As an idea and a rallying cry, “Occupy Wall Street” is now a concept that has been adopted around the world. Protests from London to Tel Aviv have used its battle cry of embracing the power of the forgotten majority. Ironically, its roots can be tracked to the very consumerist trends its founders have been rallying against, most notably the marketability of a revolution in a time of global unrest.

Last July, the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, best known for its sharp attention-grabbing stunts like “Buy Nothing Day”, began the hashtag “occupywallstreet” on Twitter and disseminated an iconic poster portraying a ballerina precariously balancing atop the Wall Street bull. With these subtle moves, Adbusters tapped into the growing discontent in North America, and provided a rallying point for activists in the United States.

In September, a group of 1,000 activists answered the Adbusters call and marched to the barricaded New York Stock Exchange in the heart of Lower Manhattan. Unable to literally occupy Wall Street, they descended on two privately owned spaces designated for public use close by, the atrium of Deutsche Bank’s North American headquarters and Zuccotti Park, which became the site of a lively tent encampment and the epicentre of the movement. It was precisely the choice of privately owned public spaces that protected the activists from immediate eviction by New York City law-enforcement officials.

The early days are a haze to most of the seasoned core of OWS. “Every day felt like a dog year,” William Dobbs, a member of the group’s press team told me in a phone conversation. Lauren Minis, a native of New York City, recently returned from a long trip abroad and was looking for a job when the occupation began. Disenchanted with an American political system that does not represent her values and a cynical electorate seemingly unable or unwilling to change the nature of the system, she was naturally drawn to the public outburst of direct democracy that has typified OWS. Immediately after her first visit, she assumed a leadership position in the sustainability working group.

As the movement grew and without a clear manifesto, US media outlets struggled to place it in the traditional political map. Some mainstream news organisations attempted to portray it as one of entitlement by focusing on the large numbers of unemployed college students, outfitted with shiny Apple computers, who made up the protesters’ ranks.

Despite the media’s apparent confusion, excessive crowd control measures exercised by local police forces – including critically wounding an Iraqi war veteran with a rubber bullet during the evacuation of the Occupy Oakland encampment – guaranteed international media exposure. Without the bellicose reaction of the police, it is doubtful the movement would have been able to enjoy such lavish coverage. Who says protesters need to be violent when the system they are confronting provides all the violence necessary to grab the headlines?

The mainstream US political establishment has used Occupy Wall Street as a platform to attack policies and blame “the other”. The “blame game” of American politics has pushed people like Alejandro Verla, 31, a public health worker and member of the empowerment and action working group at OWS, to seek out different types of political action they see embodied in the movement. “I worked for two months straight to get Obama elected,” Verla told me. “Now I want nothing to do with mainstream politics. We need to change the way Americans think about politics and democracy.”

Inside a quirky coffee shop in the affluent Upper East Side neighbourhood of Manhattan, Joshua Stephens, a 30-something professional dog walker, explained OWS with a liberal smattering of Foucault, Deleuze and classic anarchist theory. A member of the outreach and education working group, Stevens noted that the occupation has opened a space for Americans to acquire the dexterity necessary to engage in direct democracy. Between sips of thick espresso, he triumphantly pointed out that every person who attends a general assembly meeting – the nightly consensus gatherings that determine the Occupy movement’s strategy – leaves radicalised in some way. For OWS, this has been its greatest success and perhaps its only goal.

For Stevens and many others, OWS has changed traditional notions of how the left operates in the United States. In recent years, that group has watched grassroots right-wing movements (like the Tea Party) achieve electoral results and concrete media success. For many, social issues have been ignored due to the need to combat American foreign policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not only has OWS demonstrated that the left is concerned with such issues but it has also confirmed that the rest of the world is willing to stand in solidarity with an American struggle for income equality.

OWS, according to Stephens, has placed the American left at the centre of an international movement of dissent.

“It is strange that OWS has gained such international presence,” Micha Whiteman, a press liaison officer for the movement told me in the heart of the Zuccotti Park encampment at the beginning of November. “I remember the inspiration that I had while watching the Egyptian revolution unfold on Al Jazeera. The funny thing is that I had to watch [it] online because Al Jazeera is not available in the United States. Now Egyptians are watching our movement unfold with the same hopeful anticipation.”

The growth and rhetoric of OWS has clear similarities with other revolutions that shook the globe this year, but this summer’s Israeli tent protests seem to be nearly identical. Those protests began when a small group of young Tel Aviv residents erected a tent encampment in the middle of the city’s posh Rothschild Boulevard to demonstrate against high rents. Within a matter of weeks, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets demanding greater economic equality and social justice. However, the tent protesters refused to deal with the “political” issues of occupation and the institutional discrimination that non-Jewish citizens of Israel face on a daily basis, leading some to voice criticism at the honesty of the movement.

Israeli demonstrators argued vociferously that Israeli society had become too apathetic to economic policies that reflect incredible income inequality and the greed of Israeli politicians. According to its leaders, the absence of a “political” discussion concerning Palestinians and their lack of clear demands allowed for a space of radicalisation where rank-and-file Israelis could debate politics in order to learn a new language of democratic discourse. At the height of the movement, 500,000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa – the proportional equivalent of 17 million Americans – demanding social justice.

Yet, by the end of summer, the Israeli movement had all but fizzled away. With the tent encampments evacuated by law-enforcement officials, many of the protesters simply went back to their normal lives. Occupy Wall Street has clearly learnt an important lesson from its Israeli counterpart. Namely, that core social issues must be dealt with directly and not pushed aside.

For the past month, tent encampments from Los Angeles to Philadelphia have been evicted by police forces with surprising regularity. On November 15, Zuccotti Park was cleared by New York City police officers and is now only being used for meetings during daylight hours. A court case is pending to see whether the activists will be allowed to return to the park. Some activists have responded to the evictions with protest marches from New York City to Washington DC as well as planned blockades of West Coast port facilities. The activists are fighting to stay relevant now that their tent cities have disappeared and it is unclear whether OWS will succeed. For some involved in the movement it is time to regroup, return home and plan larger actions for next year.

Exactly what has the Occupy Wall Street movement accomplished in its short existence?

This unavoidable question has plagued it from the beginning but might miss the point, according to many of those living in tents across the nation. Unable to change the system from within, the OWS movement has successfully amended the national political landscape in the United States. By challenging income inequality, grassroots activists have presented an often ignored demand to expand democratic enfranchisement to a broad majority of Americans.

The growth and international support for the movement, coupled with a deep ongoing crisis in the global economy, has guaranteed that the discontent projected by Occupy Wall Street will certainly not disappear anytime soon. Despite clear plans for the future and even without explaining exactly what she meant in concrete terms, Lauren Minis ended our conversation on an upbeat note, “We are working on creating a new paradigm that is so appealing that people don’t have to think twice about walking away from the old one.”

Published in The National on 30 December 2011

The plight of African refugees in Tel Aviv has been covered extensively but the recent  passage of strict legislation in the Israeli parliament aimed at curbing the flow of refugees requires another visit to the subject. In my latest report from Tel Aviv for Monocle, I speak with refugees about their experience in Tel Aviv and what keeps them together as a diaspora community in the midst of a country usually associated with diaspora. You can listen to the entire program here [my report airs at the end of the show]. Additionally, I recommend that you download the podcast of The Globalist and incorporate Monocle 24‘s live streaming coverage from around the world into your day.

Palestine has a stock exchange. Actually, Palestine has a privately owned but independently monitored stock exchange which performed surprisingly well last year in the climate of Middle East revolutions. Political instability is built into the cost of doing business in Palestine. While regional markets in Egypt and Tunisia were turned on their head by political instablity, Palestine emerged as an ironically secure market.

In my latest radio piece for Monocle 24, I look at the Palestine Stock Exchange in an effort to analyse the true health of the Palestinian economy. You can listen to the piece here (Begins at minute 45:00) or download the podcast via iTunes. I recommend that you  incorporate Monocle 24‘s live streaming with coverage from around the world into your day.

In my first radio piece for Monocle 24, I address the simple yet deceptive question; what makes a city new? In order to answer this question, I traveled to the West Bank uber-settlement Ariel along with my colleague Radio France’s Emilie Baujard. The piece aired on the weekly program The Urbanist, which explores various aspects of city living and urban theory. I suggest that you subscribe to podcast here if you find these issues to be of interest. In the meantime, you can listen to my segment here.

Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza celebrated the return of their loved ones last Sunday as the final wave of prisoners were released in an exchange between Hamas and Israel. However, one prisoner was notably absent. Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Fatah leader known by many Palestinians as the “prince of resistance”, remains behind bars in Israel despite promises from the Palestinian leadership that his freedom would be secured through the exchange of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. On the eve of the prisoner swap, Barghouti released a 255-page book, written secretly behind bars and smuggled out via lawyers and family members, detailing his experience in Israeli jails.

Barghouti is a figure of towering reverence among Palestinians and even some Israelis, regardless of political persuasion. Yet, he was reluctant to begin a life in the political spotlight. In fact, the Israeli occupation came to him, his long-time friend Sa’ad Nimer noted during a long conversation in a dank Ramallah coffee shop. When Barghouti was just 15, living in the small village of Kober just outside Ramallah, Israeli soldiers shot his beloved dog during a military sweep of the village. From that moment on, Nimer said in a haze of nostalgia, the occupation was a personal issue for Barghouti.

A natural leader with admirable charisma and an unwavering hatred of Israeli occupation, Barghouti has been an active political leader since the early 1980s. At age 18, during one of his early stints in an Israeli prison for political organising, he was elected the prisoner representative, a task which required him to unify competing political affiliations of prisoners and negotiate with Israeli authorities. The appointment foreshadowed a long career of uniting Palestinians regardless of political agenda.

Despite his vocal support for the two-state solution and attempts at reconciliation with Israeli civil society, Barghouti has remained a puzzling and aggressive figure for Israel. “When Marwan got out of jail the second time [in 1982 at age 23], the Israelis did not know what to do with him,” said Nimer, who is the director of the Free Marwan Baghouti Campaign based in Ramallah. In the early 1980s, Barghouti was a primary organiser in the Shabibia movement, a Fatah-based student group that campaigned for better education standards in Palestine. The movement, still active in the West Bank, was a primary organising vehicle of the First Intifada.

While not overtly against the occupation, Barghouti’s early political activity was understood by Israel as a threat and he was deported to Jordan under extraordinary circumstances. According to Nimer, “Jordan was not taking deportees at the time, so the Israelis just put him on a helicopter and dropped him into the middle of the Jordanian desert, desperate to get rid of him”.

From Jordan, Barghouti helped organise the First Intifada, relaying messages and tactics to Palestinians, mostly aligned with Shabibia, in the West Bank. After the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1994 he returned to the West Bank as a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the parliament of the Palestinian Authority, and embraced the peace process wholeheartedly.

During his time as a PLC member, he maintained a tough stance on corruption inside Palestinian politics and won himself many enemies in the upper echelons of power in the West Bank and Gaza. Unlike many of his colleagues in the PLC, Barghouti was never appointed to public office and derived his political capital directly from the people who consistently provided him with strong electoral results.

For Kadoura Fares, the current president of the Palestinian Prisoners Association and former member of the PLC, Barghouti’s pragmatic approach to peace during the 1990s demonstrated his overarching desire to end Israeli occupation at all costs. “We had a meeting with Israeli officials in Jerusalem in 1996,” Fares told me in his comfortable Ramallah office adorned with paintings of the Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. “I was very worried because of the negative reaction of many Palestinians towards meeting with the Israelis, but Marwan calmed me down. He told me that it was the time for peace and we must pursue it despite the public pressure. He would always say that there is a time for peace and a time for resistance. It was a time for peace.”

When Oslo collapsed and the Second Intifada engulfed Israel and the Palestinian territories in violence, Barghouti embraced armed resistance. He assumed a leadership position in Fatah’s armed wing, coordinating attacks against the Israeli military in the West Bank and Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv. It is for these activities that Israelis understand Barghouti as a terrorist leader. His friends and colleagues maintain that his support of armed resistance as a vehicle to achieving an end to occupation was in line with the popular sentiments expressed on the street at the time.

“He got credibility for supporting armed resistance from the Palestinian street,” recalls Laila Jamal, a member of the Palestinian Authority’s media department from the village of Salfit in the central West Bank. “During that time, we saw the occupation in action and everyone supported armed resistance. He understood this and acted in line with the popular sentiment.”

Barghouti was arrested by Israeli forces conducting sweeps in Ramallah in April 2002 while he was a sitting member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. He was quickly transferred to Israel for trial in a civilian court on multiple counts of murder including authorising and organising an attack in Tel Aviv in which many civilians were killed, attempted murder and membership in a terrorist organisation.

Citing the illegitimacy of the Israeli legal system over occupied Palestinians, Barghouti refused to accept the charges or stage a defence in the Tel Aviv court. During the drawn out proceedings, he delivered impassioned and researched speeches arguing that the court and the practices of the Israeli military in the West Bank were illegal under international law.

He never recognised the authority of the Israeli court system from his first statement to the judge in which he proclaimed, “I am a political leader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, elected by my people. Israel has no right to try me, to accuse me, judge me. This is a violation of international law. I have a right to resist occupation.” Dismissing the allegation, Israel charged him with five life sentences for murdering Israelis and 40 years imprisonment for attempted murder, which he is currently serving.

Since his conviction, Barghouti has done what he knows best; actively campaigning for the reunification of Palestinian political factions. After the 2006 Hamas-Fatah split, which resulted in bloody infighting among the factions, Barghouti organised a prisoners’ campaign with members of Hamas, Fatah as well as PFLP and DFLP that called for immediate reunification. According to those close to him, like Fares, his work on Palestinian unity is a reason why so many Palestinian politicians are afraid of his freedom and a possible reason why he was left out of the recent prisoner swap.

***

If there is one experience that has the potential to unify the Palestinian people, it is the experience of being a prisoner in an Israeli military jail. Barghouti’s new book, One Thousand Nights in Solitude, is, at its core, a book about dealing with the Israeli prison system as a Palestinian. Reading like an instruction manual for coping with the experiences of interrogation and prolonged detainment, the book breaks new ground in the underreported subject of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian political prisoners.

Israel’s military court system has processed roughly 750,000 Palestinians according to the Red Crescent, but exact numbers are hard to obtain. In fact, any sort of exact information about Israel’s military jail system is difficult to find given its role as one of the primary Israeli mechanisms of controlling Palestinian dissent and nascent resistance to the occupation.

According to a recent expose by the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz, military courts have an astonishingly high conviction rate of 99.74 per cent. Many Palestinian defendants are put through a programme of psychological and physical torture that often results in coerced testimonies necessary in the maintenance of a high conviction rate. Haaretz has also released reports seemingly confirming the widespread belief that torture is widely used and that Israeli military judges are often aware that information used in tribunals is obtained through psychological and physical torture.

“He is trying to create a civil resistance inside the military prison system,” said Majad Abdel Hamid, a young artist and political activist in Ramallah. “If all Palestinians refused to recognise the legitimacy of the Israeli military court system, Israel would be in big trouble. This is partly what the new book is about.”

Kept in solitary confinement for an extended period and put through various periods of psychological and even physical torture, Barghouti’s book details the tenacity required to not wilt under such difficult conditions. In the first chapter, he describes in verbose language how Israel used various interrogators to coerce information out of him regarding senior Fatah leaders in the West Bank. This common procedure was extremely tough on Barghouti since, in the words of Sa’ad Nimer, “they wanted information tying Yasser Arafat to terrorism and they never got it from Marwan”.

Following a political career best understood as leading by example, Barghouti sets out to demonstrate how Palestinians can achieve a meaningful non-violent resistance against the military court system. In addition to the practical information of surviving within the Israeli prison system, he details his arguments for Palestinian political unity as a means of resistance to Israeli occupation.

The book devotes great detail to his three years housed in a tiny cell (measuring one by 1.5 metres) in solitary confinement. It is from this experience that the title, One Thousand Nights in Solitude was born.
Fadwa Barghouti is a carefully appointed woman who has spearheaded her husband’s awareness campaign since the beginning of his current imprisonment. From the same village of Kober, Fadwa is a distant relative of Marwan, sharing the same fourth-generation great grandfather. Sitting in her comfortable office overlooking the Muqata compound where Yasser Arafat was confined by Israeli forces at the height of the Second Intifada, Fadwa remains confident that her husband will be released soon, but is visibly upset at the recent failure by Hamas to gain his freedom. “I know why he was not released,” she told me sipping sugary tea, “but I am not going to tell you.”

Sitting under the ubiquitous photo of her husband surrounded by Israeli prison guards with handcuffed hands held high, she glowingly reports that he is using his time in prison to enrich himself intellectually.

He is a ferocious reader, consuming books in English, Arabic, Hebrew and French on topics ranging from French colonial rule in Algeria to the latest biographies of the former US president Bill Clinton and Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister. He also has a deep respect for the work of Paulo Coehlo and the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Liebowitz. Additionally, Barghouti has written two books and completed his PhD from the University of Cairo entitled, The Legislative and Political Performance of the Palestinian Legislative Council and its Contribution to the Democratic Process in Palestine from 1996 to 2008. His doctorate, like the recent book, was smuggled out of jail one page at a time and took years to complete.
In addition to maintaining public and international pressure on Palestinian and Israeli leaders for the release of her husband, Fadwa has had to raise her family without a father. One of their three sons is now living in the United Kingdom while completing his higher education. His other two sons and one daughter live in the West Bank and are known in Ramallah for their active social lives and lack of interest in Palestinian national politics. Fadwa’s dedication to her husband is demonstrated in the romantic language used to describe his meaning to the Palestinian people.

“Marwan Barghouti is the natural leader of the Palestinian people,” Fadwa said. “In opinion polls, he is regularly shown to be the choice of Palestinians because of his adherence to the two-state solution, his fight against corruption and for the rights of women and democracy. The people want Marwan Barghouti to lead them in their fight against occupation.”

Palestinians are exhausted from the emotional and physical toll of the Second Intifada. Most express dismay at the infighting that has plagued the political establishment since the 2006 fallout between Hamas and Fatah but offer little solution for dealing with it. There is also a sense that the political establishment is no longer working in the interests of the people despite the highly popular attempt to achieve statehood recognition at the United Nations earlier this year, which Barghouti supported from jail.

“I think what is needed now from the leadership is to have honesty and self-reflection. In a way, this is one of the strengths of Marwan Barghouti in that he is honest with Palestinians. He doesn’t b******* us. We are sick and tired of Palestinian leaders who [do],” said Majd Abdel Hamid, who is part of the March 15th youth movement that demanded reconciliation of political factions earlier this year after the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia reshaped the Middle East. He does not support any Palestinian political party, like many in the March 15th movement, but believes that Barghouti has the power to open a new chapter in the Palestinian national struggle if only he is released from jail.

Dancing around the subject of the recent prisoner swap, Fadwa Barghouti remains confident that the current political leadership is afraid of a free Barghouti. For five years she was told by Fatah and Hamas leaders that her husband’s freedom would come in the form of the captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. But, at the last minute, a month before the controversial deal between Hamas and Israel was signed in Egypt, Barghouti, along with nine other senior political prisoners, were dropped from this list.

“I believe that there was a weak attempt in the prisoners swap to free my husband,” Fadwa said, asserting that securing her husband’s release was indeed possible. “I am talking about the Palestinian leadership of Hamas and Fatah. The people have been demanding his release for the last 10 years and they simply ignored the people’s will.”

Indeed, Marwan Barghouti is often cited as a potential replacement for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Barghouti along with Kadoura Fares and Mohammad Dahlan threatened to begin an independent party called Al-Mustaqbal (The Future) in 2005 after Abbas offered Barghouti second place in Fatah despite clear indications that Barghouti would win national election. Ultimately, according to Fares, Barghouti felt that a second party would harm Palestinian unity and ran on the Fatah party ticket, securing a seat in the PLC as a Fatah member.

Due to the belief that Barghouti would be part of the recent prisoner swap, the grassroots movement to free him has lost momentum in recent years.

But, according to Fadwa Barghouti, things have changed and with the release of his new book there are renewed efforts to pressure the Palestinian leadership to negotiate his release. The Free Marwan Barghouti campaign is planning to stage several demonstrations in March under the banner that Palestinians refuse negotiations with Israel without a free Barghouti to lead them.

“The pressure is on the politicians, all the politicians, to release Marwan if they want to move forward with negotiations with Israel,” Fadwa told me. “Palestinians want their leader to move them forward and the political establishment will have to deal with this reality in the new year.”

Whenever discussions arise about Marwan Barghouti in Israel or Palestine, one name is unavoidable: Nelson Mandela. In the 1990s, dovish Israeli politicians and political thinkers such as Uri Avenry began calling Barghouti Palestine’s Mandela. The comparison is not without merit: both leaders have refused to swear off armed resistance, both have spent long periods of time in jail, unwilling to cooperate with authorities, and both have enjoyed a unique loyalty from their people that has transcended political affiliations. Israeli society will continue to see Barghouti as a symbol of the violent Second Intifada, but after his inevitable release, they will likely be seeing him sitting at a negotiations table working to end the conflict and dismantle the Israeli occupation.

After the statehood campaign in the UN that failed to achieve independence, Palestinians are left with a power vacuum and a tough road to reconciliation. Now, more than ever, a leader is required to bring Palestine’s political factions together. When asked who might be the leader to open a new chapter in Palestinian politics, Kadura Fares paused, and took a long drag from his ever present cigarette, “it is not necessarily one individual who can do that with the snap of his fingers. Abu Mazen tried, he did a lot, but it was not enough, but I do think that Marwan could be the person.”

Published in The National on 23 December 2011

Just ask Fakhri Barghouti.

Mr Barghouti walked out of jail in October, part of the first phase of the Egypt-brokered swap of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for a captured Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group Hamas for five years.

A cousin of the imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, he discovered that liberation from an Israeli jail did not necessarily mean freedom from Israeli harassment – a cautionary tale for those prisoners released late on Sunday in the second and final phase of the exchange.

“Shortly after I was released, soldiers raided my house at 2am and gave me orders to come to the Ofer military prison the following day,” Mr Barghouti recalled from his home in Kober, a village near Ramallah. “It was all very threatening and they conducted a number of humiliating searches during the interrogation. The army wanted to send me the message that they are still in control. ”

Mr Barghouti, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1978 for killing an Israeli soldier with a knife near the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, said that many of his fellow prisoners who were released in the first phase of the swap have been subjected to similar searches and interrogations.

In one instance, Mr Barghouti said, Israeli soldiers raided the house of a recently freed prisoner and forced his family to stay outside for hours in the middle of the night, only to take him away for interrogation at Ofer.

Despite criticism from Palestinian officials involved in the exchange, Israel attached strict terms to the release of many of the prisoners. According to the Issa Qaraqe, the minister of prisoner affairs for the Palestinian Authority, most of those released in October are required to report weekly or monthly to Israeli authorities – an Israeli tool, Mr Qaraqe said, to track the movements of their former captives.

“It is like they were never really let out of jail,” said Kadoura Fares, the president of the Palestinian Prisoners Association in Ramallah. “I warned Hamas not to sign on to these conditions, which deprive prisoners their dignity to live in quiet freedom. But they did it anyway.”

Families of recently released prisoners have also paid a price. Israel has reportedly barred the relatives of prisoners from visiting them in Jordan, where they were deported after the release. Israeli authorities said the families were denied exit permits for unspecified “security reasons”.

A spokesman for the Israeli military refused to comment on the rules for freed Palestinian prisoners, saying “the information is spread across a number of departments including the ministry of defence”.

The release conditions have become a source of tension between the Fatah and Hamas. In the run-up to the prisoner swap, Hamas officials announced that they would not accept an agreement with Israel that included strict conditions on freed prisoners and the deportation of former prisoners.

In the end, however, they agreed to a deal stipulating that more than 200 prisoners would not be able to return home to the West Bank upon their release.

Eighteen prisoners from East Jerusalem and the West Bank were deported to the Gaza Strip for a period of three years, according to the Palestinian prisoner-rights organisation Addameer. Another 146 prisoners were transferred to Gaza for an indefinite period, and 41 were exiled to Jordan and other neighbouring countries.

“Hamas is claiming that conditions on recently freed prisoners and deportations were not part of the agreement. But in fact they were part of the officially signed document. Now they are trying to deny responsibility for these conditions,” Mr Qaraqe said.

Fakhri Barghouti is happy to be back with his people but has a hard time reconciling life under occupation and the conditions placed on his movement.

“I left prison but the occupation is still here. I have more freedom than in prison, but it’s still the same occupation,” he said. “It’s just that I have more freedom of movement.”

Published in The National on 20 December 2011

Often protesters never even reach the edge of the village; crowd-control measures by the military regularly include barrages of tear gas and rubber bullets. Palestinian villagers claim that hundreds of protesters have been injured, some seriously, in the Nabi Saleh demonstrations. But no one had been killed there – until last week.

The death of 28-year-old Mustafa Tamimi may seem to have little in common with the more numerous deaths of protesters in Cairo over the past few days. Indeed the demonstrations are different from each other in many ways. But in protests from Tunis to Cairo to little Nabi Saleh, the use of tear gas by authorities, and the increasing number of related fatalities, has become a common thread in recent months.

Mr Tamimi’s injuries occurred amid a fairly common occurrence in the West Bank: protesters were throwing stones at armoured Israeli vehicles. As the demonstration slowed towards the end of the day, one Israeli jeep stopped as it was making its way out of the village. The vehicle’s back door opened wide enough for a tear-gas launcher, known to Israeli soldiers as a “ringo”, to fire a single canister of the gas.

Mr Tamimi, who was standing three metres behind the jeep, was hit directly in the face by the canister. The next morning he was pronounced dead in an Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv. Mustafa Tamimi was the 20th Palestinian protester killed by the Israeli army in the last eight years of unarmed West Bank demonstrations, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Many of the deaths have resulted from the negligent and unlawful practices of Israeli soldiers.

Israeli army regulations stipulate that soldiers are not allowed to fire tear-gas canisters directly at protesters, since doing so can turn sublethal crowd-control devices into deadly instruments of war. There are also allegations that protesters in Cairo were killed just by inhaling the gas. Palestinians have opened court cases over violations of the Israeli regulation, but no case has resulted in the prosecution of soldiers. To make the situation more frustrating for Palestinians, Israeli soldiers often demonstrate extreme restraint when dealing with Jewish settlers who riot whenever an illegal outpost draws the army’s attention.

In 2009, Bassem Abu Rahman was killed instantly when an Israeli soldier fired a tear gas-canister directly at him from close range during a demonstration against the separation barrier in the village of Bil’in.

Then, last January, Jawahar Abu Rahmah, Bassem’s sister, was killed in the same village after prolonged exposure to tear gas used to disperse demonstrators. And an activist from the United States, Tristan Anderson, was left paralysed after he was hit directly with a canister during a demonstration in the village of Ni’ilin in 2008.

US companies like the Pennsylvania based Combined Systems Inc (CSI) are among the primary suppliers of tear gas used in the West Bank. After Jawahar Abu Rahmah died as a result of breathing CSI tear gas in Bil’in, a number of pro-Palestinian advocacy groups staged protests and launched a boycott of the company. CSI officials have remained silent on the use of their product by Israeli forces.

One important consequence of this year’s Arab revolutions has been renewed interest in the use of US-made tear gas to control social protests across the Middle East. A number of US tear gas manufacturers have ramped up production, while profits have been soaring as governments from Bahrain to Egypt demand more and more tear gas to suppress political revolt.

The result has been deadly. In January, the 32-year-old French photographer Lucas Mebrouk Dolega was killed by a tear-gas canister fired at close range by Tunisian police. And hundreds of protesters in Egypt have claimed that tear gas canisters made by CSI were fired at them, often at close range, by security forces. According to the leading Egyptian daily Al Ahram, port officials in Suez recently protested against unloading a shipment of CSI-manufactured tear gas destined for the Supreme Council of Armed Forces in Cairo.

Amnesty International has joined the port officials’ protest, issuing a sharply worded statement singling out the use of CSI tear gas in Egypt, and calling on the US government to stop approving sales of the product to Egypt because of its misuse against protesters. Tear gas has become the main instrument by which authoritarian regimes control social protests that challenge their power in the Middle East. Used tear-gas canisters litter the streets of Cairo and Tunis. Identical canisters allow the Israeli army to crush unarmed demonstrations throughout the West Bank, without attracting widespread condemnation from the international community. What seems certain is that until tear gas is viewed as the deadly weapon it can be, authoritarian governments will continue to use it with impunity.

This piece was originally published in The National on 17 December 2011

For nearly two decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been characterised by a cycle of endless negotiations and episodic violence. Given the entrenchment of Israeli occupation, seen most clearly in its continued building of settlements in the West Bank, few observers see the viability of an equitable two-state settlement arrived at through negotiations.

The PA is now firmly engaged in what is perceived by many in the West Bank as a last-ditch effort to save the negotiations process by elevating their status inside Palestine and in the international community, thereby strengthening their position in relation to Israel.

Viewed from the standpoint of a negotiated two-state solution, the Palestinian statehood bid is not far-fetched, extreme or irrational. But the question remains, do the majority of Palestinians still believe in a process that has brought increased dispossession and a fracturing of the Palestinian political body?

“The Palestinians have lost confidence in the negotiations. How to get confidence again … I believe, this is the challenge,” says Ahmad Queri’a, former prime minister of the PA and current member of the executive committee of the PLO. Sitting in his office in Abu Dis on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, Queri’a noted: “I believe that we need to think about a new mechanism for negotiations.”

Underlying the statehood bid is a mounting crisis of legitimacy for a Palestinian leadership that has been unable to bring an end to the occupation through negotiations. According to a report released by the International Crisis Group in early September, this predicament has only been enhanced by the increasing economic strain being experienced by the PA, and the renewed motivation for change inspired by the Arab Spring.

Although Palestinian society remains emotionally and physically exhausted from the Second Intifada, the possibility of a confrontation between Palestinians and the PA leadership is growing as their economic situation becomes more acute and the government is unable to offer any positive programme for the future.

In an effort to defuse the frustration, the PLO has pushed forward with the statehood bid, but remained reticent over its exact contours and has yet to declare a definition of failure.

“The statehood bid is a corrective measure designed to put the negotiations process back on track after years of Israeli violations,” the PNC executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi told an audience of young Palestinian intellectuals in Ramallah in a rare public lecture by a high-ranking PLO official. Ashrawi also noted that “a state is our legitimate right and we believe that it will be a psychologically helpful move for the Palestinian people to go forward and claim our right”.

Despite the air of celebration surrounding Mahmoud Abbas’s speech, West Bank Palestinians remained largely unsure of where they stood on the issue. Even at the highest levels of the political establishment, officials privately voiced concern over the plan. Indeed, it has been difficult to pin down any two bureaucrats who could express the same reasons for the leadership’s decision to pursue this initiative. Popular opinion is even more varied, where it is clear no consensus exists. This is due, in no small part, to the lack of discourse between politicians and the wider populace over the issue, who themselves remained ambiguous.

“They have not explained this initiative to us,” said Nour Haider, a Palestinian political activist, after Ashrawi’s lecture in Ramallah. “We have not even been allowed to vote on it.”

This lack of debate has also raised concerns once again over the inability of average Palestinians to take part in a process that is shaping their future. The principal vehicle for achieving democratic consensus among Palestinians worldwide remains the PLO and its highest body, the Palestinian National Council (PNC), still recognised as “the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.

However, as a result of the Oslo Accords and the profound effect it had on transforming the Palestinian national movement from a resistance model to a proto-state governing body, this latter institution suffered years of neglect as attention and resources were channelled away from the PLO and into the nascent PA.

Today, the PNC is composed of an ageing and increasingly disconnected membership that has failed to democratically update itself for years. A revealing example of this was the appointment of Hanan Ashrawi as a member of the PLO’s executive committee in 2009 because there were not enough living members on the committee to achieve quorum.

For grassroots activists, the statehood bid, while appreciated, is considered as lacking in input and authorisation from the wider Palestinian population. It is viewed by many as an unrepresentative initiative that has ignored rank and file Palestinians, particularly those living outside the occupied territories.

“The logic is very obvious,” says Dr Mamdouh Al-Aker, commissioner general of the Independent Commission on Human Rights.

“If I am going to make a move, which represents a strategic shift, it only needs a consensus within the Palestinian body politic. By marginalising the PLO, all Palestinians in the diaspora were … kept outside the decision-making process.”

If the bid at the UN ends up going nowhere, Palestinians may increasingly turn to PLO reform as a means of re-establishing consensus. Even more dramatic will be the role of Hamas and other political factions in this reformulation process.

“It is very important for the Palestinians to have the PLO functioning and reformed because they don’t have much trust in the PA and the relationship between the PA and Israel is in doubt,” says Dr Saad Nimr, professor of politics and Palestinian society at Birzeit University in the West Bank.

Many other factors will play a role in determining what happens in the aftermath of the statehood bid, particularly the actions of other states. Israel’s hysterical reaction, best displayed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the UN General Assembly, coupled with a clearly partial US president, has confirmed what we already knew: that Palestinians will face a lengthy and uncertain application process in the UN.

Meanwhile, the US Congress, presumably with the blessing of Israel, announced last week that it would withhold upwards of $200m in aid to the PA. That money was reportedly earmarked for food aid, health care and capital necessary to build the Palestinian economy. Far from punishing the Palestinian leaders responsible for the statehood bid, or the PA security apparatus that Israel has come to depend on, these withheld funds will directly affect the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

Underneath the surface of this bid lays the prospect of another process, even more languorous and complex than the one that has stalled the realisation of Palestinian independence for nearly two decades. Indeed, it is the likelihood that this latest initiative will languish at the UN, unable to produce positive results for a broad base of Palestinians, that stands the greatest chance of provoking real change.

The crisis of legitimacy the PA has fostered now threatens to topple the entire framework from which it was conceived. Contrary to the perception that the UN bid is an alternate route for Palestinians, its chief architect Mahmoud Abbas has engineered it to reinforce his position at the negotiation table, a framework he has staked his entire career on succeeding. If the process of negotiations fails, Abbas does not have an alternative plan and will likely have to concede an open space for others to challenge for stewardship of the Palestinian national struggle.

True to Abbas’s words, Palestine is poised for a rebirth, but maybe not the way he imagines it. Abbas’s efforts to save the stagnant peace process with Israel could spell the end of his political career and produce a strategic reformulation of Palestinian political structures as well as the nature of the national struggle itself.

Published in The National and co-written with Omar Rahman.

Next week, a group of young Palestinians will board Israeli settler buses in the West Bank with the intention of traveling to East Jerusalem. The activists will likely be greeted by fully armed Israeli settlers, as well as soldiers. The threat of Israeli violence has not deterred Palestinians who maintain that they are prepared to pay a price to highlight Israel’s segregationist policies in the West Bank.

While not officially segregated, Israeli bus lines often pass through Jewish-only settlements which dot the rugged West Bank landscape. Palestinian entry to Jewish settlements is strictly forbidden, unless, of course, Palestinians are engaged in construction of the settlements, most of which are considered illegal under international law.

The upcoming protest event is being labelled by organisers as the Palestinian “Freedom Rides”. In the early 1960s, white and black activists boarded segregated buses in the American south in an effort to draw attention to the racism of Jim Crow legislation. The protests caused panic in the south and helped chip away at segregation in the US. Palestinian organisers hope that the same effect will take place in the West Bank although they understand that their battle begins with challenging the narrative of the conflict.

West Bank Freedom Rides are the latest in a series of non-violent efforts by Palestinian activists attempting to challenge the dominant narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which Palestinian human and civil rights take a back seat to Israeli security concerns. Our general understanding is dominated by the Israeli narrative of the conflict as one in which peace and security are the major factors as opposed to rights and citizenship. Earlier this summer, I wrote the following in the opinion pages of the Mail & Guardian:

In addition to the Freedom Rides planned for the West Bank, activists from around the globe boarded two ships last week headed for Gaza from Turkey carrying supplies for the besieged territory. This latest ‘Flotilla’ was another political stunt designed to highlight Israel’s control over of the world’s most densely populated area. Instead of using social media to organise demonstrations, Palestinian activists and their supporters are using the platforms to disseminate accounts of their protests in immediate and intimate ways. Additionally, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine convened last week in Cape Town in order to analyse the ‘facts on the ground’ concerning Israel’s behaviour in the occupied territories.

Challenges to the narrative are not just taking place merely at grassroots civil-society level. Last week, the Palestinian Authority claimed a major victory as Unesco — the United Nation’s educational, scientific and cultural body — recognised Palestine as a full member. The recognition threw Israel and the US into a tailspin resulting in the US ending its funding of the international body best known for women’s equality projects in the developing world. The international community, on the other hand, demonstrated a willingness to recognise the cultural heritage of Palestine, which has long been under attack by an aggressive Israeli narrative that casts Palestinians as an aggressive and stateless people.

The strategy is simple: affirm Palestinian existence and right to life free from occupation through nonviolent action. Emerging new media platforms such as Twitter have proven effective in getting the message through to the international community. As the protests get bolder and Israel’s reaction becomes increasingly violent, it is only a matter of time before the weak status quo in Israel/Palestine is shattered, likely to be replaced with a Palestinian expression of mass civil disobedience.

The piece originally appeared on Thought Leader