The first thing I knew I had to do upon returning to Ramallah was pay a visit to the four lions of Manara Square. Recently I had been told by reliable sources that years ago, when the Palestinians drew up the architectural sketches of the city’s feline centerpiece, someone in the room doodled a little wristwatch above one of the beast's paws. Afterward the plans were sent off to China, that land of cheap but hasty labor, for cheap but hasty assembly. The story goes that when the completed statues returned from the Orient, the first thing everyone noticed was one of the lion guardians sporting a sleek, stone Rolex.

I can now confirm for everyone that Manara Square is not nicknamed “Wristwatch Square” in Arabic for any other known reason. I don’t know how I missed it last time I visited.



After this brief mission in the capital I shot off to Bil’in, a place now infamous for its weekly protests against the Israeli wall. It is a relatively small village in the Ramallah governorate, but it holds much significance to people as an exemplary site of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

In 1991 two hundred acres of Bil’in agricultural lands were annexed and became the property of the Kiryat Sefer settlement. Other settlements, many erected without permit and through bogus documents, then gobbled up more of this land up until 2004, when the Israeli army began building up a “security fence” for the sake of the settlers. In 2007, after years of weekly protests at this wall, organized by Bil’in’s Committee of Popular Resistance, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled the wall unnecessary and ordered it to be rerouted so the Palestinians here might once again access their land. My friend Iyad Burnat is the head of said Popular Committee, and I scheduled a meeting with him for my weekend stay in Bil’in to cover the Friday demonstration.

I rolled into town slightly anxious about how long it would take to stumble upon Iyad’s house, to which I’d been given no direction. As I stepped out of the cab I approached the first people in sight, two men sitting outside of the shop right before me. Underneath a green tarp they chatted in the shade, looking ready for me to interrupt.

“Marhaban. Ayna Iyad Burnat?”

“Ahhh, Iyad Burnat. Welcome! You sit down. I get him.”

If only every arbitrary taxi drop could lead me so fluidly to my rendezvous! Iyad lives directly above the convenience store, and until he sauntered downstairs I made some chat with the two gentlemen, Raed and Jassam. The latter spoke more English and seemed happy to flex it.

As our conversation advanced, Jassam kept shifting his opinion of the “big problem.” First he identified it as the load of flies swarming around us in the shade. “Thubaab. Flies.” “Got it—yes, they’re horrible.” Soon after he asked me what I thought of the situation facing Bil’in. I answered briefly and returned the question: then the big problem revealed itself to be the occupation: “It is no way to live. This is a small village, most are farmers, and the occupation has taken the farmland. And we are arrested, in night raids.” Finally I asked him about when he thinks the wall might come down for good, reuniting the village with said land:

“Hah. And who takes the wall down? The Israelis? The American government? Without America, the occupation would be (wipes hands) finished. America, in my opinion, is the big problem.”



Iyad then appeared and I bid the other gentlemen goodbye. I walked to my lodgings not entirely pleased knowing that around here, my home country’s name takes the cake against both martial law and pestilence.

The next day, approaching the same shop, I saw at least a hundred people loitering and a series of buses. Friday prayers were ending soon, and the weekly march to the wall was about to begin. Bustling here were the soon-to-be demonstrators. There was a considerable international presence among them, which doesn’t surprise once one remembers how symbolic this protest has been grown over the past few years. I heard Italian, French, and some British squawking. And of course clustered together were quite a few Israeli activists that probably do this thing all the time. Most of the faces were young, especially among the locals, but the number of graying peacenik professors did not disappoint.

Sipping my coke amid the thubaab I saw some stranger elements shuffling around; there was a man in a spotless white lab coat and wraparound shades. Standing (too) near me was a man in a Charlie Brown shirt with a deep wheeze. In a way I feel as though I’ve let down both you and myself by not following up on their stories.

I spoke with Iyad briefly: he was in an organizational mode and would not actually be accompanying the crowd this week. Last time ‘round he caught a teargas canister in the leg and was advised by the doctor to sit this one out.

The imam wrapped it up over the loudspeaker and a second bullhorn was produced to lead the march. With what must have been around sixty or seventy people—though the ranks would thin out as we came closer to the actual soldiers and barbed wire—I joined the excursion from the center of Bil’in up to the wall that stands in front of one of the settlements. As the megaphone began to crackle and the locals sprung into marching mode, the great blob of internationals began to follow the flags and batons out of town and onto the rocky plain toward the wall.

It is a long way there on foot, or at least longer than I figured. Ahead of everyone was a younger guy confined to an electric wheelchair, with a gas mask strapped around the seat. Every now and then a couple of cars weaved through the cavalcade, most of them filled with local kids blasting music. Much of the chanting the bullhorn barked out was in English, to my ear tailored for young Western and Israeli idealists: “One, two, three, four—Occupation no more! Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is fascist state!” The group stopped for a moment at the memorial of Bassem Abu Rahme, a resident of Bil’in who was killed by a gas canister to the chest one month ago. From this point on the parade became more of a procession, though it continued to irritate me how obsessed some of the internationals were with taking photos. There was, at this point, really nothing to see. At times it felt as though the front half of the group was just collectively snapping their friends behind them while the latter half did the same for those ahead. It was also around this time I began to realize how oppressive the heat was and how bright the others were for bringing along their jugs of water.

Finally we came upon the menacing sight of the wall. Tall, grey and vast, it was actually more imposing than I had expected. In fact, it was so imposing that the eight soldiers poking their heads out from behind it looked comically insignificant, almost like a Three Stooges group-gawk. Even more goofy looking were the handful of settlers visible from beyond the wall, atop a hill, struggling to wave a string of Israeli flags to do emblematic battle with our rags of red, white and green.



As I said, right about now is where our numbers began to thin, as the man up front with the megaphone urged us along the length of the wall, barbed wire to our left, thorny shrubbery and stones beneath our feet. The leader of the demonstration shouted at the guards, stating the nonviolent nature of the protest and asking them to open the main gate so the Palestinians could reclaim their land. The first cluster of soldiers weren’t stirring much at this besides the one who was filming our tiny, passing figures on his iPhone. Looking behind me I felt as though the international demonstrators saw the soldiers as some kind of exhibit, as if soon they would all reconfigure and strike a different ‘occupier-on-duty’ posture for everyone to see.

Soon we had waddled through the shrubs to the main gate, guarded from on high by about six more soldiers. Our man with the bullhorn, flanked by what were obviously the most involved of the local kids, shouted more admonishments at this lot. These soldiers were more engaging than their colleagues down the line, though I couldn’t decipher the Hebrew they were shouting back at megaphone man. While this argument went back and forth I began chatting with a French fellow traveler and a handsome cameraman for Palestine Today TV. In the middle of our conversation I heard two mysterious shots ring out. My best guess as to their source would be an angry settler’s rifle from behind the wall.

Without further ado the heads of our (now considerably smaller) group turned their attention westward, toward a new branch of Mattityahu Mizrah (I believe; someone correct me on this). It lay a mile or so away, separated from us by a gravelly crag, barbed wire, another section of the wall, and a newly paved road upon which a few IDF trucks would soon roll out.

I was more or less ready for the handful of young locals that shot ahead of the internationals and the bullhorn, doing some negligible, token damage to the barbed wire sprawled across the crag. I was also ready for them to start throwing stones, and for others to join. I was ready for someone to overstep the mark—on this occasion a kid began to upheave a modest boulder to roll down the hill and was quickly reprimanded by his comrades. And, needless to say, I was ready for teargas from the aforementioned trucks below. But I did not expect the first canister to fly up and thrash about the air as a result of one stone hitting the roof of one of those Jeeps.

I didn’t see the stone bounce off of the crown of the car but I did hear the unanimous cheer let out by the demonstrators when they observed the direct hit.

I did however see the tiny Jeep pull over on the grey ribbon of pavement, miniature men in miniature helmets streaming from the sides. Within seconds they had aimed and fired, and the first canister shot up and its gas began to mingle with the wind. It took a little while longer, and a few more canisters, until my eyes, scalp and tongue were trimmed and burning and I backed away from the cliff. Without a gas mask one really must make haste to flee the scene, especially since the wind disperses the stuff faster than one can waddle away. At this point the group really was down to the lone few locals and those with gas masks. The soldiers fired off enough gas to send most of the internationals on a trek back to town. I returned to the cliff with my hat over my mouth for a brief stint, long enough to see the flames rise up off of the ground from the burning canisters. The makeshift bonfires made the whole scene remarkably grim, black earth underneath you and grey smoke above.


I caught a ride back to the village with the crew of Palestine Today TV. (Another fabulous stroke of luck; as I made my way down the dirt road, breathing heavy breaths under the sun, a silver auto pulled up next to me. The handsome cameraman from before rolled down the window and said, simply, “Get in.”) The car’s A.C. gusting on my face, I scribbled down some thoughts about the protest.

It is easy to view this whole process—enacted every Friday, let’s remember—as just another bizarre dance that plays out in the historically canonized “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.” The protesters know they’ll be gassed and the gate will not open; the soldiers know they’ll be chided and the state will receive more bad press. And if one wishes to stress institutional, procedural struggle as the real force for change, it was a ruling by the High Court that dismantled the earlier stretch of the wall, not a dramatic rush by Bil’in minutemen. That would be have been a bloodbath.

True, such a rush is not how one achieves a solid victory against this occupation. But even if I find this dance a bit hackneyed; even if I find the internationals a bit poseur; even if court orders and diplomacy are the brute forces of change, I cannot dismiss or ignore the work that Iyad and the Popular Committee do each day. They have recovered half of the land originally appropriated by an overwhelmingly powerful occupier; they convinced UNICEF to severe all relations with Israeli-American billionnaire Lev Leviev, whose money props up the settlements surrounding Bil’in. These people have waited for years for the Israeli justice system to live up to its purpose, with many a demonstration in between. It would be impossible to say any single one of the protests served as the last straw for the intransigent ministries of Justice and Defense. But something tells me that every Thursday night, enough of those judges and generals had Iyad and the Committee on their minds, wondering what the villagers might cook up the following morning to embarrass the army once again.

I seem to be rotating back to my interest in the Libyan mission, and the debate simmering between the White House and some lawmakers intersects nicely with a paper I'm working on at the moment. So perhaps a few thoughts on the current embroilment over the operation's legality are in order.

But not tonight. For now I'd just like to briefly correct a few friends of mine who somehow figure the US is once again out to snatch us some cheap oil by starting a war. Shikha Dalmia at Reason begrudgingly articulates why this is nonsense:

That we are after Libya’s oil is particularly untenable for the simple reason that Libya is only a bit player in the world oil market. It is not even among our top 15 crude oil suppliers. The U.S. consumes about 20 million barrels a day and Libya produces 1.7 million barrels for the whole globe. America lost 1 million barrels a day during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the U.S. economy barely hiccuped.

The bleating over oil greed is a tired anti-war trope that we have to hear every time the US spends—or in the opinion of people like Dalmia, wastes—money and time on striking at a rogue state in the Muslim world. Gaddafi is an even less plausible candidate for a Western oil-lunge than Saddam or the Taliban mullahs since he was perfectly compliable prior to our noisemaking over his corpse-making.

Allow me to finish some papers and we can revisit this.

In another fevered tirade on May 28 Louis Farrakhan splished and splashed his foam around a podium at the American Clergy Leadership Conference.

He calls Barack Obama an "assassin," for his decision to involve the US in NATO's campaign against the wrinkled and bloodthirsty Colonel.

And here's my brother, calling for the assassination of brother Moammar Qaddafi—what has he done? I can defend that man! You don't know that man!

Amid the list of things that the Brother Leader has done: In the mid-eighties Qaddafi gave the Nation of Islam, then under the full guardianship of Minister Farrakhan, $5 million to support the neo-fascist outfit based in Chicago. He was kind enough to receive the minister and his guest, Jeremiah Wright, at his al-Baida palace in 1984. In 1996 the colonel honored Farrakhan with the once laughably and now just disgustingly titled "Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights."

Farrakhan impels us to see that Gaddafi has been framed up: "Check the record," he says. Go to it, dear reader. A few months ago Sean Hannity worked out a genius theory that Obama would never attack the colonel because his old pastor Wright was such a dear friend of the man. Farrakhan only wishes that the President had such loyalties. "We voted for our brother," Farrakhan says. But I spy just another rhetorical flair; as early as last year, Farrakhan called Obama "the first Jewish president." I sense niether brotherhood nor unity here.

He spoke in Christian terms throughout, as it was a room full of clergymen. Luckily Farrakhan's brand is quite easy to filter through in any theological vernacular.

All in all, it was another great day for inter-faith dialogue.

Not an Onion article:

Robert Fitzpatrick, a retired transportation agency worker in New York, said he had spent more than $140,000 (£85,000) of his savings on advertisements in the run-up to 21 May to publicise the [Judgment Day] prediction.

After 1800 passed and nothing had happened, he said: "I do not understand why... I do not understand why nothing has happened."

"I can't tell you what I feel right now. Obviously, I haven't understood it correctly because we're still here."

Uriel Sinai / Getty Images

I have always been a great admirer of freelance journalist Michael J. Totten, even after he signed onto the usually laughable Pajamas Media network. A writer has to live, and since Totten continues to produce great work (now bound and available) I don't consider his slipping into Pajamas a mark of his selling out or jumping any sharks. No, I've read him long enough to know that at his weakest, he has always written passages like this:

Israel wants nothing more than peace and normal relations with its neighbors, including its Syrian neighbors, but that feeling has never been reciprocated by the majority of Syrians and is certainly not reciprocated by the Syrian government. [My italics]

And even head-scratchers like this:

The Israelis therefore have every reason to believe that a large crown of people dismantling the border fence and crossing into their territory is a threat. And as it turned out, they were at least a little bit right. Many threw rocks, and 10 Israeli soldiers were injured.

One can discern a decent writer's strain easily when he or she resorts to flabby, feeble language in an attempt to neatly sign and seal an otherwise bogus argument. The Israelis were "a little bit right" that a large crowd of people had the capacity to throw rocks. So after ten soldiers were injured (I'm expecting mildly, until it's proven otherwise) the army eschewed tear gas, opened fire, and ten protestors caught their last breath of fresh air.

To this day I've yet to wrap my head around the notion, prevalent among intelligent but uncritical supporters of Israel, that the world's second most developed, equipped and uninhibited army has anything to fear from a crowd of gangly stone-throwers. (Don't try and peg me as an Erdogan groupie: I'm well aware of the lethal hypocrisy the fumes of populism obscure.) Totten goes on to place the calamity at the border within the context of the Syrian uprising:

No doubt the Syrian government is thrilled that the Israelis opened fire. Bashar al-Assad desperately wants his furious citizens to think of the “Zionist Entity,” rather than his Arab Socialist Baath Party, as their number one enemy.

Point taken. And thrown back, if I may. Yes, Assad is the worst enemy of Syrians, but why did the Israelis have to open fire and neutralize ten people at the border rather than break up the ruckus with tear gas, like any standard pacification of an enflamed but unarmed crowd? Might the IDF pursue a strategy that doesn't have the effect of "thrilling" Arab dictatorships? Are Syrians wrong to see Israel as their enemy as well?

Regardless, Totten is right that the protests on the borders with Syria and Lebanon were, at least in part, organized political theater. As usual, I end up agreeing with his overarching point with a sour taste in my mouth after swallowing some seriously junk premises.

E. Smith

While the hands are pointing up, midnight
You're a question mark coming after people you watched collide
You can ask what you want to,
The satellite

'Cause the names you drop put ice in my veins
And for all you know, you're the only one who finds it strange
When they call it a lover's moon
The satellite

'Cause it acts just like lovers do
The satellite
A burned-out world you know
Staying up all night
The satellite

This is what's happening in Syria.

* * *Appeared in last week's Cherwell: * * *

As we tear down Highway 1 to Ben-Gurion International, the plastic cup that Jalal hands me is both flimsy and scorching. Somehow, his brother is brewing coffee in the backseat for everyone in the car. I struggle not to spill as the cup wilts in my hand. Barbed wire flies by my window as we drive alongside Israel’s “security fence,” or “apartheid wall,” depending on your politics. Taking advantage of the scenery, I ignite a brief fraternal argument over the appropriate name for the barrier. A few hours ago I didn’t know either of these men, but after spending the past six weeks at a news agency in the West Bank I’ve learned that in this place one can make fast friends so long as coffee or tea is provided.

One of the first people I shared a cup with was a protester in Bethlehem: I arrived in Palestine just as it joined the “Arab Spring”—the wave of youth-driven, democratic uprisings that began in Tunisia and is now blistering Syria. It is now referred to as the March 15 movement, to commemorate the first day of demonstrations. Rather than calling for the abdication of a dictator as in Egypt or Libya, the youth of Palestine demanded reconciliation between the secular Fatah party, which controls the West Bank and the recognized government, and the rogue Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip.

The young protester who treated me to a mug of Turkish syrup voiced his desperation in between sips: “This split between Hamas and Fatah has held back our struggle for a Palestinian state more than any Israeli policy could hope to do.” Having arrived at the movement’s beginning, I suppose it was only fitting that I left as its demands were finally reached. A few hours after I touched down at Heathrow, the two parties signed a unity deal in Cairo. Netanyahu is fuming, and my friends in Manara Square are celebrating.

Shopping for ceramics with a friend in Hebron, we ended up having tea with the shop’s owner, a man named Munir. Hebron is a city in the southern West Bank that provides the worst example of what Jewish settlements have done to the dynamic between Arabs and Israelis. The city has been partitioned into H1, governed by the Palestinian Authority, and H2, a section of town colonized by a small group of armed settlers and fully occupied by Israeli forces.




Shuffling around the streets of H2 I'm sure that my friend and I underwent the same bewilderment as any visitors to Hebron. It is known as the "sterile zone,” a euphemism that fails, since it fully conveys the numbness of one’s surroundings. The barricaded shops, the abandoned schools, and the glares of the settlers—some all too happy to finger the triggers on their chunky firearms—briefly placed us somewhere other than planet Earth. Eight hundred illegal residents have turned this section of town—population 30,000—into an urban husk.

In the middle of our tea break, a fight broke out in front of Munir’s shop, between some young settlers and a Palestinian boy; within seconds an IDF jeep rattled into view and the tussle was over. “That one, with the pink hat,” croaked Munir as he pointed, “he is around here often. He causes trouble.” As he spoke I watched the boy he identified, who was spitting at not only his Palestinian nemesis but the Israeli soldiers who had broken up their fight. Munir lowered his hand and went back to stirring his tea in silence.

Halfway through my stay actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis was murdered outside of his home in Jenin in the central West Bank and home to the most destitute refugee camp in Palestine. I had hoped to have a coffee with Juliano before I left. Having seen his film Arna’s Children a few days after arriving in Palestine, I made a plan to visit Jenin where he ran a theatre and drama school for Palestinian kids. Instead I ended up writing up a report of his assassination. On the evening of April 4 a masked gunman stepped in front of Juliano’s car, a few feet away from his home, and opened fire. While the wave of reports on his murder subsequently referred to him as “Arab-Isreali”—his mother was Jewish and his father Palestinian—Juliano once stressed that he was “one hundred percent Israeli, one hundred percent Arab.” Far be it from me to ignore his specification.

Juliano was much loved by younger people in the camp, where he erected a professional-grade theatre with all the trimmings for youths that knew only the poverty, violence and boredom of the refugee camp. But at the same time, among the godly and the literal-minded he was deeply hated for his productions at the Freedom Theatre, many of which empowered Palestinians children to reject religious and societal subjugation as well as Israeli occupation. In a recent interview, he candidly and humorously predicted his own assassination. He announced that he would die from a bullet fired by someone “very angry that we are here in Jenin,” then with a theatrical scowl and a forbidding voice, “to corrupt the youth of the Islam!” Though the investigation of his murder is not yet closed, that is most likely exactly what happened.

Not content with the demise only one innocent activist, a little more than a week later a Salafist group in Gaza kidnapped and hanged Italian peace activist Vittorio Arrigoni in an abandoned house in Gaza City. The group in question was considerably to the right of Hamas and among other things demanded that the government release its co-religionists from prison. By the time the police in Gaza reached Vittorio’s body, however, it had been lifeless for hours, long before the Salafists’ deadline.

A few days after Arrigoni’s death I attended a vigil at Bethlehem's unity tent. There were calls for perseverance and there were calls for blood. There were tears for both Vittorio and for Juliano, from those that knew them and those who did not. A colleague of mine delivered a eulogy in short bursts, as another speaker translated her words across the circle of mourners. I scribbled them on the back of a magazine for a story on the event due later that night.

Soon a doctor in the crowd, a native of Palestine who spoke to us all in English, ended his own tribute to Vittorio with a crackling voice as he began to talk about the recent murder of his friend Juliano. He suddenly spoke very slowly, and the candle in his hands started to quiver: “We will continue to do our best, to end all the violence here...to win ourselves a normal life,” until his features withered and he began to sob, “so we can finally stop things like this, from happening anymore.” With the doctor in tears, most everyone around me began to weep. He had touched a nerve connected not only of Vittorio’s death, or Juliano’s, but the entire tragedy of Palestine in all of its confusion and violence.

At that moment I nudged my friend and fellow intern Carlos, who raised his eyebrows and shook his head, before nodding in the direction of a coffee stand nearby. I nodded in turn and we started toward the cart. We had a lot to discuss.

Imagine for a moment that you are the prime minister of what could very well be—in a few short months—a bona fides state recognized by the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank. All the world's eyes are set upon your efforts to build strong institutions, invest wisely, and pursue a constructive policy with your neighbors, who have after all been a co-belligerent in a long, bloody war spanning over sixty years.

One crisp spring day, a villain of global notoriety is shot dead; a character who has not only murdered innocents of every creed, color and nation, but also annexed the cause of your people's statehood as a justification for the mass murder carried out by his apocalyptic cult. Regardless of whether or not the platform of your political party shared certain tenets of said villain’s ideology, might it appear politically expedient—whether or not humanity is your chief interest—to solemnly acknowledge the harm caused by such a figure? Would not this be the proper response?

It would be. But that is not how Ismail Haniyeh chose to respond to the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Instead, he chose to say something like this:

If this news is true, it comes as part of the US policy of killing, destruction and the shedding of Arab and Islamic blood.

Sorry, what was that, head of government soon-to-be-voted-legitimate-or-else-once again-damned-to-diplomatic-wilderness?

[Bin Laden] is a Muslim Mojahed.

Way to go, you absolute fucking shithead.