Jonathan Cook: the View from Nazareth - www.jonathan-cook.net

Email from Saffuriya

It is a reflex question for Palestinians, always posed early in the Arab greeting ritual, to ask a stranger, even another Palestinian, “Where are you from?” before enquiring: “Where do you live?” Few Palestinians live where they feel they belong.

Crossing which borders?

Earlier this year the Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua wrote at length about Zionism, the Jewish nation- building ideology formulated by Theodor Herzl, explaining that at its core lay the concept of a border. Jewish identity in the diaspora, he observed, inherently lacked borders: “It wanders around the world, a traveller between hotels. A Jew can change countries and languages without losing his Jewishness.” The Jewish state, on the other hand, required territorial limits, it needed to define the extent of the sanctuary it provides to Jews. “Borders are like doors in a house which claim everything inside as the responsibility of the master. That is what Zionism means: realising Jewish sovereignty within defined borders.”

Challenging silence

The documentary Jenin, Jenin opens with the wild gesticulations of a young mute man charging around the now-famous lunar landscape of the Palestinian refugee camp. Seemingly dragging the camera by the force of his will alone, he points in passing at bullet holes in walls, at the rubble of demolished houses, at the air from which helicopters once rained down missiles. An incomprehensible mumble subtitles everything he remembers. Intermittently he clutches at his chest and makes as if to fall down dead, then quickly regains his footing and heads down a new alleyway to begin afresh. Later in this 55-minute film, his energy and recollections spent, he points an imaginary gun to the centre of his forehead and pulls the trigger.

Covering history with concrete

The three cities most closely associated with Jesus – his birthplace in Bethlehem, the town of his boyhood in Nazareth and the place of his death in Jerusalem – are all resigned to another year without tourists or much seasonal joy this Christmas. Even the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will not be able to make his way to Bethlehem to lead the Christmas service in the Church of the Nativity.

Under Nazareth, secrets in stone

When Israel began in the mid-1990s to prepare for the pope’s millennium visit, officials realized that decades of underinvestment in the Arab city, and the congestion resulting from the confiscation of its lands, would be on show as John Paul II toured the holy places. Hurried facelifts were given to the city’s two most important churches.

Confining Barghouti’s voice

Israel is keeping Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti in solitary confinement for giving a press interview. Is this a telling sign for the fairness of his upcoming trial. Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader being held by Israel on terrorism charges, was placed in solitary confinement for five days over the Eid Al-Fitr weekend as punishment for giving an interview through one of his lawyers, Khader Shkirat, to the media last week. His legal team said Barghouti was being “victimised” for expressing his political views and that this did not bode well for his receiving a fair criminal trial, expected to begin early next year.

Jenin riddle: Why did an Israeli soldier shoot a British official in the back?

Stand where the Israeli army sniper stood and the questions come flooding in. Foremost among them is how the soldier who shot Iain Hook in the back in Jenin refugee camp could have mistaken the lanky British UN official with a mobile phone to his ear for a Palestinian youth waving a gun, as the army claims.

Terror talk

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s response to the twin attacks on Israeli citizens last week in Kenya was as melodramatic as it was swift. He activated “sleeper” spies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to wreak revenge for the hotel explosion that killed three Israeli tourists and 10 Kenyans and a near-miss missile fired at an Israeli- owned Arkia charter plane carrying some 260 passengers. A group calling itself the Army of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attacks in Mombasa, but Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad is working on the assumption, as are most other nations, that Osama Bin Laden’s Al- Qa’eda network is the real culprit.

UN accused of stalling on inquiry into Briton’s death

he United Nations has been accused of downgrading, or even trying to bury, an investigation into the killing of one of its British workers, Iain Hook, in Jenin refugee camp 10 days ago. Sources say the UN is worried the inquiry could lead to a further deterioration in its bruised relations with Israel and the US. A diplomatic source said that, despite UN statements describing as “totally incredible” Israeli claims that there were Palestinian gunmen in the compound where Hook was shot, the final report of the UN inquiry was being delayed and “may not be publicised at all”. The source said that the UN depended on cooperation from Israel and the US in the future, and much of its funding came from Washington.

‘There is Need for New Leadership to lead the ’48 National Movement’

An Interview with Awad Abdel Fattah, General Secretary of the National Democratic Assembly [NDA] on Sept 23 2002 Q: There has been talk of reforming the Arab leadership in Israel? There have even been discussions about creating a national parliament for the Arab minority? What is the likelihood of such reforms? A: We have been calling for reform of the Follow-Up Committee [which comprises all the Arab mayors, MKs and leaders of the political parties, considered to be the representative leadership body of the Palestinian citizens of Israel] for some time. The NDA does not talk about creating a parliament but about building a unified national leadership.

What really happened

An office swivel chair is still posted at the third- floor window of 75-year-old Tawfiq Marhad’s home. Hidden among the skirts of some heavy blue drapes are a handful of Israel army bullet casings fired during a gun battle between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants in Jenin refugee camp last Friday. “I thought we had cleared them all away,” says Marhad. It was from this window that the bullet that killed Iain Hook, 53, a British United Nations worker, was almost certainly fired. He bled to death some time after 1.15pm, after a UN ambulance was blocked by the army from reaching him. Although the autopsy report has yet to be issued, he is believed to have been hit by a single bullet in the back.

Miriam as human shield

An investigation by Al-Ahram Weekly reveals that three people were used by the Israeli army to protect soldiers that night as they searched for Iyad Sawalha. Units took separate human shields, suggesting that in this case the “neighbour procedure” was ordered by a senior commander and approved in advance.

Israel’s politicians target minorities: The ‘demographic time bomb’

While the question of whether Israel should stay in the occupied territories dominates foreign media coverage, another debate is raging among Israeli politicians. It is the urgent question of how to preserve the ethnic purity of the Jewish state, how to prevent Israel from being dominated by non-Jews.

Alone with the settlers

For the past month the tiny village of Yanun, south-east of Nablus, has breathed deeply the air of liberation that has followed its briefly being thrust into the limelight. Children play on the rocky track that winds up from the wide valley below, men sit on low stone walls smoking, while women lean chatting in huddles on the balconies of their homes. The relaxed atmosphere is, all of them are aware, as temporary as it is contrived. A few weeks ago the alleys of this West Bank village were empty, the last families having fled under a relentless campaign of attacks from neighbouring Israeli settlers. Today, the villagers’ safety is ensured only by the heavy presence of outsiders.

Bloody electioneering

The horrific shooting spree in which two brothers aged four and five were sprayed with bullets, along with their mother, by a lone Palestinian gunman who later slipped back into the West Bank marked the wretched start to the election campaign between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his rival for the Likud leadership, Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu joined the cabinet last week after being cornered by Sharon into accepting the post of foreign minister or risk appearing driven more by personal ambition than the country’s good. Sharon hopes the job will limit Netanyahu’s room for criticising him in the run-up to 28 November Likud leadership primary.

Finishing the job

Benny Morris, Israel’s famed “new historian”, who began unravelling Israel’s narrative of the war of 1948 – that the Palestinians fled rather than that most were expelled or terrorised from their homes – says he now believes David Ben Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, made a grievous mistake in not finishing the job of ethnic cleansing.

Labor fakes it again – and the settlers stay on

Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the defense minister, had waged a campaign to dismantle what are known in Israel as “illegal outposts,” huddles of caravans illegal even under Israeli law. When Ariel Sharon pledged to continue the heavy subsidies for his settler allies, Ben-Eliezer quit his post, taking Labor with him.

Of fences and crossings

Small red ribbons fluttered in the early evening breeze among the olive groves of the West Bank village of Falamia, leading like a child’s paper trail from the greenhouses and fields of vegetables up a gentle rocky slope towards the brow of a wide hill. There the trail ended and the devastation began. Olive trees lay upended or their trunks had been cut close to the ground, the leaves on the branches already shrivelling in the late sun. “The ribbons mark the path of the fence Israel wants to build through our lands,” said 29-year-old Sami Dahir, a civil engineer whose family owns 250 dunums (60 acres) of farmland. “Each day they inch closer. If we don’t do something soon, they will reach the wadi and we will lose everything.”

Shocking Israel

The fragile bond of trust between Israel and the country’s Bedouin was in danger of tearing apart over the case of a senior Israeli army officer accused of spying for Hizbullah, writes Jonathan Cook from Nazareth Lieutenant-Colonel Omar Hayeb, from the Bedouin village of Zarzir in the Galilee, was arrested six weeks ago but the secrecy surrounding this espionage case only lifted last week when he was charged in a Nazareth court. Hayeb, 40, is the most senior officer in Israel’s history to be accused of espionage and treason. According to the charge sheet, he passed military secrets to Hizbullah in return for drugs and money.

Arab legislators aren’t equal

A new report, “Silencing Dissent”, challenges the view that Israel can extol its virtues as a democracy while defining itself as a state for Jews. One survey shows that eight of the nine legislators belonging to Arab parties have been beaten by members of the security forces at demonstrations. Seven had to be hospitalized after attacks.