Nathan Shachar
Palestine’s new US-trained policemen at a ceremony in Ramallah in 2008
It was in April this year that my old friend Kan’an called me. “Something is happening here. You must come and have a look. Rafidiya is coming alive again.” The Rafidiya quarter is part of Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank. The quarter is home to its upper classes, its budding bourgeoisie and one of the largest universities in the West Bank. Before the lights went out in spring 2002, Rafidiya’s boulevard was the best shopping and dining stretch in the whole of the Palestinian territories.
To get there I had to pass an Israeli checkpoint on foot and squeeze into a yellow collective taxi on the other side. I introduced myself to my fellow passengers: “Please tell me what has been happening here lately, with you and with the economy.” The first time I dared to make such a declaration, many years ago, I winced with embarrassment. In Sweden, where I live, a request like this from a stranger would be met with awkward silence. But in Palestine, within seconds I was in the midst of a heap of complaints, tragedies, rumours, and pleas for help, while the cab rolled and spun wildly along the teeming road. The detachment of the young driver was impressive. To him the children, fowl and donkeys in our way seemed no more real than the obstacles in a computer game.
Such reckless driving is a hot issue in Nablus. Frequent taxi accidents often lead to clan blood feuds, and it is a measure of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s fearlessness that he has begun to set up speed traps. Fayyad is a strange politician in this part of the world, seemingly not content with siphoning public assets into his relatives’ bank accounts. He believes in changing things, one student tells me with awe. In Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital further south, the government is routinely cursed, but its leader is usually exempt, and even called bayad, the term for a chicken that lays many eggs.
Fayyad’s competence is much resented by the old-school, pocket-stuffing, back-door dealers of the Fatah movement. But the effect he has had on Nablus is remarkable. The town’s revival, and in particular the overhaul of its police force by the US general Keith Dayton, has been little reported in the western media. But it is a giant step forward for the people of this region and the first move to reverse the devastating effects of the violence that derailed the peace process in 2000.
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Jo-Ann Mort
By all accounts the Fatah Party Congress earlier this month—the first in 20 years—was a big success. It showed democracy in action, the type that the White House would no doubt like to see throughout the Arab world, with real debate and clean elections. But it was as much about who was not in the meetings room in Bethlehem on 4th-6th August as it was about those in attendance. And those who were not in attendance are as critical to Fatah’s success—and that of the Palestinian nationalist camp that Fatah represents—as those who were.
Among the victors was Marwan Barghouti, a man who was calling the shots as the leader of Young Fatah, from an Israeli prison where he is serving five consecutive life terms for his leadership role in the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades during the second intifada.
Barghouti came third in the central committee voting, but first among the “Young Guard,” Fatah members now in their forties and fifties. This group, who earned their street credibility through two intifadas and myriad terms in Israeli prison, is also seen as more reform and grassroots oriented than the elder Fatah leaders around Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Today, this faction also includes supporters among Palestinian business leaders with MBAs, and intellectuals from the universities.
A shrewd and charismatic leader, Barghouti has already declared his intention to run for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority if elections are held as scheduled in 2010, whether he is in prison or not. His name reportedly is top on the list for a potential prisoner exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held by Hamas since 2006.
“Fatah needs a leader, and according to all the polls and information that we have, Marwan is the leader of the nationalist camp,” Knesset member and leader of the left-wing Meretz Party Haim Oron told me when I visited him recently in his Tel Aviv office. Oron visits Barghouti in prison on a regular basis and has good ties too with Barghouti’s allies in the West Bank, including Qadora Fares, a Young Guard leader seen as Barghouti’s eyes and ears outside of prison. Oron is one of several Knesset members who have called for Barghouti’s release, including former defence minister Ben Eliezer and several members from the Kadima party.
“From [Barghouti’s] point of view, a two-state solution, finishing the conflict with Israel and an existing liberal state has always been his goal. Every Palestinian leader who speaks about a peace agreement knows more or less the parameters of the deal,” Oron explained.
Fares, who talked to me just prior to the Fatah Congress from his office in Ramallah where he heads an NGO for prisoners’ families, puts it this way: “If Marwan is out of prison, in one year we can find a new atmosphere. We need a national leader. Arafat was important because he recognised the other factions. We have movement leaders now. Marwan can bring together all the factions and create a new structure and national identity that includes part of Hamas, the big groups, the intellectuals and the secular.”
A June 2009 poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre and the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung Centre found that Fatah’s
popularity among Palestinians has risen to 34.9 per cent compared with 26 per cent in January 2009. Hamas’s popularity suffered a setback for the same period: their support ratio declined from 27.7 per cent to 18.8 per cent.
One clear sign of the public’s growing impatience with Hamas is a play written by a known-critic of Hamas that ran for ten days in July in downtown Gaza City and which openly criticised the Hamas strategy of lobbing rockets into Israel. It even featured women in all the key roles, singing in front of a mixed audience that included Hamas minister—in defiance of strict Muslim custom.
There’s no doubt that part of Hamas’s plunge is as attributable to the severe damage that Israel wreaked on Gaza during the recent war as well as the Israeli closure of Gaza to people or goods. Hamas has secured quiet inside Gaza, with no visible evidence of roving gangs or rival extremist movements, but the situation has made the Gaza Strip into a land mass without a functioning economy, at the same time that the West Bank economy is projected to grow by 7 per cent (though the Hamas Culture Minister, Osama Alisawi called the West Bank’s growth “a false improvement,” when I met him at the end of July).
The Hamas leadership is not suffering due to the closure of Gaza—the people of Gaza are. The closure, meant to isolate Hamas, has only strengthened Hamas’s economic hold on the region through their control of the tunnel commerce, along with other tariffs they slap on the small, but determined, business class. This is a stiff and inhumane price to pay for political change.
Indeed, this economic coercion by Hamas is one of the many ironies of the situation, since one of the reasons that Hamas was voted in over Fatah in the first place in 2006 was the perception—and reality—of Fatah’s corruption. And the perception lingers that Hamas leadership is humble. Instead of the beachfront villas of the old guard Fatah leaders that were looted by Hamas after what Fatah calls ‘the bloody coup” of 2007, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya still lives in his home in the Beach refugee camp, a dismal, dense neighborhood, along with 63,000 other Gazan residents.
“We are telling the people how to work through the siege—that even the Prophet Mohammad went through a siege,” one senior Hamas leader commented, his armed bodyguard waiting outside his office as I sat between his desk and a football match on TV along with two other reporters. He told us, too, that Hamas “ensured salaries and paid them even during the war,” but failed to mention that the money for those salaries came from Prime Minister Fayyad’s Fatah government in Ramallah. He also claimed that Hamas was “regulating businessmen not to hoard” during the siege, but if you talk to businesspeople, the truth is that Hamas demands a tax paid to them outside of whatever taxes lawfully need to be paid to Ramallah.
Still, even with Fatah’s image improved and their polling numbers up, the issue of Palestinian unity looms as large—if not larger—as the need to renew serious peace negotiations with the Israelis. That fact was brought home by the Hamas leadership, which refused to let any of the 470 Fatah delegates from Gaza leave the Strip for the convention. A few managed to sneak out and the rest took part by telephone.
Whatever happens, some form of unity is a prerequisite for elections. As one senior Hamas leader put it to me, “If we agree all together, I am okay for a January 2010 election.”
David Herman
Two weeks is a long time in journalism
On 29 January, in a previous blog post on Gaza, I wrote: “Reuters UK today published an interesting online report, ‘Hamas accused of torture death of Gaza critic‘. ” I went on to note that the article made three points: “1) The main story is that a Palestinian man accused Hamas militants of ‘torturing and killing his brother for publicly criticising them.’ The dead man, ‘a teacher, was a supporter of the Fatah movement…’ 2) According to the report, ‘About 1,300 Palestinians were killed, according to a Gaza human rights group, of whom over 700 were civilians.’ This is one of the first non-Israeli sources I have seen referring tonon-civilian casualties in such numbers. 3) ‘The Israeli daily Haaretz reported on Thursday that Hamas “executed several dozen civilians” during and after Israel’s assault on Gaza. Some were members of Fatah, but others were not politically affiliated.’
Today (February 13), more than two weeks later, The Guardian’s website breaks the following story—”Hamas murder campaign in Gaza exposed,” with the subhead: “Islamist regime has killed dozens and tortured others as ‘collaborators’ with Israel in war’s aftermath, Amnesty and Guardian sources say. New evidence has emerged revealing the extent of the crackdown by Hamas during and after Israel’s war in Gaza last month. Amnesty International said Hamas forces and militias were involved in a “campaign of abductions, deliberate and unlawful killings, torture and death threats against those they accuse of ‘collaborating’ with Israel, as well as opponents and critics.”
Could these stories possibly be related? Strange that The Guardian should be quite so late with this story and not mention Reuters, who were running what appears to be the same piece at least a fortnight previously.
Mary Fitzgerald
lsrael's Arabs: praying for change
As well as claiming the lives of over 1,000 Palestinian civilians, the war in Gaza has exposed deep fissures within Israeli society too. Adam LeBor reports on how the bloodshed has further radicalised IsraeI’s Arabs (currently around 20 per cent of the country’s population). But the last thing they want is to become part of a Palestinian state, he says; instead, many of their leaders are calling for Israel to cease being a Jewish state, and become a “state for all citizens”—with a new name, anthem and flag.
Arab Israelis, however, are just one of many “tribes” causing problems in the increasingly divided and dysfunctional state of Israel, writes John Lloyd. He hears from the country’s leading thinkers about how the threats from within Israel pose a greater threat to its existence than those from outside. Bernard Avishai also picks up on this theme, arguing that Israelis and Palestinians are more at war with themselves than each other. If President Obama is to make any difference in the middle east, Avishai argues, he must understand and exploit the divisions between the hardline and more moderate camps on both sides, and force them to work together. Israel’s leaders, he adds, must be forced into a “panic” that American support is no longer unconditional, but contingent on certain behaviour, like reigning in West Bank settlers.
Meanwhile, Tony Lerman, former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, heralds the long-awaited birth of J Street—a new, liberal American Jewish lobby. In particular, he notes J Street’s strong criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza as both a bold and a risky move. In electing Obama, though, the American public—Jewish or otherwise—have suggested their growing fatigue with Israel’s wars. And, Lerman notes, it’s about time they had a lobby to support them.
David Herman
The BBC: right to protest against the protestors?
There were two interesting points to emerge from the debate about the Disasters Emergency Committee broadcast.
The first was barely noticed because the Left was so obsessed with the BBC that it had nothing to say about Sky’s refusal to broadcast the appeal. Sky’s decision split the news organizations between the BBC and Sky, on the one hand, and ITV, Channel 4 and Five on the other. Looked at this way, there were two big international players expressing caution against three networks who no one takes seriously any more on any level. ITN used to be a world player. No longer. Messed around by ITV executives for a generation it has lost its mass audience in this country. On Channel 4 it has had a different problem, equally damaging to its credibility. It has become predictable in its left-wing bias. Jon Snow has become a parody of himself, shouting at Israeli politicians, hectoring and self-righteous. Sky, by contrast, has had a good war in Gaza, just as it did well covering the economic crash last autumn. It has won numerous awards in recent years, including a Bafta for News Coverage for reporting of the Glasgow bombings in April 2008 and has won News Channel of the Year for the sixth year out of seven at the Royal Television society awards. It has joined the BBC, displacing ITN as the second major TV news organization in this country. Read more »
Tom Chatfield
Smoke rises after an airstrike on Gaza
Our latest web-exclusive article comes from one better-placed than most to know the intricacies of middle eastern politics and conflict: Prince Hassan of Jordan, son of King Talal and Queen Zein al-Sharaf of Jordan, brother of the late King Hussein and uncle to the present King Abdullah II. In it, Prince Hassan argues that neither Hamas, Israel nor the UN are in a position to engineer a move from the current violence towards any kind of a lasting peaceful settlement. “Survival in these harsh, but staggeringly beautiful lands,” he argues, “requires cooperation over scarce resources, on the provision of employment for our youth, and on regional trade agreements. To be enduring, any meaningful peace initiative must address the region as a whole, inclusive of Iran, Israel and Turkey.”
He thus proposes that all parties seriously consider the establishment of a temporary international stabilisation agency: one able to assume a temporary caretaking role and to oversee the development of provisional democratic self-governing institutions, but also able to “undertake effective peace enforcement, inclusive of decisive action against any act of terror or violence.” It is a detailed and radical proposition for an alternative to the eternal round of ceasefires, one-off-summits and unilateral declarations. As ever, let us know your own thoughts below.
Jonathan Power
The Gaza strip: a failure to find common ground
It’s just what Barack Obama doesn’t need as he prepares to take his oath of office as the 44th president of the USA: another Israeli/Palestinian war inflaming passions anew all over the Arab world—and much of the Muslim world outside too, from Iran to Indonesia. What will his middle name, Hussein, count for in this intense firefight?
Well, maybe something, but only if he moves rapidly to change the long-standing American emphasis on supporting, by both word and deed, the Israeli side at the expense of the Palestinian. It is as simple—and as complicated—as that. After the Bush years, during which the â€clash of civilizations†became the de facto interpretation of American, and to some extent European, policy in the region, the West quickly needs to de-escalate its fixation with what it often sees as the rabid policies of the Muslim world. And it must restore a sense of humility in dealing with a great world-wide civilization, albeit one with its share of bad apples.
Comparison, even in the time of Al Qaeda, does not always work in Christendom’s favour. The West cannot overlook its near-conquest by the Nazis, whose attempt to eliminate the Jews came out of a country that was in many ways the fulcrum of modern Christianity. Nor can we ignore the inroads that atheistic Marxism made in Europe; or indeed an everyday crime rate in western nations that far exceeds that of any Muslim country, especially those in the middle east.
â€It is human to hate†wrote Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, who died last week, in his too influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. “In this new [post-Cold War] world, local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global politics is the politics of civilization. The rivalry of the super powers is replaced by the clash of civilizations.†Read more »
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