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I “knew” in some abstract sense that conditions in the
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon have become really terrible since 1982,
and are now easily the worst of those in any Palestinian refugee camps anywhere.
Worse, even, than most of the camps in Gaza, many Palestinian friends
had told me.
But on this visit to Beirut I wanted to see the situation in Shatila camp,
where I worked briefly as a volunteer English-language teacher back in 1974,
for myself.
There was a well-conceived piece by Nick Blanford in yesterday’s Daily Star, looking at the security situation along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel. He was examining in particular the fears some people have that Palestinians in S. Lebanon, upset or enraged or whatever after Arafat’s death, may launch attacks across the border, against Israel.
He noted that,
But things are different with regard to Palestinian militants operating here in Lebanon:
In the summer of 1974, shortly after I arrived in Beirut
to make my way as a journalist, I started volunteering to teach English
in Shatila, one of a number of refugee camps around Beirut that gave shelter to Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war in Israel/Palestine.
Eight years later, the name “Shatila” was to become inscribed on the conscience of the world, after the Israeli-orchestrated massacre there that left hundreds– quite possibly as many as 2,000–of the camp’s civilian population dead.
But those days were still far in the future when I first walked along the broad, but chaotic and filthy thoroughfare that led to the heart of the refugee camp in 1974.
I am really delighted with the news from Gaza (as reported by the BBC) that,
And also, that,
(The Beeb’s Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston did, however, caveat that by noting that Qurei himself was “more vague on the issue”.)
The prospect of Hamas and IJ joining a broad-based leadership would certainly help to stabilize the situation inside Palestine during the present transition, because:
(For more background on this, you might want to read the piece I had in Boston Review on Gaza, a few months ago.)
Beyond the immediate transitional arrangement of some kind of joint PLO/PA/Hamas/IJ ruling council the only plausible way to reconstitute any kind of a more lasting Palestinian leadership that can actually save Israelis and Palestinians from an escalating disaster at this point is to hold nationwide Palestinian elections in which all these different groups participate/compete.
Dr. Mustapha Barghouthi, the head of the Palestinian National Initiative has been at the forefront of the call for Palestinian national elections. He has argued that elections are, “a vital precondition for peace”. He notes too that
I would certainly second Barghouthi’s appeal for elections. But I would go further than he seems to, and argue that the next elections for a Palestinian leadership should be designed to include the Palestinian people of the diaspora, not merely those living in the occupied territories…
I saw this clip on the Beeb last night and have just found the story on their website. It’s the one where a US Marines Colonel called Gareth Brandl says:
That, you might think, is bad enough, as an indicator of how the Marines preparing to assault Fallujah are being motivated by their officers.
What seems to me almost as disturbing is the degree to which BBC reporter Paul Wood, newly embedded with Brandl’s unit, has lost the objectivity and humanitarianism that is essential for good reporting of any difficult conflict. In particular, despite the really unpleasant content of the quote above, Wood describes Brandl glowingly as, “a charismatic young officer.”
Wood also reports that the “deputy commanding general, Denis Hajlik” gave the newly embedded journalists the following very crude description of the startegy the Marines would pursue, going into the city: “We’re gonna whack ’em.”
But then the Beebman immediately gives us his own little commentary, assuring us that, “This is not bloodlust.”
I can’t figure out what is happening here. Is it the psychodynamics of embedment, which are designed by the military to persuade the embedded journos to adopt the hosting forces’ own view of the world? Or is it the BBC, having gotten a bloody nose from Blair over the whole Andrew Gilligan affair, now kowtowing more than ever to provide a view of the war that will back up Blair’s insane posture in support of it?
Maybe a bit of both.
Well, I wonder how, in years to come, Hajlik, Brandl– and Wood– will all look back at the role they played in this bizarre, hate-fueled campaign to “destroy a city in order to ‘save’ it”…
I’m sitting here in Beirut sifting a zillion things in my mind… One is regret that I haven’t mustered the courage to do what I had hoped to do while I’ve been here, which was to go to Iraq… braving a certain degree of risk, it is true… and doing some firsthand reporting from there.
In the end the degree of risk looked just too great. Or, am I getting old and flabby? Did I lose my nerve? Well, I’m sure you don’t want to hear me maundering on about my personal woes.
Anyway, I have good news for you. Dahr Jamail, a good reporter who looks from his pic to be 25 years younger than me, has just taken the plunge and gone back to Iraq. So now, the rest of us can all live out my earlier, fear-quashed hopes vicariously, through Dahr.
Here is an excerpt from the first post he put on his blog after getting back there, Friday:
I was just watching the BBC… they’re awaiting some important news from the French hospital re the Old Man… What I did see, however, was a tiny video clip, unremarked by their correspondent, that showed my old bud David Pearce, once a UPI journo and now the US Consul-General in Jerusalem, leaving the Muqataa in Ramallah.
US officials have been forbidden from meeting the Palestinian leadership for a while now, in line with Sharon’s attempt to boycott Arafat completely.
Seeing David at the Muqataa like that just reminded me of the kinds of much-needed contacts that will become possible after the Old Man’s passing…
Arafat’s physical passing, taken along with Tony Blair’s very well-timed intervention urging Bush to move fast back into Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, means that some interesting things could indeed happen on the peace front in the next few weeks. (See previous post.)
It is quite possible that the main thing David Pearce was talking about at the Muqataa was plans for a (future) funeral. Where will Arafat be buried? Which world leaders will want to attend, and which will be allowed to attend?
How about the Arab leaders, in that regard?
All fascinating questions. Plus, Islamic burial norms mean the burial should occur within 24 hours of the announcement of death. So maybe the “coma” will have to last a little longer while they iron all these details out?
Sorry to be so grisly about all this. Of course, I still wish him and his family all comfort through this passage.
… BBC still not showing anything from Percy Hospital. H’mmm.
Ze’ev Schiff is a crusty old guy, one of Israel’s founding generation, and I admit I’ve grown very fond of him and his wife Sara over the years. We disagree on a number of things, but agree on many others; his heart is in the right place, and he’s often quite ready to think outside the box.
I admit, at earlier points in the present intifada, his writings seemed to get a little hard-line for my taste. On the other hand, he’s always been a real gentleman, and he even tried to help me get into Gaza last February.
Now, he’s back in fine form with a good new column in today’s Ha’Aretz. It’s titled “Time for an Israeli initiative.”
He starts by writing that Israel has had– and missed– four “major opportunities [since 1967] for a significant change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Then, he notes,
So here’s the initiative he proposes. It must, he writes, focus on two principal elements:
What better way to respond to news that George W Bush has been elected President of the USA for the next four years than to go and visit contacts in Hizbullah, and in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, here in Beirut?
Hizbullah… Which has been listed by the US State Department as a “foreign terrorist organization”… Which has also been targeted in a US-inspired Security Council resolution that requires Lebanon to disband all “militias”..
…But which also happens to have been elected to no fewer than 12 seats in Lebanon’s 128-member parliament… and to have won control through popular elections of more than 140 municipalities throughout the country.
Hizbullah is quite a poster-boy for democratic control of local and national institutions! Just the folks to talk to about George W Bush’s extensive plans for democratizing the Middle East, don’t you think?
And then, there’s Shatila camp… Location of one of Ariel Sharon’s more notable earlier attempts to “solve” the Palestinian people through terror and extermination. I’ll write more about that, in a later post.
But meanwhile, back to Hizbullah… Back in the mid-1990s, the Lebanese people were chafing under a corruption-riddled system in which municipal leaderships had not been elected since 1963. Hizbullah was at the forefront of a movement to ensure accountable, democratic control of the municipalities, and managed to win government acquiescence in the idea of popular elections for municipal councils…
That first round of new local-level elections took place in 1998, and Hizbullah did fairly well in them. They did even better in the second round of municipal elections earlier this year, which indicates that their people performed pretty well during their maiden terms on the councils. (The local elections here Lebanon reflect the “popular will” of the electorate much more directly than the national-level elections. These latter consist of numerous small, multi-member contests conducted according to arcane rules specifying the religious affiliation of each of the candidates.)
So, being all in favor of finding out more about Hizbullah’s experiment in popular democracy, I set out this afternoon for their headquarters in the –Hizbullah-controlled– southern flanks of the city…. Also known here, more simply, as the “Dohhiya” (the suburb)…
There have been lots of reports that the “shock and awe” component of the Rumsfeld-Cheney invasion of Iraq last year was directed primarily not at the Iraqi people–who were merely to be pawns in this nasty game–but towards China.
Was it in “Plan of Attack” that I read some evidence of that? Or was it someplace else?
Well, it could make sense as an explanatory theory… Perhaps… Except that if the idea of launching that particular war, in that particular way (using lean, mobile forces… the kind that can be fairly easily deployed over large distances… Ooops! But they ain’t much good at running an occupation!) … If it was indeed Bombs-Away Don’s brilliant idea that doing that would scare the Chinese shitless, then… he scored one heck of a large-scale own goal, didn’t he?
How shocked and awed do YOU think the Chinese are by his little display of power (and its less than glorious outcome)?
In the International Herald Tribune today, Jane Perlez writes:
She then asks, quite sensibly,
She quotes one senior Asian diplomat as saying that since the mid-1990s, China’s diplomacy has been “consistent, subtle and creative.” During the same period, he said, the “U.S. has been out to lunch.”
She adds: