Helena Cobban at Just World News is still reporting from Israel/Palestine. Great stuff. Here is a piece in Salon.

Who is the real Hamas?
Now that it's in power, will the militant Palestinian group accept Israel's legitimacy in exchange for land? Or is it hiding a dedication to the Jewish state's destruction behind media-savvy spin?

The decisive victory of the militant Islamic group Hamas in the Palestinians' Jan. 25 elections stunned just about everyone involved in Palestinian affairs and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Hamas' victory raises a host of questions, but it is clearly one of the most significant developments in decades in this debilitating and frequently lethal conflict, which even more than the war in Iraq remains the greatest source of anger and misunderstanding between the U.S. and the Arab/Muslim world. As a long-standing observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with many close contacts among players on both sides, I wanted to see for myself how Hamas' triumph was playing out. To find out, I embarked on a 20-day reporting trip to Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

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She has many worthwhile posts in her weblog:

Tel Aviv etc.

... This morning I had meetings with two really nice, really smart Israeli guys whom I've known for many years. Each meeting was set up in a cafe in a different shopping mall in a different part of North Tel Aviv. Driving out to these meetings-- especiaslly the first one--was unbelievable! Mile upon mile upon mile of enormous, extremely lavish-looking apartment buildings and cranes hanging over the horizon at every aspect building yet more of the same. Who on earth can afford to live in all these super-luxury apartments? What companies have the capital to invest in such mammoth-sized projects? This country has become so unbelievably wealthy since Yasser Arafat's conclusion of the Oslo Accords with them in 1993 opened the door to much wider trade and investment relations with Europe and (especially) the "tiger" economies of East Asia! But for the poor old Palestinians themselves, meanwhile, Oslo brought almost nothing but further land-exprorpriations, further represssion, the deliberate fragmentation by the Israelis of much of the West Bank, continued economic dependence, insult, injury, and and penury... Before Oslo-- even at the height of the first intifada-- Palestinians could come and go between East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank fairly easily, could come and go between Jerusalem and Gaza fairly easily. Actually, during nearly the whole of that first intifada, 1987-93, East Jerusalem was the bubbling hub of the intifada's entire nationwide organizing effort. But then immediately after Oslo the Israeli campaign to strangle Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank really got underway in earnest. I was there in 1995 and saw the process near its beginning. Poor old Faisal Husseini, the late leader of the Jerusalem Palestinian community, an extremely decent and hard-pressed man, was tearing his hair out in frustration... Not only because of what he saw the Israelis doing every day there before his eyes but also because of his sense that Yasser Arafat really didn't have a clue about what was happening to Palestinian Jerusalem. (One of the things that was happeninbg was that much of the land owned by Jerusalem's historic Husseini family, of which Faisal was the heir, had been designated by the Israelis as a "nature zone" area, so first of all Faisal's family was forbidden to build anything on it, and then the Israeli government expropriated it completely. Just a few years after that, guess what, the "nature zone" designation was lifted and an entire settlement for ultra-Orthdox Jews was built on it. So much for protecting the environment, eh?)

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Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Walls

So anyway, I'm walking along and I see a rather interesting-looking structure beside the promenade. (The road by now has veered away from us. There's quite an expans of tough-looking grass right here.) So this structure looks like an old Arab stone house (arches, etc) that has fallen into some desuetude and then had an entire sqaur-ish glass-and-steel structure put on top of it. I'm intrigued and go closer. A sign announces it's a little museum called the "Etzel Museum". Okay, I still don't know what Etzel is-- maybe it's the name of the building? Maybe the name of a famous painter whose works are featured here? Who knows? I fork over my 10 shekels for the entry fee and then it suddenly dawns on me: Etzel is the Hebrew acronym for the Irgun Zvai Leumi-- the infamous militant ("terrorist") Zionist group that incubated Menachem Begin and the whole of the Likud Party. And this is their museum! (Actually, as I learned later, just one branch of a larger museum they have elsewhere in town.) So this is really interesting. Quite apart from the fact that I've been making quite a bit of a study of how it is that, as and after conflicts wind down, the affected societies choose to memorialize them, particularly through built memorials and museums. But the Irgun, for goodness sake! And to come upon this place quite by chance at a time when many in Israel have been calling on Abu Mazen to organize his own "Altalena". Altalena was a boat full of weapons (from France) that the Irgun had been bringing in to Palestine at the time of the fighting in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, the head of the biggest Zionist organization (the forerunners of the Labour Party) demanded that the Irgun hand over thte weapons to the unified Haganah fighting forces. The Irgun refused, and Ben Gurion seized control of the boat by force. (This was just a little bit north of here, I think.) There were a number of fatalities in that fighting, even.... So that was their big moment of bringing all the fighting forces under the command of the central state. It's certainly worth noting that Ben Gurion didn't take that step until one month after the British had withdrawn and the Zionist had celebrated the foundation of their independent state. But now, people have been wanting Abu Mazen (and before him, Yasser Arafat) to "take on" the militants in Palestinian society long before the Palestinians have even the tiniest little piece of actual sovereign independence-- or even, any guarantee at all that sovereign independence is on its way... So, the Etzel Museum. Established, I believe, with the help of the Ministry of Defence Museum Unit. My (American) tax dollars at work! At work, moreover, glorifying and memorializing the actions of a group of people who took lethal violent actions against both Palestinian civilians (in Deir Yassin, and elsewhere-- as fulsomely celebrated in this museum) and against British troops. Indeed, there in one corner of the museum is mockingly displayed the "Wanted" poster issued by the British for the entire leadership of the Irgun after they kdinaped and hanged two British Army sergeants.

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Coming to Gaza

That gate wheezes shut. I am penned in between the two sets of gates. I look around for another call button, but this time, before I find it the second gate starts to push automatically open at the command of well-hidden hands. After that one, there is another kink in the tunnel. But I am immediately assailed by a young man pushing a very primitive cart who insists on hoisting my wheelie bag and shoulder bag onto the cart. We walk on along additional pastel-tinted expanses of tunnel. The porter, who is Palestinian, kicks at some of the trash on the floor. "See this?" he says. "Israelis! Dirty, dirty! Wait till you see the Palestinian side." When we do get to the "Palestinian" section of the tunnel there's another bend in the walkway, and the construction of the tunnel changes markedly. Now, the walls are less tall, and the pastel-colored canvases have been replaced by corrugated tin roofing. And yes, the floor does look as though it has recently been swept, though to be honest there's so much dust all around here that the only way to keep a concrete floor like this really clean would be to give it a good go-over with water and a squeegee, which evidently has not been done here. Seventy yards or so of walking along the "Palestinian" tunnel brings me to their checkpoint. I am directed to, I think, the women's section: two middle-aged women with broad Gazawi smiles and hijab scarves sitting in a small room behind a counter. One of them registers my passport number. "Ameriki?" she says. "Welcome to Balestine." And that's it. Here I am in Gaza. Later, I'm sitting at lunch in a restaurant overlooking the fishing harbor that serves-- you guessed!-- absolutely fabulous fish. Little yellow boats are bobbing in the harbor. Some boys are having fun riding past on one of the donkey-carts that is still a major means of transportation around the Strip. My friends the parliamentarian Ziad Abu Amr and the psychiatrist Iyad Sarraj are talking about the stress and strain of living in Gaza, and making various assessments of the national political situation. I haven't seen Iyad for many years. I haven't been to Gaza for nearly four years; haven't seen Ziad for two years... I listen avidly and put in the occasional question.

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Weekend Haaretz

One of the interesting things about being in Israel is to be able to read the paper versions of English-language Ha'Aretz and the Jerusalem Post... However good it is to read content on-line, still, there's something special about newsprint! The weekend edition of H'Aretz, which came out yesterday, had a number of really interesting articles: This well-researched piece by Akiva Eldar, which is worth reading in full, tells us about the failure of the government to live up to its commitment to destroy settlement outposts that were constructed not just-- as all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have been-- in clear contravention of international law but also, in contravention of Israel's own laws about such construction activities.

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Discussions in Gaza

I've had some interesting conversations since coming here. Yesterday I conducted an interview with Ghazi Hamad, the managing editor of the Hamas weekly, Al-Resalah. (Here's their online edition.) Today I interviewed two of the six newly elected Hamas women MPs, Jamila Shanty and Mariam Farhat (Um Nidal). I also interviewed Khaled Abdel-Shafi, the head of the UN Development Program's Gaza office.

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