‘Arabs’ saved us, says settler boy whose father was slain

July 7, 2016, Mondoweiss http://mondoweiss.net (USA)             

In rare twist, Palestinian man rescues wounded Israelis

Rabbi Mark's car after he was killed 

in terror attack in occupied territories

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) 5 July — Just a few years ago, Islam al-Bayed spent seven months in an Israeli prison for allegedly throwing stones at Israeli troops. Now, the 26-year-old Palestinian man has become an unlikely symbol of tolerance after rescuing an Israeli family whose car crashed following a deadly roadside shooting by Palestinian militants in the West Bank. Last week’s shooting, along with the fatal stabbing of an Israeli girl as she slept in her bed, have ratcheted up tensions in the southern West Bank. Israel has responded by imposing a closure around the city of Hebron and beefed up its troop presence in the volatile area. But al-Bayed, a private security guard who lives in the al-Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron, says his actions last Friday transcended politics. “This was a very human moment. I didn’t think of the occupation or

ADMISSION DE LA PALESTINE A L’ONU - LETTRE AUX PRESIDENTS DE REGIONS DE FRANCE METROPOLITAINE

23 février 2012, Association France Palestine Solidarité http://www.france-palestine.org (France)

Paris le 21 février 2012

Monsieur le Président,

Le 23 septembre 2011, le Président de l’Organisation de Libération de la Palestine, Monsieur Mahmoud ABBAS a remis solennellement à Monsieur Ban Ki-moon, Secrétaire général de l’ONU une demande d’admission de l’État de Palestine aux Nations Unies.

Le discours qu’il a prononcé à cette occasion devant l’Assemblée Générale a eu un retentissement international

Depuis cette date, si l’adhésion à l’UNESCO a été prononcée avec un vote positif de la France, la question de l’admission à l’ONU est toujours en suspens et l’OLP maintient sa demande d’admission en tant qu’État à part entière, dans les frontières de 1967 avec Jérusalem-Est comme capitale selon les résolutions de l’ONU.

Cette question est de la plus grande importance.

Sans résoudre naturellement toutes les questions auxquelles sont confrontés les peuples pales-tinien et israélien, cela permettrait, et ce serait considérable, d’amorcer politiquement une sortie de l’impasse actuelle des "négociations" impossibles et stériles en posant l’ensemble des para-mètres d’une négociation future, entre deux États, sur des bases clairement édictées par la communauté internationale et non plus de manière unilatérale.

La France en tant que membre permanent du Conseil de Sécurité a, nous le pensons, un rôle d’entraînement à jouer.

Malheureusement, à ce jour, le gouvernement français a fait part de son intention de ne pas voter positivement pour cette admission en renvoyant les parties à des négociations préalables. Celles-ci viennent de se tenir et ne débouchent sur rien du fait de la colonisation israélienne illégale, en particulier à Jérusalem-Est. Les Chefs de mission des 27 pays membres de l’UE ont souligné ce point avec une certaine gravité.

Le droit d’avoir un État est un droit fondamental pour le peuple palestinien - 64 ans après que l’État israélien ait été créé et reconnu - et la pleine réalisation de ce droit ne saurait être indéfiniment subordonné à l’aboutissement de négociations bilatérales impossibles - une longue expérience le montre - avec la puissance occupante.

Il nous paraît indispensable de mobiliser toutes les forces démocratiques, soucieuses de l’application du droit, pour conduire le gouvernement français à revoir sa position. A l’Assemblée nationale comme au Sénat les groupes socialistes, en particulier, ont déposé des résolutions en ce sens qui sont limpides.

C’est dans ce sens que nous souhaitons que votre Assemblée soumette au débat et au vote de ses membres un vœu appelant la France à reconnaître l’État de Palestine et à donner une suite favorable à la requête de l’OLP pour son admission à l’ONU.

À titre d’information, nous vous indiquons qu’à notre connaissance, trois Conseil régionaux ont pris une délibération dans ce sens : Pays de la Loire, Franche-Comté et Poitou-Charentes.

Dans l’attente de votre réponse que nous espérons positive,
Nous vous prions d’agréer, Monsieur le Président, l’expression de notre considération distinguée.

Jean-Claude Lefort
Président

Grave matters: Israel violates Muslim religious lands

20 December 2011, Alternative Information Center (AIC)
http://www.alternativenews.org (Israel)

Mya Guarnieri

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denounced the recent rash of desecration and vandalism of mosques and Muslim cemeteries. But the destruction of Muslim religious properties in Israel is, in fact, institutionalized and has a long and sometimes shocking history

(A shattered headstone at the Sheikh Murad cemetery in South Tel Aviv/Photo: Mya Guarnieri)

Jewish settlers torched a mosque near Ramallah, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on December 15.

Earlier that week, Jewish rightists set fire to a mosque in Jerusalem. They scrawled graffiti on the walls reading “Mohammed is a pig,” and “A good Arab is a dead Arab.” Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat condemned the desecration of the religious site. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did the same in October when a mosque was burned in the north of the country.

“The images are shocking and do not belong in the state of Israel,” Netanyahu said.

When Muslim and Christian cemeteries were vandalized that same month, Netanyahu spoke out again—remarking that Israel would not “tolerate vandalism, especially not the kind that would offend religious sensibilities.”

But such statements belie the Israeli government’s long-standing attitude towards Muslim religious properties or waqf. Meaning literally endowment, waqf and income from waqf serves a charitable purpose for one’s family or community. Under Ottoman rule, waqf properties were exempt from taxes.

Following the 1947-1948 nakba, which saw some 700,000 Palestinians driven from their homes, Israel used its newly created Absentees’ Property Law to seize, among other things, waqf.

In Jaffa, alone, “There was a huge amount of waqf,” says Sami Abu Shehadeh, head of Jaffa’s Popular Committee against Home Demolitions and a PhD candidate in history. “I’m talking about hundreds of shops; I’m talking about tens of thousands of dunams of land; I’m talking about all the mosques…and there were all the cemeteries, too.”

Jaffa was renamed Yafo in 1948 and was annexed by the Tel Aviv municipality between 1948 and 1949. Most of the mosques were closed and several later became Jewish-owned art galleries.

In 2007, attorney Hisham Shabaita, three other Palestinian residents of Jaffa, and a local human rights organization, filed a lawsuit against the state of Israel, the Custodian of Absentee Property, and the Jewish Israeli trustees responsible for administering Tel Aviv-Yafo’s waqf holdings. The plaintiffs didn’t ask for the land back. Nor did they request compensation. They simply wanted to know what had happened to the properties, what their estimated earnings were, and where the money was going or had gone.

The court’s response? The information cannot be released because it apparently would embarrass the state, harming its reputation in the international community. The plaintiffs have filed an appeal and the case is expected to reach the Israeli Supreme Court.

But it’s not hard to guess what happened to the waqf properties, in part because the state admitted that all of the land had been sold. There are other clues: in the 1950s alone, the state demolished 1200 mosques. Later, the Hilton hotel, which stands in an area now known as north Tel Aviv, was built on a Muslim cemetery. Bodies were unearthed and relocated, stacked upon each other in a tiny corner of what was once a large graveyard.

Another Muslim cemetery became a parking lot for Tel Aviv University.

There are also the forgotten corners, properties the state appropriated and then neglected. The Sheikh Murad cemetery, which dates back to at least the 1800s, stands between the South Tel Aviv neighborhoods of Shapira and Kiryat Shalom. Its headstones were smashed by vandals years ago. Bits of marble have been pried off the graves, presumably for use or sale.

Locals have dumped garbage on the grounds and, the last time I checked in on the cemetery—not long after Muslim and Christian graves were vandalized in Yafo—two men were shooting heroin under the shade of a pomegranate tree. Fruit rotted on the ground.

Abu Shehadeh says that the local Islamic committee is building a fence around the cemetery in hopes of protecting it from further misuse. He adds that only Palestinian collaborators with Israel, who are often relocated to South Tel Aviv, have been buried in the graveyard since 1948.

The Jewish neighborhoods Kiryat Shalom and Kfar Shalem both stand on the land of the Palestinian village Salame, which was established before the 1596 Ottoman census. According to Abu Shehadeh, a number of Muslim cemeteries were destroyed to make way to house the country’s new occupants.

And then there’s Jerusalem.

With the approval of the Jerusalem municipality, the Simon Wiesenthal Center is building a “Museum of Tolerance” on a Muslim graveyard. Excavations are taking place at the site, which has served as a been a parking lot for several decades now, and skeletons are being exhumed so that the Los Angeles-headquartered, “global Jewish human rights” organization can teach tourists a thing or two about co-existence.

Sergio Yahni of the Alternative Information Center, an Israeli-Palestinian non-governmental organization, explained that much of Jewish West Jerusalem is built on waqf.

“One of the most striking demolitions [on land designated as waqf,” he continues, “was made [in the Old City] during the 1967 war. [Israeli forces] didn’t take care [to see] if people were out of the houses...[in some cases] they brought the buildings down on people.”

Several Palestinians who disappeared from the Old City during the war were believed to be killed during the demolitions.

This occurred in the area adjacent to the Al Aqsa Mosque. Some eighty percent of the Old City’s Jewish Quarter is built on waqf.

Jewish Israeli leaders and journalists have expressed alarm at the recent rash of vandalism and arson that has damaged Muslim religious sites and racheted up tensions between Jews and Arabs. But, in light of the fact that the government itself has perpetrated such violence against Muslim properties for over 60 years, the surprise is misplaced, at best. At worst, it is a disingenuous attempt to relieve the state of its responsibility by pointing the finger at “extremists.”

A shorter version of this article was originally published in Al Akhbar.

ALVOS CIVIS E ARMAS TÓXICAS: MAIS CRIMES EM GAZA

3 Setembro 2011, Carta Maior http://www.cartamaior.com.br (Brasil)

Baby Siqueira Abrão

Israel admitiu ter usado fósforo branco em 2006, contra o Líbano, e em 2008-2009, em Gaza. O problema é ainda mais grave porque vários metais muito tóxicos foram acrescentados às bombas de fósforo branco. Além de ferir, mutilar e matar pessoas no momento em que são aspirados ou tocam a pele, esses metais produzem mutações genéticas.

Data: 26/08/2011

A nova investida do governo israelense na Faixa de Gaza levanta algumas questões muito importantes. A primeira é o ataque a alvos civis, segundo documentou o Centro de Direitos Humanos Al-Mezan, de Gaza. Mísseis foram atirados diretamente sobre transeuntes e motoristas, matando-os e matando quem estava por perto. “Trata-se de execução sumária”, protestou o Al-Mezan. Casas, armazéns, plantações, sedes de ONGs e até uma estação de saneamento foram parcial ou totalmente destruídas.

Dessa vez, o primeiro ministro de Israel, Benjamin Netanyhau, foi obrigado a reconhecer que suas forças armadas tinham passado do limite ao recomendar “ataques cirúrgicos” a alvos “militares”. Ele se referia a residências de líderes e campos de treinamento das brigadas palestinas que costumam lançar foguetes Qassam, de fabricação caseira, no sul de Israel. Se até Netanyhau, conhecido pelas posições extremistas e as soluções de força, fez esse tipo de indicação, imagine-se o caos em que se encontra a faixa costeira palestina.

A segunda questão diz respeito às substâncias químicas com que Israel fabrica bombas e mísseis atirados contra a população palestina.

Recentemente, líderes do comitê de luta popular de Al-Wallajah, vila de refugiados próxima a Belém, denunciaram o uso de um tipo de arma desconhecido, de cor preta e tamanho menor do que os cânisters comumente utilizados pelo exército sionista, que liberou um gás muito forte. Esses mesmos líderes viram os soldados israelenses pegarem os cilindros protegidos com luvas grossas e papelão. “É óbvio que eles não quiseram deixar nenhum cânister no terreno, para evitar que descobríssemos que substâncias havia ali dentro”, afirmou Mazin Qumsieh, ativista de direitos humanos e professor da Universidade de Belém.

No primeiro dia de 2011, elementos químicos desconhecidos misturados ao gás pimenta mataram Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 35, pacifista da vila de Bil’in, a 17 quilômetros de Ramallah, na Cisjordânia. Ela sofreu asfixia, ficou inconsciente e foi levada ao hospital, onde faleceu. Médicos que a atenderam desconfiaram de que, pelo conjunto de sintomas que Jawaher apresentou, e pela devastação orgânica causada pelo gás, possivelmente havia fósforo branco misturado a ele. O fósforo branco causa queimaduras profundas dentro e fora do corpo, e pode matar ao ser inalado. Seu poder tóxico e letal levou à proibição de seu uso pelas Convenções de Genebra.

Em 15 de maio deste ano, dia em que os palestinos rememoram a Nakba (catástrofe) – processo em que seu território foi tomado pelos sionistas de maneira violenta, por grupos paramilitares como Irgun e Stern –, os médicos do hospital de Ramallah alertaram para efeitos desconhecidos em ativistas atingidos por bombas de gás pimenta. Houve tontura, sangramento, confusão mental e paralisia temporária. Menos de uma semana depois eu mesma experimentei sintomas parecidos. Quando os soldados começaram a atirar bombas em nossa direção, na manifestação semanal de Bil’in, identifiquei um cheiro diferente, muito mais forte do que o gás costumeiro, e de imediato senti a cabeça pesar. Durante uma semana tive tonturas, cambaleei e fui tomada por um sono intenso, que me fazia dormir dias inteiros. Alertei outros manifestantes, e então soube que alguns – os mais expostos ao gás, como eu – haviam sofrido sintomas semelhantes aos meus.

Israel admitiu ter usado fósforo branco em 2006, contra o Líbano, e em 2008-2009, em Gaza. O problema é ainda mais grave porque vários metais muito tóxicos foram acrescentados às bombas de fósforo branco. Além de ferir, mutilar e matar pessoas no momento em que são aspirados ou tocam a pele, esses metais produzem mutações genéticas. Mais: ao contaminar o solo, o ar, a água e as construções, eles têm efeitos, a médio e longo prazos, ainda não estabelecidos. E sua mistura pode potencializar os danos.

Um dos metais utilizados é o urânio, radioativo, utilizado em usinas nucleares e na produção de bombas atômicas. Sua vida útil é de cerca de 4,5 bilhões de anos (urânio 238) e aproximadamente 700 milhões de anos (urânio 235).

Em Gaza, tecidos retirados de ferimentos das vítimas foram analisados e os resultados, divulgados em 11 de maio de 2010 pelo New Weapons Committee (NWRG), grupo de pesquisadores, acadêmicos e profissionais de mídia que estuda os efeitos das novas tecnologias de guerra. A mídia corporativa, como é de praxe, não noticiou. Com exceção de especialistas e pesquisadores, poucas pessoas souberam da existência dessa pesquisa e de seus resultados.

A nova investida de Israel em Gaza foi analisada por especialistas da NWRG com base em imagens de feridos transmitidas por uma estação de TV de Gaza em 19 de agosto de 2011. “Parece que estamos vendo as mesmas armas usadas em 2008”, concluíram os especialistas. Veja também: http://youtu.be/F9Oeo54lmtc (mas atenção: contém imagens fortes).

Leia, a seguir, a tradução do release do MWRG, feita por mim quando de seu lançamento. É aterrador. O original em inglês pode ser encontrado em http://www.newweapons.org/?q=node/113 e em http://www.newweapons.org/files/20100511pressrelease_eng.pdf. Os destaques são nossos.

“Metais tóxicos e cancerígenos, capazes de produzir mutações genéticas, foram encontrados nos tecidos dos feridos em Gaza durante as operações militares israelenses de 2006 e 2009. A pesquisa foi realizada em ferimentos provocados por armas que não deixam fragmentos nos corpos das vítimas, uma particularidade apontada pelos médicos em Gaza. Isso mostra que foram utilizadas armas experimentais, cujos efeitos ainda são desconhecidos.

Os pesquisadores compararam 32 elementos presentes nos tecidos utilizando o ICP/MS, um tipo de espectrometria de massa altamente sensível. O trabalho, realizado pelos laboratórios da Universidade Sapienza de Roma (Itália), da Universidade de Chalmers (Suécia) e da Universidade de Beirute (Líbano), foi coordenado pelo New Weapons Research Group (NWRG), comitê independente de cientistas e especialistas na Itália que estuda o uso de armas não convencionais e seus efeitos de médio prazo sobre a população de áreas atingidas por guerras. A presença de substâncias tóxicas e cancerígenas nos metais encontrados nos ferimentos é relevante e indica riscos diretos para os sobreviventes, além da possibilidade de contaminação ambiental.

Biópsias dos tecidos foram feitas pelos médicos do hospital Shifa, da cidade de Gaza, que selecionaram e classificaram os tipos de ferimentos. A pesquisa foi realizada em 16 amostras de tecidos, pertencentes a 13 vítimas. Quatro biópsias foram levadas a efeito em junho de 2006, durante a operação "Chuvas de verão", ao passo que as outras aconteceram na primeira semana de janeiro de 2009, durante a operação "Cast lead".

Todos os tecidos foram devidamente preservados e, em seguida, analisados pelas três universidades, separadamente.

Alguns dos elementos encontrados são cancerígenos (mercúrio, arsênio, cádmio, cromo, níquel e urânio); outros são potencialmente carcinogênicos (cobalto e vanádio); e há também substâncias que contaminam fetos (alumínio, cobre, bário, chumbo e manganês). Os primeiros podem produzir mutações genéticas, os segundos podem ter o mesmo efeito em animais (ainda não há comprovação em seres humanos), os terceiros têm efeitos tóxicos sobre pessoas e podem afetar também o embrião ou o feto em mulheres grávidas. Todos os metais, encontrados em quantidades elevadas, têm efeitos patogênicos em humanos, danificando os órgãos respiratórios, o rim, a pele, o desenvolvimento e as funções sexuais e neurológicas.

Paola Manduca, porta-voz do New Weapons Research Group, professora e pesquisadora de genética da Universidade de Gênova, comentou: ‘Ninguém ainda realizara análises bióticas em amostras de tecido de feridas. Concentramos nossos estudos nos ferimentos provocados por armas que, segundo os médicos de Gaza, não deixam fragmentos. Queríamos verificar a presença de metais na pele e na derme. Suspeitava-se que esses metais estivessem presentes nesse tipo de armas [que não deixam fragmentos], mas isso nunca tinha sido demonstrado. Para nossa surpresa, mesmo as queimaduras provocadas por fósforo branco contêm alta quantidade de metais. Além disso, a presença desses metais nas armas implica que eles se dispersaram no ambiente, em quantidades e com alcance desconhecidos, e foram inalados pelas vítimas e por aqueles que testemunharam os ataques. Portanto, constituem um risco para os sobreviventes e para as pessoas que não foram diretamente atingidas pelo bombardeio’.

A pesquisa segue dois estudos anteriores conduzidos pelo NWRG. O primeiro foi publicado em 17 de dezembro de 2009 e estabeleceu a presença de metais tóxicos em áreas ao redor das crateras provocadas pelo bombardeio israelense na Faixa de Gaza. O último foi publicado em 17 de março de 2010 e apontou a presença de metais tóxicos em amostras de cabelo de crianças palestinas de Gaza. Ambos apontam para a presença de contaminação ambiental, agravada pelas condições de vida naquele território, que propiciam o contato direto com o solo e, muitas vezes, a vida em abrigos expostos ao vento e à poeira, devido à impossibilidade de reconstruir as moradias, imposta pelo bloqueio israelense a Gaza, que impede a entrada de materiais de construção e das ferramentas necessárias para a reconstrução das casas.”

Trata-se de limpeza étnica, sem dúvida, a médio e a longo prazos. Daqui a bilhões de anos Gaza ainda sofrerá os efeitos dessas substâncias. Haverá alguém lá para testemunhar a tragédia?

Atualização:
O médico Ayman Al-Sahbani, do hospital de Shifa, em Gaza, denunciou em 26 de agosto que as armas usadas pelo exército israelense nos ataques dos últimos dias são piores do que as utilizadas na Operação Cast Lead (2008-2009). A denúncia, feita a Julie Webb-Pullman, de Scoop Independent News: "Queremos que o mundo tome conhecimento do que está acontecendo em Gaza. Precisamos saber que armas são essas. Temos aqui [no hospital] vinte crianças com ferimentos que eu nunca tinha visto, nem mesmo na Operação Cast Lead, quando vi pela primeira vez as queimaduras deixadas pelo fósforo branco. As armas de agora são ainda piores, causam queimaduras terríveis, despedaçam pés, pernas, mãos, enchem os corpos com centenas de pequenos pedaços de metal".

(original em http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1108/S00321/gaza-why-is-the-question-my-son-asks-me-dr-al-sahbani.htm)

ANTI-ARAB SENTIMENT IN ISRAEL

18 August 2011, The Electronic Intifada http://electronicintifada.net (USA)

Video survey: Racism rampant among Israeli youth

Eli Ungar-Sargon

Over the past three years, my wife Pennie and I have been working on a documentary film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During our second production trip to the region, one of the many remarkable people we encountered was Uri Davis. He is one of a handful of Israelis who has built a life for himself among the Palestinians of the West Bank. This made him a very interesting subject for our film, which examines the practical and moral failings of the two-state solution.

During our interview with Davis, one of the questions we asked was whether he had encountered any anti-Semitism in the West Bank. The question was motivated by a desire on our part to address a narrative — prevalent among American and Israeli Jews — which claims that anti-Semitism is an obvious feature of Palestinian culture.

As these two groups are an important part of our target audience, we felt that it was our responsibility to address this perception. Who better to ask about the veracity of this narrative than a Jew living among Palestinians? Davis answered by saying that although Palestinian anti-Semitism does exist, it is a marginal phenomenon, while anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis is a mainstream phenomenon. Shortly after the interview, it occurred to us that we could either substantiate or disprove Davis’s provocative statement with our cameras.

We began our survey in February 2011 and completed it in early March. On the Israeli side, we interviewed a total of 250 Jewish Israelis in Haifa, Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Jerusalem and Beersheba. For this part of the survey I conducted the interviews myself from behind the camera in Hebrew. On the Palestinian side, we interviewed a total of 250 Palestinians in Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Hebron. (Despite multiple attempts, we were unable to procure permission to enter the Gaza Strip.) Here, we collaborated with local journalist Mohammad Jaradat who, using my questions, conducted the interviews in Arabic.

The questions we asked pertained to a number of sensitive political topics and the idea was to get people to talk long enough to detect if there was any racism at play in their answers. In sociological terms, we were engaged in qualitative analysis, but unlike typical qualitative interviews, we spent minutes, not hours with our subjects. Our survey is not exhaustive and our method was very simple. We went to public places and asked people to talk to us on camera. In designing the questions, I set out to distinguish actual racism from conflict-based animosity. That is, to allow for the possibility that Israelis might exhibit animosity towards Palestinians without being racist and to allow the same on the Palestinian side in reverse.

The very first question we asked of Jewish Israelis was the extremely broad “What do you think about Arabs?” It is only reasonable to expect that people who harbor anti-Arab sentiment would mask their feelings when answering such a direct question on camera. Most people responded to this question with some variation of “They are people,” although we were surprised that a sizable minority used the opportunity to launch into anti-Arab diatribes.

One of the most disturbing trends that we noticed was the strong correlation between age and anti-Arab sentiment. The majority of Israeli teenagers that we spoke to expressed unabashed and open racism towards Arabs. Statements like “I hate them,” or “they should all be killed” were common in this age group.

When looking over the data, we divided the respondents into three groups: those who were neutral about Arabs; those who were positive about them; and those who expressed negative attitudes. Amongst the responses, 60 percent were neutral, 25 percent negative and 15 percent positive.

Rights misunderstood
Interestingly, some of the same people who answered the first question by saying that Arabs are people, went on to say that they wouldn’t be willing to live next door to them. Internal inconsistencies of this nature cropped up in many of the interviews and it is for this reason that we reserved our overall judgment on the prevalence of anti-Arab sentiment until all of the answers were tabulated. Our results show that 71 percent were willing to live next door to Arab neighbors, while 24 percent were unwilling. Five percent failed to answer this question with either a “yes” or a “no.”

It should be noted that the Israel Democracy Institute received dramatically different numbers in response to the above question. In its 2010 survey, it found that 46 percent of Jewish Israelis were unwilling to live next door to an Arab. The implication of this discrepancy is that our survey sample was much less anti-Arab than the population at large.

When it came to equal rights, a clear majority of our respondents answered that they felt it was important for Arab citizens of the state of Israel to enjoy equal rights. Upon review of the data, one of the significant trends that emerged in these answers was the recurrent use of the phrase “rights and responsibilities.” Many people openly resented the fact that most Arab citizens of the state don’t perform military service and argued that Arabs should only have equal rights if they are held to the same responsibilities as Jews. This response demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the very concept of rights, but it was prevalent enough that we felt it justified its own category. We called this category “conditional.” Of these responses, 64 percent were in favor of equal rights, 16 percent were opposed and 20 percent were in favor of conditional rights.

Once again, we saw a clear discrepancy from the Israel Democracy Institute numbers, which showed that 46 percent of Israelis were opposed to full and equal rights for Arab citizens of the state.

Democracy for Jews only?
Israel defines itself as a “Jewish democracy” but we were interested in discovering which part of that definition is more important to Jewish Israelis. We went about doing this by asking: “What’s more important: that Israel be a Jewish state or a democratic state?” What we discovered was that a clear majority of the people we spoke to felt that the Jewish character of the state was at least equally if not more important than the democratic character. There was, however, an impressive minority who were clear about the fact that it was more important to them that Israel be a democratic state. This last category represents, by a slim margin, the single largest group of our respondents: 37 percent felt that a democratic character was more important, 36 percent felt that a Jewish character was more important and 27 percent felt that both were equally important.

On the subject of the settlers, we asked a more leading question: “What do you think about the settlers? Are they an impediment to peace?” We broke the responses down into three groups: those who were neutral about the settlers; those who were positive about them; and those who expressed negativity. In this instance, answering “yes” was taken as evidence of negative feelings towards the settlers, answering “no” without qualification was taken as a neutral stance and answering “no” followed by something like “they are the heroes of the Jewish people” — a phrase that we heard a number of times — was taken as evidence of positive feelings. What we discovered was that more than 70 percent of the people we spoke to were either neutral or positive towards the settlers. Of the responses, 45 percent were neutral, 28 percent were positive and 27 percent were negative about the settlers.

Many of the people we spoke to exhibited a deep suspicion and mistrust of the Palestinian people. When asked whether it was possible to make peace with the Palestinians, less than half of our respondents answered “yes.” This is a sobering statistic for anyone invested in the peace process. It would seem that most of the people we spoke to have given up on the prospect of peace. Even among the Israelis who believed that peace is possible, a recurrent theme was “not in this generation.” Another important trend in this part of the survey was blaming the Palestinian leadership for the lack of progress in the peace process. Many of the people who answered “yes” stated that peace was possible with the Palestinian people but not with their leaders. Of the responses, 48 percent believed that peace with the Palestinians is possible, while 40 percent felt that peace is not possible. Thirteen percent failed to answer this question with either a “yes” or a “no.”

Little knowledge of one-state solution
Given the subject of our film, we were very interested in exploring people’s preferences for potential solutions to the conflict. What we noticed almost immediately was that it was very important to clarify to our respondents exactly what we meant by one state or two states. For the purposes of our survey, we defined the one-state solution as a secular democracy with equal rights on all of historic Palestine, while we defined the two-state solution as two states more or less along the lines of the 1967 boundaries, with East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state. It was important that we were able to explain exactly what we meant, because many Israelis answered one way but meant something entirely different.

For example, when asked whether they preferred the one-state solution or the two-state solution, many respondents answered that they preferred the two-state solution. But when we followed up and asked what territorial concessions they would be willing to make, these same people said that they wouldn’t agree to any concessions.
Furthermore, almost no one that we spoke to was familiar with the concept of the one-state solution. Many people even took this to mean one state for Jews only, until we clarified our meaning. When we reviewed the data from this section of the survey, we decided to break down the responses into seven different categories: one state; one state (i.e. a state for Jews only); two states; two states (i.e. without territorial concessions); either one or two states; neither one nor two states; and other. What is really fascinating about our results is that over two thirds of the people we spoke to were actively opposed to the classic two-state solution on the 1967 borders. Furthermore, there were almost as many true one-state solution supporters as there were classic two-state supporters. Amongst those we surveyed, 27 percent were true two-state supporters, 23 percent were true one state supporters, 22 percent supported neither, 16 percent were in favor of two states without territorial concessions, 6 percent were okay with either one or two states, 4 percent were in favor of one state for Jews only, and 2 percent didn’t fit into any of these categories.

Racism highest in Jerusalem
In trying to answer the question of whether anti-Arab sentiment is a mainstream phenomenon among Israelis, we looked at all of the answers and divided the data into three categories: not anti-Arab; mildly anti-Arab; and strongly anti-Arab. Once again, we allowed for the possibility that a person might exhibit animosity towards Palestinians without being anti-Arab and we did not put people into one of the anti-Arab columns simply because he or she expressed right-wing political views. So, for example, if the only evidence in an interview of anti-Arab sentiment was that the respondent said that equal rights for Arabs are conditional upon equal responsibilities, we did not put them in an anti-Arab column. However, if a respondent stated that they wouldn’t live next door to an Arab, this was sufficient to push him or her into the mildly anti-Arab column. To qualify for the strongly anti-Arab category, a respondent needed to exhibit anti-Arab sentiment in two or more answers.

Our results showed that 46 percent of our respondents were either mildly or strongly anti-Arab. When we broke these numbers down according to city, there were obvious regional differences. Jerusalem was by far the most anti-Arab of the five cities we visited, with 58 percent exhibiting some level of anti-Arab sentiment, while Haifa was the least with 32 percent. Interestingly, after Jerusalem, Tel Aviv was the city with the most anti-Arab sentiment (49 percent).

The data we gathered substantiates the idea that anti-Arab sentiment is a mainstream phenomenon in Israel. Almost half of all the Jewish Israelis we spoke to exhibited some level of anti-Arab sentiment. The single most disturbing trend that emerged was the correlation between youth and strong anti-Arab sentiment. We also learned that support for the classic two-state solution along the 1967 lines was very low among the people we spoke to. This data point was reinforced by the strong support that we saw for the settlers. Given our leading question, the fact that less than a third of respondents were willing to characterize the settlers as an impediment to peace, is further evidence that the two-state solution, as it is currently being proposed by the international community, is decidedly unpopular in Israel.

Despite the lack of knowledge about the one-state solution idea, some respondents appeared willing to consider it. Once this solution was explained to them, 22 percent preferred it and around 6 percent did not object to it. Finally, when we asked Jewish Israelis to choose between the Jewish character of the state and the democratic character, 36 percent opted for the latter. All of these results must be taken with a grain of salt.

We can report anecdotally that many of the people who refused to be interviewed told us that they wouldn’t participate, because they felt that we were part of the “leftist media.” For these reasons, we feel that it is likely, if anything, that our data underestimates the actual amount of anti-Arab sentiment in Israel.

Eli Ungar-Sargon is a documentary filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He and his wife Pennie are currently looking for translators to facilitate the data analysis on the Palestinian side of this survey. Anyone interested should email withoutaland A T gmail D O T com. To learn more about the film and see a visual representation of the data discussed in this article, please visit www.withoutaland.com

J14 MAY CHALLENGE SOMETHING EVEN DEEPER THAN THE OCCUPATION

7 August 2011, + 972 http://972mag.com (Israel)

Dimi Reider*

The social justice demonstrations have been accused of ignoring the key issue of the occupation. But their tremendous groundswell of solidarity and cooperation is slowly gnawing at something even more significant than that – the principle of separation, of which the occupation is just one exercise.

Placard citing the Tahrir slogan of "Go!" and reading "Egypt is Here" at the J14 rally. Photo: Oren Ziv, Activestills.org

One of the most impressive aspects of the J14 movement is how quickly it is snowballing, drawing more and more groups and communities into a torrent of discontent. Pouring out into the streets is everything that Israelis, of all national identities, creeds and most classes complained about for years: The climbing rents, the rising prices on fuel, the parenting costs, the free-fall in the quality of public education, the overworked, unsustainable healthcare system, the complete and utter detachment of most politicians, on most levels, from most of the nation.

All this has been obfuscated for decades by the conflict, by a perpetual state of emergency; one of the benefits from leaving the occupation outside the protests, for now, was to neutralise the entire discourse of militarist fear-mongering. Contrary to what Dahlia and Joseph wrote last week, the government so far utterly failed to convince the people military needs must come before social justice; Iran has largely vanished from the news pages, and attempts to scare Israelis with references to a possible escalation with Lebanon or the Palestinian are relegated to third, fourth and fifth places in the headlines, with the texts often written in a sarcastic tone rarely employed in Israeli media on “serious” military matters.

Over the past week, though, the Palestinians themselves have begun gaining presence in the protests; not as an external threat or exclusively as monolithic victims of a monolithic Israel, but as a part and parcel of the protest movement, with their demands to rectify injustices unique to the Palestinians organically integrating with demands made by the protests on behalf of all Israelis.

First, a tent titled “1948″ was pitched on Rothschild boulevard, housing Palestinian and Jewish activists determined to discuss Palestinian collective rights and Palestinian grievances as a legitimate part of the protests. They activists tell me the arguments are exhaustive, wild and sometimes downright strange; but unlike the ultra-right activists who tried pitching a tent calling for a Jewish Tel Aviv and hoisting homophobic signs, the 1948 tenters were not pushed out, and are fast becoming part of the fabric of this “apolitical” protest.

A few days after the 1948 tent was pitched, the council of the protests – democratically elected delegates from 40 protest camps across the country – published their list of demands, including, startlingly, two of the key social justice issues unique to the Palestinians within Israel: Sweeping recognition of unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev; and expanding the municipal borders of Palestinian towns and villages to allow for natural development. The demands chimed in perfectly with the initial drive of the protest – lack of affordable housing.

The demands chimed in perfectly with the initial drive of the protest – lack of affordable housing. Neither issue has ever been included in the list of demands of a national, non-sectarian movement capable of bringing 300,000 people out into the streets.

And, finally, on Wednesday, residents of the Jewish poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Hatikva, many of them dyed-in-the-wool Likud activists, signed a covenant of cooperation with the Palestinian and Jewish Jaffa protesters, many of them activists with Jewish-Palestinian Hadash and nationalist-Palestinian Balad. They agreed they had more in common with each other than with the middle class national leadership of the protest, and that while not wishing to break apart from the J14 movement, they thought their unique demands would be better heard if they act together. At the rally, they marched together, arguing bitterly at times but sticking to each other, eventually even chanting mixed Hebrew and Arabic renditions of slogans from Tahrir.

Yesteday’s mega-rally was also where Palestinian partnership in the protests came to a head, when writer Odeh Bisharat spoke to nearly 300,000 people – overwhelmingly, centrist Israelis Jews – of the grievances of Palestinians in Israel and was met with raucous applause. I’ll return to that moment a little further below, but before that, perhaps I should explain why I think the participation of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the protests has more bearing on the conflict than any concentrated attempt to rally the crowds against the occupation.

On the most practical level, if the protesters had begun by blaming all of Israel’s social and political woes on the occupation, none of the breathtaking events of the past three weeks would have happened. They would have been written off as Israel-hating lefties and cast aside, just like every attempt to get mainstream Israelis to care for Palestinians before caring for themselves was cast aside for at least the past decade.

Altruist causes can rarely raise people to a sustained and genuine popular struggle against their own governments, and attempts to rally Israelis to the Palestinian cause for selfish reasons – i.e. for our own soldiers’ sake or because of the demographic time bomb – smacked of hypocrisy and ethnic nationalism; hypocrisy is a poor magnet for popular support, while ethnic nationalism is the natural instrument of the Right, not of the Left, which wields it awkwardly and usually to its own detriment.

It should be admitted, 11 years after the second Intifada, 18 years after the beginning of the peace process, that the Israeli left has utterly and abjectly failed to seriously enthuse Israelis in the project of ending the occupation. There was never a choice between a social struggle focused on the occupation and a social struggle temporarily putting the conflict aside, because the first attempt would have flopped . There was nothing to be gained by trying the same thing again for the Nth time. There have been many important victories in battles, but on the whole, the two-state left (as opposed to the two-state right) has lost the war.

The Occupation is just part of a bigger problem
But these were the tactical considerations valid only for the beginning of the protests. Social injustice does not exist in a vacuum, most certainly not in a conflict zone – and the problem in Israel-Palestine is much wider and deeper than the occupation. The occupation may be the most acute and violent injustice going on, and, like Aziz and I wrote in our New York Times op-ed last week, it’s certainly the greatest single obstacle to social justice on either side of the Green Line. But it’s still only one expression of an organising principle that has governed all of Israel-Palestine for at least the past sixty years: Separation.

Israel-Palestine today is, for all intents and purposes, a single political entity, with a single de-facto sovereign – the government in Jerusalem, but the populations this government controls, are divided into several levels of privilege. The broad outlines of the hierarchy are well-known – at the bottom are Palestinians of ‘67, who can’t even vote for the regime that governs most areas of their lives and are subject to military and bureaucratic violence on a day to day basis; Palestinians of ‘48, who can vote but are strongly and consistently discriminated and lack collective rights (which is a Jewish privilege); and finally the Israeli Jews.

But separation runs deeper than that: It employs and amplifies cultural and economic privilege to fracture each broad group into sub-groups, separating Druze from Bedouins from Palestinians, Ramallah residents from residents of Hebron, city residents from villagers, established residents from refugees; and within Jewish society, Mizrachis from Ashkenazis, settlers from green-line residents of Israel, ultra-Orthodox from secular, Russians from native-born Israelis, Ethiopians from everyone else, and so on.

The separation system is so chaotic even its privileges are far from self evident: ultra-Orthodox and settlers are seen as the communities most benefiting from the status quo, but it is important to remember the actual socio-economic standing of both is rather weak, and many in both are not only beneficiaries, but also hostages – the ultra-Orthodox to sectorial parties, the settlers to the occupation. And the occupation itself is just an instrument of separation: Its long term purpose is to acquire maximum land with a minimum of Palestinian on it, but for the past 40 years it mainly ensured half the population under the control of a certain government would have no recourse or representation with that government on any level.

And while the issue of the occupation remains to be engaged with directly in the #j14 movement, the very dynamic of the protests is already gnawing at the foundation on which the occupation rests – the separation axiom. Haggai Matar is a veteran anti-occupation activist, with a prison term for conscientious objection to serve in the IDF and countless West Bank protests under his belt. There are few people in Israel more committed to ending the occupation than him. And yet this is how he writes of yesterday’s rally:

Odeh Bisharat, the first Arab to address the mass rallies, greeted the enormous audience before him and reminded them that the struggle for social justice has always been the struggle of the Arab community, which has suffered from inequality, discrimination, state-level racism and house demolitions in Ramle, Lod, Jaffa and Al-Araqib. Not only was this met with ovation from a huge crowd of well over a hundred thousand people, but the masses actually chanted: “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies.” And later, in a short clip of interviews from protest camps across the country, Jews and Arabs spoke, and a number of them, including even one religious Jew, repeatedly said that “it’s time for this state to be a state for all its citizens.” A state for all its citizens. As a broad, popular demand. Who would have believed it.

It would be seriously far-fetched to assume the protesters are deliberately trying to pull down the entire meshwork of rifts and boundaries. But one of the many unexpected consequences of this movement – indeed, the movement itself is an avalanche of completely unexpected consequences – is that these boundaries are beginning to blur and to seem less relevant than what brings people together. We have failed to end the occupation by confronting it head on, but the boundary-breaking, de-segregating movement could, conceivably, undermine it.

Like Noam wrote earlier today, it’s still too soon to tell where the movement will eventually go, and “it can even bring Israel further to the right; it certainly won’t be the first time in history in which social unrest led to the rise of rightwing demagogue – but right now, it is creating a space for a new conversation. Limited as this space may be, it’s so much more than we had just a month ago.” The slow erosion of separation lines means there are also possibilities opening up for new conversation about the Jewish-Palestinian divide – including the occupation.

*Dmitry (Dimi) Reider is a journalist and photographer working from Israel and the Palestinian territories. His work had appeared in the New York Times,The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, Jerusalem Post, and Index on Censorship, etc.

Palestinians' low salaries also linked to Israeli social struggle

A Palestinian financial crisis? Problems with donor countries? Economist Raja Khalidi offers some different explanations for the PA's fiscal problems.

1 August 2011, Haaretz הארץ (Israel)

By Amira Hass

"A financial crisis in the Palestinian Authority" - that is a convenient description of the situation where, on the eve of Ramadan, the Ramallah government is (again ) unable to pay the full salaries of its 150,000 public sector employees. This is a short, but very inaccurate description, however. The crisis, says economist Raja Khalidi, is in the status quo that Israel has enjoyed since the Oslo Accords: Israel is in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - and Palestinian society and the donor countries finance the cost of this domination.

The low salaries in the Palestinian enclaves (on average, less than NIS 2,000 per month ) and the PA's large-scale withholding of wages is not some Icelandic story: These - just like the cost of housing in Israel, our tycoons and the state's wealth vs. citizens' miserable salaries - are all linked to the comprehensive economical regime that has been designed by Israeli governments between the river and the sea. It is further evidence of the Israeli crisis, even if for pragmatic reasons it is not talked about in the tent camps.

Khalidi is a development economist who has been working with the United Nations for over 25 years, and has written widely on Palestinian economic conditions in the occupied territories and Israel. "The delays in Arab pledges should not be overstated," says Khalidi (who answered questions via email ). The immediate reasons for them may change, but, he says, "the roots of the chronic PA fiscal burden have more to do with the PA being forced in effect to shoulder the financial burden of occupation, both in terms of the costs of security and provision of public services, and appearing to the world as a 'state' government - with all the usual expectations that it will balance its finances and keep its public sector trimmed. There is not really a PA budget crisis: There is a crisis in the economic sustainability of the entire 'governance' project that has been in place since Oslo."

Isn't a public sector payroll of 150,000 (with more than 20,000 whose wages are paid by the Hamas government ) a bit inflated?

Khalidi: "The public sector payroll, at an estimated $1.7 billion, is almost 25 percent of the gross domestic product - double or triple the proportion in other countries in the region. But GDP is depressed structurally as a result of prolonged occupation and hence the public sector share of a small total GDP appears large. The public sector share of GDP even seems inflated. This is a deliberate policy, which was in fact introduced by [Prime Minister] Salam Fayyad himself in 2001 in the wake of the second intifada, when he was the International Monetary Fund representative in Yasser Arafat's PA. He designed the first 'budget support' program funded by donors (first Arab, later European ) for a very good Keynesian reason: In times of economic recession, government expenditure is needed to stimulate aggregate demand.

"So the continuation of the fiscal stimulus in place for 10 years is symptomatic not of a bloated PA public sector, but rather of a specific fiscal instrument that's still in place to combat the structural economic constraints created by occupation. It was a valid instrument 10 years ago and remains the only (limited, but still valid ) fiscal policy instrument the PA has at its disposal. Without it Israel and the world would be faced with a major economic crisis in the occupied Palestinian territory."

Does the current crisis mean the end of the effort to reduce to zero donor budget support?

"The idea that reliance on donor support must be reduced as a matter of principle - despite the conditions of occupation, with no Palestinian sovereignty or national rights on the horizon - is a bit of a diversion and is in fact unfair to an economy that has been deprived of its capacity to produce, trade, grow and develop for over 40 years. Before donor aid can be effectively and usefully removed, the economy needs to be equipped with the productive means, the infrastructure and the freedom to build and grow, which have been denied in various ways in Gaza and the West Bank. And as long as Israel sits on Palestinian trade routes and captures up to half of the potential import taxes that should be destined for the PA and its strained public revenues - then there is no alternative to sustained donor aid. The PA should neither be ashamed to be dependent on aid, nor should it aim to reduce it; rather it can consider more effective ways of using the aid."

Why does the West appear more committed to contribute than the Arab countries?
"Even two generations after 1948, no Western donor, especially European and American, can be oblivious to their historic responsibility, and to the immediate security and political interests that the continuation of this conflict implies. Hence anything needed to keep a lid on things is to be expected, and indeed comes without asking the cost. As for Arab donors, they do not feel at all the historic responsibility for this situation: Their support for Palestine is more a matter of showing solidarity with their Palestinian brethren - a solidarity that grows and wanes with the Palestinians' domestic situation, with the pliability of the regimes in question when pressured by the West to play their role in this or that peace process, etc. So it is naturally neither predictable, nor seen as a matter of national security or political interest as it is for Western donors. Thus, for the West aid is an obligation they cannot escape; for Arabs it is a duty they must fulfill."

And now the West has a historic responsibility vis-a-vis the Oslo promises that were not upheld?

"It should not be forgotten that essentially the same occupation (with perhaps slightly less excellent services, no five-star hotels and no secure PA jobs ), was maintained in 1993 with 22,000 employees, plus the Israeli army, plus around 120,000 Palestinians employed in Israel and contributing about the same share of the gross national product as PA expenditures do now. Today Israel doesn't have to provide Palestinians with jobs, public services or security while it continues to expand whenever it sees fit, thanks to a usually generous donor-funded PA budget. The very same budget which is now supposedly in 'crisis' because it cannot any longer maintain an arrangement which has allowed occupation to spread and deepen, and also costs less for Israel. It's basically a clever accounting trick, in light of the fact that the only party who should have a budget crisis is Israel, which otherwise gets a pretty good deal."

Brasil decide apoiar palestinos na ONU e irrita Israel

24 julho 2011, Vermelho http://www.vermelho.org.br

O governo Dilma Rousseff já se decidiu: em setembro, quando a Autoridade Palestina pedir para se tornar o 194.º país-membro da ONU, terá o voto brasileiro. A garantia de apoio foi passada ao presidente palestino, Mahmoud Abbas, por um mensageiro especial de Dilma, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, há menos de um mês. Lula prontificou-se ainda a pessoalmente ajudar Ramallah a conquistar votos de países em desenvolvimento.

Israel, do outro lado, tenta agora uma ofensiva para "contenção de danos". Dois integrantes do primeiro escalão do governo estão a caminho do Brasil. Um deles, Moshe Yaalon, vice do primeiro-ministro Binyamin Netanyahu, solicitou um encontro com Dilma - que deverá ser recusado pelo Planalto.

Os israelenses sabem que ao final não conseguirão reverter a decisão brasileira, mas querem evitar que Brasília "puxe votos" contra Israel.

"O objetivo do Brasil é ajudar a criar um fato político que empurre israelenses e palestinos para uma negociação direta. Do jeito que está, o conflito tende a se eternizar", explicou ao Estado o assessor para Assuntos Internacionais da Presidência, Marco Aurélio Garcia. "A questão palestino-israelense é o foco de desestabilização do Oriente Médio", defendeu Garcia.

Em entrevista ao Estado de S. Paulo, o chanceler Antonio Patriota havia indicado que o Brasil "não terá dificuldades em votar a favor" do reconhecimento do Estado palestino pelas Nações Unidas.

Dilma discursará na sessão anual da Assembleia-Geral da ONU, quando virá à baila a questão. Ela será a primeira a subir à tribuna em Nova York, conforme a tradição que, desde 1947, reserva ao Brasil a abertura dos discursos de chefes de Estado, ministros e demais autoridades nacionais na plenária.

O reconhecimento dos palestinos pela ONU, porém, deverá passar ainda pelo Conselho de Segurança, onde provavelmente acabará vetado pelos EUA. (Com informações do jornal O Estado de S. Paulo)

Da prisão, líder palestino convoca milhões às ruas

21 julho 2011/Vermelho http://www.vermelho.org.br (Brasil)

Da prisão israelense de Hadarim – onde cumpre cinco penas de prisão perpétua – o líder palestino Marwan Barghouti pediu ontem que "milhões" saiam às ruas em setembro, em apoio ao pedido de independência palestina, que deve acontecer em setembro, durante a Assembleia Geral da Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU).

Crianças palestinas levantam cartaz de Barghouti

Em carta enviada à imprensa, ele incentiva os palestinos nos territórios ocupados por Israel e em outros países a "marchar pacificamente" durante a semana de votação do pedido na Assembleia Geral das Nações Unidas.

O plano palestino de pedir que a ONU aceite a Palestina como membro da organização deu início a uma disputa diplomática com Israel, que o considera – apoiado por seu aliado norte-americano – um ato unilateral, contrário aos acordos de paz assinados.

Com a paralisação das negociações de paz desde 2008 e sem sinais de que serão retomadas em breve, os palestinos disseram que pedirão na ONU uma votação em favor de sua independência. A aprovação na Assembleia Geral seria simbólica e teria pouco efeito prático, mas os palestinos acreditam que o endosso internacional representaria uma forte pressão para que Israel saia dos territórios ocupados.

O líder Barghouti manteve a influência que conquistou durante o movimento insurgente mesmo após ter sido preso. É frequentemente apontado em pesquisas como um dos favoritos à Presidência palestina.

No texto, ele diz que a ida à ONU é parte de uma nova estratégia palestina que abrirá as portas para mais manifestações. A ideia é reproduzir o espírito das revoluções árabes e acirrar a pressão sobre Israel com o aval da ONU.

"Vencer a batalha de setembro, que é um passo importante de nossa luta, requer os maiores protestos pacíficos aqui e na diáspora, nos países árabes e muçulmanos e nas capitais internacionais", disse Barghouti.

Líder palestino
Barghouti, de 51 anos, talvez seja o mais conhecido líder palestino detido por Israel – e um dos cerca de 10 mil presos políticos o que conflito já fez. Ele cumpre cinco sentenças de prisão perpétua por sua participação em levantes armados na última década. Seu nome sempre é citado quando se discute o futuro político da presidência palestina.

A mulher de Barghouti, Fadwa, afirmou que o marido ditou a mensagem para seus advogados durante uma visita recente. Ainda não está claro como a convocação de Barghouti vai evoluir, já que as manifestações vão depender da organização de ativistas pró-palestinos.

Segundo especialistas, Barghouti vem tendo sua trajetória política comparada a de Nelson Mandela – ativista e ex-presidente da África do Sul. A comparação é surgiu principalmente a partir das declarações do líder baseadas na chamada “resistência pacífica”, como pregava o militante africano. E hoje, mesmo preso, é uma das figuras mais populares da Autoridade Palestina.

Barghouti nasceu em uma aldeia próxima de Ramallah, e se tornou membro do Fatah ainda com 15 anos. Com 18, foi preso pela primeira vez por ter envolvimento com grupos militantes palestinos. Em 1987, atuou como um dos principais líderes da Primeira Intifada, levando os palestinos a protestarem em um levante contra Israel. Em 1996, Barghouti foi eleito para o Conselho Legislativo da Palestina, quando começou sua defesa ativa por um Estado Palestino independente.

Durante a Segunda Intifada, sua popularidade cresceu ainda mais e o líder passou a ser visto como uma das principais forças de combate contra as Forças de Defesa Israelenses. Ao mesmo tempo em que via sua popularidade junto às massas aumentar, o líder palestino exortava ações combativas contra Israel. Em 2001, ele conseguiu se livrar da primeira tentativa de prisão.

Só em abril de 2002, Barghouti foi preso, sob a acusação de assassinato e tentativa de homicídios decorrentes dos movimentos de insurgência popular dos quais participou. Desde que está preso, seus apoiadores – entre eles, autoridades políticas, militantes, membros do parlamento europeu – acreditam que Barghouti é uma espécie de Nelson Mandela palestino, uma vez que é apontado como o líder ideal para reanimar um movimento à deriva e dividido nacionalmente.

Estado palestino
No Brasil, a campanha “Pela Criação do Estado da Palestina Já” está em desenvolvimento e a manifestação é respaldada por cerca de três dezenas de organizações políticas e sociais. A Palestina já é reconhecida política e moralmente por mais de cem países.

A Palestina também foi admitida nas organizações da ONU, com exceção da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura (Unesco) e da Organização Mundial de Saúde (OMS). E o presidente dos Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, em pronunciamento feito em maio deste ano, admitiu a criação do Estado palestino com as fronteiras de 1967.

O ministro da Defesa de Israel, Ehud Barak, comparou a eventual decisão da ONU em favor dos palestinos a um “tsunami”. O novo embaixador de Israel na ONU, Ron Prosor, informou à imprensa israelense que o reconhecimento da Palestina por parte da ONU “levaria à violência e à guerra”.

Em 1947, a Organização das Nações Unidas (ONU) criou o Plano de Partilha da Palestina, que resultou na criação do Estado de Israel. Essa iniciativa abriu caminho para uma tragédia cotidiana para o povo palestino. Mais de 500 vilas e comunidades palestinas foram destruídas. Milhares foram presos, torturados e assassinados.

Palestinos foram expulsos de suas casas e de centenas de cidades. Cerca de 4,5 milhões de refugiados palestinos vivem hoje pelo mundo, sendo que a maioria destes se encontra nas fronteiras da Palestina ocupada, e o Estado de Israel segue negando o direito de retorno. (Da Redação, com agências)

I FLEW IN TO HELP PALESTINIANS PLANT OLIVE TREES. THE ISRAELIS TOOK ME TO A PRISON IN THE DESERT

13 July 2011, Mondoweiss http://mondoweiss.net (USA)

Elke Zwinge-Makamizile is a member of the German Peace Council as well as The International League for Human Rights. She took part in the "Fly in" protest action to Palestine. She is being interviewed by Gitta Düperthal, a journalist for Junge Welt, in German. Translation by Cynthia Beatt.

Last Friday hundreds of activists attempted to travel to Palestine via Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. [Approximately 124 managed to do so]. You are one of those deported on Sunday. How did the Israeli authorities treat you?

It already began on Friday in Frankfurt/Main: as the plane was to start on time at 11 am, it suddenly braked sharply. After hours we were unloaded onto another machine and we were only able to take off around 5 pm – apparently due to an uneven surface area on the runway! Whoever wishes to believe this can do so; I rather believe this was to give the Israeli authorities time. Therefore we landed in Ben-Gurion Aiport at 11 pm, where they immediately took away our passports. The Israeli security officials seemed to know exactly who belonged to our group.

We had been invited by the Palestinian Peace Movements and there was a program prepared for us. The day of July 9th was chosen because this day in 2004 the International Court of Justice in the Hague declared the construction of the Wall on Palestinian Territories to be illegal. Amongst other activities, we were to visit the “Freedom Theatre”, to take part in the symbolic planting of olive trees and to visit a refugee camp. Instead we were forced to spend hours in detention rooms at the airport until we were taken in the early morning on Saturday to a prison van, in which other activists had already been sitting for four and a half hours. 23 women were inside and 16 men were penned in the other area of the same van. Around 35 security officials, whom we could see through the barred windows, stood outside. To pass the time we began to sing, upon which they threatened to use tear gas on us.

Where were you taken?

We were brought to the Beersheva Ela-Prison in the middle of the Negev Desert, where we were kept from Saturday morning until Sunday midday in a kind of luxury prison – not one of those prisons in which, according to Amnesty International, torture takes place. At our request consular officials of the countries from which the activists originate visited us; that was France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany. They noted our names and asked whether anyone should be notified. The Israelis were obviously at pains to ensure that no one would have reason to complain about their treatment there. Nevertheless we were under surveillance by video cameras the entire time.

How did the security officials react to you?

We used every opportunity to explain to them that we wished to make a contribution to easing the isolation of the Palestinians – the next step should be that Palestine must be recognized as a State and receive membership in the United Nations, to be voted upon in September. They did not comment on our views but my impression was some of them seemed to understand and did not show animosity towards us. They obviously had not been expecting people like us after the unbelievable propaganda campaign that Israeli officials started against us.

Israel’s Home Secretary Yitzhak Aharanovich, for example, described us as "extremists and hooligans", intending to disrupt public order. On the Ynet internet page we were even denounced as potential lawbreakers.

The ships of the second Gaza-Flotilla have been detained in Greece since days and many “Fly In” demonstrators couldn’t reach their destination – the Israelis compelled international airlines to refuse to even carry certain passengers. How do you feel about the success of this action?

We used the situation to make the media aware of how bad the human rights situation is in the West Bank and in Gaza. Through this sharp and totally exaggerated reaction by Israel it has become evident to many people all over the world what the government is prepared to do to isolate the people of Palestine.

Palestinos pedem a Brasil e ONU boicote às armas de Israel

8 julho 2011, O outro lado da notícia http://www.outroladodanoticia.com.br (Brasil)

Representantes do movimento palestino Boicote, Desinvestimento e Sanções a Israel (BDS) entregaram cartas nesta sexta-feira ao consulado do Brasil e à sede da ONU na cidade de Ramala (Cisjordânia) com um pedido para que os Governos ponham fim ao comércio de armas com Israel.

"Os jovens e a sociedade civil pedem ao Governo brasileiro e à ONU que ponham fim a suas relações militares com Israel em todos os níveis, porque este comércio provoca violações dos direitos humanos dos palestinos", disse à Agência Efe o palestino Ibrahim Yousef, coordenador do Comitê Nacional do BDS.

Este ativista indicou que o Brasil é um dos cinco principais importadores de armas israelenses, um comércio que mantém o desenvolvimento da indústria militar do Estado judaico e que, a seu entender, "é contrário à própria Constituição brasileira".

O movimento BDS agrupa mais de 100 organismos não-governamentais, sindicatos e organizações civis palestinas.

"Faz tempo que é necessário um boicote militar absoluto a Israel. Trata-se de um passo crucial para acabar com o uso da força criminosa e ilegal contra o povo palestino e outros povos e Estados na região e representa uma medida efetiva e não violenta para pressionar Israel a cumprir suas obrigações sob o direito internacional", diz o texto da carta. (Com agências)

Picasso in Palestine: A Prized Painting Is On Rare and Welcome Visit to Ramallah

Published July 06, 2011, issue of July 15, 2011 Forward פֿאָרווערטס http://forward.com (USA)

Letter From Ramallah

Getty Images
Special Viewing: Workers carefully hang ‘Buste de Femme’ in a Palestinian art academy.

By Graham Lawson

Though it’s the temporary administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority, the small, bustling city of Ramallah is not usually a place associated with art or romance. Yet the arrival, in late June, of Picasso’s 1943 painting “Buste de Femme” has lent the place a romantic luster.

The two-year-long struggle to bring the Picasso, the first acknowledged Western masterpiece, to the West Bank has already become the subject of a documentary. Titled “Picasso Visits Palestine” and directed by Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, it is scheduled for release in 2012.

Most of us in the West take it for granted that a national museum will have a collection of masterpieces, but in the Occupied Territories there is not a single prominent museum, never mind a masterpiece. The lack of venue, coupled with the West Bank’s ambiguous political status, led to a series of logistical and bureaucratic problems that dogged the attempt to bring in the art.

Khaled Hourani, founder of the Ramallah-based International Academy of Art — Palestine initiated the project. Hourani worked in close coordination with Charles Esche, Remco de Blaaij and Galit Eilat, who are all from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. With an estimated value of $7.1 million, the painting is the Van Abbemuseum’s most valuable work, and the initial idea was met with some opposition at the museum.

Speaking with de Blaaij, a curator at the Van Abbemuseum and one of the main people involved in bringing the painting to Ramallah, made me realize just how complicated the whole process had been. Besides reassuring trustees about the insurance, security and safeguarding of the painting, de Blaaij, Esche and Eilat had to explain why such a valuable and treasured painting should travel to such an “unsafe” part of the world.

For the Van Abbemuseum curators, de Blaaij said, their momentum came from thinking of “art as a universal idea” — the idea that art has the ability to cross borders and break down walls. They wanted to question the role of the museum in today’s world and in contemporary society. By attempting to bring the painting into the West Bank, they would confront some of these issues and would also engage in a learning process along the way.

According to de Blaaij, the main difficulties in bringing the painting to Ramallah came from the Dutch Ministry of Commerce. A mixture of insurance and tax issues, coupled with the fear of the painting not returning, resulted in the Oslo accords being revisited to determine the legal status of the painting once it had crossed the “border” into the West Bank from Israel.

Documentation went back and forth among the Van Abbemuseum, the Dutch Ministry of Commerce and, finally, the Israeli customs authorities and the International Academy of Art in Ramallah. As the increasingly Kafkaesque process unfolded, de Blaaij made several visits to Ramallah to ensure that adequate care and safety precautions would be put in place.

“We were still not sure that the painting would travel, 48 hours before the opening,” de Blaaij admitted while noting that he himself could not precisely define what had been the exact stumbling blocks posed by the Dutch Ministry of Commerce. He was not even sure that “legal status” regarding the painting’s travel was ever established, speculating that requirements were waived and that permission for the painting to make its journey was merely granted at the last minute by the Dutch Ministry.

To safeguard the art, somebody from the Van Abbemuseum traveled on the specialized art transport with the painting every step of the journey. There had also been concerns that humidity and high temperatures might prove damaging to the painting, so certain formalities had been put in place, including the stipulation that viewers must be kept to a maximum of two people at a time.

The opening took place June 24 in the courtyard of the International Art Academy. There was no mistaking the festive atmosphere with abundant food and drink, Israeli and Arab art-world glitterati and a universal awareness that this was a significant moment in the history of both the academy and Ramallah. Most of those who had worked hard to bring Picasso to Palestine were present and, at least for a moment, could relax and enjoy the party.

People chatted, nibbled on hors d’oeuvres and drank, but excitement was building to see the painting — the main course of the evening. Guests jumbled into a disorderly queue, no red-carpet affair this; people hustled, shoulder to shoulder, and on reaching the top of the steps at the entrance had to hand their bags back through the crowd — an understandable security precaution.

Entering two at a time, visitors walked past armed guards and finally got a chance to see the painting in situ. Flanked by P.A. guards, “Buste de Femme” was part of a viewing like no other. We were given only two or three minutes to look at the painting. I succeeded, for the most part, in ignoring the guards, and managed to focus on the painting that had taken two years to arrive.

Everything is slightly askew in the work. The fractioned face and body have the appearance of being painted in segments, resulting in the feeling that we are not sure what we are looking at. The mouth is twisted and open. The whole figure — of a woman’s face and upper torso painted cubist style in muddy gray and green hues — suggests disconnection and distress. I decided to move on and let others come to view the work of art. I’d had my time with Ramallah’s Picasso.

The painting is on view through July and ties in with a graduation show for the students of the academy. Hourani hopes that other major art institutions will follow the Van Abbemuseum’s lead in lending major art works to the academy, but for now, the citizens of Ramallah can enjoy the “Buste de Femme.” Instead of the common cry of “the Israelis are here,” Palestinians can now shout, “Picasso is here.”

Contact Graham Lawson at feedback@forward.com

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/139522/#ixzz1RbbWcNUd

GUSH SHALOM גוש שלום MESSAGE

8 july 2011, Haaretz הארץ (Israel)

Gush Shalom גוש שלום http://zope.gush-shalom.org (Israel)

The No-Longer Temporary Occupation

5 June 2011, Forward פֿאָרווערטס http://forward.com (USA)

Getty Images
Separation: A young Palestinian boy rides his bicycle along a dirt road adjacent to the concrete separation barrier built by Israel in the West Bank town of Qalqilya.

By Joseph Dana

One particular success of Israel’s 44-year control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been the government’s ability to convince the Israeli population of the temporary nature of the occupation. Every sector of Israeli society, except religious settlers and the military establishment, understand the occupation to be an ephemeral security measure necessary only in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Ask any Israeli on the streets of Tel Aviv whether they think that Israel will permanently control the Occupied Territories and the immediate answer will be no, it is all about immediate security. This charade is exploited by successive Israeli governments as they proclaim a desire for peace while simultaneously creating permanent facts on ground like Jewish settler roads, checkpoints for Palestinians and new settlements.

Despite the proximity of the Occupied Territories to major Israeli population centers, few Israelis other than soldiers and settlers visit the Territories. Since the creation of Israel’s controversial separation barrier and the denial of thousands of Palestinian work permits to Israel, Israeli society has all but disengaged from Palestinian society. This allows the occupation to feel distant and outside the everyday lives of Israelis. Palestinians, of course, are still confronted with the daily presence of Israeli military power and mechanisms of control.

Some Israeli scholars, such as Bar Ilan University lecturer Ariella Azoulay, and Tel Aviv University professor Adi Ophir, have proposed that without this perceived temporariness and external character of the occupation, Israel would have a hard time maintaining its mandatory military conscription. A greater number of citizens would question the long- term objectives.

Israel’s occupation is a violation of no less than three international legal statutes, including the United Nations charter, The Hague Agreement of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1949, all of which forbid an occupying power from moving civilian populations into occupied land. However, whenever serious criticism of the occupation arises both within Israel and abroad, the state is able to claim that its presence in the territories is only about protecting Israeli civilians from security risks. Nothing more.

Years of international pressure have actually engendered a climate in which many Israelis have become reticent about the entrenchment of the occupation. And yet, every Israeli government since 1967 has increased settlement activity. The only way to explain this paradox is by understanding that Israelis percieve the occupation as a necessary, but temporary, evil. The growing settlements do not present a problem then, but are rather simply a solution to security concerns.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his recent defiant but well received speech to the United States Congress, made it clear that he doesn’t see things this way. He argued instead that Israel “will not return to the indefensible lines of 1967.” Netanyahu also noted that Jerusalem — a fundamental issue in the conflict — will remain undivided under full Israeli control. Effectively, he was saying, Israel is unwilling to part with the West Bank according to the internationally accepted two-state solution framework.

Advancing his argument for permanent control of the West Bank regardless of security concerns, Netanyahu made the case that the West Bank is a necessary part of Israel’s cultural and religious composition, based on Jewish history. He also dispelled the myth that the Occupied Territories are somehow external from Israeli society, arguing that Jewish settlements are basically “neighborhoods and suburbs of Jerusalem and greater Tel Aviv.”

Netanyahu’s speech has left the peace process dead in the water and presents Israelis with a harsh reality they had been ignoring: Permanent occupation which can only be maintained through a form of apartheid governance. His theoretical framework sent a clear message that Israel not only requires permanent occupation for its continued existence, but also, in fact, desires it because of religious, cultural and security concerns.

Israeli society is now forced to confront the implications of endless occupation and possible annexation. Quite simply, Netanyahu’s rejection of the two-state solution as defined by the 1967 lines reflects a shift in the way most Israelis have come to understand the occupation, forcing them to see it not as a temporary measure but as a permanent fixture of Israeli reality — a reality that might cost Israel its standing in the international community.

*Joseph Dana is a journalist and writer based in Tel Aviv and Ramallah. He has written for The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, The National and Haaretz, among other international publications. He is a contributing editor of the independent Israeli web magazine +972.

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Gaza, the most Facebook friendly place on earth

Social media sites are a force to reckon with in the Palestinian territories, says former PA communications minister, adding that if a new uprising erupts, that is where it will begin to brew.

5 June 2011, Haaretz הארץ (Israel)

By Natasha Mozgovaya

WASHINGTON - Although his father Mamdouh Saidam was one of the founders of Fatah, Dr. Sabri Saidam, deputy secretary general of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, entered the political arena at the relatively late age of 34. It was then that he was appointed minister of communications and information technology in the Palestinian government. Today, no longer in government, the former "Mr. Technology" of the Palestinian Authority prefers the hat of researcher and Palestinian Internet guru. He is also one of the activists behind the establishment of the Palestinian domain ps.

"Coming from the IT field, I can tell you honestly that I've always felt as if I were carving in stone - getting computers or talking about e-government in Palestine was mission impossible," he says in an interview with Haaretz. "Now all the politicians are meeting bloggers and talking to them. There was no party interested in these people until the events in Tunisia and Egypt. They were considered to be time-wasters, kids."

Saidam is in Washington now working with the Aspen Institute to promote entrepreneurship among young Palestinians. "All of a sudden, everybody wants to know and have a private session to talk about Facebook and how they can open an account," he says.

Half of Palestinian households in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have computers, according to Saidam, and about 30 percent are connected to the Internet.

"When the demonstrations started in Tunisia, there were 600,000 Palestinian Facebook users, and 200,000 of them were posting about politics. Each one of these 200,000 Facebook users is influencing five people around him. We're talking about over a million Palestinians over the age of 18. In terms of population size, that's 33 percent. In Egypt, that would be 28 million Egyptians, but there it took only 2,890 bloggers and computer activists to do what was done. The moral of the story is that there is a critical mass of Palestinians waiting to see how things are going to swing."

Saidam believes that all those who stormed Israel's borders on Nakba Day were simply in rehearsal mode. "Those who have broken the fear barrier, will be willing to do it again," he says. "Israel focuses on September, but they ought to focus on the 5th of June, the anniversary of the Six-Day War. There are already increased calls to march into the borders again."

There are two schools of thought on the matter, he says. "There's one that says: 'You've done it once, thank God there weren't more casualties, but don't do it again. Go to the borders, amass as many people as you can, but don't cross, because Israel has now learned the lesson. They can go and camp for a while, and this camping will send a message to Israel and the world, and it will help the Palestinians to build up pressure as preparations are made for September.' The other school of thought says: 'No, let's break fences and charge.' There are more supporters of the second approach."

Saidam says that the PA is beginning to understand the power of the Internet, and many of its members now want to meet with bloggers and open an account. "But there is no Palestinian Wael Ghonim [the young Google marketing executive who became a symbol of the revolution] . . . It's the issue of getting bored of the fact that they see leaders who existed for dozens of years. They don't want any leaders."
The trigger, he says, were the demonstrations held in the West Bank on March 15, when young Palestinians marched and called for an end to the rift between Hamas and Fatah. Abu Mazen then announced that he would be willing to go to Gaza, and an agreement was hammered out. "The young people felt they had some influence on the decision," says Saidam. "And I am telling my peers that they should not only passively listen but allow young blood to flow into the decision making of the parties."

Saidam notes that even Abu Mazen has a Facebook account. "He has a page where he posts all his meetings at president.ps. He is interested, but he is overwhelmed. Whenever I talk to him about computers, he is extremely supportive, but he doesn't have time to surf the Internet. He has a lot on his plate."

Saidam finds it amusing that a member of Congress recently asked whether the Palestinians use the Internet: "Do Palestinians use the Internet? Who is to blame for this Congressman not knowing whether we use Internet or not? No wonder they gave Netanyahu 29 standing ovations . . . they are totally ignorant. I've been in meetings in Congress, and there is a major problem, and it's a problem of education. If they visit Palestine, it's usually a courtesy visit of two hours."

Gaza a Facebook champion
Per capita, says Saidam, the largest number of Facebook users in the world is in Gaza.

"That's one thing people don't know," he says. Per capita, the largest number of video conferencing in the world is also in the Palestinian territories. "The legislative council used to meet through video conferencing in the West Bank and Gaza," says Saidam.

"There were medical exams conducted over the Internet. My mother, who lives in Gaza, has a heart problem. She comes to Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem for treatment. And in so many cases, she was refused permission to go back to Gaza after treatment. That's one of the reasons I was trying to promote Internet treatment so people wouldn't have to travel. People takes it for granted because the culture of IT is so embedded in society, but there are economic hardships that prevent people from acquiring technology, even though 94 percent use cell phones."

Several weeks ago, Saidam launched a project in the territories in which experienced Internet users volunteer to teach parents, especially stay-at-home mothers, to use the computer and to surf the Internet. Every Monday he has a radio program in which he advises listeners about what should not be publicized on Facebook. If they surf in other countries, he tells them, they need to bear in mind that the boss has the ability to surf their page, and in the case of Palestinians, so does the Shin Bet security service.

Another problem he cites is that Palestinians telecommunications services are provided by Israeli companies. "This is a prime source of intelligence for the Shabak [Shin Bet], Mossad and whatever," he says. "Everybody here publishes his or her beliefs and opinions and pictures and family news - everything. I tell them: You are the owner of the information. Whatever you are hesitant about - don't release it."

According to Saidam, Palestinian politicians are afraid of the Internet because they have no control over those who surf it. "But then they came to realize that it's something that is totally out of the censorship scissors, nobody can gag anybody else, it's a free world."

The Third Intifada Facebook page, he notes was created in Lebanon - not in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Facebook, under Jewish pressure, decided to close it. But being controversial is being famous. After Facebook closed it, there were several new pages."

Saidam says that young Palestinians are more committed than most would believe. "When you have a kid coming to his parents at Yarmouk refugee camp [in Syria], telling them he's going to have dinner in Jaffa, and they laugh at him and don't take him seriously. And then he ends up going with Israeli peace activists to Jaffa, has dinner there, gives an interview to Channel 10 and then gives himself up to the Israeli police. I think any Israeli general should worry.

"I lived in Gaza and the West Bank and have seen every adventure you can imagine, but to have this level of commitment, to come all the way to Jaffa, that's what makes me think that the 5th of May was only a rehearsal. Most young people are not talking about the peace process or the Arab initiative or the 1967 borders. If a new revolution erupts, it will be a revolution led by more sophisticated minds than those in the second intifada."

Right-wing domination
Unlike Netanyahu, he says, the Palestinians did not say "no" to everything. But Netanyahu's speech has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated the possibility that the PA will renege on its plans to ask the United Nations to vote on Palestinian statehood in September. "Our feeling is that Israeli society is dominated by right-wingers," he says. "I believe Netanyahu is receiving intelligence reports that the Palestinians won't make any further noise."

Still, the situation on the ground has changed, he says. The Palestinians have never enjoyed more support and have finally succeeded in building a consensus. The Israeli leadership, he notes, initially said that there was nothing to discuss because there was no unity among the Palestinians, and now it says that there is nothing to discuss because there is unity.

Saidam has the following to say about Hamas: "Nobody wants them to be part of the government, and they know it. Two things they won't do - they won't sit in the government, and they won't conduct the negotiations. And they know there will be a referendum."

Saidam thinks that Palestinian unity is a good thing. "We had our worst brain drain, not during the 40 plus years of occupation, but during the time of Palestinian disunity. Hamas, despite all the negative things, stands for 1967 borders, for the same political vision as Fatah."

Saidam lives in Ramallah with his two children. He has a doctorate from a British university but has never considered leaving his home. "My father was the deputy commander of the Palestinian forces in Jordan. He was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away during the conflict in 1971. I was four months old, and I had taken it upon myself that upon concluding my studies, I would go back to Palestine. In December 1995, I went to visit my family in the refugee camps of Gaza. I was encouraged to come back and live in Palestine and fulfill my dream. I have two kids, they are in Ramallah. No matter what happens, we are not leaving. I think even if we get slaughtered in our homes, we will not leave."

Every Palestinian who has lost a loved one in the conflict has a personal dilemma, he says. "In order to achieve peace with the Israelis, they have to understand our lives on the other side of the fence, how my mother spends 36 hours without electricity in Gaza, how people who need dialysis can't leave, how civilians are paying the price of the conflict. My oldest son, who is 8 years old, understands the connection. I caught him talking to his mother about the Jewish man on TV. His mother said, 'It's a Jewish man' and he said, 'This can't be, don't all Jews wear military outfits?' This is all he sees. He sees Israelis only at the checkpoints. He doesn't see them in my home. He doesn't go to their homes."