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Shifting Dimensions of the Palestinian Question: Conclusions from a Reporting Trip with Helena Cobban
Monday, April 6, 2009
Edited Transcript
of Remarks by Helena Cobban
Transcript No. 312 (6 April 2009)
Transcript No. 312 (6 April 2009)
After a month-long trip to the Middle
East, veteran journalist Helena Cobban believes
that Israel's policies in the Occupied
Palestinian Territory, from the "quartering
off" of the territory to the imprisonment of
political leaders and destruction of property
and life, is a policy of creating despair among
Palestinians.
To view the video of this briefing online go to http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/5320/pid/3584.
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
31 March 2009
Helena Cobban:
To view the video of this briefing online go to http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/ht/display/ContentDetails/i/5320/pid/3584.
The Palestine Center
Washington, D.C.
31 March 2009
Helena Cobban:
Thank you, Samar. Thank you everybody, old friends [and] new friends, for turning out. You know I prefer to work at a keyboard, but every so often it’s good to test my ideas. So, I suppose I do that in my blog. But it’s good to test them with real people as well.
First of all, I went to Egypt [and] did a few interviews there. [I] went to Jordan [and] did a few interviews there. Then, I spent more than a week in Ramallah and did a bunch of interviews there. From Ramallah, I went to Jerusalem, which is not easy. We will get there later. Then, I spent a whole week in Jerusalem. And from Jerusalem, I went down to Beit Lahm [Bethlehem], Beit Jala and Hebron. And then, I spent a few days in Tel Aviv and Nazareth. It was a very, as always, depressing trip.
Actually, I’ve been going through my notebooks, and I got way more than 45 interviews. I am still trying to plow through them. I don’t know if you guys are reading my blog, but I am trying to upload the most important ones of them. In addition to the ones Samar mentioned, I did do an interview with Efraim Inbar, who is a kind of key Likud strategic affairs thinker. He was in a very cocky mood that day and was talking about how well we are just going to play with the Americans. Anyways, go read the interview; you can find it on the blog. It was reproduced in a bunch of other places as well.
I was not able to get into Gaza because I had press credentials from a fine little magazine, big magazine actually, called The Nation, [which is] published out of New York City [and] pretty well known. Actually, [it has] a much, much bigger circulation than The Christian Science Monitor, which isn’t publishing in print anymore. Anyways, so my Israeli press credential people looked at my letter, and they said we never heard of The Nation. So, I never got my press credential. Actually, it was a kind of interesting story because I went to see the little guy in the office there whose name was Jason. He was from England. He entered my data and he said, “Oh yes. We will have that up in a moment.” I said, “Yeah I had the visiting press credential three years ago you know when I was here. So, there shouldn’t be a problem.” He said, “No, there shouldn’t be a problem. Come back next Thursday.” I called and said, “What’s up?” And he said, “Oh, it should be about 20 minutes. So, come on over.” And then he called back and said, “Oops. There’s a problem.” So, anyways, that’s when I knew there was a problem. [I] never got into Gaza.
[I] was able to talk to some very interesting people about Gaza including John Prideaux-Brune, who is the head of the Oxfam country team in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, about just the incredible difficulties and tragedies arising from the refusal of Israel to let many basic foodstuffs and any construction materials whatsoever to go into Gaza so that people whose homes were deliberately destroyed by the 100 bulldozers that the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] took into Gaza. They have been unable to rebuild anything because the Israelis are refusing to allow cement, rebar, glass, any construction materials at all. So, John talked a lot about that. He also used a phrase that I think is very important. I find actually that Oxfam people are often the smartest because they have both the hands on experience of dealing with humanitarian experiences and they also do a lot of analysis and advocacy around the issues that they deal with. He talked about a dignity crisis for the Palestinians. He said that a lot of what the Israelis are aiming at doing is aimed at destroying the dignity of the Palestinian communities. And I think that it’s very true.
In fact, I was just talking to Samar about this wonderful book that has just come out by the British journalist Jonathan Cook who is based in Nazareth. I think [he’s] the best journalist anywhere in Israel, Palestine. It’s called Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair. I think “disappearing” is a transitive verb in that context. And his thesis is that many or most of these policies, including the tight movement controls in the West Bank, are designed to sow despair with the idea that then the Palestinians will throw up their hands and leave--voluntary ethnic cleansing if you like--or that they will be driven to so much despair they will undertake some kind of you know suicide bomb mission, which will then give the Israeli military the excuse it needs to go back. Sometimes it needs an excuse; sometimes it doesn’t. These things are not always completely unwelcome in terms of providing the excuse or the Qassam rockets.
Jonathan says on the back of the book:
Over many decades, Israel has developed
and refined policies to disburse, imprison, and
impoverish the Palestinian people…It has
industrialized Palestinian despair through ever
more sophisticated systems of curfews,
checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs. It
has transformed the West Bank and Gaza into
laboratories for testing the infrastructure of
confinement, creating a lucrative ‘defense’
industry by pioneering the technologies needed
for crowd control, surveillance, collective
punishment and urban warfare.
I think that this is really important. And it’s a wonderful book, so I urge you all to go out and buy it of course.
Anyways, I didn’t get into Gaza. That’s the long and the short of that. But the situation in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is actually very important to the politics of what’s happening to the Palestinians as is the situation of the Palestinians who are citizens of Israel; 1.2 million of them are there, almost the same number of them that are in Gaza.
While I was there, I was also looking at developments in Israeli society including, of course, the rise of the right and the ultra-right and the crisis of the left and the peace movement in Israel. I did interviews with more than a dozen leaders and thinkers in the peace movement. The kind of sad conclusion is essentially the Israeli pillar of support for a two-state solution has collapsed, and they are doing a lot of reflection. I have a wonderful interview with [President of the New Israel Fund and former member of the Knesset] Naomi Chazan that’s already on the website. I’ve got a couple of more really good interviews to put up. I also recommend the one that I put up the other day with [founder of Israelis and Palestinians for Non-Violence] Amos Gvirtz, who I think is a very smart guy.
So, the West Bank. Are we talking about one Bantustan or a series of Bantustans or something completely different? I think that there are many Bantustan-like features in the West Bank or rather in each of the West Bank cities because you have to understand the degree to which Israeli policy has succeeded in breaking up one city from the next. In fact, this is a classic counterintelligence technique called quadriage as developed by the French in Algeria. Whereas you can see it didn’t get very far over the long run, but it inflicted a lot of pain on a lot of Algerians along the way. You basically quarter off the territory, and then you prevent movement between the different portions of the territory. In the West Bank, this system has been almost completely applied so that you need a special pass or you need any way to pass through a checkpoint, which may or may not let you through. It’s impossible for anybody from the rest of the West Bank to go to Jerusalem unless you have the magic magnetic card, which a very few people in the West Bank have.
In fact, there’s much more encouragement of Jerusalemites to go out and get jobs in Ramallah or in Nablus or in Hebron or in Beit Lahm with the idea that then they will move--the technical term “the center of their life”--out of Jerusalem into these other places. And it happens that life in Jerusalem is incredibly expensive because they are paying the Israeli taxes [but] not getting anything like the Israeli municipal services. So the couple of times I took a taxi into Jerusalem from Ramallah or the other way around, it had to be a Jerusalem taxi because they are the only ones allowed into Jerusalem. But they always remark on how much cheaper stuff is in Ramallah. It is. They always remark on how much more building there is in Ramallah because there’s a lot of investment. I’ll come back to that later maybe. The fact is that in Jerusalem their lives are completely squeezed and constrained. So, [there’s] a huge incentive for Jerusalem Palestinians to leave, including the fact that they are not allowed to have any kind of public political activity at all. All this stuff should be outrageous to any democratic person in this country or anywhere else. You know they are not allowed to hold a public political gathering. Do you remember when [late Palestinian politician] Faisal Husseini used to try to hold gatherings there? Do you remember--oh gosh you can go back even further to when [former U.S. Secretary of State] George Shultz used to go and meet with Faisal and [Palestinian politician] Hanan [Ashrawi] in Jerusalem when they would have press conferences in the National Palace Hotel. Jerusalem was really the center of political activity for the Palestinians. None of that is allowed anymore--nothing.
If you want the details on these restrictions on Palestinian life in Jerusalem go to the Ir Amim website; it’s a really good website. They also will tell you about how the Israelis manipulate planning law to designate most of or more than half of Palestinian housing stock in East Jerusalem as illegal housing, which means that the people who live in these places are in the constant fear that their homes are going to be demolished. And, of course, it makes for a terrible housing crisis for the 270,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem.
So, there are many Bantustan-like qualities to the West Bank enclaves. But actually, the PA [Palestinian Authority] has less powers than the rulers of the Bantustans in South Africa. And they don’t have the desire or intention to stay as the head of a Bantustan. Remember that this whole PA thing was only suppose to be a five-year interim agreement from 1994 when they came back from exile and they set this up until 1999 by which time the final status agreement would have been negotiated and implementation of the final status agreement would go into play. So, it was an interim thing. Well, here we are ten years later, no final agreement anywhere in sight, and the PA is running this sort of Bantustan-like series of enclaves.
Getting back to the enclaves and the quadriage system, you have what’s the rule of the DCOs. Does everyone here know what a DCO is? It’s the district coordination officer. He is the Israeli military officer who sits outside Ramallah and decides whether you can go in or out, whether you can visit your sick auntie in Nablus or whether you can go to your college reunion in Bethlehem. Usually, you are called to the DCO and you tell him why you want to go. He will say, “Well yes, but we want to know all about everything that’s happening in your neighborhood.” They have the population registers. They know exactly who lives where and who’s related to who. And I think this control of the population registers is a little understood facet of the continuation of the Israeli occupation both in the West Bank and in Gaza. You know the Israelis like to claim that they’ve withdrawn from Gaza. Well, they did at one point. The fact that they control the population registers as well as all people wanting to go in and out is a really important mechanism of their control.
So, the security regime in the PA. How is it run? It’s run primarily by Prime Minister [Salam] Fayyad who insisted on that when he took up the job. So, he is the person who decides what the standing rules of engagement [are] and how everything else works. I talked a little bit with him about this, but I talked more with other people who were more prepared to be forthcoming on the issue. If you read the interview I did with Mustafa Barghouthi--it’s up on the website--Mustafa, of course, is in a position to know about these things. He was a past minister in the brief national unity government. He is very well connected, very well respected. He’s one of the two MPs on the Mubadara list. According to Mustafa, the coordination with the Israelis is such between the PA security forces and the Israeli occupation forces who surround each of these enclaves, you have to understand. If you haven’t seen pictures of the walls and the watchtowers, you need to go and look at them because the watchtowers, in particular, they just send a shiver of dread down my back. I said to my Israeli Jewish friends when you look at these pictures with these walls and these watchtowers doesn’t it remind you of something? And some of them say, “It reminds us of the early pioneering days of Zionism when to establish our settlements, our colonies, we built a wall and a stockade and a tower.” And so it’s a heroic thing for some of them. I don’t know. People always want to believe the best things about their own actions, don’t they?
According to Mustafa Barghouthi, the Israelis obviously come into Area A. They come into Area B. They control Area B and control Area C completely, but they come into Area A at will, which they’re not supposed to do. So usually, they will call ahead, and they’ll say, “We’re going to go into the Sinokrot factory” or “We’re going to go in to this place or that place.” And so, the PA security forces make themselves scarce. But on occasion, the Israeli security is acting so fast on a hot lead and wants to be acting a little bit more quietly. So, they’ll go to a place without the advance warning to the PA security forces. In that case, the standing order of the PA security forces is to place their weapon on the ground and to turn their back on the Israeli military. It’s kind of a hard thing to get a Palestinian, an allegedly Palestinian security force, to do that over the long run, let me say. It doesn’t feel good to somebody.
So actually, they’ve completely re-manned the force, re-stuffed it. And everybody who came in 1994 with the old PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] forces formed at one stage the structure of the PA security force; they’ve all been pensioned off. So, they’ve taken in a whole new set of young security people. And according to Mustafa Barghouthi, the one condition for these people to enter the new PA security forces is that they have failed the Tawjihi [high school completion exam]. So, they’re not going for the intellectual crème de la crème of Palestinian society. They’re going for young impressionable people who wouldn’t have any job opportunities elsewhere. All of this is run by [U.S. Lieutenant] General [Keith] Dayton out of Jericho where Ma’an News Agency recently reported that they have opened a military intelligence academy. It’s kind of weird. I don’t know any other country where you announce that you’ve opened a military intelligence academy. But I guess they are so desperate for achievements that this counts as one.
So, what did the PA security force do during the Gaza war? They arrested a lot of people. They prevented demonstrations. They prevented public meetings. They prevented private meetings. And on one occasion, when the students from Birzeit were going to organize a nonviolent march to Beit El or one of the nearby Israeli security places, the PA security forces actually stood in the way to prevent these unarmed demonstrators from going anywhere close to the Israeli military. I heard this described as a conflict prevention measure. You could describe it like that.
I was looking primarily at the prospects for Fateh-Hamas reconciliation given that they’ve had these negotiations going on in Cairo. The focus in the mainstream media in this country has been overwhelmingly on the prospects of forming a national unity government between Fateh and Hamas that meets the Quartet’s, that is the [former U.S. President George W.] Bush administration’s three conditions. And there’s some question as to whether they will be prepared to finesse some of that. There’s also been a little bit of attention on the prisoner issue. Although now, I would say that the likelihood of an eminent prisoner exchange has plummeted to zero because it was something [former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert really wanted to do; I think he wanted to do it, but he’s no longer the prime minister.
Many Palestinians, however, are focused less on those two issues than on two other issues that are being discussed in the reconciliation talks in Cairo. First of all, the security regime in the West Bank, which of course has been aimed against Hamas, and they are not about to sign off on a national unity government that continues to act against themselves, obviously. And secondly, the question of the reform of the PLO. PLO--yeah, do we remember that organization? It sort of rings a vague bell. You know, it was back in the 1970s, 1980s. Last heard of, I think, was in 1998 when [former U.S.] President [Bill] Clinton went to Gaza to preside over the PNC session. Well, the PLO it turns out is actually a big issue amongst Palestinians. If you want to conceptualize the relationship between the PA and the PLO, you could think of the PA as being sort of a child of the PLO jointly spawned with [late Israeli Prime Minster] Yitzhak Rabin, obviously through the Oslo Agreement. And they agreed at that point, or in the process that flowed from that, to establish this temporary body called the PA. But the PLO still has some sort of paternal rights, maternal rights, supervisory rights. I mean it still should be the body that reviews the performance of the PA and says how have the negotiations been going over this final status agreement. Things like that. [It] hasn’t had a chance to do so. [It] hasn’t been convened.
Big part of the reason why is because the power within the PLO--this is really going ways back into my own memory. My book on the PLO came out in 1984, and it makes me feel so old to think that it’s 25 years. But it’s still in print thanks to Cambridge University Press. Okay, structurally in the PLO, Fateh and the Fateh leadership wheeled about two-thirds or three-fourths of the power. So, for the PLO to be effective you have to have an effective Fateh. Fateh has collapsed from the inside. If you think of, I don’t know, a fine fruit, an apple or a pear, that is just the peel and you look inside and it’s all nothing, nothing, that’s kind of Fateh. And the strange thing--not strange but you know sort of history has its little ironies that I enjoy noticing every so often--is that for the last X years the U.S. government has tried to strengthen Fateh to make it into the viable alternative to Hamas. So, it’s pumped money into the organization in one way or another, and it’s mobilized a huge amount of money from the Arab and European allies with this aim in mind. The money itself has just further fed the internal corruption culture of Fateh. So, it has hastened the demise of Fateh from the inside.
They were at Sharm El-Sheikh. Was it earlier this month? And they decided their response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is to send $600 million dollars to the PA in the West Bank and maybe $300 to Gaza. I wrote in one of my blog posts that Gaza is like Dubai on a hilltop in terms of the amount of wasteful and speculative construction in Ramallah. You go to Ramallah, you wouldn’t know there’s a humanitarian crisis anywhere in Palestine. And a lot of political visitors or NGO leaders will go only to Ramallah without recognizing that just down the road in a place like Deir Ghassanah or Bil’in or any of these frontline villages, there’s real human need. But Ramallah is a very wealthy place. It has the same size of an international NGO footprint as Kigali at the worst time when Kigali was suffering from the international NGO footprint. But here, they’re building these high-rises, great glass fronted palaces. You go to visit people in their offices, and they’re incredibly luxurious offices. It’s a very strange experience. As I said, it’s fed the corruption culture and contributed to the internal collapse of the secular nationalist movement represented by Fateh.
So, Fateh has actually been unable to arrive at a unified position on anything for the past 20 years, which was the last time the Fateh General Congress was held. It was 1989. The Fateh General Congress is supposed to be held every five years. 1989--remember [late Fateh leader Salah Khalaf known as] Abu Iyad was still alive. I think [late Fateh leader Khaled al-Hassan known as] Abu Said may have still been alive. I mean you still had Fateh as a coherent political organization capable in [a] not particularly democratic way but an acceptably inclusive way; let’s say, capable of making a decision back in 1989. [It’s] hard to say when it completely collapsed, but certainly now they are unable to arrive at a unified position. It is very easy in the West Bank to go around and interview people who are stalwarts of Fateh, who are much ruder and more critical of the Fateh leadership than anything you will hear from Hamas. So, how are they going to arrive at a unified decision on any of this stuff? Who knows?
About the PLO. The PLO is this coalition between Fateh and a bunch of other secular nationalist organizations: DFLP [Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine], PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine], PLF [Palestine Liberation Front] [and] a bunch of others. This too has just become a patronage machine. And it’s sort of poignant and sad for me because I know a lot of these people very well, and they were people who had real ideals. And in a sense, they still have real ideals. But as one of them said, “We sold our soul for the right to come back to Ramallah and that’s all we got.” You know they can’t even go from Ramallah to Jerusalem, which is what most of them would like to do. There’s this overwhelming air of sadness and “beaten downness” amongst people from these secular nationalist organizations and the idea that they’re not seeing anything come out of it. There’s no hope in this thing called the peace process, which goes on and on and on. I mean look, after the First World War, there were a lot of incredibly thorny diplomatic issues to be resolved. The very last ones were resolved by 1923, as I recall, but most of them were resolved at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. This stuff is not rocket science. I mean the idea of giving them five years from Oslo to draw the final status agreement, it was stupid. It was just a time wasting move. If you have the will in the international community to get this resolved, it could be resolved in half an hour. But we don’t have the will, and our country is a big part of the problem, obviously.
In the meantime, I’ll just give you a few snapshots, teeny-weeny snapshots of the degree of internal coherence in Hamas. I was interested because I’ve interviewed [Hamas leaders Ismail] Haniyeh and [Mahmoud] Zahar and others in Gaza. I’ve interviewed [Hamas leader in exile] Khaled Mishaal and others in Damascus. I was interested to see the state of [the] Hamas organization in the West Bank. And as it happened, I was able to interview a couple of Hamas MPs in Ramallah. I had a wonderful sort of session that happened quite serendipitously in the mayor’s office in Bethlehem. In Bethlehem, the mayor is a PFLP guy, but they have five Fateh members on the city council. And so, you were sitting in the mayor’s office and there are Hamas council members and there are Fateh council members and everybody is sitting around and they’re talking about things together. That was interesting to see that quality of those relationships among those guys because otherwise you might get this idea that Fateh and Hamas are fighting to the death in the West Bank. That’s not the case. It’s a very multi-textured relationship, if you like.
And then, I interviewed these two Hamas MPs in Hebron. First of all, of the four MPs that I interviewed back at the beginning of the month, three have subsequently been rearrested by Israel. Did we hear a peep from our democratic president in this country? I guess the answer is no. It’s hard to keep count because they keep arresting people. And then they let a few out and give them a taste of freedom. It’s not freedom. The way they describe it themselves, they free you from the small prison and you go into the big prison, which is Hebron. But you get to see your family and your friends and to eat falafel and then they take you back in. So, maybe there’s a sort of good cop, bad cop thing going on there. Here’s what struck me is how unified the message was amongst all these people--disciplined, well argued, courteous. The ones in Hebron would not shake my hand as a woman. The ones in Ramallah would. Big deal--that’s about as much of a difference as I could find amongst these people.
I would make an appointment to interview one of them and there would always be more than one there. And I’ve noticed this with Hamas. You know, I’m a Quaker. It’s the way Quakers do things usually. If you go on a Quaker mission someplace, two of you go. It makes sense. It’s just like you can back each other up. Seeing them interact amongst themselves, [there’s] no clear hierarchy. I go into the interview, there’s two people answering the questions. They defer to each other. There’s no, “Yes sir,” “No sir,” “Let him speak.” In one of the interviews, the one in Hebron, somebody else came in, another local political figure from Hamas. In fact, they let him speak even more. It was interesting. Very good quality of relations amongst them. So, those are just a few little observations. It builds on what I already know about Hamas, that this is an incredibly disciplined organization. You don’t need the comparison with Fateh. But when you have the comparison with Fateh, it’s even more startling.
They have systematically and intentionally worked since the days of [Hamas founder] Sheikh Ahmed Yassin’s first organizing to build up successor generations. And you see this on their website. You see it in everything they do. They’re always introducing new faces to the public. Sadly, most of them are male but occasionally female like the four women MPs that they have who are occasionally featured on their website. And this has made them so resilient; resilient against these successive waves of decapitation to which they have been subjected, especially earlier in this decade when they wiped out Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, [Hamas leaders] Abdel Aziz Rantisi and Salah Shehade and just scores of top leaders. But the organization continues, and it continues for two reasons. One--because they decided, very smartly, to move the leadership outside. Although, they did try to kill Khaled Mishaal in Amman, but that was before he was the leader. And secondly--because they have this focus on raising the next generation of leaders, which, of course, is what is missing [in] Fateh. The Fateh leaders, obviously a lot of them, the historic ones have died in the 20 years since the Congress. They can’t decide who should be at the Congress because they haven’t really paid any attention to leadership development amongst the successor generations--[a] very big problem for them.
I’ll leave you with three points. The first one is the rising importance of the Jerusalem issue. I’ve been writing about this a little bit. But I want to stress that it is not just an abstract issue of an item on the agenda or not on the agenda, as [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu would no doubt prefer for it not to be on the diplomatic agenda. Jerusalem is an issue of 270,000 people living in horrendous fear--the Palestinians of East Jerusalem. They are really embattled. I went and did this interview with this wonderful woman, Um Kamel El Kurd. She and her aging and infirmed husband were kicked out of their house at 3:30 a.m. back in November. They then moved into a tent on the lot next door. This was so that settlers can move in. This is deep in the Palestinian area of Sheikh Jarrah. Her husband then died. She carried on living in the tent. And now, they’ve got tents outside Silwan where the people are being threatened with home demolitions and are having home demolitions. There are tents in Gaza. She’s living in a tent because she wants to be close to where she lived, but it’s also a very potent symbol. It connects what’s happening in Palestine today, in Gaza, in Jerusalem with 1948. Learn all you can about Jerusalem and think what you can do to help the situation of the Palestinians there as well as get the issue, the diplomatic issue, resolved.
Secondly, I don’t want to leave you with a completely bleak picture of Jewish Israeli society. There are significant new trends, teeny-weeny little trends, but we have to take our hope from where we can get it in Israeli Jewish society. I met with some people from an organization called Zochrot. I don’t know how many of you know about this. Zochrot is a Jewish-Israeli organization whose mission is to do al-Nakba education amongst their fellow Jewish Israelis. And I urge you to go and find out about them. They do really interesting things like Canada Park. They aren’t just looking at the Nakba of 1948 like many people who look at this issue. They look at the Nakba as kind of continuous. So, they’ll go to the ruins of a destroyed Arab village whether it’s from 1948 or 1967. As you drive around Israel, you can recognize the ruins of most of the destroyed Arab villages. They will do research--here was the school, here was the mosque, here was the cemetery, here was the home of the baker. They do quite a lot of research on what the village was like, and they have people who work with them in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon who will find survivors of the Nakba from that village. On one occasion, they took pictures of these old men and women in Ein el-Hilweh camp, blew them up to life size and took them and placed the picture in the ruins of the village and then invited people to come and discuss the issue there. And they produced beautiful books.
Zochrot gets a lot of support from Europe, but it hasn’t gotten any, as far as I know, from this country. I think that’s an organization that we should know more about. To me, the idea of doing al-Nakba education amongst Jewish Israelis, like the guy says, Eitan Bronstein, who’s running it, “It’s not easy, but it’s very important", because otherwise you have whole generations of Israelis who only became Israelis within the last 20 years. They get a lot of Holocaust education so that connects them with Jewish history. The older generation of Israelis that were there in 1948 essentially know what happened in 1948, whether they want to talk about it or not. But the newer Israelis have no idea what happened in 1948.
I’ll just leave you with this little political idea. Fateh, as I sketched out, is currently unable to make a decision about anything. If the PA-Oslo project is to be saved, then only Hamas can save it. Actually, [Ha’aertz journalist] Amira Hass wrote something to this effect the other day, but I reached the conclusion before she published that. We should not underestimate the importance within Hamas of the decision they made in 2005 to participate in the elections, which marked a strategic shift for them. But how long they will stay on this path of participating in PA projects and essentially propping them up, we don’t know. Only Hamas can save the two-state solution, and therefore only Hamas can ensure the survival of Israel as a Jewish state. That’s another irony. I signal this. This is an irony. But how long will Hamas continue to buy into the PA project, that is in a sense the great unknown.
Thank you.
Helena Cobban is a writer and researcher who has worked on Palestinian issues since 1974. She worked for The Christian Science Monitor for many years, first as a reporter and later as a columnist. Over the past decade, Ms. Cobban has written extensively in The Boston Review on her long-maintained blog, 'Just World News', and elsewhere on developments in Israel and Palestine.
This transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.
