Category: Palestine 2009

In a small hotel in East Jerusalem last week, I met a Norwegian aid worker with many years of experience working in occupied Palestine, who told me the following story:
She and some colleagues went to visit a project their organization was running in one of the West Bank villages hard hit by the many land grabs Israel has undertaken since the 1993 conclusion of the “Oslo” agreement between Israel and the PLO. They met with a gathering of canny village elders, one of whom greeted them by saying this: “Welcome! Well, as you know we are simple people, and not all of us are good at reading your way of writing. But when we look at the word ‘Oslo’ the way you write it, it is clear to us that it begins with a zero and ends with a zero… ”
That is indeed a great reading of the meaning of “Oslo” (the agreement) from the Palestinian point of view.
Remember that Oslo was only ever planned to be an interim arrangement, with a fixed term of five years starting from the 1994 “return” of the PLO’s leaders to occupied Palestine from the previous exile in distant lands; at the end of that five-year period, the intention stated in the Oslo agreement was that implementation would thereafter begin of the final-status peace between the two peoples that would meanwhile have been fully negotiated.
Instead of which, ten years after that 1999 deadline and nearly 16 years after “Oslo” itself, the Palestinian people are still trapped in the deliberate indeterminacy and ambiguity of Oslo, with no final agreement anywhere in sight.
And meantime, throughout those 15.5 years, the number of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank has more than doubled; an entire parallel road system has been installed in the West Bank for the benefit of (and the nearly exclusive use of) the settlers; the lengthy and brutal barrier has been erected, often snaking deep within the West Bank; East Jerusalem has been sealed off from its natural West Bank hinterland and surrounded not only with the Wall but also with thick rings of new Israeli settlements; Gaza has been first strangled and then pounded physically into misery and despair; and the Israeli government continues to announce plans for vast numbers of new settlements and new demolitions of Palestinian homes.

Continue reading “Readings of ‘Oslo’, and some eroding Israeli taboos”

Is Salam Fayyad—a Palestinian economist who was
‘parachuted’ into the position of Palestinian Authority (PA) prime minister
under strong US influence in June 2007—now following in the footsteps of
Iraq’s Nuri al-Maliki and Lebanon’s Fouad Siniora by declaring a new degree of
independence from US tutelage and a new level of commitment to the broad
national interests of his own people?

On March 7, Fayyad announced he had tendered his resignation
to PA president Mahmoud Abbas. He explained that he was stepping down so he would
not be an obstacle in the formation of a national unity government that would
enjoy the support of both the big Palestinian political movements, Fateh and
Hamas.

However, in recent weeks Fayyad has given several indications
that his attitude towards the always halfhearted peace diplomacy of the United
States—the country in which he has spent most of his adult life—has become more
critical. This raises the intriguing possibility that he might re-emerge as PA
prime minister even within a national unity government in which Hamas would
have strong influence.

Thus far, however, Hamas spokesmen have remained
skeptical of Fayyad’s motives, with one of them describing his resignation as
just another “tactical maneuver” by the Americans.

(Update Tuesday 7 a.m.: Hamas’s skepticism about the meaning/intention of Fayyad’s resignation would seem to have been considerably justified by the leaks coming out of Hillary’s entourage to the effect that the resignation, and the manner in which he effected it, was actually just “a tactical move, designed to pressure Hamas into softening its opposition to Fayyad serving as prime minister in a unity government.” But perhaps the leaks themselves, rather than or even in addition to the resignation itself, were the ploy? I discuss that possibility and some of its implications at greater length here.)

In an interview I conducted with Fayyad on February 24, when
he was already clearly contemplating his resignation move, he expressed a newly
tough nationalist position on Israel’s non-compliance with commitments its
government has made to the international community on halting settlement
construction, halting IDF incursions into PA-controlled areas of the West Bank,
and removing barriers to access to Gaza, between Gaza and the West Bank, and
within the West Bank itself.

(Fayyad also reportedly
made many of these same arguments to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when he
met her in Ramallah on March 3.)

In the interview with Just World News, Fayyad said,

My worries continue about my plan to gain freedom for our people so we can live in harmony with all our neighbors, including Israel. The prospects of gaining this goal are now receding. If Israel goes ahead with its plan to develop the E-1 area, that will be the end of our hopes for a two-state solution.

Also, what is happening in Jerusalem is very worrying, with the Israelis’ threat to demolish 88 houses in East Jerusalem.

… The international community has
invested heavily in the two-state solution, and not only financially. If the
two-state solution is to keep its credibility as an option three things need to
happen:

First, there has to be a complete
settlement freeze everywhere in the occupied territories including East
Jerusalem, and there has to be the removal of settlement outposts in line with
the 2002 Road Map as was also reaffirmed at Annapolis. This is not negotiable.

Second, Israel has to change its
behavior in the West Bank. It has to stop the incursions into Areas A
and B, and return to the positions of September 28, 2000, as also called for in
the Road Map. We have proved we have restored law and order throughout the West
Bank, so they have no pretext to send their own forces in, and every time they
do that it undermines us very seriously.

Third, regarding access issues, we
need to see the implementation of the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access,
including not only access into Gaza but also the link between Gaza and the West
Bank and restoration of freedom of movement inside the West Bank.

The first two of those requirements
are non-negotiable. The third one maybe needs some further interpretation.

If we look at the peace process
like a private company then I would say that unless those requirements are met,
I personally would not buy stocks in this company!

Fayyad is not a member of either Fateh or Hamas.  After many years working as an
economist in the U.S., including with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, in 1995 he
went to Ramallah to head the mission IMF sent to help the infant PA establish its financial and
economic system. In 2001, he switched to being the PA’s finance minister.

Continue reading “Fayyad interview; and the meaning of his resignation”

The PA’s ’emergency’-installed PM Salam Fayyad has submitted his resignation to (date-expired) PA President Mahmoud Abbas. People close to Fayyad indicated to me when I was in Ramallah ten days ago this would most likely happen.
His present resignation is to pave the way for a government of national unity, or of national accord, which I guess is slightly different.
It is possible that Fayyad himself might emerge as the agreed-upon candidate for PM in the GNU/A. But whoever the next PM is, the task and mandate of the US-trained (“Dayton”) forces the PA has been fielding in the West Bank will have to change; as too will the PA’s beyond-compliant posture, or lack of posture, in the negotiations with Israel. Otherwise, no national unity or even national accord will be possible; and the implosion of Fateh will only accelerate.
Fateh’s collapse-from-inside is already pretty far advanced, anyway. No amount of US hugging and US-mobilized mega-billion funding can arrest that now. Only the GNU/A can. (Actually, absent any discernible US spine or focus in the peace negotiations, the US hugging and funding of Abbas only further undermine him. This is known as the hug of death. Ask Fouad Siniora.)
I’m writing this short post from Amman. I came here by bus this morning from Nazareth, and I have a 12-hour layover here before returning to the US. I’ve gotten some really great material during my month-long reporting trip around this part of the Middle East.
One of the items buried in a notebook is the interview I did with Fayyad on Feb. 24. I need to dig it out and write it up properly. Maybe later today.

… is here. Also here.
Since you can’t currently comment here, why don’t y’all go over and comment over at the second of those locations.
My view is that Jerusalem is emerging as increasingly central to the Palestinian-Israeli interaction. Of course, it is an issue that captures the imagination and allegiance of Muslims, Jews– and quite a few Christians– around the world. (Did you know that one of the oldest Orthodox Jewish communities inside Jerusalem, the Naturei Karta, is still resolutely anti-Zionist?)
But even at the raw political level Jerysalem is crucial because it is, if you like, a kind of “bridge issue” between the issue of ending the post-1967 occupation and the issues around the decidedly second-class citizenship that Israel’s own 1.2 million indigenous Palestinians are forced to live with.
In addition, the situation of East Jerusalem’s 220,000 Palestinians is in many ways far more precarious than that of their compatriots (and often close relatives) living elsewhere in the West Bank, outside the municipal boundaries that Israel expanded, for purely Zionist-ideological reasons, back in 1967. Primarily because, though these Palestinians do live in indubitably occupied territory, the vast majority of members of the US-dominated international community has done almost nothing to provide them with the kinds of financing and other support that the Palestinian communities in the rest of the West Bank have been receiving.
In that respect, their situation is very similar to that of Gaza’s grossly under-supported (until now) Palestinians.
Though the Jerusalem Palestinians are now nearly completely cut off from daily contact with their confreres in the rest of the West Bank they do have fairly good contacts with the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. Thus, new coalitions of solidarity have been emerging among these different segments of the Palestinian people; and the plight of the Jerusalem Palestinians throws a helpful spotlight on the challenges of continuing land-grabs and decidedly inferior civil and political status that the Palestinian Israelis face, within their own different context.
Anyway, the issues of Jerusalem’s Palestinians will certainly be important in the months ahead…

I just finished writing my weekly news analysis for IPS, which is on the situation of the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the potential for that become a huge new issue.
In the course of that I checked out a bunch of online resources, to use to supplement the results of my own very up-to-date reporting. Since I now have them all as tabs on my Firefox I’m happy to share them here.
* Website of Ir Amim in English, great resource on the situation of Palestinians in the city. Lots of good info available through the tabs/links in the left sidebar.
* FMEP’s table showing the population of Israel’s illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, through 2006.
* Info about– and link to PDF text of– the letter sent to Hillary Clinton by the residents of the Bustan neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem. Includes a fairly ghastly photo of the ageing Shimon Peres kissing Hillary.
* Info about the most recent destruction of Um Kamel’s tent in Sheikh Jarrah.
* Good article by The Independent’s Donald Macintyre about the Silwan situation.

Check out the great short movie made by ‘Waltz with Bashir’ animator Yoni Goodman about the situation of civilians in Gaza during the recent war. One thing that people working with the many international relief organizations here in Israel/Palestine note is that it is almost unprecedented for the civilian population of a war zone to be prevented from leaving it, as just about all of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians were during the recent war.
AP’s been doing some good coverage from Palestine this week. This story has a bit of background about the movie.
At a broader level, I’ve been reading Jonathan Cook’s remarkable latest book Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair which pulls together the whole history of the Zionist movement in Palestine, showing the continuity of the Zionists’ efforts– right until the present day– to try to empty Palestine of its indigenous residents. One important point he makes is that the deliberate inculcation of despair amongst Palestinians is a big part of this plan, with the goal being that the despairing Palestinians will eventually abandon their long commitment to their native land and just up and leave it.
The short text on the book’s back cover that summarizes the book’s argument includes this:

[Israel] has industrialized Palestinian despair through the ever more sophisticated systems of checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative ‘defence’ industry by pioneering the technologies needed for crowd control, surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare.

I don’t know if Jonathan wrote that text himself. I suspect he did. But I find it an extremely astute description of the situation.
I’m about three chapters into the book, which seems really well done. Jonathan is a pioneering and steadfast British writer who’s lived in and reported from Nazareth in northern Israel for several years now. On his website he writes,

I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ – a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.
Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism’s appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Update 3:10 a.m. EST Christiane also recommends this excellent French-language graphic-art report on Gaza. (I think one of the Swiss socialist MPs mentioned there is the son of Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the ICRC… Anyway, many Swiss people understand a lot about international humanitarian law.)

Saturday morning I went to Bethlehem. Took the mini-bus from just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. It trundles you south along a route which slowly gives you broad vistas of hilltop after hilltop covered with some of the newer Israeli settlements like Gilo, which is vast, and Har Homa. Then the bus deposits you unceremoniously outside a very forbidding section of the Wall, which really is 30 feet tall, forbidding, and brutal. brutal, even if the Israelis, in an excess of irony, have decided to paint a vast feel-good mural on the Wall right there near the entrance to Bethlehem emblazoned with the words “Peace and Love.”
No kidding.
I think I’ll have to write a special essay sometime about the sick esthetics of the entire people-control system the Israelis run in the OPTs.
So the bus drops you, and you have to wind your way through the cattle-shed “terminus” they have here for foot traffic. No vehicles are allowed through anywhere near here, I think. The three Palestinian guys in front of me, who had the special “magnetic cards” that graciously allow them to visit Jerusalem from Bethlehem, all took quite some time to go through as they had to fit their whole hands into a new– to me– kind of scanner machine, which didn’t seem to work very well. The bored-looking Israeli teenage border-guard girls gave peremptory instructions to the men from inside their booth. Me, with my US passport, they waved right through. (Remember that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of this country. I am a visitor; and the Israeli girls may well be recent immigrants.)
Once on the other side I called my friend Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran nonviolence activist, son of Bethlehem, and current member of the elected city council, and then started walking along to where he said he’d pick me up. The wall loops in and out in a complicated way here, as everywhere. It comes very close to many houses, and in one portion it goes right down the middle of a street. It is always 30 feet high; dark grey in color; and punctuated very frequently by looming, cylindrical watch-towers.
Hullo? Israelis? Do these towers not remind you of something in the Jewish people’s recent past??
Zoughbi drove me up to Manger Square and we then spent a fascinating 90 minutes or so sitting in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Three or four other city council members came by and participated for longer or shorter periods of time in the general political discussion. Two were from Hamas. There was a lot of good-natured political discussion and joshing amongst all those present. Neither Zoghbi nor Victor are members of Hamas. But least among these city council members, everyone seemed to get along fine. They also expressed the deep wish that the ongoing national reconciliation effort in Cairo should succeed as fast and durably as possible.
Zoughbi then took me to the neighboring town of Beit Jala. That’s the one that’s lost most of its arable and grazing lands to Gilo. Up on a hilltop near there there’s a small settlement called Har Gilo, and just beneath it is a resort-style hotel called the Everest Hotel, where by chance we found another fascinating set of people meeting. Probably shouldn’t tell you more about it without getting permission. Anyway, Zoughbi knows about half the population of the West Bank, it seems, so the organizers of this peace-oriented gathering invited us to join them for lunch. The lunch was good and warm, and the discussion very interesting. However, with bitter winds whipping around outside the hotel was, um, certainly living up to its name.
After that, Zoughbi dropped me back at the center of Beit Jala, where there’s a mini-bus service that takes you directly from there back to downtown Jerusalem. But the catch is the bus has to pass through a big vehicle terminus somewhere south of town that controls access to the “settler road” that snakes almost directly to Jerusalem from the Hebron/Kiryat Arba area in the south of the West Bank.
So going through this terminus, all the passengers have to disbark and wait until the border guards have given the vehicle and all the bags in it a very thorough check. It was now colder than ever, with a horrendous, biting wind. Old people, kids, and everyone were left to stand at the side of the road for a good 15 minutes while the border guards took their time getting around to doing what turned out to be about three minutes’ worth of checking on the bus. Then they checked all our IDs and our hand baggage as we got back on the bus. Most of my fellow-passengers seemed to be East Jerusalem residents– that is, they carried the little blue-jacketed ID cards given only to EJ people, as opposed to the “magnetic cards” that are given to a very small proportion of West Bank residents, that allow them to enter East Jerusalem.
(Yesterday I spent the day in Hebron, the nearby village of Doura, and the Israeli town of Sderot… Last Friday I had an intriguing visit to a portion of northern Jerusalem called Dahiyet al-Barid. Today I did an interview with Um Kamel, my neighbor here in Sheikh Jarrah who’s been living in a tent all winter after the Israeli police threw her and her husband out of her house last November, so a group of settlers could take it over… Her husband died of heart failure soon after. Um Kamel is not, it turns out, from the same family I briefly visited when I was here in 2002. But the problem of settler and takeovers, the demolition of Palestinian houses, and the eviction of Palestinians from their homes is one that is certainly gathering some speed right here in East Jerusalem these days, and needs to be written about a lot more…. Anyway, more of my travelogue accounts will come when I have time… tomorrow, I leave Jerusalem and continue my travels… Better get to bed…)

The best one-stop shop for regularly updated information about the continual, multi-layered assaults that the Israeli government has been sustaining against the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Gaza, is undoubtedly the website of the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in the OPTs.
From there today, you can access not only the very comprehensive “Protection of Civilians Weekly Report– the PDF of the latest edition is here— but also numerous other materials, including the more detailed (and also weekly) “Field updates on Gaza” and other resources like this very helpful map (PDF) of the area of Silwan, right near Jerusalem’s Old City where the authorities have issued demolition orders for 88 homes… or OCHA’s very handy map center.
I was in Bethlehem today. It was a horror story to get through the brutal concrete Wall as I went there from Jerusalem and back, but excellent to connect with a good friend there, nonviolence organizer Zoughbi Zoughbi, who took me to a number of really interesting and informative encounters in both Beit Laham and Beit Jala. (More, later.)
In both towns, just about all the shops were closed– except, by prior agreement, pharmacies– as the owners participated in the West Bank-wide commercial strike declared in solidarity with the threatened people of Jerusalem’s Silwan. I think the strike was observed throughout pretty much all of the West Bank. The front page of PNN right now has an interesting piece about it, which includes some very moving quotes from residents of the West Bank outside Jerusalem about the intensity of their feelings for the city and the depth of their sadness at being excluded from it.
The Fateh-dominated PLO and Hamas had both agreed to participate in calling for this strike, which perhaps can be seen as one first fruit of the reconciliation talks in Cairo.
OCHA’s latest “Protection of Civilians Weekly Report” (PDF) has a wealth of information about attacks on the rights of Palestinians in all the OPTs. On p.4 you can learn that during the whole week February 18-24 the Israelis allowed only 635 truckloads of goods in to supply the entire needs of the Strips’ 1.45 million people. The number of truckloads of goods that entered Gaza each day before Hamas won its victory in the parliamentary election of January 2006 was 750, which is the baseline defined for “normal” life since then. But the needs of Gaza’s people in the wake of the devastation caused by Israel’s military assault of December-January are certainly greater than “normal.” They desperately need cement, glass, rebar, and other basic materials required to reconstruct destroyed and damaged homes and infrastructure. They need more than 750 truckloads of goods to be entering each day… and they are in the lucky position of having friends and backers in the international community who are eager to help provide their needs. If only Israel, which is the military occupation power that controls all access points nto the Strip, would let the shipments in.
I have made a few attempts to ask humanitarian-aid people what the dreaded Israeli blacklist of foodstuffs that cannot be sent into Gaza contains. But they have stayed largely closed-lipped. The OCHA report says this:

The Israeli criteria used for processing import requests into Gaza remain unclear. During the reporting period the Israeli authorities rejected entry to 30 metric tonnes of chickpeas, 43 pallets of macaroni, 137 pallets of wheat flour, 131 recreational kits, 68 pallets of stationary items for students, 150 school-in-a-box kits, 33 boxes of medicine, 22 freezer appliances, 3 generators, and 4 water pumps.

I think the lack of clarity referred to there is important, and most likely deliberate. The Israelis don’t want to be shamed by having their full list published; and the absence of a published list meanwhile means that any decisions made on any particular day can be capriciously taken, and will therefore keep the aid-providers and recipients in a constant state of uncertainty. This increases everyone’s frustration level! But what a couple of the aid coordinators told me was that the Israeli authorities described the bans on certain foodstuffs as being applied because these were deemed to be luxury” items. Chickpeas, macaroni, and wheat flour– luxuries?
And what twisted minds would ban recreational kits and school supplies? (Oh, I guess the same twisted minds that bombed a number of schools in the Strip and a good portion of Gaza Islamic University.)
John Kerry and Hillary Clinton have both reportedly expressed their “concern” about some of the items on the banned list.
God help the people of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the rest of the West Bank. And God help all of us whose governments are complicit in these savage and illegal acts.

… Or, 25 interesting things about Ramallah and its environs.
1.
Whole areas of the Greater Ramallah area now loom like “Dubai on a hilltop”, with clusters of large high-rises either recently built, or still being built. Many are glossy, glass-fronted “trade centers” or “office complexes.” Who’s been financing this massive wave of development? Some of it, clearly, has been financed by western donor governments eager to prop up the Ramallah-based “Palestinian Authority’. Many area residents say, however, that much of it has been financed by the very extensive, and relatively well-off, networks of Ramallah expatriates. Some people say that as much as 90% of the Palestinians whose family origins are here now live elsewhere– primarily in the US. When they’ve sent money ‘home’, over the years, they have generally loved to plow it into real-estate development. Back in the days of full-bore Israeli occupation, the military authorities kept a tight lid on Palestinian building. Now, they are ‘free’ to indulge their wildest real-estate fantasies (and some truly are pretty wild and tasteless.) The results do not make it easy to persuade the many international NGOs who flock to Palestine that there is any real socioeconomic need here. Yes, there is need in Palestine, including a lot of it in other parts of the West Bank, as well as in Gaza. But for the most part you don’t find it if you stay inside Ramallah.
2.
Many of the city’s high-rises are now occupied by PA ‘ministries.’ By some counts there are 37 of them, each with its own grandiose marble-clad building. (Often, little goes on inside, but that’s another question.) But the PA is not a sovereign government. In fact it has a jurisdiction and mandate that is far more circumscribed than that of my home-state, Virginia. In Virginia, the state– or Commonwealth, as it is somewhat grandiosely known– has a ‘Department of Education’, a ‘Department of Transport’, etc etc. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate for the PA to call these bodies “Departments”, and to keep them to a reasonable and effective scale? Calling them ‘ministries’, it seems to me, is just another instance of PA grandiosity and legerdemain.
3.
Ramallah has numerous lively and engaging cafes and eateries– and apparently some bars and night-clubs, though I didn’t check those out. But I don’t think it has a single decent bookstore. H’mmm…. I moved from there to East Jerusalem recently; one of the first things I did was wander along Jerusalem’s Salahuddin Street to the Educational Bookstore. Although it’s tiny it always has the most stunning and well-organized selection of books on current political and cultural topics, in Arabic and English. Maybe they should open a branch in Ramallah?

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 1”