Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint

"The Pianist" of Palestine

By OMAR BARGHOUTI

When I watched Oscar-winning film The Pianist I had three distinct, uneasy reactions. I was not particularly impressed by the film, from a purely artistic angle; I was horrified by the film's depiction of the dehumanization of Polish Jews and the impunity of the German occupiers; and I could not help but compare the Warsaw ghetto wall with Israel's much more ominous wall caging 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in fragmented, sprawling prisons.

In the film, when German soldiers forced Jewish musicians to play for them at a checkpoint, I thought to myself: "that's one thing Israeli soldiers have not yet done to Palestinians." I spoke too soon, it seems. Israel's leading newspaper Ha'aretz reported last week that an Israeli human rights organization monitoring a daunting military roadblock near Nablus was able to videotape Israeli soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them. The same organization confirmed that similar abuse had taken place months ago at another checkpoint near Jerusalem.

In typical Israeli whitewashing, the incident was dismissed by an army spokesperson as little more that "insensitivity," with no malicious intent to humiliate the Palestinians involved. And of course the usual mantra about soldiers having to "contend with a complex and dangerous reality" was again served as a ready, one-size-fits-all excuse. I wonder whether the same would be said or accepted in describing the original Nazi practice at the Warsaw ghetto gates in the 1940's.

Regrettably, the analogy between the two illegal occupations does not stop here. Many of the methods of collective and individual "punishment" meted out to Palestinian civilians at the hands of young, racist, often sadistic and ever impervious Israeli soldiers at the hundreds of checkpoints littering the occupied Palestinian territories are reminiscent of common Nazi practices against the Jews. Following a visit to the occupied Palestinian territories in 2003, Oona King, a Jewish member of the British parliament attested to this, writing: "The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto."

Even Tommy Lapid, Israel's justice minister and a Holocaust survivor himself, stirred a political storm last year when he told Israel radio that a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris for her medication had reminded him of his grandmother who died at Auschwitz. Furthermore, he commented on his army's wanton and indiscriminate destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and farms in Gaza at the time, saying: "[I]f we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague."

Some of the war crimes that concern people like Lapid have been lately revealed in eyewitness accounts given by former soldiers, who could no longer reconcile whatever moral values they held with their complicity in the daily humiliation, abuse and physical harm of innocent civilians. Such crimes have become normalized in their minds as acceptable, even necessary, acts of "disciplining" the untamed natives, as a measure to maintain "security."

According to a recent report in the Israeli media, an army commander was accused of gratuitously beating up Palestinians at the notorious Hawwara checkpoint. Ironically, the most damning evidence presented against him was a videotape filmed by the army's education branch. In that particular episode, the senior officer at that roadblock, knowing that an army film crew was located nearby, and without any provocation, beat a Palestinian "flanked by his wife and children," punching him in the face, and "even kicked[him] in the lower part of his body," the report said.

A recent exhibit titled "Breaking the Silence," organized in Tel Aviv by a number of conscientious Israeli soldiers who served in occupied Hebron, exposed in photographs and objects more serious belligerence towrds defenseless Palestinians. Inspired by Jewish settlers' graffiti that included: "Arabs to the gas chambers"; "Arabs = an inferior race"; "Spill Arab blood"; and, of course, the ever so popular "Death to the Arabs," soldiers used a myriad of methods to make the lives of average Palestinians intolerable. One photograph showed a bumper sticker on a passing car, perhaps explaining the ultimate goal of such abuse: "Religious penitence provides strength to expel the Arabs." The exhibit's main curator described a particularly shocking policy of randomly spraying crowded Palestinian residential neighborhoods, like Abu Sneina, from heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for hours on end in response to any minor shooting of a few bullets from any house in the neighborhood on the Jewish colonies inside the city.

The Hebron horrors pale, however, in comparison to what Israeli army units have done in Gaza. In an unnerving interview with Ha'aretz in November last year, for instance, Liran Ron Furer, a staff sergeant (res.) in the Israeli army and graduate of an arts school, described the gradual transformation of every soldier to an "animal" when staffing a roadblock, irrespective of whatever values he may bring with him from home. From his perspective, those soldiers get infected with what he calls "checkpoint syndrome," a glaring symptom of which is acting violently towards Palestinians in "the most primal and impulsive manner, without fear of punishment ." "At the checkpoint," he explains, "young people have the chance to be masters and using force and violence becomes legitimate ."

Furer cites how his colleagues degraded and mercilessly beat a Palestinian dwarf just for fun; how they had a "souvenir picture" taken with bloodied, bound civilians whom they'd thrashed; how one soldier pissed on the head of a Palestinian man because the latter had "the nerve to smile" at a soldier; how another Palestinian was forced to stand on four legs and bark like a dog; and how yet another soldier asked Palestinians for cigarettes and when they refused "broke someone's hand" and "slashed their tires."

The most chilling of all the incidents was his own personal confession. "I ran toward [a group of Palestinians] and punched an Arab right in the face," he admitted. "Blood was trickling from his lip onto his chin. I led him up behind the Jeep and threw him in, his knees banged against the trunk and he landed inside." He then goes on to describe in gruesome details how he and his comrades stepped on the tightly handcuffed captive, dubbed "the Arab;" how they hit him until "he was bleeding and making a kind of puddle of blood and saliva;" how he "grabbed him by the hair and turned his head to the side," until he cried aloud, and how the soldiers then "stepped harder and harder on his back," to make him stop crying.

Furer then reveals that the company commander cheered them on: "Good work, tigers." And after they took their prey to their camp, the abuse continued in different forms. "All the other soldiers were waiting there to see what [my emphasis] we'd caught. When we came in with the Jeep, they whistled and applauded wildly." One of the soldiers, Furer said, "went up to him and kicked him in the stomach. The Arab doubled over and grunted, and we all laughed. It was funny ... I kicked him really hard in the ass and he flew forward just as I'd expected. They shouted and laughed ... and I felt happy. Our Arab was just a 16-year-old mentally retarded boy."

As savage as it is, checkpoint abuse is not unique in any sense. It fits perfectly well into the general picture of viewing the Palestinians as relative humans who are not entitled to the dignity and respect that full humans deserve. At the height of Israel's massive reoccupation of Palestinian cities in 2002, for example, soldiers used their knives to engrave the star of David on the arms of a number of detained Palestinian men and teenage boys. The haunting pictures of the victims were first shown on Arab satellite TV channels and eventually exposed on the internet.

In the same year, at al-Amari refugee camp, during a mass roundup of Palestinian males, teenagers and elderly included, Israeli troops inscribed identification numbers "on the foreheads and forearms of Palestinian detainees awaiting interrogation." The late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat compared the act to well known Nazi practices at concentration camps. Tommy Lapid was incensed, saying: "As a refugee from the Holocaust I find such an act insufferable." Nonetheless, Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, was worried only about Israel's image being tarnished: "clearly it conflicts with the desire to convey a public relations message," he told Israel Army Radio. Parroting that line, the mainstream media in Israel, too, were far too concerned about the "public relations disaster" to express any abhorrence or protestation at the immorality of the act and the irony of it all.

Yoram Peri, a professor of politics and media at Tel Aviv University, sees PR as "a fundamental issue in Israeli life." "We do not think we do anything wrong," he clarifies in an interview with the Guardian, "but we think we explain ourselves badly and that the international media is anti-Semitic." Obsessed with how Israel is seen rather than with what it actually does, Israelis, according to Peri, are mostly worried that "we do not explain ourselves well. When we discuss the horrible things that happen in the West Bank, we don't talk about the issue but about how it will be seen."

Recognizing this prevailing cynicism, apathy and acquiescence among the majority of Israelis in the criminal oppression of the Palestinians, former Knesset member Shulamit Aloni pronounced in a recent interview with the Irish publication the Handstand that "gross insensitivity" was threatening a moral disintegration of Israeli society. Referring to the Germans during the Nazi rule, she added, "I am beginning to understand why a whole nation was able to say: 'We did not know.'"

I wonder when the time will come when a glamorous, award-winning director braves predictable intellectual terror and intimidation tactics to expose the venomous Israeli cocktail of racism and impunity by making a Palestinian version of "The Pianist."

Omar Barghouti is an independent Palestinian political analyst. His article "9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen among the "Best of 2002" by the Guardian. He can be reached at: jenna@palnet.com

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Death, Delusion and Democracy

by Robert Fisk

11/16/04 "The Independent" -- So the death of Yasser Arafat is a great new opportunity for the Palestinians, is it? The man who personified the Palestinian struggle - "Mr Palestine" - is dead. So things can only get better for the Palestinians. Death means democracy. Death means statehood. That the final demise of the corrupt old guerrilla leader should be a sign of optimism demonstrates just how catastrophic the conflict in the Middle East has now become. It's a bit like Fallujah. The more we destroy it, the crueler we are, the brighter the chances of Iraqi democracy. The more successful we are, the worse things are going to get. That's what George Bush said on Friday: that violence will increase as Iraqi elections grow closer - a total mind warp since the more violent Iraq becomes, the less the chances of any election ever being held.

Note how Bush could not even bring himself to mention Arafat's name. It's the same old agenda. The Palestinians have to have a democracy. They have to prove themselves; they - not the Israelis - have to show that they are a worthy "negotiating partner". And any new leader - the colorless Ahmad Qureia or the equally colorless and undemocratic Abu Mazen - must "control his own people". That was what Arafat failed to do even though he thought his job was to represent his own people, which is what democracy is supposed to be all about.

It's worth noting how this narrative has been written. The Israelis, with their continued occupation, their continued illegal construction of colonies for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, their air strikes and helicopter executions and live-fire shooting at stone-throwing children, are not part of this equation. They are just innocently waiting to find a new "negotiating partner" now that Arafat is in his grave. Ariel Sharon, held "personally responsible" for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre by the Kahan commission report, remains, in George Bush's words, "a man of peace". No one asks whether he can control his own army. Or whether he can control his own settlers. He wants to close down the colonies in Gaza - even though his spokesman has told us that this will put Palestinian statehood into "formaldehyde".

So let's just take a look back at those tragic years of the Oslo accord. In 1993, we are supposed to believe, the Palestinians were offered statehood and a capital in Jerusalem if they accepted the right of Israel to exist. Oslo said nothing of the kind. It did set down a complex system of Israeli withdrawals from occupied Palestinian land and a timetable that the Israelis were supposed to meet. We all knew that any failure to do so would humiliate Arafat - and make him less able to "control" his own people.

And what happened? It's important, at this supposedly "optimistic" moment, to reflect on the facts of the previous "peace process" in which Europe as well as the United States spent so much time, energy and - in the EU's case - money. Under the Oslo agreement, the occupied West Bank would be divided into three zones. Zone A would come under exclusive Palestinian control, Zone B under Israeli military occupation in participation with the Palestinian Authority, and Zone C under total Israeli occupation. In the West Bank, Zone A comprised only 1.1 per cent of the land whereas in Gaza - overpopulated, rebellious, insurrectionary - almost all the territory was to come under Arafat's control. He, after all, was to be the policeman of Gaza. Zone C in the West Bank comprised 60 per cent of the land, which allowed Israel to continue the rapid expansion of settlements on Arab land.

But a detailed investigation shows that not a single one of these withdrawal agreements was honored by the Israelis. And in the meantime, the number of settlers illegally living on Palestinians' land rose after Oslo from 80,000 to 150,000 - even though the Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, were forbidden from taking "unilateral steps" under the terms of the agreement. The Palestinians saw this, not without reason, as proof of bad faith.

Since facts are sometimes elusive in the Middle East, let's remind ourselves of what happened after Oslo. The Oslo II (Taba) agreement, concluded by Yitzhak Rabin in September 1995 - the month before he was assassinated - promised three Israeli withdrawals: from Zone A (under Palestinian control), Zone B (under Israeli military occupation in co-operation with the Palestinians) and Zone C (exclusive Israeli occupation). These were to be completed by October 1997. Final-status agreement covering Jerusalem, refugees, water and settlements were to have been completed by October 1999, by which time the occupation was supposed to have ended. In January 1997, however, a handful of Jewish settlers were granted 20 per cent of Hebron, despite Israel's obligation under Oslo to leave all West Bank towns. By October 1998, a year late, Israel had not carried out the Taba accords.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, negotiated a new agreement at Wye River, dividing the second redeployment promised at Taba into two phases - but he only honored the first of them. Netanyahu had promised to reduce the percentage of West Bank land under exclusively Israeli occupation from 72 per cent to 59 per cent, transferring 41 per cent of the West Bank to Zones A and B. But at Sharm el-Sheikh in 1999, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, reneged on the agreement Netanyahu had made at Wye River, fragmenting the latter's two phases into three, the first of which would transfer 7 per cent from Zone C to Zone B. All implementation of the agreements stopped there.

When Arafat finally went to Camp David to meet Barak, he was allegedly offered 95 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza but turned it down and went to war with the second intifada. A study of the maps, however, shows that - with the exclusion of Jerusalem and its extended boundaries, with the exclusion of existing major Jewish colonies and with the inclusion of an Israeli cordon sanitaire, Arafat was offered nearer to 64 per cent of the 22 per cent of mandate Palestine that was left to him. Then a new explosion of Palestinian suicide bombings, usually aimed at Israeli civilians, destroyed Israel's patience with Arafat. Sharon, who had provoked the second intifada by strolling on to the Temple Mount with a thousand policeman, decided that Arafat was a Bin Laden-style "terrorist" and all further contact ended.

This is not to excuse the PLO or Arafat himself. His arrogance and corruption, and his little dictatorship - initially encouraged by the Israelis and Americans who lent Arafat their CIA boys to "train" the Palestinian security services - ensured that no democracy could thrive in "Palestine". And I suspect that while he personally disapproved of suicide bombings, Arafat cynically realized that they had their uses; they proved that Sharon could not provide Israel with the security he promised at his election, at least until he built the new wall - which is stealing further Palestinian land. But that was only one side of the story - and last week Bush and Blair went back to the old game of seeing only the other side. The Palestinians - the victims of 39 years of occupation - must prove themselves worthy of peace with their occupiers. The death of their leader is therefore billed as a glorious occasion that provides hope. All this is part of the self-delusion of Bush and Blair. The reality is that the outlook in the Middle East is bleaker than ever.

Oh yes, and - since we'd be asking this question today if Sharon had gone to meet his maker in an equally mysterious way - just what did Arafat die of?

© 2004 lndependent Newspapers, Ltd.

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From Revolutionary to Functionary

The Irony of Arafat

By SYLVIA SHIHADEH and ROBERT JENSEN

Yasser Arafat died as the leader of a country that does not yet exist, and therein lies the tragic nature of the former leader and the ongoing tragedy of the people of Palestine.

Arafat's passion and commitment helped forge a Palestinian independence movement, putting the dispossession of his people on the political map in a way the world couldn't ignore. Pundits are talking of him as merely a "symbol," a strategy not only to ignore his real contributions but also to denigrate the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people for justice.

Arafat had long carried those aspirations, for which he will be remembered. But at a crucial turn, he betrayed both principle and pragmatic politics by accepting the 1993 Oslo agreements, which left him not an independent leader of an emerging state but a subordinate to Israel in charge of policing his own people but with few other powers. The irony of the tragedy is that this fatal mistake is the one thing for which he is lauded in the halls of power in the United States.

When people hack through the propaganda that blankets the U.S. public, it becomes clear that the Oslo accords were an instrument of continued Palestinian subjugation; Israeli settlement building in the occupied territories more than doubled, suggesting that Israeli leaders preferred expansionism and were never serious about a just peace based on international law. An Israeli "matrix of control" -- Jewish-only highways and Israeli checkpoints, enforced by an increasingly brutal occupation army -- cut the occupied territories into isolated cantons, undermining the possibility of a functional Palestinian state. Arafat accepted these repressive terms in exchange for being allowed to continue to rule, the most corrupt of bargains.

The irony has been compounded in recent years, as Arafat was condemned in those same halls of power in the United States for failing to be a "partner for peace." Translated: Arafat refused to accept completely Israel's conception of peace based on Palestinian capitulation to Israeli domination.

To understand that requires clearing away the obfuscation around the so-called "generous offer" of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that Arafat refused at Camp David in 2000. That offer included Israeli withdrawal from Gaza but would have allowed Israel to annex valuable and strategically crucial sections of the West Bank and retain "security control" over other parts, including all Palestinian borders. The net effect would have been to institutionalize some of the worst aspects of the occupation. Arafat could not, and should not, have accepted it.

Many Palestinians had grown increasingly critical of Arafat's inability to challenge forcefully Israel's domination, but all understood that with the United States supporting Israeli intransigence -- support that intensified under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, making claims that the United States could be a "neutral broker for peace" more laughable than ever -- any Palestinian leader was working against tremendous odds.

So, Arafat remained the Palestinian leader, and remained an object of hatred in Israel. A Palestinian writer recently recalled that as a child in a Gaza refugee camp, he often saw Israeli soldiers forcing young Palestinians to their knees, threatening to beat them if they did not spit on Arafat's photo. "Say Arafat is a jackass," the soldiers would scream, but the children refused.

Arafat is gone, but the spirit of resistance to occupation that gave children the strength to endure pain rather than buckle to that brutality remains. The Palestinians have lost a founder of their movement for independence. Israel and the United States have lost a figure they could demonize easily when they wanted to manipulate public opinion and squash calls for real peace with real justice.

No doubt Israel and the United States will try to promote new "leadership" in Palestine that they hope will allow them to finish the project of solidifying permanent Israeli domination. No doubt Palestinian resistance to that project -- a resistance that owes much to Arafat -- will continue. Israel and its supporters in the United States would profit from recognizing that fact and committing to a real peace process that can bring into existence what so many Palestinians have dreamed of but Arafat did not live to see: A truly free Palestine in which peace is secured by justice not power.

Sylvia Shihadeh is coordinator of the Women's Association for Middle East Understanding in Austin and a member of Women in Black and the Interfaith Community for Palestinian Rights.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of "Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity." He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.

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The veteran Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has died in a French hospital, nearly two weeks after being transferred from the West Bank.

The 75-year-old, who dominated Palestinian politics for 40 years, died at 0330 (0230GMT) on Thursday.

His body is to be flown to the Egyptian capital Cairo for a funeral, attended by Arab leaders and other guests.

He will then be taken to the West Bank town of Ramallah, where he will be buried at his compound.

Flags were flying at half mast outside Mr Arafat's compound, where he had been kept under virtual house arrest by the Israelis for two-and-a-half years.

The BBC's James Reynolds in Ramallah said a line of guards in green uniforms had gathered around the compound as journalists gathered.

One or two people were seen wearing the checkered headscarf that became Mr Arafat's trademark.

"This is a black day in our history, and we grieve today for the death of our president," said Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat, who first made the death public.

There is no clear line of succession to the Palestinian leadership following Mr Arafat's death.

Palestinian leaders have agreed a plan to prevent a power struggle and chaos in the volatile Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian parliamentary speaker, Rawhi Fattuh, will take over as president of the Palestinian Authority until an election is held to fill the post.

Mr Erekat called on Palestinians to "unite" and ensure a smooth transition to a new leadership.

Deep coma

Mr Arafat had been in a coma at the Percy military hospital in the Clamart suburb of Paris since 3 November.

He had a brain haemorrhage on Tuesday, and in his final hours was suffering from brain damage and kidney and liver failure.

Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath said late Wednesday that only Mr Arafat's heart and lungs were continuing to function normally.

However, top Palestinian cleric, Taissir Dayut Tamimi, ruled out any question of switching off Mr Arafat's life support.

It has not been made clear what illness the Palestinian leader was suffering from, though doctors ruled out cancer and poisoning.

He was brought by French aircraft from Ramallah to Paris on 29 October, suffering from a blood disorder.

Tests showed he had a low count of blood platelets, which are needed for clotting.

Arafat aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh flew into the Egyptian capital on Wednesday to make arrangements for a state funeral there.

It has been suggested a military and religious ceremony would be conducted at Cairo's international airport.

The decision to hold the funeral in Egypt is seen as a compromise solution, enabling Arab leaders and other guests to attend without the complication of travelling to the West Bank or Gaza.

But precisely who might attend is not clear, says the BBC's Jon Leyne in Cairo.

Mr Arafat had many admirers but also made enemies in the Arab world and elsewhere.

Hope for peace?

Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei has already been assigned some of Mr Arafat's powers.

His predecessor, Mahmoud Abbas, is running the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, headed by Mr Arafat for more than 40 years.

YASSER ARAFAT: KEY DATES 24 Aug 1929: Born in Cairo 1948: Founds Fatah 1969: Elected PLO chairman 1974: Addresses UN General Assembly 1982: Expelled from Lebanon by Israelis 1990: Supports Saddam Hussein during First Gulf War 1991: Marries Suha Tawil 1993: At the White House signs peace agreement with Israel 1994: Jointly awarded Nobel peace prize with Rabin and Peres 2001: Israel blockades him inside Ramallah headquarters

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'We tried. We failed. We must try once again.'

By Randolph T. Holhut

DUMMERSTON, Vt. - It's now official. We are no longer a reality-based country.

A majority of Americans voters apparently want decades of perpetual global war. They want to see their sons and daughters sacrificed on the altar of the neo-conservative dream of an American empire in the Middle East. They want more giveaways to corporations and tax cuts for the rich. They want to see Social Security privatized and see their retirement funds gambled away in the stock market. They want our air and water polluted and our natural resources plundered. They want to see more Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and a federal judiciary that will likely turn the legal clock back to the Gilded Age.

In short, a majority of American voters must really want their nation to be a corrupt one-party theocracy run by a president who thinks he's on a mission from God has total disdain for democracy, the rule of law and truth itself.



I found it hard to believe this could really happen again.

But it did.

A majority of Americans voted to affirm a policy of lies and deception. Truth and logic didn't matter. Common sense didn't matter. A majority of Americans wanted to believe that George W. Bush will keep us safe and prosperous, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

So now what?

Fingerpointing and blame aren't effective strategies, although it does feel good to engage in it for a little while. It's easy to say that the majority of Americans are clueless morons and voted to have someone like them to be their president. It's equally easy to say that the Democratic Party needs to pull its head out of its collective butt and get rid of the blockheads who have run the party into the ground.

However, the primal screaming has to stop sometime and the hard work of building an effective opposition must begin to stop the worst planks of the Republican Party platform from becoming reality.

It's telling that the real energy in the Democratic Party didn't come from the party, but from groups like MoveOn and the rest of the independent left-of-center organizations that popped up in the last couple of years. They raised the money and mobilized support in the vacuum left by a party that has become as beholden to the big money as the GOP.

I still believe the biggest mistake the Democrats made was not having the courage to launch an anti-war campaign. Howard Dean energized liberals by having the guts to take on Bush and his illegal, immoral war in Iraq when everyone else was cowering. His organization provided a new model for the Democrats to follow, but the party leadership decided they could do better with John Kerry - someone who voted for the war and never gave a fully convincing reason to liberals as to why we should for vote him other than that he wasn't Bush.

They can't blame Ralph Nader this time. In the end, the Democrats paid dearly for destroying Dean and ignoring his supporters.

I've written this many times over the past few years, but it needs to be said over and over again. The Democrats need to offer a clear and principled alternative to conservatism. They need to shift the political discussion away from God, gays and guns and toward health care, education, the environment and an economy that benefits all people and not just the rich.

I still believe in the old-time Democratic religion as articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the Democrats "must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens."

But once again, the chickens voted for Colonel Sanders.

At the end of last year, in the midst of the most polarized political climate since the Civil War, I wrote that "in a time when it seems as if all the worst instincts of humanity are triumphant, hope is a radical ideal. We have to believe that our nation and the world can become a better place. We have no choice but to embrace the hope that tomorrow will be better than today."

I may be in despair right now and want to hop in my car and drive to Montreal, but I know that really isn't an option. We knew that when Nov. 3 came around, hard work was waiting for us. Now, the job is going to be even harder. The prospect of four more years of Bush is horrifying, but we can't give in now.

I'm ready to fight to take back my country. Are you?

Randolph T. Holhut has been a journalist in New England for more than 20 years. He edited "The George Seldes Reader" (Barricade Books). He can be reached at randyholhut@yahoo.com.

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Arafat & the Original 'October Surprise'

By Morgan Strong
November 2, 2004

A top aide to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has dropped a new clue about the original “October Surprise” mystery of 1980: the name of the Republican operative who sought the Palestine Liberation Organization’s help to block President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 Americans then being held hostage in Iran.

Longtime Arafat confidant Bassam Abu Sharif said that in mid-1980, he met in Paris with John Shaheen, a friend to both Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s campaign chief, William J. Casey. Abu Sharif told me that Shaheen, a former U.S. intelligence officer of Lebanese origin, extended a Republican offer of improved U.S. relations with the PLO if the Arafat-led organization would assist in persuading the Iranians to delay the hostage release until after the November 1980 elections.

Shaheen, who died in 1985, has long been a central figure in the so-called "October Surprise" case, allegations that Republicans sabotaged Carter’s hostage negotiations as a way to ensure the 1980 election of Reagan as president and George H.W. Bush as vice president. Though Abu Sharif and Arafat have previously discussed the Republican overture, they had refused to identify the Republican intermediary until now.

The alleged secret deal between the Reagan-Bush campaign and the Iranians popularized the idea of an “October Surprise,” a last-minute event that might alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. The phrase was coined by then-vice presidential candidate Bush in the context that Carter’s success in freeing the hostages might be his “October Surprise,” though it later came to refer to the alleged Republican scheming to derail Carter’s hostage talks.

Republican leaders have long denied that any deal with the Iranians was struck, although more than two dozen witnesses – including Iranian officials, European intelligence officers and international arms dealers – have described aspects of the 1980 Republican-Iranian contacts carried out behind President Carter’s back.

In 1992-93, a House Task Force conducted a half-hearted investigation of the controversy and judged the allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal to be false. But it was later discovered that the Task Force had concealed evidence that pointed in the opposite direction, including a classified report from the Russian government stating that Bush, Casey and CIA officers had met with Iranians in Europe in 1980 to strike a deal. [For details, see Robert Parry’s new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

Amazing Tale

I first heard of the amazing tale of the 1980 Republican "October Surprise" overture to the PLO while meeting with Arafat and Abu Sharif in Baghdad in 1988. They told me that they had been contacted in Beirut in mid-1980 by an American of Palestinian background. According to Arafat and Abu Sharif, this emissary claimed to represent a high-ranking member of the Reagan campaign who was seeking the PLO’s help to make sure the 52 American hostages in Iran wouldn’t be freed until after the 1980 election.

As a result of the Beirut meeting, Abu Sharif said he flew to Paris in July 1980 to meet the Reagan associate, who turned out to be Shaheen promising that if the PLO helped arrange the delay with the Iranians, the PLO would be rewarded. “We were told that if the hostages were held, the PLO would be given recognition as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and the White House doors would be open for us,” Abu Sharif said.

PLO Influence

Shortly after the hostages were seized on Nov. 4, 1979, President Carter had sought Arafat’s help. Arafat, who had close ties to Iran’s new Islamic government, arranged the release of 13 hostages on Thanksgiving Day 1979, a move that helped whittle down the number to 52.

The PLO had a strong relationship with the Iranian revolutionaries, in part, because Abu Sharif had helped train Iranian militants at PLO camps in Lebanon several years before the 1979 revolution that ousted the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran from power.

Abu Sharif also was an icon to many Islamic militants because of his leadership of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was regarded by Western governments as a terrorist organization. Abu Sharif’s picture was on the cover of Time magazine in 1970, headlined “The Face of Terror,” after his group hijacked three airliners, forced them to land at an abandoned British airbase in the Jordanian desert and then held the several hundred passengers hostage until a number of Palestinians jailed in Israel were released.

The leader of the Iranian students who had seized the U.S. Embassy in November 1979 had taken the nom de guerre of “Abu Sharif” in Bassam’s honor. Bassam Abu Sharif, who had direct contact with the student militia, told me that in 1980 – before the Republican contact – he was working to free the remaining American hostages for Carter.

Besides Abu Sharif’s influence, Arafat had traveled to Teheran several times to meet with Iran’s Islamic leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A staunch supporter of the PLO, Khomeini had repeatedly told the U.S. government that the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was central to peace in the Middle East and crucial for the establishment of normal relations between Washington and Iran’s revolutionary government.

Following the meeting in Paris with the Republican intermediary, Abu Sharif said the PLO stayed on the sidelines of the hostage negotiations. But Abu Sharif told me that he came to the conclusion that the Republicans had succeeded in brokering a behind-the-scenes deal with Iran to prevent the hostages getting released before the 1980 election.

“Some sort of deal [was] made with Reagan’s campaign,” Abu Sharif said.

In 1988, however, Abu Sharif and Arafat would not give me Shaheen's name or other details of the PLO-Republican meetings in 1980. They wanted to hold back that part of the story to gain leverage with the Reagan-Bush administration, which – in their view – had reneged on the purported promise to recognize the PLO.

Abu Sharif and Arafat, claiming to have tape recordings of the conversations with the Republican intermediaries, said they would make that evidence public if the administration denied the story of the 1980 contacts.

Playboy Article

I wrote an article about the PLO’s “October Surprise” claims for the September 1988 issue of Playboy magazine.

A few weeks after the article came out, according to Abu Sharif and other of my Middle East sources, the PLO was contacted by U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia Robert Pelletreau, who had been instructed by Secretary of State George Shultz and Vice President Bush to begin a “dialogue” that would lead to the recognition of the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.

The Reagan-Bush administration demanded that Arafat must publicly recognize the right of the State of Israel to exist and renounce terrorism. Arafat did that in a speech to the United Nations in Geneva in December 1988. Arafat and Abu Sharif also continued to keep whatever evidence they had about the 1980 “October Surprise” secret.

Approached by PBS Frontline in 1990, Abu Sharif repeated his assertion that a senior figure in the Reagan campaign had contacted Arafat and the PLO in Beirut about engineering a delay in the hostage release.

“It was important for Reagan not to have any of the hostages released during the remaining days of President Carter,” Abu Sharif said. “The offer was, ‘if you block the release of hostages, then the White House would be open for the PLO.’ In spite of that, we turned that down. …I guess the same offer was given to others, and I believe that some accepted to do it and managed to block the release of hostages.”

But Abu Sharif would not give Frontline the name or offer proof either. Other PLO sources told Frontline that Arafat discovered during a September 1980 trip to Iran that his intervention was superfluous since the Republicans already had established other back channels to the radical Islamic mullahs. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery.]

In the mid-1990s, Arafat also told Jimmy Carter about the Republican overture of 1980.

“There is something I want to tell you,” Arafat said, addressing Carter at a meeting in Arafat’s bunker in Gaza City 15 years after the end of the Carter Presidency. “You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO] if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election.”

Arafat insisted that he rebuffed the offer, but he supplied Carter with few other details, no name of the Republican representative nor exactly when and where the approach was made. But the conversation was recounted by historian Douglas Brinkley, who was present when Carter and Arafat spoke. Brinkley included the exchange in an article for the fall 1996 issue of Diplomatic History, a scholarly quarterly. Later, through a spokesman, Carter confirmed that the conversation with Arafat had occurred as described by Brinkley.

Opening Up

Today, with Arafat and Abu Sharif increasingly marginal players in the game of Middle East power politics, Abu Sharif finally volunteered to me the name of the Republican emissary whom he says he met in Paris almost two and a half decades ago: John Shaheen.

Shaheen, a New York-based businessman, claimed to have known Reagan since childhood in Tampico, Illinois, and reportedly was the person who convinced Casey to support Reagan in the 1980 Republican primaries. After Reagan lost the 1980 Iowa caucuses, the former California governor turned to Casey to run the campaign. Casey, a renowned wheeler-dealer who had once headed the Securities and Exchange Commission, brought his ruthless business style to guiding Reagan to the Republican nomination and then to the presidency.

Casey and Shaheen had known each other for decades, having worked together in the World War II-era Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s forerunner. Later, the two men collaborated in business deals associated with Shaheen's oil-and-natural-gas ventures.

Shaheen also was a business associate of Iranian banker Cyrus Hashemi, who was assisting the Carter administration in its 1980 hostage negotiations. Some of the “October Surprise” allegations focus on Hashemi acting as a double agent, betraying Carter by secretly helping Shaheen and Casey sabotage Carter’s efforts. [See Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Whatever the full truth about Republican-Iranian contacts, Carter’s negotiations did fail to win the hostages’ release before the November 1980 elections. Carter’s perceived ineptness contributed to a late surge behind the Reagan-Bush campaign, which won a resounding victory on Nov. 4, 1980, exactly one year after the hostages were seized. The 52 hostages were finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, just minutes after Reagan was sworn in as the nation’s 40^th president.

Some of the same characters connected to the October Surprise mystery resurfaced in the Iran-Contra Affair of 1985-86, in which U.S. arms were traded to Iran for help in winning the release of other U.S. hostages then held in Beirut, Lebanon. The Iran-Contra cast included Casey, Shaheen and Hashemi – who were early advocates of enlisting the Iranian mullahs over the Beirut hostage crisis.

None of this trio – Casey, Shaheen and Hashemi – was ever publicly questioned about the 1980 "October Surprise" case, which emerged as an issue in the later part of 1987. Shaheen died in 1985; Hashemi in 1986; and Casey, who collapsed with brain cancer in late 1986, died several months later.

Morgan Strong is a journalist and consultant on the Middle East.

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