Israel delights in Syria's unrest

Syria, Israel's longtime enemy and a key supporter of Iran, has been weakened by domestic unrest, Israeli leaders say.

GLOBAL POST April 29, 2011

Matthew Kalman

JERUSALEM — Israeli leaders and commentators could not help gloating as they watched Syrian President Bashar al-Assad writhing under the pressure of the Arab world’s latest revolt.

Unlike Egypt, whose leaders were committed to peace with Israel, or Tunisia and Libya, which long ago became minor players in the anti-Israel coalition, Assad’s Syria is regarded as one of Israel’s deadliest enemies.

“Even in our world colored with grays and not only blacks and whites, the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus would be a great blessing for the Middle East and the world,” wrote Mordechai Nisan, a former lecturer in Middle East studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

“The list of Syria’s misdemeanors and crimes is legion. From belligerent Soviet ally to godfather and patron of Palestinian terrorism, Hafez the father and Bashar the son crafted a policy strategy that demonized Israel, betrayed the Arab world, consolidated the regional hegemony of Iran, and perpetuated an Alawite sectarian regime in defiance of the Sunni Muslim majority in the country,” Nisan wrote in the Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

“With the Assads gone, the Middle East as a whole will be able to move to transcend the state of terror and tension with which the Syrian regime poisoned the political atmosphere for over four long decades,” he concluded.

Israeli observers were also bemused by the sudden discomfiture of radical Palestinian groups — including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — whose headquarters are in Damascus and who have long enjoyed the financial and political support of the Syrian dictatorship.

The Meir Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Information Center, a clearing-house for Mossad and Shin Bet analysis, said in a commentary that the Hamas leadership in Damascus was “attempting to play both sides of the fence … saying it supported both the Syrian leadership and the Syrian people.”

Hamas was particularly exposed when one of its heroes, Muslim Brotherhood spiritual mentor Sheikh Yusef al-Qaradawi, backed the Syrian protesters in a sermon aired on Al Jazeera on March 25. Calling for all-out revolution in Syria, he lambasted Assad and warned that “those who do not change will be trampled.”

“Hamas has found itself in a predicament over the clash between its solidarity with Muslim Brotherhood elements in Syria interested in toppling the regime, as well as with al-Qaradawi’s attack on Bashar al-Assad, and its dependence on the assistance provided by the Assad regime to its infrastructure and terrorist activity,” observed the center.

But Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli peace negotiator with Syria, warned that the picture was more complex. In early April, writing in Foreign Affairs, Rabinovich said that while Assad is no doubt a ruthless adversary, “Israel itself is ambivalent about the future of his rule.”

“Israeli leaders believe that Syria and the Iranian axis have been weakened by the domestic unrest plaguing Assad’s regime. But like others in the region, they wonder what the alternative to Assad might be. Although they are aware of pro-democracy and human rights groups active inside Syria and abroad, they naturally fear the power of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Rabinovich wrote.

In a commentary last week, Rabinovich suggested that Israel open a back-channel dialogue with Assad, offering to help him survive in return for changing the diplomatic dialogue between the two countries.

“People in Bashar Assad’s situation are concerned about their physical survival and Israel has something to offer in this area,” Rabinovich told Israel Radio. “We could change the agenda between us and Syria. The agenda doesn’t just have to be about a peace deal and territorial concessions.”

But for most Israelis the chance to see Assad fall is not to be missed.

“It is difficult to support any position that allows for the Assad regime’s continued rule,” wrote former Justice Minister Tzachi Hanegbi in the Jerusalem Post.

“Syria, via its proxies, spilled Israel Defense Forces blood in Lebanon for three decades,” Hanegbi recalled. “Assad offered a safe haven in Damascus to senior leaders of terrorist organizations and allowed them to continue their terror activities, with unlimited freedom, from his capital. The Syria-Iran alliance has provided Hamas and its satellites with financial aid, training camps, a supply of modern weapons and political backing … Syria’s enthusiastic support for Hezbollah has turned it into Lebanon’s strongest organization.”

Whatever outcome Israel would like to see in Syria, past attempts at interference in neighbors’ affairs are not encouraging. Israel’s effort to foster regime change in Lebanon in 1982 by backing the Christian Phalange movement led to the assassination of its leader, Bachir Gemayel, and the rise of Hezbollah. Israel’s encouragement of Islamic groups in Gaza in the 1980s to counter the influence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization led directly to the creation of Hamas.

Joshua Teitelbaum, principal fellow of the GLORIA Center in Herzilya, said Israel can do little more than watch and wait.

“All things considered, it’s a good thing,” Teitelbaum told GlobalPost. “Israel cannot affect this outcome in either way. I don’t think we can shore him up and I don’t think we can really bring him down.”

“When all is said and done, if his regime is gone, it has the possibility of being good for us. This is an ally of Iran, one who props up Hezbollah. The people who come into control, and we don’t know who they are, might choose a different policy. They might seek the comfort of the United States for all we know. There are many options.

“What we do know is that this is a very damaging regime — damaging to its own people, damaging to Lebanon and the independence of Lebanon, totally supporting Hezbollah and Iran’s main ally in the Arab world. So the weight of things from Israel’s perspective and also from an American perspective is clearly against this regime,” Teitelbaum said.

But he said it was doubtful the uprising would lead to a sudden flowering of democracy because of the ruthless suppression under the Assad regime — father and son.

“This is an authoritarian regime that’s been there for a long time controlling its people. Economically it’s horrible for them. They are not advanced. They are not sharing the fruits of globalization,” Teitelbaum said. “There’s no civil society in Syria. There’s no way to organize in Syria.”

“I think it’s more likely there’ll be some kind of regime change. There are so many unknowns here. If it’s an Alawi takeover, and they’re going to switch for another Alawi leader, it’s not going to be democracy.”

Palestinians 'confess to Israeli family murders'

THE INDEPENDENT Monday, 18 April 2011

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

Two Palestinian teenagers linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine have been arrested by Israeli security forces for the murders of an Israeli family attacked as they lay sleeping.

Udi Fogel, 36, and his wife, Ruth, 35, died in a hail of bullets from a stolen M-16 assault rifle as they fought to protect their children from two men who broke into their home in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, near Nablus, on 11 March. Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and three-month-old Hadas were found by their 12-year-old sister, who raised the alarm. Their throats had been cut. Two more children aged eight and two survived because they were sleeping in another room.

Israeli officials said yesterday that Hakim Mazen Awad, 17, and Amjad Mahmad Awad, 19, from the nearby village of Awarta, were captured during a series of raids by the Israeli army and Shin Bet security service and had confessed to the crimes. Last week they led investigators through a reconstruction of the murders at the family's home.

"The murderers are in our hands," Colonel Nimrod Aloni, the localIsraeli military commander, saidyesterday.

Hakim's father, Maazan, a PFLP member, spent five years in a Palestinian prison for killing his niece and burning her body. His uncle Jibril, who was killed during a clash with Israeli soldiers in 2003, took part in an earlier attack on Itamar in June 2002 in which five Israelis were killed.

Israeli officials said the two suspected killers showed no sign of remorse and staged "a chilling re-enactment" of the attack. Shin Bet officers said they offered a "shocking, cold, remorseless and detailed description" of the murders.

Responding to widespread international outrage, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas took the unusual step of going on Israel Radio three days later to condemn the killings as "despicable, immoral and inhuman".

Idealistic blogger 'was more Palestinian than the criminals who killed him'

Profile

By Matthew Kalman
THE INDEPENDENT Saturday, 16 April 2011

Vittorio Arrigoni's middle name was Utopia, yet he chose to spend most of the past three years in the hell of Gaza, acting as a human shield for Palestinian fishermen harassed by the Israeli navy and reporting to a worldwide audience.

His "Guerrilla Radio" blog about life in Gaza was required reading among radical circles in Italy and he published passionate newspaper commentaries about the plight of the Palestinian people and the "crimes" of "the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv", which he condemned as "one of the worst apartheid regimes in the world". His final post, published hours before his abduction, and subsequent hanging by gunmen in Gaza, praised the "invisible battle for survival" waged by the smugglers in Gaza's tunnel network under the border with Egypt against Israel's "villainous blockade".

Each blog post by "Vik from Gaza City" ended with the entreaty to "stay human" – also the title of his book about living through Israel's Cast Lead invasion in 2009, when he was one of the few foreign journalists reporting from inside Gaza. For Palestinian sympathisers around the world, Arrigoni's trademark curly pipe, rugged good looks and facial piercings became the human face of Gaza.

Arrigoni was born in Besana Brianza, near Milan, 36 years ago and said rebellion ran in his blood. He had the word muqawama – Arabic for "resistance" – tattooed on his right arm. "I come from a partisan family," he said in a recent interview. "My grandfathers fought and died struggling against an occupation, in Italy it was the Nazi-Fascist one. For this reason probably, in my DNA, my blood, there are particles that push me to struggle for freedom and human rights."

He was on the first Free Gaza boat to break the Israeli blockade in August 2008. A month later he was cut by flying glass after the Israeli navy used water cannon on a fishing boat where he was acting as a human shield. In November 2008 he was arrested by the Israelis while out with another fishing boat but managed to return to Gaza before Cast Lead began.

Among his friends in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and the Free Gaza Movement (FGM), his abduction and murder have left a bewildering sense of bereavement equal to the deaths of Rachel Corrie and Tim Hurndall, two activists killed by Israeli soldiers. Hundreds of ISM activists organised rallies in Ramallah and Gaza yesterday to mourn their friend. Several gatherings were also held in Italy.

"It's unbelievable," said Huwaida Arraf, a co-founder of the ISM. "He was more Palestinian than the criminals that killed him."

Greta Berlin, a founder of the FGM, said Arrigoni's death would not derail the struggle of foreign activists, who would remain in Gaza. The kidnapping came a week after the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis, a Palestinian-Israeli theatre director in Jenin.

"With Juliano murdered and now Vik, it makes us so terribly sad the killings continue," Ms Berlin told The Independent. "If the people behind these murders think we will quit, they are mistaken. Like the murder of Rachel Corrie, hundreds of us signed on to work for justice for the Palestinians. We will do the same this time."

Activist's murder shakes Hamas's grip on Gaza

Outrage as first death of foreigner since militants seized power in 2007 underscores rise of destabilising 'outlaw' element

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT Saturday, 16 April 2011

Rex Features

Vittorio Arrigoni mans a boat during the 2008 protest against Israel's blockade of Gaza-bound ships

The Hamas Government in Gaza has vowed to track down those behind the abduction and murder of an Italian activist who had lived in the Palestinian territory on and off since 2008.

Confusion surrounded the identity of those responsible for the murder of Vittorio Arrigoni after the extremist Islamic group that had originally claimed to be holding him denied any involvement.

Arrigoni, 36, was the first foreigner to be killed in Gaza since Hamas seized control of the enclave in 2007. He was active with the International Solidarity Movement and the Free Gaza Group and a well-known commentator in Italy.

He was found hanged in a house in the Mashrou Amer neighbourhood of Gaza City hours after an unknown group calling itself The Brigade of the Gallant Companion of the Prophet Mohamed bin Muslima released a video of him bound and blindfolded. His abductors said he would be released in return for Sheikh Hisham Su'idani, leader of the extremist Salafist Tawhid wal Jihad group who was arrested by Hamas security in March.

"We kidnapped the Italian prisoner Vittorio and we call on the Haniyeh government... to release all our prisoners," the abductors said.

But when Hamas forces stormed the house owned by a member of the group in the early hours of yesterday, they found Arrigoni had already been killed more than 12 hours before a 5pm deadline set by the kidnappers.

"The investigation led to a member of the group who gave away the other members and showed the place where the activist was kept," Hamas interior ministry spokesman Ihab al-Ghussein said in a statement.

"The security services... found the body of the hostage, who had been killed several hours earlier in an awful way," he said, adding that two of the kidnappers had been arrested and a manhunt was under way for co-conspirators.

The Italian foreign ministry expressed "deep horror over the barbaric murder" and denounced "in the strongest manner the act of vile and senseless violence committed by extremists who are indifferent to the value of human life".

Arrigoni's murder highlights increasing concerns that Hamas's influence is crumbling, exacerbated by a violent and intractable split with the Fatah-dominated leadership of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. That fear was echoed by Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, who said the "goal of this depraved band of outlaws was to spread chaos and anarchy in the Gaza Strip, a desperate attempt to strike at the stable security situation".

Former Palestine Liberation Organisation negotiator Saeb Erekat said the kidnapping resulted from the "chaos and lawlessness" in Gaza. The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights issues regular reports condemning the chaos under Hamas rule. In recent weeks, Hamas has been unable or unwilling to stop extremist splinter groups from firing hundreds of rockets across the border into Israel, triggering deadly Israeli air strikes.

Latest polls indicate that Fatah would easily defeat Hamas in new elections, but Hamas will not allow them to be held even though they are overdue.

Mr Barhoum condemned the killing as "shameful" and said he suspected Israel might be responsible since the death appeared to be timed to deter foreign activists from joining a flotilla due to sail to Gaza in May to break Israel's naval blockade of the area. Arrigoni was aboard the first blockade-busting boat in August 2008, when he was arrested by the Israelis for providing a human shield to Gaza fishermen.

Tawhid wal Jihad, which claimed responsibility for a series of attacks including the 2006 bombing of hotels in Sinai, denied killing Arrigoni, but said the death was a direct result of Hamas policies against Islamic extremists.

In 2007, the Salafist Army of Islam kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston and held him for four months. In August 2009, 24 people were killed when Hamas forces stormed a mosque in Rafah after a leader of Soldiers of the Partisans of God announced the creation of an Islamist state in Gaza.

"While we, Tawhid wal Jihad, had no role in this kidnapping, we affirm that what happened is the natural result of the repressive policy of Hamas and its government against the Salafists," said a statement from the group.

Bruising political spat cools Bieber's fever for Israel

By Matthew Kalman in Jerusalem

THE INDEPENDENT Friday, 15 April 2011

AP

Justin Bieber, a Christian, had planned to visit religious sites

Israeli teenagers were delighted when singing sensation and heartthrob Justin Bieber arrived in Tel Aviv on Sunday ahead of a concert last night for 25,000 fans.

After the cancellation of shows in Israel by Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Klaxons and Gorillaz Sound System due to a pro-Palestinian boycott, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have been expected to treat the pint-sized superstar with care. Instead, Bieber, who at 17 is too young even to vote, found himself in the middle of a petty political spat that sent the singer scuttling for the safety of his hotel room.

Bieber pouted on Twitter that he was "staying in the hotel for the rest of the week" after being "pulled into politics."

"It's been frustrating," he moaned before imposing an uncharacteristic 24-hour Twitter blackout.

The row erupted after the prime minister's office leaked the news that Bieber had refused to meet Mr Netanyahu and young Israelis threatened by constant Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza.

Bieber's camp denied he had snubbed the youngsters, saying that the meeting was never finalised and Bieber had already invited 700 children from the region bordering Gaza to be special guests at his concert.

Gadi Yaron, the concert promoter, told Israel Army Radio that he was unaware of any plans for a Netanyahu-Bieber summit, and anyway it was a bad idea. "There is heavy pressure on artists not to come to Israel," he said. "We are working very hard so they will visit Israel, get to know it, and won't view it as a political place."

But Mr Netanyahu, who fancies himself a master communicator, kept digging. "The idea was to do an event, which these kids could enjoy, to do something for the kids in the south who haven't had it easy. Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out," an aide told The Independent. "The initiative didn't come from us. It came from people claiming to be representing the Bieber people."

But Bieber's manager Scooter Braun told the Yedioth Ahronoth daily, "We never asked to meet with him nor has anyone connected with us asked to meet him."

A committed Christian, Bieber had planned to tour religious sites but complained that his plans were wrecked by the political row and photographers who pursued him around the country.

He began the week upbeat, evading hundreds of teenage girls camped outside his hotel and hitting Tel Aviv on a motor scooter while providing a running commentary on Twitter.

"This place is beautiful... Amazing place," Bieber gushed.

Then he set off for the Galilee and Jerusalem accompanied by his mother and Mama Jan, head of Jan Smith Studios in Atlanta.

"All I wanted was the chance to walk where jesus [sic] did here in isreal [sic]. I'm in the holy [sic] land and I am grateful for that. I just want to have the same personal experience that others have here," he said.

But things turned sour when photographers pursued him into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the traditional site of Christ's crucifixion.

The Israeli press is notoriously aggressive. They once sent Dallas star Victoria Principal fleeing the country, and forced Jim Carrey to hire a body double. Fights erupted with bodyguards for Madonna and Leonardo di Caprio.

"You would think paparazzi would have some respect in holy places," Bieber tweeted. "They should be ashamed of themselves. Take pictures of me eating but not in a place of prayer, ridiculous. People wait their whole lives for opportunities like this, why would they want to take that experience away from someone. But some people just don't have respect."

He was seen briefly on Wednesday in the McDonalds on Tel Aviv beach.

The ravaged palace that symbolises the hope of peace

Palestinian businessman is rebuilding his home after it was caught in the crossfire

By Matthew Kalman in Beit Jala

THE INDEPENDENT Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Albert Abu Zgheibreh's home cost $880,000 and took five years to complete

The first remodelling of Albert Abu Zgheibreh's impressive home in Beit Jala on the outskirts of Bethlehem was free of charge, but not to his taste. Hellfire missiles fired from Israeli Apache helicopter gunships left gaping holes in the walls, tank shells smashed through the supporting pillars of the verandas and the stonework was raked with heavy-calibre machine-gun fire.

For nearly a decade, the ravaged beauty towered over the valley dividing Palestinian Beit Jala from the Israeli suburb of Gilo, its blackened holes and shattered stones like broken teeth in a gaping mouth silently bemoaning the folly of war.

It took five years and $880,000 to build the house. It was barely completed before the Palestinian intifada erupted in the autumn of 2000. Taking advantage of Mr Abu Zgheibreh's absence abroad, a group of gunmen decided to use it as a machine-gun nest to fire across the valley at Gilo, triggering the explosive Israeli response.

No one knows how many holes the Israelis punched in Albert's Hall, but now he has begun to fill them. "Last year I decided it was time to rebuild it again. I didn't want the people – Israelis and Palestinians – to have to keep looking at this reminder of what war could do," Mr Abu Zgheibreh, 69, tells The Independent as he conducts a private tour of the premises.

He has recalled the expert craftsmen, stonemasons and engineers and sunk another million dollars into a second remodelling, in the hope this stark reminder of recent violence will become, instead, a symbol of peace.

"This house has entered into history because of the Israeli bombardment. Everyone wanted to know why I wasn't rebuilding," he says. "I'm building for the future and for my family. I hope now there will be peace. It's enough. For the Palestinians, for the Israelis, for everyone, peace will be better."

Mr Abu Zgheibreh's story is almost a parable for the Christian Palestinians who now make up less than 2 per cent of the population and have been reduced to a minority even in the region of Bethlehem, the traditional birthplace of Jesus.

Like thousands of Christian Palestinians, his father emigrated to Latin America in the 1920s when Palestine was hit by drought and a severe economic depression. Mr Abu Zgheibreh's grandfather was a textile merchant. His father set up a branch of the family textile business in Colombia and later settled in Honduras. Mr Abu Zgheibreh inherited the family textile business and then moved it to the Free Zone in Panama, where he has lived for the past quarter-century.

After the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, Mr Abu Zgheibreh decided it was time to re-establish the family ties with their ancestral homestead. He decided to build a new home which would also secure the family's ownership of an acre of land adjoining his grandfather's home, built in 1929. "I wanted to make something different, something new and really beautiful. I want people to look at this house and remember my family, remember this house, and remember Beit Jala," he says.

With its fine stone carvings, sweeping balconies and soaring arches, the 16,000sqft home on three storeys quickly earned the sobriquet Al Qasr – "The Palace".

"When the Israelis look across the valley they can also see that this is a good place with good people. I want everyone to enjoy the beauty of this house. It's for all the people," he says.

Mr Abu Zgheibreh climbed nearby mountains to look at the house from all angles as it was under construction and added new elements which could be seen from far off. He jokes that he has used enough stone cladding for four houses, and plans to fill the three-quarters of an acre of garden with fruit trees and fountains.

He has brought in traditional artisans like Abu Wa'el, a third-generation stonemason from the nearby village of Beit Fajjar, who on a recent morning was hand-chiselling the final touches to the delicate filigree around the windows.

"I like this artistic, delicate work," says Abu Wa'el. "There are very few people who want this kind of work these days. I learned it from my father and grandfather and I've been working like this for 40 years. I don't imagine my grandchildren will be doing this 40 years from now."

Mr Abu Zgheibreh admits he is gambling on peace to ensure he will not have to build the house a third time. He first found out what was happening to it when he saw it being attacked by a helicopter gunship on CNN. "I couldn't do anything," he says. "It was war, and I was in Panama."

He says the gunmen who first drew Israel's fire to the building in 2000 did not come from Beit Jala – a charge confirmed by Abu Atef, one of the Fatah gunmen who began firing from the building. Abu Atef says it became a right of passage for the most daring gunmen to take their turn behind the group's belt-fed Browning M2 .50-caliber machine-gun. Several gunmen and residents of Beit Jala were killed in the resulting firefights.

"The first time we came, the neighbours were OK, but after their houses began to be damaged from the Israeli tanks, people became very angry and tried to push us to another area to shoot. They didn't give us any help, not even a drink of water when the guys were thirsty. Even now they don't like us," Abu Atef admits.

These days, far from shelling the building, the Israeli army is taking an active role in securing it. Last year, the local Israeli commander made a rare early-morning visit to Beit Jala to inspect progress. A unit of Palestinian National Guard troops is stationed at the top of the road.

"If anybody comes, the Israeli soldiers see through their binoculars and tell the Palestinians to go and check it out. I have protection from both," Mr Abu Zgheibreh laughs.

Most of his five children continue to work in Latin America, but one of his daughters has married a local man and settled back in Beit Jala. He spends about four months of the year here but intends to spend more time once the house is finished. "I'm an old man and I want to retire," he says.

A Bitter Return to Politics at Israel's Bar-Ilan U.

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION April 12, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

RAMAT GAN, ISRAEL

Bar-Ilan University has a scarred past when it comes to politics.

In November 1995, Yigal Amir, a Bar-Ilan law student, shot and killed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. The assassination cast a grim shadow over Bar-Ilan, Israel's only religious university, whose founding philosophy is to combine "Jewish identity and tradition with modern technologies and research."

Some observers wondered aloud whether the university's religious values had contributed to the killer's extremist politics, and Bar-Ilan immediately banned all political activity on the campus and engaged in a deep soul-searching.

Today, Bar-Ilan is again being roiled by political controversies. A right-wing student group has accused some academics at the university of having connections to anti-Zionist, if not anti-Jewish, elements, while several left-wing faculty members have accused the university of denying them promotion because of their views.

Nasty political debates have affected other Israeli universities, but recent events at Bar-Ilan show that a university that has tried to moderate extreme political viewpoints can still be challenged by them.

For many years after Mr. Rabin's assassination, public political activity remained largely on hold at Bar-Ilan, except for occasional, carefully choreographed public debates on national issues, held just off-campus.

Then, two years ago, the Forum for the Land of Israel, a right-wing student group, demanded the reintroduction of political activity, citing Israel's laws on freedom of speech and political expression. Last fall Bar-Ilan's student union, with the university's tacit approval, said it was reviving political activity on the campus, within carefully supervised parameters, and invited students to join the debate in the pages of the student newspaper. In March, the union sponsored a Political Awareness Week, a fair with booths representing the full spectrum of Israeli politics, and a trip to the West Bank guided by both Peace Now and the Yesha Council, which represents Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

"We believe as a student union that students must be involved in society and the community," Orel Lahav, a student-union spokesman, said in an interview with The Chronicle. "Students must be part of political life. We have to ensure that the discussion is sensible, appropriate, pragmatic—and it shouldn't, God forbid, slide into incitement that could lead to the murder of a prime minister, as happened in 1995."

Student Activism

Ranen Shwartzman, a law student who founded the Forum for the Land of Israel, said his 200-member group wants an open and robust political discussion on the campus.

"We don't want only right-wing groups to act here," he told The Chronicle. "We know that because of the structure of the population here, the right wing will be stronger than the left wing. We are in favor of every political view being heard."

However, the forum has been accused of demonizing and suppressing views, among both students and faculty members, that it deems not Zionist enough. Last June a left-wing professor of psychology at Tel Aviv University pulled out of a symposium organized by the group after it was advertised with a photo montage that replaced his head with that of a hooded terrorist. The forum also objected to Bar-Ilan's giving several hundred Arab students a Muslim prayer room and an Arabic-language exam coach.

More recently the group has begun to extend its campaigns beyond student activism into Bar-Ilan's faculty affairs. In February a private meeting held by the law faculty between Israel's top international and human-rights law professors and Navanethem Pillay, the United Nations' high commissioner for human rights, was canceled by the university after protests by the forum.

"Anything the forum don't like, they try to cancel," said Mr. Lahav. "The forum are on the edge. Not a few times they have been warned that they have gone too far. On several occasions they have crossed the line."

He called the cancellation of Ms. Pillay's visit "an act of cowardice."

In March the forum accused the law faculty of consorting with anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish groups and called for an "in-depth public discussion" of their allegations.

In contrast to the Pillay incident, when Bar-Ilan acceded to the forum's demands, Haim Zisovitch, a university spokesman, condemned the group's "false accusations" and said it was attempting to "defame" the law faculty.

"The forum is doing enormous damage to the university," said Elad Caplan, a law student who heads a moderate political-religious group. "It's creating hate between Arabs and Jews. Bar-Ilan is irrelevant when it comes to left-wing politics. No one in Bar-Ilan is promoting an anti-Zionist agenda. They are manipulating fear and using demagoguery to create conflict between left and right, between secular and religious. It's really terrible."

Controversy Over Job Denials

The revival of student political activity comes at a particularly sensitive time for Bar-Ilan. In recent months, it has been accused of denying promotion to two prominent left-wing instructors because of their politics.

Menachem Klein, a lecturer in political science, was rejected for the rank of full professor for the second time in five years. Ariella Azoulay, a lecturer in cultural studies, was denied tenure last year after 10 years teaching at the university. Seventy prominent Israeli faculty members wrote to Bar-Ilan in protest, accusing it of "political persecution."

In April, Tova Cohen, a professor accused of connections to liberal causes deemed suspect by some university officials, resigned as director of gender studies after the university rejected the recommendation of the dean and a departmental search committee that her term be extended.

"The key positions in Bar-Ilan are taken by very radical people, political rightists," Mr. Klein told The Chronicle. "They are committed to the so-called purification of the university from so-called leftists."

The university said no political agenda was involved in the cases of Mr. Klein and Ms. Azoulay. "The two are convinced that their promotion was declined due to their political viewpoints. Bar-Ilan University adamantly denies this," said Mr. Zisovitch. "The criteria for promotion before the appointments committee are solely of an academic nature and based upon the academic achievements of the candidates in their field of expertise."

But a university appeals committee agreed enough with Mr. Klein's concerns that it recommended a new evaluation of his application. His proposed promotion to professor will be re-examined by a panel of experts in his field.

Mr. Klein's rejection has divided faculty members who know his work. Efraim Inbar, a professor in the political-science department who has made no secret of his opposition to Mr. Klein's promotion, rejects any accusations of political bias. "In our department, in which there is a leftist tilt, it's simply an accusation that doesn't hold water," he said to The Chronicle before the appeal committee made its decision. "Klein is trying to intimidate the university. I thought he hadn't published enough, and not in good-enough journals."

But Nathan J. Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University who was an external referee in Mr. Klein's application, called the rejection "simply puzzling."

"I am aware of concerns that it may be politically motivated. I am in no position to judge those concerns, but the outcome is a strange one," he said. "If this decision is based on scholarship, then it appears to me to be an easy one. Indeed, it is both open-and-shut and overdue. The publication record itself is easily comparable to those of more advanced rank. He has a sterling record in the academic field."

It is unclear what effect, if any, those faculty controversies will have on the decision to permit student political activity on Bar-Ilan's campus. Senior officials refused to discuss the issues with The Chronicle, aside from short statements delivered through the university spokesman.

U. of Johannesburg Official: 'UJ Is Not Part of an Academic Boycott of Israel'

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION March 25, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

Two days after the University of Johannesburg Senate voted to cancel a research agreement with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, hailed as a victory by the anti-Israel boycott campaign, the vice chancellor of the Johannesburg university issued a statement saying that "UJ is not part of an academic boycott of Israel."

On March 23, 60 percent of the Johannesburg Senate voted to end a joint project with Ben-Gurion University, in Beersheba, involving research to prevent algae from forming in Johannesburg's reservoir.

The University of Johannesburg's Petition Committee, which had led the campaign to cancel the project, called the vote "a landmark moment in the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel campaign,"and said it hoped the move would trigger "a domino boycott effect."

The vote was condemned by many Jewish groups. The Anti-Defamation League in New York called it "misguided and shortsighted," saying it "would ill-serve South Africans, Palestinians, and Israelis, and do nothing to promote reconciliation and understanding."

But Ihron Rensburg, vice chancellor and principal of Johannesburg, issued a statement on Friday saying that "UJ is not part of an academic boycott of Israel. UJ holds the view that given the current situation in the Middle East, the formal institutional agreement between UJ and BGU is an insurmountable obstacle to either institution facilitating a wider dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian academics."

"It has never been UJ's intention to sever all ties with BGU, although it may have been the intention of some UJ staff members," said Mr. Rensburg.

"This Senate resolution does not prevent individual academics from continuing and engaging in research and other partnerships with their peers from BGU and other institutions around the world, as is currently the practice in many cases," he added.

"The UJ Senate vote, in fact, encourages peer-to-peer engagements, and UJ stands ready to assist in facilitating this effort and to put resources in place to support these relationships," he added.

A representative of Ben-Gurion University described the statement as "an interesting twist, although it looks like semantics."

South African University Is First to Open Academic Boycott of Israeli Counterpart

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION March 24, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem

The international campaign for an academic boycott of Israel claimed its first success on Wednesday when the University of Johannesburg Senate voted to pull out of a two-year-old joint research project with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev to battle algae that are infesting the South African city's reservoir.

The vote means that the University of Johannesburg is the first academic institution in the world to formally cut ties with an Israeli university as a result of pressure by supporters of the international boycott campaign.

In a written statement, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel working group lauded the move, saying it set a "worldwide precedent."

The Senate vote followed a decision last September to end links with its Israeli counterpart if it found "direct or indirect military implications" to the relationship. The Senate had called on Ben-Gurion to form partnerships with Palestinian universities and ordered a review of the ties between the two institutions before April.

A fact-finding mission of officials from Johannesburg visited Ben-Gurion in February to see conditions on the Israeli campus for themselves. Ben-Gurion officials believed the visit had been a success. They are proud of the praise heaped on the university by Nelson Mandela when he accepted an honorary doctorate there, in 1997. The university conducts a number of joint projects, particularly on water and desert research, with Palestinian and Jordanian institutions and scholars.

The Ben-Gurion Student Association's chairman, Uri Keidar, who met the delegation from South Africa, wrote to its members afterward, saying, "I find it difficult to believe that BGU, the home of 20,000 free-thinking students of different religious and ethnic backgrounds, is under this brutal attack. These accusations, although faulty, are being presented as scholarly facts, which I find very disturbing."

But University of Johannesburg officials told the Senate before Wednesday's vote that no Palestinian university had been found to team up with Ben-Gurion on the algae project. Sixty percent of the Senate voted to cancel the research agreement in a secret ballot.

The University of Johannesburg's Petition Committee, which led the campaign, said in a prepared statement that the Senate had also found "significant" evidence that Ben-Gurion's research and other projects supported the Israeli military and, in particular, its occupation of Gaza.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but tensions and cross-border violence persist, including rocket fire from Gaza in recent days that was met with Israeli airstrikes.

The University of Johannesburg "is the first institution to officially sever relations with an Israeli university—a landmark moment in the growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel campaign," said the committee, hoping that it would trigger "a domino boycott effect."

Zev Krengel, national chair of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, condemned the vote as "playing to narrow-minded political prejudice and ... a severe setback for constructive intellectual engagement in South Africa."

"Rather than availing itself of a scientific cooperative project in the water-purification field that has enormous potential benefits for South Africa," Mr. Krengel said, the university "has chosen instead to further the agenda of a group of anti-Israel agitators."

Ben-Gurion University officials said they regretted the Johannesburg decision and stood by their record of cross-border co-operation with Palestinian and other institutions.

"Canceling this agreement, which was designed to solve real problems of water contamination in a reservoir near Johannesburg, will only hurt the residents of South Africa," said the university's president, Rivka Carmi. "The only losers in this decision are the people of South Africa."

FROM BRUMMIE LASS TO A BEDOUIN BRIDE

DAILY EXPRESS
Thursday March 17, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

Janice Abu Hani, 42, explains why she ditched her animal-loving life in the Midlands for the Israeli desert....

I HAD a typically English childhood. I grew up in Acocks Green in Birmingham with my parents and elder sister. I was always mad about horses and went riding every weekend. My grandad used to work on the railways with the big shire horses and my dad always kept a couple.

I dreamt of working with animals. Sometimes I used to go up to my dad’s smallholding with a sleeping bag and sleep in the stable.

My dream did come true, my house and yard are full of animals that I use to teach local children not to be violent. However, in all my fantasies of adult life I never pictured myself married to a Bedouin man, speaking Arabic and living in Rahat, a Bedouin town in the Israeli desert.

After I left school at 16 I got a job looking after a deaf and blind girl at the Elizabeth Gunn Centre in Birmingham.

I expected to spend the rest of my life in the city, working with the disabled, clubbing with friends in the evenings and riding horses at the weekend.

However, everything changed in 1988 when I turned 19 and went to Eilat, Israel, on holiday and met a waiter at a hotel. Talab was so good-looking and we hit it off.

After two weeks I came back home and we started writing to each other. After a month, I returned to Israel. I sold my horse and car and bought a one-way ticket. I didn’t know if it was going to be serious with Talab but I wanted to give it a try.

My friends thought I was nuts. My mum was worried but everyone said I could always come home if it didn’t work out.

Talab was different to my other boyfriends and the whole experience was like a big adventure.

Talab, now 48, got me a job as a chambermaid and we lived in the hotel. I experienced discrimination from a few Israeli workers and guests who asked me how I could go out with an Arab.

I was brought up a Catholic but I never had any reservations about being with someone from such a different background.

We stayed in Eilat for almost two years but after a few months I knew I wanted to marry Talab. We started talking about going to England but the British embassy said Talab could only stay for three months unless we married, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to get a visa or work.

M Y family had already met him when I took him home for my 21st birthday but his family was a different matter. Their plan was for him to go home and marry a good Bedouin girl. They knew he had a girlfriend but I hadn’t met them because Talab hid me from them.

In January 1990 we went to England and got married without telling Talab’s parents, though we sent them the photos. We stayed for three years and I continued my work with deaf and blind people while Talab worked as a waiter at the Metropole Hotel in Birmingham.

Our three sons, Michael, 18, Sammy, 17, and 16-year-old Adam were all born in Birmingham. When Sammy was six months old he was diagnosed with asthma and we thought the climate in Israel would be better for him. The night we arrived in Rahat, Talab’s family sent a convoy of cars to meet us at the airport and threw a huge party to greet us. They were really happy about our marriage. In Bedouin culture, having three sons is like hitting the jackpot so they welcomed me like one of their own daughters.

I finally met my mother-in-law and learned a few things about my new family. I noticed a woman hanging around the house who was really helpful but she didn’t seem to go home. Talab hadn’t told me his dad had a second wife. I knew Talab had two sisters and a brother but they were his own mother’s children. He also had six brothers and three sisters from his father’s second wife.

Talab, now a manager at a nearby hotel, has become more religious recently but he won’t be taking a second wife. Not if he wants to keep breathing!

I became a Muslim in a simple ceremony and we had a Muslim wedding but I didn’t change my clothes or my habits. It was difficult to adjust in the beginning because of the language. Some objected to me riding a horse because women don’t do that here but I insisted. My children were so young when they moved here they don’t recall any other lifestyle. Today I speak Arabic like any Bedouin woman but I don’t cover my hair or wear long robes. I don’t pray or fast at Ramadan.

The family don’t say anything about it and I’m very close to them. I try not to drink alcohol which is forbidden under Islam. I can put any animal I want in the garden and nobody complains. I have a horse called Prince, which I rescued from near death, Molly the goat, Shula the dog and a donkey called Shrek who has only one-and-a-half ears.

Sometimes when I walk through Rahat, people gossip and the kids tease me. I’m the only woman in the village who rides a horse and some people mind. Many have told me I’m not going to go to Heaven. I tell them I’ll get there first. I’ve done nothing wrong, I help animals and I help people. I’m sure God will make an exception that I didn’t cover my hair.

Rahat is a Bedouin town on the edge of the Negev desert. There are about 200,000 Bedouin in Israel. They were semi-nomadic but they have been forced to settle in a few towns. It has created a lot of problems.

There is high unemployment so there are lots of young men just hanging around and there is a lot of violence. Arguments and disputes escalate quickly to guns and knives. That’s what I’m trying to address with my animal classes for children.

I’ve long been concerned about the violence towards animals in Rahat. If it’s got four legs and it moves, the kids will just kill it so I hold sessions in the house teaching children how to treat animals and be kind to them. We have a whole menagerie in the front room: ferrets, rabbits, mice, doves, gerbils, budgies and a disabled cat.

Violence is part of the culture here and it’s something that really needs to be addressed. If we can get in at nursery level and go into schools and teach them non-violence and respect for each other by being respectful to the animals, I think we have a good chance to change things. It’s better to start young than trying to change their attitudes later.

I opened my own daycare centre to provide good nursery education in 1996. In 2002 I worked in a residential home in Rahat with mentally and physically challenged Arab-Bedouin children and I saw how they were treated.

We decided to save at least one child from going into a home. That’s when we started fostering children with disabilities.

We then adopted a girl with developmental problems. I try to make real positive change in the lives of the most vulnerable children.

In 2008 I became director of the early childhood resource and training centre at the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace, a non-profit organisation promoting peace and development. I also co-ordinated its community education and family literacy project.

The violence and crime rate in Rahat is extremely high. Families fight and even shoot at each other. There are a lot of guns around and any dispute quickly gets violent but when friends from home ask if it’s hard to live here, I tell them: “Not at all.” I love Israel.

I don’t know what it is: there’s more time here, a slower pace to life and my Arabic is fluent.

When I speak Hebrew people laugh because I sound like a Bedouin. I speak English to my children although I’ve lost some of my Brummie accent.

Ultimately, if I weren’t happy, I wouldn’t stay. I’d never go back to England which is hard because my parents live there but I talk to them on the phone. This is my natural place. I’m a Bedouin and that’s that.

Janice Abu Hani is featured in the new documentary Back And Forth (Ruth Diskin Films, 2010). Visit ruthfilms.com

For Einstein’s Birthday, Hebrew U. Unveils Online Archive of Physicist’s Work

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

WIRED CAMPUS March 18, 2011, 12:09 pm

By Matthew Kalman

Jerusalem—To mark Israel’s National Science Day on March 14, which by no coincidence is also Einstein’s birthday, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced that his entire archive of 80,000 documents held as a bequest by the university will be digitized and put online, thanks to a $500,000 grant from the Polonsky Foundation of London.

“Our goal is to build a user-friendly, inclusive digital database,” said Menahem Ben-Sasson, president of Hebrew University and a professor of history.

The project will make the full archive accessible for students and researchers everywhere, as well as ensure its preservation for future generations.

Einstein’s papers were originally housed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was appointed to a professorship in 1933 after fleeing Nazi Germany and remained until his death in 1955. Einstein was among the founders of Hebrew University and left his entire archive to the university in his will.

The Einstein archives are considered one of the most significant resources in the world for the history of modern physics. They contain many of his original scientific manuscripts and Einstein’s personal correspondence to and from family and friends, as well as writings on political and other matters during his lifetime.

The digitization project is expected to be completed in about one year, when it will be readily accessible on the Albert Einstein Archives Web site.

“This project unites the Hebrew University Library with digitization projects of the Polonsky Foundation recently launched at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and Cambridge University Library,” said Leonard Polonsky, executive chairman of Hansard Global PLC and head of the foundation that is backing the digitization.

Since 2003, the Einstein Archives Online has allowed viewing and browsing of 3,000 digitized images of 900 documents selected from Einstein’s writings, together with a Finding Aid allowing access to descriptions of the entire repository of Einstein papers at the university.

An archival database has allowed direct access to approximately 43,000 records of Einstein-related documents, but not to their content. Until now, Internet users have been only been able to access images of Einstein’s handwritten manuscripts. Facsimiles of correspondence, typewritten manuscripts, photos, and audio material have not been available online.

After Abbas

Faced with upheaval across the Middle East, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called elections for September. But it’s unclear who might run to succeed him, if the aging leader really does step down.

By Matthew Kalman|March 15, 2011

The day after Hosni Mubarak fell in Egypt, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced ^[1] that elections for the president and legislative council of the Palestinian Authority would be held by September. Forty-eight hours later, he asked for the resignation of the current Cabinet. “The new government should concentrate its efforts on mobilizing its energies to prepare national institutions for the establishment of an independent state of Palestine before the deadline of next September,” Abbas said.

The Palestinian leader has just seven months to reach a working relationship with Hamas, which controls Gaza and which rejects the PA government, or the elections cannot be held in Gaza. Early indications are not promising. Hamas spokesmen flatly rejected the idea of rapprochement, despite an offer from Fatah Central Committee member Nabil Sha’ath to travel there and agree to “any conditions” the group might demand. “I don’t know if there will be an independent state around September and if we will see another president in the coming months or even after September,” Nabil Amr, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister and ambassador to Cairo and Moscow, told me. A confidant of both Yasser Arafat and Abbas, Amr has become a gadfly critic of the leaders he once advised.

While Abbas’ commitment to the September deadline could be dismissed as Palestinian rhetoric in the style of Yasser Arafat’s pledge to declare an independent state in September 2000, this time the Palestinian leadership may have no choice, given the wave of popular revolts rolling across the Arab world and the Palestinians’ own internal problems. A week after the fall of the Tunisian government in January, Al Jazeera began publishing the “Palestine Papers ^[2]”—a WikiLeaks-style trove of documents detailing confidential peace talks between Palestinian negotiators and Israel that portrayed the Palestinian team as weak and desperate. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat initially denounced the documents as forgeries, but he was later forced to confirm their authenticity and resigned. Meanwhile, attention shifted to events ^[3] in Egypt, where mass demonstrations led to Mubarak’s resignation on February 11.

The loss of Erekat, a key confidante, was a serious problem for Abbas. Even worse was the fall of Mubarak, a stout supporter of Fatah and opponent of Hamas. “The Palestinian leaders don’t have a good response to what is happening,” says analyst Hani al-Masri at the Palestine Media, Research and Studies Centre ^[4]. “They are afraid because they lost their big friend and ally.” Al-Masri adds that the only way to achieve the unity with Hamas necessary to conduct elections and a breakthrough in the peace talks that will bring about independence by the September deadline is for the Palestinian leaders to change both their tactics and leadership. “Abu Mazen”—as Abbas is known—“must say seriously that he is not running in the next election,” says al-Masri. “We must prepare ourselves for the future.”

Hafez Barghouti, editor of the semi-official Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida and a veteran Fatah insider, says the party is failing to prepare for the inevitable generational handover of power. “Abu Mazen is old and he doesn’t want to be like the Arab leaders, to be fired by the people,” says Barghouti. “But I don’t know who will be the new leader. From Fatah I don’t see anybody. I cannot see a good leader or a popular leader now from Fatah. Fatah till now is sleeping.”

Hatem Abdel Kader, a former Palestinian minister for Jerusalem and a prominent leader of the young guard with close connections to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, echoes Amr’s call for Fatah to get its act together while still maintaining his support for Abbas.

“Fatah is the movement of our people, Fatah is the leader of our national project, and only Fatah can achieve our national project—but we need to clean up our home,” says Abdel Kader. “Right now we haven’t any choice, only Abu Mazen. After Abu Mazen, I don’t know.”

The absence of any natural successor to Abbas either now or in the future is likely to spell trouble for Fatah, for the Palestinian national movement, and for Israelis hoping for a peace partner. Observers agree that while Palestinian Prime Minster Salam Fayyad has built enormous political capital with his “Homestretch to Freedom” plan ^[5] for Palestinian statehood, his closeness ^[6] to the Americans makes him an object of suspicion, and there is no chance he can win an election as an independent.

“Salam Fayyad is a good man, but he is not from Fatah,” says pollster Nabil Kukali, director-general of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion in Beit Sahour. “If Fatah will support Fayyad I’m sure he will win the elections. But if Fatah have their own candidate it will be very difficult for Fayyad.”

Several members of the Palestinian Central Committee who were elected in 2009 appear to have dropped out of contention for a leadership role. Saeb Erekat’s chances were probably destroyed by the Palestine Papers leaks. Tawfik Tirawi, a former head of Palestinian General Intelligence, prefers to play a backroom role as chief security adviser to Abbas. Jibril Rajoub, former head of Preventive Security in the West Bank, is reveling in his new job as head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee and Football Association and refuses to discuss anything except soccer and athletics.

Polls suggest that the potential candidate likely to win the largest majority in a post-Abbas presidential election is Marwan Barghouti ^[7], currently serving five life terms in an Israeli jail for his part in launching terror attacks against Israelis during the intifada. While Fatah leaders respect Barghouti, they rule out his candidacy as impractical.

“Marwan Barghouti could be an excellent candidate, but he is in an Israeli prison,” says Hanna Siniora, a veteran Fatah leader in Jerusalem. Amr concurs: “I like him and he’s my friend, but who will nominate a president in prison? It will be a joke.”

Recent events also suggest that Abbas, far from encouraging a smooth leadership transition, is working hard to deter would-be successors from staking a claim to the presidency. Until November, one obvious front-runner was Mohammed Dahlan, 49, the feared former commander of Palestinian Preventive Security in Gaza. Dahlan’s U.S.-trained and -equipped forces were roundly defeated by the Hamas Executive Force and expelled from Gaza in 2007. Some 400 Fatah fighters and activists were killed in that battle. But Dahlan bounced back from that humiliation to secure a seat on the Central Committee in 2009. Dahlan had established close ties with U.S. and British intelligence during his tenure as Gaza security chief and amassed a sizable personal fortune, with which he began to build a power base in the West Bank.

But last fall, Dahlan was suddenly stripped ^[8] of his official duties and accused of financial and other misdeeds after he criticized the business dealings of the president’s family. An unprecedented attack on Dahlan published by the PLO’s official WAFA news agency announced a full-scale investigation into Dahlan’s alleged corruption and linked him to a plot to overthrow Abbas also involving Nasser al-Kidwa, Yasser Arafat’s nephew and a former foreign minister and PLO representative to the United Nations—and another possible successor to Abbas.

Indeed, al-Kidwa’s name comes up frequently in conversations with senior Fatah officials about successors. Now 57, al-Kidwa was talent-spotted in his teens by his uncle and charged with turning the General Union of Palestinian Students into an international force to help Fatah consolidate its control of the PLO while also serving as a nursery for future Palestinian leaders.

In the modest basement office he now occupies as the head of the Yasser Arafat Foundation ^[9], al-Kidwa is clearly caught between a desire to continue his uncle’s legacy, his frustration at the current leadership’s lack of progress in the peace process, and his shock at the public accusation that he was plotting with Dahlan to overthrow Abbas.

Al-Kidwa bears an uncanny resemblance to his late uncle—he favors business suits over military fatigues—but Fatah kingmakers are divided as to whether he has what it takes to fill Arafat’s shoes. His supporters cite his rich diplomatic experience, impressive intellect, and his freedom from the taint of corruption that swirls around many other Fatah officials. Detractors say he is largely untried on the domestic scene and his profile since returning from diplomatic service has been too low to attract much following among the 400,000 registered members of Fatah.

One Israeli diplomat who frequently locked horns with al-Kidwa at the United Nations said he was a force to be reckoned with. “He is very intelligent, extremely slippery, and he can be unnecessarily aggressive,” said the Israeli. Many Palestinians may feel that is exactly the kind of person they could use right now at the helm of their drifting ship.

Al-Kidwa says the conspiracy allegations published by the official news agency are symptomatic of a leadership that has lost touch with its own people and frozen democratic institutions like the legislative council.

“We are seeing a decrease in the amount of tolerance of other opinions, of opposition, of dissent,” says al-Kidwa. “There is an absence of democratic check and balance and a muting of opposition generally, especially after the military coup d’etat in Gaza. This led to more accumulation, more centralization of power. Part of this is not our making. Part of this is a result of the Hamas military coup in Gaza, the situation here, the lack of progress in the peace process. But irrespective of whose fault this might be, the results are not nice.”

He denounces the Hamas regime in Gaza as “authoritarian and merciless” but says the priority must be a power-sharing agreement that will allow Hamas to fully participate in the PLO and the Palestinian Authority without needing to join a government whose peaceful program they would be unable to endorse. He is confident that Hamas can be persuaded to drop its demands for Israel’s destruction.

“They have a really very serious problem,” al-Kidwa says of Hamas. “They don’t have answers either for the Palestinian people or for themselves.”

While he praises Salam Fayyad as “a serious man” and lauds his achievements in recent years, he says the idea that building institutions ^[10]can bring a Palestinian state into existence is “deeply flawed” in the absence of a coherent political program, both at home and internationally. He says there should be much more pressure on the Israelis from the United Nations and other international institutions to produce an agreement, since direct negotiations have clearly failed.

Evidently, he has thought long and hard about the new policies that could be pursued under a new leader. Will he run in the planned election, if it happens? “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth,” al-Kidwa replies. “There is total confusion when it comes to whatever might happen next.”

Matthew Kalman ^[11] is a foreign correspondent and filmmaker based in Jerusalem.

Debate erupts over Middle East peace talks

Revelations in leaked documents that Palestinians made major concessions spark anger.

GLOBAL POST January 24, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

JERUSALEM — In June 2008, Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, warned a conference at Tel Aviv University that time was running out for a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"This is the time for both of our leaders to decide,” Erekat said. "No one else will make these decisions for us. Not the United States, not Europe and no one else. I hope action will be taken. Every issue on the negotiating table has a solution."

“If we don't reach a settlement, there is a chance Hamas will take over the West Bank too and we will disappear,” he warned at the time.

On Sunday night, Al Jazeera revealed just how far Erekat and his colleagues were prepared to go to achieve that elusive peace deal with the publication of 1,600 documents leaked from Erekat’s own Negotiations Affairs Department office in Jericho.

The revelations were greeted with uproar from critics of the Palestinian leadership and accusations of forgery from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Some commentators said Abbas had been exposed as a cowering weakling unable to match the Israelis’ negotiating pressures. Others said the concessions revealed in the documents were old news and represented a Palestinian stance that had remained virtually unchanged for a decade.

Observers wondered who could be behind the leak and whether it was connected to an investigation announced last month into the activities of Mohammed Dahlan, a former Gaza strongman and leader of Fatah.

According to the leaked notes, maps and charts from secret meetings between Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. negotiators held between March 2008 and January 2010, dubbed the “Palestine Papers” by Al Jazeera, Palestinian leaders were prepared to cede large areas of Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem and the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees, as well as allowing the continued presence of more than 300,000 Israeli settlers, in return for a peace deal finally granting Palestinian independence.

Hamas denounced Erekat for making “free concessions” and “unprecedented compromises” over Jerusalem.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the documents revealed attempts by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority to undermine the rights of the Palestinian people and its compliance with Israel’s attempts to crush armed resistance.

"We consider these documents are further evidence of the security and political decadence which the PA stooped to," Abu Zuhri said at a press conference.

Erekat hit back by denouncing the trickle of documents planned by Al Jazeera in the coming week as “theater.”

“This is part of a campaign targeting President Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority at a time when we are going to the U.N. Security Council regarding the settlements," Erekat said, challenging Al Jazeera to name their sources.

"We have not gone back on our position,” he declared. “If we had given ground on the refugees and made such concessions, why hasn't Israel agreed to sign a peace accord?" he said, according to Al Jazeera.

As hundreds of enraged Fatah loyalists marched on the Al Jazeera bureau in Ramallah, Palestine Liberation Organization Secretary-General Yasser Abed Rabbo called a press conference to denounce the Doha-based TV network and the Emir of Qatar, who he accused of orchestrating a politically motivated campaign.

Ironically, in a meeting at a Jerusalem hotel in May 2008 included in the documents, former Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei told Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni: “Iran is against us. Qatar is against us.”

Further controversy is expected as Al Jazeera rolls out more notes of talks on refugees and security coordination with Israel, including evidence that the Palestinians downgraded their demand on refugees from the right of return for up to four million people to just 100,000, and that Israeli officials gave Ramallah advanced warning of their attack on Hamas in Gaza in December 2008.

That accusation was swiftly denied by Amos Gilad, the Israeli defense ministry official who handled contacts with the Palestinians at the time.

“This is an example of imprecision,” Gilad told Israel Radio. “Our towns were being murderously attacked. We warned Hamas there would be consequences and we briefed everyone in the world. The Palestinians received a general briefing that Israel could not continue to tolerate these attacks and one of the responses that could be expected would be a resort to military measures. We never conveyed in any manner any concrete plans to any foreigners as far as I am aware.”

After reading the entire trove of documents, retired CIA officer Robert L. Grenier told Al Jazeera that the Palestinians’ “failure to make any long-term, tangible gains for their people — despite their complicity in the process, despite their documented willingness to make far-reaching concessions, and despite having accepted American and Israeli support to repress their enemies and maintain themselves in power with at best threadbare legitimacy.”

But some local observers doubted that the uproar would have any long-term effect on the secure power base of the Palestinian leadership.

Professor Thiab Ayyoush, president of Palestine Ahliya University in Bethlehem and a veteran member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, told GlobalPost that while many Palestinians would be shocked to learn that Erekat was prepared to cede parts of Jerusalem, most of the positions expressed in the documents were well-known to insiders.

“I am familiar with most of what I heard. But many of our people and even many members of the Fatah Revolutionary Council do not have an idea about what has been said, so it will be embarrassing for sure,” Ayyoush said. “The position of Abu Mazen is very strong now. It is better than at any time before.”

Ron Pundak, one of the original architects of the Oslo peace process who is now director-general of the Peres Center for Peace, said the Palestinian position shown in the records was almost unchanged from the Camp David and Taba talks in 2000 and 2001.

"What Al Jazeera is trying to do is to smear the PLO negotiators,” Pundak told GlobalPost.

“These positions were the same positions that the Palestinians were conveying since Camp David, through Taba. The only issue here is that the resolution is a bit finer. It’s amazing to see how close the two sides were to an agreement," he said. "This is the real conclusion.”

After failed peace talks, US aid to Israel questioned

GLOBALPOST January 20, 2011

By Matthew Kalman

An Israeli soldier prays on his tank during a military exercise near the Israeli town of Katzrin, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, on Nov. 10, 2009. (Menaham Kahana/AFP/Getty Images)

JERUSALEM, Israel — The role of the United States as the largest single donor to both Israel and the Palestinians was thrown into sharp relief last November when the Israeli government rejected 20 U.S. F35 Joint Strike Fighter jets worth $2.75 billion in return for extending a West Bank settlement freeze by 90 days.

The offer — some called it a “bribe” — of military material equal in value to nearly an entire year’s worth of U.S. aid to Israel, renewed questions about the purpose of U.S. aid in the region and whether it might be more effectively deployed to better serve American strategic interests.

Israel receives more U.S. foreign aid than any other country, now around $3 billion every year. It is used only for military purposes — Israel voluntarily gave up U.S. civil aid more than a decade ago. Seventy percent of the aid is earmarked for purchases from U.S. companies.

According to the State Department’s latest budget justification for foreign operations, “U.S. assistance will help ensure that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge over potential threats, and prevent a shift in the security balance of the region. U.S. assistance is also aimed at ensuring for Israel the security it requires to make concessions necessary for comprehensive regional peace.”

This alliance is expressed in regular joint military training exercises, intelligence-sharing, a free trade agreement between the two countries, regular White House visits by Israeli leaders and frequent top-level consultations at all levels of government and the military.

In a secret cable setting the scene for a visit to Israel by Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg in November 2009, published by WikiLeaks, James B. Cunningham, the U.S. Ambassador in Tel Aviv, reported that “Israelis from the prime minister on down to the average citizen are deeply appreciative of the strong security and mil-mil cooperation with the U.S. The U.S.-Israeli security relationship remains strong … The United States remains committed to Israel's Qualitative Military Edge.”

The United States, meanwhile, is also the single largest donor to the Palestinian Authority — a point underlined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she pointed out recently that wealthy Arab states had failed to honor millions of dollars in pledges to the Palestinians made at donor conferences. In 2010 the United States earmarked $500 million in direct assistance and a further $228 million for Palestinian refugees through the United Nations.

“U.S. aid is important in terms of size and also in political importance,” a Palestinian Authority official told GlobalPost, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The money that we receive from the U.S. is almost 30 percent of the donor aid that comes to Palestine.”

The official welcomed U.S. President Barack Obama’s tougher policy on settlement building and his efforts to push Israel to conclude a peace deal, but said it seemed hampered by the “domestic complications” of being firm with Israel.

“The American administration is pushing with all of its strength to try to reach a settlement and basically achieve some progress at the political level. Unfortunately all of these efforts have been unsuccessful so far, but we continue to be hopeful,” the official said.

After the F35 debacle in November, Andrew Sullivan suggested in the Huffington Post that it was time to end the aid “because a) Israel doesn't need it and b) we need the money and c) it doesn't seem sensible to me to keep rewarding an ally that refuses to offer minimal cooperation.”

“It's time for the U.S. to assert its own interests and goals,” Sullivan argued.

Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman who relocated from Ohio to Ramallah to help build the Palestinian economy, said U.S. aid is simply “underwriting the occupation.”

“Instead of putting the burden of cost of being an occupier on the lap of the Israelis, they are underwriting them and allowing the Israelis to perpetuate occupation, almost cost free,” Bahour told GlobalPost.

“The U.S. national interest is to end the occupation. They’ve said it’s in the U.S. national interest to have a Palestinian state. So what are they waiting for to use their leverage — financial as well as others — to make that happen?”

But New Jersey Congressman Steve Rothman said, “the argument that American military aid to Israel is damaging to the United States is not only erroneous, it hurts the national security interests of this country and threatens the survival of Israel.”

Israeli leaders say U.S. aid to Israel should be seen as the most effective part of the U.S. defense budget.

“Since Israel is the most dependable and strongest ally of the U.S. here in this very unpredictable region, we save America a lot of troops and material,” Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, told GlobalPost, adding that $3 billion was about 2 percent of U.S. military spending in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

“To serve the same interests and objectives of the U.S. in the region without Israel would either have been impossible or it would have taken enormous resources, multiplying U.S. aid to Israel by one hundred times or more. The return on the investment in Israel is very evident and very big,” Ayalon said.

Critics of Israel have long argued that it is time the United States used the aid money to greater diplomatic effect.

But Gerald Steinberg, professor of politics at Bar-Ilan University, said U.S. presidents since John F. Kennedy — who threatened to stop all financial transfers in 1963 over Israel’s refusal to permit inspection of its nuclear program — have learned that financial threats will not budge Israeli governments on vital policies.

“For core issues, the threat to withhold U.S. aid will only make Israel more reluctant to take risks and increase the sense of Israeli isolation,” Steinberg told GlobalPost.

“The only way that Israel is going to be convinced to take security risks like withdrawal is by convincing Israel that those risks are offset, that Israel’s security is guaranteed. That will make Israel more willing to take the risks on the ground that will advance the peace process.”

In Jerusalem, Students Hold a Rare Conversation Across Checkpoints

CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
January 16, 2011

Yael Gidanian for The Chronicle

Students from Bethlehem U. and the Hebrew U. of Jerusalem meet in a program organized by the Interfaith Encounter Association.

By Matthew Kalman
Jerusalem

The distance between Bethlehem University, in the West Bank, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is only about four miles, but it has not been easy to traverse for a group of 20 students from the two institutions. In trying to meet to spend time in each other's company, they have had to navigate military checkpoints, a demanding bureaucracy, and a deep cultural divide.

Against a backdrop of increasing tension and threats of boycotts between Israelis and Palestinians, the students have started a rare effort to pursue dialogue across the political and religious chasm.

On a recent afternoon, dusk is gathering in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City as the students meet in the Austrian Hospice here. Outside, the fruit and vegetable merchants on the Via Dolorosa offer the last of the day's produce, their cries mingling with the muezzin's call from the nearby al-Aqsa Mosque and the hymns of Christian pilgrims retracing the last steps of Jesus.

It's an appropriate setting for a cultural exchange. Today the students are comparing the place of the olive tree and olive oil in their religious traditions.

At this, their fourth meeting, the participants greet each other like old friends, chatting easily in a mix of English, Arabic, and Hebrew. The young Israeli men favor slightly longer hair, but otherwise the two groups—to an outsider, at least—are indistinguishable. As they chat, they share coffee, cold drinks, and baklava from a local shop. The participants learn, with nods of recognition, that the olive tree, its wood, and its oil feature prominently in all three religious traditions, as well as in the history of the surrounding countryside.

The meetings consciously avoid politics, covering religious and cultural ideas instead. Those give each meeting a focus and allow the students to plan projects together. Today they decide to organize the joint distribution of olive oil from West Bank farmers.

The only division emerges as they take their first break: The smokers congregate outside, on the balcony, and the nonsmokers remain inside. Each group is about half Israeli, half Palestinian.

Following months of planning, the first meeting, early last year, was canceled after days of fighting and riots that had left the Bethlehem students facing strong objections from their friends to the idea of meeting Israelis.

Traveling to Jerusalem is no easy matter. Each West Bank student must submit an application to the Israeli military two weeks in advance, then travel to the regional military headquarters, several miles from Bethlehem, to receive a permit—if it is granted—and then pass through a grim military checkpoint of electric gates, barbed wire, and metal turnstiles.

Two meetings were canceled because the military had issued permits for the wrong date, and another for the wrong time. Nour Abu Katta, 22, a Muslim in the first year of a master's program in European studies at Al-Quds University, says it's worth the hassle. He was enrolled at Bethlehem University when the group started and still coordinates the Palestinian participants.

"I believe in negotiations. I believe that if we don't break this ice, if we don't meet and talk, we won't reach the point where we can end this conflict," says Mr. Abu Katta. "If guns and those ways had a point, they could have achieved something 20, 30 years ago. They have been struggling for 60 years, and they have achieved nothing except violence and more violence."

The Oslo peace process, started in 1993, spawned dozens of Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups, but many fell victim to the violence of the second intifada, which erupted in September 2000. After several Israelis were killed in Palestinian-controlled areas, Israel banned its citizens from going there and denied most Palestinians entry to Israel, in an effort to halt suicide bombers. Now the construction of a security barrier between Israel and the West Bank has sealed the division between the two peoples.

Attitudes on both sides have hardened. Involvement with Israelis has been branded as "normalization" by many Palestinian groups—a searing insult in the local political lexicon—suggesting that such meetings are akin to collaborating with the Israelis. Among many Israelis, meetings with Palestinians are dismissed as a waste of time.

The students at the Austrian Hospice represent a tiny vanguard of young people on each side prepared to challenge those taboos. Only a handful of dialogue groups still operate regularly. This one meets under the auspices of the Interfaith Encounter Association, a nonprofit group based in Jerusalem. Of its more than 20 active interfaith-dialogue groups, only six bring together Israelis and Palestinians. Three of those are student groups.

"Some people say it's a good thing we are doing, that it's worthwhile looking for peace," says Mr. Abu Katta. "Other people say this conflict will not end with dialogue, that it is not beneficial at all. I am hopeful that if it doesn't end the conflict, it might make it easier to be ended."

Sally Zaghmout, a Christian who is a second-year student in business administration at Bethlehem, says none of her friends will come along with her to meet Israelis.

"They say there's no purpose doing all this," says Ms. Zaghmout, 19, whose grandfather fled Haifa during Israel's war of independence, in 1948, and whose parents waged a 10-year battle to return a decade ago. Her friends, she adds, "say we're trying to send the picture that everything is good while the real situation is not like that."

"I try to convince them," she says. "It's true we're small, and we're not really affecting the government, but we're growing slowly. At least we're trying to do something instead of not doing anything at all."

Netta Hazan, 24, a Jewish student of Middle East studies at Hebrew University, says her eyes were opened to the Palestinian narrative through her courses. And working as a waitress in a Jerusalem hotel, she met Palestinians for the first time as equals.

"It's very unusual for Israelis of my age to have Palestinian friends, I'm like one in a million," says Ms. Hazan, who has learned Arabic and is involved in several groups connecting Israelis and Palestinians. "Because of it, I don't have a lot of Israeli friends. When my Israeli friends saw I was becoming more and more in relations with Palestinians, they didn't accept me and my activities. I lost most of my friends from high school or the army."

"My family is very right-wing." she says. "I have five brothers and sisters, and to speak with them about the occupation or the Palestinians—they just don't care." Ms. Hazan travels regularly to Palestinian areas, but many Israelis are scared to go. "They think it's the Wild West," she says.

Yehuda Stolov, coordinator of the Interfaith Encounter Association, says only half the number of Israelis who normally register for events held inside Israel do so when they have to cross the security barrier, even with permits from the army.

But students, he says, are especially suited to these activities, for both intellectual and practical reasons. "Students are more active, they are more willing to do things, they are more willing to go out of their way," he says. "Their routine life is less routine, so it's easier for them to do new things."

"It's very important that we are students," Ms. Hazan agrees. "You can speak more openly with students because they have some basic education, their minds are more open, they are more open to new things. It's easier."

She also believes it is worthwhile: "I think that peace will come from us, from the people. Not from the politicians, not from anyone else. Only from us."