Todos somos palestinos

Last night a friend was showing me the video she was making of the rallies in support of the Palestinian Authority (PA) president Abu Mazen's homecoming following his speech at the UN. It was full of people waving Palestinian flags and posters of the leader himself.  Many of them were wearing the black and white checkered Palestinian scarf known as the keffiyeh.

Then this morning, I was checking out a friend's blog about life on the other side of the world. Being here it's easy to forget that there are other events happening elsewhere, making similar demands for change.  So thanks, Robert, for reminding me of Chile and the efforts being made there to achieve free and fair education.

What is striking is the link between these two political struggles in the simple form of the keffiyeh, no longer a symbol of only Palestinian national identity, but of global social activism:

Some reflections on gender

At the moment I'm preparing a presentation for a workshop and the launch of a report on gender equality and development which we're hosting with the World Bank next week.  This should be interesting and details of the findings that my colleagues worked on at the beginning of the year make for interesting findings.  Granted, the fieldwork was collected in Rafah (Gaza) and Hebron, perhaps the most socially conservative part of the West Bank.  But both have to reflect Palestinian society to some degree.

Looking to New York

You would have to have been locked away in solitary confinement not to know that this week is when the Palestinian state juggernaut goes to the UN and seeks international recognition of the fact.  Walking across Clock Square (or is it now Arafat Square?) my friends and I came across the work team putting up a stage and sound system.  Palestinian flags made up the bunting between the lampposts while in Al Manara Square a few minutes’ walk away a giant blue and white chair to symbolise Palestine’s seat at the UN has been put in place (I intend to get a photo of me sitting on it, which will make me look tiny - UPDATE: That wasn't - and as of today - 9 October - still isn't possible as there always seem to be police around it!).  Meanwhile, the university president sent a circular to all staff this afternoon announcing that anyone who wants to can go attend the demonstration and speeches between 11am and 2pm.

 

Palestinian politics, unity and the role of religion

I attended the first day of Muwatin’s (the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy) two-day conference on the Arab revolutions and the political and intellectual challenges stemming from them yesterday.  I won’t be able to get to today’s presentations as I have other commitments.  Although the quality of the presentations and discussion was variable, it did present some useful insights and thoughts to consider.

First, I get the sense that there is very much a sense of disconnection from Palestinian society and the leadership.  The focus of the past few months (in case it’s escaped anyone’s attention!) has been on the Palestinian leadership’s drive to achieve recognition for a Palestinian state at the UN next week.  The last couple of weeks have seen reports coming out in the media which have raised a number of concerns in relation to this move, including the status of refugees who would be forgotten if the PLO’s status (which represents Palestinians everywhere, including in the diaspora) is revoked in favour of the PA.  There’s also the question of how to incorporate Gaza and East Jerusalem into the Palestinian state vote as well.

 

Between fact and fiction?

Flitting back and forth between Ramallah, Birzeit and Jerusalem, I don't normally come up against the occupation.  However, during Friday night some settlers wrote abusive grafitti on the walls outside the main entrance.  One can only imagine that they are trying to provoke things, ahead of the UN vote later this month.  Needless to say, the feeling in the university community is understandably angry and the students organised a protest outside the administration building for this morning.  As a friend said to me on Skype though, What's the point?  After all, it won't be targeted at the perpetrators.  But, as I pointed out, would a demo outside a settlement fair any better?  I can hardly see the army responding in a liberal and tolerant manner.

Achieving Palestinian statehood

[I'm on a roll today: two pieces after months of little action here.  That said, the following consists of some thoughts that have been brewing in my head over the last couple of months, so it was fairly easy to put them down.

UPDATE: An edited version of the article below has gone up at the Ideas blog here.]

In just over a month the question of whether a Palestinian state is recognised by the international community will be put before the UN. Despite the fact that there has been plenty of time to prepare and anticipate for this moment, it still seems uncertain how this is to be achieved in practice. Several factors are in play here – and they are outside the control of the Palestinians themselves.

Where are the current social protests going?

[The following article is now up at the LSE Ideas Centre blog.  Although I can't tell if they've edited for length.]

Tents on Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv

When the history of the present is eventually written, 2011 may well be most closely associated with the ‘Arab spring.’ Attention will undoubtedly centre on the revolutions of Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the currently ongoing protests against leaderships from the Gulf to Yemen and violent reaction from the Libyan and Syrian regimes.

However, the pressure for change in the Arab world has not occurred in isolation. The last month has seen the transformation of what was initially a youth movement in Tel Aviv against the high cost of living to encompass all elements of society in Israel. alongside the tents sprouting up along the wealthy Rothschild Boulevard in central Tel Aviv, the last three weekends have seen the size of the protests escalate, resulting in an estimated 300,000 people marching across Israel under the banner of social justice.

On Brazil's global rise

(Last month I was a participant at a conference on Brazil and the Americas in the 21st century.  It was jointly hosted by the LSE Ideas Centre and the Fundação Getulio Vargas.  I wrote a summary of my thoughts based on the participants' contributions along with some reading I did in the following weeks for a project I'm aiming to do.  I had hoped that the piece would have been posted on the Ideas Centre blog by now, but since it hasn't I've also decided to post it here.)

UPDATE: This piece has now gone up at the blog.

 

At a recent presentation to the LSE Ideas Centre, the Brazilian ambassador to the UK, Roberto Jaguaribe, painted a relatively positive picture of Brazil’s regional and global role.  He noted Brazil’s efforts to achieve greater regional integration, from the creation of the Mercosur common market (including Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and, as an associate member, Venezuela) in 1991 to the establishment of the South America-wide UNASUR in 2008.  He reported on Brazil’s increasingly diversified trade relations with the world and its current efforts to open up global governance through its participation in various groups of other state actors, along with the G20.  Brazil’s emergence, along with these other state actors, opens the prospect of change in the nature of international relations more generally.

 

Donors and Palestinian development

Back in June I was part of a seminar hosted by the Centre for Development Studies (CDS) at Birzeit University to consider alternative forms of development in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT).  This is an issue which has vexed us for much of the time that I’ve been involved with the CDS, including a conference that was put on in September last year.

The seminar came off the back of a report that I was involved in drafting which consisted of a conflict-related development analysis (CDA) of the OPT.  The seminar focused specifically on the aid community and what it might be able to do differently so as to assist development.  Our main recommendation in the report was that donors’ assistance be directed to support resistance against the occupation.  In particular this means adopting a more rights-based approach to development than has been hitherto applied, where people’s ability to choose for themselves is the primary means when determining how funding be allocated, rather than paying agencies and individuals to do things for them.

The Arab spring and its conceptual challenges

I haven’t been posting lately. This is partly because I have been focused on writing the first drafts of some papers that I intend to spend the summer revising before submission. But it’s also to do with the fact that I took an extended trip, to Jordan and Egypt. In Cairo I attended a conference on the Egyptian revolution at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and the transitions currently underway there. Since getting back I’ve also attended a conference at Birzeit on the Arab spring as well.

I’ve taken away a few interesting points from both. I was especially struck by the limitations we face as scholars to explain what has happened and is happening here in the region. This point was explicitly mentioned by several of the participants at the Birzeit conference, including Saleh Abdel Jawal and Abaher Saka, who noted the focus on old concepts which contributed to a failure to predict the uprisings since Tunisia last December. This was despite all the structural factors being in place according to Laurent Jeanpierre, from rising unemployment among the young, closed political systems and rising opposition outside of the conventional norms. Indeed, this was one of Saka’s main points: that opposition was taking place in new and emerging public spaces that had been overlooked previously.

Slipping standards?

It seems that having a PhD does not go well with politics as events in Germany and Libya seem to attest.  While most criticism is bound to be directed at the individuals concerned, I find myself wondering what the supervisors and examiners were - or rather, weren't - doing in all of this.  Didn't they question the dissertations in front of them?  Didn't they notice the plagirism?  And for the supervisors: did they not see the difference in writing styles between their students and the final product during the course of study?

Palestinians and Israeli reality

One of my criticisms of the Israeli peace camp has been that it does not seem entirely familiar with development taking place on the ground, within Palestinian society. In making that claim I am being rather sweeping and possible unfair; it may well be that there is greater awareness of the nuances within Palestinian political and social life by Israelis than I give credit for. That said, comments like those on Thursday gave me pause for thought, since a generally positive impression of the Fayyad plans and the measures implicit within it overlooks some of the starting points for my critique of the situation within the West Bank (e.g. whether market forces are both feasible or indeed justified in the context of occupation – two distinct issues in themselves). As I also mentioned in my post on Thursday, this needn’t prevent Israelis from being able to get a better perspective and understanding on the situation in the West Bank. There is sufficient material available to anyone who wants it.

A tale of disconnection

The last two days have offered an interesting juxtaposition between the reality of the occupation and the relatively disconnected nature of the Israeli peace camp.  Both were troubling.

Yesterday I was in Hebron where there were protests against the closure of Shuhada Street in the old city.  Nearby the Israel army provides a round-the-clock presence for 400 settlers who took over part of the old city in 1980 and live behind high walls, barbed wire and various security measures.  We arrived around 1pm to find the protestors – mainly teenagers and boys – going as far as they could into the old city in the street and along the roof tops and throwing rocks at the soldiers.

First thoughts about the Palestinian Papers

Of course, it can’t go without saying something about the leak of the Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera and the Guardian yesterday. I must find time to work my way through some of the documents. But what are the implications likely to be in both Palestine and Israel? Like Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, I’m inclined to think that the fallout will be more significant for the Palestinians at first. The fallout will hit the individuals’ negotiators’ credibility – although it has to be said that the general public’s mood has been largely sceptical of the leadership’s efforts in recent years. I can’t comment on Robert Grenier’s analysis that the negotiators were no quislings and were working for their people – my instinct is to give them the benefit of the doubt, since all politics is about compromise – but I doubt that the man on the Ramallah omnibus will see them in as favourably a light.

Envisioning Palestinian economic policy

There were three papers presented at the MAS conference on Sunday. Two were general, one by Samir Abdullah that examined the development gap and internal distortions between the West Bank and Gaza and the other by Numan Kanafani, which proposed some models to achieve economic integration between the two areas. A final one, by Abd Al Fatah Abu Shokor, dealt with the Jerusalem economy. Of the three, this was perhaps the least useful, since while it useful on the analysis (as many Palestinian papers are), it wasn’t so good on envisaging a future vision for Jerusalem. He provided very general recommendations, including a structural plan (which according to some of the commentators speaking after him, already appears to be in place, the President’s Office having set up a Jerusalem Unit in 2007 with EU money to complete one and which will be launched next month) and promoting religious tourism around the Haram Al Sharif and supporting ‘steadfastness’( i.e. resistance movements).

Fayyad at MAS

I don’t usually find it useful to go to a meeting or conference to listen to a politician; you can usually find what they think or have said elsewhere. Besides, if it’s a public forum they are less likely to be particularly candid, especially if there plenty of cameras and microphones in front of them. That said, they do have a pulling factor, which the most insightful academic in the world can’t match – mainly because the more critical the academic, the more likely they are to be further away from power and thus to implement their vision.

With that in mind, having been in Palestine for nearly a year now, when the opportunity came to listen to the prime minister, Salam Fayyad, speak at the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute’s (MAS) annual conference, I had to go. His shadow has loomed over the course of everything that I’ve worked on over the past year, mainly relating back to his Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State programme, the so-called Fayyad Plan, which has been the government’s main vision for the past 18 months.

Hamsters and peace

Back in August I attended a couple of seminars in Jerusalem on security and border issues between Israel and a future Palestinian state, which I’ve blogged about previously. The central challenge among the (Israeli) presenters was how to ensure security for Israel without any direct form of control.

It’s not a new question. I was struck by this as I was digging through the journal section in the LSE library this week (research for an entirely unrelated paper) and came across the first edition of The Jerusalem Journal of International Relations and an article entitled ‘A Proposal for Peace in the Middle East’ by Morton Kaplan.

Looking at the last year through new eyes

Having shivered my way through subzero temperatures in Vienna last week for the purposes of knocking heads and putting together a research proposal that will hopefully see funding for up to three years, I also had time to reflect on public perceptions to the first outing of the paper related to the conflict and development project I’ve spent the best part of a year working on. The report itself is very long and full of quotes, but the version I read and we discussed was a fifth of the size.

Essentially, the two main options that I proposed facing international donors in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT) are a choice between working to end Israel’s occupation or finding programmes and projects that tinker at the edges. The latter is clearly sub-optimal, but it’s probably also the most likely.

What was most striking for me was the extent to which I’ve internalised some assumptions from nearly a year on these issues and seeing how a European audience reacted to some issues that now seem ‘normal’ to me. For example, I felt that there was a bit if a struggle from my student and faculty audience regarding Hamas’s position as part of the furniture. Too often the party is seen as out of the ordinary in Europe. At the same time, because of the Fatah-Hamas split, I was asked whether it was possible for the two – and by implication, both wider Palestinian society and foreign donors – to find some areas where possible consensus was achievable. This might provide scope beyond the one area of joint thinking, namely an end to the occupation – and which is arguably least likely.

It brought it home to me that I feel that I am finally starting to get a real sense of how things are perceived by the community as a whole here, rather than trying to make a set of externally developed assumptions fit from without. So in a strange way, I found that instead of journeying to Europe in my trip to Vienna, I was actually brought back to the OPT.

A gulf of misunderstanding?

One of the most striking things about the ‘process’ in this part of the world is the disconnection between Israelis and Palestinians when it comes to envisaging the future. This was most visibly brought home to me during the German-sponsored IPCRI conference, ‘Peace Begins with Jerusalem?’ at the Ambassador Hotel yesterday afternoon. It was during the final session, with presentations from Sonia Najjar, Gilead Sher and Hilia Tsedaka, that I especially noted this.

Gilead Sher was Ehud Barack’s co-chief negotiator at Camp David. His presentation on Jerusalem was that the issue of Arab and Israeli neighbourhoods wasn’t the sticking point. Rather it was the Old City and how to govern the Holy Sites that caused the greatest headache. He felt that on Jerusalem the Clinton parameters that were proposed at Camp David 10 years ago are still relevant today, with the one caveat that the separation of neighbourhoods on the basis on population and majority groups should not be applied within the Old City. Instead he favours a form of independent third party administration, headed by an international and with Palestinian and Israeli input – effectively the Jerusalem Old City Initiative that was launched in May this year.

There is a catch though. Sher claimed that the time is not right for this measure to be put into place. He criticised the current process as one that is waiting for everything to be agreed between the two sides and he suggests an alternative of dealing with those issues that are feasible now and putting into place all those that can be agreed. On the surface this looks reasonable. But what is staggering is that he overlooks the fact that this has been the way that the process has taken its course since the early 1990s. In fact the whole Oslo process has been one of leaving the most insoluble issues to the end, with the aim of building confidence and trust between the two sides through smaller-scale measures in the intervening period.

It was therefore pertinent that Sonia Najjar’s presentation reminded attendees of the current and systematic process of Judaisation that is going on in East Jerusalem. She noted that Israeli laws and policies in the city are diminishing the Palestinian presence through settlement building (which as of today, there are reports that the US has abandoned efforts to try and restart the settlement freeze – outside of Jerusalem though) and the takeover of Palestinian neighbourhoods. Even if there is a ‘negative’ form of peace (i.e. no violence), this comes nowhere near any attempt to build trust between the two sides – or Sher’s vacuum.

That said, to what extent can Najjar’s own suggested course deliver results? Having cited various international obligations that Israel is a party to – and isn’t upholding – she favours international pressure on the Israeli government. But as the US failure over the settlement freeze has shown on the one hand and the Brazilian and Argentine recognition of Palestinian sovereignty within the 1967 borders has shown – there is as yet no teeth to enforce this. That said, it is not unreasonable for us internationals to pressure our governments on this issue, as Mandy Turner pointed out at her Kenyon lecture last week. Nevertheless, given the absence of international pressure to date, why should the future be any different?

So if the external environment is not conducive, what about on the ground? Hilia Tsedaka is with ‘Win-Win Jerusalem’, an organisation that wants to transform the zero sum game (‘win lose’) between Palestinians and Israelis in the city into one that benefits both. To achieve this requires greater citizen participation in decision making and she cited various examples of where this has happened from the top (e.g. Cyprus constitution) to the bottom and through mid-level players (e.g. the participatory budget in Porto Alegre). She feels that the more participation there is, the more trust will be generated between the two sides. Her method is to run facilitative workshops that ‘support’ and ‘empower’ Palestinians on the one side and transform Israeli minds on the other. This will create the conditions for greater trust, including shared interest projects, greater communication skills and better awareness of how to use the system.

Following the conference’s end, I said to her that I was still uncertain as to how trust was to be generated through the methods she suggests. Surely in the case of the Jerusalem municipality a more ‘empowered’ Palestinian is a threat and therefore someone to be denied greater participation rather than the other way around? I was still lost as to how the leap is made from win-loss to win-win.

And this is where I have the biggest problem with these proposals. Ironically, it was Sher that put his finger on it in the discussion when he said it was necessary to combine both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the process (and I assume he means more than just Jerusalem here). He said it’s necessary to condition people’s hearts and minds as well as proposing these ideas and projects, which lack detail of how they are to actually built trust. Unlike Najjar, he opposes third party intervention as a stick to beat Israel with, but supports it to help the negotiations along (a subtle way of shifting the terms of the debate, I feel). That said, he remains frustrated that there has been no movement forward since Camp David – and more to the point, no sign of any response from the Israeli leadership about the Arab Peace Initiative, which has been reiterated every years since it was first proposed in 2002.

To me this suggests that if confidence-building is to start somewhere, it has to be with the Israelis. Najjar’s analysis of a disempowered people being forced out of Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah, with the complicit support of the municipality and state, not only highlights the lack of trust between both sides, but also which side is stronger in this struggle. It’s time to stop pretending that the two sides are equal; indeed, Sher praised the institution building and degree of security that has occurred in the West Bank over the past few years – but he stopped short of suggesting that Israel offer something in return as a (confidence building) gesture.

The Israelis like to talk about Yasser Arafat having missed an opportunity at Camp David. Yet it often seems that it is they who are doing so. To conclude, contrary to the official rhetoric that Jerusalem is a united city, the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin (who spoke earlier) revealed that Israeli Jews recognise Jerusalem’s divided nature and neighbourhoods and are pragmatic enough to accept partition if their government present them with it. Rather than making public opinion, Israelis are following their leaders. Now is therefore the time for them to take the chance. Although I suspect they will miss it.

No change


Despite the hiatus on this blog, I have been writing elsewhere, for the LSE Ideas Centre and the online Spanish magazine, Global Affairs. Much of the reason for the silence here is the absence of any seminars or presentations that I have gone to over the past few months. Much of this is the result of bad timing for me, having other commitments, visitors, etc. In fact, when I arrived at the Kenyon Institute last night for Naseer Aruri’s and Mandy Turner’s presentations, I noticed that the last event I had attended was back in August – at least one where I took notes (there was also a conference at the end of September where I was both participant and scribe – I hope one day to write something more substantial than a blog piece on those issues there).

The Kenyon event took place last night and was a follow on from their own two day conference on Monday and Tuesday – which I wasn’t able to attend for the above reasons. That said, I suspect that both Aruri and Turner were able to give a flavour of what that event must have been like, since both presented there as well.

Aruri chose not to present the same paper that he had done at the conference – a great shame for me, since it was sought to put Palestinian development in historical and political context. Instead, he offered an alternative paper called ‘The Ongoing Erasure of Palestine’ which was extremely bleak. Essentially his argument was that there can be no two-state solution when Zionism is the Palestinian’s adversary. Zionist colonialism he considers to be unique as a movement, offering no territorial concessions and expanding Israel’s control of historic Palestine. He talked at length about ‘politicide’, the term that Baruch Kimmerling had fashioned to describe what was happening to the Palestinians, with the dissolution of Palestinian political identity through the use of ethnic cleansing.

Aruri was scathing both about external actors such as the US (who he has called a ‘dishonest broker’ in a previous book and who has gone against the global consensus fashioned after 1967 – i.e. end of occupation, withdrawal to the Green Line, East Jerusalem to be Palestinian, etc) and the Palestinian leadership. The latter he deems to have colluded in its own destruction, offering no alternative. Ultimately, the diplomatic paralysis that currently exists is embedded in the failed Oslo peace process for him.

Turner also presented a very compelling argument with her paper on ‘Creating “Partners for Perace”:Aid, humanitarianism and the international donor community in the OPT’. The term ‘partner for peace’ has become increasingly used and she has tried to understand what it means. Essentially, there are three elements associated with the concept: (1) an attempt by donors to support and impose the ‘right’ type of Palestinian political elite, (2) pressure the ‘right’ type of Palestinian elite to make peace with Israel on the grounds set out by Israel and (3) marginalise and/or remove the ‘wrong’ type of Palestinian elite.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that what this means is the fragmentation of Palestinian politics and society, a process has been in place since 2006 and Hamas’s electoral victory that year. Whereas Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah and Salam Fayyad are seen as ‘partners’, Hamas are clearly not. Turner believes that the Road Map period which emerged in the wake of the Second Intifada met its end in 2006 and has been replaced with the ‘partners’ paradigm, whereby the US has increased its financial commitment to the PA (as have all donors – although interestingly, this may be more to do with better tracking than actual sums) and sought to isolate and defeat Hamas by focusing on building up the West Bank.

For me as a development analyst (!), Turner’s presentation was extremely useful, since you can see a double-edged game being played in the present period. On the one hand donor aid is being used to reduce the impact of the occupation for all Palestinians, but there are differences between that provided to ‘partners’ in the West Bank and the ‘wrong’ type in Gaza. That to the West Bank aims to promote ‘appropriate’ actors while that in Gaza is more humanitarian is scope, being designed to take care of those who do not comply with the ‘partners’ model. Borrowing from a researcher in Africa (whose name I missed), Turner ends up with donor aid as a means of managing a surplus population, where Palestinians are fed but not free. (indeed, Turner also commented on the shift in conceptualising sovereignty in the Palestinian context, away from natural rights of statehood for a nation and the creation of governments to one that is primarily concerned with state capacity and governance – i.e. statehood only comes if you can prove that you can carry it out rather than demanding it as a right)

Both presentations present very bleak prospects in my view. For neither presenter is there a visible alternative to the prevailing situation, whether internal or external. Internally, the options looks extremely limited. The choice seems to be either one of being on the quisling side of supporting the US/Israeli Oslo model or being against it. In the subsequent Q&A I asked where domestic resistance was to come from and Aruri was unable to provide an answer. He said there were three choices, neither of which were realistic: (1) end the current peace process and internationalise it (but this won’t work because the Palestinians are too insignificant to challenge the international balance of power and force participants to the table), (2) maintain the status quo (which is not attractive – and besides the Palestinians are running out of any more concessions they can make) or (3) another intifada (which is not really an option given the demobilised nature of Palestinian society).

Externally, the prospects are not great either. Both Aruri and Turner concluded that the US position is unlikely to change. Turner offered some suggestions as a British and European citizen for the EU (we had a few representatives last night). She said that the EU should consider the following: (1) sue Israel for damages as a result of its destruction of EU-funded projects, (2) pull the EU (and the UN as well) out of the Quartet, since it’s effectively an American enterprise) and (3) make effective use of the human rights conditions within the EU-Israel agreement.

While this may all seem like too proposals though, what are the chances of that happening? The more I think about it, the more I feel that the current situation is like the calm before a storm – yet I don’t know what form the storm will take. It can’t be another intifada since neither the first or second achieved the removal of Israel. If anything it brought about excessive and disproportionate violence in a effort to break Palestinians’ will. In neither case did that happen, but neither did it achieve its goals of an end to occupation. So here we remain, both sides circling and eyeing each other suspiciously, with no clear end in sight. A rather grim vision.