Tag: Sari Nusseibeh

Jerusalem Palestinian families come out against building on their ancestors graves

Members of prominent Palestinian families from Jerusalem have come out today in protest against plans to build a Museum of Tolerance on top of part of the ancient Mamilla Cemetery where their ancestors are buried. Until now, much of the opposition to the building plan came from Israeli and Jewish rights activists — including Danny Seidemann, a lawyer who founded Ir-Amim (which works for an equitably shared Jerusalem), and Gershon Baskin, co-Director of the Israeli Palestinian Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), who have argued, in part, that the construction offended their Jewish beliefs and values, and was against Jewish religious and moral teachings. They have tried, through the Israeli court system, and through appeals directed mainly to Israeli and international Jewish public opinion, to block the construction of the Museum of Tolerance on the Mamilla Cemetary in Jerusalem. Excavations began on the site in 2005. It is now surrounded by a high white metal fence, with security cameras posted all around, and armed guards in navy blue shirts and trousers, wearing black sunglasses. The initiative being taken by the Palestinian families today is reaching out to a larger audience, and includes filing a petition today in Geneva to various United Nations Human Rights bodies, and to the Paris-based United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO), which is responsible for protecting the world’s cultural heritage. The petition is also being addressed to the Swiss Government, which is the repository for the Geneva Conventions.

Mamilla Cemetary - http://www.mamillacampaign.org

More information is available on the website of the New-York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, here. There is also a website for the 60 Palestinian families from Jerusalem who have launched this campaign, here.  This Mamilla Campaign website says that “Sixty individual petitioners who have attested that their ancestors … are interred in Mamilla (Ma’man Allah) Cemetery … including the following Jerusalem notables: * Abdullah Ali Koloti * Ahmad Agha Duzdar * Al-Amir Esa Bin Muhamad al-Hakari * Bader el-Din Zain * Ghaleb Jawad Ismail ‘Aref Musa Taher Abdul-Samad Ben Abdulatif Husseini * Jamal Eddine Al-Imam * Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn `Abdullah al-Dayri  al-Khalidi al-`Absi * Omar Saleh Zain * Qadi Burhan al-Din Ibn Nusayba * Qadi Mahmoud al-Khalidi * Salah El-Rahal al-Sadi * Shaykh Ahmad Ali Dajani * Shaykh Said Abdullah Ansari * TajuDin Abul Wafa Mohammad Ben ‘AlauDin ‘Ali Ben AbulWafa Al-Badri al-Husseini * Uthman Suleiman al-Kurdi * Yousef and Ali Beks Hallak * Yousef H.A. al-Kurd  Individual Petitioners (at 1 February 2010).” According to the Mamilla Campaign website, the petitioners also include Adnan Husseini, who is the Palestinian Authority’s appointed Governor of Jerusalem; AbdulQader Husseini, the son of the late Faisal Husseini, who was the PLO representative in Jerusalem and a member of the Palestinian team incorporated in the Jordanian delegation to the Madrid Peace Conference; Rafiq Husseini, an advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas; Huda Imam, directrice of the Al-Quds University Center located in the Souk al-Qattanin in the Old City of East Jerusalem; and Sari Nusseibeh, head of Al-Quds University in Abu Dis. In a press conference held in Jerusalem this morning, moderated by Huda Imam, several of the signatories briefly spoke, according to Adnan Abdel Razek (a former UN staff member who is an expert on issues related to Palestinian property seized after the 1948 war), who attended:  He said that Asem Khalidi noted that a number of men from Saleh ed-Din’s army, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, were buried in the Mamilla Cemetary.  Hajj Toufiq Abu Zuhra, Director (“al-Qayam”) of the Mamilla Waqf explained his efforts to block the excavations in the Israeli Supreme Court, and he reported that he recently found wood shavings scattered on other areas of the Mamilla Cemetary, which he and others from the Mamilla Waqf went to clean up — he said he feared this indicated that other areas of the cemetary would be obliterated and claimed for other purposes.  And Adnan Husseini called what was happening immoral and illegal. Much of the momentum behind today’s initiative comes from Palestinians who grew up and who still live in the diaspora, many in the United States. Press conferences are being held in Jerusalem, Geneva, and Los Angeles, home of the Simon Wiesenthal Center which is moving forward with its plans to build the Museum of Tolerance on top of the Mamilla Cemetary. Continue reading Jerusalem Palestinian families come out against building on their ancestors graves

New Fatah leadership – results leaking, not announced

As far as I can tell — and I took the trouble to come again to Bethlehem and even to stay overnight, and though I have made and received at least a dozen phone calls this morning — here has not yet been an official announcement for results of who won seats in the Fatah General Conference voting for either the “new” Central Committee or the “new” Revolutionary Council.

However, there have been indications that the results were tallied hours ago, perhaps soon after midnight for the 18 seats up for election in the Central Committee, and perhaps by early this morning for the 80 seats on the Revolutionary Council.

Of course, what this means is that the Palestinian and Arab media have published various lists of supposedly winning names which are said to be NOT FINAL.

However, it appears clear that nobody who opposed The Machine won.

And two of the winners are Mohammad Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, two former leaders of Fatah/Palestinian Preventive Security (Dahlan in Gaza and Rajoub in the West Bank), who have an intense rivalry.

Ahmad Qureia (Abu Alaa’), who headed the Palestinian negotiations team during the Annapolis Process, and who, like President and Party leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), was one of the key negotiators during the secret negotiations that led up to the Oslo process in the early 1990s, was not on the list that was read to me at breakfast time.

Also not elected, according to my source, are Qaddura Fares, Hussam Khader (who said he knew he would not win, but ran anyway — and one Fatah operative told me that he saw Hussam Qader’s name on many of the unofficial lists that were circulating before the vote, so he had a good chance), and Sari Nusseibeh (for whom this candidacy appears to have been a political come-back and a political rehabiiltation, and he can now come back in from the cold. Nusseibeh was interviewed for an hour on Palestine TV last night, and none of his red lines were crossed, he was not personally attacked. Nusseibeh did say that this sixth Fatah General Conferene or Congress shows that neither the Americans nor the Europeans have anything to teach the Palestinians about democracy.

Among the other reported winners are Salim Zaanoun, Abu Maher – Mohammed Ghneim, Tawfik at-Tirawi, Hussein ash-Sheikh, and Othman Abu Gharbiya, Nabil Shaath, Saeb Erekat, Nasser Qudwa, Mohammed Shtayyah. Then, Sultan Abu Al- Eineen, Jamal Mheisen, Mohammed a-Madani, Mahmoud al-Aloul.

UPDATE: Apparently, our earlier report that Tayib Abdel Rahim was one of the 18 winning candidates was wrong. I am told he came in 19th. I am also told that the names of the other two winning names that were not available to me earlier are: Azzam al-Ahmad and Abbas Zaki, the official PLO representative in Lebanon. We are also told that President Abbas has sent out the word that the results are NOT FINAL.

And of course, another winner was the highest-profile Palestinian political prisoner, Marwan Barghouthi, currently serving several life sentences in an Israeli prison for leading the Fatah Tanzim during the second intifada — but who even some Israeli ministers would like to see freed. He was on all the (unofficial) lists. “It would be a shame if Marwan didn’t win”, one Fatah source said during the voting.

The interesting question now will be, what will Abu Mazen do with the four seats that he has been authorized to nominate (he has to then get the approval of two-thirds of the new Central Committee, and two-thirds of the new Revolutionary Council), to officially appoint these nominees. I am willing to bet that three of the four appointees will be: Abu Alaa’, Farouk Kaddoumi, and Sari Nusseibeh.

The Revolutionary Council results will not be ready until later today, I was told. But I noticed one person being told who (probably himself) won the 17th place out of 641 candidates.

Sari Nusseibeh is surprise candidate for Fatah Central Committee

In a surprise move (rumored a week ago by Fatah activists in Jerusalem), Sari Nusseibeh has thrown his hat into the ring of Palestinian high politics, and is running as a candidate for Fatah’s Central Committee.

Nusseibeh is regarded as a master politician, and the move as highly tactical.

He has also been denounced for what is generally called political “moderation” — though longer explanation would be required to describe exactly what that means in terms of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and internal Palestinian politics. He retreated tactically for years into his work of building up Al-Quds (Jerusalem) University, now behind The Wall in Abu Dis; he formerly taught philosophy at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah.

But, for those who want to ensure Fatah’s appeal to the “international community”, Nusseibeh would be an important choice.

If this Fatah Conference is an “Abu Mazen show” — as many delegates and media observers claim — then Sari Nusseibeh’s candidacy can be seen as a result of effective back-room lobbying. It is unlikely that he would have nominated himself without prior assurances of big support from Abu Mazen.

However, Palestinian analysts at the Bethlehem conference say that they doubt he has a reach chance among the general delegates to the conference. “He was the first person to sell out the Palestinian right of return, and he is a member of Fatah”, said one analyst, “while Fatah’s position remains that the right to return is an inalienable right of the Palestinian people”.

Nusseibeh himself did not join the active campaigning, and was not hopping from table to table or making and receiving promises at the Jacir Palace International Hotel in Bethlehem — or even at the Bethlehem Hotel where slightly less prominent delegates were staying.

I did see him walk, alone, with one colleague, out of the Terra Sancta meeting hall on Saturday afternoon, going towards a car park to leave.

Nusseibeh was appointed the PLO representative in Jerusalem following the death of Faisal Husseini in 2001, but his attempts at activism were blocked by Israel’s reprisal policy of suppressing Palestinian political activity in East Jerusalem that was developed in response to Palestinian attacks upon Israelis at the start of the Second Intifada. He was arrested several times, and he was beaten several times as well, including by student Fatah activists, then withdrew into academia.

He did foray back into politics briefly in 2003 when he and the former head of the Israeli secret service (Shin Bet) Ami Ayalon (who is definitely not an adept politician) launched an initiative — which Nusseibeh, at least, still supports — called “The People’s Voice”, whose aim is to mobilize grassroots support for a two state solution with a return to 1967 borders, Jerusalem as an open city, and a right of return of Palestinian refugees to a (demilitarized) Palestinian state, and Jews having a right of return only to Israel. The “Peoples Voice” is a sort of competition for the Geneva Initiative launched by Yasser Abed Rabbo, now Secretary-General of the PLO, and Yossi Beilin, an Israeli politician who headed the left-wing Meretz Party and who served as the Minister of Justice under Ehud Barak.

In a rare meeting with journalists a year ago, sponsored by Media Central a West Jerusalem organization that tries to help reporters better cover Israel, which we reported http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/69129 here, Nusseibeh announced that he had urged visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in a meeting organized by embassy officials to introduce Brown prominent Jerusalem Palestinians, to “think very seriously about stopping aid to the Palestinians”. [Nusseibeh’s wife, Lucy, is British.] The suggestion, aimed to shock but nonetheless apparently quite serious, ran at counterpurposes to Brown’s visit to the region, which was aimed in part at promoting an “economic road map” to help improve conditions for the Palestinian people living under occupation as a kind of political incentive. The British Prime Minister seemed surprised and taken aback by his suggestion, Nusseibeh said. So, he said, he was bringing his proposal to the media: “My suggestion is to stop this (the European aid)”, Nusseibeh said. “The money being donated is just being wasted”, he said: “It is just sustaining the occupation”. Nusseibeh explained that “The Israelis are happy because they do not have to pay the cost of the occupation. The Europeans are happy because they feel they are doing their part by providing economic assistance … and the Palestinians are happy because we have jobs and we feel free.”

But, Nusseibeh said, “Israel cannot have its cake and eat it, too … Israel cannot continue occupying us and having European Union funds and American dollars”.

The Fateh General Conference decided on Saturday that the first new Central Committee in 20 years will have 18 elected members, plus four Presidential appointees that will have to be gain approval by a two-thirds majority of the Central Council and also of its larger Revolutionary Council.

Voting is now expected to start on Sunday night, and continue into the early morning hours of Monday.

UPDATE: voting is now expected to start at 3 pm on Sunday, and end around midnight. Counting the results is expected to take many hours, and conference planners say the results will not be known until Tuesday morning.

There are now 103 candidates (one withdrew overnight) for the 18 seats in the Central Committee, and some 650 candidates for the Revolutionary Council.

A dramatically more relaxed and lively — even charismatic — Mahmoud Abbas was appointed party President by acclamation on Saturday afternoon, and there were outbursts of flag waving and debka dancing around the hall, despite the 65 votes against the proposal (out of more than 2000 attendees). His new style mesmerized Palestinian journalists and security men watching the scene in the Bethlehem Peace Center, which is also serving as a sort of minimalist press center, on Manger Square in front of the Church of the Nativity, where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.

Bethlehem-based Ma’an News Agency reported today that “The total number of participants in the conference reached 2,325, including 25 Palestinians who were deported from Bethlehem during the siege of the Nativity Church in 2002“. This report can be read in full here .

Continue reading Sari Nusseibeh is surprise candidate for Fatah Central Committee