issue no 10

Issue No: 10 13th Jan, 2012

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Issue No: 10

Interviews:

� Rebel without a state: Evgeny

News Tour:

� French court to review Mohammed Al

� Barhoum: PA-Israeli meetings serious threat to Palestine cause

� Qassem: Security coordination and reconciliation do not meet

� Hamas urges Arab hackers to expand cyberwar on Israeli occupation

� Committee for Political Prisoners organize sit

� Tunisia's president pledges support for Palestinian rights

� Rizka: Haneyya to embark on fresh tour by end of January

� Khudari blames world

Video:

� Palestinian Lesson In Ethics

Palestinian Weekly Report is a periodical insight into the latest developments of the

Palestinian Issue. It’s issued by The Palestinian Cultural Organization

focuses on the most important news and analysis about the happenings of the

Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation in the Holy Lands of Palestine. The

views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect PCOM's editorial

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Contents

t a state: Evgeny meets Haniyeh, Prime Minister of Gaza

French court to review Mohammed Al-Durra footage for authenticit

Israeli meetings serious threat to Palestine cause.........

Qassem: Security coordination and reconciliation do not meet ..............................

Hamas urges Arab hackers to expand cyberwar on Israeli occupation

Committee for Political Prisoners organize sit-in in West Bank ……

Tunisia's president pledges support for Palestinian rights ……....…

to embark on fresh tour by end of January …………

Khudari blames world community for slow Gaza reconstruction ….

Ethics .. To Israeli Border Police................................


It’s issued by The Palestinian Cultural Organization



views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect PCOM's editorial

13th Jan, 2012

Haniyeh, Prime Minister of Gaza ………….. 3

Durra footage for authenticity.................... 8

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Hamas urges Arab hackers to expand cyberwar on Israeli occupation ......……….. 10

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..…………..…….. 11

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...…..….…….. 12

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It’s issued by The Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia and it



views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect PCOM's editorial policy.


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Interviews

Rebel without a state: Evgeny Lebedev meets Ismail Haniyeh, Prime Minister of Gaza

As prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh is one of the world's most controversial politicians. He talks to Evgeny Lebedev about the Arab Spring, suicide bombing, the Israeli blockade - and the elusive prospect of peace. Interviewed by Evgeny Lebedev.*

"From Jerusalem, the drive to Gaza passes tidy fields and shops selling locally-produced honey. For the final stretch, conifers line one side of the road. When they part, you catch sight of the wall that marks Gaza's northern perimeter, its concrete sides topped by observation posts and coils of barbed wire.

A decade ago, the divide between Israel and the occupied territory of Gaza was a single barrier manned by a handful of sentries. Not anymore. The checkpoint at Erez is the size of an airport terminal. Inside, white-shirted inspectors summon visitors to Gaza into separate cubicles for questioning before they are dispatched through the half-mile-long walkway, encased in rigid chicken-wire, that crosses the demilitarized zone.

Going the other way, back into Israel, is worse. First you enter a room with a table in its centre on which you are required to open your bags and show what is inside to a camera lens. Then a light on a metal door flicks from red to green to let you into a labyrinth of corridors, each separated by doors with their

own stop or go lights, for more intrusive searches.

Nowhere is there a lick of paint. There is barely even natural light. At one point, conveyor belts twist and turn above you as possessions are separated for inspection while suited figures stare down from a second-floor window and bark instructions through intercoms. The result is a process akin to being a prisoner prepared for release. This is apt. The reality of Gaza is what the surrounding wall makes it: a prison in which one and a half million people are held.

The head inmate is Ismail Haniyeh. He was named Gaza's prime minister six years ago when his party, Hamas, won the territory's elections in a result that surprised even themselves. Hamas, however, is an organization that refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to exist and, crucially, sent suicide bombers to blow themselves up in Israeli towns and cities. Such people were not who the West had hoped would top the poll.

Europe and the US refused to recognize the result. (Later, there was a bitter and bloody falling-out with Fatah, the hitherto dominant partner in the Palestinian Authority.) Gaza was left without an official voice with which to address the outside world. This was why I had now come to see Haniyeh. With the old certainties in the Middle East suddenly upended after a year of revolutions, it seemed more legitimate than ever to wonder how Hamas saw the region's affairs developing. Haniyeh agreed to see me because there was a message he wanted heard.

We met in his office in Gaza City. Haniyeh is a big, well-built man: taller in person than he appears on television, the greying beard tightly trimmed. He wore a loose suit jacket and was clearly in good physical shape for a man of 48. His manner was gentle and noticeably still, and – initially, at least – he smiled readily.


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Behind him hung the Palestinian flag, its colours reputedly drawn from the work of the 13th-century Arab poet Safi al-Din: "White are our deeds, black are our battles, green are our fields, red are our swords".

I had hoped that what he wanted to say would be a call for reconciliation and that he would see the revolutions of the previous 12 months as an opportunity to start a blank page in relations with the Israelis. There had been signs that compromise was in the air. Hamas's use of suicide bombings had finally stopped, partly in recognition of the outrage they caused. Negotiations had started between Hamas and its political rival, Fatah, to settle their differences. There were even rumors that Hamas might be close to officially abandoning its armed struggle.

But what I found was not a man seeking to reach out the olive branch. It was a man who had seen how the Middle East had been reshaped and who now believed – or so he said – that his version of the Palestinians' destiny might now be on the point of being realized.

"The Palestinian cause is winning," he told me. "With the Muslim Brotherhood part of the government [in Egypt], they [the Egyptians] will not besiege Gaza. They will not arrest Palestinians. They will not give cover to Israel to launch a war. Gaza was a main reason for the Arab Spring. It was people's anger at the regimes that co-operated with Israel and did not recognize the government here.

"Israel is disturbed by this. It knows the strategic environment is changing. Iran is an enemy. Relations are deteriorating with Turkey. With Egypt, they are really cold. Israel is in a security situation they have never been in before. The Palestinians are winning more than anybody else due to what's happening in the Arab countries. That will come out clearly in the future."

Haniyeh did not mince his words, blaming the West and particularly the United States for having tried to keep the people of Gaza trapped even when they sought to play by the rules set by the international community. "These people asked us to have elections and

respect the result of elections, and we did. We did what we were asked to do. Anybody who asks for democracy to be introduced should respect the results of democracy."

Would he therefore respect the result if next year's elections in Gaza go against Hamas? "Of course," he insisted. "We respect the peaceful transition of authority. We will not make the same mistakes others made in not recognizing the result in 2006."

The Israelis, he claimed, had "tricked" the West into thinking they would willingly do anything for the Palestinian people. It was "20 years" of negotiations that led to "nothing" as the "Israelis don't want to see the Palestinian people get anywhere". When he talked about the Israelis, the smile vanished. His eyes narrowed, and the air of stillness around him, previously reassuring, seemed suddenly intimidating.

He was particularly angry when he railed against the Israelis' blockade on goods going in and out of Gaza. This was enacted in September 2007, after Hamas won the brief but brutal civil war against Fatah that saw street-to-street fighting consume the territory. Although in recent months some consumer goods and raw materials have been allowed in, Gaza officially remains a "hostile entity" in Israeli eyes, and therefore an economic pariah.

Haniyeh has spent most of his life in Gaza. He grew up in the al-Shati refugee camp in the heart of Gaza City, where his parents arrived as refugees during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was there that he took his first steps into politics, in the 1980s, ultimately being imprisoned in 1989 for his participation in the anti-Israeli protests of the First Intifada. On his release, his political career burgeoned, and, after a brief exile in Lebanon, he subsequently became the assistant to Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The camp at al-Shati, however, remained his home.

This may help to explain the strength of the Hamas leader's feelings about what Palestinians call the "the siege". He described how the blockade resulted in fuel shortages so severe that cars resorted to running on cooking


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oil. There were widespread power cuts and medicine shortages. It also resulted in a near total collapse of local businesses due to the limits on exports. With anger in his eyes and voice, Haniyeh leaned forward and – seemingly forgetting about the Holocaust – declared that the blockade was "the biggest crime that modern history ever witnessed". Gaza simply wanted to be treated fairly, he insisted. "We want to live like the rest of the world. To have rights. To have a state."

Stated in those terms, it seemed a reasonable aspiration. But what of Hamas's past use of suicide bombers? Had resorting to such a tactic not discredited the organization from being part of any long-term policy settlement as the Israelis, and the Americans, maintain?

His response was blunt. They were not "suicide operations" but "martyrdom operations", he said. "We only did this because there's bloodshed done by the Israelis. It is a reaction to F16s bombarding people, killing people, women and children. They continued targeting Palestinian civilians and that's what pushed the Islamic fighters to do this kind of operation."

Yet he also declared (illuminating the dilemma Hamas sees itself facing over how far to go in limiting armed struggle): "The Europeans and Americans have said the martyrdom operations are why Hamas has been put on the terrorist list. But now these operations have stopped. Did they then remove Hamas from the list of terrorist organisations?

"We do not launch wars," he concluded. "We are people resisting occupation."

Then he stood up. "Come – let the people tell you for themselves."

Black-uniformed guards closed off the roads to traffic as our convoy of tinted-windowed SUVs travelled the five minutes from his office to the al-Shati camp, where Haniyeh still lives. When we stepped out on to the tarmac, they swarmed around to create a protective phalanx. Their presence was a reminder of Hamas's emphasis on security. The faction's greatest achievement in

government has been to make the streets safer for the majority of the population, doing much to end the gun culture which saw tribal as well as political feuding spill into shoot-outs on the streets.

But there have also been allegations – by Amnesty International, among others – of the repression of political dissidents, detentions, and beatings meted out without even the pretence of a trial. Similar accusations have been leveled at the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of these charges; what I did witness in Gaza, however, was something of the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that one would expect in such an environment. One evening, I had dinner with a selection of local artists, musicians and private citizens. After we had finished eating, a figure in a loose-hanging black leather jacket appeared and took a selection of them to one side to demand their names and details of why we had been meeting.

No one we met at the al-Shati camp alluded to these problems. Instead, Haniyeh took me by the elbow to the beach front and described how he developed the football skills that saw him become, in the 1970s, a star attacking midfielder for the Gaza Islamic Society team – by playing on the sand here as a child. Now the beach was deserted, a result of the 800,000 litres of raw sewage that are discharged daily into the surrounding sea.

The camp itself is a half-kilometre square labyrinth of makeshift concrete houses separated by narrow twisting pathways into which 87,000 people are crammed. As we walked, figures emerged from houses or leaned out of windows. A Hamas official followed us. In his hand he held a bundle of $100 bills that he passed to the prime minister to palm, like a mafia capo from The Godfather, to any who spoke with us.

The Israelis know exactly what they face in Gaza. Suicide bombings may have ceased but not the violence. There is evidence that Hamas has tried to restrain rocket attacks but they are still fired out into Israel. Only a few days


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before my arrival, one of them smashed into open land near Eshkol.

Israel agrees that the Arab Spring now means it is facing dangerous times, with potentially hostile regimes around it. That is why so many key government figures despaired when they saw their allies in the West cheer the events in the Middle East last year, and why prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in a recent speech that the Arab revolutions had created an "Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave".

"I do not see anywhere in the Arab world where the Islamists will not take over," a senior Israeli cabinet minister told me, "as the 'Google kids' [the rebels who gained public prominence in the West through their use of social network sites] are a tiny minority. The problem is that of a dysfunctional society that basically did not make it into the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

"That will lead to an Islamist phase, and that might go on longer than people think. We went through three decades of peace but what we now face is a tough time."

That very last point – the imminence of hard times – might be a rare instance in which Hamas agree with the Israelis. During my trip to Gaza, the organisation invited me to three houses, two still standing and one that was not. Each told its own story about the potential alternatives to an all too elusive peace. None of them was good.

One house belonged to Hussein Diab Hamoudi, who had lost two of his five sons in fighting with the Israelis. Interestingly, one had been a member of Hamas and the other Fatah, showing how the two political opponents could at least happily co-exist in one family.

But his loss had not led him to turn his back on war. Instead, his front room had been turned into a memorial to their sacrifice. Two giant banners of his sons' photographs flanked by rows of missiles and with images of blood dripping down their sides hung in opposite corners. Every table top and wall was filled

with memorabilia and pictures of them portrayed as jihadist soldiers to be revered. I wondered how this monument to the dead affected his other sons, and asked if he did not worry that it would encourage them into actions that would result in their own pictures joining those of their two dead brothers. "I expect it," the 59-year-old answered. "But I am not afraid of such a moment."

Why? "Because this is the way we live. We expect death every single moment. I am proud of them being martyrs. This is our land and this is the way that we live." The gathered Hamas officials nodded their approval.

The second house was home to a new-born baby boy. It was striking how many children everyone I met in Gaza had. My driver had nine and my translator seven. Haniyeh himself has 13. The demographic implications are obvious. The most recent arrival was born to Haniyeh's neighbors, in a house three doors down. When we visited, he took the baby and kissed it for the waiting photographers. But the image that struck me was a poster stuck to a bookcase in the house, between a picture of Minnie Mouse and stickers of Barcelona football players. On it was a timeline highlighting outrages against the Palestinian people, all the way back to the eighth century – a constant lesson to the youngsters that theirs was a history of betrayal.

It was here that Haniyeh started talking about his own mother. "I was with her when she died. It was when she heard of the Qana massacre in 1996 [when Israeli shells struck a UN compound in Lebanon killing 106 people, including refugees]. We were watching it on TV and she had a heart attack. I tried to resuscitate her but she was in a coma by the time she reached hospital. She was in a coma for several days and then she passed away. I consider her a martyr."

He led me out of the house and into a wasteland to its rear covered in rubble, twisted girders and piles of rubbish. "This was a building bombed by the Israelis in 2009. The


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people had evacuated but when people build their homes it costs them all the money they made during their lifetime. So when you damage the home, you damage everything they had.

"The Israelis must recognize us as the Palestinian people. They have to return prisoners, remove all settlements in the West Bank and not have one soldier on Palestinian land; a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital. We are the victims. They are the victimizer."

He reached over and rested his hand on one of the girders. "The young boy," he said of the

baby he had visited earlier. "I wish him to have dignity."

Then he headed off in the protective cocoon of his security guards. One, however, did not follow them. Instead, he stared up above us. He stared for a long time and then leaned down to speak into the microphone attached to his shirt.

"He sees an Israeli drone," one of his colleagues explained. I looked up, saw nothing but clear blue sky and said so. Those around me smiled. "It will be there. They are always there. They are watching us to see what we do."

* Evgeny Lebedev is chairman of Independent Print Ltd, owner of 'The Independent'


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News Tour

French court to review Mohammed Al-Durra footage for authenticity

05/01/2012 Eleven years after 12 year-old Mohammed Al-Durra was shot and killed during an Israeli military operation in Gaza, a court in France is to review the footage of his death to decide on its authenticity. The filmed report of the Palestinian child's death by French journalist Charles Enderlin has been at the centre of accusations by pro-Israel activists that the footage of the child being shielded by his father before succumbing to bullet wounds was fabricated. Enderlin and his Palestinian cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma, covered the incident on 30 September 2000, in the early days of the Second (Al-Aqsa) Intifada.

In 2004, France 2 channel filed a defamation case against the head of Media-Ratings, Philippe Karsenty, who had alleged that the report was a hoax. Karsenty was convicted of libel by the Court of the First Instance in France but the Court of Appeal ruled that he had used his right to criticise in good faith and that he did not violate the limits of free expression. Although Karsenty was released, the court did not rule on the film's authenticity. The case will now go to the Court of Cassation for consideration in mid February.

Source: MEMO


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Barhoum: PA-Israeli meetings serious threat to

Palestine cause

09/01/2012

Negotiations between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the Israeli occupation authority constitute a serious threat to the Palestine cause, Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said on Monday.

Barhoum said in a statement that the PA-IOA meeting in the Jordanian capital Amman on Monday, the second in the past few weeks, goes in harmony with the Israeli bid to foil the Palestinian national reconciliation.

The spokesman urged the PA to immediately cease such meetings and to stop acting unilaterally in vital Palestinian issues. He called on all Palestinian factions to stand up against those negotiations and to declare their stands against them. Source: PIC

Qassem: Security coordination and

reconciliation do not meet

09/01/2012

Security coordination and meetings with the Israeli occupation authority (IOA) do not conform to Palestinian national reconciliation, Dr. Abdulsattar Qassem, professor of political science at Najah University in Nablus, said.

He told the PIC on Sunday that no reconciliation was possible under such circumstances, pointing to the presence of security agreements between the IOA and the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah.

Qassem said that there should be radical change within the Palestinian arena in order to materialize the reconciliation, underlining that the PA is financed by the West, which links funds to security coordination and negotiations with Israel.

The university professor, a former PA presidential candidate, said that the sources of financing and political alliances must change in order to achieve real reconciliation.

Qassem said that news of reconciliation on the media was not true, that is why the USA was still channeling funds, and Israel was still transferring money to the PA. Source: PIC


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Hamas urges Arab hackers to expand cyberwar on Israeli

occupation

08/01/2012

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri hailed the anonymous Arab hackers who managed to penetrate credit cards of Israelis and expose their details as a creative work and a new means of resistance against the occupation.

"We, in Hamas, bless this effort and urge the Arab youth to activate and develop it; we consider that this effort has the same value as any kind of resistance means used by the Palestinian young men in the land of Palestine," spokesman Abu Zuhri stated in a press release.

"We stress our solidarity with the Arab hackers in the face of the Zionist threats and call upon the Arab youth not to pay any attention to these cowardly threats and to use all possible means through the virtual space to confront the Zionist crimes," the spokesman added.

The Israeli foreign ministry had threatened to respond to any attempt targeting its websites on the Internet.

Deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon said in a speech in a symposium held in Beersheba on Saturday that any act against Israel's cyberspace is a declaration of war and would be retaliated to.

He warned that Israel would follow the US strategy in this regard and would use its missile power, if necessary, to address these attacks. Source: PIC

Committee for Political Prisoners organize sit-in in

West Bank

10/01/2012

On Monday, the Committee for Political Prisoners and the Association of Muslim Youths in the West Bank organized a solidarity sit-in against policies of political detention and job severance by the Ramallah Authority.

Protesters demanded the release of all political prisoners, the reinstatement of those dismissed from jobs and general freedoms in the West Bank. The protests were staged at the Martyr's Rotary in the northern West Bank city of Nablus under the slogan "Freedom for the Al-Junaid Detainees". In a statement put out by the protesters, they asserted that "the reconciliation meetings that have taken place and the freedom committees that have been formed have not yielded anything on the ground; the file on those dismissed remains open and political prisoners in the al-Junaid prison continue to suffer. Some of these prisoners have remained in the al-Junaid prison for more than four consecutive months for having resisted the occupation, or simply for their political stances." The sit-in organizers sent invitations to members and of the Palestinian Legislative Council including its leader, the leadership of the Palestinian factions, representatives of human rights organizations, national and academic personalities and former detainees of PA prisons.

It also sent a special invitation to members of the Committee on freedoms in the West Bank which came about as a result of reconciliation meetings. It invited the Committee to take part in the sit-in, to communicate with political detainees, to condemn the postponement of their release and the fact that their case is being ignored, and denounce the continuation of rendering and detention operations.

Source: MEMO


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Tunisia's president pledges support for Palestinian rights

11/01/2012 A high-ranking human rights delegation from the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Observatory began an official visit to Tunisia on Tuesday 10th January. They presented President Al Moncef Al Marzouki with copies of international human rights reports into Israeli violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and expressed hope that Tunisia would play a greater role in supporting Palestinian rights in line with international humanitarian law.

A press statement released on by the Euro-Med Observatory stated that during a meeting with Al-Marzouki, the Tunisian president pledged that post-revolution Tunisia would intensify its support for the Palestine cause in the international arena.

According to the press release, Al-Marzouki supported the Observatory's plan to establish a regional office in Tunis, which would lead human rights activism in North Africa. Al-Marzouki described the step as an important move toward enhancing the culture of human rights in the region.

Source: MEMO

Rizka: Haneyya to embark on fresh tour by end of January

12/01/2012

Palestinian premier Ismail Haneyya is to embark on a new tour of a number of Arab and Islamic countries in late January, his political advisor Dr. Yousef Rizka said.

He told Palestine newspaper published Thursday that the tour would include Qatar, Iran, and other countries. He said that the international political siege imposed on the government formed by Hamas after winning the 2006 elections was over after the countries in the first tour received him as the premier of a government elected by the people.

The official reception accorded to Haneyya posed as an Arab and regional declaration that the world was wrong in condoning the Israeli siege on Gaza and in labeling Hamas as a “terrorist” movement, Rizka said.

The political advisor revealed that invitations were extended to a number of presidents and senior officials in the countries visited in the first tour to visit Gaza Strip to end the blockade on the coastal enclave once and for all. For his part, Haneyya told a joint meeting for ministers and lawmakers in Gaza on Thursday that his tour was a complete success.

He elaborated on details of his visit to each country and the issues discussed during the exchanges. Haneyya spoke about national unity and asserted his government’s keenness on achieving reconciliation, adding that his tour had enhanced this unity and broke the siege of Gaza.

Source: PIC


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Khudari blames world community for slow Gaza reconstruction

Independent MP Jamal Al-Khudari has blamed the world community for failing to embark on reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, which was devastated in the Israeli invasion three years ago.

Khudari, who is also the head of the popular committee against the siege , said that international pledges were kept in the drawers, opining that lifting the blockade on Gaza would serve as a major breakthrough in allowing free reconstruction projects.

The MP, in an interview with Al-Quds TV network, lauded the Gulf Cooperation Council countries which offered 250 million dollars in

reconstruction projects in the coastal enclave in addition to Turkey that launched important strategic and development projects.

He said that only 30% of the destroyed homes were reconstructed while around 80% of partially destroyed homes were repaired, adding that only one third of the devastated agricultural sector was fixed.

Khudari pointed out that big damage was inflicted on the Strip’s infrastructure, adding that 90% of Gaza water was not fit for human consumption and is in bad need of desalination plants.

The lawmaker said that the education sector was the only sector that won complete attention, adding that Israel was barring entry of construction material for local companies while allowing limited amounts for international agencies.

Khudari said that the exchange of prisoners and the return of captured soldier Gilad Shalit to his family should have ended Israeli alleged justifications for the siege that must be lifted effective immediately. Source: PIC

Video

Palestinian Lesson In Ethics .. To Israeli Border Police

Click on the image to watch the video, alternatively follow the link below: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7nx2aNyvLA

issue no 10

Documents

palestinian issue

palestinian struggle

palestinian lesson

israeli occupationcommittee

israeli blockade

israeli occupation committee

palestinian rights rizka

evgeny news tour