One week ago today, I spent the morning driving round parts of the western portion of Ramallah governorate with Anita Abdallah and a couple of other people. You can read a little about what we saw there toward the end of this post.
Here is one picture of the inside of Deir Ghassaneh, a lovely hilltop village that is home to many members of the Barghouthi family, and the site of the grave of the late Bashir Barghouthi, a great Palestinian thinker and social activist.
This is a picture of the big yellow gate the Israelis have installed at the base of the only road that leads to Deir Ghassaneh and four other villages. Note the scenic watchtower in the background! There is a military base and a growing-as-we-speak Israeli settlement right nearby.
On the day we were there, the gate was, thankfully, open. But whenever the Israelis choose to close it, they do; and sometimes it has been closed for many days in a row. Then, the people of the five villages have great difficulties getting to jobs, markets, schools, or doctor’s appontments in the nearby towns of Ramallah and Bir Zeit.
Here is a picture of Sharon’s 24-foot-high “Bigger than Berlin” concrete wall as it slices straight through the (Palestinian) eastern suburbs of Jerusalem. We’re looking at the wall here from the Aizariyeh side. My Palestinian friends told me that in some places, the local residents use cranes to lift kids over the Wall so they can get to school, etc. I’m not sure you could do that for Granny if she needs to go to a doctor’s appointment….
Finally, here is a really poignant picture of one section of the Wall that’s on the point of being completed. This is to the north of Aizariyeh, at the point where Sharon’s plan is leaving room for the the massive Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to be “included” in his crazy-quilt Jerusalem perimeter.
Author: Helena
Those elusive permits for Gaza
Since early January, the Israeli authorities have been handing a new piece of paper to foreigners entering their country (and also, to foreigners entering the occupied West Bank across the Allenby/King Hussein Bridge. This is what it looks like.
How lovely that they promise that they will make “the utmost effort” to authorize requests to enter Gaza “within 5 working days”. Too bad that these “utmost efforts” brought no results in my recent case, eh? (See this recent post on my efforts to get into Gaza last week.)
Arafat, and other encounters in Palestine/Israel
I got back home to Charlottesville, Virginia, Monday evening, and have been working my rear end off since then writing a long article to a tight deadline. Got up at 4 .a.m. this morning to work on it, no less. That wasn’t as bad as it seems, since the time-difference between here and Israel/Palestine allowed me to think of myself as basking lazily in bed till noon.
But now, having met the deadline I was working to, and having taken the faithful pooch Honey for a good long walk, I’m ready to blog here again. Where was I?
I confess I haven’t posted anything meaningful here yet about some of the most politically “significant” encounters I had while I was in Palestine/Israel. Like my lunch-party with Yasser Arafat last Friday. Or the content of the good discussions I had on Thursday with former Palestinian Minister of Culture Ziad Abu Amr and PLO Executive Committee Qays Samarrai (Abu Leila). I really didn’t see the need to advertise encounters like these to the whole world at a time when I still (on Sunday morning) had to face the prospect of a lengthy interrogation and inspection of all my baggage and notes at the time I would be leaving Ben-Gurion airport.
Are you like the many other people I have talked to since my lunch with Arafat whose first question has been, as always, “How did you find him?”
Continue reading “Arafat, and other encounters in Palestine/Israel”
Chalabi’s “intel” to be examined
Ah, it couldn’t happen to a “nicer” bunch of snake-oil salesmen! I read with delight a report I found via Yankeedoodle of Today in Iraq, that Ahmed Chalabi and his nefarious Iraqi National Congress will be having the information they supplied to the US prior to last year’s war specifically examined by W’s new Commission on the Intel (whatever it’s called.)
The good, well-reported Knight-Ridder story that Yankee sent me to says:
- Sens. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the chair and vice chair of the Senate intelligence committee, announced Thursday that they are expanding a probe into prewar intelligence to include the use of information from the INC.
It’s a good story, in general. Read it. Thanks, Yankee!
By the way, Yankee also has two other great features on his blog. One is the listing that he works hard at, in which he tries to get something up on his blog about every US soldier killed in Iraq, presented to readers state-by-state. Since I’m a Virginia home-girl, I’m going to try to copy all the listings he makes for Virginia soldiers. Maybe I could start a special area of the blog to gather them all together on.
Here’s one from his latest post:
Local story: Virginia soldier killed in Iraq.
And here’s another little feature that he introduced onto his blog just three days ago:
86-43-04. Pass it on.
‘Concentration’ in Palestine
I’ve spent most of the past week in occupied Palestine, though with
the occasional trip over the Green Line into Israel. While here, I’ve
had ample opportunity, yet again, to see the devastating effects on the lives
of the Palestinians of the tight and capriciously applied “movement controls”
that the Israeli occupation forces have maintained on the Palestinians here continuously since September 2000 (41 months).
Like the building of the ghastly Apartheid Wall, these movement controls
have been pursued by the Israelis in the name of a still-elusive search for
their own people’s security. We could discuss for a long time whether it is only the search for security, and not–in addition–a desire to pursue and consolidate Israel’s colonial-style land-grab in the occupied territories, that has motivated these measures. However, regardless of the intentions of the men who decided on them and proceeded to plan their implementation, the effect of the movement controls (as of the Apartheid Wall which is just one part of this inhuman broader policy) has been to concentrate the three-million-plus Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza
into a series of scores of disconnected pens.
We could call these pens “strategic
hamlets”, except in some cases they are whole cities. We could call
them Bantustans, except that they are far smaller and have far less potential
for any kind of self-sufficiency even than those ill-starred exercizes in
apartheid-era control and social engineering. We could call them “concentration
areas”– a fine colonial example of domination of another population group,
also pioneered in South Africa: its aim was to cut the restive Boers off
from any connection with productive economic life. (It notably did
not turn most of them into warm, cuddly, peace-seeking people; see ‘Bantustans’
above.) Or, we could call them ghettoes– walled-in ghettoes like the ones in Warsaw,
Theresienstadt, or other places into which, in the first phase of a process that later ended in the horrendously successful project to physically destroy the Jewish and Roma peoples, the Nazis penned their future victims.
I came to Israel/Palestine with one main aim: to go to Gaza to do some consulting
on p.r. issues for a US-based NGO…
Great experiences; limbo nonetheless
I’ve been hanging around here in Israel/Palestine for the past few days,
for reasons that will become clear to you if you read one third or so of
the way down in the present post.
This post is made up of some descriptive fragments that I have written over
the past couple of days as one way of dealing with this Kafka-esque limbo
situation I’ve been in. They are not well organized; but that’s for
later.
Nightfall in West Jerusalem
Monday night I decided to spend a little time in Israel. So I left the
charming little hotel I was staying in in occupied East Jerusalem, the Christmas
Hotel, and walked around 200 yards westward before dashing across the hectic
eight-lane highway built some years ago along this section of the Green Line
that divides the occupied and unoccupied halves of this ancient city. Immediately
I was plunged into the late-19th-century world of a quarter of extremely religious
Jewish Israelis called Mea Shearim.
For a long time, most of the people of Mea Shearim were so fundamental in
their religious beliefs that they did not believe any “slvation” of any value
could be brought by the establishment at human hands of a Jewish state, and
some of them were staunchly anti-Zionist. But that’s another story.
Today, as the shadows of dusk gathered in the narrow streets, I walked
through quickly, not wanting to attract attention to my “immodest” dress of
long pants and long-sleeved shirt. Large notices exhorted “Women and
girls” not to offend the quarter’s residents with any immodest garb. Pants
were expressly included in that. I wasn’t sure wherther the notice
applied to the street I was walking along, or only the smaller side-alleys.
But I walked fast, just in case.
Juan Cole’s reply to Bush
Okay, I know that because I’m traveling, I’m hopelessly behind the curve of the US news cycle. But I just read Juan Cole’s elegantly argued response to Bush’s really lame ‘Meet the Press’ appearance Sunday, and wanted to get the link up here.
I’m thinking that a smart Dem– and particularly one with a strong record of military service*– should be able to take on this sad little president we have right now, and WIN.
* Okay, I’m a Quaker and I oppose all wars and military ventures. But I respect that Kerry, despite being a member of the upper class who could easily–like W– have found a way to evade active service in Vietnam times, did not take the easy way out… Plus, the journals he wrote during and after that service, as revealed in Douglas Brinkley’s new book on him, show him to have been an unusually astute and esnsitive observer of the coarsening effects that the military life was having on everyone involved in it.
Today, by the way, is the Democratic primary back home in Virginia. I cast an absentee ballot for Dean before leaving home, and don’t regret doing so. Dean has played a magnificent role by pushing the whole party to confront Bush openly on the war issue.
Jerusalem’s Apartheid Wall
I’m now in Jerusalem. This morning, I had some time to spare so I thought
I should go and look at some local sections of the vast network of walls
and fences the Israelis are building throughout the West Bank.
Actually, before I went there I had a good visit with Tom Neu, the head of
the Jerusalem office of a humanitarian-aid organization called American Near
East Refugee Aid, with which I’m doing a little consulting work. Tom
gave me a copy of the latest edition of the map the local U.N. people put
out periodically that tries to indicate which roads are closed and open,
and where the Wall is being built. This info is vital for all the humanitarian-aid
workers attempting to deliver services to the hard-pressed Palestinians of
the West Bank
‘Wall’ is not quite an adequate term for this network of barriers that loops
back on itself many times, cutting the Palestinian population of the West
Bank into 12 or more separate pens. Like animals. (I see in today’s
paper that the Israeli military is now claiming they “did not realize” how
much hardship the Wall would cause to the Palestinians, so they’re asking
for more money to take ameliorative measures like bussing schoolkids from
one zone to another. But how about they just stop building the Wall
altogether– especially since they’re building it totally on somebody
else’s land, not their own?)
Anyway, I thought I should go check out the sections near Jerusalem…
JWN blogiversary, etc
So my first blogiversary here at JWN passed Feb 6 and I didn’t even blog that day. Oh well.
My first post, here, was about Colin Powell’s speech to the UN just the day before.
What a lot has happened in this past year!
Back in early January (2004) I wrote a CSM column urging that the administration should be held accountable for its many serious mis-statements over Iraqi WMDs– in Powell’s speech, and of course, elsewhere. I actually had no idea that that process of being-held-accountable would proceed as far and as fast as it has in the past month.
Not nearly enough, of course. I looked at the make-up of the Commission of Inquiry that the Prez himself appointed (to investigate himself… how does that work again??), and I noted along with most other commentators that of the seven folks named to date, only one has any depth of the relevant expertise.
Judge Wald, I know a little bit. She specialized in family law; then, about six or seven years ago she was named to the bench of the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Luxor fun
We had a totally awesome three days checking out various tombs and ancient temples in Luxor. I got back to Cairo yesterday, and started pulling together the raw materials for a very deep think-piece here about the fate of empires etc– with our clamber over the ruins of the statue of Ozymandias providing a great leaping-off point.
Unfortunately, however, I had a late buffet lunch at the Nile Hilton yesterday that totally pole-axed me and spent much of the evening clasping the toilet bowl as I heaved profusely into it.
Lucky, really, that at this stage in life my body has enough anti-bodies in it to various Egyptian tummy bugs that it knew exactly what to do and repelled all invading microbes in efficient (I guess) and thorough fashion.
So there went “Ozymandias, king of kings” (Shelley reference needed here.)