Reporting from Baghdad: Dahr Jamail on Iraq

Scott Horton Interviews Dahr Jamail

February 13th, 2009

Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, discusses the improved security in Baghdad that comes by way of a semi-police state fortified with concrete blast walls, the millions of Iraqi refugees who claim they will never return, the rising discontent among members of Sunni “Awakening” groups, the incredibly high potential for violence in a politically unstable country with armed militias and 50% unemployment and how the numerous U.S. military bases create facts on the ground that make a speedy withdrawal seem unlikely.

MP3 here. (38:20)

Dahr Jamail is an unembedded journalist in Iraq and author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and Military Resisters: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. His personal website is dahrjamailiraq.com and archives of his articles can be found at antiwar.com/jamail. (posted by Antiwar.com)

Helena Cobban in Ramallah

Also, Helena Cobban is visiting a number of Middle Easter nations and is currently in the city of Ramallah. Her experiences and brilliantly stated insights convey the every-day challenges Palestinians face living under Israeli control, even in what she refers to as the "Club Fed" of the occupied territories where an imagined sense of normalcy is almost possible:

I've never stayed for very long in Ramallah before. I generally preferred to stay in East Jerusalem and then as necessary traverse the ghastly Qalandia crossing point between there and Ramallah, sometimes staying with friends here in Ramallah for a night or two. But this time I decided to make Ramallah my first stop, and to stay here for a week or so, so I can catch up with everything that's been going on here. It is, after all, three years now since I was last in town.

So yesterday morning, I took a car from Amman down to the Allenby/ King Hussein Bridge. There was almost no-one else seeking to cross-- almost as bad a sign as if it had been jam-packed, I think. The deal is you do your Jordan-exit business first, east of the bridge, then take a Jordanian-provided and mandatory shuttle bus across the trickle of water known as the River Jordan, to the Israeli side. But it took nearly an hour for them to gather enough people (ten or so) to justify sending the bus across. I got a bit impatient. But in the bus I found that a fellow-traveler who's a manager with the (Abu Mazen-controlled) Palestine Investment Fund was also hoping to head up to Ramallah, so we shared a taxi and split the cost of some $120.

Getting in to the West Bank through the Israeli-controlled side was the usual, extremely depressing experience. The Israelis have cadres of young women, presumably doing their national service, whom they use as the "front-line" in many border-control jobs. Many of them love to hang around with each other and with the beefy young guys who also work there, to chat on cell-phones, to stand around admiring each other's make-up and hair-dos, and to really relish the power they have over all these exhausted-looking Palestinian families whom they have to deal with. The main power they have is to harrass and delay, but it's backed up by other much more intrusive or fearsome powers, too.

When our bus with ten people rolled in, there were around 60-70 people in the passport-control waiting area, so some of them may well have been waiting since early morning. Just about all of them looked to be Palestinians, since of course just about every Palestinian family in the West Bank has half or more of its family members now living in Jordan. And guess what, people in these families like to get together!!! But to do so, they have to pass through these border-controls that are totally controlled by the cohorts of bored and faintly malevolent young Israelis. Well, that gives just a first glimpse of what then continues to happen to Palestinians inside the West Bank, any time they want to travel from one town or city there to another, I guess.

... If all the Palestinian communities in the occupied territories can nowadays be described as "open-air prisons"-- and I believe they can-- then Ramallah is probably the "Club Fed", i.e. the top banana, in this extensive system. Provided you don't actually need to go anywhere else, provided you have plenty of money (yes, this Club Fed ain't cheap to live in), and provided you're capable of completely disabling any sense of solidarity or connectedness you might have with family members, friends, or just plain compatriots who happen to live elsewhere, such as Gaza, you could possibly even live a pretty good life here.

Places that most Ramallah people can't ever get to include even Jerusalem, which used to be just 12 minutes away by car along the hilltop road. Ramallah's a historically Christian town, and just about everyone here has family members or close business ties with East Jerusalem. Tough luck. The Wall, with its horrendous-- and oh so evocatively looming-- watch-towers, stands between.

You are reminded nearly everywhere of the tight noose Israel retains around Ramallah. Like the rest of the West Bank, it is literally a captive market for Israeli produce. Many stores are filled with Israeli-produced goods or with other imports that, having come in through Israeli ports and middle-men give them a nice cut of the profits, too. You can get some great Palestinian fresh produce, and a few locally-manufactured products like Taybeh beer, or some Palestinian-processed foods. But even for those Palestinian industries, their scale is small and many or most of their inputs have to brought in from or through Israel.

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-mr