Category: Palestine 2009

Read this…

…beautiful blog post about the (British) Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s cemetery in Gaza.
The author of the In Gaza blog, Eva from (I think) Canada, gives us many poignant photos of the beautifully looked-after cemetery, and an indication of the broad cultural diversity of the commonwealth citizens who’ve been buried there since the First Wordl War… going right down to the 23 Canadian peacekeepers killed and buried there while serving as UN peacekeepers between 1956 and 1967.
She also gives us as well as a beautiful short profile of “Ibrahim Jeradeh, the 72 year old retired gardener and caretaker who tended and nurtured the cemetery for over 50 years before passing the task on to his sons.
Eva writes:

    The cemetary lies just hundreds of metres from the Dawwar Zimmo Red Crescent centre that I and other international activist volunteers came to know so intimately during Israel’s 3 week massacre of Gaza. And like the Red Crescent centre, and so many other hospitals, medical buildings, schools, UN centres and places ostensibly off-limits to the Israeli assault, the cemetary was also wounded by Israeli shelling during the attacks.
    But toppled and shattered gravestones aside, the first thing one notices upon entering is the lush grass, the many types of beautifully-tended trees, the variety of flowers and shrubs, and the care which each grave is given…

But as I say, you should go read the whole thing yourself.
Her blog is great.

Fateh conference results very unclear

The mainstream western “script” on the results of the Fateh conference that is slowly winding up its affairs in Bethlehem this week is that it was a resounding success, that it showed “democracy in action”, and that Fateh showed a strong ability to renew itself when the conference elected a large slate of what people like to call “the young guard” to the new Central Committee.
See, for example, Avi Issacharoff in Haaretz or the wire services report in the Israeli news service Ynet.
I, meanwhile, am working my way through some Palestinian sources to try to get a read on how Palestinians think about the conference.
Maan news agency operates out of Bethlehem but tries to do a good job of providing coverage that is as neutral as possible between Fateh, Hamas, and other Palestinian organizations.
In this piece today, an unidentified Maan writer wrote,

    Analysts, observers, and former Palestinian ministers labeled the Sixth Fatah Congress a success even before the final ballot count was complete on Tuesday night.
    “The Fatah movement was re-born, it became stronger and more united, making the movement capable of dealing with all sorts of challenges both internally and externally,” one [unidentified] analyst said…

The journo went on to report that,

    Former Palestinian minister of prisoners’ affairs Ashraf Al-Ajrami said the revitalization of the governing bodies meant those responsible for “a large part of the failures of Fatah” are no longer in the party’s leadership.
    “Despite the lack of just accountability [within Fatah over the last 20 years], many from the old generation were held accountable today when they failed in elections for the Central Committee,” Al-Ajrami said.
    Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was described as the “biggest winner” by Al-Ajrami and dozens of [unidentified] observers, who noted he came out of the congress with legitimate support and a strong mandate to lead.

The Maan journo did, however, make a point of noting at one point that,

    Most of those announced as Central Council members… have held a government position at some point in their careers. No women were elected to the committee.

This does somewhat– and imho quite appropriately– deflate all the gushing talk about the new rise to prominence of “the young guard.” (Who, after all, are “young” only relative to the seriously ageing bunch of guys who’ve been running Fateh up until now… And, who are all male.)
Maan also gives us a list of the results of the first count of votes for the Central Committee:

    1 – Muhammad (Abu Maher) Ghneim: 1,338
    2 – Mahmoud Al-Aloul: 1,112
    3 – Marwan Barghouti: 1,063
    4 – Nasser Al-Kidwa: 964
    5 – Salim Za’noun: 920
    6 – Jibril Rajoub: 908
    7 – Tawfiq Tirawi: 903
    8 – Saeb Erekat: 863
    9 – Othman Abu Gharbiya: 854
    10 – Muhammad Dahlan: 853
    11 – Muhammad Al-Madani: 841
    12 – Jamal Muheisen: 733
    13 – Hussein Ash-Sheikh: 726
    14 – Azzam Al-Ahmad: 690
    15 – Sultan Abu Aynein: 677
    16 – Nabil Sha’ath: 645
    17 – Abbas Zaki: 641
    18 – Muhammad Shtayeh: 638

This is from about 2,500 voting conference participants. Fwiw, Abu Maher– #1– is an ageing founder of Fateh who was a big force in helping organize the conference (despite a hissy fit he threw at one point in the lead-up to it.)
How were people designated to attend the conference, again?
One thing we know is that it was not done in the way normal, democratically accountable political organizations elect representatives to take part in leadership conferences. It was done through invitation– but also with a lot of bargaining and threats (as well as patronage) attached to that.
Having Abu Maher come out such a strong #1– 265 votes ahead of Marwan Barghouthi!– does not make this look like the “victory of the new guard!”
I would say that half a dozen others on the list are members of the “old guard.”
But what use is this generational distinction that is made between “old guard” and “new guard”, anyway?
To think that simply because both Muhammad Dahlan and Marwan Barghouthi emerged as street leaders during the First Intifada, therefore they currently have anything important in common is quite crazy (or, lazy.) These two men espouse widely divergent policies.
In addition to Dahlan, a number of other Fateh military people who are closely associated with US Gen. Keith Dayton’s Contras-style project based in the West Bank were also elected…. Including Tawfiq Tirawi, Jibril Rajoub, etc.
Walid Awad, writing in Al-Quds al-Arabi, says that Abu Mazen “expressed amazement” at the failure of his longtime partner/competitor Abu Alaa’ (Ahmed Qurei) to get elected.
Amazement…. right… and pigs will fly…
Awad also notes that sources close to Abu Alaa’ were accusing Muhammad al-Madani, who worked in Abu Mazen’s “office of mobilization and organization”, of engineering Abu Alaa’s defeat. Amazingly (!), Madani himself came in #11 in the elections.
Awad tells us that the four Central Committee members to be appointed by (I think) the previously elected group will include one woman, one Christian, one from the Gaza Strip, and one from the Palestinian diaspora.
Awad tells us that Nabil Shaath (#16) expects the first priorities of the new Central Committee will be,

    rebuilding the movement, the restoration of national unity, attaining the liberation of the homeland, and building the Palestinian state.

Well, it does depend how the new Fateh leadership proposes to restore national unity, doesn’t it? Let’s hope it is through the negotiations with Hamas that will resume in Cairo next week, rather than through any repeat of the horrendously damaging, Dayton-backed and Dahlan-planned thuggery that they used in Gaza in 2007.
… Well, I have a lot more to read, and indeed, some other work to attend to, too. I’ll be back with more thoughts on Fateh in the days ahead.
For now, I just want to recapitulate the five “myths” about Fateh that I identified in this mid-June post:

    1. Fateh is a secular, modernizing movement that is in many ways “just like us” and therefore easy to deal with;
    2. Fateh’s leaders are ready and eager for a diplomatic deal with Israel– indeed, so ready and eager that they’ll be ready to make deep concessions on all or most of the core issues (unlike Hamas);
    3. Hamas might still be controlling Gaza, but Fateh remains more popular in the West Bank, which has about twice as many votes as Gaza;
    4. Mahmoud Abbas is an able representative of, and leader of, his people; and
    5. Fateh actually does exist as a coherent and easily unifiable political movement.

The response that Mouin Rabbani sent in to that post is also worth re-reading.
Looking at my five myths, I’d say the events of the conference have thus far borne out the fact that most of them are indeed myths.
Whether the mere fact of this conference having been held means that that Fateh does now “exist as a coherent and easily unifiable political movement” remains to be seen. There is the still mysterious (to me) Maan story about the Fateh leadership in Gaza having all resigned….
And also this other story about the results of a recount that led to some serious reshuffling of the names that bracketed the cut-off point for success in the CC election– which led to key Abu Mazen security aide al-Tayyib Abdul-Rahim suddenly getting bumped onto the CC…
So there may still be some serious contestations from within significant organs of Fateh of the result of the recent “elections.” So the legitimacy of the new CC within Fateh as a whole is by no means yet established
(Ouch. A strongly contested election result. What does that remind us of?)
But once again: all this only has any relevance at all if there is some real and hard-hitting peacemaking diplomacy from Washington and other international actors.
If there is no successful and hard-hitting peace diplomacy, then “Fateh”– which at this point is to a large degree the creature of Keith Dayton and all the US-mobilized patronage/peonage funds that have been poured into Ramallah in recent years– will disappear from the scene fairly rapidly.
Fateh’s name, let us remember, both means “victory” and is a reverse acronym for the Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyya, the Palestinian Liberation Movement. There are still many Fateh members who believe in the goal of national liberation. Whether the newly “re-elected” movement leader Abu Mazen can deliver them even one quarter of what they hope for of course remains to be seen. (The West Bank and Gaza comprise around 23% of the land area of pre-1948 Mandate Palestine.)

Agha, Malley, and some other ideas

Hussein Agha and Rob Malley have continued the slightly bizarre “madcap chase” around the arena of Israeli-Arab peacemaking that they launched with this recent essay in the NYRB, by publishing an op-ed in today’s NYT that is titled, quite misleadingly, The Two-State Solution Doesn’t Solve Anything.
Headline writers can be so obtuse…
A decent read of the Agha-Malley piece reveals that their argument really boils down to explaining why The Two-State Solution Doesn’t (immediately) Solve Everything.
Which of course is a pretty banal conclusion to come to. Far less sexy for a headline writer to trumpet.
Basically, the guys are writing that, though he gives grudging support to the idea of some highly constrained form of Palestinian “state”, what Israeli PM Netanyahu really wants from the Arabs is their recognition of Israel as Jewish state… while on the Palestinian side, though Hamas now proclaims its support for the two-state outcome, they also seek the return to their original homes inside present-day Israel of all those expelled from them during the fighting of 1948, and their descendants…
And that each of these respective positions– which we can describe as “1948-related issues”– commands large support within the two competing nations.
So what else is new?
Honestly, I find their arguments quite banal. Everyone always knew that you can’t resolve the issues of 1967 without also finding a workable resolution to the issues of 1948. (Though that attempt was made in such go-nowhere projects as Taba, the Geneva Initiative, etc.)
Here’s the good news: the issues of 1948 are, actually, far from intractable.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Israel as a Jewish state? Hullo! With a name like “the State of Israel”, does anyone expect it to be made up of Finlanders?
In the 1947 Partition Plan, which is the joint birth certificate that both Israel and the future Palestinian state have in international law, it was determined that there should be established a Jewish State and an Arab State in Palestine.
No biggie!
Of course, the rubber does hit the road when you ask “What does it mean for Israel to be a ‘Jewish’ state?” Does this mean a state guided by Jewish values– and if so, which set of Jewish values?
Does it mean that Israel should continue on the path it’s been on for 61 years now, and position itself as “the state of the Jewish people everywhere”– regardless of the fact that this positioning has always involved the systematic imposition of discrimination against that 20% of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish, but rather, ethnic-Palestinian indigenes?
Or would we hope that Israel is a state that can be both Jewish (in the sense of, informed by the best in Jewish values; and, a continuing haven for the Hebrew language…)– as well as democratic?
Clearly, that’s something that all the state’s citizens need to figure out among themselves. But outsiders who claim to uphold democratic values should certainly not support the continuation of those provisions of Israeli law that systematically discriminate against non-Jews.
But for outsiders to “recognize” Israel as a Jewish state– or even to be to required to do so? I don’t see it as a big problem. Actually, I think the whole question is a real diversion. After all, when all the scores of governments around the world that have recognized the State of Israel in the past took that step, none of them was “required” to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
Big diversion.
And then, the issue of outcomes for that large number– probably a majority– of Palestinians who happen to be refugees from the land that became Israel in 1948, or their descendants… Why should this be thought of as an intractable problem?
Clearly, these people need a way to have their national, political, and individual property rights all sufficiently respected. Does that mean– as Hamas head Khaled Meshaal told me in June– that all Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to the exact village or town from which they or their forebears fled in 1948?
Not necessarily…. As in, not necessarily to live there forever. Indeed, my friend Nadim Shehadi came up with a great concept in this recent paper he did for London’s Chatham House: “the right of return– for lunch.”
Nadim noted something that, after 61 years of separation between Israel and most of its neighbors, too often gets forgotten. That is, the very small distances between all these places we’re talking about.
In the context of peace, and of the significant upgrading of regional transportation infrastructure that immediately becomes possible (or indeed, necessary) traveling from refugee camps in Beirut or Damascus to ancestral homes in the Galilee would only take an hour or two.
Palestinian families that have been forcibly split apart from each other for 2.5 generations can finally meet and hug each other in real life, just as they have already started to do in various internet forums over recent years.
Palestinian refugees from Gaza can travel to ancestral homes in southern Israel that they haven’t seen for many years now; they can visit the family graves; rehab some of the long-destroyed mosques; have picnics beside streams that the elders remember only from their distant childhood.
Palestinians from everywhere, who have kept a deep longing for the holy places of Jerusalem and Bethlehem in their hearts, can go and visit those holy places.
In the context of peace, what is so wrong with this picture?
I’m assuming that the property-compensation issues and the having-a-stable-citizenship issues will all have been satisfactorily resolved for the refugees in the context of the final peace settlement. And a number (to be negotiated) of the refugees will likely have been allowed to return to their ancestral homes to reside– either as citizens of the Palestinian state, or as law-abiding citizens of Israel; but anyway in full respect of Israeli law.
But if, as a result of the peace, the whole region becomes knitted back together with transportation webs similar to those its had under the Ottomans or the British, then Israelis, Palestinians, and other Arabs will all be able to move around the region in a way that most people haven’t even thought possible for many decades now.
In the context of a fair peace, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis will be welcome to travel along the new highways and high-speed rail lines to Cairo, or Damascus– or Turkey, or Libya, or points beyond. Why not?
And even Jerusalem can become transformed from being a point of hatred, fear, and contention, into a center for world cultures and a truly global multi-culturalism.
Here’s another important point to remember: For Jewish Israelis– or for the adherents of any particular faith– to have assured access for pilgrims to places of deep religious significance doesn’t mean that the members of this religion have to control these places completely.
Rights of pilgrim-access don’t entail any right to reside or control.
You could call it the right to do a pilgrimage and have lunch. Whether we’re talking Jerusalem, Hebron, or anywhere else. Doesn’t that sound like a fair deal?
… Anyway, I’m thinking out loud here a bit. The main point of this thinking is to show that, though certainly the “issues from 1948” will need to be addressed even if there is a two-state outcome between Israelis and Palestinians, these issues are not, in fact, as completely intractable as many people have come to assume.

Peacemaking with Israel– the Gulf Arab dimension

My latest news analysis for IPS is just out. (Also, here.)
The title the IPS editor gave it was Saudi Arabia May Not Follow Obama’s Plan. Not a bad summary of the main thrust of the text.
I found it interesting and useful, while working on this piece, to catch up with some of the developments in the ‘Gulf Arab states’ dimension of peacemaking.
For example, I went back and gave a closer read to items like the remarks special envoy George Mitchell made when he was in Cairo on July 27 and the op-ed the Bahraini crown prince had in the WaPo on July 16.
In his June 4 speech in Cairo, Obama made some specific– and very preachily worded– requests of the Arab states:

    the Arab states must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, to recognize Israel’s legitimacy, and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

It struck me, when writing today’s piece, that he was making two substantive demands of the Arab states there– “to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state, [and] to recognize Israel’s legitimacy”. The day before, he had been in Saudi Arabia meeting the kingdom’s ageing but still apparently very savvy monarch, King Abdullah. So it is fair to assume he most likely gave Abdullah a heads-up on what these demands would be.
The Saudis and their allies in the other (and all much smaller) GCC countries seem since then to have been prepared to cooperate with the first of these requests but quite resistant on the second.
The Bahraini crown prince, Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, has been the most responsive of any GCC personality to Obama’s requests/demands. Notable, of course, that it was not the small island state’s King who “authored” the op-ed, but rather, the crown prince.
Shaikh Salman wrote this:

    We must stop the small-minded waiting game in which each side refuses to budge until the other side makes the first move… All sides need to take simultaneous, good-faith action if peace is to have a chance. A real, lasting peace requires comprehensive engagement and reconciliation at the human level. This will happen only if we address and settle the core issues dividing the Arab and the Israeli peoples, the first being the question of Palestine and occupied Arab lands. The fact that this has not yet happened helps to explain why the Jordanian and Egyptian peace accords with Israel are cold. They have not been comprehensive.
    We should move toward real peace now by consulting and educating our people and by reaching out to the Israeli public to highlight the benefits of a genuine peace.
    To be effective, we must acknowledge that, like people everywhere, the average Israeli’s primary window on the world is his or her local and national media. Our job, therefore, is to tell our story more directly to the Israeli people by getting the message out to their media, a message reflecting the hopes of the Arab mainstream that confirms peace as a strategic option and advocates the Arab Peace Initiative as a means to this end. Some conciliatory voices in reply from Israel would help speed the process.
    Some Arabs, simplistically equating communication with normalization, may think we are moving too fast toward normalization. But we all know that dialogue must be enhanced for genuine progress. We all, together, need to take the first crucial step to lay the groundwork to effectively achieve peace. So we must all invest more in communication.

I think this redirection away from Obama’s demand that the Arab states “must” move speedily towards giving the Israeli government “recognition of its legitimacy,” to a focus on urging his fellow Arabs to do more to address the Israeli “public” and their “media” directly is significant, and quite helpful. (Though how Salman expected to bring other Arabs around to his point of view by deriding their viewpoint as “simplistic”, I have no idea… The text in general looks as though it was written by a second-rate Washington PR firm.)
Recognition of the State of Israel as such is an act of state that– along with a bunch of other things– the Arab states have all promised to Israel as part of, or in the wake of, Israel’s conclusion of final peace agreements with all their neighbors. Why should anyone expect them to give it away now?
Anyway, a few more observations on this general topic:

    1. The formulation Mitchell gave in Cairo on July 27 on (a) the need for a “comprehensive” peace, (b) how he defines this comprehensive peace; and (c) how and when he considers it’s realistic to get the Arab states to undertake “confidence-building measures” was significant and important. I don’t think it got anything like sufficient attention at the time… And I can’t even find the text of that on either the State Department or the White House website.
    2. Of course, as I’ve written before, it riles the heck out of many Americans, including AIPAC, that the balance of power/interests between the US and Saudi Arabia– as well as between Washington and several other Gulf states– is such that Washington can never simply “tell” these states what to do, in the same imperialistic way it often tries to tell the big aid recipients like Egypt or Jordan what to do. (Oh, Israel is also a big aid recipient. Couldn’t we tell them what to do, also??) Regarding Saudi Arabia, the US is pathetically dependent on the Al-Saud to keep the oil spigots open and to recycle as much of their petrodollars as possible into propping up the chronically troubled US arms industries… In the case of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, those states are all now vital nodes in the US military’s basing plans in the military campaigns in both Iraq and Afghanistan– as well as significant oil exporters. Okay, so there is a sort of co-dependence between many of these governments and Washington. But that is still a far cry from the deep dependence that the Mubarak regime or Jordan’s Hashemites have on Washington.
    3. Regarding AIPAC’s recent campaign to gather senatorial signatures on the “Bayh-Risch” letter that urges Obama to “press” the Arab states to consider making “dramatic” confidence-building gestures towards Israel, it strikes me it is really a rather pro-forma effort on AIPAC’s behalf.
    After all, the big confrontation between AIPAC’s buddy-buddy BFFs in the government of Israel and the US president is currently over the issue of Israeli settlements. But we don’t see AIPAC mounting a letter-writing campaign about that one, do we? No, indeed, because for many years now AIPAC has had a strong modus operandi of not even starting campaigns they don’t think they can win handily… And on the settlement-construction issue, their analysts have evidently figured out that that’s an issue on which they wouldn’t get much support in congress.
    Good.
    4. Regarding the Arab Peace Initiative in general, though it’s a great thing for Obama and all other serious peacemakers to have in their hand, I hope they’re all aware that the prospect of “normalization with the Arab world” is no longer one that sets many Israeli hearts a-beating. You can see some of my comments on this in my recent article in Boston Review.

Finally, my biggest question right now is over timing…. Assuming that Obama and Mitchell are really serious in saying they want to nail down the “comprehensive peace agreements” between Israel and all its Arab neighbors– when the heck are they going to start?
Ramadan is coming up on around August 20. Prior to that, Hosni Mubarak is due in Washington August 18. (One week from today.)
Can we expect a big announcement of the US’s broad diplomatic initiative sometime before Ramadan? If not, then it will probably have to be delayed until the end of September or so. But I hate the thought of that much additional delay…

New (and illegal?) visa restrictions from Israel

The smart Palestinian writer Toufic Haddad has noticed that the Israeli authorities, which control all movement in and out of the occupied Palestinian territories, have recently started issuing new visas to people crossing into the West bank from Jordan– they clearly say the visa is good for “Palestinian Authority only.”
He has photos.
He writes,

    Previous Israeli-issued tourism visas do not restrict the freedom of movement of tourists who are allowed passage into the country, and who originate from countries which Israel has diplomatic relations and reciprocal arrangements regarding travel. That meaning, as long as someone was allowed into the country, they were able to travel freely whether they chose to visit the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, or the Palestinian city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank.
    “Palestinian Authority only” greatly restricts this freedom of movement, and thus undoes the former arrangement. It essentially precludes travel to areas of pre-1967 Israel, as well as to Israeli controlled areas in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
    Israel exercises full control over 59 percent of the West Bank – areas known as “Area C.”
    It further exercises security control over an additional 24 percent of the West Bank (Area B) with the Palestinian Authority [PA] in control of civil affairs there.
    The only area which the PA nominally controls in full, and which a holder of this stamp is thus presumably eligible to travel to, is Area A. The latter comprises the remaining 17 percent of the West Bank.

He writes that,

    This happens to violate the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement (also known as “Oslo II” or “Taba”) which states that “Tourists to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip from countries having diplomatic relations with Israel, who have passed through an international crossing, will not be required to pass any additional entry control before entry into Israel.” (Annex 1, Article IX “Movement Into, Within and Outside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip” 2 (e))

He notes that,

    Area A however is not composed of one territorial unit, but is divided into thirteen non-contiguous areas.
    Furthermore, the Israeli army routinely invades Area As, to arrest Palestinians, making a mockery of Palestinian control there.
    … Israel’s travel restrictions to PA areas are somewhat contradictory. Visitors can seemingly travel to Area As but must do so by crossing Israeli controlled areas (Area C). This means that visitors have the right to hop between different Area A ‘islands’, but can’t be caught in between.

He also notes that though western visitors to Israel and the OPTs would previously receive a three-month visa as a matter of routine, at least one recent visitor from the US was given a visa only to the Palestinian Authority areas, and only for one week.
People interested in freedom of travel issues should read his full post there.

Palestinian Israelis: Equality quest continues

Some 20% of Israel’s citizens are ethnic Palestinians– that is, Palestinians who in 1948 managed to remain (and are descendants of those who managed to remain) in or near their homeplaces in what became Israel while a majority of the Palestinians from those areas were ethnically cleansed from those areas during the Arab-Israeli war of that year.
The new State of Israel defined itself as a Jewish state, and has ever since given extraordinary benefits to any Jewish person from anywhere in the world, over and above those it offers to those of its citizens who happen not to be Jewish.
The many forms of discrimination to which these Palestinians are subjected is well documented by the advocacy organization Taayush (Coexistence).
So now, the Netanyahu government has formed a committee to promote the stronger representation of Palestinian Israelis in government jobs, given that they hold only 6.8% of government jobs at present.
But guess what. The eleven persons named to this committee include not a single Palestinian Israeli!
Clearly, the work of this committee is “too important” to be entrusted to someone who’s not Jewish… (Irony alert.)
* A note on nomenclature: The Haaretz article refers to the discriminated-against group as “Arabs”. Most Israeli sources prefer to use that term, which serves the purpose of making these “Israeli Arabs” sound as though they have nothing in common with the Palestinians who live in the West Bank, Gaza, or in the very extensive Palestinian diaspora. But that’s nonsense. These people were Palestinians (i.e. citizens of the British-mandated State of Palestine) before they had “Israeliness” forced upon them. And the only difference between them and those of their brothers and cousins who ended up as refugees was a series of decisions made by family forebears in those very tense, fear-riven days of 1947-48 when the Jewish/Israeli forces put the ethnic cleansing plan (‘Plan Dalet’) into operation. So to describe them only as somehow deracinated Israeli “Arabs” rather than Palestinians is highly misleading…

Kites and Gaza’s children

You may remember the recent story about the UN and various local organizations in Gaza organizing a mass children’s kite-fly that, by sending 6,000 kites into the sky at once aimed at getting into the Guinness Book of World records.
I think it’s quite appropriate that Gaza children should get this award. Every time I’ve gone to Gaza I’ve seen homemade kites flying up out of the many very heavily populated refugee camps and urban neighborhoods in the Strip. (It is worth remembering that some 70% of Gaza’s population are people whose families have been refugees since 1948, having fled or been pushed from their homes and farms in the lands that became Israel that year, and having been barred from returning to those properties ever since then.)
Now, the Palestinian writer Ramzi Baroud, who grew up in Gaza’s Nuseirat refigee camp, has written a great little essay on the importance that kite-flying had for him and the other children back when he was a boy there:

    In the summer, in Gaza’s scorching heat and humidity, we had two escapes, swimming in the sea and flying kites. The first option was interminably blocked by the Israeli military under various guises. During the intifada of 1987-93, the sea fell under Israeli siege. My house was a very short walk from the beach, yet somehow we spent over seven years without visiting it once. Not once.
    So kite running became our most favored pastime.
    Gaza’s children don’t buy ready-made-kites. There is no such thing. They construct them by hand and with unparalleled craftsmanship. To be entirely honest, I was terrible at making kites, as I am at anything that requires manual skills. The kite maker in the family was my older brother Anwar. His skill was both impressive and troubling.

Why ‘troubling’?
Well, just outside the Nuseirat refugee camp was,

    A notorious Israeli military camp and detention center … [that] served multiple purposes. It was to immediately dispatch troops into our refugee camp at the first sign of protest.
    Further, the men stationed there guarded a nearby Israeli settlement. Finally, it also served as a temporarily prison where Palestinian activists suffered torture before being hauled off to Gaza’s central prison, or worse, the Al-Nakab jail [i.e., a detention center inside Israels Negev region.]
    The military camp, however, hardly enjoyed a moment of peace. Students and other refugees from adjacent refugee camps would descend into the Israeli military grounds almost daily with marches, carrying flags, throwing stones and demanding that the soldiers depart. Of course the soldiers didn’t oblige, and my refugee camp paid a heavy price in blood with every confrontation.

The source of the ‘trouble’ the Nuseirat children had with kite-flying was therefore this:

    [The] children made kites carrying the colors of the flags and other symbols of resistance at the time, such as the initials PLO. They often flew them to be visible from the Israeli military camp, and if the wind was right, right on top of it. The cleverest amongst the kite runners were those who managed to drop the kite, in an unprecedented moment of sacrifice, right into the military camp.
    During the uprising’s summers, there would be dozens of kites, all red, black, green and white wavering atop the Israeli military camp and temporary detention center. The soldiers would often fly into a rage, storm the [refugee] camp, seeking their target: children with kites. We could determine the location of the raid when all the kites from a particular location would fall from the sky in unison…

And indeed, in the video on that BBC web-page about the recent mass kite-fly, you can see that several of their kites bear the colors of the Palestinian flag.
The event looked like a lot of fun for all the children involved!

Fateh, Hamas updates

I’ve been Quakering for the past few days. No time to update the blog. Now, I’m updating myself with what went on in the Fateh conference and the world in my absence.
The Fateh conference has been prolonged until at least tomorrow. Ma’an has published a list of the candidates for the 23-person (only 18 elected) Central Committee– here.
Today, PA head Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was elected head of Fateh by an overwhelming majority. No surprise there, since he and his cronies got to carefully craft the list of participants in the general conference. In fact, I’m amazed that 65 of the 2,200 delegates were recorded as voting against him…. Except that, as I read somewhere recently, modern-day despots are so much smarter than their Soviet-era predecessors and have understood that recording a ‘99.9%’ vote for the Great leader is no longer credible– so they modern ones are crafting it at around 68-70%.
Abbas’s came to around 97%. Close to Soviet-style, I’d say.
Oh, and Maan also tells us this:

    Shortly before the vote took place, Abbas’ supporters broke out into a prepared poem praising him and his leadership.

Meanwhile, the elected Hamas government’s foreign minister Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar left the Gaza Strip today for Egypt, along with five companions,

    “to hold important consultations with the Egyptian security officials over the fate of the coming round of Palestinian national dialogue that will be held soon in Cairo.
    Upon their arrival Az-Zahhar and the accompanied delegates were received by senior officials of the Egyptian security departments. Palestinian sources said that Hamas delegates may carry out a tour after concluding consultations with the Egyptians.

And Hamas PM Ismail Hanniyeh has been playing soccer at Gaza’s recently rehabbed Al-Yarmouk stadium.
Hanniyeh’s soccer appearance is interesting for two reasons:

    1. It is part of a much broader attempt by the Hamas leaders to develop, and place a public emphasis on, the movement’s many non-military activities. In recent weeks we had Zahhar co-producing Hamas’s first known effort in the world of movie production; Hamas branches in Gaza have organized a number of mass weddings (latest one reported here); and Hamas’s people gave support to the project of getting 6,000 Gaza children to fly kites to try to get into the Guinness Book of Records.
    2. The security implications of Hanniyeh feeling secure enough to go out and play soccer are interesting. Does this mean that the Israeli government’s long-pursued attempt to hunt him down and assassinate him whenever he shows his face in public has now been suspended? (How long did he play for?) If Israel’s quite illegal threat to engage in the extra-judicial execution of a democratically elected civilian political leader has been lifted, that is evidently good news.

… So, these are some of the interesting developments in the Palestinian field these past few days. I’ll be busy with family things for the next couple of days… but back to regular blogging from Monday evening or Tuesday.

Fateh conf stormy; Saudi king upset with Abbas

So yesterday, Abu Mazen and his cronies finally got the Fateh conference together in Bethlehem. Today, even the official spinmeister, Nabil Amr, had to describe the proceedings as “stormy.”
Actually, that M’aan report says that “delegates nearly came to blows.”
Hey, at least they didn’t (yet) start throwing the potted plants at each other as participants in some Likud conferences did back in the 1980s.
Guess what: Some of the delegates even wanted Abu Mazen and the rest of the Central Committee to give an account of what they’ve been up to– financially and politically– in the 20 years since the last General Conference was held.
The Central Committee has not presented any reports on its past actions to the conference.
Ma’an wote that after Abu Mazen came in for a lot of criticism about this, he finally told participants,

    that his 46-page speech from the day before, which glossed the history of the movement including the 20 years since the last conference, would be the reference document to replace the non-existent report from the Central Committee.
    Members accused Abbas of protecting members of the Central Committee from accusations that they had failed to do their jobs. Abbas said everyone will be punished for any mistakes they made and no one is being protected or sheltered, adding. Underlying the accusation was the notion that if the conference had been organized outside the West Bank a better conference could have been put together. To this Abbas answered, the “Fatah conference in the homeland is million times better than being held abroad.”

And guess what else. Fateh co-founder, Central committee member, and longtime Oslo critic Abul-Lutf (Farouq al-Qaddoumi), speaking in Algiers, said the conference “has no legitimacy because it’s being held under the shadow of the Israeli occupation.”
He said he wouldn’t recognize any of the decisions that come out of the conference.
Very significant, too: King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has sent a telegram to Abu Mazen calling urgently on the Palestinians to unite. From the wording of that report in al-Quds al-Arabi Abdullah seemed to be drawing a stark contrast between Fateh under Arafat (“which went from victory to victory”) and how it is now…
Well, I’m not sure about the “victory to victory” bit. But the contrast he drew was noticeable.
Very bad news for Abu Mazen (and the Americans), I think.

Is this gnome running US Mideast diplomacy?

It turns out there’s a popular figure in some portions of US popular culture called “the underpants gnome.”
The underpants gnome has a “business plan” that consists of three phases. Phase one is “Collect underpants”. Phase three is “Profit.” But neither the gnome nor anyone else can figure out what the Phase two is that bridges from phase one to phase three.
Joshua Foust at Registan has used the UG as a metaphor for various proposals that have been made to deploy more military-backed “Provincial Reconstruction Teams” into either Afghanistan or Pakistan. He is (imho rightly) very skeptical of the idea that PRTs can be a magic bullet to resolve the deepset problems of governance and security in either country.
But I think we’ve seen the underpants gnome phenomenon at work in Obama’s Arab-Israeli “peace” diplomacy, as well:

    Phase One: Keep on repeating that you want to speedily solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by establishing a Palestinian state; keep on publicly criticizing the Israeli government’s settlement construction; send George Mitchell out to the region like a yo-yo, many times.
    Phase Two: ? ?
    Phase Three: Achieve the Palestinian-Israeli final peace agreement.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the underpants gnome video clip, do go see it. It’s only 30 seconds.