Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "intifada"
Mother and Son, Wars and Recipes
War correspondent Matt McAllester fled into the fields of battle to escape an alcoholic, mentally ill mother. In his memoir, Bittersweet, he tries to make amends with her, in the kitchen. Read my interview with McAllester on The Daily Beast.
Photos of the Jerusalem you don't read about in the newspaper
My friend Ilan Mizrahi has published a wonderful book of his photos about Jerusalem -- not the conventional Jerusalem of suicide bombs and the Dome of the Rock and praying Hassids (though he covers that, too). Ilan, who was born just down the road from where I now live and is as "Jerusalem" as they come, aims to capture a side of the city populated by the poor, the drug abusers, the beggars: the scavengers who make it a real place, one that's more interesting than anything you'd ever imagine from the cliched nuthouse of the tv news. My favorite is of a man playing violin on the street for small change, while another man urinates furtively against the wall behind him. Look at some of Ilan's photos here. Ilan also asked me to write an introduction to the book. Here it is:
Jerusalem is a rumor, fed by the whispers of centuries, until its echo returns distorted from its tittle-tattle travels, unrecognizable to those who live in it. Like all rumors, it is unreliable and somehow more broadly accepted than the reality.
I arrived in 1996, drawn by my relationship with a woman, rather than any particular fascination with Jerusalem. Of course, I had heard the rumors like everyone else; they crept out from the Bible and the histories of Rome and of Islam, on through my two great-uncles, who rode into town with Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. But I came with few preconceptions, and that’s how I stayed. Though my business at first was the news, I was under no illusions about the uselessness of newspaper and magazine formulas for unveiling the truth of a place. I tried to travel the neighborhoods of Jerusalem with an anthropologist’s eye. It turned out I was attempting, as a writer, to do just what Ilan Mizrahi has been able to do as a photographer.
When I arrived, journalists were busy writing about the dull mechanics of the Oslo peace process. Lots of stories about the first Palestinian beer, the first Palestinian Olympic team, Palestine’s acceptance into FIFA, and the first joint patrols between Israeli and Palestinian soldiers. None of these developments amounted to much in the end, except perhaps the beer, but foreigners were so preoccupied with these pointless milestones that they were slow to see the danger signs. When I joined Time as Jerusalem bureau chief in 2000, the magazine’s editors had been considering hiring a business writer, because they believed that peace was on the way and that Israel’s high-tech industry would become the center of the story. Then came the intifada. Which only goes to show how little editors know.
I wasn’t as surprised as many by the violence which engulfed the second half of the period covered by Ilan Mizrahi’s book. One morning in 1998, I awoke in my Abu Tor apartment to discover 300 East Jerusalem Palestinians protesting on my street, where one of their compatriots had been stabbed early that morning. It wasn’t the fact that they turned out to chant and throw their fists in the air that shocked me, but that ready and waiting they had a massive Palestinian flag, five meters by three, which they had draped over a wall. This was supposed to be a neighborhood where the Arab residents weren’t militant and yet this flag materialized. But I heard something else in their cry, choking them less with politics than with the dryness of the old desert traditions of blood feud. So it was no surprise to me four years later when a Jewish woman was stabbed in the woods abutting the same street.
Since then, the Jerusalem of the newspapers has been the realm of endless suicide bombs and clichés about an “intractable conflict.” But the intifada revealed so much more, if you only looked. In 2002, 45 percent of small businesses in Jerusalem went bankrupt. That, in a city already stricken by some of the worst poverty in Israel. A city with a Palestinian refugee camp within its municipal boundaries, and another “camp,” Mahaneh Yehuda, where junkies shoot up at night.
When I came to write my nonfiction account of life here, Cain’s Field, I went to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods around Mea She’arim to write about the conflict between the burgeoning religious population and the old inhabitants, mostly from Morocco, being shoved out because they weren’t religious enough. As I walked through these streets, I noticed that schoolchildren stopped to stare suspiciously at me. I felt more foreign than I’ve ever done wandering a Gaza refugee camp. To me it was an important lesson about Jerusalem: its alienness comes to you when you least expect it. The sights and sounds to which you’ve been attuned all your life -- the Bible, the news, poetry and art -- can inspire, so long as you let them. With repetition, they dwindle into inflated half-truths for which you feel contempt or anger or boredom. But in the places where you’d expect Jerusalem to be drab and rotting, the places which aren’t the subject of scripture or famous songs, there you find the timeless moments of enlightenment. There, the city is no longer a whispered rumor. Instead, it speaks to you, loudly, berates you, until you’re forced to acknowledge that it isn’t what you thought it was. It never will be.
Jerusalem is a rumor, fed by the whispers of centuries, until its echo returns distorted from its tittle-tattle travels, unrecognizable to those who live in it. Like all rumors, it is unreliable and somehow more broadly accepted than the reality.
I arrived in 1996, drawn by my relationship with a woman, rather than any particular fascination with Jerusalem. Of course, I had heard the rumors like everyone else; they crept out from the Bible and the histories of Rome and of Islam, on through my two great-uncles, who rode into town with Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. But I came with few preconceptions, and that’s how I stayed. Though my business at first was the news, I was under no illusions about the uselessness of newspaper and magazine formulas for unveiling the truth of a place. I tried to travel the neighborhoods of Jerusalem with an anthropologist’s eye. It turned out I was attempting, as a writer, to do just what Ilan Mizrahi has been able to do as a photographer.
When I arrived, journalists were busy writing about the dull mechanics of the Oslo peace process. Lots of stories about the first Palestinian beer, the first Palestinian Olympic team, Palestine’s acceptance into FIFA, and the first joint patrols between Israeli and Palestinian soldiers. None of these developments amounted to much in the end, except perhaps the beer, but foreigners were so preoccupied with these pointless milestones that they were slow to see the danger signs. When I joined Time as Jerusalem bureau chief in 2000, the magazine’s editors had been considering hiring a business writer, because they believed that peace was on the way and that Israel’s high-tech industry would become the center of the story. Then came the intifada. Which only goes to show how little editors know.
I wasn’t as surprised as many by the violence which engulfed the second half of the period covered by Ilan Mizrahi’s book. One morning in 1998, I awoke in my Abu Tor apartment to discover 300 East Jerusalem Palestinians protesting on my street, where one of their compatriots had been stabbed early that morning. It wasn’t the fact that they turned out to chant and throw their fists in the air that shocked me, but that ready and waiting they had a massive Palestinian flag, five meters by three, which they had draped over a wall. This was supposed to be a neighborhood where the Arab residents weren’t militant and yet this flag materialized. But I heard something else in their cry, choking them less with politics than with the dryness of the old desert traditions of blood feud. So it was no surprise to me four years later when a Jewish woman was stabbed in the woods abutting the same street.
Since then, the Jerusalem of the newspapers has been the realm of endless suicide bombs and clichés about an “intractable conflict.” But the intifada revealed so much more, if you only looked. In 2002, 45 percent of small businesses in Jerusalem went bankrupt. That, in a city already stricken by some of the worst poverty in Israel. A city with a Palestinian refugee camp within its municipal boundaries, and another “camp,” Mahaneh Yehuda, where junkies shoot up at night.
When I came to write my nonfiction account of life here, Cain’s Field, I went to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods around Mea She’arim to write about the conflict between the burgeoning religious population and the old inhabitants, mostly from Morocco, being shoved out because they weren’t religious enough. As I walked through these streets, I noticed that schoolchildren stopped to stare suspiciously at me. I felt more foreign than I’ve ever done wandering a Gaza refugee camp. To me it was an important lesson about Jerusalem: its alienness comes to you when you least expect it. The sights and sounds to which you’ve been attuned all your life -- the Bible, the news, poetry and art -- can inspire, so long as you let them. With repetition, they dwindle into inflated half-truths for which you feel contempt or anger or boredom. But in the places where you’d expect Jerusalem to be drab and rotting, the places which aren’t the subject of scripture or famous songs, there you find the timeless moments of enlightenment. There, the city is no longer a whispered rumor. Instead, it speaks to you, loudly, berates you, until you’re forced to acknowledge that it isn’t what you thought it was. It never will be.
Israelis riot, thanks be to God
Orthodox Jews face off against secularists in the Holy Land — a sign that all is well. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — Ultra-orthodox Jews have been rioting the last few weeks against a parking lot the municipality wants to leave open during the Jewish Sabbath, leading to dozens of arrests and quite a few moderate to serious injuries. Secular activists have held protests in favor of free garaging for those who defy God by driving on Saturday.
All of which is a sign of good times in Israel.
Here’s why: It shows that Israelis think there’s nothing worse to worry about.
When I first came to Jerusalem in 1996, the ultra-Orthodox, or "Haredim" as they’re known here (it means “those who quake,” as in quaking before the wrathful God of the Jewish Bible) used to riot over a major thoroughfare that ran through one of their neighborhoods. They wanted Bar-Ilan Street closed between sundown Friday and the onset of Saturday night.
The Sabbath, they argued, ought to be sacred to every Jew, but at the very least no one ought to drive along Bar-Ilan, reminding them that its sanctity was being violated (by people who in turning their keys in the ignition were violating the rabbinic commandment not to kindle a flame on the Sabbath. It’s one of 39 tasks “set aside” on the Sabbath, because they were used in building the Ark of Covenant and therefore shouldn’t be carried out on the day of rest. No ritual slaughtering, tanning — of leather, that is — or separating of threads is allowed either, for example).
In my neighborhood, there was one old white-bearded rabbi who used to sit on a stool at the side of the road reading and wagging his finger at me as I drove by. But in more religious neighborhoods there was real violence. In Mea Shearim, the heart of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, gangs of black-hatted rioters used to light trash cans on fire, throw stones, kick and spit on journalists, and aim rather feeble punches at policemen. (Feeble because almost all the rioters are full-time yeshiva students who are, to say the least, short on regular physical activity.)
Secular activists used to counter-protest in Jerusalem. They’d turn up, too, at shopping malls near largely secular Tel Aviv to barrack the so-called “Sabbath inspectors,” non-Jews employed by the government to hand out fines to businesses that opened on the holy day.
This was among the most important issues of those days.
Then came the intifada. The Sabbath wasn’t so contentious anymore with suicide bombers working every day of the week. Maybe it’s also that Israeli Jews decided it was time to unite against their attackers.But a month ago, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat (who replaced his ultra-Orthodox predecessor this spring) decided to leave a parking lot beside city hall open through the Sabbath. There are plenty of restaurants and bars open Friday night on a nearby street and Barkat’s aim was to prevent that street from filling with poorly parked cars.
Trouble was the lot wasn’t far from the edge of Beit Israel, one of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods stretching through central Jerusalem. Rabbis ordered out their spindly troops and rioting ensued.
Barkat switched the parking lot to one underneath the Old City walls beside the Jaffa Gate. If he’d started out there, things might’ve been different. But the rabbis had a good head of steam up and had returned to the rhetoric of my early days in Jerusalem — namely that secular Israelis were the worst anti-Semites, because they were self-hating and felt inadequate in the face of the dedication to religion of their ultra-Orthodox compatriots whose observance they wished to destroy.
So this past weekend the rioting reached a new stage of ugliness. Police arrested 57 ultra-Orthodox protesters, many of whom had bussed in for the Sabbath. One man fell off a wall and was in serious condition in hospital. The riots continued throughout Sunday, as the ultra-Orthodox protested for the release of those who had been arrested the previous day. The riots centered around Sabbath Square in the middle of Mea Shearim.
There are plenty of problems for Israel these days, not least the tortuous attempt by the current right-wing government to persist with settlement building in the face of (for the first time in years) genuine American insistence on a construction freeze. It isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, too, that Europe might get tough on Israel unless peace talks with the Palestinians show some fruit.
But in comparison to the intifada, these are easy times for Israel. Long may the Sabbath be a time for rioting.
JERUSALEM — Ultra-orthodox Jews have been rioting the last few weeks against a parking lot the municipality wants to leave open during the Jewish Sabbath, leading to dozens of arrests and quite a few moderate to serious injuries. Secular activists have held protests in favor of free garaging for those who defy God by driving on Saturday.
All of which is a sign of good times in Israel.
Here’s why: It shows that Israelis think there’s nothing worse to worry about.
When I first came to Jerusalem in 1996, the ultra-Orthodox, or "Haredim" as they’re known here (it means “those who quake,” as in quaking before the wrathful God of the Jewish Bible) used to riot over a major thoroughfare that ran through one of their neighborhoods. They wanted Bar-Ilan Street closed between sundown Friday and the onset of Saturday night.
The Sabbath, they argued, ought to be sacred to every Jew, but at the very least no one ought to drive along Bar-Ilan, reminding them that its sanctity was being violated (by people who in turning their keys in the ignition were violating the rabbinic commandment not to kindle a flame on the Sabbath. It’s one of 39 tasks “set aside” on the Sabbath, because they were used in building the Ark of Covenant and therefore shouldn’t be carried out on the day of rest. No ritual slaughtering, tanning — of leather, that is — or separating of threads is allowed either, for example).
In my neighborhood, there was one old white-bearded rabbi who used to sit on a stool at the side of the road reading and wagging his finger at me as I drove by. But in more religious neighborhoods there was real violence. In Mea Shearim, the heart of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, gangs of black-hatted rioters used to light trash cans on fire, throw stones, kick and spit on journalists, and aim rather feeble punches at policemen. (Feeble because almost all the rioters are full-time yeshiva students who are, to say the least, short on regular physical activity.)
Secular activists used to counter-protest in Jerusalem. They’d turn up, too, at shopping malls near largely secular Tel Aviv to barrack the so-called “Sabbath inspectors,” non-Jews employed by the government to hand out fines to businesses that opened on the holy day.
This was among the most important issues of those days.
Then came the intifada. The Sabbath wasn’t so contentious anymore with suicide bombers working every day of the week. Maybe it’s also that Israeli Jews decided it was time to unite against their attackers.But a month ago, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat (who replaced his ultra-Orthodox predecessor this spring) decided to leave a parking lot beside city hall open through the Sabbath. There are plenty of restaurants and bars open Friday night on a nearby street and Barkat’s aim was to prevent that street from filling with poorly parked cars.
Trouble was the lot wasn’t far from the edge of Beit Israel, one of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods stretching through central Jerusalem. Rabbis ordered out their spindly troops and rioting ensued.
Barkat switched the parking lot to one underneath the Old City walls beside the Jaffa Gate. If he’d started out there, things might’ve been different. But the rabbis had a good head of steam up and had returned to the rhetoric of my early days in Jerusalem — namely that secular Israelis were the worst anti-Semites, because they were self-hating and felt inadequate in the face of the dedication to religion of their ultra-Orthodox compatriots whose observance they wished to destroy.
So this past weekend the rioting reached a new stage of ugliness. Police arrested 57 ultra-Orthodox protesters, many of whom had bussed in for the Sabbath. One man fell off a wall and was in serious condition in hospital. The riots continued throughout Sunday, as the ultra-Orthodox protested for the release of those who had been arrested the previous day. The riots centered around Sabbath Square in the middle of Mea Shearim.
There are plenty of problems for Israel these days, not least the tortuous attempt by the current right-wing government to persist with settlement building in the face of (for the first time in years) genuine American insistence on a construction freeze. It isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, too, that Europe might get tough on Israel unless peace talks with the Palestinians show some fruit.
But in comparison to the intifada, these are easy times for Israel. Long may the Sabbath be a time for rioting.
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.
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.
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.
In Bethlehem, the Third Intifada approaches
Rain on the streets of Bethlehem can't cool simmering tension. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine. I wrote about Arabs in the rain.
It was raining in the city of Jesus’ birth throughout “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” the first of my Palestinian crime novels. I set the story during the brief Middle Eastern winter because it makes the place look different, not as one might expect.
That’s what I wanted to do for the Palestinians — to make readers look at them as real people, not as the stereotypes we’re accustomed to seeing in the news. Not as violent types rioting in the baking sunshine. But slouching through the drizzle, sitting in their overcoats on their living room couches with no heat.
As I crossed the checkpoint and went through the gate in the Israeli wall around the town, the skies darkened, flat and gray this week, too. By the time I greeted my friend Walid, a former bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, the sky was pouring already.
“The city seems a bit livelier than it was the run-up to last Christmas,” I said.
"Yes,” said Walid, who also happens to be a Palestinian weight-lifting champion (he dead-lifts 680 pounds). “But underneath, it’s very dangerous and everyone fears a Third Intifada.”
Again, not what you'd expect. Palestinians are supposed to be on the way to a better life, with the security and economic improvements pushed by U.S. diplomats and advisers. Stutteringly, without much help from their Israeli counterparts or their own civil strife, but getting there. Still like the rain in this desert town, that view warrants another look.
Palestinian newspapers have reported in the last week that the Fatah Party is preparing for new demonstrations against Israel, which it will dub the “Third Intifada.” (The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was considered a success among Palestinians, because the abiding image was of young boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks. The Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005, failed, because it turned quickly to armed violence and brought the wrath of the Israeli army fully onto Palestinian civilians.)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have given his support to a new intifada, provided it eschews firearms. Disappointed with the U.S. failure to force an absolute freeze on Israeli settlement construction, Fatah wants to unleash protests of the kind that take place every Friday at the Israeli “separation barrier” near the villages of Bilin and Na’alin. Stone-throwing and tear gas are the order of the day there.
But Hamas would be unlikely to stick to stones. In Bethlehem, Palestinian officials say Hamas has been working underground to rebuild its power — the West Bank is under Fatah’s control and many Hamas men have been jailed. A Third Intifada would be an opportunity for the Islamist group to come into the open, to confront Israeli soldiers and, more worrisome for many Bethlehem residents, to take on the Palestinian Authority and perhaps win control of the city.
Walid and I headed to Dehaisha Refugee Camp. It’s home to 16,000 people, including the fictional character in my books, schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef (and the real-life figure on whom I based him). I always love being in Dehaisha. It isn’t what you’d expect from the city of childhood Christmas carols.
It’s densely packed, clinging to a hillside. Buildings in poured concrete and cinder block rising to four stories. Colorful graffiti about the dead of the intifadas and about hope for a kind of freedom that seems far off. In the rain, water floods down the steep streets, because there’s inadequate drainage.
In the long, narrow alley where the Akhras clan lives, there was the taint of urine in the damp air, as the drains backed up. On the shuttered front of a small workshop, posters marked the death in March 2002 of Ayat al-Akhras. She was 18. She witnessed her cousin’s death, killed by Israeli soldiers. She decided to take revenge. She became the third female suicide bomber of the Second Intifada. She killed a supermarket guard and an Israeli girl almost her own age. Now she’s a faded poster and, outside the school where my fictional Omar teaches, she’s a large stencil painted black onto a pedestrian bridge, brandishing a pistol.
Her uncle Lutfi al-Akhras hobbled along the street. He greeted me with a left-handed shake. His right hand is a paralyzed fist, since he took a bullet in 1990. You could say he should’ve got the message before that blow. Earlier in the First Intifada, in 1988, an Israeli bullet shattered his left knee and another took away part of his head. Beneath his thinning black hair, a quarter of his skull is plastic. He lets me touch it, from time to time.
Lutfi led me up the cold stairs to his apartment. A bare room, a couple of couches, a television tuned to a Japanese cartoon with Arabic voice-over on a Jordanian channel, a spartan kitchen and a simple bathroom. His wife was back in the bedroom and, though Lutfi is not particularly religious, she stayed there until I left, out of modesty.
His daughter came out to say hello. She’s 10 years old, but she looks 7 at most. I assume it’s the lack of nutrition. After all, Lutfi can’t work with his disabilities. He gets an allowance of 1,350 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority. That’s about $375. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Well, it isn’t really anything.”
With his good hand, Lutfi shakily cooked some coffee on the stove. Flavored with cardamom, it was thick and good. He was hopeful German mediators could do a deal between Hamas and Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Perhaps, he said, the deal would be done by the end of the week, when Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid al-Adha, marking the new moon that ends the Hajj pilgrimage.
I asked him what he thought of the talk among Palestinian leaders of a Third Intifada. “God willing, it won’t happen.” With his good hand, he lifted his useless arm and was quiet. It was as though he were thinking about his crippling in a time of intifada, his niece’s dreadful sacrifice, and wondering how many more lives would be ended or ruined by a new round of violence.
His train of thought seemed to flash from his own disaster and its consequences to those of the Palestinian future. “Thirteen hundred shekels, it’s really nothing,” he murmurs. “God willing, this thing won’t happen. God willing.”
BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine. I wrote about Arabs in the rain.
It was raining in the city of Jesus’ birth throughout “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” the first of my Palestinian crime novels. I set the story during the brief Middle Eastern winter because it makes the place look different, not as one might expect.
That’s what I wanted to do for the Palestinians — to make readers look at them as real people, not as the stereotypes we’re accustomed to seeing in the news. Not as violent types rioting in the baking sunshine. But slouching through the drizzle, sitting in their overcoats on their living room couches with no heat.
As I crossed the checkpoint and went through the gate in the Israeli wall around the town, the skies darkened, flat and gray this week, too. By the time I greeted my friend Walid, a former bodyguard to Yasser Arafat, the sky was pouring already.
“The city seems a bit livelier than it was the run-up to last Christmas,” I said.
"Yes,” said Walid, who also happens to be a Palestinian weight-lifting champion (he dead-lifts 680 pounds). “But underneath, it’s very dangerous and everyone fears a Third Intifada.”
Again, not what you'd expect. Palestinians are supposed to be on the way to a better life, with the security and economic improvements pushed by U.S. diplomats and advisers. Stutteringly, without much help from their Israeli counterparts or their own civil strife, but getting there. Still like the rain in this desert town, that view warrants another look.
Palestinian newspapers have reported in the last week that the Fatah Party is preparing for new demonstrations against Israel, which it will dub the “Third Intifada.” (The First Intifada, from 1987 to 1993, was considered a success among Palestinians, because the abiding image was of young boys throwing stones at Israeli tanks. The Second Intifada, 2000 to 2005, failed, because it turned quickly to armed violence and brought the wrath of the Israeli army fully onto Palestinian civilians.)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reported to have given his support to a new intifada, provided it eschews firearms. Disappointed with the U.S. failure to force an absolute freeze on Israeli settlement construction, Fatah wants to unleash protests of the kind that take place every Friday at the Israeli “separation barrier” near the villages of Bilin and Na’alin. Stone-throwing and tear gas are the order of the day there.
But Hamas would be unlikely to stick to stones. In Bethlehem, Palestinian officials say Hamas has been working underground to rebuild its power — the West Bank is under Fatah’s control and many Hamas men have been jailed. A Third Intifada would be an opportunity for the Islamist group to come into the open, to confront Israeli soldiers and, more worrisome for many Bethlehem residents, to take on the Palestinian Authority and perhaps win control of the city.
Walid and I headed to Dehaisha Refugee Camp. It’s home to 16,000 people, including the fictional character in my books, schoolteacher-detective Omar Yussef (and the real-life figure on whom I based him). I always love being in Dehaisha. It isn’t what you’d expect from the city of childhood Christmas carols.
It’s densely packed, clinging to a hillside. Buildings in poured concrete and cinder block rising to four stories. Colorful graffiti about the dead of the intifadas and about hope for a kind of freedom that seems far off. In the rain, water floods down the steep streets, because there’s inadequate drainage.
In the long, narrow alley where the Akhras clan lives, there was the taint of urine in the damp air, as the drains backed up. On the shuttered front of a small workshop, posters marked the death in March 2002 of Ayat al-Akhras. She was 18. She witnessed her cousin’s death, killed by Israeli soldiers. She decided to take revenge. She became the third female suicide bomber of the Second Intifada. She killed a supermarket guard and an Israeli girl almost her own age. Now she’s a faded poster and, outside the school where my fictional Omar teaches, she’s a large stencil painted black onto a pedestrian bridge, brandishing a pistol.
Her uncle Lutfi al-Akhras hobbled along the street. He greeted me with a left-handed shake. His right hand is a paralyzed fist, since he took a bullet in 1990. You could say he should’ve got the message before that blow. Earlier in the First Intifada, in 1988, an Israeli bullet shattered his left knee and another took away part of his head. Beneath his thinning black hair, a quarter of his skull is plastic. He lets me touch it, from time to time.
Lutfi led me up the cold stairs to his apartment. A bare room, a couple of couches, a television tuned to a Japanese cartoon with Arabic voice-over on a Jordanian channel, a spartan kitchen and a simple bathroom. His wife was back in the bedroom and, though Lutfi is not particularly religious, she stayed there until I left, out of modesty.
His daughter came out to say hello. She’s 10 years old, but she looks 7 at most. I assume it’s the lack of nutrition. After all, Lutfi can’t work with his disabilities. He gets an allowance of 1,350 shekels a month from the Palestinian Authority. That’s about $375. “It isn’t much,” he said. “Well, it isn’t really anything.”
With his good hand, Lutfi shakily cooked some coffee on the stove. Flavored with cardamom, it was thick and good. He was hopeful German mediators could do a deal between Hamas and Israel to free Palestinian prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier held in Gaza. Perhaps, he said, the deal would be done by the end of the week, when Muslims celebrate the festival of Eid al-Adha, marking the new moon that ends the Hajj pilgrimage.
I asked him what he thought of the talk among Palestinian leaders of a Third Intifada. “God willing, it won’t happen.” With his good hand, he lifted his useless arm and was quiet. It was as though he were thinking about his crippling in a time of intifada, his niece’s dreadful sacrifice, and wondering how many more lives would be ended or ruined by a new round of violence.
His train of thought seemed to flash from his own disaster and its consequences to those of the Palestinian future. “Thirteen hundred shekels, it’s really nothing,” he murmurs. “God willing, this thing won’t happen. God willing.”
The "Palestinian Mandela"?
Marwan Barghouti, serving five life sentences in an Israeli jail, is a key sticking point in negotiations between Israel and Hamas over kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. (I posted this on Global Post.)The most important man in Palestinian politics is neither president nor prime minister. He doesn’t shuttle between meetings at the U.S. ambassador’s residence and the Israeli foreign ministry. In fact, he doesn’t go anywhere. He’s in an Israeli jail.
Marwan Barghouti, 50, is serving five life sentences handed down by an Israeli court for the murders of a number of Israelis and a foreigner between 2000 and 2002. Though Barghouti was a leader of the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the rival group Hamas is demanding his release in return for the freedom of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped and held in the Gaza Strip.
The release of Barghouti, who’s sometimes called “the Palestinian Nelson Mandela,” is a key sticking point in negotiations between Israel and Hamas over Shalit. Israeli officials are prepared to free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including many who killed Israelis in terror attacks. But Barghouti is among a coterie of senior Palestinian politicians Israel doesn’t want to give up.
Why is that so important? Because many Palestinians see Barghouti as a leader who can reunite them, at a time when they’re deeply divided — Fatah against Hamas, Gaza against the West Bank, pro-Iranian against pro-U.S.
A fluent Hebrew-speaker, he has a record as favoring the old Oslo peace accords with Israel, while refusing to eschew violence, which he regards as the right of an occupied people. That makes many Palestinians feel he’d lead them toward peace with a firmer hand than their current leadership, which they often see as weak in the face of American pressure and apparent Israeli intransigence.
Could Barghouti do it? Well, this tiny, bustling, barrel-chested charmer had the power to break the Palestinians apart with the second intifada. Perhaps he retains the street cred to do the job in reverse.
Most journalists explain the onset of the intifada’s violence in 2000 with tales of faltering peace talks or “provocative” visits to the Aqsa Mosque compound by then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon. I’d sum it up differently. With two words: Marwan Barghouti.
When Yasser Arafat returned to govern the Palestinians in 1994, he divided his leadership. The “Outside” leaders, who returned from decades in Lebanon and Europe, sewed up all the best jobs in the ministries and the security establishment. With disdain, Palestinians called them “the Tunisians,” after their last place of exile.
The “Inside” leadership, in turn, felt cheated. They had lived through the occupation and been jailed during the tough years of the first intifada, which they, after all, had headed and which had been the point of pressure that led to Israel’s willingness to make a peace deal at all.
Barghouti headed the Inside leaders. Born in Kobar, this small, welcoming village in a glen near Ramallah, he co-founded the Fatah youth movement in his teens, was first arrested by Israel at 18, and was key to the first intifada, which began in 1987. (He was deported to Jordan by the Israelis and coordinated the intifada from there.)
This gave him greater support among ordinary Palestinians, who knew and respected him, as opposed to the unknown or, at best, distant figures of the Outside leadership. Yet, under the Oslo Accords, leaders like Barghouti were stymied. Arafat put Outsiders in control of all the cash, jobs, and favors.
Outside the Palestinian parliament in Ramallah in November 1997, I chatted with Barghouti alone. He made some remarks that I simply scribbled in my notebook and attributed to a combination of bluster, bluff and sour grapes.
“The Inside leadership still feels they don’t have what’s coming to them,” Barghouti told me in his rapid speech. “Former intifada leaders, who were very important, are nothing now. Not one of them is in the leadership of the Authority. The people who lived through the intifada will insist on freedom. As a result, maybe the intifada will be renewed, but maybe this time with more violence.”
In the end, Barghouti became so disenchanted with Arafat’s regime that, when violence broke out in September 2000, he took hold of the uprising and used it to bring the entire Oslo edifice crashing down on Arafat’s regime. His thinking: If Oslo were destroyed, the Outside leaders would lose their power and Arafat would have to turn to Barghouti.
His comments outside the Palestinian parliament came back to me, and in the early days of the intifada I understood why the Israelis and Palestinians had been engulfed in violence that eventually cost thousands of lives: Arafat didn’t handle Barghouti right.
The Israeli prime minister at the start of the intifada, Ehud Barak, understood that. In talks with Arafat just before he was defeated by Sharon in February 2001, Barak demanded that the Palestinian chief rein in Barghouti, who was leading bloody, daily demonstrations at Israeli checkpoints. Barak later said that Arafat turned to his aides, shrugging: “Who does he mean? Who’s he talking about?” said Arafat, who simply didn’t want to discuss his upstart rival, according to Barak.
Barak later described Arafat’s reaction as “bullshit.” It was. Arafat knew Barghouti’s importance better than anyone.
The reason Israeli leaders balk at Hamas’s demand for Barghouti’s release is because they know it, too.
