape and an audiotape, reportedly recorded during last winter’s war, in which Abbas and a key security aide, Tayyib Abdul-Rahim, both urged Israel’s leaders to continue and even escalate their attack on Gaza.

Those allegations struck a chord with many Palestinians who, during the war, had noted the refusal of most members of the PLO’s far-flung diplomatic corps to say or do anything to oppose Israel’s lengthy and very harmful pounding of Gaza’s overwhelmingly civilian population.

Inside the West Bank, meanwhile, the PA’s security forces (commanded in part by Abdul-Rahim) suppressed many of the demonstrations that erupted against the war, and arrested scores of Gaza solidarity activists.

It is not clear whether the Israeli government sees the political pummeling Abbas has taken as a result of his Goldstone decision as welcome, because it reduces his ability to negotiate peace in the name of the whole Palestinian people, or as regrettable, given the strength of his opposition to Hamas; but nonetheless necessary, as a way for Israel to ensure the blocking of the process Goldstone recommended.

One thing that is clear is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been very serious about blocking any Security Council consideration of the Goldstone Report. Government spokesmen have launched nasty personal smears against Goldstone, who himself is Jewish, and whose daughter describes him as a committed Zionist.

Netanyahu’s ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, said Thursday that the Goldstone Report is more insidious than the Holocaust denial of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If Goldstone’s recommendations are accepted by the international community, Oren said, this would paralyse western democracies from defending themselves against terrorism.

He also noted the “intense cooperation” his government had received from the Barack Obama administration in fending off the “danger” it judged the Goldstone Report posed to Israel and the west.

Oren and Netanyahu might be feeling good about fending off this “danger”. But the hardball way they – and apparently also U.S. officials – treated Abbas over this affair have considerably complicated the diplomatic game-plan that the Obama administration previously seemed to be following, which relied strongly on building up Abbas’s and Fatah’s political weight relative to that of Hamas.

It is that political balance that has now been tipped – perhaps decisively.

This is a big change since early August, when Abbas won many plaudits from western leaders for having organised a successful “General Conference” for Fatah – the movement’s first such gathering in 20 years.

The combination of that successful Fatah conference and the continued infusion of western funding into the PA, where it is controlled by both Abbas and the technocratic, pro-western Ramallah Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, encouraged some western governments to think that these two men could now marginalise Hamas from having any real impact on peace negotiations.

Now, that plan looks far less feasible. Abbas’s standing has been reduced not only by the decisions he most recently made regarding Goldstone, but also by the compete stasis in Washington’s peace diplomacy, Washington’s failure to win a settlement freeze from Netanyahu, as it had promised to do – and by the humiliating way Abbas was forced to engage in a “three-way” meeting with Netanyahu and Obama at the U.N. General Assembly in late September.

Obama’s special envoy George Mitchell is back in Jerusalem Friday on the seventh or eighth of his quick shuttle tours around the Israeli-Arab region. On Saturday he will be in Ramallah.

Al-Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros reported from occupied East Jerusalem that the city’s Palestinians “are very upset and angry and becoming increasingly disappointed with this new U.S. approach, which is bringing nothing new to the table”.

Meantime, there is increasing talk amongst both Palestinians and many Israelis of the possibility of a new intifada. If this does occur, it is most likely to be sparked by the massive wave of colonisation and linked activities the Israeli authorities have been undertaking in East Jerusalem.

Senior diplomats from neighbouring Arab states have warned that, given Jerusalem’s intense significance for Arabs and Muslims everywhere, the effects of a new, Jerusalem-focused intifada could be felt far beyond Palestine.

Proponents say that step considerably reduces western fears that Tehran was heading for nuclear weapons, and is a good move toward rebuilding the long-broken confidence between Tehran and most western governments.

It also reveals the degree to which western governments now find they must take due account of non-western powers like Russia and China, rather than continuing to allow their policies to be dictated by the more hawkish tendencies among their own citizenries.

In Geneva, chief Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili said the meeting “created a good opportunity for fresh cooperation to remove international concerns”.

Here in Washington, Pres. Barack Obama described the agreement reached in Geneva as “a constructive beginning”, but noted that further hard work still lies ahead.

Under the Geneva agreement, Iran will export to Russia around 80 percent of the uranium gas that it has now enriched to around three percent of the nuclear-useful U235 isotope. Russia will further enrich it to just under 19 percent and (using some French technology) convert it into the form of solid fuel rods.

The rods will be useful for the nuclear-medical work Iran needs. But the uranium in them cannot, either then or subsequently, be used as feedstock for nuclear weapons.

In Geneva, Tehran also pledged to allow full inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of all its nuclear facilities, including the small facility near Qom whose existence it reported Sep. 21.

IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei is expected to travel to Tehran on Saturday to follow up on the agreements reached in Geneva.

Obama himself had contributed to the constructive outcome in Geneva, in at least two ways. One was through the contacts his negotiators conducted over recent weeks with Russia and others of the six nations that met the Iranians in Geneva – contacts which helped work out the nature of the Russian-French plan.

The six nations are the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (P5), plus Germany.

The other way Obama contributed to the talks’ success was by allowing his negotiator there, Undersecretary of State William J. Burns, to hold an informal, 45-minute meeting one-on-one with chief Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Other members of the U.S. team also held similar “side-meetings” in Geneva with their Iranian counterparts, amidst unconfirmed speculation that those talks covered other aspects of the two countries’ relations. (Speculation about more far-reaching negotiations was also fueled by a mysterious, two-hour visit that Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki made to Washington on Wednesday.)

The only time that Pres. George W. Bush allowed a U.S. official to participate in P5+1 talks with Iran was in July 2008. But that official was permitted to interact with the Iranian negotiators only in the full plenary session, and to discuss nothing other than Iran’s nuclear programme.

Those earlier talks reached no agreement – not even on the holding of follow-up talks.

In Thursday’s talks, by contrast, Washington gave the U.S. negotiators far more room for real engagement with the Iranians. That engagement resulted in the attainment of the two agreements which mandate a number of activities that can provide readily verifiable evidence of the good faith (or otherwise) of all sides.

For western governments previously wary that Iran was working to amass enough partially enriched uranium to allow the building of a nuclear weapon within a short time period, the removal of most of Iran’s present stock of three percent-enriched uranium from any possibility of weaponisation buys time in which the broader relationship between Iran and the west can be healed.

In addition, as the Russian-French enrichment plan gets underway, that can provide valuable assurance to the Tehran government that these and other P5+1 governments are willing to help Tehran meet its long-stated needs in the nuclear technology field.

Iran has always said its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes. Supreme Leader Ali al-Khamenei has issued a fatwa (religious decree) describing the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons as “forbidden under Islam”.

Many in the U.S. right wing who believe strongly in the use of U.S. or U.S.-Israeli military power have expressed predictable criticisms of the Geneva agreement. Pres. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, warned darkly that Tehran has now “got the United States ensnared in negotiations”.

However, the fulminations of people like Bolton underline the big changes that have occurred since Obama’s election – not just in the policies pursued by Washington but also in the degree to which Washington policymakers now more clearly understand the shifting balance in world politics.

Russia and China have been wary for more than 20 years now of the western powers’ push to isolate, attack, or even subvert the Islamic government in Iran. In the past, they were also wary of the very similar campaign Washington maintained against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – right up to the point in 2003 when U.S. forces invaded Iraq and directly toppled him from power.

In 2003, Russia and China were unable (both in strictly military terms, and in terms of global power equations) to block the invasion of Iraq. But since 2003, Russia has stabilised its internal governance considerably from the chaotic state it was still in at that time, and China has continued its steady rise to greater power on the world scene.

Two developments over the past year have underlined, for many U.S. strategic planners, the stark facts of the United States’ deep interdependence with these two significant world powers. One was last autumn’s collapse of the financial markets in New York and other financial centres around the world, which revealed the extent of the dependence the west’s financial system has on China’s (mainly governmental) investors.

The other turning point has been the serious challenges the U.S. faced in its campaigns against Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Earlier this year, Pakistani-based Islamist militants mounted such extensive attacks against convoys carrying desperately needed supplies to U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan that Washington was forced to sign an agreement with Moscow to open alternative supply routes through Russia.

Russia and China both have significant interests in Iran, which they are now clearly unwilling to jeopardise simply in order to appease Washington.

This year, China is reportedly on track to import 15 percent of its crude oil needs from Iran, up from 12 percent last year. In March, the two countries signed a 3.3-billion-dollar deal to develop some of Iran’s natural gas fields.

Earlier this week, influential former Chinese diplomat Sun Bigan underlined the importance of Middle East hydrocarbon to Beijing in an essay in a state-published, Mandarin-language journal.

“The U.S. has always sought to control the faucet of global oil supplies,” Sun wrote. “There is cooperation between China and the U.S., but there is also struggle, and the U.S. has always seen us as a potential foe.”

Sun recently retired as Beijing’s special envoy on the Middle East. Before that, he served terms as China’s ambassador in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.

His comments to the journal underscored the weight that China’s Communist Party rulers now give to the Middle East as a place to prevent any further expansion of Washington’s global power.

The websites of state-controlled Chinese media provide more evidence of Beijing’s growing concern with, and understanding of, the Middle East. On the “Top Stories” page of the “China View” site, no fewer than nine of the top 20 stories Friday were from the region – covering developments in Iraq, and Israel-Palestine, as well as Iran.

Thursday brought dramatic evidence of the growing weight of non-western powers in policies toward Iran. What is still unclear is when there will be evidence of any parallel growth in their influence in Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy.

Some of these problems were on view during two high-level appearances Obama made in New York this week.

On Tuesday, speaking to the media after the three-way meeting he held with the Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Obama notably avoided saying anything about the failure of the high-profile campaign he and his chief peace envoy, George Mitchell, have pursued to “persuade” the Israeli government to stop building settlement housing in the occupied West Bank.

Obama instead announced a new project: the resumption of the long-suspended negotiations between the parties over the terms of their final peace.

Most observers – in Palestine, Israel, and the U.S. – interpreted Tuesday’s events as marking two distinct victories for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Obama had in effect been forced to abandon his campaign for a settlement freeze. And Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the interim Palestinian Authority (PA), was forced to meet with Netanyahu despite previously vowing he would not negotiate with him until the freeze was in place.

For some pro-peace Americans, one bright spot in Tuesday’s encounter was that Obama spelled out to the media that peace is a key interest not just for the parties directly involved, but also for the United States.

In his big speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, Obama pledged his public commitment to the pursuit – though tellingly, not the speedy attainment – of a “just and lasting peace between Israel, Palestine, and the Arab world.”

He also said, “We continue to emphasise that America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

However, numerous commentators in both the Arab world and in Israel’s much-diminished “peace camp” noted that since Obama has never moved beyond words in his push to freeze settlement construction, there seemed little reason to hope he would do so in his pursuit of the broader peace settlement, either.

Meanwhile, there have been worrying signs of discord among the team consisting of Obama and top peace-team members. One well-connected Arab observer told IPS that he judged that Obama’s shift in focus from the settlement freeze to the final-status issue signaled the president’s frustration with the approach that Mitchell has used until now.

This observer said he judged Mitchell had paid too much attention to pushing for the settlement freeze, which was only ever seen as an interim step. It was described by Mitchell and others as part of a package – along with some sweeteners from Arab states -that would help build initial confidence between the parties.

But both Netanyahu and the most powerful Arab states balked at providing what Mitchell asked for. Meanwhile, many valuable months have been wasted – months during which settlement building has continued with little pause.

The Arab observer said his understanding of Mitchell’s approach, as demonstrated in his successful mediation in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, was that it involved having negotiators from the warring parties participate in lengthy face-to-face encounters during which their fears and distrust could slowly be melted away.

Another Washington analyst has observed that that approach may have been helpful in Northern Ireland, or South Africa, where the aim was to help warring parties find a way to live together over the long term within a single state.

“But in the case of Israel and Palestine, we’re talking about a divorce,” she said. “All these two need to talk about is the terms of that divorce, and how to do it in a way that works.”

Additional evidence of high-level discord in the White House came in an interview Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, gave to television host Charlie Rose Wednesday night.

Just the day before, Obama had spelled out that peace is “in the interests of the United States”. But Emanuel told Rose a couple of times that the U.S. “can’t want peace more than [the parties] want it”.

That was a formula frequently used during the Clinton and Bush II administrations to signify that, if a difference should emerge between Washington and Israel over the peace diplomacy, then Washington would back down.

Regarding the next steps in the U.S.-led diplomacy, Obama said Tuesday that he had asked Netanyahu and Abbas to send their negotiators to Washington “next week”, and he had asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to report to him on the status of these negotiations in mid-October.

Maan News reported from Israeli-occupied Bethlehem today that Abbas’s top negotiator, Saeb Erakat, would be participating in the talks, due to start Oct. 1.

In Washington Friday, veteran Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi warned that Obama’s failure to win the settlement freeze and the extreme reluctance he showed toward holding Israel in any way accountable for its defiance had weakened not only Obama’s standing among Palestinians and other Arabs, but also that of Mahmoud Abbas.

“The whole process Obama has gone through until now has lost Abu Mazen a lot of credibility with the Palestinian people,” she said, using the name Palestinians use for Abbas.

“For Palestinians it’s very important that our leadership not constantly be the one to give in,” she said.

Ashrawi, who was a member of the Palestinian delegation at the 1991 Madrid peace talks, said she thought Obama’s speech to General Assembly Wednesday seemed to “salvage” his policy somewhat. “So, he said the right thing there,” she said. “But now we need to see if he can make the right moves.”

She judged that the latest developments in the diplomacy had weakened Abbas significantly among all sectors of the Palestinian people – including with the grassroots in his own party, Fatah.

For their part, the leaders of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas issued a statement Thursday that urged Abbbas and Fatah to “stop deceiving and misleading the Palestinian people by attaching more hopes on the ‘useless’ negotiations with the Israelis.” The Hamas statement also strongly criticised Obama’s “obvious” bias toward the Israelis.

Fatah and Hamas will be sending high-level emissaries to Cairo on Sunday to take part in yet another in the long series of reconciliation they have held over recent months.

There are few signs yet that the upcoming round of talks will succeed where so many others have failed.

With those two big Palestinian movements still at loggerheads, the Obama administration apparently split and anyway unwilling to confront Israel on key issues, and Israel’s peace movement now a mere shadow of its former vibrant self, the prospects for rapid success in the diplomacy look very dim.

In recent days, there have been big developments in both areas. On Sep. 11, the Obama administration announced that it will take part, along with the other members of the “P5+1″ group, in a major round of nuclear talks with Iran scheduled for Oct. 1.

Then on Tuesday, Judge Richard Goldstone presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council a painstakingly investigated report that accused both Israel and some Palestinian armed groups of having committed war crimes during Israel’s assault on Gaza last winter.

That development, along with Netanyahu’s recent announcement of yet more housing starts for West Bank settlers, increased the international pressure on Obama to announce long-awaited new steps in the Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy.

Obama and his special envoy, George Mitchell, have both vowed – ever since Obama’s first days in office, in January – to work hard to secure a final peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians that involves establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

But Obama and Mitchell have been notably tight-lipped about the details, and even the timetable, of how they will achieve that. This has led to some speculation that Obama will announce a new diplomatic initiative when, or soon after, he addresses the General Assembly Sep. 23.

Most Israeli governments of recent years, however, have argued that peace diplomacy with the Palestinians should take a determinedly back seat to the effort – which they hope will be spearheaded by the U.S. – to strip Iran of any possibility it could ever develop the technical knowhow to produce nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders have argued that they need to see the threat of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons decisively averted before Israel can feel secure enough to even consider making peace with the Palestinians.

The Israelis’ arguments about the primacy of confronting Iran have been echoed by many right-wing and pro-Israeli forces inside the U.S. political elite. For example, advocacy of tough action against Iran has become a major organising and fundraising theme for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC.

Iranian officials argue strongly that their nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only. They note that Iran, unlike Israel, is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and that Israel already has a fearsome, though still clandestine, nuclear arsenal.

Since Obama was inaugurated, he has taken a tack notably different from Israel’s on the relationship between the anti-Iran campaign and Israel-Palestinian peace diplomacy. He has argued that concluding a solid peace between Israelis and Palestinians is desirable both for its own sake and also because it will make it easier for the U.S. to subsequently build a strong international coalition against Iran.

In other words, peacemaking first, and then – if it is still necessary – confront Iran.

In recent days, Obama has taken a number of steps that indicate that he anyway judges the possibility of Iran acquiring an advanced capability to make and deliver nuclear weapons to be smaller than former president George W. Bush judged it to be.

He took that decision to respond positively to Tehran’s invitation to go to the Oct. 1 meeting, along with the other P5+1 governments – China, Russia, France, Britain, and Germany.

On Thursday, he also announced a decision to reduce the scope of the anti-missile system the Bush administration planned to build in Eastern Europe. The mission of the original Bush project was to intercept long-range missiles, possibly including nuclear-tipped ones, that Iran might send over Eastern Europe against targets in the United States.

Obama has moved carefully, if slowly, toward trying to deflect the pressures that Israel and its allies have exerted on him to step up his confrontation against Iran.

But those who urged decisive and speedy action in the peace diplomacy have also been disappointed.

In his first days in office, Obama acted fast to spell out his vision of a final Palestinian-Israeli peace in an interview with a respected Arabic-language television station, Al-Arabiya. Later, in live speeches in Ankara and Cairo, he elaborated on that theme with audiences containing hundreds of Middle Eastern Muslims.

Since January, Mitchell has undertaken five or six very low-key “listening trips” to the Middle East, and Obama and all members of his team repeatedly called on Israel to halt all construction in the settlements in the occupied West Bank – including East Jerusalem.

But the administration has undertaken no visible policy steps at all towards securing either the construction halt or, more importantly, the final peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Instead, Mitchell got into a lengthy, inconclusive, and quite diversionary negotiation with Netanyahu on defining some limits – far short of a total freeze – on Israel’s construction in the settlements.

Netanyahu has publicly embarrassed Obama by announcing several rounds of new housing starts in the settlements, and has met no consequences at all for that defiance. Generous U.S. aid in the financial, military, and economic fields continues to flow to Israel unimpeded.

The publication of Goldstone’s report presented another challenge to Washington’s continued support for Israel. Goldstone recommended that both the U.N. Human Rights Council – which Washington finally joined last Monday – and the even more important Security Council should take follow-up actions to ensure Israeli (and Palestinian) accountability.

The U.S. takes over the presidency of the Security Council for the next month. Governments around the world – as well as rights activists – will be watching to see how it deals with Goldstone’s recommendations. The first reactions from Obama’s ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice, were very dismissive about them.

Many Arab states, including those that are politically closest to the U.S., meanwhile continue to watch impatiently for sign of real activism from Washington on the peacemaking.

One Arab ambassador told IPS he wants to see Obama speedily announce the time and place of the start of negotiations over the final peace. He noted that many details of such an agreement were nailed down during earlier rounds of negotiation, including those conducted between the Olmert government and the Palestinians last year.

“We could see a final peace agreement concluded by the end of this year,” he said. “And we need to see that. Because then Mahmoud Abbas can go into next January’s Palestinian elections with a more compelling narrative than that of Hamas.”

This envoy said he judged the negotiations should be held inside the U.S., and should have the urgency and political heft of those held in Dayton in 1995, which provided a General Framework Agreement for Peace for Bosnia.

He also emphasised the dangers he saw arising from the confrontational and aggrandising activities being undertaken by ultra-nationalist Jewish activists in several key parts of occupied east Jerusalem, including inside the historic Old City.

“It is absolutely necessary for the U.S. to curb those activities – especially if it wants to keep the support of Arab and Muslim states in its campaign against Iran,” he said. “If there is no deal on Jerusalem, then forget about it. Jerusalem is important for Muslims everywhere.”

The Arab states are one key swing constituency in the tussle of priorities that continues to be waged between Netanyahu and Obama. Thus far, all without exception have been urging action on Israeli-Palestinian peace before any escalation of tensions against Iran.

So, very clearly, have those other significant players in world politics, China and Russia. Both those veto-wielding powers blocked a proposal Washington presented last month to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that would have stepped up the actions the IAEA takes against Iran.

Washington cannot get its way in international bodies as easily now as it has for most of the past 20 years. So the probability of it being able to assemble a tough coalition against Iran is anyway receding.

But that fact does not bring serious U.S. efforts in the peace process any closer. Indeed, by making a strong anti-Iran coalition look unachievable under any circumstances, it may even lessen the motivation of some in Washington to push hard on Israeli-Palestinian peace diplomacy.

WASHINGTON, Sep 11 (IPS) – This week, two respected human rights organisations – one Palestinian, one Israeli – each came out with very full reports into the extent of the damage caused by the assault Israel waged against Gaza last winter.

According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which is based in Gaza, 1,419 Palestinians were killed during the fighting, of whom 252 were combatants and the rest noncombatants, including members of the civilian police. Three hundred and eighteen of those killed were, it said, children.

The Israeli group B’Tselem (“In the Image”) tallied 1,387 Gazans killed by the Israelis, including 320 minors. It assessed that 330 of those killed had taken part in the hostilities. B’Tselem also noted that three Israeli civilians and nine soldiers were killed during the fighting.

The Israeli government earlier claimed that 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the fighting, of whom only 89 were minors under the age of 16, while 60 percent were “members of Hamas and other armed groups”.

PCHR and B’Tselem published their latest reports in the lead-up to next week’s widely awaited presentation to the U.N.’s Human Rights Council of the final report on Gaza war casualties prepared by the investigative commission headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone.

PCHR and B’Tselem based their tallies on painstaking field research. (There are some small discrepancies between them. But most can be explained by differences in the definitions used.)

The Israeli government, by contrast, has not revealed the methodology by which – without having any access at all to surviving family members or local officials on the ground – it felt able to compile its much lower tally.

Meanwhile, in the lead-up to the publication of Goldstone’s report, the Israeli government has launched a very tough offensive against all the Israeli and international rights organisations that have been documenting the damage in Gaza.

At the international level, that includes both the Goldstone Commission itself and international citizen groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Judge Goldstone is a practiced investigator of war crimes and other atrocities. He first made his name in the late 1980s by heading a judicial investigation that South Africa’s apartheid government was obliged to establish, to look into allegations of abuses by the South African Defence Force.

He resisted significant pressures to produce a whitewash on that occasion; and the subsequent publication of his findings revealed a lot about the dark underside of the security forces’ behaviour that was not previously known.

In 1993, he became the first prosecutor at the war crimes court the U.N. established for the former Yugoslavia, establishing its entire international investigative operation.

On his latest mission, the Israeli government refused to allow Goldstone to travel to Gaza from Israel. But he and members of his team traveled there via Egypt. They held hearings in Gaza and in Geneva on alleged violations of international humanitarian law during the war committed by both Israel and Hamas and other Palestinian organisations in Gaza.

The publication of their findings next week will be an important event, and is being eagerly awaited by human rights activists and by officials at the many rights organisations that have also worked on this case.

These organisations have all come under particularly sharp attack from the government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its supporters since last July, when Netanyahu openly accused them of pursuing an anti-Israel agenda.

Netanyahu’s attack gave great encouragement to a hitherto small Israeli body, itself a non-governmental organisation, or NGO, which is called “NGO Monitor”.

Members of the Netanyahu government and NGO Monitor have launched blistering attacks against Israeli groups like “Breaking the Silence”, which did breakthrough work in publicising accusations made by Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza regarding the laws-of-war violations they saw while there.

NGO Monitor and prominent rightwing Israeli politicians have proposed banning the provision by foreign governments of funding to groups like Breaking the Silence.

At the international level, one of NGO Monitor’s main targets has been HRW. HRW has long been the most influential rights group inside the United States and gained even more influence inside the administration after Barack Obama became president.

On Tuesday, NGO Monitor published an extensively documented, 99-page attack on both the neutrality of HRW’s leadership and staff members and the quality of its work. (Full disclosure: this writer is a member of HRW’s Middle East advisory committee and was also targeted in passing in this report.)

On Wednesday, NGO monitor published a shorter, but equally hard-hitting, attack against the Goldstone Commission.

Meantime, HRW’s standing was dented when, apparently independently from NGO Monitor’s effort, some pro-Israeli bloggers in the U.S. revealed on Tuesday that Marc Garlasco, a key HRW staff member responsible for much of its work on Gaza, had an intense out-of-hours involvement in the hobby of collecting Nazi-era military memorabilia.

HRW’s leaders have tried to keep their attention focused on the broader campaign to reveal the true extent of the laws-of-war violations committed by both sides in Gaza and to try to hold the perpetrators accountable for their acts.

Other organisations worldwide are meanwhile placing more of their focus on the violations of the Geneva Conventions that Israel continues to perpetrate with respect to Gaza – in particular, its continued refusal to allow the passage into the Strip of any goods except those needed for minimal physical survival.

Israel is still, eight months after last winter’s fighting ended, blocking the shipment into Gaza even of basic construction materials, needed to repair the extensive damage the Israeli forces caused to homes, schools, and infrastructure throughout the Strip.

When, or soon after, the U.N. General Assembly convenes in New York later this month, Pres. Obama is expected to launch another round of peace diplomacy between Israelis and Palestinians. But meanwhile, the people of Gaza still suffer.

Judge Goldstone’s revelations about the violations of last winter will not end their suffering. But it may help many people understand their fate better, and thus build the constituency for the speedy securing of a final peace agreement.