Tag: Palestine

The recent hostilities between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank have been presented in the media as a sort of small-scale Palestinian civil war, ending (for now) with a Hamas coup in the Gaza Strip.

It is far more accurate to understand it as a failed coup attempt against the elected government by US-sponsored gangs in Gaza — “the Palestinian Contras” as Ali Abunimah puts it. Chief among their leaders was Gaza warlord Mohammed Dahlan, who earned the contempt of Hamas during the Oslo years with round-ups and torture of their activists.

Furthermore, it’s not only Hamas who sees things this way. Hani al-Hassan, one of the founders of the Fatah movement recently supported this view during an interview with al-Jazeera TV. In the current Al-Ahram weekly, veteran Palestinian journalist Khaled Amayreh reports from Ramallah that: “He argued that the recent showdown in Gaza was not a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas but one between Hamas and the Dahlan faction. Referring to Dahlan’s supporters as ‘the Dayton group’, a reference to the American General Keith Dayton who was in charge of arming and financing the former Gaza strongman, Al-Hassan said that Hamas had to do what it did in order to protect the overall national cause”. After he spoke out, al-Hassan’s house was shot at by unknown gunmen.

US backing of Dahlan via General Dayton is a matter of record as reported in the New York Times on the 18th of May:

Israel has made no secret of backing Fatah and attacking only Hamas targets. When a Fatah leader, Muhammad Dahlan, needed to bring in reinforcements on Tuesday — a brigade of guards undergoing training in Egypt — Israel made sure in a widely publicized move that the Rafah bordere crossing would be open to admit them.

The training of the guards is being supervised under an American program devised by the American security coordinator, Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, which is being financed by some $40 million from Congress and more from Western allies.

There is currently a theory popular those among Palestinian supporters of Fatah, who nevertheless recognise that Dahlan and his ilk are US stooges — those that Hamas refers to as “genuine Fatah” and that a Palestinian friend of mine calls “the Fatah of the first intifada”. The theory goes that Palestinian President, and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas actually conspired with Hamas to rid Gaza of Dahlan, since the violent chaos his armed gangs caused there was (presumably) becoming too much of an embarrassment. Once it succeeded, and Hamas by default ended up in control of the whole of Gaza, Abbas then turned on Hamas and used it as an excuse to dismiss the democratically elected government and install a government comprised of his and the US government’s favourites.

Whether or not this part is true (that Abbas wanted rid of Dahlan), the fact that Fatah-tending people in the West Bank believe it shows just how unrepresentative Dahlan and his gangs are. But a story published in Israel’s most popular paper Yedioth Ahronoth yesterday, that the PA emergency government has confiscated millions of dollars from Dahlan would seem to support the theory.

Also well worth reading is this op-ed on YA about Israel’s hypocrisy when it claims to want “Palestinian democracy” whilst saying it supports Abbas. It is worth remembering (as most media reports about the “new” government seem to forget or ignore) that this government is, according to Palestinian law, only supposed to be an “emergency government,” lasting one month.

Let’s see what anti-democratic steps are taken to extend it when this runs out…

I was thinking of writing something on the re-invasion of Gaza (and I still might) but, really, Gideon Levy says most of what needs to be said in today’s Ha’aretz.

——

“A Black Flag”

by Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 2nd July 2006

A black flag hangs over the “rolling” operation in Gaza. The more the operation “rolls,” the darker the flag becomes. The “summer rains” we are showering on Gaza are not only pointless, but are first and foremost blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to penetrate Syria’s airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a quarter of a parliament.

A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror organization. The harsher the steps, the more monstrous and stupid they become, the more the moral underpinnings for them are removed and the stronger the impression that the Israeli government has lost its nerve. Now one must hope that the weekend lull, whether initiated by Egypt or the prime minister, and in any case to the dismay of Channel 2’s Roni Daniel and the IDF, will lead to a radical change.

Continue reading Gideon Levy: “A Black Flag”

I came across this cartoon on the ISM Canada website. I’m posting it here, because it sums up so well what is incorrect with the image most people have of Israel’s Wall. It is NOT a “separation barrier” built between Israelis and Palestinians. It is an annexation barrier, the vast majority of which is built or is being built within Palestine. The primary aim of this project is to take more land away from Palestinians and add it to the state of Israel. For a long time, the Israeli government denied this, and claimed it was “only for security”, and that the route of the Wall could be moved in the event of a final status agreement. To anyone on the ground suffering from the effects, this was a transpartent lie. It is now conceded by high Israeli officials (including Tzipi Livni) that the Wall is going to be “the border”, within the framework of “convergence”.

Still, the cartoon is not the whole picture. It would be more acurate to show a series of fences being built within the Palestinian house, separating the mother from the father, from the children. Because this is what is being done – Palestinians are being divided into isolated, unliveable ghettos. Consulting some of the various maps available, demonstrates this plainly. Palestinian Reservations, modeled on the North American manifest destiny example are the ultimate aim.

So, what can we do to stop this? From outside, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign (similar to that of the boycott of apartheid era South Africa) is, in my judgement, one of few hopes left for any kind of future for Palestine. This article by a British academic who worked in Beirzeit University (near Ramallah, in the West Bank) during the early 80s, brilliantly argues for the academic boycott, and speaks from first hand experience about the denial of academic freedom that Israel routinely enforces on Palestinians. This article by a friend of mine is a good summary of the current state of the campaign.

On the 24th of May the Israeli army invaded the West Bank city of Ramallah, my current home. In the middle of the day, undercover Israeli forces performed an “arrest operation” on a Palestinian militant in the centre of Ramallah. When their cover was blown, a large force of Israeli soldiers were sent in so that they could shoot their way out of the city past the angry crowds of Palestinians that had assembled. The Palestinian fighters were, for the most part, nowhere to be seen during the invasion. It was left to crowds of youths to defend the city from this act of aggression, using whatever came to hand. Stones, tins of paint, scrap metal – all of it was thrown at the soldier’s jeeps from the rooftops of Ramallah. In the course of events, the Israeli army martyred three civilians and one Policeman (who was apparently unarmed at the time) and injured about thirty others, shooting rubber-coated and live ammunition at the crowds of civilians. In this act of war, Israel violated the entirely one-way ceasefire that Hamas and all the other armed Palestinian factions (apart from Islamic Jihad) had been sticking to since February 2005, despite regular Israeli military operations and killings in the Palestinian territories.

Continue reading Ethnic Cleansing in Slow-Motion