Introduction to Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context
by Sarah Willen
Willen, Sarah S. 2007. “Introduction.” In Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context, ed. Sarah S. Willen. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
21 views
Seen by:
Download (.pdf) Citizens, "Real" Others, and "Other" Others: Governmentality, Biopolitics, and the Deportation of Undocumented Migrants from Tel Aviv
by Sarah Willen
Willen, Sarah S. 2010. “Citizens, ‘Real’ Others, and ‘Other’ Others: Governmentality, Biopolitics, and the Deportation of Undocumented Migrants from Tel Aviv.” In The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, eds. Durham: Duke University Press.
![](http://photos.academia.edu/1144051/402603/491870/tiny_andrea.vastano.jpg?1327267917 "<strong>Andrea Vastano</strong><br/>University of Naples "L'Orientale""){kind=small}
L'oeuvre de Hilma Granqvist : l'Orient imaginaire confronté à la réalité d'un village palestinien
publié dans la Revue d'Etudes Palestiniennes, no. 105, 2007
4 views
Seen by:
Consociation in a constant state of contingency? The case of the Palestinian Territory
Co-authored with Michelle Pace (2012) in 'Third World Quarterly' 33(3), pp. 541-58
It has become common to regard consociational democracy as a method of managing conflict in ethnically divided... more It has become common to regard consociational democracy as a method of managing conflict in ethnically divided societies but little attention has been paid to its applicability to societies where the primary political cleavage is between secular and religious forces. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by examining the applicability of consociationalism to the case of the Palestinian Territory. We argue that, while Palestinian society is characterised by 'pillarisation' along a secularist/Islamist cleavage, formal power-sharing between the representatives of the two main Palestinian factions, namely Fatah and Hamas, has proved elusive. However, rather than seeking to explain the seeming inability of the factions to share power by reference to the nature of the cleavage, as other authors have done, we instead highlight the contextual factors that have made power sharing difficult to achieve, namely the difficulties Hamas and Fatah face in accepting each other as political partners, and opposition from external actors.
(2012) “Desposeimiento, ocupación y unilateralismo. La dimensión socioeconómica del conflicto israelo-palestino”
en Sanahuja, José Antonio (coord.): Construcción de la paz, seguridad y desarrollo. Visiones, políticas y actores. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2012, pp. 2001-230. ISBN: 978-84-9938-124-4.
Eco-Arsonists, Bomb-Wielding Neighbors & Queer Vegans: Reflecting on Labeling As Reflective Practice [2012]
The following discussion will attempt to draw out aspects of reflective practice a bit more, focusing on the three... more The following discussion will attempt to draw out aspects of reflective practice a bit more, focusing on the three venues touched upon namely: researching the animal and environmental liberation movement, organizing and reporting on the Palestinian intifada, and finally, advocating for a politic of holistic anti-oppression situated in problematizing the animal-human binary and advancing a vegan framework within academic fields of analysis.
16 views
Seen by:
Mounting Israeli soccer violence reflects fading hope in Palestinian peace
By James M. Dorsey
A stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a dwindling number of Palestinians... more
By James M. Dorsey
A stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a dwindling number of Palestinians participating in non-governmental reconciliation efforts and increased racism in Israeli soccer constitute two sides of the same coin: fading hope and interest in peace, hardening battle lines and a resurgence of racism on both sides of the divide.
Yet, the measures being discussed to curb mounting violence on and off the pitch threaten to reduce political and social issues to a problem of law enforcement as the heads of Israel’s 16 premier league club meet to debate how to cope with a situation that is spiralling out of control. The solution to Israel’s soccer violence no doubt involves law enforcement, but a crackdown and harsher penalties are unlikely to restore faith in future Israeli-Palestinian coexistence or mitigate the brutalizing effect on Israeli society of 45 years of occupation of Palestinian land.
Granted, the heads of Israel’s top soccer clubs lack the power to address the larger political and social issues. Their inability to influence political and security decisions has become evident over the past year in what Palestinian soccer officials say is the inability of Israeli sports officials to even ease the restrictions on travel imposed on Palestinian athletes in the West Bank and Gaza. A hotline established last year between the Israeli and Palestinian Olympic committees to tackle such issues has so far produced little results.
"The problem is the Israeli committee is not the relevant authority for the movement of people and equipment. We are trying, but I don't want to embarrass anyone," said Jibril Rajoub, who heads both the Palestinian Football Association and Olympic Committee, in an interview last year.
Nonetheless, there are things the Israeli soccer federation can do to counter an environment of increased polarisation and racially motivated violence in the absence of political will among both Israeli and Palestinian political elites to definitively tackle big ticket issues involved in peace such as settlements, refugees, borders and the future of Jerusalem.
The Israeli Football Association (IFA) and the heads of soccer clubs need to come to grips with two types of albeit inter-related violence: racially-motivated aggression against Palestinians and those that empathise with their cause and violence involving only Jewish players and fans. Their response to inter-Jewish violence is clear.
"The first thing to do is significantly increase the punishments. I have been talking about this for more than 20 years, and that was a time football was much more violent," the Associated Press quoted Maccabi Haifa Chairman Jacob Shahar as saying.
Less clear is their response to mounting Israeli-Palestinian soccer tension. "The field has become a battleground, involving not only fans but also players, coaches, officials ... it is impossible to stay silent," Israeli Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat told a recent press conference after being instructed by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to put an end to the violence.
Messrs. Livnat and Shahar were speaking after a series of incidents in which players and fans clashed on the pitch and notoriously racist supporters of Beitar Jerusalem, a club historically linked to Israel’s right-wing attacked Palestinian shoppers and workers in a mall as well as later a Jewish woman who protest against their racist attitudes. Beitar Jerusalem is the only Israeli club that has never hired a Palestinian player, who are among Israel’s highest scorers. In response to Beitar Jerusalem chants of ‘Death to the Arabs,’ Palestinian supporters of Israeli Palestinian clubs like Bnei Sakhnin have begun singing ‘Death to the Jews.’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ8y7Zios3c
Writing in Soccer & Society, Israeli sports scholar Amir Ben-Porat warned already four years ago that “the football stadium has become an arena for protest: political, ethnic, nationalism, etc… ‘Death to the Arabs’ has thus become common chant in football stadiums… Many Israelis consider the Israeli Arabs (Palestinians) to be ‘Conditional Strangers,’ that is temporary citizens… Contrary to conventional expectations, these fans are not unsophisticated rowdies, but middle-class political-ideological right-wingers, whose rejection of Arab football players on their team is based on a definite conception of Israel as a Jewish (Zionist) state,” Mr. Ben-Porat wrote.
The IFA, despite being the only soccer body in the Middle East to have launched a campaign against racism, has allowed what Mr. Ben-Porat describes as ‘permissive territory’ that in which “some deviant behaviours are tolerated (such as using profanities) as long as definite rules are followed (that is, no racist chants)” to get out of hand.
The IFA has signalled a lack of sincerity by failing to impose its anti-racism rule by cracking down as hard on racism as it intends to do on what amounts to hooliganism. Forcing Beitar Jerusalem to drop its ban on Palestinian players, a violation of Israeli equal opportunity laws, and severely penalizing it for its fan behaviour rather than simply giving the club a slap on its knuckles while also taking Bnei Sakhnin to task for the behaviour of its fans would go a long way to tackling the issue of mounting racism on the pitch.
It would also send a signal to Israelis and Palestinians at a time that Palestinians are increasingly less inclined to engage with Israelis in the belief that reconciliation efforts are senseless as long as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is stalemated. An IFA crackdown on racism would to some degree counter Palestinian claims that there is no partner in Israel amidst the violence employed by Israeli security forces against protesters on the West Bank and anti-Palestinian statements by Israel’s ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Israeli peace activists warn that waning Palestinian interest in people-to-people encounters with Israelis threaten to undermine what is left of Israel’s already weakened peace movement. While peace may be beyond the IFA’s purview, a serious crackdown on racism would not only serve to counter what is an increasingly ugly trend in Israeli society but like the hotline signal that there are Israeli institutions that are willing to play their part.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Exceptional States: The (Bio)politics of Love in Darwish's A State of Siege
by Tom Langley
published in 'Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies', 2012
Mahmoud Darwish's transition from the resistance poet of Palestinian nationalism to the ‘meditative and lyrical’... more Mahmoud Darwish's transition from the resistance poet of Palestinian nationalism to the ‘meditative and lyrical’ writer he became in his later years has often been controversial with Darwish's readers, who have frequently seen it as a movement away from the politics that first brought him to prominence. The question, as one commentator has provocatively put it, has been: ‘Does Mahmoud Darwish have a right to produce a book of poetry solely dedicated to love?’ (Hadidi 2008: 95). This essay will focus on his poem A State of Siege, which, though written during and about the 2002 Israeli siege of the West Bank, seems at times more concerned with the possibilities for love than with politics. I first attempt to view the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, focusing particularly on the period of the second intifada, within the theoretical framework of biopolitics established by Giorgio Agamben, before then going on to explore the resonances between Darwish's poem and the Homo Sacer project in an effort to bring to the surface the ‘emancipatory possibilities’ implicit in both texts. Ultimately, I want to suggest that there is, in fact, something radically political about the act of writing love poetry in a time of siege.
Conflicting visions of society spark Israeli and Egyptian soccer violence
By James M. Dorsey
Fan violence has sparked match cancellations on both sides of the Arab-Israeli... more
By James M. Dorsey
Fan violence has sparked match cancellations on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide.
The stakes for Egyptian and Israeli soccer fans are high – the nature of the society they want to live in and in some cases the very existence of some of their financially troubled clubs – even if the two groups are likely to agree on little more than their passion for the game.
For militant Egyptian soccer fans the battle is about securing the goals of last year’s popular uprising that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, ending military rule and saving clubs from financial ruin as a result of initial suspension and ultimate cancellation of Egypt’s top two tournaments. A majority of Egyptian fans, who favor a more pro-Palestinian Egyptian foreign policy, have little empathy for their Israeli counterparts whom they see as thugs, many of whom are racists with their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim chants attitudes.
The Egyptian view is not unfounded even if leaders of the Egyptian ultras – militant, highly politicized, street battle-hardened fan groups modeled on similar organizations in Italy and Serbia – are struggling to keep their rank and file whose cry for dignity is often expressed in clashes with security forces under control.
Israeli soccer brawls over the past month ranged from pure hooliganism and violent clashes between players to attacks on Palestinians and more moderate Jews outside the confines of the stadium. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday called for a crackdown on violence on the soccer field, after fighting broke out on Friday between players of Hapoel Ramat Gan and Bnei Lod. "If there's violence, there will not be soccer. We must uproot this violence in order to return to games that spectators can enjoy, myself among them,” Mr. Netanyahu told a cabinet meeting according to The Jerusalem Post.
The incident in Ramat Gan followed thousands of Hapoel Tel Aviv fans rioting on the pitch after their team lost to Maccabi Tel Aviv.
A few days later, two fans of Maccabi Petach Tikvah attempted to attack a referee. In late March a Hapoel Haifa player was hospitalized after being headbutted by a Maccabi Petach Tikvah coach and then kicked in the head by a team associate. The two most onerous incidents involved militant anti-Arab fans of financially troubled Beitar Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s notorious club, in which supporters first attacked Palestinian workers and shoppers in a Jerusalem mall and later a Jewish woman who protested against their racist attitude. Police were severely criticized for failing to intervene in the mall attack.
The situation in nationalist Israel and post-Egypt could not be more different the laxity of the Israeli police notwithstanding. Yet, they are similar when it comes to the lack of political will on both sides of the Egyptian-Israeli divide to tackle soccer violence as well as governments’ failure to create an environment in which politically motivated violence is viewed as unacceptable. To be sure, the Israeli Football Association (IFA) has responded firmly to player violence but despite being the only soccer body in the Middle East and North Africa to have launched an anti-racist campaign has been lenient in meting out punishments for politically motivated violence.
The IFA last month significantly reduced Beitar's punishment for soccer violence from three home games out of town and one behind partly closed doors to on the grounds that the measure would not change fan behavior. With the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s Premier League, Beitar has faced since 2005 more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including point deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racism.
Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s mostly Sephardic fans of Middle Eastern and North African origin, revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews of East European extraction rivals their disdain for Palestinians. Supported by Israeli right wing leaders, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities. Beitar is Israel’s only leading club never to have signed an Israeli Palestinian player because of fan pressure despite the fact that Palestinians are among the country’s top players.
By contrast, Egyptian teams already reeling from the cancellation of the Premier League in February following the death of 74 fans in a brawl in the Suez Canal city of Port Said fear financial disaster as a result of Sunday’s looming annulment of the Egypt Cup. The Egyptian Football Association (EFA) has appealed to the country’s military rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), to step in after a refusal by the interior ministry, which controls the police and the security forces. The refusal was prompted by the security forces’ reluctance to engage with deeply hostile, militant soccer fans because clashes would further damage their already tarnished image as the executioners of the former Mubarak regime and the military.
The military and the police have done little in the 14 months since Mubarak’s departure to polish the image of the security forces by projecting a willingness to reform the police, holding officers accountable for their actions and being seen to investigate the Port Said incident that allows the chips to fall where they fall. The trial against 61, people including fans and nine security officials, accused of responsibility for Port Said was suspended at its opening last week after disruptions by family and friends of the dead.
Police reform is a tough pill to swallow for the Egyptian military. The military “find themselves in a classic Catch-22 situation with regards to police reform. If they listen to the aspirations of the people and fully reform the police, they lose a valuable tool of state control. Should reform take place, where would the buck stop? Real reform in state institutions might later have personal ramifications for SCAF itself, as Egyptians are already calling for civilian control over the military, which may lead to investigations of the military junta down the line. On the other hand, should SCAF choose not to fully reform the police, they risk continued clashes with the people, who no longer fear the police - and consider it one of the last remaining bastions of the old regime,” said Adel Abdel Ghafar, a PhD scholar at the Australian National University and scion of a prominent Egyptian soccer figure, writing on Al Jazeera.com.
Granted, the Israeli police does not have the problems of their Egyptian counterpart. But if the stakes in Egypt are a more transparent, more accountable society, in Israel they are the very democracy that the Jewish state prides itself on, which increasingly is less based on tolerance and respect for diverging opinions and ethnic and religious minorities and ever more so on intolerance and the brutalizing effects of 45 years of occupation of Palestinian lands.
Violence in Israel is not limited to the soccer pitch. A senior Israeli military officer was celebrated by Israel’s right wing after attacking on camera a bicycle protester on the West Bank on camera in the same week as the Ramat Gan incident. Youths on a Tel Aviv beach taunted and abused a mentally disturbed woman inviting her to have sex with them.
The battles in Egypt and Israel are fought on multiple battlefields of which soccer is an important one. That puts the onus not only on governments but also on soccer associations, club management and last but not least world soccer body FIFA, which so far for all practical matters has looked the other way by at best issuing lame protests that Israelis and Egyptians can ignore because there is no price to pay.
With an inept military more concerned about its perks than the country’s future in charge in Egypt and an Israeli government that includes many Beitar Jerusalem supporters, little can be expected beyond at best demands for law enforcement from the highest authority in the country.
That means that the national soccer federations, FIFA and the regional associations, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the Confederation of African Football (CAF), more than ever need to step up to the plate.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Re-reading the Myth of Fayyadism: A Critical Analysis of the Palestinian Authority’s Reform and State-building Agenda, 2008-2011
by Abed Ayyad
Much is being said of the attempts by Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to re-brand the image of Palestinians in the West. More locally, questions are being raised about the ability of his "Washington Consensus" inspired policies to create meaningful, positive change for Palestinians living under the rule of the Palestinian Authority.
Fayyadism is a term coined by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that has gained widespread usage in the media and... more Fayyadism is a term coined by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that has gained widespread usage in the media and the quasi-academic literature emanating from various high-profile English-language think tanks. The term is named after the current prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Dr. Salam Fayyad, formally an economist at the IMF, and is used to describe the raft of political and economic reforms that have been central to the PA's state-building agenda. Supporters of this agenda from all sides have promoted it in orientalist terms (i.e., as a reasonable method for Palestinians to achieve their national goals), in contrast to uncivilized armed resistance and/or Islamism. This paper argues that Fayyadism does not, in fact, constitute a radical new approach to ending the occupation or liberating Palestinians. Rather, Palestinian agency remains contingent on the same basic dynamics as it has since the beginning of the Oslo process. If Fayyadism has had any effect at all on this arrangement of power, it has been to entrench the occupation rather than to end it.
Beitar Jerusalem fans beat Jewish musician for protesting against their racism
By James M. Dorsey
Militant supporters of storied but controversial Beitar Jerusalem Football Club known... more
By James M. Dorsey
Militant supporters of storied but controversial Beitar Jerusalem Football Club known for their anti-Palestinian, anti-Ashkenazi Jewish attitudes harassed and beat a middle-aged Jewish woman who objected to their anti-Arab slogans in the second such attack in less than a month, according to Haaretz newspaper.
Contrary to last month’s assault by the Beitar fans on Palestinian shoppers and workers in a Jerusalem mall, police launched an immediate investigation. The Israeli police force was heavily criticized for failing to initially intervene or investigation the mall incident.
The attacks as well as the police’s laxity have outraged many Israelis and raised questions about the moral fiber of a society that tolerates such incidents as well as a soccer club that is unashamedly racist.
Jerusalem musician Reli Margalit was attacked after she objected to dozens of Beitar fans chanting anti-Arab slogans as they marched on Sunday to Jerusalem’s Teddy Kollek Stadium for a match against Hapoel Acre that Beitar won 1:0.
"I heard cries of 'Death to the Arabs,' and since I was still incensed by the Malha Mall attack, I decided that I had to confront them now. I made a sign reading 'Down with Beitar's racism.' I believed that since I'm not a young woman and since I was alone, at worst it would come to curses, no more," Ms. Margalit told Haaretz.
Her assumption proved to be wrong. "Within seconds they surrounded me and started spitting at me. They took away my sign, and one of them - actually an older fan - hit me on the head with the pole of his flag. None of the fans protected me, and one girl showed up and tried to argue with me,” she said.
Police said they had escorted the militants for part of their march but had not heard racist slurs in the fans’ chants.
In a repeat of Beitar’s standard response to the racism of its most militant fans, spokesman Assaf Shaked said the team "cannot be responsible to all its supporters' actions."
Mounting Beitar fan aggression and violence is believed to stem from the growing influence among the club’s fans of a group known as La Familia that is dominated by supporters of Kach, the outlawed violent and racist party that was headed by assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane. Beitar’s management has so far failed to stymie the group’s influence.
The incidents occurred in what City University of New York scholar Dov Waxman described in a recent article in The Middle East Journal as an atmosphere of escalating tension between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. “Attitudes on both sides have hardened, mutual distrust has intensified, fear has increased, and political opinion has become more militant and uncompromising….Jews and Palestinians are currently on a collision course, with potentially severe consequences for their continued peaceful co-existence, as well as for stability and democracy in Israel,” Mr. Waxman wrote.
The incidents further highlight the failure of the Israeli Football Association (IFA), the only soccer body in the Middle East and North Africa to have launched a campaign against racism and discrimination, to rein in the Beitar fans and curb the club’s submission to its supporters’ racist attitudes. With the worst disciplinary record in Israel’s Premier League, Beitar has faced since 2005 more than 20 hearings and has received various punishments, including point deductions, fines and matches behind closed doors because of its fans’ racist behaviour.
Beitar’s matches often resemble a Middle Eastern battlefield. It’s mostly Sephardic fans of Middle Eastern and North African origin, revel in their status as the bad boys of Israeli soccer. Their dislike of Ashkenazi Jews of East European extraction rivals their disdain for Palestinians.
Supported by Israeli right wing leaders such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Beitar traces its roots to a revanchist Zionist youth movement. Its founding players actively resisted the pre-state British mandate authorities.
Beitar is Israel’s only leading club never to have signed an Israeli Palestinian player because of fan pressure despite the fact that Palestinians are among the country’s top players. Maccabi Haifa striker Mohammed Ghadir recently put Beitar on the spot when he challenged the club to hire him despite its discriminatory hiring policies. The club refused on the grounds that its fans were not willing to accept a Palestinian player.
Beitar fans shocked Israelis several years ago when they refused to observe a moment of silence for assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who initiated the first peace negotiations with the Palestinians.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
The Said and the Unsaid: Performative Guiding In a Jerusalem Neighborhood
by Chaim Noy
Brin, E., and Noy, C. (2010). Tourist Studies, 10(1): 19-33.
This paper describes a guided walking tour of a formerly Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem and an important... more This paper describes a guided walking tour of a formerly Palestinian neighborhood in Jerusalem and an important battlefield in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The paper assumes a critical performance approach to guided tours in examining how through performative guiding, identities, histories and places are (re)constituted. We conceive of performative guiding as a situated event which both takes place in and simultaneously signifies and reconstructs the environment wherein it transpires. The tour we analyze was given by a Jewish-Israeli guide to a Jewish-Israeli audience, and was attended by the first author. The guide’s apparent inclination towards the Israeli and Zionist narrative regarding the story of the neighborhood is highlighted through an analysis of the commentary given. Through an examination of things said and unsaid, we highlight the dual role of performative guiding: relaying historical information and reaffirming partisan narratives.
Italian Involvement in the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936-1939
by Nir Arielli
Italian involvement in the Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936–1939) was perhaps the most explicit example of Rome's... more Italian involvement in the Arab Revolt in Palestine (1936–1939) was perhaps the most explicit example of Rome's attempt to destabilize London's position in the Middle East, prior to Italy's entry to the Second World War. This article examines the mechanisms of Fascist Italy's assistance to the rebels in Palestine, focusing on the secret contacts between Italian officials and the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. It describes the financial support given by Italy as well as the attempts to smuggle arms to Palestine. The article also analyses Rome's diplomatic manoeuvres in connection with Palestine and its pro-Arab propaganda. It is argued that Italian policy in Palestine was governed by, and subordinate to, wider considerations of Italian policy such as imperial competition with Great Britain and a desire to increase Italy's influence in the Middle East. In fact, Fascist involvement in the ‘first Intifada’ teaches us more about Italian foreign policy than it does on the course of events in Palestine during the Arab rebellion.
Arabs boycott Adidas as public displeasure shifts from the West to China
By James M. Dorsey
Arab youth and sports ministers announced this week a boycott of sports apparel... more
By James M. Dorsey
Arab youth and sports ministers announced this week a boycott of sports apparel manufacturer Adidas because of its sponsorship of last month’s Jerusalem marathon. The boycott comes at a time that Arab public displeasure is expanding from the West to China and Russia because of their support for the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The announcement of the boycott by Saudi Prince Nawaf bin Faisal, chairman of the Arab council of youth and sports ministers, contrasted starkly with an analysis presented the same day by a prominent UAE intellectual that if a year ago Arabs were denouncing the United States for its support of Israel and Arab autocrats, today their anger was focused on China.
"All companies that have sponsored the marathon of Jerusalem, including Adidas, will be boycotted," Saudi Prince Nawaf said at the end of meeting of the council in Jeddah.
Adidas, the only non-Israeli sponsor, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Jerusalem municipality to re-route the marathon to avoid occupied East Jerusalem after three city council members had complained to the German multi-national. That did little however to dissuade Arab ministers.
In fact, going beyond the boycott, Prince Nawaf said the council had also decided to organise a separate marathon next year in Arab cities entitled ‘Jerusalem is Ours’ to coincide with the annual Jerusalem event. "Israel is trying to misguide public opinion into believing that Jerusalem is its capital and that is a violation of all UN resolutions," Prince Nawaf said.
Prince Nawaf’s statement appeared to have an element of the pot talking to the kettle with the marathon’s slogan seemingly matching Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem rather than to Arab countries’ long-standing endorsement of a peace plan that envisages Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine with the east of the city serving as the administrative seat of the Palestinian state.
The council’s decisions reflect as much a deep-seated Arab stake in Jerusalem, Islam’s third most holy city, as it does an effort to by largely troubled regimes to garner public support at a time that a demand for far-reaching change is sweeping the Middle East and Africa for the past 16 months. The wave has already toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen and has pushed Syrian President Bashar al Assad to the brink.
Speaking at a symposium organized by the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute (MEI), Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent US-educated UAE University political scientist, cautioned that despite continued public Arab condemnation of US and Western support for Israel and contradictory policies towards the protest wave sweeping the Middle East and North Africa,
China was for the first time seeing its flags burnt at demonstrations and calls for boycotts of Chinese goods echoing on social media.
At the root of public anger with China, a country that for years was respected for its support of the Palestinians and other liberation movements, is its dithering in Libya during last year’s NATO-backed rebellion that toppled Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, and even more so China’s refusal to back away from Mr. Assad, whose year-long bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters and rebels has already cost an estimated 9,000 lives.
Speaking at the same symposium Peking University Arabist Wu Bingbing identified the wave of protests in the Middle East and North Africa as a threat to Chinese interests alongside what he charged was a US concerted effort to secure its hegemony in the region. Mr. Bingbing avoided mentioning the crackdown in Syria but described Chinese-Russian cooperation, an apparent reference to the two countries’ vetoing of anti-Syrian resolutions in the United Nations Security Council, as strategic.
China has insisted its veto did not amount to supporting Mr. Assad and was intended to prevent the situation in Syria from worsening. While insisting that the battle in Syria was a domestic affair, China has since said it backs Arab League efforts to find a political solution despite military support for the anti-Assad rebels by key Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two of the People’s Republic’s key energy suppliers.
Mr Abdulla suggested that at this point the growing anti-Chinese sentiment was unlikely to damage China’s economic interests despite Arab leaders publicly criticizing China as well as Russia for their vetoes of anti-Syrian resolutions in the United Nations Security Council. While that appears largely to be the case for the Gulf’s autocratic oil producers, China’s most important counterparts in the Middle East, that may not be the same for those nations such as oil producing Libya that have toppled their autocrats.
Saudi King Abdullah in widely reported blunt remarks in early February directed at China and Russia without mentioning them by name described their UN vetoes as “absolutely regrettable.” The king went on to say that “no matter how powerful, countries cannot rule the whole world. The world is ruled by brains by justice, by morals and by fairness.” An Arab League representative confronted senior Russian officials days later in in even blunter, undiplomatic terms during a heated debate behind-closed-doors.
China last year supported a Security Council resolution that imposed an arms embargo and other sanctions on the regime of Mr. Qaddafi, and endorsed referral of the regime’s crackdown to the International Criminal Court in The Hague but abstained from voting on a resolution that authorized international military intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds.
At the same time, China attempted to straddle the fence by cultivating relations with both Mr. Qaddafi’s embattled regime and the rebels. That even-handed approach however didn’t prevent the rebels from threatening a commercial boycott, particularly after they found documents purporting to show that Chinese defence companies had discussed the supply of arms with Qaddafi operatives.
A Chinese Ministry of Commerce delegation visiting Libya in February failed to secure agreement on recovering at least some of the losses that China, Libya’s biggest foreign contractor, suffered with the evacuation last year of 35,000 Chinese workers who were servicing $18.8 billion worth of contracts.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Israel arrests Palestinian soccer players
By James M. Dorsey
Israeli security forces have arrested the goalkeeper of the Palestinian Olympic soccer... more
By James M. Dorsey
Israeli security forces have arrested the goalkeeper of the Palestinian Olympic soccer team on charges of involvement in a shoot-out with Israeli troops, according to the Israeli military.
Palestinian soccer officials said the arrest of 23 year-old Omar Abu Rois, an alleged member of Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls the Gaza Strip, was followed the next day by the detention of Ahmad Khalil Ali Abu El-Asal a player for the Aqabat Jaber Palestinian refugee camp soccer team.
The military said Mr. Abu Rois was one of 13 people arrested following an attack on Israeli troops in January in the Al Amari Palestinian refugee camp near the West Bank town of Ramallah.
The military charged that the group had fired Kalashnikovs that had been provided by the head of security for the local branch of the Red Crescent, Palestine’s equivalent of the Red Cross. The security chief, Monastery Abbas, was among those detained. Mr. Abu Rois, according to the military, is a Red Crescent employee.
The military said the shooting occurred on January 20. It said no one was hurt in the incident but that an Israeli vehicle had been damaged. It said that interrogation of the detainees had revealed that Mr. Abu Rois had prepared the weapons used in the attack a day after the incident for return to a monastery where they had originally been stashed. It said the group had planned further attacks on several Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.
In a letter to world soccer body FIFA president Sepp Blatter copied to Asian Football Confederation (AFC) president Zhang Jilong and International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Jacque Rogue, Palestine Football Association (PFA) president Jibril Rajoub, a former Palestinian security chief, said Mr. Abu Rois was arrested on February 20 and Mr. El-Asal on February 21 in what he described as “another Israeli transgression against Palestinian players.” Mr. Rajoub said the two players had been “abducted” by Israeli occupation authorities.
PFA officials did not respond to questions about the background and possible political affiliations and activities of the two detained players.
Mr. Rajoub said Mr. Abou Rois had been arrested at work and taken to an unknown location while Mr. El-Asal was detained at his home.
The Palestinian soccer boss asked Mr. Blatter to intervene on behalf of the two players, charging that it “was in total disregard of all agreements signed by the Israeli side and in direct violation to the simplest right of our players.”
In an emailed response, FIFA official Guy-Phillipe Mathieu said FIFA would take “adequate steps.”
Mr. Rajoub, who also heads the Palestinian Olympic Committee, last year reached with the help of the IOC agreement with his counterparts at the Israeli soccer association and Olympic committee on ways to overcome Israeli security obstacles facing Palestinian players and athletes. They agreed to set up a telephone hotline so that Israeli sports bodies could intervene to ease the movement of Palestinian athletes, coaches, and officials if and when they encountered problems at checkpoints or in requests to travel.
The effort however has so far produced limited results. Palestinian officials say that FIFA shipments are often still delayed at Ben Gurion Airport customs, which incurs storage and other costs that can amount to a multi-fold of the value of the goods shipped.
Nonetheless, there has been a limited improvement in athletes' ability to move around the West Bank or between the Palestine Authority-controlled region and the Gaza Strip. "The problem is the Israeli committee is not the relevant authority for the movement of people and equipment. We are trying, but I don't want to embarrass anyone," Mr. Rajoub said in an interview last year, suggesting that the Israeli sports body had little sway with security authorities.
Mr. Rajoub as well as other soccer officials and players conceded however that crossing checkpoints had become somewhat easier. They attributed this primarily to improved security with Israel less concerned about the threat of terrorist attacks being launched from the West Bank. In addition, the PFA has created sleeping quarters in the Faisal Hussein Stadium so that players can get together to train without worrying whether they will be able to return home.
The easing of travel has meant that the Palestinian team has been able to host and travel for Olympic and World Cup qualifiers even though it failed to qualify for this year’s London Olympics.
That is in stark contrast to 2007 when FIFA forced the Palestinians to forfeit a World Cup qualifier to Singapore because they failed to field a full team after Israel denied permits to 18 players and officials from Gaza.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Digital Occupation: Gaza’s High-Tech Enclosure
Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 41, no. 1 (Winter 2012)
In disengaging from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel did not end the occupation but technologized it through purportedly... more In disengaging from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Israel did not end the occupation but technologized it through purportedly “frictionless” high-technology mechanisms. The telecommunications sector was turned over to the Palestinian Authority under Oslo II and subcontracted to Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL), furthering a neoliberal economic agenda that privately “enclosed” digital space. Coming on top of Israel’s ongoing limitations on Palestinian land-lines, cellular, and Internet infrastructures, the result is a “digital occupation” of Gaza characterized by increasing privatization, surveillance, and control. While deepening Palestinian economic reliance on Israel and making Palestinian high-tech firms into dependent agents, digital occupation also enhances Israel’s territorial containment of the Strip.
16 views
Seen by:
