On the Road from Doha to Damascus. Mona.

On the Road from Doha to Damascus

Nov. 26, 2008
Mona Eltahawy , THE JERUSALEM POST

An article in Issue 17, December 8, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report.

DAMASCUS: As a Cairene who grew up in
London and now lives in New York City, my standards for what constitutes a "real city" are high. It's difficult to get my attention unless we're talking about at least 8 million inhabitants or a long history, the more convoluted and troubled the better.
Jerusalem might be small but it makes up for it with bucketfuls of trouble.

Cairo has a daytime population of around 18 million people so I had to raise my hat to Mumbai during a visit there in June, jam-packed as it is with 24 million. It was Cairo on cocaine - frenetic, bursting at every seam and nook and disarmingly high.

With Damascus, which I first visited in 1999 on a reporting assignment for the British paper The Guardian, it was love at first traffic jam, even before I'd been to the Old City or learned that it's the longest-inhabited city in the world.
And here I am back again for the fourth time, staying at the same hotel as I did in 1999 and the view from my room and the dinner in the Old City last night is just the same as it was back then. More restaurants, perhaps, but no rush for reinvention here.

Two weeks ago, I was in Doha, Qatar, and although it was also my fourth visit to that capital, I drew back the curtains of my hotel room there and recognized nothing. On the surface at least, Doha has changed more since I first started to visit in 2006 than Damascus has over the past nine years since our first introduction.

Neither Syria nor Qatar is a democracy. They also share a love of maverick political alliances that distinguish them from powerful neighbors. Syria's neighbors are not just Israel and Turkey, but an Arab world where the powerhouses such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia have Sunni Muslim majorities. Another neighbor, Iraq, until the invasion and war, was ruled by a leader of the Sunni Muslim minority.

Syria is Iraq's mirror reflection - made up of several religious and ethnic groups and ruled by the son of the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam. When you look around at those Sunni-led powerhouses, you can see why Syria is Iran's best friend in the Arab world.
For Qatar, the powerful neighbor is Saudi Arabia with which it shares being richer than is possible to imagine but also the ultra-conservative Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

Saudi Arabia is the biggest and most powerful of the Arab Gulf countries and emirates, home to the two holiest sites of Islam and it sits upon the largest oil reserves in the world.
So how does Qatar, tiny in geography and even smaller in population but with an abundance of natural gas and supersize ambitions, maintain a separate identity?

It talks to everyone and it keeps its Wahhabism in the background.

I call Qatar the Bermuda Triangle of the Middle East. Whatever you think "common sense" is in the rest of the Arab Middle East vanishes in Qatar, home to the outspoken Al Jazeera TV network, as well as the largest U.S. airbase in the Arab world and an Israeli trade interest office.

I wonder sometimes if the points of that triangle think of the other points. Are Al Jazeera viewers aware of those two other points, for example?

I've taken you on this journey with me on the road from Damascus to Doha with one destination in mind - debunking the myth of the "Arab street." What a reductive and insulting concept to think that 300+ million people think alike just because they speak the same language.
Imagine some journalist citing "the American street." You would hear howls of protest from every corner of the United States. Would such an imaginary street be in New York or Los Angeles - the only two cities jokingly acknowledged in a New Yorker cartoon map of the United States? Or would it lie somewhere along the Midwest and its claims to represent the backbone of all that is "American?" Or is it somewhere in the South, amid the churches and troubled history of the Bible Belt? Or, in the stubborn independence of the Pacific Northwest?

And yet we hear again and again of the "Arab street."

It doesn't help of course that many media outlets have closed their offices in Arab cities. And it certainly doesn't help that some parachute writers into the region and when those writers find people with ideas that don't fit the ones they flew in with, they simply dismiss them as irrelevant or out of touch.

There are multitudes of Arab streets and - my snobbery aside - cities that span the spectrum from the megalopolis to the eerily empty. The entire population of Qatar - around 800,000 could fit into a corner of the Cairo neighborhood of Shubra, population 7 million.
Here's one thing you can generalize on when it comes to the Arab world - it is very young. The majority of people in the region are younger than 30. Like Qatar, they are trying on new hair colors and trying to figure out what they want to be. There's another street where you can find those young people - it ain't the "Arab street" but the "information super highway" - i.e. the Internet.

More on that next time. •

Wild West Bank like Wild West July 4th 2008

"Noar Gvaot" stoned moving bus near Shiloh on West Bank. July 4th 2008.

I was by the windows that shattered on the bus with "Peace Now".

Hagit Ofran of "Peace Now" settlement watch took us on a tour Friday.

As we drove from Jerusalem we were pointed out that apart from many settlements there are many "illegal" outposts. like "Givat Asaf, Azmona, Migron" and many more.

In second picture I took you can see one of the leaders of a small village "kiryot"

telling us about the many problems living on west bank.

The road leading from the village has been blocked making it difficult to go to nearby Ramallah.

I wished them that Inshalah the many Problems can be solved.

We also went by Beit El where many years ago was my Miluim Storage point.

I was at Shiloh twice soon after it was declared "Archeological Dig" in 1977 and with "Peace Now" when Tumarkin set up "Dove Tower" there.

30 years since 1978 and the situation is impossible and is far from stable. 

Ynet report:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3564543,00.html

14:16 , 07.06.08

PR in Territories
 Bus stoned in West Bank Photo courtesy of Peace Now 
  Peace Now organizes settlement tours 

Poll ordered by left-wing movement reveals 73% of Israelis have not visited West Bank in recent years. Following data, group decides to hold summer tours to settlements, outpost to explain its stance 
Efrat Weiss

A poll ordered recently by the Peace Now left-wing movement reveals that some 73% of Israelis have not visited the West Bank over the past few years, and those who have, did it as part of their military service or due to a family event. 
 
Following the data, the movement decided to hold summer tours to settlements and outpost in order to allow people to closely examine the situation there. 

A movement official said that one of the most difficult problems is explaining the current state of affairs in the territories, settlements and outposts to the Israeli public – as people find it difficult to understand the impacts of the settlement construction without personally visiting the area. 

 

To tackle this problem, Peace Now ordered a survey from the Maagar Mochot research institution, aimed at examining the patterns of visiting the West Bank area among the wide public. 

Asked "how many times have you visited settlements in the Judea and Samaria territories over the past five year?", 73% of the respondents said they have never visited the area, while 22% said they have visited the area once or several times as part of a trip, a visit, a family event, military service and business. 

Peace Now bus with shattered windows (Photo courtesy of Peace Now)

 
According to the poll, the majority of the public have not visited the territories due to lack of interest and for fear of terror attacks, as well as for political reasons. 


 
The survey also revealed that the frequency of visits to settlements among the ultra-Orthodox in particular and the Jewish sector in general is double the frequency among the Arab sector. 


 
In addition, 79% of the Israeli public have never visited West Bank outposts. The percentage of visitors is higher among younger Israelis. 


 
In response to the poll, Peace Now decided to hold a series of tours during the summer, appealing to people who have never visited the territories. 


 
A first tour to settlements and outposts in the Binyamin region was held over the weekend with 80 participants. The buses they traveled in were stoned near the settlement of Shiloh, and the windows were damaged. 


 

Additional tours are planned to the separation fence and roadblocks, as well as to the city of Hebron. 


 
Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer said, "More people prefer spending the summer holiday in Antalya and Paris than witnessing what is taking place a half-hour car drive away from their homes." 

פעילי ימין יידו אבנים לעבר פעילי "שלום עכשיו"
יום שישי, 4 ביולי 2008, 16:04 מאת: מערכת וואלה! חדשות

פעילי ימין יידו היום (שישי) אבנים לעבר שני אוטובוסים של פעילי תנועת "שלום עכשיו", שסיירו באזור שילה ובנימין. בגלי צה"ל דווח, כי איש לא נפגע, אך נזק נגרם לאוטובוסים.

Seeing Is Believing- Dialogue

We Need a true Dialogue between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Israelis and Palestinians.

reminds me of this article last August:

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN wrote August 2007 :" Seeing Is Believing"

Is the surge in Iraq working? That is the question that Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker will answer for us next month. I, alas, am not interested in their opinions.

It is not because I don’t hold both men in very high regard. I do. But I’m still not interested in their opinions. I’m only interested in yours. Yes, you — the person reading this column. You know more than you think.

You see, I have a simple view about both Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making, and it goes like this: Any Arab-Israeli peace overture that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you is not worth considering. It’s going nowhere.

Either a peace overture is so obvious and grabs you in the gut — Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel — or it’s going nowhere. That is why the Saudi-Arab League peace overture is going nowhere. No emotional content. It was basically faxed to the Israeli people, and people don’t give up land for peace in a deal that comes over the fax.

Ditto with Iraqi surges. If it takes a Middle East expert to explain to you why it is working, it’s not working. To be sure, it is good news if the number of Iraqis found dead in Baghdad each night is diminishing. Indeed, it is good news if casualties are down everywhere that U.S. troops have made their presence felt. But all that tells me is something that was obvious from the start of the war, which Donald Rumsfeld ignored: where you put in large numbers of U.S. troops you get security, and where you don’t you get insecurity.

There’s only one thing at this stage that would truly impress me, and it is this: proof that there is an Iraq, proof that there is a coalition of Iraqi Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds who share our vision of a unified, multiparty, power-sharing, democratizing Iraq and who are willing to forge a social contract that will allow them to maintain such an Iraq — without U.S. troops.

Because if that is not the case, even if U.S. troops create more pockets of security via the surge, they will have no one to hand these pockets to who can maintain them without us. In other words, the only people who can prove that the surge is working are the Iraqis, and the way they prove that is by showing that violence is down in areas where there are no U.S. troops or where U.S. troops have come and gone.

Because many Americans no longer believe anything President Bush says about Iraq, he has outsourced the assessment of the surge to the firm of Petraeus & Crocker. But this puts them in an impossible position. I admire their efforts, and those of their soldiers, to try to salvage something decent in Iraq, especially when you see who we are losing to — Sunni suicide jihadists and Shiite militants, who murder fellow Muslims by the dozen and whose retrograde visions offer Iraqis only a future of tears. But we could never defeat them on our own. It takes a village, and right now too many of the Iraqi villagers won’t work together.

Most likely the Bush team will say the surge is a “partial” success and needs more time. But that is like your contractor telling you that your home is almost finished — the bricks are up, but there’s no cement. Thanks a lot.

The Democrats should not fight Petraeus & Crocker over their answer. They should redefine the question. They should say: “My fellow Americans, ask yourselves this: What will convey to you, in your gut — without anyone interpreting it — that the surge is working and worth sustaining?”

My answer: If I saw something with my own eyes that I hadn’t seen before — Iraq’s Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders stepping forward, declaring their willingness to work out their differences by a set deadline and publicly asking us to stay until they do. That’s the only thing worth giving more time to develop.

But it may just be too late. Had the surge happened in 2003, when it should have, it might have prevented the kindling of all of Iraq’s sectarian passions. But now that those fires have been set, trying to unify Iraq feels like doing carpentry on a burning house.

I’ve been thinking about Iraq’s multi-religious soccer team, which just won the Asian Cup. The team was assembled from Iraqis who play for other pro teams outside Iraq. In fact, it was reported that the Iraqi soccer team hadn’t played a home game in 17 years because of violence or U.N. sanctions. In short, it’s a real team with a virtual country. That’s what I fear the surge is trying to protect: a unified Iraq that exists only in the imagination and on foreign soccer fields.

Only Iraqis living in Iraq can prove otherwise. So far, I don’t see it.

We will never have a perfect model of risk By Alan Greenspan

We will never have a perfect model of risk

By Alan Greenspan

Published: March 16 2008 18:25 | Last updated: March 16 2008 18:25

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war. It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities.

Home price stabilisation will restore much-needed clarity to the marketplace because losses will be realised rather than prospective. The major source of contagion will be removed. Financial institutions will then recapitalise or go out of business. Trust in the solvency of remaining counterparties will be gradually restored and issuance of loans and securities will slowly return to normal. Although inventories of vacant single-family homes – those belonging to builders and investors – have recently peaked, until liquidation of these inventories proceeds in earnest, the level at which home prices will stabilise remains problematic.

The American housing bubble peaked in early 2006, followed by an abrupt and rapid retreat over the past two years. Since summer 2006, hundreds of thousands of homeowners, many forced by foreclosure, have moved out of single-family homes into rental housing, creating an excess of approximately 600,000 vacant, largely investor-owned single-family units for sale. Homebuilders caught by the market’s rapid contraction have involuntarily added an additional 200,000 newly built homes to the “empty-house-for-sale” market.

Home prices have been receding rapidly under the weight of this inventory overhang. Single-family housing starts have declined by 60 per cent since early 2006, but have only recently fallen below single-family home demand. Indeed, this sharply lower level of pending housing additions, together with the expected 1m increase in the number of US households this year as well as underlying demand for second homes and replacement homes, together imply a decline in the stock of vacant single-family homes for sale of approximately 400,000 over the course of 2008.

The pace of liquidation is likely to pick up even more as new-home construction falls further. The level of home prices will probably stabilise as soon as the rate of inventory liquidation reaches its maximum, well before the ultimate elimination of inventory excess. That point, however, is still an indeterminate number of months in the future.

The crisis will leave many casualties. Particularly hard hit will be much of today’s financial risk-valuation system, significant parts of which failed under stress. Those of us who look to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder equity have to be in a state of shocked disbelief. But I hope that one of the casualties will not be reliance on counterparty surveillance, and more generally financial self-regulation, as the fundamental balance mechanism for global finance.

The problems, at least in the early stages of this crisis, were most pronounced among banks whose regulatory oversight has been elaborate for years. To be sure, the systems of setting bank capital requirements, both economic and regulatory, which have developed over the past two decades will be overhauled substantially in light of recent experience. Indeed, private investors are already demanding larger capital buffers and collateral, and the mavens convened under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements will surely amend the newly minted Basel II international regulatory accord. Also being questioned, tangentially, are the mathematically elegant economic forecasting models that once again have been unable to anticipate a financial crisis or the onset of recession.

Credit market systems and their degree of leverage and liquidity are rooted in trust in the solvency of counterparties. That trust was badly shaken on August 9 2007 when BNP Paribas revealed large unanticipated losses on US subprime securities. Risk management systems – and the models at their core – were supposed to guard against outsized losses. How did we go so wrong?

The essential problem is that our models – both risk models and econometric models – as complex as they have become, are still too simple to capture the full array of governing variables that drive global economic reality. A model, of necessity, is an abstraction from the full detail of the real world. In line with the time-honoured observation that diversification lowers risk, computers crunched reams of historical data in quest of negative correlations between prices of tradeable assets; correlations that could help insulate investment portfolios from the broad swings in an economy. When such asset prices, rather than offsetting each other’s movements, fell in unison on and following August 9 last year, huge losses across virtually all risk-asset classes ensued.

The most credible explanation of why risk management based on state-of-the-art statistical models can perform so poorly is that the underlying data used to estimate a model’s structure are drawn generally from both periods of euphoria and periods of fear, that is, from regimes with importantly different dynamics.

The contraction phase of credit and business cycles, driven by fear, have historically been far shorter and far more abrupt than the expansion phase, which is driven by a slow but cumulative build-up of euphoria. Over the past half-century, the American economy was in contraction only one-seventh of the time. But it is the onset of that one-seventh for which risk management must be most prepared. Negative correlations among asset classes, so evident during an expansion, can collapse as all asset prices fall together, undermining the strategy of improving risk/reward trade-offs through diversification.

If we could adequately model each phase of the cycle separately and divine the signals that tell us when the shift in regimes is about to occur, risk management systems would be improved significantly. One difficult problem is that much of the dubious financial-market behaviour that chronically emerges during the expansion phase is the result not of ignorance of badly underpriced risk, but of the concern that unless firms participate in a current euphoria, they will irretrievably lose market share.

Risk management seeks to maximise risk-adjusted rates of return on equity; often, in the process, underused capital is considered “waste”. Gone are the days when banks prided themselves on triple-A ratings and sometimes hinted at hidden balance-sheet reserves (often true) that conveyed an aura of invulnerability. Today, or at least prior to August 9 2007, the assets and capital that define triple-A status, or seemed to, entailed too high a competitive cost.

I do not say that the current systems of risk management or econometric forecasting are not in large measure soundly rooted in the real world. The exploration of the benefits of diversification in risk-management models is unquestionably sound and the use of an elaborate macroeconometric model does enforce forecasting discipline. It requires, for example, that saving equal investment, that the marginal propensity to consume be positive, and that inventories be non-negative. These restraints, among others, eliminated most of the distressing inconsistencies of the unsophisticated forecasting world of a half century ago.

But these models do not fully capture what I believe has been, to date, only a peripheral addendum to business-cycle and financial modelling – the innate human responses that result in swings between euphoria and fear that repeat themselves generation after generation with little evidence of a learning curve. Asset-price bubbles build and burst today as they have since the early 18th century, when modern competitive markets evolved. To be sure, we tend to label such behavioural responses as non-rational. But forecasters’ concerns should be not whether human response is rational or irrational, only that it is observable and systematic.

This, to me, is the large missing “explanatory variable” in both risk-management and macroeconometric models. Current practice is to introduce notions of “animal spirits”, as John Maynard Keynes put it, through “add factors”. That is, we arbitrarily change the outcome of our model’s equations. Add-factoring, however, is an implicit recognition that models, as we currently employ them, are structurally deficient; it does not sufficiently address the problem of the missing variable.

We will never be able to anticipate all discontinuities in financial markets. Discontinuities are, of necessity, a surprise. Anticipated events are arbitraged away. But if, as I strongly suspect, periods of euphoria are very difficult to suppress as they build, they will not collapse until the speculative fever breaks on its own. Paradoxically, to the extent risk management succeeds in identifying such episodes, it can prolong and enlarge the period of euphoria. But risk management can never reach perfection. It will eventually fail and a disturbing reality will be laid bare, prompting an unexpected and sharp discontinuous response.

In the current crisis, as in past crises, we can learn much, and policy in the future will be informed by these lessons. But we cannot hope to anticipate the specifics of future crises with any degree of confidence. Thus it is important, indeed crucial, that any reforms in, and adjustments to, the structure of markets and regulation not inhibit our most reliable and effective safeguards against cumulative economic failure: market flexibility and open competition.

The writer is former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and author of ‘The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World’

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Israel's Peace Now turns 30

by Beth O'ConnellMon Apr 7, 3:29 PM ET

Loathed or loved by many Israelis, Peace Now this week marks 30 years as a movement which has deeply influenced public opinion but not achieved its vision of peace with the Palestinians.

The group plans to celebrate three decades of activism and anti-settlement battles on Tuesday at a Tel Aviv square named after prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated after addressing a peace rally there in 1995.

In 1982, Peace Now led a 400,000-strong protest at the same square, calling for a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

What was then seen as a radical concept is now the US-backed consensus view in Israel and the basis for negotiations under way with the Palestinians.

Longtime activist Galia Golan remembers secret meetings with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in occupied east Jerusalem nearly 30 years ago to discuss possible future peace talks.

The breakthrough finally came in 1993 when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Rabin signed the Oslo accords, five years after the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist.

"We had a role in changing the public dialogue and the fact is that today there is a majority supporting the two-state solution, negotiations and pulling out of the West Bank," said Golan, 69.

Peace Now first won prominence on Israel's political scene in 1978, riding a wave of popular support for army reserve officers who had published a letter calling for peace between Israel and Egypt.

One year later, president Anwar Sadar signed a peace treaty with prime minister Menachem Begin making Egypt the first Arab government to make peace with Israel.

Since then Peace Now, which calls itself Israel's oldest peace movement, has drawn hundreds of thousands of Israelis to its rallies, and some of its activists have gone on to win parliamentary seats.

It has also taken its campaign against Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank to Israel's highest court. The international community considers the settlements illegal and a key hurdle to Middle East peace.

"Peace Now was established to fight the settler movement," says Sammy Smooha, a sociology professor at Haifa University.

"It has provided information on settlements and demonstrated that they are counterproductive for Israeli security and the peace process."

The peace movement was a counterforce to hardline Jews who settled the West Bank and Gaza Strip after their occupation in the 1967 Middle East war.

"We saw the issue of the settlements as central for peace from the start," says Golan, a professor at the Lauder school of government in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv.

"We failed to prevent new construction but we managed to make the issue critical and make the public realise we must get rid of them," she said.

Not surprisingly, the movement's loudest critics come from the right-wing settler movement.

"In 30 years Peace Now has brought upon Israel only violence. I don't judge their intentions, just the result of their deeds," says Dani Dayan, chairman of the main settlement organization, the Yesha Council.

Dayan pointed to the group's support for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza five years later, which he said had served only to bolster Israel's Islamist foes Hezbollah and Hamas.

The last major Peace Now demonstration was in May 2005 in support of the removal of Jewish settlements in Gaza, and today some question the group's relevance now that its political views are mainstream.

To the settlers, Peace Now's influence seems to have waned since the outbreak of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, the collapse of US-sponsored peace talks early the following year and Hamas's seizure of Gaza last June.

"Israeli public opinion has seen the illusion of peace, seen the big mistakes Peace Now and their allies have made," says Dayan, who believes it may result in victory for the right at the next elections.

But over the years Peace Now has made a significant contribution to raising public awareness, says Smooha, "spreading the idea that peace is possible, achievable, and not an illusion."

Very Bad day in Knesset

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

Last update - 13:59 05/03/2008 MK Eitam to Arab MKs: One day we will expel you from Israel By Shahar Ilan, Haaretz Correspondent Tempers flared Wednesday during Knesset plenary session when National Union MK Effie Eitam told Arab MKs that "one day we will expel you from this house, and from the national home of the Jewish people." Eitam expressed his anger at Tuesday's rally in Umm al-Fahm, where demonstrators chanted slogans calling Israel "a Zionazi state" and urging "Gaza martyrs" to carry on with their struggle. "No sane democracy can put up with acts of treason during wartime," Eitam said. "We have to drive you out, as well as everyone else who took part in yesterday's unruly, reckless and treacherous anti-Israel diatribe." Balad Chairman MK Jamal Zahalka heckled him in turn: "You're a madman, a miserable character, a racist," and was ejected from the debate. Ra'am-Ta'al MK Taleb El-Sana said Eitam should be imprisoned and court-martialed for his conduct as a senior IDF officer during the first Intifada. "He advocates the expulsion of Israeli citizens," El-Sana said. "Eitam belong in history's garbage can." Eitam said in response that he did not call to expel the Israeli Arab community entirely, only Arab MKs and those who participated in Tuesday's rally. Related articles: Thousands rally across Mideast to protest IDF attacks on Gaza Police halt Israeli Arab rally against Gaza op, arrest 2 at T.A. protest 2 IDF soldiers, 61 Palestinians die in Gaza clashes