We awoke today to the BBC presenting breaking news of Arafat’s death. I now have to crash-edit an obit-style column on him that I drafted ten days ago. It’s more an evaluation of him as a person/leader than a piece about the politics: what comes next, etc.
Tough piece to write because I feel so much of the disappointment, anger, etc towards him that many of my Palestinian friends (and some Israeli friends) feel… (See this JWN post.)
And yet he did play an important role, historically. That is undeniable. Plus, it’s not appropriate to speak too harshly of the recently departed.
I reckon that some similarly complex mixture of feelings and assessments may explain why the reaction to the news of his failing over the past couple of weeks, coming from Palestinians inside and outside the homeland, has been notably muted. That, and the very unseemly public set-to between Suha and the old guys.
Oh yes, and let’s not forget that the Palestinian “leadership” still doesn’t have any real strategy for success beyond the essentially defensive strategy of avoiding internal breakdown. Though avoiding that is extremely important, I know.
Best of luck to them all.
Gotta go.
Update 11 a.m. Beirut/Ramallah time:
Was just watching Al-Jazeera. Saw Salim al-Zaanoun announcing that Abu Mazen’s been named head of the PLO Executive Committee. At the same time a crawl at the bottom saying that Fateh’s Central Committee has named Farouq Qaddumi as its head. Interesting.
Then, over to the BBC: reporters on the streets of Ramallah where a quiet though fairly sparse-looking group of Palestinians had started to gather. This seems like interesting evidence of the remoteness of the old guys inside the Muqataa from the actual Palestinian people all around them… That they didn’t even have people outside the Muqataa organizing anything?
Reportedly, more activity in the Ain al-Helwa refugee camp in south Lebanon, which has long been a hotbed for a fairly radical form of pro-Fateh activism.
Author: Helena
Gitmo: significant victory for human rights
With all the continuing, terrible news about Iraq it was good to hear of one small but significant achievement for the global human rights movement.
Namely, Monday’s decision by Judge James Robertson of the US Federal Court in Washington DC, in the case of long-time Gitmo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, inwhich he judged that:
- * The Geneva Conventions applied to the conflict in Afghanistan and to all people in the conflict;
* The combatant status review tribunal (established by the Pentagon after the Supreme Court
Fallujah: the new world “order”
I can’t add much to what everyone is learning, thinking, and feeling these days about Fallujah.
I just note that the current massive incursion of foreign (that is, US) fighters into the city is a tragedy and a travesty against all the norms of reason and international law.
The Guardian, citing NPR, is reporting some large-scale desertions among the Iraqi forces who were supposed to be “spearheading”, or at least accompanying, the US assailants:
- One Iraqi battalion shrunk from over 500 men to 170 over the past two weeks – with 255 members quitting over the weekend, the [NPR] correspondent said.
That was a correspondent “embedded” with the US military who got and reported that story. Good for her (or him).
Juan Cole reports that the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni party that has been in the interim government so far, is now threatening to quit it. Also, Moqtada Sadr’s people and the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars have both called on the members of the “Iraqi” forces to desert rather than join the operation against Fallujah.
If the “Iraqi” forces have indeed now lost two-thirds of that battalion– and who knows what has happened with other battalions?– it strikes me that once again, as already happened in April and July, the US-Allawist insistence on pushing forward with a militaristic assault has resulted in setting back the project to (re-)constitute a new national force, as well as to (re-)constitute a new national political order.
It is quite possible that the only people left in the “Iraqi” battalions after the big desertions, are Kurds. What will that do for inter-ethnic entente in the country, I wonder?
… It seems clear to me that the timing of the assault has been calibrated to fall between last week’s US elections and the opening November 22 of the “Iraqi reconstruction conference” in Sharm al-Sheikh. I guess the Americans wanted to have the worst of the assault all over and “mopped up” before the conference opens.
But who on earth knows what will happen between now and then? Violence will always beget more violence.
Timing-wise, the synchronicity between these extremely tragic affairs in Iraq and Arafat’s long demise in Paris is also very significant…
Back to Shatila, part 2
I “knew” in some abstract sense that conditions in the
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have become really terrible since 1982,
and are now easily the worst of those in any Palestinian refugee camps anywhere.
Worse, even, than most of the camps in Gaza, many Palestinian friends
had told me.
But on this visit to Beirut I wanted to see the situation in Shatila camp,
where I worked briefly as a volunteer English-language teacher back in 1974,
for myself.
Hizbollah and Israel’s border
There was a well-conceived piece by Nick Blanford in yesterday’s Daily Star, looking at the security situation along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. He was examining in particular the fears some people have that Palestinians in S. Lebanon, upset or enraged or whatever after Arafat’s death, may launch attacks across the border, against Israel.
He noted that,
- Ironically, Hizbullah and Israel have a joint interest in maintaining the status quo along the United Nations-delineated Blue Line.
Hizbullah is careful to protect its tactical control of the Blue Line, aware that the finely-tuned rules that govern border clashes can easily be upset by unauthorized attacks. Hizbullah’s militants are deployed along the length of the 110-kilometer border, some at small observation posts, others armed and in military uniforms staking out the remoter stretches of the frontier. The fighters have been known to stop armed Palestinians on their way to the frontier and hand them over to the Lebanese authorities. Israel is aware of the occasionally useful role its arch foe plays in helping maintain calm along the border, hence the willingness to play down last week’s Katyusha attack.
But things are different with regard to Palestinian militants operating here in Lebanon:
Back to Shatila, part 1
In the summer of 1974, shortly after I arrived in Beirut
to make my way as a journalist, I started volunteering to teach English
in Shatila, one of a number of refugee camps around Beirut that gave shelter to Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war in Israel/Palestine.
Eight years later, the name “Shatila” was to become inscribed on the conscience of the world, after the Israeli-orchestrated massacre there that left hundreds– quite possibly as many as 2,000–of the camp’s civilian population dead.
But those days were still far in the future when I first walked along the broad, but chaotic and filthy thoroughfare that led to the heart of the refugee camp in 1974.
Palestinian prospects
I am really delighted with the news from Gaza (as reported by the BBC) that,
- Hamas and Islamic Jihad are pressing for a more broad-based national leadership in which they would have a say…
And also, that,
- A Hamas spokesman said after the meeting that Mr Qurei [Abu Alaa] had accepted the idea in principle and that there would be more talks on how to implement this.
(The Beeb’s Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston did, however, caveat that by noting that Qurei himself was “more vague on the issue”.)
The prospect of Hamas and IJ joining a broad-based leadership would certainly help to stabilize the situation inside Palestine during the present transition, because:
- (1) Between them these two Islamic groups form such a large proportion of the community that keeping them out of its ruling councils– as has been Arafat’s insistence up until now— has been a recipe for political paralysis, a breakdown of internal trust, and considerable factionalism, and
(2) These two groups have considerably more internal discipline and dedication than the secular-nationalist groups, led by Arafat’s own Fateh, that have monopolized PA/PLO decision-making until now.
(For more background on this, you might want to read the piece I had in Boston Review on Gaza, a few months ago.)
Beyond the immediate transitional arrangement of some kind of joint PLO/PA/Hamas/IJ ruling council the only plausible way to reconstitute any kind of a more lasting Palestinian leadership that can actually save Israelis and Palestinians from an escalating disaster at this point is to hold nationwide Palestinian elections in which all these different groups participate/compete.
Dr. Mustapha Barghouthi, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative has been at the forefront of the call for Palestinian national elections. He has argued that elections are, “a vital precondition for peace”. He notes too that
- [F]reedom of movement is needed to ensure these elections may take place.
… these elections will not take place unless the international community provides an international presence to ensure an easing of the political and territorial conditions that make elections impossible.
I would certainly second Barghouthi’s appeal for elections. But I would go further than he seems to, and argue that the next elections for a Palestinian leadership should be designed to include the Palestinian people of the diaspora, not merely those living in the occupied territories…
“Satan” in Fallujah
I saw this clip on the Beeb last night and have just found the story on their website. It’s the one where a US Marines Colonel called Gareth Brandl says:
- “The marines that I have had wounded over the past five months have been attacked by a faceless enemy…
“But the enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He lives in Falluja. And we’re going to destroy him.”
That, you might think, is bad enough, as an indicator of how the Marines preparing to assault Fallujah are being motivated by their officers.
What seems to me almost as disturbing is the degree to which BBC reporter Paul Wood, newly embedded with Brandl’s unit, has lost the objectivity and humanitarianism that is essential for good reporting of any difficult conflict. In particular, despite the really unpleasant content of the quote above, Wood describes Brandl glowingly as, “a charismatic young officer.”
Wood also reports that the “deputy commanding general, Denis Hajlik” gave the newly embedded journalists the following very crude description of the startegy the Marines would pursue, going into the city: “We’re gonna whack ’em.”
But then the Beebman immediately gives us his own little commentary, assuring us that, “This is not bloodlust.”
I can’t figure out what is happening here. Is it the psychodynamics of embedment, which are designed by the military to persuade the embedded journos to adopt the hosting forces’ own view of the world? Or is it the BBC, having gotten a bloody nose from Blair over the whole Andrew Gilligan affair, now kowtowing more than ever to provide a view of the war that will back up Blair’s insane posture in support of it?
Maybe a bit of both.
Well, I wonder how, in years to come, Hajlik, Brandl– and Wood– will all look back at the role they played in this bizarre, hate-fueled campaign to “destroy a city in order to ‘save’ it”…
Dahr Jamail returns to Iraq
I’m sitting here in Beirut sifting a zillion things in my mind… One is regret that I haven’t mustered the courage to do what I had hoped to do while I’ve been here, which was to go to Iraq… braving a certain degree of risk, it is true… and doing some firsthand reporting from there.
In the end the degree of risk looked just too great. Or, am I getting old and flabby? Did I lose my nerve? Well, I’m sure you don’t want to hear me maundering on about my personal woes.
Anyway, I have good news for you. Dahr Jamail, a good reporter who looks from his pic to be 25 years younger than me, has just taken the plunge and gone back to Iraq. So now, the rest of us can all live out my earlier, fear-quashed hopes vicariously, through Dahr.
Here is an excerpt from the first post he put on his blog after getting back there, Friday:
Arafat: transition notes
I was just watching the BBC… they’re awaiting some important news from the French hospital re the Old Man… What I did see, however, was a tiny video clip, unremarked by their correspondent, that showed my old bud David Pearce, once a UPI journo and now the US Consul-General in Jerusalem, leaving the Muqataa in Ramallah.
US officials have been forbidden from meeting the Palestinian leadership for a while now, in line with Sharon’s attempt to boycott Arafat completely.
Seeing David at the Muqataa like that just reminded me of the kinds of much-needed contacts that will become possible after the Old Man’s passing…
Arafat’s physical passing, taken along with Tony Blair’s very well-timed intervention urging Bush to move fast back into Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, means that some interesting things could indeed happen on the peace front in the next few weeks. (See previous post.)
It is quite possible that the main thing David Pearce was talking about at the Muqataa was plans for a (future) funeral. Where will Arafat be buried? Which world leaders will want to attend, and which will be allowed to attend?
How about the Arab leaders, in that regard?
All fascinating questions. Plus, Islamic burial norms mean the burial should occur within 24 hours of the announcement of death. So maybe the “coma” will have to last a little longer while they iron all these details out?
Sorry to be so grisly about all this. Of course, I still wish him and his family all comfort through this passage.
… BBC still not showing anything from Percy Hospital. H’mmm.