Category: Palestine 2006

I regret that I didn’t get to see PA president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) when I was in Palestine recently. It seemed that whenever I was in Gaza, he was in Ramallah, and vice versa. (He was also out of the country for a while there.)
Anyway, I did get to speak to some old friends who know him well. One man of great political smarts and great political connections told me, off the record, back at the end of February that,

Abu Mazen felt badly wounded by Hamas in the [January] election. Now he wants to humiliate them in return… That’s why we’re facing some months of wrangling between the President and the PLC.

Well, my friend was right. In the past few days, Abbas has launched a number of political initiatives designed to circumsrcibe Hamas’s power, even though (or, in my friend’s view, precisely because) Hamas trounced Abbas’s Fateh Party at the polls. These intiatives have included moves to grab as many as possible of the (admittedly meager) levers of power at the disposal of the PA to his office in the Presidency, and away from control of the Hamas-led government.
(Ironic, of course, that when Abbas was the PM and Arafat was the Prez, the US had striven mightily and with great success to get these powers shifted to the PM’s office… )
In addition, according to this article by Chris McGreal in today’s Guardian, Abbas is delivering a letter to Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh today. According to “sources close to Mr Abbas” this letter “is intended to ‘draw the battle lines’ with Hamas, but it also serves as a warning to Israel and foreign powers that threats to sever aid and links are likely to strengthen rather than weaken the Islamist party.
McGreal said he “saw” the letter before it was delivered. (Was he able to read it as well, I wonder?)
Anyway, HaAretz’a Akiva Eldar also has a piece about this letter in his paper today (on Shabbat? How does that work? Maybe they just have an online edition on Shabbat?). He writes that though he didn’t ‘see” the letter itself, he and a group of other reporters were briefed about its contents by Abbas’s aide Tayeb Abdel-Rahim.
Kind of interesting and significant, I think, that the content of this intra-Palestinian letter would, at a time of continuing, very tough conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, be briefed to Israeli reporters even before it is transmitted to PM-designate Haniyeh?
I guess the letter is part of Abbas’s attempt, discreetly, to have some influence for the good on the Israeli elections. (I.e. by showing that he is “standing up to” Hamas, and therefore that “there IS someone to talk to on the Palestinian side”– i.e. him.)
This was also, even more clearly, the intention of the interview that he gave to Eldar last Wednesday.
Eldar wrote there about Abbas that:

Continue reading “Abu Mazen plays hardball (but not with Israel)”

This is Reliefweb’s portal to solid, sector-by-sector information about the humanitarian situation i the Occupied Palestinian territories.
Through there you can go to this March 19 report from the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on the humanitarian impact of the closures of the Karni (al-Muntar) crossing. It stated,

Gaza requires 450MT of wheat each day to maintain bread supplies. The usual 30-60 day wheat stock kept in Gaza is exhausted. Other basic food commodities are in extremely short supply including dairy products and fruit. Rice and sugar are selling at more than twice their normal price and are also very difficult to find in stores.
Karni crossing (al Muntar) is the only source to import large-scale quantities of wheat and the commercial terminal for imports and exports of goods from Israel. As of today, Karni crossing has been closed 46 days or 60% of this year. (Four of the days (10-13 January — ‘Eid al Adha) were due to Palestinian decision making. ) In comparison, in 2005, Karni was closed for a total of 18% of the year and 19% of the year in 2004.
United Nations organisations are facing similar constraints. UNRWA has been unable to start its emergency food distribuition today because of insufficient wheatflour supplies. The World Food Programme reports that 3,594 MT of wheatflour contracted to local mills were unable to enter Gaza during the recent brief period Karni was opened.
The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) state that the reason for Karni’s closure is the suspected presence of tunnels dug by Palestinian militants leading to the crossing. The IDF contends that it will not open the crossing until the Palestinian Authority (PA) digs several trenches to intercept these tunnels. Palestinian security services, at the request of the IDF, have dug four trenches, totalling more than 1.5 kilometres in length around the crossing, in an effort to find these tunnels. So far, none have been found.

The report also has a helpful-looking timeline. It makes depressing reading, mainly detailing how many times the IDF demanded that the Palestinians dig ever deeper and deeper trenches in order to discover those oh-so-elusive “tunnels”. The only possible trace of possible tunnel-start was discovered on 20 January:

5 January: The IDF requests the Palestinian Authority (PA) to dig a trench west of the Karni crossing to intercept a possible tunnel leading to the crossing. The PA starts this work the same day, digging a 6 metre trench approximately 1km in length.
20 January: The PA completes the trench. According to the IDF, one tunnel was discovered, while according to the PA, a small hole, possibly the start of a tunnel, connecting to a water pipeline was discovered.

That trench was 6 meters deep. Later, the IDF demanded that the PA dig three more trenches, one of them “10m in depth, 300m long,” Still no further evidence of anything even possibly resembling tunneling was found…

So it now seems the delusional imaginings of one Israeli civilian woman “caused” the Israelis’ entire, world-class armed forces to decide to close the Karni crossing for nearly all of the past six weeks.
At the time the crossing was first closed, Israeli spokespeople assured us that this was because they had evidence that Palestinians were digging dangerous tunnels somewhere close by. Today, HaAretz’s Amos Harel tells us that,

A few weeks ago, the crossing was closed after a civilian employee thought she heard knocking underneath it, but searches uncovered no sign of a booby-trapped tunnel, and military professionals have since suggested that the government consider reopening the crossing.

The content of the Israeli reporting on this was such as to lead at least one good-faith observer– frequent JWN commenter Jonathan Edelstein– to conclude that, “The closing also occurred just after an explosion in a tunnel under the crossing.”
Explosion! How scary! (But just, in fact, non-existent.)
Karni is, as JWN readers probably know, the main crossing-point through which goods from outside, including vital foodstuffs and medical/health supplies, can enter the Gaza Strip and the only one through which the Strip’s exports (most of which are extremely perishable market-garden products bound for world markets) can be shipped… So those delusional imaginings of that one, quite possibly stressed-out Israeli woman were used as a pretext to impose the Israeli government’s regime of tight economic strangulation on all 1.4 million of Gaza’s people.
(I don’t necessarily blame her, either. The whole tenor of the propaganda from the Israeli authorities is designed to keep the fires of anti-Palestinian fear and hatred well stoked among the Israeli populace… particularly during an Israeli election season.)
I would love to know, though, at what point the Israeli military professionals reached the determination that the “knocking” allegedly heard by that woman was not in fact related to any activity (or “explosions”) in any non-existent Palestinian tunnel? It’s quite possible they reached that conclusion pretty fast– maybe, within hours… After all, tunnel-detection is something they have quite a lot of experience of doing, there in the Southern Command.
But regardless of how fast they discovered this, Karni remained closed… for weeks on end. At the insistence of the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv it was re-opened briefly, Tuesday. But within 30 minutes Israeli authorities rammed it shut again.
And now, in the run-up to that great event in the march of global democracy, Israel’s March 28 general election, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz is saying, according to Harel, that Karni should still be kept closed, “apparently partly out of fear of an election-eve attack.” It strikes me that he’s the one who really needs the smelling salts.

As part of the research for the big piece I’m writing this week on Palestine, I’ve found a couple of good portals to Palestinian polling and other info. This is a portal from Hanan Ashrawi’s Miftah Center, that strives to aggregate data from all the Palestinian polling centers. It doesn’t totally succeed, because it doesn’t (yet?) include this poll, conducted March 9-11 by the An-Najah National University Center for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies, which has some interesting data…
Of course, the Palestinian pollsters all came in for huge criticism recently for not having forecast the Hamas victory in the January elections. Dr. Nabil Kukali of the Beit Sahour-based PCPO tried to address this issue in this early-February report. I didn’t find totally convincing his claim there that the range of degrees of support that the opinion pollsters had found for Hamasshortly before the election, which were between 29% and 35%, “which lies … on the tolerated edge of the margin of error.” Hamas’s final tally was 44% (of the national vote.) H’mmm.
But still, it was brave and honest of Kukali to try to reflect publicly on the problem, which is more than I’ve seen any of the others do.
I have addressed what I call the “person with the clipboard problem” in doing any opinion surveying, e.g. here, before. In addition, I believe cold-call-type, individualized opinion surveying has many more pitfalls than its practicioners generally admit. (For example, I nearly always refuse to participate, as a matter of principle and personal privacy, in any telephone-based opinion surveys. Call me ornery if you want. But if there’s another chunk of people out there like me in this respect, as I’m sure there is, what does this do to the “validity” of such polls?) So I think we’d all do well to take such polls with more than a few grains of salt… What one can perhaps discern from them is trends, at best. (Even if the trend in question is merely one of resistance to poll-answering?)
But I digress.
Another interesting site I found in the course of this small research is Zajel, a useful looking news aggregator produced by the An-Najah University public relations department. Given the fact that, as Jonathan has told us, in the new Hamas-dominated cabinet, “At least four of the 24 ministers are drawn from the Najah faculty,” the contents of this site– which looks to be well maintained– could give us a window into what is on the minds of people within Najah’s general milieu.

Here‘s Jazeera English’s report on the new PA cabinet list. Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar is, as was earlier predicted, the new Foreign Minister-designate. Which makes my recent interview with him all the more relevant.
Jazeera tells us that Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister-designate, told a joint news conference on Sunday that:

“I met Brother Abu Mazen (Abbas) and officially submitted to him the list of the cabinet”…
“The president is going to study the make-up of the government and its programme,” he said, adding that the atmosphere of the meeting had been “positive”.
The 24-member cabinet includes one woman and one Christian.

I wish Hamas had done a bit better on both those counts. Of course, the fact that the US and Israel mounted threats and other forms of pressure against many non-Hamas parties and individuals, in an attempt to have them not join a Hamas-led government, means that Haniya and Co. probably didn’t have a whole lot of qualified female or Christian ministrables to choose from.
Note: these transliterations of the names as used here are probably not definitive. Some of them look very weird to me. Including I am still convinced that Zahhar needs two “h”s.

AP is
reporting
today that Mahmoud Zahhar, one of the co-founders of Hamas, “most likely will be named foreign minister, according to a preliminary
list of Cabinet ministers given to The Associated Press by officials in Hamas
and the PFLP.”

So I thought I should quickly write up the interview I conducted with Dr.
Zahhar in his mosque-side Gaza home, after the end of evening prayers on
March 6.  In it, he oozed self-confidence, and a determination that
the Hamas government would not be making the kinds of concessions to Israel
and the west that were what, in the view of many Hamas supporters, had
led Mahmoud Abbas’s Fateh Party into such a non-productive and humiliating
dead end.

Zahhar described a Hamas program that for the next two years would focus
on rebuilding the Palestinians’ own society as much as possible, while quite possibly redirecting Gaza’s economic links away from Israel
and towards Egypt, and that would not necessarily involve any negotiations at all
with Israel.  At one point, when I asked if Hamas could do anything
to help reassure Israelis, he answered flatly, “They should be scared,
because whenever they felt a sense of security they felt it would be okay
to make aggressions… When they felt insecurity, was when they withdrew.
 And that was a big victory for us.”

We sat in a large, ground-floor reception room, near a corner in which stood
two large flags: the green Hamas flag and the four-colored flag of Palestine.
 An aide brought us first coffee, then tea, from a small kitchen at
the far end of the room.  

Next to the kitchen I could see, incongruously, a small, beat-up Japanese
sedan parked in an indoor garage that was not walled off from the reception
room at all.  At one point,  Zahhar pointed to it.  “That’s
my car,” he said.  “Did you see the expensive cars that the Fateh leaders
drive?”  Later, he said, “The people saw the sacrifice that the Hamas
leaders made for the people’s interest.”  He himself lost his son, Khaled,
who was killed, along with a Zahhar bodyguard, when Israeli F-16s dropped
an 1,100-pound bomb on his home in September 2003. That bombing was ordered
the day after Hamas suicide bombers killed 15 young people– including a
number of soldiers– at two locations inside Israel.  

Zahhar was at the door of his home when the big bomb dropped.  He, his
wife, and one of their daughters were among those injured in the bombing.

He speaks English well.  (I think he received some of his training as
a physician in Britain.)   We exchanged greetings, and I asked how he
was.  He sounded happy and confident as he responded, “I feel good today.”
  He referred to some far-reaching constitutional and administrative
changes that the lame-duck, Fateh-dominated Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) enacted February 13, just before it dissolved and made way for the new PLC, elected January 25, in which Hamas held 74 of the 132 seats.
He said,

Continue reading “Interview with Zahhar”

Oops, I knew the Israeli raid on the Jericho jail was a major humiliation for Abu Mazen, but now AP is reporting that several officials in his own Fateh Party are calling on him to resign because of it.
The report says:

During a meeting of senior Fatah officials Thursday evening, several suggested to Abbas that he resign and dissolve the Palestinian Authority, said Taysir Nasrallah, a senior Fatah activist from the West Bank city of Nablus.
Were the Palestinian government to be dissolved, Israel would be forced to step in as an occupying power and assume direct responsibility for the Palestinians. A dissolution of the Palestinian Authority also would render the victory of the Islamic militant Hamas in January parliament elections meaningless.

Well, who knows how this will turn out? Personally, I doubt strongly if Abu Mazen will do this. But if he did, would Hamas then be in a position of trying to preserve the PA?

Amira Hass has two interesting stories in today’s HaAretz that describe important elements of the stance Hamas has adopted with regard to the two major challenges it faces: forming a Palestinian government and dealing with the international community. (Though actually, the “international” issue is an intimate part of the intra-Palestinian negotiations, too.)
In this piece is about the internal Palestinian negotiations. Hass tells us that Fateh’s Central Committee decided late Thursday not to take up Hamas’s invitation to join a national unity government.
She said that Hamas officials were still hopeful that some of the smaller parties/lists represented in the parliament might join a Hamas-led government. But she indicated that this effort also looked as though it would be unsuccessful, referring to, “The factions’ apparent refusal to join a Hamas-led government.”
She reported that the first of the three successive draft proposals that Hamas presented to the small parties (and perhaps also to Fateh as well?), “discussed considering negotiations with Israel only if the latter first recognizes the rights of the Palestinian people and guarantees a full withdrawal to 1967 lines.”
This accords exactly with what Ismail Haniyeh, Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, Dr. Mahmoud Ramahi, and Ghazi Hamad all told me on my recent trip, though some of them indicated that this “exchange of recognitions” could also be more simultaneous and reciprocal than Hass indicates.
If Hamas is indeed prepared to commit to a recognition of Israel, even though conditional, and if the international community is truly committed to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, then this Hamas position would surely give a good-faith international mediator a substantial starting point for brokering some kind of a simultaneous, reciprocal exchange of recognitions.
That second “if” there might seem like a big one. But why on earth should anyone in the international community expect Palestinians or anyone else to provide any kind of recognition of Israel having rights outside of its own national borders?
Hass reported the response of the Palestinian parties to Hamas’s political overture as follows:

Continue reading “Hamas’s negotiating stance”

I’m still a bit uncertain about posting photos into the blog. Both because I’m uncertain about digital photography in general and because I know they take a lot of space/time for people with slow connections to get access to. So I uploaded them onto my home website and shall provide links here.
Here goes.
Here are photos from my visit to the Jabaliya camp Islamic preschool, in Gaza, as described in my Salon article on the Hamas women: classroom scene, phys ed session, teachers doing puppets, writing teacher.
Here are two views– taken by the talented Laila el-Haddad– of the Salah Foundation Girls’ School in Deir al-Balah (also described in the Salon article): the school’s mosque and library building, and a classroom block.
Here is the truly 1984-ish crossing point from Ramallah to Jerusalem, at Qalandiya: first, the general approach from the Ramallah side, then some of the graffiti— a work by Banksy on the left and a nice image of Gandhi on the right.
You can only see one, 30-foot-high concrete-clad Israeli watchtower in that first picture…. So you’ve arrived at Qalandiya from Ramallah or el-Bireh, most likely in a car or a share-taxi– you can see these vehicles all turning around there at the crossing point. Then you go on foot with all your bags or sick granny or whatever through a break in this wall just to the left of the watch-tower and then traverse the weird lunarscape of gashed-into rock and earth beyond it, walking 100 yards to the under-construction “terminal” there, which has complex gate systems that lead you to a no-man’s land on the other side. The lunarscape and the no-man’s land are also studded with two or three free-standing watchtowers, 30-feet and 40-feet high. And there’s also a lot of other construction there. You walk along a trash-strewn walkway to another short segment of wall, beyond which are the vehicles that take you to locations within the next sections of wall– either al-Ram, walled in right ahead of you to the left, or to Jerusalem itself, for which you dip down to a little place on the right where small buses wait to gather people who have the favored Jeusalem passbooks. The bus then inscribes a huge arc to the southwest– on “Israelis only” roads in this completely apartheided road system– and then arrives to the bus depot on Jerusalem’s Nablus Road.
These are some scenes I noted in Tel Aviv/Jaffa when I took the walk described in this JWN post: the seaside monument to Jewish illegal immigration into Palestine, IDF female soldiers slouching toward Jaffa with their guns, a mosque in the shadow of the David Intercontinental Hotel,a display on Deir Yassin in the Irgun Museum, exterior view of the Irgun Museum, and a small slice of Old Jaffa.
Three pics from Jerusalem: the Damascus Gate to the Old City, with some IOF soldiers visible over to the right; Palestinian herb vendors at the Damascus Gate– notice the beautiful embroidered dresses some wear for their daily work!– and finally just a little view through a postern in the middle of a busy shoopping street– with a T-shirt vendor to the right.
Here are some pics from the showroom of the Atfaluna (“our children”) school and project for the deaf in Gaza City, which is an oasis of calm and focused industry right there on Filasteen Street: embroidered bags, embroidered cushions, and a general view of the shop/showroom there. If anyone wants to buy some of their beautiful products (and help their project and their clients by doing so) then I can assure you their goods are beautifully made, beautifully finished, and their order fulfillment/distribution system is little short of miraculous.

Here is my second piece for Salon.com, up on their site today. Once again, if you’re not a subscriber you’ll have to sit through a small ad before you can read it.
Shoot, I forgot to remind them to put something about JWN into the tagline.
My body meanwhile is a little in crazysville. I flew back to Boston Saturday, a seven-hour time difference from Jerusalem. Sunday I did a quick revision of the Salon piece (which I wrote the first draft of, Thursday and Friday). Sunday I also gave a talk for the Cape Ann Forum between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. It was on the theme of “The Perfect Storm” of challenges to the US in the Middle East. I chose the theme long ago– and only when I got there to Gloucester, Massachusetts did I realize that the movie of that name was both set and shot there!
I managed to stay awake, on my feet, and relatively coherent till 9 p.m.
Yesterday I flew back to Virginia and started writing a CSM column to deadline. But my brain stopped working around 7 p.m. so I got up this morning at 5 a.m. to finish it. Since then I’ve taken my first run for three weeks, done laundry, been lying around.
But it’s nice to see the piece up on Salon.