Mourid Barghouti

History Of Jerusalem

The Weak, The Strong and The Neutral

Today Editorial by The Guardian:

Gerald Kaufman once described Labour's 1983 manifesto as the longest suicide note in history. If ever a set of documents merits this epithet, it is surely the one we publish today. Written by Palestinian officials, obtained by al-Jazeera and shared with the Guardian, the papers are the confidential record of 10 years of efforts to seek a peace agreement with Israel.

It is hard to tell who appears worst: the Palestinian leaders, who are weak, craven and eager to shower their counterparts with compliments; the Israelis, who are polite in word but contemptuous in deed; or the Americans, whose neutrality consists of bullying the weak and holding the hand of the strong. Together they conspire to build a puppet state in Palestine, at best authoritarian, at worst a surrogate for an occupying force. To obtain even this form of bondage, the Palestinians have to flog the family silver. Saeb Erekat, the PLO chief negotiator, is reduced at one point to pleading for a fig leaf: "What good am I if I'm the joke of my wife, if I'm so weak," he told Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell.

Palestinian concessions roll on. The Israeli settlements around East Jerusalem? Sold, two years ago in a map which allows Israel to annex all of the settlements bar one, Har Homa. Mr Erekat called it the biggest Yerushalayim (he used the Hebrew word for Jerusalem) in history. Israel's former foreign minister Tzipi Livni acknowledges the pain involved, but refuses the offer. Israel banks the concession anyway. They are building in occupied Gilo today as if there is no tomorrow. Haram al-Sharif, the third holiest site in the Muslim world? That, too, is up for grabs. Mr Erekat said he was prepared to consider "creative ways" to solve the problem of Haram al-Sharif or the Temple Mount.

The surrender of land Palestinians have lived on for centuries prompts more demands. Not only does Israel want all of East Jerusalem, Har Homa, and the settlement blocs of Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim which carve strategic swathes out of the West Bank. Not only does it insist on a demilitarised state. It also wants Palestinian leaders to sign away their future. When Mr Erekat asked Ms Livni: "Short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defence?". She replied: "No. In order to create your state you have to agree in advance with Israel – you have to choose not to have the right of choice afterwards. These are the basic pillars."

Before the extreme right politician Avigdor Lieberman rose to prominence, the papers reveal that Israel asked for some of its Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state. Since then, state population swaps have entered the mainstream of Israeli debate, but no one is asking the Israeli Arabs themselves. Has the former nightclub bouncer from Moldova become more Israeli? Or is Israel behaving more like a Moldovan nightclub bouncer?

One requires Panglossian optimism to believe that these negotiations can one day be resurrected. Nineteen years of redrawing the 1967 borders, of expanding the boundaries of Jerusalem, of refusal to accept the return of Palestinian refugees, and of pleading for a fig leaf, has sullied the concept of peace.

The Palestinian Authority may continue as an employer but, as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street. The two-state solution itself could just as swiftly perish with it. If that is to be saved, three things have to happen: America must drop its veto on Palestinian unity talks and take up Hamas's offer of a one-year ceasefire; a negotiating team that represents all major Palestinian factions must be formed; and Israel has to accept that a state created on 1967 borders, not around them, is the minimum price of an end to the conflict. The alternative is to allow the cancer of the existing one-state solution to grow and to prepare for the next war. No one will have to wait long for that.

Picture Of The Day

Joe Sacco

Hero Of The Day

Al-Nakba

Wanted (in Britain)

Posturing and laughter as victims rot

Mahmoud Abbas stepped further into humiliation by saying the only option for Arabs is to make peace with Israel

by Robert Fisk

The front page of the Beirut daily As-Safir said it all yesterday. Across the top was a terrible photograph of the bloated body of a Palestinian man newly discovered in the ruins of his home while two male members of his family shrieked and roared their grief. Below, at half the size, was a photograph from Israel of Western leaders joking with Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister. Olmert was roaring with laughter. Silvio Berlusconi, arms on the back of Olmert's shoulders, was also joshing and roaring – with laughter, not grief – and on Olmert's right was Nicolas Sarkozy of France wearing his stupidest of smiles. Only Chancellor Merkel appeared to understand the moral collapse. No smiles from Germany.

Europe laughs while Palestinians mourn their dead. No wonder that in the streets of Beirut, shops were doing a flourishing trade in Palestinian scarves and flags. Even some of Palestine's most serious enemies in Lebanon wore the Palestinian keffiyeh in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Over and over again, Al-Jazeera television strapped headlines on to their news reports of Palestinians carrying the decomposing corpses of their dead: "More than 1,300 dead in Gaza, 400 of them women and children – Israeli dead in the war 13, three of them civilians." That, too, said it all.

All day, the Arabs also had to endure watching their own leaders primping and posing in front of the cameras at the Arab summit in Kuwait, where the kings and presidents who claim to rule them also smiled and shook hands and tried to pretend that they were unified behind a Palestinian people who have been sorely betrayed. Even Mahmoud Abbas was there, the powerless, impotent leader of "Palestine" – where is that precisely, one had to ask? – trying to suck some importance from the coat-tails and robes of his betters.

Slipping and sliding on the corpses of Gaza, these assembled supreme beings should perhaps be pitied. What else could they do? Saudi King Abdullah announced £750,000 to rebuild Gaza; but how many times have the Arabs and the Europeans been throwing money at Gaza only to see it torn to shreds by incoming shell-fire?

It has to be said that the two cowled Hamas gunmen who announced that they had won a "victory" in the ruins of Gaza were only fractionally less hypocritical. Still they had not understood that they were not the Hizbollah of Lebanon. Gaza was no longer Beirut. Now, it seemed, Gaza was Stalingrad. But whose uniforms did Hamas think they were wearing: German or Soviet?

"Israel has to understand," the good king said – as if the Israelis were listening – "that the choice between war and peace will not always stay open and that the Arab initiative (for Arab recognition in return for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders of Israel) that is on the table today will not stay on the table." He knew that "an eye for an eye ... did not say an eye for the eyes of a whole city". But how many times – how many bodies have to be pulled from the ruins – before the Saudis realise that time has run out?

The Israelis briskly dismissed land for peace in 2002 but yesterday they suddenly showed their interest again. "We continue to be willing to negotiate with all our neighbours on the basis of that initiative," the Israeli government spokesmen said – as if his own country's original rejection had never been thrown at the Arabs.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, of course, dismissed the whole initiative in Qatar last week as dead, insisting that Israel be declared a "terrorist entity". But Mahmoud Abbas stepped further into humiliation yesterday by announcing that the "only option" for Arabs was to make peace with Israel. It was Arab "shortcomings" that led to the failure of the 2002 Arab initiative. Not Israel's rejection, mark you. No, it was all the fault of the Arabs. And this from the leader of "Palestine".

No wonder America's man in Egypt – a certain Hosni Mubarak – repeated the tired old slogan that "peace in the Middle East is an imperative that cannot be delayed". And then the Emir of Kuwait invited Bashar and Hosni and King Abdullah of Jordan and the other King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to have lunch together – the menu was not disclosed – to end their feuding.

Al-Jazeera showed the ever-more putrid bodies being tugged from beneath cross-beams and crushed concrete as these mighty potentates debated their little disputes. There was really no adequate comment for this charade.

Said Siam (RIP)

The Hamas interior minister Said Siam, who was assassinated, aged 51, when Israeli warplanes attacked his brother's home in Gaza City, was the most senior Hamas leader killed so far in the invasion of Gaza. He was regarded as number three behind the prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, and the party's political head in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar.

Siam joined the Gaza Hamas collective leadership in 2004 after Israeli forces killed his mentor, the then Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz al Rantissi. He contested Palestine's 2006 legislative council elections, which were won by Hamas, polling the highest number of votes cast for any candidate.

Duly elected one of eight MPs for Gaza City, he was appointed interior minister and created the executive forces, a cohort of gunmen ostensibly meant to act as auxiliary police. They answered directly to Siam and became a counterweight to the official security force, loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. "We will beat with an iron fist all groups who are acting illegally," warned Siam. Their foes in the Fatah-linked Al Aqsa brigade called them "criminals". Drawn mainly from Hamas militias, their numbers rose from 3,000 to 5,800 by January 2007, and possibly 12,000 today.

Siam helped mastermind the defeat of pro-Fatah units in June 2007 after a four-day uprising that killed at least 116. He had previously promised, just 14 months earlier, that "there will be no armed clash. We'll settle quarrels through dialogue." The "coup", as described by Fatah loyalists, effectively torpedoed the unity government and split the Abbas-controlled regime on the West Bank from the Hamas regime in Gaza.

In November 1995 Siam had told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz: "I don't hate [Israelis] for being Jewish but because of what they have done to us. If the reason for hate will not exist, [and] you recognise the injustice we suffered ... everything is possible."

A decade later, though, he had solidified into a determined militant. In April 2006 he praised a suicide attack in Tel Aviv - the first after months of truce between the Islamists and Israel - as a justifiable strike against the economic blockade. Interviewed by Italy's La Repubblica at the time, he proclaimed: "Our people have never had a heavenly life. To us, distress is not something new. They ask us to defend their dignity and their rights, and food will come after."

Siam preferred polo necks and a neatly trimmed beard over the Arab robes favoured by his colleagues. Later a favoured interlocutor with Iran and Egypt, he was born in Shati refugee camp, Gaza, to a family who hailed from Al-Jura, a now destroyed village west of the Israeli city of Ashkelon. All its Palestinian residents fled when confronted by the Israeli Givati brigade, which conquered the locale in November 1948. Other figures from Al-Jura include the late Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder and first leader of Hamas, and the parents of Haniyeh.

At first Siam worked as a maths and science teacher at UN-run schools. An early member of Hamas, he headed their teachers union and during the first intifada (1987-1992), he led a unit that killed Palestinians suspected of informing for Israel. In 1992 he was one of 415 Hamas affiliates whom Israel deported to southern Lebanon. On returning to Gaza, he was often arrested by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, instituted in 1994. That year he exhorted worshippers at Gaza's Palestine mosque to put aside differences and unite against Israel.

After Hamas won the 2006 elections, some credited Siam with cracking down on rampant clan violence. But he quelled opponents ruthlessly, and human rights agencies highlighted his ministry's use of torture. Last August, Siam, Zahar and their allies ousted more moderate Haniyeh supporters in internal Hamas elections, suggesting a renaissance for the militants.

Also killed in Thursday's attack was Siam's brother Iyad, a controller of Hamas rocket units, one of Siam's sons, and Salah Abu Sharah, director of Hamas internal security in Gaza. Palestinian sources reported that 20 others were injured. Siam is survived by his wife, two daughters and three sons.

• Said Mohammed Siam, politician, born 1957; died 15 January 2009

by Lawrence Joffe

The Massacre, As per Today

As per Sun 11 Jan 09, and according to international press, Israel has killed 854 and wounded more than 3,500 Palestinians. Palestinians have killed, in the other hand, 13 Israelis (10 of them, military personnel). You can reach your own conclusions.

Mass Murder

Can you imagine Palestinians killing 500 Israelis because they suffered 16 loses in 10 years due Israelli attacks? Shocking, isn't it?

Waltz With Bashir

A good film!

Jaweed al-Ghussein

Palestinian leader persecuted after exposing Arafat deceit

Jaweed al-Ghussein, who has died aged 77, was a Palestinian philanthropist, educationist and former chairman of the Palestinian National Fund. In that role, he drew attention to the extensive corruption of his colleague Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). His whistleblowing was met with a sustained campaign of persecution by the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Ghussein was born in Gaza, the son of a prominent land-owning family. He attended the Friends school in Ramallah, but with the creation of Israel in 1948, the family, like many fellow Palestinians, became refugees. However, unlike many others, the Ghusseins could afford to send their son to complete his education at the American University in Cairo, where he studied economics and first met Arafat. The two became friends: while the young Arafat pursued a political career, Ghussein went into business, with huge success.

In 1964, having moved his family to Britain, he set up, with an American consortium, an engineering and construction company, Cordoba, in Abu Dhabi. The company became a major player in establishing the infrastructure of the oil-rich desert sheikdom. Cordoba built the first water pipeline from the oasis of Al Ain to Abu Dhabi city as well as roads, hospitals and many of the most important buildings in the emirate, including the iconic Sheik Zayed cultural centre.

During this time of plenty, Ghussein clung on to his Palestinian roots and traditions. He personally funded the education of many young Palestinians and then made sure they got the jobs to match their qualifications, either at Cordoba or elsewhere. He was a passionate believer in peaceful co-existence with Israel and determined to ensure the rights of all Palestinians. Inevitably, he entered politics.

In 1984 Ghussein was reunited with Arafat, and became chairman of the Palestinian National Fund, the financial arm of the PLO. He soon began to suspect that money intended to help families and fighters in the resistance was being siphoned off by the PLO leader into secret bank accounts. "None of us ever knew how much Arafat got from the Arab states," he said recently. "It could have been billions." Known payments included two from Saddam Hussein, each for $50m, which were neither acknowledged nor audited.

Ghussein kept his suspicions to himself, out of loyalty to the PLO and a fear of what he called "washing dirty linen in public". But when he criticised Arafat's backing of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, instigating the first Gulf war in 1990, their relationship collapsed. Six years later Ghussein, sickened by the deceit and hypocrisy that surrounded him, resigned very publicly on Abu Dhabi television when he called for accountability and transparency in the PLO.

From that moment on, he was a marked man. An extraordinary campaign of innuendo and accusation was orchestrated by the PA, alleging misappropriation of funds. Despite all accusations against him being quashed, in 2000 Ghussein, while attending a wedding reception in Abu Dhabi, was abducted and bundled into a private jet, taken to Gaza and held captive by the PA. He was eventually allowed to travel to Cairo for cancer treatment, but a group of armed men burst into his hospital room, kidnapped him and took him back to Gaza. Only international pressure led by Amnesty International secured his release, and he was finally brought to London for urgent medical treatment.

This period of persecution left Ghussein's health permanently damaged, and saw the huge wealth he had built up virtually disappear. Cordoba, with a one-time annual turnover of around $1bn, had ground to a halt, mostly because clients had allowed huge debts to accumulate. They remain unpaid.

Ghussein insisted on maintaining the Palestinian tradition of warmth and boundless hospitality at his London home in Mayfair. Every evening, guests, not necessarily invited but always welcome, would turn up for good conversation, followed by the inevitable itfaddalou - sit, eat, join us at our table. He had, according to his daughter Mona Bauwens, an "open house, open heart".

He never stopped trying to ease the Palestinian people's suffering and was co-founder, with the industrialist Arnold Weinstock among others, of the New Century Foundation, a non-governmental organisation created specifically to encourage dialogue between adversaries.

Recently he was honoured by the American University in Cairo in recognition of his services to education in Palestine. In his acceptance speech at the ceremony in London, all he uttered was a cry for help for Palestine. He is survived by his wife Khalida, Mona and son Tawfiq.

· Jaweed al-Ghussein, businessman and political activist, born July 18 1930; died July 1 2008

Another Day...

... another "legal" killing of Palestinians - this time a mother and her four sons.