Will the Arab League or the UN play a role in the current Mideast peace process?

Earlier this month, at the Arab League’s conference in Libya, its monitoring committee on the Arab Peace Initiative gave Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas support for his decision to suspend direct talks with Israel as long as settlement construction continues. The Arab Peace Initiative is a Saudi inspired peace plan first presented by the Arab League in 2002 and then endorsed again in 2007, which calls for a Palestinian state with borders based explicitly on the UN borders established before the 1967 Six Day War. It offers full normalization of relations with Israel, in exchange for the withdrawal of its forces from all the occupied territories, including the Golan Heights, recognition of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a just solution for the Palestinian refugees. Of course, the Arab League, a 22 member league of Arab nations, is not negotiating with Israel, but PA president Abbas has similar demands and is seeking the support and coercive power of the League to pressure the US to get Israel to impose an absolute moratorium on construction in the West Bank before returning to negotiations. He argued that the Palestinian issue was one that affected all Arabs and that if the Arab League refused to intervene, it would mean that it was giving up on the matter. One of the problems according to Haaretz, reporters Avi Issacharoff and Akiva Elldar, who used the London based Al Hayyat newspaper as the source for this article, is that Arab League members seem to be at odds over their role in the Mideast peace process. An example is Syria’s president Bashar Assad who argued that the Arab League’s monitoring committee doesn’t have the authority to give the PA the license to continue negotiations. He felt that the League was focusing on settlements rather than the bigger picture of territories and refugees. As the case has been for decades, the Arab nations are not all like-minded and often have diverging opinions and motivations, but they are all weighing in on the question of Israel/Palestinian negotiations. The question is how much influence will they have in the matter?

It is interesting to note that one of the co-editors of the Palestine-Israel Journal, Hillel Schenker had high hopes that additional Arab participation might be of more influence during these negotiations. In an article he wrote in September, before this round of talks began, he stated that the existence of the Arab Peace Initiative and the fact that both Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah were present in Washington at the inauguration of the current round of talks was promising and might make a difference. He saw this as an advantage over the Camp David peace talks in 2000 because he presents these two Arab leaders as seeing the context of the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations as embedded in a broader regional peace between Israel and the Arab world. Mr. Schenker is very left-leaning in his opinions and the article I’ve chosen is an opinion piece he wrote, so it is not objective, but I used it because he addresses the increased Arab involvement. He presents Mubarak and King Abdullah in a more positive light than Israel’s current leadership and calls on the Knesset Members who are more left leaning to seriously discuss the Arab Peace Initiative. He also stated that if these negotiations stalled, it would be up to the US to offer creative bridging proposals to ensure the negotiations don’t completely fail. He concludes with a well known saying attributed to the late Abba Eban about the history of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in which all sides seem to “never miss the opportunity to miss an opportunity” and hopes that all concerned will not miss this opportunity for peace.

In the meantime, skeptics are saying “I told you so” and the negotiations have stalled. According to an article in Haartz, taken from the Associated Press, Abbas and the Arab League are now saying that they are considering going to the UN as soon as next month to seek United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state if Israel continues to build settlements. The AP is just reporting the facts, but in essence what would going to the UN accomplish? Is it a symbolic gesture? Would it lead to armed conflict? Also, Abbas is threatening to step down if Israel resumes building which would lead to dissolution of the PA. This would cause all civil and security to revert to Israel or the UN – both cases would result in chaos and are not something Israel would like to see happen. These are in essence threats being used by Abbas and the Arab League in the continual political game being played in the course of these negotiations.

Golan Heights Wind Farm

A new alternative energy project will soon be launched in the northern Golan Heights. A 70 wind turbine farm, which is capable of producing 200 megawatts of energy, will be built by an Israeli company called Multimatrix in collaboration with an American company AES, a worldwide developer of power projects. It will help alleviate growing concerns over the potential of future energy shortages in Israel.

Yosi Omid and his brother Uri Omid serve as the director and CEO of Multimatrix and are extremely enthusiastic about the project. As quoted in the article, they call the project a “revolution” and feel that it will be their “contribution to Israel, showing that we can make electricity in a green way.”

 The wind farm will be built in the Golan Heights, an area that was captured from Syria by Israel in the 1967 war. Syria seeks the return of the Golan with any peace deal with Israel, so it is also a political issue. Nevertheless, the Omid brothers call it a “peace project” and are confident that no matter who will be there and where the electricity will go, it will be a good, clean, green energy that will benefit people. They also commented that this type of green energy is proven to be efficient and profitable and will put an end to the jokes about green projects that are made by people who don’t take it seriously.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be taking green energy seriously and has declared the wind farm a national project. It has also gained the support of government officials, who recognize the need for alternative energy sources in Israel. Before this project was approved by Israel’s Public Utility Authority (PUA), the agency responsible for issuing licenses to build power plants, they had to ensured that the company had valid contracts proving that they owned the land, showed a sound financial situation and had the capability to deliver the power nationwide.

A related article in the Jerusalem Post dated Sept. 21st, mentions that when Netanyahu gave the project national priority, that helped to abbreviate the time it would take for the farm to be up and running. It will take six months to a year to install the turbines and the current plan is for the farm to begin operation in 2012. Each turbine will be 80 meters tall and have a blade diameter of 50 meters. Each turbine will use 300 square meters and be set 300 meters apart. The land will still be used for agricultural purposes and cows will even be free to roam on the land - and interestingly enough, it apparently has been shown that cows use the turbine poles to scratch their backs. (Interesting - I'd love to see a photo of that!)

Wind energy is stated to be the most economically competitive of alternative energies to fossil fuels and has seen a massive surge in development around the world. European countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have been using wind farms for years. Apparently, there are some skeptics who have questioned whether Israel has sufficient wind speeds to sustain a robust wind power industry, but several experts believe that Israel does have greater potential than the skeptics believe.

I found both articles in the Jerusalem Post and it's interesting to note that one of them is by an independent reporter working for The Media Line. I found that The Media Line is a non-profit news organization which describes itself as being established to enhance and balance media coverage in the Middle East. I understood that the Jerusalem Post probably works with  reporters from other organizations as supplements to their own staff. The information that The Media Line reporter provided included interviews with people involved in the project. The other reporter included more descriptive information about the size and scope of the project. Both are reliable types of information. They also both seemed to favor the construction of the wind farms (indicating a pro-alternative energy point of view) and portrayed it as beneficial to Israel while any reference to the potential problem of it being built in the Golan Heights was only mentioned in the first article in the context of it being a "peace project." 

I feel it would have been more reliable to provide actual statistics about the efficiency of wind power compared to other alternative energies and fossil fuels. Also, more information about why the skeptics think that Israel doesn't have sufficient wind speeds to sustain a wind power industry. I would imagine that before investing hundreds of millions of dollars in such a venture, the experts and investors involved would have made sure that Israel has sufficient wind speeds to merit such an investment.  

Theatre Festival in Acre

The 31st Acre Festival of Alternative Theater will take place from September 26 – 29, 2010 in and around a Crusader Fortress in the Old City of Acre (also known as Acco) in Northern Israel. A series of plays, outdoor street performances, special projects, art installations, music and dance will be featured during the 4 day festival. The organizers of the festival “seek to provide new theatrical language for familiar themes” and they also seek to address and question the extent that artistic expression can affect the reality – especially the complex reality of life in Israel and the political situation in the region.


Performers and artists from 15 different countries were selected by a committee to present “alternative” styles of performance. There are street performers from Romania, Spain, German, Slovenia and Holland, a collaboration performance between Israeli and Croatian performers, political cabaret shows, various clowns, and a bus ride combination thriller performance with an Israeli component about religiosity and faith.

Nine plays will be competing in the festival for top honors. A favorite is likely to be The Family Table, which is a three hour multi-layered work by David Ma’ayan. It is a play that takes eight groups of performers through the alleyways of Acre’s Old City and brings them together around a huge dining table. Other entries include an Austrian/Israeli collaboration of cousins Markus Kupferblum and Pablo Ariel called Response to a Letter My Father Never Wrote Me, where we see what happens when ideas and ideologies clash and another is a cheeky and political take on Israeli reality called Don’t worry, Be Happy by Roby Edelman.

There are also three Arabic language monodrama plays from the recent Masrahid festival which will be guests at the Acre festival and an installation by artist Iman Abu Hamid dedicated to her grandmother. Some of the plays and performances require advance purchase of tickets but many of the performances and the outdoor music can all be enjoyed for free.

The Jerusalem Post reporter, Helen Kaye, is a reliable source, informing the public of the many offerings at the Acre Festival and for more details and information she gives a link to the festival website http://www.accofestival.co.il/. Israel hosts many cultural, music and art festivals year round. As exemplified on the Acre Festival website, the advertisements for the events will often appear in Hebrew, English and Arabic – highlighting the multiethnic and multicultural backgrounds of participants or members of the audience. Although the reporter does not express a point of view on the Festival, the organizers of this Festival explain that they seek expressions of “alternative” theater, which is characterized by daring and original thinking about familiar themes and offers a different take on them, including political issues. Often, in a democracy that allows freedom of speech, artists and theater productions will serve as a means of self examination, raising awareness of people to overlooked issues and often can lead to criticism that leads to change.

Although I did not find articles relating to current art and theater in the Palestinian publications, possibly because they may not exist or be considered worthy of coverage, I came across an article in Ha’artz called Where would Palestinian art be without Politics? The article interviews three Palestinian artists who are members of an organization called Palestinian Peace & Youth Forum and is written by reporter Philip Kleinfeld. Of course, by interviewing Palestinian artists who are members of such a Forum, the expected views would be considerably more progressive and left of center than artists in Gaza might be. The newspaper Ha’aretz, being left of center itself, makes a point of seeking out and finding like minded Palestinians. The artists interviewed discuss Palestinian street artists who produce graffiti in the streets of the West Bank and are so influenced by the political messages of the PLO that their art consists almost solely of topics dealing with the conflict with Israel, the occupation and the Palestinian people as either victims or heroes. Being so political has been a drawback for Palestinian artists, claims Majd Abdel Hamid, 22 a graduate of the International Art Academy of Palestine and the Malmo Art Academy of Sweden. He argues that self criticism in art and in society in general will benefit the art, culture and people of Palestine. This is the same point made by the organizers of the alternative theater festival in Israel - art of any kind often serves as a people's response to their political and social realities, but in order for artists to grow, there must be a chance to self examin so that their artistic expression may even one day affect reality. Hopefully in a postive way.

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