Saturday, March 28, 2009

Headlines:


-mr
Update on Iraq from Informed Comment:

26 Killed, 37 Wounded in Baghdad Bombing;Women's Condition Deteriorating

A car bombing in a market district of Shaab, Baghdad, killed 26 and wounded 37 on Thursday, the fifth large bombing in March. The LAT underlines that blast walls separating Shiite Shaab from nearby Sunni Arab areas have recently been removed. But it should be remembered that Shaab used to be mixed and is now almost wholly Shiite, so there could be some disgruntled Sunnis and who struck back.

AP has video:



Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iranian speaker of the House Ali Larijani is on a secret mission in Iraq to mediate between the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his sometime coalition partner, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). The two parties are seeking to form coalitions in several southern Shiite provincial councils, and Iran is said impatient for the deal to be concluded.

Compare this item to the complaints of the incoming US ambassador to Iraq, slamming Iranian influence.

Iraqi women are in the grip of a silent emergency, according to Oxfam:

' "Women are the forgotten victims of Iraq. Despite the billions of dollars poured into rebuilding Iraq and recent security gains, a quarter of the women interviewed still do not have daily access to water, a third cannot send their children to school and since the war started, over half have been the victim of violence.'


McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday:
' Baghdad

A car bomb targeted civilians near al Zahraa Hospital in Shaab neighbourhood, northern Baghdad at 1 p.m. Thursday killing 16 civilians including four women, injuring 40 others including four women.

Nineveh

Gunmen attacked and killed a store owner in his store in Faisaliyah neighbourhood, central Mosul at 11.30 a.m. Thursday.

A joint Iraqi police and Iraqi army patrol opened fire upon a suspect speeding car that wouldn't stop at the checkpoint in al Jamiaa neighbourhood in which Mosul University is located injuring the driver and accidentally killing a female student who was passing by. The car turned out to be booby trapped and was detonated under control without casualties.

- A gunman threw a grenade at a shop in Dawasa neighborhood in downtown Mosul in the afternoon. The shop owner was wounded and the gunman was arrested by police.

Kirkuk

Gunmen attempted to kidnap one of the body guards of the President of the Criminal Court in Kirkuk, Thursday morning. And during the ensuing hand fight, people started to gather and the gunmen fled leaving the body guard, Murad Fikret with superficial injuries.

Three workers in the Electricity Department in Kirkuk were injured when a roadside bomb targeted them while working in Rashad neighbourhood, western Kirkuk, early Thursday afternoon.'


My interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com is now available on the web. It concerns my book:


Engaging the Muslim World


Sunni Arab Refugees from Iraq Not Returning; $3-5 Bn. US Reconstruction Aid Wasted

Hamza Hendawi of AP says his interviews and on-the-ground researches in Baghdad support my contention that the Iraqi capital is now only 10 percent to 15 percent Sunni (in 2003 it was roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shiite):

' Among the statistics obtained by the AP:

— Only an estimated 50,000 of 300,000 displaced families — or 16 percent — have returned to their Baghdad homes, according to the U.S. military. Most are believed to be Sunnis.

— In Hurriyah, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 families, most of them Sunnis, fled in 2006 and 2007. Of those, only 648 families — or 16 to 22 percent — have come back since September.

In addition, 350 to 400 of the displaced families have sold or rented their Hurriyah homes, suggesting they intend to stay away forever, said Maj. Hussein al-Qaissy, Hurriyah's Iraqi army commander.


Note that 300,000 displaced Iraqi families would likely be 1.5 million individuals.

I did research in August, 2008, in Jordan on Iraqi refugees, and it became very clear to me that they are not returning to Iraq. Many are traumatized, having seen horrific violence against neighbors, friends or family members. One fourth of the families applying for refugee aid reported having had a child kidnapped. Many have been personally threatened by militias who still control their old neighborhood. Sometimes the militias track them down in East Amman and threaten them again. Iraqi Sunnis do not feel safe returning to districts that are now largely Shiite. Mixed families feel that they no longer have a place to live safely. Most refugees have had their property confiscated. Many former Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad are now ghost towns.

-mr

Friday, March 20, 2009

In Iraq, a boy named 'War' turns 6:

That same year, War sat in the car as his dad drove down the dark streets of his neighborhood one night. A car stopped in front of them, and members of the Shiite militia, the Mahdi army, pulled a man from the trunk of the car and shot him.

They left him on the street and drove away. It was one of thousands of killings by street militias at the height of sectarian violence. The body was one of many that littered the streets like garbage in 2006 and 2007. Often, 50 bodies were found a day.

Badr got out of the car to see if it was someone from the neighborhood. Some boys distracted him briefly and warned him not to approach the body. When he turned, his son was gone.

War looked into the face of the dead Sunni man.

"What are you doing?" his father asked, running up to the little boy.

"Look baba," he said. "Poor man."

He's seen things a child should never see.

His parents try to protect him, but he asks questions.

"If he sees a man with a gun, he asks if he's going to kill someone," Iman, his mother, said as she baked bread in her home. "I don't know yet how it is going to affect him."

She looked at her son and held her daughter, not yet 2, in her arms.

"Our life is destruction, on top of destruction," she said.

War has never been to a playground and never been on a picnic. He's never been on a ride at an amusement park.

"He always asks to go out," his mother said. "He tells me, 'We haven't seen anything in our lives. Why are we like prisoners in our house?'"

Today, War turns 6. He's never had a birthday party. READ MORE

-mr

Dressed to Kill

From The Angry Arab News Service:
"A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it." Remind me to design T-shirts when Palestine is finally liberated. I have a few ideas. (thanks Asa)

From Informed Comment:

Israeli Excesses in Gaza Revealed

A discussion among Israeli veterans of the past winter's military campaign against Gaza has become public, embarrassing the Israeli military and the politicians who launched that attack, which killed many more innocent civilians than it did Hamas militants, and which wrought enormous damage on Gaza's already dilapidated civilian infrastructure. The Israeli soldiers complained of their inability to stop war crimes such as the arbitrary killing of unarmed civilians. They spoke of deliberate vandalism and destruction of property, including just tossing household effects of Gazan homes out the window.

The BBC adds,

'The soldiers' testimonies also reportedly told of an unusually high intervention by military and non-military rabbis, who circulated pamphlets describing the war in religious terminology.'
There was a general feeling, the soldiers reported, that Palestinian lives counted for little.

Aljazeera English has video:



Aljazeera English also interviews Gazan families who corroborate what the Israeli soldiers divulged.



M. J. Rosenberg has more, including a round-up of news about the ongoing hostilities between Hamas and Israel.

See also Richard Silverstein.

-mr

Monday, March 16, 2009

The Inside View

Another rich, nuanced and illuminating post on the state of affairs in three occupied West Bank cities by veteran journalist and writer Helena Cobban.

What you won't find in The Press: Fateh/Hamas accord, Jewish-Israeli de-development and subsequent gentrification of historic Palestinian city centers, the insignificance of the Arab Peace Initiative, and Zayyad's best-known poetry:

Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem: Not a Christmas Story

Posted by Helena Cobban
March 15, 2009 10:32 PM EST | Link
Filed in Palestine 2009

1. Bethlehem

One morning at the end of February I spent 90 minutes hanging out in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine, that is. And yes, the mayor's office overlooks Manger Square, looking south toward the Church of the Nativity; so there is a certain sense of history to the place.

During our conversation, Batarseh wanted to make sure he got on the record with his scalding criticisms of Israel's recent war against Gaza. "This war was not against Hamas. It was against the Gaza Strips' women and children and its whole infrastructure," he said.

    They were trying to destroy the whole society there... Just as Sharon did here in the West Bank in 2002, and we still haven't totally rebuilt from that.

    How can the western governments, time and time again, ask their people to pay for all these damages caused by Israel's military actions?

Bethlehem's city council has 15 members: eight are Christians and seven are Muslims, and of the Muslims, five are members of Hamas. Batarseh is a Christian, affiliated with one of the venerable leftist factions of the PLO: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP.

I'd been taken to Batarseh's office by council member Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran peace activist and also, fwiw, a Christian. Visiting the office that morning were two of the Hamas council members and one of the Fateh members. Batarseh sat behind his desk, the council members and I sat in the easy chairs in front of the desk. Mainly we talked politics-- in English and Arabic. There was a lot of camaraderie and good-natured teasing amongst the council members in the gathering, which assumed the feel, very familiar to me, of an Arabic style "majlis" get-together. Every so often a city official would come in to do some business, and there were some discussions of serious differences among the council members on the question of whether the number of peddlers' cart licenses should be increased or not. (That one sounded like an issue of expanding the economic opportunities available to low-income people versus not scaring off valuable, revenue-bearing foreign tourists by having too many peddlers in the streets.)

Of course, given that the weather was very chilly that day the whole gathering was also lubricated by numerous rounds of hot drinks: yensoon (aniseed tea), mint tea, Arabic coffee, back to yensoon...

Armchair analysts in the west who believe that there are deep and possibly irreconcileable rifts between Fateh and Hamas would have done well to spend a morning with me in Batarseh's office. "In Bethlehem, there are no problems between Fateh and Hamas because we know each other well," Hamas councillor Saleh Shawkeh said. And the way the council members from the different Palestinian movements all interacted together seemed to bear out his words.

"Hamas has to join the PLO!" Zoughbi exclaimed at one point. Batarseh clarified that he thought that Hamas and Islamic Jihad should come in "under the PLO umbrella... and the PLO needs to be renewed and reformed so it can assure the representation of all Palestinians both inside the homeland and in the diaspora."

Shawkeh said, "Yes, the PLO is a legitimate body but it's not the only one in the field. So our idea is that the PLO needs to be fixed before we can come into it." (That echoed exactly what I'd heard from two Hamas parliamentarians I'd interviewed a few days earlier, in Ramallah/Bireh.)

Batarseh jumped in with: "Hamas needs to change too... It shouldn't reach for power by force, as it did in Gaza in 2007."

Shawkeh: "Look, we did win power firstly by votes, but no-one let us even start to exercise our constitutional power after the election!"

Half an hour later a Fateh councillor (whose name I didn't write down) also joined us. "There is no alternative but for both Hamas and Fateh to end the conflict between us," he said, "for the sake of the Palestinian people." Later on, though, he also chided the Hamas councillors, saying many Arab satellite news channels had been strongly biased toward Hamas-- "and they never mentioned the suffering Hamas inflicted on the people in Gaza."

When the conversation turned to broader political principles Batarseh betrayed his PFLP origins when he said,

    We and Hamas both want peace based on justice... We preferred an outcome of one state for all the people in in it: the secular democratic state that used to be the PLO's dream. A state based on religion or ethnicity is always going to have many problems.

    Is there any space left for a Palestinian state any more, with all these Israeli settlements all around us and all these settler-only roads? If we're going to have a Palestinian state we need it to be viable!

Later in the conversation he laid stress on the fact that, "All of us agree that the Oslo Agreement was a big mistake in which Arafat and the PLO gave away far too much."

... All in all, it was a good-- and very good-natured-- political discussion.

Outside Batarseh's office, the streets that snake around and up and down the steep hills on which Bethlehem sits were much quieter than usual. A commercial strike had been called by the PA that day, to protest against Israel's newly announced plans to demolish 88 homes in the Silwan area of Jerusalem.

That strike was significant: It was the first nationwide public action called for jointly by both Fateh and Hamas. It was also an evocative reminder of the heady days of the First Intifada, 1987-93, during which the vast majority of the Palestinians' protest actions had been nonviolent mass actions like commercial strikes, sit-ins, and marches. And yes, the commercial strike announced that day (Feb. 28) was remarkably widely observed-- in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, in East Jerusalem, and in many other areas of the occupied West Bank.

The discussions inside the mayor's chamber may have been friendly and warm, and the streets outside subdued and calm. But around the Bethlehem and its sister cities of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala stood The Wall, its forbidding 30-foot-high presence a constant and very "concrete" reminder of the encirclement of the Palestinian communities of the West Bank.

I cannot overstate how brutal and ugly the Wall is. It becomes a fence in many of the more rural parts of the West Bank. But here, as all around east Jerusalem, and in nearby Ramallah, it is definitely and inescapeably a Wall-- one that's about twice the height of the Berlin Wall, which was already shocking enough.

The Israeli Wall where it comes anywhere close to populated areas-- and oftentimes, it will cut right through them-- is punctuated by cylindrical concrete watch-towers that are even taller than the Wall. At the top of the towers are large, slanted-forward bullet-proof glass windows from which heavily armed Israelis look down on the Palestinians living below. There are also numerous free-standing watch-towers, also of 35-40 feet high. Sometimes their thick slanted glass windows looks directly into apartments on the upper stories of buildings.

The sheer size and extent of these Walls and towers-- and the massive investment that has gone, and continues to go, into their ever-expanding construction-- make a mockery of the idea that the Israeli government might be seeking peace with its neighbors any time soon.

Concentration camps were first invented by the British, during their wars against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century. The experience of being "concentrated" into these closely guarded camps did not make the Boer civilian population that was herded into them into a warm, pliant, peace-loving people, to say the least. No reason to think that Israel's ongoing attempts to quadrillage, "concentrate", and control the Palestinians of the West Bank would be much different.

But at least the Anglo-Boer wars came to an end and after just a few years of concentration the Boers were allowed back to their farms.

In Bethlehem or Beit Jala, by contrast, if you look out across the Wall to the areas outside it, most of what you see are the gigantic new Jews-only settlements of Gilo and Har Homa eating up more and more land with every month that passes. Those settlers don't look as though they are going anywhere anytime soon. So the Walls and fences that keep the indigenous Palestinians away from those expropriated portions of their native lands likely won't be coming down anytime soon, either.

As Zoughbi and I looked out westward across a valley toward what is now the settlement of Gilo he said, "Those used to be the fields and grazing lands for the landowners of Beit Jala. Beit Jala's people had such wonderful lands-- they used to stretch from here right down to the coastal plain. They took all that land... "

At the end of my visit to Bethlehem and Beit Jala, Zoughbi took me to a bus-stop in the center of Beit Jala where we were lucky (on a strike day) to find a mini-bus heading for Jerusalem. You can read a bit about that trip here.

I can't tell you how sad and guilty I felt that I-- a complete foreigner-- was able to travel fairly easily from Bethlehem to Jerusalem while Zoughbi, like the vast majority of other residents of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour have been forbidden since 2000 from traveling to Jerusalem, their close relatives and business associates there, and the many holy places there for both Christians and Muslims. And they, like all the other Palestinians of the West Bank have absolutely zero prospect, as of now, that these roads will be reopened to them any time soon.

Downtown Bethlehem is about seven miles as the crow flies from the center of Jerusalem.

2. Nazareth.

Back in the 1980s I made a couple of visits to Nazareth, which is the largest city in northern Israel and the largest Arab city anywhere in Israel. Back in those days if you started off from the-- in my view exceedingly ugly-- Church of the Basilica you could immediately climb upward into the dense network of tiny stone-paved streets that laced up the hills up behind it forming the dense and busy Arabic-style suq (market) that lies at the heart of all ancient Middle Eastern cities.

Back then, the guidebooks said that if you go to the second haberdasher on the right side of a certain street in the suq, you could get the key to a nearby, half-underground structure that was absolutely reputed to be the very synagogue in which Jesus of Nazareth, aged 12, had delivered his first sermon. In 1989 my father, a devout Anglican and something of a sermonizer in his own right, was staying with us in Israel/Palestine for ten days, and we couldn't resist the temptation to seek out the haberdasher in question, and get hold of the key... Before long, we were standing in that very synagogue room, imbibing many centuries' worth of pure ambience from the roughcut, cobwebby walls around us. Gosh, I must still have the photos of that somewhere...

And then, we exited the synagogue, coming out directly into the hustle-bustle of the suq that was all around us.

When I was planning the return trip I made to Nazareth ten days ago, I asked Jonathan Cook, a very smart British writer who I think has now earned the title of "The Sage of Nazareth", where would be a good place to stay. Jonathan suggested I try one of the two little guest houses that have recently opened up within the Old City. I was excited. I love the intricacies, history, and bustle of the Middle East's "Old Cities". When I was in Damascus back in January our delegation stayed in a place called the Talisman Hotel, which is one of a number of small boutique hotels that have opened up in recent years-- along with an even greater number of very fancy restaurants-- inside the traditional, courtyard-based homes and "palaces" of the Old City... Or, you could think of the often smaller "riyadh" guest-houses established in lovely old homes in Marrakesh... One of the principal attractions of such lodgings is the fact that they are located in, and help to sustain the economic fabric of, fully functioning ancient downtown areas.

Well, that is there. But Nazareth is in Israel, which apparently doesn't place much value on fully functioning Arab-style (and Arab-peopled) downtown areas.

Back in 2000, the Pope decided he wanted to visit Nazareth for the millennium. So a few years before that the Israeli government decided to gussy the whole city center up. That, according to Jonathan, involved closing down the entire downtown area for three years so the facades of the buildings could be entirely cleaned and standardized. The Pope came, and I imagine he may have looked at the facades for some minutes (or not.) But most of the shopowners and the residents who once lived above and all round them never returned. Downtown Nazareth became a nearly deserted urban wasteland, inhabited only by a small number of very poor squatters and drug addicts.

Jonathan has described the process as the "de-development" of the Nazareth downtown. You can see a few of his photos of Life in Nazareth here.

And guess what. Here as in Jaffa and Acre and the "de-developed" historic centers of other Palestinian cities inside Israel, Jewish-Israeli entrepreneurs have just now moving in to try to gentrify, boutiquize, and rebrand the Old City.

That is after, of course, the Israeli government has already, over the years, taken numerous steps to expropriate and re-purpose-- for Jews only-- many of the lands around the city that for generations were owned by Palestinian landowners. One of the biggest of these land-grabs was the one that resulted in the building of an whole new Jewish town, called Nazareth Illit ("Upper Nazareth") on the hills north of town.

Historian Geremy Forman has written that,

    Like other Jewish settlements in the Galilee, an important aim of Upper Nazareth was to ensure Jewish state control and sovereignty in the region. According to IDF Planning Department Director Yuval Ne'eman, the new settlement would "emphasize and safeguard the Jewish character of the Galilee as a whole, and ... demonstrate state sovereignty to the Arab population more than any other settlement operation." More specifically, Upper Nazareth was meant to address the challenge perceived as emanating from the all-Arab city of Nazareth. It would do this not by achieving a Jewish majority within the city of Nazareth itself, but rather by quickly evolving from a neighborhood into a city and eventually overpowering Arab Nazareth numerically, economically, and politically. According to Northern Military Governor Colonel Mikhael Mikhael, the final aim of the settlement was to "swallow up" the Arab city through "growth of the Jewish population around a hard-core group" and "the transfer of the center of gravity of life from Nazareth to the Jewish neighborhood." (G. Forman: Military Rule, Political Manipulation, and Jewish Settlement: Israeli Mechanisms for Controlling Nazareth in the 1950s, The Journal of Israeli History, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2006), p.351, cited in Wikipedia.)
...Well, despite my disappointment about the sad fate of Nazareth's Old City, I did have a good time during my short stay there. Jonathan and his wife, Sally Azzam, were extremely kind in showing me around. They showed me how to find some of the small number of functioning businesses inside the Old City. But we also wondered around many streets looking at some of the fine architectural details of beautiful old homes now falling into disrepair.

Both of them are really interesting people. Jonathan is an amazingly prolific and smart writer. He's now published three books of his own, as well as contributing chapters to several edited volumes. (Details here.)

I managed to buy and read his latest book, Disappearing Palestine, before I got to Nazareth, and strongly recommend it. On his website he describes his perspective in these terms:

    Geographically, I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ - a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.

    Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.

    From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism's appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Sally was equally interesting to talk to. She is probably somewhere in her early thirties, and she's a native of Nazareth. She talked about how, growing up there and going to one of the city's many nun-run schools, she never heard very much talk at all-- either at home or from her teachers at school-- about the Nakba (catastrophe) that struck the whole Arab community of Palestine in 1948. She said her grandmother, who had lived through the whole Nakba, "never wanted to talk about it at all", and her mother never said much about it until recently, either.

It was only after Sally went to university, in Haifa, that she really started to hear the Nakba discussed openly. And it was then, too, that she started to explore and strengthen her identity as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. (Official Israeli policy has always been to try to downplay the "Palestinian-ness" of the country's Palestinian-Arab citizens, describing them only as "Israeli Arabs", or further sub-dividing them into even smaller categories like ""Christian Arabs", or "Israeli Druze", or "Israeli Beduins", or whatever... Anything but the dreaded P-word that might cause them-- gasp!-- to identify more closely with those of their cousins and brothers who had left as refugees in 1948 or who, living just a few miles south of Nazareth, were living under the yoke of Israeli military occupation in the confines of the West Bank.)

Sally also talked a little about how, young and eager to be "modern", she was eager when she went to university to have her first real opportunity to make friends with Jewish Israeli girls her age. But she said that most of her efforts to do so were rebuffed: "They really didn't want anything to do with us."

These days, one of the things Sally is doing is working with one of the many "co-existence and conflict resolution" projects that have been started by NGOs within the Palestinian-Israeli community. She's been working with a group of Palestinian-Israeli girls in Nazareth on life-skills, nonviolent communication, and things like that.

She recalled one recent event when "her" group of Palestinian-Israeli girls were scheduled to meet up and do a joint activity with a group of Jewish-Israeli girls who had been taking part in a parallel program someplace else. "Our girls were pretty excited at the opportunity to get together as equals, for once, with these Jewish girls. But when we got there, none of the Jewish girls turned up. They just couldn't be bothered. It was pretty hard to explain to the girls in my group that this event they had been looking forward to, and preparing for, for quite some time-- to the Jewish girls, it was just nothing."

for me, that story of Sally's was an echo of something Jewish Israeli strategic analyst Yossi Alpher had told me just a few days earlier.

We were having lunch in a nice cafe in northern Tel Aviv, and at one point Alpher said,

    You know, for the Arab states, they seem to act as if this 'normalization of relations' that they are holding out to Israel as part of the Arab Peace Initiative is a big deal. But it really isn't. Most Israelis don't give a toss these days about having good relations with the Arab world, becoming well integrated into the Middle East region, and all that. For an earlier generation of Israelis-- maybe that mattered. But nowadays? No. The present generation of Israelis have largely turned their back on the Arab world. They're much more focused on Europe.

    Now, you have numerous Israelis who commute on a weekly basis between Tel Aviv and London or Amsterdam. Then you have the descendants of all those earlier generations of Israelis who came here from Poland or Romania or wherever in the 1930s: Now that most of those countries have gone into the EU, Israelis are reclaiming their citizenship rights there, and those EU passports, at a fast rate. Why would they want to be bothered with the Arabs?

Anyway, back to Nazareth: Guess who's coming to the city again, (though in a new instantiation) this May?

The pope. H'mmm.

3. Tawfiq Zayyad

From 1973 until his untimely death in 1994, the Palestinian-Israeli Communist poet Tawfiq Zayyad was both Mayor of Nazareth and a member of Israel's Knesset (parliament.)

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, are English-language translations of two of Zayyad's best-known poems:

    Here We Will Remain

    In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
    we shall remain
    like a wall upon your chest,
    and in your throat
    like a shard of glass,
    a cactus thorn,
    and in your eyes
    a sandstorm.
    We shall remain
    a wall upon your chest,
    clean dishes in your restaurants,
    serve drinks in your bars,
    sweep the floors of your kitchens
    to snatch a bite for our children
    from your blue fangs.
    Here we shall stay,
    sing our songs,
    take to the angry streets,
    fill prisons with dignity.
    In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
    we shall remain,
    guard the shade of the fig
    and olive trees,
    ferment rebellion in our children
    as yeast in the dough.

    * * *

    All I Have

    I never carried a rifle
    On my shoulder
    Or pulled a trigger.
    All I have
    Is a flute's melody
    A brush to paint my dreams,
    A bottle of ink.
    All I have
    Is unshakeable faith
    And an infinite love
    For my people in pain.

Zayyad was killed in a car accident in July 994, as he drove back to Nazareth after a visit he made to Jericho to welcome Yasser Arafat on the occasion of Arafat's post-Oslo return to the West Bank.

How tragic was that?

4. Jerusalem

I have written quite a lot about Jerusalem here already-- about the Jewish-Israeli western part of the city, from which some 60,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the fighting of 1948, and have never since been allowed to return, and about the now Israeli-occupied eastern part of the city from which some 2,000 Jewish people were ethnically cleansed during the 1948...

The eastern half of the city includes the city's historic and fascinating walled Old City, home of some of the holiest sites of the three monotheistic religions: The Kotel, or Wailing Wall, beloved as a place of intense lamentation by Jews; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is, truth be told, much fought over among a myriad of Christian churches; and the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) of the Muslims, home to the highly venerated Al-Aqsa mosque and the gold-carapaced Dome of the Rock, a shrine on the spot from which the prophet is reputed to have sprung on his horse during his mystic Night Journey... The Haram al-Sharif is also reputedly on the site of the Jewish people's destroyed Third Temple. (The Kotel that we can see is the wall facing a portion of its foundation. The lamentations there are over the destruction of the temple.)

Ah, as soon as I write about this sacred geography, and its intimacy, you can start to see the complexity and incendiary nature of the issues involved.

No wonder my friend Moshe Ma'oz says "The negotiators should start with the issue of Jerusalem, not end with it. With goodwill and mutual respect all round these issues can be resolved. And once you've solved Jerusalem everything else falls easily into place."

However, the mutual respect part of this might require quite some effort to build. After Israel's military occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967 it almost immediately set about trying to Judaize as much of the city as it could. First it seized back control over the historic Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Then it decided to make a big ceremonial plaza in front of the Kotel, for which purpose it demolished 135 Palestinian homes in the Mughariba Quarter near the Wall, along with two neighborhood mosques and the shrine of a Sufi saint. Then, almost immediately, it set about building thick swathes of Jewish settlements in such a way as to stifle the city's remaining Palestinian residents and to cut them off from their cousins and compatriots in the rest of the West Bank.

For this purpose, too, the Israeli government unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem considerably beyond where they had previously been and then declared the unilateral Anschluss of the whole expanded city to the State of Israel. The Palestinians trapped inside the annexed city now number 220,000. The number of Israeli settlers quite illegally planted into the occupied east of the city number around 195,000. The boundaries of the city are ringed by the brutal concrete Wall.

And still the demolitions of Palestinian homes inside the city continues, as does the creeping forward of Israeli settlement projects right through the heart of historic Palestinian neighborhoods both within the Old City and outside it..."

-mr

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Headlines:

Pakistan information minister quits:
Sherry Rehman resigns over differences with president regarding media control.
For more on the deepening crises in Pakistan check out Prof. Cole's resourceful and well-informed posts on the topic.

Gaps in Palestinian health care:

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have fragmented health services, according to a new study, due to the restrictions imposed upon people by Israeli security forces, poor management, and a growing population.

Ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem:
Just this past week in the East Jerusalem area, 88 homes in al-Bustan, 55 homes in Shufat refugee camp, 35 Bedouin homes on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, and 66 homes in al-Isawiyya were slated for destruction, affecting more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of whom have lived there for generations.

Israeli Settlers Terrorize Palestinian Villagers:
"We saw a group of masked Israeli settlers armed with sticks and chains heading towards us. The younger shepherds ran and managed to escape, leaving me with the flock of sheep," Rabaye told IPS.

"It was physically impossible for me to run, and I also didn't want the settlers to kill or steal my sheep. The security guard pushed me over, but I was not injured," recalled Rabaye, who was then seven months pregnant.

U.S. queries Israel's toilet-paper rules for Gaza:
The United States is protesting to Israel over seemingly random restrictions on deliveries to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip of harmless goods such as soap and toilet paper, diplomats said Wednesday.

"It is totally surreal," one European diplomat said of Israeli decision-making. "One day we had 600 kg (1,300 pounds) of pasta at the Kerem Shalom crossing but they said, 'Today, pasta can't go in'."

Another Western diplomat said: "It's ever-changing. One week jam is okay and the next week it's not."

In addition to soap and toilet paper, the officials cited restrictions that come and go on imports of certain types of cheeses, toothbrushes and toothpaste.

Scott Horton Interviews Ray McGovern
March 12th, 2009

Ray McGovern, former senior analyst at the CIA, discusses the ebb and flow of neoconservative influence in the White House, how the scuttled Charles Freeman appointment weakens U.S. leverage with Israel, the incredible influence still exerted by Steven J. Rosen despite his indictment under the Espionage Act, the shortcomings of the mainstream media and how the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran prevented a disastrous war.

-mr

Israeli Terror

American citizen critically injured after being shot in the head by Israeli forces in Ni’lin:
Tristan was shot by the new tear-gas canisters that can be shot up to 500m. I ran over as I saw someone had been shot, while the Israeli forces continued to fire tear-gas at us. When an ambulance came, the Israeli soldiers refused to allow the ambulance through the checkpoint just outside the village. After 5 minutes of arguing with the soldiers, the ambulance passed.
– Teah Lunqvist (Sweden) - International Solidarity Movement
Four Palestinian villagers have already been killed for protesting against the separation wall in the West Bank Village of Ni’lin.

-am,mr

Friday, March 13, 2009

Just in from The Angry Arab News Service:

960 Palestinian civilians: who are the terrorists?

"Israel's 22-day offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, 239 police officers and 235 fighters, a Palestinian human rights group said Thursday." (thanks Olivia)

The mother of all atrocious defense videos

"Unfortunately for us, Israeli arms-maker Rafael chose C. Which means we may have just found the most atrocious defense video of all time..." (thanks Laleh)

Didn't I tell you?

Yesterday, Chas Freeman withdrew his name. I wrote this the first day. (thanks Laurie)

Elliott Abrams: His Expertise

This is the expertise of Abrams: a man who never studied the Middle East and does not speak or read any of its languages (but he is fluent in Gun Zionism): "Expertise: U.S. policy in the Middle East, Israel-Palestinian affairs, democracy promotion, human rights policy, U.S. foreign policy." (thanks Mounzer)

They will not go

"Following the lead of Umm Kamel al-Kurd who put up a tent near her home in Sheikh Jarrah after she was forcibly removed from her home four months ago, other neighborhoods in Jerusalem facing a similar fate have set up such tents as spaces for organizing and encouraging others to stand in solidarity with each neighborhood. Such tents exist now on the Mount of Olives and in Ras Khamis. One of the organizers of the solidarity tent in al-Bustan, Ahmed Siam, told me "We will not let history repeat itself. We learned from history. We will not leave our land like we did in 1948. If they come and kill my son, I will not leave. This is our land. Even if they kill me and only my blood remains, it will remain on this land." The 7,000 residents of the area intend to fight for their right to stay on their land rather than see it turned into a new, illegal Israeli colony."

DON'T MISS Prof. As'ad AbuKhalil's scathing critique of the obnoxious provocateur, and self-interested scum of the earth, Christopher Hitchens - another privileged white man making the soulless trek from youthful radical to middle-aged reactionary.
-mr

Breaking news: Iraqi hero gets three years

Prof. Cole reports on al-Zaidi: 3 Years Sentence on Shoe-Thrower

Iraqi shoe-thrower Muntadhar al-Zaidi was sentenced to 3 years in prison on Thursday, under a statute forbidding assaults on visiting heads of state. The maximum sentence is 15 years, but the judge said he took into account al-Zaidi's youth and that it was his first offense. Al-Zaydi's lawyers maintained that the law only forbade assault, and that it was wrong to punish al-Zaydi under the statute since he had merely mounted a symbolic protest.

Al-Zaydi's sister complained bitterly that the court had sided with the US against its own people, according to Aswat al-Iraq, an independent wire service. She also said that Muntadhar had asked her to distribute sweets when his verdict was read out, since he was proud of what he had done. Al-Hayat [Life] writes in Arabic that Al-Zaydi's family dismissed the verdict as faulty and purely "political," and his brother called the court "American." Iraqis will be having "Hero Parties" in his honor.

Al-Zaydi told the judge that he had been angered because of Bush's crimes, which had kicked off the violence in Iraq. He said his throwing shoes at Bush had been natural and understandable, and that any Iraqi who stood in his position would have done the same. . .

Aljazeera English has video and relevant interviews:





-mr

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Iraq Instability

Middle East expert, Prof. Juan Cole, examines the slated troop withdrawal from Iraq. There are several great articles to link to through his post. Note the level of reconciliation happening in places like Samarra, while violence escalates elsewhere in the country. In terms of political violence we are still talking magnetic car bombs, motorcycle riding suicide bombers, hand grenades tossed into crowded markets, and newly dug mass graves. This is the stuff we can only imagine on the big screen, and for all intents and purposes, its considered stability in Iraq.

Those pundits trumpeting peace in Iraq should authentic their message with a willingness to actually travel to Iraq themselves. They could hit up trendy Mansur, stop by historic Al-Mutanabi for a quick read, enjoy some Masgouf along the Dijla. Or, just try staying alive. Why is it that 'non-Westerners' are forced to accept a different kind of peace?

12000 US Troops Withdrawn from Iraq; 32 Killed in Police Academy Bombing

The Obama administration will not replace two US brigades (12,000 troops) that are departing Iraq. There are 140,000 US troops in that country, down from 160,000 in 2008 during the Bush troop escalation or "surge." The two brigades will likely be brought out of al-Anbar Province and Baghdad. Al-Anbar, once one of the most violent places in Iraq (and the world) has seen attacks and deaths decline dramatically since the tribal Awakening Councils started taking US salaries to fight Salafi extremists (what the US calls 'al-Qaeda'). Baghdad is also much less violent than in 2007, in large part because the Sunni Arab population has largely been ethnically cleansed from the capital, so that it seems to be 80% or 85% Shiite now. The 4,000 British troops stationed at the airport in Basra will also leave by the end of June, 2009.

The step will leave 128,000 US troops in Iraq through the December, 2009, parliamentary elections, when they will be needed to lock down the country and prevent car-bombings of polling stations. Those elections will be the last conducted under US auspices. By August, 2010, another 80,000 to 100,000 troops will be withdrawn, with all US soldiers and Marines scheduled to be out of Iraq by December 31, 2011.

AP has video on the news conference announcing the withdrawal:



Aljazeera English reports on the Iraqi politics around the US troop withdrawal.



The security challenges remaining in Iraq were demonstrated by the nine bombings over the weekend, including a major attack by a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest at a police training facility in central Baghdad. That attack killed at least 32 and wounded 60. Among the dead were 8 police officials. It has all along been the goal of the Sunni Arab guerrillas to punish the new Iraqi police recruits as "collaborators" with the new Iraqi government and Washington. Despite large numbers of attacks on recruits and police, however, they have not prevented the establishment of a large, newly trained police force and army, which have begun performing better against the guerrillas in pitched battles.

The establishment of Sunni-majority elected provincial assemblies after the Jan. 31 provincial elections in Al-Anbar, Ninevah, Salahuddin and Diyala raises the question of whether Sunni Iraqis will begin channeling their energies into improving their provinces instead of supporting the guerrillas.

The potential for Sunni-Shiite reconciliation was attested to on Friday when nearly a million Shiites converged on the Askariya shrine or golden dome of Samarra to commemorate the death of Imam Hasan al-Askari, who is buried at the shrine. Samarra is a Sunni-majority city in the strongly Sunni province of Salahuddin, the site of many guerrilla attacks against US troops and those of the new Iraqi military. There was little violence associated with this pilgrimage. In February 2006, Sunni Arab guerrillas blew up the shrine of Samarra, setting off nearly two years of civil war.

Turkey will help train the Iraqi military, and will accept Iraqi cadets into its military academies. This step is ironic because the Iraqi officer corps after WW I was Ottoman-trained. After a century of Arab nationalism, Iraq's military is again establishing close ties to Turkey. From Ankara's point of view, having Iraqi officers educated in its military academies gives Turkey a chance to influence among the most important groups of future Iraqi leaders. In particular, Turkish military academies are stongly secular and hostile to religion.

Aljazeera English reports on the travails of poor Iraqi women laborers under the new regime:



Iraqi women are struggling to regain the rights they lost with the American occupation, which was marketed to the US public as a liberation of Iraqi women!

Mcclatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

' Baghdad

- A roadside bomb detonated in Ghazaliyah neighborhood in western Baghdad targeting a Sahwa patrol around 7:30 a.m. Three Sahwa members were wounded.

- A magnetic bomb detonated under a parliament employee’s car in Damascus intersection in downtown Baghdad around 7:40 a.m. Two people were wounded including the employee.

- A suicide bomber riding a motor- bike filled with explosives targeted a crowd of recruiters for police in front of the police academy in Palestine street around 10:30 a.m. At least 28 people were killed (including five policemen and three traffic policemen) and 57 others were wounded.

Mosul

- Gunmen opened fire at two soldiers in Mithaq neighborhood in Mosul on Saturday night. The two soldiers who were killed, were going to buy some food stuff from the commercial shops near their military check point in the area.

- A gunman threw a grenade at a police patrol in Shareen market in downtown Mosul early morning. Two people were wounded including a policeman.

- Gunmen killed a young man in downtown Mosil around 8:30 p.m. The young man was a student at the technical institution in Mosul.

Diyala

- Police found eight mass graves in the orchards of the Al-Bu Tumaa village of Khalis (about 10 miles north of Baquba). There were 25 dead bodies in those graves who were killed by the Qaida which was controlling Diyala province.' (posted by Juan Cole @ 3/09/2009 - Informed Comment)
-mr

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Headlines:

  • Exclusive: Lawyer says Guantanamo abuse worse since Obama

"Here they also sold bridles, saddles and shoes for religious men," says Afram Hussein al Fufuli, 69, concluding my history lesson. My translator-colleague and I had been directed to Fufuli by a younger bookseller up the street, who had called him "the dictionary." In his brown blazer and sweater, Fufuli did indeed have a professorial air. Framed by dusty stacks of books tall as himself (between Arabic volumes: John Le Carre, Macroeconomic Theory, Richard Nixon's Leaders), he conducted slow business out of a small brick storefront which, he said, his father opened in 1930.

Fufuli described how, when the car bomb exploded nearby, all his books were knocked down and his metal gate was twisted. "Thanks to God, I was away from the shop at the time." After that, for a while, the street was deserted. The explosion killed 38, and was a well-documented tragedy. READ MORE

In a statement read to the media in central|London. Mr Mohamed said: "I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares.

"Before this ordeal, torture was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim.

"It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways - all orchestrated by the United States government."READ MORE

-mr

"CLOSED ZONE"

`Closed Zone`: 90 animated seconds on the closure of Gaza
Gisha - I am pleased to send you a link to "Closed Zone", a 90-second animated film by Yoni Goodman, Director of Animation for the Academy Award-nominated film "Waltz with Bashir". Closed Zone shows the closure of the Gaza Strip and its effects on the ability of one and a half million human beings living there to pursue their aspirations and, more recently – even to run from harm`s way, during the devastating military operation in Gaza. Unfortunately, despite post-war calls to rehabilitate Gaza, the closure policy remains in effect.

-mr

Death of the two-state solution and Gaza reconstruction . . .

Informed Comment on Hillary Clinton in the Holy Land, and Gaza aid:

Clinton Slams Israel on Jerusalem House Demolitions; 50-Years War Looms with Danger to US

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slammed Israel on Wednesday for its plan to demolish 88 Palestinian homes in Occupied East Jerusalem, calling it a violation of the Roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace. She said after meeting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, "Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road-map'... It is an issue that we intend to raise with the government of Israel and the government at the municipal level in Jerusalem."

Clinton will get lots of critical emails from a tightly organized network of far rightwing Revisionist-Zionists for her comment. Please consider sending her a supportive message for daring speak out on the issue. In fact, urge her to use a stronger word than "unhelpful" the next time. And, other bloggers: Please send your readers to make such comments, as well. The left blogosphere that cares about these things is bigger than the Jabotinskyites, but we don't bother to network or write or contribute specifically on this issue, and so we are always being out-organized and outflanked and marginalized.

The issue of the house demolitions in Jerusalem is important because of its emotional resonance for Palestinians and for the whole Muslim world, which views Jerusalem as Islam's third holiest city, a city Muslims ruled in history for longer than Jews did. Bin Laden repeatedly cited the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, along with the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, as his motivation for attacking New York.

But in fact the demolition of 88 houses is a minor affair compared to Israel's plans to build 73,000 new houses in the Occupied West Bank, which would lead to a doubling of the Israeli squatter population to 600,000. About a third of the Jewish colonists in the West Bank are Americans. The plan will almost certainly be implemented by the far rightwing government being assembled by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. The two-state solution is already dead, but this massive expansion of the squatter population would be the final nail in the coffin. Palestinian statehood is important because currently over half the world's some 9 million Palestinians are stateless,including those in Gaza and the West Bank. Statelessness is a severe disability in the contemporary world, because the state guarantees basic political and civil rights. No stateless Palestinians enjoy the basic rights and freedoms granted Americans by the US Bill of Rights, because their occupiers or hosts will not grant them and the Palestinians have no state representation of their own. (The Palestine Authority is essentially an extension of the Israeli occupation authority and lacks the prerogatives and sovereignty of a state). There are not two sides to this issue, whereby someone could argue that Palestinians don't deserve citizenship in a state and it is good for them to be expropriated at will. It is a scandal and a crime that they remain stateless after all these decades. And, no, it is not the "Arabs" fault. The "Arabs" did not expel the Palestinians from their homes, and since Israel kept the Occupied Territories after 1967, they are its responsibility, not Morocco's.

Clinton has told CNN, "The two-state solution is the inevitable, inescapable outcome of any effort," Clinton told CNN. "It is hard to imagine what other positive outcome could be arrived at." But Clinton has been so cautious in her statements while in Israel, neglecting to press the Israelis publicly and forcefully on their extensive colonization plans, that Palestinians are despairing of genuine progress. They are calling her "Condi Clinton." That seems harsh, given that Condi would almost certainly not have chided the Israelis publicly over house demolitions in Jerusalem.

Hillary is right and wrong. A two-state solution is no longer feasible. It was the best hope for peace, but Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon killed it, with some help from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. There will not be a positive outcome in the Mideast. We are in for a fifty-years war, which Israel is very likely to lose in the long run, and during the course of which there will be enormous violence and terrorism, including, probably, further attacks on the United States for its knee-jerk support of Israeli expansionism and aggressive total wars on Arab civilian populations.

Since,apparently, the US government is primed to let John Yoo rewrite the US constitution whenever a few bombs go off, so that freedom of speech and the press can be abolished and the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure can be revoked, the Mideast 50-years-war very likely will lead to the destruction of American democracy. The blueprint for that demolition job has long existed and steps toward it were taken under Bush.

Aljazeera English reports on Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and its refusal to grant building permits to Arab families, while building new housing for Jewish families. These policies violate the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1949 Geneva Convention on occupied territories, which forbid the settlement of citizens of the Occupier in the conquered area, and forbid significant alterations in the lifeways of the occupied population. Israel has single-handedly reduced the Geneva Conventions to irrelevancy, since it flouts them and strong-arms the United States into acquiescing in and supporting the flouting.



Aljazeera English notes that while Bill and Hillary Clinton helped open the Gaza Airport in 1998, Hillary did not bother to visit Gaza now that she is secretary of state, and the Israelis have destroyed the airport, turning Gaza into "the world's largest prison," or as a Vatican spokesman put it, a concentration camp.





Cairo Donor Conference Nets $5 bn for Gaza Reconstruction;
Israelis Block Gaza Reconstruction

Shorter AFP: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will try to tell Binyamin Netanyahu, the far rightwing prospective prime minister of Israel, that he should allow the rebuilding of Gaza and start up a peace process that leads to a Palestinian State. Netanyahu ask her to let him bomb Iran and go on colonizing the West Bank and making sure there is a never a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu probably won't get his way on Iran, but he likely will keep the Palestinians stateless, i.e., in subhuman conditions.

Clinton arrives in Israel from a donors conference in Cairo that raised $5 bn. Unfortunately, Israel won't let most of it in, since it is trying to half-starve the Palestinians into submission. And the only realistic conduit for that amount of money is the Palestinian Authority bureaucracy in Gaza, which was taken over by Hamas when it won the January, 2006 elections. But the US and Israel refuse to deal with Hamas and won't let the money go through bureaucracies it controls (all the relevant ones). Washington and Tel Aviv will probably try to use the money to bolster Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction within the Palestinian authority. What they can't understand is that Palestinians have excellent bs meters, and don't support people they view as corrupt collaborators. The frantic search for the 'good Palestinian' only creates unpopular failures over time, in the nature of the case.

Anyway, rebuilding is pretty hard when Israel won't let in concrete for . . . rebuilding.

Aljazeera English reports on the challenges of rebuilding Gaza and the Israeli blockade that is keeping basic materials out. 90% of Gaza's water is unsafe to drink, and the damage the Israelis did the sewage treatment plant has sent raw sewage into the drinking water.



Veteran journalist and Palestine expert Helena Cobban is in the area and has been filing some eye-opening reports at her blog on the condition of the Palestinians.

-mr

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Helena Cobban in the OPT's:

Bantustan Days, Part 1

... Or, 25 interesting things about Ramallah and its environs.

1.

Whole areas of the Greater Ramallah area now loom like "Dubai on a hilltop", with clusters of large high-rises either recently built, or still being built. Many are glossy, glass-fronted "trade centers" or "office complexes." Who's been financing this massive wave of development? Some of it, clearly, has been financed by western donor governments eager to prop up the Ramallah-based "Palestinian Authority'. Many area residents say, however, that much of it has been financed by the very extensive, and relatively well-off, networks of Ramallah expatriates. Some people say that as much as 90% of the Palestinians whose family origins are here now live elsewhere-- primarily in the US. When they've sent money 'home', over the years, they have generally loved to plow it into real-estate development. Back in the days of full-bore Israeli occupation, the military authorities kept a tight lid on Palestinian building. Now, they are 'free' to indulge their wildest real-estate fantasies (and some truly are pretty wild and tasteless.) The results do not make it easy to persuade the many international NGOs who flock to Palestine that there is any real socioeconomic need here. Yes, there is need in Palestine, including a lot of it in other parts of the West Bank, as well as in Gaza. But for the most part you don't find it if you stay inside Ramallah.

2.

Many of the city's high-rises are now occupied by PA 'ministries.' By some counts there are 37 of them, each with its own grandiose marble-clad building. (Often, little goes on inside, but that's another question.) But the PA is not a sovereign government. In fact it has a jurisdiction and mandate that is far more circumscribed than that of my home-state, Virginia. In Virginia, the state-- or Commonwealth, as it is somewhat grandiosely known-- has a 'Department of Education', a 'Department of Transport', etc etc. Wouldn't it be more appropriate for the PA to call these bodies "Departments", and to keep them to a reasonable and effective scale? Calling them 'ministries', it seems to me, is just another instance of PA grandiosity and legerdemain.

3.

Ramallah has numerous lively and engaging cafes and eateries-- and apparently some bars and night-clubs, though I didn't check those out. But I don't think it has a single decent bookstore. H'mmm.... I moved from there to East Jerusalem recently; one of the first things I did was wander along Jerusalem's Salahuddin Street to the Educational Bookstore. Although it's tiny it always has the most stunning and well-organized selection of books on current political and cultural topics, in Arabic and English. Maybe they should open a branch in Ramallah? READ MORE

-mr

Headlines:

Obama's Iraq plan draws fire from Left

US deaths
spike in Afghanistan

Israel's death squads:
A soldiers story

The target, Razeq, was in the passenger seat, closest to the APC. "I have no doubt I see him in the scope. I start shooting. Everyone starts shooting, and I lose control. I shoot for one or two seconds. I counted afterwards – shot 11 bullets in his head. I could have shot one shot and that's it. It was five seconds of firing.

"I look through the scope, see half of his head. I have no reason to shoot 11 bullets. I think maybe from the fear, maybe to cope with all the things that are happening, I just continue shooting."

As far as he can recall, the order to fire was not specific to the sharpshooters in the APC. He cannot know for certain if the troops in the truck thought wrongly that some of the fire was directed at them from the cars. But he says that after he stopped "the firing gets even worse. I think the people in the truck started to panic. They're firing and one of the cars starts driving and the commander says, 'Stop, stop, stop, stop!' It takes a few seconds to completely stop and what I see afterwards is that both cars are full of holes. The first car, too, which was there by coincidence."

Razeq and Dhuheir, the militants, were dead. So were Abu Laban and Al Leddawi. Miraculously, the driver of the taxi, Nahed Fuju, was unscathed. The sharpshooter can remember only one of the four bodies lying on the ground. "I was shocked by that body. It was like a sack. It was full of flies. And they asked who shot the first car [the Mercedes] and nobody answered. I think everybody was confused. It was clear that it had been a screw-up and nobody was admitting [it]." But the commander did not hold a formal debriefing until the unit returned to its main base.

"The commander came in and said, 'Congratulations. We got a phone call from the Prime Minister and from the Minister of Defence and the chief of staff. They all congratulated us. We succeeded perfectly in our mission. Thank you.' And from that point on, I understood that they were very happy." He says the only discussion was over the real risk there had been of soldiers' casualties from friendly fire in the shoot-out, in which at least one of the IDF's own vehicles was hit by ricocheting bullets, and at the end of which at least one soldier even got out of the 4x4 and fired at an inert body on the ground. READ MORE

-mr