Category: Palestine 2009

Al-Quds al-Arabi has some good, substantial news articles about the continuing saga of preparations for Fateh’s 6th general conference, due to open tomorrow in Bethlehem.
It seems the conference is still on track to proceed, despite continuing problems regarding both the attendance and the credentialing of the delegates from Gaza.
This QA report tells us that the meeting of the Revolutionary Council (the medium-level body that stands between the Conference and the Central Committee was postponed from yesterday evening to this evening. It also has a host of other details about conference preparations.
Regarding the attendance of the Gaza delegates, there have been reports that both Hamas and Israel have (separately) prevented the travel of these delegates from Gaza to Bethlehem. I don’t think this would actually be a deal-breaking issue on its own– modern videochat/videoconference technology could certainly enable the delegates to take part remotely, though of course all these communications would be visible to everyone in the spy business, including of course the Israelis. But who is Fateh kidding? Of course their conference, like their movement, is already deeply penetrated by the Shin Beth.
Anyway, they already have provision for the ‘involvement’ in some form or another, of more than 200 of Fateh’s longstanding group of prisoners inside Israel’s (smaller) jails, who won’t actually be making it to Bethlehem. So what’s the big deal about whether the Gaza delegates can physically travel to Bethlehem or not?
That same QA report says that reliable Fateh sources in Bethlehem say there are some Gaza-origined Fateh people now in Bethlehem/ the West Bank who are credentialed for the conference– and they spell out that this is a reference to Muhammad Dahlan and his supporters– but who are afraid that if the conference goes ahead they could be called to account for the disastrous failure Fateh suffered at the hands of Hamas in Gaza in June 2007… and that if this looks likely to happen, the Dahlan group would prefer to call the conference off on the pretext of the non-attendance of the delegates who are still resident in Gaza, rather than go ahead with it…
Yes, wheels within wheels within wheels there. I guess that’s what happens when you try to run a political “movement” that has no functioning mechanisms of internal accountability except the sloshing around of huge amounts of US-mobilized money.
Xinhua, meanwhile, reported out of Gaza a short while ago that, Ibraheem Abu al-Najja, described as a Fatah leader in Gaza, told their reporter that,

“We have agreed to go ahead with holding the general conference without Fatah members of Gaza and to append them to the central committee and the revolutionary council after two months,” he told Xinhua.
Abu al-Najja had been in the West Bank but has just returned to the Gaza Strip “to join the Fatah people who were banned from heading for the West Bank.”

I don’t know if that means they’ll go ahead with the video-conference option, or not.
This whole business about who is prevented by Hamas from going to Bethlehem, who is prevented by Israel from going, and of course the continuing Israeli bans on just about everyone else’s travel into or out of Gaza, and on the travel to East Jerusalem of any West Bank Palestinians (or those visiting the West Bank for the conference) is a sort of very vivid and physicalized representation of the degree to which ll three of these parties can hold each other hostage….
Ah, but I don’t notice that anyone is holding any Israelis hostage in that picture, except for the one young Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured while he was on a military operation just over three years ago.
So: one Israeli held hostage by Palestinians versus millions of Palestinians held hostage by Israel. That is a good representation of the balance of power on the ground… And therefore, a strong reminder, if such be needed, that just “leaving the two parties to work out the details of a final peace agreement on their own,” as so many people have suggested could only ever lead to an outcome that is highly coercive, unjust, and unstable, and thus an absolute non-starter…
Luckily, there is another basis for securing the peace agreement. That is international law, the resolutions and principles of the United Nations, and the full weight of the international community. So let’s get ahead and use all those tools as soon as possible!
It would help a lot, of course, if Fateh and Hamas could meanwhile speedily reach some kind of an agreement on how they’re going to work together, including in authorizing and monitoring the performance of a Palestinian negotiating team.
(Update #1, in case you missed it, was here.)

Xinhua has shown its emerging agility in reporting on Palestinian-Israeli developments by apparently getting hold of a copy of the “political report” that Mahmoud Abbas’s leadership will be presenting to the Fateh conference due to open Tuesday in Bethlehem.
In Xinhua’s characterization of the document, it would commit Fateh to

adopt[ing] public peaceful resistance against Israel to support peace talks between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the Jewish state, a new document showed…
“The forms of public resistance can be found in all types of boycotting, public and cultural mobilization against the occupation, escalating public activities against the occupation, its checkpoints and settlement and carrying out these activities on daily systematic process,” said the document obtained by Xinhua.
The awaited Fatah program did not mention any sort of military activities or reveal the future of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the movement’s armed wing.

However, for those hoping that Fateh would be bending completely to the will of Israel and the US, there were some shocks. Xinhua:

Meanwhile, the document stressed that settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be based on UN resolutions and Arab visions rather than the U.S.-backed Road Map peace plan or the declaration of the 2007 U.S.-hosted Annapolis peace conference.
Fatah will “stick to international references to the peace process and the Arab peace initiative and will not be drawn to alternative references that help the (Israeli) occupation disavowing its commitments.”
It also emphasized that the Palestinians can never recognize Israel as a Jewish state. “This is to protect the rights of the Palestinian refugees and the Palestinians (Arabs) who live inside the green line (Israel).”

Looks like an interesting political straddle to me.
It is also not very far from the political stance of Hamas, including as articulated to me by political bureau head Khaled Meshaal on June 4, and most recently also by Meshaal to the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon and Julien Barnes-Dacey.
We can also note, in the document reported by Xinhua, that not mentioning armed activities is not the same as disavowing them.
The latest news about the content of the proposed Fateh political platform comes while intense controversy continues to swirl about Tuesday’s conference, which will be the Sixth General Conference of Fateh, which was founded by Palestinian refugees in Kuwait in 1959.
This latest conference will, however, be the first to be held since 1989. And as I noted in this recent IPS news analysis and elsewhere, a tremendous amount of things have happened to the Palestinian people since 1989….
Including, of course, the whole fiasco– from the Palestinians’ point of view– of the so-called “Oslo process”, which has been presided over continuously since 1993 by the Fateh leaders of the PLO and the Oslo-derived Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, PISGA.
Small wonder, then, that Fateh is in deep internal chaos.
(I have written about this fact extensively this year, including in some of the reporting I did from the West Bank in February-March. One notable blog post on this topic was this one. Other blog posts and print articles on the topic can be accessed through this portal.)
Much of the commentary in the western media has focused on whether Fateh’s rivals in Hamas (which also now gives significant support to the whole PISGA project) will “allow” those delegates to the Fateh conference who are residents of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to leave the Strip and travel to the conference site in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.
Mahmoud Abbas and several of his allies have accused Hamas of holding the Fateh members in Gaza captive.
However, matters are by no means that simple! Three Fateh conference delegates resident in Gaza have now told Ma’an news agency that though Hamas is ready to facilitate their departure for Bethlehem, it is Israel that will not allow them to go to Bethlehem.
This is a very vivid example of the fact that– as many Fateh activists both inside and outside the occupied territories have long warned– Abbas’s decision to hold the conference in the Israeli-controlled West Bank gives Israel a de-facto veto over who attends, and thus wrecks the idea that the conference will produce any authentic or legitimate expression of an independent Palestinian nationalist will.
And in addition to Israel banning the participation of some Fateh delegates from Gaza, the veteran leadership of Fateh in Gaza under Zakariya al-Agha is still actively contemplating a boycott of the conference of its own accord, over its accusation that Abu Mazen has engaged in massive packing of the conference by suddenly credentialing an additional 1,000 participants of his own choosing, to add to the 1,200 previously envisioned.
Toufic Haddad of Faster Times published a terrific article Tuesday with many details of the way in which many of Abbas’s recent decisions around the conference have served to further deepen the already severe crisis of trust and legitimacy within Fateh.
If you scroll down that page, you’ll find the handy translation into English that Haddad made of a key article that Bilal Hasan published in al-Sharq al-Awsat on July 19.
Hasan– a veteran journalist and one-time leading member of the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine– is also the brother of two of the key founders of Fateh, the late Khaled al-Hasan and Hani al-Hasan.
Bilal Hasan recounted how the committee that Abbas had originally established to prepare for the fateh conference was some while ago summarily disbanded by him. GIven that the committee was headed by longtime Fateh Central Committee member Abu Maher (Muhammad al-Ghunaim), that move already signaled a serious new fissure.
(You can find a list of all of the Central Committee’s current 13 members at the bottom of this Maan web-page.)
So Bilal Hasan doesn’t say exactly when Abu Maher’s PrepComm was disbanded, but evidently it was a number of weeks ago– before veteran Central Committee member Aboul-Lutf dropped his big bombshell by accusing Abu Mazen of complicity in the poisoning of Arafat.
Hasan wrote that after disbanding the PrepComm, Abu Mazen,

announced in an individual manner, that he was calling upon a number of Fateh cadres located in the West Bank to an emergency meeting in the presidential compound. The meeting — the majority of whose attendees derived from one political stripe — took absolute and binding decisions regarding all three issues that had been debated in the dissolved “Preparatory Committee.”

Those issues were the location of the conference– that is, under Israeli occupation, or not under it; who would participate; and the content of the party platform.
Hasan went on,

It was decided that the conference would take place inside [i.e. in the OPT] and that the delegates would be open to 1200-1600 [members of Fateh], so as to give the opportunity to change and exchange [members]. As for the [conference’s preparatory] documents [and their political line], discourse would head towards ending armed confrontation with the occupation. It [armed struggle] will remain mentioned in [the movement’s] general principles, but will be removed from the operational program.
This is what happened in the face of the Preparatory Committee, and against it. A coup by all meanings of the term. A coup inside Fateh, led and implemented by the head of the government, that aims in the end at controlling it organizationally, intellectually, and politically, and with the support of a group that represents one stream inside Fateh with respect to its political coloration. One stream [as well] as far as its membership.

Hasan described the outcome as a fairly (though not totally) definitive-sounding split within Fateh. And he warned that,

if Fateh splits, it won’t just split in two. There could be successive splits — one splitting off independently in an Arab country, another in Europe [etc.] so that we find ourselves before a series of Fateh splinters. Moreover these splits will not result in anything inevitable [such as the reform of the movement], but could bring about the gradual diminishing of the movements membership [overall], such that its [Fateh’s] body, presence and influence atrophy day after day, until one day the only part of Fateh within them is a piece of its history.
These splits point to the end and failure of the Palestinian national project that was led by Fateh, by way of the PLO, and its declared political program. They also point to the end of the revolution and the failure of the revolution. The question here is what comes after the end of a revolution and its failure?

Anyway, as Haddad writes, there are all sorts of further stories of intrigue, buy-offs, vote-packing etc involved in the preparations for the planned conference… It remains quite possible that the conference will not be held at all… And of course, the political worth of whatever comes out of it, if it’s held, will remain open to serious contestation– especially from among the ranks of still-disgruntled Fateh members.
… So, there’ll be lots to watch for over the days ahead. The best English-language news sources I’ve found are Ma’an and Xinhua. I guess I’ll also try to read some Arabic-language sources on this over the next couple of days..

Okay, they’re very different, but here they are:

1. This beautiful essay by African-American poet and author Alice Walker: Overcoming Speechlessness: A Poet Encounters “the horror” in Rwanda, Eastern Congo and Palestine/Israel. It is a powerful reflection on some of what Walker experienced as a participant on the recent CODEPINK delegation to Gaza. It takes time to read, but is well worth it.
When our Quaker group published its 2004 book on the Israel/Palestine conflict we called the final chapter, “Beyond Silence.” Alice Walker goes very beautifully beyond silence in this essay. Including writing about the painful fact that her (Jewish) husband still
could not tolerate criticism of Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians./Our very different positions on what is happening now in Palestine/Israel and what has been happening for over fifty years, has been perhaps our most severe disagreement. It is a subject we have never been able to rationally discuss. He does not see the racist treatment of Palestinians as the same racist treatment of blacks and some Jews that he fought against so nobly in Mississippi. And that he objected to in his own Brooklyn-based family… His mother, when told of our marriage, sat shiva[because of Alice’s skin color], which declared my husband dead. These were people who knew how to hate, and how to severely punish others, even those beloved, as he was, of their own. This is one reason I understand the courage it takes for some Jews to speak out against Israeli brutality and against what they know are crimes against humanity.

A shorter version of Walker’s essay has been published at Electronic Intifada– HT: Ray Close. But it’s better to read the whole thing.
2. I told you this would be different. But “Rbguy”, writing his regular diary at “Daily Kos” this week, has done a great job of pulling together the many recent resources in the English language (including one of my own) on the topic of including Hamas in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
I was planning to do a longer JWN post on all these resources. But then, after reading Rbguy’s diary I realized I really don’t need to.
Rbguy, btw, is one of the new generation of Jewish-American bloggers and other activists who are certainly ready to “speak out against Israeli brutality” and to join with everyone else who is sincerely brainstorming fair and sustainable ways to end Israel’s long-running oppression of the Palestinian people and all other manifestations of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
And yes, his writing is also beautiful in its own way!

IPS published my piece on Fateh’s leadership crisis yesterday. It’s here, also archived here.
The news peg for this was, obviously, Farouq Qaddoumi’s public launching last week of the accusation that Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) had conspired with Dahlan, the US, and the Israelis in the poisoning of Yasser Arafat, and the subsequent ruckus within Fateh.
Fateh’s Sixth general Conference is due to open August 4– just ten days from now– in Bethlehem. Let’s see how that goes. Actually, I’d kind of like to go there and cover it.
I am intrigued by the logistics of the operation. Bethlehem, along with its traditionally Christian sister-towns of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, is encircled by some particularly ferocious sections of Israel’s 8-meter high concrete Wall. And as I noted when I visited there in late February, access to this enclave is tightly controlled by the Israeli occupation forces… And that is just access from elsewhere in the West Bank! Then, of course, there is access to the West Bank as a whole, which is also controlled by the IOF.
Will Fateh’s members from occupied East Jerusalem be allowed to travel to Bethlehem to take part? Fateh members from Amman or Beirut or elsewhere in the Palestinian diaspora?
It strikes me that for Abbas and his followers, this is sort of a no-win situation. If he wants to get a truly representative group of Fateh leaders and activists together for the conference, he needs Israeli cooperation… But then, especially in the present circumstances, having that cooperation can taint the proceedings very deeply, perhaps irreparably.
The PLO, which is the broader, Fateh-dominated body that claims to speak for all Palestinians, held a meeting of its policymaking National Council in Gaza in 1998. That was at the request of the PM of Israel, then as now Netanyahu, with the express aim that it should over-ride or delete those portions of the PLO’s founding Charter that called for the end of a specifically Jewish state in historic Palestine.
That session was attended by no less a personage than Pres. Bill Clinton. (Woohoo! … Irony alert.) It did not delete but did attempt to over-ride the controversial portions of the Charter.
Other key governance events that have taken place within the OPTs under Israeli occupation have of course included the elections of 1996, 2005, and 2006. Those, however, were all elections merely to administrative/governance positions within the Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, rather than relating to the nationwide Palestinian constituency, a clear majority of which consists of Palestinians exiled from their homeland who have no vote in (and no direct interest in) the workings of the PISGA.
Fateh, however, claims to represent a portion of the “nationwide” constituency of Palestinians. So the idea that it will hold its policymaking gathering under the tight control and ever-watchful eyes and ears of the Israeli occupation is strange, to say the least.
But then, let’s face it, Fateh is a strange entity altogether.
—
p.s. I intend to make it a practice to refer to the PISGA by its full name and initials whenever possible, as a way of reminding all of us that this body is not, and was never intending to be, a long-term governance solution for the Palestinians of the OPTs. Indeed it is now seriously past its Sell-by Date, since the text of the Oslo Accords stipulated that by 1999 Israel and the PLO (yes, the PLO, not the PISGA) would have negotiated a final-status peace between them, and presumably any “interim” governance formula would thereafter be phased out.

Ma’an news agency had this disturbing report today, in which it listed the names of 59 Gazans still missing since last december’s Israeli assault on the Strip, and presumed still buried under the estimated 1.5 million tons of rubble still left uncleared there.
The listing goes in order of age. The youngest three are:

1. In’am Ra’fat Al-Masri, 12, Ash-Shati Refugee Camp
2. Abed Ar-Rahman Ahmad Al-A’tawnah, 15, Al-Faloja
3. Jihan Sami Al-Helu, 17, Al-Karama Tower

The oldest five are:

54. Hakmah Abed Ar-Rahman Al-‘Attar, 75, Beit Lahiya
55. Mahdiaeyah Salman Ayyad, 76, Az-Zaitoun
56. Eid Jum’a A’yyad, 80, Az-Zaitoun
57. Mariam Abed Ar-Rahman Abu Thaher, 85, Beit Lahiya
58. Mariam Mutawe’ Mutawe’, 85, Al-Mughraqa

May their souls rest in peace. But what an outrage that Israel refuses to allow into the Strip the heavy lifting equipment required to locate and extract the mortal remains of these 59 people, so they can be given a decent burial.
Remember the huge lengths Israel goes to to get hold of the body parts of every single Israeli citizen, including airmen downed in combat? Well, Palestinians honor their dead every bit as much. I can barely imagine the pain the families of these missing people must be experiencing.

Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now did a great post on their blog recently showing how wildly inaccurate PM Netanyahu was when he claimed, Sunday, that Palestinians can buy homes and live in West Jerusalem.
Netanyahu made this mendacious claim to buttress his argument that “it should be quite okay” for Jewish Israelis to construct homes and live in occupied East Jerusalem.
But as Lara– and a number of others have pointed out– it is just about impossible for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem to “move over” and live in West Jerusalem, since most of the housing there is on what is called “Israeli state land”, whose sale, or rather long-term lease, to people who are not either Israeli citizens or certifiedly Jewish people from elsewhere is forbidden under a covenant between the government and the Israel Lands Authority.
However, neither Lara nor her primary source, Israeli attorney Daniel Seidemann, mention two other highly relevant aspects of the situation regarding access to housing in West Jerusalem:

1. Though the Israeli High Court has ruled (in the Qa’adan case) that real estate controlled by the ILA should be made available to Palestinian citizens of Israel, on an equal footing with Jewish Israelis, in practice Palestinian Israelis still find it just about impossible to buy or even rent ILA-controlled homes. Therefore it is not just Palestinians registered as residents of occupied East Jerusalem who can’t freely buy or move into the ILA-controlled homes in West Jerusalem– neither can Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship.
2. The vast majority of homes controlled by the ILA and other Israeli government authorities in West Jerusalem are properties that rightfully belong to Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from that half of the city during the fighting of 1948. Many of those former residents of West Jerusalem ended up in East Jerusalem. (They include Um Kamel al-Kurd, evicted from her home in Sheikh Jarrah for the benefit of Israeli settlers, last November, and living in harsh circumstances in a tent since then.)
These West Jerusalem / East Jerusalemites now have to suffer this triple indignity:
a. They are forbidden to return to family homes that are often just a short walk away from where they now live in East Jerusalem, and have to watch as the homes’ current Jewish residents make free and full use of properties that the Palestinian owners’ forebears scrimped and saved hard to build, and designed and decorated with great loving care.
b. Since 1948 these West Jerusalem / East Jerusalemites have done the best they can to build new– though always hopefully temporary– lives for themselves in the East Jerusalem areas where they sought refuge in in 1948. But now, even these neighborhoods are under intensive attack from Israeli settlers who receive considerable support from the Israeli authorities.
c. And now, too, they hear the Israeli prime minister making the quite mendacious claim that they are just as “free” to move into West Jerusalem as the settlers are to move into East Jerusalem!

It simply isn’t so.
I note that Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Association has even weighed in on this issue, saying incredulously to Netanyahu:

as a longtime Jerusalem resident, I can only say — huh? Arabs in West Jerusalem? Wen? Eyfo?

By the way, Lara Friedman also has an informative interview with Seidemann here about the settlers’ projects in Sheikh Jarrah. And if you go to to the Ir Amim webste (English here) you can find a lot more information about the planning/settling/demographic situation in Jerusalem. Including you can download a good description— with map– of the settlers’ plans for Sheikh Jarrah.

On Wednesday, I went to two intriguing discussions in Washington about different aspects of the Palestine Question.
The first was a seven-person round-table discussion on the US Institute of Peace’s recent report Hamas: Ideological Rigidity and Political Flexibility. The seven people included the report’s two authors, Paul Scham (formerly of Americans for Peace Now; now a visiting prof at the University of Maryland and Executive Director of its Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies), and Osama Abu-Irshaid, the imam of a mosque in Northern Virginia and founding editor-in-chief of Al-Meezan. It also included a moderator and four other people, all of them male and almost none of them with the degree of expert knowledge of Hamas’s politics that I have.
But hey, USIP has to keep its Congressional source of funding flowing, so I guess the very cautious people there felt they couldn’t have anyone who has actually conducted (and published) as much research on Hamas as I have!
… Anyway, there were a couple of interesting exchanges there. Some of the most interesting involved David Makovsky, a long-time pro-Israeli propagandist who is currently the director of the “Project on the Middle East peace process” at the pro-AIPAC Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Listening to Makovsky marshalling his very misleading (and often simply mendacious) claims and arguments was made bearable only because the other panelists and the moderator, the WSJ’s Cam Simpson, all did a good job of having a decent, fact-based, and realistic discussion on the issues.
I’ll get back to Makovsky in a moment.
… From USIP I biked along to the New America Foundation where Michael Sfard, a Jewish Israeli lawyer and the legal adviser to the excellent Yesh Din anti-occupation organization, was talking about “Settlements and the Occupation.”
New America is such an agile, tech-savvy organization that they already have the16-minute video record of that session available for your viewing there. Along with Sfard, it features the indefatigable NAF duo of Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah.
Sfard made several important points in his presentation. He noted that the maps of where the settlement boundaries are inside the West Bank always greatly understate the depth of the disruption, fear, and exclusion that the presence of the settlements, their (often Jews-only) feeder roads, and other Israeli objects and facilities have on the lives of the area’s 2.3 million indigenous Palestinians.
He said,

Every Palestinian farmer knows the true situation better than any Israeli politician. They know that there’s an unseen line around each settlement or other Israeli facility– even a cell-phone tower!– that they can’t cross without a real fear of getting shot at; and this line is ways outside the boundaries of the settlement or other facility.
Every Israeli structure in the West Bank is the epicenter of magnetic lines, if you like, of growth and of domination.
We in Yesh Din are trying to map the real lines of domination. The existing maps don’t show it. The true situation is constantly changing.

He argued, too, that even if the Obama administration succeeds in winning a complete freeze on settlement construction from the Netanyahu government, even that would count for little unless there is also a complete freeze on planning for new construction in the settlements.

Continue reading “D. Makovsky and M. Sfard on the Palestine Question”

I have a lot more to blog about Hamas. Including this news report that Tom Pickering, a former US Under-Secretary of State and ambassador to the UN, met with Mahmoud Zahhar, foreign minister in the PA government that was elected in 2006, in Switzerland recently.
But I’m finishing my preps for my presentation on regional implications of the US withdrawal from Iraq.
More later.