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There is an informative interview on Al-Jazeera’s website with Muhammad Samhouri, the general coordinator of the PA’s “Technical Committee For Following Disengagement”. Samhouri, who’s a US-trained economist, supervises a team of 40 experts who are handling the technical details of the Gaza disengagement from the Palestinian side.
The interviewer is Leila Haddad.
Some excerpts:
Now that thankfully most of the “drama” of Israel’s evacuation from Gaza of settlers (and of hundreds of extremist outside agitators) is winding down, it’s time to pay some serious attention to Palestinian politics. In particular, what are the hopes for finding a workable form of national unity inside Gaza once the IDF/IOF troops have finally left?
To a large degree, the answer for that lies with the Sharon government. Will it actually allow a robust Palestinian national administration to establish and exercise authority in the Strip after the disengagement? (See my last week’s column in the CSM for some thoughts on that.)
In addition to whatever longterm restrictions the Israelis may seek to retain on the Gazans’ ability to interact freely with the global economy, and to control their own borders and residency rights, in the short term there is also a real possibility that some in the Israeli security establishment may seek to puncture any Palestinian elation over the IDF/IOF withdrawal by launching one last massive, “didactic” strike against Gaza as they leave…
Let’s hope not.
(We can also expect that any such strike would only further consolidate Palestinian and Arab feeling around Hamas, which has always been far more doubting of the Sharon government’s bona fides than has Abu Mazen.)
But assuming the “best” re a relatively violence-free IDF/IOF withdrawal from here on, what can we expect regarding Palestinian politics?
Abu Mazen, as we know, has announced that the delayed elections to the Palestinian legislature will be held next January 21. Hamas has already said it will run in them. Abu Mazen– as I’ve written about on JWN a number of times in the past, and also here in Boston Review— has been much more realistic than Yasser Arafat ever was about the need to find a politically inclusive modus vivendi with Hamas, if the Palestinians are ever to have coherent national-level decisionmaking.
Also, as I noted in that BosRev piece, and in subsequent posts on JWN, inside Gaza, Hamas is certainly far better organized and more disciplined than the Palestinian secular nationalists. Many of the secular nationalists are known more these days for their profligacy, corruption, and intense internal jealousies than for any concrete service to their people.
(Abu Mazen is by and large– though perhaps not wholly– exempted from those kinds of criticisms.)
Hamas politburo president Khaled Mishal gave an important press conference in Beirut on Wednesday. It received sadly little attention in a US MSM that was absolutely drenched in the hyped-up “angst” of the settler-evacuations at the time. Luckily Israel’s HaAretz carried a fairly decent AP report of it:
The piece also noted that, “Meshal urged Arab countries not to hasten to normalize relations with Israel because of the withdrawal.”
Mishal has the distinction of having survived a very nasty and very personalized chemical-weapon attack that the Mossad launched against him in Amman, Jordan, in 1998.
Also quoted in that AP piece was Hamas’s spokesman in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar. The piece noted that Zahar had told the London-based Saudi daily Al-sharq Al-Awsat that, “Hamas planned to move its fight to the West Bank after Israel completed its pullout from Gaza.”
Meanwhile, I have found this interesting interview that Mishal gave (by phone) to al-Hayat’s talented bureau chief in Damascus, Ibrahim Homeidi, on Tuesday. In addition to reporting many of the comments cited above, Homeidi also reported the following (quick translation by HC here):
To me, the most interesting thing there is Mishal’s announcement that Hamas will shortly be entering the PNA’s executive body. Recall that back in 1993-94, at the time when the Oslo Accords created this body called the “PA”, which would have some functions both to administer the areas of the WB&G from which Israel withdrew and would also be the body that negotiated the Palestinians’ broader, “final-status” claims against the Israelis, Hamas still adamantly opposed the whole process.
That was why, during the territories-wide elections of 1996 that voted Arafat in as PA “president” and also voted for a Palestinian Legislative Council, Hamas as an organbization completely abstained from participation because of the depth of its opposition to the Oslo process.
Here we are, nine years down the line, and Hamas is not only, as we know, planning to compete vigorously in the scheduled PLC elections– but now, Mishal is signaling its readiness to enter–though notably not to take over– the P(N)A’s government.
I think Hamas’s inclusion in the Palestinian political system is a very, very constructive step. As is its participation in the ceasefire so far. Of course, for Hamas– as for the Palestinian secular nationists– there are many tough issues remaining regarding whether and how to seek to retain some form of “armed struggle” option at a time when the struggle for an independent national state is still extremely far from being over. (My own strong view, for what it is worth, is– with respect to the Palestinians as well as to the south Lebanese– that strong, community-wide grassroots organization, strong internal discipline, and very smart leadership can, in today’s world, be more reliably expected than any attempts at “armed struggle” to win the Arab peoples struggling against Israeli occupation a sustainable and independent national future.)
But anyway, this is clearly a political story whose unfolding over the months and years ahead promises to be really interesting. Maybe I should start planning my next trip to Gaza?
A great piece on Counterpunch yesterday by Jennifer Loewenstein, about the Gaza evacuation “drama”. She writes:
A short but very moving photo essay on the BBC website about a victim of post-war trauma and his family.
I am absolutely disgusted by the lead on this new AP story:
I understand that everyone’s emotions are running high. But why should the fact of “sobbing Jewish settlers” being evacuated from places where their presence is now illegal under both international and Israeli law be considered to take precedence over the violent ending of the lives of three Palestinians?
I am glad that Sharon quickly and quite rightly denounced the killings as “Jewish terror”. But still, doesn’t the violent ending of these theree people’s lives merit greater media attention than the drama-queen tactics of the long-pandered-to settlers?
It seems evident that some extreme militants in the settler movement are determined to try to provoke a Palestinian reaction and thus spark a very nasty inter-communal, Jewish-Arab conflict in different places. This, from the same story:
Let us hope that as many Israelis as possible are sensible enough to turn against these apostles of hate. Also, that as many Palestinians as possible understand that for them, too, staying calm and refusing to get provoked into counter-violence of any kind is also very, very important.
The great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has argued that sometimes, just staying calm can save lives. I think that now, throughout the whole of Israel/Palestine, is such a time.
As for Amy Teibel of AP, who wrote that piece, and her editors, perhaps they can reflect a little on whether they actually think that the fates of all human beings are equally deserving of our attention and their coverage…. A bunch of sobbing settler women “trumps” the killing of three Palestinians (and the wounding of two others)?
I don’t think so.
James Rupert, the Islamabad correspondent of New York Newsday, has recently been making the interesting argument that westerners who want to see the spread of democracy in the Muslim-peopled parts of the world should entertain the idea that, as he puts it, “in some cases only ‘Islamic government’ can be the solution.”
I am therefore pleased to publish here, as an exclusive publication of ‘Just World News’*, a short text in which he makes this case…. (drum-roll)
As Muslim peoples debate secular and “Islamic” forms of government, we in the West are given to shuddering at the idea of “Islamic republics” or a role in government for sharia law. And of course, there are plenty of human rights abuses under “Islamic” systems to make us shudder! But I think Westerners who yearn to see real democracy in the Muslim world must hear the idea (promoted recently by Brown University Prof. William Beeman and others) that Islamic government can be part of the solution instead of being seen as the problem.
Indeed, I’d suggest that in some cases only “Islamic government” can be the solution. I was reminded of the argument for this last week in the Dir Valley of Pakistan’s Pashtun belt, near the Afghan border. In Dir, Shad Begum, an energetic social worker in her 20s, is pushing the kind of revolution that I think most of us would want to see: education and basic health services for girls and women, and a voice in government for the female half of society.
Shad faces the Pashtuns’ iron culture of absolute male power and frequent enslavement of women (a repression dressed and legitimized to a largely illiterate population as “Islam”). In her insular, tradition-bound society, she has no conceivable tool but Islam with which to challenge this misrule. In her case, of course, it’s an Islam grounded in a much broader reading of the literature of her faith than that of those in power.
For those of us who are Western outsiders amid this battle of Islams, I think it’s very hard to understand how deeply any contribution we might want to make has been tainted by the baggage of still-not-so-long-ago Western colonization, Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc. In Dir, the most dangerous thing our friend Shad does is to quietly take grants from Western relief and development agencies.
In Friday sermons, Dir’s mullahs condemn the “obscenity and vulgarity” threatened by outsiders bent on change. And the men listen. Up the valley last month, a male relative shot social worker Zubaida Begum and her daughter to death after another worshipper taunted him (police reported) about failing to control her “un-Islamic” activities.
There’s a reason that the tribal khans and landlords of Dir dress their repression as religion, and it’s the reason that any reform must be dressed the same way. Put a little crudely, it’s the only thing that sells. Westerners might fondly yearn for Shad to campaign for a more comfortably familiar, secular order in this corner of the Muslim world. But in Dir, it’s hard to imagine her making any progress (or indeed surviving) by standing on a soapbox to recite Tom Paine.
Obviously, not all of the Islamic world is the Pashtun extreme, and the depth and details of the Islamic dress in which governments must come will vary. And just as obviously, we need to pay urgent attention when the “Islamic” features of Muslim-world governments are cover for repression. It’s something that Iraqis fear as they draft their constitution these days, and God knows it’s an issue here in Pakistan, too.
But Western people and polities that shudder at the phrase “Islamic government” must learn to lose that reflex. Most of us in the West surely wish to help Muslim liberals and democrats, whether Iran’s celebrated Nobel laureate, Shirin Ebadi, or the unknown Shad Begum of Dir. But we must understand that Islamic forms of democracy are the only kind these liberals can build. If we can’t swallow that, the best thing we can do for Ebadi or Shad is to shut up and go home.
* Rupert had articulated much of this same argument in a private communication earlier. But he and I lightly edited that text to arrive at the present one, and he happily gave permission for publishing it on JWN.
Ze’ev Schiff writes this in HaAretz today about expectations in the Israeli security forces:
Interesting. However, I’m not sure I agree with the assessment that once the settlers are gone Hamas will start firing against the remaining IDF troops. Firstly, the Israeli security forces have very often misread Hamas in the past, so let’s not take their word as Torah this time round?
Secondly, Hamas seems to be positioning itself for broad political influence in Gaza after the IDF withdrawal… getting into a firefight with the IDF could well be judged as likely to undermine that goal.
(But I still do worry that– once the settlers are all gone– the IDF might be tempted to launch its own round of punitive actions inside Gaza, anyway? Remember: there is no third-party monitoring force present in Gaza that could necessarily record which side started or escalated any incident.)
Thirdly, regarding Israelis present inside occupied Palestine, I’m not sure that Hamas makes much of an operational distinction between civilians (i.e. settlers) and security-force personnel: for them, it’s not that military operations against one of those groups is more or less legitimate than against another.
But anyway, Schiff’s piece is interesting because he is, as always, a savvy and very well-informed observer of the thinking of the Israeli security chiefs.
For a savvy and very well-informed Israeli view of Palestinian thinking, it’s always worth reading HaAretz’s Danny Rubinstein. He writes today:
Nicely put, Danny. Thanks for holding up a lamp of humanity to the world.
In the Gaza Strip portion of occupied Palestine, today is the announced deadline for the evacuation of all the Israeli settlers who have enjoyed decades of extremely pampered (and quite illegal) residence there until now.
Lest we forget, these settlers are far from the first in modern times to be evicted from from a heavily government-subsidized existence when the government of the metropole decided that maintaining their colonial venture in a foreign land was no longer a good thing to do.
In 1962, a million French citizens who, as colons rooted in Algeria for many generations had considered that territory was just one other departement of Mother France, realized that Paris had changed its mind: Algeria was being summarily over to the FLN.
How much slaveringly attentive media coverage did the pieds noirs get from the rest of the world as they rushed back to France with often only the clothes on their backs?
In 1975, hundreds of thousands of Portuguese colonists in Angola and Mozambique learned in turn that Lisbon had changed its mind and would no longer subsidize and protect their colonies. Many fled to South Africa; others slunk back to Portugal, dazed and confused.
In those earlier cases– and scores of others around the world– the deeply racial order of things that had previously supported their exploitative colonial-settler lifestyle was brought to an end. Millions of (mainly European-origined) colonists from around the world found their previous dreams and expectations rudely cancelled or curtailed. That can be a difficult thing for anyone to come to terms with…
On the other hand, if the earlier dreams and expectations were based on the continuation of a deeply inegalitarian system and the actual maintenance of highly abusive military rule of “the Other”, then evidently they needed to be curtailed or cancelled… And the indigenous “Other” certainly needed to be given a chance to pursue her dreams on a quite egalitarian basis. That is, including the provision of a fair degree of reparations for the extensive damages of the past.
No discussion yet of such reparations in the case of Gaza’s Palestinians.
Lest we forget, meanwhile, the Israeli settlers departing Gaza are being given very generous compensation packages for giving up the subsidized lifestyle they have enjoyed for much of the past 38 years. (Paid for through the generosity with which the US Congress hands out my tax dollars to the Israelis, time after time after time.)
But despite all the evident inequities that continue between pampered Israel and the Palestinians… despite all that… at least Ariel Sharon and a huge chunk of the Israel center seem finally to have understood that a contraction of Israel’s former colonial order is a wise thing to do. But in the US meanwhile, there is still sadly little public recognition yet from the Bush administration or the mainstream of the US political elite that exactly the same is true regarding their former dreams of neocolonial domination in Iraq.
Grassroots sentiment inside the US body politic now does, thankfully, seem to be pushing increasingly harder for a speedy pullback from Iraq. But President Bush is still– publicly, at least– “standing tall”. He is “resolute”. He is “staying the course.” And so on.
That’s in public. In private, though, there are increasing signs that his administration is preparing to undertake a maneuver that none of us should be so insensitive as to call “cutting and running”…. Um, “reordering and rationalizing the US presence in Iraq” might be, perhaps, what we could call it.
In this important piece in yesterday’s WaPo, Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer– reporting from Washington and Baghdad, respectively– wrote:
Immediately, one tries to judge how high-up and therefore how well-informed about current cabinet-level thinking this anonymous “senior official” is. One first point: No-one that I can think who truly fits the description “senior official”– and who’s a civilian– only started his/her involvement in policy in 2003. There were no major turnovers of civilian policymakers at a high level that year, that I can remember. Therefore, we are most likely talking about one of the generals.
Interesting.
Later in the piece, Wright and Knickmeyer write:
And later still, this:
Not clear if this is the same official as the first one quoted. Or maybe it’s the second one. But anyway, the picture that emerges is that rather quietly, behind the scenes, people actually involved in implementing the policy are starting to implement one involving considerable retrenchment and downsizing of goals… And– speaking always “off the record”– they are now starting to be ready to admit to this.
But how about the president, with his puffed-up little chest down there in Crawford, Texas? When will he be able to start leveling with the US citizenry, and to tell the worried parents of the US fighters in Iraq that the lives of their loved ones are now being put on the line there for a venture that, as is increasingly evident, has failed?
By the way, George Bush, if you want someone to help you write the speech in which you do this, in stirring rhetoric that reaches to the heart of our national principles, just give me a call…
Note, George, how this refers to all men [and women.] Not just to “US citizens” or any other subset of world humanity.
So yes! Now surely is the time to pull speedily out of Iraq– just as Israel is pulling out of Gaza– and to allow the Iraqis to exercize their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
(As for the Iraqi “Constitution”– deadline being today– you’ll note that I’m still steadfastly not writing about it. What a sad, sad, farce.)
Imshin, the author of the “Not a fish” blog from Israel, has been posting some interesting reflections on the Israeli disengagement from Gaza.
In this Aug 12 post she expresses her support for the rule of law in Israel:
Today I was cruising the always informative portion of the American Civil Liberty Union’s website where the ACLU has been posting the documents re US torture that it has painstakingly been able to get released by the Dept. of Defense.
One of the documents they have there (see below) gives a graphic description– by a civilian contractor employee working in a “monitoring room” overlooking an interrogation room in Gitmo in April 2003– of extremely humiliating sexual abuse of a detainee being performed by a female military interrogator.
(The DOD is currently trying to say it can argue in secret as to why it need not comply with court orders to release further photos, videos, and other documents providing evidence of abuse of detainees in various US-run detention centers.)
Anyway, I was looking through this collection of government docs that was released– in heavily “redacted” form– by the government on July 26. ( A short guide to what’s in that large, lengthy PDF document can be found here.)
What interested me in the 139-page-long PDF collection was the “story” that gradually emerged there in which a contractor for a company called ACS Defense working alongside uniformed military personnel in Gitmo in April 2003, reported on some bad abuse he’d seen being used inside an interrogation room there… But what this guy did was he rported it to his own supervisors in the contractor company, rather than keeping his testimony within the military chain of command.
It’s kind of hard to read the story clearly… Primarily because of the huge swathes of black-out redactions, but also because the DOD unhelpfully released the docs in reverse order… The general effect is of reading a mystery novel in which only a small proportion of the “clues”, and of the final resolution of the story, are ever provided– plus, you have to read it backwards. Also, given that nmost of the names are redacted, the dramatis personae is very thin and hard to follow.
So anyway, if you go down to p.87 in the PDF file, you find the contractor’s original description of what he saw as he stood with others in a “Monitoring room” overlooking two interrogation rooms in Camp Delta, Gitmo, on April 22, 2003.
The author of this memo, which was dated April 26, 2003, describes himself as having previously been trained in, and used, interrogation techniques in the US army. He says, ” I had never seen in FM [Field Manual] 34-52 any section describing or prescribing what [the interrogator] had done to the detainee.”
So you’ll have to go to the doc to read what that contract employee saw… Basically, it was this: