Just World News with Helena Cobban

On March 2, I had the opportunity to conduct a short
interview in Hebron with local parliamentarians Dr. Azzam
Salhab, a professor of religion at Hebron University,
and Nizar Ramadan.

The two were among the nine members of the
Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform list that swept all nine Hebron-area seats
in the PLC elections of January 2006. Their election
was all the more remarkable because for four months
prior to the election they had been held in prison in Israel on vague charges
of “membership in an illegal organization” (as opposed to, for example, charges
connected with the commission of specific acts.) A strange
imprisonment because Israel and its western backers had been very eager to get
pro-Hamas people involved in the electoral process. During the only
previous round of PLC elections, back in 1996, Hamas was still so deeply
opposed to the whole Oslo/PA process that they sat the elections out. Their
decision to take part in the 2006 election was widely hailed by westerners as a
constructive development…

Until Hamas won, that is.

So Salhab and Ramadan and the
handful of other Palestinian parliamentarians who were elected from their jail
cells inside Israel were kept in prison even after the election.  In June 2006 they were joined there by
scores of other elected legislators from the West Bank, who were simply taken
hostage by Israel to be used as “bargaining chips” in the negotiation to win
the release of Israeli POW Gilad Shalit,
who was captured and held by Palestinian groups in Gaza.

This February, amidst a flurry of rumors that the
long-drawn-out prisoner-exchange negotiations were about to be successfully
concluded, Salhab and Ramadan were among the handful
of captive legislators who were freed. Well, “freed” from the small prison they
had been held in inside Israel to one of the larger, open-air prisons into
which the West Bank has now been transformed for its 2.3 million Palestinian residents.

These negotiations have been conducted between Israel and
Hamas in Egypt, with the Egyptian government acting as intermediary. Last week
they hit another roadblock; and in the wee hours of March 19 the Israeli
military burst into Hebron and several of the other supposedly PA-controlled
areas of the West Bank and arrested ten leading Hamas political leaders. Salhab and Ramadan were among the four PLC members taken in
that raid. So I consider myself quite fortunate to have been able to conduct
the interview with them March 2. I only wish I’d been able to stay longer to
talk with them.

The interview took place mainly in Arabic, in the office the
two men maintain on a main road near the center of Hebron. One other local
political figure joined us a few minutes into the interview. Since I never
learned his name I shall call him merely A.B.

I started by asking how Salhab and
Ramadan saw the political situation after the recent Gaza war. “It was not a
war,” Ramadan immediately replied. “It was simply a fierce Israeli attack on
Gaza.”

The two men said they were hopeful about the prospects of
success in the intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks then underway in Cairo.
“It will be good to bring the two wings of occupied Palestine together,”
Ramadan said, spreading his hands some to represent wings and spelling out that
he was speaking about the geographically separated West Bank and Gaza.

I asked what hopes they had from the new US administration.

Ramadan replied,

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 8: Two more Hamas MPs (since arrested)”

When I published my February 22nd interview with Palestinian parliamentarians Ayman Daraghmeh and Mahmoud Musleh here yesterday I failed to note that Daraghmeh was one of the four duly elected Hamas-affiliated legislators who were captured by Israel on March 19. He has since been held in detention someplace, likely in Israel.
Today, one of those legislators, (former) Deputy Prime Minister Nasser Ad-Din Ash-Sha’er was sentenced by a military court in Israel to six months’ “administrative detention”, that is, detention without charge or trial.
Daraghmeh and the other two kidnapped legislators have not yet had any kind of a day in court. There is considerable reason to be worried about what kind of treatment they have been receiving while they have been kept in the post-detention “back hole” of the Israeli prison system.
It is hard to keep track of how many of the Palestinian legislators who were duly elected in the January 2006 election, which was certified by European and US observers as free and fair are currently being held as political prisoners– and also, indeed, as “bargaining chips”– by the Israelis. When I interviewed Daraghmeh and Musleh last month they told me that 41 of the 52 Hamas-affiliated legislators in the west Bank were then in Israeli prisoners. (Musleh had only recently been released from an Israeli prison.)
So I guess now that is 45 Hamas-affiliated legislators being held captive by Israel. That is in addition to a much smaller number of MPs affiliated with Fateh or the PFLP. The PLC has a total of 132 seats.
All democratic forces in the world should strongly protest these detentions.
In a small number of these cases– including those of Fateh’s Marwan Barghouthi and PFLP leader Ahmad Sa’adat– the detainees have been given a formal “trial” in Israel, and received lengthy prison sentences on being found “guilty.” In those two trials, the charges were overtly political, rather than being related to the two men’s actual commission of any violent crime, and both men robustly challenged the right of an Israeli court to have any jurisdiction over them. Hence they mounted no defense; so the state’s “evidence” against them was never tested in any way.
In the case of most of these detentions of duly elected legislators, however, either the men have never had a trial, but simply been consigned to Israel’s draconian system of ever-renewable periods of six months of “administrative” detention, or, when given “trials”, these have been completely political.
For example, MPs Azzam Salhab and Nizar Ramadan from Hebron were both arrested together in late 2005 after they had announced their intention to run for the election on the Hamas-affiliated Change & Reform list. They were “charged” in an Israeli court with membership in a “terrorist” organization– Hamas– but never charged with any specified act of wrongdoing or violence.
(Salhab and Ramadan continued their election campaign from within prison, and won. Sometime this past February, I believe, they were released. But they were picked up again on March 19 and returned to their prison cells in Israel.)
This is all outrageous. The US government and all western governments all strongly supported– indeed pushed for– the holding of the PLC election in January 2006. The election was intended to revive the internal political life of the PA, and it could well have had that effect if the results had been respected by Israel and its western backers.
If there were reasonable grounds to accuse men like Daraghmeh, Salhab, Ramadan, and Ash-Sha’er of actual criminal wrongdoing, that evidence would surely have been produced at that time. It was not– most likely because there was none.
Instead, Israel was simply allowed to “use” the 2006 elections to identify, “flush out”, and detain Hamas’s leading political supporters throughout the West Bank: a perversion of democracy that all true democrats around the world should strongly oppose.
… Ehud Olmert’s last-legs government in Israel apparently decided on last week’s new round-up of Hamas supporters in the West Bank as a way to put added pressure on the Hamas leadership to make further concessions in the negotiation over Israeli POW Gilad Shalit, now held under Hamas’s control somewhere in Gaza. I note that there is a big disparity between the case of Shalit, a young man who was actively engaged in the military when he was captured as a POW, and that of the captured legislators and the many thousands of other Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel.
When Shalit entered the military, whether he did so as a conscript or a volunteer, he knowingly entered the realm of military law, a realm whose participants have the “right” to kill duly identified military targets but who also knowingly undertake the risk that in the course of their duty they might be killed, wounded, or captured. The same is, essentially, true for any Palestinian nationalist who knowingly takes up arms against Israeli targets. But most of the Palestinian prisoners held by Israel– including, I believe, just about all of the imprisoned Hamas legislators– are not “military people” in this sense, at all.
In the case of the legislators, they volunteered to participate peaceably in parliamentary elections, the conduct of which was completely (or almost completely) peaceful. If the west allows Israel to continue claiming that such participation is a “crime”, then the west is in deeper trouble around the world than most westerners realize.

Just a propos of the Jerusalem question and its rising importance, I remembered something Yossi Alpher said when I had lunch with him in Ramot Hasharon three weeks ago…
It was really a crystallization or aide-memoire of something I’d figured out long time ago. Namely that the essential political tradeoff at the heart of the Clinton Parameters, Taba, the Geneva Inititiative etc was always that the Palestinian side would be expected to “give up” just about all its demands on the actual return of 1948 Palestinian refugees to their original homes (though they would get some substantial compensation), and in return Israel would have to “give up” something in terms of its claims to sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem for all time.
Now, I recognize that’s a very Israelo-centric way of looking at things. Most Palestinians would say that with the 1988 Declaration of Independence the PLO already “gave up” its claim to 78% of Mandate Palestine and could not be expected to give up up anything more. However, it remains true that Arafat’s negotiators at Taba, and Yasser Abed Rabboo and Co (with Arafat’s backing) at Geneva, showed themselves very ready indeed to consider the kind of deal that Alpher was talking about.
But if Jerusalem’s new mayor Nir Barkat is– with the expected strong backing of the incoming Netanyahu government– essentially “going for broke” in Jerusalem by trying to break up its remaining centers of Palestinian population once and for all, then what does that do to the “Clinton/Geneva Grand Bargain”?
And that’s just at the political level. If the Netanyahu government goes ahead with backing Barkat in Jerusalem and pushes ahead with the E-1 development that links Jerusalem even more effectively to Maale Adumim, what happens to the territorial basis of a two-state solution, anyway?
Just asking.
(I hope someone in Sen. Mitchell’s office is looking very closely indeed at all these questions.)

On February 22, I conducted an interview with two parliamentarians from the Hamas-affiliated ‘Change and Reform’ bloc. They were Mahmoud Musleh, elected to one of the five constituency-based seats elected from Ramallah/al-Bireh (where Hamas won four of the five seats), and Dr. Ayman Daraghmeh, who was #20 of the 29 people elected from Change and Reform’s nationwide list.
They told me that of the 52 Hamas parliamentarians based in the West Bank, 41 were in prison in Israel. Indeed, Musleh had only recently been released.
I met them in Daraghmeh’s office in Ramallah. Daraghmeh seems to be in his forties and is, I believe, a medical doctor. Musleh is in his late sixties. It was a cold day, and Musleh was wearing a good warm woolen abaya over his pants-and-jacket outfit, and a traditional-style keffiyeh headscarf. Daraghmeh was in a western-style suit. (Fwiw, I might add that both men reached out their hands to shake mine. When I interviewed two male Hamas MPs in Hebron a few days later, they notably chose not to.)
I started out by asking Musleh quite a lot of questions about the treatment he and the other Palestinian political prisoners had received in prison. He told me first how hard it is whenever the detainees have court hearings: they’re wakened very early, taken in a van with nothing to hang onto– and them with handcuffs and leg-shackles, being thrown around in the back of the van– to a holding center near Ramleh; held there overnight and then taken from there to the courtroom. He said there is a lot of aimless waiting around. After the hearing they are taken back to Ramleh for another night, then back to the prison-camp, and with all the transfers made in the same very uncomfortable and often painful way in the vans.
The prison-camp he was held in was near B’ir Saba. He also talked a bit about the lousy medical treatment the prisoners receive. The ICRC visits the prisoners, he said, “every few months.”
He explained that generally, the political prisoners from all the different Palestinian factions were held together. Their morale was good, he said, and they got along very well together. However, when the Gaza war started, the prison authorities started to separate them according to their affiliation.
I then asked them was about their expectations from the intra-Palestinian dialogue, which was scheduled to start in Cairo three days later. Daraghmeh said that the most important reconciliation to be effected was that between Hamas and Fateh,

and the main two issues we need to agree on are reform of the PLO and reform of the security forces. Forming the new government will not be so hard, compared with those.

He said that reforming the PLO, which is the parent body of the Palestinian Authority and represents all the Palestinians, both inside and outside the occupied territories, would require “a new kind of PNC—one that represents all Palestinians.” The PNC– Palestinian National Council– is the broad, allegedly representative body that makes policy for the PLO’s 18-person Executive Committee.
Daraghmeh spelled out that,

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 7: Two Hamas parliamentarians”

Mustafa Barghouthi was born in Jerusalem in 1954. He followed his, at the time, better-known cousin Bashir Barghouthi, into the Palestinian Communist Party (which Bashir B. was for a long time the head of), and studied medicine in the USSR. On returning to Palestine he established and for many years ran the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, a non-governmental network that– like the parallel network of Agricultural Relief Committees– provided vital support for the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians during the First Intifada, 1987-93.
In 1991 he was a delegate to the Madrid Peace Conference. In 1996 he ran unsuccessfully in the first elections held for the PA’s legislature. Over the years he became a strong critic of the large amount of corruption within the PLO. In 2002, he left the Communist Party, which remained affiliated with the PLO. (By then, it had been renamed the People’s Party.) Along with Gaza’s much-loved leftist leader Dr Haidar Abdel-Shafei, Edward Said, and Ibrahim Dakkak, Barghouthi founded a completely new nationalist movement called the Al-Mubadara al-Wataniya al-Filastiniya, the Palestinian National Initiative. Abdel-Shafei and Said have since then passed away.
In 2005, Barghouthi ran in the PA’s presidential election, coming in second only to Mahmoud Abbas with 19% of the vote. That was the PNI’s finest moment to date. The following year Barghouthi topped the PNI’s list in the PLC elections. He and Rawia al-Shawwa were both elected from the list. In 2003 and once again during the campaign for the 2006 election Barghoughi made a point of trying to conduct political activities openly in the city of his birth, (East) Jerusalem. But since the Israelis had long since revoked the special “permit” that all Palestinians require if they want to carry on living in– or even just to visit– Jerusalem, on both those occasions he was arrested. During the detention he suffered in 2003, which lasted some days, he was interrogated and beaten with a rifle butt, which left him with a broken knee.
… By a happy chance I met Barghouthi when I went to the fourth-anniversary anti-Wall march in Bil’in, on February 20. He was accompanied there by a spirited group of around 20 PNI activists waving the movement’s large orange flags.
Three days later I went to do a formal interview with him in the new headquarters of the Union of Medical Relief Committees, which were surprisingly opulent-looking.
“I’m very worried because our internal rifts are growing,” he started out saying–

This is due to a number of factors, of which the first is the transformation the PA underwent during the recent conflict[in Gaza]. It came under even more pressure from Israel to become a security sub-agent for Israel here. Why, yesterday the PA’s Interior Ministry even prevented the holding of a civil-society meeting scheduled for Nablus, that had been convened to discuss the role of the PLO. They tried to force the people organizing it to apply for permits to hold this meeting. This is completely new!

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 6: Mustafa Barghouthi”

Khalida Jarrar is a senior activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the longtime Palestinian wing of the Arab Nationalist Movement that was founded by the late Dr. George Habash. She was Number Three on the PFLP’s list in the 2006 parliamentary elections and therefore just squeaked into the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). (Jarrar is also married to someone who’s a cousin of AFSC’s Raed Jarrar, hence the shared family name. Actually, one of the things she achieved during the short time the PLC was still a bit functional was to get legislation enacted that would allow Palestinian women to keep their birth names rather than having to take their husband’s, which is what she still uses.)
On February 21 I found Jarrar in the office she maintains not far from the PLC’s Ramallah building. Her office is on an upper floor of one of those many incongruous large buildings that cluster onto the streets around Manara Square and that, once you go into them, reveal themselves to be large, and really rather unkempt and ugly, indoor shopping malls. The rooms on the upper floors tend to be used by professionals– or unused. From her office there was a fine view out over the hills around but the weather was extremely ugly that day: thunder, lighning, and a massive hailstorm that left marble-sized hailstones in drifts on the streets below.
She started out by defining the five key principles that, she said, informed the work of the PFLP and the other leftist parties inside the PLO/PA:

First, we strongly believe in the need to have dialogue between all the different parties and civil society. We need to develop an effective ‘national front’ in order to meet the challenges that our people faces by being under occupation, rather than using violence amongst palestinians.

Second, we believe strongly in the need for regular elections.

Third, we think the election law should be changed to make it 100% constituency-based, rather than being the mixture of constituency-based seats and national list seats that we currently have. We think that would make the parliamentarians more responsive to their constituencies.

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 5: A PFLP parliamentarian”

To understand some of the internal problems inside Fateh, I found it really helpful to go along and talk to Qaddura Fares, a veteran Fateh activist in his mid-forties who was one of the stalwarts of the First Intifada (1987-93.) Fares grew up in Silwad, the same village in the West Bank north of Ramallah where Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal also grew up– though Fares said that Meshaal was six years older than him and they never met in their youth.
When I interviewed Fares on February 19 I had to go to the headquarters in Ramallah/El-Bireh of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, of which he has been Chairman since– and maybe also before?– he lost his parliamentary seat in the elections of 2006. The clubs ground-floor offices are dominated by larger-than-life photos of the “dean” of the many Fateh prisoners still held in Israeli prisons, Marwan Barghouthi. In one of these photos, Barghouthi has been photoshopped into a stance alongside a veteran PFLP prisoner.
It’s a salient political fact that the 11,000 or more Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel have a much more vivid understanding of the need for national unity than many of the political figures living outside those jails. Fares seems closely connected to the prisoners’ zeitgeist.
“Fateh is in a big crisis!” This was one of the first things Fares said to me about the veteran Palestinan movement that has dominated the PLO for 40 years now (and has dominated the PA since its inception at Oslo.)
“Fateh has to hold its general conference!” Fares urged. And indeed, under the bylaws of the 50-year-old organization it is supposed to hold this policy-making gathering every five years. The last one was held in 1989 and, um, quite a few things have happened in Palestinian politics– and on the ground in Palestine– since then.
Later, I asked, somewhat gingerly if he could speak about the “problem” inside Fateh. “No, it’s not a problem, it’s a crisis,” he insisted.
He continued:

Continue reading “Bantustan Days, Part 4: The in-Fateh opposition”