10 January 2009
BEIRUT: A Carnegie Middle East Center Seminar Thursday at the Rotana Gefinor Hotel in Hamra discussed the effects and repercussions of the Gaza war and the two-year Gaza siege. The discussion did not break much new ground, pointing familiar fingers and shying away from serious analysis on the role of civil society and the prospects of legal challenges to this latest Israeli action on the people of Gaza.
This most recent conflict began in late December and has cost hundreds of Palestinian civilian lives, despite broadly defined, and according to an American lawyer attending Thursday's event, "ill-conceived," military goals. Hours after the end of the seminar, the UN passed a resolution calling for a conditional cease-fire, subsequently rejected by both Israel and Hamas.
The event lurched from one topic to the next, as its vocal panelists appeared overly diverse in their capacity to discuss with expertise the Gazan situation.
Mahmoud Soueid, director of the Institute for Palestinian Studies and billed as the panel's expert on international legal matters, discussed the ramifications of Israel's "disproportionate" response to Hamas rocket attacks and political belligerence toward the Jewish state.
On this topic, an international human-rights lawyer, Marie Ghantous, who was active following the Lebanon 2006 war in building the legal case against Israel, told The Daily Star after the seminar that "I was disappointed. They did not report anything, nor did they have any plans to follow up. In my opinion, it was just a talk about things that we already know." Ghantous had hoped that the event would focus more specifically on a practical and logistical plan to aid the Gazans in collecting forensics and building a case against Israeli "human-rights violations."
The two-hour event did however feature two brief but interesting discussions regarding both the meaning of the current conflict and the tone of the Arab response to Gaza's suffering.
Discussing the meaning of the conflict, panelist and AUB professor of social and behavioral sciences Sari Hanafi said: "The West's plan is to make the Palestinian pay dearly for his vote."
"Though Hamas is using the 'right to return' on a popular level, that is unfortunate as it is an individual right and should not be something to be politically manipulated," he added.
Helmi Moussa of As-Safir newspaper agreed, saying: "This is not a war about the right to return. It is a war regarding a regional solution."
The panel's consensus seemed to be that without a regional solution to democratic liberalization and a balancing-out of the West's hand in the conflict, there would be no progress.
This led to the Arab response, with all panelists speculating that Arab regimes, specifically Egypt and Jordan, were dragging their feet in coming to Gaza's aid as Hamas represented a domestic threat due to its status as an Islamist political party elected by the Palestinian people.
Event moderator Amr Hamazawy of the Carnegie Middle East Center, an Egyptian himself, speculated that Cairo's response has to do with minimizing its domestic exposure to Islamist politics, due its "secular ruling elite," drawing parallels to the current situation in Turkey where there have been recent accusations in Ankara of an alleged secular coup.
Copyright The Daily Star 2009.
