Category: Palestine 2003-05

Another round of important Middle Eastern elections was held Thursday– the municipal elections in Gaza’s 25 cities, towns, and villages.
The Palestinian population of Gaza is about 1.3 million, with 80% of those people being refugees from inside Israel (or, the descendants of those original refugees from 1948, who also have refugee status and burning but still unaddressed claims against Israel basedon that. They did get to vote on Thursday.)
Hamas won 78 of the 118 seats being contested, according to this story in yesterday’s WaPo, which also spelled out that Hamas won control of seven of the ten “towns” (for which, read “towns or cities”) being contested.
The movement’s victories in Gaza follow the ones they registered in a few West Bank jurisdictions on December 23, as I posted about here.
That WaPo piece, by John Ward Anderson, is worth reading because it gives a broad but fairly well informed assessment of the meaning of the elections. The New York Times did not mention them until today, when their reporter Steven Erlanger did so in a very dismissive and classically “orientalist” way.
First of all, Erlanger only writes about the Strip having “towns and villages”, though Gaza City is very evidently a city. (Okay, Anderson did that, too.) But it’s a sort of typically orientalist/colonialist thing to do to down-grade the designators used for population centers. Many of what the Israelis call “villages” in the occupied territories or Lebanon have far greater populations than what the Israelis call “towns” inside Israel.
But instead of making his own independent assessment of the importance of the vote, or quoting one of the many very well informed Palestinian commentators on it, Erlanger’s first comment on the vote came from– you guessed it,

a senior Israeli military official [who] said the results were not especially important, given the influence of local clans that supported slates of candidates. The vote had more to do with local issues than national policy, the official said.

And then, Erlanger did nothing to challenge, balance, or even qualify that assessment, leaving it standing as the most authoritative “analysis” he provided. All he did was add a little “local color” in the form of a quote from a Palestinian “housewife”.
Lazy journalism, or bias? Most likely, a bit of both.
The idea that in any analogous conflict, one would present the “analysis” of “a senior military official” of one of the contending powers on the internal politics of the other power to be in any way objective or authorittative would be outrageous. (Oops, it happens all the time in US reporting on Iraq. But in all cases, it’s more significant for what it tells us about the way the quoted official is trying to “spin” the situation than for what is actually happening inside the community being commented on.)
Note the reference to “clans”, which is a way of downgrading and dismissing the importance of the Palestinians’ internal political processes that the Israelis have used non-stop since 1948…
Regardless of all that spin, the internal politics really are interesting. Hamas is emerging more and more as a smart and well organized political force.
I am really glad that I have my big article on Lebanon’s Hizbullah in the works at Boston Review, since one of the reasons I wrote it was to look at Hizbullah’s political strategy as a possible predictor for what either Hamas and the Shiite parties in Iraq might do.
At this point, Hizbullah’s record seems a much better predictor for Hamas than for the Shiite parties.
Alert readers may say, “Yes, Helena, but isn’t Hamas Sunni?” Yes, indeed it is. But the coordination between it and Hizbullah has been notably strong ever since, in December 1992, Yitzhak Rabin unwittingly sent about 400 cadres from Hamas to study at “Hizbullah University” in the bare hills of South Lebanon.
That has to be one of the great ironies of history. Rabin had recently been elected PM, and he was determined– five years into the first intifada– to “teach the Palestinian militants a lesson”. (Have we heard that before?) So what he did, in a midnight raid, was round up more than 400 Palestinian militants, including many Hamas cadres, from their homes and seek to deport them all summarily to Lebanon…

Continue reading “Hamas victories, Gaza municipals”

Here is my translation of the interview that Hayat’s Ghassan Charbel recently conducted with Hamas secretary-general Khaled Mashaal. (And here is the link to the Arabic original.)
Mashaal’s word is the definitive word at this point, regarding the movement’s political position.
What he says here accords closely with the reported Hamas position paper that I wrote about (and linked to) here, on January 19.
Inb particular, in the interview Mashaal talks about the importance of “realizing true [Palestinian] sovereignty over the areas from which the [Israeli] occupation withdraws” — without spelling out whether or not he means the occupation of 1967.
On the crucial issue of a truce, he is reported as saying:

There is talk about a calming, but about a conditional calming until the time that the occupation becomes committed to defined terms, the most important of which are the ending of all forms of aggression and attack and assassinations and killing, and the release of all the Palestinian prisoners. And in the event that the enemy should comply with these terms we in Hamas and also the other forces of the resistance, in general terms, we would be ready to deal positively with the issue of calming or a provisional truce.

I find another aspect of what he says also extremely interesting. This is the way he talks about Hamas’s political relations with the PLO.
People who don’t know much about Palestinian history probably need to understand that there’s a huge depth of animosity between Hamas and the PLO that goes back a long way, and was certainly exacerbated greatly by many actions that Yasser Arafat took.
So long as Arafat was alive, he didn’t want Hamas included anywhere at all in Palestinian decisionmaking structures– and they hated and distrusted him him greatly, in return. Back in 2003, Abu Mazen did try to bring them into an expanded leadership structure during his short-lived term as PM, and won their preliminary agreement to the move. But Arafat nixed it totally, which was a good part of the reason that Abu Mazen resigned. (Read some reflections on what happened then in this piece I published in BR last spring.)
But then, Arafat died….
Now, Abu Mazen has a much better shot than he did 18 months ago at bringing Hamas into the leadership. I believe they trust him much more than they ever did Arafat.
Two aspects of what Mashaal says in this regard are particularly interesting:

Continue reading “Mashaal’s interview”

Khaled Mashaal, the top leader of Hamas, has now told al-Hayat that Hamas “is prepared to suspend attacks if Israel stops targeting militants and agrees to release thousands of Palestinian prisoners,” according to this story by AP’s Lara Sukhtian.
I’ll be heading over to the Hayat website to get the text of that interview. (In a couple of hours I leave for New York, so I hope I can read the interview on the plane.)
Sukhtian writes:

Mashaal said Hamas, which has called for Israel to be replaced by an Islamic state, would agree to stop attacks if Israel ends “aggression, invasion, assassination, killings” and agrees to release all Palestinian prisoners.
“If the enemy abides by these conditions, we, in Hamas, and other resistance forces in general, are ready to deal positively with the issue of pacification or temporary truce,” Mashaal told the London-based newspaper, which did not say when or where the interview was conducted.

I saw a story on Reuters late last night conveying in general that the truce negotiations with Abu Mazen had succeeded.
As I understand it, Hamas is agreeing to a ceasefire of limited duration, which quite understyandably they expect Israel to join. If that does not happen, evidently the ceasefire becomes null and void.
Sukhtian notes:

A senior Hamas leader in the West Bank has said the group has agreed to suspend attacks for 30 days to test Israel’s response.
In summer 2003, Hamas had agreed to a truce that fell apart after less than two months.
Israel has refused to guarantee it would not pursue militants, but has said it will respond to calm with calm.

The general calming seems already to be happening. But the truce period will be a testing time for all parties.
Firstly, it challenges Sharon to truly back down from continuing to use violence, assassinations, etc., to impose his own version of “pacification” on the 3.5 million Palestinians of the occupied territories.
Secondly it tests the Bush administration to really help in moving Israel towards things Israel should have done a long time ago. Some short-term (but very important) things like releasing all the thousands of Palestinian detainees who are being held with no “probable cause” for their detention at all, and helping open up the Palestinian economy. But also, serious longterm moves like speeding up the total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and moving immediately to serious (and long, long overdue) negotiations on all final-status issues.
Thirdly, it tests Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the other Palestinian militant groups to see if they truly can control their own, often hotheaded supporters and get them to go along with the truce. If they can, that will immensely strengthen their political position as a potential part of the Palestinian ruling coalition.
Fourthly and finally, it tests Abu Mazen– both his intention and his capability. Personally, though, I think he’s already passed all the many, many tests to which he’s been subjected. He has the intention to make peace. But it’s all the other parties– particularly the Israelis and Americans– which will determine whether he ends up with both the phsyical and the political capability of doing so.
Of course, the way the Americans and Israelis like to tell it, all this is really only a “test” of Abu Mazen.
But remember, back in summer of 2003, he passed an exactly similar test very successfully. The Israelis and Americans certainly didn’t do what they should have back then.
Will they, this time? Let’s hope…

Ha’Aretz has two interesting articles today on the Palestinian situation. One is an assessment of Abu Mazen’s situation, written by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. Rob worked on Palestinian-Israeli issues in the Clinton White House and Hussein has been a longtime advisor to the Palestinian leadership. They are both astute and experienced; but of course like everyone else they look at things almost exclusively from their own point of view.
I’ll come back to their article later. First, though, I want to mention this piece, by Arnon Regular, that gives what I judge to be an unrealisticially “optimistic” gloss to the Hamas position paper I wrote about here, a couple of days ago.
Somewhat breathlessly, Regular reports that,

Hamas has distributed a document … in which the organization, for the first time in its existence, unequivocally recognizes the 1967 borders …

Not so fast there!
What the document in question actually expresses, in Article I-6, is this:

Commitment to the goal of dislodging the occupation, and the establishment of an independent, fully soveriegn Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.

“Dislodging the occupation” is notably not the same thing as “recognizing the 1967 borders”, for two reasons:
Firstly, the meaning of the term “occupation” is not spelled out there. There are plenty of Palestinians who believe that Israel’s entire presence inside its pre-1967 borders constitutes an “occupation”, just as much as its presence in the West Bank and Gaza. (Plus, under international law, certain significant chunks of pre-1967 Israel were not allocated to the Jewish state in the 1947 Partition Plan and are therefore not unequivocally regarded as “Israel’s”.)
For the Hamas leaders to use the term “occupation”, without specifying “occupation of 1967”, leaves the extent of the occupation that they seek to dislodge still ambiguous.
Secondly, regardless of the extent of the “occupation” they seek to dislodge, they are notably not saying that that is the end of their demands. What they say still leaves open the possibility of them having a “two-stage” approach…
I think it’s important to clarify these points. The Hamas document is significant, both for its existence as a first, publicly available clear statement of their current position and proposals, and for a number of points of its actual content. Including (but not limited to) Article I-6. What they say in Art. I-6 certainly leaves open the possibility of them settling for a two-state outcome. And that is new and significant.
But what it does not do, at this point, is commit Hamas to accepting the existence of Israel within its pre-1967 borders, or indeed, any stated borders at all.
I think it’s very important not to over-interpret the advances this document represents. To do so would be to lead to disappointment and accusations of betrayal of trust when, sometime down the pike, Hamas leaders might well say, “Oh no, we never agreed to the existence of Israel inside the 1967 borders.”
It’s also important to read their statement as near as one can to the way they wrote it. These are people for whom the power and impact of every single word is very carefully chosen. One cannot understand them well or deal with them effectively if one does not read what they are saying.
Having said all of which, what they did say was still extremely significant.
And now, to the Agha-Malley article:

Continue reading “Haaretz looking at Palestine”

Hamas did not give Abu Mazen anything of a honeymoon after his electoral win last week, but instead mounted (along with Jihad and the Aqsa Brigades) the operations at the Karnei crossing point, which killed six Israelis, including two truck drivers and four crossing-administrators. Then this week Hamas launched the attack against Shin Bet agents staffing a checkpoint deep inside Gaza, killing one of them.
But still, it seems the tide on both sides of the national divide there in Israel/Palestine is shifting toward the possibility of some de-escalation. Indeed, despite Sharon’s big announcement of a decision last week that he would not open talks with Abu Mazen because of the Karnei attack, tonight there was a meeting at the Erez checkpoint between high-level security delegations from both sides.
Abu Mazen has thus far laid a lot of stress on “cleaning up the internal house” of intra-Palestinian politics. A very wise move indeed, given the (sometimes deadly) internal chaos that had over recent years increasingly become the norm in relations even inside Fateh– and that had actually left Fateh with little time or energy to wage any kind of internal political battle against any other forces inside Palestinian society. (Let alone against Israel.)
Abu Mazen has also laid stress on resolving intra-Palestinian issues through negotiation and other peaceful means, rather than through force– though force is certainly what the Israelis and Americans have been urging him to use against the militant forces inside Palestinian society.
My sense of what’s happening in Palestinian politics right now is that most Palestinians are quite happy to see the schisms emerging inside Israeli society over the issue of the planned withdrawal from Gaza, and are fairly determined not to let similar schisms tear their own already very vulnerable society apart. I have to note that for all the many, many attempts the Israelis have made over the years to cultivate some form of a Buthelezi-like “third force” figure inside Palestinian society, they have never to this day succeeded in that.
(Anyone out there remember the name Mustafa Dudeen? He was the “great white hope” of the Begin administration, circa 1981.) Arafat, for his all his many, many flaws was never prepared to become a Palestinian Quisling– despite all the vitriol that Edward Said launched his way (from the safety and comfort of Edward’s perch at Columbia University). And Abu Mazen certainly is no Quisling, either.
Anyway, Abu Mazen’s first job is to try to fashion some kind of a working administration out of the organizational chaos and anarchy he has inherited from Arafat. According to this piece from occupied Jerusalem in Thursday’s Al-Hayat, Abu Mazen has said that, “the ‘reform file’ for the PA contains four principal headlines, which are the security organs, the administration, the economy, and the judiciary.”
Well, that should all be heard as good news by democracy-lovers all around the world. It might also come as good news for Hamas, which has also– just like Hizbullah in Lebanon– taken increasingly in recent years to promoting its cause under the general banner of “good governance.”
In recent days, Hamas reportedly presented a document to all the other Palestinian factions which was their suggested draft for a “Document of Palestinian Dignity”, which basically lays out ground-rules for how they want the different Palestinian factions to relate to each other.
It’s long on general principles and short on specific details, but one of the really significant things in it is the degree to which it avoids airy-fairy, specifically religious rhetoric or references and the degree to which it really does use the language of general good governance.
Look, for example, at numbers 4, 5, and 6 in the second part of their listing (“internal relations”):

Continue reading “Internal politics in Palestine”

So Abu Mazen won the Palestinian election No surprise whatsoever there. The turnout was down significantly from the last election, in 1996. (Actually, on the AP story I was reading, it said that Election Commission chief Hanna Nassir refused to release a final turnout figure.
Abbas obtained 62.32 percent of votes cast, streets ahead of his nearest rival Mustafa Barghuti, who won 19.8 percent.
And today, the Sharon-Peres version of a “unity government” in Israel just got sworn in, by 58 votes to 56 in the 120-member Knesset.
The government is committed to a platform mandating implementation of Sharon’s year-old “disengagement” plan, that is, the complete or near-complete withdrawal from Gaza and the dismantling of four so-called “illegal” outposts in the northern West Bank.
Sharon had declared that he would treat today Knesset vote on the new government as a “confidence” vote, i.e., if 61 members voted against it he would resign. As it was, 13 Likud members voted against him and he was saved only by the last-minute decision of some small leftist parties to support him.
But what if Sharon had– like Abbas– gone to the general citizenry to test their support of his approach? The latest “Peace Index” survey of Israeli public opinion, put out by the Steinmetz Center at Tel Aviv University, reports that as of Dec 27-28,

Continue reading “Palestine/Israel: the work begins”

Bill the spouse is just back from Jerusalem. Yesterday he was in Hebron and Ramallah. He brought back some interesting Palestinian election materials. Like this, which is from a T-shirt:

That says: “On the path of Yasser Arafat”. I’m afraid the part of it above– which says simply “Vote for Abu Mazen”– for some reason didn’t scan.
Then we have this bumper sticker:

It says: “For the sake of bringing down the racist separation wall– Let us vote for– Doctor Mustafa Barghouthi.”
Mustafa Barghouthi, in case you’d forgotten, is not the same as Marwan Barghouthi. the “radical” inside Fateh who decided not to run. Mustafa is a generally leftist physician who’s the long-time head of the Medical Relief Committees in the occupied territories. He’s a wonderfully smart and sincere guy who’s a good organizer.
Finally, this flier:

Continue reading “Palestinian election memorabilia”

I’ve been reading the interview with Abu Mazen that was in yesterday’s Al-Sharq al-Awsat. It’s great that he came out so strongly for the demilitarization of the intifada, as noted in many mainstream media. Another great aspect of what he said was that he called for the continuation of the intifada by other, non-military means.
Here’s the full text of that question and answer:

Q: You (in the plural) had a clear opinion about the militarization of the intifada, and has that opinion remained only an opinion or have you adopted alternative steps [to the military ones]?
A: There’s no value in an opinion if it remains only an opinion, and it’s necessary that it should be implemented, and one of the means of such implementation is the imperative of disarming the intifada because the intifada is a legitimate right of the people in order to express its opposition to the occupation by popular and social means. And that’s what happened in the first intifada in the ‘eighties. Therefore the Palestinian people aren’t prevented from pursuing such activities, which express its viewpoint. The use of arms was harmful and it must stop, through working for calming members of the ranks of the Palestinian people.

He did not, unfortunately, spell out any further what he meant by these “popular and social means”. (Readers interested in learning more about Palestinian nonviolence organizations can look here, or here, or here.)
One of the other topics discussed in the interview–which was conducted by Naser Qadih, during Abu Mazen’s trip to Kuwait– was the whole issue of Abu Mazen’s tour around various Arab countries that (like Kuwait) previously were fairly or extremely hostile to the PLO/PA leadership.
It strikes me that this new Palestinian-Arab rapprochement is one of the most significant– but generally, under-noted– consequences of the death of Yasser Arafat.
And let’s face it, as the Stalinists used to say, this is “no accident”. To be precise, one of the greatest of the many dis-services that Yasser Arafat did the Palestinian cause was his record in quite gratuitously and seriously irritating large numbers of Arab leaders…

Continue reading “Palestinian politics update”

With all my travels I failed to post anything here before now about the column I had in the CSM November 29, under the title Revisiting the gritty symbol of Palestinian survival – Shatila.
Well, I wouldn’t have given it that title since the whole way the story was written was so that the name of the camp wouldn’t be disclosed till about one-third the way down.
Ever since the column came out, the near-rabid “watchdog” group CAMERA has been snapping at the heels of my editors at the CSM, focusing on where I described the terrible 1982 massacre in the camp as “Israeli-orchestrated”.
The CSM is one of 14 “print media” outlets that CAMERA has on its watchlist, according to this page on their website. They also have a lengthy watchlist of individual journos, too. Shucks, I didn’t make that one!
You can get a good idea of how this operation, CAMERA, works if you check their website out a bit. For example, on one page there they have a so-called Dictionary of Bias.
I suppose their intent in calling it that is to show their “activists” how to identify what CAMERA judges to be anti-Israeli bias? But what they recommend there, in terms of “acceptable” terminology, would embody a high degree of pro-Likud bias… So yes, you could indeed say it is a “Dictionary of Bias”.
(See in particular what they have to say about the terms “occupied territories”, “settlements”, etc… )
Oh well. I think my editors are trying to fight the good fight. At least, I hope so.

Today, both the NYT and the WaPo had short reports of yesterday’s incident in Gaza in which a Hamas unit apparently lured an Israeli unit into an ambush and one Israeli soldier was killed.
In both reports, this incident was presented as an out-of-the-blue operation undertaken by Hamas that broke what was reported as (NYT) “a relatively calm spell that had followed Mr. Arafat’s death”, or (WaPo) “three weeks of relative calm in Gaza “.
Relative calm???
Who the heck do they think they’re kidding?
Check, for example, this report from the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which tells us that during the week of Nov 25 – Dec 1:

* 7 Palestinians, including a mentally handicapped man and a physician, were killed by Israeli troops. [Four of these were killed in Gaza; three in the West Bank.]
* Israeli troops conducted a series of incursions into Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
* 8 houses were destroyed in Rafah [Gaza]
* 35 donums[1] of agricultural land were razed in the Khan Yunis [Gaza]
* 3 houses were destroyed in the West Bank in the context of retaliatory measures against families of Palestinian activists
* Houses were raided and dozens of Palestinian civilians were arrested in the West Bank
* Continued shelling of residential areas and civilian facilities, especially in Rafah where 13 Palestinian civilians were injured…

Continue reading ““Calm” in Palestine?”