Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

*** Palestinian views on Dennis Ross.  President Obama’s chief Mideast adviser Dennis Ross is in Jerusalem, trying to find a formula for restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.  Ross’s message to Israel is that in order to prevent its deligimization it must return to the negotiating table on the basis of the proposals put forward by President Obama, namely peace talks based on the 1967 borders with mutually agreed land swaps that take into account the demographic changes that have occurred in the last 44 years.

That Ross is not seen as a neutral party by many Palestinians was made clear in a ‘go home’ message from the pro-Hamas Palestine Information Centre.  A commentary by Khalid Amayirah described Ross as a “venemous Zionist reptile who obviously has no iota of honesty and rectitude”.  Amayirah went on to say that Ross’s mission was “to succeed in convincing the weak Palestinian leadership to succumb to the whims and vagaries of Jewish fascism, especially those voiced ad nauseam by clearly psychotic Jewish supremacists and megalomaniacs such as Binyamin Netanyahu and his cohorts in Washington and Occupied Jerusalem”.

*** Turks and Kurds.  A report on ‘Perceptions and Expectations on the Kurdish Issue’ from Turkey’s Konda research group provides a sombre snapshot of Turkish attitudes to the Kurds.  According to the survey, 47.4% of Turks do not want a Kurdish neighbour and 57.6% do not want a Kurdish daughter-in-law.  Interestingly, supporters of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have stronger opinions than supporters of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).  Of the former, 42.9% don’t want a Kurdish neighbour, 48.8% don’t want a Kurdish business partner, and 51.7% don’t want a Kurdish daughter-in-law.  The respectice figures for CHP supporters are 38.7%, 43.4%, and 47.2%.

Kurdish candidates nominated by the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), but standing as independents, won 36 out of 550 seats in the 12 June election.

*** Russian pessimism on Mideast.  Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, some of the most pessimistic assessments have been coming out of Russia, with constant warnings about the duration of the crisis.  So far the Russian assessment has proven closer to the mark than original Western hopes of rapid and successful transitions.  It is hard to find a Russian Mideast expert who is not pessimistic and who does not believe the crisis will persist for many years.  Sergey Demidenko from the Institute for Strategic Studies and Analysis added to the weight of pessimistic Russian assessments last week, warning of a “second wave of explosions” as a result of unfulfilled expectations.  He said: “Arab societies are developing, and there are many of them; they are very young and demand change while authorities do not supply the change...This is why, one way or another, we shall inevitably witness a second wave of explosions in five or six years.”