Author: Helena

Jerusalem: writing, visiting, talking

I had a good day in Jerusalem today.  Starting with writing,
writing, writing.  Yesterday after I got back to the Jerusalem
Meridian Hotel, I started writing my second piece for Salon– about the
Hamas women in Gaza, and about Hamas more generally… And I’d hope to
finish it yesterday, too.  But I have so much material from Gaza
rattling around in my notebook and in my head that it took a while for
it to settle down and “compose”… So I only made a start on the
article yesterday evening.

This morning I got up, had a quick breakfast in the hotel’s beautiful old stone-arched
restaurant, then told myself, “Helena, write!” 
Actually, I also had the hope of a rather interesting interview in Tel
Aviv today, but by around 10 a.m. the guy’s executive assistant had
called to say it wouldn’t, after all, work out.  So I got to
continue with my writing instead.  And shortly after 2 p.m. the
Salon  piece was done– in at just under 3,000 words.  I
don’t think the shape is perfect– I find it really, really hard to
compose anything, let alone a longer piece like this, completely on the
small laptop screen, without doing any printouts.  (I’m a big fan of
self-editing on hard copy.)  But it is what it is.  There’s a
professional editor there at Salon at work on the piece, so let’s hope
he can rebalance whatever needs to be rebalanced in it.  Maybe
it’s two pieces, anyway?  Or one main piece and a sidebar?  I
guess we’ll see.

Holed up in a quiet hotel room writing, and eating from room service.
It’s not a bad situation to be in– especially if, as is now the case,
the room in question has a fabulous view out over the Mount of Olives,
pierced on its ridge by the two towers of the Augusta Victoria Hospital
and the Hebrew U. Mount Scopus campus.  But after nearly 24 hours
of this holed-up-in-room-writing regime, I definitely needed to
walk.  I had nearly an hour to spare before I was due to go visit
my old Palestinian-Armenian friend Albert Aghazarian, who lives in the
Old City, so I decided to take a roundabout route to his place there.

What a fabulous, intriguing city Jerusalem is, especially for
pedestrians.  When I was in Gaza, I was once again acutely aware
of how lucky I am to be able to come to Jerusalem whenever I want
to.  Some of the Palestinians I talked to there had never visited
this city.  Some hadn’t been able to visit it for many years
now.  It was actually easier for Gazans to get to Jerusalem during
the height of the first intifada than it became after the conclusion
iof the Oslo Accord.  But the Gazans all long for the city
intensely.  A large, glowing image of the Dome of the Rock is the
main decoration in many public places there (as, indeed, throughout the whole
Palestinian diaspora)

… Well, my route to Albert’s place turned out to be a bit more
roundabout than I had expected.  He’d reminded me I needed to go
to the Armenian Convent of St. James and ask for his house there. 
So I walked along Salaheddine Street to the Old City walls, and then
southwest along the outside of the walls a bit till I reached the
Damascus Gate.  (It was cold out. It’s been a blustery day here today: the first real
time in all my visit that I’ve been glad to have the warm wool coat
that I almost jettisoned ten days ago because it seemed such a pain to
have to carry it around.)

In front of the Damascus Gate there’s a broad stone plaza that’s linked to the gate by a wide stone footbridge where
normally a row of older Palestinian women from the villages around will
sit and sell their herbs and other produce.  Most of these women–
both the ones sitting outside the gate and the far greater number of
their sisters who sit at various points throughout the Old City– wear
the intricately embroidered dresses that are an important part of their
dowry and their identity.  The other day when I was at the
Damascus Gate, a gaggle of Israeli soldiers was hanging around the
footbridge, with another soldier silhouetted in the high little window
in the high stone battlements above the gate.

Continue reading “Jerusalem: writing, visiting, talking”

Today’s CSM column on Gaza

Here’s my column in today’s CSM. (Also here.)
I should just tell you one thing about the donkey carts mentioned in the story (and featured, I see, in the subhead they gave it.). In the late 1980s, that traditional form of trasnportation had just about disappeared from Gaza. But the strict regime of collective punishments the IOF imposed on the Palestinians during the first intifada included– along with weeks-long lockdowns, mass arrests, public humiliations of local elders, etc etc etc– the imposition of ever more complex and bizarre regulations on the owners of motor vehicles. At that point, many car-owners in Gaza, which is much flatter and much poorer than the West Bank, simply gave up the attempt to keep a car on the road, and switched back to donkey- or horse-drawn carts. It was a very vivid example of the de-development trend that Israel’s lengthy occupation imposed on the Gazans.
So I’m interested to see that– even after the short, alleged honeymoon period of post-Oslo, then the second intifada, and the Israeli disengagement– the donkey-carts have persisted, They comprise probably about 20% of the vehicles I saw on the roads in Gaza. Every morning I would wake to the clip-clop of their metal-shoed hoofs on the road by the fishing-port, and the intermittent braying of some donkey, somewhere. Hey, I’m starting to miss Gaza already– though I realize that what I regard as a funky and distinctive feature of the local scene probably represents for most Gazans yet another reminder of the economic de-development into which they’ve been forced.

Chaos, closure, and the Gaza greenhouses

One commenter wrote that when I wrote here recently about the greenhouses in Gaza that an American Jewish group helped hand over to the Palestinians last year, the source I quoted, Khaled Abdel-Shafi “had not told the whole story.” That commenter, RB, then helpfully provided URLs to some earlier versions of this story, which featured accounts of some serious looting of greenhouse paraphernalia that took place immediately after the “handover”.
This September 13 story referenced by RB tells us that, “Jihad al-Wazir, the deputy Palestinian finance minister, said roughly 30 percent of the greenhouses suffered various degrees of damage.”
Actually, Abdel-Shafi did tell me about the looting. He explained to me that because of the Israelis’ firm insistence on not coordinating any aspect of their departure with the PA, it was almost impossible for the PA to arrange to deploy sufficient security forces into the greenhouse region, or to make a plan on how to secure the greenhouses, before the IOF soldiers simply up and left the greenhouse areas in, as I recall it, the wee hours of one morning in early September.
However, despite the setback caused to the Palestinians’ plans by the looting, the Palestinian Economic Development Company did manage to get some decent-sized crops of specialty items out of those greenhouses– as did the owners of other existing large Palestinian greenhouse operations up and down the Strip in the most recent (indeed, ongoing) growing season.
But the most recent part of this story remains the fact that the Israeli government has not lived up to its commitment under last November’s “Rafah Agreement” to keep the Karni goods crossing– the only way for these ultra-perishable goods to reach the international markets for which they were grown– fully open to expedite their transit to these markets.
Reuters told us yesterday that,

    [A] report, prepared by a U.S. Agency for International Development contractor and obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, estimated agriculture losses in Gaza due to the closure of the Karni crossing at more than $450,000 per day.
    The Palestine Economic Development Co., which manages the greenhouses left behind by evacuated Jewish settlers, has been losing more than $120,000 a day, the report estimated.
    The greenhouse project was launched with much fanfare late last year as a sign of Gaza Strip’s potential after Israel’s withdrawal.
    A border deal brokered by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was supposed to clear the way for Gaza to increase sharply its agricultural exports.
    But a World Bank report released on Monday found “no sustained improvement” in the movement of goods across Karni before or after Israel’s Gaza pullout, completed last September.
    Israel closed Karni for 21 days between Jan. 15 and Feb. 5. It was closed again on Feb. 21 after a mysterious explosion in the area and has remained closed because of “continued security alerts”, the army said.

The phenomenon of the looting in the abandoned Israeli settlements and the greenhouses reminds me of the story of the looting in Baghdad in the days aftere the fall of Saddam Hussein. In both cases, you had these elements:

    (1) A population that had been living under a lot of socioeconomic pressure for a long time, and in which many of the norms of respect of property rights had seriously broken down,
    (2) A population, moreover, that lacked trusted police forces, and
    (3) A much more powerful military actor that through its actions had caused the change that left the major security vacuum, which some — though certainly, in both cases, far from all– elements of the population sought to exploit… and an actor that crucially had made no preparations at all to deal with the very foreseeable probability of this security breakdown— indeed, that seemed almost wilfully oblivious to such consequences.

I think this case needs to be included in my intermittent study of military occupation-ology. Today, I drove back through northern Gaza from Gaza City to the Erez Crossing. The landscape was generally very bleak. The population density throughout the Gaza is enormous, and vast portions of the landscape are covered with raw concrete dwellings, two, three, and four stories high. Trash and sand blew across the rutted streets, and there were vast areas of rubble from the remains of former Israeli settlements and military bases. Actually, the most colorful thing is the election-related flags that still fly high above the buildings and utility poles… green for Hamas, yellow for Fateh, and red for the Popular Front. They are so numerous! And today they were all snapping smartly in a brisk wind.
Anyway, as we drove those few miles, I thought: what a contrast here, or in Iraq, with the situation in Germany or Japan after just a few years of US military occupation… In those earlier occupations, the US made it clear from the get-go that it had no ambitions to control either the land, the resources, or the population of those occupied areas, and that it would not maintain its military-occupation rule over them for any longer than was absolutely needed. In both areas, moreover, the occupying had a long-prepared and well executed plan for the rehabilitation of the indigenous society at all levels, including the socioeconomic and the political.
But Israel in the West Bank and Gaza? … Or the US in Iraq? What terrible betrayals, in both cases, of the “trust” that running a temporary military occupation over someone else’s country represents.
(Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is coming up to its 39th burthday this June.)

More Gaza

Well, guess who I’ve been hanging out with in Gaza these past couple of days…
If you guessed Ismail Haniyeh, well yes, you could be right. (Did you see this bellicose statement from Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, warning that Haniyeh is “not immune” from being assassinated? Or this, from Olmert saying Haniyeh should fear for his life if Hamas militants resume their attacks on Israel?)
If you guessed Dr. Mahgmoud Zahhar, you could be right.
And if you guessed Leila el-Haddad, the talented author of “Raising Yousuf” and the Gaza correspondent of the Al-Jazeera English-language website, you’d be right, too.
It’s been a huge pleasure getting to know Leila a bit. She’s the same age as my son, which is fun. She’s also a plucky mom-journalist trying to juggle a zillion things. She’s a Palestinian from Gaza, got a BA from Duke University and an MA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She could be working here as a journalist along with her spouse and child except that–
Her spouse is a Palestinian originally from Haifa, who was born in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in Lebanon just three months before the Israeli-backed Flangist forces stormed the camp in 1976. He carries the travel document that the Lebanese government gives to Palestinian residents of Lebanon. And guess what–
The Palestinians don’t have the right to control who comes in and out of Gaza. Even after the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from the Strip: Israel still gets to detrmine that. So Leila’s Palestinian husband is among that majority of Palestinians who are actually forbidden from coming to Gaza. He can’t even come under “family reunification.”
So anyway, she’s working here. He’s actually doing a medical residency in the States. They have a long-distance commuter marriage. Luckily she has a great set of parents who have recently retired– both of them were phsyicians– and she and her two-year-old, Yousuf, live with them.
What I love about her blog is her sense of connectedness to the society here.

Discussions in Gaza

I’ve had some interesting conversations since coming here. Yesterday I conducted an interview with Ghazi Hamad, the managing editor of the Hamas weekly, Al-Resalah. (Here‘s their online edition.) Today I interviewed two of the six newly elected Hamas women MPs, Jamila Shanty and Mariam Farhat (Um Nidal). I also interviewed Khaled Abdel-Shafi, the head of the UN Development Program’s Gaza office.
I got great material in all these interview. But I don’t have time to write them all up now, so I’ll start by giving you a few of the most important points from Ghazi Hamad. This portion was when I’d asked him how Hamas intended to deal with the three demands placed on Hamas by the international community:

    We don’t want to go into a clash with the international community. There are some issues on which we can be flexible, and some we can’t…
    We see that they ask us to make commitments, but not Israel. This is a problem for us.
    We accept a state in the 1967 borders. And a long truce means we can stop all the attacks.
    Before the elections we said we opposed all the agreements previously reached with Israel. Now we say we can consider all of them. (At another point he said, “Hamas has been moving very fast toward the Red Line issue of recognition, saying we can rule within the 1967 borders. We know we have further to go.”)
    We have a problem when they demand that we recognize Israel. It’s difficult for us because it would be recognizing the Israeli occupation–as Khaled Meshaal says. But we say we accept the 1967 borders.
    … Hamas is not ready to sell the political decision for money. Don’t ask us to do that.
    … Arafat gave them everything they asked for– including saying that they could keep the Gush Etzion [settlement bloc.] And you see how they treated him!
    But if Israel would say publicly that Gaza and the West Bank are occupied territories, and that they could give us a timetable to withdraw all their settlers, even over three years or four years– that is what we need to hear from them. But now Olmert is saying that he’ll keep ‘unified’ Jerusalem and keep the big settlement blocs, and he won’t recognize our right of return. What is there to talk about?
    … We don’t expect to see a political solution in the next 3-4 years because the rightist parties will be ruling in Israel. But we will not be isolated. We’ll move carefully. We don’t want to get trapped in the muddy lake of negotiations!

Actually, there was a lot more in the interview, so I need to write the whole thing up a lot better. (Right now I’m composing online, on an internet link on someone else’s phone connection. Not ideal, but a lot better than nothing.)
The two women were really interesting…

Continue reading “Discussions in Gaza”

Weekend Haaretz

One of the interesting things about being in Israel is to be able to read the paper versions of English-language Ha’Aretz and the Jerusalem Post… However good it is to read content on-line, still, there’s something special about newsprint!
The weekend edition of H’Aretz, which came out yesterday, had a number of really interesting articles:
This well-researched piece by Akiva Eldar, which is worth reading in full, tells us about the failure of the government to live up to its commitment to destroy settlement outposts that were constructed not just– as all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have been– in clear contravention of international law but also, in contravention of Israel’s own laws about such construction activities.
Eldar writes:

    Next Wednesday will mark a year since the modest ceremony at which the outposts report was submitted to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Instead of an answer to the obvious question, “What has happened since then,” the author of the report, former state prosecutor and attorney Talia Sasson, suggests visiting Migron, in the Binyamin region. This outpost starred in the report as a symbol of systemic collapse.
    It all began in April 2002, with a fake antenna, “a pole with a costume,” as the Israel Defense Forces’ brigade commander told Sasson. Pinhas Wallerstein, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council and a public servant, gave a commitment in writing that the antenna would not develop into another illegal outpost. But it ended up as such – the permanent home of 150 families, with public buildings, roads, lighting and so on.
    “I am not naive about the state’s conduct in the territories,” says Sasson, “but in the case of Migron, it is a matter of establishing a settlement on private land that belongs to Palestinians, without a government decision and without any legal status. And as if that were not enough, it is the public coffers that are paying for the tractors that broke the road through to the outpost and funded the public buildings there. It is important to understand that every day that the state allows the settlers to hold on to the land is another day of violating the law and human rights. A state that respects its desire to be democratic cannot accept this phenomenon. I put very grave findings on the government’s table, but to my great regret, what there was is what there is and apparently also what there will be.”
    Sasson notes that at least half a dozen outposts the High Court of Justice ordered evacuated are still standing. The court handed down this decision after the Defense Ministry and the area commander told it that the outposts are not legal and that therefore the government must evacuate them. “This is a serious and unparalleled failure at the government level,” says Sasson decisively.
    And indeed, despite the government’s explicit commitment – in the framework of the road map plan – to dismantle the 24 illegal outposts that have been established during the terms of Sharon’s governments, not a single outpost has been evacuated. Had it not been for the petition by Peace Now, even the nine houses at the Amona outpost would have remained standing.

I had a good talk with Eldar as couple of days ago. He did say that he thinks that after the failure of the extremist settlers to prevent last summer’s disengagement from Gaza, he thinks the settlers are “in deep crisis”. He said that whereas previously, most Israeli elections have been fought over the issue of how (or wherther) to make peace with the Palestinians, “This time the issue is not about peace; it’s about quiet. It’s about conflict management, not conflict resolution.”
Though he sees Kadima’s position as representing this broad public sentiment at this time, he said he thought the longer-term outlook for the party isn’t very good. “The Kadima Party is a cocktail party,” he said. “It’s not yet the end of Labour and Likud… Israel has seen a whole series of these ‘third parties’ that have come and gone, and most likely Kadmia will be like the rest of them.”
He said that the Hamas victory in the OPTs hadn’t affected the Israeli electrions much– “except that it seems to prove to many Israelis that ‘there’s no-one to talk to.’ So it’s made Labour more irrelevant.”
Well, talking of Labour, Ha’Aretz also had a lengthy, very informative (to me) interview with new Labour head Amir Peretz. He presented himself very much as a plucky outsider who has fought for his values and will keep the interests of Israel’s huddled masses front and center in his work. (Not surprisingly, since his power base was with the Histadrut trade-union federation. Additionally, he’s of Moroccan Jewish background, which makes him doubly an ‘outsider’.)
Here’s what he said about the ‘peace process’:

Continue reading “Weekend Haaretz”

Coming to Gaza

The taxi took around 75 minutes to drive from Jerusalem down to the
Erez checkpoint at the northern end of Gaza.  Two years ago, when
I was trying to enter Gaza to do some consulting for a US-based NGO, I
waited here at the main entrance to the crossing-point for about five
hours before it started to get dark and I decided to hitch a ride back
to Jerusalem with some passing UN bureaucrats.  This time, my
Israeli press pass worked like a charm.  The Israeli army girls
behind the counter had me fill out one form– I believe I was signing
something to the effect that I understood that going to Gaza was very
dangerous but I was going anyway– and then told me to walk on
through.  That was literaly all there was to the border
formalities at this end.

They indicated that I walk “straight through”.  There was a sort
of maze of gates, concrete blocks, watchtowers, little trailers,
concrete blocks and so on outside.  As I approached a one-way
turnstile one of the security people said, “No!  Gate No.
2!”  So I went through gate No. 2 and entered the beginning of a
long, covered and enclosed walkway.  It was  maybe about 25
feet wide.  The “walls” on each side were made from the same
sections of preformed concrete that the “Wall” in the West Bank– and
indeed, the wall that surrounds Gaza– is also built.  That is,
sections of concrete walling about four feet wide and to one side of me
about 8 metres tall, to the other, about 6 metres tall, each section
sitting on its own heavy 20-inch-high solid footing.  Above the
tops of the walls there were light metal structures that gave a few
inches more open height for ventilation and also provided a frrame for
the canvas that formed the “roof” of the tunnel.  Somewhat
bizarrely, these canvases were in different colors– starting out blue,
then moving to pink and green, all of which gave the light inside the
tunnel  some interesting tones. 

I am the only person in this tunnel, which has two sides to it, divided
by a metal fence….

Continue reading “Coming to Gaza”

Kaplan making sense?!

I don’t think I’ve ever agreed with much at all of what Robert Kaplan– just one of a long string of western male writers who trail around the world imagining themselves to be Joseph Conrad– has written in the past. So imagine my surprise today when I read this piece in the WaPo in which Kaplan seems to have come round almost completely to the view of the world I’ve been articulating for many years now.
It includes these important truths:

    Physical security remains the primary human freedom. And so the fact that a state is despotic does not necessarily make it immoral. That is the essential fact of the Middle East that those intent on enforcing democracy abroad forget.
    For the average person who just wants to walk the streets without being brutalized or blown up by criminal gangs, a despotic state that can protect him is more moral and far more useful than a democratic one that cannot.

Also this:

    The lesson to take away is that where it involves other despotic regimes in the region — none of which is nearly as despotic as [Saddam] Hussein’s — the last thing we should do is actively precipitate their demise. The more organically they evolve and dissolve, the less likely it is that blood will flow. That goes especially for Syria and Pakistan, both of which could be Muslim Yugoslavias in the making, with regionally based ethnic groups that have a history of dislike for each other. The neoconservative yearning to topple Bashar al-Assad, and the liberal one to undermine Pervez Musharraf, are equally adventurous.

Kaplan was an eager supporter of the decision to topple Saddam. Now, he seems to be hedging his bets– or would you say this paragraph qualifies almost as a mea-culpa?

    In the case of Iraq, the state under Saddam Hussein was so cruel and oppressive it bore little relationship to all these other dictatorships. Because under Hussein anybody could and in fact did disappear in the middle of the night and was tortured in the most horrific manner, the Baathist state constituted a form of anarchy masquerading as tyranny. The decision to remove him was defensible, while not providential. [Meaning– what??] The portrait of Iraq that has emerged since his fall reveals him as the Hobbesian nemesis who may have kept in check an even greater anarchy than the kind that obtained under his rule.

No, I don’t think it’s a mea culpa. But still it’s great to see someone who has been such an inspiring figure for the architects of various US military adventures since the early 1990s suddenly starting to urge caution.
(Hat-tip to spouse for telling me I should read that. It was interesting to see that George Will had a piece urging US caution re Iraq on the same op-ed page… Those two, and Frank Fukuyama: quite interesting how the debacle in Iraq is starting to fragment the previously existing bloc of US militarists of both left and right.)

Articles in Salon.com, Foreign Policy

So the piece I wrote for Salon on Hamas went up onto their site last night. It’s here. If you don’t have a subscription you just have to sit through a little ad thing that comes on, before you can read it.
This is a new experience for me, writing for an online publication. I was sued to a whirlwind news cycle back when I worked for Reuters in the 1970s. Recently, in my ‘composed’ writings I’ve become used to a much more leisurely pace. (Btw, my piece on international courts is now up on the Foreign Policy website, but there’s a strict pre-registration thing you need to go through there if you want to read it.)
On the other hand, I’ve also been blogging for three years– and that can be just as immediate as you (I) want it to be.
My CSM columns typically have a turnround time of some 2-3 days. Working on the Salon piece felt fairly similar to that.

Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Walls

Well, I just heard I got my Israeli press pass.  This is excellent
news.  One of the main reasons I need it is that being the bearer of a
press pass is the only
way foreigners and Israelis get to cross into Gaza at all these
days.  Of course, once I’ve got it no doubt there are all sorts of
other fascinating things I can do with it.

I’m still in Tel Aviv.  I’ve been hanging around waiting for an
interview that now (nearly 6 p.m.) looks as though it ain’t going to
come through for me.  All Israeli political figures are incredibly
busy these days, organizing their campaigns for the March 28
elections.  I even had a hard time getting an “appointment” with
Naomi Chazan, the former deputy Knesset Speaker from the leftist Meretz
Party, whom I think of as a dear friend.  Oh well, I understand…

Actually, one thing quite a few Israelis have remarked on since I came
here has been how indifferent much of the public seems to be to the
whole campaign.  Usually, politics in Israel is a 24/7
obsession.  But as much as I can figure out from listening to
radios in taxi-cabs, that portion of the media seems much more
interested in Hamas (or as Israelis say it, “Khamas”) and Abu Mazen
than they are in their own politicians. Go figure.

Also, I haven’t seen one single recognizably electoral billboard or
informally posted flyer on the hoardings in the streets yet. 
There are plenty of billboards bearing the ayatollah-like image of the
Shas Party’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Youssef– not just
billboards, but massive displays on the sides of buses, etc etc. 
But people say even that even there, the “message” is not political at
all, but one that features some kind of religious exhortation.

In fact, Youssef’s bearded and turbaned visage on these billboards and
displays is quite reminiscent of the parades of beared and turbaned
ayatollahs who (along with their own religious homilies) grace many of
the billboards of Hizbullah-dominated South Lebanon or come to think of
it of the posters for Hamas I saw in the West Bank, which have an
impishly grinning photo of a (bearded, headscarveded) Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin.

.. Well, anyway, late this morning, cellphone clutched in hand, I
decided to walk down the seaside promenade to the old city of Jaffa
that’s perched on a hilly promontory that juts out into the
Mediterranean just over a mile south of Tel Aviv’s city center. 
The seaside promenade is beautiful: much nearer to sea-level than the
Corniche in Beirut, and much cleaner and better appointed.  As I
walked briskly along I passed a few groups of older guys sitting
together on folding chairs playing shesh-besh (backgammon) almost
exactly as they would be doing at the very same time on the Beirut
Corniche…

Continue reading “Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Walls”