PNA Officials Study U.S. Government Press Relations In USIA-Sponsored Project for Palestine

by Elaine Kelley

Palestine National Authority officials visited four U.S. cities from April 7 to 25, including Portland, Oregon, as part of a U.S. Information Agency-sponsored project for Palestinians to study government and media relations in the United States. The World Affairs Council of Oregon's International Visitor Program hosted the group in Portland.

The PNA study group, which arrived April 7 in Washington, DC and later traveled to Des Moines, Portland and New York City, included Maher Karaki, public relations director general for the PNA Ministry of Interior; Senan Shaqdih, press office Head for the Palestinian Legislative Council; Maysoun Al-Maghatheh, deputy director of external relations and media department for the Ministry of Information; As'ad Hasan Odeh Ghazawneh, legal consultant for the Ministry of Information; Darwish Basem El Sarraj, public relations officer of the Committee for Information Service; and Saneya Faisal El Husaini, public affairs manager for the Palestinian Legislative Council. The study group also included Fahim Ibrahim Kilani, who is assistant manager of the Orient House Press Office, and State Department escort interpreters Muhammed Chahine and Tawfik Ammar.

During their week in Portland, the PNA officials met with the Washington Report and with Greg Noakes, who is a government reporter for Oregon's oldest and largest newspaper, the Oregonian (and no relation to the former Washington Report news editor of the same name). They also spoke with KPTV news director John Sears and with Tom Fuller, a reporter for the local NBC affiliate, KGW-TV, who gave an overview of government-media relations in Oregon. At the State Capitol in Salem the group met with Dave White, whose responsibilities for the State of Oregon include state communications and special programs. And in meetings held at the offices of the World Affairs Council of Oregon they met with Frank Afranji and Sid Lezak, board members of the Oregon chapter of the Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East, and with Rabbi Daniel Isaak of Portland's Congregation Neveh Shalom. Afranji provided study group participants with a history of the Interreligious Committee and efforts by Muslim, Jewish and Christian Americans in working effectively with the media.

At the group's luncheon meeting with this Washington Report writer, Senan Shaqdih of the Palestinian Legislative Council's press office acknowledged mistakes made by the PNA, including extrajudicial detentions of Palestinian human rights activists. These include Dr. Eyad Sarraj, director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, imprisoned by the Palestinian Authority three times in 1995 and 1996 and Raji Sourani of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and Maher Alami of Al Quds newspaper, both arrested and detained for accusing the Palestinian Authority of human rights violations. Shaqdih said that in the early days "the relationship [of the PA] to local media was not clear." He said the Palestinian Ministry of Information is drafting a new press code to clarify policy and encourage a free press.

Other members of the study group described efforts by the Palestinian Authority to allow for the expression of "legitimate opposition" and attributed past abuses of power by the PA to mistakes made by a new, inexperienced authority operating under pressure and without sufficient resources or the benefit of a constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech.

Israeli, Palestinian Lawyers Address Palestinian Rights

Israeli lawyer Lea Tsemel and Palestinian lawyer Usama Halabi, both from Jerusalem, visited Portland May 3rd as part of a national educational tour sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. A workshop designed for activists, lawyers and immigrant advocates, and a public educational forum entitled "The Quiet Expulsion: The Erosion of Palestinian Residency Rights" were organized by local sponsors of the tour, including the AFSC, the Palestine Arab-American Association, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon and others.

Lea Tsemel has defended Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners held in Israeli prisons. For the past 27 years she has represented Palestinians on house demolition, land confiscation, deportation, residency and family reunification cases before the military courts and the Israeli Supreme Court. Usama Halabi, an Israeli citizen, has written extensively in Arabic and English on issues of land expropriation, the rights and status of Arab citizens in Israel, town planning and human and civil rights issues.

As a Palestinian of Druze background, Halabi is required to serve in the Israel Defense Forces, unlike other Arab Israelis who are prohibited from serving in the Israeli military. Therefore, as a consequence of his refusal to serve on grounds of conscientious objection, a status that is not recognized in Israel, Halabi served two years in prison. Upon his release and after passing the examination for his license to practice law he fought a two-year legal battle to win the right to practice his profession. From 1991 to 1996 he directed the legal department of the Quaker Legal Aid and Information Center in East Jerusalem and currently represents Palestinians on movement and travel restrictions, residency rights in East Jerusalem and town planning in the West Bank.

"Two years after Oslo," said Tsemel, "after all the kisses and the promises," Israel is trying with the expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem "to change the demography as a fait accompli." She explained that by keeping the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem a minority, Israel will be guaranteed a foothold in the area where Palestinians hope to have their national capital. Tsemel, who works for the Center for Alternative Information, an Israeli human rights organization, said the purpose of her U.S. tour with Halabi is to direct attention to an "existing new phenomenon" of construction and expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem that is the most serious threat to the peace process and to seek the help of concerned Americans in changing the U.S. policy of unconditional support for Israel.

Tsemel said that in the past year and a half Israel has "totally changed its policy toward Palestinians in East Jerusalem" and that, in an "ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem," Israel is treating Palestinian residents in Jerusalem as foreigners. She explained that after the 1967 occupation, Israel developed an ostensibly liberal policy of "open bridges" which allowed Palestinians to travel freely to other Arab states, Europe and America and to return to their homes within the three-year limit set by their travel permits.

In fact, the open bridge policy's real purpose, she said, was the economic benefit of Israel. Many Palestinians did leave their homes to find educational and work opportunities outside, she said, because Israel did not provide Arabic universities in Israel, or good health care for Palestinian citizens, or job opportunities on an equal basis with Israelis. Palestinians who left did so out of economic necessity and with the intention of returning to their homes and families. They were not emigrants in the true sense, but people forced temporarily to leave to pursue education and jobs.

Tsemel explained that the ethnic cleansing affects Palestinians in various categories. Those who complied with the conditions of the travel permit and returned within three years after leaving East Jerusalem now are being told the rules no longer apply and that if they have traveled abroad at all in the past three years they no longer have the right to return. Those who were forced from East Jerusalem into the West Bank because of prohibitions on housing construction now are denied residency rights in East Jerusalem. And those who haven't left East Jerusalem at all in the past three years but who acquired dual citizenship prior to that are now considered foreigners without residency rights. In response to those who point to Prime Minister Netanyahu as the cause of a new belligerent policy Tsemel stated, "You can't blame Netanyahu and Likud for what happens now because Zionist policy crosses lines of all Israeli governments."

Usama Halabi expounded further on the new residency policy, explaining that since 1967 Palestinians have been required to apply to Israel for "family reunification" permits if their spouse was not registered as a West Bank or Gaza resident. Typically, these permits were not granted, or were given only after payoffs to corrupt Israeli officials.

While efforts by Israeli and Palestinian lawyers and human rights groups have helped Palestinians living in the West Bank and in Gaza, for Palestinians in East Jerusalem the situation is worse. He said that when unsuspecting Palestinians attempt to return to East Jersualem they are told their status has changed and that their residency rights no longer exist because of new rules defining status as based on an individual's most recent "center of life"that is, where he has been studying or working most of the time.

As an example, Halabi told of a Palestinian woman from East Jerusalem who married a Jordanian and went to live in Amman temporarily, returning to East Jerusalem within the three years as stipulated by the permit. When she applied for residency under Israel's family reunification policy, she was denied residency because she had been living outside East Jerusalem "within" the past three years, and her "center of life" was now in Amman, not in East Jerusalem.

Halabi said these new rules affect at least 50,000 people and not only those claiming East Jerusalem residency rights, but also those in small villages outside the borders of the city limits and in the West Bank. He explained that all of those affected are in danger of losing their identification cards and access to previously guaranteed medical care and education unless they can prove their "center of life" to be in Jerusalem.

"How can a legal system build up a new reality and deny rights by internal legal declarations?" Halabi asked the audience. "These people were annexed against their will," he said, then forced to find educational opportunities and jobs abroad. Then, even after they followed the unjust rules of residency, they were told that suddenly they are foreigners without rights. "Now Palestinians are in the same straits as Filipinos and others exploited in Israel as cheap labor," he said.

Halabi answered questions about the controversial Har Homa development in East Jerusalem, a site on the southeast edge of the city limits immediately adjacent to the Palestinian towns of Bethlehem and Beit Sahour, where Israel in March sparked an international outcry by bulldozing to begin construction of a 6,500-unit Jewish settlement.

Halabi said that Har Homa will complete the string of Jewish settlements around the boundary of East Jerusalem, but that this is not the most serious development. He described the expansion of existing Jewish settlements adjacent to Palestinian populations in Bethany and Abu Dis and in the neighborhood of French Hill and the huge settlement of Ma'ale Adumim near Jericho. Halabi said the expansion of these settlements eventually will connect them all and "cut the West Bank in half," forming a thick barrier of densely populated Israeli settlements from Jerusalem to Jericho. The area will be surrounded by bypass roads and patrolled by Israeli soldiers, separating Palestinians in the north from those in the south and effectively driving a wedge from Jerusalem straight through the West Bank to the border of Jordan.

Between April 28 and May 5 Lea Tsemel and Usama Halabi spoke to audiences in seven U.S. cities New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Washington, DC and Portland. They also met with Palestinians in the U.S. who are in danger of having their residency permits confiscated as a result of the new Israeli policies.

The American Friends Service Committee, the sponsoring organization, is a Quaker organization with a long commitment to human rights and a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The group's Palestinian family unification campaign encourages Americans to adopt a Palestinian family and to advocate on the family's behalf for reunification. Persons interested in obtaining more information may contact the AFSC in Philadelphia at (215) 241-7019.

Conference Features Gaza Mental Health Program Co-Founder Marlene Eid

Marlene Eid, a Palestinian from Jerusalem, was one of seven presenters at the annual Northwest Regional Middle East Studies Conference held April 19th at Portland State University. Ms. Eid, who now resides in Portland, is coordinator of Palestinian Studies at the Middle East Studies Center, Portland State University, and teaches psychology and courses in women's and gender issues. She was co-founder, along with prominent human rights activist Dr. Eyad Sarraj, of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program in Gaza City.

Ms. Eid's presentation on "Mental Health and Cultural Issues in Palestine" focused on her experiences in Gaza in 1990, which led her to a growing interest in cultural psychology with its focus on explaining behavior based on cultural differences. "I thought it would be easy," Eid began. "I was a Palestinian. I lived under occupation." But because she left Palestine to live abroad, not sharing experiences in common with those who lived in Palestine through the years of the intifada, she was not accepted and could not establish the trust needed in therapy. She soon realized that "It is not enough to be from a culture. You must share experiences" as well, she said.

Eid said that many foreign volunteers with good intentions are working in mental health in Gaza, but that these people can actually do more harm than good. "Symptoms of anxiety and depression are different in the Third World," she explained. "Over there no one uses those words." Instead they describe physical symptoms, like choking, which is their way to describe anxiety.

Ms. Eid has pursued further study and research in the area of cultural psychology and believes something must be done to help those suffering from political and poverty-specific traumas. She said, "There are now one million people living in Gaza, two-thirds in refugee camps, with no electricity, no running water, no jobs. Men can't feed their chidren. There's not enough food. What kind of mental state would they be in?"

She said that in the religious teaching of Islam there is a notion of death as the ultimate goal of life but, Eid believes, "This is not strictly religious." She told of four- and five-year-old children who told her of wanting to die. "This is not normal," she said. She explained that in Gaza children see death on a daily basis and they can't go outside to play because they don't have freedoms we take for granted. "They see other kids shot and fathers taken to prison," she explained, "and some want to die to be with their fathers."

Eid collected children's drawings in Gaza and told of one child who drew six flowers in a vase, four black and two purple. The child explained to her that there are four dead flowers because there is not enough water, reflecting a real situation in Gaza where water shortages can be traced to discriminatory Israeli water management policies. Eid said that this same child stated he wanted to be a garbage collector, a job that in the mind of the child would give him the freedom to go outside, a privilege only garbage collectors could enjoy when a general military curfew was imposed.

She said that from a mental health perspective there is "discontent with the peace process." What is really needed in the place of "band-aid therapy" is a complete change in the total environment, starting with turning the wheels of economics.

The annual Northwest Middle East Regional Conference provides the opportunity for faculty of Middle East studies to share the fruits of their research with each other and students. Other presenters in this year's conference included Anne Meneley of Lewis and Clark College lecturing on "Feminism, Orientalism and the Inculcation of Moral Personhood Within the Anthropological Canon"; Mine Eder of Lewis and Clark, who addressed the topic of "Prospects and Constraints for Economic Cooperation in the Middle East"; Dariush Dolat-Shahi, a musician and composer, who spoke on "Persian Music: Its History and Evolution"; Anita Weiss of the University of Oregon, talking on "Working for Women's Empowerment in Pakistan after Beijing"; David McMurray of Oregon State University talking on "Arab Cultural Influences in French Popular Culture"; and Terry Ann Rogers, executive director of Multnomah County Legal Services, who shared her experiences in Kyrgyzstan in a talk called "Law and Transition in Kyrgyzstan." The conference ended with a showing of clips from the four-hour BBC series "Crusades," an entertaining documentary hosted by Terry Jones of Monty Python.

A request for funding under Department of Education Title VI by the newly organized Oregon Middle East Studies Consortium, reported in the April/May 1997 Washington Report, has been denied. Marta Colburn, assistant director of the Portland State University Middle East Studies Center, who authored the grant request, said that the consortium met again on April 20 and decided to continue. Colburn currently is pursuing other sources of funding.

Christian Peacemaker Describes Hebron Experiences

Dianne Roe of Corning, New York, a member of the Christian Peacemakers Team residing in Hebron, visited the Northwest April 20 to 24, speaking to audiences in Seattle and Portland about her most recent experiences in the West Bank town. CPT is a project of Mennonite, Brethren and Friends congregations which support violence-reduction teams around the world. Teams currently are in Bosnia, Chiapas, Chechnya and Hebron.

Ms. Roe, who has been arrested twice in Israel because of her participation in non-violent acts of civil disobedience, hopes to return to her CPT community in Hebron this summer if she is allowed to re-enter the country. In 1992, following her arrest by Israelis for walking across the Green Line into the West Bank along with 129 others from around the world who were participating in a "Walk for Peace and Justice in Israel/ Palestine," she was deported, and not allowed to return to Israel for three years. Upon her return in 1996, she was arrested again while protesting a house demolition. However, the Israeli police officer who arrested her did not appear to file formal charges and the charges were dropped.

Roe explained that her work in Hebron is based on Christian values and a preference for the poor and oppressed expressed by living among them to share their experiences. "Accompaniment is what we do," she explained. "It feels ordinary walking a child to school so he won't be harrassed by settler children or staying with a family whose house is slated for demolition." She told of one family in Hebron who received a notice, along with 23 other families on the same day, from the Israeli authorities stating that their house was to be demolished because a building permit had not been granted. The notice said that if the family did not arrange for the demolition themselves, the Israel Defense Forces, IDF, would demolish it and send the family the bill.

"To people on the bottom there is no recourse to demolitions or settler violence," Roe said. She said that Jewish settlers on the West Bank have many voices in the U.S., and that in Israel armed settlers and settler militias disregard their government and Israeli soldiers often turn a blind eye to settler violence against Palestinians. "Hope comes from groups who reject violence, Israeli peace groups, rabbis for human rights, and settlers who renounce violence," Roe said.

Using a map that had been prepared as part of the Oslo negotiations, Roe described to students how Israel maintains control over most of the land and resources of the West Bank. These include Area A, the main towns where Palestinian self-rule has been established, covering about 3 percent of the West Bank. Area B, mostly rural areas where redeployment and transfer to Palestinian control has been delayed, encompasses 27 percent of the West Bank. Area C, the largest area, covers 70 percent of the West Bank where building permits for Palestinians have been prohibited since 1978.

Palestinian Human Rights Activist Eyad Sarraj Speaks at University of Washington

Palestinian human rights activist and board member of the independent Palestinian Commission on Human Rights Dr. Eyad Sarraj of Gaza spoke to a large gathering at the University of Washington in Seattle on April 15. An outspoken critic of the peace accords and of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, Dr. Sarraj described his repeated arrests and imprisonment by the PA for exposing human rights violations by the Arafat government.

"The Oslo agreement, in the eyes of the Palestinians, was only a joke, and a dirty one, not something that you can be pleased with," he began. "I remember in the first few months of the entry of the Palestinian forces to Gaza a chief negotiator came in and said, 'Palestinians have managed to get something very important from the Israelis. Palestinians can cross now from Gaza to Egypt with no Israelis in sight.' I said, 'Oh, good, fantastic! You won't see them. They will see us.'"

Sarraj described the ongoing constraints on movement when traveling in and out of Gaza. "We wait nearly three hours for a bus to go 200 meters with a group of 20 Palestinians until Israelis grant permission. This is what we receive in the name of peace." He said he was not surprised when a cousin of his expressed a desire to die as a martyr for his country because he could not expect ever to go to a university, find a decent job or have the chance to marry and have a home. "Why don't we all die for God," his cousin asked, "because when you die you go into the hand of God and will be very happy there." "How can you answer such a man when he lives in such misery?" Sarraj asked.

Dr. Sarraj said Israel will have peace only when Palestinians have their own state and a free government. The Israeli government's idea of peace is to "send them all to Jordan, you will feel secure, or better, send them to Iraq," Sarraj said.

He said peace is being attempted between those who are not equal since Israel has all the power because of U.S. backing. "Palestinians have always to comply in the hope that this will lead to something, but we are realizing this peace process is a failure," he said.

Dr. Sarraj said that when he started to speak publicly about violations of human rights by the Palestinian Authority he was arrested for the first time and detained for one day. He said it was agreed that he would be allowed to act as a commissioner for citizen rights, visiting detention centers to make sure people were not tortured.

A few months later, feeling he must again speak out about his knowledge of PA treatment of prisoners, he granted an interview to a reporter for The New York Times, who published his accusations. Dr. Sarraj again was arrested by the PA. At that time, he was not beaten, he said, but was put in isolation. Again he was released with assurances that Arafat's government would "open a new page" on human rights.

Later, however, after he wrote a letter to PNAPresident Yasser Arafat insisting that the human rights issue be addressed, Sarraj was imprisoned for 17 days, during which time he was subjected to torture and threats of death.

"It was my first experience of torture," Sarraj said. "I had to get treatment. I don't wish it for anybody. I think it made me look deeply into myself, helped me discover myself." He said that after his own experience with unjust imprisonment and torture, "I came back full force with a little pain in my back and determined to continue what I believe in."

Good Samaritan Drug Treatment Program in Palestine in Danger of Closing

Good Samaritan Ministries, which sponsors the Al-Sadiq Al-Tayeb Association in Jerusalem, a counseling center recognized worldwide for its innovations in the drug addiction field, has been notified by its Palestinian landlord that ASTA must either buy the building it currently occupies or move out.

The GSM's summer newsletter states that Majed Alloush, director of ASTA, says there are no appropriate buildings available into which to move the 210 people who currently are being treated. The program claims a recovery rate eight times higher than in the U.S.

ASTA and Good Samaritan Ministries have decided to try to raise the funds to purchase the building, at a cost of $250,000. Of this, $70,000 has been raised and the remainder is due by September. Potential donors may contact GSM at 7929 SW Cirrus Drive, Bldg. #23, Beaverton, OR 97008-5973, (503) 644-2339.