Hi. I'm Back.
Mitzpe was lovely, as usual.

The town was full of mourning notices for Keren Kashani, killed in Immanuel. Apparently her sister lives in Mitzpe Ramon.


Sari Nusseiba and his university (again).
Here is another donation to the ongoing discussion on the closure of Nusseiba’s university offices – right or wrong. You’ll have to remember that I’ve been in Mitzpe Ramon since Thursday, with no TV, radio, internet or fresh newspapers (my choice – these things are available there, we just choose not to have them). This article was in the Thursday Yediot Aharonot that I took with me. For all I know a translation of this has already been posted somewhere and everyone’s been discussing it all weekend.

“The University that was, in fact, an opposition
By Guy Bechor” (this is also someone who knows what he’s talking about).

“It is absurd to present an institute that challenged Yasser Arafat as his official representative.

This week, the Internal Security Ministry publicized documents seized during the entrance into the offices of the management of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, as proof that the offices were, in effect, “a representative of the Palestinian Authority inside Israel”. Included in the documents was, for instance, a letter of the Palestinians “Preventative Security”, from 1998, requesting the president of the university, Sari Nusseiba, to include in the university studies a course for criminal investigation and legal medicine for people from the said PPSS. On the basis of these documents Minister Landau judged the university and justified it’s closure, after having entered the offices.

The public accepted the allegation … as a …fact. But the truth is completely different, and I can bear witness to that because I know the Al Quds University (that was established in 1991 by unifying separate colleges) and most of its deans. On the contrary, since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1993, Al Quds university has been subject to more friction and conflicts with the PA and it’s heads than any other Palestinian university.

Arafat often regards Sari Nusseiba with suspicion (just as he regarded the late Faisal Husseini). In both cases, the main reason is the suspects’ family ancestry. The Fatah movement, lead by Arafat, was established in 1959 by members of the Palestinian lower middle class partly as an opposition to the Palestinian aristocratic families – Nusseiba, Nashashibi, Haldi, Husseini and others like them – who brought the 1948 calamity upon their people. Arafat is, therefore, not one to allow the new generation of the old elite to take over the Palestinian leadership. Moreover, fearing the talks these elitists were holding with Israeli representatives in Washington, following the Madrid Summit, and fearing that this group would regain seniority, Arafat hurriedly made progress with the Oslo process.

“The Committee of Higher Education”, an indoctrinal branch of the PA, never hid its wish to control everything taught in the Al Quds University, and there was also a struggle over hegemony: the private colleges that had merged into the university were not happy to accept a centralistic takeover of the university from above. Furthermore, the university’s law faculty became a main point of friction with the PA. Headed by the faculty’s dean, Ali Hashan, an expert on constitutional law, this faculty was concerning itself with a desirable Palestinian constitution, with questions of proper administration, the neutralization of the judicial system or Palestinian civil rights, subjects that angered the heads of the PA. This faculty was the anchor of a future Palestinian civil society, made possible by its immunity, because of its geographical proximity to Israel, and before the Intifada its heads spoke out against the militarization Arafat brought with him from abroad. On the other hand, the student organization was ruled by representatives of the Islamic Jihad, mainly Hamas people, who weren’t overly fond of the PA, either. This way or that, relations eventually became so bad that most of the Palestinian leadership boycotted the university, and cut its funds.

I’m not saying that Al Quds University didn’t identify with the PA all these years as a living symbol of Palestinian interests. It was, and is, part of Palestinian society, even though it kept open channels with the Israeli academia. In any case, it’s absurd to present the one establishment that challenged the PA and Arafat as their official representative. It’s a pity that this absurdity was translated into unnecessary operative steps.”

So what’s going on here? Is it moves by people who are against any sort of settlement with the Palestinians, ever, (and I suspect that Minister Uzi Landau is such a person) putting spokes in the wheels of any possible opposition to Arafat, therefore making the Bush reform plan impossible to implement? Or is it, as has been suggested, an effort to make Nusseiba seem less of a “collaborator” to ordinary Palestinians and thus making him a more realistic candidate to take over Palestinian leadership? Is there real, concrete intelligence about hostile activities that were going on in the university that had to be stopped, and we can’t be told of so as not to harm the sources? Or shouldn’t we rule out plain foolishness as a reason?



I’ve got it!
It took the peace of the desert, this weekend, along with Douglas Davis’ delightful commentary on Arafat in this week’s Spectator (well, mainly Douglas Davis’ delightful commentary, be honest, Imshin) for me to realize.

We’ve all been wondering about it. No one seems to have come up with a satisfactory explanation. For what? For the thundering silence of the press (mainly the European press) and European leaders over the current Israeli takeover of PA ruled cities in the West Bank during “Determined Path”. Not a word. Not even a peep. A lot of us wondered if it was because of the Bush speech. But the takeover began over a week before the speech. And besides, many European newspapers had made a point of ridiculing Bush and his speech. Bish suggested Arafat had just gone too far killing too many Israeli civilians. But there were more massacres before “Defensive Shield” with many more fatalities, than after. Anyway, no one could care less about the Israeli dead.

Something has changed, something obvious and simple and particularly shameful for those who are a part of it. There it was, deliciously staring me in the face through Douglas Davis’ words.

He made fools of them. He made them look completely and utterly stupid and inept with the “Jenin Massacre” lie. No one likes being shown up like that. You can murder and rob and pillage someone else, but if you make me look like an idiot in public, well, that’s another story. “Hell hath no fury…” and all that.

They’ve finally (!!!) come to the conclusion that Arafat can’t be trusted. They’re afraid he’s going to show them up again for the incompetent, unreliable journalists (and statesmen) that they are, and they can’t take the chance. If he and his main spokesmen lied so glibly, so shamelessly, about the “Jenin Massacre”, who’s to say they’re not lying about everything else?

Here are some of the highlights of Douglas Davis’ article:
“I wanted to believe Arafat when he painted a picture of Palestinian and Israeli children growing up in peace; but then I remembered the late King Hussein of Jordan, Arafat’s best friend at the time, publicly branding him a duplicitous liar. And I remembered a Syrian colleague telling me he had overestimated the intelligence of Israelis: ‘Do you really think you can negotiate with a mafia boss?’ he asked incredulously.

[…] On the road to becoming Mister Palestine and Great Survivor, he brought death and destruction on a vast scale. He provoked two civil wars (in Jordan and Lebanon). He generated chaos in Israel. And ultimately he produced tragedy rather than statehood for his own people.

[…] The human tragedy of the violence can never be quantified, but Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip can measure the material consequences in a single set of statistics: when Arafat and the Palestinian Authority were installed after the Oslo Accords, the average annual income of Palestinians was 40 per cent that of their Israeli neighbours; today, it is just 5 per cent.

[…] Of course there was no massacre and no cover-up. If the European politicians and journalists had given the matter two minutes’ thought, they would have grasped the point even before they sped to the scene. Israel’s civilian-soldiers in Jenin, like those in any other Israeli military operation, cover the waterfront of political opinion, and no doubt include a share of journalists and jurists, doctors and dustmen, university professors and human-rights activists, each one carrying a mobile phone. A massacre is as unthinkable as a cover-up is unimaginable.

The head of Israel’s military planning branch, Brigadier-General Eival Giladi, dismissed the ‘massacre’ charges with contempt. Unlike other armies which might have been tempted to use artillery, he said, Israel refrained, even though it cost the lives of 23 soldiers. Nor was the restraint a consequence of outside pressure or public opinion, ‘but because of Israel’s norms and standards. The Israel Defense Forces will never put themselves in the position of doing something that Israeli society will not accept.’

[…] Given Israeli goodwill and the largesse of the international donor community — about £6 billion over the past eight years — the Palestinians should today be looking to a bright economic future in their shiny new state. Instead, Arafat’s stewardship has left them looking for humanitarian assistance.

[…] (The Bush prescription) is a bitter pill, too, for the Europeans, who must finally dispel their post-colonial guilt and learn to treat the Palestinians as sentient adults. If they had demanded decent standards of governance from Arafat at the outset, their money would have been well spent and much of the subsequent trauma might have been avoided.”



Another delightful Spectator story
is Bruce Anderson’s, which explains “why, how and when the West will topple Saddam.”



I still don’t get it
I’ve written about this before, I know but it’s still bugging me. It’s the Palestinian objection to the security fence, again.

They want a state, right? The state will have an internationally recognized border, right? The state will also have internationally recognized passports, right? Palestinians wanting to work in a neighboring state will have to use those internationally recognized passports to cross that internationally recognized border in order to work in that neighboring state, right? So what’s there problem with the security fence? Is it so important for them to be able to infiltrate the neighboring state, illegally? Why is that, exactly?

Please, please, explain this to me, someone, anyone. I ‘m losing sleep over this here. Well, not really, I’m just saying that to emphasize my point.

A lot of people in Israel are grasping at the security fence concept, and maybe at unilateral withdrawal, as a magical solution to all our problems. I don’t think that’s very realistic, (especially unilateral withdrawal which could prove to be calamitous) although I haven’t anything better to offer, right now. As a matter of fact, I don’t think this is the time to be offering solutions at all.

But the Palestinian objection is particularly suspect, in my mind. They don’t want to be fenced in, they say. Well, what the hell DO they want? It looks like they want whatever will make Israel suffer, and they’re not bothering to look any further. Well, as far as I’m concerned, they can go and drink the sea in Gaza, as Arafat himself would say.