Category: Palestine 2009

Interesting to see that the comments board here recently attracted an interesting and well-written comment from emerging young blogger Michael Totten, who’s just completed a short junket to Israel paid for by the American Jewish Committee.
To his credit, Totten– unlike so many earlier beneficiaries of all-expenses-paid junkets provided by pro-Israeli organizations– did at least admit his sponsorship upfront. However, he did not admit in the comment submitted here, if it was indeed he who submitted it, that the whole text of that comment ran on his blog, here, a month ago.
Since I missed it then, I’m interested to see it now, since it not only paints an interesting picture of the views of many members of the Jewish Israeli policy elite but it also conveys pretty clearly to an English-speaking audience the messages those Israelis want to have conveyed.
Overwhelmingly that message is that “There is no fast or easy solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
You could also, certainly, link that argument with description– which by all accounts seems an accurate one– of the degree to which Israelis feel happy or satisfied with the results of the recent Gaza war. As he blogged on January 26, “Most Israelis I spoke to in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem last week feel a tremendous sense of relief and seem more at ease than they have been in years.”
In other words, they feel– or as of January 26, they did feel– under no immediate pressure to change any of their existing practices in the security/strategic field. Those practices include, though Totten makes no mention of these issues, their continued building of additional settlements in the West Bank, the continued maintenance of the ‘movement control’ noose around West Bankers, and most shockingly of all the continuation of the tight siege around Gaza that prevents the delivery of even basic construction materials that are desperately needed to rebuild the thousands of badly damaged and completely destroyed homes, water systems, and other basic infrastructure there.
“Israelis feel okay about themselves– so therefore, there’s no need for anyone to rush hard toward making peace with the Palestinians”: That seems to be the general trend of the extremely self-referential argument that Totten is both describing and subscribing to.
In the blog post “The mother of all quagmires”, which was what was sent here as a comment, Totten adduces several pieces of “evidence” as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is currently unsolvable.
The most important of these items of ‘evidence’ is his argument that (1) Hamas doesn’t recognize Israel’s to exist (and by clear implication, that it cannot be made to accept this, even perhaps grudgingly, in the context of a broad peace bargain in which others of its important demands get met); and (2) that this rejection by Hamas of Israel’s “right to exist” and a concomitant rejection of a two-state solution, are widely shared among Palestinians.
Regarding the first part of that argument, of course diplomatic balancing of all the issues is quite possible, in the context of a true, wide-ranging peace negotiation– as Khaled Meshaal and other Hamas leaders have very clearly indicated. (But Hamas, unlike Fateh, is unlikely to give away all its negotiating cards upfront.)
Regarding the second part of the argument, Totten is just plain wrong. He writes,

Hamas speaks for a genuinely enormous number of Palestinians, and peace is impossible as long as that’s true. An-Najah University conducted a poll of Palestinian public opinion a few months ago and found that 53.4 percent persist in their rejection of a two-state solution.

Where did he get that figure?
You go to any of the series of very professionally conducted polls that have been conducted among the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, and you’ll din the picture is almost the direct obverse of what Totten claims.
The PCPSR (Shikaki) poll of early December 2008 found that:

* 53% accept and 46% reject a mutual recognition of Israel as the state for the Jewish people and Palestine as the state for the Palestinian people; 48% think a majority of Palestinians support the mutual recognition while 38% think a majority of Israelis support it.
* 66% support and 30% oppose the Saudi Initiative that calls for an Israeli withdrawal to the lines of 1967 in return for an Arab recognition of Israel and normalization of relations with it.

The JMCC poll of late January 2009 found, in Q.11, that, of a list of different final outcomes suggested (and some not suggested) by the poll-takers, 54.8% of respondents preferred the two-state outcome, as against 18.4% for a “A binational state on all of historic Palestine”, 1.6% for an Islamic state, etc.
These most recent poll results, I should note, are remarkably consistent with findings of polls undertaken by these and other polling organizations for many years past. Back in the early years of this decade, I recall that the level of Palestinian support for a two-state solution was around two-thirds. Yes, it has declined since then; but only slowly. And crucially, even in the context of complete stasis in the negotiations, a continuation/acceleration of Israeli settlement building, and the recent Gaza war, it still remains noticeably above 50%.
That certainly gives peace negotiators a great basis of public support to work on– if they use it swiftly and well.
(Ah, but how about the levels of Israeli support for a robust two-state solution like the one the Saudi/Arab peace initiative calls for? Those figures would be far, far lower, I think… )
So why does Michael Totten distort (or, unquestioningly accept and re-propagate the Israeli distortions of) this part of the Palestinian record?
I guess there are two separate questions there. One is about Totten. In a sense it’s a trivial question. Totten is a journalist-provocateur, on the same order as his friend Chris Hitchens (with whom he got into a little adventure in Beirut last week, after the ever-pugnacious Hitchens decided to deface a mnument of the veteran Lebanese party the SSNP.) Hitchens is so “famous” now that he doesn’t even have to pretend to do real reportorial journalism. Totten is still up-and-coming, however; and he does make some effort to do real reportorial journalism (which also builds up his value to those who want to use him as a journalist-provocateur.) But he does his “journalism” in an unabashedly biased way. He goes to Israel on the dime of the AJC and he makes no attempt whatsoever, while there, to seek out any Palestinians and gain anything even approaching a “balanced”– as between Israelis and Palestinians– view of the conflict between these two peoples. Instead, he just parrots the views and impressions of local anti-Arab propagandists like Martin Kramer.
(I recall that last August, during the Ossetian war, Totten went to Tbilisi and did some blatantly propagandistic flacking for Saakashvili, while there. I’d love to know who picked up those expenses for him… Is it the neocon ideology that drives his work, I wonder; or the taste for “Boys’ Own” adventures of the most laddish kind; or the excitement of getting noticed and adopted by powerful and rich organizations like the AJC? Maybe a bit of all that.)
But a more interesting question is why the influential Israelis with whom he met want to put about the idea that there is “no hope for peace” because “the Palestinians are all hate-filled irredentists who don’t even, really, want the two-state solution they claim is their goal.”
Ah, I guess once I write it down that way, that question looks pretty obvious and trivial, too.

I had an interesting morning. First, it being a normal workday here in Ramallah, I went to conduct a 90-minute interview with two members of the Palestinian Legislative Council which was, you will recall, elected in a free and fair election here in January 2006.
One of these men had recently been released from an Israeli prison where he’s spent nearly the whole of the last 32 months. The only accusation against him was that he’s a member of a parliamentary bloc, ‘Change and Reform’, that, though it ran in the election quite legitimately– and indeed, with the express authorization of both Israel and the US– was suddenly deemed by Israel, five months later, to have an affiliation with “terrorists.”
Back in June-July 2006 a large number of PLC members were rounded up by the Israeli occupation forces. That was shortly after militants in Gaza captured the young, on-active-duty Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit as a POW; and just about everyone said at the time that the PLC members had been captured as additional “bargaining chips” against Shalit’s release. (That, though the taking of hostages for the any purpose, including that of using them as bargaining chips, is quite prohibited by international law.)
41 of those PLC hostages still remain in prison, including PLC speaker Aziz al-Dweik. The PLC, which has 132 members, has been unable to muster a quorum since June 2006 and thus has done no business for this entire time. (George Bush, quite shamefully, uttered not a word of protest against Israel’s cruel and expressly anti-democratic move. Will President Obama change that position? I hope so.)
Both PA president Mahmoud Abbas, whose own elected term ran out on January 9, and the man elected by parliament to be PM back in March 2006, Ismail Haniyeh, took upon themselves the right to name an “emergency government.” The Abbas-designated government, which is based here in Ramallah, has been given very generous financial support (and weapons and many forms of training) by the US-led west, which has meantime worked consistently– ever since January 2006– to support Israel’s extremely harsh, and in many cases actually lethal, siege of Gaza.
Those policies were just two prongs of a wide US-Israeli campaign to oust the duly elected Haniyeh government completely.
So in my meeting with the two parliamentarians here this morning, Mahmoud Musleh, MP, who was the one recently released from jail told me about some of the forms of mistreatment and humiliation to which he and his fellow parliamentarians were subjected while there. He, like several of the others, is a man in his late sixties. On thing he noted was that each time any of the detainees is taken to an Israeli court for a hearing, they are subjected to two days of demeaning and sometimes painful treatment on their way there and back.
More from that interview, later.
… A couple of hours later I had a chance meeting with an American woman who’s here on a two-year contract with USAID to work on “rule of law” issues with the Abbas/Fayyad government’s “Ministry of Justice.”
I was interested to find out what it is, exactly, that she does. The old rubric “capacity building” doesn’t tell you very much, does it? She talked a bit about what she had done on previous contracts, in Bosnia and Afghanistan. One of the things she mentioned specifically was the establishment of regulations for judgment enforcement. This is especially important, she explained, for foreign investors– otherwise, what are their contracts worth, at all?
She said she doesn’t really “do” human rights. But even in what she does do, she said she had run into considerable problems, because any governmental regulations that are drafted in a “rule of aw” situation need to be drafted in line with the enabling legislation— and the legislature hasn’t been able to conduct any business since June 2006…
This professional dilemma of hers is a great illustration of the “cart before the horse” or “Alice Through the Looking Glass” nature of many of the “aid” interventions that western governments have been running in occupied Palestine ever since Oslo. (And that is 16 years now… )
The basic issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty have not even come close to being resolved here yet! Israel’s occupation forces surround this city–and they send snatch-squads in to capture or sometimes kill suspects here with impunity, several times a month. Meantime, all around the extensive fence-and-wall system that surrounds Ramallah, the Israeli settlements expand, expand, expand, gobbling up yet more Palestinian land.
And yet, though the occupation continues– here, as in Gaza– western governments are building “Palestinian” court-houses and prisons and giving numerous “trainings” and other interventions to “teach” these obviously somewhat backward Palestinians (irony alert) all about the “rule of law.”
As if the Palestinians didn’t actually in an earlier era establish nearly all the state administrations for all the little emirates/statelets/former “Trucial states” down in the Gulf– including their judicial systems, penal systems, etc.
And these presumably comfortably compensated US contract workers continue to do this, while day-in-day-out strong US ally Israel gives the Palestinians the exactly opposite lesson about the ascendancy of raw might over any concept of domestic or international law.
Talk about Looking Glass Land.
The rule of law, here in the West Bank and Gaza. Now wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

My weekly piece on major developments in the peace (or no-peace) diplomacy on Arab-Israeli issues is here.
Also here.
Title: Peace Talks on Hold Amid Dual Power Struggles. Tragic.
News analysis is an interesting hybrid of, um, news reporting and analysis. I think I’m getting the hang of it. Qadoura Fares was really interesting to talk to. was that only yesterday? Seems an age ago, because I’ve been doing so many other interesting things.
(By the way, Twittering the Bil’in activities didn’t work. Maybe I’ll try a third time to link my Jawwal phone to my twitter account…. Anyway, you can find a few after-action reports at my Twitter account.)

I just heard from a well-informed friend here in Ramallah that the Cairo-hosted Palestinian reconciliation talks scheduled to open Feb 22nd will be postponed. Sad if so.

I’ve never stayed for very long in Ramallah before. I generally preferred to stay in East Jerusalem and then as necessary traverse the ghastly Qalandia crossing point between there and Ramallah, sometimes staying with friends here in Ramallah for a night or two. But this time I decided to make Ramallah my first stop, and to stay here for a week or so, so I can catch up with everything that’s been going on here. It is, after all, three years now since I was last in town.
So yesterday morning, I took a car from Amman down to the Allenby/ King Hussein Bridge. There was almost no-one else seeking to cross– almost as bad a sign as if it had been jam-packed, I think. The deal is you do your Jordan-exit business first, east of the bridge, then take a Jordanian-provided and mandatory shuttle bus across the trickle of water known as the River Jordan, to the Israeli side. But it took nearly an hour for them to gather enough people (ten or so) to justify sending the bus across. I got a bit impatient. But in the bus I found that a fellow-traveler who’s a manager with the (Abu Mazen-controlled) Palestine Investment Fund was also hoping to head up to Ramallah, so we shared a taxi and split the cost of some $120.
Getting in to the West Bank through the Israeli-controlled side was the usual, extremely depressing experience. The Israelis have cadres of young women, presumably doing their national service, whom they use as the “front-line” in many border-control jobs. Many of them love to hang around with each other and with the beefy young guys who also work there, to chat on cell-phones, to stand around admiring each other’s make-up and hair-dos, and to really relish the power they have over all these exhausted-looking Palestinian families whom they have to deal with. The main power they have is to harrass and delay, but it’s backed up by other much more intrusive or fearsome powers, too.
When our bus with ten people rolled in, there were around 60-70 people in the passport-control waiting area, so some of them may well have been waiting since early morning. Just about all of them looked to be Palestinians, since of course just about every Palestinian family in the West Bank has half or more of its family members now living in Jordan. And guess what, people in these families like to get together!!! But to do so, they have to pass through these border-controls that are totally controlled by the cohorts of bored and faintly malevolent young Israelis. Well, that gives just a first glimpse of what then continues to happen to Palestinians inside the West Bank, any time they want to travel from one town or city there to another, I guess.
… If all the Palestinian communities in the occupied territories can nowadays be described as “open-air prisons”– and I believe they can– then Ramallah is probably the “Club Fed”, i.e. the top banana, in this extensive system. Provided you don’t actually need to go anywhere else, provided you have plenty of money (yes, this Club Fed ain’t cheap to live in), and provided you’re capable of completely disabling any sense of solidarity or connectedness you might have with family members, friends, or just plain compatriots who happen to live elsewhere, such as Gaza, you could possibly even live a pretty good life here.
Places that most Ramallah people can’t ever get to include even Jerusalem, which used to be just 12 minutes away by car along the hilltop road. Ramallah’s a historically Christian town, and just about everyone here has family members or close business ties with East Jerusalem. Tough luck. The Wall, with its horrendous– and oh so evocatively looming– watch-towers, stands between.
You are reminded nearly everywhere of the tight noose Israel retains around Ramallah. Like the rest of the West Bank, it is literally a captive market for Israeli produce. Many stores are filled with Israeli-produced goods or with other imports that, having come in through Israeli ports and middle-men give them a nice cut of the profits, too. You can get some great Palestinian fresh produce, and a few locally-manufactured products like Taybeh beer, or some Palestinian-processed foods. But even for those Palestinian industries, their scale is small and many or most of their inputs have to brought in from or through Israel.
… But having said all that, I also have to say that, just for now, I’m getting real pleasure from being here. One big part of that is to reconnect with old friends, which has already started to happen. And the other is just to experience the urban environment in this bustling but airy and beautiful Palestinian Arab city.
I’ve taken a couple of walks now, from my fairly central hotel here up to the “Manara” landmark, around some of the back streets there, and along Main Street a bit. For various reasons– including over the years the actual presence of Israeli occupation troops in the streets, the tensions of various intifadas, or the threat of either of them rolling in at any time– I’ve never really experienced Ramallah as a functioning and flourishing city-center before. I never realized there is a pretty sizeable big produce-market tucked in to the east of the Manara, filling up a number of whole streets with with push-carts piled high with riotously colorful fruits, veggies, and greens. Especially, at this time of year, greens. There are side-streets lined with little stores selling traditional (or made-in-China) housewares: brooms, loofas, knitted string back-scratchers, aluminum pots, etc. Between them are little store-fronts in which people make and sell the very best in Arab street food: felafel carefully made with a dusting of sesame seeds atop each one; kibbeh balls staright out of the deep-fryer; tall pillars of succulently rotating meat for shawerma; stacked rows of whole chickens browning slowly on their automated spits; little meat-pies or cheese-pies; kaak; kunefeh…
Oh, to walk down a street drenched in the smells from all these great foods is a pure delight. Or you turn a corner and the sharp tang of cardamom coffee comes in from somewhere. Or the rich, warm smell of thyme-coated mana’eesh…
There are a lot of cars– yellow taxis everywhere!– and quite a lot of honking that reverberates between the mainly solid stone walls of the city center’s buildings. However, one of the things Abu Mazen’s “Palestinian Authority” has done is put on the streets a large number of pretty well trained traffic cops. Their little whistles punctuate the noise in the city center– as do, too, in the most commercial portion of the city, the loudspeakers that many shop-owners have hung outside their stores, blaring repetitive messages about their “special offers” over and over into the street outside.
One of the best things about Ramallah– as was also true of East Jerusalem, back in the day– is that many of the farm-women you see either selling their produce in the streets or walking purposefully through the crowds to do their business are still wearing their traditional, hand-embroidered dresses. It always amazed me how these women, who spend many months sewing vast swathes and plateaus of these intricate, traditional patterns into their dresses before they get married, would thereafter wear these treasured heirlooms day-in-day-out as they proceeded about what was often very dirty work. Many of the younger women in the street are wearing a simpler, non-embroidered form of hijab. (In the whole broader district around Ramallah, Muslim Palestinians have been in a clear majority for some time now.) But you do still see plenty of women in the older embroidered thobes. That certainly brightens my day.
(I was telling my daughter Lorna a few things about my time in Ramallah in an IM exchange yesterday. She urged me to take and post some photos. I’m a bit reluctant. I feel there’s something a bit exploitative or objectivizing about photography of other people unless it’s as part of a pre-agreed or clearly understood transaction between equals… I feel much more confident about the nature of the transaction if I just write about my experiences, instead.)
I guess the other big observation I have is how generally pleasant the medium- and long-range views from and around Ramallah are. The city is built on a series of hills. Like Amman, which is where I came from yesterday, though the hills and valleys here crowd closer together and are even steeper than the ones in Amman. In both places, as you travel around the city you get many opportunities for pleasing, multi-curved vistas or sweeping views. But here in Ramallah there are many more mature trees interspersed between the buildings. And though there are many fairly undistinguished apartment buildings here of seven or eight stories high, there are still also many gracious older stone houses of two stories or so that are topped with the pyramidal red tile roofs that were once common in this city, as in Lebanon.
(Nowadays throughout most of the West Bank, a cluster of red-tiled roofs is a dead giveaway for an Israeli settlement, since the vast majority of the Palestinians towns and villages here are dominated by buildings that have flat roofs.. much more useful, historically, as additional storage space or a good place to dry your peppers or whatever.)
But the trees and the occasional red roofs here in Ramallah and its twin-city, El-Bireh, make many of the accidental vistas you see as you walk or drive around the place very beautiful indeed.
Club Fed, yes.
And then, there’s Gaza….