Mideast by Midwest

Wish You Were Here—in Tahrir Square

2013-03-29T20:35:00.004-04:00

New "postcards" up at CairObserver.

Postcards from Revolutionary Cairo

2013-03-19T12:29:00.000-04:00

One cartoonist's attempt to boost tourism in Cairo.

This illustration first appeared on Farah Halime's blog, Rebel Economy.

With Print in Decline, Cartoonists Take Their Wit Online

2012-12-10T09:59:00.001-05:00

Here's an essay I penned for the Fall 2012 issue of the Cairo Review on the future of the American political cartoon:

Click on the Flip-Flop icon on the iPhone or iPad app, POTUS Pick, a digital platform created by Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, and an image of President Barack Obama appears. It is an adroit caricature, emphasizing his brooding eyebrows and pokey ears. “We can’t just drill our way out of the problem,” we hear the president say. Suddenly Obama springs into a gymnastic flip, and intones, “I believe that we should continue to expand oil production in America.” Telnaes has scored her point: Obama is a flip-flopping president on the hotly contested issue of exploiting domestic oil deposits.

Welcome to the brave new world of political cartooning. With the decline of print media, where the art form has flourished for two and a half centuries, the future of political cartooning has been thrown into doubt. There are fewer than twenty-five full time staff editorial cartoonists working in the U.S. today, down from some three hundred as recently as 1990. But true to their combative spirit, American cartoonists are hardly going down without a fight. Growing numbers of them are finding creative ways to survive and flourish in the era of digital media, using innovative apps to display their wit, posting cartoons on new websites, and in some cases becoming gainfully employed by online publications. It may turn out that rather than killing the political cartoon by hastening the demise of the printed page, the Internet may revitalize the art form with an infusion of young, independent and more diverse voices.

Illustrated commentary is an American tradition dating back to at least 1754, when Benjamin Franklin published a wood-cut cartoon titled Join or Die in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Depicting a snake severed into eight parts representing different American colonies, it implored colonialists to unite in preparation for what the Americans called the French and Indian War. The editorial cartoonist holds an esteemed mantle in America; more vaunted than a mere satirist or illustrator. He or she is an ombudsman, holding public servants accountable for policies and gaffes. An exemplar of the craft was Thomas Nast, who launched his arrows from the pages of Harper’s Weekly in the late nineteenth century. Nast cartoons like one titled Who Stole the People’s Money famously helped bring down William M. “Boss” Tweed of the corrupt Tammany Hall political machine in New York. (Tweed purported demanded: “Stop them damned pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!”)

Generations of editorial cartoonists like Paul Conrad, recipient of three Pulitzer prizes while working for the Los Angeles Times, have followed in Nast’s footsteps. Conrad took on eleven American presidents, most notably excoriating President Richard Nixon for the criminal abuse of power known as the Watergate Scandal—an act that landed Conrad on Nixon’s infamous Enemies List. Long before the decline of print media, cartoonists battled for editorial space against editors fearful that their work would offend powerful interests or advertisers. “The way to succeed in this business is to play it safe, to crank out boring, derivative, redundant, often even plagiarized work,” explains syndicated cartoonist Ted Rall.

KEEP READING at the Cairo Review.

In Cairo, Where Are We Today?

2012-12-04T10:32:00.003-05:00

Here's my latest dispatch from Tahrir Square:

Last Tuesday night I joined a diverse crowd making its way across town toward Tahrir Square, marching from the Culture Wheel, a community arts center. Hundreds of mostly young, well-dressed protesters ambled down the main drag I walk every day. Embassy and traffic police—all in their tidy sweaters and trimmed mustaches—looked on, grinning. There was no stopping this stream of demonstrators. Young lads in keffieh scarves directed oncoming cars to pass or slow down. A critical mass waving the ever-ubiquitous striped Egyptian flag and chanting the slogans of the revolution: “The People Want the Downfall of the Regime.”

Twenty-sixth of July Street—which commemorates the date in 1952 when the ousted King Fuad II departed from Egypt, and the Free Officers Movement (i.e., the military) took the reigns of power—is the primary thoroughfare in the island of Gezira, once colonized by the British and now gentrified by everyone else. As the parade marched toward Tahrir Square, taking up three lanes of traffic, everyone became a participant or spectator. We passed the military officers’ club and military-owned grocery, then the gas stations. Every single shopkeeper stood on the sidewalk outside his place of work: some laughing, some unfazed, and some joining the marches. A group of chefs from a chic Asian restaurant filmed the proceedings on their smartphones.

“Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice.” Some of these protesters must have chanted that verse thousands of times before. Indeed, the slogan has been immortalized as graffiti on the bridge under which they strode. I know that this isn’t my revolution and that I didn’t endure 18 days in Tahrir against Mubarak’s violent inertia in 2011, that I am just a young Detroiter with a one-way ticket to Cairo. But I find myself deeply invested in an Egypt that guarantees bread, freedom, and social justice for all. With my notebook in hand, I had to restrain myself—or else I would have been chanting along with the crowd.

A woman lounging five floors up on the balcony of an art deco apartment building overlooking the Nile yelled, “The People Want …” and everyone in the street below completed the phrase—and on and on it went.

Across the Nile stood the towering Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a slick skyscraper with Oriental flourishes. Next to it, Maspero, the government press center, where 28 Coptic Christians were killed and hundreds more were injured a year ago by government vehicles. Justice has yet to be delivered to those who committed the heinous act. But this march wasn’t protesting these vestiges of the old regime; rather, it protested the concentration of power sought by the new would-be pharaoh—President Muhammed Morsi. (Last week, nearly every independent Egyptian newspaper published caricatures of Morsi wearing the gilded facemasks of Tutankhamen or Ramses).

Last June, Morsi came to Tahrir Square and said in his inaugural address: “Let us remain steadfast, men of the revolution, boys and girls, men and women. I am one of you—that is how I was; I still am; and will always be … I came to talk to you today because I believe that you are the source of power and legitimacy. There is no person, party, institution, or authority that is above the will of the people.”

That was then. Now, Cairo’s city center and public squares across the country of some 90 million are erupting in protest against the democratically elected president. That’s because on Thanksgiving day, Morsi granted himself extensive, unchecked new powers. This act has set him squarely against the revolution. By way of follow-up, Morsi employed his executive clout to ram through a draft constitution. All of which calls into question Egypt’s transition from autocracy to democracy.

For months, the country has been in limbo—without a parliament, without a constitution. The constituent assembly tasked with writing the nation’s new set of laws had been on tenterhooks, stalling and deliberating, until Morsi hurriedly advanced a draft constitution (a typo in the first line betrays the haste). To seal the deal, he has called for a national referendum in two weeks. It’s not the worst social contract ever produced, even though it contains provisions that institutionalize military trials and inadequately protect freedom of religion and expression. That the headline on Human Rights Watch’s press release critiquing the draft language’s read “Mixed on Support of Rights” suggests there may still be reason for cautious hope, that Morsi and his party can still be coaxed to do the right thing.

The crowd had overtaken the corniche along the Nile and its usually steady traffic flow. The whine of a siren—an orange ambulance—was scarcely heard over the people’s intonations. This is one of Egypt’s remaining injustices—the fact that emergency vehicles have to fight through traffic just like the rest of us. It made me think of last week’s train crash in Assuit province, which killed at least 50 children. Who was in this ambulance, going against the grain of human traffic?

The protest chants echoed on the hushed banks of the Nile as the nearly full moon dipped behind a cloud. The crowd by then had doubled, perhaps tripled, as it approached the bridge that crosses the river into downtown Cairo, into the sacred space of Tahrir. The clapping, banging, and honking intensified as converging parades united.

It’s a friendly affair on the bridge—some of these camera-wielding folks must be tourists, if not from Europe than from just down the street, holding their children’s hands and patiently explaining to them what the revolution is, why it continues. Too many citizen journalists were videotaping everything. All of the bridge’s eastbound lanes filled with walkers and their flags, while westbound lanes featured men and women gripping flipcams and smartphones, with the occasional car or motorcycle barreling through.

Despite all the yelling, noise, and excitement, only one car alarm went off, across the street, and it almost instantly ceased. Standing in front of the distinguished gates of the League of Arab States, a whiff of tear gas comingled with the smoke of sweet potatoes and grilled maize from pushcarts on Tahrir Square’s periphery. Spontaneously, a joyous mob entering the Square applauded. It was peaceful and calm, a stark contrast to the front-page photos of street battles. Sure, those were occurring on side streets, but they represent a sliver of the protest movement. Hell, there was a cotton candy man selling his treats as he wandered through the crowd.

Three months ago, the more violent demonstrations that rocked the U.S. embassy here in Cairo were a defining moment for President Morsi. Critics in the West called him out for being too slow in condemning the protests and the breach of the U.S. embassy. Morsi moved to clear the Square, lining its margins with military conscripts and imposing black trucks. Newly budded grass patches were planted in Tahir Square’s inner circle, alongside tree saplings. The martyrs’ families, some of whom has been camped out for over 18 months, were displaced by the greenery, which was organic but felt like Astroturf. Now, that grass was under the shoes of thousands upon thousands of protesters.

How many of the people in the packed Square had voted for Morsi in the June presidential run-off? How many had viewed the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate as preferable to a face of the old regime? How many had lodged a protest vote in order to counter the counter-revolution?

From Shubra, one of Cairo’s largest and most populous districts, about 20,000 more marched through the downtown shopping districts from the other direction, also toward the Square. Revolutionary socialists, lawyer syndicates, young and old, just about every face you could imagine, waving flags enthusiastically. Talaat Harb Street—home of the storied cafes in which author Naguib Mafouz used to drink coffee between the beautiful French windows of hundred-year-old edifices—was packed to the gills with people and chants. (“Get out, Get out!”). I walked two blocks west in hope of 3G service to post a tweet, and the streets were virtually silent.

It was there that I saw an elderly man with thick silver whiskers and in a traditional brown thobesauntering toward the Square, encircled by an entourage. It was Ahmed Fouad Negm, the 83-year old poet whose verses had sparred with President Hosni Mubarak and mocked Anwar Sadat.

His poem “The Strike” served as a caption for the evening:

… Where are we today?And how many are we?How many will we be tomorrow?And where will we be at?Each day we visit a placeOur numbers grow Each dayWe open doorsAnd each dayWe destroy obstacleEach dayWe set up buildingsEach dayWe remove rubbleEach dayWe’re impregnated with chantsEach day …

Whether or not Tahrir Square is overflowing tomorrow, or the next day, the people can be sure that Morsi had heard their message loud and clear.

Does Morsi have a message for America?

2012-09-27T15:34:00.000-04:00

Egyptian President Morsi has been on a charm offensive (defensive?) this week during his visit to New York for the U.N. General Assembly. He spoke to Charlie Rose and delivered a long, somewhat drab speech to the UN. In my humble opinion, he could have done better. Here was my advice for Morsi, up on the Cairo Review's Tahrir Forum:

Originally published at theCairoReview.com

In June 2009, President Barack Obama had the opportunity to speak to the Egyptian people, over the head of then-President Hosni Mubarak. Even as the goodwill won by Obama’s Cairo University speech has dissipated, the level of engagement pursued early in his term suggested a reevaluation of how America does business in the Middle East. Morsi deserves his own chance to win America’s goodwill, and he’ll have that very opportunity this week at the General Assembly.

How can Morsi tell the world that the still unfolding revolution shares the same democratic values as America and Europe? First, Morsi should state clearly that in the “new” Egypt, the right to protest—against an anti-Islam video, the military, or his own administration—will be respected. On the flipside, violence, by demonstrators or the security apparatus, will not be tolerated. Then, Morsi must convey the obvious: clashes before the U.S. embassy were simply not representative of how Egypt views America. He should emphasize that the Egyptian people love American culture (Sponge Bob is ubiquitous in Cairo storefronts, and McDonalds is as common as falafel).

Read the full article at Tahrir Forum.

For a Cairo on edge, reason offers an alluring alternative

2012-09-19T13:09:00.003-04:00

There have been many horrible images coming out of Cairo in recent days, as anger over a hastily produced anti-Islam video has set the Muslim world alight. But in Tahrir Square, once the scene of its own bloody unrest, Egyptians have had another agenda: to be heard.

"I completely reject the attack on the Benghazi consulate," said Ahmed Hussein, a quality control inspector at a local factory, when I approached him last week. "If you're expressing rage and frustration, do it in a peaceful way."

On Friday, the usual vendors were on the periphery, selling flags, macaroni and Muslim Brotherhood baseball caps. Police and military patrols were absent; had they been there they would have been bored.

Not far away thousands of demonstrators massed outside the US embassy, and one protester was killed in the melee. But as that tragedy unfolded, business as usual prevailed in the rest of Cairo. For many Egyptians, the only thing being hurled are words and ideas.

The arteries leading into the square began to fill with protesters, a diverse parade of football hooligans, young professionals and bearded Salafis. The protesters were angry. But not in the way that the amateur film at the centre of this debacle depicts angry Muslims, donning swords and screaming obscenities. Those in Tahrir were personally offended by the YouTube video and wanted to convey a message of peace.

"Islam is a religion of tolerance," was the most common refrain repeated by a dozen activists and passersby. "This is a country that loves the other," said Khairat Hijab, a tailor, wearing a neon green hat with an Egyptian flag. He had a surgical mask around his neck, anticipating tear gas, and he smiled profusely.

"Burning and killing is not Egyptian behaviour," said Hassan Ahmed, a communications engineer. "Our revolution was peaceful and will continue to be peaceful." He disavowed the outbreak at the embassy and called the violence an attempt "to damage the picture" of Muslims and the Muslim Brotherhood.

To each individual I spoke with, the protest was about something slightly different. For Amr, a 28-year-old football fan sporting a red Ahly Club jersey, it didn't just pertain to the film emerging from America - it was about the imperative of respecting religion.

"People here should be in the square as Muslims and Christians, without fighting," Amr said. "The only thing there's benefit in is in standing together. This demonstration should be far from the US embassy."

Another activist picked up: "Jews have a place in Egypt, and Christians have a place in Egypt," he said. "So long as they respect each other all religions and nationalities are welcome. All religions have a place." Four young men standing beside him nodded in approval.

Continue reading at The National.

Big Questions for President Morsi

2012-07-09T11:51:00.001-04:00

With Egypt's new president, Muhammed Morsi, taking the oath of the high office last Saturday, the political party of the once-illegal Muslim Brotherhood officially reigns supreme. But the Supreme Council of the Armed Forced (SCAF), an inseparable lever of Egyptian state autocracy, is still very much in charge.

To discuss Egypt's protracted power struggle, the Cairo Review of Global Affairs and the New America Foundation's Middle East Task Force convened a round table in Washington, D.C. last week. Leading analysts Samer Shehata and Michael Wahid Hanna reflected on their recent visits to Egypt during the presidential balloting and assessed the so-called revolution's progress, or lack thereof.

"It's interesting that [President Morsi] went to see [SCAF Chairman] Tantawi instead of Tantawi going to see him," noted Georgetown Professor Samer Shehata in describing just how little the underlying Egyptian power dynamics have changed.

If one were to deconstruct Cairo's politics since January 2011, the three strongest forces vying for power are the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the protest movement in Tahrir Square and beyond. Despite temporary alliances, no one political actor can control all of the three.

Let's start with the SCAF. I asked Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation, about the military's outlook: whether its heavy-handed marshaling of Egypt's transition exemplifies a stroke of evil genius or bungling impulsiveness.

Keep reading at the Huffington Post or Tahrir Forum, the Cairo Review's blog.

Videoblog on Egypt's Messy Transition

2012-07-01T15:20:00.002-04:00

Follow me on Twitter: @mideastXmidwest

Snaps of Egypt's Presidential Election

2012-05-23T18:44:00.000-04:00

Egypt’s Electoral Collage

2012-05-22T18:15:00.001-04:00

CAIRO — The cityscape looks a bit different these days. Buildings are sporting a darker layer of dust, and graffiti—provocative, elaborate, and in defiance of the regime—is everywhere. Walk beyond Tahrir Square and you’ll see a snake with Mubarak’s wife as its head, hieroglyphic renditions of the uprising, and psychedelic memorials to the revolution’s martyrs. Graffiti, nearly absent prior to 2011, is now so ubiquitous it’s almost passé.

Then there are the campaign ads. Egyptians are voting in a competitive presidential election this week. The frontrunners’ faces are plastered everywhere—peering out from billboard portraits with arms crossed, stretching their lips into slightly menacing smiles. They look more like the Sopranos than politicians.

In the chaotic year and a half since January 2011, Tahrir Square has gone from the site of revolt to the sanctioned area for protest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has ruled since Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, now tacitly permits various demonstrations in the city center as a sort of safety valve. The SCAF’s tolerance for protests doesn’t, however, extend to the Ministry of Defense. Recent protests in front of it were met with water cannons, tear gas, and rocks.

Nearly every Friday, some group or party—increasingly the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists—calls for a “million man march” on Tahrir. Only a few thousand, at most, show up. Vendors sell flags, revolution kitsch, and, of course, the obligatory Sponge Bob T-shirts.

Morsi supporter in downtown Cairo.

Politics are moving at a dizzying pace. Drama between the SCAF, the ruling military council, and the Muslim Brotherhood-led legislature sets the backdrop. The Cabinet has been disbanded and shuffled; the military has met political protests with violence; the economy remains stagnant. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is keeping up business as usual. The constitution, which will delineate the president’s powers, has not yet been written.

All eyes are focused on how quickly the ruling military authority transfers power to the elected executive, with June 30th being the military’s ostensible deadline. How much power will the mysterious council of somewhere between 19 and 21 members be willing to give up? One thing is certain: they aren’t as popular as last year. The approval rating of de-facto ruler Field Marshall Hussein Tantawi has fallen 27 points since then, to 63 percent, according to a recent poll.

The once-popular slogan “The people and the army are one” still decorates most army tanks, often beside the image of a soldier cradling an infant, but such images are no longer in fashion. “That poster is the SCAF’s unconscious projection of their opinion of the Egyptian people,” said Nour Ali, a McSweeney’s columnist based here. “We’re the equivalent of drooling toddlers to them.” Still, the 63 percent of Egyptians who approve of the military custodians do represent a silent majority. They are citizens frustrated more by the traffic jams caused by demonstrations than by unlawful military trials of citizens.

Shafiq and Morsi billboards battle for Cairo's skyline.

Egyptians are being treated to extravagant campaign promises. Former Aviation Minister Ahmed Shafiq, who is favored by Mubarak enthusiasts, has vowed that if elected president he will fix Cairo’s infamous traffic problem within 24 hours. “I really mean it,” he barked to business elites at a luncheon hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce last week. He did not share the details of how he would pull off such a miracle.

No one has any idea who will win Egypt’s top post. Amr Moussa is the leading secular candidate, having served as foreign minister in the 90’s under Mubarak and, over the past decade, secretary general of the Arab League. He is popular for his strong criticism of Israel, yet he has little to show for his tenure at the Arab League other than being the first senior Arab official to visit Hamas-ruled Gaza. Although polls had forecasted him as a front-runner, lately he’s struggling to keep up.

Mubarak loyalist Ahmed Shafiq is wooing voters who crave the status quo. Shafiq served as Mubarak’s prime minister amid the uprising, resigning just a month after his boss did. He has since risen like a phoenix, although he is a counterrevolutionary par excellence, and he vows to remove protesters from Tahrir Square forcibly, as if the uprising never occurred. Speaking to the American Chamber, Shafiq called Mubarak, “an ideal person,” because of his old boss’s “ability to separate personal relationships from work.”

keep reading at Zócalo Public Square.

How Oil and Democracy Mix

2012-05-09T09:39:00.002-04:00

In the Spring issue of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, I review Timothy Mitchell's new book Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.

As oil prices rose to more than $105 per barrel in March, Ali Al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, took to the Financial Times to reassure gas-guzzlers that scarcity is a “myth.” The kingdom, he claimed, could increase its production by 25 percent, if necessary. Not only has oil driven “incredible, and unprecedented, economic and social progress,” Al-Naimi wrote in the FT, its supply has also limited the imagination of all governments, democracies and autocracies alike.

We live in an era where reliance on fossil fuels has come to restrict the menu of energy supply policy options available. Our carbon dependency has essentially undercut democracy. The ostensibly endless supply of a nonrenewable resource has set a trap. Rather than putting forward energy alternatives, politicians prioritize low prices at the pump. Saudi’s oil surplus has become a tool to superficially alleviate the global financial crisis. Energy reliance is further aggravated by the nature of the international economy, which is accountable to market rather than democratic forces. How did government policies, financial markets, and indeed our everyday habits, become dominated by carbon?

In Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Timothy Mitchell links dependence on fossil fuels with the withering of democracy. While coal actually helped shape modern democracy, he writes, oil has set some of its limits. Oil producing and consuming states appear equally incapable of addressing the root causes of climate change or the prospect of energy shortages stemming from over-consumption.Carbon Democracy is at once a biography of energy, an intellectual history of economic theory and interventions, and a revisionist account of Western foreign policy in the Middle East. Mitchell draws connections between the sites of production and shipping routes, the influence of U.S. dollar and transnational economic institutions, and weapons deals and trade imbalances, to demonstrate that just about everything we think we know about energy is wrong.

Keep reading at the Cairo Review.

Will Cairo Clashes Impact Egypt's Election?

2012-05-04T15:01:00.000-04:00

Quick hit on France24's hourly newscast on violence outside the Ministry of Defense in Abasseya, Cairo, and what it might mean for the May 23-24 presidential vote.

Follow me on Twitter: @mideastXmidwest

Bipartisan Barack at the Super Bowl

2012-02-07T12:34:00.000-05:00

originally published at Huffington Post

What Is Obama's Message for Tahrir Square?

2012-01-26T00:26:00.003-05:00

Mubarak, 2/1/2011

Originally published on Huffington Post

Last night, I attended the White House's State of the Union "tweet up," a gathering of a couple hundred new media addicts at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. We watched an "enhanced" version of the speech with all sorts of graphs and graphics, though I was too busy tweeting to watch. The scene at the #WHTweetup was geek chic, with most heads down busy clicking their thumbs on Apple products. Too bad the Middle East scarcely figured into the speech.

On the sidelines of the event I had the opportunity to have a few words with Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Rhodes was the author of Obama's Cairo speech, which has continued to frame the White House's approach to the region even as the tectonic plates have dramatically shifted in the interim. Here is the exclusive interview:

What is President Obama's message for Tahrir Square where Egyptians are gathering right now?

Ben Rhodes: We did a statement today. But basically tomorrow is an important day -- it's one year since the anniversary. We are taking a number of steps to support Egypt's transition to democracy. We've seen a number of important steps in recent days: the parliament; the announcement by [SCAF leader] Tantawi that they're going to get rid of the emergency law. So our message is [that] we support their transition. We're going to be there on the other side of it. We're supporting the government as they take steps to implement the transition, and we want to see them follow that road map. We want to see Egypt as a model for the rest of the region.

What about the rest of the region, which sees Washington supporting autocrats in other countries? We're about to host Yemeni President Saleh. We continue to support Bahrain, and the Jordanian king visited the White House last week.

Rhodes: We support a set of universal values that the president spoke about today -- a process of change in each of these countries. But it's going to be different in each of these countries.

How many times did he say "look" in the speech?

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State of the Union: "the enhanced version"

2012-01-23T21:08:00.004-05:00

SOTU 2008

The State of the Union is always a fun event to peg a presidential portrait. To that end, I need to hit the drawing board tonight.

Tomorrow I'll be attending a White House Tweetup for #SOTU. Follow @MideastChannel and @mideastXmidwest for terse updates. Don't worry, I won't just transcribe the same remarks you'll be watching; I'll try to offer some savvy analysis...

The interactive part? Immediately following the speech, I'll have the opportunity to ask your questions to an exclusive panel of "senior advisors" -- that is, if you "mention" me on Twitter. Among the panelists: Ben Rhodes and ~~Mark Zuckerberg~~ [correction: Mark Zuckerman -- oops].

I'll be drawing some snazzy 'toons of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building's finest screening room, too. That's right -- we're going to be watching, "the enhanced version of the speech that features graphics, data and stats that highlight the issues the President is discussing live from South Court Auditorium." Get ready to geek out with me.

In the meantime, here is another SOTU 'toon:

Why do analysts feel compelled to always "grade" the president every January?

In which my transcription skills come in handy

2012-01-11T10:44:00.001-05:00

I sat down with Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, member of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Executive Committee, at her Ramallah office. We shared a plate of "healthy stuff," fresh fruits and vegetables -- in contrast to the cigarette smoke-filled rooms of the Palestinian Authority's headquarters, the Muqata -- and discussed the PLO's strategies for 2012.

1. You were in Cairo three weeks ago for Fatah-Hamas reconciliation talks. How are the unity talks being affected by the Quartet's January 26 deadline?

Dr. Ashrawi: I don't even think about it as a deadline, because I would hate to link our own internal domestic issues to what the Quartet says. Frankly speaking, the Quartet hasn't been doing anything. It's just all show and no substance; all talk and no action. And I don't see why we should adopt their deadlines knowing that they're not doing anything, and all they're doing is asking us to negotiate. And they should know better because they are seeing what's happening on the ground.... We don't have anything against talks. But we have something against talks that are used for a pretext to provide Israel with cover -- legal cover, protection, and time to destroy the two-state solution.... Now either they rectify the negotiations, the so-called process, or we look for something else.

2. Is that "something else" a United Nations strategy?

David Levine's drawing of Dr. Ashrawi

Yes. We need to protect ourselves, we need to solidify and empower ourselves internally. We need to have peaceful, nonviolent resistance. We need to continue to build our institutions and work on unification. We need to repair our democracy. We need to have elections. All of these are internal issues. We need to work with the internationally community not just to get recognition but to get access - to all different instruments of accountability: legal, judicial, and so on.

I don't know why the whole world has to wax hysterical at our trying to get some accountability for Israel. Why do they insist that Israel has to be given preferential treatment and remain above the law? Of course we want to join all of the different U.N. organizations... And I don't see why everyone wants us ahead of time to promise that we won't hold Israel accountable. This is ridiculous. Why should we relinquish the victim's right to seek protection?

Keep reading at Huffington Post.

Dispatch from Area C

2011-12-30T12:55:00.002-05:00

My latest on Foreign Policy's Mideast Channel:

The last straw for Bedouin in Jerusalem's periphery?

View of dump from proposed re-location site

KHAN AL-AHMAR, WEST BANK -- United Nations officials have issued a warning that the Government of Israel's plans for Palestinian Bedouin communities living in Jerusalem's periphery could constitute "mass forcible transfers" and "grave breaches" of international law. A pending plan in the West Bank threatens to displace Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin village of refugees originally from Israel's south, pushed off their indigenous land in the early 1950's. Khan al-Ahmar lies on the side of a major West Bank thoroughfare and is sandwiched between the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumin and Jerusalem. This area is known as E1, an especially controversial 12 km patch of land where East Jerusalem would expand as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

It is impossible for Bedouins living here to obtain building permits from Israeli planning authorities, a situation that is not unique to Khan al-Ahmar. That Israeli officials consider Khan al-Ahmar's local community school, which educates over 70 children from surrounding villages, to be illegally constructed might spell its imminent destruction.

Over tea -- and then coffee -- Id al-Jahalin, Khan al-Ahmar's spokesman, described the perilous nature of day-to-day life in his village. There is neither running water nor electricity from a central grid here, and trash is burned as there is no waste pick-up by Israeli public services. Provocations from neighboring settlers punctuate daily routines in this pastoralist community.

The proposed site for re-residence of this community is a newly flattened plot just outside of Jerusalem, less than 100 meters from the municipal garbage dump, and in clear violation of international health standards. A thousand tons of rubbish from the Jerusalem municipality and settlements are trucked to this dump daily, making it the largest refuse site in the West Bank. An armed guard sitting atop a watch tower prohibits visitors from entering the dump. But from the proposed relocation site, one can see pipes coming out of the trash mountain, where methane gas is released in order to limit the internal combustion occurring underground. CO2 levels here are also dangerously high, according to UN officials. Standing in the squalid relocation site for the Bedouin community, the putrid scent of the dump is unbearable.


Abu Chamis in Khan al-Ahmar

Maj. Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry's administration office for the West Bank, would not provide a timeline for the development of these plots, only more than a stone's throw from the dump. He said that environmental tests for the site were currently underway. "Whether a rubbish dump, a golden palace, or even Paris, I don't want to go anywhere," said Jahalin, also known as Abu Chamis. "It's my right to have a village here. It's my right for my children to have an education, and for us to live in dignity like any other human beings."

The Jewish settlement of Maale Adumin has pushed for the immediate bulldozing of the school. They have cut off all contact with Khan al-Ahmar's residents since the educational facility's construction in 2009. Ultimately, the decision whether to raze the school and transfer the Bedouin population will fall under the jurisdiction of the Defense Ministry.

Under the Oslo accords, Israel exerts full civil, administrative, and military control over Area C, which consists of 60 percent of the West Bank. Even as Ramallah has attempted to expand its influence in Area C, the Palestinian Authority (PA) refused to build a school in Khan al-Ahmar in defiance of Israeli zoning regulations. This community is one of 20 Palestinian Bedouin villages in Area C that are unrecognized. And with access to only 1 percent of Area C for agrarian usage, Bedouin children shepherd livestock on the side of busy roads. An Italian NGO assisted in constructing the community's school out of tires, mud, and used falafel oil. It is situated between the ramshackle structures of the village, also built "illegally," according to authorities in Israel. Before the six classrooms were here, young Bedouin students had to travel as far as Jericho for basic schooling. Following much pressure, the PA has now provided teachers and a head-mistress for the education facility, but has provided little else. "We know the PA doesn't care about the people here, but they should at least care about the land," said Abu Chamis. "Since 1996, [PLO negotiator] Saeb Erakat has used this road [adjacent to Khan al-Ahmar]. Three or four years ago he actually had a puncture while driving on the road, and I fixed his tire for him. I invited him to come here, but he would not come and see our life."

There are other challenges facing Khan al-Ahmar, too. To understand how unwelcome this refugee Bedouin community is, one need only look at the sewage air vent from pipes leading from the adjacent settlement: the sewage ventilation is less than a meter from the school's restroom facilities. Recent expansion of the freeway has meant that the main road is creeping onto the little land the Jahalin tribe lives on. Khan al-Ahmar could easily be linked to the public services and utilities of the nearby settlements, according to one Western official in Tel Aviv. The Israeli government, however, has not even considered such an arrangement.

It seems that there are so many disturbances here that many in the Bedouin community have become normalized to basic violations of rights, including livestock theft at the hands of settlers. Furthermore, residents fear filing official complaints to the Israeli government -- even in extreme cases, like when Maale Adumin's cesspool has overflowed into Khan al-Ahmar. "Self-defense is being punished," Abu Chamis explained, going on to say that if one were to issue a complaint against the settlement that the village could face fines for the clean-up.

"It's quite clear that the plan for mass forcible transfer relates to settlement expansion, which is not just illegal under international law but also condemned by powerful U.N. member states, including some of Israel's closest allies," warned UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness. The European Union Security Council members issued a joint statement two days ago drawing attention to ongoing settlement growth in the West Bank. "The viability of the Palestinian state that we want to see and the two-state solution that is essential for Israel's long-term security are threatened by the systematic and deliberate expansion of settlements." Meanwhile, EU envoy Andrew Stanley has specifically raised the issue of road expansion in E1 to Israeli officials.

Khan al-Ahmar, located in E1

Maj. Inbar would not confirm whether there was a master plan for relocating Bedouin communities living outside Jerusalem and would not comment on the status of demolition plans for Khan al-Ahmar. Yet the Washington Post reports that a scheme to resettle up to 2,000 Bedouins is in the works.

If the Bedouin re-settlement plan moves forward, combined with Maale Adumin's attendant expansion, a wedge would be further driven through E1, cutting off Palestinian East Jerusalem from thousands of Palestinians living in the West Bank. This would effectively make it impossible for Jerusalem to be Palestine's capital in a two-state solution. "I think we have to build in E1 and elsewhere in Maale Adumin," Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told the Jerusalem Post last week. "...[I]t is high time to tell our American friends that this is not the [moment in which] Israel should take into consideration any objections..."

UPDATE 2/7/12: Amira Hass reports, "The Bedouin community that lives just east of Jerusalem will not be required to move next to the Abu Dis garbage dump, as initially proposed, and the Civil Administration will provide another permanent site where they will be able to settle."

Chilly?

2011-12-06T18:58:00.007-05:00

Here's my take on Israel-US relations and where the Jewish community fits in, from The Guardian's Comment is Free:

The Israeli government has come under criticism from both the Obama administration and American Jewish communities over the past week – the latter focused on a bizarre advertisement campaign aimed at the US diaspora. The current Israeli government's insensitivity toward American Jews has gotten their attention, but whether forthcoming Knesset bills that are an affront to democratic values will cause similar alarm is yet to be seen.

Hillary Clinton, America's top diplomat, said at this past weekend's Saban Forum in Washington that she is "concerned over Israeli democracy", according to reports. Earlier in the week, prominent US communal organisations condemned a series of public-service announcements produced by the Israel's Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, which insinuated that Israeli citizens should not marry American Jews.

In one of the ads, a family split between the US and Israel shares a holiday rendezvous via Skype; when the Israeli grandparents ask their American granddaughter what holiday it is, she says that it's Christmas. "They will remain Israelis; their children won't," the ad's narrator advises. The campaign has since been withdrawn, but it is just one example of bad taste.


Clinton, by the author

More troubling is a forthcoming Knesset bill which would give the Israeli government new powers to regulate – or, more accurately, police – Israeli NGOs that receive foreign funding. The draft law would "revoke the right to income tax exemption" on such non-profits, and place a 45% tax rate on contributions from "a foreign state entity", to Israeli organisations, among other parameters scarcely seen in liberal democracies. Secretary of State Clinton was said to have criticised this piece of legislation as a threat to Israel's democratic institutions at last weekend's closed forum. She also drew attention to restrictions on women singing in public, according to Israeli news outlets. As for gender segregation on Jerusalem buses, Clinton called it "reminiscent of Rosa Parks".

One Israeli headline described US Defense Secretary Panetta's remarks at the same forum as "a slap on the face" to Netanyahu. Panetta warned against Israel's military option with regards to the Iranian nuclear program and advised Tel Aviv to "mend fences" with Egypt and Turkey. Panetta said that taking risks for peace with the Palestinians is "Israel's long-term security interest", despite the fact that talks between the two parties remain mired.

It is little surprise, perhaps, that a senior US official would be so forthcoming on security issues with Israel and the need to "get to the damn table", as Panetta put it. "The [Obama] administration has been making an ongoing strategic argument that Israel faces real, serious challenges," said Jeremy Ben-Ami, director of J Street, a group which has advocated that Washington take a bolder role in Middle East diplomacy.

Panetta's remarks do not indicate any sort of break; rather, they mesh with what former national security adviser Jim Jones and former Centcom commander General David Petraeus have said. That Clinton rebuked Israel's sequence of "anti-democratic" legislation, though, signals that Washington is taking note of the shrinking space for dissent in Israel. The past year has witnessed a variety of oppressive Knesset legislation, including laws targeting Israel's Palestinian-Arab minority and banning organised boycotts against the state.

Last week, an egregious Defamation Prohibition Law was passed, which "raise[s] the amount of punitive compensation for libel, without proof of actual damage", according to the Association for Civil Rights (ACRI) in Israel. If the NGO bill goes forward in Israel's parliament, watchdog groups like ACRI would be taxed at a punitive rate. In fact, a wide range of NGOs, today fully compliant with Israeli law, would suddenly come under an Orwellian regime.

"By focusing on individual flare-ups like the fuss over a minor ad campaign, the Israeli government is missing the bigger picture strategically," Ben-Ami told me. "American Jewish support for and connection to Israel will continue to erode over time if Israel isn't fully committed to the core values that bind the Jewish people together."

(go to the Guardian's site to read some comments...)

"Reporting from Change Square" at New America Foundation

2011-12-03T14:15:00.000-05:00

In case you missed the discussion I hosted on Thursday with Laura Kasinof and Mohammed Albasha on developments in Yemen, here's the archived video:

One step forward, two steps back

2011-11-30T16:54:00.003-05:00

"An anti-Saleh tribesman in Sana this month." via NYT

Here's a taste of my latest HuffPo piece:

Following 10 months of popular protests calling for his resignation, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh signed an agreement last week to transfer power to his vice president. It's unlikely, though, that a piece of paper will bring a peaceful transition to this beleaguered Arabian Peninsula state....

Since the agreement was signed, "plainclothes government thugs" shot dead at least five protesters in the capital. Meanwhile, "Yemeni troops appear to have unlawfully killed as many as 35 civilians in the city of Taizz," the country's third-largest, according to Human Rights Watch.

Alas, violence -- from state-sponsored forces to independent militias, not to mention drones strikes from the U.S. -- is commonplace in Yemen. That Saleh has returned to Sanaa and continues to issue statements as if he were in power -- even after accepting the deal in Riyadh -- is a perhaps a bigger threat to the transition than the continuing violence across the country.

For more, come listen to Laura Kasinof, a New York Times correspondent who has reported from Sanaa since 2009, as she reflects on Yemen's uprising tomorrow, December 1, at 12:15pm. We'll be live-streaming the discussion (here).

The Mendacious Mr. Netanyahu?

2011-11-16T14:02:00.000-05:00

My first blog at The Huffington Post:

By now you've heard that French President Nicholas Sarkozy -- without realizing that his microphone was live -- called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "a liar," at last week's G20 summit, according to reports.

Most Israelis would agree.

A full 60 percent of Israelis do not find Netanyahu to be "honest and trustworthy," according to a survey of 1000 Israelis, conducted by the New America Foundation's Middle East Task Force in 2009. Surprisingly, even among Israelis who respond favorably to their prime minister, 41 percent do not think he is truthful.

So, what's the big deal? Netanyahu's Israeli colleagues have not been shy in calling Netanyahu out either. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was quoted as saying, "A liar you were, and a liar you have remained," to Netanyahu's face, according to Sharon's son Gilad.

Dan Meridor, who now serves as minister of intelligence and atomic energy in Netanyahu's cabinet, has accused Netanyahu of "turning his lies into an art form."

Keep reading at Huff Po.

An increasingly irrelevant Mideast peace broker

2011-10-21T19:29:00.005-04:00

Here's my take on PM Salam Fayyad's visit to DC this week and where the "peace process" game stands, published at Inter Press Service:

WASHINGTON, Oct 21, 2011 (IPS) - While a growing number of influential voices here and in the region insist that the nearly 20-year, U.S.-sponsored "peace process" has reached its terminal phase, the administration of President Barack Obama remains committed to reviving direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

"…[M]oving forward, we want to see progress on the peace talks," State Department spokesman Mark Toner has emphasised repeatedly over the last two weeks, which have seen Washington's special envoy David Hale shuttling between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

"We want to see the two parties, the Palestinians and the Israelis, get back into direct negotiations. And that's where are our focus remains," he said.

But there is little reason at this point to believe that Washington's efforts will bear fruit.

That conclusion was reinforced here Wednesday night by none other than one of the process's strongest Palestinian advocates. In a speech at the annual gala of the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad indicated no great eagerness on the part of his regime to resume talks with his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Our own assessment is that the conditions are not ripe at this juncture for a meaningful resumption of talks," Fayyad told the upper-crust crowd.
That has been the standard line of the Palestinians who broke off talks 13 months ago when Netanyahu rejected a U.S. offer of substantially more military aid, as well as a host of mostly security-related guarantees, if his government agreed to extend a partial moratorium on building or expanding settlements on Palestinian territory in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

That line has, if anything, grown firmer, particularly in the wake of last month's formal application to the U.N. Security Council by PA President Mahmoud Abbas, in his capacity as PLO chairman, to recognise Palestine as a U.N. member.

That Abbas followed through with the application over the vehement objections and a veto threat by Obama himself offered the clearest evidence to date of Washington's loss of influence over Palestinians, by far the weaker of the two parties in conflict.

And the fact that Netanyahu has shrugged off repeated U.S. objections to new settlement activity - including last week's announcement that it would build 8,000 new apartment units for Jewish settlers in occupied East Jerusalem - has made clear to all concerned that Washington enjoys little or no sway with the stronger.

"The notion that the U.S. has the wherewithal to get the parties to do what it wants them to do is …a thing of the past," according to Robert Malley, director of the International Crisis Group's Middle East and North Africa programme.

"The U.S. made demands that both parties felt free to ignore," he told a discussion at the New America Foundation (NAF) last week.

But even if both parties agreed to revive the "peace process", there's little indication that the long-sought two-state solution would be advanced at the negotiating table.

"When people don't know what to do, they go to negotiations," said Malley, who worked on the Israel-Palestine file at the Clinton White House. "[That's] probably the most unwise reason to go somewhere… [and is] a recipe for further polarising the situation and convincing the parties that there's no way out… [It is] a very short-term approach."

"For last 20 years, negotiations have not brought anything tangible for the Palestinians," Nadia Bilbassy, senior correspondent from the Middle East Broadcasting Center and a U.S.-based analyst originally from Gaza, told the NAF audience. In any event, she noted, while "both the (Obama) administration and the Israelis believe in the two- state solution, they don't have a vision for how to achieve it."


The U.S. is dead set on returning to the negotiating table.

Nor does it help that, despite an April reconciliation accord in principle between Abbas's Fatah and its Islamist rival, Hamas, the two main political parties remain deeply divided and unable to patch together a coalition government.

Hamas has been excluded from the "peace process" because it has not yet agreed to the three main conditions set by the U.S. and its Quartet partners, the U.N., Russia, and the European Union. They have demanded that the party, which beat Fatah in the PA's 2006 elections, reject violence, recognise Israel's right to exist, and accept previous treaties negotiated by the PLO.

Abbas received a major boost in popularity back home by defying Washington and then delivering a poignant speech on behalf of his cause and a two-state solution before the U.N. General Assembly.

But this week's prisoner exchange - an Egyptian- and Turkish-brokered deal between Israel and Hamas - has revived Hamas's fortunes at Abbas's expense, reminding everyone once again how little the PA has gained by committing themselves so devotedly to the nearly 20-year- old, U.S.-guided peace process.

The prisoner deal "levels [the] Hamas-Fatah playing field," according to Mouin Rabbani of Al-Shabaka, an international Palestinian policy network. Under the deal, Israel agreed to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for one Israeli soldier captured by Hamas militants along the Gaza border five years ago.

The fact that Egypt and Turkey helped mediate the deal without any apparent support from the U.S. also underlined the degree to which Washington is no longer "indispensable" for getting things done and indicates that regional powers feel they have more freedom to assert their own interests independent of the U.S.

While both Hamas and Netanyahu praised the mediators, the White House reaction was more muted. "The connection between this and the peace process is not direct, at the very least," said White House spokesman Jay Carney. "The road to peace is through direct negotiations."

"[We] have to stop being such hypocritical advocates of pointless negotiations," Yossi Alpher, co-editor of the Israeli-Palestinian web magazine Bitter Lemons, said during his presentation to NAF.

Alpher, former director of the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University and a long-time supporter of the two-state solution, has embraced the U.N. approach, although he admits it is more unpredictable.

"Once you start internationalising this conflict, it's a slippery slope and you don't know what comes next," he told the NAF audience, adding that Israel should itself take the lead in recognising Palestine.

If it did so, the conflict would become a state-to-state issue and, as such, more manageable, he argued, because it would help balance the abiding asymmetry between the two peoples. Still, a multilateral role would be essential to the process, he argued.

"I could imagine a situation in which Israel welcomes an international force to get rid of these people (in Jewish settlements and outposts in the occupied territories) and thereby reduce the risk …of strife between Israelis," he said.

Adding to the growing irrelevance of Washington's hopes to revive the peace process are recent actions by the pro-Israel lawmakers in the U.S. Congress, who vowed to punish Abbas if he pursued his statehood bid at the U.N.

While technocrats in the Security Council review his statehood application, key Republican lawmakers have placed holds on 192 million dollars in humanitarian aid to the occupied territories and another 150 million dollars in security assistance to the PA.

The Republican-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee has even approved bills that would cut off all U.S. funding to U.N. agencies that grant recognition to Palestine, actions that provoked at least one strongly pro-Israel Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham, to suggest that Washington could lose whatever leverage it has left to influence the Palestinians.

"For the first time, there is a broad recognition of the emptiness of the American claim that the U.S. is uniquely qualified to bring the Israel-Palestine conflict to an end," said Henry Siegman, a former executive director of the American Jewish Congress and director of the U.S.-Middle East Project (USMEP) at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Plus Ça Change… Israel-Palestine after September at the U.N.

2011-10-14T18:53:00.002-04:00

Originally published at Foreign Policy

Today I hosted an interesting panel with Yossi Alpher, Rob Malley, and Nadia Bilbassy at the think tank. Malley urged the audience to "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Will post a video of the discussion once its archived. In the meantime, here is one of my favorite Mideast cartoons...

Lulav diplomacy

2011-10-06T23:07:00.004-04:00

My talmudic take on Succot and Egyptian-Israeli relations in Haaretz:

"Palm fronds and political thickets"

In late August, after extended verbal clashes between Israel and Egypt, which followed a deadly terror attack on Israel emanating from Sinai and Israel's aggressive response to it, a Saudi newspaper already foresaw "the ghost of a new crisis ... on the horizons of the two countries." No, the paper wasn't anticipating an Egyptian mob's shocking September 9 siege of Israel's Cairo embassy. Rather, it was the effects of a ban issued by the Egyptian agriculture minister on the export of lulavs, a key ingredient in the observance of the festival of Sukkot.

Egyptian palm-frond production is big business. Israel imports somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 lulavs annually and has come to depend on Egypt's crop for Sukkot. This year's harvest holiday, which begins next Wednesday evening, comes as Israel is still coming to terms with the Egypt emerging in a post-Mubarak era.

It's not the first time that lulav sales have been a bone of contention. Egypt stopped exports to Israel in 2005, claiming that harvest of palm fronds hurt date output. A year later, though only a short time after the Second Lebanon War, Cairo and Jerusalem were able to find a quiet solution to the lulav issue, according to a confidential missive from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in 2006, revealed by Wikileaks. "[D]espite the suspension of the [Egypt-Israel agricultural] working group's activities," Ambassador Frank Ricciardone reported to Washington, "Egypt would permit export of 500,000 palm fronds to Israel in time for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot."

American officials continue to show an interest in this vexing issue. Last week, U.S. Representative Howard Berman of California wrote to Egypt's U.S. ambassador, imploring him "to take all necessary steps to prevent any disruption in the supply of lulavs" to Israel, many of which are re-exported to America. Berman suggested that "the ban ... was imposed for purely political reasons," and that's likely the case. But is it possible the congressman was not seeing the palm grove for the trees?

If Egypt uses this important Jewish religious symbol to express its displeasure with Israel, it's also true that so long as Mubarak was in charge, Israel enjoyed Egyptian complicity in its blockade of Gaza and its overall strategy vis-a-vis the Palestinians.

Now that Mubarak is gone, Israel can expect relations with its Arab neighbor to bump along from crisis to crisis. Already, in addition to the border attack near Eilat, and Israel's response, which left five Egyptians dead, and the embassy invasion, we have seen repeated attacks on the pipeline carrying Egyptian natural gas across Sinai to Israel.

Mubarak was willing to cooperate with Israel, but he was encouraged to do so by Washington, which provided gargantuan military and aid packages to both parties. Now, the situation is different, and the United States is concerned. This week, Leon Panetta made his first trip as defense secretary to Egypt and, in his words, to an "increasingly isolated" Israel. His mission: "to ask them how we can be helpful in trying to improve those relations." Yet Panetta did not even succeed in securing the release of Ilan Grapel, an American-born Israeli student imprisoned in Cairo on charges of being a Mossad agent. Under Mubarak, such an incident would have been handled behind the scenes.

We can take comfort in the fact that a full 71 percent of Egyptians want to uphold "the legal state of peace" with Israel. But rest assured that, whatever party triumphs in the long-awaited Egyptian elections (legislative elections are set for late next month ), day-to-day functioning of that pact will look different afterward. In the meantime, the ruling military junta is discovering its leverage over Jerusalem. With more than half of Egyptians favoring an end of natural gas sales to Israel, expect the renegotiation of energy agreements - at the very least.

Clearly, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is not yet confident in its rule. The storming of the Israeli Embassy, for instance, might be seen as the military allowing demonstrators to let off steam, while diverting attention from the fact that the junta is unelected and is itself a target of protest.

The sooner Israel's government internalizes the fact that it can no longer manage the "Egypt file" on a strictly bilateral basis, the better. A post-Tahrir Square regime will inevitably be more responsive to public opinion and, as such, committed to pushing those issues most likely to ruffle Israeli diplomatic feathers, chief among them Palestinian independence. (It should be remembered that the Camp David Accords included in their framework a call to resolve "the Palestinian problem in all of its aspects." )

In this sense, and considering the season, perhaps Israel would do well to think of its treaty with Egypt in terms of an etrog, that other essential Sukkot accessory. Any damage to the pitom - the stem - makes the costly fruit un-kosher. If the Camp David Accords are not cushioned by smart strategy and are instead taken for granted - which would be akin to the pitom getting knocked off - I fear that Israel won't be able to make sweet jam out of that spoiled citron.

Talking with BBC about the drone that killed Awlaki

2011-10-03T20:25:00.007-04:00

How will Anwar al-Awlaki's death impact al Qaeda—and US-Yemen relations?

That's what I talked to BBC5 about on Friday. Listen here.

There's plenty of controversy over the illegality of drone strikes. But what I find interesting is the timing of Awlaki's death—the targeted killing of the prominent cleric comes just a week after beleaguered Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned home from rehab in Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile in Sana'a, protests are ongoing and are increasingly being met by brutal violence at the hands of Saleh supporters.

But US-Yemen counter-terror cooperation has never been better. Laura Kasinof reports from Sana'a:

A high-ranking Yemeni official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Yemen had provided the United States with intelligence on the location of the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by an American drone strike on Friday.