Author: Helena

Interview with Zahhar

AP is
reporting
today that Mahmoud Zahhar, one of the co-founders of Hamas, “most likely will be named foreign minister, according to a preliminary
list of Cabinet ministers given to The Associated Press by officials in Hamas
and the PFLP.”

So I thought I should quickly write up the interview I conducted with Dr.
Zahhar in his mosque-side Gaza home, after the end of evening prayers on
March 6.  In it, he oozed self-confidence, and a determination that
the Hamas government would not be making the kinds of concessions to Israel
and the west that were what, in the view of many Hamas supporters, had
led Mahmoud Abbas’s Fateh Party into such a non-productive and humiliating
dead end.

Zahhar described a Hamas program that for the next two years would focus
on rebuilding the Palestinians’ own society as much as possible, while quite possibly redirecting Gaza’s economic links away from Israel
and towards Egypt, and that would not necessarily involve any negotiations at all
with Israel.  At one point, when I asked if Hamas could do anything
to help reassure Israelis, he answered flatly, “They should be scared,
because whenever they felt a sense of security they felt it would be okay
to make aggressions… When they felt insecurity, was when they withdrew.
 And that was a big victory for us.”

We sat in a large, ground-floor reception room, near a corner in which stood
two large flags: the green Hamas flag and the four-colored flag of Palestine.
 An aide brought us first coffee, then tea, from a small kitchen at
the far end of the room.  

Next to the kitchen I could see, incongruously, a small, beat-up Japanese
sedan parked in an indoor garage that was not walled off from the reception
room at all.  At one point,  Zahhar pointed to it.  “That’s
my car,” he said.  “Did you see the expensive cars that the Fateh leaders
drive?”  Later, he said, “The people saw the sacrifice that the Hamas
leaders made for the people’s interest.”  He himself lost his son, Khaled,
who was killed, along with a Zahhar bodyguard, when Israeli F-16s dropped
an 1,100-pound bomb on his home in September 2003. That bombing was ordered
the day after Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 young people– including a
number of soldiers– at two locations inside Israel.  

Zahhar was at the door of his home when the big bomb dropped.  He, his
wife, and one of their daughters were among those injured in the bombing.

He speaks English well.  (I think he received some of his training as
a physician in Britain.)   We exchanged greetings, and I asked how he
was.  He sounded happy and confident as he responded, “I feel good today.”
  He referred to some far-reaching constitutional and administrative
changes that the lame-duck, Fateh-dominated Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) enacted February 13, just before it dissolved and made way for the new PLC, elected January 25, in which Hamas held 74 of the 132 seats.
He said,

Continue reading “Interview with Zahhar”

Tom Fox’s last journey

Susan (Dancewater) over at Today in Iraq has posted the text of an email she got from Doug Pritchard, the Toronto-based co-director of the Christian Peacemaker teams, about Tom’s last journey.
Did you know that CPT still has an active (remaining) team in Iraq, which as of mid-February had seven members? You can read about some of their activities here.
Anyway, here’s Doug’s email:

    The U.S. Embassy arranged for Beth Pyles, a member of the CPT Iraq team, to travel to Anaconda, and she was able to keep vigil with Tom for the next 36 hours until his departure. Meanwhile, CPT’ers Rich Meyer and Anne Montgomery traveled to Dover [air-force base in Delaware, US, to which the bodies of deceased US soldiers are sent], and have been in the vicinity since 5 p.m. Mar. 11, keeping vigil and awaiting Tom’s arrival. Pyles was present on the tarmac at Anaconda as Tom’s coffin was loaded onto the plane for Dover. She reported that his coffin was draped in a U.S. flag. This is unusual for a civilian, but Tom may not have been uncomfortable with this since he had always called his nation to live out the high ideals which it professed. Iraqi detainees who die in US custody are also transported to Dover for autopsies and forensics. On this plane, right beside Tom’s coffin, was the coffin of an Iraqi detainee. So Tom accompanied an Iraqi detainee in death, just as he had done so often in life.
    At Tom’s departure, Pyles read out from the Gospel of John, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it” (1:5). In honour of Tom’s Iraqi companion, she spoke the words called out repeatedly from the mosques of Baghdad during the Shock and Awe bombing campaign in March 2003, “allah akhbar” (God is greater). She concluded the sending with words from the Jewish scriptures, “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21).
    Dawn broke. The contingent of Puerto Rican soldiers nearby saluted. The plane taxied away. Venus, the morning star, shone brightly overhead as the night faded away. Godspeed you, Tom, on your final journey home to your family and friends.

Trouble in Fatehland

Oops, I knew the Israeli raid on the Jericho jail was a major humiliation for Abu Mazen, but now AP is reporting that several officials in his own Fateh Party are calling on him to resign because of it.
The report says:

    During a meeting of senior Fatah officials Thursday evening, several suggested to Abbas that he resign and dissolve the Palestinian Authority, said Taysir Nasrallah, a senior Fatah activist from the West Bank city of Nablus.
    Were the Palestinian government to be dissolved, Israel would be forced to step in as an occupying power and assume direct responsibility for the Palestinians. A dissolution of the Palestinian Authority also would render the victory of the Islamic militant Hamas in January parliament elections meaningless.

Well, who knows how this will turn out? Personally, I doubt strongly if Abu Mazen will do this. But if he did, would Hamas then be in a position of trying to preserve the PA?

Hamas’s negotiating stance

Amira Hass has two interesting stories in today’s HaAretz that describe important elements of the stance Hamas has adopted with regard to the two major challenges it faces: forming a Palestinian government and dealing with the international community. (Though actually, the “international” issue is an intimate part of the intra-Palestinian negotiations, too.)
In this piece is about the internal Palestinian negotiations. Hass tells us that Fateh’s Central Committee decided late Thursday not to take up Hamas’s invitation to join a national unity government.
She said that Hamas officials were still hopeful that some of the smaller parties/lists represented in the parliament might join a Hamas-led government. But she indicated that this effort also looked as though it would be unsuccessful, referring to, “The factions’ apparent refusal to join a Hamas-led government.”
She reported that the first of the three successive draft proposals that Hamas presented to the small parties (and perhaps also to Fateh as well?), “discussed considering negotiations with Israel only if the latter first recognizes the rights of the Palestinian people and guarantees a full withdrawal to 1967 lines.”
This accords exactly with what Ismail Haniyeh, Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi, and Ghazi Hamad all told me on my recent trip, though some of them indicated that this “exchange of recognitions” could also be more simultaneous and reciprocal than Hass indicates.
If Hamas is indeed prepared to commit to a recognition of Israel, even though conditional, and if the international community is truly committed to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, then this Hamas position would surely give a good-faith international mediator a substantial starting point for brokering some kind of a simultaneous, reciprocal exchange of recognitions.
That second “if” there might seem like a big one. But why on earth should anyone in the international community expect Palestinians or anyone else to provide any kind of recognition of Israel having rights outside of its own national borders?
Hass reported the response of the Palestinian parties to Hamas’s political overture as follows:

Continue reading “Hamas’s negotiating stance”

Nir Rosen from Iraq

The latest (March-April) issue of Boston Review has a riveting piece of reporting from Iraq by Nir Rosen. Nir is a fearless young reporter who has already racked up huge amounts of experience (and gathered good contacts) in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and other war zones.
This report includes interviews with several Sunni political leaders as well as some high-ranking Sadrists. It was conducted mainly during last Ramadan (October-Novermber). Though it’s a bit dated, I think it still has real value.

Major new article on the pro-Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are two of the most important thinkers in the “realist” school of US foreign-policy analysts. Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Walt is the Academic Dean at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he holds the Robert and Renee Belfer Professorship in International Affairs.
These two men are not, as you can see, fuzzy-headed liberals who are marginal to the mainstream of policy discourse in the United States.
Now, they have a major new article in the upcoming issue of the London Review of Books on the power and detrimental role that the pro-Israel lobby in Washington has played over the years. (The LRB piece has no footnotes. But you can access a fully documented, PDF version of the longer article from which it was excerpted, if you click here. 211 endnotes, many of them very lengthy, to document just 48 pages of text… These guys are empiricists after my own heart!)
Here is some of what they argue in the LRB version:

    Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
    Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

And this:

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CSM column on the Israeli election

The CSM today published my column on the Israeli election (here and here). It underlines the fact that in this election, the main platform plank of the front-running party is that, as I write, it will,

    turns its back on 58 years of Israeli commitment to negotiating peace with its neighbors, promising voters instead that a Kadima-led government is ready and eager to draw Israel’s borders quite unilaterally.

Perhaps I was too generous. Perhaps I should have written, “58 years of Israeli avowals of commitment to negotiating peace”… Since if there had been a real commitment to a negotiated peace over these past 39 years, then successive Israeli governments would surely not have devoted a lot of effort and resources to implanting lavish, Jews-only colonies in the heart of the occupied territories?
But still, until now, those avowals of committment to a negotiated peace have been politically important in many ways. Crucially, they have allowed the US a big “in” to play the key role of “third party mediator” that since late 1973 has dominated all attempts at negotiations.
But if Israel– the major beneficiary of US “foreign aid” funding over all those decades– is now openly saying, “to heck with negotiations”, then where does that leave the US? Merely as Israel’s main backer, I would say, without any longer also enjoying the fig-leaf of being the main peace-broker between it and its neighbors.
As I note in the column, Olmert has said that his unilateralist plans

    had been shared with the Bush administration, which “refrained from public comment.” He implied this gave him at least an yellow light to go ahead.

I believe that those fearless members of the US press corps who attend State Department or White House briefings should follow up aggressively on this issue. If I were one of them, here are the kinds of question I would ask:

    — Is it true that envoys of Mr. Olmert have shared with you his plans for unilaterally delineating Israel’s final borders by 2010?
    — What is your reaction to this proposal?
    — What impact do you think this proposal has on the US’s long-held commitment to the idea that all details of the final status between Israel and the Palestinians, including the border and all other issues, should be the subject of negotiation between the parties?
    — If an Israeli government proceeds with this expansionist plan, what impact will this have on US readiness to continue according Israel massive political and financial support?
    — What do you say to President Mahmoud Abbas and those other Palestinians who have taken great political risks over a number of years to promote and pursue the path of winning a negotiated peace with Israel?

Well, I’m sure you get my drift. But I doubt if many members of the inside-the-beltway press corps will push very hard on questions like these.
By the way, I wrote the piece before Olmert’s latest “unilateralist spectacular”, the raid on the Jericho prison. Laila el-Haddad’s been doing some great blogging about it. (1, 2, 3.)

New Visser paper on Sistani’s role

I’ve just gotten the time to read this paper, which Iraqi-Shiite affairs expert Reidar Visser sent me. It is his assessment of the role that Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has played in Iraqi politics in recent years– and of the role that Sistani might be expected to continue to play in the future.
Visser is a careful, apparently very knowledgeable historian. This paper, which runs 33 pages of PDF file, single-spaced, is thoroughly documented and (for me) well worth the time it took to give it a fairly careful read. Long-time JWN readers will know that I’ve long been intrigued with trying to understand Sistani’s role– and I’ve made a few of my own guesses, some probably fairly wrong-headed, along the way. (That’s why I really appreciate being able to profit from Visser’s careful scholarship.)
He is fairly adamant about his methodology. In an atmosphere where many people claim on occasion to speak for Sistani, Visser tries to restrict himself to a consideration of the bayans that are issued directly by the Ayatollah himself, usually through his own website. (Interestingly, we learn toward the end of Visser’s paper that the site is maintained by Jawad Shahristani, who is the head of Sistani’s office in Qom, Iran. Visser notes that this “entails certain editorial prerogatives, and asks the “heretical but necessary question” as to whether these prerogatives have allowed Shahristani “to pursue a Sistani policy of his own… [O]nce a pronouncement is produced, the decision whether to publish it or not may well have been controlled from Iran as much as from Iraq.” But he concludes that, “As of today there is however no convincing documentary basis for insinuations of this kind.”– pp.26-27.)
So the main thrust of Visser’s careful study of the website material reveals to him three distinct periods in Sistani’s engagement with overt Iraqi politics: first, a period of general quietism toward political affairs, which lasted from the Saddam era and through around June 2003; then a period of much greater engagement, between June 2003 and October 2004; and finally, from November 2004 until today, “there has been evidence of a return to seclusion and a renewed preoccupation with matters concerning the Shiite faith and the protection of its religious infrastructure.” — p.7.
Visser documents these shifts– and in particular, the strong role that Sistani played in 2004 in overthrowing Bremer’s original “caucus” plan for a transitional government and insisting on the holding of one-person, one-vote elections for both the transitional government and the final government. At the same time, he was making many pronouncements and interventions in favor of Iraq remaining a unitary state, and in favor of the shari’ religious law having a strong role in the Constitution.
In that period, too, Sistani came to issue some interesting bayans on the issue of the wilayat al-faqih (the Rule of the Jurisprudent) in which he seemed to stray very far from the opposition that his own earlier religious mentor, Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Khoei, had evinced toward the concept. Visser writes that though Sistani’s apparent embrace of the concept was greeted with jubilation in Teheran, where many regime people assumed that meant he was bowing to the supremacy of their own faqih there, Ayataollah Khamenei, in fact Sistani never gave any explicit recognition to the identification of Khamanei as faqih. When asked, Who is this faqih? Sistani merely answered, “The just jurisprudent acceptable to all the believers.” Which, Visser says, could even be interpreted as possibly referring to Sistani himself…
But, Visser notes, the period of active (and remarkably effective) engagement in Iraqi politics came to an end at the end of November 2004, and since then Sistani has returned to being a sort of delphic figure who concerns himself mostly with arcane matters of ritual and observance, leaving his followers to guess, and make claims and counter-claims, when it comes to questions of concrete political guidance:

Continue reading “New Visser paper on Sistani’s role”

Pictures from Palestine/Israel

I’m still a bit uncertain about posting photos into the blog. Both because I’m uncertain about digital photography in general and because I know they take a lot of space/time for people with slow connections to get access to. So I uploaded them onto my home website and shall provide links here.
Here goes.
Here are photos from my visit to the Jabaliya camp Islamic preschool, in Gaza, as described in my Salon article on the Hamas women: classroom scene, phys ed session, teachers doing puppets, writing teacher.
Here are two views– taken by the talented Laila el-Haddad– of the Salah Foundation Girls’ School in Deir al-Balah (also described in the Salon article): the school’s mosque and library building, and a classroom block.
Here is the truly 1984-ish crossing point from Ramallah to Jerusalem, at Qalandiya: first, the general approach from the Ramallah side, then some of the graffiti— a work by Banksy on the left and a nice image of Gandhi on the right.
You can only see one, 30-foot-high concrete-clad Israeli watchtower in that first picture…. So you’ve arrived at Qalandiya from Ramallah or el-Bireh, most likely in a car or a share-taxi– you can see these vehicles all turning around there at the crossing point. Then you go on foot with all your bags or sick granny or whatever through a break in this wall just to the left of the watch-tower and then traverse the weird lunarscape of gashed-into rock and earth beyond it, walking 100 yards to the under-construction “terminal” there, which has complex gate systems that lead you to a no-man’s land on the other side. The lunarscape and the no-man’s land are also studded with two or three free-standing watchtowers, 30-feet and 40-feet high. And there’s also a lot of other construction there. You walk along a trash-strewn walkway to another short segment of wall, beyond which are the vehicles that take you to locations within the next sections of wall– either al-Ram, walled in right ahead of you to the left, or to Jerusalem itself, for which you dip down to a little place on the right where small buses wait to gather people who have the favored Jeusalem passbooks. The bus then inscribes a huge arc to the southwest– on “Israelis only” roads in this completely apartheided road system– and then arrives to the bus depot on Jerusalem’s Nablus Road.
These are some scenes I noted in Tel Aviv/Jaffa when I took the walk described in this JWN post: the seaside monument to Jewish illegal immigration into Palestine, IDF female soldiers slouching toward Jaffa with their guns, a mosque in the shadow of the David Intercontinental Hotel,a display on Deir Yassin in the Irgun Museum, exterior view of the Irgun Museum, and a small slice of Old Jaffa.
Three pics from Jerusalem: the Damascus Gate to the Old City, with some IOF soldiers visible over to the right; Palestinian herb vendors at the Damascus Gate– notice the beautiful embroidered dresses some wear for their daily work!– and finally just a little view through a postern in the middle of a busy shoopping street– with a T-shirt vendor to the right.
Here are some pics from the showroom of the Atfaluna (“our children”) school and project for the deaf in Gaza City, which is an oasis of calm and focused industry right there on Filasteen Street: embroidered bags, embroidered cushions, and a general view of the shop/showroom there. If anyone wants to buy some of their beautiful products (and help their project and their clients by doing so) then I can assure you their goods are beautifully made, beautifully finished, and their order fulfillment/distribution system is little short of miraculous.