I woke up this morning with mixed feelings about what I’m doing here. It’s really cold here at present, and my usual positive attitude has walked away somewhere! But it’s also a nagging question of whether this visit to Palestine is productive. Over the last year, here at the school, we have spent a lot of time and energy working to comply with Western donors’ escalating standards of accountability – using up time, money and energy we don’t have – and sometimes I’ve found myself wondering whether I’m here to help improve life-conditions for Palestinians or whether actually I am simply working, at personal expense, to satisfy the needs of Westerners.
Perhaps my feelings around this are confused, affected by a number of factors which I haven’t yet sorted out. One is my own perplexity over where my home and allegiances lie – Britain is not very welcoming to me at present and Palestine cannot itself grant me residence (that’s an Israeli decision and I’m not Jewish, so the answer is no). But there’s more.
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| Okay, now guess what part of this picture is the Israeli settlement |
Here I’m going to get political because the politics affect the way Palestinians perceive a Westerner like me, a local representative of the Western powers that give them a lot of problems. Mercifully, they distinguish between ordinary Westerners and their governments and they know that, although we have democracy, that doesn’t mean we have much influence – so they don’t blame folks like me for what our governments do. But they sometimes wonder what side I’m really on.
My feelings about my visit here are highlighted by the strategies the West is engaging in right now over Iran, Syria and Palestine which, in my view, are sorely counterproductive and will lead to trouble, causing grief and hardship for Arabs and ultimately loss for Westerners too. It’s all about oil and geopolitical power, and the prospects aren’t good.
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| Another Israeli settlement - picturesque! |
The West talks about freedom, human rights and democracy but it doesn’t practise what it preaches. Here’s the list. It scuppered the Palestinians’ democratic choices back in 2006-07, when they voted in a party the West and Israel didn’t want; it has supported regimes around the Middle East that are neither democratic nor rights-oriented nor acting for the common good; it has propped up Israel in its wars, its occupation of Palestine and its Western-financed settlement-building project; it has flooded the region with arms and money to support ruling elites who act as proxies; it has failed to deal with nuclear disarmament over the last 60 years and now contemplates waging war against one country, Iran, over Iranian nuclear ambitions while quietly supporting Israel in its own nuclear arms monopoly in the Middle East; it has wrecked Iraq and Afghanistan and recently intervened, with mixed results, in Libya; and, worst of all, it will not desist from this century-long habit.
Meanwhile, Middle Eastern people want to sort out their problems without foreign intervention – everyone knows Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy are more interested in their election prospects and clubability than the welfare of paltry Arabs. Since the fall of the Ottomans around 1920, this region has been under Western dominance and it’s time for this to end. Actually, it is gradually, painfully ending, and Western world hegemony is declining, but Western countries still retain a grandiose belief in their right to call the shots, even when things are going wrong at home and the West cannot afford such dominance. It has lost the plot. But it has arms, influence and vested interests, and dying dragons, thrashing their tails, are dangerous, desperate and deluded.
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| The Israeli separation wall and an electronic surveillance tower above Beit Jala |
Here in Palestine there have been many good peace-building projects, and I have been involved with a few and told my readers about them. I am deeply involved with one, the Hope Flowers school and centre. But there is a problem. These worthy efforts have little effect while the people at the top in the West, the now-famous 1%, are blocking change and pursuing self-interest. Dear reader, please do not fall for the belief that Western countries are altruistic, concerned for the welfare of others – except when it is in their narrow interests to do so. The Palestinians are ready for peace and coexistence, they want to get on with life and build their future. But this is stoppered not just by Israel but by Western countries too – advocating peace processes, justice and democracy while actually creating the opposite.
Palestinians make up nearly half of the population of this land but we see no democracy here. Someone once said, “Israel is democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs” but even the ‘democratic for Jews’ bit is inaccurate, with 80% of the nation’s resources controlled by sixteen families. In 2006 Palestine had the cleanest and most genuinely democratic election the Middle East has seen for years, as verified by international observers, while in Israel’s last election the party getting the most votes didn’t even get into power.
But in 2006 Israel and the West decided to intervene and scupper the Palestinian elections (more here). Twenty parliamentarians elected then are still in Israeli jails, five years later, together with ‘Palestine’s Mandela’, a man called Marwan Barghouti, who has been ten years in jail. Hamas, the winning party with a thumping 60% majority, whatever its merits, is still deemed a terrorist organisation when, in the experience of the majority of the people of the Middle East, the terror actually comes from the over-armed West. Hamas is a social-reform party and, like any political party, it has its plusses and minuses, but it didn’t deserve this. It is the ‘party of resistance’, yes, which in previous years fought Israel, but if another country were invading yours and killing your citizens in thousands, wouldn’t there be a similar party in your country? Yes. Britain’s great hero Churchill took the same line against Hitler as Hamas has done against Israel.
It’s happening again in Syria. I don’t support the Assad regime in Syria or what it is doing. Any regime that indiscriminately kills its own people is heading for demise and disgrace. However, the fact is, as discovered by a British polling institution (YouGov), a majority of the Syrian people wish to retain the current regime – this has not even been clearly reported in the West. Many Syrians support or accept Assad because they have seen the new governments that have taken power in countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, even Egypt, and they don’t see progress there. They don’t support the Assad regime as it stands, but they believe that there is a greater chance of reform under Assad than they would get from a Western puppet regime.
Syrians look at the Arab League, led as it is by undemocratic governments in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Sudan, and they don’t want to submit to its pressures. They watch the two biggest Arabic satellite TV stations, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, baying about human rights, but these stations come from the undemocratic oil sheikdoms of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, hardly the home of human rights.
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| A street in Bethlehem's Old Town |
There’s some wisdom in their perception, and they want to sort out their problems themselves without foreign intervention. It is precisely this which the West and its Arabic proxies do not like. The West doesn’t like independent players: it wants control. This was what lay behind the West’s war against Saddam Hussein who, though a thorough asshole, has not been replaced by significantly better men, leaving Iraq in a mess.
But Syria has a big problem: its people are divided, the regime has lost legitimacy and it is firing on its own people. This issue is not easily solved, and putting a Western-supported regime in its place is a naïve solution – as we are now seeing in Libya. Funding and arming the Syrian opposition is a geopolitical strategy which isn’t necessarily best for Syrians. This is business. The West also wants to keep China, Russia and India out of the Middle East. It wants compliant, business-friendly regimes.
For the last twenty years, since the fall of the Soviet Union, the West has been railing against Islamists, calling them terrorists. This has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and to untold hardship. The Western development model feeds rich elites, binding increasing swathes of the world into capitalism, but it doesn’t really benefit ordinary people or bring the justice, democracy and other goodies that are promised.
Yet now, following the Arab Spring, Islamists are gaining power across the Middle East, and generally by democratic consent. They are becoming the new establishment here, and the West is getting into bed with them, to try to stop Arabs acting too independently. Why so, when the Islamists were recently the enemy? It has nothing to do with justice, peace and the needs of the majority. It has everything to do with money, oil and geostrategic considerations.
The Islamists will prove in coming years that they are mere politicians with the usual flaws, and the promises they have made, to bring justice, fairness and prosperity to all, will come up against hard reality. Within ten years, the Islamists, like the socialist parties of Europe in previous decades, will prove to be a mixed bag, and not the Big Solution. However it is the people of the Middle East who must decide on this: this is the core principle of democracy. The West doesn’t know best, the results of its previous interventions have been bad for ordinary people here and it has no inherent right to entrain everyone to its own ways. Imperialism is a thing of the past.
The crucial indicator here is Palestine, which has experienced the effects of forty years of Western-sponsored peace processes. Twenty years of aid and development money in Palestine, since the Oslo Accords, has simply bred a new elite in Ramallah, softening the blow of the Israeli settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories. Aid has acted like morphine rather than medicine. British JCBs have demolished Palestinian homes, American arms have besieged Gaza, German guilt-money has supported Israel and Israel’s nuclear bombs were developed with the help of France. Thanks, guys.
Palestine has been one of the causes of the Arab Spring: the people of the Middle East have grown tired of living under puppet regimes that fail to deliver the goods because of their fear of stepping out of line in the West’s eyes, and these very regimes have failed to solve the Palestinian question. This is a core issue for Arabs: Palestine symbolises the treatment they all have received over many decades.
Three resistors of Western dominance have been Libya, Syria and Iran. These have not been good regimes, yet they all came into existence as a result of earlier Western interventions in the Middle East. Now, the West doesn’t want them, and it is willing to impose hardship and war on ordinary people to get rid of them. Because of oil, because of money, because of geostrategic control, not because of justice, peace and human rights.
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| Arabs - disposable |
Yes, Westerners do genuinely believe in justice and human rights, and this is good, but Western governments do not practise what they preach – they bomb people and wreck countries, and Western electorates generally do not hold their governments to account over foreign policy issues. Western electorates want cheap oil and steady supplies of it for their cars, so anything goes, and Arabs don’t matter much – they’re only primitive, stupid, dangerous Muslims, after all.
It would be easy right now for someone to say that I support bad regimes in the Middle East – I don’t. But I believe the West should go away and attend to its own problems, leaving the people of the Middle East to sort themselves out. Most of all, the West needs to cut its support for Arabic puppet elites and for Israel, both of which constitute a big problem for ordinary people in the Middle East right now.
If Western support for Israel were cut, then the playing field would be levelled and Israel would have to make some big decisions. Peace would come closer, for simple, realistic reasons. The Israeli economy, propped up by Western money and favour, would weaken and the West Bank occupation and the siege of Gaza would be less viable. Israel would be obliged to trade with its neighbours and make friends with them, for its own survival. Most Arabs don’t want to drive the Jews out – they just want some normality, equality and justice. The separation walls must come down, the five million Palestinian refugees need restitution, Israeli control over Palestinians’ lives must end, and the outrages of the Israeli army and settlers must be curtailed. That’s what needs to happen. Oh, and the return of East Jerusalem.
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| Even more disposable |
But it isn’t happening, and that’s what affects my current mood. Someone like me cannot do much to help Palestinians get a decent life unless something changes at the top, with the regimes and vested interests in Israel and the West. It’s as simple as that. I’m getting futility feelings.
It impacts on this very school. I work here not only because the school helps Palestinian refugee and disadvantaged families. I work here because I have worked for peace for forty years and this school is a world leader in dealing with war trauma and the psycho-social causes of violence, and I think that’s worth working for. Also the Palestinian people are world leaders in dealing with hardship and the effects of conflict, with ninety years of experience as an occupied, stunted country.
This morning, Mahmoud, a child from a neighbouring house and the son of Amal, the school cleaner, called me downstairs and handed me a letter. The letter was written by his fourteen-year old sister, who has quite good English. It asked whether their mother could borrow 100 shekels (£5) until the end of the month. There are two reasons for this. First, their father, imprisoned by the Israelis, was not allowed to change his clothes or clean himself for over a year, meaning that now, as a free man, he has a skin disease preventing him from working and thoroughly undermining his self-esteem – and they cannot afford treatment. He hides away, hurting. So the family is poor. Second, Hope Flowers School has had recent funding problems necessitating serious financial cuts (with staff reductions and a cut of kids at school from 350 to 150). Amal’s hours have been reduced (though she still works as hard as she did before). So she has less money. So they don’t have enough to get them through the cold weather. So they needed to borrow from me.
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| Useless, lazy, unproductive Arabs |
Of course I lent them the money. I expect repayment will be difficult, so this will probably be a gift. I do so wholeheartedly because Amal and her family have been friendly and helped me over the years. Mahmoud returned two hours later with some home-baked bread. Bless these folk. But it presents a dilemma: here am I, a ‘rich’ Westerner, reinforcing the aid-dependency Palestinians experience. They are dependent thanks to the Israeli occupation, which deprives them of the capacity to build their own economy and support themselves. Westerners support Palestinians because they do not want to force Israel to stop what it is doing, and Israel fails to carry out its duties as an occupying power by providing social, health and educational facilities on an equal basis to its own Jewish citizens. Bluntly put, Western aid to Palestine supports the Israeli military regime by keeping the Palestinians quiet.
So today I had 100 shekels-worth of dilemma - what in economics they call 'moral hazard'. I’m happy to help Amal – she’s a fine lady. But in doing so I implicitly absolve others of responsibility for the crimes they are committing. That’s not what I am here for. I am here to work toward the ending of war and military oppression. But I land up implicitly supporting it.
Which is why I wonder what I am doing here. Yes, I know my presence here is bringing benefit, and it’s worth it. But it is compromised. I do not like this.
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| Bottom of the apartheid pile - the Bedouin! |
Meanwhile, I’m trying to decide whether to go back to Britain when my Israeli visa expires on 10th February, or whether to go to Egypt and try to re-enter, grovelling suitably, to stay until late March. Back in Britain, I have no home, no job, no partner to return to, and arriving back to nowhere and nothing much will be quite a challenge. I’m doing my best to resolve this, but no positive answers are as yet forthcoming. So I have a few humanitarian issues to sort out with myself.
Liz, my visitor from Glastonbury, left for Egypt today. Aisha and her English brother are staying two nights with me, and they’re off tomorrow. A friend in Europe skyped me for help with some personal issues and I felt rather clueless to help. I have work to do, but I’m struggling over it. I could do with a hug. Well, life goes on. After all, if one chooses to be a tightrope-walker, it’s to be expected that things will get wobbly!
But I must remember something I got clear about years ago, when I first entered into this Palestine business. Not to expect results. If you hope for results, you inevitably get disappointed. I think I’m being tested on this now.
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| Oh Palestine, what's coming next? Photo taken from just under the separation wall in a photo above - that photo was taken from the bump on the horizon on the right, the Herodeon. |
