A Palestinian State Within Two Years?

by Yacov Ben Efrat
On Tuesday, August 25, 2009, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad presented his plan to establish a Palestinian state within two years. He stressed the internal changes that must be made in order to build its legal, economic and social infrastructure.

It is not clear what led Fayyad to present his plan at a time when contacts between the Netanyahu government and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are at their lowest in half a year. It appears that he wants to build his political status on this attempt to flesh out the vision of US President Barack Obama.Fayyad has no public or party base. In the Palestinian arena he depends mainly on PA President Abu Mazen. He is the Great Palestinian Hope of the Americans, who condition all aid to the PA on Fayyad's being the one to administer the funds. This condition arouses the ire of Fatah members who want to dip their own hands into the public purse. That is apparently the reason why some old-timers came out against Fayyad's plan, accusing him of going over their heads in declaring a Palestinian state, when they are the ones who have devoted their lives to the cause. Hamas too opposes Fayyad, accusing him of compromising Palestinian principles, above all the refugees' right of return.
Deep internal division

The Palestinian factions are wrangling over the skin of a bear they haven't caught. Internally, they are more fractured than ever. At the height of the August heat we were witness to the Fatah convention in Bethlehem, where, after two decades, the Old Guard was swept out in favor of the New.

A quick check of the names of those elected to Fatah's Central Committee, which has 20 members, shows the predominance of people identified with the Oslo Accords. At their head is Abu Mazen, who was elected by consensus: no one challenges him. The representatives from the Palestinian diaspora are mostly out. Their places have been taken by younger people from the West Bank and Gaza. Thus Fatah has sealed the transformation that began at Oslo, when the exiles in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon lost influence.

There are many, to be sure, who view the election of Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned in Israel, as a sign of deep change. The other elected figures, however, include Muhammad Dahlan, Jibril Rajoub, Tufik Tirawi and Hussein Sheikh—all heads of the various security forces. These former grassroots leaders have risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of well-deserved oblivion. They are from the regime that Yasser Arafat founded, which was rife with corruption. They cooperate fully with America—currently in the person of General Keith Dayton—and with Israel's Shin Beth. They were among those who created the situation that enabled Hamas to win the 2006 elections. In effect, the Fatah Convention gave a seal of approval to the policies of the PA since its beginnings, without calling anyone to account. The sole exception is Farouk al-Kadumi, the PLO's "Secretary of State," who boycotted the convention in Bethlehem. Kadumi gave an interview to Al Jazeera accusing Abu Mazen and Dahlan of planning Arafat's assassination with Ariel Sharon, the then Israeli Prime Minister, after the outbreak of the second Intifada.

It is no wonder, too, that the talks between Fatah and Hamas in Cairo are in deep freeze. The Fatah Convention amounted to a Declaration of War on Hamas: those elected are the very people who want to overthrow Hamas in Gaza. They tacitly support Israel's continuing siege on the Strip.

Hamas, for its part, prevented Fatah members living in Gaza from attending the Bethlehem convention (while Israel allowed entrance to Fatah members from the refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon). Hamas continues a policy aimed at perpetuating its rule and alleviating the siege. To this end it maintains a strict cease fire de facto with Israel and seeks the release of a thousand prisoners in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Internally, on the other hand, Hamas wields an iron fist. It has ordered girls to wear the jilbab (long garment) as a condition for entering school, clearly a sign that it intends to enforce Islamic law. The laws of separation between the sexes impose rule by fear, enabling the regime to intervene in the private lives of its citizens. Thus two very different entities are crystallizing in the Occupied Territories: a secular one with its capital in Ramallah and a fundamentalist one with its capital in Gaza.

Fayyad's plan to prepare the ground for a Palestinian state within two years appears, in the light of all this, as no more than an additional item in a long wish-list, beginning with the celebration in Algeria in 1988, when Arafat accepted a two-state solution and the Palestinian national anthem was unveiled (lyrics by Mahmoud Darwish, music by Mikis Theodorakis), then continuing to Oslo with its successors: the Mitchell plan, the Road Map and Annapolis. Nothing remains of these castles in the sand.

Fayyad's plan is strange in another respect. Shouldn't it have been the task of the Fatah institutions to come out with a program? Instead, we get a document written by the protégé of the Americans.

Concerning prospects for a solution of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, Israeli Foreign Secretary Avigdor Lieberman claims that the next 16 years will be pretty much like the last: nothing doing. Given the gloomy conditions within the Palestinian arena, this prophecy is probably not too far from the mark. Within 16 years the number of settlers, now almost half a million including East Jerusalem, will grow by 250,000. The dream of a Palestinian state will be lost forever. The West Bank will become Israeli territory de facto. In order to avoid an Arab majority, Israel will implement apartheid. It will then lose whatever legitimacy it still has in the eyes of the international community. In short, Israel's attempt to exploit Palestinian weakness will bring disaster not only on the Palestinians but on the Israelis too.

Israeli Army official: Hebron man killed in cold blood, soldiers were never charged

Saed Bannoura

- IMEMC An Israeli military official confirmed the story of the family of Yasser Tmeizy, from the southern West Bank City of Hebron, who said that Israel soldiers killed their son in cold blood, but Israel never filed charges against them. Odi Ben Moha, an Israeli military commander in charge of the Hebron district, stated that it is a scandal that no charges were filed against the soldiers especially since the crime took place on January 13 this year. Tmeizy, 35, was working in his olive orchard, close to the annexation Wall in Ithna town, near Hebron. Israeli soldiers approached him and started hitting him before they forced him into their jeep. Ben Moha stated that according to army investigation, the soldiers approached Tmeizy was he was working in his land, and that his six-year old son was with him when the soldiers kidnapped him and left the child alone in the orchard. He added that the soldiers took Tmeizy to Tarqoumia military base, and that he was blindfolded and handcuffed. A soldier was standing guard next to him; Tmeizy started asking about his son, as he was worried about what happened to his child who was left alone in the field. Ben Moha said that Tmeizy made a sudden move, as he was worried about his son, and the soldier guarding him fired three rounds at the cuffed and blindfolded man; one of the bullets hit Tmeizy in the chest. The army never filed charges against the soldier, and never investigated the soldiers involved in the whole incident. Soldiers tried to allege that Tmeizy attempted to snatch a weapon from one of them, but Tmeizy was cuffed and blindfolded, an issue that pushed Moha to discredit the claims. The soldiers even claimed that the man allegedly "became violent in the jeep, managed to free his hands and tried to steal a weapon from one of the guards". The soldiers also claimed that Tmeizy, who was working in his own field and accompanied by his child, has no identification card and that they had to arrest him.

Girl, 15, seeks justice for Gaza in world court

A 15-year-old Palestinian girl who says Israeli troops killed her father and two siblings in Gaza in January, sought justice from the International Criminal Court on Monday.

"I am here to lodge a complaint against the occupying army," Amira Alqerem told journalists in The Hague, seven months after her family was killed in an early-morning assault in the Tal Al Hawa neighbourhood that also left her severely injured.

"I hope this complaint will succeed because it is the truth," the soft-spoken teenager said, seated next to her lawyer on his way to the ICC to file the complaint with the office of the prosecutor.

In her court filing, Alqerem says her 67-year-old father Fathi, 16-year-old-sister Ismat, and 14-year-old brother Ala, were killed by Israeli army fire in the early hours of January 14.

The three children were awoken by an explosion to find their father's body, covered in blood, next to a crater near their house, the document claims.

Ismat and Ala went off to seek help, but were killed in another explosion. Amira, who had stayed behind with her dead father, was hit in the right leg.

"This was a crime against humanity, that is why we brought it to the ICC," said her lawyer Gilles Devers, who claims the attacks were aimed at civilians.

"Israeli politicians and military leaders must be held responsible."

Israel's 22-day offensive on Islamist Hamas-controlled Gaza left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead before ceasefire took effect on January 18.

ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced in February he had begun a "preliminary analysis" of alleged crimes committed by Israel during the Gaza offensive.

He has to date received complaints and evidence from the Palestinian Justice Minister Ali Kashan, the Palestinian National Authority, and over 360 other individuals and non-governmental bodies, his office said on Monday.

Amira, meanwhile, is undergoing physical and psychological rehabilitation in France.

"I am doing this for all the children of Gaza," she said through an interpreter.

"I want to do something to change the situation."

explosive information related to alleged Israeli organ harvesting

Dear friends,

We want to alert you to some additional, fairly explosive information related to alleged Israeli organ harvesting that researcher/writer Michelle Kinnucan recently uncovered:

In June 2001, the premier expert on international organ trafficking, Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes of the University of California-Berkeley and Organs Watch testified to the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights.

She described a "multi-million dollar business" that the Israeli Ministry of Health refused "to intervene and crack down on." She stated:

"... hundreds of kidney patients from Israel ... travel in privately brokered 'transplant tourist' junkets to Turkey, Moldova, Romania .... to Russia ... and to South Africa ...

"While in Israel for Organs Watch in the summer of [2000] and, again in March 2001, ... I interviewed more than 50 transplants professionals, transplant patients, and organs buyers and sellers involved in commercialized transplants ... none were willing to condemn a practice which they saw as 'saving lives'...

"Meanwhile, human rights groups in the West Bank complained to me of tissue and organs stealing of slain Palestinians by Israeli pathologists at the national Israeli legal medical institute in Tel Aviv...

"A more troubling phenomenon is the support and direct involvement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in the illicit national 'program' of transplant tourism. Some patients who traveled with the outlaw Israeli transplant surgeon to other countries noted that in each of the organized transplant groups were members of the Ministry of Defense or those closely related to them."

In light of the attacks against Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom and the newspaper that published his article, we feel that this additional information should be distributed widely.

Also, a petition is now posted online at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/investigateorgantheft/

While we realize that there are a great number of online petitions and they have limited effectiveness, we urge you to view this one and sign it if you agree with its content. We feel it provides a valuable synopsis of the issues involved.

* * *

Clarification: The original version of Alison's article contained a sentence in a parentheses near the end of the piece that may have seemed to say that Israeli professor and author Israel Shahak also believed there was a basis to the blood libel accusations. In reality, the findings that were similar to Professor Toaff’s were Shahak’s information on Talmudic texts emphasizing vengeance and on religious violence within some medieval Jewish communities – and not that there had been ritual killings of Christians.

We urge people to read Shahak's book (http://tinyurl.com/mob8py ) to learn his findings for themselves. It is also posted here (http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html ).

To see more on this, please see Alison's entry "Israeli organ harvesting?" http://alisonweir.org/

Best wishes,

If Americans Knew

Additional Links:

• Translation of the Swedish article: http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?reference=8390&lg=en
• Alison Weir's article: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/sweden.html
• Weir's Blog entry: http://alisonweir.org/journal/2009/9/1/israeli-organ-harvesting.html
• The petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/investigateorgantheft/