AxisMundi Jerusalem

Desperately seeking… Madonna? Enlightenment?

“You’re so beautiful!” a middle-aged American woman in a modern Orthodox Jewish headscarf called out across the street to a complete stranger as I was walking through the northern Israeli town of Safed the other day. Anywhere but Safed – also known as Tzfat – and I might have been more startled. But in this mountain-top retreat for Jewish mystics, both of an Orthodox and of less conventional persuasion, the public outburst of peace, love and understanding seemed entirely natural.

Depending on your national cultural references, it’s hard to capture the spirit of Safed precisely – it is part hippie-haven, part devotional centre for hordes of black-clad Hassidic Jews; part Taos, New Mexico, part Crown Heights, Brooklyn. I have tried to sum it up in a story today. While the Orthodox who flock there in the hundreds of thousands every spring to pray at the graves of the founders of Kabbalah mysticism would doubtless take exception to the idea, for an international audience it is probably Madonna who has done most to put Safed on the map lately. The Queen of Pop, whose interest in Kabbalah has drawn many other non-Jewish celebrity emulators, paid a brief visit last year, while on tour in Israel.

The town originally came to prominence when a Roman-era Jewish sage, taking refuge nearby, penned what is viewed as the foundational text of Kabbalah, the Zohar. After a period when it was better known as the biggest Crusader fortress in the Middle East, Safed acquired new fame in the 16th-century when Ottoman rulers let Jews expelled from Spain settle there. They brought back to the Holy Land a Kabbalistic tradition that was substantially reinvigorated by rabbis in Safed. The town, where some believe the Messiah will appear, has since then been one of four holy cities for Jews, alongside Hebron, Tiberias and Jerusalem.

As a town housing both Arabs and Jews, Safed saw violence in the decades leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In that year, Safed had a  substantial Muslim Arab majority, including the 13-year-old Mahmoud Abbas – now the Palestinian president. Most became refugees as Jewish forces swept through the Galilee. Aside from a mosque, turned into an art gallery, and some Israeli public monuments to the war, there are few reminders of their presence.

The town is now enjoying a new role amid a tourist boom in Israel in general and the green hills of the Galilee in particular. To find out more about Safed and Kabbalah, here are a few sites to explore:  http://www.safed.co.il/; http://www.livnot.org.il/; http://www.tzfat-kabbalah.org/.

PICTURES:

Mahmoud Abbas “on trial”

A youth group in the Gaza Strip held a mock trial for the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday. The Youth Parliament, a group under the media department of the Islamist group Hamas, prosecuted Abbas on charge of “betraying the blood of the martyrs and the injured”.

The charge was in reference to Abbas’s agreement to defer the vote on the Goldstone Report at the United Nations Human Rights Council earlier this month. Many human rights groups have been pressing nations to endorse the UN report critical of the Gaza War seeing it as a way to hold both Israel and Hamas accountable for the hundreds of civilian deaths in the devastating war. The vote on the Goldstone Report was delayed to next March, which looked like a victory for Israel, and some Palestinians charged his decision had raised serious questions about Abbas’s leadership. Abbas, doing some damage control, pledged to push for an exceptional UNHCR session, which is being held on Wednesday. (Read more here.)

A panel of three teen judges presided over this trial held at the Hamas media offices in Rafah, a city in the Gaza Strip. A man with a similar physique as the Palestinian Authority president acted the part of the defendant, wearing a mask with a picture of Abbas’s face, standing handcuffed and chained at the ankles throughout the trial. He also mimicked Abbas’s accent and intonation.

The prosecutor’s opening statement was followed by testimonies from a human rights group representative, an Arab League representative, Abbas’s defense lawyer, and Mahmoud Abbas “himself”. A young girl, representative of “the children of Palestine”, claiming to have come straight from school to testify against the “traitor”, spoke as a “witness to the crimes committed against the children”.

Abbas was unsurprisingly found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. His personal property is also to be seized for public use, the mock verdict said.

The Parliament is comprised of 50 girls and boys under the age of 18. It has already “tried” several politicians: former U.S. President George W. Bush towards the end of his term and former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shortly before he fell ill a few years ago.

Peace Without Hamas?

According to International Peace Institute’s (IPI) new poll conducted in both Hamas-ruled Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank administered by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement, Palestinians still offer substantial support for the Islamist Hamas group for being “the party of resistance”.

IPI said 55 percent of Palestinians favor a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, which shows a shift in Palestinian public opinion towards greater willingness to accept “the overall package and of provisions for Israeli withdrawal, Palestinian demilitarization, and mutual recognition.”

So, most Palestinians want a state of their own through a peace deal with Israel. But at the same time, a significant percentage back Hamas which refuses to recognise Israel and will only consider a long-term truce, not a peace treaty creating two states.  Elections are due next year and if this poll is right, Fatah will win but hardly by a landslide.

It shows Palestinians are still ambivalent about their choice of leadership. Poll results show Abbas winning a head-to-head election against Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh with 52 percent, which it calls a “narrow margin”.

Click below to see a massive Hamas rally celebrating the Islamist group’s 21st anniversary on December 14, 2008:

The Iran question, again

It seems last week’s focus, settlement expansion, has given way to this week’s prime focus: Might Israel attack Iran?

Last week the Arab media found Israel’s refusal to cease settlement expansion unsurprising and affirmative of what they said was Israel’s unwillingness to pursue a peace settlement with the Palestinians. An op-ed in Al Ahram Weekly, an English-language newspaper in Egypt, questioned the Arabs’ ability to challenge Israel: “Will they have the courage to shift the focus back from the Israeli-instigated ‘Iranian threat’ to the clear and present Israeli danger to the region?”

Lebanon’s Daily Star echoed the argument that Israel was using a perceived Iranian threat as a diversion to its greater “Machiavellian design”.

“The strategy that they employ is simple: Draw attention away from the issue of Israeli occupation and toward Iran, which they portray as a far greater threat to regional security,” the paper wrote in an editorial. “Campaigns that rely on this method tend to downplay the destabilizing impact that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory has on the region, and argue that the Islamic Republic is the main – or indeed the only – source of regional violence.”

Former Israeli deputy defence minister Ephraim Sneh said Israel might be compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear sites if international powers had not agreed to impose sanctions by the end of this year, while the current Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said a nuclear Iran would not constitute a threat to Israel’s existence – since Israel would act first to pre-empt such a threat.

Hopeless or Hopeful?

The trilateral summit tomorrow at the United Nations in New York will be the first time the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian president will be meeting since the suspension of peace talks last December, but nobody’s waiting with bated breath. According to our latest article, the inability to reach an agreement on a settlement freeze and Israelis and Palestinians accusing each other for the lack of efforts to revive peace negotiations, continue to be the bumps in the road to peace. (Read our FACTBOX about Israel’s settlements.)

After the U.S. envoy George Mitchell’s week-long shuttle diplomacy ended last week without obvious result. He had attempted to break the negotiation deadlock between the two sides, any chance of bringing three leaders together for dialogue – albeit “without preconditions” and promise for resumption of negotiations – should seem to be an occasion worth anticipating. (Read more of our coverage here.) Israeli newspapers, however, were not encouraged, calling the summit “the flight to nowhere” and projecting it would be “solely symbolic”.

Prominent Israeli commentator Nahum Barnea called the trilateral summit “not a meeting; not even half a meeting,” and “a joke at the expense of an American president who tried to get involved in Mideast politics and was stung”.

Avi Issacharoff in a news analysis for Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz, called the summit “a much sought-after photo-op” for the Obama administration:

“… Three leaders shaking hands, seemingly getting back to negotiations. This would come against the backdrop of the White House’s resounding failure to force Israel’s agreement to a complete settlement freeze or to persuade Arab states to make even tentative steps toward normalization with Israel, so a picture of the three leaders together will look like an extraordinary achievement,” wrote Issacharoff. “It might even help Obama and his administration to get the stalled peace process moving, however slowly.”

An ageing body politic

The ageing executive body of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction is trying to emerge from its current congress in Bethlehem with a “new look” and a “new image”  – not easy when the youngest member of the executive is 70-years-old and the oldest 87.

“I am sorry. I have Alzheimers,” joked one Fatah member during the congress when he realised he had forgotten to bring the list of candidates that he was supposed to vote for in the group’s first get-together in 20 years.

Even the group’s one-time ’young guard’ has grown old between congresses.

One of the drivers working for a member of Fatah’s Central Committee told me that he was shocked (and a little amused) when he asked his elderly passenger for a destination expecting somewhere in Bethlehem or nearby Ramallah and was told to drive to Beirut.

Five posts of the Central Committe have remained vacant for the past two decades while members waited for this congress to elect a new committee.

On Sunday, the Congress voted to elect new members to the Central Committee in a bid to have a new Fatah that would strengthen the credentials of its leader Mahmoud Abbas. For full story click here.

About half the members of the Central Committee are seeking re-election, including Salim al-Zanoun, the 87-year-old man. For his sake, and for the faction’s, it is hoped the next Congress can be organised before 2030 or there might be a lot of seats coming vacant before the next round of elections.

The Ghost of Fatah Past

Driving from Ramallah to Bethlehem for the Fatah conference, you can’t miss the countless images and posters of deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the founder of Fatah.The Fatah conference’s own publicity campaign has itself capitalized on Arafat imagery in its advertisements, from posters with the aging leader waving in the background, to TV advertisements with emotional music and Arafat’s image lightly transposed over footage of current leaders meeting. Old clips of Arafat and his followers, huddled together during the Israeli siege the Palestinian Authority headquarters, are being played now and then on the Palestinian TV station Al-Quds.

Arafat’s larger-than-life presence haunts the Palestinian street’s views on Fatah. Talk to Palestinians lingering in the square outside the closed conference proceedings, the conversation quickly turns to Arafat.

He was “part of the people, modest, and he listened to the average Palestinian’s concerns,” the narrative goes. Asked for an opinion on the conference, and most give apathetic responses, as if Fatah has nothing to do with them. More than one person responds by saying “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.”

Whether it’s true or not, Palestinians remember Arafat as representing their needs, which many say they don’t see in Fatah anymore. It will be important for that feeling to be rekindled in light of the goals of the Palestinian Authority, made up mostly of Fatah members, to push on toward a two-state solution.

A recent article in the New York Review of Books sounded the death knell of the two-state solution, because under Mahmoud Abbas, the head of Fatah and the president of the Palestinian Authority, that solution had morphed from what Palestinians saw as a national cause under Arafat, to a “foreign” (i.e. an Israel and Western-backed) idea that no longer represented Palestinian interest.

“If [Abbas'] actions are to be seen as legitimate and his endorsement of an agreement is to carry weight, he cannot appear as the president of only some Palestinians but must appear as the president of all… [the politicians ] currently speak and act as if they are at the head of some Palestinians-the more respectable ones-while leaving it to others to handle the more troublesome lot. All of which diminishes the PA’s standing, even in the eyes of many otherwise most prone to support its program, and inflates its opposition, even among many who share nothing in common with the Islamists’ agenda.”

Driving to the Intercontinental hotel, where most conference delegates are staying, one cab driver ( Christian) mocks the media focus on the Fatah conference: “And they still wonder why we voted for Hamas?”

Poisonous Plans:Revealing the Truth? Or Taking Down Mahmoud Abbas?

This week, Farouq al-Qadoumi, general secretary of the Fatah party’s Central Committee, set off a firestorm in the Arab media. He released documents that he claims links Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to a plot to poison Yasser Arafat. The episode not only stoked controversy among Palestinian political factions, it led to the shutting down of the Arabic news broadcaster Al-Jazeera in the West Bank.

Al-Qadoumi has only released some parts of the document in question. According to Al-Jazeera, Al-Qadoumi says that Arafat gave him a record of the secret meeting before his death, and that a plot existed in which Abbas and security adviser Mohammed Dahlan met with former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and some US intelligence agents.

The parts released include a quote from Sharon arguing for assassinating Arafat using poison, to which Abbas replies “If Arafat dies before we’re able to gain control of the ground, and all the organization including Fatah and the Al-Aqsa Brigade, then we will face huge difficulties.” Abbas also supposedly suggests passing Israeli plans for “cleansing” Palestinian resistance leadership through Arafat himself. Al-Jazeera also quotes a part of the document where Dahlan allegedly told Sharon that he was working on penetrating the ranks of Palestinian organizations. (See AL-Jazeera’s report here. Note: this is in Arabic)

Abbas supporters in Fatah say the documents are false: “Qadoumi is trying to split Fatah and prevent the holding of the 6th Congress,” the Central Committee added in [a statement], referring to plans to hold a much delayed party assembly in the West Bank on Aug. 4, the first such congress in 20 years.” (Read the entire report here).

Al-Qadoumi, who resides in Tunis, is against holding the conference in land under Israeli occupation. Qadoumi and his supporters think the conference should be held abroad, as it was previously.

In the wake of these accusations, the Palestinian Authority closed down the Al-Jazeera news station in the West Bank, arguing that it was “spreading falsehoods” and “inciting viewers against authorities”. Many speculate that the reason has to do with Al-Jazeera’s lengthy coverage of Al-Qadoumi that day, as well as a feeling among Fatah members and the PA that Al-Jazeera is biased against them. Al-Jazeera rejected the claims, arguing that all Arabic stations were covering al-Qadoumi.

PA’s Latest Security Procedure: Hand Sanitizer

Want to shake Mahmoud Abbas’s hand? Not so fast. Our correspondent Ali Sawafta was surprised by a change in protocol at a meeting with the Palestinian president:

“I went to the opening of the first public park in the West Bank. Standing in front of the tent where the opening festivities were being held and Abbas was to speak, was a guard carrying a bottle of hand sanitizer. Everyone who went in had to use some in order to get in the tent. No one was exempt from the procedure, whether they were ministers or businessmen.

“Many of us attending wondered if the goal was to prevent passing swine flu to the president. Officials called the procedure simply a ‘basic health measure’.”

In case you’ve missed it…

If you happened to miss Israeli Prime Minister Benajamin Netanyahu’s speech Sunday evening (June 14), or if you would just like to have another listen, we’ve uploaded it for you. The version below has simultaneous English translation.

Naturally, there was plenty of reaction from all quarters in the region. In the edit below, you can listen to comments from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat (an advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas); Judy Kramer, a resident of the Ofra settlement; Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri; and a number of residents of Gaza. Some of the soundbites are in Arabic. If you want to follow along with an English translation, click here.

This final edit includes more reaction from settlers and Palestinians (both in the West Bank and Gaza). Also included are some interesting comments from Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev who talks about Israeli government efforts to reach “understandings” about settlements with the Obama administration. Another comment comes from Arieh Eldad, a lawmaker from the right-wing Israeli National Unity Party, who says Netanyahu made a “very dangerous decision” in accepting the notion of a Palestinian state.

(Again, some of the Palestinian soundbites are in Arabic. You can follow along in English here.)