Author: Helena

A journalistic war-dog reflects

Todd Pitman, whose name has bylined many of AP’s stories out of Iraq over the past few years, has written a beautiful and reflective piece (also here) about the death-by-fire in May 2007 of his friend and colleague, the Russian news photog Dmitry Chebotayev, 29.
Pitman starts by describing nightmares that he still has about what he recalls happening in the immediate aftermath of Dmitry’s killing, which took place in the midst of what sounds like a fierce fire-fight:

    When the gunshots ease, I survey the scene nervously.
    I circle around one body in particular: a man in a maroon shirt, lying face up. Carefully, deliberately, I take photo after photo, capturing it at different angles. The Stryker is just behind, shadowed by a large golden-domed mosque across the street. I think this is an Iraqi civilian in a dishdasha gown, perhaps one of the attackers.
    I am expecting Dmitry to come running with his camera, but he does not appear. I think soldiers are keeping him back — photographing American casualties is often taboo.
    Inside an abandoned house where we seek shelter, I ask where he is.
    “Out front,” a soldier says. “You OK?”
    I am relieved, thankful.
    I know we will share these stories later: a dangerous time, a brush with death, but we escaped unharmed.
    Desperate to talk to Dmitry, I wander outside again. I still can’t find him, and ask somebody else where he is.
    Inside the house, a dozen red-eyed, mourning soldiers are sitting against the walls, staring angrily toward the harsh light outside.
    Until this moment, I am an observer.
    When a soldier answers, I become one of them.
    I am numb.
    Dmitry is outside on the ground near the door — the one wearing the maroon shirt. His blue flak jacket, helmet and sunglasses are gone. His smashed camera is on the ground beside him. His face is covered in dust.
    When I gain the strength to go out and look, he is gone. Soldiers have carried him away.
    Now I want to ask him: Can you forgive me taking your picture?
    And I ask myself: Why was I taking his picture, any of these pictures, at all?
    ___
    For a journalist, the world unfolds as an infinite stream of events. Your job is to witness them, capture them, explain them.
    But they build up inside you.
    I traveled to Iraq half a dozen times for the Associated Press over the years. I saw families crouching in their homes while Americans fought on their rooftops. I heard the screams of a dying Iraqi soldier as we crawled on a roof under a boiling midday sun. I watched helicopter gunships fire rockets across a twilit sky at insurgents holed up in palm groves below.
    Unlike everybody else, I was always able to hop on a plane and leave it all behind, returning to a world where you did not cringe, where you could walk — not run — down the street, without worrying about trip wires or bombs or snipers.
    I was always able to leave it all behind — until Dmitry was killed.
    That day, I crossed through a kind of looking glass, and saw the war in Iraq from another side.
    To the daily churn of news, it was just one more tragic story.
    To me, it was far more profound. It reverberated through lives thousands of miles away, changing them forever.
    I think about all the stories we have written — all the headlines and statistics that comprise the daily death tolls.
    I do not look at them so casually anymore.
    ___
    At the end of May, I traveled to Moscow for Dmitry’s funeral and met his parents, sister and girlfriend.
    They didn’t really know what had happened, and telling them, between shots of ice-cold vodka, was one of the hardest things I have ever done. (Dmitry, it turned out, had never told his parents he was going to Iraq. They thought he was in Jordan, shooting pictures of refugees).
    His death forced me to slow down my 100 mph life. In less than a year, I had traveled to Iraq twice, with 20 countries and a coup in Thailand in between.
    My fiancee and I took a long vacation visiting family and friends, swimming with giant turtles in a sapphire-blue Hawaiian bay. We got married. And now she is pregnant with our baby boy.
    I could not be happier — except when I think about what happened.
    I have not returned to Iraq, but I’ve been back many times in my mind.
    Often, I see Dmitry smiling.
    Often, I see him dead.
    In my dreams, I lean down and hold what is left of him. I do not care about the blood.
    I press my forehead to his — as I did not have the chance to do — then tell him I am sorry, and say goodbye. It is important for me to recognize him, to treat him as a human being — not the object of a camera lens.
    I take no pictures, and I am finally at ease.
    But this is not a peaceful place.
    Nearly a year later, I still wonder what we could have done differently. I feel stupid for seeking the war out. And I’m haunted by the words — “Be careful what you wish for” — that one soldier said to us the day before Dmitry died, as we resolved to go out with the Strykers again.
    Now I am left with questions, memories and hundreds of digital photographs that I can no longer look at, that I cannot show anyone and cannot throw away. ..

Pitman asks some absolutely crucial questions about the role of journalists in war situations. I know, because for several years after I finished working as a war correspondent in Lebanon in the 1970s I suffered from several symptoms that today would be classified as PTSD. At times it was only, really, the grinding daily need to be there as the (single) mother for my kids that me going. (The therapeutic effects of folding a pile of laundry made up of small kids’ clothes has never, I feel, been explored as deeply as it should have been.)
Journalists are trained to be professionally present in the most harrowing of situations while keeping their souls and their emotions absent from these situations. Actually, if you’re in a stressful situation, then having something to do is certainly better than not having something to do. So chalk up going out there with a notebook and pen– or, as in Pitman’s case that night, a notebook, pen, and camera– in the middle of a stressful situation as being another excellent coping mechanism, too.
But of course, as Pitman, Elizabeth Rubin, and a host of other fine war correspondents have discovered, you can’t absent your emotions and your soul from these situations. They will come back and bite you later.
So I really admire, certainly, all the journalists who– quite literally– have put their lives on the line in order to tell the world about the grisly and horrendous realities of war. But I think I have special admiration for those who also take the huge professional and personal risk of trying to tell us what it feels like, to them, as they do so.
Thanks, Todd Pitman, for a great and sensitive writing job. I really sympathize about your loss of your friend.

Ehud Barak the blocker?

Abu Mazen has been quoted as saying that a “senior figure” in the Israeli cabinet has been blocking the Israel-Hamas peace deal and he is widely thought to have been referring to Defense Minister Ehud Barak. As some possible corroborating evidence for this, note that IOF troops operating undercover killed five militants in an assassination op in the West Bank today. Of the five, four were reported as being Islamic Jihad and one with the (Fateh-linked) Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
In the west, Ehud Barak is generally widely thought of as a relative “peacenik” among Israeli political leaders. In 1999, when he was head of the Labor Party, he was indeed elected PM on a strongly pro-peace platform. (“I will complete the negotiations with the Palestinians within 6-9 months,” etc.) He failed miserably. In fact, he was hustled at the speed of light out of being the IDF’s chief of staff into being head of Labor, and never had time to learn anything at all about politics or diplomacy along the way. Hence, the coalition that he headed in Israel fell apart in almost record time, because of his total lack of political skills. The “peace process” fell apart disastrously, too, bringing us n short order Sharon’s disastrous September 2000 visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and Sharon’s amazing trioumphant re-entry into national leadership just 17 years after the Kahan Commission had said he should be banned from high office for life.
Along the way, Barak did make what could be described as two “drive-by, quickie” attempts at peacemaking. One with Hafez al-Asad, which failed miserably because of Barak’s arrogance and duplicity (and Bill Clinton’s complicity with both those aspects of Bark’s behavior.) That failure almost certainly helped kill Hafez al-Asad. After that one failed, Barak turned those same attributes in Yasser Arafat’s direction, forcing him to the completely ill-prepared Camp David 2 summit from which both Barak and Clinton emerged vociferously and in a quite one-sided way blaming Arafat.
My best friends in the Israeli peace movement heap a lot of blame on Barak for killing the Israeli peace movement at that point. By successfully spreading the (significantly inaccurate) story that he had made Arafat a “generous offer” and that Arafat had turned it down out of hand, Barak spread the idea very broadly in Israel and the US that the Israelis had “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side.
Israel’s Labour Party has always been a flawed vehicle for any hopes of concluding a just and sustainable peace. One problem with the party since its inception has been the extremely incestuous relationship between its leadership and that of the Israeli military. Some of the IDF’s retired generals have become voices of good sense regarding the need for peacemaking; but many more of them have not. People like Ephraim Sneh, Binyamin (“Fouad”) Ben-Eliezer, and Ehud Barak have taken into the party’s upper echelons the mindset of bulldozers and bullies. They are also very much aware of the huge interests many of their friends and former colleagues have in the success of Israel’s massive military-industrial complex.
So I’m not totally surprised now if we see Ehud Olmert being more forward-leaning on peace issues than Ehud Barak.
Let’s hope Barak gets up to no more mischief and the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal can still be saved.

Israel-Hamas deal closer; New role for Abu Mazen

Hamas looks as though it is moving ever closer to concluding the ceasefire (Tahdi’a) deal with Israel. (For previous sit reps on this see 1 and 2.) A couple of important markers this morning:
— Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh has publicly laid out the terms and extent of the deal his movement seeks. That Reuters reports says this:

    “There must be a commitment by Israel to end all acts of aggression against our people, assassinations, killings and raids, and lift the (Gaza) siege and reopen the crossings,” Ismail Haniyeh, leader of Hamas’s administration in the Gaza Strip, said in a speech. [It was at Gaza’s Islamic University, much of which was destroyed by Fateh in fighting last year.]
    A ceasefire, he said, should be “reciprocal, comprehensive and simultaneous,” apply both to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and be approved by other Palestinian factions.

— This same position is also substantially confirmed from Hamas’s over-all leadership, the political bureau based in Damascus. The Hamas-linked PIC website also looks as though it is preparing Hamas’s Palestinian supporters for the news of the hopefully imminent conclusion of the ceasefire deal, by framing it in the context of a report that Olmert has acknowledged his government’s failure to stop the Gaza-originated rocket attacks on southern Israel.
— Progress is also apparently being made in the effort to achieve an intra-Palestinian reconciliation. Hamas head Khaled Meshaal is supposed to be in Yemen today or tomorrow to help Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh along with that.
Paradoxically, as Israel and Hamas move closer to achieving a (hopefully) workable, Gaza-based ceasefire agreement Fateh boss and PA president Mahmoud Abbas will be taking on a new role: that of the “public face” of intermediation between the two sides. The leaders of both Israel and Hamas both need him to play that role, since neither of those sets of leaders wants to stand up and tell their people openly that they are dealing directly with the other.
Abu Mazen himself probably doesn’t relish playing the role of “front man” for either of these two much bigger and more significant parties. But it’s not as if he has many other options.
Update, Wed., 11:20 EST:
This new report from Haaretz’s Ami Issacharoff neatly illustrates Abu Mazen’s emerging role, and the weakness that has pushed him into it. Issacharoff wites:

    A deal being formulated between Israel, Egypt and Hamas involves deploying Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ troops at the crossings with the Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources told Haaretz yesterday.

Note there who is doing the negotiating and who would merely get to be “deployed” by those negotiators…

US war in Iraq: the financial cost to Americans

Nobel Economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have recently tallied the overall cost to the US economy of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq at $3 trillion. I haven’t read enough of their study to understand what assumption they are using there for the future length of the war going forward. (Can anybody know that at this point? If John McCain is serious about committing the US to the battlefield there for “100 years”, then at what point do the costs of that engagement become simply unquantifiable? Pretty soon into the 100 years, I’d say.)
Next week we will mark the fifth anniversary of this tragic engagement. In those five years Iraq, the country, has been essentially destroyed. Scores of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis have lost their lives. More than four million of them have been displaced within or outside the country’s borders. Compared with the suffering that the war has inflicted on Iraqis, it seems almost trivial to mention the loss it has inflicted on the US citizenry. Nearly 4,000 volunteer service members have been killed, and tens of thousands more left with lasting physical injuries; hundreds of thousands with mental and spiritual injuries. (Remembering that just about all Iraq’s 30 million people have been left with mental and spiritual injuries by the war.)
And then, there is also the cost of the financial costs to the US citizenry, which in themselves are by no means trivial.
What was the war alleged to be “about”, again? Oh, WMDs, you might remember. SUNY Purchase professor Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has tallied the total budget of the UN’s 2002 inspection operation in Iraq (UNMOVIC) at “approximately $80 million, which includes the initial purchase of permanent equipment.” The budget of UNMOVIC’s predecessor, UNSCOM was “$25-30 million per year.” What is more, UNSCOM worked! Its operations and attentiveness did indeed lead to Saddam Hussein ending and destroying all his WMD programs sometime in the mid 1990s.
So imagine if, in 2002, in response to all the– as it turned out, completely hyped up, cherry-picked, and perhaps downright fabricated– allegations about Saddam still having WMD programs, the US had allowed the UN simply to continue with the UNMOVIC program, which was much more intrusive yet than the UNSCOM program.
(Which had worked… Did I mention that before?)
It would have cost the international community around $80 million a year.
Instead of which, the US taxpayers, with almost no help from anyone else (and after all, why should they?) are currently paying out on the continuing war in Iraq at a rate that Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate at $12 billion per month. That is, $144 billion per year.
Back in January 2003, when I went with my friends from the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice to the City Council hearing at which our city became formally designated as a “City for Peace”, I spoke to the councillors and explained how– after my study of Israel’s lengthy military invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon, I had noted the degree to which maintaining that occupation had become a massive drag on Israel’s economy. (I wrote about that, too, in those pre-war months of 2003.) And I told the city councillors that it was evident that:

    (1) the US would find it far harder to get out of Iraq than it was to get in, in spite of all the talk about a “cake-walk”, etc;
    (2) The costs of the maintaining the post-invasion occupation would be huge, and mounting;
    (3) Just the logistics costs alone, of sustaining a massive occupation force at such a distance from the US’s own borders, would be exponentially higher than the comparable costs had been for Israel, given that Lebanon was right next door; and
    (4) All this money would have to come from somewhere; and it would in fact come out of the US’s ability to provide decent basic services for its own citizens at home, which meant that it would be communities like Charlottesville that would end up suffering.

Guess what. It has all been happening.
This morning, as I drove from C’ville up to Washington DC I was listening to the hearing the Senate Appropriations Committee held on the costs of the war. Depressing, indeed. But at least we have a democratic majority in the senate which is holding hearings like this. I thought the Committee Chair pro-tem Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) did a great job.

Support democratic principles in Egypt!

Reuters is reporting from Cairo that Egypt’s biggest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood says that only 50 or 60 of the thousands of its members who have tried to register as candidates in the April 8 local elections have been allowed to do so.
Reuters reports this:

    Since the middle of February police have detained, usually without charges, more than 300 Brotherhood members who were planning to stand or who were helping with campaigning.
    Muslim Brotherhood officials said on Monday that the movement planned to field about 7,000 candidates for the 52,600 seats at stake in the elections on village, town, district and provincial councils across the country.
    The Brotherhood seeks an Islamic state through non-violent, democratic means. The government calls it a banned organisation but allows it to operate within limits.

Egypt’s President Husni Mubarak receives considerable financial, military, and “security sector” support from the US and from other western democracies. Now is a time for democrats in western and other countries to stand up. Do we support democracy in other countries only when it brings to power people who agree completely with our own views? Or do we support the participation in it of all parties and movements that agree to abide by the rules of the democratic game, first and foremost among them being an agreement to settle differences through nonviolent means?
Regarding the use of violence and violent intimidation sin the prent confrontation between the Mubarak regime and the opposition political forces in Egypt, look at any of the pictures of what is happening at the candidate-registration places and read any of the accounts of what is happening, and you decide: which side is trying to use violence and intimidation?
Western governments should inform Mubarak that the aid they give him is completely conditional on him allowing these long-planned elections to proceed in a free and fair manner. Otherwise, what kind of “democracy” is it that these governments proclaim?

Will this Israel-Hamas de-escalation continue?

Barak Ravid and Amos Harel of Haaretz tell us that PA President Mahmoud Abbas told al-Arabiyya t.v. that

    Hamas has asked Israel to refrain from killing its leaders, and the leaders of militant movement Islamic Jihad. Abbas said “I think that Israel has agreed or will soon agree.” He added that the details of the agreement will likely emerge in the coming days.

I couldn’t find it on Arabiyya’s English-language site and didn’t have time to look on their Arabic-language site.
All the reporting I’m seeing today (read below) indicates that:

    (1) There has been a notable lull in the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas;
    (2) The Israel-Hamas negotiations currently being mediated by Egypt, that I wrote about in depth here on Saturday, are now very serious indeed; and the present lull may well be designed– by the relevant actors on all sides– to give them the maximum chance to succeed; and
    (3) The desire for revenge stirred up in some quarters in Israel by last week’s killings in the Mercaz Harav yeshiva may well have been deflected by Olmert away from Gaza and into the announcement of a couple of new settlement-construction projects in the occupied West Bank.

It is worth noting, too, that as Husni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt acts in this matter it is acutely aware of the rising pressure it faces from its own, very strongly pro-Hamas citizenry.
AP reports from Jerusalem today that officials there say that PM Olmert,

    has instructed the army to scale back airstrikes and raids into the Gaza Strip in response to a recent drop in rocket fire from the territory…
    Israeli defense officials and the Hamas rulers of Gaza said there was no formal truce in place. But the officials in Olmert’s office said the prime minister had ordered the army to rein in its operations to allow Egypt to proceed in mediation talks.

This is an intriguing follow-up to what I was reporting here on Saturday, namely that the Egypt-mediate Israel-Hamas negotiation seemed to be making serious progress.
Haaretz’s Ravid and Harel write this:

    Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel would continue to operate against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
    “The fighting is ongoing and will continue and will at times increase and decrease,” he said.
    “There is not at this point any agreement,” Barak said. “But if today people go to school in Ashkelon without Grad-type [rockets], or sit in Sderot and Sapir College without Qassams, I wouldn’t propose complaining about any quiet day, but at any moment in which we need to act, we will.”
    Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also said Monday that no comprehensive cease-fire had been reached. Hamas officials said their leaders would, however, continue Egyptian-led efforts to secure a truce.
    The government recently ordered the IDF to exercise restraint in operations in the Gaza Strip, pursuant to what a senior government official termed new rules of the game forged in the aftermath of last week’s military operation in Gaza.

A separate piece in Haaretz, co-written by Harel and Ami Issacharoff, gives details of the decline in Gaza-sourced rocketings of southern Israel in recent days, though they concluded this didn’t seem to have been the result of a specific agreement between Israel and Hamas. They wrote:

    At its peak, on February 29, some 50 rockets were fired each day, mostly by Hamas militants. In the middle of last week, the rate dropped to 10-15 rockets per day, fired by more extremist groups – but the Qassams were provided to them mostly by Hamas. Since last Friday, one or two rockets have been fired each day.

As for the Hamas-linked Palestine Information Center, yesterday it reported from Cairo that,

    Egyptian diplomatic sources have revealed that a comprehensive plan for calm, ending siege and opening crossings in the Gaza Strip was ready with international approval but still facing difficulties.
    The sources … added that the Americans as well as the Europeans were supportive of the Egyptian efforts.
    They explained that the mediation bid targets achieving calm, lifting the siege, solving inter-Palestinian problems and resuming negotiations.

Today the PIC reported from Damascus that “Mohamed Nasr, a member of the Hamas political bureau, categorically denied that his Movement had reached an agreement on a truce with the Israeli occupation through Egypt.” But Nasr also said that the negotiations in Egypt were ongoing.
If the present “lull” can indeed be hardened into a formally agreed– and hopefully also credibly monitored— ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that will be excellent news: for the Palestinians, for the Israelis, and for the prospects of a much broader calming of tensions throughout the whole region.
In the context of such a calming, everyone concerned about the region’s wellbeing can proceed with due haste to the broader kinds of negotiation that were urged by the Iraq Study Group: one on the terms of (and context for) the US withdrawal from Iraq, and the other on a sustainable and comprehensive final Arab-Israeli peace agreement on all outstanding tracks.
Neither of those two broader negotiations can even start to be addressed so long as the armed conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, and so long as Israel maintains its completely inhumane siege of Gaza. Therefore let’s hope the most recent de-escalation continues, accelerates, and deepens.

Good recent resources on Palestinians and nonviolence

Ten days ago I had the pleasure of attending a book event for Mary E.
King, in connection with the recent publication of her book A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian
Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Nation Books,
2007).  Mary is a long-time friend and colleague, and this book is
a compendious mine of information on its subject. 

Once I decided to write something here about Mary’s book, I thought it
would also be a good idea to discuss with the people who were my
collaborators and co-authors in the International Quaker Working Party
on Israel and Palestine of 2002-2004, to see if we could also put up
onto the web the great
chapter on Nonviolence in our 2004 book When the Rain Returns:
Toward Justice and
Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel.  So I consulted with Tony Bing, who was the principal author of that
chapter and with the 12 other– mainly Quaker– people who were the
other co-authors of the book project; and now, I am happy to be able to do this.
(Sadly, our friend Misty Gerner, who was a wonderful colleague on the
project, passed away in 2006.  So I consulted with her widower and
literary executor, Phil Schrodt, in her place.)

The good news, therefore: You can now access our Nonviolence chapter here in HTML format and here as a Word doc. 
Please note the licensing conditions at the top there — as well as the
instructions for how you can order a copy of the whole of our book,
which is certainly still worth reading!

… Mary King brought to her book a long engagement in both the
practice and the study of nonviolence.  Back in the early 1960s
she was one of “a tiny handful” of white women from the northern
American states who traveled to the south to work with the Southern
racial eqaulity movement called the “civil rights movement” that was
led by Martin Luther King, Jr..  Her memoir of those days, Freedom Song, later won the Robert
F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award.  Her second book was Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
which surveyed not only the nonviolent freedom movements led by those
two men but also half a dozen more recent nonviolent movements for
radical social change.  Along the way she also got a doctorate in
the topic of the role of nonviolence in international relations. 
She has been closely involved in Middle Eastern issues for many years
and has done numerous projects with President Jimmy Carter’s Carter
Center.  Indeed, Carter contributed a short Foreword to Mary’s
latest book.

Reading the book brought back so many memories for me!  The first
intifada, which ran from 1987 through 1993, truly was a time of
enormous social, organizational, and ideological excitement for the
Palestinians of the occupied territories– as it was, too, for those
Israeli sympathizers who were mounting their own nonviolent actions
within Israel, with a view to “Ending the Occupation” and “Bringing the
Troops Home.”  I spent two periods of time in Palestine and Israel
in those years: one visit that lasted two months or so, as I recall it,
in the summer of 1989, and then a shorter visit in 1992. 
Actually, in 1989, I started off doing some research oin the nonviolent
movements on both sides of the Green Line–  work that was
subsequently published in two articles in the short-lived “Wolrd
Monitor” monthly magazine… (I should really look them out and re-read
them.)  But then I became fascinated with the relationship between
the people inside the OPTs who were running and leading their own
intifada there and the PLO leadership that was stuck in distant Tunis;
and I published an article on that topic in the Spring 1990 issue of
the Middle East Journal.

A couple of aspects of Mary’s book are particularly noteworthy. 
One was the way she was able to convey just how widespread and
all-encompassing the mass organizing was that lay at the heart of the
resilience the Palestinians showed in the first intifada.  For
example, she has a whole chapter on “Women at the forefront of
nonviolent struggles” during the intifada, and another on the
“Movements of students, prisoners, and work committees.” 
Actually, a really good complement to these chapters is Joost
Hiltermann’s classic 1993 book Behind the Intifada which
provided a very rich account of the development of the many kinds of
mass organizations in the OPTs in the years before 1987 as well as (as
I recall it) during the early years of the first intifada.

Another notable aspect of Mary’s book is that at many points it
underlines the huge role that was played during the first intifada by
the activist Palestinian intellectuals who were based in occupied East Jerusalem. 
Back in those days, the “special” status the Israelis acorded to East
Jerusalem by virtue of their claim that it was “part of” Israel meant
that the city’s 150,000 indigenous Palestinian residents had broad
freedoms to travel, both inside Israel and throughout the West Bank;
and even down to Gaza– that their compatriots in the rest of the
occupied territories did not have.  Because of those freedoms, and
because East Jerusalem really still was in so many ways the historic
business, religious, and educational hub of the whole of the West Bank,
as it had been since the nakba
of 1948, the city’s community leaders played a huge role not only in
coordinating but also in leading the actions of the first intifada.

As I have noted several times before, it was only after Oslo that the
Israelis started erecting a ring of steel around East Jerusalem,
cutting it off in any way they could think of from its historic West
Bank hinterland and forcing many aspects of the city’s life to wither
on the vine.  Since Israel was at the same time also building the
fence that started to completely enclose Gaza, the residents of East
Jerusalem then became effectively shut off from that other main
concentration of the “also-occupied” among the Palestinians. 
Thus, since Oslo, the Jerusalem Palestinians have been cast into a
cut-off form of limbo, and their once-proud institutions have been
either suffocated or– as in so many cases– shut down completely by
the occupation authorities, even while the building of Jews-only
settlements and Israeli ministries and other forms of national
institutions has continued apace within every corner of the city…

So there is a particular poignancy to reading Mary’s account of the
crucial and exciting leadership role the Jerusalem Palestinians played
in the first intifada.

Her book is very broad, very detailed, and meticulously
researched.  I might wish, though, that she had taken the story a
couple of steps further and added a couple of chapters about what
happened at the end
of the first intifada, that is, effectively, what happened with the
September 1993 signing of the Oslo Accord and then, hot on its heels,
the “Return” of the PLO leadership from Tunis to the OPTs.  In our
chapter on Nonviolence in When the
Rain Returns we wrote quite a lot about that, because we judged it to be an important part of the whole long story of
nonviolence activism among the Palestinians.

Regarding what became of the Palestinians’ use of, and attitudes
towards, nonviolence as the intifada ground on and on, we wrote:

  • … As the intifada dragged on
    into its fourth and fifth years with no respite in sight, the
    Palestinians’ use of physical violence mounted–both against the
    Israelis and to try to resolve differences of opinion inside
    Palestinian society.  National unity
    started to erode, as national exhaustion set in.
  • The activists and leaders of the intifada
    had all along resisted the urgings of Israeli and U.S. government officials
    that they negotiate their own future themselves, without involving the
    exiled PLO.  “Only the PLO can represent
    us,” they stated repeatedly.  In 1993, they
    got what they had asked for: Israel did finally conclude
    the Oslo Accords directly with the PLO.   Once
    Arafat and his colleagues “returned” to the occupied territories,
    however, they proved a hugely damaging disappointment for the people
    there.  Long used to the secretive,
    authoritarian ways of an exile-based underground, Arafat almost
    immediately felt threatened by the network of community organizations
    he found in Gaza and the West Bank.  As Raji
    Sourani reminded us in Gaza,
    Arafat then set about
    working to dismantle the very community-based organizations whose
    grassroots activism had brought him back to his homeland.

We also have a whole section there on the debate that raged inside the
Palestinian movement on the question of nonviolence, in the decade
after 1993.

More from Rabbani on Fateh

    My esteemed colleague Mouin Rabbani was kind enough to send me a speedy and thoughtful response to the comments I wrote here, a couple of days ago, about the short article he wrote on Fateh in the latest issue of the “Arab Reform Bulletin”. Here it is, with his permission but under a headline composed by myself. ~HC

More notes on Fateh
By Mouin Rabbani
1. Fragmentation: I entirley agree with you. The point I sought to make is not that fragmentation into multiple, competing power centres is a new phenomenon, but that it has ‘progressed’ markedly in recent years relative to earlier periods – particularly since 2000 and especially so after Arafat’s death. Poor choice of words on my part.
As for your point that such an organisational structure may have been only way for Fatah to proceed in earlier eras I’m not sure I agree. While it doubtless served the agenda of being everything to everyone and thus played a role in Fatah’s ability to establish and maintain supremacy of the national movement, more disciplined and coherent forms of organisation are not so difficult to envisage. More importantly, I don’t think you can separate the relatively functional ‘controlled decentralisation’ – if you will – of the 1970s and 1908s from the endemic and accelerating fragmentation of more recent years.
2. Spinal cord analogy: I chose this because I believe that Fatah in its multiple forms collectively still represents the center of gravity of the Palestinian movement, and that the quadraplegic current status of the national movement is the result of the desultory state of this spinal cord.
3. Nature of challenges of 6th General Conference: I entirely agree it is not “merely a logistical, organisational problem”. I was pointing out that this is one, important aspect regarding the convening of the GC, not that it is either the more important one or even the most important dimension of Fatah’s broader crisis. So no disagreement between us here.
4. Return of exile leaders: Personally I fully concur with the decision of some key leaders to refuse to return to a partially self-governing occupied territory masquerading as a state in formation because in their view this would confer legitimacy on Oslo. As you point out in some cases such decisions were voluntary, in others leaders and cadres were prepared to return but blocked by Israel and/or sabotaged by members of the Palestinian Oslo elite inciting Israel against erstwhile comrades. Qaddumi like Hawatmeh falls somewhere in between – an initial refusenik, he later expressed an interest in returning and deals to this effect were ultimately vetoed by Israel (Netanyahu if I recall correctly).
Finally, yes, as you surmise I sought in this article to focus primarily on issues relating to the convening of the GC rather than Fatah’s broader crisis, though the two are obviously related. I am as it happens currently working on a broader examination of the latter.

M.E. peace mission for Annan, Carter, & Robinson

The group of visionary retired world leaders called The Elders has announced that three of their number– Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and former Irish President Mary Robinson– will be undertaking a peace-focused fact-finding mission in mid-April.
The announcement says the three,

    will visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia from April 13-21 to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking Middle Eastern conflicts.
    The Elders will listen to all parties in the countries. They will meet with leaders from governments, civil society, and key groups that influence the conflict, in an attempt to understand their various perspectives. At the end of the mission, the Elders will prepare a report for the public to help people understand the urgency of peace and what is needed to secure it. The Elders will also meet and begin to work with groups that will reinforce the efforts by the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to negotiate a peace agreement based on a two-state solution.

I am intrigued by the way they describe their mission there. They notably make zero mention of the very disappointing “Annapolis” peace process. Indeed, it also looks as if that last sentence there was sort of tacked on as a later addendum to what otherwise looks like a very appropriately open-ended, listening-focused mission.
The very best of luck to them. If it would help them, I’d be very to send along any of my writings on the conflicts and the prospects for peace in Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine. That would include numerous posts here on JWN, or articles elsewhere, especially my longer articles in Boston Review since 2001; my 2000 book on Syrian-Israeli peace diplomacy; or the 2004 book that I worked on with 13 other Quakers that was basically the result of a three-week listening-centered mission we conducted in Israel and Palestine in 2002.
The very best of luck to them. I have great respect for all three of these leaders. I have had the honor of meeting and interviewing both Robinson (when she was at the UNHCHR in Geneva) and Carter. I certainly hope that on this mission these Elders make a point of meeting, and listening carefully to, all the relevant parties in the region including those who are currently judged to be “off-limits” to the diplomats of the US and its allies on the (highly politicized) grounds that they are terrorists. I’ll read the report they produce with huge interest.

Progress in the Gaza ceasefire talks?

The western MSM has been fixated on Thursday’s tragic, unjustifiable killings of eight students at a West Jerusalem yeshiva (Jewish religious school), and to a lesser extent on the effect that those killings might have on the Annapolis-launched “peace process.”
But they’re missing the main story. The really serious and interesting peace (or rather ceasefire) negotiations are not the Annapolis-launched ones. Those have led nowhere. So far they’ve resulted only in: the proliferation, rather than removal, of IOF checkpoints and Israeli settlements in the West Bank; and the continuation of acts of violence against Israeli civilians. The serious and potentially much more fruitful negotiations are the ones that have apparently been gathering pace in recent weeks between the Olmert government and the leaders of Hamas, through the mediation of Egypt.
Fathia el-Dakhakhni of the independent Egyptian daily Al-Masry al-Youm has the story in today’s paper.
It seems like this negotiation is not yet poised on the brink of a breakthrough. But it does seem serious. What I found fascinating and significant in Dakhakhni’s story were two main things:
1. She had yet another reference to the fact that this negotiation is “US-backed.” She writes that Condi Rice, who was in Egypt as well as Israel and Ramallah this past week, “said she had talked to the Egyptian leaders and expressed confidence that their efforts could promote the US-backed peace talks.”
I checked the record, and here is AFP’s account of what Rice told reporters in Brussels, Thursday. That account is a little fuller than the State Department’s own version. Specifically, the AFP account spells out that Rice’s remarks were in response to a question “about reported talks between Cairo and Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
2. Dakhakhni also gives details of the way that Hamas’s Gaza spokesman Taher al-Nono describes the movement’s negotiating position at this point. Dakhakhni wrote that a delegation representing both Hamas and Islamic Jihad met on Thursday in Egypt with Egyptian government officials, and presented their terms for a ceasefire to them. She quoted Nono as saying that the Egyptian side had given no immediate response, but had told the Palestinians to “expect a response to our suggestions soon.”
As to the content of those “suggestions”, Nono told Dakhakhni that the Haniyeh-led Palestinian “caretaker government”, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad all have a single, “clear” position regarding the ceasefire, and they established three three conditions for the ceasefire with Israel:

    it should be mutual and simultaneous; Israel has to stop its aggression on the Palestinian people; it should also end the blockade imposed on Gaza and open the crossings.
    The meeting [Hamas negotiators had just been holding with Egyptian negotiators] touched on the issue of the Rafah Crossing and the role of the [PA] presidency and the EU monitors. Hamas movement said it does not object to the presence of former staff members who were present at the Crossing and who represent the Palestinian presidency, al-Nono said. Regarding security, Hamas set a condition that the matter be assumed by persons “whose hands are clean and who had not been charged in corruption cases or violence,” he said.
    The Movement has no objection to the return of the EU monitors to the Crossing provided they should not control the opening and closing of the Crossing and that they reside in Arish or Gaza so that Israel has no control over their presence at the Crossing, he stated.
    He also pointed out that it had been agreed during the talks to provide the urgent humanitarian assistance to the Strip and to continue treating the sick and wounded from the Israeli aggression, stressing that the Islamic Jihad had backed the positions of Hamas.
    An agreement was reached with the Egyptian officials on the possibility of Cairo hosting a large Hamas delegation to discuss the matter if necessary, he added.
    For his part, a member of the Islamic Jihad delegation to the talks with Egypt said that the Islamic Jihad would hold internal discussions and respond to the truce proposal within days, asserting that Jihad would continue self-defense operations as long as Israel continues its attacks.

We should note that Rice’s comments, as reported above, were made before the news broke about the killings in the Jerusalem yeshiva. It is entirely possible that Olmert’s position regarding the talks with Hamas– and therefore also that of Rice, who acts primarily, though perhaps not always solely, as his emissary– has changed since then.
The Hamas leadership certainly dented its bona-fides as a negotiator with the confused response it displayed to the yeshiva killings. The Hamas-linked Palestinian Information Center website still describes the killings as a “heroic operation”, though the Hamas leaders have also been at pains not to claim the movement’s responsibility for it. The perpetrator of the killings, who may well have acted alone, was 24-year-old Ala Abu Dehaim, a resident of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. He was shot dead during the melee that accompanied his lethal rampage.
The yeshiva killings have probably made it harder, at least in the immediate future, for Olmert to justify to his people a policy of concluding a ceasefire with Hamas concerning Gaza. But if Olmert is indeed serious about going for a ceasefire with Hamas over Gaza, perhaps he should also have thought that many of his own government’s escalatory decisions of recent weeks made retaliation from enraged Palestinians, whether in East Jerusalem, in other portions of the occupied West Bank, or elsewhere, considerably more rather than less likely? If both sides are serious about pursuing this ceasefire option, then surely they both need to think rather carefully about all the many implications this approach has on other aspects of policy.
A final, very important note about Egypt’s role in all this. As I wrote here not long ago, President Mubarak seems to really hate the idea of Gaza becoming closely integrated with Egypt in any political way. This is primarily because of the long and close political ties between Hamas, which now runs Gaza, and the Muslim Brotherhood, who are his own main– and currently very threatening– opposition group.
But it is the very closeness of these ties and the current strength of the MB within Egyptian society that are also, right now, forcing Mubarak to do something to alleviate the suffering of Gaza’s 1.45 million people. However much he wants to, he cannot simply turn his back on their plight.
These twin factors are what seem to be motivating his recent decision to build a sturdy, presumably unbreachable, wall between Gaza and Egypt. In the context of the existence of such a wall it will be far more possible for him and Hamas between them to control and regulate the passage between Egypt and Gaza. I think both leaderships were quite dismayed about some of the things that happened during the 11-day period in Jan-Feb when there was no barrier and no regulation at all. Hundreds of Egypt’s own homegrown and very violent and unpredictable jihadi militants crossed from Egypt into Gaza, considerably complicating Hamas’s ability to exert its control over Gaza’s relatively lengthy border with Israel. And other unwelcome passages of people and goods– in both directions– no doubt also occurred. As I wrote here February 3,

    For Gaza’s economic opening to and through Egypt to work, as [leading Hamas member Mahmoud] Zahhar and his colleagues want it to, both the Palestinians and the Egyptians need to be able to control– and keep calm– their respective borders with Israel.

Finally, regarding Egypt, everyone should stay closely attuned to the popular pressures that are continuing to mount against Mubarak’s regime. This is, certainly, a matter of great importance to the prospects of a successful Israeli-Hamas ceasefire. But it is also of far, far wider importance to the strategic balance within the whole region!
Two other reports in today’s English language AMAY give a small glimpse into the depth of this crisis. This one is about the long-continuing, economic-related unrest in the industrial region of Mahalla el-Kubra. And this one is about highly politicized sermons and associated disturbances inside the Al-Azhar mosque during yesterday’s prayer.
It is notable that in Egypt– as in Lebanon and most likely numerous other Arab countries– popular unrest is currently being mobilized around the two issues of:

    (1) Gaza, and Palestine in general, and
    (2) rapidly deteriorating local economic conditions, “fueled” by spiraling prices for both food and fuel.

The ageing Egyptian president probably feels that today he is sitting atop an increasingly explosive mix; and no doubt he tried to convey some of that sense of discomfort/threat to Condi Rice during their recent meeting.
Cairo. Watch that space.