SHUHADA STREET CHAOS

  

Shuhada Street as it was in the past.

It is a total coincidence that I just did a post that had me hunting for images of the tomb of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein. Then I read here it is today the 16^th anniversary of his vicious cowardly assault upon praying Muslims at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Shahuda Street has been highly contested since then and forbidden to Palestinians who regularly seek to return but are, of course, denied. However, I am sure that today, it will be full of those who admire Goldstein and call him "hero". Cowards all to celebrate such an atrocity and such a warped individual.

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Shuhada Street today.

Editor Palestine Monitor,

25 February 2011
Witness Gaza.com

Closed exactly 16 years ago when American-born Israeli Baruch Goldstein killed 29 worshipers and wounded 125 with an IMI Galil assault rifle in the burial place of Abraham, this effective clotting of the heart of The Old City of Hebron has devastated the local market economy in tandem with rapacious settler colonization.

“The people want an end to the occupation,” bellowed the protesters. “The people want Shuhada Street.”

After the Friday prayer, the mixed crowd of foreigners, Israeli activists and Palestinians marched down into the border line of H1 and H2, respectively Palestinian Authority and Israeli military zones of control. At H1, riot-geared green military and blue police forces covered the ground and dotted buildings.
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An initial cordon of six blue policemen could not hold the tide, and the protesters broke through. All began to run and made their way east towards Bab Al Baladia, or the entrance to the Old City. Israeli forces reformed in front of the Shavei Hebron yeshiva. When the protesters arrived, police detonated sound bombs and launched teargas canisters at close range and level to the ground ~ both actions are illegal under Israeli law.

In the ensuing chaos, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi was dragged by his bodyguard after a confrontation with Israeli soldiers to the relative safety of the Old City’s souq. 
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 Dr. Barghouthi speaking to the soldiers

There, about forty Palestinians regrouped, wrecked by the gas. Palestinian Medical Relief Society health workers treated two suffering men as angry soldiers approached.

“They don’t want to arrest me,” Dr. Barghouthi said. “I told them I won’t move. They don’t want a scandal.”

After an Israeli officer tried in vain to escort Dr. Barghouthi away, the small group left the shadow of Al-Khalil’s trashnets and rejoined the protest’s other half. Soon, they chanted solidarity between Silwan and Hebron and “life to the revolution.”
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Even with wire mesh as protection, the kids manage to throw small enough rocks to shatter the glass.

The soldiers and police began advancing on the crowd and arrested two International Solidarity Movement activists and at least one Palestinian. They grabbed protest leaders and pulled them to the sides as once again chaos reigned in Al-Khalil.

“Why are you doing this?” Dr. Barghouthi said while being shoved. “We are non-violent.”

The crowd dispersed into the alleys and side streets of Al-Khalil as ISM and Israeli activists were apprehended. Young men and boys began throwing stones, and police and soldiers returned fire with teargas grenades. As the youth fell back into the narrow streets between stone Palestinian homes, fuming teargas canisters followed in pursuit.

After the shabab stopped throwing stones and soldiers retreated towards the settler enclaves in H2, the remnants of the protest massed on the west side of the Old City. Tired and worn from the day, they had little time to rest.

Two squads of Palestinian Authority riot-police marched towards the mélange of international, Israeli and Palestinian activists, their batons swinging slightly to the left of their large plastic shields. Everyone left ~ according to Human Rights Watch, 95 percent of PA prisoners are tortured.

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Young settlers, future IDF, "the kindest military in the world", walking down Shuhada Street banging on doors of Palestinians, saying rude things, spitting and tossing stones at both Palestinians and visitors.The one in blue has a particularly maniacal smirk.

Photographers were told their work is mamnu3a ~ forbidden ~ by gruff plainclothes PA operators.

The popular demand for the reopening of Shuhada Street began with Israeli overreaction and ended with PA police.

ABBAS AND FAYYAD MUST RESIGN TOO

Mahmoud Abbas has been criticised at home

after Al Jazeera released the Palestine papers

Seen as corrupt and impotent, 
Abbas and Fayyad should hand over power before public anger erupts.

By Fadi Elsalameen

February 20, 2011

Al Jazeera

After two decades of failed political moves, the Palestinian Authority represented by its top leadership are hoping to avoid the inevitable: paying a heavy price for corruption of all kinds, alienating the Palestinian people, and failing to negotiate an end to Israel’s occupation.
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Threatened and undermined by the Al Jazeera-Guardian Palestine Papers leak, and dismayed by wrongly siding with Egypt’s ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak, the Palestinian Authority is employing desperate political maneuvers.
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Palestinian President Abbas has asked his Chief Negotiator and cabinet in the West Bank to submit their resignation. He has also called for Parliamentarian and Presidential elections in September and deliberately avoided giving a specific date.
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Will Abbas and Fayyad succeed in soaking the Palestinian anger by these desperate maneuvers? No.  Nothing short of Abbas and Fayyad handing in their own resignations and accepting responsibility for their failures will satisfy the Palestinian streets.
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Need for new leadership.
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With fewer allies in the region and no options left for a political horizon with Israel, Abbas and Fayyad must resign to pave the way for a newly elected, and more representative Palestinian leadership.
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Abbas and Fayyad have no political capital left to spend, they are out of touch with the Palestinian street, and they have successfully managed to alienate even supporters within Fatah.
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Their failures politically have discredited them and the Palestinian Authority both at home and abroad.
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At home, they are seen as corrupt, ineffective, and above all as Israel’s agents. The people do not trust them, and the fact that superb security coordination with Israel is all what they have to offer Palestinians after years of failed negotiations has even alienated the younger guard in Fatah, Abbas' only political base.
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Fatah's young guard is also disappointed in Abbas for failing to rebuild their movement and giving Fayyad the chance to further undermine their effectiveness in the West Bank. 
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Accepting responsibility
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Abbas has yet to promote Fatah's young in taking active leadership roles in the movement. 
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To many in Fatah, Abbas is nicknamed the Gorbachev of the movement that has actively played a part in dismantling it and making it weaker. For a long time, he refused to replace Fayyad with a prime minister from Fatah and allowed Fayyad to claim credit for Fatah’s political concessions to Israel.
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Abroad, especially in the Arab and Muslim worlds, Abbas and Fayyad placed themselves on the wrong side of history. Fayyad, Abbas and aides like PLO secretary general Tayyeb Abdelrahim expressed strong public support for Egypt’s ousted dictator president Hosni Mubarak.
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The Palestinian leadership not only echoed Israel’s line which was sorry to see Mubarak leave, but also showed the Arab and Muslim worlds, where people were glued to its television sets watching Al Jazeera in support of the revolution ~ that this is a leadership that has nothing in common with them.
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Why would anyone support such leadership for the Palestinians? 
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If anything, Abbas and Fayyad's actions confirm that this is a leadership that is only capable of one bad decision after the other. They must all resign and accept responsibility for their failures.
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Abbas and Fayyad are of a past era. They are no longer representative of the future we young Palestinians seek for ourselves.  Rather, we see them through the lens of withering and illegitimate Arab regimes that if not replaced democratically will be toppled through a popular revolution that I can assure them has already begun. 
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Fadi Elsalameen is a fellow with the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program. He is also director general of the Palestine Note and Diwan Palestine, Internet newspapers in English and Arabic.

PA PRIME MINISTER OFFERS UNITY DEAL TO HAMAS

By ASSOCIATED PRESS 
02/20/2011 15:47

After US veto of UNSC settlement condemnation, Fayyad says: "we are not willing to compromise for a fistful of dollars;" PA to rule with Hamas as long as it upholds ceasefire with Israel.

 

JENIN, West Bank ~

The Palestinian prime minister on Sunday angrily denounced the US veto of a United Nations resolution condemning Israel's West Bank settlements and offered to form a unity government with the rival Hamas militant group.

The comments reflected the Palestinians' frustration over US-led peace efforts, which have made little headway during President Barack Obama's term in office.

RELATED:
Abbas says no to elections if Gazans cannot vote
Washington Watch: Speaking truth to power

During a trip to this West Bank town, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad urged the Americans to "reconsider their approach" after vetoing a Security Council resolution that would have declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem to be illegal. The measure was supported by the council's 14 other members.

"The Americans have chosen to be alone in disrupting the internationally backed Palestinian efforts," Fayyad said in an interview with The Associated Press.

The Palestinians, along with the international community, say Israeli settlements on occupied lands claimed by the Palestinians are illegal. At Friday's Security Council meeting, the U.S. said it agreed with this position, but did not believe the United Nations is the appropriate place to resolve the dispute.

Palestinian officials quoted Obama as telling them that if he had gone forward with the measure, Israel's supporters in Congress had threatened to withhold financial aid to the Palestinians.

"I found this offensive," Fayyad said. "We are not willing to compromise our national enterprise for a fistful of dollars, however big or small."

The Palestinians receive more than $200 million a year in direct financial assistance from the U.S., making Washington the largest individual donor to Fayyad's government.

US-backed peace talks broke down in late September, just three weeks after their launch, after a limited Israeli freeze on settlement construction ended. The Palestinians have refused to talk if Israel continues to build homes for Jews on the land the Palestinians seek for their future state, calling it a sign of bad faith.

With peace talks stalled and calls for democracy rising throughout the Middle East, Fayyad's boss, President Mahmoud Abbas, said this month he would hold overdue general elections in September.

But the Hamas militant group, which controls the Gaza Strip, the other territory claimed by the Palestinians, has said it would boycott the vote unless there is reconciliation first. Hamas won a parliamentary election in 2006, and a year later violently routed Abbas' forces and seized full control of Gaza.

Abbas has since appeared to backpedal, saying elections could not be held without Gaza.

Seeking to resolve the deadlock, Fayyad proposed forming a unity government with Hamas in order to hold the election on time.

The details of Fayyad's plan appeared vague but proposed leaving much of the status quo in place. He said Hamas could retain security control in Gaza under his proposal as long as it preserved a cease-fire with Israel. Fayyad would continue to govern from the West Bank, and would work with Hamas to place both territories under a single governing authority.

"The split has been too long and should not continue, and it won't end by itself. We need to move to end the split," Fayyad said.

Fayyad refused to say who might lead the unity government, saying this would have to be worked out in negotiations. He said that as long as Hamas, which has fired thousands of rockets at Israel, agrees to maintain calm, all other issues could be resolved.

In Gaza, Hamas officials refused to comment, saying they needed more details on Fayyad's plan.

Any unity government would likely end any hopes of reviving Mideast peace talks. Israel and the international community have said there will be no dealings with Hamas until it formally renounces violence and recognizes Israel's right to exist.

Palestinian officials in the West Bank appear willing to take this risk, saying they have little faith the U.S. can revive negotiations in any case.

PALESTINIAN ENVOY: U.S. VETO AT UN 'ENCOURAGES ISRAELI INTRANSIGENCE' ON SETTLEMENTS

If THIS doesn’t tell the world who runs America, nothing else will. Obama is terrified of the Zionist bankers and AIPAC obviously because of their power of the purse just before he will need campaign funds for the elections next year. Not only that, but he was bought and sold long ago. He may put on a show of caring about peace, and maybe somewhere in his heart he has a cell or two that wants it, but generally speaking, he is a hawk bought and owned by Israel.

Hamas says the veto shows the American administration's bias towards the occupation and slams it as immoral behavior disregarding the international community. 

By News Agencies and Haaretz Service

February 19, 2011

The Palestinian Permanent Observer to the United Nations, called 'unfortunate' the U.S. veto of an Arab-sponsored United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem on Friday.

"The Security Council failed to respond to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and send a clear and firm message to Israel that it must ... cease all of its violations and its obstruction of the peace process," said Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian representative.

Israel has a plan and it will not do a damn thing to halt building and settling the lands full of illegal settlements. Legal, schmeagal, it means nothing to Israel, never has and never will. As I have written and posted before, they have the plan for the Greater Israel and NOTHING will stop them. In their supreme arrogance and hubris they will continue.  Only the most naïve would ever have considered hope from a peace process. And after the leak of the Palestine Papers, this is fact. 

Israel does not know how to bargain in good will and has no interest in doing so. They never follow through on their word unless it is good for Israel. The way they treated Abbas, the way he let them treat him, and how he kowtowed to their demands, should tell the world this peace process, like the two state solution, is a waste of time.

"We fear ... that the message sent today may be one that only encourages further Israeli intransigence and impunity," Mansour said.

Israel does not care about encouragement from the outside world. As pointed out, they have their own agenda, one that has been on paper for a very long time.

The United States on Friday voted against a United Nations Security Council draft resolution that would have condemned Israeli settlements as illegal. The veto by the U.S., a permanent council member, prevented the resolution from being adopted.

Home of the brave? In the past, yes. Today, politicians are cowardly critters. They just obey Israel, don’t so what is right or what the people want. They are greedy and spineless…

The other 14 Security Council members voted in favor of the draft resolution. But the U.S., as one of five permanent council members with the power to block any action by the Security Council, struck it down.

The resolution had nearly 120 co-sponsors. The Obama administration's veto is certain to anger Arab countries and Palestinian supporters around the world.

The U.S. opposes new Israeli settlements but says taking the issue to the UN will only complicate efforts to resume stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a two-state solution.

What a complete crock full of hooey! For all the reasons mentioned above.

Prime Minister Netanyahu said that Israel was deeply grateful to the United States for vetoing the resolution. "Israel deeply appreciates the decision by (U.S.) President (Barack) Obama to veto the Security Council Resolution," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said in a statement.

Israel was "prepared to pursue negotiations vigorously" and was "eager to get on" with Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, the premier's office said. The "decision by the US makes it clear that the only path to such a peace will come through direct negotiations and not through the decisions of international bodies," it continued.

Nothing I would like to put in here can be said in polite society. That creature does not want peace. For so many reasons.  War is the only thing Israel understands, it keeps the citizens on their toes for a myriad of reasons; and it is wonderful to bring in the more fanatic Jews to these settlements with the objective of making life so miserable for the Palestinians that they abandon the land.

These people are so set in their intentions that, even when offered a fortune in the latest jets, they turned the offer down and that was to only halt building for a few months! That should tell you something.

Palestinians say continued settlement building flouts the internationally-backed peace plan that will permit them to create a viable, contiguous state on the land after a treaty with Israel to end its control of the West Bank and decades of conflict.

I am thinking Palestine needs to begin to rethink this whole issue, break out of the box and come up with some alternative ideas.

Israel says this is an excuse for avoiding peace talks and a precondition never demanded before during 17 years of negotiation, which has so far produced no agreement.

Pass me the spittoon please. This hypocrisy is too much to stand.

Peace negotiations were halted in September after a temporary Israeli settlement freeze expired. Palestinians refuse to return to the negotiating table unless settlement building halts completely, including in East Jerusalem.

The Islamic Palestinian Hamas group also slammed the U.S. veto describing it as immoral behavior and a disregard of the international community.

Hamas said in a statement that the veto shows the American administration's bias towards the occupation.

Hamas urged the Palestinian Authority to stop all forms of security coordination with Israel.

Hamas is bang on in all counts. Of course.

Egypt also slammed the decision saying it was "disappointing."

A spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Hossam Zaki, predicted that the veto will instead push all sides away from the talks and further damage the credibility of the US as a mediator.

It also shows that, for all his fancy words in Cairo about world peace and understanding, Obama was just grandstanding.

Its stance was "not only disappointing to the Palestinian and Arab people, but also on an international level, especially in all of the states that supported the draft resolution," Zaki said.

PALESTINIAN GOVERNMENT TO QUIT MONDAY: TOP OFFICIAL

Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin Netanyahu sharing an extremely Masonic looking handshake. Abbas is beaming, Bibi is hard put to hide a smirk, this photo does not tell the average viewer the true story.

41 minutes ago

Google

February 13, 2011

RAMALLAH, Palestinian Territories 

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad will tender his government's resignation to president Mahmud Abbas on Monday morning, a senior official told AFP on Sunday.

Prime Minister Salam Fayad 

attending a Christian Palestinian Christmas celebration.

Abbas will immediately ask Fayyad to form a new government, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity, and the premier would immediately begin talks on doing so.

The Palestinian president had already made known his intention to reshuffle the government headed by Fayyad, an independent. He had also said the 58-year-old would be asked to stay on in the post he has occupied since 2007.

The official said consultations on forming a new government had been delayed by the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, which are allies of the Palestinian Authority (PA).

In an interview with The Washington Post on Sunday, Fayyad said he was confident of Egypt's future support for the PA, despite the political changes there that resulted in the departure on Friday of president Hosni Mubarak.

"Why would I presume that Egypt in the aftermath of this movement is going to be any less supportive?" he asked. "Egyptian people are very supportive of the Palestinian people."

On Saturday, the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank announced plans to hold elections by September, running into immediate opposition from its Islamist Hamas rivals in the Gaza Strip.

The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) executive committee's call for presidential and legislative polls came amid stalemate in Israeli-Palestinian talks and the political upheaval in Egypt, a key player in peace efforts.

Hamas had already killed off a PA plan to hold a Palestinian general election in January 2010.

The Islamist movement scored a surprise triumph in a legislative election in 2006 and seized control of the Gaza enclave in June 2007, ousting Fatah in a week of deadly street fighting.

The PLO, which groups the main Palestinian nationalist movements but not Hamas, has since 2004 been led by Abbas, whose mandate as president expired in January 2009 but was extended until new polls to avoid a political vacuum.

"The executive committee has decided to start preparations for presidential and parliamentary elections in the coming months... no later than September," the PLO's Yasser Abed Rabbo told journalists on Saturday.

Hamas immediately rejected the latest elections plan. "This procedure is invalid because president Abbas has no legitimacy and is not fit to organise such elections," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhum said.

Abbas's government last week also called local elections for July 9, the first Palestinian vote since 2006. But the Hamas rulers of Gaza vowed to ignore that decision, limiting the poll to the West Bank.

THE PALESTINE PAPERS

How could anyone not see what a joke this was? 

Both players laughing at the world.

Posted on 29. Jan, 2011

By Raja Mujtaba in Palestine

By Prof Lawrence Davidson

AN ANALYSIS

PART I ~ A TRADITION OF STRENGTH

The Palestinians have always been a strong and determined people. You have to be so in order to defy a powerful and ruthless adversary, backed by the most of the world’s great powers, for close to one hundred years.

The Palestinian leaders, both secular and religious, have likewise been strong and determined. A list of such people would run into the hundreds and so I shall just name a few: Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, who organized Palestinian resistance against both the Zionists and the British only to be gunned down by the latter in 1935; George Habash who founded and led the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder and leader of Hamas until his assassination by the Israelis in 2004 and, of course, Yasir Arafat who led the Palestinian struggle for independence and statehood for half a century.

None of these men were terrorists.

They were freedom fighters.

And the inevitable violence that they carried out was minuscule compared to that violence leveled upon the Palestinians by their adversaries. Finally, none of them ever gave up.

In order to not give up when facing far stronger foes one needs to:

1. Have a sense of what is possible over the long run. That is not to be overwhelmed by the immediate past and/or the immediate future. To understand that there is an essential difference between losing a battle, even a number of battles, and losing a war.

2. To have a sense of multiple strategic and tactical possibilities. That is what can be achieved through violent resistance, non-violent resistance, alliances and united fronts near and far, etc.

3. And to have a proper sense of certain bottom line principles that one simply cannot compromise, for without their tangible existence the struggle loses its meaning.

PART II ~ THE PRESENCE OF WEAKNESS

These leadership qualities existed within the secular organizations of Palestinian resistance for decades and did not start to ebb until the latter part of Yasir Arafat’s period of authority. At that time intimations of weakness such as corrupt practices, opportunism and questionable compromises were already evident.

In addition, Arafat ended up running the Palestinian territories like a sheikhdom and the effect was to stifle the ambitions and enthusiasm of younger potential leaders. After the great man’s death his older, less innovative companions remained entrenched in their positions.

It is difficult to know why this happened when it did, and not earlier. However, it might be that this branch of the Palestinian resistance movement simply fell victim to statistical odds.

To produce strong and talented leaders over a hundred years of struggle is already extraordinary. It means that over a century you have continuously produced those special leaders who are capable of strategic and tactical genius, capable of inspiring generation after generation of oppressed people and refugees, and to do all this while being castigated as terrorists by half the governments on the globe and hunted by many of the major security services of advanced nations.

As time goes on the odds of reproducing such leadership becomes increasingly poor. That the production of such an exceptional leadership cannot go on forever is one of the major assumptions of the Palestinians’ Zionist foes. And, at least in the case of the PNA leadership, their assumption has now proven correct.

That this is so has been known to the Israelis and indeed to most Palestinians since 2004. And now it is known to everyone else thanks to the leaked Palestine(PP) recently released by Al-Jazeera and independently authenticated by The Guardian in England.

Though the PP does not tell us anything remarkably novel they do lay out the truth for the world and thereby render preposterous the charade of a peace process behind which this now revealed reality was hidden. Here are aspects of the picture the PP paints:

ONE ~ It reveals the present PNA leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and his fellows as naive, groveling and collaborationist. Apparently, Abbas and his people were and are so overwhelmed by a sense of Realpolitik that they could think of nothing else to do by capitulate in stages. And in doing so they ended up giving away those things that made the struggle worthwhile in the first place.

They were willing to accept the Bantustans,

to give up almost all of Jerusalem,

to turn their backs on 99% of the Palestinian refugees,

to look the other way as the people of Gaza were slaughtered and

to even serve as an ally of the Israeli occupation forces on the West Bank.

By the time they were done there was nothing left that was worth fighting for. As the PNA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat told U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell, they had done everything but "convert to Zionism." And yet, the Israelis scorned the Palestinian compromises.

TWO ~ That is why, in these leaked papers, notes and memoranda the Israelis are revealed as every bit as disgusting as Abbas and his people.

The Zionists are seen to be duplicitous in the extreme. Clearly all the talk about their being no negotiating partner on the Palestinian side was a lie. It is true that it takes at least two to negotiate. But the missing negotiating partner was always, from beginning to end, the Israelis.

The ideologically driven orientation of the Israeli leadership precluded any compromises with the Palestinians and effectively stifled those few younger Israeli diplomats and representatives, such as those at Taba in 2001, who might have been willing to make a reasonable settlement.

Thus, there is something deeply disturbing to vicariously witness the Israeli leaders directing negotiations with the Palestinians for decades while knowing that they never intend to close an honest and just deal. That their diplomacy would always be gunboat diplomacy and the rest was just playing for time, maneuvering so that in the end you get it all.

Ironically, the only other modern nation that I know of whose leaders played this game was Nazi Germany.

THREE ~ The Palestine Papers also reveal the leaders and diplomats of the United States as utterly pathetic. Their behavior transforms their claim of being an "honest broker" into a classic Big Lie.

There is one passage in the PP where Abbas turns to Mitchell and says "Nineteen years of promises and you haven’t made up your minds what you want to do with us." If Abbas is revealed here as incapable of independent action, so is the U.S.

As the recent behavior of Barack Obama has demonstrated, Israel, through its allied Zionist lobbies, controls U.S. foreign policy when it comes to the Palestine-Israel conflict. The tail is wagging the dog. That is just a fact and the PP revelations substantiate it.

Thus it is that the men who inherited the mantle of Yasir Arafat are failures. Not because they have failed to win an independent Palestinian state, but because they have been willing to toss to the winds the underlying goals that make any such state worth having.

Because their lack of insight and courage made them blind to the truth that was right there before them for years ~ that they were bargaining with people (be they of the Israeli left or right) who were in the game only to humiliate them, only to satisfy some perverse need to see these Palestinians waste time while they, the Zionists, boldly stole everything they had. The Israelis never intended to fulfill the peace process. They want only the land–all of it.

PART III ~ BACK TO THE TRADITION OF STRENGTH

So, is the game up?

No it is not.

There are two additional sources of strong Palestinian leadership still on the field. There are still strong and determined Palestinian leaders at the head of Hamas. And, it should be kept in mind that the leaders of Hamas are the democratically elected leaders of Palestine.

Whatever Washington might say, Abbas and his cronies (on top of everything else) are politically illegitimate. And, as far as most of the Palestinians are concerned, the important thing at this juncture is that Hamas still has the stamina and talent to preserve the goals for which the Palestinians have always fought.

As Tariq Ali has correctly noted, 

 "Now we know why the Israel/US/EU nexus was so keen to disregard the outcome of the Palestinian elections and try to destroy Hamas militarily."

It was because they could not castrate Hamas

as they had the Abbas crowd.

But it is not just Hamas where you find determined and principled leadership. There are a number of West Bank Palestinians who are strong leaders in the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions(BDS) campaign against Israel.

 







These people, such as Omar Barghouti and Lisa Taraki, are just as tough minded as anyone in Hamas. And, as Hamas has its allies in the outside world, so do these leaders of the BDS movement. And these allies collectively number in the millions.

What this all means is that the Palestinians are in good shape to absorb the public destruction of the PNA as a representative of the Palestinian People. Given that the PNA is an authoritarian and repressive organization, armed and funded by the United States, its corrupt and self-serving remnant will be with us for awhile.

But it represents no one and no one but con men and the ignorant will take it seriously. Its demise in all but form represents a healthy event for it paves the way for ever greater numbers of men and women in civil society to throw their weight behind those who still have the will to fight.

So, with the air cleared, what we have here is not so much a bad end, as a fresh beginning.

Lawrence Davidson is a Professor of Middle East History at West Chester University in West Chester Pennsylvania. He is the author of America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University Press of Florida, 2001), Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 2003), and, co-author with Arthur Goldschmidt of the Concise History of the Middle East, 8th and 9th Editions (Westview Press, 2006 and 2009). His latest book is entitled Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing American National Interest (University of Kentucky Press, 2009). Professor Davidson travels often and widely in the Middle East. He also has taken on the role of public intellectual in order to explain to American audiences the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.