A Diaspora within a Diaspora: African Refugees in Tel Aviv

Jan 172012
 

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

  •  17/01/2012

The Palestine Stock Exchange Emerges as a Regional Player

Jan 102012
 

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

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

  •  10/01/2012

How do you build an Israeli settlement from scratch?

Jan 062012
 

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

  •  06/01/2012

Page by page, Marwan Barghouti’s anti-war tome walked out of prison

Dec 242011
 

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

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

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

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

While not overtly against the occupation, Barghouti’s early political activity was understood by Israel as a threat and he was deported to Jordan under extraordinary circumstances. According to Nimer, “Jordan was not taking deportees at the time, so the Israelis just put him on a helicopter and dropped him into the middle of the Jordanian desert, desperate to get rid of him”.
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  •  24/12/2011

Palestinians prisoners are out of jail, but not yet free

Dec 222011
 

RAMALLAH // Celebrations marking the release of 550 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails stretched into the early hours of yesterday morning, but life outside prison will not necessarily mean freedom from the long arm of Israeli authorities.

Just ask Fakhri Barghouti.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in The National on 20 December 2011

  •  22/12/2011
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