Saw some great photos on the BBC website today, of the big gatherings outside the Muqataa in Ramallah last night after Sharon’s cabinet voted to try to expel Arafat.
YA seemed to be in his element, greeting and blessing them. Now, wouldn’t it be great if he realized that the ONLY source of any power and legitimacy he has is the organized Palestinian people, and really threw his weight behind their continued civilian, nonviolent mass organizing?
It was the organized, unarmed Palestinian people whose steadfast and nearly completely nonviolent intifada sustained from 1987 thru 1993 brought him back into the homeland in 1994… It was the organized unarmed Palestinian people who elected him President in January 1996…
Too bad he used so much of his early power to crush their civilian mass-organization networks. Is it too late for him to learn his lesson on this?
Then again, is it too late for Sharon to learn there ain’t no forceful way to bring peace and security to his people, either??
The Israeli press has had a number of articles recently that strongly indicate that Sharon is kind of losing his marbles or his sanity. Here’s one by Hannah Kim from today’s Ha’Aretz.
Both sides, it seems to me, are going through serious crises of leadership. Actually, it may be that Israel’s is more severe than the Palestinians’.
Category: Palestine 2003-05
Abu Mazen/David Kelly
I just quickly want to say this about Abu Mazen, whom I know a little, and whose career I have followed for some 30 years now. He is a very decent person who sincerely wants his best for his people and the world.
Why, when I follow his news these days, do I keep getting so eerily reminded of David Kelly, the British WMD specialist whose frustrations with his job led to the tragedy of his suicide (and to the ongoing drama of the Hutton Inquiry into his death)?
I think it’s the strong sense I have of each of these two decent, slightly shy men being ground between historical forces that are much larger and much more ruthless than they are, and whose ruthlessness these gentle people can only guess at.
Kelly was hung out to dry, essentially, by the ruthlessness of the Blair government, including both the coterie around Blair and the folks at the MoD (but also by the British media and the strutting egos on the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee).
Abu Mazen, for his part, is being royally hung out to dry by Sharon (who now seems to be openly gloating that he’s “off the hook” regarding the Roadmap), by Prez Bush, whose promises of supportive intervention have led to nothing (but also, secondarily, by his old comrade-in arms, Yasser Arafat).
Someone, someone, please throw Abu Mazen a life-line before he feels compelled to follow Kelly’s path.
Thin mattress stories–from Palestine and Iraq
Two stories about thin mattresses today. First, from Iraq. Thanks to Juan Cole for linking to Trudy Rubin’s recent piece from Najaf in the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which she recounts highlights from an interview with Ayatollah Muhammad Sa’id al-Hakim.
(By the way, Cole’s continuing compilations of news from world Shia’dom are so well-done and so timely that I’ve put a permanent link to his blog in my ‘select list’ of blog links, to the right.)
Anyway, one telling detail from Rubin’s story was:
- The 37-year-old Hakim, in black turban and robe, received me in a bare room in the narrow Najaf rowhouse near the shrine [of Imam Ali], where petitioners come to seek religious rulings. We sat on thin cushions on the floor…
So there he is, one of the four Shi-ite Ayatollahs in Najaf, sitting on “thin cushions” in “a narrow Najaf rowhouese.”
And there are the US overlords, still swanning around in the hulking great palaces that Saddam built for himself all over the country.
In a situation in which most Iraqis are suffering from lengthy power outages, unsafe drinking water, general economic collapse, and rampant insecurity, does anyone (=Paul Bremer) think the symbolism here might be just a tad inappropriate???
I “understand”, of course, that Bremer and his staff, and numerous US army units, chose the palaces to lodge in “primarily because of security considerations”.
But has he stopped to think that the palaces were built where they were, and in the ultra-high-security way they were built in– precisely because Saddam knew that he needed multiple layers of protection against the hatred and wrath of his much-abused people?
So if Bremer’s people and the US military choose to live in the palaces “for security reasons”, what does that say about their expectation of building a relationship of trust (and respect, and equality) with the Iraqi people?
Pictures of US troops cavorting in a swimming pool in one of Saddam’s palaces on July 4 also presumably didn’t go down too well with the millions of Iraqis lacking access to safe drinking water.
How about if Bremer at least opened up a few of the Saddam palaces with their extensive leisure complexes for use by low-income Iraqi kids, or something generous like that??
Okay, on to Palestine. Thin mattress story #2. This was a great quote from James Bennet’s story from Tel Aviv in yesterday’s NYT. Bennet quoted Samir al-Mashharawi, a leader of the mainstream Palestinian faction, Fatah as saying:
Continue reading “Thin mattress stories–from Palestine and Iraq”