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Occupational hazards in the West Bank

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While the world’s attention was turned to Gaza, stealthier military manoeuvres in the West Bank were pushing more Palestinians off their land.

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Bedouin children in the northern West Bank face a precarious future. Photo: ©Khaled Diab

As we turned off the road, there opened up before us a vista of the most exquisite and rugged splendour. Hugged on both sides by majestic mountains, the valley we drove through stretched as far as the eye could see with barely a manmade structure to distort the view, unlike in much of the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories.

A few kilometres in, we finally arrived at our destination, which was about as remote as you could possibly get in the densely populated West Bank: a tiny Bedouin community in Wadi al-Maleh in the northern Jordan Valley. As we pulled up, we were first greeted by dozens of goats, followed by the children, then the adults, mostly women, because the men were out at a funeral.

Behind the idyllic beauty of the scene, there lurked an ugly reality. First, there was the community’s obvious poverty: living in makeshift tents, with no electricity and with water at a premium because it has to be trucked in, not to mention the children who have to walk about 10km each way to the nearest road so that they can go to school, which eats at least a couple of additional hours out of their day, and means they set out at sunrise and often return just before sunset.

But all this pales into insignificance when compared with the imminent threat facing the community – mostly made up of a clan called Turcoman – of being pushed off the land they have lived on and worked since they were displaced during the 1948 war from the coastal areas of what is today northern Israel. Wadi al-Maleh is home to several such threatened communities, some Bedouin and others sedentary farmers, each numbering around 50-100 people.

The Bedouins I met there – whom I had come to train in ways of better communicating their plight – told me that they had received demolition and eviction orders from Israel’s Civil Administration and that a number of tents had been torn down by the army to show that it meant business. One said that they had even been threatened with the confiscation of their economic mainstay, goats, if they did not up sticks. “Where are we going to go and how are we going to survive without our goats?” the community’s matron figure asked in distress.

The ostensible reason for this community’s planned displacement is because the Bedouins live in whatIsrael has declared to be a closed military zone, a designation which applies to about a fifth of the total surface area of the West Bank, affecting some 5,000 residents. The locals reported that the Israeli and American militaries had recently taken part in joint manoeuvres on the other side of a nearby mountain.

Across the Jordan Valley, numerous communities received eviction orders just ahead of the joint exercises. Although the orders do not specify the nature of the training exercises, activists are convinced that the manoeuvres in question are the joint US-Israeli ones. If this is the case, this would make the United States complicit inIsrael’s illegal use of occupied land.

Under international law, Israel has no right to designate any part of the West Bank as a military zone because this, like settlement building, is not permitted on occupied land, despite the inventive efforts of government-appointed Israeli legal experts to argue away the existence of the occupation and frame it as little more than a Palestinian preoccupation.

Wadi al-Maleh may be a remote community, but its situation is far from isolated. All over Area C of the West Bank – which, according to the Oslo accords, is under full Israeli military and civil control – and in East Jerusalem, homes are being demolished, people are being evicted and communities are slowly disappearing, and at an increasing rate.

So far in 2012, over 550 Palestinian-owned homes and other structures were demolished in these areas, displacing more than a thousand people, the UN reports. Similarly, last year, Israel demolished 622 structures, more than 40% than the year before, displacing almost 1,100 people, more than half of whom were children.

Since I moved to Jeusalem last year, I have visited numerous threatened communities, and I always depart with a sense of bewilderment at how people can survive in such circumstances. Many are engaged in years-long legal battles to be allowed to stay where they are, or are haunted by the spectre of losing their homes.

They live with the uncertainty that their children may well not have a school to attend later in the term, while they are often unable to work because of movement restrictions or because they cannot reach their land. Others are largely cut off from the rest of society by the wall, while many face regular harassment from settlers.

While lack of mobility is tough for anyone, it takes a particularly bad toll on the Bedouins, who feel it is their heritage, even their birth right, to roam free, and I have heard numerous complaints from them about how caged in and trapped they feel. On a more practical level, this also affects their livelihood, as they have little land left on which to graze their livestock.

The sense of powerlessness this creates can leave enormous emotional scars. “We feel constant guilt towards our children, and wonder if they ask themselves, ‘Why did you bring us into this world?’” admitted one father in Izbat al-Tabib, a village near Qalqilya, which suffers from most of the problems I outlined above. “We feel powerless to improve the situation of our children or even to protect them. Can you imagine how difficult that is for a father to bear?”

These words shook me hard. Yes, I could imagine how devastating it would feel to raise our three-year-old in such unenviable conditions, but I thanked my lucky stars that all I was being asked to do was to imagine, and not actually to experience, the soul-destroying reality of witnessing my son being denied his childhood.

Youth is also no barrel of laughs, when you have no prospects, no job, nowhere to go, and perhaps even no one your age to hang out with. “At night, I ask myself, ‘What have I done today?” I realise nothing,” confesses Salama, a young Bedouin who lives on the outskirts ofJerusalem. “Sometimes, I just want to do something, so I knock something down and rebuild it.”

On a more political level, Area C is the only contiguous territory in theWest Bank, which is not only home to the majority of Palestinian agricultural land but would also provide the bulk of the space upon which a future Palestinian state would be built.

By building in Area C and in East Jerusalem, Israelis driving the final nail in the coffin of the two-state solution, and with the United Statesnot only providing $3 billion in free military hardware to Israelbut also apparently co-training in the occupied West Bank, Washingtonis supplying the hammer. This is not just a tragedy for Palestinians but problematic for Israelis, as Israel’s own statistics now show that Jews have become a minority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan.

—

Follow Khaled Diab on Twitter.

This article first appeared in Haaretz on 3 December 2012.

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The battle for Palestinian memory

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By Sohair Mohidin

Palestinians run the risk of forgetting the Nakba and there are those who do not wish us to remember it. But our future freedom depends on our memory.

Sunday 13 May 2012

Villa Palestine in Marseille, France. Photo: ©Abou Zouz

It is not easy to carry the responsibility of a collective memory in early childhood. For the first few weeks after I started school at the age of six, I used to go home to my mother almost every day in tears. The other children taunted me for being “Palestinian”. I asked my mother to explain to me what it meant and why we were different. She said that we Palestinians had so many things in common with our Jordanian brothers: “We are all the same,” she insisted. But – and there was this big “but”– “We have a home and lands in Palestine to which we cannot return for the time being, but to which we shall, one day, inshallah.”

I then embraced this belonging and my Palestinian identity in every single composition the Arabic or English teachers asked us to do for homework. I peppered my texts with mentions of Palestine, my grandfather’s lost land. Palestine appeared everywhere, in my drawings, in my accessories, in every single expression possible. The dream of a free Palestine has not left me since then.

When I was nine, I read all the stories that Ghassan Kanafani wrote for children. I remember the book cover with the title Ard el-Bortoqal al-Hazeen (The Land of Sad Oranges). I also kept that with me. Even to this day, the presence of oranges or the slightest hint of their tangy odour makes me feel melancholic for lost Palestine and the sad eyes of those Palestinian kids illustrated in that book.

My parents used to tell me, “When we die bury us in Palestine. If you can’t manage that, then try to bring some of its soil and bury it with us.”

This huge responsibility of belonging to a place I’d never seen and would probably never visit, of identity and of memory instilled in me how important the right of return is to Palestinians. This is my cause which I should stand for no matter what. But what is my identity? The question of who I am has echoed in my mind for years. I found part of the answer in Mahmoud Darwish’s poem I Come From There.

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.

And “there” for my father is the town of Silat al-Harethyiah near the city of Jenin, which he left in 1957, originally to serve for three months in the East Bank border town of Ramtha. He was a police officer. Back at that time, the West and East Banks of the Jordan were one open territory ruled over by Jordan.

My father’s service took longer than he has imagined, so my mother joined him six months later. They were newlyweds. My father was 21 and my mother was 18. My father was still on duty, a decade later, when the 1967 war broke out. This marked the beginning of my family’s displacement, and my parents were given a “nazeheen card”. Nazeheen are Palestinians displaced from the West Bank and Jerusalem as a result of the 1967 war.

My father was forced to sell the house he built in Silat al-Harethyiah because my grandfather feared that the Israelis would take it over under what they call the Absentee Property Law, which was created to enable Israel to seize the maximum amount of property, especially since it is Israelis who created the displacement which led to this “absence” of the original owners.

Growing up as a Palestinian in Jordan did not “de- Jordanize” me, but it did not make me less Palestinian either. It only reinforced both my Arab identities and my desire to exercise my right of return. This right is recognised in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948 and is enshrined in numerous bodies of international law, including customary and treaty law. Article 13(b) of the Universal Declaration of Human Right states: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

Like exiled Palestinians everywhere, I am in a constant state of deferment, as if we are all sitting in a waiting room awaiting the return train home. In recent years, I have been struck by the realisation that there are so many things in my life I keep on subconsciously postponing, as if I were in a temporary state of transit.

This reminds me of the late grandmother of my friend Ahmad Ameen, a screenwriter who lives in Amman. After his grandmother, a refugee from Jaffa, passed away, he and his mother started to sift through the belongings in her room. “I looked under the bed to find dozens of black bags sitting there. I crawled under the bed and took them out one by one. They were dozens of black bags containing expired canned food,” he told me in dismay.

“Was she in a constant state of waiting?” he asked me. “Or did she simply carry her identity as a refugee with her wherever she went?”

And the burden of memory is not just about not forgetting, it also carries other burdens. One is the immense pressure, known to vulnerable minorities everywhere such as Jews, to make something of your life in order to attain a measure of security. “As a Palestinian, you need to overachieve, to secure something for yourself because you will most probably be somewhere else soon, and the risk is very high that you will lose it all,” my friend Deema Shahin reflected. This can be referred to as the “culture of return”.

But would I actually return? I sometimes ask myself: “If I have the choice, would I really want to live there? Would that really be home to me?” At times like this, I answer myself: “If you give up on this, if you accept the concessions made since Oslo, our right of return will sooner or later be exhibited in museums.”

Then, the unruly horse of my imagination would gallop off with me, and I’d imagine my future children taking their children on a guided tour to the ruins of our memory. I’d imagine them saying in a foreign language: “Here they dreamt, here they fought, here they aspired, and here they died of frustration…may their memory rest in peace.” In panic, I’d rephrase the last part: “…and here they died of frustration, and here their memory survived, peace be upon them.”

But the trouble with our painful memories is not only the risk that we may forget, but also that there are those who do not wish us to remember, who wish to punish Palestinians for feeling pain at their loss, at their Nakba, their Catastrophe, of 1948. In March 2011, the Knesset enacted its controversial “Nakba Law”, which denies state funding to institutions, including schools, which “undermine the foundations of the state and contradict its values”, which has been read to include the marking Israeli Independence Day by Palestinian citizens of Israel as an occasion of mourning for Palestinians.

Here I would like to paint a contrast rather than draw a parallel. Whereas Israel denies the right of Palestinians not only to commemorate the loss of their homes, but also their right of return and even their right to visit, Israel has a “Law of Return” for Jews which allows, organises and facilitates the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over the world to what was once Palestine, but where Palestinians now live under occupation and apartheid.

Over the past two decades, land expropriation through the construction of the illegal Israeli separation wall and aggressive settlement building has left Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem with fewer resources, and even without homes, due to demolitions and evictions.

Rather than seeing more Palestinians driven off their land, we should be seeing the return of Palestinian refugees. When the Resolution 194 was passed, it did not stipulate that peace was a prerequisite for return. Over the past 18 years, the peace process has been trudging from one swamp to another, until it completely drowned in its own shortcomings. The peace process is dead and the only way out is to acknowledge that and work on creating new structures that could lead to a comprehensive solution. For decades now, the international community has found comfort in managing the conflict instead of ending it. Living the illusion of resuming negotiations in the current state of affairs will only contribute to increasing the frustration of Palestinians in the current Arab revolutionary context.

When I am asked how the right of return will be implemented, my answer is through one secular democratic state for Palestinians and Israelis together, a state where all citizens enjoy equal rights. This can only happen when the Israelis remove all forms of occupation, discrimination and hatred established within their education system and policies.

So far Israeli politicians have failed to present us with a true partner of peace. All we see is the shifting of Israeli governments from left to extreme right, and they all proved not only a lack of political will but also to be violent. Their poor proposals did not respond to the minimum Palestinian aspirations.

Israeli society should realise that their politicians have put them under the worst form of siege, that of the endless fear of extermination and distrust of the whole world. Peace cannot be achieved with such a recipe. Peace cannot be achieved if Israelis fail to recognise and implement our rights.

Today, away from the failures of politics I still see my free Palestine coming. The work of our memory hasn’t even begun yet. The work of our memory is too powerful for a state of occupation to control. It goes beyond everything because we keep it alive within us and for generations to come. On Nakba Day, we remember hundreds of Palestinian villages that were wiped off the map by Jewish armed groups. We remember hundreds of innocent Palestinians who were killed while defending their lands and homes. Our memory will be at the vanguard of the endless battle for our rights and our freedom.

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Video: Personal Palestine – Part 1: A disappearing world

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By Khaled Diab

In part I of this Palestinian great-grandmother’s story, she tells of the tranquil Jerusalem in which she spent her youth until disaster struck.

Friday 11 May 2012

Um Khalil is a walking embodiment of modern Palestinian history and has lived through the most significant events of the past nine decades. A great-grandmother of 90, she has known peace, tranquility and tolerance… war and displacement… not to mention, British, Jordanian and Israeli rule, but no independence.

History is usually about mega events and the acts of leaders. And millions of us are familiar with the politics, wars, ideology and major episodes of the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But what about ordinary people? What was and is life like for them on the ground? How did the major convulsions of the conflict affect them? Do their personal experiences match the familiar narratives?

Um Khalil’s memories and recollections can provide us with some valuable insights into the personal history of a Palestinian person, as opposed to the more familiar collective history of the Palestinian people. Of course, Um Khalil’s personal history, like her life, is unique to her, and her experiences and impressions are not universal – some will be similar to the experiences of other Palestinians, others will differ.

Born in 1922 at the beginning of the British mandate over Palestine, Um Khalil missed the convulsions of World War I and Ottoman rule, which she only heard about from her parents. She was born into a prominent Palestinian family and spent the early years of her life in the ancient melting pot of the old city.

At the age of six or seven, following a major earthquake, her family was forced to move out of the old city and settle in one of the modern new neighbourhoods just outside the city’s walls.

Though she distrusts the British and blames them for what befell her country, she admired their cordiality, politeness and efficiency. “If they saw an Arab woman on the pavement, they stepped off onto the road. They never bothered anyone,” she opines.

She got married at the age of 19 to a young man who was in charge, as his ancestors had been, with managing the affairs of the Holy Sanctuary (the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock). Though they were married in 1941, World War II passed but hardly noticed, except for the fact that they had to blackout their windows at night. But their time was soon to come.

“Life in Jerusalem was beautiful,” she remembers, and with their comfortable lifestyle, there seemed no reason why it should not be. The young couple made their home in West Jerusalem, near al-Baladiya (City Hall), which was then home to well-to-do Arabs and Jews. “We lived side by side, Muslims, Christians and Jews,” she recalls nostalgically.

Describing her Jewish neighbours as “friends”, she recalled how Arabs and Jews mixed freely, and some even came searching for them, 19 years after they’d last seen each other, following Israel’s capturing of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967.

Her Jewish neighbours, all of whom spoke Arabic, shared a love for the Egyptian silver screen and, in those days without home entertainment systems, the local cinema was a popular hangout for all.

A particular favourite for all was the legendary Jewish Egyptian actress Leila Murad who came numerous times to visit Jerusalem, as did many other leading lights of Arab art, including the Syrian-Druze superstars Asmahan and her brother Farid al-Atrash and the “Lawrence Olivier” of the Arab World Youssef Wahbi.

This interfaith mixing had its advantages, lots of holidays to celebrate. “Muslims would celebrate Christian festivals with Christians, and Christians would celebrate Muslim festivals with us. And the same went for the Jews. We were all the same, except that each followed their own religion,” she said.

Um Khalil had little sense of the clouds of war and disaster forming on the horizon, nor did the low-intensity conflict between Zionist settlers and Arab nationalists register much in her daily life, though she would sometimes hear “older people talking about the Balfour Declaration”.

But then the UN partitioned Palestine and this comfortable, middle-class world came crashing down around everyone’s ears. Though the early fighting during the civil war had not affected them or their lives, when her son was about four months old and her daughter was four, they heard about the Deir Yassin massacre. “Everyone was afraid and people around here began to flee,” she recalled, describing the streams of frightened citizens carrying their children and a few belonging as they fled for safer ground.

Afraid that something might befall their children, they first fled to her family’s home, which was in a safer corner of Jerusalem. Then her mother-in-law urged her husband to seek refuge for his young family with a distant relative in Amman which was tiny, underdeveloped and full of “Bedouin houses”. “We left with nothing,” she says. And after a few months there, they returned to nothing, finding that their home had fallen inside the Jewish-controlled part of the city.

There, the landscape which greeted them was one in which tents outnumbered houses. “They pitched tents everywhere. There were no houses, just empty land full of tents,” she describes, recalling the wretched souls they saw in the refugee camps.

They were a little more fortunate, though eight of her family stayed in a single tiny room. “The Palestinians were fed a curse,” she concludes. And this “curse” they call the Nakba, or Catastrophe.

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Egypt, Israel and Palestine: towards the promised land of peace?

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By Khaled Diab

It is high time for Israelis and Palestinians – with grassroots support from Egyptians – to unlock their latent people’s power and forge a popular peace.

Monday 15 August 2011

Although it has primarily focused on domestic issues, the Egyptian revolution has sent ripples of hope and shockwaves of fear across the Middle East. Not only has Egypt traditionally been regarded as the unspoken leader of the Arab world, the dramatic exhibition of people power in action has inspired ordinary people everywhere and terrified the region’s fossilised leadership.

As Egyptians grapple to redefine their relationship with those who govern them, questions are being asked about how the revolution will affect Egypt’s foreign policy. One area of particular interest is how the ‘New Egypt’ will relate to Israel and the Palestinian struggle for statehood.

Like other political elites across the Middle East, the Israeli and Palestinian leadership – including both Fatah and Hamas – have been eyeing the Egyptian revolution with nervousness, because it threatens to upset the status quo on which they depend. But reality is gradually sinking in.

Many questions about the future remain. Can post-revolution Egypt play a more dynamic mediating role in the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Will Egypt’s cold peace with Israel chill further? Will popular anger at Israel’s occupation spill over into Egypt ‘tearing up’ its peace accord with Israel, as many Israelis fear? Is the enthusiasm of some Palestinians that Egypt’s ’return to dignity’ will help their cause warranted? How will the Egyptian revolution affect Israeli and Palestinian politics and how the two sides relate to each other, and to Egypt?

I will seek to answer these questions, as well as to consider how Egypt can best walk the tight rope of championing the Palestinian cause and nudging Israel towards a just resolution of the conflict, without returning to the ‘bad old days’ of futile belligerence. I will also explore what role the largely uninvolved Egyptian grassroots and civil society can play in bridging the gap between the two sides.

Israelis: between fear and enthusiasm

First, I will consider the Israeli response to the revolution and how the revolution has played out among Israel’s political class, the general public and progressive activists. When the revolution first broke in late January, the initial reaction of the Israeli government and establishment was one of concern and even panic, though ministers and officials were initially ordered not to make any public statements on the issue.

This ‘wait and see’ attitude rapidly shifted when the Mubarak regime looked in real danger of collapsing. Israel’s hard-line prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu even toured Europe and the United States to try to convince Western leaders to prop up the collapsing and corrupt dictator, though he now, at least rhetorically, welcomes the prospect of democracy in Egypt.

So what was behind this diplomatic panic and why was Israel, which describes itself as the Middle East’s “only democracy”, so fearful of the Egyptian people’s democratic aspirations?

In Israel, like in the United States and some parts of Europe, Mubarak was seen as a ‘benign dictator’ who protected both Western and Israeli interests against the perceived threat of extremist Islamism and kept Israel’s western front, historically the most dangerous, quiet.

In addition, many Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, have long been lecturing that the reason that peace has been elusive is not due to the Israeli occupation but to the absence of democracy in the Arab world. Now what if the dawn of Arab democracy arrives and Israel still fails to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world?

In addition, I suspect that the current extremist Israeli government, despite its rhetoric of wanting peace with the Palestinians if only there were a true “partner for peace”, feared the unknown impact of the Egyptian revolution on the Palestinian question. Would Palestinians follow the Egyptian and Tunisian examples of mass protest and disobedience? Would a revolutionary Egypt ratchet up the pressure on Israel to reach a deal with the Palestinians or, worse, side more clearly and robustly with the Palestinians?

Among the general Israeli public who know little about Egypt and the Arab world, and understand it even less, the experts and officials who lined up to deliver dire warning that Egypt could well become the “next Iran” and tear up the Camp David peace treaty pumped up the fear level among a population which already felt isolated, surrounded and beleaguered.

A typical response was delivered by Israel’s president Shimon Peres in February. Expressing his feeling that Mubarak’s “contribution to peace will never be forgotten”, he warned that “”Elections in Egypt are dangerous. Should the Muslim Brotherhood be elected they will not bring peace.”

At the time, I wrote that such fears were unfounded: that Egypt was no Iran and that the country was unlikely to renege on its peace treaty with Israel, though, given the plight of the Palestinians, “this probably means that the cold Egyptian-Israeli peace will become frostier”.

Since then, events seem to have largely confirmed my analysis. Although the Muslim Brotherhood is a significant force in the post-revolutionary landscape, it is by no means the only show in town, despite backroom deals between its leadership and the army’s top brass. In fact, a July poll showed that the Ikhwan’s approval rating stood at only around 17%.

In addition, now that the possibility of entering government has become realistic, the group has demonstrated its political pragmatism. Despite its official opposition to peace with Israel and its call for the Camp David agreement to be reviewed, a spokesman has said that the future of the peace treaty would be up to “the Egyptian people and not the Brotherhood”.

And it appears that most Egyptians desire peace. Two recent polls (here and here) showed that, in addition to supporting the creation of an independent Palestinian state, nearly two-thirds of respondents were in favour of maintaining the peace deal with Israel.

But it would be a mistake to think that the Egyptian revolution lacks support in Israel. Not only have some in the liberal and progressive end of the Israeli media spectrum expressed support for the revolution, a number of voices in its more conservative reaches have also publicised their backing.

Writing in The Jerusalem Post last week, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach chastised Israel’s former deputy prime minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer for expressing admiration for Mubarak. “The unseemly spectacle of the Middle East’s sole democracy failing to support a revolutionary freedom movement in Arab countries is a stark omission that the Arabs are not likely to forget,” he wrote.

More importantly, the Egyptian revolution and the ‘Arab Spring’ in general enjoy a surprising amount of grassroots support in Israel, especially among the young and liberal, with various groups releasing songs and letters of support. I have personally encountered numerous Israelis who wax enthusiastic about it. “[The Arab Spring] has made me more eager to dream that the borders will open one day,” Mati Shemoelof, an Israeli journalist, poet and activist told me over drinks. “And I feel that we can only learn from this fabulous, new, brave movement,” he added.

As if to confirm his point, Israel has subsequently been gripped by protests over soaring housing prices, centred on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild’s Avenue, which has been described by some commentators as the country’s own “Tahrir Square”. Moreover, the protests provide a perhaps unprecedented opportunity for Israelis and Palestinians (both Israelis citizens and those in the West Bank and Gaza) to rally around a common issue – housing shortages – that affect them all.

Although the protests have so far remained apolitical, more and more Israelis are connecting the housing crisis within Israel to the generous state subsidies lavished on West Bank settlements and the high cost of maintaining the occupation.

“By removing the single most divisive issue in Israeli politics, the protesters have created a safe space for Israelis of all ethnic, national and class identities to act together,” Dimi Reider and Aziz Abu Sarah wrote in the New York Times earlier this month. “Israel will never become the progressive social democracy the protesters envision until it sheds the moral stain and economic burden of the occupation,” they went on to caution.

Palestinians: inspired but disillusioned

Palestinian reactions to the Egyptian revolution have been complex and divided, both at the official and popular level. Fatah, which received a lot of backing from the Egyptian regime, tried to walk the tight rope of supporting both Mubarak and the “legitimate demands” of the people.

“We hope that Egypt manages to overcome this crisis while preserving its achievements and meeting the legitimate demands for democracy, political reform, and popular participation,” was Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s reaction in early February, according to the al-Ayyam newspaper.

The extremist Islamist group Hamas, too, has been lukewarm about the Egyptian revolution. Although Hamas despised the former Egyptian regime’s hostility to the movement and Egypt’s collaboration in the blockade of Gaza, the secular nature of the youth spearheading the revolution and the sidelining of the Muslim Brotherhood worried the Islamic movement. In addition, like the PA, Hamas also benefits from the status quo and has entertained fears that the Egyptian people’s example might inspire Gazans to rise up against Hamas and its increasingly repressive rule.

Hamas witnessed an inkling of this possibility when a Facebook page calling for a ‘Day of Rage’ in Gaza against the Islamist movement attracted 10,000 members within only three days, despite the intermittent power cuts and relatively low internet penetration in the Strip.

This might explain why both Hamas and the PA suppressed, in the early days of the revolution, rallies in support of the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts.

However, at the grassroots level, the majority of Palestinians seem to feel solidarity with their Egyptian neighbours. Ever since I moved to Jerusalem a few months ago, most Palestinians I have encountered have reacted very positively to the Egyptian revolution. Everywhere I go, I receive warm congratulations as if I was the father or the midwife of the uprising!

While out researching an article in a tiny Palestinian village effectively cut off from the outside world by settlements, the locals I met got sidetracked from talking about their demoralising plight to enthuse about the achievements of the Egyptian people. “You Egyptians have raised the head of every Arab,” Mohammed Barakat, a local lawyer, told me, in a typical reaction.

Even in the more glitzy surroundings of a luxury hotel in Ramallah, at an official celebration of the 23 July revolution hosted by the Egyptian consulate, Salam Fayyad launched into rhetorical acrobatics to pay tribute to both the 1952 and 2011 revolutions, even though the latter only came about because the earlier failed to deliver on its promises.

In addition to awakening hopes that the Egyptian revolution will lead Egypt to become more supportive of the Palestinian struggle for statehood, the protest movement in Egypt has inspired some dedicated young Palestinian activists, under the umbrella of the so-called March 15 movement, to agitate for change.

The date refers to the day when organisers employing social media, text messaging and word of mouth managed to draw thousands of protesters on to the streets of Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank, as well as Gaza City.

However, their demands were not wholesale regime change, but reconciliation. “Our top priority is to end the divisions within Palestinian society. This is the only way to deal with the occupation,” Z, one of the young founders of the movement in Ramallah, explained to me.

That said, the movement has not managed to replicate the most successful ingredient of the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain: constant pressure from the streets. This is partly due to the two-tiered nature of the oppression facing Palestinians, and the restrictions on their movement imposed by the occupation. “Unfortunately, we have two levels of repression in Palestine: Israeli and domestic,” says Z.

In addition, there is the psychological barrier of widespread despair and disillusionment afflicting wide swaths of the population. “The problem among Palestinians is that revolutions are nothing new, yet nothing changes or things get worse,” Z observes. “Neither uprisings nor negotiations have worked, Palestinians believe – we’re still under occupation.”

This sense that whatever happens, the Palestinians are screwed might help explain why quite a few Palestinians I meet are despondent about the ultimate outcome of the Egyptian revolution, with some expressing their expectations that Egyptian will revert to dictatorship. A few, probably drawing on their sense of powerlessness, have even expressed their suspicions that the revolution is not an expression of the will of the Egyptian people but a joint CIA-Mossad conspiracy.

Nevertheless, a number of observers believe that the Egyptian-brokered Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement – despite its clear weaknesses – was partly a sign of the success of the youth protest movement. It was inspired, they say, by the fear that ordinary Palestinians would follow the Tunisian and Egyptian lead and rise up against the oppressive rule of Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank. In addition, it has been viewed as an indication of the more robust role post-revolutionary Egypt can play in the Palestinian struggle. Similarly, Egypt’s decision to open the Rafah crossing has been interpreted as an early indication of the New Egypt’s more sympathetic approach to the plight of the Palestinians.

September: Palestine or the Palestinians?

We are only a few short weeks away from the moment of truth, when the Palestinian leadership plan to go to the United Nations and demand the world body’s recognition of Palestine as a state.

It strikes me that Palestinians, disillusioned, demoralised and desperate are screaming out to the international community, and particularly the United Nations: “You got us into this mess. Now get us out of it.”

There are parallels to be drawn between this bid and the 1947 UN partition plan which paved the way, despite Arab rejection, to the creation of the state of Israel. However, this time around it is unlikely to serve the Palestinians as well because they are too weak, the Israelis too powerful and the international community lacks the wherewithal to impose a solution on the two parties. Besides, if we are to learn anything from the tragic past, it is that UN involvement with only one side’s support was disastrous, and there is no reason to think it won’t be again.

Personally, I can’t help thinking that, rather than grant Palestinians the statehood they desire, the unilateral UN option could backfire by ending in failure or resulting in a virtual but hollow state that enjoys the sheen of international legitimacy but does not actually exist on the ground.

And I’m not the only one with misgivings. Earlier this week, a young Palestinian activist told me: “I think that nothing will really change on the ground.” He added: “I am really afraid of the PA because they will not ask for a full membership of the UN and instead they will go for non-member status which will not help us in this movement but they will sell it to us as a victory.”

The main reason that Palestinians might shy away from demanding full membership is a function of the way the UN operates. For a country to gain membership to the world body, the UN Security Council must first recommend statehood to the General Assembly. And judging by previous and current form, Washington is very likely to veto any such proposal. In fact, some US officials have warned that Washington could withdraw its funding for the UN, if the proposed vote goes ahead.

Of course, there is a chance that Abbas and the Palestinian leadership are actually not seriously contemplating going to the UN and are using this as a bluff to focus Israeli minds, lure Israel back to the negotiating table and force it to offer the Palestinians a viable state along the pre-1967 borders. But if that is the case, it looks like Israel has decided to call their bluff.

The Israeli reaction to possible UN recognition of Palestinian statehood is difficult to gauge but it is unlikely to be positive. The UN option enjoys the backing of some Israelis who see in it a ‘win-win’ solution for both sides. But such an enlightened Israeli view is a minority one, and the Israeli government and much of the public interpret the plan as an act of hostility.

Besides, previous declarations of statehood achieved little. Palestine, which has existed as a virtual state for decades, and is currently recognised bilaterally by over 110 countries, including Egypt, still remains a state-in-waiting. For example, the 1988 unilateral Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which was made in exile by the PLO in Algiers, was little more than an exercise in symbolism.

The real gains for the Palestinian cause were being made, a quarter of a century before the ‘Arab Spring’, by the ordinary Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza who rose up in the largely peaceful and leaderless first intifada, paving the way to the peace process and the two-state solution.

New Egypt and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Until now, the impact of the Egyptian revolution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been difficult to gauge. Nonetheless, a number of positive and negative ramifications can be discerned.

On the negative side, the upheavals in Egypt and other parts of the region connected to the Arab Spring have diverted much of the global interest away from the Palestinians question. It has also enabled Israel to more or less quietly create more ‘facts on the ground’ ahead of the Palestinians plan to go to the UN in September. This can be seen, for instance, in the accelerated rate of evictions, displacements and demolitions in East Jerusalem and ‘Area C’ of the West Bank this year.

On the positive side, Egypt has already taken some action that was aimed at improving the situation, such as brokering the Palestinian reconciliation agreement and easing restrictions on Gaza. More intangibly, the Egyptian revolution has provided both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership with a taste of what can happen when an unjust and untenable status quo is left to fester unattended for too long.

In the longer term, many commentators have expressed hope that a democratic Egypt can play a more robust and vibrant role as a peace broker and help mediate some form of reconciliation and peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Some more militant and extremist Palestinians hope, and many Israelis fear, that Egypt will become more hostile and belligerent in its support of the Palestinian cause and its opposition to the occupation.

Personally, I don’t expect either outcome is likely. However, a democratic Egypt more in tune with its public’s mood might act as a deterrent against excessive Israeli militarism. That said, for many years to come, Egypt will be embroiled primarily in domestic affairs. This includes the construction of a new political system, fixing the economy, addressing inequalities, combating corruption, dealing with sectarian tensions, and more. Moreover, even a democratic Egypt will lack the clout to impose a resolution and Egyptians have learnt through long and bitter experience that belligerence leads nowhere.

So, it would perhaps be a mistake for those Israelis and Palestinians who pine for peace to await an Egyptian saviour. Instead, they should look to the more intangible support that Egypt can provide, namely that they need not await a foreign messiah because their true saviour is within themselves.

Egypt has provided Palestinians and Israelis, long cynical and disillusioned that the powers that be can bring about any meaningful change in their situation, with a dose of much-needed hope and inspiration, especially in their own latent powers as people.

People power: the missing link

I am a strong believer in the idea that ‘people power’ is the missing link in the quest for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The vast majority of the discourse relating to the conflict focuses on a top-down solutions in which an international broker or brokers bring the two parties together to the negotiating table and lean on them until they kiss and make up and agree to live together happily ever after.

The trouble with this model is that it overlooks the fact that no external mediator enjoys the kind of clout or willpower necessary to push through a resolution. In addition, it ignores the glaring disparities in power between Israelis and Palestinians. It also turns a blind eye to the fractured and divided political landscape on both sides which makes reaching a consensus over the painful realities both sides must accept for the sake of peace a task of Herculean proportions.

This is particularly the case given the decades-long mutual distrust and loathing, which renders the necessary groundswell of popular opinion required to achieve peace impossible to attain.

I believe that it is time to follow a new track in which ordinary people lead the process and not just act as passive by-standers. Palestinians and Israelis need to awaken to their own power and unlock their dormant potential to steer their own destiny towards peace and reconciliation. And the best way to do this, as the ‘Arab Awakening’ is illustrating, is through mass, peaceful joint activism.

For many years, a minority of activists on both sides have joined forces and found common cause in opposing the occupation, settlement building, the separation wall and home demolitions and evictions. This needs to be stepped up and activists must find creative ways of inspiring the mainstream – they need to make their movement go viral.

Being the dreamer that I am, I cannot shake the vision in my head of joint Israeli-Palestinian activism infecting the masses, and the current housing protests could be a good foundation upon which to build such a movement.

In my vision, squares in cities across Israel and Palestine would be filled with people rallying around a single goal: “The people demand an end to the occupation.” Protesters on both sides would also pitch tents at checkpoints to demand their removal and, who knows, perhaps one day have their own Berlin wall moment.

Likewise, ordinary Egyptians need to overcome their own apathy and passivity and help facilitate and mediate such a ‘people’s peace’. For the sake of peace and the future, Egyptians need to cast aside their ideological opposition to dealing with Israelis and act in active and open solidarity with the Israeli-Palestinian peace movement and export the spirit of their revolution to neighours who are in desperate need of it.

This article is based on a talk given by Khaled Diab at a conference on the future of Egypt organised by the International Peace Studies Centre which took place in London on Saturday 13 August 2011.

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Race against space

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By Khaled Diab

Both time and space are running out for the two-state solution. If Israelis wish to preserve the Jewish identity of their state, they need to act now to create a Palestinian state.

Monday 25 July 2011

Perched on a scenic hilltop named ‘Mont de Joie’ (‘Mountain of Joy’) by the Crusaders for its commanding view of the Jerusalem they were about to conquer, Nabi Samwil’s 250 or so Palestinian inhabitants have little to feel joyous about. They are cut off, by Israeli settlements and the separation wall, from the rest of the West Bank, while the West Bank IDs they carry deprive them of access to Jerusalem, even though Israel considers their village to be within the municipal boundaries of the city.

“We’ve become like a tiny island,” describes Mohammed Barakat, a local lawyer, who lives with three branches of his family, i.e. 13 people, in a small house of about 120m². “If a child needs a doctor, you have to embark on a very long journey to get to other nearby villages or Ramallah.”

As he speaks, Barakat, who was crippled in a car crash in Amman, is sitting on his bed working on his computer, one of the few connections he has with the outside world. In addition to being a key advocate of the villagers’ rights, Barakat runs an NGO appropriately called, given the confinement of his village, Disabled without Borders.

One practical problem associated with their imposed isolation is getting relatives and friends from other parts of the West Bank into the village. Mohammed’s brother, Rebhi, who is a member of the village council, is somewhat anxious about a local wedding that is due to take place later in the week.

“The Israeli civilian administration insists on knowing the names of everyone who is coming,” he complains. “But you can never know who exactly is coming because each person you invite usually brings along their family and friends.”

The villagers’ woes don’t end there. Owing to draconian Israeli building restrictions, the bride and groom, like many other young people, are forced to abandon the village in search of housing elsewhere. Villagers report that only two houses have been built since Israel took over control in 1967, while numerous homes were demolished near the mosque and the tomb that is believed by some, despite the absence of archaeological or biblical evidence, to house the prophet Samuel.

One of the sad consequences of this inability to build which I witnessed is that some two dozen children have to squeeze into the village’s tiny one-room school, which will soon lack a properly functioning toilet because the one they built has a demolition order on it.

Isolated as Nabi Samwil is, it is not an isolated case – demolitions and displacements are a daily fact of life. This is clearly illustrated in a new report by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) which is due out on 21 July. Entitled Forced Out, the sobering document focuses on displaced communities in Area C, more than three-fifths of the West Bank over which Israel retains full civil and security control under the Oslo Accords.

It documents how local communities – faced with restrictions on their movement, a freeze on building and settler violence and intimidation – are facing severe housing shortages, with many moving to Areas A and B as a result. Among the hardest hit are farming and Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley, some of whom have even resorted to building concrete structures inside their tents to conceal them from the army.

“While the intent behind the various policies applied by Israel to Area C is unclear, their effect is to make it impossible for many Palestinian communities to develop,” says UN Humanitarian Coordinator Maxwell Gaylard who expresses “concerns about demographic shifts and changes to the ethnic make-up of Area C”.

Although Israel’s intentions are indeed unclear, the fact that a sharp increase in demolitions and evictions has taken place this year seems to suggest a bid to “create realities on the ground” before the Palestinian leadership gets a chance to go to the UN to seek recognition for an independent Palestine. OCHA’s records show that over 1,100 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced so far in 2011 in Area C and East Jerusalem.

Area C, which has experienced a massive upsurge in settlement building since the signing of the Oslo Accords, is currently home to twice as many Israeli settlers as Palestinians (300,000 as opposed to 150,000). Nevertheless, it possesses the majority of Palestinian agricultural and grazing land and is the only contiguous territory in the West Bank, which was foreseen to provide, under the ‘land for peace’ formula, the bulk of the space upon which a future Palestinian state would be established.

However, with 70% of Area C currently set aside for settlements or the IDF, there is little room left for the two-state solution. This might partly explain why the Palestinian leadership, caught as it is in a race against space, has desperately resorted to the UN path, despite its slim chances of success.

But it is not just Palestinians who should be worried about the changing reality of Area C and East Jerusalem, ordinary Israelis should be, too. If current policies remain unchecked, most of the Palestinian population will soon be living in a series of disconnected islands that will be impossible to join up into a coherent territory, leading to a de facto single Israeli-Palestinian state.

Once they realise that their dream of an independent state is dead, Palestinians are likely to start focusing their attention on demanding equal civil rights and Israeli citizenship. This will leave Israel with a dilemma: either live up to its democratic credentials and grant Palestinians full rights and dilute the country’s prized Jewish identity, or continue an unsustainable and increasingly oppressive occupation, with all the disenfranchisement it involves, to hold on to this Jewishness.

I am personally in favour of a single binational state made up of two non-geographical Israeli and Palestinian community governments which oversee the affairs of their peoples, and a joint federal government which manages common issues, such as trade, defence and foreign policy.

Although a growing minority of Israelis supports this vision, most favour a state with a clearly Jewish identity which, by implication, makes them supporters of an independent Palestine on the pre-1967 borders. However, the current government, which holds the land to be holier than its people, is unlikely to take any meaningful steps to achieve the two-state vision.

This leaves it up to ordinary Israelis to bring pressure to bear on the government to act now or risk forever holding back peace. Last Friday, some 4,500 protesters, mostly Israelis, marched through East Jerusalem to voice their support for an independent Palestine. The time has come for hundreds of thousands more to join them.

This article first appeared in The Jerusalem Post on Friday 21 July 2011.

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