Tag: israel/palestine

Gaza beach deaths

Jumping back in to the blogging game from Gaza… Rumors have it Palestinian factions will announce agreement tonight, but for now with regards to the beach deaths, Hossam mentioned Saturday’s Guardian report. In fact all three British tabloids, Guardian, Telegraph and her majesty’s Times took the Israeli army’s account to task on Friday and Saturday, but it was the Times that had the more damning account, including an internal UN radio call contradicting the crucial Israeli timeline of events: Continue reading Gaza beach deaths

MERIP on Iran, twice

MERIP has published two interesting articles on Iran in the last week. The first looked at the strategic Iran-Israel rivalry, arguing that posturing in both countries had to do with their self-image as the region’s only real powers and their need to be counted as a player by the region’s superpower, the US. The article contains some interesting info on the Iranian position on Palestine, for instance, where despite much posturing there has been relatively little real help (an anecdote of a 1979 meeting between Khomeini and Arafat is quite enlightening in this regard.) Continue reading MERIP on Iran, twice

Dirty tricks in Palestine

I’ve been following the events taking place in Palestine with consternation for the past few months. Like Yasser Arafat before him, Mahmoud Abbas seems all too willing to collaborate with Israel and the US against the Palestinian people’s own interest to remain in power. It’s not that I particularly want to defend Hamas, but more that Abbas is pushing for a civil war that will likely be bloody and detrimental to Palestinians, who already have enough to worry about. Add on top of this the growing realization that a unilateral solution will give a veneer of legitimacy to Israel’s definitive annexation of parts of the West Bank (and control of various other parts of it through direct military presence or indirect pressure), not to mention the Golan Heights. All of this reminds me of what I thought when Hamas won the elections: they won because they are fighting back, not because of corruption in Fatah or other problems. Abbas does not think about fighting back the occupation anymore, he is too busy fighting to keep his privileges and power. It’s classic divide and conquer.

This editorial by Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada, reproduced below, explains the situation quite well. It’s obviously going to have a repercussion beyond Palestine, especially as Egypt will probably be arming and training Abbas’ newly expanded personal militia.

Dangerous dirty tricks in Palestine

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada 6 June 2006

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4765.shtml

Palestinian Authority chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is pushing the internal Palestinian situation towards a dangerous and unnecessary crisis. He has called a referendum supposedly to gain public endorsement for a document written by Hamas and Fatah members held in Israeli jails which calls for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel in all the territories occupied in 1967. But Abbas’ ploy has nothing to do with hastening the creation of such a state, and everything to do with Fatah’s inability to come to terms with its defeat in last January’s legislative elections.

Without consulting PA prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, Abbas announced that Hamas would have ten days to accept the prisoners’ document without any changes or he would call a referendum. Hamas made clear that it views the referendum as illegal. Palestinian law makes no provision for referendums, and only the legislative council, in which Hamas has a huge majority, can amend the law. No matter; Abbas, like President Bush, can seem to find powers to do anything he wants as the need arises. Following the collapse of talks between Hamas and Fatah on June 5, Abbas announced that he would go ahead with the referendum by “presidential decree.” The next morning he announced a three-day extension of his deadline to allow for “dialogue,” but made clear that Hamas had to take or leave the document as is.

Continue reading Dirty tricks in Palestine

How Israel treats foreign NGO workers

Here’s a couple of recent stories about what happened to Western aid workers operating in the Occupied Territories. Of course, the Rachel Corrie episode showed how Israel feels about Westerners trying to help Palestinians.

Ayaz Ali of Islamic Relief:

Ayaz Ali returned from Israel to Britain last week after a military judge ruled he had done nothing wrong. On his release, the Israeli government issued a statement accusing Ali, 35, of assisting Hamas and implied that he was a neo-Nazi and a supporter of al-Qaeda.

. . .

Every day he was taken to an interrogation room to be questioned for up to 14 hours under bright lights by agents of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet, while handcuffed and shackled to a chair. When his interrogators deemed he was being co-operative, his handcuffs were removed; they were replaced when they believed he was not helpful.

‘They were brilliant at playing mind games. They said they knew everything about me and they had been watching me for five months. They knew my wife was expecting a baby, and told me I would never see my baby. I just tried to be completely honest,’ Ali said.

The interrogations were led by an aggressive man who was assisted by others who played a sympathetic role. ‘He told me that if he thought I was an imminent threat or knew about an imminent threat, he was prepared to kill me. I was in fear for my life,’ he said.

Maureen Murphy of Al Haq:

In the late afternoon of 28 May 2005, Al-Haq human rights defender and American citizen Maureen Murphy arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Israel, on her way back from the USA to Ramallah in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). She was questioned, denied entry into Israel, declared persona non grata and deported on a plane at 00:55 am on 29 May.

Israeli lawyer Smadar Ben-Natan went to see Maureen at the airport and petitioned for an interim injunction to prevent the deportation. The petition was denied by Judge Nurit Akhituv, via phone, at 00:40. The formal basis on which Maureen was denied entry and deported was immigration. The Israeli authorities allegedly feared that Maureen was attempting to settle illegally in Israel. The lawyer’s argument that Ramallah is not in Israel, but rather in the OPT, was discarded. However, there is no way to enter the West Bank without passing through Israeli border control since the Israeli occupation authorities do not allow the operation of any airports inside the West Bank.

Maureen has no intention of settling in Israel. Her intention is to assist Al-Haq in its work defending human rights in the OPT. Maureen’s case is emblematic of an increasing pattern of international human rights defenders being denied access to the OPT. Al-Haq is gravely concerned that this will deprive local human rights organisations of their ability to recruit the people of their choice in order to best monitor, document and expose human rights violations in the OPT.

LAT on Muslim-Jewish campus relations in US

Here’s an interesting article on Muslim-Jewish relations on a Californian university campus by my friend Ashraf Khalil, now sorely missed in Cairo. It’s a shame these activists go for comparisons between Palestine and the Holocaust when there really is no need for comparison — what’s happening in Palestine is bad enough as it is, and it’s happening now.

Iran would have accepted Beirut Declaration

Did Iran offer recognition of Israel according to the Beirut Declaration in 2003? Some top experts on Iran at no less an establishment institution as Johns Hopkins’ SAIS think so:

WASHINGTON, May 24 (IPS) – Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and to cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel’s 1967 borders, according to the secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-U.S. agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, was conveyed to the United States in late April or early May 2003. Trita Parsi, a specialist on Iranian foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies who provided the document to IPS, says he got it from an Iranian official earlier this year but is not at liberty to reveal the source.

The two-page document contradicts the official line of the George W. Bush administration that Iran is committed to the destruction of Israel and the sponsorship of terrorism in the region.

Parsi says the document is a summary of an even more detailed Iranian negotiating proposal which he learned about in 2003 from the U.S. intermediary who carried it to the State Department on behalf of the Swiss Embassy in late April or early May 2003. The intermediary has not yet agreed to be identified, according to Parsi.

The Iranian negotiating proposal indicated clearly that Iran was prepared to give up its role as a supporter of armed groups in the region in return for a larger bargain with the United States. What the Iranians wanted in return, as suggested by the document itself as well as expert observers of Iranian policy, was an end to U.S. hostility and recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region.

Before the 2003 proposal, Iran had attacked Arab governments which had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The negotiating document, however, offered “acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration”, which it also referred to as the “Saudi initiative, two-states approach.”

The Beirut Declaration, which when you think about it was a really landmark proposal from the Arab League, was always ignored by Israel. Why? Because Israel wants to annex part of the West Bank, against all UN resolutions and principles of international law. And this is why we risk another war in the Middle East rather than a solution to the crisis. I’m sure the Iranian proposal probably included other demand, and perhaps negotiations would have led nowhere, but the point was that they were ready to talk before the recent election brought back that nutcase Ahmedinejad. The article makes for good reading to put things in perspective — the Iran regime may be nasty, but it is neither automatically belligerent nor unwilling to negotiate on something as fundamental as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process according to the generous terms of the Beirut Declaration. If there is no partner for peace, it’s on the Israeli side.

Abu-Assad and Paradise Now

Hany Abu-Assad, director of Paradise Now, responds to the Angry Arab’s critique of his film:

I attempted to repaint the story no longer from the mythological point of view but from that of current reality. To kill yourself with your enemy is a Biblical story. The story of Samson already tells us that people prefer to kill themselves together with their enemies rather than accept humiliation. I believe the story of Samson never happened, but was written as a fable in order to tell us something about human beings and humiliation. Unfortunately, the same story is now happening on the same land, with different people. It’s no longer a fable, but a reality. If I wanted to repaint it, I had to take it beyond its subject. Instead of concluding that people choose to kill themselves with others rather than accept humiliation, which has already been done, I began with this point and then tried to open the discussion about morality and its relevance. To be or not to be. The Last Supper also happened 2,000 years ago in Palestine, not in Italy. Leonardo Da Vinci painted as if the light came from God. I tried to repaint it in a new medium in a place not far from where it happened, but with the light coming from a neon lamp.

We the Palestinians are a human phenomenon facing a gigantic colonizer, and we refuse to give up. What’s more, our colonizer doesn’t simply want to pillage our resources under the guise of “civilizing” us, it wants us off the land altogether. We are facing a project of ethnic cleansing. Our only weapons are persistence, knowledge, culture and art. The role of art in this case is to be so creative as to change our specific case into a universal one without losing authenticity or the differences of details. It must feel real without generalizing or stereotyping. Oppression necessitates a militarily strong, organized group, but art necessitates talented individuals whose conscience is not for sale. A superior book or a beautiful painting will persist throughout history as a metaphor for humanity in all times and all places. Let the Israelis put all their energy into the science of oppression, serving the interests of a civilization that not long ago made them into soap in order to protect the narrow idea of a Jewish state. Let the Palestinians instead put all of their energy into the science of the human….

O (Muslim) Brothers, Where Art Thou?

One of the big “disappointments,” if you can call it such, about yesterday’s 25 May demo in Cairo was that the Muslim Brotherhood was no-show. That meant that, aside from the 300 judges that stood silently in front of their Club to demand judicial independence, there were only a few hundred leftists activists in Central Cairo. I haven’t heard about what happened in other areas of Cairo, or in the provinces, so there may be a lot more people out elsewhere, including Brothers. If the Brothers had come to Central Cairo, there would have been thousands on the streets as during the last few Thursdays.

Activist friends tell me they heard late on Wednesday night that the MB was not showing up. It’s not clear why — maybe this is a sign to the regime that they are open to collaboration rather than being locked in to confrontation like Kifaya, or maybe they didn’t want more bloodshed, violence and mass arrests of their cadres. Either way, it did show that the MB is not a reliable partner of Kifaya activists. It may be that the Kifaya people’s strategy is wrong and that the MB is right to led the Judges stand by themselves, without various political groups surrounding them and tainting their actions. I suspect, though, that it had more to do with a self-preservation instinct among the MB, especially after some senior leaders were arrested the previous Thursday. Has anyone noticed that whenever the MB insists on making a big show on the street, spokesman Essam Al Erian gets arrested and then the MB starts behaving? Same thing happened last year.

In other news, yesterday three Muslim Brotherhood MPs met with the political officer of the European Union delegation in Cairo. According to press reports (in Al Masri Al Youm), the meeting was at the request of the European Commission. I believe it marks the first meeting (rather than casual encounter) of an EU official with the MB. Mid-level Western diplomats, aside from US ones, routinely have meetings with the MB for information gathering — is this different? The fact that it was requested from Brussels is also interesting, especially that in many ways the EU has been more militant about pushing democratization in Egypt than individual EU member states. This has largely been due to the awareness-raising work of EU parliamentarians such as Emma Bonino, the Italian Radical Party leader, who has been frequently visiting Cairo for the past four years and even started learning Arabic. I find her politics bizarre, but when she talks about the need democracy in the Arab world, she puts her money where her mouth is. I do wish the Radical Party didn’t advocate EU membership for Israel, though.

Meanwhile, the NDP protests that it would never, never engage in a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood because it’s against the law. I suspect Egypt also never had sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

One more thing: a paper quoted “a high-level diplomatic source” as saying Egypt won’t be sending a security contingent to Palestine (presumably to “protect” Mahmoud Abbas). My first thought: OMG the Egyptians are sending a security contingent to Palestine! At least they’re considering it. The Egyptian FM has been snubbing the Palestinan FM lately, and the Egyptians have made some (unfounded, or at least they’re not sharing the evidence) noise about links between the Sinai bombings and Palestine. Ever servile, Egypt is busily trying to help out with the coming, engineered, fall of the Hamas government.