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Pieces of Palestine: the Middle East's Festering Wound

On June 1, I was standing alongside a highway in northern Lebanon shooting pictures of the ruins of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp; a hundred kilometers to the south, a young man my age approached a narrow checkpoint on the perimeter of the Ain el-Helweh camp. He was wearing a suicide belt, armed with two kilograms of TNT and a kilo of metal. Before he was able to detonate the belt or navigate the checkpoint, he was shot and killed by members of the Lebanese army (LAF). Press reports named him Mahmud Yassin al-Ahmad, a 28-year-old Palestinian resident of the camp.

He was, in fact, not al-Ahmad. Nor was he Palestinian; he was a young Saudi dissident that had come to what is likely the next front of the global jihad. Why the Lebanese are playing down the level of Salafi intrusion in these camps is difficult to understand. Press reports following last summer's battle in Nahr al-Bared — which pitted the LAF against jihadis led by veterans of Iraq insurgency — suggested that 10 of the 27 bodies pulled from the rubble were identified as Saudi. During the battle, a Fatah leader suggested 42 of the combatants were Saudi. Off-the-record talks suggest the number was likely higher, possibly well over a hundred.

In Lebanon, Palestinians have not been allowed to integrate as fluidly as they have elsewhere in the region. Lebanon's unwillingness to allow Palestinians to work as anything other than laborers — even if they have the degrees and training to warrant such occupations — combined with inheritance laws that keep property from passing from one generation to the next, have all but guaranteed the population remains impoverished and confined to the camps. It is a situation Syria long ensured, and independent Lebanon has continued. A dozen camps spread across the country host over 300,000 Palestinians, 40 percent of that population under the age of 15. Simply put, Lebanon faces a choice: address the festering camps, or watch as an entire generation becomes radicalized and turns its anger outwards.

The other day I sat in on a small roundtable discussion with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a former contender for the Palestinian premiership and now a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. He was in Washington, D.C. to update Members of Congress on current developments between Israelis and Palestinians.

It was clear from Barghouti's comments, and interviews during his visit, that the Palestinian situation has worsened substantially over Bush's tenure, even since the Annapolis summit last November. According to Barghouti, before the summit there were 521 Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank; now there are 607. Palestinians pay at least twice the rate Israeli settlers do for electricity, and an Israeli settler has almost 50 times the water allowance of a Palestinian. Barghouti suggested that Obama's Berlin speech — about not allowing walls to divide us — was given a few hours too late; after he had left Palestine, after he had left the land where a wall twice the height and three times the length of the Berlin Wall keeps a near-apartheid system in place. It's difficult to disagree.

We have to face a difficult truth: that the Palestinian situation, left unattended for nearly a decade now, is near a breaking point. And the Israeli leadership, it seems, has come to quietly hold that Palestine as a sovereign state — which could not be invaded at will — poses a far more potent threat than the current paradigm.

But, Al Qaeda has raised the possibility that Israel will be its next target; it has already made overtures toward the military wing of Hamas, attempting to peal its ranks from civilian leadership that has opted to participate in elections, a process jihadis avow as counter to the tenants of Islam. So far, efforts appear to have failed.

More than the threat of Al Qaeda, Palestine — as evident in slow simmering wars between Salafis and traditional secular militiamen in Lebanese camps, and the split between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza — lacks a clear voice. "There is no PLO; there is no Fatah; there is only Hamas," one ranking member of Hamas told me earlier this summer.

The next president needs to make this issue amongst his top priorities. Engaging Hamas is critical. All factions must be brought together with the help of the international community; it's only with a semblance of Palestinian unity that the process might once again move forward. As we look back at last week's bombings in Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan and India, we might remember that the plight of the Palestinian people remains the premier recreating tool for Al Qaeda and its offshoots — a fact we can't expect to change unless the U.S. takes an attentive, balanced approach to the conflict.

Brian Till can be contacted at brian.m.till@gmail.com. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Comments

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Sir; You know; I don't think those people love our guts like they are supposed to. Has anyone speaking for the people of the United States bothered to ask why not? I think they are like us. They get around on two legs, and they manage to support themselves when they are not mad enough to kill. All we hear is: that is the enemy. Well, I can figure that out, but there are too many to kill. And it should be illegal to kill people when there is no sport in it, and we have all the sport in us of a fly swatter. So, if we are killing them, and they are killing us, and everyone in between is killing, maybe we should ask what is the good coming from this killing. Right now, at this instant, you are collecting pay reporting the death of a human being. Good for you; but if it were truly good, wouldn't it be worth doing for free? How many people for absolutly nothing are reporting deaths all around the planet, and even in some senses, of the planet. You could be like them, but my sense is that such reporting of deaths for nothing is a part of the problem. When we read of a death, and its meaning is nothing, made to seem as nothing, and having no importance, that blood is swabbed from memory and from history at the same moment. Maybe, if some one were charged every time a death was reported, so that some one had to pay, all the nonsense of killing people would stop. Maybe the next time you report a death you should charge double. Whether good is intended or not, the reporting of death for nothing seems to be making things worse. When some one undertands that it is their turn, and that their death cannot possibly be avoided, then they want their meaningless death, their death that stands for nothing, and no meaning, because their life stands for no meaning, except for the pittance of a reporter then they are forced to take our lives, in order to be counted with our dead. We don't count them until they cost us life, until they cost us money and time which are together judged equivalent to life. Some one has to ask these folks why they don't like us aside from the multitude of ways we abuse their lives and religion. It just seems so unreasonable. What do you think ... Sweeney

Comment: #1
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Thu Jul 31, 2008 8:24 AM