Communicating Arts - Main Web SitePalestinian Authority police employed brute force to break up a second day of protesting in Ramallah on Sunday, with activists and eyewitnesses claiming police assaulted both male and female protesters with batons and chains, the Jerusalem Post reported. [1]
One of the journalists beaten was Saed Hawari, a Reuters cameraman. Although the Washington Post picked up on the story, it’s strange that I haven’t seen Reuters mention the attack on their own photographer. Unless I missed something, the radio silence is a tremendous disservice — both to readers, and to Reuters itself. [2]
From what I may glean between the two reports cited, protesters in Ramallah, incensed by the prospect of an eminent meeting between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz found themselves on the receiving end of Palestinian Authority riot police.
How is this for twisted?
The complaint launched by Honest Reporting's Pesach Benson, and which I encounted in one of my Facebook groups, first thing this late morning, was that Reuters would have been quick to report Israeli police brutality, but over this protest, hardly a word.
There may be some editorial desk bias working to suppress the reporting of this incident in which Abbas, his police, and Israeli interests seem -- finally, for once -- aligned!
Of course, after so many rancorous years blanketed with anti-Zionist screeds and soaked in anti-Israeli animus, a Palestinian Authority accommodation, overture, or turnaround on the "two-state solution" isn't going to be easy, as every inch of such a pivot defies generations of political programming.
While Honest Reporting has focused on the violence of the violent protest and perceived "biased" in relation to underreporting about what riot police do, the more central story, indeed a thorny one, may have to do with explaining how the Abbas Administration came to suppress exactly the sort of anti-Israel, anti-peace riot for which it has programmed its people for decades.
"Electronic Intifada wasn't spared either" writes Pesach Benson.
Of course not.
Who can see a sea change?
A hint as to how this may have happened:
Since Hamas gained control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, head of the USSC since November 2005, and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) have helped with the “gendarmerie-style” training of West Bank-based PA security personnel. As of June 2009, approximately 400 Presidential Guardsmen and 2,200 National Security Forces troops have been trained at the Jordan International Police Training Center (JIPTC) near Amman. All troops, new or already serving, are vetted for terrorist links, human rights violations, and/or criminal records by the State Department, Israel, Jordan, and the PA before they are admitted to U.S.-sponsored training courses at JIPTC. Approximately $395 million in U.S. funds have been reprogrammed or appropriated through the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) account for training, non-lethal equipment, facilities, and strategic planning assistance for the PA forces, and for PA criminal justice sector reform projects, including $100 million for FY2010 pursuant to the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2010 (P.L. 111-117). [3]
Those are some expensive Palestinian Authority "thugs".
Call them what you want: what they're doing beating up the recorders and scribblers at a protest fueled by the deeply programmed fear and hate of peace with Israel, that Jewish State, I don't know, but I'm aware of some large moving parts surrounding this story:
- An American President approaching election season;
- Authorization of more than 800 new Israeli housing units on Israel's soil;
- Ascent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt;
- Islamic Small Wars turmoil throughout the region.
My guess is Obama could do with a little peace, and there are now many and pervasive peace-trending elements in the comparatively confined Israel-Palestine conflict arena, and I mention them often in Facebook forums, citing transaction or trade in business, education, and health sectors. Here I will try something a little different -- in a section titled, "West Bank, 2007-2011", Wikipedia offers a ten-paragraph wrap of improved conditions for the region [4]. Here is the first:
In 2007, the economy in the West Bank improved gradually. Economic growth for the occupied areas reached about 4-5% and unemployment dropped about 3%. Israeli figures indicated that wages in the West Bank rose more than 20% in 2008 and trade rose about 35%. Tourism in Bethlehem increased to about twice its previous levels, and tourism increased by 50% in Jericho.[15] Life expectancy is 73.4, placing the territories 77th in the world, compared with a life expectancy of 72.5 in Jordan, and 71.8 in Turkey.[16]
If there's anyone in the economic development field following this story, it should read sensibly: the productive interests are not in revenues in sustained conflict to the extent they may have been five or more years ago.
Oh my how the times they are a'changin'.
Well may we see the head of the old Palestine Liberation Organization, the new Palestinian Authority as boss of a joint American, Jordanian, Israeli, Palestinian "gendarmerie-style" security force defending a growing economy against escalations in conflict and the sabotage of those it helped to educate, motivate, and train to destroy the better interests -- in growing affluence and real spiritual liberation --of its own future.
Cited Reference
1. Gottlieg, Benjamin. "Ramallah protesters attacked by Palestinian Authority police (photos)". Blog Post, The Washington Post, July 1, 2012: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/ramallah-protesters-attacked-by-pa-police-photos/2012/07/01/gJQAWExWGW_blog.html
2. Benson, Pesach. "Where's Reuters On Its Own Photographer's Brutal Beating?" BackSpin, Honest Reporting, July 2, 2012: http://honestreporting.com/wheres-reuters-on-its-own-photographers-brutal-beating/
3. Zanotti, Jim. "U.S. Security Assistance to the Palestinian Authority." Congressional Research Service, January 8, 2010: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/R40664.pdf
4. Wikipedia. "Economy of the Palestinian Territories." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Palestinian_territories
Other Reference
Lynfield, Ben. "With West focused on Iran, Netanyahu moves to expand Israeli settlements." The Christian Science Monitor, April 12, 2012: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2012/0412/With-West-focused-on-Iran-Netanyahu-moves-to-expand-Israeli-settlements
Addendum
Thrall, Nathan. "Our Man in Palestine." The New York Review of Books, September 16, 2010: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/14/our-man-palestine/?pagination=false -- This piece, about two years old, provides a terrific summary of the force dynamics and political currents and flows at work around General Dayton's peace and security creating project. This is its last paragraph:
In October, Dayton will retire and be replaced by a three-star Air Force general, Michael Moeller. During the next year, Moeller is scheduled to receive the USSC’s largest ever appropriation.61 His task, as the deadlines for both the Fayyad plan and the end of Israeli–Palestinian negotiations approach, will be to advance two irreconcilable goals: building a Palestinian force that can guarantee Israeli security while also lessening the perception that the US is firmly supporting what many residents of the West Bank, like the independent politician Mustafa Barghouti, have come to describe not as one occupation but two.
Remember, the piece was cobbled together in 2010, and we are about two years forward of it. I suppose I will have to look up the coverage of "Michael Moeller", but even so, yesterday's anti-peace protests, the response by the Palestinian Authority security forces, the economic development boasts on the West Bank, and the truth about how this very small patch of earth works, despite the political rancor and the positions and postures of those prominent in the news, seem to line up and in a most predictable way: cooperate with the Jews, with Israel, and its alliances and, lo and behold, many real things improve -- employment, health, justice, and peace -- because they can with that direction and cannot in the other.
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