Refugees are Iraq's forgotten people
Refugees International, Electronic Intifada, July 14, 2003
On the grounds of the Haifa Sports Club in central Baghdad, 250 Palestinian families live in a tent camp, sweltering in heat that exceeds 125 degrees. The camp's residents are mostly women, children and elderly people. To drink, they must haul water from distant faucets. Mothers complain that their children can't sleep because of the heat, and the frightening rattle of gunfire during the night. What's shocking is not that there are unhappy refugees in Baghdad in the wake of the war but that for more than two months the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority did not know they were there. Yet these families are just a small sliver of the 130,000 displaced people living in Iraq, families whose existence is not recognized, whose needs are not being met - not because the coalition doesn't care but because it lacks the systematic strategy and clear vision necessary for success. If there is a master plan for reconstruction, the public has not seen it, and without it, micro-level problems become chronic as the Iraqis grow impatient and restless. From top to bottom, no one seems quite sure where to go to find solutions. Being an Iraqi with a problem is like standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles holding a number no one calls. Though accompanied by a military escort, one Iraqi woman embroiled in a property dispute spent two weeks simply trying to find the Civil Affairs Office to which she had been directed. No soldier or coalition administrator even knew where the building was. The United States appears firmly committed to one policy: holding the United Nations at bay. Unfortunately, minimizing U.N. involvement deprives the U.S. of the U.N.'s long experience in Iraq and its emergency-response skills. In past conflicts - in Kosovo, for instance, and more recently Afghanistan - the U.N. has been involved in all facets of reconstruction, from food distribution and water and sanitation projects to the training and equipping of police forces.

The full, in depth testimony of Haggai Matar
Gush Shalom, July 2003
The testimony is a grave accusation against the Israeli occupation. The court martial trial of draft resisters Haggai Matar, Matan Kaminer, Shimri Tzameret, Adam Maor and Noam Bahat will resume next Monday, 14th July. These five young men refuse to enlist since they regard the service in the IDF as opposed to their conscience "The NIR School" and Usama. -- In 1999 I was in the 9th grade, when one of my teachers, who knew I was interested in politics and the occupation, asked me to join a new Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian project called "The NIR School". I thought it would be quite an interesting experience to go school with Palestinians, so I agreed. This is how I found myself, in the summer of 99', on a two-week long cardiology seminar, with 60 youths from Israel, Jordan and the West Bank, living in youth-hostels in Israel and Jordan. We didn't really talk about current affairs. We were all good friends, and we got to know each other through study-groups, social activities, music lessons etc. Rarely one of the Palestinian members would share a check-point story, but mostly it just didn't come-up. This is experience was most important for me; the first time I got to meet Palestinians. I'll get back to this story later on. It was around that time that I joined the "Open Doors" project with my mother. We exchanged letters with a Palestinian administrative-detainee called Usama Barham, who had been sitting in jail for years without a trial. I used to tell him about my life, and he would write about his past, his future plans, and about life in prison. He used to tell me about the world as he would have it, a world where Jews and Palestinians could live in peace - and where he and I would be able to meet. We corresponded for a long time, as new detention warrants kept coming out every six months, prolonging his detention in what seemed to last forever. As Usama's case reached the high-court (no Palestinian was put in administrative detention for so long as he - six years in the Israeli jail without a trial) - he was suddenly released, "under condition" that he signed a declaration, stating he would not take part in any terrorist activity. I can testify that he would have signed the same declaration years before. Usama always used to tell me: "They say 'you're with the Jihad', I say I'm not, they say I am, I say I'm not?" We came to visit Usama in his home during a feast that was held in light of his release. This was my first time in the occupied territories, my first time in a Palestinian village. I saw bullet-holes in the family's house, and some smashed furniture. Usama's nephews spoke to me in Arabic, and all I could make out was: "Yahud, Yahud" - I gathered they were referring to IDF soldiers. I was amazed to see such a different world, just 20 minutes from my home.

A Wall in their Heart
By Meron Rappaport, Gush Shalom/Yedioth Aharonoth, May 23, 2003
On February 6, 2001, Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister. "That same night I got a call from Sharon's people asking me to meet him as son as possible,"says Prof. Arnon Sofer, "and they asked me to bring the maps." [The map of the wall, as published in "Yediot Aharonot" can be found here: www.gush-shalom.org/thewall] The maps that Sharon's people asked for were the maps that Prof. Sofer, a geographer at Haifa University and the prophet of "the Arab demographic danger," presented in a lecture at the Herzliya Conference a few months earlier. Borders should be set immediately for the State of Israel, Sofer said at the time, otherwise the Arabs will inundate us and there will be no Jewish entity here anymore. The West Bank, he explained, must be split into three parts, three cantons, basically three sausages. One sausage from Jenin to Ramallah, a second sausage from Bethlehem to Hebron and a third tiny sausage around the city of Jericho. An electric fence must be put up around these three Palestinian sausages, which extend on less than half the West Bank, and finish the business. Prof. Sofer and Sharon, then leader of the opposition, conversed at the Herzliya conference. They have not been in constant touch since then, but when Sofer sees the map of the separation fence going up, he smiles to himself. "This is exactly my map," he says, "it's as if an exact copy is being put up." Sofer takes too much credit for himself. This map is not something new for Sharon. "I haven't sat with the prime minister recently," says Ron Nahman, the mayor of Ariel, "but the map of the fence, the sketch of which you see here, is the same map I saw during every visit Arik made here since 1978. He told me he has been thinking about it since 1973." There are some who call this plan of Sharon's "the bantustan plan" (according to Ha'aretz, Sharon used this term when talking to the former prime minister of Italy four years ago), there are those who call it the canton plan. But it is clear that this plan is now taking on concrete and barbed wire. Only now it is called the seamline plan. Sharon is keeping close tabs on the plan. He comes himself to the site, and sometimes even sketches exactly where the fence is to run. Military sources (the army is the official body responsible for drawing the fence) said recently that every question that comes up goes to the Prime Minister's Office, to Sharon's adviser on settler affairs, Uzi Keren, and to Sharon himself. Keren, incidentally, drew up a separation map while a member of the Third Way movement, almost identical to Sharon's map and to Prof. Sofer's map. Something strange has been happening in recent months to the separation fence. What began thanks to a campaign of the Israeli Left and Center under Barak-style slogans of "we are here, they are there," it has become the baby of the Sharon government. The same Sharon who during the unity government opposed building the fence and was dragged into it almost against his will, on any given day has 500 bulldozers at work, paving and building one of the largest projects in the history of the country, perhaps the largest.

Another Day in the Life of an Insignificant Person: The View From Below
By Lisa Taraki, MIFTAH, July 15, 2003
It is a hot day in July. By ten in the morning, which is the time I arrive, the place is teeming with hopeful applicants. Most have been there since 8:30, when the gate is opened. The Israeli "civil administration" outpost on the edge of the settlement of Beit El consists of a few shacks with corrugated tin roofs topped by sandbags, barbed wire, and an empty watchtower which must have seen better days. No cars are allowed into this compound; supplicants and applicants must walk a stretch of the once-flourishing Ramallah-Nablus highway by foot, after scaling some dirt mounds softened and worn down by thousands of feet leading to the compound from the desolate "parking lot" on the Ramallah side of the road. A concessionaire has been granted permission to dispense coffee, cold drinks and nuts in exchange for sweeping the courtyard. The public toilets are unspeakably filthy, and a healthy swarm of flies enjoys unhindered access to the teeming multitudes. There are four windows with faded signs in Hebrew and Arabic indicating where different kinds of permits can be applied for and received. A big crowd of men of various ages and a few women waits patiently at the windows marked "magnetic cards." My window, a multi-purpose window for various kinds of permits, is in chaos. A burly young man who has situated himself at the top of the line by the window, is a self-appointed translator for the rest of us ignorants. He is trying to push the pile of applications gathered from the rest of the crowd since 8:30 through the small opening of the "window" (protected by iron bars) so that the soldier-clerk on the other side will begin processing them. By ten o'clock, he is lucky enough to have the clerk receive them. I heave a sigh of relief that my application for a permit to use Ben Gurion airport for a trip abroad is among the papers. Or so I think at the time. I decide to use my waiting time for ethnographic inquiry. A good cross-section of society is represented here. I note that the gender balance is quite acceptable, and follow intently the politics of the gendered body (how much space is allowed a woman to approach the window; what weight the age factor has here; the benefits and drawbacks of the various forms of dress worn by women: full hijab, modified hijab, token hijab, full western dress with jeans, modified western dress with skirt, etc., etc.). The vast majority of the applicants are here to get "checkpoint passes," given out for varying durations (a few hours to several days, for internal checkpoints). A smattering want "Israel passes," permits that allow you to enter Israel. Some, like me, are waiting for airport permits. A young couple from Gaza living in Ramallah are hoping to get permits so they can visit their families in Gaza (have not been able to do so for two years).

Navy Captain, Other Officials Call for Probe of Israel’s Attack on USS Liberty
By Delinda C. Hanley, Arab News, July 16, 2003
WASHINGTON, 16 July 2003 — Nearly every former senior government and military official who has examined Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty agrees it was deliberate. Now, thanks to the publication of Judge A. Jay Cristol’s book “The Liberty Incident: The 1967 Attack on a US Navy Spy Ship”, they are going public. Cristol’s book tour included a December 2002 presentation at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, DC, where he touted his version of the attack which, based primarily on Israeli sources, he says was unintentional. Ironically, it looks as though what actually was unintentional is that Cristol’s efforts to quell the debate have had exactly the opposite effect. Reading reports of Cristol’s whitewash of the devastating attack, which killed 34 American crewmen and wounded 172 others, was the last straw for Capt. Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the Navy’s Court of Inquiry. The Commander-in-Chief Naval Forces Europe, Boston and the late Rear Adm. Isaac “Ike” Kidd were given just one week by Adm. John McCain (father of Sen. John McCain) to investigate the attack and gather testimony from survivors still on board the crippled ship. Capt. Boston asked each witness to tell his story for a court stenographer. “There is no question in my mind that those people tried to kill every one on board,” Boston told Arab News. “I was the counsel. I put witnesses on. I talked to kids never exposed to combat who’d seen their friend’s head blown off. Kids who were crying as they told me what they’d gone through. Those boys who had their heads blown away were not out fighting [the Israelis]. They were sunbathing. They weren’t even given a chance to get to their machine guns.” Boston also watched the bodies of the dead carried out of the hold and saw boys throw up as they retrieved body parts and mopped up after the shelling and torpedo attack. He recalled seeing the shot-up US flags that had clearly marked the ship as an American vessel. Boston flatly dismisses the claims of Cristol and Israel that Israeli fighter pilots mistook the electronically advanced spy ship, complete with an 18-foot-wide satellite dish, a microwave dish, and antennae, for the El Quseir, a 1920s-era Egyptian horse transport ship. The Navy captain heard survivors’ testimonies that the Israelis even shot up the Liberty’s lifeboats after they were lowered into the waters to save the crew.

Mabrouk
By Toine van Teeffelen, Electronic Intifada, July 15, 2003
14 July 2003 -- Mabrouk ("blessings to you") is an Arabic expression to congratulate people. You not only use it on occasions like a birthday but also when something new has been bought, like clothes, or in the case somebody has moved to another house. Saying mabrouk confirms that your interlocutor made the right choice. Arab culture has more of such customary expressions. They are not just polite ways of showing that you know the rules of address - like in the West - but they are said in an often quite enthusiastic and involved manner showing that the speaker has been alert and has detected something new or special. Naa'yman, people tell you emphatically and gaily after you took a shower or had a haircut. Summer especially is the time of saying mabrouk. Nowadays each Sunday in Bethlehem is marked by a series of weddings and baptisms; some of them delayed because of all the curfews last year and the beginning of this year, others scheduled because the summer provides the appropriate weather and allows visiting family members from abroad to join. Summer is also the time for congratulating students with their school or university diplomas. But I have noticed that saying mabrouk is now extended to cover occasions for which it was never reserved. Thus, it is quite common to congratulate one another upon reception of a tasrih (a travel permit). A few weeks ago Mary embraced a friend and congratulated her for the tasrih that allowed her friend to leave for Germany during the summer holiday. Her friend was enormously relieved to be able to travel through Tel Aviv airport (traveling via Jordan, the other option for West Bankers, is now very difficult too).

When It Works, Don’t Mess With it
By Ghassan Andoni, International Middle East Media Center, July 16, 2003
According to the road map, signed by the two parties in Aqaba summit, the Palestinian government did sign to a commitment which reads “Palestinian security authorities are to confiscate illegal weapons and dismantle "terrorist capabilities and infrastructure." In the road to fulfill such an obligation, Abu Mazen’s government has a spectacular record of success as scaled against all others who attempted to bring an end to the violent side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The most remarkable achievement on the way was the truce agreement, which was signed and respected by all significant Palestinian resistance groups. The positive impact of the truce agreement could not be denied even by Israeli military generals and security officials. Both have repeatedly reported a dramatic decrease in attack alerts as well as Palestinian military activities. One can't imagine as a result of the truce agreement how many lives have been saved. To scale success, one needs to look at both the security capabilities of the Palestinian government and the success record of the Israeli security establishment in the pre- Road Map period. Israeli army and Security establishment failed dramatically in their efforts to force a reduction in both military attacks and activities. Israeli army generals claim success in reducing the capabilities of resistance groups, in the West Bank in particular, to launch attacks against Israel. Yet, even with the army daily operations and massive arrests, the hardest attacks against the Israeli army and settlers as well as attacks inside Israeli originated in the West bank where the army had direct security control. Army generals and security officials always claimed that without their activities much more would have happened. Those claims, which can be well founded, are marginal if compared to the changes Abu Mazen’s government, through the truce agreement, was able to produce. Even so, Israel, both on the political and security fields is demanding from Abu Mazen miracles that their powerful security and military forces were not able to achieve.

The army is far from the negotiations
By Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz, July 16, 2003
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz surprised Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon and some other generals last week when he announced he was stripping the IDF planning branch of its strategic division that, among other things, dealt with the issue of negotiations with the Palestinians and strategic relations with other countries. Mofaz is moving those missions to the defense ministry - the civilian part of the defense establishment. Among the surprised ones was Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Gilad, head of the recently established political-security branch in the defense ministry, who will become responsible for the strategic division. In addition, many of the functions of the IDF's external relations department will move to the defense ministry. Taking the political negotiations with the Palestinians and responsibility for strategic relations with other countries out of the hands of the army is a genuine revolution - although it does not necessarily guarantee a more moderate political-security regime and might even bring the opposite. From his position as minister, Mofaz must see things he did not as chief of staff. Seven years ago, he headed the planning branch in the general staff and as a major general was in the Israeli delegation to the Wye Plantation where Israel negotiated with the Syrians. The branch he headed even dealt with water issues and prepared a map of Israeli interests in Judea and Samaria. The strategic division was established three years before Mofaz reached the planning branch, and since then four brigadier generals have headed it.

What's a VIP Under the Occupation?
By Lisa Taraki, Palestine Monitor, July 14, 2003
It is one of those hot Ramallah days. By ten in the morning, which is the time I arrive, the place is teeming with hopeful applicants. Most have been there since 8:30, when the gate is opened. The Israeli "civil administration" outpost on the edge of the settlement of Beit El consists of a few shacks with corrugated tin roofs topped by sandbags, barbed wire, and an empty watchtower which has seen better days. No cars are allowed into this compound; supplicants and applicants must walk a stretch of the once-flourishing Ramallah-Nablus highway by foot, after scaling some dirt mounds softened and worn down by thousands of feet leading to the compound from the desolate "parking lot" on the Ramallah side of the road. A concessionaire has been granted permission to dispense coffee, cold drinks and nuts in exchange for sweeping the courtyard. The public toilets are unspeakably filthy, and a healthy swarm of flies enjoys unhindered access to the teeming multitudes. There are four windows with faded signs in Hebrew and Arabic indicating where different kinds of permits can be applied for and received. A big crowd of men of various ages and a few women waits patiently at the windows marked "magnetic cards." My window, a multi-purpose window for various kinds of permits, is in chaos. A burly young man who has situated himself at the top of the line by the window, is a self-appointed translator for the rest of us ignorants. He is trying to push the pile of applications gathered from the crowd since 8:30 through the small opening of the "window" (protected by iron bars) so that the soldier-clerk on the other side will begin processing them. By ten o'clock, he is lucky enough to have the clerk receive them. I heave a sigh of relief that my application for a permit to use Ben Gurion airport for a trip abroad is among the papers. Or so I think at the time. I decide to use my waiting time for ethnographic inquiry. A good cross-section of society is represented here. I note that the gender balance is quite acceptable, and follow intently the politics of the gendered body (how much space is allowed a woman to approach the window; what weight the age factor has here; the benefits and drawbacks of the various forms of dress worn by women: full hijab, modified hijab, token hijab, full western dress with jeans, modified western dress with skirt, etc., etc.). The vast majority of the applicants are here to get "checkpoint passes," given out for varying durations (a few hours to several days, for internal checkpoints).