Category: Palestine 2006

I decided to go down to Bil’in today, to the weekly anti-Wall demonstration that the villagers have been running there for more than a year now. I went with a great group of women from Ramallah, who included Neta Golan, an Israeli activist who is married to a Palestinian and lives in Ramallah with him and their two kids, and Anne X., a nAmerican woman of almost 70 years of age who also lives in Ramallah.
We had made the stunningly beautifully drive from Ramallah through the steep hills west to Bil’in in two cars, with some other people, so I didn’t meet Anne till we got to the village. The moment I met her she handed me a keffiyeh and said, “Here, quick put it on, the tear-gas is coming our way.” And it was.
We were a little late for the main event, which had been a procession from the village mosque down to the place where the line of Wall cuts right across an access road the villagers had always used to get to their lands that are now being taken from them by the line of the Wall. It was kind of hard to see what was happening, as the lines of Israeli soldiers and of demonstrators kept dissolving and reforming in different clumps. There were probably about 30-40 soldiers there, that I saw, and maybe 50-60 demonstrators. The demonstrators seemed to be, just over half of them, Palestinians, most of the rest Israeli peace activists, and a smattering of “internationals.” There were quite a few press people there, too, and a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance.
I talked a little with Rateb Abu Rahmeh, a man from the village who teaches social work in the Al Quds Open University. He explained that he’s a member of the village’s Popular Committee which has been maintaining this action as a creative, nonviolent protest for all this time. (The villagers who are owners of some of the land cut off by the Wall here are also maintaining a challenge to its location in the Israeli courts. Akiva Eldar wrote about that in HaAretz earlier this week.)
Rateb told me that every week the Friday anti-Wall demonstration has a different theme. This week, they had made a large model of a graveyard, 30 meters by 10 meters, to commemorate the nine local people who have been killed in connection with anti-Wall protests. And they carried that to the Wall as their protest. “The Israelis broke up the model graveyard. They also broke my wrist,” he said, showing me the bandaged hand he was shielding inside his jacket.
Rateb seemed like a very interesting person and I’d like to write more about him. But the only other thing I have time to note here is the very easy, friendly relations I saw between the Israeli anti-Wall protesters and their Palestinian colleagues. In fact, the Israeli protesters seemed great: very active and dedicated and committed to the discipline of nonviolence. Also, they played a special role in reproaching the young soldiers there in their own language.
Actually, many of the men in the village speak Hebrew. Bil’in is so close to the Green Line that until the latest intifada most of the village men would go to work in Israel– and, one of them told me, some of them still do.
As the demonstration came to an end, everyone drifted back to the main part of the village. Some of the Israeli “Border” Guards came after the departing demonstrators, and there were a few skirmishes between them and some youngsters who started throwing stones as the soldiers approached. The soldiers lobbed few canisters of tear gas and we heard some much sharper bullet shots ring out, too. But the Israeli demonstrators– most of whom were, it seemed, self-described anarchists– seemed very at ease with the villagers, some of whom invited them into their homes for tea, and sat and chatted at length with them in Hebrew.

This is an interesting and significant short public exposition, in English, of the views of a Hamas legislator on how he sees the role of Islam in society. (And actually, on a bit more than that, too.)
It’s from the online publication Bitterlemons-international, which is a joint project of the Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher and the (outgoing) PA Minister of Planning, Ghassan Khatib.Until now, Hamas has refused to participate in any of the joint Palestinian-Israeli “people to people” type projects that have proliferated since about 1990. I imagine that reluctance will continue. But it’s interesting that Yehya Mousa contibuted this to BLI.

I had a good day in Jerusalem today.  Starting with writing,
writing, writing.  Yesterday after I got back to the Jerusalem
Meridian Hotel, I started writing my second piece for Salon– about the
Hamas women in Gaza, and about Hamas more generally… And I’d hope to
finish it yesterday, too.  But I have so much material from Gaza
rattling around in my notebook and in my head that it took a while for
it to settle down and “compose”… So I only made a start on the
article yesterday evening.

This morning I got up, had a quick breakfast in the hotel’s beautiful old stone-arched
restaurant, then told myself, “Helena, write!” 
Actually, I also had the hope of a rather interesting interview in Tel
Aviv today, but by around 10 a.m. the guy’s executive assistant had
called to say it wouldn’t, after all, work out.  So I got to
continue with my writing instead.  And shortly after 2 p.m. the
Salon  piece was done– in at just under 3,000 words.  I
don’t think the shape is perfect– I find it really, really hard to
compose anything, let alone a longer piece like this, completely on the
small laptop screen, without doing any printouts.  (I’m a big fan of
self-editing on hard copy.)  But it is what it is.  There’s a
professional editor there at Salon at work on the piece, so let’s hope
he can rebalance whatever needs to be rebalanced in it.  Maybe
it’s two pieces, anyway?  Or one main piece and a sidebar?  I
guess we’ll see.

Holed up in a quiet hotel room writing, and eating from room service.
It’s not a bad situation to be in– especially if, as is now the case,
the room in question has a fabulous view out over the Mount of Olives,
pierced on its ridge by the two towers of the Augusta Victoria Hospital
and the Hebrew U. Mount Scopus campus.  But after nearly 24 hours
of this holed-up-in-room-writing regime, I definitely needed to
walk.  I had nearly an hour to spare before I was due to go visit
my old Palestinian-Armenian friend Albert Aghazarian, who lives in the
Old City, so I decided to take a roundabout route to his place there.

What a fabulous, intriguing city Jerusalem is, especially for
pedestrians.  When I was in Gaza, I was once again acutely aware
of how lucky I am to be able to come to Jerusalem whenever I want
to.  Some of the Palestinians I talked to there had never visited
this city.  Some hadn’t been able to visit it for many years
now.  It was actually easier for Gazans to get to Jerusalem during
the height of the first intifada than it became after the conclusion
iof the Oslo Accord.  But the Gazans all long for the city
intensely.  A large, glowing image of the Dome of the Rock is the
main decoration in many public places there (as, indeed, throughout the whole
Palestinian diaspora)

… Well, my route to Albert’s place turned out to be a bit more
roundabout than I had expected.  He’d reminded me I needed to go
to the Armenian Convent of St. James and ask for his house there. 
So I walked along Salaheddine Street to the Old City walls, and then
southwest along the outside of the walls a bit till I reached the
Damascus Gate.  (It was cold out. It’s been a blustery day here today: the first real
time in all my visit that I’ve been glad to have the warm wool coat
that I almost jettisoned ten days ago because it seemed such a pain to
have to carry it around.)

In front of the Damascus Gate there’s a broad stone plaza that’s linked to the gate by a wide stone footbridge where
normally a row of older Palestinian women from the villages around will
sit and sell their herbs and other produce.  Most of these women–
both the ones sitting outside the gate and the far greater number of
their sisters who sit at various points throughout the Old City– wear
the intricately embroidered dresses that are an important part of their
dowry and their identity.  The other day when I was at the
Damascus Gate, a gaggle of Israeli soldiers was hanging around the
footbridge, with another soldier silhouetted in the high little window
in the high stone battlements above the gate.

Continue reading “Jerusalem: writing, visiting, talking”

Here’s my column in today’s CSM. (Also here.)
I should just tell you one thing about the donkey carts mentioned in the story (and featured, I see, in the subhead they gave it.). In the late 1980s, that traditional form of trasnportation had just about disappeared from Gaza. But the strict regime of collective punishments the IOF imposed on the Palestinians during the first intifada included– along with weeks-long lockdowns, mass arrests, public humiliations of local elders, etc etc etc– the imposition of ever more complex and bizarre regulations on the owners of motor vehicles. At that point, many car-owners in Gaza, which is much flatter and much poorer than the West Bank, simply gave up the attempt to keep a car on the road, and switched back to donkey- or horse-drawn carts. It was a very vivid example of the de-development trend that Israel’s lengthy occupation imposed on the Gazans.
So I’m interested to see that– even after the short, alleged honeymoon period of post-Oslo, then the second intifada, and the Israeli disengagement– the donkey-carts have persisted, They comprise probably about 20% of the vehicles I saw on the roads in Gaza. Every morning I would wake to the clip-clop of their metal-shoed hoofs on the road by the fishing-port, and the intermittent braying of some donkey, somewhere. Hey, I’m starting to miss Gaza already– though I realize that what I regard as a funky and distinctive feature of the local scene probably represents for most Gazans yet another reminder of the economic de-development into which they’ve been forced.

I’ve had some interesting conversations since coming here. Yesterday I conducted an interview with Ghazi Hamad, the managing editor of the Hamas weekly, Al-Resalah. (Here‘s their online edition.) Today I interviewed two of the six newly elected Hamas women MPs, Jamila Shanty and Mariam Farhat (Um Nidal). I also interviewed Khaled Abdel-Shafi, the head of the UN Development Program’s Gaza office.
I got great material in all these interview. But I don’t have time to write them all up now, so I’ll start by giving you a few of the most important points from Ghazi Hamad. This portion was when I’d asked him how Hamas intended to deal with the three demands placed on Hamas by the international community:

We don’t want to go into a clash with the international community. There are some issues on which we can be flexible, and some we can’t…
We see that they ask us to make commitments, but not Israel. This is a problem for us.
We accept a state in the 1967 borders. And a long truce means we can stop all the attacks.
Before the elections we said we opposed all the agreements previously reached with Israel. Now we say we can consider all of them. (At another point he said, “Hamas has been moving very fast toward the Red Line issue of recognition, saying we can rule within the 1967 borders. We know we have further to go.”)
We have a problem when they demand that we recognize Israel. It’s difficult for us because it would be recognizing the Israeli occupation–as Khaled Meshaal says. But we say we accept the 1967 borders.
… Hamas is not ready to sell the political decision for money. Don’t ask us to do that.
… Arafat gave them everything they asked for– including saying that they could keep the Gush Etzion [settlement bloc.] And you see how they treated him!
But if Israel would say publicly that Gaza and the West Bank are occupied territories, and that they could give us a timetable to withdraw all their settlers, even over three years or four years– that is what we need to hear from them. But now Olmert is saying that he’ll keep ‘unified’ Jerusalem and keep the big settlement blocs, and he won’t recognize our right of return. What is there to talk about?
… We don’t expect to see a political solution in the next 3-4 years because the rightist parties will be ruling in Israel. But we will not be isolated. We’ll move carefully. We don’t want to get trapped in the muddy lake of negotiations!

Actually, there was a lot more in the interview, so I need to write the whole thing up a lot better. (Right now I’m composing online, on an internet link on someone else’s phone connection. Not ideal, but a lot better than nothing.)
The two women were really interesting…

Continue reading “Discussions in Gaza”

The taxi took around 75 minutes to drive from Jerusalem down to the
Erez checkpoint at the northern end of Gaza.  Two years ago, when
I was trying to enter Gaza to do some consulting for a US-based NGO, I
waited here at the main entrance to the crossing-point for about five
hours before it started to get dark and I decided to hitch a ride back
to Jerusalem with some passing UN bureaucrats.  This time, my
Israeli press pass worked like a charm.  The Israeli army girls
behind the counter had me fill out one form– I believe I was signing
something to the effect that I understood that going to Gaza was very
dangerous but I was going anyway– and then told me to walk on
through.  That was literaly all there was to the border
formalities at this end.

They indicated that I walk “straight through”.  There was a sort
of maze of gates, concrete blocks, watchtowers, little trailers,
concrete blocks and so on outside.  As I approached a one-way
turnstile one of the security people said, “No!  Gate No.
2!”  So I went through gate No. 2 and entered the beginning of a
long, covered and enclosed walkway.  It was  maybe about 25
feet wide.  The “walls” on each side were made from the same
sections of preformed concrete that the “Wall” in the West Bank– and
indeed, the wall that surrounds Gaza– is also built.  That is,
sections of concrete walling about four feet wide and to one side of me
about 8 metres tall, to the other, about 6 metres tall, each section
sitting on its own heavy 20-inch-high solid footing.  Above the
tops of the walls there were light metal structures that gave a few
inches more open height for ventilation and also provided a frrame for
the canvas that formed the “roof” of the tunnel.  Somewhat
bizarrely, these canvases were in different colors– starting out blue,
then moving to pink and green, all of which gave the light inside the
tunnel  some interesting tones. 

I am the only person in this tunnel, which has two sides to it, divided
by a metal fence….

Continue reading “Coming to Gaza”

I just want to bookmark the link to the version of James Wolfensohn’s letter of February 25 that was acquired by the WaPo and published yesterday.

Hamas Chief Whip Mahmoud Ramahi said yesterday that the party would be prepared to have the Palestinians’ ‘foreign affairs’ conducted by the (Fateh-dominated) PLO, rather than insisting that it be the responsibility of the new Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
That was the main highlight of an interview I conducted in Ramullah yesterday with Dr. Ramahi, an Italian-trained anesthesiologist who is the “party whip” for Hamas’s new 74-person bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Today, I see that the WaPo’s is carrying the transcript of a phone interview that Lally Weymouth conducted with Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh. She doesn’t say which day she conducted it.
Just about everything that Haniyeh said to Weymouth tracks exactly with what Ramahi said to me. (We had asked some of the same questions, some different. My interview was, I think, broader.) But these guys certainly know how to stay on message!
Anyway, I thought I’d write a post here that summarizes what Ramahi said to me and gives some additional atmospherics about the situation in and around the PLC’s building in Ramallah.
I hadn’t previously been to this building of the PLC, which is on a nice ridge-top site close to the bustling heart of Ramullah. Security going in was ways, ways laxer than I’d expected. Actually, I’d have to say just about non-existent: there was only one bored-looking guy sitting at a desk on the far side of the foyer who looked a bit surprised when I walked in and, instead of heading straight to the stairs or elevator, headed over to him to ask where the Hamas bloc had its offices. “Third floor,” he said laconically and went back to picking his finger-nails.
Okay.
I took the stairs. The second floor landing had a huge photo of Yasser Arafat. I guess that’s where the Fateh bloc has its offices?
On the third floor landing, there were no visible decorations. I walked along to a secretary’s office and asked first of all for the new PLC speaker, Aziz Dweik. There were three female administrative people there. Two wore hijab scarves that completely covered their hair, the third wore no scarf. I sat and waited. (A good journalistic skill, wherever you are.) Fateh bloc head Azzam Ahmed popped his head in at one point and was hustled in to a meeting with Dweik. That seemed to keep Dweik busy, so after a bunch of time one of the male assistants who came in and out said I could talk to Ramahi instead. Fine by me.
Dr. Ramahi was polite and welcoming. I was kind of ready– after many long experiences in Lebanon, Iran, etc– not to shake his hand but to do the old hand-over-the-heart thing. But he walked out from behind his desk with his hand extended for a handshake. (And for what it’s worth, he has no beard.) We started a conversation, which was almost immediately interrupted… So we made an appointment to meet later on in the afternoon.
When we finally did sit down together, we spoke for about half an hour. He answered all my questions in nearly impeccable English.
My first question– also, I see, Lally Weymouth’s!– was whether Hamas had been surprised by the extent of its victory in the January 25 election.
He said,

Continue reading “The Hamas perspective”