Category Archives: Sam Bahour

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Palestinian clowns are everywhere

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour

Some Palestinians refuse to just sit still and accept their fate as a permanently, militarily occupied people. One would think by now that Palestinians would have received the message loud and clear – the world couldn’t care less about their fate. But no, these Palestinians just refuse to sit still. They continue to defy their reality and can be seen across the Holy Land – jumping, climbing, swinging, falling, tripping, singing, twirling, juggling, cycling, tight roping, and the like. Their nerve! To think they can attempt to live a normal life when the powers that be are spending billions, literally, to cause a collapse of Palestinian society. Continue reading →

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JUST VISION: Home Front: Portraits from Sheikh Jarrah (Short videos)

Sam Bahour
Home Front is a new series of four video portraits chronicling the resolve of a neighborhood [Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem], and the support it receives from the most unexpected of places.

1. A Palestinian teenager whose family is forced to give up part of their home and live under the same roof as a family of settlers. He comes of age in the face of unrelenting tension with his neighbors and unexpected cooperation with Israeli allies in his backyard. (8:50min) 

2. An American-born Israeli mother who to her own surprise becomes involved in the demonstrations after her children are arrested for protesting. (8:09min) 

3. A Palestinian community organizer from Sheikh Jarrah who spearheads the involvement of local women in the movement while facing the risk of losing her own home to the settlers. (7:55min) 

4. A former Israeli soldier from a religious background who only several years after his combat service in the West Bank finds himself taking on a leading role in the protests. (7:19min) 


Sheikh Jarrah, and every inch of Palestine, struggles on,
Sam Bahour

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Political art at its worst

Palestine Israel Flag

Sam Bahour, 21 June 2011

For anyone closely following the Palestinian-Israeli issue, nothing is more insulting than the world’s political players peddling another peace initiative, crusading as the ultimate formula to extract the conflict from its current abyss.

The most recent episode of such political peddling happened in rapid fire from mid-May to early June 2011, when US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu engaged in a ping-pong-like game of four days of policy speeches. The political fallout of these speeches was rather predictable. The media hailed Obama’s words as historic and started to view his approach as a new set of parameters (which are actually a step back from past US parameters) that could serve to bring the parties back to the negotiations table and on a path to resolving the conflict.

Those immersed in this conflict knew better. They saw Obama’s words for what they really were: a total buckling of US policy to an arrogant and intransigent Israeli prime minister who wields tremendous domestic leverage on US politics by way of the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). For Obama, who already has his eye on the prize of a second term, the pressure was too much to bear.

A few days later, yet another “peace initiative” was announced, this time from France. In reply to the French announcement, the June 6 Haaretz editorial title read loud and clear: “Netanyahu must accept French peace initiative”. The editorial explained why:

France has placed an offer on the desk of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Begin direct negotiations with the Palestinians in September, on the basis of the Obama plan. The proposal does not define Israel’s borders, draw a map of Jerusalem or determine which settlements Israel must remove. It even helps the Israeli position in that it speaks of “two states for two peoples,” in other words it acknowledges that Israel is a Jewish state. It opposes unilateral steps by either side–that is, both the expansion of Israeli settlements and the Palestinians’ intention of seeking UN recognition for their state.

Anyone who knows anything about this conflict can tell you that this so-called “initiative” has as much chance of serving its proclaimed purpose as Hosni Mubarak has of being re-elected as president of Egypt.

The collective global memory seems to be in deep amnesia. We have been here before–at a point where half-baked initiatives and resolutions, non-compliant with international law and absent of any sense of historical justice, were touted as “the right formula”.

Palestinians don’t forget so easily, especially since their deep wounds due to dispossession since 1948, military occupation since 1967 and non-stop institutional discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel have never been given a chance to heal.

To name just a few of the past infamous peace initiatives, whose number is mind-boggling: UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) Future Government of Palestine (November 29, 1947), Count Folke Bernadotte proposals (1947-1948), UN Security Council Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967), Jarring Mission (1967-1971), Allon Plan (July 26, 1967), Rogers Plan (1969), UN Security Council Resolution 338 (October 22, 1973), Reagan Plan (Sept. 1, 1982), Oslo Accords (1993), Wye River Memorandum (October 23, 1998), Camp David 2000 Summit (2000), The Clinton Parameters (December 23, 2000), Taba summit (January 2001), The Tenet Plan (June 13, 2001), Elon Peace Plan (2002), Nusseibeh-Ayalon Agreement (2002), Arab Peace Initiative (March 28, 2002), The People’s Voice (July 27, 2002), Road Map for Peace (April 30, 2003), Geneva Accord (October 20, 2003), Sharm el-Sheikh Summit of 2005 (February 8, 2005), 2006 Franco-Italian-Spanish Middle East Peace Plan and, sadly, the list goes on and on.

For those still believing a two-state solution paradigm is possible, one past initiative is worthy to reflect upon: that of Count Folke Bernadotte. On May 20, 1948, Count Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat and nobleman, was unanimously appointed as the United Nations mediator in Palestine, the first official mediator in UN history. He was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by the militant Zionist group Lehi while pursuing his official duties. Lehi was led at the time by Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister of Israel.

After unsuccessfully trying to promote the idea of a “union” between Palestine and Transjordan, he proposed two independent states. This proposal was completed on September 16, 1948, and its seven “basic premises” were:

1. Peace must return to Palestine and every feasible measure should be taken to ensure that hostilities will not be resumed and that harmonious relations between Arab and Jew will ultimately be restored.

2. A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so.

3. The boundaries of this new State must finally be fixed either by formal agreement between the parties concerned or failing that, by the United Nations.

4. Adherence to the principle of geographical homogeneity and integration, which should be the major objective of the boundary arrangements, should apply equally to Arab and Jewish territories, whose frontiers should not therefore, be rigidly controlled by the territorial arrangements envisaged in the resolution of 29 November.

5. The right of innocent people, uprooted from their homes by the present terror and ravages of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return.

6. The City of Jerusalem, because of its religious and international significance and the complexity of interests involved, should be accorded special and separate treatment.

7. International responsibility should be expressed where desirable and necessary in the form of international guarantees, as a means of allaying existing fears, and particularly with regard to boundaries and human rights.

Although this two-state approach is more honest in its larger context (as it relates to the flawed notion of “Jewish state” and right of return of Palestinian refugees), the text in premise four demonstrates that Count Bernadotte, 64 years earlier, stated the same principle that President Obama and the most recent French “initiative” promote: setting borders not compliant with the reference at the time, which was UN Resolution 181, the Partition Plan.

Sixty-four years has only changed the reference point of borders to the disadvantage of Palestinians, and today, the forces-that-be are proposing that the 1949 Armistice line (1967 green line) not be respected. Palestinians can only expect that remaining on the same path will result in Israel gobbling up more land while the international community continues to grasp for a workable initiative. In the meantime, the entire two-state paradigm is collapsing.

I’ll never understand why they call this field “political science”, for it is political art at its worst.- Published 20/6/2011 © bitterlemons.org

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business development consultant. He is co-author of “HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (1994). This article was first published at Bitterlemons.org

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Israel Lost in Denial

Sam Bahour

The Israeli government’s sigh of relief was surely heard around the globe. When the rift between Palestinian factions existed, Israel simply brushed off any possibility for resolution of the conflict, claiming that the Palestinian president was simply too weak to implement any agreement as along as Hamas was in control of Gaza. Then, taking all by surprise, the two largest Palestinian factions declared an end to their five-year disunity and signed a reconciliation agreement brokered by the post-Mubarak Egyptian government. The agreement itself reads more like a power-sharing agreement, something every living democracy knows very well. However, before the ink on the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation agreement was dry, Israel opened its worn out play script and started reading from past chapters; this time the Israeli kneejerk reaction–within hours–was that there is no way to make peace with Palestinians as long as Hamas is involved. This would be comic if lives, both Palestinian and Israeli, were not at stake.

Let’s take a step back and look at the facts, possibly inconvenient facts for many.

Why did Israel, from the outset of the Oslo process nearly two decades ago, enter into an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, better known as the PLO? There is no secret here. The first step that kicked off the entire infamous Oslo Accords was an exchange of letters, one of which the PLO, via its late Chairman Yasser Arafat, provided to Israel. The full text of the document is public knowledge and states unequivocally, in its entirety:

“The signing of the Declaration of Principles marks a new era…I would like to confirm the following PLO commitments: The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. The PLO accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The PLO commits itself…to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations…the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators…the PLO affirms that those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter are now inoperative and no longer valid. Consequently, the PLO undertakes to submit to the Palestinian National Council for formal approval the necessary changes in regard to the Palestinian Covenant.”

On the very same day, September 9, 1993, Yitzhak Rabin, then Prime Minister of Israel, issued his own letter which stated the following, in its entirety:

“In response to your letter of September 9, 1993, I wish to confirm to you that, in light of the PLO commitments included in your letter, the Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process.”

Note two very important issues here, 1) the entity Israel recognized is the PLO (an organization composed of many different factions representing the full political and ideological spectrum), not Fatah, not Hamas and not the Palestinian Authority, which, by the way, is a product of the Oslo agreement itself and has no negotiating mandate, and 2) the PLO not only recognized Israel as other states did, as simply a member state of the United Nations, but went even further to state its “right…to exist in peace and security.” No country on earth has formally recognized Israel in such a comprehensive manner.

So all the rumpus about Fatah and Hamas reconciling their internal differences and all the immediate punishing of Palestinians by Israel for this reconciliation raises some key concerns. First and foremost, what does Israel want? Does it want a Palestinian partner who can actually reflect a representative political system with the potential to reach and then implement a peace agreement?

Likewise, what are all the old-new demands that Hamas must recognize Israel? Hamas does not recognize Israel anymore than Israel’s current foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party represents the State of Israel. What difference is there between the far right coalition in Israel and the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas?
The fact of the matter is that anyone observing the agonizing details of this conflict over the past six decades can only deduce one main thing: Israel has no intention to reach a lasting peace with Palestinians. Furthermore, in order to maintain the international community’s commitment to underwriting Israel’s continuing military occupation, Israel has perfected the sadistic game of maintaining a never-ending peace process, one that only gives it more time to create additional facts on the ground (such as settlements) which may be jeopardizing the entire two-state framework as a solution.

Ordinary Israelis are afraid to put down their guns and make peace because the scenarios seem too vulnerable and uncertain. Instead of calming these fears by forging good, new, functional partnerships with Palestinians as equals, the current Israeli government intensifies these fears with the same tired old angry rhetoric about terrorism and the culture, religion, and aspirations of their neighbors.

The missing voices in the debate are many, but a key voice that has yet to be heard is that of the world Jewry. After all, Israel is acting, or so it believes, in the best interest of Jews worldwide. It is hard for me to believe that continued settlement building, continued economic strangulation, continued collective punishment, continued denying of Palestinians from reaching their holy sites, including the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and other forms of repression of another people are in the interest of the world Jewry. However, until we hear loud and clear from Jewish communities around the globe that these acts of Israel are not being done in their name, we can only assume that Israel is drunk on its own arrogance and narcissism because of the unfettered support that it receives from the world Jewry, and this realization, if true, would be sadder than the lack of a peace agreement.

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business development consultant from Youngstown, Ohio living in the Palestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994) and may be reached at sbahour@palnet.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Originally posted at The Jewish Post & News

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Palestine is the Key to Arab Democracy

Palestine Flag

Palestine Flag

Palestine Flag

Sam Bahour, 8 Feb 2011

Current events in Egypt and Tunisia have the entire region and beyond glued to their television sets. The all-too-spoken-about Arab street has risen, seemingly from the dead. But while it is satisfying to see a dictatorial head of state being ousted by his own people, it is far too early to rejoice.

What we are witnessing is the removal and replacement of leaders, not an upgrading of the political systems that allowed someone like the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to remain in power for 30 years and then have the audacity to position his son to succeed him, while the Egyptian people sank into deepening poverty. Unrest across the region will force these reactionary regimes to make some minimal changes, such as introducing term limits, which should have been done decades ago. But these knee-jerk legislative changes are solely aimed at persuading the demonstrators to go home.

Likewise, no one should belittle the fact that hundreds of thousands of average citizens are challenging their governments in the streets. This is not like demonstrations as we know them in western countries. It is the real thing. Serious conviction – and sustained repression – is the prerequisite to get many people to challenge a police state that ignores even the most basic human rights.

In the Arab world, civil uprisings – or intifadas, as they are frequently called – were coined in the Palestinian context. However, the context of the first Palestinian intifada was very different to what we are seeing today. Back in 1987 Palestinians genuinely became fed up with the foreign military occupation that Israel maintains to this day. Communities across the West Bank and Gaza took to the streets and sustained their efforts for nearly six years. Demonstrations were only part of the story. The real ingredient to the Palestinians’ ability to remain steadfast was much more complicated. Palestinians are highly political, and they organised themselves in a decentralised fashion and knew how to operate out of Israel’s sight.

But the first intifada was aimed solely at a foreign entity, Israel, and ended with the signing of the infamous Oslo peace accords, which have failed multiple times over the past two decades. The Palestinian leadership tried to pick the fruits of their intifada prematurely and paid a dear price in human, political, economic and social loss.

Egyptians would be well advised to learn from the Palestinians that the window of opportunity for real change comes all too infrequently. They should therefore be very clear on what they desire from this historic episode. I’d guess that the US state department already has more than a few scenarios in place and dealing with these is what the Egyptian people will really be up against in the coming weeks.

The second Palestinian intifada in 2000 had many more similar elements to today’s upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt. Following the collapse of the Camp David II talks and continuing Israeli provocations, the Palestinian street erupted. Although this second uprising was quickly steered to target Israel, the undercurrent at the time was boiling against a Palestinian leadership that was seriously corrupt and refused to shift gear politically, opting instead for a never-ending US-sponsored peace process.

The Palestinian president at the time, Yasser Arafat, knew that the second intifada had the potential to turn on him and the house of cards that he had created, the Palestinian Authority. Arafat knew how to shrewdly get his people to vent their anger elsewhere – towards Israel, the foreign occupier. Arafat thought, like today’s Mubarak and the many other leaders of his generation, that the US would come to his rescue and make things happen. He was wrong. Every major Palestinian political crisis witnessed the traditional Palestinian leadership taking minute steps forward to keep the masses at a distance. Often these steps meant rearranging the cabinet while paying lip service to the demanded structural reforms. Expect the same in Egypt and Tunisia.

Over the years, Palestinians have been able to maintain pressure on their occupier and keep their own quasi-government in check because they were organised at the grassroots level for many years beforehand. This level of deep, sustained organising has been weak to non-existent in most of the Arab world. The police-state governments in Egypt, Tunisia and across the Middle East made sure civil society remained obedient – as the media and the private sector were made to be.

The obvious question is: if Palestinians are so experienced in taking to the streets, why then are there so few serious demonstrations in Nablus, Ramallah, Bethlehem or Gaza in solidarity with the Egyptian people? The reason is that the Palestinian Authority has been co-opted by a US-dominated and foreign-funded agenda which, in times of crisis, understands a single tool: force. The same applies to the Palestinian government in Gaza, for different reasons. Since the last Palestinian elections, which ended in infighting, the US has equipped, trained and led a new generation of Palestinian security services to serve their old model of Arab world governance – police states and banana republics. Expect the US not to embrace real democracy in the Arab world, but rather to put a new, younger facade on an old and corrupt system of governance.

If you want a barometer for today’s Middle East political temperature, follow Egypt; however, if you want a barometer for tomorrow’s possibilities for serious, sustainable reform, keep your eye on the Palestinian people who are in a dual struggle – one to shed themselves from 43 years of a brutal Israeli occupation and one to create the first Arab model of truly representative and accountable governance. The main factor preventing the Palestinians from continuing on their path to structural reform, following their first genuine elections in 2006, is the refusal of the US to accept the results of those elections. Expect a similar US veto on any forthcoming Egyptian move towards electoral reform that encompasses true representation.

Until the people of the Middle East take reforms seriously and transform their mass demonstrations into sustained, organised efforts that address all aspects of society – political, legislative, economic and social – then the blood and tears invested in this latest round of civil outcry will be wasted.

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American freelance business consultant and serves as a Board of Trustees member at Birzeit University. He is also a Director at the Arab Islamic Bank and the community foundation Dalia Association. He contributed this article to RamallahOnline.com. Visit: www.epalestine.com. (This article was first published on guardian.co.uk, February 7, 2011.)

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US mediation monopoly collapsing

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour, 6 Dec 2010

The United States is at a crossroads in its mediation of Middle East peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. The Obama administration can no longer walk on the Israeli side of the line–which is exactly where the US has been since Israel’s creation–while continuing to pay lip service to the illusion of walking on the thin line of fair mediation. Unfortunately, neither the US, nor anyone in the Palestinian leadership for that matter, has proposed anything beyond brushing the dust off already-failed initiatives and placing the burden for progress on the need for more Palestinian concessions; concessions that do not exist.

The international euphoria surrounding the US bear hug embrace of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in Ramallah is about to quickly pass and, come autumn 2011–the Fayyad government’s declared target for Palestinian statehood–the region will find itself exactly where former President George W. Bush left it: at a dead end.

What is urgently needed is a restructuring of international mediation addressing the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Shuttle diplomacy by world powers unable or unwilling to commit to international and humanitarian law as a foundation for Palestinian and Israeli reconciliation is a waste of time, money and Palestinian and Israeli lives. Military occupation must end if good faith final status negotiations are ever to sincerely begin.

The US has proved beyond a reasonable doubt that its historic alliance with Israel, an “unholy alliance” as it has often been called, prohibits it from being a fair and impartial mediator. Over the years, the Israeli agenda has become a domestic US issue and is integrally linked to US elections, US foreign policy and aid, and the US military-industrial complex. The collapse of the infamous Oslo peace process gave the US a historic chance to clean its slate of its blind support to Israel. It chose not to do so, thus losing any impression of being a credible, impartial mediator.

The US is fully aware of its failed attempts at mediation, especially over the past 20 years, and thus moved to create the so-called “Quartet”. In essence, the Quartet attempted to camouflage the dominating US role in the conflict with the inclusion of the European Union, Russian Federation and United Nations. This fuzzy, ineffective diplomatic mechanism, which self-proclaims a mandate of mediating the conflict, falls short of having any real international legitimacy. Over the past years, the Quartet, currently represented by Tony Blair, quietly observed unprecedented Israeli aggression against Palestinians and a collapse of the peace process while doing little more than deciding how high to jump after being ordered to do so by the US.

An alternative to the Quartet would be to create a properly mandated UN Security Council mediation team in which no member would be allowed to exercise veto power. The team would be equipped with the necessary resources to bring Israel (the occupier) and the Palestinians (the occupied) to the table with the agenda of ending the 43-year Israeli military occupation of Palestinians. The basis for an end to the occupation would be dictated as prescribed in international and humanitarian law. This mediation team would have the authority to deploy a specified number of multinational peacekeeping forces should they be required.

The wild card actually blocking such a serious approach to mediation is the US. Why would the US accept a mediation arrangement that would definitely drive a wedge between the US and Israel? There are 101 reasons for the US to take a backseat in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, not the least being the quagmire that it created for itself in Iraq and Afghanistan or the constantly increasing costs that Israel is inflicting upon the US, both financially and politically. Sooner or later, the US must take action to remove Israel from dominating its domestic agenda. With President Barack Obama past the mid-term elections, despite recovering from a setback, he should be able to breathe a little easier and spend serious political capital to repair some of the damage that was done to his presidency when he was forced to retreat from the showdown with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu over continued illegal Israeli settlement building.

However, betting on the US or Obama to make a historic unilateral about-face is most likely a losing bet. The international community needs to urgently step up to the plate.

If the US refuses to cooperate on it own, then the international community can take action regardless. Under a well-known and tested United Nations procedure called “Uniting for Peace” (General Assembly Resolution 377 A (V)), the UN General Assembly can demand a withdrawal of Israel from the occupied Palestinian lands. The General Assembly may also call for a United Nations peacekeeping force to be sent to Palestine to protect Palestinians from the occupying power. The “Uniting for Peace” procedure has been used before, by none other than the United States.

International law must be defined and applied by the world institutions that were established for the purpose, and not by the existing superpower or the party to the conflict that can hire the better public relations firms or has the stronger military. The clear and unequivocal end to Israeli occupation, in all its forms, has the power to bring justice, security and stability to a region on the verge of self-destruction. – Published 6/12/2010 © bitterlemons.org

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman.

http://www.bitterlemons.org/issue/pal2.php

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A Show of Palestinian Business Resilience

Sam Bahour

Sam Bahour, 31 Oct 2010

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad will most likely cut a ribbon; a handful of government officials will be jockeying for camera time to claim economic leadership; major multinationals will compete to get their logo in the limelight; international donors, like USAID, DFID and the World Bank will be prominently featured and the media will eat all of this and regurgitate it, with little or no real analysis, as economic development toward statehood. This is all a probable scenario in the upcoming Palestinian information and communication technology (ICT) sector’s premier annual public event, EXPOTECH Technology Week 2010.

The real story however will be embedded in the exhibition’s booths, in the people who are struggling to survive under a brutal and prolonged Israeli military occupation while keeping their eye on the prize: building an information technology sector that has the potential to be a pillar of a future Palestinian state while in the meantime providing sustenance under the distress of occupation.

This exhibition is not about growth; it is about survival.

Education

Palestine’s ICT players are many but the key to this sector is its knowledge-based resources. The human resources that feed the sector are a mix between products of Palestine’s higher education system and Palestine’s diaspora and ex-pat community who have returned home during the past two decades.

Palestinian universities have been weathering crisis after crisis ever since Israeli occupation began in 1967. In the mid 1970’s university presidents and staff had to deal with being deported from their homes by Israel; in the late 1980’s several Palestinian universities were closed for years on end and hundreds of staff and students were arrested by Israel; in the 1990’s, with the signing of the Oslo peace accords, what was supposedly a paradigm shift toward independence turned out to be a reshuffling of the occupation with a new layer of bureaucracy called the Palestinian Authority (PA). Since the year 2000 Palestinian professors and students have been randomly blocked by Israeli checkpoints and closure regimes from reaching their classrooms and continue, all the while, to be arbitrarily harassed, humiliated and arrested.

More recently, how higher education institutions in Gaza can sustain their existence under Israeli siege and constant shelling from the air, land and sea is a story in itself and will surely be noted in tomorrow’s history books.

In spite of this bitter reality, Palestinians persevered and held on to education like there was no tomorrow. This steadfastness in the face of incredible odds should not be underestimated. In the midst of all of this chaos, universities struggled to attain their fair allocation of the PA budget to meet their payrolls, retain their teaching staff and adjust their offerings to meet the rapidly changing market needs. For better or for worse, this is the foundation that the information technology sector of Palestine stands on.

Business Drivers

Those driving Palestine’s occupied economy are also key. Thus far, the donor community, by virtue of its funding abilities, is the back-seat driver of the entire economy and is in structural control. The U.S., EU, World Bank and the like are micromanaging many sectors in Palestine; the ICT sector is not an exception.

Intervention comes in many shapes and sizes and, over time, develops its modalities. What started nearly two decades ago as charitable assistance has since moved to grants managed by each donor country’s private sector firms. Over time, and with the need to navigate through a political minefield, assistance to the sector took a new shape: partnerships with local civil society. Even multinational corporate social responsibility venues started playing a major role.

A growing number of Palestinian software development firms and service providers are reaching out to global markets, some benefiting from this international support and others on their own. Hidden in the alley ways of Palestine’s economic landscape are Palestinians from the ex-pat community and diaspora who are linking local engineers to global markets.

Firms like gSoft Technology Solutions (www.gsofttech.com), one of the leading software development companies in Palestine which provides outsourcing services to leading American companies specializing in the semiconductor, solar, insurance, medical, real-estate and mobile markets in the U.S., is a prime case in point. gSoft also builds and globally markets mobile and advertising products and services. This firm highlights the organic link that the Palestinian diaspora can play in opening up markets for local firms to serve.

Another local success story is Bisan Systems (www.bisan.ps). This firm has been providing accounting software services to the lion’s share of the Palestinian market for over 22 years. In keeping with the times they now provide all of the occupied territory with a new version of their Java-based, multilingual, online accounting application in an application service provider model. The firm is also providing the accounting system plumbing behind some of the main elements of the Palestinian Authority’s institutional financial reform efforts and is receiving rave reviews by international organizations like the World Bank. This is another local success story—ready, able and willing to compete on a regional and global scale. The examples are many.

Over the years many multinational firms have dabbled into Palestine’s ICT sector as well. At one point TIMEX had a team of Palestinian developers working as part of their global research and development network to develop new digital watch software. Today, HP and Google are just two more examples of firms on the ground in Palestine.

The most promising of the multinational experiences has been a three year commitment from CISCO’s CEO John Chambers, which is due to expire at the end of this year. CISCO has hinted that they are more than pleased with the investments they have made in Palestinian firms. The sector anxiously awaits a comprehensive review of the $10 million that was invested by CISCO in order to build on this high profile platform for other multinationals to follow suit.

Sector Leadership

The convener of the upcoming high-tech exhibition is the Palestinian Information Technology Association of Companies (PITA), of which my consulting firm is a proud member. PITA was founded in 1999 by a group of Palestinian entrepreneurs who wanted to create a non-governmental body to defend the interests of the ICT sector. Operations began in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank with one employee and a paid member base of 25 Palestinian ICT companies.

PITA can safely claim to be the most active Palestinian trade association, both on and offline. During the tough years of the second Intifada, PITA grew and today represents 100 ICT firms (29 of them based in Gaza)—everything from hardware distributors, software development firms, office automation vendors, internet service providers, telecommunications, IT consulting, IT training and related businesses. This growth and member base diversity exemplifies the dynamism of this sector and reflects its tremendous potential.

The newest addition to the sector has been the establishment of several university-based Centers of Excellences dedicated to incubation services to capture a pipeline of ideas emerging from Palestine’s youthful population.

Even the Palestinian Authority itself, at least in the West Bank, has started to finally get its act together and make progress on several long standing issues that have held back the sector, such as opening the telecommunications market for competition.

Capital in Action

The investment leadership in the sector has also become richer and more diverse in recent years. Today Palestine is proud to host several new private equity funds that are open to ICT investments. Abraaj Capital, the region’s biggest private equity group in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, has partnered with the Palestine Investment Fund, Palestine’s sovereign wealth fund, to launch Palestine’s branch of the Riyada Enterprise Development by way of a $50 million private equity fund. Abraaj Capital Group, the parent of Riyada Enterprise Development, was a recent recipient of $150 million in financial support from the U.S.’s Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to expand its efforts in the MENA region.

Massar International, one of Palestine’s emerging economic powerhouses, has recently received $30 million financial support from OPIC to launch the Siraj Palestine Fund I, another private equity fund.

Some funds have tried to bury the political complexities of managing a matrix of interests in Palestine, but others have dealt with the political complexities head on. For example, as reported in America.com, the Aspen Institute “has several projects designed to encourage Middle East entrepreneurship. It has played a key role in organizing the Middle East Venture Capital Fund, which is managed by Israeli businessman Yadin Kaufmann and Palestinian entrepreneur Saed Nashef. Backed by the European Investment Bank, Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corporation and other contributors, the fund has $50 million to fund high-growth, export-oriented ventures in information technology.”

The UK-based aid and development agency Mercy Corps recently reported in a press release that it “received a major international award for its work to support Palestinian information and communication technology (ICT) companies…They won the prestigious Digital Opportunity Award for their programme building links between Palestinian and Israeli ICT companies as a step towards peace in the region…[and]…in recognition of their ‘remarkable and successful’ work in building closer business relationships between Palestinian and Israeli companies. The programme involved an extensive awareness-raising campaign and proactively building business relationships, through meetings and the launch of a new website [see the Outsource to Palestine website at www.outsource2pal.com] and report , all aimed at promoting the capabilities of the Palestinian ICT sector to the Israeli and international market.”

Several new private equity and venture capital funds are also in the pipeline. Thus, one can see a clear building of the needed investment infrastructure. But to be honest to Palestine’s experience, it was never the hard infrastructure which was cause for concern, but rather the soft infrastructure—that which may be called the investment eco-system—that has hindered our progress: things like freedom of movement of people and goods, the right to engage in cross border trade without Israeli restrictions, a telecommunications network which is not forced to go through an Israeli operator and the like.

The rigorous international intervention to support Palestine’s ICT sector is surely welcomed; however, it would be meaningless if it was not accompanied by concentrated efforts from donor states to remove—not maneuver between—Israel’s illegal actions that hamper our sector’s development.

A Real Display of Resilience

Palestine’s EXPOTECH Technology Week 2010 has all the trappings of any world class exhibition. It will be the first event to be held in Palestine’s first 5-star Movenpick Hotel in Ramallah. A parallel venue in Gaza is also planned for those not permitted by Israel to attend. Aside from the business to business meetings, an array of workshops will be held on IT Business in Palestine, Telecommunication and Broadband, Technology Entrepreneurship, Technology Trends, e-Government Initiative, Technology Financing, Strategies to Grow the ICT Sector, Technology/Innovation Marketing and IT Education. If one did not know better, the exhibition agenda looks like one from any free market anywhere in the world. However, we do know better.

In the face of the systematic Israeli stifling of our economy, our technology entrepreneurs are putting on a show of Palestinian business resilience like no other. It can be viewed as an example of a battered people, proudly standing up at the podium of a globally vibrant sector, and screaming at the top of their voice that we are a people yearning to be free, yearning to compete in a global economy. We are a people that have kept abreast of our sector’s developments across the globe even as we find it hard to move from city to city in our own homeland.

The exhibition will physically bring together West Bank Palestinians, Jerusalemites, a few Gazan Palestinians and Palestinians from the Diaspora. It will be a symbolic sign of economic unity, albeit not fully complete. Those Palestinian technologists that are dispersed throughout our refugee community will be missing. Yet other loved ones from our sector who are currently being imprisoned by Israel will also be missing. But in spirit all will be present and all will be showing a side of Palestine that is rarely seen—a Palestine that can contribute to human knowledge; a Palestine that can improve human well being; and maybe more than anything else, a Palestine that is giving countries of the world yet another chance to uphold their obligations as signatories to the Fourth Geneva Convention and to remove the misery caused by the dirty boot of Israeli military occupation being on our necks for so many years.

(Visit this display of genuine Palestinian business resilience at www.expotech.ps.)

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh/Ramallah in the West Bank.

  • (A version of this article was first published in Arab News: http://arabnews.com.)

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    Can the OECD Stand up to Israel?

    Sam Bahour

    Sam Bahour and Charles Shamas

    What can be said for the state of international law when international organisations such as the OECD find themselves unable to prevent a member country from bringing its unlawful practice into the life of the organisation itself? In such situations, how can law-abiding member countries avoid being drawn into acquiescence? Later this month, these questions may find answers when Israel hosts an OECD gathering in Jerusalem to discuss global tourism.

    The OECD is an international economic organisation of 33 countries, with the latest controversial addition to this club being Israel. The OECD explains its mission as providing “a setting where governments compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practice and co-ordinate domestic and international policies”. At minimum, one would expect the co-ordination of these “international policies” to remain within the bounds of international law.

    At Israel’s invitation, the 86th session of the OECD tourism committee will take place in Jerusalem on 20 and 21 October to discuss supporting a sustainable and competitive tourism industry for the benefit of the members’ economies. The session will be attended by senior government officials from OECD member countries and key emerging economies. This is only the second time that the meeting has been held outside Paris.

    Israel will conduct itself as the host and as an OECD member based on the Israeli ministry of tourism’s unlawful unilateral extension of its jurisdiction to include occupied East Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights and touristic sites and businesses in those parts of the West Bank reserved for Israeli settlement.

    Israel’s ministry of tourism website clearly lists tourist sites in occupied territory, such as the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as Israeli sites. The ministry’s websites also publicise settlement-based tourist services licensed by the ministry and receiving Israeli state financial support under the ministry’s auspices. They present maps that depict the entire territory of historic Palestine west of the Jordan river, as well as the Syrian Golan, as territory of Israel that falls under Israel’s national tourism-related and cultural heritage-related responsibility.

    Despite OECD efforts to the contrary, photographs of touristic sites in occupied territory have been incorporated in a website that Israel has constructed under OECD auspices.

    Last month, the Right to Enter campaign – a grassroots campaign for the freedom of movement to/from and within the occupied Palestinian territories, for which we volunteer – wrote to each OECD member to explain the situation and the harm that will be done by allowing such Israeli practice under OECD auspices, and by acquiescing to Israel’s insistence on basing its participation in the OECD on its illegal acts of annexation and settlement in occupied territory.

    All OECD member countries refuse to recognise Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem and have therefore insisted in keeping their embassies in Tel Aviv instead of Israel’s self-proclaimed “unified” capital. They presumably would not want to be drawn into acts or omissions that would imply that Israeli practice resulting from the very acts of annexation and settlement they condemn as internationally unlawful can be considered legitimate under the OECD’s auspices.

    It remains to be seen how they will manage to avoid such missteps. It is hardly encouraging that during the runup to the tourism meeting web pages bearing the OECD emblem continue to advertise touristic and cultural heritage sites in the occupied Palestinian territories as Israeli.

    It is difficult to overlook the fact that Israel has been permitted to base its performance of its obligations and conduct its participation in OECD activities on its own policies of settlement and annexation, notwithstanding the duty of the OECD and its member countries not to recognise these Israeli practices as lawful or give them effect within the OECD.

    Countries planning to attend include Spain, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States.

    For those countries that decide to attend, the devil will be in the details. The proficiency of their delegates at identifying and preventing the importation of Israel’s violations of international law into the proceedings and surrounding events will be sorely tested.

    It can make no sense for world leaders to allow themselves to be drawn progressively into acquiescing to Israel’s serious and persistent violations of international law while continuing to demand that Palestinians respect and place their confidence in international law after 62 years of dispossession and 43 years of military occupation.

    Yet Israel has become a habitual violator and has also become highly proficient at dragging other states along with it. If the OECD and its member countries cannot be expected to effectively resist this pull, who can be expected to hold the line? Who is left to defend the normative foundations of the just and peaceful world order that states and international organisations like the OECD regularly proclaim their resolve to promote?

    Sam Bahour

    Sam Bahour

    Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American freelance business consultant and serves as a Board of Trustees member at Birzeit University. He is also a Director at the Arab Islamic Bank and the community foundation Dalia Association. www.epalestine.com. And Charles Shamas is a senior partner with the Mattin Group. His human rights practice is specialised in problems of international humanitarian law and human rights enforcement and state responsibility. (This article was first published at the Guardian Online: guardian.co.uk.)

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    Dignified Failure

    President Barack Obama watches as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left) and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (right) shake hands at a trilateral meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, Sept. 22, 2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

    Sam Bahour, 22 Sept 2010

    The entire U.S. administration’s Middle East A-team–President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and Special Envoy Mitchell–is defying the mass majority of political analysts by dismissing the status quo in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, and insisting that the latest round of Palestinian-Israeli direct talks has the potential to lead to an agreement which will resolve the conflict. I have a deep fear that they may be correct in predicting an agreement will be signed, but I do not have an iota of confidence that it will end the conflict.

    Conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic predicts that the current peace talks will hit a cement wall before the one-year time frame expires. The numerous explanations for the predicted failure are all sensible given the region’s track record. International law is blatantly ignored, the logic of might is right trumps justice and the international community continues to turn its back to its own obligations toward the occupied Palestinian people.

    On the Palestinian side, reality is a mix between frustration, despair, disunity and betrayal. The Palestinian negotiating team claims to be a legitimate leadership but there is not one functioning institutional body that can claim to be the source of their self-defined legitimacy. This quasi-leadership understands its legitimacy crisis so well that only a few months ago they were forced to cancel legally-required municipal elections out of concern of losing, even though Hamas was boycotting the elections– so much for Palestinian democracy.

    The fear is that the Palestinian negotiating team is in their final round in the game of political survival. If these current talks do not reach an agreement–any agreement– the only way for Mahmoud Abbas and his cohorts to remain in office will be by way of the barrel of a gun, similar to how most other Arab states exist today.

    However, the Palestinian people are not your average Arab population; they understand that their demise was not served up at the hands of the Palestinian leadership, legitimate or otherwise. First to blame is Israel for its dispossession of Palestinians and what is commonly referred to as military occupation. The 1948 dispossession took place in broad daylight for all to see, although many preferred blindness. Israel was created on the remains–both living and dead–of Palestinians, leaving some 5 million refugees dwelling in squalid refugee camps for over 60 years and many others displaced in their own homeland. It is no wonder that Israel fears for its security.

    The military occupation part of Israel’s crimes against humanity began in 1967 and is becoming less and less recognizable with every new Israeli settlement and violation of the Fourth Geneva Conventions. International law defines military occupation as a state of affairs which is temporary by nature. After forty-three years it is becoming much harder to classify Israel’s occupation as temporary. As a matter of fact, the occupier, Israel, has dumped volumes of professional media spin over the past four decades to convince the world that the lands in question are in fact “disputed” and not militarily occupied. If the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are not occupied, then what are they? Are the negotiations launched in Washington D.C. aimed at ending an internationally-recognized (and U.S. recognized) military occupation or are they rearranging some other reality which is yet unnamed?

    If we view the facts on the ground in Israel-Palestine for what they are today, then only one word applies: apartheid. Realizing this reality as apartheid is not new. President Jimmy Carter referred to it in his recent book title; past Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak both spoke the “A” word as being the direction in which Israel is heading.

    True, apartheid is best known for its application in South Africa and for its ultimate collapse there. However, the system of apartheid did not stop with its failure, it moved on to be defined in international law for what it was: a crime. The 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defined the crime of apartheid as inhumane acts of a character similar to other crimes against humanity “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” If this definition does not reflect what Israel is doing to Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel proper, then blindness reigns supreme.

    Thus, if these current direct talks are aiming to produce an agreement that ignores or attempts to coexist with the unrelenting, slow-motion, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Israel continues to this day, then it will be worthy of merely a few photo-ops that will be forgotten before the negotiating teams return to their respective homes. Even the creative idea floating around of using a failure in the talks to get the UN to admit Palestine as a state–if it does not remove the underlying system of apartheid–would merely be rearranging the legal status to serve the continuation of Israel’s crimes against humanity.

    The most dignified failure these talks can hope for is that the international community finally come to its senses, preferably with the U.S., and passes a UN resolution with specific punitive actions that identifies the status in Israel-Palestine, all of historic Palestine, for what it is: the crime of apartheid.

    Only when the definition of the problem is crystal clear can we formulate an appropriate solution and have renewed faith in the international community’s ability to act on what it knows very well to be reality: that Israeli actions over the last six decades have nullified the two-state solution. A new model of co-existence must be envisioned, a model built not on racism, separation and exceptionalism, but on mutual and equal human and civil rights across all of Palestine and Israel.

    If the current peace talks surprise the world and result in a true sovereign Palestine, free of Israeli control and domination, then I’d be happy to be mistaken; if not however, it’s time for the world to at least call reality for what it is. Anything less is an insult to our collective intelligence.

    Sam Bahour

    Sam Bahour

    Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant living in the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994). Contact him at: sbahour@palnet.com.

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    Bitterlemons: Civil society in the lead

    Sam Bahour

    Sam Bahour

    When politicians face failure what do they do? Step down? No way. Not in Palestine at least. Over and over again the Palestinian leadership has hit a cement wall (no pun intended) in its attempts to lead the Palestinian people to freedom and independence. And with every colossal failure, the leadership looks to Palestinian civil society for direction.

    The first intifada was adopted to cover for the failures in Lebanon, and the second intifada was adopted to cover for the collapse of Oslo. The current Palestinian Authority boycott of Israeli settlement products is no different. The boycott is the scaffolding that the PA is attempting to erect and climb in order to retake a leadership position. The dilemma PA leaders face is that it is very possible that they may be expending efforts to build a scaffold that others may climb to assume leadership of the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence.