EDITOR: Obama’s dilemma
The failure of the US to move Israel into any negotiated peace in the last few decades is coming to haunt Obama. That the US has so totally accepted Israel’s narrative and positioning, is also the reason why there is no possible just solution. Netanyahu, like his Israeli public, is unable to move towards vacating the territories – having spent every minute of his political life supporting the settlers and the continued stealing of Palestinian land. There is no Two-State solution, and there never was – Israel has started to build the settlements within few months of its victory in 1967, exactly in order to make a Palestinian state impossible. All Israeli government of whatever party have continued with this policy of dispossession of the Palestinians of their land, whether they called themselves right, left of centre. That is why there will not be a Palestinian state as result of the vote: Israel’s acts and Washington’s support and veto, will make even this symbolic state impossible, on 22% of Palestine.
So, we have to think beyond this coming week. Israel is threatening to annul the Oslo Accords as a result of the Palestinian UN resolution. To this we should say, good! Let them do so. Let the occupation stand bare, unmitigated by Palestinian agents. Israel controls all that moves in Palestine, so let this situation be clear and visible. This will make Israel again responsible for all the Palestinians and their rights. So let us start accepting realities and demand a single democratic state in the whole of Palestine, with an immediate end to Zionism.
Now this may sound strange for those who were fooled by the decades of the ‘Peace Process’, a process which made it possible for Israel to settle more people on Palestinian land, but brought neither peace nor justice. There is no longer any reason to be fooled, and most people realise that now. Let us start now fighting fora single democratic state of all its citizens, devoid of Zionist racism. There is no other solution, is there?
In the face of the blind intransigence of Israel and the US, there is no longer any choice. What is wrong with a single, democratic, secular state of all its citizens, living in equality? Who, apart from extreme undemocratic Zionists, is against it?
An American veto of Palestine statehood would be a tragedy: Observer
The unconditional, unquestioning support of the United States towards Israel helps neither country
Henry Porter
Beneath the slogan: “Be on our side – we are on the side of peace and justice”, a couple of nice-looking young men, a Palestinian designer and an Israeli social worker, plus their children, gaze out of the poster that appeared on the New York subway last week. I passed it a few times before registering the message at the bottom of the ad, an appeal to end US military aid to Israel, which is timed for the Palestinian application for statehood at the UN Security Council this week.
To the European eye, the message isn’t particularly alarming, in fact barely worth noting, but in one of the great Jewish cities of the world it is regarded as inflammatory. In no time, local Jewish leaders were on TV claiming that the poster was anti-Israel, possibly even anti-Jewish, regardless of the fact that the campaign was paid for by a group that included many Jews and it raises a legitimate issue.
One of the depressing parts of the intractable Middle East problem is the chill that descends on any discussion in the United States about the future of Palestine or, indeed, US support for Israel. Apart from occasional press comment, notably in the New York Times, the media stay clear of criticising Israel, while politicians live in fear of offending the Jewish vote in a country where elections are never more that two years away.
When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book The Israel Lobby came out four years ago, they were firstly pilloried and then the book was buried, so that their proposition that Israel’s supporters distorted American foreign policy to the detriment of both Israel and America was never properly tested. That episode dishonoured America’s tradition of unfettered political debate.
But the chill is amazingly effective. Even in these straitened times, when the US is running an overdraft of $14 trillion, the American taxpayer unquestioningly continues to stump up about $3bn every year to support Israel’s military and ensure the country’s continued regional dominance.
Watching a TV reporter tiptoeing round the story of the subway campaign, which was naturally all about who was going to be offended by the ads, rather than the $3bn, I realised that the problem is not so much American public opinion as the lack of it. Most Americans have decided that it is simply safer to leave Israel out of the discourse. So, unconditional support continues without much review or debate or, for that matter, anyone being able to list the benefits to the American national interest that derive from this alliance.
Supporters of Israel in Europe, among which I count myself, find the terms of this uncritical, one-way relationship bizarre and it is unsustainable after three regimes in North Africa have fallen to a genuinely democratic popular movement and a heroic struggle continues in Syria, Bahrain and Yemen. A year ago, the application by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to the Security Council for full statehood might have seen premature, but today it is the natural and proper outcome of the liberation that is sweeping through the Arab world.
American diplomats and the representative of the Quartet Powers, Tony Blair, fought hard to dissuade Abbas, arguing that the application for statehood, which will be almost certainly vetoed by the US, would dangerously raise expectations in the West Bank and Gaza, when nothing will have changed on the ground. This is true, but there are times when you can’t stand in the way of history. We are at a moment where diplomatic finesse and arguments about timing and convenience count for little, especially after the democratic aspirations of the people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria have been warmly welcomed by the US.
The inconsistency between the US attitude towards Tunisia, for example, and Palestine seems rank hypocrisy to hundreds of millions of Arabs, whose revolutions, incidentally, were never defined by hatred for Israel or America. The young activists I met on the streets of Tunis and Cairo earlier this year may be wary of both countries but in scores of conversations I had, they talked only about democracy, rights, accountability, jobs and the corruption of their leaders. No one raised Israel or America. That signified an enormous change from the previous generation and provided us with a once-in-a-century opportunity that may be about to be lost.
While many in the State Department and the White House recognised what was vital and new about the Arab Spring, they have allowed the American debate, such as it is, to be dominated by myths that the revolutions inevitably contained an Islamist core and that the Arab peoples were preternaturally disposed to tyranny and sweeping Jews into the sea. True, there has already been an eruption of anti-Israeli sentiment in Egypt with the storming of the embassy 10 days ago, but this is nothing compared with what may ensue if Palestinian aspirations are rejected by America and Israel, both of whom have already accepted the principle of two-state solution. A new Palestinian intifada would be a disaster for the Middle East and Israel and in the current turbulence there is no way of knowing where it would end.
If Susan Rice, American ambassador to the UN, goes against the wishes of more than 120 countries that support the recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and vetoes the move, we can be certain of at least two outcomes: the reduction of American influence in the Middle East and the further isolation of Israel, which this year has already lost two important allies in Egypt and Turkey. A vote against Palestine statehood will also increase Iran’s opportunities to cause mischief and drive a wedge between Saudi Arabia and the US, which some may welcome, though it is probably not in the long-term interests of peace.
The Obama administration has failed to bring Israel and Palestine together in meaningful talks and has absolutely nothing but further Israeli prevarication to offer the Palestinians. Though we may fear the consequences, Abbas is right to press the interests of his people this week.
We should remember that when Israel applied for membership of the UN in 1949, it argued that issues about refugees and the status of Jerusalem stood a better chance of being resolved if Israel was awarded statehood. That is exactly the Palestinian position. Abbas asks only that Palestine should meet Israel in negotiations as an equal.
There is no good reason for a veto and no conceivable upside. It is a tragedy to watch America, compelled by a failure of its national debate and the fear of what Israel’s supporters may do at the next election, to move unerringly towards such a disastrous action.
A Palestinian state is a moral right: Observer Editorial
The case for a Palestinian state is unanswerable and must be supported in the west
For the Zionist movement seeking an independent state of Israel, desire became reality in November 1947, when the General Assembly of the United Nations passed Resolution 181 supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in a partitioned Palestine.
That state was declared on 14 May 1948 by David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish people’s council in a Tel Aviv museum. The state of Israel was recognised that evening by President Truman of United States and by the Soviet Union a few days later.
More than six decades later, Palestinians, who at first refused to accept the partition plan of the newly minted UN, are seeking similar recognition, firstly in front of the Security Council, asking for their own state based on the 1967 borders free from occupation and settlement by half-a-million Israelis, able to determine their own affairs.
The idea of a Palestinian state should be uncontroversial. The United States supports the notion, as does the UK. Indeed, in his 2009 Cairo speech, President Barack Obama insisted: “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.”
Yet Obama appears determined to veto the move towards Palestinian statehood, while Britain has hinted it is likely to abstain in a Security Council vote.
Should the Palestinian request fail at the Security Council, it will then go to the General Assembly, where it seems likely that close to 130 states will vote to support a Palestinian resolution which will be able only to grant an enhanced status to become the equivalent of the Vatican – an “observer state”. It will, however, be a deeply symbolic moment providing a political, moral and diplomatic victory for the Palestinian cause that the world will find difficult to ignore.
It will, significantly, also allow Palestine to become a signatory to the International Criminal Court, permitting it to pursue claims against Israel.
While it seems certain that European countries such as France and Spain will support recognition, what is less clear is how the UK will vote in the General Assembly, amid increasing speculation that it might support an enhanced Palestinian status of “observer state” with the right to complain to the International Criminal Court, but only if cases cannot be raised retrospectively.
The objections to a Palestinian state – driven by Israel with the support of the US – are dangerous and transparently self-serving ones, not least in the midst of an Arab Spring where the US and Europe have tried to present themselves as being supporters of democracy, freedom and justice.
The only valid mechanism for the creation of a Palestinian state, this argument goes, is the ongoing peace process, but in fact it is a moribund peace process, which Israel has done its best to smother under the obstructionist leadership of Binyamin Netanyahu.
Equally contentious is the claim by some supporters of Israel that in seeking their own state through the declaration of the international community rather than direct talks, Palestinians are seeking to “delegitimise” Israel.
The reality is that what those opposing the moves at the UN are demanding is that Palestinians adhere to a non-existent peace process in the good faith that at some time it might be revived in the future under American guidance.
They also require Palestinians to refrain from moves that would expose the double standards of the White House and Congress which, while supporting a two-state solution in words, has not only failed to deliver one but now threatens actively to block that outcome.
Palestinians, this newspaper believes, are right to be wary of the vague promise that things might be better in a revived peace process at some unspecified time in the future. Despite Oslo and 20 years of peace negotiations, as comparison of maps makes only too clear, the space available for a Palestinian state has only shrunk with each passing decade as Israel has continued to appropriate more land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The actions of the Israeli army in the occupied territories, as the recent book of a decade’s worth of soldiers’ testimonies by the servicemen’s group Breaking the Silence has recently demonstrated, have not changed in the desire to control and disrupt ordinary Palestinian life on a daily basis.
The truth is that the occupation has become self-sustaining, both for the Israeli army which is implementing the policy, and for a partly militarised society and its politicians, who cannot persuade themselves to bring the occupation to an end.
There are risks, inevitably, in taking the issue of statehood to the UN, even in the end if it is only for the upgrading of its observer status. Moves on statehood threaten the long-fractious relationship between Fatah and Hamas, the latter of which opposes the statehood moves, particularly in its stronghold, Gaza, raising the risk of more political violence between the rival factions.
There is the danger, too, that the tactic will feel like a damp squib on the day after when Palestinians wake up to see nothing in their lives has changed.
But already the strategy has shed important light on a Middle East peace process in which a United States that has long cast itself as an impartial broker (while vetoing every crticism of Israel raised at the UN) is a far from neutral referee, even as its influence in the region has appeared diminished.
That new reality was dramatised last week with the explicit threat by Saudi Arabia that its important relationship with the US will be downgraded should America choose to use its veto. As in November 1947, we stand at a crossroads of history.
As British ministers deliberate how they will vote in the Security Council, they are confronted with the choice between what is morally right – supporting a Palestinian state – and hypocrisy justified in the name of pragmatism.
The state of Israel was founded amid risk and uncertainty, which those who supported it fully recognised. They did not argue that a Jewish homeland was possible only in the most ideal and secure conditions. That argument should not be used to further delay Palestinian statehood.
Israel fears settlers in West Bank are using terror tactics: Independent
By Catrina Stewart in Jerusalem: Independen
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, says that Jewish extremists are forming new “terrorist” groups that are deliberately targeting Palestinians and Israeli peace activists, intelligence sources were quoted as saying yesterday.
Israeli officials have watched with alarm a sudden spike in attacks by Jewish zealots, particularly West Bank settlers, on Palestinian and Israeli property and personnel following the Israeli army’s demolition of several homes in Migron, an illegal Jewish outpost in the occupied West Bank, 10 days ago.
Tensions are also rising because of Palestinian plans to seek membership of the United Nations in New York next week, a move that right-wing Israelis fear could lead to an eventual evacuation of West Bank settlements, viewed as illegal under international law, to make way for an independent state.
Shin Bet sources told the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper that the Jewish groups were essentially engaged in “terrorist activity” by planning attacks, conducting covert surveillance of Palestinian villages, and gathering data on Israeli activists. The disclosure reveals growing unease among the security forces at their inability to contain increasingly militant settlers, seemingly bent on exacting revenge for every move against them through so-called “price tag” attacks – where Palestinian property is destroyed for every hostile move towards the settlers by the Israeli authorities.
In recent days, settlers are suspected of defacing two Palestinian mosques, uprooting and setting fire to olive trees, torching cars and daubing graffiti on the walls of a Palestinian university in Birzeit. Vandals also broke into an Israeli army base, slashing tyres and spray painting “price tag” on army vehicles, and wrecked the engines of bulldozers used for the demolitions in Migron.
At the home of an Israeli activist who works for Israel’s Peace Now, which monitors the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the assailants’ slogans included “Migron forever” and “Death to traitors”. “They want to silence us, to scare us. It’s not going to happen,” said the activist, who did not want to be named.
In a statement, Peace Now called for “emergency measures against what is becoming the new Jewish underground”.
Ideologically-motivated settlers, who believe they have a divine right to the West Bank, represent some of the most right-wing opinion in Israel. Though a majority of Israelis support a two-state solution, many settlers remain fiercely opposed to either a bi-national state or to Palestinian statehood, doubting that the two peoples could exist peacefully side by side.
“We need to erase the idea of a Palestinian state from people’s minds and convince the world that Islam is a danger,” Michael Ben-Ari, a right-wing politician and settler, told a workshop this week.
Palestinian anger at US fuels diplomatic crisis over statehood: Guardian
President Abbas takes case for UN recognition to the security council after negotiators say US response was ‘final straw’
Harriet Sherwood in Ramallah
Saturday 17 September 2011
Palestinian negotiators accused Washington of failing to offer measures that might have headed off a looming diplomatic crisis over UN recognition of a Palestinian state. A senior official said US proposals had been the “final straw” that led to the decision to go to the UN.
Nabil Shaath, a member of the team headed by President Mahmoud Abbas that left for New York said he “gulped” when he saw the proposal presented by the US team of David Hale and Dennis Ross.
“This was the statement supposed to persuade Abu Mazen [Abbas] not to go?” he said. There was no mention of Israeli settlements, of the future of Jerusalem or of refugees. It also included the demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a “Jewish state”. The US, he added, was “not a neutral observer, but a strategic ally of Israel”.
His claim came as British officials said they were still undecided on how they would vote either at the UN Security Council later this week or in the subsequent vote in the UN’s General Assembly that is widely expected to grant Palestine enhanced status at the UN.
Abbas will lodge the formal application for Palestine to be admitted to the UN as an independent state based on the borders of 4 June 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in the coming week. The Palestinians’ resolve to resist intense pressure from the US, the European Union and Israel has set it on a collision course whose repercussions could be far-reaching.
Among the threats of retaliation made by Israeli ministers are tearing up the Oslo accords, under which the Palestinian Authority was given control of parts of the West Bank and Gaza, annexing West Bank settlements to Israel and withholding tax revenues which Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinians.
But, Shaath said, “there will not be any rowing back, reticence or hesitation in completing our mission of seeking international support for recognition of our independent Palestinian state on 1967 borders.” He added: “This is the moment of truth.”
The Palestinians were still prepared to look at fresh proposals for a return to peace talks, but “after all the discussions, negotiations, threats, incentives and meetings of the past two to three weeks” they were now committed to going to the security council.
Jerusalem and Ramallah have been the scene of frenetic diplomatic activity in the past week. In addition to Hale and Ross, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Middle East envoy Tony Blair have been attempting to formulate proposals to bring the two sides back to the negotiating table. Meetings with the US delegation had continued until “the last minutes before the president’s speech”, said Shaath.
As well as rounding on the Americans, he dismissed Blair’s efforts to craft a statement by the Quartet on the Middle East (the US, EU, UN and Russia) as a framework for restarting talks. “Mr Blair doesn’t sound like a neutral interlocutor, he sounds very much like an Israeli diplomat sometimes,” he said. In contrast, “the Europeans have played a much more serious and positive game. The Europeans were seriously engaged.” But the EU had failed to unite around a common position and “they are also being threatened by the US”, he said.
The Palestinian team was not alarmed by the prospect of the US withholding funding in the aftermath of their approach to the UN. “To tell you the truth we’re not concerned. You don’t barter for your rights for money,” he said. Arab states had pledged to make up any shortfall, and “the Europeans have assured us they won’t cut our funds, so have the Japanese”. Shaath said the Palestinians had only two serious options. One was to go back to war, “which we don’t want. There is nobody planning violence on this side, but Netanyahu would love to make the world believe that Israel is threatened. We are not going back to violence – it’s too costly for us and the Israelis”. The other was to go to the international community to seek support for a Palestinian state.
The US said it continued to be committed to a return to talks. “What we are focused on is… getting them back to the table so that they can address the many final status issues and reach a comprehensive peace agreement that results in two states living side by side,” a State Department spokesman said.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu said: “When the Palestinian Authority will abandon these futile and unilateral measures at the UN, it will find Israel to be a genuine partner for direct peace negotiations.”
Donald Macintyre: Now is the moment for Israel to talk: Independent
Let’s roll the clock back to last Friday night/Saturday morning when six security guards were trapped inside Israel’s Cairo embassy, separated by only one steel door from enraged Egyptian demonstrators who had stormed the building. It was an ugly moment, and by all accounts Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, conducted himself during the crisis with considerable cool. Probably the most crucial step he took was to phone Barack Obama, who in the words of the former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, showed “leadership of historic dimensions” by hitting the phones to Cairo, paving the way for the Israelis’ rescue.
The incident was a reminder that the anxieties Israel has about security on its southern flank after the toppling of Hosni Mubarak are real. But it was also a reminder of how much Israel still owes to Washington and its President. Particularly as the Americans embark on their final 48-hour effort to limit what Israel has persuaded them will be the damage caused by the Palestinian application to the UN for statehood. What Washington is now desperately trying for is a formula, agreed by the “Quartet” (the US, the EU, the UN and Russia) which will persuade the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, to give negotiations with Netanyahu another try. And to do that with any vestige of credibility they would need something from the Israeli Prime Minister.
What Abbas wearily said of the Quartet’s efforts in Ramallah last week (in answer to a question from The Independent, as it happens), “To be frank with you, they came too late”, it was understandable. He had at least wanted some clear terms of reference, signed up to by the Americans, given the yawning gap between what Netanyahu had previously showed any sign of offering, and the minimum the Palestinians could accept.
It looked from the first of two speeches Obama made back in May, stressing that a Palestinian state should be based on 1967 borders, that this would happen. But when it came to the July Quartet meeting, the US proposal had been so modified to accommodate Israeli demands, that not only Russia, but to her credit, the EU’s representative, Baronness Ashton, quickly realised that it wouldn’t fly and rejected it. This tedious diplomatic saga is only worth rehearsing to emphasise that Abbas would need some evidence that talks might actually get somewhere, if he were not to become a regional laughing stock by resuming them. He knows very well that only negotiations can produce lasting peace. But he also knows Netanyahu is under no pressure from his coalition to facilitate talks which neither side believes will succeed.
Yet in a saner world this would actually just be the time for Netanyahu to remove the obstacles to credible negotiations, including the stipulation that Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state – one not required by previous Israeli governments. For improbable as they are, serious negotiations with the Palestinians are probably the one development that would rescue what the opposition leader Tzipi Livni yesterday called “the most right- wing government in Israel’s history” from what she went on to describe as “the worst possible diplomatic crisis”.
Even allowing for a politician’s hyperbole, she has a point. It would blunt the edge of the mounting anger from Ankara to Cairo. And begin to repay the debt Netanyahu owes to Obama in return for the US risking still further his badly faltering relations with the Arab world by promising to use Washington’s UN veto yet again.
The best bet remains that the Palestinians will instead still seek non-member state status at the UN General Assembly. If so, the Europeans should surely do what Washington can’t and line up behind what a European Council of Foreign Relations paper eloquently calls “an alarm call over a peace process that is dying on its feet.” To do any less would be to turn their back on the two years of successful Palestinian state-building they invested so much capital – political and financial– to bring about.
Turkey’s secularism may worry Hamas
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, though welcoming Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Cairo yesterday, sounded a polite warning to the Turkish Prime Minister, saying it did not think “he and his country alone” should be “leading the region or drawing up its future.”
Part of the problem between Turkey and Israel has been the latter’s fears of Erdogan’s relatively cordial relations with Hamas, historically an offshoot of the Brotherhood – a fear that has been fuelled by his threat to visit Gaza. But could the Brotherhood’s reservations be because Erdogan, despite his Islamist credentials, emphasised that the new Egypt should be secular? Or because of his enthusiastic backing for the Palestinian Authority’s bid for UN membership, something to which Hamas’s reaction in Gaza has ranged from very lukewarm to downright hostile?
Could Blair fill Mitchell’s shoes?
The man leading the bid to restart peace negotiations is Tony Blair, mandated by the US for the first time to work on the politics, rather than economics and Palestinian state-building issues. Could the US possibly be thinking of giving Blair a more permanent Middle East envoy role, of the kind it gave George Mitchell? Like Mitchell, Blair is a politician, not a career diplomat, albeit not an American one.
Palestinians: profile of a people in search of statehood: Observer
As their leaders go to the UN for a vote on state recognition amid a diplomatic crisis, six men and women say what it means to be Palestinian in 2011
Palestinians state their case – gallery
Harriet Sherwood and Phoebe Greenwood
Saturday 17 September 2011 17.14 BST
NAME Mahmoud Albeak
AGE 33
LIVES Al-Sawiya, West Bank
JOB High school maths teacher
RELIGION Muslim
FAMILY Married, no children
Mahmoud Albeak lives in a small village bordered by Israeli settlements, outposts and an army base. He is employed by the Palestinian Authority as a teacher, but receives his salary irregularly due to the vagaries of donor funds to the PA.
“This month we received our monthly pay for August yesterday [September 15],” he says. “It was the full amount but sometimes we only get half-wage. It’s very difficult to manage with half money. Even a full wage is not enough for a teacher. Some teachers have more than one job, and many teachers leave to be construction workers because they earn more than us.”
His full take-home pay is around £485 after deductions for income tax and medical insurance to the authority.
Albeak, who is not aligned with any political faction, is ambivalent about the authority’s approach to the UN. “Under the current circumstances of living under occupation, going to the UN is not worth ink on paper. We are still under occupation. We have no control of our land, our borders, our water. It will be a state on paper.
“But I think we have to explain our point of view to the international community in a clearer way. We should work harder to get other countries to support us.”
Village life is “deeply affected” by harassment from Jewish settlers, he says. “People cannot go and harvest their land. The settlers take our olives, they throw rocks at people.”
Albeak’s journey to his school in another village requires him changing from one shared service taxi – a common form of transport – to another at a major junction.
“There is a lot of harassment by settlers – beatings and spitting. You have to stay at least 200m away from the settlement bus stop. You are not allowed to wait at the bus stop, it’s forbidden. It’s a private bus stop for settlers. If a driver of a Palestinian [shared service] taxi wants to stop he has to be very careful, or he will get a ticket.
“You are afraid for your life. [But] we have to go through that road, there is no alternative, no matter what they do to us.”
Last year, he says, settlers “came to our mosque and wrote Zionist slogans, curses against our prophet and the Star of David. Last year they burned the village school, a whole storage room was destroyed. They are above the law.”
Palestinians, he says, are defined by the land. “A person without a homeland is nothing. It’s our roots.
“I hope that the children I teach will take responsibility in building the coming state. Building a state is not easy. The first step is preparing individuals to be good citizens to help build the country. And I hope they will live a better life than I have lived.”
NAME Abu Ahmed*
AGE 37
LIVES Gaza City
JOB Spokesman, al-Quds Brigade
RELIGION Muslim
FAMILY Married with six children
Abu Ahmed runs his prayer beads through his large fingers as he describes the experiences that led him to join one of Gaza’s most hardcore militant groups.
His family came to Gaza City in 1948 as refugees from Beit Jirja, a village that has now been absorbed into the Israeli town of Sderot, a town just across the border at which his fellow militants regularly fire rockets. He joined the Islamic Jihad movement when he was at high school, but it was only during the second intifada that he became active in the group’s militant wing, al-Quds Brigade.
“The Israeli occupation is an overt act of violence against Palestinians and I believed military action was the only way to liberate our land,” he explains. “I saw we had two choices, victory or martyrdom.”
Ahmed keeps a low profile for fear of being targeted by the Israeli Defence Forces in retaliation for the regular rocket attacks on civilians in southern Israel. But even as a father, personal safety is a sacrifice he’s happy to make.
“There is no conflict between being a militant and a father,” he says. “We are ready to sacrifice even our family. My eldest son is 13 now, but I would prefer him to be educated and go to university first. The educated militant is better than the uneducated militant.”
Ahmed, the spokesman for al-Quds Brigade, says the UN is no place to defeat an occupier.
“When Hitler invaded France they didn’t reclaim their land through the UN, but through fighting. When the Americans occupied Vietnam, the Vietnamese didn’t get their state through the UN, but through fighting. There is no connection between the [UN] application and the resistance. The resistance is connected to the occupation. As long as there is an occupation we will continue fighting.”
Ahmed claims bloodshed is not the brigade’s ultimate aim. “This battle was forced upon us,” he insists. “We are not aiming to erase Israelis, but if they want to live in this place they have to live in an Islamic state.
“I think if we united our nation’s efforts, the people of Israel would flee. And when there is no Israel, there will be peace all over the world. Jews are trouble-makers.”
*Not his real name
NAME Mohamed Faris
AGE 57
LIVES Mena, Gaza City
JOB Businessman
RELIGION Muslim
FAMILY Married with two children
Mohamed Faris is full of entrepreneurial ideas and Gaza, he says, is rich with potential.
One vision is to make Gaza a duty-free hub, shipping goods from Europe into the Palestinian port and distributing them across the Arab world on trucks and a railway system yet to be built. He also wants to start a chamber of commerce to encourage external investors. But these dreams, he admits, are a long way off.
His current venture is Rosy’s, the largest beauty salon in Gaza. It offers hairdressing, a beautician, gym facilities and a clothes store. These are luxuries increasingly few Palestinians can afford.
“I don’t believe any businessman would be able to function in the conditions we are in,” Faris says baldly.
On a good day Rosy’s takes £500. Faris says they should be making £5,000. Last Thursday, during an escalation in the fighting, Israeli jets dropped a bomb on an empty building behind Rosy’s. The blast shattered every piece of glass in his building, which cost Faris £6,300 to replace.
The conflict has hampered his industry for years. As importers of household goods from Europe, Faris and his father ran the fifth largest business in the Palestinian territories. That company folded during the second intifada.
“Why?” he says. “The [Israeli border] closures. We weren’t able to distribute our goods freely. The banks foreclosed on us. The people that owed money to us stopped paying. It came together all in one package.
“In 2002 I found that the only source of income is this little business [Rosy’s] I had made for my wife.”
Faris has sold his family farm, his shops in Gaza’s old city and declared bankruptcy in order to support his two sons and their families, his mother and his wife. The stress is evidently taking its toll.
“I lose a piece of my heart every year in little bits,” he says. “Each stroke comes stronger. I have had two, I’m waiting for the third.
“Sometimes I think I want to go away, I want to go to a different country, but where and how? This is my homeland. This is where I want to see my children and grandchildren grow up, on a small beautiful piece of land that is ours.”
Faris holds little hope that the UN will recognise Palestine this week. “If we declare a state, where is this state?” he argues. “We are under occupation.
“What will help business in Palestine is opening borders and having free trade and free movement. We need to reach a stage where we are stable so investors from abroad will be able to come here and help us to raise our economy.”
NAME Muna Mushahwar
AGE 33
LIVES Beit Hanina, east Jerusalem
JOB Doctor, Hadassah hospital, west Jerusalem
RELIGION Christian (Greek Orthodox)
FAMILY Single, lives with father
“The Palestinian people are long past the usual stereotype,” says Mushahwar, a Palestinian doctor specialising in ophthalmology and working in an Israeli hospital. “We’re an educated people with a long struggle for freedom. It’s a struggle that went through lots of stages, and now we’re at the stage of diplomacy, thank God. We just want our human rights, to have a country and our land, and to be able to say ‘I’m a Palestinian’ and not feel threatened.
“I’m proud of being Palestinian and it’s about time the world looked at us without stereotyping us as antisemitic western-hating terrorists.
“More Palestinians who are second or third generation displaced people are now choosing to come back and live here. This is one of our biggest strengths – people want to help build the Palestinian dream of freedom.”
Mushahwar says she regularly encounters racism among patients when they realise she is a Palestinian. “You’re only human, but as a doctor you have to put it aside.”
She also detects a rise in both anti-Arab and anti-Christian sentiment. “Christians are being harassed every Easter and Christmas when we try to get to our churches. We find [Israeli] roadblocks inside the Old City of Jerusalem. When we have to go to court to ask for our right to go to church – that’s extreme.
“The closer we get to the point where things will be decided, you find people becoming more extreme on both sides. They are frightened. But most people are sick and tired of this fight, and want to live in peace. But a fair peace.”
Mushahwar defines herself as “a Palestinian woman living in Jerusalem – that’s very important to me. When I tell Israelis I’m a Palestinian Jerusalemite, that raises a conflict for them. They think of Jerusalem as belonging to them.”
She supports the UN move. “The world should be looking at this as a positive step. We want to become a peace-loving nation. When we say we want to be part of the UN, that should be welcomed. Isn’t this what everyone wanted, for us to go through legal channels?
“No one thinks it will be solved overnight and that we will have freedom and fireworks the next day. But this is the Palestinian voice being heard across the world.”
NAME Mazen Saadeh
AGE 51
LIVES Birzeit, West Bank
JOB Artist, novelist, restaurant owner
RELIGION None, but from mixed Muslim-Christian family
FAMILY Separated from wife, two sons aged 16 and 21
“I didn’t choose my Palestinian identity,” says Saadeh, who was born into a refugee family in Jericho and later lived in Jordan, Lebanon and the US. “I lived my life in different countries. I came back to Palestine but discovered it’s not my Palestine, my Palestine is behind a wall. I still feel I am a refugee.”
An artist and the author of three novels, Saadeh opened a restaurant last October in a beautifully restored centuries-old stone house, which serves traditional Palestinian food to a mixed clientele of local people and international workers. The restaurant also serves wines and spirits along with the local Palestinian beer, Taybeh. “There’s no problem with serving alcohol, Birzeit is a Christian city,” says Saadeh.
He spent nine years in a Jordanian prison after becoming involved in student activism and the Palestine Liberation Organisation when studying law at university in Amman. He renounced political activity almost 20 years ago.
“I was an activist until 1992 when I quit and chose art and literature. Politics was no longer the right way for me to express myself and change the world. Art and literature is a better tool for change. Political groups isolate themselves – they put themselves inside the four walls of their ideology and they don’t see the wider picture. I am very disillusioned with politics.”
As well as finishing his fourth novel, Saadeh is also working on a huge mural in Ramallah, the latest of several in the city. “I’m creating an image from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish [the Palestinian poet and author]. I work with public art because I believe it will challenge and change people to break taboos.”
He approves of the approach to the UN. “The Palestinian leadership have their backs against the wall, so they are trying to open a small window. I think it’s a good step
“My identity as a Palestinian created my feelings, my condition, my friends, my dreams, everything. Being Palestinian shapes everything I do. I am proud to be Palestinian.
“Darwish created the Palestinian identity with his poetry more than the PLO. Darwish gave us an epic. He is our prophet.”
NAME Ola Anan
AGE 26
LIVES Gaza City
JOB Blogger
RELIGION Muslim
FAMILY Single, lives with parents
Ola Anan considers herself “an advocate for a different image of Gaza”. As one of Gaza’s longest standing and most successful bloggers, her blog, FromGhazza, averages 320 hits a day.
“All the media attention is going to politics and the miserable life people are having here in Gaza. I have other things to tell,” she says.
Her short-term goal is to publish a book of her posts. “I was discussing this idea with my family recently. It was very challenging to convince them I should be doing something they think is completely crazy,” she admits.
There is the additional issue of the blockade. Anan explains there are few publishers and a very limited market for writers in Gaza. Getting out to meet interested publishers abroad requires a long wait for a permit to travel.
“This was the plan – I was going to register my name for a permit [at Rafah] and in the two months I would wait for it to come through, I was going to try to convince my family.
“But in the end, we agreed I would apply for jobs that seemed suitable for me here and contact people from Egypt to help me with this book idea at the same time.”
Jobs in general are few and far between in Gaza. Anan has a masters degree in computer technology and has worked as a new media consultant for international NGOs, but like most people she struggles to secure contracts for any longer than a few months. At the moment she says she’s “on vacation”.
“I keep myself very busy, following what happens in Egypt, keeping in touch with activists there. Sometimes I even feel disconnected from my own reality because I want that life so much. I want something similar to happen here but, honestly, I don’t think I will see that in my lifetime.”
For Anan, the Palestinian Authority’s application for statehood has little relevance to her life and her struggle. “If they had conducted a referendum and the majority of people had agreed to this, I would respect it,” she says. “But how can I say what [Mahmoud] Abbas is going to do is representing the Palestinians? Even he couldn’t say that.
“The Palestinian identity is fading through time. Sometimes I feel the point of being Palestinian is to struggle. I wonder, if we weren’t in this position would we have the same love for this country? Being Palestinian is a bitter-sweet thing.”
Obama’s historic opportunity: Haaretz
How is it that the supposedly new America is continuing to sing the same old songs from its evil past??
By Gideon Levy
What is the American president going to say to his citizens? What will he say to the citizens of the world? How will he rationalize his country’s opposition to recognizing a Palestinian state? How will he explain his position, which runs counter to the position of the enlightened – and less enlightened – world?
And above all, what will Barack Obama say to himself before he goes to bed? That the Palestinians don’t deserve a state? That they have a chance to get it through negotiations with Israel? That they do not have equal rights in the new world that we thought he was going to establish? Will he admit to himself that, because of opportunistic election considerations – yes, Obama is now being exposed as quite an opportunist – he is also harming his country’s interests as well as the (real ) interests of Israel, and is acting against his own conscience too?
It is difficult now to understand Obama’s America. The man who promised change is turning out to be the father of American conservatives. With regard to Israel, there is no difference between him and the last of the celebrants at the Tea Party. We did not expect a great deal from Hillary Clinton; she can continue to recite hollow speeches about negotiations-shmegotiations – but Obama?
Et tu, Brute? After all, in your Cairo speech you promised a new dawn for the Muslim world, you promised a new America to the Arab world. And what came of this? The same old American wolf – which blindly and automatically supports every whim of Israel’s to such an extent that it is not clear which is the world power and which is the protectorate – and not even dressed in sheep’s clothing. The riddle remains unsolved: How is it that the supposedly new America is continuing to sing the same old songs from its evil past? How is it that Obama is behaving as if he does not understand that the Palestinians will no longer agree to live another four decades without civil rights, certainly not in view of all that is taking place around them in the awakening Arab world?
The riddle remains unsolved because it is difficult to comprehend how a black president, who believes in justice and equality, can bow down with such unbearable lightness to a right-wing government in Israel, to narrow election considerations in America, and to Jewish and Christian lobbies. It is difficult to comprehend how his America does not understand that it is shooting itself with a lethal bullet in the heart by supporting the Israeli refusal to make peace. After all, deep in his heart this American president knows that the Palestinians’ demand is justified because they too are worthy, finally, of becoming independent – and that Israel supports occupation. Why does one have to wait for the book of memoirs that he will surely write one day in order to hear this? He knows that the Arab Spring, that erupted to a certain extent in the wake of his promising Cairo speech, will now turn its anger and hatred toward America, once more toward America, simply because of its insistent opposition to Palestinian freedom.
Obama is also supposed to know that concern for Israel’s future, and genuine friendship toward Israel, must include support for the establishment of a Palestinian state. That is the only way to neutralize the explosive fuse that is going to set off the entire region, against Israel and against the United States. He also knows that America’s stance against the entire world will once again arouse the hostility of the world against the U.S. leader. And all of that – for what? For a handful of votes in the next elections. That cannot be considered an excuse on the part of someone who was seen as so promising a leader with such a highly developed awareness of history. A person who sells his country’s interests and his own weltanschauung during his first term of office will display similar opportunism during the second term.
How pathetic is the vision of the two American emissaries who are once again shuttling back and forth now in the region and distributing threats. And to whom? To the Palestinians who are turning to a new diplomatic route, but not to the Israeli government for its destructive refusal. How pathetic it is to see Dennis Ross, the eternal American Mr. Negotiations of almost all its administrations, scuttling around with nothing to do between Ramallah and Jerusalem as he has been doing for decades. That is the old, bad America, as if there were no Obama.
The American president this week has the historic opportunity of improving the status of his country, of justifying retroactively the Nobel Prize for Peace that he was awarded, of demonstrating real commitment to imposing peace in the most dangerous region for the fate of the world, and of showing genuine concern for the well-being of Israel – but what do we get instead?
George Bush. George Bush for the poor.