Category: Palestine 2003-05

Yesterday, in West Jerusalem, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated his
bomb on a crowded early-morning bus. Eight people–actually nine,
including
the bomber himself– were killed, and scores injured.
What a tragedy.

Here
are some details about seven of these people.

I was in West Jerusalem exactly two weeks ago. When I visited Israel in
2002, I was glad to have the opportunity to take a few bus-rides, as I
hoped
it would show some sort of solidarity with my many friends in Israel who,
I know, live with a constant level of dread that something like this may
happen.
On my most recent visit to Jerusalem, just two weeks ago, I
didn’t ride a bus.
But I made a point of spending an evening walking
over to Ben Yehuda Street and eating in a nice, popular restaurant there.
The same sort of (perhaps ill-focused) “solidarity” at work.

The Israeli government and, it seems, many people in Israel are vocal in
making the case that the fear they suffer from the suicide bombers
justifies
many of the policies their government has adopted taken and continues to
adopt
toward (or against) the Palestinians.
That includes the policy of not
negotiating with Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority–on the grounds
that
the extremely hard-pressed PA is “not tough enough” on the militant
organizations
that organize the missions of the suicide bombers.
It also, more currently,
includes the government’s pursuit of its present wall-building project in
the West Bank.

I think I understand a little about how terrible it must feel to live in
a country that is subject to periodic suicide-bomb assaults, many of them
detonated in places filled with civilians.
I have only spent a little
time in Israel.
But back when I was in Lebanon in the late 1970s, car-bomb
attacks against “soft”, civilian-packed targets were certainly one of the
many tactics used by the (Israeli-backed) Maronite extremist organizations
against the people of mainly-Muslim West Beirut.
Like most of the other
western journalists working in Lebanon at that time, I lived in West
Beirut.
I also had my children there.
Yes, we were living within the bounds
of an always unpredictable civil war (which was why I left the city, with
my children, in 1981).
Many horrendous things happened while I was
there– and of course, many even worse things, in 1982, after I was gone.
But one of the things that happened periodically in West Beirut was
certainly car-bombs.

Continue reading “Hard thinking about suicide bombings”

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.

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.)

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”

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…

Continue reading “‘Concentration’ in Palestine”

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…

Continue reading “Jerusalem’s Apartheid Wall”

Yesterday, reader Adel el-Sayed put up a comment onto a post I wrote on JWN Feb. 22 in which I argued against the point of view that, “Anyone who wants a just Palestinian solution should be supporting a war in Iraq… It would be good for Palestinian aspirations.”
Those had been the exact words used by the once-smart (British) Mideast affairs analyst Fred Halliday, writing that week in Salon.com.
Though I have respected Fred’s work a lot in the past, I just could not agree with that assessment. (Read my earlier post for my reasoning there.)
But in general, I think we should all add this whole question of the alleged “Palestinian-Israeli benefits” of a US war to topple Saddam to the Bill of Particulars in which we list the many forms of dishonest argumentation that prior to the March 19 Day of Infamy were used to jerk the US (and UK) publics into supporting the war effort…
The main argument I heard before March 19 from several war supporters was admittedly was a little different from the one that Halliday expressed, though it had the same bottom line: that a US war against Saddam would be good for the Palestinians. It ran roughly as follows:

(1) The financial support the Saddam Hussein regimes gives to Palestinian “terrorists” is one of the main factors motivating them to continue their actsof otherwise quite inexplicable violence against Israel.
(2) It is only because of these acts of wanton, quite unprovoked violence that the hard-pressed Sharon is obliged, becuase of its responsibilities to the Israeli public, to retaliate against the Palestinian sources of this terror. Otherwise, this Israeli government—-which is as eager as all Israeli governments are to make peace with its neighbors!–would conclude a reasonable, durable peace with the Palestinians tomorrow.

Continue reading “Iraq-Palestine revisited”

The ‘Geneva Accord’ signed today between non-governmental negotiators from Israel and Palestine was a great achievement, despite its many evident limitations.
Chief among the latter is the fact that neither of the two negotiating teams has any governmental mandate to negotiate. (Though it should be noted that Yasser Abed Rabboo, unlike Yossi Beilin, is a close associate of the two persons wielding leadership in his own society.) There also seem to me to be some weaknesses in the content of the plan. But these are minor compared with its achievements. The main achievements are, in my humble opinion, threefold:

(1) The ability of these two teams to reach agreement in spite of the continuing levels of violence their societies suffer from, and despite the tepidity of support coming from the world’s sole superpower, shows that there is some hope, and some good reason to keep hope alive.
(2) On both sides, it shows the doubters that despite all their hopelessness and cynicism it is still not true to say that “There is no-one to talk to on the ‘other side’. All that people ‘over there’ ever understand is the language of force, not reason.” Instead, yes, there is someone to talk to; and reasoned discussion can lead toward a sufficiently good–even if still not ‘perfect’–outcome.
(3) The single greatest achievement of the accord: to point definitively to the need to define an agreed “final outcome”, and then work perhaps incrementally towards it, rather than continuing to toil endlessly and without gain over ever smaller and smaller subsets of the interim.
As the (upcoming in February) report of the International Quaker Working Party on the Israel-Palestine Conflict argues, the obsession with incrementalism that has plagued all US efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace for the past 25 years always led to a decrease in confidence between the two peoples rather than the increase in confidence that its advocates always promised. Returning the focus to finding a final outcome that the two peoples can both live with, and then working towards it, is the only possible way out of the current mess.

So thanks, Yasser and Yossi, for achieving those things. The language of negotiation and compromise is the only thing that will bring this conflict and the immense suffering it continues to inflict on both palestinians and Israelis, to an end.

So, poor old Edward finally passed away yesterday. The poor guy. He was so brilliant, so insightful, and so frequently wearing his sense of deep psychological wounding right there on his sleeve.
It’s not easy being a lightning rod, I know. But he hung in there, proclaiming his values against all critics from all sides.
The most outrageous thing that anyone did to him was the pro-Israeli extremist agitator or agitators who went to great lengths to “disprove” that Edward had any legitimate links to Palestine. But I read a great piece someplace by the Israeli psychologist Benjamin Bet-Hallahmi who said it was truly ridiculous that any Jewish Israelis– who had come “back” to Israel from all over the world–should be the ones trying to besmirch Edward’s claims to his links with the land.
BBH was quite right!
My deep sympathies to Edward’s wife, his kids, his sisters, and the rest of his family. May he now rest in the peace that was so brutally denied to him for nearly all his life.