On March 2, I had the opportunity to conduct a short
interview in Hebron with local parliamentarians Dr. Azzam
Salhab, a professor of religion at Hebron University,
and Nizar Ramadan.
The two were among the nine members of the
Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform list that swept all nine Hebron-area seats
in the PLC elections of January 2006. Their election
was all the more remarkable because for four months
prior to the election they had been held in prison in Israel on vague charges
of “membership in an illegal organization” (as opposed to, for example, charges
connected with the commission of specific acts.) A strange
imprisonment because Israel and its western backers had been very eager to get
pro-Hamas people involved in the electoral process. During the only
previous round of PLC elections, back in 1996, Hamas was still so deeply
opposed to the whole Oslo/PA process that they sat the elections out. Their
decision to take part in the 2006 election was widely hailed by westerners as a
constructive development…
Until Hamas won, that is.
So Salhab and Ramadan and the
handful of other Palestinian parliamentarians who were elected from their jail
cells inside Israel were kept in prison even after the election. In June 2006 they were joined there by
scores of other elected legislators from the West Bank, who were simply taken
hostage by Israel to be used as “bargaining chips” in the negotiation to win
the release of Israeli POW Gilad Shalit,
who was captured and held by Palestinian groups in Gaza.
This February, amidst a flurry of rumors that the
long-drawn-out prisoner-exchange negotiations were about to be successfully
concluded, Salhab and Ramadan were among the handful
of captive legislators who were freed. Well, “freed” from the small prison they
had been held in inside Israel to one of the larger, open-air prisons into
which the West Bank has now been transformed for its 2.3 million Palestinian residents.
These negotiations have been conducted between Israel and
Hamas in Egypt, with the Egyptian government acting as intermediary. Last week
they hit another roadblock; and in the wee hours of March 19 the Israeli
military burst into Hebron and several of the other supposedly PA-controlled
areas of the West Bank and arrested ten leading Hamas political leaders. Salhab and Ramadan were among the four PLC members taken in
that raid. So I consider myself quite fortunate to have been able to conduct
the interview with them March 2. I only wish I’d been able to stay longer to
talk with them.
The interview took place mainly in Arabic, in the office the
two men maintain on a main road near the center of Hebron. One other local
political figure joined us a few minutes into the interview. Since I never
learned his name I shall call him merely A.B.
I started by asking how Salhab and
Ramadan saw the political situation after the recent Gaza war. “It was not a
war,” Ramadan immediately replied. “It was simply a fierce Israeli attack on
Gaza.”
The two men said they were hopeful about the prospects of
success in the intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks then underway in Cairo.
“It will be good to bring the two wings of occupied Palestine together,”
Ramadan said, spreading his hands some to represent wings and spelling out that
he was speaking about the geographically separated West Bank and Gaza.
I asked what hopes they had from the new US administration.
Ramadan replied,
We hope that the new American
administration will understand our situation here and start to look at our
situation through its own eyes, not Israel’s eyes as has happened too much
until now. We hope they will
recognize that they have their own American interests in the region and can
change the American policy so it deals with and serves
their own interests, not Israel’s.
We also want to see firm conditions
placed on the Israeli side, and Israel held accountable under those conditions,
rather than just having the conditions placed on our side all the time.
I asked whether and how they judged that conditions had
changed in Hebron in the three and a half years of their imprisonment.
Ramadan:
It is so sad! I see the situation
here so closed in, and the economy so bad. All that talk we heard earlier about
Palestine becoming a ‘New Singapore’—none of it has come to anything!
He said that in addition to the thousands of political
prisoners held by Israel, the security forces of the Ramallah-based
PA were holding “around 700” political prisoners, and that though 33 of these
had recently been released around 70 others had been arrested even since the opening
of the reconciliation talks in Cairo.
AB interjected, asking,
Why do the Americans respect the
results of the Israeli elections but not ours? After all, if Mitchell succeeded
in Northern Ireland it was through including all the different parties in the
negotiations and respecting the results of elections there…
However, Mitchell’s experience here
in 2001 was very different. Here, he failed to have any effect.
American has blackened its image so
badly in the region through the way it has treated us! People here are seeing
and living the results of Americans policy here, every day. You cant fool them.
I asked what expectations the men had of incoming Israeli PM
Netanyahu.
AB said,
They have tried everything to
oppress us, and it has all led to a dead end. The exit from the present
conflict is wellknown: It’s the respect of
Palestinian rights. But Netanyahu’s victory is just a sign that the Israeli
people have continued to move to the right.
He added that Hamas is against the Arab Peace Initiative,
because “it gives too much away to Israel.”
Ramadan:
Actually, it seems clear to us that
Israel doesn’t want negotiations, because if they really wanted negotiations
they could not have found a negotiator better for their interests than the
current leadership of the PA and the PLO.
Hamas is wise because it doesn’t want
to get trapped into the situation of allowing Israel to drag out the
negotiations for another 15 years, like the 15 years they have already won from
this present PA leadership.
Salhab:
Yes, everyone is saying that
nowadays.
The Israeli people bear the
responsibility for what happens, because they elected Netanyahu. And the US
gave them every support. But in truth, the failure of negotiations has been a
big gain for Hamas.
My final question was whether, since they said that Hamas
opposed the Arab peace Initiative, they thought the organization would or
should enter into negotiations conducted more explicitly on the basis of
international law.
Ramadan gave the kind of reply often favored by Hamas
people: “Only if Israel declared its commitment to international law first.”