Category: Palestine 2003-05

Yasser Arafat reportedly collapsed yesterday evening while eating soup with present “prime minister” Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa) and former PM Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The new reports coming out of the Muqataa compound in Ramallah where he has been imprisoned by the Israelis since March 2002 give a hint of the unseemly political jockeying and chaos that are underway there as contenders for power try to position themselves for the succession era.
The AP’s Muhammed Daraghmeh writes this:

A Palestinian official in Arafat’s office said the Palestinian leader had created a special committee of three senior officials, including Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, to run Palestinian affairs while Arafat was incapacitated.
However, other Palestinian officials, including his spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh, denied that such a committee had been formed.

How tragic, then, that it’s “business as usual” in the Muqataa, a place that over the past 31 months has become the focus of nearly all the international concern about Palestinian politics when in my view people should have been paying a lot more attention instead to the parlous situation of the broad Palestinian communities on the ground–whether in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon, or elsewhere.
When looked at from that perspective, the sad effects of the many political mistakes that Arafat has made over past decades are evident. But his personal flaws are so deep that– as I have written a number of times here and elsewhere–he started to think increasingly that the Palestinian question was all about him. Sharon was then able to play to that fantasy like a maestro, making it seem in the world of international diplomacy that the Palestinian issue was indeed all “about” dealing, or not dealing, with Arafat.
I’ve been following Arafat’s political progress fairly closely for 30 years now– I last saw him in person in the Muqataa, last February–and I can honestly say that I don’t think he’s a bad person… Just extremely, extremely limited in his political capabilities and personal vision.
At one level he’s quite a phenomenon. The post-colonial world has in the past couple of decades–tragically– seen all too many of what the Africans call “big men”. You know: men who in their youth led daring and visionary independence movements, who were then handed the reins of power and spent some years in the heady and sometimes productive phase of nation-building… but whose rule later hardens into the autocracy/kleptocracy of the “big man”, who has come to identify his own fate almost totally with that of his “nation”…
Arafat skipped through that middle phase–the one of nation-building–almost completely.
That is one dimension of the tragedy of Arafat…

Continue reading “Arafat: a Palestinian tragedy”

I have a column in the CSM today about Arafat. It also has a recommendation for what the US could reasonably do, right now and also after the November election, to help improve the situation. The segué there is this crucial argument:

[The] trends in Palestinian politics are extremely important to the US, because Washington’s recent policies on the Palestinian issue are cited by Muslims worldwide as one of the main reasons for their strong opposition to Washington.
It may be true that Mr. Sharon is now willing to pull back from the tiny, overpopulated Gaza Strip. But what Muslims around the world see is that he continues to implant thousands of new Israeli settlers each month into the West Bank, including East Jerusalem – a holy city for Muslims, as well as Jews and Christians. When Washington continues to give Israel generous and unconditional support despite Sharon’s pursuit of the West Bank settlement project, that seriously undercuts US ability to win Muslim support in the campaign against global terrorism.

Now, I wish I’d put that point up to the very top of the piece. Bush’s flagrantly unfair, inhumane, and destructive policy on the Palestinian issue is really the big, unmentioned elephant in the room in all the current discussions in the US discourse over “what can we do to undercut support for Al-Qaeda”.
Nearly everyone engaged in these discussions “knows” the elephant is there, running rampage round the room. But no-one really wants to mention it. Not the 9/11 commission report. Not John Kerry (particularly, not John Kerry, the pathetic wimp). Not the editorialists in major newspapers…

Continue reading “CSM column on Arafat, US policy”

Well, guess who’s in Cairo, talking about security issues in Gaza?
According to Reuters, Khaled Mashaal, the head of Hamas, is.
Mashaal is the guy whom the Israelis tried to kill, using poison darts, in Jordan, back in 1997. I’m assuming his security people have gotten some solid-looking commitments from the Egyptians that the israelis won’t be allowed to try the same thing again this time?
The Reuters story, by Nidal Mughrabi, says:

Sources in Hamas, an Islamist movement behind many suicide attacks on Israelis, said the Cairo talks would seek to clarify Egypt’s offer to send up to 200 security advisers to Gaza.
Egypt, one of only two Arab states to have a peace treaty with Israel, wants to help prevent any collapse into anarchy or an Islamist takeover on its borders after Jewish settlers leave.
A Hamas delegation led by Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas politburo chief who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997, arrived in Cairo Monday to prepare for the talks.
“Each side will seek clarification from the other on a number of Palestinian, regional and international issues,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters by telephone from Gaza.
“The discussion will touch on (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon’s Gaza plan, (possible) roles of Arab countries such as Egypt, and the latest crisis in the Palestinian territories.”
There was no immediate comment available from Egyptian officials on the talks.

Of course, all this takes place in the context of the continuing turmoil within the ranks of the (mainly secular) Fateh and allied Palestinian movements.
This would not be the first time that the Egyptian government–or, indeed, the Israeli government–has sought to strengthen the role of Palestinian Islamists as a way to countering the power of Palestinian secular nationalists…

Continue reading “Hamas on a roll?”

How quickly the world forgets. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the apartheid government in South Africa pushed forward its plan to create “Bantu homelands” within South Africa which would:

(a) be small, territorially non-contiguous, and located in some of the country’s most unfertile regions, and
(b) be totally under the control of the Pretoria government in practice, even though four of the ten homelands were given a nominal “independence”. (Note the importance of the fact that no significant outside powers–except Israel!–ever gave formal recognition to this “independence”.)

What did the map of all of South Africa with the ten tiny homelands inside it look like? It looked like this. Maps of the Bantustans are so hard to come by these days that it took me a while to find that one: it came from vol. 7 of the TRC’s report, p.935.
When you look at that map, remember that the Black African population of South Africa at the time was more than 75% of the total. No wonder the vast majority of the country’s people rose up to oppose that system, and replaced it with a unitary system of one-person-one-vote democracy.
So here, now, are some maps that show what has been happning to the occupied Palestinian territories during the 37 years of Israel’s military occupation:
First up, this very clear map from the Foundation for Middle East Peace that shows the “leopard spots” of limited self-government in the occupied West Bank that the Palestinians were allowed under the post-Oslo “peace process” of 1993-2000.
Then, we have this map of the situation in Gaza as of last October. It comes from the UN’s Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs. If you click on the link for the large version there, you can see clearly just how much of the surface-area of Gaza is now off-limits to the Palestinians, because of the Israeli settlements and various “security” needs. And oh, the Israeli “security roads” just happen to cut the “Palestinian” parts of Gaza into four non-contiguous chunks.
There are a few other things worth remembering in this picture…

Continue reading “Bantustans: South Africa and Palestine”

Ouch. This must have been very painful for the embattled Arafat: to have Hamas’s Damascus-based head Khaled Mashaal urging him to restore calm and act wisely.
Th AP’s Muhammed Daraghmeh has a sort of catch-all piece out of Ramallah this evening listing all kinds of people and institutions–including the elected Palestinian legislature– that are urging Arafat to accept Abu Alaa’s resignation. And then halfway down, we have this:

The Syria-based head of the Hamas militant movement, Khaled Mashaal, telephoned Arafat Wednesday to urge him to restore calm.
Mashaal, whose organization has a wide following in Gaza, called for “a wise leadership handling to get out of this turmoil and for resorting to dialogue'” to resolve Palestinian differences, said a Hamas statement.
Hamas has sat quietly for the past week while factions of Arafat’s Fatah movement and his security forces sank deeper into violent rivalry.

Wouldn’t you have loved to have heard that conversation?
As I noted in this article in the April-May Boston Review, Hamas is the best organized and one of the best-respected and most popular political organizations in the Gaza Strip.
Last year, when Abu Mazen was PM, he urged Arafat to bring Hamas into the government as a follow-on to its agreement to participate in the ceasefire against Israel. Arafat refused. I think most of all he just hates that the Hamas people don’t kowtow to him as most of the people in his own entourage do. Plus, they are generally well-respected for not being corrupt, and raise trenchant criticisms of the corruption in his entourage. And compared with his lot–the wildly chaotic, many-faceted Fateh– they are a model of solid, serious, effective internal organization. Even with many of their leaders wiped out by Israel’s fiendish campaign of assassinations.
Well, here we are again: one year and many hundred Palestinian (and Israeli) casualties later.
I read the report about Mashaal’s call to YA as signifying both (a) that he’s making an overture that could well signal a willingness to open coalition talks, and (b) that he’s doing so from a position of apparent political self-confidence and strength. There’s something rather elder-statesman-ly, perhaps even fatherlike and/or patronizing, about what he is reported to have said to Arafat.
That’s what must have hurt.
Oh, did I mention that Hamas is on the U.S. government’s list of Terrorist Organizations?

One of the scary things about the current Palestinian nationalist movement is the degree to which the sheer personal vanity of one stubborn old man has succeeded in paralyzing nearly the entire (secular) part of the national movement for more than four years now.
Why does Yasser Arafat continue to cling to the trappings (if absolutely none of the realities) of political power so long after the failure of the strategy he spearheaded in the 1990s was so vividly demonstrated?
That’s one good question. It’s easy to answer. Vanity is enough of an answer, buttressed perhaps in this case by the degree of self-delusion he has succeeded in engendering throughout the decades, along the lines of la Palestine, c’est moi.
And of course, Sharon and Bush have known how to play on this vanity like a fine violin: they know full well that every time they attack him, or reject the claims he makes to represent the Palestinian people, that he’ll wrap himself ever tighter in the shroud of la Palestine, c’est moi-ism. It has never so far failed to work!
(Maybe it’s due to fail soon though?)
But here’s another question, even tougher to answer than the first one. Why have the Palestinian people put up for so long, in this era that is so critical for their cause, with Yasser Arafat and his absurd and very damaging claims to “represent” them?
Yes, I know, I know all the very heavy national-ideological baggage about the “historical” role he played in the national movement. (I even wrote some of that history myself.)
But just because a person played a historical role in a national movement doesn’t mean he continues to be asset to that movement in every succeeding era.
I’ve been following the guy’s career very closely for 30 years now. Indeed, it was July of 1974 when I left Britain for Beirut, planning to make a career as a foreign correspondent. I’d start in Beirut, I thought, and then maybe move elsewhere. As it was, the “stories” there were so gripping that I stayed for seven years, and got thoroughly bitten by the Middle-East affairs bug. The very first book I wrote (1984) was a study of the PLO.
I’ve written some fairly critical reflections on his performance over the years. But with all the latest news about Abu Alaa’s resignation and the escalating political chaos inside Gaza, I got to reflecting once again on how I would try to define YA’s shortcomings. So if I were writing the “bill of particulars” against him at this time, it might look like this:

Continue reading “Arafat: Planless in Gaza”

On June 30, AP had a story quoting unnamed Israeli security officials saying that, “Israel plans to establish a three-mile-deep ‘security zone’ in the northern Gaza Strip, with hundreds of troops patrolling the area in coming months to prevent Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli border towns.”
Oh boy, how tragic–for the Palestinians and for the Israelis.
You think the Israeli “security officials” have learned nothing from their country’s history over the past 20 years?
1985 was the year that, with their economy and society hit hard by the huge costs of maintaining an already 3-year-old occupation of one-third of Lebanon, the Israelis decided to withdraw the IDF from much–but notably not all of the land they occupied there. The portion they stayed in, they called the “security zone”.
Well, they could call it what they liked. For the poor bloody Lebanese who lived inside it–who included many relatives of my ex-husband–and for even more hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees who lived in the area to the north of the “SZ”, its presence brought anything but security.
I don’t have to hand the figures for the literally thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian people who lost their lives because of continued fighting across the SZ’s northern front-line over the 15 years that followed that decision. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Lebanese fixed-capital goods were destroyed in that fighting, too.
(Reparations from Israel, anyone?)
But we could just recall a few “high points” in the conflagrations that flared over that front-line: 1993, 1996, etc.
Oh, and along the way, the Israelis and their proxy forces in the SZ ran one of the Middle East’s worst torture centers there, in the prison in Khiam. And they kidnaped random Lebanese clerics and held them for more than a dozen years as hostages. Etc., etc.
Yes, some scores of Israelis died in those events, too. Overwhelmingly, though, they were soldiers: members of an armed force maintaining a military occupation over a portion of someone else’s country…

Continue reading “Gaza: Israel’s security ‘concept’”

Meanwhile, are you wondering why Ariel Sharon, his tanks, his D-9 armored Caterpillar bulldozers, and his helicopter gunships seem to be going quite insanely beserk with their violence in Gaza? 12,000 Palestinians rendered homeless thru demolitions, and counting…
Well, number one, perhaps, because they can. Who’s going to stop ’em? Colin Powell? The Pope? Right, I can just see Sharon quaking in his shoes at the prospect…
Also, don’t under-estimate the pique of this Israeli leadership after the IDF lost two APC’s full of soldiers to IEDs last week, in two consecutive days. I think a total of eleven Israeli soldiers lost their lives? … Looks like the militants in Gaza have been picking up some tips from Lebanon’s Hizbollah on how to really make a difference in Israeli thinking: hit at soldiers carrying out missions that are controversial inside Israel, rather than hitting at civilians. (Nearly all of Hizbollah’s lethal actions were aimed against soldiers.)
And then, of course, there’s the additional pique factor, for Sharon, that these tactics seem to be having a good political effect: they’ve been reviving the activism of the Israeli peace movement which staged a rally in Tel Aviv over the weekend of proportions not seen since…. the first intifada?

Continue reading “Homeless in Gaza”

The following is a translation from Arabic of the appeal by 70 Palestinian intellectuals and officials that appeared in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam earlier this week. The translation came from someone at the American Task Force on Palestine.
It looks like an interesting, generally well-crafted and constructive text. I’d love to see the original, however, if someone can send me a link to it, as the translation doesn’t look totally sound.
PUBLIC STATEMENT
We the undersigned, members of the of the Palestinian people from all political, intellectual and social sectors who are unified in their struggle and steadfastness, affirm our condemnation of the blatant aggression launched by Israel against our people, which was embodied two days ago with the criminal operation conducted by Sharon and his right-wing gang which resulted in the martyrdom of the leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his struggling comrades.
We reaffirm our people’s rights, stipulated in all international covenants, and the use of all methods to defend ourselves. We are almost exploding from the pain and hurt of the disaster but despite this we call upon our people in the homeland, and in line with our national interest, to take the initiative from the hands of the criminal occupation gang and arise again in a wide ranging peaceful and popular intifadah with clear aims and sound speech wherein our people own the element of its initiative and the path it takes. This way we can make Sharon miss the opportunity of crowning his aggression against our people and sacred places by putting the final touches on his security plans.
We call upon a unified intifadah as a new step to revitalizing popular work organized with basis that have a clear program and a political revenue. We reaffirm our commitment to our just and legitimate demands of our rights and call for alignment based on national unity and unified leadership to resist the occupation.
Enough Criminal Assassination Operations
Enough Bloodshed.. Enough Occupation
The signatories:
1- Ibrahim al-Hafi
2- Ibrahim Msallam
3- Ahmad Jbara (Abul Sukkar)
4- Ahmad Hallas (Abu Maher)
5- Ahmad Fares
6- As’ad Odeh
7- Amin Maqboul
8- Buthayna al-Duqmaq
9- Jad Is’haq
10- Jamal Dar’awi

Continue reading “Palestinian call for nonviolent intifada”

In a post
here yesterday (Tuesday), I posed five questions about the phenomenon of
Palestinian suicide bombings and assigned myself the pretty onerous task
of addressing them “over the coming days.”  (You can go straight to
the list of questions, from
here
.)  In that earlier post, I tried to tackle Question 1, Is there
something about these types of attack that makes them uniquely different
from any other form of assault against a society, and if so, what is it?
— and I made some reference to a couple of the later questions.  

Today, I want to start at Question 2, Do the “special” attributes of this
form of attack justify “special” forms of response against those judged
responsible for such attacks? And maybe from there I’ll segué
right on into Question 3:  How broadly or narrowly should such “responsibility”
be ascribed?

Continue reading “Suicide bombings, contd.”