To Boycott Israel... or Not?

Joel Bleifuss
In These Times

March 30, 2009

At the height of the war in Gaza, author Naomi Klein endorsed the campaign known as Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). A coalition of Palestinian groups founded the BDS movement on July 9, 2005, as a way for the international community to put pressure on Israel to reach a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.

In her syndicated column, Klein wrote, “It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.”

Klein, author of the best selling books, The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, has taken heat for her position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Israel is always more emotionally difficult for me,” she told New Voices, a national Jewish student magazine, “I think mainly it’s because of the force of the reaction and the closeness [of the] reaction. It’s not a stranger that is upset about [what I write], it’s people in my family who write me long letters saying, ‘Oh, I hate you!’ ”

Similar strong feelings are on display at Hampshire College, which has been debating whether it should divest from companies that do business in Israel. Hampshire’s Students for Justice in Palestine wants its college to divest from companies like Caterpillar, General Electric, Motorola and United Technologies. In response, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz has threatened to lead a divestment campaign against Hampshire College if the administration gives in to the students’ demands.

Is BDS the right response? Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a contributing editor of Ramparts and a former fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, says that the BDS campaign will not work. He maintains that significant differences exist between the political situation in apartheid-era South Africa and present-day Israel.

In 1969, Waskow began campaigning for a two-state peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. He is co-author of The Tent of Abraham: Stories of Hope and Peace for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Currently, he is the director of the Shalom Center, a Philadelphia-based organization that he describes as “a prophetic voice in Jewish, multi-religious, and American life that brings Jewish and other spiritual thought and practice to bear on seeking peace, pursuing justice, healing the earth, and celebrating community.”

Recently, Klein and Waskow spoke with In These Times about the efficacy of the BDS strategy.

Naomi, won’t your BDS proposal strategy simply strengthen the position of Israeli nationalists, who will then be able to turn to moderates and say, “We are under attack!”

Naomi Klein: The hard right seems to be strengthening all on its own, if we judge by the results of the recent Israeli elections.

But I’ve noticed a change within Israel. I got quite a few e-mails from Israelis saying, “I’ve always opposed this, but I feel that it is the only option left.” I think that’s a reflection of the feeling of desperation among progressive Israelis who are watching their country move hard right and seeing the level of violence increase exponentially.

Arthur, you were an anti-apartheid activist who supported a BDS approach to South Africa. Are there similarities between the Bantustans, the small areas of South Africa that were under “independent” black rule, and the Occupied Territories?

Rabbi Arthur Waskow: There are similarities, but the BDS approach is not the way to bring about the change that is absolutely necessary.

The most important, and probably the only effective, change that can be brought about is a serious change in the behavior of the U.S. government. That means we need to engage in serious organizing within the United States.

Naomi has written about the failure of carrots in changing the way Israel has behaved so far, and I agree. One carrot the Israeli government has essentially ignored, with the help of the Bush administration, is the offer of the Arab League, led by a surprisingly creative King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It outlines a general peace treaty between Israel and all the Arab states, on the condition of a peace treaty being negotiated between Israel and a viable, sensible Palestinian state with perhaps some variations on the 1967 boundaries.

But the Israeli government of the last 10 years has been totally uninterested because it thought it could get away with de facto annexing more and more land of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

If the U.S. government had said, “Here’s the deal: the Arab League proposal is what we are after, and we will offer carrots and we will offer sticks, whatever is necessary to bring this about.” Then there would be very serious change, both within the Palestinian territories and Israel.

Real political change within the United States could come through an Abrahamic Alliance, an alliance between big chunks—though, of course, not all—of the Jewish community, the Muslim community, and the Christians.

Boycotts and divestment are not going to do it. I understand that they express a kind of personal purity—”not with my money you don’t”—but they won’t change U.S. policy, which is exactly what needs to be changed.

NK: It is not a question of personal purity. It’s a question of basic solidarity. A call for this tactic has come from coalitions of Palestinian groups representing a very wide spectrum of political parties, labor unions and community groups.

Interestingly, the country which has responded the most seriously to the BDS movement is South Africa, precisely because the parallels are seen most clearly in South Africa.

A lot of this criticism of the BDS movement has been: Why Israel? Why not Sri Lanka? And the point is that, according to basic left principles of solidarity, the tactics should be chosen by the oppressed communities themselves.

In terms of the ultimate solution and what that should be, BDS and Arthur’s calls for an Abrahamic Alliance are not incompatible goals. I think that really what we’re talking about is how you build pressure toward a resolution.

AW: But Naomi, something different is going on inside Israeli Jewish and Israeli Palestinian society than what was going on within white South Africa. Leaving aside the fact that in Israel, about a fifth of the population with some voting power is Israeli Palestinians, within Jewish Israel there is a real internal split.

Even though during the last election Israelis moved to the hard right, a serious body of people is still working for a two-state solution. And the only force in the world that can deliver that is the United States government.

You’re right that many Palestinians have called for divestment, etc., but I disagree that the oppressed automatically get to decide their own tactics. For example, Hamas made a terrible ethical and practical political mistake by responding to the embargo and blockade on Gaza with rocket attacks on civilians in Israel.

I recognize that there had to be resistance, but there were nonviolent alternatives. There were beginning to be “ship-ins,” in the model of sit-ins. Small boats that had been certified as not carrying any weapons, began to cross the Mediterranean carrying medicine and food, especially baby food, to civilians in Gaza. The first couple got through, but then beginning with the massive attack on Gaza, the Israeli navy forced others back.

NK: They rammed one and may have fired shots at another.

AW: Yes. Now, the question is, what would have happened if the Palestinian leadership, including Hamas, had said to Europeans and to Americans, “We welcome this vigorous, assertive, nonviolent resistance to the blockade. We beg for doctors and peaceniks and academics and everybody under the sun to start joining in and bringing these boats, and we appeal for pastors and priests and rabbis and imams to start coming in these boats.” In fact, there was a mass public welcome of the first boats that got through.

But Hamas did not choose that response. Rather they shot rockets into civilian neighborhoods, which is both ineffective and unethical.

NK: Let me clarify. I don’t believe any oppressed community deserves blind support for its tactics. But it’s precisely because there has been so much blanket criticism of any Palestinian armed resistance that I think there is an added responsibility to respect calls for nonviolent solidarity actions like BDS, which are the most effective tactics in the nonviolent arsenal.

AW: But the question is, “What will work?” And when you say what the tactics could be, I agree that sanctions are a thousand times better than shooting rockets at civilian neighborhoods, but they don’t work. The nonviolent tactic of the ship-ins was direct, visible, and could’ve become a massive event. It would’ve been as direct a challenge to the blockade as the sit-ins in the restaurants were to American segregation.

The sit-ins in the American South were extraordinary because people didn’t say, “Pass a new law to end segregation.” They said, “We ourselves are going to end segregation. We imagine the future without segregation, we’re going to do it, and then you all are going to have to decide what to do with us. Kill us or change the law.” So that was extraordinarily effective. For me, the question is, “How do you create that kind of change?”

The Presbyterians and a few other Protestant groups broached the question of divestment from Caterpillar, which was producing the bulldozers that were knocking down Palestinian houses. I told the Presbyterians, “This is a waste of time. What would work would be if you all decided that every Presbyterian Church in America was going to bring an Israeli and a Palestinian at the same time to lay out the Geneva Initiative for a two-state peace treaty and the Presbyterian Church was going to commit itself to lobbying for that with the Congress and the president.” That would’ve been incredibly effective, and still would be, if the churches and some Jews and some Muslims got together on this.

NK: I think those are wonderfully complementary strategies. This problem is going to take everything we’ve got. And that’s why I’m so resistant to taking such powerful tactics as BDS off the table at such a crucial moment. The U.S. government was hardly a world leader when it came to sanctions against South Africa. But when universities and municipalities joined the sanctions movement, it eventually forced the federal government to get with the program.

I support the BDS strategy for Israel because it will work again, and it will work because it cuts to the heart of something that is so important to so many Israelis. And that is the idea of normalcy, the idea that Israel is really an honorary adjunct to North America and Europe—even though it happens to be located in the Middle East.

At the moment, it is possible to lead a very comfortable, very secure, very cosmopolitan life in most parts of Israel—despite the fact that Israel is at war with neighbors. I don’t think Israel has a right to simultaneously rain bombs and missiles on Gaza, to attack Lebanon in 2006, to massively expand the settlements, and also have this state of normalcy within its borders. For justice to come, the status quo will have to first become uncomfortable.

When concerts are canceled in Tel Aviv, when tourists don’t come to Israel, then, I believe, many Israelis will start putting pressure on their political leaders to finally negotiate a lasting peace. So I don’t buy the argument that they’ll just feel isolated and become more right wing. The threat of isolation can be a very powerful tool for progressive change in a country like Israel.

Naomi, Helen Suzman, a white South African who was a leader of the anti-apartheid movement, who died this past January, argued that economic sanctions against South Africa during apartheid had hurt the entire population, particularly the poor. Would not the same thing happen in the occupied territories?

NK: It is true that in South Africa it did hurt the entire population. And the call for sanctions was consciously made despite that fact. And that is why it is so extraordinary, that there has been such a widespread call from Palestinians despite the fact that they will also suffer under BDS.

But we can’t compare the kind of suffering Gazans are facing under the Israeli blockade and embargo to what Israelis would suffer if a BDS campaign were to get off the ground. We’re talking about people in Gaza lacking life-saving medicine, cooking oil and food, versus Israel losing some foreign investment, and not having concerts and some academic conferences. These are not in the same league.

AW: Naomi, you said you see them as complementary strategies, but in the real world, people have to decide what to put their energies into. Do we think that if the Presbyterian church is trying to put its energies into boycotts this time, not just of Caterpillar but of all Israeli society, that that’s going to be workable alongside of, and at the same time as, mobilizing Israeli and Palestinian voices simultaneously in those churches, and then those churches lobbying Congress on these solutions? I don’t believe it.

NK: That is what happened with South Africa. The BDS strategy personalizes the dispute. You follow the money at your own school, your own shopping habits, your own government, and extraordinarily lively debates ensue that are not just about the boycott strategy but are about why the boycott is happening. That’s happening right now at Hampshire College.

The boycott starts the debate, it brings teeth to it so you’re not just signing yet another statement that can be ignored. Or bringing together like-minded people to listen to another speaker or dialogue.

And that’s the dynamic that BDS promises. Just as in South Africa, where you had a lot of industry saying to the apartheid regime, “We can’t live with this any longer,” we would have that dynamic within Israel.

AW: But there is a huge difference between South Africa and Israel. In South Africa, the U.S. government was not pouring billions of dollars into the country. Whereas, in the case of Israel, the U.S. government is. That support seems to me to be far more the point.

The likelihood of Israelis saying, “Wait a minute, this is a serious problem,” is going to be much greater if the Obama administration says: “Here’s the deal. There’s going to be an emergency peace conference in the Middle East. It’s going to come out with a Palestinian state that’s really independent, not chopped up in little bits, and there will be a peace treaty with all the Arab states.” I can see the possibility of a whole new American outlook making peace in the Middle East.

NK: Once again, the question is how do we get to the point where the Obama administration feels the need to get tough and say, “Here’s the deal.” I don’t believe that mere dialogue will bring us there. I’m arguing that BDS is a fantastic movement-building tool precisely because it is a conversation starter; it ignites the debate. It makes the conflict personal in the same way as the amazing grassroots movement we had in the ’80s against South Africa did in the United States. It is only once those debates are raging that there will be the kind of bottom-up pressure on Obama that could lead to a real shift in U.S. policy.

AW: Yes, there needs to be a real life, day-by-day connection to making change happen. But from my point of view, if you could bring Muslims and Jews and Christians together, meeting each other, talking to each other, getting past the fear and stereotypes about each other, if you could get that happening, that would be a piece of the future the way the sit-ins were a piece of the future.

The way to build the movement in the United States is for the people who are here to build a movement among themselves. A big chunk of the unrepresented Jewish population in the United States—somewhere between half and two-thirds of it—agree that there needs to be a two-state solution. Their institutions either don’t agree or won’t do much about it.

Arthur, during the war on Gaza, J Street, which is a new “pro-peace, pro-Israel” group, posted an editorial on its website stating, “We recognize that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong.”

In response, Noah Pollack, on the Commentary magazine blog, wrote, “It is time that thinking people start calling J Street what it actually is: an anti-Israeli group.” What is it about Israeli politics that makes it so difficult to discuss?

AW: Well of course Commentary would say that. But it’s not difficult to discuss. In fact, J Street has gone right on and continued speaking out.

Much more to the point, and much more upsetting, was that Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote an op-ed in Forward condemning J Street, saying that J Street’s “words are deeply distressing because they are morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naive.” He represents, in theory, a million Jews. But it didn’t kill J Street.

You can’t do now what was done in the 1970s to the first American Jewish organization to talk about a two-state solution, Breira, which got killed by attacks from the center as well as the right wing of Jewish institutional life. That’s not working this time.

NK: While I understand that the Jewish community is finding voices that are more diverse, we have to be clear that this is not just a Jewish issue. And maybe it shouldn’t even be Jews who lead this issue. In Europe, it isn’t just Jews who are leading this issue.

AW: Well, the other difference between Europe and the United States is that in Europe, the Jewish community, for reasons of history 75 years ago, doesn’t have much political clout. In the United States, the Jewish community does. So changing the Jewish community, building progressive organizations is both possible and necessary in the American Jewish community.

I don’t attack BDS as unethical. I’m saying it won’t work. But there is one major ethical defect to it, I think, which is that it doesn’t embody the future in the present. The future it does not embody is the one most precious and most legitimate for Israel: peace with all the Arab states.

I agree that a policy of all carrots for Israel and all sticks for the Palestinians is both an ethical and practical disaster. But sticks-only for Israel won’t and shouldn’t work, and that’s what the BDS approach feels like. Sometimes that works anyway—it did in South Africa. But it hasn’t worked (and shouldn’t) when used against Palestine—what stronger BDS could there be than the one against Gaza?—and it hasn’t worked (and shouldn’t be used) against Cuba.

In the United States around civil rights, it was embodying the future in the present that worked. What will and should work now is that One Big Carrot of peace, with sticks right behind it if an Israeli government rejects the carrot.

NK: First of all, Israel has received all carrots all the time, and introducing any sticks at all would represent real progress. Also I think BDS does embody the future, because it says that Palestinian lives matter deeply. There is such an asymmetry of outrage on this issue—the uproar about Israeli universities facing a boycott at the same time as Palestinian schools and universities are being bombed, for instance. When we treat Israeli war crimes as deserving of international sanction, we are rejecting this double standard and embodying the future we want, which is a future of genuine equality.

AW: But what would have happened if Hampshire College had twinned itself with the university in Gaza and a university in Ramallah and had done its best to make real-life connections?

NK: Frankly, not as much as what is going to come of their bold BDS stance. At Hampshire College, there have been plenty of exchanges and dialogues of all kinds, but those don’t change the economic and political dynamics of the conflict, which are what need changing.

AW: I agree that that is what needs changing, but I don’t think this is the way to do it. I don’t think we’re going to agree on which set of tactics are best, but I guess people are going to have to make up their own minds. I do think we have to recognize that nothing is going to happen unless the policy of the United States changes.

NK: I agree with that. We just have a disagreement about how we get there. I think BDS changes the dynamic, because it inserts multiple other economic powers into the equation. It would put grassroots pressure on the Obama administration that could become hard to ignore. And also pressure within Israel. I certainly agree that it will piss off Israelis, but I also think we need to acknowledge that ignoring the call is an active position toward Palestinians, it’s not a passive one.

Israeli ambassador condemns students for 'celebration of ignorance'

Photography by: Danah Abdulla for SPHR
Israeli ambassador condemns students for 'celebration of ignorance'

Katie DeRosa
The Ottawa Citizen

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

University of Ottawa students were expecting a lecture by Israeli Ambassador Alan Baker. What they didn't expect was to be lectured to, reports Katie DeRosa.


A speech at the University of Ottawa by the Israeli ambassador to Canada sparked a debate over the validity of a movement that accuses Israel of apartheid.

Alan Baker denounced Israel Apartheid Week as "crude propagandism, pure hypocrisy and cynical manipulation of the student body."

Israel Apartheid Week began yesterday, coinciding with Israel Week and the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel.

"I want to explain to you and through you, the student bodies in these campuses, what an absurdity is this whole expression," said Mr. Baker. "I think that it's a sort of celebration of ignorance, both of the meaning of apartheid and a complete and utter lack of awareness of the state of Israel and what it means."

Mr. Baker was speaking to a classroom of about 50 University of Ottawa students during a lecture titled, "Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East." He referred to a series of events and lectures organized at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa under the Israel Apartheid banner as "intellectually dishonest and the antithesis of what one would expect in a home of learning."

He called the title of the week a slur and something that should never be allowed on university campuses.

But, a professor at the university defended students' right to hear both sides of the issue.
"University is a place where people think," said Tyseer Aboulnasr, a professor of electrical engineering and a former dean of engineering at U of O. "So you provide to them the different point of views, the different perspectives and let them have an open and respectful debate and let the students think and make up their minds."

She said the fact that two opposing celebrations coincide on the same week is a great idea. "It just gives people the chance to hear both sides."

Ms. Aboulnasr said she was also disappointed the ambassador spent much of his speech pointing out the human rights abuses of other Arab countries instead of providing proof of Israel's practices.

But, Mr. Baker referenced the apartheid in South Africa, which saw extreme racial degradation and segregation and defended Israel as a Liberal democracy with laws incompatible with such actions.

"It's an abuse of Canadian values because it's a vulgar attempt to undermine and slang a democratic country through dishonest ways," he said. "It's a picture of a forceful group of outspoken extremists trying to impose their narrow political views on a group of students to the exclusion of genuine issues."

Aider les Palestiniens

Edito du Monde (www.lemonde.fr)

Il est des violences presque invisibles. L'étranglement économique des territoires palestiniens par l'armée israélienne est de celles-là. Les check-points qui ont essaimé en Cisjordanie et le blocus imposé à la bande de Gaza au nom de la sécurité ont entraîné, depuis sept ans, une récession à nulle autre pareille. Le cantonnement des entreprises palestiniennes dans de petites enclaves, ajouté à la fermeture brutale du marché de l'emploi en Israël aux travailleurs palestiniens, a propulsé l'Autorité palestinienne en première ligne, l'obligeant à multiplier le nombre des fonctionnaires pour éviter un dangereux contre-choc social. Parant au plus pressé, la communauté internationale a fait le choix de soutenir de plus en plus massivement les finances publiques palestiniennes ; elle verse des salaires, directement sur les comptes des fonctionnaires de l'Autorité, méthode la plus immédiate de redistribution.

Ces choix dictés par les circonstances constituent autant de contre-sens économiques. Ils ne peuvent être que des réponses de très court terme, en attendant qu'un processus politique contribue à modifier en profondeur la situation sur le terrain pour que les Palestiniens, qui sont sans doute parmi les mieux formés de la région, puissent enfin vivre et se déplacer comme partout ailleurs dans le monde. L'intitulé volontariste de la conférence des donateurs pour l'Etat palestinien réunie à Paris le 17 décembre suggère que depuis la réunion d'Annapolis, le 27 novembre, un dialogue israélo-palestinien a été renoué et que l'Etat palestinien est désormais à portée de main. La réalité oblige malheureusement à la circonspection. Un processus politique va peut-être s'enclencher mais la situation des Palestiniens risque de rester pour longtemps encore dictée par l'urgence. La plus grande partie des dons récoltés à Paris sera donc utilisée à boucler les fins de mois d'une Autorité palestinienne constamment menacée de banqueroute. Concrètement, près d'un fonctionnaire palestinien sur deux sera payé par la communauté internationale, qui prend évidemment le risque de financer ainsi l'occupation israélienne.

Les dons rassemblés à Paris vont conforter un triste record : les Palestiniens sont, par habitant, le peuple le plus aidé de la terre, alors que leur niveau de vie, du fait des contraintes qui sont les leurs, ne cesse de baisser. La Banque mondiale répète depuis des années, telle une litanie, que l'aide internationale sans la liberté de mouvement reste impuissante à relever l'économie palestinienne. Il conviendrait que les donateurs prennent conscience que les quêtes, même les plus prolifiques, ne font pas une politique. Et qu'Israël, qui a créé une des économies les plus dynamiques de la région, comprenne que sa sécurité ne sera pas assurée tant que la désespérance et la misère camperont à sa porte.

Article paru dans l'édition du 18.12.07.

For Israel's Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion

By Scott Wilson

Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 20, 2007; A01

KARMIEL, Israel -- Fatina and Ahmad Zubeidat, young Arab citizens of Israel, met on the first day of class at the prestigious Bezalel arts and architecture academy in Jerusalem. Married last year, the couple rents an airy house here in the Galilee filled with stylish furniture and other modern grace notes.

But this is not where they wanted to live. They had hoped to be in Rakefet, a nearby town where 150 Jewish families live on state land close to the mall project Ahmad is building. After months of interviews and testing, the town's admission committee rejected the Arab couple on the grounds of "social incompatibility."

They petitioned Israel's high court to end such screening, claiming discrimination, a charge town officials are challenging.

"We can't just be good citizens," said Fatina, 27, who is expecting the couple's first child. "If they won't develop our villages, then we will choose where we want to live. The problem lies not with us, but with Jewish society that does not accept the other."

The Zubeidats are players in a wider ethnic clash unfolding in the Galilee, a northern region where Arabs, those who remained in Israel after its creation in 1948 and their descendants, outnumber Jews. Israel's policies have deepened the gulf between Arab and Jewish citizens in recent years, through concrete walls, laws that favor Jews, and political proposals that place the Arab minority outside national life.

This process of separation within Israel's original boundaries mirrors in many ways the broader one taking place between Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied territories.

With most of Israel's land controlled by a government agency, Israeli Arabs have long had more trouble acquiring property than Jews, who outnumber them five to one in a population of about 6.5 million people. In response, Arab lawmakers joined a Jewish parliamentary majority this year in endorsing the construction of a new Arab city in the Galilee, where demographic rivalry and ethnic separation are most pronounced. Arabs say it will be the first city built on their behalf since the state's founding.

But some Jewish political leaders have suggested that Israel's Arabs, who commonly refer to themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, should eventually live in a future Palestinian state, the subject of peace negotiations inaugurated last month in Annapolis, Md. Israel's foreign minister and lead negotiator, Tzipi Livni, said before the meeting that such a state would "be the national answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different refugee camps or in Israel."

Arabs and Jews study in separate schools in Israel -- the Arab system receives fewer resources -- and learn Israeli history in different ways. Israel's Jewish education minister, Yuli Tamir, ordered this year that Arab third-grade textbooks note that Arab citizens call Israel's 1948 War of Independence "the catastrophe." Many Jewish lawmakers reacted with scorn.

Except for a relatively small Druze population, Arabs are excluded also from military service mandatory for all but ultra-Orthodox Jews, an essential shared experience of Israeli life and a traditional training ground for future political leaders. Arab lawmakers have lined up now against a new proposal for Arabs to perform "national service" in lieu of time in the army, an institution they hold responsible for enforcing the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.

"We have lost the Arab citizens of Israel," said Amir Sheleg, 63, who is head of security for the Jewish community of Nir Zevi on Israel's coastal plain. "They no longer want to be a part of the state, and I am sorry for it."

Sheleg, burly and bald, patrolled in a black pickup truck along a concrete wall that rises along the town's edge. The 15-foot-high barrier, funded by the government, divides the leafy streets of Nir Zevi from the adjacent Arab community of Lod. Rising crime, he said, prompted his town to begin building the wall four years ago.

"It only adds hatred," said Rifat Iliatim, 39, an Arab resident of Lod who sells horses for a living. "All our lives we lived together and there was respect on both sides. Do they want this part of Israel to be like Jerusalem or Gaza where Jews and Arabs are separate?"

ACRE

Acre is a city of 52,000 Arab and Jewish citizens, many living in mixed neighborhoods along a sweep of Mediterranean coast.

Arabs dominate the seaside Old City, a U.N. World Heritage Site of crenellated stone walls possessed over the centuries by Greeks, Egyptians and Crusader kings. A single crowded high school just outside the ancient walls serves the entire Arab population, 27 percent of Acre's total. The city's five mosques, including el-Jazzar, the second largest in Israel and the territories after al-Aqsa in Jerusalem, are also concentrated in the area.

Jews live in the newer, outlying neighborhoods that ring the Old City. For more than two decades, Jews rising into the middle class left the older neighborhoods and Arabs filled in behind them.

"This is a mixed city and that's a fact," said Ohad Segev, Acre's Jewish director general, who believes the two groups should mix as little as possible. "Just as I wouldn't allow a yeshiva to open in the Old City, I wouldn't allow a mosque to open in the new one."

In the past year, conflict between Arabs and Jews -- over business hours, the right to open mosques, and an increasing Jewish presence in Arab-majority areas -- has flashed through neighborhoods running between the two largely ethnically distinct parts of the city.

Yeshiva Hesder-Acco is dwarfed by decrepit apartment buildings with laundry hanging from balconies. Once populated by new Jewish immigrants, the apartments are filled now by Arabs. Young girls walk the streets in head scarves. Arab boys play soccer on the asphalt court next to the yeshiva.

"It's just background noise, part of the scenery," said Mordechai Behar, a 22-year-old yeshiva student, referring to his Arab neighbors. "We try not to interact with them."

Yossi Stern, a 35-year-old rabbi, runs the yeshiva with a bustling energy. He arrived in 2001 from the West Bank settlement of Elon Moreh, one of the earliest and most radical in the territories, where he was a teacher.

His move reflected a shift in his focus from settling the West Bank to promoting a larger and more politically aware Jewish majority within Israel's original boundaries. He has grown the yeshiva from 20 to 120 students since then.

"Inside the Green Line, people have not awakened to their role of the last 100 years," Stern said, referring to the 1949 armistice line that marked Israel's boundary until it seized the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war. "If we fall asleep here, we will wake up to an Arab majority."

His students volunteer in public schools and direct tours of the Old City, where a state-run development company is buying Arab property and selling it to Jewish businessmen.

Stern works with the city government, led by a Jewish mayor, on projects designed to attract Jews to Acre, including a recently approved housing development designated for Jewish military families. Built on state land, the development will include a new, 350-student yeshiva that Stern advertises as "the center for Jewish identity in the Galilee."

"We're not trying to build a settlement in this city," he said. "Here we're mature enough to see this as a long process."

But Ahmad Odeh, an Arab member of the city council, calls Stern precisely that -- "a settler" trying to make Arab neighborhoods more Jewish. Odeh's family fled from the Galilee village of Shaab during the 1948 war, eventually settling in a neighborhood not far from Stern's yeshiva. Odeh has sued the Jewish-majority council successfully six times for violating Arab rights to education and property.

Odeh, a slight, wiry man with spiky hair, has been lobbying the council to reopen a mosque outside the Old City that the government closed decades ago. It sits among some of the city's more than 50 synagogues.

Because the single Arab high school is overcrowded, Odeh's eldest daughter commutes to one in a village 45 minutes from town, reversing the rural-to-urban migration patterns of recent decades.

"This is all part of the project to Judaize the Galilee," said Odeh, 48. "We want to be partners in our city."

KARMIEL

This hilltop community with streets lined by date palms and split by lush grassy medians emerged in the 1960s as a Zionist response to the large Arab population in the Galilee. The Zubeidats are among a tiny fraction of Arabs who live here.

The couple considered building a home in Sakhnin, a nearby Arab town. But as with many Arab towns and villages, its public services pale next to those of Jewish ones. The prospects appeared better in Rakefet, and they applied to live there after marrying.

The Israel Land Administration controls 93 percent of the land in Israel, including the hilltop where Rakefet sits. The government agency has a say in who is allowed to live in such communities with a representative on the local "absorption committees" that weigh the applications.

For the Zubeidats, who speak Hebrew and Arabic fluently, the months-long process began in the summer of 2006. It included a series of interviews and tests, some taken with the dozen or so Jewish applicants also seeking to move in.

"All the questions had to do with how we would integrate into the community," Fatina said. "We have many, many Jewish friends. We spend our holidays with them, and they do the same. We're not from outer space, we're from here."

The rejection letter followed a conversation the Zubeidats had with an official from the Misgav Regional Council, which oversees Rakefet and dozens of other nearby towns. He told them, Fatina recalled, that although they were "very nice people," he would have to begin marketing Rakefet as a "mixed community" to possible buyers in Tel Aviv if they moved in. The designation would hurt sales.

"Obviously, this whole process was designed to push us back to Sakhnin," Ahmad said. "And the way these Arab towns are now, it's like a ghetto."

Maya Tsaban, a spokeswoman for the regional council that oversees Rakefet, said, "This decision was based on rules we didn't make," referring to regulations established by national government agencies. She declined to comment further.

The Israel Land Administration, which set the selection criteria, rejected the Zubeidats' appeal this year. An agency spokeswoman, Ortal Tzabar, said, "One aspect taken into consideration in deciding whether to accept someone is the homogeneity of the community."

The houses of Rakefet are set along steep, curving streets lined with pines and cedar. Nadav Garmi, a 35-year-old engineer, is building a home there. He makes a short drive each day from his neighboring community -- also populated only by Jews -- that falls under the same regional council.

"I'm very left-wing, but I think Arabs should live in one place, ultra-Orthodox Jews in one place, secular Jews in one place and so on," Garmi said. "If you want a good neighbor, you have to have a place for everybody. It's best not to mix too much."

Scapegoats in an Unwelcoming Land

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Last Wednesday, a car-bomb blast on a crowded Beirut street killed Brig. Gen. Francois Hajj, one of Lebanon's top generals. The capital began buzzing with speculation that Hajj had been assassinated in retaliation for his role as the operational commander of the army's bloody three-month battle with an armed Islamic group last summer. In May, Fatah al-Islam -- a foreign jihadist group inspired by al-Qaeda, led by veterans of the struggle in Iraq and made up mostly of Saudis, Syrians and even some Lebanese -- ensconced itself on the outskirts of Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, and massacred Lebanese troops at an army checkpoint. Hajj's forces responded by indiscriminately bombarding the camp in the name of the war on terror, and the Lebanese public rallied 'round.

Palestinians had once again become Lebanon's scapegoats, victims of a land in which they have long faced slaughter and discrimination. Attacking them may be personally risky, but it's also often good politics; the assassinated general's boss, army commander Gen. Michel Suleiman, is poised to become Lebanon's next president. Suleiman isn't the first army commander to punish the Palestinians, and he won't be the first president to do so, either. Between 1958 and 1964, President Fuad Shehab created an elaborate, ruthless secret-service network to monitor the Palestinian camps. During his 1970-76 reign, President Suleiman Franjieh clashed militarily with Palestinian factions, even using the air force to bomb a neighborhood thought to be pro-Palestinian. I've heard followers of assassinated president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose Maronite Christian militia massacred Palestinians in 1976, brag that he was stopped at a checkpoint in the early years of the country's 1975-90 civil war with a trunk full of the skulls of dead Palestinians. Even today, the Lebanese opposition's preferred candidate for president is Michel Aoun, a Christian retired general who also participated in the 1976 killings.

The rights of the Palestinian refugees have been ignored for six decades by a world that has wished them away. But the Middle East will never know peace or stability until they are granted justice. In 1948-49, around the conflict that Israelis refer to as their War of Independence and that Palestinians call the Catastrophe, some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed to make way for the creation of the Jewish state. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, 400,000 Palestinians were expelled by the Israeli military, according to Amnesty International.

A series of subsequent peace processes has ignored the refugees, offered no compensation for their suffering and lost property, or refused to recognize their right to return to their homes in their homeland. It's not just the Israelis who have brutalized them; Palestinian refugees have been massacred in Jordan and Lebanon. Small numbers have become so radicalized that they have gone on to fight the U.S. occupation of Iraq. In Lebanon -- a small, weak state with a delicate sectarian balance and turbulent political system where, according to Refugees International, about 382,000 Palestinians have registered with a U.N. refugee-relief agency -- the refugee problem has never really left center stage.

Last summer, I witnessed yet another chapter in the book of the refugees' misery. By late June, most of the Palestinians from Nahr al-Bared had fled to Badawi, another refugee camp nearby. In a schoolyard there, I was stopped by a man named Abu Hadi, born in Haifa in 1946. "I am a person without an address," he told me. "I wish I was a donkey or a horse so I would have doctors and lawyers for my rights." He showed me a plastic bag with a sponge and a towel. "My bathroom is in my hand," he said.

The term "refugee camp" summons up images of tents and squalor, but Nahr al-Bared, like many of its counterparts elsewhere in Lebanon, had been a thoroughly urban camp, with low-slung apartment buildings. It even had soothing views of the Mediterranean. The 40,000 Palestinians of Nahr al-Bared wound up housed in schools in the Badawi refugee camp and Tripoli, watching from afar as their homes were obliterated. According to aid workers and Palestinian nongovernmental organizations, at least 42 Palestinian civilians had been killed by Sept. 2, when the Lebanese army and media declared that Gen. Suleiman's forces had won a great victory.

Only in October did the army finally begin to allow a trickle of Palestinians back to their homes, and then only in the so-called new camp, a small area on the outskirts of the original camp that had housed 2,000 families and been safely under Lebanese army control throughout the clash.

When about 1,000 families finally passed through the checkpoints, to the jeers of soldiers and demonstrators, they found only destruction. Every single home, building, apartment and shop that I saw had been destroyed. Most buildings had been burned from the inside; the signs of the flammable liquids that the soldiers had used were scorched on the walls, and empty fuel canisters were strewn on the floors. Ceilings and walls were riddled with bullets, shot from inside, seemingly for sport. Most homes that I saw had been emptied of furniture, appliances, sinks, toilets, televisions and refrigerators. Most shockingly, soldiers had defecated in kitchens and bedrooms, on plates, bowls, pots and mattresses; they had urinated into olive-oil jars.

The media were not permitted in, and most Lebanese outlets ignored or denied the outrages. When I managed to slip inside, I was shocked by the scope of the damage. The buildings were crumpled, windows broken, electrical wiring yanked out, water pumps destroyed, generators stolen or shot up. All the gold jewelry had been stolen, as had been the cash that so many Palestinians had stored in their bedrooms. Insulting graffiti were scrawled on the charred walls, as were threats, signed by various Lebanese army units. Every car in the camp that I saw had been burned, shot or crushed by tanks or bulldozers. The ruination had been strikingly personal; I saw photo albums that had been torn to shreds. Palestinians told me that they had seen their belongings on sale in the main outdoor market in Tripoli.

Like all institutions in Lebanon, the army is sectarian, a fact that helps explain the devastation. Most of the soldiers fighting in Nahr al-Bared had been Sunnis from northern Lebanon; the Sunnis had once seen Palestinian militias as friendly, but now they blamed the Palestinians for the outsiders of Fatah al-Islam and unleashed their fury on the camp. By contrast, refugees told me, Shiite soldiers from the south had been far kinder and more supportive after the fighting.

The camp had once been woven into the area's economy and culture. Now the Palestinians were again unwanted and rejected. "It is our destiny," one man said emotionlessly in his blackened home in Nahr al-Bared, standing near feces that Lebanese soldiers had left on his kitchen floor.

I saw Palestinian children's art from this period that depicted the Lebanese soldiers and tanks that destroyed the camp as Israelis, equating their suffering at the hands of the Lebanese with the suffering of their brethren at the hands of the Israelis. I saw videos filmed by Lebanese soldiers on the Internet, showing army medical staff abusing corpses and beating prisoners. Hundreds of Palestinians had been abused or tortured in Lebanese detention, according to human rights groups, and refugees told me that some had died from medical neglect of treatable wounds.

The refugees still faced harassment and the occasional beating by Lebanese soldiers. Nobody is helping them, but rather than giving up, hundreds of Palestinians were at work emptying their homes of debris and trying to get on with their lives. One woman stood on her balcony, throwing rubble from inside her home out onto the broken street. She was lucky; most of the Palestinians still couldn't get to their homes and could only wonder what awaited them. On the roof of one of the taller buildings in the new camp, I found Farhan Said Mansur, a sanitation worker, standing with his wife. They were gazing silently across to their distant home, whose broken roof they could just make out, as if they were looking over the border toward Palestine, where he was born. "It is a calamity to all Palestinians," he said.

nirrosen@yahoo.com

Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of "In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq."

You can access the article by following this link:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401329_pf.html

Welcome to "Palestine"

by Robert Fisk
Published: 16 June 2007 in The Independent, UK

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are.

First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.
No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over ?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province).

We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.

We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror".

Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.

For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?

It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).

If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government?

The New York Times: A Life of Unrest

By: STEVEN ERLANGER
Published: July 15, 2007

Palestinians never used to do these things to one another. Putting bullets in the back of the heads of men on their knees. Shooting up hospitals. Killing patients. Knee-capping doctors. Executing clerics. Throwing handcuffed prisoners to their deaths from Gaza’s highest (and most expensive) apartment buildings. There is a madness in Gaza now. Hamas — a religious political-military organization that dominated the last Palestinian elections — claimed it was fighting infidels, with a holy sanction to kill. Fatah — the largest group in the Palestine Liberation Organization — was nearly as brutal as Hamas and claimed it was fighting the Nazis. Poor young men from the squalid, stinking refugee camps of Gaza, their heads filled with religious slogans and revolutionary cant, took off their knitted black masks to pose in front of the gilded bathrooms of the once-powerful and rich men of Fatah. Then they stole the sinks, toilets, tiles and pipes, leaving the wiring and the metal scraps for the ordinary, unarmed poor.

Arafat's Legacy, Revised
Hilal invokes not the establishment Arafat but the pre-Oslo, revolutionary Arafat.
Gaza today is so far from the hopes of people like James Wolfensohn — the former World Bank president who tried to coordinate economic redevelopment in the 140-square-mile territory between Israel and Egypt after the Israelis withdrew nearly two years ago — as to seem like the other side of the earth. Rather than a model for a future Palestinian state, Gaza looks like Somalia: broken and ravenous. The civil war that Palestinians insisted could never happen just has, a civil war abetted by Israel and the United States in the name of antiterrorism and stability — another policy that has failed, at least here, where a burning smell still fills the nostrils and where a masked Hamas gunman with an AK-47 recently sat at the abandoned desk of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, lifted up the phone and said: “Hello, Condoleezza Rice? You have me to deal with now.” But the military victory of Hamas may also bring a welcome measure of quiet and security to the 1.5 million people of Gaza, nearly 70 percent of them refugees, who have been living a nightmare of criminal gangs, street-corner vendettas, clan warfare, absent police, corrupt officials, religious incitement and unremitting poverty.
Khaled Abu Hilal, a thin, grizzled chain-smoker who sucks in tobacco smoke the way an emphysema patient sucks in oxygen, is at the center of the revolution. He is a hated figure among many in the secular, nationalist Fatah; they think he is a heretic who helped set off the Gaza implosion. But his journey is Gaza’s journey, from Fatah fighter and Israeli prisoner to disgusted ex-Fatah man, now associated with Hamas. His anger with Mahmoud Abbas — Yasir Arafat’s successor as chairman of the P.L.O. and now president of the Palestinian Authority — and with what he considers the endless, futile and demeaning effort of a corrupt Fatah to please the Israelis, is shared among an increasing number of Palestinians.
Standing early last month amid the Israeli-bombed ruins of the buildings of the Executive Force, which he helped Hamas build as a parallel police and protection force, Hilal, now 39, was quietly triumphant. He had been serving as a close aide to, and spokesman for, the tough Hamas interior minister, Said Siam, who left office in opposition to the national-unity government with Fatah. Both he and Siam were central to the campaign by the Executive Force and by Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, that pulled Fatah down in six days in early June. “I feel proud, no question,” he said as aides urgently shoved cellphones into his hand. “I feel I did my national duty, and that makes me very comfortable, psychologically speaking.” Two weeks later, at a packed and sweaty rally in Gaza City, Hilal announced that he would lead a new Fatah movement and military force in Gaza, allied with Hamas, called Fatah al-Yasir/Higher Military Command, named after Yasir Arafat.
“This is pure Fatah, Fatah before Oslo,” Hilal shouted hoarsely, referring to the 1993 peace accords with Israel that created the Palestinian Authority. Hilal sees Oslo as a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle for real statehood, and he called his new movement “a true Palestinian national liberation movement.” Surrounded by large, bearded gunmen in black uniforms, Hilal wore a loose, untucked shirt and looked as tiny as Arafat. “The good and honorable people of the Fatah movement have rejected the collaborators!” he shouted. At the end, he was mobbed by hundreds of young men, both acolytes and job seekers.
Whether or not he succeeds with the new movement, Hilal (if he lives) presents the first major internal challenge to the Fatah establishment, represented by Abbas, calling Fatah back to its roots as a resistance movement of revolutionary fighters. Establishment Fatah has excommunicated Hilal, and some would surely like to see him dead. But if Palestine is now divided between the West Bank and Gaza, Fatah in Gaza is divided, too.
In a conversation after the Hamas victory, Hilal, speaking through an interpreter, said he felt “bitterness about the spilling of Palestinian blood,” but the spilling of blood for the cause of Palestinian independence and dignity, as he sees it, is an inevitable, even necessary sacrifice. At least 160 Palestinians, most of them Fatah, died in that week of war last month, including 45 civilians, and some 800 were wounded, according to the Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza. Another 50 were killed in an earlier round of fighting, in May. No matter what happens now, Hilal said, “it will not be worse than the previous period of chaos, nothing worse can come. And maybe now we have the chance to move very seriously to encourage the local economy, small business, agriculture. The most important thing is that we have got rid of the mafia that exists in the security apparatuses and that paralyzed our daily life.”
By “mafia” he means Fatah — or at least the leadership of Fatah that he believes betrayed its duty to its own people. For Hilal, the recent battle was for the purity of Fatah, which he maintains he represents against what he calls “the polluted stream” of Fatah, “the diverted ones,” who betrayed Palestinian aspirations for independence at Oslo and became entranced by Israeli and American approval and gold. The major mistake of Arafat and Fatah was to accept the Oslo accords, Hilal says, and those who opposed the accords then — Hamas and Islamic Jihad — were correct. “I am pro-peace and anti-Oslo,” Hilal told me. “Oslo is a project for treason, not for peace.”
The Palestinian Authority, an outgrowth of the accords, was not a government, in Hilal’s view, but a welfare agency that has served Israeli interests. By keeping Palestinians focused on getting their monthly checks, it has enslaved them and prolonged the Israeli occupation of Palestine, instead of enabling Palestinians to build a real economy and nation. “Negotiations have become a good in themselves after Oslo, and that’s a complete failure,” he said. “The Palestinians only talk, and the Israelis are happy. They can negotiate forever and seduce these collaborators with money, V.I.P. treatment, exit visas, cars, businesses and monopolies.
“It’s a form of control, of colonialism,” Hilal went on. “When the Palestinian Authority employs 180,000 people, you drive them away from the real issue, you hold them by their neck and you make them dependent on the system. If you agree with Oslo, you get benefits and jobs. For those who resist, nothing; the price is sometimes to be killed.” There is no real economy in the Palestinian territories, he said, noting that the authority has to rely on foreign aid even to pay its swollen wage bill for employees who do little work. “Instead of decent jobs, we have these colonial handouts, and the corrupted ones take their cut of everything,” he said. He paused a moment, then added, “You can control an animal by feeding it, but a human being will start to think.”
Born in southern Gaza a year after the 1967 war, Hilal came of age in the refugee camps of Khan Yunis. His family fled from Bashit, a village in what is now central Israel, during the 1948 war. The village was destroyed, he notes coldly, replaced by what he calls “the Jewish settlements” of Benaya and Aseret.
He grew up under Israeli occupation in the twisting, fetid alleys of Khan Yunis, only a few yards from the home of Muhammad Dahlan. Dahlan, seven years older than Hilal, would become Fatah’s security chief in Gaza. Hilal once worked for him, then came to despise him.
Hilal was radicalized early. “I was no observer,” he says now. “I was arrested two days before I turned 16, because I threw a hand-made bomb toward an Israeli military jeep in Khan Yunis.” He spent the next 11 years, from 1984 to 1995, in six different Israeli prisons, from the most secure, in Ashkelon, to the most difficult, in the Negev tent prison of Ketziot, which was shut down for a time after international protests. “I paid the price,” Hilal says flatly. “Many like me paid the price. Though our economic situation then was better than in any Arab country, we cared more about fighting the occupation than about bread or school. The occupation arrested us to put an end to all these emotions in us. But it backfired. ”
Like Maxim Gorky, he said that “prison was my university,” and then he laughed. A year in Israeli prison, he says, “is like 10 years outside in terms of educational consciousness and commitment to your country, transferring it to a faith inside yourself. That’s the most powerful incentive, to sacrifice for your country with consciousness. It’s not about passion.” Every Palestinian entering prison chose a faction; he chose Fatah, he says, because of Arafat. Most prisoners belonged to Fatah, and they met three times a day, for 90 minutes a session, to learn about the history of Palestine, the Arab world and the Fatah program. They also studied what Hilal calls “political science and military science.” They studied languages; he chose to learn Hebrew, which he speaks and reads easily.
After the Oslo accords, which brought Arafat and the P.L.O. back from exile in Tunis, thousands of Palestinian prisoners were released, but not Hilal. “I opposed Oslo from the beginning,” he says. “I was the representative of all the factions in Ketziot then, and the Israelis knew I opposed Oslo. Not because I oppose peace, but because I didn’t trust the Israelis and military occupation.”
Fatah split bitterly over Oslo, with Farouk Kaddoumi, Arafat’s No. 2 in the faction, remaining in exile. When Hilal was finally released in 1995, Arafat persuaded him to “give Oslo a try” and work in the Palestinian Authority. He served in the presidential-security detail from 1996 until 2002, the second year of the second intifada. He then became a leader of Fatah’s Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades — set up by Arafat to compete with Hamas’s military wing, and using many of the same tactics, including killing Israeli civilians — and was a close aide to Samir al-Masharawi, who was Muhammad Dahlan’s right-hand man.
Then, following Hamas’s victory in January 2006, Hilal left Fatah, soon becoming spokesman for the minister of the interior in the new Hamas government. Why? “I discovered there were traitors in conspiracy against our Palestinian cause,” Hilal told me. “Even Arafat understood by 2002 that Israel and America were looking for collaborators, not partners for peace.” For Hilal, the symbol of the rot in Fatah was the dapper Dahlan, the boy who grew up near him in Khan Yunis and who became a favorite of the Israelis and the Americans. “Dahlan is an American employee,” Hilal said. “I heard Arafat say that myself.”
Ahmed Hillis, a critic of Dahlan who nonetheless remained in Gaza as a leader of Fatah after last month’s fighting, dismisses Hilal’s claim to hold true to the ideals of the organization. “He’s Hamas now,” Hillis says. “He was kicked out of Fatah a long time ago.”
Ziad Abu Ein, a Fatah leader in Ramallah, knew Hilal in Ashkelon prison and respected him. He says he believes that Hilal left Fatah over a difference about money and sponsorship. “For the sake of dollars he left the official channels and went to Hamas seeking funding,” Ein said. “He doesn’t represent Fatah anymore; he was fired when he joined the Hamas government. Fatah doesn’t need mercenaries. He sold himself to Hamas, even though he claims he is Fatah.”
Hilal scoffs at the charge. And in fact he seems sincere in his anger with Fatah and in his belief that those who supported Oslo and negotiations with Israel, led by Abbas, have lost their way and lost touch with the real life of Gaza’s people.
Hamas won the January 2006 elections for many reasons, but prime among them was a general disgust that had built among Palestinians, and among many members of Fatah like Hilal, at the corruption of Fatah’s men at the top. They may have begun as revolutionaries, but they ended up as padded bureaucrats, benefiting from the privileges that their supposed adversary, Israel, was eager to provide them. One Israeli negotiator in the days of Camp David, Gidi Grinstein, recently described how Fatah’s leaders would travel only first class, with junior staff traveling in business. Only Israeli cabinet ministers could travel business class, Grinstein noted. “We used to joke that they were the ‘full-belly revolutionaries,’ ” he said. “Dahlan was a kid from a refugee camp who lived in a palace.”
Dahlan, who has always denied corruption charges, used to control monopolies on oil supplies into Gaza and on exit permits. Fatah took a big cut of the import and export business at the Karni crossing on the Israeli border. But there was also Ahmed Qurei, the former prime minister known as Abu Ala, who was famous for his factory in Abu Dis, which was widely reported to supply cement for the building of some Israeli settlements and even for the separation wall.
Fatah lost touch not only with the grass roots but also with its soul, and when it largely traded armed resistance against Israel for negotiations that failed to produce either peace or a better life for Palestinians, it seemed to lose a certain amount of self-respect. When Arafat died, it lost its defining symbol, the one charismatic man who combined the idea of war and politics in his tiny, uniformed self, his kaffiyeh carefully tied in the shape of British Mandate Palestine, and who could gather together the many strands of Palestinian politics.
Even the gunmen of Fatah’s Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades began to lose faith in their leaders, especially in Abbas. He had trouble paying them, but more important, his sincere, open and brave commitment to nonviolence seemed to them a surrender to Israeli occupation.
Hamas, working to Islamicize Palestinians and recruit them, combined religious fervor, well-financed charitable and social work and an effective strategy of military confrontation and terrorism. It is classified as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, and both try to disrupt its financing through charitable contributions and bank transfers. Its choice to enter electoral politics was much discussed inside the movement and presented a profound change. It also meant that Fatah had a competitor for the first time, and one as well-financed as itself.
Hamas has a religious foundation, but it is also an intensely nationalist movement, with Palestine as its focus. Hamas continues to refuse to recognize the existence of Israel. But it has none of the grand ambitions of Osama Bin Laden or Al Qaeda to drive the “U.S. crusaders” out of the Middle East, nor does it aim at Americans; instead, Hamas sees Washington as a reality and wants the Americans to push Israel to leave lands it occupied after the 1967 war, although Hamas refuses to endorse a permanent two-state solution. Hamas is secretive and severe but also, in its way, pragmatic. (For example, it stopped carrying out suicide bombings inside pre-1967 Israel as of September 2004, judging them to be counterproductive.)
It was Muhammad Dahlan who organized the Gaza crackdown on Hamas in 1996, when on Arafat’s orders, Hamas men were arrested and their beards shaved. Many were taken to the headquarters of the Preventive Security, which Dahlan headed, where, it was reported at the time, they were tortured. Sometimes, according to Hamas officials, men were made to sit on bottles and thus sodomize themselves. Ten years later, during one postelection round of fighting between Hamas and Fatah, men of the Preventive Security marched through the streets, chanting a slogan referencing that time, with particular messages for Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister, and Mahmoud Zahar, then the Hamas foreign minister. “Zahar!” they chanted. “Tell Haniya! The time of the bottle is returning!”
When Hamas took over Gaza, its fighters wept as they raised their green flag over the Preventive Security building, then turned to Mecca and prayed. Then they looted the building and Dahlan’s luxurious villa. Dahlan, who was in Cairo, did not return to Gaza but fled to the West Bank.
The fight between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza has been brutal ever since last year’s elections brought Hamas to power. Fatah refused Hamas’s invitation to join in a coalition government. And, together with the security forces it had controlled since the Palestinian Authority was established after the 1993 Oslo accords, Fatah simply refused to recognize the legitimacy of Hamas, elected or not.
Even more, there were organized campaigns of crime and disruption from Fatah-run security forces, intended to make Hamas’s government untenable. Many Palestinians spoke of recognizing Fatah men as they hijacked cars or forced their way to the head of lines in hospitals and ministries. One family I met spoke of Fatah officers, called to stop a riot in Khan Yunis over a new delivery of cooking gas, forcing their way to the front of the line and taking the remaining gas canisters for themselves. Then there were the criminal gangs that, as Hilal put it, “hid under the umbrella of resistance and invented a slogan and bought the T-shirt and pretended to belong to the Brigades of Whatever.”
Hilal, like the leaders of Hamas, says that Fatah security forces deliberately set out to undermine the new Hamas government. But in any case, the Fatah-dominated police were doing little to enforce the law or to confront armed gangs, some of whom also contained policemen. Nor were the courts in Gaza providing any form of justice, meaning Gazans who wanted retribution or protection found their own armed men, usually from their own clan, or hamulla.
To defend Hamas and to try to provide security on the streets, in April 2006, the Palestinian Authority’s new interior minister, Hamas’s Said Siam, created the Executive Force, the parallel police force of volunteers, which President Abbas soon banned. No one in Gaza paid any attention to the ban. Hilal went to work for Siam and Hamas, agreeing with their attempt to bring security to Gazans, as Hamas had promised during its campaign. Hilal brought with him, he told me, 1,000 members of the Fatah-affiliated Aksa and Abu Rish Brigades, as well as representatives from other factional militias who were committed to fighting Israel, like the Popular Resistance Committees, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. (The Israeli security agency, Shin Bet, confirmed this information to me.)
“We can do more to provide security with 3,500 volunteers than the Palestinian security forces with their 70,000,” Hilal said at the time, in one of a series of conversations we’ve had since Hamas took over. “We hold the gun out of faith and commitment to the national project, not for a salary. The main reason for the chaos is not the society, but the paralysis, weakness and corruption of the Palestinian Authority and its security forces, who just incite and do not do their jobs.”
Hilal, who lives modestly with his wife and five children in the center of Gaza, is revered by many in the Executive Force, who regard him as clean, committed and logical. Akhaim al-Khalidi is one of them, a 23-year-old Fatah member from a Fatah family. He joined the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades in 2001 to fight the Israeli occupation, he told me recently. “But instead, many of them became corrupted, trying to find money,” he said, especially as Arafat was being squeezed by Washington and Israel to stop paying so many gunmen. “Abu Hilal is an honorable man, and he is doing important work.” Another Gazan fighter who supports Hilal, Muhammad Saqqa, is also Fatah but told me he admires Hamas. “Though we in Fatah were the fathers, I feel jealous of Hamas and their inspiration,” he said. “They respect the young and the old, they’re very secretive and disciplined, unlike Fatah. Don’t consider them a stupid terrorist group. They’re educated, organized, and they were elected. They distinguish between military and political and social work, and they are very honest with themselves.”
Saqqa said that his father and one brother worked for Abbas’s Presidential Guard; another brother worked for Fatah General Intelligence. But another brother joined Hamas’s military, the Qassam Brigades, while Saqqa himself joined the Executive Force. “My family criticizes me for dealing with Hamas, but Hamas are our brothers,” he said, adding later, “Abu Hilal knows Fatah very well and understands its shortcomings.”
By the time the fighting in Gaza began last month, the Executive Force had grown to nearly 6,000 well-trained men and had been made a part of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, and they were being paid. The Shin Bet says the force shared a military headquarters with the Qassam Brigades, and while retaliating for rocket fire into Israel, Israeli forces aimed at and destroyed nearly every facility of the Executive Force. Shin Bet officials refused to discuss Hilal, despite his prominence and his years in Israeli prisons, but Israel clearly regards him as a danger. On May 17, an Israeli missile was fired at the bodyguards around Hilal’s house. One of them, Talat Abed Haniya, 30, was killed, and four others were wounded.
Israel is now confronted with an excruciating if not quite existential dilemma. There is a hostile entity on its southern border, run by an armed group that is committed to fighting Israel and is opposed to its existence. Gaza has become comparable to southern Lebanon, which is run by Hezbollah. Israel let Hezbollah grow, feeling restrained by an international border and its own nightmares about its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Many in Israel consider that policy of restraint to have been a considerable mistake. Should Israel now let a Gazan Hamastan grow, or try to take it out, hoping that Fatah can restore some semblance of authority there? Even before last month’s rout of Fatah, there was already pressure from the Israeli Southern Command for a major incursion into Gaza to try to whack back growing Hamas power — “to cut the grass,” as the Israeli military chief of staff, Dan Halutz, told me when he was still in office.
The problem of Gaza will be the first to confront Ehud Barak, the new Israeli defense minister. Barak, who as prime minister tried and failed, with Bill Clinton, to cut the clotted mess with the Palestinians in one go, is also the most decorated soldier in Israel’s history. A former army commando, Barak is likely to favor operations neater than massed-armor invasions of crowded refugee camps. But ambitious to be prime minister again, he is also unlikely to sit on his hands.
Hamas is likely to try to ensure that it gives Israel no provocation for such an incursion, needing the time to try to consolidate daily life in Gaza, which means working functionally with Israel on imports of fuel oil, electricity, milk, drugs and most everything else. Fighting Israel now will do nothing for Hamas or for Gazans who want Hamas to deliver on its promise of “change and reform,” the slogan under which it won power.
Hilal says that he still believes, like Abbas and unlike Hamas, in a negotiated two-state solution. “But more and more,” he explained, “Palestinians understand that a real peace is built on struggle, and it is made between enemies, not friends. The government that is an enemy to Israel but chosen by the people is the one able to make peace.”
As you move around Gaza, along with the poverty and shoddy construction of everything except public buildings, a few lavish apartment houses and the mosques, what strikes you hardest is the increasing religious conservatism. Most of the people in the streets are men, and the women you see are almost invariably covered — not just with a head scarf that surrounds the face and hides the hair, but with long, heavy dresses, usually black, that fall to the ankles. You notice the radical fervor of the martyr posters and the fierceness of the gunmen, but perhaps the biggest shock is how young everyone is. According to official figures from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 49 percent of the population of Gaza is 14 or younger; 60 percent are 19 or younger. Nearly 76 percent are under 30. So there is a lot of testosterone, not much sexual mingling and very few jobs.
For Hilal, this pressure cooker of youth, anger and lack of opportunity is necessary for the revolution in consciousness he maintains is happening. According to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 58 percent of those under 30 expect a more violent struggle with Israel over the next 5 to 10 years, and only 22 percent say that there will be a peaceful negotiated solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Forty-eight percent say they believe such an agreement is impossible; 20 percent more say that it will come only “in a few generations.”
Nasreen al-Howh is a 26-year-old psychiatric social worker in Gaza, and she says that the constituency for peace is shrinking, especially among the young. “I’m very worried about this generation,” she said recently, pulling at her white head covering. “They are very pessimistic and very vulnerable to appeals for mastery, for meaning.” What they want, she says, is a sense that they can control their lives, and that their lives will have meaning. So they are susceptible to appeals from religious groups and armed groups that claim to be fighting Israel. She conceded that she, too, cannot imagine a final peace with Israel or a two-state solution. “The resistance camp is crowding out the peace camp,” she told me. “So long as there’s no peace, there’s resistance.”
Under pressure and without work, many young men “will try to avoid all that responsibility and go to the tanzim,” she went on to say, referring to the militias. “The tanzim also gives them self-confidence; it alleviates the fear inside of them.” Mkhaimer Abusada, who teaches at Al Azhar University, told me: “They can get $100 working for the tanzim. They’ve lost perspective. They’ve lost the belief in peace. And they’ve lost faith in education — in their future here.”
It’s not hard to find young people at loose ends, jobless and bored, admiring of the gunmen, ready to be inspired or recruited or manipulated or brainwashed into fighting for — or against — something larger than their own lives. Some want a job, but many believe that their only honorable future is in “struggle” or “resistance” against an Israel that they, like Hilal, believe does not keep its promises and is insincere about its willingness to leave Palestinian lands in return for peace.
Fadel Bsiso, a skinny and jobless teenager, sat with two friends in the smoky A-Shiraa coffee shop in Gaza City not long ago, nursing a single coffee and sharing a water-pipe. (Each pipe costs $1.20 to rent with one bowl of tobacco.) His father “confronted the Israelis many times in the first intifada,” he said proudly.
And Bsiso himself? “I’ve just got into one military faction,” he said. Why join? “I feel I’m looking for protection,” he said. “This is how I find it.” Protection from whom? He looked stunned. “From Israel,” he said. “It’s a war, an endless war with them, mentioned even in the Koran. Our religion does not allow us to live with them.”
But his father is Fatah, which recognizes a two-state solution, right? Bsiso shrugged: “The Jews are imposed on us. They have no roots here. They came and took our land and built a state, but we don’t accept it.”
One of the friends, Sakher Hillis, who is 19, broke in. “They chose a weak country, but they were surprised to find out we’re strong,” he said.
Bsiso said his father wants him to be a teacher. “But then he jokes and says, ‘Even if you go as a martyr, I have seven others.’ ”
Hillis’s own father is in Hamas. “I’m very pessimistic,” he said. “But I feel I can give my life to the cause. I’m very bored with this life, honestly. This life has no meaning for me. If I can find a goal and achieve it, I can be optimistic. But this depression is inside of us.”
Is religion part of the answer? “Religion plays a role because it encourages struggle,” Hillis said. “It says fight in the name of God. I’m not extreme, I promise you — this is normal.”
The Palestinian poet Ahmed Dahbour is troubled by the turn to Hamas and religious and political extremism and has tried to understand it as an expression of frustration, especially generational frustration. Dahbour was 2 when his family fled Haifa into exile in 1948. “I’m the generation of the nakba,” he told me recently — the “catastrophe,” as Palestinians refer to the establishment of Israel and their own flight or expulsion. “We fled with nothing, and my mother used to create for me an imaginary city, a paradise called ‘Haifa.’ The enemy was an idea. But this generation is different. This generation saw the Israeli soldier, and it is full of bitterness and envy.”
He emphasized the patriarchal nature of Palestinian society, and the deep humiliation suffered by a father who cannot protect his family from invasion, incursion, poverty, unemployment and fear. “The fathers feel shame, but so do the sons,” Dahbour said. “The sons become martyrs, not the fathers.”
Then he added, “The revolution of the sons is to protect the dignity of the fathers.”
“This suffering and these deaths are the tax imposed on us by the occupation,” Hilal told me. “We suffer and burn, but what causes revolution? Poverty, injustice and anger — this is what leads to revolution, even in free countries. This is what gives us fuel to resist the occupation and create a revolution in our thinking.”
Two phenomena are merging, he went on to say: “personal revenge and the national project.” Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank, he’s convinced, are stoking a third intifada, “more bloody and violent.” Hilal is stoking it too, in his own way. The young generation now, with all its anger and hopelessness, is a necessary part of the victory Hilal is sure will come — when Israel, he believes, will come to terms with Palestinian nationalism and negotiate a future with an enemy it has been forced to respect.
“I think this generation will be the liberation generation,” he said. “If in the past, 1 percent of the people went into resistance, from this generation, 20 percent or more will do it. This generation will be the one most ready to resist. This generation will be our liberation army.”

Steven Erlanger is the Jerusalem bureau chief for The New York Times. Taghreed El-Khodary contributed additional reporting from Gaza.

Israel reintroduces draconian measures against Palestinians

18/07/2005
Article can be found on www.palestine-info.info

The Israeli occupation army has reintroduced some of thedraconian measures against Palestinian civilians that prevailed during the height ofthe intifada.These include, inter alia, cutting off Palestinian towns from each other withroadblocks and huge concrete slabs ,denying Palestinian patients access to hospitalsand students to their colleges.In some instances Israeli soldiers manning these "machsoms" (Hebrew for roadblocks)even prevent people from returning to their homes, which may be located a shortdistance from the roadblock, forcing them to circumvent several kilometers to returnhome.The re-institution of the draconian collective punishment is not confined to aspecific area or region but covers the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, from Jeninto Rafah.This week (the third week of July) the Israeli army "reactivated" the so-called"Container Roadblock" outside the town of Abu Dis, effectively paralyzing travelmovement between the Hebron-Bethlehem region and the rest of the West Bank.This roadblock is –well-known among Palestinian travelers and drivers for itsnotoriety and harshness as Palestinian motorists are deliberately kept waiting for along period in the sizzling heat.Interestingly, this happens in an area where Israel tells the world that thePalestinian Authority (PA) is in control when in fact the Israeli army controlsevery aspect of Palestinian life.Go home Occasionally, depending on the mood of the officers in charge at a given roadblock,the Israeli army allows extremely ill patients, especially those carried inambulances, to proceed to hospital.However, this correspondent witnessed on Sunday (17 July) an Israeli female soldierturn back a Palestinian couple from Abu Dis, 7 kilometers east of Jerusalem, whowanted to take their 10-day-old baby to the Karitas pediatrics hospital inBethlehem.The woman begged the soldier to allow her to proceed, citing the serious conditionof her jaundiced baby, but to no avail."What do you mean we can't pass, I have a sick baby with me, his life is in dangerand I must take him to hospital," said the woman, producing a doctor's referral.However, the soldier didn't relent. She told the grieving woman that "You must dowhat I say, get out of the taxi or else I will use force against you."And when this correspondent tried to explain to the soldier that this was ahumanitarian case and that she should allow the couple to take their baby tohospital, the soldier said "I am the one who gives orders here."" I am a soldier, and I have the authority to decide who goes from here and whodoesn't," said the young soldier.Eventually, the female soldier, backed by a male soldier who was training hisGalilee submachine gun at the passengers inside the taxi ejected the couple, Ibrahimand Sumayya Uweisat, telling them in harsh words to return home.But the couple, anxious about the deteriorating health of their first-born, justcouldn't go home, with his body becoming increasingly yellowish.In fact, after thinking for a while what to do, the couple ventured down the hill onthe eastern side of "Wadi al Nar" (meaning literally the valley of fire) towardother yellow caps awaiting passengers on the other side of the roadblock, a fewhundred meters away.The soldiers, watching passively if not gleefully, the couple navigating their waythrough the difficult terrain, didn't try to stop them, suggesting that the realgoal of the soldiers manning the roadblocks really had nothing to do with "security"as the Israeli foreign ministry officials would tell the foreign media but wasactually to punish and torment ordinary Palestinians.Eventually, Ibrahim and Sumayya Uweisat, thanks to their determination to challengethe Israeli repression, reached the hospital in Bethlehem where their baby receivedthe necessary treatment.This correspondent thought of filming the entire episode but decided against doingso, given the unpredictability of Israeli soldiers' behavior.The Israeli army refused to say why such draconian and largely unjustified measureswere being reintroduced in the West Bank, despite the relative calm in the area.The Israeli army spokesman didn’t return calls, despite several attempts, enquiringabout the latest harsh measure.Earlier, this week, Palestinian officials accused the Israeli government of "doingevery thing to undermine the authority and stature of PA President Mahmoud Abbas.One official, Ghassan Khatib, accused Israeli prime Minister Ariel Sharon of"deliberately weakening Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas's nom de geurre) by demonstratingto the Palestinians that he (Abbas) can't get Israel to alleviate Palestiniansuffering."This prognosis seems to be correct to a large extent.On 16 July, the Beit Sahur-based Palestinian Center for Public Opinion Studies(PCPO) released the results of an opinion survey conducted in the West Bank and GazaStrip in mid July.They showed that over half the Palestinians in the two regions thought Abbas wasfailing its job.According to the study, up to 49 % of respondents said they didn't think the PA wasqualified to improve their quality of lifeIn March, up to 65% of Palestinians gave Abbas the benefit of the doubt. Now, inthis latest suvey, only 34% said they still had confidence in his ability to makethings better.