Abbas: Israel Promised to Release More Prisoners

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas welcomes a prisoner wearing a Hamas headband after the release of hundreds of prisoners from Israeli jails on October 18, 2011, in Ramallah.

Abbas Momani / AFP / Getty Images

As Palestinians exult in the release of 477 prisoners from Israeli jails, and anticipate the arrival of the 550 more due to be freed in December under the terms of the bargain Hamas brokered for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas is pushing Israel to release even more, citing what he terms a secret promise from a previous prime minister.

Abbas tells TIME in an interview that the promise was made by Ehud Olmert, who preceded Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, and spent months negotiating the details of a potential peace deal with Abbas before being forced from office three years ago. Abbas says the subject of prisoners came up after Olmert twice arranged the release of several hundred prisoners as a good will gesture in advance of peace talks. "And after that I asked him to release some big number," Abbas says. (Press reports at the time mentioned 2,000.) "He said now I cannot because we have a Shalit deal, but I promise you when we conclude Shalit and everything is okay, I will give you, not the same number, not the same quality, more. I think that he repeated it twice in different meetings.

"But," Abbas adds, "he asked me, please keep it secret, confidential between us, because we don't want to affect the deal with Shalit. I said, okay, okay, I will keep it. Now the deal is over, and we will ask them to fulfill their promises." Olmert's negotiations for Shalit's release fell through but Abbas wants Netanyahu to keep his predecessor's promise. (see photos from the prisoner swap between Palestine and Israel.)

In an effort to nudge the process along, Abbas says he laid out the offer to the Obama administration on Wednesday, informing U.S. diplomat Daniel Rubinstein of the details during a meeting in Ramallah. As U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem, Rubinstein is the primary point of contact for Palestinian officials. Abbas says he is also one of two American diplomats who broached the possibility of prisoner releases as a "confidence building" measure Washington was offering to spark the resumption of peace talks.

"The American envoy David Hall, and the counsel general, Daniel Rubinstein, came six or seven months [ago] telling me that President Obama is willing to give you a confidence building measures to be fulfilled by Netanyahu," Abbas says. "I said what kind of confidence building measures? They said to help Gaza, to alleviate the siege around Gaza, to remove some of the roadblocks, to help you in the C area [portions of the West Bank entirely under Israeli control] and to release prisoners.

"What was my answer? No. Why? Because I knew the Israelis will put it on the table and start to negotiate it instead of the final status issues. But after that they returned back two or three times saying, please this is our offer. You have to appreciate it, you have to accept, because you don't' have to do anything. It is free of charge. It will not cost you anything. After the third time I said okay, let us start. Of course they didn't start, nothing happened." (See why the joy of Gilad Shalit's release is tempered by memories of an Intifadeh.)

Neither the American diplomats nor Olmert could be reached Wednesday night, the start of a religious holiday in Jerusalem. But Abbas' account illustrates the potency of the prisoner issue with the Palestinian public. The Shalit deal gave an immediate political boost to Hamas, the Islamist rival of the secular Fatah party Abbas leads. It was a deft political move that changed the subject, at least for a time, from admiration for Abbas' Sept. 23 speech requesting Palestinian statehood at the United Nations. On Tuesday, both the Gaza Strip, which the Islamist party controls, and Ramallah, a solidly Fatah city, were awash in the green flags of Hamas.

"Why not?" Abbas says. "They are celebrating a very big victory — granted by our neighbor." The neighbor is Israel, and the jab betrays his irritation that the Shalit deal boosted Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel's destruction, at the relative expense of Abbas' Palestinian Authority, the body committed to reaching a negotiated end to the conflict and the four-decade occupation of Palestinian territory by Israel troops. Abbas in fact goes on to say he's skeptical that Netanyahu will honor his predecessor's vow on prisoners, the leader of the conservative Likud Party having already declined to accept the positions Olmert negotiated during months of secret peace negotiations with Abbas.

"Of course I doubt that Netanyahu will do it," Abbas says, seated on a couch in his heavily guarded apartment in northern Ramallah. He shrugs. "But I will send to him a message within two or three days, to ask him whether he will accept or not. I'm not going to argue with him or not negotiate with him or to talk in details about it. Either, or. If he doesn't believe us, he can ask Mr. Olmert. He can turn back to the minutes, protocols — everything is in writing. Of course he didn't give us it in writing, but of course his colleagues write everything."

See photos of the five-year ordeal of Gilad Shalit.

See "Gilad Shalit and the End of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process."

Israel: What Occupy Tel Aviv Can Teach Occupy Wall Street

Israelis sleep in a protest tent encampment in central Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2011.

The tents seem to be everywhere now — Wall Street, London, Hong Kong, Madrid — but very little really comes close to what happened in Israel this summer: thousands camping out, hundreds of thousands marching, a society transformed. "It's all part of the same thing. It's people saying, 'We want to be in charge,'" says Stav Shaffir, 26, one of the first Israeli campers. Says Yonatan Levi, also 26, and also an early organizer, on the comparison with the scale of things in New York City: "Sadly I think we were much more successful in transmitting our message and our ability to show up in great numbers. I mean, a half million to a million people!"

The tent protests in Tel Aviv began in muggy mid-July with a handful of young people pitching tents to protest the skyrocketing price of housing in Israel. (Tents, get it?) The first night the reporters outnumbered the protesters, but a chord had been struck. The focus quickly widened to take in a wide gamut of shared complaints about an economy that looked great at the macro level, but had created a growing gap between rich and poor. Inspired in part by the Arab Spring — "People thought, Wow, if they can do it, why can't we do it?" says Shaffir — and in part by Madrid's Indignants movement, the Israeli protests combined and managed the contagious spread seen in Israel's neighbors as well as the difficult economic and social issues similar to those that emerged in Spain. Ground zero, fittingly enough, in the Tel Aviv protests was Rothschild Boulevard, a shady walkway named for a fabulously wealthy family who helped found Israel as a state originally grounded in social welfare. Within two weeks, 40 camps had sprung up around the country. Two weeks later, the camps numbered 100 and marchers 350,000, a whopping turnout in a country of just 7 million.(See photos of Occupy protests from around the world.)

"The spirit of this was amazing," says Shaffir. "That's maybe something you can send to the people at Wall Street: happiness was the key. Journalists asked: 'Is it really serious? Because I see a lot of people smiling.' I said that's what makes it serious. People have hope again."

Another key: nonpartisanship. There was no room for labels and even less for parties in a protest that strove for a "new language" based on common ground staked out in group discussions, assemblies or councils. People shared with strangers what they were embarrassed about confessing to their children: We can't afford the expensive ice cream.

"The other thing that's very important is chaos," says Shaffir, who arrived for a breakfast interview after spending the night talking on Rothschild Boulevard, where a handful of tents had gone up anew, weeks after police dismantled the last vestiges of the main camp. "As a movement that goes up against the most powerful force, if you act like an organization, like an institution, you lose. If you have one head, they know what to cut off. You have to be like water, to be everywhere, to be unpredictable. We work like an open code. Everybody should act their part. Everybody should act like a leader."(Read about New York City protesters holding ground in Zuccotti Park.)

At one end of Rothschild, a headquarters of sorts went up, though it amounted to a few work stations under fabric stretched to keep down the glare on the computers that lay underneath it all. "I think in a way what we see in the streets today is a result of things we were trained for from using the Internet since age 5," says Levi. "I think these assemblies are chat rooms, wide open, with this sense of nonhierarchy, that everyone is equal in the kingdom of the Internet, where there are no kings or queens. We've taken these tools that we've acquired unknowingly — this generation of ours which was blamed for not doing anything in the world — and now we've taken these things we've learned out into the street. And it's pretty impressive I must say."

In Israel, the leap to the masses was both more challenging and, in other ways, a bit easier than elsewhere. Jewish Israeli society is relatively small and cohesive, united in a sense of nationhood and shared risk; almost everyone, for instance, serves in the army. But it is also riven by differences, between secular and religious, between Jews and the 20% of the population that is Arab, between recent immigrant and native-born. Only the black-clad ultra-orthodox religious, who gather in residential enclaves, started the summer with a community, Shaffir notes. "If you're secular, your community is your family, that's all."

"If we talk about tips, the most important thing is to connect the different groups, the different social classes," she says. "And that's the hardest thing."

Yet it happened. In just weeks, the protests that some conservative politicians reflexively dismissed as elitist or leftist swelled into a national movement, drawing Israelis from every class and cohort, all of them beaming as they found one another on the street together. In the tent cities, campers organized kitchens, kindergartens, trash removal, even electing representatives to reclaim a political realm that had grown alien and remote, the province of professional politicians. "And people were so happy," Shaffir says. "Israelis, for so many years, didn't feel like we could do anything."(Read about rioters hijacking Rome's Occupy protest.)

In time the political establishment scrambled to respond, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu naming a committee to list specific actions — more money for child care, less for defense — that many in the group call a misapprehension of what was, at bottom, something more diffuse: a remaking of the national consciousness. "The fact that we have no specific list of demands is very hard for them," says Levi, referring to the Knesset, the Israeli legislature. "I'm not sure we've directly affected the political system yet, but I'm sure we will. Because the people who elect these robots spent many hours in the tent cities. It was a learning experience."

The lessons continue. The other day organizers set out to secure Tel Aviv's main public gathering place, Rabin Square, for a follow-up demonstration. They learned it would cost them around $5,000. "That's a disgrace," says Shaffir. "It's like your right of protest is also privatized."

So they decided they didn't need the permission of the very people they were opposing. "We just told everybody we're going to reoccupy Rothschild," she says. "It made everybody happy, because we were getting back to the streets." — With reporting by Aaron J. Klein / Tel Aviv

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Is Israel Again Weighing an Attack on Iran's Nuclear Facilities?

"I think the most effective way to deal with Iran is not on a unilateral basis," Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters in Israel on Tuesday, stressing that the Israeli government needed to act in concert and consensus with the international community. Israeli reporters noted his repeated use of the word together when it came to dealing with Iran. Panetta's comments, coming barely a month after the U.S. reportedly agreed to deliver 55 bunker-busting GBU-28 bombs to Israel, were widely viewed as an "down, boy" message to any adventurist bomb-Iran impulses on the part of Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Curiously enough, the very same day, recently retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan also saw fit to publicly tamp down hysteria over Iran's nuclear progress, and to pour cold water over any "military option" for dealing with it. Dagan, who has previously publicly decried the idea of bombing Iran as "the stupidest thing I've ever heard" and warned that it could plunge Israel into a conflict it couldn't win, again publicly pooh-poohed the military option, saying there were more effective ways of dealing with Iran's nuclear program. And he stressed that Iran was nowhere close to being able to build a bomb.   Dagan and the official U.S. intelligence assessment concur that while using its nuclear program to acquire the technological means to build a bomb, the Iranian leadership has not yet taken a strategic decision to actually build such a weapon.

Indeed, an unnamed senior Israeli official fretted in the Jerusalem Post on Sunday  that "Iran very well could continue on its current course for a while, during which it continues to enrich uranium like it is today but without going to the breakout stage and publicly making a nuclear weapon." Maintaining the ambiguity of having -- but not exercising the option to break out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, expel IAEA inspectors and build a weapon, the paper wrote, "avoid(s) providing the world with the justification to either increase sanctions or to use military action to stop it."

Indeed, right now there's precious little support anywhere in the international community for starting a war with Iran on the grounds that it has acquired the technology to build nuclear weapons. Netanyahu has always preferred discussing the existential threat he insists Israel faces from Iran -- although even Barak has publicly challenged the idea that Iran would risk obliteration by launching a nuclear attack on Israel -- to dealing with the Palestinian question, but the "Arab Spring" has drained the life out of his claim that action against Iran carries the support of moderate Arab regimes. President Hosni Mubarak, often rolled out as Exhibit A in that argument, is gone, and the generals that replaced him moved immediately to normalize relations with Iran. And much of the Arab world has responded to the turmoil of the past year by moving increasingly out of the U.S. orbit.

Turkey, whose regional influence is growing -- at the expense of both Iran and the United States -- may be a NATO member state, and as such agreed recently to install an anti-ballistic missile radar on its border with Iran, but it has challenged the U.S.-Israeli approach to dealing with the Iran nuclear issue. In a recent interview with TIME, Prime Minister Recep Tayipp Erdogan said Turkey opposes "the presence of nuclear weapons in our region," but has seen no evidence to back the assumption that Iran seeks to weaponize nuclear material. "And let me ask you," he continued, "who is under threat? Is it Israel or the countries in the vicinity of Israel that are under threat? Israel has nuclear weapons. How can you explain this to me? There are no sanctions on Israel, but all the other countries in the neighborhood are suffering from sanctions... It would be unacceptable for us to ratify this approach. There's injustice there."

And even Iran's most intractable Arab foe, Saudi Arabia, is not on board for a military campaign against Iran despite its fervent opposition to any move by Iran to weaponize nuclear material. Unlike Turkey, Saudi Arabia supports sanctions to pressure Iran to refrain from pursuing nuclear weapons, but the influential former intelligence minister Prince Turki al-Faisal told a conference in Geneva last month that "military strikes would be entirely counter-productive". And he made clear that Riyadh was not simply calling on Iran to renounce nuclear weapons, but instead, like Turkey and Egypt, is pressing to make the Middle East a nuclear weapons-free zone -- in other words, to include Israel's nuclear capacity in the equation, rather than protect its monopoly on strategic weapons. Needless to say, Israel has shown little interest in such proposals, but the idea of winning the support of other states in the region for an unprovoked attack on Iran's nuclear facilities seems increasingly far-fetched.

Still, Israel's strategy all along is to encourage the belief in the Iranians that Israel will launch air-strikes once Iran's nuclear progress crosses some undefined red line -- well, less undefined than flexible; Iran has crossed every previous red line set by the Israelis and the U.S. in respect of acquiring nuclear technologies. So the latest round of chatter could be nothing more than the by-now quotidian Israeli saber rattling designed to make Iran believe that it faces imminent military action. Israeli observers have argued that because winter weather makes such complex air strikes more difficult, Israel has a two-month window of opportunity to launch an assault on Iran's nuclear facility. And some in Israel make the case that President Barack Obama's political vulnerability, and his concern to avoid being seen to be clashing with the Israeli leadership, make this an optimal moment to present Washington with a fait accompli by bombing Iran, on the assumption that the U.S. would have no choice but to back Israel up in the aftermath.

But the pressures Obama might face in the political system would likely be counterbalanced by those from the U.S. military, whose leaders have long made clear their belief that an Israeli military strike on Iran would have disastrous consequences both for Israel and for U.S. forces throughout the Middle East. Also, Netanyahu is more cautious than many in Israel's political establishment when it comes to starting wars. And he'll also know that initiating hostilities with Iran could fatally weaken Washington's ability to shield Israel from international isolation on a scale suffered by the South African government during the apartheid era -- which, of course, is what the Palestinian leadership is pressing for, in order to create leverage to force Israeli to agree to withdraw from the territories it captured in 1967.

So we may as easily be looking at another round of posturing without serious intent, based on the idea that the Iranians need to believe that Israel is poised to start a war to stop Iran acquiring the capacity to build nuclear weapons, in order to deter its nuclear activities (although there's no evidence that this approach has worked over the past five years). But Netanyahu's claims of Iran representing an intolerable threat will have been helped by Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei's comments last weekend rejecting the Palestinians bid for U.N. recognition of a state based on the 1967 lines, calling Israel a "cancerous tumor" that could not be allowed to survive in the Middle East. Indeed, as Iranian scholar Trita Parsi, who has studied the Iran-U.S.-Israel relationship over decaes, wrote last weekend, the dangerous escalation of rhetoric amid the absence of communication channels between the U.S. and an increasingly isolated, embattled and skittish Iran raise the danger of an unintended lurch into tragedy. He warns of declining American influence creating a vacuum that a number of competing forces are jockeying to fill, and that the decision-making of key players is increasingly shaped by domestic politics rather than strategic calculation. Parsi writes:

This near-collapse of statecraft is clearly visible in Israel. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to limit its foreign policy maneuverability to whatever its fragile governing coalition can endure. Disproportionate foreign policy risks are accepted in order to prolong the life span of the coalition at the expense of Israel's long-term interest...

"In Iran, political cannibalism within the Iranian elite has reached new heights. While this has not necessarily given birth to a new Iranian adventurism (beyond the harsh rhetoric), it has paralyzed the state and weakened its ability to maneuver in a changing strategic environment. This is particularly the case when it comes to crucial issues such as its relations with the United States...

"This paralysis is all the more dangerous in an environment in which the parties aren't on talking terms. This has led to a collapse of statecraft and an increase in bluster that could prove quite dangerous. One small spark could cause a conflagration."