THREAD: On Tuesday evening it appeared the end was finally in sight. Hamas formally accepted the ceasefire proposal put forward by Egypt and Qatar, and spontaneous celebrations erupted in the streets Rafah and other Palestinian towns in the Gaza Strip.
Given that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other US officials have repeatedly insisted that Hamas forms the sole obstacle to a ceasefire agreement, Palestinians could be forgiven for believing that day 213 of this genocidal ordeal would be the last.
The euphoria however proved short-lived. Several hours later the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced that Israel’s war cabinet had unanimously agreed that the proposal “is far from Israel’s necessary requirements”,
and that its latest offensive on the southern town of Rafah abutting the Palestinian-Egyptian border would continue as planned.
Indeed, Israel’s Western-supplied and supported military launched intensive air and artillery strikes to support an incursion into Rafah that commenced shortly after Netanyahu’s announcement.
Ceasefire negotiations have been going on for some time, led by Egypt and Qatar, both of whom maintain working relationships with both Israel and Hamas. Egypt additionally has a close alliance with Israel, while Qatar hosts the Hamas leadership on its territory.
The United States is often identified as a mediator as well, but this is not quite accurate. Not only is it Israel’s chief sponsor in every sense of the word, but it also openly demands the destruction and elimination of Hamas, with whom it has neither contact nor communication.
Although it participates in the negotiations, as Blinken’s statements attest Washington serves primarily as a proxy for Israel rather than as what any reasonable observer would characterise as a mediator.
Given US power and US President Joe Biden’s unqualified support for Israel and its far-right government, the working assumption in Cairo and Doha has been that whatever Washington accepts will be translated into an Israeli endorsement.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, and the main reason is that Biden and Blinken’s unmatched embrace of Israel and Israeli impunity in its dealings with the Palestinian people has extended to permitting Netanyahu to ride roughshod over US policy preferences without consequence.
So long as Blinken takes center stage in US Middle East diplomacy it can safely be ignored. Clueless as ever, on his most recent trip to the Middle East he once again prioritised a Saudi-Israeli normalisation agreement, which he appears to genuinely believe is imminent.
As for a ceasefire, he couldn’t restrain himself from praising Israel’s “extraordinarily generous” offer to pause its genocidal onslaught on the Gaza Strip for a few weeks, with mass killings resuming only after Israel safely retrieved its captives.
It was only after the hapless Secretary returned to DC to shred further dissent memos from State Department staff and issue additional certificates of good conduct to his favorite genocidaires in order to enable further weapons deliveries to them, that things began to change.
Once again, Blinken was replaced by CIA Director William Burns, a serious diplomat who knows the Middle East well, and who unlike his boss in the White House can distinguish between US and Israeli interests.
Among the key sticking points in the negotiations is that Hamas demanded an end to Israel’s war while Israel insisted on continuing it.
Given this contradiction the mediators could not incorporate explicit wording that either ended or failed to end the war and still clinch the deal. What appears to have happened is that a sufficiently vague formula was included in the proposal,
paired with informal American assurances that if Hamas implemented the first stages of the three-stage deal, Washington would guarantee an Israeli cessation of hostilities by the end of its final stage.
For the record, US assurances to the Palestinians over the years have been honoured mainly in the breach.
This was most prominently the case in 1982, when the Reagan administration guaranteed the protection of civilians remaining in Beirut after the PLO withdrawal from the Lebanese capital, but did nothing to stop the Sabra-Shatila massacres.
Against this background, and given Hamas’s insistence on an end to Israel’s war, Netanyahu was confident no deal would be achieved, and for good measure informed the mediators that Israel would only send representatives to Cairo if Hamas formally accepted the latest proposal.
To Israel’s great consternation, it emerged that the Hamas delegation despatched to Cairo had instructions to engage positively with the proposal and secure a deal. Netanyahu went ballistic.
He responded with a series of statements that Israel was determined to invade Rafah even if a ceasefire agreement was concluded, and that it would only end its campaign after achieving the total victory that has systematically eluded it from the outset.
For good measure Israel also banned Al-Jazeera from operating in Israel in a move deliberately calculated to anger the Qatari government and provoke its withdrawal from the negotiations.
Hamas interpreted Israel’s latest antics as making a mockery of the proposal and, more importantly, of the US role in its implementation, and the movement’s delegation duly returned to Doha.
Similarly incensed the Egyptians and Qataris refined their proposal (and presumably the US guarantees as well) to make these more palatable to Hamas, which this time accepted them.
Presented as an Egyptian-Qatari initiative, it is inconceivable that even a punctuation mark within it was not first cleared with Burns, who is also in Doha, or that Burns did not similarly consult with Washington before signing off on it.
Hamas claims it was assured by the Egyptians and Qataris that Biden would ensure the agreement’s implementation if the movement accepted it. We’ll probably find out the reality behind this assertion in the coming days.
Same for any statements Burns or officials in Washington may make that they had no role in crafting the latest proposal.
In a different world one might think this would mean Israel would also be forced to accept the agreement, particularly since Biden has publicly identified an Israeli invasion of Rafah as a “red line”. But that different world does not exist.
Netanyahu is confident he can cross Washington’s red lines at will, because it will continue to refrain from imposing any consequences on him for doing so. Indeed, Washington is already backing off, now claiming it only opposes a “major” Israeli ground operation into Rafah.
The coming days will reveal if Israel’s calculations are sound, or if there is a limit beyond which the Biden administration is unwilling to be led by its far-right Israeli allies.
As for the idea that this is all Netanyahu’s doing, and solely motivated by his desire to remain in power to evade trial for corruption, this doesn’t agree particularly well with a war cabinet that unanimously endorsed rejected the proposal on the table and the invasion of Rafah.
What is happening in Gaza, and in Palestine more generally, far transcends the determination of one politician to cling to power. END
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THREAD (Also posted on my Substack: ): The former president of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari has died in London at age 82.mouinrabbani.substack.com
Buhari served three terms as the country’s head of state. In his first stint, he was installed in the top job in 1983 after participating in a military coup, then ousted in a further putsch two years later. More recently he was elected to the presidency in 2015, serving two terms until 2023.
For those otherwise unfamiliar with Nigeria and its politics, Buhari ’s time as military dictator during the mid-1980s is best remembered for an incident that his obituary on the Bibi Si’s website’s chose to omit, presumably at the direction of its chief censor on Israel reporting, Raffi Berg. It was known as the Dikko Affair.
THREAD (ALSO POSTED AS A SINGLE TEXT ON MY SUBSTACK): Taqiyya. Prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, and the tsunami of Islamophobia it unleashed, I’d never heard of taqiyya. Nor had any of the Muslims or those identified as Muslims I had encountered before that time. More precisely, the topic never came up. Not once.
As explained by Islamophobes, and Israel flunkies in particular, taqiyya means not only “liar” but much, much more. In their telling, taqiyya not only permits but positively requires Muslims to lie and conceal, about anything and everything, in order to achieve their collective objective of global domination, transforming the entire planet into an Islamic caliphate. Through subterfuge, of course. It is a divine license, directed provided by Allah, to fabricate and dissemble at will. It is the primary religious obligation of every Muslim, whether religious or not, far exceeding the Shahada and the other pillars of the Muslim faith.
It also means that anything a Muslim, or one identified as such, says or writes or does can be dismissed with a single word: taqiyya. A Muslim (or for that matter a Christian Arab or Sikh wearing a turban) states s/he doesn’t want to kill all the Jews? Taqiyya. A Muslim swears allegiance to the US constitution? Taqiyya. A Muslim claims not be an active-duty Jihadi? Taqiyya. And so on. The pinnacle of taqiyya consists of assertions about Israel: occupation, apartheid, genocide? It’s all taqiyya. The very existence of the Palestinian people is, needless to say, the ultimate expression of taqiyya.
THREAD (ALSO POSTED AS SINGLE TEXT ON MY SUBSTACK): During the Gaza Genocide Israel flunkies have become obsessed with the proposition that Palestinians do not exist and never have existed. In their telling, those who call themselves Palestinians are, if anything, just generic Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, or Egyptians and Jordanians in disguise. They come from virtually everywhere, except Palestine. The surnames of some, which reference foreign cities or countries, prove it, just like Tom Holland and Jools Holland are indisputably Dutch, and the Russian-British scholar Isaiah Berlin was German.
Just as importantly, these ideological fanatics insist that there is not and cannot be such a thing as a Palestinian people. In their telling this political collective is a fabrication, and anyone claiming to be part of it a fraud.
It is the perfect alibi. If the victim does not exist, there cannot have been a crime.
THREAD (ALSO POSTED AS SINGLE TEXT ON MY SUBSTACK)
A Hasbara Symphony Orchestra fan favorite, often played during encores, is the funereal sonata, “Hamas Throws Gays from Buildings”. Although it has recently been overtaken by the more upbeat waltz, “No Roofs Left Because We Flattened All the Buildings”, the two are often played in succession.
To bolster their claims, Israel flunkies have published videos and provided other evidence of this horrific practice, but never provided the name or any other identifying information of a single gay Palestinian man who was thrown to his death by Hamas from the rooftop of one of the Gaza Strip’s former buildings.
The reason they have not done so is quite simple. It is pure fiction, plain and simple, and never happened. The continued and regular insistence by Israel flunkies that this is the certain fate allotted to gay men in the Gaza Strip has as firm a connection to reality as the non-existent pictures Joe Biden repeatedly claimed to have seen of Israeli infants beheaded by Palestinians during the 7 October 2023 attacks.
THREAD: Identity is a dynamic, multi-dimensional, and typically contextual phenomenon. Groups and individuals don’t have fixed, static identities, because these typically change over time and place. Identity is furthermore not exclusively self-generated, but also exists and is formed in the eye of the beholder.
A US soldier in Iraq, for example, may view herself as just another American, New Yorker, and military officer, but be perceived by her peers primarily as an African-American or woman (or African-American woman), and by Iraqis as nothing other than an illegitimate foreign occupier.
Saladin, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusades in 1187 and whose name has become synonymous with chivalry, has for almost a millennium been hailed by Muslims the world over as one of their greatest military commanders, and by Kurds as one of their finest sons. While it is beyond dispute that Saladin was both Muslim and Kurdish, it seems entirely plausible that he viewed himself primarily as the leader and custodian of the Ayyubid dynasty he helped establish, prioritized his Muslim identity when leading his armies, and related to others who like him hailed from Iraq on the basis of his tribal affiliation, geographic origin, religious/sectarian association, Kurdish lineage, or any combination of the above depending on the circumstances.