Dipping Into Hummus, Again

By George S. Hishmeh

This commentary was published in the Jordan Times on 10/12/2010

 

Here we go again. Hummus is back in the news, and almost on the front pages of American newspapers.

My column titled “The Undeclared War on Arab Cuisine”, written more than two years ago, received more letters than most columns I have written. This is probably because I challenged the Israelis’ and their friends’ claims that this popular dip and couscous, among others, were misidentified as Israeli, another of the many unfounded claims of the Israelis.

This is how The New York Times led its news report (on page 7) on December 3: “Forget Hizbollah and Hamas. The latest chapter in the Israeli-Arab (not Arab-Israeli) conflict is all about hummus, the chickpea dip that is a staple of American college cafeterias.”

Well and good. But, this time around, the point of the story was that Palestinian students and their supporters at Princeton and DePaul universities challenged the sale at the university cafeterias of hummus under the brand-name Sabra, “in an effort to focus attention on accusations that Israeli military forces violated human rights”.

The point of the story is that the manufacturer of this brand of hummus - Sabra Dipping Company - has ties to an Israeli army brigade “notorious for allegations of human rights abuses”. And, more significantly, the students’ effort came against the backdrop of another expanding campaign known as boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, undertaken in order to make it comply with international law and the universal principles of human rights. This five-year-old movement, established by 171 non-governmental organisations, views Israel as analogous to South Africa in the apartheid era.

Although the Palestinian students and their supporters lost the Princeton referendum vote for another hummus brand - 1014 to 699, Yoel Bitran, the Jewish president of the Princeton Committee on Palestine (PCP), told The Daily Princetonian that he was excited by the high amount of student support.

“The main goal of this initiative was to raise awareness about Sabra and its association to Israel’s human rights violations,” he said.

“In that sense we have been extremely successful.”

Bitran added that the PCP still hopes to convince the university to provide an alternative hummus.

PCP sponsored the referendum as part of a larger boycott campaign against the Strauss Group, an Israeli-held conglomerate that owns 50 per cent of Sabra Dipping Company and has financially and publicly supported the Golani Brigade of the Israeli army.

At DePaul, the Catholic university administration backtracked after initially agreeing to stop stocking the Sabra brand and issued a “clarification that it will reshelve the product while it awaits the results of an ethics review”.

Jonathan Corin, writing in The Socialist Worker, exposed the Golani brigade, revealing that it “has participated in nearly every IDF campaign involving the displacement and murder of Palestinian civilians since the Nakba in 1948, including Israel’s 2008-2009 assault on Gaza that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, most of whom were unarmed non-combatants, in just three weeks”.

He also quoted a woman student identified only by her first name, Shirien, as saying that “the temporary suspension of Sabra at DePaul is a small victory, but I think something like this gets people pumped up and ready for more .... When it comes to something like justice for Palestine, every little victory eats away at the monster of injustice and brings us one step closer to victory”.

Noura Erekat, a human rights attorney and adjunct professor of international human rights law at Georgetown University, believes that “any form of BDS movement on campuses, within institutions and communities is a positive one and a significant step in the solidarity movement for Palestinian freedom and self-determination”.

She went on to explain that “the reasons for, and thinking behind, the [student] campaign against Sabra are just as important, if not more so, than the outcome itself since BDS is meant to mobilise a grassroots solidarity movement to be stakeholders in ending Israeli colonialism and apartheid”.

Palestinians are nowadays sponsoring Israeli Apartheid Week in 40 cities worldwide and for the first time in Beirut, Lebanon, this year. As far as the US is concerned, a New York activist is quoted as saying that she has discovered that American audiences relate much more easily to narratives of institutionalised racial discrimination than those of occupation.

“Hence,” Erekat underlined, “they work to draw parallels between the civil rights movement and the Palestinian movement to achieve freedom and equality”.

Real Face Of Iran Exposed

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah

This commentary was published in Gulf Times on 10/12/2010

What did Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad intend to tell the world at the international level? Why did he exonerate al-Qaeda of the Sept 11, 2001 attack, which remains the greatest criminal act of this age? The regular lies the dictatorial government tells the media were useless at the international level, especially when the issue had to do with terrorism and the intention to exonerate the terrorists. The terrorist group had declared complicity in the worst terrorist attack, but why did Tehran transform itself into an advocate for al-Qaeda group? Actually, this exposed the real face of the Iranian government and the falsity of all its slogans. It is pertinent now to put everything in its proper perspective at the international level regarding Tehran’s role in international crimes.

The international community will no longer allow Tehran government to openly defend terrorism while depending on the use of force to threaten and intimidate other countries with war. This is a deliberate suicide attempt. A good example of this is Russia which used to be the greatest ally of Iran, but now opposes Iran’s efforts in stockpiling ammunitions and rockets. Russia has been reviewing its ties with Iran and even denied entry to Iranian officials who were working on the nuclear file.

The Iranian President openly announces war in the region whenever the international community decides to control Tehran’s crazy nuclear program. The latest Iranian speech has become a major source of concern, because the leadership claims that Iran is a regional superpower and that the current faceoff is between two superpowers. This statement indicates that America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will seem like a child’s play in a war against Iran. Iranian leadership should reflect seriously to realize the implication of challenging the entire world and violating international regulations. It appears that the previous Iraqi-Iranian war which left millions dead from both sides with monumental destruction and economic collapse never taught lessons to Iranian leaders.

Also, the Iranian leadership never learnt to stop using provocative language and military maneuvers, while knowing that there is no alternative to dialogue with the international community, which will draft the course of the dialogue as well as the mechanism. This stems from the fact that the international community is in-charge of deciding the course and the end of wars.
The Iranian leaders should be convinced that wars do not make a country great; real superpowers have economic power, the ability to overcome unemployment, improve the living standard of citizens, make scientific advancement, and they have low crime rate and protect the rights of opinions and expression. Countries don’t become great by military buildup or hot utterances which are capable of bringing disasters on people. How can Iran become a superpower when its seven million citizens are in exile or running away from evil actions?

The final question is: Will history repeat itself? We hope this does not happen and that Iranians will learn from experiences of the past and the present dictators, right from the German Nazis to the propagandist Gamal Abdul Nasser government and the cruel Saddam Hussein. They should think deeply about the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to take a cue and understand that power and extremism under the disguise of religion can only produce destruction. They should also realize that flexing muscles or power play against the international community and the repeat of policing propaganda under which the Shah government lived no longer make any impact and do not have any place in the contemporary world. This is simply because all countries in the region enjoy sovereignty and independence and it is impossible for any other government to police over them.

The 'Real Jew' Debate

By Roger Cohen
This commentary was published in The New York Times on 9/12/2010

LONDON — Ira Stup was raised in Philadelphia attending Jewish day school and camps. He found his home in the Jewish community and was “intoxicated with Jewish democracy” as framed in the ideals of Israel’s foundation. Now he has returned deeply troubled from a one-year fellowship based in Tel Aviv.

The worst single incident occurred on Ben Yehuda Street in central Jerusalem. Stup, 24, a Columbia graduate, was returning from a rally with a couple of friends carrying a banner that said, “Zionists are not settlers.” A group of religious Jews wearing yarmulkes approached, spat on them and started punching.

“About 20 people saw the whole thing and just watched. They were screaming, ‘You are not real Jews.’ Most of them were American. It was one of the most disappointing moments of my life — you can disagree as much as you want with a banner but to allow violence and not react is outrageous. For me it was a turning point. Nobody previously had said I was not a real Jew.”

The view that American Jews supportive of Israel but critical of its policies are not “real Jews” is, however, widespread. Israel-right-or-wrong continues to be the core approach of major U.S. Jewish organizations, from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

To oppose the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank (“Zionists are not settlers”), or question growing anti-Arab bigotry as personified by Israel’s rightist foreign minister and illustrated by the “loyalty oath” debate, or ask whether the “de-legitimization” of Israel might not have something to do with its own actions is to incur these organizations’ steady ire.

Debate remains stifled, despite Peter Beinart’s important piece this year in the New York Review of Books describing growing alienation among young American Jews asked to “check their liberalism at Zionism’s door.” Oh, sure, you can find all sorts of opinions about Israel all over the place; America remains an open society. But Aipac has systematically shunned a debate with J Street, the upstart Jewish organization that supports Israel, opposes the settlements and attempts to reclaim the progressive ideals of Zionism by saying that the systematic oppression of the Palestinians undermines Israel.

“These organizations’ view remains essentially that any time you engage in an activity critical of Israel you are trying to destroy the state of Israel,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, told me. “Here are all these Jewish kids being raised on great liberal values at Hebrew schools — walks for the homeless, Darfur, AIDS — but God forbid we talk about what’s happening in Israel! It’s a dynamic that cuts off discourse.”

The issues are worth debating at the highest level. Middle East talks have just broken down again, precisely over settlements. President Barack Obama had virtually no domestic constituency for his attempt to denounce the continued growth of settlements as unacceptable and as undermining a two-state peace at its core: land.

Obama was left dangling, more so after the midterms, and had to retreat. This is not merely a failure of the parties. It is a failure of U.S. politics and the way those politics are straitjacketed by an Israel-right-or-wrong mantra that leads inexorably, over time, to one state with more Arabs in it than Jews. What then will remain of the Zionist dream?

Stup’s research took him often to the West Bank. He would come back to Tel Aviv and talk about Palestinian humiliation he’d seen and found that Israelis seemed unaware or unconcerned. He read in one newspaper that 53 percent of Israeli Jews would encourage Israeli Arabs to leave — “and I saw and felt that anecdotally.”

A painful question hardened: “Seeing what the occupation looked like, and given the ideals of Jewish democracy I was raised on, I wondered: Could Israel be failing and could we American Jews be defending that failure?”

It’s time to think again and, above all, think openly. Last month, Ben-Ami was scheduled to speak at a Reform Jewish synagogue, Temple Beth Avodah, in Newton, near Boston. At the last minute the event got canceled because of what the rabbi described as strong opposition from a “small, influential group” within the congregation.

Jewish groups, or Hillel societies, on U.S. campuses sometimes discover they will lose their biggest donors if they allow a J Street youth group to form within them.

Last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to the Jewish Federations of North America in New Orleans, was heckled by protesters holding banners suggesting the occupation and loyalty oaths de-legitimize Israel. Their banners were ripped (with teeth) and the young Jews dragged out. Where an important conversation could be held, confrontation prevails.

Stup, moved to act, has joined J Street. This decision caused tremendous pressure on his family back in Philadelphia. One very close family friend came over to his mother’s house recently and accused him of “poisoning the minds of young Jews.” The friendship has been strained to breaking point.

“Why,” Stup asked me, “is it poisoning minds to encourage them to think critically about the actions of the Israeli government?”

A Palestinian State Means War

By Jonathan Schanzer

This commentary was published in Foreign Policy on 9/12/2010 

With the U.S.-led peace process looking increasingly moribund, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has begun enlisting foreign leaders in a dangerous effort to recognize a Palestinian state without Israel's agreement. Abbas and his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, began this effort earlier this year to strengthen the Palestinian negotiating position, and it is bearing more fruit than even he could have expected. Abbas, however, should be careful what he wishes for. A declaration of statehood without Israeli approval could start a war in which the Palestinians themselves would pay the highest price.

Abbas has been laying the diplomatic groundwork for a unilateral declaration of statehood for months, visiting foreign capitals and lobbying governments to extend recognition. But his efforts have gained momentum this month as a U.S. proposal for an Israeli settlement freeze has fallen apart.

 

On Dec. 5, Abbas visited Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara. Afterward, the Palestinian envoy to Turkey announced that Erdogan would recognize a Palestinian state (within the 1967 borders) at an unspecified time. Erdogan also reportedly promised to go to bat for the initiative with other heads of state. The territory in question includes both the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and the Fatah-led West Bank, with the presumption (no doubt invoking the ire of Hamas) that the West Bank leadership would be in charge.

In recent days, several other countries have made similar declarations. In response to a request from Abbas, outgoing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared last week that his country recognized the state of Palestine based on the 1967 borders. On Dec. 6, Uruguay announced that it would do the same, and Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner also wrote to Abbas that her country recognizes a "free and independent" Palestine. On Dec. 8, after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused a U.S. request to extend the moratorium on construction in West Bank settlements and Abbas withdrew from peace talks, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit reportedly insisted that discussions should transition to an "end game for a Palestinian settlement."

Almost 100 countries already recognize an independent Palestine, and it is unclear how many others Abbas has asked to sign on to his plan of a unilateral declaration. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has approached U.N. and European officials, demanding that they force Israel to stop imposing "facts on the ground" in the West Bank. Meanwhile, Abbas advisor Nimer Hammad openly states that the Palestinians are considering a plan whereby the United Nations would approve of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Although U.S. officials oppose a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, Barack Obama's administration has not denounced these efforts.

Although a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood is a seemingly attractive alternative to negotiations and is gaining credence among a growing group of countries, it is an almost surefire recipe for war. If the Palestinian government unilaterally claims land where an estimated 400,000 Israeli settlers currently reside in the West Bank, don't expect them simply to pull up and move, especially if they were not consulted on the matter. Expect them to fight.

From there, a border dispute with Israel becomes inevitable. And in the Middle East, border disputes are not settled through binding arbitration. Another military conflict is sure to follow. We can expect the Iran-sponsored proxies Hezbollah and Hamas to launch new rounds of rocket attacks, and perhaps even a military assault from the Palestinian territories.

The United States and European Union are clearly worried about this possibility. They have already trained some 3,000 Palestinian soldiers who have successfully maintained calm in the West Bank in recent months. That has allowed Israel to rapidly redeploy its forces out of the West Bank, where Israeli troop levels are now at their lowest levels since after the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987. Ironically, this means the new Palestinian security forces can more easily deploy to various corners of the West Bank to defend Abbas's territorial claims.

Even if it did not result in an open war with Israel, a unilateral declaration of statehood would probably not do the Palestinians any favors. The move could unify the warring Hamas and Fatah factions -- as the second intifada against Israel did briefly when the peace process unraveled in 2000 -- but it could also divide them further. In the wake of a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, the two factions will almost certainly square off over who constitutes the sovereign government.

Yet with more and more countries recognizing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, what began as a seemingly empty threat to squeeze concessions from Israel has gained traction and appears increasingly likely to become a reality. A two-state solution may be around the corner, but that doesn't mean peace will follow.

Less Than Null On The Palestinian Level

By Zuheir Kseibati

This commentary was published in al-Hayat on 9/12/2010

President Mahmoud Abbas was not shocked when the Americans informed him about their failure to convince the Israelis to freeze the settlements, in order to push forward the direct negotiations between the Palestinian authority and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The great wall erected by extremism in the Hebrew state to deter the attempts of dragging it toward serious negotiations over the Palestinian state, is blinding any prospect of a solution. Nonetheless, it does not obscure the fact that the division between Ramallah – the “weak” partner in peace – and the forgotten Gaza to its authority and poverty, is still the strongest weapon of this extremism.

The result is null for all the shuttle tours that took a lot of George Mitchell’s time, followed by direct pressures exerted by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, thus exhausting much more time from the Palestinians than the Israelis – that is, if they exhausted any of their blackmail abilities to begin with. The Israelis are certainly registering one victory after the other over the American administration’s Democrats, starting with the reduced ability of President Barack Obama to threaten with any sanctions in the face of the outbreak of Jewish settlement activities, and ending with forcing this administration to publicly recognize that this file was no longer on the negotiations table as a first priority.

There is nothing new in saying that the beginning was seen with the slap of the congressional elections, as the Jewish lobby appeared to be the most prominent voter. Moreover, there is nothing new in saying that this bitter experience for the Democrats represented a “rehearsal” for the upcoming presidential elections in the United States. Today, while Obama is “besieged” amid Netanyahu’s blackmail and the Wikileaks scandals which are undermining the remaining trust between some Arabs and the “soft” diplomacy of the American administration, the Palestinians have no incentive to trust the fact that this diplomacy is worth trying again. But what is the alternative?

True, Obama has so far been losing in the battle of the major promises to revive the lifeless Palestinian-Israeli track. However, the Palestinians cannot just rely on scoring points through evidence proving the obstinacy and unwillingness of Netanyahu’s government to find a so-called “balanced” solution, or even one proving Washington’s inability to meet its promises. They are still the biggest losers and will remain in the position of those wagering on weak cards as long as Palestinian division has placed free weapons in Israel’s hands. As for the American game of blackmail, it will remain open to the presidential elections in the United States in 2012.

Once again, the Palestinians would be mistaken if they were to place hope in Obama’s uprising in the face of what they consider to be an Israeli slap of the American president, and if Abbas averts the truth by describing Washington’s recognition of the failure as being “a difficult crisis,” while everyone knows the futility of the attempts to reach a solution with the extremist Israeli right-wing. Consequently, the United States’ return to the dialogue of the deaf in the indirect negotiations will generate results that are worse than null for the Palestinian authority.

In this context, the attempt of Hillary Clinton’s team to promote a new approach placing the border and security files ahead of the settlement conundrum, is a mere attempt to run forward. Moreover, it gives the Israeli time-wasting game all the freedom it needs to eliminate any grounds for the negotiations.

Far from the political vocabulary which no longer has anything to water down at the level of the dead peace process, can the authority or Hamas disregard the Israeli sarcastic question: “What Palestinian state is being recognized by the Brazilians and the Argentines?” We are in the presence of a dead peace and a state which is intended to remain an illusion by Netanyahu, while Hamas and the authority are competing over arrests in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as over claims of torture and human rights violations.

In the meantime, the Israelis are wondering: “When will the Palestinians understand what the Americans have understood,” after they were able to convince the Americans to place the settlement file on the shelf while certainly aware of the fact that the arms of the struggle between the authority and Hamas are a necessity to extend the lifetime of the alliance of extremists in the Hebrew state. There is a great difference between the Palestinian arms of treason and the Gaza authority’s training of its muscles through the protection of public morals on the street, and the Israeli arms of blackmail employed with Washington, through the use of the ammunition of “the alliance of the extremists” that is “sponsored” by Iran.

The difference between the concerns over the Iranian “nuclear” bomb and the fears over the moral situation in the Gaza of the poor, equals the distance between the dream of a Palestinian state and what some Palestinians are doing to thwart it. As for Abbas’ threat to disband the authority, it is similar to a rifle without bullets and is allowing Israel to launch its Judaization battle from the widest doors.

The difference between Obama and Netanyahu is that the former is trying and failing, while the latter is succeeding in convincing the Israelis that they are safe as long as the Palestinians and others in the neighboring states are competing over the prevention of the launching of rockets.

Iranian Source: Mossad Sought To Assassinate Ahmadinejad In Lebanon

By Abdul Sattar Hatita
This article was published in Asharq al-Awsat on 9/12/2010

Cairo - An informed Iranian source revealed that Israeli Mossad attempted to assassinate Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his recent visit to Lebanon. The source also revealed that a number of Iranians visited the Israeli border [with Lebanon] two weeks ago under the protection of Hezbollah, and also accused Washington of attempting to bring the Iranian opposition together under one leadership in order to create tension in Iran.

 
The Iranian source, whom Asharq al-Awsat met early this week, claimed that Iran had observed a number of attempts by Mossad to assassinate Ahmadinejad during his visit to Lebanon in October via the opponents of the Iranian regime, many of whom live in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.
 
The Iranian source added that his country is monitoring the movement of most of these opposition figures "who have sold themselves to the forces of arrogance and Zionism (the West and Israel)."
 
The source said that Tehran did not want to issue an official statement on this issue in order not to give these figures a platform. He told Asharq Al-Awsat that "we do not call them opposition, like the political opposition that we have in the country who stood in the elections against President Ahmadinejad, rather we call them hypocrites, because from abroad they are cooperating with Zionism against the Islamic Revolution, as well as against the people of Iran.." This was a veiled reference to the People's Mujahedin of Iran group [which advocates overthrowing the Iranian government] and other opposition groups.
 
The source also told Asharq Al-Awsat that while the Iranian security authorities cooperated with the official Lebanese security forces in ensuring protection for President Ahmadinejad's visit, the Iranians had "relied more heavily upon the security and military apparatus of the Lebanese Hezbollah party."

 
The Iranian source also disclosed that a number of Iranians had visited the Israeli border two weeks ago under the protection of Hezbollah, although he refused to reveal to Asharq Al-Awsat whether these were government officials, security officials, or ordinary citizens. The source said that this group had reached the Fatima Gate [also known as the Good Fence crossing] close to the village of Kfar Kila in southern Lebanon, which is just a stone's throw from the Israeli border. He said that this Iranian group had been able to view "Zionist military vehicles from there" adding that "it was possible to see their [Israeli] soldiers." He also said that this group had visited the al-Khayam camp in southern Lebanon, an infamous Israeli detention camp where Lebanese citizens are said to have been tortured during the Israeli presence in the country, from 1982 – 2000.
 
As for whether there was any proof that these Iranians had visited the Israeli border from either the Lebanese army that is deployed throughout southern Lebanon or UNIFIL [United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon] that are deployed along the Israeli – Lebanese border, the source told Asharq Al-Awsat that "members of Hezbollah were waiting for the Iranian visitors at all checkpoints they passed through in the south until they reached the Fatima Gate." He added that "if they reached a checkpoint that was guarded either by Lebanese soldiers or internationals observers, members of Hezbollah came to authorize them to pass, and they did not allow any other party to interfere…this region is completely controlled by the resistance…and they are the ones who make the decisions there."
 
The source, who spoke to Asharq Al-Awsat on the condition of anonymity, also accused Washington of seeking to bring together the armed Iranian opposition – including the Kurd, Baluch, Arab, and other secessionists – under one leadership. He claimed that Tehran was in possession of information that 3 parties were acting in coordination to unite the Iranian opposition; revealing that these 3 parties are the US, Israel and Britain. He said that the US was acting directly in this regard, whilst Britan and Israel were acting indirectly. The Iranian source also claimed that the objective of unifying the armed Iranian opposition was to carry out bombings inside Iran.

 
The Iranian source went on to the say that his countries' authorities are carefully monitoring Washington's attempts to unify the Iranian opposition, and that the Iranian authorities had come into possession of this information – and others – following the arrest of opposition leaders and cadres recently.

 
The Iranian source also spoke of attempts by Israel's Mossad – in cooperation with a number of armed opposition groups in Iran – to carry out bombings in Iran. He added that this [cooperation between Mossad and armed anti-governmental groups] was responsible for the recent spate of bombings targeting Iranian nuclear scientists in the country.
 
The Iranian source ended his talk with Asharq Al-Awsat saying that his country is at war with "its enemies" and that "when the public sees its enemies supporting any opposition wing, they distance themselves from it."

A WikiLeaks Warning To Damascus

By Michael Young
This commentary was published in The Daily Star on 9/12/2010

A diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks and released exclusively by The Daily Star earlier this week helps illustrate the precariousness of Syria’s position, as it instructs its allies to push the Lebanese government to discuss the matter of “false witnesses.”

In the cable, written in 2006, Jeffrey Feltman, the US ambassador to Lebanon, reported that the head of the United Nations International Independent Investigative Commission (UNIIIC), Serge Brammertz, had told him the following: “Syria has five different security apparatuses. I can’t imagine that an order came down from [President Bashar Assad] and worked its way through all the security services and until they killed Hariri.” Brammertz then clarified that thought: “If anything, you probably had one security service involved, and the order came from on high and, how high, we’ll have to figure out.”

What Brammertz appeared to be saying was fairly straightforward, for those who recall the security hierarchy at the time in Damascus. Aside from admitting that he was focusing on Syrian involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the commissioner was making an operational observation: It was likely one Syrian security service that had taken part in the crime, by which Brammertz probably meant military intelligence, at the time headed by Assad’s brother in law. The commissioner was merely declaring it unlikely that the entire gamut of Syrian intelligence services were in on the killing of the former Lebanese prime minister; and he was uncertain how far up the chain of command the order to eliminate Hariri had come from.

Far from being a declaration of Syrian innocence, the cable confirms that in 2006 UNIIIC was still convinced that Syria had participated in the Hariri assassination. Sources in UNIIIC have since corroborated this, as did, implicitly, Brammertz’s first report issued in March 2006. The commissioner wrote in the document that investigators believed “there is a layer of perpetrators between those who initially commissioned the crime and the actual perpetrators on the day of the crime, namely those who enabled the crime to occur.”

If we assume, as we must, that the perpetrator was a suicide bomber; and if the prosecutor of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Daniel Bellemare, indicts Hizbullah members for having enabled the crime, that still does not answer who commissioned the crime. It was precisely on that question that Brammertz was exchanging views with Feltman, and his remarks, if we are to believe the cable leaked by WikiLeaks, shows in what direction he hoped to point the finger.

But then he never did. However, the Syrians are not reassured. They realize that although Bellemare’s initial indictments might not touch them, there are no guarantees that subsequent indictments will not do so if the trial opens up new investigative avenues. No one in Damascus can be certain of what lies ahead. There is much testimony in Bellemare’s files collected by the first UNIIIC commissioner, Detlev Mehlis, pointing in the direction of Syria, even if the relative lack of progress during Brammertz’s term creates serious doubts about whether Bellemare would have enough to draft solid indictments.

The Syrians appear to be pursuing two simultaneous objectives with the aim of reviving their supremacy in Lebanon: acceptance by the Lebanese government of measures casting doubt on the credibility of the tribunal for the period after indictments are issued; and avoidance of a debilitating Lebanese confrontation over the tribunal before the legal accusations come out, because Damascus grasps that the indictments would allow it to play Prime Minister Saad Hariri and Hizbullah off against each other, to Syria’s own advantage.

That appears to be one reason why the Syrians have instructed the speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, to undermine efforts by President Michel Sleiman to deal with the “false witnesses” file in the national dialogue sessions. The president wants to buy time, but the Syrian gambit doesn’t allow for much time. And the last thing Bashar Assad wants is for his Lebanese counterpart to act as an effective mediator between the Lebanese, because he covets that role for himself.

Syrian intentions continue to be a matter of debate. Recently, the Syrian deputy foreign minister, Faysal Mekdad, told a Kuwaiti newspaper that Syria had no intention of returning to Lebanon militarily, “no matter how difficult the situation becomes.” There seemed more than a hint of sour grapes and menace in that phrase, against the backdrop of Walid Jumblatt’s statements that if there is instability in Lebanon, the return of the Syrian army would be desirable. Syria would relish the opportunity to bring its soldiers back. The problem is that virtually everyone opposes this, including in all probability Iran and Hizbullah, who have extensive control over the commanding heights of Lebanon’s major security institutions.

Sleiman’s performance is another Syrian preoccupation. Because of the polarization in Lebanon, room has been created for the president to fill the vacuum. However, his leading ministers have taken hits lately. Interior Minister Ziad Baroud has been criticized by pro-Hariri politicians, while Elias Murr has had to fend off criticism for indirectly offering advice to Israel in the event it attacked Lebanon – information contained in a US cable leaked to the pro-Hizbullah Al-Akhbar. Sleiman is the vulnerable man in the middle, and everyone is trying to shove the president in one direction or the other, reminding him that his share in any new government might be reduced.  

It’s an upward climb for Syria in Lebanon. The Feltman cable, though it tells us nothing we didn’t know, will concentrate minds in Damascus, where the urge to both undermine the tribunal and use it as a lever to enhance Syrian influence in Beirut has imposed a subtle balancing act. Mekdad stated that Syria didn’t seek a military return to Lebanon, but he omitted any mention of a political return. Michel Sleiman’s isolation underscores the significance of that exclusion.   

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR and author of “The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle” (Simon & Schuster).