Laila El-Haddad has written a powerful and infuriating post about going home to visit her parents:
“Its not very comfortable in there is it?” said the stony faced official, cigarette smoke forming a haze around his gleaming oval head.
“Its OK. We’re fine” I replied wearily, delirious after being awake for a straight period of 30 hours.
“You could be in there for days you know. For weeks. Indefinitely. “So, tell me, you are taking a plane tomorrow morning to the US?”
****
…I hold a Palestinian Authority passport. It replaced the “temporary two-year Jordanian passport for Gaza residents” that we held until the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid ’90s, which itself replaced the Egyptian travel documents we held before that. A progression in a long line of stateless documentation.
It is a passport that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry to my own home. This is its purpose: to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identity.
Please, please, please read the whole account.
Please do not comment unless you accept the basic dignity, equality, and inherent worth of all people.
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
Well, I’m sorry for you and your family – looks like Egypt doesn’t want to upset the Israelis.
The people to blame for this are the staff at the Egyptian embassy – they probably didn’t know what they were talking about, or failed to check. Still doesn’t make up for the fact that they denied you entry to your home.
Well, that’s what a beauracracy does – follow the rules, and in the absence of clear instructions, delay, delay, delay and delay. It’s the egyptian government and the israeli government’s fault, at the end of it. The embassy staff must share some of the blame but it’s the leaders of these two countries who are at fault.
I know the staff at the airport weren’t too friendly – but as someone who’s family member works in government, they don’t make the rules, and they’d be fired if they broke them.
I just wanted to thank you for posting this. It took a few days before I had the time to read the entire thing. Such a horrible experience, and it’s not some bureaucratic one-off but what she potentially faces every time she thinks about seeing her family. Thank you for bringing attention to it.
I am troubled by the international demand that Israel recognize the principle of two states for two peoples and recognize the Palestinian state as the national state for the Palestinian people but the Palestinians are vocal in saying that they have no intention of recognizing the national state of the Jewish People.
This is patently unfair. If Palestinians deserve a nation of their own, respected for its inherent integrity as a nation, then the same guarantee should be made by all people – and particularly by Palestinian authorities – to the Israelis.
Neil, when you say “the Palestinians are vocal…” you mean “Hamas is vocal.” Not the same thing. Obfuscation like this costs real people their lives.
Who is the representative of Palestinians? I thought Hamas had won the January 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections (which seem generally to have been thougt free and fair elections), and had been ousted from the West Bank only by Fatah’s use of force. While I didn’t like having a government I hadn’t voted into power be my representative when all three branches of U.S. government were held by Republicans, in a democracy I had to bow to the fact that the majority of my fellow citizens disagreed with me. Or do you mean that elected officials who belong to Hamas have staked out a different position wrt Israel’s right to exist than the organization as a whole?
PG, thanks – you have that correctly. Julie, Palestinian pollsters (and I stress that they are Palestinian so you know the information is not weighted by the Israelis) point out that over 54% of Palestinians support military attacks against Israeli civilians (- Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah).
Dr. Hussein Ahmad, the Director of An-Najah’s polling center released numbers in Nov 2008: when Hamas supporters were asked about the creation of two states on the historic land of Palestine (a Palestinian state and Israel), 52.6% rejected a Palestinian state on the 1967 occupied territories and 72.4% rejected the creation of two state on the historic land of Palestine (a Palestinian state and Israel), and 52.6% of Hamas supporters rejected of a Palestinian state even on the 1967 occupied territories.
Numbers aside, let’s look at the big picture: The people of the West (not yet the governments)have joined the Arab states in placing the majority of the blame on Israel. They ignore the myriad attacks by Palestinians in all 60 years of Israel’s existence and point out all of Israel’s actions, most recently the Gaza War.
Let me offer up this quote from Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe:
“Under Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, Israel surrendered the entire Gaza Strip, released hundreds of arrested terrorists, and even offered to divide Jerusalem with the Palestinian Authority… The steeper the price Israel has been willing to pay for peace, the more it has been repaid with violence: suicide bombings, rocket attacks, kidnapped and murdered soldiers, and wars with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.” (Apr 5 2009) When’s the last time you saw this analysis on a comments page in any blog?
Who exactly is it who is not making demands on Hamas to agree in principle to a two state solution? Currently, representatives of the US won’t even meet with representatives of Hamas because Hamas supports violence against Israelis and refuses to agree in principle to a two-state solution. Hamas was forced out of power with the backing of the US and Israel because Hamas’s views are considered unacceptable. I (fortunately) can’t imagine the US backing a coup d’etat against the Likud government of Israel for rejecting a 2-state solution, so it seems absurd to complain that the US is applying more force to Israel than to the Palestinian power blocks over its use of violence against the Palestinians or its rejection of a two state solution. Of course, you did say that this was the generic people of the West who were unfair to Israel, rather than governments, specifically suggesting that the people of the West as represented in blog comments are unfair to Israel. Fortunately, as you kindly demonstrate by quoting Jeff Jacoby, the people of the West control only the comments of blogs, and not the major media.
The existing Fatah government of the West Bank (under the elected President Mahmoud Abbas) does agree in principle to a two state solution, and Neil’s cited study above shows that nearly half of Hamas supporters support a two state solution with a Palestinian state comprising the occupied territories (out side the 1967 borders). You might think from the way that information was deployed that Hamas supporters = Palestinians, but this is rather obviously not so.
In fact, 74% of Palestinians support a two-state solution, essentially the same as Israeli support (78%) for a two-state solution. The elected governments of both Israel and the Occupied territories do not accurately represent their populace on this subject.
Neil? PG? I’m not going to sit here and have this same argument, pull out the same statistics and argue over the implications of the same data points, for the millionth time. Not gonna do it.
Peace.
Charles, I accept the statistics you cite. What I challenge is the realpolitik . Many Palestinians as well as Arabs throughout the Muslim sphere are prepared to accept Israel. However, the 25% who are opposed hold the power; not only the political power, as Hamas does in Gaza, but the physical power, which can be seen in the Hamas’ treatment of Fatah Gazans: kneecapping, throwing them off roofs, etc. There are many more examples of this behavior but the media remains reluctant to highlight Palestinian travesties. I won’t even touch on the anti-women lashings, stonings and beheadings since this is mostly outside of Palestine but I trust you’ll accept their truth.
Now, the most common argument that gets put up is that the new Israeli government refuses a tw0-state solution. This disregards aan essential point: the offer of a two-state solution has been on the table since 2000 – actually, since the 1993 Oslo Accords, way before Likud put this coaltion together. Israel has made good-faith efforts to compromise.
It’s also pretty irrelevant, unless there’s some gender equality prereq to recognizing Israel of which I am not aware. FYI, bringing up this sort of thing where it has no relationship to the subject under discussion tends to tinge your entire comment with “I’m just looking for excuses to bash Muslims.”
Netanyahu and Lieberman are continously quoted by the media as saying that they will not accept a two-state solution. That’s just more media bias. What they aresaying is that they will not acquiesce to a two-state solution until the Palestinians accept Israel. 75% of Palestinians are not enough to guarantee Israeli security. Proof? Look at the bus and pizza parlor bombings before the security fence.
The Hamas Charter has been reaffirmed continuously even now and you only need to google to see that Hamas insists that they will never acknowledge or accept Israel.
Hamas has transformed the Palestinian conflict from a nationalist struggle to create a Palestinian state into an Islamist struggle against the existence of a Jewish state. While more and more Americans castigate Israel for its militancy, the reality is that Israel has been making concessions since the Six Day War and what it gets in return is Mickey Mouse declaring jihad on children’s tv.
There will never be a 100 percent guarantee of Israeli security and holding out for one is a way of saying you’d rather have no solution than a less-than-perfect solution. Look at Northern Ireland. You still have hold-out elements of the old IRA. Does that mean Britain was wrong to sign on to the Good Friday accords? Wrong to expand self-government in Northern Ireland?
I know PG was responding a particular part of your argument, but this is actually my problem with everything you’ve written here. The post is not about who Israel should or shouldn’t negotiate with. It is not about how wonderful Hamas is. It is not about what concessions each side should make. It is one story about the human cost of the conflict.
What is the fundamental divide between the “Pro-Palestinian” and “Pro-Israel” positions? The Palestinian defenders argue that Israel has used colonialist, hard-handed techniques to subjugate a beleaguered indiginous people. The Israel defenders argue that the Arb world as a whole is determined to eliminate Israel as a non-Islamic nation and that the Palestinians have been deceitfully abused by doctrinaire Arab ( and now Iranian) governments to deflect attention from their own human-rights and corrupted mismanagement. One of the more troubling aspects of this divide for me is that Palestinian advocates accept no responsibility for the Arab/Islamic spewing of the most rancid type of bigotry but are quick to chastise Israel for any act of prejudice. Does Israel treat its Arab population better than the Arab world has treated its Jews? Of course. But you make no acknowledment of this. Instead, it’s all Israel-as-criminal and no criticism of the Hamas charter which is inherently racist.
Who are you talking to, Neil? Who is this “you” here who is placing all the blame on Israel?
And if you actually read the piece this post is about, you’d know the Arab governments don’t exactly come out smelling like roses.