Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "fatah"
As The (Palestinian) World Turns
Searching for a new script to get Hamas and Fatah to cooperate. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Soap operas usually block out scenes with two cameras, one for each of the glaring opponents. The editor switches between each actor as they snarl and sneer. As for the plot, you can tune in every few months and nothing seems to have changed.
Sorry, did I write “soap operas?" I meant to type “current Palestinian politics.”
In the latest episode, Hamas — in the role of bad guy, at least according to most Western viewers of this particular soap — stares wild-eyed and affronted from the Gaza Strip toward Fatah in the West Bank. Fatah, playing the loose-living, stylish cousin, tosses its chin high and looks down its nose. Egyptian mediators pop in like script doctors searching for a new twist. But they come up with the same tired old plotlines.
Over a recent weekend, Egypt’s deputy chief of intelligence, General Muhammad Ibrahim, spent two days in Ramallah just trying to convince the different Palestinian factions that they ought to turn up in Cairo on July 25 for the next round in the “national reconciliation” talks — the seventh such meeting since the spring of 2007, when Hamas threw Fatah out of the Gaza Strip (and also threw some Fatah officials out of high windows).
Ibrahim’s suggestion, according to Palestinian officials, was for both sides to agree that Hamas would rule the Gaza Strip, while Fatah would control the West Bank.
Did I mention that he didn’t come with any new ideas?
The Egyptians hoped that if the two sides agreed not to be angry any more about the status quo, Fatah could be persuaded to contribute to rebuilding Gaza after the damage caused there by the war at the turn of the year. In return Hamas might consent to allow policemen from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority to return to the Gaza Strip, the Egyptians suggested.
Ibrahim’s aim wasn’t to solve the entire problem of the Palestinian civil war, but rather to stanch the bleeding.
Without grabbing headlines, the blood is flowing. Hamas recently arrested a series of Fatah-affiliated Gazans who, according to human-rights organizations, face torture or injury during their incarceration. Fatah responded by rounding up more Hamas people in the West Bank.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sounded in no hurry to make a deal when he said Sunday that he’d "accept any Egyptian proposal that ends the internal rift and lifts the siege imposed on the Palestinian people." Except the proposals put to him over the weekend, of course, which he appears to have rejected.
Like any good soap opera, the reason for such hardheadedness is trouble inside the family.
Fatah officials face a party congress in early August and are reluctant to make any concessions to Hamas. Such a move could make them vulnerable to attack by party rivals striking a tough guy pose.
That’s likely to make the talks next week in Cairo a waste of time, though the Egyptians vowed to press ahead.
Hamas has been talking more softly about regional politics, even as it’s been taking a hard line against its compatriots. In late June, the group’s Damascus-based leader, Khaled Meshaal, said Hamas accepted the idea of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (even as he rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, calling it “racist, no different from Nazis.”)
Hamas seems to be in a bit more of a hurry than Fatah to make nice because of the desperate straits of Gaza’s population. Fatah refuses to budge in the Cairo talks unless it gets a true foothold in Gaza, where the Palestinian Authority pays the wages of civil servants and is largely ordering them to stay at home.
Even so, Hamas isn’t ready to roll over. It maintains the arrests of its activists in the West Bank were ordered by the Israeli army and the U.S. security coordinator to the region, Keith Dayton. (Israeli military officials say cooperation these days with the Palestinians is better even than during the years of the Oslo peace agreements — in the West Bank only, of course.)
Hamas also insists that the term of the current parliament be extended because, since it won a majority in the legislature in 2006, it has been unable to exert control due to international boycotts and, later, the civil strife with Fatah.
Perhaps Meshaal dropped his opposition to a two-state solution because he’s staring in the face of a three-state solution, in which Fatah gets an internationally recognized state in the West Bank and Hamas heads a pariah outpost in Gaza under the shadow of the Israeli war machine.
What would such states look like anyway? These days, despite the money flowing into the West Bank from the U.S. and the cash smuggled to Hamas by Iran, they’d be fairly sorry specimens.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said this week that the population of the Palestinian territories was about 3.9 million, with 2.4 million people in the West Bank and 1.5 million in the Gaza Strip.
Of those, 25 percent are unemployed. With plenty of time for bad daytime TV.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Soap operas usually block out scenes with two cameras, one for each of the glaring opponents. The editor switches between each actor as they snarl and sneer. As for the plot, you can tune in every few months and nothing seems to have changed.
Sorry, did I write “soap operas?" I meant to type “current Palestinian politics.”
In the latest episode, Hamas — in the role of bad guy, at least according to most Western viewers of this particular soap — stares wild-eyed and affronted from the Gaza Strip toward Fatah in the West Bank. Fatah, playing the loose-living, stylish cousin, tosses its chin high and looks down its nose. Egyptian mediators pop in like script doctors searching for a new twist. But they come up with the same tired old plotlines.
Over a recent weekend, Egypt’s deputy chief of intelligence, General Muhammad Ibrahim, spent two days in Ramallah just trying to convince the different Palestinian factions that they ought to turn up in Cairo on July 25 for the next round in the “national reconciliation” talks — the seventh such meeting since the spring of 2007, when Hamas threw Fatah out of the Gaza Strip (and also threw some Fatah officials out of high windows).
Ibrahim’s suggestion, according to Palestinian officials, was for both sides to agree that Hamas would rule the Gaza Strip, while Fatah would control the West Bank.
Did I mention that he didn’t come with any new ideas?
The Egyptians hoped that if the two sides agreed not to be angry any more about the status quo, Fatah could be persuaded to contribute to rebuilding Gaza after the damage caused there by the war at the turn of the year. In return Hamas might consent to allow policemen from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority to return to the Gaza Strip, the Egyptians suggested.
Ibrahim’s aim wasn’t to solve the entire problem of the Palestinian civil war, but rather to stanch the bleeding.
Without grabbing headlines, the blood is flowing. Hamas recently arrested a series of Fatah-affiliated Gazans who, according to human-rights organizations, face torture or injury during their incarceration. Fatah responded by rounding up more Hamas people in the West Bank.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sounded in no hurry to make a deal when he said Sunday that he’d "accept any Egyptian proposal that ends the internal rift and lifts the siege imposed on the Palestinian people." Except the proposals put to him over the weekend, of course, which he appears to have rejected.
Like any good soap opera, the reason for such hardheadedness is trouble inside the family.
Fatah officials face a party congress in early August and are reluctant to make any concessions to Hamas. Such a move could make them vulnerable to attack by party rivals striking a tough guy pose.
That’s likely to make the talks next week in Cairo a waste of time, though the Egyptians vowed to press ahead.
Hamas has been talking more softly about regional politics, even as it’s been taking a hard line against its compatriots. In late June, the group’s Damascus-based leader, Khaled Meshaal, said Hamas accepted the idea of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (even as he rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, calling it “racist, no different from Nazis.”)
Hamas seems to be in a bit more of a hurry than Fatah to make nice because of the desperate straits of Gaza’s population. Fatah refuses to budge in the Cairo talks unless it gets a true foothold in Gaza, where the Palestinian Authority pays the wages of civil servants and is largely ordering them to stay at home.
Even so, Hamas isn’t ready to roll over. It maintains the arrests of its activists in the West Bank were ordered by the Israeli army and the U.S. security coordinator to the region, Keith Dayton. (Israeli military officials say cooperation these days with the Palestinians is better even than during the years of the Oslo peace agreements — in the West Bank only, of course.)
Hamas also insists that the term of the current parliament be extended because, since it won a majority in the legislature in 2006, it has been unable to exert control due to international boycotts and, later, the civil strife with Fatah.
Perhaps Meshaal dropped his opposition to a two-state solution because he’s staring in the face of a three-state solution, in which Fatah gets an internationally recognized state in the West Bank and Hamas heads a pariah outpost in Gaza under the shadow of the Israeli war machine.
What would such states look like anyway? These days, despite the money flowing into the West Bank from the U.S. and the cash smuggled to Hamas by Iran, they’d be fairly sorry specimens.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said this week that the population of the Palestinian territories was about 3.9 million, with 2.4 million people in the West Bank and 1.5 million in the Gaza Strip.
Of those, 25 percent are unemployed. With plenty of time for bad daytime TV.
So what, and who, really killed Arafat?
Poison? By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Yasser Arafat’s body lies in the back of the presidential compound, beyond the parking lot, in a mausoleum of stone and glass. Two guards in ceremonial uniforms that seem out of place in the camouflaged guerrilla world of Palestinian militias watch over the angled stone marking the former leader’s grave.
The gravestone gives Arafat’s date of birth in Arabic characters as Aug. 4, 1929, though researchers long ago uncovered a Cairo birth certificate stating that he was born three weeks later. The tomb notes his death as occurring on Nov. 11, 2004, a full week after the date of news reports from his Paris hospital that he was either dead or brain-dead.
The dates aren’t all about Arafat’s grave that is in dispute. Palestinian politics has been torn apart in the last week after a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official announced that the symbol of his people’s struggle had been the victim of a poison plot. Farouk Kaddumi named the two main conspirators as then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Kaddumi, who was head of the PLO’s political bureau under Arafat and nominally responsible for foreign affairs, is engaged in a struggle for control of the Palestinian national movement with Abbas. A conference of their Fatah faction is called for next month where young reformers close to Abbas hope to sweep away corrupt, older leaders. But the conference is to be held in the West Bank and Kaddumi, who rejected the Oslo Peace Accords, has never returned from exile.
That’s probably why he chose to reveal the “findings” of his investigation into Arafat’s death last week in the Jordanian capital Amman, according to senior Palestinian officials in the West Bank. But it doesn’t defuse the firestorm of rage unleashed in Ramallah where Abbas has shut down Al Jazeera, the international cable station that aired an interview with Kaddumi.
Why is Abbas so mad about what could surely be have been dismissed as the ravings of an angry party rival of advancing years? (Well, actually Abbas tried that. His aides called Kaddumi, who was born in 1931, “a sick mind” and “demented.”) That didn’t fly because most Palestinians encountered on the streets of Ramallah on a recent weekend said Kaddumi’s accusation confirmed precisely what they believed happened to their old leader.
If there’s doubt about Arafat’s death, it’s largely because his successor Abbas has never released a report by Arafat’s French doctors on what killed “The Old Man,” as Palestinians call him.
There was no autopsy, yet reports emerge from time to time about what the French doctors suspected ended Arafat’s 35-year reign as head of the PLO.
In Israeli newspapers it has become accepted that Arafat died of AIDS and that Abbas covered it up because of the shame of that disease — an element I worked into the plot of my Palestinian crime novel “The Samaritan’s Secret.”
If there was no autopsy, the Israeli newspapers have written, it’s because the results would’ve been a shocking indictment of Arafat’s morals that would’ve dirtied the whole Palestinian struggle. But then Israelis always did like to demonize Arafat by suggesting he was a sexual pervert.
Now Kaddumi accuses Abbas of taking his supporter Muhammad Dahlan, a former head of Gaza’s secret police, to a meeting with Prime Minister Sharon where it was agreed that Arafat — as well as certain other Palestinian leaders who rejected peace with Israel — would be poisoned.
Kaddumi says he decided to publish the information only when Abbas ordered the party conference to be held in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Aug. 4. He maintains that since Arafat’s death he’s the true head of Fatah and, therefore, he ought to decide where the conference takes place. (Palestinian officials in Bethlehem told GlobalPost recently that they doubt the conference will take place at all, because Fatah is so divided.)
Kaddumi isn’t the first to suggest Arafat was poisoned. In 2004, Arafat’s cabinet secretary Ahmad Abdel Rahman told the Arabic-language London newspaper Al Hayat that Arafat was poisoned “with gas” during a meeting at his headquarters a year before his death.
After shaking hands with a group of international and Israeli peace campaigners who had cycled to his besieged office, Arafat vomited. Later he told Abdel Rahman: “Could it be that they got to me? Is it possible that 10 doctors can't find out what I'm suffering from?”
At that time, one of Arafat’s doctors told me that the leader had developed an infection in his blood that ultimately affected his internal organs.
When I visited Ramallah in those last days of Arafat’s regime, I found that people who spent a lot of time with the leader were deeply concerned. Not about Arafat’s blood, but about his state of mind. He went a year without washing the scarf he used to tie around his neck like an Ascot, one of them said. Another said he rambled about the old days in Beirut, whenever an aide would try to get him to address the disastrous situation of the Palestinian towns, which were subject to constant raids by the Israeli army.
It always struck me that one of them might have decided to put an end to the PLO chairman’s long decline.
When Arafat took a final turn for the worse, his long-time doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, prepared to come to him from his home in Jordan. Top PLO officials called Kurdi and told him not to make the journey to Ramallah.
Instead, Abbas and a few other PLO chiefs went with Arafat. They stayed by his side until he was dead (and then another week, perhaps, until they actually decided to announce his death).
Then they spent $1.75 million on his mausoleum. When he unveiled the completed structure in November 2007, Abbas said: “We will continue on the path of the martyred President Yasser Arafat.”
What kind of martyrdom it was, perhaps only Abbas knows.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Yasser Arafat’s body lies in the back of the presidential compound, beyond the parking lot, in a mausoleum of stone and glass. Two guards in ceremonial uniforms that seem out of place in the camouflaged guerrilla world of Palestinian militias watch over the angled stone marking the former leader’s grave.
The gravestone gives Arafat’s date of birth in Arabic characters as Aug. 4, 1929, though researchers long ago uncovered a Cairo birth certificate stating that he was born three weeks later. The tomb notes his death as occurring on Nov. 11, 2004, a full week after the date of news reports from his Paris hospital that he was either dead or brain-dead.
The dates aren’t all about Arafat’s grave that is in dispute. Palestinian politics has been torn apart in the last week after a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official announced that the symbol of his people’s struggle had been the victim of a poison plot. Farouk Kaddumi named the two main conspirators as then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Kaddumi, who was head of the PLO’s political bureau under Arafat and nominally responsible for foreign affairs, is engaged in a struggle for control of the Palestinian national movement with Abbas. A conference of their Fatah faction is called for next month where young reformers close to Abbas hope to sweep away corrupt, older leaders. But the conference is to be held in the West Bank and Kaddumi, who rejected the Oslo Peace Accords, has never returned from exile.
That’s probably why he chose to reveal the “findings” of his investigation into Arafat’s death last week in the Jordanian capital Amman, according to senior Palestinian officials in the West Bank. But it doesn’t defuse the firestorm of rage unleashed in Ramallah where Abbas has shut down Al Jazeera, the international cable station that aired an interview with Kaddumi.
Why is Abbas so mad about what could surely be have been dismissed as the ravings of an angry party rival of advancing years? (Well, actually Abbas tried that. His aides called Kaddumi, who was born in 1931, “a sick mind” and “demented.”) That didn’t fly because most Palestinians encountered on the streets of Ramallah on a recent weekend said Kaddumi’s accusation confirmed precisely what they believed happened to their old leader.
If there’s doubt about Arafat’s death, it’s largely because his successor Abbas has never released a report by Arafat’s French doctors on what killed “The Old Man,” as Palestinians call him.
There was no autopsy, yet reports emerge from time to time about what the French doctors suspected ended Arafat’s 35-year reign as head of the PLO.
In Israeli newspapers it has become accepted that Arafat died of AIDS and that Abbas covered it up because of the shame of that disease — an element I worked into the plot of my Palestinian crime novel “The Samaritan’s Secret.”
If there was no autopsy, the Israeli newspapers have written, it’s because the results would’ve been a shocking indictment of Arafat’s morals that would’ve dirtied the whole Palestinian struggle. But then Israelis always did like to demonize Arafat by suggesting he was a sexual pervert.
Now Kaddumi accuses Abbas of taking his supporter Muhammad Dahlan, a former head of Gaza’s secret police, to a meeting with Prime Minister Sharon where it was agreed that Arafat — as well as certain other Palestinian leaders who rejected peace with Israel — would be poisoned.
Kaddumi says he decided to publish the information only when Abbas ordered the party conference to be held in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Aug. 4. He maintains that since Arafat’s death he’s the true head of Fatah and, therefore, he ought to decide where the conference takes place. (Palestinian officials in Bethlehem told GlobalPost recently that they doubt the conference will take place at all, because Fatah is so divided.)
Kaddumi isn’t the first to suggest Arafat was poisoned. In 2004, Arafat’s cabinet secretary Ahmad Abdel Rahman told the Arabic-language London newspaper Al Hayat that Arafat was poisoned “with gas” during a meeting at his headquarters a year before his death.
After shaking hands with a group of international and Israeli peace campaigners who had cycled to his besieged office, Arafat vomited. Later he told Abdel Rahman: “Could it be that they got to me? Is it possible that 10 doctors can't find out what I'm suffering from?”
At that time, one of Arafat’s doctors told me that the leader had developed an infection in his blood that ultimately affected his internal organs.
When I visited Ramallah in those last days of Arafat’s regime, I found that people who spent a lot of time with the leader were deeply concerned. Not about Arafat’s blood, but about his state of mind. He went a year without washing the scarf he used to tie around his neck like an Ascot, one of them said. Another said he rambled about the old days in Beirut, whenever an aide would try to get him to address the disastrous situation of the Palestinian towns, which were subject to constant raids by the Israeli army.
It always struck me that one of them might have decided to put an end to the PLO chairman’s long decline.
When Arafat took a final turn for the worse, his long-time doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, prepared to come to him from his home in Jordan. Top PLO officials called Kurdi and told him not to make the journey to Ramallah.
Instead, Abbas and a few other PLO chiefs went with Arafat. They stayed by his side until he was dead (and then another week, perhaps, until they actually decided to announce his death).
Then they spent $1.75 million on his mausoleum. When he unveiled the completed structure in November 2007, Abbas said: “We will continue on the path of the martyred President Yasser Arafat.”
What kind of martyrdom it was, perhaps only Abbas knows.
Just like the (good?) old days
With US diplomats roaming the streets of Jerusalem, it's like the intifada never happened.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — It’s like the intifada never happened.
American diplomats mobbed the streets of Jerusalem this week. Even Iran point man Dennis Ross, whose sad-sack demeanor was a frequent feature of the Oslo peace process, stopped by to keep the U.S. defense secretary, the Mideast peace envoy, and the national security adviser company.
Meanwhile, in Palestinian politics, where hatred of Israel once brought everyone together for secret terror summits, Hamas again hates Fatah, which hates Hamas and also dislikes itself. In Israel, the two most powerful men are Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.
Just like the old days. Before the five years of violence known as the intifada that began in September 2000, when Palestinian riots turned into gunbattles and the Israeli army reoccupied all the Palestinian towns it had evacuated during the previous seven years of the peace process.
Except there’s one reminder this week that the intifada actually did take place: Fouad Shoubaki is still screwed.
The man who ran military procurement and budgets for Yasser Arafat was convicted by an Israeli military court Wednesday of handing on $7 million worth in arms to the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which used the weapons to kill Israelis during the intifada.
The court also found Shoubaki guilty of paying $125,000 (from Arafat) to fund the voyage of a ship called the Karine A. When Israeli commandos from the Shayetet 13 — the equivalent of the Navy Seals — captured the Karine A in January 2002, it was carrying 50 tons of guns, missiles and material, loaded on board by Hezbollah operatives off the Iranian coast.
Though the intifada was 15 months old at the time the Karine A was captured, many in Washington and other world capitals became convinced that Arafat really did think he was at war with Israel. They stopped talking about “putting the peace process back on track.” Until recently.
The Palestinians put Shoubaki in jail in Jericho. The Israelis said all along that he was just a fall guy being held for appearances sake. In 2006, when it seemed Shoubaki might be released, the Israelis raided the Jericho jail and captured him. His trial lasted three years.
In the court, Shoubaki claimed to “have sought peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis and to build neighborly relations.” He said he was close to current Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who’s considered a moderate in favor of peace talks with Israel (although he won’t talk to them just now).
But the court also heard that Shoubaki admitted some unneighborly actions during his interrogation by the Israeli domestic security service, the Shin Bet.
He was the go-between for Arafat’s contacts with Imad Mughniya, a top Hezbollah operative believed to have been behind the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed more than 300 people. (Mughniya, whose bloody resume was much longer than can be detailed here, died in a car bomb in Damascus in February last year. Hezbollah factions, the Syrian government and the Israeli Mossad have all been blamed for his killing at one time or another.)
Shoubaki maintained, under interrogation, that he was just following orders. Arafat signed off on all the payments and it was a time of war, so Shoubaki can’t be held responsible, he argued. At his sentencing next month, the 70-year-old looks certain to get life.
Shoubaki’s activities seem to belong to a distant era, now that the Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank are following orders from their U.S. adviser, Gen. Keith Dayton, and Israeli officials describe cooperation as better even than during the Oslo period.
But it’s only a few years, really. Many of the same people are in power on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. The same is true of much of the U.S. negotiating team. While they may not be capable of messing up on the scale Arafat managed in the early years of the intifada, there are signs that what seemed like momentum two months ago is fizzling.
The U.S. had demanded a freeze on construction in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Special envoy George Mitchell was here this week trying to get the Israelis to agree to a partial freeze. Israeli officials say the Americans are now attempting to get the Israelis to stop some construction in return for a removal of restrictions in certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlements.
But such new construction will take up Palestinian land just like the settlements whose expansion Israel is on track to halt. And the settlements which will get the green light are where the building is most frenetic, because of high birth rates among ultra-Orthodox communities.
The Palestinians, too, are repeating the mistakes that led them to bring the Oslo edifice down about their own heads. A meeting set for next week in Bethlehem to reform the ruling Fatah faction may not go ahead, and even if it does it won’t sweep away as many corrupt old hacks as the party’s young guard wants.
Last time that happened, the young leaders decided to destroy the peace process, which formed the power base of the old cadres, so that Arafat would have to turn to them for support. It didn’t work out, of course, but there are plenty who might want to have another shot.
Shoubaki may be going to jail forever, but his old pals might soon need his Rolodex.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — It’s like the intifada never happened.
American diplomats mobbed the streets of Jerusalem this week. Even Iran point man Dennis Ross, whose sad-sack demeanor was a frequent feature of the Oslo peace process, stopped by to keep the U.S. defense secretary, the Mideast peace envoy, and the national security adviser company.
Meanwhile, in Palestinian politics, where hatred of Israel once brought everyone together for secret terror summits, Hamas again hates Fatah, which hates Hamas and also dislikes itself. In Israel, the two most powerful men are Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.
Just like the old days. Before the five years of violence known as the intifada that began in September 2000, when Palestinian riots turned into gunbattles and the Israeli army reoccupied all the Palestinian towns it had evacuated during the previous seven years of the peace process.
Except there’s one reminder this week that the intifada actually did take place: Fouad Shoubaki is still screwed.
The man who ran military procurement and budgets for Yasser Arafat was convicted by an Israeli military court Wednesday of handing on $7 million worth in arms to the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which used the weapons to kill Israelis during the intifada.
The court also found Shoubaki guilty of paying $125,000 (from Arafat) to fund the voyage of a ship called the Karine A. When Israeli commandos from the Shayetet 13 — the equivalent of the Navy Seals — captured the Karine A in January 2002, it was carrying 50 tons of guns, missiles and material, loaded on board by Hezbollah operatives off the Iranian coast.
Though the intifada was 15 months old at the time the Karine A was captured, many in Washington and other world capitals became convinced that Arafat really did think he was at war with Israel. They stopped talking about “putting the peace process back on track.” Until recently.
The Palestinians put Shoubaki in jail in Jericho. The Israelis said all along that he was just a fall guy being held for appearances sake. In 2006, when it seemed Shoubaki might be released, the Israelis raided the Jericho jail and captured him. His trial lasted three years.
In the court, Shoubaki claimed to “have sought peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis and to build neighborly relations.” He said he was close to current Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who’s considered a moderate in favor of peace talks with Israel (although he won’t talk to them just now).
But the court also heard that Shoubaki admitted some unneighborly actions during his interrogation by the Israeli domestic security service, the Shin Bet.
He was the go-between for Arafat’s contacts with Imad Mughniya, a top Hezbollah operative believed to have been behind the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed more than 300 people. (Mughniya, whose bloody resume was much longer than can be detailed here, died in a car bomb in Damascus in February last year. Hezbollah factions, the Syrian government and the Israeli Mossad have all been blamed for his killing at one time or another.)
Shoubaki maintained, under interrogation, that he was just following orders. Arafat signed off on all the payments and it was a time of war, so Shoubaki can’t be held responsible, he argued. At his sentencing next month, the 70-year-old looks certain to get life.
Shoubaki’s activities seem to belong to a distant era, now that the Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank are following orders from their U.S. adviser, Gen. Keith Dayton, and Israeli officials describe cooperation as better even than during the Oslo period.
But it’s only a few years, really. Many of the same people are in power on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. The same is true of much of the U.S. negotiating team. While they may not be capable of messing up on the scale Arafat managed in the early years of the intifada, there are signs that what seemed like momentum two months ago is fizzling.
The U.S. had demanded a freeze on construction in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Special envoy George Mitchell was here this week trying to get the Israelis to agree to a partial freeze. Israeli officials say the Americans are now attempting to get the Israelis to stop some construction in return for a removal of restrictions in certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlements.
But such new construction will take up Palestinian land just like the settlements whose expansion Israel is on track to halt. And the settlements which will get the green light are where the building is most frenetic, because of high birth rates among ultra-Orthodox communities.
The Palestinians, too, are repeating the mistakes that led them to bring the Oslo edifice down about their own heads. A meeting set for next week in Bethlehem to reform the ruling Fatah faction may not go ahead, and even if it does it won’t sweep away as many corrupt old hacks as the party’s young guard wants.
Last time that happened, the young leaders decided to destroy the peace process, which formed the power base of the old cadres, so that Arafat would have to turn to them for support. It didn’t work out, of course, but there are plenty who might want to have another shot.
Shoubaki may be going to jail forever, but his old pals might soon need his Rolodex.
New Republic: The Samaritan's Secret a 'wonderful detective thriller'
In his New Republic blog, the magazine's honcho Marty Peretz rightly rails at the failure of the Fatah Party to agree on anything at its conference this week in Bethlehem -- except that Israel killed Arafat. Rails because, of course, that's not going to reform this corrupt bunch of villains who're currently clogging Manger Square with their swanky wheels, nor is it going to improve the daily life of ordinary Palestinians one bit. Peretz then notes: "If you want to read a wonderful detective thriller by Matt Beynon Rees, whom L'Express called "the Dashiell Hammet of Palestine," pick up The Samaritan's Secret, in which Arafat's late life and death lurk as vivid presence and macabre ghost."
Israel: Less corrupt than Somalia!
Seems even those holding the keys to the Holy Land need reminding that thou shall not steal. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — In its international survey of corruption, Transparency International (TI) ranks Israel a respectable number 33 out of 180 countries.
Pity the poor people of Somalia (rank: 180), because the graft stinks bad enough here, 147 places higher on the list.
Israel occupies its position on the TI scale between those other paragons of good government, Dominica and the United Arab Emirates, despite having its last prime minister under investigation for several corruption offenses, its former finance minister on his way to jail for dipping into union funds and its current foreign minister fighting an investigation into his business dealings.
The root of the corruption is cronyism in the political system. This week, the attorney general dropped an investigation of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who had allegedly made 260 political appointments against civil service rules. That was seen as a lifeline for one of his former ministers, Tzahi Hanegbi, who’s on trial for a mere 80 shady appointments.
But corruption isn't the biggest problem for Israel (which is why 33rd place in the TI survey is deceptively high). Rather it’s the refusal of Israeli politicians to acknowledge their wrongdoing that sets a tone for the entire society. Thanks to the men in its Knesset, Israelis are a nation of blame throwers.
Take former Health Minister Shlomo Benizri, who’ll be jailed for four years for bribe-taking, fraud, breach of trust and conspiracy as soon as the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur holidays are over. (He plans to be with his family for those.) Benizri is a powerful force in the Shas Party, which represents religious Jews with origins in Arab countries who’re known as Sephardi. Last week he denounced his sentence as racist.
His party chief Eli Yishai, who is also interior minister, this week called for his pal to be pardoned by President Shimon Peres, before he even begins his sentence. Yishai went on a national radio talkshow to say that “there’s no one who doesn’t tell me on the street that [Benizri’s conviction:] is because he’s Sephardi and religious.”
Shas has long played the ethnic card. Yishai is facing an imminent challenge to his leadership from Aryeh Deri, a former minister who was jailed for bribe-taking in 1999. Deri will shortly have completed the cooling-off period for politicians convicted of crimes “of moral turpitude,” after which they may once again run for positions of power.
Back then Shas ran an entire election campaign based around the slogan “He’s innocent,” with angelic photos of Deri and accusations that the Israeli establishment set out to crush a bright kid from the Moroccan immigrant underclass. Just lately Deri has been quoted as telling people close to him: “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see shame. I see an innocent man.”
Being a part of the establishment doesn’t necessarily cover a politician in anti-corruption Teflon. Ask Ehud Olmert, who left office as prime minister in March. It’d be an understatement to say that Olmert quit under a cloud. It was more of a storm of investigations.
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz told Olmert’s lawyers this week that he’d soon decide whether to charge the former prime minister in three corruption cases. Olmert’s accused of taking envelopes stuffed with cash from an American businessman. He’s also suspected of double-billing charities and the government for the same flights, using falsified receipts for travel expenses. Then there’s another case in which it’s alleged Olmert granted favors to his old law partner, saving one of his clients $11 million in taxes.
That’s only the short-list. The attorney general this week closed a bribery case against Olmert for lack of evidence. He’d previously dropped another case in which Olmert was suspected of helping an Australian friend buy a big Israeli bank, and another corruption investigation involving Olmert’s discounted purchase of a home on one of Jerusalem’s most exclusive streets.
So Olmert might get off scot free. Unlike his finance minister, Avraham Hirshson, who was sentenced in June to five years and five months in prison for embezzling $1 million from a trade union.
Olmert’s fighting all these charges. He, too, sees an innocent man in the mirror.
Across the Israeli wall in Bethlehem, there was what looked like better news last week. Corrupt old hacks from the Fatah Party were swept away in the first Fatah congress for 20 years. Young activists — mainly middle-aged, actually, though the previous chiefs were truly decrepit —replaced all but four of the 18-person Central Committee, disposing of a number of aged cronies of Yasser Arafat.
They replaced them with …. relatively youthful cronies of Yasser Arafat. The new faces include Jibril Rajoub, 56-year-old former head of Arafat’s West Bank secret police. During his tenure at the helm of Preventive Security, I tracked a scam Rajoub’s men were running in which wealthy businessmen would be arrested and big ransoms extorted from their family. He also had an official monopoly on the import of gasoline to the West Bank.
Fatah also elected Marwan Barghouti to the Central Committee. He’s serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for his part in the killing of four Israelis and a foreigner during the intifada.
And just like all those corrupt Israeli pols, Barghouti’s not saying sorry either.
JERUSALEM — In its international survey of corruption, Transparency International (TI) ranks Israel a respectable number 33 out of 180 countries.
Pity the poor people of Somalia (rank: 180), because the graft stinks bad enough here, 147 places higher on the list.
Israel occupies its position on the TI scale between those other paragons of good government, Dominica and the United Arab Emirates, despite having its last prime minister under investigation for several corruption offenses, its former finance minister on his way to jail for dipping into union funds and its current foreign minister fighting an investigation into his business dealings.
The root of the corruption is cronyism in the political system. This week, the attorney general dropped an investigation of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who had allegedly made 260 political appointments against civil service rules. That was seen as a lifeline for one of his former ministers, Tzahi Hanegbi, who’s on trial for a mere 80 shady appointments.
But corruption isn't the biggest problem for Israel (which is why 33rd place in the TI survey is deceptively high). Rather it’s the refusal of Israeli politicians to acknowledge their wrongdoing that sets a tone for the entire society. Thanks to the men in its Knesset, Israelis are a nation of blame throwers.
Take former Health Minister Shlomo Benizri, who’ll be jailed for four years for bribe-taking, fraud, breach of trust and conspiracy as soon as the Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur holidays are over. (He plans to be with his family for those.) Benizri is a powerful force in the Shas Party, which represents religious Jews with origins in Arab countries who’re known as Sephardi. Last week he denounced his sentence as racist.
His party chief Eli Yishai, who is also interior minister, this week called for his pal to be pardoned by President Shimon Peres, before he even begins his sentence. Yishai went on a national radio talkshow to say that “there’s no one who doesn’t tell me on the street that [Benizri’s conviction:] is because he’s Sephardi and religious.”
Shas has long played the ethnic card. Yishai is facing an imminent challenge to his leadership from Aryeh Deri, a former minister who was jailed for bribe-taking in 1999. Deri will shortly have completed the cooling-off period for politicians convicted of crimes “of moral turpitude,” after which they may once again run for positions of power.
Back then Shas ran an entire election campaign based around the slogan “He’s innocent,” with angelic photos of Deri and accusations that the Israeli establishment set out to crush a bright kid from the Moroccan immigrant underclass. Just lately Deri has been quoted as telling people close to him: “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see shame. I see an innocent man.”
Being a part of the establishment doesn’t necessarily cover a politician in anti-corruption Teflon. Ask Ehud Olmert, who left office as prime minister in March. It’d be an understatement to say that Olmert quit under a cloud. It was more of a storm of investigations.
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz told Olmert’s lawyers this week that he’d soon decide whether to charge the former prime minister in three corruption cases. Olmert’s accused of taking envelopes stuffed with cash from an American businessman. He’s also suspected of double-billing charities and the government for the same flights, using falsified receipts for travel expenses. Then there’s another case in which it’s alleged Olmert granted favors to his old law partner, saving one of his clients $11 million in taxes.
That’s only the short-list. The attorney general this week closed a bribery case against Olmert for lack of evidence. He’d previously dropped another case in which Olmert was suspected of helping an Australian friend buy a big Israeli bank, and another corruption investigation involving Olmert’s discounted purchase of a home on one of Jerusalem’s most exclusive streets.
So Olmert might get off scot free. Unlike his finance minister, Avraham Hirshson, who was sentenced in June to five years and five months in prison for embezzling $1 million from a trade union.
Olmert’s fighting all these charges. He, too, sees an innocent man in the mirror.
Across the Israeli wall in Bethlehem, there was what looked like better news last week. Corrupt old hacks from the Fatah Party were swept away in the first Fatah congress for 20 years. Young activists — mainly middle-aged, actually, though the previous chiefs were truly decrepit —replaced all but four of the 18-person Central Committee, disposing of a number of aged cronies of Yasser Arafat.
They replaced them with …. relatively youthful cronies of Yasser Arafat. The new faces include Jibril Rajoub, 56-year-old former head of Arafat’s West Bank secret police. During his tenure at the helm of Preventive Security, I tracked a scam Rajoub’s men were running in which wealthy businessmen would be arrested and big ransoms extorted from their family. He also had an official monopoly on the import of gasoline to the West Bank.
Fatah also elected Marwan Barghouti to the Central Committee. He’s serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail for his part in the killing of four Israelis and a foreigner during the intifada.
And just like all those corrupt Israeli pols, Barghouti’s not saying sorry either.
Can Palestinians step up to self-government?
Tax breaks, smaller government, a rationalized legal system? No, this is a long way from New Jersey. By Matt Beynon Rees, Global Post
RAMALLAH — More than two decades after declaring an independent state, the Palestinians now say they may be able to run one.
Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat declared an independent Palestinian state at a conference in Algiers in 1988. But in 2000, when presented with the basis for a state, he failed to agree to a final deal in negotiations with Israel. Current Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad unveiled a plan this week that would set up an independent state in the Palestinian areas in two years — whether Israel likes it or not.
“We must confront the whole world with the reality that Palestinians are united and steadfast in their determination to remain on their homeland, end the occupation and achieve their freedom and independence," Fayyad said at a press conference in Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority has its seat of government. "We will be the initiators and set up a de facto Palestinian state."
Fayyad, as U.S.-educated economist, has been urging other Palestinian politicians to end the civil strife between the Fatah Party, which effectively governs the West Bank, and the Islamists of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Privately he has said for some time that the Palestinians need to be seen to be governing themselves, rather than stumbling along at Israel’s whim.
That feeble appearance had been particularly strong since peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel broke down during the war in Gaza at the turn of the year. Since then, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate until Israel halts all building in its West Bank settlements.
At first the U.S. seemed to support that position and the Palestinians settled back to watch Israel’s new right-wing government sweat. But the Israelis have brazened it out, so that international politicians now appear to accept the idea that Israel can continue to build in its settlements provided that it doesn’t expand their boundaries.
After a meeting in London on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown accepted what Israelis call “natural growth” in the settlements. “They need kindergartens and houses for their families,” Brown said. “This doesn’t mean it’ll take up more West Bank territory.”
Perhaps Brown thinks the Israelis are planning to build new floors on top of existing homes in the West Bank. Anyone who’s watched the settlements expand knows that more West Bank territory is precisely what’ll be swallowed up as long as Israel doesn’t promise an absolute freeze. But Brown’s declaration demonstrates the formula international leaders are using to back down from their earlier pressure on Israel.
It’s clear to Fayyad and the more realistic Palestinian politicians that they’ve lost the initiative that seemed to be with them in June when President Barack Obama called for a settlement freeze. His 65-page plan is an attempt to regain that lost impetus.
Fayyad’s statehood plan includes an international airport, a sea cargo terminal, and an oil refinery.
If that state sounds more like New Jersey than Palestine, then wait until you hear the Americanized ideology behind it.
Fayyad says he wants to cut Palestine’s dependence on foreign aid by giving tax breaks to encourage foreign investment. He wants smaller government and a rationalized legal system.
Without Fayyad’s imprimatur, you’d have to say the plan was total bunk. After all, these are the same Palestinians who wasted most of the $4 billion in foreign aid they received during the decade after signing the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, siphoning much of it off into corrupt projects and secret bank accounts.
I take that back. They aren’t the same Palestinians. They’re much worse off.
These days the putative Palestinian state is divided. Fayyad can only claim control over the West Bank. Hamas has Gaza, and they aren’t buying into his plan.
Sami Abu Zohari, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said Wednesday that Fayyad’s regime was “illegal” and the plan needs to be approved by the Palestinian parliament, which Hamas controls. Other Hamas officials in Gaza said that independence could only be achieved by “resistance” to Israel.
Such fiery declarations often go down well with Palestinians angered by Israel’s continued occupation. But Fayyad has made a success of small, boring measures, and Palestinians have come to appreciate that, too.
A former World Bank and International Monetary Fund official, he replaced the Hamas prime minister in June 2007, when the Islamists ran Fatah out of Gaza. Which is why Hamas thinks his position is illegal.
Since then, Fayyad has instituted economic reforms aimed at reducing corruption and waste. He has pushed security reforms, with the help of a U.S. adviser, so successfully that Israeli military chiefs cut 41 checkpoints in the West Bank recently, allowing much easier movement for ordinary Palestinians.
So does Fayyad have a chance?
First, if he hadn’t done this, then it was becoming clear the Palestinians might have waited a long time for any change of heart from the Israeli government. At this week’s Israeli cabinet meeting, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liebermann noted that it was 16 years since the Oslo Accords were signed.
“It will be impossible in the next 16 years to bridge the gaps on Jerusalem, on the refugees, or on Israel as a Jewish state,” he added.
Second, Fayyad’s plan is a way for those Palestinians who reject violence to chart a path that will give ordinary West Bankers a political alternative to the corrupt power of the militias. If it’s a success, it might also force Hamas to come out of its isolation, making peace with Fatah to get a piece of the action.
A true Palestinian state in two years may seem about as easy to achieve as universal health care for U.S. citizens. But aspects of Fayyad’s plan may be in place by 2011 to improve the lives of Palestinians, whether their state is a reality or not. After all, at his press conference Fayyad pledged to provide state housing and education for all Palestinians.
He also promised free health care. [image error]
RAMALLAH — More than two decades after declaring an independent state, the Palestinians now say they may be able to run one.
Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat declared an independent Palestinian state at a conference in Algiers in 1988. But in 2000, when presented with the basis for a state, he failed to agree to a final deal in negotiations with Israel. Current Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad unveiled a plan this week that would set up an independent state in the Palestinian areas in two years — whether Israel likes it or not.
“We must confront the whole world with the reality that Palestinians are united and steadfast in their determination to remain on their homeland, end the occupation and achieve their freedom and independence," Fayyad said at a press conference in Ramallah, where the Palestinian Authority has its seat of government. "We will be the initiators and set up a de facto Palestinian state."
Fayyad, as U.S.-educated economist, has been urging other Palestinian politicians to end the civil strife between the Fatah Party, which effectively governs the West Bank, and the Islamists of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip. Privately he has said for some time that the Palestinians need to be seen to be governing themselves, rather than stumbling along at Israel’s whim.
That feeble appearance had been particularly strong since peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel broke down during the war in Gaza at the turn of the year. Since then, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate until Israel halts all building in its West Bank settlements.
At first the U.S. seemed to support that position and the Palestinians settled back to watch Israel’s new right-wing government sweat. But the Israelis have brazened it out, so that international politicians now appear to accept the idea that Israel can continue to build in its settlements provided that it doesn’t expand their boundaries.
After a meeting in London on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown accepted what Israelis call “natural growth” in the settlements. “They need kindergartens and houses for their families,” Brown said. “This doesn’t mean it’ll take up more West Bank territory.”
Perhaps Brown thinks the Israelis are planning to build new floors on top of existing homes in the West Bank. Anyone who’s watched the settlements expand knows that more West Bank territory is precisely what’ll be swallowed up as long as Israel doesn’t promise an absolute freeze. But Brown’s declaration demonstrates the formula international leaders are using to back down from their earlier pressure on Israel.
It’s clear to Fayyad and the more realistic Palestinian politicians that they’ve lost the initiative that seemed to be with them in June when President Barack Obama called for a settlement freeze. His 65-page plan is an attempt to regain that lost impetus.
Fayyad’s statehood plan includes an international airport, a sea cargo terminal, and an oil refinery.
If that state sounds more like New Jersey than Palestine, then wait until you hear the Americanized ideology behind it.
Fayyad says he wants to cut Palestine’s dependence on foreign aid by giving tax breaks to encourage foreign investment. He wants smaller government and a rationalized legal system.
Without Fayyad’s imprimatur, you’d have to say the plan was total bunk. After all, these are the same Palestinians who wasted most of the $4 billion in foreign aid they received during the decade after signing the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, siphoning much of it off into corrupt projects and secret bank accounts.
I take that back. They aren’t the same Palestinians. They’re much worse off.
These days the putative Palestinian state is divided. Fayyad can only claim control over the West Bank. Hamas has Gaza, and they aren’t buying into his plan.
Sami Abu Zohari, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said Wednesday that Fayyad’s regime was “illegal” and the plan needs to be approved by the Palestinian parliament, which Hamas controls. Other Hamas officials in Gaza said that independence could only be achieved by “resistance” to Israel.
Such fiery declarations often go down well with Palestinians angered by Israel’s continued occupation. But Fayyad has made a success of small, boring measures, and Palestinians have come to appreciate that, too.
A former World Bank and International Monetary Fund official, he replaced the Hamas prime minister in June 2007, when the Islamists ran Fatah out of Gaza. Which is why Hamas thinks his position is illegal.
Since then, Fayyad has instituted economic reforms aimed at reducing corruption and waste. He has pushed security reforms, with the help of a U.S. adviser, so successfully that Israeli military chiefs cut 41 checkpoints in the West Bank recently, allowing much easier movement for ordinary Palestinians.
So does Fayyad have a chance?
First, if he hadn’t done this, then it was becoming clear the Palestinians might have waited a long time for any change of heart from the Israeli government. At this week’s Israeli cabinet meeting, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liebermann noted that it was 16 years since the Oslo Accords were signed.
“It will be impossible in the next 16 years to bridge the gaps on Jerusalem, on the refugees, or on Israel as a Jewish state,” he added.
Second, Fayyad’s plan is a way for those Palestinians who reject violence to chart a path that will give ordinary West Bankers a political alternative to the corrupt power of the militias. If it’s a success, it might also force Hamas to come out of its isolation, making peace with Fatah to get a piece of the action.
A true Palestinian state in two years may seem about as easy to achieve as universal health care for U.S. citizens. But aspects of Fayyad’s plan may be in place by 2011 to improve the lives of Palestinians, whether their state is a reality or not. After all, at his press conference Fayyad pledged to provide state housing and education for all Palestinians.
He also promised free health care. [image error]
Let's do the time warp again
A brouhaha over who can pray at the Temple Mount recalls a similar disagreement ... that became known as the second intifada. by Matt Beynon Rees on GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — I just returned to Jerusalem after a month away. Or at least I thought I did.
I suspect I entered a cosmic wormhole that popped me out in the right place — the Israeli capital — only nine years earlier.
Muslim leaders claim radical Jews plan to pray at the mosques on the Temple Mount. Protect the Mount, goes the cry. Rioters throw rocks at tourists and at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. Both sides scream that they’re being provoked.
That’s the news this week. But it was also the news in the week that started the second intifada in October 2000. So you’ll have to forgive me for wondering whether I passed through a fold in the space-time continuum on the flight back from Zurich, where I was vacationing on Lake Geneva after finishing up a book tour.
In October 2000, Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Islamic Movement inside Israel, called on Muslims to defend the Haram ash-Sharif (the “Noble Sanctuary,” which is also known as the Temple Mount because it was the site of the ancient Jewish temple).
To defend it against a visit by Israel’s then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon, and against Jews who supposedly wanted to pray there, and against archaeological excavations undermining the mount (the supposed digging was aimed at proving what Salah and his followers argue is a Zionist lie that the Jewish temple ever stood there). His call was in essence to defend the mount against any perceived affront to Muslim “sovereignty” over it by Israel.
The result: the second intifada, more than 1,000 dead Israelis and Palestinians, and another 7,000 injured. Secondary results: deep-freeze for a peace process that’s still frosty on the outside and ice-cold within, Palestinian civil war and a big boost for right-wing Israeli politicians who said the peace process was a mistake in the first place.
Despite such dreadful consequences, if Salah could go back in time, he’d do it over just the same.
In fact, that’s what he’s doing. He spent the last week in Jerusalem pushing for a violent response to the plans of a Jewish group to pray on the Mount. The Israeli police barred the group, which hopes their temple will be rebuilt on the site and the Jewish Messiah will come, from entering the holy precinct. That wasn’t enough for the sheikh.
Nor for the Palestinian Authority, which has used the crisis and the violence surrounding it to deflect attention from its own confused response to the U.N.’s investigative report on the war in Gaza at the turn of the year. The Palestinian government in Ramallah initially wanted to turn the screw on Israel and to have the report form the basis of hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Israel headed that off with threats of economic sanctions.
Many Palestinians were unhappy with the decision to ease off on the war crimes angle. Thus, the Palestinian leadership got on board with Salah. One of the leading Jerusalem members of Fatah, the faction that rules the West Bank, threatened a “third intifada” over the Temple Mount. The chief Palestinian peace negotiator blamed Israel for the tension at the holy site.
That plays well with a Palestinian public that is angry at Israel’s right-wing government, but it won’t outweigh the disgust of Gazans that there’ll be no push to put Israel on trial at The Hague.
In Gaza this week, Hamas displayed large posters of Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with the caption “Traitor.” Gazans were invited to throw shoes at the picture. In the Middle East, showing the dirty sole of your shoe to someone is an insult. To throw it at them is much worse.
Israel’s leadership has responded to the Temple Mount shenanigans so far with bewilderment. The police have arrested 75 Palestinians, including 24 minors. A Jerusalem judge freed Salah after he was arrested Tuesday, but he banned the sheikh from Jerusalem for 30 days. Given the nasty atmosphere in Jerusalem, that seemed to me like Salah was being rewarded for what the judge called his “incitement.” But then I spent the previous week in Montreux where the most inciteful thing is a lakefront statue of Freddie Mercury in tight pants.
It seems unlikely that the sheikh’s Islamic Movement will be banned, though Israeli politicians have raised the idea.
The focus on the Temple Mount conspiracy theories of Sheikh Salah would be laughable if it wasn’t for the fact that it raises the prospect of violence potentially as damaging as that which followed the onset of the second intifada nine years ago.
It also deflects attention from the very real issues Palestinians have to face with Israeli policy in general and with Jerusalem in particular. Efforts by the Obama administration to force a freeze on building in Israel’s West Bank settlements were essentially evaded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — Israel agreed to a freeze, but before it takes effect permits will be granted for a lot of new building.
Meanwhile in the Jabal Mukhaber neighborhood of Jerusalem, just over the Green Line into East Jerusalem, a right-wing politician and the former chief rabbi laid the cornerstone Wednesday for a new Israeli residential complex called Nof Zion. The 105 housing units planned for the site could be a source of tension to add to the more ideological Israeli settlements deeper in East Jerusalem, close to the Temple Mount.
The view which gives the complex its name (Nof Zion means “View of Zion” in Hebrew) is the forked valley known as the “holy basin,” with the golden Dome of the Rock at its center. The residents of Nof Zion might soon have a front-row seat for some unholy fireworks.
JERUSALEM — I just returned to Jerusalem after a month away. Or at least I thought I did.
I suspect I entered a cosmic wormhole that popped me out in the right place — the Israeli capital — only nine years earlier.
Muslim leaders claim radical Jews plan to pray at the mosques on the Temple Mount. Protect the Mount, goes the cry. Rioters throw rocks at tourists and at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. Both sides scream that they’re being provoked.
That’s the news this week. But it was also the news in the week that started the second intifada in October 2000. So you’ll have to forgive me for wondering whether I passed through a fold in the space-time continuum on the flight back from Zurich, where I was vacationing on Lake Geneva after finishing up a book tour.
In October 2000, Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Northern Islamic Movement inside Israel, called on Muslims to defend the Haram ash-Sharif (the “Noble Sanctuary,” which is also known as the Temple Mount because it was the site of the ancient Jewish temple).
To defend it against a visit by Israel’s then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon, and against Jews who supposedly wanted to pray there, and against archaeological excavations undermining the mount (the supposed digging was aimed at proving what Salah and his followers argue is a Zionist lie that the Jewish temple ever stood there). His call was in essence to defend the mount against any perceived affront to Muslim “sovereignty” over it by Israel.
The result: the second intifada, more than 1,000 dead Israelis and Palestinians, and another 7,000 injured. Secondary results: deep-freeze for a peace process that’s still frosty on the outside and ice-cold within, Palestinian civil war and a big boost for right-wing Israeli politicians who said the peace process was a mistake in the first place.
Despite such dreadful consequences, if Salah could go back in time, he’d do it over just the same.
In fact, that’s what he’s doing. He spent the last week in Jerusalem pushing for a violent response to the plans of a Jewish group to pray on the Mount. The Israeli police barred the group, which hopes their temple will be rebuilt on the site and the Jewish Messiah will come, from entering the holy precinct. That wasn’t enough for the sheikh.
Nor for the Palestinian Authority, which has used the crisis and the violence surrounding it to deflect attention from its own confused response to the U.N.’s investigative report on the war in Gaza at the turn of the year. The Palestinian government in Ramallah initially wanted to turn the screw on Israel and to have the report form the basis of hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Israel headed that off with threats of economic sanctions.
Many Palestinians were unhappy with the decision to ease off on the war crimes angle. Thus, the Palestinian leadership got on board with Salah. One of the leading Jerusalem members of Fatah, the faction that rules the West Bank, threatened a “third intifada” over the Temple Mount. The chief Palestinian peace negotiator blamed Israel for the tension at the holy site.
That plays well with a Palestinian public that is angry at Israel’s right-wing government, but it won’t outweigh the disgust of Gazans that there’ll be no push to put Israel on trial at The Hague.
In Gaza this week, Hamas displayed large posters of Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with the caption “Traitor.” Gazans were invited to throw shoes at the picture. In the Middle East, showing the dirty sole of your shoe to someone is an insult. To throw it at them is much worse.
Israel’s leadership has responded to the Temple Mount shenanigans so far with bewilderment. The police have arrested 75 Palestinians, including 24 minors. A Jerusalem judge freed Salah after he was arrested Tuesday, but he banned the sheikh from Jerusalem for 30 days. Given the nasty atmosphere in Jerusalem, that seemed to me like Salah was being rewarded for what the judge called his “incitement.” But then I spent the previous week in Montreux where the most inciteful thing is a lakefront statue of Freddie Mercury in tight pants.
It seems unlikely that the sheikh’s Islamic Movement will be banned, though Israeli politicians have raised the idea.
The focus on the Temple Mount conspiracy theories of Sheikh Salah would be laughable if it wasn’t for the fact that it raises the prospect of violence potentially as damaging as that which followed the onset of the second intifada nine years ago.
It also deflects attention from the very real issues Palestinians have to face with Israeli policy in general and with Jerusalem in particular. Efforts by the Obama administration to force a freeze on building in Israel’s West Bank settlements were essentially evaded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — Israel agreed to a freeze, but before it takes effect permits will be granted for a lot of new building.
Meanwhile in the Jabal Mukhaber neighborhood of Jerusalem, just over the Green Line into East Jerusalem, a right-wing politician and the former chief rabbi laid the cornerstone Wednesday for a new Israeli residential complex called Nof Zion. The 105 housing units planned for the site could be a source of tension to add to the more ideological Israeli settlements deeper in East Jerusalem, close to the Temple Mount.
The view which gives the complex its name (Nof Zion means “View of Zion” in Hebrew) is the forked valley known as the “holy basin,” with the golden Dome of the Rock at its center. The residents of Nof Zion might soon have a front-row seat for some unholy fireworks.
US unhappy over Hamas-Fatah deal
The planned agreement goes some way toward validating Hamas control of the Gaza Strip. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Warring Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have drafted an agreement to end their two-year civil war. But U.S. diplomats oppose the deal. Here’s why.
The planned agreement, a copy of which GlobalPost obtained from senior Palestinian officials this week, goes some way toward validating Hamas control of the Gaza Strip. The 25-page document in Arabic also orders Palestinian security forces, currently being trained by a U.S. general, to “respect the right of the Palestinian people to resist and to defend the homeland and the citizens,” suggesting that attacks against Israeli targets won’t be countered.
The agreement could be a major setback to the Obama administration’s attempt to get recalcitrant Israeli and Palestinian negotiators back into peace talks. Israel is not likely to strike a deal with Fatah if it believes its "partners" in the "peace process" are making nice to Hamas.
The measures laid out in the document suggest Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has succumbed to recent domestic pressure over his handling of a U.N. report critical of Israel’s tactics in the war in Gaza at the turn of the year. Abbas was criticized for dropping plans to push for hearings against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague over the U.N. report. He has revived those plans, but now also risks a confrontation with the U.S. over a deal that concedes much ground to the Islamist party.
Fatah officials say they signed the agreement already this week, though they added that the text of the deal hasn’t been made public. Hamas has yet to sign the document. By Oct. 25, according to the document, Abbas will ink an order scheduling elections for June next year.
Hamas drove Abbas’s Fatah faction out of the Gaza Strip by force of arms in spring 2007, when the Islamist party also controlled parliament and the prime minister’s post. Since then, Abbas has ruled from Ramallah with a prime minister Hamas says is illegitimate. Both sides have tortured opponents and, according to human rights groups, Hamas has murdered Fatah supporters in Gaza. (The text obtained by GlobalPost includes provisions for the release of political prisoners by both sides.)
The tension between the two factions has been a factor in the stalled peace talks with Israel. The U.S. has pushed for a deal that would end the civil conflict, though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Ramallah earlier this year that any agreement must not allow Hamas a role in Palestinian government. Since Fatah was driven out of Gaza, it has paid wages to government workers there, but ordered them to stay at home.
In repeated negotiations under the auspices of the United States' Egyptian allies, Fatah appears now to have conceded a governing role to Hamas. The agreement calls for a “joint committee” to act as a transitional government over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The committee would be staffed by Fatah and Hamas officials.
That would probably mean government workers in Gaza would go back to their desks, working under Hamas rule — something the U.S., which along with the European Union pays much of their salaries, opposes.
The agreement calls for “a culture of tolerance, affection and reconciliation.” Before signing the deal, Abbas slipped in some less than affectionate rhetoric about Hamas Tuesday in Jenin. He called Hamas’s Gaza Strip an “Emirate of Darkness.”
The newly decreed tolerance doesn’t seem to extend to Israel either. Resistance to Israel’s occupation must be respected by Palestinian security forces, the document says.
That won’t sit well with General Keith Dayton, the U.S. adviser who has transformed the Palestinian security forces over the last year. Israeli military chiefs acknowledge that cooperation with Palestinian troops has never been better and have consequently removed a number of checkpoints on key West Bank arteries.
The proposed agreement appears to turn back the clock to the days of Yasser Arafat’s regime in the 1990s, when senior Palestinian security officials were never quite sure if they were supposed to arrest militants — to protect the peace agreement with Israel — or let them engage in valid “resistance” against Israeli targets. Under such circumstances, Israel’s newfound confidence in the Palestinian security forces would be dented and Dayton’s good work would be set back.
U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell reportedly communicated Washington’s opposition to Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman over the weekend, according to reports in the Israeli media. The U.S. Embassy was not available for comment on this issue.
However, analysts here concur that the U.S. wouldn’t be likely to oppose all elements of the agreement. In particular the proposals for the elections next year favor Fatah. The number of parliamentary seats selected by proportional representation is to be increased. In the 2006 elections, Hamas won largely because it did well in seats selected by district.
That’s not going to be enough to get Mitchell to buy it. But it may already be too late for him to stop it.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Warring Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have drafted an agreement to end their two-year civil war. But U.S. diplomats oppose the deal. Here’s why.
The planned agreement, a copy of which GlobalPost obtained from senior Palestinian officials this week, goes some way toward validating Hamas control of the Gaza Strip. The 25-page document in Arabic also orders Palestinian security forces, currently being trained by a U.S. general, to “respect the right of the Palestinian people to resist and to defend the homeland and the citizens,” suggesting that attacks against Israeli targets won’t be countered.
The agreement could be a major setback to the Obama administration’s attempt to get recalcitrant Israeli and Palestinian negotiators back into peace talks. Israel is not likely to strike a deal with Fatah if it believes its "partners" in the "peace process" are making nice to Hamas.
The measures laid out in the document suggest Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has succumbed to recent domestic pressure over his handling of a U.N. report critical of Israel’s tactics in the war in Gaza at the turn of the year. Abbas was criticized for dropping plans to push for hearings against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague over the U.N. report. He has revived those plans, but now also risks a confrontation with the U.S. over a deal that concedes much ground to the Islamist party.
Fatah officials say they signed the agreement already this week, though they added that the text of the deal hasn’t been made public. Hamas has yet to sign the document. By Oct. 25, according to the document, Abbas will ink an order scheduling elections for June next year.
Hamas drove Abbas’s Fatah faction out of the Gaza Strip by force of arms in spring 2007, when the Islamist party also controlled parliament and the prime minister’s post. Since then, Abbas has ruled from Ramallah with a prime minister Hamas says is illegitimate. Both sides have tortured opponents and, according to human rights groups, Hamas has murdered Fatah supporters in Gaza. (The text obtained by GlobalPost includes provisions for the release of political prisoners by both sides.)
The tension between the two factions has been a factor in the stalled peace talks with Israel. The U.S. has pushed for a deal that would end the civil conflict, though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Ramallah earlier this year that any agreement must not allow Hamas a role in Palestinian government. Since Fatah was driven out of Gaza, it has paid wages to government workers there, but ordered them to stay at home.
In repeated negotiations under the auspices of the United States' Egyptian allies, Fatah appears now to have conceded a governing role to Hamas. The agreement calls for a “joint committee” to act as a transitional government over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The committee would be staffed by Fatah and Hamas officials.
That would probably mean government workers in Gaza would go back to their desks, working under Hamas rule — something the U.S., which along with the European Union pays much of their salaries, opposes.
The agreement calls for “a culture of tolerance, affection and reconciliation.” Before signing the deal, Abbas slipped in some less than affectionate rhetoric about Hamas Tuesday in Jenin. He called Hamas’s Gaza Strip an “Emirate of Darkness.”
The newly decreed tolerance doesn’t seem to extend to Israel either. Resistance to Israel’s occupation must be respected by Palestinian security forces, the document says.
That won’t sit well with General Keith Dayton, the U.S. adviser who has transformed the Palestinian security forces over the last year. Israeli military chiefs acknowledge that cooperation with Palestinian troops has never been better and have consequently removed a number of checkpoints on key West Bank arteries.
The proposed agreement appears to turn back the clock to the days of Yasser Arafat’s regime in the 1990s, when senior Palestinian security officials were never quite sure if they were supposed to arrest militants — to protect the peace agreement with Israel — or let them engage in valid “resistance” against Israeli targets. Under such circumstances, Israel’s newfound confidence in the Palestinian security forces would be dented and Dayton’s good work would be set back.
U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell reportedly communicated Washington’s opposition to Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman over the weekend, according to reports in the Israeli media. The U.S. Embassy was not available for comment on this issue.
However, analysts here concur that the U.S. wouldn’t be likely to oppose all elements of the agreement. In particular the proposals for the elections next year favor Fatah. The number of parliamentary seats selected by proportional representation is to be increased. In the 2006 elections, Hamas won largely because it did well in seats selected by district.
That’s not going to be enough to get Mitchell to buy it. But it may already be too late for him to stop it.
All rise for the Palestinian anthem
A parody of a nationalistic Palestinian song ridicules the intractable dispute between Hamas and Fatah leaders. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Last week, Hamas and Fatah were on the verge of an agreement to end more than two years of civil strife. Then Hamas tore it up, and both sides went back to tearing apart Palestinian politics.
The two main political factions, which respectively rule the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, have tortured and even killed each other’s members. Their dispute has also held up peace talks with Israel. That, you might think is nothing to sing about.
Unless you’re preparing a YouTube parody of a nationalistic Palestinian anthem with the intention of skewering leaders of the two sides as undemocratic schemers.
The parody, which was aired this week on the Arab satellite news channel Al Jazeera, bridged the otherwise intractable differences between Hamas and Fatah, uniting them in upright self-righteousness.
The clip takes the 75-year-old song “Mawteni” (My Homeland) and reworks some of the lines.
The first verse ought to go like this:
“My homeland, My homeland
Glory and beauty, Sublimity and splendor
Are in your hills, Are in your hills
Life and deliverance, Pleasure and hope
Are in your air, Are in your Air
Will I see you? Will I see you?”
Nothing there beyond the idealized boosterism of the average national anthem, as heard all over the world.
But here’s the Youtube/Al Jazeera version:
“My homeland, My homeland
Curse and perversity, Plague and hypocrisy
Are in your hills, Are in your hills
Tyrants and oppressors, Cunning not fidelity
Are in your sanctuary, Are in your sanctuary”
Against a backdrop of images of Fatah and Hamas leaders, the spoof goes on to state that political chiefs “want/to live like slaves/which is certain shame for us.”
The clip, which has been posted in two versions on YouTube, has been viewed by more than 120,000 people online in the last month. Al Jazeera aired it in the middle of a talk show debate between a Fatah leader and a Hamas official.
Both men responded with shock.
Nasser al-Qudwa, a senior Fatah official and Yasser Arafat’s nephew, told the Al Jazeera presenter that broadcasting the song was “an unprecedented regression.”
A Palestinian student journalist in Nablus on Tuesday announced his intention to sue Al Jazeera for broadcasting the clip, which he characterized as a slur on Palestinian nationhood. Ghaith Ghazi, who works at the An-Najjah University radio station, told a Palestinian news site that the anthem has a “psychological and emotional impact on the Arab peoples, especially the Palestinians.”
Perhaps Ghazi is particularly sensitive about “Mawteni,” because its lyrics were written in 1934 by another Nablus resident, Ibrahim Touqan. A Lebanese composer added the music and for many years it was seen as the anthem of the Palestinians.
It was taken up by other Arab countries too and was for a time the anthem of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. It’s also an official anthem in Syria and Algeria, which use it to show solidarity with the Palestinians.
It’s not to be confused with the official Palestinian national anthem “Biladi” (My Country).
"Biladi" was made the anthem in 1996, when it was adopted by the Palestinian National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s main legislative body.
Here’s the first verse of "Biladi":
"With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my revenge
With the longing in my blood for my land and my home
I have climbed the mountains and fought the wars
I have conquered the impossible, and crossed the frontiers"
The current Palestinian leadership doesn’t exactly measure up to those lyrics, either. Watch out for a cruel internet spoof to the tune of “Biladi,” no doubt.
Meanwhile, Hamas rejected a deal brokered by Egypt to end the long civil conflict with Fatah, though Fatah had signed on to the agreement last week.
Officials from both sides said they expected soon to be called to Cairo for further negotiations. No doubt, they’ll both continue singing the same song.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Last week, Hamas and Fatah were on the verge of an agreement to end more than two years of civil strife. Then Hamas tore it up, and both sides went back to tearing apart Palestinian politics.
The two main political factions, which respectively rule the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, have tortured and even killed each other’s members. Their dispute has also held up peace talks with Israel. That, you might think is nothing to sing about.
Unless you’re preparing a YouTube parody of a nationalistic Palestinian anthem with the intention of skewering leaders of the two sides as undemocratic schemers.
The parody, which was aired this week on the Arab satellite news channel Al Jazeera, bridged the otherwise intractable differences between Hamas and Fatah, uniting them in upright self-righteousness.
The clip takes the 75-year-old song “Mawteni” (My Homeland) and reworks some of the lines.
The first verse ought to go like this:
“My homeland, My homeland
Glory and beauty, Sublimity and splendor
Are in your hills, Are in your hills
Life and deliverance, Pleasure and hope
Are in your air, Are in your Air
Will I see you? Will I see you?”
Nothing there beyond the idealized boosterism of the average national anthem, as heard all over the world.
But here’s the Youtube/Al Jazeera version:
“My homeland, My homeland
Curse and perversity, Plague and hypocrisy
Are in your hills, Are in your hills
Tyrants and oppressors, Cunning not fidelity
Are in your sanctuary, Are in your sanctuary”
Against a backdrop of images of Fatah and Hamas leaders, the spoof goes on to state that political chiefs “want/to live like slaves/which is certain shame for us.”
The clip, which has been posted in two versions on YouTube, has been viewed by more than 120,000 people online in the last month. Al Jazeera aired it in the middle of a talk show debate between a Fatah leader and a Hamas official.
Both men responded with shock.
Nasser al-Qudwa, a senior Fatah official and Yasser Arafat’s nephew, told the Al Jazeera presenter that broadcasting the song was “an unprecedented regression.”
A Palestinian student journalist in Nablus on Tuesday announced his intention to sue Al Jazeera for broadcasting the clip, which he characterized as a slur on Palestinian nationhood. Ghaith Ghazi, who works at the An-Najjah University radio station, told a Palestinian news site that the anthem has a “psychological and emotional impact on the Arab peoples, especially the Palestinians.”
Perhaps Ghazi is particularly sensitive about “Mawteni,” because its lyrics were written in 1934 by another Nablus resident, Ibrahim Touqan. A Lebanese composer added the music and for many years it was seen as the anthem of the Palestinians.
It was taken up by other Arab countries too and was for a time the anthem of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. It’s also an official anthem in Syria and Algeria, which use it to show solidarity with the Palestinians.
It’s not to be confused with the official Palestinian national anthem “Biladi” (My Country).
"Biladi" was made the anthem in 1996, when it was adopted by the Palestinian National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s main legislative body.
Here’s the first verse of "Biladi":
"With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my revenge
With the longing in my blood for my land and my home
I have climbed the mountains and fought the wars
I have conquered the impossible, and crossed the frontiers"
The current Palestinian leadership doesn’t exactly measure up to those lyrics, either. Watch out for a cruel internet spoof to the tune of “Biladi,” no doubt.
Meanwhile, Hamas rejected a deal brokered by Egypt to end the long civil conflict with Fatah, though Fatah had signed on to the agreement last week.
Officials from both sides said they expected soon to be called to Cairo for further negotiations. No doubt, they’ll both continue singing the same song.
Scene of the Crime
I went back to the spot where I killed my first man yesterday. I killed him four years ago. I return every few months. Each time I arrive, it’s so peaceful I can’t believe anyone really died. But, even though I’m a writer of crime fiction, someone really did.
I walked across a dirt lot, puddled with the afternoon rain, past the empty reservoir at the head of the valley. Below me the village of Irtas drifted down toward the convent where they hold the annual lettuce festival. The buildings fingered the bare hillsides. Beyond the pines and a silent olive grove: the scene of the murder.
A cabbage patch. In 2003, a young gunman from the Fatah faction of the PLO was creeping home to be with his family for the Ramadan breakfast. Just as darkness was falling. The very time I was there yesterday.
I imagined the trees closing above him, the dim glow of the fluorescent lights inside the house calling him. Then, if he noticed it, the red dot of a laser pointer, used by a local collaborator to alert the Israeli snipers on the hill above to their target. The crack of a distant rifle—the snipers would’ve been 800 metres away—and nothing, or at best a few struggling breaths.
His body was gone when I arrived there the day after his death. I stood in that spot with his wife and mother, as they told me about the moment when they heard the shot, saw the body in the twilight, recognized his clothing, touched his blood. They told me with such vivid detail I knew it had to be part of a novel—it was simply too vibrant, too full of the emotions of life in extreme circumstances, for me to limit it to my weekly report for Time Magazine.
So I made that death the first one in my debut crime novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM (UK title: THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS). When I re-read those pages, it always makes me want to drive the few miles from my home to this place on the southern tip of Bethlehem, drawn by the real death, the fictional death, my memories and my prose.
When it’s dank and raining and the same time of year as that first killing, the draw is too strong. So I stood in the olive grove watching the outside of the house across the cabbages.
I stared up at the hill where the Israelis had waited. I’ve been in situations as a journalist, where I’ve looked about and wondered if I was in someone’s sights. I knew that, now, there were no shooters around. Still I felt the dryness in my mouth that comes with pondering whether a man with his finger on the trigger will object to your taking a step into the open.
I edged backward, disturbing the rain from the branches of an olive tree. It always seemed to me most likely that the collaborator had waited here, watching. Angry, hating himself for what he had been trapped into doing, wondering if he’d get away this time or be caught and slaughtered in the street.
He might be dead by now. So many Palestinians, particularly those who collaborate or are suspected of collaborating with Israel, are.
But he’s also my collaborator. I don’t pretend to be free of the damage of the intifada that I covered as a journalist. I’m not Israeli or Palestinian. It doesn’t draw me back into its violent clutches as seems to be happening to them once more.
Still, when I wait among those olive trees, I’m somehow nervous and unsure of myself, like the collaborator who waited for his mark to emerge from the silent darkness. Though the target, the real man and the character in my book, is long dead, I find myself whispering to him: “Come on. Come on out of the trees. Let me see you.”
One day, I expect him to come.
(I posted this earlier today on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I write with three other crime novelists. Take a look.)
I walked across a dirt lot, puddled with the afternoon rain, past the empty reservoir at the head of the valley. Below me the village of Irtas drifted down toward the convent where they hold the annual lettuce festival. The buildings fingered the bare hillsides. Beyond the pines and a silent olive grove: the scene of the murder.
A cabbage patch. In 2003, a young gunman from the Fatah faction of the PLO was creeping home to be with his family for the Ramadan breakfast. Just as darkness was falling. The very time I was there yesterday.
I imagined the trees closing above him, the dim glow of the fluorescent lights inside the house calling him. Then, if he noticed it, the red dot of a laser pointer, used by a local collaborator to alert the Israeli snipers on the hill above to their target. The crack of a distant rifle—the snipers would’ve been 800 metres away—and nothing, or at best a few struggling breaths.
His body was gone when I arrived there the day after his death. I stood in that spot with his wife and mother, as they told me about the moment when they heard the shot, saw the body in the twilight, recognized his clothing, touched his blood. They told me with such vivid detail I knew it had to be part of a novel—it was simply too vibrant, too full of the emotions of life in extreme circumstances, for me to limit it to my weekly report for Time Magazine.
So I made that death the first one in my debut crime novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM (UK title: THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS). When I re-read those pages, it always makes me want to drive the few miles from my home to this place on the southern tip of Bethlehem, drawn by the real death, the fictional death, my memories and my prose.
When it’s dank and raining and the same time of year as that first killing, the draw is too strong. So I stood in the olive grove watching the outside of the house across the cabbages.
I stared up at the hill where the Israelis had waited. I’ve been in situations as a journalist, where I’ve looked about and wondered if I was in someone’s sights. I knew that, now, there were no shooters around. Still I felt the dryness in my mouth that comes with pondering whether a man with his finger on the trigger will object to your taking a step into the open.
I edged backward, disturbing the rain from the branches of an olive tree. It always seemed to me most likely that the collaborator had waited here, watching. Angry, hating himself for what he had been trapped into doing, wondering if he’d get away this time or be caught and slaughtered in the street.
He might be dead by now. So many Palestinians, particularly those who collaborate or are suspected of collaborating with Israel, are.
But he’s also my collaborator. I don’t pretend to be free of the damage of the intifada that I covered as a journalist. I’m not Israeli or Palestinian. It doesn’t draw me back into its violent clutches as seems to be happening to them once more.
Still, when I wait among those olive trees, I’m somehow nervous and unsure of myself, like the collaborator who waited for his mark to emerge from the silent darkness. Though the target, the real man and the character in my book, is long dead, I find myself whispering to him: “Come on. Come on out of the trees. Let me see you.”
One day, I expect him to come.
(I posted this earlier today on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I write with three other crime novelists. Take a look.)
