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CIAO DATE: 03/03
Winter 2003 (Volume XXXII, Number 2, Issue 126)
Article
Privatizing the Occupation: The Political Economy of an Oslo Development Project by Peter Lagerquist
During Oslo, a Palestinian industrial estates scheme sponsored by international donors was marketed as a template for the occupied territories’ integration into global markets. This article traces the project’s significance as an encounter between donor agendas, development discourses, and the nexus of Israeli security prerogatives and Palestinian clientele politics that shaped Oslo’s political economy. It argues that in addition to dubious economics, the scheme provided rent-seeking opportunities to Israeli middlemen arbitrating between Israeli security apparatuses and Palestinian economic elites, both rehearsing a wider tendency of development projects to obscure issues of power and control, and ultimately itself reinvesting a local, colonial genealogy of development as control.
Perspectives
Facing Defeat: The Intifada Two Years On by Graham Usher
This overview of the intifada gives special attention to the intra-Palestinian dimension, notably the rise of the tanzim that preceded the uprising and, once the uprising began, the evolving inner dynamics of the Fatah movement and the Palestinian Authority (PA) under the impact of the crushing Israeli assault, international pressures, and so on. The author shows how, as the intifada enters its third year, the national movement is essentially split into three wings–the PA leadership, the young and still emergent Fatah leadership, and the armed resistance led by Hamas and Fatah offshoots–all following mutually incompatible strategies. In the author’s view, democratic elections, if allowed, could provide one way out of the impasse.
The Quest for Strategy by Azmi Bishara
After critiquing what have become the main axes of political debate in the occupied territories–suicide bombings, armed operations, and reform–the author emphasizes the imperative need for a comprehensive, inclusive resistance strategy. Elaborating upon five major ingredients that must be taken into account when developing a sound strategy–cost to the adversary, cost to Palestinian society, political discourse, a clear message to the adversary, and a clear message to the world–he argues that in the present phase a resistance strategy is not at odds with state building, and that the two should be pursued in tandem.
The Prospects of Peace in the Middle East by Walid Khalidi
This address delves into the underpinnings of the current crisis in the occupied territories: the Bush administration’s deemphasis on the Palestine problem to avoid confrontation with Israel over settlement policy; the designation of Sharon as a "man of peace" despite his history; rejection of any exploration of the political roots of 9/11; the deepening alliance between American Christian fundamentalism and Israel; the willful and gross distortion of the Palestinian stance at Camp David. Nonetheless, the author argues that the parameters of a settlement, reinforced by the Saudi initiative, remain the two-state solution, and it is up to Israel and the United States to respond.
Interview
The Occupation (and Life) through an Absurdist Lens an Interview with Elia Suleiman
Elia Suleiman, born in Nazareth in 1960, is the first Palestinian filmmaker to be selected for the "official competition" of the Cannes International Film Festival: his Divine Intervention: A Chronicle of Love and Pain was not only one of the twenty-one films out of 939 entries chosen for the fifty-fifth festival in May 2002, it also won the Jury Prize and the International Critics Prize. Suleiman had already come to the attention of the 2001 Cannes Festival, where his short Cyber Palestine was shown at the "Directors’ Fortnight."
Though without formal training, Suleiman has been winning prizes since his first film, a short entitled Introduction to the End of an Argument, won the award for best experimental documentary-USA in 1991. This was followed by his 1992 short Homage by Assassination, which won a Rockefeller Prize. By the time he made his first full-length movie, Chronicle of a Disappearance (which won the prize for the best first-feature at the 1996 Venice International Film Festival), his style was already well developed: a progression of sketches–witty, surreal, ironic, often devastating–and a virtual absence of narrative; in the case of Chronicle, a main character (a filmmaker called E.S., played by Suleiman himself) appears in a number of the episodes, most of which shed harsh light on life in Nazareth, but his presence seems more accidental than part of a storyline. Film critic Stanley Kaufman of the New Republic called Chronicle of a Disappearance "a film of the absurd. If Ionesco had been a Palestinian and a filmmaker, he might have made it."
While his recent film, Divine Intervention, is still very much an assemblage of vignettes, it does nonetheless have a semblance of narrative: a "central character" (again, a filmmaker named E.S., again played by Suleiman) shuttles between his hometown of Nazareth, where his father, beset by business woes, has a heart attack and lies dying; his apartment in East Jerusalem, where he is working on a screenplay; and a checkpoint between East Jerusalem and Ramallah, where he holds tender but wordless meetings in a parked car with his lover, a Ramallah woman hemmed in by borders and closures. In one of the checkpoint scenes that combines the visual beauty, whimsy, humor, and satire characteristic of the film, the hero inflates a large red balloon bearing the smiling visage of Yasir Arafat and releases it, creating havoc among the soldiers. aking advantage of the ensuing confusion, the hero and his lover manage to speed through the checkpoint, while the camera follows the balloon as it soars over the landscape toward Jerusalem, floating over the rooftops of the Old City and past the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to alight on the Dome of the Rock.
When Divine Intervention won the Jury Prize at Cannes, the New York Times (27 May 2002) called it "a Keatonesque exploration of the large and small absurdities of Palestinian life under occupation." And indeed, despite the humor, moments of tenderness, and laugh-out-loud sight gags, the film presents an all-too-realistic picture, pitiless and meticulous, of the devastating impact of occupation on Palestinian society both in Israel and in the occupied territories. Suleiman is witty and light, but dead serious; allergic to preaching, propaganda, and cliché, but highly political.
The underlying grimness of the film is relieved not only by the humor but by resort to fantasy: the hero, cruising along a highway, casually tosses an apricot pit out of his car window and a tank blows up; a stunningly beautiful woman (the hero’s lover) strides through a checkpoint, mesmerizing the soldiers with her fierce beauty, and a military watchtower collapses. The most elaborate such sequence is the spectacular "Ninja scene," a violently beautiful and stylized choreography wherein the same woman is imagined as a guerrilla fighter who dispatches (seemingly bloodlessly) a whole phalanx of Israeli sharpshooters who have been firing at her effigy in a shooting range.
The meaning of the images, whose connectedness one to the next is not always immediately apparent, can leave the spectator temporarily puzzled; the New York Times of 7 October 2002 called them "cinematic riddles and visual puns, delivered in elegant deadpan." The cumulative impact, however, is clear, and the images themselves linger long after the film ends. New York Times critic A. O. Scott, while noting the film's "appearance of randomness," adds that there is "an oblique, elegant sense of structure here" and that "the interlocking series of setups, punch lines and non sequiturs add up to something touching, provocative, and wonderfully strange."
Divine Intervention currently is being shown throughout Europe and will be opening in the Middle East and Israel in January 2003. Shown at the New York Film Festival in October 2002, it will open commercially in the United States in January. Suleiman, in Paris for the opening of his film, was interviewed by Linda Butler, associate editor of JPS, on 26 September 2002.
Special Document
Mahmud Abbas’s Call for a Halt to the Militarization of the Intifada
Around mid-November 2002, PLO Executive Committee secretary Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazin), who is often named as a possible successor to Yasir Arafat, delivered a controversial speech to a closed meeting of the heads of the popular committees of the Gaza Strip refugee camps in which he criticized the course taken by the al-Aqsa intifada and called for abandonment of the armed struggle. The transcript of Abbas’s speech was published by al-Hayat on 26 November, enlivening public debate as to what the Palestinian strategy should be (for another perspective see the Azmi Bishara piece in this issue). The excerpts below were translated and published by Mideast Mirror on 27 November.
Review Essay
Najati Sidqi (1905-79): The Enigmatic Jerusalem Bolshevik by Salim Tamari
This essay reviews the colorful life of Najati Sidki, a Palestinian communist who, during his various long sojourns in the Soviet Union, came to know the major communist figures of his day (including Joseph Stalin), and who also fought in the Spanish civil war. The essay is accompanied by long excerpts from Sidki’s memoirs, including segments on the early days of the communist movement in Palestine, the author’s student days in Moscow at the time of the great ideological debates between Trotskysts and Stalinists, and an amusing account of his years in prison under the Mandate.
From the Hebrew Press
Recent Books
Cohen: The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem reviewed by Adel Manna
Dumper: The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict reviewed by Issam Nassar
Kanaaneh: Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel reviewed by Farha Ghannam
Shehadeh: Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine reviewed by Carol Bardenstein
Kretzmer: The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories reviewed by Ardi Imseis
Barghouti: I Saw Ramallah reviewed by Fouad Moughrabi
Samara: Epidemic of Globalization: Ventures in World Order, Arab Nation and Zionism reviewed by Avram Bornstein
Feitelson and Haddad: Management of Shared Groundwater Resources: The Israeli-Palestinian Case with an International Perspective reviewed by Sharif S. Elmusa
Bishara: Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid? Prospects for Resolving the Conflict reviewed by Naseer Aruri
Shorter Notices
Arab Views
Quarterly Update on Conflict and Diplomacy
Settlement Monitor
Documents and Source Material
International
A1. United Nations, "Humanitarian Plan of Action 2003: Occupied Palestinian Territory," New York, November 2002 (excerpts)
A2. Various Organizations, Losses on the Two-Year Anniversary of the al-Aqsa Intifada (Comparative Statistical Table)
Arab
B1. Executive Authority, List of Members, Ramallah, 29 October 2002
B2. Birzeit Institute of Community and Public Health, "Schooling at Gunpoint: Palestinian Children’s Learning Environment in War-Like Conditions," Ramallah, 1 December 2002 (excerpts).
Israel
C. National Democratic Alliance (Israeli Arab), Manifesto, "Before Deteriorating into Apartheid," September 2002 (excerpts).
United States
D1. U.S. Congress, Provisions Relevant to Israel and Palestine of the U.S. Foreign Relations Authorization Act for 2003, Washington, 26 September 2002
D2. President George W. Bush, Written Statement concerning Provisions of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for 2003, Washington, 30 September 2002 (excerpts)
D3. Bush Administration, Draft "Road Map" to Ending the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Washington, 15 October 2002
Chronology
Bibliography of Periodical Literature
History (to 1948) and Geography
This section lists articles and reviews of books relevant to Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Entries are classified under the following headings: History (to 1948) and Geography; Palestinian Politics and Society; Jerusalem; Israeli Politics, Society, and Zionism; Arab and Middle Eastern Politics; International Relations; Law; Military; Economy, Society, and Education; Literature and Art; Book Reviews; and Reports Received.
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