External Injustice, Self-Inflicted Wounds Add Fuel to Palestine’s Crisis, Says Hanan Ashrawi

By Pat and Samir Twair


	(l-r): PCRF president Lily Karam, Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, and Dr. Musa Nasir, PCRF chairman (Staff photo S. Twair).

THE RIFT IN Palestinian politics and the upcoming Annapolis conference were uppermost concerns in Dr. Hanan Ashrawi’s Nov. 3 address to more than 700 supporters of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund gathered at the Anaheim Hilton Hotel.

Noting that “Our land certainly is traumatized,” the founder of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH) attributed this crisis to external injustice and self-inflicted wounds.

Citing the 530 checkpoints that disrupt life in the West Bank, Ashrawi said there are more than 11,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, where they are subjected to tear gassing and torture, and that, since 2000, more than 5,000 Palestinians have been killed, 500 of them children.

Now, she continued, Israel refers to Gaza as a hostile entity. ”When has a people living under military occupation been friendly to their occupier?” she asked rhetorically.

“We’re suffering from the Terrible Ds: deconstruction, deprivation, despondency and despair,” added Ashrawi.

Turning to the “rift” between Gaza and the West Bank, Dr. Ashrawi said Palestinians did not accept the corruption of the Palestinian Authority nor its sense of entitlement.


Mohanad Hamouda, 10, was brought to the U.S. by PCRF after an Israeli sniper in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp shot him in the knee (Staff photo S. Twair).

“Many members of Fatah as well as many Christians voted for Hamas,” she explained, “because they wanted to see an honest system come to power.”

While Fatah refused to relinquish power, however, Hamas didn’t know how to exercise power, Ashrawi said. Now, she emphasized, Israel has placed the Palestinians on probation to prove they can be good victims, and calls those who demand a withdrawal to the 1967 borders hard-liners.

“Israel wants to speak to Palestinians who will adopt Zionist precepts, relinquish the right of return and Jerusalem, as well as forsake a national identity for localized Bantustans,” she said. “The reality is that Israel is not going to find Palestinian Zionists to negotiate with.”

In fact, Ashrawi argued, it is the Palestinians who haven’t found an Israeli partner to negotiate with. The resulting political vacuum was filled by violence, which Dr. Ashrawi terms a man-made disaster. “We need women to find solutions,” she said to a round of applause.

As for the Annapolis conference, Dr. Ashrawi doubted that the U.S. had suddenly become altruistic in calling for such a meeting to negotiate a two-state solution. Has it been called because of the disaster of the Iraq war, she wondered.

“We need a genuine arbitration and applicable assurances,” Ashrawi stated. “We always asked for international envoys, and we end up with Tony Blair. What can he possibly do that he failed to do as prime minister of Great Britain?

“The Annapolis conference must deal with political engagement on a timeline, the cessation of human rights violations, articulated objectives and permanent status issues,” Ashrawi concluded. “We don’t want a state with ‘transitional’ borders and an end to occupation. We must go as a unified body, no delegates can be excluded. There will be no normalization without withdrawal.”

The PCRF brings wounded Palestinian, Lebanese and Iraqi children to the U.S. for medical treatment and sends specialized medical teams to the Middle East. At its Nov. 3 banquet, Mohanad Hamouda, 10, who was shot in the knee during sniper fire in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp, received a standing ovation. It took extensive pressure on the part of the U.S. State Department to gain passage for Mohanad through Gaza’s Erez crossing into Israel and on to the U.S., where he is receiving treatment at the Shriner’s Children’s Hospital.

Al-Nakba Network Opens

Americans are bombarded these days with print and TV ads inviting them to visit Israel during 2008, its 60th anniversary. But Palestinians aren’t celebrating this landmark year of al-Nakba (the catastrophe), in which they were violently thrust from their land so European Jews could move in.

Southern California organizations dedicated to finding an equitable peace in the Middle East have met and established the al-Nakba network to coordinate and post events scheduled to inform the public of Israel’s 60-year campaign of apartheid policies against the Palestinian people.

Al-Nakba activities are listed at <http://www.nakba60la.wordpress.com>.

Rep. Ellison Addresses 2,000 at CAIR Event


	CAIR-LA headliners (l-r) Hussam Ayloush, Rep. Keith Ellison, Fouad Khatib and Massoud Nassimi (Staff photo S. Twair).

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is the first African American elected to Congress in Minnesota and the first Muslim ever to serve in Congress. On Nov. 10, he spoke to his largest California audience when more than 2,000 Muslim Americans gathered to hear him at the Anaheim Hilton Hotel.

The occasion was the 11th annual benefit of the Greater Los Angeles Area Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). In keeping with the theme, “Let the Conversation Begin,” Ellison had a lot of advice for his audience on how to communicate with their legislators.

“Litigate, legislate, educate our case in a righteous manner,” he advised. “Make yourselves known. The next time the California legislature has an open house, form a huge Muslim delegation and go to Sacramento. Bring your youth, your seniors and women. Get your feet wet in the legislative process in your state capital before you lobby in Washington, DC.”

The freshman congressman called for an army of Muslim lobbyists in the nation’s capital.

“Make demands,” he urged, “other lobbies do—but first know what you want. An end to torture and rendition, Federal Housing Authority financing for Muslims? We have 7,000 Muslims serving in the U.S. military and we have the right to ask for what our community needs.”

Tremendous obstacles are blocking American Muslims, he noted. When slurs are made about African Americans the blowback can be fierce, yet it is acceptable to publicly defame Muslims, he stated.

“You can stop this by putting the truth out there,” he said, citing the examples of renditioned Canadian-Syrian Maher Arar and U.S. Army Chaplain Captain James Yee, who was imprisoned for 78 days for being “too friendly” to Muslim detainees in the American prison on Cuban soil.

“The U.S. must never be associated with torture,” he declared. “It is a stain on the U.S. When it is pursued, the enemy can say how evil we are. The new attorney general Michael Mukasey should never have equivocated on torture.

“The stain deepened on the U.S. in the case of Arar who it rendered to Syria for torture. Guantanamo must close.”

A dramatic highlight of the evening was a reading from Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the U.S. Passages included the words of Cesar Chavez, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama and Paul Robeson. Emotions were high when the audience was asked to give a big hand to the hotel workers serving the food.

CAIR’s national executive director Nihad Awad called upon the Los Angeles Police Department to cease its program of mapping communities with a high percentage of Muslims. “We can’t allow discrimination to become official,” he emphasized. “Enlist us, but don’t blacklist us.”

Last year, said Husasam Ayloush, who heads CAIR’s Greater Los Angeles operations, he took his two oldest children on a trip to visit Manzinar, a camp in the California desert where Japanese-American citizens were jailed during World War II.

“It was a life-changing experience to hear the words of the surviving internees,” Aylous stated. “We will not be silent and will not put up with religious profiling generated by a foreign lobby. We must shut down the present day internment camp at Guantanamo and unequivocally repudiate rendition and waterboarding.

“Our country works best when people don’t remain silent,” he concluded.

Nobuko Miyamoto of the committee to free Iraq war resister Lt. Ehren Watada took exception to Ayloush’s reference to Manzinar as an internment camp.

“Manzinar was a concentration camp in which a minority group was concentrated and forcibly kept apart from the rest of the society,” she explained. “The so-called Nazi concentration camps for Jews and Gypsies were death camps.”

Final Two L.A. 8 Defendants Cleared

A 20-year deportation case against Palestinians Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh ended Oct. 31 when the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissed all charges against the two (see Shehadeh’s article in this issue’s “Other Voices” supplement).

The case began in January 1987, when the government arrested the pair, along with Hamide’s Kenya-born wife and five other Palestinians, and accused them of having ties with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

The government agreed to drop all charges and not seek to deport either man. Stated their attorney Marc Van Der Hout: “Hamide and Shehadeh did nothing more than to advocate for the Palestinians a right to a homeland and support charitable causes in the occupied territories. The government’s attempt to deport them all these years marks another shameful period in its history of targeting certain groups of immigrants for their political beliefs and activities.”

“After 20 years, the nightmare finally is over,” Hamide said. Now 52 and graying, he no longer engages in political activity but lives quietly with his wife and children in upscale Chino Hills.

The government specifically agreed not to charge Hamide or Shehadeh as “removable, deportable, excludable or inadmissible or bring any other type of proceedings to expel” them or confiscate their lawful permanent resident status “based on any affiliations, associations, information or conduct in any way connected with any organizations that were identified or described in any testimony.”

In exchange, the two agreed not to apply for citizenship for three years. They also relinquished their right to sue any government officials or agencies—including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement—for any action taken in the course of the case.

Pat and Samir Twair are free-lance journalists based in Los Angeles.