Just World News with Helena Cobban – Page 85 – Info, analysis, discussion

The Year of the Ox

The Chinese new year of the Ox began on January 26th, and it portends to be a year of change for China-Taiwan relations.

China’s premier and Taiwan’s president seem ready to make substantial changes in their longstnding bellicose relationship.

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Check out the great short movie made by ‘Waltz with Bashir’ animator Yoni Goodman about the situation of civilians in Gaza during the recent war. One thing that people working with the many international relief organizations here in Israel/Palestine note is that it is almost unprecedented for the civilian population of a war zone to be prevented from leaving it, as just about all of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians were during the recent war.
AP’s been doing some good coverage from Palestine this week. This story has a bit of background about the movie.
At a broader level, I’ve been reading Jonathan Cook’s remarkable latest book Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair which pulls together the whole history of the Zionist movement in Palestine, showing the continuity of the Zionists’ efforts– right until the present day– to try to empty Palestine of its indigenous residents. One important point he makes is that the deliberate inculcation of despair amongst Palestinians is a big part of this plan, with the goal being that the despairing Palestinians will eventually abandon their long commitment to their native land and just up and leave it.
The short text on the book’s back cover that summarizes the book’s argument includes this:

[Israel] has industrialized Palestinian despair through the ever more sophisticated systems of checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative ‘defence’ industry by pioneering the technologies needed for crowd control, surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare.

I don’t know if Jonathan wrote that text himself. I suspect he did. But I find it an extremely astute description of the situation.
I’m about three chapters into the book, which seems really well done. Jonathan is a pioneering and steadfast British writer who’s lived in and reported from Nazareth in northern Israel for several years now. On his website he writes,

Update 3:10 a.m. EST Christiane also recommends this excellent French-language graphic-art report on Gaza. (I think one of the Swiss socialist MPs mentioned there is the son of Cornelio Sommaruga, former head of the ICRC… Anyway, many Swiss people understand a lot about international humanitarian law.)

Divide and Conquer

Success in foreign affairs, where domination is the goal, is often accomplished withn a divide-and-conquer strategy.
Conn Hallinan, 2004:

And in Iraq, there was the Samarra mosque bombing in 2006.

The world-famed Golden Mosque, a Shiite religious shrine located in Samarra, Iraq, was bombed Feb. 22. The mosque’s golden dome was blown off in the explosion, which touched off a round of Sunni-Shiite discord across the country.

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Bantustan Days, Part 2

Saturday morning I went to Bethlehem. Took the mini-bus from just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. It trundles you south along a route which slowly gives you broad vistas of hilltop after hilltop covered with some of the newer Israeli settlements like Gilo, which is vast, and Har Homa. Then the bus deposits you unceremoniously outside a very forbidding section of the Wall, which really is 30 feet tall, forbidding, and brutal. brutal, even if the Israelis, in an excess of irony, have decided to paint a vast feel-good mural on the Wall right there near the entrance to Bethlehem emblazoned with the words “Peace and Love.”
No kidding.
I think I’ll have to write a special essay sometime about the sick esthetics of the entire people-control system the Israelis run in the OPTs.
So the bus drops you, and you have to wind your way through the cattle-shed “terminus” they have here for foot traffic. No vehicles are allowed through anywhere near here, I think. The three Palestinian guys in front of me, who had the special “magnetic cards” that graciously allow them to visit Jerusalem from Bethlehem, all took quite some time to go through as they had to fit their whole hands into a new– to me– kind of scanner machine, which didn’t seem to work very well. The bored-looking Israeli teenage border-guard girls gave peremptory instructions to the men from inside their booth. Me, with my US passport, they waved right through. (Remember that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of this country. I am a visitor; and the Israeli girls may well be recent immigrants.)
Once on the other side I called my friend Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran nonviolence activist, son of Bethlehem, and current member of the elected city council, and then started walking along to where he said he’d pick me up. The wall loops in and out in a complicated way here, as everywhere. It comes very close to many houses, and in one portion it goes right down the middle of a street. It is always 30 feet high; dark grey in color; and punctuated very frequently by looming, cylindrical watch-towers.
Hullo? Israelis? Do these towers not remind you of something in the Jewish people’s recent past??
Zoughbi drove me up to Manger Square and we then spent a fascinating 90 minutes or so sitting in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Three or four other city council members came by and participated for longer or shorter periods of time in the general political discussion. Two were from Hamas. There was a lot of good-natured political discussion and joshing amongst all those present. Neither Zoghbi nor Victor are members of Hamas. But least among these city council members, everyone seemed to get along fine. They also expressed the deep wish that the ongoing national reconciliation effort in Cairo should succeed as fast and durably as possible.
Zoughbi then took me to the neighboring town of Beit Jala. That’s the one that’s lost most of its arable and grazing lands to Gilo. Up on a hilltop near there there’s a small settlement called Har Gilo, and just beneath it is a resort-style hotel called the Everest Hotel, where by chance we found another fascinating set of people meeting. Probably shouldn’t tell you more about it without getting permission. Anyway, Zoughbi knows about half the population of the West Bank, it seems, so the organizers of this peace-oriented gathering invited us to join them for lunch. The lunch was good and warm, and the discussion very interesting. However, with bitter winds whipping around outside the hotel was, um, certainly living up to its name.
After that, Zoughbi dropped me back at the center of Beit Jala, where there’s a mini-bus service that takes you directly from there back to downtown Jerusalem. But the catch is the bus has to pass through a big vehicle terminus somewhere south of town that controls access to the “settler road” that snakes almost directly to Jerusalem from the Hebron/Kiryat Arba area in the south of the West Bank.
So going through this terminus, all the passengers have to disbark and wait until the border guards have given the vehicle and all the bags in it a very thorough check. It was now colder than ever, with a horrendous, biting wind. Old people, kids, and everyone were left to stand at the side of the road for a good 15 minutes while the border guards took their time getting around to doing what turned out to be about three minutes’ worth of checking on the bus. Then they checked all our IDs and our hand baggage as we got back on the bus. Most of my fellow-passengers seemed to be East Jerusalem residents– that is, they carried the little blue-jacketed ID cards given only to EJ people, as opposed to the “magnetic cards” that are given to a very small proportion of West Bank residents, that allow them to enter East Jerusalem.
(Yesterday I spent the day in Hebron, the nearby village of Doura, and the Israeli town of Sderot… Last Friday I had an intriguing visit to a portion of northern Jerusalem called Dahiyet al-Barid. Today I did an interview with Um Kamel, my neighbor here in Sheikh Jarrah who’s been living in a tent all winter after the Israeli police threw her and her husband out of her house last November, so a group of settlers could take it over… Her husband died of heart failure soon after. Um Kamel is not, it turns out, from the same family I briefly visited when I was here in 2002. But the problem of settler and takeovers, the demolition of Palestinian houses, and the eviction of Palestinians from their homes is one that is certainly gathering some speed right here in East Jerusalem these days, and needs to be written about a lot more…. Anyway, more of my travelogue accounts will come when I have time… tomorrow, I leave Jerusalem and continue my travels… Better get to bed…)

Note on my Inbar interview

I have just written up and posted onto this blog a lengthy account of the interview I conducted with Efraim Inbar here in Jerusalem, on Sunday. I did it in the form of more or less straight news reporting, though with occasional injections of the first person– mainly, as a way to keep the account as lively and ‘immediate’ as possible. It does not contain my commentary, and has precious little analysis in it, either.
I wrote it in this form so that it could be republished as widely as possible as a useful account/exploration of the thinking of someone whose assessments will almost certainly be consulted by Prime Minister-elect Netanyahu once he has completed his task of coalition formation.
Commentary can come later.
Just two requests to anyone who does decide to republish the interview, whether in English or any language: First, as with all the material on JWN, this is published under a Creative Commons license, which means you must give full attribution to me and JWN (preferably with a link to JWN), and you can only freely republish it in not-for-profit contexts; for republication in any other context, a prior agreement on terms must be concluded with me.
Secondly, I’d really appreciate it if anyone republishing this could drop me a note telling me where else it’s appeared, if possible with a link to that other platform. Thanks!

Likud strategic thinker Inbar’s self-confident view of the world

Jerusalem, March 3—Israel’s government should try to block the reconstruction of Gaza; incoming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu might try to send the military back into Gaza at some point; the two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead; and Israel is strong and the rest of the world just needs to get used to that: These were some of the key themes that emerged in an interview I conducted here March 1 with senior Likud security-affairs specialist Efraim Inbar.
Inbar is Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, and has often advised Likud leaders in the past. The views he expressed in the interview coincided at several points with those expressed in an op-ed article published in Yediot Aharonoth today by former Netanyahu national-security adviser Giora Eiland.
Like so many other interviews that foreign journalists and researchers conduct in Jerusalem, this one was conducted over coffee in a lounge of the lovely, traditionally built American Colony Hotel. Inbar is a friendly man in his early 60s who wears a yarmulke atop a mass of springy white curls.
I asked his assessment of the prospects for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “The most important factor for us is not the Arabs, but the Americans,” he said. “And honestly, no-one there really believes in this. Even at Annapolis, in spite of all the fine rhetoric about concluding an agreement before the end of the year, in actual fact their only goal was a ‘shelf agreement’—that is, an agreement that could sit on a shelf for an indefinite ength of time.
“The two-state solution is passé—because the Palestinians aren’t up to it. The only way it could work would be if two conditions were fulfilled: that the Palestinians should support it, which they don’t; and that the state would have a monopoly on the use of force, which the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have.”

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Reconstruct Gaza? A Likud adviser says ‘No’

Egypt is today hosting a big conference in Sharm al-Sheikh to rally (mainly pro-western) donors to the task of rebuilding the large amounts of housing and public infrastructure in Gaza that were destroyed by Israel during the recent war.
Ramallah-based Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayad is requesting $2.5 billion for the task. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is reportedly carrying with her to Sharm a pledge of $900 million of US funds. Different governments and groups around the world are even competing to give (or be seen to give) money for this reconstruction effort. In some cases, like that of the US, this intention of giving reconstruction aid now seems bizarre and hypocritical, given that Washington could have stopped Israel’s assault on Gaza in its very first hours, and thereby prevented just about all of the horrendous damage Gazans have suffered; but under Pres. Bush it chose not to do so.
But there is one party that might well be strongly opposed to the rebuilding of Gaza: the Likud Party, which is shortly going to take over power in Israel. In a telling op-ed published in The Jerusalem Post in early February, Prof. Efraim Inbar, an adviser to Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, argued that,

The developing international campaign to reconstruct Gaza is strategic folly. It is also unlikely to be effective. And, under current circumstances, it is also immoral.

The article strongly supported a policy of punishing all the people of Gaza for the actions of Hamas.
I interviewed Inbar here in Jerusalem yesterday. Referring to his article and to today’s donors’ conference, he admitted that the international community might (misguidedly) insist on rebuilding Gaza– “but we can always slow the process down.”
Indeed until now Israel, which is the “occupying power” in the Gaza Strip, has complete control over the passage of all freight into or out of the Strip. Since the Gaza war it has used that power to prevent the entry of just about all the basic materials required for physical rebuilding: cement, rebar, glass, piping, etc. So it seems that the outgoing Olmert government has already been working hard to prevent or slow down the rebuilding of Gaza.
Inbar is the Director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. In another part of yesterday’s interview he talked about the need to maintain the extensive series of roadblocks and other movement-control mechanisms deep inside the West Bank with which Israel controls its 2.3 million Palestinians. Those roadblocks currently number more than 600, and have completely paralyzed the ability of West Bankers to build anything like a functioning economy.
Inbar described the West Bank roadblocks as another part of the effort to punish, or “train”, the Palestinians. The US and other governments have urged Israel to reduce their number. But Inbar told me, “The Americans may push us on this, and we may remove one or two roadblocks. We’ll just play with the Americans!”
He expressed a lot of confidence that, despite the different “tone” he now hears coming out of Obama’s Washington, the new president will not end up doing anything very different on the Palestinian issue than his predecessor. “Time is on our side,” he said a number of times.

Magnanimous in Defeat

It’s a beautiful place to sit, on a bench overlooking Tarakena Bay on the southeast corner of New Zealand’s North Island. One can watch the ferry boats traversing Cook Strait which separates the North and South Islands, and in the foreground are rocky crags with nesting gulls.
Just to divert a moment from the main subject, we observe a nesting gull (White, yellow beak with a red spot, gray wings) shift position as a juvenile gull (all brown) settles in on the nest. The juvenile stretches its neck up and down a couple of times, then bows down low, obviously to disgorge some food to unseen chicks in the nest. I didn’t know that juveniles did that! But we check the bird book. Adult gulls are similar in appearance but the juveniles are brown.
What a grand thing we’ve seen. A bird of one generation giving up food for members of its own generation. The mind wanders. In the US the government is running up a huge debt with ever-increasing gigantic deficits to finance corporate welfare and needless wars, when those funds could be used to house and feed the needy. What we could learn from gulls!
Anyhow, I told you that to tell you this. If you were fortunate enough to be sitting on that bench, and you looked up and over your left shoulder, you would see perched on a bluff a large concrete structure called “Ataturk Memorial.”

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Another day in Jerusalem, with some walking

More blustery and foul, rainy weather in Jerusalem today. In the morning I did great back-to-back interviews with Naomi Chazan and Yigal Kipnis. Naomi’s the Chair of the Meretz Party, a former leading Meretz MK, and one-time deputy speaker of the Knesset. Yigal is a farmer/settler on Golan who’s very supportive of the idea of a land-for-peace deal with Syria and has written a lot about the history of the Golan. Two peaceniks with interesting perspectives on the decline of their country’s peace movement– which is what I was principally asking about.
I did those interviews holed up at one end of the lounge at the American Colony Hotel. Time was, I could afford to stay there; but its prices skyrocketed a while ago so now I just go and get the occasional coffee there.
One interesting thing about the vast majority of Jewish Israelis– even peaceniks– is that they don’t know much about about the geography of the predominantly Palestinian portions of East Jerusalem and often seem a bit confused if you mention the name of any hotel here other than the American Colony. That probably dates back to the ‘Good Old Days’ of the First Intifada when most of the press conferences held by intifada leaders were in the National Palace Hotel, which is now closed, and many of the other meetings– like the ones between George Schultz and Faisal Husseini, or Hanan Ashrawi– were in the American Colony Hotel. Since Oslo, however, the Rabin government and all the governments since then have worked hard to try to eliminate all Palestinian political activity from Jerusalem… Once the PLO people came back to their homeland, they were not allowed to live or run offices in Jerusalem at all, and the center of their West Bank activity was established in Ramallah…
Anyway, I enjoy sitting around in the lovely spaces of the A.C. and can just about afford a cup of coffee there.
After those interviews I came back to my hotel to do some logistics. I called young Jason in the Government Press Office, to check on the progress of the application I made seven days ago for a foreign press pass. He checked up on my file and said he could make me a “freelancers’ press pass” within about an hour– and that yes, that would enable me to go to Gaza.
Yay!
I told him I’d be by his office later in the afternoon to pick it up.
Half an hour later he called back and said, Oh dear, there’s been “a problem” (unspecified.) He can’t, it turns out, make me any kind of press pass until unspecified further things have happened. No, there’s nothing I can do to make this happen faster.
(Jason: You reading this? Give me a call! Tell me what’s happening!)
By that time I had about 90 minutes spare time before my next interview. Just enough to walk at a rapid clip down to the Old City, have a quick walk round there, grab a sandwich, and do a few errands. It was raining and blustery on and off. The kind of day when you don’t know if it’s worth putting up your umbrella because at any moment the rain might stop or the umbrella get blown inside out and ruined. Or, the rain might get a lot harder and your umbrella get blown inside-out and ruined.
Once inside the Bab al-Amoud (Damascus Gate) I headed down the Souk Khan el-Zayt. The two Israeli soldiers were guarding the Bab were down at street level, standing around under an awning with their big assault rifles dangling down by their shins. In the Khan al-Zayt, most little storefronts have a plastic or metal “lid” that projects between two and three feet out into the narrow stone-paved alley. These give some protection from the rain if you keep under them, but of course the rain then just torrents down from the edge of the lid, sometimes forming an almost solid sheet of water down the middle of the alley. The shops were all open and there were a few other hardy shoppers dodging between the raindrops like me.
I ducked into one of the restaurants there that look small on the outside but that, once you go in, have several rooms set deep back into beautifully arched and stone-vaulted interior space. Had a quick shawerma sandwich with fries. Continued on to the Via Dolorosa and found a great little store near the 8th Station of the Cross selling beads and nice assembled bead-and-silver necklaces. (Presents for the daughters.)
It’s amazing how the history of Jerusalem is layered and layered upon itself. Was this indeed the Via Dolorosa, I wonder? And anyway, when did anyone start observing “the Stations of the Cross” and when did they get inscribed onto the floor-plan of this ancient city in this way?
I went back down the Via Dolorosa to Al-Wad (Valley) Street and turned back up it toward the Damascus Gate. In the middle of Al-Wad Street you have to walk right under the enormous great edifice– built right across the street– that Ariel Sharon bought as a second residence for himself sometime back in the 1980s. Israeli flags waving limply from several places along its roofline. No sign today, though, of the huge security presence that used to be required to guard it. A handful of small Palestinian-run stores operated at street level in the arched space beneath it.
… Well, back along Salahuddine Street to the American Colony for the third interview of the day, this one with Efraim Inbar, a pro-Likud strategic-studies specialist (and Director of the “Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies” at Bar Ilan University) with whom I’ve kept in some degree of touch over the years. We talked for over an hour, me furiously scribbling notes because he talks fast and said a lot of extremely interesting things.
So it’s been a good day. This evening I’m going for dinner with an old friend, walking (I think, weather permitting) along a route that will take me directly past the tent where an elderly Palestinian woman called Um Kamel has been living for a number of years now, after settlers and the police evicted her from the family home she and her husband (who passed away a few months ago) and his family before him had lived in for 150 years.
I believe she was the same one who was there when we interviewed a family in just those circumstances, in just about that same exact place, seven years ago.
In this weather. Tents– here in Jerusalem and there in Gaza.

Palestinians continuously under threat: Jerusalem and Gaza

The best one-stop shop for regularly updated information about the continual, multi-layered assaults that the Israeli government has been sustaining against the Palestinians of the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Gaza, is undoubtedly the website of the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs in the OPTs.
From there today, you can access not only the very comprehensive “Protection of Civilians Weekly Report– the PDF of the latest edition is here— but also numerous other materials, including the more detailed (and also weekly) “Field updates on Gaza” and other resources like this very helpful map (PDF) of the area of Silwan, right near Jerusalem’s Old City where the authorities have issued demolition orders for 88 homes… or OCHA’s very handy map center.
I was in Bethlehem today. It was a horror story to get through the brutal concrete Wall as I went there from Jerusalem and back, but excellent to connect with a good friend there, nonviolence organizer Zoughbi Zoughbi, who took me to a number of really interesting and informative encounters in both Beit Laham and Beit Jala. (More, later.)
In both towns, just about all the shops were closed– except, by prior agreement, pharmacies– as the owners participated in the West Bank-wide commercial strike declared in solidarity with the threatened people of Jerusalem’s Silwan. I think the strike was observed throughout pretty much all of the West Bank. The front page of PNN right now has an interesting piece about it, which includes some very moving quotes from residents of the West Bank outside Jerusalem about the intensity of their feelings for the city and the depth of their sadness at being excluded from it.
The Fateh-dominated PLO and Hamas had both agreed to participate in calling for this strike, which perhaps can be seen as one first fruit of the reconciliation talks in Cairo.
OCHA’s latest “Protection of Civilians Weekly Report” (PDF) has a wealth of information about attacks on the rights of Palestinians in all the OPTs. On p.4 you can learn that during the whole week February 18-24 the Israelis allowed only 635 truckloads of goods in to supply the entire needs of the Strips’ 1.45 million people. The number of truckloads of goods that entered Gaza each day before Hamas won its victory in the parliamentary election of January 2006 was 750, which is the baseline defined for “normal” life since then. But the needs of Gaza’s people in the wake of the devastation caused by Israel’s military assault of December-January are certainly greater than “normal.” They desperately need cement, glass, rebar, and other basic materials required to reconstruct destroyed and damaged homes and infrastructure. They need more than 750 truckloads of goods to be entering each day… and they are in the lucky position of having friends and backers in the international community who are eager to help provide their needs. If only Israel, which is the military occupation power that controls all access points nto the Strip, would let the shipments in.
I have made a few attempts to ask humanitarian-aid people what the dreaded Israeli blacklist of foodstuffs that cannot be sent into Gaza contains. But they have stayed largely closed-lipped. The OCHA report says this:

The Israeli criteria used for processing import requests into Gaza remain unclear. During the reporting period the Israeli authorities rejected entry to 30 metric tonnes of chickpeas, 43 pallets of macaroni, 137 pallets of wheat flour, 131 recreational kits, 68 pallets of stationary items for students, 150 school-in-a-box kits, 33 boxes of medicine, 22 freezer appliances, 3 generators, and 4 water pumps.

I think the lack of clarity referred to there is important, and most likely deliberate. The Israelis don’t want to be shamed by having their full list published; and the absence of a published list meanwhile means that any decisions made on any particular day can be capriciously taken, and will therefore keep the aid-providers and recipients in a constant state of uncertainty. This increases everyone’s frustration level! But what a couple of the aid coordinators told me was that the Israeli authorities described the bans on certain foodstuffs as being applied because these were deemed to be luxury” items. Chickpeas, macaroni, and wheat flour– luxuries?
And what twisted minds would ban recreational kits and school supplies? (Oh, I guess the same twisted minds that bombed a number of schools in the Strip and a good portion of Gaza Islamic University.)
John Kerry and Hillary Clinton have both reportedly expressed their “concern” about some of the items on the banned list.
God help the people of Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the rest of the West Bank. And God help all of us whose governments are complicit in these savage and illegal acts.