by Robert Fisk

Published on Saturday, June 16, 2007 by The Independent/UK

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today “Palestine” - and let’s keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn’t like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” still left to negotiate over ?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the “moderate” (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word “occupation”, who always referred to Israeli “redeployment” rather than “withdrawal”, a “leader” we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn’t vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas’s bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas’s Fatah and the rotten nature of the “Palestinian Authority”.

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer “Palestine” EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our “war on terror” in the wastelands of Helmand province).

We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.

We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair’s recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a “statesman” by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose “democracy” is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the “war on terror”.

Yes, and we love King Abdullah’s unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn’t like The Independent’s coverage of what he quaintly calls “the Middle East”. If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the “Middle East” would be to control.

For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?

It’s easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that’s what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn’t President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn’t in control of Iran (even if he doesn’t actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).

If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don’t behave like us civilised Westerners.

So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don’t deserve our sacrifice and our love.

How do we deal with a coup d’état by an elected government?

© 2007 The Independent

Sami Hermez writing from Baddawi Refugee Camp, Live from Lebanon, 2 June 2007

1 June 2007

I have been to the Baddawi camp twice now. It is swarming with people and has more than doubled in population. The future of the camp is bleak and according to the World Health Organization the likelihood of disease is high, and there is limited water and electricity. The number of civilian deaths in the Nahr al-Bared camp is difficult to determine due to a media blackout; my last check saw a range between 17 and 40, but today’s indiscriminate bombing from land and sea has certainly increased this figure. In the Lebanese daily An-Nahar, on 31 May, there was a single story that only reported the details of the deaths of Lebanese soldiers. The official number from the Lebanese army over last weekend was a resounding one civilian death.

By denying Palestinian civilian deaths we effectively commit a double crime: The first is the indiscriminate death of the victim; the second is the denial of this original crime. I suppose the victim is meant to carry a camera and document her own death to truly confirm it in the public’s eyes.

I felt this as I stood in front of two Palestine Red Crescent Society volunteers in the Baddawi camp while they argued about the number of victims and how the army was making it difficult to document the deaths and the situation in the camp. I stood as they tried to prove to me, hoping I would get the word out, that there was more than one death. It mattered so much to them; it mattered more than the world that there was more than one death. In my mind I caught a glimpse of the idealist romantic in me and thought of how the world should react to even one death; that it was not in the numbers, it was in the act itself. But I caught myself and came back to the ways of this world: the numbers do matter; the proof of dead bodies is required, and the media needs pictures, names, time and cause of death before it will believe the story of the victim over that of the state. As it stands, the Palestinian is killed and then denied the recognition of her unjust death. With no recognition of injustice how can people deal with their loss?

And it is not the first injustice denied to these people. It begins with the denial of their right to return to Palestine. Standing in an overcrowded Baddawi camp, I found myself making conversation by asking one man a question about his origins; a painful question for a Palestinian refugee.

To be Palestinian in Lebanon is to be wished a thousand deaths and hunted a million times.

And the man’s reply was that his family was originally from a village outside of Haifa. His grandfather fled to Tel al-Zaatar; any Lebanese can tell you about the massacre there in 1976. After which they fled to Chatilla; any Lebanese can tell you about the massacre there in 1982. And so after that they fled to Nahr al-Bared; few Lebanese will tell you what is happening there now or call it a massacre. He is now in the Baddawi camp hoping to return, but if the curse of Palestinian return is any indication, it might be decades before this man, Nasser, returns to anywhere but the UNRWA school he resides in now. And that is probably the real reason why there are still about 10,000 people in Nahr al-Bared who refuse to leave what they now call their homes. They already have experience from the last time they left.

Mona, a woman from the Nahr al-Bared camp, reinforces this idea. She speaks to me passionately: “I care deeply about the camp. It is the symbol of my refuge; it is the place from where I will defend my cause and from where I struggle for my right to return to Palestine.” She continued: “If they remove all civilians from Nahr al-Bared the army will completely demolish the camp. I need to defend the camp. In a few days we will all return if there is no solution. People want the civilians out but we will return. We are thinking of this option now if things stay as they are.”

She reminds me of the Lebanese in the war this summer speaking in relation to the South: how they wanted to return and how the men did not want to leave. People here value home as an extension of their lives and their bodies. They want to remain because escaping into the uncertain world is an infringement on their humanity and perhaps equal, at that moment of departure, to the finality of death. For some reason the Lebanese expect the Palestinians to just desert their homes as if they were meaningless when they themselves would not and have a history of staying their ground.

At the camp, one of the guys there tells me that in recent years there has been more intermixing between Palestinians and Lebanese, and that this was new. He said this with enthusiasm to show a common ground between us, and that he thought better times were ahead. I suppose the idea is that marriage brings two tribes together, so why not two nations. It doesn’t seem to work that way though. No matter how many mixed national marriages there are between the Lebanese and Palestinians or Lebanese and Syrians, the people still fight. Kinship and nation-state politics don’t really work in the same way as kinship does with tribal politics. Somehow the relationships don’t have meaning in state diplomacy, and it is perhaps because of the firm detachment between the family and the state. So we can intermarry from here till next century but to no avail. The state will adamantly privilege the general population over the family and the general population will remain “purely Lebanese” — whatever that means.

The Lebanese army is committing crimes in the Nahr al-Bared camp and the Lebanese are silent. Perhaps the Lebanese should imagine the camp was a Beirut neighborhood and Fatah al-Islam was hiding, lets say, in Ashrafieh or the Hamra area. They should then ask themselves if they would be calling on the army to use the same methods to get rid of the group.

Agreed, terrorists should not hide behind civilians, but when they do, state armies also have a responsibility to not destroy the civilian population. Remember, the civilians are victims and now the army is killing the victim. The Palestinians of Nahr al-Bared are hostages. The army is killing the hostage and destroying his town and home. Is there logic to this?

The Palestinians cannot be punished for their leadership’s incompetence. Otherwise, we should ask if the Lebanese people should be punished for their leadership’s incompetence. The Lebanese army can take a stand but it needs to do so within the rules of war. If it cannot, then it should not fight a battle it cannot win.

Here is where the Lebanese people and government are to fault. The people are to fault for their silence and the government for its unaccountable behavior, its inability to govern its own affairs and then blaming it on everyone else, and its direct or indirect complicity in the arming of Fatah al-Islam. Again, I call for a full investigation of the recent events and into the dealings of the top politicians (Opposition and March 14) in the country. With no accountability there will always be political space for militias to harvest.

Note: In the meantime, tonight we are beginning to hear that things in the Ein al-Hilweh camp in the South are starting to flare up. None of this is making sense; something is definitely not right!

Sami Hermez is a doctoral student of anthropology at Princeton University researching violence and armed resistance in Lebanon and has been active in relief and redevelopment projects in the south of Lebanon. Sami can be reached at shermez at princeton.edu.

I would like to raise the following points:

1- As Arabs (or Arabic speaking people) it is time to change our
conservative, sectarian, tribal, mobbish, violent and inhuman mentality in dealing with problems, issues, crisis and challenges which are facing us.

2- Human and civil rights, rationalism, enlightenment, rule of law and institutions, citizenship and individual rights are fundamental principles of the new required mentality.

3- In principle the welfare and the security of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is the legal responsibility of the Lebanese government and the moral responsibility of the Lebanese people.

4- As Lebanese we should acknowledge that our internal divisions and our sectarian political systems are the main factor of our troubles and periodic civil wars that have occurred for centuries, i.e. before the Palestinian cause and Assad’s regime in Syria. Our destructive internal divisions attracts and encourage, in a very opportunistic and deliberate way, external factors to be very effective and even dominant in our political life. Only in this perspective we can understand the “Palestinian Era” and the “Syrian Era” in Lebanon.

5- The continuous crisis in the Lebanese political system (with the
attraction of different external factors) and the political opportunism for decades are the main reasons behind not building a rational policy towards the Palestinian camps and refugees based on human rights and legal obligations towards the Lebanese sovereignty.

6- Based on this, disregarding Fateh Al Islam and its criminal acts and its supporters, we can’t at all tolerate the shelling and destroying of the Nahr El Bared Refugee camp which has resulted in the needless deaths of Palestinian civilians. This is a war crime and should stop immediately.

7- The response to the current crisis in north Lebanon should consist, in my opinion, of 3 main elements:

A- Imposing the law through the judiciary system, law enforcement agencies and intelligence against the criminals.

B- Thorough investigation by a trusted independent committee.

C- Introduction of a national policy towards Palestinian camps and refugees based, as I said before, on human rights and legal obligations towards the Lebanese sovereignty. A policy which also aims to segregate the Palestinian refugee tragedy from the political struggle and opportunism in Lebanon.

Ali Hamdan