Hamas, which recently celebrated its 22nd birthday, has grown up quite quickly: what began as a clandestine group of activists determined to form an Islamic resistance movement out of a previously quiescent Muslim Brotherhood is now a governing party in Gaza and a major focus of international attention. But having achieved such success, the movement’s leaders now find themselves confronted with difficult choices about their priorities. Hamas’s leaders have promised their followers that they can resist Israel, govern Gaza and reform Palestinian society along Islamic lines. But those goals increasingly pull the movement in very different directions. Since its startling triumph in Palestine’s January 2006 elections and especially since its seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007, Hamas is showing signs of strain over which path to emphasise.
One set of goals emphasises the group’s Islamist agenda. The Muslim Brotherhood, since its founding in Egypt 80 years ago, has always emphasised reforming the individual and society according to Islamic dictates. For many years, Palestinian members of the Muslim Brotherhood emphasised personal and social reform at the expense of politics and the national struggle; Palestine could be liberated, they held, only after it had become more thoroughly Islamic. Hamas was founded by Brotherhood activists frustrated with such passivity and tired of being taunted by secular Palestinian nationalists who accused the Islamists of contributing nothing to the liberation struggle. The founders of Hamas insisted that there was no need to postpone resistance: they could take direct action against the Israeli occupation while pursuing the Islamisation of Palestinian society.
Yet since it won the 2006 parliamentary elections, Hamas has given mixed signals regarding its Islamic agenda. Religious issues were deliberately played down in the electoral campaign, and the group did not use its parliamentary majority to rush through any religiously-inspired education. It kept the existing school curriculum, moving only to modestly expand the classroom time devoted to religious instruction. But since its seizure of power in Gaza in June 2007, some movement activists have become impatient: they seek to use the movement’s dominant political position to bring Palestine’s legal framework and public life in line with Islamic values and teachings. Some of their efforts – such as the formation of a morality police – have received international attention, but much has taken place on a grass-roots level.
A second path for Hamas emphasises resistance – literally the movement’s middle name (Hamas is an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement). Hamas was born in an effort to participate in what Palestinians term their “revolution”. While a latecomer to armed action, Hamas emerged from the Oslo process as the most prominent movement dedicated to continued resistance. Even during the second intifada, when other movements (including parts of Fatah) returned to violent activity, Hamas still stood at the vanguard of Palestinian resistance to Israel.
Yet as with its Islamist agenda, Hamas’s pursuit of resistance has been uneven for the past three years. From March 2006, when it formed the Palestinian Authority cabinet, until June 2007, when the Palestinian Authority split in two (with Hamas controlling only the Gaza half), Hamas came under enormous international pressure to renounce violence. It responded with a half-measure: while it completely rejected the international calls in theory, in practice it held its own activities to a minimum. Since June 2007, this pattern has actually become more pronounced. Hamas has generally sought a ceasefire with Israel while disavowing any intention of reaching a permanent settlement or disarming. It has, of course, fired rockets from Gaza – but with the declared aim of securing a ceasefire on more favourable terms. And when an indirectly negotiated ceasefire prevailed, Hamas largely observed it; not only that, the movement enforced other factions’ observance.
Continue reading The National: Coming of age
Showing posts with label Palestine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palestine. Show all posts
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
Saturday, 25 July 2009
A Palestinian enigma
Twelve years after Israel’s botched attempt to assassinate Khalid Mishal, he leads Hamas with more authority than ever, Gershom Gorenberg writes. But can Mishal steer his movement into the arena of political compromise?
Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assasination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas
Paul McGeough
Quartet Books
Dh128
“When Israel occupied Jerusalem, I was 14,” Sheikh Jamil Hamami once told me. Hamami grew up in East Jerusalem. That week in June 1967, he had heard the promises on the radio that the Arab states would defeat Israel “in a few days, a few hours”. Instead came the Israeli advance. Hamami described the day that the Old City fell in a series of staccato images: “The black picture in my mind is seeing an Israeli soldier enter Al Aqsa… Near the Wailing Wall, I saw a soldier step on the Quran… A soldier told us it was forbidden to pray in Al Aqsa.”
Hamami later became one of the first leaders of Hamas in the West Bank, though he left the movement in 1995, believing that the time for “military action” had ended with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. His jagged memories of June 1967 allude to two of the reasons for the Islamic revival in the occupied territories – and for the birth of Hamas, for that organisation’s ascendance as a rival to the secular nationalist PLO and for its position today as one of the two power centres of riven Palestinian politics.
In Hamami’s emblematic account, Israel’s military victory in 1967 was an affront to Islam, represented most vividly by Israel’s control of the Al Aqsa mosque. But it also revealed the bankruptcy of the Arab states – chief among them Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Secular Arab nationalism had brought the Palestinians a second disaster. Islam was both a part of an identity under perceived threat and a potential replacement for discredited ideologies.
Indeed, Islamic activists gave an explanation halfway between sociology and theology for the outcome of the war, as the Palestinian political scientist Ziad Abu-Amr observed in his sympathetic study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Islamic Fundamentalism in Gaza and the West Bank: Israel’s victory, Islamic groups claimed, “was the result of the adherence of the Jews to their religion, and… the Arabs’ defeat was caused by their failure to adhere to Islam”. (The explanation, ironically, ignored the intensely secular character of Israeli society in 1967.)
The return to faith that followed was incremental, seen more easily by those not in its midst. In 1999, I met in Nablus with a group of activists from left-wing Palestinian organisations. One woman had been deported from the West Bank by Israel in the early 1970s and had recently returned during the Oslo thaw. She wore slacks and a short-sleeve blouse; her hair was uncovered. That had been the style in Nablus when she was exiled, she said. Now, she continued, she was a stranger in the city of her birth, where the hijab and long, modest garments were de rigueur. Later that year, on the last Friday of Ramadan – as it turned out, the last Ramadan when Palestinians from the occupied territories had easy access to Al Aqsa – hundreds of thousands of people filled the open plaza behind the actual mosque building at the southern end of the Haram al Sharif. Before 1967, one Islamic activist told me, the number of worshippers was too small to fill the mosque building itself.
The local Palestinian religious revival was part of much wider patterns. The Arab defeat of 1967 created an ideological vacuum that Islam filled throughout the region. As Abu-Amr notes, the oil crisis of the 1970s enriched conservative regimes eager to promote Islam. The Iranian revolution of 1979 inspired Islamic activists as the Russian Revolution had once encouraged the left: Success was possible.
Yet the resurgence of Islam was itself part of an even larger trend, which the French scholar Gilles Kepel has labelled “the revenge of God”. The 1970s and 1980s saw the worldwide rise of radical movements that offered political programmes rooted in anti-modern interpretations of faith. In America, conservative Protestants emerged from political quietism to dominate the Republican Party. In Israel, the Gush Emunim settlement movement declared secular Zionism dead, anointed itself the new vanguard and tilted the entire national agenda rightward. That matched a common pattern: absorbing nationalism and making it a theological truth.
In the occupied territories, the Islamic revival was strongest in the Gaza Strip. In 1973, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin started the Islamic Centre – mosque, clinic, sports club and front for the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. Yassin’s influence spread through Gaza and into the West Bank. The Brotherhood regarded all of Palestine as Islamic land and rejected any compromise with Israel. But it devoted its efforts to dawa, spreading the faith. Fighting Israel would come later, after reshaping Palestinian society from the bottom up.
Such patience made sense for a religious movement with a long view of history. But the Brotherhood took intense criticism from supporters of Fatah and the PLO’s other constituent groups, which filled the post-1967 vacuum by offering direct, violent struggle against Israel. Those groups were born on the “outside”, in the Palestinian diaspora. In December 1987, they were taken by surprise by the explosion of the “inside”, when frustration with the occupation erupted into the first intifada in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Brotherhood was also caught off guard. Yassin and his comrades decided they had a choice between irrelevance and switching direction. The would-be leaders had to follow the public or lose it. Using the name Hamas – “the Islamic Resistance Movement” – the Brotherhood chose to compete with the PLO for control of the uprising. Hamas’s original 1988 charter assigned the same exclusive role to jihad that the PLO once gave to armed struggle – wrapping revolutionary violence in a theological cloak. And it enshrined the idea that all of Palestine was a waqf, an eternal Islamic trust, which therefore could not be “relinquished entirely or partially.”
Nearly every account of Hamas history stresses that in contrast to the PLO, it was born on the “inside”. Paul McGeough’s new biography of Hamas’s present leader, Kill Khalid, is an exception. In McGeough’s account, Hamas’s true architect is Khalid Mishal, who left the West Bank village of Silwad at age 11, just after the Israeli conquest. With his mother and siblings, he joined his father, who was living in Kuwait. He grew up to become an Islamic activist within the country’s large Palestinian community.
In 1983, McGeough recounts, about 30 Brotherhood activists from the occupied territories and the Palestinian diaspora met secretly in Amman. There Mishal proposed that the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing seize the role of the vanguard of violent resistance against Israel. The PLO had been evicted the year before from Lebanon and Mishal believed that the moment was ripe to surpass the weakened secular organisation. Diaspora supporters would raise money from Arab governments and businessmen for the Muslim Brotherhood’s new effort. At first the funds financed Yassin’s schools and charitable projects. When the intifada broke out, McGeough quotes Mishal as saying, it was “the opportune moment to declare a project that was already born”. Those words suggest that from Kuwait, Mishal made the decision that the Muslim Brotherhood on the “inside” would switch from dawa to jihad.
It’s possible that McGeough has properly recast the history of Hamas. Equally likely, though, the strange shape of his book pushed him to portray Mishal as the movement’s central figure from its start.
The core of Kill Khalid is a 100-page riff on the Israeli attempt to assassinate Mishal on an Amman street in 1997, using a puff of poison from a fake camera that was absorbed through his ear. The attack was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following a series of Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem. In cold strategic terms, it was a remarkably foolish decision: a hit job in the capital of an Arab country that had signed a peace agreement with Israel. Two Mossad agents administered the poison, but failed to remain unnoticed; Mishal’s bodyguard caught them after a mad chase through the city. Afterward, Israel had to work desperately to salvage relations with King Hussein. Besides providing an antidote for Mishal, it released Ahmad Yassin from prison. Hamas received a significant boost in stature. So did Mishal, seen as the martyr who did not die. McGeough’s description of these events is classic espionage writing – quick-moving, detailed and suspenseful.
But to make this story worthy of a book, he has set it inside a biography of Mishal. And to justify that, he has emphasised the role of Mishal and the Palestinian “outside” in creating Hamas – though parts of his own narrative undercut that picture. His writing sheds little light on the forces that shaped Hamas or on the group’s synthesis of faith and nationalism.
Any biography suggests that history is a product not only of social forces but also of personalities. Yet at the end of his book, McGeough admits that “the Khalid Mishal who had risen through the ranks to speak with such authority… was a Palestinian enigma”. Unfortunately, that’s true. After 400 pages, we haven’t learnt what makes him tick.
What the book really teaches is that history is also shaped by rolls of the dice, bad bets and unintended consequences. When Mishal moved to Amman during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, he was an anonymous functionary, according to McGeough’s own account. The head of Hamas’s political bureau was Mousa Abu Marzook, a Gazan-raised, American-educated disciple of Yassin who moved control of the organisation to the safety of Amman after Israel jailed the sheikh in 1989. In 1995, as a sop to the United States and Israel, Jordan expelled Abu Marzook – who made his own ill-considered gamble. Rashly, he returned to the United States. There he was arrested and held nearly two years until Israel dropped an extradition request. Mishal took over as political bureau chief and effective head of Hamas. Abu Marzook’s mistake gave him his position. Israel’s mistake cemented it.
One more example of the influence of unintended consequences was provided by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s 1992 decision to deport 415 Islamic activists to Lebanon. As Israeli scholars Shaul Mishal (no relation to Khalid) and Avraham Sela noted in their book The Palestinian Hamas, a year of close contact with Hizbollah led Hamas to adopt the Shiite organisation’s trademark tactic: suicide bombings.
In 2006, Hamas bent its ideology to compete in elections in the Palestinian Authority, an institution created through an agreement with Israel. Entering electoral politics indicated that “Hamas is drifting toward moderation, not radicalism”, Ziad Abu-Amr told me at the time. “You don’t go into the [political] system to wage an all-out war against Israel.” That said, the movement was as unready as everyone else was for its victory, which put it under immense international pressure to recognise Israel in order to govern. The flow of foreign funds that the PA needed to operate was cut off. Fatah and Hamas slid toward violent conflict.
The events that led from Hamas’s electoral victory to its current position await a more coherent account than McGeough offers. Today, though, Hamas rules the besieged and shattered enclave of Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah-based government suppresses it in the West Bank. Based in Damascus, Mishal continues to head the organisation by remote control. In one sense, he has never been more powerful. Without a mechanism to include Hamas and Gaza, Barack Obama’s effort to revive the Palestinian-Israel diplomatic process and engineer a two-state solution will be stymied.
And yet, that is part of the reason that Hamas is besieged ideologically as well as physically. Israel failed last winter to overturn Hamas’s rule of Gaza by force. By the same measure, though, Hamas cannot even lift the siege by jihad – much less conquer Israel. Meanwhile, recent polls of Palestinians in the occupied territories show that backing for a two-state solution ranges from 55 to 61 per cent, more than twice the support for any other option. That solution is the most realistic path for Palestinians to achieve political independence – and to get there, Hamas must accede to the diplomatic process.
So to remain relevant, Hamas is again seeking to follow the public that it seeks to lead. Just as it had to bend its strategy to join the intifada in 1987, today it needs to reconcile its theology with the need for political compromise. In various statements over the past year, Mishal has adopted the positions generally ascribed to Hamas’s relatively moderate wing: in favour of creating a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines, next to Israel but without formally recognising it.
This is far from the movement’s original stance. Whether Mishal and Hamas can yet move far enough to join a diplomatic process remains to be seen, but the pressures are strong. Mishal’s personal rise may be partially due to accident; his movement’s rise was part of forces greater than itself. So, too, its current shift is a product of forces larger than Khalid Mishal.
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assasination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas
Paul McGeough
Quartet Books
Dh128
“When Israel occupied Jerusalem, I was 14,” Sheikh Jamil Hamami once told me. Hamami grew up in East Jerusalem. That week in June 1967, he had heard the promises on the radio that the Arab states would defeat Israel “in a few days, a few hours”. Instead came the Israeli advance. Hamami described the day that the Old City fell in a series of staccato images: “The black picture in my mind is seeing an Israeli soldier enter Al Aqsa… Near the Wailing Wall, I saw a soldier step on the Quran… A soldier told us it was forbidden to pray in Al Aqsa.”
Hamami later became one of the first leaders of Hamas in the West Bank, though he left the movement in 1995, believing that the time for “military action” had ended with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. His jagged memories of June 1967 allude to two of the reasons for the Islamic revival in the occupied territories – and for the birth of Hamas, for that organisation’s ascendance as a rival to the secular nationalist PLO and for its position today as one of the two power centres of riven Palestinian politics.
In Hamami’s emblematic account, Israel’s military victory in 1967 was an affront to Islam, represented most vividly by Israel’s control of the Al Aqsa mosque. But it also revealed the bankruptcy of the Arab states – chief among them Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Secular Arab nationalism had brought the Palestinians a second disaster. Islam was both a part of an identity under perceived threat and a potential replacement for discredited ideologies.
Indeed, Islamic activists gave an explanation halfway between sociology and theology for the outcome of the war, as the Palestinian political scientist Ziad Abu-Amr observed in his sympathetic study of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Islamic Fundamentalism in Gaza and the West Bank: Israel’s victory, Islamic groups claimed, “was the result of the adherence of the Jews to their religion, and… the Arabs’ defeat was caused by their failure to adhere to Islam”. (The explanation, ironically, ignored the intensely secular character of Israeli society in 1967.)
The return to faith that followed was incremental, seen more easily by those not in its midst. In 1999, I met in Nablus with a group of activists from left-wing Palestinian organisations. One woman had been deported from the West Bank by Israel in the early 1970s and had recently returned during the Oslo thaw. She wore slacks and a short-sleeve blouse; her hair was uncovered. That had been the style in Nablus when she was exiled, she said. Now, she continued, she was a stranger in the city of her birth, where the hijab and long, modest garments were de rigueur. Later that year, on the last Friday of Ramadan – as it turned out, the last Ramadan when Palestinians from the occupied territories had easy access to Al Aqsa – hundreds of thousands of people filled the open plaza behind the actual mosque building at the southern end of the Haram al Sharif. Before 1967, one Islamic activist told me, the number of worshippers was too small to fill the mosque building itself.
The local Palestinian religious revival was part of much wider patterns. The Arab defeat of 1967 created an ideological vacuum that Islam filled throughout the region. As Abu-Amr notes, the oil crisis of the 1970s enriched conservative regimes eager to promote Islam. The Iranian revolution of 1979 inspired Islamic activists as the Russian Revolution had once encouraged the left: Success was possible.
Yet the resurgence of Islam was itself part of an even larger trend, which the French scholar Gilles Kepel has labelled “the revenge of God”. The 1970s and 1980s saw the worldwide rise of radical movements that offered political programmes rooted in anti-modern interpretations of faith. In America, conservative Protestants emerged from political quietism to dominate the Republican Party. In Israel, the Gush Emunim settlement movement declared secular Zionism dead, anointed itself the new vanguard and tilted the entire national agenda rightward. That matched a common pattern: absorbing nationalism and making it a theological truth.
In the occupied territories, the Islamic revival was strongest in the Gaza Strip. In 1973, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin started the Islamic Centre – mosque, clinic, sports club and front for the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. Yassin’s influence spread through Gaza and into the West Bank. The Brotherhood regarded all of Palestine as Islamic land and rejected any compromise with Israel. But it devoted its efforts to dawa, spreading the faith. Fighting Israel would come later, after reshaping Palestinian society from the bottom up.
Such patience made sense for a religious movement with a long view of history. But the Brotherhood took intense criticism from supporters of Fatah and the PLO’s other constituent groups, which filled the post-1967 vacuum by offering direct, violent struggle against Israel. Those groups were born on the “outside”, in the Palestinian diaspora. In December 1987, they were taken by surprise by the explosion of the “inside”, when frustration with the occupation erupted into the first intifada in Gaza and the West Bank.
The Brotherhood was also caught off guard. Yassin and his comrades decided they had a choice between irrelevance and switching direction. The would-be leaders had to follow the public or lose it. Using the name Hamas – “the Islamic Resistance Movement” – the Brotherhood chose to compete with the PLO for control of the uprising. Hamas’s original 1988 charter assigned the same exclusive role to jihad that the PLO once gave to armed struggle – wrapping revolutionary violence in a theological cloak. And it enshrined the idea that all of Palestine was a waqf, an eternal Islamic trust, which therefore could not be “relinquished entirely or partially.”
Nearly every account of Hamas history stresses that in contrast to the PLO, it was born on the “inside”. Paul McGeough’s new biography of Hamas’s present leader, Kill Khalid, is an exception. In McGeough’s account, Hamas’s true architect is Khalid Mishal, who left the West Bank village of Silwad at age 11, just after the Israeli conquest. With his mother and siblings, he joined his father, who was living in Kuwait. He grew up to become an Islamic activist within the country’s large Palestinian community.
In 1983, McGeough recounts, about 30 Brotherhood activists from the occupied territories and the Palestinian diaspora met secretly in Amman. There Mishal proposed that the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing seize the role of the vanguard of violent resistance against Israel. The PLO had been evicted the year before from Lebanon and Mishal believed that the moment was ripe to surpass the weakened secular organisation. Diaspora supporters would raise money from Arab governments and businessmen for the Muslim Brotherhood’s new effort. At first the funds financed Yassin’s schools and charitable projects. When the intifada broke out, McGeough quotes Mishal as saying, it was “the opportune moment to declare a project that was already born”. Those words suggest that from Kuwait, Mishal made the decision that the Muslim Brotherhood on the “inside” would switch from dawa to jihad.
It’s possible that McGeough has properly recast the history of Hamas. Equally likely, though, the strange shape of his book pushed him to portray Mishal as the movement’s central figure from its start.
The core of Kill Khalid is a 100-page riff on the Israeli attempt to assassinate Mishal on an Amman street in 1997, using a puff of poison from a fake camera that was absorbed through his ear. The attack was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following a series of Hamas suicide bombings in Jerusalem. In cold strategic terms, it was a remarkably foolish decision: a hit job in the capital of an Arab country that had signed a peace agreement with Israel. Two Mossad agents administered the poison, but failed to remain unnoticed; Mishal’s bodyguard caught them after a mad chase through the city. Afterward, Israel had to work desperately to salvage relations with King Hussein. Besides providing an antidote for Mishal, it released Ahmad Yassin from prison. Hamas received a significant boost in stature. So did Mishal, seen as the martyr who did not die. McGeough’s description of these events is classic espionage writing – quick-moving, detailed and suspenseful.
But to make this story worthy of a book, he has set it inside a biography of Mishal. And to justify that, he has emphasised the role of Mishal and the Palestinian “outside” in creating Hamas – though parts of his own narrative undercut that picture. His writing sheds little light on the forces that shaped Hamas or on the group’s synthesis of faith and nationalism.
Any biography suggests that history is a product not only of social forces but also of personalities. Yet at the end of his book, McGeough admits that “the Khalid Mishal who had risen through the ranks to speak with such authority… was a Palestinian enigma”. Unfortunately, that’s true. After 400 pages, we haven’t learnt what makes him tick.
What the book really teaches is that history is also shaped by rolls of the dice, bad bets and unintended consequences. When Mishal moved to Amman during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, he was an anonymous functionary, according to McGeough’s own account. The head of Hamas’s political bureau was Mousa Abu Marzook, a Gazan-raised, American-educated disciple of Yassin who moved control of the organisation to the safety of Amman after Israel jailed the sheikh in 1989. In 1995, as a sop to the United States and Israel, Jordan expelled Abu Marzook – who made his own ill-considered gamble. Rashly, he returned to the United States. There he was arrested and held nearly two years until Israel dropped an extradition request. Mishal took over as political bureau chief and effective head of Hamas. Abu Marzook’s mistake gave him his position. Israel’s mistake cemented it.
One more example of the influence of unintended consequences was provided by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s 1992 decision to deport 415 Islamic activists to Lebanon. As Israeli scholars Shaul Mishal (no relation to Khalid) and Avraham Sela noted in their book The Palestinian Hamas, a year of close contact with Hizbollah led Hamas to adopt the Shiite organisation’s trademark tactic: suicide bombings.
In 2006, Hamas bent its ideology to compete in elections in the Palestinian Authority, an institution created through an agreement with Israel. Entering electoral politics indicated that “Hamas is drifting toward moderation, not radicalism”, Ziad Abu-Amr told me at the time. “You don’t go into the [political] system to wage an all-out war against Israel.” That said, the movement was as unready as everyone else was for its victory, which put it under immense international pressure to recognise Israel in order to govern. The flow of foreign funds that the PA needed to operate was cut off. Fatah and Hamas slid toward violent conflict.
The events that led from Hamas’s electoral victory to its current position await a more coherent account than McGeough offers. Today, though, Hamas rules the besieged and shattered enclave of Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah-based government suppresses it in the West Bank. Based in Damascus, Mishal continues to head the organisation by remote control. In one sense, he has never been more powerful. Without a mechanism to include Hamas and Gaza, Barack Obama’s effort to revive the Palestinian-Israel diplomatic process and engineer a two-state solution will be stymied.
And yet, that is part of the reason that Hamas is besieged ideologically as well as physically. Israel failed last winter to overturn Hamas’s rule of Gaza by force. By the same measure, though, Hamas cannot even lift the siege by jihad – much less conquer Israel. Meanwhile, recent polls of Palestinians in the occupied territories show that backing for a two-state solution ranges from 55 to 61 per cent, more than twice the support for any other option. That solution is the most realistic path for Palestinians to achieve political independence – and to get there, Hamas must accede to the diplomatic process.
So to remain relevant, Hamas is again seeking to follow the public that it seeks to lead. Just as it had to bend its strategy to join the intifada in 1987, today it needs to reconcile its theology with the need for political compromise. In various statements over the past year, Mishal has adopted the positions generally ascribed to Hamas’s relatively moderate wing: in favour of creating a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines, next to Israel but without formally recognising it.
This is far from the movement’s original stance. Whether Mishal and Hamas can yet move far enough to join a diplomatic process remains to be seen, but the pressures are strong. Mishal’s personal rise may be partially due to accident; his movement’s rise was part of forces greater than itself. So, too, its current shift is a product of forces larger than Khalid Mishal.
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect. He blogs at southjerusalem.com.
Friday, 17 July 2009
Israel to drop Arabic names
NAZARETH, ISRAEL // Thousands of road signs are the latest front in Israel’s battle to erase the Arab heritage from much of the Holy Land, according to critics in both Israel and the wider Arab world.
Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardised”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.
Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.
Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.
Arab leaders are concerned that Mr Katz’s plan offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.
“This decision comes in the framework of a series of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the ‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”
Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, have responded with alarm to a policy they believe is designed to make them ever less visible.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if he thinks that changing a few words can erase the existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”
The transport ministry has made little effort to conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.
In announcing the move on Monday, Mr Katz, a hawkish member of Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said he objected to Palestinians using the names of communities that existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.
“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. “This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”
Other Israeli officials have played down the political significance of Mr Katz’s decision. A transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike.”
“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognise?”
Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.
“I was among those who intervened at the time to get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”
He said Mr Katz’s scheme would push this process even further by requiring not only the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, but the replication of the Hebrew spelling as well. “It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult,” he said.
Meir Margalit, a former Jerusalem councillor, said official policy was to make the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem as invisible as possible, including by ignoring their neighbourhoods on many signs.
The transport ministry’s plans for the West Bank are less clear. In his announcement Mr Katz said Palestinian-controlled areas of the territory would still be free to use proper Arabic place names. But he hinted that signs in the 60 per cent of the West Bank under Israeli military rule would be Hebraised, too.
That could mean Palestinians driving across parts of the West Bank to the Palestinian city of Nablus, for example, will have to look for the Hebrew name “Shechem” spelt out in Arabic.
Mr Benvenisti said that, after Israel’s establishment in 1948, a naming committee was given the task of erasing thousands of Arab place names, including those of hills, valleys and springs, and creating Hebrew names. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told the committee: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.”
In addition, the Arabic names of more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 war were lost as Jewish communities took their place.
Israel’s surviving Palestinian minority, today one-fifth of the population, have had to battle in the courts for the inclusion of Arabic on road signs, despite Arabic being an official language.
Many signs on national highways were provided only in Hebrew and English until the courts in 1999 insisted Arabic be included. Three years later the courts ruled that Arabic must also be included on signs in cities where a significant number of Arabs live.
However, as the political climate has shifted rightward in Israel, there has been a backlash, including an unsuccessful bid by legislators to end Arabic’s status as an official language last year.
Recently the Israeli media revealed that nationalist groups have been spraying over Arabic names on road signs, especially in the Jerusalem area. Israel has also antagonised Palestinians in both Israel and the West Bank by naming roads after right-wing figures.
The main motorway in the Jordan Valley, which runs through Palestinian territory but is used by Israelis to drive between northern Israel and Jerusalem, is named “Gandhi’s Road” – not for the Indian spiritual leader but after the nickname of an Israeli general, Rehavam Zeevi, who called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Greater Israel.
Israel Katz, the transport minister, announced this week that signs on all major roads in Israel, East Jerusalem and possibly parts of the West Bank would be “standardised”, converting English and Arabic place names into straight transliterations of the Hebrew name.
Currently, road signs include the place name as it is traditionally rendered in all three languages.
Under the new scheme, the Arab identity of important Palestinian communities will be obscured: Jerusalem, or “al Quds” in Arabic, will be Hebraised to “Yerushalayim”; Nazareth, or “al Nasra” in Arabic, the city of Jesus’s childhood, will become “Natzrat”; and Jaffa, the port city after which Palestine’s oranges were named, will be “Yafo”.
Arab leaders are concerned that Mr Katz’s plan offers a foretaste of the demand by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state.
On Wednesday, Mohammed Sabih, a senior official at the Arab League, called the initiative “racist and dangerous”.
“This decision comes in the framework of a series of steps in Israel aimed at implementing the ‘Jewish State’ slogan on the ground.”
Palestinians in Israel and Jerusalem, meanwhile, have responded with alarm to a policy they believe is designed to make them ever less visible.
Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator in the Israeli parliament, said: “Minister Katz is mistaken if he thinks that changing a few words can erase the existence of the Arab people or their connection to Israel.”
The transport ministry has made little effort to conceal the political motivation behind its policy of Hebraising road signs.
In announcing the move on Monday, Mr Katz, a hawkish member of Likud, Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing party, said he objected to Palestinians using the names of communities that existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948.
“I will not allow that on our signs,” he said. “This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem into Palestinian al Quds.”
Other Israeli officials have played down the political significance of Mr Katz’s decision. A transport department spokesman, Yeshaayahu Ronen, said: “The lack of uniform spelling on signs has been a problem for those speaking foreign languages, citizens and tourists alike.”
“That’s ridiculous,” responded Tareq Shehadeh, head of the Nazareth Cultural and Tourism Association. “Does the ministry really think it’s helping tourists by renaming Nazareth, one of the most famous places in the world, ‘Natzrat’, a Hebrew name only Israeli Jews recognise?”
Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said Israel had begun interfering with the Arabic on the signs for East Jerusalem as soon as it occupied the city in 1967. It invented a new word, “Urshalim”, that was supposed to be the Arabic form of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalayim”.
“I was among those who intervened at the time to get the word ‘al Quds’ placed on signs, too, after ‘Urshalim’ and separated by a hyphen. But over the years ‘al Quds’ was demoted to brackets and nowadays it’s not included on new signs at all.”
He said Mr Katz’s scheme would push this process even further by requiring not only the Arabic equivalent of the Hebrew word for Jerusalem, but the replication of the Hebrew spelling as well. “It’s completely chauvinistic and an insult,” he said.
Meir Margalit, a former Jerusalem councillor, said official policy was to make the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem as invisible as possible, including by ignoring their neighbourhoods on many signs.
The transport ministry’s plans for the West Bank are less clear. In his announcement Mr Katz said Palestinian-controlled areas of the territory would still be free to use proper Arabic place names. But he hinted that signs in the 60 per cent of the West Bank under Israeli military rule would be Hebraised, too.
That could mean Palestinians driving across parts of the West Bank to the Palestinian city of Nablus, for example, will have to look for the Hebrew name “Shechem” spelt out in Arabic.
Mr Benvenisti said that, after Israel’s establishment in 1948, a naming committee was given the task of erasing thousands of Arab place names, including those of hills, valleys and springs, and creating Hebrew names. The country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, told the committee: “We are obliged to remove the Arabic names for reasons of state.”
In addition, the Arabic names of more than 400 Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 war were lost as Jewish communities took their place.
Israel’s surviving Palestinian minority, today one-fifth of the population, have had to battle in the courts for the inclusion of Arabic on road signs, despite Arabic being an official language.
Many signs on national highways were provided only in Hebrew and English until the courts in 1999 insisted Arabic be included. Three years later the courts ruled that Arabic must also be included on signs in cities where a significant number of Arabs live.
However, as the political climate has shifted rightward in Israel, there has been a backlash, including an unsuccessful bid by legislators to end Arabic’s status as an official language last year.
Recently the Israeli media revealed that nationalist groups have been spraying over Arabic names on road signs, especially in the Jerusalem area. Israel has also antagonised Palestinians in both Israel and the West Bank by naming roads after right-wing figures.
The main motorway in the Jordan Valley, which runs through Palestinian territory but is used by Israelis to drive between northern Israel and Jerusalem, is named “Gandhi’s Road” – not for the Indian spiritual leader but after the nickname of an Israeli general, Rehavam Zeevi, who called for the expulsion of Palestinians from Greater Israel.
Monday, 13 July 2009
'Revolution until victory'
PLO: HISTORY OF A REVOLUTION
'Revolution until victory'
By Omar al-Issawi, documentary filmmaker
The PLO was created in 1964 and led by Yasser Arafat for 40 years
Filmmaker Omar al-Issawi spent five years making his documentary on the history of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In that time, he conducted 150 hours of interviews on four continents - including the last 'historical' interview with Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, and the first interviews with key operatives from the Black September Organisation.
In the following account, he discusses the making of PLO: History of a Revolution.
The six-part series begins airing on Al Jazeera English from Monday, July 13, at 0530GMT.
I had just stepped into Yasser Arafat's office in Ramallah. There, behind his desk among piles of papers and documents sat the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the PLO.
Arafat also doubled as the president of the Palestinian Authority, the first democratically-elected president of the Palestinian territories, and probably the first leader chosen by popular vote in the Arab world.
But to me he was first and foremost the PLO chief and for almost four decades the leader of the Palestinian revolution.
Arafat's trademark keffiyeh, or Arab headdress, had become a symbol of Palestine throughout the world.
He was, according to Nelson Mandela "an icon in the proper sense of the word".
What some may not know is Arafat's trademark phrase, "revolution until victory". Coined in the late 1960s, it has been used by Palestinians for decades.
Arafat the 'icon'
My quest for an interview with Arafat began when I decided that I wanted to produce a major documentary on the PLO as a follow-up to a previous film I had made on the Lebanese civil war.
I knew that I had to get Arafat to talk to me.
Arafat had died by the time the documentary was completed [GALLO/GETTY]
Arafat sat behind his desk wearing his large reading glasses. I stood in front of him. His aide, Nabil Abu Rudeina, had told me Arafat "did not do history interviews". I said I wanted to try.
Arafat did not seem to be interested and barely glanced up from the document he was examining.
I played my last card. "May I call you Abu Ammar?"
Abu Ammar was his nom de guerre. He looked up and smiled, "Of course, of course, please have a seat".
I had secured an interview with the Palestinian leader.
It was the last "history of the PLO" interview Arafat would give before being subjected by the Israelis to one of the harshest and most relentless sieges endured by a leader in modern times.
End of an era
By the time the documentary was completed, I had conducted over 150 hours of interviews on four continents and accumulated more than 50 hours of archive footage and dozens of still pictures and de-classified documents.
During this time, however, three major interviewees had died: Yasser Arafat, Abu al-Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, and Mamdouh Nofal, the former military commander of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
In Washington, DC, during the set-up for an interview with Robert Malley, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, he asked me who I had interviewed.
I rattled off a few names and then concluded: "I interviewed Arafat and now he's dead, Abu al-Abbas, he's dead too, and Mamdouh Nofal who has died since." Silence.
Then Malley said: "What do you want to ask me first?"
"How's your health?" interjected my sound man, Brian. We all broke up laughing.
Excruciating process
It was a rare moment of levity in what seemed to be at times an excruciating process.
In two separate incidents, for example, I was made to cool my heels at airports; once at London Heathrow and the other time at Washington Dulles.
IN DEPTH
Special report - A Question of Arab Unity
Special report - 60 Years of Division
Special report - Crisis in Gaza
Israel: Rise of the Right
PLO: History of a Revolution
At Heathrow, a customs officer wanted all kinds of guarantees - the involvement of a local clearing company and a substantial cash deposit - that I would leave the UK with all the equipment I had brought with me.
I had timed my arrival just right and come in on a weekend which did not help matters.
After more than 90 minutes, the officer suddenly remembered that he had a form which would meet my requirements, because "an American film crew had filled one just like it".
At Washington Dulles airport, the immigration officer did not even bother to return my greeting.
He highlighted in yellow the arrivals form I had filled in, flipped my passport and the form back at me and gave me a blank look. Maybe I didn't exist.
"What?" I asked.
He motioned me toward an as yet undetermined location in the arrivals hall.
I persisted: "I don't understand."
He told me to report to an area to the left of customs. And there I and many others waited for about two hours before being allowed into the US.
VIP treatment
It was a completely different story in Jordan where, from the moment of my arrival, I was treated as a VIP.
I was there to interview the former crown prince of the Hashemite kingdom and was treated as a guest of the royal palaces - the handwritten notation in my passport said so.
My Lebanese cameraman and sound-man arriving via the land border from Syria were stunned to be accorded so much deferential attention.
My arrival in Baghdad in the dying months of the Iraqi Baathist government was an almost surreal experience.
I had entered a country that seemed to accept that it was now living on borrowed time.
I had flown into Saddam International Airport and had my passport stamped there. Today that somewhat incomplete stamp has become a part of history.
So has one of the people I had come to Iraq to interview.
From drama to tragedy
Black September kidnapped members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team [GALLO/GETTY]
I was to meet Muhammad Abbas Zeidan, more commonly known as Abu al-Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF).
It was the PLF which in 1985 had hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the Mediterranean.
The drama that unfolded soon turned to tragedy when the Palestinian gunmen killed and threw overboard a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer.
After one of the recording sessions (long interviews were always recorded over several sessions) and over dinner at his house Abu al-Abbas was very open.
He said he very much regretted the Achille Lauro affair. I said perhaps his men were incompetent to begin with; he didn't disagree.
Abu al-Abbas said that if someone were to tell him today that they were going to hijack an aircraft, he would break their arms and legs.
I was sure then that he was more than capable of doing that.
He also made a revelation related to the Achille Lauro affair that perhaps one day I will be able to publish.
And then I detected worry about the future, if not fear.
Fearful future
Abu al-Abbas knew, like almost everyone else, that the US was about to invade Iraq, the country where the Palestinian leader had sought refuge.
He said that during the Clinton administration he was assured that the Achille Lauro case had been dropped.
"But you never know with the Americans," he added.
"Especially Americans like George Bush [the then US president]," I said, and we left it at that.
The Americans quickly apprehended Abu al-Abbas and he died in US custody the following year.
I had been the last journalist to interview him.
Controversial interviews
I am often asked whether I have any reservations about interviewing controversial figures. The answer is no.
For this documentary on the PLO I interviewed Abu Daoud, the man on whose shoulders the Palestinian Black September gunmen had literally and physically climbed to gain access to the Olympic village in Munich in 1972.
I believe I was also the first journalist ever to interview on film one of the assassins of the late Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal.
"We shot him 14 times," Jawad Abu Azizah of Black September told me 35 years after he had pulled the trigger.
End of the road
It has just dawned on me as I write this account that it brings me closer to the end of the road after several years of very hard and often lonely work documenting the history of the PLO.
In 2008 and 2009, Al Jazeera broadcast the original Arabic version, all 13 one-hour parts of it.
That production has been trimmed to six half-hour episodes on Al Jazeera English, condensing the Arabic version without detracting from the content.
Throughout the long production process of this major documentary I have received Al Jazeera's full backing.
The network has been exemplary in its support. I doubt I would have had the editorial and directorial freedom from any other broadcaster.
Today, as I watch the unfolding events in the Palestinian territories and look back on the history of the PLO I still have no doubt that there will continue to be a revolution until victory.
'Revolution until victory'
By Omar al-Issawi, documentary filmmaker
The PLO was created in 1964 and led by Yasser Arafat for 40 years
Filmmaker Omar al-Issawi spent five years making his documentary on the history of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
In that time, he conducted 150 hours of interviews on four continents - including the last 'historical' interview with Yasser Arafat, the PLO leader, and the first interviews with key operatives from the Black September Organisation.
In the following account, he discusses the making of PLO: History of a Revolution.
The six-part series begins airing on Al Jazeera English from Monday, July 13, at 0530GMT.
I had just stepped into Yasser Arafat's office in Ramallah. There, behind his desk among piles of papers and documents sat the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the PLO.
Arafat also doubled as the president of the Palestinian Authority, the first democratically-elected president of the Palestinian territories, and probably the first leader chosen by popular vote in the Arab world.
But to me he was first and foremost the PLO chief and for almost four decades the leader of the Palestinian revolution.
Arafat's trademark keffiyeh, or Arab headdress, had become a symbol of Palestine throughout the world.
He was, according to Nelson Mandela "an icon in the proper sense of the word".
What some may not know is Arafat's trademark phrase, "revolution until victory". Coined in the late 1960s, it has been used by Palestinians for decades.
Arafat the 'icon'
My quest for an interview with Arafat began when I decided that I wanted to produce a major documentary on the PLO as a follow-up to a previous film I had made on the Lebanese civil war.
I knew that I had to get Arafat to talk to me.
Arafat had died by the time the documentary was completed [GALLO/GETTY]
Arafat sat behind his desk wearing his large reading glasses. I stood in front of him. His aide, Nabil Abu Rudeina, had told me Arafat "did not do history interviews". I said I wanted to try.
Arafat did not seem to be interested and barely glanced up from the document he was examining.
I played my last card. "May I call you Abu Ammar?"
Abu Ammar was his nom de guerre. He looked up and smiled, "Of course, of course, please have a seat".
I had secured an interview with the Palestinian leader.
It was the last "history of the PLO" interview Arafat would give before being subjected by the Israelis to one of the harshest and most relentless sieges endured by a leader in modern times.
End of an era
By the time the documentary was completed, I had conducted over 150 hours of interviews on four continents and accumulated more than 50 hours of archive footage and dozens of still pictures and de-classified documents.
During this time, however, three major interviewees had died: Yasser Arafat, Abu al-Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, and Mamdouh Nofal, the former military commander of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
In Washington, DC, during the set-up for an interview with Robert Malley, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, he asked me who I had interviewed.
I rattled off a few names and then concluded: "I interviewed Arafat and now he's dead, Abu al-Abbas, he's dead too, and Mamdouh Nofal who has died since." Silence.
Then Malley said: "What do you want to ask me first?"
"How's your health?" interjected my sound man, Brian. We all broke up laughing.
Excruciating process
It was a rare moment of levity in what seemed to be at times an excruciating process.
In two separate incidents, for example, I was made to cool my heels at airports; once at London Heathrow and the other time at Washington Dulles.
IN DEPTH
Special report - A Question of Arab Unity
Special report - 60 Years of Division
Special report - Crisis in Gaza
Israel: Rise of the Right
PLO: History of a Revolution
At Heathrow, a customs officer wanted all kinds of guarantees - the involvement of a local clearing company and a substantial cash deposit - that I would leave the UK with all the equipment I had brought with me.
I had timed my arrival just right and come in on a weekend which did not help matters.
After more than 90 minutes, the officer suddenly remembered that he had a form which would meet my requirements, because "an American film crew had filled one just like it".
At Washington Dulles airport, the immigration officer did not even bother to return my greeting.
He highlighted in yellow the arrivals form I had filled in, flipped my passport and the form back at me and gave me a blank look. Maybe I didn't exist.
"What?" I asked.
He motioned me toward an as yet undetermined location in the arrivals hall.
I persisted: "I don't understand."
He told me to report to an area to the left of customs. And there I and many others waited for about two hours before being allowed into the US.
VIP treatment
It was a completely different story in Jordan where, from the moment of my arrival, I was treated as a VIP.
I was there to interview the former crown prince of the Hashemite kingdom and was treated as a guest of the royal palaces - the handwritten notation in my passport said so.
My Lebanese cameraman and sound-man arriving via the land border from Syria were stunned to be accorded so much deferential attention.
My arrival in Baghdad in the dying months of the Iraqi Baathist government was an almost surreal experience.
I had entered a country that seemed to accept that it was now living on borrowed time.
I had flown into Saddam International Airport and had my passport stamped there. Today that somewhat incomplete stamp has become a part of history.
So has one of the people I had come to Iraq to interview.
From drama to tragedy
Black September kidnapped members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team [GALLO/GETTY]
I was to meet Muhammad Abbas Zeidan, more commonly known as Abu al-Abbas, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF).
It was the PLF which in 1985 had hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship in the Mediterranean.
The drama that unfolded soon turned to tragedy when the Palestinian gunmen killed and threw overboard a wheelchair-bound American Jew, Leon Klinghoffer.
After one of the recording sessions (long interviews were always recorded over several sessions) and over dinner at his house Abu al-Abbas was very open.
He said he very much regretted the Achille Lauro affair. I said perhaps his men were incompetent to begin with; he didn't disagree.
Abu al-Abbas said that if someone were to tell him today that they were going to hijack an aircraft, he would break their arms and legs.
I was sure then that he was more than capable of doing that.
He also made a revelation related to the Achille Lauro affair that perhaps one day I will be able to publish.
And then I detected worry about the future, if not fear.
Fearful future
Abu al-Abbas knew, like almost everyone else, that the US was about to invade Iraq, the country where the Palestinian leader had sought refuge.
He said that during the Clinton administration he was assured that the Achille Lauro case had been dropped.
"But you never know with the Americans," he added.
"Especially Americans like George Bush [the then US president]," I said, and we left it at that.
The Americans quickly apprehended Abu al-Abbas and he died in US custody the following year.
I had been the last journalist to interview him.
Controversial interviews
I am often asked whether I have any reservations about interviewing controversial figures. The answer is no.
For this documentary on the PLO I interviewed Abu Daoud, the man on whose shoulders the Palestinian Black September gunmen had literally and physically climbed to gain access to the Olympic village in Munich in 1972.
I believe I was also the first journalist ever to interview on film one of the assassins of the late Jordanian prime minister, Wasfi al-Tal.
"We shot him 14 times," Jawad Abu Azizah of Black September told me 35 years after he had pulled the trigger.
End of the road
It has just dawned on me as I write this account that it brings me closer to the end of the road after several years of very hard and often lonely work documenting the history of the PLO.
In 2008 and 2009, Al Jazeera broadcast the original Arabic version, all 13 one-hour parts of it.
That production has been trimmed to six half-hour episodes on Al Jazeera English, condensing the Arabic version without detracting from the content.
Throughout the long production process of this major documentary I have received Al Jazeera's full backing.
The network has been exemplary in its support. I doubt I would have had the editorial and directorial freedom from any other broadcaster.
Today, as I watch the unfolding events in the Palestinian territories and look back on the history of the PLO I still have no doubt that there will continue to be a revolution until victory.
Monday, 8 June 2009
‘Loyalty oath’ to keep Arabs out of Galilee town
MISGAV, ISRAEL // A community in northern Israel has changed its bylaws to demand that new residents pledge support for “Zionism, Jewish heritage and settlement of the land” in a thinly veiled attempt to block Arab applicants from gaining admission.
Critics are calling the bylaw, adopted by Manof, home to 170 Jewish families in Galilee, a local “loyalty oath” similar to a national scheme recently proposed by the far-Right party of the government minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Other Jewish communities in the central Galilee – falling under the umbrella of a regional council known as Misgav – are preparing similar bylaws in response to a court petition filed by an Arab couple hoping to build a home in Misgav.
“It looks very much like this is being co-ordinated by the Misgav council in an attempt to pre-empt the court ruling,” said Ronin Ben Ari, resident of another Misgav community, Mikhmanim, and an opponent of the bylaw change.
Manof’s move comes in the wake of efforts by Ahmed and Fatina Zbeidat, who live in the neighbouring Arab town of Sakhnin, to win admission to the Misgav community of Rakafet.
Traditionally some 700 rural communities in Israel, including 30 in Misgav, have weeded out Arab applicants by issuing automatic rejections through special vetting committees. Arab citizens make up one-fifth of the country’s population.
Click here to find out more!
According to a legal rights group, rural communities, which are home to only five per cent of the population but have control over four-fifths of the countryside, are seen by the state as a bulwark against Arabs gaining access to what are called “national lands”.
However, the vetting system has been under threat since a court ruling in 2000 that required the committees to consider Arab applicants and justify their decisions.
In line with the ruling, the Zbeidats demanded the right to take a suitability test when their application was turned down in 2006. Examiners found Fatina too “individualistic” for life in a small community while her husband lacked “knowledge of sophisticated interpersonal relations”.
The Zbeidats then petitioned the courts against the use of vetting committees, saying they enforced “blatant discrimination” against Arab applicants.
Earlier this year, in an indication that the court was preparing to back them, it demanded that the attorney-general explain why the vetting committees should continue.
“There is little doubt that many residents of Misgav are panicking about the court case,” said Mr Ben Ari, who heads a small dissident group called Alternative Voice in the Galilee.
He added that Ron Shani, who was elected Misgav’s mayor late last year, made opposition to the Zbeidats’ bid to live in Rakafet a major platform in his campaign.
Mr Shani defended the bylaw change last week to the Israeli media. “The council’s position is that it is appropriate to strengthen the character of the community – a community in which Zionist values and Jewish heritage stand at the heart of its way of life. We don’t see this as racism in any way.”
Mr Ben Ari said: “There is a widely held feeling in Misgav that changing the bylaws is a legitimate way for the Jewish minority in the Galilee to defend itself against an Arab and Islamic danger.
“The residents here are not right-wing types like Lieberman. They see themselves as liberals and in fact are made very uncomfortable by the Lieberman comparison.”
A bill proposed by Mr Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party that conditioned citizenship on declaring loyalty to a Jewish state was rejected by a ministerial committee last week.
The bylaw, accepted by an overwhelming majority in Manof, stipulates that applicants must share “the values of the Zionist movement, Jewish heritage, settlement of the Land of Israel ... and observance of Jewish holidays”.
It also proposes that local children be encouraged to join the Zionist youth movement and the Israeli army.
A similarly worded proposal will come before another Misgav community, Yuvalim, later this month.
One resident opposed to the change, Arik Kirschenbaum, told the liberal Haaretz newspaper last week: “It suddenly seems as if we adopted bylaws from the settlements.”
Residents of Manof have been quoted in the Israeli media decrying accusations of racism.
“It’s unpleasant and even offensive to wake up one morning and find that you’ve turned into Lieberman,” said Alon Mayer, pointing out that Yisrael Beiteinu won only 2.5 per cent of Manof’s vote in the February general election.
Several residents were reported to fear that living alongside Arabs might lead to ethnic tensions and sectarian violence.
Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the Adalah legal rights group who is representing the Zbeidats, said: “There is nothing unique or special about the way of life in these communities to justify this kind of restriction on admission.
“Rather, the purpose of the selection system is to make sure 80 per cent of the territory inside Israel is not accessible to Arabs, that the control of public resources stays exclusively in Jewish hands.”
The Zbeidats’ application was submitted after they were unable to find a building plot in Sakhnin. The town’s young couples face increasing difficulties building homes after much of Sakhnin’s land was turned over to Misgav’s jurisdiction.
Sakhnin officials point out that its 25,000 inhabitants have only one-twentieth of the land available to the 20,000 residents of Misgav’s 30 communities. An appeal by Sakhnin that it be awarded some of Misgav’s land was rejected by a boundary commission in 2005.
Misgav promotes itself, in the words of its website, as a model of “ethnic pluralism” because it includes 5,000 Bedouin.
However, critics note that Misgav’s Bedouin live in a handful of separate communities deprived of the land available to the Jewish communities.
The Bedouin inhabitants are generally denied basic services such as water and electricity, as well as schools and medical clinics. In one, Arab al Naim, the inhabitants are forced to live in tin shacks because permanent structures are demolished by the state.
Last week, three members of the Israeli parliament introduced a bill stipulating that vetting committees should assess candidates’ “suitability to the community’s way of life and social fabric”. The legislators said the bill would help in “maintaining the Zionist vision”.
Critics are calling the bylaw, adopted by Manof, home to 170 Jewish families in Galilee, a local “loyalty oath” similar to a national scheme recently proposed by the far-Right party of the government minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Other Jewish communities in the central Galilee – falling under the umbrella of a regional council known as Misgav – are preparing similar bylaws in response to a court petition filed by an Arab couple hoping to build a home in Misgav.
“It looks very much like this is being co-ordinated by the Misgav council in an attempt to pre-empt the court ruling,” said Ronin Ben Ari, resident of another Misgav community, Mikhmanim, and an opponent of the bylaw change.
Manof’s move comes in the wake of efforts by Ahmed and Fatina Zbeidat, who live in the neighbouring Arab town of Sakhnin, to win admission to the Misgav community of Rakafet.
Traditionally some 700 rural communities in Israel, including 30 in Misgav, have weeded out Arab applicants by issuing automatic rejections through special vetting committees. Arab citizens make up one-fifth of the country’s population.
Click here to find out more!
According to a legal rights group, rural communities, which are home to only five per cent of the population but have control over four-fifths of the countryside, are seen by the state as a bulwark against Arabs gaining access to what are called “national lands”.
However, the vetting system has been under threat since a court ruling in 2000 that required the committees to consider Arab applicants and justify their decisions.
In line with the ruling, the Zbeidats demanded the right to take a suitability test when their application was turned down in 2006. Examiners found Fatina too “individualistic” for life in a small community while her husband lacked “knowledge of sophisticated interpersonal relations”.
The Zbeidats then petitioned the courts against the use of vetting committees, saying they enforced “blatant discrimination” against Arab applicants.
Earlier this year, in an indication that the court was preparing to back them, it demanded that the attorney-general explain why the vetting committees should continue.
“There is little doubt that many residents of Misgav are panicking about the court case,” said Mr Ben Ari, who heads a small dissident group called Alternative Voice in the Galilee.
He added that Ron Shani, who was elected Misgav’s mayor late last year, made opposition to the Zbeidats’ bid to live in Rakafet a major platform in his campaign.
Mr Shani defended the bylaw change last week to the Israeli media. “The council’s position is that it is appropriate to strengthen the character of the community – a community in which Zionist values and Jewish heritage stand at the heart of its way of life. We don’t see this as racism in any way.”
Mr Ben Ari said: “There is a widely held feeling in Misgav that changing the bylaws is a legitimate way for the Jewish minority in the Galilee to defend itself against an Arab and Islamic danger.
“The residents here are not right-wing types like Lieberman. They see themselves as liberals and in fact are made very uncomfortable by the Lieberman comparison.”
A bill proposed by Mr Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party that conditioned citizenship on declaring loyalty to a Jewish state was rejected by a ministerial committee last week.
The bylaw, accepted by an overwhelming majority in Manof, stipulates that applicants must share “the values of the Zionist movement, Jewish heritage, settlement of the Land of Israel ... and observance of Jewish holidays”.
It also proposes that local children be encouraged to join the Zionist youth movement and the Israeli army.
A similarly worded proposal will come before another Misgav community, Yuvalim, later this month.
One resident opposed to the change, Arik Kirschenbaum, told the liberal Haaretz newspaper last week: “It suddenly seems as if we adopted bylaws from the settlements.”
Residents of Manof have been quoted in the Israeli media decrying accusations of racism.
“It’s unpleasant and even offensive to wake up one morning and find that you’ve turned into Lieberman,” said Alon Mayer, pointing out that Yisrael Beiteinu won only 2.5 per cent of Manof’s vote in the February general election.
Several residents were reported to fear that living alongside Arabs might lead to ethnic tensions and sectarian violence.
Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with the Adalah legal rights group who is representing the Zbeidats, said: “There is nothing unique or special about the way of life in these communities to justify this kind of restriction on admission.
“Rather, the purpose of the selection system is to make sure 80 per cent of the territory inside Israel is not accessible to Arabs, that the control of public resources stays exclusively in Jewish hands.”
The Zbeidats’ application was submitted after they were unable to find a building plot in Sakhnin. The town’s young couples face increasing difficulties building homes after much of Sakhnin’s land was turned over to Misgav’s jurisdiction.
Sakhnin officials point out that its 25,000 inhabitants have only one-twentieth of the land available to the 20,000 residents of Misgav’s 30 communities. An appeal by Sakhnin that it be awarded some of Misgav’s land was rejected by a boundary commission in 2005.
Misgav promotes itself, in the words of its website, as a model of “ethnic pluralism” because it includes 5,000 Bedouin.
However, critics note that Misgav’s Bedouin live in a handful of separate communities deprived of the land available to the Jewish communities.
The Bedouin inhabitants are generally denied basic services such as water and electricity, as well as schools and medical clinics. In one, Arab al Naim, the inhabitants are forced to live in tin shacks because permanent structures are demolished by the state.
Last week, three members of the Israeli parliament introduced a bill stipulating that vetting committees should assess candidates’ “suitability to the community’s way of life and social fabric”. The legislators said the bill would help in “maintaining the Zionist vision”.
Friday, 1 May 2009
Palestine's Holocaust museum By Dania Yousef in Ni'lin, occupied West Bank
In a small anonymous home in the West Bank, a Palestinian academic has set up a project which is almost unheard of in the Occupied Territories.
Hassan Musa is the curator of a museum exhibition dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust in Europe.
The cracked white walls of this makeshift museum in the village of Ni'lin are covered from floor to ceiling with images of people forced out of their homes, tortured, imprisoned, starved and murdered.
In addition to the pictures depicting the Nazi brutality against Jews in Europe, there are also images of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the violence in Palestine since.
On one wall, there is a picture of a scared Jewish boy holding up his hands as Nazi soldiers look on; the caption reads: "Make your final account with Hitler and the Nazi Germans, not with the Palestinians."
On an adjacent wall there are photos of dead children, demolished homes and women screaming during the Israeli war on Gaza in January.
Musa, who is also a member of Ni'lin's Popular Committee Against the Wall, says pictures of the atrocities committed against both peoples were strategically placed side-by-side to not only reflect the suffering of both and help Israelis and Palestinians better understand each other, but also to demonstrate how victims of one conflict can become the harbinger of another.
"The Palestinians have no connection to the Holocaust in Europe, but unfortunately we are paying the price of a misdeed we did not commit," he said.
'Paying' for the holocaust
Musa believes this question is the impetus behind the exhibit, hoping it will challenge the international community on what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians.
"The world is shamefully silent about what is happening in Palestine as a way of expressing their sorrow for the death of six million Jews, but in the meantime, they are supporting the state of occupation," he said.
Ni'lin has become synonymous with violent weekly clashes between Israeli soldiers and activists protesting against the construction of the 'Separation Wall'.
The current path of the Wall will annex 10,000 acres of Ni'lin land to Israel, leaving its residents with 30,000 acres; this is a fraction of the 228,000 acres that constituted the village in 1948.
Since then, Ni'lin residents have lost more than 85 per cent of their land to confiscation and illegal settlement building.
People in the village also accused the Israeli military of killing four Ni'lin residents since protests against land confiscation began in May 2008.
Among those was Musa's 10-year-old nephew, Ahmad, who died on July 29, 2008 from a bullet wound to the head; a number of residents and activists have also been injured in the protests.
In March, Tristan Anderson, a 38-year-old American activist acting as an observer with the International Solidarity Movement, was shot in the head with a high-velocity tear gas canister, leaving him in critical condition.
Understanding the occupier
There are also pictures depicting the Nakba in 1948 and the violence since
It is these events that make the location of the museum all the more significant, Musa says.
In a place where Palestinians struggle to fend off occupation, Musa now offers them an opportunity to empathise with and further understand their occupier.
Israeli, Palestinian and international visitors continue to trickle into the museum, though they are fewer in number than the crowds that gather for the protests.
Remaining optimistic, Musa hopes this endeavour will encourage Israelis to pressure their government to halt the occupation.
"Our message to the Jewish people all over the world is that having been victims of such a brutal genocide, we expect you to be messengers of all the principles of justice, mercy and humanity," he told Al Jazeera.
According to Musa, reaction from Palestinians, especially those in the village, has been positive; the exhibits are, in many instances, the first images they have ever seen of the Holocaust.
Musa says some Palestinian visitors leave the exhibit feeling sorrow for the Jewish people, but also with the same question posed in the messages plastered across the walls: "Why are they punishing us?"
"I lost my nephew and I know how painful it is for me," Musa says, "that's why I don't want anyone else living on this land to lose their loved ones."
Hassan Musa is the curator of a museum exhibition dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust in Europe.
The cracked white walls of this makeshift museum in the village of Ni'lin are covered from floor to ceiling with images of people forced out of their homes, tortured, imprisoned, starved and murdered.
In addition to the pictures depicting the Nazi brutality against Jews in Europe, there are also images of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the violence in Palestine since.
On one wall, there is a picture of a scared Jewish boy holding up his hands as Nazi soldiers look on; the caption reads: "Make your final account with Hitler and the Nazi Germans, not with the Palestinians."
On an adjacent wall there are photos of dead children, demolished homes and women screaming during the Israeli war on Gaza in January.
Musa, who is also a member of Ni'lin's Popular Committee Against the Wall, says pictures of the atrocities committed against both peoples were strategically placed side-by-side to not only reflect the suffering of both and help Israelis and Palestinians better understand each other, but also to demonstrate how victims of one conflict can become the harbinger of another.
"The Palestinians have no connection to the Holocaust in Europe, but unfortunately we are paying the price of a misdeed we did not commit," he said.
'Paying' for the holocaust
Musa believes this question is the impetus behind the exhibit, hoping it will challenge the international community on what is happening between Israelis and Palestinians.
"The world is shamefully silent about what is happening in Palestine as a way of expressing their sorrow for the death of six million Jews, but in the meantime, they are supporting the state of occupation," he said.
Ni'lin has become synonymous with violent weekly clashes between Israeli soldiers and activists protesting against the construction of the 'Separation Wall'.
The current path of the Wall will annex 10,000 acres of Ni'lin land to Israel, leaving its residents with 30,000 acres; this is a fraction of the 228,000 acres that constituted the village in 1948.
Since then, Ni'lin residents have lost more than 85 per cent of their land to confiscation and illegal settlement building.
People in the village also accused the Israeli military of killing four Ni'lin residents since protests against land confiscation began in May 2008.
Among those was Musa's 10-year-old nephew, Ahmad, who died on July 29, 2008 from a bullet wound to the head; a number of residents and activists have also been injured in the protests.
In March, Tristan Anderson, a 38-year-old American activist acting as an observer with the International Solidarity Movement, was shot in the head with a high-velocity tear gas canister, leaving him in critical condition.
Understanding the occupier
There are also pictures depicting the Nakba in 1948 and the violence since
It is these events that make the location of the museum all the more significant, Musa says.
In a place where Palestinians struggle to fend off occupation, Musa now offers them an opportunity to empathise with and further understand their occupier.
Israeli, Palestinian and international visitors continue to trickle into the museum, though they are fewer in number than the crowds that gather for the protests.
Remaining optimistic, Musa hopes this endeavour will encourage Israelis to pressure their government to halt the occupation.
"Our message to the Jewish people all over the world is that having been victims of such a brutal genocide, we expect you to be messengers of all the principles of justice, mercy and humanity," he told Al Jazeera.
According to Musa, reaction from Palestinians, especially those in the village, has been positive; the exhibits are, in many instances, the first images they have ever seen of the Holocaust.
Musa says some Palestinian visitors leave the exhibit feeling sorrow for the Jewish people, but also with the same question posed in the messages plastered across the walls: "Why are they punishing us?"
"I lost my nephew and I know how painful it is for me," Musa says, "that's why I don't want anyone else living on this land to lose their loved ones."
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
Israel's War Against Hamas: Rhetoric and Reality
The war lasted only 22 days, but its effect on public opinion of Israel has been nothing but devastating
By Avi Shlaim | 02 March 2009
Israel’s war on Gaza lasted 22 days and claimed the lives of over 1,200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. The only way to make sense of this senseless war is through understanding the historical context. The State of Israel was established in May 1948 on the basis of a UN resolution. Nevertheless, it involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh, but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza’s prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development, but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. The building of civilian Jewish settlements on occupied Arab territories began in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War. These settlements are both illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and a large share of the desperately scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day and rely for food rations on UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilized values—a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005, a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a victory for Hamas and a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the move as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after the withdrawal, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
Continue reading: Islamica Magazine
By Avi Shlaim | 02 March 2009
Israel’s war on Gaza lasted 22 days and claimed the lives of over 1,200 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. The only way to make sense of this senseless war is through understanding the historical context. The State of Israel was established in May 1948 on the basis of a UN resolution. Nevertheless, it involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh, but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza’s prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development, but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. The building of civilian Jewish settlements on occupied Arab territories began in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War. These settlements are both illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and a large share of the desperately scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day and rely for food rations on UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilized values—a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005, a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a victory for Hamas and a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the move as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after the withdrawal, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
Continue reading: Islamica Magazine
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Olmert Rejected Hamas Back Channel
Hamas made an attempt to forge a secret communications channel with Israel in the period leading up to Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, at one point involving a member of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's family in transferring a message to the premier, according to a report in the British weekly The Observer Sunday.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The report makes the assertion that Hamas's effort to establish "a direct line of communication" with Israel "fundamentally alters the narrative of the build up to the war in Gaza" and quotes veteran peace activist Gershon Baskin as saying that he was "at the center" of the failed attempt.
The paper did not divulge the identity of the member of Olmert's family and the role that person played in conveying messages to the prime minister, saying only that it was aware of the family member's identity.
According to the report, Baskin was in contact with several senior Hamas members, as well as with Israel officials and the prime minister himself, through his contact in Olmert's family.
The report stated that over two years after the kidnapping of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit in a cross-border raid, Hamas expressed readiness to directly discuss the kidnapping with Israel, as well as the conditions for a renewed truce.
Baskin, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, told The Observer that Israel's failure to capitalize on the opportunity presented to it by Hamas was one of the reasons behind the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
"Three times since Schalit's kidnapping there has been the suggestion of opening a back channel through me. The first time that Hamas suggested to me opening a secret back channel was not long after Schalit's kidnapping," Baskin told the paper, stating that Olmert's office had rejected out of hand any negotiations with terrorists.
Baskin claimed to have had contacts on both sides; on the one hand, a senior Hamas figure he had met in Europe, and on the other, Olmert's family member, who was serving as a "messenger."
According to the report, although Olmert's office generally turned away Baskin's efforts, the contact did eventually lead to Israel receiving a letter from Schalit to his father, Noam.
The contact, however, had not lasted long when it was hurriedly closed, the report claimed, after the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) found out that Hamas members were discussing the identity of the member of Olmert's family who was ferrying messages from the organization.
Baskin was quoted by the paper as saying that a year after the initial contact had been made, he received Israeli approval to pursue the contacts while coordinating his efforts to secure a prisoner exchange with Ofer Dekel, the prime minister's point man on the Schalit issue.
The report did not account for the discrepancies in the time frame provided by Baskin. Although the paper reported that the first contact with Hamas came "over two years after" Schalit's kidnapping in June 2006, which would place it in the second half of 2008, it went on to say that contacts were resumed a year later.
Baskin said that he pursued the renewed channel despite Hamas's emerging insistence on linking Schalit's release to a larger cease-fire deal and a lifting of the blockade of the Gaza Strip. When the attempts proved unsuccessful and he was left out of the Israeli efforts to free Schalit, Baskin continued, he made a final attempt to convey a message to Olmert through his family member.
Baskin was rebuffed and told "to find another messenger," he said, adding that by that point it was too late since "war had already been decided on."
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
The report makes the assertion that Hamas's effort to establish "a direct line of communication" with Israel "fundamentally alters the narrative of the build up to the war in Gaza" and quotes veteran peace activist Gershon Baskin as saying that he was "at the center" of the failed attempt.
The paper did not divulge the identity of the member of Olmert's family and the role that person played in conveying messages to the prime minister, saying only that it was aware of the family member's identity.
According to the report, Baskin was in contact with several senior Hamas members, as well as with Israel officials and the prime minister himself, through his contact in Olmert's family.
The report stated that over two years after the kidnapping of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit in a cross-border raid, Hamas expressed readiness to directly discuss the kidnapping with Israel, as well as the conditions for a renewed truce.
Baskin, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, told The Observer that Israel's failure to capitalize on the opportunity presented to it by Hamas was one of the reasons behind the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
"Three times since Schalit's kidnapping there has been the suggestion of opening a back channel through me. The first time that Hamas suggested to me opening a secret back channel was not long after Schalit's kidnapping," Baskin told the paper, stating that Olmert's office had rejected out of hand any negotiations with terrorists.
Baskin claimed to have had contacts on both sides; on the one hand, a senior Hamas figure he had met in Europe, and on the other, Olmert's family member, who was serving as a "messenger."
According to the report, although Olmert's office generally turned away Baskin's efforts, the contact did eventually lead to Israel receiving a letter from Schalit to his father, Noam.
The contact, however, had not lasted long when it was hurriedly closed, the report claimed, after the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) found out that Hamas members were discussing the identity of the member of Olmert's family who was ferrying messages from the organization.
Baskin was quoted by the paper as saying that a year after the initial contact had been made, he received Israeli approval to pursue the contacts while coordinating his efforts to secure a prisoner exchange with Ofer Dekel, the prime minister's point man on the Schalit issue.
The report did not account for the discrepancies in the time frame provided by Baskin. Although the paper reported that the first contact with Hamas came "over two years after" Schalit's kidnapping in June 2006, which would place it in the second half of 2008, it went on to say that contacts were resumed a year later.
Baskin said that he pursued the renewed channel despite Hamas's emerging insistence on linking Schalit's release to a larger cease-fire deal and a lifting of the blockade of the Gaza Strip. When the attempts proved unsuccessful and he was left out of the Israeli efforts to free Schalit, Baskin continued, he made a final attempt to convey a message to Olmert through his family member.
Baskin was rebuffed and told "to find another messenger," he said, adding that by that point it was too late since "war had already been decided on."
Saturday, 31 January 2009
A song for peace in Gaza
DUBAI // A group of 40 musicians appalled by the scenes of suffering in Gaza is uniting to record a peace anthem for the Middle East.
The artists from different parts of the world are collaborating on a track called We Want Peace, a response to the recent Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip.
The project was conceived by Nasir Akmal, a Dubai-based rapper who records under the name of Jihad, and is reminiscent of Bob Geldof’s Band Aid charity appeal for famine relief.
Akmal’s intention is not to raise money, however. It is simply to spread a message of peace and he will make the track available through a free download, he said.
The track will include hip-hop artists such as Bishop Lamont, who is signed to Dr Dre’s Aftermath Records, and Desert Heat, a popular Emirati band.
The idea came to him after he saw reports from Gaza on television. “All the images were of innocent people getting killed and I felt I wanted to do something about it,” he said. “I wanted to step out of my sphere and use music as a way to raise awareness about what was going on in Gaza. I thought if I reached out to many artists then we could attract a bigger audience and use our work to do something positive.”
Akmal contacted as many musicians as he could through friends, e-mails and phone calls. Within days he had a list of artists.
Among those who agreed to contribute was Freeway, a Muslim African-American rapper signed to Jay-Z's Roc-a-fella label. Akmal also has confirmation of a contribution from the rappers Trick Trick and Crooked I, who have worked with Eminem and Dr Dre respectively. .
“Not all the artists are well known,” said Akmal. “Many are from the streets and are fighting their own fight. They recognise the meaning of struggle and it is amazing that they want to take part in the record.”
A Los Angeles rapper called DK is performing on the track with his teenage children.
Akmal has sent an e-mail to all the contributors with the basic beat and the first eight-bar verse of the song, which he wrote and recorded in Dubai. “I made the feeling of it clear with the first verse and set the tone for the others to follow,” he said.
Another three verses have already been submitted and a Los Angeles-based producer, Big 40, is working on the record in America.
“Once we have all the work in then we will mix it down and work on the arrangement which I will probably do from Dubai,” Akmal said. “None of the artists are getting paid. It is all being done in the name of peace.”
He added, “If the youth hear us talking about these issues they might listen more than if they hear a politician speaking. Obviously there’s only so much difference one song can make but at least we are doing something.”
Eighteen months ago, eight Pakistani musicians produced a video titled Yeh Hum Naheen (This Is Not Us) to counter a perception that Pakistanis supported terrorism. It was a hit on YouTube with thousands of downloads and extensive play on MTV Pakistan.
Although Akmal is Muslim, he maintains that We Want Peace will transcend the issue of faith.
Akmal will talk about We Want Peace and his other work on Danny Neville’s Radio 1 show tonight at 7pm.
The artists from different parts of the world are collaborating on a track called We Want Peace, a response to the recent Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip.
The project was conceived by Nasir Akmal, a Dubai-based rapper who records under the name of Jihad, and is reminiscent of Bob Geldof’s Band Aid charity appeal for famine relief.
Akmal’s intention is not to raise money, however. It is simply to spread a message of peace and he will make the track available through a free download, he said.
The track will include hip-hop artists such as Bishop Lamont, who is signed to Dr Dre’s Aftermath Records, and Desert Heat, a popular Emirati band.
The idea came to him after he saw reports from Gaza on television. “All the images were of innocent people getting killed and I felt I wanted to do something about it,” he said. “I wanted to step out of my sphere and use music as a way to raise awareness about what was going on in Gaza. I thought if I reached out to many artists then we could attract a bigger audience and use our work to do something positive.”
Akmal contacted as many musicians as he could through friends, e-mails and phone calls. Within days he had a list of artists.
Among those who agreed to contribute was Freeway, a Muslim African-American rapper signed to Jay-Z's Roc-a-fella label. Akmal also has confirmation of a contribution from the rappers Trick Trick and Crooked I, who have worked with Eminem and Dr Dre respectively. .
“Not all the artists are well known,” said Akmal. “Many are from the streets and are fighting their own fight. They recognise the meaning of struggle and it is amazing that they want to take part in the record.”
A Los Angeles rapper called DK is performing on the track with his teenage children.
Akmal has sent an e-mail to all the contributors with the basic beat and the first eight-bar verse of the song, which he wrote and recorded in Dubai. “I made the feeling of it clear with the first verse and set the tone for the others to follow,” he said.
Another three verses have already been submitted and a Los Angeles-based producer, Big 40, is working on the record in America.
“Once we have all the work in then we will mix it down and work on the arrangement which I will probably do from Dubai,” Akmal said. “None of the artists are getting paid. It is all being done in the name of peace.”
He added, “If the youth hear us talking about these issues they might listen more than if they hear a politician speaking. Obviously there’s only so much difference one song can make but at least we are doing something.”
Eighteen months ago, eight Pakistani musicians produced a video titled Yeh Hum Naheen (This Is Not Us) to counter a perception that Pakistanis supported terrorism. It was a hit on YouTube with thousands of downloads and extensive play on MTV Pakistan.
Although Akmal is Muslim, he maintains that We Want Peace will transcend the issue of faith.
Akmal will talk about We Want Peace and his other work on Danny Neville’s Radio 1 show tonight at 7pm.
Thursday, 29 January 2009
What You Don’t Know About Gaza
NEARLY everything you’ve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip.
THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.
THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gaza’s air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.
THE BLOCKADE Israel’s blockade of the strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.
The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment — with the tacit support of the United States — of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.
THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures). The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.
WAR CRIMES The targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers. Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
This war on the people of Gaza isn’t really about rockets. Nor is it about “restoring Israel’s deterrence,” as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East." (Book release is 10 March, 2009)
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
A tale of two wars, two Turks and a nation riding a wave
Gaza is yet another memorable diplomatic letdown for the international community. Once again, Israel rampages through the beleaguered Strip. Once again, the rest of the world watches impotently. Arab countries refuse to so much as recall their ambassadors from Tel Aviv and the death toll on the ground inches towards 1,000.
But diplomatic history will remember the conflict for two Turks: the animated Tayyip Erdogan, accusing Israel of committing “a dark stain on human history”, and the bookish Ahmet Davutoglu, working behind the scenes to effect a ceasefire and imprint the weight of a newly energised Turkey on the region. Erdogan’s New Year’s Eve dash to the region drew the media spotlight, but it was the composed Davutoglu – an academic and former ambassador – who continued the shuttle diplomacy between Damascus, Paris and Cairo, passing on messages from Hamas’s leadership in Damascus to the French president Nicholas Sarkozy, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
At times, they cancelled each other out. Erdogan’s angry rhetoric erased much of the good achieved by Davutoglu. The Turkish prime minister refused to take Ehud Olmert’s phone calls before a ceasefire was negotiated and pointedly omitted Israel from his regional tour. His behaviour prompted Turkish commentators to say that he was playing to the Arab gallery. Turkey is anxious to lead a post-conflict stabilisation force in Gaza that will police the peace, and its popularity in the Muslim world has increased rapidly.
Should Ankara ultimately put boots on the ground in Gaza, it will mark the return of Turkish troops to the region 90 years after they left amid the floating ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It would be the first palpable success for a foreign policy dubbed neo-Ottomanist for its focus on former imperial provinces that have emerged into crucial strategic crossroads. The Ottoman empire’s Iraq province contains fabled oil resources; the Syrian province defiantly continues to influence the regional agenda; and Palestine has been transformed into a civilisational battlefield. In refocusing Turkey’s energies on its Middle Eastern back yard after close to a century of Ataturkist pro-westernism and republican isolationism, Turkey is reconnecting with its cultural and religious roots.
But where Davutoglu’s foreign policy goes beyond Ottomanism is in its reaching out to powers that were once bitter rivals. Turkey’s navy has just completed training exercises with a similarly resurgent Russia in the Mediterranean. Iran’s National Security Council chief, Saeed Jalili, was in Ankara last week to transmit Tehran’s views to the West as part of a new partnership that began with military cooperation in fighting Kurdish separatists and is now entering a phase of diplomatic collaboration.
Turkey’s foreign policy has been radically revamped by Davutoglu, who embraced Turkey’s cultural and religious links in a bid to refashion it into an “imperative power” in the region. Davutoglu argues that only the inclusion of Turkey in the EU can turn the economic bloc into a political one too. He lays out this doctrine in his book Strategic Depth and argues that Turkey’s unique combination of geostrategic positioning at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and the Caucasus, its history of playing a leading role in the Islamic world and its current pro-western orientation can transform it into the region’s pivotal diplomatic power.
The doctrine has been behind improved relations with countries such as Armenia, Greece, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and other former Ottoman dominions as Turkey seeks to transform its soft economic power into more tangible diplomatic influence.
But Tel Aviv is unlikely to view Erdogan as an impartial broker after he condemned Israeli actions as “a crime against humanity”, discontinued his country’s mediating role in peace talks between Syria and Israel and broke ranks with the generally pro-Israeli Turkish General Staff to express his sympathy for the Palestinian side. The fresh tension will compound existing frictions between the two allies over Israel’s unstated policy of supporting northern Iraq’s Kurdish leadership and Ankara’s closer ties with Damascus, Tehran, Hamas and Hizbollah.
But losing Israel may be a small price to pay at a time when Turkey is emerging as the primary regional power broker. Whether acting as a diplomatic channel for Syria and Iran, a facilitator for Washington or Brussels or playing the role that Egypt once did, it appears that Turkey is riding a wave. The tension was palpable when an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman denied that the Turks were involved in hammering out an Egyptian and French-negotiated ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, even as Davutoglu arrived in the Egyptian capital having held fresh talks with the Hamas leadership in Syria.
And what is Turkey’s payback for all its diplomatic exertions? One is certainly its transformation from a powerful but isolated pro-western military power in the north Middle East to a country respected and feted throughout the region. But soft power aside, there may already be some early signs of the benefits accruing to Ankara. Over the weekend, Hurriyet newspaper carried an intriguing announcement from the Iranian Kurdish guerrilla movement Pejhak, an offshoot of the PKK that has been launching raids inside Iran since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The announcement was a statement by the Iranian state news agency IRNA reporting a Pejhak-affiliated TV channel saying that the organisation was ceasing anti-government activities because of a “lack of power”.
After the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, what a difference two years, two wars and two Turks make.
Iason Athanasiadis is a writer based in Istanbul
But diplomatic history will remember the conflict for two Turks: the animated Tayyip Erdogan, accusing Israel of committing “a dark stain on human history”, and the bookish Ahmet Davutoglu, working behind the scenes to effect a ceasefire and imprint the weight of a newly energised Turkey on the region. Erdogan’s New Year’s Eve dash to the region drew the media spotlight, but it was the composed Davutoglu – an academic and former ambassador – who continued the shuttle diplomacy between Damascus, Paris and Cairo, passing on messages from Hamas’s leadership in Damascus to the French president Nicholas Sarkozy, the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
At times, they cancelled each other out. Erdogan’s angry rhetoric erased much of the good achieved by Davutoglu. The Turkish prime minister refused to take Ehud Olmert’s phone calls before a ceasefire was negotiated and pointedly omitted Israel from his regional tour. His behaviour prompted Turkish commentators to say that he was playing to the Arab gallery. Turkey is anxious to lead a post-conflict stabilisation force in Gaza that will police the peace, and its popularity in the Muslim world has increased rapidly.
Should Ankara ultimately put boots on the ground in Gaza, it will mark the return of Turkish troops to the region 90 years after they left amid the floating ashes of the Ottoman Empire. It would be the first palpable success for a foreign policy dubbed neo-Ottomanist for its focus on former imperial provinces that have emerged into crucial strategic crossroads. The Ottoman empire’s Iraq province contains fabled oil resources; the Syrian province defiantly continues to influence the regional agenda; and Palestine has been transformed into a civilisational battlefield. In refocusing Turkey’s energies on its Middle Eastern back yard after close to a century of Ataturkist pro-westernism and republican isolationism, Turkey is reconnecting with its cultural and religious roots.
But where Davutoglu’s foreign policy goes beyond Ottomanism is in its reaching out to powers that were once bitter rivals. Turkey’s navy has just completed training exercises with a similarly resurgent Russia in the Mediterranean. Iran’s National Security Council chief, Saeed Jalili, was in Ankara last week to transmit Tehran’s views to the West as part of a new partnership that began with military cooperation in fighting Kurdish separatists and is now entering a phase of diplomatic collaboration.
Turkey’s foreign policy has been radically revamped by Davutoglu, who embraced Turkey’s cultural and religious links in a bid to refashion it into an “imperative power” in the region. Davutoglu argues that only the inclusion of Turkey in the EU can turn the economic bloc into a political one too. He lays out this doctrine in his book Strategic Depth and argues that Turkey’s unique combination of geostrategic positioning at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe and the Caucasus, its history of playing a leading role in the Islamic world and its current pro-western orientation can transform it into the region’s pivotal diplomatic power.
The doctrine has been behind improved relations with countries such as Armenia, Greece, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and other former Ottoman dominions as Turkey seeks to transform its soft economic power into more tangible diplomatic influence.
But Tel Aviv is unlikely to view Erdogan as an impartial broker after he condemned Israeli actions as “a crime against humanity”, discontinued his country’s mediating role in peace talks between Syria and Israel and broke ranks with the generally pro-Israeli Turkish General Staff to express his sympathy for the Palestinian side. The fresh tension will compound existing frictions between the two allies over Israel’s unstated policy of supporting northern Iraq’s Kurdish leadership and Ankara’s closer ties with Damascus, Tehran, Hamas and Hizbollah.
But losing Israel may be a small price to pay at a time when Turkey is emerging as the primary regional power broker. Whether acting as a diplomatic channel for Syria and Iran, a facilitator for Washington or Brussels or playing the role that Egypt once did, it appears that Turkey is riding a wave. The tension was palpable when an Egyptian foreign ministry spokesman denied that the Turks were involved in hammering out an Egyptian and French-negotiated ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel, even as Davutoglu arrived in the Egyptian capital having held fresh talks with the Hamas leadership in Syria.
And what is Turkey’s payback for all its diplomatic exertions? One is certainly its transformation from a powerful but isolated pro-western military power in the north Middle East to a country respected and feted throughout the region. But soft power aside, there may already be some early signs of the benefits accruing to Ankara. Over the weekend, Hurriyet newspaper carried an intriguing announcement from the Iranian Kurdish guerrilla movement Pejhak, an offshoot of the PKK that has been launching raids inside Iran since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The announcement was a statement by the Iranian state news agency IRNA reporting a Pejhak-affiliated TV channel saying that the organisation was ceasing anti-government activities because of a “lack of power”.
After the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006, what a difference two years, two wars and two Turks make.
Iason Athanasiadis is a writer based in Istanbul
Sunday, 30 November 2008
Daughters of the desert
A family stand in the Negev, amid the wreckage of their house. They are not Palestinians, but Israeli citizens with voting rights and husbands who have served in the army. So why did soldiers destroy their home? Rachel Cooke meets the Bedouin women who officially do not exist.
Bedouin villages in the area, is 'unrecognised' by an Israeli government that refuses to accept the land claims of the Negev Desert's indigenous people.
By the time I get to what remains of Nuf Al-Queda's house, its destruction is old news, both in the village of Al-Zarnouk, where the single-storey building had stood for more than 20 years, and far beyond: thanks to mobile telephones and the internet, hundreds of people have already seen images of its demolition by the Israeli Defense Forces on the morning of 30 October. But, five days on, the air is still heavy with cement dust and quiet despair. Nuf, who is 28 and has three children under the age of five, wears the bewildering smile of one so traumatised that she is more inclined to uncontrolled laughter than tears. She stares at the chalky pile of rubble that is her former home - spears of metal protrude from the cheap concrete like giant thorns - and wonders yet again if the gold that she received on her marriage lies somewhere beneath it. It would be good to find those necklaces and bangles because her life savings, a wad of shekels worth about £1,200, were nowhere to be found when her neighbours managed to drag the chest of drawers in which she kept it outside in the moments before the JCBs began their terrible work. Had the soldiers inside already been through it and taken what they wanted? This is her belief, though she has no proof of it, of course.
Nuf is a teacher. She was at school when the army arrived. They came at 9am - 50 soldiers, plus a handful of contractors, a group of Jewish settlers - and by 9.45am their task was complete. Though her neighbours tried to stop them, the soldiers were impassive, their faces 'like walls'. Ostensibly the reason they chose Nuf's house as opposed to any other in Al-Zarnouk was because she had recently renovated it, exchanging its asbestos roof for one made of corrugated iron; an inspector had ruled these changes 'illegal'.
But the truth is that her improvements had little to do with it. Al-Zarnouk, like 44 other Bedouin villages in the area, is 'unrecognised' by an Israeli government that refuses to accept the land claims of the Negev Desert's indigenous people. The Negev, says the government, is not the ancestral land of the Bedouin; it belongs to the Israeli state, and whether their roofs are made of iron or asbestos the Bedouin are merely squatters. The government would like Nuf and her neighbours to move into one of the seven townships it does recognise, towns built specially for them - and for as long as they refuse to do so, they will pay the price: no electricity, no water, the constant threat of demolition. If a place does not exist - and the government is so determined these villages do not exist, it has made sure that they are not signposted on Negev highways, nor marked on any map - how can they be connected to the national grid or the nearest reservoir? The destruction of Nuf's home, which involved the army first driving past dozens of ramshackle buildings just like it, is surely a warning as much as a punishment: this could happen to you, too. Isn't it time to move on?
The Bedouin are Israeli citizens. They are eligible to vote, and must pay taxes, and many of them also opt to do national service in the Israeli army (Taysir Hayb, the 20-year-old soldier who killed Tom Hurndall, the British photographer, in Gaza in 2004, and is now serving an 11-year sentence for manslaughter, was also a Bedouin).
For Nuf, however, the situation is more than usually ironic. As a teacher, she is employed full time by the very state that has just razed her home to the ground. 'Why do I deserve this?' she says in a flat voice. 'In my work I must teach the children about independence, the founding of the state, all the other national myths. But still they come and they knock down my house.' She takes me into the shed where she and her three children, together with her 70-year-old mother-in-law, are now living. It is the size of the garage that you might find attached to a suburban British semi. Three of its walls are made of corrugated iron, a fourth from a blanket and a plastic sheet. At one end are the things she and her neighbours managed to salvage from her house: a plastic bowl filled with bits and pieces of china, an ancient refrigerator, a bunch of ornamental flowers, a couple of mangled window frames. At the other end is a frying pan on a Calor gas stove and some blankets: this is where the family cooks, and sleeps. The place is entirely open to the elements (and to the rats: refuse and open sewers are a problem in the unrecognised villages, and rats love both). It is now November: the desert nights are cold, and getting more so every day. How long will she be able to survive here?
'It's hard to know,' she says, with a shrug. And then - unwilling to abandon the traditional rules of hospitality for all that she cannot make us mint tea - she pours Coca-Cola into plastic cups, and smilingly insists we drink.
Facts about human suffering are troublingly abstract until you have experienced them for yourself, even if only on the tiniest, most feeble scale, so I'm staying in Al-Zarnouk - population 1,250 - for a couple of nights. My host is Hissen Al-Queda (thanks to the tribal custom of cousin marriages, a tradition designed to avoid land disputes, pretty much everyone in Al-Zarnouk is an Al-Queda). Like many of the men here, Hissen's husband, Yusuf, is a polygamist: she is the second of his three wives (under sharia, a man is entitled to four), and he now lives with the third, a fact that she finds hard. She has 11 children and virtually no income because, though Yusuf works - something that is quite unusual in a community where unemployment is officially around 36 per cent, but is probably much higher - he gives her very little money; his third wife, Haqmi, has nine children, so possibly he has other priorities.
Hissen takes comfort, however, in the fact that his first wife, Kamle, also a mother of 11, is her close friend. Hissen had not wanted to marry Yusuf, her cousin, at all. She was in love with a man from another family.
But her father was having none of it, even when she went on hunger strike. Once it was clear that she had no choice in the matter, she went to Kamle and explained her feelings, whereupon the two women clasped one another and burst into tears. These days, they are united by a new tragedy: the advent of Haqmi, whom they regard as a flirt. One last thing. All three of the women's children are of similar ages: they have sometimes been pregnant at the same time, a fact that often makes it difficult to work out who is who.
My stay begins with a tour. I visit the refuse tip at the edge of the village, three mountains of waste so stinking it is all I can do not to gag, and I am shown one of the rudimentary and very noisy generators some people here use to obtain their three or four hours of electricity a night (only those who can afford it use generators; others make do with an oil lamp and go to bed soon after nightfall). It's not just that these things are unpleasant; they are confusing, too, because they are so unnecessary.
Israel is not a developing country. On my way to Al-Zarnouk, I drove through Omer, a gated Jewish suburb of Be'er Sheva, the Negev's biggest city. Omer is one of the richest communities in Israel (three Be'er Sheva suburbs are on the list of Israel's 10 richest towns), and its modern houses, with their desert views and suspiciously lush gardens, look like they have come straight out of the pages of a piece of Californian property porn. Omer is less than 20 minutes' drive from Al-Zarnouk. On a clear day you can actually see it. As if this were not bad enough, the pylons that carry electricity from Be'er Sheva to Omer and then beyond, to cities like Arad, march through this very village. An iron foot belonging to one of them stands right by the generator I'm currently looking at, next to a small area where a family's goats and sheep are penned (residents can no longer graze animals on, or farm, the land outside the village; the Israeli government used to spray it with pesticides to prevent this - and when the practice was outlawed by Israel's high court, it found other ways, such as driving tractors through the crops). One of Hissen's daughters points up at the pylon - as if I could miss it. But she doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. We are now walking in the gloaming: I am already painfully aware of the insult that it represents.
Hissen's house is like all Bedouin houses: tiny, thrown up, cobbled together. If the big bad wolf huffed and puffed at this place, it would blow down in an instant. The Bedouin used to be nomadic, moving across the desert with their animals according to the season - a fact that the Israeli government likes to use against them: how
can you own your lands, it asks, if you are nomads? (No matter that the British Mandate acknowledged the Bedouin's claim to the very same lands in the Twenties, and the Ottoman empire before it). But the Negev Bedouin were in the process of becoming sedentarised as along ago as the 19th century, and, in satellite photographs, there is evidence to suggest that dwellings were built on these barren hills in the middle of the last century, and perhaps before. (In the Sixties and Seventies, many Bedouin used to pitch a traditional tent, woven from the hair of black goats, beside their houses, but since no one can keep goats in sufficient quantities any more, only those few who make a living from tourism continue with this practice.)
Hissen's house is far superior to most 21st-century Bedouin homes: this part of Al-Zarnouk has clean water, which comes from a tank someone has managed to install in the village, and she is connected. But this is not saying a lot. Poverty, combined with the constant fear of demolition, means that many Bedouin live in slum conditions. 'Which century do you think you are in?' she says with a smile as I look about - and it's true that I cannot imagine anyone in Tel Aviv living like this.
There are three rooms. One for sitting in, one for sleeping in, one for the preparation of food. Hissen's furniture amounts to five plastic garden chairs, a double bed - I, like her children, will sleep on the floor - and an old television. Out back, in a rickety lean-to, is the old metal bread oven in which pitta is baked over a wood fire. The room fills with smoke on bread-baking days, so perhaps it is just as well that you can see the sky through its breeze-block walls. Here, too, food is fried in a pan on a gas burner on the floor. In the evenings, when it is pitch black, this room is an extremely dangerous place to be.
In my honour, Hissen has managed to 'borrow' some electricity from a neighbour with a generator - she does not own one herself - and she has brought it into her house via a terrifying arrangement of dangling wires. For three hours, then, we have a light bulb and Al-Jazeera. Nine-year-old Hoda, Hissen's youngest child, lies on her stomach beside this single bulb, desperately trying to do her homework - a sight that makes me wonder all over again at the fact that Amira, her older sister, is now a Hebrew language student at Ben-Gurion University. How does anyone study here? At six we eat: chicken and rice, bread, a few slices of cucumber and tomato, oranges. We talk. Hissen tells me that her house has only been demolished once, and that was a long time ago, before the Gulf war. But Kamle's house, which is next door, has been knocked down twice; after the second time, she fell into a deep depression. By 8pm, we are ready to go to bed: such is the quality of the darkness there is simply nothing else to be done. I lie in my sleeping bag on a rug on the concrete floor and hope that sleep will come quickly. If it does, I won't have to identify the source of the animal scratching I can hear above Hissen's nocturnal sighs.
There are 160,000 Bedouin in Israel, of whom roughly half live in 'unrecognised' villages. They comprise 25 per cent of the northern Negev's population, but live on only 2 per cent of its land - a fact that makes Israel's apparent fear and loathing of them seem particularly disproportionate. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, many of them fled the Negev, or were expelled to Eygpt and Jordan.
'I remember it well,' says Hissen's mother Tammam, who is in her seventies. 'We saw the tanks, so we put our tents on the camels and moved. We lived just outside Hebron [in the West Bank] for a year. We felt like refugees. But the land does not have legs; it cannot get up and walk. No one was cultivating it. So we came back, and life went on as it had before.'
Her family was relatively lucky in that it returned to its own land. Others did not get off so lightly. In the Fifties and Sixties, those who had stayed behind were relocated by the Israeli government to a triangular zone - the Siyag - in the northeast of the Negev, on land that was relatively infertile. Meanwhile, outside the Siyag, expulsions continued. The Bedouin were removed, their place names erased from official maps. Towns were then given new Hebrew names. 'Just as we do not recognise the Arabs' proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognise their spiritual proprietorship and their names,' said David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister, who appointed the committee that carried out this task.
With the founding of the State of Israel came some benefits for the remaining Bedouin: mandatory education meant that literacy levels rose and healthcare was theoretically more widely available. But the discrimination continued. In the Sixties Moshe Dayan, then minister of agriculture, made the now-infamous statement in which he spoke of a 'revolution' in which the Bedouin would become an urban proletariat: 'His children will get used to a father who wears trousers, who does not carry a dagger and who does not pick out their nits in public. They will go to school, their hair combed. This will be a revolution, and it will be achieved in two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction... this phenomenon of the Bedouin will disappear.'
In the Seventies another agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, declared much of the Negev a nature reserve, out of bounds to Bedouin herders, and established the Green Patrol to police it. Some 900 Bedouin encampments were removed during this period, and goat herds cut by a third. In the same decade, the government established the seven urban townships to which Bedouin could move on renunciation of their ancestral lands. Denied access to their grazing rights, and to basic services in the unrecognised villages, thousands took the miserable decision to move, and thousands came to regret it: today, life in townships such as Laqia and Hura is better than in the unrecognised villages, but only marginally so. In Laqia - the home, incidentally, of the only Bedouin Knesset member, Talab Al-Sana - there is no proper sewage system and no waste collection. Roads, where they exist at all, are poor. The townships were not properly planned. The Bedouin birth rate is one of the highest in the world (7.6 children per woman in 2005): as land runs out, families build insanitary shacks and pray that God will bless them with mild winters and gentle summers.
In the past few years, 59 new Jewish farms have been established in the Negev, isolated properties that the local authorities usually connect to water and electricity grids without hesitation, even if their owners have not yet secured building permits. Meanwhile, in the unrecognised Bedouin villages, people struggle on without either of these things. Even the villages' medical centres - clinics that have been established thanks to the lobbying efforts of organisations such as Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which regularly petition the high court on such matters - must run on generators, which means, among other things, that they cannot refrigerate medicine 24 hours a day. 'All the improvements that have come to the villages so far have come only with the involvement of the high court,' says Shlomit Avni, the head of the residence department at PHR. 'The first clinic did not open until 1995, but even now there are still only 11.'
You might imagine, of course, that once the high court has acknowledged that residents in a particular village have a right to a clinic, this would lead to recognition of the village in the more general sense: how can a village that does not exist require health services? Not so. 'In 2006, we appealed to the court to connect the house of a child with cancer to the grid; the family needed electricity to keep his medicine cold. The court turned down our appeal. It argued that the child's health was his parents' responsibility, and that they chose to live in an unrecognised village.'
So the demolitions continue. Ministry of interior records show that government demolitions in the Negev more than doubled, from 143 in 2005 to 367 in 2006. The army does not limit itself to destroying domestic homes; it has also been known to demolish businesses, agricultural buildings and even mosques. Since 2005 it has been possible to file a demolition order against a building without its owner's knowledge. Things have tailed off more recently - there were 200 demolitions in 2007 - but there is a widespread suspicion among the Bedouin and many of the NGOs that work in the area that this is just the quiet before another storm.
As you sweep along the smooth highway that leads out of Be'er Sheva to the city of Dimona, the unrecognised villages, hunkered down on far off hills, don't look too bad. It's only when you get close that you realise how squalid they are and, since the roads to them are unmarked, few people are likely to make a detour. Do Israelis know what conditions their fellow citizens are living in? Avni believes that most do not. But even if they did, they would not necessarily be sympathetic. 'Those who do know have a big fear which sits on racism,' she says. 'It's demographic: they're taking our land. There's no real reason for this: we're talking about 2 per cent of the Negev. Unfortunately, an Israeli Jew doesn't always make a distinction between a Bedouin Arab, who has done army service, and a Palestinian, who has not. They all look the same. So there's another basic fear that is very hard to overcome - a security fear.'
The statistics, however, are striking. Israel has a national health insurance scheme which entitles all residents to access to a health 'basket', irrespective of income. It is considered progressive and efficient, and health outcomes in the country are good. So why, then, is the infant-mortality rate among the Bedouin population so high (15.5 for every 1,000 in 2006) compared to that of the Jewish population (three for every 1,000 in 2006)? (In the wider Israeli Arab population, the figure is eight for every 1,000; the Bedouin are, as Avni points out, at 'the very bottom of the heap').
The Bedouin are ill, mostly due to the lack of clean water available to them. Intestinal infections are common, diarrhoea endemic during the summer. In a sirocco, when the wind whips up, the dust rises and temperatures peak, 60 per cent of the children in Negev hospitals are Bedouin, a figure that sometimes rises to 80 per cent during the summer. Bedouin children and older adults suffer disproportionately from respiratory diseases such as asthma because their iron houses are so hot by day and so cold by night; their villages full of burning garbage; their homes too close to Israel's main hazardous waste facility, Romat Hovav (the site is also home to 19 chemical factories).
The 11 clinics in the unrecognised villages are often inaccessible - public transport does not extend here - and keep short hours due to restrictions on their electricity. The doctors who work in them often do not speak Arabic, Israel's second official language (some 50 per cent of Bedouin women cannot speak Hebrew, and most are illiterate in it). Emergency services are effectively nonexistent: either ambulances cannot find the villages or their drivers refuse to enter them. As a result of the demolitions, rates of mental illness are also very high - particularly among women, for whom the home is so central to their sense of self.
The Regional Council for the Unrecognised Arab Bedouin Villages - which was established in 1997 and whose work is supported by, among others, Oxfam - lobbies policy makers on behalf of the community. Like PHR, it has found that the only real way of effecting change is through appealing to the courts. But it is slow work. 'Our dreams are dead,' says Ibrahim Abu Fash, one of its members. Ibrahim lives in Wadi Ani'am, the nearest unrecognised village to Ramat Hovav. Between 1948 and 1953 most of his tribe were forced out of the Negev, to Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai. In 1953 the remaining members were moved into the triangle.
'On Fridays, I take my sons and grandsons, and show them the old lands. The old lands are known, and clear; everyone knows them by name. Show me a map, and I can tell you who owns what. But anyone who thinks we will ever get them back is dreaming.'
The people of Wadi Ani'am have made history by being the first to agree to move en masse; they can live with the fumes emanating from Ramat Hovav no longer. But they are determined not to go to a township. 'We are an agricultural-based community. We want to be recognised as such, never mind where. We want to herd sheep, grow basic crops. Rates of cancer are too high here. The nearest clinic is 4km away.' Like many older Bedouin men, Ibrahim has an extra reason for feeling aggrieved at the state. From 1971 to 1974 he did military service in the Israeli army. 'I did it in order to prevent anyone from accusing me of not fulfilling my duties to the state,' he says (service is optional for the Bedouin - and his sons, having seen that their father reaped no benefits from it, have chosen not to volunteer). Later, he worked for an Israeli company, mining bromide. As he makes clear, he does not have a problem with the Israeli state per se - only with the way it treats his people. The Bedouin are not politicised like the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; they only want to be allowed to live freely, and with dignity. 'Perhaps this sounds strange, but the regime does not concern us. There were the Ottomans, the British, the Israelis. Who knows who will come next? The only steady thing is the right to live over our lands.'
Does he feel the Bedouin have become invisible? He smiles, and rolls his eyes. 'Everyone knows about the Palestinians. But the Arabs inside Israel are forgotten, even in Arab countries. We want to say to them: "We are Muslims and we pray, just like you."'
Some good things are happening in the villages. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise. Though the dropout rate is still high, most Bedouin children now have access to schooling, even if they must slog along dangerous, dusty roads to meet a bus that is unable to enter their village. At Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva some 600 Bedouin students, through sheer stubbornness and hard work, are studying for degrees (the Bedouin mutter that most of the scholarships available are for women, a strategy on the part of a government that believes education will take them 'out of the fertility cycle', but the figures do not back up this argument - and even if they did, I am not at all sure this is a bad thing). In Al-Zarnouk and other villages, women like Hissen are learning to read courtesy of a scheme run by a community organisation, Sidreh, and supported by Oxfam. Sidreh also runs a project, based in Lakia, in which traditional Bedouin weaving skills have been revived and used to build a thriving business selling rugs, bags and cushions. Last April a women's group, supported by Oxfam and PHR, went to Jerusalem and addressed Knesset members - it was the first time their voices had been heard there.
But back in Al-Zarnouk, it is hard to feel optimistic. When we wake up, we discover that rats - the source of the scratching, I presume - got into Hissen's chicken pen last night, and decapitated at least one bird. I spend the day carrying out a series of misery-inducing interviews: a woman who was attacked by rats as she slept; a woman whose husband died because she had no electricity for his respiratory equipment; a woman whose three-year-old son lost a hand after it was caught in her electricity generator. 'He was playing with a stick, and when it got caught in the generator, he put his hand in to catch it,' says Nawal Abu Jamia. 'We only found him when someone noticed that the sound of the generator was different. He was courageous at first. He bore it. Now, he's more vulnerable, more feeble. He wants to sleep next to me, even though he is 12 years old.' She has never received any compensation for his injury and wonders, with good reason, how her son is going to make his way in the world.
This isn't picturesque, noble, rural poverty; this isn't the way of life you might have read about in the books of Wilfred Thesiger and other Orientalist travellers. It's grim: dirty, ugly, claustrophobic; animals too close to people; people too close to the hazards afforded by a cut-price version of modern life, to gas canisters and oil cans, ancient tractors and broken-down cars.
It's also boring. When Hissen was a girl she spent her days herding, an option not open to her now. 'I'm ready to be a belly dancer, I'm so bored and so poor,' she says (belly dancing is about the most shameful job a traditional Muslim woman can do). Is boredom perhaps one reason why she has so many children? No. 'It's haram [forbidden] to refuse your husband,' she says. Polygamy, however, is dying out. 'The older men regard the one with only one wife as a weakling: he might as well have only one eye. But it's almost over. Most younger men do not even want two wives - and if they did, the women would probably not go along with it.' She is proud that her daughter Amira has made it to university, but it is also her contention that the Israeli state's refusal to recognise villages like Al-Zarnouk makes life especially hard for women. When honour killings happen, for instance, the police are unwilling to investigate.
Come nightfall, we are huddled together once again, eating hummus. Haqmi, the third wife, is persuaded to visit; Hissen knows that I am curious to meet her, so she puts up with her presence, tight-lipped. Once again we have borrowed some electricity and, after we've eaten, a big family group - all three wives, three daughters, a daughter-in-law and Hissen's mother - settles down to watch a Turkish telenovela, The Tears of the Rose. This is their absolute favourite show, and for the next hour they are entranced by its magnificently silly plot (so am I). Then, abruptly, it is bedtime again. Once everyone else is lying down, the door locked, an oil lamp lit for comfort, Hissen drags her aching bones into bed, keen to make the most of the hours before we are woken by the dawn call to prayer.
Bedouin villages in the area, is 'unrecognised' by an Israeli government that refuses to accept the land claims of the Negev Desert's indigenous people.
By the time I get to what remains of Nuf Al-Queda's house, its destruction is old news, both in the village of Al-Zarnouk, where the single-storey building had stood for more than 20 years, and far beyond: thanks to mobile telephones and the internet, hundreds of people have already seen images of its demolition by the Israeli Defense Forces on the morning of 30 October. But, five days on, the air is still heavy with cement dust and quiet despair. Nuf, who is 28 and has three children under the age of five, wears the bewildering smile of one so traumatised that she is more inclined to uncontrolled laughter than tears. She stares at the chalky pile of rubble that is her former home - spears of metal protrude from the cheap concrete like giant thorns - and wonders yet again if the gold that she received on her marriage lies somewhere beneath it. It would be good to find those necklaces and bangles because her life savings, a wad of shekels worth about £1,200, were nowhere to be found when her neighbours managed to drag the chest of drawers in which she kept it outside in the moments before the JCBs began their terrible work. Had the soldiers inside already been through it and taken what they wanted? This is her belief, though she has no proof of it, of course.
Nuf is a teacher. She was at school when the army arrived. They came at 9am - 50 soldiers, plus a handful of contractors, a group of Jewish settlers - and by 9.45am their task was complete. Though her neighbours tried to stop them, the soldiers were impassive, their faces 'like walls'. Ostensibly the reason they chose Nuf's house as opposed to any other in Al-Zarnouk was because she had recently renovated it, exchanging its asbestos roof for one made of corrugated iron; an inspector had ruled these changes 'illegal'.
But the truth is that her improvements had little to do with it. Al-Zarnouk, like 44 other Bedouin villages in the area, is 'unrecognised' by an Israeli government that refuses to accept the land claims of the Negev Desert's indigenous people. The Negev, says the government, is not the ancestral land of the Bedouin; it belongs to the Israeli state, and whether their roofs are made of iron or asbestos the Bedouin are merely squatters. The government would like Nuf and her neighbours to move into one of the seven townships it does recognise, towns built specially for them - and for as long as they refuse to do so, they will pay the price: no electricity, no water, the constant threat of demolition. If a place does not exist - and the government is so determined these villages do not exist, it has made sure that they are not signposted on Negev highways, nor marked on any map - how can they be connected to the national grid or the nearest reservoir? The destruction of Nuf's home, which involved the army first driving past dozens of ramshackle buildings just like it, is surely a warning as much as a punishment: this could happen to you, too. Isn't it time to move on?
The Bedouin are Israeli citizens. They are eligible to vote, and must pay taxes, and many of them also opt to do national service in the Israeli army (Taysir Hayb, the 20-year-old soldier who killed Tom Hurndall, the British photographer, in Gaza in 2004, and is now serving an 11-year sentence for manslaughter, was also a Bedouin).
For Nuf, however, the situation is more than usually ironic. As a teacher, she is employed full time by the very state that has just razed her home to the ground. 'Why do I deserve this?' she says in a flat voice. 'In my work I must teach the children about independence, the founding of the state, all the other national myths. But still they come and they knock down my house.' She takes me into the shed where she and her three children, together with her 70-year-old mother-in-law, are now living. It is the size of the garage that you might find attached to a suburban British semi. Three of its walls are made of corrugated iron, a fourth from a blanket and a plastic sheet. At one end are the things she and her neighbours managed to salvage from her house: a plastic bowl filled with bits and pieces of china, an ancient refrigerator, a bunch of ornamental flowers, a couple of mangled window frames. At the other end is a frying pan on a Calor gas stove and some blankets: this is where the family cooks, and sleeps. The place is entirely open to the elements (and to the rats: refuse and open sewers are a problem in the unrecognised villages, and rats love both). It is now November: the desert nights are cold, and getting more so every day. How long will she be able to survive here?
'It's hard to know,' she says, with a shrug. And then - unwilling to abandon the traditional rules of hospitality for all that she cannot make us mint tea - she pours Coca-Cola into plastic cups, and smilingly insists we drink.
Facts about human suffering are troublingly abstract until you have experienced them for yourself, even if only on the tiniest, most feeble scale, so I'm staying in Al-Zarnouk - population 1,250 - for a couple of nights. My host is Hissen Al-Queda (thanks to the tribal custom of cousin marriages, a tradition designed to avoid land disputes, pretty much everyone in Al-Zarnouk is an Al-Queda). Like many of the men here, Hissen's husband, Yusuf, is a polygamist: she is the second of his three wives (under sharia, a man is entitled to four), and he now lives with the third, a fact that she finds hard. She has 11 children and virtually no income because, though Yusuf works - something that is quite unusual in a community where unemployment is officially around 36 per cent, but is probably much higher - he gives her very little money; his third wife, Haqmi, has nine children, so possibly he has other priorities.
Hissen takes comfort, however, in the fact that his first wife, Kamle, also a mother of 11, is her close friend. Hissen had not wanted to marry Yusuf, her cousin, at all. She was in love with a man from another family.
But her father was having none of it, even when she went on hunger strike. Once it was clear that she had no choice in the matter, she went to Kamle and explained her feelings, whereupon the two women clasped one another and burst into tears. These days, they are united by a new tragedy: the advent of Haqmi, whom they regard as a flirt. One last thing. All three of the women's children are of similar ages: they have sometimes been pregnant at the same time, a fact that often makes it difficult to work out who is who.
My stay begins with a tour. I visit the refuse tip at the edge of the village, three mountains of waste so stinking it is all I can do not to gag, and I am shown one of the rudimentary and very noisy generators some people here use to obtain their three or four hours of electricity a night (only those who can afford it use generators; others make do with an oil lamp and go to bed soon after nightfall). It's not just that these things are unpleasant; they are confusing, too, because they are so unnecessary.
Israel is not a developing country. On my way to Al-Zarnouk, I drove through Omer, a gated Jewish suburb of Be'er Sheva, the Negev's biggest city. Omer is one of the richest communities in Israel (three Be'er Sheva suburbs are on the list of Israel's 10 richest towns), and its modern houses, with their desert views and suspiciously lush gardens, look like they have come straight out of the pages of a piece of Californian property porn. Omer is less than 20 minutes' drive from Al-Zarnouk. On a clear day you can actually see it. As if this were not bad enough, the pylons that carry electricity from Be'er Sheva to Omer and then beyond, to cities like Arad, march through this very village. An iron foot belonging to one of them stands right by the generator I'm currently looking at, next to a small area where a family's goats and sheep are penned (residents can no longer graze animals on, or farm, the land outside the village; the Israeli government used to spray it with pesticides to prevent this - and when the practice was outlawed by Israel's high court, it found other ways, such as driving tractors through the crops). One of Hissen's daughters points up at the pylon - as if I could miss it. But she doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. We are now walking in the gloaming: I am already painfully aware of the insult that it represents.
Hissen's house is like all Bedouin houses: tiny, thrown up, cobbled together. If the big bad wolf huffed and puffed at this place, it would blow down in an instant. The Bedouin used to be nomadic, moving across the desert with their animals according to the season - a fact that the Israeli government likes to use against them: how
can you own your lands, it asks, if you are nomads? (No matter that the British Mandate acknowledged the Bedouin's claim to the very same lands in the Twenties, and the Ottoman empire before it). But the Negev Bedouin were in the process of becoming sedentarised as along ago as the 19th century, and, in satellite photographs, there is evidence to suggest that dwellings were built on these barren hills in the middle of the last century, and perhaps before. (In the Sixties and Seventies, many Bedouin used to pitch a traditional tent, woven from the hair of black goats, beside their houses, but since no one can keep goats in sufficient quantities any more, only those few who make a living from tourism continue with this practice.)
Hissen's house is far superior to most 21st-century Bedouin homes: this part of Al-Zarnouk has clean water, which comes from a tank someone has managed to install in the village, and she is connected. But this is not saying a lot. Poverty, combined with the constant fear of demolition, means that many Bedouin live in slum conditions. 'Which century do you think you are in?' she says with a smile as I look about - and it's true that I cannot imagine anyone in Tel Aviv living like this.
There are three rooms. One for sitting in, one for sleeping in, one for the preparation of food. Hissen's furniture amounts to five plastic garden chairs, a double bed - I, like her children, will sleep on the floor - and an old television. Out back, in a rickety lean-to, is the old metal bread oven in which pitta is baked over a wood fire. The room fills with smoke on bread-baking days, so perhaps it is just as well that you can see the sky through its breeze-block walls. Here, too, food is fried in a pan on a gas burner on the floor. In the evenings, when it is pitch black, this room is an extremely dangerous place to be.
In my honour, Hissen has managed to 'borrow' some electricity from a neighbour with a generator - she does not own one herself - and she has brought it into her house via a terrifying arrangement of dangling wires. For three hours, then, we have a light bulb and Al-Jazeera. Nine-year-old Hoda, Hissen's youngest child, lies on her stomach beside this single bulb, desperately trying to do her homework - a sight that makes me wonder all over again at the fact that Amira, her older sister, is now a Hebrew language student at Ben-Gurion University. How does anyone study here? At six we eat: chicken and rice, bread, a few slices of cucumber and tomato, oranges. We talk. Hissen tells me that her house has only been demolished once, and that was a long time ago, before the Gulf war. But Kamle's house, which is next door, has been knocked down twice; after the second time, she fell into a deep depression. By 8pm, we are ready to go to bed: such is the quality of the darkness there is simply nothing else to be done. I lie in my sleeping bag on a rug on the concrete floor and hope that sleep will come quickly. If it does, I won't have to identify the source of the animal scratching I can hear above Hissen's nocturnal sighs.
There are 160,000 Bedouin in Israel, of whom roughly half live in 'unrecognised' villages. They comprise 25 per cent of the northern Negev's population, but live on only 2 per cent of its land - a fact that makes Israel's apparent fear and loathing of them seem particularly disproportionate. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, many of them fled the Negev, or were expelled to Eygpt and Jordan.
'I remember it well,' says Hissen's mother Tammam, who is in her seventies. 'We saw the tanks, so we put our tents on the camels and moved. We lived just outside Hebron [in the West Bank] for a year. We felt like refugees. But the land does not have legs; it cannot get up and walk. No one was cultivating it. So we came back, and life went on as it had before.'
Her family was relatively lucky in that it returned to its own land. Others did not get off so lightly. In the Fifties and Sixties, those who had stayed behind were relocated by the Israeli government to a triangular zone - the Siyag - in the northeast of the Negev, on land that was relatively infertile. Meanwhile, outside the Siyag, expulsions continued. The Bedouin were removed, their place names erased from official maps. Towns were then given new Hebrew names. 'Just as we do not recognise the Arabs' proprietorship of the land, so also we do not recognise their spiritual proprietorship and their names,' said David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister, who appointed the committee that carried out this task.
With the founding of the State of Israel came some benefits for the remaining Bedouin: mandatory education meant that literacy levels rose and healthcare was theoretically more widely available. But the discrimination continued. In the Sixties Moshe Dayan, then minister of agriculture, made the now-infamous statement in which he spoke of a 'revolution' in which the Bedouin would become an urban proletariat: 'His children will get used to a father who wears trousers, who does not carry a dagger and who does not pick out their nits in public. They will go to school, their hair combed. This will be a revolution, and it will be achieved in two generations. Without coercion but with governmental direction... this phenomenon of the Bedouin will disappear.'
In the Seventies another agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, declared much of the Negev a nature reserve, out of bounds to Bedouin herders, and established the Green Patrol to police it. Some 900 Bedouin encampments were removed during this period, and goat herds cut by a third. In the same decade, the government established the seven urban townships to which Bedouin could move on renunciation of their ancestral lands. Denied access to their grazing rights, and to basic services in the unrecognised villages, thousands took the miserable decision to move, and thousands came to regret it: today, life in townships such as Laqia and Hura is better than in the unrecognised villages, but only marginally so. In Laqia - the home, incidentally, of the only Bedouin Knesset member, Talab Al-Sana - there is no proper sewage system and no waste collection. Roads, where they exist at all, are poor. The townships were not properly planned. The Bedouin birth rate is one of the highest in the world (7.6 children per woman in 2005): as land runs out, families build insanitary shacks and pray that God will bless them with mild winters and gentle summers.
In the past few years, 59 new Jewish farms have been established in the Negev, isolated properties that the local authorities usually connect to water and electricity grids without hesitation, even if their owners have not yet secured building permits. Meanwhile, in the unrecognised Bedouin villages, people struggle on without either of these things. Even the villages' medical centres - clinics that have been established thanks to the lobbying efforts of organisations such as Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which regularly petition the high court on such matters - must run on generators, which means, among other things, that they cannot refrigerate medicine 24 hours a day. 'All the improvements that have come to the villages so far have come only with the involvement of the high court,' says Shlomit Avni, the head of the residence department at PHR. 'The first clinic did not open until 1995, but even now there are still only 11.'
You might imagine, of course, that once the high court has acknowledged that residents in a particular village have a right to a clinic, this would lead to recognition of the village in the more general sense: how can a village that does not exist require health services? Not so. 'In 2006, we appealed to the court to connect the house of a child with cancer to the grid; the family needed electricity to keep his medicine cold. The court turned down our appeal. It argued that the child's health was his parents' responsibility, and that they chose to live in an unrecognised village.'
So the demolitions continue. Ministry of interior records show that government demolitions in the Negev more than doubled, from 143 in 2005 to 367 in 2006. The army does not limit itself to destroying domestic homes; it has also been known to demolish businesses, agricultural buildings and even mosques. Since 2005 it has been possible to file a demolition order against a building without its owner's knowledge. Things have tailed off more recently - there were 200 demolitions in 2007 - but there is a widespread suspicion among the Bedouin and many of the NGOs that work in the area that this is just the quiet before another storm.
As you sweep along the smooth highway that leads out of Be'er Sheva to the city of Dimona, the unrecognised villages, hunkered down on far off hills, don't look too bad. It's only when you get close that you realise how squalid they are and, since the roads to them are unmarked, few people are likely to make a detour. Do Israelis know what conditions their fellow citizens are living in? Avni believes that most do not. But even if they did, they would not necessarily be sympathetic. 'Those who do know have a big fear which sits on racism,' she says. 'It's demographic: they're taking our land. There's no real reason for this: we're talking about 2 per cent of the Negev. Unfortunately, an Israeli Jew doesn't always make a distinction between a Bedouin Arab, who has done army service, and a Palestinian, who has not. They all look the same. So there's another basic fear that is very hard to overcome - a security fear.'
The statistics, however, are striking. Israel has a national health insurance scheme which entitles all residents to access to a health 'basket', irrespective of income. It is considered progressive and efficient, and health outcomes in the country are good. So why, then, is the infant-mortality rate among the Bedouin population so high (15.5 for every 1,000 in 2006) compared to that of the Jewish population (three for every 1,000 in 2006)? (In the wider Israeli Arab population, the figure is eight for every 1,000; the Bedouin are, as Avni points out, at 'the very bottom of the heap').
The Bedouin are ill, mostly due to the lack of clean water available to them. Intestinal infections are common, diarrhoea endemic during the summer. In a sirocco, when the wind whips up, the dust rises and temperatures peak, 60 per cent of the children in Negev hospitals are Bedouin, a figure that sometimes rises to 80 per cent during the summer. Bedouin children and older adults suffer disproportionately from respiratory diseases such as asthma because their iron houses are so hot by day and so cold by night; their villages full of burning garbage; their homes too close to Israel's main hazardous waste facility, Romat Hovav (the site is also home to 19 chemical factories).
The 11 clinics in the unrecognised villages are often inaccessible - public transport does not extend here - and keep short hours due to restrictions on their electricity. The doctors who work in them often do not speak Arabic, Israel's second official language (some 50 per cent of Bedouin women cannot speak Hebrew, and most are illiterate in it). Emergency services are effectively nonexistent: either ambulances cannot find the villages or their drivers refuse to enter them. As a result of the demolitions, rates of mental illness are also very high - particularly among women, for whom the home is so central to their sense of self.
The Regional Council for the Unrecognised Arab Bedouin Villages - which was established in 1997 and whose work is supported by, among others, Oxfam - lobbies policy makers on behalf of the community. Like PHR, it has found that the only real way of effecting change is through appealing to the courts. But it is slow work. 'Our dreams are dead,' says Ibrahim Abu Fash, one of its members. Ibrahim lives in Wadi Ani'am, the nearest unrecognised village to Ramat Hovav. Between 1948 and 1953 most of his tribe were forced out of the Negev, to Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai. In 1953 the remaining members were moved into the triangle.
'On Fridays, I take my sons and grandsons, and show them the old lands. The old lands are known, and clear; everyone knows them by name. Show me a map, and I can tell you who owns what. But anyone who thinks we will ever get them back is dreaming.'
The people of Wadi Ani'am have made history by being the first to agree to move en masse; they can live with the fumes emanating from Ramat Hovav no longer. But they are determined not to go to a township. 'We are an agricultural-based community. We want to be recognised as such, never mind where. We want to herd sheep, grow basic crops. Rates of cancer are too high here. The nearest clinic is 4km away.' Like many older Bedouin men, Ibrahim has an extra reason for feeling aggrieved at the state. From 1971 to 1974 he did military service in the Israeli army. 'I did it in order to prevent anyone from accusing me of not fulfilling my duties to the state,' he says (service is optional for the Bedouin - and his sons, having seen that their father reaped no benefits from it, have chosen not to volunteer). Later, he worked for an Israeli company, mining bromide. As he makes clear, he does not have a problem with the Israeli state per se - only with the way it treats his people. The Bedouin are not politicised like the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza; they only want to be allowed to live freely, and with dignity. 'Perhaps this sounds strange, but the regime does not concern us. There were the Ottomans, the British, the Israelis. Who knows who will come next? The only steady thing is the right to live over our lands.'
Does he feel the Bedouin have become invisible? He smiles, and rolls his eyes. 'Everyone knows about the Palestinians. But the Arabs inside Israel are forgotten, even in Arab countries. We want to say to them: "We are Muslims and we pray, just like you."'
Some good things are happening in the villages. It would be wrong to suggest otherwise. Though the dropout rate is still high, most Bedouin children now have access to schooling, even if they must slog along dangerous, dusty roads to meet a bus that is unable to enter their village. At Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva some 600 Bedouin students, through sheer stubbornness and hard work, are studying for degrees (the Bedouin mutter that most of the scholarships available are for women, a strategy on the part of a government that believes education will take them 'out of the fertility cycle', but the figures do not back up this argument - and even if they did, I am not at all sure this is a bad thing). In Al-Zarnouk and other villages, women like Hissen are learning to read courtesy of a scheme run by a community organisation, Sidreh, and supported by Oxfam. Sidreh also runs a project, based in Lakia, in which traditional Bedouin weaving skills have been revived and used to build a thriving business selling rugs, bags and cushions. Last April a women's group, supported by Oxfam and PHR, went to Jerusalem and addressed Knesset members - it was the first time their voices had been heard there.
But back in Al-Zarnouk, it is hard to feel optimistic. When we wake up, we discover that rats - the source of the scratching, I presume - got into Hissen's chicken pen last night, and decapitated at least one bird. I spend the day carrying out a series of misery-inducing interviews: a woman who was attacked by rats as she slept; a woman whose husband died because she had no electricity for his respiratory equipment; a woman whose three-year-old son lost a hand after it was caught in her electricity generator. 'He was playing with a stick, and when it got caught in the generator, he put his hand in to catch it,' says Nawal Abu Jamia. 'We only found him when someone noticed that the sound of the generator was different. He was courageous at first. He bore it. Now, he's more vulnerable, more feeble. He wants to sleep next to me, even though he is 12 years old.' She has never received any compensation for his injury and wonders, with good reason, how her son is going to make his way in the world.
This isn't picturesque, noble, rural poverty; this isn't the way of life you might have read about in the books of Wilfred Thesiger and other Orientalist travellers. It's grim: dirty, ugly, claustrophobic; animals too close to people; people too close to the hazards afforded by a cut-price version of modern life, to gas canisters and oil cans, ancient tractors and broken-down cars.
It's also boring. When Hissen was a girl she spent her days herding, an option not open to her now. 'I'm ready to be a belly dancer, I'm so bored and so poor,' she says (belly dancing is about the most shameful job a traditional Muslim woman can do). Is boredom perhaps one reason why she has so many children? No. 'It's haram [forbidden] to refuse your husband,' she says. Polygamy, however, is dying out. 'The older men regard the one with only one wife as a weakling: he might as well have only one eye. But it's almost over. Most younger men do not even want two wives - and if they did, the women would probably not go along with it.' She is proud that her daughter Amira has made it to university, but it is also her contention that the Israeli state's refusal to recognise villages like Al-Zarnouk makes life especially hard for women. When honour killings happen, for instance, the police are unwilling to investigate.
Come nightfall, we are huddled together once again, eating hummus. Haqmi, the third wife, is persuaded to visit; Hissen knows that I am curious to meet her, so she puts up with her presence, tight-lipped. Once again we have borrowed some electricity and, after we've eaten, a big family group - all three wives, three daughters, a daughter-in-law and Hissen's mother - settles down to watch a Turkish telenovela, The Tears of the Rose. This is their absolute favourite show, and for the next hour they are entranced by its magnificently silly plot (so am I). Then, abruptly, it is bedtime again. Once everyone else is lying down, the door locked, an oil lamp lit for comfort, Hissen drags her aching bones into bed, keen to make the most of the hours before we are woken by the dawn call to prayer.
Saturday, 25 October 2008
Toronto Palestine Film Festival
Jackie Reem Salloum directed the documentary Slingshot Hip Hop, which portrays the experience of Palestinians living in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, airing at Toronto Palestine Film Festival
On the heels of the Toronto International Film Festival comes another motion picture fete about a people trying to carve out a state in a war-torn region.
From October 25 to November 1, Toronto will showcase 36 films about the Palestinians as part of year-long commemorations marking the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Kole Kilibarda, one of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) organisers, believes audiences will be surprised by "the amazing cinema produced even under the most difficult of circumstances."
The TPFF will include Canadian, North American, and world premieres of award-winning documentaries, features, and short films.
Palestinian films have gained prominence on the international scene in recent years, beginning with the enigmatic Divine Intervention (2002) and the controversial Oscar-nominated Paradise Now (2005).
Young Palestinians use hip hop to surmount divisions imposed by occupation and poverty
Jackie Reem Salloum, the director of the documentary Slingshot Hip Hop, which is being screened at the festival, believes Palestinian filmmakers have a responsibility to portray the social and political conflict in the Middle East.
"Hollywood doesn't know anything about the Palestinian issue," she told Al Jazeera.
Salloum says Palestinian parents should encourage their children to tell their stories through artistic expression and the media.
Social, not political
TPFF organisers say they chose to showcase Palestinian works as artistic and cultural productions, steering away from political discourse.
Driving to Zigzigland, directed by Nicole Ballivian
This film follows the life of Bashar from the streets of Jerusalem and Ramallah to Los Angeles where he is a taxi driver with ambitions of becoming an actor in Hollywood. He soon realises that he has 24 hours to pay off his utilities but must choose between his own family and the Department of Homeland Security.
For more information about the Toronto Palestine Film Festival...
Dania Majid, the head organiser, admits that the films necessarily touch on political issues due to the reality of day-to-day life for Palestinians, but she says the express purpose of the festival is a cultural "opportunity to discuss Palestinian narratives."
Kilibarda says the films were carefully selected, from more than 200 submissions, to exhibit a diversity of viewpoints across gender, sexual preferences, religion and age.
"They [the films] should be listened to on their own terms because the views presented don't necessarily fit into political categories [but rather] they focus on the human story," Kilibarda told Al Jazeera.
Nicole Ballivian, director of the festival feature Driving to Zigzigland, says her film is about more than a Palestinian experience.
"It's homage to immigrants coming to America to try to pursue the American dream and finding it is a major struggle."
Ballivian, who is not an Arab, says the film is a comedy composite of real experiences she and her Palestinian ex-husband experienced in the US after 9/11 (including a "verbatim" conversation between her and FBI officers).
For two years, Ballivian was followed and questioned by the FBI. Though she says she was never seriously concerned, "anything could happen to anyone in this country [the US]."
Ballivian believes that while one cannot separate the human drama from the politics, it is nonetheless the audience – in both composition and intent – that determines whether a film about Palestinians is necessarily "political."
Israeli film festival
"The only place we [Israelis and Palestinians] should compete is in culture, and sports maybe"
Eran Bester, one of the organisers of the Israel Film Festival
Organisers say public reaction to the festival has been overwhelmingly positive and that many films have already sold out.
But the public and those interested in issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will also have the chance to view some seven films screened during the Israel Film Festival which also opens on October 25.
The Israel Film Festival was previously held in Montreal in May.
A Jewish Film Festival, which was held in Toronto last May, played at least two of the seven films featured in the upcoming Israel festival.
Eran Bester, one of the organisers of the Israeli film festival, insists he only recently discovered the "coincidence" that the two festivals appear to overlap.
"The only place we [Israelis and Palestinians] should compete is in culture, and sports maybe," Bester said.
Focus on human interest
Salt of this Sea, directed by Annemarie Jacir
The film follows the trials and tribulations of a Brooklyn-born Palestinian woman who fulfils her life-long dream of "returning" to Palestine where she is forced to deal with the realities of a people living under occupation.
For more information about the Toronto Palestine Film Festival...
However, both the Palestinian and Israeli film festivals appear to be following a trend of "de-politicising" the conflict in the Middle East and instead focusing on the human interest angle as depicted through art.
"There is a real desire to instrumentalise art and culture in a way to use for political ends, but art and culture are much more powerful" says Kilibarda.
While none of the films offer simple solutions to the conflict or the difficulties Palestinians face in their daily life, Kilibarda believes the fact these films were even made should provide inspiration.
That such films received financing and distribution and be screened at large venues offers "enough reason for hope," he said.
"It's a really important kind of success."
On the heels of the Toronto International Film Festival comes another motion picture fete about a people trying to carve out a state in a war-torn region.
From October 25 to November 1, Toronto will showcase 36 films about the Palestinians as part of year-long commemorations marking the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe.
Kole Kilibarda, one of the Toronto Palestine Film Festival (TPFF) organisers, believes audiences will be surprised by "the amazing cinema produced even under the most difficult of circumstances."
The TPFF will include Canadian, North American, and world premieres of award-winning documentaries, features, and short films.
Palestinian films have gained prominence on the international scene in recent years, beginning with the enigmatic Divine Intervention (2002) and the controversial Oscar-nominated Paradise Now (2005).
Young Palestinians use hip hop to surmount divisions imposed by occupation and poverty
Jackie Reem Salloum, the director of the documentary Slingshot Hip Hop, which is being screened at the festival, believes Palestinian filmmakers have a responsibility to portray the social and political conflict in the Middle East.
"Hollywood doesn't know anything about the Palestinian issue," she told Al Jazeera.
Salloum says Palestinian parents should encourage their children to tell their stories through artistic expression and the media.
Social, not political
TPFF organisers say they chose to showcase Palestinian works as artistic and cultural productions, steering away from political discourse.
Driving to Zigzigland, directed by Nicole Ballivian
This film follows the life of Bashar from the streets of Jerusalem and Ramallah to Los Angeles where he is a taxi driver with ambitions of becoming an actor in Hollywood. He soon realises that he has 24 hours to pay off his utilities but must choose between his own family and the Department of Homeland Security.
For more information about the Toronto Palestine Film Festival...
Dania Majid, the head organiser, admits that the films necessarily touch on political issues due to the reality of day-to-day life for Palestinians, but she says the express purpose of the festival is a cultural "opportunity to discuss Palestinian narratives."
Kilibarda says the films were carefully selected, from more than 200 submissions, to exhibit a diversity of viewpoints across gender, sexual preferences, religion and age.
"They [the films] should be listened to on their own terms because the views presented don't necessarily fit into political categories [but rather] they focus on the human story," Kilibarda told Al Jazeera.
Nicole Ballivian, director of the festival feature Driving to Zigzigland, says her film is about more than a Palestinian experience.
"It's homage to immigrants coming to America to try to pursue the American dream and finding it is a major struggle."
Ballivian, who is not an Arab, says the film is a comedy composite of real experiences she and her Palestinian ex-husband experienced in the US after 9/11 (including a "verbatim" conversation between her and FBI officers).
For two years, Ballivian was followed and questioned by the FBI. Though she says she was never seriously concerned, "anything could happen to anyone in this country [the US]."
Ballivian believes that while one cannot separate the human drama from the politics, it is nonetheless the audience – in both composition and intent – that determines whether a film about Palestinians is necessarily "political."
Israeli film festival
"The only place we [Israelis and Palestinians] should compete is in culture, and sports maybe"
Eran Bester, one of the organisers of the Israel Film Festival
Organisers say public reaction to the festival has been overwhelmingly positive and that many films have already sold out.
But the public and those interested in issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will also have the chance to view some seven films screened during the Israel Film Festival which also opens on October 25.
The Israel Film Festival was previously held in Montreal in May.
A Jewish Film Festival, which was held in Toronto last May, played at least two of the seven films featured in the upcoming Israel festival.
Eran Bester, one of the organisers of the Israeli film festival, insists he only recently discovered the "coincidence" that the two festivals appear to overlap.
"The only place we [Israelis and Palestinians] should compete is in culture, and sports maybe," Bester said.
Focus on human interest
Salt of this Sea, directed by Annemarie Jacir
The film follows the trials and tribulations of a Brooklyn-born Palestinian woman who fulfils her life-long dream of "returning" to Palestine where she is forced to deal with the realities of a people living under occupation.
For more information about the Toronto Palestine Film Festival...
However, both the Palestinian and Israeli film festivals appear to be following a trend of "de-politicising" the conflict in the Middle East and instead focusing on the human interest angle as depicted through art.
"There is a real desire to instrumentalise art and culture in a way to use for political ends, but art and culture are much more powerful" says Kilibarda.
While none of the films offer simple solutions to the conflict or the difficulties Palestinians face in their daily life, Kilibarda believes the fact these films were even made should provide inspiration.
That such films received financing and distribution and be screened at large venues offers "enough reason for hope," he said.
"It's a really important kind of success."
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